Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy 9780226313009

Citation preview

Objects as Actors

Objects as Actors Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy melissa mueller

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Melissa Mueller is associate professor of classics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  1  2  3  4  5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-31295-8 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-31300-9 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226313009.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Mueller, Melissa, author. Objects as actors : props and the poetics of performance in Greek tragedy / Melissa Mueller. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-31295-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-226-31300-9 (ebook)  1. Greek drama (Tragedy)—History and criticism.  2. Stage props.  I. Title. pa3203.m84 2015 792.02'50938—dc23 2015014455 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction Props and the Poetics of Performance Props and Deixis Organization and Chapters

1 4 7 8

part i 1   Epic Weapons on the Tragic Stage Exekias’s Ajax From Text to Performance: Reading the Sword in Sophocles’ Ajax The “Deception” Speech (646–­92) Hector’s Revenge (815–­65) A Riddle Resolved Weapons and the Poetics of Reperformance Philoctetes’ Bow as a Haptic Actor Conclusion

15 16 19 22 29 31 34 38 40

2  Tragic Textiles and the House of Atreus Electra in Rags Playing Priam in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon Silver-­Bought Textiles and Sensory Overload Textilizing Agamemnon: Aeschylus and the Dokimasia Painter The Weaver Woven: The Tapestry Scene Re-­played From Costume to Character Conclusion

42 44 48 51 58 60 64 68

3  The Material Poetics of Tragic Recognition Euripides’ Ion and the Power of the Replica Objects and Interpellation A Mother’s Symbola

70 72 73 75

viii

contents

Containing Time in an Ageless Basket Autopsy, Recognition, and Collective Memory Signatures of the Self: Signet Rings and Secret Signs Putting Tokens to the Test in Euripides’ Electra Grafting Culture onto the Body The City’s Test: Recognition as Dokimasia A Nature-­Culture Hybrid Falling into the Present: Recognition and Embateusis Conclusion

78 80 84 88 90 94 99 100 105

part ii 4  Electra’s Urns: Receptacles and Tragic Reception Receptacles and Reception Electra’s Urn and “ The Haunted Stage” Hidden in the Bushes Somatic Memories and Mourning Temporal Materialities Props as Props: An Intermedial Turn Props, Pathos, and Nachleben Conclusion

111 112 114 116 119 125 127 128 132

5  Ajax’s Shield: Bridging Troy and Athens Ajax’s Shield as a Second Skin Eurysakes the Shield-­Receiver Solon’s Sakos Ajax’s Exodos Conclusion

134 135 140 144 148 153

6  Tragic and Tragicomic “Letters” The Deltos  from Dodona: A Hidden Prop in Sophocles’ Trachiniae Co-­opting the Plot: Phaedra’s Deltos and Aphrodite’s Revenge Reading Phaedra’s Deltos as a Defixio Epistolary Dysfunction in the  Iphigenia Plays The “Rape” of the Tablet in Iphigenia at Aulis Conclusion

155 158 163 170 178 184 188

Epilogue

190 Notes  195 Bibliography  235 General Index  259 Index Locorum  269

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of a long period of reflection on objects in Greek tragedy. It is a pleasure to thank here the colleagues and friends who offered support and guidance over many years, and to acknowledge the institutions that enabled the book’s completion. A residential fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, in 2009–­10, gave me the time and the courage to envision the project anew. I’m grateful to CHS director Gregory Nagy and the senior fellows for making the resources of the Center available to me and to my cohort of fellow researchers for their stimulating conversation and camaraderie. The College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, generously provided the supplementary funding that made my stay in DC possible. Individual chapters of this book have been read and judiciously critiqued by Joshua Billings, John Gibert, Justina Gregory, Mark Griffith, Debbie Felton, Donald Mastronarde, Alex Purves, Antonia Syson, and Oliver Taplin. I’m also indebted to the anonymous readers of two previously published articles: “Athens in a Basket: Naming, Objects, and Identity in Euripides’ Ion,” which appeared in Arethusa (43:365–­402) in 2010, and “Phaedra’s Defixio: Scripting Sophrosune in Euripides’ Hippolytus,” which appeared in Classical Antiquity (30:148–­77) in 2011. I acknowledge with gratitude the permission granted by the Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of California Press to include portions of these articles in chapters 3 and 6, respectively. Audiences at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Toronto, the American University of Paris, Brandeis University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Leiden University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Smith College, and Yale University heard early versions of several chapters, and provided valuable feedback.

x

acknowledgments

Conversations and correspondence with Roberto Alejandro, Joselyn Almeida-­Beveridge, Emily Baragwanath, Yelena Baraz, Lilah Grace Cane­ varo, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, Francis Dunn, Petra Kalshoven, Androm­ ache Karanika, Naomi Rood, Tyler Rowland, Seth Schein, Janine Solberg, Barry Spence, and Antonia Syson renewed my enthusiasm and nuanced my thinking at critical junctures. My classics colleagues at UMass-­Amherst were patient with me as months of revisions stretched into years. And Maria Bulzacchelli and Debbie Felton made Amherst into a home away from home during much of that time. My writing has benefited immensely from the interventions and incisive comments of six readers who critiqued drafts of the manuscript in its entirety, at various stages. Egbert Bakker sharpened the analysis, style, and structure of the whole; Helene Foley wisely urged me to rethink and rewrite the Oresteia chapter; Leslie Kurke helped me see where the theatrical and the political intersected; Laura McClure encouraged me to simplify and to summarize; Mario Telò introduced me to the “affective turn,” significantly expanding my sense of what objects can do, while Donald Mastronarde made many improvements to both the style and substance of a penultimate draft. I also wish to thank “Reader B,” one of the three readers chosen by the University of Chicago Press, for a set of comments that challenged me to deepen my engagement with theater and performance studies. I’m especially grateful to Susan Bielstein for seeing the project’s potential at an early stage, and for expertly shepherding it through the review process at the Press. I’d also like to thank James Whitman Toftness for his help in securing permissions and preparing the manuscript for production and Kathryn Krug for her excellent copyediting. All errors and infelicities are, of course, my own. I have been wonderfully lucky in having had teachers who were as generous as they were exacting. Here I single out three who have significantly shaped this work. Helene Foley, Leslie Kurke, and Donald Mastronarde not only provided inspirational models for how to read tragedy, but also acted as daimones ek ponōn eparōgoi—­steering me safely to shore on more than one occasion. I have been fortunate also in my friends. Larry Kim and Sira Schulz, Dylan Sailor, and Joëlle Tamraz have sustained me for more years than I care to count, reminding me of what really matters. No words can capture what I owe Egbert Bakker, who has had to live with a work in progress for far too long. I thank him for reminding me to look to the end, and for showing me the way. I dedicate Objects as Actors to my parents, Alfred and Julia Mueller, who have waited forty years for the thesis to become a book.

introduction

As actors, stage objects vest nonhuman elements in the tragic text with a physical presence. Once we imagine these in their materialized form—­once, that is, we fully reanimate them as props—­objects can be recognized for doing what they do best: provoking surprising turns of plot, eliciting un­ expected reactions from viewers both inside and outside of the theatrical frame, and furnishing us with some of tragedy’s most thrilling moments of pure theater. When we see objects as actors, we discover that they are vital to the performance and reception of tragedy in Athens during the second half of the fifth century BCE. Props get to the heart of what is humanly—­and nonhumanly—­possible. Previous scholarship has tended to downplay the role of the nonhuman in several key episodes where props take on uncanny agency. For example, read­ ers of Sophocles’ Ajax  have often assumed that Ajax must be speaking deceit­ fully when he professes to have changed his mind about suicide. Deception has been invoked to smooth over the perceived illogicality of his subsequent behavior, namely, the fact that he then goes on to kill himself. Yet, if his sword (the gift of his enemy-­turned-­friend, Hector) is duly registered as a physical presence, one that shapes both what Ajax says and how we hear his words in this troubling speech, the hero’s ultimate failure to spare his life becomes less baffling. The sword’s hostility—­the lingering traces of Hector’s animus reified—­manifests itself as a distinctly negative force in the plot’s unfolding, providing the basis for the new reading of Ajax’s “suicide” in chapter 1. Verbal allusion heightens our sense of how the sword continues to act out its past life. Giving embodied form to the nexus of past relationships from which they draw their theatrical livelihood, the sword and other tragic weap­ ons destabilize viewers’ sense of where on the continuum between human

2

introduction

and nonhuman they belong. The actions undertaken by human characters are inseparable from the physical expression of those weapons, as the lively on-­stage interactions between props and people remind us. But as animated actors of the inanimate, objects also enable the recycling and repurposing of material elements, both within and across productions. In this sense, objects are “actors” whose formative presence and agency becomes part of the very texture—­the plot, pacing, and poetics—­of certain tragedies. In Image, Music, Text, Roland Barthes (1977, 146) describes the text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture.” Every work of art, whatever its medium—­whether visual, verbal, musical, or some combination of all of these—­draws from a repertoire of similarly assembled creations. The tissue metaphor is particularly apt, however, as it signals that “quotation” need not imply purely verbal artifice. Intertextuality has until re­ cently confined its scope to verbal allusion, but the theater does not privilege words over all its other means of communication. Costumes can “quote” one another visually just as characters draw upon the words of other characters.1 Sights, sounds, even in some cases evocations of smell and touch, can cite other sensory data of a related type. Theater’s equivalent of the “full-­knowing reader,” whose presence Pucci (1998) has demonstrated is central to the mechanism of textual allusion, would thus be the “experienced theatergoer.”2 The concept is not a new one, but it has not yet been fruitfully applied to the interpretation of tragic objects. The institutionalized aspect of the state theater in classical Athens, where regular attendance at festivals “could produce sophisticated and attuned au­ diences,”3 should certainly be taken into account. But audience skills were honed not just from watching but also from actively participating in the per­ formance culture of classical Athens.4 When we try to imagine ancient the­ atergoers, we should not think of passive consumers but rather, of  “sometime performers with experience in singing and dancing before a huge audience.”5 The insights gleaned over years of watching, acting in, and living in close proximity to drama helped fashion a viewer who was attuned to the various “languages” and perceptual registers mobilized by theatrical productions, a viewer with a holistic orientation toward tragedy, as both an aesthetic and an intellectual experience.6 Experienced theatergoers would be able to anticipate where a plot was headed. They would pick up on cues embedded within the artifactual design of a tragedy (i.e., its use of costume, props, and settings) while also appreciat­ ing the subtleties of its verbal script, its choreography, and its musical score.7 Ancient audiences must have been highly sensitized to the visual and material dimensions of tragic performance. The overlapping demographics between

introduction

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spectators and performers, as well as the theatergoing habit financed by the Athenian polis, created conditions that can only be described as close to ideal for the intertheatrical readings of tragedy I pursue here.8 Art always makes itself out of other works of art (to paraphrase Barthes’s insight), yet some artists make a point of more consciously flagging their restructuring, recycling, and repurposing of components familiar from else­ where. In The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Marvin Carl­ son (2001, 4) suggests that “we are able to ‘read’ new works—­whether they be plays, paintings, musical compositions, or, for that matter, new signifying structures that make no claim to artistic expression at all—­only because we can recognize within them elements that have been recycled from other struc­ tures of experience that we have experienced earlier.”9 The House of Atreus offers a case study in the dynamics of this sort of  “intertextual” spectatorship. First introduced to theatergoers in Aeschylus’s memorable Oresteia produc­ tion of 458 BCE, the Atreid clan’s dynastic travails continued to haunt the stage and engage audiences for the rest of the century and beyond—­thanks to reperformances of Aeschylus as well as the tragedies of Sophocles and Eurip­ ides that explicitly revisit this trilogy (the two Electra plays, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Orestes). Critics have cultivated an inter­ est in the metapoetic and self-­reflexive aspects of this particular set of trag­ edies (see especially Torrance 2013). Yet stagecraft and production elements remain underexplored territory even here. Consider, for example, the purple tapestry from Agamemnon to which the returning king reluctantly sets foot as he steps from his chariot. It is a central element of that play’s staged action, a material trope that has been appreciated by the trilogy’s readers and that can be played out to visually stunning effect on the stage. But the theatrical afterlife of this textile is equally fascinating. The distinctive materiality of Agamemnon’s purple textile gets etched into the repertoire, creating a dynamic and complex nexus of sartorial allusions between the Oresteia and the later Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides. The visual resonances are particularly striking in Euripides’ Electra, where the textile appears to have migrated to the body of the flamboyantly dressed Clytemnestra; in one of the final scenes of the play, Clytemnestra approaches her daughter’s humble cottage. It is clearly a remake of Agamemnon’s tapestry scene. But this time, wearing a visual echo of the garment with which her Aeschylean counterpart had seduced the king, she walks to her own death, following in her husband’s footsteps. Props, as this example shows, forge connections between plays, thematizing seemingly disparate fragments of a performance tradition into a coherent, if inevitably discontinuous, narrative whole.

4

introduction

The invisibility of props in Euripides’ Orestes and Electra is a notable fea­ ture of their dramaturgy, as is the fact of Apollo’s palpable absence. The two are interrelated, and mark where these tragedies deliberately depart from the production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. There the recognition tokens were fully materialized and Clytemnestra’s Furies—­like the god Apollo—­were visible in the flesh, at least in the final play of the trilogy. Yet what this shift in staging signifies and what a prop, such as Orestes’ bow, or his lock of hair, commu­ nicates through its absence are questions that are only now beginning to be asked. Early on in the Orestes, the hero seeks the help of Apollo and his bow (Or. 268–­76) in fighting off his mother’s Furies: “Give me my gift from Loxias, my horn-­tipped bow, with which Apollo told me to fend off the goddesses!” (δὸς τόξα μοι κερουλκά, δῶρα Λοξίου, / οἷς μ᾿εἶπ᾿ Ἀπόλλων ἐξαμύνεσθαι θεάς, 268–­69).10 But there is little reason to assume that the god’s gift actually mate­ rializes on stage. “Its ‘reality,’ ” as C. W. Willink (1986, ad loc.) notes, “is of the same mythic order as that of the Furies themselves, and here rightly takes tan­ gible form only in Orestes’ demented mind.”11 Likewise, in Euripides’ Electra, the three physical tokens from Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, tokens which viewers assume will persuade Electra of Orestes’ return, remain offstage; Electra rec­ ognizes her brother, in a notable departure from Aeschylus’s production, by an inconspicuous scar on his face. T. B. L. Webster (1971, 34) faulted Euripides’ Electra for “removing the story from the epic-­aristocratic world of family hair and family feet and put­ ting it into the realistic world of the fifth century.” All tragedies participate, to a greater or lesser degree, in this sort of conceptual updating. Tragedy gener­ ally encodes mythical story lines into a language and material idiom that was calculated to speak to its audiences. Props, costume, and stage-­sets not only helped translate disembodied narrative into the engaging 3-­D and multi­ sensory medium of the theater, but also invited viewers to reflect on what was new, providing tangible cues and visible pointers as to the redesign of well-­known stories and characters. Props and the Poetics of Performance As material entities, props elide text and context. The realm of myth as it was shaped by poetic and iconographic sources, previous dramatic performances that continue to haunt similarly themed plays, and the world outside the the­ ater, in its social, economic, and political complexity, all figure, at various points, as referential nodes for the props we will consider. By focusing on where the cultural meets the theatrical, looking, that is, at where the use of

introduction

5

props as tools for staging texts intersects with their mediating role as sites for cultural negotiation, we will experience something of the vibrancy and dyna­ mism of these objects in their original contexts. With trajectories arcing both forwards and backwards, props afforded their (contemporary) spectators an experiential journey through time. Props variously pulled viewers into a viv­ idly conjured past and catapulted them into a “future” that they would have recognized as their present. They are one of the primary media exploited by tragedy for bringing viewers into spatial, visual, and cognitive contact with the materials of the past as they were being used to explain the present.12 Various prop-­related strategies can be grouped loosely under the heading of “poetics.” Originating with Aristotle’s similarly named discussion, “poet­ ics” at its most basic refers to the analysis of a text through the study of its formal constitutive elements, including plot, character, diction, meter, and visual effects (opsis). But the theoretical reach of poetics has grown in recent years, in recognition of the fluid boundaries between art and culture, text and context. A New Historicist approach to cultural production, of which “Cultural Materialism” and “Cultural Poetics” are offshoots, seeks to trace the circulation of social energy between these notionally separate yet politically interconnected realms.13 That literary texts are participants in the cultural de­ bates that they reflect and record is hardly a matter of controversy these days, but there has been a notable lag in ascribing to stage objects a similar sort of cultural agency. Readers of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, for example, are likely to be familiar with the notion that the purple fabrics strewn before Agamem­ non’s feet at his homecoming evoke violence and bloodshed. Yet not every modern viewer will be aware of the sheer cost of the purple dye as something that complicates the fabric’s symbolism. Props can invoke a sense of touch and smell alongside their stunning vi­ sual effects. The tapestry that Agamemnon traverses in Aeschylus’s tragedy of the same name is dyed a richly suggestive color, prompting many to fo­ cus exclusively on the prop’s visual meaning. Purple dye (porphyra), however, was in antiquity also associated with a pungent odor, redolent of extrava­ gance and its follies. In chapter 2, I track the olfactory implications of the textile’s porphyra-­infused materiality, and ask what role, if any, smell plays in Agamemnon’s entrapment. In Sophocles’ Electra, there is an urn which is early on described as “a bronze-­ribbed” artifact (τύπωμα χαλκόπλευρον, El. 54); as soon as she comes into physical contact with this object, Electra is transported back to an earlier time. She imagines that the weight of the vessel she holds in her arms is her infant brother Orestes, as we will see in chapter 4. While the realm of sight remains the most important sense, the full import of stage props is by no means exhausted by their visual effects.

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introduction

Andrew Sofer (2003, 50) has argued that to “register as a prop, the object must be perceived by a spectator as a sign.” I wish to qualify Sofer’s statement for cases in which an object is not yet on stage. It’s no doubt true of stage objects that they must signal their action-­worthiness, so as not to blend in with less remarkable features of the scenery. But because of the horizon of semiotic possibilities created by the genre’s more general reliance on stage props to create meaning, it seems, in my view, likely that regular theatergoers would have been capable of intuiting a prop’s action before seeing the object itself—­before registering it, that is, as a visual sign. It’s helpful here to keep in mind that a viewer’s relationship to prophood is not constructed on the spot. Affective responses in the presence of certain objects are, to borrow Richard Schechner’s term, a “restored behavior.”14 My readings seek out the uncanny power possessed by stage props, even apart from their visual allure. What kind of tension can an object generate, for example, even before it is seen? The urn of Sophocles’ Electra emerges as a physical property only late in the game, yet it is around this object that the entire deception plot revolves, not to mention the unexpected reincarnation of Electra herself into a figure of maternal mourning (as we see in chapter 4). Similarly, the oracle-­inscribed tablet (deltos) is an object that is frequently mentioned and palpably present throughout Sophocles’ Trachiniae, though it is never actually seen (chapter 6). It is on this tablet that Heracles transcribed a prophecy from Dodona describing a crossroads for his life’s journey. The object is currently in Deianeira’s safekeeping, its presence behind the palace doors lending a sense of oracular gloom to the play’s proceedings. Both ob­ jects, the urn and the tablet, testify to the degree to which an invisible prop can make its presence felt. The theater is a “place of disclosure, not a place of reference,” as Bert O. States (1985, 4) puts it. Props engage characters and spectators in myriad ways, their meanings resisting overly rigid classification. This book’s methodology is catholic, in recognition of the fact that props will solicit different theoreti­ cal approaches, depending on their unique theatrical profiles. But given that readers may be more familiar with semiotic approaches, it’s worth pointing out that objects can also inspire sensory and embodied engagements.15 The phenomenologist’s focus, to quote States again, is “on the activity of theater making itself  out of its essential materials: speech, sound, movement, scenery, text, etc.” (1985, 1). Props are one of those “essential materials” out of which tragic theater makes itself. They occupy a central place in the spectators’ tool-­ kit, helping them figure out not only what a play means, but how it means, both as a self-­contained theatrical event, and as an episode within a living, ever-­expanding and self-­renewing theatrical repertoire.

introduction

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Props and Deixis Since there were no stage directions in the modern sense, the only way to ascertain when a prop first becomes visible is through demonstrative verbal markers, or deictics. As Nancy Felson (2004, 253) observes, “Deictics bridge the tangible world of reality and the abstract world of fantasy.” Ancient Greek has three deictic pronouns/adjectives, each of which takes charge of a par­ ticular type of “pointing” function. In descending order of proximity to the speaking subject, these deictics are: ὅδε “this-­here,” οὗτος “that-­there,” and ἐκεῖνος “that.”16 While ὅδε is sometimes referred to as the “proximal” or “first person” deictic, and can be used for “self-­pointing,” οὗτος is a “second per­ son,” or “hearer-­oriented” deictic. Let me illustrate this with an example from Sophocles’ Ajax (a play to which I return in chapter 1). When Ajax refers to the sword he holds in his hand, intending shortly thereafter to bury it, he calls it τόδ᾿ ἔγχος τοὐμόν (“this-­here sword of mine”), using the proximal deictic τόδε because he points to something that he is placing before spectators’ eyes consciously for the first time (Aj. 658). The sword has been in close proximity to Ajax, but its visible presence is only now being made salient to the hearer.17 By contrast, when Ajax mentions the same sword a few lines later, he calls it τοῦτο—­“For I, ever since I took in my hand that-­thing there” (ἐγὼ γάρ, ἐξ οὗ χειρὶ τοῦτ᾿ ἐδεξάμην, 661), and so on. Ajax here uses a hearer-­oriented deictic (a form of οὗτος), since the sword has already been introduced. It is a known entity and therefore can be verbally referenced as that sword.18 In practice, there may have been props used for which no textual indica­ tion was recorded. But these props are unlikely to have attained the status of silent, nonhuman characters. Such props and their theatrical profiles are in any case unknown to us.19 But where the textual traces are more abundant, it’s important to bear in mind that prophood was neither a fixed nor an essen­ tialized condition. The staging of a text would have established the cognitive framework for viewers, determining what moved into and out of focus and in this way conditioning their reception of props.20 In the theater deictics often actively create the specific features of the dra­ matic environment to which they simultaneously, or subsequently, refer. It is not a matter simply of gesturing to pre-­existing objective realities. When, for example, the Tutor, as prologue speaker of Sophocles’ Electra, says to Orestes, τὸ γὰρ παλαιὸν Ἄργος οὑπόθεις τόδε (4), “this here is the ancient Argos you have been longing for,” he calls “Argos” into being, endowing the previously unmarked theatrical setting with a spatial identity. The generative force of the deictic pronoun aligns the visible area referred to as τόδε with “Argos” for the duration of the performance (or until a new identity takes its place).

8

introduction

This modality of speaking, known as Deixis am Phantasma (“pointing at the ghost”), can be counted on to conjure into being particular cities or places; one of its lesser-­known functions, however, is to do for props what it does for place. Deictically activated objects come to embody the distinctive verbal fea­ tures ascribed to them, exhibiting in performance the liveliness and animacy encoded in their textual profiles. Organization and Chapters The six chapters are organized thematically around different categories of objects—­weapons, textiles, recognition tokens, vessels, and writing tablets. While the objects in the first half of the book (chapters 1–­3) tend to evoke situations from epic and earlier tragedy to which they offer a sequel, those in the second half of the book (chapters 4–­6) by contrast reach out across the invisible fourth wall, linking up with contemporary practices (e.g., modes of writing, in the case of the “letters” chapter), or challenging well-­established notions of genre and performance. The two weapons from Ajax, his sword and shield, are given separate chapters and placed in different parts of the book. Ajax’s sword pulls him and the action back into epic entanglements. His shield, on the other hand, despite its epic pedigree, enters more directly into dialogue with the Athenian audience’s democratic present: the shield of­ fers an etiological narrative for Ajax’s own naturalization as an eponymous hero of Athens, as I argue in chapter 5. Metaphor and metonymy provide the organizational principles for each part of the book. While the metonymical props of chapters 1–­3 model them­ selves on well-­known epic or theatrical objects (which serve as their material intertexts), the metaphorical props of chapters 4–­6 either subvert or radically refurbish their source material (if there is a clear antecedent), practically be­ yond recognition. For example, the urn in Sophocles’ Electra grants material life to an urn from Aeschylus’s Choephoroi which was mentioned in a speech but never appeared in Choephoroi as a prop. Other metaphorical props invite viewers to connect what they see on stage with their lived experience. For example, the shield in Ajax at the moment of its bequeathal cues the shrine of Eurysakes, a site of worship located in Athens. The book starts with those tragedies whose props are deeply preoccupied with their fictional predecessors, saving an exploration of the future-­pointing, prescriptive props for later chapters. In the course of our journey, we move from the mythical past into the democratic present. Chapter boundaries re­ spect typological distinctions; yet significant disparities will emerge between artifacts of the same “class,” and how these are seen to operate within their

introduction

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fictional settings. For instance, not all writing tablets turn out to be “letters,” nor do they act in ways one might expect a letter to act. Chapter 1 considers the uncanny agency of weapons in Sophocles’ Ajax, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and Euripides’ Heracles. On the tragic stage, the sword hones audience awareness of the intertextual factors conditioning the hero’s decision-­making, and forces a reassessment of Ajax’s rejection of suicide. His expressed desire to be rid of this weapon, which has brought him only pain and misfortune since the day he received it, gains in poignancy when we see Ajax holding the weapon itself. A gift to Ajax originally from his enemy Hec­ tor, the sword continues to channel the animus of the unresolved duel they fought on Homer’s Trojan battlefield in the seventh book of the Iliad. The bow of Heracles in Philoctetes and the weapons in Euripides’ Heracles pro­ vide valuable comparanda for the animacy and social entanglements of tragic weaponry. Chapter 2, focusing on the tapestry scene in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, pur­ sues a reading of the scene that is sensitive to the textile’s qualities as a physi­ cal artifact. I consider, in particular, how the garment’s distinctive materiality gets repurposed in the later Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides. While it has often been assumed that Clytemnestra herself has woven the tapestry, I argue that the garment’s agency is not readily traceable to a single hand. The textile embodies the complex (and complexly dysfunctional) economy of the entire House of Atreus. It does not merely symbolize Clytemnestra’s guileful entrapment. The more immediate causes of Agamemnon’s capitulation are to be found in the object’s overpowering visual and sensory output, qualities it possesses by virtue of its elaborate pattern-­weave and distinctive purple dye. My retrospectively framed interpretation of the tapestry scene aims to capture something of the enduringly prescriptive qualities of the mesmer­ izing object at its center: to this end, I take into account the prop’s material refractions, first in the Choephoroi and subsequently in the two Electra plays. Chapter 3 tackles the use (and abuse) of material tokens in tragic scenes of recognition, taking Euripides’ Ion and Electra as its two main case studies. The tokens reuniting Ion with his mother are replicas (mimēmata) that evoke the birth of Ericthonius, a mythical ancestor to the classical Athenians. These tokens thus give a mythico-­political cast to what might otherwise be charac­ terized as a private reunion between a mother and her son. The recognition scene of Euripides’ Electra, usually read as a parody of the similar scene in the Choephoroi on which it is based, more overtly politicizes the recognition of Orestes. Rejecting the familial tokens that had secured Orestes’ identity in the Choephoroi, Euripides’ restaging has this scene instead hinge on the recogni­ tion of a bodily scar. In this way (I argue), the authentication, or recognition,

10

introduction

of Orestes is made into a proto-­exemplar for the audience of their own, Athe­ nian practice of scrutinizing citizens (dokimasia). Chapter 4 offers a new reading of the urn in Sophocles’ Electra, an object that casts Electra unexpectedly into the role of a mourning mother, on the model of Niobe. Before being handled by Electra, the urn, though still invis­ ible, stands in for an already canonical dramatic tradition (i.e., the Electra plays), encouraging spectators to reflect on how Sophocles’ tragedy signals its own reception and reshaping of earlier material through props. Containers, best known for their somewhat pedestrian role in preserving goods, turn out to be an inspirational element in the composition and performance of this tragedy. While the urn equips the dramatist with a powerful tool for inter­ rupting the linear flow of the action with a temporal flashback (analepsis), it also exemplifies the malleability of the performance medium; its association with an actor named Polus who chose to substitute the ashes of his son for the empty stage urn in a fourth-­century BCE performance of Electra is, I propose, emblematic of the close collaboration between props and reception history. Chapter 5 returns to Sophocles’ Ajax for a closer look at how Ajax’s leg­ endary status as the unparalleled defender of the Achaean troops in Homer is reshaped when he bequeaths his shield to his son, Eurysakes. As an arti­ fact, the shield is carefully positioned in between the bygone world of epic and Sophocles’ contemporary Athens. Its hybrid status—­part-­heroic, part-­ hoplite weapon—­allows the weapon to bridge the distance between Ajax’s demise at the hands of Hector in Troy (see chapter 1) and his reemergence as one of the ten eponymous heroes of Cleisthenes’ Athens. The object, it is argued, thus not only fills an important narrative gap in the hero’s biography, but reaches out (across the invisible fourth wall) to Sophocles’ audience, in­ viting them to see themselves as the beneficiaries of Ajax’s shield-­based legacy as a defender par excellence. The sixth and final chapter, on writing tablets, argues that these symbol­ ize and embody the contested process of composing a tragedy out of various narrative threads and possible plotlines. The roles played by letter-­props are dynamically varied. The Trachiniae’s oracular deltos seves as a mise-­en-­abîme refraction of the entire play; Phaedra’s writing tablet is more akin to a defixio (a curse tablet) than a letter and is used by the heroine preemptively to si­ lence her stepson in Euripides’ Hippolytus. The letter Iphigenia reads aloud in Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians provokes a playful scene of rec­ ognition, while Agamemnon’s revised letter, revoking his earlier decision to sacrifice his daughter, becomes the catalyst for a burlesque tug-­of-­war in the Iphigenia at Aulis; in that play, it is particularly clear that control of the

introduction

11

girl—­and consequently of the plot—­is what is at issue. But because of their general tendency to thematize plotting as a tragic concern, these props, more than any others, solicit metatheatrical interpretations. A Note on Editions and Transliterations: I use OCT (Oxford Classical Text) editions for the texts of Homer, the three tragedians, and Aristophanes and other authors, when possible. The abbreviations of the names of ancient au­ thors and works follow Liddell-­Scott-­Jones, A Greek English Lexicon. I gener­ ally adopt the Latinized spellings of Greek names (e.g., “Ajax” rather than “Aias”), with a few exceptions, as these are likely to be familiar to more readers.

1

Epic Weapons on the Tragic Stage

Greeks of the Archaic and Classical Age inhabited a cognitive landscape far removed from our own. Theirs was a world where pots and cups, as well as funerary inscriptions and statues, “spoke” in the first person, and where swords and shields acted as surrogates for physically absent owners.1 For example, at the Bouphonia (or Dipolieia) festival honoring Zeus Polieus, celebrants gathered on the Acropolis to watch oxen being led around the altar of Zeus, a table-­like surface on which grain cakes were spread out; the first animal to stretch its neck toward one of the cakes was dealt a fatal blow by the “ox-­slayer” (Bouphonos), who then fled the scene of the crime leaving the guilty weapon behind to stand trial.2 Pausanias (1.28.10), our source for this anecdote, even suggests a link between the Bouphonia’s ritualized murder trial and the custom of trying objects in the Prytaneion.3 There may be significant overlap in how ritual and real-­life weapons are to be imagined as operating. The special sort of accountability to which objects were held by Athenian law and religious custom finds its correlate in the theater, where weapons were also vested with a person-­like status and where objects more generally allude to, or index, their sources of self-­generation (whether human, divine, natural, or some combination of the three). As a material index, moreover, an object can continue to shape its surroundings, through its social interactions. Anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998, 231) has written of the “diffusion of the person into the milieu, via a thousand causal influences and pathways, not all of which can be monitored and controlled,” emphasizing that this is not the effect of black magic or “volt sorcery,” but of taking seriously the “distributed” nature of social agency. For Gell, the exercise of agency on the part of nonhuman entities is a manifestation of what he calls “distributed personhood.”4

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Gell’s notion of distributed personhood, though developed to theorize the agency of works of art, has wider-­ranging applicability. It can help us understand how what would seem to be uniquely human behavioral tendencies (i.e., the will to seek vengeance or, more benignly, empathy for others) can become embodied in and exemplified by objects. Or similarly, how the vibrancy and vitality seen to emanate from, or to reside in, objects of various types (not just weapons) can elicit otherwise hard-­to-­account-­for human responses.5 These are features of materiality that have been acknowledged by historians of Greek art, as well as by archaeologists, but have yet to be affirmed—­or disproved—­by scholars of Greek theater.6 In this chapter, I adapt Gell’s insights to my reading of the stage roles of tragic weaponry. I focus here primarily on two weapons whose biographies are intricately interwoven into the action of Sophocles’ Ajax and his Philoctetes: the sword of Ajax, a gift long ago from his enemy-­turned-­friend Hector, and the bow of Philoctetes, a prop which still vividly evokes its previous owner, the now-­dead, or apotheosized, Heracles.7 As Judith Fletcher (2013, 200) indicates, these objects “are gifts that have brought with them the spectral presence of their former owners who never entirely relinquish them.” They uncannily destabilize the very assumptions about friendship, obligation, and survival that, in earlier contexts, they had been the ones to validate. If weapons take on the character and the abiding obsessions of their dead donors, as both the sword and the bow do to startling effect, where do we draw the line between human and nonhuman—­between subject and object? With their animacy these weapons disturb and unsettle ontologies that are central to the tragic hero’s sense of himself in the world. It is their transgressive, transformative power that I want to explore here. Let us first visually orient ourselves by considering Exekias’s famous Ajax contemplating death as he kneels before his sword; from there, we will segue to Sophocles’ staging of a similar moment in his Ajax, a scene that raises profound questions, either about Ajax’s “change of mind”—­as the debate has traditionally been framed—­or, as I prefer to re-­frame it, about his loss of autonomy. In light of what he still “owes” Hector, who is metonymically present on stage thanks to his sword, Ajax’s death hardly resembles a suicide. I conclude with some more general reflections on weapons in performance and weapons as a mode of reperforming the past in Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Euripides’ Heracles. Exekias’s Ajax Many Greek vases feature weapons whose entanglements with human actors position them as more than passively instrumental.8 A striking example,

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especially relevant because of its subject matter, is Exekias’s painting of Ajax kneeling before his sword (see figure 1). The vase is usually dated to the middle of the sixth century (540 BCE) and the Ajax was produced some hundred years later (450s–­440s BCE). While direct influence is therefore unlikely, the two scenes—­one painted, the other acted—­share an important feature. In both, our attention is drawn to the sword itself, which dominates the foreground of the painting, as it does the playing space of Sophocles’ drama. The decision on the painter’s part to “show Ajax brought to his senses after a fit of madness, and preparing suicide” marks his departure from the “the bloody impalement preferred by most artists.”9 Sophocles may have been similarly creative in his handling of Ajax’s suicide. One of the ancient commentators on the play (Σ 815) in fact “questions Sophocles’ motives in performing rather than reporting Ajax’s suicide,” as Thomas Falkner (2002, 354) puts it. The scholiast concludes that Sophocles, “perhaps wishing ‘to innovate’ (καινοτομεῖν) and not to follow in the footsteps of another, or rather wishing to ‘astonish’ (ἐκπλῆξαι) placed the deed in full view (ὑπ᾿ ὄψιν).”10 The “footsteps” he would have hesitated to follow are those of Aeschylus whose Thracian Women (the middle play of a trilogy that probably started with the Judgment of Arms and ended with the Women of Salamis) very likely covered the same narrative ground as our Ajax.11 Sophocles’ Ajax, however, makes two notable changes to Aeschylus’s Thracian Women, replacing the Chorus of Thracian women with Salaminian sailors, and bringing the off-­stage suicide on-­stage. Among the few surviving fragments of Aeschylus’s Thracian Women is a part of this Messenger’s speech (TrGF 3.83 Radt), which conveys the difficulty the hero had in piercing his resistant skin. The sword supposedly bent uncooperatively and the skin refused to give way, “just as if someone were stretching a bow” (τόξον ὥς τις ἐντείνων). Eventually, according to the messenger, a goddess showed Ajax where to position the blade, given that his armpit was the one mortal part of his anatomy.12 Sophocles dispenses with the third party that helped the hero commit suicide in Aeschylus’s earlier production, giving precedence instead to the visual and verbal “dialogue” between the warrior and his weapon. Sophocles’ innovative approach to restaging traditional material suggests a desire to raise the sword to the level of heroic antagonist. In this, his version follows more closely the example set by Exekias. Both artists convey an unusually focused degree of interaction between the sword and the man, suggestive of a close emotional and cognitive bond. And in each work of art, the tension between man and weapon is heightened by the absence of other human figures. A change of scene occurred at this point in the play, from the camp of the Achaean army to the deserted seashore; in the painting, the barrenness of the

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f i g u r e 1 . The suicide of Ajax by Exekias, black-­figure belly amphora, ca. 540 BCE. Collection musée de Boulogne sur mer, inv. 558.3, copyright Philippe Beurtheret.

background is alluded to by the palm fronds. The weapons on the sidelines, the scene’s only other personifiable presence, only further emphasize Ajax’s isolation.13 Both artistic media to a greater or lesser degree invite the spectator to supply the missing narrative. On stage, Sophocles’ Ajax himself verbally alludes to the sword’s cursed history, but only elliptically; likewise, Ajax’s bent posture in the painting, in indicating his preparations for suicide, also gestures to a subtler “reading” of the scene’s epic sources, one that might include reflection on the part played by Hector.

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On stage, man and sword meet as if in a duel: they are conjoined in a peculiar relation of epic antagonism that dates back to the Trojan plain where the sword seemed to signal Ajax’s superior combat performance. Viewed retrospectively, however, the act of transfer in the Homeric episode foreshadows Ajax’s subsequent demise at Hector’s hands. The works of Exekias and Sophocles both allude to that act of the sword’s transfer as the point of origin for the final episode in Ajax’s career.14 In the painting, the sword’s key role as an actor comes through clearly in the way that it seems to draw Ajax, the human character, down to its own level, so that he is nearly eye to eye with the Gorgon-­faced shield—­or would be, were that weapon to be facing him rather than staring out at the viewer. When Ajax explains the sword’s only recently revealed significance in his life (in the Deception Speech) and consequently sets it up as his “executioner” (sphageus) in the very next scene (his Suicide Speech), the sword’s animated presence calls visual attention to itself. In what follows, I pursue the textual cues indicating how the sword as a physical object should be imagined as inflecting Ajax’s decision-­making and how, in particular, it disrupts his plan to kill himself. From Text to Performance: Reading the Sword in Sophocles’ Ajax Ajax begins on the day following the hero’s nocturnal foray against the Greek commanders. The Achaean army’s most trusted defender, the hero whose uniquely descriptive formulaic characterization in epic is ἕρκος Ἀχαιῶν “bulwark of the Achaeans,” has turned against his own people with treacherous, lethal force. But at the last minute, Athena clouds his vision and he slaughters the army’s sheep and cattle instead of their commanders. The allusions to Ajax’s companionship with his sword in the play’s opening scenes underline the hero’s reliance on this object, his weapon of choice for seeking revenge on his fellow soldiers. Athena mentions Ajax’s “hands which use the sword to kill” (χέρας ξιφοκτόνους, 10) in her prologue speech, and just a few lines later, Odysseus reports that there was an eyewitness who saw Ajax alone, “leaping through the plains with his newly spattered sword” (πηδῶντα πεδία σὺν νεορράντῳ ξίφει, 30).15 Moreover, in an effort to have Odysseus revel in Ajax’s deep humiliation, Athena asks Ajax ironically if he has “dyed his sword well in the blood of the Achaean army” (ἔβαψας ἔγχος εὖ πρὸς Ἀργείων στράτῷ, 95). In a more sympathetic vein, the Chorus bemoans their leader’s plight, having heard it rumored that Ajax has killed the captive animals with his “flashing iron” (αἴθωνι σιδήρῳ, 147). A bit later, with the rumor confirmed, they fear

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for the fate of the man who killed the cattle and herdsmen “with his black sword” (κελαινοῖς ξίφεσιν, 231). Tecmessa then recounts her version of events, telling the Chorus that while she tried to stop him, Ajax took his “double-­ edged sword” and rushed off into the night (286–­87).16 In the aftermath of the disaster, as Tecmessa reports, Ajax comes to his senses “amidst the sword-­ slaughtered animals” (ἐν μέσοις βοτοῖς / σιδηροκμῆσιν, 324–­25). The clustering of compound words is striking. The audience’s aural attention, at the very least, is being directed to the sword even before the physical prop reveals itself, with a neologism such as σιδηροκμῆσιν underlining the weapon’s unparalleled effects.17 In the first three hundred lines of Ajax compound adjectives also graphically evoke the material collateral of the sword’s deadly agency: its victims are described, e.g., as “hand-­slaughtered, blood-­ dipped sacrifices,” (χειροδάικτα σφάγι᾿ αἱμοβαφῆ, 219).18 Such hybrid adjectival forms are a marker of high literary diction, as ancient critics recognized, and have the effect of framing the sword as a kind of heroic “actor,” albeit one whose actions have increased the toll taken by Ajax’s madness.19 Its first visible appearance is likely at 346, where the sword may have lain among the detritus surrounding Ajax. A scholiast tells us that he is on the ekkuklēma, a wheeled platform which, when rolled out, provides spectators visual access to what has just happened inside, giving them a view of the interior. Often, what they see are dead bodies, the aftermath of violent acts. In Ajax’s case, the ekkuklēma offers up a view of the hero while he is still alive, if surrounded by death.20 Tecmessa has thrown open the doors of the stage building and the sailors behold their fallen leader. As he is wheeled out, Ajax’s slaughtered animal victims and blood-­soaked sword provide conspicuous reminders of the previous night’s humiliating failure.21 From his position on the platform, Ajax bids his Salaminian sailors farewell. He implores them to help in ending his life: “I-­o, race of men skilled in the sailing craft, you who have embarked, rowing a sea oar, I look to you, you alone as my supporting shepherds, but now join in slaying me (ἀλλά με συνδάιξον)” (356–­61). They in turn tell him to “speak less blasphemously” (εὔφημα φώνει, 362), lest he mire himself more deeply in ruin. Tecmessa echoes the Sailors’ pleas for moderation, begging her husband to “yield, by the gods, and think better thoughts” (ὦ πρὸς θεῶν ὕπεικε καὶ φρόνησον εὖ, 371).22 But Ajax continues to circle around, in speech, the various ways in which he might exact revenge on the two kings and the vilest wretch of them all—­the child of Laertes—­before dying himself (387–­91). There is no explicit verbal confirmation that this is the same sword with which Ajax will go on to kill himself. But it seems unlikely he would have

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changed swords, and there is certainly no indication in the play to this effect. Ajax’s sword, then, is from the outset linked to acts of bloodshed, the resonances of which will carry over into the prop’s first “official,” that is, its first textually cued, appearance.23 By the time the sword appears at 646, its role as the instrument (if not the instigator) of Ajax’s misdirected violence will have been fully fleshed out in words. The play’s readers, for whom the action is relayed in its textual form, will be unaware of the kind of entrance Ajax makes, sword in hand. But a live audience would notice the sword immediately, with consequences that I discuss below. Since there is no textual basis for assuming that Ajax carries his sword in the prologue (91–­117) nor at 358–­595, the actor’s entrance at 646, providing the first verifiable instance that the weapon is visibly on stage, only adds to the urgency of discovering why it needed to be brought forth into the light of day.24 Having determined to die nobly if he can no longer live nobly (479–­80), Ajax exits the playing area and goes into the stage building at 595. All signs and the conventions of drama underline that in going inside, Ajax intends to commit suicide.25 But he returns, against all expectations, and at 646 he delivers a speech that either conveys a genuine change of mind in favor of life, or else beautifully conceals Ajax’s unchanging commitment to suicide. The question facing the hero’s audience—­both inside and outside the dramatic frame—­when he returns at 646 is first and foremost, Why? Has he changed his mind? Or is he merely feigning a change of mind while his heart remains set on death? Numerous answers have been proposed to these questions.26 This is not the place to evaluate their individual merits,27 but the assumption is often that Ajax’s words alone, excerpted from their material and theatrical context, will furnish the answer that has eluded scholars for more than a century. Not usually mentioned is that the character’s words would have been spoken by an actor whose blood-­spattered, sword-­wielding appearance must have been distinctly unsettling.28 When investigating a (soon-­to-­be) murder, what better place to start than with the physical evidence? While there has been no shortage of reflection on the aesthetic and dramatic nuances of the speech itself, there has been much less discussion of the scene as staged action.29 This privileging of the strictly rhetorical over the embodied (figural, gestural, and material) cues serves as a stark indictment of the textual bias of much tragedy scholarship.30 Props are appreciated more for their ambience than for their action potential. Deception-­Speech scholarship is surprisingly unconcerned with this prop. The weapon is not even imagined to be capable of substantially affecting how Ajax’s words are heard. Yet, tragedy as a performative medium takes a minimalist approach to

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stage design, making pointed but economical use of visible properties.31 In a dramatic form that tends not to clutter its playing space, every object that enters the for-­the-­most-­part empty stage merits a closer look. That the sword is even part of the staged action requires explanation. If Ajax arrives on stage with the sword in hand, the prop must be considered part of the syntax of his speech. Ajax’s words, just like his movements, gestures, voice, and costume, would have been received as part of his visually inflected persona. As the actor’s words unfolded, so too would the sword’s weighty presence in his hands have framed their meaning. the “deception” speech (646–92) Ajax’s focus at the beginning of his speech is on time—­the “long and unmeasurable chronos” which “brings to light everything that is invisible and once it has been made apparent causes it to be hidden” (ἅπανθ᾿ ὁ μακρὸς κἀναρίθμητος χρόνος / φύει τ᾿ ἄδηλα καὶ φανέντα κρύπτεται, 646–­47). His words, if taken as an oblique commentary on the hero’s own reemergence into visibility, prefigure in ways that have certainly not gone unnoticed the eventual “burial” (κρύπτεται) of the sword in Ajax’s own body; when he uses this same verb at 658, this time expressing the intention to “hide” his sword (κρύψω τόδ᾿ ἔγχος), an echo of chronos’s ineluctable power can be heard.32 The immediate point of reference for his opening declaration, however, is not Ajax’s eventual death, but the sword itself—­a weapon whose true character is at long last about to be publicly revealed. Next, Ajax evokes for his audience his former self as a kind of double of the sword, only to emphasize that presently he has become much less rigid (650–­53): κἀγὼ γάρ, ὅς τὰ δείν᾿ ἐκαρτέρουν τότε, βαφῇ σίδηρος ὥς, ἐθηλύνθην στόμα πρὸς τῆσδε τῆς γυναικός· οἰκτίρω δέ νιν χήραν παρ᾿ ἐχθροῖς παῖδά τ᾿ ὀρφανὸν λιπεῖν. And I for my part who was terribly rigid back then, just like iron hardened with tempering, I have become womanly, as far as my “bite” is concerned, under the influence of this woman right here. For I feel pity at leaving her a widow among my enemies and leaving my child an orphan.

Tecmessa (“this woman right here”) has effeminized Ajax. If we assume for the moment that these are not outright lies (and there’s no indication they are), then the fact that Ajax can reflect on his behavior suggests that he has

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put some distance between himself and earlier events. Just as recently as 582, he was talking about a wound that needed cutting, a remark that spurred the Chorus to rebuke their leader for his “sharpened tongue” (γλῶσσά σου τεθηγμένη, 584). Ajax’s choice of simile for his former self also encourages his listeners, the external audience in particular, to connect that metaphorized Ajax of the past with the actual, material sword that he holds now in his hand. His plan to bury this object will be announced shortly, only strengthening the assimilation of the cursed weapon qua tempered iron with the past version of himself that Ajax is here repudiating. In the next few lines, Ajax declares that he will go to the seashore to rinse off the filth that still stains his body, and to “hide” the sword. These two projected actions—­bathing his body and “hiding” the weapon—­stem from the same desire. In each case, Ajax’s goal is to purify himself of past pollution, and to be free of Athena’s wrath (ὡς ἂν λύμαθ᾿ ἁγνίσας ἐμὰ / μῆνιν βαρεῖαν ἐξαλύξωμαι θεᾶς, 655–­56). He continues: “I will seek out some untrodden spot, and bury this sword of mine (τόδ᾿ ἔγγος τοὐμόν), most hateful of weapons . . .” (657–­58). There is no basis for reading deceptive intent into this statement, either. What he wants is in fact to rid himself of the weapon’s pollution and the filth with which it has stained his body. If he is to have a future, he must free himself of the past.33 And, in so far as the sword’s responsibility for his past failures necessitates a serious attempt to dispose of it (as one does with polluted objects),34 Ajax stands before his philoi to share the urgency of this task (661–­63): ἐγὼ γὰρ, ἐξ οὗ χειρὶ τοῦτ᾿ ἐδεξάμην παρ᾿ ῞Εκτορος δώρημα δυσμενεστάτου οὔπω τι κεδνὸν ἔσχον Ἀργείων πάρα. For I, ever since I accepted that thing in my hand, a gift from Hector the worst of my enemies, I’ve gotten no good from the Argives.

The sword, Ajax has finally realized, has been instrumental in his own mis­ fortunes. The last three words of  line 661, moreover, clearly distill the message that in Ajax’s posture, as he stands before his audience, his original acceptance of this weapon is being reenacted. The sword he now holds in his hand was received (by the very same hand) on that fateful day, as recounted in the seventh book of the Iliad, when two soldiers who had been meaning to fight to the death, instead settled for a truce, each one carrying off the Trojan battlefield a prize possession given to him by the other. These two warriors are Hector and Ajax, and while the Sophoclean Ajax merely alludes to the

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epic situation in a few words, his gestural presentation of the sword serves as a metonymic citation of that weapon’s epic past: an entire narrative episode is alluded to by his (verbally cued) grasping of the prop. The prop, visual tragic “part” standing in for epic’s narrative “whole,” evocatively brings to mind for the audience in the theater the Iliad ’s graphic account of this duel’s tense unfolding. Ajax’s own spear passes clean through Hector’s shield, his corselet, and even his tunic, forcing the latter to torque to one side to avoid death, and eventually leading to their eventual exchange of armor. Ajax’s unrivaled shield (sakos) resists the spearhead Hector throws at it, and Hector himself is very nearly downed by a boulder. (There is a strong focus, in the epic blow-­by-­blow, on the defensive action of both warriors’ shields.)35 After Hector’s knees have given way—­a loosening that typically precedes death in the Iliad—­and he is knocked over onto his back (7.270),36 it is Apollo who sets him on his feet again. The two warriors could then have continued to fight; Ajax now being in the dominant position would easily have won. But, with nightfall encroaching, heralds intervene and the duel is called off. Hector proposes that the two resume their fighting another day (ὕστερον αὖτε μαχησόμεθ᾿, he says to Ajax at 291). To sweeten the deal, Hector initiates an exchange of weapons, offering his enemy a sword studded with silver nails, its sheath, and a sword strap, and receiving from him in turn a red-­dyed war belt (299–­305): Come, let us give famed gifts to one another, so that someone of the Achaeans and Trojans will say (ὄφρά τις ὧδ’ εἴπῃσιν), “The two fought each other in soul-­devouring strife, but parted in friendship.” So speaking he (i.e., Hector) gave a silver-­studded sword (ξίφος ἀργυρόηλον), offering it together with a sheath and a well-­cut strap (σὺν κολεῷ τε φέρων καὶ ἐϋτμήτῳ τελαμῶνι). And Ajax gave him a war belt, shining with red (Αἴας δὲ ζωστῆρα δίδου φοίνικι φαεινόν).

By remaining silent during this exchange, Ajax grants Hector full authority to script the terms of their détente.37 And being keenly focused on shaping public opinion proactively, Hector ensures that others will see the pause as an amicable conclusion to their fighting. In the very act of trading objects, he ventriloquizes a stranger’s point of view. Let us trade gifts, he says, so that it may be said that they “fought each other in soul-­devouring strife, but parted in friendship.” Here Hector affixes his own interpretation to the exchange. As Hector suggests, the gifts will be seen as a pledge of friendship, though in reality they serve as a placeholder for future conflict. The trade will be contracted, the ὡς clause implies, for the very purpose of perpetuating a doubly coded

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message. While the Homeric Ajax never fully fathoms the futility of waiting for that definitive reprise of their interrupted duel, his tragic counterpart, privileged with retrospective vision, appears to understand all too well the negatively binding consequences of exchanging arms with Hector. Indeed, if he had realized then what he knows now, he might never have accepted such a gift. This tragically-­too-­late recognition of the sword’s pervasively hostile influence shapes Sophoclean Ajax’s thoughts about his most recent humiliation. The sword, to return to the lines quoted from Sophocles above, has split Ajax’s life down the middle into the time before he owned it and the time “ever since” (ἐξ οὗ, 661). The “ever since” covers a broad span. It includes Ajax’s near-­triumphs over Hector in books 7, 14, and 16 of the Iliad,38 as well as events that fall outside the narrative boundaries of the Iliad and Ajax, such as Ajax’s having been denied the arms of Achilles, arms that rightfully should have gone to him as “second best of the Achaeans.”39 More recently, as already discussed, the sword has disastrously derailed his efforts at punishing the Atreidae who awarded those arms to Odysseus instead. Athena was, by her own admission (Aj. 51–­60), the instigator of Ajax’s misdirected killing spree, but the sword may have provided her with a convenient platform. Ajax also blames the goddess: “But the daughter of Zeus, valiant goddess, destroys me perniciously,” he proclaims (ἀλλά μ᾿ ἁ Διὸς / ἀλκίμα θεὸς / ὀλέθριον αἰκίζει, 401–­3). Nor is he forced to rethink this assessment of his “diseased madness” (λυσσώδη νόσον, 452) until his first brush with self-­violence.40 “For I, ever since I accepted that thing in my hand, a gift from Hector the worst of my enemies, I’ve gotten no good from the Argives” (661–­63). This is the realization as Ajax reports it to Tecmessa and the Chorus, but the insight itself must have come to him earlier. If it hadn’t, Ajax would have remained inside his tent. In the interval between 595 and 646, the audience has no direct access to the hero’s actions or thoughts. Suicide is, as I already suggested, what they have to assume he is preparing himself for. But an unexpected insight stops Ajax in his tracks: to kill himself would be to advance Hector’s hostile agenda, finalizing his enemy’s victory over him. Ajax alludes to the recentness of this realization when he says, at 678, “For just now do I understand” (ἐπίσταμαι γὰρ ἀρτίως).41 Whatever has triggered Ajax’s awareness of the sword’s hostile profile must have done so while he was out of sight. While it’s impossible to know for sure what the catalyst was, Ajax’s emphasis on the recentness (ἀρτίως) of his understanding, as well as the fact that he reemerges into the playing space with the sword in hand, points to the likelihood that he was in his tent, making ready to kill himself, when the realization struck.

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Ajax credits the sword with disabusing him of his former ignorance. His declaration of intention to “bury this sword of mine” (τόδ’ ἔγχος τοὐμόν, 658) issues directly from his weapon-­triggered memory of having received the gift from Hector with the same hand that presently holds it (χειρὶ τοῦτ᾿ ἐδεξάμην, 661). In 661, τοῦτο, a hearer-­oriented deictic, refers back to the earlier (speaker-­oriented) τόδε of 658, confirming that the audience is already aware of the object that he has shown them.42 It is a known entity, not just because its presence has been visually registered, but because of the intertextual allusions in Ajax’s speech that bring the prop’s biography fully to life. If he were to kill himself, Ajax now believes, he would be falling prey to a plot of Hector’s earlier making (664–­65): ἀλλ᾿ ἔστ᾿ ἀληθὴς ἡ βροτῶν παροιμία ἐχθρῶν ἄδωρα δῶρα κοὐκ ὀνήσιμα. But the saying among mortals is true: The gifts of enemies are ungifts and not helpful at all.

His own experience of Hector’s sword has proven to Ajax the truth of these words. Ajax thus brings out the weapon, as if beckoning his internal audience to behold the object that he now renounces along with the version of himself it duplicitously helped create. The prop seen by the audience is to be imagined as the very same sword with which the Homeric Ajax was duped by Hector into terms of friendship that were destined never to be fulfilled. Tragic Ajax at long last (and too late) admits that the sword qua tragic prop is fulfilling Hector’s words only too literally; for while others, including Sophocles’ own audience, may have assumed that Hector and Ajax “fought each other in soul-­ devouring strife, but parted in friendship,” (Il. 7.300), the sword’s past and present owners know better. It was never the purpose of their truce to secure a lasting friendship. That was merely the impression created by the narrative Hector scripted with the sword’s help—­a narrative that Ajax himself endorsed, but whose tragic consequences he had not fully grasped until he was about to fulfill the weapon’s imperative. A prop’s possession of a biography that remains stable through time and across genres allows it to stand in, not only for itself, but also for past selves that are known to its current audience.43 This feature of prophood has been flawlessly exploited by Sophocles in the case of Ajax’s sword. The sword cues itself as exactly the same weapon that changed hands between Ajax and Hector in the Iliad, with important consequences for how he read Ajax’s commentary on that exchange.

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As his Sophoclean counterpart now realizes, Homer’s Ajax was duped into signing over his victory rights—­even though he knew he had won the duel against Hector.44 Consequently, he distances himself from the sword, which to his mind now symbolizes that duplicitous exchange and his being bested by Hector. After expressing his intention to bury the weapon, tragic Ajax adds: “Let Hades and Night guard it below” (ἀλλ᾿αὐτὸ νὺξ Ἅιδης τε σῳζόντων κάτω, 660). At the end of his speech, Ajax uses the same verb, σῴζειν, in reference to himself, hinting that his internal audience will soon hear how he has been “saved” (σεσωμένον, 692).45 The salvation language may point ahead to the next scene, but the pairing of Night with Hades suggests an even more specific intertext.46 In Iliad 7, Hector had mentioned “night” specifically as the reason for interrupting his duel with Ajax (290–­93): Let us now stop the battle and the fighting today. Later we will fight again, until a god decides between us, and gives to one side or the other victory. Night already comes to fulfillment, and it is good to obey the night (νὺξ δ’ ἤδη τελέθει· ἀγαθὸν καὶ νυκτὶ πιθέσθαι).

The decision to return the sword to Night, whence it came, thus provides a kind of ring-­composition, a fittingly dramatic finale for this object’s “epic” performance.47 The revelatory force of time’s passing is the rhetorical trope with which Ajax opened his speech (Aj. 646–­47). In the long stretch of time that has intervened between Ajax’s epic past and his tragic present, he has learned that one must “help a friend only to the extent that you know he will not always be a friend” (680). Indeed, Hector’s sword was never given as a pledge of lasting friendship, but rather as a promise that these “friends” would eventually reprise their enmity. That promise is what has been guiding Ajax’s actions until the present moment. Only on the basis of his insight into the weapon’s hostile agency has he now decided that it must be returned to its original donor—­returned, that is, to Night. After Ajax has left the stage at 692, supposedly to find a deserted place in which to bury Hector’s sword, he reappears at 815, this time with the sword clearly set up for slaughter.48 For Tecmessa and the Chorus, who had taken Ajax’s earlier speech as a renunciation of death, the suicide that follows it is the ultimate betrayal. Scholars who reject the deception reading of the earlier speech have also struggled to make sense of what they can only account for in terms of a second change of mind. Speculation has included, for instance, that Athena strikes our hero out of the blue with a suicidal impulse.49 But there is no need to introduce such speculative plot devices. Ajax has expressed, in no uncertain terms, his intention to rid himself of the cursed object. Yet he finds

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that determination countered by the weapon itself, a resistance that manifests itself in what I would call Ajax’s “plural” voice. The linguistic phenomenon attests to a cognitive one. Ajax has been speaking in the first person singular throughout, only switching into the first person plural when he says, “So then, from now on we will know, on the one hand, how to yield to the gods and we will learn, on the other, to reverence the Atreidae” (τοιγὰρ τὸ λοιπὸν εἰσόμεσθα μὲν θεοῖς / εἴκειν, μαθησόμεσθα δ᾿ Ἀτρείδας σέβειν, 666–­67). Speakers who are complying with the request made of them by an interlocutor frequently use the dialogic particle τοιγάρ.50 While deictics elsewhere confirm his awareness of the physical presence of both Tecmessa and the weapon (see lines 652 and 658), Ajax’s use of τοιγάρ engages both of these “interlocutors.” Curious, however, is that it is at precisely this point in his speech that Ajax also switches over into the plural. He is in the midst of signaling his cooperation, perhaps even letting Tecmessa know that he is complying with her earlier request that he “soften” himself (πρὸς θεῶν, μαλάσσου, 594), but he complies, not in his own (univocal) speaking voice, but as a “we” (εἰσόμεσθα). Why “we”? While Tecmessa’s earlier request that Ajax “soften” himself would initially seem to reinforce Ajax’s newfound determination to resist the sword’s siren call, the rhetoric of “softening” one’s στόμα (“bite”), if properly situated within the metaphorical nexus of ancient metalworking, would imply a lessening of resistance: Ajax’s formerly tempered surface is now more easily breached. Although Ajax articulates a retreat from death, his words, even as he utters them, are undermining his message.51 Ajax’s singular speaking voice has been subsumed by the sword—­just as his body will be drawn to the sword’s metallic edge.52 Whatever plans Ajax now has for the sword will be overwritten by its plans for him. In particular, Ajax will be guided by Hector (acting through his weapon) to “yield to the gods” and “to reverence the Atreidae.” The more noticeably the sword indexes Hector’s hostile friendship, the greater the pressure on Ajax to become an (involuntary) agent in his own death. It is not merely in an instrumental sense that the sword kills Ajax. In Ajax’s mind, the weapon clearly extends Hector’s personhood beyond that hero’s mortal lifespan, continuing and concluding the enmity between them that the Iliad began. Gell’s notion of distributed personhood is especially apt here. For the sword that has been so explicitly aligned with its epic donor in this scene will, in the next, be set up—­and personified—­as Ajax’s executioner. Eventually their two surfaces will meet, but in the last part of the so-­called Deception Speech, the audience witnesses Ajax’s final effort at resisting that assimilation. The Chorus of sailors are audibly overjoyed by this speech (e.g., at 693ff.). They hear only the “I” voice (Ajax’s own expressed intentions). They are

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inside the story—­actors within the action—­and are unfamiliar with the sword’s epic history. They cannot recognize the intertextual echoes in Ajax’s dialogue, nor do they hear the sword’s latent agency speaking through Ajax, and grafting onto Ajax’s words the doublespeak that turns the speaker’s every innocent utterance against himself. Unlike the theater audience, they do not grasp that death has been scripted into Ajax’s mythical biography. They take him at his word, as does the audience, except that the audience can also hear the sword’s voice undermining Ajax’s plans at every turn. hector’s revenge (815–65) At the moment of death, Ajax resembles a warrior dying in battle.53 He is, of course, physically responsible for leaping onto the sword (among other actions), but deeper responsibility lies elsewhere, as Teucer will confirm. The scene has changed from in front of Ajax’s tent to a deserted shoreline, a place reminiscent of Exekias’s rendition of the hero kneeling before his weapon.54 When Ajax returns to the playing space for his final speech he appears to be resisting suicide, even as he makes ready to leap onto the sword (815–­22): ὁ μὲν σφαγεὺς ἕστηκεν ᾗ τομώτατος γένοιτ᾿ ἄν, εἴ τῳ καὶ λογίζεσθαι σχολή· δῶρον μὲν ἀνδρὸς Ἕκτορος ξένων ἐμοὶ μάλιστα μισηθέντος, ἐχθίστου θ᾿ ὁρᾶν· πέπηγε δ᾿ ἐν γῇ πολεμίᾳ τῇ Τρῳάδι, σιδηροβρῶτι θηγάνῃ νεηκονής· ἔπηξα δ᾿ αὐτὸν εὖ περιστείλας ἐγώ, εὐνούστατον τῷδ᾿ ἀνδρὶ διὰ τάχους θανεῖν. The slayer is standing in a way that would be most cutting, if there is leisure for anyone even to reflect on this: the gift of Hector, of all my guest friends a man who is by far most hated and hostile to look at. It has been planted in the enemy soil of Troy, newly sharpened against the iron-­devouring whetstone; for I planted it—­I was the one who did this—­taking care to arrange it, making it most favorably inclined for this man right here to die with the utmost speed.

Sphageus, the term by which Ajax refers to the weapon (815), is a nomen agentis, or “agent noun,” and these are normally predicated only of persons. This is the sole appearance of the term in Sophocles.55 Although forms of σφαγίς occur only rarely in tragedy, the instances we have make it clear that this term, sharing the same verbal root as σφαγεύς, applies to swords (or knives) as instruments of slaughter or sacrifice (as, e.g., at E. El. 811 and 1142). Ajax’s choice of the human-­agent term over the instrumental term is in this

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respect marked. It reveals the sword to us—­through Ajax’s vision of it—­as an executioner. Ajax indicates a few lines later that he has “fixed” the weapon in the ground: ἔπηξα in 821. The staging of this gesture, as well as of the hero’s subsequent death leap, has occasioned more than the usual amount of speculation and debate.56 Peter Meineck (2006, 455) proposes that the ekkuklēma “is preset with Hector’s sword and a small mound where Ajax will plant it” while others, such as Jebb (on 815) and Kamerbeek (1963, 168) have suggested that only the sword’s point would have been visible. David Seale (1982, 164), arguing that the sword is “the explicit focus of the speech, more prominent than in his previous utterance, where it was referred to after the speech got underway,” concludes that it must be visible. There is simply no way of deciding on the basis of the text alone how the sword was positioned; likewise, whether Ajax disappears inside the tent to kill himself or does so in full view of the audience can not be determined, though, as Meineck points out, the latter scenario would have created “major staging problems” (455). Among more recent commentators, Ley (1988), Rehm (2002), and Meineck (2006) appear to favor the use of the ekkuklēma for displaying the sword to the audience, before the actor playing Ajax retreats inside the stage building at the end of his speech, and the ekkuklēma is later rolled out again with a bloodied dummy corpse impaled on the sword.57 All that can be known for certain is that Ajax is the Messenger of his own death, a detail of considerable significance when we consider the usual tendency of having a third party relay acts of violence undertaken within the confines of the stage building. What motivates this innovative staging? It would have been considerably harder for the audience viscerally to gauge Ajax’s relationship with his sword, had they not witnessed it for themselves. When they see and hear Ajax addressing the weapon as his “executioner,” spectators can be in no doubt as to the hero’s state of mind. From a purely theatrical standpoint, moreover, the tour de force staging would have given the actor playing Ajax ample opportunity to display his skill. There is an anecdote, preserved in the scholia, about the actor Timotheus being nicknamed “Cut-­throat” (or Sphageus) in recognition of the superb skill with which he threw himself onto a self-­retracting sword-­prop in a post-­premiere production of Ajax.58 According to René Nünlist (2009, 353n64), “the critic apparently presumes that the actor falls on the sword and then remains in a position that requires much strength.” Reinforcing the audience’s sense of the object’s agency is Ajax’s language, which suggests that his own movements are reactive, rather than autonomous. He plants the sword in the earth in such a way that it will cut “most

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kindly” through his flesh. But as the gift of his most hated enemy (μισηθέντος and ἐχθίστου at 818), the sword embodies and enacts the hostile reciprocity that defined Ajax’s relations with Hector. The latter’s presence on stage, moreover, is effectively conjured by Ajax’s personifying use of masculine forms—νεηκονής (820), αὐτόν (821), and εὐνούστατον (822)—­to refer to what, grammatically speaking, is a neuter entity. Whereas English always uses the neuter pronoun “it” to refer to an object, Greek chooses the pronoun or adjective that agrees in gender with the noun antecedent, regardless of whether that gendered noun is a person or a thing. The masculine gender of the above-­mentioned words reaches back all the way to the masculine agent noun sphageus. That Ajax chooses the masculine pronoun/adjective over the neuter form, even though a neuter antecedent (δῶρον) is closer, at 817, only increases the listener’s confusion over whether it is a person or a thing Ajax is speaking about. The participle περιστείλας (821) can also be understood in more than one sense. Presumably Ajax has arranged (earth) around his sword,59 and thus positioned it in the ground at just the right angle, but as περιστέλλειν is the technical term for clothing a dead body for burial, Ajax could also be understood as saying he had “wrapped him (i.e., Hector) for burial.”60 In being performed live, these verbal ambiguities would have easily resolved themselves through the actor’s gestures and visual cues: there is no real doubt about Ajax’s positioning of the sword in the ground for the purpose of leaping onto it. There are, however, ontological ambiguities created by Ajax’s word choices. The shadowy figure of Hector evoked by Ajax’s use of a masculine rather than a neuter adjectival form transforms the prop into a synecdoche of that man. While the sword planted in the ground next to the speaker clearly supplies the material referent for Ajax’s utterances, much less clear is whether Ajax himself or his Hector-­haunted weapon is stage-­ directing the hero’s physical movements. The ambiguity centers on the nature of the weapon and reflects, in this sense, the categorical confusion created by Ajax’s interactions with his enemy’s sword.61 Ajax’s intentions, moreover, are never articulated, except in so far as he takes care physically to position the blade in such a way that it will end his life quickly (διὰ τάχους θανεῖν, 822). a r i d d l e r e s o lv e d Teucer, Ajax’s half-­brother, calls the sword a phoneus “slayer” in an exclamation of grief that provides the third—­and most emphatic—­statement of Hector’s posthumous agency acting through his sword (1025–­27):62

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ὦ τάλας, ὑφ’ οὗ φονέως ἄρ’ ἐξέπνευσας. εἶδες ὡς χρόνῳ ἔμελλέ σ’ Ἕκτωρ καὶ θανὼν ἀποφθίσειν; Doomed man! By what a slayer (I now realize) you breathed your last. Have you seen how in time Hector, even in death, was going to destroy you?

Notice the force of the particle ἄρα combined with the verb μέλλειν in Teucer’s speech. As Egbert Bakker (2005, 97) has written of ἄρα and μέλλειν in Homer, “these two elements have a strong semantic affinity to each other. They may be characterized, in their Homeric use, as markers of visual evidence in the here and now of the speaker ; more precisely, they mark the interpretation of such visual evidence” (emphasis in the original).63 Faced with the concrete evidence of Ajax’s body, Teucer is now realizing that Ajax’s death has been caused by an external “slayer” (phoneus), a slayer most intimately connected with Hector—­whom he in fact identifies as Hector. For Teucer, Ajax’s death is not a suicide. Indeed, Teucer’s words here provide the answer, for the first time articulated out loud, to the kenning that was posed by Ajax himself in his Deception Speech—­more on that in a moment. Teucer continues (1032–­33):64 οὗτος δ᾽ ἐκείνου τήνδε δωρεὰν ἔχων πρὸς τοῦδ᾽ ὄλωλε θανασίμῳ πεσήματι And this man, having received this gift from that one, perished by means of it/him in a deadly fall.

Agency is distributed between the giver and his gift, which is placed in the syntactic role of agent (πρὸς τοῦδ᾽ “through this one, or this thing here”).65 The Greek deictic pronoun τοῦδε can reference either a masculine or a neuter antecedent. A comparable case of animated weaponry can be found in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes, where the “Scythian stranger” is part of the Chorus’s riddling prophecy about the death of Oedipus’s sons (727–­31): ξένος δὲ κλήρους ἐπινωμᾷ Χάλυβος Σκυθῶν ἄποικος, κτεάνων χρηματοδαίτας πικρός, ὠμόφρων σίδαρος, χθόνα ναίειν διαπήλας ὁπόσαν καὶ φθιμένους ἐγκατέχειν τῶν μεγάλων πεδίων ἀμοίρους.

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A stranger apportions the shares, a Chalyb, colonist of the Scythians, bitter distributor of possessions, raw-­minded iron. He assigns so much soil to dwell on as the dead can occupy, bereft of the wide plains.

Here the identity of “Chalyb” is framed as a kind of puzzle (or γρῖφος). Is it human or nonhuman? Certainly we are encouraged to hear the noun χάλυβος (“hardened iron”) as if it were a personal name. But the answer appears a few verses later when the singers mention “raw-­minded iron” (730).66 Characterized with person-­specific vocabulary, e.g, ἄποικος (“colonist”) and ὠμόφρων (“savage, or raw-­minded”), the weapon will act as host to Oedipus’s curse. It is the father’s vengeful, “raw” fury (his Erinys, 945) that will kill the sons and that renders the weapon ὠμόφρων.67 The sword will divide the land, apportioning to each son just enough earth to be buried in. But by introducing the iron weapon as a “stranger” the Chorus turns the object’s identity into a riddle—­one whose answer is a personhood as mysterious and ultimately as injurious as that of Hector’s sword. Aeschylus appends an explanation to this riddle. In Ajax, the sword qua physical prop solves the mystery of Ajax’s own riddling “prophecy” in the Deception Speech.68 Without the answer in the form of the sword’s “quasi-­ animate hostility,”69 however, Ajax’s language would be as hopelessly paradoxical and inscrutable as the prophecy of the Chorus in the Seven against Thebes, had they not included within the same ode their riddle’s decipherment. The only reason the Deception Speech continues to elude a similar hermeneutic closure is that the clue to its decipherment happens to be a stage prop, an object whose material absence from the tragedy’s textual transmission has become complicit in perpetuating the belief that there is an inherent and irreconcilable contradiction between Ajax’s words and his actions. It is infused with double entendres, to be sure. But this speech’s reputation for being recalcitrantly enigmatic—­thus spawning the labeling of Ajax as “deceptive,” in an attempt to resolve the seeming disjuncture—­is also, in a way, symptomatic of scholarship’s unreflective sidelining of tragedy’s material actors. Not just in this play but in other tragedies as well, the material presence of props critically shapes characters’ deliberations in live performance, helping spectators make sense of actions that might otherwise appear unmotivated, or downright perverse. Like the other Achaean heroes, Ajax went to Troy to win kleos for himself. This does not happen in the way Ajax once imagined it would. In fact, it is his officious pursuit of kleos that is often cited as a complicating factor for the heroic reading of Ajax’s death that Teucer promotes.70 Speaking to the

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Chorus, the Messenger recounts a conversation that supposedly took place between Ajax and his father before the former set forth for Troy. In response to Telamon’s sage advice that he “be always victorious with divine help” (σὺν θεῷ δ᾿ ἀεὶ κρατεῖν, 765) Ajax says that he will win on his own terms (767–­69): πάτερ, θεοῖς μὲν κἂν ὁ μηδὲν ὢν ὁμοῦ κράτος κατακτήσαιτ᾿· ἐγὼ δὲ καὶ δίχα κείνων πέποιθα τοῦτ᾿ ἐπισπάσειν κλέος. Father, with the gods on his side even a nobody might obtain victory. But even apart from them, I trust that I will drag that kleos in my wake.

The action verb that Ajax uses for his pursuit of kleos at 769 is ἐπισπάσειν, a word more commonly found in expressions such as “dragging by the hair,” where it is paired with an object susceptible to physical manipulation (e.g., κόμης). Ajax’s rhetoric in this sense reeks of brutality and force.71 This verb, moreover, shares a root with ἀποσπάω, the term Teucer later uses when he de­ spairs of ever being able to “drag” Ajax’s body off of the sword tip (Aj. 1024–­25, οἴμοι, τί δράσω; πῶς σ᾿ ἀποσπάσω πικροῦ / τοῦδ᾿ αἰόλου κνώδοντος;). The same verbal root (σπᾶν) appears in both contexts, and to poignant effect. The boast that he would physically overpower kleos has apparently returned to haunt Ajax in his death. It is now his own corpse—­not his kleos—­that suffers the impact of his violent rhetoric. Sophocles’ staging shows us Ajax in the act of dying: we see—­and feel—­ the weight of his death. Verbs of dragging are key to Ajax’s being in the world, and to his perception of his being in the world—­Achilles sings klea andrōn, Ajax reportedly boasted that he would “draw toward (himself)” kleos (Aj. 769). It is tragically appropriate, therefore, that Ajax’s “yielding” to the gods and the Atreidae turns into a literal yielding to the overwhelming attraction of the sword’s materiality. This is the vitalism, the “vibrancy,” of metal at work in sinister ways. Iron draws iron—­the sword beckoning the tempered hero to give himself over to its irresistible draw.72 His own “bite” (στόμα) has been softened, Ajax announced earlier (at 651). But this turns out only to increase the magnetic attraction between himself and the fateful weapon. Ajax successfully resists suicide only, in the end, to succumb to Hector.

Weapons and the Poetics of Reperformance Tragic weapons, unlike their epic counterparts, are never shown in the heat of battle. In epic, the fighting hero can be presented as a perfectly blended

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f i g u r e 2 . Mourners and funeral procession, amphora ca. 750 BCE from Kerameikos Cemetery, near Dipylon Gate. National Archaeological Museum Athens. Photo Credit: Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive of Art Resource, NY.

person-­weapon, the boundaries of his autonomous self vanishing into those of the panoply he has donned, his muscular agency becoming an extension of the metals and the other materials he wears on his body. At the same time, those layerings become a kind of second skin, seamlessly extending the hero’s fighting capabilities and shaping the perception of his personhood.73 A striking visual expression of this effect can be found in Late Geometric Attic pottery featuring Dipylon shields (see figure 2). These shields, “distinguished by the scallops cut into each side” represent “a geometricized version of the large but light hide shields which had a long history in Greece.”74 They are essentially integrated into the figures of the warriors that wield them and serve not just as shields but also as the soldier’s entire torso. The iconographic representations capture a still-­shot of this blended-­effect, wherein warriors are their weapons.75 Tragedy, by contrast, mines the acts of transfer, revisiting the biographies that bind a man to his bow, or a son to his father’s shield. How and why weapons change hands, and under what circumstances they have been won, lost, and bequeathed are the questions from which tragic weapons draw their performative charge. Where a man makes a gift of an object to another (whether

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friend or enemy), he will continue to be represented, or, as some would say “indexed,” in that object’s actions. Alfred Gell’s (1998) notion of “distributed personhood” frames material objects as extensions of human agency and personhood, as we saw earlier.76 Hector’s sweat-­stained shield (and sling) from Euripides’ Trojan Women is perhaps the most clear-­cut case of distributed personhood in all of tragedy. Hecuba speaks to Hector’s shield affectionately, as if she were addressing her recently deceased son (1196–­99): ὡς ἡδὺς ἐν πόρπακι σῷ κεῖται τύπος ἴτυός τ᾿ ἐν εὐτόρνοισι περιδρόμοις ἱδρώς, ὃν ἐκ μετώπου πολλάκις πόνους ἔχων ἔσταζεν How sweet is the impression (tupos) which lies on your handle and the marks on your well-­turned rim from the sweat which Hector dripped from his brow when he endured many toils (ponous) in battle and pressed [you] against his chin.

For this grieving mother, the shield is a still vital link to her son, its visible stain attesting to the physical strain (the πόνους) recently borne by his body. Unlike other signs and tokens, however, this “impression” (τύπος) does not signify arbitrarily. In its imprint, the shield preserves a material trace of the man himself, evoking not just his body—­the arm that held the sling—­but also reifying the soldier’s ephemeral feats. His toils in the heat of battle have left their mark on the rim of the shield with which he caught the sweat from his forehead, leaving ingrained a legible record of his performance in battle. Hecuba’s pathos-­filled reaction to the shield is a moving testament in itself to how this artifact temporarily reanimates the now dead soldier, in his moth­ er’s eyes. Even if less visibly so than Hector’s shield, weapons worn and wielded by epic warriors archive their owners’ acts of valor and suffering. Heracles, for example, in Euripides’ play of the same name, finds his life’s story painfully bound up with the weapons whose future he debates out loud. Heracles must reckon with the terrible violence he has wrought on his own family with his famous bow and arrows. Driven mad by Hera, he killed his three sons and his wife. Now, returned to sanity, he confronts the perpetrators of these atrocities. In the speech quoted below Heracles initially treats the weapons as inanimate objects (τάδε), but in the very next breath he resurrects them to fully human status (HF 1378–­85): ἀμηχανῶ γὰρ πότερ’ ἔχω τάδ’ ἢ μεθῶ, ἃ πλευρὰ τἀμὰ προσπίτνοντ’ ἐρεῖ τάδε·

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Ἡμῖν τέκν’ εἷλες καὶ δάμαρθ’· ἡμᾶς ἔχεις παιδοκτόνους σούς. εἶτ’ ἐγὼ τάδ’ ὠλέναις οἴσω; τί φάσκων; ἀλλὰ γυμνωθεὶς ὅπλων ξὺν οἷς τὰ κάλλιστ’ ἐξέπραξ’ ἐν Ἑλλάδι ἐχθροῖς ἐμαυτὸν ὑποβαλὼν αἰσχρῶς θάνω; οὐ λειπτέον τάδ’, ἀθλίως δὲ σωστέον. I am at a loss (amēchanō)—­should I keep these (tade) or let them go? Weapons which, falling by my side, will reproach me: “With our help you killed your children and your wife; in us you hold the killers of your children” (paidoktonous sous). Will I then bear these in my arms? What can I say? But stripped of the weapons with which I achieved the most beautiful things in Hellas, should I then die shamefully, subjecting myself to my enemies? They must not be left behind; however miserably, they must be kept.

