The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy [Course Book ed.] 9781400825073

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
A Note to the Reader
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE. The Theater and Athenian Spatial Practice
CHAPTER TWO. Space for Returns
CHAPTER THREE. Eremetic Space
CHAPTER FOUR. Space and the Body
CHAPTER FIVE. Space, Time, and Memory: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus
CHAPTER SIX. Space and the Other
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Index

Citation preview

A PR INCETON UNI V ER SIT Y PR ESS E-BOOK

The Play of Space Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy Rush Rehm

THE PLAY OF SPACE

THE PLAY OF SPACE S PAT I A L T R A N S F O R M AT I O N IN GREEK TRAGEDY

Rush Rehm

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

COPYRIGHT 䉷 2002 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 3 MARKET PLACE, WOODSTOCK, OXFORDSHIRE OX20 1SY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ISBN 0-691-05809-1 (ALK. PAPER) BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN BERKELEY BOOK PRINTED ON ACID-FREE PAPER. ⬁ WWW.PUP.PRINCETON.EDU PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1

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Contents

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A NOTE

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INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE

The Theater and Athenian Spatial Practice 35 The Theater of Dionysus 37 The Sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus 41 The City Dionysia: Procession, Sacrifice, and the Secular 44 Inside Out, Outside In: Land, Livelihood, and Living Space in the Polis CHAPTER TWO

Space for Returns 76 The Oresteia: Homecoming and Its Returns Heracles and Home 100

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CHAPTER THREE

Eremetic Space 114 Antigone: Desolation Takes the Stage 115 Ajax: Alone in Space, In and Out of Time 123 Philoctetes: The Island er¯emia 138 Prometheus Bound: The Ends of the Earth 156 CHAPTER FOUR

Space and the Body 168 Hecuba: The Body as Measure 175 Euripides’ Electra: The Intimate Body 187 The Bacchae: The Theatrical Body 200 CHAPTER FIVE

Space, Time, and Memory: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus

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CHAPTER SIX

Space and the Other 236 Persians 239 The Other Medea: Woman, Barbarian, Exile, Athenian CONCLUSION

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APPENDIX

Theories of Space NOTES

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BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

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1. Theater of Dionysus in Athens, view from above. 2. Map of Athens (Travlos). 3. Theater of Dionysus, view toward the south. 4. Theater of Dionysus, view toward the southeast. 5. Theater of Dionysus, view toward the southwest. 6. Sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus. 7. Sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus (plan, Roman period). 8. Athenian agora plan, ca. 500 B.C. (Thompson and Wycherley) 9. Aerial view of the city of Athens. 10. Plan of the first Pnyx (Travlos). 11. Plan of the old and new Athenian bouleut¯eria (Dinsmoor). 12. Plan of the Athenian Long Walls (Travlos). All photos courtesy of the Deutsches Arch¨aologisches Institut-Athen; my thanks to Hans Rupprecht Goette. Plans are courtesy of Travlos 1971, and the Agora excavations, American School of Classical Studies, Athens (Thompson and Wycherley 1972, and Camp 1992 [Dinsmoor]).

Acknowledgments

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NITIAL WORK on this book was spurred by David Wiles, who invited me to give a paper on space at the Classical Association conference in Exeter in 1994, organized by Richard Seaford and Christopher Gill. This invitation encouraged me to think about theatrical space in a way I never had before, and I am grateful to the organizers and participants at the conference for that opportunity. The Donald Andrewes Whittier Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center in 1995–96 allowed me time to begin shaping ideas toward a book, in which the editors at Princeton University Press— Brigitta von Rheinberg and, later, Chuck Meyers—showed interest and confidence. I am also grateful to Lorna Hardwick of the Open University, London, for inviting me to address its conference on Classical Theatre in 1998, where I discussed space and Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and to Eric Csapo who kindly included me in a panel on performance at the conference on Euripides at the Banff Center in 1999, organized by Kevin Lee and Martin Cropp. There I presented an early version of space in Euripides’ Heracles, now published in Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century (ICS 24–25, 1999–2000), edited by M. Cropp, K. Lee, and D. Sansone (Champaign, Il., 2000). I benefited greatly from participation and discussion on all these occasions. I owe special thanks to the anonymous readers of the Press, to the copyeditor Brian Macdonald, and to those who have shared their thoughts with me about space and the ancient theater, including David Wiles, Oliver Taplin, Deborah Boedeker, Steven Scully, Jenny March, Hans Rupert Goette, and particularly Pat Easterling, whose comments on parts of the manuscript have improved it enormously. I owe a great deal to my former Emory colleagues Dick Neisser (now back at Cornell, who set me on to James J. Gibson), Richard and Cynthia Patterson (whose work and company are an ongoing delight), and Bonna Wescoat (the nonpareil of on-site companions). At Stanford I have depended on the invaluable support of Ron Davies, and have profited from conversations with Sissy Wood, Aleksandra Wolska, Charles Junkerman, and Mark Edwards. I owe special thanks to Reviel Netz, who offered helpful comments on the appendix; Michael Jameson, whose encyclopedic knowledge of Greek history, culture, and religion saved me from many errors; and Andrea Nightingale, who read and responded to the manuscript with insight and magnanimity. Finally, I offer this book in grateful memory of two teachers from whom I learned much, George Gellie (1918–88) and Charles R. Lyons (1933–99).

A Note to the Reader

Unless otherwise indicated, I have used the following Oxford Classical Texts of the tragedies: Aeschylus, edited by Denys Page (1972); Sophocles, edited by H. Lloyd-Jones and Nigel G. Wilson (1990); Euripides, edited by J. Diggle, vol. 1, rpt. with corr. (1989), vol. 2, rpt. with corr. (1986), and vol. 3 (1994). These editions are supplemented by other texts, listed in the bibliography under the editor’s name. Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted, and generally tend to the literal rather than the literary. Dates are B.C. unless otherwise indicated. Abbreviations for Greek authors and texts follow Liddell, Scott, and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, and for scholarly journals, L’ann´ee philologique (founded by J. Marouzeau, Paris) and the American Journal of Archaeology. In the English spelling of Greek words, I follow common usage, but I have tried to respect original spelling in quotations. Introduction, chapter, and appendix refer internally to this book. In the endnotes I use “cf.” in the sense of “contrast,” indicating a view substantially different from, or opposed to, the previous citation. The references in the notes limited to author, year, and page number are keyed to the entries in the bibliography, where full publication information can be found.

THE PLAY OF SPACE

INTRODUCTION To underestimate, ignore and diminish space amounts to the overestimation of texts, written matter, and writing systems, along with the readable . . . to the point of assigning these a monopoly on intelligibility. —Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

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BASE THIS BOOK on the simple premise that space is a proper value of the theater, part and parcel of what it is and how it works. Until recently, the function of space has gone relatively unnoticed in scholarship and criticism of our earliest drama. Now that the subject has emerged, it usually takes the form of a set of spatial binaries, reflecting the influence of structuralism. We confront a spatially discrete world, in which distinctions such as public-private, outside-inside, cultured-wild, center-margin are applied to the spaces of tragedy. Armed with this oppositional structure, critics argue (some with great subtlety) that tragedy supports traditional gender differentiations and patriarchy;1 that it exploits the basic polarities that myth seeks to mediate;2 that it plays into an “us” (Greek, Athenian, male) versus “them” (barbarian, metic/slave, female) scenario, which uses space to mark the “otherness” of the “Other”;3 that it instantiates a split between performance as social event and writing as private act;4 or—just the opposite—that tragedy’s dependence on writing provides a “spectographic division of narrative into exotopic speech positions.”5 Although such approaches can generate illuminating readings of the plays and the culture that produced them, the explicit dualism underlying the various interpretive schemes often leaves the complexity of space in Greek tragedy overlooked, or unexplored. A spatial alternative to structuralist readings that has emerged over the past twenty years involves what some call spatial semiotics. This relatively new critical field already suffers from a proliferation of competing “sets of spaces,” each designed to function conceptually with little concern for the physical or affective nature of the phenomenon.6 In his analysis of Oedipus at Colonus, for example, Lowell Edmunds modifies Issacharoff’s semiotic approach to theatrical space by offering the following categories: theater space (the architectural givens); stage space (stage and set design, costumes, actors’ bodies, makeup, etc.); and dramatic space (created by the “stage-word”), subdivided into mimetic space (dramatic discourse on the visible space of the stage) and diegetic space (words focused on offstage space), further subdivided into “space represented as visible to the characters on stage (but not

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visible to the spectators) and space invisible to both the characters on stage and the spectators.”7 A moment’s reflection reveals that these categories aim at taxonomic completeness rather than at an understanding of dramatic action and spatial interaction. Everything that happens in a play will “fit,” but we may understand no better in the end what they are “fit for.” On the other hand, the semiotics of space also can suffer from the most sweeping of generalities, such as the claim that “space is an active agent” in making theatrical meanings.8 The redundancy “active agent” suggests a rhetorical desperation aimed at obscuring the fact that space can “act” only in the loosest metaphorical sense. Action implies choice, or at least the possibility of choice, as Kenneth Burke reminds us: “Things move, persons act.”9 To accept that space influences the meanings we make in the theater hardly requires that we grant to it the property of human agency. So what do we mean by space? Keimpe Algra answers the skeptic who thinks that our understanding of the term has nothing in common with ancient Greek usage, steering a sane course between the Scylla of radical relativism (emphasizing discontinuities, while ignoring the problem of coherence) and the Charybdis of simple essentialism (assuming a simple identity of meaning across time).10 I discuss various meanings of space in the appendix (“Theories of Space”), but let me sketch three interrelated ways I apply the term to the theater: 1. Space “allows for” what we see and hear during a theatrical performance, providing a (primarily) visual and acoustic context for relating objects, bodies, characters, and their manifestation in dramatic action. 2. Space also “comes to be” in the extension of objects and bodies in the theater, something like their “aura” viewed in material and not imaginary terms. 3. Space is an umbrella term that covers places, locations, regions, geographical features, and so on, whether present, represented, or referred to during a performance. That which is not literally present can “come to presence” in the space of the theater, when (for example) a dramatic character powerfully evokes the place from which he or she arrives.

In his critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time (where Time is the basic category of human existence), the Japanese philosopher Watsuji (1889– 1960) emphasizes the importance of linking space and the social: My concern was this: while temporality is presented as the subject’s structure of being, why isn’t spatiality equally well presented as a fundamental structure of being? . . . Temporality cannot be a true temporality unless it is in conjunction with spatiality. The reason that Heidegger stopped there is that his Dasein is limited to . . . existence as the Being of the individual person. This is only an abstracted aspect when we consider persons under the double structure of being both individual and social.11

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In daily experience Watsuji locates a more fundamental, intersubjective reality, called “basho,” reminiscent of the gestalt thinkers who insist on background and situation as integral to personal life-space. Leaving the internal clock and the individual’s solipsistic focus on the self in time, we find ourselves “out there” in the world. The fact of live performance involves a comparable spatial move, away from private time into public space. Speaking generally, we might claim that the theater is the art of social space, bringing before an audience the potentially intersubjective “life-spaces” of the characters in the drama.12 It is a truism that early Greek thinkers (and many others after them) frame mental acts—particularly “knowing”—in terms of vision, acknowledging our human dependence on the external world when giving an account of our inner processes of thought. As Iris Murdoch observes, “Our ability to use visual structures to understand non-visual structures (as well as different visual ones) is fundamental to explanation in any field.”13 Hers is a useful reminder for the theater, recalling the etymological link that both theory and theater have with the Greek word for sight—theaomai ‘I see’, from whence theatron ‘theater,’ ‘where the viewers are’; theat¯es ‘the spectator,’ ‘sightseer’; the¯oros ‘spectator,’ ‘ambassador’ (who announces a truce linked to a sacred festival, or serves on an official delegation to an oracle or a Panhellenic contest); the¯ore¯o ‘I see,’ ‘I view as a spectator,’ ‘I serve as a the¯oros [envoy]’, ‘I contemplate’; and finally the¯oria ‘way of seeing,’ ‘contemplation’.14 Werner Jaeger summarizes the relationship this way: The the¯oria of Greek philosophy was deeply and inherently connected with Greek art and Greek poetry; for it embodied not only rational thought, the element which we think of first, but also (as the name implies) vision, which apprehends every object as a whole, which sees the idea in everything—namely, the visible pattern.15

Seeing and knowing are closely connected in Greek; the same root is used as a past tense to mean (mainly) “see” (eidon ‘I saw’) and as a perfect tense to mean “know” (oida, ‘I have seen’, ‘I know’), as if knowledge were a perfected form of seeing. Indeed, early Greek thinkers conceived of intellectual activity on the model of physical sight.16 According to both Empedocles and Plato, interaction is only possible between entities of a similar kind, exemplified by the “well-known thesis that the human eye could not perceive the light of the sun were the eye itself not a luminous object.”17 The sun illuminates all things, therefore it sees everything; the human eye sees, therefore it too illuminates. To lose the “seeing light” of the sun meant to live no more, and Hades, by popular etymology, was the place for the “invisible” or “unseen” (a-id¯es).18 By extension, that which is not seen is blind. Amphitryon in Heracles praises the archer who wounds his opponents “with blind arrows” (tuphlois toxeumasin), meaning they arrive unseen (Eur. HF 199).19 The par-

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odos of Antigone opens with the Chorus’s apostrophe to the sun—“Oh eye of the golden day” (S. Ant. 104–5)—which shone on, and saw, the Theban defeat of the Argive invaders, and now looks down on its aftermath, much like the spectators in the theater.20 “Light was vision, and vision was luminous,” Vernant observes, discussing the reciprocity between seen and seer in Greek thought: For the ancient Greek man, the world was not the objectified external universe, cut off from man by the impassable barrier that separates matter from the mind, the physical from the psychic. Man was in a relationship of intimate community with the animate universe to which everything connected him.21

For the Greeks, the corporeal and the intellectual, the physical and the mental, did not present distinct realms.22 Extending this observation, Vernant denies subjective interiority—an apparently essential spatial metaphor for conscious activity—to the ancient Greeks. He separates their mental life from the later European metaphysical and psychological tradition that focuses on subjective experience and inner contemplation.23 From Descartes’ doubting to Heidegger’s concentration on temporality, modern philosophers have privileged self-examination over engagement with the world “out there.” According to Vernant, this later tradition has misappropriated the Greek rubric “Know thyself,” with the unintended results that the original religious, social, and environmental significance (“Know your human place in the cosmos”) has been displaced by the modern ego, driven to explore its inner psyche, or (in the new-age imperative) to “follow your bliss.”24 Vernant and others are right to emphasize the communal and social aspects basic to Greek self-conception, “public space” against “private self.” But further reflection on the relationship between vision, knowledge, and selfperception complicates the picture. In ancient Athens, for example, the term “eye” (omma, ophthalmos) could serve as a metonym for the essential quality of a thing or person; “the eye of the bride” (S. Tr. 527), for example, indicates both “the bride herself” and “the bride as perceived by the groom” (i.e., attractive, alluring).25 In a “mixed” metonymy, the Chorus of Choephori hopes that the “eye of the house” will not perish (A. Cho. 934), and Athena at the end of the trilogy calls forth “the eye [omma] of the whole land of Theseus” to escort the Furies home (Eum. 1025–26). Occurring twelve times in the Iliad, the standard Homeric euphemism “darkness hid his eyes” equates death with the loss of ocular brightness. The term pros¯opon (literally, “toward the eye”) was used for face, mask, and dramatic character.26 Speaking generally, the link between self and sight seems to emerge at a young age, evidenced in the game where children cover their eyes and assert “you can’t see me.” Psychologists traditionally assumed an irrational egocentricity in youngsters—because I (the child) can’t see you, you can’t see me.

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In recent experiments, however, developmental psychologists discovered something quite different. When they asked their eyes-covered subjects “Can I see you?” most two- or three-year-olds answered “No.” But they did answer “Yes” to a host of other questions: “Can I see Snoopy” (a nearby doll)? “Yes.” “Can I see your leg?” “Yes.” “Your head?” “Yes.” “Can I see you?” “No.” Children don’t manifest an egocentric misunderstanding of other’s vision; rather they locate the self at or near the point of visual observation.27 Returning to the world of ancient Greece, we can extend the triad of knowledge-sight-self by considering the link between intelligence and blindness that occurs in Greek myth. In the cases of Demodocus, the blind bard in the Odyssey, and the prophet Teiresias (in both his epic and tragic manifestations), blindness does not indicate self-knowledge. Instead, the blind seer possesses insight into the mythic past, the communal present, or the foreseeable future. For the protagonist of Sophocles’ two Oedipus’ plays, however, the loss of external vision leads to a growth in inner personal sight, revealing a space of incipient self-awareness. As Oedipus says on his arrival to Athens, “Do not dishonor me, seeing my hard-to-look-at eyes / for I have come as a holy, god-fearing man / bringing great benefits to your city” (OC 285–88). An unspecified character in a fragment of a lost Sophocles’ play puts it simply, “I close my eyes and see.”28 As Bernard Williams points out, sight and seeing provide a key to Greek ethical thinking, particularly with regard to shame.29 But shame implies more than being seen by others; if that were all it meant, then the central issue would simply involve avoiding discovery. The Homeric hero could run away freely, so long as no one saw him; Ajax in Sophocles’ play would set sail after his mad butchery of livestock, before anyone could find out who did it (recall that Ajax is unaware that Athena has allowed Odysseus to view his madness). But Ajax cannot so easily escape the consequences of his actions; the simple function of retrospective narration—in which he engages during the play and imagines performing in the future with his father—forces Ajax to view himself as an object, to see himself in a setting as if he were someone else.30 In a similar way, “prospective shame” can operate motivationally (much like fear), when a character anticipates what someone might say or how he himself might feel if he were to commit a shameful act, with “the imagined gaze of an imagined other” in mind. Nausicaa, for example, fears what her people might say if they were to see her with the handsome stranger, adding “And I myself would think badly of a girl who acted so” (Od. 6.285–86). Along with the prospect of hostile reactions, Nausicaa has internalized the notion of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, behavior, a prerequisite (as Williams observes) for “the very idea of there being a shame culture, a coherent system for the regulation of conduct.”31 The “internalized other . . . is conceived as someone whose reactions I would respect.” Ajax commits suicide in Sophocles’ play because “he has no

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way of living that anyone he respects would respect—which means that he cannot live with any self-respect.”32 Using Havelock’s work on Democritus and other elder sophists, Peter Rose concludes that the attempt to found a more inner-directed morality precedes Plato’s Socrates: The process, never complete, by which the traditional shame culture’s ethical terminology was transformed into a set of mental constructs affecting the psyche of an individual apart from witnesses was longer and more complex than Plato suggests. . . . The anthropologically oriented thinkers who explored the origin of ethics in the survival needs of the group also examined the subtle socialization process by which necessary values are internalized in members of the group. They recognized that without some internalization of ethical values no social intercourse is possible, that instead of relations based on persuasion there would be only deceit or brute force.33

Such an interactive view of Greek moral culture properly complicates the notion of “exteriority.” The act of vision directed at the external world mutually illuminates the world and the viewer. So, too, the tragic character seen by others internalizes (in complicated, socially directed, and idiosyncratic ways) that seeing, and comes to see the world through its “eyes.” For Williams, the internalized other in ancient Greek culture need not collapse into one of two reductive extremes, either of a wholly interiorized, or a totally externalized, self. These opposite poles receive powerful instantiations in Euripides’ Hippolytus—the solipsistic, inner-directed, self-viewing title character (Hippolytus: “Oh how I wish I could stand in front of myself / and weep at the miseries that I am suffering,” Hipp. 1074–75); and his opposite, the outer-directed, fearful of discovery, wholly “social” Phaedra, who commits perjury and suicide to keep up external appearances.34 Put simply, viewing others in their unique situations (assuming they are recognizable and not completely foreign), a Greek can also see himself. Looking on his deranged enemy Ajax, Odysseus says “I pity him . . . not thinking of his fate, but of my own. / I see the all of us who live / are no more than ghostly traces [eid¯ola] or weightless shadows” (S. Ajax 121–26).35 Again, we trace the triadic relationship moving from the spatial (visually outward) to the social (recognizable others) to the individual (self), and then back out again (self as potential other). Although the visual (as physiological process and as metaphor) constitutes an important part of dramatic experience, theatrical space encompasses more than what one sees. Sound, no less than sight, requires a spatial medium, and a resonating space within the body to produce it with sufficient volume to be audible.36 Ancient sources indicate that the voice of the actor proved his most valuable tool; Aristotle calls it “the most imitative [or “performative,” mim¯etik¯otaton] of our parts, which provides the basis for the arts of acting and epic recitation.”37 According to Aristotle, the tragic actor The-

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odorus forbade other actors to appear before him onstage because “an audience always takes kindly to the first voice that meets the ears.”38 The oral nature of ancient Greek society establishes—with tautological force—that acoustic contact (being in the same acoustic space) constituted the primary mode of communication. Coming upon a silent Hecuba, Agamemenon remonstrates: “Not born a prophet, I can’t track down / the path of your thoughts unless I hear them” (Eur. Hec. 743–44). Even more than what we see, what we hear demands proximity.39 We may look at the stars, for example, but their silence reminds us of their vast distance. We can close our eyes (in the theater, as elsewhere) far more effectively than our ears, as Oedipus discovers after his self-blinding, wishing he could “choke off the spring of hearing” and so move “beyond the reach of evils” (S. OT 1386–90). In Oedipus at Colonus, we watch the blind hero hear the play that happens around him. Humans with sight can select what to look at, but sound surrounds us and pours in whether we like it or not. In “On Thinking and Speaking,” Humboldt argues that the human voice produces “the most decisive of all changes in time. . . . Issuing from man himself with the breath that animates him, and vanishing instantly, they [the temporal changes] are by far the most alive and arousing.”40 That is, the presence of the human voice reminds all who hear it that time, lived time, is passing. In Homeric epic, distance frequently is measured by “sound contact.” The temenos of Alcinoos lies “as far off from the city as [a man] could make himself heard by shouting” (Od. 6.294), and there are many other examples.41 Effective language is “winged,” traveling with a purpose like an arrow that hits the target, linking speaker and intended audient. “Unwinged speech” either remains unspoken or fails to achieve its desired effect (Od. 17.57, 19.29, 21.386, 22.398). Translated into political terms, Aristotle suggests the absurdity of a city whose population is too large for a herald to address it.42 The open mouth of the Greek theatrical mask provides the requisite passage for the actor’s voice, but it also symbolizes tragedy’s need to bear spoken witness to the unspeakable, to keep talking in the face of horror. To stop speech that will curse, the soldiers gag Iphigenia before they sacrifice her in Agamemnon (233–38); in Hecuba, an outraged Agamemnon binds Polymestor’s tongue to keep from hearing his unwelcome predictions (Hec. 1283– 84). Out of sight in Greek tragedy does not mean beyond perception, as the offstage cries of many victims (or near victims) make clear.43 In the same way we should consider other offstage sounds that may have been heard by the audience—the argument within between the Nurse and Hippolytus, for example (Eur. Hipp. 565–600), or the first arrival of Philoctetes (S. Ph. 201– 19). And, of course, the experience of Greek tragedy involved music, with aulos (and occasionally lyre, tambourine, and/or castanet) accompaniment to the lyric sections of the Chorus, to the actor singing alone (monody), and to

