Seeing Theater: The Phenomenology of Classical Greek Drama 0520393082, 9780520393080

Table of contents :
Cover
Series Editors
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations
Introduction
Phenomenology, Aristotle, and Classical Greek Drama
Theōrein and Seeing Theater
The “Play of Actuality” beyond Fifth-Century Theater
Engaged Spectatorship
Genre and Scope
1. Opening Spaces
Tragic and Comic Space
Seeing the Setting
Staged Spectatorship
Seeing Theater, Seeing Assembly
Atopic Beginnings
The Phenomenology of Space in the Classical Greek Theater
2. Seeing What
Is This That? Aeschylus’s Theoroi
Visual Indeterminacy in Aeschylus’s Suppliants
Winging with Words in Aristophanes’s Birds
3. Pain Between Bodies
Dustheatos
Blinded Bodies I: Euripides’s Cyclops and Hecuba
Blinded Bodies II: Sophocles’s Oedipus the King
Sympathetic Bodies: [Aeschylus’s] Prometheus Bound
Pleasure in Pain
4. Pots and Plays
Actor, Mask, Costume
The Basel Chorus Krater
The London Pandora Krater
The Naples Birds Krater
Epilogue
Works Cited
General Index
Index Locorum
Series List

Citation preview

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The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature.

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SEEING THEATER

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SEEING THEATER the phenomenology of classical greek drama

Naomi Weiss

university of california press

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2023 by Naomi Weiss Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weiss, Naomi A., author. Title: Seeing theater : the phenomenology of classical Greek  drama / Naomi Weiss. Description: Oakland, California : University of California  Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022043292 (print) | lccn 2022043293  (ebook) | isbn 9780520393080 (hardback) | isbn 9780520393097 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Theater—Greece—History—To 500. |  Theater—Philosophy. | Greek drama—History and criticism. Classification: lcc pa3201 .w45 2023 (print) | lcc pa3201  (ebook) | ddc 882/.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043292 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043293 Manufactured in the United States of America 28  27  26  25  24  23  22 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

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For Sam

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations Introduction Phenomenology, Aristotle, and Classical Greek Drama

ix xi xv 1 6

Theōrein and Seeing Theater

13

The “Play of Actuality” beyond Fifth-Century Theater

15

Engaged Spectatorship

30

Genre and Scope

33

1. Opening Spaces

41

Tragic and Comic Space

44

Seeing the Setting

48

Staged Spectatorship

51

Seeing Theater, Seeing Assembly

55

Atopic Beginnings

65

The Phenomenology of Space in the Classical Greek Theater

76

2. Seeing What?

78

Is This That? Aeschylus’s Theoroi

80

Visual Indeterminacy in Aeschylus’s Suppliants

91

Winging with Words in Aristophanes’s Birds

104

vii

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3. Pain Between Bodies

122

Dustheatos

128

Blinded Bodies I: Euripides’s Cyclops and Hecuba

130

Blinded Bodies II: Sophocles’s Oedipus the King

133

Sympathetic Bodies: [Aeschylus’s] Prometheus Bound

138

Pleasure in Pain

159

4. Pots and Plays

162

Actor, Mask, Costume

166

The Basel Chorus Krater

173

The London Pandora Krater

184

The Naples Birds Krater

196

Epilogue Works Cited General Index Index Locorum

207

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213 239 243

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Attic red-figure chous, ca. 420 BCE  /  2 2. Attic black-figure skyphos (side A), ca. 520–510 BCE  /  23 3. Attic black-figure skyphos (side B), ca. 520–510 BCE  /  23 4. Attic black-figure cup-krater, ca. 550 BCE  /  25 5. Attic red-figure astragalos attributed to the Sotades Painter (side A), ca. 470–450 BCE  /  27 6. Attic red-figure astragalos attributed to the Sotades Painter (side B), ca. 470–450 BCE  /  27 7. Apulian red-figure bell-krater attributed to the Tarporley Painter (side A), 410–380 BCE  /  89 8. Apulian red-figure bell-krater attributed to the Tarporley Painter (side B), 410–380 BCE  /  90 9. David Oyelowo as Prometheus in Prometheus Bound, directed by James Kerr  /  127 10. Attic red-figure pelike attributed to the Phiale Painter, ca. 430 BCE  /  167 11. Attic red-figure bell-krater, ca. 475–425 BCE  /  168 12. Attic red-figure volute-krater (side A), ca. 400 BCE  /  170 13. Attic red-figure volute-krater (side B), ca. 400 BCE  /  172 14. Attic red-figure column-krater (side A), ca. 500–490 BCE  /  174 15. Attic red-figure kalpis attributed to the Leningrad Painter, ca. 480–460 BCE  /  176 16. Attic red-figure hydria, ca. 500–450 BCE  /  177

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x     ILLUSTRATIONS

17. Attic red-figure kylix attributed to Makron, signed by Hieron, ca. 490 BCE  /  180 18. Attic red-figure column-krater (side B), ca. 500–490 BCE  /  181 19. Attic red-figure calyx-krater attributed to the Niobid Painter (side A), ca. 460–450 BCE  /  185 20. Attic red-figure calyx-krater attributed to the Niobid Painter (side B), ca. 460–450 BCE  /  186 21. Attic red-figure calyx-krater attributed to the Niobid Painter (sides A-B), ca. 460–450 BCE  /  190 22. Attic red-figure calyx-krater (side A), ca. 425 BCE  /  197 23. Attic red-figure calyx-krater (side B), ca. 425 BCE  /  204 24. René Magritte, La Trahison des images, 1929  /  208

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would not have been able to write this book without the help of numerous friends and colleagues, to whom I am extremely grateful. First and foremost are Lauren Curtis and Sarah Olsen, who have been sources of encouragement, critical insight, and wise judgment at every step of the way. Long ago, Lauren and I formed what we call Thiasos: a working group for (then) junior female faculty. That group has been a lifeline ever since. Along with Sarah, two of its most recent members who have also contributed greatly to the making of this book are Carolyn Laferrière and Nicole Brown. Carolyn’s expertise in ancient Greek art has been especially useful. Mario Telò helped me extensively both with the book’s framing and with particular details of my argument across several chapters. He also encouraged me as an editor when I was revising a version of chapter 1 for Classical Antiquity, and offered sage advice at crucial moments. Meg Foster also provided great feedback on that particular chapter; more importantly, she has been a steadfast friend, always ready to talk about anything. Leslie Kurke has continued to be an extraordinary mentor for every aspect of my professional life. For this book, as for so much of my work, she was able to articulate what I was trying to do long before I could. In June 2021, I held a workshop on the full manuscript of Seeing Theater. I am indebted to Josh Billings, Jaś Elsner, Melissa Mueller, and Alex Purves for participating so generously. Thanks to their numerous insights and suggestions, I was able to restructure the entire book and present more precisely its contributions. Melissa followed up by giving me written comments on every xi

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xii     ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

chapter; the book is so much better for her characteristically brilliant input. Jaś also gave me extensive feedback, which became the basis of several important revisions. I have also had the opportunity to present two chapters to the members of my working group here at Harvard: many thanks to David Atherton, Sarah Dimick, Annabel Kim, Annette Damayanti Lienau, and Saul Zarritt for reading my work so thoughtfully. As I started to work more and more with visual evidence, I became increasingly aware of my own limitations as a philologist and sought assistance from those much more knowledgeable than myself. Seth Estrin and Richard Neer, who both read versions of chapter 4, not only saved me from numerous errors but also helped me to see what types of connections I was trying to make between such different media. At various stages of this project I benefited enormously from conversations— in person, on Zoom, by email—with Sheramy Bundrick, Rob Cioffi, Anne Conser, Eric Csapo, Sean Curran, Sarah Derbew, Al Duncan, Milette Gaifman, Jane Grieve, Ollie Grieve, Mark Griffith, Derek Miller, Natasha Peponi, Verity Platt, and Debbie Steiner. Thanks to them all for being such willing interlocutors. I have also learned much from audiences at Cambridge, Columbia, Harvard, King’s College London, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Oxford. My colleagues here at Harvard have been wonderfully supportive throughout. Among them, special thanks are due to Kathy Coleman, David Elmer, Paul Kosmin, Alyson Lynch, Greg Nagy, Irene Peirano Garrison, and Teresa Wu. As I finished the book, David Palacios produced an image for the cover that brilliantly encapsulated the entire project. Seeing Theater would never have gotten off the ground had I not had a full year of research leave in 2018–19. I am grateful to the Loeb Classical Library Foundation and to St. John’s College, Cambridge for making that leave possible, and to Mark Griffith, Bridget Murnaghan, and Natasha Peponi for supporting my funding applications. I was able to spend that year at the University of Cambridge owing to the support of Renaud Gagné and Emily Gowers. Many thanks to them and to Simon Goldhill, Richard Hunter, Rebecca Lämmle, Robin Osborne, Henry Spelman, and Tim Whitmarsh for being so welcoming and accommodating while I was there. I feel very lucky to be able to work with Eric Schmidt, LeKeisha Hughes, and Cindy Fulton at UC Press. They have been a wonderful team at the finish line. The two anonymous readers for the press provided rich feedback, which

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS      xiii

proved invaluable as I made final revisions to the manuscript. Catherine Osborne has been an exemplary copy editor. The world was a very different place when I first started on this project. I am grateful that my father got to know something of what the book was about, even though he did not live to see its completion. I am grateful to my mother for remaining engaged in what I do, despite everything that the last few years have thrown at her. Above all, I am grateful for Sam, without whose constant love and partnership none of this would have been possible. Through transatlantic moves, limited childcare, personal losses, the stress and excitement of tenure, and the daily adventures of life with young children, he has remained my rock and my best friend. This book is dedicated to him.

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NOTE ON TEXTS, TRANSLATIONS, AND ABBREVIATIONS

Unless otherwise specified, Greek and Latin authors are quoted from the most recent Oxford Classical Texts, with the following exceptions: Sommerstein 2019 for Aeschylus’ Suppliants; Sommerstein 2008 for fragments of Aeschylus and often for [Aeschylus’] Prometheus Bound. For the latter I also use Griffith 1983. For scholia on Prometheus Bound I use Herington 1972; for scholia on Aristophanes’ Birds I use Holwerda 1991. For Shakespeare I use the most recent Arden edition (Proudfoot et al. 2021). Translations are my own except where otherwise indicated. They tend toward accuracy rather than elegance. For Greek person- and place-names that are best known in their Latinate form (e.g., Sophocles, Dionysus), I have generally used that spelling. Names of ancient authors and titles of texts are abbreviated in accordance with the list in S. Hornblower, A. Spawforth, and E. Eidinow, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (2012). Journal titles are abbreviated according to the conventions of L’Année Philologique. Additional abbreviations are listed below: DK

H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds. 1952. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. 3 vols. Berlin: Weidmann.

BAPD

Beazley Archive Pottery Database. http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk.

LSJ

H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, H. Stuart Jones, R. McKenzie, and P. G. W. Glare, eds. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon. 9th ed., with supplement. Oxford: Clarendon. xv

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xvi     Note on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations

KA

R. Kassel and C. Austin, eds. 1983–2023. Poetae comici Graeci. 8 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter.

M

Maehler, H. 1989. Pindari carmina cum fragmentis. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Teubner.

PMGF

M. Davies, ed. 1991. Poetarum melicorum Graecorum fragmenta. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon.

TrGF

B. Snell, R. Kannicht, and S. Radt, eds. 1971–2004. Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta. 5 vols. Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht.

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Introduction People delight in looking at images, because it happens that, through perceptively seeing, they learn and infer about what each part is, for example that this person is that person. —Arist. Poet. 4.1448b15–17

Understanding theatrical presence as the play of actuality (rather than as a stable essence, given in itself within the perceptual act) enables one to approach dramatic performance with an appreciation of its phenomenological complexity—a complexity that comprehends, indeed is fueled by, difference and absence. —Garner 1994: 43

Painted on a red-figure chous (wine jug) in Athens from around 420 BCE, pieced together from fragments and much eroded, is the only surviving image of a theater audience and stage in Attic art (figure 1). To the right is a man on a raised platform. Traces of a mask and costume—lines suggesting a naked bodysuit, a large tied-up phallus—identify him as a comic actor.1 Balancing on one leg and raising one arm, he carries a sickle and a bag, both objects 1.  On such indications of costume and mask, see especially Hughes 2006: 424–25 and Froning 2014: 306–8. These analyses are based on empirical observation of the chous itself, which for a long time was held privately in the Vlastos collection and could not be viewed in person. Both repudiate suggestions that the figure is a dwarf (e.g., Pickard-Cambridge 1988: 237; Oakley 2020: 123, fig. 6.11) or satyr performer (e.g., Brommer 1959: 32–33; Wiles 2008: 377). Several other Attic choes from the late fifth and early fourth centuries show comic performances, though none with spectators also present: e.g., St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum 1869.47, BAPD 10930; Athens, Benaki Museum 30890, BAPD 44577; Athens, National Archaeological Museum 17752, BAPD 15483; Paris, Musée du Louvre N3408, BAPD 217495.

1

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figure 1. Attic red-figure chous, ca. 420 BCE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 518. BAPD 216566. D-DAI-ATH-Athen Varia 1088. Photograph by Hermann Wagner © Deutsches Archäologisches Institut and Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources.

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Introduction      3

associated with the hero Perseus. Steps lead up to the platform; a curved structure rising up from beneath may represent a piece of stage scenery.2 To the left are two males seated on chairs. One, older, bearded, and enveloped by his himation (mantle), is shown in profile. The other, younger, beardless, and with a bare torso, is depicted frontally as he turns toward his partner. In one hand he holds a long staff; with his other, his arm bent, he appears to point in the direction of the actor. Discussions of this pot have generally been concerned with identifying these various details. One of its most remarkable features, however, is its focus on theatrical spectatorship itself. Actors, chorus, musician, judges, and audience have been reduced to an exchange between a single performer and two spectators.3 The latter have been variously identified as two judges; a judge with the chorēgos, the man who financed the production; a judge with the dramatic poet; or just regular audience members.4 Whoever they may be, the scene invites its viewer to position themselves alongside this pair—to look upon the actor and the physical properties of his performance space and perhaps also, like modern scholars, to wonder about their potential objects of representation. Yet the curved shape of the pot prevents any stable viewing of or with the spectators, for only when not actually using this chous to pour wine might a user see the entire scene; otherwise they would flit between audience and actor. In a way, this experience is analogous to that of seeing a play, especially in a light-filled, open-air structure: that is, an audience member may look as much at his fellow spectators as at the performance itself.5 The curved shape also accentuates the fact that it is not only the two seated men who look, for their gaze on one side is balanced by that of the actor on the other. Together, these figures suggest a two-way viewing experience; if we

2.  On this object as a representation of stage scenery, see Caputo 1935: 274–78; Bulle 1937: 53; Webster 1953: 200, 262; Froning 2014: 309–10. 3.  Cf. Csapo 2010a: 26 on the two spectators as “a synecdoche for the audience”; also Hughes 2006: 427–28; Csapo 2014: 105. 4.  For these possible identities, see, e.g., Caputo 1935: 275; Bieber 1961: 48; Hughes 2006: 419, 427; Froning 2014: 311–13. It has also been suggested that the bearded man is the priest of Dionysus (Csapo and Slater 1995: 65; Wilson 2000: 378n204) or even Dionysus himself (Hamilton 1978: 386; Wiles 2008: 377). 5.  I generally use male pronouns for individual spectators of classical Greek drama, since the plays were produced for a predominantly male audience. On the presence of women at theater performances in Athens, see especially Roselli 2011: 158–94.

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4     Introduction

look with the actor, we look back toward the spectators. We are also invited to dwell on how this pair presents several possibilities for how an audience might physically engage with a performance: it could be silent and motionless, like the older man, remaining entirely focused on the stage area; or it could respond to a play as the younger man does, by gesticulating, turning around, and talking.6 Whatever the internal dynamics of this pair’s relationship, the contrast between their two spectatorial stances, as well as between their ages and attire, suggests different forms of embodied response and complicates any sense of a homogeneous audience utterly immersed in the world of a play. Thus the vessel’s focus is not simply on the actor, stage, props, and their various representational possibilities, but on the very act of seeing theater. This book is a study of that act. It analyzes classical Greek tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies that interrogate the spectator’s own viewing experience, often by presenting characters who verbalize what and how they see. These plays highlight and exploit the potential instability of the perceptual act, and in doing so encourage particular forms of deep engagement on the part of its audiences. The book also explores the extent to which such plays share elements of visuality with the entirely different medium of vase painting—the only surviving visual archive contemporary with the plays themselves that offers traces of fifth-century Athenian theater practice. What the book is not is also what the chous is not—that is, a precise reconstruction of what classical Greek theater looked like. Though various suggestions have been made for the performance and physical structures possibly represented, the object itself evades many such identifications. This is partly due to extensive damage, which has led many to rely on a 1935 drawing instead.7 But it is also because its entire scheme resembles that of several Attic vase paintings from the second half of the fifth century BCE in which a bearded spectator, wearing a wreath, wrapped in a himation, and usually holding a staff, sits on a chair (klismos) facing a musician, who stands on a raised 6.  Froning 2014: 312–13 sees the differences in their attitudes as evidence for the older man representing an “ideal” type of judge and for the younger man being the poet, who is “[pressuring] the bearded judge to vote for the Perseus-comedy” (312). 7.  The drawing, by E. Gilliéron, was produced for the pot’s first publication. Hughes 2006 provides a detailed study of the drawing in comparison with the chous itself, based both on its current state and on four photographs by Hermann Wagner, which were also published in 1935; one of these is figure 1 above. David Palacios based his drawing for this book’s cover on a combination of Gilliéron’s drawing and Wagner’s photographs.

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Introduction      5

platform playing a kithara (lyre) or aulos (double reed-pipes).8 On an Attic calyx-krater in Larisa, dated to 440–435 BCE, there is also a beardless young man, seated, wearing a wreath, and holding a staff.9 The adaptation of such a scheme here belies any attempt to view it as a sort of photographic snapshot or illustration of a particular dramatic production. It also prevents us from assuming that the seated men are in special front-row seats, or from linking the stage area to the structure of any one particular Attic theater.10 Certainly little about this scene resembles the Theater of Dionysus, where most of the surviving classical dramas were first produced: there, some six thousand spectators would sit upon rows of wooden benches spread around the curve of the Acropolis hillside.11 The stage area or orchēstra (“dancing place”) was rectilinear in shape; from at least the middle of the fifth century there was a wooden stage building called a skēnē. The platform depicted on the chous more likely refers to a theater in one of the Attic demes, where plays were also regularly performed.12 But regardless of such difficulties of identification, in its interrogation of the act of spectatorship, the chous provides a window into the visuality of classical Greek drama and suggests some of its complexities. This book follows suit. Like the chous, the plays analyzed here generate their own representational ambiguities, which, I argue, draw out the perceptual instability inherent to the act of seeing theater.

8.  Athens, Agora Museum P27349, BAPD 2726; Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco Vaticano 16556, BAPD 213505; Paris, Musée du Louvre, N3393, BAPD 11285; London, British Museum E460, BAPD 213525. 9.  Larisa, Archaeological Museum 86.101, BAPD 44648. An Attic red-figure amphora in Basel, attributed to the Andokides Painter, from ca. 520 BCE (Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig BS 491, BAPD 200004), shows two youths as spectators or judges, one seated and one standing. 10.  Hughes 2006: 428–29 suggests that the curved object included in the chous painting could refer to new curved benches at the stone theater in the Attic deme of Thorikos. Against this interpretation see Froning 2014: 309–10. 11.  In the fifth century, the prohedria (front-row seating) in the Theater of Dionysus probably had wooden klismoi (chairs), which the later marble seats of the Lycurgan prohedria imitated. On this feature in connection with the klismoi depicted on the chous, see Csapo and Slater 1995: 65. 12.  Froning 2014: 315–17. The depiction of the stage platform on this chous resembles that in many fourth-century BCE South Italian vase paintings showing comic performances: Caputo 1935: 277–78; Hughes 2006: 421–23.

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6     Introduction

phenomenology, aristotle, and classical greek drama My particular focus on the visual experience of theater and the instabilities that it could entail follows the now long-established movement within theater studies toward phenomenology. This was first heralded by Bert States with his highly influential 1985 book, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, which emphasizes the actuality or “affective corporeality” of the theatrical medium itself and the bodies within it over the signifying systems of textual semiotics, which tend to privilege text over material presence. Elaborating on States’s work and drawing in particular on Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis in Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) on embodied subjectivity (or Leiblichkeit, “lived bodiliness”), Stanton Garner, Jr., has argued that all theater is characterized by a “play of actuality”—an unstable oscillation between the virtual and actual, presentational and representational.13 On the one hand, we see and hear, for example, Lear as Lear, in the virtual world created for him by Shakespeare’s play; on the other, “the actor’s body never ceases asserting itself in its material, physiological facticity.”14 Scholars of Greek drama, especially of tragedy, have sometimes applied to ancient plays the idea of “illusion” and the breaking thereof, but the bodied experience of theater—its phenomenology—always involves some degree of actuality.15 As Garner shows, even Ibsen’s realist theater, precisely by incorporating so much of the “real world” beyond the theater, exposes the limits of its representation. Such an approach prompts a fresh consideration of one of the best-known ancient analyses of visual perception in theater. In the Poetics, before shifting his focus specifically to drama, Aristotle refers to the visual arts to explain “the pleasure all men take in mimetic objects” (τὸ χαίρειν τοῖς μιμήσασι πάντας, 1448b8–9). We enjoy looking at, say, a wall painting by Polygnotus or Pauson because, by “perceptively seeing” (θεωροῦντας), we come to understand “what each [part] is” (τί ἕκαστον); we infer, for example, that “this

13.  Garner 1994: 39–45, 2007. 14.  Garner 1994: 44. 15.  E.g., Bain 1975, 1977, 1987; Chapman 1983. For effective arguments against the idea of “illusion” or Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief ” in (ancient Greek) theater, see especially Sifakis 1971: 7–14; Taplin 1986: 164–65; Marshall 1999–2000; Slater 2002: 3, 51.

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Introduction      7

[person is] that [person]” (οὗτος ἐκεῖνος, 1448b16–17).16 Whereas Plato takes a primarily epistemological approach to mimetic art, concerned with its deceptive ability to produce mere “phantoms” (φαντάσματα, εἴδωλα) at “the third remove from that which is” (τριττὰ ἀπέχοντα τοῦ ὄντος), Aristotle is focused here on the viewer’s aesthetic experience.17 The pleasure of this experience derives from our connecting a figure in a painting with what it represents and, in doing so, appreciating the means of its representation.18 According to Aristotle, metaphor works similarly, since it involves identifying “this as that” (τοῦτο ἐκεῖνο); like mimesis, it is a cognitive process requiring a particular way of seeing, for which he uses the verb theōrein (θεωρεῖν).19 The painting example in Poetics 4 is used to elucidate the workings of mimesis for poetry in general; occurring as it does in a discussion focused on tragedy, however, it is clearly meant to apply to the experience of theater.20 Indeed, the neat, affirmative phrase “this [is] that,” a combination of two deictic pronouns, echoes its occurrence in scenes of recognition in classical Greek drama: in Sophocles’s Electra, for example, when Orestes is confused by his sister’s unkempt appearance and asks “Is this really the renowned form of Electra?” (ἦ σὸν τὸ κλεινὸν εἶδος Ἠλέκτρας τόδε, 1177), she replies “This is that” (τόδ’ ἔστ’ ἐκεῖνο, 1178).21 Orestes is like a spectator here, connecting 16.  On the meaning of οὗτος ἐκεῖνος as “this person is that person” rather than a more generic “this is that,” see Halliwell 2002: 178n3, with further references. On the question of whether εἰκών here means specifically a portrait painting or any sort of pictorial image, see especially Halliwell 2002: 183–84; Tsitsiridis 2005: 436–37. 17.  Pl. Rep. 599a. See, however, Halliwell 2002: 72–97 for the “spectrum of psychological responses to mimesis” (84) explored in Republic and Laws; also Grethlein 2020. 18.  See especially Halliwell 2002: 177–93 on this “compound reaction to . . . representational content and its artistic rendering” (185). On the nature of the pleasure that Aristotle means here, see too, e.g., Dupont-Roc and Lallot 1980: 165; Sifakis 1986; Nagy 1990: 44; Belfiore 1992: 46–66. 19.  Arist. Rhet. 1410b19, Poet. 1459a7–8. Cf. Rhet. 1371b4–10. On the link between these passages and Poet. 1448b4–19, see especially Sifakis 1986; Halliwell 2002: 189–91; Peponi 2004: 309–12; Chaston 2009: 6–10. As Peponi notes, Aristotle is careful in Poetics 4 to distinguish between the verbs ὁρᾶν (for seeing the object itself) and θεωρεῖν (for seeing the object’s representation) (311). Cf. Belfiore 1992: 67: “We see ugly shapes and colors, but by means of theōria we learn and reason about a representational relationship between the imitation and the object imitated.” 20.  On the scope of this account of poetic mimesis, see especially Halliwell 1986: 73–74, 79–80; Nagy 1994–1995: 15–16. 21.  On the use of this phrase in tragedy, see especially Estrin 2018: 114–15. Tragic and comic examples of οὗτος ἐκεῖνος involving recognition and/or identification include Ar. Ran. 318 (on which see T. Power 2021: 185–86), Pax 240, Thesm. 1219; Eur. Med. 97, Hel. 622; Soph. Phil. 261.

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8     Introduction

the actor before him with the character he represents. It can be tempting, then, to follow Aristotle in using “this is that” as a convenient shorthand for the aesthetic experience of dramatic mimesis, and to approach visuality in classical Greek theater as a quite simple and stable process as a result. Essentially assuming a one-to-one relationship between the surviving script and the realia of a dramatic production, scholars of drama have often tried to map quite precisely what an ancient audience sees (and does not see) at an “original” performance of a play: this prop as that object, this stage scenery as that building, this body as that character performing that action.22 As Garner demonstrates, however, the experience of seeing theater is seldom so straightforward. And indeed, in Aristotle’s own discussion of mimesis we can detect an appreciation of how it could be rather more complicated than his catchy “this is that” phrase might at first suggest. He does not claim that we immediately “see” one thing as another, for theōrein is coupled with “learning and inferring” (μανθάνειν καὶ συλλογίζεσθαι, 1448b16); it takes cognitive work to realize the relationship between the means and object of representation.23 Moreover, elsewhere Aristotle indicates that he certainly understood how, at least in the case of the visual arts, we can see “this” and “that” together, at the same time. In Parts of Animals, he points out that “we enjoy looking at (theōrountes) pictures of [animals] because we are simultaneously looking at (suntheōroumen) the technical skill that crafted them” (τὰς . . . εἰκόνας αὐτῶν θεωροῦντες χαίρομεν ὅτι τὴν δημιουργήσασαν τέχνην συνθεωροῦμεν, 645a11–13).24 Modern art historians have discussed the view22.  Still very influential in this respect are Oliver Taplin’s two groundbreaking books, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977) and Greek Tragedy in Action (1978). For critical discussion of Taplin’s working hypothesis that “there was no significant action other than that indicated by the words” (1977: 50), see Goldhill 1986, 1989; Wiles 1987. More recent studies concerned with mapping plays’ “original” enactments include Wiles 1997; Slater 2002; Revermann 2006; Ley 2007. Revermann 2006: 46–65 and passim provides extensive analysis of the performative “reliability” or “authenticity” of the surviving comic and tragic scripts. Bassi 2005 offers an especially good analysis of “the script’s role in signifying both the desire for, and the absence of, the original play in performance” (260). 23.  See Halliwell 2002: 175–93 on “the potential complexity of Aristotle’s cognitive model of the experience of mimetic art” (191–92). On the cognitive process suggested by μανθάνειν καὶ συλλογίζεσθαι, see also Tsitsiridis 2005, with further references. 24.  See Halliwell 2002: 181–82 on this passage, in connection with Poetics 4, in terms of “an aesthetic experience of mimetic art in which appreciation of both medium and ‘object,’ of the material artifact and the imagined world that it represents, coalesce in a complex state of

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Introduction      9

ing of art in a comparable way: most influentially, Richard Wollheim has coined the term “seeing-in” for objects that invite a sort of twofoldness in how we view them, whereby we see simultaneously both the represented object and the medium of its representation.25 Aristotle’s painting analogy in the Poetics posits a commonality between the visual experience of these two very different media. As I explore more fully in chapter 4, we might in part locate this commonality in terms of how seeing “this is that” in theater itself always involves a duality, since a performance’s materiality is never entirely absent from a spectator’s perceptual field. Dicaeopolis in Aristophanes’s Acharnians makes this clear when, readying himself for the role of Telephus, he declares that he must simultaneously “be who I am, but not appear so” (εἶναι μὲν ὅσπερ εἰμί, φαίνεσθαι δὲ μή, 441). As Ismene Lada-Richards notes, he thus “reflects self-consciously upon [the] twofold way in which the elements of ‘actor’ and of ‘character’ can co-exist in a performer’s stage presence.”26 But for the audience, as Garner emphasizes, this is not necessarily a seamless experience: it is not about a smooth co-presence of the object and means of representation but rather, as he states in the epigraph above, it involves “phenomenological complexity—a complexity that comprehends, indeed is fueled by difference and absence.”27 Once we appreciate the lack of any fixed one-to-one representation and focus on how this could affect an audience’s own act of viewing, we can gain a deeper understanding of the artistic opportunities afforded by the potential fissures, tensions, or misalignments between “this” and “that.” We can also go beyond Aristotle’s “this is that” formula to understand seeing theater not simply as a cognitive puzzle but as an embodied, multisensory process. awareness” (emphasis original). A difficult passage in On Memory is also sometimes seen in relation to Poetics 4: when we look at a painting, he says, “we can see [theōrein] it as both a zōon and an eikōn” (ἔστι θεωρεῖν καὶ ὡς ζῷον καὶ ὡς εἰκόνα, 450b23–24). Scholars disagree as to whether the meaning here is that we see the painting as “both a living thing [the most literal meaning of ζῷον] and an image [of a living thing]” or that we see it as “both a figural painting and a portrait [of an actual thing].” On this see especially Belfiore 1992: 48-49; Halliwell 2002: 182–84. See also Everson 1997: 194–96; Webb 2009: 111–13 (in relation to the concept of enargeia in ancient rhetorical handbooks); Griffith 2021: 53–55 (in relation to musical memory). 25.  Wollheim 1980: 205–26. On the connection between the account of mimesis in Poetics 4 and Wollheim’s “seeing-in,” see Belfiore 1992: 62–63. 26.  Lada-Richards 2002: 396. Cf. Slater 2002: 56. See also Lada-Richards 1997 on Stanislavskian versus Brechtian performative perspectives in fifth-century Attic theater (especially pp. 77–79 on Ar. Ach. 440–44). 27.  Garner 1994: 43.

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10     Introduction

A brief look at two tragedies—Sophocles’s Electra, which I have already mentioned, and Aeschylus’s Eumenides—enables us to see how a drama could generate and even thematize such phenomenological complexity. Electra opens with the infinitival imperative φάσκειν . . . ὁρᾶν (9), meaning both “think that you see” and also “say that you see.” Thus not only is the act of visualizing the dramatic space on the audience’s own part laid bare, but so also the role of speech in shaping the play’s visuality. At the same time, as we shall see in chapter 1, the direction renders such visualization unstable, since the list of sites to see conflates different times and spaces. This opening scene sets in motion a broader exploration of theatrical representation through repeated deceptions and misidentifications. The famously empty urn, “a prop in both the fictive world of the play and the real world of the audience,” is perhaps the clearest example.28 Believing that it contains her brother’s ashes, Electra addresses it with a long spoken lament as if it is in fact Orestes (1126–70). The audience knows that this prop is not what it seems, and can see Orestes himself there onstage, still to be recognized by his sister. As several scholars have shown, the scene’s artificiality thus raises “questions of reality and appearance.”29 That such questions were evident to ancient audiences is clear from Aulus Gellius’s anecdote that the fourth-century BCE actor Polus, playing the part of Electra, apparently put the ashes of his own son in the urn, “embraced it as if it was Orestes’s, and filled the whole place not with simulations and imitations, but with grief and genuine lamentations and sighs.”30 These are also questions of difference and absence—of how far a prop can assume a bodily form and of how far witnessing such an aurally and visually powerful performance of lament can offset the bodily presence of Orestes onstage.31 At the same time, for Orestes, the internal audience here, Electra’s

28.  Ringer 1998: 4. 29.  Billings 2018: 50. Cf. especially Segal 1986: 125–29; Ringer 1998: 1–5, 185–90. 30.  Gel. 6.5 (quasi Oresti amplexus, opplevit omnia non simulacris neque imitamentis, sed luctu atque lamentis veris et spirantibus). See especially Lada-Richards 2005: 460–61 on the “ineradicable presence of the actor’s self in the theatrical event that constitutes Polus’ performative legacy” (461). 31.  Cf. Mueller 2016a: 119–25 on Electra’s bodily engagement with the urn and her mourning of “Orestes’ ‘non-existence’ (οὐδὲν ὄντα [1129])” (121). See also Billings 2018 on how, through the play, the urn “acts as a physical correlative of the logos of Orestes’ death” and so “becomes a charged site for thinking about the way that language can affect reality” (51). Electra even refers to the urn with the same proto-Aristotelian “this is that” formulation (τοῦτ’ ἐκεῖν’, 1115) in a sort of “misplaced . . . recognition” of Orestes himself (Billings 2018: 58; cf. Mueller 2016a: 120).

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Introduction      11

lament makes what seemed absent present, since he realizes that she is his sister. Even so, as we saw above, his recognition is complicated by her unkempt appearance: before her proto-Aristotelian affirmation of “this is that,” he wonders if “this” really could be “that.” Their recognition scene raises the possibility of a gap or disconnect between an onstage body and the role it plays, even as the audience knows perfectly well who each of these characters is.32 Aeschylus’s Eumenides begins with a character dwelling on the experience of seeing theatrical bodies. The Pythia, after first offering a prayer to Apollo and entering his temple (represented by the skēnē), then hurries out to communicate what she has seen within—that is, the Erinyes, whose first theatrical appearance was probably in this very play.33 Most immediately, she materializes them through her own transformed body, as she crawls back onstage like a child (36–38)—or like a beast, as if responding in kind to the bestial creatures that she has just seen.34 By dwelling on her repulsion as a viewer, both bodily (they are βδελύκτροποι [52], “nauseating” or “vomit-inducing”) and acoustic (their bellowing snores are “unapproachable” [οὐ πλατοῖσι, 53]), she urges upon audience members a visceral response of their own in anticipation of this chorus, especially as they begin to hear the Erinyes’ groans.35 At the same time, the Pythia prevents any clear visualization of these creatures, thus disorienting the audience’s own viewing experience as much as constructing it.36 She likens the Erinyes to Gorgons and then to Harpies,

32.  Mueller 2016a emphasizes the role of Electra’s previous manifestations on the tragic stage here: Electra’s use of impersonal pronouns when declaring “this is that” suggests “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” (124). 33.  Frontisi-Ducroux 2007: 166. 34.  Weiss 2018b: 177. Cf. Nooter 2017: “the priestess performs the transformative effect of this monstrousness by displaying and describing her own transformed affect” (255). 35.  Cf. Nooter 2017: 245–88 on the emphasis in Eumenides on the Erinyes’ bestial sounds as well as bodily fluids. The question of exactly when and how the chorus is meant to appear onstage has been much debated: from behind the skēnē via an ekkyklēma at line 64; not until 94ff. or even 140; or perhaps, as Rehm 1988: 296–97 argues, the chorus could already be in the orchēstra, in an “inside out” scene, at the start of the play. For a useful summary of possible stagings, see Mitchell-Boyask 2009: 45–55. 36.  The Erinyes are the most dramatic manifestation of a play throughout the Oresteia trilogy with the shift from immaterial to material, invisible to visible, with objects and bodies extensively prepared for in language before finally appearing in physical form: see G. Ferrari 1997; Frontisi-Ducroux 2007; Elmer 2017: 59; Bakola 2018; Weiss 2018b: 176–84. Cf. Ps.-

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12     Introduction

whom she has seen in a painting (γεγραμμένας, 50), and so prompts spectators to see them in terms of representations of monstrous females in other media. Some might also think of other comparable figures in Attic theater, most notably, perhaps, Lyssa in Aeschylus’s Wool-Carders (Xantriai) and probably also in Archeresses (Toxotides).37 But the Pythia promptly shatters any such visualization, declaring that she has never before seen such a race of wingless creatures in black (57) and so preventing the audience from making any assumptions based on its own cultural repertoire. Such visual uncertainty sets up the chorus’s potential, when it becomes fully visible, to shock its audience quite viscerally—and indeed a story in the anonymous Life of Aeschylus, whatever its veracity, suggests that this chorus became renowned for doing so: apparently, the Erinyes’ entrance was so terrifying that children fainted and women miscarried.38 As this second example in particular demonstrates, my phenomenological approach foregrounds the experience of the spectator and their engagement with a performance, in terms of their own bodied presence within a material event. Such a grounding in theater phenomenology distinguishes this book from older studies of visuality and from more recent scholarship focused primarily on metatheater, both of which have often leaned more toward semiotics to explore the construction of meaning in the ancient Greek theater.39 Instead the book participates in a broader turn within the study of ancient Greek theater toward the sensory, embodied, and cognitive involvement of an

Longinus’s comment on Orestes’s vision of the Erinyes in Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris and Orestes and its transference to the audience: “Here the poet himself saw the Erinyes, and he almost forced the audience too to see what he had imagined” (ὁ ποιητὴς αὐτὸς εἶδεν Ἐρινύας· ὁ δ’ ἐφαντάσθη, μικροῦ δεῖν θεάσασθαι καὶ τοὺς ἀκουόντας ἠνάγκασεν, De subl. 15.2). 37.  Cf. Hall 2006: 116–18 on how the allusion to works of art in line 50 could visually remind audiences of earlier tragic spectacles, such as the Harpies in Aeschylus’s Phineus. 38.  Vit. Aesch. 9; Pollux 4.110. 39.  E.g., Bain 1977; Segal 1986: 113–36, 1997: 215–71; Seale 1982; Edmunds 1996; Ringer 1998; Revermann 2006; Ruffell 2011. Slater 2002’s examination of metatheatricality in Aristophanic comedy is akin to my approach in its focus throughout on the spectators’ active engagement; unlike me, however, he emphasizes the political function of various metatheatrical techniques. For more metapoetic studies of Greek theater, concerned with a play’s palimpsestic resonances and reworkings of earlier dramas, see especially Zeitlin 1980; Dobrov 2001; Torrance 2013. For an “intertheatrical” approach, focused on a drama’s restructuring of the visual and material elements of previous productions, see especially Mueller 2016a. Tragic and comic metatheater has also been analyzed in terms of ritual: see especially Bierl 1991, 2009.

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Introduction      13

audience.40 Much of this work has rightly pushed against the visual paradigm: sound, smell, touch, and taste are also frequently activated in Attic drama, which “both puts bodies on view and itself plays directly on the body’s senses.”41 While this book is about “seeing theater,” it does not return to such a paradigm by privileging sight over other senses, but rather, in following phenomenologists’ insistence on the fundamental instability of the perceptual act, it problematizes the visual. Pushing against any idea of representation as a straightforward process, my focus throughout is on the multiplicity, flexibility, and dissonance that seeing “this is that” in the ancient Greek theater could entail. I reveal how some of the earliest surviving theatrical texts exploit the tensions involved in dramatic mimesis, and I use these to develop a new approach to the relationship between fifth-century drama and vase painting. In the rest of this introduction, I will first return to the verb theōrein, used by Aristotle in Poetics 4, and its spheres of meaning within and beyond the theater, in order to delineate the book’s culturally specific aesthetic project. This will lead me to demonstrate other contexts and media involving phenomenologies that we might compare with the “play of actuality” inherent to the experience of seeing theater: choral lyric, epiphanic performance, and the visual arts. I will then turn to a recurrent argument across the book as a whole regarding the “play of actuality” and audience engagement: namely that, by exposing and problematizing theater’s representational process, classical Greek tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays draw in their spectators as coparticipants in the dramatic production. Finally, I will combine an overview of the chapters to come with a discussion of the book’s multi-generic and intermedial approach to the visuality of Greek drama.

theōrein and seeing theater The theatron, was, quite literally, a “place for seeing”—a place for theasthai and also for theōrein. The verb theōrein, which can be used with a general

40.  On the audience’s sensory, bodily engagement, see especially Coo 2016; Weiss 2018a: 236–44; Worman 2018b, 2020; Angelopoulou 2020, 2021; Olsen 2021b. Such scholarship is closely linked to the “affective turn” in approaches to Greek drama: see especially Telò 2013, 2016; Visvardi 2015; Telò and Mueller 2018a. For cognitive approaches, see especially Ruffell 2008, 2011; Chaston 2010; Meineck 2018; Budelmann 2019; Noel 2019. 41.  Worman 2020: 2.

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14     Introduction

sense of “seeing” or “watching,” has multiple, interconnected valences, all of which were in play in the fifth century BCE. Traditionally, it is an activity associated with the wider, panhellenic cultural practice of theōria or “sacred sightseeing”—that is, going on a journey to attend a festival or consult an oracle, or more broadly “to see some sort of spectacle or to learn something about the outside world.”42 The very word itself encompasses the close connection between vision and the sacred; both its etymologies, from theos (god) and thea (sight, spectacle), have been discussed since the early Roman period.43 Such theōria was therefore characterized by a distinct mode of seeing: as Jaś Elsner has argued, ritual-centered viewing at a religious sanctuary involved a “reciprocal gaze of divine confrontation.”44 Other meanings of theōrein can veer more toward the political. Linked to the traditional sense of “sacred sightseeing” is Herodotus’s account of Solon’s theōria—his journey away from Athens in search of worldly knowledge, which seems to be bound up with his role as lawgiver in Athens.45 Indeed, as Simon Goldhill argued in a series of important articles in the 1990s and early 2000s, we could understand theōrein as a specifically Athenian political activity.46 To see and be seen as a theatēs, “an evaluating, judging spectator,” he suggested, is part of the performance of Athenian democracy. Through the fifth century BCE, the language of theōrein and theasthai comes to “[echo] with the normative force of a democratic ideal,” as citizens, whether at the theater, the assembly, or lawcourts, are invited to participate in the collective, reciprocal, selfconscious viewing of the democratic polis.47 For Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century, theōria is instead primarily philosophical contemplation—a meaning that we may also connect to Herodotus’s fifth-century account of Solon’s journey.48 However, as we have seen, Aristotle uses the verb theōrein in the Poetics to refer specifically to the aesthetic activity fundamental to the mimetic art of theater. I take my cue from the Poetics in approaching theōrein (as well as theasthai) in this way. By turning 42.  Nightingale 2004: 40. On this meaning of theōria, see especially Rutherford 1995, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2013; Dillon 1997; Elsner and Rutherford 2005. 43.  On such etymologies see especially Rutherford 2000: 136–37; 2013: 5, 144–48. 44.  Elsner 2000: 61. 45.  Ker 2000. 46.  Goldhill 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000. 47.  Goldhill 2000: 171. 48.  On this meaning of theōria, see especially Nightingale 2004; Rutherford 2013: 324–38.

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Introduction      15

toward aesthetics, and away from the emphasis on cultural and social history that dominates much of the previous scholarship on theatrical visuality, this book presents new readings of individual plays, concerned with how they highlight and problematize the spectator’s experiential role in the construction of dramatic bodies, objects, and space. Nevertheless, it is helpful to note at the outset the expansive range of theōrein in the period during which these plays were produced, since this can prompt us to appreciate better how the act of seeing theater itself is flexible and multifarious. It may involve the sort of straightforward “this is that” identification with which Aristotle is concerned, but it can also be a more complex embodied experience constructed through a synesthetic mix of words, sounds, and sights. It can include the viewing of the sacred in the sphere of Dionysus, in whose precinct these plays were first produced at a festival in his honor. It can also include not just the viewing of other spectators, both those within a play and those within the theatron, but a heightened awareness of one’s own spectatorial position.

the “play of actuality” beyond fifth-century theater My approach to “seeing theater” encourages us to situate the visuality of classical drama not so much within the self-reflexive discourse of viewing in democratic Athens, but instead against various forms of aesthetic experience across different media and performance genres, stretching back at least some two hundred years before the beginnings of theatrical competitions in Athens. In this section, I will discuss three broad areas—archaic choral lyric, epiphanic processions, and the visual arts—not to provide an exhaustive overview or history but simply to demonstrate some contexts and comparisons beyond the theater for some of the visual experiences that I explore in the subsequent chapters.49 My scope should not be taken to suggest that such experiences and the discourses that they provoked were confined to the archaic and classical periods: on the contrary, as recent important work by Jonas Grethlein, Verity Platt, and Ruth Webb, for example, has shown, Greek prose literature of the imperial period frequently dwells on the potential tensions involved in 49.  Cf. Peponi 2016 on thinking about theatrical spectatorship in connection with “techniques of apposing, correlating, and at times fusing actual and virtual vision” in archaic choral lyric (2–3).

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16     Introduction

visual and verbal representation.50 I restrict myself here primarily to examples of aesthetic experience comparable with theater’s “play of actuality” from roughly the seventh to the fifth centuries BCE to provide a backdrop for the plays and pots on which I focus for the rest of the book.

Archaic Choral Lyric In Alcman’s first partheneion, a fragmentary maiden choral song from seventhcentury BCE Sparta, the chorus shifts between simile and metaphor as it envisions its two leaders, Hagesichora and Agido, as a series of figures and objects: ἦ οὐχ ὁρῇς; ὁ μὲν κέλης Ἐνετικός· ἁ δὲ χαίτα τᾶς ἐμᾶς ἀνεψιᾶς Ἁγησιχόρας ἐπανθεῖ χρυσὸς [ὡ]ς ἀκήρατος· τό τ’ ἀργύριον πρόσωπον, διαφάδαν τί τοι λέγω; Ἁγησιχόρα μὲν αὕτα· ἁ δὲ δευτέρα πεδ’ Ἀγιδὼ τὸ ϝεῖδος ἵππος Ἰβηνῷ Κολαξαῖος δραμήται· ταὶ Πεληάδες γὰρ ἇμιν ὀρθρίᾳ φᾶρος φεροίσαις νύκτα δι’ ἀμβροσίαν ἅτε σήριον ἄστρον ἀυηρομέναι μάχονται.

(50)

(55)

(60)

Don’t you see? The horse is Enetic; but the hair of my cousin Hagesichora blooms like unmixed gold; and her silver face, [but] why do I speak about what’s obvious? 50.  Webb 2006, 2009: 167–91 (see especially 168–69 on the “as if ” quality of enargeia, whereby “[t]he audience . . . combine a state of imaginative and emotional involvement in the worlds represented with an awareness that these worlds are not real”); Platt 2011 on the dynamics of presence and representation in epiphany (discussed more below); Grethlein 2017: 39–130 on the “as-if ” involved in reading narrative (focusing on Heliodorus’s Aethiopica). There has been extensive scholarship on the hermeneutics of vision and interplay of visual and verbal representation in Philostratus’s Imagines in particular: in addition to Webb 2006, see especially Elsner 1995: 21–45; Squire 2013, with extensive bibliography. See also Whitmarsh 2013: 63–74 on the “transgressiveness and instability of impersonation” (71) in fictional autobiography.

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Introduction      17

This is Hagesichora here! And second in beauty, Agido, a Colaxaean horse next to an Ibenian one, will run. For these doves for (with?) us, as we bring a robe (or plough?) to Orthria through the ambrosial night, rising like the Sirius star, are fighting. —Alc. fr. 1. PMGF 45–63

Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, in a discussion of metaphor and deixis in this song, shows how the chorus urges on the audience a form of imaginative viewing or visualizing, so that it is invited “not to ‘see’ what is really present but instead, while looking at what is present, to imaginatively transform the actually visible agents and their actions into a virtual and imaginary spectacle.”51 Through the chorus’s description, Hagesichora and Agido—or, rather, the girls in these roles—can become for their audience horses (Enetic, Colaxaean, Ibenian), precious metals (gold, silver), doves, and stars.52 Peponi looks at this invitation to “see” against the same discussion of mimesis in the Poetics with which I began, arguing that Alcman and Aristotle share an awareness of how “viewers construct equivalences between a this and a that”—the “that” being something beyond what is physically present, something that must be visualized.53 Alcman’s partheneion provides, as she puts it, “an initiation into that art of creatively seeing, that is, the art of θεωρεῖν.”54 It also goes beyond Aristotle in dwelling on the act of viewing and the forms it might take. On the one hand, the questions “Don’t you see?” (50) and “why do I speak about what’s obvious?” (56) urge on the audience an awareness of its own spectatorial role and a complicity in the representational play at work in this choral performance. On the other hand, they hold out the possibility that the audience does not see Hagesichora and Agido as horses, metals, doves, or stars, and so suggest the potential difficulty of visualizing “this” as “that.” Moreover, what the chorus claims to be “obvious” are multiple possible objects of representation, multiple ways of seeing its two leaders as it 51.  Peponi 2004: 301 (emphasis original); cf. Peponi 2015: 214, 2016: 3. See also Steiner 2021: 646–50 on the “quasi-visionary choral gaze” at work in these lines. 52.  Πεληάδες in line 60 most likely refers to doves, but we may also see here a reference to the Pleiades star cluster: see especially Peponi 2004: 305–6; G. Ferrari 2008; Swift 2010: 179–80, with further bibliography. 53.  Peponi 2004: 312. 54.  Peponi 2004: 312.

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18     Introduction

flits from horses to metal to doves to stars while simultaneously reasserting their identities as Hagesichora and Agido.55 We can situate this focus in Alcman’s partheneion on the audience’s own viewing experience within a long tradition of choruses not simply encouraging their audiences to visualize their bodies or hear their songs in a particular way—a tradition that I have discussed elsewhere—but simultaneously drawing attention to the corporeality or materiality of their own performance.56 So, to take just one example, in Pindar fr. 107a M, apparently a fragment of a hyporchēma, the chorus presents alternatives for how the audience might see its dancing bodies by instructing itself to “represent the Pelasgian horse or a dog, / an Amyclaean one” (Πελασγὸν ἵππον ἢ κύνα / Ἀμυκλάιαν, 1–2). As Peponi again notes, the disjunction opens up multiple possibilities for the object of representation; she sees it as “transform[ing] comprehension from an act of simple recognition into a moment of complex contemplation.”57 At the same time, the imperative “represent” (μιμέο), combined with quite precise instructions to “spin with your foot and chase after the bending melody” (ἐλελιζόμενος ποδὶ . . . καμπύλον μέλος διώκων, 3), focuses on the act or mechanics of representation itself. In the “play of actuality” here, the spinning feet are both an animal’s and the choreuts’ own; the “bending melody” suggests both the bent legs of a running animal or dancer and the modulation (and perhaps even meter) of the song.58 The chorus thus highlights the phenomenological complexity—the perceptual instability, the flitting between and combining of the means and objects of representation—that characterizes its performance and the viewing it engenders.

Epiphanic Processions Ancient Greek religious practice frequently involved a slippage between the presentational and representational, material bodies and divine manifestation. As Verity Platt has shown, sacred images in Greek culture continually negotiate a paradox “between their phenomenological effect (when they are experienced as a form of epiphany) and their ontological status (that is, their

55.  Cf. Peponi 2004: 313, 2015: 214–15. 56.  Weiss 2018a, especially 23–36. 57.  Peponi 2015: 215. 58.  Franklin 2013: 228–29.

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Introduction      19

material and representational nature, their existence as objects).”59 This sort of experience of the divine was an important element of “enacted epiphanies” as well—that is, festival processions in which people would dress up as the deity they served.60 We can understand the tyrant Peisistratus’s famous return from exile to Athens in the 550s BCE in terms of this tradition—and as a performance that reveals the doubleness or slippage that such enacted epiphanies involved.61 As Herodotus tells us, Peisistratus and Megacles, head of one of the political factions in Athens, “devised the silliest scheme by far” (μηχανῶνται . . . πρῆγμα εὐηθέστατον, 1.60.3): they dressed a tall and beautiful woman called Phye in armor, put her on a chariot, and brought her into the city, with messengers announcing that this was Athena herself bringing back Peisistratus. Herodotus is apparently amazed that the famously clever Athenians “believed that the woman was the goddess and offered prayers to the mortal woman and welcomed back Peisistratus” (πειθόμενοι τὴν γυναῖκα εἶναι αὐτὴν τὴν θεὸν προσεύχοντό τε τὴν ἄνθρωπον καὶ ἐδέκοντο Πεισίστρατον, 1.60.5). And yet, as several scholars have pointed out, for all Herodotus’s amusement, “Athenians, like the rest of the Greeks, would have been culturally preconditioned to accept the double ontological status of the girl as both a real goddess and a real young woman, at least for the duration of the sacred procession.”62 Like other examples of enacted epiphanies, then, the Phye episode is not a case of delusion but of an audience participating in a particular mode of ritual viewing wherein the belief that a person or image was in fact a divinity “did not preclude reflexive examination of [their] ritual, material, and representational status and function.”63 Herodotus dwells on the mechanics of this representation, but elsewhere in the Histories he reports on epiphanies without questioning their ontological status. His inclusion here of various theatrical details— the costume, the staging of Phye on the chariot, the use of messengers to provide the Athenians with a verbal framing of what they saw—suggests that he perceived the similarities between the representational strategies

59.  Platt 2011: 82 (emphasis original). 60.  On “enacted epiphanies,” see especially Petridou 2016; also Platt 2011: 15–17. 61.  Connor 1987: 42–47; Sinos 1993: 83–84; Petridou 2016: 147–70. 62.  Petridou 2016: 153. Cf. Connor 1987: 44–46; Sinos 1993: 83–84; Platt 2011: 16–17, 48n49; Koch-Piettre 2018: 192–93. 63.  Platt 2011: 49.

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20     Introduction

of theater and epiphanic performance, and perhaps also their respective phenomenologies.64 Other processions involving a degree of enactment on the part of its participants include those for Dionysus, the most epiphanic of the Greek pantheon.65 In Athens, one of the largest of such processions occurred at the City Dionysia, the annual springtime festival for Dionysus. This procession— the pompē—occurred shortly after the eisagōgē (“introduction”), which was when the cult statue of Dionysus Eleuthereus was escorted back into the city.66 Both the eisagōgē and the pompē were essentially epiphanic: the first reenacted the god’s arrival in Athens; the second demonstrated his presence by “[bringing] sacrifice and entertainment to the god and [being] focused on the ‘madness’ of the community caused by the god’s presence.”67 Eric Csapo has argued that it is in connection with the creation or remodeling of the Dionysia, and especially with the pompē, that, from the mid-sixth century onward, Dionysus, satyrs, phalluses, and various Dionysian themes suddenly become very popular in Attic art, “[expressing] the experience of Dionysian processions.”68 We should be wary of directly linking such visual images to the pompē, and certainly they should not be interpreted as accurate snapshots of any particular procession. Nevertheless, taken together with later literary evidence for the practice of dressing up as satyrs and Bacchants as part of the proces-

64.  On the influence of theater here, see especially Koch-Piettre 2018: 193–98. Chaniotis 1997: 223 sees the episode as a precursor to the increased degree of theatricality in Greek political life during the Hellenistic period. Plutarch emphasizes the connection to theater in his version of this story by immediately following it with the supposed encounter between Thespis, credited as the inventor of tragedy, and Solon, who warns against such play entering real-life affairs (Sol. 29.4–5). See also Wiles 2007: 258–59 on the doubleness of epiphanic experience in relation to theatrical mimesis. 65.  On Dionysus’s distinctively epiphanic nature, see especially Otto 1965; Henrichs 1993. 66.  For a reconstruction of the City Dionysia, including the eisagōgē and pompē, see especially Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 69–120 (though see below, n. 69, against her conceptualization of the pompē). 67.  Csapo 2015: 78. As Csapo notes (77–78), the phalluses that were so prominent in the pompē were probably also thought to represent Dionysus. 68.  Csapo 2015: 83; Csapo 2013. On this imagery see also, e.g., Carpenter 1986; Shapiro 1989: 89–100; Shapiro 1995: 84–100; Hedreen 1992: 155–70; Isler-Kerényi 2004, 2007; Csapo and Miller 2007b: 22–24.

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Introduction      21

sion’s komastic revelry,69 they can suggest the unstable blurring of identity that could be experienced at this sort of event, not just by the participants themselves but by the audience watching them along the processional route.70 For example, vase paintings that represent the return of Hephaestus to Olympus as a Dionysian epiphanic procession tend to mix together human performance and mythic narrative.71 Also possibly connected with the pompē, and more generally with the Dionysian imaginary, is a small group of black-figure Attic vases that show Dionysus and satyrs riding ship-wagons, indicating a similar sort of slippage between the presentational and representational:72 the vehicle’s technology is showcased, with Dionysus’s ship clearly on wheels; on some we see human escorts as well as satyrs. Though it is not my aim here to attempt any sort of history of the murky origins of theater in Athens, it is worth noting that the City Dionysia became a primary site for dramatic productions, with tragic competitions starting in the late sixth century and comic ones apparently from around 486 BCE.73 Certainly the experience of watching komastic revelers, along with various choruses, go past in a carnival-like procession would have been different from experiencing a play from a fixed spot in a fixed performance space.74 Nevertheless, we can see that tragedy, satyr play, and comedy, the evolution of which 69.  Schol. Dem. 21.617 Dilts; Dem. 19.287. For a reconceptualization of the pompē as more carnival (hence “komastic revelry”) than solemn procession, see especially Csapo 1997, 2013, 2015 and Bierl 2009: 267–325, contra the model propounded in particular by Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 69–81. 70.  For reconstructions of the route, see especially Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 107–9; Csapo 2015: 93–105. 71.  One good example is an Attic black-figure dinos (mixing bowl) in Paris (Musée du Louvre E 876, BAPD 300837): on this see Csapo 2013: 16. Cf. Csapo 2015: 84–85. On the connection between such iconography and epiphanic Dionysian processions in Athens, see Hedreen 2004. 72.  Three are fragmentary skyphoi (cups): London, British Museum B79, BAPD 4319; Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico 130, BAPD 4321; Athens, Acropolis Museum 1.1281a, BAPD 465. One is an amphora fragment: Tübingen, Eberhad Karls Universität Tübingen, Institut für Klassische Archäologie D53, BAPD 5921. On the use of such ship-wagons during the City Dionysia rather than the Anthesteria (as has been traditionally assumed) or Lenaea, see Csapo 2012, 2013: 20–25 (contra, e.g., Pickard-Cambridge 1988: 12–13; Burkert 1985: 229; Parker 2005: 302–15). 73.  Evidence for the date of 486 BCE comes from Suda, s.v. Chionides. On the early developments of tragedy and comedy, see, e.g., West 1989; Scullion 2002a, 2002b; Rusten 2006; Csapo 2015. 74.  Csapo 2015: 106–7.

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22     Introduction

must to some degree be linked to the sorts of Dionysian performances within the pompē as well as at other events within the Dionysia, shared in some of the “play of actuality” on display there. They were also produced in the context of a festival revolving around Dionysus, whose various manifestations beyond the theater—through wine, revelry, choruses—could affect an audience’s viewing experience within it.