Heracles is at a cognitive impasse: beholding his bow and arrows, as well as his signature club, he sees no mere passive objects but the “killers” of his loved ones. The horror of realizing that he has acted with violence against his family gives rise to a quandary. Should he take them, or leave them behind? The Sophoclean Ajax faces a similar dilemma in his eponymous drama. He chooses to bury his compromised sword. Heracles by contrast decides his weapons “must be kept.” Both sets of weapons help articulate the distinctively tragic dilemmas of their owners. The Iliad ’s warriors are completely “blended” with their weaponry; they are one in mind and body with the tools that enable their tremendous physical exploits. Skin-­tight greaves, breast-­plates, and closely held shields are visible indices of the soldiers whose bodies they clad, and of the power that infuses their limbs when Ares the war god puts into them the “fighting strength” with which they test their physical limits.77 When performing at peak capacity, a warrior presents a seamless front to the world. Occasionally, a hero is caught in a rare moment of un-­guardedness—­Ajax, for instance, as he breathes heavily and struggles to hold up his shield.78 In even this small hint, however, epic betrays the dark side of its own kleos culture, yielding insight into a tragic world where weapons will come to represent the pain and personal devastation that “glory” can entail. On the tragic stage, heroes such as Heracles and Ajax are faced with the literal dismantling of their glorious pasts, a past that from tragedy’s perspective can be classified as “epic” or “mythical.” The weapons in Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes evoke familiar epic contexts and conflicts. But they also gesture to their viewers’ contemporary institutions and social realities. Initially, an object such as Ajax’s great sakos (shield), his signature weapon in the Iliad, may look a bit old-­fashioned and out of place in Sophocles’ fifth-­century theaterscape. Through its namesake

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Eurysakes, however, the shield helps forge an important link between two episodes in Ajax’s biography: his death in the Troad at the hands of Hector and his eventual “rebirth” in Athens as the founding hero of one of the ten Cleisthenic tribes (as I explore further in chapter 5). Likewise, in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the bow of Heracles marshals its own mythical biography to instill in Neoptolemus feelings of empathy for the isolated and still seizure-­prone Philoctetes. Named by the Trojan prophet Helenus as a necessary ingredient in Troy’s fall, and in Philoctetes’ possession when the tragedy begins, the bow was originally Heracles’ gift to the latter for ending his physical torment. It in turn impresses its history of euergesia (benefaction) upon Neoptolemus. The bow in this sense complicates the latter’s role in Odysseus’s deception plot. Philoctetes hands over his bow to Neoptolemus willingly, asking him to safeguard it while he is in the clutches of his disease (763–­73). Secure in Philoctetes’ trust, it would have been supremely easy for Neoptolemus simply to walk away with the “object of his hunt” (839). As he relinquishes it, however, Philoctetes tells his young friend to “pray to divine phthonos” that the bow not trouble him in the way it did its previous two owners (776–­78), hinting here for the first time at the bow’s tainted legacy. Philoctetes’ words bring home the twofold character of this gift. The bow exacts a heavy price for the friendship it bestows. philo ctetes’ bow as a haptic actor It is a testament to the bow’s numinous, choreographic power that Odysseus’s deception plot encounters resistance midway through the action. This resistance can be traced directly to Neoptolemus’s visual experience—­but more importantly to his tactile experience—­of Heracles’ weapon. Neoptolemus witnesses firsthand Philoctetes’ debilitating seizure (730–­805) and, having been ordered by the older man to act as guardian to his sacred bow, he starts to empathize with the bow-­owner’s pain. Neoptolemus has been given the bow to hold by line 766, but he confesses already at 806 that he has “long been grieving”: ἀλγῶ πάλαι δὴ τἀπὶ σοὶ στένων κακά. At most only a few minutes of playing time can have passed since he first took hold of the weapon, yet Neoptolemus professes a long-­felt empathy with Philoctetes. The prop instantly synchronizes Neoptolemus’s affect with that of Philoctetes, causing the former to feel for the first time what the latter has long suffered, as if that feeling had been his all along. More powerful even than Odysseus’s rhetoric is the bow’s capacity to elicit physical empathy: ἀλγῶ (806) is a literal expression of pain, and Neoptolemus, it turns out, emulates Philoctetes’ response long ago to Heracles’ pain.79 Here we see the bow’s extraordinary gifts

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in action. It has kept Philoctetes alive on this deserted island for many years. But by winning him a human ally in Neoptolemus, whom the bow draws into a network of reciprocal benefaction that includes Philoctetes, Heracles, and even the god Apollo, it also leaves its distinctive mark on the tragedy’s plot.80 While the bow’s sacred character eludes Odysseus who is focused exclusively on political gain, it clearly affects Neoptolemus, shaping his emotions according to the history of empathy that contact with this weapon has been known to inspire.81 Since no one else has been allowed to touch the sacred object, there is a direct line of succession being established between past and present owners, even though Neoptolemus’s “mastery” of the bow is meant to be only temporary. Like the bow of Philoctetes, Ajax’s sword is a haptic actor—­an artifact whose primary mode of communication is through the medium of touch. Wherever characters mention the handling of a significant prop, or even the part of the body with which it has come into contact—­the hand, for instance, that received the sword (at Aj. 661)—­we can be sure that the haptic reference contains a cognitive correlate, one that will manifest itself in the action, sooner or later. The places in a script where a weapon (or other object) is about to change hands repay close attention. These oftentimes point up where the current production deliberately departs from earlier versions. I conclude with two examples. Dio Chrysostom’s Oration 52 indicates that in both Aeschylus’s and Euripides’ Philoctetes plays, the bow is stolen from him during one of Philoctetes’ paroxysms of pain. In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, which has a later production date, the Chorus of sailors urges Neoptolemus to take advantage of Philoctetes’ post-­paroxysmal slumber to make off with the bow (835–­39). “What are we waiting for?” they ask pointedly at 836 (πρὸς τί μένομεν πράσσειν;). It is a question that, by drawing attention to the direction the plot might have been expected to take, strongly underlines the innovative character of both Neoptolemus’s reluctance and the more active role assigned to the prop in this later (Sophoclean) production, where the bow itself does the work of converting Neoptolemus. Rather than allowing Neoptolemus simply to steal from a sleeping Philoctetes, Sophocles revises the earlier script to highlight the fact that the bow has been elevated to full-­blown character status. Without the weapon’s complicity, neither Troy’s capture, nor Neoptolemus’s participation can be counted on. The bow reshapes the traditional plot in its own image, making it conform to the weapon’s own history of persuasive benefaction. Likewise in Ajax, the full impact of Sophocles’ experimental dramaturgy comes across in the hero’s on-­stage death. One gets a better sense of the distinctive role played by the sword in Ajax’s death when Sophocles’ version is

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compared to the earlier discussed fragment of Aeschylus’s Thracian Women Messenger’s speech (TrGF 3.83 Radt). Reporting the difficulty the hero had in piercing his resistant skin, the Messenger describes the sword as bending uncooperatively, “just as if someone were stretching a bow” (τόξον ὥς τις ἐντείνων), each time he tried to stab himself.82 Aeschylus’s staging seems to have placed Ajax in dialogue with a goddess who guided his hand to the fatal spot underneath his arm; his use of the sword was purely instrumental. But Sophocles, as we have seen, makes the relationship between Ajax and his sword antagonistic to the extreme, as if they are two warriors dueling (once again) to the death. To anyone familiar with the Aeschylean production (or other productions like it), this shift in causal responsibility from the divine realm to the mortal plane has important consequences. Sophocles’ choreography, bolstered by the verbal script, makes clear that the struggle is between two men. What had been accomplished through divine mediation is now, thanks to the animation ascribed to the weaponry itself, presented as Ajax’s submission to his “executioner” (sphageus). The hero says out loud that he has fixed the sword in the ground in such a way that it will be “most well-­disposed” (εὐνούστατον) toward him and he will die most quickly (822), perhaps even alluding here to Aeschylus’s earlier play. Implicit, certainly, is that there will be no divine intermediaries to rescue Ajax from awkward attempts at impaling himself. There is originality in publicly staging the hero’s death, to be sure, but, more importantly, the stage design is predicated on the sword itself, a weapon whose past is intimately entwined with Ajax’s present. Only in the presentation of the visual evidence can the sword be recognized as causally implicated in its owner’s death leap. With their capacity to signal to the audience where a play deliberately departs from a previous production, props provide a sort of meta-­commentary on the action as it unfolds, revealing, agonistically perhaps, where “improvements” have been introduced. Tragedy in the act of being performed is—­more often than we realize—­a reperformance. This performance dynamic of reacting to productions past places props in the fascinating role of guiding the audience’s reception of what they are watching, as they are watching it. Conclusion By restoring the sword to its full “actor” potential in this chapter, we have uncovered important features of this tragedy as live theater, features that are not accessible to those who engage with Ajax purely as a textual artifact. The “Deception” and “Suicide” speeches in particular are richly textured with

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temporal overlays that come through most clearly in the sword’s shaping of the hero’s movements and words. The weapon first lured its master inside, only to have him come bounding back, prepared to rewrite the ending of his epic career. Time, which leaves nothing untouched, has at long last revealed to Ajax what this “gift” has really meant. Ajax has good reasons to want to see the sword buried, reasons which he readily shares with his listeners. That the weapon will end up “buried” in Ajax’s side rather than in the deserted spot he has in mind for it may already be signaled in his first utterance of κρύπτεται (at 647), but such a possibility does not preclude our hearing in Ajax’s words a genuinely expressed desire to avoid that outcome. Apart from everything else, the Deception Speech enacts for us Ajax’s mental loopback to the day of the sword’s original transfer into his hands. Ajax’s much more recently acquired understanding of how the weapon’s charismatic charge has shaped his life in formerly unthinkable ways cues the audience’s recollection of an episode from the Iliad that profoundly underpins Ajax’s decision-­making in Sophocles’ tragedy. As a stage prop, the sword shares the spotlight with the human protagonist in both the second and third episodes of the play. But it does much more than that. Serving as the material proxy for Ajax’s epic antagonist Hector, the sword allows us to interpret Ajax’s otherwise baffling reversals of intention as a dynamic but fatefully flawed “di­ alogue” between Ajax’s past and present selves, and between two competing imperatives resulting from his recognition of his life’s bifurcated temporality: on the one side, his will to move past the epic legacy now irrevocably tainted by the shameful actions of the previous night; on the other, his inability to escape the shadow of the “ever since” (ἐξ οὗ, 661) under which this weapon has cast him from the first moment he took it in his hands. His powerlessness is made more tragic by the fact that Ajax now understands what might have been, if only he had never agreed to Hector’s terms.

2

Tragic Textiles and the House of Atreus

Ajax’s sword brought to the fore an important intertextual dimension of the hero’s fraught decision-­making, underlining how profoundly the plot of Ajax gets shaped by the protagonist’s (mis)understanding of his epic past. The sword, as we saw in the last chapter, serves as a material, metonymic link to its past owner, Hector. It is Hector’s personhood that is evoked in Ajax’s final two stage appearances (with his sword), confirming his role—­and the weapon’s agency—­in Ajax’s death. The props to be considered in the present chapter also expand the temporal horizon of the dramatic action. But rather than providing a mechanism for looping back and forth between epic and tragedy, the fabrics that form the centerpiece of our reading of Aeschylus’s Oresteia open up a space for reflecting on how stage props signal genealogical and “intertextual” links between successive tragic performances. We transition therefore from intertextuality to intertheatricality : The Oresteia’s textiles set the stage, both dramaturgically and thematically speaking, for the reception of the House of Atreus in antiquity; they also guide, to a large extent, how the trilogy has been appropriated and repurposed—­and how it continues to be adapted, even today.1 The Oresteia became something of an instant classic when it was first performed in 458 BCE. Its near-­canonical status can be gauged, even barring external evidence for fifth-­century reperformances of the trilogy, from the productive engagement of other Athenian dramatists with Aeschylus’s Atreid clan.2 Recently there has been intensified interest in three tragedies by Euripides—­Electra, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Orestes —­all of which, as Froma Zeitlin (2005, 200) observes, offer “precious testimony to the reception of the trilogy—­its dramaturgy, psychology, and ideology—­in the evolving political and intellectual developments in Athens during the course of the

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fifth century.”3 Matthew Wright (2005, 133–­57), in a similar vein, has coined the term “metamythology” for the phenomenon of Euripidean characters knowingly bringing with them into new dramatic contexts the mythological baggage (mishaps, obsessions, and travails) they have accumulated in previous plays. And Isabelle Torrance makes a strong case, not only for reading Ores­ tes as “ultimately a rival to Eumenides in mythopoetic terms” (2013, 47), but for the other Oresteia-­inspired dramas (Electra, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Iphigenia in Aulis) being representative examples of the “art of composing tragedy within an already densely populated tradition” (2011, 182).4 It is not only as testament to the canonicity of their predecessors, however, that such latecomers to the tradition can, or should, be read. “Anxiety of influence” is a powerful model, but not an exclusionary one. Reperformances of tragedies at Athens in the fifth century BCE were probably rare enough that they should be considered “a mark of distinction that could be granted to a specific play or, as a sort of ‘lifetime achievement award’ to an individual.”5 For Aeschylus’s plays to have been granted this kind of honor is a sign of the playwright’s cultural prestige, his iconicity, just decades after his death; it also increases the likelihood that later fifth-­century audiences would have remained conversant with Aeschylus’s distinctive stagecraft.6 The relationship between two plays that share a similar story line (as the Electra of Sophocles and Euripides do with the Choephoroi ) has traditionally been framed in terms of their production chronology, with the “original” providing source material for later receptions.7 Yet, in a theater tradition such as that of classical Athens, the influence did not flow in just one direction. A memorable production might achieve a certain cachet, thus affecting the staging of later plays on a similar theme, as well as the restaging of tragedies that had been produced earlier. If the Oresteia was indeed put on again sometime between the 440s and 420s, the Euripidean Electra’s repudiation of  luxurious clothing in her eponymous tragedy becomes especially suggestive.8 Agamemnon’s central stage action revolves around the protagonist’s coyly devised death march across a purple spread of fabrics. Herein can be gleaned the source of the Euripidean heroine’s disgust with her mother’s fondness for the spoils of Troy.9 Clytemnestra’s overtly theatrical “staging” of her husband’s procession toward the palace doors also gains in poignancy when it is reconsidered through this retrospective lens. Euripides’ audience will be reminded of Clytemnestra’s magisterial handling of textiles, a decisive episode in Atreid family history, when they encounter the daughter’s harsh critique of her mother’s expensively clad appearance in Electra, but they will also sharpen their analysis of the contest of authority and its consequences in Agamemnon’s tapestry scene. The goal of

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this chapter, then, is to return, by way of their appropriation by later adapters, to the signifying power of these lustrous fabrics as they are first revealed to spectators of the Agamemnon. I read the episode with an eye to how this textile’s legacy—­not to mention its sheer phantasmagoric allure—­continues to haunt the children of Agamemnon in the Choephoroi and beyond. Electra in Rags From the very beginning of Euripides’ Electra, material signifiers of aristocratic wealth and privilege loom large. In the same prologue in which he details the fortunes (and fall from fortune) of his own family, the Farmer mentions the huge quantity of barbarian spoils (σκῦλα πλεῖστα βαρβάρων, 7) that Agamemnon brought back with him from Troy. The prefatory remark that Agamemnon “placed” these “in lofty temples” preempts any hint of wrongdoing on the part of the returning king. By contrast, the Farmer spares no criticism of Aegisthus’s mishandling of gold and scepter, the earmarks of royal prestige. The illegitimate king has put a gold price on Orestes’ head (32–­33), and he has taken for himself the scepter of Agamemnon that, by rights of succession, should have gone to Orestes (11–­12).10 Usurpers are a recurrent theme in the dynastic history of the House of Atreus. Thyestes stole a lamb that Pan had intended for his brother (720–­26); now Aegisthus appropriates a scepter not meant for him. Both usurpers acquire their objects of investiture through acts of adultery. But Aegisthus may have won the upper hand in deceit and brazenness in so far as he reportedly rides in the murdered king’s chariot (320), holding the scepter in his still blood-­stained hand (322). He also jumps drunkenly up and down on Agamemnon’s tomb (327)—­impudent behavior that infuriates Electra. The eponymous heroine of Sophocles’ Electra confides to the Chorus her emotional distress at being forced to watch while Aegisthus, seated on Agamemnon’s throne and wearing his clothes, pours libations on the very spot where he killed the king (267–­70). Rosie Wyles reads Aegisthus’s appropriation of Agamemnon’s clothes in Sophocles’ Electra as a kind of “identity theft.”11 This would have come through vividly in performance especially if, as Wyles (2011, 88) proposes, Sophocles “presented Aegisthus in a costume which recalled, in the memory of the audience, the costume of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s play”; the visual citation of a distinctive feature Aeschylean dramaturgy would “be operating much as an intertext designed to acknowledge debt to an earlier work.” In its Iliadic context, the scepter of Agamemnon is passed down in a continuous line of succession from Hephaestus (its creator) to Agamemnon, a

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verb for “giving” or “leaving” marking each leg of its journey from owner to new recipient.12 The hallowed genealogy suggests that the scepter itself embodies and transmits authority. Its mere presence in Agamemnon’s hands guarantees the legitimacy of his kingship.13 In Euripides’ Electra, by contrast, the Farmer’s syntax reinforces the illegitimacy of Aegisthus’s succession: Agamemnon dies (ὁ μὲν . . . ὄλωλεν, 11–­12) and next, but not as his appointed successor, Aegisthus rules Argos (Αἴγισθος δὲ βασιλεύει χθονός, 12). He gains access to the kingship only through an adulterous relationship with Clytemnestra. Moreover, the collocation σκῆπτρ᾿ ἐν οἷς (321) which Electra uses to describe the scepter “with which / in which” her father ruled the Hellenes gives pause—­both syntactically and semantically. In his commentary J. D. Denniston (1939, ad loc.) notes that “the preposition is difficult, particularly with a ‘poetic’ plural. ἐν is often used of dress: e.g. S. Tr. 613: cf. HF 677.” En­ glish does not permit one to “wear” a scepter, but as part of the royal insignia, the scepter of Agamemnon is designed for wearing, just like any other item of invest iture. The unusual preposition may be cognitively motivated. To Electra’s way of thinking at least, Aegisthus’s possession of the kingly scepter is a desecration of Agamemnon’s personhood similar to the crime of wearing the former king’s clothes (an insult to her father’s memory endured by Electra’s Sophoclean counterpart). The scepter is not his to “wear” any more than is the clothing the other Aegisthus has donned in a farce of kingly authority. With their focus on Aegisthus’s sartorial transgressions, both Electra plays pay homage to the textile thematic of the Oresteia, where cloth was a distinctive register for embedding the perversions of the storied Atreid clan. In Euripides’ Electra, moreover, the heroine’s frequent cataloguing of her physical deprivations and ragged appearance (e.g., 304–­9) becomes a primary strategy for dissociating herself, aesthetically and politically, from the usurpers to the throne.14 No less controversial than her character itself is the Euripidean Electra’s refusal to borrow clothing and golden adornment from the Chorus of Argive women, so that she may join them in their procession to the Argive Heraion.15 Electra’s raggedness has alienated readers, who see in it a false representation of her actual circumstances (175–­89).16 At one point, she urges the unrecognized Orestes to tell her brother how she has had to weave (with her own hands) paltry scraps of clothing to cover herself (303–­8). And this, while her mother “sits on the throne, surrounded by Phrygian spoils and servants,” the very ones that had been plundered by Agamemnon while he was at Troy (314–­16). Electra may be prone to exaggeration, but even those who defend her impoverishment as appropriately realistic, just like those who defend her right to mourn,17 overlook an essential feature of how staged garments discursively

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operate in the Athenian theater. There are two interrelated issues here: the first concerns the social lives of textiles themselves (not just staged textiles) considered as a form of fungible wealth; the second, how textiles act as props in a play that is itself an adaptation of an earlier work of art whose communicative strategy relied so profoundly on the visual language of cloth. I discuss each of these in turn. In societies where human hands laboriously produce every thread of a garment, clothing does not merely symbolize wealth—­it is wealth. The socioeconomic perspective Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass bring to the study of Renaissance clothing is helpful for unpacking Electra’s controversial “fashion sense” (2000, 27):18 Before the advent of the modern bank, men and women of every class stored up wealth in clothes. Modern scholars have failed to understand that clothes were an important way to store wealth because they have failed to imagine what people without bank accounts did with the money they had. . . . Gold and other forms of “money” were often worn as clothes and jewels. This currency of cloth and gems could, when necessary, be exchanged for cash.

In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the convertibility between woven textiles and money (i.e., silver) is acknowledged when Agamemnon refers to the cloth upon which his wife encourages him to tread as “silver-­bought weavings” (ἀργυρωνήτους . . . ὑφάς, Ag. 949).19 This fungibility is crucial to understanding the semiotics of adornment in Electra as well, where material props become a powerful tool in Electra’s campaign to avenge her dead father. Electra has figured out how to wear Aegisthus’s hubris on her body. Her husband, the Farmer, offers to carry her water jug to the well, but Electra refuses his help because she has calculated that the gods will become enraged at the pitiful sight of her laboring like a lowly slave. She carries the jug (on her head) not out of necessity, but to shore up political and divine capital, “so that we may show Aegisthus’s hubris to the gods” (ἀλλ᾿ ὡς ὕβριν δείξωμεν Αἰγίσθου θεοῖς, 58), as she explains to her husband.20 Intensive mourning is sustained for similar reasons (59). And in the interest of appearing consistently impoverished, Electra refuses to join the other Argive women in their procession to the temple of Hera.21 She self-­consciously enacts self-­abuse, with the intention of turning divine (and audience) sympathy away from her luxuriantly clad mother and stepfather. These considerations may not endear Electra to her harshest critics—­those who view her as “implacable, self-­centered, fantastic in hatred, [and] callous to the verge of insanity”—­but they do offer insight into the theatricalization of the prop in Euripides.22 This

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is the first time that we have seen a character baldly profess to be exploiting a material accessory for her own purposes. Objects in other plays of course influence human behavior, as evidenced in our reading of weapons in chapter 1. Still, it is surprising to encounter a fictional character displaying such self-­awareness of the theatricality of her gestures. It is a self-­consciousness that speaks, I believe, to Electra’s place in the tradition of House of Atreus tragedies. Electra may in some sense be the first postmodern heroine—­the first to consciously manipulate her audience’s reaction with props (and verbally to “flag” that this is what she is doing)—­ but it is a skill the daughter has learned from her mother, who also masterfully manipulated audience reaction in her own play.23 In the Agamemnon, Clytemnestra successfully coaxes her husband into assuming the role of the hubristic Eastern tyrant. Displaying fabrics before his feet that, through their mesmerizing patterning, will overcome his resistance, she lures Agamemnon against his better judgment to tread these sacred cloths. Electra’s “confession,” spoken as it is early on in her own tragedy, serves as a prompt to the audience to look beneath the surface meaning of things—­to consider not just the message but also the medium. Like her mother before her, Electra knows how to accessorize a speech to elicit the desired response. When Electra accuses Clytemnestra of having spent her own and Orestes’ inheritance on procuring a new husband, she need only point to her mother’s body for evidence. Clytemnestra literally shines from the luster of the family fortune in which she has cloaked herself (στολῇ λαμπρύνεται, El. 966).24 N. G. L. Hammond (1984, 374) speculates that “Clytemnestra was beautifully dressed—­probably in royal purple.” Even her female slaves have their Idaean robes pinned with gold (Ἰδαῖα φάρη χρυσέαις ἐζευγμέναι / πόρπαισιν, 317–­18). But Electra adds verbal indictment to this incriminating visual data (1088–­90): πῶς οὐ πόσιν κτείνασα πατρῴους δόμους ἡμῖν προσῆψας, ἀλλ᾿ ἐπηνέγκω λέχει τἀλλότρια, μισθοῦ τοὺς γάμους ὠνουμένη; How is it that after killing your husband you did not give us our paternal home, but instead diverted an inheritance belonging to others into your bed, purchasing your marriage for a fee?

According to her daughter, Clytemnestra’s unforgivable crime has been to channel Agamemnon’s wealth—­rightfully the property of his children—­ into a second marriage. Clytemnestra has misappropriated property that is

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designated for others (τἀλλότρια); and she has treated this stolen property as common currency. With the term misthos, frequently used of commercial or one-­off payments, Electra stresses that Clytemnestra has “purchased” her marriage. Prostitution may even be hinted at in the juxtaposition of μισθός with λέχος: Clytemnestra has used her children’s inheritance to buy sex.25 Electra’s choice, then, to wear rags rather than festival-­appropriate attire should be considered within the context of what textiles mean to the Atreids and also within the broader discourse of tragic costuming. More than an expression of personal taste, Electra’s tattered garments constitute a carefully crafted ideological stance; they are a rejection of her mother’s luxurious lifestyle and adulterous actions, especially those committed in the Agamemnon. Moreover, being a character with at least one well-­known theatrical predecessor (i.e., Aeschylus’s Electra), the Euripidean Electra’s visually honed persona helps elucidate the relationship between the fictional realms of these two tragic productions. Within her own play, the Euripidean Electra’s sartorial stance represents her repudiation of her mother’s questionable oikonomia and sexual mores, serving as a direct counterpoint to her mother’s choice of richly embroidered cloth as a tool through which to vanquish Agamemnon.26 The results of those choices—­Clytemnestra’s choices—­are starkly dramatized in the subsequent Electra plays, but just as each new “take” on a classic production prompts a rethinking of the source material from which the reception has drawn its inspiration, the textile-­thematic with which both Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electras engage in their own dramas serves as an invitation to return to the Oresteia itself. Clytemnestra’s in its own way self-­consciously theatrical stage-­ management of her husband’s death walk across a sea of red fabric originates the distinctively Atreid obsession with the signifying potential of cloth and clothes. The Euripidean Electra’s manipulation of props and costume in this sense also focuses attention more broadly on how the recycling, reshaping, and recoding of material motifs constitutes an important mode of theatrical communication, a topic to which I return at the end of this chapter. Playing Priam in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon Aeschylus’s Oresteia presents its audience with textiles that are at the same time a dramatic confirmation of the power objects can have on the stage and a radical departure from the idea of textiles as the cornerstone of a domestic, homespun economy. Visually arresting and notionally complex, the fabrics on which Clytemnestra invites her husband to tread upon his arrival home from Troy are one of the key elements in the Oresteia as staged action. The

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moment of actual return—­the king’s reunion with his palace—­is where we now pick up the thread. Before he can step out of the carriage or make his way toward the stage building, Clytemnestra takes up her position, moving already, no doubt, as Agamemnon finishes speaking (851–­54); she is attended by servants carrying the cloth that will form the visual focus of the upcoming scene. “She blocks the way, she occupies the threshold: Clytemnestra controls the way into the house, and Agamemnon can only leave his temporary transport and enter the house on her conditions.”27 When the triumphantly returning king is about to leave his carriage, his wife Clytemnestra orders her servants to lay the spreads before him:28 Agamemnon, she says, is not to walk on the ground, but instead take a “purple-­strewn course” (Ag. 905–­11): νῦν δέ μοι, φίλον κάρα, ἔκβαιν’ ἀπήνης τῆσδε, μὴ χαμαὶ τιθεὶς τὸν σὸν πόδ’, ὦναξ, Ἰλίου πορθήτορα. δμῳαί, τί μέλλεθ’, αἷς ἐπέσταλται τέλος πέδον κελεύθου στορνύναι πετάσμασιν; εὐθὺς γενέσθω πορφυρόστρωτος πόρος, ἐς δῶμ’ ἄελπτον ὡς ἂν ἡγῆται Δίκη· And now, my dear, step out of that carriage, without putting your foot on the ground, my lord, the foot that destroyed Ilion. Servants, what are you waiting for? You have been ordered the task of covering the ground of his path with spreading cloths; let there be forthwith a purple-­strewn pathway, so that Justice leads you into a house you never hoped to see.

Clytemnestra assumes the role of a stage-­director in this scene,29 giving the various actors around her, silent or otherwise, clear instructions as to how the “path” is to be laid. Silent extras, present for the purpose of creating the path with “spreads” (πετάσμασιν), would presumably start fulfilling her instructions as soon as she addresses them (at 908).30 Meanwhile, Agamemnon most likely remains seated in his carriage, his silent Trojan spear-­bride by his side. Amidst Clytemnestra’s deviously ambiguous language there is one straight­ forward detail: the fineries are purple-­dyed.31 Such purple was obtained by extracting the fluid from murex sea snails, a process described in great detail by Pliny the Elder.32 The dye used to stain the fabrics on which the returning king will step is of foreign extraction, having come from outside the oikos.33 It would in principle have been possible, of course, for the pre-­dyed wool to have been brought into the house for weaving into garments by Clytemnestra and her female slaves. Helen in two different scenes in the Iliad and in the Odyssey is represented as weaving with purple wool (Il. 3.125–­28;

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Od. 4.135).34 But in Agamemnon it is the textiles themselves (ὑφάς, 949), already woven, that are called “silver-­bought,” not the wool. The purple spreads have been read straightforwardly as a symbol of household wealth (e.g., Morrell 1997) and as an “instrument of feminine destruction” (M. Lee 2004, 262). But within the trilogy as a whole, there are signs of a deliberate effort to distinguish between the traditional work of women’s hands—­home-­woven wealth, as it were—­and the kind of perverted “weaving” that Clytemnestra does.35 Nowhere in Agamemnon does Clytemnestra say that the purple weavings are the product of her own hands, and for his part, Agamemnon has assumed the opposite.36 Purple was a symbol of eastern luxury, a “rhetorical cliché for tyranny and decadence,” as Meyer Reinhold (1970, 24) puts it.37 As a soft, overtly expensive substance, these textiles blur the boundaries between man and woman (“do not pamper me as if I were a woman,” says Agamemnon to his wife, 918–­19) as well as between man and god: the cloth prevents the king from walking the earth, as humans do (906–­7); “revere me at the human level, not like a god,” says Agamemnon a little later (925–­26), expressing his fear lest accepting this “gift” will expose him to the envy of the gods. But most saliently, the purple garments undermine the distinction between Greek and barbarian, victor and vanquished, just as they call into question the economic integrity of the oikos. When she asks him what Priam would have done (935), and in her readiness to speak for the sea and its limitless munificence, Clytemnestra seeks to assimilate Agamemnon to the posture of an eastern monarch, whose wealth equals the sum total of the resources of his kingdom. It is a dangerous move, politically and rhetorically, for she cannot elide the fact that in his absence, she has overseen this great wealth. Her house, the house to which Agamemnon returns, already has the appearance of a western outpost of Priam’s—­or, perhaps, in contemporary terms, Xerxes’—­vast empire, with the phthonos-­ provoking fabrics spread out for all to see.38 Certainly, wealthier Athenians could indulge their taste for eastern luxury goods without fear of reproach, so long as their fabrics hung on walls, away from the reproachful gaze of en­ vious onlookers.39 Clytemnestra, however, contrives to place the textile in as visibly prominent a position as possible, seeking in this sense to provoke the envy that Agamemnon understands ought to be avoided, despite the fabric’s irresistible appeal to him (947). In addition to subverting the gender roles in the adulterous pseudo-­oikos she has created in her husband’s absence, Clytemnestra calls unflattering attention to her own management of the household economy. What should ideally have been a self-­supporting unit with wealth deriving from exchange or home production has now taken on

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the features of an Asiatic monarch’s palace, with its ostentatious display of money-­bought finery. The appeal of the textiles to the returning war hero would have had the air of a déjà vu in light of contemporary military commanders who proved incapable of resisting the lure of the wealth of the vanquished Persian adversary.40 Through the palace doors foreign products enter and the household’s “innate” goods depart. What has spilled out of the house itself is in this sense the essence of the family’s interiorized wealth—­the woven spreads signaling the perverted trafficking of goods across the very threshold they mark. Under both Agamemnon’s and Clytemnestra’s watch, the border has been crossed by actors (human and nonhuman) moving in the wrong direction. Iphigenia herself, for example, once the “house’s prize possession” (δόμων ἄγαλμα, Ag. 208), has crossed the border—­in some versions, though not in this one, under false pretences of marriage to Achilles. Orestes, too, having been exiled, is conspicuously absent from his father’s homecoming (Ag. 877–­79) while a strange woman, Cassandra (called ξένην by Agamemnon at 950), sits silently by in the carriage, waiting to enter.41 In the next play, Orestes will claim that he was “sold”—­by which he means, of course, exiled (Ch. 915).42 His choice of verb is significant, however, for the language of commerce is central to the dynamic between inside and outside.43 The purple path graphically enhances the audience’s awareness of this troubled threshold, all the while making the argument that, in regard to import and export dynamics, the house has been engaging in some risky practices.44 It has allowed Orestes to leave and be “nourished” by a stranger (τρέφει γὰρ αὐτὸν εὐμενὴς δορύξενος, Ag. 880) while a product “nourished” by the sea has taken up residence inside.45 Both product and proof of the household’s inverted economy, the fabric’s exotic hue invites reflection on how such a luxurious artifact came to be there in the first place. Did the arrival of these foreign-­made spreads displace Agamemnon’s children? Were they sold or, more euphemistically, “exiled,” to underwrite their mother’s appetite for esoteric goods (Ch. 254)? Clytemnestra’s control of the scene’s dramaturgy places the family’s wealth and its oikonomia conspicuously under the city’s gaze, soliciting a public scrutiny that cannot but end badly for both of the scene’s protagonists. s i l v e r - ­b o u g h t t e x t i l e s a n d s e n s o r y o v e r l o a d It is not until Agamemnon issues the command for one of the silent attendants to loosen his sandals that we can be sure he intends to tread the pathway (944–­47):

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ἀλλ’ εἰ δοκεῖ σοι ταῦθ’, ὑπαί τις ἀρβύλας λύοι τάχος, πρόδουλον ἔμβασιν ποδός, καὶ τοῖσδέ μ’ ἐμβαίνονθ’ ἁλουργέσιν θεῶν μή τις πρόσωθεν ὄμματος βάλοι φθόνος. If this seems best to you, let someone loosen my sandals quickly, the slaves for the treading of my foot, and as I walk these sea-­stained spreads, let no envious glance of the gods strike me from afar.

The proximal deictic pronoun τοῖσδέ in 946 is the first verbal indicator of the textile’s visible presence. And the actualization of what previously had been a notional object certainly changes the tenor of Agamemnon’s reasoning. Now, rather than outright refusal to do what Clytemnestra has asked of him, he focuses instead on making sure that his action will be received in the right way, with as little envy and regret as possible (948–­52): πολλὴ γὰρ αἰδὼς δωματοφθορεῖν ποσὶν φθείροντα πλοῦτον ἀργυρωνήτους θ’ ὑφάς. τούτων μὲν οὕτω, τὴν ξένην δὲ πρευμενῶς τήνδ’ ἐσκόμιζε· τὸν κρατοῦντα μαλθακῶς θεὸς πρόσωθεν εὐμενῶς προσδέρκεται. For there is great shame in destroying the house with one’s feet, ruining wealth and silver-­bought weavings. So much for this, but as for this stranger right here, escort her inside kindly. The one who rules softly, god glances favorably at him from afar.

The way Agamemnon refers to the fabrics here reveals what is at stake in his decision. They are not just a potential source of envy, but a “silver-­bought” luxury item, commensurate in their value with the house itself, in so far as destroying them would “destroy the house” (δωματοφθορεῖν, 948). The frankness with which Agamemnon mentions money (“silver-­bought”) and wealth (πλοῦτον) is in stark contrast with the less explicitly economic value terms that both he and Clytemnestra had used earlier. Agamemnon attempts to negotiate the reception of his own “moneyed-­prize” just after framing the household’s wealth in terms of the language of commodities; Cassandra he refers to in similarly blunt language as “the choicest of all commodities,” post­poning the word “flower” (ἄνθος) through enjambment to the next line: “And she, of all commodities the choicest / flower, the army’s gift, has come with me” (αὕτη δὲ πολλῶν χρημάτων ἐξαίρετον / ἄνθος, στρατοῦ δώρημ’, ἐμοὶ ξυνέσπετο, 954–­55). This is an awkward juxtaposition in so far as it assimilates the purple-­strewn path to his spear-­bride, Cassandra, and hence to the spoils of war.

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Redoubling the awkwardness is that in the course of speaking, Agamemnon comes to the conclusion that ruling “softly” (μαλθακῶς, 951) is the best defense against divine envy, phthonos. Presumably, his barefoot treading of the textiles is an expression of this “soft” rule, yet paradoxically, in his concern not to damage the cloths, he will approach his own portal tentatively, as if he were a stranger.46 To walk lightly or softly marks one as a self-­styled practitioner of habrosunē, a certain luxury-­loving lifestyle, strongly affiliated in the fifth-­century Greek imaginary with the East.47 For all intents and purposes, Agamemnon walks not on land but on sea, treading porphyras. It is their deaths that have furnished the tincture for the weavings. A frequent point of entry into the semantics of porphyra in this play is the color’s visceral evocation of spilled blood, and hence of violence.48 Even apart from the specifics of the material he treads, however, the verb pateō, as others have noted, evokes transgression and hubris.49 When Agamemnon, about to give in to Clytemnestra’s insistence, expresses concern about the value of the fineries—­won’t treading on them destroy the wealth of the house, as they were bought with silver (φθείροντα πλοῦτον ἀργυρωνήτους θ᾽ ὑφάς, 949)?—­Clytemnestra reassures him: the resources of the house are commensurate with the boundless sea (Ag. 958–­62): ἔστιν θάλασσα, τίς δέ νιν κατασβέσει; τρέφουσα πολλῆς πορφύρας ἰσάργυρον κηκῖδα παγκαίνιστον, εἱμάτων βαφάς· οἶκος δ’ ὑπάρχει τῶνδε σὺν θεοῖς, ἄναξ, ἔχειν, πένεσθαι δ’ οὐκ ἐπίσταται δόμος. There is the sea, and who will drain it dry? It nurtures the dye of purple unlimited, equal to silver, ever replenished and tincture for our clothes. Our oikos has a supply of this, with the gods’ will, lord. Our house does not know how to be poor.

Clytemnestra implies that the source of the color spread before her husband is as inexhaustible as the sea. “Who will drain it dry?” she asks, as if the sea’s very existence could ensure an endless supply of porphyra and purple-­dyed fabric. Although they have been purchased with silver, the garments are treated as symbols of the household’s infinite wealth.50 Clytemnestra’s representation of the dye as a substance belonging to both sea and house collapses two normally separate economies. The adjective ἰσάργυρον (959) reminds us, on the one hand, that money (i.e., silver) has been used to buy the dye. But the description of the sea “nourishing” this dye in the purple shellfish that are its living source conjures, on the other hand, a very different sense of the fabrics as a bountiful resource of Nature.

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Purple, in the first lines of Clytemnestra’s response, lies beyond the realm of human currency, not as something that needs to be fished and processed, but as simply what is, like the sea: ἔστιν θάλασσα. A few lines later, however, this supposedly endlessly renewable natural resource, which Clytemnestra locates first in (or as) the sea, is moved to the house.51 It is the οἶκος at 961 that Clytemnestra says can supply τῶνδε (“these things right here”) for human possession (ἔχειν). The antecedent of the deictic pronoun τῶνδε has been left unspecified. Although grammatically the garments are implied, the word order allows the listener to hear in this proximal deictic pronoun the supply of purple nourished by the sea as well. What Clytemnestra points to, figuratively and demonstratively (i.e., with the use of deixis in her speech), is a “sea” of garments (εἱμάτων), visible to the eyes of both characters and spectators.52 If Clytemnestra were to speak too directly about the substance and source of her wealth, one might begin to question its sustainability, for unlike the natural wealth of the sea, the economy of the oikos depends on human labor. And like the heimata on which Agamemnon is being persuaded to tread, money is a human artifact. Textiles are usually considered the product of domestic (i.e., women’s) labor, and it is precisely their work (i.e., ergon) that Clytemnestra has elided from her speech.53 As Richard Seaford (1998, 124–­25) observes, “the inexhaustibility of the supply of dye is relevant only if there is an inexhaustible supply of money (silver) to pay for it.” For Seaford, the sea becomes money’s analogue in the natural world in that it is “both homogeneous and unlimited.” But Clytemnestra’s presentation of the dyed fabrics as part of this unlimited natural munificence is, from the standpoint of household economics, deeply problematic. The wealth of the oikos and the bounty of Nature have become one, as she tells it, with the perplexing interference of monetary terminology nevertheless suggesting that the equivalence between sea and house is not (and could never be) unmediated. Silver—­money—­ must have left the house in order for the dyed fabrics to be transferred into it. The monetary terms in which both husband and wife refer to the fabrics have not always been appreciated for the way in which they oppose Agamemnon’s house under Clytemnestra’s rule both to the economy of the traditional Greek oikos and to the Homeric economy of gift-­exchange. In Homeric epic, textiles are circulated through social networks: economic transactions take the form of guest-­gifts that are traded between aristocratic friends (xenoi or philoi ).54 When Telemachus is about to leave Sparta, for example, Helen bestows on him a precious robe that she has woven with her own hands (Od. 15.125–­29). Helen calls her gift of a peplos (15.124) a “monument to her hands” (μνῆμ’ Ἑλένης χειρῶν), and it will become a prized possession in the

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house of its new owner, where it will also perpetuate the memory of its original owner.55 In contrast to Homeric epic, which highlights the role of fabrics in sustaining social bonds, the elision of female labor from the purple fabrics that Agamemnon tramples gives them a different kind of valence. As even Agamemnon acknowledges, it is a “phthonos-­provoking” path (ἐπίφθονον πόρον, 921) that has been set before him, and yet his admiration for the textile’s elaborate, multi-­chrome weave betrays his aesthetic vulnerability in the face of its visually seductive power. The key term in this regard is poikilia: Agamemnon refers to the elaborately patterned textiles as ποικίλοις (923) and ποικίλων (926), then again as ποικίλοις (used as a substantive) at 936, this last time to affirm his belief that Priam would have deemed it right to tread such finery: ἐν ποικίλοις ἂν κάρτα μοι βῆναι δοκεῖ.56 The poikil-­language has been taken as marking the fabric’s sacred quality as well as its expensiveness.57 Laura McClure (1999, 85), for example, has drawn attention to the presence of terms such as poikilos and telos in Agamemnon’s final speech, terms that she reads as alluding to the religious importance of the purple spreads; poikilos is often used to describe clothing worn by or offered to deities.58 For McClure, the carpet scene represents Clytemnestra’s perversion of proper religious ritual with feminine magic.59 Whether the “magic” is textile-­based or rhetorical is difficult to determine, however; as with erotic magic, verbal and material dimensions are complementary and intertwined.60 It is also not clear what the proper form of the ritual would be—­what type of rite is being perverted? But there can be no doubt that poikilia marks these fabrics as something out of the ordinary. Lynda McNeil (2005, 7) observes that patterning “had a special significance to ancient Greeks, having been produced in the ritual sphere by women weavers.”61 We can be confident in this context that there is an undisputed reference being made to the exquisite detailing of the textiles. But in light of the significance poikilia plays in the discourse of Greek aesthetics we may want to look beyond the symbolic to the explicitly sensory implications of such language.62 In her study of the term’s relevance to archaic and classical Greek musical culture, Pauline LeVen (2013, 238–­39) concludes that poikilia captures the pan-­sensual nature of aesthetic experience: “Ποικίλος is . . . not simply a judgment on beauty, but a self-­conscious expression of the sensual nature of its experience. Rather than being transferred from one realm to another, the adjective shows the continuity between the senses regardless of their object.” It is this pan-­sensual experience that, by triggering a sort of sensory overload, may lie behind the sudden deflation of Agamemnon’s resistance. Agamemnon

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appears to experience the fabric’s performative effects even as he answers the queen’s casting call, which (as we’ve seen) is framed as a rhetorical question: “What would Priam have done?” (935). The language of poikilia would thus attest to the fabric’s alluring and sensually charged conquest of its spectator, suggesting that the seemingly irrational “decision” Agamemnon makes has at least in part been prompted by his senses. The pan-­sensual nature of the tapestry is communicated to spectators both verbally and visually. But smell may also have been involved. Ancient audiences were well aware of the strong odor generated by porphyra dye, an embarrassing feature of this luxury good that provided fuel for Roman satirists, many centuries later. As Lindsay and Patricia Watson note in their commentary on the Martial epigrams that mock the foul smell of purple (Sidone tinctus olenti ): “Tyrian purple had a pungent odor (virus grave Plin. Nat. Hist. 9.127), because the dye was obtained from decaying shell-­fish (Lilja 1972, 136). This disadvantage was overlooked by those who prized it as a luxury item, but in satirical contexts its smell is emphasized to illustrate the folly of luxuria.”63 There may, then, be a suggestion in the language of poikilia examined above that the king himself is somehow overcome by the odor emanating from the purple path. When it is Cassandra’s turn to step down from the carriage and process toward the palace (retracing Agamemnon’s steps), she picks up, with her hound-­ like olfaction, additional sensory cues. The Chorus describes Cassandra as εὔρις . . . κυνὸς δίκην, “keen-­scented like a dog,” (1093). In her own voice, the Trojan princess claims to be able to track by their scent (ῥινηλατούσῃ, 1185) the serial crimes committed behind the palace’s closed doors. This emphasis on Cassandra’s keen-­scentedness has generally been taken as metaphorical—­a way of emphasizing her astuteness of perception, and her prophetic gifts. But given the visual and dramaturgic emphasis placed on the tapestry in the earlier scene, is there not a hint here that she may actually have smelled the putrefaction wafting off of its porphyra-­stained threads? The olfactory subtext is there (in the scintillating purple hue), just waiting to be picked up by spectators and readers. With Cassandra’s uncannily perspicacious nose, materiality and metonymy coalesce. The blood from murdered family members is represented—­visually and olfactorily—­by the dyed artifact. And the decay (of human blood) has become indistinguishable from the still lingering “decaying shell-­fish” scent of the tapestry itself, even though, by the time Cassandra speaks, the tapestry has disappeared inside the palace. We have no way of knowing whether the spectators in the theater would have picked up the scent that Cassandra gives voice to. From the moment the tapestry is spread on the ground for Agamemnon to tread, would the

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smell of its porphyra-­dyed threads have migrated from playing space into the seating area? In a fascinating discussion of the ethics of olfaction in Mac­ beth, Jonathan Gil Harris (2007) has suggested that from its opening scene, where squibs are detonated, the odor of gunpowder might have “served as a metonymy for contemporary political scandal, archaic stagecraft, and the suppressed religion that linked the two” (486). If for Shakespeare’s audience the diabolical sulfur of the “fireworks’ thick smoke” conjured these associations,64 then perhaps in Aeschylus’s theater, the fishy smell of the dyed fabric evoked not only spilled blood from generations past but the attendant stink of wealth that so powerfully infuses the verbal register of the carpet scene and its aftermath. While beyond the realm of proof, the “censing” of this scene is, as J. G. Harris might put it, nothing to sniff at. In any case, by Clytemnestra’s design and through the textile’s mediation, the returning monarch approaches his palace without ever even setting foot to his native soil. But while this crime in itself will strike most readers (or even spectators) as unequal to the retribution it calls down on Agamemnon, the event of the treading provides a synoptic view of a diachronic process. Props, being temporally unbounded, can gesture both forwards and backwards in time. Indeed, the tapestry in particular, “through its malleability, becomes a metonym for the entire trilogy,” as Anne-­Sophie Noel remarks.65 The purple-­strewn path is both a prolepsis of Agamemnon’s imminent demise and an analepsis of his kingly treading at Troy, no less than it is a recapitulation of his trampling of the household’s own agalma before he set out for Troy. In his first speech (810–­54), after acknowledging the gods who helped him “exact justice from Priam’s city” (812–­13), Agamemnon details some of the physical signs of the city’s destruction. The “blasts of atē still live,” he says, but the dying embers, highly alliteratively, “exhale rich breaths of wealth” (προπέμπει πίονας πλούτου πνοάς, 820). The reek of wealth destroyed proleptically figures the scenic-­action we have just analyzed. Wealth is not literally destroyed in the king’s procession from his carriage to the palace doors (Agamemnon’s bare feet do not irreparably damage the cloth he tramples). Plenty remains—­for Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, that is. But the true heirs of the House of Atreus have been plundered and impoverished, just like Agamemnon’s Trojan victims. For many years the House has squandered its native resources, including its own children, while at the same time drowning itself in the “unquenchable” wealth of the sea, something Clytemnestra’s speech has already alluded to. These perversely complementary tendencies visually coalesce, attaining dramatized form in the fabric itself, which also serves as a multigenerational story cloth of sorts for the entire Atreid clan.

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Textilizing Agamemnon: Aeschylus and the Dokimasia Painter Each of the three characters closest to the king in his final moments construes textiles as playing a crucial part in Agamemnon’s murder. Cassandra cries out for the “bull” to be kept away from the “cow,” prophetically proclaiming her vision of the female striking down the male with a black-­horned instrument, having trapped him in robes (ἐν πέπλοισιν . . . λαβοῦσα, 1126–­27). Clytemnestra, standing over her husband’s dead body, explains how she used “a limitless net, as if for fish” (ἄπειρον ἀμφίβληστρον, ὥσπερ ἰχθύων, 1382) to catch him, “an evil wealth of garment” (πλοῦτον εἵματος κακόν, 1383). Aegisthus, appearing at the end of the play to greet the “justice-­bearing day,” says that he sees this man right here, lying “in the woven robes of Erinyes” (ὑφαντοῖς ἐν πέπλοις Ἐρινύων, 1580). And the Chorus of Argive elders also explicitly gestures to the death shroud in which their king lies trapped, as if “in a spider’s woven web” (κεῖσαι δ᾿ ἀράχνης ἐν ὑφάσματι τῷδ᾿, 1492). A well-­known and roughly contemporary painting (on a red-­figure calyx krater) by the Dokimasia Painter shows Agamemnon caught in cloth at the moment of his assassination (see figure 3).66 In the memorable words of Emily Vermeule (1966, 21), Agamemnon’s garment here “is sheer and costly fabric, richly embroidered at the hem, finely diaphanous with gentle ripples, trapping Agamemnon’s head and face, tangling his feet, offering no exit for his feebly batting hands.” The “particular horror of this robe,” Vermeule points out, is that “it combines expensive delicacy and animal cruelty.” Placing side by side the evidence of the tragic script and the painted death scene, we arrive easily at the impression that the fabric is the murder weapon.67 Not merely a perverted act of weaving, the textile is in fact instrumental in Agamemnon’s execution. Agamemnon is not the only tragic protagonist to succumb to fabric’s cloying allure.68 We should acknowledge the use made of fabric by other heroines in Greek tragedy.69 Medea, for instance, in Euripides’ play of the same name, destroys her Corinthian successor with gifts of clothing (a robe and a crown) that literally end up trapping her in the materials of Medea’s own dowry;70 that robe is also described as poikilos (at 1159). And no sooner does the girl’s father (Creon, king of Corinth) try to rescue her than he is similarly caught in the robe’s fatally adhesive grip. In Sophocles’ Trachin­ iae, Deianeira attempts to seduce her husband Heracles with a robe enhanced with love charms and spells; this robe also kills its wearer on contact. The role of a textile in the murder of the king inside the palace and outside the range of view of the audience in the theater may raise the question as to the relation of this textile and the fabrics over which Agamemnon stepped when disappearing into the palace. And this may make us wonder about the

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f i g u r e 3 . The killing of Agamemnon by the Dokimasia Painter, Athenian red-­figure calyx krater, ca. 460 BCE, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William Francis Warden Fund, 63.1246. Photograph copyright 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

staging of the various scenes. Like Clytemnestra’s language, the staging of the carpet scene offers the audience a visual prolepsis of what will happen to Agamemnon once he is inside. As Oliver Taplin (1977, 308–­9) conjectures, Agamemnon must be moving very slowly along the spread while Clytemnestra delivers her “abundance-­of-­the-­sea speech” (958–­72). He would therefore be disappearing into the skēnē just as she speaks her final lines. Perhaps the final part of her speech coincided with the last steps of the king’s attendants, “maids who took up the cloth behind Agamemnon as he went.” Such a staging would show Agamemnon and the cloth in the process of merging into one entity, even before he is fatally entrapped. Clytemnestra’s referring to a “a limitless net, as if for fish” (ἄπειρον ἀμφίβληστρον, ὥσπερ ἰχθύων, 1382) continues the theme of the “unlimited

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abundance-­of-­the-­sea” from her previous speech, and we may observe that even though Agamemnon dies on land, his death is associated with the sea, the element where the nostos of many of the Achaean chieftains came to an end. But more immediately relevant for our purposes, we may wonder whether the “net” used for trapping Agamemnon is not the same cloth on which he stepped to enter his house, with the treading being a proleptic entangling and marking of Agamemnon as a walking corpse. Clytemnestra also makes mention of a “richness of raiment”71 (πλοῦτον εἵματος, 1383), a verbal utterance that may find a material analogue in the (blood-­stained) robe in which Agamemnon is wrapped, and which covers his otherwise naked body, as it is wheeled out in the silver bath where he was struck down.72 There is no overt confirmation or proof for this in the text. But asking for such textual proof (for example, Clytemnestra vaunting over the dead body of her husband: “There you lie, strangled in the same tapestries that brought out your pompous vanity”) would be to betray our textual bias. There is no need for Agamemnon as script for staged performance (and that is what our text is) to encode textually what spectators in the theater could see immediately when Agamemnon’s and Cassandra’s bodies are wheeled out on the ekkuklēma. Indeed, any verbal language might weaken such a starkly visual effect. The Weaver Woven: The Tapestry Scene Re-­played The robe as prop is a powerful tool in the hands of the playwright to contribute to what is such a powerful force in the Oresteia: the elimination of the flow of time. Events that are widely separated in time are “stacked” onto each other to produce an effect of stifling density. Time is stalled, and each new act merges with a past act that is its primary cause. In Choephoroi, when Orestes has killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, the doors of the palace open again, showing the new protagonist standing over the bodies of his mother and her paramour and holding up the robe, stained with blood, that testifies to Agamemnon’s murder as if it were a personal witness.73 For the purposes of Orestes’ vengeful agenda, the robe (φᾶρος τόδε, 1011) “speaks” with the authority of the king himself. Orestes’ description of the robe in the Choephoroi (at 973–­1017) and Clytemnestra’s description of the textile Agamemnon walked over to enter the house echo one another, as we shall soon see in more detail. Orestes calls upon his (internal) audience to “behold the twofold tyranny of the land, looters of the house and father-­killers” (πατροκτόνους τε δωμάτων πορθήτορας,

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973).74 Then he calls for the robe itself to be spread out (ἐκτείνατ᾿ αὐτό, 983) so that all can see, including Helios himself, what kind of “impious work” his mother has accomplished (ἄναγνα μητρὸς ἔργα τῆς ἐμῆς, 986), and so that the garment itself may bear witness against her, while exonerating Orestes (ὡς ἂν παρῇ μοι μάρτυς ἐν δίκῃ ποτέ, 987). In arranging for the robe to be made visible, Orestes has initially framed its role as that of a witness (μάρτυς). He goes on, however, to impugn Clytemnestra, comparing her to a viper and a sea snake (991–­96). By the time he turns his attention to the robe once again, it is not entirely clear to what (or whom) he thinks he is speaking (997–­1000): τί νιν προσείπω, κἂν τύχω μάλ’ εὐστομῶν; ἄγρευμα θηρός, ἢ νεκροῦ ποδένδυτον δροίτης κατασκήνωμα; δίκτυον μὲν οὖν ἄρκυν τ’ ἂν εἴποις καὶ ποδιστῆρας πέπλους. What am I to call it/her, if I should speak correctly? A trap for a wild beast, or the foot-­wrapping of a corpse, covering for his bath? It is a net, you could say, a hunting net, and foot-­entangling robes.

Orestes appears unable to decide what to call the garment, and his choice of pronoun further reinforces our sense of his ambivalence, νιν being used more often of male or female than of neuter entities. How does the garment, possibly the very fabrics on which his father trod in the previous play, present itself, in his eyes? Is it Clytemnestra? A hunting net? A shroud? The ambiguity fails to resolve itself as Orestes continues to speak: at 1005, he uses the deictic τοιάδε to modify ξύνοικος. Presumably here he means Clytemnestra, “the sort of woman” he hopes never again to share his house with. But is he pointing to his mother’s corpse? Or is his gaze still focused on the garment? Only the staging of this scene would be able to tell us. Yet, one thing is clear: the ποδιστῆρας πέπλους (1000) condenses, as it were, the tapestry scene, where Agamemnon’s feet, stripped of sandals, are literally entangled in the robes.75 From the script, it is clear enough that the “garment” is no mere phantom of Orestes’ imagination, just as its role in the crimes he details has been far from passive. The symptoms of incipient madness may already be on exhibit in these lines, which are among those referred to by A. F. Garvie as “the most vexed passage in the speech.”76 Orestes apparently experiences an ontological disorientation similar to what we saw Ajax experiencing in his “suicide” scene, where that hero’s language personified the sword as his slayer. Here, the textile itself appears to be triggering Orestes’ cognitive turmoil; what the audience will (later) perceive as a case of Furies-­inflicted madness has as its inception Orestes’ overly close contact with these blood-­stained fabrics. Here

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Orestes also adapts words familiar to us from Agamemnon, and in so doing, he enhances the viewer’s sense of the fabric’s coy role in killing his father. It is a “father-­killing weave,” he claims, using an adjective implying personal agency, πατροκτόνον (1015).77 This is the very same epithet by which, earlier, Orestes had referred to Clytemnestra and Aegisthus (cf. 973). Comparing now the language used by Clytemnestra to refer to the purple fabrics in Agamemnon and by Orestes to refer to the robe Orestes holds up to view as “witness” and “father-­killer” in the Choephoroi, we are in a position to appreciate the way in which the textiles contribute to thematic and theatrical continuities between the two plays (Ch. 1010–­17): ἔδρασεν ἢ οὐκ ἔδρασε; μαρτυρεῖ δέ μοι φᾶρος τόδ’ ὡς ἔβαψεν Αἰγίσθου ξίφος· φόνου δὲ κηκὶς ξὺν χρόνῳ ξυμβάλλεται πολλὰς βαφὰς φθείρουσα τοῦ ποικίλματος. νῦν αὐτὸν αἰνῶ, νῦν ἀποιμώζω παρών, πατροκτόνον γ’ ὕφασμα προσφωνῶν τόδε· ἀλγῶ μὲν ἔργα καὶ πάθος γένος τε πᾶν, ἄζηλα νίκης τῆσδ’ ἔχων μιάσματα. Did she do it or did she not? This robe here is my witness to how she dipped the sword of Aegisthus. And the tincture of murder with time contributes to the destruction of the precious fabric, wearing away the many dyes of its variegated patterning. Now I praise him, now, standing by, I weep, and I address this the father-­killing weaving. I feel pain for what my whole clan has done and what they have suffered, I who, unenviably, hold the pollution of this “victory.”

The textile that Orestes holds up to view, or gestures to, in the second play is presumably identical to the fabrics that Agamemnon trod in the first play; at the very least the two are conjoined in Orestes’ perception.78 We cannot but be struck by the terminal overlap between this speech and Clytemnestra’s abundance-­of-­the-­sea speech (Ag. 958–­74). Κηκίς and βαφάς are carried over from that speech (κηκῖδα παγκαίνιστον, εἱμάτων βαφάς, Ag. 960), and ποικίλματος harks back to Agamemnon’s way of referring to the tapes­ tries (Ag. 923, 926). Clytemnestra’s rhetoric of nourishment and renewal (τρέφουσα and παγκαίνιστον, Ag. 959, 960) has now been replaced with words denoting destruction. The participle φθείρουσα pointedly reverses the action of τρέφουσα, with which Clytemnestra had evoked the sea’s nurturing of the purple-­generating sea snails. Clytemnestra had framed the household’s wealth as being as inexhaustible as the sea. In Orestes’ speech, however, we are shown the cost of merging the two distinct currencies. For in the death robe

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itself, the two tinctures blend. The kēkis (“spurt”) of blood now mixes with the fabric’s original dye, a detail that is paralleled in the Dokimasia Painter’s depiction of a spray of blood from Agamemnon’s rib cage, something that is visible thanks to the diaphanous quality of the “robe” that contains him. Orestes reminds us once again of the hidden subtext of Clytemnestra’s rhetoric of Nature and renewability in the Agamemnon.79 The vocabulary of dyeing and textile production adapts itself to a new context—­one where the connections with violence are openly revealed, and where the cloth has received an additional staining, not of sea purple but rather from the blood in which Clytemnestra has “dipped the sword of Aegisthus.” This kēkis (“spurt”), unlike that of the porphyra, is what destroys the fabric, wearing away its original dyed color, its original βαφάς (Ag. 960). When he first came on the scene, Orestes regarded Clytemnestra and Aegisthus as his father’s killers. Now it is the fabric itself that bears the brunt of his blame. The garment has gone from being a mere “witness” to an agent of death. The legacy of fatal cloth that Orestes himself inherits from the first play of the trilogy will, moreover, be passed down—­metatheatrically—­to the children of Agamemnon in other Orestes plays, where they are shown still to be grappling with the charged presence of textiles in their lives. As speaker of Orestes’ prologue, Electra refers to Clytemnestra as “the one who killed her husband by enveloping him in a boundless woven garment” (ἣ πόσιν ἀπείρῳ περιβαλοῦσ᾿ ὑφάσματι / ἔκτεινεν, 25–­26). And Aegisthus’s appropriation of Agamemnon’s clothing in Sophocles’ Electra taps into the same motif, as we have seen, of the garment as a weapon, an agent of literal death no less than of the figurative death brought about by “identity theft.” Only because he wishes to “play” Agamemnon, to be recognized in public as his legitimate successor, would Aegisthus wear the latter’s clothes. But in doing so he takes on the full-­ fledged curse of textiles in the Oresteia, securing his own destruction by the net of evil fabrics that engulfed his Aeschylean predecessors. Has Aegisthus, against his better judgment, become Agamemnon? As audiences familiar with 458 BCE production of the Oresteia would have grasped, material motifs and resonances, such as those we have been tracing, carry over from one play to the next, creating a nexus of textile-­actors across the tradition.80 To come full circle back to Euripides’ Electra, we may now note not only that clothing, gold, and other bodily adornments worn by the wealthy are especially overdetermined symbols in the later play, but that the carpet scene itself gets reenacted (with a significant change of cast) when Electra, having chided Aegisthus’s corpse for boasting that he was powerful because of his possessions (ηὔχεις τις εἶναι τοῖσι χρήμασι σθένων, 939), contrives to have her mother come to her humble cottage on the pretense that Electra has given

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birth.81 As she sees her mother’s carriage approaching, Electra announces that “she is coming nicely, right into the middle of the net” (καλῶς ἄρ᾿ἄρκυν ἐς μέσην πορεύεται, 965).82 As Anne Lebeck (1971, 64) wrote of the Agamemnon, “the net belongs to a system of imagery by which Aeschylus unites the capture of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon so that they illustrate the gnome παθεῖν τὸν ἔρξαντα.”83 There is of course no visible “net” in this scene, but the carefully balanced rheseis between Electra and Clytemnestra, devolving into stichomythic dialogue followed by a single character walking toward the entrance of the skēnē, calls to mind the similarly paced conversation between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra that culminated in his passage over the fateful path and into the palace. Clytemnestra’s carriage entrance in itself creates a sense of history repeating itself, with the ending of this episode only all too clear.84 “Clytemnestra’s death in Euripides is the mirror image of her own crime in Aeschylus,” writes Torrance (2011, 190), just as her mode of traveling to the Farmer’s humble abode ironically evokes her husband’s triumphal return. Like Agamemnon in the earlier play, Clytemnestra makes a show of stepping down from her carriage, after first ordering her Trojan slave women to descend so they can help her: “Step down from the carriage, Trojan women, and take hold of my hand, so that I may set foot outside of this carriage.” (ἔκβητ᾿ἀπήνης, Τρῳάδες, χειρὸς δ᾿ ἐμῆς / λάβεσθ᾿, ἴν᾿ ἔξω τοῦδ᾿ ὄχου στήσω πόδα, (998–­99). She is once again stage-­directing the movements of those around her (compare Ag. 906–­7, lines spoken by Clytemnestra to Agamemnon: ἔκβαιν᾿ ἀπήνης τῆσδε, μὴ χαμαὶ τιθεὶς / τὸν σὸν πόδ᾿, ὦναξ, Ἰλίου πορθήτορα).85 This time, however, she will process from carriage to cottage door, making a trek that in its non-­showiness—­the purple path is conspicuously absent—­highlights how the tapestries her husband had been lured into stepping over have now migrated onto Clytemnestra’s body.86 She wears the wealth of Troy that she had tried to cast him into the role of having boastfully plundered—­a hubristic tyrant flaunting his limitless wealth. The irony is certainly not lost on Electra, who notes, wryly, in the speech that fills the structural slot of her mother’s “abundance of the sea speech” in the earlier version, “don’t let the (cottage’s) sooty air ruin your clothes” (μή σ᾿αἰθαλώσῃ πολύκαπνον στέγος πέπλους, El. 1140).87 From Costume to Character Clothes and other bodily accessories help craft the very identities—­the world­ views and fashion aesthetic alike—­for which they used to be taken as mere signifiers.88 Among anthropologists, garments and accessories are now rou-

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tinely treated as critical actors in the performance of everyday life. But while theater provided the model from which this idea of materially constructed selfhood emerged, only recently have these insights spawned interest in the visual aesthetics and materially derived meaning of tragic performance.89 The working assumption had for a long time been that plot and character were constructs of language, and that whatever could be known about them would be communicated verbally.90 But audiences intuitively grasped that the material environment is a vital component of the stage action, fundamentally impinging on both the characters’ actions and the plot’s development. Verbal cues are all that we, as readers of these texts, have to work from. Yet if there is mention of specific material details of costume or stage action, as there is in the case of Aegisthus’s appropriation of Agamemnon’s clothes in Sophocles’ Electra, this in itself invites further reflection on these embodied dramaturgical choices. Viewed metadramatically, Aegisthus’s usurpation of Agamemnon’s costume in Sophocles’ Electra self-­reflexively relays Electra’s own recycling of Agamemnon. Another example of a stage prop serving as a citation for a scene’s theatrical source can be found in Euripides’ Trojan Women. Cassandra removes and bids farewell to the insignia of Apollo, the garlands that attest to her affiliation with the god and his festivals (Tr. 451–­54):91 ὦ στέφη τοῦ φιλτάτου μοι θεῶν, ἀγάλματ’ εὔια, χαίρετ’· ἐκλέλοιφ’ ἑορτὰς αἷς πάροιθ’ ἠγαλλόμην. ἴτ’ ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ χρωτὸς σπαραγμοῖς, ὡς ἔτ’ οὖσ’ ἁγνὴ χρόα δῶ θοαῖς αὔραις φέρεσθαι σοὶ τάδ’, ὦ μαντεῖ’ ἄναξ. Oh garlands of the dearest to me of gods, precious ornaments, farewell— I leave behind the festivals in which I formerly delighted. Away from my skin, you tattered shreds, so that while I am still pure I may give these things to the swift winds to bring to you, oh lord of prophecy.

Taking off the fillets, she simultaneously disrobes herself of her priestly office, knowing that there will be no place for these objects in her future. She is destined to travel to Argos with Agamemnon where she will face certain death. Cassandra’s gesture of removing the god’s insignia from her head is one already familiar to Euripides’ audience, thanks to a similar casting off of priestly wear by Cassandra at Agamemnon 1267; the stage gesture thus not only triggers a glimpse into the “future” but also a metapoetic nod backwards.92 In the priestly garlands themselves that Cassandra tears off her head is an “unmistakable echo of the Aeschylean prototype,” writes Easterling (2005, 32). There is also, I would add, a citation of the tragedy that has made this gesture into an iconic theatrical moment.93

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For the Oresteia and its remakes, fabrics are carriers of intertheatrical meanings not always evident to their human handlers within the tragedies; Cassandra proves exceptional in her ability to “read” props much as the audience would. Clytemnestra, for example, may think she holds the fate of her family in her hands as she coaxes her husband to cross a sea of purple in Agamemnon, but her range of vision is limited. Her stage-­managing of his reentry, as well as her commanding position at the palace threshold, certainly contributes to her appearance of total control. Yet Clytemnestra directs only the tapestry scene—­not the entire trilogy. Far be it from her, then, to foresee the trap she weaves around herself as she is busy ensnaring Agamemnon. Ancient spectators themselves may not have been fully alert to the trilogy’s larger design, though their familiarity with the mythological arc of the plot would surely have sensitized them to signs easily overlooked by modern readers. Orestes pointing to that bloodied garment, while echoing—­in places verbatim—­his mother’s language of guile and entrapment, is one such sign of great visual import, spelling out, in the form of a palimpsest-­like writing (or weaving) over of one death by another, the ironic consequences of the wife’s earlier textilization of her husband. No longer instrumental to any particular human character’s desire, the Choephoroi garment in a sense materializes the lack of closure that afflicts the House: it remains open, always, to further acts of revenge, to an unending process of revisiting and rewriting the past. With the blood from Aegis­ thus’s sword long blended into the exquisite patterning of its expensively dyed purple weave, the textile that had symbolized Clytemnestra’s triumph over her husband (a justice brilliantly executed) now bears her blood as well. The multi-­layered textile contains different forms of “dye” (blood /porphyra) that symbolize how the natural cosmos inextricably bleeds into the human world, while the latter stains and mimetically perverts the original pattern, human blood vying with natural sea-­purple. Only in this second act do playgoers come away with a deeper appreciation of the tapestry’s aesthetically mesmerizing yet ethically confounding poikilia. Our focus on textiles and costuming raises further questions about the culture of props—­and their “offstage” lives. What, for instance, would have happened to the costumes actors wore? Would these have been literally recycled in future productions? Did the role itself get passed on through the costume? Such questions are now occupying the attention of theater historians, such as Marvin Carlson, who have written on the “haunting” effect of actors’ performances and of iconic stagings.94 In a provocative piece on the role of costume in performance reception, itself inspired by Carlson’s work, Rosie Wyles (2010, 174) suggests that whereas modern theatrical traditions have to

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deal with the celebrity factor—­so for example, in a production of Euripides’ Hecuba “we do not see Hecuba dressed in rags but Vanessa Redgrave dressed in rags playing Hecuba”—­the use of masks in the ancient Greek tradition limits this effect: “In ancient productions, the use of masks allowed the costume to belong absolutely to the character rather than the actor.”95 Interestingly, the comic poet Aristophanes seems to have anticipated precisely this kind of fascination with the material poetics of performance. In need of beggarly wear to make a speech before the Chorus of angry Acharnians, Dikaiopolis drops in on Euripides, in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, and pleads with the playwright to lend him rags worn by the beggars in his plays.96 Euripides complies, ordering his servant to search out the rags of Telephus, which are “lying between the rags of Thyestes and Ino” (κεῖται δ᾿ ἄνωθεν τῶν Θυεστείων ῥακῶν / μεταξὺ τῶν Ἰνοῦς, 433–­34). The scene lends support to the idea that costumes from previous tragic productions may have been stored at the playwright’s residence, remaining available for future plays or reperformances, and that, on the comic stage at least, “characters from Euripides’ tragedies are understood to continue to exist in the costumes which remain from the productions.”97 Such recycling needs to be factored into our assessment of the agency of garments in tragic performance. An additional intertheatrical layer becomes part of the experience of theatergoing, in a theater culture that endorses borrowing not only plot elements but also visual design from earlier stagings. Even if they did not recognize specific costumes, audiences may have been attuned to the verbal cues “flagging” material reception. Costumes, as material artifacts, carry the history of the bodies that animated them in the past; these bodies should still perhaps be considered felt presences in the theater. Possessed of both characters’ and actors’ past selves, the garments might also have been seen as having the power to impart their “knowledge” to aspiring actors and playwrights who were keen to draw inspiration from the performance archives, as it were. Frances Muecke (1982, 23) has noted the slippage in Aristophanes between costume and playscript, which is rooted, she argues, in the fact that “costume, or what it can easily stand for, impersonation—­the actor’s pretending to be a fictional character—­is the most basic element of theatre.” Such appears to be precisely what Agathon, the fictional character based on the tragic poet, counts on when he dons female dress in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae. The spectacle of a male tragic poet dressed up as a woman is of course humor-­driven. Yet, the silliness of the scene should not prevent us from exploring the more serious aspirations underlying Agathon’s transvestism.98 Euripides and the Kinsman encounter the tragic poet outside his house, composing lyrics for his latest play, which includes a Chorus of Trojan maidens.

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In pursuit of a pitch-­perfect and authentically gendered aria, Agathon has put on a dress and become a “woman.” He turns himself into an object of ridicule for both internal and external audiences, but Agathon’s motivation derives from the transformative powers of material mimesis. He can escape the confines of his own sex and embody an entirely different one only by putting on a dress, the reason being (as he explains to his puzzled onlookers) that the body leads the way for the mind to inhabit a new reality: “If the poet writes plays about women, he must have his body experience their behaviors” (Th. 151–­52). Costuming himself in female garb, Agathon starts to act like a woman, and to sing like a woman. He acquires a new set of behaviors, as well as a markedly feminine disposition. Cross-­dressing enables the poet to inhabit the gendered identity from which a new dramatic character is born. While we tend to think of costume as a tool for implementing a preconceived visual effect—­for looking the part, as it were—­the inverse may have been true in antiquity. Perhaps the garment inspired the idea for a role, for which a script was then sketched out. For the tragic and comic dramaturgs, many of whom were also actors, costumes may have created characters. Conclusion Our cross-­temporal readings of later and earlier Electra plays have allowed us to tease out some of the latent nuances of the famous carpet scene, and to appreciate that episode’s enduring resonances in Sophocles and Euripides. We started by considering the remarkable afterlife of the Agamemnon tapestries. The Euripidean Clytemnestra who, in Electra, is cloaked in finery that her daughter takes as visual evidence of her moral decrepitude becomes a sort of meta-­commentary on her Aeschylean analogue. In Sophocles’ Electra it is Aegisthus whose clothing evokes Agamemnon’s former wealth in Aeschylus’s play, materializing for viewers the intricate web of connections binding together various members of the extended Atreid family, as well as the actors who play them. We then looked in detail at the tapestry scene itself, giving ample attention to sensory and material features of the staging that vitiate a narrowly anthropocentric interpretation of Agamemnon’s behavior. The purple-­dyed textile in the Agamemnon triangulates, as we saw, what has usually been read as a contest between just two characters—­two speaking characters, that is. Agamemnon succumbs at 944ff. not “simply because he is at the mercy of his own vanity and arrogance.”99 Nor is it Clytemnestra’s persuasive rhetoric alone that defeats him. As John Jones (1962, 81) sagely put it over fifty years ago, “all attempts to spell out of the Oresteia a fault personal to Agamemnon

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and intelligibly related to his fate are misdirected.” There are larger forces at work—­among them, the blood-­soaked history of the oikos itself, and the war that has been fought and “won” at Troy. Agamemnon is (not for the first time) caught in the crosshairs of competing imperatives. Clytemnestra, mapping her fantasy of the household’s inexhaustible wealth onto the very fabrics she spreads before her husband’s feet, articulates in both material and verbal “speech” the alluringness of that vision that the resources of the sea are inexhaustibly at their disposal. It is a vision whose seductive power proves to be irresistible.

3

The Material Poetics of Tragic Recognition

Souvenirs never go out of fashion, as the countless miniature replicas of Athena Parthenos sold in tourist shops throughout Greece will attest even today. Replicas make it possible for the tourist to take home a small piece of the city she has visited. Unlike the modern-­day tourist, neither the protagonists nor the Athenian Chorus of Euripides’ Ion will leave with concrete tokens of Delphi in hand, for it is Athens whose icons take center stage in the final recognition scene. Born in Athens into the royal Erechtheid clan but abandoned at birth by his mother Kreousa, Ion was rescued (unbeknownst to her) by his divine father Apollo. He has grown up in Delphi, a temple-­keeper for Apollo, but is clearly destined for greater things. In having Kreousa recognize her long-­lost son in Delphi, Ion invites its mostly Athenian audience to see their city and its mythologized past as if for the first time, through the starry-­ eyed gaze of the foreigner, who turns out, in a plot twist more romantic than tragic, to be a native-­born Athenian after all.1 As Susan Stewart suggests in On Longing, “the souvenir is by definition always incomplete;” it requires the “supplementary narrative” of its owner to activate its meaning (1993, 136): The plastic replica of the Eiffel Tower does not define and delimit the Eiffel Tower for us in the way that an architect’s model would define and delimit a building. The souvenir replica is an allusion and not a model; it comes after the fact and remains both partial to and more expansive than the fact. It will not function without the supplementary narrative discourse that both attaches it to its origins and creates a myth with regard to those origins.