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the actor and Chorus singing together (kommos). Although we cannot reconstruct the sound, we can identify general moods associated with different instruments and modalities, and detect evocations of the foreign and exotic.44 The impact of the visual, vocal, and musical elements of tragedy depended on the space in which they were performed, even as they transformed that space into fictional worlds of great imaginative scope and compass. If Greek tragic theater is a spatial art, made of sights and sounds in the shared presence of an audience, then we should think hard about the appropriateness of metaphors of text and reading that dominate contemporary critical discourse. From Simon Goldhill’s Reading Greek Tragedy to Barbara Goff’s The Noose of Words, recent studies of tragedy emphasize the activity of reading,45 an interpretive metaphor that has worked its way into other areas of classical studies. In “Reading” Greek Death, for example, SourvinouInwood proposes “methodologies for reading the Greek discourse of death, which involves the reading of texts, images, and archaeological evidence . . . , methodologies capable of allowing us—in so far as this is possible—to read ancient texts through the eyes of their contemporary readers.”46 The fact that there were few ancient readers seems beside the point. Even in approaches to tragedy that emphasize staging, metaphors of text, reading, and writing remain prominent. Oliver Taplin’s magisterial The Stagecraft of Aeschylus explicitly addresses Fraenkel’s call for a “grammar of dramatic technique,” as does Michael Halleran’s Stagecraft in Euripides, and, on a smaller scale, David Bain’s Masters, Servants and Orders in Greek Tragedy and Donald Mastronarde’s Contact and Discontinuity.47 In Tragedy in Athens, David Wiles strongly criticizes the assumptions underlying Taplin’s approach and argues for various structuralist and semiotic readings of tragedy, incorporating ideas from Anne Ubersfeld’s Lire le th´eatre. ˆ However, as the title of Ubersfeld’s book suggests, the predictable structuralist and poststructuralist practices of reading—decoding, signifying (in the sense of generating meaning by signs), explicating binaries—dominate.48 These same interpretive metaphors hold sway in other humanistic disciplines, as scholars convert the world’s plenitude into so many “texts” to be “read.”49 At the first order of approximation, what does reading involve? Whether under a tree or on a subway, in the library or at the airport, or sitting absorbed by the computer monitor, reading in the contemporary world reaches its telos when we are lost in the book or on the screen, and the world outside is kept at bay. Reading silently, an act of private concentration, we cut ourselves off from what is present outside the text; the closer the reading, the narrower the spatial blinders. The magic of writing indicates those parts of the “exterior world” worthy of conscious attention, invoking these externals almost always in their absence.50 H´el`ene Cixous summarizes the process: “We annihilate the world with a book. . . . As soon as you open the book as

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a door, you enter another world, you close the door on this world. Reading is escaping in broad daylight, it’s the rejection of the other; most of the time it’s a solitary act, exactly like writing.”51 To be sure, for the greatest part of its (short) history reading was practiced in public and out loud. Far from an act of isolation, reading took place as a communal event, a shared aural experience, long after the introduction of writing and even of books.52 Because listeners, unlike readers, “have to understand in real time,” ancient reading depended on live performance, and not the other way around.53 What evidence we have suggests that tragic actors themselves (quite possibly illiterate) learned their parts by hearing them read aloud.54 George Steiner and Jonathan Smith pinpoint the rise of the “classic phase” of silent reading in Europe to the seventeenth century, when elites had access to books, space, silence, and leisure.55 Places of privilege for silent reading have their counterpart in the modern university, where academics in the humanities extend the metaphor of reading with scarcely a thought to how small a role literacy actually plays in many lives. While students and professors at Stanford University, for example, elucidate the pleasures of the text and define various interpretive communities, 25 percent of the adults in California’s Santa Clara County (wealthy Silicon Valley) can be defined as functionally illiterate. A far larger percentage of the world’s population has little meaningful access to written language. Applied to the theater, or to society, or to culture, the metaphor of reading is remarkably exclusive, leaving out much of the phenomena that the metaphor is invoked to explain. Certainly, most classicists in a reflective mood would agree that “tragedy as read” or “society as text” would have made little sense to the population that attended dramatic performances in fifth-century Athens. As A. M. Dale reminds us, “we read lyric poetry, the Greeks watched and listened to it. It is easy for us to forget this simple yet profound difference.”56 If a playwright failed to direct his own play (as happened with several of Aristophanes’ comedies, for example), his name did not appear in the public formalities connected with the production. Athens officially honored the names of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes as didaskaloi (directors), not as writers of texts.57 Turning to the nontheatrical realm, Charles Hedrick points out that the writing on stone that confronted Athenians (inscriptions on votives, dedications, and grave markers) operated more as monumental reminders than as a texts to be read.58 Several scholars have challenged the notion that mass literacy existed in ancient Athens, whose traditional agrarian economy required no general reading public and supported no state-sponsored formal schooling to promote one.59 Be that as it may, focusing on texts (and, by extension, the world as text) offers critics unquestionable power. Due to the trapped nature of written language, we can detach the intrepretive process from its moorings in ongoing experience. Technologically speaking, this power increased dramatically

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with the transition from the papyrus roll (where going back was no easy task—how would a reader locate the passage without unrolling the whole thing?) to the codex, with its sheets bound much like a modern book.60 The grammarians of Alexandria were among the first to demonstrate the great critical advantages that accrue from a book we can easily “manipulate,” giving us control over any prior context for the words we read. Changes from the ancient scriptura continua to the “canonical separation” of words in Latin manuscripts (achieved in the twelfth-century) played a major role in spurring the change to silent reading.61 The book’s power over space yields power over time—that is, over the original sequencing of plot, narrative, and argument. We can rearrange texts as we choose, without regard for their original context. This practice constitutes a major aspect of the interpretive act, a recasting of the tale more to the critic’s purposes, generating new narratives by de- and recontextualizing the parts of someone else’s. Flipping through the world of the book, we manifest a godlike power to suspend or reverse time. Indeed, only death need end our spinning out narratives about other narratives, should we so choose.62 Something like this happens when we turn the study of plays into the interpretation of texts meant to be read; we ignore the insistent ephemerality at the heart of theatrical performance, the ineluctable concomitant of its spatial life.63 Missing in a text-driven approach is the simple fact that theatrical space demands presence—the simultaneous presence of performers and audience.64 The actor’s body in a given space before an attendant audience is the sine qua non of theatrical life. When the actor succeeds, that body moves from being present to being a presence; he or she is “there on the night,” “takes the stage,” “lights up the theater,” “fills the space.” After a bad performance, the actor “didn’t show up tonight, but phoned it in.” Metaphors of absence mark the performance as a failure. Most theater practitioners—in my experience, a highly eclectic lot—think of dramatic performance in radically untextual terms. The space of the theater allows for something to come to life in the flesh, and in that process imagination and creativity merge with unshakable (and often brutal) realities of theatrical production. In the case of Greek tragedy, and much drama that followed, what comes to presence manifests itself in the form of named characters or groups of characters enacting a narrative in space and time. Without falling into mimetic quicksand, most theater artists recognize something intractably human about this enterprise. Translated into semiotic terms, the presence of a visible and audible actor in real time performing a character in a recognizably human situation brings too much information to the interpretive task, complicating our best efforts to reduce dramatic action to the level of “text” constituted by readable but arbitrary signs.65 To be sure, scholars isolate costume, gesture, design, theater architecture, lighting, movement, music, dramaturgy, speech, acting, directing, and so on,

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deriving from each a specific set of codes and meanings. For some critics, the living world represented on stage simply poses a code to be cracked, as when Barthes characterizes the theater as “a kind of cybernetic machine.”66 Such categorizing and decoding, however, runs the risk of laboratory dissection, which leaves little but the proverbial dead rat, as phenomenologists remind us. Husserl observes that when “the spatial thing which we see is . . . perceived, we are consciously aware of it as given in its embodied form. We are not given an image or a sign in its place. We must not substitute the consciousness of a sign or an image for a perception.” Bachelard puts it more simply: “Sight says too many things at one time.”67 For all of its pedigree in contintental philosophy, the phenomenology of theatrical performance emerges as less conceptual than physical, involving human bodies, voices, sights, sounds, gestures, objects—“the roar of the greasepaint and smell of the crowd,” in American musical parlance. Even in the Poetics—increasingly viewed as a text that undervalues performance— Aristotle understands tragedy’s “move to presence” as a mark of its development from epic mim¯esis (1448a19–29). Nagy reminds us that, for the ancients including Aristotle, the term mim¯esis implied performance (understood as enactment and reenactment) rather than imitation, as later thinkers would have it.68 In this context, Aristotle traces a development from straight narrative to the mixed mode found in Homer (narrative plus the dramatizing of first-person speech) and finally to the fully dramatic mode of tragedy, where characters speak for themselves. Here he follows his teacher Plato, who differentiates dramatic from other types of poetry by its consisting completely of speeches in the first person.69 As Aristotle puts it, “Some say that’s why they’re called ‘dramas’ [dramata ‘things done’], because they imitate those who do things [dr¯ontas]” (Po. 1448a28–29). Although Aristotle focuses on the absence of the poet or storyteller in tragedy, that absence makes room for the presence of the actor, who instantiates a “present” experience that the storyteller can only recall. Put schematically, spatial presence entails the temporal present; in semiotic terms, the actor in Greek tragedy is less a sign than a symbol, not simply a pointer to what is absent but also an embodiment of what is present.70 The attack on presence—quintessentially captured in Derrida’s counterintuitive and antihistorical claim that writing comes before speaking—displaces present oral and gestural communication with mediated “texts” as the fundamental site of human interaction.71 In this well-worn scenario, writing and reading expose the absence at the heart of language signs. Actually present are only arbitrary marks on a page, accepted as meaning something (and not something else) by convention or fiat. Deconstructing such an arbitrary construction is meant to constitute an act of liberation. One steps out from under the authority of external referentiality and the author who pretends to control it, moving into the free play of the signifier; each reader is free to

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undermine a true(r) reading by concentrating on the polysemous possibilities inherent in language, a system that refers ultimately only to itself. Saussure, the purported source for the deconstructionist view of language, seems to have had nothing like this in mind. As Raymond Tallis reminds us, “When Saussure compared signifiers and signifieds to currency denominations [whose value is internal to the currency system], he did not imply that words in use were like pound coins that could purchase only other pound coins and never buy real goods.”72 It remains an important political question why academics so fervently embraced this version of language over communitarian and universalist notions propounded by “nativists” like Noam Chomsky.73 Explicitly or not, those who view the world (or that part of the world presented in the theater) as a text to be read tend to adopt what linguist Steven Pinker calls the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM).74 This view of human perception and cognition denies that significant influence emanates from the human organism prior to enculturated experience. We are what we are fed (mentally and physically), and we can be fed—and presumably digest—more or less anything. The dominant issue in the SSSM scenario (Foucault explores it in detail) involves not meaning or truth, but power. Critics riding this juggernaut, as Peter Dews points out, seem hellbent to “dissolve any supposedly intrinsic significance of lived experience into an effect of impersonal structures and forces.”75 Paraphrasing Rousseau, in the SSSM the mind is a blank tablet onto which culture inscribes its various meanings and maladies. To adopt a favorite metaphor of the postmodern, “minds don’t write, they are written on.” The undoctrinated mind— understood as a universal aspect of human beings—simply does not exist. In this view, as the anthropologist Dan Sperber notes with incredulity, “the mind imposes no greater constraints on the contents of cultures than does printing technology on the contents of books.”76 How are these observations relevant to space as a proper value of the theater? Perhaps we can identify qualities intrinsic to space and our perception of it that resist the reading-writing-text paradigm and the attendant SSSM of the inscribed mind. What lies before us in the theater may carry messages available to most observers and constitutes a shared world for perception. “Though visions are many, the visible may yet be one,” as Robert Brandom puts it.77 If not, then “space” in tragedy becomes another version of a social-science construction, following a postmodern critical strategy that a skeptic might call “hyberbolic substitution”—for “text” read “space,” which proves on examination to be (always already) the biggest text of all. Not surprisingly, this process is well in train, as evidenced by the proliferation of critical studies on the theater with “space” in the title. There we can read cultural givens and ideological constraints—all the “effects of impersonal structures and forces”—writ large.78

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Whatever else it may do, the present book does not pursue this critical gambit. Instead, I make use of “nontextual” ways that people have thought about space, starting with a version of perceptual realism championed by the cognitive psychologist James J. Gibson. After years of research on vision (from young babies recognizing “breaks” in their crawl surface to studies of how best to train airplane pilots), Gibson developed an “ecological approach to visual perception,” the title of his summary work. In so doing, he categorically dismisses the utility of space as a concept: “The doctrine that we could not perceive the world around us unless we already had the concept of space is nonsense. It is quite the other way around. We could not conceive of empty space unless we could see the ground under our feet and the sky above. Space is a myth, a ghost, a fiction for geometers.”79 Although I assume the usefulness of space as an interpretive category, Gibson’s analysis of perception deserves close attention, primarily because it situates the human perceiver (as does Greek tragedy) in the physical world and not in the mental space of reading or the semiotic space of signal decoding. Gibson’s realism starts with the obvious but neglected fact that we are terrestrial creatures surrounded by an environment that offers essential information for our survival and well-being. An environment is characterized by its stability, which is why it is worth knowing about—“the persisting surfaces of the environment are what provide the framework of [visual] reality.”80 Its layout appears to us visually as a flow of information structured by the reflected light that reaches our eyes, what Gibson calls “the ambient optical array.” This information consists of invariants underlying change,81 making perception “an act of attention, not a triggered impression, an achievement, not a reflex.”82 Chief among these invariants is the ground, the literal basis of our environment, extending under and supporting other invariants, namely the people, places, and things that we perceive in our world.83 We see “not with the eyes but with the eyes-in-the-head-on-the-body-resting-on-the-ground.”84 Normal perception is not a pair of eyeballs isolated in a dark room looking at slides, as most laboratory experiments on visual perception assume. We don’t perceive an abstracted reality, as in a snapshot, or view the world like a picture, or read it like a book. Rather, we see surfaces, continuities, breaks, edges, obstacles, openings, paths—potential routes for movement and barriers to get around. Moving from one place to another involves the opening up of the vista ahead and the closing in of the vista behind: “A living observer is never frozen in the vista of a moment. Perceiving is sequential. . . . One sees around corners because one can go around corners in the course of time [and someone who has gone behind a surface can reemerge from it]. The concept of the arrested image has misled us. The static picture is not the basic element of visual perception.”85 Problems of visual “integration” via memory (the mistaken idea that recognition resembles taking photos of the world and comparing them with earlier photos,

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filed in the brain) disappear when we realize that “no succession of discrete images occurs, either in scanning or looking around. . . . [T]he scene is in the sequence, is specified by the invariant structure that underlies the samples of the ambient array.”86 Gibson emphasizes that normal human perception is mobile, connected to our animal need to locate and orient ourselves for purposes of survival and well-being. We perceive the world (visually, aurally, kinesthetically, olfactorally, haptically) with our heads on our necks, aware of our own bodies by virtue of their being within our perceptual field. Visual “proprioception” begins with our noses, due to the inset location of our eyes (contrast a horse), but it normally extends to our limbs, as I observe my arms and hands when I type, for example, or my shoulder when I turn my head to look for a book. Proprioception also includes the information we pick up from the environment, available in what we see, locating and orienting ourselves as we move through the world. As Gibson puts it, “the perception of the environment is always accompanied by co-perception of the self. . . . [E]goreception accompanies exteroception like two sides of a coin.”87 The visual information structured in the ambient optic array reveals objects that offer various affordances, Gibson’s term for what the environment provides or furnishes us, understood as a possession neither of the physical world nor of those who perceive that world, but rather as the complementarity of creature and surroundings: What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental, as we are accustomed to believe. The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either. To perceive that a surface is level and solid is also to perceive that it is walk-on-able [i.e., that it “affords” walking].88

What something affords is related directly to one’s situation—for example, for someone in a car, a highway affords driving; for someone out of gas, it affords a path for walking to an emergency phone; for someone walking a dog, it affords a dangerous environment.89 Applied to the ancient Athenian audience, the outdoor theater of Dionysus afforded a sloping terrain on which to sit, a place to view part of the city, an open space where one was visible oneself, a place to see the dramatic performances and participate in one of the great civic festivals, and so on. Applied to a given tragedy, the idea of affordances can play into the changing dynamics of the drama. The humiliated Ajax in Sophocles’ play, for example, no longer perceives the sword of Hector as a status gift befitting a war hero. Instead, the sword reverts to its original function, affording Ajax the means to fall by an enemy weapon and so assume the appearance of a hero’s death in a world that has lost its heroic values. By fixing its hilt in the Trojan earth,

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Ajax converts a detached object (“a layout of surfaces completely surrounded by the medium . . . that can be moved without breaking or rupturing the continuity of any surface”) into an attached object (whose substance “is continuous with the substance of another surface,” in this case the ground).90 In his suicide, Ajax attaches his body to the hostile land he has helped to conquer. The Chorus in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (454–55) describes the similar “attachment” of other Greeks who fell at Troy: “now lovely bodies hold the land they won” (Ag. 454–55). Unlike the abstract space of geometry, consisting of points located in a coordinate system, Gibson’s “ecological space” consists of places, located by their inclusion in larger places. The perception of smaller units embedded in larger ones Gibson calls “nesting.”91 In the context of ancient performance, the theater of Dionysus is located in the sanctuary dedicated to the god on the south slope of the Acropolis within the walled portion of Athens on the Attic peninsula, part of the Greek mainland, which is part of the Mediterranean world, and so on, each place nested within a larger region (places can be named but they need not have sharp boundaries). We naturally see things as components of other things, due to the fact that our vision is ambient and continuous, not static, broken, or abstracted. In the same way, Gibson insists that we see not “depth” but rather one thing behind another. Perception is “an experiencing of things rather than the having of experiences.”92 This means that there exists not merely a metaphorical path through life but a real one, moving from place to place. Every real animal follows a single real route through the real environment in real time; mutatis mutandis, dramatic characters in performance do the same.93 So, too, did those attending the theater in ancient Athens, tracing out various paths from their homes to the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus, then through the theater’s parodoi and up to their seats, where they enjoyed a vista overlooking the paths they had come and by which they would return home after the performances. In general terms, Gibson’s analysis of the way we visually “keep in touch with the world” emphasizes the universal aspects of visual perception. In part, this results from the adaptation of human cognitive and perceptual categories to the environment, as Konrad Lorenz notes, “for the same reason that the horse’s hoof is suited for the plains before the horse is born, and the fin of a fish is adapted for water before the fish hatches from its egg.”94 We bring common perceptual capacities to the world, due to our biological endowment, and we take common information from the world, due to the affordances we perceive in the environment: “People are not only parts of the environment but also perceivers of the environment. Hence a given observer perceives other perceivers. And he also perceives what others perceive. In this way each observer is aware of a shared environment, one that is common to

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all observers, not just his environment.”95 Because we are mobile and can turn our heads, we have the ability to see objects and places from another person’s standpoint. Although our perceptions can be identical, our “sensations” (stimuli preceding perception) can never be, at least not simultaneously. For example, I can’t occupy your point of view now, but I could have in the past and might in the future. Put differently, our visual system can substitute sequential vision for panoramic vision, successive order for adjacent order, space for time.96 Gibson challenges the idea that perception is a private affair, whereas knowledge—due to common language and culture—is shared: Even the direct perception of objects and surfaces is shared over time because of common points of observation and the ability to see from other points than the one now occupied. . . . The awareness of a common world . . . is not entirely due to our verbal agreements with one another, as so many philosophers are tempted to believe. It is also due to the independence of our perception from a fixed point of observation, the ability to pick up invariants over time. This underlies the ability to get knowledge by means of pictures and words. The social psychology of knowledge has a basis in ecological optics.97

Considered in terms of the theater, Gibson’s observations offer useful insights into the conditions of performance in ancient Athens, the subject of chapter 1. From their different perspectives, members of the audience viewed one another and the common world before them. The ground of the theater was both the location of the performance (the orchestra floor, where the actors played) and also part of the larger perceptual layout, the continuous surface (real ground) that lay beneath the audience and extended past the city and the surrounding landscape to the horizon.98 We may contrast this sense of theatrical ground with our experience in a contemporary indoor theater, visually cut off from the earth and most of the natural world, where we confront a raised stage, artificial lights, and a completely constructed environment.99 Gibson’s observations about the importance of permanence within change—the way we pick up information by perceiving invariants in our physical environment—apply metaphorically to dramatic characterization: “The identity of a thing, its constancy, can emerge in perception only when it is observed under changing circumstances in various aspects. The static form of a thing, its image or picture, is not at all what is permanent about it.”100 The “heroic temper” frequently associated with Sophoclean protagonists shows itself by a character’s constancy in the face of changing circumstances, by the use of dramatic foils (the title characters of Antigone, Electra, and Oedipus Tyrannus as opposed to Ismene, Chrysothemis, and Creon, respectively), and by the simple fact that the same actor plays the character over