Visual Arts The examples of vase paintings above suggest that, despite the difference between seeing a play and looking at a pot, we may detect some connections between the visualities at work across these two media. This can be the case regardless of whether a vase painting depicts a performance related to a “real life” event. For example, about twenty Attic black-figure sympotic vases from the mid- to late sixth century BCE show choruses in matching, elaborate outfits, typically facing an aulos player; often the chorus members appear to be costumed as animals or animal-riders.75 Several suggest a mix of actuality and virtuality, whereby markers of artifice are combined with suggestions that it really is a chorus of animals.76 For instance, on one side of a skyphos (cup) in Boston are an aulos player and a chorus of six hoplites riding dolphins (figure 2); on the other side are an aulos player and six men, with cloaks, diadems, and long spears, riding enormous birds (figure 3); on this side there is also a smaller figure between the musician and the chorus. While the aulos players indicate that these are human performances, there is no sign that the birds or dolphins themselves are props.77 The smaller figure on side B could, as some have suggested, be the leader in a dithyrambic

75.  On the categorization of these vases see especially Sifakis 1971: 73–75; Green 1985, 1991; Rusten 2006: 44–51; Rothwell 2007: 36–80. Green included in this group vases showing stilt walkers and dancing warriors: on these see also Rothwell 2007: 30–33; Compton-Engle 2015: 110–24. On the problems with categorizing such vases according to these particular elements, see Osborne 2008: 397–406. 76.  Weiss 2021a. 77.  We only see the legs of two of the dolphin-riders; the others could be viewed as dolphinhuman hybrids. Perhaps we may imagine them as performers working inside dolphin stage props that conceal the lower half of their bodies (see Rothwell 2007: 63, 240n170, in response to Csapo and Slater 1995: 96–97), but if we view the image so literally then we would also expect still to see at least their feet (cf. Green 2007, “dolphin riders must have had their feet on the ground” [100]).

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figure 2. Attic black-figure skyphos (side A), ca. 520–510 BCE. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 20.18. BAPD 4090. Photograph © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. figure 3. Attic black-figure skyphos (side B), ca. 520–510 BCE. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 20.18. BAPD 4090. Photograph © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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24     Introduction

procession, but his size may instead suggest that he is a mythical character, perhaps a pygmy.78 It is tempting to interpret this combination in terms of an actual performance and so connect it to theater’s “play of actuality”—and indeed, such vases were for a long time assumed to show some form of “protodramatic,” even specifically “protocomic,” performance.79 More recently, they have been linked instead to the dithyramb and, more generally, the dithyrambic imaginary, and also to the satyric kōmoi in the pompē at the City Dionysia.80 We should remember, however, that paintings like these are at least as much imaginative as they are historical, so that, even as they can reference various forms of performance, they are understandable on their own terms: they show “not what daily life looked like, but the resources which daily life gave to painters to think with and through.”81 So while they may capture something of the phenomenology of a choral performance, in which an audience can experience both “this” and “that”—both human performers and dolphins or birds—at the same time, they produce their own play within their own medium without needing to refer to any “original” performance at all. Some depictions of choruses on archaic and early classical Attic pottery not only suggest both actuality and virtuality but also produce, through their material form, a sort of slippage or oscillation between them. One especially effective example is an Attic black-figure cup-krater in Paris from the mid-sixth century BCE (figure 4). In contrast with the Boston skyphos, which has men and dolphins together within a single image of performance, here they are separated.

78.  Dithyrambs were large-scale choral performances for Dionysus involving fifty men or boys. On this figure on the Boston skyphos as an exarchos (either dithyrambic or for a kōmos), see Csapo and Miller 2007b: 22; Csapo 2014: 99–100; as pygmy, see Sifakis 1971: 91–92. Csapo 2010a: 11, 2014: 99–100 thinks that he is wearing a satyr mask. For further identifications, see Rothwell 2007: 71, 244–45n236 with additional references. Steinhart 2004: 21 suggests that all the riders are pygmies mounted on ostriches, ready for battle against the cranes. The scene could also allude to the Geranomachia if the birds themselves are cranes rather than ostriches: Steiner 2021: 179n171; Weiss 2021a: 215. 79.  The assumption of “protocomedy” was largely based on the frequency with which Old Comedy involves choruses of animals or animal-riders. On such choruses and their possible connection to the vase paintings, see Rothwell 2007: 102–50. 80.  On their connections to the dithyramb, see especially Csapo 2003: 86–90, 2013: 64–66; Rusten 2006; Csapo and Miller 2007b: 22–24. On connections to satyric performances at the Dionysian pompē, see Csapo 2013. They have also been linked to depictions of padded dancers on Corinthian and Attic vases: see especially Seeberg 1995; Green 2007; Steinhart 2007. 81.  Osborne 2008: 403.

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Introduction      25

figure 4. Attic black-figure cup-krater, ca. 550 BCE. Paris, Musée du Louvre, CA 2988. BAPD 8656. Photograph © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

On the outside of the cup-krater’s rim is a chorus of men, and on the inside, a chorus of dolphins. Dolphins tend to be associated with Dionysus in ancient Greek art and performance culture; they often appear, as apparently here, in connection with the dithyramb, itself a choral song of and for Dionysus.82 Barbara Kowalzig has suggested that, when this krater is “looked at from the most usual angle, that is to say, slightly from above, the two lines of choral dancers blur into one and the same, the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’ [chorus] become almost indistinguishable.”83 But the two lines also remain distinct: from one angle, the user sees both at the same time; from another, just the dolphins; from another, just the human chorus. Inside and outside, present and absent, similar and different, these figures together produce their own play between actuality and virtuality; their material division encourages an unstable mode of viewing. A red-figure astragalos (knucklebone) attributed to the Sotades painter provides a later example, though through an otherwise very different image 82.  Csapo 2003; Kowalzig 2013. 83.  Kowalzig 2013: 35. Cf. Weiss 2018a: 81–82; Weiss 2020: 167.

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26     Introduction

and material form, of an object producing this sort of instability. On one side is a bearded man directing female choral dancers, shown in the midst of joining hands and beginning to step in line (figure 5).84 Elsewhere, however, the dancers appear to be flying; some of them raise their bent arms, which, covered by their sleeves, create the appearance of wings (figure 6). As the user turns this small object in their hands, they can see both the mechanics of the human performance—the direction of the dancers’ movement, the avian look of their clothes—and its transformative effect, with the dancers not just flying but actually appearing as bird-girl hybrids. The user can flit from one to the other and see both at the same time. As for the Paris krater, then, we may see in the visual flexibility generated by the shape of the object itself a parallel for the sort of phenomenological complexity highlighted by the choruses of both Alcman’s partheneion and Pindar’s hyporchēma. We may also consider fifth-century theater’s play with the relationship between actuality and virtuality, presentational and representational, against roughly contemporary experimentation in the visual arts with the effects of blending the material support of a painting or sculpture with the image it shows. Referring to Wollheim’s concept of “seeing-in,” Richard Neer argues that late sixth-century and early fifth-century Attic vase painting effects a similar twofoldness for the viewer, as Pioneer Group painters like Euphronios become increasingly interested in “fragment[ing] the picture-field” by combining illusionistic detail with extravagant displays of painterly skill that emphasize the medium’s materiality.85 Also drawing from Wollheim’s terminology, Deborah Steiner notes how archaic and early classical votive, funerary, and 84.  On the mix of figures on this astragalos see Hoffman 1997: 107–11 and G. Ferrari 2008: 2–5. Ferrari (followed by Steiner 2021: 1–3) argues on the basis of literary imagery that this is a depiction specifically of the cosmic choruses of the Pleiades and Hyades, and that their “shabby” director “finds a match . . . in the caricature of the Pythagorean on the Athenian comic stage” (5). 85.  Neer 1995, 2002, especially 44–86 (quote from 5). Grethlein 2017 also draws from Wollheim’s model (see especially 158–68) in his exploration of the mix of “immersion” and “distance” typical of the “as-if ” of aesthetic experience. In his analysis specifically of ancient Greek vase painting (191–248), he emphasizes how images of Medusa and of the blinding of Polyphemus offer a self-reflexive meditation on the beholder’s own viewing, highlighting the “detachment of pictorial seeing” (214). In contrast, in both my study of vase paintings in chapter 4 and my analysis of ancient Greek plays more broadly, I emphasize not the detachment or distance of the viewer but how their deep engagement can be activated through representational friction and ambiguity.

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figure 5. Attic red-figure astragalos attributed to the Sotades Painter (side A), ca. 470–450 BCE. London, The British Museum, 1860, 1201.2. BAPD 209477. Photograph © The British Museum, London. figure 6. Attic red-figure astragalos attributed to the Sotades Painter (side B), ca. 470–450 BCE. London, The British Museum, 1860, 1201.2. BAPD 209477. Photograph © The British Museum, London.

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victory statues already “combine their ability to call an absent body or event most vividly to mind with an emphatic declaration of their own materiality and poiēsis, the process of manufacture that imposes itself on the spectator and actually enhances the pleasure he experiences from the work.”86 As Neer points out, such pleasure can also derive from the tensions “between mark and matière.”87 With the possibility of illusionism came increased experimentation with “the production of pictorial friction.”88 The sort of twofoldness that classical Greek art could urge upon the viewer is also bound up with the experience of epiphany. This, as we have already seen in the case of epiphanic processions, tends to be “a complex exercise in hermeneutics, concerned with the relationship between sense-perception and conceptual knowledge.”89 For example, as Platt has shown, the enhanced naturalism of Pheidias’s temple statues, combined with their size and glittery expense, on the one hand “sought to reproduce the divine encounter,” with the gods appearing as they do in as in the Homeric Hymns—“spectacularly big, beautiful and shining.”90 On the other, their display of wealth and artistic technē also drew attention to their material representation—the Athena Parthenos on the Acropolis was renowned for its huge amount of gold, which Pheidias was accused of embezzling. According to Platt, when classical statuary combines naturalistic forms alongside archaizing ones, which seem more obviously to display their materiality, it can produce a visual exploration of the relationship between god and image, presentation and representation, prompting both “cognitive reliability” and “cognitive dissonance” on the part of the viewer.91 86.  Steiner 2001: 20. 87.  Neer 2002: 61. 88.  Neer 2002: 65. Cf. Steiner 2001: 44–54. See also Estrin 2018 on classical funerary monuments. Comparing their slippage between depiction and memory (“this” and “that”) to that in Euripides’s Ion, he shows how they share “strategies of image recognition that infused real-life interaction with material objects” (132). 89.  Platt 2011: 59. Cf. Elsner 2000, 2007: 1–26, on naturalistic and ritual modes of viewing. 90.  Platt 2011: 89 (emphasis original). 91.  Platt 2011: 114–23. This does not mean, however, that there was a clear-cut distinction between such forms in terms of their production of divine presence: see especially Gaifman 2012 on “a spectrum of iconicity” as well as “a spectrum of the aniconic” in Greek art (44). In the rest of her book, Platt explores how these earlier engagements with modes of viewing the divine develop into post-classical (especially second sophistic) discourses on the mechanics of epiphany and representation.

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Introduction      29

It might seem surprising to situate theater’s “play of actuality” against the forms of perception invited by these other media. The materiality of a pot or statue is not equivalent to theater’s various technologies; the tensions such objects may generate are therefore not identical to the sort of perceptual instability experienced by an audience of a play. Even so, amid the “general flourishing of discourses on art and aesthetics” in the classical period, the frequent connections made between the visual arts and theater—connections that we already noted in Aristotle’s Poetics—encourage us to see them in terms of a shared culture of visuality.92 Plato’s discourses on the deceptive qualities of painting and tragedy alike are well known, but many other Greek writers and artists also recognized that different art forms could share representational strategies and effects. Gorgias, for example, describes the power of both tragedy and painting as a form of deception, whereby “the one deceived is wiser than the one not deceived” (ὁ ἀπατηθεὶς σοφώτερος τοῦ μὴ ἀπατηθέντος, DK 82 B 23).93 In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socrates discusses the “representation of things seen” (εἰκασία τῶν ὁρωμένων, 3.10.1) with, in succession, a painter, a sculptor, and an armorer.94 Moreover, the theater itself became a site for commenting on representation in the visual arts, as well as its connection to the audience’s own viewing experience.95 Froma Zeitlin and others have highlighted the “encounter between the two representational modes of theatre and the arts of the day”

92.  Porter 2010: 184. On such discourses, see especially Pollitt 1974; Rouveret 1989; Goldhill 1996, 1997, 2000; Steiner 2001. 93.  See Billings 2018 on how Gorgias’s paradox “elides [the] ‘as if ’ quality of drama, the gap between mimēsis and reality” (50). On Gorgias’s remarks here in the context of fifth-century ideas about truth, illusion, and the arts, see especially de Romilly 1973; Verdenius 1981; Franz 1991; Sier 2000. 94.  On the questions this passage raises about representation and spectatorship, see especially Rouveret 1989: 18; Zeitlin 1994: 193; Goldhill 1996: 20–21, 1997; Steiner 2001: 33–35. 95.  Some of the innovations in the visual arts also developed in connection with the theater. According to Vitruvius, perspectival representation was apparently pioneered by Agatharchus in his stage painting for a tragedy by Aeschylus (On Architecture 7, praef. 11); it shares with theater a “play with the boundary between surfaces and depth, illusion and reality” (Tanner 2016: 114). See Rouveret 1989: 65–79 and Small 2013 (with further bibliography) on the meaning of skēnographia in relation to Vitruvius’s anecdote. Skiagraphia (“shadow painting”), one of Plato’s targets in Republic 10, is also associated with the theater in Greek thought: see especially Rouveret 1989: 25, 57–59; Rouveret 2006.

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by focusing, in particular, on ekphrastic discourse in Euripidean drama.96 The scene most commonly cited in this respect is the parodos of Ion, when the chorus marvels at the sculptural scenes adorning the temple of Apollo at Delphi, producing “a verbal exercise designed to create the theatrical illusion of an absent presence in the eyes of the spectator.”97 The story that Euripides started as a painter before taking up playwriting, whatever its veracity, reflects both the frequency with which his plays refer to the visual arts and the connections that ancient audiences could perceive between the different areas of artistic representation.98 Zeitlin’s work has revealed how ekphrastic language frequently guides ancient audiences to visualize what characters describe verbally against their own repertoire of images in and beyond the theater. Such moments draw on a common cultural poetics, but also suggest that these different media could generate comparable forms of visuality.99

engaged spectatorship We have seen, then, multiple contexts and media where the slippage between actuality and virtuality, along with the act of spectatorship itself, could be played with, exposed, and interrogated. Though theater—with its fixed performance space and audience space, costumes, props, and stage building— provided its own particular sensory realm, its “play of actuality” was nevertheless tied to other aesthetic experiences familiar to a fifth-century audience, especially an Athenian one. Throughout this book, but above all in the final chapter, I shall return to classical Greek vase painting to explore its dialogue with the sorts of visual experiences at work in the plays themselves. My aim is to show that tragedians and comedians were deeply embedded in a culture of visuality that frequently examined the viewer’s own act of spectatorship 96.  Zeitlin 1994: 139. 97.  Zeitlin 1994: 149. Other important discussions of engagements with the visual arts in tragedy, especially Euripidean tragedy, include Barlow 1971; Steiner 2001: 44–56; Hall 2006: 99–141; O’Sullivan 2008; Porter 2010: 191–92; Stieber 2011; Torrance 2013: 63–134. 98.  Vit. Eur. 17–18; Suda, s.v. Euripides E.3695 (Kovacs 1994: 10–11, no. 2). Cf. O’Sullivan 2008: 175n6. 99.  Cf. Zeitlin 1994: both painting and drama “share the requirement of an attentive gaze, a stylized and informed mode of viewing, which not only arouses spectators’ affective responses but also engages their cognitive skills in learning how to recognize, evaluate, and interpret the visual codes of what they see” (140–41).

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and the representational strategies that could shape it. Athenian playwrights in fifth-century Athens were just as aware as twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury theorists have been of the “play of actuality” inherent to theater as an art form. In highlighting the perceptual activity of the audience, this book emphasizes the particular forms of aesthetic engagement that the plays of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles could produce. It is now a commonplace in theater studies to emphasize the spectator’s role in a drama’s production—to understand the spectator not as a passive recipient of what a playwright makes them see but as, to quote Rancière, “emancipated.”100 Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater has long been viewed as a key moment in theater’s history for how, in marked contrast with realist theater’s fourth wall, it explicitly aimed “to activate the audience: to encourage spectators to watch performances critically and alertly, to judge and argue over what they had seen, and to consider its political and social relevance to their own lives.”101 But such a distinction between the active spectatorship required by epic theater (and its successors) and the apparent passivity allowed by realist theater is not necessarily so clear-cut. Amy Holzapfel, for example, has recently demonstrated how, despite their box sets and darkened auditoriums, nineteenth-century realist dramatists aimed “to make their audiences more conscious of the experience of subjective vision” by repeatedly raising “the question of how we see.”102 Nevertheless, engaged spectatorship is not inevitably encouraged, and certainly not equally or in the same ways, by all drama across all cultural contexts. In the case of classical Greek drama, recent scholarship has highlighted how seeing theater in fifth-century Athens was a distinctively engaged and embodied act. This was partly because audience members would have had such extensive experience not just as spectators of theater but also as 100.  Rancière 2011. Bennett 1997 (originally published in 1990) remains a key work on this issue. For a good overview of theater scholarship on the centrality of the spectator, see Balme 2008: 34–46. 101.  Bradley 2016: 1029. For useful overviews of trends in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury theater practice and theory toward rejecting the idea of passive spectatorship and pushing audiences into greater political action and awareness, see Freshwater 2009: 38–61 and Purcell 2013: 43–54, with particular reference to Antonin Artaud’s “theater of cruelty,” Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater, Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience (1966), and Rancière 2011. 102.  Holzapfel 2014: 18.

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participants in the various types of choral performance enacted onstage;103 because the plays repeatedly draw on their spectators’ cultural knowledge of earlier theatrical and literary models, as well as of visual art;104 because the plays stage scenes, from sacrifices to law-court-style debates, that audience members would have regularly attended outside the theater;105 because so many plays revolve around war, a common feature of life for a fifth-century audience;106 and because there is a powerful circulation of affect within the language and materials of the plays themselves.107 In this book, I show that Greek plays can engender “active, participatory sense-making”108 through raising the question of how we see and revealing its complexity. Often they do so through scenes of staged spectatorship—that is, when a character or group of characters sees with and for the audience. This is not, as in Brechtian theater, an exposure of theater’s artificiality designed to distance the audience emotionally from the drama. On the contrary, I repeatedly use the phrases “expose” and “lay bare” to refer to how such scenes make the representational machineries of their productions intelligible and available, inviting their audiences to participate, alongside the actors and technicians, in the creation of meaning. The audience can thus become part of the production, not just seeing but making theater. At this point it is important to note what, in fact, I mean—or do not mean—by “the audience.” I do not refer to a consistent set of people when I use the words “audience” or “spectators.” On the one hand, this study is grounded in the context of the plays’ ancient productions: their first productions at theatrical competitions in Athens and subsequent productions across the Greek world, from Attic deme theaters to Sicily and Southern Italy. Sometimes I focus more on the audience at the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, for whom most of the surviving plays were originally designed; this is especially the case in chapter 1, in which I discuss several plays that are set in or near Athens and engage with specifically Athenian structures. An “Athenian”

103.  Revermann 2006; Weiss 2018b, especially 236–44. Cf. Olsen 2017, 2021b. 104.  On this vast topic see especially Zeitlin 1994. 105.  Angelopoulou 2020: 41, with further bibliography. 106.  On Greek theater and “combat trauma” see especially Meineck and Konstan 2014; Meineck 2016. 107.  See especially Telò and Mueller 2018a. 108.  Meineck 2018: 20.

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audience did not, however, mean a homogenous one, as recent scholarship has shown: watching plays at the City Dionysia alongside Athenian male citizens were metics (resident aliens), foreigners, and also, probably, some women and slaves.109 Sometimes my use of the word “audience” in an ancient Greek context is more capacious, though I do still tend to assume that spectators possess a cultural repertoire—that is, a familiarity with other performances, especially dramatic productions—that shapes their way of viewing a particular play. On the other hand, by drawing on modern theater scholarship and, in particular, by employing throughout Garner’s phrase “play of actuality,” I also veer toward a more transhistorical approach, whereby “the audience” can also be “us.” When I do so, I am not presuming an affinity between my position as a female reader of ancient texts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2022, and that of a predominantly male audience of tragedy, satyr play, and comedy in Athens in the fifth century BCE. And yet, while I am not attempting to reconstruct these plays’ “original” reception, I occasionally find myself drawn into their own mechanisms of constructing and engaging their audiences— mechanisms that we will occasionally find to be shared across different cultures and artforms.110

genre and scope One important contribution of this book lies in its generic reach, combining all three genres of classical Greek drama. This does not mean that I am proposing that tragedy, satyr play, and comedy constructed one homogenous form of aesthetic reception among their audiences. Almost forty years ago, Oliver Taplin proposed that a fundamental difference between tragedy and comedy lay in “the relation of the world of the play to the world of the audience.”111 109.  See especially Roselli 2011. The Lenaea festival, the other context for the first production of tragedies and especially comedies, was for a mostly Athenian audience: Ar. Ach. 501–8; Csapo and Slater 1995: 123. 110.  Cf. chapter 4, where I refer to Rainer Mack’s (2002) distinction, in relation to vase painting, between “how an image engages its viewer” and “how a viewer in fact receives [it]” (574). See also, famously, Blau 1990 on the audience as “initiated or precipitated” by a play itself: “The audience is what happens when, performing the signs and passwords of a play, something postulates itself and unfolds in response” (25, emphasis original). 111.  Taplin 1986: 164. Taplin 1996 presents a somewhat less polarized view, focused on the chorus, gods, and degrees of closure in tragedy and comedy.

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Tragedy, he claimed, demands silence and inactivity on the part of its audience, which must be totally immersed in the drama’s closed-off, fictional world. Comedy, in contrast, reaches out to its audience repeatedly through metatheatrical references and direct addresses (most notably in the parabasis); it encourages noisy interruption rather than silent absorption. Over the past few decades, scholars have gradually moved beyond such a clean distinction— as well as the idea that satyr play was somehow positioned somewhere between tragedy and comedy in this respect.112 Yet the persistence of the idea that the “cognitive contract” between a play and its spectators is fundamentally different for tragedy and comedy has meant that they are still rarely analyzed side by side.113 Important recent studies on the sensory and affective modes of Greek drama have focused on tragedy or comedy—and seldom satyr play at all.114 There are, of course, important generic distinctions between tragedy, satyr play, and comedy. Comedy does indeed refer to the realia of a dramatic production and contemporary Athenian spaces, events, and people far more frequently and explicitly than tragedy or satyr play. It is in this sense more overtly self-conscious in its engagement with the material aspects of its performance as well as with the audience itself. However, if we bring the three genres together, we can see phenomenological commonalities, drawn out by the plays themselves, that have previously gone unnoticed—how, for example, Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus keeps its audience in a sort of spatial limbo by using representational strategies that we also see at work in Aristophanes’s plays, especially Birds (chapter 1); or how Birds takes to an extreme a tendency toward taking apart the means and object of representation that we can also detect in Aeschylus’s Theoroi and Suppliants (chapter 2).

112.  E.g., Gredley 1996; Foley 2008; Griffith 2008, 2013; Ruffell 2008, 2011: 214–60. Ruffell’s work is especially helpful in problematizing Taplin’s model of audience response, showing how “both tragedy and comedy have elements of emotional engagement and abstract reflection, and that these are carried out in different but not mutually exclusive ways” (2008: 38). On the porousness of comedy and tragedy as genres more generally, including how each can appropriate the other, see especially Platter 2007; Bakola, Prauscello, and Telò 2013; Jendza 2020. 113.  The phrase “cognitive contract” comes from Hall (2006: 107, 2010: 53). In both these studies, Hall upholds Taplin’s generic distinction between tragedy and comedy in terms of degrees of self-referentiality. 114.  E.g., Telò 2013, 2016; Telò and Mueller 2018a; Weiss 2018a; Angelopoulou 2020; Worman 2020.

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Thus, by setting tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies against each other, often defamiliarizing well-known plays by juxtaposing them with perhaps surprising partners, I show striking instances of overlap in the playwrights’ representational strategies and modes of engaging their audiences. (One exception to this approach is chapter 3, discussed more below.) All the plays that I analyze here lay bare, often through moments of staged spectatorship, the process of seeing bodies, objects, and spaces in the theater. They negotiate the tensions inherent to theōrein as it is understood by Aristotle: sometimes by highlighting the gap between “this” and “that”; sometimes by encouraging an audience to see them simultaneously; sometimes by offering multiple representational possibilities for physical onstage presences; sometimes by presenting bodies that seem unrepresentable. In all these plays across all three genres, such exposure of the mechanisms of theatrical representation focuses on the audience’s own spectatorial role and draws it in as a co-participant in a drama’s production. As we shall see, such participation or co-construction can involve a sort of visual disorientation, shared with characters within the drama itself, that is fundamental to the momentum and plot of a play and the themes it explores. It can also amplify various possible bodily responses or affects on the audience’s part, from the sort of fear and repulsion that is urged upon the audience at the start of the Eumenides, to anxiety, sexual attraction, or a visceral sense of pain. The first three chapters focus on the representational possibilities of language and its interaction with theater’s physical apparatus and bodies, both those of the performers and those of the audience. Chapter 1 explores the construction of dramatic space in the prologues of tragedy and comedy. Drawing from theater scholarship on the phenomenology of space, I show how tragedians and comedians alike experimented with how to shape their audience’s experience of a play’s setting. I focus on opening scenes of staged spectatorship in plays by Sophocles (Electra, Ajax, and especially Oedipus at Colonus) and Aristophanes (Acharnians in particular; also Birds, Clouds, Peace, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Assemblywomen). Directions or models for the viewing of space in the theater can not only facilitate it but also, I suggest, expose its inherent complications—or even delay spatial identifications altogether. These scenes reveal a tendency in the work of both playwrights to make manifest at the very start of a play the experiential role of the spectator in the construction of dramatic space. Chapter 2 turns from space to bodies, masks, costumes, and props. In this chapter, I analyze a group of plays—Aeschylus’s Theoroi and Suppliants

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and Aristophanes’s Birds—that explicitly destabilize and deconstruct any equivalences between the means and objects of representation. In a fragment of Theoroi, the chorus problematizes its own identification as a group of satyrs by questioning the relationship between its appearance and that of satyrimages that it appears to be dedicating at the temple of Poseidon. Both Suppliants and Birds present bodies and objects that can be visually (and aurally) identified in multiple, often conflicting, ways all at once. In doing so, they draw their audiences into an open-ended process of theatrical theōrein, whereby the power of language to construct visual appearance is simultaneously highlighted and undermined. The first two chapters, then, by together discussing tragedy, satyr play, and comedy across different media, demonstrate how all three genres self-consciously engage in theater’s “play of actuality” and draw out the perceptual instabilities that it generates. Chapter 3 goes in a somewhat different direction, focusing primarily on just two tragedies, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and [Aeschylus’s] Prometheus Bound, and examining a particular problem: how to see a body in pain. Referring to Elaine Scarry’s famous argument that pain is incommunicable, I show how both plays, but especially Prometheus Bound, explore the means by which an apparently unrepresentable experience of extreme suffering can be communicated through the viewers’ own bodily engagement. Dustheatos, an adjective used of both the tortured Prometheus and the raving Io, might be understood quite literally as “unseeable,” in the sense of there being a gap or boundary between these bodies and their viewers. Paradoxically, however, they, like the self-mutilated Oedipus, are also dustheatos because of how viscerally their pain can affect an audience. Whereas the other chapters tend to emphasize phenomenological commonalities across dramatic genres, chapter 3, by focusing on tragedy, reminds us of some of the differences—in this case, that, as far as we can tell from the surviving plays, neither satyr play nor comedy tends to stage such deeply disturbing bodies. This not to say that satyric or comic bodies do not undergo violent abuse—far from it—but rather that these genres seem not to dwell on the nexus of bodily suffering, representational difficulty, and spectatorial response that we find on display in Oedipus the King and Prometheus Bound. Chapter 4 then shifts away from the plays themselves to the entirely different medium of vase painting, as another archive with the potential to shed light on the visual experience of theater. Vase paintings have long been used in studies of classical Greek drama essentially as illustrations of certain scenes,

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typically in support of a reading of a play. This approach was encouraged by the publication in 1971 of A. D. Trendall and T. B. L. Webster’s Illustrations of Greek Drama (1971), which elided all differences between the two media by treating vase paintings as images of particular plays. A generation later, Oliver Taplin’s Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-painting of the Fourth Century B.C. (2007) was groundbreaking in demonstrating the interconnectedness of tragedy and vase painting in Southern Italy and Sicily in the fourth century, especially between 350 and 320 BCE. Taplin pushed past the outdated methodology of Trendall and Webster by emphasizing instead “the sensibilities and associations of the viewers,” who were likely very familiar with tragic myths.115 As one reviewer put it, Pots and Plays “does not tell us what the paintings on the vases mean but how they mean, and the ultimate authority for this ‘meaning’ is neither the art historian nor the scholar but each and every viewer absorbed in contemplation.”116 As its title suggests, chapter 4 takes inspiration from Taplin’s work, but it also departs from it several significant respects. Rather than any sort of compendium of vase paintings related to theater, I provide a detailed analysis of just three fifth-century vases, all of them Attic. None of these vessels has a direct relationship to tragedy, comedy, or satyr play, just as none of the older vase paintings with elaborately costumed choruses that I mentioned above has a direct relationship to any one “original” choral performance. Although I share with Taplin a focus on the viewer and their cultural repertoire, I do not try to link the paintings to individual plays or performances. Instead, I explore how we might find in them resonances of theatrical modes of viewing by referring back to strategies and effects at work in the textual material examined in the previous three chapters: the mixing of presentational and representational; the use of internal spectators; the suggestion of multiple representational possibilities; viewing as a synesthetic, embodied act; and frontality as a form of audience engagement. This new approach to “theatrical” vase painting offers an alternative medium through which to work toward the heightened visual experience of theater. At the same time, the generic

115.  Taplin 2007: vii. On the question of such vases’ relationship to actual plays, see also chapter 4 in this book. 116.  Lada-Richards 2009: 102. Another important work in this area is Todisco et al 2003, though, as Taplin himself notes (2007: 2), it contains little discussion of the relationship between the two art forms.

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reach of the pots I discuss demonstrates the importance of considering different dramatic genres together in an analysis of seeing theater in classical Athens. This book does not intend to be exhaustive in the examples it uses; for some readers, there may appear to be some surprising omissions. I do not, for instance, discuss in great detail Euripides’s Bacchae, which has long been appreciated for its metatheatrical play with the mimetic workings of theater as it brings on stage Dionysus, the shape-shifting god of theater himself.117 Nor do I dwell at great length either on the costuming of the Kinsman in Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria, which stages the process of theatrical transformation, or Agathon’s famous remark on his own mimetic practice— that he assumes the behavior and mentality of the (female) characters he plays.118 Moreover, despite my demonstration above of the connections between the phenomenologies of theater and epiphany, for the most part I do not talk about the convention of the deus ex machina in tragedy, which can “invite awareness on the part of the audience of the creative power of the dramatic medium.”119 Such omissions are partly because such plays and topics have already been so extensively discussed elsewhere, and I wish to redirect attention to other places in the surviving corpus of classical drama where the process of theatrical representation is laid bare. They are also because the plays that I analyze here interrogate not simply the mechanics of theater but the tensions and misalignments involved in its phenomenology. The fact that, of the tragedians, I draw from Sophocles and Aeschylus more than I do from Euripides is partly because the latter has thus far figured so prominently in discussions of theatrical spectatorship, above all in terms of tragedy’s engagement with the visual arts.120 It would certainly seem appropriate to include in this study the architectural sightseeing in Ion, for example, or the play of illusion and reality in Helen. And yet, quite apart from the fact that these subjects have been extensively discussed elsewhere, I have found 117.  E.g., Foley 1980; Zeitlin 1985 ( = 1996: 341–74); Segal 1997; Mueller 2016b. See also chapter 2 in this book. 118.  Ar. Thesm. 213–68, 154–67. On these much-discussed scenes, see especially Muecke 1982a; Zeitlin 1996: 375–416; Lada-Richards 2002: 401–2. 119.  Easterling 1993: 81. The bibliography on epiphany in Greek tragedy and the technologies it involved is vast; see especially Mastronarde 1990; Henrichs 1993; Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 459–511. 120.  See above, n. 97.

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the work of the older two tragedians even more fertile for extended scenes of internal spectatorship that expose and exploit some of the difficulties involved in theatrical theōrein. By looking beyond Euripides, I also complicate a developmental model of tragedy whereby, over the course of the fifth century, the genre “appears to become more and more interested in the visual conditions of performance.”121 As the overview above demonstrated, fifth-century plays that focus on the audience’s own viewing experience should be understood against a long history of exploring and problematizing visuality in choral performance, ritual, and visual art. The chronological range of the vase paintings discussed in chapter 4, however complicated their relationship to theater, also demonstrates a shared, vibrant culture of examining the visuality of dramatic performance spanning the entire fifth century. Moreover, my discussion of Aeschylus’s Suppliants in chapter 2 complements other studies of the visual dynamics of Aeschylean tragedy in revealing how, already in the 460s, interest in visuality was strong enough for much of a tragedy to be centered on the perceptual instability inherent to “seeing theater.”122 Any apparent omissions in the book also result from my aim not to privilege tragedy in this exploration of theatrical aesthetics, nor to focus solely on text. By appreciating the similarities between the phenomenologies of tragedy, comedy, and satyr play, and observing how all three genres negotiate the complexities and pitfalls involved in “seeing theater,” we can better understand the sophisticated discourse and self-aware experience of spectatorship shared between playwrights, artists, and audiences in classical Athens.

121.  Goldhill 2000: 174. Goldhill bases this suggestion on the rarity of “theama, theōrein, theatēs, and their cognates” in Aeschylus (except for Prometheus Bound, which likely postdates Aeschylus) as opposed to Sophocles or Euripides, where such terms occur frequently. Studies of metatheater in ancient drama tend similarly to emphasize later tragedy over Aeschylus: see, e.g., Dobrov 2001: 11. 122.  On the visual dynamics of Aeschylean tragedy, especially the play between visualization and material object, see especially Frontisi-Ducroux 2007; Weiss 2018b. Cf. Hall 2006 on Suppliants: Pelasgus’s reaction to the Danaids “indicates that even pre-sophistic tragedies could display their own affinity, as performed spectacles, with the visual arts” (114, emphasis original).

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chapter 1

Opening Spaces The ear sees scenery and the eye hears it. —States 1985: 53

Sophocles’s Electra opens with the Paedagogus leading Orestes onstage, announcing their arrival in a space to which Orestes has long wished to return: “now that you’re here, it’s possible for you to gaze upon what you always yearned for” (νῦν ἐκεῖν’ ἔξεστί σοι / παρόντι λεύσσειν, ὧν πρόθυμος ἦσθ’ ἀεί, 2–3). What follows, however, is no simple identification of the dramatic setting. Instead, the Paedagogus points out with a series of deictics seven places: first “ancient Argos” (τὸ . . . παλαιὸν Ἄργος, 4), then the grove of Io, the temple of Apollo, the agora, the Heraion, Mycenae, and finally the house of Orestes’s father. As Francis Dunn has shown, the Paedagogus here asks the audience as well as Orestes to imagine multiple settings with conflicting associations and chronologies all at once. “Ancient” Argos and Io, for example, exist in the mythical past, while the agora (here conflated with the temple of Apollo) is a fifth-century institution; the Heraion brings to mind the new temple of Hera still under construction outside Argos at the time of this play’s first production.1 The deictics suggest that the audience is to project a view of these places onto different parts of the theater; the list also makes the dramatic space seem flexible, conflating different landmarks of different eras.2 1.  Dunn 2006. Finglass 2007: 94 ad loc. asserts that τὸ . . . παλαιὸν Ἄργος must refer to the plain of the Argolid rather than the city itself. See Mueller 2016a: 7–8 on the role of deictics here in “endowing the previously unmarked theatrical setting with a spatial identity” (7). 2.  Cf. Ringer 1998: 133: “The Paedagogus’ words . . . paint an ambiguous, problematic space suggestive of transformation and duality.”

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When he mentions Mycenae and the house, the Paedagogus appears to identify the specific location at which he, Orestes, and Pylades have arrived: οἷ δ’ ἱκάνομεν, φάσκειν Μυκήνας τὰς πολυχρύσους ὁρᾶν, πολύφθορόν τε δῶμα Πελοπιδῶν τόδε But here where we’ve come, think that you see much-golden Mycenae, and the much-ruining house of the Pelopidae, this here. —Soph. El. 8–10

Thus the spectators must now understand the dramatic setting to be Mycenae and the skēnē, “this [building] here” (τόδε, 10), to be the house of the Atreids. And yet, even with this final identification, they are challenged to combine different views, for the city that they would expect—based on its mention at the start, the landmarks the Paedagogus has just listed, and their own theatrical repertoire (above all Aeschylus’s Oresteia, but perhaps also Euripides’s Electra)—is Argos.3 The juxtaposition of “much-golden Mycenae,” evoking Homeric epic, with the more tragic-sounding “much-ruining house of the Pelopidae” complicates the audience’s visual understanding, forcing it to remain manifold.4 The Paedagogus directs Orestes’s identification of the space before him by saying “think that you see” (φάσκειν . . . ὁρᾶν, 9). As noted in the introduction, this phrase points to the act of visualizing on the audience’s part, whereby, as always in theater, it is to see one thing as another—or, to use Aristotle’s expression, “this” as “that.”5 The verb φάσκειν, which can refer to speaking 3.  On the question of whether Euripides’s Electra preceded Sophocles’s version or vice versa, see especially Denniston 1939: xxxiv-ix; Michelini 1987: 199–206; Cropp 1988: xlviii-lx; Finglass 2007: 1–4. 4.  On the shift between epic and tragic here, see Davidson 1988: 51; Dunn 2006: 194–96; Finglass 2007: 96 ad loc. Cf. Saïd 1993: 171. 5.  Arist. Poet. 1448b15–17. On this phrase see the introduction to this book. On the use of φάσκειν ὁρᾶν in Sophocles’s Electra, cf. Dunn 2006: “Paradoxically, now that the speaker is describing not places imagined as existing elsewhere but the physical space before the audience, his aptly chosen words (φάσκειν . . . ὁρᾶν, ‘rest assured that you see’) may remind the viewer of the leap of faith that was involved in accepting the dramatic illusion” (194). A similar use of φάσκειν occurs in Sophocles’s Philoctetes, when Heracles tells us all, “Know that you’re hearing with your ears the voice / and seeing the sight of Heracles” (φάσκειν δ’ αὐδὴν τὴν Ἡρακλέους / ἀκοῇ τε κλύειν λεύσσειν τ’ ὄψιν, 1411–12). See Finglass 2007: 96 on Soph. El. 9.

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Opening Spaces      43

as well as to thinking or knowing, also suggests the role of speech in shaping the dramatic space. But the list of sites renders the process of seeing theater here, the process of phaskein horan (φάσκειν ὁρᾶν), far more flexible and multilayered than a simple visualization of a verbal direction. By seeing with the Paedagogus and Orestes, the audience can see the theater and Athens as Mycenae, but also as Argos, both mythical and contemporary. The allusion to fifth-century structures encourages an ancient audience to relate the setting to the actual site of Argos in the Peloponnese, but it may then also remind it that Mycenae, which was actually destroyed by Argos in the 460s, can only exist—can only take Argos’s place—in the fictional world of the theater.6 Thus, in these opening lines of the prologue, a moment when tragic characters often make clear their play’s setting, Sophocles prevents any simple one-to-one process of representation, instead offering multiple ways for his audience to view the dramatic space. This chapter examines how settings are constructed in both tragedy and comedy. My focus is the prologue, since this is when spectators must do the most work in identifying the setting: having typically seen the performance space represent somewhere different within the same festival or even in a play just preceding this one, they must now understand anew both the dramatic space and the central characters’ relationship to it. The comedies and tragedies that I will discuss here draw attention within their opening scenes to the phenomenology of space in the theater, revealing, as the entire book reveals, that tragedians and comedians alike experimented with how to shape their audiences’ viewing experiences. These plays interrogate the process whereby an audience can be led to identify the space before and around it in a particular way. As we shall see, this process often involves senses beyond sight, especially sound. The plays typically accomplish such interrogation via a form of staged spectatorship—that is, through a character acting as an internal spectator, seeing with and for the audience, as the Paedagogus does in Sophocles’s Electra. Such exposure of the means of theatrical representation, I argue, amplifies the audience’s own role in the construction of dramatic space.

6.  Dunn 2006 sees such “chronological irony” in terms of further raising the question of whether Sophocles will follow the precedents of Aeschylus and tragedy (Argos) or those of Homer and epic (Mycenae) (195).

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tragic and comic space Comedy is usually discussed separately from tragedy when it comes to spatial conventions.7 It is often noted that, in contrast to the typical fixity of tragic space, comic settings tend to be more changeable, often shifting during the course of a play and sometimes within a single scene. Some comic characters explicitly perform such shifts from one place to another, as Xanthias and Dionysus do as they travel to Hades in the long prologue of Aristophanes’s Frogs, or Trygaeus as he flies on a dung beetle to Olympus in Peace.8 Comedy’s dramatic settings seem also to require more extensive spatial set-up and identification, since whereas tragedy draws from a repertoire of myth that may more immediately situate the audience, the setting of Aristophanic comedy, however Athenocentric it might be, tends to be more open and capable of surprise. As Nick Lowe puts it, “Comic prologues . . . have to construct an entire universe ex nihilo. . . . [A]s Antiphanes’ famous syncrisis ruefully notes, in comedy it is not possible simply to say ‘This is Thebes and the king is Oedipus,’ and have the audience instantly know what the skēnē represents and who all the characters are.”9 The surviving fragments of Cratinus suggest that even comedies with mythological settings could begin with elaborate, protracted constructions of the dramatic setting—in Cratinus’s case necessitated by his new, unpredictable retellings of traditional myth.10 7.  On the spatial dynamics of classical tragedy, see especially Taplin 1977, 1978: 21–41; Zeitlin 1985 (= Zeitlin 1996: 341–74); Padel 1990; Kuntz 1993; Saïd 1993; Di Benedetto and Medda 1997; Wiles 1997; Rehm 2002, 2012a, 2012b; Ley 2007; Lloyd 2012; Kampourelli 2016; Bakola 2018. On space in Greek comedy see especially Saïd 1997; Silk 2000; Jay-Robert 2003; Lowe 2006; Revermann 2006: 107–45; Bowie 2012; Worman 2014. See also Issacharoff 1987 on the semiotics of comic space more generally. Lowe 2006 demonstrates some similarities between Aristophanes’s construction of space and spatial meaning and that found in tragedy, especially in terms of the skēnē door as a boundary between private interiors and public exteriors. 8.  On comedy “acting out” spatial movement and change, see Revermann 2006: 126–27. On the prologue of Frogs, see especially Russo 1994: 209–13; Worman 2014. As Lowe 2006: 59–60 notes, however, for the rest of the play the identity of the skēnē (as Pluto’s palace) remains remarkably constant. Like Thiercy 2000, Lowe demonstrates the spatial coherency of Aristophanic drama in general. 9.  Lowe 2006: 52, referring to Antiphanes fr. 189 KA. The fragment itself does not actually mention Thebes: “I need only say ‘Oedipus,’ and they [the spectators] know everything else” (Οἰδίπουν γὰρ ἂν μόνον / φῶ, τἄλλα πάντ’ ἴσασιν, 5–6). 10.  On the construction of mythical settings in comedy, see Bakola 2010: 230–51. At 234–46 she focuses on Cratinus fr. 143 KA: apparently from the opening parodos of Odysseus

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Several tragedies, however, complicate such a dichotomy of tragic vs. comic space. Euripides tends to keep his dramas fixed in the one setting, but surviving plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus indicate that tragic space did not have to remain so static. In Sophocles’s Ajax, a play that I will discuss in more detail below, the setting shifts from outside the hero’s tent to the remote spot on the shore where he kills himself.11 And Aeschylus’s Eumenides exhibits extreme spatial movement, easily on a par with the multiple shifts in setting that we find in many comedies. This tragedy begins by showing us both the outside and the inside of Apollo’s temple at Delphi. The Pythia first gives an elaborate aetiology of the place, emphasizing the change in setting from the two preceding tragedies, and then, remarkably, exits and re-enters, effectively restarting the play with a focus on what is within the skēnē instead—the terrifying bodies of the Erinyes.12 The audience sees the inside as Orestes and Apollo appear, possibly on an ekkyklēma, then the ghost of Clytemnestra, and soon (or perhaps already) also the chorus of Erinyes, whom, as we saw in the introduction, the Pythia has described so vividly.13 The dramatic setting later shifts again, this time further from the original location but into the Athenian audience’s own immediate spatial environment, first to the temple of Athena Polias on the Acropolis and then (probably) to the Areopagus.14 though delivered by Odysseus himself, these lines reveal an elaborate construction of a sea storm, achieved through a mix of deictic gestures, vivid verbal descriptions, choreography, music, props, stage scenery, and perhaps sound effects produced using a bronteion or similar device. This play also seems to fit the pattern described by Lowe 2006: 52 with respect to Aristophanic comedy, whereby the arrival of the chorus with the parodos tends to fix the dramatic location with more certainty than the prologue. 11.  On the staging of Ajax, see especially the papers in Most and Ozbek 2015. 12.  Taplin 1977: 362–63. 13.  On the possible use of an ekkyklēma here, see especially Taplin 1977: 365–74; Sommerstein 1989: 33, 93; Di Benedetto and Medda 1997: 89–90, 98–99. West 1990a: 265–69 argues for a moveable skēnē façade. On the related question of when the full chorus is meant to be physically present in the orchēstra, see note 35 in the introduction. Rehm 1988: 290–301 (cf. 2002: 89–91) argues that the temple’s interior would be represented in the orchēstra, even as the Pythia delivers her opening monologue. 14.  The shift from the temple on the Acropolis to the Areopagus has been contested: see Scullion 1994: 77–86. Rehm 2002: 89 tracks a spatial shift across the entire Oresteia, culminating in the multiple changes of dramatic setting in Eumenides: “The progressive flexibility of scenic space over the course of the three plays—from the solitary focus on the house in Agamemnon, to the twin settings of tomb and palace in Libation Bearers, to the triple scenic locations in Eumenides—mirrors the trilogy’s movement from a fixed mythic past toward the more openended contemporary world of the audience” (cf. Rehm 2012a: 321–22).

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According to the fragmentary hypothesis of Women of Aetna, which Aeschylus apparently produced in Sicily in honor of the tyrant Hieron’s founding of the city (476/5 BCE), this play likewise included multiple changes of scene, requiring its audiences to see the dramatic space successively as Aetna (probably the mountain rather than the city), Xuthia (near Leontini), Aetna again, Leontini, Syracuse, and Temenite, a Syracusan suburb.15 So just as comic space did not have to fluctuate—in Wasps the setting actually remains the same throughout—so tragic space did not have to be rigidly fixed.16 As my opening example from Sophocles’s Electra demonstrated, tragedy could also include quite complex constructions of space.17 This is in part precisely because (not despite the fact that) the mythical-theatrical repertoire colors the audience’s understanding of the setting from the moment the play begins: a focus on space is one way to distinguish this treatment from other representations of the same story. So, in Electra, the spatial layering both recalls the Aeschylean (and perhaps also Euripidean) setting of Argos and immediately establishes Sophocles’s version—set in Mycenae—as different.18 Iphigenia in Tauris, to take another example, begins with Iphigenia talking about Aulis and her sacrifice there, before she then suddenly reveals her new position, the “barbarian and mythically unconventional” land of the Taurians.19 In Andromache, Euripides conjures up the other locations associated with the titular character—her home city of Thebe in Mysia, which she addresses in the first line as if she can see it,20 and Priam’s house in Troy—

15.  POxy. 2257. On the changing dramatic settings of Women of Aetna, see Taplin 1977: 416–18; Poli-Palladini 2001. Bosher 2012b links them to the Syracusan performance context: “That such unorthodox shifts of location were written into a play destined for Sicilian performance suggests that plays produced in Sicily may not have followed Athenian customs” (107). 16.  On the spatial unity of Wasps see Lowe 2006: 49–51. Scholars have also argued for scene changes (or “refocusing,” A. M. Dale’s influential term for movement from one area on the stage to another) in Aeschylus’s Persians and Libation Bearers: see especially Dale 1969: 119–20; Taplin 1977: 103–7, 338–40, 454. Scullion 1994: 67–128 argues against scene changes in any tragedy other than Eumenides. 17.  Cf. Rehm 2002: 20–21 on tragedy’s scenic flexibility. 18.  The question of whether Euripides’s Electra predated Sophocles’s play or vice versa has been much debated: see especially Denniston 1939: xxxiv–ix; Michelini 1987: 199–206; Cropp 1988: xlviii–lx; Finglass 2007: 1–3. 19.  Allan 2008: 144. 20.  Ἀσιάτιδος γῆς σχῆμα, Θηβαία πόλις (“Asian land’s form, city of Thebe,” Eur. Andr. 1). Though the initial address to Thebe might momentarily raise the possibility that this is the

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before landing the audience in Phthia and then further identifying this setting in terms of three generations of Neoptolemus’s family. Though the dramatic space, once identified, remains consistent in these two plays, the other locations mentioned in the opening lines become part of their initial construction, reminding the audience of the protagonist’s crucial backstory before being overlaid with her present situation. It is such processes of constructing space that interest me in this chapter. Most of the discussion below concerns the prologues of plays by Aristophanes and Sophocles, especially Acharnians, with its extensive play with the spatial overlap of the theater and the assembly, and Oedipus at Colonus, in which Sophocles uses several spatial strategies also found in comedy to encourage his audience to visualize space with Antigone and Oedipus. My focus on Aristophanes and Sophocles is not meant to suggest that they were obviously more innovative in this respect than other classical playwrights. Euripides, as we have already seen from the two examples above, could also complicate his audience’s initial identification of dramatic space. Above all, as I mentioned in the introduction with reference to the work of Froma Zeitlin in particular, the parodos of Ion, in which the chorus marvels at the sculptural scenes adorning the temple of Apollo at Delphi, reveals this tragedian’s deep interest in the language of visual description and the cultural repertoire against which spectators come to “recognize, evaluate, and interpret the visual codes of what they see.”21 As for Aeschylus, we have already seen that the scene changes in Eumenides and Women of Aetna indicate his transgeneric play with tragic space. The opening scene of Agamemnon, with the watchman lying on the roof of the skēnē, also demonstrates how he could construct the dramatic space through explicit references to a part of the theater’s physical structure and the actor’s position in relation to it.22 Meanwhile the fragments of Cratinus, as Emmanuela Bakola has shown, reveal innovative uses of space in dramatic setting, the use of the word σχῆμα (shape, appearance, figure) suggests that it exists more as an elusive form than as an onstage presence. Cf. Eur. Hec. 619, where Hecuba apostrophizes her house at Troy, now destroyed. (But contrast its use at Alc. 912, where it periphrastically refers to a physical object visible onstage—that is, Admetus’s house, represented by the skēnē.) On its meaning at Andr. 1, see Stevens 1971: 85 ad loc. 21.  Zeitlin 1994: 140–41; cf. Estrin 2018. 22.  On the position of the actor here, see especially Taplin 1977: 276–77; Sommerstein 2010: 155. On the materialization of both the house and the beacon in this scene, see Weiss 2018b: 178.

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non-Aristophanic comedy.23 Nevertheless, the dramas by Aristophanes and Sophocles that I analyze here do point to an especially pronounced tendency in the work of these two playwrights to lay bare, at the very start of a comedy or tragedy, the experiential role of the spectator in the construction of dramatic space. In addition, as we shall see in the case of Birds and Oedipus at Colonus, Aristophanes and Sophocles even experimented with the possibility of explicitly depriving their audience of any initial spatial identification altogether.

seeing the setting How an audience visualizes the dramatic setting is a mix of what it hears, what it (actually) sees, and all the knowledge and experiences that inform its seeing. In my example from Sophocles’s Electra, I focused on the language of its opening lines, on which the audience depends for a precise identification of what the skēnē represents. The most famous and famously explicit example of such a verbal creation of space is the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V, when the chorus invites us to see “within this wooden O” the “vasty fields of France”; as States writes, “the character creates a verbal world that bathes what we see before us in its quality.”24 It is not just a verbal world, however, but also an acoustic and corporeal one: words are heard and the bodies that produce them are (most of the time, at least) seen, so that an audience’s understanding of what they represent results as much from vocal effects (in addition to any nonvocal sounds) and bodily movement—like that of the Paedagogus pointing to areas of the theater—as from actual verbal content.25 And in the open-air Greek theater, especially but not exclusively in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, the site of first performance for most of the plays that have survived,26 these sounds and bodies can interact not just with props and stage scenery but with the physical structure of the theater itself and the buildings, landscape, sky, and sea beyond it.27 23.  Bakola 2010: 230–51. 24.  States 1985: 57. 25.  Cf. Rehm 2002: 9–12 against an overly textual understanding of tragic space. 26.  My discussion here is Athenocentric, considering the spatial construction of tragedies and comedies primarily as they were designed for a first production in Athens, but many of the strategies that I describe could be effective in other settings as well. 27.  See Rehm 2002: 35–75 on the performance conditions in Athens, with an emphasis on the “expansive outdoor space” (35); also Meineck 2018: 52–78.

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The distinction between space that is materially visible and space that is verbally described is central to many theoretical discussions of theater’s spatial dynamics. A semiotic approach like Michael Issacharoff’s emphasizes the “sign system” by which the spatial setting of a dramatic narrative is signified, often privileging the role of a play’s text but also considering the effects of theater buildings and their location within wider social spaces.28 A phenomenological approach like that taken by States emphasizes the “affective corporeality” of theater as a way of communicating meaning—that is, how we as an audience experience space through our own sensory engagement with what we hear (words, sound effects) and see (scenery, bodies).29 Combining such approaches, Gay McAuley divides space into five categories: the physical space of the theater and its surrounding urban area; “presentational space,” by which she means actors’ bodily engagement with space; onstage and offstage fictional space; “thematic space,” referring to the ideological workings of space within a play and its production; and, at work across all spatial categories, “textual space,” that is, “the spatial structures contained in the playtext,” including the naming and description of place, verbs of movement, and other indications of proxemic dynamics like deictics and prepositions.30 At the heart of McAuley’s methodology is her emphasis on how “the onstage is always both perceived and conceived,” seen as and through a mix of physical and fictional elements.31 In this she recalls Garner’s characterization of all theater as a “play of actuality”—that is, as I discussed in the introduction, a constant oscillation between the actual and virtual or presentational 28.  E.g., Ubersfeld 1977, 1981; Pavis 1980; Issacharoff 1981, 1989; Jansen 1984. Analyses of space in classical Greek theater that draw on contemporary methodologies in theater and performance studies tend to adopt a purely semiotic approach (Rehm 2002 is a notable exception): see, e.g., Edmunds 1996; Wiles 1997; Revermann 2006: 107–45; Kampourelli 2016. 29.  States 1985: 27; also especially Garner 1994. 30.  McAuley 1999: 32. 31.  McAuley 1999: 21. Here she problematizes the distinction made by Scolnicov 1987 between “perceived space” and “conceived space.” Cf. Elam 1980 on the different temporal levels (“discourse time,” “plot time,” “chronological time,” “historical time”) constituting the “dramatic world” (71–72). My emphasis on the duality of physical and fictional, actual and virtual—and on how both tragic and comic playwrights exploit it to shape their audience’s viewing experience—is one important way in which my approach to the spatial dynamics of ancient theater is distinct from that of Rehm 2002. On the relationship between “fictional” and “real” worlds in ancient Greek theater (specifically Old Comedy) more generally, see especially Ruffell 2011, particularly 36–47.

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and representational.32 My own approach is similar to McAuley’s in how I bring together multiple overlapping spatial categories that together produce a complex “play of actuality” in the audience’s experience of dramatic space— and one that, as Garner puts it, can be “fueled by difference and absence.”33 Inevitably I focus above all on the fictional or virtual space created through the text: the plays that I study here all to some degree produce their dramatic spaces through words, conjuring up their own “kingdom[s] for a stage.” The words are also, of course, the primary route for me as a philologist to access those spaces—and indeed to access the bodies and props that I discuss in the following two chapters. We have already established, however, that for a theater audience they are heard, not read; they should therefore be understood in terms of “acoustic space” or “acoustic scenery,” formed through vocal utterance and incorporating music and sound effects in addition to the words themselves.34 Acoustic space interacts with visible and nonvisible structures within and around the theater, and with the actors’ own proxemic movement, or, to use McAuley’s terminology, with the “presentational space.”35 All these types of space interact with the cultural, mythical-theatrical repertoire that also informs the audience’s spatial understanding.36 I use the term “dramatic space,” then, not specifically to denote the virtual space evoked by the text,37 but instead to encompass a broader phenomenology of space during a theater performance, experienced by an audience through a combination of different signs and sensory inputs.38

32.  Garner 1994: 39–45, 2007. 33.  Garner 1994: 43. 34.  States 1985: 50–57; see also especially Honzl 1976 [1940]; Elam 1980: 57–58; Issacharoff 1981: 218–20. I do not consider in detail here all the nonverbal sound effects included in the category of acoustic space: for example, the use of a bronteion to give the impression of a storm or earthquake, or the auletic accompaniment to a choral song, which could help to conjure up the offstage scene of a sea journey, with rowers keeping time to its tune (Weiss 2018b: 78–84, 180–84). 35.  See Brook 1968 for a classic account of how theater occurs through the bodily activation of space. Cf. Lefebvre 1991 on gesture and space: “Bodies themselves generate spaces, which are produced by and for their gestures” (216). 36.  Cf. Kampourelli 2016: 15–16 on “intertheatrical space.” 37.  Ubersfeld 1977, 1981; Issacharoff 1981. 38.  Since I am interested more in the overlapping impacts of these signs and inputs on the audience than in the precise nature of the spaces represented, categories like “scenic space” or “extrascenic space” (used, for example, by Rehm 2002) are not especially helpful for my analysis here.