Stewart’s reflections on the plastic miniature of the Eiffel Tower can be applied to any other type of souvenir. Allusion is the operative trope. But her

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comment about the myth-­making potential of such souvenirs is particularly suggestive for interpreting not only the “souvenirs” of Athens in which the action of Euripides’ Ion culminates, but the performative power of the tragic recognition token more generally. Souvenirs, as Stewart (1993, 136) puts it, are the “point of origin for narrative.” They authenticate and externalize the personal experiences to which they allude, making it possible to transform an immaterial event into a performable narrative. When Kreousa names each of the recognition tokens at the end of Ion, she reactivates personal memories that at the same time prompt recognition in the audience assembled in the Theater of Dionysus. These trinkets offer the audience “souvenirs” of their collectively owned past. Of course, it is a “past” that is called into being by the very act of remembering. And icons play a key part in prompting such collective memories. The items in Kreousa’s basket materialize iconic moments of the mythical history of Athens, from the ageless olive wreath symbolizing its foundation by Athena, to the golden snakes (modeled on those of Erichthonios) that protected the baby Ion until the Pythia rescued him on the temple steps at Delphi. We have encountered stage props that effect various reversals of fortune and identity, turning, for instance, friends back into enemies (in Ajax), a returning king into a stranger in his own household (in the Agamemnon), and a noble-­born sister overcome by grief into a hydria-­carrying slave (in Euripides’ Electra). In none of these plays, however, did the artifacts have the power to turn a man from a foreigner into a native-­born citizen. One thing, then, that stands out about the Ion’s tokens is the political cast of their performativity. Recent studies have turned to Euripides’ Ion as a fundamental text for understanding constructions of individual subjectivity and collective identity, both ancient and modern, just as they have seen in the recognition scene of Euripides’ Electra a parody-­driven replay of its Aeschylean model in the Choephoroi.2 But the material agents behind Ion’s fashioning of his Athenian self, the symbola exposed with him at birth, have gone largely unexamined, just as the absence of the recognition tokens in Electra has not elicited the attention it deserves.3 How do the Ion’s recognition tokens affirm an intimate bond between two strangers on stage? Whence the authenticating capabilities of these seemingly trivial trinkets? And how is it that a scar secures Orestes’ identity in the Electra recognition scene, when the authenticating power of other tokens is pointedly refuted? The material focus of the recognition scene (anagnōrisis)—­its concern with mapping intangible experiences onto visible (and tangible) surfaces—­ reveals the poetics of identity operative in a particular cultural milieu. Euripides’ iconoclastic rewriting of the Aeschylean recognition scene in his Electra

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in this sense invites its audience to question the efficacy of tokens that, in earlier fictional settings, affirmed personal identity. Signs that had been relied upon to verify, for instance, that “Orestes” was really Orestes, come in for intense scrutiny in Euripides’ revisionist treatment. Innovations to the traditional form of the recognition-­scene in plays such as Ion and Electra shed light not only on Euripidean poetics but also on the social and political ideologies underlying the “recognition” trope as a dramatic fiction. In the last two chapters we explored props’ vertical affiliations by looking, for example, at how stage objects gesture to the previous incarnations of themselves (whether in tragedy or epic) that haunt their present appearances, and that lend to their stage lives a multi-­layeredness. In this chapter, I focus instead on the horizontal affiliations delineated through the formal process of recognition. The conceptual world of the fifth-­century BCE Athenian democracy serves as a backdrop to my close readings of each recognition scene. In the first part of the chapter, on Ion, I consider how the tokens contained in a basket gesture more broadly to the political arena of Athens and how, reaching out beyond the theater, these objects both reflect and reshape the city’s narrative about its origins. In the second half of the chapter, on Euripides’ Electra, I argue that the citizen-­authentication procedure instituted by Athenian demes to ensure the legitimacy of their members provides a template of sorts for the unusual form that anagnōrisis (“recognition”) assumes in this play, where Orestes is recognized as an “everyman.” The legibility of Orestes’ scar, as it is negotiated between Orestes and the nameless Old Man, demonstrates that in the democratized world of this Euripidean tragedy, recognition is predicated on a character’s being a citizen rather than a hero. A contextualizing discussion of the dynamics of recognition in the Odyssey and in other recognition-­centered tragedies will serve as a segue between Ion and Electra. Euripides’ Ion and the Power of the Replica Traditional myths of autochthony deprived Athenian women of any semblance of political authority by ascribing the birth of citizens to the Earth, thereby negating the importance of human motherhood.4 By contrast, Euripides’ Ion, as Arlene Saxonhouse has argued (1986, 259), “calls the autochthony myth into question” and rewrites the female role: “Not only is the woman brought back into the foundation myth, but she is also placed squarely at its center in this play that primarily extols the unity of the mother and the child” (267). In Ion the privilege of autochthonous ancestry is transmitted through the maternal line. We can extend Saxonhouse’s insight even fur-

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ther, however. For by naming the heirlooms concealed in Ion’s birth basket, Kreousa effectively displaces her husband, Xouthos, as “father” of her son. Her recognition re-­scripts the father’s tenth-­day naming (dekatē) of his infant son into a semi-­ritualized viewing of the child’s birth tokens by mother and adult son. As replications (mimēmata) of Athenian icons, moreover, the recognition tokens present an intensely personal scene of recognition as one that is at the same time generic. Whoever, sitting in the theater, recognizes the tokens that Ion holds up to view is, in a sense, Ion. Each member of the audience will experience through shared autopsy Ion’s authentication. The theater in this way turns a fictional scene of recognition into a collective experience of Athenian self-­realization. o b j e c t s a n d i n t e r p e l l at i o n As described by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, interpellation is a kind of “hailing” and it is a central feature of how ideology (or an “ideological state apparatus”) constitutes its subjects. In a passage from “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (reproduced in Lenin and Philosophy), Althusser explains the performative effect of ideology through the metaphor of “hailing” (1971, 174): I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’

Althusser’s example highlights the deictic interplay between the voice of the authority figure (the police) summoning the potential subject, and the “interpellated” individual’s corresponding recognition of himself in the pronoun “you.” By turning around when he is hailed, the individual acknowledges the authority of the recruiter to subject him (or her) to the law: he becomes, in that moment, a subject.5 But the same type of reflexive recognition can be achieved when a thing rather than a person hails a subject. Adapting the Althusserian notion of interpellation to the context of the theater will allow us to theorize the agency of recognition tokens. If interpellation can explain how ideology subjects its citizens, it can also help us understand the similar kinds of effects that spectatorship, conceived of as a kind of  “state apparatus,” might engender in its subjects.6 By this I don’t mean to suggest that plays were written and produced in Athens for the purpose of

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indoctrinating the Athenian public. If the past several decades of scholarship have demonstrated anything, it is that tension and ambiguity are essential features of tragedy. Yet, certain poignant moments of high emotional and dramatic stage tension do place the spectator in the spotlight, casting particular urgency on questions of agency and authentication. Ion, the protagonist of Euripides’ play of the same name, whose identity as an Athenian hangs in the balance throughout the action, offers a case in point. The late-­arriving recognition scene draws the audience directly into the action by obliquely posing the question: Who has the authority to recognize Ion as a citizen? Whence the agency of the tokens that affirm such a status? That artifacts are capable of offering proof of a character’s identity in itself calls for a more nuanced accounting of (what I am calling) the interpellative force of tokens and textiles. After setting up a tent large enough to hold all the people of Delphi (1140) and decorating the area inside with sacred tapestries (ὑφάσμαθ᾿ ἱερά, 1141) taken from the temple treasuries, Ion presides over a feast celebrating his “birth” as well as his imminent departure for Athens. Xouthos has claimed him as a son on Apollo’s authority, thus pressuring Kreousa to prevent this usurper-­to-­be from contaminating her bloodline. She has plans of her own—­a plan, in particular, to poison Ion. And so the symbolically charged space inside the tent will be transformed, potentially, into a crime scene. Ion for his part now faces (although he does not yet realize it) the greatest threat to his survival since his exposure as an infant. The tent thus becomes the place within which Ion’s oracular skills and his cultural reflexes are put to the test.7 As the bowls are refilled with new wine, a flock of doves arrives and begins to taste the wine that was poured out. The messenger describes the effect of the wine on the birds, including the “bacchic convulsions” (ἔσεισε κἀβάκχευσεν, 1204) and “uninterpretable cry” (ἐκ δ᾿ ἔκλαγξ᾿ ὄπα / ἀξύνετον αἰάζουσ᾿, 1204–­5) of the one that drinks what was intended for Ion. Because he has been raised in a temple and among seers, however, Ion heeds this omen and orders everyone present to pour out their drinks. Several cues attest to Apollo’s presence in this scene, although he is nowhere to be seen: first, the ominous human cry (βλασφημίαν, 1189); then silence followed, finally, by the bird’s Bacchic convulsions and death cry.8 Dionysus and Apollo frequented Delphi in alternate seasons, making it less surprising that Apollo should reveal himself through “bacchic” signs.9 Birds appeared earlier in the play during Ion’s monody and he was reluctant to shoot them because they brought messages from the gods (180). What the Old Man gave Ion to drink (ὡς . . . χάριν φέρων, 1183) is not charis, but wine

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that has been mixed with a powerful poison (φάρμακον δραστήριον, 1185). The drink offering speaks directly to the breakdown of charis relations between Kreousa and Apollo. For the god’s lack of reciprocity—­or, rather, his delayed reciprocity—­is what has led Kreousa to take these vengeful measures. But responding through his own language of signs and ominous utterances, Apollo refuses to allow failed charis to turn into revenge. He offers Ion the chance to save himself  by reading the signs. He will also intervene on Kreousa’s behalf when Ion in turn tries to kill her. The object with its powerful agency—­notice the adjective δραστήριον that qualifies φάρμακον in line 1185—­signifies at cross-­purposes to its giver’s intention. Rather than destroy its intended victim, it brings Ion closer to his mother. Of course, Ion’s own skill in divination—­his acculturation to the temple and its community of noble seers (1190)—­is what saves him from being poisoned. Ion immediately grabs the Old Man by the arm and demands an explanation (1213–­14). It is a significant gesture, for Ion recognizes that this is the hand from which he received the poisoned drink (καὶ πῶμα χειρὸς σῆς ἐδεξάμην πάρα, 1212), and searches for an explanation through contact. The Old Man confesses under compulsion the “daring” plot of Kreousa and “the machinations of the drink” (1216). Thus Ion learns of the path of his gift, which has passed through Kreousa’s hands into his own by route of the Old Man. But originally the pharmakon belonged to Athena, and it is this origin that Ion will discover when he pursues his own act of revenge against Kreousa. a mother’s symbola A talisman’s special power to endow its owner with political and religious authority derives from its divine origin and consecration through ritual.10 An example of what Louis Gernet termed “hereditary talismans,” the Golden Vine that brings about the recognition between Hypsipyle and her two sons (Thoas and Euneos) in Euripides’ lost Hypsipyle belonged originally to Dionysus.11 As a “symbol” of the family (γένους σύμβολον, Anth. Pal. 3.10) to which it was given as a gift, the vine is revealed at a critical moment in order to save Hypsipyle from death.12 In much the same way, the tokens in Ion effect a recognition at the moment when Ion is intent on killing Kreousa. Ion even refers to the objects in the basket as μητρὸς σύμβολα (1386), the “symbols of his mother” that Apollo has saved for him and that Ion intends to rededicate to the god.13 These hereditary talismans are the things that truly qualify Ion for living in Athens; as symbols of investiture, moreover, they constitute an

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interesting mixture of the divine and human.14 The arrival on stage of the basket containing these talismanic objects interrupts Kreousa’s plot to murder Ion, fortuitously bringing about their reconciliation, not as strangers but as kin. The tokens do not qualify as agalmata according to Gernet’s strict criterion of divine craftsmanship.15 But the basket (antipēx) in which they are kept remains miraculously free of the effects of time. The tokens themselves, moreover, embody the history of Athens as constituted through the bloodline of the Erechtheids. Two categories of heirlooms come into play in the ultimately successful recognition of Ion.16 The first consists of the inheritance that Kreousa wears on her own body: two drops of Gorgon blood that have been passed down through her family line and are presently contained in a golden bracelet worn around her wrist. Second are the gifts enclosed in the antipēx in which she exposed Ion.17 These include Kreousa’s weaving sampler (with a gorgoneion), two golden snakes (made in imitation of the live snakes that Athena put inside Erichthonios’s basket) and a still-­blooming olive wreath. These two categories of heirlooms play very different roles in Ion’s acquisition of an Athenian identity. His encounter with the Gorgon blood, with which Kreousa tried to poison him, performs a quasi-­ephebic initiation rite by testing Ion’s heroic potential. Athenian ephebes were assigned to protect frontier regions of Athenian territory (Aeschines, On the Embassy 167; Plato, Laws 6, 760b) thus occupying a geographic space mirroring their social liminality.18 Ion’s time inside the tent is thus analogous to the Athenian ephebe’s journey to the frontiers; upon his return, the ephebe-­turned-­citizen male can be expected to take up a more central position in the civic, religious, and military life of his city. The second set of heirlooms, those hidden in the basket, are more closely aligned with tokens of investiture, which are typically not revealed until the moment when they are needed by an heir to the throne, for the purpose of validating his legitimacy.19 Nearly all the characters in the play apart from Xouthos are aware that Ion’s move to Athens would threaten the purity of the Erechtheid family line. The Old Man dwells on Ion’s ignoble birth. It would have been a lesser fault, he says, had Xouthos decided to adopt a son from a well-­born mother (παρ᾿ εὐγενοῦς / μητρός, 839–­40). But since he has used deception, and adopted the son of a slave woman, Kreousa is entitled to seek revenge. The Chorus concurs when, for example, they pray in their third stasimon that “no one, except one of the well-­born Erechtheids, may ever arrive to rule the city (1058–­60).” They know too that Kreousa will not tolerate foreigners ruling her house while she is still alive. But Kreousa’s recital of the pedigree of the Gorgon blood

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puts into even clearer perspective what is at stake in keeping Ion out of the family. Kreousa has rejected several unacceptable plans for revenge already, and the Old Man is clearly annoyed by her lack of resolve (984). The question she puts to him at 987 would seem to be yet a further distraction: “Listen now, are you familiar with the Gigantomachy?” (ἄκουε τοίνυν· οἶσθα γηγενῆ μάχην;). Why would Kreousa choose this moment to recall an event from the mythical past? On the surface, her remark registers as a badly timed scholarly digression. But it soon becomes clear that in narrating the Gigantomachy, Kreousa is marshaling material and psychological support for the matter at hand.20 She frames her revenge in this way as a personal and pragmatic engagement with the knowable past. Especially interesting is the new twist Kreousa gives to the traditional account of the Gorgon’s slaying. In Hesiod’s Theogony (274–­83), the Gorgons are the offspring of the sea creatures, Phorkys and Keto, and they live on a faraway island, near the Hesperides; in Kreousa’s account, Earth gives birth to a Gorgon who is an ally (σύμμαχον) to her children against the gods (989–­90).21 Traditionally, Perseus is the slayer of the mortal Gorgon (Medusa), but Kreousa says that Athena killed her (991).22 In line 994 (generally now printed as following 991), the Old Man questions the ancient authority of this myth.23 “Is this the story of old that I have heard?” (ἆρ᾿οὗτός ἐσθ᾿ ὁ μῦθος ὃν κλύω πάλαι;), he asks. His question focuses attention on the antiquity, or supposed antiquity, of Kreousa’s version.24 Her response (995) should be read as an attempt to strengthen her account by providing material evidence: “[Yes], that Athena wears the skin of that creature (ταύτης) on her chest” (ταύτης Ἀθάναν δέρος ἐπὶ στέρνοις ἔχειν). With her answer, Kreousa has subtly revised the question. The Old Man had asked about the tradition of Athena as Gorgon-­slayer, which is not older than Euripides, so far as we know. But Kreousa uses the goddess’s long-­standing association with the aegis to give weight to her version of the myth.25 The proof of the deed—­that the goddess killed the Gorgon—­becomes the fact that she wears the monster’s skin on her breastplate. Kreousa caps the story of the aegis with an etymology: in 997, she derives aegis from the verb αΐσσειν, claiming that the aegis got its name when Athena leaped into battle on the side of the gods. Kreousa’s etymology of the aegis, it should be emphasized, does more than offer a new variation on the traditional Gorgon-­slaying theme. It makes Kreousa herself into a name-­giver and as such places her in a position to compete directly with her husband for control over Ion’s identity. Focusing in more closely on line 997, we might

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even see in the position of the word θεῶν right after ὄνομα a hint that the name that Kreousa etymologizes belongs in fact to the language of the gods.26 If we keep in mind that gods use one set of names, and mortals another, then Kreousa shows her ability here to speak with words/names that belong to the divine register.27 Kreousa etymologizes the name of the aegis just as, earlier, Xouthos gave an etymological account of Ion’s name. Both etymologies are likely to be Euripidean invention. Within its dramatic context, however, Kreousa’s etymology carries more authority in so far as it integrates both the aegis and the Gorgon drops into specifically Athenian mythology. Furthermore, Kreousa’s etymology is neither authorized by “chance” (cf. Xouthos’s etymology); nor does it directly contradict the plan of Apollo that was previewed in the prologue. The Homeric genealogy of the aegis records that it was made by He­ phaistos and given to Zeus to wear (Il. 15.308–­10).28 A scholion to these lines of the Iliad reiterates that the aegis was made for Zeus and did not belong to Athena, “as the more recent poets assert.”29 Kreousa’s attribution of the aegis’s ownership to Athena does seem to have had some credence among post-­Homeric authors. We may never know how recent this version (in which Athena acquires the aegis by defeating the Gorgon in the Gigantomachy) was by Euripides’ time, or whether it was a Euripidean invention. But the revisionist history’s dramatic and ideological significance is clear: by making Athena the primary owner of the aegis and slayer of the Gorgon, Kreousa has established a direct line of descent between the goddess and her people, the Erechtheids.

c o n ta i n i n g t i m e i n a n ag e l e s s b a s k e t The Pythia arrives on stage (1320) with a container in her hands (ἄγγος, 1337). Her entrance has been compared to that of a dea ex machina, but the true resolution is to be found not in her presence but in the object that she carries:30 “an age old basket” (παλαιὰν ἀντίπηγ᾿, 1338) with sacred fillets, as Ion remarks.31 The adjective παλαιός used to describe the basket recalls the golden vessel containing Gorgon blood; this miniature vessel was called the παλαιὸν ὄργανον of Athena (1030). But Ion’s description of the basket clarifies that this object is not just very old, but also ageless (1389–­94): ὦ στέμμαθ’ ἱερά, τί ποτέ μοι κεκεύθατε, καὶ σύνδεθ’ οἷσι τἄμ’ ἐφρουρήθη φίλα; ἰδοὺ περίπτυγμ’ ἀντίπηγος εὐκύκλου ὡς οὐ γεγήρακ’ ἔκ τινος θεηλάτου,

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εὐρώς τ’ ἄπεστι πλεγμάτων· ὁ δ’ ἐν μέσῳ χρόνος πολὺς δὴ τοῖσδε θησαυρίσμασιν. Oh sacred fillets, what is it that you are hiding from me, and you, fastenings, by which my dear possessions have been guarded? Look how the lid of the well-­rounded antipēx has not aged at all because of some divine protection, and how mildew has kept away from its woven texture, even though the intervening time has been very long since these treasures were stored.

The basket invites comparison with Theseus’s sandals in Callimachus’s Hecale (236.3 Pf.), which are described as also being free of mold: πέδιλα, τὰ μὴ πύσε νήχυτος εὐρώς.32 The basket itself resists the corrupting effects of time and fends off decay from everything that it contains. While the roundness of the antipēx may be evocative of death and rebirth, in so far as it implies a cyclical notion of time, the metaphor of temporal suspension may be even more appropriate. For the containing action of the basket seems actually to have suspended the forward movement of time, keeping it finite and static even though, in Ion’s words, “the time in the middle has been great” (ὁ δ᾿ ἐν μέσῳ χρόνος πολύς, 1393–­94). “Time in the middle” would seem to refer to the years intervening between Ion’s birth and his present discovery of the birth tokens. But there is no reason to exclude the spatial resonance of ἐν μέσῳ “in the middle,” which, if taken literally, conjures an image of the basket itself containing, within its hollowed interiors, this quantity of time. This is not such a stretch if we are attuned to how figurations of space and time intersect in the Greek imagination, especially when it comes to Delphi.33 The last two details about the basket that we are given—­that it is woven (πλεγμάτων) and stored as a treasure (τοῖσδε θησαυρίσμασιν)—­are also important. Recalling that the tent too was composed of weavings taken from the temple treasuries, we can now appreciate the mirroring effect of these two media in which personal identity is encoded.34 The weavings hung in the tent visually articulate key components of Athenian identity in a public display before the people (λαόν, 1140) of Delphi.35 By comparison, the objects found inside, and including, the basket constitute a much smaller and more private affair, although of comparable effect. An Athenian viewer of the tent-­ textiles would be “interpellated” by seeing what position he occupied with respect to the rest of the kosmos as represented in the weavings (or ekphra­ sis). Likewise, in opening the basket Ion finds himself silently interpellated by the objects hidden therein.36 He discovers an identity that both he and the audience can recognize. Between the three objects, Ion acquires both an intimately personal and a political view of himself. For what functioned once rather mundanely as Ion’s swaddling clothes (σπάργανα, 1490) will presently

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enable the collective “remembering” of  his birth by the spectators in the Athe­ nian theater.37 a u t o p s y, r e c o g n i t i o n , a n d c o l l e c t i v e m e m o r y Ion, Kreousa, and the Pythia are gathered around the basket that contains the peaceful solution to the Erechtheid family drama, mother and son each having recently tried—­and failed—­to kill the other. The scene is thereby set for the recognition that will tie together all the strands of the plot. The Pythia intensifies our curiosity about the basket by drawing attention, once again, to the total secrecy in which its objects have been shrouded (1361–­2): “No mortal man has known these things (τάδε) that are in my possession, nor where they have been hidden (οὐδ᾿ ἵν᾿ ἦν κεκρυμμένα).” They will be revealed for the first time to both the stage characters and the theater audience. Ion eventually summons the courage to remove the lid, first addressing the fastenings and fillets that have guarded their secret for so long, and marveling over the “beautifully rounded basket” that remains miraculously un-­aged (1389–­94). And then the testing begins. Ion asks Kreousa to “name” the objects before seeing them (note the use of τοὔνομα at 1414).38 If Kreousa can put a “name” to each token, then she will have a son. The language of memory is not explicitly part of the verbal texture of this scene but remembering is, of course, key to the success of this naming. By accurately recalling the things that she placed in the basket with Ion years ago—­things he is presently looking at—­Kreousa will prove her maternity. And in a broader sense, Kreousa’s naming is what secures Athenian cultural memory about Ion. The qualitative differences between this scene and Xouthos’s naming now also clearly emerge. Xouthos had no material evidence to back up the words of the oracle on which he based his claim to Ion. Furthermore, he had no recollection at all of the circumstances of Ion’s birth. It was only with Ion’s creative questioning that he was finally persuaded to “remember” a Delphic slave girl who might have been Ion’s mother. The tokens that give Kreousa a son also act, to Ion’s benefit, as heirlooms of Athens—­Athenian symbola—­and constitute the city’s history in miniature from its foundation to the present moment. Two of the objects are gifts of Athena, and the third (Kreousa’s weaving sampler) is a woven imitation of the goddess’s own aegis. The first object Kreousa names for Ion is her “weaving sampler” (ἐκδίδαγμα κερκίδος, 1419).39 There is a gorgoneion woven into its center (1421) thus transforming this girlhood exercise into an aegis of sorts (αἰγίδος τρόπον, 1423).40 A notable feature of this object is that it is incomplete—­

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οὐ τέλεον (1419)—­a deficit that may symbolize Kreousa’s failure to make the transition from parthenos to married woman; crucial, in this regard, is the un-­reciprocated charis of Apollo that has kept her childless until this point. Read in another way, however, the material incompleteness of Kreousa’s sampler is evocative of the metaphorical incompleteness that Stewart (1993, 136) has identified as the source of the souvenir’s allusive authority. By its very nature incomplete, the souvenir requires a supplementary narrative. The action of Euripides’ Ion is, in a sense, the missing narrative that gives meaning to the sampler that, though not a souvenir, has provided a point of origin for that narrative’s resolution. The golden snakes that Kreousa describes next belong, like the woven aegis, to the family archives. Kreousa calls them replications (mimēmata) of the snakes with which Athena protected Erichthonios when she handed him to the Aglaurids (1427–­29).41 These golden snakes are also the “gift of Athena” (like the Gorgon blood, and golden vessel that contains it) and a memento of the birth of the first of the Erechtheids, Erichthonios, who in many ways is Ion’s double. Both aegis and snakes are replications of an irrecoverable original. It is instructive to compare the stage props, as mimēmata, to reproductions of famous cult statues, such as the Athena Parthenos, for each genre of replication makes visible and known what was designed in its original context to be viewed only by a select few—­Pheidias’s statue because it was concealed within the inner sanctum of the Parthenon, and the aegis and snakes because they belonged exclusively to the Erechtheids. By staging the recognition of Ion through tokens that are copies of “lost” originals, Euripides’ drama implicitly suggests that what were originally exclusive family heirlooms are now in the public domain. Explaining the cultural significance of replicating images of gods, Milette Gaifman (2006, 259) writes, “effectively, replications attest to the degree in which the enclosed image of the god was embedded in daily experience outside the confines of cultic spaces and ritual.” Ion’s spargana similarly translate their Erichthonian model from the confines of atemporal myth into the cultural consciousness of the here and now. For the third token, Kreousa names the evergreen olive wreath, which commemorates Ion’s birth and Athena’s victory.42 This object recalls the gift through which Athena defeated Poseidon for possession of the city and its name.43 Indeed, the garland of olive that Kreousa wrapped around her infant child came from that very tree on the Acropolis. She notes that it is still green, and grown from a (miraculously) ageless tree (οὔποτ᾿ ἐκλείπει χλόην, / θάλλει δ᾿, ἐλαίας ἐξ ἀκηράτου γεγώς, 1435–­36). The olive branch also recalls the broom with which Ion was sweeping the entrance to the temple in his

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opening monody. The broom is made out of bay and was described as coming from immortal gardens (κάπων ἐξ ἀθανάτων, 116, and νεηθαλές, 112).44 Ion has exchanged one ageless branch for another—­the bay for the olive—­ just as he is leaving Delphi for Athens. In fact, this “exchange of symbolic objects” could be taken further in that Ion’s life in Delphi is identified with three possessions: the broom, his water jug, and his bow.45 Three Delphic objects that, in leaving Delphi for Athens, Ion trades in for three Athenian symbola. Recognition tokens require a “reader” to decipher their meaning, but they in turn interpellate their readers (internal and external) by soliciting interpretation. Kreousa is scripted as the interpreter and Ion as her audience within this particular scene, allowing each one’s personhood to be completed and confirmed through the act of mutual recognition that these special (yet fundamentally generic) objects enable. Ion has found the mother he needs to become an Athenian, while Kreousa has found an heir and therefore new life for her family—­for when mother and son at last recognize each other, Kreousa pronounces Erectheus “rejuvenated” (ἀνηβᾷ δ᾿ Ἐρεχθεύς, 1465). Moreover, in contrast to Xouthos’s naming of Ion, the recognition between Kreousa and Ion has been not unilateral, but simultaneous and reciprocal.46 Ion looks inside the basket at things that are at first hidden from the view of the audience and Kreousa, while Kreousa names each object from memory. As she describes each object, Ion confirms the description through autopsy. But is the audience in a position to see what Ion sees? I believe that they are, and that their collective gaze has been scripted into the text. Let us return briefly to the moment when the Pythia emerges from the temple, carrying the rounded basket with the tokens inside. As Kreousa begins to describe the first token—­her unfinished, Gorgon-­decorated weaving sampler—­Ion pulls it out of the basket and exclaims (1424–­25): ἰδού· τόδ᾿ ἔσθ᾿ ὕφασμα †θέσφαθ᾿ ὡς εὑρίσκομεν.† Look! Here is the weaving. . . .

The textual corruption in the second half of line 1425 need not prevent us from confirming the cues to the staging of the scene that are offered by both the imperative (ἰδού) and the deictic τόδε. Ion’s words are likely to have been mirrored by the actor’s gesture of pulling the object from the basket and holding it up to the audience to witness.47 Although it is impossible to be sure such an action was performed, the deictic marker τόδε makes it likely that a gesture of some kind accompanied this speech act.48

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In being made witness to the material proof of Ion’s self-­discovery the play’s audience shares the stage, temporarily at least, with the hero himself. Until he sees for himself the physical evidence, Ion is unwilling to acknowledge Kreousa’s maternity; proof for him resides in the objects themselves. The scene could also have been staged without props, leaving the tokens to the audience to imagine. But by inviting Kreousa to see what the spectators in the theater will also see, Ion orchestrates a theatrical—­and a political—­ event. Directing every spectator’s gaze in the theater to a single point in space, the props become the centerpiece of an intensely personal recognition that is at the same time a collective experience. For spectators would have been just seconds behind Ion in recognizing themselves in the tokens that confirm him as Athenian. Ion’s viewing of himself in these tokens—­his autopsy—­is first performed as a private viewing, but soon enough it becomes a public display of the material history of Athens. In a quintessentially performative turn, a private moment of self-­recognition and authentication becomes the occasion for public spectacle. Although Ion does not have direct memory of the tokens (he would have been too young to remember when they were left to him) the viewing process that he undergoes while testing Kreousa creates the conditions for a proper recognition. Normally, for an object to function as a token of recognition (gnōrisma) it must provoke in the viewer a recollection of a pre-­established social bond: for example, Orestes’ proving to Electra who he is by showing her a piece of her own weaving in Aeschylus’s Choephoroi 231–­32, or Orestes’ verbal reference to Iphigenia’s weaving in Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians 814–­16. The final recognition in Ion collapses the viewing, which creates memory, and the recognition of the heirlooms into a single event. Although Ion views the heirlooms for the first time, he also recognizes his mother through them, as if, like gnōrismata, they were reminding him of the long established bond between the two of them. In this sense, these objects themselves occupy a “perfective present” tense: they were circulated long ago but not fully relegated to the past. Their verbal effect is similar to the present-­ tense language of giving used to describe the transmission of an heirloom (or a child) from one generation to the next (e.g., δίδωσι, 1007). For, as objects of memory which are firmly embedded in the past, heirlooms allow the past to recreate itself in the present (as Ion re-­embodies Erichthonios and Erechtheus) while also allowing each present generation to experience that “past” as part of their living present. No doubt the presentation of the Panathenaic peplos depicting the gigantomachy was also an occasion for collective self-­reflection.49 And there were many others. Ion’s self-­recognition merely

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dramatizes for us the cultural agency of iconic replicas, giving us a means of imagining and theorizing the other occasions on which Athenians “remembered” who they were. Another such occasion, though not one explicitly marked as Athenian, is the return of Orestes in Euripides’ Electra, which presents technical dif­ ficulties inconceivable in the world of Aeschylus’s Oresteia where the Homeric signs of kinship (similar hair, feet, hands, bodily shape, and voice) are still valid. In the textually corrupted opening lines of Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, Orestes addresses Hermes over the tomb of his father. Orestes announces that he has brought two locks of hair with him, one as an offering to the river god, Inachus, and the second as a token of mourning for his dead father (πλόκαμον Ἰνάχῳ θρεπτήριον / τὸν δεύτερον δὲ τόνδε πενθητήριον, 6–­7). Both locks serve a ritual function, the hair offered to the river being a standard way in which ephebes marked their gratitude for the water’s “nurturing” (θρεπτήριον) role in their transition to adulthood.50 It is not therefore surprising to find Orestes in the Choephoroi as well as in the Electra plays of both Sophocles and Euripides honoring his father’s grave in this way. More surprising is that the lock of hair may already have been a catalyst for the recognition of Orestes in Stesichorus’s Oresteia, an interesting detail that would turn Aeschylus, no less than Euripides, into a receptor (and innovator) of literary tradition;51 for its part, the lock of hair already functions as a kind of citation device, marking the convergences, as well as points of difference, from one performance context to the next. As we transition from Ion to Electra, we can expect to find surprisingly similar underlying motifs. The role of repetition, and the sense (shared by both characters and audience) of reperforming a script for which the template was created long ago link these two tragedies in unexpected ways. Signatures of the Self: Signet Rings and Secret Signs In Homer, as in Aeschylus and Sophocles, heroes come to be recognized as legitimate sons by inheriting family heirlooms, armor, and a paternal cast of body. The Sophoclean Ajax famously hands over his shield to his young son Eurysakes (“Broadshield”) with the injunction to replicate his father’s life in every respect except for his bad fortune.52 The new-­age Euripidean hero, however, will be recognized neither by his family hair and family feet, nor through inherited possessions. A childhood scar instead inscribes legitimacy on Orestes’ body. Rather than talismanic tokens vouching for the legitimacy of the hero who owns them, in the Euripidean context, it is the city that establishes the criteria of authenticity. Apollo’s conspicuous absence from Electra

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and Iphigenia among the Taurians and his bit part in Orestes give dramatic form to this cultural paradigm shift. While Apollo appears ex machina at the very end of Orestes, it is only to announce Helen’s rescue and Orestes’ impending exile (1625–­65). Earlier in the same play, Orestes had sought the help of Apollo’s bow in fighting off the Furies (268–­76). But as we saw above, in the introduction, the bow remains a figment of Orestes’ diseased imagination. Nor does Apolline support manifest itself in Electra.53 Having denounced the prophecies of wise Apollo as “not wise” (1246), the Dioscuroi urge Orestes to find shelter from his mother’s Furies under the aegis of the Athena Polias statue in Athens (1254–­57): “Go to Athens and embrace the holy statue of Pallas. For she will drive off the [Furies] fluttering with terrifying snakes, holding a gorgon-­imprinted aegis over your head, so that they will not touch you.” These are the same Furies that Apollo drove out of his sanctuary at Delphi with the threat of his “gold-­wrought bow” in Aeschylus’s Eumenides.54 In Electra, Castor’s description of Athena’s Gorgon-­emblazoned shield calls to mind the artistic program of Achilles’ shield as it was celebrated in an earlier choral ode: a swift-­footed Perseus cutting the Gorgon’s throat (458–­64). The city, in other words, has taken possession of the talismanic objects that once brought kudos to individual warriors and their patron gods. But why, then, does the Chorus celebrate the divinely crafted arms of Achilles in song? And what has happened to the personal wealth of the Atreid clan? In what follows I explore in detail how the city’s assumption of a more active role in the lives of its citizens impacts tragedy’s most famous mythical family—­the House of Atreus—­in Euripides’ Electra. But let us first review some of the more private facets of anagnōrisis, looking back briefly over the acts of communication that occur through signs known only to intimate family members, and whose tokens are closely guarded family secrets, so as to have a framework for appreciating the novelty of the public recognition of Orestes in Electra. Just as a signet ring’s familiarity can inspire trust in a letter’s intended recipient, a token of recognition (gnōrisma) is meaningful only to those who are already closely bound to one another in a social intimacy that encompasses the event commemorated by the token itself. To the casual and uninitiated viewer, the token is a mere curiosity.55 When inserted into the appropriate context, the token is capable of renewing a long defunct bond of philia. Precisely because of its capacity to inspire trust, however, the familiar object (whether a token, signet ring, or gift) can also do great harm, catching its victim by surprise when he feels safest. Familiar objects turn out to be some of the most dangerous gifts in Greek tragedy.56

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Jason’s false sense of security in his relationship with Medea allows him to accept deadly gifts that were given under the guise of friendship in Euripides’ Medea.57 Likewise, Phaedra’s written accusation against the title character of Hippolytus puts Theseus in the unenviable position of having to choose whether to trust his dead wife or his illegitimate son. His interaction with the unopened tablet suggests that he is already prejudiced in Phaedra’s favor from the minute he sets eyes on the carefully staged scene of her suicide. Before he even begins to read her words, his trust is already “sealed” by the distinctive imprint of Phaedra’s gold-­set signet ring (862–­64). Heracles is in a similarly trusting position when he receives Deianeira’s sphragis-­sealed gift of a poisoned robe in Trachiniae. What the seal of her sphragis guarantees is not a discursive truth, but rather the gift’s provenance: the special mark is a surrogate for the act of physically handing over the robe in person (614–­15). The same is true for Phaedra’s signet ring. Its mark ensures that whatever lies hidden within the tablet’s folds has been written by Phaedra’s own hand. As an extension of Agamemnon’s personhood, the signet ring that Orestes shows to his sister in Sophocles’ Electra secures near-­instantaneous recognition and trust in its viewer (1222–­3): “Look at this signet-­ring of my father and learn if I speak the truth” (τήνδ προσβλέψασα μου / σφραγῖδα πατρὸς ἔκμαθ᾿ εἰ σαφῆ λέγω), he says, having just made the preposterous claim to be Orestes, risen from the dead. The recognition token in this context profers irrefutable proof of patrilineal descent, as it does also in Euripides’ Augē, where, according to the eighth-­century CE testimony of Moses of Chorene, it is through seeing his own ring that Heracles recognizes Telephus as his son.58 Augē, the child’s mother, had attached the ring to her baby, as proof of his paternity. The ring token in Sophocles thus operates in marked contrast to the absent tokens in Euripides’ Electra, not only because it forecloses any discussion or analysis of its mechanisms of authentication but because it advances a patrilineal model of legitimacy: Telephus and Orestes are both recognized as sons of their ring-­owning fathers. The Sophoclean Electra trusts the signet ring because it is a sign she recognizes—­and also because it is her father’s sign. In this regard the sphragis captures something essential not only about recognition tokens but about many of the props in this book—­especially those that appear in Sophoclean tragedies. Objects function as extensions of human personhood. They can act for their human “owners” in absentia, shoring up credibility for those who have made, owned, or given them. The power encoded in the token to affirm a character’s claim to a certain identity, likewise, issues from the collective faith vested in that material sign to perform precisely this sort of legitimiz­ ing work.

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Behind all the tragic variations, however, lies the “masterplot . . . of Odys­ seus himself and his return home.”59 The Odyssey, as Froma Zeitlin (2012, 361) has recently observed, contains the three essential elements that characterize the “Orestes-­Electra plot” in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: nostos (return), anagnōrisis (recognition), and mēchanēma (the intrigue). In the Odyssey, Odysseus’s bed is compared to a “thick column” (πάχετος δ᾿ ἦν ἠΰτε κίων, 23.191); the symbolic centrality of the bed becomes literal when we realize that the bed is made out of an olive tree that has been left in place, its roots still grounded in the earth. The rest of the chamber and the entire residence have been built around this fixed point. So stable is this object, Odysseus claims, that not even a god could dislodge it easily (23.185–­86). And in fact, as he discovers just a few lines later, no one has moved his bed. For Penelope “recognizes the signs” that her husband gives her—­in his knowledge of the bed’s construction and fixity—­and receives him at long last into her life again. The test of the bed, it is implied, is the only proof that will suffice to convince her of Odysseus’s return. She has explained previously to Telemachus that if the man before her is truly Odysseus, they will know each other by secret signs, unknown to the rest of the world (23.107–­10).60 Only her husband would know that the bed is immobilized. As if on cue, in his outrage that someone has dislodged this “bedrock” of his former self, Odysseus reveals himself to Penelope as her true husband. In the bed which he has made with his own hands, and which symbolizes his marriage to Penelope, is encoded the unique sign of their marriage. Iphigenia’s recognition of Orestes in Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Tau­ rians is also accomplished through private signs. While Iphigenia does not trick Orestes into revealing himself, the tekmēria he offers her of who he is owe much to Homer’s model (IT 808–­26). Orestes mentions three family heirlooms, two of which—­a piece of weaving and a lock of hair—­he is familiar with from hearsay, and a third (a spear) which he has seen with his own eyes. The textile depicts an episode from the family’s past—­the sun reversing its course in reaction to the theft of the golden lamb. The spear of Pelops, which is kept in the maiden quarters (826), would have been known only to the innermost circle of family members, as is implied in the object’s storage location. It was in her maiden quarters that Iphigenia dreamt she was sleeping when the palace collapsed, leaving a lone pillar standing. In her dream, the pillar stands for Orestes, the lone male survivor of this misfortune-­plagued clan. Both pillar and spear are unmistakable symbols of male identity, but whereas the pillar denotes strength, the spear is associated with hidden violation.61 Intruding into a markedly female space, the spear—­ the same one that Pelops brandished against Oinomaos to win his daughter

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(823–­25)—­symbolizes the violence at the root of this family’s marriages. In later generations, kin-­killing resurfaces in sacrificial form, in the “sacrifice” of Iphigenia by Agamemnon, of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra, and finally in the technē that Iphigenia herself practices on the column in her dream, and—­ very nearly—­on her brother, in real life.62 Like the bed in the Odyssey, the tekmēria mentioned by Orestes reunite two long-­separated family members by reminding them of their intensely private yet shared past. Only a husband would know the secret of the bed’s construction. But while the bed offers an image of marital harmony and stability, the spear connotes the opposite. It tells a story of marriage so intricately linked to violence that the house itself must be destroyed (as it is in Iphigenia’s dream) and its secret divulged, in order for the clan to survive. The spear has clearly been preserved as a kind of trophy commemorating Pelops’s chariot victory and, in this sense, it is also a monument to the family’s earliest days. Yet its legacy of victory is inseparable from what has followed in the wake of Hippodameia’s marriage. Iphigenia’s own history is linked to that of the spear of Pelops by her own chariot ride to Aulis as the (sacrificial) bride-­to-­be of Achilles.63 Iphigenia’s own near-­sacrifice at Aulis is merely the latest chapter in an ongoing family saga.64 And so it is with the biographies of many tragic weapons: intimate familiarity with an object’s special lore implies proximity to its history of violence. Putting Tokens to the Test in Euripides’ Electra In Ion, the basket and spargana they contain have been kept hidden from view for many years by the time the Pythia reveals them to the public eye. When she steps out from the temple, holding the basket in her arms, it is almost as if she is heralding the admission of these artifacts into the public record: “I have kept them in silence, but now I show them” (σιγῇ γὰρ εἶχον αὐτά· νῦν δὲ δείκνυμεν, 1341). In sharp contrast, the crucial recognition “token” of Euripides’ Electra, the scar over Orestes’ eyebrow, has always existed in plain view. The two sets of tokens thus exemplify the intersections between oikos and polis, household and city, but from two very different perspectives—­those from Ion intertwine personal family lore with civic foundation myth, while the recognition of Orestes in Electra reveals the political importance of what at first sight seems to be a scar too trivial to notice. The dramaturgical setup for each recognition scene likewise offers a study in contrasts. As we have seen, the Pythia’s arrival on stage lends to the Ion episode a divinely-­authorized aura: she stage-­manages her own and the basket’s entrance, explaining whence the tokens have come and what the human

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characters who share the playing space with her are expected to do in their presence. Electra and the Old Man, on the other hand, practically stumble, by accident, into their recognition scene. Martin Cropp (1988, 134) observes of lines 487–­698 that “the design of this scene is difficult to appreciate except in the light of narrative and poetic traditions.” As he comes back onto the scene, the Old Man announces that he has brought with him livestock, garlands, cheeses, and wine—­provisions for their recently arrived houseguests (494–­ 500). The focus is on hospitality and entertainment, until Electra asks about the Old Man’s tear-­filled eyes. Why is he crying? He then recounts his visit to Agamemnon’s tomb, where he had gone in order to pour a libation; but once there, he noticed a freshly cut lock of blonde hair (515). This leads the Old Man to wonder if Orestes may have secretly returned (518).65 For Electra in the Choephoroi, the lock of hair at her father’s tomb is very much an actor in its own right. She proclaims it ὁμόπτερος (“of like plumage”) and affirms for the Chorus its visible similarity to her own hair (καὶ μὴν ὅδ᾿ ἐστὶ κάρτ᾿ ἰδεῖν ὁμόπτερος, 174).66 Seeing the lock immediately elicits recognition in Electra whose powerful emotions emerge as tears (186–­88). But certainty no sooner arrives than it is gone, and in the remainder of her speech, Electra unsuccessfully seeks reassurance from this mute and recalcitrant witness. She wishes out loud that the lock could speak, like a messenger (195–­96). If it had a voice, the lock would be able either to confirm or refute her hunch that it has in fact come from the head of Orestes (197–­98). Further personifying it, Electra imagines that the sympathetic lock would share her grief (199). Perhaps most revealing of her cognitive framework is Electra’s turn to the divine realm for help in deciphering this intractable sign. In Choephoroi the lock of hair enters a mantic frame of reference when Electra calls upon the gods to adjudicate its significance—­ἀλλ᾿ εἰδότας μὲν τοὺς θεοὺς καλούμεθα (201). Electra has fallen victim to the paradox of human recognition, namely that only those already in the know can re-­cognize. The footprints, to which she refers as the “second proof ” (δεύτερον τεκμήριον, 205), also send her mind into a painful labor (πάρεστι δ᾿ ὠδὶς καὶ φρενῶν καταφθορά, 211). Tokens of recognition “speak” not to the ignorant public but to a small circle of intimates, those who are privileged with the knowledge needed to decode such signs. As the sister of Orestes, Electra is among the acquaintances to whom the lock should “speak,” but she suspends her belief, awaiting divine resolution of her cognitive uncertainties. Electra’s skepticism reflects her awareness of her (relatively low) position within a cosmic hierarchy where gods are epistemologically supreme, and where the divine world communicates through mute signs and things—­the entrails of animals, for instance, or the flight patterns of birds. When Orestes appears to his sister in

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person, she treats him no differently than any of these other signs. In fact, by appearing to her in person, he perversely undermines Electra’s previous faith in the material symptoms of his return. By privileging the silent testimony of his physical surrogates over her brother’s actual apparition, Electra finds herself trapped in a regressive chain of significations, each one further removed from the person himself. The irony of this ad infinitum regress is not lost on Orestes (225–­27). But while no single sign in isolation can guarantee its own authenticity, in the end, Electra is persuaded by an accumulation of evidence (hair, footprints, and weaving) that, in its totality, puts to rest her fear of self-­deception; through the integrated presence of these silent tokens, Electra finds herself once again convinced that it is her brother who has reappeared. Stripped down to bare rhetoric on the Euripidean stage, the quasi-­magical pull of the Aeschylean tokens reveals itself as nothing more than a series of hypothetical propositions, which, as Electra herself demonstrates, can be refuted through counter-­propositions. Both hair and footprints are denaturalized. And even the kinship-­based foundations of good birth (eugeneia) are called into question. The Euripidean Electra neither invokes the gods, nor does she pursue autopsy as a mechanism of verification (in the way that Ion came to know who he was through viewing his birth tokens). In Electra the pointedly absent recognition tokens are instead examined through the discourse of fifth-­century rationalism, with implicit appeals to the categories of nature and culture (physis and nomos). The seemingly irreconcilable gap between these two terms achieves synthesis in a third category: neither nature nor culture, strictly speaking, but what has become naturalized through culture. This third category is represented by a suitably hybrid sign, whose material embodiment is Orestes’ scar. g r a f t i n g c u lt u r e o n t o t h e b o d y Electra’s recognition of her brother in Aeschylus’s Choephoroi never exposes to view the unexamined premises of recognition—­the material, psychological, and political conditions that enable a material token to prove that an unrecognized stranger is, or is not, Orestes. Nor does the Chorus of that play question Electra’s ability to determine, at a glance, the material resemblance between the offering at the tomb and her own hair. The Aeschylean Electra does eventually question the authenticity of both the lock and footprints, but only when she comes face to face with their human source. The corresponding scene in Euripides by contrast demystifies the recognition token as a dramatic device, while at the same time situating the failure of these now outmoded practices within a broader discussion of Nature’s “confusion.”67

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There is, moreover, a third “Electra” recognition scene, from Sophocles’ tragedy of the same name, that offers yet another variation on the prototype of the recognition token. There, as we have seen, the sphragis (signet ring) of the father acts as the authoritative sign; the oikos rather than the polis is acknowledged as the source of Orestes’ identity.68 In the Euripidean context, the Old Man initially privileges the evidence of nature when he asks Electra to put the lock of hair that he has found on Agamemnon’s tomb up to her own hair, hoping in this way to determine whether it belongs to someone of the same stock (520–­21): σκέψαι δὲ χαίτην προστιθεῖσα σῇ κόμῃ, εἰ χρῶμα ταὐτὸν κουρίμης ἔσται τριχός· Putting the lock up against your own hair, consider whether the color of the cut lock will be the same as your own.

The Old Man seems to be issuing a stage direction, here; if so, it is one that would reenact a similar request made by Orestes in Aeschylus’s Choephoroi that Electra put the shorn lock back to the place on his head from which it had been cut.69 But in the Euripidean context, there is no stage prop to be handled, rendering it impossible to reperform Aeschylus’s script in the here and now. Moreover, the suggestion that she place such a lock, even were it to materialize, next to her own head only draws attention to the futility and ludicrousness of such a gesture: as C. W. Marshall (1999–­2000, 339) points out, “the most explicit feature about Electra’s appearance is her closely cropped hair (108, 148, 241, 335).”70 After recovering from this false start, which in itself invites comparison with Orestes’ complaint at Ch. 226 that Electra seemed to see him better when she looked at “this lock here” (κουρὰν δ᾿ ἰδοῦσα τήνδε) than while regarding his own person, the recognition scene proceeds—­though it retains a note of self-­conscious irony. There are two stages leading up to the final acceptance of brother by sister, with the appearance in person of Orestes and Pylades marking the transition from one to the next. I devote the rest of this section to the first part, which has often been thought spurious on account of its intertheatrical play with the Choephoroi,71 while saving the successful token of the scar for separate consideration below. We’ve seen already that the lock of hair fails to manifest as a token on stage; it is soon to be summarily dismissed by Electra (not for its invisibility, but for its generic inadequacy). First, however, she raises the issue of hair as a gendered sign, one that has been shaped, if it belongs to a well-­born (eugenēs) man, by the masculine practice of frequenting the palaestra (527–­29):

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ἔπειτα χαίτης πῶς συνοίσεται πλόκος, ὁ μὲν παλαίστραις ἀνδρὸς εὐγενοῦς τραφείς, ὁ δὲ κτενισμοῖς θῆλυς; ἀλλ’ ἀμήχανον. Then, how will one lock match another, when the one belonging to a noble-­ born man has been raised in the palaestra, whereas the female lock has been nurtured with combing? It’s impossible.72

The palaestra was a space associated in Greek thought with the education of elite males. A domain for games and exercise from which women were excluded, it offered a unique venue for creating and reinforcing elite social norms, as well as their physical manifestations.73 As Mireille Lee (2009, 163) puts it, “the habitual repetition of exercise and bathing reinforces individual identities; the erotic gaze of other men assures identification with the group of masculine elite.” By drawing attention to the cultural mediation involved in producing certain physical characteristics, Electra reveals the cultural constructedness of a sign (i.e., hair) that traditionally (in epic and earlier tragic tradition) had served as a natural marker of filial identity. Electra deliberately shapes her argument to counter the Old Man’s proposition that patrilineal descent produces clearly identifiable symptoms of blood-­kinship (522–­23). Hair would be one such bodily signifier among the physical similarities between siblings rendered plentiful by “nature” (τὰ πόλλ᾿ ὅμοια σώματος πεφυκέναι, 523). I have put “nature” here in quotation marks because this is the term (πεφυκέναι) whose role Electra’s argument contests.74 What in fact is “natural” about human hair that has been “raised” in the palaestra or treated with combing?75 Even if there were at one time natural affinities between her brother’s hair and her own, Electra argues that the patina of culture and its gender-­specific practices would long since have erased Nature’s blueprint. Electra takes her refutation one step further when she contests even this hypothesis—­namely, that nature stripped of culture, if such a thing could ever exist, would provide a template for verifying blood-­kinship, for “you could find many people with the same hair (βοστρύχους ὁμοπτέρους) who are not blood-­relatives,” she tells the Old Man at 530–­31. The adjective ὁμόπτερος (“of like plumage”) was used by Aeschylus’s Electra to describe the unidentified lock of hair at Choephoroi 174. The Euripidean Electra’s utterance of the same word here underlines the fallibility of her predecessor’s reliance on Nature, and the false assumption that patrilineal descent leaves visible bodily traces. The Old Man turns next to the second Aeschylean token, a footprint on the ground, and asks Electra to determine whether it is “proportionate” (σύμμετρος) with her own (532–­33):

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σὺ δ’ εἰς ἴχνος βᾶσ’ ἀρβύλης σκέψαι βάσιν εἰ σύμμετρος σῷ ποδὶ γενήσεται, τέκνον. But step into the shoe-­print and see if it is proportionate with your own foot, child.

Electra treats the second token with the same empirical skepticism that led her to dismiss the first one. Rocky ground is inappropriate for receiving an imprint, and male and female feet are no more comparable than gendered locks of hair (534–­37). It was Aeschylus’s Electra who had claimed that the heels and imprints of the stranger’s feet were “proportionate” (μετρούμεναι, Ch. 209) with her own, thus prompting the Old Man’s question to the Euripidean Electra about whether the footprint he observed might not be “proportionate” (σύμμετρος, El. 533) to hers. Denniston’s impatience with the playwright’s supposed insouciance here has shaped many a critical response to these lines (1939, 113): “In making the ground round the tomb rocky, without, apparently, enough dust to take a print (534–­35), and in restricting the resemblance between the locks to that of colour (521), Euripides seems to be going out of his way to create difficulty” (my emphasis), he objects. Electra refutes the argument from nature, that bodily similarities produced by physis can confirm blood ties between siblings, with the argument from gender, or the “natural” differences between the sexes. If, indeed, there were two pairs of footprints belonging to siblings, how could the masculine one not be greater than the feminine? With the third token, however, Electra makes a complete turnabout, rejecting the woven textile as evidence precisely because it is not a product of nature, and because it could not possibly have grown with her brother’s growing body. Beyond claiming that she was too young to have woven anything when her brother was removed from their home, Electra scoffs at the suggestion that clothes he wore as a child could possibly still identify the adult Orestes, unless the Old Man has in mind a kind of magically expanding garment: εἰ μὴ ξυναύξοινθ᾿ οἱ πέπλοι τῷ σώματι; (544). In implying that only such a “growing” garment would be a proof-­worthy token, Electra reverts to the realm of Nature. Taken together, the three tokens rejected by Electra span the spectrum from the natural (genealogically determined) signs to the purely cultural, contingent (and fabricated) object. What, then, remains as a viable criterion of authenticity? Is it irrational to expect sound reasoning from a heroine whose poetic progenitor may, in inventing this dialogue, simply have “gone out of his way to create difficulty,” to quote Denniston again?76 The piece of evidence that does finally convince Electra, however, is categorically different from the other three signs. A scar is delicately poised between

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the determinants of nature and culture. It has been externally inscribed. Yet, once grafted, it grows on and with the body. Both inalienable and fabricated, the scar combines properties that the other tokens only exhibited in isolation, and as such, it vindicates Electra’s rejection of the three earlier tokens. the city’s test: recognition as dokimasia Orestes and Pylades emerge from the Farmer’s house at 549 (as announced by Electra) and the second part of the recognition scene begins. Up until this point, the Old Man has questioned Electra about offstage recognition tokens, and Electra has responded, speaking about objects with which neither of them can physically engage. But as soon as he sees Orestes and Pylades, the Old Man pronounces them “well-­born” (εὐγενεῖς). He quickly qualifies the statement with the concession that even good birth can be counterfeited (550–­52): ἀλλ’ εὐγενεῖς μέν, ἐν δὲ κιβδήλῳ τόδε· πολλοὶ γὰρ ὄντες εὐγενεῖς εἰσιν κακοί. ὅμως δὲ χαίρειν τοὺς ξένους προσεννέπω. Well, they are wellborn, but this can be a matter of counterfeiting: For there are many who, although well-­born, are of bad character. All the same, I bid the strangers welcome.

Though it means “birth from noble parents,” the Old Man claims that eu­ geneia is not the exclusive cause of the effects that are commonly attributed to it—­nor, for that matter, as we have seen, can similar hair or feet be referred to a shared bloodline. The case of the Farmer, Electra’s peasant-­husband, is revealing in this regard. Pleased to learn that this is the man who has left his marriage to Electra unconsummated (for all the right reasons), Orestes finds in him an example of Nature’s “confusion” when it comes to inherited virtue (367–­72): οὐκ ἔστ᾿ ἀκριβὲς οὐδὲν εἰς εὐανδρίαν ἔχουσι γὰρ ταραγμὸν αἱ φύσεις βροτῶν. ἤδη γὰρ εἶδον ἄνδρα γενναίου πατρὸς τὸ μηδὲν ὄντα, χρηστὰ δ᾿ ἐκ κακῶν τέκνα, λιμόν τ᾿ ἐν ἀνδρὸς πλουσίου φρονήματι, γνώμην δὲ μεγάλην ἐν πένητι σώματι. There is no secure way to predict where one will find virtue, for the nature of men is in confusion. I’ve seen already a man worth nothing born from a noble father, while the children of bad parents are good, and famine in the mind of a rich man and great judgment in the body of a poor man.

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The Farmer’s own case is clear: “great judgment in the body of a poor man” (γνώμην δὲ μεγάλην ἐν πένητι σώματι, 372).77 Part of Orestes’ purpose, no doubt, is to praise the Farmer for his exemplary treatment of Electra. But eulogy alone would not require deliberation on standards and the question of standards is clearly foremost in Orestes’ mind as he begins to speak: “There is no secure way to predict where one will find virtue.” All the old measures—­ birth, wealth, battle—­are no longer reliable. Nature has been thrown into confusion: noble children are born to poor fathers, and the children of the wellborn and wealthy grow up to be empty-­headed fools (369–­72). But if manliness—­euandria—­is no longer the exclusive property of the wealthy and well-­born, to whom does it belong? Moving from the particular case of the Farmer to general principles, Ores­ tes advocates that euandria be sought, not in biological pedigree or wealth, but in character and companionship (383–­85). A man’s character (ethos), he argues, and the company he keeps (homilia) offer a more secure guide to his internal worth—­his eugeneia—­than the objective data of his genealogy. The logic governing the relationship between inside and outside has been reversed. Previously, a man’s genos—­his birthright—­was believed to secure his social value and produce the external markers appropriate to his inherited class (such as appearance, behavior, and wealth). Now, the external signs of good birth are treated with suspicion. Looks may deceive, wealth can be inappropriately acquired; therefore, a man’s external actions and habitus must be scrutinized, along with his aristocratic appearance, to determine his true status. Ironically, Orestes himself  becomes the test case for his own thesis later in the play when he is subjected to the Old Man’s discriminating gaze, his true value the object of this scrutiny. Orestes is quick to follow up on the imagery of the counterfeit (kibdēlon) that heralded his and Pylades’ entrance (550). A few lines later, he compares himself to the mark on a silver coin (558–­59): τί μ’ ἐσδέδορκεν ὥσπερ ἀργύρου σκοπῶν λαμπρὸν χαρακτῆρ’; ἦ προσεικάζει μέ τῳ; Why does he look at me as if he were examining the shiny mark on a silver coin? Or is he comparing me to someone/something?

Orestes’ discomfort at being the object of the Old Man’s inspection gives an unusually clear picture of the blocking of this scene. Orestes, probably standing still, wonders why he is being looked over so intently, while the Old Man, circling around him,78 communicates in his body language that he is intrigued by the “sign” on Orestes’ face. The scar is visible enough to catch

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the Old Man’s attention but otherwise hard to make out.79 In his eagerness to confirm a hunch (“Is it that  scar?”), the Old Man also raises the stakes for the audience, his movements (in combination with Orestes’ questions) subtly conveying that in the identification of this sign will be resolved the entire mystery of this man’s identity, as well as the more philosophical problem of how a man’s invisible qualities can be known. But Orestes’ diction also invites commentary. Charaktēr, from the verb χαράσσειν (to dig, or etch), in its most literal sense refers to the impression left from an “etching out” of a surface.80 The metaphorical resonances between a human scar and a coin’s charaktēr, the technical term for the impression left by the die on a coin face, are even more compelling. The imaginary coin to which Orestes compares himself is silver, and its charaktēr is shiny. The majority of Attic coins in circulation during the mid-­to-­late fifth century BCE were indeed made of silver, and only silver. Although Lydians put gold into circulation alongside silver, there is only one known instance of Athenians minting gold coins. Facing a dire shortage of silver during the later years of the Peloponnesian War, in 407–­406 BCE the Athenians melted down eight golden statues of Nike from the Acropolis and struck gold coins for the first time in their minting history; the next year, bronze coins were struck.81 But these were exceptions to what Christopher Howgego has suggested may have been a taboo against issuing coins of either gold or electrum.82 Silver was the metal of choice, and its “middling” status, as well as its local autochthonous source in the Laureion mines, made it a fitting symbol of the democratic polis.83 What the scar offers both to Electra, in her quest to find her brother, and to the Old Man, in his attempt to determine the stranger’s true type, is a legible sign of authenticity. In essence a perfectly ordinary trace from a mundane fall, the scar unassumingly indexes domestic life—­this could be any man’s scar. Yet, the same scar proves Orestes’ specific identity, marking him as the son of Agamemnon. Seaford (2004, 153) has emphasized the depersonalized nature of the scar, qua coin mark. But I find it impossible to tell which register—­family or city—­takes precedence since they signify simultaneously. In this regard, the procedure of dokimasia that Athenians deployed in order to authenticate citizen males provides a more useful analogy for understanding the scar’s redoubled signification.84 The inspection ritual was designed to verify a man’s legal right to citizenship by affirming that he had been born, legitimately, to citizen parents. The Old Man’s careful examination of the mark on Orestes’ face may even have struck viewers as a theatrical reenactment of the Athenian dokimasia, through which the city promoted its ephebes to full citizen status.85 To be recognized as legitimate (or gnēsios) in Athens of the period following Pericles’

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citizenship law (451/50), a man had to establish that both his parents were Athenians in their own right, and legally married at the time of his birth.86 The process of legitimation, however, would be ongoing throughout his life. Every potential magistrate had to undergo a testing—­a dokimasia—­which included specific questions about his parentage.87 He would be asked, for instance, to give the name of his father and his father’s father, as well as that of his mother and his mother’s father (e.g., Arist. Ath. 55.3–­4). In the words of Cynthia Patterson (1990, 61), “Pericles’ law established a legitimacy requirement for the polis itself, and can be seen as part of the way in which the Classical Athenian polis structured itself on the model of the family.” But in a somewhat circular process, the Periclean Citizenship law, by setting standards for the city, inevitably ended up recasting the normative Athenian family in its own image. The gender-­ambiguous pronoun τῳ that Orestes uses at line 559 further blurs the boundaries between man and coin. Martin Cropp translates the indefinite τῳ as a masculine “someone,” giving the sense, “Is he matching me to someone?” But the neuter is also possible: “Is he matching me with something ?” Understood in this way, Orestes’ question would allude to the official archetype against which the stamp on each untested coin was to be matched. The coin analogy in fact lends an extra dimension to the “proofing” quality of Orestes’ recognition, which we have already discussed in terms of dokimasia. “That there was an analogy operative between citizens and coins in the civic imaginary is confirmed,” writes Leslie Kurke (1999, 309), “by the Athenian legal practice of the dokimasia. . . . The dokimasia was a procedure by which the democratic city proofed its citizens, testing the quality of their birth and behavior.” It is precisely this link between proofing coins and citizens that gives dokimasia its special charge, as Kurke has shown. But passing a test of dokimasia meant only that one was minimally qualified for citizenship; the test ignores entirely the matter of distinctions between citizens. Beyond confirming that they were in compliance with these basic standards, the authentication procedure revealed nothing about the citizens themselves, nor about their unique family backgrounds.88 By contrast, the tokens typically deployed in recognition scenes in tragedy seek to secure an exclusive identity. The material tokens from Ion, let us recall, were heirlooms that had been passed down from the gods to the Erechtheids, an olive wreath and golden snake necklace containing the family’s history from its very beginnings. The third token—­Kreousa’s weaving sampler—­also had autobiographical significance. The Choephoroi tokens are likewise aimed at proving clan affiliations and are concerned with the differences between individuals rather than their common traits. In Electra, Orestes’ scar may not

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appear to be an exclusive sign, yet it is linked to a particular event—­Orestes’ fall in the family courtyard—­that only family members would recall (573–­75): Πρ. οὐλὴν παρ’ ὀφρύν, ἥν ποτ’ ἐν πατρὸς δόμοις νεβρὸν διώκων σοῦ μέθ’ ᾑμάχθη πεσών. Ηλ. πῶς φῄς; ὁρῶ μὲν πτώματος τεκμήριον. o.m.: For there is a scar beside his eyebrow, which once pursuing a fawn with you in his father’s house he got because he had fallen, bloodying himself. el.: Are you serious? I see the sign of the fall.

The proof here is personal. She sees and recognizes the “sign of the fall” (πτώματος τεκμήριον), the only sign that convinces skeptical Electra that her brother has returned. Orestes’ scar is the perfect token of recognition for the democratic age.89 The scar qua sign inscribes not a singular event, but instead a continuous mode of being (i.e., that of being a legitimate son, and hence a true member of the polis);90 its origins do not go back to a heroic encounter, but to something as mundane as a child’s fall in his father’s house. As a recognition token the scar is categorically different from hair, footprints, and even from weaving: for, while tracing its own origin to a temporally bounded act (i.e., the fall that resulted in scarring), this sign nevertheless serves as the marker of a temporally unbounded status. The other tokens are symptomatic of a status that is continuous over time—­for instance, being the son of Agamemnon—­and are therefore not correlated directly with particular memories. The memory of the fall, however, is what proves Orestes’ membership in a genos. The scar’s success as a token also derives from its ability to signify different things to different people. For Electra, recognition restores an intimate family bond, one that is embodied in the scar’s evocation of the childhood that she and her brother shared. For the Chorus the scar confirms that Orestes is qualified once again to “set foot” (ἐμβατεύειν) in the city. In his prologue speech the Farmer described himself as “lustrous,” at least as far as his lineage is concerned (λαμπροὶ γὰρ ἐς γένος γε, 37). Orestes uses the same adjective to describe the mark on the imaginary silver coin to which he compares himself (λαμπρὸν χαρακτῆρ᾿, 559); Electra later describes her mother as “shining” in her chariot and apparel (λαμπρύνεται, 966), as we saw in the last chapter. Each of these instances of the lampr-­root directs attention to the relationship between outer surface and inner core. Electra casts aspersions on her mother’s character through an implied antithesis between the shining clothes and the base woman they conceal. Orestes’ choice of adjective takes its cue from the Old Man’s overtly intense scrutiny of him but

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likewise responds to a supposed discrepancy between appearance and reality. Apposite here is F. A. Paley’s association of Orestes’ remark with the historical phenomenon of false coinage.91 Shiny new coins were the ones most likely to arouse suspicion of forgery, the older ones having already passed official scrutiny. Lampros, therefore, touches directly upon the question of authenticity and how it is to be gauged. In the case of  both moneyed and human character, overt luster may be a sign of (an attempt to conceal) inner corruption, thus necessitating even stricter testing. a n a t u r e - ­c u l t u r e h y b r i d While Ion presented the city of Athens as a unified, aristocratic family, Electra approaches the question of  legitimacy from a somewhat different angle. Here, instead of the city configuring itself as a family, the royal family of Argos appropriates the symbolism and ideology of the democratic polis. Euripides’ audience would have been aware of the fact that Argos was also a democratic city, making it less of a stretch for them to see the tragedy’s action as relevant to their own city.92 The Old Man’s careful inspection of Orestes, in evoking the recognizably Athenian institution of dokimasia, suggests that even family scars yield civic meaning. In contradistinction to the unquantifiable value of family heirlooms, a coin’s charaktēr indicates a fixed value relative to a publicly defined standard. In this sense, it is a perfect emblem of culture (nomos). But the scar’s “natural” elements should not be ignored. In chapter 16 of the Poetics, Aristotle divides signs (sēmeia) of anagnori­ sis into three groups: those that are “natural” (τὰ μὲν σύμφυτα), those that are “acquired” (τὰ δὲ ἐπίκτητα), and those that are “external” (τὰ δὲ ἐκτός). The example given for the “acquired” category is a scar. A birthmark represents the category of the “natural” sign, whereas a necklace is mentioned as an example of an “external” sign. In light of these Aristotelian distinctions, the scar and its success in the Electra demands reanalysis with respect to the refutation of the other two categories of tokens. Because a scar is as intimate and inalienable as a lock of hair or footprint, yet produced by an external agent, it effectively bridges nature and culture. It appears as intrinsic to the person as any “natural” sign, yet it continues to function as a material marker of the event that produced it, in this way authenticating itself through the memory of eyewitnesses. Here it’s worth dwelling for a moment also on the literal embodiment of identity that recognition through the mediation of a scar achieves. As Aristotle’s Poetics suggests, the scar is a “sign” that has been grafted onto the body by an external agent: it is representative of the category of

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“acquired” tokens. Yet, in its inalienability from the body, the scar mimics the status of a natural symbol. In Euripides’ Medea, the heroine’s prayer to Zeus imagines a charaktēr that might be “ingrown” on the body, and which could be used to distinguish good men from bad (516–­19): “Zeus, why is it that for gold, you have endowed human beings with clear proofs of which type is counterfeit, but in the case of men, there is no natural marking ingrown on the body, with which to discern which of them is kakos (ἀνδρῶν δ’ ὅτῳ χρὴ τὸν κακὸν διειδέναι / οὐδεὶς χαρακτὴρ ἐμπέφυκε σώματι, 518–­19)?” The non-­availability of such a criterion—­οὐδεὶς χαρακτὴρ ἐμπέφυκε σώματι—­is at the source of Medea’s unraveling marriage with Jason.93 But the verb I have translated as “ingrown” (ἐμπέφυκε) actually shares a root with physis. Puzzling over the strange juxtaposition of ἔμπέφυκε, whose root is ἐμφύειν, with the externally imposed charaktēr, Frederic Will (1960, 235) asks, “does it mean ‘to grow into from without,’ or ‘to grow within’?” The question is a good one, and it touches on the unusual status of the charaktēr as a sign in between nature and culture. The charaktēr that convinces Electra to recognize Orestes is precisely the sort of paradoxical sign Medea had prayed for: an externally imposed measure of good birth (eugeneia) that has nevertheless grown into the body, so that it becomes an inalienable feature of the person it identifies. In Electra’s case, the city rather than Zeus guarantees the value of the sign, thus marking a “shift of authority over social justice from the gods to the polis”—­ a shift that coinage entails.94 Electra successfully debunks the credibility of the two biological tokens that were privileged in the Choephoroi as Nature’s mark of consanguinity. The third token—­the piece of clothing—­she rejects for its non-­biological properties, its inability “to grow with the body” (543–­44). It is clear by now that her refutations are not the incoherent product of a skeptical, or irrational, mind, but a concerted attack upon the isolated privileging of any single symptom of nature or culture as an exclusive source of human authenticity. The refutation of each type of token in turn has paved the way for the victory of the scar, a perfect hybrid between nomos (culture) and physis (nature). fa l l i n g i n to t h e p r e s e n t : r e c o g n i t i o n a n d e m b at e u s i s Comparing Orestes’ scar to that of Odysseus, Theodore Tarkow (1981) and Barbara Goff (1991) separately conclude that whereas Odysseus’s scar forms the cornerstone of an epic coming-­of-­age tale within a recognition scene of equally heroic magnitude, Orestes’ scar is small and insignificant. There

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seems an almost deliberate effort by Euripides, both scholars agree, to distance his hero from the Homeric context of the boar hunt that made a man out of Odysseus.95 Odysseus earns his scar during his first hunting expedition with other men. Orestes, by contrast, is simply chasing a fawn in his own backyard when he wounds himself (not on the thigh, but over his eyebrow). Nevertheless, to treat his scar simply as a heroic sign manqué is to miss the contemporary resonances at the core of the process of authentication in which its narrative is embedded.Compared to Odysseus’s boar-­induced scar, Orestes’ tekmērion is unheroic. Here is a son who is recognized for having fallen. We can be forgiven for assuming that this must be some kind of literary in-­joke—­a comic upending of the coming-­of-­age tale of the hunting scar. And so it may well be. Still, “falling,” a prominent motif in Electra, is not to be taken lightly.96 As a token of recognition, the scar does more than confirm the personal identity that it is called upon to authenticate. Orestes becomes the son that he is remembered as being, i.e., the son who childishly tripped in his father’s courtyard. Likewise, at the moment of his recognition by Eurycleia, Odysseus becomes the man who heroically killed a boar, because it is through (the sign of) this memory that he is recognized. There is a prescriptive element to each token that invests it with the power to create rather than merely to confirm. Each scar authorizes and at the same time authors the man whose identity it rescues from anonymity. But the power to “make” a man is hardly intrinsic to the scar as a material sign. Unspoken criteria of recognition authorize the scar as an authenticating mechanism of Orestes, just as any sign is invested with its authority by sources outside of itself. Recognition is the process of inscribing certain qualities over others with legibility. In this case, the scar is vested with the power to confirm the presence of those pre-­selected qualities and, simultaneously, to authenticate the individual who is made recognizable through them. A similar circularity is scripted into the city’s authentication of its citizens. Athens did not strictly monitor the legitimacy of its children until they reached the age of eighteen, and were eligible for induction into the deme registers.97 But by instituting an occasion on which citizen identity was officially recognized (i.e., the dokimasia), the city maintained prescriptive control over a child’s sense of himself (as legitimate or otherwise) from his earliest years. An ephebe’s failure to pass the deme’s scrutiny would not leave his family unaffected. And the status of being a nothos (“bastard”) was likewise both a public and private identity.98 The nothos’s relationship to his father could be put into jeopardy by the city’s ultimate jurisdiction over his legitimacy. A sense of the emotional trauma occasioned by such uncertainty comes through clearly in

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Hippolytus, where civic categories such as nothos and gnēsios insinuate themselves into the psychic lives of the play’s characters. A nothos such as Hippolytus is no more “legitimate” (gnēsios) in his father’s eyes than he is in the eyes of his city, the two gazes—­civic and paternal—­having become fully fused. Scholars have disembedded Orestes’ sign, however, from these kinds of political factors. Limiting their search for meaning to the episode itself that created the scar, critics have found Orestes to be intrinsically and uninterestingly childlike.99 The sign becomes meaningful, I have suggested, only in relation to the specific criteria that it is called upon to authenticate. The fall in the courtyard was not, at the moment of its occurrence, a life-­defining event for the young Orestes. What gives the scar significance is its ability in the pres­ ent to locate the grown-­up Orestes on the family estate of Agamemnon some fifteen years earlier. Even Odysseus’s scar, which commemorates what was objectively a more significant event, was not at the moment of its creation particularly important. His successful defeat of the boar is in itself a rite of passage, but the material by-­product of that act of manliness—­the scar—­ becomes significant only after the fact. For his fellow hunters, no scar was needed to prove Odysseus’s achievement on that day: they witnessed his performance in the first person. It is only with the distance of time and space that the scar assumes the status of a personal identity-­maker, and it fills this role because of its ability materially to reconnect Odysseus to those earlier events whose occurrence can no longer be verified, except through metonymy. In the case of Orestes, the scar does not so much gesture to what happened on that day in the courtyard as to the fact that there was a day when Orestes was in the courtyard of Agamemnon as a child; just as, for purposes of proving legitimacy, the particular name a father gives his son is less important than the fact that he has given him a name in the first place.100 “We are unlikely ever to encounter a more loquacious scar,” Maud Ellmann (1982, 84) has remarked of Odysseus’s scar. Although the terseness of Orestes’ scar has frustrated some readers, its refusal to “speak” at length is also an important sign. The two-­line narrative attached to the scar would appear even to contain a residual trace of the “stepping” metaphor that we considered earlier. What we have here is not an epic “scarring” of the narrative such as Ellmann has recognized for the Odyssey, but something scripted in a minor key.101 Given the importance in the epic tradition for the son to match his father’s footsteps, Orestes’ “fall” (πτῶμα) is playfully iconoclastic. At the very least it gives pause for thought. And a quick look ahead at what follows the recognition reveals that the “fall” that created the scar is not a unique event; falling, in both its literal and figurative senses, becomes a thematic refrain of Orestes’ return to Argos.

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After Electra and Orestes have “fallen” into one another’s arms (576), they discuss their revenge. The Old Man advises Orestes to approach Aegisthus in the fields, where he will be preparing a sacrifice, and there to “plan in reaction to what falls” (τοὐνθένδε πρὸς τὸ πῖπτον αὐτὸς ἐννόει, 639). The metaphor comes, most likely, from the “fall of dice” in a board game; it speaks, nevertheless, to the element of chance that seems to define Orestes’ and Electra’s every move. They are making up the rules as they go along, turning away from the scripted plot of tradition in the direction of something unknown. Electra seems to be aware of this when she tells Orestes that she will take her own life in the event that during the ensuing struggle with Aegisthus, he “falls a deathly fall” (εἰ παλαισθεὶς πτῶμα θανάσιμον πεσῇ, 686).102 Nor should it surprise us that when Electra goads her brother to kill their mother she does so also with the injunction that he avoid “falling” into cowardice (οὐ μὴ κακισθεὶς εἰς ἀνανδρίαν πεσῇ, 982). What does all of this “falling” add up to? Describing the practice known among contemporary legal scholars of classical antiquity as embateusis, A. R. W. Harrison observes (1971, 188) that “when a private litigant secured judgment in his favour, if the judgment was for ownership of a thing, he would proceed to seize the thing. If it was immovable, he would enter on it (ἐμβατεύειν).”103 A practice such as embateusis runs smoothly so long as there are no disputes within a family as to who is the rightful heir; the city and courts ideally should not have to intervene in what is purely family business. In the case of Agamemnon’s household, a usurper has muddied the legitimate successor’s footprints with illegitimate steppings of his own. Gernet makes this point well when he ingeniously links the supposed footprints of Orestes at the tomb of his father with Aegisthus’s reported dancing on that same tomb (1981b, 177): “Orestes’ embateusis has its sacrilegious counterpart in the act of the usurper Aegisthus, who dances on the tomb of Agamemnon, a ritual act in its own way, but, of course, one with an opposite sense.” In line with this observation is Electra’s report that Aegisthus steps into Agamemnon’s chariot (ἐς ταὐτὰ βαίνων ἅρματ᾿, 320), try­ ing publicly to perform his authority by taking possession of the dead king’s regalia, including his kingly scepter.104 Euripides has complicated the legitimacy of Orestes’ return to Argos by compounding the act of embateusis with the hero’s own propensity for falling, but also by adding into the mix the footprints of a usurper. As a result, it becomes impossible to read Orestes’ own footprints as authentic signs. The problem of dynastic succession does not, of course, begin with Aegis­ thus and Orestes. In the previous generation, Atreus and Thyestes fought for the throne by contesting ownership of a mythical golden lamb. Electra’s second choral stasimon (699–­760) recalls this conflict in detail, beginning with

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Pan’s bestowal upon Atreus of the lamb, a gift from the gods. A herald summons the Argives to the agora to witness the “terrifying aparitions” (φάσματα δείματα).105 But the divine authorization of Atreus’s kingship, in the form of the golden lamb, only provokes Thyestes to a bolder act of treachery. He preemptively acquires possession of the lamb (720–­23) and proclaims his coup to the assembled Argives (723–­26). As Aegisthus will do in the next generation, Thyestes infiltrates the king’s bed, gaining a secret and sexual advantage over him through his wife.106 But to the extent that the lamb is a portent of divine will (τέρας, 722), its signification cannot be usurped completely by a mortal pretender. In the next strophe and antistrophe, the Chorus relates Zeus’s counter-­sign: the reversal of the direction of the sun’s path signals to all, universally, the cosmic rejection of this false king. What has changed in the present generation’s dynastic dispute is the city’s involvement in the process of adjudication. There are no divinely dispatched signs to discredit usurpers and validate the legitimate heirs. Sanction to assume his place in the city is instead communicated to Orestes by the Chorus, using the term ἐμβατεύειν to describe Orestes’ return as a return to the city: “Raise your hand and voice,” they cheer Electra, “release prayers to the gods, with luck for you that your brother crosses the threshold (ἐμβατεῦσαι) of the city (592–­95).” But there is a price to be paid, as Electra will make clear, in granting the city full authority to “recognize” its citizens and thus allowing it to serve in loco parentis. Certain citizens of classical Athens chose to use as the secondary identifier after their individual name the name of their deme (a demotic) rather than the patronymic (a popular form of address among the Homeric heroes).107 No man in his right mind, however, would have welcomed being addressed as the son of his mother.108 It is precisely this type of emasculation that Electra portends for her brother while addressing Aegisthus’s corpse (932–­35): καίτοι τόδ’ αἰσχρόν, προστατεῖν γε δωμάτων γυναῖκα, μὴ τὸν ἄνδρα· κἀκείνους στυγῶ τοὺς παῖδας, ὅστις τοῦ μὲν ἄρσενος πατρὸς οὐκ ὠνόμασται, τῆς δὲ μητρὸς ἐν πόλει. And this indeed is shameful, when the woman (not the man) rules a house; I hate those children who are called not by the patronymic but by their mother’s name in the city.