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the course of the performance. Similarly, for all their apparent fixity, the masks worn by the characters come to full dramatic life only when seen against the changing events the character faces.101 Turning to physical movement, in Gibson’s terms the theater of Dionysus affords paths and obstacles to the performers in the form of the side entrances, sk¯en¯e facade, central doorway, the seated audience, and so on. Recall that the eisodoi afford audience and actors alike ambulatory access to the theater, and in the latter case the affordance extends to characters arriving on carts (Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Euripides’ Trojan Women), chariots (in Aeschylus’ Persians, Euripides’ Electra), biers (Sophocles’ Trachiniae; Euripides’ Alcestis, Hippolytus, Suppliant Women), and so on. At key moments in the drama, an opening can convert to a barrier, and vice versa, perhaps best exemplified in the coup de theatre at the close of Euripides’ Medea. Hoping to save his sons from Medea’s vengeance, Jason runs onstage to find the entrance to the house locked, barring him from the place he once ruled as lord and master. As he pounds vainly at the door, the barrier that keeps him from his sons, a miraculous passage opens above for the triumphant Medea, who appears with her dead children in the chariot of the sun. In this spatial transformation, Euripides exposes Jason’s earthbound impotence before the power of a semidivine Medea. A related aspect of motion in the theater involves what Gibson calls “occlusion,” when a person moves behind a surface. We take in information as that movement occurs, such that we perceive (for example) the teacher who sits down behind her desk, although part of her body is occluded. As Gibson puts it, “the persistence of an object is specified by invariants of structure, not by the persistence of stimulation.”102 We don’t “remember” that the teacher has legs, we perceive them, because we see what we have seen and are seeing, even though the desk blocks the visual stimulation we can isolate as “legs.” The same can apply to cases of total occlusion—when my girlfriend steps behind the shower curtain, she is no longer visible, but her position in the environment is fully specified. “Thus the fact that objects continue to exist after they go out of sight can be seen; it need not be inferred.” Recent experiments testing for the perception of object permanence in four-month-old babies supports this conclusion, contrary to the view (entrenched in popular culture) championed by Jean Piaget. Disappearing acts surprise all of us, babies and adults: out of sight is not out of mind.103 When the magician removes the screen and the elephant is not there, we are surprised; it looks “impossible.” I know of no such disappearing acts in Greek tragedy, but characters do enter and exit (move in and out of occlusion) with different degrees of audience perception. In Agamemnon, for example, Clytemnestra appears at the central doorway (perhaps on the ekkukl¯ema) after the offstage murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra. Her appearance does not surprise the audience

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because we perceive where she was—inside the palace, albeit “out of sight.” We don’t remember suddenly that she had been waiting within; we perceived it all along. However, when Aegisthus enters from the eisodos two hundred lines later, it is a complete surprise. We may reason after the fact that Aegisthus must have been lurking in the background all the time, but we have never seen him onstage before. Unlike Clytemnestra’s entrances, Aegisthus’ arrival startles, and his physical presence destabilizes the drama, bringing on the next play of the trilogy. Moving in and out of occlusion constitutes a simple but significant dramatic resource in the ancient theater, one that articulates with Gibson’s “ecological” sense of object permanence. Another visual aspect of Greek tragedy that benefits from Gibson’s analysis involves the purposes and means of scene painting (sk¯enographia) in the ancient theater. A (possibly interpolated) passage in Aristotle’s Poetics (49a18– 19) credits Sophocles with the invention of scene painting, and scholars have speculated on its perspectival nature, assuming that painted Renaissance perspective marks an advance over the indexical signaling of place that characterizes most Greek art. In Attic vase painting, for example, a palm tree signals Delos, an altar means a sanctuary, a door stands for a house. This visual economy, based on a conventionalized metonymy, proved far more important to Greek painting than the development of linear perspective. Moreover, the problem with a single focused perspective for ancient scene painting is precisely that—given its size and shape, the theater of Dionysus offers anything but a single, frontal point-of-view. As a result, Ruth Padel’s claim that fifthcentury scene painting reflected perspectival architectural drawing seems forced.104 The natural background of the city and landscape makes painted perspective irrelevant; moreover, the bodily motion of characters entering and leaving by the central entrance and the parodoi, would rupture any trompe l’oeil effects painted on the facade. Gibson views the artificial fixedpoint perspective of the Renaissance as a second-order phenomenon, where the framed optic array comes from a fixed, flat picture to the (properly placed) eye; however, the “natural perspective” of ancient optics (present in the Greek theater and unaffected by scene painting, if I am right) represents the first-order phenomenon, where the ambient optic array comes directly from the world to the eye.105 Gibson offers useful insights into the visual perception called into play in a large outdoor space like the theater of Dionysus in Athens. A second “spatial thinker” who provides interpretive help is the gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, whose notion of “hodological” space seems particularly appropriate to Greek tragedy. Hodological implies roads or paths, the root hodos present in the Greek word eisodos ‘way in’ (used by Aristophanes of the side entranceways into the theater), exodos ‘way out’ (applied in Old Comedy to the chorus’s final exit), and parodos ‘side way’ (the term for the entrance song of the chorus).106 For Lewin, hodological space is space that matters, paths that

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tie people together or distances that keep them apart—put simply, direction to and from. The basic pattern of arrival and departure in the Greek theater—the interpretive basis for Oliver Taplin’s groundbreaking study The Stagecraft of Aeschylus—lends itself to Lewin’s psychological view of space.107 We might contrast Lewin’s gestalt sense of space as a medium of connection with that of a “modernist” like Proust, who viewed space as a primal quality that keeps things from coming together, manifesting a cruel separation at the heart of things.108 Speaking broadly, Greek tragedy prefers Lewin’s hodological connectedness but sees it (and not Proustian separation) as the source of potential tragedy. Finally, in a short essay entitled “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault introduces the useful idea of a heterotopia—a space freed from the normal constraints of time, either by accumulating it (like a cemetery or museum) or by liberating it, “time in the mode of festival” (fleeting, transitory, precarious). For Foucault, heterotopias provide a space for play, fantasy, and deviance (a Club Med resort, a cruise ship, a brothel), or its opposite, a meticulous space whose orderly arrangement contrasts with our jumbled reality (a Puritan settlement in North America, an early Jesuit colony in Paraguay).109 Of the latter sort, we might imagine a Disney theme park or perfectly run retirement center (with all-weather climate control); of the former, we might include a leather bar, the empty apartment in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, a rock festival. Xouthus in Euripides’ Ion, for instance, recalls the Delphi of his youth as such a heterotopia. There, at the biennial festival to Dionysus, he slept with a Delphian girl and (he wrongly thinks) fathered Ion. We might extend the notion generally—at least from the audience’s perspective—to the theater of Dionysus, where Athenians enjoyed festival license sanctioned by the god, subsidized by the polis, and performed within the confines of their city. Here we come upon what Foucault calls “those singular spaces . . . found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even opposite of others.”110 The concept of heterotopia suggests that a given space might escape the spatial assumptions that seem preordained by those committed to the Standard Social Science Model. In chapter 1 I use the observations just outlined to discuss the theater of Dionysus and what Lefebvre calls “spatial practice,” the way fifth-century Athenians conceived the interlocking spaces—domestic, sacred (or “sacralizing”), political, and geographical—in which they made their lives. In chapters 2 through 6, I examine specific tragedies, organized in what I take to be viable (but by no means exclusive) spatial patterns: Space for return: Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Euripides’ Heracles. Eremetic space: Sophocles’ Ajax, Antigone, Philoctetes; Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.

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Space and the body: Euripides’ Hecuba, Electra, Bacchae. Space, time, and memory: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Space and the “other”: Aeschylus’ Persians, Euripides’ Medea.

It will become clear in the discussion that these spatial categories neither limit nor exhaust a given play (e.g., Persians is also a “return” play), but suggest a dominant motif regarding space and its transformation within the drama. In the appendix, I return to the question, What is space? discussing the views of early Greek thinkers around the time of the theater’s rise. In the process, I suggest ways in which philosophical and scientific conceptions of space might help us understand what happened in the ancient theater. The discussion of specific plays draws on six spatial categories that I consider basic to the theater of Dionysus in Athens: theatrical space, scenic space, extrascenic space, distanced space, self-referential space, and reflexive space.111 The theater becomes a theatrical space when it “houses” a dramatic performance, that is, when the other spaces come into play. The term refers specifically to the spatial constraints and opportunities offered by the fifth-century theater. The physical nature of those theatrical givens has spurred significant controversy (about orchestra shape, the sk¯en¯e facade, the presence and function of an orchestra altar, the existence of a raised stage), which I address in chapter 1, within the context of other Athenian civic spaces. My second category, scenic space, involves the setting of a tragedy, specified by the facade with central entrance, by scenic elements (an altar or tomb, painted backdrops, significant props), and by references in the text (the cave of Philoctetes, the tent of Ajax, the house of Atreus in Agamemnon and Choephori, the temple of Apollo at Delphi in Eumenides, and so on). Even these examples force us to recognize how flexible and mutable scenic space can be. In Ajax the scene shifts from the hero’s tent in the Greek camp at Troy to an isolated beach, where Ajax’ suicide takes place. Although visually present, the palace in Choephori remains virtually “absent” during the first half of the play, where the action focuses on the grave of Agamemnon. We find no evidence that the palace looks out onto Agamemnon’s grave in any but a symbolic sense. In Eumenides, the temple of Apollo at Delphi provides the original setting, but the action soon shifts to Athens—first to the site of Athena’s cult image on the Acropolis, then to the court on the Areopagus. In other words, even when the scenic space seems fixed by the facade, a completely different scene may be created without any fundamental change in what the audience literally sees.112 This basic theatrical fact applies all the more to tragedies that are not set before built structures, such as Oedipus at Colonus. Here, for example, the area near the facade represents the outdoor grove of the Furies, from which the Chorus insists that Oedipus leave, draw-

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ing him toward the center of the orchestra, a “public meeting area” (lesch¯e, OC 167).113 In spite of plays like Eumenides and Ajax, which clearly mark their change of scene, and the scenic flexibility manifest in dramas like Choephori, the modern notion of the theater as an empty space does not fit Greek tragedy. Such free play, without preexisting spatial associations and coordinates, diffuses the dramatic focus that tragedy strives to achieve. Scenic space defines the place of a given tragedy, although it can do so with greater or less specificity, as in Orestes, where the scene seems to shift between inside and outside the house of Atreus.114 In Oedipus Tyrannus, on the other hand, the fact that the background constantly remains the house of the Labdacids is of signal importance in rooting the protagonist to his unrecognized home. It is significant that the action of Philoctetes unfolds within and without the hero’s violated cave and not anywhere on Lemnos. The house of Admetus provides the essential background for the strange events of Alcestis, from the exchange between Apollo and Thanatos at the outset to Alcestis’ miraculous return at the end, brought home to the husband and house for which she had died. Related to the stage setting is my third category, extrascenic space, lying immediately offstage, behind and contiguous to the facade—the palace interior in Agamemnon, or the cavernous space of Cyclops’ cave. Frequently a messenger evokes a specific area, as (for example) the Messenger in Oedipus Tyrannus, who describes the bedroom where Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus stabs out his sight. The tragedians also could reveal extrascenic space by showing it literally on the ekkukl¯ema, as when the mad hero in Heracles appears bound to a pillar of the home he has destroyed. Regarding offstage space generally, Lefebvre puns on the “seen and the obscene,” implying that what lies immediately offstage is psychically dangerous and must be kept out of sight. In a similar vein, Ruth Padel sees tragedy’s expulsion on the ekkukl¯ema of what lies within as a visual metaphor for exposing the hidden workings of the mind, demonstrating the difficulty of describing mental processes without resorting to interiority (which Vernant considers inappropriate for the ancient Greeks): This is the theater exulting in possibilities of relating inside to outside, unseen to seen, private inner experience to the external watching and guessing of others. . . . [The house offers] an image of the self. . . . [The] single central door . . . makes the genre’s supreme doubleness apparent. . . . The inside and outside of the theater’s space offers the watching imagination a way of thinking about the inside and outside of other structures important to tragedy: city, house, self. The performance of tragedy [is] articulated through spatial dualities.115

Critical interest in these dualities has, of course, informed structuralist readings of Greek tragedy, but we should be wary of overly dualistic schemes.

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For all its simplicity, Greek tragedy involves more than the psychological dualism of conscious and unconscious (or “the repressed”), and it includes far more spatial play than that suggested by contemporary accounts of the onstage and offstage polarity, with its homologous twins outside and inside, public and private, exposed and hidden, male and female, polis and oikos, and so on.116 In her valuable study The Family in Greek History, Cynthia Patterson reminds us that the oft-repeated “dichotomous equations public/ private ⳱ state/family ⳱ male/female ⳱ history/nonhistory” do not describe or account for the ancient Greek family.117 Similarly, ancient theatrical practice suggests that the Greeks held a much more interactive, permeable, and transformative notion of space than the modern scholars who study them. With this in mind, my fourth category—distanced space—refers to space that bears no immediate relationship to the scenic givens that provide the setting. In Oedipus Tyrannus, for example, Corinth, Cithairon, the oracle at Delphi, and the junction of the three roads all have a vivid presence, but none lies in the scenic or extrascenic realms. They are distanced, in that they lie beyond the theatrical and scenic areas visible to the audience. Whereas extrascenic space affords exits and entrances through the central door, distanced space provides for arrivals and departures via the eisodoi leading into the orchestra.118 In the case of divinities, arrival and departure may occur on high—by alighting from and flying off on the “crane-machine” (m¯echan¯e), or by appearing on or descending from the roof of the facade.119 Such arrivals remind us that the setting of a Greek tragedy is contained within larger spaces, which frequently are linked to wisdom and power, both divine and human. These distant places can emerge with special force when evoked by a “focal” character, one who serves as “a centre of sympathetic attention.”120 Cassandra in Agamemnon exemplifies such a “spatial carrier,” evoking the fate of far-off Troy even as she embodies it on stage. We can divide distanced space usefully into the subcategories of local, foreign, and divine (or mythic) places, each implying further physical distance from the scenic space and greater difficulty in bridging that distance. In Euripides’ Electra, for example, as well as the scenic space of the Farmer’s cottage, and the extrascenic space of its interior (the site of Clytemnestra’s murder), we meet several local distanced spaces in Argos. Radiating outward, these include the well where Electra fetches water; the fields where the Farmer leaves to work; the sanctuary of the Heraion, where the Chorus is headed to celebrate Hera’s festival; the rural homestead where the old Tutor keeps his flocks and from whence he arrives with food; the meadow where Aegisthus sacrifices to the nymphs, intruded upon by Orestes and Pylades; and the palace of Argos from whence Clytemnestra arrives (via chariot) with her servants. Foreign spaces include Phocis, from whence Orestes returns with Pylades, and places linked to Troy. The Trojan War seems to merge

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foreign and mythic distanced space, until the Dioscuri appear on the machine and Castor announces that the war was fought for a phantom. The fact that Helen never went to Troy effectively “voids” that distanced space, overturning its relation to the myth, a transformation already suggested by the play’s setting. Recall that Electra opens not at the palace, as we might expect, but before a rural cottage, where the heroine lives in rags as the wife of a poor farmer. The interplay between and among these various spaces supports a radical reworking of the story of Troy and its aftermath, discussed in chapter 4. If the previous spatial categories move progressively outward to include further and further reaches, my fifth category, self-referential or metatheatrical space, returns us to the theatrical playing area as such. Here, the playwright momentarily foregrounds the fact of dramatic performance by alluding to theatrical representation, musical accompaniment, and choral dance; by parodying dramatic and other performance genres; by employing quasi-direct address to the audience; by manipulating various “plots within plots”; and so on. Consider, for example, the emergence of self-referential space following Agave’s arrival in the Bacchae. She carries the mask of Pentheus, which represents both her son’s head and (in her delusion) that of the lion she has killed. Euripides reinforces the spatial play between the theater and its fictive setting by having the actor who previously played Pentheus now play the mother who murdered him. Similarly, the recognition scene in Euripides’ Electra draws on and mocks the parallel scene in Aeschylus’ Choephori, encouraging the audience to view the reunion of Orestes and Electra against its earlier theatrical representation. In Oedipus Tyrannus, when the Chorus asks, ti dei me choreuein; (“Why should I dance?” OT 896), it calls into question the function of the festival performance itself. If, as the Chorus fears at the moment, there exists no meaningful link between the divine forces of the cosmos and human actions, then why bother to dance in the gods’ honor? For the audience, the logical question becomes, Why gather to watch?121 In Oedipus Tyrannus, self-referential space opens up new, and troubling, issues for the audience. In my view the metatheatrical aspect in Greek tragedy does not operate primarily on an aesthetic level (delight in theatrical play for its own sake), nor does it signal a “crisis of representation,” where the drama refers to its own (and other) performances and little else.122 Rather, when Greek tragedy points to its own operations, the audience develops a flexibility of seeing that draws it further into the process by which meanings emerge and the narrative has an effect. The spectators view tragedy with an increasing sense of their own relationship to the action, not because of the subject matter but because of the mode by which the subject matter comes to life. My final category, reflexive space, extends the idea of a critically alert audience, suggesting that the fifth-century theater offered a space for civic reflec-

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tion and self-awareness, part of the relationship between tragedy and Athenian democracy.123 By using various anachronisms (political, legal, cultural) and incorporating Athens into the plot, tragedy draws the fifth-century city and its audience into the drama. Discussing Shakespeare’s history plays, Rackin observes that anachronisms “break the frame of historical representation” and thereby “dissolve the distance between past events and present audience in the eternal present of dramatic performance.”124 By “cracking open” the time of the play, if you will, the Greek tragedian opened up its spaces as well, allowing the drama to “spill over . . . into the polis at large,” as Halliburton puts it.125 Among examples of reflexive space, consider the Athenian-like popular assembly hinted at in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women (365–75, 516–23, 600–624) and Agamemnon (844–47, 1409–14, 1352– 55, 1615–16), elaborated more fully in Euripides’ Suppliant Women; dramatic scenes built around the form and vocabulary of fifth-century lawcourts (the trial of Orestes in Eumenides, the ersatz trials of Helen in Trojan Women and Polymestor in Hecuba, and the trial-influenced scenes in Sophocles’ two Oedipus plays); evocations of contemporary social and performance practice, as in the monstrous symposium in Cyclops, or the epinician for Orestes in Euripides’ Electra; and—most significantly—the movement of the action to Athens, the very city where the tragedies were performed, in Eumenides, Medea, Heracles, Ion, and Oedipus at Colonus.126 Unlike the concept of the “metatheatrical” (an idea based on the implicit doubleness of all dramatic representation), reflexive space emerges when tragedy takes on a strongly fifth-century flavor, or a speaker alludes to contemporary political concerns, or when the theater evokes other public spaces, like the Athenian lawcourts or the assembly. Redfield proposes the interesting counterargument that tragedy used contemporary material “to lead the audience into the reality of the legend.” By adopting a kind of theatrical naturalism, the plays make the old myths appear more reasonable and relevant: Sophocles’ Oedipus becomes believable because he behaves like Pericles, not because Oedipus Tyrannus has anything particular to say about the Athenian leader.127 But surely the process works both ways. Tragedians use myth to explore the world of the audience; they do not simply exploit the world of the audience to justify myth. Far from producing an alienating effect, the evocation of reflexive space brings the experience of the play closer to those who have gathered to watch it. This capacity arises in part from the paradoxical fact that tragedy presents a heroic and not a fifthcentury setting, an “elsewhere” in time and space that creates distance from the local and avoids the dangers and difficulties of direct political engagement. But there is more to the story, as Easterling points out: “If distance were all that mattered, it would be just as effective to use an anonymous and unlocalized ’once upon a time,’ whereas here [in tragedy] the specific echoing of the language, characters, and stories of epic—and lyric—poetry is

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taken to quite elaborate lengths of allusiveness and opens up multiple ironic possibilities.”128 To help understand how the play between—and among—these spatial categories might operate, let us look briefly at Euripides’ Suppliant Women. The tragedy takes place before the temple of Demeter at Eleusis, indicated by the sk¯en¯e facade with a central doorway. The text provides information about the scenic space, particularly the presence of an altar to Demeter, located in the center of the orchestra (33–34, 291).129 Athough visibly prominent at the outset, the facade affords not a single entrance or exit during the play, a unique occurrence in a tragedy where a facade is acknowledged as present.130 In the terms adopted here, no extrascenic space materializes behind the facade, meaning that we see only arrivals from, and departures to, various distanced spaces, including the following: 1. The local environs of Athens, which eventually take over the scenic space of Eleusis. These are signaled by Theseus’ arrival from the city and return with his mother, his visit (with Adrastus and the sons) to the Athenian assembly, and his departure to muster the Athenian troops for battle. 2. The foreign cities of Thebes and Argos. The Theban Herald, the Messenger, and Theseus (returning from Thebes with the corpses) all arrive from Thebes and help create it in the audience’s imagination. As for Argos, the canceled entry of the Argive suppliants at the outset brings Argos to the stage, as does the strange arrival of Evadne and Iphis, and Iphis’ desolate return home. 3. The divine space represented by Athena. Her appearance on high, as we shall see, merges the distanced space of the gods with the reflexive space of Athens.

Euripides’ refusal to employ the extrascenic space of the temple, or to call attention to the building as such after the opening scene, gradually diminishes its importance. In the process, the play moves away from its Eleusinian setting and the promise of the Mysteries, reflecting the hope of renewal in the Demeter-Persephone myth. In its place, the political space of Athens increasingly dominates the action, culminating in the arrival of Athena, warrior goddess of the city, on the machine. The staging of the first part of Suppliant Women gives us clear signs of this spatial trajectory. In a canceled entry Aethra stands at Demeter’s altar, surrounded by the women of the Chorus who plead for help in recovering the corpses of their unburied sons. The temple background, orchestra altar, and verbal description establish that we are at Eleusis, where Aethra has come to celebrate the Proerosia, an Athenian ritual for the fall plowing. The women “bind” Aethra with suppliant wands, where she remains “imprisoned” (31– 32) at the altar until “freed” (364), at which point the play cuts loose from Eleusis.