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staged spectatorship The dramatic space is activated for the audience when an actor (or chorus) enters and frames it through his speech and movement. Many surviving tragedies establish their setting within the first few lines, whether through dialogue (Sophocles’s favorite method) or in the programmatic prologue for which Euripides became renowned. Often, especially in Euripidean tragedy, this is done through a quick deictic statement that both identifies the dramatic space and situates the actor’s body in relation to it.39 So, for example, Euripides’s Bacchae begins with Dionysus declaring, “I have come to this Theban land” (ἥκω . . . τήνδε Θηβαίαν χθόνα, 1). At the start of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, Odysseus announces, “This is the shore of the sea-girt land / of Lemnos” (ἀκτὴ μὲν ἥδε τῆς περιρρύτου χθονὸς / Λήμνου, 1–2), emphasizing from the outset the play’s unusual setting. In Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, when Orestes says that he has “come to this land” (ἥκω γὰρ εἰς γῆν τήνδε, 3), we know both from the previous play in the tetralogy and from our prior knowledge of his story that we are therefore probably still in Argos. He then identifies the location more exactly by referring to a physical prop evident onstage, both with a deictic and corresponding gesture and through his own address to Agamemnon, who is buried there: “upon this mound of a tomb I call upon my father” (τύμβου δ’ ἐπ’ ὄχθῳ τῷδε κηρύσσω πατρί, 4). In all such cases the actor provides an immediate identification of the space that he is inhabiting as a character, showing the audience with his body as well as with his words how we are to understand it for the length of the play. Aristophanic comedy does not tend to fix the setting so immediately using this sort of swift deictic statement.40 But in both tragedy and comedy, plays

39.  Cf. Mueller 2016a: “In the theater deictics often actively create the specific features of the dramatic environment to which they simultaneously, or subsequently, refer” (7). See especially Felson 2004 on how deictics can bridge reality and fantasy. 40.  In Knights, Peace, and Wasps, however, the setting does become clear quite quickly. On the comparative use of deictics in tragedy and comedy, see D’Alessio 2007: 101–2; Jacobson 2011. As D’Alessio notes, deictics are “una caratteristica propria di un genere di spettacolo in cui il testo costantemente attira l’attenzione su quello che lo spettatore deve vedere” (102). Bakola 2010: 248 suggests that one reason for comedy not being so prone to using deictics in this way is its spatial flexibility: “Less precision and repetition in spatial references and descriptions made it easier for the scene to change, or for the skēnē-building to be reidentified or transformed, as often, into a simple ‘inside’ space.” Cf. Jacobson 2011: 67–68. The lower quantity of deictics does not, of course, mean a lack of nonverbal gestures demarcating space: on the likely extensive use of these in Old Comedy see Poe 2000.

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that begin with a more pronounced emphasis on the construction of space tend to stress the act of seeing in relation to the physical structures within, of, and around the theater. In doing so, they also tend to draw the audience’s attention to the position and movement of the actors within the performance space. The language of sight in these opening (or at least early) scenes can be directed at the audience as much as at an internal interlocutor, prompting them to share the same view and affective response. In this section, I provide a few brief examples of such prologues to demonstrate how actors’ visual language and proxemic movement can create a dynamic of spectatorship internal to the drama, so that, however briefly, the audience is encouraged to adopt the same sightlines as one of the characters. As we already saw with the example of the Paedagogus in Electra, however, such moments of staged spectatorship are not necessarily straightforward or seamless; they can highlight and exploit the complexities of theatrical representation as much as facilitate it. Another play by Sophocles that begins with an emphasis on the act of seeing in relation to the dramatic space is Ajax. This scene of staged spectatorship does not simply help the audience to identify the skēnē but also already makes clear, long before Ajax’s suicide on the deserted shore, the close relationship between his presence and the play’s setting: “when Ajax moves, the whole play follows after him.”41 Verbs of seeing in the opening lines focus directly on the physical structure of the performance space, as Athena tells Odysseus, “I see you at the tents (skēnais) of Ajax by the ships, where he has the outermost post” (ἐπὶ σκηναῖς σε ναυτικαῖς ὁρῶ / Αἴαντος, ἔνθα τάξιν ἐσχάτην ἔχει, 3–4). In doing so, she reveals the location by focusing the audience’s attention on the skēnē (the stage building; Ajax’s tent) and on Odysseus’s prowling movements around it, as he looks (ἴδῃς, 6) for Ajax. The spectators, like Athena, are unseen or at least out of sight (ἄποπτος, 15), and look on the scene from that privileged position.42 But they are also led to identify with Odysseus himself, as he examines the skēnē and wonders what is inside—and indeed as he looks for Ajax, whom the audience too awaits as the play’s protagonist.

41.  Knox 1961: 2. 42.  There has been extensive scholarly debate about the extent to which Odysseus can or cannot see Athena in this scene, and where Athena therefore appears (onstage, offstage, on a theologeion on top of the skēnē, etc.). Finglass 2011: 137–38 summarizes the positions; see also Angelopoulou 2020 on “the interaction between visible and invisible bodies onstage” in the prologue (43).

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Informing both the audience and Odysseus that Ajax has just gone inside, Athena states that there is no longer any need to “peer within this door” (εἴσω τῆσδε παπταίνειν πύλης, 11): they all now know what the skēnē door there before them represents and who is within it. At the same time, this focus on the stage building, the man within, and the man who tracks him makes it a charged space, generating in the audience a nervous anticipation for Ajax’s entrance (that is, his exit from the skēnē) at the end of the prologue.43 Internal spectators can thus prompt an audience’s initial understanding of and emotional response to the dramatic space. They can also prompt a change in such understanding as the setting itself changes, and in doing so lay bare what that visual process entails. Clouds, for example, begins “inside out,” with Strepsiades and Pheidippides in bed, though without any clear spatial identifiers.44 But after Strepsiades wakes his son and starts to explain his plan for evading his debtors, they shift apparently seamlessly into outside space and the skēnē comes to represent the Thinkery. At this moment the dramatic setting, which will remain the same for the rest of the play, is established with marked clarity: Στ.      δεῦρό νυν ἀπόβλεπε. ὁρᾷς τὸ θύριον τοῦτο καὶ τᾠκίδιον; Φε. ὁρῶ. τί οὖν τοῦτ’ ἐστὶν ἐτεόν, ὦ πάτερ; Στ. ψυχῶν σοφῶν τοῦτ’ ἐστὶ φροντιστήριον. Ph. S. Ph.

Now look over here. Do you see this little door and this little house? I see them. What is this exactly, father? This is the Thinkery for clever souls. —Ar. Nub. 91–94

On the one hand, this scene of directed spectatorship resembles numerous others in classical Greek drama, with one character telling the other to look at something that he then identifies, thereby urging the audience to understand it in the same way. We might think of the sightseeing scene in Euripides’s Ion, for example, or the Titan’s pleas in [Aeschylus’s] Prometheus Bound to all 43.  Cf. Ringer 1998: 32; also Rehm 2012b (“Rarely in tragedy does extra-scenic space receive such attention” [335]). 44.  On this tableau (and the unlikelihood that an ekkyklēma would be used) see Revermann 2006: 180–82. The opening scene of Euripides’s Orestes provides an interesting comparandum for such an “inside out” start; see Revermann 2006: 180–82, as well as Taplin 1977: 135–36.

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around him to look upon his suffering body, which I discuss in detail in chapter 4.45 On the other hand, this moment in Clouds is striking in how it enacts the process whereby the audience is to (re)orient its visual understanding of the skēnē. Strepsiades quite explicitly refers to the physical structures of the performance space, while Pheidippides acts the part of the audience, seeing the skēnē and the door but not yet knowing what “exactly” (ἐτεόν, 93) they represent until his father marks them as the sophists’ Thinkery. The shift in how the internal and external spectators alike are to view these structures comes with the imperative δεῦρό . . . ἀπόβλεπε in line 91, directing them not just to “look” but to “look away [from there] to here.” Strepsiades is in effect telling the audience to refocus and look anew at the skēnē, the identity of which is now no longer ambiguous. He is not simply announcing the new dramatic location but directing the process of visualizing it. In Peace, another play in which the setting shifts during the prologue, the technique of staged spectatorship ultimately highlights the incongruity of the spatial transformation. From the opening lines of Peace our focus is drawn to the skēnē door through which the First Slave rushes in and out with cakes of dung.46 When the Second Slave explains the situation to the spectators (τῶν θεατῶν, 43), he reveals that the skēnē represents his master’s house. Just as the slave is about to look inside (ὄψομαι, 78), however, Trygaeus comes out on the mēchanē and soon flies his Etna beetle to “the halls of Zeus” (Διὸς . . . αὐλάς, 161). His song in lines 154–72, urging the beetle forward, and presumably his corresponding movement on the mēchanē, encourage the audience to view the dramatic space as in flux.47 He then announces “I see the house of Zeus” (καθορῶ τὴν οἰκίαν τὴν τοῦ Διός, 178) and knocks on the skēnē door—probably the same one that previously represented the entrance to Trygaeus’s house and will do so again.48 Directing the audience to “see” in the same way, this statement identifies the space anew, apparently completing the shift from the 45.  Eur. Ion 184–218; [Aesch.] PV 88–95, 141, 298–99, 304–5, 1093. 46.  This scene provides a rare example in Aristophanic comedy of a description of “extrascenic” space—that is, of space that is invisible but immediately accessed (typically via the skēnē door or ekkyklēma) from the space represented onstage (see Bowie 2012: 370). The term “extrascenic” comes from Ubersfeld 1977. To use McAuley’s terminology, this is a localized offstage fictional place that is contiguous to the performance space (1999: 30–32). 47.  The mēchanē may have been used similarly in Cratinus’s Nemesis, in which Zeus flies to Rhamnous; see Bakola 2010: 251. 48.  On the use of the same door for both houses, see Lowe 2006: 61n13.

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one location to the other. But the ostentatiously bizarre nature of the spatial change also generates resistance: the audience still holds in mind what the skēnē previously represented, and much of the scene’s comedy lies in the uncomfortable layering of Trygaeus’s dung-filled house and Zeus’s palace.

seeing theater, seeing assembly Sophocles’s Electra and Ajax and Aristophanes’s Clouds and Peace all, then, provide examples of staged spectatorship could bring the act of phaskein horan to the fore in the construction of dramatic space. A related form of staged spectatorship occurs when, instead of one character acting as a guide for another, a character behaves quite explicitly like a notional member of the audience in how he interacts with the theater space and the performers within it. This technique tends to be used in plays set in Athens, in which the gap between actual and virtual space can be especially blurry. It is particularly pronounced, as I show in this section, in Aristophanes’s Acharnians, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Assemblywomen, and also, as I show in the next section, in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. Most tragedies produce for an Athenian audience a dramatic setting at a distance from Athens itself, whether in another Greek city (most often Thebes or Argos) or somewhere more exotic like Egypt or Scythia. Nevertheless, even when they are set elsewhere, tragedies can still integrate the actual surroundings of the theater within their construction of the dramatic space. They may do so by gesturing to structures visible from or at least close to the theater space, thereby encouraging the audience to link verbal description to physical architecture. For example, in Euripides’s Hypsipyle, when Thoas tells his brother Euneos to look up at the reliefs decorating Zeus’s temple at Nemea (fr. 764 TrGF), this direction could draw some audience members’ attention beyond the Theater of Dionysus to the abandoned Peisistratid temple of Zeus to the southeast of Dionysus’s precinct. Tragedies can also bring other Athenian spaces into the theater through a form like the agōn and references to political oratory.49 Characters like Hecuba and Helen in Euripides’s Trojan Women, for example, assume the terminology of sophistic orators as they speak in turn and thus conjure up the environment—if not the specific spatial features—of the law 49.  Athenian drama’s engagement with political institutions and rhetoric has been much discussed: see, e.g., Ober and Strauss 1990; Lloyd 1992; Halliwell 1997; Pelling 2005.

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court (914–1033). In that play the evocation of such a space for male public debate jars uncomfortably with the setting outside the ruins of Troy, the helplessness of the female captives, and the lack of any jury beyond Menelaus himself. As we will see below in the case of Oedipus at Colonus, some tragedies explicitly incorporate within the dramatic space the Athenian landscape close to the original audience’s own situation in the Theater of Dionysus. Even so, Aristophanic comedy tends, as is well known, to be much more markedly Athenocentric, frequently engaging directly with the city’s urban fabric. Most of the surviving comedies are fully or partially set in Athens; even when the setting moves somewhere fantastical, such as heaven in Peace or Cloudcuckooland in Birds, it tends to have marked parallels with the city of its production.50 Acharnians, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Assemblywomen engage extensively with one local structure in particular: the Pnyx, the small hill where the assembly (ekklēsia) was held, to the west and slightly south of the theater. The theater and assembly, as scholars have long noted, were very similar in their spatial organization, with a large audience seated on a slope facing and responding to multiple speakers who would perform for them in the stage area or on the assembly platform (bēma).51 The functions of these spaces and the behaviors exhibited within them could also overlap, not just in the ideological sense in which, for both of them, participation as an audience member was part of the performance of democracy.52 On the one hand, following the City Dionysia, at which both Women at the Thesmophoria and Assemblywomen were probably first produced,53 the assembly would actually be held in the Theater of Dionysus. On the other, as Cleon famously claims in Thucydides’s account of the Mytilinean Debate in 427 BCE, Athenians in the late fifth century could apparently behave in the assembly as if they were

50.  See Bowie 2012: 367–68 on this sort of “scenic doubling.” The dramatic space in Cratinus’s plays with mythical settings could also strongly evoke Athens (Bakola 2010: 249). 51.  On the parallels see especially Ober 1989: 152–53; Loraux 2002: 15–19; Rehm 2002: 53–54. I use the term “stage area” to allow for the possibility of a slightly raised wooden stage that extended into the orchēstra. On the likelihood that a raised stage was used in the Theater of Dionysus in the late fifth century, see most recently Tsitsiridis 2019. 52.  On theatergoing as a performance of democracy, see especially Goldhill 1997, 1999, 2000; also the introduction to this book. 53.  On the performance context of Women at the Thesmophoria, see Austin and Olson 2004: xxxiii–xliv; on Assemblywomen, see Sommerstein 1998: 7. Acharnians was first produced at the Lenaea festival.

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passively watching a show in the theater (Thuc. 3.38). Acharnians, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Assemblywomen, plays spanning Aristophanes’s career, all exploit and participate in these spatial associations. The theater-assembly analogy lies at the very heart of Acharnians (425 BCE), Aristophanes’s earliest surviving play; it is also part of a broader pattern of spatial blending. The audience is repeatedly asked to reidentify the dramatic space, as the action moves from the assembly to Dicaeopolis’s house and then between his house and those of Euripides and Lamachus.54 Places are brought together, beginning with the theater and assembly in the prologue. When the skēnē is finally identified as Dicaeopolis’s house, which he enters to celebrate the Rural Dionysia (202), the exact setting is ambiguous. Referred to as both in the city and in the countryside, the house’s location appears deliberately twofold. As Angus Bowie has suggested, it thus reflects Dicaeopolis’s own identity as both a countryman and a citizen of Athens.55 When the skēnē is then rather abruptly reidentified as Euripides’s house (394) and Dicaeopolis performs an extensive parody of Telephus, the audience sees the performance space as a mix of comic and tragic.56 Much of the rest of the comedy concerns the merging of public and private space as Dicaeopolis opens his own market outside his house, marking out its boundaries onstage (719–28). And if a production were to use just the one skēnē door,57 then towards the end, when Dicaeopolis and Lamachus repeatedly send their slaves inside to fetch food and (in Lamachus’s case) armor and military supplies (1097–1141), this could not only shift from representing one house entrance to another but represent both at once. The merging of their houses, with such different items appearing from the one entrance, could accentuate the contrast between the luxuries and comforts enjoyed by Dicaeopolis and the hardships and dangers that Lamachus will continue to endure. The blending of theater and assembly in the prologue is distinct from those later combinations, however, precisely because here Aristophanes so explicitly amalgamates the theater space, performance space, presentational space

54.  On the extreme spatial fluidity of Acharnians, see especially Slater 1993; Slater 2002: 42–49; Saïd 1997: 341–43. In contrast with earlier scholars, Lowe 2006: 60–61 demonstrates the coherence of the play’s spatial scheme. 55.  Bowie 2012: 365–67. 56.  On the merging of tragic and comic space in Acharnians, see Slater 1993: 402–3, 411; Slater 2002: 49, 60–61. 57.  Olson 2002: lxix–lxx.

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(bodies in space), and extra-theater space. Such a spatial hybrid is constructed in the play’s opening lines through Dicaeopolis’s overt identification with the audience. Scholars have for a long time noticed how he initially acts as if he were at the theater himself, occupying the same position as the audience and reflecting on his own past viewing experience.58 His catalogue of performances almost entirely concerns festival entertainments: a play by Theognis when he was expecting, mouth open with anticipation (’κεχήνη, 10), one by Aeschylus; also performances by the kitharode Dexitheus and the aulete Chaeris. The humiliating incident concerning Cleon that he mentions first of all may refer to a comedy.59 Not yet giving his name, he positions himself not as a particular individual but as one of the audience members, urging on them the sort of anticipation he felt for Aeschylus as they await the entrance of (more) performers and wonder what this play will entail.60 When Dicaeopolis identifies the setting in lines 19–20, then, the audience is primed to see the dramatic space as simultaneously the physical space of the theater and the virtual space of the assembly. Shifting to his present situation, he declares that it is the appointed time for the assembly but “this Pnyx here is empty” (ἔρημος ἡ Πνὺξ αὑτηί, 20). The emphatic demonstrative pronoun, perhaps accompanied by a bodily gesture, tells the audience to see this space as the analogous one just a short walk away. Going on to claim that everyone is still in the agora instead (21), he introduces a third public Athenian space that will become the focus of the play’s second half, transformed into Dicaeopolis’s own private version. But here the focus is the blurring of theater and assembly, and Dicaeopolis continues to facilitate this mix by describing his own behavior as he waits for people to arrive on the Pnyx: ἐγὼ δ’ ἀεὶ πρώτιστος εἰς ἐκκλησίαν νοστῶν κάθημαι· κᾆτ’, ἐπειδὰν ὦ μόνος, στένω, κέχηνα, σκορδινῶμαι, πέρδομαι, 58.  Macdowell 1983: 145; Goldhill 1991: 186; Slater 1993: 398–400; Slater 2002: 43–47; Van Steen 1994: 216. On possible stagings of this scene, perhaps with Dicaeopolis seated relatively close to the audience, see Macdowell 1983: 147; Slater 1993: 398–400; Slater 2002: 42–47. Dicaeopolis also resembles a tragic hero, beginning a play with a list of his misfortunes: see Goldhill 1991: 186; Compton-Engle 2001. 59.  Slater 1993: 398; Slater 2002: 45; Olson 2002: 66–67 on Ar. Ach. 6–8. 60.  We do not learn that he is called Dicaeopolis until line 406. Cf. Macdowell 1983: “he is identified to the audience as one of themselves, sharing their experiences, before he is given a name or any other characteristics whatever” (145).

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ἀπορῶ, γράφω, παρατίλλομαι, λογίζομαι, ἀποβλέπων εἰς τὸν ἀγρὸν εἰρήνης ἐρῶν, στυγῶν μὲν ἄστυ τὸν δ’ ἐμὸν δῆμον ποθῶν. I’m always the very first to come to the assembly and sit down. And then, since I’m alone, I sigh, I yawn, I stretch, I fart, I’m bored, I write, I pluck my hair, I count, Looking away out to the countryside, longing for peace, Hating the city but yearning for my deme. —Ar. Ach. 28–33

As with the figures on the chous that I discussed in the introduction, Dicaeopolis here provides multiple possible models for the audience’s own response to a theatrical performance, even as he ostensibly describes his own actions when alone at the assembly. His use of the verb χάσκω (κέχηνα, 30), which he earlier used to refer to eagerness for an Aeschylean tragedy (’κεχήνη, 10), itself presents two different affects on the audience’s part: mouths open either from excited anticipation or from bored yawning. Thus the spaces of theater and assembly are merged through shared bodily behavior within them. They also come together through the alignment of Dicaeopolis’s own view, as he looks out (ἀποβλέπων, 32) beyond the theater/assembly, with the audience’s: from the Theater of Dionysus it too could see the Attic countryside, albeit the area to the south of the Acropolis rather than to the north, where his deme of Cholleidai is located. Presumably at the time of the play’s first production, many in the audience might also share his longing to return there after being confined in the city due to the war—an affective response that further intensifies the presence of actual space within the play’s virtual landscape. Dicaeopolis continues to share the audience’s position as other characters finally enter and the assembly begins, and in responding to what he sees and hears, he shapes the audience’s own viewing experience. For much of the next 130 lines he provides a running commentary on the various figures who appear, beginning with the prytaneis jostling for seats in front. In part he thus acts as a member of the citizen audience at the assembly, interjecting during the various proceedings there,61 but by remarking in particular on aspects of the characters’ costumes, he also aligns himself with the theater audience. When

61.  Macdowell 1983: 147; Slater 1993: 400; Slater 2002: 47; Van Steen 1994: 216.

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the Athenian ambassadors to Persia enter, his initial reaction concerns their spectacular appearance: “Whoa, O Ecbatana, what a costume!” (βαβαιάξ. ὦκβάτανα, τοῦ σχήματος, 64).62 Turning the capital of Media into an exclamation (ὦκβάτανα), Diceaeopolis implies that the ambassadors’ attire is so extraordinarily foreign that with their entrance an entire Persian city has become part of the dramatic space.63 Dicaeopolis’s response to the King’s Eye also focuses on the character’s appearance, this time pointing out an eye mask: ὦναξ Ἡράκλεις. πρὸς τῶν θεῶν, ἄνθρωπε ναύφαρκτον βλέπων, ἦ περὶ ἄκραν κάμπτων νεώσοικον σκοπεῖς; ἄσκωμ’ ἔχεις που περὶ τὸν ὀφθαλμὸν κάτω. Lord Heracles! By the gods, man, you’re looking warship-like, or are you bending around a point and looking for a dock? Perhaps you have a porthole flap around your lower eye. —Ar. Ach. 94–97

His reaction here encourages the audience to be equally amazed by this actor’s bizarre mask. The eye painted on it, resembling, according to Dicaeopolis, those painted on ships, appears as a comic literalization of the Persian official’s title—the King’s Eye wears an eye mask. But the focus on this extraordinary costume, a costume that is all about seeing and being seen, also reveals the allure of lavish spectacle, which here will help to persuade the assembly to believe the Persians have “bushels of gold” (ἀχάνας . . . χρυσίου, 108) for the Athenians, even though what the King’s Eye actually says in garbled Greek (οὐ λῆψι χρυσό, 104) suggests the contrary. Dicaeopolis then makes this show’s theatricality even more explicit by exposing the Persian’s attendants: like the actors themselves, they are Athenians who come “from right here” (ἐνθένδ’ αὐτόθεν, 116) and are costumed as eunuchs (εὐνοῦχος . . . ἐσκευασμένος, 121). The merging of theater and assembly culminates in these attendants’ exposure as, in both spaces, actors behind their costumes and masks.

62.  For σχῆμα as costume, cf. Ar. Ran. 463, 523; Eq. 1331. 63.  Cf. above on Eur. Andr. 1, when Andromache’s vocative address to Thebe brings that city into the dramatic space.

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At this point Dicaeopolis begins to separate himself from the audience, no longer sharing their view of the dramatic space and instead joining the spectacle itself.64 Sending Amphitheus off to obtain a private treaty with Sparta, he tells the audience, “You go on sending your ambassadors and gaping” (πρεσβεύεσθε καὶ κεχήνετε, 133). His use of the verb χάσκω (κεχήνετε) this time accentuates the difference, rather than the similarity, between their position and behavior: it is for the audience to gape—whether in excitement or in boredom—as spectators of both assembly and theater, while Dicaeopolis sets in motion the play’s plot. Following the entrance of Theorus and then his group of Thracian soldiers, the assembly is dissolved (173) and the dramatic space becomes neutral as the audience’s focus shifts to the exchange between Dicaeopolis and Amphitheus, who presents the treaties that he has obtained from Sparta. We may assume that Dicaeopolis is once again alone on the Pnyx,65 but with the exit of the prytaneis and absence of any further verbal references to the assembly, the audience is no longer prompted to see the sort of spatial merging that characterized the play’s opening.66 The neutral nature of the dramatic space in this brief scene then facilitates the quick shift at the end of the prologue, as the skēnē becomes Dicaeopolis’s home, which, as we have seen, is itself spatially undefined. Despite the shift away from the assembly, however, this setting, so powerfully evoked in the play’s opening, never really recedes from view within the first half of the play. Dicaeopolis continues to merge civic spaces as he avoids being attacked by the chorus of Acharnians by mixing tragic parody and costume with speeches reminiscent of both the law court and the assembly (366–84, 497–506). Even while he laments how easily citizens are delighted and deceived by fraudulent speeches and theatrical antics in the assembly, he himself is assuming the guise of the tragic Telephus to convince the Acharnians to let him go. He also, however, assumes to some extent the guise of Aristophanes himself, apparently speaking in his voice at 377–383 and 497–

64.  Cf. Slater 1993: 400; Slater 2002: 47. Assuming the use of a wooden stage platform, he suggests that Dicaeopolis must leave the outer part of the orchēstra and “mount the stage” when he begins to interrogate the King’s Eye at 109ff. 65.  Olson 2002: 125 on Ar. Ach. 172–73. 66.  On the neutrality of the dramatic space here, see Slater 1993: 400–1; Slater 2002: 47; Saïd 1997: 342.

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506, both times directly to the spectators.67 In the latter speech, he presents himself as both giving a speech “about the city” (περὶ τῆς πόλεως, 499) at the assembly and making a comedy (τρυγῳδίαν ποιῶν, 499—really a “trygedy,” a pun that underscores the comedy’s appropriation of tragedy) at the Lenaea festival (504).68 But even as Dicaeopolis continues to encourage the spectators to see these two spaces together, he disrupts such spatial blending by demanding of them a different sort of spectatorship. Already at the start of his speech at 366–84, when he uses the double imperative “look and see” (ἰδοὺ θεᾶσθε, 366), this seems to be a direction to the audience itself to do more than just see him making a speech over a chopping block. The focus on the audience’s own spectatorship becomes not simply a reflection on theater’s “play of actuality” but a way to promote a more discerning form of viewing. This is, in fact, what the chorus in the parabasis boasts about: that Aristophanes has prevented the Athenians from becoming, through flattery and deceptive speeches, χαυνοπολίτας (635)—a compound adjective meaning literally “gaping citizens,” from the same root as the verb χάσκω. Thus the spectatorial affect that has been repeatedly mentioned as a way to bring theater and assembly together, assimilating the possible responses of audiences in both spaces, becomes precisely how they are not to behave. The play suggests that, like Dicaeopolis himself, who switches from gaping spectator to participant in the dramatic action, the audience is also to become more actively involved in its city’s policymaking. Acharnians is the earliest extant play to exploit the similarity between the theater and assembly through an extended merging of the two spaces. Its prologue becomes part of the theatrical repertoire that helps to shape the viewing experience of audiences of subsequent dramas featuring the assembly. In Women at the Thesmophoria, produced probably in 411 BCE, as soon as Euripides starts explaining that he hopes to persuade Agathon to attend the assembly being held by the women at the Thesmophoria, we expect the dramatic setting to shift to something like the assembly at the Thesmophorium

67.  We should not, however, assume a precise or rigid identification between Dicaeopolis and Aristophanes. See Goldhill 1991: 190–96 on the “vertiginous destabilization of the poet’s voice” (196) in this speech. On Dicaeopolis’s roles here, see also the introduction to this book. 68.  On the “trygedy” pun here, see especially Taplin 1983; Edwards 1991: 157–63; Silk 2000: 41.

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sanctuary, which may have also been on the Pnyx (at least this is the location indicated in the play).69 The Kinsman facilitates the spatial shift as well as the merging of assembly and Thesmophoria ritual by describing what he sees as he approaches. Telling his (perhaps nonexistent)70 slave girl to “come now . . . follow . . . look” (δεῦρό νυν . . . ἕπου / . . . θέασαι, 279–80), he also directs the audience to focus on a new, different sight—that is, the entrance of the chorus, holding torches and enveloped by smoke (280–81). Thus the audience can visualize the orchēstra as the Thesmophorium through the moving bodies of the chorus and their torch props. The scene change is also effected through the Kinsman’s own behavior, as he makes an offering to Demeter and Persephone (284–88). But then his attention shifts to finding a seat so that he can “hear the speakers clearly” (ἐξακούω, 293). With this new focus he encourages the spectators to see (and hear) the dramatic space as the assembly and also, by assimilating his bodily position to theirs, to experience it as the theater. Like Dicaeopolis, he is (initially at least) one of the audience members, looking for a good seat and then waiting for the proceedings to begin. The set of speeches that follows constitutes a parody of male rhetorical debate in the assembly. In assuming some of the ritual, language, and behavior performed there, the women evoke the space of the Pnyx, rather as the agōn form in Euripidean tragedy evokes the law court. But we continue to be reminded of the physical theater space, since their complaints focus on Euripides and Mica peppers her speech with quotations from his plays. Indeed, the Thesmophorium recedes as a setting as the scene’s theatricality becomes more pronounced, with the Kinsman leaving his position as a spectator and speaking himself at the assembly, dressed up in a tragic female costume borrowed from Agathon and parodying, like Dicaeopolis does, a speech from Euripides’s Telephus (467–519).71 69.  Ar. Thesm. 658. On the location of the Thesmophorion sanctuary in Athens, see Henderson 1996: 92–93. Clinton 1996 argues that the Thesmophoria festival was administered and celebrated in the individual demes rather than by the Athenian polis as a whole. 70.  If this is not a part to be played by a mute extra, then the Kinsman’s address to her here should be understood as part of his theatrical performance: “He improvises brilliantly to create the successful illusion, at least for the moment, of a well-to-do matron on her way to the Thesmophoria festival, who would of course not go out without her accompanying servant girl” (Slater 2002: 159). 71.  On this speech riffing as much on Aristophanes’s own Acharnians as on Euripides’s play, see Slater 2002: 163–64.

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Assemblywomen (produced around 392 BCE) also literalizes the theaterassembly analogy, creating a dramatic space that the audience is to see and occupy as theater and assembly at the same time. And yet, even though the assembly is vividly evoked in the first half of the play, it is never the actual dramatic setting. Unlike Acharnians, Assemblywomen begins in an undefined part of Athens as female characters, including the chorus, gradually gather on stage. In Praxagora’s opening speech, however, it becomes clear very quickly that their destination is the assembly. As in the two earlier comedies, the language and action of sitting establish an identification, despite the differences in gender, between the characters within the play and the audience in the theater, though here it is the chorus that acts as audience rather than an individual actor. Once the other two women and chorus have entered, Praxagora tells them all to sit (κάθησθε τοίνυν, 57), at which point the chorus could effectively, whatever the exact staging here, “become at once the front rows of the Theater of Dionysus and proleptically the front rows of the assembly on the Pnyx.”72 Soon, with Praxagora as their director and choreographer, the women start putting on their costumes and rehearsing the movements and speeches they plan to make (116–284). The audience members are thus invited to see the theater space as the assembly and to see themselves, like the chorus, as spectators in the assembly, even while being reminded not only that this is the theater but that the women’s performance is itself a theatrical rehearsal. Over the next two hundred lines Aristophanes continues to play with ways of conjuring up the assembly as an offstage fictional and physical space. The audience is reminded of its own proximity to the Pnyx through the emphasis on the movement there and back again during the chorus’s first two songs, both performed en route (289–310, 478–99).73 And rather in the style of tragic messenger speeches, especially those which report on debates in an assembly, the space is also produced verbally and acoustically when Chremes delivers a report describing the events of the assembly before the women re-enter (376–457).74

72.  Slater 1997: 103; Slater 2002: 212. Cf. Bowie 2012: 364 on “scenic doubling” in Assemblywomen; also Capra forthcoming. 73.  The first song (not strictly a parodos, since the chorus is already present in the orchēstra) begins with the line, “We’re making our way to [or even “dancing to”] the assembly” (χωρῶμεν εἰς ἐκκλησίαν, 289). Cf. Eccl. 478 (ἔμβα χώρει). 74.  See Bowie 2012: 369–73 for other examples of diegetic space in comedy. The term “diegetic space” comes from Issacharoff 1981.

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These scenes in Acharnians, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Assemblywomen suggest that the blending of theater and assembly became an established trope in Aristophanic comedy, such that audiences became accustomed to seeing the two spaces together at the same time and to flitting between them as each became more or less prominent in the action of a play. All three comedies feature internal spectators who align themselves with the position of the theater audience and thus shape their viewing of the dramatic setting as this combination of actual and virtual space. All three emphasize the linguistic and behavioral conventions of the assembly, evoking the Pnyx as a setting through the actors’ speech and movements. And in all three the Athenian audience may be especially inclined to see one space as the other not just because their functions could overlap or because contemporary politicians like Cleon were emphasizing the crossover in the habits of their audiences, but also as a result of the theatrical repertoire to which these plays themselves contributed. This repertoire includes tragedies that bring civic spaces for debate in Athens into the theater, whether literally, as in the trial of Orestes on the Areopagus in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, or, more commonly, through dramatic form or poetic description, like the messenger’s account of the Argive assembly in Euripides’s Orestes (866–956). For Women at the Thesmophoria and Assemblywomen, it includes Acharnians, Aristophanes’s first extant play to use the assembly as a dramatic setting, and the first explicitly to encourage its audience to see both the theater and the assembly together at the same time.

atopic beginnings In the tragedies and comedies that I have discussed thus far, the audience comes to understand reasonably quickly how to see the dramatic space. These plays all conjure up their own “kingdom[s] for a stage” in their opening scenes through the synesthetic mix of different types of space: acoustic space, presentational space, performance space, theater space, extra-theater space, and a broader mythical and theatrical repertoire. Some or all of these spaces are usually brought together with the help of an internal spectator: someone who, however momentarily, sees and acts like and for the audience at the start of the play. The plays may expose the process of phaskein horan as flexible or complicated, but the audience still knows quite quickly where it is and why.

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A few prologues, however, are initially and ostentatiously atopic—that is, they emphasize the question “where are we?” and leave it unanswered for a surprising or at least marked amount of time. In doing so, they keep open the gap between “this” and “that,” delaying any form of spatial representation at all. In this last section I look at three plays with such a prologue: Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria again, Birds, and, in particular, Sophocles’s Oedipus in Colonus. As we shall see, these atopic beginnings explicitly foreground the construction of dramatic space as a task for both characters and audience, combining a range of visual and aural signs for them to make sense of together. Women at the Thesmophoria opens with Euripides and the Kinsman entering the stage area, in an undefined setting and en route to an unknown location. Disgruntled about having walked for so long, the Kinsman asks Euripides to tell him their destination: Ὦ Ζεῦ, χελιδὼν ἆρά ποτε φανήσεται; ἀπολεῖ μ’ ἀλοῶν ἅνθρωπος ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ. οἷόν τε, πρὶν τὸν σπλῆνα κομιδῇ μ’ ἐκβαλεῖν, παρὰ σοῦ πυθέσθαι ποῖ μ’ ἄγεις, ωὖριπίδη; O Zeus, will the swallow ever appear? The man will ruin me, wandering around ever since dawn. Is it possible, before I chuck my guts out completely, to learn from you where you’re taking me, O Euripides? —Ar. Thesm. 1–4

Instead of answering his question, Euripides embarks on a conversation about seeing and hearing as two distinct senses:75 Eυ. Κη. Ευ. Κη. Ευ. Κη. Ευ.

ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα ὄψει παρεστώς. πῶς λέγεις; αὖθις φράσον· οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ. πῶς μοι παραινεῖς; δεξιῶς μέντοι λέγεις. οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν. χωρὶς γὰρ αὐτοῖν ἑκατέρου ’στὶν ἡ φύσις.

75. Euripides’ discourse on the senses here evokes contemporary philosophical thought: see esp. Billings 2021: 121– 24.

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E: K: E: K: E: K: E:

But you don’t need to hear everything that you will straightway see in person. What do you mean? Say that again: I don’t need to hear? Not what you’re about to see. And I don’t need to see? Not what you need to hear. What are you proposing? You’re speaking pretty cleverly. You’re saying that I must neither hear nor see. Yes, for the nature of each of the two is different. —Ar. Thesm. 5–11

Thus the play begins with a commentary on the acoustic set-up of dramatic space that is so typical of tragedy in particular, whereby, as we have seen, the audience is told the setting within the first few lines. Euripides informs the Kinsman that, since he will soon see where they are heading, he does not need to hear it; conversely, if he hears it, he does not need to see it. The result is that Euripides neither tells nor shows him, instead going on to describe how the two senses were long ago separated by Aether as he made the eye and the ear (13–18). In the meantime, of course, the spectators are prompted by this exchange to wonder about what they themselves are seeing and hearing, and how and when the characters’ destination will materialize. They can see the physical structure (the skēnē door) to which Euripides and the Kinsman are presumably gradually making their way, but they rely on what they hear as well as see—the actors’ words, movements, and gestures—both to know that this is their focus and to identify it. When Euripides then gives the order to “come over here and pay attention” (βάδιζε δευρὶ καὶ πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν, 25) and asks, “Do you see this little door?” (ὁρᾷς τὸ θύριον τοῦτο, 26), he directs both the Kinsman and the audience to look at the skēnē door, just as Strepsiades does with Pheidippides in the prologue of Clouds. As the audience knows, however, seeing is not enough: Euripides now orders his companion to listen (ἄκου’, 28), and after the Kinsman confirms that this is indeed what he is doing (ἀκούω, 28), we finally hear that this is Agathon’s house (29–30). Euripides’s account of the two senses’ primordial separation is thus undermined by the need for both at the same time in the construction of dramatic space. In Birds, the audience has to wait much longer before being able to identify the setting. This play about the construction of the “Cloudcuckooland” utopia

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starts with an atopia; it begins nowhere.76 As in Women at the Thesmophoria, the question of location is thematized from the start, with Euelpides declaring, “I no longer know where on earth we are” (οὐδὲ ποῦ γῆς ἐσμὲν οἶδ’ ἔγωγ’ ἔτι, 9). The audience is thus alerted to look out for signs by which it might situate the action in a particular place—signs that it would expect to receive reasonably quickly in the play’s opening scene—but none really appears for almost two hundred lines. Theater studies scholar Ryan Claycomb has shown how theatrical productions that prevent their audience members from immediately entering a “spatiotemporal elsewhere” (a phrase he takes from Keir Elam) are designed to make them self-consciously participate in the drama’s construction by reflecting on their own spectatorship and so developing “a sense of awareness of their own stake in the performance event.”77 Plays that do not allow us to know what a space is representing or whether it is representing something at all—Claycomb gives Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) as one especially compelling example—“disrupt conventional, passive spectatorial practices by disrupting the expectations surrounding narrative beginnings.”78 Aristophanes achieves something similar in the prologue of Birds. By explicitly avoiding any identification of the dramatic location, he encourages the audience to wonder where the play is set, what the stage scenery is meant to represent, and how to see it as a result.79 Teetering in a sort of no man’s land between actual and virtual space, the spectators are in the same state as Euelpides: where on earth are they? When the spectators finally are able to identify the dramatic space, they do so by being made aware quite explicitly of their own role in its construction.80 Though it soon becomes clear that Peisetaerus and Euelpides are looking for 76.  On the “spatial vagueness” of the opening scene and the play in general, see Konstan 1997. On Nephelococcygia as a verbal construct and the “semantic vacuum” with which the comedy begins, see also Dobrov 1997: 95–97; Slater 2002: 139. Even the two main characters, Peisetaerus and Euelpides, are left unnamed until a third of the way into the play (644–45). 77.  Claycomb 2009: 168, 175; cf. Elam 1980: 61. 78.  Claycomb 2009: 174, 167. See also his discussion of Einar Schleef ’s production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome in Berlin in 1997, where the opening ten-minute tableau vivant “force[d] the audience to linger upon their own practices of looking” (172); he draws here from Fischer-Lichte 2003. 79.  Cf. Slater 2002: the spectators’ “participation in the creation of the performance” (133) is made explicit when Euelpides addresses them directly at line 30 (ὦνδρες οἱ παρόντες ἐν λόγῳ). 80.  Jacobson 2011: 58 explains the especially high number of spatial deictics in Birds compared to other surviving Aristophanic comedy in terms of this extraordinary city’s construction, which “requires that it be acknowledged as present, as ‘here’ and ‘now,’ with a proximal demonstrative.”

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Tereus the Hoopoe, no geographical orientation is provided until Peisetaerus starts to construct the city on stage with Tereus, quite literally out of thin air: Επ. Πε. Επ. Πε. Επ. Πε. Επ. Πε. Επ. Πε. Επ. Πε.

ποίαν δ’ ἂν οἰκίσαιμεν ὄρνιθες πόλιν; ἄληθες, ὦ σκαιότατον εἰρηκὼς ἔπος; βλέψον κάτω. καὶ δὴ βλέπω. βλέπε νυν ἄνω. βλέπω. περίαγε τὸν τράχηλον. νὴ Δία ἀπολαύσομαί γ’ ⟨ἄρ’⟩, εἰ διαστραφήσομαι· εἶδές τι; τὰς νεφέλας γε καὶ τὸν οὐρανόν. οὐχ οὗτος οὖν δήπου ’στὶν ὀρνίθων πόλος; πόλος; τίνα τρόπον; ὥσπερ εἴποι τις τόπος. ὅτι δὲ πολεῖται τοῦτο καὶ διέρχεται ἅπαντα διὰ τούτου, καλεῖται νῦν πόλος. ἢν δ’ οἰκίσητε τοῦτο καὶ φάρξηθ’ ἅπαξ, ἐκ τοῦ πόλου τούτου κεκλήσεται πόλις.

(175)

(180)

T: But what kind of city could birds found? P: Really, what a supremely stupid thing you’ve said! Look down. T: OK, I’m looking. P: Now look up. T: I’m looking. P: Twist your neck around. T: Right, by Zeus, I’ll really do well if I twist my neck! P: Did you see anything? T: The clouds and the sky. P: Well then, isn’t this the birds’ site (polos)? T: Site (polos)? In what way? P: As someone might say, their place (topos). Since this is frequented (poleitai) and everything goes through it, it’s now called a site (polos). But as soon as you found this and fortify it, from this site (polos) there will be named a city (polis). —Ar. Av. 173–84

Peisetaerus is not just etymologizing through the polos/polis pun here. As well as verbally producing polos from topos and then polis from polos, he is

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constructing the sight/site of the city for his internal and external audiences— for Tereus, whom he directs to look down and up and around, and for the spectators, who are prompted to adjust their gaze similarly, focusing, like Tereus, first on the floor of orchēstra and then on the clouds and sky above.81 Niall Slater suggests that, as the bird chorus then enters and fills the orchēstra, “the stage and the city it represents are now airborne.”82 But stage and city become airborne even before the chorus’s entrance through the merging of “up” and “down,” ἄνω and κάτω, with the spectators’ own bodily actions replicated before them as, together with Tereus, they are to see the dance floor transformed into a city in the sky.83 As in Sophocles’s Electra, the open-air theater facilitates such spatial flexibility as a result of the various viewpoints available to the audience from its position on the hillside. The phenomenology of space here encompasses not just the virtual world being created through the actors’ language and movements, but actual sky, clouds, birds (which could be heard as well as seen, of course), and city, as well as the structures and bodies within the theater itself. The opening scene of Oedipus at Colonus also brings to the fore the question of “where are we?”84 As the blind Oedipus learns of his location through the words of Antigone, who guides him, and then the stranger, who finally tells them that the sanctuary they have reached is in the deme of Colonus, the audience learns of and visualizes the dramatic space with him—and also with Antigone—through a combination of visual and aural elements. The play

81.  Cf. the similar sequence at Ar. Eq. 162–81; on the similarity, see Dunbar 1995: 191. On the shift from polos to polis see also Telò 2020b: 219. 82.  Slater 2002: 137; also Revermann 2006: 124. 83.  Cf. Revermann 2006: 111–13 and Meineck 2018: 58–73, who specifically discuss the significance of the sky and sun in the visual field of ancient audiences of open-air theater. This is the first of three scenes that mark out the city such that the audience is to visualize it as or see it superimposed upon parts of the theater: see Slater 2002: 137 on 386–92, when Peisetaerus marks out the city perimeter with a pot, and Senseney 2011: 88–92 on 992–1019, when the geometer and astronomer Meton measures out the different parts of the sky-city. Following the first messenger’s account of the building of its walls, when Peisetaerus exclaims, “It truly seems like lies to me!” (ἴσα γὰρ ἀληθῶς φαίνεταί μοι ψεύδεσιν, 1167), he “openly admits that the bird city is built of words” (Slater 2002: 143). 84.  On Sophocles’s play with the construction of dramatic space in this scene, see Dunn 1992, 2011: 368–71; Edmunds 1996: 39–49, 101–3. On the transformation of Athenian space in the play, see Saïd 2011: 81–96. Beginning with a close reading of the prologue, Reitzammer 2018 argues that, with Oedipus’s arrival, Colonus becomes a theoric space, as individuals from across Greece journey there to speak to him.

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opens with Oedipus asking his daughter, “In what lands have we arrived?” (τίνας / χώρους ἀφίγμεθ’, 1–2); he repeats this question, directly or indirectly, four more times over the next fifty lines (11–12, 23, 38, 52). As so often in Aristophanic comedy, but unusually for a tragedy,85 the broader dramatic setting is Athens, as the two characters are already aware: “I know at any rate that it is Athens,” Antigone says, “but not the place” (τὰς γοῦν Ἀθήνας οἶδα, τὸν δὲ χῶρον οὔ, 24). It is the more precise location that is at stake. The spectators may already know this thanks to the play’s title and subject,86 but they are not there yet; it still needs to be materialized for them as it does for Oedipus. Initially the dramatic setting is produced for the audience not through direct identification but through Antigone’s description of its environment: πάτερ ταλαίπωρ’ Οἰδίπους, πύργοι μὲν οἳ πόλιν στέφουσιν, ὡς ἀπ’ ὀμμάτων, πρόσω· χῶρος δ’ ὅδ’ ἱερός, ὡς σάφ’ εἰκάσαι, βρύων δάφνης, ἐλαίας, ἀμπέλου· πυκνόπτεροι δ’ εἴσω κατ’ αὐτὸν εὐστομοῦσ’ ἀηδόνες· οὗ κῶλα κάμψον τοῦδ’ ἐπ’ ἀξέστου πέτρου· μακρὰν γὰρ ὡς γέροντι προὐστάλης ὁδόν. Father, wretched Oedipus, the ramparts encircle the city, far off, to judge by sight. But this place here is sacred, as one can clearly guess, full of laurel, olive, vine; and thickly feathered nightingales throughout it inside produce sweet sounds. Bend your limbs here upon this unpolished stone: for you were sent forth on a road that was long for an old man. —Soph. OC 14–20

Antigone translates sight (ἀπ’ ὀμμάτων, 15) into words for Oedipus and the audience to hear; she does so again when she spots the native stranger

85.  Only three other surviving tragedies have Athenian/Attic settings: Aeschylus’s Eumenides and Euripides’s Heraclidae and Suppliants. Though not set in Athens, Ion evokes Athenian topography, especially the cave of Pan, so frequently and vividly that the audience is encouraged to see both Delphi and Athens at once: Euripides appears to be exploiting an Athenian audience’s simultaneous viewing of the performance space (representing Delphi) and the city and Attic landscape visible beyond the Theater of Dionysus. On the merging of Delphi and Athens in this play, see especially Loraux 1993: 195–98. 86.  The subjects of the plays were announced the day before the City Dionysia began (Pickard-Cambridge 1988: 67–68).

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approaching (28–32) and later when she sees Ismene (313–21).87 Seeing through sound is a motif running through the first part of the play:88 Oedipus hears from Antigone, who sees for them both (ἀκούων τῆσδε τῆς ὑπέρ τ’ ἐμοῦ / αὑτῆς θ’ ὁρώσης, 33–34); when the stranger eventually begins to identify the place more precisely, he tells Oedipus—but also the audience, of course—that he will learn it by listening (κλυών, 53). But Oedipus also sees for others with his own prophetic utterances: he tells the stranger, “Everything I say I shall say seeing” (ὅσ’ ἂν λέγωμεν πάνθ’ ὁρῶντα λέξομεν, 74). When he claims to the chorus, “I see by means of voice” (φωνῇ . . . ὁρῶ, 138), then, he appears to refer not simply to his reliance on what he hears from others but to his own superior insight. For the audience, the scenery that Antigone describes is not just acoustic, since it interacts with the physical space of the theater and its surroundings. Though in one respect aligned with Oedipus, waiting to hear the name of the place,89 the spectators at the Theater of Dionysus in Athens are also in the position of Antigone, able, like her, to see their city’s walls, though in their case by looking out southwards from the slope of the theatron.90 They are also seated within a sacred place, the sanctuary of Dionysus, the god for whom the vine (ἀμπέλου, 17), of course, is a frequent symbol. The nightingales singing within the sanctuary described by Antigone can signify lament in sympathy with “wretched Oedipus” (ταλαίπωρ’ Οἰδίπους, 14), but in both tragedy and comedy their music is also associated with that of the aulete, who provided the instrumental accompaniment in every production.91 When the chorus later 87.  Haselswerdt 2019: 614–15 shows how, as Antigone’s verbal account of Ismene becomes confused, so “the audience’s own perception is temporarily stalled” (615). 88.  See Haselswerdt 2019 on how Oedipus’s blindness facilitates a disruption of the sensory hierarchy, as sound in particular “draws the audience into a particularly powerful sensory sympathy with Oedipus himself, and with the dramatic world he inhabits” (614). Touch also plays an elevated role: see Worman 2018b: 46–49; Worman 2020: 56–58. 89.  Cf. Dunn 2011: “The protagonist within the drama who does not know where he is, what place he has come to, mirrors the external audience and its attempt at the beginning of the drama to understand what the setting represents” (369). 90.  Later the audience becomes aligned with the chorus, asked by Creon, “Do you see this, natives of this land?” (ὁρᾶτε ταῦτα, τῆσδε γῆς ἐγχώριοι, 871). 91.  See especially Ar. Av. 213–14, 672; Eur. Hel. 1111; Oed. fr. 556 TrGF. On the association of the aulos with the nightingale, see Romer 1983; A. Barker 2004; Weiss 2017. Suksi 2001 argues that the mention of the nightingale here and at OC 668–80 is meant to remind us of the metamorphosis of Procne, whom we are to see as a symbol of Oedipus’s own transformation

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refers to the soundscape of Colonus with a similar focus on the nightingale, it also evokes the sound of the aulos accompanying its own song and dance in a space sacred to Dionysus (668–80).92 The hint in the opening scene of the instrumental sound that the audience knows it will soon hear with the arrival of the chorus makes the dramatic setting more vivid through these anticipated acoustics. It also simultaneously encourages the merging of the space of the theater with that of the grove that Antigone pictures. It is within this sacred space of auletic bird song, commanding a view out to the city walls, that Oedipus is finally to sit down. As in Women at the Thesmophoria and Assemblywomen, the emphasis here on the need to find a seat is suggestive of the spectators’ own movement and position in the theater. Oedipus has already drawn attention to this act, twice telling his daughter to seat him (με κἀξίδρυσον, 11; κάθιζέ νύν με, 21), and does so twice more: “I would not wish to leave this seat again” (οὐχ ἕδρας γε τῆσδ’ ἂν ἐξέλθοιμ’ ἔτι, 45); “I have sat upon this holy unpolished step” (κἀπὶ σεμνὸν ἑζόμην / βάθρον τόδ’ ἀσκέπαρνον, 100–101).93 This last statement, echoing Antigone’s instruction that he sit “here upon this unpolished stone” (τοῦδ’ ἐπ’ ἀξέστου πέτρου, 19), uses the word bathron, which can also refer to a wooden bench like those used in the fifth-century theater.94 Thus the audience is aligned with the blind Oedipus not just through its reliance on sound to see the dramatic space and the characters within it, but through a form of bodily empathy based on their mutual seated positions. Deictic gestures also bring together the virtual space and the theater’s physical structure and situation. In the lines quoted above, Antigone and Oedipus refer to his seat with the deictic pronoun ὅδε, “this here.” When the stranger identifies the place as Colonus, he does so by pointing to a statue with

within the grove and even of “the transformation brought about by the tragedian himself of stories of grief and horror into a performance in honour of Dionysus” (656). Haselswerdt 2019 suggests that the reference to nightingales at 17–18 entails a “sensory slippage,” since Oedipus presumably can already hear their song—“this detail must, rather, be for us” (616). 92.  The chorus describes the space in which it is singing and dancing to the auletic accompaniment as where “the shrill nightingale warbles” (ἁ λίγεια μινύρεται . . . ἀη- / δών, 671–73) and “the reveler Dionysus always steps” (ὁ βακχιώ- / τας ἀεὶ Διόνυσος ἐμβατεύει, 678–79). 93.  This early focus on sitting also points forward to 1597, when Oedipus takes a seat “in a special spot to which his inner sight has led him” (Easterling 2006: 142). 94.  On bathron as “wooden bench,” with specific reference to seating in the theater (or assembly), see Csapo 2007: 95, 103–7.

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the same deictic pronoun: “The neighboring lands boast that this horseman Colonus here is their founder” (οἱ δὲ πλησίοι γύαι / τόνδ’ ἱππότην Κολωνὸν εὔχονται σφίσιν / ἀρχηγὸν εἶναι, 58–60). Whether or not either the stone seat or the statue is represented by an actual prop, in both cases the audience is quite explicitly encouraged to notice part of the performance space and see it as part of the dramatic space.95 This moment, when the precise identification of the setting coincides with that of a physical element of the theater, a moment that typically occurs in the opening lines of a tragedy, provides a sense of arrival in a space that the audience, as well as Oedipus and Antigone, have already been occupying for over fifty lines. Yet even when the dramatic setting is identified in this tangible way, the audience members have not yet been told why they, along with Antigone and Oedipus, have been led there. For all the multiple strategies that Sophocles employs in this extraordinary opening scene to enable the audience to visualize and inhabit the dramatic space as Colonus, it becomes clear from quite early on that its real meaning for the drama is something that neither the audience nor any of the characters but Oedipus can see.96 As soon as Oedipus hears that the grove is sacred to the Eumenides, he understands that he has arrived at his final destination: these goddesses are the “sign of my fortune” (ξυμφορᾶς ξύνθημ’ ἐμῆς, 46). After the stranger leaves, he reveals some of the place’s significance—namely, that this is where Apollo told him he would “take the last turn in the course of my miserable life” (κάμψειν τὸν ταλαίπωρον βίον, 91); by dying here, he says, he will benefit Athens. The tragedy continues to be about the dramatic space and what it means. As Dunn says, “definition of the setting is postponed and becomes a central

95.  On the possibilities for representing the statue, see Edmunds 1996: 47; he suggests that the stranger could simply point to the altar in the middle of the orchēstra. Such a reconstruction assumes, however, that there was always an altar in this position: on this issue, see note 45 in chapter 4. 96.  The audience may indeed have known or at least guessed the reason, since Colonus was probably already associated with Oedipus’s hero cult: see especially Mastronarde 1994: 626 on Eur. Pho. 1704–7; Hesk 2012: 176–77. But the opening scene denies the audience a straightforward confirmation of any expectations regarding the setting and its precise connection to Oedipus’s death and burial. Cf. Easterling 2006: 138: “The play was designed, after all, for a theatrical performance in which the words would have the power to create an imaginary world, informed, indeed, by the experiences of contemporary audiences as participants in worship, but certainly not circumscribed by them.”

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concern of the action itself; when the full meaning of the setting is clear, the Oedipus at Colonus is over. In a sense the drama is stripped down to a single aspect of stage convention: from beginning to end we are occupied in discovering what the scene represents.”97 Ultimately the moment of Oedipus’s death and the site of his burial, to which the plot has been leading, exist beyond the dramatic space entirely. The audience hears the messenger’s detailed account of the grove where Oedipus prepared for his death (1590–97), but for anyone familiar with the places he evokes its visualization is far from straightforward: the complex overlay of multiple spatial and ritual associations, with allusions to sites sacred to the Eumenides and to Demeter and Persephone in different parts of Attica (but especially Eleusis), prevents even an ancient audience seated only two miles from Colonus from identifying its actual geographical location.98 The precise nature of Oedipus’s death, a sight “unbearable to see” (οὐδ’ ἀνασχετοῦ βλέπειν, 1652) that is witnessed by Theseus alone, remains a mystery. And the site of his burial, where his presence ensures Athens’s security, likewise remains hidden from view to everyone except himself and Theseus, whom he tells never to reveal it (1520–38). That this offstage fictional space is not seen, not even by the messenger, is said to be vital to the city’s wellbeing (1760–65). Thus throughout the play, despite such elaborate verbal descriptions of the dramatic space, the audience remains disoriented, blinder even than Oedipus himself.99 In Oedipus at Colonus, then, through frequent play between the visual and aural materialization of space, the audience comes to visualize the dramatic setting along with the two initial characters—two internal spectators, one seeing and one blind—and is left poised between them in terms of its own ability to see. Sophocles draws here on strategies that we have seen at work in comedy. As in Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria and especially his Birds, we find a delaying and disruption of the expected spatial set-up at the drama’s start. We also find, as in Acharnians, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Assemblywomen, the explicit construction of the dramatic space out of the physical space of the theater. In shaping his audience’s visualization of

97.  Dunn 1992: 6–7. Cf. Kelly 2009: 43–44; Dunn 2011. 98.  See especially Easterling 2006: 141–44; Kelly 2009: 101–2; Hesk 2012: 176–77. 99.  Cf. Haselswerdt 2019: “[Oedipus] has gone somewhere the audience cannot follow, with access to a mode of sensation that is illegible to us, an interruption of the earlier sensory sympathy” (625).

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dramatic space Sophocles utilizes strategies frequently found across both tragedy and comedy, such as deictics, gestures and proxemic movement, engagement with space beyond the theater (both visible and nonvisible), and an emphasis on the act of seeing, all of which we also saw in his Ajax and Electra. These techniques invite the audience to participate in the construction of the dramatic space—to see it along with some of the characters and thus in relation to its own physical situation in the theater. The stretching out of phaskein horan over the course of the prologue urges on the audience an awareness of its engagement in this process, a process that lies at the heart of all theater. With such a long initial period of spatial uncertainty, Sophocles extends the representational gap between actual and virtual space. Keeping his audience in spatial limbo, he, like the playwrights studied by Claycomb, draws them in as complicit in the play’s very production, having to gradually make sense of what the performance space represents. At the same time, over the course of this play, Sophocles points to the limits of theatrical representation through a focus on the invisible, as the audience is ultimately deprived of any visualization—through sight or sound—of the most important space of all.

the phenomenology of space in the classical greek theater Like the other plays (and pots) that I will discuss in this book, then, these tragedies and comedies highlight how the process of seeing theater, seeing “this” as “that,” need not be straightforward—and how, when not straightforward, it demands a particularly high degree of participation from the audience. This is the case for seeing bodies and objects as much as it is for seeing space, of course, as we will see in the following two chapters, and as Sophocles’s Electra, with which I began this one, demonstrates well. As I showed in the introduction to this book, the spatial uncertainty at the play’s start is just the first of several scenes that draw attention to the possibility of a gap or misalignment between the means and objects of representation. The prologues that I have analyzed here all highlight, to lesser or greater degrees, such a representational gap, or at least its potential, by modeling the audience’s act of phaskein horan specifically in relation to space. There can be multiple, even conflicting, possibilities for how to see dramatic space; actual and virtual space can coincide even as the spectatorial practices shared between

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them are challenged; dramatic space can remain indeterminate for a surprising amount of time. By looking at tragedy and comedy together, we can see how the difficulties involved in seeing space in theater are common to both genres, as are some of the strategies used not simply to highlight them but also, in doing so, to draw the audience into a drama’s spatial construction. It turns out that for neither comedy nor tragedy is it enough simply to say “this is Thebes and the king is Oedipus,” since such a verbal announcement is but one element in the phenomenology of space. In tragedy, as in comedy, the process whereby the audience visualizes the dramatic space can be much more complicated.