Electra directs her words officially to the corpse, but they contain an implicit threat that can be meant only for Orestes. In order to be publicly recognized as, or “named,” the son of Agamemnon (not of Clytemnestra), Orestes must

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kill their mother. Electra makes the stakes of inaction even more bluntly clear a few lines later: “See to it that you do not fall into cowardice” (οὐ μὴ κακισθεὶς εἰς ἀνανδρίαν πεσῇ, 982), continuing the falling leitmotif. In returning to Argos, Orestes was welcomed by the Chorus as a member of the polis. Now, the fear of being found unworthy of his father’s name persuades him to commit a crime (matricide) for which the city will disenfranchise him. Indeed, the Chorus will excommunicate Orestes in precisely the same language with which they welcomed him into the city (1250–­51): σὺ δ᾿ Ἄργος ἔκλιπ᾿· οὐ γὰρ ἔστι σοι πόλιν / τήνδ᾿ ἐμβατεύειν, μητέρα κτείναντα σήν. Ores­ tes must leave Argos immediately, for it is unacceptable for a matricide to “set foot” in the city. Like Perseus before him, Orestes covers his eyes as he slays the maternal Gorgon (1221–­23). But in becoming Perseus, Orestes unleashes the Furies that will send him running for cover under Athena’s aegis. An act of “heroism” conjures up a vision of cowardice; the son who tries to follow in his father’s footsteps, to reclaim through embateusis his rightful patrimony, is simulta­ neously driven from his father’s city. Orestes in this way comes to embody the paradox of the mythical hero who has stepped (or perhaps fallen?) precariously into the legal system of classical Athenian democracy. Upon discovering that his patron-­god Apollo is nowhere to be found, Orestes must instead turn for protection to the Gorgon-­imprinted aegis of Athena. Although the Dioscuroi are openly critical of Apollo’s actions, the moment in the future that they prophesy perhaps confirms, more optimistically, that Orestes will successfully navigate the transition from heroic age to democracy. Orestes’ reliance on Athena’s shield for protection introduces a new prototype of identity for citizens. “Heroes” of the democratic polis will be recognized in accordance with an abstract standard of legitimacy. Rather than matching the unique imprints of their fathers’ feet, they will instead be measured against criteria approved by the city. Men are made, not born, citizens. The city borrows from epic the scarring motif to lend authority to its own proofing mechanism, a legitimization process that has been etiologically reconstituted with this inaugural performance on Orestes. Conclusion Centering its recognition scene on tokens that encapsulate the mythological narratives about the founding of Athens and the birth of her first family, Euripides’ Ion suggested that there was an unbroken line of succession between Ion and his Erechtheid ancestors. Yet, in underlining the non-­original

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status of these recognition tokens, which are referred to as mimēmata, the drama at the same time implies that the ritualized form of the recognition scene draws it power from its status as a reperformance. In the contemporary life of the city, rituals undertaken to shore up sociopolitical and religious cohesion are all reenactments of foundational moments from the city’s irrecoverable past. Euripides’ Electra takes an equally innovative approach to the question of recognition and its relationship to past models. The traditional tokens (hair, footprints, clothing) that were used to verify Orestes’ identity in Aeschylus and perhaps even in Stesichorus have been superseded by a bodily sign whose inspection provides unparalleled cognitive certainty. This would seem to herald a new age for the recognition scene. And yet, in its deliberate opening up of a literary trope to a broader base, this tragedy recalls Ion. Traditionally, anagnōrisis was the province of (female) family members, whose memory could be relied upon to prove that a long-­absent brother or husband had returned to the paternal homestead. In these two tragedies, recognition derives its dynamism from the audience’s familiarity with the models currently being overwritten. Recognition takes place in the interstices between the spectacle on stage and the theatron proper, and it includes elements, whether in the form of the replicas of famous Athenian icons, or a childhood scar, of which members of Euripides’ audience could claim firsthand knowledge. Both Ion and Electra present their protagonists as everymen of noble birth, a strong point of contact between two tragedies that on the surface have little in common. By way of conclusion, I’d like to return to one of the discarded tokens in Euripides’ Electra for a closer look at the theatrical “afterlife” of this prop. A reference to the “lock left at the tomb” motif crops up in the second parabasis of Aristophanes’ (second) Clouds, where the Chorus leader compares the comedy currently being performed to “that famous Electra,” who has come in search of a spectatorship as intelligent as she (i.e., comedy) encountered in the past.109 Like Electra, “she will know her brother’s lock of hair when she sees it” (γνώσεται γάρ, ἤνπερ ἴδῃ, τἀδελφοῦ τὸν βόστρυχον, 536). The line suggests that this tragic token was famous enough—­or had been seen in performance sufficiently recently—­to spawn a paratragic riff. Two plays produced most likely after the Clouds offer their own variations on this now tragicomic token. At Orestes 96, Helen asks Electra to carry a lock of hair on her behalf to her sister’s tomb (and to pour libations there as well). It is a request that is promptly denied. The question alone, however, introduces the audience to a Helen who threatens to undermine canonical plot structures.110 Though her request goes unheeded, it helps to establish the playfully ironic

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tone of the tragedy early on in the action. Likewise, Chrysothemis’s report in Sophocles’ Electra that she has seen clear signs of Orestes’ return (i.e., “a freshly-­cut lock of hair on the tomb”: νεώρη βόστρυχον τετμημένον, 901) offers an appropriately tragic co-­opting of the “original” Aeschylean variant. Chrysothemis clearly takes on the role that Electra had played in the Choephoroi. Yet her report about the tokens at the tomb is rejected by Sophocles’ Electra, who favors the Tutor’s false tale of Orestes’ death. Electra’s inability to recognize what Chrysothemis has correctly deduced, that their brother has returned, leads her to place greater trust in what the audience knows to be a deliberately false tekmērion, namely the urn (see chapter 4). The Euripidean Electra’s critique of the traditional tokens is both more sustained and more nuanced than some of these other riffs, and, depending on this play’s date, may have been what inspired Aristophanes’ comic treatment. The scene as a whole, while pointedly critiquing its Aeschylean model, raises questions, as we have seen, about the literary institution of anognōrisis that Aeschylus and Homer had helped to naturalize. In a striking departure from their material presence in Choephoroi, the tokens in Electra have devolved into mere verbal allusion. The Old Man in Electra rearticulates as a logical hypothesis the visible link between father and son that implicitly informs Homeric recognition: if the unidentified lock of hair is the same color as Electra’s, then it must belong to her brother, “for nature loves to produce in those who share the blood of a father a majority of similar bodily features” (φιλεῖ γάρ, αἷμα ταὐτὸν οἷς ᾖ πατρός, / τὰ πόλλ᾿ ὅμοια σώματος πεφυκέναι, 522–­23).111 Whereas in the earlier scenarios, the object itself wordlessly inspired belief, in Euripides’ refashioning, the words stand alone, unaccompanied by the material evidence that they nevertheless invoke. We have moved from a world where the tokens themselves supplied the argument, into a world where words alone must suffice. Keeping her comments general in tone, Electra avoids both physical and rhetorical contact with the particular lock of hair the Old Man allegedly has seen lying on Agamemnon’s tomb. But this requires little effort on her part, since the hair is nowhere visible on stage. “It would be quite inappropriate,” writes David Raeburn (2000, 160), “for the Old Man to remove a ritual dedication from the grave and there is no deictic pronoun as at A. Cho. 168.” Religion aside, there are also good dramatic reasons for keeping the prop offstage. The stage prop—­or what had been a prop in earlier dramatic productions—­ has become an abstraction, something to be debated rather than experienced. I mean this not as a criticism of Euripides’ artistry but in order to draw attention to what the lock of hair is doing in its absence. By not appearing in

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propria persona, the lock of hair facilitates debate about its potential, as well as its potential failings, as a recognition token, as opposed to acting qua recognition token, and in this sense, it powerfully heralds its own reception as a tragic leitmotif whose paratragic appropriations will breathe into the tragic recognition scene a new comic life.112

4

Electra’s Urns: Receptacles and Tragic Reception

Receptacles have time-­defying capacities that are put to a variety of uses on the tragic stage, with roles ranging from the pedestrian to the intertheatrical. In Euripides’ Alcestis, for example, the title character retrieves a dress to wear to her own funeral from “cedar storage rooms” (κεδρίνων δόμων, 160–­61). Cedar, then as now, was known for its ability to protect textiles from decay. Noting the unusual locution δόμων, A. M. Dale (1992, 65) suggests that Euripides “probably has in mind Priam’s ‘high-­roofed chamber of cedar-­wood’ (Il. 24.191–­92) from which he fetched the robes for Hector’s ransom.” The most valued and vulnerable objects would be stored in these “cedar rooms,” and taken out only when exceptional circumstances required. Even more explicit, in terms of designating a space within as a place outside of time, is the way in which the antipēx is described in Euripides’ Ion. As we saw in the last chapter, the space inside the basket is exempt from the biological cycle of growth and decay; the tokens have been kept mold-­free and selfsame. When the lid is at long last removed, the characters are miraculously transported to a much earlier time, as they reenact an episode from Athens’s mythical past. A similar time-­stopping quality is ascribed to the chest (or larnax) in a set of myths devoted to Danae and her infant son, Perseus.1 Euripides’ fragmentary Danae alludes to the imprisoning of Danae and Perseus in a chest, which is meant to protect both from the wrath of Acrisius, who suspects his daughter of having been seduced by a rich suitor.2 Simonides’ Danae fragment likewise mentions an “intricately carved larnax ” (λάρνακι / ἐν δαιδαλέᾳ, 1–­2) which keeps Danae and baby Perseus safe from the blasts of wind and bilges of seawater.3 Inside, where no harm can come to them, the baby will sleep soundly. The space inside the chest represents the antithesis

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to nature’s buffeting forces. Inside is free of water, wind, and danger—­a veritable haven from the elements. Inside is, in this sense, outside of time. The only difference between Danae’s container and Alcestis’s cedar rooms is that the “object” placed within Danae’s larnax happens to be her son. As far as the receptacles are concerned, each creates within itself an atemporal zone, free from decay, winds, and water.4 “I bid you, sleep, child” (κέλομαι ‹ δ᾿›, εὗδε βρέφος, 21), are Danae’s words of comfort to Perseus. The child’s projected sleep previews the permanence and changelessness of death. Likewise, she bids the world of time and change for which the sea, with its endless ebb and flow, serves as a vivid metaphor, also to rest—­“let the sea sleep, and let our measureless trouble sleep” (εὑδέτω δὲ πόντος, εὑδέτω ‹ δ᾿› ἄμετρον κακόν, 22)—­so long as the child remains encased in the larnax ’s protective, womb-­like embrace.5 These poetic parallels perhaps make it less alarming to encounter Sophocles’ Electra begging to be let into a similarly enclosured safe space—­the cinerary urn believed to contain Orestes’ ashes. Although this urn is empty, its powers of preservation are intact.6 The urn carves out within itself a notional theatrical space, a space symbolizing performance potential as well as a place to store past performances, as this chapter will argue. Receptacles and Reception Holding the urn that supposedly contains her brother’s remains, the heroine of Sophocles’ Electra mourns him memorably, only later to discover that the urn has been a ruse.7 This prop temporarily captures the spotlight of Sophocles’ play, as is clear even to readers of Electra. But thanks to a remarkable anecdote recorded in Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights (second-­century CE) about a fourth-­century BCE actor named Polus, we also have a non-­tragic witness to the urn’s performance history. In playing the role of Electra, Polus reportedly substituted an urn holding his own son’s ashes for the usual empty stage prop. At that time he was to act the Electra of Sophocles at Athens, and it was his part to carry an urn which was supposed to contain the ashes of Orestes. The plot of the play requires that Electra, who is represented as carrying her brother’s remains, should lament and bewail the fate that she believed had overtaken him. Accordingly Polus, clad in the mourning garb of Electra, took from the tomb the ashes and urn of his son, embraced them as if they were those of Orestes, and filled the whole place, not with the appearance and imitation of sorrow, but with genuine grief and unfeigned lamentation. Therefore, while it seemed that a play was being acted, it was in fact real grief that was enacted.8

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Mark Ringer (1998, 3) remarks that “in Gellius’ anecdote, Polus emerges not as a morbid neurotic but as a consummate artist, aware of his own emotional life and prepared to exploit it cold-­bloodedly in the service of his art.” Vividly illustrating the dramaturgic potential of stage objects, the anecdote provides a tantalizing glimpse into ancient Greek acting techniques, or at least into the lore that sprang up around some of the more compelling performers.9 And, as Leofranc Holford-­Strevens (2005, 507) has shown, the anecdote became “a stock example for those who wrote on the theory of rousing emotion on stage, at the bar, or in the pulpit” from the Renaissance onwards. Whether or not it is apocryphal, the anecdote also attests to the increasing professionalization of actors and the opportunities acting afforded them for achieving a kind of celebrity status. Gellius’s shaping of Polus’s story, moreover, gives us insight into how stage properties helped actors tap emotional reserves that they might not otherwise have been able to access. Ismene Lada-­ Richards (2005, 461) points out that the method used to good effect by Polus looks remarkably similar to “the foundational technique of Stanislavskian acting, namely, ‘affective’ or ‘emotion’ memory (the recall and exploitation in performance of feelings and situations belonging to the actor’s own past).” There is no knowing what Polus’s interpretation of the role would have been like if he hadn’t used his own private urn. But it’s the melding of his own biography with that of Electra—­his blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction—­that makes this actor’s performance newsworthy, in Gellius’s eyes at least. The actor’s creative use of this “prop” is what animates Polus’s performance as well as Gellius’s story. The anecdote was to become a starting point for discussions about the acting techniques of famous actors,10 and as such, one might compare it to ancient anecdotes about the playwrights, and the inspiration they too drew from props. Sophocles, for example, reportedly “took up the cithara on stage in the lead role” of his own Thamyras, a tragedy about the mythical Thracian lyre-­ player’s challenging of the Muses.11 Sophocles may also have starred as Nausicaa in his lost tragedy or satyr play of the same name, perhaps supplementing his performance there with the ancient equivalent of a beach ball.12 Their hands-­on experience would undoubtedly have influenced how Sophocles and other dramaturgs wrote scripts for the stage.13 A prop can help an actor take ownership of his role, as the urn clearly helped Polus in his interpretation of Electra.14 But would it also have figured in the creation of that role in the first place? The sword, textiles, and tokens (from part 1, above) all evoked a fully formed anterior episode (whether from myth, epic, or drama), and for this

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reason we surveyed them sequentially, in the first three chapters, as cases studies in metonymy. The urn in Sophocles’ Electra alludes to several tragic receptacles, including the water vessels borne by the Chorus of Eastern slave women in the Choephoroi, and the bronze funerary urn mentioned later in the same tragedy. But it is not in any straightforward sense a metonymic prop. Rather than calling to mind an already established production element (with its own performance history), this prop inserts itself into a narrative frame of its own making—­it creates its own genealogy, signaling where previously there was a gap, an underexploited opportunity, in the repertoire. In this regard the urn operates more like a metaphor than a metonym, though perhaps “metaphor and metonymy are best seen as points on a cline.”15 In performance, the urn represents not only itself and its dramatic precursors, but also the potential of urns, and of props more generally, to create and sustain the illusionistic power of theater.16 e l e c t r a’ s u r n a n d “t h e h a u n t e d s t a g e” In his 1994 essay “The Haunted Stage”—­which is also the title of his 2001 book—­theater historian Marvin Carlson observes that “for most of the history of the theatre, repeated characters and situations were a dominant element in the experience of the drama.”17 Carlson dubs this phenomenon a kind of “ghosting” since the specter of actors who had previously acted in those roles, or of visual components familiar from earlier staged versions, hover in the background of the current production. Carlson suggests that in many theater traditions that had a limited repertoire and/or acting personnel, this haunting would have been the norm: With “many plays so often revived . . . actors and directors can, indeed must, assume a previous audience familiarity with various interpretations of them.”18 The memory of a previous use of the same type of prop can, then, be counted on to “haunt” the audience attendant at a new production, especially if they are regular theatergoers and the performance space remains the same.19 And while verbal echoes certainly help to reinforce such connections in the spectator’s mind, in themselves they are not always sufficient to trigger awareness of which elements have been differently interpreted and to what effect. For Carlson (1994b, 113), the “ ‘invisible but inevitable’ ghosts of previous roles in the theatre has certain parallels to the phenomenon of intertextuality in reading where ‘ghosts’ of previous reading experiences continually condition our activity.” The same might be said of roles that are reinvented from one production to the next, with the role of Sophocles’ Electra in his tragedy of the same name being “ghosted,” for example, by the Electra from

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Aeschylus’s Choephoroi. (This is similar to what we have been calling intertheatricality.) Moreover, the possibility that this ghosting will occur creates conditions for the meaningful contribution of visual stage elements, for, “like celebrity in acting, the audience’s continued awareness of a director’s previous work can, if imaginatively utilized, provide a source for enriched experience rather than a distraction” (1994b, 116). Should we assume, then, that Sophocles, in his production of Electra, deliberately exploited his audience’s familiarity with an Aeschylean (or other) prototype of the urn? (And if so, to what end?) In short, my answer is yes, and although it can be difficult to make an argument about dramaturgy in the absence of live performance data, in what follows I venture to reanimate the stagecraft potential of this prop by examining it in light of comparable production elements, drawn from both ancient and modern theater traditions. I consider, first, the urn as an announced but hidden object before examining its appearance as a tactile stage prop later in the action. Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, clearly the model for both later Electra plays by Sophocles and Euripides, features libation vessels and a cinerary urn. In its prologue, the Choephoroi ’s Chorus of slave women mention choai (libations), which they are carrying to Agamemnon’s tomb (i.e., Ch. 23), and Electra self-­referentially speaks of pouring “these lustral offerings” at 129 and again at 149. Both the gestures and the vessels themselves would presumably have been visible on stage, as is strongly implied by the deictics τάσδε χέρνιβας (129) and τάσδ᾿ . . . χοάς (149). The bronze cinerary urn, by contrast, is merely mentioned by Orestes in the fabricated report of his own death, a report he claims to have heard from a Phocian man named Strophius. Orestes concludes his speech about his own death as follows: “For now the sides of the bronze vessel hide the ashes of the well-­mourned man” (νῦν γὰρ λέβητος χαλκέου πλευρώματα / σποδὸν κέκευθεν ἀνδρὸς εὖ κεκλαυμένου, 686–­87). Although its bronze cast is specified, Orestes does not elaborate on the urn’s location, nor does it ever appear as a physical object on Aeschylus’s stage. But around this single detail Sophocles would eventually craft an intricate plot, granting material form to the vessel, and even couching his description of the object in Aeschylean language. The urn in Sophocles’ Electra is also “a bronze-­ribbed” artifact (τύπωμα χαλκόπλευρον, 54).20 The receptacles in each Electra thereby create their own reception history, the urn in Sophocles’ Electra clearly being modeled on the bronze urn of Orestes’ fabricated report (Ch. 686–­87), while the water jug carried by the protagonist of Euripides’ Electra traces its origins back to the libation-­vessels handled by the Chorus and by Electra herself in Aeschylus’s tragedy. A domestic vessel for hauling water, this prop is in its own way emblematic

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of the unusual dramatic setting of Euripides’ Electra, where neither tomb nor libations are central to the tragic plot, as we saw in the last chapter.21 The Euripidean Electra, married to a farmer of noble birth but lowly means, brazenly parades her water jug as proof of the impoverished status to which Aegisthus has reduced her. Indeed, Euripides’ Electra turns the urn into a kind of lowbrow fashion accessory, one she uses “not to pour out any liquid ritually on the grave but to draw water for ordinary household purposes.”22 Her insistence on carrying her own water jar invites us to read this scene intertheatrically.23 Claiming that she will “make a display to the gods of Aegisthus’s hubris” (ὡς ὕβριν δείξωμεν Αἰγίσθου θεοῖς, El. 58) Electra positions the jar (τόδ’ ἄγγος, 55) as a key witness in her personal quest to prosecute Aegisthus before a divine jury, as we saw in chapter 2. The iconoclasm of the prop’s new role, however, depends on audience familiarity with its poetic precursor(s). As an act of reception, Electra’s display of her “urn” derives meaning from the tension between the urn’s original role (as a libation vessel in Aeschylus’s Choephoroi ) and its secular transformation into a domestic accessory that Electra self-­consciously deploys as a theatrical prop. Both Electra plays (as texts and as productions) are in this sense “reception” dramas. And this fact reminds us that as a recycled entity, the urn in Sophocles’ Electra is from the start a familiar artifact. Let us now turn to that urn and examine how its stage role—­so coyly foreshadowed—­actually plays out. hidden in the bushes Sophocles’ Electra opens with Orestes’ return to Mycenae from the “Pythian oracle,” whose advice he shares with the Tutor. For plotting their revenge on Agamemnon’s killers, the god has recommended deception (dolos), and he has instructed Orestes to enter the palace “unarmed” (ἄσκευον, 36), using deceit to take lawful vengeance (δόλοισι κλέψαι χειρὸς ἐνδίκου σφαγάς, 37).24 Assuming the role of a stage director within the action, Orestes explains to the Tutor how they are to proceed (51–­58): ἡμεῖς δὲ πατρὸς τύμβον, ὡς ἐφίετο, λοιβαῖσι πρῶτον καὶ καρατόμοις χλιδαῖς στέψαντες, εἶτ’ ἄψορρον ἥξομεν πάλιν, τύπωμα χαλκόπλευρον ἠρμένοι χεροῖν, ὃ καὶ σὺ θάμνοις οἶσθά που κεκρυμμένον, ὅπως λόγῳ κλέπτοντες ἡδεῖαν φάτιν φέρωμεν αὐτοῖς, τοὐμὸν ὡς ἔρρει δέμας φλογιστὸν ἤδη καὶ κατηνθρακωμένον.

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But having first wreathed the tomb of my father with poured offerings and rich locks of hair cut from our head, as he commanded, we shall then return here, carrying the bronze-­sided molding in our hands, which you also know has been hidden somewhere in the bushes, so that, deceiving them with our story, we may bring to them the pleasing report that I am gone, my body already burnt and turned to ash.

In keeping with the traditional story line about Orestes’ death in a chariot race, the Tutor will relate an elaborately false tale, after which, Orestes specifies, he and Pylades will return to the house carrying “the bronze-­sided molding.”25 The urn is cast here already as material proof of the Tutor’s false logos, a way for Orestes and Pylades to persuade their listeners of the truth of their “pleasing report” (ἡδεῖαν φάτιν, 56). As part of the same speech to the Tutor, Orestes explains that before they can carry out revenge, they must first visit Agamemnon’s tomb and pay their respects there. It is in this context that Orestes mentions the urn’s location: it is currently hidden near the tomb “somewhere in the bushes,” a detail that doesn’t make much sense if we apply the criteria of literary realism. Indeed, this slight fissure in the play’s oth­ erwise carefully sustained illusion has troubled P. J. Finglass, who observes (2007, 108) that “It is not clear how the urn can already have been hidden near the tomb, since Orestes and the Tutor are only now setting off in that direction. The audience will not have lingered over the point, but it remains an inconcinnity.” But the urn’s placement presents a problem only on the assumption that the reason for mentioning the urn’s location would be to disclose to the audience the fictional characters’ movements prior to this opening scene. Applying these kinds of real-­world strictures to the imaginary space of the theater inevitably leads to disappointment of a kind that Finglass adroitly tries to gloss over. Spectators, however, being more attuned to the logic of theatrical space, a semiotic realm not subject to the same constraints as experiential  space (and indeed on occasion deliberately flaunting these for dramatic effect), may have felt less need to apologize on Sophocles’ behalf for this seeming oversight. Why then would we have to be told that the urn has been hidden somewhere (που) in the bushes? The indefiniteness of the location is curious. Ringer (1998, 139) treats “the bushes as a hiding place” and regards the lack of specificity as perhaps appropriate for characters who have themselves “embarked on a strategy of deception and playacting.” He reflects, furthermore, on the ethical implications of hiding the urn: “Bushes do not represent an obvious site for heroic men to carry out manly strategy. These bushes serve as a

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kind of skene, masking a prop from the eyes of its intended audience until the time is ripe” (140). Like Ringer, Francis Dunn (1996, 151) detects a nuanced rejection of heroic values in this reference to bushes, which, for Dunn, also clearly evoke Archilochus fragment 5. For while there is a distinct “Homeric coloring” to the terms τύπωμα, ἠρμένοι, and χαλκόπλευρον in line 54, the more precise point of contact, Dunn argues (1996, 152), is with Archilochus, “who boasted that some Thracian would find and enjoy the shield he abandoned by a bush” (ἣν παρὰ θάμνῳ . . . κάλλιπον, fr. 5 West). But if, as I have suggested, the urn was already familiar from the Choephoroi, what might its being hidden have signified to Sophocles’ audience? I propose that the mention of the urn at the start of Electra constitutes an allusion to the earlier play—­one that simultaneously recycles and adapts the old object to a new stage design. It is as if the audience is being told that the values and semiotics of Aeschylus’s urn have gone the way of Archilochus’s shield.26 From a stagecraft perspective, mentioning the urn upfront orients the spectator to the tragedy’s placing of itself within a living theatrical tradition, while it also generates suspense around the object’s impending entrance. To gauge the theatrical impact of such an object, let us consider the use of the gun in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, a prop whose stage role is artfully unpacked by Andrew Sofer.27 At the end of act 1, Hedda says that she still has “one thing to kill time with.” She refers to her father’s pistols, which she will use to kill herself at the end of the play. Sofer reads Hedda’s words more broadly as a statement about the gun’s ability to kill time itself. His analysis focuses on “how playwrights have often played with time by using objects to speed up, retard, or suspend the action” (2003, 167). And in this context Sofer (168) un­ derlines that “for the attentive spectator, a gun planted in the action early on underscores the unwinding meter of performance that counterpoints the rising action of any play.”28 We need not actually see the gun to be aware of its destined role. Its invisibility may even increase the tension the audience feels since they know that it will eventually have to be put to use. Although obviously not as dangerous as a gun, the urn similarly signals its predestined stage role: from the moment it is mentioned as a key component of the deception plot, we know that it is bound to do something.29 Like Hedda’s gun, the urn in Electra acts as a metronome, counting down the measured beats until its own entrance. But because of its previous life in Aeschylus’s tragedy, it also creates suspense around what will be done differently this time. Once it is in Electra’s hands the urn seemingly acquires the remarkable capacity to reverse the flow of time, as it transports Electra into a past so vividly recalled that she virtually relives it. The urn initially

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plants the expectation that the action will unfold as a divinely orchestrated revenge drama. But when it finally comes on stage (at 1098) the prop slyly upends its authorized role. A “deception” ploy that was meant to be used against Agamemnon’s killers, the urn complicates what was forecast to be a tightly plotted revenge tragedy by instead deceiving Electra. It also articulates for Sophocles’ audience what is different—­and distinctive—­about his Electra as a tragic character. Its notional, off-­stage placement at the beginning of the action is what frames these issues for the audience. The urn’s being hidden “somewhere in the bushes,” to return to that intriguing locution, offers the play’s spectators insight into how they are to read the current production in light of its status as a reperformance of an earlier play on the same theme.30 The indefinite adverb που (55) points to the fact that the playgoer must mentally supply a spatial coordinate for a location that can neither be mapped onto a real (i.e., visible), nor onto a remembered theatrical setting. “Somewhere in the bushes,” from an intertheatrical standpoint, might be considered shorthand for the actor or the understudy who is waiting in the wings. Sophocles deployed neither wings nor understudies, so far as we know. Yet bushes were a feature of ancient Greek theater practice, and they were used to keep hidden from view objects and actors who were not currently needed by the action.31 “Somewhere in the bushes,” then, is where those actors who have not yet been called upon to perform, yet whose time will come, wait their turn. “Bushes” might in this sense be considered metaphorical for downtime—­time, that is, in between episodes and theatrical events. An object whose stage potential Aeschylus never fully developed in his Choephoroi, Sophocles’ urn is a material actor that has waited patiently in the wings all these many years for its part to be written. Somatic Memories and Mourning In the prologue it is already indicated that the revenge plot of Apollo will not proceed along Aeschylean lines.32 Hearing cries of lament emanating from the house and suspecting that they are Electra’s, Orestes asks the Tutor whether they ought to wait for her. The Tutor’s reply—­ἥκιστα (“hardly,” 82)—­marks a decisive turning away from the source script, cueing Sophocles’ audience to the fact that they are watching an entirely different drama.33 Having dislodged the recognition scene between the siblings from its place at the start of the Choephoroi, Sophocles flips the hierarchy of revenge and recognition, casting the spotlight memorably on the urn as the silent actor at the center of what might more accurately be characterized as a misrecognition scene.

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Coming as it does in the aftermath of this elaborately deferred recognition, the revenge is almost anticlimactic. Nor will the urn prove to be all that important for securing Electra’s recognition of her brother. On the contrary, the object diverts and delays both recognition and revenge. It takes over a thousand lines from when it is first mentioned for the urn to materialize. Orestes announces that he has been sent by Strophius (1110–11), and then that he and Pylades are carrying the “small vessel” containing Ores­ tes’ remains (1113–­14): “We approach, as you see, bearing the scanty remains of him, the one who has died, in a small vessel” (φέροντες αὐτοῦ σμικρὰ λείψαν᾿ ἐν βραχεῖ / τεύχει θανόντος, ὡς ὁρᾷς, κομίζομεν). Orestes’ reference to the urn as a visible object (ὡς ὁρᾷς) makes clear that the vessel is now a prop, carried either in his hands, or by silent attendants. From this moment on, the urn becomes the focal point of the action. It is the material “evidence” that Electra dreads. Electra projects onto it the story of Orestes’ death that she has just been told (1115): “Oh, what awful news. It is clearly that which I feared” (οἲ ᾿γὼ τάλαινα, τοῦτ᾿ ἐκεῖν᾿, ἤδη σαφές). Electra here identifies the prop that has just entered the playing area—­and is therefore marked by the demonstrative pronoun τοῦτο—­as the embodiment of that (ἐκεῖνο) which she has already been turning over in her mind. The demonstrative pronoun ἐκεῖνος is commonly used for “what is remote, not materially present in the speech situation,” as Egbert Bakker notes (2010, 155), though he adds that “what is physically absent may be very present mentally.” This is certainly true of Electra’s first sighting of the urn, which she connects to the story she has just heard about her brother’s death. Electra’s words direct the audience’s gaze to the urn. And also to her hands, for she adds: “I look, so it seems, at a burden that is at-­hand” (πρόχειρον ἄχθος, 1116). The focus on Electra’s hands and her gaze are central elements of the scene’s staging. Orestes’ response, in turn, speaks to immediate and more distant concerns: “If you are crying about the misfortunes of Orestes, you should know that this very vessel covers over his body” (εἴπερ τι κλαίεις τῶν Ὀρεστείων κακῶν, / τόδ᾿ ἄγγος ἴσθι σῶμα τοὐκείνου στέγον, 1117–­18). Gesturing to the urn with a proximal deictic (τόδ᾿ ἄγγος), Orestes reinforces his sister’s belief in the false report. Then, at 1119–­20, Electra orders the still-­unrecognized Orestes to hand over the urn: “Now, give it to me, by the gods, if this is the very vessel that contains him, to take in my hands.” Orestes relays the request to a silent helper. By the time Electra begins her more formal lament at 1126, she holds the urn. And once it is in her arms, the prop becomes the driving force behind her monologue, its physical weight prompting her to remember.34 As she cradles the urn, Electra recalls a similar episode from her past (1126–­30):

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ὦ φιλτάτου μνημεῖον ἀνθρώπων ἐμοὶ ψυχῆς Ὀρέστου λοιπόν, ὥς ‹σ᾿› ἀπ᾿ ἐλπίδων οὐχ ὧνπερ ἐξέπεμπον εἰσεδεξάμην. νῦν μὲν γὰρ οὐδὲν ὄντα βαστάζω χεροῖν, δόμων δέ σ᾿, ὦ παῖ, λαμπρὸν ἐξέπεμψ᾿ ἐγώ. Oh, memorial of the dearest to me of human beings, last reminder of the life of Orestes, how far from the hopes with which I sent you away have I received you back. For now, I clasp you, being nothing, in my hands, but I sent you forth from home bright with life, oh child.

Clasping the bronze vessel, Electra gives herself over to mourning her brother’s non-­existence—­νῦν μὲν γὰρ οὐδὲν ὄντα βαστάζω χεροῖν (1129).35 She remembers how she sent her brother away—­ἐξέπεμπον (1128). She uses here the imperfect tense of the verb, but in the very next breath, having switched into the present tense with βαστάζω, she reverts to an aorist of the same verb: ἐξέπεμψα (1130). This slippage in verb tenses indexes deeper temporal disruptions. Indeed, Electra appears to be caught in a kind of cognitive short circuit: having “Orestes” back in her arms reminds Electra of the last time she held him. Whereas the imperfect captures the moment in the past when she sent him away, the aorist indicates that she is reliving that past event in the present.36 Orestes is once again in her arms, the child she should never have handed over to the Tutor. The past is manifestly displacing the present. The sensation of touching the urn, moreover, seems to be what brings the past so vividly to mind. Electra’s tactile engagement with the urn draws attention to its shape and texture. Early on, it was described as a “bronze-­ribbed figure” (τύπωμα χαλκόπλευρον, 54). This metaphorical language anticipates the urn’s human qualities, which are fully fleshed out in the current scene. In mourning Orestes’ “non-­existence” (οὐδὲν ὄντα), Electra relives the occasion, just after the murder of Agamemnon, when she smuggled him out of the house with the Tutor’s help (a detail mentioned by the Tutor himself in the prologue). It is a loss that she is now reliving as the “death” of her adult brother, the placement of whose burnt remains in the small urn reduces him once again to childlike proportions (1113–­14).37 No wonder she’s so vehemently opposed to setting down the urn. And just as the sensory experience of feeling the object’s weight in her hands triggers her memory of holding the infant Orestes, Electra cognitively processes the loss of her adult brother as if it were the death of her own child.38 A certain bodily logic underpins this revisionist remembering as well. For, as long as Aegisthus holds political power, there will be neither marriage nor children for Electra and her sister, as Electra bitterly reminds Chrysothemis (961–­66).39 Once in her grasp, the

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prop instantly catalyzes memories—­becoming the μνημεῖον (“memory container”) that Electra had apostrophized at 1126. In performance, the prop itself would be a magnet for the audience’s gaze. But the script invites us to visualize instead Electra’s hands, mentioned many times in just a few lines. She refers to them first when she issues her command that the urn be given to her “to take in her hands” (ἐς χεῖρας λαβεῖν, 1120). At 1129, after saying that she has received Orestes (what is left of him) with hopes very different from those with which she sent him away, Electra takes up the urn/Orestes with her hands (βαστάζω χεροῖν). Next comes a wish: “Would that I had died before I sent you to a foreign land and that stealing you away with these two hands, I had saved you from murder” (χεροῖν / κλέψασα ταῖνδε κἀνασώσασθαι φόνου, 1132–­33). Once more, she verbally gestures to her hands with the demonstrative dual adjective. Although, as theater semiotician Keir Elam (1980, 73–­74) reminds us, verbal deixis provides cues to staging, deixis being “an important bridge” between gesture and speech, for Electra deictically to point to her own hands would involve an act of self-­reflexivity difficult to conceptualize in gestural terms. But it is certainly not impossible to imagine Electra’s gaze falling on the hands she verbally references. Because she herself smuggled him off to a foreign land, Orestes has now died far from home, and she has not cared for his body “with her own dear hands” (ἐν φίλαισι χερσίν, 1138). Electra regrets that she has not laid out her brother, nor gathered up his burnt remains (1138–­40). His death rites have been left to the tending of  “strangers’ hands” (ἐν ξένησι χερσὶ κηδευθείς, 1141). Nevertheless, Electra has been more of a mother to Orestes than Clytemnestra ever was. Her spoken lament is, in fact, closely modeled on that of the Nurse at Choephoroi 734–­65, who, in her own play, served as “mother” to Orestes.40 Electra calls herself the only “nurse” her brother ever had—­οὔθ᾿ οἱ κατ᾿ οἶκον ἦσαν ἀλλ᾿ ἐγὼ τροφός (El. 1147)—­thus recalling the Nurse in the Choephoroi who mourned for Orestes as for her own child, fondly remembering how she had fed and cared for him. As Finglass (2007, 450) points out, “the references to τροφή and τροφός (1147) do not imply that Electra was Orestes’ wet-­nurse: nor could she have been, not having had a pregnancy.” The trope of maternal loss obviously does not derive from Electra’s physical experience of having nursed Orestes. There is a strong physiological connection, nevertheless, between Electra’s maternally inflected mourning and her handling of the urn-­prop. For most of her lament, Electra treats the urn as if it were her brother’s body, apostrophizing the object as such—­ὦ δέμας οἰκτρόν. φεῦ φεῦ (1161). But by the end of her speech, she sees the object once again as a receptacle.

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It has become a miniature replica of the house of Hades. Still speaking to Orestes, but now envisioning him inside the vessel, she begs her brother to receive her in this dwelling place of the dead: “Receive me into your home,” she says at 1165, σὺ δέξαι μ᾿ ἐς τὸ σὸν τόδε στέγος.41 Here, in her explicitly articulated wish to enter the vessel as if it were the room of a house, we recognize Electra’s similarity to Niobe, whom earlier, in her kommos, she had declared to be “a god” (150–­52): ἰὼ παντλάμων Νιόβα, σὲ δ᾿ ἔγωγε νέμω θεόν, ἅτ᾿ ἐν τάφῳ πετραίῳ, αἰαῖ, δακρύεις. Oh, all-­wretched Niobe, I regard you as a god, since in your grave of stone, aiai, you continuously weep.

Electra’s praise of Niobe seems incongruous, for Niobe is punished with the death of her children for brazenly having boasted of her superlative mother­ hood.42 Electra’s comparison of herself to a “nightingale who has lost her young” (τεκνολέτειρ᾿ ὥς τις ἀηδών, 107) likewise calls to mind the mythical example of Procne, who is transformed into a nightingale out of grief for her son, Itys.43 The unmarried, childless Electra is not usually depicted as a mother— certainly not as a boastful or murderous one. But when she voices her desire physically to be contained by the urn that holds her brother’s ashes, we see her in that moment as a Niobe reborn. Both women are transformed, the one literally, the other figuratively, by their irremediable grief. While Niobe, so the story goes, literally changed from living woman into rock, continuously weeping all the while (compare the Niobe exemplum at Ant. 823ff.), Electra merely wishes herself dead. In addressing her brother’s ashes in the second person, as she earlier addressed Niobe, Electra begs admittance to the underworld chamber where her brother now resides. She longs for a grave enclosure, like Niobe’s. The intensity of her grief, moreover, threatens to make her wish come true. Indeed, as Chrysothemis warns her sister, there are plans underway to have her imprisoned underground if she refuses to curtail her lamentation (379–­82).44 Such an imprisonment appears to be precisely what Electra craves.45 The incessant quality of each woman’s mourning actively entombs her while she is still alive. And just as the Niobe of myth continues to live, after a fashion, once she has become a stony outcrop, Electra prays that she may dwell down below with her brother, in the urn that she visualizes as his tomb: ὡς σὺν σοὶ κάτω / ναίω τὸ λοιπόν (1166–­67). So focused is she on the material symbol of her loss that Electra barely

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interacts with the human actor(s) on the stage. A mute Pylades and her disguised brother stand by, mere observers. Orestes surely recognizes his sister once she begins speaking, but he lets her finish her lament before registering the shock of his recognition (1177–­78): Ορ. ἦ σὸν τὸ κλεινὸν εἶδος Ἠλέκτρας τόδε; Ηλ. τόδ᾿ ἔστ᾿ ἐκεῖνο, καὶ μάλ᾿ ἀθλίως ἔχον. or.: Is yours the famous form of Electra? el.: This which you see before you (tode) is that one (ekeino), even though it is in wretched shape.

“This is indeed that,” Electra says, speaking about herself in the third person. The urn’s tangibility and concreteness have provided a secure platform for cognitive projection: Electra temporarily escapes her present wretchedness while she relives past sufferings. But Orestes’ question at 1177—­“is yours the famous form (εἶδος) of Electra?”—­has jolted her back into the present. Why does Electra not simply say “I” am that one? She describes her physical form, τόδε (whose antecedent is εἶδος), as if it were something entirely disconnected from her speaking voice, eschewing the first person “I” at 1178. Her syntax, while partially shaped by the dynamics of recognition, also contains an implicit acknowledgment of the wide gulf between her current state of being (μαλ᾿ ἀθλίως ἔχον) and her glorious reputation. “What you see before you is indeed the one you’ve heard so much about, though you’d never guess it to look at me,” would more accurately capture the tenor of Electra’s response. Does she hesitate perhaps to claim for herself the title of “renowned” Electra, whose fame seems to have nothing to do with her? The strangeness of Electra’s response speaks to the cognitive complexities of recognition, which requires the viewer to match his present perception to his past recollection, even though the two perspectives may be irreconcilable. The splitting off of Electra’s voice from her visible body also suggests a splintering of her character into its various textual manifestations.46 Her response in this regard hints at the challenge of staging a recognition play that has already achieved canonical form. For the audience, Electra is indeed “famous” (κλεινόν), in part because her character was given such a memorable dramatic incarnation by Aeschylus.47 The stakes go up when you are following in Aeschylus’s footsteps.48 When Orestes decides to tell Electra the truth, he asks her to put down the urn (μέθες τόδ᾿ ἄγγος νυν, ὅπως τὸ πᾶν μάθῃς, 1205), a command that Electra ignores. A verbal struggle ensues, with Electra clinging to the only thing

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she has left of her brother, and Orestes insisting that she set down the urn, which he, of course, understands is only a prop. The urn contains nothing of Orestes, he finally concedes, except something that has been crafted through speech (ἀλλ᾿ οὐκ Ὀρέστου, πλὴν λόγῳ γ᾿ ἠσκημένον, 1217). What Electra has accepted on faith as the burial chamber for her dead brother has all along been merely an empty receptacle. Speech (logos) has made the prop into something it was not. But as soon as the one object is set aside as mere “prop,” another is immediately produced—­the signet ring (sphragis) that once belonged to their father, and which Orestes bids Electra to “look at” so that she may “learn” if he speaks the truth (τήνδε προσβλέπουσα μου / σφραγῖδα πατρὸς ἔκμαθ᾿ εἰ σαφῆ λέγω, 1222–­23). Just as the urn itself was once treated as visible proof of Orestes’ death, the sphragis is now presented as evidence of his being alive. Objects with memorable stage roles usually share a bond with their owners, a bond that gets acknowledged even by those who do not participate in it directly. Props such as the bow of Philoctetes or the sword of Ajax in this way enjoy a measure of celebrity: these objects’ biographies are known, even if the objects may eventually contest, through their stage actions, the version of events (and of loyalties) to which their human interactants have subscribed. Electra’s urn, though destined to become famous (thanks to Sophocles), is for the duration of the play’s action essentially an unknown entity. When it is finally revealed in its true form, it is shown to have been a ruse. In this respect, its status as a prop differs radically from the already mythologized weapon-­props of Ajax and Philoctetes. The urn has no biography, apart form the meta-­fictional, intertheatrical lineage that we traced at the beginning of this chapter. And it shares no history with Electra’s character. The urn instead is an object onto which various tales and fantasies are projected. Its weight in Electra’s hands becomes the vehicle through which she tells a story whose scope is narrowly autobiographical. Electra is the only character in the tragedy to perceive the urn as her dead child. In this respect, her experience may speak to something essential about the rite of mourning, to which all others remain mere onlookers, incapable of sharing the mourner’s pain. t e m p o r a l m at e r i a l i t i e s Our focus in this chapter has been on the different temporalities activated by the urn. We have seen that from its very first mention in the prologue, the urn served as a sort of loaded gun, a means of focusing the theatergoer’s awareness of the time frame of the revenge plot, and that plot’s intricate interdependence on a hidden prop. From our analysis of Electra’s scene of

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mourning with the urn, a different temporal focus emerged. There, the prop, operating as a flashback device, facilitated a journey back into her character’s non-­dramatized past. Holding it in her arms Electra recalls having Orestes as a babe in her arms, before releasing him to the guardianship of the Tutor. Intertwined with her mourning for her “lost” brother is a dirge for her unlived present.49 As triangulated through the myth of Niobe, the urn evokes in Electra’s mind her own dead (i.e., unborn) child. The capacity of the urn to give tangible shape to a past experience is not, of course, unique to this particular prop. Even perfectly ordinary containers can function as time capsules, controlling the release of stored up elements, whether of the material or mnemonic variety.50 In Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, the mourners at the tomb of Agamemnon half expect their kommos to be answered by Agamemnon himself, whose spirit at any moment may rise from his grave.51 Furies show up by the end of the Choephoroi, making their appearance first in Orestes’ mind before they materialize on stage. The trilogy’s final installment features Clytemnestra’s ghost and her Furies on stage together, hunting the living. The Oresteia’s dead move from light to darkness and back again. In Sophocles’ Electra there is less mo­ bility between upper and lower realms, but perhaps a greater degree of temporal fluidity, enabled by a merging of the cognitive perspectives of persons and things. Other tragedies deploy Furies, while Electra’s characters dialogue with and through objects.52 The Chorus, for example, conjures up the “bronze-­ jawed” axe (at 195–­96), which remembers having murdered Agamemnon, a memory for which it seeks retribution against the human perpetrators of this crime (482). From Chrysothemis we hear about the perversely blooming scepter “casting its shade over all of Mycenae” (422–­23) in Clytemnestra’s dream, and thus prompting the queen’s desire to have libations poured at her husband’s grave. As Charles Segal (1966, 487) notes, the oddly blooming scepter is the “first sign that those below may live, that vengeance may come upon the living.”53 In light of these evocations of other worlds, which are transmitted through objects curated by women’s speech, the episode of Electra’s lamentation and recognition takes on the contours of a mise-­en-­abîme, encapsulating the whole of the action in its borders and containing, in a sense, all of Electra’s lived experience, from the moment when she was forced to relinquish her infant brother up until her present remembrance and reenactment of this still painful separation. The upper world is already cast in otherworldly darkness, as Clytemnestra’s dream predicted it would be. Electra actively embraces this darkness in her shade-­like existence. She is wedded to the underworld, wanting nothing more than to descend to the realm of Hades.

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Props as Props: An Intermedial Turn Containers and their capacity to safeguard their contents from the agency of time, their unusual carving out of a temporal void within an otherwise constantly changing phenomenological landscape, can get appropriated and adapted for various narrative purposes: a storyteller, reaching into the jar of memory, releases a long stored up element of her past which, once allowed to escape this temporal safe haven becomes an active component of the plot. In the Trachiniae, Deianeira’s robe, smeared with the long-­guarded poison of the Centaur, is already on its way to Heracles by the time she realizes what it is that she has unleashed from her past. However similar to objects in the real world, however, stage props have been read primarily for their symbolic values. Keir Elam calls this the “semiotization” of the object, and describes it with the following example (1980, 80): A table employed in dramatic representation will not usually differ in any material or structural fashion from the item of furniture that the members of the audience eat at, and yet it is in some sense transformed: it acquires, as it were, a set of quotation marks. It is tempting to see the stage table as bearing a direct relationship to its dramatic equivalent—­the fictional object that it represents—­but this is not strictly the case; the material stage object becomes, rather, a semiotic unit standing not directly for another (imaginary) table but for the intermediary signified ‘table’, i.e. for the class of objects of which it is a member.

Elam’s description of the material prop’s relationship to its dramatic equivalent (i.e., the stage prop scripted into the dramatic text) introduces a third term—­the “signified” class of objects. It is from the intermediary term (i.e., “table” as a class of objects) that the audience infers the imaginary (i.e., scripted) object. Reminiscent of the Platonic theory of Forms, Elam’s intermediary “signified,” effectively drives a wedge between the material stage prop and its scripted twin, opening up a gap that can, in turn, be theatrically exploited. Normally, the inference from material to scripted prop is intuitive and unproblematic. In subscribing to the theatrical contract, viewers generally agree not to let the signifying apparatus itself interfere with their enjoyment of dramatic fictions. Unless they are called upon consciously to contemplate the fictional nature of a prop, a spectator will simply regard the chair on stage as a piece of furniture. But if viewers are given a reason to suspect that the material prop may be something other than what it appears to be (that the stage table, for example, is not just a table), they may read beyond the

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referential function of the object and focus instead on its self-­reflexivity qua signifier. This type of cognitive distraction results in what Brecht called a theatrical Verfremdungseffekt (“alienation effect”). Electra’s articulation of the urn’s emptiness comes close to this.54 She acknowledges the “devices” through which the once dead Orestes has been brought back to life: “dead by contrivance, he has now been saved by contrivance” (μηχαναῖσι μὲν / θανόντα, νῦν δὲ μηχαναῖς σεσωμένον, 1228–­29). The term μηχανή, as Ringer (1998, 193) notes, “has an inescapable association for theater historians,” being a part of the proverbial phrase θεὸς ἀπὸ μηχανῆς, more commonly encountered as deus ex machina.55 Orestes’ being brought back to life is in its own way a deus ex machina, but one that at the same time that it achieves this supernatural effect also exposes the fictional quality of the “reality” to which it has given rise. Orestes’ “death” has been a fiction; although his salvation is presented as a truer fiction, its credibility has been shored up through similar strategies. If there is a metatheatrical turn anywhere in Sophoclean tragedy it is here. This scene makes the consummate argument that props are theater. As a prop, the urn reveals the fictionality—­the mēchanai—­at the very core of the tragic recognition scene. But it is not just Electra who has been fooled. The same prop pulls Clytemnestra into the orbit of its dangerous fictionality, trapping her in a vulnerable position at the end of the play. It is Electra who describes her mother’s posture and movements at 1400–­1401. She is bent over the cinerary urn, adorning it, as the killers approach: ἡ μὲν ἐς τάφον / λέβητα κοσμεῖ / τὼ δ᾿ ἐφέστατον πέλας. As Kells comments (1973, ad loc.), “The horror and ignominy of Ores­ tes’ murder of his mother is enhanced by the detail that, at the moment he stands over her, waiting his chance to kill her, she is actually tending the urn which she supposed to contain his ashes.”56 Clytemnestra is caught and killed while performing a version of last rites for her son, a seemingly genuine act of caring. The urn, in the end, does in fact perform as Apollo prescribed, with dolos; but its succesful deception does not necessarily cast the children of Agamemnon in a favorable light. p r o p s , pat h o s , a n d n a c h l e b e n Aristotle claims in the Poetics  that humans derive innate cognitive pleasure from recognizing that “this” is “that” (οὗτος ἐκεῖνος).57 The presence of a material, tangible entity on stage, onto which an actor projects the first element of this deictic equation, is theater in its most elemental form. There is pleasure to be gotten from connecting the dots between “this” urn on stage and “that” which was not represented, the “that” being the formerly hidden

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property mentioned at the start of Sophocles’ tragedy but also the ghostly presence of an Aeschylean predecessor. Props are capable of transmitting their reception histories and in this way creating a genealogy between plays and between productions. It should come as no surprise, then, that the “time capsule” function of Electra’s urn extends not just backwards, but also into the future. From the vantage point of posterity, tragic props possess the unique ability to gesture to their own afterlife. Not only do they facilitate the iconographic reception of theatrical events, they also offer a ready-­made means of citing and refashioning the dramatic works for which they function as labels of a sort. We began this chapter with Gellius’s anecdote about the fourth-­ century BCE actor named Polus, who, having taken time off from his professional acting career to mourn his son’s death, returned to the stage to perform the role of Electra in Sophocles’ tragedy. But there are also intermedial links to consider, modes of cross-­referencing between different media, particularly between plays and pots. Props prove to be an effective tool for translating the diachronic medium of drama into the static frame of visual art. In Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-­Painting of the Fourth Century B.C. (2007), Oliver Taplin presents a strong case for treating the theater and the visual arts as reciprocally interactive, if not fully interdependent, media. And he reminds us that the visually spectacular features of tragedy were those most often represented on painted pottery (2007, vii): “We see, again and again, how certain features of tragedy particularly appeal to the viewers: the spectacular costumes and stage properties; the scenes of threatened violence; scenes of entreaty and taking refuge.” The so-­called South Italian vases of the fourth century BCE provide a reflection of some of the most theatrical aspects of tragedy, those that Aristotle’s Poetics catalogues somewhat disparagingly under the rubric of opsis. And while very few vases explicitly reproduce a theatrical setting by, for instance, depicting architectural elements of the stage building, many more allude to tragedy’s mythical content, sometimes even visually “quoting” from particular plays.58 Taplin (1993, 27) strikes a cautious note in summarizing the relationship between the theater and the visual arts, emphasizing that while “tragedy-­related vases” are not scene-­specific—­they do not confine themselves to accurate representations of actual stage events—­nevertheless, “they were produced for a public that was well immersed in tragedy, and was best acquainted with many myths through that medium.” Along similar lines, Rasmussen and Spivey (1991, 176) acknowledge that while “few South Italian vases show the actual stage . . . the influence of the stage is almost certainly to be seen in the elaborate and richly decorated costumes worn by the principal characters.” Even as we resist the

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urge to treat them as visual transcripts of plays, the vases collected in Taplin’s 2007 volume nevertheless convey a vivid impression of what tragedy must have been like in performance.59 The presence of props on vases creates for the viewer an interpretive foothold, by embedding generic scenes in a specific narrative framework. Consider, in this regard, the mid-­fourth-­century BCE Lucanian red-­figure bell krater attributed to the Sydney Painter, which depicts two males in the heroic nude approaching a veiled woman (see figure 4). One of the males, presumably Orestes, holds forth a hydria to the pensive-­looking Electra. Though the urn in the image does not appear to be made of bronze, the hydria “which was a standard vessel for ashes” is compatible with the function that the prop is assigned in the tragedy (Taplin 2007, 97). It has been modeled, one assumes, on the similar scene from Sophocles’ Electra that we examined above, where Electra asks to hold the vessel that she wrongly believes to contain the burnt remains of her brother. The connection between pot and play depends exclusively, however, on the urn’s presence in the painting. The urn codes the three human figures as Electra, Orestes, and Pylades and accordingly gives a narrative dimension to what might otherwise be considered a fairly static image. It is the urn that visually relays the dramatic praxis, potentially sparking recognition in the viewer. And it is the urn in this illustration that “is about to provide a physical link between brother and sister, literally closing the gap that Electra has allowed to grow up between herself and the rest of the world,” as J. Michael Walton (1996, 47) puts it. Indeed, carried by Orestes in the palm of his hand, the urn “is so large it draws the eye away from the human figures.”60 The Sydney painter’s Lucanian bell krater in this sense illustrates the metonymic dynamics of visual discourse. Serving as a sign for the entire tragic plot, which for reasons of visual economy cannot be depicted, the urn is the only marker of the scene’s dramatic lineage. Its position and size are both striking, perhaps more visually arresting than would have been possible in the theater itself. Yet even if its scale is somewhat diminutive in Sophocles’ play, the urn’s engaging stage role there sets the stage for its own afterlife. For by offering distinctive and highly citable cues, props ensure their own reception. If one were to watch Sophocles’ Electra, after having seen the urn’s iconographic double, the stage urn would appear to be gesturing to the iconographic citations of itself, of which only a few select examples have survived. The urn reportedly inspired the actor Polus to a virtuoso act of improvisation in a fourth-­century reperformance of Electra. The prop may also lie at the heart of Sophocles’ creative re-­crafting of the Choephoroi ’s plot and its characters. Several anecdotes about Sophocles’ own involvement in the material mechanics of acting survive: I mentioned above his kithara-­playing

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f i g u r e 4 . Pylades, Orestes and Electra, attributed to the Sydney Painter, Lucanian red-­figure bell krater, ca. 350s BCE. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, ANSA IV 689.

as the title character in Thamyras and also that he played ball while acting the part of the protagonist in his own Nausicaa. Was prop-­inspired role-­playing a critical component of ancient play-­writing?61 If actors made use of costume to “get into character,” what was to prevent playwrights (who were also actors) from redesigning tragic roles with the help of props?62 They are, of course, parodied for doing so in Aristophanes, in whose comedies the rags of Euripides and other tragic props stand in for the playwright’s tragedies.63 Tragedy is not as overtly metatheatrical as comedy in its use of stage artifacts. But as we’ve seen in several chapters, the reuse of significant properties from past performances establishes a meta-­discursive framework through which the audience is encouraged to interpret both the specific artifact, as well as the characters and plot that the property helps to reinvent. The childless mother-­ in-­mourning is Sophocles’ bold revision to the Aeschylean prototype of Electra as a grief-­stricken daughter. Only the urn brings out this strangely moving facet of her character. The mourning-­mother motif is hinted at earlier in the

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play, as we saw, with allusions to Niobe and Procne, but only in the scene where she laments over her brother’s ashes do we understand just how like these mythical exempla Electra herself is. The urn in this sense grants Electra’s suffering mythical status from the start, even before reperformances of the tragedy were to make Sophocles’ Electra the canonical one. Conclusion Sophocles’ stage is, “for the most part, literally empty of divinity,” writes Seth Schein (1997, 124).64 Missing is the clearly defined vertical axis, which is integral to the ordering of justice in the Oresteia. Francis Dunn (2009, 353) likewise remarks on the lack of concrete spatial and temporal markers in the play’s action in general: Whereas stage language tends to be constructed from meaningful spaces (a tomb or a cottage) and meaningful things (a lock of hair or a footprint), in Sophocles’ Electra it proceeds by negation: the interior of the house is a scene of misery hardly distinguishable from that onstage; the tomb of Agamemnon is unseen and the grave-­offerings there are considered meaningless.

Negation is an effect in part produced by Electra’s lamentation, which “not only seems to transcend time, like that of weeping Niobe in her rocky tomb (150–­52), but also obliterates distinctions in space.”65 “Sophocles’ use of  ‘nega­ tive space’, ” Dunn (2009, 346) concludes, “not only heightens the emotional power of his protagonist but also makes it hard for spectators to find meaning in the murders.” Just as Euripides’ Orestes inserts itself into the dramatic “dead” time in between the Choephoroi and the Eumenides, mapping new territories onto older literary terrain,66 Sophocles’ Electra situates itself in a notional performance space, a space that is alluded to in the first scene as being left untended by Aeschylus. The urn retrieved from the bushes operates initially as a decoy, but eventually becomes the central pivot for the tragic action. In tracing the trajectory from “overlooked object” to “character-­defining prop,” the reception history of the urn that is subtly embedded within Electra itself speaks to the process of crafting tragic poetry out of the discarded materials left behind by one’s dramatic progenitors. The urn serves, in this sense, as a material metaphor for the art of Sophocles. By the end of the Eumenides, the blood pollution of the past has been expurgated, both from the House of Atreus and from the other places it has infected. In Electra, by contrast, action originates with the urn, which frames the quest for revenge as a self-­contained enterprise, more claustrophobic than cosmic in its contours. The urn, as we have seen, at first does not even

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represent itself in propria persona; it is introduced to us indirectly, through the mantic words that Orestes brings from Delphi and reports to the Tutor. However “real” it is or isn’t in the traditional sense, this prop does generate powerful dramatic effects, some of which we have traced here, through comparison with its “sibling” urns in the other Electra plays, and in relation to the arresting qualities of receptacles more generally.

5

Ajax’s Shield: Bridging Troy and Athens

Spears and swords embody the privileges of elite patrimony.1 They confer filial legitimacy, but at the same time promote competition among men of a similar rank. Achilles’ ashen spear, a wedding gift from Cheiron to Achilles’ father Peleus, is exemplary in this regard. Peleus relies on this divinely crafted weapon in battle, and he passes it on to his son Achilles, who wins renown with the same spear. As a divinely fashioned object, the spear confers on the mortal who wields it an aura of divine prestige; but it is not an aura that can be shared by just anyone. When Patroclus goes into battle dressed as Achilles, he dons every part of the latter’s panoply except this spear (ἔγχος δ᾿ οὐκ ἕλετο, Il. 16.140). It’s worth noting also that this ashen spear is the only piece to survive from the original armor (the rest will be lost to Hector) and in this sense connects Achilles directly to his mortal father, “just as his new armor,” according to Stoll Shannon III (1975, 31), “connects him with his immortal mother.” The spear’s unwieldiness, as attested by the fact that Patroclus is unable to carry it, in a sense materializes its commitment to Achilles. Another commitment can be heard in the weapon’s “aural” evocations. Consider, for example, the anaphoric repetition of the first syllable of Peleus’s name (Πηλ-) at the head of two consecutive hexameters of Iliad 16—Πηλιάδα μελίην (143) and Πηλίου ἐκ κορυφῆς (144). The repetition not only reinforces the likeness between man and object—­between the “Pelian” spear and the son of Peleus—­ but also suggests that the similarity is grounded in the uniqueness of a certain place. Mt. Pelion is the source, and the echoing of the same first syllable in the names of spear, mountain, and man subtly implies that the other two are natural outgrowths of the mountain itself.2 Indeed, the spear’s demarcation of a biological relationship is more than symbolic. When he brandishes the

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“Pelian spear,” Achilles becomes the son of Peleus, taking possession of a social identity that admits of no surer means of authentication.3 In Ajax’s case, there is neither a sword nor a spear to pass down to his son. Ajax worries about appearing before his father “naked” of the marks of excellence (γυμνὸν φανέντα τῶν ἀριστείων ἄτερ, 464) an anxiety that speaks to both the cause and the consequence of his failure to win the arms of Achilles. Not only has he been deprived of his lawful standing as second best of the Achaeans, but that decision has also jeopardized Ajax’s claim to filial legitimacy. Fathers pass down their weapons to their sons, ensuring that they will be publicly recognized as these objects’ legitimate owners, and that they will bring honor to the family name. In having failed to secure the external marks of glory, the aristeia that would assure Telamon of the legitimacy of his offspring, Ajax has in effect disinherited and bastardized himself in his father’s eyes. As we saw in chapter 1, he arranges for his sword to be buried with himself, while handing over to his son the great shield (sakos) after which Eurysakes has been named. The psychological rationale for this decision is clear. But its theatrical ramifications have not yet been fully explored. As we shall see in this chapter, the dynamics of patrimony are altered by the fact that the shield embodies a defensive mode of fighting. Likewise, its transmission of agency works differently from that of the sword, which resisted being transferrred and remained, in both its epic and its tragic manifestations, more strongly affiliated with Hector than with Ajax. Because the shield delineates a different sort of object-­person assemblage (different, also, from that of Achilles and his spear), it deserves a separate treatment. The shield is a prosthetic weapon, an artifact that extends the natural limits of Ajax’s biological agency, making him into a fiercer, stronger, more impenetrable version of himself.4 It makes most sense to view it not as another example of “distributed personhood,” the concept of object agency we used to explain the sword’s unusual stage effects in chapter 1, but rather as a sort of  “second skin.” This prosthetic object, once it has permanently been severed from its human half, acts as a platform onto which elements of Ajax’s heroic biography can be projected and reified, allowing them to be transmitted to the play’s audience (to become their cultural patrimony). The shield is Ajax objectified. Ajax’s Shield as a Second Skin As a piece of weaponry the sakos of Ajax is singled out for special mention by the Iliad, its “biography” related at the point where Ajax meets Hector (in book 7), in their first of several epic confrontations whose ramifications we

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have already discussed.5 The object consists of seven layers of premium ox-­ hide and an eighth layer of bronze (222–­23).6 Despite having been fashioned by a mortal, Tychios, “the best of leather-­cutters” (σκυτοτόμων ὄχ’ ἄριστος, 221), the weapon is a marvel of craftsmanship.7 In this shield’s biography, divine authorship cedes to human excellence, a preeminence that applies both to the shield’s maker and to the man who bears it.8 No divinely procured weaponry for Ajax, and no help from the gods. The man stands alone, facing an epic tradition that, Ajax later will come to believe, never favored him. Olympian politicking and epic plotting ensure that Ajax, his superior sakos notwithstanding, will never surpass Achilles for whom the prize of defeating Hector is being held in reserve. While the shield (and Ajax’s wielding of it) is valorized as a heroic defensive weapon, by the time we meet the Sophoclean Ajax his epic standing has been retroactively called into question and the contrast between “active” and “passive” weaponry more starkly drawn. It is Achilles’ spear (an exemplary active weapon) that signals his pedigree. For the descendants of Telamon, defensive tactics are written into the familial names of father and son. Ajax’s failure to obtain Achilles’ armor after the latter’s death, an episode related in the Little Iliad and the immediate backdrop to Sophocles’ Ajax, in this sense comes to seem overdetermined.9 Epic’s recognition of Ajax as “second best” of the Achaeans suggests that he was the obvious candidate to be awarded Achilles’ armor. But, whether by guile or fair play, Odysseus won the contest and the arms.10 Most Iliadic warriors fight with the aspis, a handgrip shield that is “even all around” (πάντοσ᾽ ἐΐση) and “bossed” (ὀμφαλόεσσα), but there is another type of defensive gear, the so-­called sakos, that is a “large and heavy” (μέγα τε στιβαρόν τε) full-­body shield.11 This shield is not a military reality any more for the Iliad ’s historical audiences; it comes out of a distant past remembered by epic, a Bronze Age both in a heroic and in an archaeological sense.12 And because there are so few heroes on the battlefield of the Trojan plain who wield such a shield, the shield itself becomes an important identity marker.13 That both Achilles and Ajax are sakos-­bearers, for example, is a way of signaling that these two are best and second best of the Achaeans, respectively.14 But the shield is more than a static identity marker. Only in the high-­ stakes arena of the Homeric duel are we vividly introduced to the dynamic interplay between man and weapon. In Iliad 7, Ajax and Hector meet in a duel meant to decide the fortunes of their people. We examined the duel already in chapter 1, but there our focus was primarily on the misunderstood “truce” to which Ajax agrees, thus forfeiting his chance of redeeming his victory. Here, I want to look instead at the way the shield directs the epic narrator’s gaze, and how the shield makes palpable, through its subtle interactions with Ajax,

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the tremendous expenditure of energy and will that his performance on the battlefield demands. Just lines before hearing the shield’s biography, we are told that the mere sight of Ajax striding forth causes trembling among the Trojans, even setting Hector’s thumos aflutter (7.215–­16). It is the man they fear, but it is the shield that captures the spotlight of the ensuing narrative action (219–­62), creating the impression that Hector is not so much dueling a human enemy as an impenetrable wall.15 The duel is, in fact, played out on both sides between two shields. Grammatically, the shields receive the full brunt of the action verbs, their owners being relegated to a “possessive” position in the genitive case. Consider, for example, Hector’s opening move (244–­46): Ἦ ῥα, καὶ ἀμπεπαλὼν προΐει δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος, καὶ βάλεν Αἴαντος δεινὸν σάκος ἑπταβόειον ἀκρότατον κατὰ χαλκόν, ὃς ὄγδοος ἦεν ἐπ’ αὐτῷ. He spoke and brandishing his shadow-­casting spear, he hit the terrible seven-­ ox-­layered sakos of Ajax on the outermost bronze—­its eighth layer.

From there, the narration continues to be object-­driven, following the journey of Hector’s spear through six folds of ox-­hide, and only when the spear comes to rest in the seventh layer switching over to the action on Ajax’s side. Ajax himself hurls his spear, hitting Hector’s shield (248–­50): δεύτερος αὖτε Αἴας διογενὴς προΐει δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος, καὶ βάλε Πριαμίδαο κατ’ ἀσπίδα πάντοσ’ ἐΐσην. And in turn the illustrious Ajax hurled his shadow-­casting spear and hit the son of Priam in his shield, which was even all around.

What follows is essentially a replay of the first engagement between their two sets of weapons, with a very different result, as Ajax’s spear, encountering much less resistance from Hector’s shield, rips through his corselet and tunic (251–­54): διὰ μὲν ἀσπίδος ἦλθε φαεινῆς ὄβριμον ἔγχος, καὶ διὰ θώρηκος πολυδαιδάλου ἠρήρειστο· ἀντικρὺ δὲ παραὶ λαπάρην διάμησε χιτῶνα ἔγχος· ὃ δ’ ἐκλίνθη καὶ ἀλεύατο κῆρα μέλαιναν. And through the shining shield went the shadowy spear, and through his carefully wrought breast-­plate it penetrated, going straight through, right up against his flank, the spearhead tore through his tunic; but he for his part torqued to the side, avoiding dark death.

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The subject of each verb is the spearhead (ἔγχος, 251 and 254), which reaches all the way to Hector’s vulnerable flesh. The man himself is described as merely the furthest extension of this layering of materials: outermost is the metallic, bronze sheen of his shield, then comes the breastplate, followed by the tunic. Once the sharpened missile has penetrated these outer layers, it grazes the flank (λαπάρην, mentioned in 253 as if it were simply one more material fold) of the man, who reacts—­twisting to avoid death—­only when all previous layers of his outer shell have been breached. Weapons are the narrative drivers. The personal human subjects (i.e., Αἴας at 249, ὃ δ᾿ at 254) have been relegated to the edges of the screen, as it were. They provide the initial bolt of force and register impact, but only at the end of a long chain of material defenders. The culmination of this object-­centered dueling comes when Hector and Ajax forsake their spears for boulders, each hurling one at the other; and this too is where their shields play a defining role. For while Hector’s boulder evokes only a loud echoing from Ajax’s bronze-­plated sakos, Ajax’s boulder completely shatters Hector’s aspis, simultaneously knocking the life force from the man himself. Only because of Apollo’s intervention does Hector rise again (272). The true hero of this battle sequence, then, is the sakos. Let’s review in close-­up what happens when the boulder meets the shield (266–67): τῷ βάλεν Αἴαντος δεινὸν σάκος ἑπταβόειον μέσσον ἐπομφάλιον· περιήχησεν δ’ ἄρα χαλκός. With it (i.e., the boulder) he hit the terrifying seven-­layered sakos, right in the middle of the boss; and the bronze echoed loudly all around.

Ajax’s great defensive strength comes down, once again, to the “terrifying seven-­layered sakos,” which, in the lines above, fends off a boulder from Hector. Whereas Hector’s shield is unexceptional, both materially and linguistically, having not even a single epithet to adorn it, Ajax’s sakos fills more than the second half of a hexameter line, being both δεινόν and (characteristically) ἑπταβόειον. It has received the brunt of the impact from the boulder, and consequently the shield’s reaction (not the soldier’s) is what gets recorded—­ bronze echoing loudly all around. All the Iliad passages examined thus far point up an interesting fact: as far as the narrative of battle combat is concerned, the weapons (shields and projectiles) are represented as the true combatants. Why aren’t the warriors themselves featured more prominently? Isn’t it their excellence that is on the line, their reputations that are being forged (and destroyed) in the arena of war?

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Our readings of the excerpts above, while technically accurate (in so far as we have identified the inanimate protagonists), have glossed over one essential factor: the blending of human and material actors in the arena of combat. Taking a step back from the micro-­dynamics of the hexameter line, we can appreciate that within the Homeric duel there is a leveling of  human and nonhuman participants. The fighting hero is a perfectly blended person-­weapon, the boundaries of his autonomous self vanishing into those of the panoply he has donned. His muscular agency becomes an extension of the layers of leather-­crafted shield and other materials he wears on his body. At the same time, those layers of defensive material become a kind of second skin, seamlessly extending the hero’s personhood (and his fighting capabilities) in ways that would be unthinkable outside of the context of war. Analogies from our own world spring readily to mind: the formula-­one racer, who merges seamlessly with his car; or the musician who becomes an extension of her cello, unlocking the instrument’s potential. In the “flow” context of performance, the boundaries normally dividing persons and things (into the categories of agent and instrument, subject and object) are temporarily suspended. Warriors are their weapons for the duration of the duel. The sakos almost supernaturally extends Ajax’s human agency, allowing him to enact the role—­ and to assume the identity—­of the herkos Achaiōn (something he would not be able to do without his shield).16 Partly in function of what it enables the warrior to achieve, the sakos itself, its kleos-­worthiness, is affirmed by onlookers within the poem and by the poetic tradition more broadly, as witnessed by the object’s biography.17 In the way the fighting has been reported, shield and man are charismatically conjoined, with the narrative consciously eliding the boundary between them. In the heat of battle, the shield makes the man. But as with all such occasions where individuals test their physical and cognitive limits, the feeling of being unbounded cannot last forever. What happens once the “performance” is over? Only when the limits of his endurance begin to be tested are we made aware of the soldier’s suffering body. And in its suffering, the body calls to mind the gap between the shield and its wearer, between sign and signified. When the shield comes to be distinguished from its bearer, it changes from being a second skin into a symbol. At the beginning of book 16 cracks begin surfacing. Here the Iliad offers us a view of Ajax suffering, uncharacteristically, from fatigue. The weariness that afflicts him is in itself an indication that the spell of blended agency has been broken. At such a moment, Ajax’s sakos becomes almost unbearably heavy. Ajax endures the enemy battery while “always holding up” (αἰὲν ἔχων, 16.107) the shield. But while the shield tirelessly fends off the Trojans’ relentless forward thrust, the man himself shows signs of mortal strain

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(109–­11). His breathing is hoarse and painful (αἰεὶ δ᾿ ἀργαλέῳ ἔχετ᾿ ἄσθματι, 109). In book 7, the physical energy that was required to maneuver it was never mentioned, but here we are invited to focus on Ajax’s expenditure of effort. The object weighs heavily on Ajax’s left shoulder especially: “and he was weary in his left shoulder, always holding up steadfast the multi-­colored shield” (ὁ δ᾿ ἀριστερὸν ὦμον ἔκαμνεν, / ἔμπεδον αἰὲν ἔχων σάκος αἰόλον, 106–­7). We are made aware of the physical cost to Ajax of keeping his steadfast stance. Hector’s sword served as a visual shorthand for the Iliadic nexus of reciprocity and indebtedness. With the shield, the hero’s future is alluded to rather than his past. Although Ajax has died at Troy, victim to his epic entanglements, his legacy as a “bulwark,” a protecting and defending force of nature, will find new life—­and a new cultic idiom—­in Athens.18 In what follows, I suggest that the shield signals this new reality directly to Sophocles’ audience. By drawing attention to how material actors help craft Athenians’ civic discourse about their past, I pursue an interpretation of the shield that dovetails with our politically oriented analysis of the tokens from the recognition scene of Euripides’ Ion (chapter 3). Both recognition and bequeathal scenes implicitly pose the question of how to transmit and perform (Athenian) identity and, in this regard, serve as important case studies for how stage props both reflect and contribute to ongoing dialogues about the past. Eurysakes the Shield-­Receiver For Eurysakes, the weapon which becomes his own from the moment he touches it serves as an exhortation to live up to the greatness of his name. Heroes can be named after their fathers’ main characteristics.19 The best-­known case, explicitly spelled out in epic, is Hector’s son Astyanax, who owes his name to the fundamental role of his father as “lord of the city” (Il. 6.402–3). In the same way, Ajax’s son Eurysakes embodies his father’s kleos as the bearer of the “broad sakos.”20 Sophocles self-­ consciously appropriates the Homeric epithet when he has Odysseus refer to Ajax as “the sakos-­bearer” (τῷ σακεσφόρῳ, Aj. 19).21 His desire to bequeath his shield is one of the surest signs that Ajax is contemplating suicide. We traced in chapter 1 the meandering twists and turns of his death wish, acted out in the Deception and Suicide speeches. Here I consider the prelude to those final two stage appearances. Ajax has just called for Eurysakes to be brought to him and with his son in his sights, he turns over to him the great shield (574–­76):

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ἀλλ᾿ αὐτό μοι σύ, παῖ, λαβὼν τοὐπώνυμον, Εὐρύσακες, ἴσχε διὰ πολυρράφου στρέφων πόρπακος ἑπτάβοιον ἄρρηκτον σάκος. Child, taking the thing of mine after which you are named, Eurysakes, hold the unbreakable, seven-­hide-­thick shield, turning it by its well-­stitched arm-­grip.

While Ajax’s speech lacks the verbal deictics that would securely signal the presence of a shield prop on stage, the emphatic word order, combined with Ajax’s imperatives, has an almost reifying effect.22 Whether or not the actor playing Ajax gestures to a prop as he utters αὐτό, his speech act summons the shield into being; it is what his son is ordered to “take up” (λαβών) and “hold” (ἴσχε).23 These are tactile cues, words that draw attention to the importance of the physical contact being made; it is imperative not only that Eurysakes be told that the shield is now his, but that he be seen holding the weapon itself. In this carefully choreographed scene, the child’s initial contact with his father’s shield has an inceptive force. It is a gesture that will be evoked and reenacted every time Eurysakes subsequently takes up his shield. Also telling is that Ajax orders his son to hold the weapon by its arm-­grip (πόρπακος).24 Such detailed instructions make the weapon a visualizable artifact even though the verbal evocation of the shield lacks the deictic specificity of the sword in the so-­called Deception Speech, where τόδε strongly signaled that prop’s material presence at 658 (see chapter 1). The bequeathal of the sakos is handled as a private affair between father and son, an intimate moment that excludes the audience as active participants. Yet the spectators in the theater do end up witnessing an event of seminal importance for fifth-­ century Athenian religious and political life, as will be indicated as early as the play’s exodus, particularly if Eurysakes is shown taking up once again the same great shield (but with the weapon in that final scene encasing his father’s body). “May you be luckier than your father but in all other things the same; and (i.e., in that case) you would turn out not to be base” (ὦ παῖ, γένοιο πατρὸς εὐτυχέστερος / τὰ δ᾿ ἄλλ᾿ ὁμοῖος· καὶ γένοι᾿ ἂν οὐ κακός), Ajax wishes out loud (550–­51). “Luckier” (εὐτυχέστερος) can only be an oblique reference to the sword’s deleterious effect on Ajax and the better forgotten episode of his life that it helped to write. Eurysakes, it is to be hoped, will grow up to become the Ajax that is indexed by his father’s shield, not his sword. Interestingly, however, Ajax does not project for Eurysakes a future that is more valiant than his own past. The son is not to be imagined as superseding his father.

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In this respect, Ajax’s hopes for his son’s future diverge sharply from those of Hector, who at Iliad 6 prays to Zeus that Astyanax be recognized as “better by far than his father” (πατρός γ᾿ ὅδε πολλὸν ἀμείνων, 6.479).25 And not irrelevant either is that Hector, just after he has taken off his helmet, prays that his son may come back from battle bearing the gory armor of the man he has killed, an act in which his mother will take delight (6.480–­81).26 Has touching his helmet transported Hector into a reverie about his son’s future—­the weapon itself acting as the medium for his meditation? Begrudging as Ajax’s words may sound by comparison, their nuanced qualification of Hector’s prayer has a material justification.27 When, some twenty lines later, Ajax orders his son to take hold of the shield (574–­76), we understand why he has placed similitude, even exact identification between father and son, at the center of his expressed wish. As Ajax’s proxy, the shield cannot but make the son into the double of his father. These are the constraints of the material medium, which enables both ownership and affect to be transferred. Achilles’ ability to wield Peleus’s ashen spear was what authenticated him as a genuine “Peliad.” Eurysakes, too, will be recognized as his father’s son by the shield he carries, but it is Ajax’s language, particularly his use of the Homeric-­sounding ἑπτάβοιον at 576, that specifies precisely which part of his father’s legacy the son will carry into the future. This epithet secures the shield as a tangible, Homeric relic. In donning it, Eurysakes will be taking over his father’s heroic past (or so Ajax hopes). Just as the sakos shaped Ajax in the Iliad into the human representative of its material virtues, so too will it mold his son in its (and his) own image. We have seen that the shield evokes Ajax’s defensive style of fighting in the Iliad. But consider also this telling detail of Ajax’s speech. Before entrusting the object directly to Eurysakes, Ajax first asks his Salaminian sailors to carry a message to Teucer. Ajax calls his sailors “shield-­bearing men” (ἄνδρες ἀσπιστῆρες, 565), an unusual descriptive, especially because he also addresses them as “seafaring people” (ἐνάλιος λεώς, 565) in the same line. Who better than the Athenians—­who took to their “wooden walls” to save their city—­to recognize themselves in these vocatives?28 Sailors by trade, Ajax’s followers are apparently already being invoked by their future identity as “shield-­bearers.” And Ajax has a special favor to ask of them—­that the shield-­bearer designate, Eurysakes, be given safe passage to Ajax’s homeland under Teucer’s guardianship (567–­72). The second part of Ajax’s request has to do with the fate of his other weapons. These, he commands, must be buried with him so as to avoid the terrible fate of Achilles’ arms (573–­74). As first-­time, uninitiated spectators, we might discern here only the voice of bitter resentment, a hero who is still angry over the injurious slight dealt him by his former friends. With the

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privilege of hindsight (or foresight), however, the sword’s specter wanes. As we begin to view this scene from the perspective of the shield, we can discern the outlines of a future for Ajax and his people that is founded on the sakos and its human namesake. It is worth noting, then, that the Chorus of Salaminian sailors find themselves in a similar position to Eurysakes after Ajax’s death. They sing in their third stasimon how Ajax was for them “a shield” against the dangers of the night (1211–­22). Although not explicitly acknowledging Ajax’s new role in cult, the Chorus here claims that Ajax offered them protective force greater even than their own shields when it came to warding off nightmarish fears (1211–­13): καὶ πρὶν μὲν ἐννυχίου δείματος ἦν μοι προβολὰ καὶ βελέων θούριος Αἴας· And before now impetuous Ajax was my defense against nighttime fears and arrows . . .