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Arrayed silently in the background are the women’s grandsons (the sons of the dead) and the defeated Argive leader Adrastus. The gendered spatial arrangement—women in a ritual deadlock near the center, men at the back— is maintained through most of the opening sequence. With Theseus’ arrival from Athens, however, civic demands replace ritual concerns, and female thr¯enoi give way to political logoi. Eventually this dynamic alters the stage picture, dividing the Argive contingent (Adrastus, sons, the suppliant women) near the facade from the Athenian mother and son at the orchestra altar.131 Adrastus appeals to Theseus as the leader of a strong and merciful city, unlike Sparta (187), encouraging the audience to glimpse—behind the myth—the contemporary cities of Athens, Thebes, Argos, and Sparta destructively entangled in the Peloponnesian War.132 When Theseus rejects the Argives’ plea for help, Aethra enters the fray, challenging her son to uphold Panhellenic norms by leading Athens against Thebes (297–331). She delivers the first of the play’s overtly political speeches; the now persuaded Theseus follows with a description of democratic self-government and the workings of the Athenian assembly (349–56), where he will present the Argive case.133 The poignancy of mourning and the simple eloquence of supplication yield to political discourse with a strong fifth-century accent. The sense that Athens has become the place of the play increases markedly with the release of Aethra from her suppliant bondage.134 After she departs for Athens with Theseus, Adrastus, and the secondary chorus of the sons, we hear next to nothing of the Eleusinian setting.135 The Chorus performs one of the shortest odes in tragedy (only sixteen lines), during which time Theseus meets with the Athenian assembly, persuades the city to vote for recovering the dead bodies, and returns with Adrastus to Eleusis. Flexible treatment of space and time characterizes tragedy, as the near speed-of-light arrival of the Greeks from Troy in Agamemnon demonstrates. But in Suppliant Women Euripides so compacts space and time that the distance separating Athens from Eleusis collapses, and the contemporary world increasingly impinges on the heroic and mythic.136 The encounter between Theseus and the Theban Herald accelerates this transformation. In a detail often overlooked, Theseus first instructs his own herald on the message he must take to Thebes (381–94). The unexpected arrival of Creon’s Herald preempts the Athenian’s departure, as if the important distanced spaces now converge on Athens. A rancorous debate ensues on the relative merits of tyranny and democracy, marked by fifth-century vocabulary and references to contemporary life. The Theban compares his advantageous position to one who moves first in pessos (409–10), a popular board game with strong political overtones.137 The Herald’s attack on democratic excess resonates with other fifth-century sources, and his particular charge that Athens “meddles” in other states’ affairs (prassein su poll’, 576–

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77) echoes the oft-repeated accusation against Periclean polupragmosun¯e.138 Theseus praises the annual rotation of officers, a distinguishing feature of Athenian democracy (406–7); he emphasizes political equality, denied in tyranny (429–32) but guaranteed in Athens (440–41); he even quotes the phrase that opened each meeting of the Athenian assembly (438–39). The space of the play becomes increasingly reflexive, as the Eleusinian setting and its mythical associations fade. We see two men engaged in a constitutional debate, an exchange not unlike that between the Corinthians and the Athenians in Thucydides (1.68–78).139 More and more the theater resembles an Athenian public forum. Bringing news of the Athenian victory, the Messenger at first glance introduces a world geographically and temporally distant from fifth-century Athens. He evokes Thebes of the heroic age, with its formidable seven gates; the Boeotian plain where an epiclike battle is met; and a warrior Theseus, who provides the mythic foundation for Athens’ superiority, both moral and military (650–723).140 However, specific details wrest the action from a distanced space and heroic past, moving it toward the theatrical here-and-now. An escaped Argive prisoner of war, the Messenger watches the battle from a Theban tower, “spectator” (theat¯es, 652) rather than participant. His relationship to the action resembles that of the audience to his own account; he even responds to the battle like a thrilled theatergoer, shouting, applauding (kakrousa cheiras), and dancing his approval of the Athenian victory (719–20).141 In a similar metatheatrical vein, Theseus recovers the corpses of rank-and-file Argives who died at Thebes and he buries them at Eleutherae, on the Attic side of Mount Cithairon (756–59), a village associated with Dionysus Eleuthereus, the patron god of the City Dionysia.142 In its spatial play, however, the Messenger’s speech scatters more than a light dust of theatrical self-reference. Praising Theseus’ restraint in not sacking Thebes (721–25), the Messenger proclaims “That’s the kind of man to elect as general [haireisthai strat¯egon]” (726), alluding to the ten annually elected strat¯egoi who ran the Athenian military, discussed in chapter 1. Pericles’ reelection to that office allowed him to wield power as primus inter pares till his death in 429. Thereafter the office went increasingly to demagogues like Cleon, charged with prolonging the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, by several characters in Aristophanes’ comedies, and obliquely by Theseus himself earlier in Suppliant Women (232–37).143 The Messenger distrusts leaders who lack Theseus’ self-control, climbing too high only to bring themselves and their cities crashing down (728–30). Again, Euripides uses the theater to dramatize contemporary public concerns while presenting a narrative from the “mythic past.” On his return with the bodies of the Seven, Theseus invites Adrastus to deliver a funeral oration over the corpses for the instruction of “these young men of the city” (843), referring to the young Athenians in the theater audi-

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ence. In a passage that troubles some critics, Theseus warns Adrastus not to give a blow-by-blow account of how the heroes met their deaths (846– 56), a pointed barb at Aeschylean technique where battle reports unfold with a clarity that mocks the chaos of war.145 As in the Messenger speech, theatrical self-reference gives way to the evocation of Athenian reflexive space, drawing on the great epitaphioi logoi delivered at the Kerameikos, part of the annual Genesia festival that provided public burial for Athenians who fell in battle.146 In his funeral address, Adrastus drastically rewrites history, converting arrogant soldiers-of-fortune into models of civic propriety. He unwittingly underlines the dangers inherent in such public occasions, tailor-made for social and political indoctrination.147 Sobriety aside, Adrastus anticipates Chekhov’s classic story “The Orator,” in which the title character produces grand graveside rhetoric over the wrong corpse. By modeling Adrastus’ funeral speech on the public discourse of contemporary Athens, Euripides transforms the theater of Dionysus into a space where the original audience members gained critical perspective on their city and its ideological formation. With the unexpected appearance of Evadne on a crag above the sanctuary,148 the original setting of Eleusis reasserts itself. Unmentioned before or after her scene, the widow of Capaneus throws herself on his funeral pyre and so arrives at “the marriage chamber of Persephone” (1022). But Evadne reenacts the Eleusinian story as if in a parabolic mirror. In the Hymn to Demeter, Persephone leaves her husband Hades, ascends into the light, and joyfully reunites with her mother Demeter. Evadne does the reverse, leaping down into the fire to merge erotically and indissolubly with her dead husband, leaving her father Iphis desolate. In spatial terms, Evadne is either too high above or too far below her father for him to make contact. “Your hand cannot reach me!” she cries out before leaping (1069), creating the negative image of Theseus clasping his mother’s hand when they leave Eleusis (361). Their departure for Athens sustains the Eleusinian promise of parent-child reunion; the eternal separation of Iphis and Evadne shatters it.149 Evadne’s appearance returns the play to Eleusis, but her suicide denies the sanctuary its gift of hope beyond the grave. Cut off forever from his daughter, Iphis wishes for a second life without offspring, whose early deaths cut too deeply for a parent to bear (1080–112).150 Iphis’ wish never to have fathered children echoes the Chorus’s desire to have lived unmarried and childless (786–93), a wish the women repeat when they see the bodies of their dead sons: “If only my body had never been yoked / to a husband’s bed” (822–23). Similar statements occur at moments of fear and loss in other tragedies, but the Eleusinian setting gives the sentiment particular bite. Mirroring Demeter’s journey to Eleusis in search of her lost daughter, Iphis knows nothing of the myth’s restorative conclusion, or of the promise it offers those initiated in its Mysteries.

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This extraordinary scene highlights the anomaly of the play’s initial Eleusinian setting. We recognize the locational disjunction earlier, when Theseus speaks of the inappropriateness of foreign women—dressed in mourning, their hair shorn—surrounding his mother at Demeter’s altar (92–97). “What’s going on?” (ti chr¯ema; 92) he asks, for corpses do not belong at a Greek sanctuary, particularly one that celebrates a successful anodos ‘way up’ or anabasis ‘upward journey’ from the underworld. Adrastus explains that the women have “not come on a mission to the Mysteries of Demeter, but in order to bury the dead” (173–74), and the phrase “bury the dead” rings like a refrain until the stage is laden with corpses.151 In the first funereal sequence (794–954, the longest in tragedy), we watch the procession into the theater of the recovered bodies, a kommos between the Chorus and Adrastus, the funeral oration discussed earlier, and the procession of the corpses back out the eisodoi for cremation offstage. In contrast to the Demeter-Persephone anabasis, the women of the Chorus wish to “perish with these children / making the journey down [katabasa] with them to Hades” (796–97). The second funeral sequence follows hard on the Evadne-Iphis scene, where suicide introjects the immediacy of dying into a space overwhelmed by the already dead. Iphis exits out one eisodos into self-imposed oblivion, saying that the old should die and make way for the young (1112–13). As if on cue, the sons of the Seven (with Adrastus) enter through the other eisodos, bearing the ashes of their fathers. Once they join the Chorus of women, the stage holds the span of Argive generations, a visual image of the hard-won achievement of the suppliants’ petition that opened the play. And yet a rift grows between the grieving mothers of the dead and their grandsons, consumed with the desire for heroic revenge (1143–52). As the generation and gender gaps widen, the space of Suppliant Women again opens up reflexively, incorporating aspects of the festival of Dionysus that preceded the tragic performances, discussed in chapter 1. At the age of eighteen, orphaned sons of Athenian soldiers who fell in battle marched through the orchestra dressed in hoplite armor provided by the city. Raised and armed at civic expense, the young men promised to defend Athens in the future. In the drama, Argive orphans (emphasized at 1132–34) process through the orchestra holding the cremated remains of their fathers, men who had received a funeral oration (857–917) like the fathers of the Athenian orphans at the public ceremony in the Kerameikos. The Argive youths long to bear a shield and avenge their war-slain fathers (1144, 1146–47, 1150–51), just as their Athenian counterparts bore the city’s armor (including the hoplite shield) in honor of their dead forebears. From on high, Athena exhorts the Argive orphans to lead a “bronze-clad” army against Thebes when their “beards begin to shadow” (1219–20), again recalling the Athenian boys who take up arms when they come of age. “Persephone’s hallowed floor” (271), from which the mothers made their opening

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supplication, now serves as a proto–staging area for another invasion of Thebes, the same (orchestral) ground where the audience at the preperformance ritual had witnessed homegrown orphans encouraged to fight on behalf of the city. In both the scenic space of the play and the real space of the theater, the seeds of future war are sown. Perhaps more than any extant tragedy, Suppliant Women conjoins mythical Athens with its living counterpart. That Greek theater offered a space to dramatize contemporary issues does not reflect a lack of concern for the plot, dialogue, and character of the heroic story-at-hand. On the contrary, it demonstrates that tragic myths possessed sufficient gravity to hold the contemporary world within their orbit, creating a wide spatial field in which mythic and contemporary worlds could coexist. In a play like Suppliant Women, that field includes nothing more important than the Peloponnesian War. Creon’s tyrannical refusal to return the Argive corpses leads to the women’s supplication and Theseus’ battle on their behalf; it also reflects the historical refusal of the Thebans to relinquish Athenian dead after the campaign at Delium in November 424.152 Suppliant Women premiered some five months later in 423, only a few days before the Athenian assembly voted on a year-long armistice with Sparta, part of the increasing effort to end the Peloponnesian War.153 It seems likely that the delegates from the Peloponnesus arrived for discussions with the Athenian boul¯e just before the City Dionysia began and actually were in attendance at the first performance of Suppliant Women, along with many of the citizens of Athens who would vote on the agreement. In such an environment, the image of the orphan-to-hoplite ceremony at the end of the play would loom large, moving from theatrical fiction into Athens’ immediate future.154 Similarly, when Athena insists that Theseus formalize a defensive alliance between her city and Argos (1183–1212), she echoes the on-again, off-again negotiations that eventually led to the Argive-Athenian alliance of 420, forged after the short-lived Peace of Nikias ended the first stage of the Peloponnesian War in 421.155 A deep-rooted concern for peace may explain Euripides’ use of the myth of the Argive Seven to explore arguments for a just war; the advantages of restraint in combat; the preference for resolving disputes without force; and, above all, the need to resist the compulsions to vengeance and violence.156 The play establishes beyond doubt that the original Seven surrendered to these destructive impulses, with tragic results for the survivors, as the title suggests.157 Not only was the conflict avoidable, as Adrastus himself admits (737–41), but the gods themselves condemned it (155–61, 214–18, 229– 31). In taking up the Argive cause, Theseus explicitly distances the recovery of the corpses for burial from the Seven’s original attack on Thebes (246–49, 522–41 after pointedly silencing Adrastus at 513, 558–63, 590–93, 720– 25). The hubris of that invasion left its mark on Greek iconography, in the depiction of Capaneus struck down by Zeus’ lightning bolt as he mounts a

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siege ladder on the walls of Thebes. The image occurs several times in the play (496–505, 639–40, 727–30 [by implication], 860, 934–35, 980–85, 1009–11), and we catch its reflection in the leap of Capaneus’ widow into his funeral pyre.159 If Euripides goes to such lengths to establish the injustice of the Seven’s campaign against Thebes, why does Athena encourage their sons to mount another invasion to exact vengeance? Considering important spatial patterns in the tragedy helps provide an answer. The unexpected arrival of Athena on high completes the scenic shift from Eleusis to Athens, and from the mythic world to the contemporary polis, discussed earlier. Athena counters the image of Demeter at the outset, symbolically present in the figure of Aethra, standing orchestra center at the goddess’s altar, performing rites in her honor. 160 So, too, Athena stands in place of Evadne, the female character who brings the play suddenly back to Eleusis. Appearing in the same position as Evadne, Athena proves no less shocking.161 The goddess unleashes a cycle of violence whose impact the audience has, in a sense, already seen in Evadne’s suicide from the same spot. When the immortal Athena urges young men to battle (1213–26), the audience sees—standing below Athena and behind the boys—the suppliant mothers still dressed for mourning, whose presence throughout evokes the pain unleashed by war. The split focus—immortal on high, mortals below—simultaneously acknowledges and denies the lessons about violent excess that the play has exposed. We hear them voiced by Adrastus and Theseus, reflected in the moderation of Theseus in battle, embodied in the fate of Capaneus, and forgotten at the end. Although linked by gender and the fact that the same actor played all three roles (a convention explored further in chapter 4), the characters of Aethra, Evadne, and Athena behave in very different ways, providing a useful perspective on the spaces of Greek religious cult referred to in Suppliant Women. Athena appears on high, a confident Olympian talking down to her subjects, a goddess who requires lavish public worship at civicwide festivals like the Panathenaia. She stands as the chauvinist champion of her city, Promachos (“fighting in the forefront”), a virgin warrior whose colossal bronze statue dominated the Athenian Acropolis, rising so high that sailors rounding Cape Sounion (some forty miles distant) could see the point of her spear and crest of her helmet catching the sun.162 Evadne signals the other side of Greek religious life, a chthonic cult linked to the heroic dead. She leaps down to the earth to join Capaneus, who—buried apart, at Theseus’ behest (934–36, 1009–11)—is destined for worship.163 Such hero cults required sacrificial blood to flow into the ground, frequently without feasting among the participants, unlike Olympian ritual where the smoke of burnt sacrifice rose to the heavens and a shared meal followed.164 Moving between Olympian sky and a hero’s earth is the goddess Demeter, whose altar at Eleusis plays a prominent role early in the play. In the Hymn to

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Demeter, she appears at Eleusis both in divine and human form, challenging Zeus and the male gods who allowed Hades to abduct her daughter. Using her power over the earth to withhold its vegetation, Demeter frees Persephone from the underworld and reverses (for two-thirds of the year) the virilocal pattern of her marriage to Hades. An “eccentric goddess,” Demeter stands somewhat outside the pantheon, a divinity closely linked to women. Her most widely attested festival, the Thesmophoria, allowed only female participants.165 At Eleusis, her mystery cult was neither parochial nor chauvinistic, but Panhellenic in nature, like the norms that Aethra insists should guide her city’s actions vis-`a-vis the dead (306–13).166 Open to all Greek speakers who sought initiation, the Mysteries offered mortals a communal experience of light and hope, bridging the gap between death and immortality. Two images associated with Demeter—new growth from the earth, and life-giving harvest—reflect the agricultural cycle basic to human survival, and central to Greek conceptions of the space of the cosmos (examined in the appendix).167 To celebrate the Proerosia, a sacrifice before the fall plowing and sowing, Aethra comes to Demeter’s shrine “where the bristling ears of corn appeared for the first time above this earth” (28–36).168 Theseus alludes later to the natural cycle of growth and harvest (205–7), echoing the traditional sentiment (Od. 19.109–14) that a land governed with justice brings forth abundant crops. However, the arrival and supplication of the mothers of the dead interrupt Aethra’s generative ritual. They bind her to the altar with a “chainless chain of leaves” (28–36), insisting that the ritual demand to return “corpses to the earth, and spirit to the air” (534) take precedence.169 As Theseus comes to understand, “that which nourished life [the earth] must take it back” (536).170 In the process, we hear of various ways that humans bring forth and cut down, replacing the natural regenerative cycle with ongoing destruction. Theseus ridicules the Theban refusal to bury the dead out of fear that “those covered in the earth / will somehow dig up your land; or that the earth’s dark womb / will bear children, and with them vengeance” (544–46). The Thebans themselves are spartoi ‘sown ones’ (578, 712), whose mythical emergence from the soil (and resulting bloodbath) the Herald invokes before the battle with Athens (578–80).171 Paranoid tyrants kill their city’s best and brightest, like “one who cuts down the ears of spring wheat” (448–49), an image echoed in Herodotus’ account of the despotic behavior of the Milesian tyrant Thrasybulus and his Corinthian counterpart Periander.172 In his battle against the tyrant Creon, Theseus swings his mace like a scythe at harvest time, “snapping necks like stalks and cropping the helmets on their heads like ears of summer corn” (716–17).173 After the sacrifice that seals the pact between Argos and Athens, Athena instructs Theseus “to bury the sharpcutting knife in the earth’s womb,” where it will emerge to frighten Argives

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who forget the oath and march on Athens (1205–9).174 The spatially concrete replaces the ambiguities of language and memory, for it is the knife in the ground that guarantees the treaty. The buried knife suggests that the play of space in Suppliant Women includes some appropriate “placements”: the Chorus releases Aethra from her suppliant prison; the earth receives the corpses, the air the souls of the Argive heros, as Theseus promises (524–36); the victorious Athenians do not violate the inner sanctum of Thebes but only take back the dead;175 the Argive suppliants, displaced at the start, return to Argos with the remains of their loved ones. Yet the childish fears of the Thebans lambasted by Theseus seem justified in the end: out of the recovered dead grows vengeance, until the sons threaten a future invasion and the destruction of Thebes. Many scholars think that Euripides faces up to the instrinsic violence in human nature, acknowledging that forces within cannot be gainsaid and will emerge no matter what. To give the argument its spatial form, they see Euripides as a tragic realist who locates irrepressible instincts to violence in the natural space of the womb (both earthly and motherly), which are passed on in birth.176 Others note the ultimate failure of logos in the face of pathos, pitting the rationality espoused by Theseus against the emotional suffering of the suppliant women.177 Missing from both these accounts is the play’s insistence on the role of education in developing or deterring propensities to violence. We hear time and again of the duty of the elders to try to redirect hot-blooded or wrongheaded youth away from their destructive tendencies. In their different ways, Adrastus (with the Seven, 160–161, 231–37, 250– 51), Iphis (with Evadne, 1038–69), and the women of the Chorus (with their grandsons, 1143–58) fail to do this. Aethra succeeds by changing Theseus’ mind (297–341), and he firmly and wisely limits the violence he must employ, as the Messenger reports. But the success or failure of paideia against destructive instincts ultimately must be measured across a society. Theseus invites Adrastus to speak for the benefit of young Athenians (843), and in his speech history is forgotten, replaced by untruths that perpetuate the cycle of violence. Adrastus closes his funeral oration by affirming the importance of such an education: “This bravery [of the Seven] can be taught [didakton], for even a baby is taught [didasketai] to hear and say things he doesn’t yet understand [math¯esin]. Whoever learns [an math¯ei] something that way is likely to hold onto it until old age” (913–17). We find few clearer statements in tragedy of what we would call ideological brainwashing. In his lavish praise of the Seven, Adrastus emphasizes the way they learned their values from a young age: the young (neanias, 873) Eteoclus; Hippomedon, who learned to prefer a martial life from childhood (pais o¯ n, 882); the foreign-born Parthenopaeus, raised as a youth (pais, 889) and educated (paideuetai, 891) in Argos; and Tydeus, who received excellent training in weapons (heur¯on akrib¯e mousik¯en en aspidi 906).

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It is not, as Burian claims, that “Theseus’ ordered world of the intellect will yield to the mother’s world of emotions, bringing into question the assumptions on which it is founded.”178 The women do not demand a new war on Thebes, only the return of their sons’ bodies. The trouble arises not from emotional mothers but from their grandsons, educated toward violence by a logos that Theseus himself seems to have resisted. Returning to the space of Suppliant Women, we now can view it as an educational arena that reflects other paideutic spaces in Athens: the assembly, lawcourts, the agora, various ritual situations, schools, state funerals, preperformance festivities, even tragic performances themselves.179 Adopting Lewin’s formulation, these are all “spaces that matter,” that build the ideological roads that connect the city within itself and out to the larger world. By serving as a heterotopia in Foucault’s sense, the theater stands sufficiently outside those ideological forces to offer a critical perspective on them. Athena, however, offers no such perspective, demanding that her “patronized” Theseus stand by while the seeds take root of another unjust war. In the figure of Athena, the locus of “Athenian state religion,” we see a twisted image of Theseus’ mother Aethra, who rose off her knees from the orchestra floor and bravely entered the world of political discourse, shaming her son into undertaking a just war.180 Speaking down from above, Athena teaches precisely the opposite, and the young Theseus (emphasized at 190, 283, 580) must learn the lesson. Despite his best efforts, he finds himself trapped in a web of history and myth.181 The cycle of violence continues, in no small part because it receives official sanction. The fact that Athena shifts the destination at the end of the play to Athens underlines this bleak conclusion. Before Athena’s appearance, Adrastus bids farewell to Theseus, and he and his contingent (the suppliant women, and the sons with the funeral urns) prepare to depart for Argos (1165–82). After the goddess’s intervention, however, the entire party exits through the eisodos to swear the oath “before this man and his city” (t¯oid’ andri polei t’, 1232– 34), moving out of the fictional world and into the reality of Athens, where the tragedy was performed. Earlier, the play brought the city’s various spaces temporarily into view, nested in the orchestra; at the end, that relationship is reversed. The theater again becomes a place nested in the wider space of the fifth-century polis. When the members of the audience, too, make their exit, they reinhabit their city as they choose, influenced by what the spatial transformations of Suppliant Women have revealed.