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chapter 2

Seeing What? Nay, I’ll show you the manner of it. This shoe is my father. No, this left shoe is my father. No, no, this left shoe is my mother. Nay, that cannot be so neither. Yes, it is so, it is so: it hath the worser sole. This shoe with the hole in it is my mother, and this my father. A vengeance on’t—there ’tis. Now, sir, this staff is my sister; for, look you, she is as white as a lily and as small as a wand. This hat is Nan, our maid. I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog. O, the dog is me, and I am myself. Ay, so, so. —William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, II.iii.13–22.

In Act II of Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the clown Lance enters, about to follow his master Proteus to Milan but first offering a comical commentary on theater’s modes of representation. Trying to reenact the scene of departure from his family, Lance becomes hopelessly confused as to what could represent what: a shoe as his father or his mother; himself as the dog or the dog as himself. Keir Elam uses this passage to demonstrate the “transformability of the sign” or “denotational flexibility” in theater, whereby the one prop or figure can assume multiple roles, often in quick succession.1 But this is not just a matter of semiotics: such flexibility can cause perceptual instability on the part of the spectators—as it does for Lance himself within the play—as they attempt to see “this” as “that.” Lance’s confusion emphasizes the potential for a lack of convergence or stable alignment between actual and virtual, not only because of the different representational possibilities available, but also because these bodies and objects continue to assert their

1.  Elam 1980: 8–9. Elam here refers in particular to theater director and semiotician Jindrich Honzl’s argument on the “dynamism” of the sign (Honzl 1976 [1940]). Cf. Mueller 2016a: 127–28.

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material presence: this will always be the shoe “with the hole in”; the dog will always be an actual dog.2 In chapter 1, we saw how the construction of dramatic space in ancient Greek tragedy and comedy could highlight and exploit such representational flexibility and potential for misalignment. In this chapter, I turn to bodies, masks, costumes, and props, and how the act of seeing them becomes, as in Shakespeare’s play, explicitly unstable and manifold. In each of plays that I analyze here—a satyr play, a tragedy, and a comedy—a significant portion of the plot focuses on the pulling apart of the actual and virtual, generating visual disorientation on the part of both internal spectators and the audience in the theater. In each play, as in Lance’s speech, the material presence of theater’s bodies and objects complicates and disrupts the identification of what they represent, even while it is never independent of their verbal construction. These dramas all exploit the tensions inherent to theater’s “play of actuality” by both complicating the identification of an actor as character or a prop as dramatic object and weaving such complexity into the dramatic narrative. I begin the chapter with a fragment of Aeschylus’s Theoroi in which the chorus is dedicating images of itself, probably masks, at the temple of Poseidon. I show how, by framing this as a confrontation between actual and virtual, the chorus examines the process by which a character can be materialized through a mask or costume. At the same time, it opens up the possibility, however tenuous, that an audience might not see these bodies as satyrs after all. A brief discussion of an Apulian bell-krater attributed to the Tarporley Painter shows how the medium of vase painting could produce some analogous play with the relationship between performer, mask, costume, and prop.3 I then provide detailed readings of Aeschylus’s Suppliants and Aristophanes’s Birds, plays that, despite their unlikely pairing, both significantly extend the sort of visual uncertainty more briefly explored in Theoroi. I show how much of Suppliants is dominated by the question of how to understand various aspects of the chorus of Danaids’ appearance—their skin color, clothing, suppliant branches, and girdles. Their bodies and the objects they hold can be viewed in manifold and seemingly contradictory ways both for Pelasgus, as an internal spectator, and 2.  States 1985: 36 famously uses the example of Lance’s dog to show the constant play between medium and object of representation: “We may see the dog as dog or as image, or we may allow our mind to oscillate rapidly between the two kinds of perception.” 3.  Sydney, Chau Chak Wing Museum NM47.5.

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for the audience in the theater. Such visual ambiguity, as well as the anxiety it can produce in their viewers, almost entirely surrounds the Danaids; it is closely tied to their agency within the play and across the entire trilogy. In contrast, in Birds, virtually every single body, mask, costume, and prop seems to offer multiple representational possibilities. This comedy revolves around the power of words to construct what is not physically present in the theater and to transform what is. It repeatedly calls the audience into the visual games generated through such verbal play and the ontological questions that this raises. Like the rest of the book, these case studies demonstrate a deep awareness shared by playwrights and audiences of how “seeing theater” is never a simple act. All three plays develop some of the strategies of (de)constructing their audiences’ viewing experience that we have already analyzed. They all make use of internal spectators—figures whom we already saw on the chous discussed in the introduction, and who recurred in chapter 1 as a device for exposing theater’s phenomenological complexities. The sort of representational flexibility showcased via such internal spectators in Suppliants and Birds, the multiplicity of options offered to the audience for what it sees and hears onstage, may remind us in particular of Alcman’s first partheneion and Pindar’s hyporchēma fragment, which I mentioned in the introduction, and also of the opening of Sophocles’s Electra, which I examined in chapter 1. Like many of the tragedies and comedies that I analyzed in the previous chapter, the plays here highlight the representational power of language but also draw attention to its limits, undercutting any fixed identification. Even more so than Oedipus at Colonus, they also reveal the role of nonverbal sound in materializing the bodies and objects they present to us, and thereby undermine any hierarchy of the senses even as they stress the act of seeing. Finally, through such extended examination of the process of seeing theater (or, to use once again the phrase from Sophocles’s Electra, phaskein horan) these three plays, like the others discussed in this book, actively engage their audiences in the construction of their dramatic worlds—even as, paradoxically, their objects of representation cannot be securely identified.

is this that? aeschylus’s theoroi One of the most famous scenes in surviving classical Greek drama is the moment in Euripides’s Bacchae when Agave triumphantly enters holding a thyrsus with a head impaled upon it. The audience has already been told by the messenger

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that the head is that of Pentheus, her son; Agave herself thinks it a lion’s. When Cadmus, her father, asks her “whose head (prosōpon) are you holding in your arms?” (τίνος πρόσωπον δῆτ’ ἐν ἀγκάλαις ἔχεις, 1277), he draws the audience’s attention to the object as a mask (another meaning of prosōpon) with several representational possibilities.4 On the one hand, since the same actor would probably play both Agave and Pentheus, the “mask” is, or at least evokes, the one that he would himself have been wearing in his other role.5 In this respect, Pentheus, as Helene Foley has argued, is reduced entirely to his tragic mask, in contrast with the transformational ambiguity of Dionysus, whose mask may represent different identities—god, beast, human stranger—to internal and external audiences at different points in the play.6 On the other hand, Agave’s hesitation in response to Cadmus’s question may, as Melissa Mueller suggests, prompt the audience, too, to question what it sees in her arms.7 Such an untethering of mask from character briefly raises the possibility that Pentheus’s mask may represent something different from before: for while Agave sees it temporarily as a lion, the audience may note its likeness to cult statues of Dionysus himself.8 The mask’s referential flexibility effects a final, shocking epiphany, as “[e]verything and everyone is, by the end, Dionysus.”9 Elsewhere in Athenian drama, we find that mask and character can be pulled apart more explicitly, with the possibility of their nonconvergence

4.  On the extent to which the use of the word prosōpon could draw attention to the materiality of the mask, see especially Hall 2006: 108–9; Duncan 2018: 91–95. 5.  On such role doubling (as a result of the “three actor rule”) in tragedy, see especially Marshall 1994; Cohen 1999. Lada-Richards 2005: 463 links this moment in Bacchae to the idea, common to the western theatrical tradition, of how an actor must annihilate himself to take on a role: sometimes “the actor’s renunciation of his own identity is self-reflexively foregrounded by performative or textual means, as when the actor playing Agave is shown to peer into the blood-stained prosōpon of the dismembered Pentheus, the now redundant, empty mask of his abandoned previous self.” See also Lada-Richards 2002: 409. 6.  Foley 1980, with reference to Jones 1962: 45–46, 270. Cf. Segal 1997: 248–49. The nature of Dionysus’s mask (especially the idea that it is smiling) in Bacchae has been much discussed: in addition to the above, see especially Vernant 1988; Segal 1997: 234–40; Billings 2017. 7.  Mueller 2016b: 68. 8.  Chaston 2009: 180–84 argues that Pentheus’s head-mask atop the thyrsus would recall the cult-images on the so-called Lenaea Vases. Mueller 2016b: 70 suggests that Pentheus is effectively transformed here into the cult statue (xoanon) of Dionysus that was processed from Eleutherae into Athens at the start of the City Dionysia. 9.  Mueller 2016b: 70.

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generating much of a dramatic plot. This is especially evident in a fragment of a satyr play by Aeschylus that has two possible titles: either Isthmiastai or, as it is more commonly known, Theoroi—not simply The Sacred Delegates but The Viewers, those who engage in the act of theōrein.10 This fragment exposes and problematizes its audience’s mode of seeing “this is that” in the theater by staging a confrontation between the chorus of satyrs and their likenesses. In doing so, it visually demonstrates the premise of the entire play—namely, that these satyrs are not behaving as satyrs should. In what appears to be an early scene in Theoroi, an unidentified character says that he is “seeing images” (ὁρῶντες εἰκούς, fr. 78a.1 TrGF) that are beyond human in form.11 We learn from the chorus’s response that he is not simply referring to the satyrs themselves, as equine-human hybrids, but to objects that they are attaching as dedications to the temple of Poseidon: ἄκουε δὴ πᾶς· σῖγα δ ’̣ ειθ ̣ε ̣λ ̣ειδ.̣ [.].   ἄθ ̣ρ ̣η̣σ ο̣ ν, εἰ .̣ [..]..[ εἴδωλον ε ̣ἶναι τ̣ ̣ο ̣ῦδ’ ἐμῇ μορφῇ πλέον τὸ Δαιδάλου μ[ί]μ ̣ημα· φω̣ν ̣ῆς δεῖ μόνον.   ταδ[..]. ει ..̣   ὁρα. [. ]. (. )ρ. [   χώρει μάλα. εὐκταῖα κόσμον ταῦ.τ.[α] τῷ θεῷ φέρω   καλλίγραπ̣τ ̣ον εὐχά̣ ̣ν. τῇ μητρὶ τἠμῇ πράγματ’̣ ἂν παρασχέθοι·   ἰδοῦσα γάρ νιν̣ ̣ ἂν σαφῶς   τρέποιτ’̣ ἂν αἰάζοιτό θ’, ὡς   δοκοῦσ’ ἔμ’ εἶναι, τὸν ἐξ   έθρ ̣εψεν̣ ̣· οὕτως ἐμφερὴς ὅδ’ ἐστίν. εἷα δή, σκοπεῖτε δ ̣ῶμα ποντίου σεισίχθο[νος κἀπιπασσάλευ’ ἕ ̣κ ̣αστος τῆς κ[α]λῆς μορφῆς .[ ἄγγελον, κήρυκ’ [ἄ]ναυδον, ἐμπόρων κωλύτορ[α, ὅ ̣[ς] γ ̣’ ἐπισχήσει κελεύθου τοὺς ξένο[υς] φο ̣[β.... χαῖρ’, ἄναξ· χαῖρ’, ὦ Πόσειδον, ἐπίτροπο ̣[σ θ’]   ὑφ[ίστασο. ̣

(5)

(15)

(20)

Now listen everyone, and in silence... Look and see whether [you] th[ink at all]

10.  On the meanings of theōrein and theōria, see the introduction to this book. 11.  This speaker has been variously identified as Sisyphus, Theseus, Hephaestus, or Daedalus: see Lämmle 2013: 307, with further references.

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if Daedalus’s model is a closer image of my form than this is. It just needs a voice! This . . . see . . . Come on now! I bring these votives to the god to adorn his house— fine paintings to fulfill a vow! It would cause my mother some problems! If she saw it, I’m quite sure she’d turn about and cry out in horror, because she’d think it was me, the child that she brought up! That’s how like me it is!



Ho there! Set your eyes on the house of the Sea-god, the Earth-shaker and each of you nail up here an [image] of your fair form as a messenger, a voiceless herald, a restrainer of travelers, which will make visitors halt in their path [by the] fear[some look   in its eyes]. Hail, lord! Hail, Poseidon, [and] undertake [to be our] guardian!12



—Aesch. fr. 78.a.4–22 TrGF

In this passage replete with vocabulary of seeing and images seen, in a play revolving around—even named for—theōrein, the satyr chorus models the audience’s own act of spectatorship.13 The lifelike images that are the scene’s focus are most likely themselves masks, which could be used as votive objects.14 The chorus, then, looks on satyr masks as the audience looks on the satyr chorus, and it notes the degree of similarity between the representation and 12.  Translation modified from Sommerstein 2008. 13.  On self-reflexive spectatorship here, see Zeitlin 1994: 138–39; Steiner 2001: 46–49; Chaston 2009: 24. On the play’s title, see Rutherford 2013: “Is it this act of contemplation that prompted the first of the ancient titles for the play, ‘Theōroi’?” (342). 14.  The question of what these objects are has been endlessly debated. Their identification as masks goes back to Fraenkel 1942: 245; see also, e.g., Snell 1956: 6–7; Mette 1963: 165; Green 1994: 45–46; Wiles 2007: 205–6; Thomas 2019: 72–75. Votive masks, usually made of precious metal, appear quite often in cult inventories: Rutherford 2013: 118–19. Masks were also sometimes dedicated at Dionysus’s temple by victorious chorēgoi at the City Dionysia: on the link between such votive masks and the objects in this Theoroi fragment, see Wilson 2000: 236–43; Duncan 2018: 85–88; Thomas 2019: 73–74. Others have suggested that the satyrs are holding full portraits (Krumeich 2000: 176–92) or statues (e.g., F. Ferrari 2013: 201; Sonnino 2016: 46). I find the argument for masks more convincing, though for much of my discussion here the objects’ precise identification is not so important, since not only can they work metonymically but they are constructed as much through the satyrs’ own words as through their physical form.

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the “real thing”—that is, itself.15 In doing so, in one sense the chorus asks the audience to fall for the dramatic mimesis entirely, as if saying “here’s the representation; we’re the ‘real’ satyrs.” At the same time, the chorus makes the audience sharply aware of the dramatic mimesis by drawing attention to its own masks alongside those it holds, as two interchangeable objects of theatrical artifice. Indeed, when the chorus leader claims that “it just needs voice” (φων̣ ῆς ̣ δεῖ μόνον, 7), the rest of the chorus starts singing in trochaic tetrameters (with some more trimeters in-between), as if supplying the voice lacked by the masks themselves.16 The satyrs then claim that the masks are such great likenesses that their own mothers would be shocked: “she’d think it was me, the one she brought up” (δοκοῦσ’ ἔμ’ εἶναι, τὸν ἐξ- / έθρ ̣εψεν̣ ̣, 16–17). The focus of the chorus’s performance here is a twofold boundary between actual and virtual, between satyr and mask and between performer (with mask) and satyr. The doubleness inherent to dramatic mimesis is explicit; the spectators are invited to see the means and object of representation, “this” and “that,” side by side.17 This invitation to “see double” applies to stage scenery as well: when the chorus leader tells the chorus—but also implicitly the audience—to “look at the house of the Sea-god, the Earth-shaker” (σκοπεῖτε δ ̣ῶμα ποντίου σεισίχθο[νος, 18), he probably directs them all to look at the skēnē, which at the play’s first performance was still a new addition to the theater.18 He thus requires of the audience the same sort of viewing of theater’s physical apparatus that the satyrs themselves are adopting when looking at the masks: it is to see this structure as Poseidon’s temple, just as the chorus sees the masks as satyrs. As the satyr play continues, however, the act of seeing theater as it appears to be staged in this scene becomes more complicated. First, we begin to realize 15.  Cf. Green 1994: 45–46 on the play with dramatic illusion here. Wiles 2007: 208 insists that such an interpretation is “haunted by the real citizen actor lurking beneath the false theatrical mask.” 16.  Duncan 2018: 89–90, comparing this moment to the Aesopic fable “The Fox to the Mask,” suggests that they “share the conceit that masks are persons in all but speech” (90). 17.  On such doubleness, see Steiner 2001: 47–49, who understands the satyrs’ response to these Daedalic objects of skilled craftsmanship as a crude sort of “seeing in,” whereby they draw attention to the masks’ artifice and realism at the same time. Cf. Stieber 1994 on the Theoroi fragment as a response to increased realism in Greek art. On Richard Wollheim’s concept of “seeing in,” see the introduction to this book. 18.  On the dating of the play in relation to the skēnē (as well as, perhaps, in relation to the burning down and rebuilding of the Isthmian temple of Poseidon in ca. 470–450 BCE), see Thomas 2019: 68.

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as readers of this text something that would have been the case from the very start of the scene for a live audience: how we see “that” is determined not simply by the visual appearance of the mask-dedications, which many audience members would be too far away to see clearly anyway, but by the words used to describe them and the reactions that they provoke—by, that is, the “voice” (φωνή) of the chorus that the masks themselves lack.19 When the chorus calls each mask “a messenger, a voiceless herald” (ἄγγελον, κήρυκ’ [ἄ]ν ̣αυδον, 20), it prompts an association between these objects and previous uses of this particular expression in Aeschylean drama: in the Seven Against Thebes and Suppliants, the dust of an incoming army is described as an ἄναυδος ἄγγελος.20 Our viewing of the masks in Theoroi thus becomes layered with previous instances of this phrase. In Seven and Suppliants, it is applied to something the audience could not see—not just substanceless dust, but an army itself, which the chorus of Seven in particular materializes through its vivid descriptions of and reactions to the sounds and sights approaching it.21 In Theoroi, despite all the deictics and directions to look and see, and despite the (presumably) physical presence of the mask-dedications onstage, these objects are still also verbal constructions; they become mirror images of the satyr-chorus through words at least as much as through their material form. Of course, it is also through voice that actual masks and costumes—not to mention scenery and props—assume an identifiable form: indeed, as we shall see below, Pelasgus in Suppliants explicitly relies on a φθόγγος (“voice,” “sound,” Supp. 245) to understand the chorus’s appearance. So, in Theoroi, the satyr chorus, by becoming, as it were, its own spectators, provides further commentary on the process by which a mask represents a character. We will see in chapter 3 how bodies can become materialized in the theater through their affective impact on internal and external audiences. Here the mask19.  Cf. Meineck 2018: 90–96 on the “visual ambiguity” and “affective mutability” of the Greek dramatic mask within the “visually dynamic environment” of the Theater of Dionysus. Cf. Wiles 2007: 225; Meineck 2011. Thomas 2019: 74 notes that Aeschylus refers to his own poetic art with the double meaning of καλλίγραπ ̣τον ̣ in line 12: the dedications are not just “well painted” but “well written.” Cf. Weiss 2018b on material form as a verbal construct in Aeschylean tragedy. 20.  Aesch. Sept. 82, Supp. 180. Cf. Ag. 496, where dust is also described as ἄναυδος. 21.  See Weiss 2018b: 171–76 on Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes; cf. Gianvittorio-Ungar 2019: 243–46; Weiss 2021b: 237–38. On this sort of visual layering, see Zeitlin 1994: 171–96 on the literary backdrop to Antigone’s “hyperviewing” of the Argive army in Euripides’s Phoenissae.

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dedications—metonymically the satyrs’ body-doubles—assume an especially powerful material, discernible form through the shock of the satyrs themselves, the horror of their mother, and, as line 20 continues, the fear of unsuspecting travelers—xenoi coming to the Isthmian Games but also, we may suspect, the audience themselves, who have traveled to the theater from Attica and beyond.22 As the fragment continues, it becomes clear that the relationship between actual and virtual, so carefully constructed in the dedication scene, does not work here, or at least does not work quite like the satyrs have claimed. Though the satyrs attach the images of themselves to Poseidon’s temple and address him in the hope that he might appear as their guardian (χαῖρ’, ἄναξ· χαῖρ’, ὦ Πόσειδον, ἐπίτροπο ̣[ς θ’] ὑφ̣ ̣[ίστασο, 22), it is Dionysus, god of the theater and their more usual guardian, who appears instead. Finally he has tracked them down, and now he berates them for abandoning their usual satyric ways and attempting to become athletes: ὁ ̣ρ ̣ῶ̣ν ̣ μύουρα καὶ βραχέα τὰ ̣ . [ ̣ ̣ ̣]α, ̣ ὡς ἐξέτριβες Ἰσθμιαστικὴν ̣ [ ̣ ̣ ̣]ν, ̣ κοὐκ ἠμέλησας, ἀλλ’ ἐγυμνάζ[ου κα]λῶς. εἰ δ’ οὖν ἐσῴζου τὴν πάλαι παρο ̣[ιμία]ν ̣, τοὔρχημα μᾶλλον εἰκὸς ἦν σε ̣[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣]ε ̣ ̣ιν· σὺ δ’ ἰσθμ ̣ιάζεις καὶ τρόπους και[νοὺς μ]α ̣θὼν ̣ βραχί ̣ο ̣[ν’ ἀ]σ ̣κ ̣εῖς [I knew (?) . . . ], when I saw your [phalluses] mouse-tailed and short, that you were polishing up your Isthmian [wrestling], and that you hadn’t neglected it but were training well. Well, if you’d stayed faithful to the old proverb, you’d have more likely been [practicing] dancing; but you’re being Isthmian athletes and, learning new ways, you’re exercising your arms.23 —fr. 78a. 29–35 TrGF

The plots of satyr plays typically revolve around satyrs not behaving as they should. In Theoroi, as Rebecca Lämmle notes, “the conflict between the satyrs’ regular, Dionysiac activities, choral dance in particular, and their new role as

22.  On the satyr-masks’ efficacy as apotropaic objects, see O’Sullivan 2000. 23.  Translation adapted from Sommerstein 2008.

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Isthmian athletes structures large parts of what is preserved of the play.”24 Dionysus reveals two signs that the satyrs are not acting properly. First, their phalluses are “mouse-tailed and short” (μύουρα καὶ βραχέα, 29) to imitate the practice of athletes. That is, the usually erect phalluses on their perizōmata (the shorts typical of satyr costume, though similar shorts, without the phallus and tail, could also be used in athletic competitions like the ones in which these satyrs are preparing to participate) have been tucked or tied up to appear shorter.25 Second, they have either not been dancing at all, something very strange indeed for satyrs, or at least not with their usual Dionysiac abandon. It therefore seems very likely that the entire time that the satyrs have been commenting on the similarity between themselves and the masks that they are dedicating, images that are so like them, so satyr-like, that their own mothers would confuse them—all that time they have been appearing bizarrely unsatyr-like in these two important respects. In the dedication scene, then, the comparison between satyr and satyr image, the staging of “this” against “that,” underscores the disconnect as much as the identity between them.26 The satyrs are not simply emphasizing that the masks, metonymic body-doubles, look just like them; they are also reassuring us that they themselves look just like the masks—that is, that they are still satyrs, despite their altered appearance and movements. The satyr chorus does not quite match the satyr images, but it is asking us to see its distorted bodies as satyrs regardless of any such visual confusion. This scene exposes the process by which an audience can be led to connect the means and object of representation, destabilizing their association even while insisting, despite suggestions to the contrary, on their convergence. At the same time, that insistence can reassure the audience (if it was ever really in any doubt!) that these are satyrs and this is a satyr play. In doing so, it points toward the entrance 24.  Lämmle 2019: 35; cf. Lämmle 2013: 312. On such satyric plot patterns see also Sutton 1980: 157; Krumeich, Pechstein, and Seidensticker 1999: 17–18; Voelke 2001: 379–80; Lämmle 2013: 203–15. Satyrs frequently “adopt new activities, typically under the sway of a master other than Dionysos and in mythological settings to which satyrs do not traditionally belong” (Lämmle 2019: 30). 25.  On Dionysus’s meaning here, see Lämmle 2013: 308n18, with further references. On athletic perizōmata, see Bonfante 1989; McDonnell 1993; Shapiro 2000: 321–30. On the use of perizōmata in satyr play, see Kossatz-Deissmann 1982. 26.  Cf. Porter 2010: “the fragment never stops pointing to the ineluctable gap between the artifact and life, which is occupied by the missing element of the voice” (332n130).

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of Dionysus and the beginning of their reconciliation to him. But the chorus’s visual ambiguity also perhaps suggests the presence of Dionysus, the transformational god of the theater, who, as Euripides’s Bacchae makes clear, is himself a uniquely destabilizing force when it comes to what and how we see. In the previous chapter, we saw how, in any theatrical performance, multiple factors determine—and complicate—how the audience sees “this” as “that”: the words of the play, but also the actors’ movements and sounds; the physical elements of theater, like costume, masks, and stage scenery; the audience’s own cultural repertoire across different media. The chorus here lays bare such multiply-determined viewing by prompting the audience to see these un-satyr-like satyrs as the satyr-like images they hold, even as these—the images—are in large part constructed through the chorus’s own verbal description, which itself draws on the language of earlier plays by Aeschylus. The comparison to painted objects, ones that even trump Daedalus’s own statues, also cues the audience to see the satyrs and the mask-images both against theatrical technologies (costumes and masks) familiar from other satyric performances and against images of satyrs in the visual arts, especially vase painting, where, as we saw in the introduction, they became particularly popular from the late archaic period onward. Images of satyr performers in the visual arts could in turn play with the technologies of theater and the visual experience that they engendered. We will explore these sorts of dynamics in Attic vase painting, of which the most famous example is the Pronomos Vase, in more detail in chapter 4. Here, for an analogous exploration of theater’s “play of actuality” presented in Theoroi, we may pause to consider an Apulian vase instead: a red-figure bell-krater in Sydney, attributed to the Tarporley Painter and dated to 410–380 BCE (figures 7 and 8). On side A are three satyr chorus members, each displaying a different relationship with his mask. The performer to the left holds his mask up with one hand, so that it appears starkly in profile, looking up toward his beardless, youthful face and so encouraging a comparison with the shaggy wildness of the satyr whose role he has just assumed or will assume. He and the middle performer are turned toward each other, as if in conversation, both their bodies in a partially frontal pose. The middle performer stretches out one arm to the left; with the other he holds his mask up against his body, appearing, if not to disregard it entirely, at least not to interact with it as directly as his companion. All three performers wear perizōmata, but the bodily angle of these two is such that their tails are hidden and their phalluses do not especially stand out against the decoration of the shorts. The figure to the right, however, is wearing his mask,

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figure 7. Apulian red-figure bell-krater attributed to the Tarporley Painter (side A), 410–380 BCE. Sydney, Chau Chak Wing Museum NM47.5. Photograph © Nicholson Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney.

which has become integrated with his human body.27 Fully in profile, he flaunts his erect phallus and equine tail prominently against the black background, even as his perizōma is still marked as costume.28 Standing on tiptoes with one leg and bending the other, he appears to be dancing; a tympanon (drum) by his feet suggests the Dionysiac music and revelry in which satyrs typically participate. 27.  Cf. Wiles 2007: 15 on the effect of “melting” between a performer’s mask and face; also Pickard-Cambridge 1988: 187. To me, “melting” suggests a more seamless merging of performer and character than what the artist is exploring here. 28.  Referring to this krater, Uhlig 2018: 157–58 demonstrates how, unlike the “melting” mask, the perizōma “retains its marked status as costume even when performing its mimetic function” (157).

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figure 8. Apulian red-figure bell-krater attributed to the Tarporley Painter (side B), 410–380 BCE. Sydney, Chau Chak Wing Museum NM47.5. Photograph © Nicholson Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney.

I am not proposing any direct connection between Theoroi and the krater, which was produced in Apulia at least fifty years after Aeschylus’s play was first performed in Athens.29 Nevertheless, it is illuminating to consider them side by side, since this scene offers a visual commentary on theater’s “play of actuality,” shifting between the pronounced artifactuality of the masks and costumes and the virtuality of a satyric performance. It explores the relation-

29.  Despite being Apulian, the krater “exemplifies [Athens’] iconographic idioms” (Uhlig 2018: 157; cf. Csapo 2010a: 42). For images of choreuts just before or after a performance, putting on or removing their costumes, in Attic vase painting, see chapter 4 in this book. The Tarporley Painter’s krater provides one of several surviving examples of this scene type from South Italy: Taplin 2007: 10–13; Hart 2010: 47.

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ship between performer, mask, costume, and prop, with each figure engaging to a different degree with these theatrical technologies and so also with the roles that they enable. Theoroi also explores this relationship, though of course the actors themselves are never unmasked: the chorus remains a chorus of satyrs; its examination of the votive objects produces not so much a confrontation between actor and mask but an interrogation of its own virtual appearance in relation to its masks, costumes, and movements. The scene on side B of the krater echoes side A in its composition (figure 8). Here are three young men, all standing and draped in himatia. The two on the right look toward the one on the left. Just like his counterpart on side A, the man in the middle, shown partially frontally, bends his left arm and stretches out his right toward his companion. In his right hand he holds a strigil. This is the only object in the scene, but, as a marker of the gymnasium, it identifies a type of activity on the youths’ part as much as their masks do on the other side. The contrast between the krater’s two sides may remind us of the contrast in Theoroi between the satyrs’ current attempt to be athletes and their usual dancing with erect phalluses, except that here it concerns the different activities in which a young citizen could quite normally engage—exercising in the gymnasium or dancing as a satyr for Dionysus. In the Theoroi, as we have seen, these roles jar against each other, producing, however momentarily, some visual friction as the audience must reconcile the chorus’s altered appearance and behavior with its satyric character, even as the latter is emphatically affirmed.

visual indeterminacy in aeschylus’s suppliants The relationship between masks, costumes, props and the characters they represent is also explored and problematized in the next two case studies, Aeschylus’s Suppliants (produced probably in the 460s BCE) and Aristophanes’s Birds (produced at the City Dionysia in 414 BCE).30 We have seen how Theoroi plays with the potential for visual disorientation on the audience’s part by drawing attention to a possible misalignment between actual and virtual—the potential for these performers to represent something other than satyrs. Suppliants and Birds also raise the question of how the audience, both internal and external, is to see the actors’ theatrical prosthetics and the props

30.  On the date of Suppliants, see especially Garvie 1969.

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with which they interact. Compared with Theoroi (at least so far as we can tell from its surviving fragments), however, these plays keep the question open to a much greater degree, unsettling spectators’ attempts to identify in any fixed way onstage bodies, masks, costumes, and objects. Both plays do so in part by repeatedly offering multiple representational possibilities; in Suppliants, these center on the Danaids and the objects they hold. The appearance of the chorus of Suppliants has been much commented upon in modern scholarship on the play. The chorus consists of the daughters of Danaus, who have come from Egypt with their father to seek protection in Argos from their Egyptian cousins, who are determined to marry them against their will. In the long parodos, the Danaids both declare their Argive ancestry, via Io’s son Epaphus (40–48), and draw attention to the non-Greek elements of their looks and sounds: they refer to their “barbaric voice” (καρβᾶνα . . . αὐδάν, 118) and “Sidonian veil[s]” (Σιδονίᾳ καλύπτρᾳ, 121 = 132) while performing a lament, a type of song and dance often associated with foreigners in Aeschylean tragedy.31 They also seem to suggest that their skin is dark: their cheeks are “sun-warmed” (εἱλοθερῆ, 70); their “race” (γένος) is “dark-blooming / sunbeaten” (μελανθὲς / ἡλιόκτυπον, 154–55).32 It is therefore typically assumed that the chorus’s costumes would have been obviously foreign and its masks dark brown or black, at least in the original production.33 Some commentators even imagine a sort of ancient version of blackface, suggesting that the chorus members’ exposed skin could be dyed or painted so as to seem black all over.34 Such assumptions, however, deprive the chorus of its visual indeterminacy. It is often noted that, by presenting a chorus of Egyptian women who claim 31.  On this association, see especially Hall 1989: 83–84, 130–33; Weiss 2017. 32.  When the word γένος is used in Suppliants, I translate it as “race.” As Derbew 2022: 66–97 demonstrates, the play foregrounds the racialization of the Danaids’ bodies: Pelasgus attempts to categorize them in large part (but not exclusively) according to their physical appearance, while the women themselves, from the parodos onward, manipulate the various “masks of difference” assigned to them. Cf. Worman 2020: 116–19. On ways of understanding γένος in terms of the classification of human difference, see especially Buell 2005: 1–2; McCoskey 2012: 29–30. The Danaids’ ethnicity—their classification according to their ancestry—is also a central concern in the tragedy. On this definition of ethnicity as opposed to race, see Mac Sweeney 2021. 33.  E.g., Friis Johansen and Whittle 1980: 2:128–29; Hall 1989: 139–40, 2006: 112–13; Vasunia 2001: 47–48; Papadopoulou 2009: 83–84; Bowen 2013: 26; Sommerstein 2019: 39; Derbew 2022: 69. 34.  E.g., Friis Johansen and Whittle 1980: 2.128; Papadopoulou 2009: 83; Bowen 2013: 26.

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Argive heritage, Suppliants complicates any strict division between Greek and “barbarian,” as, presumably, did the trilogy as a whole: in the following two plays, the women end up marrying their Egyptian cousins and then murdering all but one of them on the wedding night. The surviving couple, Hypermestra and Lynceus, then become the ancestors of a renowned Greek lineage that includes the heroes Perseus and Heracles.35 Much of the first half of Suppliants, especially the exchange between the Danaids and Pelasgus, the Argive king, muddies Greek/non-Greek distinctions even as it appears to sharpen them, in part by generating intense ambiguity regarding the Danaids’ appearance, which cannot be viewed in any one way. Yet modern scholars, like Pelasgus within the play itself, still typically want to fix onto the chorus’s clothing and masks a clearly “foreign” identity—to assign a single meaning to its appearance even while discussing how the Danaids break down non-Greek stereotypes. Such readings underestimate the role of the text itself in shaping an audience’s viewing of costumes or masks. As Rosie Wyles notes, the chorus’s clothing in this play could be quite neutral in design, but “[the Danaids’] own admittance of who they are in their opening ode invites the audience to see the costume as foreign.”36 The confrontation between the Danaids and Pelasgus is set up as a sort of mise-en-abyme, with the king as an internal spectator. The chorus has already posited an audience’s reaction to its performance, claiming in its parodos that a “nearby native” (πέλας . . . ἔγγαιος, 58–59) who is skilled in bird augury “will think that he hears a voice of Tereus’s wife” (δοξάσει τιν’ ἀκούειν ὄπα τᾶς Τηρεΐας, 60). We saw in chapter 1 how the phrase phaskein horan (“know/ declare that you see”) in the prologue of Sophocles’s Electra lays bare the audience’s act of visualizing one thing as another; dokein akouein (δοκεῖν ἀκούειν) 35.  See, e.g., Vasunia 2001: 41–43; L. Mitchell 2006; Bakewell 2013: Sommerstein 2019: 27–29. Suppliants is usually thought to be the first play in its tetralogy, followed by Egyptians. We know that Danaids and Amymone were the third tragedy and satyr play respectively: for a review of the evidence, see especially Winnington-Ingram 1961; Garvie 1969: 183–86; Friis Johansen and Whittle 1980: 1:40–55; Bowen 2013: 7–10; Sommerstein 2019: 10–20. (Sommerstein supports instead the theory that Egyptians was the first play, in which case it presumably would have covered the dispute between Aegyptus and Danaus that led to his and his daughters’ departure.) 36.  Wyles 2011: 82. She suggests that the costumes “may have been fairly unexceptional in design, perhaps chitons made of simple white linen” and notes that the Egyptian men are described as dressed in “white robes” (λευκῶν . . . πεπλωμάτων, 720). The movements and sounds of the chorus’ lament in the prologue also make its visual appearance appear less Greek, whatever the actual design or color of its costumes or masks.

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suggests the acoustic equivalent, urging the audience to hear the chorus’s song—and perhaps also the melody of the aulos in accompaniment—as a lament like that of Tereus’s wife, Aëdon or Procne the nightingale.37 Following the parodos, the suggestion of an internally staged performance, designed to be received in a particular way, becomes more prominent as Danaus tries to direct the entire ensuing scene with Pelasgus. Spotting the king and his entourage, he infers that they are coming as spies or, more literally, “viewers” (ὀπτῆρες, 185), and quickly tells the Danaids where to sit, how to hold their suppliant-branches, what demeanor they should assume, and how they should speak (191–203).38 By the time Pelasgus appears, then, the (Greek) audience has been primed to see him in a position analogous to its own, as a “native” Greek spectator trying to make sense of this chorus. Upon entering, Pelasgus fits right into the spectatorial role already assigned to him, immediately commenting on the Danaids’ appearance and his difficulty in understanding it: ποδαπὸν ὅμιλον τόνδ’ ἀνελληνόστολον πέπλοισι βαρβάροισι κἀμπυκώμασιν χλίοντα προσφωνοῦμεν; οὐ γὰρ Ἀργολὶς ἐσθὴς γυναικῶν οὐδ’ ἀφ’ Ἑλλάδος τόπων. ὅπως δὲ χώραν οὔτε κηρύκων ὕπο ἀπρόξενοί τε νόσφι θ’ ἡγητῶν μολεῖν ἔτλητ’ ἀτρέστως, τοῦτο θαυμαστὸν πέλει. κλάδοι γε μὲν δὴ κατὰ νόμους ἀφικτόρων κεῖνται παρ’ ὑμῖν πρὸς θεοῖς ἀγωνίοις· μόνον τόδ’ Ἑλλὰς χθὼν ξυνοίσεται στόχῳ. καὶ τἄλλα πόλλ’ ἔτ’ εἰκάσαι δίκαιον ἦν, εἰ μὴ παρόντι φθόγγος ἦν ὁ σημανῶν.

(235)

(240)

(245)

From where is this crowd in un-Greek gear luxuriating in barbarian robes and headbands, that I am addressing? For it isn’t Argive, the women’s dress, nor is it from any place in Greece. And how, without heralds and with no native patron, and without guides, 37.  On the significance of this reference to the story of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus, see especially Gödde 2000: 153–56. On the connection between lament, the nightingale, and the aulos in the ancient Greek musical imaginary, see Weiss 2017; also below. 38.  Cf. Murnaghan 2006 on Danaus here as “a reflection of the chorēgoi who may lie behind all tragic actors” (191).

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you dared fearlessly to come to this land—this is amazing. But, according to the customs of suppliants, branches lie next to you, before the assembled gods; in this alone could “Greek land” be a reasonable guess, and in other respects, too, it would be right to make many further guesses, if there were not someone here with a voice to explain.39 —Aesch. Supp. 234–45

Pelasgus is confounded by the mix of Greek and non-Greek identity that the chorus has emphasized from the start of the play: “un-Greek” clothes suggest that the women are foreign, but their wool-wreathed olive branches, at least some of which now lie on the altar of Greek gods, lead him also to guess at Greek origins.40 Pelasgus makes no reference to skin color here—he is most immediately struck by the chorus’s costumes and props, which together make it hard for him, as perhaps also a Greek audience, to neatly classify the chorus’s identity. If elements of the parodos enabled any sense of referential stability, Pelasgus’s response ensures this is undone. Like the audience, Pelasgus is therefore reliant on a verbal explanation to construct how he is to understand visually the chorus’s appearance. He makes the same kinds of guesses that an audience, too, may have made before the chorus began to speak at the start of the play—before hearing a “voice” that could “explain” or, more literally, “signify” (φθόγγος . . . σημανῶν, 245).41 Just as the satyrs’ masks in Theoroi need a voice to assume material form, so the chorus—any chorus—begins to assume an identifiable character not through its external appearance but through its words; these are needed to clarify what 39.  Or “if there were not someone with a voice to explain to me in person.” On the question of to whom the participle παρόντι refers (the chorus leader, despite the participle’s masculine gender, or Pelasgus himself), see Friis Johansen and Whittle 1980: 2:198 ad loc.; Bowen 2013: 198 ad loc.; Sommerstein 2019: 160 ad loc. 40.  On this mix of costume and behavior see Bakewell 2013: 22; Derbew 2022: 80–82. Derbew argues that Pelasgus’s use of the alpha privative ἀν- in ἀνελληνόστολον (“un-Greek gear”) underscores his binary understanding of Danaids, which cannot—at least initially— accommodate their intersectionality. On the timing of the branches’ (gradual?) placement on the altar, see especially Bowen 2013: 147–48. 41.  σημαίνω can be understood here as simply “tell, inform,” a meaning that is relatively rare in Aeschylus (see Griffith 1977: 182). But in the context of Pelasgus trying to make sense of the chorus’ appearance, the verb conveys, as it usually does, a sense of interpretation and clarification. Cf. Wyles 2011: 48–50 on how Pelasgus models the audience’s own process of viewing the chorus at the start of the play.

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its costumes and props are meant to represent. Even so, however, Pelasgus’s confused attempt at identification itself demonstrates the doubleness that is a fundamental part of the women’s characterization, since they are in fact simultaneously foreign and Greek. Yet even while Pelasgus suggests that any such identification is utterly reliant on language, he does not mention the need for logos here but instead uses the word φθόγγος. I have translated this as “voice,” but, like φωνή, to which the satyrs in Theoroi refer, it often denotes sound more broadly; in Birds, as we will see, it refers to the sound of both the aulos and birds. Pelasgus thus points to the acoustic, not just verbal, materialization of the chorus as a dramatic character—its materialization through song, which is its primary mode of performance for the entire play. At the same time, Pelasgus holds out the possibility that its sound may not even be human in its foreignness. Even as he hopes that it will “signify,” he points to the potential ambiguity of the chorus’s voice—an ambiguity already evident in the parodos, when, as we have already seen, it sang of its Greek ancestry in a “barbaric” (καρβᾶνα, 118) voice that it likened to birdsong. In the parodos, the chorus provided the spectators with an explanation of its origins and purpose. Now, however, it leaves Pelasgus, as internal spectator, hanging. First, in line 246, it claims rather evasively that he has spoken “not falsely” (ἀψευδῆ) about its “adornment” (κόσμον), thus apparently confirming that the women are both foreign and Greek without providing the clarification that he had expected.42 Then, the chorus immediately directs the king’s own question back at him, now itself becoming the internal spectator with Pelasgus as the viewed body to be identified. And indeed, he is still to be identified, for the external audience does not know yet that he is Pelasgus, even if, like Danaus when he spots him in the distance, it may already guess that he is the “ruler of this land” (τῆσδε γῆς ἀρχηγέτης, 183). The chorus complicates any such immediate inferences by opening up multiple possibilities for what role this actor could be playing and what his own costume and prop—a staff—could represent: should they address him as “a private citizen or a temple warden

42.  L. Mitchell 2006 suggests that the Danaids’ reply here “[makes] it quite clear that the audience can see (or cannot fail to notice) that the women do not look Greek, but indeed look distinctly unGreek” (212). I read line 246 as more ambiguous, referring to Pelasgus’s understanding of their entire appearance and so including not just the chorus’ masks and costumes but also the objects (suppliant branches) it holds.

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with a sacred staff or the city’s leader” (ἔτην . . . ἢ τηρὸν ἱερόρραβδον ἢ πόλεως ἀγόν, 247–48)? Any ambiguity about his identity quickly seems to evaporate, however, as Pelasgus answers straight away and at length, emphatically resisting any of the women’s own indeterminacy by not just announcing his name but also demarcating his precise geographical origins both through his ancestry—as grandson of “earthborn Palaechthon” (τοῦ γηγενοῦς . . . Παλαίχθονος, 250) and therefore native—and through a lengthy account of the extent of his city’s territory.43 Thus, while the Danaids only briefly play the part of a spectator trying to work out the meaning of what they see onstage, Pelasgus stays in this role for longer, as he continues to struggle with the chorus’s identification. The Danaids declare to him that they are “Argive by race” (Ἀργεῖαι γένος, 274), and promise to give “proofs” (πιστά, 276) of their ancestry. Their statement, however, leaves the king even more confused: ἄπιστα μυθεῖσθ’, ὦ ξέναι, κλυεῖν ἐμοί, ὅπως τόδ’ ὑμῖν ἐστιν Ἀργεῖον γένος. Λιβυστικαῖς γὰρ μᾶλλον ἐμφερέστεραι γυναιξίν ἐστε, κοὐδαμῶς ἐγχωρίαις· καὶ Νεῖλος ἂν θρέψειε τοιοῦτον φυτόν· Κύπριος χαρακτήρ τ’ ἐν γυναικείοις τύποις εἰκὼς πέπληκται τεκτόνων πρὸς ἀρσένων· Ἰνδάς τ’ ἀκούω νομάδας ἱπποβάμοσιν εἶναι καμήλοις ἀστραβιζούσας χθόνα παρ’ Αἰθίοψιν ἀστυγειτονουμένας· καὶ τὰς ἀνάνδρους κρεοβότους τ’ Ἀμαζόνας, εἰ τοξοτευχεῖς ἦστε, κάρτ’ ἂν ᾔκασα ὑμᾶς. διδαχθεὶς δ’ ἂν τόδ’ εἰδείην πλέον, ὅπως γένεθλον σπέρμα τ’ Ἀργεῖον τὸ σόν.

(280)

(285)

(290)

What you’ve said is unbelievable, strangers, for me to hear, that this here race of yours is Argive. For you are far more like Libyan women and not at all like local ones; the Nile, too, might nurture such offspring; and similar [to your appearance] is a Cyprian stamp struck upon female molds by male craftsmen; I’ve also heard that there are Indian nomad women who ride saddled 43.  On Palaechthon, probably Aeschylus’s invention, see Friis Johansen and Whittle 1980: 2:204 ad loc; Bowen 2013: 199 ad loc; Sommerstein 2019: 163–64 ad loc.

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on camels stepping like horses and who neighbor Ethiopian land; and the menless, flesh-eating Amazons, too, if you had bows, I’d have certainly guessed you were them. But if you’d inform me, I would understand this more fully, how your origin and line could be Argive. —Aesch. Supp. 277–90

Earlier, in its opening anapaests, the chorus promised to provide “trustworthy proofs” (πιστὰ τεκμήρια, 55) of its Argive ancestry, as if to ensure Pelasgus’s recognition of them as kin, but then instead sang a song ostentatiously framed as foreign. As it repeats its claim here, Pelasgus models the external audience’s response by declaring a confusing disconnect between what he sees (“this here,” τόδ’, 278) and what he hears (κλυεῖν, 277)—between, essentially, “this” and “that.” He once again tries to make sense of the chorus’s appearance, this time by likening it to a series of foreign women: Libyans, Egyptians, Indians (living near Ethiopians), even Amazons. In a much-disputed part of the same passage, he also compares them to a “Cyprian stamp”—most likely the stamp on a coin, an immediate identifier of origin.44 The inclusion of Cyprus as Pelasgus speculates on the women’s origins suggests that they could simultaneously appear to be from somewhere much closer and more familiar to mainland Greece as well as from much more exotic lands like Libya or India. For some scholars, this is one of the main reasons for deeming lines 282–83 inauthentic. Anthony Bowen writes that “it would . . . be odd for Cypriots to count with Africans, Egyptians, Indians, Ethiopians and Amazons, all of whom were not Greek at all,” while Friis Johansen and Whittle claim that “the selection of Cypriot girls to illustrate the definitely non-Greek impression which the Danaids make on Pelasgus is . . . baffling.”45 But as in Pelasgus’s first reaction to the chorus, such baffling oddness is surely the point: even as they appear foreign, the women are also (potentially) Greek, and so he grasps at several conflicting representational possibilities at once. The king’s attempt to pinpoint the women’s identity spans vast stretches of the known world, both relatively near (like Cyprus) and far. While some of his guesses may allude to skin color, to begin with at least, he does not 44.  On the “Cyprian stamp” as a coin metaphor, see especially Sommerstein 1977: 69–71; Bakewell 2013: 70–72. This reference to the technology of molding could also draw the audience’s attention to the materiality of the chorus’ masks: see Hall 2006: 113. 45.  Bowen 2013: 205; Friis Johansen and Whittle 1980: 2:225.

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seem to focus on any particular aspect of their looks at all, instead keeping the nature of their appearance undetermined and unresolved. It has been suggested that Pelasgus mentions these particular peoples because they can be linked to “abnormal” sexual practices in the Greek cultural imagination; the “menless” Amazons, with whom he ends, are the most extreme example.46 Such an undercurrent may be present here, but his wide-ranging guesswork above all emphasizes how the women could be from virtually anywhere other than Argos, the place that they claim as their ancestral home. The audience, of course, already knows which of the places listed by Pelasgus is correct, since the women announced at the very start of the play that they were from Egypt. Even so, Pelasgus’s uncertainty unsettles the audience’s own knowledge; together they await more details about the women’s ancestry—they wait for the chorus to “signify” (σημαίνειν, 245) and “inform” (διδάσκειν, 289).47 There is one aspect of the chorus to which Pelasgus indirectly draws attention toward the end of this passage: not its clothing or skin (mask) color, but the objects in its hands. If the women were equipped with bows (τοξοτευχεῖς, 288), he would conjecture that they were Amazons. Instead, they hold suppliant branches, those confusing markers of Greekness that confound all of Pelasgus’s guesses. By noting what they do not have, Pelasgus returns the audience’s focus to these props and his difficulty in reconciling them with other elements of the Danaids’ attire. At the same time, the mention of bows presents another, more threatening representational possibility for these objects, reminding the audience that the women will eventually attack the men who pursue them, in this respect resembling the Amazons in their violence as well as in their resistance to marriage.48 The branches continue to be a focal point for Pelasgus, symbolizing not just a Greek identity but his own obligation to help the Danaids as suppliants. After the women have finally explained their ancestry, he asks them why they are supplicating him with “white-wreathed, freshly plucked branches”

46.  Bakewell 2013: 68–73. He argues that this is also the main point of the Cypriot comparison, since the adjective Κύπριος evokes Aphrodite as well as the island. 47.  Derbew 2022: 87–88 sees line 289 as a moment of transition for Pelasgus, who now shifts away from a binary (Greek vs. foreign) understanding of the Danaids’ appearance and “assumes the role of a student eager for instruction” (88). 48.  Cf. Mitchell 2006: 213.

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(λευκοστεφεῖς . . . νεοδρέπτους κλάδους, 334). After requesting that he protect them against their Egyptian cousins, the Danaids urge Pelasgus to be a sympathetic audience—to “hear me / with a kindly heart” (κλῦθί μου / πρόφρονι καρδίᾳ, 348–49) and “see me, the suppliant, the wandering fugitive” (ἴδε με τὰν ἱκέτιν φυγάδα περίδρομον, 350). He responds by emphasizing what he sees, once again referring to their branches, which appear to occlude the Danaids themselves: “I see a crowd, shaded by fresh-plucked branches” (ὁρῶ κλάδοισι νεοδρόποις κατάσκιον / . . . ὅμιλον, 354–55).49 Thus the branches assume a powerful agency here, visually persuading Pelasgus along with—or even more than—the chorus’s verbal entreaties. At the same time, the chorus’s language has by now rendered unstable what exactly these particular objects represent and portend. Pelasgus’s obsession with the branches draws attention to them during his confrontation with the Danaids, but already from the very start of the play the chorus has encouraged the audience to notice these objects, even gesturing to them with deictic markers: τίν’ ἂν οὖν χώραν εὔφρονα μᾶλλον τῆσδ’ ἀφικοίμεθα σὺν τοῖσδ’ ἱκετῶν ἐγχειριδίοις, ἐριοστέπτοισι κλάδοισιν; To what more friendly land than this could we come with these handheld emblems of suppliants, wool-wreathed branches? —Aesch. Supp. 19–22

This first reference to what the chorus is holding suggests that the visual identification of the props as suppliant branches is not entirely secure. Before calling them branches (κλάδοι, 22), it first calls them ἐγχειριδία (21), translated here as “handheld emblems”; literally they are just “handheld things.”50 Usually,

49.  Cf. Supp. 656–57, where the reference to their speaking “from shaded mouths” (ὑποσκίων / ἐκ στομάτων) may allude to the shade of the suppliant branches as well as or instead of actual facial veiling (see Worman 2020: 117n69). 50.  Bakewell 2013: 23, 136n48 detects a focus on hands and objects in hands throughout the play and trilogy, from the branches and the belts that the women may grasp as they threaten to hang themselves, to the daggers that they will use in Danaids. The Egyptian men’s hands also become a focal point—and source of fear: Supp. 756, 821; see Worman 2020: 79; Teló forthcoming. See also Gödde 2000: 234–38 on the significance of hand gestures in Suppliants.

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however, an ἐγχειριδίον is a dagger, the same weapon that the women will use to kill their Egyptian husbands on their wedding night.51 The oxymoronic phrase “these suppliants’ daggers” (τοῖσδ’ ἱκετῶν ἐγχειριδίοις) before the mention of “branches” in the following line thus prevents any face-value identification of this crucial element of the chorus’s appearance. It also endows the branches with a more aggressive potency than they might at first appear to hold; as we have seen, they will soon have a markedly powerful impact on Pelasgus. The dissonance created by the dagger-branches in lines 21–22 builds on the unsettling ambiguity of the word στόλος to describe the chorus in line 2—often translated here as “band,” this word usually refers to an army or a warlike mission. Similarly, the chorus refers to Danaus as στασίαρχος in line 12—“leader of our band” but also of “discord” or “war” (στάσις).52 The chorus, its leader, and the items it holds are thus to be understood in multiple, conflicting ways from the very beginning of the play (and likely trilogy), in terms not just of Greekness or foreignness but also of the women’s status as suppliants—as helpless victims or violent intruders. Such uncertainty is also pronounced in the second reference to the branchprops in the tragedy. This comes near the end of the parodos, when the chorus reveals the threat that will ensure Pelasgus’s protection: τὸν γάϊον, τὸν πολυξενώτατον Ζῆνα τῶν κεκμηκότων ἱξόμεσθα σὺν κλάδοις ἀρτάναις θανοῦσαι, μὴ τυχοῦσαι θεῶν Ὀλυμπίων. Zeus of the earth, most hospitable Zeus of the dead,

51.  Cf. Apollod. 2.1.5: Danaus “gave his daughters daggers” (ἐγχειρίδια δίδωσι ταῖς θυγατράσιν). On the double meaning of ἐγχειρίδια, foreshadowing the daggers later used by the women against their husbands, see especially Winnington-Ingram 1961: 148; Gantz 1978: 280; Friis Johansen and Whittle 1980: 2:21–22 ad loc; Sandin 2005: 48–49; Bakewell 2013: 65; Bowen 2013: 148 ad loc; Sommerstein 2019: 100 ad loc. Hands themselves can be ambiguous or twofold in their actions and potency: see Worman 2020: 78–79, centering on Zeus “Toucher” (ἐπαφῆς, 17; ἐφάπτωρ, 313), on how the play “foregrounds the possibility that the violent hand and the one that protects may be one and the same” (78). 52.  Sommerstein 2019: 97 ad loc. These are just a couple of examples of numerous allusions in Suppliants to the violence and bloodshed that will follow later in the trilogy: see especially Seaford 1987: 116–17; L. Mitchell 2006: 209.

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him we will supplicate with branches, with nooses dying, if we don’t win [the support of] the Olympian gods. —Aesch. Supp. 156–61

Here the word κλάδοις, following the verb ἱξόμεσθα (“we will supplicate”), initially denotes the branches of suppliants, objects suitable for “most hospitable” (πολυξενώτατον) Zeus. But just as Zeus of Strangers is juxtaposed with “Zeus of the dead” (Ζῆνα τῶν κεκμηκότων) within lines 156–58, so the branches are immediately offset and redefined by ἀρτάναις (“nooses”) at the start of line 160—also in the dative plural, but a noun with a very different meaning.53 Regardless of the impossibility of suppliant branches being used for hanging, “nooses” provide an alternative way of understanding these props, imbuing them with a more deadly agency and so again raising the question of how, exactly, the audience should understand them—and so also how to understand the women who hold them.54 The κλάδοι thus become a problematic aspect of the Danaids’ tableau not simply for Pelasgus, the spectator within the play, but for the audience within the theater, as the identification of these objects is repeatedly destabilized, pointing forward to the violence that is to come. The Danaids’ threat becomes more tangible when they issue it to Pelasgus himself; it also once again complicates any straightforward visualization of their appearance. At the climax of its encounter with the king, the chorus draws his and the audience’s attention to a part of its attire that has not previously been noted at all: “bands and belts” (στρόφους ζώνας τε, 457). These are apparently unremarkable elements of female costume; as Pelasgus says, such items are “appropriate for women” (γυναικῶν . . . συμπρεπῆ, 458). But they too are not what they first seem, since, after a series of ambiguous statements, the chorus makes clear how it might use them: Βα. Χο.

αἰνιγματῶδες τοὔπος· ἀλλ’ ἁπλῶς φράσον. ἐκ τῶνδ’ ὅπως τάχιστ’ ἀπάγξασθαι θεῶν.

53.  Translations tend to smooth over this jarring juxtaposition: Sommerstein 2008, for example, gives “[we] will supplicate . . . in death, with nooses / instead of olive-branches.” I have deliberately provided a very literal translation in an attempt to replicate the word order of lines 159–60. 54.  These lines may also further complicate the Danaids’ claims of Greekness since they threaten Zeus and the Olympian gods: see L. Mitchell 2006: 217–18.

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Βα. Χο.

ἤκουσα μαστικτῆρα καρδίας λόγον. ξυνῆκας· ὠμμάτωσα γὰρ σαφέστερον.