The sailors are clearly at a loss without their leader, whom they call to mind, using a Homeric epithet (θούριος). In his absence, the sailors have been reduced to the neediness and nighttime terror of children. Their lament signals, then, what is at stake in making sure that Ajax receives a proper burial. Only then will his dependents overcome their fears. The audience, meanwhile, can empathize while taking consolation in the promise held out to them by the shield itself, or, at the very least, its human namesake, for Eurysakes betokens the eventuality of his father’s return to Athens. Subtly reinforcing the future importance of Salamis to Athenian history is the play’s emphasis on the proximity of this island to Athens, in both geographical and political terms. In addressing the Chorus at Ajax 201–­2, Tecmessa calls them “supporters of Ajax’s ship, born from the clan of earthborn Erechtheids” (ναὸς ἀρωγοὶ τῆς Αἴαντος, / γενεᾶς χθονίων ἀπ᾿ Ἐρεχθειδᾶν). Such a description neatly elides the distance between Salamis and Athens, as well as the difference between ally and native-­born Athenian.29 And likewise, Ajax’s final words in the play reinforce his affinities with Athens. He bids farewell to the plain of Salamis, his fatherland, and in the same breath, he calls the Athenians a “brotherly race” (τὸ σύντροφον γένος, 861). As Peter Rose (1995, 70) has suggested, it is at such moments that “Ajax and the chorus are most intimately and directly fused with the land and city of Sophocles’ own audience.”30 Between the Atheno-­Salaminian sailors and Eurysakes (the bearer of his father’s great shield), the protagonists of the future fifth-­century

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cult of the Aiantids in Athens are already in full view on Sophocles’ stage. The hero’s Athenian fame, while not that of epic kleos enshrined in song, is the kind of glory that can be passed “intact from one generation to the next,” and eternally renewed through the collective remembering engendered by hero-­ cult.31 As Rush Rehm (2002, 137) puts it, “Ajax’s restoration over the course of the play ‘spills’ over into the Athenian audience.” For what they are witnessing is not simply the restoration of a fallen epic hero, but the remaking of one of their own. solon’s sakos We have seen that the cooperative ethos hinted at in Ajax’s close relationship to the Salaminian sailors in our play finds a material expression in the protagonist’s shield. But this transformation of the epic weapon into a metaphor of political cohesion can be traced back even further in time, to the verses of the sixth-­century BCE Athenian poet and statesman, Solon. In its epic context, as we have already noted, sakos is a marked term, referring in several memorable instances to the shields carried by Achilles and Ajax.32 Ajax, however, is also the hero from Salamis, and given Solon’s investment elsewhere in securing Athenian sovereignty over the island, it is worth considering whether the speaker of Fr. 5W may in fact be impersonating Ajax, with his particular brand of heroism. In Solon’s fifth fragment, the speaker relegates to his heavy shield the serious work of reconciling the warring classes within the polis. This Solon-­identified persona loquens claims to have achieved a more just distribution of privileges among the demos and the well-­born (Solon 5 West): δήμῳ μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκα τόσον γέρας ὅσσον ἐπαρκεῖν, τιμῆς οὔτ’ ἀφελὼν οὔτ’ ἐπορεξάμενος· οἳ δ’ εἶχον δύναμιν καὶ χρήμασιν ἦσαν ἀγητοί, καὶ τοῖς ἐφρασάμην μηδὲν ἀεικὲς ἔχειν· ἔστην δ’ ἀμφιβαλὼν κρατερὸν σάκος ἀμφοτέροισι, νικᾶν δ’ οὐκ εἴασ’ οὐδετέρους ἀδίκως. For to the demos I gave only as much privilege as suffices, neither shortchanging nor overextending their honor. And there were some who had power and were admirable in wealth, and to them I contrived that they suffer nothing shameful. I stood, holding my strong shield in front of both groups, and I didn’t allow either side unjustly to gain victory.

Terms like γέρας, τιμή, and σάκος evoke the competitive honor-­based social economy of Homeric poetry. Moreover, in being able to “take away” or “extend” honor to various groups, the speaker enjoys an almost god-­like status.33

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“From a poetic perspective,” writes Elizabeth Irwin (2006, 46) “to speak of the dēmos as recipient of the γέρας and τιμή is nothing less than a travesty of heroic language.” For γέρας denotes “that which is allotted to the various immortals in the Theogony, and both the Odyssey and the Works and Days emphasize the association of γέρας with kingly honours” (46–­47). In arrogating to himself the power to determine whose interests will be counted in the polis, Solon somewhat paradoxically evokes the authority of epic kings. Travesty though this may appear, it is also a deadly serious reordering of the epic cosmos to suit the needs and tastes of Solon’s public. There will be no opportunity for Achillean rage and withdrawal, no epic-­styled conflict erupting within the confines of his poetic world.34 For in the fifth verse, the speaker re-­describes the role of the sakos. The shield is not to be cast in its usual martial role, as a wedge driving two warring factions farther apart. Instead, the weapon is presented as the primary mechanism of reconciliation. The position of the demos in this configuration further transforms the shield into a political metaphor, of special relevance to the Athenian politeia. Does the “strong shield” (κρατερὸν σάκος) mentioned by the speaker channel Ajax’s epic persona? As the Salaminian hero’s defensive weapon par excellence, the sakos offers Solon qua poetic narrator a powerful image for the harmonizing effect that his poetry seeks to procure; and the question of Athenian control of Salamis likewise becomes a rallying point for resolving the class warfare between the demos and the wealthy: these warring factions are instead visualized as a collectivity, a body politic that, Solon’s poetry emphasizes elsewhere, already includes the island of Salamis.35 While it is difficult to establish a detailed narrative about the history of Salamis in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, in broad outline, a few facts are clear.36 Athens and Megara were at this time mired in a struggle for control of the island. Solon urged his fellow citizens to this task (in his Salamis poem). By the end of the sixth century at the latest, Athenian control had been established, as is recorded in an Athenian decree, IG i3 1 “which concerns the property and obligations of Athenians on Salamis.”37 This inscription contains regulations for an Athenian settlement (probably a cleruchy) on Salamis,38 the legal basis for an Atheno-­Salaminian community that would later play a vital role in the battle of Salamis.39 Ajax’s towering presence in epic protected the Achaeans from enemy assault. Solon’s sakos is similarly deployed as a weapon of defense, but it is one that seeks to protect the polis from itself. Enabling the ethos of hoplite cooperation and strategic action, Solon’s shield makes visible the unseen hand of law; it is a concrete symbol that both sides (the rich and the poor) can relate to. Also important is that the sakos is less implicated in the exclusionary

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discourses of aristocratic self-­fashioning than some other types of weaponry. Ajax’s sakos is not a token of investiture; nor is its prestige tied up with divine favor, or birthright, as the Iliad makes clear. Fashioned by Tychios, it was handed over to Ajax directly,40 and this origin outside of the nexus of elite patrimony further strengthens the sakos’s democratic credentials, subtly sending the message that eugeneia need not be by right of birth or divine inheritance. As a mythical weapon from Homeric epic (where already it is represented as a holdover from a bygone era), Ajax’s sakos is far removed from the realities of the fifth-­century hoplite phalanx. Yet the cooperative ethos the shield channels is one whose origins can be traced all the way back to the hero’s epic reputation as the defensive fighter extraordinaire : In the Iliad, for example, Ajax holds his shield up protectively in front of his brother Teucer, when the two of them fight side by side;41 moreover, Ajax’s bravery in retrieving Achilles’ body, an episode memorably preserved in the iconographic tradition, is visually communicated by the prominent presence of the hero’s shield in several black-­figure vase paintings.42 As a stage prop, however, the shield is not exclusively framed as a Bronze Age relic. For while Ajax refers to the weapon as a “seven-­layered sakos,” invoking its epic context, he in the same breath orders his son to take hold of it by twisting (his arm) through its πόρπαξ (575–­76), as we saw above. By porpax, Stanford suggests, “Sophocles probably means the arm-­grip of a fifth-­ century hoplite shield, i.e., the band of metal in the centre of the inside of the shield through which the hoplite put his arm before grasping the hand-­grip (ἀντιλαβή) inside the rim.”43 The porpax was by no means a standardized feature of the hoplite shield, but the term does not occur anywhere in Homeric epic, so Stanford is right in treating this arm-­grip as a signature mark of a later shield design.44 Moreover, while most porpakes were made out of metal, the arm-­grip Ajax asks his son to take hold of is leather, thus raising the possibility, as Finglass (2011, 307) indicates, “that Sophocles is conflat­ ing the metal πόρπαξ of his day with the leather τελαμών known to him from the Iliad.” As a stage prop, the shield appears, then, to be a composite entity: it is a heroic-­hoplite weapon, borrowing and blending distinctive features from both Iliadic and contemporary shields. In this respect, the sakos offers a material analogue for the mixing of registers we saw in Solon Fr. 5W, where the demos was depicted as the recipient of a heroic division of spoils (geras and timē). Homeric language is blended with terminology drawn from Athenian military realia in both Solon and Sophocles. The hybridization of language used to describe the shield reinforces this weapon’s capacity to bridge the distance between the past and the present. Ajax’s verbal evocation of the shield

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as such is what enables the shield’s transfer from the world of epic, wherein it was fashioned, into the sociopolitical space of democratic Athens, where it will be received. In light of Solon’s push to remake the sakos into a symbol of reconciliation between the city’s warring factions, Ajax’s sakos arguably already possesses democratic associations for its fifth-­century viewers. If so, Sophocles’ script takes the semantic reconfiguration of the seven-­layered sakos to its natural endpoint. The shield Eurysakes receives from his father can also be seen as an already fetishized monument to the epic origins of Ajax’s tragic afterlife. It requires little to imagine then that this “relic” could be taken from Troy to Salamis and from there to Athens,45 where it would give rise to the foundation of a shrine that the Athenians themselves called the Eurysakeion. When, and under what circumstances, this shrine was established is difficult to determine.46 What we know is that Ajax became an influential presence in Athens. According to Plutarch, Alcibiades’ family traced their lineage back to Ajax through Eurysakes, while Cimon, another prominent fifth-­century BCE political figure, claimed kinship with Ajax through the latter’s son, or grandson, Philaios.47 Comprising a temenos and an altar (Pausanias 1.35.30), the Eurysakeion became a cult center of the genos Salaminioi and the place where the Cleisthenic tribe of the Aiantids (who traced their lineage back to Aias) set up their decrees.48 This obviously is not a reality that the play’s script directly acknowledges, but the existence of this shrine, which later sources place in the heart of Athens, at the southwestern end of the Agora, complicates in intriguing ways Eurysakes’ role in Ajax.49 It allows us to assume the play’s audience would have been primed to read the “future” back into the past, especially in the case of Eurysakes whose presence is key, despite his being a kōphon prosōpon (a silent character). Furthermore, the Eurysakeion offers an extra-­dramatic explanation for why the shield is to be spared the burial with himself that Ajax prescribes for his other weapons (τὰ δ᾿ ἄλλα τεύχη κοίν᾿ ἐμοὶ τεθάψεται, 577). The audience would have known that it needed to be preserved so that Eurysakes could carry it to Athens, where it would serve as a material foundation for his shrine (and also perhaps help to oversee his own arrival in that city). In 508/7 BCE, Cleisthenes oversaw a re-­division of the Attic tribes, from four to ten, and a corresponding selection of ten eponymous heroes; Pausanias provides a list of the ten, of which “third was Ajax, son of Telamon” (καὶ τρίτος Αἴας ὁ Τελαμῶνος, 1.5.2).The selection, confirmed by the Delphic oracle, established a new canon of ancestors for the democratic era.50 Through his son and his prosthetic shield, Ajax was destined eventually to become one of these ten eponymous Athenian heroes. His on-­stage

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bequeathal of this part of himself offers a dramatic enactment of his otherwise undocumented naturalization. That the episode has been crafted to suggest a Homeric literary source does not preempt such a political reading. The Homeric precedent endows Eurysakes with the patina of an epic pedigree, and thereby creates an unbroken succession between the father, steeped in the old world, and his post-­epic son. Ajax himself has come from the world of epic, and he has suffered a brief reprise of that heroic past—­as dramatized for us in his final struggle on stage with “Hector”—­before transitioning to his democratic future (i.e., the audience’s present). The case of Eurysakes is comparable, except that his epic past is first invented by tragedy. Sophocles’ projection of an epic past for Eurysakes by analogy with Astyanax invites the audience to view the son’s future in Athens as part of the same teleological arc that governs Ajax’s “rebirth” as a protective daimon for the Athenians. For son as for father, his civic role is predicated on his epic past. Even without the privilege of belonging to the Philaid or Eurysacid clans, spectators might have felt a more general appreciation for the genealogical ties materialized in the shield, and the fantasy of “heroic” descent that it gave rise to. If at all conversant with recent political history, they would know that the Salaminian hero became the protector of all of Athens (not just the Aiantids) on the day he helped the Athenian fleet defeat the Persians at Salamis in 480 BCE. Ajax’s Exodos Despite the heightened stakes of the outcome, the burial debates for most readers still probably “mark an unfortunate lessening in the dramatic tension,” as Elton Barker (2009, 295) observes. After the hero’s dramatic self-­killing, these speeches have been considered anticlimactic. But there was undoubtedly visual drama in watching the action circle around Ajax’s dead body. His “suicide” complete, the visibility of Ajax’s corpse and its central placement are key blocking elements of the final third of the tragedy’s action. As Michael Ewans (2002, 65–­66) observes, “the ritual guarding of the body by Eurysakes and Tekmessa, the arguments over the body between Teucer and the Atreidai, and the final scene of resolution, all need the corpse to be in place where it can be walked around, addressed in ritual lament by an actor behind it and facing forward towards the centre block of spectators, and argued over by two actors facing each other at opposite ends of the body.”51 Ewans’s emphasis on the centrality of the corpse provides further justification for regarding the shield itself as an important factor in the outcome of the deliberations.

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Whether or not it remains in the playing area after the bequeathal scene, the shield “speaks” forcefully to both internal and external audiences as they await the outcome of the verbal contest being played out between Teucer, Odysseus, and the Atreids. The weapon stands as a lone survivor of the thorough dismantling of Ajax’s epic persona. For the hero’s death—­one for which epic (not tragedy) must shoulder the blame—­the sword is responsible. The shield, on the other hand, despite its epic biography, points a way forward. It is a future-­focused weapon, whose participation gives greater temporal depth to the action, animatedly and proleptically carving out a cultic space for Ajax in Athens. Even without realizing it, Ajax’s intimates in this tragedy secure the foundations for his cultic afterlife by advocating for his burial. Ajax’s transformation into a hero of cult is not articulated as explicitly as, say, the foundation of Oedipus’s cult is in Oedipus at Colonus. Yet the dramaturgical design of Ajax clearly alludes to its protagonist’s imminent transformation. Eurysakes, for one, is positioned by his father’s side as a suppliant. This has been taken to indicate that Ajax’s body is vested with apotropaic qualities even before it has been interred. As Peter Burian (1972, 154) explains: The child, by seeking protection from the seemingly helpless warrior, reveals that Ajax is not helpless after all. Indeed, the body becomes in effect a hallowed place, for it is recognized to have the power of a hero’s tomb even before the question of burial is settled.

Moreover, as Albert Henrichs (1993, 169) notes, the Chorus of the play also signals his eventual transformation.52 Their immediate concern is to get Ajax’s body safely buried (1164–­65), but the grave they imagine Ajax as occupying is one that will always be remembered (βροτοῖς τὸν ἀείμνηστον / τάφον εὐρώεντα καθέξει, 1166–­67). These verbal allusions to Ajax’s incipient heroization have rightly been emphasized in the critical literature on Ajax’s death, but they gain in significance when they are read in conjunction with the visual statement made by his body and the son seeking its apotropaic protection. Ajax, as we know, was “played out in front of an Athenian audience to whom Ajax was a familiar, popular and important hero,”53 a fact that makes it all the more interesting to imagine how the seemingly epic artifacts that define this hero would have been received by the play’s contemporary audience. Are these relics from a bygone age of relevance only within the play’s fictional world, or do they transcend the invisible barrier separating the theater spectator from the theatrical action?

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Focusing on the penultimate episode of the play, where Teucer instructs Eurysakes to stay close to his father’s body and gives him a lock of hair as a kind of magical amulet that will protect the boy against Ajax’s enemies, Henrichs argues that the body itself, and its incipient hero status, is what protects this otherwise defenseless boy. Like Burian, Henrichs sees the body as already imbued with some of the force of the hallowed tomb. But Henrichs (1993, 167) places particular weight on the verb φύλασσε at 1180, which he reads as an expression of “ritual dependence and local confinement” rather than an imperative exhorting Eurysakes literally to “guard” his father’s body. Parallel usages of this same verb can be found in tragic contexts where suppliants seek the ritual protection of an altar as, for example, Amphitryon describes himself and Megara as doing in Euripides’ Heracles (51, τάσδ᾿ ἕδρας φυλάσσομεν). In the final analysis, argues Henrichs (1993, 167), it is Ajax’s corpse itself that “functions both as the ultimate bulwark against aggression and as the guarantor of his son’s safety.” The question Henrichs leaves unasked, however, is why we are presented in the first place with the tableau of dead father and son, in close physical and quasi-­magical alliance. Are we perhaps being invited to read Eurysakes’ need for protection as the catalyzing agent that endows his father’s corpse with its cultic powers? It is Eurysakes’ dependency, his utter defencelessness, after all, that elicits the talismanic qualities Henrichs aptly identifies as those belonging to an incipient cult hero. Moreover, as Ruth Scodel (2006, 67) observes, “it may not be a coincidence that the son who is important in the play also has a shrine in Melite that was also probably a centre of the cult of Ajax.” Eurysakes contributes to the etiology of Ajax’s Athenian presence, giving explanatory force to the protective power Ajax’s name will consequently assume.54 The democratic identities of father and son are in this respect closely intertwined, with the mutual dependence and physical entanglement of their bodies on stage already delineating a cultic space that will embrace both halves of this tableau—­the father and the son.55 While Henrichs focuses on the tomb itself and the locus of burial as a crucial component of Ajax’s cultic transformation, I would place equal emphasis on Eurysakes and his recently acquired shield. Eurysakes bridges for the audience in the theater the epic Ajax, now dead in the Troad, and their own eponymous Athenian hero. A fourth-­century BCE stele from Salamis, discovered during the excavation of a Byzantine chapel near Moulki and first published in 1949, sheds light on the cultural resonance of the father-­son tableau (see figure 5).56 Consisting of both a relief and decree, it depicts an Ajax dressed in a himation with a spear in his left hand and the signature shield (also to his left). The honorand is on Ajax’s right, and another figure, to his left, is

f i g u r e 5 . Ajax and Eurysakes, fourth-­century BCE relief, Archaeological Museum of Salamis, MΠ 4228. Photograph copyright, Archaeological Museum of Salamis.

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holding the shield. This figure had previously been identified as Demos, or perhaps as a second honorand, but Lawton and Harris (1990) argue in favor of the figure’s identification with Eurysakes, primarily because of his closeness to and physical contact with Ajax’s shield. If their interpretation is correct, this would make the relief one of the only extant visual representations of Eurysakes, and a significant iconographic parallel for the stage tableau we have described above. In both media, that is, both in stone and on stage, Eury­sakes functions as a kind of extension of his father’s shield, showing us the blocking we had already conjectured. In Sophocles, then, Eurysakes’ silent “guarding” of Ajax’s corpse gestures toward the personification and incipient heroization of Ajax that the stele confirms had become a recognizable visual topos by the fourth century. It is Teucer who initiates the funeral procession by lifting his half-­brother’s corpse and exhorting Eurysakes to do the same (1409ff.). We are never told where they will take the body. Nor are we told how the corpse is removed. Although there is no textual indication of its stage presence in the final scene, the ready availability of the shield qua prop might have mitigated the awkwardness of Ajax’s exit by supplying a funerary bier on which his corpse could be carried off. Indeed, the hero’s body laid out on his great shield might then form the visual and spiritual center of this cortège.57 The shield in this sense would offer a dignified solution to the practical problem of how to remove the body. The dead Ajax would exit the orchestra as a war hero, held up by—­ and guarding in turn—­his philoi. But at what point would the shield have been brought back on stage? The text of the play, with its embedded stage directions, allows us to reconstruct various possibilities for staging, even if the particulars of a certain production lie beyond our grasp. Among the various possibilities, one trajectory for the shield stands out as especially appealing. Assuming that the shield is materially represented in the bequeathal scene, it probably goes off stage with Tecmessa and Eurysakes at 596, not reappearing (if at all) until Eurysakes comes back on, several hundred lines later. After he has delivered his Deception Speech, Ajax would exit along the eisodos headed in the direction of the sea coast. Tecmessa and Eurysakes (with or without the shield), who were silently standing by during the speech, at this point probably also make their way out of the playing area and into the skēnē. It would be distinctly odd if Ajax were to appear with the shield (alongside his sword) for his Suicide Speech, and indeed the shield is nowhere referenced during that episode. There is a certain dramatic logic, however, to having the weapon, once it’s been bequeathed, stay close by Eurysakes’ side (each being a personification, or objectification, of the other). So, when

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Teucer calls for him to be fetched at 985, Eurysakes likely comes on stage with the shield, which would remain a visible part of the action from that moment on. At 1163, Tecmessa and Eurysakes approach Teucer, who positions them next to Ajax’s corpse. As discussed already, if the shield is part of that tableau then the blocking of the scene mirrors the relief-­image from Moulki (absent Tecmessa). But this is not the only way in which a late-­in-­the-­action reappearance of the shield might have been handled. It has been suggested by Stanford (2002, ad loc.) that Teucer at 1184 leaves the scene “to get the necessities for the burial,” including a funerary bier. If the shield is not already a part of the tableau surrounding Ajax’s body, then Teucer might have fetched it (in place of the requisite bier) and deposited it, when he returns at 1223, to the safekeeping of Tecmessa, her son, and Ajax. Contact with Ajax’s dead body, as we have seen, offers talismanic protection to the otherwise defenseless boy when he is bereft of his living father, and it becomes meaningful to realize that this contact—­which was inaugurated by the transfer of the shield—­remains unbroken in the play’s subsequent action. Staging the exodus with Ajax’s body borne up by his son and half-­ brother (with the shield acting as a bier) gestures to the journey homeward. They eventually end up in Athens, after a detour to Cyprus, where the new Salamis is to be founded—­as was to be dramatized in the (now lost) Eurysakes by Sophocles.58 The Chorus’s perhaps deliberate vagueness as to the whereabouts of Ajax’s tomb sidelines the question of actual physical space, encouraging the spectator to forget that Troy is not Athens.59 As Henrichs suggests (1993, 169), “the choral intervention establishes the conceptual and ritual boundaries of the hero’s final resting place in no uncertain terms, and with repeated recourse to Homeric themes.” But in so far as Ajax’s burial is accomplished through performative language and with recourse to Homeric themes, how important can the specific location of his tomb be? “Evoked as a poetic construct” (170), this “tomb” reifies itself in the mind of the spectator. As they dwell on the Chorus’s ritualized heroification of Ajax, Sophocles’ audience would have been “reminded of his future tomb and of the prospect of cultic commemoration outside the dramatic boundaries of the play” (170), a prospect that by the time of the play’s premiere production had already been realized. Conclusion Within the visual vocabulary of the Sophoclean theater, weapons hold pride of place. Unlike Aeschylus, who went to Sicily, and Euripides, who spent his final years at the court of Archelaus of Macedon, Sophocles stayed in Athens

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until the end of his life, sealing his reputation as an unwaveringly loyal Athenian. His ancient biographers are especially keen on the relationship between Sophocles’ poetry and his generalships.60 And one wonders if the focus on military achievement (or lack thereof) that proves to be so central to the plot of Ajax can be traced back, however circuitously, to the playwright’s own biography. Sophilus, Sophocles’ father, is said to have been a bronze-­smith, perhaps even a sword-­maker. This biographical detail is, of course, not a literal statement of fact; such anecdotes are, in the words of Mary Lefkowitz (1981, 77), “representations of the poet’s heroic stature.”61 But even, or perhaps especially, if we treat it as fictional, such an anecdote pays homage to the centrality of weapons in Sophoclean dramaturgy. The biography of the poet, just like that of the characters into whom his poetry breathes life, derives sustenance from the sword-­maker’s craft. Taking its cue from the plays themselves, the genre of ancient biography thus confirms in its anecdotic refraction of theatrical practice the central role of props. In a live production, stage weapons communicate the rise and fall of tragic characters, giving material form to their mythical or mythico-­historical biographies. One of the most eloquent statements of this kind is Xerxes’ emptied quiver in Aeschylus’s Persians: a tiny object which the defeated king holds up to view while also gesturing to his rags (1017–­22). This empty quiver captures the inexpressible magnitude of the Persian king’s loss. In Ajax, the tensions created through the “dialogue” between the two weapons accounts in large measure for the play’s bifurcated structure and challenging message. As the sword is to the shield, so is epic to tragedy, and past to future. But because of the nature of tragic temporality, the future to which the shield points is a reality that the play’s audience can already claim as their past. Due to the mostly mythical settings of tragic plots, events that are still in the future from the point of view of a play’s tragic characters tend to be already firmly embedded features of their spectators’ lived reality. The two weapons line up with two distinct temporal planes—­and genres. The sword represents the Ajax that epic both created and destroyed; the shield best captures the Ajax of tragedy, at least for the Athenian viewing public, for whom Ajax was a near-­native hero. Each weapon transmits a different episode of the hero’s life story. Whereas the sword exerted a backward pull, reminding us of Ajax’s epic debts, and the fatal chain reaction he set in motion by allowing Hector to determine the terms of their “truce” in Iliad 7, the sakos resonates with cultic and political realities better known to Sophocles’ audience than to his characters.

6

Tragic and Tragicomic “Letters”

In her study of ancient epistolary fictions, Patricia Rosenmeyer (2001, 67) explores some of the many ways in which a letter can create meaning apart from its textual message: In Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereu­ ses, she reminds us, Valmont’s beloved responds to his letter to say that she feels their correspondence must be broken off, yet the mere act writing and sending the letter conveys the opposite sentiment. Like Valmont’s letter, tragic writing-­tablets (deltoi) can produce effects that are at odds with their verbal content, or even with the epistolary genre. As props, letters focus attention metatheatrically on the process of plotting; as communications asking to be acted upon, they make notional plotlines into performed realities, gesturing to outcomes passed over as well as to the “roads taken.”1 Iphigenia’s letter in Iphigenia among the Taurians, transcribed for her by a sympathetic Greek prisoner, brings about the recognition between brother and sister simply by being read aloud.2 Agamemnon’s letter in Iphigenia at Aulis —­the material product of his having changed his mind about sacrificing his daughter—­points up the permanent and indelible nature of his first letter, which it fails to overwrite. Phaedra’s written tablet in Hippolytus also arises out of a context of crisis: it is the heroine’s response to being overwhelmed by erōs. But it differs significantly from the other two in that its dramatic function appears to be to hide rather than to reveal its contents publicly.3 Their tragic contexts, however, belie the fact that two of these deltoi —­those in the two Iphigenia plays—­actually bring considerable comic relief to tense situations (hence the chapter title).4 The earliest documented example of a letter is a text that was inscribed on a piece of lead and found unopened in Berezan, near the Black Sea, with its recipient’s name still intact on the outside; it dates to between 550 and

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500 BCE.5 The letter’s sender was a man who was in danger of being enslaved; in the letter, he asks his son for help. As Paola Ceccarelli (2013, 38) describes it, the message is written in the present tense, thus reflecting the sender, Archilodoros’s, temporal perspective, though “later, letter writers will commonly use the so-­called ‘epistolary past’ (they will adopt the temporal perspective of the addressee).”6 The material record provides limited evidence for the development of letter writing over the century that follows,7 but the increasing acceptability of letters as evidence in legal cases (e.g., Antiphon 5.53–­56) serves as indirect testimony for the growth of the genre.8 We can assume, then, that the double-­folded wooden writing tablet was a functional if not yet entirely pedestrian artifact by the time it emerged as a dynamic presence on the fifth-­century tragic stage. Staged deltoi do not, however, offer a transparent reflection of the cultural phenomenon of letter writing in contemporary Athenian society. I say this, first of all, because the letters we shall examine tend to spotlight the hazards—­or what J. L. Austin would call the “infelicities”—­of communication, in both its written and oral forms.9 And, second, because not every deltos in tragedy can or should be assumed to be a letter: Phaedra’s deltos in Hippolytus, bears a striking resemblance to a curse tablet (a defixio) in its preemptive silencing of Hippolytus. Whatever their precise dramatic roles, tragic deltoi trigger a self-­reflexive turn in the action. The dialogues they give rise to, as we shall see, are as much about the technology and speech conventions that underlie all acts of communication, whether spoken or written, as they are attempts at decoding, committing to memory, or acting upon the purported messages inscribed in the folds of the tablets themselves. Though, as props, tablets (deltoi ) possess metonymical features, and can be understood as representatives of their class (i.e., of real-­life counterparts), their complex embedding in a tragic plot in which they are shown to assume directorial agency also frames them as a sort of metaphor for the very process of tragic poiēsis, as Isabelle Torrance has recently argued.10 Writing tablets thus speak obliquely to tragedy’s textuality. Their inscribed messages, by inciting characters to recite and interpret them, cast light on the mostly unacknowledged fact that the actor’s performance itself is predicated on a written text.11 In Euripides’ Hippolytus, Theseus describes Phaedra’s written missive, which he reads to himself on stage, as a “song envoiced in writing” (γραφαῖς μέλος / φθεγγόμενον, Hipp. 879–­80). The choice of such an expression, writes Isabelle Torrance (2010, 224), “is remarkably suggestive of the process of producing dramatic poetry itself. What is a tragic performance if not a song (poetry composed in metre) voiced (performed) through writing (i.e. a script)?” Perhaps more surprisingly, the relationship between script and performance

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can be construed as an oracular one. In Sophocles’ Trachiniae there is an “ancient tablet” (157), an artifact that, as Deianeira gradually discerns, contains the script for how her husband’s life will play out. A hidden prop of sorts, in the sense that the audience never gains certainty that it will not appear, this tablet in its absence controls every element of the unfolding drama, aligning from behind the scenes the human time of the stage action with its own oracular temporality. As a text whose telos is understood to be the enactment of its prophetic script, the hidden tablet in Deianeira’s possession provides a model for the Trachiniae itself, as a theatrical event. And, even if less overtly than Deianeira’s deltos, the actual letter-­props in Euripides’ three aforementioned dramas also call attention to the pre-­scribed nature of tragedy, serving as mise-­en-­ abîme moments where the theatrical production gives a nod, as it were, to the enabling sponsorship of the tragic playscript. There are, however, important differences in how each of these props operates in its unique dramatic environment. By using the oracular perspective offered by Trachiniae as an interpretive framework, I hope to nuance our understanding of writing in all four plays. By taking note, for example, of what the divine realm, so clearly present in Sophocles’ tragedy, contributes to our interpretation of writing in that play, it will be easier to appreciate writing’s secular cast in Euripides; it is more often than not the absence of clear signals from the gods in his plays, or the sense that a god may be misguided, that prompts human characters to take the plotting into their own hands. The deltos from Dodona in Trachiniae is a metaphor for what I call that play’s “oracular script.” It provides a divinely authored blueprint for the tragic performance—one that reveals its prescriptive force only after the forecasted events have transpired. As such, it reinforces the audience’s feeling that the tragedy must hew to and fulfill a preordained reality. Any hope they may harbor of an alternative outcome is soon enough foreclosed by this oracular setup. In Euripides, writing tablets spotlight instead the competitive heuristics at the core of the poetic endeavor. In tragedies where the direction of the plot is made to seem very much at issue, the fragile body of the deltos itself symbolizes the contest between the various forces (mythological, divine, and human) competing to wrest control over the outcome of the play from one another. Before turning to the details, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the dual nature (fluid, yet concrete) of these writing tablets. The written text can easily be conceptualized as the external manifestation of an internal state of mind. Charles Segal articulates this eloquently (1986, 81) when he writes

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that “in the fifth century the ‘graphic space’ of alphabetic writing becomes a convenient metaphor for making visible the hidden realm of the emotional life. As the concretization into solid, stable, and visual from the fluid, invisible breath of the voice’s ‘winged words,’ writing can represent the process of revealing what lies unseen within the mind.” The opposition that Segal assumes, however, between the “breath” of the spoken word and the concrete and “solid” form of the written, deconstructs itself as soon as we imagine the event of reading. For, in the act of reading out loud, the previously “concretized” words are inspired with a living voice: the written text, in other words, transforms itself once again into “winged words.”12 The mercurial nature of the deltos then—­at once solid matter and evanescent speech—­lends its dynamism to the stagecraft of dramas that incorporate material letter-­props into their action. I briefly consider Sophocles’ oracular tablet before returning to those staged letters. The Deltos from Dodona: A Hidden Prop in Sophocles’ Trachiniae The inscribed artifact that lies behind the Trachiniae as staged action is framed by the tragedy itself as its sine qua non. Straddling the divine and mortal realms, it connects the fate of Heracles to an ancient oracular pronouncement made at the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona, in northwestern Greece. As the play opens, Deianeira ponders the significance of the object, later referred to as an “ancient tablet” (παλαιὰν δέλτον, 157), that her husband has entrusted to her care.13 She first mentions the object to substantiate her suspicion that Heracles must be in serious trouble, “such is the tablet he left behind him when he set off ” (τοιαύτην ἐμοὶ / δέλτον λιπὼν ἔστειχε, 46–­47), and she wonders out loud if the very act of receiving the tablet may have been ill-­fated on her part (48). In her short life, Deianeira has already experienced a surfeit of pain, but this tablet, she suspects, bodes yet more grief. It will be another thirty lines before Deianeira describes to her son Hyllus the “trusted prophecies” that the tablet contains, but she has already implanted in the spectator’s mind the idea that this object is somehow fatefully entwined with Heracles’ nostos, and that it forecasts the different directions the plot itself could take. In leaving her the tablet, Heracles has deviated from his usual departure routine. He has had to come and go any number of times in the past but always, as Deianeira puts it, “with the intention of doing something, and not of dying” (ἀλλ᾿ ὥς τι δράσων εἷρπε κοὐ θανούμενος, 160). The tablet itself in this sense betokens Heracles’ suspicion that this time his labor will end differently.

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Although they never see the tablet as a physical entity, its hidden presence guides the audience toward a clearer understanding of the Trachiniae’s intersecting plotlines and its temporal framework. In this regard, it is comparable to the urn in Sophocles’ Electra, an object that, as we saw in chapter 4, generated considerable anticipation around its early-­forecasted appearance. The temporal framework of the Trachiniae’s script in fact converges nearly exactly with the window during which the oracle’s prediction is meant to take effect, thus intensifying the feeling that the performance as it unfurls is on a collision course with time itself. Deianeira and Heracles in their respective interpretations of the tablet’s significance alert us to this synchronicity between performance time and oracular fulfillment. While explaining to the Chorus that the tablet contains prophecies from the oracle of Zeus, Deianeira emphatically asserts that the time of the oracle’s relevance is the present. For Heracles had “pre-­appointed the time” (χρόνον προτάξας, 164) “when he would have been gone from home for three months and a year” (ὡς τρίμηνος ἡνίκ᾿ ἂν / χώρας ἀπείη κἀνιαύσιος βεβώς, 164–­65), as the moment at which he was destined either to die or to live a future free from pain (166–­68): τότ’ ἢ θανεῖν χρείη σφε τῷδε τῷ χρόνῳ, ἢ τοῦθ’ ὑπεκδραμόντα τοῦ χρόνου τέλος τὸ λοιπὸν ἤδη ζῆν ἀλυπήτῳ βίῳ. Either he was fated to die at that time or, having gotten past that temporal milestone, to live the rest of his life—­now already—­without suffering.

We can see clearly in 166 how Heracles’ abstract formulation of the god’s prediction—­that he was destined to die τότε (“at that time”)—­has become Deianeira’s present, lived reality (τῷδε τῷ χρόνῳ). The “fifteenth month after Heracles’ departure” is when he will either have made it to the “end” (telos) of the proscribed probationary period, or die.14 If he is fortunate enough to make it past this limit Heracles will live pain-­free for the rest of his mortal life. Deianeira reaffirms the urgency of the matter when she describes the present moment as “the very time when these things are destined to find fulfillment” (173–­74). The tablet is also said to have been inscribed with “covenants” (ξυνθήματα, 158) that Heracles “has never before, even when setting out on his many labors, dared to indicate” to his wife (158–­59). What are these ξυνθήματα? R. Jebb (1908, 28) thinks that the term ξυνθήματα was meant to conjure up an ancient kind of writing, perhaps because “it suited the heroic age to speak

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of writing as a mystery.” The tablet certainly contains “something mysterious,”15 and as a physical artifact it is “ancient” (157). But potentially more illuminating is the semi-­technical meaning that ξύνθημα has in other tragic contexts, where it designates a “watchword,” a signal that is to function by agreement as a cue for action.16 The nominal form, deriving from the verb συντίθεσθαι, suggests “something agreed upon.”17 We can get a clearer grasp of the noun’s semantic force from its occurrence at the beginning of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. The blind Oedipus has found his way with his daughter’s help to a sacred grove. He asks a local stranger where they are, and upon hearing that the place is “inviolable” and belongs to the “all-­seeing Eumenides” (OC 39–­42), Oedipus announces that he has come to the seat that he will never leave. Confused, the stranger asks for clarification (τί δ᾿ ἐστὶ τοῦτο; 46), to which Oedipus responds: ξυμφορᾶς ξύνθημ᾿ ἐμῆς (46). The place he has reached is the “pre-­ agreed-­upon sign” (ξύνθημα) of his misfortune that he has been instructed to watch out for.18 The broader context of his words becomes retrospectively clearer when Oedipus mentions Apollo’s prophecy. Before Oedipus was to make his final journey to Colonus, Apollo had prophesied to him that he would die when he came finally to the sanctuary of the dread goddesses (θεῶν / σεμνῶν, 89–­90). Once situated within this grove of the semnai theai (also known as the Eumenides) in Colonus, Oedipus is destined to be a source of profit to those who have welcomed him, while inflicting ruin (ἄτην) on any who try to drive him out (92–­93). From Oedipus’s recollection of the god’s words, we can deduce that the sanctuary of the Eumenides functions as a ξύνθημα in two related senses: it was preannounced as the final resting place for Oedipus but it also serves as a preordained signal to Oedipus that the rest of Apollo’s oracular speech (concerning his release from pain) will subsequently take effect. When Apollo long ago prophesied “all the evil” that Oedipus was destined to endure, he also alerted him to the temporal limits of his suffering. Oedipus would find relief after a long passage of time, and the grove of the Eumenides was mentioned as the physical marker of the temporal boundedness of Oedipus’s ordeal (i.e., his life): “He said that when I came to the final place, that that would be my resting place after a long stretch of time” (ταύτην ἔλεξε παύλην ἐν χρόνῳ μακρῷ / ἐλθόντι χώραν τερμίαν, 88–­89). And it is because Apollo has preordained his life to end in this way that Oedipus recognizes the Eumenidean sanctuary as the ξυμφορᾶς ξύνθημ᾿ ἐμῆς (46)—­we can translate this now as “the (temporal) limit of my misfortune”—­when he finally reaches it. The situations of Oedipus and Heracles are comparable in so far as each has been burdened with an excess of ponoi (toils) and yet has been privately

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informed by a god that his burden has a limit. Oedipus was given for his “watchword” a physical landmark. In Trachiniae, the oracle has been designed to count down to the present time (the “now” of the theatrical event), signaling instead a temporal terminus to Heracles’ trials. That a prophecy comes to fruition is not exactly news in the Theater of Dionysus. Rather, what continues to intrigue about this tablet is that it envelopes within its temporal compass the script carved at another time and place into the metaphorical tablet of Deianeira’s memory. It is Deianeira who likens herself to a written artifact, a receptacle for the fateful instructions the centaur handed over to her along with the love philter she will apply to Heracles’ robe in the course of the action (680–­87). The centaur’s words are seared in her mind, as hard to wash away as the writing engraved on a bronze tablet (683); moreover, Deianeira describes her recent actions, her application of the centaur’s pharmakon to a robe for Heracles, as the delayed effect of Nessus’s past utterance (688–­92).19 The lapidary quality of their inscription in her memory has preserved the perlocutionary force of Nessus’s by now ancient words.20 Deianeira explains that she has guarded the centaur’s words “as if they were an inscription, hard-­to-­wash-­away from the bronze tablet” (χαλκῆς ὅπως δύσνιπτον ἐκ δέλτου γραφήν, 683).21 The detail that the tablet is bronze “serves to emphasize,” writes Ceccarelli (2013, 204), “the hardness, the stability with which the writing has implanted itself in Deianira’s mind,” thus lending credibility to her claim to have accurately followed Nessus’s instructions. Her own actions, she assures the Chorus, are no different than if she had carried out Nessus’s prescription at the moment of its pronouncement: “as these things were told to me, so I did them” (καί μοι τάδ᾿ ἦν πρόρρητα, καὶ τοιαῦτ᾿ ἔδρων, 684). Fearing that she may be perceived as one of those “daring women” whom she despises (582–­83), Deianeira seeks reassurance from the women of the Chorus, who iterate the motto of “truth in performance,” thereby affirming the logic of Deianeira’s actions. To Deianeira the Chorus says: “If there is any trust to be had in deeds done, you seem to us not to have reasoned badly” (ἀλλ᾿, εἴ τις ἐστὶ πίστις ἐν τοῖς δρωμένοις, / δοκεῖς παρ᾿ ἡμῖν οὐ βεβουλεῦσθαι κακῶς, 588–­89). Only in the doing of the deed, in other words, can its soundness be known. While this may sound like one of the tautologies for which tragic choruses are famous, set against the oracular background of this play, the Chorus’s words take on a more targeted meaning: Deianeira, like her husband, is caught in the double bind of only being able to learn the efficacy of the centaur’s instructions by carrying them out. A few lines later, the Chorus repeats the point: “To gain knowledge, one must take action.” (ἀλλ᾿ εἰδέναι

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χρὴ δρῶσαν, 592).22 In the case of oracles, knowledge is inseparable from action; an oracle’s meaning becomes clear only when it has been fulfilled. Similarly, there can be no such phenomenon as live-­performance theater without the corporeal embodiment of the words that have been scripted for the purpose of being acted out.23 The telos of “drama” (from δρᾶν, the Greek verb meaning “do”) is in its “being done,” in the drama. The Oracle of Zeus at Dodona thus finds in Deianeira an unwitting accomplice to the fulfillment of its prophecy—­as Heracles realizes in his final moments when, ravaged by pain but still mentally lucid, he recognizes how the two oracles that he received at different stages of his life are actually one and the same. To Hyllus he repeats Zeus’s prophecy, made to him long ago, that he would die “at the hands of no-­one of those who breathe” (πρὸς τῶν πνεόντων μηδενὸς θανεῖν ποτε, 1160). Such a turn of phrase could be taken to refer, somewhat enigmatically, to an inanimate object, such as the robe that literally kills Heracles. The next line (1161), however, names Heracles’ killer as a Hades dweller.24 What posed as an enigma in the past is now a verifiable reality. Heracles has at the same time recognized the correspondence, not only of older oracles with more recent ones, but also of human action with divine speech. Moreover, the centaur’s script, as dictated to Deianeira, and Zeus’s oracular “script,” which Heracles recorded himself (ἐξεγραψάμην, 1167), have now reached a point of convergence. Having learned from Hyllus how the centaur tricked Deianeira, Heracles also realizes that Zeus’s ancient prediction dovetails with a more recent oracle. At the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, Heracles wrote down what he calls “new prophecies,” μαντεῖα καινά (1165). Heracles’ present “release from toils” (as predicted by the Dodona oracle) we now know to have been orchestrated from beyond the grave by Nessus—­thereby elucidating the riddle of the older oracle. With Deianeira acting as go-­between, Nessus, although being dead himself, has killed Heracles.25 Only in the “live performance” of Heracles’ revelation, however, have the previously abstract and enigmatic divine predictions revealed their transparent truth. It was “the many-­voiced oak” (1168) in the grove of the Selli, after all, that predicted to Heracles that in the “time that is alive and present now” (χρόνῳ τῷ ζῶντι καὶ παρόντι νῦν, 1169) he would find an end to his toils, words that Heracles now understands to have presaged nothing other than his own death. Only in death is a man’s freedom from toil finalized (1170–­72). What resonates in particular with the Chorus’s emphasis on praxis-­based knowledge (592) is Heracles’ articulation that the truth has only come out in the doing itself of the deed. Heracles’ depiction of the present time as “living time” at 1169 clearly echoes an earlier sentiment shared by Deianeira,

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regarding the synchronicity between the time when the oracle’s covenants were forecast to come true and the “time now present” (τοῦ νῦν παρόντος, 174). Both of these statements allude to the fact that oracular truths are revealed in the doing, or (to borrow from the language of theater) in the time of performance. The inscribed text of the oracle from Dodona in this sense serves as a blueprint for the theatrical phenomenon we know as the Trachin­ iae. Both oracular and theatrical scripts are recorded in advance for a future performance date, reinforcing the mutually enabling synchronicity between divine and human temporalities in the play. Writing about epitaphs, Ruth Scodel (1992b, 57) observes that “inscription is an attempt to control the speech of absent speakers.” Scodel’s formulation allocates agency to the inscription itself, through whose written medium the dead can continue to exert control over the speech of the living. As a commemorative medium, epitaphs aim at securing a good reputation for the dead by scripting eulogies that readers, their attention momentarily arrested by the monument’s visible presence, will be coaxed into reciting. The theater script can also be likened to an “epitaph” of sorts, one that relies instead, however, on actors bringing the “dead” characters temporarily back to life. Unlike the tablets to whose Euripidean stage lives I now turn, Heracles’ tablet remains a verbal construct—­what I have chosen to call here a “hidden prop.”26 The audience imagines it as a real entity, an object that could make a stage appearance at any moment. Although this does not happen, the tablet’s imagined presence just behind the walls of the palace sensitizes viewers to the oracle’s past predictions as well as to the scripted nature of what happens in the theater. Both oracles and theatrical scripts are telos-­driven, time-­sensitive contracts that only self-­actualize through performance. In this tragedy to a greater degree than in others (thanks to the deltos’s singular history) spectators are brought face to face with the oracular nature of tragic performance. Co-­opting the Plot: Phaedra’s Deltos and Aphrodite’s Revenge The three tablets that appear as material stage properties in Euripides’ Hip­ polytus, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Iphigenia at Aulis are usually referred to in the critical literature on these tragedies as “letters.” But so as not to prejudge issues of genre or interpretation, I shall refer to the objects by their Greek name (i.e., deltos), or simply as a “tablet,” or “writing tablet.” Accessible to the theatergoer only through the mediating presence of an internal on-­stage reader, these deltos props entangle the spectator in interpretive triangles of various sorts. One tablet recedes into redundancy (Iphigenia among the Taurians), another signals the inaccessible status of its inscribed text,

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which remains cloaked in its reader’s silence (Hippolytus). A third occasions a physical scuffle, hinting thereby at the violability of the plot that, like the del­ tos itself, has been conceptualized as a female body (Iphigenia at Aulis). What they have in common is their material substance and form: wooden planks sewn together to create a writing surface that folds in on itself. Phaedra’s writing tablet is closely aligned with Aphrodite’s plan to exact revenge from Hippolytus for his puritanical spurning of her.27 While it does not metaphorically instantiate the script of the entire play in the manner of the Dodona deltos, the tablet enacts a key dimension of Hippolytus’s plot: the goddess’s punishment of Hippolytus with death. As I argue in this section, however, it achieves this as a secondary rather than as a primary effect of its human author’s writing. That her written missive would end up killing Hippolytus is a consequence that was unanticipated by Phaedra herself. Furthermore, I propose that in this unintended result we can best appreciate the tragedy’s subtle exploration of agency and responsibility. We get a close-­up look at a goddess’s plan for vengeance, the mortal woman who resists it, and the material interfaces of their competing agencies. The deltos materializes the fateful confluence of divine and mortal authorial actions, but by keeping Phaedra’s actual words carefully hidden, the play reveals all too clearly how Aphrodite profits from Theseus’s misreading of his wife’s words. Theseus’s reading of his wife’s deltos has been called the first fictionalized representation of silent reading,28 but much more can be said about the scene’s staging and its importance within the drama. Why does Theseus read silently to himself, keeping Phaedra’s words in this way hidden from the audience, whereas in the Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia among the Taurians respectively, the missives of Agamemnon and Iphigenia, the two other (extant) Euripidean letter-­writers, are read aloud? The act of silent reading creates a buffer between the external spectator and the tablet, allowing for the misinterpretation that drives the second part of the tragedy’s plot to go unchecked. And while many of the play’s critics have simply treated Phaedra’s suicide and writing as acts of punitive revenge against Hippolytus, there are strong indications within the play itself, especially in Hippolytus’s praise of her sōphrosunē (Hipp. 1034), that Phaedra’s purpose in writing, as in suicide, may have been preemptive rather than retributive—­an attempt to avert disaster by disabling the potentially deadly mechanisms of gossip and slander. Today’s readers of Euripides’ tragedy tend to refer to this deltos as Phaedra’s “suicide note,” but such a nomenclature obscures the performative effect that Phaedra anticipates her words as having. Elise Garrison (1995), for example, uses the term “suicide note” loosely to refer to the places in tragedy where “death wishes” or the desire to be elsewhere are given verbal expression.29 But

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Phaedra’s writing represents more than a death wish; it is a script that has been specifically designed to silence Hippolytus. With such a purpose behind its conception, the deltos models itself rather more closely on a binding spell than on an escape song or a suicide note.30 It is usually assumed, moreover, that in writing her letter, Phaedra is as interested in avenging her unrequited desire as she is in protecting her own reputation (eukleia). In this respect, scholars have aligned Phaedra’s motivations with those of the goddess who has infected her with the disease of erōs. Or it may be that we are still viewing the extant Phaedra through the reflection of her less virtuous alter ego, the Phaedra of Euripides’ other Hippolytus. Scholars have treated the extant Phaedra as a “Potiphar’s wife,” a woman so maddened by frustrated desire that it is hard to imagine her planning for anything other than her coveted lover’s destruction.31 This, no doubt, was true to the character type of the earlier Phaedra, whose shadowy presence in this play is still palpable in our heroine’s deep and abiding concern with her reputation. Euripides, it seems, went out of his way in composing his second Hippolytus play, to create a Phaedra who would be as different as possible from the “bad woman” of the earlier Hippolytus.32 His second Phaedra is an ideal wife whose reputation for sōphrosunē manages to withstand even Aphrodite’s carefully plotted siege.33 Almost as if she were aware of what the other Phaedra had done, our Phaedra sets out to preserve her honor at any cost, and in the end, her virtue is recognized, both by the stepson whose life she has destroyed as well as by Artemis, who explains to Hippolytus that Theseus “was deluded by the plans of a daimon” (ἐξηπατήθη δαίμονος βουλεύμασιν, 1406). As we learn from the play’s prologue, Phaedra has been forced into playing a role in the goddess’s revenge plot against Hippolytus.34 The mortal woman’s weakened body and desperate fear of speaking are in themselves symptoms, both of Aphrodite’s assault on her and of Phaedra’s resistance. But even while she is being victimized by the goddess, Phaedra develops a strategy of her own for preserving an honorable reputation for both herself and her children. Phaedra concedes that she has been beaten by “bitter erōs” (727). She recognizes that her death “on this day” (726) will delight Aphrodite, but Phaedra draws consolation from the thought that in dying, as she says, “I will become a kakon to another” (ἀτὰρ κακόν γε χἀτέρῳ γενήσομαι / θανοῦσ᾿, 728–­29).35 Read in isolation, her language could be taken as a statement of intent to punish Hippolytus. Like other tragic characters who curse their enemies as they themselves are dying, Phaedra regards death as a source of agency.36 Phaedra does not merely foresee that Theseus will release from his mouth an ὀλοὸν κακόν (883–­84); the circumstantial participle θανοῦσα

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in line 729 has a causative force. It is in and through her death that Phaedra will become a curse. Death here furnishes the means by which Phaedra will transform herself into a κακόν, enabling her to control the speech-­acts of others from beyond the grave. It is important, however, to read Phaedra’s words in context, paying close attention to the purpose clause in which Phaedra spells out fully her motivation (725–­31): ἐγὼ δὲ Κύπριν, ἥπερ ἐξόλλυσί με, ψυχῆς ἀπαλλαχθεῖσα τῇδ’ ἐν ἡμέρᾳ τέρψω· πικροῦ δ’ ἔρωτος ἡσσηθήσομαι. ἀτὰρ κακόν γε χἀτέρῳ γενήσομαι θανοῦσ’, ἵν’ εἰδῇ μὴ ’πὶ τοῖς ἐμοῖς κακοῖς ὑψηλὸς εἶναι· τῆς νόσου δὲ τῆσδέ μοι κοινῇ μετασχὼν σωφρονεῖν μαθήσεται. I know that in giving up my life on this very day I will delight the one who destroys me: Aphrodite. And I will have been beaten by bitter erōs. But I, in turn, by dying will become a curse to another, so that he may learn not to gloat over my misfortunes and by sharing in this disease of mine, he will learn to practice sōphrosunē.

Notice first of all that Phaedra acknowledges Aphrodite as her destroyer; she does not blame Hippolytus. She anticipates, moreover, that the goddess will take pleasure in her death (ἐγὼ δὲ Κύρπιν . . . τέρψω). “Revenge is sweet,” says Aristotle in the Rhetoric (καὶ τὸ τιμωρεῖσθαι ἡδύ, 1370b29), for it is a kind of victory and “victory is pleasant not just to ambitious people, but to all” (καὶ τὸ νικᾶν ἡδύ, οὐ μόνον τοῖς φιλονίκοις ἀλλὰ πᾶσιν, 1370b31–­32). Aristotle’s reasoning here taps into the popular ethos of “helping friends and harming enemies” that informs the actions of many characters on the tragic stage.37 In the prologue of Sophocles’ Ajax , for example, Athena encourages Odysseus to laugh at the spectacle of Ajax’s self-­destruction (79): “Isn’t it the greatest pleasure of all to laugh at your enemies?” (οὔκουν γέλως ἥδιστος εἰς ἐχθροὺς γελᾶν;), she asks him. By the same token, if Phaedra had regarded Hippolytus as an enemy to be vanquished we might have expected from her some proleptic expression of enjoyment as she anticipated his demise.38 Phaedra ascribes the pleasure of revenge to Aphrodite but she crafts her own “curse” in very different language. She speaks of learning and of self-­restraint (sōphrosunē), eschewing the pleasure-­infused rhetoric of revenge. Phaedra’s goal is not to avenge a prior humiliation but to influence Hippolytus’s future behavior, and in this respect she projects a purpose for her death that mirrors the magical effect of a binding spell.

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More specifically, Phaedra articulates the hope that her death, while bringing harm, will teach Hippolytus not to gloat over her misfortunes (729–­30) and that by sharing in her “disease,” he will be taught sōphrosunē (σωφρονεῖν μαθήσεται, 731). What, then, would it mean for Hippolytus “to share in this disease”? Given the common conception of erōs as a disease and the abundant manifestation of this metaphor in the first half of the play,39 it certainly seems as if Phaedra is plotting to make Hippolytus fall in love with her.40 While she has experienced the failure of the Nurse’s rhetorical appeals to Hippolytus, Phaedra does not reject absolutely the notion of deploying magical means to win his affection. We never of course get any concrete sign that her plans have evolved in this direction, but the wording of her “death wish,” as it were, is intriguing to say the least. As Christopher Faraone (1999, 81) notes, binding spells work by “forcing their victims to do something against their will.” Whether it is explicitly erotic in nature or closer to the pattern of the judicial curse, Phaedra’s rhetoric suggests that by turning herself into a kakon she hopes to induce Hippolytus to adopt a disposition alien to his nature; her words gesture to the need to make him honor his oath, despite the likelihood he intends to break it. The perversity of Aphrodite’s revenge—­the fact that she has afflicted Phae­ dra but not the true target of her anger with the “disease” of erōs  —­has long puzzled critics, but the indirectness of her strategy proves purposeful: Hippolytus is, in the end, also caught in the web of desire.41 If not enamored of the living Phaedra, he at least shows her the respect of keeping her secret in death. And in his agōn with Theseus later in the play, he forsakes the opportunity to save his own life, choosing (or being bound) instead cryptically to praise his stepmother’s self-­control. “For although she did not possess sōphrosunē,” Hippolytus claims, “she exercised sōphrosunē” (ἐσωφρόνησε δ᾿ οὐκ ἔχουσα σωφρονεῖν, 1034). Here Hippolytus’s “inchoate wisdom,” as one scholar has put it,42 in fact precisely echoes Phaedra’s own language, where she articulated her wish that Hippolytus would learn sōphrosunē (σωφρονεῖν μαθήσεται, 731). “Hippolytus’s statement,” observes Froma Zeitlin (1996, 253), “seems to fulfill her prediction to the letter—­and in the letter.”43 Given the subtle interplay between speech and sexual desire that pervades this play, as well as tragedy’s traffic in verbal paradox more generally, it should hardly come as a surprise that sōphrosunē turns out to be about—­but not exclusively about—­sexual self-­control.44 Phaedra’s last words, σωφρονεῖν μαθήσεται, do not constitute a threat to divest Hippolytus of the kind of sōphrosunē for which he has publicly won renown (e.g., “resistance to illicit desire”). If we interpret Phaedra’s words within the broader context of her all-­consuming, obsessive concern with reputation (eukleia), we will see that

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Phaedra is here predicting the performative effect her death and her writing will have: Hippolytus “will learn to exercise verbal self-­restraint” (σωφρονεῖν μαθήσεται); he will not, in other words, reveal to Theseus his wife’s secret.45 For Phaedra, sōphrosunē, like so much else in her world, is language-­driven and logocentric; it is an ethical term with particular valence in the realm of logoi. Such an analysis of Phaedra’s use of this term has the additional benefit of demystifying Hippolytus’s own cryptic statement about his past failure to exercise sōphrosunē: “Although I was capable, I did not use it well” (ἡμεῖς δ᾿ ἔχοντες οὐ καλῶς ἐχρώμεθα, 1035). Whereas previously Hippolytus had equated sōphrosunē with chastity, here he adopts Phaedra’s understanding of the term as his own. Hippolytus is not confessing to a crime of passion that he did not commit, although this is how his words must sound to Theseus’s ears. Misled by his wife’s writing which, it is worth emphasizing, never gets read aloud and is therefore unknowable to the audience, Theseus invokes his special relationship to his father Poseidon to punish his guiltless son. This does not mean, however, that Phaedra herself is responsible for what Theseus has done to Hippolytus. If anything, Hippolytus fully exonerates her from even the suspicion of having been involved in his death. For in a bizarre but dramatically satisfying reversal of positions, Hippolytus credits Phaedra with having achieved his ideal of sōphrosunē, in so far as she has resisted in her death the desire with which Aphrodite had sickened her: “She was chaste, despite not being able to be chaste” (ἐσωφρόνησε δ᾿ οὐκ ἔχουσα σωφρονεῖν, 1034). He blames himself, furthermore, for not having met her standard of sōphrosunē: ἡμεῖς δ᾿ ἔχοντες οὐ καλῶς ἐχρώμεθα (1035). The very threat of breaking his oath, Hippolytus seems to concede in this line, as well as his subsequent invective against women, constituted precisely the verbal assault—­ the lack of verbal self-­restraint (sōphrosunē)—­against which Phaedra felt compelled to defend herself. It is this (lack of) sōphrosunē for which Phaedra admonishes him when she says σωφρονεῖν μαθήσεται (731). In the later scene with Theseus, Hippolytus confirms that Phaedra’s prediction has come true. When he concedes that he failed to exercise sōphrosunē despite having had the capacity to do so (1035), Hippolytus rebukes himself for the reputation-­destroying discourse that drove Phaedra to extreme measures. But in honoring his oath as well as his stepmother’s eukleia, Hippolytus presently proves that he has—­as Phaedra performatively anticipated that he would—­finally learned sōphrosunē. Radiating an almost magnetic force, Phaedra’s deltos serves as a concrete node for the interpretive complexities that confront viewers of Euripides’ Hippolytus. It becomes the center of theatrical attention, functioning as a

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surrogate for her body, which is almost forgotten after Thesus picks up the letter.46 Simultaneously speechless and, at least to Theseus’s ear, shouting out accursed things (877), the tablet also embodies the paradox of voiceless voice. Despite being fashioned out of seemingly inert substance, it is possessed of a performative kind of logos that the human characters in this play can only dream of. It forces one speaker to release from his mouth a deadly curse, while in turn preventing another from speaking up in his own self-­defense, modeling through its range of performative effects the power of the theatrical script to elicit breath and life from otherwise mute characters. Alfred Gell’s approach, which we adapted to our reading of the agency of Hector’s sword in chapter 1, can help us appreciate what the materiality of Phaedra’s tablet contributes, without simply reducing the object to its textual message. It is precisely the object’s un-­readability—­its opacity to the viewing public—­that gets emphasized in the scene’s staging. We have a clear sense that Phaedra’s agency has in some way produced this material artifact. Borrowing Gell’s vocabulary, we would say that Phaedra’s agency can be “abducted” from the tablet, meaning that the existence of its originator (i.e., Phaedra) can be inferred from the object’s material presence.47 But this is not the same as asserting that Phaedra qua originator is in every way responsible for the tablet’s actions in the world. Objects in certain situations instigate actions independently of their makers/users, and thereby acquire a kind of animacy. Such an animacy is evidenced in the stage interaction between Phaedra’s tablet and its internal reader, in the scene where Theseus notices for the first time the object attached to his wife’s body. “What in the world could this deltos suspended from her dear hand possibly be? Does it wish to signal something new?” exclaims an astonished Theseus (τί δή ποθ᾿ ἥδε δέλτος ἐκ φίλης χερὸς / ἠρτημένη; θέλει τι σημῆναι νέον; 856–­57). In ascribing to the tablet the wish “to signal” (σημῆναι) to him, Theseus has already endowed the object with voice and will. In calling it a “song envoiced in writing” (γραφαῖς μέλος / φθεγγόμενον, 879–­80) he gives greater specificity to the quality of its voice, which is audible only to his eyes.48 In Theseus’s description of its verbal contents as a melos, the tablet inches yet further away from the textual indictment whose validity may be affirmed or refuted through the rational scrutiny of elenchus. Melos indicates a register of incantatory speech that is capable of enchanting its listeners in ways very different from normal (i.e., constative) utterances. The Furies who sing a binding song over Orestes refer to their humnos also as a melos, in Aeschylus’s Eumenides 329.49 Faraone (1985, 152) has demonstrated, moreover, that these Erinyes, who are portrayed as “litigants in a forthcoming murder trial,” actually make use of verbal formulas familiar from defixiones, for example, by

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“binding the phrenes” of their victim (Eum. 327–­33 = 341–­46). In Euripides, melos more than once stands for the magical melody through which Orpheus swayed forces of nature not normally subject to human persuasion.50 It is important to keep in mind the incantatory potential of melos illustrated in these examples. Just as the Furies deploy a “binding song” against Orestes, Phaedra may also be exploiting magical means to protect herself in what she projects will be a forthcoming trial. But, I reiterate, her projected vision of how the tablet ought to function is not necessarily coextensive with its measurable effects. Let me summarize what has been obtained by disentangling Phaedra’s authorial intentions from the tablet’s action. In so far as Theseus takes the tablet’s inscription as compelling proof of Hippolytus’s violation of his marriage bed, the deltos can be said to have caused Theseus to curse his son. Theseus also invokes Poseidon as the divine enactor of that curse and this god’s agency is later indexed in the fulfillment of Theseus’s speech-­act.51 While Phaedra’s agency as the tablet’s author can be inferred from its being attached to her body and sealed with her sphragis (which Theseus recognizes) we can not simply extrapolate from Theseus’s reaction to it Phaedra’s intentions regarding the tablet’s action(s). Separating out Phaedra’s agency from that of her tablet allows us to imagine a dramatic situation in which Phaedra has encoded the tablet with a message that seeks to silence Hippolytus and punish him for his arrogance, though it is read by Theseus as a strong provocation to destroy his son. If we were not already predisposed to regard Phaedra’s intentions toward Hippolytus as vindictive, this would perhaps present itself as the most likely scenario. Suppose that the tablet does contain a direct or indirect accusation of rape—and, given my contention that its inscription is inaccessible to the audience, this hypothesis cannot be ruled out: I would still want to maintain that this false accusation serves Phaedra as a mechanism of self-­defense rather than as cruel and unusual punishment of her stepson’s piety. An exploration of the cultural milieu in which curse tablets were commissioned and inscribed will round out our view of the tablet’s stage persona, allowing us to weigh the object’s effects on its reader in light of its author’s projected intentions for it. r e a d i n g p h a e d r a ’ s d e lt o s a s a d e f i x i o In the Greco-­Roman world, defixiones were deposited in places of maximal contact with the underworld. Although it is frequently cited, David Jordan’s definition of defixiones as “inscribed pieces of lead, usually in the form of

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thin sheets, intended to bring supernatural power to bear against persons or animals” may also be criticized for making too much of medium.52 The fact that the majority of extant curse tablets are written on lead is an accident of survival, and not necessarily an inherent feature of the defixiones themselves, although sympathetic magic did make use of the intrinsic properties of the material inscribed.53 More important is the contact that the tablets were intended to initiate between the worlds of the living and the dead. Plato (Resp. 364c) describes how itinerant magoi (“enchanters”) offered their services to prospective clients who sought to boost their chances of a victory in court through magical means; but it is just as likely that many defendants in the classical period would simply have written their own curses, for “the act of flattening out a soft piece of lead and then scratching a name into it certainly did not require much more effort or technical skill than inscribing a potsherd for a vote of ostracism.”54 The judicial curse tablets, once inscribed, were then deposited in places of maximal contact with the underworld. Of those tablets whose find spots can be identified, about half come from tombs and cemeteries, many of them buried in the graves of those who had recently died in an “untimely” or “violent” manner—the aōroi or the biaio­ thanatoi.55 “The concept is an old one,” as Graf (1997, 150) notes, for “these beings appear already in the texts found on curse tablets from classical Athens.” It had long been thought that the tablets were deposited in or near tombs so that the dead could serve as messengers, ferrying the curses to underworld divinities who would then act upon their directives. Sarah Johnston, however, ascribes to the dead a more active role. Observing that the gods who are most frequently invoked in the classical period—Hecate, Hermes, and Per­ sephone—­were known to have “special control” over the dead, Johnston argues that these gods were not expected to fulfill the curses directly but rather to mobilize the dead into performing them.56 In support of her thesis is the fact that by far the most desirable destinations for curse tablets were the tombs of the aōroi and the biaiothanatoi.57 The liminality of these “restless dead,” as well as the lingering bitterness they were imagined to feel, made them ideal candidates to do harm to the living. The biaiothanatoi as a category comprise those who have died before their allotted time, whether because of plague, disease, murder, execution, or from suicide.58 Phaedra’s untimely and violent death not only qualifies her to be classified among the biaiothanatoi, it yields insight into the mechanism of Hippolytus’s future tongue-­tied performance. With the advantage of hindsight, we can see Phaedra’s prospective view on her “dying” (at 688) as implying a causal connection with the “new words” that she also mentions in this same line.59 I would even argue that Phaedra’s

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rhetorical juxtaposition of these two factors—death and logos—­plants the suggestion in her listener’s mind that she is cognizant of the illocutionary force that her suicide will impart to her “new words.” Despite the genre’s commerce in violent death, it is rare for characters in tragedy to be explicitly named as biaiothanatoi, and the combination of some form of θνῄσκειν with the adverb βιαίως occurs in only two extant plays. The infrequency of such language makes it all the more significant that Hippoly­ tus is one of those plays. The Trozenian women of the Chorus lament their mistress’s death in the presence of Theseus, addressing her as βιαίως θανοῦσ᾿ (814). The other example is in Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, where Orestes, in interpreting his mother’s dream, sees himself in the snake that has drawn blood from Clytemnestra’s breast (548–­50). Since, as he says, his mother has raised a serpent as her own child (ὡς ἔθρεψεν ἔκπαγλον τέρας, 548), she is also destined to die a violent death (δεῖ τοί νιν . . . θανεῖν βιαίως, 548–­49). In being killed before her time through an act of violence, Clytemnestra not only fits the profile of the biaiothanatos herself, she is also represented as the victim of the restless agency of another biaiothanatos—the husband she violently felled before his allotted time. In fact, the editions of Aeschylus’s Choephoroi that print the restored lines from Aristophanes’ Frogs as Choephoroi 1–5 (e.g., West 1991 and Sommerstein 2008) actually contain a direct mention by Ores­ tes that his father “was destroyed violently by a woman’s hand” (βιαίως ἐκ γυναικείας χερός . . . ἀπώλετο, 3b–­c).60 We never meet Phaedra’s ghost on stage as we do Clytemnestra’s in the Eumenides, nor are we led to expect Phaedra’s return from the dead in the same way we suspect that Agamemnon’s restless spirit could rise from his tomb in the Choephoroi. Nevertheless, the Chorus’s designation of Phaedra as a βιαίως θανοῦσα renders the restless agency of the violently dead (biaio­ thanatoi ) a suggestive cultural context within which to read her suicide and its eventful aftermath. Such a context also offers a way of accounting for the tablet’s striking placement, in close proximity to its author’s dead body. Theseus, as we saw, describes Phaedra’s tablet as “suspended from her hand” (ἐκ φίλης χερὸς / ἠρτημένη, 856–57), a detail that has inspired critics to comment on the visual dimension of Phaedra’s entanglement with her own words. Loraux remarks that the tablet reproduces Phaedra’s own physical aspect, hanging from her hand as she hangs from the rafters of her bedroom ceiling.61 Zeitlin (1996) adds that when Hippolytus gets caught up in the reins of his own horses, he “suspends” his body backwards with the same verb with which Phaedra’s tablet hangs from her wrist (1222). “This entanglement,” writes Zeitlin, “results directly from the tablet that Phaedra has wrapped with sealing cords and that Theseus must unravel (exelixas) to read its message”

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(1996, 225). While Zeitlin and Loraux both explore entanglement as a literary topos, neither ventures into more historically grounded interpretations of the binding theme.62 First, a thought on the tablet’s placement: we may suppose that there could be a pragmatic reason, underlying the symbolic ones just mentioned, for Phaedra to attach the tablet to her hand. That defixiones were frequently buried with the untimely dead is reason enough to suspect that Phaedra’s suicide is being exploited for a similar purpose. How better to guarantee that her curse derive agency from her death than to bind the tablet to the hand that wrote it? This suggestion becomes more compelling when we take into account an intriguing piece of archaeological evidence. Two defixiones (Peek Kerameikos, Fluchtafeln 3 and 6 = Jordan, SGD 1 and 2), which are now housed in the Kerameikos museum in Athens, were discovered in graves that can be dated to the fifth century BCE.63 One of these (SGD 1 = Peek 3) is described by Jordan as cursing “more than twenty men and women and often their tongues and souls as well.”64 Especially interesting is the unusual find spot of these defixiones. Each one was found carefully wrapped and placed in the right hand fingertips of the skeleton whose grave it shared—a clear sign of the belief that the tablet would derive agency from the body itself and that the dead person was in some fundamental way entrusted with performing the defixio.65 In the case of the archaeologically recovered curse tablets, we have to imagine a scenario somewhat different from the one being played out on Eu­ ripides’ stage. Clients would take their tablets, either professionally inscribed or self-­made, to the graves of the recently deceased, searching for those whose violent deaths rendered them suitable candidates for enacting curses. In burying her tablet in such a grave, a prospective defendant sought to channel the ghost’s restless energy against the person whose name supplied the desired target of whatever type of binding action had been prescribed, whether in writing or as a verbal performative. All of this presupposes that the dead were able to read these tablets, identify their targets, and afflict them with the prescribed malady. In the case of Phaedra’s tablet we have no explicit verbal reference to a verb of binding. But Phaedra’s physical posture—­her hanging from a noose, with the tablet bound to her hand—is in itself a nonverbal performance of a similar type, one that could be read as having been designed to divest Hippolytus’s future logoi of their power to harm her. By enacting the physical effect of his “noose of words” on her body, Phaedra has preempted and in this way also deactivated Hippolytus’s threat. Moreover, the tablet’s placement points not only to the site of violent agency, but also indicates its new

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direction. Phaedra’s hand, the source of violence that was in the first instance self-­directed, now, if we are reading her body language correctly, lends its agency to the words inscribed in the tablet that is bound to it. As in the case of Agamemnon who died brutally at Clytemnestra’s hand, one violent death spawns—­or, where curses are involved, enables—other acts of violence. But we must also consider Theseus’s role. Theseus stands as an intermediary between Phaedra as “client” and Hippolytus as “target,” and in this sense he occupies the same middle ground as the biaiothanatoi. He reads Phaedra’s text and lets it direct his uncontainable anger against his son. The tablet would not have found such a cooperative reader in Theseus were it not for the co-­ presence of Phaedra’s corpse, the shocking sight of which prompts Theseus to take immediate action. Phaedra’s body in fact is present throughout the agōn, like evidence at a trial, and in this regard, Theseus and Phaedra share between them the role of the biaiothanatoi with their restless agency. I’m not proposing a one-­to-­one correspondence between the mechanics of a judicial defixio and the stage role of Phaedra’s tablet. But if we look beyond the precise verbal formulations of binding spells, we will notice that their goal, broadly stated, is to harness the volatile emotions that underlie agonistic judicial performances in such a way as to bolster the defendant’s chances of winning. Binding the tongue and mind of a said opponent is a concise formula for expressing and enacting this desired goal. But the same end—victory for the defendant—can also be achieved in less direct ways, for instance, by putting the plaintiff verbally on the defensive, or making him the target of the strong emotions (especially anger) that he had expected to channel against his opponent. In just this way, Hippolytus finds himself on the receiving end of the slander and opprobrium he had threatened to unleash against Phaedra. Every mention of the tongue in Hippolytus flirts with the possibility of dangerous, reputation-­destroying speech. Phaedra is the first to mention the tongue as something not to be trusted (γλώσσῃ γὰρ οὐδὲν πιστόν, 395): for when the tongue translates the mind’s thoughts into speech, it “acquires by its own doing the greatest evils” (αὐτὴ δ᾿ ὑφ᾿αὑτῆς πλεῖστα κέκτηται κακά, 397). Hippolytus threatens to make good on Phaedra’s statement during a conversation with the Nurse that Phaedra overhears. “My tongue has sworn,” he says, “but my mind is unsworn” (ἡ γλῶσσ᾿ ὀμώμοχ᾿, ἡ δὲ φρὴν ἀνώμοτος, 612). This celebrated line took on a life of its own in antiquity, being parodied thrice in two extant plays by Aristophanes.66 From Aristotle (Rhetoric 1416a 28–­34) we learn that a certain Hygiainon even used Hippolytus 612 during an antidosis trial against Euripides, citing it as evidence of the playwright’s impious character.67 Although Hippolytus later promises to abide by his original oath (656–­60), the threat of the violation of the oath lingers, and the strategy

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that Phaedra shortly thereafter adopts in order to safeguard her reputation bears the imprint of this threat. If he were to break his oath, Phaedra’s phronēmata, the thoughts she had tried to keep secret by not speaking, would indeed have become so much grist in the mill of her critics’ slandering tongues. The discourse about the tongue and its defamatory capabilities is reprised in the agōn between Theseus and Hippolytus, where once again it appears probable that Hippolytus will break his oath of silence. Shortly after his entrance on the scene, Hippolytus reprimands his father for what he misconstrues as his “light-­hearted” tone (923–­24). Barrett’s translation (1964, 340) of these lines perfectly captures the unselfconscious irony of the speaker’s words: “But this is no time, father, for subtle talk: I fear your troubles may have made your tongue run wild” (δέδοικα μή σου γλῶσσ᾿ ὑπερβάλλῃ κακοῖς, 924). Hippolytus still has no clue just how wild his father’s tongue has run, not having been present for Theseus’s cursing of him just minutes before his arrival. Theseus’s tongue has been loosened by the very same “troubles” that will keep Hippolytus’s tongue tied up. Some fifty lines later, when he has realized the gravity of his situation, Hippolytus finds himself unable to speak in his own self-­defense. Hippolytus begins his rhesis at line 983 with a trope well suited to the defendant at a trial; he plays up his own lack of rhetorical skill, particularly his ineptitude at speaking before a large crowd.68 As many have noticed, Hippolytus’s language comes from the courtroom and creates a forensic context for the agōn between him and his father.69 But the familiar forensic language comes to an abrupt end when he makes an unusual declaration, at 990–91: “Nevertheless [i.e., in spite of being an inexperienced speaker] necessity— the arrival of misfortune—forces me to let loose the tongue” (γλῶσσάν μ᾿ ἀφεῖναι). This locution—“to let loose the tongue”—is highly unusual for the orator, but it recalls Hippolytus’s earlier equivocation about his tongue’s being sworn (ἡ γλῶσσ᾿ ὀμώμοχ᾿, 612) and at the same time echoes something Phaedra had said, in the context of reviling adulterous wives.70 How could such women, she wondered, not fear that their bedroom walls might “let loose a voice” (μή ποτε φθογγὴν ἀφῆι, 418)?71 Phaedra says φθογγή rather than γλῶσσα (a term reserved for articulate human speech), but she makes a similar point: the voice, once released, exposes shameful behavior. Hippolytus concludes with the piously intoned opinion that “it is not permissible for me to say more” (ἐμοὶ γὰρ οὐ θέμις πέρα λέγειν, 1033), falling back on the language of ritual propriety to explain his refusal to speak about why Phaedra killed herself. Theseus has every right to be puzzled by Hippolytus’s tongue-­twisted and opaque speech, for he is ignorant of the earlier oath of silence his son swore in the Nurse’s presence, an oath whose binding

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power may now be reasserting itself with Hippolytus’s reluctance to say more. In so far as Hippolytus articulates a reason for his silence, that reason appears to be the ritually binding authority of the oath. However, neither Hippolytus nor Theseus is fully aware of all the facets of Phaedra’s plotting. The audience is in a position to weigh both factors and to recognize in Hippolytus’s refusal to speak about the cause of Phaedra’s death the combined effects of his oath and her tablet. Inscribing your opponent’s name on a lead tablet, perhaps along with a binding curse, and then depositing the rolled up tablet in a grave—preferably the grave of someone who had died young and violently—is certainly not how you would seek to gain the upper hand in a trial today. But if we are to believe the archaeological record, judicial curse tablets were a fairly common part of life for Athenians of Euripides’ generation.72 “We must now begin to consider the likelihood that commissioning a curse tablet against prospective judicial proponents was a regular feature of the legal process in the Greco-­ Roman world,” John Gager (1992, 178) wrote over twenty years ago. Faraone (2002, 91–92) similarly concludes that the “Athenian courts [were] . . . sites of intense competition where perjury and binding curses are typical weapons which citizens used to attack each other.”73 In light of such insights into Athenian legal practices it is appealing to reconsider the deltos in Euripides’ Hippolytus as an object with performative resonances that echo those of the curse tablet. Scholars used to believe that judicial defixiones were post-­trial “revenge curses” until Richard Wünsch (1900, 68) demonstrated that all the curse formulas seemed to point to a future event. The conclusion reasonably followed that defendants deployed the curses before (or, at any rate, during) a trial. Their function was to influence the outcome of events.74 One of the strongest arguments for viewing Phaedra’s tablet as a defixio is its preemptive function as an object poised, like the defixio, to influence the future, rather than to enact punitive measures for past injuries. Phaedra knows that her reputation depends wholly on what people say about her. Hippolytus puts her good name in jeopardy when he threatens within range of her hearing to break the oath of silence that he has sworn to the Nurse. Consequently, Phaedra develops a plan that is aimed, primarily, at inhibiting the free flow of Hippolytus’s blame speech. Theseus, as the reader of the tablet, becomes the medium through which Phaedra is able to gain a rhetorical advantage over her opponent. As we have seen here, the cornerstone of Phaedra’s defense strategy is to subject her own potential accuser to precisely the kind of slander, or innuendo, that she fears from him. That the agōn of this play is conducted like a

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trial is not a new observation, but until now there has been no attempt to read backwards from the juridical turn of events to the planning stages of Phaedra’s self-­defense. The supposition that she sees herself as preparing for an upcoming trial gains credibility from Artemis’s observation that it was “for fear of falling into an elenchus ” (εἰς ἔλεγχον μὴ πέσῃ φοβουμένη, 1310) that Phaedra wrote her misleading text. In the case of Phaedra’s tablet, we have only circumstantial evidence pointing us in the direction of its status as a judicial curse. But a brief comparison between the “stage life” of Phaedra’s tablet and that of the other two writing tablets that achieve stage roles will demonstrate just how different Phaedra’s writing is. We have examined three features that, in my view, compel us to regard Phaedra’s text as some form of a “preemptive judicial strike.”75 First of all, like the commissioners of judicial curses, Phaedra is a defendant seeking desperate measures to avoid losing what is most precious to her—her reputation.76 The primary aim of the judicial curses is to foreclose the possibility of a victory for the plaintiff rather than to avenge that victory after the fact, and in this regard the judicial curse offers an attractive model for Phaedra’s writing, which likewise seeks to shape the future rather than to avenge the past. Second, in aiming to control the plaintiff’s court performance, commissioners of judicial curses frequently target the tongues of their antagonists, the tongue being the body part responsible for speech and therefore the plaintiff ’s most valuable asset during the trial. Phaedra, too, greatly fears the damage Hippolytus’s tongue may do her, and in conceiving of a defense strategy she has been concerned to minimize his ability to speak. Third, it was common practice for clients to deposit their completed curse tablets in the graves of the recently and violently dead—the biaiothanatoi. It is therefore perhaps not entirely incidental that the Chorus refers to Phaedra as βιαίως θανοῦσα (“having died violently”) at 814. But just as we will never know what, precisely, Phaedra wrote inside her tablet, it is also impossible to know whether she would have approved of having that tablet labeled a defixio (or κατάδεσμος). Within the fictionalized world of the play, however, there are a striking number of indications that that is what Phaedra’s tablet is. The tablet, I suggested at the beginning of this section, is instrumental to the revenge plot set into motion by the goddess in the prologue. But we can now appreciate that this object also represents Phaedra’s last-­gasp effort to shield herself, and her name, against the defamatory effects of her incestuous infatuation. In this respect, the prop is caught in the crosshairs of Aphrodite’s desire for revenge, on the one hand, and Phaedra’s commitment to sōphrosunē, on the other. It is an apt expression of Phaedra’s heroic if not

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entirely successful circumvention of her divinely (and, one might also add, mythically) scripted end. Mythical imperatives and the binding force these exert on characters’ actions will take center stage in the next section, where I consider the letters of Iphigenia and Agamemnon in Euripides’ two Iphigenia tragedies. Epistolary Dysfunction in the Iphigenia Plays Iphigenia’s deltos in the Iphigenia among the Taurians, originally inscribed for her by a former Greek captive, has been stored in the temple of Artemis, awaiting a courier. Iphigenia describes it as a product of pity (ἥν τις οἰκτίρας ἐμὲ / ἔγραψεν αἰχμάλωτος, 584–85), the pity that this captive felt for her because she, as the priestess of the Taurian Artemis, was tasked with sacrificing him. The tablet is poised to extend its “pity” to yet another Greek captive, as soon becomes clear when Iphigenia reveals her plan (λόγον, 578) to her current captives—Orestes and Pylades—who have traveled to the land of the Taurians to bring Artemis’s statue back to Greece and are not yet recognized by Iphigenia, nor she by them. The tablet, which contains an appeal in Iphigenia’s own voice to Orestes to come rescue her, will travel with one of these two, earning its fare by exempting from sacrifice whoever brings it to Argos; the other will have to be sacrificed. The question of who is to become its courier embroils the prop in a recognition subplot—one that drew Aristotle’s praise—and, relatedly, in an intense discussion about the nature and obligations of  “friendship” (philia).77 Orestes and Pylades, their hands bound, are led by silent extras to Iphigenia, who will sacrifice them, as the Chorus announces (at 456ff.). After learning that one of her captives is from Argos, she comes up with a “plan” (578) that will allow her to have her letter delivered; she goes to fetch the letter from the temple (643) and returns (725), introducing the object, curiously, as “many-doored” (727): “Here are the many-doored folds of the tablet” (δέλτου μὲν αἵδε πολύθυροι διαπτυχαί), she says, addressing the strangers as she reenters the playing area. The description is odd, as most writing tablets are depicted as having only two leaves. Indeed, πολύθυρος “can be understood as modeled on δίθυρος, a term that could be used of the two leaves of a tablet,” suggests Ceccarelli (2013, 228). Yet the choice to emphasize these additional “leaves” is surprising and probably significant.78 Ceccarelli (2013, 228) associates the idea of “many doors” with the “reformulations of the mythical legacy”: the fact that “Euripides is giving new shape to traditional material” may mean he wishes to stress the notion of “alternative outcomes.”79 I would add that the notion of more than one door is surely significant in a rewriting of

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the Oresteia trilogy. The claustrophobic domination of the playing area in the Agamemnon by the one central door of the palace is here being counterpoised by the proliferation of “doors” through which the children of Agamemnon are plotting their escape. And as readers of the play have long recognized, the tablet accomplishes its purpose faster and more directly than its sender could have imagined. Although she has entrusted her message to the written medium of the deltos, Iphigenia recites her communiqué verbatim so that its courier may commit the contents to memory (should the letter get lost). It is a convenient pretext, as others have noted, for revealing the tablet’s message, and thereby prompting Orestes’ recognition of his sister. Iphigenia begins by speaking to Pylades, the chosen courier. However, as soon as she announces the letter’s recipient, telling Pylades to report to “Orestes, the son of Agamemnon” (ἄγγελλ᾿ Ὀρέστῃ, παιδὶ τἀγαμέμνονος, 769)—she has, unwittingly, invited the unrecognized Orestes into the conversation.80 Keeping to good epistolary form, Iphigenia begins by stating her own name, as the letter’s sender (770–71): Ἡ ’ν Αὐλίδι σφαγεῖσ’ ἐπιστέλλει τάδε ζῶσ’ Ἰφιγένεια, τοῖς ἐκεῖ δ’ οὐ ζῶσ’ ἔτι. The one who was sacrificed at Aulis sends these things, Iphigenia, alive, although to those there she is no longer living.