CHAPTER ONE THE THEATER AND ATHENIAN SPATIAL PRACTICE We have already said that the city should be open to the land and to the sea, and to the whole country as far as possible. —Aristotle, Politics

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E CAN DESCRIBE the fifth-century theater of Dionysus at Athens as a spare architectural frame set in a natural landscape,1 in contrast to the enclosed buildings we usually think of as theaters. This expansive outdoor space gathered a large and diverse audience. Theatergoers arrived by foot from the city, via animal cart from the environs of Attica, and by sea from elsewhere in Greece. They made their way to the precinct of Dionysus Eleuthereus, past the god’s altar and temple, then through the eisodoi (the same side entrances used by the performers), across the hard earth of the orchestra, and finally up the south slope of the Acropolis to the seating area (cavea), which included the bare ground of the hillside (figure 1).2 From their different vantage points, those in the audience looked down over the paths they had just traveled. They could see the temple and sanctuary of Dionysus, the city walls, and (from east to west) the Hippades, Diomeian, Itonian, Halade, and South gates (figure 2). Within the walls were visible (from various points in the cavea) the sanctuary of Olympian Zeus, including the abandoned but imposing temple started by the Pisistratids; the temple of Apollo Pythios, called the Pythion; the temple of Apollo Delphinios and the nearby Palladion (the wooden statue of Athena purportedly captured at Troy), with the adjoining areas where the eponymous homicide courts (the Delphinion and Palladion) met; the sanctuary of Cronos and Rhea; the shrine to G¯e; a shrine called the Neleion, dedicated to Kodros, Neleus, and Basil¯e; the sanctuary of the Nymphs, where brides-to-be dedicated votives before their wedding; possibly a shrine dedicated to Theseus, Hippolytus, and Aphrodite; and many private houses of the southern city, which Thucydides (2.15.3) considered to be the oldest part of non-Acropolis Athens (figure 3). Those sitting higher up in the theater audience could gaze outside the walls. They could see the Illissos valley and the extension of the city to the south, including the sanctuary and gymnasium of Kynosarges, the sanctuary of Zeus Meilichios in Agrai, and the Callirrhoe spring, which provided water for the nuptial baths that a bride and groom took (separately) as part of their

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wedding ritual; to the east (figure 4) they caught the slopes of Mount Hymettos, famous for its thyme (an Athenian export), honey, and the marble quarries that provided much of the building material for Athens’ impressive public monuments; closer in they could see the Ardettos hill, the sanctuary of Artemis Agrotera (the site of annual sacrifices commemorating the victory over the Persians at Marathon) and the edges of the Lykeion, the exercise ground and place of muster for the Athenian hoplites and cavalry; to the south and west (figure 5), the bay of Phaleron (hidden by the hill of the Nymphs and of the Muses), out in the direction of the city’s port, Piraeus; further beyond, the Saronic Gulf and the peak of Prophitis Ilias, the site of the shrine of Zeus Panhellenios, on the island of Aegina where many Athenians had sheltered when the Persians occupied and burned their city in 480.3 Behind and above them loomed the Acropolis (the particular target of the Persians), packed with various cult sites, most of them dedicated to the goddess Athena. The audience gazed up at the sky, down at the beaten earth of the orchestra, out over the city, its plains, hills, and out toward the sea. The spectators also looked at one another because the slope where they sat and the common light of the sun forced them to survey themselves even as they watched the performances. Let us compare this account with the description of the Greek theater offered by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy: “[It] recalls a lonely valley in the mountains: the architecture of the scene appears like a luminous cloud formation that the Bacchants swarming over the mountains behold from a height—like a splendid frame in which the image of Dionysus is revealed to them.”4 For all its power, Nietzsche’s vision of romantic loneliness and Dionysiac apotheosis ignores the theater’s civic location. To be sure, it remained part of the natural environment, and performances depended on the cooperation of the elements. But the theater also acknowledged its physical situation within the city, offering public and open space, outward in its impulses and in its potential for shared experience. The space of such a theater implies not only the order of nature and the gods but also the human society of which it is a part. Tragedy continually draws together the natural world of the earth and the heavens and the built environment of the polis, exemplified in the opening lines of the parodos in Antigone: Hail the sun! Brightest of all that ever dawned on the seven gates of Thebes, great eye of golden day, sending light across the rippling waters of Dirce. (Ant. 100–105)

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Greek tragedies often refer to sunlight or the dawn near their outset, a dramatically effective means of bringing the myth into the present world of its performance.5 The acknowledgment of natural elements may lessen the differences that some critics postulate between the Athens of the audience and the non-Athenian settings of many tragedies, especially Thebes.6 In the Antigone passage, for example, the audience that watched the Theban Chorus praise the dawn also looked on the sun overhead, the Athenian city gates, and the reflected light off the Ilissos, all analogous to elements in the choral aubade. The morning sun heralds Thebes’ victory over Argos, the successful expulsion of disaster from the city; it also brings to light a new disaster, emanating from the corpse of Polyneices. As the Guard reports, Antigone appears over the body “when the bright circle / of the sun stood in the middle of the heavens / warming us with its heat” (Ant. 415–17).7 As the tragedy moves toward its climax, Teiresias warns Creon that he faces his own disaster “before the racing sun completes many laps” (1064–65). The sun signals key moments in the mythic world of the play, even as it visibly registers the passage of time during the performance. Following Gibson’s lead, this chapter considers the theater of Dionysus “ecologically,” as a place nested within a series of encompassing spaces. We begin by reconstructing (with unavoidable speculation and simplification) the fifth-century theater per se, focusing on the audience, orchestra, and stage areas. As noted earlier, the theater lay within the temenos (sacred precinct) of Dionysus Eleuthereus, and we need to consider the sanctuary’s layout, as well as the place of the festival within the Athenian religious and agricultural calendar. The discussion leads to the role played by sacred, or sacralizing, space in Athenian life, defined by permanent elements (primarily altars), processions that link them, and rituals performed there, particularly blood sacrifice. We then consider the ceremonies that took place in the theater before and after the competitions. Here, the orchestra-audience relationship resembled that of other civic spaces crucial to Athenian democracy, such as the Pnyx (where the assembly met), the council chamber (bouleut¯erion), and the lawcourts. We then examine other aspects of Athenian spatial practice, including the interdependence of city and country in daily life and the configuration of domestic space, with its interplay between inside and outside. In the process we may understand better how the Greek theatrical environment included the nontheatrical world in its compass, extending the audience’s visual field and exploiting the reflexive possibilities inherent in this open public space.

The Theater of Dionysus The theatron in fifth-century Athens was less a building than what we would call landscape architecture. It derived its physical nature and layout from

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three basic elements, listed in order of their importance for providing a workable theatrical space: 1. The hillside on the south slope of the Acropolis, called the cavea, provided space for the audience, most of whom sat on the ground or on wooden benches, although some stone seating may have appeared late in the century. 2. A flat area of beaten earth supported by a retaining wall lying lower down the slope, called the orch¯estra (henceforth “orchestra”), was where the performers played.8 3. A wooden stage-building, called the sk¯en¯e, at the back of the orchestra and in front of the terrace wall, allowed for access (eisodoi) into the orchestra along its two edges. Its facade had a single door or opening offering entrances and exits— into a house, cave, temple, tent—reflecting the setting of the play. The door may have fronted onto a low wooden stage (perhaps three feet high) extending into the orchestra, linked to it by wooden steps, although this is uncertain.9 At some later date in the century, a machine called the ekkukl¯ema allowed for the revelation of “interior” scenes, by rolling out a preset tableau through the door that exposed part of the offstage space. Similarly, the sk¯en¯e supported a roof on which characters could appear, either climbing up by ladder or ramp from behind, or by being hoisted on a cranelike device, the m¯echan¯e, or “machine.”10 Scene painting, attached to the sk¯en¯e, may have played a role in indicating the setting, but scholars have exaggerated its importance.11

In this scenario, priority goes to the cavea, which accommodates a large audience (estimates range from ten thousand to fifteen thousand), followed by the orchestra, which captures the audience’s focus.12 In his valuable study The Idea of Space in Greek Architecture, Martiennsen speaks generally of the “horizontal plane . . . as the first essential in any system of formal arrangement intended to embrace the activities of organized or collective life,” negating as it does “the irregularity of existing topographical conditions.”13 The terraced orchestra floor, which provides a level playing area for the performers and a clear focus for the audience, converts the south slope of the Acropolis into a theater. Stabilizing the hillside by arresting its movement downward, the orchestra opens up a space where something other than what normally transpires can happen there. The final element in defining the theater space, and one that may not have emerged at the outset, is the simple horizontal screen offered by the sk¯en¯e building.14 This facade further stabilized the activities onstage, although by virtue of its impermanent nature and modest proportions (compared with its massive Roman successors), the facade did not deny the vista beyond. In contrast to later buildings that would dominate performance, the space of the theater of Dionysus offered definition without control, shape without separation, enclosure without protection, “une liaison du th´eaˆ tre et du terrain” (figure 6).15

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Lacking in this account is any standard architectural form or template into which the theater fits. Fostering a very different reconstruction, some archaeologists and theater historians give priority to a circular orchestra, suggesting that Athenian “spatial practice” vis-`a-vis the theater demanded this geometrical shape. Just over a century ago the German archaeologist Wilhelm Dorp¨ feld excavated the theater of Dionysus and found seven smallish stones in the form of an arc. These he connected with another stone some twenty meters away to reconstruct an original circular orchestra, a farfetched idea that still holds the popular imagination and a prominent place in the scholarship.16 Circles have a powerful attraction and make for a reassuring sense of order, handy for schematic drawings and plans reproduced in handbooks on the theater. Sadly, there is no substantial archaeological evidence for a circular orchestra in any fifth-century theater, including the theater of Dionysus in Athens, and sound evidence against it.17 Nonetheless, the myth of an original—and originating—circular orchestra remains. What might account for the continued purchase of this idea on our notion of the early theater in Athens? First of all, it aligns archaeological reconstruction to the ancient Greek interest in geometry and geometric forms.18 A circle for the orchestra suggests an abstract template existing prior to the theater cavea and organizing its subsequent development. Much of what we know of nonsurviving ancient architecture comes from the Roman Vitruvius, a committed geometrician, who championed the notion that the theater grew up around the orchestra, and not down from the hillside where the audience sat.19 Once accepted as the a priori fact, a circular orchestra allows us to see the theater as a visual-spatial image of the cosmos, a symbolic microcosm.20 For example, ancient thinkers who believed in a flat earth envisioned it as a circular plain surrounded by the river Ocean, like the picture Hephaestus engraves on the shield of Achilles in Iliad 18.21 Others believed in a spherical earth,22 and in such a system a circular orchestra might suggest a two-dimensional analogue for a centrifocal earth. As well as offering the attractions of large-scale geometry, the idea of a circle responds to the roundness of the sun and moon, the dome of the heavens, the radial form of trees and plants, and so on. Shifting to the working world of the Greeks, scholars see in the circular orchestra a reflection of the threshing floor. Tying ancient drama to the agricultural cycle, they draw (often unconsciously) on the “Cambridge School” theory that tragedy sprang from the ritual death and rejuvenation of Dionysus as a year god, born again each spring. The circle now serves as an image of the cycle of seasons, and what the earth can produce through human effort. Sadly, the evidence we have fails to support such a conclusion. Ancient Greek threshing floors were paved in stone, not the beaten earth of the theater orchestra. Threshing seems to have been accomplished by draft animals, when available, who could be tethered to walk in a circular route

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(hence the shape of the threshing floor). We should be cautious about invoking peasant progenitors of a circular dance who turned monotonous threshwalking into a choreographic form that demanded a circular orchestra, the sine qua non (according to the argument) of the ancient theater.23 The earliest surviving theaters in the Greek world all appear to have irregularly shaped orchestras, more or less rectilinear in form. The compelling desiderata involved finding a suitable seating area on a hillside that offered the audience a view down on the action, then a flat area of earth (supported by a retaining wall when necessary) that established the orchestra. No circle was drawn in the dirt, around which a seating area was built, a practice that seems to begin with the construction of the great theater in Epidauros, dating from the second half of the fourth century. Unlike this paragon of formal perfection, the early theater in Athens was not governed by geometric preconditions or architectural refinement. The gradual improvements in visual focus and acoustics, the petrification of seats and stage building, the growth in importance of the sk¯en¯e facade reflect a formalizing of the idea of theateras-building, which only begins in the late classical period and flourishes in the era of town planning that followed. Connected to the construction of new cities and the expansion of old sanctuaries, all surviving theaters with circular orchestras date from then. Were we to ignore the best archaeological evidence and reconstruct an original orchestra circle for the Athenian theater of Dionysus, we still would need to explain why no deme theater in Attica followed suit—all (save Thorikos) later than the big theater, and surely modeled on it. As to why a fully fledged orchestra circle should appear for the first time at Epidauros, we can only speculate. Certainly fourth-century interest in the geometry of urban and sanctuary planning influenced the innovation. Moreover, as was the case generally among popular cults, the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros competed with rival shrines elsewhere to attract pilgrims. The presence of spectacular productions (fourth-century theater seemed to move in that direction) in a spectacular setting offered an obvious drawing card. The Asclepion at Epidauros already featured a famous circular building associated by Pausanias with Polycleitus, the tholos (also known as the thumele), considered the finest of its kind in the ancient world. Although tholoi had long existed in Greece, earlier in the fourth century the architect Theodoros built an elaborate marble version at Delphi, and Epidauros created its own not long after. The tholos became its most famous building, housing a labyrinthine crypt beneath the floor that may have represented the tomb of Asclepius.24 Perhaps the distinctive tholos shape encouraged sanctuary officials to write it large on the landscape, featuring it in the new theater they were to build. Without doubt, the theater at Epidauros was like none before it, surpassing earlier examples in scale, technological innovation, and architectural refinement— and, as the archaeological evidence suggests, in boasting the first orchestra circle.

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Similar misconceptions to the idea of an original circular orchestra in Athens operate in the arguments for a permanent altar located at its center. As Richard Schechner puts it (with characteristic assurance), “At the center of the theater stood the altar of Dionysus, open to the heavens; around it, encircling the sacrificial nexus of Athenian drama, danced the chorus.”25 As far as we can tell, no altar of Dionysus ever stood in an early orchestra; the altar dedicated to the god, the site of ritual sacrifice during the City Dionysia, stood much further down the slope, in the southern end of the sanctuary, well below the retaining wall and outside the theatrical area. No sacrifices or offerings needing an altar took place in the theater itself. Probably a temporary construction when used as a prop (in plays like Euripides’ Suppliant Women), the stage altar most likely was placed in the central area of the orchestra to take advantage of the dramatic focus and power of that position.26 In the spirit of Schechner, David Wiles construes the “governing spatial paradigm” of the theater of Dionysus as “a community gathered in a ritual circle around a surrogate altar.”27 However, we know from the location of altars in Greek sanctuaries that encirclement by the crowd usually was impossible, given the location of the altar close to the cult temple.28 That is, sacrifice did not take place “in the round”; altars, like temples, “faced” front. The officiating person, priest, or priestess stood behind the altar, while those gathered stood before it, free to arrange themselves as they wished, including an arc to maximize sight lines. In the rare case where members of a large audience could surround an altar, it seems unlikely they did, for much of what took place would be hard to see from behind. In Wiles’ attractive but misleading scenario, the presentational nature of the events that constituted a sacrifice have given way to the seductions of a “ritual circle,” not a secure basis from which to reconstruct Greek spatial practice. Rejecting an idealized notion of orchestra as circle, or a central altar that constructs the theater as a place of surrogate sacrifice, we might more profitably compare the theater of Dionysus to other plein-air public enclosures, particularly the agora and the Pnyx. Before doing so, however, let us consider more fully the immediate spatial context of the theater, the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus, and the festivals in which tragic performances played a part. This will lead to a discussion of secular and sacred (or “sacralizing”) space, the function of various rituals (including sacrifice), and the place of the gods in Athenian life.

The Sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus The theater of Dionysus abutted the god’s sanctuary, and the festival of the City Dionysia (including performances of tragedy, satyr plays, comedies, and dithyrambs) and the Lenaia (with tragedies and comedies) bound the two

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areas together. Generally speaking, a sanctuary (temenos ‘a place cut off’) was a precinct set aside for the ritual worship of a god or hero. It inevitably included an altar for offerings and animal sacrifice, “the ritual core of Greek religion,” as Jameson reminds us, and frequently it had a temple to house the cult image of the god.30 The sanctuary of Dionysus south of the Acropolis fits the pattern, with a large altar (a base roughly 11.5 by 3.3 meters) oriented east-west near the southern edge of the precinct (allowing a large crowd to witness the sacrifice from further up the slope), and an archaic temple to the god, which held his wooden image (xoanon) during the festival, located close to the orchestra retaining wall to the north and west of the altar.31 A low wall (peribolos) or a series of boundary stones marked the perimeter of the sanctuary, and it seems that the northern boundary of the temenos of Dionysus was coextensive with the retaining wall of the orchestra and sk¯en¯e building. This suggests the precinct was two-tiered, with a formal area dedicated to the god below, and an ancillary area for the performances higher up the hill (figure 7).32 This spatial division helps explain the uses of the theater separate from the sanctuary and outside the festival proper, of which there were many. For example, more than twelve hundred performers had to rehearse in the space before the festival every year. Each of the ten phul¯e —“tribes” created by the reforms of Cleisthenes—presented two dithyrambs (choral lyric in praise of a god) in both a boys’ and a men’s competition.33 We can assume that the fifty members of each chorus had some access to the theater before their moment in the sun, time to practice their entrance and exit, the audibility of their singing, their internal spacing in the orchestra, the volume of the musical accompaniment, and so on. Simply guaranteeing the order of twenty different groups performing on the same day presents a logistical nightmare that would require its own rehearsal before the festival.34 In addition to these thousand performers competing for their tribes, the city as a whole arranged for the production of three sets of tragic tetralogies (three tragedies plus a satyr play, all by the same author), each requiring a minimum of three actors and a chorus of twelve, later fifteen, performers, not to mention extras, secondary choruses, and so on, as noted in our discussion of Euripides’ Suppliant Women. In addition, the polis produced five comedies by five different playwrights, each with three to five actors and a chorus of twenty-four.35 Many of these plays demanded chariot entrances, large processions, arrivals on high via the machine, long entrances down the eisodoi, carefully timed appearances on the ekkukl¯ema, and so on. Theatrical common sense tells us that the theater and the sanctuary environs were in constant use for weeks before the festival began.36 If the Lenaia also used the theater of Dionysus for its performances, a similar rehearsal schedule operated earlier in the winter, albeit on a smaller scale.37 As well as rehearsals before these festivals, the theater provided the meet-

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ing place for the “oversight” assembly at the close of the City Dionysia, and we know that the assembly also met in the theater in the fourth century for its annual review of the ephebes. We have substantial evidence that other theaters in Attica (and elsewhere in Greece) were used for political meetings,38 undermining the notion that the theater of Dionysus was simply an extension of the sanctuary and “belonged” to the god. The multifaceted nature of the theater may reflect earlier dramatic performances in the Athenian agora. A place of burial in the Mycenaean period and of both burial and habitation later (through the geometric period), this relatively flat area north of the Acropolis gradually became the civic and religious center of town, its composite nature reflecting the inclusive attitude of the Greeks to these activities. As Martiennsen puts it, “From a practical standpoint, the agora was equivalent to a great open-air hall, available no less for festivals than for the ordinary activities of everyday life.”39 Theatrical performance took place in a part of the agora called the orch¯estra,40 an area that has left no archaeological trace but nonetheless has proliferated theories about its form and structure.41 This open area (figure 8) lay just to the west of the main roadway (dromos), which ran from the cemetery and potters’ quarter (the Kerameikos, outside the Dipylon Gate) through the agora and up to the Acropolis, the route taken by the great Panathenaic procession. Hammond believes that the “just-off-the-road” location of early agora performances may have provided the impetus for the eisodoi ‘in-roads’ (also called parodoi ‘sideroads’) in the theater of Dionysus, located alongside the sk¯en¯e building and linking the theater orchestra to the outside world.42 It also seems likely that the assembly (ekkl¯esia) met in the agora (possibly in the orch¯estra) until the reforms of Ephialtes in the late 460s, when the meetings took place on the Pnyx, a hill to the south.43 The early spatial overlap between dramatic performance and political assembly in the agora suggests that tragedy—in the reflexive manner outlined in the introduction—could evoke political space without straining, something it continued to do after the performances moved to the theater of Dionysus. Another structure in the agora, the altar of the Twelve Gods (figure 8, located west of the dromos and north of the orch¯estra), may have influenced tragedy in its early days. Built by the younger Pisistratus (son of Hippias and grandson of the tyrant Pisistratus) around 521 B.C., the altar united the pantheon of Olympian gods in a concentration of the sacred.44 Road distances in Attica were measured from this spot, the symbolic center from which the Athenian polis radiated outward. Pisistratus’ uncle, the tyrant Hipparchus, erected herms on the roads marking the midpoint between the city (measured from the altar) and the deme centers, one side bearing this geographical information and the other a moral tag like “Pass, thinking just thoughts” or “Don’t deceive a friend.”45 As well as marking the city’s territorial center, the altar of the Twelve Gods

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became the locus for foreign suppliants seeking Athenian aid.46 In 519, shortly after the altar was dedicated, the Plataeans appeared at the shrine to supplicate Athens to help them against the Thebans,47 anticipating—in broad terms, and by almost a century—the plot of Euripides’ Suppliant Women. The fact that supplication plays an important role in tragedy, and that political debate and violence frequently result from a suppliant’s request, suggest that activities near the original agora orch¯estra may have left their mark on the genre and the new theaters in which it came to be performed.48 That the first home of tragedy may have stood near the focal point for the territory of Athens is suggestive. Time and again in the plays that survive (written for the theater and not the agora) we observe characters pulled in from far away as if drawn by a magnet. I know of no theatrical genre that more easily accommodates “attraction from a distance” than Greek tragedy. When the magnetic poles reverse (as they frequently do), characters depart under compulsion (flight, exile, a foundational journey), sent off from a place of previous attraction. We explore this pattern in later chapters, but we should note here the strong centralizing function of tragedy, reflecting the site of its earliest performances and continuing in the theater of Dionysus. The move from the agora seems to have occurred in the late sixth or early fifth century. The area south of the Acropolis may have recommended itself because it held a preexisting sanctuary to Dionysus, although the date of the earliest structure there—the old temple to the god—could be contemporaneous with the move, suggesting that the newly democratic polis relocated the City Dionysia as a way of celebrating the city’s political transformation.49 There can be no question of the theater moving to the margins (a feature of early Elizabethan public playhouses in London),50 but separation from the rule of the Pisistratids and their building program in the agora may have played a role. In practical terms, the new location on the south slope of the Acropolis offered several advantages (figure 9): it could support a far larger audience than the agora orch¯estra; by its relative isolation from other activities, the space allowed for more dedicated use, helpful in preparation and rehearsal; the protective location below the Acropolis sheltered the audience from the strong north winds of the winter and early spring, when the dramatic festivals took place; and the grand prospect suited a festival that welcomed visitors from all over the Greek world, eventually providing the locus for ceremonies linked to the Athenian Empire.