P: Ch: P: Ch:

Your words are riddling—but speak plainly. To hang ourselves from these gods as quickly as possible. I’ve heard speech that lashes my heart. You’ve understood: for you’ve seen more clearly. —Aesch. Supp. 464–67

Through the chorus’s words these parts of its costume assume a new form; hearing them (ἤκουσα, 466), both the king and the audience see them (ὠμμάτωσα, 467) anew. The chorus’s waistbands, like its branches, are at least momentarily transformed from markers of femininity into (potentially) powerful weapons; the words that redefine them foreshadow the physical force of their new form, lashing Pelasgus like a whip (μαστικτῆρα, 466). Any visual clues provided by masks, costumes, and props as to the chorus’s identity and behavior in Suppliants are thus repeatedly rendered uncertain. Though this process is especially marked in the first half of the play, earlier identifications of the Danaids continue to be problematized in the second half as well. In particular, the violent confrontation between the Danaids and the Egyptian men, following their encounter with Pelasgus, on the one hand reaffirms the women’s position as suppliant victims and, on the other, further complicates foreignness. They seem to be sharply distinguished in this scene from their pursuers. Now it is the Egyptians who have dark skin (719, 745, 888);55 the Danaids referred earlier to their “barbaric speech,” but the Egyptian men actually sing in broken Greek (836–42; cf. 118); whereas the women supplicated to the Olympian gods, the men only “honor the gods who are by the Nile” (τοὺς ἀμφὶ Νεῖλον, 922). This is not to say that the women now appear “Greek” themselves in any straightforward way. On the contrary, their distraught, nonverbal cries and frenetic lyrics fit the stereotype of excessively emotional easterners; their singing combines with that of the new Egyptian chorus to create an overall impression of foreignness.56 But, at the same time, the Egyptian men are contrasted with the Danaids in the same respects in which the Danaids had previously presented themselves as different from their internal and external Greek audiences. Any earlier inferences based on the

55.  On the distinction that the Danaids make here, see Derbew 2022: 88–89. 56.  Weiss forthcoming a.

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chorus’s appearance—whatever the actual masks or costumes used in a production—are again unsettled by this hybrid chorus. Suppliants, then, repeatedly draws attention to how difficult and unstable the process of seeing and understanding onstage bodies and props can be. With Pelasgus as an internal spectator, the play draws this process out at length, continuously complicating and deferring any clear view of the chorus and the objects associated with it. It also demonstrates the need not just for visual clues but for acoustic ones as well, while problematizing the vision that these too might create. We saw how such visual indeterminacy early on in Theoroi is closely connected to the particular identity that the satyrs have temporarily assumed and so also to the trajectory of the play’s plot. The instability involved in “seeing theater” in Suppliants continues throughout the tragedy and is fundamental to both the Danaids’ characterization and the dramatic action of the entire trilogy. It is also much more disturbing, not only because it is never allayed or resolved, but also because of the stakes involved in viewing these women and the objects they hold. Pelasgus’s anxious inability to understand them urges such confusion on the audience too, who then become implicated in the violence that will erupt in the following play.

winging with words in aristophanes’s birds Suppliants therefore presents us with a powerful example of tragedy’s experimentation with the potential gap or nonconvergence between “this” and “that” and the visual disorientation that it can generate. Old Comedy frequently and explicitly keeps such a gap open, allowing for multiple understandings of what the audience is to see onstage. No surviving play does so more than Aristophanes’s Birds. Already in chapter 1 we saw how “Cloudcuckooland” is materialized through Peisetaerus directing the gaze of both Tereus, as an internal spectator, and the audience in the theater. That moment of spatial construction explicitly involves linguistic reconstruction, through an etymological transformation of polos (“site,” πόλος, 179, 184) into polis (“city,” πόλις, 184). As we shall see in this final section, the scene is connected to a much larger focus in Birds on the role of words, speech, and sound in transforming onstage bodies, along with masks, costumes, and props. In a literalization of the Homeric “winged words” metaphor, Peisetaerus encapsulates this tenet of the play by telling one of the characters seeking to join his city that he is “winging

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[him] by speaking” (λέγων πτερῶ, 1437) for “everyone becomes winged with words” (πάντες τοι λόγοις / ἀναπτεροῦνται, 1438–39).57 Such play with the power of language in performance can be understood as part of the comedy’s extreme metatheatricality.58 As Gregory Dobrov has shown, this is bound up with ontological questions surrounding the repeated “man as bird” metaphor and its inversion, “bird as man.”59 Tereus, the former Thracian king and now a hoopoe, embodies such play about the shifts between man and bird, actor and character. But such metatheatricality should also be understood in terms of Aristophanes’s deep exploration of how a drama can be visually constructed for its audience. Since much of Birds is concerned with the identification of one thing as something else, it repeatedly exposes the work entailed in “seeing theater,” complicating and destabilizing the relationship between “this” and “that,” actual and virtual, as well as the role of language in shaping it. Whereas the visual indeterminacy of Suppliants revolves specifically around the Danaids and their agency, in Birds, anything can be everything at once, and the comedy hinges on such ontological play and its impact on the audience’s own act of viewing. From its opening scene onward, the play draws its audience’s attention to the means by which and the extent to which it might see an actor as a bird. When Peisetaerus and Euelpides, two old Athenians, first come onstage, each of them apparently holds a bird as a prop (maybe models, maybe real ones); they tell us one bird is a crow, the other a jackdaw (5–8).60 At this point, then, the audience is invited to see men and birds as two separate things. The scene is somewhat akin to the satyrs holding satyr-masks in Theoroi, except that the characters are not (yet) themselves birds. That is, whereas the satyr-masks ultimately do reveal what the satyrs are and always will be, despite their altered appearance, the bird-props function as images of what Peisetaerus and 57.  See especially Dobrov 2001: 125 on how these winged metaphors express the creative power of speech. Cf. Slater 2002: “[Peisetaerus] claims that his language is ‘performative’ language, and in doing so he literalizes metaphor in a typically Aristophanic fashion: he has been creating citizens for the bird city by language, and the city is a city of language” (145). 58.  Compton-Engle 2015: 129–43 emphasizes the comedy’s self-conscious use of costume in connection with its play with language. 59.  Dobrov 1997. 60.  On the question of whether these are props or real birds that they later let fly away, see Dunbar 1995: 130–31.

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Euelpides are not and perhaps never will be, despite the wings that they acquire halfway through the play. After the two men knock on the skēnē door (representing Tereus’s house), the slave who answers presents new problems of avian identification. His appearance prompts Peisetaerus to remark on the “gaping chasm” (τοῦ χασμήματος, 61) of his mouth. While this may refer specifically to a mask with a gaping beak attached, masks in the ancient Greek theater always, as far as we can tell from visual evidence and modern efforts at reconstruction, had open mouths.61 At least in terms of the play’s text, then, this detail does not in fact mean that the slave is clearly a bird. Even so, he exclaims upon seeing Peisetaerus and Euelpides, “here are a couple of bird-catchers” (ὀρνιθοθήρα τουτωί, 62). In response, they pretend to be not men (ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐσμὲν ἀνθρώπω, 64) but birds themselves, inventing new species that reveal their fear: Peisetaerus says he is a Libyan “cowerer” (ὑποδεδιώς, 65), while Euelpides, following his companion’s direction to look at his behind for proof, claims to be a “Phasian shitterling” (ἐπικεχοδὼς . . . Φασιανικός, 68).62 The slave is not at all convinced: “you’re talking nonsense,” he says—or, more literally, “you’re saying nothing” (οὐδὲν λέγεις, 66). At this point, then, their speech proves ineffectual at making them seem anything other than the ordinary men. But the slave does seem avian to Peisetaerus and Euelpides, and they spend some time working out what kind of bird he is meant to be; elaborating on his own self-identification as “slave bird” (ὄρνις . . . δοῦλος, 69), they settle on a “running bird” (τροχίλος ὄρνις, 79). Even when, apparently, a character is more obviously a bird, there is therefore still uncertainty as to what exactly he represents, allowing for various verbal definitions. The explicit lack of an avian repertoire to inform the men’s—and audience’s— understanding prompts them instead to base their guesses on the decidedly human tasks (running around, pan or ladle in hand, for various types of food, 75–79) that the slave performs for his master, Tereus. As the slave goes back into the skēnē to wake up Tereus, the birds held by Peisetaerus and Euelpides apparently fly away (86–91). The audience’s view in

61.  On reconstructing the masks of classical Greek theater, including experimentation with different mouth sizes, see, e.g., Cohen 2007. 62.  Φασιανικός (“Phasian”) can also be translated as “pheasant-type”; the name refers to the River Phasis in Colchis, which, as Dunbar notes, “like Africa is a plausible home for an unknown species” (1995: 157 ad loc.).

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this initial scene has therefore shifted from seeing men and birds to man as bird (an actor in bird costume playing a bird but still identified in terms of his human characteristics) and then to men unsuccessfully pretending to be birds through words alone. The gap between actual and virtual, between an actor and the part he plays, is thus made obvious; it is also complicated as a result of these cues for the audience to notice the different ways in which a performer might or might not be a bird. With these various degrees of bird-human pretense the audience is primed for the entrance of Tereus and, later, Procne the nightingale, both humansturned-birds. The first ten lines of the exchange with Tereus are taken up by Peisetaerus and Euelpides trying to make sense of his costume: “Whatever is this creature? What’s the plumage? What’s the style of the crest?” (τουτὶ τί ποτ’ ἐστὶ θηρίον; / τίς ἡ πτέρωσις; τίς ὁ τρόπος τῆς τριλοφίας; 93–94). Tereus explains his funny beak by referring to his representation in Sophocles’s tragedy, presumably produced a few years earlier: “That’s how Sophocles mistreats me, the [famous] Tereus, in his tragedies!” (τοιαῦτα μέντοι Σοφοκλέης λυμαίνεται / ἐν ταῖς τραγῳδίαισιν ἐμέ τὸν Τηρέα, 100–1). Slater suggests that the explanation for his lack of feathers (Tereus claims, rather bizarrely, that birds shed them during the winter, 105–6) in fact refers to the storage of the costume used in Sophocles’s play, which Aristophanes or his producer then bought secondhand.63 Even if the costume itself is not from the tragedy (and we do not know if Tereus actually appeared as a hoopoe in Sophocles’s play), these comments encourage the audience to view Tereus and his attire against the backdrop of that performance.64 Drawing from Marvin Carlson’s work on theatrical “haunting,” whereby a production can trigger an audience’s memory of a prop’s or costume’s previous use or of another actor in a particular role, Mueller emphasizes the close connection between costume and character in Greek tragedy and comedy: “costumes, as material artifacts, 63.  Slater 2002: 135. Cf. Compton-Engle 2015: 132–33. The possibility that tragic costumes could be reused in comedies is suggested by Ar. Ach. 393–489, where Euripides finds an appropriate Telephus costume for Dicaeopolis: on this scene and the effects of such “recycling” see especially Muecke 1982b: 19–23; Wyles 2011: 40, 61–64. 64.  On Birds as a response to Sophocles’s Tereus, see especially Dobrov 2001: 105–26 (based on Dobrov 1993). See also Hall 2006: 115–18 on such “inter-performative” references in tragedy; Mueller 2016a passim on “intertheatricality.” Later Tereus claims to be the grandfather of the hoopoe in the tragedian Philocles’s Pandion tetralogy (281–82), thus again shaping the audience’s viewing of his bird-body through a reference to an earlier staging of the Tereus myth.

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carry the history of the bodies that animated them in the past; these bodies should still perhaps be considered felt presences in the theater.”65 We can see this connection in Birds, where the identification of the actor’s role coincides with an identification of his costume: the audience is to visualize him as Tereus—man and hoopoe—by remembering his tragic counterpart. Tereus then summons the nightingale in order to summon the rest of the birds—that is, the chorus. At first, rather than seeing any birds physically present, the audience is encouraged to hear them instead, through both the aulos player’s accompaniment, which can represent the nightingale’s song (as it may also do in the parodos of Aeschylus’s Suppliants), and then Tereus’s own increasingly bird-like cries.66 Despite this encouragement to visualize birds through sound, however, they are not there yet for spectators, whether internal or external, to really see: “Do you see any bird?” (ὁρᾷς τιν’ ὄρνιν, 263), Peisetaerus asks; “No by Apollo, I don’t” (μὰ τὸν Ἀπόλλω ᾿γὼ μὲν οὔ, 263), Euelpides answers. But then the chorus members appear gradually (sporadēn), and Tereus, Peisetaerus, and Euelpides point out all twenty-four as each enters in turn (267–304). They remark quite specifically on the first four birds’ appearances, prompting the audience to link details in their costumes and beaks to particular species, both real and imaginary—that is, to connect actual to virtual, “this” to “that.” The ensuing confrontation between the men and birds is initially hostile, before Peisetaerus persuades the birds to build their city across the entire sky and wrest power back from the Olympian gods. As the birds prepare to attack them, Peisetaerus directs Euelpides to find objects with which they might defend themselves (352–61): pots as shields against owls,67 a skewer to plant in front of them, and bowls to protect their eyes. As Nan Dunbar notes, when Peisetaerus says “we must fight and take up the pots” (δεῖ μάχεσθαι λαμβάνειν τε τῶν χυτρῶν, 357), the audience would expect to hear not χυτρῶν (“pots”) at the end of the line but the metrically equivalent ὅπλων (“weapons”). The

65.  Mueller 2016a: 67, with reference to Carlson 2001; cf. Sofer 2003. 66.  On the aulete’s music representing the nightingale, see Romer 1983; Dunbar 1995: 203; A. Barker 2004; also below. On the use of language to represent bird sounds, especially in the second part of Tereus’s song (227–62), see Weiss 2017: 256n32 (with further references), 2018a: 162–63, 165–66; Telò 2020b: 221–25. 67.  On the various hypotheses for why χύτραι might quite literally keep owls away, see Dunbar 1995: 273 ad loc.

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audience is in effect asked to see the pots as weapons, χύτραι as ὅπλα, while at the same time to understand all too well the incongruity of any such equivalence. At this point the skewer (ὀβελίσκος, 359) appears to function as a palisade but perhaps also as a bird-scare (“reminding [the audience] of their habit of spit-roasting birds” using the same instrument).68 A little later, however, it is to be understood rather differently: Peisetaerus tells Euelpides that “we must patrol holding our spear, the skewer” (τὸ δόρυ χρή, τὸν ὀβελίσκον / περιπατεῖν ἔχοντας ἡμᾶς, 388–89). We saw how, in Suppliants, the chorus redefines its suppliant branches, first as daggers and then verbally multiplying them as “branches / nooses” (κλάδοις / ἀρτάναις, 159–60). Similarly, here in Birds, the audience is to understand this skewer prop, like the pot-weapons, as different objects simultaneously (a “spear skewer,” δόρυ . . . ὀβελίσκον), even while being reminded that it is nothing more than an ordinary household tool. The transformation of household objects into weapons highlights the central premise of the entire comedy. In this topsy-turvy world in which men will become birds (Tereus later promises that Peisetaerus and Euelpides will grow wings after eating a “little root” [ῥιζίον], 654–55), birds are to rule as gods, and Peisetaerus will take the place of Zeus, everyone and everything are to appear different from what they are. This is an ontological theme but also an aesthetic one, connected to the audience’s own viewing experience, exposing the perceptual instability resulting from theater’s “play of actuality.”69 Such dynamics of theatrical spectatorship become even more pronounced when, after the bird chorus has agreed to Peisetaerus’s proposals, the longanticipated nightingale finally appears in person. Previously she was present acoustically, through the piping of the aulos; now she appears visually as well.70 Peisetaerus and Euelpides stage for the audience multiple ways of viewing her: 68.  Dunbar 1995: 270 ad loc. 69.  Dobrov 1997 understands the entire play as “a dramatic deconstruction of metaphor” (100), displaying “the profound rift between human language and the world of phenomena (referents)” (105). See also Romer 1983: “That things are not always what they seem is an old literary theme and nowhere more prominent than in this play. . . . To all appearances Peisetaerus and Euelpides are men, but they deny their humanity and claim birdhood. . . . For these rascals, there is no being a bird but saying makes it so” (141). 70.  She is long anticipated not only since Tereus already summoned her at 209–22 but also as a result of the very appearance of Tereus in this play and his reference to Sophocles’s tragedy, which lead us to expect Procne as well as him.

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Ευ. Επ. Πε. Ευ. Πε. Ευ. Πε. Ευ.

ἐκβίβασον αὐτοῦ πρὸς θεῶν αὐτήν, ἵνα καὶ νὼ θεασώμεσθα τὴν ἀηδόνα. ἀλλ’ εἰ δοκεῖ σφῷν, ταῦτα χρὴ δρᾶν. ἡ Πρόκνη, ἔκβαινε καὶ σαυτὴν ἐπιδείκνυ τοῖς ξένοις. ὦ Ζεῦ πολυτίμηθ’, ὡς καλὸν τοὐρνίθιον, ὡς δ’ ἁπαλόν, ὡς δὲ λευκόν. ἆρά γ’ οἶσθ’ ὅτι ἐγὼ διαμηρίζοιμ’ ἂν αὐτὴν ἡδέως; ὅσον δ’ ἔχει τὸν χρυσόν, ὥσπερ παρθένος. ἐγὼ μὲν αὐτὴν κἂν φιλῆσαί μοι δοκῶ. ἀλλ’, ὦ κακόδαιμον, ῥύγχος ὀβελίσκοιν ἔχει. ἀλλ’ ὥσπερ ᾠὸν νὴ Δί’ ἀπολέψαντα χρὴ ἀπὸ τῆς κεφαλῆς τὸ λέμμα κᾆθ’ οὕτω φιλεῖν.

(665)

(670)

E: Bring her out here, by the gods, so that we too can see the nightingale. T: Well then, if it seems good to you, I must do this. O Procne, come out and show yourself to the strangers. P: O much-honored Zeus, what a beautiful birdie: how tender, and how fair! E: Yeah, you know, I’d gladly spread her thighs. P: What a lot of gold she has, like a young girl! E: I think I’d like to kiss her too. P: But, you idiot, she has a couple of skewers for a beak! E: But like an egg, by Zeus, we have to peel the outer layer off the head and kiss her that way. —Ar. Av. 663–74

The nightingale is the object of everyone’s sight in this scene. Euelpides wants her to come out so that we can all see her (θεασώμεσθα, 664), thus encouraging the audience to share in this act of spectatorship—an act that is explicitly bound up with sexual desire.71 “Original” or intended stagings of this scene are difficult to determine and much debated. Long ago, Frank Romer, followed twenty years later by Andrew Barker, suggested that the figure who appears here could be the aulos player.72 As we noted, it has already been clear from when the aulete started playing

71.  On the “male gaze” (a term taken from Laura Mulvey’s classic 1975 work on cinema) directed at female bodies in Aristophanic comedy, see especially Zweig 1992; Walin 2012: 104–41. 72.  Romer 1983; A. Barker 2004. On the scene’s staging see also, e.g., Taplin 1993: 106–7; Dunbar 1995: 421–22.

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that his music could represent the nightingale’s song; the chorus later makes this identification explicit when it addresses the nightingale as one who “plays the fair-voiced aulos” (καλλιβόαν . . . αὐλόν, 682–83) and then tells her to “lead off the anapaests” (ἄρχου τῶν ἀναπαίστων, 684).73 Peisetaerus’s remark that her beak consists of “a couple of skewers” (ὀβελίσκοιν, 672) presumably refers to the two pipes of the aulos, which prevent the addition of a beak-mask, or at least of a beak attachment. The “shell” that they would need to peel off would then refer primarily to the phorbeia, the headband often used to keep the aulos in place.74 At the same time, Peisetaerus’s own confused viewing of the aulos, as he reaches instead for mundane objects like skewers and eggshells to describe these supposed beaks, defamiliarizes the appearance of the musician whom an ancient audience would see in every dramatic production—and generates many of the difficulties faced by those who have tried to reconstruct the scene’s staging. At this point, then, the audience is not just to hear the aulete as the nightingale but to see him as one as well; it may in fact be the very first moment that it gets to see the aulete, after awaiting his onstage entrance as Peisetaerus, Euelpides, Tereus, and the chorus await that of the character he represents.75 Slipping between performer and character, he becomes a multiform figure. Indeed, he appears not only as a nightingale but also, later, as a raven: when the chorus, performing a processional song to mark the beginning of their city’s inaugural sacrifices, refers explicitly to their song’s auletic accompaniment (858), Peisetaerus remarks that he has never before seen “a raven wearing 73.  Cf. Weiss 2017 on the long association of the aulos with the nightingale, and with birdsong more generally. 74.  Romer 1983: 137–38; A. Barker 2004: 201. Some scholars have thought it could mean an actor’s mask instead: see especially Chapman 1983: 13; Compton-Engle 2007. 75.  Noting the lack of a big choral parodos and the relatively small amount of choral singing—typically accompanied by an aulete—prior to the nightingale scene, A. Barker 2004: 200–2 argues that the aulete, like the nightingale, has been only heard by this point and makes his initial entrance at line 666. This argument may be further supported by the chorus’ song at 676–84: they exclaim “you’ve come, you’ve come, you’re here to see, / bringing sweet sound to me!” (ἦλθες, ἦλθες, ὤφθης, / ἡδὺν φθόγγον ἐμοὶ φέρουσ’, 680–81), as if remarking on the aulete-nightingale’s physical absence up until then (on these lines see also below). Despite the emphasis placed on bringing the nightingale “out” (ἐκβίβασον, 662, 663; ἔκβαινε, 666), however, it is possible that the aulete could have already been onstage—in which case he is the ultimate double figure, repeatedly flitting between his role as performer and that of character right before the audience’s eyes.

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a phorbeia” (κόρακ’ . . . ἐμπεφορβειωμένον, 861). In doing so, he again emphasizes, as he did with Tereus’s slave, the audience’s own lack of familiarity with what this play’s bodies and objects might represent.76 In this scene, then, both internal spectators and, with them, the audience itself see before them both aulete and nightingale. But these are not the only ways to identify this figure, as the reactions of Peisetaerus and Euelpides demonstrate. When Peisetaerus mentions how much gold she is wearing, “like parthenos” (ὥσπερ παρθένος, 670), he seems to allude to Pheidias’s famously golden statue of Athena—the Parthenos.77 Euelpides’s desire to “spread her thighs” (διαμηρίζοιμ’, 669) and kiss her (φιλῆσαι, 671), however, makes it clear that they also see this figure not as the Parthenos nor as a virginal parthenos (“young girl”) but as an aulētris, the female pipe-player and typically also sexworker who would entertain men at a symposium.78 The difficulties of seeing the aulete-aulētris as a nightingale are then translated into a problem of sexual contact: they cannot kiss her because she has the “skewers” (ὀβελίσκοιν, 672). Previously ὀβελίσκοι appeared as onstage props, to be used as weapons, as Peisetaerus and Euelpides took them up against the hostile bird-chorus. Now the pipes of the aulos are the ὀβελίσκοι, to be understood as five potential things at once: not just pipes, skewers, and beak, but also palisades and spears, which make any sexual advance dangerous. Thus the multiple, overlapping

76.  Dunbar 1995: 421–22, 503 argues that both Procne and the phorbeia-wearing raven mentioned at 859–62 are to be played by mute actors, miming the playing being done by the aulete. Such a configuration would cleverly play with how instrumental sound might affect the audience’s viewing of the performers (see below), but requires a literal, face-value identification of this figure based on actual costume rather than allowing for the sort of flexible viewing that I am arguing is showcased through the entire comedy. Compton-Engle 2007 contends that Procne must be played by an actor wearing a full bird mask with a beak, but this argument similarly relies on the assumption that the audience would be viewing Procne literally throughout: if played by (or simply dressed as) an aulete, she need not seem entirely “anthropomorphic” (116), since both the instrument’s sound and the other characters’ reactions to her can affect the audience’s understanding of her appearance; the egg analogy need not rely on a part of the costume actually resembling an egg. Likewise, Peisetaerus’s remark at 860–61 that he has not previously seen a raven with a phorbeia need not be inconsistent (if consistency is required) with Procne as an aulete two hundred lines earlier. Much comedy derives from Peisetaerus and Euelpides not recognizing the pipes of the aulos in this earlier scene and instead seeing them as beak-skewers. 77.  Platt 2011: 111. 78.  Romer 1983: 137n7; Dunbar 1995: 442 ad loc; A. Barker 2004: 198.

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identifications for both the aulos-skewers and the figure who carries them encourage a flexibility in the audience’s own gaze, a simultaneous viewing of multiple potential “thats” for the onstage “this.” Ironically, however, for all this emphasis on the nightingale’s visual appearance, it is still its acoustic representation that determines the identification between the aulete and the bird. Before she appears “in person”—before the aulete comes out as the nightingale—the chorus leader emphasizes once again her musicality: she is “sweet-singing” (ἡδυμελῆ) and a “singer who sings with the Muses” (ξύμφωνον ἀηδόνα Μούσαις, 659).79 Delivered in anapaestic tetrameters, this statement would likely be accompanied by the aulete, playing again after a brief lull following the chorus’s last song and providing a sonic manifestation of the chorus leader’s words. After the nightingale-aulete has appeared and Peisetaerus and Euelpides have gone inside, the chorus makes the reliance on sound for sight explicit when it exclaims “you’ve come, you’ve come, you’re here to see, bringing sweet sound to me” (ἦλθες, ἦλθες, ὤφθης, / ἡδὺν φθόγγον ἐμοὶ φέρουσ’, 680–81). Finally the nightingale has been spotted (ὤφθης, literally “you’ve been seen”), but she still primarily exists through the aulos’s sound (φθόγγος, the same word Pelasgus uses with regard to the chorus in Suppliants). It is above all through this music and the instrument that produces it, not through costume or masks, that she can be visualized.80 This sort of play with the different ways in which we might see men as birds can be directed at the audience, not simply as viewers but as figures viewed— as itself an object of spectatorship, a role to which we will turn in more detail at the end of the next chapter. The nightingale scene is followed by the parabasis, in which the chorus leader twice invites the audience to join the chorus as birds (753–68, 785–800). The second time, in his final speech in the parabasis (the antepirrhema), he imagines what would happen “if one of you spectators had wings” (ὑμῶν τῶν θεατῶν εἴ τις ἦν ὑπόπτερος, 786). He begins with any old spectator—with wings he would be able fly away and have lunch when he got hungry and bored during the performances of tragedy (786–89). The chorus leader goes on to consider what particular members of 79.  ἀηδών means both “singer” and “nightingale.” 80.  Cf. Romer 1983: “[n]ot a mask but the quality of a song from her pipes emphasizes the piper’s (or piper-mime’s) nightingale aspect” (142). He suggests that the aulete would wear the costume of an aulētris, but it is hard to know what that—as opposed to the aulete’s own recognizable costume—would be.

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the audience (“a Patrocleides” and an adulterer) would do if they could fly (790–800). Then Peisetaerus and Euelpides reenter, now equipped with wings themselves, in the state that the chorus leader has been imagining for the spectators. As Peisetaerus comes into the orchēstra he exclaims “Ta da! By Zeus, I’ve never seen a funnier thing” (ταυτὶ τοιαυτί. μὰ Δί’ ἐγὼ μὲν πρᾶγμά πω / γελοιότερον οὐκ εἶδον οὐδεπώποτε, 801–2). What I, following Jeffrey Henderson, have translated as “Ta da!” is actually ταυτὶ τοιαυτί, a double deictic expression close to Aristotle’s οὗτος ἐκεῖνος and expressions of recognition elsewhere in Greek drama.81 Literally, it means “this here is of just such a sort”; less literally, “what you see here is what you just heard about.”82 Immediately following the chorus leader’s remarks about winged spectators, it may momentarily be somewhat ambiguous to whom or what this expression refers. The next few lines make it clear that Peisetaerus is talking about Euelpides and their wings, and the deictics could certainly be reinforced by physical gestures as they point to their new bird costumes. However, ταυτὶ τοιαυτί could also seem to refer to the audience: it has become τοιαῦτα, “of such a sort”; it is the funny sight, momentarily visualized as birds. The flexible viewing of theater is thus applied to the audience itself, as it momentarily becomes the viewed object, transformed into birds through words alone.83 The rest of Birds continues to foreground the question of theatrical mimesis, bound up with one of human ontology: to what extent can a man be a bird, and to what extent can an actor look like one? The play repeatedly makes explicit the technologies used to construct what an audience might or might not see, focusing on costumes, props, and, above all, language—and the visual framing of costumes and props through language. This is especially the case during three onstage “costuming” scenes. Upon hearing that thousands of humans are about to arrive at the bird city, “wanting wings and taloned ways” (πτερῶν δεόμενοι καὶ τρόπων γαμψωνύχων, 1306), Peisetaerus orders his slaves to bring out baskets full of wings. There is then a series of three characters who enter seeking wings: a young man who hopes to beat up his father; Cinesias, the dithyrambic poet; and an informer (sykophantēs). None, however, appears actually to receive them. Cinesias’s lyrics are full of references to birds 81.  On such expressions of recognition, see the introduction. 82.  Dunbar 1995: 487 ad loc. gives the literal translation “this is the way all that is.” 83.  Cf. Ar. Nub. 1096–1100 and Ran. 274–76 for comparable moments where the audience briefly becomes the viewed object.

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and flying, but they are not alone capable of avian transformation; Peisetaerus refuses to give him physical wings and instead uses some to chase him away (1373–1409). In the case of the father beater and informer, however, it is unclear whether Peisetaerus is in fact handing out wings at all, as opposed to military gear that is to be imagined as bird parts. Peisetaerus tells the young man: τὸν μὲν πατέρα μὴ τύπτε· ταυτηνδὶ λαβὼν τὴν πτέρυγα καὶ τουτὶ τὸ πλῆκτρον θἠτέρᾳ, νομίσας ἀλεκτρυόνος ἔχειν τονδὶ λόφον, φρούρει, στρατεύου, μισθοφορῶν σαυτὸν τρέφε. Don’t beat your father: take this here wing and this spur in your other hand, thinking that this crest is a cock’s, stand guard, go on campaign, look after yourself by earning a wage. —Ar. Av. 1364–66

A scholion on these lines reveals that even ancient scholars disagreed over whether the objects that Peisetaerus is supplying are bird costumes that are to be understood as military equipment or military equipment that is to be understood as bird costumes: Σύμμαχος· καθοπλίζει αὐτὸν τῇ μὲν πτέρυγι ὡς ἀσπίδι, τῷ δὲ πλήκτρῳ ὡς ξίφει, τῷ δὲ λόφῳ ὡς περικεφαλαίᾳ. Δίδυμος δέ· ἀντὶ μὲν τῆς πτέρυγος ἀσπίδα δίδωσιν αὐτῷ, ἀντὶ δὲ τοῦ πλήκτρου ξίφος. Symmachus: [Peisetaerus] is equipping him with the wing as if it is a shield, the [cock’s] spur as if it is a sword, and the crest as if it is a helmet. But Didymus: instead of the wing he gives him a shield, and instead of the spur he gives him a sword. —Schol. ad Ar. Av. 1363a

Nan Dunbar contends that Didymus’s interpretation—that military equipment is to be understood as bird parts here—is the one intended by Aristophanes, given that the father beater is told to “think that this crest is a cock’s” (1366): “if the object did look at all like a cock’s comb, the youth would not be told to ‘consider’ that he had it.”84 But the language is deliberately ambiguous so as to allow for either reading. A πλῆκτρον can be both a cock’s spur and a

84.  Dunbar 1995: 659 ad loc.

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spear point (and has both meanings already earlier in line 759; it can also be a plectrum).85 A λόφος can be the crest of either a helmet or a bird. Such ambiguity encourages the audience, as well as the father beater himself, to see each item double, in two ways at once. At the same time, if Peisetaerus brings out a shield, spear, and helmet from a basket that apparently contains wings, his direction to understand these objects as parts of a cockerel underscores the comic distance between man and bird. When the informer appears, the disconnect between “this” and “that” is further spotlighted in a scene that again multiplies the referential potential of particular props. Peisetaerus explicitly tells the informer, in the lines I quoted earlier, that he is “winging” him with words; by this point it is clear that such a statement, repeated five times with only slight variation as the informer asks for clarification (1437, 1437–1438, 1438–1439, 1446, 1448), encapsulates much of the play. After the informer asks for the “swift and light wings / of a hawk or kestrel” (ταχέσι καὶ κούφοις πτεροῖς / ἱέρακος ἢ κερχνῇδος, 1453–54) so that he can fly around like a spinning top (βέμβικος, 1461), Peisetaerus puts his claim into action: Πε. Συ. Πε.

μανθάνω βέμβικα. καὶ μὴν ἔστι μοι νὴ τὸν Δία κάλλιστα Κορκυραῖα τοιαυτὶ πτερά. οἴμοι τάλας, μάστιγ’ ἔχεις. πτερὼ μὲν οὖν, οἷσί σε ποιήσω τήμερον βεμβικιᾶν.

P: I: P:

I understand, a top! And, by Zeus, I actually have just such wings here, excellent Corcyran ones. Oh I’m done for! You’re holding a whip! No, a pair of wings; With these I’ll make you spin like a top today! —Ar. Av. 1461–65

Peisetaerus produces from the basket a costume-prop that he insists is a pair of wings (1463, 1464). But, like the cockerel accoutrement for the father beater, as well as the pots and skewers taken up against the bird chorus earlier in the 85.  According to Schol. ad Ar. Av. 759b, πλῆκτρα can also be “bronze points added to the spurs” of fighting cocks (τὰ ἔμβολα τὰ χαλκᾶ τὰ ἐμβαλλόμενα τοῖς πλήκτροις). If so, the representational potential of these objects is multiplied further.

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play, it is apparently something else—this time a whip (μάστιξ) that can spin a top (βέμβιξ) around.86 Peisetaerus himself then drops the pretense of any true avian transformation by claiming to make the informer not a bird but βεμβικιᾶν (“top-like,” 1465). The combination of the prop itself and Peisetaerus’s language here, actualizing the informer’s earlier simile, urges upon the audience an entirely different potential visualization of the informer, as a top spun by a whip. At the same time, the verbal and metrical similarity between the two words, βέμβιξ and μάστιξ, adds to some puzzlement as to who or what is which object. Like the military gear given to the father beater, the costume-prop that Peisetaerus holds here assumes multiple possible identities—as whip and wings, and also, confusingly, the top itself. At the same time, the shift from wings to these everyday objects suggests that ultimately they have no signification beyond their immediate, face-value appearance. Thus Birds increasingly takes apart the process of seeing theater or phaskein horan, even while the audience is throughout still to see the chorus as birds, and individual actors as a whole cast of characters, from ordinary Athenian men to Prometheus, Poseidon, and a Triballian god. Peisetaerus and Euelpides themselves exemplify the difficulty—the incongruity—of seeing onstage bodies as something other than what they immediately appear to be. When they reenter following the parabasis, they direct the audience’s attention, as we have seen, to their new wings. Peisetaerus also, however, underscores the fact that these are costume-props rather than real avian body parts by likening his companion to “a cheaply painted goose” (εἰς εὐτέλειαν χηνὶ συγγεγραμμένῳ, 805).87 His comparison prompts Euelpides to say in turn that Peisetaerus is like “a blackbird with a pudding-bowl haircut” (κοψίχῳ . . . σκάφιον ἀποτετιλμένῳ, 806), a rejoinder that suggests he may have wings (presumably black ones), but his haircut (therefore his human mask) remains the same.88 Any identification relies on an analogy that, in circular fashion, refers to the artificial nature of their own guises. As Peisetaerus declares, “we’ve become the objects of those comparisons— to quote Aeschylus: ‘these come not from others, but by our very own feathers’ ” (ταυτὶ μὲν ᾐκάσμεσθα κατὰ τὸν Αἰσχύλον· / τάδ’ οὐχ ὑπ’ ἄλλων, ἀλλὰ τοῖς

86.  According to Schol. ad Ar. Av. 1463b, the wings are described as “Corcyran” because Corcyra was a well-known producer of whips. See Dunbar 1995: 686 ad loc. 87.  Cf. Slater 2002: the comparison “only underlines the theatricality rather than the reality of the transformation” (140). 88.  Dunbar 1995: 488 ad loc.

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αὑτῶν πτεροῖς, 807–8).89 Thus the audience is never told, as it was in the case of Tereus and the chorus, what birds these figures now represent. For all their excitement over their new look, Peisetaerus and Euelpides can be no more than mere likenesses of themselves, as birds that are not even birds at all. Ultimately, then, even as the play revolves around the power of language to transform what and how an audience sees, it also emphasizes the limits of verbal transformation. Such limits are explicitly demonstrated at the end of the comedy, as a messenger announces the entrance of Peisetaerus, now wielding a thunderbolt like Zeus and accompanied by his bride, Basileia: ὦ πάντ’ ἀγαθὰ πράττοντες, ὦ μείζω λόγου, ὦ τρισμακάριον πτηνὸν ὀρνίθων γένος, δέχεσθε τὸν τύραννον ὀλβίοις δόμοις. προσέρχεται γὰρ οἷος οὔτε παμφαὴς ἀστὴρ ἰδεῖν ἔλαμψε χρυσαυγεῖ δρόμῳ οὔθ’ ἡλίου τηλαυγὲς ἀκτίνων σέλας τοιοῦτον ἐξέλαμψεν, οἷος ἔρχεται ἔχων γυναικὸς κάλλος οὐ φατὸν λέγειν, πάλλων κεραυνόν, πτεροφόρον Διὸς βέλος· ὀσμὴ δ’ ἀνωνόμαστος εἰς βάθος κύκλου χωρεῖ, καλὸν θέαμα· θυμιαμάτων δ’ αὖραι διαψαίρουσι πλεκτάνην καπνοῦ. ὁδὶ δὲ καὐτός ἐστιν.

(1710)

(1715)

 you who’ve achieved entirely good fortune, greater than words can say, O O triple-blessed winged race of birds, welcome your king to a prosperous palace. For he approaches, and not even an all-bright star on a gold-gleaming course has shone [so brightly] to behold, nor the far-gleaming light of the sun’s rays, as Peisetaerus does, as he comes with a beautiful wife, impossible to describe with words, brandishing a thunderbolt, Zeus’s winged weapon. An unnamable smell reaches the depths of the [sky’s] circle, a beautiful sight, and from the incense breezes blow a wreath of smoke. Here is he himself! —Ar. Av. 1706–18

89.  The quotation here comes from a famous moment in Aeschylus’s Myrmidons, when Achilles, lamenting his role in Patroclus’s death, refers to the tale of an eagle being shot by an arrow fitted with eagle feathers (fr. 139 TrGF).

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Now, with its new godlike status, the bird chorus apparently defies any verbal description. Though the apostrophe ὦ μείζω λόγου (“O greater than words can say,” 1706) strictly applies to the birds’ success (to be understood with the participle πράττοντες), it also suggests the inability of logos to provide a suitable invocation for them. Such a suggestion is repeated at 1713, when the herald calls Basileia’s beauty οὐ φατὸν λέγειν (“impossible to describe with words”), reinforcing the insufficiency of language by adding λέγειν, a virtually redundant infinitive.90 Verbal deficiency also surrounds Peisetaerus, and this is closely tied to his representational excess—for, like so many bodies and objects in this play, he represents multiple figures at once. Now he is not just man and bird but also Zeus. At the same time, the entrance of this tyrannos (τύραννον, 1708) materializes the verbal similarity between his name and that of the tyrant Peisistratus, evoking a moment in Athenian history known, as we saw in the introduction, for its own theatrical “play of actuality.”91 As Peisistratus famously entered Athens with Phye, a maiden in the role of Athena, beside him and thus reclaimed his power, so Peisetaerus asserts his rule over his new city in the form of a god, with a mute character in the role of Basileia. Basileia (Βασίλεια, “Queen”) herself can be understood in multiple ways at once. She is Pandora (a gift from Zeus delivered by Prometheus) and Hera (wife to Peisetaerus’s Zeus), but also Athena: Prometheus earlier described her as a maiden who guards Zeus’s thunderbolt and presides over civic order (1537–41). She also embodies Peisetaerus’s new reign: βασιλεία, with the acute accent on the penultimate rather than the second syllable, means “kingdom.” Spectators might even liken her to the Basilinna, wife of the king archon.92 Yet for all these echoes and potential identifications, amplified by those of his new wife, Peisetaerus remains elusive. As we have already seen, he has occupied an ambiguous position for some time, assuming the role of bird and then bird-god while remaining an ordinary man. Indeed, the question of whether he might be transformed at all through language alone was already raised near the start of the play, when, upon first claiming to be a bird, he was

90.  οὐ φατόν by itself already means “not to be spoken,” “indescribable.” 91.  On the Peisetaerus-Peisistratus analogy here, see, e.g., Bowie 1993: 162–66; Anderson and Dix 2007: 324; Petridou 2016: 169. 92.  On Basileia’s various meanings, see especially Bowie 1993: 164–65; Dunbar 1995: 735–38; Dobrov 1997: 63; Anderson and Dix 2007.

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accused of “saying nothing” (οὐδὲν λέγεις, 66) by Tereus’s slave. In the passage above, just before Peisetaerus’s final entrance, the herald offers two similes, comparing him to a meteor and the sun itself, but in both cases the likeness fails, since neither one (οὔτε . . . οὕθ’, 1709–11) is as bright as he. Previously, after donning his wings, he could only be defined through circular analogy; now even similes fail. The herald then prepares the audience for a “beautiful sight” (καλὸν θέαμα, 1716) by drawing on smell, as if one sense can materialize or at least elaborate on the other—yet even the fragrance apparently wafting toward them is “unnamable” (ἀνωνόμαστος, 1715).93 Finally Peisetaerus enters, and the herald abandons any attempt to describe him and instead directs the audience to see and identify him with the simple deictic phrase “here he is himself ” (ὁδὶ δὲ καὐτός ἐστιν, 1718). By the end of the play, then, the question of how to see Peisetaerus—how to understand him visually and identify him ontologically—appears to be left open. The figure addressed in the final line as “highest of divinities” (δαιμόνων ὑπέρτατε, 1765) is also just “this man here” (τόνδε τὸν ἄνδρ’, 1728). We saw at the beginning of this chapter how Lance’s confusion in The Two Gentlemen of Verona emphasizes how, whichever character it represents, his shoe will still be a shoe and his dog a dog. Here in Birds, even as he seems to have almost unlimited representational potential, Peisetaerus is still “this here”—an everyman comic hero within the play and a masked and costumed body in the theater. Aristophanes’s Birds thus explores the power but also the limits of language, in combination with other theatrical technologies, to shape theater’s phenomenology. It is a play about “winging with words,” but it is as much about the instability and incompatibility of verbal description and visual appearance as it is about how the two combine. In this respect it represents the most extreme end of a trend we have tracked through the course of this chapter across three very different plays. Theoroi, Suppliants, and Birds all draw attention to how language—as well as, more generally, voice and sound—can form, transform, and unform the visual experience of theater. All three plays expose not simply the process whereby an audience can be led to understand what onstage bodies, costumes, masks, and props represent, but also the potential disconnect or gap between the means and object of representation. In Theoroi such a gap appears only temporarily: the satyrs’ comparison of themselves with the mask-

93.  Cf. [Aesch.] PV 115–27: see chapter 3 in this book.

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images that they hold ultimately seems to confirm their one-to-one identification, despite their altered appearance. Both Suppliants and Birds, however, leave the gap open. Aeschylus’s play prevents any straightforward visual identification of its hybrid protagonists and the objects they hold; as Pelasgus, faced with various possibilities, struggles to find a likeness for the chorus members before him or see how they will use the objects they hold, he cues a comparable anxiety in the audience. In Birds, everything seems unstable, always able to be visualized in multiple different ways: pots and shields, whips and wings, pipes and beaks, skewers, stakes, and palisades. The play does not simply deny a convergence of “this” and “that”; it repeatedly presents several, often conflicting, representational possibilities for what both internal and external spectators see. In the end, Peisetaerus himself exceeds any verbalization at all, appearing in such an incongruous position as a man-bird-Zeus that he is indescribable.

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chapter 3

Pain Between Bodies When one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth. Scarry 1985: 3

In its evocation of corporeal duress, the suffering body brings to the point of crisis the body’s representational volatility, and it casts in relief the experiential exchanges of character, actor, and spectator. The “performance” of pain invades, and is in turn invaded by, the perceptual actuality of pain in a way that foregrounds the uncanny circuitry and ambiguity of dramatic representation itself. Garner 1994: 45

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that physical pain is inherently resistant to verbal expression.1 The bodily experience of pain is unshareable, she writes, because it is alogos, entailing the “shattering of language”: it “[brings] about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”2 Yet we still try to express it, to cross the gap between a body in pain and an audience. Scarry’s examples of such attempts include accounts of torture, medical questionnaires, and also art: “Here and there . . . one comes upon an isolated play, 1.  Scarry 1985. See also her discussion of visual strategies of representing pain in advertising, where the original subject itself—the interiority of the body—is absent in Scarry 1994: 13–48. 2.  Scarry 1985: 5, 4.

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an exceptional film, an extraordinary novel that is not just incidentally but centrally and uninterruptedly about the nature of bodily pain.”3 Since the publication of this enormously influential book in 1985, there have been numerous critiques of Scarry’s concept of pain as non-lexical and unmediated and the apparent dualism of mind and body on which it depends.4 Several scholars have sought to demonstrate how pain need not entirely isolate its subject, for humans do seem, as Steve Larocco states, “to share pain and to empathize with it, especially in manifestations that can be represented in visually available, bodily forms (such as a finger being stuck with a pin).”5 Larocco in particular argues for taking fuller account of the interplay of language and the signifying processes of the body itself in the communication of pain: whereas Scarry separates the “semiosomatic” and the discursive, we should instead understand them as closely interwoven. Pain may not be representable in any simple one-to-one way, but it can still involve an interbodily communication: “Pain’s withering cries may not create empathetic transfer, the re-representation of the self ’s suffering in the other, but they do, almost invariably, disturb, altering the intercorporeal realm.”6 Scarry herself repeatedly refers to Sophocles’s Philoctetes as an example of a work of art dedicated to the expression of pain, above all through the nonverbal sounds of its protagonist.7 In this chapter, I am instead concerned with Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and, in particular, [Aeschylus’s] Prometheus  Bound.8 Both these plays, I argue, connect pain’s “intercorporeal” potential to questions of visuality and theatrical representation. The following discussion is in many ways aligned with recent, affect-oriented approaches to Greek drama focused on emotion as a physical exchange or contagion between

3.  Scarry 1985: 10. 4.  Van Ommen, Cromby, and Yen 2016 and Dawney and Huzar 2019 provide useful overviews of such critiques. For a critique of Scarry’s thesis in connection with ancient GrecoRoman discourses on pain, specifically in terms of the relationship between pain and language, see King 2018: 17–21. 5.  Larocco 2016: 347, with reference to Morrison et al. 2004; Goubert et al. 2005; Jackson, Meltzoff, and Decety 2005. 6.  Larocco 2016: 349. 7.  Scarry 1985: 5, 10, 17, 53. 8.  The much-debated question of authenticity does not affect my discussion of Prometheus Bound, though I follow Griffith 1977 in not attributing the play to Aeschylus and in dating it to the 440s or 430s. See also Griffith 1983: 31–35, 281–305.

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bodies. In a recent discussion of the affective materiality of Greek tragedy, for example, Mario Telò and Melissa Mueller draw on Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of fear as an emotion that “works through and on the bodies of those who are transformed into its subjects, as well as its objects.”9 In my exploration of the phenomenology of tragic pain, however, I am most influenced by theater scholarship that foregrounds the experiential role of the audience.10 As Simon Shepherd emphasizes, “theater is an art of bodies witnessed by bodies”—that is, the bodies of the performers and those of the audience are mutually implicated.11 Scholars in film studies, too, have for some time emphasized bodily reciprocity as an experience of film.12 As Vivian Sobchack argues, this experience is simultaneously literal and figural, as we make sense of filmic images through our own sensual bodies: “We are caught up without a thought . . . in this vacillating and reversible sensual structure that both differentiates and connects the sense of my literal body to the sense of the figurative bodies and objects I see on the screen.”13 Though the screen has its own particular forms of tactility, theater is also able to produce a sort of intercorporeality—

9.  Ahmed 2004: 62, partially quoted by Telò and Mueller 2018b: 7. They apply this sort of affective reading to the parodos of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, demonstrating the circulation of fear as a material force in this scene. See also Telò’s lengthier discussion in the same volume of the contagion of affect in Philoctetes, drawing in particular from Deleuze and Guattari 1987 (Telò 2018). On the “affective turn” in approaches to Greek drama, see the introduction to this book. Larocco 2016 himself links his concept of pain’s “intercorporeality” to affect theory, referring in particular to Ahmed 2004 and Burkitt 2014 (“a similar kind of enmeshment of embodied feeling and intersubjective sway operates with pain” [354]). 10.  An affect-oriented approach to tragedy need not exclude the audience: “Thinking of tragic emotion in terms of affect encourages us to heed the multiple levels of between-ness created by the extant texts of the three tragedians—to imagine how the fraught intensities passed between characters onstage relate to those passed on to an audience, whether spectators/listeners or readers (including critics)” (Telò forthcoming). On the audience’s sensory engagement in tragedy, see especially Weiss 2018a: 236–44; Worman 2018a, 2018b, 2020; Angelopoulou 2020, 2021; Olsen 2021b. 11.  Shepherd 2006: 73. In his approach to theater Shepherd looks back, in particular, to Merleau-Ponty 1945; States 1985, 1992; Garner 1994. 12.  See especially Sobchack 1992, 2004; Marks 2000, 2002; J. Barker 2009; Laine 2011, 2015. On the intersection of such analyses with the recent turn toward materiality and affect, and their fruitful application to the study of Greek tragedy, see Telò and Mueller 2018a. 13.  Sobchack 2004: 77 (emphasis original).

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a connection, though not necessarily a one-to-one match, between what we see onstage and our sense of our own physical bodies.14 Ancient Greek theorists of performance and spectatorship were deeply aware of the potential for a bodily response to an object of representation on the part of both performers and, in particular, audiences.15 Gorgias, for example, claims that the audience of poetry can experience “very fearful shuddering and tearful pity and desire that loves to lament” (φρίκη περίφοβος καὶ ἔλεος πολύδακρυς καὶ πόθος φιλοπενθής, Hel. 9) in response to the fortunes of the characters represented.16 Ion, the rhapsode in Plato’s dialogue, describes how he himself sheds tears when he narrates something pitiable and feels his hair stand on end and his heart leap when his subject is frightening, and how his spectators exhibit the same reactions (Pl. Ion 535b-e).17 In the Poetics, Aristotle, as we shall see, also mentions “shuddering” (φρίκη) as a response to tragedy (1453b5).18 In that treatise he famously talks of pity and fear as the primary emotions generated by this art form; in the Rhetoric, he considers at more length the extent to which pity, as well as fear, can be “a kind of pain” (λύπη τις, 1385b13) felt in reaction to someone else’s state of suffering.19 And

14.  On film’s “tactility,” see especially J. Barker 2009. I take the term “intercorporeality” from Larocco 2016’s critique of Scarry 1985. 15.  For a discussion of such sources in relation to tragedy, see especially Segal 1996, arguing for emotional participation as a form of communal solidarity in Greek drama and as a crucial element of Aristotelian catharsis. In response to Segal, Easterling 1996 emphasizes the audience’s “witnessing” role, with tragic texts cuing their emotional responses. I am emphasizing here the bodily engagement of tragedy’s audiences; as we shall see below, I am inclined to link this more to tragedy’s “anticathartic aesthetics” (Telò 2020a) than to the sort of cathartic resolution that Segal envisages. 16.  On this account of audience engagement, see especially Halliwell 2011: 274–75, 280–81; Cairns 2015: 82–83. 17.  On this passage, see especially Cairns 2015: 84–85. On the degree to which, according to Plato, audiences (as opposed to performers) of tragedy and Homer may assimilate themselves to a character, see especially Halliwell 2002: 80–81. 18.  On phrikē as a response to visual or verbal representation in ancient Greek thought, see Cairns 2015. 19.  Cf. Arist. Rhet. 1382a20–26, 1386a26–29. On what Aristotle means here by “a kind of pain” and the extent of equivalence between the state of the pitier (or fearer) and that of the pitied, see especially Nehamas 1992: 300–303; Nussbaum 1992: 273–76; Konstan 2001: 128–36; Halliwell 2002: 207–16. See also Arist. De an. 403a5-b19 on how these and other emotions are closely connected with the body.

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in the Politics, in a discussion specifically concerning music, especially “theatrical music” (ἡ θεατρικὴ μουσική, 1342a18), he explores how “everybody when listening to representations [mimēseōn] is thrown into a corresponding state of feeling [sympatheis]” (ἀκροώμενοι τῶν μιμήσεων γίγνονται πάντες συμπαθεῖς, 1340a12–13), including the feeling of pain.20 Representations of violence and physical pain in theater can in particular be intercorporeal, generating powerful bodily responses in audiences.21 One famous example from Shakespeare is the scene in Titus Andronicus when Lavinia appears onstage after her rape with her tongue and hands cut out. Though the act itself occurs offstage, productions of this play often exploit the combination of Lavinia’s visual appearance and the long description by Marcus to make audiences feel physically uncomfortable.22 We, the audience, can be “pushed to respond to specific wounds on specific bodies through an imaginative process that connects what we see onstage with our sense of our own bodies.”23 A common element in the most powerful stagings of physical suffering, and one that can especially prompt this sort of intercorporeal response, is—to use Garner’s phrase from the epigraph—bodily pain’s “perceptual actuality.”24 A production of the play on which much of this chapter will focus provides another example: reviews of James Kerr’s Prometheus Bound, staged first in London in 2005 and then in New York in 2007, with David Oyelowo in the title role (figure 9), emphasized the “authenticity” of the actor’s representation of intolerable pain, above all in relation to the bodiliness of his performance.25 As one commented, he “descends into a feral state: his guttural cries and thrashing limbs resound as pure anguish, not an actor’s choreography.”26 The spectators’ response is described as bodily in turn:

20.  On this passage, see especially Kivy 1984: 33–35; Weiss forthcoming a. Cf. Pl. Rep. 605d on listening to a lament in epic or tragedy: “surrendering ourselves, we follow it, feeling with it [sympaschontes]” (ἐνδόντες ἡμᾶς αὐτοὺς ἑπόμεθα συμπάσχοντες, 605d3). 21.  See especially Nevitt 2013: 15–23 and passim. On the spectacle of violence and pain in theater, see also, e.g., Allard and Martin 2009; Carlson 2010. 22.  On the relationship of language and spectacle in different productions of Titus Andronicus II.iv, see White 1998: 189–95; also Nevitt 2013: 20–23. Cf. Staines 2009 on spectators’ responses to Gloucester in King Lear. 23.  Nevitt 2013: 23. 24.  Garner 1994: 45. 25.  de Jongh 2005. 26.  Blankenship 2007.

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figure 9. David Oyelowo as Prometheus in Prometheus Bound, directed by James Kerr. East 13th Street Theater, New York, March 2007. Photograph © Richard Termine.

Oyelowo’s portrayal is not just “harrowed and harrowing,” but “gutwrenching.”27 It is precisely the (inter)corporeality of depictions of pain that, according to Garner, “brings to the point of crisis the body’s representational volatility,” collapsing the duality of theatrical presentation and representation by blurring 27.  de Jongh 2005; Thaxter 2005. The performance of bodily pain by the shackled, almost naked Oyelowo in this production evokes in particular the enslavement of and violence against Black bodies: Hall 2011: 214.

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the lines between the bodies of character, actor, and spectator.28 The body in pain, then, on the one hand poses a representational challenge, seeming to belong to “an invisible geography.” On the other, it seems to exceed the virtual altogether by appearing only too real. I will argue here that it is via the engagement of the spectators’ own bodies that some of the most powerful stagings of pain in surviving Greek theater are mediated.29 This chapter therefore explores a subject that pushes against the frame of representation arguably more than any of the other bodies, spaces, and objects discussed in the rest of the book. While constantly foregrounding sight and spectacle, it also most complicates the role of the visual in the phenomenology of theater. Unlike the previous two chapters, this one is mainly concerned with tragedy, as a genre that uses the body in pain not just to interrogate theater’s representational potential but to urge on its spectators a particularly visceral form of bodily sympathy—and one that is closely tied to their own act of viewing.

dustheatos Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and [Aeschylus’s] Prometheus Bound explicitly highlight how difficult it is for an audience to view the bodies that they bring onstage: Oedipus after he has gouged out his eyes and Prometheus when he is pinned to the rock, impaled by an iron stake through his chest. Both these figures, as well as Io, another one of Zeus’s victims who appears in the second half of Prometheus Bound, are described as hard to look at—as the chorus says of Prometheus and Io, they are δυσθέατος. This compound adjective means “hard to see.” It communicates a disruption of seeing in two respects: the prefix dus- renders the act difficult or unbearable, so that the adjective is similar in sense to the common expression “terrible to see” (δεινὸς ὁρᾶν); it also contains a sense of negation, working almost like an alpha privative to imply that something cannot be seen—and points to the role of language in visualizing the unseeable. Elsewhere in surviving Greek drama dustheatos is used of dead bodies onstage: those of Eteocles and Polynices in Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (978); the corpse of Ajax in Sophocles’s Ajax (1004), a 28.  Garner 1994: 45. 29.  Worman 2020 notes that Scarry tends to elide “how mimesis is mediated by body” and emphasizes in particular the role of touch in “[activating] a feeling of proximity and shared sensation” (2020: 14).

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play that, as we saw in chapter 1, emphasizes from the very start the act of seeing, especially in relation to the hero’s body.30 In Prometheus Bound, dustheatos conveys the paradox of representing bodies in extreme suffering in the theater: these are, in one sense, “unseeable” bodies, posing significant challenges to the poet who tries to represent them; they are also “difficult to see” precisely because of their potential to make a deep, bodily impact on their viewers, both those within the drama and the theater audience itself. While Sophocles’s Philoctetes focuses above all on the role of nonverbal sound in communicating the hero’s pain to his internal and external audiences, both Prometheus Bound and Oedipus the King thematize the viewing of pain and the complexity of its representation.31 They explore the extremes of theater’s representational potential through the audience’s physical involvement. Oedipus, Prometheus, and Io are not the only characters in surviving Greek tragedy whose bodies are presented both as unseeable and in terms of their somatic effect on their viewers. As Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux has shown, the Erinyes in Aeschylus’s Eumenides are an especially notable example of the paradox of representing Gorgonic figures at whom none should look.32 We saw in the introduction how the Pythia, failing to find a visual analogy for the Erinyes, highlights their potential unrepresentability and links this to her terror upon seeing them—they are “terrible to see with one’s eyes” (δεινὰ δ’ 30.  See also Soph. OC 286, when Oedipus describes his blinded face as δυσπρόσοπτον (“hard to behold”). On the “aesthetics of sensation” in Ajax, see Angelopoulou 2020. She shows how this play, too, is concerned with the perception of physical pain, though primarily in relation to inner turmoil. 31.  See especially Allen-Hornblower 2013, 2016: 261–73 on the acoustic transfer of Philoctetes’s pain to his internal audiences, especially the chorus. But other senses are at work as well, as Nancy Worman 2020 shows: he is “a sensory virtuoso, screaming, festering, and even stinking” (45n50); she emphasizes Neoptolemus’s role in particular as the “affective companion to this body’s excruciating sensory effects” (45–46). For another example of a tragedy that emphasizes specifically the viewing of a body in pain, see Soph. Trach. 947–1113, especially 1076–80. According to Worman, Heracles’s instruction to his son to come close to see him suggests that viewing must be done “body to body, as if by sheer proximity the viewers could share fully his horrifying experience” (39). 32.  Frontisi-Ducroux 1995: 132; 2007. She quotes the Suda on the Erinyes as “faceless and painful to look at” (ἀπροσώπων καὶ δυσειδῶν, E.2995): “This definition, admittedly late, posits an equivalence between a revolting sight and ἀπροσωπία, the absence of face. The point is that the Erinyes are among those deadly powers whose relation to death places them in the field of the barely envisageable, or rather the invisible—such as Hades . . . or such as the Gorgon, on whose face and eyes none can bear to gaze” (2007: 166).

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ὀφθαλμοῖς δρακεῖν, 34). As we noted, she also urges on the audience a shared response to these creatures through her own bodily, bestial transformation, as she crawls on her hands and knees, seeming to materialize them even before they have physically appeared in the theater. Another such creature is Lyssa in Euripides’s Heracles, who is presented almost entirely in terms of others’ affect and movement.33 This “Gorgon of the Night” (Νυκτὸς Γοργών, 882) turns Heracles himself into a violently kinetic, gorgon-eyed (γοργωποὺς κόρας, 868) madman. The two plays on which I focus in this chapter likewise expose the difficulties of theater’s representational process by bringing on bodies that are, in quite a literal sense, hard to see, and materialize them at least in part through their somatic impact on those who view them. But in the abject, painful state of the bodies with which they present us, these two tragedies are different from those which bring Gorgonic figures onstage. Writing about American performance artist Ron Athey, whose shows famously involve self-mutilation, theater scholar Dominic Johnson describes how he “stages painful actions that foreground the eye as a particularly vulnerable point of entry; he prioritizes the physiologically challenging qualities of looking at a body in the grip of pain.”34 In this chapter, after first briefly looking, by way of contrast, at the blinding scenes in Euripides’s Cyclops and Hecuba, I show how Sophocles and, in particular, the poet of Prometheus Bound represent bodies in pain precisely by prioritizing the physiological challenges of looking at them. As throughout the book, we find in these fifth-century plays a laying bare of theater’s representational processes, here bound up with the bodily engagement of its spectators.

blinded bodies i: euripides’s cyclops and hecuba Sophocles’s Oedipus the King is one of several fifth-century Greek plays featuring the blinding of a central character. In almost all of them, though the violent act itself remains offstage, its mutilated victim appears onstage after-

33.  I show this more extensively in Weiss forthcoming b. Lyssa would have previously appeared in Aeschylus’s Wool-Carders (Xantriai) and probably also in his Archeresses (Toxotides). 34.  Johnson 2012: 69.