But before she can continue, Orestes intervenes, responding to what Iphigenia has just said as if she had been speaking to him directly: “But where is she? Has she come back from the dead?” (ποῦ δ’ ἔστ’ ἐκείνη; κατθανοῦσ’ ἥκει πάλιν; 772). Orestes here articulates the very question that theatergoers probably had in mind when they heard Iphigenia introduce herself in a similarly paradoxical fashion—in the prologue.81 With her recitation interrupted, Iphigenia replies to Orestes’ question, only then resuming her reading (773–­76): ἥδ’ ἣν ὁρᾷς σύ· μὴ λόγων ἔκπλησσέ με. Κόμισαί μ’ ἐς Ἄργος, ὦ σύναιμε, πρὶν θανεῖν, ἐκ βαρβάρου γῆς καὶ μετάστησον θεᾶς σφαγίων, ἐφ’ οἷσι ξενοφόνους τιμὰς ἔχω. She’s the one you’re looking at; but don’t distract me from what I’m saying. “Bring me back to Argos from the barbarian land, oh my blood brother, before I die, and free me from the goddess’s slaughters, over which I have the stranger-­killing honors of presiding.”

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As soon as Orestes recognizes the woman reciting the letter as his long-­dead sister, he interrupts a second time, with more impassioned questions, despite her sharp “Don’t distract me from what I’m saying!” He cries: “Pylades, what should I say? Where in the world have we found ourselves?” (Πυλάδη, τί λέξω; ποῦ ποτ’ ὄνθ’ ηὑρήμεθα; 777). What makes Iphigenia’s recitation effective theater—and here I pick up on Anne Pippin Burnett’s (1971, 54) observations about the scene’s “inspired ‘play-acting’ ”—is her adherence to a script that has been rendered obsolete. This letter, once believed to be her only hope of salvation, has become the obstruction to the siblings’ reunion. Iphigenia’s insistence on reading it through to the end is now the only thing keeping her from recognizing that the brother she addresses as if he were still far away is standing right beside her. Orestes’ impatient interruptions, moreover, highlight the artificiality of the epistolary form and its inappropriateness to the present context. The information in the letter is already well known to the audience. As Iphigenia recites the essential details of her post-Aulidian biography, the listener is free to focus instead on the scene’s skillful dramaturgy. Orestes’ confusion gives way to shock and recognition of his long-dead sister, while she, oblivious to his growing dismay, continues reciting. The familiarity of certain key turns of phrase, in the meantime, trigger recognition of another sort. Especially provocative is the question Orestes poses at 772: “But where is she? Has she come back from the dead?” At the start of her letter, Iphigenia had introduced herself with pointed irony as “the girl slaughtered at Aulis” (ἡ ’ν Αὐλίδι σφαγεῖσα, 770), mimicking the rhetorical strategy of the prologue where, in the first person, she introduced herself as the child of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. She, the speaker, is the one “whom my father sacrificed to Artemis for Helen’s sake, or so he thinks, in the famous vales of Aulis” (ἔσφαξεν Ἑλένης οὕνεχ’, ὡς δοκεῖ, πατὴρ / Ἀρτέμιδι κλειναῖς ἐν πτυχαῖσιν Αὐλίδος, 8–9). This, of course, presents the audience with a paradox: If Agamemnon slaughtered his daughter for Helen’s sake, how can the speaker, who claims to be the sacrificed daughter, be telling her own story? By line 28 Iphigenia explains that a deer was substituted for her at the last minute, and that she was safely conveyed to the land of the Taurians, from which location she presently speaks. But before Iphigenia qualifies her introductory remarks, there is no way of knowing whether she is alive or dead. The prologue speaker of Euripides’ Hecuba was a ghost, after all (Hecuba’s murdered son, Polydorus). The only hint that this is not the direction in which Iphigenia’s revelations are headed is the parenthetical ὡς δοκεῖ (8), which she inserts into the same line where she relates that Agamemnon slew her, or so he thinks.

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If one already knows the version of the myth in which Iphigenia is rescued by Artemis (as transmitted to us by Proclus’s summary of the Cypria), then the ὡς δοκεῖ serves to delineate the relevant story line: a last-­minute substitution has saved Iphigenia, who speaks from the safety of her exile among the Taurians.82 But now consider the text of her letter (783–87): λέγ’ οὕνεκ’ ἔλαφον ἀντιδοῦσά μου θεὰ Ἄρτεμις ἔσωσέ μ’, ἣν ἔθυσ’ ἐμὸς πατήρ, δοκῶν ἐς ἡμᾶς ὀξὺ φάσγανον βαλεῖν, ἐς τήνδε δ’ ᾤκισ’ αἶαν. αἵδ’ ἐπιστολαί, τάδ’ ἐστὶ τἀν δέλτοισιν ἐγγεγραμμένα. “Tell him (i.e., Orestes) that having substituted a deer in my place the goddess Artemis saved me, whom my father sacrificed, thinking that he was driving the sharp blade into me; but she (i.e, the goddess) settled me in this land.” This is my message, this is what has been written inside the folds.

In these lines Iphigenia reveals how it is possible for the “one who has been sacrificed in Aulis” to author a letter. She also adopts the spatiotemporal perspective of the sender (not that of the addressee). Because of the goddess’s last-­minute substitution, her father, although believing (δοκῶν) that he has plunged his sharp sword into his daughter’s flesh, has in reality only slaughtered a deer. The δοκῶν in 785 directly echoes the prologue’s ὡς δοκεῖ (8). Iphigenia’s written description of Artemis’s role in saving her repeats almost word for word her description of the same events in the prologue: the same phrase—ἔλαφον ἀντιδοῦσά μου (28)—occurs in both contexts (cf. 783). As for the girl’s migration to the land of the Taurians, compare μ᾿ ἐς τήνδ᾿ ᾤκισεν Ταύρων χθόνα (30), with ἐς τήνδε δ᾿ ᾤκισ᾿ αἶαν (786). Even the deictics match up. The epistolary τήνδε captures the letter writer’s spatial perspective, but for the theater audience it also sounds like a nearly exact quotation of her prologue speech. Hearing Iphigenia recite from a written text words that she has already spoken at the play’s opening conjures a fleeting sense of déjà vu, and this is only heightened by having had Orestes model for the audience their own initial perplexity at the paradox of the sacrificed, yet still speaking, child of Agamemnon. What does the echoing signify? I venture that the spectator who is attuned to the repetitions in Iphigenia’s language will begin to question the temporal sequence of the two speeches. The audience first hears Iphigenia tell of her survival in the prologue. When she repeats this information in summary form in her letter, it sounds as if she is quoting to her internal audience (i.e., Orestes and Pylades) what she told the theater audience at the beginning of the play. There is, however, the inescapable fact that the letter

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must be imagined as having been in the temple for a good deal longer than the time that has passed since the beginning of the play. Clearly, the letter pre-­dates the prologue speech. The letter was notionally already in the temple long before the opening sequence of the tragedy. Like the oracular script of the “ancient tablet” from which the Trachiniae  itself emerged, Iphigenia’s letter is a sort of miniaturized version of the play. It is the axis around which the tragedy’s two main story lines (recognition and escape) converge, for once she has been recognized, Iphigenia will plot and ingeniously orchestrate her own, her brother’s, and Artemis’s escape. Linking the recognition scene to what came earlier is the letter’s own verbatim echoing of the prologue. Only when you hear the letter’s text recited in the recognition scene do you realize that these were the words with which Iphigenia introduced herself in the prologue.83 The letter in this sense presents itself as the script of that earlier speech, a speech that appeared to have been spontaneously spoken at the time, but that was already contained in miniature in the folds of the long-­stored-­away tablet, first introduced to us as δέλτου . . . διαπτυχαί (727). Should we perhaps also hear the tablet’s folds proleptically echoed in the “famous folds of Aulis” (κλειναῖς ἐν πτυχαῖσιν Αὐλίδος, 9) where Iphigenia says she was sacrificed? As a prop that reflects on a smaller scale some of the central dramatic and temporal complexities of the play as a whole, this tablet qualifies as a mise en abîme—a literary figure of speech that relates iconically to the work in which it is embedded.84 Although it has gained most notoriety as a recognition token, the tablet’s stage presence registers its effects variously as an epistolary text, a recognition token, and a theatrical script. With its resistance to simple categorization, the tablet attests to the subtlety and self-consciousness of Euripides’ artistry. Designed to make absent authors “present” in epistolary form to their readers, letters must be written on material sufficiently durable to withstand the wear and tear of long-distance travel.85 Anxiety about the circumstances of her tablet’s journey creates a pretext for Iphigenia to read her letter aloud, and through this reading, to reveal her identity as Orestes’ sister. Even before Iphigenia launches into a recitation of her letter, she ponders out loud the risks involved in having the tablet transported to Argos. What if Pylades encounters stormy seas or other natural disasters? She circumvents this disastrous scenario by having him memorize the text of her message. That way, “even if the writing should disappear at sea,” she tells him, “by saving your body you will save my words” (ἢν δ᾽ ἐν θαλάσσῃ γράμματ᾽ ἀφανισθῇ τάδε, / τὸ σῶμα σώσας τοὺς λόγους σώσεις ἐμοί, 764–65).86 In the event that

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Pylades himself survives, he could still convey her message, despite the letter’s disappearance. With epistolary communication, any feat of persuasion, exhortation, or consolation a letter might be expected to perform is predicated on the physical integrity of the material on which it is inscribed. If all goes well, the letter delivers its inscribed message silently (αὐτὴ φράσει σιγῶσα τἀγγεγραμμένα, 763). If not, it may still be preserved on the “tablet of the mind” of its messenger. Either way, as she emphasizes above, Iphigenia’s message will require the survival of the body of its human purveyor. We are made most aware of the tablet’s corporeality when we are invited to contemplate its—­and its messenger’s—dissolution. Similarly, the formal conventions of letter writing get articulated most clearly through an infelicitous application of the technology. Letters are designed by their lightness and mobility to facilitate communication at a distance. The epistolarity of Iphigenia’s letter demands our attention precisely because she is reading aloud words that should (ideally) speak in their own voice silently to the reader (763). Because she is reciting a text that her audience cannot see, Iphigenia includes aural cues that clearly mark where the letter proper begins.87 She says to Pylades, by way of preface (760–61): “Everything that has been written down and is contained in the folds of the tablet I will tell you, so that you may report it to my friends” (τἀνόντα κἀγγεγραμμέν᾿ ἐν δέλτου πτυχαῖς / λόγῳ φράσω σοι πάντ᾿ ἀπαγγεῖλαι φίλοις). She will give an account in speech (λόγῳ φράσω) of the written words. She concludes with similar precision: “These are my injunctions. This is what has been written in the tablet” (αἵδ᾿ ἐπιστολαί / τάδ᾿ ἐστὶ τἀν δέλτοισιν ἐγγεγραμμένα, 786–87). Iphigenia uses deictic, verbal cues. She is transforming a visible text into an aural one, relying on pronouns acoustically to orient her listener to the letter’s visual dimensions. The tablet’s material presence underlines the mechanics involved in the production of dialogue on stage, a seemingly weightless, unmediated phenomenon. It would have been easier to grasp from the performance of this scene that Iphigenia’s speech and behavior were dictated by the tablet from which she was reading. But even beyond creating an impression of realism—­ beyond, that is, giving Iphigenia a “real” text from which to recite—the letter’s material presence on stage directs the viewer’s focus to the normally overlooked technologies of communication that enable drama. Real letters do not draw attention to their own epistolarity. The conventions that would have come off as completely natural in the eyes of a letter-­reader appear stilted and forced when they are upheld through viva voce recitation. Iphigenia’s letter in

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this way exposes to view the scriptedness of this small piece of the play (and the similarly worded prologue), while the illusion of spontaneity—of “real” action and adventure—gets sustained elsewhere. t h e “ra p e” o f t h e t a b l e t i n i p h i g e n i a at a u l i s The letter writer’s inability fully to control the circumstances of his or her letter’s reception takes a somewhat different turn in Iphigenia at Aulis. This play opens on Agamemnon’s tortured efforts to rewrite an earlier letter whose message he now regrets. As he confides to his old servant, his first letter (already dispatched) urgently implored Clytemnestra to send their daughter, Iphigenia, to Aulis, promising marriage to Achilles as a ploy. But having now reconsidered his earlier willingness to sacrifice his daughter, Agamemnon burns the midnight oil while he “rewrites” (μεταγράφω, 108) what has already been sent.88 The content of either letter might easily have been communicated through a human messenger alone. The epistolary form, however, fully dramatizes Agamemnon’s struggle to retract his earlier communication. Both letters in this respect reveal their author’s impotence in the face of the material autonomy of the deltos, for while the first arrives at its destination before it can be intercepted, the second letter—the one represented by a prop—falls narrowly short of its goal of countermanding the first; before it can do this, it is intercepted and read by Menelaus. In the prologue we are introduced to writing as process, as we watch Agamemnon physically wrestling with the tablet and other writing implements (35–42). From the old man’s reference to the tablet as τήνδε (36) we can be fairly certain that Agamemnon is handling a visible prop. He is caught in a negative feedback loop, writing, erasing, rewriting, then sealing and unsealing the same letter over and over again. Agamemnon even hurls the wooden object (πεύκην, 39) to the floor and sheds tears, as if the deltos itself were the source of his frustration. The textual tradition, moreover, on which we depend for interpreting Agamemnon’s “revision” may itself be the product of substantial revision and interpolation; the play was likely left unfinished at Euripides’ death in 407/6 BCE, and was produced for the first time posthumously in 405 BCE.89 The external medium of Agamemnon’s letter (i.e., the double-­folded material deltos) is a platform onto which Agamemnon projects the inner turmoil of his indecision about whether or not to sacrifice his daughter. Later in the play, when the product of his midnight labors has been intercepted, the tablet stands in as a surrogate for the body of Iphigenia herself. Apart from being the focal point of the conflict between Agamemnon’s public and private

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selves that is provoked by Calchas’ dire prophecy, the tablet raises questions about the violability of his daughter’s body, which ought to remain “sealed” until marriage. Page duBois (1988) has analyzed the deltos as a metaphor for the female body that revises, in the light of the growth of literacy and written texts over the course of the fifth century, the older metaphor of the woman as arable field:90 The newer metaphor marks the final logical moment in this process, a metaphor that emphasizes the passivity and receptivity of female interiority, that assumes that the mover of the stylus, the inscriber, the literate male who carves and marks the passive medium, alone has the power to generate the marks of the text, which will proliferate not on the tablet itself, but in the mind of the reader, who will again, himself alone, inscribe a new text on a tablet that has been erased, scraped clean.91

The deltos, a metaphor for “female interiority,” becomes the receptacle for the male stylus, much as the earth is for the plow, but without its naturally generative capacity. Once released into the world, the deltos, a passive object at the moment of its inscription, takes flight. No longer under the guardianship of its author, it requires a sphragis (seal) to protect its written contents until it is safely in the hands of its designated reader. Authentication of a letter’s contents is an essential part of the contract between the letter-writer and letter-reader. In a face-­to-­face encounter, the authenticity of spoken words can be confirmed through visual and aural cues, but the reader of a silent text whose author is absent has to rely on cues of a different kind. The Old Man in the Iphigenia at Aulis asks Agamemnon how he will be received as trustworthy when he delivers the king’s second letter to his wife (153–54). Agamemnon’s answer is simple: “Guard the seal that you carry on this tablet right here” (σφραγίδα φύλασσ᾿ ἣν ἐπὶ δέλτῳ / τῇδε κομίζεις, 155–56). Clytemnestra’s recognition of this sign will secure the letter’s authenticity in her eyes. The marks (tupoi ) impressed into the wax that seals the tablet guarantee the authorship of the writing that precedes it (much like a signature), in the same way that the distinctive sound of a voice will guarantee the source of spoken words.92 When Agamemnon affixes a seal to his letter—as indicated by the verb σφραγίζειν (38), he ensures that the tablet will remain unopened and unread until it reaches Clytemnestra, or if it has been opened and read, that this violation of trust will be evident. The affixing of the seal would normally be the author’s final gesture before entrusting his letter to the care of a courier. At the other end of the journey, when the letter reaches its reader-­designate, the seal serves to authenticate the tablet’s source.

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It is a visible proof for the letter-­reader that the letter is just as it has been inscribed by the owner of the sphragis. Whether it is affixed to a deltos or to a container of some kind, the sphragis is designed to prevent tampering. We might compare Deianeira’s sealing of her poisonous gift to Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, and her explanation to the herald Lichas, who will deliver her robe to Heracles, that the mark of her seal ring is a sign (σῆμα, 614) that her husband will easily recognize, “being on the circle of the seal” (σφραγῖδος ἕρκει τῷδ᾿ ἐπὸν, 615).93 Its intactness testifies to the onlooker that whatever is “sealed” inside has not been accessed; its dislocation or removal would suggest the opposite. The seal can also have a sexual connotation. In Agamemnon, when Clytemnestra asks the Herald to convey to her newly returned husband that she has been faithful during his long absence, she says that he will find her in his house, a trusty guard-­dog, just as he left her. She exploits the imagery of the sphragis to strengthen her rhetoric. Tell my husband, she says, “that I have not broken his seal in all the length of time” he has been away (σημαντήριον / οὐδὲν διαφθείρασαν ἐν μήκει χρόνου, 609–10). The implications of Clytemnestra’s metaphor are clear. The wife’s body is itself a vessel to which the husband alone has authorized access. In leaving for war, Agamemnon expected his wife to remain “sealed” until his return. Turning now to the scene of the letter’s interception in the Iphigenia at Aulis, we find the deltos prompting a barrage of verbal insult and physical jostling more commonly encountered on the comic stage. On his way to Clytemnestra the Old Man has been ambushed by Menelaus, who wrests the letter out of his hands and reads it. “You had no right to open the deltos I was carrying,” shouts the slave at 307, to which Menelaus predictably retorts that he should not have been carrying “evils to all the Greeks” in the first place. When Agamemnon enters the fray at 325, disturbed by the fracas unfolding at his gates (317), he deploys language that echoes his slave’s, and castigates Menelaus for his unauthorized reading: “Did you rip open the seal and learn what you have no business knowing right now?” (ἦ γὰρ οἶσθ᾿ ἃ μή σε καιρὸς εἰδέναι, σήμαντρ᾿ ἀνείς; 325). This question comes at the climax of a physical tussle between the other two for possession of the tablet, and Agamemnon’s appearance barely gives them pause. On the surface this three-­way tug-­of-­ war—highly unusual for tragedy—is about who controls the tablet’s written message, but at a deeper level it is concerned with what the prop symbolizes, namely the pristine body of Iphigenia. Not coincidentally, the “seal” imagery is equally appropriate for both bodies—that of the girl and the tablet. Moreover, each, as a material variant on “the pubic triangle (like a delta) to be sowed/inscribed,” evokes the other.94 Just as the seal is meant to protect the

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tablet from prying eyes, a girl is “sealed” until her wedding night, and there­ after metaphorically sealed by her fidelity to her husband, the only authorized “reader” of her deltos. In the struggle over the deltos, therefore, the two brothers in this scene are shown to be rather comically—though consequentially—dueling for ownership of Iphigenia. The false promise of marriage that Agamemnon earlier exploited as a ploy to lure his daughter to Aulis adds a further layer of irony. “Marriage” is what this second letter seeks to put on hold, before it is brutally ripped open. And marriage, remember, is the culturally sanctioned mechanism for “unsealing” girls. That Menelaus, in breaking open the seal of Agamemnon’s tablet, has committed an act of “rape,” is affirmed by the Old Man’s outraged reaction. Crying out that Menelaus has “seized” (ἐξαρπάσας, 315) the deltos from his hands, the Old Man uses a verb—ἁρπάζειν—that in other contexts is explicitly associated with sexual violence; the speaker adds that this has been done “forcefully” (βίᾳ, 315), for good measure. The semantics of verb and noun together imply sexual transgression, as we can ascertain from near contemporary sources. “The speaker in Lysias I,” writes Rosanna Omitowoju (2002, 54) “uses bia to contrast with peitho to describe rape rather than seduction (Lys. I.32.2).” Boisterously built up, the erotic subtext of the scene as a whole—and here we must supply with our visual imagination the potentially comic touches of this burlesque physical encounter—culminates in Agamemnon’s accusation that his brother has “broken open the seal” of the letter (σήμαντρ᾿ ἀνείς, 325).95 The Chorus of Agamemnon describes the dreadful moment when Aga­ memnon decided to sacrifice his daughter as follows: “Once he got under the yoke of Necessity” (ἐπεὶ δ’ ἀνάγκας ἔδυ λέπαδνον, 218), Agamemnon’s mind was made up and his “mind shifted to all-daring thinking” (τὸ παντότολμον φρονεῖν μετέγνω, 221). What the earlier play depicted as an internal struggle Euripides has transposed onto the physical realm of the acting area, making expressive drama out of the cerebral activity of deliberation. Each letter, the first invisible and the second written and intercepted, represents a different phase in Agamemnon’s thought process. Trying to come to terms with his change of mind, Agamemnon defends his decision—and his daughter— against Menelaus’s verbal and physical assault. Such an externalization of the mind’s tropes and self-­torments is enabled by the material presence of the prop, which turns the usually interiorized process of cogitation into visible drama. In the struggle for the tablet being waged by the two brothers there can also be seen a metapoetic contest for control over the play’s plotline. Will Aeschylus’s version of  Iphigenia’s story win out? Will she be sacrificed? Or will things take a different turn? Perhaps there will be a divine rescue or

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even a heroically minded virgin who embraces self-­sacrifice. In the stalling of narrative momentum that the scuffle itself enforces we are given the chance to pause and reflect on the various possibilities for plotting that are packed into this scene, and to appreciate how the prop itself highlights the contingency of what is by signaling what almost was. There is no divine blueprint for the action of the Iphigenia at Aulis, nor does Artemis’s demand for appeasement, as reported by Calchas, have the binding force it did in Agamemnon, which was produced over fifty years earlier. In the meantime, audiences will have watched an Iphigenia, who is rescued from slaughter at the last minute, in turn rescue her brother and the statue of Artemis from the land of the Taurians in Euripides’ other Iphigenia. In Iphigenia at Aulis, the final play in a long and rich sequence of Oresteia spin-offs, Agamemnon decides to take matters into his own hands and, ignoring the oracle’s demands, sets out to save his daughter’s life—with a letter. Conclusion Writing can facilitate communication at a distance, but it also creates complications, interesting and messy dramatic complications. Enlisting silent readers and intercepted texts, the deltos is a prop whose potential to revolutionize how plays got plotted and performed we have considered here. Within the tragedies surveyed, characters use writing to pursue the agendas they themselves desire, or feel compelled to see enacted. But as stage objects, the tablets also gesture more allusively to the writing that underpins tragedy as an artistic medium. All the deltoi we have examined in this chapter at some level echo the disaster narratives of their real-world counterparts. Hitting a lugubrious middle ground between the mundane and the mysterious, Phaedra’s tablet emblematized the difficult balancing act the playwrights were engaged in as they translated the timeless plots of the heroic age into a contemporary language and material idiom. The fictional world of Greek tragedy was receptive both to social and political developments as well as to technological advances, such as writing and coinage, that were not strictly in keeping with the mythical, in illo tempore settings favored by the genre. While the appearance of any writing whatsoever could by this criterion be considered anachronistic, our survey of inscribed tablets has shown that the story is not quite so simple: the ancient tablet on which Heracles wrote “covenants” (ξυνθήματα, 158) from the oracle of Zeus at Dodona in Sophocles’ Trachiniae is certainly not an intrusion from the fifth-­century marketplace of letters.

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The letters of Euripidean drama, moreover, do not illustrate the normative practice of fifth-century BCE letter-writing but rather its tragic and, in certain cases, comic perversions. Each tragic tablet is embedded in a unique set of circumstances that complicate its transmission from the author to his or her intended reader. In Hippolytus, Phaedra’s tablet aims to silence a third party, but Theseus’s silent misreading of her text drives the proceedings in a deadlier direction. Who, ultimately, is responsible for Hippolytus’s death? Can Phaedra be blamed for resisting, with a preemptive strike, the disease with which Aphrodite has threatened her good name? Although they are meant to ease communication between distant friends or relatives, the letters intercepted, read, and rewritten in the two Iphigenia plays highlight instead the dangers and the dramas of miscommunication. With its infusion of burlesque gestures and comic tonal registers, Agamemnon’s second letter-­prop in the Iphigenia at Aulis creates a surge in the intensity of the acting resulting, as we saw, in a brief power-outage that, by interrupting the flow of the action, turns the spotlight back on tragic poiēsis itself.

Epilogue

In Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart (2007, 15–­16) observes that “politics starts in the animated inhabitation of things. . . . The first step in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react.” Wherever there is an object on stage, there is an event. But it is not just in the physical objects themselves that “animated inhabitation” can occur but also in the mind’s eye of those conceptualizing what objects are capable of, what their accountability is for the actions in which they have become entangled. Antiphon’s second tetralogy is concerned with a weapon that, for all intents and purposes, is being put on trial, even though the identity of the man who hurled the homicidal javelin is already known. Composed of a set of paired speeches, the tetralogy addresses the question of who—or what—is to blame for the death of a boy, killed after he ran out onto a field where youths were practicing javelin-­throwing. The plaintiff, the dead boy’s father, maintains that the javelin-­hurling youth is guilty of unintentional homicide, but the defendant, who is the father of the accused, sketches a different scenario. He argues that the murder weapon is to blame. The boy, moreover, is also to blame because he “ran under the trajectory of the javelin and placed his body in its path” (2.4).1 Since his peers stood by on the sidelines, the boy’s behavior can be considered idiosyncratic and ill-­advised. The question of guilt in this case comes down to one of error (hamartia). Are the object’s actions vindicated by the fact that other bystanders sensibly stayed out of its way? A similar debate about the agency of objects can be found in Plutarch’s Pericles 36.3. Indeed, in citing this as a parallel for Antiphon’s second tetralogy, Gagarin and MacDowell (1998, 30) note that “after a competitor was killed in a similar situation, Pericles and Protagoras spent an entire day discussing

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whether the javelin or the thrower or the organizers of the contest were responsible for the death ‘according to the most correct argument’ (logos).” The scenarios sketched in both Antiphon and Plutarch are fictional, to be sure, for the tetralogies were never actually performed in a court of law. They were composed instead as rhetorical exercises in forensic argumentation. As such, however, they offer an important window onto how questions of agency were being framed, as well as how the boundaries of personhood were rhetorically conceptualized and challenged.2 The speaker of Demosthenes 23 summarizes the roles of the four different homicide tribunals at Athens (the Areopagus, the Delphinium, the Palladium, and the Prytaneion), and referring to the latter, he says (23.76): “Its function is that, if a man is struck by a stone, or a piece of wood or iron, or anything of that sort, falling upon him, and if someone, without knowing who threw it, knows and possesses the implement of homicide, he takes proceedings against these implements in that court.”3 The prosecutor does not tell the members of the jury anything they do not already know. But for modern readers, the description of such homicide trials may come as a surprise. If objects can “perform” in real life, in however ritualized or anecdotic ways, then they can do so a fortiori in the imagined and constructed world of the tetralogy or the dramatic stage. Little wonder, then, that tragedies feature animated weaponry, fabrics that cause humans fatally to misstep, and recognition tokens which reveal a royal family’s long-hidden secrets, to recall just a few of the objects whose stories and actions we have investigated. Even Aristotle, by most accounts a writer committed to the appeal of a well-­crafted plot more than to a play’s visual effects, in the ninth chapter of his Poetics relates a curious detail, the kernel of a potentially fascinating tragedy: The statue of a murdered man named Mitys falls by chance one day on Mitys’s murderer, killing him while he gazes up at it.4 For Aristotle, the statue’s timely action provides a fine example of how even among causally disconnected events those that seem to happen by design are thaumasiōtata, most wondrous. More than this Aristotle does not say. Yet the anecdote itself invites deeper reflection on the dramatic potential of objects. Were there perhaps less familiar ways (ways uncharted by Aristotle and his successors) to produce “wonder” on the tragic stage? If Mitys’s statue had fallen in the course of a tragic performance, would spectators have considered its action deliberate? Would they have inferred that the dead man’s restless spirit was acting through his material likeness? What manner of agency is, after all, responsible for the death of Mitys’s murderer? Mitys’s “revenge” appeals to our sense of poetic justice, but it also provokes awe precisely because a statue—a thing normally considered devoid of

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mind and free will—has behaved as if it had agency of its own. This intrusion of personhood where we least expect it brings an otherworldly dimension to an otherwise unremarkable sequence of crime and punishment. Murders that leave nothing to the imagination do not hold theatergoers in their grip. What makes the death of Mitys’s murderer potentially the stuff of tragedy is that the statue’s action seems to bear a causal connection to what came before.5 Yet the fact that the statue did not and, rationally speaking, cannot have deliberately chosen its victim, or even have had a victim in mind, leaves much to the imagination. The murder “weapon” is poised on the cusp of different realities. So, too, are many of the props whose agencies the previous chapters explored. Midway through Sophocles’ Ajax, the hero impaled himself on his sword, its physical presence on stage conjuring in the viewer’s mind the complex epic prequel that had, in some sense, predestined Ajax for this tragic end (chapter 1). Ajax, however, was also known to Sophocles’ audience as a protector of Athenian interests. His statue stood in the Athenian Agora; he had a temple and a festival on Salamis; he was named one of the ten eponymous heroes of Athens after Cleisthenes’ re-division of the Athenian people into ten tribes (508/7 BCE). More than merely acknowledging the coexistence of these two Ajaxes or even juxtaposing them, Sophocles’ tragedy actively forges a narrative link between them, relying at least in part on the language of props to do so. The two props, sword and shield, represent two rather different dramaturgic phenomena. The sword operates metonymically, drawing the spectator back in time, while the shield challenges the limits of fictionality. Positioning itself as “tragedy” next to the sword’s “epic,” the shield points toward Ajax’s ascendancy in democratic Athens—an Athens whose valorization of the collectivity of its (hoplite) citizens vests this material artifact with a distinctly political resonance (chapter 5). From weapons of war, to textiles, recognition tokens, receptacles, and writing tablets—tragic characters involve themselves in high-­risk ventures of various sorts simply by coming into contact with objects. In several instances, human protagonists find their “decisions” upstaged by the artifacts themselves. Agamemnon of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon stood on the threshold of his own household, as much a victim of his wife’s wheedling words as of the unexpectedly seductive red fabrics that he was coaxed into treading. Reanimating the material presence of the fabric itself, our discussion emphasized how markedly the physical prop influenced Agamemnon’s actions. When one considers the visually striking, sensorily complex tapestry, as well as the economic language in which it is verbally couched, a significantly dif-

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ferent understanding of the power play between the two lead human characters emerges. These fabrics continue to haunt the House of Atreus throughout the Ores­ teia trilogy, but also in subsequent tragedies centering on the return and revenge of Orestes. Chapter 2 was, in this respect, foundational for the chapters that tracked the post-­Aeschylean fates and intertheatrical afterlives of the children of Agamemnon (in both Electra plays among others). Props afford playwrights a chance to reconfigure the dramatic tradition they have inherited, a tradition that in certain cases can be visually captured on stage by a single artifact. A prop such as the urn in Sophocles’ Electra signals where the current tragedy inscribes itself into the earlier sequence of Electra plays while it also actively reshapes that sequence (chapter 4). In Euripides’ Ion and Electra, tokens were the hidden actors governing the metaphors by which humans make sense of themselves and their relationship to the larger civic community. The tragic recognition scene revealed its poetic but also its political cast in Euripides’ Electra, where through their pointed absence, the tokens gave expression to a strikingly contemporary (i.e, fifth-­century) ideology of citizenship (chapter 3). In the same chapter we considered how the recognition scene in Ion presents the performance of recognition as always already a re­ performance. The notion of reperformance was also central to our survey of the stage lives of writing-­tablets whose inscribed texts are designed for future recitation, just like the playscripts of tragedies (chapter 6). Figured as one moment in the oracularly predicted future—as a telos —performance would have to be a singular event. Figured as a playscript that can be endlessly reenacted, performance becomes open-­ended and infinitely renewable. This is one of the many paradoxes to which tragedy often returns.

Notes

Introduction 1. On tragic costume, see Wyles 2010; and Wyles 2011, 46–­60 and 88–­89. 2. See Pucci 1998, 27–­48. There is a growing literature on intertextuality in Greek drama: see especially Dobrov 2001, Dunn 2010, Telò 2010, Whitmarsh 2013, and Torrance 2013. For a more general discussion of the state of intertextual play in the field of classics, see Baraz and van den Berg 2013, 1–­8. 3. See, e.g., Marshall 1999–­2000, 329. 4. By performance, I mean “actions that people train to do,” their “restored behavior,” as Richard Schechner (2002, 22) defines it. 5. Wiles 2000, 32; compare Revermann 2006b on the “competence” of theater audiences. 6. See Revermann (2006a, 32) on the textual bias of classicists, and Mastronarde (2010, 45) on balancing the “literary” and “non-­literary” (political and social) sides of tragedy. 7. While I use “object” and “artifact” synonymously, without implying anything about their visible materiality, “prop” does usually entail the embodied presence (or imminent presence) of a stage object. Strictly speaking, there is no Greek word with the same semantic profile as “property,” or “prop,” though skeuē, the word used for baggage, equipment, or simply “gear,” comes closest. In the context of the Greek theater, it refers primarily to the material aspects of an actor’s costume. In a compound form, i.e., skeuopoios, it means “mask-­maker.” Aristophanes’ Knights has a skeuopoios who is unwilling to craft a “Cleon” mask, and Aristotle in his Poetics 1450b18–­20 differentiates between the art of the “prop-­maker” (skeuopoiou technē) and that of the poet. On props and scenic effects more generally, see Dingel 1967 and 1971; Taplin 1978, 77–­100; Csapo and Slater 1994, 268–­74; Ley 2006, 25–­29, and 2007a; Revermann 2013; and Tordoff 2013. 8. On the choregeia and other financial matters relating to drama, see e.g., Wilson 2000 and 2008. 9. Carlson (2001, 4) builds here on Barthes’s crucial insight, cited above. 10. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 11. Discussion of the staging of these lines dates back to antiquity, with comments by a scholiast suggesting that, in Hellenistic reenactments of this scene, no prop was used. Willink (1986, ad loc.) takes this to imply a contrast with the precedent of bow-­giving in Stesichorus (PMG 217), rather than with pre-­Hellenistic productions that employed the stage prop of a bow.

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For the argument that the scene as originally staged did include a real, not an imaginary, bow, see Kovacs 2002. 12. See Chaston 2010 for an approach to reading tragic stage props informed by cognitive science. 13. In an influential edited volume, Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece, Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke (1998, 5) challenge the “privileging or bracketing of a self-­contained realm of art within society, which an old-­fashioned historical approach to literature maintains, with its carefully articulated foreground and backdrop, the text and its context.” In their view, works of art are fully integrated in a society’s institutional structures and operate as sites “for the ongoing negotiation of power relations within society.” 14. On Schechner’s notion of performance as a restored behavior, see note 4 above. 15. Semiotic approaches to theater trace their origins to Ferdinand de Saussure’s insights into the structures underpinning language. An individual word (parole), according to Saussure, acquires meaning only through its difference from all other words in the same system (langue): for example, “hat” (the sign) signifies hat (the referent) because it is composed of material phonemes and written signs different from those in “shoe,” “coat,” and so on. A prop similarly owes its signifying potential to its unique position within the entire system of theatrically coded signs to which it belongs. Its referential function may vary, however, depending on its changing relationships with other objects and actors during a performance. “The danger of a linguistic approach to theater,” as States (1985, 7) cautions, “is that one is apt to look past the site of our sensory engagement with its empirical objects.” 16. Bakker 2010, 153. Each of these pronouns can also function as an adjective. 17. See, further, chapter 1 for a more in-­depth examination of the sword’s performative role in this speech. The convention in drama, both tragedy and comedy, for introducing a new character who is just entering the playing space is to use the first-­person deictic ὅδε. Once the character has been introduced, he or she will be referenced with one of the other two deictics, either the hearer-­oriented οὗτος, or the third-­person ἐκεῖνος. 18. This is sometimes called the “anaphoric” use of the deictic, on which see further Felson 2004 and Bakker 2010, 157. 19. See the remarks of Tordoff (2013, 99) on irrecoverable props. 20. As Gay McAuley (2000, 184) describes the shifting perspectives that can place the same prop in a different light, “the object itself is unchanged”; whatever transformations it undergoes in the course of a performance therefore “requires the imaginative participation of the spectator.” Chapter One 1. Even representations of objects on vases acquired a sort of enhanced presence through labeling. On the François Vase, to take just one example, labels are used for all kinds of figures, “even for inanimate objects such as fountains and seats,” as Robin Osborne (1998a, 95) observes. 2. According to Pausanias 1.24.4, the axe was tried and acquitted, but Porphyry De Abstinentia 2.10.29–­31 (based on Theophrastus) states that the knife was found guilty, cursed, and thrown into the sea. 3. On the slaying and the festival, see Hyde 1917, 153; Simon 1983, 8; Katz 1993; Parker 2005, 187–­91; and Nakassis 2011; on the trial of objects in the Prytaneion, Lanni 2006, 77, with references.

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4. Gell is careful not to deny the “core of agency” that “lies at the heart” of the social networks of agency he examines, such as the “Kula Ring” (1998, 228–­32). 5. On vitalism and materiality, see Bennett 2010; on material agency and the “extended mind,” see Malafouris 2013. 6. E.g., DeMarrais et al. 2004, Malafouris 2013; for applications of Gell’s insights to classical Greek art, see Osborne and Tanner 2007, Whitley 2012, and Hölscher 2014. 7. I claim neither fully human nor biological agency for these weapons but wish, instead, to explore their relational impact, building on the insight from Gell (1998, 123) that it does not matter, in ascribing ‘social agent’ status, “what a thing (or a person) ‘is’ in itself; what matters is where it stands in a network of social relations.” 8. Lissarague 2010 and Hölscher 2014. 9. Rasmussen and Spivey 1991, 82. See also Finglass 2011, 29–­30, on this black-­figure amphora and on the shift in Attic art from depicting Ajax’s corpse to the moment of heightened tension just before his death. 10. The translation is from Falkner 2002, 355. The scholiast to Ajax 815 also records that “in Thracian Women Aeschylus had already reported the death of Ajax through a messenger.” 11. See Falkner (2002, 354–­55) for a translation and discussion of this scholion and Flashar (2000, 44–­47) for comparison of the Aeschylean and Sophoclean versions. 12. TrGF 3.83 Radt evokes a dramatic context wherein the sword did not pierce his skin until a goddess, whose name is not specified, “standing beside him, pointed out to him where to strike” (πρὶν δή τις παροῦσα δαίμων ἔδειξεν αὐτῷ κατὰ ποῖον μέρος δεῖ χρήσασθαι τῇ σφαγῇ). And the scholiast continues, “Ajax was invulnerable throughout his body except for in his armpit” (κατὰ τὸ ἄλλο σῶμα ἄτρωτον ἦν ὁ Αἴας, κατὰ δὲ τὴν μασχάλην μόνην τρωτός). For the full text, see Christodoulou 1977, 190. 13. On another vase by Exekias, Ajax and Achilles play a board game and each warrior’s helmet and shield captures his standing in the game. Hölscher (2014, 171) describes how their weapons dramatize and index the conflict between the heroes: while Achilles wears his helmet, Ajax’s has been set aside and is even turned away, as if ready for flight; Ajax’s shield is emblazoned with a gorgon’s head, but Achilles’ makes a cockier impression with a Silenus head. 14. Duffy (2008, 76) counts sixteen battlefield encounters between Ajax and Hector, more than for any other pair of heroes. The scene of Ajax’s suicide in Sophocles can thus be viewed as a resolution to their frequent but inconclusive Homeric dueling. 15. Notice the συν- prefix at 230. M. W. Blundell (1989, 73, 103–­4) observes of the sun-­/ xun-­prefix that it “is often used to suggest the cooperation of philoi ” (note 67) or of “joining or sharing in an activity” (103), though in Ajax’s specific case “sun-­ and xun-­words link him not with cooperative friendship but with evils (429), evil doom (123), sickness (338), madness (611) and death (854).” 16. Tecmessa refers to it as ἔγχος at 287, but this use of ἔγχος to mean sword is not uncommon in tragedy: see Finglass 2011 on Ajax 95, also Jebb 2004 ad loc., and Bergson 1956, 84. 17. See Garvie 1998, ad loc., on the compound epithet. 18. Compound adjectives continue to cluster around the sword and its related implements (such as a whetstone) in the Suicide Speech, e.g., 820 and 828. Nooter (2012, 42) identifies the compound adjectives in the first part of the “deception” speech as an essential component of Ajax’s “lyrical loquacity.” 19. On compounds as a signature feature of Sophocles’ early, “bloated” or “displeasing” stylistic phase, see, e.g., Earp 1944; and on “ornamental epithets” in both Aeschylus and Sophocles, see also Bergson 1956.

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20. The prescient spectator may of course have seen this action as foreshadowing Ajax’s imminent demise. 21. Schol. Aj. 346: ἐνταῦθα ἐκκύκλημά τι γίνεται, ἵνα φανῇ ἐν μέσοις ὁ Αἴας τοῖς ποιμνίοις. εἰς ἔκπληξιν γὰρ φέρει καὶ ταῦτα τὸν θεατήν, τὰ ἐν τῇ ὄψει περιπαθέστερα. δείκνυται δὲ ξιφήρης, ᾑματωμένος, μεταξὺ τῶν ποιμνίων καθήμενος. (An ekkuklēma comes on at this point so that Ajax may appear in the midst of the flock. For this also will induce shock in the spectator, the open display of such violent distress. And he is on exhibit, sitting in the middle of the flock, covered in blood, with the sword in his hand.) 22. See Nooter 2012, 32–­33 on Ajax’s mishandling of his relations with the gods from the beginning of the action. 23. The repetition of ἐγχος at 95, 287, and 658 strengthens the connection between the two episodes of violence. 24. Like Taplin (1978, 85) and Heath (1987, 168), I am highly skeptical of the suggestion that Ajax bears a whip as he comes out of the skēnē at 91; the play’s ancient subtitle was Mastigophoros (“whip-­bearer”), which may derive from a later performance tradition, and was used by ancient bibliographers to distinguish our Ajax from another play by Sophocles about the Locrian Ajax: see Taplin 1978, 188n7; Ajax’s mention of a “whip” at 110 hardly constitutes proof of a stage prop. 25. E.g., Reinhardt 1979, 22: “there can no longer be any doubt as to what will happen.” On the skēnē as the visual focus of tragic action more generally, see Taplin 1977, 438–­40; and, as the House of Death in Ajax, see Wiles 1997, 164–­65. No clear consensus has emerged on how to gauge the attitudes of Sophocles’ contemporaries on the morality of suicide. Parker (1983, 41–­42) argues that death by suicide would have been seen as generating more pollution, while Yoshitake (1994) argues that suicide was a justifiable means of preserving honor, and Demosthenes 60.31 references Ajax’s suicide as a heroic act. For discussion of suicide in tragedy, and especially Sophocles, see Seidensticker 1983, Garrison 1995, 45–­53, and Belfiore 2000, 103–­8. On Greek attitudes to suicide more generally, see also Garland 1985, 95–­99. 26. The scholarly consensus, well articulated by Gibert (1995, 125), is that, since “Ajax clearly has a suicidal intention when he actually commits suicide we must say that . . . there is either no change of mind or there are two.” What follows from this supposition is that either Ajax’s commitment to suicide remains unchanged throughout three separate appearances, i.e., at 545–­95, 646–­92, and 815–­65 (and it is merely his rhetoric that misleads his hearers), or Ajax changes his mind twice, once as signaled by the Deception Speech and for the second time during the interval between his exit at 692 and his reentrance at 815. 27. Lardinois (2006, 213) offers the following useful summary of the history of the Deception Speech’s critical reception: “Three main interpretations have been offered to explain the reaction of the chorus and Tecmessa. According to the first interpretation, Ajax at this point in the play has, temporarily, given up his intention to commit suicide. Tecmessa and the chorus therefore understand his words correctly. According to the second interpretation, Ajax still intends to kill himself, but he deliberately misleads the chorus and Tecmessa with words that hide the truth from them. The third interpretation agrees with the second that Ajax still wishes to kill himself but maintains that he does not deliberately try to mislead Tecmessa or the chorus. Instead, it is they who fail to understand his words, which point quite clearly at a suicide.” 28. But see Kane 1996, 21n14: “Besides verbal indications, bloodstains still visible on the sword at the start of the Trugrede would tell their own story.” 29. T. von Wilamowitz-­Moellendorff famously proposed that the speech redoubles the emotional impact of Ajax’s suicide. By stretching out Ajax’s dance with death over so many

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hundreds of lines, Sophocles keeps his audience on tenterhooks, wondering whether Ajax has genuinely renounced his death wish. The “retardation” thesis still has supporters, though few have gone so far as T. Wilamowitz (1917) in suggesting a type of rationale that today might be classified as a “special effect.” Sicherl (1977), for example, sees an analogy in the hyporchema, which “is designed to achieve retardation” in other plays (e.g., S. Ant. 1115–­54; OT 1086–­1109; Tr. 633–­62) and remarks that Ajax’s speech also causes a retardation in the action, increasing the impact of the disaster that follows it (70); he adds, however, that in other cases “the relaxation of tension has an inner motivation” (75). 30. There are important exceptions to such textual bias, and notably among them, Fletcher 2013. 31. Taplin (1978, 77), in this same context, refers to stage props as “miniature repositories of huge associations.” 32. For Crane (1990, 98–­99), Ajax’s privileging of Chronos over the gods betrays “that anthropocentric attitude which, as the audience will soon for the first time learn, is the cause of Ajax’ predicament” (99). 33. Bowra 1944, 43: “As his purification will rid Ajax of pollution, so the burial of the sword will free him from future danger.” 34. E.g., Jason’s burial of the sword that killed Apsyrtus in Apollonius Rhodius 4.696. On the familiar custom of removing polluted objects, Sicherl (1977, 79n45) cites S. El. 435ff., A. R. 4.694, and E. Supp. 1205ff. U. Wilamowitz (1924, 250), citing Pollux 8.20, compares the “guilt” borne by the sword (and Ajax’s subsequent desire to bury it) to Athenian lawsuits brought against ἄψυχα that were cast beyond the boundaries of Attica by the Phylobasileis. 35. Iliad 7.206–­312. For discussion of the dynamics of the second round of the duel, involving the warriors’ shields, see chapter 5. 36. On the elements and sequence of formal duels in the Iliad, see Fenik 1968; Kirk 1978; Duban 1981; Fenik 1986, 5–­43; and Morrison 1999. 37. On Ajax as an Achillean heroic type, averse to both dolos and verbal excess, see M. W. Blundell 1989, 83–­84; terseness is a defining characteristic of Ajax in the ancient literary tradition, as seen, for example, in Pi. N. 7 and N. 8 where, as Hesk (2003, 37) puts it, “Pindar clearly implies that Odysseus’ superior rhetorical skills and outright lies won the day.” Ajax brings his hatred of Odysseus with him to the Underworld in the form of silence (Od. 11.563–­64), a scene with which Sophocles’ Ajax “seems to be so imbued that it reads like a probing and explanatory ‘prequel’ to it”: Hesk 2003, 27. 38. As catalogued by Kane (1996, 20n12), the main confrontations are at 13.188–­205, 311–­27, 709–­22, and 809–­32; 14.402–­32; 15.415ff; 16.114–­23; and 17.127–­39, 233–­317, and 746–­61. Brief recaps of the battle action in books 14 and 16 confirm that the “victory postponed” dynamic is firmly in place. Nor is it only in his interactions with Hector that Ajax fails to secure a non-­ambiguous victory. In the funeral games for Patroclus in Iliad 23, Odysseus throws Ajax twice, but ends up falling on top of him as a consequence (23.726–­32). Indeed, the two matches are so indecisive that Achilles, acting as umpire, declares them both victors; after dividing the prizes equally between themselves, they are told to clear the field, so that the rest of the Achaeans may have their chance at competing. An essential component of Ajax’s epic profile is the inability to be recognized as sole victor in the events in which he competes. 39. Second best: e.g., Il. 2.768–­9; 13.324; 17.280; the judgment over Achilles’ arms and Ajax’s ensuing madness belongs to the epic cycle, and was probably part of the Little Iliad (as summarized by Proclus), fragments of which are published in West’s (2003) Greek Epic Fragments. On

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the judgment of arms in relation to Sophocles’ play, see Sorum 1986, 375–­77; March 1991–­93, 2–­4; and Hesk 2003, 24–­34. Garvie (1998, 1–­11) and Finglass (2011, 26–­41) provide excellent overviews of Ajax’s source materials. 40. Biggs (1966, 224) regards the disease language as indicating “physical intensifications” of the hero’s nature and suggests that Athena, who has caused Ajax’s madness, “represents the highest intensification of that nature.” On diagnosing the source of Ajax’s mania, see Heath 1987, 171–­72, and for a narratological approach to his madness, see de Jong 2006. 41. On philia and its perversions in this play, see Kane 1996; Blundell 1989, 60–­105; and Belfiore 2000, 101–­16. 42. Ruijgh (2006, 156) points out that “τοῦτο can only by interpreted as the neutral anaphoric pronoun.” See also Ruijgh 2006, 158–­59, for examples of “the addressee-­oriented” οὗτος in Sophocles. For the difference between speaker-­oriented and hearer-­oriented deixis in Homer, see Bakker 2005, 78–­80. 43. This is not necessarily the case for human characters. Should the Orestes, for example, of Aeschylus’s Choephoroi be considered the same as the Orestes of Euripides’ later eponymous play? Poets have a certain leeway in how they appropriate and repurpose familiar fictional characters, and audiences do not expect a complete match between the latest version and the character’s fictional predecessors. 44. Homer’s Ajax leaves the fight scene well aware, we are told, that he has won this round of fighting: “The strong-­greaved Achaians led Ajax, happy in his victory (κεχαρηότα νίκῃ), to great Agamemnon” (7.311–­12). This description of Ajax’s emotional state makes little sense when we consider that the duel has just ended in a draw. As de Jong (2004, 101–­2), however, explains, the “victory” should be understood as an internal focalization, a self-­judgment. Ajax views himself as the winner. 45. See Wigodsky 1962, 154, on the “double meaning”; to Tecmessa and the Chorus σεσωμένον must mean “safely alive,” while for Ajax and the audience, “who know the end of the myth, it can only mean ‘safely dead.’ ” For Taplin (1979, 126) the “salvation” language in this passage points to Ajax’s eventual “rehabilitation” in death, a thesis that Seaford (1994b) reads in connection with possible allusions to the mysteries elsewhere in the same speech. See also Seaford 1994a, 396–­97. 46. E.g., Morrison 1999, 130–­31, with representative examples of “darkness” (σκότος) and “black night” (ἐρεβεννὴ νύξ) overcoming the warrior at the moment of his death in Iliadic battle scenes. On the realm of the dead as “dark” or “misty,” see e.g., Il. 21.56 and 22.482. 47. See Worman 2001 on circular patterns in the actors’ movements giving an embodied dimension to the rhetorical emphasis on circularity throughout the play. 48. On the scene change, see note 54. 49. For this minority view, see e.g., Webster 1936, 96, and Bowra 1944, 43–­45, an interpretation that may ultimately derive from the scholiast’s comments on vv. 684 and 646. In Sicherl’s view (1977, 72), to which many have implicitly subscribed, to suggest that Ajax dies under the influence of divinely inflicted wrath would be to deprive him of his essential heroism. 50. E.g., Il. 10.427; S. Tr. 1249; on this particle, see also Heath 1987, 187, and Denniston 1954, 565. For Ajax’s awareness of his (internal) audience, see Pelling 2005, 93, citing Fraenkel 1967, 82–­83, and Battezzato 1995, 92–­104. 51. Stanford (2002, 146) rightly notes the strangeness of this first person plural and speculates that “perhaps Sophocles intends this to signify that Ajax can now identify himself with humanity in general” but the immediate context of Ajax’s speech tells against this universalist reading. More susceptible to the universalizing interpretation is Odysseus’s assertion at 125–­26,

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noted by Stanford as a comparandum for Ajax’s language: ὁρῶ γὰρ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν ἄλλο πλὴν / εἴδωλ᾿, ὅσοιπερ ζῶμεν, ἢ κούφην σκιάν (“for I see that we, those of us who are alive, are nothing but ghosts, or an empty shadow”). It is harder to accept that Ajax is identifying his own situation with that of humankind in 666–­67. 52. Seale (1982, 164) has proposed, of Ajax’s language at 823, that “the weapon is part of him; its character is his character.” This may be true of what Ajax says in this later episode, but in the current speech the opposite effect obtains. Ajax’s “character” has become that of the sword; his character is its character. 53. Cohen 1978; Loraux 1987, 12, 20; Belfiore 2000, 107. 54. Finglass (2011, ad loc.), accepting the change of scene ἐπὶ ἐρήμου τινὸς χωρίου mentioned by Σ 815, observes that the audience will understand that, with Ajax’s reappearance, the setting has shifted to “the unidentified place in the wilderness designated earlier as his destination (657–­59),” i.e., the “untrodden spot” where he intended to bury the sword, and argues elsewhere (2011, 12) that “since Ajax enters from the skēnē, which up to this point represents the hut, and yet has had no opportunity to reenter that building since his departure at 692, a change of scene is the only possible explanation.” Scullion (1994, 109–­28) argues against a scene change on the grounds that such a change would require much clearer verbal signposting than is offered in the Deception Speech. For a compelling response to Scullion’s objections, see Finglass 2011, 16–­20. 55. There are three occurrences of the noun in Euripides (i.e., HF 451, IT 623, Rh. 253), used in each case of human agents, and no instances in Aeschylus. I read E. Andr. 1134 (σφαγῆς) as a genitive of separation with ἔκλυτοι (following Lloyd 1994, ad loc.) rather than as the nominative plural of σφαγεύς. 56. See Scullion 1994, 89–­128, for a thorough discussion of the problem(s), and Finglass 2011, 375–­90, for an overview of the bibliography and various proposals. 57. The ekkuklēma is used in tragedy for revealing interior spaces, and since the skēnē is at this point in the action to be identified with the νάπος mentioned by Ajax at 892, Finglass (2011, 378) objects that “in tragedy a grove could not be treated as if it were a house” (this is meant to serve as a refutation of Scullion [1994, 108], citing Ar. Av. 92 ἄνοιγε τὴν ὕλην, ἵν᾿ ἐξέλθω ποτέ, as a comic parody of tragic technique). But since the dramaturgy of this scene, with a character’s self-­murder being openly shown on stage, is also unparalleled, not every feature of the staging can be expected to conform to known precedents. 58. The anecdote is recorded in the scholia vetera 864a, edited by G. A. Christodoulou (1977): δεῖ δὲ ὑπονοῆσαι ὅτι περιπίπτει τῷ ξίφει. καὶ δεῖ καρτερόν τινα εἶναι τὸν ὑποκριτήν, ὡς ἄξαι τοὺς θεατὰς εἰς τὴν τοῦ Αἴαντος φαντασίαν· ὁποῖα περὶ τοῦ Ζακυνθίου Τιμοθέου φασὶν ὅτι ἦγε τοὺς θεατὰς καὶ ἐψυχαγώγει τῇ ὑποκρίσει, ὡς σφαγέα αὐτὸν κληθῆναι. (It is necessary to suppose that he falls onto the sword and that the actor must be someone toughly resolute, so as to lead the spectators toward the impression of witnessing Ajax, just in the way that they say about Timotheus of Zacynthos that he convinced the audience and enchanted them with his acting so that he was named Sphageus / Slayer.) On ψυχαγωγία (amusement, allurement) as a literary critical term in the scholia, see Nünlist 2009, 144. 59. Kamerbeek (1963, ad loc.) notes that “περιστέλλειν is used specially of ‘committing to the earth’ (infra 1170, Ant. 903)” while for Finglass (2011, ad loc.) “περι- suggests the piling up of earth around the sword to ensure stability.” 60. I am grateful to Donald Mastronarde for this suggestion. 61. Cf. the position of Reinhardt (1979, 24), who also suggests that in “the words of Ajax a discord can be heard underneath the noble praise of the order of the world,” but identifies it

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rather as “an undertone of revulsion, almost of scorn of that wisdom which is the wisdom of the world.” 62. Notice also the grim reciprocity in the detail, also provided by Teucer, that Hector was killed by the gift of the war belt he received from Ajax (1029–­31); these lines are deleted by Morstadt (1863, 30–­31), followed by Finglass (2011), but defended by Jebb (2004, 234–­35) and Kamerbeek (1963, ad loc.). 63. See Bakker 2005, 97–­101, for discussion of “evidential semantics”; Bakker argues (101) that the future infinitive complement of μέλλειν is “intimately connected with the contrast between understanding and ignorance,” an observation that, when applied to Teucer’s utterance, makes it clear that the “future” which Teucer knows and which Ajax in the past did not know “is in fact nothing other than the present moment of [Teucer’s] speech” (emphasis in the original). I have adapted Bakker’s interpretation of Patroklos’s speech at Il. 11.816–­18 to this tragic context. In other words, Teucer’s speech performatively actualizes the past of which he is now fully conscious (as is the play’s audience, in being made privy to his realization). 64. On the authenticity of these lines, see note 62. 65. When combined with a genitive object, πρός signals personal agency or, according to Moorhouse (1982, 123), “the personal source on which the action draws, or from which it derives.” For examples, see Moorhouse 1982, 123–­24, and Pearson 1929, 169, with fuller discussion of agent expressions at George 2005, 195–­221. 66. For other examples of this sort of riddling in Aeschylus’s plays, see Agamemnon 80ff., 494, and Fraenkel 1950 vol. 2, 251. 67. Teucer asks rhetorically if an Erinys has “crafted” the sword that kills Ajax, and Hades has made the belt that kills Hector (Aj. 1034–­35: ἆρ᾿ οὐκ Ἐρινὺς τοῦτ᾿ ἐχάλκευσε ξίφος / κἀκεῖνον Ἅιδης, δημιουργὸς ἄγριος;). 68. In case we haven’t solved the riddle on our own, Sophocles has Teucer reveal it in no uncertain terms at Aj. 1025–­27. 69. Kane’s (1996) expression. 70. Scodel (1984, 19) notes the irony in the fact that the one time Ajax has “accepted the help of Athena in the attack on the chiefs, [it is] to his ruin.” Kyriakou (2011, 189–­90) argues that Ajax’s behavior should be considered a form of hubris, despite the relatively infrequent appearance of the term itself. 71. E.g., the same verb, ἐπισπᾶν, is also used for the action of drawing a spear from its spear-­ case, e.g., Il. 19.387. In his review of Finglass 2011 in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Mastronarde (2012) offers a useful corrective to the common assumption that ἐπισπάω is not usually paired with physical objects: “in this boastful utterance the verb in ἐπισπάσειν κλέος is quite forceful and plays off the physical violence this verb often expresses; it is wrong of LSJ to soften the verb to ‘win, acquire’ by grouping it with a set of (mostly prose) passages using the middle voice.” 72. On the vibrancy of weapons more generally, see Lissarague 2010 and Purves 2015. 73. See further chapter 5. 74. Scallops: Rasmussen and Spivey 1991, 50; geometricized hide shield: Boardman 1998, 26. 75. This blended-­effect is an idea succinctly expressed in the following formulaic verse, where, in putting on their armor, warriors are said to “remember” martial valor: οἱ δ᾿ αὖτις κατὰ τεύχε᾿ ἔδυν, μνήσαντο δὲ χάρμης (e.g., Il. 4.222). 76. Bruno Latour has also challenged anthropocentric notions of agency, particularly in his emphasis on the mediating role of networks comprised of both human and inanimate “actants,” (e.g., 1999, 181), but for describing the relations between humans and weapons in tragedy, I find Gell’s model more compelling. By positing artifacts that “distribute” mind and agency through

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the world, Gell retains as his primary reference point “people and their intentionality behind the world of artifacts,” as Daniel Miller (2005, 13) succinctly puts it. See Miller 2005, 11–­13, for an overview of the two theorists’ contributions to the debate on the agency of objects. 77. E.g., Il. 17.210–­12: “The armor was fitted to Hector’s skin, and Ares the dangerous war god entered him so that the inward body was packed full of force and fighting strength” (translated by R. Lattimore). 78. See chapter 5 on Ajax’s uncharacteristic fatigue at Il. 16.106–­7. 79. Philoctetes mentions his “acting as a benefactor” (εὐεργετῶν, 670) as what won him the bow in the first place (cf. 801–­3). 80. Dingel (1971, 362) treats the crisis of meaning generated by Philoctetes’ bow (as both hunting weapon and instrument of Troy’s salvation) as something that is resolved, at the end of the play, by Heracles’ naming the bow his own and authorizing Philoctetes to bring it to Troy. For the bow as a visual symbol of heroic values, see Segal 1980, 131–­33, and 1986, 121–­25. 81. See, further, Austin 2011, 105–­6. 82. See pages 16–­17 above. Chapter Two 1. On adapting the Agamemnon’s “carpet scene” for the contemporary (or near-­ contemporary) stage, see, for example, Foley 2005, 315, 319–­25, 329, 333; Walton 2005, 203–­4; and Goldhill 2007, 15–­17, 110–­11. Wyles (2010, 177) suggests that if the boots worn by Clytemnestra in Molora, a South-­African reconceptualization of Agamemnon, are “ ‘haunted’ by this moment in the Agamemnon, then one way of reading them is as a reminder of her murder of Agamemnon and also as an expression of her usurpation of his role and power.” 2. See Easterling 2005 on the canonical status of Agamemnon in antiquity. Revermann (2006a, 16n24) argues that “many instances of paratragedy are so close to the original as to require texts in circulation.” In one of these, Electra is mentioned in the parabasis of Clouds 534–­35 as “having come in search of wise spectators” on which, see Telò 2010. 3. Zeitlin (2005), focusing almost exclusively on the IT, ends up tracing how its plot provides “ritual strategies for working through the traumas of haunted memory in the unhappy family” (200). But both her own earlier treatment of Orestes as a palimpsestic text (i.e., Zeitlin 1980) and Sansone 1975 are harbingers of the kinds of  “reception” readings of Euripides currently in vogue. 4. On composing in an overcrowded field, see Torrance 2011. Of Euripides’ innovation and tragic tradition, Mastronarde (2010, 54) observes that the poet “is not abandoning or corrupting a fixed genre, but exploring the potentiality of a living genre.” 5. Revermann 2006a, 72. 6. See Wilson 2000, 22, and Revermann 2006a, 19–­20. Hammond (1984, 379n19) suggests that there “was probably a revival of the Oresteia in the 440’s because shoes are worn by Orestes and Pylades in the Melian Relief (n. 21), whereas in the original production they were barefoot and left marks of heels and tendons (Cho. 209).” For a discussion of the likelihood of a 420s revival, see Newiger 1961, 427–­30. Ancient sources on the fifth-­century BCE (re)performances of Aeschylus include the decree, mentioned at the Life of Aeschylus 1.48, that whoever wanted to produce an Aeschylean tragedy would be granted a chorus; Aristophanes’ Acharnians 9–­12, where Dicaeopolis recalls being sorely disappointed that Theognis rather than Aeschylus is being performed; and Philostratus’s comment (Life of Apollonius 6.11.129–­32) that the Athenians invited Aeschylus back to the Dionysia after he had died, whereupon he “won again.” For a more skeptical analysis of the decree, see Biles 2006–­7, and for possible reperformances of Aeschylus

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at the site of his tomb in Sicily, as is mentioned at the Life of Aeschylus 1.46, see Revermann 2006a, 21, and Kowalzig 2008. 7. On the relative dating of the two Electras, see Cropp (1988, xlix–­l) who, after an evenhanded review of the state of the discussion, concludes that Sophocles’ play is likelier to have been written earlier; but there is no scholarly consensus on this issue. 8. The scene at Electra 988–­1146, which is framed by Clytemnestra’s arrival in a mule-­drawn carriage and her exit into the stage building, is clearly a reenactment of the tapestry scene from Agamemnon. I argue, however, that the nexus of interconnections between the fictional worlds of the two plays extends even beyond the explicit restaging evidenced in these lines (on which see further below). 9. See El. 314–­16, which I discuss below. 10. Agamemnon’s scepter, whose theft by Aegisthus emblematizes the latter’s political transgression in Argos, is serialized as a material motif in the “reception” plays. For example, the scepter is the protagonist in Clytemnestra’s nightmare at S. El. 420–­23; and at E. Or. 437, Menelaus asks Orestes if the city allows him to hold Agamemnon’s scepter, to which Orestes replies ironically, “What? They, who won’t even let us still live?” (πῶς, οἵτινες ζῆν οὐκ ἐῶσ᾿ ἡμᾶς ἔτι;). 11. Wyles 2010, 177; see also Wyles 2011, 65–­66 and 88. 12. Iliad 2.102–­7. 13. It may even be possible to read the tensions between the brothers Atreus and Thyestes, detailed elsewhere in the myth of the golden lamb, from the diction of the Iliadic passage cited above; see, e.g., Lowenstam 1993, 65n13: “Since the aim of the scepter passage is to demonstrate the continuity of traditional power which Agamemnon inherited, the conflicts within the family would be out of place (there may be some hint of these quarrels in the use of ἔλιπε instead of δῶκε, as Σ Α ad 2.107 points out; cf. Kirk 1985, 127).” 14. For the use of clothing to signal gender, status, and political values in ancient Greece, see Geddes 1987; Kurke 1992, 92–­97, and 1999, 184–­87; Crane 1993, 135; Battezzato 1999–­2000; Llewellyn-­Jones 2003; and Foxhall 2013, 107–­12. 15. See Zeitlin 1970 on this festival and the role of ritual in the play more generally. 16. Goff (1999–­2000, 96) notes the play’s seeming obsession with “the material world.” For different approaches to reading the tone of the play (especially in the recognition scene), see Hammond 1984; Goff 1999–­2000; Gallagher 2003; Wright 2010, 180–­82; Torrance 2011, 185–­88, and 2013, 24–­33; and my chapter 3. 17. E.g., Lloyd (1986, 5), on the “unrestrained and demonstrative form” of Greek lamentation, which can include references “to one’s own physical demonstrations of grief.” Dingel (1969, 104) suggests that the setting of Euripides’ play, and Electra’s ragged demeanor especially, are borrowed from the scene on Laertes’ farm in Odyssey 24. 18. See Stallybrass 2002 for an expanded and revised version. 19. On this expression, see, further, Seaford 2004, 147–­50. For ancient commentators purple dye from the murex snail was considered to be “worth its weight in silver.” The economic aspect of purple that is suggested by Clytemnestra’s expression πορφύρας ἰσάργυρον κηκῖδα (Ag. 959–­60) is mentioned, for example, by Theompompus (=Athenaeus 12.526c, a text cited by many commentators on this line) in reference to the people of Colophon: “Theopompus says in the fifteenth book of his Histories that a thousand of them thronged the city wearing purple robes; this, as everyone knows, was at that time a colour rare even for princes, and very much desired. For purple was reckoned as equivalent to its weight in silver” (ἰσοστάσιος γὰρ ἦν ἡ πορφύρα πρὸς ἄργυρον ἐξεταζομένη).” Trans. C. B. Gulick (Loeb vol. 5).

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20. The hydria remains in Electra’s possession until she bids a silent attendant remove it from her head and set it down, as specified at 140–­41, midway through her monody, which turns briskly into a lament as soon as she is free of the vessel. 21. Raeburn (2000, 153) recognizes that the motifs of the water pitcher and dress, plus accoutrements, are “indications of the same propensity,” but he remains unimpressed with the overt theatricality of Electra’s gestures and chides the heroine who “is evidently deriving too much personal satisfaction from her tears and complaints to be willing or able easily to give up the status quo” when she is offered more suitable clothing by the Chorus. Similarly Chaston (2010, 142) refers to Electra’s “strident attachment to unnecessary hardship.” 22. The quotation is from Kitto 1961, 334. 23. Here I take a very different view from Torrance (2013, 17), who holds that “Electra may be self-­obsessed but she is not at all self-­aware.” 24. Compare E. Or. 839–­43, where the Chorus recalls Clytemnestra as dressed in “robes of golden-­weave” (χρυσεοπηνήτων φαρέων, 840) as she makes her last appeal, breast exposed, to Orestes as he is poised to kill her. 25. Von Reden (1995, 89–­92) concludes from her survey of misthos in fifth-­and fourth-­ century authors and inscriptions that the term “unequivocally signified unequal relationships, and a lack of self-­sufficiency or autarky in the recipient” (92). On misthos and prostitution, see Von Reden 1995, 197–­200. 26. Compare Wyles’s reading (2011, 87–­88) of the potential costuming of Aegisthus in Sophocles’ Electra as a visual double of the Aeschylean Agamemnon. 27. Taplin 1977, 307. 28. The term used for the vehicle in which Agamemnon and Cassandra arrives is apēnē, which is closer to a “carriage” or “wagon” than a chariot; as Ley (2007b, 70–­7 1) notes, the standard term for chariot, harma, while appearing in tragedy, is never used of a stage vehicle conveying actors/characters into the playing space. It is best to assume then that in this scene a simple mule-­pulled carriage carries Agamemnon and Cassandra to the space in front of the palace, and that Agamemnon remains in the stage vehicle until his sandals are removed. 29. Rutherford (2012, 300) describes her as “stage-­managing” Agamemnon’s exit into the palace; see Telò 2016 on the Aristophanic appropriation of this scene for Strepsiades’ katabasis into the Thinkery, at Clouds 507ff. 30. Clytemnestra’s use of the term petasmata at 909 may have called to mind Persian wall hangings. As Margaret Miller (1997, 76) observes, “woven colorful hangings (parapetasmata poikila) are first attested in Herodotus, as part of the booty collected after the battle of Plataia.” Clytemnestra herself does not specify that the textiles are “colorful,” but Agamemnon, in deliberating whether to fulfill his wife’s injunction, will refer to them with forms of poikilia no fewer than three times (at 923, 926, and 936). 31. My focus here is on the purple-­hued objects within the trilogy, but for more general discussions of porphyra, see Blum 1998 with bibliography, Burke 1999 on the purple-­trade in the prehistoric period, with reference to the Linear B tablets, and Vickers 1999, 26–­27. See Fraenkel 1950, ad loc., and Jenkins 1985 on the mythical aspects of purple, and Mitchell-­Boyask 2009, 96, on the association between the purplish garments worn by the Chorus of the Eumenides and the garb of metics in the Panathenaic procession in Athens. The vocabulary of  “purple,” whether in its epithet or noun form, is “fixed by its etymological connection with πορφύρα ‘the purple fish’, ” as Eleanor Irwin (1974, 28) points out in her study of ancient color terminology. The “purple” of the ancient world was probably a “rich brilliant crimson.”