The City Dionysia: Procession, Sacrifice, and the Secular The annual festival of the City Dionysia had to fit into the preexisting religious and civic calendars of Athens,51 as well as into the unofficial schedule

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of agricultural activity on which Athenian life depended. “The agricultural year shaped the religious year,” Osborne points out,52 and Athens celebrated the City Dionysia during an idle time in the fields, after the last olives were gathered in February and before the grain harvest in late May. Scheduled over seven days in early spring (mid to late March), when the Aegean was navigable and non-Athenians could attend, the festival preceded the annual election of the ten generals (strat¯egoi) and the assembly meetings that planned the military campaigns of April and May, after which the demands of the summer harvest (late May to early July) and the fall plowing and planting (September to November) reasserted themselves.53 The lesser dramatic festivals took place earlier in the winter, also a period of agricultural inactivity. At least 14 demes (local political units in Athens, of which there were 139), as well as Brauron and Salamis, possessed some sort of theater. There they celebrated the rural Dionysia in December,54 and the city as a whole mounted the Lenaia in January, setting the stage for the great Dionysia two months later. The conformity to given political, religious, and natural parameters is not unique to dramatic festivals, but it does suggest how integrated these elements were in the Athenian idea of the theater. Where we might construe tragedy as ritual, or insist that drama is political, or claim the theater primarily as an aesthetic phenomenon, or theorize performance as “playing the Other,” the Athenians experienced a theatrical continuum that incorporated sacred, secular, civic, artistic, and natural realms. We can identify distinctive elements that contribute to this unified picture, many of which underwent important transformations over the course of the week-long celebration of the City Dionysia. The festival began with a great procession (pomp¯e)—second in size and grandeur to the quadrennial Great Panathenaia—that brought celebrants, sacrificial victims, and other offerings to the god in his sanctuary below the theater. The procession involved the community in its broadest definition, either as audience members lining the route or as direct participants: men, women, slaves, metics, children, Athenian allies, foreigners in town for the performances, rich and poor, old and young.55 Each Athenian colony dedicated a carved wooden phallos, which was borne in the parade; the chor¯egoi, picked by the city and by the ten tribes to pay for the dramatic and dithyrambic choruses respectively, marched in ornate dress; the metics, alien residents of Athens, wore dark-red robes and carried trays of offerings; wellborn girls, called kan¯ephoroi, bore baskets of gold filled with firstfruits (perhaps grapes); citizens marched with full wineskins, and others carried thin loaves of bread resembling spits; attendants drove along the bulls meant for sacrifice, numbering between 100 to 240 animals.56 Although the route of the procession remains unknown, Xenophon informs us that it included a choral dance at the altar of the Twelve Gods, the

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only reference to any public ritual there.57 Perhaps the “city on the move” paused to acknowledge the place of past performances, if indeed the early orch¯estra was located near this altar dedicated to the Greek pantheon. Gathering its people, past, and values, the city took measure of itself in the procession to the sanctuary of Dionysus, “activating, like an electric current, the landscape’s potential symbolism,” as Jameson puts it.58 According to Hubert and Mauss, a procession that culminates in sacrifice “constitutes a process of sacralization, bringing something from the profane world [domestic animals] and making it over to the world of the gods [sacrificial offerings].”59 For the humans involved, the procession resembles a temporary rite de passage (like the rituals of transition marking childbirth, puberty, marriage, and death), with a liminal period before the sacrifice and the reintegration of the participants in their “normal” world afterward.60 Other theorists downplay the procession, viewing sacrificial bloodshed as the act of self-definition, where humans dramatize their proper place between animals and gods.61 According to Burkert, Greek sacrifice confronts a basic anxiety over bloodletting and so requires the victim’s “willing compliance.”62 Girard emphasizes how sacrificial ritual harnesses violent tendencies and directs them against acceptable targets.63 Bloch views ritual bloodshed as a losing and gaining of vitality in an endless process of “rebounding violence.”64 More politically minded theorists locate sacrifice within a broader ritual network designed to prop up the sociopolitical status quo.65 For example, the “commensal occasion” following a sacrifice confirms the power of those organizing the event and distributing the meat.66 In her study of visual imagery associated with Athenian sacrifice, Pierce challenges the more overwrought of these theories. The images offer “a visual metaphor for ideas of festivity, celebrations, and blessings,” making it “impossible that the viewers for whom these images were intended experienced thysia as an awesome, fearsome, or guilty act.” Sacrifice for fifth-century Greeks involved the “dedication of animals and their acceptance by the gods . . . as an aspect of feast and festival.”67 In sum, we understand the procession of the City Dionysia as a sacralizing process that gathered and moved the community through the city, while consecrating the sacrificial animals for the god. At the altar in the sanctuary, the bloodletting itself was more celebratory than anxiety-ridden, in anticipation of the coming feast. After slaying the beasts, the priests and attendants wrapped the thigh bones with fat and burned them on the altar, roasted tail pieces auspiciously, and divided the butchered meat among the crowd. Many took their portion home for consumption and private festivities, while others remained in the sanctuary to cook their meat on portable braziers and share in a larger communal feast.68 No precise information survives regarding the distribution of meat at the

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City Dionysia, but the Panathenaia dedicated specific portions to various officials, with the rest divided among the demes in proportion to the number of deme members in attendance.69 Following its inclusive procession, the Panathenaia adopted a mode of division that reflected the principles of Athenian democracy, which directly involved only male deme members and not women, children, metics, or slaves. It may be that similar criteria regarding meat distribution operated at the City Dionysia. Of course, at both festivals those who received their portion were free to share it with whomever they chose—most likely their oikos, including family, household slaves, and guests.70 It seems reasonable that the pomp¯e, sacrifice, feasting, and celebration occupied the first day of the festival, with the competitions (for dithyramb, tragedy, and comedy) spread out over the next five days.71 The contests exemplify the divisions referred to earlier, in this case the difference between a citywide and an intracity rivalry. The ten boys’ and ten men’s dithyrambs pitted tribe (phul¯e) against tribe. With the chor¯egoi and performers drawn from each group, success meant a victory for that phul¯e alone.72 The dramatic performances, on the other hand, were the product of the city in its political totality. City-supported artistic teams drawn from the polis at large—chor¯egos, playwright, actors, chorus, aulos players—competed before a (comparatively) impartial audience, judged by ten representatives drawn by lot from each tribe.73 In Sourvinou-Inwood’s terms, the festival performances manifested both a “whole-polis articulation” and an “articulation by polis subdivision,”74 defining the city on both the large and small scale.75 However, artistic and cultural factors complicate the view that festival performances were designed solely for the mutual articulation of the polis and its tribes. At the City Dionysia, we know that many (perhaps most) of the dithyrambs were composed by non-Athenian poets, and the instrumentalist (aul¯et¯es ‘aulos player’) who accompanied each of the choruses (dithyrambic, tragic, satyric, comic) also tended to be foreign.76 Because music was central to the Greek idea of poetry and performance of almost any kind (including ritual events, athletic contests, marching to battle, rowing, dancing, feasting), we cannot overestimate the impact of the aul¯etai at the City Dionysia. They played the diaulos, a difficult double-beating reed instrument—like a bifurcated oboe with two sets of fingerholes—that originated in Asia Minor or Syria, first appearing in Greece in the seventh century.77 Plato and Aristotle associate its music with frenzy and orgiastic possession,78 and this (along with its provenance) may explain why the virtuosi were foreign to Athens. As well as the dithyrambic poets and aul¯etai, playwrights and actors were frequently non-Athenian. Pratinas, credited with introducing the satyr play and winner on one occasion against Aeschylus, haled from Phlius, and his

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son Aristias also won tragic competitions at the City Dionysia. Achaeus of Eretria and Ion of Chios both competed against Sophocles and Euripides (whose Hippolytus was among the plays Ion defeated in 428), and were admitted to the Alexandrian canon of great tragedians. We also hear in fifthcentury Athens of the tragic poets Aristarchus of Tegea and Spintharus of Heracleia in Bithynia and the comic playwright Acestor of Thrace.79 Regarding non-Athenian performers, we know of the Aeschylean actor Mynniskos of Chalkis and, in the fourth century, Neoptolemus of Scyros, Aristodemus of Metapontum, and the notorious Polus of Aegina, the first “method actor,” if one credits the anecdote that he used an urn with the ashes of his newly deceased son while portraying Sophocles’ Electra (in the scene where she mourns her dead brother).80 At the Lenaia, foreigners also competed as playwrights, and metics could serve as chor¯egoi and perform as chorus members in the tragic and comic competitions.81 At the local level, demes celebrating the rural Dionysia followed the general pattern of the city festival with a procession, sacrifice, local liturgies, and performances of tragedies, comedies, and dithyrambs (any or all, as each deme chose for itself).82 There is evidence—at Ikarion in the mid-fifth century and at Eleusis in the mid-fourth—that an alien residing in the deme could assume the role of chor¯egos for these performances. Whitehead thinks that these exceptions prove the rule that no noncitizen or nondemesman was involved in the rural Dionysia.83 But the dithyrambic poets (when dithyrambs were performed), the playwrights, and presumably the acting companies that played them may have had no deme connection whatsoever. Moreover, if metics could pay for, and act in, performances at the Lenaia, why should a similar involvement be impossible at the local level? Are we to imagine a demarch, eager to make a splash with a tragedy at his rural Dionysia, prohibiting a local metic from participating in the chorus, even though the same man had sung and danced at the Lenaia before thousands? This seems unlikely. We have no idea how many, or how frequently, metics served in dramatic choruses at the Lenaia and locally, but the fact that they did cautions against any simple bipolar reading of tragedy that sets the mythic, heroic characters against a chorus of “citizens,” if by citizens we understand only adult male Athenians. Although the restriction on choral participation did apply at the City Dionysia, it did not extend to the other festivals in Athens or to productions outside of Attica, which began as early as Aeschylus (in Sicily) and became increasingly popular in southern Italy in the fourth century.84 This is not to claim that tragedy had no local purchase; on the contrary, as Poole asserts, “the power of Greek tragedy to outlive the local conditions of its original production depends on the quality of the challenge which it once offered to those local conditions.”85 The connection of the genre and its per-

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formance to the polis, however, may be less about strict citizen definition than about a more inclusive sense of polis membership. The Cleisthenic reforms of 508/7 formalized the deme system by recognizing the political status of preexisting towns and neighborhoods throughout Attica, a process that may have enrolled some aliens as citizens in the initial deme formation. This would help explain the replacement of the patronymic with the demotic as the official designation of an Athenian citizen, an easy way to avoid embarrassing a “new” citizen whose (foreign-sounding) father’s name would drop away.86 The argument remains controversial, and Whitehead rejects it out of hand.87 Emphasizing Aristotle’s juristic classification of citizens in terms of strict political “rights” and responsibilities, he views Athenian metics less as “quasi-citizens” than as “anti-citizens.”88 This division fits Whitehead’s dualistic scheme perhaps better than it does the actual experience of living in classical Athens, where (for example) conservatives raged against the apparent interchangeability of metic and citizen.89 Metics served in the Athenian fleet and as hoplites—more than three thousand fought alongside Athenian citizens at Megara in 431, at the outset of the Peloponnesian War. Although they could not own land in their own name, some metics acquired great wealth and power and owned slaves; others, especially from the poorer allied states, took advantage of Athenian openness to improve their economic circumstances and that of their families back home. Metics participated in most religious cults, including such major civic festivals as the Panathenaia and City Dionysia. They attended the theater, used the public gymnasia, and contributed greatly to the intellectual life of the city; Herodotus, Hippodamus, Lysias, Isaeus, Aristotle, and some of the Sophists were foreigners who lived more or less permanently in Athens.90 As Connor points out, Pericles’ citizenship law of 451/0 disenfranchised the future offspring of marriages between Athenians and foreigners, effectively preventing international dynastic families from using their influence to manipulate Athenian foreign policy. Paradoxically, the law encouraged the private interchange between metics and citizens, exemplified by Pericles himself, who set up a stable relationship with the foreign-born Aspasia without fear of political consequences.91 So, too, metics like Anaxagoras (Pericles’ friend) and others spread their intellectual influence without being viewed as a direct threat to the political body.92 Because deme (like tribal) membership was hereditary, over time the politicogeographic definition of Athenians grew to include a historical as well as a living connection to place. For example, when citizens moved to a new village in Attica, they maintained their old (inherited) deme allegiance.93 In both its political organization and its festival life, Athens “stirred up” the loyalties of its citizen population. Part of that agitation involved the inclusion of noncitizens in the mix, where the theater played an important part. In its

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festival context, production process, and subject matter, Greek tragedy at the City Dionysia, the Lenaia, and the various rural Dionysia challenged the assumption that the male citizen—whether on or off the stage—was all that mattered. With this possibility in mind, let us look briefly at two other significant factors, the composition of the audience and the function of the preperformance ceremonies. Based on the surviving evidence and testimonia, most scholars agree that the theater audience included anyone who could afford a ticket: men, women, children, metics, slaves, prisoners (released on bail specially for the festival), foreigners, Athenians and non-Athenians, citizens and noncitizens alike. This openness reflects the nature of Dionysiac cult generally, and the particular pan-Athenaic flavor of the City Dionysia.94 The theoric fund (probably introduced in the fourth century) provided poorer citizens with money to purchase theater tickets; other economic advantages of citizenship included subsidies for grain, and payments for jury duty, attendance at the assembly, and service in public office.95 In the case of the theater, however, the polis subsidy for male Athenians does not mean that nonmales and noncitizens could not, or did not, attend. The preperformance ceremonies have attracted a good deal of recent interest, and (as noted in the discussion of Suppliant Women) they have much to say about the play of space in the tragic performances themselves. The first such ceremony involved the purification of the theater by carrying a bleeding piglet, whose throat had been cut, around the orchestra. This was the common means of purifying Athenian public spaces, most prominently the Pnyx before assembly meetings, but also temples, civic buildings, and even shipyards.96 Nilsson differentiates the pig-bleeding practice from sacrifice proper, which required that an animal be offered to a specific god (or gods) who received some part of it, not at all what transpired during these purification rites.97 We hear of the analogous rite applied to personal purification at Eumenides 280–83, when Orestes refers to “slaughtered swine” at Apollo’s hearth, whose blood—poured over his head and hands—cleansed him of matricide.98 At some point after the purification (the exact order of events is beyond recovery), the ten strat¯egoi—the annually elected board of generals, one from each tribe—entered the orchestra and poured libations to the gods. The fact that these libations were offered by the leading military personnel of the city, and not the priest of Dionysus or the annually appointed archon eponymous (who oversaw the festival), indicates the complicated weave into which tragic performances fit. The festival took place shortly before the election of the strat¯egoi, and the appearance of those “incumbents” in the orchestra who were candidates for reelection might have helped their chances. In the introduction we discussed the reference in Suppliant Women (723–28) to strat¯egoi,

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including advice about the kind of general the Athenians should choose. Shortly after that election, the assembly met to decide on the military strategy for the upcoming summer, meaning that the City Dionysia was well timed to raise issues relevant to Athenian foreign policy.99 Pericles, for example, held power in Athens due to his election to the annual board of generals twenty-two times, including fifteen consecutive terms.100 Between circa 453 and 429, Pericles appeared before the huge crowds at the City Dionysia twenty-two times, performing the ritual libation reserved for the generals. As a younger man he also availed himself of the theater to catch the public eye and register his political sympathies, serving as chor¯egos in 472 for the Aeschylean tetralogy that included Persians, discussed in chapter 6. By emphasizing Themistocles’ role in the victory at Salamis, Aeschylus (and perhaps Pericles) indicated his tacit support for the policies of the beleagured leader, ostracized not long after Persians was produced.101 Through Pericles’ role as chor¯egos and strat¯egos, we see the ties linking the festival space of the City Dionysia, the theatrical space of the performances proper, and the political space of Athens. A further manifestation of the theater’s spatial reach involves the preperformance ceremony of Athenian orphans whose fathers had fallen in battle, a practice evoked at the end of Suppliant Women. Raised at the city’s expense, the orphans marked their coming of age by parading in the orchestra dressed in full hoplite armor (a gift of the city) and then taking front-row seats for the performances.102 We may wonder if the prominence of fatherless orphans in tragedy—Orestes, Neoptolemus, Eteocles and Polyneices, the sons of the Seven against Thebes, Astyanax, Eurysakes, Hyllus, the sons of Heracles, Pentheus, even Xerxes—goes beyond the givens of the myth to tap the affective experience of the Athenian audience, who has seen its own orphans feted before the play. Although the ceremony emphasized the future (the armor given and worn for the defense of the city), the absent father and husband remain in the shadows, as the Chorus in Agamemnon suggests: And everywhere, for those who sped to war from the land of Greece, a woman sits lost in grief— home after home— cut deep to the heart. They know the ones they sent, but take back—home after home— an urn of ashes instead of a man. (Ag. 429–36)

The selection of judges for the competitions also took place in the orchestra, probably after the generals’ libation. Although the manner in which the votes

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were counted remains uncertain, the festival took elaborate measures to insure that the selection of judges and their verdicts avoided any taint of bribery or tampering. Here, the City Dionysia clearly reflects the democratic practices found elsewhere in the city. Prior to the festival, each of the tribes submitted a list of possible judges, whose names (after approval by the boul¯e, or council) were sealed in jars and kept in the polis treasury on the Acropolis. On the day of selection, the jars were brought down to the theater and the archon drew a name from each. The judges picked by this lottery stepped forward and swore an oath of impartiality in front of their fellow audience members, then sat in special seats set aside for them to watch the performances.103 The process offers a window on the Athenian political and legal system, because it combines aspects of both: tribal allotment (e.g., the fifty-member prytaneis, drawn from the council, which served for a tenth of the year); nomination (e.g., some magistrates); boul¯e approval (e.g., the new archons and newly elected boul¯e, examined by the council before taking office); sortition (e.g., the jurors for the people’s courts picked daily from a larger group of eligibles, or the selection of the priestesses of Athena Nike and Bendis from all Athenian wives and their daughters); public oath taking (e.g., council members, magistrates, and jurors); and special privileges (e.g., the free meals for the sitting prytaneis or the prohedria for the aforementioned judges and orphans).104 Following the judges’ vote at the close of the competition, the winning didaskalos (normally the playwright-director) was crowned with an ivy wreath in the theater,105 and we can presume a similar honor for the chor¯egos of the winning production, and for the best actor (after the institution of the prize for tragic protagonists in 449).106 This public acknowledgment mirrors the preperformance ceremony in which distinguished citizens and foreign benefactors of the state, to whom the assembly had voted golden crowns, were proclaimed by a public herald.107 The theater offered the space and occasion where the Athenian community (not simply those eligible to attend the assembly), as well foreigners who had come for the festival, could share in the celebration of polis honors—whether for past public service or for theatrical productions that had just taken place. The theater crowd also heard a proclamation naming slaves who had been freed by their masters. Here the audience assumed the role of potential legal witnesses, for Athens lacked any civic record or public roll that listed slaves.108 As befits an oral culture in which writing played a secondary role in legal and political matters, the manumission proclamation in the theater insured that “everybody knew” of the former slave’s new status (freedmen who chose to remain in Athens became metics).109 Should doubts arise in the future, a freed slave would have the citizens in the audience as witnesses. Hypothetically, a slave whose freedom was announced in the theater of Dionysus could (at some later date) sponsor a dramatic chorus, or perform in a tragedy or

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comedy, in the same theater during the Lenaia. The fact that manumission became public just before the tragic performances may have made more poignant sentiments like those uttered by the Paidagogus (a slave in the royal house of Athens) in Euripides’ Ion: One thing alone brings shame to slaves— the name; in all else a slave who is a good man is no way inferior to those who are free. (Ion 854–56)

A final preperformance ceremony in the orchestra involved the display of the annual tribute (phoros) paid by the members of the Delian League.110 It seems likely that the practice began with the transferal of the league treasury from Delos to Athens in 454 B.C. Most of the allied cities chose to pay tribute rather than contribute directly (via ships and soldiers) to the defense of the league, which Athens came to dominate.111 Like the libations involving the strat¯egoi and the parade of war orphans, the display of the phoroi brought political and military issues directly into the theater, albeit outside the performances proper. It seems likely that a herald announced the source and amount of each contribution, although the actual tribute probably was divided evenly among its bearers and carried into the orchestra without concern for its place of origin. The ceremony provided the allies with an unwritten “receipt,” public acknowledgment at the City Dionysia of their payment. On many occasions the event must have generated celebratory and patriotic feelings; on others— after allied revolts, for example—it called attention to the league’s unpopularity abroad.112 According to Thucydides, allied revolts before and after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War forcefully engaged the d¯emos of Athens, revealing the harsh realities of imperial rule.113 Called to mind during the tribute ceremony in the orchestra, the tensions between Athens and its allied subjects found their way into the plays themselves, as many critics have recognized in Euripides’ Trojan Women.114 After the City Dionysia, the assembly met in the theater to evaluate the festival’s success. By convening the ekkl¯esia there, male citizens asserted their prerogative in the space that the festival previously had opened to residents of Attica and to foreigners who desired to attend. At this meeting, any citizen (i.e., males over eighteen born of Athenian parents) could stand in the orchestra and address the assembly, much like the actors and choruses over the previous few days.115 The “spatial rhyme” goes both ways, for the relationship between actor and audience in the theater of Dionysus mirrored that of speaker and assembly in the large concavity of the Pnyx (figure 10). There at least once every month (but usually two, three, and even four times), citizens gathered to determine polis policy by simple majority vote. Exploiting the power of the spoken word, speakers appealed to reason, emotion, and morality, not unlike actors playing characters in the theater. In fact, the ac-

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claimed Athenian right of is¯egoria, usually translated “freedom of speech,” resembled something closer to “freedom to perform,” given the daunting prospect of addressing an assembly whose quorum numbered six thousand.116 The spatial similarities between the Pnyx and the theater reflect the essential role played by public performance in democratic Athens. A similar relationship applies to smaller political arenas where democracy flourished—the council or boul¯e (five hundred citizens who set the assembly’s agenda), local deme gatherings, and meetings of kinship and neighborhood organizations. In the boul¯e, each deme had representation proportional to its population, and the year-long term of office—renewable only once after a lapse of two years—meant that a significant minority of Athenian citizens belonged to the council at least once in their lives (by contrast, urban dwellers tended to dominate the assembly).117 Both the old (ca. 500) and new (415–406) council chambers (bouleut¯eria) in the agora seem to have included seating banks around the speaker’s platform much like the cavea surrounding the orchestra in the theater of Dionysus (figure 11). Reporting a sacrilegious act in the new chamber as if it were a scene from Euripides, Xenophon describes how antidemocratic elements violently removed suppliants who had taken refuge at the council altar. Here the actions were staged to terrify council members rather than to outrage a theater audience.118 We find an even closer analogue to theatrical performance in the Athenian lawcourts, where the jury (ranging from one hundred to two thousand members) reached its verdict by majority vote, after hearing speeches offered by the litigants. Some of these speeches have survived, composed by professional writers to be delivered by the principals, because no lawyers were present at the trial. Here the legal system converted both plaintiff and defendant into performers charged with interpreting their script for the benefit of a jury-audience.119 Histrionics from the sublime to the ridiculous characterized these forensic displays, which even exploited the presence of weeping women and children, who could attend the court but not testify.120 The creation and interpretation of a “character” for a lawcourt performance drew on, and may have influenced, the work of the playwright and actor in the theater. To be sure, Athenian litigiousness provided a rich vein for Greek comedy, and it left its mark on tragedy as well, in the ubiquitous legal vocabulary and in such courtroom scenes as Orestes’ trial in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Polymestor’s arraignment in Euripides’ Hecuba.121