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wards, for all—both internal and external audiences—to see.35 The two other fully surviving plays of this sort are Euripides’s Hecuba and Cyclops, a satyr drama. In neither play, however, is the blinded body presented as something either especially horrifying or hard to look at, nor is the viewing of it either thematized or complicated. In Hecuba, the ambivalent presentation of the Thracian Polymestor prevents the audience from being overly disturbed by the sight of his mutilated body. After blinding him and killing his two sons with the help of the other Trojan women, Hecuba tells the chorus and audience quite matter-of-factly that they are about to see both the dead children and Polymestor himself, “blind, walking with a blind, reeling step” (τυφλὸν τυφλῷ στείχοντα παραφόρῳ ποδί, 1050). The audience may be shocked at what Hecuba has accomplished, but Polymestor’s earlier actions already prevent or at least unsettle any sympathy it may have for him. In the prologue, the ghost of Polydorus, Hecuba’s son, announces that he was killed by Polymestor, to whom he had been sent for protection; just before Hecuba enacts her revenge, Polymestor puts on a false show of commiseration and assurances about the boy’s safety. Now, prepared for the sight, the audience is prompted to focus its attention both on the dead bodies, which would appear on the ekkyklēma, and on the appearance of Polymestor, who enters singing: ὤμοι ἐγώ, πᾷ βῶ, πᾷ στῶ, πᾷ κέλσω, τετράποδος βάσιν θηρὸς ὀρεστέρου τιθέμενος ἐπὶ χεῖρα καὶ ἴχνος; Ah me, where shall I go, where shall I stand, where shall I take anchor, moving like a four-footed wild mountain beast, placing my hands upon the path? —Eur. Hec. 1056–59

Like the Pythia in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Polymestor is here reduced to a bestial state, crawling onstage in a demonstration of his physical transformation; his movements and bodily affect suggest his blindness as much as any

35.  One exception to this pattern was probably Sophocles’s Thamyris, in which the act of blinding may have occurred onstage. For a recent discussion of this play’s presentation of blindness, see especially Coo 2016 with further bibliography; on other tragic characters (e.g., Phineus) blinded during the course of a play, see Coo 2016: 243.

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change in mask might.36 The oft-noted evocation of the Odyssean Polyphemus here, strengthened by the similarity between their names, intensifies Polymestor’s nonhuman aspect.37 As we already saw in the description of Oyelowo’s “feral” performance as Prometheus, depictions of extreme pain often veer toward or evoke the bestial. Here, however, the suggestion of bestiality underscores not so much Polymestor’s suffering as a victim but his own aggressive nature as a predator, as he expresses his desire to feed on the women, “to eat my fill of their flesh and bones, / making a wild beasts’ banquet” (σαρκῶν ὀστέων τ’ ἐμπλησθῶ, / θοίναν ἀγρίων τιθέμενος θηρῶν, 1071–72; cf. 1125–26). Such bestial aggression repels rather than attracts, discouraging any identification between Polymestor and his audiences, both internal and external. None of the other characters dwells on his torture or fixes their attention on his pain. The chorus offsets its one-line expression of somewhat ambivalent sympathy with a gnomic statement about his recompense (“for one who does shameful deeds terrible is the penalty,” δράσαντι δ’ αἰσχρὰ δεινὰ τἀπιτίμια, 1086). When Agamemnon enters, he briefly asks who has bloodied Polymestor’s eyes (αἱμάξας κόρας, 1117) and killed his children, but similarly balances this brief show of sympathy with a remark about the great anger the perpetrator must have felt (1118–19). The play does not, then, invite its audience to respond especially deeply to this mutilated body. In Cyclops, produced probably much later than Hecuba,38 the blinding of Polyphemus invokes no sympathy whatsoever on the part of his viewers. Satyr play often focuses on the bodiliness of its characters, especially the satyrs themselves.39 As we saw in the previous chapter, it can also quite explicitly pull apart the means and object of representation by focusing on the performers’ own bodies and their prosthetics. At least as far as we can tell from what 36.  On the use of masks for blinded characters like Polymestor and Oedipus, see, e.g., Taplin 1978: 89; Marshall 1999: 192, 200n41. For a more cautious approach, noting the lack of evidence, see Halliwell 1993: 206n36. 37.  On such Odyssean echoes, see especially Segal 1993: 162–63; Battezzato 2018: 225 on Hec. 1071. The portrayal of Polymestor here may evoke various dramatizations of the Polyphemus story (Seaford 1982: 169). 38.  On the date of Cyclops, see especially Hunter and Lämmle 2020: 38–47. On the relationship between the two plays’ blinding scenes and their aftermath, see Sutton 1980; Hunter and Lämmle 2020: 43–44. 39.  On satyric bodiliness, see especially Uhlig 2018.

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survives of this genre, however, any such exposure of theater’s representational process does not tend to focus on the spectacle of pain or the difficulty of viewing it. What Cyclops generates instead, or at least exposes, is the viewers’ mas­ ochistic attraction toward the gory mutilation of Polyphemus’s body. The chorus emphasizes the burning of his eye, even enacting it with their words and bodily movements as Odysseus performs the deed. Gleefully issuing instructions like “thrust” (ὠ- / θεῖτε, 656–57) and “twist it, pull on it” (τόρνευ’ ἕλκε, 661), the satyrs encourage the audience to have a quite visceral sense of this gruesome offstage scene. The physicality of their language describing Odysseus’s violent act is partly a source of humor, since the satyrs are too cowardly to carry it out themselves. But it can also suggest the delight of the audience itself, waiting and listening, like the satyrs, for the offstage action— delight in the violence and enthusiasm for a view of its results. When Polyphemus appears onstage, the chorus, instead of flinching or expressing pain on his behalf, calls his anguished cry a “fine song of victory” (καλός γ’ ὁ παιάν, 664) and remarks “you certainly do look ugly” (αἰσχρός γε φαίνῃ, 670). His mutilation is presented not as something hard for a spectator to endure but, rather, as an object of enjoyment and comedy.

blinded bodies ii: sophocles’s oedipus THE KING In neither Hecuba nor Cyclops, then, is the viewing of pain emphasized or problematized. The responses of other characters to both Polymestor and Polyphemus allow for the audience’s own satisfaction in the viewing of these blinded, bestial figures, without any questioning of the viewing process. In this respect the two plays put into relief Sophocles’s very different representation of Oedipus, whose tortured appearance, framed as something both visible and not to be seen, is presented in terms of its deeply disturbing impact on internal and external spectators alike.40 The audience first hears about Oedipus’s act of self-blinding through the messenger speech, one of the goriest accounts of offstage action in surviving Greek tragedy: 40.  The blinding of Oedipus was also dramatized in Aeschylus’s Oedipus (of which no fragments survive) and Euripides’s Oedipus, in which the king is blinded by the servants of the dead Laius (a moment not covered by the surviving fragments).

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ἐπεὶ δὲ γῇ ἔκειτο τλήμων, δεινά γ’ ἦν τἀνθένδ’ ὁρᾶν. ἀποσπάσας γὰρ εἱμάτων χρυσηλάτους περόνας ἀπ’ αὐτῆς, αἷσιν ἐξεστέλλετο, ἄρας ἔπαισεν ἄρθρα τῶν αὑτοῦ κύκλων, αὐδῶν τοιαῦθ’, ὁθούνεκ’ οὐκ ὄψοιντό νιν οὔθ’ οἷ’ ἔπασχεν οὔθ’ ὁποῖ’ ἔδρα κακά, ἀλλ’ ἐν σκότῳ τὸ λοιπὸν οὓς μὲν οὐκ ἔδει ὀψοίαθ’, οὓς δ’ ἔχρῃζεν οὐ γνωσοίατο. τοιαῦτ’ ἐφυμνῶν πολλάκις τε κοὐχ ἅπαξ ἤρασσ’ ἐπαίρων βλέφαρα. φοίνιαι δ’ ὁμοῦ γλῆναι γένει’ ἔτεγγον, οὐδ’ ἀνίεσαν. [φόνου μυδώσας σταγόνας, ἀλλ’ ὁμοῦ μέλας ὄμβρος †χαλάζης αἵματος† ἐτέγγετο.]

(1270)

(1275)

When on the ground the unhappy woman [Jocasta] lay, then indeed what happened next was   terrible to see. For he tore off from her the clothes’ beaten-gold brooch-pins, with which she was adorned, and, lifting them up, he struck his eyes’ sockets, saying such words as these, that they should not see the terrible things he was suffering or doing, but that in the future they would in darkness see those they shouldn’t, and not recognize those he wished to. Singing such words, repeatedly and not just once he struck his eyes as he raised them. And together the bloody eyeballs drenched his cheeks and did not stop. [Oozing drops of gore, but all at once a dark shower of blood fell like hail.] —Soph. OT 1266–79

The repetition of Oedipus’s act here (stabbing his eyes), the anatomical language referring to specific parts of the eyes (eyeballs, sockets), and the focus on the bloody, oozing, endless gore (especially if lines 1278–79 are somewhat authentic)—all these details produce a deeply visceral scene.41 With his excruciatingly detailed account, the messenger quite literally “foreground[s]

41.  Cf. Worman 2020: 53–54 on the “sensory and affective horror” of this blinding scene. On linguistic and metrical problems in lines 1278–79, see Dawe 2006: 184 ad loc.; Finglass 2018: 558–59 ad loc.

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the eye as a particularly vulnerable point of entry.”42 His description becomes painful through its somatic impact, encouraging in the audience an uncomfortable sense of its own corporeality. The scene’s bodiliness is closely tied to its visuality, as the spectators are invited not just to visualize but to feel Oedipus’s gory act of self-mutilation; for them, as for the messenger, it is thus “terrible to see” (δεινά . . . ὁρᾶν, 1267).43 Oedipus’s presentation of his own blindness as a form of twisted sight (his eyes will “see / those they shouldn’t, and not recognize those he wished to,” 1273–74) suggests a parallel in the audience’s own difficult, paradoxical act of viewing: not yet seeing Oedipus’s body but visualizing his wounds all too clearly, it sees what (apparently) it does not wish to. Following his verbal description of Oedipus’s act, the messenger then prepares both the chorus and the audience for the king’s onstage visual impact. Unlike Hecuba’s pitiless announcement of the entrance of the blind Polymestor, the messenger’s words here urge a deeply sympathetic response: τὸ γὰρ νόσημα μεῖζον ἢ φέρειν. δείξει δὲ καὶ σοί. κλῇθρα γὰρ πυλῶν τάδε διοίγεται· θέαμα δ’ εἰσόψῃ τάχα τοιοῦτον οἷον καὶ στυγοῦντ’ ἐποικτίσαι.   For his sickness is greater than he can bear. But he will display it to you too. For the gates’ bars, these here, are opening; and you shall soon look upon a sight [theama] such that even one who hates him would feel pity. —Soph. OT 1293–96

Up until the messenger’s entrance, the tragedy has already been replete with the language of vision, repeatedly playing with the relationship between sight, blindness, knowledge, and ignorance, above all in relation to the abilities of

42.  Johnson 2012: 69, quoted above regarding the work of Ron Athey. 43.  On δεινὸς ὁρᾶν and related expressions cf. Nooter 2017, who sees this moment in Oedipus the King in terms of the “chorus mediating between grotesque bodies—monsters and objects of mutilation—and the audience, instructing spectators on the amount of horror they should feel when confronted with images of monstrosity” (255). Segal 1996: 166–68 highlights how the play here and in its closing scenes “[calls] attention to the community of shared suffering created by the theatre” (166; see also Segal 1993: 27–28).

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Oedipus and Teiresias.44 Now the focus is on Oedipus himself as a theama on display—a theatrical spectacle with the chorus and audience united as his spectators.45 As an onstage body, the blinded Oedipus continues to be difficult to see. As he enters from the skēnē, the chorus emphatically assumes its own spectatorial role:

ὦ δεινὸν ἰδεῖν πάθος ἀνθρώποις, ὦ δεινότατον πάντων ὅσ’ ἐγὼ προσέκυρσ’ ἤδη. τίς σ’, ὦ τλῆμον, προσέβη μανία; τίς ὁ πηδήσας μείζονα δαίμων τῶν μηκίστων πρὸς σῇ δυσδαίμονι μοίρᾳ; φεῦ φεῦ δύστην’, ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ἐσιδεῖν δύναμαί σ’, ἐθέλων πόλλ’ ἀνερέσθαι, πολλὰ πυθέσθαι, πολλὰ δ’ ἀθρῆσαι· τοίαν φρίκην παρέχεις μοι.



O suffering terrible for men to see, O most terrible of everything I’ve encountered before. What madness, miserable one, came upon you? What divine being was it that leapt further than the longest leap toward your ill-starred fate? Pheu, pheu, wretched one, I cannot even look upon you, though there are many things I wish to ask, many to learn, and many to gaze at: such shuddering you cause me!



—Soph. OT. 1297–1306

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Seeing the transformed body of Oedipus for the first time, the chorus, like the messenger before it, dwells on how this sight is “terrible to see” (δεινὸν ἰδεῖν, 1297), though the object here is not simply the king himself but his pathos—as 44.  The bibliography on sight, blindness, and knowledge in Oedipus the King is vast. See, e.g., Buxton 1980, 1996; Seale 1982: 215–60; Goldhill 1986: 199–221; Thumiger 2013: 227–30. 45.  The theama of Oedipus, both his self-blinding as described by the messenger and his entrance afterwards, contrasts with the hidden body of Jocasta, whose actual suicide the messenger neither himself sees nor then relates: he states that “the most painful part is absent: for there was/is no viewing of it” (τὰ μὲν / ἄλγιστ’ ἄπεστιν· ἡ γὰρ ὄψις οὐ πάρα, OT 1237–38). Finglass 2018: 546 notes, however, that “the impact of the Messenger’s words belies his exaltation of the visual” here (ad loc.).

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Douglas Cairns puts it, “not just the self-blinding, but the general catastrophe of which the self-blinding is the latest, most physical, and most visible expression.”46 With Oedipus now onstage, his body is in one respect all too visible; a new mask, if used, could provide a physical analogue to the verbal description of his mutilation.47 But the audience’s response to his new appearance is shaped not so much by what it “actually” sees—though of course the combination of costuming and physical movement and gesture could be very powerful—but by the messenger’s account and by the chorus’s own response as fellow spectators. When the chorus goes on to say that he is “something terrible, not to be heard, nor to be looked upon” (δεινόν, οὐδ’ ἀκουστόν, οὐδ’ ἐπόψιμον, 1312), on the one hand it reinforces the idea that its experience is both unbearable and inexpressible—it can be neither heard nor seen. On the other hand, by bringing the two senses together here, just as the messenger did at the start of his speech (“what deeds you will hear, what deeds you will see, and how much / grief you will suffer” [οἷ’ ἔργ’ ἀκούσεσθ’, οἷα δ’ εἰσόψεσθ’, ὅσον δ’ / ἀρεῖσθε πένθος], 1224–25), the chorus, seeing for and with the audience, lays bare the role of verbal description in visualizing such an unseeable sight. The chorus’s initial response to Oedipus’s appearance ends with its describing his impact in terms of phrikē (φρίκη), translated above as “shuddering.” This word typically denotes “fundamentally a physical experience, the experience of a body that shivers and shudders,” often, as Cairns has shown, in reaction to sudden visual or aural stimuli.48 As I mentioned above, Aristotle talks of phrikē (using the verb φρίττειν) in his Poetics as the potential response, along with pity, simply to hearing (ἀκούοντα) the events of a tragedy “even without seeing them” (καὶ ἄνευ τοῦ ὁρᾶν, 1453b4).49 He gives Oedipus the King as an example of a play that can have this effect, presumably—given the coincidence of vocabulary—with this very scene in mind.50 Aristotle thus captures the potential of acoustic description to have a strongly somatic impact on an audience, suggesting something akin to the statements by both the 46.  Cairns 2015: 75–76. 47.  On the question of whether second masks would be used for blinded characters, see n. 36 above. 48.  Cairns 2015: 76. 49.  Aristotle uses the same verb at De motu an. 701b18–23 to refer to how people “shudder and feel fear” (φρίττουσι καὶ φοβοῦνται) in response as much to the thought of something as to the thing itself. 50.  Cf. Segal 1993: 28, 1996: 167.

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messenger and the chorus about Oedipus’s suffering as something both heard and seen: that is, hearing of his act can produce phrikē as much as seeing it. The chorus models such a somatic response—through its words and also through any bodily gestures or stances that accompany them—for the audience in the theater, as together they face the theama of the mutilated Oedipus.51 Even so, it is the close connection between phrikē and specifically the act of seeing that the chorus emphasizes in lines 1297–1306. We shall see this sort of intercorporeal model of spectatorship at work on a much more sustained scale in Prometheus Bound. Here in Oedipus the King, the chorus not only models for the audience phrikē as a response to viewing pain but suggests the pleasure that it can involve. Its exclamation that Oedipus causes “such shuddering” immediately follows its admittance that “there are many things I wish to ask, many to learn, and many to gaze at” (ἐθέλων πόλλ’ ἀνερέσθαι, / πολλὰ πυθέσθαι, πολλὰ δ’ ἀθρῆσαι, 1304–5). The chorus thus reveals its own “desire for a quasi-sexual encounter with pain.”52 Phrikē is the climax of both feeling it cannot look (οὐδ’ ἐσιδεῖν, 1303) and fulfilling its desire to gaze at multiple (πολλά) aspects of Oedipus’s abject body—and, if we also read πολλά as adverbial, to gaze at them many times over. In this respect, the chorus alludes to what the satyrs in Cyclops more explicitly expose: that is, the pleasure involved in looking at a body in pain, a pleasure that is here closely tied to the spectator’s own bodily response—and a pleasure to which I shall return at the end of this chapter.

sympathetic bodies: [aeschylus’s] prometheus bound While Oedipus the King concentrates its audience’s attention on this disturbing spectacle only in the closing scene, [Aeschylus’s] Prometheus Bound, from its opening right to its very end, revolves around a body in a state of extreme physical suffering and around the possibilities for bodily response on the part

51.  Segal 1993: 29, 1996: 168 suggests that the weeping of Oedipus and his children later in the play (1473, 1485) also provides “a cue for the desired and appropriate response of the audience, their participation in the emotional release in the theatre.” 52.  Telò 2020a: 55, with reference to the chorus’ response to Oedipus in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, especially 510–14. See also Worman on the “quasi-pornographic” staging of Oedipus’s self-mutilation (2020: 161; cf. 53–55).

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of its viewers.53 In doing so, this tragedy, on which the rest of the chapter is focused, offers a rich, extended exploration of theatrical sight, pain, and intercorporeal sympathy—that is, to draw from the passage of Aristotle’s Politics that I mentioned above, sympatheia, a sharing not just of pathos in the sense of affect or feeling but of pathos in the more general sense of experience or suffering, physical as well as mental or emotional. Prometheus Bound, as we shall see, lays bare theater’s bodily engagement and its close connection to the communication of pain. This tragedy is full of shock and spectacle, much of it achieved through extensive use of theater’s technologies.54 It has many unusual characters with masks and costumes probably different from the usual basic types of classical tragedy, from Kratos and Bia (Power and Force personified) to the horned Io.55 It requires props such as Hephaestus’s anvil and perhaps also sound effects for both this and the cataclysm at the end.56 The wall of the skēnē assumes a significant materiality, as the rock to which Prometheus is bound.57 Oceanus enters on a griffin, probably via a mēchanē (crane); the manner of the chorus’s entrance is much debated, but the script invites the possibility that it enters on top of the skēnē, perhaps via ramps behind it or on each side, either

53.  Cf. Hall 2010: “There is no Greek tragedy which concentrates so hard on physical suffering” (230). 54.  The play prompts innovative use of theater technologies in modern stagings as well as ancient, such as the giant revolving steel wheel used in the production directed by Travis Preston at the Getty Villa, Malibu, in 2013. 55.  References are made to Io’s horns at 588 and 674. The visual impact of unusual costumes and masks would be immediate with the entrance of Kratos, Bia, and Hephaestus at the start of the play. When Hephaestus comments that Kratos’s violent words suit his appearance (ὁμοῖα μορφῇ γλῶσσά σου γηρύεται, 78), he may refer to the startling nature of his theatrical attire (cf. Griffith 1983: “Kratos’ mask, costume, and posture would lend force to this remark” [98 ad loc.]). Hephaestus himself may not seem especially startling beyond (presumably) his hammer prop and perhaps other accoutrements of the blacksmith god, but his entrance onstage could have made a powerful impact on a Greek audience simply because he so rarely appears in the theater. (This is the only surviving play that includes him as a character.) 56.  On the acoustic effects particularly of the play’s opening scene, see Bakola 2019. 57.  I find it unlikely that, in the original production, Prometheus would have been bound to an actual rock or stage altar elsewhere in the theater, but for the purposes of my argument below what is important is simply that Prometheus is the central focal point throughout the play. On the position of Prometheus see Hammond 1972; Taplin 1977: 448–49; West 1979: 135–36; Griffith 1983: 30; Davidson 1994; Goetsch 1995.

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in prop-chariots or representing them simply through its own dancing.58 My interest here, however, is not so much in these technical feats of the play’s production, but in its bodiliness—its extraordinary, sustained focus on, above all, the body of Prometheus. As we shall see, when the audience’s attention is not directed to his body, it is instead drawn toward that of Io, who provides another example of the extreme sufferings endured by Zeus’s victims—this time a victim of his desire rather than his anger. Prometheus and Io are set in contrast: he, a male Titan, is completely stationary from the play’s start to finish, while she, a pitiful half-beast woman, is defined by uncontrollable movement. Yet they are united in the bodiliness of their suffering—a suffering that is dustheatos, “unseeable” and “hard to see,” a suffering for which seeing involves a visceral response. The play materializes what cannot be straightforwardly represented—that is, bodies in pain—by concentrating on theater’s potential to disturb, exposing its own production of pity, discomfort, and fear in these bodies’ spectators.59

Binding Prometheus: Violence Onstage Prometheus Bound is a unique tragedy in terms of its onstage violent brutality and the detail with which this is directed and described even before its physical enactment.60 The play opens with Kratos and Bia leading Prometheus onstage, accompanied by Hephaestus. Kratos immediately outlines what Hephaestus, following Zeus’s instructions, must do: bind him against the cliffs “in unbreakable fetters of adamantine bonds” (ἀδὰμαντίνων δεσμῶν 58.  On the staging of the Oceanids’ entrance, see especially Taplin 1977: 252–60; West 1979: 136–38; Griffith 1983: 109; Mastronarde 1990: 266–68; Davidson 1994. Some scholars have wondered about the use of the mēchanē for this entrance, but as both Griffith and Mastronarde point out, it seems unlikely that in the fifth-century theater there would have been one strong enough to lift twelve or fifteen choreuts onto the skēnē roof. 59.  Referring to Scarry’s work, Bassi 2010 distinguishes between two forms of “stateinflicted pain” in Prometheus Bound: the vivid enactment of Prometheus’s punishment on the one hand and his torture, which “resists visual proof ” (82), on the other. She argues that this distinction lies at the heart of a debate “over the political justification for inflicting physical suffering” (85). I do not see such a sharp distinction in the play between different levels of visuality. 60.  The closest parallel is probably the moment in Aeschylus’s Suppliants when the Egyptian suitors seize the chorus of Danaids (825–907), but while it is full of violent language and frenetic movement, that scene does not dwell on the bodily suffering of its victims, nor is this the focus for an extended stretch of the drama in the way that it is for almost all of Prometheus Bound.

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ἐν ἀρρήκτοις πέδαις, 6). Hephaestus reluctantly confirms that he will nail Prometheus to the rock (19–20), then details some of the Titan’s ensuing suffering: sun-scorched by day and frozen at night, he will stay there, “upright, sleepless, not bending a knee” (ὀρθοστάδην, ἄυπνος, οὐ κάμπτων γόνυ, 32), wailing in vain. From the moment the play begins, then, its focus is the punishment to be inflicted upon Prometheus’s body. When Hephaestus begins to carry out this punishment, he does so following Kratos’s directions, his every action described as it is simultaneously performed: Ηφ. Κρ. Ηφ. Κρ. Ηφ. Κρ. Ηφ. Κρ. Ηφ. Κρ. Ηφ. Κρ. Ηφ. Κρ. Ηφ. Κρ.

καὶ δὴ πρόχειρα ψάλια δέρκεσθαι πάρα. βαλών νιν ἀμφὶ χερσὶν ἐγκρατεῖ σθένει ῥαιστῆρι θεῖνε, πασσάλευε πρὸς πέτραις. περαίνεται δὴ κοὐ ματᾷ τοὖργον τόδε. ἄρασσε μᾶλλον, σφίγγε, μηδαμῇ χάλα, δεινὸς γὰρ εὑρεῖν κἀξ ἀμηχάνων πόρον. ἄραρεν ἥδε γ’ ὠλένη δυσεκλύτως. καὶ τήνδε νῦν πόρπασον ἀσφαλῶς, ἵνα μάθῃ σοφιστὴς ὢν Διὸς νωθέστερος. πλὴν τοῦδ’ ἂν οὐδεὶς ἐνδίκως μέμψαιτό μοι. ἀδαμαντίνου νῦν σφηνὸς αὐθάδη γνάθον στέρνων διαμπὰξ πασσάλευ’ ἐρρωμένως. αἰαῖ Προμηθεῦ, σῶν ὕπερ στένω πόνων. σὺ δ’ αὖ κατοκνεῖς τῶν Διός τ’ ἐχθρῶν ὕπερ στένεις; ὅπως μὴ σαυτὸν οἰκτιεῖς ποτε. ὁρᾷς θέαμα δυσθέατον ὄμμασιν; ὁρῶ κυροῦντα τόνδε τῶν ἐπαξίων. ἀλλ’ ἀμφὶ πλευραῖς μασχαλιστῆρας βάλε. δρᾶν ταῦτ’ ἀνάγκη· μηδὲν ἐγκέλευ’ ἄγαν. ἦ μὴν κελεύσω κἀπιθωύξω γε πρός. χώρει κάτω, σκέλη δὲ κίρκωσον βίᾳ. καὶ δὴ πέπρακται τοὖργον οὐ μακρῷ πόνῳ. ἐρρωμένως νῦν θεῖνε διατόρους πέδας, ὡς οὑπιτιμητής γε τῶν ἔργων βαρύς

H: K: H: K: H:

Well look! You can see the harness all ready to hand. Put it around his hands with powerful strength and strike with your hammer, nail it to the rock. This job’s being done, see, and not in vain. Strike harder, bind him tight, don’t leave any slack, for he’s clever at finding a way out even from impossible situations. This arm at least is fixed and hard to get loose.

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K: And now pin down this other one safely, so that he’ll learn, sophist that he is, that he is more stupid than Zeus. H: Except this man here, no one could justly find fault with me. K: Now the remorseless bite of the adamantine wedge, Hammer this forcefully right through his chest. H: Ah Prometheus, I groan for your pains! K: Do you hesitate again and groan for Zeus’s enemies? Be careful you don’t end up pitying yourself one day! H: Do you see the sight, hard for eyes to see (theama dustheaton   ommasin)? K: I see this one getting what he deserves. But put the arm-pit bands about his ribs. H: I have to do these things: don’t keep ordering me unnecessarily. K: I certainly will order you, and shout commands loudly too. Move downwards, and hoop his legs with force. H: Look, the job’s being done without great effort. K: Now hammer in the pierced shackles powerfully, as your work’s appraiser is harsh.

—[Aesch.] PV 53–77

Using a barrage of intensely physical verbs of binding, striking, hammering, and piercing (πασσάλευε, 56, 65; ἄρασσε . . . σφίγγε, 58; πόρπασον, 61; θεῖνε, 76) and expressions of physical strength (ἐγκρατεῖ σθένει, 55; ἐρρωμένως, 65, 76; βίᾳ, 74), Kratos urges Hephaestus on to perform ever more violent acts— not just fastening every part of Prometheus to the rock but impaling him through the chest, a new element of his punishment that the audience realizes only as it is carried out. Hephaestus draws attention to the onstage enactment of all these acts of torture.61 He repeats the participial phrase καὶ δή (54, 75), which “signifies, vividly and dramatically, that something is actually taking place at the moment,” typically “marking vivid perception by mind, ear, or eye.”62 He twice asserts that “the job’s being done” (περαίνεται . . . τοὖργον, 57; πέπρακται τοὖργον, 75). Throughout, he and Kratos use deictic pronouns and, we imagine, also accompanying gestures to emphasize that both Prometheus and the instruments of his torture are right there—as Hephaestus says of the harness, “you can see [it], all ready to hand” (πρόχειρα . . . δέρκεσθαι πάρα, 61.  Cf. Worman 2020: “in what seems like an overt demonstration of the envisioning powers of tragic deixis, [Hephaestus] matches the material fixings of the torture to the tortured body” (34). 62.  Denniston 1954: 250.

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54). Perhaps accompanied by loud sound effects to represent the clanging of Hephaestus’s hammer, the insistence that every aspect of the torture is visible urges on the audience a sense of shared visual experience, as it too witnesses bodily violence so terrible that it is, as Hephaestus says in line 70, dustheatos. Prometheus is silent throughout this scene: he does not speak; he does not even cry out in pain.63 The entire prologue revolves around the torture of his pinioned and pierced body; he is all external flesh, revealing not a trace of any internal thought. Kratos and Hephaestus draw the audience’s attention not just to the punishment itself but to each physical part of Prometheus: his hands, arms, ribs, chest, and legs. Ancient commentators understood the instruction for Hephaestus to “move downwards” (χώρει κάτω, 74) to imply that the Titan’s body is so enormous that the god has to climb down the rock-face to reach his legs.64 While this meaning is unlikely,65 it suggests how strongly an audience or reader is encouraged to visualize him in terms of his bodiliness. Prometheus’s silence may indeed suggest his “titanic resilience,”66 but the god is also, in a fundamental sense, reduced to just body here—and a body that is a spectacle, seen and not yet heard. In Euripides’s Hecuba, we saw how Polymestor’s predatory bestiality—in body and in song—weakens the potential for both visual attention and sympathy on the part of his audiences. In contrast, in the case of Prometheus, mankind’s benefactor, who, as he reminds us later in the play, both invented writing and taught men how to yoke animals (460–66), the image of the god as an alogos beast himself, shackled and harnessed, accentuates the pitiful reduction in his status and trains all eyes upon him.67 63.  On the notorious silence of Aeschylean characters, famously noted at Ar. Ran. 910–11, 919–20, see especially Taplin 1972; Montiglio 2010: 173–76, 213–19 (where she notes how silence is often followed by “vocal vehemence”). 64.  Schol. [Aesch.] PV 74a: διὰ τὸ “χώρει κάτω” τὸ μέγεθος ἐνέφηνε τοῦ δεσμευομένου θεοῦ (“ ‘move downwards’ is because he was referring to the size of the bound god”). Schol. [Aesch.] PV 74b: τοῦτο εἰπὼν δηλοῖ ὅτι παμμεγέθης ἦν ὁ Προμηθεύς (“by saying this he makes it clear that Prometheus was immense”). 65.  χώρει κάτω (74) probably just means “proceed downwards,” i.e., Hephaestus is to work his way down to the legs after securing the chest: see Taplin 1977: 244; Griffith 1983: 93 ad loc. 66.  Taplin 1972: 78. 67.  Cf. Nooter 2017 on bodiliness and bestiality in Aeschylus; see especially 60–63, 84–86 on how the nonverbal cries later emitted by both Prometheus and Io align them with the animalistic end of the “mortality spectrum.” On the language and imagery of horse-breaking in PV, see Mossman 1996: 62–63. In addition to the harness (ψάλια, 54), the “armpit-bands” (μασχαλιστῆρας, 71) would typically be used to fasten a horse to a yoke.

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The focus on Prometheus’s anatomy also cues a somatic response on the part of the audience. Kratos and Hephaestus emphasize at the play’s start its nonhuman setting and characters: they are in “a wilderness deserted of mortals” (ἄβροτον . . . ἐρημίαν, 2), where, bound to a “rock remote from men” (ἀπανθρώπῳ πάγῳ, 20), Prometheus will perceive “neither mortal voice nor mortal form,” (οὔτε φωνὴν οὔτε του μορφὴν βροτῶν, 21). Yet the singling out of his individual body parts and the torture inflicted upon them encourages a sense of physical affinity between this Titan and his human spectators, whose presence is paradoxically emphasized by the insistence on their absence.68 Such affinity becomes especially acute at the surprise climax of this painful scene, when Hephaestus impales him with an iron spike right through (διαμπὰξ, 65) his chest.69 The visceral discomfort that this direction/action can provoke in the audience is echoed in Hephaestus’s own reaction: he, not Prometheus, utters a cry of αἰαῖ in line 66—a nonverbal cry that typically expresses lament for one’s own situation, as it does when Prometheus himself shouts it seventy lines later.70 Here it conveys pity, but it is also a cry of misery, conveying the pain that Hephaestus himself appears to feel and that the audience in the theater is urged to feel in reaction to a vividly violent act of metal piercing through flesh. Kratos seems immediately to sense such intercorporeal sympatheia on Hephaestus’s part, warning him to be careful that he does not end up pitying himself (σαυτὸν οἰκτιεῖς, 68) as a result. While the point here is that Zeus might then punish him too, the alignment of what Hephaestus feels for Prometheus and what he may feel for himself suggests a correlation of affect between them. Hephaestus’s exclamation thus models for the audience a painful response to the pain of Prometheus. From this point onward, first with Hephaestus as an internal spectator and empathizer, then with the chorus of Oceanids, Prometheus’s suffering body, already the play’s focal point, is repeatedly presented as a deeply disturbing spectacle. When, replying to Kratos’s threat, Hephaestus 68.  Bassi 2010: “the paradoxical effect of the opening scene is to magnify the presence of the (human) audience in the very act of denying that presence; there can be no doubt that the actor playing Prometheus is looking out upon thousands of human ‘forms’ in the theater” (85). 69.  Cf. Worman 2020: “[The scene] is stunning for the material detailing of the punishment as well as the agonized recoil at the suffering it entails, an insistence on the stuff of physical experiencing that aims at arousing not merely the audience’s horror and sympathy but also their own embodied sensory responsiveness” (34). 70.  Griffith 1983: “αἰαῖ is usually a cry of misery; uniquely here of pity” (96 ad loc.).

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asks him—but also the audience—“do you see the sight, hard for eyes to see?” (69), he effectively encapsulates, with an oxymoronic phrase focused on the act of viewing (θέαμα δυσθέατον, theama dustheaton), the complicated visual aesthetics of the entire tragedy. Prometheus is both a “sight hard to see” and an “unseeable sight.” Hephaestus’s question insists on the visibility and visual draw of Prometheus’s body even as it underscores the difficulty of such spectatorship.71

Prometheus as Spectacle Finally, once alone, Prometheus begins to speak. It is at this moment that he becomes a character, changing from a mute body to a person—a god—with logos. His presence in this play is so closely tied to his corporeal suffering that, in a sense, it is only after torture has been inflicted on every part of his body that he materializes as an animate being, his character emerging out of the bodily pain that he must now endure. The play continues to foreground the viewing of such bodily pain, with characters repeatedly emphasizing, as Hephaestus did, the spectacle of Prometheus and revealing its effect on the viewer. When Prometheus speaks, he first calls upon the elements—sky, winds, springs, sea, earth—to look upon him (ἴδεσθέ μ’, 92). As he begins to sing (or chant), switching from iambic trimeter to anapaests, he repeats the direction to see (δέρχθηθ’, 93) his suffering. An address to the elements is a common trope in tragic monologues, but Prometheus’s insistence on their seeing him is distinct in how it fits within a pattern of expanding spectatorship, stretching from internal spectators to the audience in the theater to the sky, sea, and earth. As Hephaestus’s question earlier (“do you see?”) is aimed at the audience as much as at Kratos, so the target here includes the audience as well as the elements, as the two lots of spectators who witness his suffering while he is alone onstage. Like the moment of the city’s construction in Birds, which I discussed in chapter 1, his 71.  Cf. Rehm 2002: “From the start, Prometheus Bound presents a (literal) spectacle, set up during the opening sequence when Prometheus is immobilized. From that point till the end of the play, Aeschylus holds up his protagonist to others’ scrutiny, like some superhuman insect fixed for observation—a theama dustheaton (69), ‘a sight hard to look at,’ ‘a spectacle no one wants to see,’ in Hephaestus’s oxymoron. References to looking, to being seen, and to escaping the gaze of others recur throughout the play” (161–62). θέαμα δυσθέατον also points to Prometheus’s own mixed attitude to being an object of spectatorship: he is both humiliated by being seen in this helpless state and also keen for others to witness his unjust suffering (Griffith 1983: 97 ad loc.; Rehm 2002: 161–63).

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pleas heighten the audience’s sense of its own physical situatedness by directly referring to the natural environment surrounding the open-air theater. The theatron as a “seeing space” becomes boundless, converging with the dramatic space to include the cosmos itself. When the chorus of Oceanids begins to enter, Prometheus maintains his position as the primary object of sight. Whatever the nature of its arrival, the chorus is a new visual draw for the audience—and an especially exciting one if it appears on top of the skēnē and/or in prop-chariots. But Prometheus himself cannot yet see it: τίς ἀχώ, τίς ὀδμὰ προσέπτα μ’ ἀφεγγής; θεόσυτος ἢ βρότειος ἢ κεκραμένη ἵκετο τερμόνιον ἐπὶ πάγον; πόνων ἐμῶν θεωρός, ἢ τί δὴ θέλων; ὁρᾶτε δεσμώτην με, δύσποτμον θεόν. What sound, what smell wafts over me, unseen? God-sent or mortal or in-between, has it come to the rock at world’s end? As a spectator of my pains, or just what does it want? Look at me, a prisoner, ill-fated god. —[Aesch.] PV 115–19

Though the chorus competes for the audience’s visual attention, for Prometheus it is something only heard or smelled, not seen; thus he suggests senses other than sight for experiencing and identifying theatrical bodies.72 Like dustheatos, the privative adjective ἀφεγγής (“unseen,” 115) may suggest the limits and complexities of theatrical representation, but here it is specific to Prometheus’s experience of the chorus—for the audience, in contrast, the chorus’s entrance, however it is staged, is spectacular. Even so, Prometheus maintains that he himself is still the spectacle here, with the chorus arriving as a spectator (θεωρός, 117) and beholding him (ὁρᾶτε, 119). Very quickly, then, the chorus is aligned with the audience as viewers of Prometheus. When Prometheus wonders if a θεωρός (theōros) is approaching, he acti­ vates multiple meanings of this word. As we saw in the introduction, theōros

72.  I assume that the chorus is to start appearing from 114ff., but it could instead here be unseen for the audience too, materializing only as it begins singing their parodos. The timing in part depends on the stage mechanics employed for its entrance: see above, n. 58.

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and theōrein can refer to the wider cultural practice of theōria, of going on a journey to attend a festival or consult an oracle, or more generally to view a spectacle. It can also, as in Aristotle’s Poetics, denote the specific aesthetic activity involved in seeing theater. Through the course of the play Prometheus will become an oracle of sorts, knowing his own future, telling Io hers, and withholding his knowledge from Zeus. But he is above all a spectacle, an extraordinary sight at the edge of the world, where the Oceanids are his first visitors. The audience are theōroi in this sense too, traveling to the theater to see this visually extraordinary play. Both the Oceanids and the audience are also theōroi in terms of being spectators (internal and external) within the theater, making sense of what they see onstage and of what such seeing can entail. Together they are viewers of Prometheus’s πόνοι—not just his humiliation but his physical pain. Indeed, it is the sound of Hephaestus’s hammering of the Titan’s body against the rock that, striking them violently in turn (ἔπληξε, 134), prompts the Oceanids to leave the Ocean’s depths in the first place. Sight, then, initially appears to be the privileged sense for a scene that is, ironically, dustheatos. Yet it soon becomes clear that seeing Prometheus is a profoundly visceral experience; his body is represented not simply through its visual appearance or the words used to describe it, but through the mutuality of bodily affect between viewer and viewed. Following Prometheus’s repeated directions to behold him (ὁρᾶτε, 119; δέρχθητ’, ἐσίδεσθ’, 141), the Oceanids describe the impact of such viewing: λεύσσω, Προμηθεῦ· φοβερὰ δ’ ἐμοῖσιν ὄσσοις ὀμίχλα προσῇξε πλήρης δακρύων σὸν δέμας εἰσιδούσᾳ πέτρᾳ προσαυαινόμενον ταῖσδ’ ἀδαμαντοδέτοισι λύμαις. I see, Prometheus; and over my eyes a fearful mist rushed, full of tears, as I looked upon your body made to wither away against the rock by these adamant-bound indignities. —[Aesch.] PV 144–48

The sight of Prometheus’s body (δέμας, 146) produces not just pity but fear— a mist of tears that is φοβερά, meaning both “fearful” and “causing fear”: that is, the Oceanids feel fear themselves and also model this affect for the

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spectators, urging it upon them. It is his physical state, as well as the indignity of his punishment, that prompts such a reaction: the verb αὐαίνω, from which comes the participle [προσ]αυαινόμενον (“made to wither away,” 147), has quite a literal, corporeal sense of “drying up,” not just a metaphorical one.73 The Oceanids’ mention of fear sets up a circulation of affect between them and Prometheus, as the sight of his torture has a physical impact on their own bodies. They first explain their fear in terms of Zeus’s power and anger in diminishing such a god as Prometheus (149–51, 160–67); then they focus on Prometheus’s obstinate audacity in taking such a stance against the Olympian (178–80). The result is that “a piercing fear agitates my mind / and I’m afraid for what will happen to you” (ἐμᾶς δὲ φρένας ἠρέθισε διάτορος φόβος, / δέδια δ’ ἀμφὶ σαῖς τύχαις, 181–82). The use of the adjective διάτορος (“piercing”) is striking. Kratos uses the same word to describe the shackles binding Prometheus earlier in the play (διατόρους πέδας, 76), where it emphasizes the gory nature of the punishment: though we should probably understand διατόρους there as (unusually) passive in meaning (i.e., “pierced shackles”),74 it also suggests the sharp penetration (the active “piercing”) of flesh, even if Hephaestus is not actually hammering nails through his hands and feet.75 In the parodos the adjective translates the physical punishment inflicted upon Prometheus into the Oceanids’ mental state. Just as Hephaestus emits a cry of misery and pain on the Titan’s behalf, then, the chorus also appears to share some of Prometheus’s pain. Such sympatheia is closely tied to spectatorship. After the parodos, Prometheus explains the cause of his punishment to the chorus and concludes by referring to his current state: “That, you see, is why I’m bent by these torments, / painful to suffer and piteous to see” (τῷ τοι τοιαῖσδε πημοναῖσι κάμπτομαι, / πάσχειν μὲν ἀλγειναῖσιν, οἰκτραῖσιν δ’ ἰδεῖν, 237–38). The chiastic structure of line 238 (literally “to suffer painful, piteous to see”) suggests not so much an antithesis as a sort of equivalence between, on the one hand, the two verbs (suffering and seeing) and, on the other, their effects (pain and pity).

73.  Griffith 1983: 116 ad loc. 74.  Griffith 1983 (“probably passive, ‘pierced shackles,’ referring to the holes in the clamps through which the nails . . . were inserted to tighten them”) (97–98 ad loc.). 75.  Cf. Scarry 1984: 16 on the importance of the means (weapons) of torture in the apprehension of pain.

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The Oceanids respond in kind, with a similar emphasis on the spectator’s sharing of Prometheus’s suffering even as they yearn not to see it: “For I would not have wished to see these things / and having seen them, I feel pain in my heart” (ἐγὼ γὰρ οὔτ’ ἂν εἰσιδεῖν τάδε / ἔχρῃζον, εἰσιδοῦσά τ’ ἠλγύνθην κέαρ, 244–45).76 Prometheus replies by agreeing that he is “pitiable to see” (ἐλεινὸς εἰσορᾶν, 246). Their exchange makes it clear that pity here is indeed, as Aristotle says, “a kind of pain,” involving a sharing of suffering, both mental and physical.77 The chorus is pained (ἠλγύνθην, 245, from the verb ἀλγύνω) upon seeing Prometheus’s painful (ἀλγειναῖσιν, 238) suffering. The chorus’s response virtually confirms the equivalence set up in Prometheus’s preceding lines: to see this body is to feel pain in one’s own. The chorus thus repeatedly demonstrates its sympatheia before Prometheus actually tells it outright to share his suffering (συμπονήσατε, 274). It continues to do so afterwards as well, preparing the way for its willingness, so extraordinary to some critics, to stay with him and “suffer what is necessary” (ὅ τι χρὴ πάσχειν, 1067) at the play’s end.78 The Oceanids’ response overlaps but also contrasts with that of their father, Oceanus, who enters just as they begin to descend from their chariots (probably from the top of the skēnē) in response to Prometheus’s bidding at 274. Like his daughters, Oceanus seems to be presented as a sympathetic spectator: after mentioning his long journey (284–87), he tells Prometheus “I share in the pain of your misfortunes” (ταῖς σαῖς δὲ τύχαις . . . συναλγῶ, 288); Prometheus then asks him if he too has come “to be a viewer of my sufferings” (πόνων ἐμῶν . . . ἐπόπτης, 298–99), “to see [theōrēsōn) my misfortunes . . . and to share in my troubles” (θεωρήσων τύχας / ἐμὰς . . . καὶ συνασχαλῶν κακοῖς, 302–3), before directing him to

76.  On the “dramatic aorist” and internal accusative here, see Griffith 1983: 132 ad loc. 77.  Arist. Rhet. 1385ba21. See above. Sienkewicz 1984: 64 argues that the Oceanids are careful to limit their response to “sympathetic indignation”—to pain felt in the heart (κέαρ, 245) rather than the body. I do not think such caution is so evident here, given that these lines are preceded by the repeated suggestions that their sympathy is a bodily reaction as much as a mental or emotional one. 78.  See especially Griffith 1977: 133, 1983: 273–74 ad loc.; Sienkewicz 1984; Scott 1987 on the chorus’ change in attitude, including its apparent contrast both with the second stasimon, in which it claims to have learned from Prometheus’s plight not to cross Zeus, and with its speech just before its declaration at 1067, where it urges him to follow Hermes’s advice and obey Zeus.

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“look at the sight” (δέρκου θέαμα, 304).79 As before, then, Prometheus frames this arrival in terms of theōria. But Oceanus proves to be a less sincerely sympathetic viewer than the chorus, more a sightseer than an audience sharing in the Titan’s pain. After offering advice and warnings, all rejected by Prometheus, he soon leaves. In staying, the Oceanids emphasize the difference between their own model of audience response and their father’s. They further show this difference by performing, in the first stasimon, a lament for Prometheus that refers repeatedly to the sharing of his suffering, again encouraging the audience to participate in a nexus of pity and pain that centers on the sight of his tortured, motionless body. This lament emphasizes song and sound more generally as forms of sympathetic response generated by multiple bodies, from the Oceanids themselves out to the entire cosmos. Beginning with their own groans for his misfortune (στένω σε τᾶς οὐλομένας τύχας, Προμηθεῦ, 397), they envisage a universal performance of mourning, from Asia to Scythia to Arabia. Men suffer with him (συγκάμνουσι θνατοί, 414); finally, the natural world participates: the sea’s waves “cry out” (βοᾷ, 431) as they “crash together” (ξυμπίτνων, 432);80 its depths groan (στένει, 432); the underground recesses of Hades “rumble” (ὑποβρέμει, 433); the rivers “groan for your piteous pain” (στένουσιν ἄλγος οἰκτρόν, 435). We noted how Prometheus’s own address to the elements expanded the physical space of the theater to incorporate them as his spectators; here the theatron is expanded acoustically, as the sea, rivers, and underworld are imagined, through the chorus’s words, song, and dance, to join in this noisy lament. Just before Io enters, the chorus sings another ode, the second stasimon, in which it once again refers to its fear upon seeing Prometheus. Wishing never to anger Zeus themselves, the Oceanids “shudder to see you, / worn away by countless troubles” (φρίσσω δέ σε δερκομένα / μυρίοις μόχθοις διακναιόμενον, 540–41). The language here echoes Prometheus’s own opening anapaests 450 lines earlier (“See [δέρχθηθ’] with what tortures / I am

79.  Oceanus also emphasizes his own viewing of Prometheus, just as the chorus did: ὁρῶ, Προμηθεῦ (307, cf. 144). 80.  Sommerstein 2008 follows Stinton and West in positing a lacuna in lines 430–31 and suggesting that this stanza would have begun with a reference to the earth (e.g., ⟨Προμηθεῦ, σᾶς δὲ γᾶ στένει τύχας⟩). West 1990b posits another lacuna in 431 and conjectures ⟨πόνοις ἅμα⟩, whereby the participle ξυμπίτνων comes to mean “crashing together [with your pains],” as if the waves are providing an acoustic accompaniment to Prometheus’s suffering.

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worn away [διακναιόμενος]”, 93–94), as if drawing to a close this half of the play. There, as here, we could translate the participle διακναιόμενον as “worn away,” but διακναίω also has a more physical meaning of “scrape,” “grate,” or “cut”; in Euripides’s Cyclops it is used to refer to the gouging out of Polyphemus’s eye.81 Thus again the chorus points to the physical mutilation of Prometheus’s body, bringing to mind, as it did earlier with the adjective διάτορος, a sense of torn flesh. Correspondingly, the verb that it uses to describe its own response here, φρίσσω (phrissō, “I shudder), also suggests an uncomfortably physical experience. This is the same verb with which, as we saw, Aristotle describes the potential impact of even just hearing the events of a tragedy. Contrary to Aristotle’s claim, but like the phrikē that the chorus experiences upon seeing Oedipus in Sophocles’s play, such “shuddering” is specifically tied to the act of seeing (δερκομένα); it denotes a deeply somatic response to a tragic spectacle.82

Io as Spectacle With the entrance of Io, the maiden desired by Zeus, transformed into a cow, and pursued by the gadfly, the dynamics of spectatorship established through the first half of the play change. No longer is Prometheus’s static, suffering body the drama’s sole spectacle, for Io comes onstage not so much as a theōros as another body to be viewed and also heard, presenting the audience with a different, competing object for their attention and sympathy. Like Prometheus in the opening scene of the play, Io also appears entirely in terms of her body. While she does not undergo the sort of physical torture endured by Prometheus, her suffering is nevertheless intimately tied to her body—a body desired and bestialized. Such bodiliness, however, is represented not through silent, harnessed immobility but through bestial sound and wild movement. She enters singing, first asking where she is and what she sees (561–65) and then suddenly shouting nonverbal cries as she is stung by the gadfly once more (566ff.). As she describes her affliction, Io’s lyrics become very agitated, full of exclamations and repetition, their rhythm mostly dochmiacs and syncopated iambics. As Sarah Nooter has emphasized, her voice is almost immediately characterized as nonverbal: Io herself describes it as a 81.  Eur. Cyc. 487. LSJ s.v. διακναίω. 82.  For φρίκη tied to hearing, as opposed to seeing, see Soph. Ant. 997, Trach. 1044; Eur. Hipp. 1202.

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φθέγμα (588), “not a linguistic or musical voice, but a grunt, a snort, an animal cry.”83 But she is defined not only by the raw, animal-like sounds of her lament, but also, as Sarah Olsen has demonstrated, by her “urgent corporeality.”84 In her songs and her later speech, references to wandering, leaping, kicking, and whirling, combined with agitated rhythms, suggest that her bovine transformation involves disturbing movement.85 In both these respects—her sound and her movement—Io becomes an acoustic and kinetic counterbalance to the Titan’s visual display of Zeus’s punishment. The chorus of Oceanids now acts as an internal audience of Io as well as Prometheus. It is silent for some time after Io’s entrance, as if as surprised by her interruption as the theater audience itself may be. When it finally speaks again, it does so to stop Prometheus from revealing Io’s future just yet and to ask her to give it “a share of pleasure” (μοῖραν . . . ἡδονῆς, 631) by relating her past misfortunes, which Prometheus, who already knows them, has no need to hear. This interjection is the only moment in the play that indicates, like the chorus of Oedipus the King does, the pleasure involved in witnessing tragic suffering. It is seemingly on the basis of such pleasure—pleasure for the chorus but also for the audience itself—that Io is allowed to remain the drama’s focus for a while longer, before Prometheus becomes the dominant voice once again. With her relevance to Prometheus’s plight not yet clear—only later will he reveal that the link between them is Heracles, her descendant and his deliverer—the Oceanids prompt the audience to dwell with them on this figure and her story as a sort of a play within a play.86 The Oceanids initially express a desire to hear Io’s tale, and Prometheus in turn casts them in the role of listeners (τῶν κλυόντων, 639). When she has finished, however, they sing about their experience of seeing her as well:

83.  Nooter 2017: 62. 84.  Olsen 2021a: 69. Cf. Worman 2020: 35–37 on the emphasis on Io’s body, dance, and “mobile intensity” at the beginning and end of her onstage presence. 85.  See especially [Aesch.] PV 599–600, 673–77, 877–86. Olsen 2021a: 52–72 emphasizes the disturbing nature of Io’s solo dance: she is a parthenos without a chorus, “moving in ways that signify pain and struggle rather than highlighting her physical beauty and sexual appeal” (62). 86.  Cf. Olsen 2021a: “[The Oceanids] cast themselves as Io’s audience, a role reinforced by their claim, following Io’s narrative, to have ‘looked on at Io’s affair’ (εἰσιδοῦσα πρᾶξιν Ἰοῦς, 695). The Oceanids watch Io move and listen to her speak, not as fellow maiden-performers but as a sympathetic audience that ‘looks on’ as she suffers” (62).

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ἔα ἔα· ἄπεχε, φεῦ· οὔποθ’ ⟨ὧδ’⟩ οὔποτ’ ηὔχουν ξένους μολεῖσθαι λόγους ἐς ἀκοὰν ἐμάν, οὐδ’ ὧδε δυσθέατα καὶ δύσοιστα †πήματα λύματα δείματ’ ἀμφήκει κέντρῳ ψύχειν ψυχὰν ἐμάν†. ἰὼ ἰὼ μοῖρα μοῖρα, πέφρικ’ εἰσιδοῦσα πρᾶξιν Ἰοῦς.



Ah! Ah! Keep off! Pheu! Never, never did I expect that such strange words would come to my hearing, nor that such hard-to-see [dustheata] and hard-to-bear †sufferings, outrages, terrors would chill my soul with a two-pronged goad†. Iō iō! Fate fate! I shudder to see Io’s state.



—[Aesch.] PV 687–95

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The chorus here models for the audience the impact of Io’s words—or rather, it intensifies that impact by displaying it itself. Already visually and sonically disturbing, Io through her painful story has become, just like Prometheus, dustheatos: her sufferings are simultaneously “hard to see and hard to bear” (δυσθέατα καὶ δύσοιστα, 690); seeing and suffering are once again aligned, even in almost negated form. The chorus demonstrates such equivalence through its exclamations and the agitated meter (syncopated iambics with a few dochmiacs) of its song, which thus resembles Io’s earlier monody: it reveals its sympatheia not just verbally, but by assuming her voice and rhythms, and perhaps also her bodily movement. It is as if Io’s “sickness,” to which she and the chorus have referred repeatedly, has become literally contagious.87 The chorus’s reaction to Io’s tale here also closely recalls its sympathetic reaction to Prometheus. Not only does it refer to both as dustheatos; it also describes her impact with the language of horse-breaking that was earlier applied to Prometheus: her sufferings strike it with a “goad” (κέντρῳ, 692; cf. 87.  νόσος, νοσέω: 596, 606, 632, 698. Io mentions νόσημα (685) just before the chorus starts singing: though she uses this word here as a metaphor to describe false tales, it can remind the audience of the circulation of sickness surrounding her—and this is then made all the more apparent by the chorus’ troubled response. On the imagery of disease in PV, see Mossman 1996: 63–64.

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323, 597). The chorus then encapsulates the corporeal nature of their response with the same verb that it used some 150 lines earlier with reference to Prometheus: it “shudder[s] to see” her (πέφρικ’ εἰσιδοῦσα, 695; cf. φρίσσω δέ σε δερκομένα, 540). Again, seeing and shuddering occur together. As in Oedipus the King, phrikē as the culmination of the chorus’s reaction to her body—a sight all the more affective as a result of what it has heard—suggests the nature of its enjoyment of this experience. Its desire for a “share of pleasure” climaxes in this shuddering exclamation. This reaction is also bound up with fear—the chilling “terrors” (δείματ’, 691) that the chorus experiences for Io, as earlier it did for Prometheus. Just before leaving, she sings her final song, with an especially intense description of her own fear (φόβῳ, 881), madness, and crazed movement and sound (“my eyes whirl around in circles . . . with my tongue uncontrolled” [τροχοδινεῖται δ’ ὄμμαθ’ ἑλίγδην . . . γλώσσης ἀκρατής], 882–84). Again Io seems to become contagious, as her terror infects the chorus: expressing its reaction in song (though with a more restrained rhythm of dactylo-epitrites), the chorus sings “I’m frightened as I look upon Io, the virgin who has loved no man” (ταρβῶ . . . ἀστεργάνορα παρθενίαν / εἰσορῶσ’ Ἰοῦς, 898–99). By displaying such a mutuality of affect between sufferer and spectator, the chorus once again urges it upon the audience.

Bodily Cataclysm Prometheus Bound ends with yet more punishment predicted for Prometheus, who, after Io’s departure, is once again the drama’s primary focus. His next visitor is Hermes, who enters not as a theōros but as Zeus’s messenger, to order the Titan to divulge his knowledge about the Olympian’s future fall from power. Prometheus, who has become increasingly defiant against Zeus’s authority through the course of the play, refuses to obey. Hermes therefore tells him the next two stages of torture that will result: first Zeus’s thunderbolt (1016–19) and then the eagle perpetually gnawing at his flesh (1021–25). His description of the latter is especially visual and visceral, emphasizing color as well as gore: the eagle is δαφοινός (blood-red and blood-spattered, not just bloodthirsty, 1022);88 the liver has (proleptically) become black (κελαινόβρωτον, 1025). Hermes’s words ensure that the audience’s attention returns (if it ever left) to Prometheus’s ravaged body.