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32. Nat. Hist. 9.60.125–­38. Pliny also describes the process of extracting and condensing what is secreted by the snails upon their death, so that the desired tincture results (Nat. Hist. 9.60.125–­26). For the dye to be manufactured in quantity, snails were crushed, steeped in salt for three days and then boiled in a cauldron so that the flesh (of no value for dyeing) would sink to the bottom. On the tenth day the whole mixture was strained and tested for readiness with a fleece (Nat. Hist. 9.62.133). 33. Dye used on fabrics in the Argolid would have come, very likely, from one of the chief purple dye industries in the Peloponnese, such as Hermione, on which see Perlman 2000. 34. In the Odyssey, the purple wool is attached to the distaff and not yet woven (ἠλακάτη ἰοδνεφὲς εἶρος ἔχουσα). Note too that Helen asks for “purple blankets” to be spread for her visitors (Od. 4.297–­98), and that Andromache is also represented as weaving a double-­folded “purple” web at Il. 22.441. 35. The assumption that all textiles must be the product of women’s domestic labor has had a distorting effect on interpretations of the tapestry scene. To take just one recent example, Tordoff (2013, 110) comments that “woven garments on the ancient Greek tragic stage were most likely (my emphasis) to be the work of women’s hands” and that Aeschylus’s Agamemnon “once more provides a memorable scene in which this fact (my emphasis) is of the greatest importance.” Tordoff, like other critics, acknowledges—­and immediately glosses over—­a very real ambiguity relating to the provenance of these woven garments. 36. The thematic motif of “hands” in the Oresteia is much broader than I will have space to discuss here, and would benefit from the kind of discussion that Lebeck (1971, 74–­79) devotes to the theme of “trampling underfoot.” Crucial connections, in addition to women’s work, are brought out in the imagery of “hands” in all three plays. These include, first, hands as the locus of power, agency, and revenge, on which see, for example, Ag. 111 (χερὶ πράκτορι), 117 (χερὸς ἐκ δοριπάλτου), 424 (παραλλάξασα διὰ χερῶν), 725, 817, 1110–­11, 1357, 1405, 142, 1496, and 1520 (δαμεὶς ἐκ χερός); Ch. 104 (πρὸς ἄλλης δεσποτούμενον χερός), 141 (χεῖρα τ᾿ εὐσεβέστεραν), 385 (πανούργῳ χειρί), 395 (Ζεὺς ἐπὶ χεῖρα βάλοι), 949; Eu. 102 (πρὸς χερῶν μητροκτόνων), 260, 349, 779, and 809; second, hands as sullied by blood, and in this sense agents of contamination, and sources of pollution: Ag. 209–­10 (μιαίνων . . . πατρῴους χέρας); Ch. 73 (χερομυσῆ φόνον), 378 (χέρες οὐχ ὅσιαι), 1055 (αἷμα σοι χεροῖν); Eu. 41–­42 (αἵματι στάζοντα χεῖρας), 237 (οὐδ᾿ ἀφοίβαντον χέρα), 280, 313, 317, 446, 448; and third, hands as the agents of (corrupted) sacrifice/feast: Ag. 1220 (χείρας κρεῶν πλήθοντες), 1582, 1594; Ch. 257. 37. See also Crane 1993, 131, on the cultural semantics of porphyra. 38. See Rosenbloom 1995 on the dynamics of empire in the Oresteia, and the fleet in particular “as a source of anxiety to Aeschylus both as a citizen and as a poet” (97). 39. In a mock rehearsal for a symposium in Aristophanes’ Wasps, an Athenian son (Bdelycleon) tells his father (Philocleon) to stretch himself out comfortably on the throw rugs (ἐν τοῖς στρώμασιν, 1213), and to “admire the wall hangings” (κρεκάδι᾿ αὐλῆς θαύμασον, 1215). “Carpets,” however, as Crane (1993, 122) notes, “were not a regular part of Greek culture—­even among the upper classes—­until the time of Alexander, and even then, the use of carpets . . . seems to have been a foreign import, a custom long practiced by the potentates of the Near East.” 40. Crane 1993, 123–­25. On Pausanias’s medism, Thuc. 1.128–­30, and on Themistocles’ arrest, also for conspiring with the Persians, Thuc. 1.135–­38. It may not be without significance that Themistocles’ death took place in 459 BCE, a year before the production of the Oresteia. 41. Cassandra’s silent presence is an additional complicating factor throughout this scene; see Meridor 1987, 39; Wohl 1998, 110–­14; and McNeil 2005, 14–­15. 42. Ch. 132–­34, 249, 275, 301, 915.

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43. See especially Wohl 1998, 83–­99. 44. A situation perhaps alluded to by the Guard, who cries over the fortunes of the house “not excellently managed as in the past” (οὐχ ὡς τὰ πρόσθ᾿ ἄριστα διαπονουμένου, Ag. 19). 45. At 960 Clytemnestra describes the sea as “nourishing” (τρέφουσα) an “ever renewed spurt of purple.” 46. Cf. Macleod (1975, 202), who assumes on the basis of 948 that Agamemnon “walks over the garments in pride and in ignorance.” 47. E.g., Kurke 1992 and 1999, 20–­21 and 185. Compare Crane 1993, 119: “If the dominant Athenian demos was shocked that he walked upon the carpet, others in Greece and doubtless in Athens would have faulted him for the hesitant and pusillanimous manner in which he performed this gesture.” 48. See Neustadt 1929, 263–­65; Goheen 1955, 115–­26; Lebeck 1971, 80–­86; and Taplin 1977, 314–­16. 49. As Foley (2001, 210) observes, “among other things, Clytemnestra has in the tapestry scene implicitly made a public demonstration of Agamemnon’s unfitness to rule and of his corruption by the Trojan experience.” 50. See Seaford 1998, 124–­25, on the replacement of a talismanic object by money, and 2004, 166–­7 1 (suggesting at 2004, 167 that the textile, an embodiment of unlimited money, kills him “because it has no limit ”); Wohl (1998, 86–­87) sees here the play’s clearest expression of the disenchantment of an agalma, and its collapse into the category of ploutos (disembedded wealth). 51. Sailor and Stroup 1999, 177: “Their house is not like the house of a citizen; it is a house which has at its command the resources of the world: its wealth is coterminous with the abundance of nature.” 52. The question of whether the heimata that Agamemnon treads are not simply cloth or “carpet” but actual clothing is treated extensively in the literature on this passage. In support of reading these textiles as clothing: Denniston and Page 1957, 148; Dover 1977, 58; Flintoff 1987, 121; and Vermeule 1966, 21. See Morrell 1997, 155–­57, esp. n. 21, for a summary of other views. I. Jenkins (1985, 116) helpfully points out that ancient clothing, being less tailored than modern, was not necessarily fixed in function. See also Noel 2013, 161. 53. On the place of women’s work in the economy of ancient Greece, see Barber 1991, 283–­98; Brock 1994; and Blundell 1995; on women and property, Foxhall 1989 and Pomeroy 1994, 41–­67; on weaving as a political metaphor, Scheid and Svenbro 1996 and Vetter 2005. 54. On clothing within the Homeric gift economy see Morrell 1997, 141–­46; Pedrick 1998; Von Reden 1995, 31–­36; and Mueller 2010a. 55. See further Mueller 2010a. 56. See Johnston 1995 on poikilos implying guile or deception. 57. Sacredness: Fraenkel 1950, ad loc.; and wealth: Zimmermann 2011, 430–­31. 58. See also Fraenkel 1950, 419. 59. McClure 1997, 129. On the supernatural elements involved in the treading, see also Dingel 1967, 166 and Moreau 1976–­77. 60. For the connection between poikilia and magic, especially in Sappho fr. 1V, see Putnam 1960; Segal 1974; Winkler 1990a, 166–­76; and Petropoulos 1993. 61. McNeil (2005, 15–­17) goes on to suggest that the fabrics may be a story cloth, and that their iconographic narrative may include scenes from the Procne-­Philomela story, with the comparisons of Cassandra to a swallow. 62. E.g., Rinaudo 2009, 46–­49; Porter 2010, 393–­94; Grand-­Clément 2011, 426–­28; Grand-­ Clément observes at 428 that the term is reserved in the Archaic period for objects of exquisite

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craftsmanship (“poikilos s’applique avant tout à des objets qui sont le produit d’une activité artisanale parfaitement maîtrisée”). 63. I’m grateful to Mario Telò for this reference, and for his help with the olfactory resonances of the tapestry. 64. See the relevant discussion at Harris 2007, 466: “In its first performances, then, the play most likely started not just with a bang, but also a stink, which would have persisted through the first scene as the fireworks’ thick smoke wafted across the stage and into the audience.” 65. Noel (2013, 173): “Par sa malléabilité, l’objet devient alors une métonymie de la trilogie tout entière, à plusieurs niveaux: il est d’abord l’image, visible sur la scène, mais surtout suggérée par les mots, de l’infini du cycle de la vengeance de génération en génération.” She focuses on the protean quality of both the language and net imagery which together create a sense of the unlimitedness, the infinitude, of this object. 66. Prag (1985, 25) dates the vase on stylistic grounds to 475–­465 BCE. 67. The text of Agamemnon is not explicit about what kind of weapon (sword or axe) Clytemnestra used to kill her husband, and M. Lee (2004, 265) suggests that “Aeschylus deliberately did not specify the type of weapon used in order to focus attention on the garment itself.” Marshall (2001) sees a way out of this ambiguity in the ever-­evolving performance tradition: the sword may have been the weapon of choice in 458 BCE, but a reperformance of the Oresteia at some point in the 420s likely featured an axe, since Euripidean tragedy takes for granted that the axe was the murder weapon, and as Prag (1985, 82) notes the axe very quickly “got into the [iconographic] tradition of Agamemnon’s and Cassandra’s death after Aeschylus.” 68. Nor is Aeschylus’s Agamemnon unique in this regard. As Raeburn and Thomas (2011, ad loc.) note, Agamemnon’s death robe is called χίτων ἄπειρος at Sophocles’ Polyxena (fr. 526). In this fragment, apeiros echoes the deadly textile-­trap at Ag. 1082: ἄπειρον ἀμφίβληστρον, ὥσπερ ἰχθύων. 69. See Lyons 2003 and 2012, 77–­90. 70. Med. 949; see further Mueller 2001. 71. The phrase is Raeburn and Thomas’s (2011, ad loc.). 72. That the bathtub was likely to have been part of this tableau as a stage prop is confirmed by the Chorus’s later reference to it at 1540–­41. Seaford (1984) suggests that the garment in which he is wrapped is to be read as a perverted funeral robe, of a sort to match his “funeral” bath. 73. A scholiast to Ch. 973 suggests that the ekkuklēma would have been used in this scene (ἀνοίγεται ἡ σκηνὴ καὶ ἐπὶ ἐκκυκλήματος ὁρᾶται τὰ σώματα), just as it was in Clytemnestra’s display of the corpses at Ag. 1372, but Taplin (1977, 357) objects that there is no indication in the case of Orestes’ speech that the scene is set indoors as it seems to be in the Agamemnon (based on what Clytemnestra says at Ag. 1379), and proposes instead that “the bodies and stage properties were brought on by mute extras, no doubt the same attendants as those who hold out the cloth at 983ff.” 74. See Taplin 1977, 358, with references to earlier literature on the visual correspondence between this scene and the one at Ag. 1372ff. 75. Thanks to Mario Telò for this insight. 76. Garvie (1986, ad loc.), on lines 997–­1004, while noting Orestes’ back and forth between the robe and Clytemnestra and finding “the disruption of the thought intolerable” asserts that “we cannot attribute the disruption to the onset of Orestes’ madness; for at this point he is still completely sane (cf. 1026).” But simply proclaiming sanity, as Orestes does at 1026 (ἕως δ᾿ ἔτ᾿ ἔμφρων εἰμί) does not make one sane—­does it?

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77. Compare Ajax’s referring to his sword as sphageus (Aj. 815) and the relevant discussion in chapter 1. 78. Vermeule (1966, 21) argues that they were likely one and the same based on the representation on the Boston Oresteia Krater whose image we considered above, and Taplin (1977, 315) concedes that “it is even possible that one and the same stage-­property was used for both cloths, though there is no positive evidence for this,” a possibility that “the indefiniteness of the nature of the purple cloth” (314) in Agamemnon certainly supports, though in his 1978 discussion of the same scene he backtracks, claiming that “it is unlikely that the same stage-­property was used throughout both for the coverlets and for the trap” (81). 79. Goldhill (1986a, 14–­16) emphasizes the similarities between Clytemnestra’s plot and Orestes’ revenge in terms of their “reliance on deceitful persuasion, misrepresenting messages in the power struggle of the house.” 80. Compare Taplin (1977, 358) on Orestes’ utterance of ἴδεσθε δ᾿αὖτε at Choephoroi 980: “This αὖτε is not merely a resumption of line 973, it harks back to the scene in Ag.” I propose that the perception of such connections forged by props can extend even beyond the borders of the trilogy. 81. For a different recasting of Aeschylus’s Choephoroi at Or. 94ff., with Helen taking over Clytemnestra’s role, Hermione playing Electra, and Menelaus as Orestes, see Torrance (2013, 50–­51); moreover, the Phrygian slave in Orestes can be considered a sort of Cassandra figure (Torrance 2013, 55). 82. The specific word arkus, one of several terms for “net” in Aeschylus, is spoken by Cassandra at Ag. 1116, when she cries out, in reference to Clytemnestra, “No, she is a net that shares his bed, the one who shares the guilt of his murder” (ἀλλ᾿ ἄρκυς ἡ ξύνευνος, ἡ ξυναιτία/ φόνου). 83. “The doer suffers.” See further Lebeck 1971, 63–­68, and Taplin 1977, 314–­15, 381, on net imagery in the Oresteia; on the repurposing of this nexus of imagery in Euripides, Torrance 2013, 54. 84. Carriage entrances, notes Torrance (2011, 190), “seem to have been a particular feature of Aeschylean drama,” on which, see Taplin 1977, 43, 70–­78, and 304–­6. 85. The term for the “carriage” that the Euripidean Clytemnestra uses, apēnē (998) echoes her character’s similar words in Agamemnon (906), signaling that the current scene is a reenactment of the earlier one. Compare Ley (2007b, 77), who observes that “the allusion to the arrival of Agamemnon and Cassandra in Agamemnon is understandably attractive in a tragedy that transforms some part of the action of the Oresteia.” See also Torrance 2011, 190, and 2013, 31–­32. 86. This point could be made very powerfully in performance if, as has been suggested by Hammond (1984, 374), the actor playing Clytemnestra were to be clothed in “royal purple.” 87. A rebuttal of sorts to Clytemnestra’s reference to Electra’s being “unwashed and shoddily clad” (σὺ δ᾿ ὧδ᾿ ἄλουτος καὶ δυσείματος χρόα, El. 1107), the soot-­smothered building in this line is to be compared with the “smoke-­filled dwellings” on which Justice shines her light, at Ag. 774–­75, as Cropp (1988) notes ad loc.: “El.’s poor house (1139) harbours Justice (1146) for Cl. who luxuriates in sinful wealth (cf. Ag. 776–­80).” 88. See, e.g., Weiner and Schneider 1989; Weiner 1992; Hendrickson 1995; Küchler and Miller 2005; and D. Miller 2010. 89. See, e.g., Wyles 2011 on tragic costume and Wiles 2007 on masks. 90. It is important, however, to note the “performative turn” in more recent criticism, on which see Bierl 2005. Important antecedents include, e.g., Taplin 1977; Wiles 1987, 1997, and 2000; Walton 1991; and Rehm 2002.

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91. An idea that comes through in the syntax of the speech accompanying her gesture: she begins with an apostrophe to the “fillets” (ὦ στέφη τοῦ φιλτάτου μοι θεῶν) and ends with a direct address to the god himself (ὦ μαντεῖ᾿ ἄναξ). 92. Easterling (2005, 31–­32) on Cassandra rediviva in Euripides’ Trojan Women. 93. Cassandra’s disrobing may well have resonated metadramatically even in its Aeschylean performance context, as Wyles (2011, 66) suggests: “When Cassandra throws down her insignia, she is deconstructing her semiotic representation as a character.” 94. E.g., Carlson 2001; see further chapter 6. 95. The impact of aural dynamics ought to be considered, however; would spectators have seen through mask and costume, tipped off by an actor’s distinctive voice? 96. On the use of props in this scene to conduct a “rezeptionsästhetische Analyse” of Euripides’ ragged heroes, see Zimmermann 2011. Macleod (1974, 221) first suggested that the rags lent to Dikaiopolis by Euripides at Acharnians 400–­34 could be interpreted as “copies of the Telephus and other Euripidean plays.” On the metatheatricality of the scene, see also Milanezi 2005; Robson 2005; and Wyles 2011, 40. 97. Wyles 2011, 53. 98. Duncan (2006, 35–­36) argues that “Aristophanes presents Agathon as an ontological puzzle,” since at one moment he seems to “embody a postmodern theory of identity (and in particular gender identity) as constructed, contingent upon the clothing, gestures, and mannerisms—­the style, if you will—­that a person assumes and displays” whereas at other times Agathon “seems to expose an essentialist theory of identity rooted in one’s innermost nature and expressed naturally in one’s body and appearance.” See also Stehle 2002. 99. Denniston and Page 1957, ad loc. Chapter Three 1. In case tourism seems a distinctly anachronistic lens through which to view Ion’s birth tokens, we should recall the play’s Chorus pointing to the figures on the frieze of Apollo’s temple (190–­92): “See! Look there: Zeus’s son killing the Lernian hydra with his golden sickle,” says one member of the Chorus to another, excited to see a familiar mythological scene in a foreign city. On travel and tourism in the ancient world, see Elsner 1994, Duchêne 2003, and Dougherty 2009. 2. See especially Zeitlin 1996; Zacharia 2003, on the repressed violence at the heart of late fifth-­century BCE Athenian imperialism to which she reads Euripides’ Ion as a pointed response; and Pedrick 2007, on Ion as a dramatic investigation of “the choices that bind a family together and form a romance of belonging” (186). In the second half of this chapter, I consider in detail the recognition scene from Euripides’ Electra. 3. Other genres have fared better, where object analysis is concerned: see Dewald 1993, Crielaard 2003, Bassi 2005, and Grethlein 2008 on objects in epic and historiography. See also Taplin’s (1978, 97–­98) brief but incisive comments on the recognition tokens in Ion. 4. An expanded version of this Ion discussion can be found at Mueller 2010b. On the autochthony theme, Loraux 1993, 184–­236, and Saxonhouse 1986. 5. Compare Wohl 1998, xxxi: “The theory also suggests a mode of power that is generative, that creates subjects, rather than one that simply manipulates or represses preexistent subjects.” 6. See Wohl 1998, xxxi–­xxxiv, for a lucid and more expansive account of Althusserian “interpellation” and its applications to Greek tragedy. 7. As interpreted by Goff (1988) the tent displays some of the crucial conflicts and paradoxes

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of being Athenian; see Zacharia 2003, 35–­39, on the late fifth-­century BCE Athenian imperial agenda articulated in the tent tapestries. 8. See Montiglio 2000, 199–­204, on Apollo’s silence in Ion. 9. Dionysus was worshipped every other year in mystery celebrations of maenads, and a ritual in memory of Semele was performed every eighth year (Burnett 1970, 133). Xouthos supposedly engendered Ion during the ritual of Dionysus Liknites (a celebration of the baby Dionysus being placed in a basket and handed over to nymphs) on Mt. Parnassus. Nymphs (Thyiades) probably would have wakened the infant god in the Corycian cave during this ceremony (Zeitlin 1996, 302). 10. Faraone 1992, 3–­17. 11. As recorded in Anth. Pal. 3.10 and printed by Bond (1963, 148). 12. Gernet 1981a, 139. Bond (1963, 19) posits that the golden vine is referred to at Euripides’ Hypsipyle fr. 765 Kannicht (=TrGF 5.2.765), οἰάνθα τρέφει τὸν ἱερὸν βότρυν and at fr. 759a.1632 Kannicht, where the words οἰνωπὸν βότρυν appear. 13. Cf. συμβόλαια at 411, as noted by Loraux (1993, 187n14). 14. See Gernet 1981a, 132–­34, on the myths of the Golden Fleece (of Atreus and the Argonauts) as reflecting investiture ceremonies. 15. On agalmata see Gernet 1981a, 114–­19; and Wohl 1998, 61–­63, and passim. The agalma par excellence can be found in Euripides’ IT where the cult statue of Artemis is said to have “fallen from the sky” into the Taurian temple (87–­88). 16. I use the term heirloom to designate an object that is given a genealogy. 17. On the antipēx as a round wicker basket with a hinged lid, see Bergson 1960 and Young 1941, with visual parallels. 18. Evidence is lacking for a fifth-­century ephebeia, but many scholars agree with Vidal-­ Naquet (1981, 147) that “the ephebia of the fourth century B.C. had its roots in ancient practices of ‘apprenticeship,’ whose object was to introduce young men to their future rôles as citizens and heads of families.” See, more generally, Vidal-­Naquet 1981; and, on the ephebeia and Greek tragedy, Vidal-­Naquet 1990; Winkler 1990b, 20–­37; and Sommerstein 2010, 47–­60. 19. As examples, Gernet (1981a, 135–­40) cites the sandals and sword of Theseus, hidden under a rock by Aegeus until his son is of age (i.e., an ephebe) to claim them, and the legends of the Golden Fleece. Cf. Herodotus 4.9–­10 on the bow and girdle that Herakles leaves with the snake-­woman who has conceived three sons by him; the son who is able to string the bow and put on the girdle will win the right to remain in the country which will henceforth be called “Scythia” after him (Skythes). 20. Rosivach (1977, 290–­93) compares Kreousa’s gigantomachy narrative with that of the parodos. 21. In Hesiod’s Theogony 274–­83 there are three Gorgons of which Medusa is the only mortal. An aegis with a Gorgon head appears at Il. 5.738–­42; in the Kypria, Medusa’s head is given to Athena for her aegis; and in Aspis 229–­37 there are references to snaky locks and snakes around the waist of Gorgons; cf. snakes at Pindar, P. 10.46–­48; 12.9–­12. 22. Perseus is mentioned for the first time as the slayer of Medusa at Hes. Th. 280; see also Euripides’ Andromeda fr.123 and El. 459ff. on Perseus as the Gorgon-­slayer. 23. I follow Kirchoff ’s transposition of lines 992–­93 to follow 997, as printed by Diggle (1981–­94, vol. 2), Parmentier and Grégoire (1997), and Kovacs (1999). The traditional order is defended by Owen (1990 ad loc.), Mastronarde (1975, 174n33), Biehl (1992), and K. Lee (1997 ad loc.), in which case θώρακ’ (993) would mean “breast” rather than “breastplate.”

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24. Mastronarde (1975, 174n33) reads line 994 as an attempt to give “a fairly recent Attic variant or even ad hoc innovation by Euripides . . . specious prestige.” 25. On Athena’s aegis see Il. 2.447–­49. There are conflicting versions also about who manufactures the aegis: at Il. 15.309–­10 Hephaestus makes it for Zeus; in Hesiod fr. 343 MW Metis makes it for Athena; later authors (see Ps–­Eratosthenes, Katasterismoi ) claim the aegis is made out of the skin of the goat that nourished baby Zeus or the skin of Athena’s father, Pallas, whom she killed when he tried to rape her. According to Diodorus Siculus 3.70.3–­5 the aegis was an earth-­born monster killed by Athena who then wore its skin, a version very similar to Kreousa’s. For further references to the aegis as the skin of a Gorgon killed in the gigantomachy, see Burkert 1983, 67n39. 26. See Plato’s Cratylus 391d on the different names used by gods and mortals in Homer for the same things, e.g. the river that the gods call Xanthus, mortals call Scamander; or the bird that the gods call “chalcis,” mortals call “cymindis.” For discussion of the phenomenon of double naming, see T. Rosenmeyer 1955, 228, and Clay 1972. 27. Goff (1990, 87–­90) remarks that the speech of the gods in Euripides’ Hippolytus “sets up an alternative to human discourse and, simultaneously, reproduces the conditions of that discourse” (89). 28. In this particular context, however, Apollo wears it (309). 29. Scholion to line 310: Ἥφαιστος Διὶ δῶκε· ὅτι σαφῶς Διὶ ἐσκεύασται ἡ αἰγίς, καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν Ἀθηνᾶς, καθὼς οἱ νεώτεροι ποιηταὶ λέγουσιν. 30. Zeitlin (1996, 302–­6), noting the parallel with Dionysus Liknites who, like Erichthonios and Ion, was placed in a basket (liknon) as a baby and handed over to female nurses, observes that the kistē was used as a container for the sacred talismans during the Eleusinian mysteries (306); on the latter, see Burkert 1983, 269–­74, and Kerenyi 1967, 66; Loraux (1993, 232) discusses the kistē of the Arrephoroi who repeat the act of the Kekropides. 31. K. Lee (1997, ad loc.), translating palaian as “age old,” notes the “miraculously preserved condition of the crib and its contents.” 32. This is fragment 11 in Hollis’s (1990) edition of Callimachus’s Hecale. 33. Purves (2010, 156) observes that, in Herodotus’s Histories, Delphi is depicted as “a kind of storage space for the various objects that work their way through the narrative.” See also Purves 2004, on the pre-­Olympian history of Hesiod’s cosmos being contained in the storage-­like space of Erebos. 34. Cf. 1141: ὑφάσμαθ᾿ ἱερὰ θησαυρῶν πάρα. 35. Goff (1988, 44): “The images displayed on the tent, the figures of Athenian and βάρβαροι associated with the hangings, can be seen as working towards a definition of what it means to be Greek and specifically an Athenian.” 36. See Gibert 1995, 185–­89, on this scene as the climax to a series of metaphorical and literal “openings” in the play. 37. Swaddling clothes are also mentioned or used as tokens of recognition (with differing degrees of success) in Aeschylus Ch. 231 and Euripides El. 539–­40, on which see Loraux 1993, 187n15. 38. I have found only one other thing being named (as direct object of ὀνομάζειν) in Euripides, besides the aegis to be discussed below: Hecuba’s sēma at Hec. 1271–­73 (κυνὸς σῆμα) a geographical landmark rather than an object per se. 39. Weaving plays an important role also in the Eleusinian mysteries and the Panathenaia: Kore was working at a loom before the snake attacked her (Burkert 1983, 272); and as an unfinished peplos, Kreousa’s weaving recalls the garment dedicated yearly to Athena at the

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Panathenaia (Loraux 1993, 225). On the Panathenaic peplos and festival, see Barber 1992 and Neils 1992 and 1996. 40. Burkert (1983, 153n76) cites Harpokr. αἰγίς and Suda αι 60 for the aegis as made of plaited wool (ἐκ τῶν στεμμάτων πλέγμα). 41. E.g., Loraux (1993, 231) on Kreousa’s placement of the antipēx in a hollow under the Acropolis as imitating in reverse the “raising up” of Erichthonios into Athena’s arms. 42. It was customary to announce the birth of a male child by hanging an olive wreath outside the doorway while the birth of a female child was announced with wool. See Hesychius s.v. stephanon ekpherein (ἔθος ἦν, ὁπότε παιδίον ἄρρεν γένοιτο παρὰ Ἀττικοῖς, στέφανον ἐλαίας τιθέναι πρὸ τῶν θυρῶν· ἐπὶ δὲ τῶν θηλειῶν ἔρια διὰ τὴν ταλασίαν) and Golden 1990, 23. 43. See Ion 1480 and Herodotus 8.55 on the contest between Athena and Poseidon and the olive tree springing to life again the day after the Persians had burned the Acropolis; Apollodorus Bibl. 3.14.1 on Athena calling Kekrops to witness her gift; E. Tr. 801–­2 on the olive tree as an adornment (kosmon) of Athens. On the symbolism of the olive tree in Greek culture, Detienne 1970 and Parker 1987, 198–­99. 44. Cf. Kreousa’s monody, where she refers the Delian bay’s hatred of Apollo (919–­21); Leto gave birth to Apollo in a garden surrounded by palms and bay. 45. See Zeitlin 1996, 292, and Hoffer 1996, 295–­99. 46. Writing on the power dynamics of naming, Judith Butler (1997, 29) indicates that “the scene of naming appears then first as a unilateral action: there are those who address their speech to others, who borrow, amalgamate, and coin a name, deriving it from available linguistic convention, and establish that derivation as proper in the act of naming.” 47. Compare Aeschylus, Ch. 231, where Orestes displays his woven token to Electra with a similar interjection and accompanying gesture: ἰδοῦ δ᾿ ὕφασμα τοῦτο, σῆς ἔργον χερός. 48. See further Mueller 2011b on reading gestures back into deictic expressions. 49. On the festival, see Parke 1977, 29–­50, and Burkert 1985, 232. 50. Onians (1973, 229–­31) explains the hair dedication of a youth upon reaching puberty as an acknowledgement of the river’s vital role in having nurtured him with life-­giving liquids; the local river has “produced not only the water he has drunk but also in large degree that which he has absorbed in plants—­wine and barley-­grouts, the marrow of men, etc.—­and animals nourished thereby” (229). A scholion to Il. 23.142ff., where Achilles dedicates to Patroclus a lock of hair that he had been intending to offer his native river Spercheios upon his return home, confirms that “rivers are regarded as youth rearers (κουροτρόφοι) because the liquid gives growth.” Burkert (1985, 70) describes hair offerings as a way of sacralizing, at the moment of symbolic death, what has been left over from a previous existence: “Just as the sacralization at the sacrifice contains something of bad conscience and restitution, so here the anxiety associated with the turning point of life becomes a symbolic redemption from the powers which have previously ruled one’s life.” For further references, see Burkert 1985, 373n29. 51. P. Oxy. 2617, 7–­13: τὸν ἀναγ[νωρισμὸ]ν διὰ τοῦ βοστρύχο[υ Στ]ησιχόρωι ἐστιν[. . .]; see Davies and Finglass (2014) for the fragments of Stesichorus’s Oresteia. 52. Ai. 550–­51. See further chapter 5. 53. Goldhill (1986a, 163): “In Euripides, even the divine support for Orestes’ action is undercut as the Dioscuroi in famous and shocking lines accuse the wise Apollo of delivering not wise oracles (1245–­46).” 54. Eu. 180–­84. 55. Cf. Charicleia’s comments on the effectiveness of gnōrismata in Heliodorus’s Aethiopica 9.24.7 (cited and translated by Cave [1988, 20]): “ ‘The tokens [ gnōrismata],’ said Chariclea, ‘are

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tokens to those who know them or who exposed them with me; but to those who know them not, or cannot recognize them all, they are mere unmeaning keepsakes or, perchance, necklaces that involve their holders in suspicion of theft and brigandage.’ ” 56. A theme explored extensively by Deborah Lyons, who traces the anxiety surrounding women’s gifts back to the Odyssey : e.g., Lyons 2003, 99–­101, and 2012, 69–­76. McClure (1997) considers how tragic heroines control men through textiles and highlights the magical language of Clytemnestra’s speech (Ag. 958–­74) in the carpet scene, as we saw in chapter 2; see too Wohl 1998, 8–­9, 24–­25, and 152–­53 on women as gift–­givers. 57. See Mueller 2001. 58. I assume here that the “ring” (anulus) referred to in the Latin translation of this Armenian text goes back to a σφραγίς vel sim. in the Greek original: see Collard and Cropp (2008, 266, test. iib). 59. Zeitlin 2012, 361. 60. Emlyn-­Jones (1984, 7) notes parallels between this recognition and the modern Greek poetic tradition of the “Return of the long-­absent husband,” particularly the proof, “σημάδια, which the disbelieving wife demands from the husband,” and which consists of “progressively more intimate details of courtyard, house, and bedroom until finally her husband, by referring to marks on her body and also his amulet, which she wears between her breasts, convinces her of his real identity.” See further Kakridis 1971 and, on the sign of the bed, Zeitlin 1996, 27–­32. 61. Contrast O’Brien (1988, 103) who reads the spear as the only proof that evokes a happy memory. 62. Sansone 1975, 290–­91. 63. Pelops’s marriage contest is also mentioned in the first lines of the play (1–­4); O’Brien (1988, 102) observes that the “family history is . . . effectively compressed into two events, the victory of Pelops and the sacrifice at Aulis.” 64. On the respective chariots of Pelops and Iphigenia, see P. O. 1.77–­87 and E. IA 610–­18. In IT the furies’ pursuit of Orestes is frequently described with a chariot-­driving metaphor, i.e. at 81–­83 and 934; see Cropp 2000, ad loc. 65. I follow Diggle’s Oxford Classical Text which retains all of the lines (518–­44) subject to dispute. Among editors in favor of deleting all the lines are Mau (1877), Fraenkel (1950 vol. 3, 821–­26), and Bain (1977). For arguments in favor of retaining all the lines, see e.g., Lloyd-­Jones 1961, Bond 1974, and Donzelli 1980. 66. The Euripidean Electra uses the same adjective at Electra 530, perhaps intending a pun on homopatrios (“sharing the same father”). 67. On the “confusion” (taragmos) that Orestes has observed in human reproduction, see El. 367–­72 and my discussion below. 68. On the sphragis in Sophocles’ Electra, see Batchelder (1995) and, for a recent overview of all three recognition scenes, Zeitlin 2012. 69. El. 520–­21 closely echoes Ch. 229–­30 (σκέψαι τομῇ προσθεῖσα βόστρυχον τριχὸς / σαυτῆς ἀδελφοῦ σύμμετρον τὠμῷ κάρα) whether or not one reads κόμῃ for τόμῃ at Ch. 230. See further Paduano 1970, 388, and for an overview of how the lock, which is the only token common to them all, functions in all three “Electra” recognition scenes, Kucharski 2004 and Zeitlin 2012, 365–­67. 70. Marshall also notes that with her cropped, ragged, and emaciated appearance, “Electra looks like many other Euripidean heroines” (1999–­2000, 339). 71. See note 65 on the textual issue in this passage.

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72. These lines should be considered perhaps as belonging to the nexus of athletic imagery which clusters around the death of Aegisthus, as well discussed by Swift (2010, 156–­70). 73. See, for instance, the Chorus’s description in Aristophanes’ Frogs of the citizens with the highest aristocratic credentials as “those who were trained in the palaestra and in choruses and music” (Ra. 729). On the palaestra as a social stage for performing and testing elite masculinity, see Osborne 1998b and Kurke 1999, 275. 74. On physis and its cognates in Greek tragedy, see Hajistephanou 1975, especially 72–­78 on Electra; for the philosophical and cultural significance of these terms in the fifth century, Heinimann 1945, Kerferd 1981, and Goldhill 1986a, 239–­43. 75. For Gallagher (2003, 406), the fact that Electra has slyly diverted the focus from the color (as mentioned by the Old Man) to the texture of the hair, as affected by its combing, is sufficient to undermine her credibility as both a speaker and a character, but I am not convinced Euripides’ audience would have found fault with Electra for seeming “to violate the correctness of names” (410), as outlined by certain sophists (Gallagher refers readers to Guthrie 1971, 204, and Kerferd 1981, 73–­74). 76. Denniston 1939, 113. A variation on Denniston’s approach is to regard Electra as incurably “skeptical.” On the critical reception (or construction) of a skeptical Electra, see in particular Gellie 1981, Halporn 1983, and Goff 1999–­2000, 94–­97; on Electra as a sophist, Gallagher 2003. 77. But Orestes concurs with the Farmer that poverty destroys the positive value of eugeneia (375–­76): ἀλλ᾿ ἔχει νόσον / πενία, διδάσκει δ᾿ ἄνδρα τῇ χρείᾳ κακόν. 78. At 561 Orestes wonders aloud “why he walks in a circle around me” (τί δὲ κυκλεῖ πέριξ πόδα;). 79. See Marshall 1999–­2000, 340n60, for interesting remarks on what is at stake in the scar’s visibility, and Marshall 1999, 200n44, on the visual representation of scarring and scratch marks on tragic masks. 80. Körte (1929) traces the semantic evolution of charaktēr : originally, it designated a personal agent (“the one who χαράσσει”), then entered an intermediary stage of instrumentality (i.e., “the instrument used for χαράσσειν”), and finally settled into the sense most familiar to us from literary contexts (“the result of χαράσσειν”) i.e., “imprint.” The verb has two primary technical meanings, that of carving out letters on a hard (stone, metal, wood) surface, and of putting a die mark on a coin (70–­7 1). See, too, Will 1960 on charaktēr in Euripides. 81. E.g., Körte 1929, 72; Howgego 1995, 111. 82. Howgego (1995, 8–­9): “It is worth asking why civic gold and electrum coinage is so rare. . . . We know that both Athens and Rome stored gold against dire necessity, on the Acropolis and in the aerarium sanctius respectively. . . . Was there some taboo that gold should not be used for coinage unless absolutely necessary?” 83. See further Kurke (1999, 303–­5) on the ideological resonances of silver, which she terms a “middling metal,” one “not so high as gold, but still precious metal in contrast to base bronze.” 84. Seaford (2004) maintains that Euripides has avoided explicit reference to coinage (“it is as if the dramatist has coinage in mind, but does not want to commit the anachronism of naming it directly,” 154), but the mention of silver as opposed to gold, juxtaposed with such terms as kibdēlos, and charaktēr, strikes me as a fairly explicit allusion to money. On coin imagery in Euripides, see Kurke 1999, 354; on anachronism in tragedy, Easterling 1985, 6–­7. 85. Compare the comical reference to a dokimasia at Aristophanes’ Wasps 578, where Philokleon claims that one of the perks of jury duty is viewing the genitals of candidates to determine whether they are age–­appropriate; see Whitehead 1986, 100–­101.

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86. Women did not have citizen rights, but could be distinguished by their birth as legitimately Athenian or otherwise. “Legal marriage” is thus hard to define in an Athenian context. Key factors would have included the egguē, or pledging of a daughter by her father; the dowry; the gamēlia (the feasts given by a new groom for his fellow phratry members); and the birth of a child. See further Ogden 1996, 85–­86. 87. On dokimasia, Harrison 1971, vol. 2, 200–­207; Hansen 1999, 218–­20; Todd 1993; Ogden 1996, 123–­24; and Kurke 1999, 309–­14. Dokimasiai were conducted by either the council or the courts; the council oversaw the testing of potential councillors and archons while the thesmothe­ tai conducted all other dokimasiai in the courts. Ogden (1996, 123) cites Demosthenes 57 in which Euxitheus mentions four occasions on which his citizenship was affirmed (in the deme context): “first at his father’s deme scrutiny (dokimasia) by the council; then at his own, then at the scrutiny of membership by the deme itself (diaspēphisis), and a fourth time when he was nominated among the best born for the priesthood of Heracles.” 88. On the koureion, the phratries’ scrutiny of their ephebic members, Ogden (1996, 119) comments: “It is clear from these measures that the phratry was far more interested in protecting itself against the admission of non-­citizens than it was about ensuring just decisions upon its candidates.” While the ability to prove deme membership was the sine qua non of Athenian citizenship, it is far from clear what role phratry membership played in verifying citizen identity: see Whitehead 1986, 98–­99. 89. Gallagher (2003, 414) argues that Electra is “refuted, silenced, and made to look ridiculous” after she has refuted the Old Man, but I don’t think he takes sufficient account of the categorical differences between the scar and the earlier three tokens. 90. The relationship of both Electra and Orestes to the polis is well discussed by Ormand (2009, 250–­60). 91. Paley 1858, ad loc.: λαμπρὸν χαρακτῆρ᾿, at El. 559, indicates that coiners of false money were not uncommon in the time of Euripides. 92. As Griffith (2009, 285) has recently suggested, “it was not a big mental stretch to imagine the events and relationships occurring in a fictional Argos as corresponding quite closely to those of a fictional (but imaginable) Athens.” On Argos in the Athenian imaginary, see Saïd 1993; on democratic Argos, see Griffith 2009, 299n83, and Robinson 2011, 6–­21. 93. In comparing Jason’s status among men to that of fake gold, Medea depicts her husband as a counterfeit aristocrat. Gold, after all, is the touchstone of aristocratic (and divine) excellence. But the metaphor of the kibdēlos (counterfeit) paradoxically evokes a democratic practice: that of putting a visible stamp, a charaktēr, on coins to ensure their value. It is the failure of aristocratic social relations that propels Medea’s desire for an externally validated sign of some kind—­one whose value, as marked on the body, would be guaranteed by Zeus. 94. Von Reden 1995, 175. 95. For both Tarkow and Goff, the effect of the scar is to cast Orestes as younger and less heroic than Odysseus. Tarkow (1981, 147) writes that “the mythical foil which the scar suggests thus serves to remind us of the essentially unheroic fellow Euripides is portraying in Orestes,” while Goff (1991, 264) adds that the scar as token that proved Odysseus a man “both when it is acquired and again when its rediscovery confirms his status” in the case of Orestes “conversely, marks him as a child.” Torrance (2013, 28–­31), following in their footsteps, regards the scar as an epicizing move on Euripides’ part. 96. As Purves (2006) has shown, falling is intimately connected with mortality in the Homeric epics. Below I adapt Purves’s insights on human temporality to the language of falling in the Electra.

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97. See Whitehead 1986, 97–­109, on the ancient sources that describe this procedure, including Arist. Ath. 42; Demosthenes 57.23 and 40.28 mention the testimony of phratry members being used to confirm deme membership. Induction into the phratries: e.g., Is. 6.64 and 8.19; D. 57.54; see Lambert 1993, 143–­61, for further discussion. 98. Ogden (1996, 14) is insightful on the way that the “natural family” is a construction of the state, and subject to the latter’s “hierarchizations and limitations, namely the enforced privileging of one union, or the denial of the validity of unions between individuals of certain classes.” 99. E.g., Goff (1991, 264) observes that the scar “locks him into a symbolic childhood” precisely at the moment when Orestes should be transitioning to adult responsibilities, which include avenging his father’s death. 100. Once given, of course, the particularity of the name does have tremendous importance, especially in tragedy; consider, for example, Orestes’ refusal in the IT to give up his onoma (name) to Iphigenia although she already controls the fate of his sōma (body); see IT 504. 101. In Ellman’s memorable formulation (1982, 82), “it is as if Odysseus’ scar had scarred the narrative itself, which plunges into memory and self-­dismemberment.” Although Goff (1991, 261) proposes that “the brevity of the Euripidean account . . . may indicate that it offers itself as a metonymy for the Odyssean narrative,” I prefer to see the scar’s brevity as suggestive of the ellipsis of its epic predecessor. 102. Swift (2010, 157) observes that the athletic language prepares for the murder of Aegis­ thus to be framed as a nikē, an athletic victory. 103. Moreover, continues Harrison (1971, 188), if the property under dispute was “moveable, it would often be before the court, and the litigant would simply need to lay hands on it (ἐφάπτεσθαι).” 104. See chapter 2 on this scepter and on the sartorial identity theft. 105. Denniston and other editors place daggers around δείματα and Ἀτρειδᾶν because the asyndeton does not make for easy comprehension (see Denniston 1939, ad loc.); it seems likely, though, that δεῖμα is not out of place semantically, and both Diggle and Denniston propose φάσματα δεινά. 106. Rosivach (1978, 190–­91) brings out well the parallel transgressions of Thyestes and Aegisthus. 107. Strauss (1993, 26) explains that there was no uniformity of naming practices in fifth-­ century Athens—­“some Athenians enthusiastically accepted the demotic, while others adhered to the patronymic”—­but that by the fourth century “a compromise had been worked out by which it was common (either in speech or in writing) for an Athenian to use both the patronymic and the demotic, for example: Aristoteles, son of Euphiletos of Akharnai (IG II2 44).” 108. Compare Electra’s criticism of her sister, Chrysothemis, at S. El. 365–­67: νῦν δ᾿ ἐξὸν πατρὸς / πάντων ἀρίστου παῖδα κεκλῆσθαι, καλοῦ / τῆς ματρός. “But as it is, although it was possible for you to be called the child of your father, best of all fathers, be now called your mother’s daughter.” 109. On paratragedy in the Clouds, see Revermann 2006a, 232–­35; on the comic use of the “lock” motif, see Foley 2008, 19, with the suggestion that Aristophanes “borrows from tragedy to underline his claim to comic subtlety,” and Telò 2016. 110. Noting other instances where the everyday and increasingly ordinary concerns of characters impinge on the action, Foley (2008, 32) suggests that “Euripides is using these uneasy transitions to communicate a changed tragic vision and orient his audience to it.” 111. The impersonal construction, φιλεῖ with an infinitive, is used to express a natural tendency, or what Paduano (1970, 393) calls a “gnomic present.” While not unique to the

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philosophers, the physis root (πεφυκέναι) in combination with φιλεῖ is reminiscent of Heraclitus fr. 208 (Kirk, Raven, Schofield): φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ. 112. Paduano (1970, 390) emphasizes that the hypothetical quality of the Aeschylean tokens in Euripides makes it logically easier to undermine them, particularly in the case of the weaving: “Euripide li distrugge col semplice artificio di farli precedere da un ‘se’. ” Chapter Four 1. On Simonides’ Danae Fragment, see Rosenmeyer 1991. 2. Karamanou (2006, 103) notes that the speaker of fr. 13 “is clearly Danae imploring her father not to separate her from her baby son,” whereas fr. 15 “which directly comments on the reversal of fortune, could have been the concluding evaluation of a messenger-­speech reporting the exposure of the chest, in which Danae and Perseus are imprisoned” (110). 3. Quotations are taken from Simonides fr. 543 Campbell. Rosenmeyer (1991, 15–­16), suggests that both words “independently evoke an epic past,” with larnax in Homer being used “as a box for valuables and money” as well as on other occasions to refer to “a funerary urn or coffin” whereas “the word δαιδαλέος in Homer is applied consistently to curiously wrought metal or wood, often implying divine provenance.” 4. The agency of such time-­defying receptacles acquires a negative permutation in another set of myths, vividly exemplified in Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Trachiniae; here textiles are stored and transported in receptacles that in themselves symbolize the potentially explosive effect of a pressurized time capsule. In both tragedies, deadly drugs applied to the fabrics will kick into action only under the catalyzing force of daylight and the warmth of human flesh. Deianeira reports that she folded up the garment destined for her husband, having smeared it with the Centaur’s ointment, and kept it out of the sunlight “in a hollow chest” (κοίλῳ ζυγάστρῳ, Tr. 692). It is more difficult to gauge how Medea’s deadly gift of a “fine robe and golden wreath” was transported to the Corinthian princess, but these too may have been carried in a receptacle of some kind; see Mastronarde 2002, 39–­40. 5. On the basket as a material metaphor for pregnancy on the Plautine stage, see Telò, forthcoming. 6. On the urn’s emptiness, see Ringer 1996, 98–­100. 7. See S. El. 1098–­1231. 8. Gellius 6.5.5–­8, translated by John C. Rolfe (Loeb, vol. 2, 1946). 9. See further Revermann 2006b, 114, on the “rise of migrant star performers” over the course of the fifth century; on Polus, see Easterling 2002, 335–­36; Lada-­Richards 2005, 460–­62; and Duncan 2005, where Polus’s performance of Electra is compared with that of the fourth-­ century BCE actor Theodorus. 10. Holford-­Strevens (2005) discusses the uses made of Polus’s story by theorists of acting and rhetoric from the sixteenth century onward. Whitmarsh (2013, 10) observes that while frame-­breaking may not have been “a feature of the actual surviving texts of tragedy,” anecdotes such as this one about Polus interpolating his own urn into his playing of Electra “show us how it could arise in performance, with the actor himself serving as the hinge between the mimetic world and reality.” 11. The quotation is from Wilson 2002, 43. On Sophocles acting the part of Thamyras, see the Life of Sophocles preserved by the tenth-­century CE encyclopedia known as the Suda (= TrGF 4.A.1.24–­25 Radt), and on the play itself, see Wilson 2009, 70–­79.

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12. See Eustathios, In Odysseam 1.241, where Sophocles is said to have boosted his popularity by playing the part of Nausicaa playing with a ball (τὸ τῆς Ναυσικάας πρόσωπον σφαίρᾳ παιζούσης ὑποκρινόμενος, ἰσχυρῶς εὐδοκίμησεν). 13. On the ancient tradition that Sophocles supposedly tailored his roles to individual acting talents, as well as the tradition that he himself gave up acting because of a weak voice, see Hall 2002, 9–­10. 14. For the sake of simplicity I refer to the object as an “urn” throughout, but it is worth noting that Sophocles’ language is much more varied, and includes the following terminology for this object: “bronze-­ribbed casting” (τύπωμα χαλκόπλευρον, 54); “small bronze container” (βραχεῖ / χαλκῷ, 757–­58; “small vessel” (βραχεῖ / τεύχει, 1113–­14); “burden at hand” (πρόχειρον ἄχθος, 1116); “this here container” (τόδ᾿ ἄγγος, 1118 and 1205); and “this little room of yours” (τὸ σὸν τόδε στέγος, 1165). The cinerary urn that Electra sees her mother “decorating,” just before she is killed by Orestes is referred to as λέβητα (1401). 15. The quotation is from Allan (2008, 13), who notes (2008, 11) that the distinction between metaphor and metonymy typically rests on “the possibility of demarcating the boundaries between domains (or domain matrices)” although these can be subjectively fluid. 16. This strand of my argument owes much to Ringer 1998. 17. Carlson 1994a, 7. 18. Carlson 1994a, 8. 19. In a similar vein, Marshall (1999–­2000, 329) notes that “the institutionalized experience of going to the theatre in Athens and the high rate of festival participation by the male citizen body could produce sophisticated and attuned audiences.” See introduction, above, pp. 2–3. 20. On the epic resonances of this phrase, see Dunn 1996. 21. Luschnig (1995, 91) reads the water pot as a “symbol of Electra’s displacement” and connects it both to her “lost future (as the wife of a noble Hellene) and stolen past (as the much loved and loving daughter in the palace of her father).” 22. Luschnig 1995, 91. 23. For an overview of theatrical referentiality in Euripides’ Electra see Marshall 1999–­2000. Hammond (1984, 380) points out that in Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, Electra both carries the urn on her head and dances with it, actions that “were memorable features of the production of that play” and are clearly evoked in Electra’s reference to the vessel she carries at E. El. 54–­55 (τόδ᾿ ἄγγος) and in her performance of the first part of her monody (112–­39), with the urn / water jug still on her head. Rehm (2002, 189) suggests that when she sets down the jug at 140–­42, it may still remain in view as a “silent reminder of the physical labor Electra loves to loathe.” 24. On the dolos theme, see especially MacLeod 2001. It is appealing to read ἄσκευον as a metatheatrical comment on the lack of stage props that will accompany Pylades and Orestes into the palace, given that skeuē can mean “props” and the fact that the prologue is set up as a sort of rehearsal for the play to follow. As Ringer (1998, 136–­37), puts it: “Up until now, the Tutor has served as a kind of playwright/director, rehearsing Orestes for his role as Agamemnon’s avenger. Now we watch as Orestes reverses these roles, making the Tutor an actor in the deceptive ‘play’ he has ‘authored.’ ” 25. The description of the “bronze urn” is clearly borrowed from Choephoroi 686–­87. 26. Ringer’s suggestion (1998, 140) that “bushes are fit receptacles for an antihero’s ‘arms,’ be they Orestes’ or Achilochus’ ” could be taken farther, as the bushes that serve as a rubbish bin for this kind of “armor” might be thought to encompass the detritus of the heroic world more generally (as Dunn [1996] implies).

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27. See Sofer 2003, 167–­83. 28. Sofer (2003, 168) also considers the example of Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother (1982) where the loaded gun in the first scene will be used by the protagonist Jesse Cates to kill herself at the end of the evening, and where “stage time and clock time synchronize.” 29. Chaston (2010, 149–­50) indicates that the urn will remain in the “mind’s eye of the spectators” from the time when it is first announced (i.e., at 54) “as a stage prop to appear later in the play and to facilitate the plot.” 30. I thank Leslie Kurke for helping me think through the prop’s meta-­performative qualities. 31. See, e.g., Hammond (1984, 377–­78) reasoning that in Euripides’ Electra, bushes would have been a part of the stage set necessary for concealing Orestes, Pylades, and their two silent attendants (109), but other commentators (i.e., Denniston [1939, 75] and Diggle [1981, 33]) assume the men would have been lying in wait behind the altar or behind the statue situated in front of the doorway. 32. On Sophocles’ text drawing “attention to its refusal to follow the Aeschylean pattern,” see Foley 2001, 158, and more generally 146–­7 1. 33. E.g., Kaibel 1896, ad loc. See also Foley 2001, 148, and Finglass 2007, ad loc. 34. Kitzinger (1991, 324) observes that in her mourning over the urn, Electra’s language is “subverted into futile and extraneous expression.” I’m more interested here in interpreting Electra’s words as an expression of her physical contact with the urn. 35. See Foley 2001, 160, on the tactile component of lament: “the lamenter touches the body of the dead—­or, as later in this play, the urn supposedly containing the ashes and bones—­and inflicts pain on herself.” Also Seale 1982, 69–­70. 36. The imperfect, as Bakker (2005, 169) indicates, “displaces the temporal deictic center to the past” and is in a sense comparable to a “camera eye placed at the center of the action” (2005, 162). The aorist, by contrast, has the opposite effect: it brings the past into the present, putting a vivid image before the readers’ own eyes. On the verb tenses in this speech, see also Hutchinson 1999, 55–­56. 37. Iphigenia laments for the brother she left while he was still a baby, at IT 230–­35, and the motif returns during the recognition scene, at 834–­36; on the linkage this play makes between Orestes and Apollo as babes in their mothers’ arms, see Zeitlin 2005, 213. On Orestes’ “infantilization” in Orestes, see Griffith 2009, 288–­91. 38. In this respect, Electra’s spoken lament is closely modeled on that of the Nurse at Choe­ phoroi 734–­65, a connection I explore below. 39. See Ormand 1999, 61–­63, on Electra’s subjectivity, which is constructed in relation to marriage even though she is unmarried. 40. Finglass 2007, 443–­45. Swift (2010, 347) points out that Electra has not only taken over the role of surrogate mother, but also that of servant. 41. Chaston (2010, 146) notes that the urn calls attention to “a spatial dichotomy between inside and outside” which serves to cue the audience to other important dichotomies in the play. 42. Electra may be showing her admiration for Niobe’s excessive mourning, but Hopman (2004, 456–­67) argues that Niobe was worshipped as a local cult hero in Thebes, and by “homonymy” also in Argos. On the Niobe myth before Sophocles, see de Jonge 2003. Swift (2010, 342–­43) suggests that Electra’s comparison of herself to Niobe would have resonated oddly with Sophocles’ audience, who must have had in mind Achilles’ citation of Niobe in Iliad 24 as an example of overcoming grief. 43. The drama of Procne who mourns for the son she herself killed was the subject of Sophocles’ lost Tereus, “perhaps produced soon after 430”: see March 2001, ad loc., and March

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2000. Nooter (2012, 107–­8) remarks of the unusual term τεκνολέτειρ’, which is not attested again until after the fifth century, that “Electra has been creating poetically evocative words on childlessness rather than creating children.” 44. March 2001, on lines 147–­52, and Swift 2010, 342. 45. Chrysothemis warns Electra that when Aegisthus returns home, she will be imprisoned, to which Electra responds: “Well, then, let him come quickly for that purpose” (ἀλλ᾿ ἐξίκοιτο τοῦδέ γ᾿ οὕνεκ᾿ ἐν τάχει (387). 46. I thank Mario Telò for this formulation. 47. Compare the use of κλεινά to modify the bow of Heracles at S. Ph. 654: Neoptolemus asks Philoctetes if that is the “famous” bow he is holding (ἦ ταῦτα γὰρ τὰ κλεινὰ τόξ’ ἃ νῦν ἔχεις;). 48. The recognition scene in Euripides’ Electra takes up the same challenge in a different way (see chapter 3). 49. Kitzinger (1991, 305) observes that while Orestes “moves the action forward,” Electra appears to be stuck in a “static and circular” experience of time. 50. See Purves 2004, on the jar-­shaped Erebos in Hesiod’s Theogony as a repository of stories. 51. Just as Darius does in Aeschylus’s Persians; on this and other ghostly apparitions on the tragic stage, see Bardel 2005. 52. Segal (1966, 483) observes that Sophocles is “not much interested in the Erinyes at all (though they are there, on Orestes’ side: 1386–­90).” And Kitzinger (1991, 301) comments that “the notorious non-­appearance of the Erinyes at the end of the play, coupled with the limited contribution of the choros, denies to the audience any other voice to replace or continue Elektra’s; and so, silence and deceit cast their shadow upon the final act of the play.” 53. See also Segal 1966, 493, for Clytemnestra’s dream (259–­60) containing the “blooming” scepter which “overshadows” the earth as the murdered father comes “into the light” (417–­23). 54. For Ringer (1996, 98) “it is central to the impact of this tragedy that Electra’s speech of mourning (1126–­1176), one of the most famous set pieces in ancient drama, is not directed at a ‘real’ object but at the urn which serves as a ‘prop’ both in the theatre where Electra is being performed as well as in the fictive world of the play.” 55. Ringer (1998, 193) adds that “Electra’s word choice uses the common meaning of μηχανή as a ‘stratagem,’ but in the metatheatrical environment Sophocles has created, it reminds the listener of a prominent part of the ancient theater, the device for creating staged epiphanies.” 56. Pace Finglass (2007, ad loc.), who suggests this was “not the urn, which was never taken inside” but a different vessel that Clytemnestra was preparing “in anticipation of the return of her son’s ashes to the house.” Finglass (2007, 456) interprets Electra’s setting down of the urn somewhere between 1216 and 1226 as a final abandonment of the object, i.e., “Electra’s abandonment of the object will represent the abandonment of her belief in Orestes’ death.” While I agree that this would be “undeniably potent” symbolism, the urn is originally intended as a mechanism for deceiving Agamemnon’s killers, and there is no reason to assume that it is not fulfilling that purpose when Clytemnestra is described by Electra as adorning a lebēs at 1401; further strengthening the link between this vessel and our prop is the fact that lebēs was used by Orestes at Ch. 686 to describe the cinerary urn said to contain his ashes. More distantly evoked is the δολοφόνου λέβητος in which Cassandra prophesied Agamemnon would be killed at Ag. 1129. 57. Poetics 1448b17. 58. Only two vases, by the Sicilian “Capodarso” painter, unequivocally show tragedy being performed in its theatrical setting: Trendall and Webster (1971, III. 6, 1, and III. 2, 8). See further Taplin 1993, 27–­29.

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59. Tragedy in the fourth century BCE was “hugely popular, performed storytelling” (Taplin 2007, vii). Viewers of the plays would also have viewed the pots, produced largely in the Greek west between 350 and 320 BCE and decorated with mythological scenes that enhanced the occasions of mourning for which they were made. 60. Walton (1996, 47) estimates that “the urn is about two feet in height.” 61. Modern parallels abound here, but I mention just one. In her autobiography, Blood Memory, dancer choreographer Martha Graham (1991, 220) recalls how for her Clytemnestra she spent “many evenings on the studio floor placing great pieces of red material around me.” In collaboration with the artist Isamu Noguchi, prop-­maker extraordinaire, they created a “triumphal cape” that Graham describes as “both a costume and a prop.” “I had used fabric in movement before,” she reflects, “but not in an intense design way, such as this.” 62. Think also of the Agathon scene from Thesmophoriazusae examined at the end of chapter 2. See Robson 2005, for a speculative but fascinating account of method acting avant la lettre. 63. See chapter 2. 64. Gods appear as characters only twice in the seven extant plays of Sophocles (Athena in the prologue of Ajax and Heracles at the end of Philoctetes). But the absence of gods as personified stage presences does not mean that these plays are lacking in divinity. On the contrary, gods appear in the form of oracles, prophecies, cult statues, and references to hero cults (Schein 1997, 125), challenging audiences to contextualize human actions in light of these superhuman phenomena. 65. Dunn (2009, 347) notes that Electra’s liminality is expressed through her frequently being positioned just outside the doors of the palace. See also Nooter 2012, 109, on how Electra uses lament “to demarcate the space of the play.” 66. On Orestes as a rewriting of the Oresteia, see Zeitlin 1980 and, for other Euripidean engagements with the Oresteia, Zeitlin 2005; Torrance 2011, and 2013, 13–­62. Chapter Five 1. See further Goff 2010. In Euripides’ IT, the spear (λόγχην, 823) of Pelops serves as a sort of family heirloom and identity card: Orestes mentions as proof (τεκμήρια, 822) of his own membership in the Pelopid clan that he knows that it was brandished by Pelops when he won Hippodameia in marriage, and that it currently lies hidden in the maiden quarters (826). 2. Janko 1992, 335: “Homer plays on the meaning of Πηλιάς, offering as cognates πῆλαι, Πηλίον and no doubt Πηλεύς; its true origin is surely Πηλίον.” On the “old notion that mankind sprang from trees, rocks, or earth,” see Janko’s discussion of Il. 16.33–­35 (319–­20). 3. Adding further nuance to the poetics of prestige is that the first syllable of the verb πῆλαι “to wield” (142) echoes the first syllable of both human and place names, aurally reinforcing that the spear’s wielding is an exclusive right of the Peliads: see Louden 1995, 30. 4. Prosthesis is an apt metaphor, in the sense that the shield is represented as being almost a part of Ajax’s body, so closely identified is it with his physical self, and with his identity as the best of the Greek defenders. Serlin (2006, 51), however, cautions against treating prosthesis as “a postmodern tool or artifact,” in his critique of those “who fail to give agency to the people who use prosthetic technology every day without glamour or fanfare.” 5. Most famous among biographied weapons in the Iliad is the shield of Achilles, whose manufacture fills the narrative of the first part of book 18, but other objects, such as Agamemnon’s scepter and the boar’s tusk helmet have their genealogies narrated as well: see Crielaard 2003 and Grethlein 2008.

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6. The Homeric epithet ἑπταβόειον is used exclusively of Ajax’s sakos, at Il. 7.220, 7.245, 7.266, and 11.544: see Whallon 1966, 7; by contrast, Achilles’ divinely crafted sakos has only five layers: πέντε δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ αὐτοῦ ἔσαν σάκεος πτύχες (Il. 18.481). 7. Louden (2006, 39–­40) observes that Ajax’s arming scene has been curtailed to place greater emphasis on the shield itself which, in addition to receiving the unique designation of “like a tower [πύργον],” is “further distinguished in receiving a brief account of its maker, Tukhios, and his making of the shield.” 8. Reinforcing the parallel is, as Louden points out (2006, 40), that “the same formula is used of Hephaistos fashioning Akilleus’s shield, κάμε τεύχων (7.220, 19.368).” 9. The earliest mention of the contest of the arms is in the Odyssey, where Odysseus encounters a stubbornly silent Ajax in the Underworld (11.541–­65). 10. In Ajax, Teucer (1135, 1137) and the Atreidae (1239–­45) offer conflicting perspectives on whether the verdict was undermined by foul play or whether Ajax simply refused to accept the judges’ ruling; on this issue, see Kyriakou 2011, 234–­37. Note that Ajax ironically, given their later history, rescues Odysseus at Il. 11.473–­88. 11. On the poetics of aspis and sakos see Bershadsky (2010), arguing for a notional rather than a rigidly materialistic understanding of how these “moveable labels” operate in the epic narrative (15). “An application of these terms to a shield communicates the level of safety and the likelihood of victory that the shield-­bearer has in a given episode: superior in the case of sakos, moderate in the case of aspis pantos’ eise, and inferior in the case of aspis ” (18, emphasis mine). So, for example, while a certain shield may be termed a sakos in a scene in which the weapon’s defensive capabilities are being played up, the same object (in a different scene) might be termed an aspis if its defensive role is projected to be weaker. 12. Wace and Stubbings (1962, 510) offer archaeological parallels for the Homeric full-­body shields in the two types of shields (one shaped like a figure eight and the other like a tower) that are depicted on artifacts, such as the Lion-­hunt dagger blade, from Mycenaean shaft graves. On the tower shields in the Theran ship-­fresco, see Morris 1989, 525, fig. 6. 13. Like Ajax and Achilles, Teucer is a sakos-­bearer (e.g., Il. 15.479), although his shield is described as being made of only four layers (τετραθέλυμνον). 14. Whallon 1966, 14: “Ajax and Achilles always carry ‘sakea’, Hector and Aeneas ‘aspides.’ ” The interchangeability of these two heroes is further underlined when Achilles claims at 18.193–­94 that he could not possibly “wear the famed weapons of any other hero, save the sakos of Telamonian Ajax.” 15. Indeed, Ajax is famously ἕρκος Ἀχαιῶν (at Il. 3.229, 6.5, and 7.211) and Achilles at Il. 1.284, a further link between the two. 16. Although he is never called herkos in Ajax, the Chorus’s celebration of the interdependence of great and small (158–­59), and particularly the phrase πύργου ῥῦμα (159), evokes Ajax’s Iliadic shield, which also happens to be called “tower-­like.” 17. Epic readily acknowledges that weaponry can be the bearer of kleos with the formula “famous weapons” (κλυτὰ τεύχεα) which occurs fifteen times in the Iliad (i.e., 5.435, 6.504, 11.334, 16.64, 17.85, 17.125, 17.191, 17.208, 18.144, 18.147, 18.192, 18.197, 19.10, 22.258, 22.399) and twice in the Odyssey (i.e., 12.228, 22.109). Note the parallel with Achilles’ armor, which temporarily turns Patroclus into his double, causing the Trojans to think that Achilles has set aside his anger, and prompting their desire to flee, at Il. 16.278–­83. In so far as the armor fashions Patroclus into the likeness of Achilles it exhibits the second-­degree agency of Achilles’ distributed personhood. 18. Although a xeinos, in Herodotus’s words, Ajax was nevertheless considered a “neighbor and an ally”: τοῦτον δέ, ἅτε ἀστυγείτονα καὶ σύμμαχον, ξεῖνον ἐόντα προσέθετο (5.66).

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19. Nagy 1979, 146. 20. Schol. Il. 11.527 21. See Davidson 2006 on the challenges of reading importations of Homeric language in Sophocles. 22. Even the syntax here is performative, for αὐτό—­separated from the noun σάκος, which secures its sense, by nearly three full lines—­places increased emphasis on sakos, as if mimicking the action of the shield itself, with its far-­reaching embrace. See Budelmann 2000, 35, on this deferral as an instance of “intervention,” which “can help the temporarily isolated words to spread their influence while they are without construction.” 23. Budelmann (2000, 34) takes the shield’s material presence as a given: “It is of course open to the actor playing Ajax to make a gesture which points to the shield, but linguistically αὐτό is much in need of its head and thus gains considerable prominence.” 24. On the translation of πόρπακος (a term borrowed from the milieu of hoplite warfare) as “arm-­grip” see my discussion below (pp. 146–­47). 25. Just before this, however, Hector, in his own voice, prays to Zeus and the other gods to make this child of his “just as I am” (ὡς καὶ ἐγώ περ, 477). 26. I’m grateful to Alex Purves for this observation. 27. Next to Hector, Ajax has been seen to lack modesty; see, e.g., Garvie 1998, ad loc., and March 1991–­93, 15–­16, although, as Garvie stresses, Ajax’s “concern corresponds with his reluctance to face his own father now that he has been dishonoured.” 28. Themistocles correctly decodes the oracle’s reference to a “wooden wall” at Hdt. 7.143. 29. Compare Pi. N. 2, which celebrates the victory of Timodemos in the pankration (485? BCE) and his return home from Nemea to Acharnai (outside of Athens). Timodemos, the son of Timonöos, belonged to the Timodemidai, a Salaminian clan that enjoyed numerous athletic victories at Delphi and Isthmia. Because of Timodemos’s Salaminian affiliations, Pindar links him with Ajax in the third strophe: Timodemos’s continued successes are supported by the fact that he has been born in Salamis—­“and Salamis, at any rate, is capable of rearing a man of battle” (καὶ μὰν ἁ Σαλαμίς γε θρέψαι φῶτα μαχατάν / δυνατός, 20–­21). From Salamis the song transitions to that island’s greatest hero, Ajax whom “Hector heard about at Troy” (ἐν Τροΐᾳ μὲν Ἕ-/κτωρ Αἴαντος ἄκουσεν, 21–­22), an Ajax who is evoked here from the perspective of his greatest epic enemy. Present victory heralds future victories, in which Timodemos will follow in his father’s footsteps and bring glory to Athens. While being linked by Pindar to the (Homeric) Ajax, Timodemos serves at the same time as a poetic precedent for the Sophoclean Ajax, in so far as a Salaminian hero is treated as native Athenian (and his victory is Athens’s victory). 30. Scodel (2006, 65–­66) makes a similar point. Cf. Kowalzig (2006, 88–­89), who reads Tecmessa’s words at 201–­2 as instead emphasizing Salaminian otherness and that “the Salaminians had in fact not originally been part of the exclusive group of autochthonous Athenians: they had acquired citizenship through arrangement.” 31. O’Higgins 1989, 48. 32. See p. 136. 33. The verb ἔδωκα recalls Zeus’s redistribution of honors in Hesiod’s Theogony, e.g., 399. Noussia-­Fantuzzi (2010, 287) notes the echoes between ἀφελών in the second verse of the fragment and Achilles’ articulation of his grievance at Il. 1.161 and 16.52–­54: “The anger of Achilles in the Iliad teaches us how heavy the consequences can be when someone is deprived of his γέρας.” 34. Anhalt 1993, 124–­25.

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35. See, for example, 1–­3 W2, especially lines 5–­6, which Noussia-­Fantuzzi ad loc. describes as a shame-­provoking “focalization through the eyes of a real or imagined critic” of any of those who were willing to tolerate the loss of Salamis. 36. The war ends with Sparta arbitrating, according to Plutarch, Sol. 10. On Herodotus’s account (1.59.4) of Peisistratus’s conquest of Nisea (which leaves out any mention of Solon or Salamis), see Lavelle 2005, 46–­60. On extant evidence for Athens’s political interest in Salamis, and the conflict this occasioned between Athens and Megara, see Taylor 1997, 21–­47, and Lavelle 2005, 60–­65; on how the historical context informs Sophocles’ play, see Kowalzig 2006, 86–­91, and Scodel 2006, 65–­7 1. 37. Lambert 1997, 98. Plutarch mentions in one of his accounts of the Athenian capture of Salamis that Solon arrived with five hundred Athenian volunteers, who were to become kurioi of the politeuma in the event of a successful Athenian takeover (Plu. Sol. 9.2). For Lambert, therefore, “it does not seem impossible that the genos of the Salaminioi might have regarded themselves as descendants of the original 6th century settlers on Salamis, leaders of the Salaminian politeuma” (99–­100). 38. An archon for Salamis was appointed centrally at Athens annually (and is also referred to in this same inscription). Taylor (1997, 47) concedes “it is possible (but no more than possible) that an arbitration took place ca. 519 or ca. 510 B.C. at which time Salamis was finally adjudicated to Athens, and that this event was later anachronistically associated with Solon or Peisistratos.” If so, this timing would align well with Ajax’s being elected eponymous hero. 39. Because of his Salaminian origins, Athenians sought Ajax’s help when they faced off against the Persians in 480 BCE. The Greek forces prayed to Ajax and Telamon to join them at Salamis (Hdt. 8.64) and, after the battle had been won, dedicated a Phoenician trireme to Ajax (Hdt. 8.121). 40. See Il. 7.219–­223. 41. E.g., Il. 8.266–­67, 15.482–­83. 42. LIMC “Achilles” 849, 853c, 854 and 854a, 859, and 860–­96; see Burgess 2009, 39–­40, on the iconographic and literary sources, including Od. 5.308–­310, 24.36–­42 and Proclus’s summary of the Aithiopis, and Burgess 2001, 185, on early representations of the retrieval of the corpse. 43. Stanford 2002, ad loc. 44. The porpax is a post-­epic feature that, as Finglass (2011, 306) writes, “is first attested, in art and archaeology, in the early to mid seventh century.” Finglass cites Lorimer 1947, 80–­93, but see also Krentz 2007 on the porpax shield and hoplite weaponry more generally. 45. Pausanias (1.35.3) records that he visited the grave of Ajax on the shores of Salamis. Ajax’s bones were apparently brought back to his native Salamis after his burial at Troy, just as Theseus’s bones were relocated to Athens. 46. There are two main issues: first, whether the cult of a nameless hero in Melite was transferred to Eurysakes, as Ferguson (1938, 16) proposes; Garland (1984, 105) counters that “it is equally likely that the cult was newly created for the purpose.” And second, whether the identification with Eurysakes “was made during the long sixth-­century quarrel with Megara over Salamis,” as Kearns (1989, 105) and Shapiro (1989, 143–­56) find likely, or in connection with the Cleisthenic division of tribes, in 508/7 BCE. Shapiro (1989, 143–­56) furthermore suggests that to counter the Megarian claim that Ajax was born to a Megarian mother (Eriboia), the Athenians invented the tradition that Eriboia married Theseus, thus transforming Ajax into a native Athenian hero (Plu. Sol. 29). 47. Alcibiades: Plu. Alc.1; and Cimon: Paus. 1.35.2.

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48. A decree of the Aiantis tribe (Agora I 3625, printed as no. 15 at Merritt 1938, 94–­96) specifies that the epimeletai of the tribe were to set up the stele in the Eurysakeion (cf. Wycherley, 1957, 92–­98). The Eurysakeion was also a center for the Salaminians, and Wycherley (1957, 91) suggests that the Aianteion in the Agora mentioned in various decrees of the Salaminians was associated with the Eurysakeion on Kolonos Agoraios. Whether or not the Aianteion should be identified with the Eurysakeion is less clear: see Lewis 1955, 16, and Stroud 1998, 90. 49. Harpocration s.v. Mελιτή; Plu. Sol. 10; Wycherley 1957, 18. 50. In considering the choice of the ten heroes to represent the Athenian tribes, Greg Anderson (2003, 129) regards the selection of three for their “historical links with areas that are either marginal or adjacent to Attica” as especially noteworthy, and he argues that the naming of Pandion, Ajax, and Hippothoon as epōnymoi “carried with it the implicit Athenian claims to control the Megarid, Salamis, and Eleusis, respectively.” The remains of the Monument of the Eponymous Heroes currently in the Agora dates to ca. 330 BCE, but literary attestations of such a monument go back to the 420s BCE: see Camp (1986, 97). 51. See also Golder (1992, 350–­51) whom Ewans (2002, 63) critiques for his presupposition that there was a raised stage for acting, which would force “center stage,” according to Ewans, unacceptably far back to the “rear perimeter of the orchestra.” 52. The key term here is κατέχειν, which in epic is the verb used of the earth’s taking possession of the dead. For heroes of cult, this passive relationship, of being “held” by the earth, turns active, as Henrichs (1993, 175) elaborates: “By reversing the ordinary relationship between the dead and their chthonian habitat, Aischylos and, even more emphatically, Sophokles thus stress the notion, central to hero cult, that there is life after death and that the cultic hero ‘possesses’ (κατέχει) his tomb in the same manner in which a god inhabits and controls his territory.” 53. March (1991–­93, 1), whose article is essential reading for the democratic reception of the play. 54. Ajax’s main site of worship would still have been on Salamis, where he had both a temenos and a temple, as well as a festival (the Aianteia): see IGii21035.31–­32, IGii21008, and Paus. 1.35.3; Stroud (1998, 90) expresses skepticism as to whether “Ajax and Eurysakes were worshiped together in the Eurysakeion,” though he does grant that “this shrine was an important site for the tribe Aiantis” (note 12). 55. Compare Rehm (2002, 133): “At Teucer’s suggestion (1168–­81), Tecmessa and Eurysakes sit as suppliants by the corpse, where they remain for more than two hundred lines until Teucer carries it off for burial (1403–­17). Their silent presence as suppliants, guardians, ritual observers of the dead, and guarantors of its curse (1168–­81) testifies to the aura of the body, anticipating Ajax’ transformation from traitor to sacred hero.” 56. The following description and interpretation are drawn from Lawton and Harris (1990), which includes illustrations of the relief. See also Taylor (1995). 57. I’m grateful to Leslie Kurke for this suggestion. 58. Only a single-­word fragment survives from this play (TrGF 4.223 Radt) whose date is unknown. 59. Rehm (2002, 137–­38) makes a similar point about the ending, noting that “the cortège bearing his body out of the theater of Dionysus moves the action away from Troy and into the world of Athens.” 60. Ferrario 2012. 61. Lefkowitz (1981, 77) adds that “the same impulse emphasizes the importance of Aeschylus’s military service in his biography.”

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1. See Ceccarelli 2013, 183–­235, on writing and written artifacts in tragedy. See also Jenkins 2006, 81–­101; Griffiths 2007, 277–­78; and Torrance 2010 and 2013, 135–­82. Wise (1998) stresses writing’s enabling effect on tragedy, arguing that the theatrical art form owes “its central generic outlines to . . . literacy” (25). 2. Burnett (1971, 54–­55) describes the letter as a “material witness to a principal quality of Iphigenia’s spirit, her faithful confidence, reminding us that she had never quite ceased to hope for rescue and return.” 3. In another sense, of course, this brings Phaedra’s tablet more in line with actual letters; in so far as letters are a private form of communication, their appearance on stage represents something of a paradox, for the very form of the deltos (its folded leaves) implies secrecy, on which see, e.g., Carson 1998, 98–­101. 4. I use “tragicomic” heuristically as a way of isolating features in the letters of both Iphigenia plays that might be considered comic. I do not imply that these dramas are in any respect failed tragedies. For a subtle discussion of the problems of genre raised by late Euripides, see Mastronarde (2010, 44–­62), who rightly cautions against the moralizing and teleological tendencies of some past specimens of genre criticism. 5. Rosenmeyer 2001, 29–­30; Ceccarelli 2013, 38, and, for an edited text and translation, 2013, Appendix 1.1. 6. A point to which we will return in the section on the letter in IT. 7. See, however, Ceccarelli 2013, 35–­47, for discussion of the documentary evidence. 8. Stirewalt (1993, 11) suggests that the late fifth century BCE was when “letter-­writing became a popular practice in Athenian culture,” but there is good reason to believe that writing was widespread and in use throughout the fifth century (Ceccarelli 2013, 265, with references). See Rosenmeyer 2001, 30–­31, and Ceccarelli 2013, 265–­74, on writing and written documents in the Attic orators. 9. On “infelicities” of communication, see, eg., Austin 1975, 16, 21–­28, and passim. See Mastronarde 2010, 222–­45, on fateful miscommunication as a more general feature of the rhetorical contests of speeches in Euripides. 10. For her subtle demonstration of the metapoetic resonances of writing in Euripides, my discussion in this chapter of tragic writing tablets is generally indebted to Isabelle Torrance (2013). My approach diverges most sharply from hers in so far as I attempt to read allusions to writing in connection with the poetics of live performance (especially in the Trachiniae), the materiality of the tablets themselves (IT and IA), and in relation to the cultural milieu of late fifth-­century Athens, where the use of curse tablets to defang forensic opponents provides a context that I find more compelling than epistolarity for understanding the dramatic role of Phaedra’s deltos (in Hippolytus). See also T. Jenkins 2005 on comic letters and plot-­ making. 11. The extent to which performances of tragedy were predicated on writing is still a subject of contention; for a strong statement of tragedy as a literacy-­based genre, see Wise 1998; cf. Taplin 1977, 12–­16, and 1986, 168, for a more moderate position. 12. See Svenbro 1993, 44–­63; Ceccarelli (2013, 201) observes that written documents may need to be publicly proclaimed to become authoritative. As an example of a written text that presents itself as live speech, consider the already mentioned description of Phaedra’s writing as γραφαῖς μέλος / φθεγγόμενον (Hipp. 879–­80), “song envoiced in writing.”