Inside Out, Outside In: Land, Livelihood, and Living Space in the Polis Although the theater of Dionysus shared essential qualities with other public forums, the plays almost invariably focus on domestic space, usually a palace

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or house, sometimes a cave, a tent, or even a cottage. The (apparently natural) division between onstage and offstage has led critics to posit the former as the “male,” public area and the latter as the “female,” private, interior domain.122 No one denies the interpretive power of this approach to space, or the evidence from the plays that supports it. Clytemnestra speaks of female quarters in Choephori; Creon insists that women should stay inside where they belong in Antigone; the Farmer chastizes his wife for talking with strange men outside the cottage, while she in turn claims mastery over its interior, in Euripides’ Electra. Although these examples (there are others) differentiate male and female realms, tragedy violates this division so consistently as to raise doubts about its functional value. Time and again female characters appear unapologetically in public, protest when they are kept from doing so, and manifest their independence from, and power over, men.123 Choruses of women arrive from afar and give opinions on matters ranging from public policy to personal morality, from the role of education to the nature of the gods. Among extant tragedies, five of seven choruses of Aeschylus, two of seven of Sophocles, and fourteen of seventeen of Euripides consist of women. Above all, female tragic characters attend to the essential rituals of their families and philoi, frequently outside their homes and often at risk to themselves. Birth ritual draws Clytmenestra to the cottage in Euripides’ Electra; wedding ritual figures prominently in Medea, Iphigenia in Aulis, and Trojan Women; and female characters attend to death ritual in Aeschylus’ Choephori and Seven against Thebes,124 Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra, and Euripides’ Alcestis, Suppliant Women, Heracles, Trojan Women, Helen, Orestes, and Bacchae. Female supplication features prominently in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, and Euripides’ Medea, Andromache, Hecuba, Suppliant Women, and Helen. Women make ritual offerings and sacrifice outside the home in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and Euripides’ Suppliant Women, and the Chorus of Euripides’ Electra visits her on its way to attend the festival of Hera. In pursuing these activities, female characters mirror the lives of their fifth-century counterparts, who participated in and made crucial contributions to the religious life of their oikoi and the Athenian polis at large. Cynthia Patterson meets head-on the notion that fifth-century Athenian women lived lives of seclusion, tracing the idea back to its roots in eighteenth-century European Orientalism, later instantiated as “fact” by nineteenth-century social historians like Johan Jakob Bachofen, Denis-Numa Fustel de Coulanges, Henry Maine, Louis Henry Morgan, and Friedrich Engels. Patterson’s important study recovers a very different reality; far from living in private seclusion, “the Athenian women was . . . a privileged ‘shareholder’ in the Athenian polis.”125 To be sure, Athenian women lived in a patriarchal society that offered them little power over their own person and no role in political decision making. Nevertheless, a variety of work (domestic chores,

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agricultural labor, “cottage” industry, child care) and religious responsibilities (festivals, cult service, ritual duties, rites of passage, priesthoods) took Athenian women out of their houses and into the public sphere. Although these activities do not fit neatly into the male-oriented idea of “the political,” they were public in nature and played an essential role in the life and well-being of the Athenian polis.126 Recent work on ancient Greek houses also challenges the traditional dualistic notion of separate male and female spaces. The archaeological record indicates no clear division between male and female areas in Greek dwellings of the classical period. In a famous essay, Vernant argues that the HestiaHermes dyad organized the annual Greek experience of space. “The hearth [Hestia], established at the centre of the domestic space is, in Greece, fixed, implanted in the earth. It represents, as it were, the omphalos of the house; it is the navel by which the human dwelling is rooted into the depths of the earth.” Hermes, on the other hand, is all movement and flow, providing transitional contact with foreign elements: “in the house, his place is at the door, protecting the threshold.”127 For all its suggestiveness, Vernant’s argument draws next to no support from archaeological remains, fitting a virtual world far better than the one lived in ancient Greece. The overwhelming majority of excavated houses from the classical period show no trace of a permanent hearth; moreover, as Jameson concludes, “no circular hearths, thought to be essential to the ideology of the household, are known for any [my emphasis] classical house.” Instead, portable braziers (of terracotta or bronze) and small fires on the dirt floor (of charcoal or brushwood) were the rule. As for household herms, they too operated more as an ideal than as an actual physical presence, except in a few wealthy homes whose occupants could afford a stone-carved monument at their doorway.128 Athenian houses tended to be small and unprepossessing, usually one floor, with rooms unspecialized as to function. No architectural or structural features emerge to distinguish male from female areas, or those meant for slaves. The sole exception, the so-called andr¯on ‘men’s room’, served like an old-fashioned front parlor, used for entertainment and hospitality (“the one room to which males outside the family had access”), for transacting business, and for accommodating guests overnight. Not everyone had the resources for such a room, but in the many oikoi that did, the andr¯on was not physically isolated from the living and working areas of the household.129 When thinking of the domestic realities of classical Athens, we should recall the description of Heracleides in the third century: “The whole city is dry, not well watered, badly laid out on account of its antiquity. Most of the houses are mean, the nice ones few. A stranger would doubt, on seeing it first, if this were really the renowned city of the Athenians.”130 However, there was a core element characteristic of almost all Greek

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houses, namely the courtyard, the area where most of the work and ongoing activity of the oikos took place.131 Even those who spent a disproportionate amount of time at home—wealthy women and their retainers, in the main— were still “out of doors” much of the time. Unlike a front yard that provides a transition from the public street to the private interior, the enclosed courtyard incorporates the “outside” on the “inside.” Rooms opened directly onto the courtyard and were extensions of its living area; open to the sun, it provided almost all the light in the house, as windows were rare and narrow. Because the rooms generally lacked interconnecting doors, one entered and left them via the courtyard.132 A single entranceway, opening onto the street, did not call attention to the house; in this respect alone, Greek domestic space resembled the “introversion” of traditional Muslim homes in the Mediterranean, where the appearance toward the outside was unimportant.133 Where orthagonal “town planning” held sway (probably introduced to the Greek world in the late eighth century, but associated by modern scholars with the fifth-century Hippodamus of Miletus), “uniform blocks of housing took precedence over every other consideration.”134 In the housing “insula” that Hippodamus developed in Piraeus, the blocks of essentially undifferentiated dwellings with party walls did not interconnect but remained independent units next to, and isolated from, their neighbors, each with its set of rooms off a courtyard.135 Housing an extended nuclear family, the economically and socially independent oikos remained the basic building block of the polis throughout the classical period. As such, its health and inviolability offered a measure of the well-being of the city at large,136 a mutually informing relationship explored relentlessly on the Greek stage. The economic well-being of most Athenian oikoi was tied to the soil.137 The fact that the citizen population worked the land, coupled with the political organization of Athenian democracy, meant that Athens avoided a pronounced split between urban and rural worlds.138 Although for much of the fifth and fourth centuries Athens depended on grain imports (primarily from the Black Sea) to supplement local production, an ideology based on agricultural work informed the life of its citizens.139 In this regard, Athens—as, indeed, most ancient Greek cities—fits Braudel’s category of an “open city,” that is, “open to the countryside and on terms of equality with it,” a relationship manifest in tragedies that deal specifically with the Athenian landscape.140 Recent theories on the rise of the Greek polis emphasize the manner in which the city (astu) and countryside (agros) were bound together. In Cults, Territories, and the Origins of the Greek State, de Polignac argues that the early polis bound its “urban” center to the outlying territory via the establishment of rural religious cults (often at border areas), physically linked by festival processions from the center to the periphery.141 Although de Polignac exempts Athens from this pattern, other scholars point out that the

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extramural sanctuaries at Brauron (Artemis), Eleusis and Halimus (Demeter and Persephone), Phaleron (Athena), Eleutherai (Dionysus), and Sounion (Poseidon) each were connected to a site in the astu on or near the Athenian Acropolis.142 Critics note that his bipolar model neglects important changes in social practice, such as colonization and the growing links between military service and citizenship.143 Perhaps de Polignac’s most important contribution lies in his emphasis on “religious citizenship” (which included women), “without which there could never have been any citizenship of the other, political, kind.” For de Polignac, “religious citizenship was a sine qua non condition for the formation of the city, or rather for the very process of the redefinition of social cohesion from which the polis resulted.”144 Territory cohered around religious cult linked to specific sanctuaries, in which an inclusive idea of citizenship arose, allowing a more defined “political” identity to emerge later. Tied to the land by agricultural work, ownership, religion, and political identity, Athenians imagined themselves to be autochthonous, a race aboriginal to the soil of Attica. In Herodotus, the Athenians boast that “we alone among the Greeks have never changed our dwelling,” and, according to Thucydides, Attica “has been inhabited by the same people always.” The myth surfaces in several tragedies, particularly Euripides’ Ion, which conjoins the xenophobia of native Athenians with the humorous and fatherly wisdom of the foreign-born Xouthus (husband of the Athenian Creusa), who explains to his erstwhile son, “My boy, the earth doesn’t have children.”145 The past two decades have seen a spate of scholarly interest in the role of autochthony in forging Athenian self-identity.146 Some critics argue that the myth devalues the role of women as mothers, consistent with the misogyny they find in Athenian society and on the tragic stage. Other interpretations see autochthony as a compensatory measure for the lack of epic heroes— Athenians play an insignificant role in the Homeric poems. By making the earth the mother of the race, Athens avoids the unique “oikist” figure typical of other cities’ foundational narratives.147 Lacking a dominant individual or family, a “gathering together” of the population (sunoikismos) offers a myth of origins without an originating agent. As Connor observes, authochthony and sunoikismos “united citizens of different regions and backgrounds within Attica, avoiding the necessity of probing into genealogy and claims of aristocratic distinction.”148 Athenians associated their communal integration with the mythological hero Theseus, the closest the city got to a founding hero and the representative of Athens in tragedy, as discussed in the introduction. Interestingly, Theseus’ genealogy (in all its mythic variations) inevitably represents him as an outsider, born of a non-Athenian mother (Aethra, whom we met in Suppliant Women), who immigrates as a young man to Athens.149 Through his

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various tragic guises—in propria persona in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides’ Suppliant Women, and Heracles, and via his father (Aegeus) in Medea and his son (Demophon) in Heracleidae—Theseus reaches out to suppliants and welcomes them to Athens. His own background, coupled with his attitude toward foreigners, provides mythic validation for the incorporation of outsiders into the city, crucial to its cultural and economic prosperity, discussed earlier vis-`a-vis the metic population. The integral relationship between Athenian identity and the land of Attica helps account for tragedy’s keen interest in exile and expatriation. When the Chorus in Agamemnon invokes the fugitive Orestes, for example, the usurping Aegisthus responds: “An exile feeds on empty hopes—I know; I was one” (A. Ag. 1668). In their eponymous plays, Oedipus, Philoctetes, Hippolytus, Orestes, Heracles, the sons of Heracles, Euripides’ Electra, and Aeschylus’ suppliant women all experience a form of exile. The return of the banished Polyneices to Thebes has disastrous consequences in Aeschylus’ Seven, Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus, and Euripides’ Phoenician Women and Suppliant Women. Captive slaves have lost or stand to lose their homeland in Choephori, Trachiniae, Andromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women, Helen, Electra, and Iphigenia among the Taurians. Even in Ion, the most autochthonously Athenian of extant tragedies, the last descendant of the earthborn Erechtheids begs not to be removed from his (nonnatal) home in Delphi and forced to live in Athens (589–647). There, the “famous autochthonous Athenians” will resent him for his (apparent) foreign birth (589–92), and their ballots will “shut him off” (603–5), a reference to the practice of ostracism, by which the Athenian d¯emos “voted out” (for ten years) citizens deemed to pose a threat to the city. The fact that the exiled party was banished from Attica at large and not simply from the “political center” of the astu reminds us that an urban-rural continuum characterized the Athenian polis.150 Viewed from an autochthonous perspective, ostracism offered Athenians a grass-roots mechanism to correct the predictable consequences of their own foundation myth—not all subsequent offspring would measure up to the original children of the earth. Whatever its ideological effects, the myth of autochthony nurtured a central paradox in the city during the fifth century. Three times in the span of fifty years, Athens forsook its unmediated link to the land, abandoning its territory to foreign invaders in order to defend its population. In the 480s, when the Athenians inquired at Delphi about the impending Persian invasion, the oracle proclaimed that only “a rampart of wood would stay unravaged” (Hdt. 7.141). Based on this response, Themistocles convinced the assembly to evacuate the city and place its hopes in its ships. Some eighty thousand Athenians fled to Troezen (on the Peloponnesian coast) and the nearby islands of Salamis and Aegina, while Xerxes’ army laid waste to Attica

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and burnt the Acropolis, only to be destroyed by the Athenian fleet in the naval battle off Salamis in 480.151 A year later, the city repeated this strategy before the invasion of Mardonius, who burned the city a second time before his army was defeated at Plataea.152 After these victories, the Athenians expanded their fleet and also rebuilt their “nonwooden” walls with great urgency, improving the rough circuit around the city that the Persians had destroyed. Between 461 and 456, they extended the fortifications to the port of Piraeus and the southern end of the bay of Phaleron, the “Long Walls” that protected Athens’ vital link to the sea (figure 12).153 The fortifications encouraged Pericles to adopt a strategy in the Peloponnesian War similar to that of Themistocles fifty years earlier, when the city “opened itself” to the Persians. Trusting in the Long Walls and in the Athenian fleet, Pericles refused to engage the Spartan army when it invaded the Attic countryside in 431. During the enemy’s seasonal occupation over the next five years, the threatened population moved behind the city walls, where temporary overcrowding worsened the plague that had broken out in Athens (discussed in chapter 5).154 The epidemic confirmed what many Athenians felt to be the unnatural dispensation of their fields and oikoi. In Thucydides’ words, Pericles’ defensive posture forced nonurban Athenians to “leave their homes, their sacred places which had been passed on to them continuously from their ancestors . . . transforming their way of life, each person in effect abandoning his own polis.”155 When the Spartans gained a permanent base in Attica by capturing Decelea in 413, the impact of territorial dispossession grew worse: “The Athenians were deprived of [using] their whole countryside; more than twenty thousand slaves deserted, most of them skilled workers; all the sheep and beasts of burden were lost.”156 Ignoring these realities, Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ Frogs looks back to Pericles’ policy with nostalgia, as if it held the answer to defeating the Spartans— Athenians should save themselves “by considering the land of their enemies / to be their own, and their own to be their enemies’ ” (Ran. 1463–64). The paradoxical relationship of Athens to its own territory reflected the city’s trust in its fleet and its growing empire, allowing its own “mother” to be occupied by enemy forces, while drawing sustenance, nurture, and tribute from foreign lands.157 Between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, Athens settled poorer citizens overseas, including a thousand led by Pericles to Chersonese (the setting of Euripides’ Hecuba, discussed in chapter 4), and others to Naxos, Andros, Carystos on Euboea, and Lemnos (the location of Sophocles’ Philoctetes).158 Wealthy Athenians could buy property in allied cities, a right extended only rarely in the other direction, to non-Athenians in Attica. During the Peloponnesian War Athens seized the land of rebellious allies such as Mytilene (427) and Melos (416), which it distributed to its own citizen cleruchs, who either occupied the land or, as absentee landlords, rented it back to local inhabitants.159

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In spite of its importance for trade and empire, the sea never lost its sense of danger for the Athenians.160 Death at sea was deemed particularly grievous, for it denied the oikos of the deceased the chance to fulfill its ritual obligations to the dead. According to Diodorus, the failure at Arginusae to recover Athenian corpses for burial led to the execution of the six naval commanders (including Pericles’ son) in 406, in spite of their having engineered an unexpected victory over the Spartan fleet, when the Peloponnesian War hung in the balance.161 One of innumerable ironies in Euripides’ Helen involves a comparable scenario that plays off traditional burial in Greek soil. To escape from Egypt, Helen concocts a false “funeral at sea” for Menelaus, the opposite of what any Athenian would desire. However, the corpses left in her wake (unarmed Egyptians cut down by her previously unrecognized husband) may have reminded the audience of the multitude of Athenians lost in the waters off Syracuse in 413, the year before the play was produced.162 Both the vital role of the sea and its dangers surface time and again in tragedy: storm and shipwreck haunt plays dealing with the Trojan War and its aftermath (Agamemnon, Hecuba, the Trojan trilogy of Euripides, the satyr plays Cyclops and Proteus); battle deaths at sea feature prominently in Persians; the Athenian navy lurks behind the Chorus in Ajax and Philoctetes (discussed in chapter 3); metaphors based on sailing and navigation elucidate personal and political norms from Seven against Thebes to Oedipus at Colonus.163 On occasion, the sea even invades the prerogatives of dry land. In Hippolytus, for example, the protagonist meets his death in a chariot along the shore, but the Messenger describes the events like a shipwreck. A giant wave, heaven-high, cuts off the sight of land (Hipp. 1206–9), and Hippolytus pulls on the reins like a rower pulling hard on his oar (1220–22). However, the horses fail to respond to the “shipmaster’s hand” (naukl¯erou cheir, 1224). No matter where he “moves the rudder” (ech¯on oiakas euthunoi, 1227), Hippolytus cannot avoid disaster, and his chariot smashes on the rocks (1230–39). Whether on sea or land, the realities of Athenian life find their way into the play of tragic space. In the interaction of theatrical, scenic, extrascenic, and distant spaces, we see reflected the continuum of urban and rural worlds; the outside-as-inside core of domestic experience; the workaday mobility of women, metics, and slaves connected to the oikos; the conception of public life as one that includes the religious and ritual spheres; the pull of empire out to the distance, with its potential for destruction and relocation; the paradox of autochthony where the homegrown leave and foreigners move in. Within the context of civic festivals, each tragic production was the result of democratic processes that it might then represent onstage. In tragedy’s metatheatrical and reflexive moments, the Athenian audience could see itself included in the performance space. Taken together, these various spaces make up the heterotopia that was the theater of Dionysus, a place that could

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be “other” by virtue of being grounded, embedded in a landscape, offering its vistas and affordances, representing “spaces that matter” in the city to which it belonged. With these observations in mind, let us turn to the idea of nostos in tragedy, “homecomings” that bring to Athens new—and unexpected—residents.

Figure 1: Theater of Dionysus in Athens (view from above), including the hillside on which the audience sat and the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus below the theater (DAI 75/576).

I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. 14. 15. 148. 151. 152. 158. 159.

160. 176. 181. 182. 184. 185. 186. 189. 192. 198. 202. 206. 214. 215. 217. 218. 219. 220. 222. 223. 229. 235.

Delphinion State Burial-place Palladion Shrine of Kodros Dionysion in Limnai Palaestra of Taureas Lysikrates Monument Pythion Kynosarges Stadium Lykeion Garden of Theophrastos Eridanos Ilissos Areopagus Kolonos Agoraios Hill of the Nymphs Mouseion Ardettos Lykabettos Road to Phaleron Road to the Mesogaia 255. 256.

242. 243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254.

236. 237. 239. 240. 241.

Road to Acharnai Road to Eleusis Hellenistic Building Heros Iatros Altar of Zeus Phratrios and Athena Phratria Shrine of Herakles Monument of Euboulides Artemis Aristoboule Poros Building Grave enclosure Lesche Herakles Alexikakos Amyneion Fountain House Pnyx Diateichisma Naiskos Grave enclosure NW of Gate XIII Grave enclosure near Gate XIII Classical house

Figure 2: The plan of ancient Athens in relation to the modern city. The numbers are keyed to the list of buildings and monuments (Travlos 1971, pp. 169, 168).

Demian Gate Peiraic Gate Sacred Gate Dipylon Eriai Gate Acharnian Gate Northeast Gate Diochares Gate Hippades Gate Diomeian Gate Itonian Gate Halade Gate South Gate Dipylon above the Gates Melitides Gate Eleusinion Prytaneion Shrine of Nymphe Artemis Agrotera Metroon in Agrai Olympieion Kronos and Rhea

Figure 3: Turn-of-the-century photograph of the theater of Dionysus, showing the expanse of Attic landscape visible toward the south (DAI A.B. 119).

Figure 4: Theater of Dionysus, view toward the southeast, including the slopes of Mount Hymettos (DAI A.B. 514).

Figure 5: Theater of Dionysus, view to the southwest toward the bay of Phaleron (DAI A.B. 512).

Figure 6: The theater of Dionysus and the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus below, sloping down to the left (south) (DAI 78/197).

Figure 7: Plan of the theater of Dionysus (Roman period) and sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus, showing the old temple of Dionysus (F) and the altar (H) (Travlos 1971, p. 541).

Figure 8: Plan of the Athenian agora, ca. 500 B.C., showing the agora orch¯estra, the altar of the twelve Gods, the old bouleut¯erion (council hall), and the Panathenaic Way (Thompson and Wycherley 1972, pl. 4).

Theatre of Dionysus

Agora

Acropolis

Figure 9: Aerial view of the city of Athens, showing the Acropolis, agora, Pnyx, and theater of Dionysus (DAI AKR 2013).

Pnyx

Figure 10: Plan of the Pnyx, meeting place of the Athenian assembly (ca. 500 B.C.), showing the theater-like relationship between speaker and audience (Travlos 1971, p. 471).

Figure 11: Plans of the old and new bouleut¯erion (council hall), showing the theaterlike relationship between speaker (who addressed the council from the bema) and audience (Dinsmoor, in Camp 1992, pp. 52 and 91).

Figure 12: Plan showing the Long Walls (231, 232) running between Athens and the port of Peiraeus, and the Phaleron Wall (233) that extended from the city to the southern part of the bay of Phaleron (Travlos 1971, p. 164).