88.  Griffith 1983: 266 ad loc.

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While the audience is encouraged to visualize this later torture, however, it is the thunderbolt that becomes the focus at the end of the tragedy. Just as Prometheus’s binding is prepared for verbally before Kratos and Hephaestus carry it out, so here the final cataclysm is pictured in increasingly vivid detail, by both Hermes (1016–19, 1061–62) and Prometheus himself (992–96, 1043–53). Then, in the last moment of the tragedy, it happens, with Prometheus describing the cataclysm and, like Hephaestus in the opening scene, highlighting its simultaneous enactment:

καὶ μὴν ἔργῳ κοὐκέτι μύθῳ χθὼν σεσάλευται, βρυχία δ’ ἠχὼ παραμυκᾶται βροντῆς, ἕλικες δ’ ἐκλάμπουσι στεροπῆς ζάπυροι, στρόμβοι δὲ κόνιν εἱλίσσουσι, σκιρτᾷ δ’ ἀνέμων πνεύματα πάντων εἰς ἄλληλα στάσιν ἀντίπνουν ἀποδεικνύμενα, ξυντετάρακται δ’ αἰθὴρ πόντῳ· τοιάδ’ ἐπ’ ἐμοὶ ῥιπὴ Διόθεν τεύχουσα φόβον στείχει φανερῶς. ὦ μητρὸς ἐμῆς σέβας, ὦ πάντων αἰθὴρ κοινὸν φάος εἱλίσσων, ἐσορᾷς μ’ ὡς ἔκδικα πάσχω.



And see now, in action, no longer in word the earth is shaking, and from the depths there bellows in response the sound of thunder, and there shine out twists of lightning, fiery, and whirlwinds whirl dust around, and the blasts of all the winds leap against each other, displaying their strife of opposing gusts, and sky is confounded with sea. Such a storm comes against me from Zeus, causing fear, quite visibly. O my honored mother, O sky, revolving the shared light of all, See how unjustly I suffer!



—[Aesch.] PV 1080–93

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The extent to which stage machinery might have been employed in the original production to effect the engulfment of Prometheus has been much

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debated.89 The use, for example, of a bronteion (thunder machine) could intensify the sense of a terrifying cacophony and echo the play’s beginning, with its focus on the sound of Hephaestus’s hammer.90 But Prometheus’s verbal description of the thunderous bellowing, with an overload of sound words in lines 1082–83 (βρυχία δ’ ἠχὼ παραμυκᾶται / βροντῆς), produces its own cacophonic impact.91 Likewise his emphasis on visual elements as well as sound here—the fiery lightning, the winds “displaying their strife” (στάσιν . . . ἀποδεικνύμενα, 1087)—encourages the audience to visualize this extraordinary scene along with Prometheus himself, without requiring the sorts of stage effects that we might expect in a modern production.92 The enjambment of lines 1080–90 ends, significantly, with the adverb φανερῶς (“visibly”)— everything that he has described is in plain sight. The claim at 1080 (“in action, no longer in word,” ἔργῳ κοὐκέτι μύθῳ) recalls Hephaestus’s language in the play’s opening scene, as he emphasizes the onstage enactment of Prometheus’s torture. Here it may be a self-consciously theatrical nod to the power of such richly synaesthetic language to make the onstage blasting of Prometheus by Zeus’s thunderbolt, the most violent and elemental act in all extant tragedy, manifest—φανερός—to the audience. Both the chorus and the audience’s memory of Io can also play a role in producing this final cataclysmic scene. Prometheus himself must still be bound and immobile, but his language is full of references to choreographic movement. “Whirlwinds whirl” (στρόμβοι . . . εἱλίσσουσι, 1084–85), as does the sky (εἱλίσσων, 1092),93 and the winds “leap” (σκιρτᾷ, 1085). His speech echoes in several respects Io’s descriptions of her madness, but especially her own strongly kinetic language: she too “whirls” (882, cf. 589) and “leaps” (675). Such resonances bring to mind Io’s frenetic movement and perhaps also her voice, which, as we saw, was characterized in terms of nonverbal noise. The overlap, as Mark Griffith suggests, seems “to provide another link between the two 89.  For discussion of this issue see, e.g., Taplin 1977: 273–75; Griffith 1983: 276–77 on PV 1080; Podlecki 2005: 193; Nooter 2017: 71. 90.  On the bronteion see Pollux 4.130. 91.  On the mix of enacted and described sounds here, see Nooter 2017: 27, 71–72. 92.  As Griffith 1983: 278 notes regarding PV 1083–84, the “lightning machine” (keraunoskopeion) was probably not used in the fifth-century theater. 93.  On the choreographic resonance of εἰλίσσω and other words denoting circular movement in tragedy (especially Euripidean tragedy), see Csapo 1999–2000: 422–24; Weiss 2018a: 9 and passim.

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victims of Zeus’s power, and to underline the chaotic and destructive effects of his passions.”94 At the same time, the chorus, if still onstage, could respond to such kinetic and acoustic language, as well the references to violent sounds, with its own dancing and even shouting, thereby providing a bodily materialization of the events described by Prometheus.95 It could simultaneously provide a visible (φανερός) display of fear (φόβον, 1090)—fear caused by such elemental violence and also repeatedly mentioned as its bodily affect in response to Prometheus’s torture. In doing so, it could urge such agitation upon the audience itself, so that once again Prometheus’s suffering radiates beyond his own body out to those of internal and external spectators alike. Even without such a choral response, however, Prometheus’s words assume a bodily form through the memory of Io, whom the audience is encouraged to see as present here, singing and dancing madly in a complementary demonstration of Zeus’s destructive power. These other bodies, then, may aid an audience’s visualization of this violent, extraordinary scene, a scene that pushes to the limit theater’s representational power and the potentialities of vision. Ultimately, however, its gaze is still drawn to Prometheus himself. The tragedy closes with Prometheus once more calling upon the elements (the earth and sky) to see (ἐσορᾷς, 1093) him and his suffering. Like Prometheus’s other repeated injunctions to his spectators to view him throughout the play, this direction is aimed also at the audience, which it again connects to a much more expansive spectatorship, a whole cosmos looking on. It ensures that at the end, as at the beginning, the audience’s attention is trained upon the Titan’s fixed body.

Prometheus’s Body, Seeing and Seen Prometheus is not, however, simply the object of the audience’s viewing: he is himself a viewer. Over and over again we have noted his extraordinary immobility, in contrast to the moving bodies (especially those of the chorus and Io) around him. An important effect of this fixity is that, from the moment he is pinioned to the rock, Prometheus continuously looks straight at the

94.  Griffith 1983: 278 on PV 1085–86. 95.  On the question of whether the chorus leaves before, during, or after Prometheus’s final speech, see especially Griffith 1977: 113–14, 144; Griffith 1983: 277; Taplin 1977: 273–75; Conacher 1980: 187–88; Lloyd-Jones 2003: 65–66.

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audience.96 The evidence of vase painting may suggest that this was an especially memorable aspect of both this play and the opening scene of Prometheus Unbound. For whereas earlier images of Prometheus’s punishment on Attic vases tend to show the moment of his rescue rather than the torture itself, frontal depictions of his shackled body became more popular from the midfifth century onward, and in the fourth century in South Italian vase painting.97 We need not propose any direct line of influence, but rather note that for the viewers of such pots, as for the audiences of Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and other plays that dealt with the same myth, the tortured Titan’s frontality became an important part of his iconography and identity. He became known for his frontal stare, which could be experienced through the medium of pottery as well as through theater. We have seen how this tragedy plays with theater’s limits of representation in terms of revolving around the dustheatos sight of a body in pain and, in the final scene, drawing attention to the potential difficulties of its own performance through an insistence on its visibility. Prometheus’s relentless frontality pushes these limits in how it positions the audience in relation to the virtual world of the play. We will return to this effect in the next chapter, with regard to frontal depictions in two fifth-century Attic vase paintings connected to theater: Pandora on a calyx-krater in London and an aulos player on a calyxkrater in Naples.98 Always meeting his audience’s gaze and repeatedly calling

96.  Cf. Rehm 2002: “Aeschylus introduces a protagonist who spends most of the play watching those who watch him. He is the other characters’ audience and ours, just as we are his, a process of mutual observation that runs through the play” (163). 97.  Williams 2008. The best-known example is an Apulian calyx-krater attributed to the Branca Painter in Berlin (Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 1969.9): see Taplin 2007: 80–82. Williams extends the chronological range of this series back to around 440 BCE, arguing that the shackled feet on a fragment of an Attic red-figure stamnos, found at Naukratis and now in the Ashmolean Museum, must belong to Prometheus (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum G725, BAPD 12801). An Attic black-figure neck amphora in Florence (Museo Archeologico Etrusco 76359, BAPD 310028), dated to 575–525 BCE, shows a huge male figure, depicted frontally, seemingly fixed in place with raised, bent arms; two female figures, depicted in profile and much smaller in stature, appear to support him. This has sometimes been understood as an image of Prometheus with two Oceanids, though Atlas may be more likely: see Kunze-Götte 1973: 86–90; Korshak 1977: 66; De Griño and Olmos 1986: 8; Mommsen 2009. On the different trends in representing Prometheus in Greek art, see Viccei 2012–2013. 98.  London, British Museum 1856.1213.1, BAPD 206955; Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale 205239, BAPD 9034185.

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attention to its presence, Prometheus does not just fix its attention on his own body but blurs the boundary between viewer and viewed. He situates each audience member both as another spectator within his expansive theater of suffering and as the object of his own stare. In this respect, Prometheus as himself a spectator challenges his own position as an object of representation. Guy Hedreen has argued that frontality in Greek vase painting disrupts or exceeds the representational frame by reaching beyond the limits of what is represented and thus by “[drawing] us imaginatively into the world of the depicted figure(s).”99 Despite the differences between the two media, this approach to pottery provides a productive way for us to understand how destabilizing Prometheus’s continuously en face position onstage can be, especially in a drama that insistently aligns the experience of its chorus with that of its spectators. At the same time, like the play’s focus on his bodily pain, by reaching out beyond the play’s representational frame and toward the world of the audience, his frontality “inserts . . . [an] intrusive actuality into the field of dramatic representation.”100

pleasure in pain Dominic Johnson describes how Ron Athey’s work “epitomizes the attempt to incite pain in the experience of vision.”101 This chapter has shown how both Oedipus the King and, in particular, Prometheus Bound make such an attempt by means of the entire body, destabilizing vision as a primary sense of reception even as the protagonists explicitly draw everyone’s visual attention. In the same discussion of mimesis in the Poetics with which I began this book, Aristotle seems to talk specifically of “pain in the experience of vision,” stating that, “of the things we see (horōmen) with pain, we enjoy seeing (theōrountes) 99.  Hedreen 2017: 177, drawing in particular from Wollheim’s discussion of how a picture’s internal spectator can achieve for the external spectator “a distinctive access to [its] content” (1987: 129). Frontisi-Ducroux 1995 (especially 199–224) in particular emphasizes the effect of the frontal face as a form of address to the viewer, but theorizes that it acts as a mirror, rather than, as Hedreen convincingly shows, pointing to something outside the frame of representation. See also Mack 2002 on how the Gorgoneion’s frontality sets up “the opposition of the ‘petrifying’ gaze of Medusa and the objectifying gaze of the viewer” (592), and in doing so renders unstable the latter’s subject position. 100.  Garner 1994: 44. 101.  Johnson 2012: 69.

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those images that are especially accurate, such as the forms of the most obscene wild beasts and corpses” (ἃ γὰρ αὐτὰ λυπηρῶς ὁρῶμεν, τούτων τὰς εἰκόνας τὰς μάλιστα ἠκριβωμένας χαίρομεν θεωροῦντες, οἷον θηρίων τε μορφὰς τῶν ἀτιμοτάτων καὶ νεκρῶν, 1448b10–12). He appears to claim here that it is the process of learning “this is that,” seeing as theōrein rather than just horan, facilitated by the “accuracy” of the representation, that renders such an experience pleasurable.102 By focusing in this passage entirely on the visual, however, he elides our somatic response to painful images—a response that later in the same treatise he mentions in terms of phrikē or shuddering, and a response that can facilitate the materialization of the represented object.103 For, as this chapter has shown, in Oedipus the King and Prometheus Bound, the potential gap between “this” and “that” in the communication of extreme pain is mediated by the visceral reactions that Oedipus, Prometheus, and Io urge upon their audiences. Even as both plays highlight the ability of language to visualize what appears unseeable, they also, paradoxically, insist upon moving beyond the verbal as a means of representation by engaging the bodies of their internal and external spectators. By turning at the end of this chapter to Prometheus’s frontality, we have also seen how the representation of pain in Prometheus Bound in particular brings to the fore, to return to Garner’s opening quote, “the body’s representational volatility.” This is closely tied to the aesthetic enjoyment afforded by both plays—the pleasure induced by the spectacle of pain, pleasure not simply from a cognitive process of identification but from a bodily engagement.104 In Euripides’s Hecuba and Cyclops, as we saw, the audience’s emotional response to the mutilation of Polyphemus and Polymestor involves a degree of distance. 102.  On Aristotle’s conception of “proper” tragic pleasure as cognitive, see especially Halliwell 1987: 62–81, 2002: 177–206; Heath 2001. As Destrée 2013 points out, the frequent references in the Poetics to pleasure in relation to pity and fear (especially 1453b10–13) suggest that the “proper” pleasure involved in seeing tragedy is not, in fact, just cognitive; it also lies, he suggests, in the ability of spectators to “experience their emotions in a safe environment” (21). See also Ford 2002: 266–70 against the idea that Aristotle is arguing for “learning” as tragedy’s primary pleasure. 103.  Cf. Worman 2020: Aristotle does not seem “very interested in, or attach any aesthetic notions to, the bodies on the tragic stage, except insofar as these contribute to the pleasures afforded by mimesis and plotting” (12). 104.  Cf. Worman 2020, drawing from both Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982) and Sara Ahmed’s work on disgust (2004: 86–88), on the “shuddering attention” (14) to bodies in tragedy, especially in terms of proximity and touching (especially 10–15, 27–91).

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In neither play do characters dwell on the act of seeing these bodies, nor do they urge a sympathetic response; like the satyrs issuing directions to Odysseus offstage, we might wish vicariously to inflict violence ourselves on the Cyclops but are removed from the act itself. In contrast, Prometheus’s suffering body and, to a lesser degree, the bodies of Oedipus and Io, repeatedly seem to exceed the “virtual space” of their representation by involving the bodies of those around them, inviting the audience to share, like their internal spectators, in their pain.105 Such an invitation to respond bodily is enticing; as the chorus of Oedipus the King in particular makes clear, the desire to see is closely bound up with the shuddering such viewing can produce. We find in these two tragedies extreme examples of what Mario Telò has recently called tragedy’s “anticathartic aesthetics”: pleasurable pain from which the audience, at least for the duration of these two plays, never finds release.106 Both Oedipus the King and Prometheus Bound, as we have seen, repeatedly encourage spectatorship while suggesting not just its difficulty but even its negation. Oedipus is “terrible to see”; Prometheus and Io are dustheatos. It is precisely in the prefix dus- that our perverse pleasure in this visual experience lies: the enjoyment of bodies that are not straightforwardly seen but instead are deeply felt, to the point of being (almost) unbearable; the enjoyment of bodies that destabilize the bounds of representation itself.

105.  Garner 1994: 44 takes the term “virtual space” from Langer 1953: 69–103. 106.  Telò 2020a.

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chapter 4

Pots And Plays

This book began with the theater audience, stage, and actor depicted on an Attic chous (figure 1).1 In the introduction, I used its interrogation of the act of viewing—the visual exchange between the spectators and actor, the various possibilities it presents for an audience’s engagement with a performance—as an analogy for the project of the book as a whole. The first three chapters then analyzed how the plays themselves explore that act, with a particular focus on the productive flexibility and instability involved in theater’s “play of actuality.” Now I turn back to pottery, as another archive that can offer residues of the visual experience of classical Athenian theater. Keeping in mind the various aspects of this experience explored in the previous chapters, I consider more directly how Attic vase painting and theater, pots and plays, may be in dialogue, in an attempt to provide a new way of moving between these two media. To do so, I focus in this chapter primarily on three fifth-century Attic pots: a column-krater in Basel, from the early 400s, with an image of a singing and dancing chorus; a calyx-krater in London, attributed to the Niobid Painter, from the mid-400s, with a depiction of Pandora and various forms of performance; and a calyx-krater in Naples, from the third quarter of the fifth century, which shows an aulete flanked by two figures in bird costume.2 As we have 1.  Athens, National Archaeological Museum 518, BAPD 216566. 2.  Basel, Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung BS415, BAPD 260; London, British Museum 1856.1213.1, BAPD 206955; Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale 205239, BAPD 9034185.

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already seen, these are by no means the only fifth-century vessels that may be linked to the theater, though the Basel and Naples kraters, along with the Pronomos Vase, which I discuss more briefly, are some of the best known.3 I do not offer here an exhaustive account of all such pottery, as Taplin does in Pots and Plays for South Italian vase painting related to tragedy, nor do I assume a distinct category of pots engaged with theater in the first place.4 Instead, I restrict my discussion primarily to these three pots in order to explore in detail their points of contact with Attic theater’s particular visualities.5 The most obvious connection is Dionysus. All three pots engage with the Dionysiac sphere by virtue of their sympotic function and also, especially in the case of the Basel chorus krater and London Pandora krater, their iconography. This is also a further point of contact between the theater and the chous with the scene of spectatorship, since it was a jug for wine, and such vessels were typically used in drinking competitions at the Anthesteria, a festival for Dionysus. The god’s role in the visual experience of classical Greek theater has largely been latent thus far in this book, save for a brief discussion of Euripides’s Bacchae in chapter 2; there we noted, with regard to the representational potential of Pentheus’s mask’s, how “[e]verything and everyone is, by the end, Dionysus.”6 As we now look outward from my readings of individual plays, these pots remind us of his presence in both contexts, and of the close connection between seeing theatrical bodies, objects, and space assume different forms and witnessing the epiphanic potential of this most shapeshifting god.7 It is in within the sphere of Dionysus that these vases display their own engagement in a play between actuality and virtuality, which will be this 3.  Pronomos Vase: Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale 81673, BAPD 217500. 4.  Taplin 2007. Likewise I am not attempting the sort of catalogue that Trendall and Webster 1971 provide. See the introduction for further discussion of my approach in relation especially to Taplin’s. 5.  The book’s culturally specific focus on fifth-century Athens also accounts for the omission from my discussion here of South Italian vase painting, even though this can sometimes be related to Attic drama: on images of theater in western Greek art, see especially Taplin 1993, 2007; Green 2012. 6.  Mueller 2016b: 70. 7.  On Dionysus’s distinctive epiphanic quality, see especially Otto 1965; Henrichs 1993. On the connection between Dionysian epiphany and theater, see, e.g., Bierl 1991: 181–86; Bierl 2012; Segal 1997: 223–42. The Homeric Hymn to Dionysus is an especially powerful account of the god’s multiform epiphanies: on this see especially Platt 2011: 67–68.

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chapter’s focus.8 As we saw in the introduction, already in late archaic vase painting we find slippages between the presentational and representational, such as in the images of elaborately costumed choruses.9 As we shall see in the first section of this chapter, some fifth-century vases, most famously the Pronomos Vase, engage in such play somewhat differently—and directly in relation to theater—by showing actors or chorus members immediately before or after a performance, in various stages of costuming. Like the Tarporley Painter’s krater that I discussed in chapter 2, they explore the relationship between an actor, his theatrical prosthetics, and the role he plays. The Basel chorus krater, London Pandora krater, and Naples birds krater instead show apparently “mid-performance” scenes that, like some of the older paintings of costumed choruses, combine things represented with an emphasis on the act of representation. This combination facilitates a degree of representational flexibility for the bodies and objects depicted on them. It also urges on the viewer various forms of bodily engagement that are often specifically related to the symposium, for which such vessels were at least notionally designed. Even as the scenes depicted on these vases derive at least as much from the painters’ imagination as from any specific historical reality, then, we can detect in them a discursive connection with the phenomenologies of theater as explored in the previous chapters. This leads me to underscore explicitly two things that I am not doing here. First, as for the vase paintings that I discussed in the introduction, I am not claiming that the images shown on these vessels are to be understood as snapshots of actual productions, giving us an audience’s view of a particular moment in a particular performance.10 On the contrary, some of the appeal 8.  My focus on such play in relation to the phenomenology of classical theater distinguishes my approach from older discussions of the mix of theatrical realism and mythical fantasy shown on some Attic vases: see, e.g., Beazley 1955: 313; Green 1991, especially 34–35; Csapo 1997, 2010a: 1–82; Krumeich 2004; Wyles 2011: 8. Cf. Pickard-Cambridge 1988: 187 on the effect of “melting” between how actors appear on and off-stage; also Wiles 2007: 15. Also cf. Steinhart 2004’s concept of the “Bildbruch” in representations of mimetic performance on archaic Greek vases. 9.  See also Weiss 2021a. 10.  See Taplin 2007: 22–26 for a review of the “philodramatist” approach (i.e., assuming a close relationship between a painting and a play) as opposed to the “iconocentric” position, which emphasizes the internal language of vase painting over its reference to particular performances. See also Squire 2009: 122–39 on the misleading notion of “illustration” as a model for the relationship between image and text in Graeco-Roman antiquity.

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of such pottery, both in Athens and in Italy, where the majority of the pots discussed here were found, presumably was a result of the flexibility of their potential references, such that multiple users could enjoy them.11 We can actually find in their generic reach another parallel with the visual experience of classical theater: for as the “intertheatricality” of comedy, tragedy, satyr play, and dithyramb stretches across all four genres,12 with an audience seeing the material elements of one type of performance with and against others (as, for example, we saw in chapter 2 in the case of Tereus in Birds), so these vases do not merely show a tragic or comic scene, but have a broader field of choral reference that includes both dithyramb and, in particular, satyr play and the satyric imaginary. These vases’ flexibility in terms of the performances they can suggest allows the viewer to “see theater” by interpreting them through his own cultural repertoire. He need not have experienced one specific performance to become immersed in the ones that they represent.13 Second, I am not concerned with precisely reconstructing the actual responses of these vases’ viewers. As in previous chapters I considered how the plays themselves urge particular responses and forms of involvement on their spectators, so here I will talk about the vases’ potential impact and the visual strategies that work to achieve it. In an article on the affective capacity of the gorgoneion in Greek vase painting, Rainer Mack distinguishes “between affect as a set of claims made by an image and affect as a realized experience of an image . . . between address (how an image engages its viewer) and reception (how a viewer in fact receives an image).”14 When I consider these vases’ engagement with their viewer, I mean, as Mack puts it, “the would-be viewer.”15 Of course the images on them would mean different things to different people in different contexts, from a symposium in Athens to a burial in Italy. But Athenian painters explored the dynamics of theater according to their own repertoires of performance, so when I consider how these objects address their

11.  Cf. Osborne 2008 on how painters were interested “in giving scenes to which the viewer has to write his or her own caption” (415). 12.  On the “intertheatricality” of classical Greek drama, see especially Mueller 2016a. 13.  I use male pronouns for these vessels’ primary intended users, but do not thereby mean to preclude the possibility of female viewers or users as well. 14.  Mack 2002: 574. 15.  Mack 2002: 576.

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would-be viewers and the sorts of responses that they invite, I do so with primarily Athenian cultural practices in mind.16

actor, mask, costume Most surviving vase paintings from fifth-century Athens that explicitly refer to tragic theater show what Taplin calls “offstage” scenes, which highlight the prosthetics, especially masks, whereby a performer assumes a dramatic role.17 In this way, as we already noted, such images produce their own particular type of interrogation of the visual experience of theater. On a pelike (wine jar) in Boston, for example, dated to about 430 BCE and attributed to the Phiale Painter, we see two chorusmen, both wearing chitons (figure 10). The one on the right is still unmasked and puts on the boots that seem to have become a typical part of tragic costume in this period. The chorusman on the left already wears boots and a female mask; perhaps, given the style of headband, he is playing a maenad.18 S/he carries a large piece of fabric in one hand and raises the other up in the air while leaning forward, as if exhorting the other chorus member, but also giving a sense of some of the choreographed movement they are both about to perform. Between them lies a mask, identical to the one already being worn by the chorusman on the left. It lies directly beneath the fabric he is holding, which is presumably part of a costume (perhaps another chiton), so that together, positioned in the center of the scene, they showcase the technologies whereby an actor becomes a character.19 Thus we see three 16.  In this I follow Osborne 2018, who uses the example of the Pronomos Vase (found in a grave in Ruvo) to argue that “Athenian potters and painters in general did not feel the need to create new iconographies in order to satisfy these specific [Italian] markets” (46); see also Osborne 2004. On the much-debated question of how far the designs on Attic vases were aimed at foreign markets, especially Etruria, see, e.g., Marconi 2004; Avramidou 2006; Lynch 2009; Bundrick 2015; Langridge-Noti 2016. At least two of the three pots on which my discussion here centers are from Italy: the London Pandora krater was found in Altamura; the provenance of the Naples birds krater was almost certainly Italy, to which it was returned by the Getty Museum in 2007; the provenance of the Basel chorus krater is unknown. 17.  Taplin 1993: 7; Taplin 2007: 30 and passim. 18.  Maenads often (though by no means exclusively) wear the mitra headband on fifthcentury Attic vases: see below. On this figure on the pelike as a maenad see Frontisi-Ducroux 1997: 85; Wiles 2007: 25; Wyles 2011: 14. 19.  Cf. Wellenbach 2015: 86 on the mask’s position symbolizing “its mediating role in the transition from performer to character.”

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figure 10. Attic red-figure pelike attributed to the Phiale Painter, ca. 430 BCE, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 98.883. BAPD 214224. Photograph © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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figure 11. Attic red-figure bell-krater, ca. 475–425 BCE. Ferrara, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Ferrara 20299. BAPD 5039. Photograph © akg-images / André Held.

different stages of prosthetic construction: the bare mask and costume themselves; a chorus member on his way to assuming a role as he puts his costume on; and one who already inhabits a role, appearing as both a maenad or other female character and as a masked performer.20 We find a similar scheme on an older Attic red-figure bell-krater from the mid-400s in Ferrara (figure 11). There a young actor holds a frontal-facing mask, which is positioned at the scene’s center, directly above the dancing, booted foot of a chorus member, who is fully masked and costumed as a maenad, complete with a fawnskin over the chiton.21 These vase paintings, then, explore the relationship between the performer’s body and the masks and costumes that facilitate his assumption of a role. In effect, they examine theater’s “play of actuality” by showing the creation of the 20.  Cf. Junker 2010: 142: this figure “is already fully dressed, with the result that he has neutralized, so to speak, his role as a—male—actor and can no longer be distinguished from a ‘normal’ woman.” Cf. Wiles 2007: 25–26. 21.  See Frontisi-Ducroux 1997: 87 on the opposition between the frontal-facing mask that is carried and the one in profile that is worn.

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conditions for virtuality—the conditions whereby an audience can see this body as that character. The best known visual exploration of this sort, on a much bigger scale than the two vessels just mentioned, is the Pronomos Vase in Naples (figure 12). On one side of this volute-krater, dated to around 400 BCE, is a depiction of a victorious tragic troupe, some of its members labeled, following the performance of a tetralogy: elaborately costumed actors; chorusmen dressed as satyrs; poet, chorēgos, and aulete (Pronomos). These figures surround Dionysus, in whose honor they have performed, along with a woman who is probably Ariadne and a small, winged figure labeled Himeros (“Desire”). The actors and all but one of the chorus members hold their masks, interacting with them in different ways. At the far left, for example, a chorus member looks at his mask as if it is a mirror reflection, while the chorus member next to him holds his mask down so that it touches the head of a fellow performer beneath, replicating his left-looking profile.22 The one chorus member who is not holding a mask is wearing it instead; marked off from the others by appearing between the poet and Pronomos, he is dancing to the aulete’s music. While his satyr-shorts and the name (Nikoleos) written next to him remind us that he is a human performer, in other respects he appears to be a satyr.23 Thus seen as both satyr and human performer, fully inhabiting his role with movement as well as mask, this figure (Nikoleos) appears on a different plane from the rest of the troupe. He is closely connected to Dionysus, who is just above him: one hand reaches toward the foot of the god’s couch; from his head blooms a vine that joins him to the top of the god’s thyrsus. At the same time, in contrast to the feet of the standing and sitting figures around him, his left foot crosses into the maeander border beneath, as if breaking out of the frame and leaping into the viewer’s own world.24 Dionysus and Ariadne

22.  See Frontisi-Ducroux 1997: 81–84, 93–94 on how the various positions of the masks in this scene represent “les diverse relations qui peuvent s’établir, sur le plan graphique, entre le vrai visage et l’accessoire scénique, les deux faces de ce prosopon collectif qui caractérise le choeur” (82). 23.  Cf. Csapo 2010a: “[he] dances like a satyr and for all appearances becomes one” (20). Wiles 2007: 29 argues that his mask is “melted” to become a satyr face. See also Seidensticker 2010 on this figure’s movement in relation to other depictions of dancing satyrs in classical Attic vase painting. On the question of whether the chorus members’ names on the vase refer to actual members of a victorious tragic troupe or signify a generic chorus, see especially Osborne 2010. 24.  For further ways in which the Pronomos Vase combines theatrical artifice and mythical fantasy, see especially Csapo 2010a: 19–21. He dwells on the depiction of the actors

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figure 12. Attic red-figure volute-krater (side A), ca. 400 BCE. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli 81673. BAPD 217500. Photograph © Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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already suggest the god’s presence in the theater; this performer reminds the viewer that it is in part through dancing, masked, and costumed bodies like his that Dionysus becomes manifest. Such play between different degrees of actuality and virtuality continues across the rest of the vase. While the chorus members are given a mix of standard Athenian names and rare ones (such as Nikoleos), one of the actors is given his character name (Heracles), Dionysus and Himeros are both labeled as themselves, while other figures are left unnamed. This combination, as Robin Osborne shows, is a “[prompt] to viewers to concern themselves with levels of reality, or rather a further insistence that in the theatre there can be no stable reality.”25 The unnamed woman sharing the couch with Dionysus and Ariadne is most likely Tragoedia, the personification of tragedy itself; but as a woman wearing female tragic costume and holding a female mask, she also invites—and complicates—the same sort of reflection on the relationship between performer and mask that many of the surrounding male performers do. Himeros, who faces her, suggests the erotic desire that may be at play not just within a drama but also in terms of an audience’s own embodied response.26 Dionysus and Ariadne themselves, in addition to indicating the god’s presence, also indicate some of the Dionysian world that could be represented within a drama (whether one of the tragedies or the satyr play concluding the tetralogy).27 Such a world is depicted more fully on side B (figure 13), where Dionysus, Ariadne, and Himeros are surrounded by “real” satyrs and maenads. The close connection between the two scenes is emphasized by the contact made between the “real” and theatrical satyrs beneath one of the krater’s handles: a satyr on side B stretches out a wine cup toward a chorus member, who holds a mask that matches the satyr’s face.28

in the scene on side A, who “are, as real individuals, insignificant, but as mythical characters, fully present” (21; cf. Frontisi-Ducroux 1997: 94). 25.  Osborne 2010: 153. 26.  Cf. Osborne 2010: “we might well take Himeros . . . as at a different ontological level again, more a stage direction than a character either appearing on-stage or being referred to by chorus or characters” (154). 27.  Osborne 2010: 154. 28.  Cf. Wiles 2007: “the ancient viewer, passing his eyes around the circuit of the vase, in fact encountered no dividing line at the point where the mimetic world yields to the divine world depicted on the reverse of the vase” (32).

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figure 13. Attic red-figure volute-krater (side B), ca. 400 BCE. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli 81673. BAPD 217500. Photograph © Alinari Archives / Art Resource, NY.

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the basel chorus krater The Pronomos Vase, then, produced at the end of the fifth century, shows elaborate play between the virtual world of a drama and the actual bodies, costumes, and masks that represent it, and between such play and the sphere of Dionysus. The god’s sphere also, of course, constitutes a powerful connection between the theatrical domain as it is explored on the krater itself and the sympotic context for which it was theoretically designed—that is, between the visual representation and the viewer’s own physical situation. On a pot produced some 100 years earlier, we find somewhat comparable play, but with far less overt reference to theatrical prosthetics in relation to an actor’s body and the role he assumes. This is the Basel chorus krater, an unusual Attic red-figure column-krater painted in the “mannerist” style and dating from between 500 and 490 BCE—and, along with the Pronomos Vase, reproduced in virtually every discussion of theatrical iconography in Athens. On one side of this krater, three pairs of men face a smaller, bearded male figure on the far left (figure 14). The latter appears above a rectangular structure, adorned with branches and fillets, atop three steps; this could be either an altar or a tomb. His mouth is open; to the right, as if issuing from it, is a nonsense inscription, the letters φε( )σεο. ̣ The six men facing him all raise their arms, bend their legs, and tilt their bodies back. Their coordinated poses indicate that they are dancing in a chorus. Another nonsense inscription, a line of vowels (αοοι(ο), now almost indecipherable) that extends beneath the arms of the first pair, suggests that they are also singing, communicating their sound in visual form.29 They are dressed as soldiers, with chitoniskoi beneath elaborately decorated corselets; the tassels hanging from these corselets indicate that they are made of woven fabric rather than metal.30 In place of helmets they wear diadems, which feature a geometric decoration similar to that on the corselets and also on the fillets that cover the tomb-like structure to the left. While there is some variation between their outfits, the men’s faces and hair are identical; the open mouths and pronounced chin lines, extending all 29.  The two other inscriptions on the krater are kalos tags: one on the altar, interrupted by the foot of the foremost dancer; the other on side B on the krater’s neck. 30.  Wyles 2011: 7. These chitoniskoi resemble those worn by two choreuts shown approaching Dionysus on an Attic red-figure hydria (water jar) in St. Petersburg from ca. 490–480 BCE (State Hermitage Museum 627, BAPD 206338).

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figure 14. Attic red-figure column-krater (side A), ca. 500–490 BCE. Basel, Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig BS415. BAPD 260. Photograph © Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig.

the way up to their ears, suggest that they are wearing masks with wig-hair attached.31 On the three outermost legs—that is, on the left legs of the three dancers who appear closest to us—there are lines at the ankles, perhaps suggesting the body-tights that were (or at least became) typical of tragic costume.32 There is not, however, any sign of similar lines at the wrists. Unlike the vases discussed above, then, the Basel chorus krater shows a mid-performance scene: we do not see here actors putting on costumes or 31.  Csapo 2010a: 7; he also notes the unnatural hair-line placement of the diadems and the unusual marking out of each strand of hair. 32.  Contra the suggestion by Krumeich 2004: 159 that the lines represent anklets.

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masks or holding them after a performance, but instead a costumed chorus in the midst of singing and dancing. J. R. Green has discussed its choral scene as a rare exception to the general rule that the figures in vase paintings of tragedy are typically depicted as the actual characters of myth.33 There are numerous depictions of satyric chorusmen in performance who are obviously wearing costumes and masks and are typically shown with auletes, though, since such costumed choreia was a common aspect of satyric iconography, in general these scenes cannot always straightforwardly be linked to theater.34 The scenes of comic actors that appear later in the fifth century show them clearly in costume; likewise the figurines of comic actors that start to be produced at the very end of the century.35 There is, however, only a small handful of fifth-century vase paintings that show what appear to be tragic performers qua performers.36 In relation to these, the composition of the scene on the Basel krater is unique. It resembles more closely instead the depictions of costumed choruses in late sixth and early fifth-century vase painting that I mentioned above and in the introduction, since these typically show four to six choreuts facing an aulete.37 We also find a somewhat similar composition on a couple of later Attic red-figure vases showing costumed satyr choruses in an apparently theatrical context. On a kalpis (water jar) in Boston from around 470–460 BCE are six members of a satyr chorus singing and dancing in a line with parts of a piece of furniture before an aulete and another stationary figure who may represent the chorēgos (figure 15). On a hydria in the Fujita collection in Würzburg from the same period are five members of a satyr 33.  Green 1991, especially 34–39. See also Green 2007. Later depictions of tragic scenes in South Italian vase painting tend to include features that reveal their tragic origins (such as elaborate costumes, particular backgrounds, and anonymous witness figures), but they are primarily presented as mythical scenes: Csapo 1997: 34–35; Taplin 2007: 37–41 (his “index of signals”) and passim. 34.  On depictions of “stage” satyrs, see especially Green 1991: 44–49; Green 1994: 38–46; Krumeich, Pechstein, and Seidensticker 1999: 41–73; Froning 2002: 82–89; Junker 2010: 132–36; Seidensticker 2010. 35.  On these see more below. 36.  Corinth, Archaeological Museum T620, T1144, BAPD 206565; a bell-krater fragment in Kiev, Museum of the Academy of Sciences (no inv.; see especially Braund and Hall 2014); possibly also Berlin, Antikensammlung 3223, BAPD 206777 (see Green 1991: 33–34). On tragic choral images of this type, see especially Green 1991: 33–40; Csapo 2010a: 5–12. 37.  On connections between these older choral scenes and the one on the Basel krater, see especially Wellenbach 2015.

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figure 15. Attic red-figure kalpis attributed to the Leningrad Painter, ca. 480–460 BCE. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 03.788. BAPD 206566. Photograph © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

chorus, costumed as elderly satyrs though with no sign of their perizōmata and tails, sitting in identical poses facing the sphinx, who is shown perched on a rock at the far left (figure 16).38 Such similarities suggest that we should approach the unusual choral scene on the Basel krater in terms of a more generically capacious iconographic tradition for representing choruses involved in dramatic play, rather than group it together with the few other Attic vase paintings that appear to show specifically tragic performance.

38.  Fourth-century choregic reliefs can also show a similar composition: Green 1991: 24; Csapo 2010a: 12–19; Csapo 2010b.

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figure 16. Attic red-figure hydria, ca. 500–450 BCE. Würzburg, Fujita Collection, Martin von Wagner Museum ZA20. BAPD 7239. Photograph by C. Kiefer © Martin von Wagner Museum der Universität Würzburg.

Such a mid-performance choral scene, even as it highlights some of theater’s technologies, can also generate a degree of representational flexibility that produces its own play between actuality and virtuality. This is nicely demonstrated on the Fujita hydria, where we see both markers of theater (above all the satyrs’ elaborate costumes) and a seemingly “real” sphinx. The apparent absence of the satyrs’ perizōmata and tails invites speculation regarding the extent to which a satyr can look or behave unsatyrlike, reminiscent of the questions raised by the appearance and movements of the chorus in Aeschylus’s Theoroi, which we discussed in chapter 2.39 On the Basel chorus krater, we can see the six men facing left as a hoplite phalanx; we can also see them as a chorus of soldiers or even, given their lack of beards, ephebes. At the same time, details like the chin-lines, marks on some of the ankles, and diadems, as well as the inscriptions functioning as visual symbols of song, encourage us to see them as a chorus in a dramatic production. The very ambiguity of their outfits, 39.  On this scene on the hydria and its connection to satyr play see especially Krumeich, Pechstein, and Seidensticker 1999: 191–96.

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which seem to oscillate between costume and armor, and between different costuming possibilities, facilitates such double or layered viewing. Do they wear corselets or merely sleeveless tops?40 Do the lines at the ankles indicate body-tights, despite the lack of corresponding lines at the wrists, or might they imply footwear instead, despite the fact that the men’s feet are clearly bare?41 Should we imagine that all the choreuts are thus outfitted when such marks are discernible on only three of their twelve legs? Some of these uncertainties must result from our own ignorance rather than the painter’s original design. Nevertheless, in allowing for multiple interpretations on the viewer’s part, the image can present a mix of actual and virtual, or presentational and representational, that encourages us to see both the world of a drama and that of a theatrical production (or multiple theatrical productions) at the same time. In this respect the scene is resonant of the visual experience of theater itself. However we identify the bearded figure on the left, he too connects the scene to the phenomenology of theater. One possible interpretation is that he is a solo performer within a tragic performance. His open mouth may suggest a mask,42 though we cannot be sure, since damage to the krater means that we cannot see any chin line. The letters by his mouth suggest that he is issuing a command or response to the chorus; given the musical nature of its performance, their exchange gives the impression of antiphonal song, which is typically shared between a chorus and actor. The scene has often been seen as a ghost-raising like that in Aeschylus’s Persians; under this reading the figure would appear to be an actor appearing from a tomb as a ghost, summoned by the chorus’s song and dance like Darius is in that play, which postdates the krater by two decades.43 He could also call to mind a ghost who, like Agamemnon in Libation Bearers, does not actually appear onstage but is virtually materialized through the power of the song and dance that summon him. Just as the audience of a ghost-raising—or potential ghost-raising—scene in Attic theater is likely to understand it against moments in other plays where ghosts

40.  Csapo 2010a: 7; Wyles 2011: 7. 41.  Wyles 2011: 7–8. As Wyles reminds us, we should not assume that parts of tragic costume that later become defining features of the genre (especially the boots) were already fixed by the early fifth century. 42.  Froning 2002: 72. 43.  Taplin 1997: 70n2 suggests Aeschylus’s Psychopompoi as another possibility. As its name suggests, this lost play included a scene in which Odysseus’s men summoned the dead Teiresias.

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appear, the viewer of this scene can understand it according to his own experience of theater and so see it as a mix of possible scenes at once.44 Viewed in relation to a broad theatrical repertoire, the rectangular object itself could also be a tomb or altar, for though Greek tragedies often feature a tomb as a stage property, they just as frequently require an altar. Even within a single trilogy, as in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the same structure could represent either object.45 Another possible interpretation, however, is that the male figure is the god Dionysus himself. Understood in this way, he can span both the virtual world of a drama and the “actual” context of a performance, in a comparable way to the otherwise very different depiction of the god on the Pronomos Vase. The letters by his and the first choreut’s mouths suggest an exchange within a dramatic performance itself; at the same time, they can suggest a more general sense of communication between the chorus and the god for whom it performs. Perhaps, instead of ghost-raising, we should see this as Dionysus responding to the epiphanic power of their performance, either in a play or more generally within the context of his festival and theater—and also of the symposium at which the krater was designed to be seen and used.46 The figure could instead be a statue of Dionysus, somewhat similar to the cult-images on the so-called Lenaea vases, where he appears as a mask atop a column, often dressed with clothing, surrounded by female worshippers (usually identified as maenads), who are dancing and/or drinking.47 One of the Lenaea vases offers an

44.  On tragic ghosts see Bardel 1999, 2005; Cioffi 2021. Other examples, in addition to Darius, are Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Polydorus in Euripides’s Hecuba, and Achilles in Sophocles’s Polyxena (fr. 523 TrGF). In Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, it is in part such a repertoire that causes the long kommos scene to generate so much suspense, since an audience member familiar with such tragedies would know that Agamemnon’s ghost could in fact appear in response to the powerful appeals of Orestes, Electra and the chorus. 45.  Cf. Froning 2002: 73 (“beide Deutungen [tomb or altar] sind sachlich gesehen möglich”). On the much-debated issue of the presence, location, and usability of an altar in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, see especially Rehm 1988, 2002: 41 (arguing in particular against the assumptions in Wiles 1997). On the use of the same structure to represent either a tomb or an altar, see especially Arnott 1962: 58–59; Taplin 1977: 117. On the use of the orchestral altar in Eumenides (previously a tomb in Libation Bearers), see Rehm 1988: 290–301. 46.  On choreia and epiphany see Weiss 2018a: 179–90 and passim. 47.  On the “Lenaea vases” see especially Peirce 1998. On this figure as a statue of Dionysus, see Simon 1969: 273–76; Froning 1971: 23–25. Another much earlier possible comparandum in terms of Dionysus as a statue is Munich, Antikensammlungen 1871, BAPD 330512, a blackfigure lekythos that shows three men kneeling, in identical postures, before a column with a

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figure 17. Attic red-figure kylix attributed to Makron, signed by Hieron, ca. 490 BCE, Berlin, Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin F2290. BAPD 204730. Photograph by Johannes Laurentius © bpk / Antikensammlung, SMB.

especially nice example of how painters could play with the overlapping ways in which Dionysus could seem present: on the outside of an early to mid-fifthcentury kylix painted by Makron (figure 17), he appears both as a pole-statue adorned with a mask and as a miniature figure painted on an altar nearby; on the inside he is shown as himself, coming into view as the user drinks his wine. Instead of including various different representations of Dionysus within the one scene, the Basel krater may evoke his multiple forms of presence—as image, character, and the god himself—within the one figure, who marks the performance as one for Dionysus within his sanctuary. If the bearded figure on the Basel krater is Dionysus, then, he can encourage the viewer to experience his presence in multiple ways. Even if he is not, Dionysus is still present within the image, as the god for whom such a performance would be made and through the double vertical bands of ivy framing the scene; he is also experienced through the wine the krater is designed to hold. In this respect, the krater evokes, through its use and the visuality of its own particular medium, the phenomenology of theater. For an audience head, possibly of Dionysus, atop it: on various interpretations of this figure (including the possibility that the men are a chorus), see especially Simon 1969: 274–76; Green 1991: 35–37. On this lekythos in relation to the “Lenaea vases” see Hamilton 2003: 51n15.

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figure 18. Attic red-figure column-krater (side B), ca. 500–490 BCE. Basel, Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig BS415. BAPD 260. Photograph © Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig.

could see Dionysus as a character within a play and manifested through other bodies, like in the Bacchae or Aeschylus’s Theoroi. It could see him in sculptural form, as, for example, the statue carried into the sanctuary from the city’s northwestern outskirts at the opening of the Dionysia, but also, virtually, within a play, as when the chorus of Ion describes his appearance on the reliefs adorning Apollo’s temple at Delphi (216–18).48 As we noted in chapter 2, the mask that Agave carries in Bacchae could itself recall cult statues of the god.49 More generally, of course, Dionysus is part of theater’s visuality as a divine presence permeating the entire festival in his honor. Dionysus’s presence also continues on the other side of krater (figure 18), through two satyrs concerned, as satyrs typically are, with the drinking of wine. Both satyrs, an older bearded one on the left and a younger one on

48.  In later periods, when theater buildings across the Greek world began to be built entirely of stone, Dionysus could be present in the sculptural decoration visible behind the orchēstra: see especially Sturgeon 1977, focusing on the second-century CE theater reliefs at the Theater of Dionysus in Athens. On this scene in Euripides’s Ion, see the introduction to this book. 49.  Mueller 2016b: 70.

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the right, are dancing around a comically large volute-krater; the young satyr holds a skyphos (cup) immediately above it, as if about to take a drink. The framing of this scene is identical to the choral one, encouraging a sense of connection between them: bands of ivy on the sides, a simple line at the bottom, and a striped motif along the krater’s shoulder.50 More ivy hangs between the volute-krater’s handles, emphasizing the nature of its contents, as well as that of the material object itself. The satyrs’ revelry invites the user within a sympotic context to link their activity to his own; in this respect they participate in a long tradition of painters asking the viewer to “spot the difference” between the fun of the satyr and the fun of the reveler, symposiast, or athlete.51 Further connections between the two scenes suggest further analogies for the visual experience of theater. The outer dancer closest to the bearded figure has a small black figure painted on the shoulder of his costume that appears to be a satyr. This detail acts as a point of contact with the satyrs on side B and could perhaps also hint at the chorus’s own playing of satyrs within the one tragic tetralogy.52 There is also some continuity in how both the right hand of the older satyr on side B and those of the chorus members on side A push through their respective frames. This could suggest some contact between the performers and the satyric figures that they would themselves represent. We saw how, on the Pronomos Vase, the satyrs and gods on one side suggest, at least in part, the virtual world of a play performed by the tragic troupe on the other. On the much older Basel krater, suggestions of the virtual in the theatrical scene on side A are offset but also complemented by the scene of “real” satyrs on side B, even as this does not itself bear any connection to a performance of satyric drama.53 The krater thus shifts between “actual” and virtual, theatrical artifice and the satyric imaginary, across its two sides. The satyric scene on side B of the Basel krater also reminds us that, regardless of the particular genre of performance an image may represent, for the viewer it can be associated with other genres as well. While the choral scene

50.  The palmette motif on the neck on side A of the krater is not continued on side B. 51.  Osborne 2007, 2008: 398–99. 52.  Wiles 2007 suggests that the satyr figure painted on the costume “is running away from the tomb towards his colleagues on the reverse” (18). 53.  In general, most images of satyrs should be understood as part of the broader satyric imaginary rather than in connection with any specific performance: see especially Lissarrague 1990a, 2013: 21–37.

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on side A is most commonly understood to be a representation of tragic choreia, when it was originally published it was thought to represent a dithyrambic performance instead—an interpretation that is complicated by the suggestion of costumes and masks.54 The other choral scenes in Attic vase painting to which this scene appears most similar in terms of its composition themselves span several genres. As we saw in the introduction, the older images of elaborately costumed choruses have been linked to a variety of possible types of performance; the most likely may be Dionysian kōmoi, though we should be wary of assuming a direct correlation with actual practice. The Boston kalpis and Fujita hydria mentioned above show satyr choruses in apparently theatrical scenes. For a viewer familiar with these other iconographic trends, the scene on side A of the Basel krater, even as primarily a depiction of tragedy, could therefore evoke a range of choral genres.55 It might also evoke such a range for the viewer through his own diverse choral and theatrical repertoire. This sort of response to the vase painting— recalling other performances while looking at this particular representation— could be embodied as much as cognitive, involving somatic memory of his own presence at performances of theater or dithyramb; within an Athenian context at least, such memory could include his own participation in choral performances of various genres within the theater itself.56 The suggestion of song in the painting could also provoke an embodied response by not just reflecting but prompting the singing common at symposia—perhaps some lyrics from a tragedy, or from a satyr play, comedy, or dithyramb; also scolia, monodies, and non-dramatic choral song.57 54.  Schmidt 1967. On this possibility see Wellenbach 2015 with further references. 55.  Perhaps it could even evoke the pyrrhichē (an armed dance), which some have also seen in this scene: see Steinhart 2004: 20 (he suggests, rather improbably, that it is a pyrrhic scene of mourning Amazons); Hart 2010: 29. 56.  On local choruses in performances of tragedy beyond Attica, see especially Taplin 2012: 240–41. On this sort of response to depictions of choral performance in Attic vase painting, see Weiss 2021a. See also Stähli 2010: 57–65 on the relationship between depictions of moving bodies in the visual arts and a viewer’s own repertoire of bodily movement and representation (“körperliches Bewegungs- und Darstellungsrepertoire” [63]). 57.  Cf. Lissarrague 1990b: “by making the guests’ song visible, the painters integrate the acoustic into the visual and celebrate the verbal and musical content of the symposium” (135). See also Slater 1999: 157 on how lyric inscriptions on vases could work as prompts to the viewer to start singing, and Neer 2002 on vases as “participants in a sympotic field” (26).

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In these respects too, then, there are points of contact between the visuality of the vase and that of theater. As we have seen repeatedly in this book, a spectator’s viewing of a drama is frequently shaped by his experience of other performances and representations of performance, including those produced within the same space at the same festival. This experience, like the act of viewing itself, would in large part be an embodied one—the experience of sitting in the theater, which plays like Acharnians and Oedipus at Colonus (discussed in chapter 1) exploit so extensively, and of not just seeing but hearing and, as Prometheus Bound (discussed in chapter 3) so powerfully demonstrates, feeling the performances produced there. As for many viewers of the krater, it may also be embodied in terms of a spectator’s own prior practice as a choral performer, which, as I have argued elsewhere, can in turn prompt a sense of somatic involvement in a drama, especially its music.58 I do not mean to suggest the Basel krater produces the same responses in its viewers as theater itself could in its audience. There are, however, crossovers in the repertoires they engage to produce, in their respective contexts, particular forms of bodily response.

the london pandora krater There is another mid-performance scene of tragedy—and satyric play as well as, perhaps, satyr play—on a vase that is generally overlooked in discussions of images of fifth-century Attic theater, largely on account of the subtlety with which it suggests a tragic production.59 This is a red-figure calyx-krater in London, attributed to the Niobid Painter and dated to 460–450 BCE (figures 19 and 20). This object explores the relationship between performers and characters, the act and objects of representation, through complex play across multiple registers. Like the Basel chorus krater, it cues the viewer to understand and respond to the figures painted on its surface against his own cultural repertoire and in the context of his own (potential) physical situation—that

58.  Weiss 2018a: 236–38. In this I draw heavily on Olsen 2017, who demonstrates that ancient Greek poets and philosophers frequently describe the experience of choral spectatorship in terms of kinesthetic empathy or contagion (this term is taken from dance studies: see especially Foster 2008, 2010; Sklar 2008). See also Meineck 2018: 120–53 on the impact of dance and other movement in tragedy on its spectators in terms of “motor-action-orientated kinesthetic empathy and sensory-mirroring” (120). 59.  An important exception is Green and Handley 1995: 19–20.

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figure 19. Attic red-figure calyx-krater attributed to the Niobid Painter (side A), ca. 460– 450 BCE. London, British Museum 1856.1213.1, BAPD 206955. Photograph © The British Museum, London.

is, the symposium. Unlike the older krater, however, we see on this one an emphasis on spectatorship, including both a model for the viewer as audience and a figure who turns the viewer himself into an object viewed. The decoration of this krater consists of two friezes stretching around both sides. On side A, in the upper frieze, a chorus of women dances on either side of an aulete (figure 19). At the far left stands a bearded male, holding a staff, between two of the chorus members. Beneath this scene, in the lower frieze, is a group of satyrs at play. On the left, an elderly satyr leans on a staff with one hand and holds a ball with the other; next to him is a boy satyr with a

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figure 20. Attic red-figure calyx-krater attributed to the Niobid Painter (side B), ca. 460– 450 BCE. London, British Museum 1856.1213.1, BAPD 206955. Photograph © The British Museum, London.

hoop; on the right are two pairs of satyrs riding on each other’s shoulders, with the “riders” stretching out their arms as if to catch the ball. In the middle, beneath the aulete, stands a maenad holding a thyrsus. On side B, in the middle of the upper frieze, stands Pandora in a frontal pose, surrounded by gods (figure 20). At one end is Iris, at the other Hera, both looking on the scene between them; the other figures are grouped in pairs, with Zeus and Poseidon facing each other, Athena holding out a wreath to Pandora, and Ares turning round to look at Hermes, who runs off to the right. Immediately below Pandora in the lower frieze stands an aulete, flanked by four dancing goatish satyric

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performers. They wear perizōmata with phalluses and goat (not horse) tails attached; on their satyr heads (masks?) are Pan-like horns.60 This scene is separated from the satyr scene on side A by a double palmette design under the handles; there is no such divide between the upper frieze scenes on the two sides. Between the upper and lower friezes and below the lower one on both sides are identical bands with a pattern of maeanders and squares with crosses. The upper frieze on side A presents us with an ambiguous mix of theatricality and non-dramatic choreia. The musician’s pointed shoes and longsleeved chiton, decorated with dots and a black stripe down the side, conform to the standard iconography for the costume of theater auletes.61 At first glance, however, the figures dancing around him appear to be actual women. Scholars accordingly vary between identifying them as a chorus of women or girls, and, given the presence of the aulete, as a possible theatrical chorus.62 Without any sign of masks or the sleeves or leggings that we would expect a tragic chorus to wear, these figures could be viewed as the characters represented in a drama—one of the many female choruses that appear in tragedy. And yet a closer look reveals that they could (also) be a theatrical chorus. Though their Doric chitons vary in style and decoration, their faces, headdresses, and hair (shown just poking out by the side of the ears) are identical. This detail would not necessarily be noteworthy were it not for the considerable variety in facial characteristics shown among the figures in the upper frieze on side B. But while the uniform faces of the chorus on side A may give only the slightest hint of masks, their footwear more strongly indicates tragic attire. Most of the other figures on the vase quite clearly have bare feet (or, in the case of the satyrs on side B, hooves), and the artist has taken pains to mark their toes and ankles. All the chorus members, in contrast, appear to be wearing pointed soft boots with turned-up toes; the line of the boot rising to knee height is marked through the chiton of the figure on the far right. These boots match those worn by the figures in the dressing scenes shown on both the Boston pelike and the Ferrara bell-krater that I mentioned above. Such vases, dating from a thirty-year window in the mid-fifth century, suggest that in this

60.  On links between satyrs, goats, and Pan, see Lissarrague 2013: 114–21. On perizōmata, see chapter 2 in this book. 61.  See especially Miller 1997: 162–63; Braund and Hall 2014: 3. 62.  See, e.g., Beazley 1955: 317; Green and Handley 1995: 20; Steinhart 2004: 27; Osborne 2007: 403–5; Hart 2010: 96.

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period tragic performers wore flat-soled soft boots (kothornoi), not the thicksoled ones that later became emblematic of the genre.63 Though kothornoi could be worn in daily life, in a choral scene, especially one including other markers of theatricality, they more likely signify a dramatic performance. There are also some suggestions here that this chorus could be maenadic. The clearest is the presence of an actual maenad in the center of the satyr scene in the lower frieze: in dialogue with the dancers above her, she acts as one part that the chorus members could play. A less obvious sign is the style of the headdress that each of the chorus members wears: this appears to be wrapped around the heads like a turban, thus resembling a mitra.64 In late archaic and classical Attic vase-painting such headbands are often worn by sex workers in sympotic scenes or maenads in Dionysiac ones, and in general tend to be associated with the East and exoticism.65 The Boston pelike and the Ferrara bell-krater show comparable headgear attached to the chorusmen’s masks;66 in both cases, the costume is usually seen as maenadic.67 The inclusion of the mitra on the London Pandora krater could similarly hint at the maenadic or at least exotic character that the chorus may be assuming. At the same time, it could add an erotic appeal to this chorus (also suggested by the presence of Pandora on the other side, as I will discuss more below), perhaps reminding the viewer of similarly adorned female entertainers who might dance to the sound of the aulos at a symposium, the very space for which the krater was designed.68 More so than the chorus on the Basel krater, then, this one is flexible in terms of its potential identity. The subtlety of its nods to tragic theater (the boots are not obviously marked; the faces, hair, and headdresses are uniform but there are no pronounced chin lines to indicate masks; the headdresses only hint at maenadism without making it explicit) allows us to see this as a group of actual women and as a theatrical chorus at the same time. As the latter, too, its character is flexible, allowing various identifications: perhaps a chorus of maenads, but perhaps instead simply one of maidens or women. The styling 63.  Wyles 2011: 13–14, 24–26. See also n. 41 above. 64.  It is more usually identified as a sakkos, which was a one-piece cap. 65.  On the uses and associations of the mitra (and other headbands) see especially Kurtz and Boardman 1986: 50–56; Lee 2015: 159–60. 66.  On the Boston pelike the mitra is open-ended with the hair poking through. 67.  See above. 68.  On the representation of female sympotic dancers (orchēstrides) in archaic and classical Greek art and literature, see especially Olsen 2021a: 152–59.