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13. For the suggestion that this tablet is left “as a kind of substitute” for Heracles, see Ceccarelli 2013, 202, citing Magini 1998, 41–­42. 14. But as Ormand (1999, 52) points out, Deianeira’s suggestion elsewhere (77) that the end-­ point corresponds to Heracles’ attacking the city of Eurytus creates “a certain epistemological uncertainty” as to whether time or place is the crucial element. 15. Ceccarelli 2013, 202. For the comparison to the “mournful signs” (σήματα λυγρά) inscribed on the tablet given by Proetus to Bellerophon in the Iliad, see Davies 1991, 93. 16. What it most certainly does not denote (pace Pearson, 1925) is a will concerning the division of Heracles’ property after his death. Davies (1991, ad loc.), quoting Tycho von Wilamowitz, rightly points out that Heracles’ “ ‘will’ was purely verbal”: the verb εἶπε at 162 makes this much clear. There is, moreover, no indication elsewhere in the play that the deltos is concerned with the posthumous allocation of Heracles’ estate. Nor is there reason to suppose that the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona would have dealt in matters of this kind. As hinted at earlier by Deianeira, the deltos is to be regarded as a written transcript of the prophecy spoken to Heracles by the ancient oak at Dodona. 17. Sharing the same linguistic root is σύνθεσις, the word that Aristotle uses for the “composition” or “structure” of the tragic plot, at Poetics 1452b30. 18. The term ξύνθημα has a similar meaning in the Euripidean Rhesus (521), where “Phoebus” is pre-­arranged signal, or watchword, among the Trojans. 19. Steiner (1994, 85) notes the similarities between the love charm and the oracular tablet of Zeus, describing both as “talismans of the hero’s life and fate, objects whose condition determines and corresponds to his own.” 20. On “tablets of memory,” see Steiner 1994, 86 and 100–­104; also Yates 1966 and Carruthers 1990. Perlocutionary acts, Austin explains (1975, 109), are “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading.” Austin makes allowances for nonverbal forms of perlocutionary speech (1975, 119): “It is characteristic of perlocutionary acts that the response achieved, or the sequel, can be achieved additionally or entirely by non-­locutionary means: thus intimidation may be achieved by waving a stick or pointing a gun. . . . we can for example warn or order or appoint or give or protest or apologize by non-­verbal means and these are illocutionary acts. Thus we may cock a snook or hurl a tomato by way of protest.” 21. Steiner (1994, 86) observes that θεσμοί, a term appropriate to the inscription of sacred law, lends a divine aura to the Centaur’s utterances. 22. My interpretation here aligns with that of Jebb (1908) who translates: “Nay, knowledge must come through action.” For a different interpretation, see Solmsen (1985, 493–­96), who translates: “But you must know if (when) you act.” Like Easterling (1982, at lines 582–­93), I read the Chorus as cautious rather than peremptory. 23. See Wise (1998, 116) on the tragic text remaining essentially “unfinished” because it “intends performance by contemporary bodies.” In this regard, writes Wise (1998, 116n53), it is “fascinating, if perplexing” that among literary theorists the novel enjoys the status of “unfinishedness,” despite being “a genre that, more completely than any other, reflects the fixed and finished tendency of print literacy.” 24. It is still possible to read a reference to the Hydra here, as Easterling does (1982, 177): “The Chorus trace the disaster to its sources, Nessus and the Hydra, metaphorically representing Heracles’ struggle in the robe as a physical encounter with these two monsters.” In their privileged view of events, the Chorus infuse the murder weapon with a different agentive force than Heracles will give it: the robe, in the Chorus’s view, is an instrument, not of Deianeira’s revenge

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but of two of Heracles’ long-­dead enemies. The way in which an object is described, particularly one as devastating as the poisoned robe, reflects the degree of knowledge of its interpreter(s). Like texts, textiles also require a “reader,” their meaning being subject to interpretation. In the case of Heracles, who later changes his mind, his initial designation of the robe as the instrument of his wife’s vengeful plot reflects the fact that he has received the robe in a box sealed and sent by Deianeira. 25. Bowman (1999, 345) argues that Deianeira’s trust in the Centaur is represented as akin to adultery—­“Deianeira allowed another male to ‘write his words’ on her as on a bronze tablet (683)”—­playing here on the notion of the deltos as “a metaphor for female genitalia.” 26. I choose the term “hidden” rather than “invisible” or “imaginary” to convey that the object, which exists out of sight, may at some point materialize and that its potential to do so was strongly felt, instilling in spectators both anticipation and possibly fear. Unlike the hidden prop, which is understood to have a material existence, the “imaginary prop,” an expression coined by Jiri Veltrusky, is evoked by an actor’s gestures. In Veltrusky’s (1964, 88) words: “The actor performs without props an action for which a certain prop is usually required; the spectator feels its presence though in reality it is not present.” 27. In Mueller 2011a, I argue that the deltos functions more like a defixio (i.e., a curse tablet) than a letter; the following discussion is adapted with minor revisions from that article. 28. Knox 1968; on Theseus’s silent reading, see also Svenbro 1993, 179ff. As for solitary reading of literature, “it so happens that the first reader of a literary work whom we meet in a Greek text is reading Euripides: this is Dionysus himself in Ar. Ran. 52–­54,” writes Harris (1989, 84n90). 29. Garrison 1995, 80: “In extant tragedies involving suicides or suicidal thoughts, escape songs function primarily as death wishes: suicide notes, as it were.” Phaedra’s deltos she calls “an actual suicide note” (89). 30. It remains uncertain whether there was an equivalent of the “suicide note” with which Euripides’ audience would have been familiar. 31. For the assimilation of Phaedra’s revenge to the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, see for example Barrett 1964, 6, and Halleran 1995, 37. 32. Pace Hutchinson (2004) and Gibert (1997). On the ancient reception of female characters in Euripides, see March 1990 and Gibert 1997, 93–­97; and, on T. B. L Webster’s coinage of the term “bad women,” Gibert 1997, 85n5. 33. On Aphrodite as the “primal cause” of the action, see Zeitlin 1996, 225–­32. 34. Kovacs (1987, 71) takes the extreme view that Aphrodite bears full responsibility for all the faults of the mortal characters, but I agree with Gregory’s (1991, 80n16) objection that “if Hippolytus and Phaedra were not responsible for the tragic outcome, they could not attain the heroic status Kovacs assigns to them.” 35. An expression curiously misunderstood by Loraux, who takes kakon out of context and interprets the line to mean that Phaedra will lose her honor (1978: 55): “L’honneur vrai a disparu: par son suicide, Phèdre devient un mal. Kakon genesomai: le contraire de la belle mort, dont le syntagme-­clef, agathos genesthai, dit la conquête de la valeur.” 36. Ajax uses what looks like a curse formula (ὥσπερ / τώς), at Aj. 840–­41, in calling upon the Furies to punish the sons of Atreus. The authenticity of these lines, however, has been suspected since antiquity since nowhere in the tradition is Agamemnon killed by one of his descendants. Consider also the dying Eurydice’s imprecations against Creon (Ant. 1304–­05), as reported by the Messenger (σοὶ κακάς / πράξεις ἐφυμνήσασα). 37. M. W. Blundell 1989, 26–­49.

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38. Compare, for example, Medea’s response to the messenger’s news about the deaths of Creon and his bride: “You would delight me, if (you say) they have died most wretchedly” (τέρψειας ἡμᾶς, εἰ τεθνᾶσι παγκάκως, Med.1135). On the pleasure of exacting revenge, Blundell 1989, 26–­28 and 60–­68, and Allen 2000, 83. 39. There are twenty-­four instances of νόσος, νοσεῖν, and νοσερός in Hippolytus, and most occur in the first 700 lines. On the distinctive uses of νόσος by different speakers in the play, see Kosak 2004, 51. Goff (1990, 30–­39) discusses the symptoms of Phaedra’s desire as (un)articulated in speech while Holmes (2010, 252–­64) demonstrates that in this play Euripides draws on the “conceptual resources being developed in contemporary medicine” (265). 40. Relevant here is Faraone’s (1999, 55) observation that the essential difference between curses and erotic spells is that “the former torture their victims with fever or pain until they die, while the latter do so only until they yield ” (my emphasis). 41. See Goff (1990, 65) on Hippolytus’s strangulation by the reins of his horses, a death that “recalls Phaedra’s suicide.” 42. Luschnig 1988, 49. 43. Zeitlin 1996, 253 (emphasis in original). 44. Sōphrōn, as Justina Gregory notes (1991, 90) is “Hippolytus’ favorite self-­description, as well as his highest commendation for others.” Sōphrosunē is also, observes Goff (1990, 39), “one of the terms in the play that most acutely focuses the problems of the relation between desire and speech.” Phaedra’s ominous prophecy that Hippolytus “will learn sōphrosunē” both echoes and answers Hippolytus’s own earlier threat to keep slandering women until they might be taught sōphrosunē (668). Hanna Roisman (1998, 117) concludes that “she already begins to slander him in her assertion that she will teach him σωφροσύνη (sōphrosynē, 731) since he does not already have it.” In other words, Phaedra has imputed to Hippolytus a lack of sexual self-­ restraint—­she has slandered him with a charge that is evidently false. But sōphrosunē is not univocal; it has a particularly rich semantic range that extends beyond “resistance to illicit desire,” the sense in which Hippolytus most often deploys it. For other senses of sōphrosunē, see especially Rademaker 2005, 163–­73. 45. North 1966, 81, and Zeitlin 1996, 253–­54, esp. note 74. 46. I thank Mario Telò for this observation. 47. On “abduction,” Gell 1998, 14–­16. 48. Halleran (1995, ad loc.) projects the significance of the term melos onto the reader, with the suggestion that “the combination of sight and sound (sunaesthēsia) might underscore Theseus’ distraught state.” How Theseus responds to it, I would add, is a crucial indicator of the tablet’s performative effect. This is an object that the audience comes to grips with primarily through the stage reader’s response. 49. Of the strophe that contains the phrase ὕμνος δέσμιος Prins (1991, 185) observes: “Beginning again with ἐπί, it is ingeniously constructed as a series of appositions, so that the cumulative weight of  ‘this melody’ (τόδε μέλος) bears down upon (ἐπί) Orestes, both rhythmically and syntactically.” See, also, McClure 1997. 50. In Alcestis, Admetus wishes out loud that he had the power of Orpheus’s song—εἰ δ᾿ Ὀρφέως μοι γλῶσσα καὶ μέλος παρῆν (357)—­so that he could persuade either Demeter’s daughter or her husband, “charming them with hymns,” to release his wife from Hades (357–­59). And in Medea, Jason counts Orpheus’s ability to sing among humankind’s greatest resources (541–­43). 51. A further layer of divine agency is also present in Aphrodite’s role as director of all the proceedings. Artemis in the end forgives Theseus’s error (ἁμαρτίαν, 1334), she says, first because

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it was made out of ignorance and, second, because he fell victim to the deceptions of another goddess (1406). 52. Jordan 1985, 206. Other media for defixiones include bronze, ostraca, limestones, wax, and, especially in Egypt, papyrus (Gager 1992, 3, with references). 53. Gager 1992, 4. On sympathetic magic, Graf 1997, 145–­46 and 205–­15. 54. Faraone 1991, 4. 55. Jordan (1985, 207) has calculated that 325 of the roughly 625 defixiones (outside the agora) with identifiable find spots come from tombs and cemeteries, and he estimates (1988, 273) that the aōroi in whose graves the tablets were placed were quite young when they had died; see also Faraone 1999, 34–­35, and Johnston 1999, 71–­75, on the graves of the aōroi as particularly popular sites for depositing curse tablets. 56. Johnston 1999, 72–­73, and Graf 1997, 148–­49. 57. Although the tablets from earlier periods generally contain much less information about their burial context, later tablets do address themselves to the “untimely dead” and “you unmarried ones,” giving hints as to how the dead were called upon (in ritual if not in writing) in earlier times. A third-­century tablet from Attica (Defixionum Tabellae 52 and Gager 73) begins with four names and then continues: “I bind Kerkis, the words and deeds of Kerkis and also the tongue, in the presence of those who died before marriage [eitheoi ] . . .” 58. Waszink (1954, 391) cites S. Ant. 896 and E. Alc. 168–­69 as evidence that Greeks of the classical period already had the concept of an allotted lifespan. On the biaiothanatoi as a conceptual and religious category, Graf 1997, 150; Johnston 1999, 127–­60; Ogden 2001, 233–­36; and Felton 2007, 96–­99. 59. Phaedra, speaking to the Nurse, at Hipp. 687–­88: “But you didn’t hold back; therefore I will no longer die with my reputation intact. Instead I am in need, in fact, of new words” (σὺ δ᾿ οὐκ ἀνέσχου· τοιγὰρ οὐκέτ᾿ εὐκλεεῖς / θανούμεθ᾿. ἀλλὰ δεῖ με δὴ καινῶν λόγων). 60. I’m grateful to Mark Griffith for this observation. 61. Loraux (1978, 54) notes the mirroring effect between the hanging tablet and hanging woman: “à la main de la morte pend une tablette qui joue à imiter la femme pendue.” 62. Goff (1990) overlooks the magical powers of the tablet which are also part of the performative effects of logos in this play. 63. Although it might have been possible for a tablet of a later date to have been deposited in a fifth-­century grave, Peek (1941, 93) considers this possibility to have been refuted by K. Kübler. Unfortunately, Peek does not provide a reference to Kübler. 64. An edited text and image can be found in Peek (1941, vol. 3, plates 22.3 and 23.2). 65. Peek (1941, 89): “Von den im folgenden mitgeteilten Fluchtafeln sind die Tafeln Nr.3 und 6 in Skelettgräbern gefunden worden; sie lagen zusammengewickelt je an den Fingerspitzen der rechten Hand.” 66. Ar. Th. 275–­76 and Ra. 101–­2 and 1471. 67. See further Avery 1968, 22–­35, on Hygiainon’s accusation and the significance of this line within the Hippolytus. 68. Lloyd (1992, 48) describes Hippolytus as having transformed a commonplace that was typically expressed in a deferential manner into an opportunity to express his superiority over the mob. 69. On the forensic language, see McClure 1999, 147. 70. The tongue gets mentioned disparagingly in the orators, as, for example, when Aes­ chines declares of Demosthenes that “if one were to remove his tongue . . . there would be

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nothing left” (3.229); for the tongue in connection with the rhetoric of abuse, see Worman 2008, 236, 265–­66, and 323. 71. See Loraux 1978, 53; and on other forms of nonverbal speech in the play, Turato 1976, 179. It is worth noting that Hippolytus wishes that the royal house could make an utterance (φθέγμα) in support of his innocence (Hipp. 1074–­75) and that the voice of the bull that rises from the sea is also called a φθόγγος (1205) and is later referenced as a φθέγμα (1215). 72. Gager (1992, 117) observes that among the published Greek defixiones, “judicial or legal types constitute the second largest subgroup.” Some sixty-­seven have been published (ranging in dates from 500 BCE to the third century CE). The earliest tablets come from Sicily, but “several well preserved tablets” from the Greek mainland, dating to fifth and fourth centuries BCE, have survived. 73. Faraone (2002, 87) also suggests that the binding spell of the Furies in Aeschylus’s Eumenides is part of the “charter myth” for this practice in Athenian courts, and that it appears to have worked in the play—­Orestes does not defend himself very well. See also Ogden 1999, 89–­90, on reasons for the “ghettoization” within classical scholarship of the study of curse tablets and magical texts. 74. Faraone (1991, 15): “They are attempts at binding the opponent’s ability to think clearly and speak effectively in court in the hope that a dismal performance will cause him to lose the case.” 75. See Faraone (1991, 4) on judicial curses as “pre-­emptive strikes” rather than “after-­the-­ fact measures of vengeful spite.” 76. On commissioners of judicial curses as defendants facing prosecution, Gager 1992, 117–­18. 77. Arist. Poetics 1455a16–­20: “The best anagnōrisis of all is the one that happens from the events themselves and when the element of surprise is produced from probable circumstances, such as in the Oedipus of Sophocles and in the Iphigenia, where it is probable that she should wish to send a letter. These are the only kinds of recognitions to happen without contrived tokens and necklaces.” 78. I focus on the literary meanings of the term, but it should be noted that polyptychs did exist (for longer texts or collections of records), and that this may have implied to the audience that Iphigenia’s message was of some length; the word is used in both Greek and Latin. For an illustration of a set of wax tablets (δέλτοι πολύπτυχοι) see, for example, Turner 1987, 34, figure 10. 79. See also Foley 1985, 93–­95, and Torrance 2013, 158–­65, on Euripides’ rewriting of myth in the IA. 80. Kovacs transposes lines 779–­81 to after 769, accepting Jackson’s emendation, but I follow L’s ordering as printed in Diggle’s edition. 81. IT 5–­9. 82. See Cypria Argumentum 8 at West 2003, 74: “When the expedition was assembled at Aulis for the second time, Agamemnon killed a deer while hunting and claimed to surpass Artemis herself. The goddess in her wrath stopped them from sailing by sending wild weather. When Calchas told them of the goddess’s wrath and said they should sacrifice Iphigenia to Artemis, they sent for her as if she was to marry Achilles, and set about to sacrifice her. . . . But Artemis snatches her away and conveys her to the Tauroi and makes her immortal, setting a deer by the altar in place of the girl” (translation by M. L. West). 83. This may be another motivation for having Iphigenia read the text of her letter out loud. 84. Dällenbach 1989 is a classic discussion of mise en abîme. For recent applications to tragic and epic texts, see, e.g., Torrance 2010 and de Jong 2011.

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85. See Carson 1998, 99. Rosenmeyer’s definition of the letter (2001, 20) notes that the written message replaces “an oral injunction or private conversation between two persons geographically removed from one another.” Likewise, Trapp (2003, 1) addresses both the content (“a letter is a written message from one person (or set of people) to another”) and the mobility and durability of the form (“set down in a tangible medium, which itself is to be physically conveyed from sender(s) to recipient(s)”). 86. On the logos-­sōma dichotomy playfully manipulated here, see Ferrari 1988, 19–­20; Wright 2005, 293–­94; and Ceccarelli 2013, 224. 87. While it is clear that Iphigenia is incapable of writing (why else would she need the Greek captive to act as scribe?), it is less certain whether or not she can read; she appears to be reciting the letter from memory, and it should be noted that she “marks” her recitation as a letter by using the standard epistolary formula “X sends this to Y” at 770. On women’s literacy in classical Greece, see, Cole 1981 and W. Harris 1989, 106–­8, with the estimate that up to 95 percent of women or more may have been functionally illiterate. 88. Lines 106–­63 are bracketed by Kovacs 2002, and because this is its sole occurrence in a poetic text, μεταγράφω (108) has been considered suspect (Page), but there are plenty of contemporary prose parallels: see Knox 1972, 287, and Stockert 1992, 206. 89. See further Knox 1972; Stockert 1992, 66–­79; Kovacs 2003; and Gurd 2005. 90. Also current in the fifth century was the concept of deltos as “tablet of the mind” (deltographos phrēn), on which see Solmsen 1944; Pfeiffer 1968, 25–­26; Steiner 1994, 100–­107; and Ceccarelli 2013, 187–­89. 91. DuBois 1988, 165–­66. On this metaphor and its tragic mobilizations, see also Zeitlin 1996, 245–­46, and Ormand 1999, 52–­53. 92. Seals predate signatures, which become characteristic for letters only in the fourth century BCE: see Thomas 1989, 40. Edmunds (1997, 32–­34) emphasizes the “practical” function of seals (to prevent tampering) as opposed to their being marks of ownership. See also Bonner 1908; Woodbury (1952, 23) discerns two main functions: “They may be affixed to door, lid, or stopper in order to keep unauthorized persons from access to room, box, or jar; or they may be used to attest authenticity.” 93. Wohl (1998, 24) notes that Deianeira’s gift has magical connotations, being constituted as an “enticement” (κηλητήριον, 575) a “philter” (φίλτροις, 584) and a “charm” (θέλκτροισι, 585). 94. The quotation is from duBois (1988, 130). 95. Scholars have similarly argued of the Hippolytus that Phaedra’s deltos symbolizes her sexuality: See, for example, Zeitlin 1996, 245–­47, on the deltos as the “external sign of the woman’s inward parts, exposed yet still concealed,” and Segal (1992, 432–­33), who refers to Phaedra’s signet ring as a “synecdochic extension of her sexuality,” and the breaking open of the writing tablet’s seal as “a potentially sexual gesture.” For the metaphorical deltos of Deianeira’s mind conjuring sexual associations, see Bowman 1999, 344–­45. Epilogue 1. As Gagarin (1997, 146) notes, the argument “comes close to a modern concept of ‘negligence’ in terms of a ‘reasonable man’ standard of behavior.” 2. Compare Gagarin 1997, 144–­45: the debate between Pericles and Protagoras “indicates that the causes of and responsibility for accidental events occupied the attention of many intellectuals at this time.” 3. Translated by A. T. Murray. Cf. Demosthenes 26.76, where the category of lifeless things

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(eligible for trial) is referred to as τῶν ἀψύχων καὶ μὴ μετεχόντων τοῦ φρονεῖν, and Arist. Ath. 57.4; see Sealey 2006. 4. Arist. Poet. 1452a7–­11. Other sources of the story include Mirabilium Auscultationes 846a22–23 Arist. [Mir. 156](where the name is Bitys), and Plutarch’s De Sera Numinis Vindicta 553d1–7, which repeats the account in the Poetics. Johnston (1999, 154) associates Mitys with other tales of heroes working through statues, e.g., the Olympic victor Theagenes. 5. The belief that the occurrence was not causally disconnected would in fact have been the likely assumption. Those who weren’t intellectuals or philosophers recognized supernatural forces in all manner of uncanny and inexplicable events. Most likely, the intention to punish would be ascribed to the gods or the spirit of the dead man.

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General Index

The letter f  following a page number denotes a figure. Achilles, 25, 34, 51, 88, 134–­35, 136, 146, 184, 197n13, 199n38, 224n33; contest over arms of, 135–­36, 142, 199n39, 223nn9–­10; shield of, 85, 134, 136, 144, 197n13, 222n5, 223n6, 223n8. See also hero(es); Iliad ; weapons Acropolis, 15, 81, 96 acting, 113, 131. See also actor(s); theater actor(s), 1–­2, 19–­34, 38–­40, 63, 65–­68, 89, 115–­31 passim, 169, 172. See also haptic actors; material actors; Polus; props, tragic; Timotheus of Zacynthus; weapons adultery, 44, 45, 104, 175 aegis of Athena, 77–­78, 81, 85, 105, 212n25, 213n40; etymology of, 77–­78 Aegisthus, 58, 103, 121, 221n45; hubris of, 44, 46, 65, 116; murder by Orestes, 60, 64, 103; “usurpation” of Agamemnon’s trappings, 44, 45, 65. See also Atreids; Clytemnestra; Electra; Iphigenia; Orestes Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 3, 5, 42–­69, 71, 179; Choephoroi, 4, 43, 44, 60–­63, 66, 71, 84, 91, 100, 106, 114–­15, 116, 119, 126, 127–­28, 132, 172; Eumenides, 43, 85, 126, 132, 169–­70, 172, 232n73; Persians, 154; reperformance of plays, 43, 44; Seven against Thebes, 32–­33; Thracian Women, 17, 39–­40. See also Chorus; “rewriting” Agamemnon, 44–­45, 51, 58–­60, 62–­63, 86, 103; entrapment of, 3, 5, 44, 47–­48, 50–­51, 55–­56, 58–­60, 64–­65, 68–­69, 174; and Iphigenia, 184–­85, 186, 188; and Menelaus, 186–­87, 189; tomb of, 84, 117, 126. See also Aegisthus; Atreids; Clytemnestra; Electra; Iphigenia; Orestes; “tapestry scene”

Agathon, 67–­68 agent noun, 29–­32. See also grammar Aglaurids, 81 Aiantids, 147. See also Ajax; Eurysakes Ajax, 144, 146, 148–­53, 154, 197n13; burial of, 37, 41, 143, 149, 152–­53; cult of, 143–­44, 149, 150, 152–­53, 226n52; duel with Hector, 40–­44, 137–­38, 139, 148, 200n44; as founding hero, 38, 147–­48, 192; in Iliad, 24–­25, 26–­27, 37, 137, 139–­40, 145; “rebirth” of, 38, 144, 148; suicide of, 7, 16, 19–­34, 39–­40, 62, 197n14, 198n26, 201n58. See also Eurysakes; shield of Ajax; Sophocles; suicide; sword of Ajax/ Hector Alcibiades, lineage of, 147 Althusser, Louis, 73–­74 Andromache, 142, 206n34 antipēx (basket), 76, 79, 111, 211n17, 213n41. See also Ion; recognition/recognition scene; swaddling clothes “anxiety of influence,” 43 Aphrodite, in Hippolytus, 164, 166, 177, 229n34. See also gods Apollo, 24, 39, 65, 105, 138, 160, 213n44, 213n53; in Ion, 70, 74, 75, 77, 81, 85; in Sophocles’ Electra, 119, 128. See also gods Ares, 37. See also gods Argos, as democracy, 99, 216n92 aristocracy, being “well born” (eugenēs), 94–­95, 146, 215n77, 216n93 Aristophanes, 67–­68, 131; Acharnians, 67, 210n96; Clouds, 106, 107, 203n2, 217n109; Frogs, 172, 174, 215n73; Thesmophoriazusae, 67–­68, 174, 210n98; Wasps, 206n39, 215n85

260 Aristotle: Poetics, 5, 99, 128–­29, 178, 191, 195n7, 232n77; Rhetoric, 166, 174. See also Plato art, 3, 196n13; visual, and tragedy, 16–­18, 18f, 35–­36, 35f, 58–­59, 59f, 129–­32, 131f, 146, 150–­52, 151f. See also purple; textiles; theater Artemis, 177, 181, 188, 230–­31n51. See also gods Astyanax, 140, 142, 148. See also Hector Athena, 77, 81, 85, 200n.40, 213n43; aegis of, 77–­78, 81, 85, 105, 212n25, 213n40; in Ajax, 19, 23, 25, 27, 66; in Ion, 75, 77, 78, 81. See also gods Athena Parthenos, 81. See also Athena Athens, 38, 70, 71, 76, 83, 99, 153; Ajax’s legacy to, 140, 143–­44, 192; theater in, 2, 42–­43. See also Ajax; dokimasia; polis Atreids: “blood-­soaked” history of, 44, 45, 57–­58, 65, 66, 69, 85, 87, 132; in Greek tragedy, 3–­4, 9, 28, 42–­69, 132–­33, 149, 193. See also Aeschylus Atreus, 103–­4. See also Atreids; myth audience, 2, 3, 39, 47, 71, 66, 157, 176; and action, 73–­74, 119–­20, 131, 143, 148, 149, 154, 180, 181, 201n54; and interpellation, 82, 83, 85, 141; and props, 6, 40, 41, 47, 65, 66, 67, 73, 79–­80, 82, 122, 127–­28, 163 Augē, 86 Austin, J. L., 156 autochthony, 72 axe, “bronze-­jawed,” 126. See also weapons Bakker, E., 32, 120 Barker, E., 148 Barrett, W. S., 175 Barthes, Roland, 2, 3, 195n9 basket, 212n30; ageless, in Ion, 78, 79, 80, 111. See also antipēx ; props, tragic; symbols/ symbolism bequeathal scene, in Ajax, 140–­44, 147–­48, 152 “biography,” of objects, 26, 35, 125, 135–­36, 139. See also props, tragic blood, 76–­77, 81, 172. See also purple Bouphonia, 15, 196n2 Bouphonos (ox-­slayer), 15 bow, 17; of Heracles, 9, 36–­37; of Ion, 82; of Ores­ tes, 4, 85, 195n11; of Philoctetes, 9, 16, 38–­40, 203nn79–­80, 221n47. See also Philoctetes, bow of; weapons Brecht, Berthold, Verfremdungseffekt, 128 burial, of Ajax’s sword, 23, 26, 27, 31, 37, 41, 135, 142, 147, 199n33. See also Ajax; tomb(s) Burian, P., 149, 150 Burnett, A. P., 180 Carlson, Marvin, 3, 66, 114 Cassandra, 51, 56–­57, 58, 60, 65–­66 Ceccarelli, P., 156, 161, 178 centaur. See Nessus, in Trachiniae

gener al index characters, inanimate, 39, 67–­68. See also material actors charaktēr, 96–­100, 215n80, 216n91 Cheiron, 134 Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre, 155 Chorus: in Agamemnon, 56, 58, 187; in Ajax, 17, 19–­20, 23, 25, 27, 28–­29, 142–­43, 149, 153; in Choephoroi, 90, 115, 126; in Euripides’ Electra, 45, 85, 98, 103–­4, 105; in Hippoly­ tus, 172, 177; in Ion, 76, 201n1; in Iphigenia among the Taurians, 178; in Philoctetes, 39; in Seven against Thebes, 32–­33; in Sophocles’ Electra, 44, 45; in Thesmophoriazusae, 67; in Trachiniae, 158–­63 Chrysothemis, 107, 121, 123, 126, 217n108. See also Electra clothing, 48, 52, 58–­59, 61–­62, 63, 64–­68, 204n14, 207n52; rags of Euripides’ Electra, 44–­48; as wealth, 45, 46, 64–­65. See also Clytemnestra; costumes; ostentation; textiles Clytemnestra, 3, 47–­48, 122; Furies of, 4, 58, 85, 105, 126; letters from Agamemnon, 184, 185; manipulation of Agamemnon, 49, 52, 54–­55; murder of Agamemnon, 58, 69, 174, 202n1; and Orestes, 60–­65, 128, 205n24; as stage-­ director, 49, 51, 64, 66; in tapestry scene, 9, 43, 49–­55, 57–­60, 68–­69. See also Aegisthus; Atreids; Electra; Iphigenia; Orestes; “tapestry scene” coins, 96–­99 passim, 215n84, 216n93 color(s), 5, 62–­63. See also purple; silver/“silver-­ bought textiles” comedy, 106, 131. See also Aristophanes comic relief, in tragedy, 155, 186–­87. See also Aristophanes; comedy; Euripides compound words, 20, 197nn18–­19. See also grammar costumes, 2, 67–­68, 129; rags as, 44, 45, 48, 67. See also clothing; “identity theft”; textiles Cropp, M., 89, 97 cross-­dressing, 67–­68 cult(s) of Ajax. See Ajax “Cultural Materialism,” 5 “Cultural Poetics,” 5, 196n13. See also poetics curse(s), 165–­66, 169, 170, 175, 226n55, 230n40, 232n72. See also curse tablet curse tablet (defixio), 10, 156, 165–­66, 169–­78, 227n10, 229n27, 231n52, 231n55, 231n57, 232n72. See also curse(s) Dale, A. M., 111 Danae, 111, 112 death. See lament; mourning; suicide death wish, 126, 140–­41, 167. See also suicide Deception Speech (in Ajax), 19, 21, 22–­29, 32, 33, 40–­41, 141, 198nn26–­27, 198–­99n29

gener al index defixio. See curse tablet Deianeira, 6, 58, 86, 127, 157, 158–­63, 186. See also Heracles; Sophocles deictics, 7–­8, 22, 28, 32, 52, 54, 61, 73, 82, 91, 115, 120, 122, 124, 128–­29, 141, 181, 183, 196nn16–­18, 200n42, 213n48. See also grammar Deixis am Phantasma, 8 Delphi, 70, 74, 212n33. See also Apollo; Ion; Pythia deltos/ oi (tablet[s]), 155–­57, 168, 169, 187; forecasts and contains plot, 158–­60, 182; in Hippoly­ tus, 163–­78, 227n3, 227n10, 229n29; in Iphigenia plays, 178–­88; lead, 170–­7 1; material of, 166, 170–­7 1, 174, 184; of mind, 161, 183, 228n20, 233n90; “rape” of, 184–­88, 229n25; in Trachiniae, 158–­63, 182. See also letters; props, tragic democracy, 144, 146. See also Athens demos, in Solon’s poetry, 144–­46 Denniston, J. D., 45, 93 deus ex machina, 85, 128 Dionysus, 74, 211n9, 229n28. See also gods; theater Dioscuroi, 85, 105, 213n53. See also gods Dipolieia, 15. See also Bouphonia director, stage: Clytemnestra as, 49, 51, 64, 66; Orestes as, 116–­17 dirge. See lament disease, erōs as, 166–­67 “distributed personhood” (Gell), 15–­16, 18–­19, 22–­31, 36, 135, 223n17 dokimasia (legitimation, testing), 10, 80, 94–­99; Athenian, 96–­97, 98, 101–­2, 215n85, 216n87. See also Athens Dokimasia Painter, 58–­60, 59f, 63 doubles entendres, 33, 178–­79, 200n45. See also doublespeak; grammar; metaphor doublespeak, 29. See also grammar dream as omen: Clytemnestra’s, 172; Iphigenia’s, 87–­88 duBois, P., 185 duel, Homeric, 139–­40. See also Ajax; Hector Dunn, F., 118, 132 dye. See purple Easterling, P. E., 65 ekkuklēma, 20, 30, 60, 198n21, 201n57, 208n73 ekphrasis, 79 Elam, Keir, 127 Electra: in Choephoroi, 89, 90, 92, 124; in Euripi­ des, 44–­48, 63–­65, 88–­105 passim; in Sophocles, 6, 45, 86, 91, 112, 112–­32 passim. See also Atreids Ellmann, M., 102 embateusis, and recognition, 100–­105 entanglement, in Hippolytus, 172–­73 ephebes, 76, 84, 96, 101–­2, 211n18, 216n88 epic, 18–­19, 23–­24, 34–­35, 54–­55, 105, 136, 144,

261 147–­48. See also epithets ; Iliad; Odyssey; tragedy; weapons epistle. See deltos/ oi (tablet[s]); letters epitaphs, as scripts, 163. See also tomb(s) epithets, 19, 140, 142, 143 Erechtheids, 76, 78, 81, 97, 143. See also Euripides; Ion Erechtheus, 82, 83 Erichthonios, 71, 76, 81, 83 Erinys. See Fury(ies) erōs, 155, 165, 166–­67 Eumenides. See Aeschylus; Fury(ies) Euripides, 67, 174, 182, 210n96; Alcestis, 111, 112; Augē, 86; Danae, 111–­12; Electra, 3, 4, 29, 42, 43, 44–­48, 64, 71, 84, 86–­105 passim; Electra, parallels with Agamemnon, 63–­65; Electra, as parody of Choephoroi, 71–­72; Hecuba, 67; Heracles, 36, 150; Hippolytus, 86, 101–­2, 155, 156, 163–­78, 189; Hypsipyle, 75; Ion, 72–­84, 88, 97, 105–­6, 111, 140; Iphigenia among the Taurians, 42, 43, 87–­88, 155, 164–­65, 178–­84, 189; Iphigenia at Aulis, 155, 164–­65, 184–­88, 189; Medea, 58–­59, 86, 100; Orestes, 4, 42, 43, 84–­85, 106–­7, 132; “other” Hippolytus, 165; Philoctetes, 39; Trojan Women, 36, 65–­66. See also Chorus Eurycleia, 101 Eurysakeion, 147, 150, 226n48. See also Eurysakes Eurysakes, 37–­38, 147, 148, 149, 150–­52, 151f, 153, 225n46; receives shield, 84, 135, 140–­44. See also Ajax; bequeathal scene; shield of Ajax; weapons Ewans, M., 148 Exekias, 197n13; “Ajax contemplating death” (amphora), 16–­19, 18f, 29 fabrics. See clothing; costumes; textiles Falkner, T., 17 falling, 216n96; in Euripides’ Electra, 100–­105 Faraone, C., 167 Farmer, in Euripides’ Electra, 44, 45, 46, 64, 94–­95, 98 Felson, N., 7 Finglass, P. J., 117, 122, 146 flashback, via urn, 126 Fletcher, J., 16 footprint. See signs/signatures François Vase, 196n1 friendship (philia), 27, 28, 38, 85 Fury(ies): of Clytemnestra, 4, 58, 85, 105, 126, 160, 169–­70, 221n52; of Oedipus, 33; summoned by Ajax, 229n36. See also Aeschylus: Eumen­ ides ; Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus Gagarin, M., 191 Gager, J., 176

262 Gaifman, M., 81 garments. See clothing; costumes; textiles Garrison, E., 164–­65 Garvie, A. F., 61 Gell, Alfred, 15–­16, 28, 36, 169, 197n4, 197nn6–­7, 202–­3n76, 230n47. See also “distributed personhood” gender, of objects, 31, 92, 93, 97. See also grammar genres. See comedy; epic; tragedy Gernet, L., 75, 76, 103 ghost, 126, 180. See also haunting gift exchange, 35–­36, 54–­55; in Hector’s duel with Ajax, 23–­25, 32, 41. See also duel, Homeric; sword of Ajax/Hector gift giving, 26, 38, 54–­55, 58, 81, 85 Gigantomachy, 77, 78, 83–­84 glory (kleos): Ajax and, 33–­34, 135, 143–­44; Electra’s, 124; of weapons, 223n17 gods, 78, 81, 87, 89, 100, 132, 136, 171, 197n12, 212n27, 222n64 Goff, B., 100–­101 Gorgon, 76–­78, 81, 85, 105, 210n21 gorgoneion, 76, 80, 82. See also aegis of Athena Graf, F., 171 Graham, Martha, 222n16 grammar: agency, 32; “plural” voice, 28, 200–­ 201n51; of pronouns, 97, 121; semiotics, 127–­28; verb tenses, 83, 121, 156, 220n36. See also agent noun; deictics; language grave. See tomb(s) gun, in Ibsen, 118–­19. See also weapons Hades, 123, 126 hair, lock of, 84, 87, 89–­93, 98, 106–­8, 150, 213n50, 215n75. See also signs/signatures; tokens Hammond, N. G. L., 47 haptic actors, 38–­40 Harris, C., 152 Harris, J. G., 57 Harrison, A. R. W., 103 haunting, 3, 193; in Sophocles’ Electra, 114–­16, 128–­ 29, 203n1. See also Carlson, Marvin; ghost; Hector; sword of Ajax/Hector Hecate, 171. See also gods Hector, 29–­32, 135–­40, 142; presence in Ajax’s sword, 1, 16, 18, 23, 24–­28, 31, 33, 41, 42, 140, 148. See also sword of Ajax/Hector Hecuba, 36, 67, 180 heirlooms, 73, 76, 80–­83, 84, 87, 97, 99; Ajax’s shield as, 134–­54; signet ring, 86, 91, 124, 170, 233n95. See also patrimony; signs/signatures; souvenirs; tokens Helen, 85, 106, 180; weaves fabric in Iliad and Odyssey, 49, 55 Henrichs, A., 149, 150, 153 Hephaestus, 44, 78, 212n25. See also gods

gener al index Hera, 36. See also gods Heracles, 6, 16, 36–­37, 58, 86, 127, 157, 158–­63 passim, 186, 188, 210n19, 228n16, 228–­29n24; bow of, 9, 16, 38–­39. See also hero(es) Herald: in Agamemnon, 186; in Trachiniae, 186 Hermes, 84, 171. See also gods hero(es): Ajax as, 38, 47, 104, 105, 138, 144, 147–­48, 149, 154, 199n37; eponymous, 10, 147, 192, 225n38, 226n50; Oedipus as, 149, 160–­61. See also warrior Hesiod: Theogony, 77, 145, 210n21; Works and Days, 145 Hippodameia, won by Pelops, 88, 222n1. See also spear of Pelops Hippolytus, 102, 156, 163–­68 passim, 170–­76 passim Holford-­Strevens, L., 113 Homer. See epic hoplite culture, 10, 20, 145–­46, 192. See also Athens Howgego, C., 96 hubris, 46, 53, 64–­65; of Aegisthus, 44–­45, 46, 65, 116 “hybrid” adjectives. See compound words; grammar hybridity, nature/culture, 90, 93, 99–­100 Hyllus, 158, 162 Hypsipyle, 75 Ibsen, Henrik, Hedda Gabler, gun in, 118–­19 identity, embodiment of, 99–­100, 101–­2 “identity theft,” costume-­related, 44, 63, 217n104 Iliad, 23–­28 passim, 37, 41, 44–­45, 78, 111, 134–­40, 142, 146, 199n38. See also epic; Odyssey intertextuality, 2, 3, 27, 29, 42, 44, 114–­15, 179, 195n2. See also intertheatricality; metapoetry; metatheatricality; textiles intertheatricality, 3, 42, 66–­69, 91, 111, 125, 129; in Sophocles’ Electra, 114–­15, 116, 119. See also intertextuality; metapoetry; metatheatricality; textiles invisibility, of prop, 4, 83, 157, 159, 183 Ion, 70, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80. See also Euripides Iphigenia, 51, 83, 87–­88, 155, 178–­88. See also Atreids Irwin, E., 145 Jason, 86, 100, 199n34. See also Euripides javelin, in Antiphon, second tetralogy, 190. See also weapons Jebb, R. C., 30 Johnston, S., 171 Jones, A. R., 46 Jones, J., 68 Kamerbeek, J. C., 30 Kells, J. H., 128 kommos, 123, 126. See also Chorus; tragedy Kreousa, 70, 74, 76–­78, 213n41, 213n44; as name-­

gener al index giver, 71, 73, 77, 80; proves maternity, 80–­83. See also Erechtheids; Euripides; Ion Kurke, L., 97 lament: in Ajax, 143; in Euripides’ Electra, 204n17; in Hippolytus, 172; in Sophocles’ Electra, 120–­24, 126, 220n35, 220n37. See also mourning language: Ajax’s, 142; of gods, 78, 212n27; Hippolytus’s (forensic), 175; Homeric, 146–­47; nonverbal, 173, 228n20, 232n71; oracular, 160, 202n63, 223n11; semiotics, 127, 196n15; “semiotization,” 127; stage language, 128, 219n24; of theater, 2, 4. See also epithets; grammar Latour, Bruno, 202n76 Lawton, C., 152 Lebeck, A., 64 Lee, M., 50, 92 Lefkowitz, M., 154 letters, 179–­89 passim, 233n85, 233n87, 233n90. See also deltos/oi (tablet[s]) LeVen, P., 55–­56 Ley, G., 30 Little Iliad, 136, 199–­200n39. See also epic; Iliad; Odyssey Loraux, N., 172–­73 MacDowell, D. M., 191 madness: of Ajax, 17, 20, 25, 61–­62, 197n15, 199n39, 200n40; of Heracles, 36–­37; of Orestes, 62, 208n76 magic: Phaedra’s attempted, 167; sympathetic, 171; textile-­based, 55 marriage: false promise of, 186, 187; as master plot, 87–­88 Marshall, C. W., 91, 195n3, 214n70, 215n79, 219n19, 219n23 masks, 67, 195n7, 209n89, 210n95, 215n79 material actors, 20, 33, 40, 51, 63, 89, 119, 138–­40. See also haptic actors; props, tragic matricide, 61–­65, 104–­5 McClure, L., 55 McNeil, L., 55 mēchanēma, mēchanai (intrigue), 87, 128 Medea, 58, 86, 100, 216n93, 218n4, 230n38 Meineck, P., 30 memorization, within tragic plot, 182–­83 Menelaus, 184, 186; rape of deltos, 187 messenger: in Ajax, 34; Ajax as, 30; in Antigone, 229n36; the dead as, 171; in Ion, 74; in Iphigenia at Aulis, 184; in Medea, 229n38; in Thracian Women, 17, 40 meta-­commentary, props as, 39–­40, 68–­69 metaphor, 2, 3, 8, 23, 28, 54, 56, 73, 79, 81, 103, 112, 114, 119, 156, 193, 219n15; of coin, 96; of

263 female body, 185, 186; of urn, 114–­26 passim. See also language; metonymy; symbols/ symbolism metapoetry, 3, 66, 125, 187, 227n10 metatheatricality, 11, 40, 63, 65, 128, 131, 155, 179, 210n93, 210n96. See also intertextuality; intertheatricality; metapoetry metonymy, 114, 156, 219n15; in Agamemnon, 56–­57; in Ajax, 23–­24; in Odyssey, 102. See also metaphor; symbols/symbolism mimēmata, 9, 73, 81, 106 mimesis, material, 68. See also mimēmata mise-­en-­abîme, 10, 126, 157, 182, 232n84. See also language Mitys, statue’s revenge, 191–­92 money, 46, 51–­52, 54, 99, 207n50, 215n84, 216n91. See also clothing; coins; ostentation; silver/“silver-­bought textiles”; textiles; wealth Moses of Chorene, 86 motherhood, importance of: in Ion, 72–­73, 80, 82; in Sophocles’ Electra, 122–­23, 125–­26, 131–­32. See also women mourning, 119–­25, 220n34, 220n42, 221n54. See also lament Muecke, F., 67–­68 myth: Athenian, 78, 111, 210n1; “meta-­mythology,” 43; Sophocles’ Electra and, 131–­32; in tragedy, 4–­5, 77, 131–­32, 154, 178, 181; in visual arts, 16–­18, 18f, 35–­36, 35f, 58–­59, 59f, 129–­32, 131f, 146, 150–­52, 151f. See also epic; tragedy names/naming, 77, 78, 104–­5, 140, 212n26, 213n46, 217n100, 217n107. See also Eurysakes Nausicaa, role played by Sophocles, 113. See also Sophocles Neoptolemus, 38–­40. See also Achilles Nessus, in Trachiniae, 127, 161, 228n21 New Historicism, 5 nightingale, Electra as, 123. See also Procne, Electra as Niobe, Electra as, 123, 126, 132, 220n42 Noel, A.-­S., 57 nothos (bastard), 101–­2 Nünlist, R., 30 Nurse: in Choephoroi, 122; in Hippolytus, 167, 174, 175 object(s), stage, 85; as actors, 1–­2, 63, 169, 172; agency of, 34–­37, 164, 170, 173, 190–­92, 202n75, 203n76, 228n24; animacy of, 16, 19, 34, 36, 40, 169, 190–­91, 197n5, 202n72; bushes, 116–­19; distributed personhood and, 16, 31, 86, 113, 119–­24, 169; interpellation and, 73–­75; smell of, 56–­57; tainted legacy of, 38, 88. See also “biography,” of objects;

264 object(s) (cont.) deltos/ oi (tablet[s]); haptic actors; material actors; props, tragic; purple; scepter of Agamemnon; shield; signs/signatures; sword; textiles; tokens; weapons Odysseus, 87, 136, 199nn37–­38; in Ajax, 19, 20, 25, 149, 166; bed of, 87, 88; in Philoctetes, 38, 39; scar of, 100–­103. See also Odyssey; Sophocles Odyssey, 55, 87, 102, 145, 214n60. See also epic; Odysseus Oedipus, 33, 149, 160. See also hero(es) Oinomaos, 87–­88. See also spear of Pelops Old Man: in Euripides’ Electra, 89–­105 passim; in Ion, 75, 76–­77; in Iphigenia at Aulis, 185, 186, 187 olive wreath. See tokens Omitowoju, R., 187 ontology, of objects, 16, 31, 62. See also agent noun; material actors; object(s), stage; props, tragic oracle, 80, 116, 147; and prophecy in Trachiniae, 158–­63 passim, 188. See also time/ temporality Oresteia, 3, 42, 43–­44, 60, 66, 69, 84, 132, 178–­79, 188. See also Aeschylus; Atreids; “rewriting” Orestes, 45, 51, 66, 71–­72, 84–­105 passim, 121, 126, 128, 130, 169–­70, 172, 200n43; and Electra, 90–­99; and Iphigenia, 87–­88, 155, 178–­84; as stage director, 116–­17. See also Atreids; recognition/recognition scene; scar Orpheus, 170, 230n50 ostentation (“Eastern”), 48, 64; and Agamemnon’s palace in his absence, 5, 48–­50, 64. See also clothing; Clytemnestra; silver/“silver-­ bought textiles”; textiles palaestra, 91–­92, 215n73 Paley, F. A., 99 Pan, 44, 104. See also gods Panathenaia, 205n31; and peplos, 83, 212–­13n39 parody, of Aeschylus by Euripides, 71–­72, 131. See also Aristophanes Parthenon, 81 patrimony, 105, 134–­35, 146. See also heirlooms; names/naming Patroclus, 134, 199n38, 202n63, 223n17. See also Achilles; weapons Patterson, C., 97 Pausanias, 15, 147, 196n2, 225n45 Peleus, 134–­35, 142, 222n2. See also Achilles Pelops, 87, 88, 214n63, 222n1. See also Atreids; myth; spear of Pelops Periclean Citizenship law, 96–­97 Perseus, 105, 111, 112. See also Orestes personification, of the inanimate, 15, 30, 31, 32–­33, 89. See also “distributed personhood”; sword of Ajax/Hector; weapons

gener al index Phaedra, 86, 155, 156, 163–­68 passim, 171–­74, 188. See also Euripides; Hippolytus Pheidias, 81 phenomenology, 6. See also States, Bert O. philia, 85, 178, 200n41. See also friendship Philoctetes, bow of, 16, 38–­40, 203nn79–­80, 221n47. See also bow; object(s), stage; weapons Pindar, on Ajax and Salamis, 199n37, 224n29 Plato, 127, 171, 212n26. See also Aristotle “plural” voice, of Sophocles’ Ajax, 28. See also grammar poetics, 5, 65; of tragic recognition, 70–­108 passim. See also Aristotle poiēsis, tragic, 156, 189 poikilia, 55–­56, 58, 62, 66, 205n30, 207n56, 207n60, 207–­8n62, 228–­29n24; in clothing, 58–­59, 127, 161–­62, 218n4. See also textiles polis, 3, 88, 91, 96–­100, 105, 144–­45, 216n90. See also Athens Polus, 111–­13, 129–­30, 218nn9–­10 Poseidon, 81, 168, 170, 213n43. See also gods Potiphar’s wife, Phaedra as, 165, 229n31 pottery, and tragedy, 16–­18, 18f, 35–­36, 35f, 58–­59, 59f, 129–­32, 131f, 146, 205nn20–­21 Priam, 111; as Eastern despot, 50, 55–­57 Proclus, Cypria, 181 Procne, Electra as, 123, 132, 220n43 prophecy: of Apollo, 160; of Calchas, 185, 188; in Trachiniae, 158–­63 passim. See also oracle props, tragic, 4, 5, 6, 7–­8, 33, 38, 40, 67–­68, 81, 107, 114, 125, 195n7, 196n15; and audience, 6, 40, 41, 47, 65, 66, 67, 73, 79–­80, 82, 122, 127–­28; and biography, 26, 35, 125, 135–­36, 139, 154; deltos as, 158–­63, 184; functions of, 4–­6; “haunting” of, 114; and intertheatricality, 65–­66, 72; invisible (“hidden”/“imaginary”), 6, 157–­63, 229n26; invoke epic, 23–­24; on pottery, 131–­32; power of, 6, 16, 47, 57, 71, 113, 114, 128–­29, 168–­69, 188; “prophood,” 7, 26; as props, 21–­22, 127–­28; “recycling” of, 67; and temporality, 57, 128–­29, 149. See also bow; deictics; deltos/oi (tablet[s]); Ibsen, Henrik; intertextuality; intertheatricality; object(s), stage; pottery, and tragedy; scepter of Agamemnon; sword; textiles; tokens; urn; weapons Prytaneion, 15, 196n3 Pucci, J., 2 purple (porphyra): dye mixed with blood, 53, 56–­ 57, 62–­63, 66; symbolism of, 47, 49–­50, 52, 53–­54, 204n19, 205n31, 206n32, 206n34. See also “tapestry scene”; textiles; wealth “purple path.” See “tapestry scene” Pylades, 91, 94, 117, 120, 130, 178, 179. See also Orestes Pythia, in Ion, 71, 78, 80, 88. See also oracle

gener al index Raeburn, D., 107 rags, as costumes, 44–­48, 67, 154. See also clothing; costumes; Electra; Telephus “rape,” 184–­88. See also letters recognition/recognition scene (anagnórisis), 71–­72, 90–­91, 106, 124–­25, 193; dokimasia as, 94–­99; in Euripides’ Electra, 91–­99, 107; in Ion, 74, 80–­83; in Iphigenia among the Taurians, 87–­88, 155, 179–­83; misrecognition scene, 119; in Odyssey, 87, 100–­103, 214n60; as reperformance, 106; in Sophocles’ Electra, 120–­25; tragic, 70–­108 passim. See also dokimasia; epic; signs/signatures; tokens “recycling”: of costumes/props, 3, 9, 42, 48, 67, 116, 200n43, 209n83; of plot, 65. See also intertheatricality; “rewriting” Redgrave, Vanessa, 67 Rehm, R., 30, 144 Reinhold, M., 50 reperformance, 40, 42–­44, 64–­65, 67, 84, 106, 119, 193, 203–­4n6 replications (original gone), 70, 72–­73, 81, 84. See also mimēmata; souvenirs reputation (eukleia), Phaedra’s, 165, 167–­68, 175, 176, 177 “restless dead,” power of, 171–­72, 177. See also Fury(ies) revenge (plot): Aphrodite’s, 163–­70; Phaedra’s, 166, 177; in Sophocles’ Electra, 116–­17, 119–­20 “rewriting”: by Euripides, 71–­72, 89–­105, 178–­79; of letter by Agamemnon, 184; of Oresteia, 3–­4, 42–­69, 114–­19, 124. See also deltos/ oi (tablet[s]); writing, and tragedy Ringer, M., 113, 117, 128 Rose, P., 143 Rosenmeyer, P., 155 sacrifice (“kin-­killing”), 87–­88, 178–­82, 184–­88. See also Iphigenia sakos (body shield): of Achilles, 136, 223n14; of Ajax, 24, 37, 135–­44, 146, 223nn6–­8, 223n11, 224nn22–­23; of Solon, 144–­48; transfer from epic to Athens, 146–­47. See also shield; shield of Ajax Salaminioi (genos), 147, 225n37. See also Salamis Salamis, relation to Athens, 143–­45, 147–­48, 150, 224nn29–­30, 225nn35–­39, 225n45, 226n54. See also Ajax; Athens Saussure, Ferdinand de, 196n15 Saxonhouse, A., 72 scar, 84, 88, 93–­94, 95–­105, 217n99; as “hybrid sign,” 90, 93, 99–­100; Orestes’ vs. Odysseus’s, 72, 100–­105, 216n95. See also recognition/recognition scene; signs/signatures; tokens

265 scepter of Agamemnon, 126, 204n10, 204n13, 222n5; Aigisthus co-­opts, 44, 45, 103; genealogy of, 44–­45. See also props, tragic Schechner, Richard, 6, 195n4 Schein, S., 132 scholia: on Ajax, 17, 20, 30, 197n10, 197n12, 200n49; Eustathios, 219n12. See also Sophocles Scodel, R., 150, 163 script, tragedy as, 155–­93 passim. See also writing, and tragedy “Scythian stranger,” in Seven against Thebes, 32–­33 sea, 60; as wealth, 49–­54, 57–­58, 60–­64, 66, 69. See also Clytemnestra; purple; wealth Seaford, R., 54 Seale, D., 30 Segal, C., 126, 157–­58 senses (5), 2, 5, 6, 39, 55–­57; and tactile cues, 141–­ 42. See also haptic actors; object(s), stage Shakespeare, William, 57 shield, 34–­36, 118; of Achilles, 85, 134, 136, 144, 197n13, 222n5, 223n6, 223n8; Dipylon, 35, 35f; of Hector, in Iliad, 24; of Hector, in Trojan Women, 36; words for, 136, 223n11, 223n14, 223n16. See also sakos; shield of Ajax; sword; sword of Ajax/Hector; weapons shield of Ajax: in Ajax, 134–­54 passim, 192; bequeathal scene, 140–­44; as bier, 152–­53; biography of, 136, 149; in Iliad, 24, 37–­38; as “second skin” (or prosthetic), 135–­40, 147, 222n4. See also Eurysakes; sakos; shield; weapons signet ring (sphragis), 84, 86, 91, 124, 170, 186, 214n58. See also signs/signatures signs/signatures, 87, 88, 90, 99–­100, 107, 140–­41, 169; Aristotle on, 99–­100; deltos as, 169; footprint as, 89, 90, 92–­93, 103, 105; hair as, 84, 87, 89, 90, 91–­92, 106–­8; Homeric, 84, 87, 100–­103; scar as, 84, 88, 97–­100. See also heirlooms; object(s), stage; props, tragic; souvenirs; symbols/symbolism; tokens silver/“silver-­bought textiles,” 96, 215n83; as emblem of wealth, 46, 50, 52, 54; as symbol, 46, 50, 52, 54, 96. See also Athens; clothing; money; ostentation; purple; recognition/ recognition scene; textiles snakes, golden, in Ion, 71, 76, 81. See also recognition/recognition scene; replications Sofer, Andrew, 6, 118 Solon, shield of (sakos), 144–­48. See also shield Sommerstein, A. H., 172 song. See voice Sophilus, 154 Sophocles: as actor in own plays, 113, 130–­31, 219nn12–­13; Ajax, 1, 7, 16, 19–­34, 37, 40–­41, 71, 84, 134–­54 passim, 192, 223n10 (see also scholia: on Ajax); biography of, 153–­54; Electra,

266 Sophocles: as actor in own plays (cont.) 6, 7, 43, 63, 84, 86, 112–­33 passim; Eurysakes, 152; Nausicaa, 131; Oedipus at Colonus, 149, 160; Philoctetes, 16, 37–­40; Tereus, 220–­21n43; Thamyras, 113, 131; Trachiniae, 6, 59, 86, 127, 156, 157, 158–­63, 182, 186, 188. See also Chorus sōphrosunē (self-­control), in Hippolytus, 164–­68, 177, 230n44 souvenirs, 70–­7 1, 81. See also heirlooms; props, tragic; tokens spear of Pelops, 87–­88, 222n1. See also weapons spectators. See audience sphragis (seal). See signet ring stage building (skēnē): in Agamemnon, 49, 60; in Ajax, 20, 21, 30, 152, 198nn24–­25, 201n54; in Euripides’ Electra, 64, 204n8; and visual arts, 129 staging, 40, 59–­60, 61, 95, 120, 148, 152–­53, 220n31, 226n51; tour de force, in Ajax, 30, 40, 152. See also director, stage Stallybrass, Peter, 46 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 113 States, Bert O., 6 statue, as weapon, 191–­92. See also weapons Stesichorus, Oresteia, 84, 106 Stewart, Kathleen, 190 Stewart, Susan, 70–­7 1 suicide, 118; of Ajax, 1, 6–­34, 40, 62, 86, 198n25; Phaedra’s, 171–­73; “suicide note,” 164–­65. See also Ajax; sword of Ajax/Hector Suicide Speech, in Ajax, 19, 29–­34, 40–­41 swaddling clothes (spargana), Ion’s. See tokens sword, in Seven against Thebes, 33 sword of Ajax/Hector, 1, 7, 16, 22, 33, 34, 37, 40, 41, 140, 154, 192; as actor, 19–­32, 39–­40; burial of, 23, 26, 27, 31, 37, 41, 135, 142, 147; as Hector, 31, 32; visual/verbal dialogue with, 17–­19. See also Ajax; object(s), stage; props, tragic; shield of Ajax; weapons Sydney Painter, 130–­32, 131f symbola, mother’s (in Ion), 71, 75–­78, 80–­82. See also motherhood, importance of; women symbols/symbolism: of Athens, 71, 80; of clothing, 5, 63, 64; of kingship, 103–­4; of purple, 49–­ 50, 52, 53–­54; sakos as, 145–­46; silver as, 46, 50, 52, 54, 96. See also grammar; metaphor; tokens tablets. See deltos/ oi; writing, and tragedy “tapestry scene,” in Agamemnon, 49–­50, 55, 66, 68–­ 69; reenactment of, 64–­65, 204n8. See also Agamemnon; Clytemnestra; purple; textiles Taplin, O., 129–­30 Tarkow, T., 100–­101 Tecmesssa, 20, 22, 25, 27, 28, 152, 153. See also Ajax

gener al index Telamon, 34, 135. See also Ajax Telephus, 67, 86, 210n96. See also rags, as costumes tent (skēnē): of Ajax, 25–­27, 30, 201n54, 201n57; in Ion, 74, 78 Teucer, 29, 31–­32, 33, 34, 142, 146, 149, 152, 153, 202n62, 223n13. See also Ajax textiles, 46–­48, 58, 87; as actors, 63; bloody, as evi­ dence of murder, 60–­61, 62–­63; dyed purple in tapestry scene, 49–­50, 55; “father-­killing,” 62, 63; as fungible wealth, 46, 47, 50; madness-­ inducing, 61–­62; as murder weapon, 58–­59, 60, 63, 191; and poikilia, 55–­56, 66; power of, on stage, 48, 55–­56; as props in Agamemnon, 3, 5, 43–­44, 46, 47, 48–­49, 50–­51, 53, 209n78; in reenactment of carpet scene, 64–­65; as story of Atreids, 57, 87; thematic in Oresteia, 45, 62–­63, 66. See also clothing; cos­tumes; ostentation; props, tragic; “textilizing” “textilizing”: of Agamemnon, 58–­60, 66. See also Agamemnon: entrapment of; textiles theater, 6, 40, 128–­29, 196n15, 219n19; in Athens, 42–­43, 44–­45; and visual arts, 129–­32. See also acting; actor(s); art; audience; props, tragic Theseus, 79, 86, 210n19, 230n48; in Hippolytus, 156, 168–­70 passim, 174 thing(s). See object(s), stage; props, tragic; symbols/symbolism; tokens Thyestes, 103–­4. See also Atreids; myth time/temporality: in Ajax, 27, 40–­41, 149, 154; in Hippolytus, 177; in Oedipus at Colonus, 160–­ 61; and oracle in Trachiniae, 158–­63 passim; in Oresteia, 60, 68, 177; and props, 26, 42, 57, 126, 128–­29, 149; in Sophocles’ Electra, 118–­19, 121, 125–­26, 132; suspension of, 78, 79. See also oracle; urn Timotheus of Zacynthus (actor), 30, 201n58 tokens, 4, 9, 193; gold bracelet, 76; golden snakes, 71, 76, 81; hair as, 84, 87, 89, 106; in Ion, 70–­7 1, 76, 80, 83, 88–­89, 97; olive wreath, 71, 81, 213n42; scar, 84, 88, 93–­94, 98; swaddling clothes (spargana), 79–­80, 81, 88; weaving sampler, 80–­81, 82. See also heirlooms; object(s), stage; props, tragic; signs/signatures; souvenirs; symbols/symbolism tomb(s): of Agamemnon, 44, 84, 89, 90, 93, 103, 106–­7, 117, 126; of Niobe, 123; of “restless dead,” 171–­74, 176, 177. See also burial, of Ajax’s sword tongue, as dangerous in Hippolytus, 171, 174–­75 Torrance, I., 3, 43, 64, 156 tragedy, 2, 4, 35–­38, 40, 156, 188, 222n59; and pottery, 16–­18, 18f, 58–­59, 59f, 129–­32, 131f, 146, 221n58; recognition in, 70–­108; use of

gener al index props in, 21–­22, 33; weapons in, 35–­40; and writing, 155–­89. See also epic; myth; props, tragic; recognition/recognition scene transvestism. See cross-­dressing trial (agōn), in Hippolytus, 167, 174, 175, 176–­77 Tutor, in Sophocles’ Electra, 107, 116–­17, 119, 121, 219n24 Tychios, 136, 146, 223n7 urn: in Attic Nights, 112–­13; in Choephoroi, 114–­16, 118–­19, 159; in Euripides’ Electra, 115–­16, 193; in Sophocles’ Electra, 6, 8, 115–­33 passim, 193, 219n14, 221n56. See also invisibility, of prop; props, tragic; “rewriting” usurpation: Aegisthus’s, 45, 65, 103; among Atreids, 44, 65 Vermeule, E., 58 voice (song), deltos (tablet) as, 156, 169–­70, 227n12 Walton, J. M., 130 warrior: one with weapons, 34–­35, 35f, 37, 136, 137–­ 39, 201n52, 202n75; separates from weapons, 139–­40. See also hero(es); weapons wealth, 52–­53, 57, 60; of Agamemnon’s household, 52–­53; clothing as, 45, 46, 64–­65; sea as, 54, 57–­58, 63, 69. See also clothing; money; ostentation; silver/“silver-­bought textiles”; textiles weapons, 16, 36–­37, 87–­88, 138, 154, 223n17; “animated weaponry,” 16–­41 passim, 191,

267 192; burial of Ajax’s, 23, 26, 27, 31, 37, 41, 135, 142, 147; in epic, 34–­35, 36, 134–­38; one with warrior, 34–­36, 35f, 136–­39; power of, 16–­41; in Seven against Thebes, 32, 33; as warriors, 134–­38. See also bequeathal scene, in Ajax ; bow; object(s), stage; props, tragic; shield; shield of Ajax; spear of Pelops; sword; sword of Ajax/Hector weaving, 49, 50, 54, 66, 206n35, 212–­13n39. See also Helen; textiles; tokens Webster, T. B. L., 4 Will, F., 100 Willinck, C. W., 4 women: as body/farmland, 185; as body/vessel, 186; and citizenship, 97, 216n86; gifts of, 85, 214n56; rape of, 184–­88; as weavers, 50, 54–­55, 206n35. See also cross-­dressing; motherhood, importance of Wright, M., 43 writing, and tragedy, 155–­89 passim, 227n1. See also curse(s); curse tablet; deltos/ oi (tablet[s]) Wünsch, R., 176 Wyles, R., 44, 66 Xerxes, 50; in Persians, 154 Xouthos, 73, 74, 76, 78, 82, 211n9 Zeitlin, F., 42, 87, 167, 172–­73 Zeus, 15, 78, 100; oracle at Dodona, 158, 162, 188, 228n16

Index Locorum

Aeschines, 2.167: 76, 3.229: 231–­32n70 Aeschylus Agamemnon, 19: 207n44, 80: 202n66, 111: 206n36, 117: 206n36, 208: 51, 209–­10: 206n36, 218–­21: 187, 424: 206n36, 494: 202n66, 609–­10: 186, 774–­80: 209n87, 810–­54: 57, 851–­54: 49, 877–­80: 51, 905–­11: 49, 906–­7: 50, 64, 205n28, 209n85, 909: 205n30, 918–­19: 50, 921: 55, 923: 55, 63, 925–­26: 50, 55, 63, 935: 50, 56, 936: 55, 944–­47: 51, 52, 69, 948–­52: 52, 207n46, 949: 46, 50, 950: 51, 954–­55: 53, 958–­74: 53, 59, 62, 214n56, 959–­60: 63, 64, 204n19, 207n45, 961: 54, 1082: 208n68, 1093: 56, 1116: 209n82, 1126–­27: 58, 1129: 221n56, 1185: 56, 1220: 206n36, 1267: 66, 1372: 208n74, 1382–­83: 58, 60, 1492: 58, 1520: 206n36, 1580: 58 Choephoroi, 1–­5: 172, 6–­7: 84, 23: 115, 73: 206n36, 104: 206n36, 129: 115, 141: 206n36, 149: 115, 168: 107, 174: 89, 92, 186–­88: 89, 195–­211: 89–­90, 209: 203n6, 225–­27: 90–­91, 229–­30: 214n69, 231–­32: 83, 212n37, 213n47, 254: 51, 378: 206n36, 385: 206n36, 395: 206n36, 548–­50: 172, 686–­87: 115, 219n25, 221n56, 734–­65: 122, 220n38, 915: 51, 973–­1017: 61–­62, 980: 209n80, 997–­ 1000: 61, 208n76, 1010–­17: 62, 1026: 208n76, 1055: 206n36 Eumenides, 41–­42: 206n36, 102: 206n36, 180–­84: 85n54, 237: 206n36, 327–­33: 169–­70, 230n49, 341–­46: 170 Persians, 1017–­22: 154 Seven against Thebes, 727–­31: 32–­33, 945: 33

Thracian Women, fr. 83: 17, 40, 197n12 Antiphon, 2.4: 190 5.53–­56: 156 Apollodorus Bibliotheca, 3.14.1: 213n43 Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica, 4.694: 199n34, 4.696: 199n34 Archilochus, 5W: 118 Aristophanes Acharnians, 9–­12: 203n6, 400–­34: 67, 210n96 Birds, 92: 201n57 Clouds, 507: 205n29, 534–­35: 203n2, 536: 106 Frogs, 52–­54: 229n28, 101–­2: 174, 231n66, 729: 215n73, 1471: 174, 231n66 Thesmophoriazusae, 151–­52: 68, 275–­76: 174, 231n66 Wasps, 578: 215n85, 1213–­15: 206n39 Aristotle Poetics, 1448b17: 128, 221n57, 1450b18–­20: 195n7, 1452a7–­11: 191, 1452b30: 228n17, 1454b18–­25: 99–­100, 1455a16–­20: 178, 232n77 Rhetoric, 1370b29–­32: 166, 1416a28–­34: 174 [Aristotle] Constitution of the Athenians, 42: 217n97, 55.3–­4: 97, 57.4: 234n4 Mirabilium Auscultationes, 846a22–­23: 191, 234n4 Athenaeus, 12.526c: 204n19 Aulus Gellius Attic Nights, 6.5.5–­8: 112–­13, 128, 218n8 Callimachus Hecale, fr. 236.3 Pf: 79 Cypria Argumentum 8: 181, 232n82

270 Demosthenes, 23.76: 191, 233–­34n3, 40.28: 217n97, 57.23: 217n97, 57.54: 217n97 Dio Chrysostom Oration, 52:39 Diodorus Siculus, 3.70.3–­5: 212n25 Euripides Alcestis, 160–­61: 111, 168–­69: 231n58, 357–­59: 230n50 Andromache, 1134: 201n55 Andromeda, fr. 123: 211n22 Electra, 7: 44, 11–­12: 44–­45, 32–­33: 44, 55–­58: 116, 219n23, 58–­59: 46, 112–­39: 219n23, 140–­42: 205n20, 219n23, 175–­89: 45, 267–­70: 44, 304–­9: 45, 314–­16: 45, 317–­18: 47, 320: 44, 103, 321: 45, 322: 44, 327: 44, 367–­72: 94–­95, 375–­76: 215n77, 383–­85: 95, 458–­64: 85, 211n22, 494–­500: 89, 515–­18: 89, 518–­44: 214n65, 520–­21: 91, 93, 214n69, 522–­23: 92, 107, 527–­29: 91–­92, 530: 214n66, 530–­33: 92–­93, 534–­37: 93, 539–­40: 212n37, 543–­44: 100, 544: 93, 549–­52: 94, 550: 95, 558–­59: 95, 97, 216n91, 561: 215n78, 576: 103, 592–­95: 104, 639: 103, 686: 103, 699–­760: 103, 720–­26: 44, 104, 932–­35: 104, 939: 64, 965: 64, 966: 47, 982: 103, 105, 998–­99: 64, 209n85, 1088–­90: 47, 1107: 209n87, 1140: 65, 1221–­23: 105, 1245–­46: 85, 213n53, 1250–­51: 105, 1254–­57: 85 Hecuba, 1271–­73: 212n38 Heracles, 51: 150, 451: 201n55, 677: 45, 1378–­85: 36–­37 Hippolytus, 395–­97: 174, 418: 175, 612: 174–­75, 656–­60: 174–­75, 668: 230n44, 687–­88: 171, 231n59, 725–­31: 166–­68, 230n44, 726–­29: 165–­66, 229n35, 729–­31: 167–­68, 814: 172, 177, 856–­57: 169, 172–­73, 862–­64: 86, 879–­80: 156, 169, 227n12, 883–­84: 165, 923–­24: 175, 983–­91: 175, 1033: 175, 1034–­35: 164, 167–­68, 1074–­75: 232n71, 1205: 232n71, 1215: 232n71, 1310: 177, 1334: 230–­ 31n51, 1406: 165, 231n51 Hypsipyle, fr. 759a.1632: 211n12, fr. 765: 75, 211n12 Ion, 112: 82, 116: 82, 180: 74, 190–­92: 210n1, 411: 211n13, 839–­40: 76, 919–­21: 213n44, 984–­87: 77, 989–­91: 77, 992–­93: 211n23, 994: 212n24, 995–­97: 77, 78, 1007: 83, 1030: 78, 1058–­60: 76, 1140–­41: 74, 79, 212n34, 1183: 74, 1185: 75, 1189: 74, 1190: 75, 1204–­5: 74, 1212–­16: 75, 1337–­ 38: 78, 1341: 88, 1361–­62: 80, 1386: 75, 1389–­94: 78–­80, 1414: 80, 1419–­23: 80–­

in de x l ocoru m 81, 1424–­25: 82, 1427–­29: 81, 1435–­36: 81, 1465: 82, 1480: 213n43, 1490: 79 Iphigenia among the Taurians, 5–­9: 179–­80, 182, 28–­30: 180–­81, 81–­83: 214n64, 87–­88: 211n15, 230–­35: 220n37, 456: 178, 504: 217n100, 578: 178, 584–­85: 178, 623: 201n55, 643: 178, 725–­27: 178, 182, 760–­63: 183, 764–­65: 182, 769–­77: 179–­80, 779–­81: 232n80, 783–­87: 181, 183, 808–­26: 87–­88, 222n1, 814–­16: 83, 834–­36: 220n37, 934: 214n64 Iphigenia at Aulis, 35–­42: 184, 106–­63: 233n88, 108: 184, 153–­56: 185, 307: 186, 315: 187, 317–­25: 186–­87, 610–­18: 214n64 Medea, 516–­19: 100, 541–­43: 230n50, 1135: 230n38, 1159: 58 Orestes, 25–­26: 63, 94: 209n81, 96: 106, 268–­69: 4, 268–­76: 85, 437: 204n10, 839–­43: 205n24, 1625–­65: 85 Suppliants, 1205: 199n34 Trojan Women, 451–­54: 65, 210n91, 801–­2: 213n43, 1196–­99: 36 [Euripides] Rhesus, 253: 201n55, 521: 228n18 Eustathius In Odysseam, 1.241: 113, 219n12 Heliodorus, 9.24.7: 213–­14n55 Herodotus, 1.59.4: 225n36, 4.9–­10: 211n19, 5.66: 223n18, 7.143: 224n28, 8.55: 213n43, 8.64: 225n39, 8.121: 225n39 Hesiod Aspis, 229–­37: 211n21 Theogony, 274–­83: 77, 211n21, 280: 211n22, 399: 224n33, fr. 343MW: 212n25 Homer Iliad, 1.284: 223n15, 2.102–­7: 204n12, 2.447–­ 49: 212n25, 2.768–­69: 199n39, 3.125–­28: 50, 3.229: 223n15, 4.222: 202n75, 5.435: 223n17, 5.738–­42: 211n21, 6.5: 223n15, 6.402–­3: 140, 6.479–­81: 142, 6.504: 223n17, 7.206–­312: 199n35, 7.211: 223n15, 7.215–­16: 137, 7.219–­23: 146, 7.220: 223n6, 223n8, 7.221–­23: 136, 7.244–­46: 137, 223n6, 7.248–­54: 137, 7.266–­67: 138, 223n6, 7.270: 24, 7.272: 138, 7.290–­93: 27, 7.300: 26, 7.311–­12: 200n44, 8.266–­67: 146, 10.427: 200n50, 11.334: 223n17, 11.473–­88: 223n10, 11.544: 223n6, 11.816–­18: 202n63, 13.188–­205: 199n38, 13.311–­27: 199n38, 13.324: 199n39, 13.709–­22: 199n38, 13.809–­32: 199n38, 14.402–­32: 199n38, 15.308–­10: 78, 212n25, 15.415: 199n38, 15.479: 223n13, 15.482–­83: 146, 16.33–­ 35: 222n2, 16.64: 223n17, 16.106–­11:

in de x l ocoru m 139–­40, 16.114–­23: 199n38, 16.140: 134, 16.142: 222n3, 16.143–­44: 134, 17.85: 223n17, 17.125: 223n17, 17.127–­39: 199n38, 17.191: 223n17, 17.208: 223n17, 17.210–­12: 203n77, 17.233–­317: 199n38, 17.280: 199n39, 17.746–­61: 199n38, 18.144–­47: 223n17, 18.192–­94: 223n14, 223n17, 18.197: 223n17, 18.481: 223n6, 19.10: 223n17, 19.368: 223n8, 19.387: 202n71, 21.56: 200n46, 22.258: 223n17, 22.399: 223n17, 22.441: 206n34, 22.482: 200n46, 23.726–­32: 199n38, 24.191–­92: 111 Life of Aeschylus, 1.48: 203n6 Odyssey, 4.135: 50, 4.297–­98: 206n34, 11.541–­65: 223n9, 11.563–­64: 199n37, 12.228: 223n17, 15.124: 55, 15.125–­29: 55, 23.107–­10: 87, 223n17, 23.185–­86: 87, 23.191: 87 Lysias, 1.32.2: 187 Pausanias, 1.5.2: 147, 1.24.4: 196n2, 1.28.10: 15, 1.35.2: 147, 225n47, 1.35.3: 225n45, 226n54, 1.35.30: 147 Philostratus Life of Apollonius, 6.11.129–­32: 203n6 Pindar Nemean, 2.20–­22: 224n29 Olympian, 1.77–­87: 214n64 Pythian, 10.46–­48: 211n21 Plato Cratylus, 391d: 212n26 Laws, 6.760b: 76 Republic, 364c: 171 Pliny the Elder Natural History, 9.127: 49, 56, 206n32 Plutarch Alcibiades, 1: 147, 225n47 De sera numinis vindicta, 553d1–­7: 234n4 Pericles, 36.3: 190–­91 Solon, 9.2: 225n37, 29: 225n46 Pollux, 8.20: 199n34 Porphyry De Abstinentia, 2.10.29–­31: 196n2 Sappho, fr. 1V: 207n60 Scholia to Aeschylus, Choephoroi, 973: 208n73 Homer, Iliad, 2.107: 204n13, 11.527: 140, 224n20, 15.310: 78, 212n29, 23.142: 213n50 Sophocles, Ajax , 346: 20, 198n21, 815: 17, 30, 201n54, 201n58 Simonides PMG, 543.1–­2: 111, 543.21–­22: 111

271 Solon, fr. 5W: 144–­46, fr. 1–­3W: 145, 225n35 Sophocles Ajax, 10: 19, 19: 140, 30: 19, 51–­60: 25, 79: 166, 91: 198n24, 95: 19, 198n23, 110: 198n24, 123: 197n15, 125–­26: 200n51, 147: 19, 158–­59: 223n16, 201–­2: 143, 219: 20, 231: 20, 286–­87: 20, 197n16, 198n23, 291: 24, 299–­305: 24, 324–­25: 20, 338: 197n15, 346: 20, 356–­62: 20, 358–­595: 21, 371: 20, 387–­91: 20, 401–­3: 25, 429: 197n15, 452: 25, 464: 135, 479–­80: 21, 545–­95: 198n26, 550–­51: 84, 141, 213n52, 565: 142, 567–­74: 142, 574–­76: 140–­42, 146, 224nn22–­24, 225n44, 577: 147, 584: 23, 594: 28, 595: 21, 25, 611: 197n15, 646: 21, 25, 646–­47: 22, 27, 646–­ 92: 198nn26–­29, 647: 41, 650–­53: 22, 28, 34, 655–­58: 23, 141, 657–­59: 201n54, 658: 7, 22, 26, 28, 198n23, 660: 27, 661: 7, 25, 26, 661–­63: 23, 25, 39, 41, 664–­65: 26, 666–­67: 28, 200n51, 678: 25, 680: 27, 692: 27, 198n26, 201n54, 693: 28, 767–­69: 34, 815: 27, 29, 198n26, 209n77, 815–­22: 29, 30, 815–­65: 198n26, 817: 31, 818: 31, 820: 31, 821: 30, 31, 201n59, 822: 31, 40, 823: 201n52, 840–­41: 229n36, 854: 197n15, 861: 143, 892: 201n57, 985: 153, 1024–­ 25: 34, 1025–­27: 32, 202n68, 1029–­31: 202n62, 1032–­33: 32, 1034–­35: 202n67, 1135–­37: 223n10, 1163: 153, 1164–­67: 149, 226n52, 1180: 150, 1184: 153, 1211–­13: 143, 1223: 153, 1239–­45: 223n10, 1409: 152 Antigone, 823: 123, 896: 231n58, 1115–­54: 199n29, 1304–­5: 229n36 Electra, 4: 7, 36–­37: 116, 51–­58: 116–­17, 54: 5, 115, 118, 121, 219n14, 55: 119, 82: 119, 107: 123, 220–­21n43, 150–­52: 123, 195–­96: 126, 259–­60: 221n53, 365–­67: 217n108, 379–­82: 123, 387: 221n45, 417–­23: 126, 204n10, 221n53, 435: 199n34, 482: 126, 522–­23: 107, 217–­ 18n111, 757–­58: 219n14, 811: 29, 901: 107, 961–­66: 121, 1098: 119, 1098–­1231: 112, 1113–­20: 120–­21, 219n14, 1126–­30: 121–­22, 1132–­33: 122, 1138–­41: 122, 1142: 29, 1147: 122, 1161: 122, 1165: 123, 219n14, 1166–­67: 123, 1177–­78: 124, 1205: 124, 219n14, 1217: 125, 1222–­23: 86, 125, 1228–­29: 128, 1400–­1401: 128, 219n14, 221n56 Eurysakes, fr. 223: 153, 226n58 Oedipus at Colonus, 39–­42: 160, 46: 160, 88–­93: 160 Oedipus Tyrannus, 1086–­1109: 199n29 Philoctetes, 654: 221n47, 670: 203n79,

272 Philoctetes (cont.) 730–­805: 38, 763–­73: 38, 766: 38, 776–­78: 38, 801–­3: 203n79, 806: 38, 835–­39: 39 Polyxena, fr. 526: 208n68 Thamyras, fr. 1.24–­25: 113, 218n11 Trachiniae, 46–­48: 158, 160, 157: 156–­58, 158–­59: 159, 160, 160: 158, 164–­68: 159, 173–­74: 159, 163, 575: 233n93, 582–­83: 161, 584–­85: 233n93, 588–­89: 161,

in de x l ocoru m 592: 161–­62, 228n22, 613: 45, 614–­15: 86, 186, 633–­62: 199n29, 680–­92: 161, 229n25, 692: 218n4, 1160–­61: 162, 228–­ 29n24, 1165–­72: 162, 1249: 200n50 Stesichorus PMGF, 217: 195n11 P. Oxy., 216, 7–­13: 213n51 Thucydides, 1.128–­30: 206n40, 1.135–­38: 206n40