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of the chorus invites the viewer to see the scene through multiple potential lenses: he can understand its contents through iconographic traditions within vase painting; he can also understand them through his experience not only with the technologies of theater but also with other forms of performance and their representation within the Greek musical imaginary, from partheneia to maenadic revelry to female sympotic dancing. At the same time, the placement of this scene immediately above that of the satyrs and the connection between the two via the figure of the maenad—as a potential character for the chorus members to play, but also through her alignment with the aulete, whose dotted costume is matched by her panther skin—may remind the viewer of the satyr play that was part of every tragic tetralogy, even while this particular satyric group itself includes no suggestion of theatricality.69 Like the chorus members, the older man included in the choral scene on the upper frieze of side A both gestures toward theater and can simultaneously appear as a character represented within a drama (figure 21). With his wreathed head, staff, himation, and immobile, profile pose, he is distinct from the chorus and may, like the stationary figure on the Boston kalpis mentioned above, represent the chorēgos or perhaps the chorus trainer. Whatever his precise identity (he may be meant to suggest both chorēgos and trainer),70 he is primarily a spectator here: facing left and forming a pair with an especially dynamic chorus member, he is focused on her and invites us, too, to watch her as he does, joining him as an internal spectator. And yet, despite his different clothing and pose, by being positioned between two chorus members he also appears to be integrated within the chorus, or at least we are prompted to look at him and them together.71 His pairing with the chorus member on the left in particular encourages us to see an uncostumed, immobile citizen male against a fully costumed, dancing performer-cum-female-character. Like the figures on the Boston pelike, together they reveal the degree of transformation that can occur in a theatrical context—perhaps a transformation that such a man may himself 69.  On the remarkable nature of this familial satyric scene, see Osborne 2018: 202–4. 70.  Wilson 2000: 257–58 discusses these possible identifications and suggests that such ambiguity is deliberate here: “there may well have been a certain fluidity, even for an ancient viewer, in the supposed identity of this figure—a fluidity that . . . khoregoi may have chosen to exploit—between a more engaged, active khoros-leader or trainer and the rôle of khoregic financier” (258). 71.  See Wilson 2000 on the position of the chorēgos in vase painting “on the border between the civic and dramatic worlds” (257).

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figure 21. Attic red-figure calyx-krater attributed to the Niobid Painter (sides A-B), ca. 460–450 BCE. London, British Museum 1856.1213.1, BAPD 206955. Photograph © The British Museum, London.

have undergone in his youth as a choral performer. At the same time, by his position he appears within the same fluid actual-virtual plane as the chorus members, and so we can see him not just as a spectator, but as a character within the performance, having an exchange with the chorus or single chorus-leader. The continuity between the choral scene on side A and the Pandora scene on side B adds to this blend of theatrical representation and the virtual world being represented. As noted above, there is no divide between the two sides of the upper frieze as there is in the lower one: Iris stands next to the chorus member on the far left, Hera next to the chorus member on the far right. There are also some similarities between the upper friezes that unite them, beyond

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the basic layout consisting of one central figure flanked by four on the left and three on the right. First is a similarity in clothing: the two chorus members to the right of the aulete on side A are dressed in chitons that are very similar in style and patterning to those of Athena and Pandora. As in the case of the chorus members’ faces and headdresses, this similarity is all the more noticeable as a result of the otherwise great variety of clothing across both sides. Second is a similarity in bodily pose. Though Hermes forms a pair with Ares, he also does so with Hera to the right, in whose direction he is hastening (also figure 21). In both this pair and that of the chorus member and man next to them, the righthand figure holds a staff and looks toward the figure to the left (though Hera’s body is turned to the right). The lefthand figures in both pairs (Hermes, chorus member) look in different directions but are linked through their dynamic poses: they extend at least one arm, bend their right legs, and raise their right feet so that they balance on their toes. Hermes’s left foot is above the ground, as if he is just about to fly off; the chorus member’s left foot is just coming down to the ground, though her widespread arms may indicate a flying motion. The two sides of the pot and the worlds they represent are thus connected, so that the chorus members, who appear as both performers and the characters they could play, become associated with figures of myth, who, like the satyrs on side A, appear without any overt signs of theatricality.72 Such contact across registers affects our viewing of the Pandora scene as well, which the suggestions of theater on side A encourage us to associate with theater, even though the scene in itself exists outside it. This effect also occurs across the vertical axis, since beneath the gods and Pandora are the Pan-satyrs, who are characterized to some degree as theatrical performers by their perizōmata with phalluses and tails attached; three of the perizōmata are accentuated by being black. They are also dancing to the accompaniment of an aulete, although this aulete is not obviously one of the theater, since he is dressed in an ordinary himation. The satyr-performer closest to the aulete on the right and the one on the far left both look up at Pandora, inviting the

72.  Steinhart 2004 argues that the chorus on side A is to be understood as the one representing the mythical Pandora scene on side B (“der Mythos und die ihn Vorführenden in ein Bild gefügt” [27]). Somewhat more plausibly, Beazley 1955 sees the scenes as more indirectly linked through theater: “It may be that the artist . . . has made a selection of the possible topics provided by a tetralogy: has chosen on the one hand the subject of the satyr-play Pandora, and on the other the female chorus from one of the tragedies” (317).

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viewer to see a connection between the two friezes. They appear to be referring to Pandora in their choreia, but alternatively we could understand them as watching her, as if they are an audience witnessing the process of her adornment in a theatrical performance. It may then be noteworthy that the spectator/chorēgos on side A looks not just toward the choreut to the left but also toward Pandora herself. The Pandora scene on the upper frieze of side B has in fact sometimes been understood as having an exact counterpart in a satyr play. One suggestion has been Sophocles’s lost Pandora or Hammerers, though a more likely candidate for a representation of this play is the scene depicted on the neck of an Attic volute-krater from the mid-fifth century in Ferrara.73 And yet, as in the case of the Basel krater, there is no need to hypothesize a specific dramatic referent here, nor does the user of this krater need to know of such a play to appreciate the theatrical potential of this mythical scene. It is primarily the images below and around the other side of the upper frieze that lend the suggestion that such a scene could be staged. The satyr scene beneath Pandora and the gods is not, however, obviously theatrical. Like the choral scene on the upper frieze on side A, it combines markers of theatricality (the perizōmata) with effects that suggest these are as much satyrs as they are human performers. As in many vase images of theater satyrs, their satyr heads are not obviously masks. We may be reminded in this respect of Nikoleos, the dancing satyr performer on the Pronomos Vase, whose face matches those of the “real” satyrs on the other side. However, unlike Nikoleos, whose feet remind us that he is still or also a human performer, the Pan-satyrs on the Pandora krater have hooves, suggesting the represented world of satyric fantasy. It is instead the satyrs on side A of this krater who have human feet. On the one hand, then, the performers on side B correspond with the satyrs on side A; the painter is playing with different degrees of bestial transformation, blurring the divide (if there ever was one) between the performance of men and that of satyrs. On the other hand, the ambiguous mix of actuality and virtuality here also corresponds with that in the choral frieze on side A. The link between the two—the lower frieze on 73.  Ferrara, Museo Archeologico Nazionale 3031, BAPD 207095. Here an aulete and chorēgos mark the scene as theatrical, while the satyrs are “real” satyrs, without any signs of costuming. For Sophocles’s Pandora or Hammerers as a possible referent for these vases, see Simon 1982: 145–46; Shapiro 1994: 67.

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side B and the upper frieze on side A—is also suggested by the presence of an aulete in both, though only the elaborately dressed one accompanying the female chorus obviously belongs in the theater. The wreathed young man playing the aulos amid the satyrs is dressed, as we noted, in an ordinary himation, so that the scene can potentially exist beyond the theater in other contexts where men might physically respond to the instrument’s sound. The performance of a chorus in a satyr play is thus merged not only with that of “real” satyrs (or Pan-satyrs) but with, for example, the enjoyment of men at a symposium in response to aulos music there. After all, as we saw in the case of the Basel chorus krater, paintings on sympotic vessels frequently show inebriated, playful satyrs, who appear as potential counterparts to the user/viewer. Such an evocation of the context in which the krater itself could be used further links this satyric scene with the image of the chorus on side A, which likewise prompts us to wonder about potential spaces beyond the theater where women in this sort of attire might dance to auletic accompaniment. Both sides of this vase and both friezes are therefore together playing across registers with the unstable line between performers and the characters they represent. Perhaps we should not understand such play specifically in terms of theater but instead as part of an imaginative exploration into impersonation and transformation. We have already seen how this vase explores various levels of equine metamorphosis. The dressing of Pandora indicates a parallel transformation: as Osborne suggests, “ just as men who dance to the aulos effectively put on the satyr (and can be shown by an artist literally to have done so), and just as the gods’ adornments convert Pandora into an irresistible woman, so when men ride upon each other’s shoulders they convert themselves into horse-like men, and can be shown by an artist to have become satyrs.”74 But the hints of tragic and satyric costumes, as well as the aulete’s theatrical attire and the presence of the spectator/chorēgos on side A, situate this exploration in the context of theater, while connections at work across the krater’s different registers also link transformation in the theater with forms of transformation elsewhere, from the costuming of Pandora in myth to “playing the satyr” in the symposium. In its play between different degrees of transformation, we can connect the krater as a whole, not just its particular scenes, to the representational play of

74.  Osborne 2008: 405.

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theater. It may especially remind us of Aristophanes’s Birds, which, as we saw in chapter 2, in large part revolves around the different degrees to which a man—through words, but also through mask, costume, sound (especially that of the aulos), and movement—can become a bird. We can also find points of contact with the experience of theater in how the krater produces its own frames of reference for viewing theatrical bodies. It can remind its viewer of the satyric imaginary and other contexts for satyric behavior as he looks at the theatrical chorus of satyrs. While the scene showing Pandora’s costuming could evoke an actual play like Sophocles’s Hammerers/Pandora, it could also act as a mythical model for understanding the transformation of citizen men into a chorus of girls or satyrs, or even of maenads—for, as the two auletes visually correspond with each other across the two sides of the vase, so Pandora, as the central figure in the upper frieze on side B, corresponds with the maenad, the female figure in the middle of the satyr scene on side A. As we notice how two of the satyrs in the frieze beneath look up at her, aroused as all satyrs are, we see a further blending of Pandora with the maenad, the female figure who is most commonly the target of satyrs’ sexual desire in archaic and classical vase painting. Thus the maenad in turn functions as a way to understand Pandora as she might appear in a satyr play, provoking the sort of erotic response from the chorus that, in the satyric imaginary, is usually directed at maenads. At the same time, the correspondence between Pandora’s position and that of the two auletes, both the one immediately beneath her and the one in the upper frieze of side A, suggests the role of musical sound in facilitating the representation of a character (or, as we have seen in previous chapters, a space or object) in the theater—perhaps even the character of Pandora. This vase thus engages with its viewer’s own cultural repertoire, from which he draws in order to understand its complex network of images. Like the Basel chorus krater, the combined scenes on this calyx-krater are sufficiently capacious in terms of the tragic or satyric performances they evoke that they allow for multiple associations, whether for a viewer in Athens, where it was made, or in Apulia, where it ended up.75 These associations become especially powerful for a viewer accustomed not just to the mythical world of satyrs as it is represented in art but to various forms of musical performance, from theatrical 75.  On understanding the iconography of such a vase as Athenocentric despite its nonAthenian provenance, see n. 16 above.

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choreia to sympotic dancing. The krater also engages the viewer in its own productions, inviting him in as an internal audience: we can follow the spectator/chorēgos figure in contemplating the choreuts’ dynamic bodies; we can also follow both his and the satyr-performers’ sightlines in looking at the seductive Pandora, who, in turn, locks eyes with us, ensuring that she is the object of our gaze. But by seeing as these figures do, the viewer is also encouraged to become a performer himself and so to position himself within the vase’s virtual world of theatrical-mythical performance.76 At the same time, since the krater is large enough that the viewer must walk around it to connect one scene with the other across both sides and both friezes, the pot itself choreographs his movement, and in this sense too draws him within its depictions of choral performance.77 The figure of Pandora, facing outward, urges onto the viewer an especially powerful engagement with the scenes surrounding her. Her frontal pose accentuates her immobility in contrast to the dynamic gods, chorus members, and satyrs on either side and beneath her around both sides of the pot. Entirely symmetrical, with both arms by her sides and her feet pointing outward, she seems static, more a statue than a woman; as in Hesiod’s poems, here she appears as an artificial automaton.78 In this respect, the user is invited to view Pandora’s manufacture against the “real” divine figures around her, and perhaps also against the materiality of the vase itself.79 But her 76.  Cf. Osborne 2018: 221–24 on “the invitation to gaze” in classical Attic vase painting. See also below, and Squire 2016b (with further bibliography) on sight as reciprocal in the Graeco-Roman imaginary, especially as revealed in art: “to see was to enter upon a dynamic, reciprocal and mutually implicative relationship with the thing seen” (8). 77.  Cf. Olsen 2015 on the representation of choreia on the François Vase: “a viewer would . . . have to walk around the krater in order to view the frieze in its entirety, echoing, in his own body and motion, the movement of the dance and thereby implicating himself in the choral system” (121n29). Of course, in the symposium, the content of the krater could also affect the user’s body, as the drinking of wine brings him closer to the extreme inebriated behavior in which satyrs typically engage. Yet the satyrs in the lower frieze on side A, unlike those on side B of the Basel krater, are far from the symposium and instead are engaged in a surprisingly familial scene. See Osborne 2018: 199–204 on the disappearance of the satyr from sympotic scenes in the later classical period. 78.  On the use of a frontal view to depict statues in Greek vase-painting, beginning in the early classical period, see Hedreen 2001: 25–27; Hedreen 2017: 163. On the artifactual nature of Pandora in Hesiod, particularly the Theogony, see especially Wickkiser 2010. 79.  Cf. Platt 2011: 114–23 on depictions, from the mid-fifth century BCE onward and across various media, “of scenes in which a statue of a deity is pointedly juxtaposed with a ‘real’ divine presence” (114–15).

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frontal stare also means that she has an affective impact, not just on the satyrs beneath her but on the viewer, at whom she looks as he in turn looks at her. One effect of this visual confrontation, as I have noted, is to position him as an audience, along with the satyr-performers below and spectator/ chorēgos figure around to the right. It also, however, turns him into the viewed object, inviting him to consider his own capacity for transformation and his own potential participation in the array of performances that the krater as a whole can evoke.80 Despite the differences in medium, Pandora on this krater and the composition of the scenes around her provide something of an analogy for the effect of Prometheus’s relentlessly fixed stance in Prometheus Bound. As we saw in chapter 3, his immobility stands in stark contrast to the movement of bodies, especially the chorus, around him; all these other bodies, even to a certain extent Io, act as internal spectators, directing the audience’s gaze toward the Titan’s tortured body. They thus function in a comparable way to the figures around the static figure of Pandora, who, through their gaze, position her as the focal point of the scene on side B. And as Prometheus always looks out to his audience, thereby blurring the line between viewer and viewed, so Pandora too disrupts the representational frame. Where the Aeschylean play further destabilizes the bounds of representation by insistently involving the bodies of its audience, the London Pandora krater, like so many sympotic vessels, gestures out to the sympotic context of its (would-be) viewer and cues various possible bodily responses, from erotic engagement to choreographed movement. This is not a precise analogy, of course, but the parallels between these visual experiences reveal another way in which the two media of pots and plays can be productively analyzed against each other.

the naples birds krater Frontality and its potential effects on the viewer are even more marked with the object of my last case study, which brings us, finally, back to comedy and its depiction in Attic art: a red-figure calyx-krater in Naples (previously in the 80.  Cf. Hedreen 2017, drawing on Wollheim 1987: 101–86, on how frontal faces on vases can encourage the viewer to engage imaginatively in the represented world. See also Korshak 1987: 42–43; Mack 2002; Hedreen 2007. Frontisi-Ducroux 1995 (especially 199–297) is the classic account of how facial frontality in vase painting urges on the viewer a reciprocity of the gaze.

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figure 22. Attic red-figure calyx-krater (side A), ca. 425 BCE. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli 205239. BAPD 9034185. Photograph by Giorgio Albano © Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

Getty), on which we see an aulos player flanked by two performers in bird costumes (figure 22). Most images that can be linked with some certainty to comedy in fifth-century Attic vase painting, including the chous with which I began this book, appear on smaller, cheaper pottery, not designed for a sympotic audience and/or for export. Those vases, produced from the 430s BCE and into the early fourth century, generally show actors rather than choruses, and they explicitly accentuate the artifice of theater. In this they can be seen as precursors to the more numerous and generally much more elaborate depictions of comedy in South Italian vase

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painting.81 The Naples Birds krater is unusual among the majority of classical Attic vase paintings connected to comedy in several respects: in its size, sympotic function, the richness of its design, and also because the two bird figures may more likely be chorus members rather than individual actors.82 As I shall demonstrate, this object does draw attention to theater’s technologies, but it also engages, as all the vases I have discussed in this chapter do, in its own play between actuality and virtuality. The aulos player stands in a frontal pose right in the center of the scene on side A of this krater. His fingers are spread across the two pipes of the aulos; his cheeks are bulging from the circular breathing required to play them. He wears an elaborate chiton, decorated with a mixture of geometric motifs and images of chariots and animals. His body is slightly turned to the left; the right hem of the chiton rises up and his right foot appears tilted back, as if in movement. The two figures on either side of him are in ithyphallic bird costume, decorated with dots and circles. They wear wings, beaked masks with crests, and, attached to their perizōmata, tails and phalluses. Phalluses are also attached to their boots as cockspurs. Both bird performers face the aulos player and appear to be dancing in response to his music, bending their legs and raising their arms toward him. As for the other vase paintings that I have discussed in this chapter, we cannot link this scene with any particular theatrical production, despite various attempts to do so.83 It was originally thought to illustrate a moment

81.  For an overview of images of comedy in Greek art, see especially Csapo 2014. It is now generally thought that the South Italian vases show scenes from Attic comedies rather than “phylax plays”: for a review of the scholarship on this issue, see Hughes 1996: 95–96. 82.  The assumption that these are members of a chorus is based on their almost identical costumes, as well as the appearance of a similarly costumed single figure on a pelike in Atlanta (Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University 2008.4.1, BAPD 9023810), discussed below, which could represent “the unity of a chorus” (Csapo 2014: 103). As we shall see, their choral identity may not be quite so self-evident; likewise the connection to comedy, since the ithyphallic aspects of their costume are more akin to satyr play. Not counting the older vase paintings of costumed choruses as “proto-comic,” there are, I believe, just two other Attic vases that seem to show a comic chorus, both from the fourth century: Heidelberg, Ruprecht-Karls Universität B134, BAPD 4648; Athens, Benaki Museum 30890, BAPD 44577. There are also two fragmentary choregic reliefs depicting comic choruses: Agora S 1025, 1586; Agora S 2098. 83.  On the type of performance apparently represented on this krater and the various suggestions for its specific referent, see, e.g., Green 1985; Taplin 1987: 92–96; Taplin 1993: 101–4; Csapo 1993a, 1993b; Csapo 2010a: 9–12; Csapo 2014: 102–4; Revermann 2006: 217–19;

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in Aristophanes’s Birds, but now appears to predate that play by at least a decade.84 It is assumed to refer to the same performance as a pelike in Atlanta that shows, on one side, a single dancing figure dressed in an almost identical costume and, on the other, a bearded aulos player in a decorated chiton.85 Its other closest parallels are a couple of much older Attic black-figure pots from the late sixth or early fifth century that are typically grouped together with those showing elaborately costumed choruses, especially of animals or animalriders: an oinochoe in London that shows two men in bird costumes dancing to the right of an aulete, and an amphora in Berlin on which two men wearing bird masks and cloaks follow behind an aulete.86 Its iconographic similarities with those older pots complicate any attempt to reconstruct a precise contemporary referent. Moreover, if we abandon the temptation to see any of these paintings as photographic snapshots, we should anyway be cautious in assuming that the Naples krater and the more contemporary Atlanta pelike derive from a single “original” source in the first place. Finally, even if the painter of the Naples krater did base the scene on a performance he himself had seen, we cannot assume that users of the vessel in Italy would have recognized it.87 In a more general sense, however, the object of representation on the Naples krater initially seems self-evident: an aulete with two dramatic performers playing birds. Given their dance movements in response to the musician and the similarity of their costumes, the two avian figures are usually understood to be members of a chorus. Possibly, given their crests and the wattle visible beneath one of their chins, they represent roosters/cockerels. Yet the scene also holds out various questions, especially for the modern viewer, who cannot Rothwell 2006: 54; Compton-Engle 2015: 120–23. In addition to Aristophanes’s Birds, other known comedies with avian choruses are Magnes’s Birds (predating Aristophanes’s play by probably some fifty years or more), Aristophanes’s Storks (390s?), Cantharus’s Nightingales, and another Birds by the fourth-century Crates. 84.  For the earlier dating of the vase (425 BCE at the very latest), see Froning 2009: 116; Csapo 2010a: 33n34, with further references. 85.  Atlanta, Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, no. 2008.4.1, BAPD 9023810. For the assumption that they refer to the same performance, see Csapo 2010a: 9–12; Csapo 2014: 102–4; Compton-Engle 2015: 123. 86.  London, British Museum 1842.0728.787, BAPD 330555; Berlin, Antikensammlung F1830, BAPD 2698. On these pots in connection with the Naples krater, see Green 1985; Compton-Engle 2015: 117–24. 87.  On the krater’s provenance, see n. 16 above.

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easily connect it with any performance within their repertoire. For even regardless of the lack of any particular play as a clear referent, what kind of performance is this? It is assumed to be a comedy, but the erect phalluses, more typical of satyr play, complicate that identification. Could we instead see it in terms of the sort of komastic revelry that characterized the pompē at the City Dionysia, which I discussed in the introduction? Or, if the performance represented here is indeed a theatrical one, could the individuated movements on the part of the two bird figures suggest that they are actors rather than chorus members? For us, but perhaps also for some of the pot’s ancient viewers, the scene leaves various representational possibilities open. At the same time, this image involves us in the performance it represents, which, whether or not it refers to a “real world” event, is at the very least some form of dramatic play. Discussions of the Naples krater usually focus on the bird performers—what types of birds they are meant to be and, as a result, in what (type of) play they are performing. The scene’s focal point, however, is actually the aulos player, a figure supposedly outside of the birds’ virtual, avian world. Not only does he stand at the midpoint between the handles, framed by the performers on either side of him, but every part of those two figures frames and points toward him—their hands, knees, feet, and phalluses. The phalluses are part of their costumes, but their positioning nonetheless suggests that the bird-characters’ response to the aulete and his music is not just kinetic but erotic. His unusual frontal depiction means that he also draws the viewer’s attention toward his body and instrument.88 As Sheramy Bundrick notes, “his frontal face directly confronts the viewer, adding to the performative nature of the scene and the position of viewer as audience member.”89 We see the dancing, phallic bodies looking at and being erotically drawn to the aulete, but he looks at us, not them, and so encourages a similar response, as if we too can see and hear his musical performance. Like Pandora on the London krater, and also, in a different medium, like Prometheus in the Aeschylean play, the aulos player thus disrupts the representational frame, not just reaching

88.  Such frontality is unusual for a depiction of a theater aulete. Other frontal auletes in Attic vase painting tend to be either satyrs or symposiasts: see, e.g., Munich, Antikensammlungen 8732, BAPD 201659; London, British Museum 1867.5–8.1061, BAPD 212625. For more examples see Korshak 1987: plates 59–66. 89.  Bundrick 2005: 176.

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out toward the viewer’s own world but urging on him a bodily response—here a sexual response—like that of his internal spectators.90 The erotic focus on the aulete here may remind us of the nightingale scene in Aristophanes’s Birds that I discussed in chapter 2. There, Peisetaerus and Euelpides, about to become birds or at least to assume some bird features, look at and focus the audience’s attention on the aulete and on what he and his music are meant to be representing at that moment in the play. The bird-figures’ reaction to the aulete on the Naples krater may primarily be to the music that he produces as an instrumental accompanist, but their physical proximity and erotic attention suggest that he himself could also be assuming, or be imagined to assume, a dramatic role. That is, we could see him rather like the aulete in Birds playing the nightingale, whose sexual appeal Peisetaerus and Euelpides urge upon the audience. As we saw, those two characters, by focusing on the instrument, allude to the sexual act she might perform even as they remind us that this is the aulete with his skewer-pipes. The aulete on the krater, depicted at the center of the performance, with all sightlines drawn to him, and engaging us as spectators alongside the infatuated bird-figures, invites us to wonder about what parts he and his instrument could play. Even though he is clearly not a character—his human, bearded, unmasked head contrasts starkly with the elaborate masks on either side—we still think about the dramatic or fictional relationship between him and the bird characters.91 That he is unmasked leaves open what or who he might represent and how we may be led, however briefly, to visualize such a figure. At the same time, his bare face may prompt us to wonder about the humans under the bird masks next to him—the actors whom we are to see as birds. The aulos itself also assumes a representational flexibility, as the blowing of its two pipes right next to two erections can be viewed as distinctly phallic.92 The image’s eroticism thus suggests, as the nightingale scene suggests in Birds, that the aulos need not 90.  Cf. Steiner 2021: “the costumed figures’ open ‘beaks,’ bent knees and prominent erect phalloi, whose shape finds an echo in the piper’s double aulos, invite an erotic engagement on the viewer’s part” (178). 91.  Cf. Taplin 1993: 70–75 on “metatheatrical” aulos players in South Italian vase painting related to comedy. 92.  On the analogy between the aulos and the penis in Attic vase painting, typically in relation to satyrs, see especially A. Mitchell 2009: 167–69. In comedy the sexual associations of aulos playing can also be tied to the role of aulos players (male and female) at the symposium: see, e.g., Ar. Vesp. 1341–47, where Philocleon instructs the aulētris to rub his cock.

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simply be a piece of theatrical technology; its material presence, as well as the sound it produces, can simultaneously play a role within the virtual world being represented. The aulete’s clothing also brings us closer to the virtual object of the performers’ dramatic representation by encouraging us to see it as both the instrumentalist’s garb and as something more. Classical vase paintings often show theater auletes wearing elaborate costumes, most often decorated with sequin-like circles. But this chiton, with its mix of geometric motifs and images of chariots, winged horses, deer, and hares, is extraordinary. It seems to communicate more than the reality of the aulete’s appearance in the theater: it also suggests something about his tune and the song that it accompanies. On the one hand, the elaborate decorations create a visual impression of musical poikilia—that is, melodic variety and intricacy, for which the aulos was renowned.93 On the other hand, they also call to mind the sorts of animals to which the performers of choral lyric frequently assimilate themselves—in particular, birds and horses, and winged bird-horse hybrids.94 As we saw in the introduction, the choruses of Alcman’s first partheneion and Pindar’s hyporchēma invite their audiences to visualize them as such animals in quick succession. The animals depicted on the aulete’s chiton thus provide an imaginative counterpoint to the bird costumes worn by the performers on either side, reminding the viewer of the broader choral-musical imaginary amid what otherwise seems to be a highly theatrical display. Like many of the bodies, objects, and spaces discussed in the previous chapters, as well as some of those on the Basel chorus krater and the London Pandora krater, this aulete can therefore be viewed in multiple ways. He presents us with several possibilities for both the identities we might see him assume and the figures that can become materialized through his music and the choral song and dance that it accompanies. As we saw, the nightingale in Birds is only really seen as such as a result of the aulos’s sound; her appearance reminds us of how “seeing theater” is always a synesthetic experience, involving other senses in combination with that of sight. When a viewer looks at the krater, he primarily “hears” the aulete through this 93.  On the aulos and musical poikilia, see especially Csapo 2004: 226–29; Csapo and Wilson 2009; LeVen 2013; Weiss 2018a: 151–52. 94.  On the choral associations of these animals, see Weiss 2018a, especially 29–30; Steiner 2021: 115–81.

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visual image, but perhaps also through the aulos music performed in the sympotic context for which this mixing bowl was designed. We have also seen how, like the bodies I discussed in chapter 3, the aulos player’s representational potential is only fully realized through his corporeal impact on his internal and external spectators. Aulos players at a symposium were typically slaves and often also sex workers. For a viewer within that context, then, such an acoustic environment, as well as the sexually available bodies that produced it, could also shape his experience of the musician represented on the krater.95 Side B of the Naples krater (figure 23) can further expand a viewer’s understanding of this scene of performance. Here, in place of the frontal musician, is a naked young man in profile, holding, instead of an aulos, a helmet and spear. Flanking him, in place of the bird figures, are an older man and woman; their outstretched arms direct attention toward him in a rather more restrained fashion than their avian counterparts on side A. The same decorative bands along the pot’s rim and the handles’ base continue around the vessel, framing both scenes identically. These similarities in composition encourage us to view them in combination, as two apparently everyday scenes: some sort of dramatic performance, possibly comedy; a mother and father bidding farewell to a son as he goes off to war. If we see side A as representing comic theater, it is tempting to see in their combination a suggestion of the broader festival context of performances at the City Dionysia: side B could recall for an Athenian viewer the parade of young men clad in hoplite gear, war orphans raised by the city, just before the dramatic competitions began, and the special seats assigned to them within the theater. Seen in this way, the older couple could be generic figures of the city itself, sending off their “son” to fight on their behalf. The viewer is positioned as one of this pair, drawn to the spectacle of the departing youth, as the bird figures and viewer are drawn to the aulos player on the other side. Looking at the two sides of the krater can thus also remind us, as modern scholars, of some of the experiences beyond any one specific dramatic performance that could shape a fifth-century Athenian audience’s view of theater. At the same time, the long iconographic tradition of this sort of “departing warrior” scene, combined with the various difficulties involved in 95.  Steiner 2021, identifying the birds as cocks, suggests further erotic play with a sympotic context: “in keeping with the . . . pederastic dimension to the drinking party . . . the birds furnish one among the love gifts that the erastēs typically offers his beloved” (178).

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figure 23. Attic red-figure calyx-krater (side B), ca. 425 BCE. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli 205239. BAPD 9034185. Photograph by Giorgio Albano © Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

connecting side A to a specific performance, should make us wary about assuming too hastily any such references to Athenian life.96 Even without any direct connections to actual Athenian practices, however, we can see how, within the internal system of this krater, from one side to the other, bodies become different bodies, objects become different objects. Auletic sound, produced visually but also, as we saw, bodily and even acoustically, may 96.  On the departing warrior scene type in Attic vase painting, see especially Lissarrague 1990c: 35–53; Spiess 1992; Matheson 2005, 2009. This one, however, is a variation of the usual Kriegerabschied, in which the wife, not the parents, bid farewell to the warrior.

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also be flexible: on the one side theatrical, sexual, avian, equine; perhaps, traveling over to side B, it could evoke for some viewers the use of the same instrument on triremes, on which soldiers like the one depicted here would likely travel. I am not positing a straightforward relationship between the two scenes or the figures within them, but I find their complementarity a productive parallel for how, from a phenomenological perspective, representation in theater is never fixed or stable. Some of this instability or flexibility can be generated by the language of a play itself—and this is what I have inevitably relied upon for much of this book. As I have repeatedly shown, however, it is also closely tied to a performance’s materiality and an audience’s own bodied presence. A pot can produce its own sort of visual flexibility by combining, within the one image but also across sides and registers, an emphasis on the technologies of theater with an exploration of the multifaceted virtual realm that they can materialize—and by gesturing beyond that realm to other possible bodies, objects, spaces, sounds, and activities, especially those within the context of a symposium. The pots studied in this chapter, then, have enabled us to reflect back on the philological readings earlier in this book, but cannot provide straightforward support for any of them. I have shown instead how pots and plays together can be seen as parallel artistic creations in how they each exploit the capacity of their particular medium to explore the relationship between the actual and virtual realm of a performance.97 We may assume, then, that an ancient audience familiar with such exploration across different artforms may have been especially receptive to the sort of visual play that I have shown to be at work in the dramas themselves. And they may have been especially receptive within the realm of Dionysus, which is the most direct link between the theater and all these sympotic vessels. At the same time, while we should not presume that any of the vases discussed here represent any real-life performance, let alone any particular play, we can in them detect some resonances of the phenomenology of classical Greek drama: for they can, to use Tonio Hölscher’s phrase, “correspond to experiences of reality.”98 “Images,” he writes,

97.  I take some of this wording from Hölscher 2018 on the farewell scene in Euripides’s Alcestis and departure scenes in vase painting: “What we have is two parallel artistic creations, each exploiting the capacities of its particular medium.” As he argues, “both scenes must have been taken by ancient audiences and observers as representations of reality, whether from myth or from the Lebenswelt” (223). 98.  Hölscher 2018: 221.

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“have the potential of articulating elements and factors of the conceptual Lebenswelt as far as they are visually meaningful.”99 In this sense, these vase paintings articulate theater’s “play of actuality” as a fundamental aspect of this artform as it was experienced and conceptualized in the classical Greek world.

99.  Hölscher 2018: 243.

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EPILOGUE

“A carefully drawn pipe, and underneath it (handwritten in a steady, painstaking, artificial script, a script from the convent, like that found heading the notebooks of schoolboys, or on a blackboard after an object lesson), this note: ‘This is not a pipe.’ ”1 René Magritte’s La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), a painting also known as Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe), has long prompted questions about the nature of artistic representation (figure 24). Most influentially, Michel Foucault used the painting to discuss the relationship between words and images, “verbal signs and visual representations,” emphasizing how the denotative authority of Magritte’s schoolboy script, appearing as if from an “object lesson” (une leçon de choses), is rendered unstable by its negative statement.2 While Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, according to Foucault, had already ruptured the expectation on the viewer’s part that “What you see is that,” Magritte, with his verbal negation of what he has rendered visually in such literal detail, dissociates “resemblance and affirmation” entirely.3 His painting stages not just a play of word and image, however, but the instability of representation itself: the deictic statement, “This is not a pipe,” questions both what is that—the object of

1.  Foucault 2008: 15. 2.  Foucault 2008: 33. 3.  Foucault 2008: 33 (emphasis original), 34. For a useful analysis of Foucault’s argument in Ceci n’est pas une pipe in relation to his other writing on painting, see esp. Tanke 2009: 93–122; Soussloff 2017: 69–96.

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figure 24. René Magritte, La Trahison des images, 1929. Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph © 2022 Museum Associates / LACMA / C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society, New York. Licensed by Art Resource, NY.

representation—and also what is this (ceci)—the visual and verbal means of representation.4 I began the book with one visual analogy; now I end with another. In its rupturing of the relationship between “this” and “that” and its showcasing of the instability surrounding the object of representation (is this a pipe or just paint on a canvas? Is what it represents a pipe, a penis, or something else entirely?), Magritte’s painting is reminiscent of many of the plays studied here.5 It also provides a productive counterpoint to Aristotle’s account in the Poetics of visual perception in the theater. There, as we saw in the introduction, 4.  On the referential uncertainty of ceci in Ceci n’est pas une pipe, see Harris 2005. My inspiration for closing the book with Magritte’s painting comes from Platt 2007: 247–49. 5.  On the “suggestive power” of Magritte’s pipe, see esp. Schnapp 1998 (quote from 48). Faire une pipe is early to mid-twentieth-century slang for fellatio. Magritte produced a series of drawings of penis-pipes and penis-noses stuffing pipes, culminating in La lampe philosophique (1936). On the connection between this series and La Trahison des images, see Schnapp 1998: 42.

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he suggests, through an analogy with painting, that the pleasure involved in theōrein is largely a cognitive one, based on our ability to connect “this” to “that.” On the one hand, by turning to pottery in the final chapter, this book has taken inspiration from Aristotle by considering painting and theater as operating within the same spectrum of cultural visuality. On the other hand, the book has shown how the relationship between the means and object of representation in theater, even in the very tragedies on which Aristotle was basing some of his discussion, can be far more complicated than that brief but influential passage indicates. It has shown how, from the very beginnings of ancient Greek drama, playwrights and artists understood theater’s “phenomenological complexity”—its play between actual and virtual, presence and absence. Theater’s potential for representational fluidity and ambiguity provided rich aesthetic opportunities for tragedians and comedians alike, who frequently exposed and exploited the frictions, gaps, and absences between “this” and “that.” They could encourage their audiences to see both at the same time, to see the differences between them, or to see multiple possible “thats” at once or in quick succession. For a substantial portion of a play, they could prevent any identification at all of onstage spaces, bodies, and objects. They could also push theater to the limits of representation, whether through a figure like Peisetaerus in Birds, who ultimately appears to exceed any verbal description at all, or through the dustheatos sight of a body in extreme pain. In all these ways, Athenian playwrights were not simply experimenting with modes of representation but expanding on the potentialities of vision—on what it means to see. Throughout the book, a common thread regarding what and how audiences see has been that viewing is an embodied, participatory act. As I draw the book to a close, it is worth briefly dwelling further on the nature of this act. I have occasionally drawn on the work of playwrights and directors in other cultures and periods to elucidate the phenomenology of the Greek theater, from acoustic scenery and “denotational flexibility” in Shakespeare to the “gut-wrenching” impact of a twenty-first-century production of Prometheus Bound.6 I have also made frequent use of work in theater studies that itself draws on a wide range of theater practice, and in this respect have encouraged a transhistorical, transcultural approach to seeing theater in fifth-century

6.  Elam 1980: 8–9; Thaxter 2005.

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Athens. On the whole, however, I have avoided making many direct parallels for the simple reason that, even as the surviving texts and images can still act upon us, as their modern readers and viewers, the visuality of classical Greek drama is culturally specific. As we saw in chapter 1 in particular, the open-air theater produces a very particular visual experience centered on the spectator’s own physical situation, from his bodily posture to his view of the urban and natural landscape beyond. In this theatron or “seeing space,” spectators can, moreover, always see other spectators, not as a homogenous group but as many individuals exhibiting, as the two on the Attic chous with which I began the book exhibit, a range of different responses to a play. Each audience member is thus always aware of his own spectatorial position alongside those of others—an awareness that makes this sort of theater quite unlike the box sets and dark auditoriums that have been common in the western tradition since the nineteenth century. As chapter 4 reminded us through the medium of vase painting, the theater is also a religious space. It is the sphere of Dionysus, an especially transformational god, who could be experienced through the transformations of the bodies within it, both those onstage and those of the audience itself. That chapter also reminded us that many spectators in the fifth-century theater could feel physically connected to an onstage performance through their own experiences as choral performers, even, for some, within that very same space. In these respects, the visuality of classical Greek theater involved distinctive forms of immersion on the part of its audiences. I do not mean immersion in the sense of getting lost within a dramatic “illusion,” but rather as a deep engagement with a drama’s construction, such that a spectator is also a participant, as much attuned to the mechanisms of representation, in which he himself plays a crucial part, as to the virtual world that they generate. It is in terms of such immersion that we should approach the “play of actuality” as it is examined by fifth-century dramatists. By taking apart the process of theatrical representation and pushing it to its limits, they do not simply activate and extend the sort of cognitive work in which Aristotle is interested— understanding this body as that character or this prop as that thing. They also cue a type of viewing that already, by virtue of the particularities of the Greek theater itself, involves the whole body, not just its physical situatedness but its various senses and affects. The internal spectators whom we have encountered in so many plays, from Dicaeopolis in Aristophanes’s Acharnians to Pelasgus in Aeschylus’s Suppliants, offer multiple possibilities for such

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bodily engagement among the spectators in the theater—as internal spectators in vase painting, like the man on the Pandora krater whom I discussed in chapter 4, also do for their own viewers. In Prometheus Bound, which of all surviving Greek plays is the one most concerned with the act of seeing as well as the somatic responses it can entail, we also find a character who looks back at the audience, reminding it of its spectatorial role but simultaneously destabilizing the bounds of representation by raising the possibility of entry into his drama. We saw in the introduction that we can situate fifth-century Greek theater’s “play of actuality” against a long tradition across multiple media and cultural practices of generating perceptual instability by drawing attention to the actual as well as the virtual. Theater brought the opportunity for a sustained interrogation of the medium’s own production of this sort of visual experience. However paradoxical it may seem to us, such interrogation contributed to the heightened, immersive visuality that theater could provide for its ancient audiences—a type of theōrein that came to be subsidized by distributions of public funds, called theōrika, and, from the fourth century, the Theoric Fund.7 The phenomenology of classical Greek theater will always evade any attempt at precise reconstruction. Nevertheless, analysis of the plays themselves reveals that a fundamental aspect of this experience was the connection between the world represented onstage and the role of the spectator in producing it.

7.  On theōrika in the fifth century BCE and their relation to the later Theoric Fund, see esp. Roselli 2009.

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General Index

actor, passim; bodily presence of, 6, 10–11, 126–27; character and, 6, 8, 9, 10–11, 78–121, 166–71, 189–94; mask and, 60, 81–93, 106, 137, 166–73, 201–2; proxemics and, 47, 49–76; as spectator, 3–4, 113–14, 144, 157–59, 211. See also chorus Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 47; Archeresses, 12; Eumenides, 11–12, 45, 47, 65, 129–30; interest in visuality, passim, esp. 38–39; Libation Bearers, 51, 178; Myrmidons, 117–18; Persians, 178; Prometheus Bound, 53–54, 128–30, 138–61, 184, 196, 200, 209, 211; Prometheus Unbound, 158; Seven Against Thebes, 85, 128; spatial strategies in, 45–47, 51; Suppliants, 34, 39, 79–80, 85, 91–104, 113, 120–21, 210; Theoroi, 34, 79, 82–91, 95, 105, 120–21, 177, 181; Women of Aetna, 46, 47; Wool-Carders, 12 affect theory, 123–24 Ahmed, Sara, 124 Alcman fr. 1 PMGF, 16–17, 80, 202 Anthesteria, 163 Aristophanes: Acharnians, 9, 47, 56–65, 75, 184, 210; Assemblywomen, 56–57, 64–65, 73, 75; Birds, 34, 48, 56, 67–70, 79–80, 91, 96, 104–21, 145, 165, 194, 198–99, 202, 209; Clouds, 53–54, 67; Frogs, 44; Peace, 44, 54–56; spatial strategies in, 44, 47–48, 53–70; Wasps, 46; Women at the Thesmophoria, 38, 56–57, 62–63, 65–67, 73, 75 Aristotle: on audience response, 125–26, 137–38, 151, 159–60; on mimesis, 6–9, 17, 159–60, 208–9; on pain, 125, 149,

159–60; Parts of Animals, 8; Poetics, 6–9, 14–15, 29, 114, 125, 137–38, 147, 151, 159–60, 208–9; Politics, 126, 139; Rhetoric, 7, 125, 149; on sympatheia, 126, 139; on theōrein, 7–8, 14–15, 17, 147, 208–9; on visual arts, 6–9, 29 assembly (Athenian), 56–65. See also Pnyx Athens: Peisistratus and, 19, 119; as performance context, 14–15, 32–33, 43, 48, 55–65, 203–4; processions in, 18–22. See also assembly; City Dionysia; Pnyx; Theater of Dionysus Athey, Ron, 130, 159 audience, passim; bodily involvement of, 31–32, 123–61, 184, 195–96, 200–201, 203, 205, 209–21; cultural repertoire of, 85, 88, 107, 165, 178–79, 183–84, 193–95, 205, 210; as viewed object, 3–4, 113–14, 157–59, 211. See also spectatorship aulos: birdsong and, 72–73, 93–94, 96, 108–13, 202–3; eroticism of, 201–3; in vase painting, 5, 22, 169, 175, 186–89, 191–94, 197– 205. See also sound Bakola, Emmanuela, 47–48 Barker, Andrew, 110 bestiality, 11, 130–33, 143, 151–54, 192 birds: actors as, 104–21, 197–205; aulete as, 109–13; chorus as, 17, 22, 108, 198–202; in vase painting, 22, 26, 196–205. See also aulos; chorus blinding, 131–38 Bowen, Anthony, 98

239

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240     General Index Bowie, Angus, 57 Brecht, Bertolt, 31, 32 Bundrick, Sheramy, 200 Cairns, Douglas, 137 Carlson, Marvin, 107–8 chorus: as animals, 17–18, 22–27, 108, 198– 202; as spectator, 82–91, 136–38, 146–57, 191–92; in vase painting, 3, 22–27, 37, 166– 71, 173–78, 182–83, 185–96, 198–200; viewing of, 11–12, 17–18, 82–91, 91–104, 108, 146–47. See also actor; dance Cinesias, 114–15 City Dionysia, 21–22, 24, 33, 200–203 Claycomb, Ryan, 68, 76 Cleon, 56–57, 65 comedy: as genre, 33–35; space in, 44–48; vase painting and, 1–4, 24, 165, 175, 183, 196–205 costume: of aulete, 187, 189, 193, 198, 202; character and, 85–99, 102–4, 107–8, 117–18, 139, 166–73, 188–89; comic, 1, 200; foreignness and, 92–93; reuse of, 107; satyric, 87–89, 176–77, 191–92; tragic, 92–93, 166, 178, 187–88; in vase painting, 88–91, 164, 166–78, 187–93, 198–200, 202; viewing of, 86–89, 95–99, 102–4, 108, 114–18 Cratinus, 44, 47–48 Csapo, Eric, 20 dance: choral, 17–18, 73, 86–87, 89, 91–92, 140, 150, 157, 166–69, 173–75, 178, 182–83, 185–95, 199–202; of satyrs, 86–87, 89, 91, 175, 181– 82, 186–87, 191–95; solo, 151–52, 157; at symposium, 188–89, 193, 196. See also chorus deus ex machina, 38 Didymus, 115 Dionysus: cult statues of, 20, 81, 179–81; as god of theater, 15, 38, 81, 86–66, 210; processions for, 20–22; in vase painting, 20–21, 163, 169–73, 179–82, 205 dithyramb: dolphins and, 25; vase painting and, 23–25, 165, 183 Dobrov, Gregory, 105 Dunbar, Nan, 108, 115 Dunn, Francis, 41, 74–75 Elam, Keir, 68, 78 Elsner, Jaś, 14 epiphany, 18–22, 28, 38; Dionysus and, 20–21, 81, 163, 179–81 ekkyklēma, 45, 131

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Euphronius, 26 Euripides: Andromache, 46–47; in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, 57; in Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria, 62–63, 66–67; Bacchae, 38, 51, 80–81, 88, 163, 181; Cyclops, 132–33, 138, 151, 160–61; Hecuba, 131–33, 143, 160–61; Helen, 38; Heracles, 130; Hypsipyle, 55; Ion, 30, 38, 47, 53, 181; Iphigenia in Aulis, 46; Orestes, 65; spatial strategies in, 45–47, 51; Telephus, 57, 63; Trojan Women, 55–56; visual arts in, 30, 38 fear: Aristotle on, 125; circulation of, 124–25, 147–48, 154, 157. See also phrikē Foley, Helene, 81 Foucault, Michel, 207–8 frontality: in theater, 157–59; in vase painting, 158–59, 168, 195–96, 198, 200–201 Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise, 129 Garner, Jr., Stanton, 6, 8–9, 33, 49–50, 122, 126–28, 159, 160 Gellius, Aulus, 10 ghosts, 178–79 Goldhill, Simon, 14, 39 Gorgias, 29, 125 Green, J. R., 175 Grethlein, Jonas, 15 Griffith, Mark, 156–57 Hedreen, Guy, 159 Henderson, Jeffrey, 114 Herodotus, 14, 19–20 Hesiod, 195 Hölscher, Tonio, 205–6 Holzapfel, Amy, 31 Ibsen, Henrik, 6 intercorporeality, 123–30, 133–61; ancient theories of, 125–26. See also audience Issacharoff, Michael, 49 Johnson, Dominic, 130, 159 Kandinsky, Wassily, 207 kithara, 4–5 Klee, Paul, 207 Lada-Richards, Ismene, 9 lament: birdsong and, 72, 94; foreignness and, 92; performance of, 10–11, 92, 150, 152

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General Index      241 Lämmle, Rebecca, 86–87 language, passim; limits of, 118–22, 137, 160, 207–8 Larocco, Steve, 123 Lenaea vases, 179–80 Life of Aeschylus, 12 Lowe, Nick, 44 Mack, Rainer, 165 Makron, 180 Magritte, René, 207–8 masks: aulos and, 111; character and, 81–93, 106, 137, 166–73, 201–2; in vase painting, 88–91, 166–79, 187–88, 198–99, 201. See also actor; costume McAuley, Gay, 49–50 mechanē, 54, 139 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6 metaphor: Aristotle on, 7; deixis and, 16–17; literalization of, 104–5 Mueller, Melissa, 81, 107–8, 124 music: representation and, 50, 73, 94, 108–11, 113, 194, 202; satyrs and, 89, 194–95; at symposium, 112, 183, 189, 203; vase painting and, 4–5, 22, 169, 173, 175, 177–78, 187, 191–94, 197–203. See also aulos; dance; kithara; lament; sound Neer, Richard, 26, 28 Niobid Painter, 184–96 Nooter, Sarah, 151–52 Olsen, Sarah, 152 Osborne, Robin, 171, 193 Oyelowo, David, 126–27, 132 pain: pity and, 125, 148–50; pleasure and, 159–61; representation of, 122–61 Pauson, 6 Peisistratus, 19, 119 Peponi, Anastasia-Erasmia, 17–18 phenomenology, passim; in film studies, 124; in theater studies, 6, 12–13, 49, 124 Phiale Painter, 166 Pheidias, 28, 112 phrikē, 125, 137–38, 150–51, 153, 160. See also Aristotle; fear; pleasure Pindar fr. 107 M, 18, 80, 202 Pirandello, Luigi, 68 pity: Aristotle on, 125, 137; pain and, 148–50; sight and, 144, 147–50

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Plato: Ion, 125; on mimesis, 7; Republic, 7 Platt, Verity, 15, 18–19, 28 pleasure: mimesis and, 7, 209; pain and, 138, 152, 154, 159–61; violence and, 133 Pnyx, 56–65. See also assembly Polygnotus, 6 Pronomos Vase, 88, 163, 169–73, 179, 182, 192 props: agency of, 100–102; language and, 108–9, 112–13, 114–17; space and, 48, 51, 63, 74; unusual, 139–40, 146; viewing of, passim, esp. 8, 10–11, 78–121 Rancière, Jacques, 31 representation, passim; limits of, 122–28, 137, 140–61, 196, 200, 209 ritual, visuality and, 14, 19, 39, 63, 75 Romer, Frank, 110 satyr play: as genre, 33–35, 132–33; vase painting and, 165, 169–72, 175–76, 182–83, 189, 191–95. See also satyrs satyrs: masks and, 82–91, 169–72; in processions, 20–22, 24; in vase painting, 20–21, 88, 169–72, 175–76, 180–83, 185–96. See also satyr play Scarry, Elaine, 122–24 semiotics, in theater studies, 12, 49–50, 78 Shakespeare: Henry V, 48; King Lear, 6; Titus Andronicus, 126; The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 78–79, 120 Shepherd, Simon, 124 Sicily: performance context of, 32, 46; vase painting in, 37 skēnē, 5, 42, 45, 52–54, 57, 61, 67, 84, 106, 139– 40, 149 Slater, Niall, 70, 107 Sobchack, Vivian, 124 Solon, 14 Sophocles: Ajax, 45, 52–53, 128–29; Electra, 7–8, 10–11, 41–43, 70, 76, 80, 93; interest in visuality, passim, esp. 38–39; Oedipus at Colonus, 34, 47, 48, 70–76, 80, 184; Oedipus the King, 133–38, 152, 154, 159–61; Pandora (or Hammerers), 192, 194; Philoctetes, 51, 123, 129; spatial strategies in, 47–48, 51–53, 70–76; Tereus, 107 Sotades Painter, 25–27 sound: representation and, 50, 64, 67, 70–72, 80, 96, 108, 113, 129, 137–38, 143–44, 150–52, 156, 194, 202–3; vase painting and, 173, 177– 79, 183, 194, 202–3. See also aulos; music

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242     General Index space: acoustic, 50, 64, 67, 70–72, 150; constructions of, 10, 41–77, 104; in theater studies, 49–50; undefined, 65–76 spectatorship, passim; desire and, 110–12, 138, 152–54, 161, 171, 188, 194, 200–203; embodied, 31–32, 123–61, 184, 195–96, 200–201, 203, 205, 209–11; internal (or staged), 1–4, 35, 43, 51–55, 58–60, 65, 93–113, 135–36, 144–57, 189–90, 192–96, 210–11. See also audience States, Bert, 6, 48–49 Steiner, Deborah, 26–27 symposium: entertainment at, 112, 183, 188–89, 193; vase painting and, 164–65, 173, 182–83, 188–89, 193, 196, 203, 205 Taplin, Oliver, 33–34, 37, 163, 166 Tarporley Painter, 79, 88–91, 164 Telò, Mario, 124, 161 theater, passim; outdoor, 3, 48, 70, 145–46, 210; physical structure of, 5, 48–49, 52, 57–58, 63–65, 70, 72–75 Theater of Dionysus, 5, 15, 32, 48, 55–56, 59, 64, 72

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theōrein, passim; Aristotle on, 7–8, 13–15, 17, 147, 208–9 theōria, 14, 82, 146–47, 150 Theoric Fund, 211 tragedy: as genre, 33–35, 128; space in, 44–48; vase painting and, 165–96 Thucydides, 56–57 vase painting: contexts for viewing, 165–66, 173, 182–85, 193, 197, 203, 205; frontality in, 158–59, 168, 195–96, 198, 200–201; South Italian, 88–91, 158, 163, 165, 197–98; theater and, 1–5, 22–28, 36–38, 88–91, 162–206, 209; viewer engagement in, 164– 66, 169, 179–80, 182–85, 193–96, 200–205 violence: offstage, 126, 133–35; onstage, 140– 45, 155–57 Webb, Ruth, 15 Wollheim, Richard, 9, 26–27 Wyles, Rosie, 93 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 29 Zeitlin, Froma, 29–30, 47

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Index Locorum

Aeschylus Agamemnon 1–39 496 Eumenides 34 36–38 50 52–53 57

47 85n20

129–30 11 11–12 11 12

Libation Bearers 3–4

51

Myrmidons fr. 139 TrGF

118n89

Seven Against Thebes 82 978 Suppliants 2 12 17 19–22 40–48 55 58–60 70 118

85 128

101 101 101n51 100–101 92 98 93 92 92, 96, 103

121 132 154–55 156–61 159–60 180 183 185–203 234–45 245 246–50 274–76 277–90 313 334 348–50 354–55 457–58 464–67 656–57 719 720 745 756 821 825–907 836–42 888 922 Theoroi (Isthmiastai) fr. 78a.1 TrGF

92 92 92 101–2 109 85 96 94 94–96 85, 99 96–97 97 97–99 101n51 99–100 100 100 102 102–3 100n49 103 93n36 103 100n50 100n50 140n60 103 103 103

82

243

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.

244     Index Locorum fr. 78a.4–22 TrGF fr. 78a.29–35 TrGF Women of Aetna P.Oxy. 2257 [Aeschylus] Prometheus Bound 2 6 19–20 20–21 32 53–77 76 78 88–95 92–93 93–94 115–19 134 141 144–48 149–51 160–67 178–82 237–38 244–46 274 284–88 298–99 302–4 304–5 307 323 397–435 460–66 540 540–41 561–88 588 589 596 597 599–600 600 631 632 639 673–77

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82–86 86–87

46

144 140–41 141 144 141 141–45 148 139n55 53–54 145 150–51 146 147 53–54, 147 147 148 148 148 148–49 149 149 149 53–54, 149 149–50 53–54 150 153–54 150 143 154 150–51 151–52 139n55, 152 156 153n87 153–54 152n85 153n87 152 153n87 152 152n85

674 675 685 687–95 692 695 698 877–86 881–84 882 898–99 992–96 1016–19 1021–25 1043–53 1061–62 1067 1080–93 1093

139n55 156 153n87 152–54 153 152n86, 154 153n87 152n85 154 156 154 155 154, 155 154 155 155 149n78 155–57 53–54

Alcman fr. 1 PMGF

16–18

Antiphanes fr. 189 KA

44

Apollodorus Library 2.1.5

101n51

Aristophanes Acharnians 1–33 64 94–97 104–21 133 173 202 366–84 393–489 394 441 497–506 719–28 1097–1141

58–59 60 60 60 61 61 57 61–62 107n63 57 9 61–62 57 57

Assemblywomen 57 289–310

64 64

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Index Locorum      245 376–99 478–99 Birds 5–8 9 30 61–79 66 86–91 93–94 100–106 173–84 179 184 209–22 213–14 227–62 263 267–304 281–82 352–61 386–92 388–89 644–45 654–55 662 663–74 672 676–84 680–81 682–84 753–68 785–800 801–2 805–8 858 861 992–1019 1167 1306 1364–66 1373–1409 1437–39 1446 1448 1453–54 1461–65 1537–41 1706–18

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64 64

105 68 68n78 106 120 106 107 107 69–70 104 104 109n70 72n90 108n66 108 108 107n64 108–9 70n82 109 68n75 109 111n75 110–13 72n90 111n75 113 111 113 113–14 114 117–18 111 111–12 70n82 70n82 114 115–16 115 105, 116 116 116 116 116–17 119 118–20

1728 1765

120 120

Clouds 91–94 1096–1100

53–54 114n83

Frogs 274–76 910–11 919–20

114n83 143n63 143n63

Knights 162–81

70n80

Peace 1–178

54–55

Women at the Thesmophoria 1–30 154–67 213–68 279–93 467–519 658

66–67 38 38 63 63 63

Aristotle On Memory 450b23–24

9n24

On the Soul 403a5–b19

125n19

Parts of Animals 645a11–13

8

Poetics 1448b8–9 1448b10–12 1448b15–17 1453b3–5 1453b10–13 1459a7–8

6 159–60 1, 6–8, 42, 208–9 125, 137 160 7

Politics 1342a18

126

Rhetoric 1385b13 1410b19

125 7

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246     Index Locorum Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 6.5 Cratinus fr. 143 KA Euripides Alcestis 912 Andromache 1 Bacchae 1 1277

Orestes 866–956

65

10 44–45n10

47n20

46–47

51 81

Trojan Women 914–1033

55–56

Gorgias (82 DK) B 11 DK (Encomium of Helen) 9

125

B 23 DK

29

Herodotus Histories 1.60.3–5

19–20

Life of Aeschylus 9

12

Life of Euripides 17–18

30

Cyclops 487 656–70

151 133

Hecuba 619 1050 1056–59 1071–72 1117–19 1125–26

47n20 131 131–32 132 132 132

Helen 1111

72n90

Heracles 868 882

130 130

Republic 599a1–3 605d3

7 126n20

151n82

Plutarch Life of Solon 29.4–5

20n64

Pollux Onomasticon 4.110 4.130

12 156n90

Hippolytus 1202 Hypsipyle fr. 764 TrGF Ion

184–218 216–18

Iphigenia in Tauris 1–30 Oedipus fr. 556 TrGF

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55 30, 53 181 46 72n90

[Longinus] On the Sublime 15.2

12n36

Pindar fr. 107a M

18

Plato Ion 535b–e

125

Scholia [Aeschylus], Prometheus Bound 74a 74b

143 143

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.

Index Locorum      247 Aristophanes, Birds 759b 1363a 1463b

116n85 115 117n86

Shakespeare Henry V Prol. 13

48

Titus Andronicus II.iv

126

Two Gentlemen of Verona II.iii.13–22

78–79

Sophocles Ajax 1–15 1004

52–53 128–29

Antigone 997

151n82

Electra 2–4 8–10 9 1126–70 1177–78 Oedipus at Colonus 1–2 11 11–12 14–20 21 23 24 28–32 33–34 38 45 46 52 53 58–60 74

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41 43 10 10 7–8, 10

71 73 71 71–72, 73 73 71 71 71–72 72 71 73 74 71 72 73–74 72

91 100–101 138 286 313–21 510–14 668–80 871 1520–38 1590–97 1652 1760–65

74 73 72 129n30 72 138n52 72–73 72n89 75 75 75 75

Oedipus the King 1224–25 1237–38 1266–79 1293–96 1297–1306 1312 1473 1485

137 136n45 133–35 135 136–38 137 138n51 138n51

Philoctetes 1–2 135–218 1411–12

51 124n9 42n5

Women of Trachis 947–1113 1044

129n31 151n82

Suda E.2995 E.3695

129n32 30

Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War 3.38

56–57

Vitruvius On Architecture 7, praef. 11

29n95

Xenophon Memorabilia 3.10.1

29

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