CHAPTER TWO SPACE FOR RETURNS Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place. —Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

N

O NARRATIVE CAPTURED the Greek imagination more than that of a hero’s return (nostos) to his home and family, usually after war or exile. In her study of Pindar, Kurke examines the “loop of nostos” that reflects the cultural imperative to achieve kleos ‘fame’, ‘renown’. Whether athlete or mythic warrior, a hero’s trajectory involves leaving home and returning with the “goods.”1 Befitting a hero who comes to question the Trojan War (Il. 1.149–60, 9.337–45, 400–420), Achilles understands that his return to battle means he will never go home: If I stay here fighting beside the city of the Trojans, my day of return is ruined, but my fame will last forever; if I return home to my fatherland, however, my glory will depart with me, but there will be long life left to me, and death will not come quickly. (Il. 9.412–16)2

In less heroic contexts, initiation and marriage rituals, annual festivals honoring the gods, and even the founding of colonies are figured as homecomings.3 A formative idea for the ancient Greeks, nostos structured both their lived and imagined worlds.4 Homer’s Odyssey epitomizes the nostos pattern, providing the model for countless other tales (many of them lost) of Greek heroes returning home after the Trojan War. Recurrent elements include wanderings at sea, adventures and disasters along the way, the hero’s arrival alone or with a significantly reduced party (yet usually with plunder intact), a disturbed political situation at home, and violence associated with the hero’s reintegration into his former world, often resulting in his own death (Aeschylus’ Agamemnon) or that of his family (Euripides’ Heracles). Other Odyssean motifs that recur in later mythic nostoi include the hero’s acquisition of “distant” knowledge;5 a wife whose presence of mind proves essential in effecting his return; the

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hero’s use of disguise to gain entry, aided by loyal retainers; tests and trials of fidelity; and various ritual reversals that mark the stages in the restitution of social and familial order. Mutatis mutandis, we recognize these elements in Aeschylus’ Persians, Agamemnon, and Choephori; Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Electra; and Euripides’ Hippolytus (Theseus’ return), Andromache (Neoptolemus’ expected homecoming), Heracles, and Electra.6 Of course, arrivals home imply departures, and we might identify Euripides’ Hecuba and Trojan Women as “departure plays” whose dramatic effect depends on the difficult return projected for the Greeks. Similarly, the various ironies in Iphigenia in Aulis, which deals with the departure of the Greek army for Troy, rely on the fatal homecoming that lies ten years in the future. Plays based on the Argive Seven (Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, Euripides’ Phoenissae) also depend on Polyneices’ return to his native Thebes. Euripides’ Bacchae dramatizes the destruction wreaked on Thebes as a consequence of Dionysus’ “homecoming.” His Helen, Ion, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, while not enacting a return home, all end with one. Even Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus dramatizes a kind of nostos, where the return takes the form of a recognition of the home that was always there. Characters in the Odyssey frequently contrast Odysseus’ homecoming to his faithful Penelope with the fatal nostos of Agamemnon, murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus (Od 1.29–43, 298–300; 3.254– 312; 4.514–37; 11.405–39). These two outcomes provide the opposing poles for many subsequent versions of heroic return. On his visit to the underworld, Odysseus learns of Agamemnon’s fate from the shade of the Greek commander himself. As noted in the introduction, the narrative underpinnings of a descent into Hades (katabasis) and subsequent return (anabasis) find their mythic roots in the story of Persephone (Kore).7 Scholars identify a parallel movement in the wanderings of Odysseus, culminating in his landing asleep on Ithaca, where he awakens to his native island as if emerging from the dead.8 Literally (in the nekuia of book 10) and figuratively (in his homecoming from the “shadow land” of Scheria), Odysseus’ nostos involves an anodos ‘path up’ from the land of shades.9 These related patterns of homecoming—from combat or exile, from the underworld—inform the spatial transformations of Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Euripides’ Heracles.

The Oresteia: Homecoming and Its Returns And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

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Ain’t you glad that walls don’t talk. —Jazz standard

Agamemnon begins with a lone Watchman addressing the audience from the roof of the house of Atreus. His rare vantage point emphasizes the importance of the house as the play’s setting. Perched there every night for a year (Ag. 1–3), the Watchman surveys both the changing pattern of the heavens (their “kingly fires,” 4–7) and the changing fate of the house of Atreus (18– 21). Out of the expanse of stars, he keeps his eye out for a man-made flame, the beacon fires signaling the destruction of Troy and the imminent return of its conqueror (8–11). Shifting between the eternal realm of the burning stars and the torch fires of a fallen city, the prologue tacitly links the stories of Argos and Troy to the celestial forces against which they are set. As the beacon fires merge with the rising sun (20–23), the fate of Troy and the house of Atreus momentarily transcend their local place and time. The means by which the Oresteia enlarges its scope while focusing in on specific homecomings constitute much of the trilogy’s spatial play. In simple terms, Agamemnon tells of the fatal arrival of the Greek commander home from the Trojan War; Choephori dramatizes Orestes’ return from exile to avenge his father’s murder; and Eumenides presents both the legal vindication of Orestes—allowing for his second (and final) homecoming to Argos—and the provision of a new home for the Furies as permanent residents in Athens. Using the categories outlined in the introduction, let us examine the way these homecomings play out across the trilogy. Beginning with theatrical space, Taplin argues that Aeschylus introduced the sk¯en¯e facade with the Oresteia, marking a radical shift in the resources available at the theater of Dionysus. Although that seems unlikely (chapter 1, note 14), Aeschylus does make consummate use of the facade in Agamemnon. It establishes the scenic space as the house of Atreus in Argos, the destination for all that arrives from Troy—the beacon fire, the Herald, Agamemnon, Cassandra. Clytemnestra’s revelation of the corpses of the last two on the ekkukl¯ema demonstrates her control over the extrascenic interior of the palace, the logical focus for a play about a king’s return home.10 The dark-red tapestries spread across the orchestra link Agamemnon’s destruction of the distanced space of Troy to this extrascenic world. As her husband tramples the fabrics, Clytemnestra celebrates the fecundity of the sea that breeds the purple-red dyes, an image of boundless wealth (958–65).11 By laying out the tapestries, she puts the inner resources of the house on view. However, like an octopus disgorging its stomach to capture its prey, the fabric extending from inside takes its victim with it as it retracts. Perhaps the most memorable homecoming in Western drama, the tapestry scene magnifies the power of the offstage space where Agamemnon ultimately goes. Linguistic details add to the dangerous seductions of the red

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fabric, as Clytemnestra spins out her trap. The scene begins with an exchange of formal, public speech—Agamemnon’s “homecoming address” (Ag. 810–54) followed by Clytemnestra’s response (855–913). She begins by referring to Agamemnon in the third person, and even when she slides into second person, she never addresses her husband directly.12 Clytemnestra shifts back to the public third person in the explosion of similes (896–901) that celebrates the homecoming of “this man here” (andra tonde, 896), before finally addressing him directly (and with imperatives) when she exhorts him to take his final steps home (905–7).13 Agamemnon responds with his own counterimperatives (914–30), before being drawn into a rapid-fire stichomythic exchange with his wife (931–43), all in direct address. As he walks down the dark-red path, Clytemnestra offers a double-edged prayer to Zeus the Fulfiller (973–74), and the door closes behind them. This homecoming takes place on Clytemnestra’s terms, an interweaving of language and theatrical symbol that draws Agamemnon inexorably into the extrascenic space of the palace. Aeschylus builds up his entrance only to pull its dramatic punch. The audience expects to hear Agamemnon’s offstage death cry, an expectation heightened by the Chorus’s song of foreboding (975–1034). Instead of this coup de grace, however, Clytemnestra appears unexpectedly from the house to lure in the silent figure of Cassandra. Cassandra’s presence at “the homecoming sacrifice inside” concerns Clytemnestra (1035–38), and her entrance constitutes the climax of Agamemnon.14 But why does Aeschylus keep the play from moving offstage, after accelerating its momentum in that direction? What does the unexpected focus on the Trojan prophetess accomplish in terms of the spatial categories adopted here? Beginning with scenic space, recall the Watchman’s enigmatic statement at the end of his prologue: “For the rest, I remain silent. There’s an ox / standing on my tongue. But if this house could speak, / it would tell a different story” (36–38). Pressured by Clytemnestra, Cassandra refuses to speak until after her nemesis returns to the extrascenic space of the palace. Only then does she break her silence, calling on Apollo as her destroyer and as “lord of the ways” (1080–81, 1085–86), referring to the god as protector of the passage between doorways and streets. A small aniconic column dedicated to Apollo may have stood before the central door of the sk¯en¯e, reflecting the common Athenian practice of placing these markers (much like curbstones) just outside the house door.15 Cassandra asks Apollo where he has brought her, “to what [kind of] house?” (pros poian steg¯en; 1087—literally, “to what roof?”), and in the scene that follows (the longest in the play) the foreignborn princess answers her own question by giving the house its voice, “making space speak.”16 Inspired by prophecy, Cassandra sees through the walls of the house into its past, disclosing the butchered children whom Atreus fed to their father

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Thyestes behind that very facade (acknowledged by the Chorus at 1242–44). Shifting to the present, she describes what Clytemnestra is preparing within—Agamemnon’s murder, and her own. Looking to the future, Cassandra sees a child of the house, “an exile, a wanderer, estranged from this land” (phugas d’ al¯et¯es t¯esde g¯es apoxenos, 1282). By emphasizing Orestes’ status as an exile, Cassandra gestures toward his nostos in the next play, when “the stretched out corpse of his father will lead him home” (1285). Given the focus on the palace facade, Cassandra’s evocation of its future takes an appropriately architectural form. Orestes will “put a coping-stone on these acts of ruin” (1283), as if the destructive past of the house were a wall that could be crowned with a final course.17 The effect of Cassandra’s visions on the audience are captured in Goethe’s enthusiastic letter to Humboldt: “past, present and future are so beautifully integrated that the spectator becomes a seer, in other words, close to divinity.”18 The act of seeing the house of Atreus “naked” for what it is leads Cassandra back in time and space to the fate of Troy: the fatal marriage of Paris and Helen, her own childhood by the banks of the Scamander, her father’s pious sacrifices to the gods (1156–61, 1167–72). In both her physical presence and her spoken memories, Cassandra evokes far-off Troy, the most prominent distanced space in Agamemnon. She draws together the fate of her former home with that of her short-lived new one, the scenically present Argos. By weaving together scenic, extrascenic, and distanced spaces, Cassandra creates a snare that draws the elders of the Chorus into her mode of experience. They leave the normal iambic trimeters with which they addressed her previously, adopting the lyric meters she has used since breaking her silence. The moment of lyric infection (1121) occurs just after Cassandra identifies Clytemnestra as the “net of Hades” and calls on the Furies (1114– 18), and just before she describes the bloody bath where Clytemnestra entangles Agamemnon with robes and cuts him down (1125–29). Figurative and literal nets conjoin, as Cassandra draws together the house of Atreus, its offstage interior, and her distant home whose destruction has bound her to the now doomed Agamemnon.19 As noted earlier, Cassandra is not the first to link Troy and Argos. Clytemnestra ominously connects the two via the “relay of fire” (314) that brings the news: “Then the light fell on the roof of the house of Atreus, / a fire not undescended from the flames of Ida” (310–11).20 She warns that “the race is only half over. / They [the Greeks] face a long home stretch to win a safe return” (Ag. 343–44),21 hinting that Agamemnon’s homecoming remains fatally linked to the carnage that precedes it. The Herald, too, brings with him a vivid sense of Troy, from the hardships the Greeks endured before its walls (558–66) to the utter destruction they eventually wreaked there (524–29, 532–37). The Chorus also evokes Troy in the second stasimon, describing Helen’s arrival, her marriage to Paris, and the death that follows in the form

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of the Greek invaders (681–749). Agamemnon himself describes the strange offspring of the Trojan horse that drank its fill of royal blood (825–28) and left the city a heap of ashes, “where only the winds of ruin live” (819). Aeschylus brings Troy before us in a series of increasingly present manifestations. The proleptic fires of the Watchman give way to the specific geography of the beacons (281–314), followed by Clytemnestra’s recreation of the fallen city itself (320–42). Next, the Herald offers the plain words of an actual eyewitness (489–500), followed by the arrival of Agamemnon with booty from the sacked city, including a living remnant, Cassandra, “the choicest flower of our many spoils” (954). When, at last, a Trojan stands before us, her visions range across time and space.22 Although Aeschylus never makes the link explicit, Cassandra’s presence calls to mind another princess, Iphigenia, whose sacrifice at Aulis the Chorus reenacts in the parodos (228–49).23 Stopping just short of the bloodshed, the Chorus so graphically creates the scene that, among the play’s distant places, Aulis takes on a reality second only to Troy. Iphigenia’s sacrifice makes a lasting impression on the audience. When Clytemnestra later informs Agamemnon that “your child is not standing here as it should be, / the living proof of our love for each other” (Ag. 877–78), we hear the possibility that the child (pais, gender unspecified) to whom Clytemnestra refers is Iphigenia, until she finally names Orestes (879). Evoked in the parodos, Iphigenia shares important attributes with the Cassandra we meet on stage. Their deaths take the form of a perverted sacrifice, with royal daughter substituted for animal victim. Both Iphigenia (238) and Cassandra (1266–72) cast off garments before meeting their fate, metaphoric undressings linked to the twin gods associated with their demise, Artemis (134–38, 146–55, 201–2) and Apollo (1072–87, 1202–13, 1256–57, 1269–72). Their respective disrobings also signal the transition from an innocent maid to a bride of death, especially if the saffron-dyed cloth Iphigenia discards is a veil.24 The image of an unveiled Iphigenia foreshadows Cassandra’s address to the Chorus: “No more like a newly wedded bride / will my prophecies look out from under veils” (1178–79). Held over the altar, Iphigenia resembles “a picture [graphais] straining to speak” (242), a comparison Cassandra also applies to herself at the point of death, where “one stroke of a wet sponge and the picture [graph¯en] is gone” (1329). By linking the two young women, Aeschylus brings together the separate damages wreaked by Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and the audience views their respective fates accordingly. We understand that Agamemnon has to die, the result of his impious conquest of Troy that began with the sacrifice of his daughter at Aulis. Similarly, Clytemnestra’s murder of Cassandra—more than her slaying of Agamemnon—turns the audience against her and makes her death acceptable. Cassandra’s entrance into the palace represents a complex of “homecom-

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ings”: that of a foreign slave incorporated by sacrificial ritual into the house of her new masters (Ag. 1035–46, 1056–59, 1296–98, 1310); that of a “wife,” brought by her husband via marriage cart to her new domicile (950– 55, 1039, 1070–71);25 that of the dead Iphigenia’s living stand-in, who (as a Trojan) must pay along with Agamemnon for what happened at Aulis. Above all, Cassandra’s entrance marks the final, and singularly authentic, arrival from Troy. Unlike Agamemnon, she knows she walks to her death and does so with her eyes open. We might compare another “reverse homecoming,” the Chorus’s recreation of Helen’s arrival at Troy, “stepping lightly through the gates” (Ag. 407–8) to a marriage that brings destruction. Cassandra is no Helen, but her entrance through the “gates of Hades” (1291), past the stench of a tomb (1309–11), brings the fall of Troy full circle. By butchering this innocent victim, Clytemnestra participates in the destruction of the city set in motion ten years earlier when her sister Helen arrived at Troy. Displayed on the ekkukl¯ema, the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra reveal the most recent extrascenic horrors of the house. Speaking over the bodies, Clytemnestra relives the murders like a possessed celebrant: I stand where I struck. ............. He could not flee this death nor fight against it. Casting around him an inescapable net, a rich evil of robes, I trapped him like a fish. I strike twice. With two cries he sinks to his knees and, when he falls, a third blow—my offering to the god who guards the dead. Life gushes from him in spurts, spattering me with drops of blood; and I rejoice, as spring seeds in the pangs of birth drink the god-sent rain and burst into life. It is done, old men. Rejoice if you will; I revel in it. (1379–94)

By bringing the interior space outside (“I stand where I struck,” 1379), and by shifting to the present tense (“I cast an endless net,” 1383; “I strike twice,” 1384), Clytemnestra seems to transcend the normal constraints on space and time.26 She compares her husband’s blood with seminal fluid that unleashes generative forces in the earth,27 a twisted version of natural growth that ties her crimes to those of Agamemnon at Troy: “Digging up the soil, he uprooted Troy / with the pick-ax of Zeus, who brings justice. / Altars smashed, temples rubble / the seed of the whole land destroyed” (525–28). With the murder of

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Cassandra, Trojan blood literally flows out of the house of Atreus, and Clytemnestra wields the sword.28 The scenic and extrascenic spaces (simultaneously present via the ekkukl¯ema) extend to the distant space of Troy, much as the tapestries linked the bloodshed at Aulis and Troy to the slaughter waiting inside the house. Clytemnestra construes her murder as a horrific parody of the cosmic wedding between the rain-bearing sky and seed-bearing earth.29 Her travesty of nature is all the more disturbing for taking place outside, beneath the sun and against the backdrop of the Attic countryside. “Oh blessed light of this day that brings justice!” exclaims Aegisthus at the sight of the corpses. In the mirror scene in Choephori, standing over his two victims, Orestes stretches out the net that trapped Agamemnon, so that “the father might see—not mine but the one who looks over everything, the Sun” (Cho. 984–86). Clytemnestra comes to represent natural forces gone wrong, forces over which she appears to have power—the fire that moves from Troy to Argos (281– 316), the sea that breeds vast quantities of rich dyes (960–65), even Zeus the Fulfiller, who helps accomplish her “marriage-harvest” (973–74)—until she herself suffers a most unnatural death at the hands of her son.30 At the end of the trilogy, returning the forces of nature—particularly the Furies—to their proper place and function becomes the overriding task. After confronting Clytemnestra with the obscenity of her act and its inevitable consequences (1407–11, 1426–30), the Chorus redirects its energies away from the crime and toward lamenting the murdered king (1489– 96 ⳱ 1513–20, 1537–50). The creation of a “ritual space” around the body of Agamemnon signals the prospect of other transformations involving the future of the house. Initially Clytemnestra appropriates the funeral rites, insisting that she has poured the proper offerings for her husband and that she alone will lament his death, supervise the burial, and speak over the tomb (1551–59). With ironic foresight, she already has provided his funeral bath and arranged for a perverse prothesis of the corpse, laid out in public view, wrapped in its net-cum-funeral-shroud. The Chorus even refers to a “garland of unwashed blood” coming from Helen (1458–60), as if a funeral stephanos had been placed on the body.31 Under pressure from the Chorus, however, Clytemnestra gradually adopts a less aggressive tone and admits the workings of a vengeful spirit in the race (1474–80, 1497–1504, 1567–76). With her admission, the house stands fully exposed, and the incipient funeral rites provide a context for the exhaustion of hostilities. The stage picture of dead king, grieving citizens, and subdued murderer (given the outlandish celebration with which Clytemnestra began the scene) contributes to the Chorus’s sense of stasis: Taunt answers taunt, hard to judge between them.

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The taker is taken, the killer killed. This law remains while Zeus is throned— Who acts must suffer. Who can drive the inbred curse from the house? Its seed is glued to ruin. (1560–66)

Aegisthus’ unexpected entrance (1577) shatters any communal sense of the future of the house. Purposefully absent from the palace when Agamemnon returned (1608–9), he now boldly claims his share in the conquest, vaunting over the dead king (1577–1611) with the rhetoric of vengeance and insult that Clytemnestra used some two hundred lines before. But the mood has changed from celebration (Clytemnestra) and outrage (Chorus) to one of mournful resignation. Entering not from the palace but via an eisodos, Aegisthus in effect walks into the wrong play. Following the return of Agamemnon at line 782, the spatial focus has remained firmly on the space between the orchestra and the palace interior—Agamemnon’s homecoming down the tapestries, Cassandra’s protracted entrance to her death, the Chorus’s confused response to the offstage cries of Agamemnon (1343–71), Clytemnestra’s appearance with the corpses on the ekkukl¯ema and her standoff with the Chorus. Aegisthus’ entrance down an eisodos jars this spatial cohesion.32 His unexpected and off-centered arrival, accompanied by armed bodyguards, proves him to be the usurper he denies he is.33 The Chorus responds to Aegisthus with disbelief and defiance, and its manner of departure—scattered dispersals as the men return to their homes—offers an appropriate image for the political division caused by the new tyrant. Although we cannot be certain how they left, the Chorus of elders lacks the normal anapestic “exit song” that characterizes most Greek tragedies.34 Instead, it hurls trochaic tetrameter lines back at Aegisthus in a raucous exchange, punctuated by a short interjection and a closing couplet from Clytemnestra (1649–73). Commentators assume that the Chorus exits silently out the eisodoi after the Queen’s last lines, while Aegisthus, Clytemnestra, and the bodyguards enter the palace (followed, presumably, by the corpses on the ekkukl¯ema).35 However, a more effective ending has the six individual trochaic tetrameter lines delivered by six different Chorus members, on the model of the twelve trimeter couplets spoken individually by each of the twelve Chorus members after Agamemnon’s death (1348–71). At the conclusion of each of the last four outbursts at Aegisthus—“No Argive would fawn on a man like you!” (1665); “Not if the spirit of this place leads Orestes home!” (1667); “Go on. Grow fat. Stain what is just—you can!” (1669); “Boast and strut like a cock beside his hen!” (1671)—the Chorus speaker exits out an eisodos with two of his fellows. Following Clytemnestra’s conciliatory interjection (1654–61)—“No more bloodshed . . . Go to your

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homes, old men”—the dispersal of the Chorus emphasizes its lack of respect for Aegisthus, the new “tyrant of Argos” (1633; cf. 1365). He and Clytemnestra find themselves speaking to a diminishing citizen body and, at the end, to no one but each other, as her last lines—the last in the play— suggest: “Let them bark like toothless dogs. / You and I will rule, and make the house well again” (1672–73). A scattered choral exit offers the appropriate spatial image for the turbulent political situation in Argos, establishing the need for the restorative action of Choephori. Whereas Aeschylus sets Agamemnon solely before the palace, he splits the scenic space of Choephori between Agamemnon’s tomb in the center of the orchestra (lines 1–651) and the house of Atreus (652–end), effectively occluding the palace for the first two-thirds of the play.36 Orestes enacts his homecoming at the liminal space of the tomb, where the living and dead strive to converse,37 and it is to this spot that Clytemnestra sends Electra and the Chorus with conciliatory offerings for the dead, the source of the play’s title. The tomb setting proved memorable, for more than fifty Attic vases (dated from after the Oresteia) depict the recognition scene of Electra and Orestes at Agamemnon’s grave.38 Only after Orestes outlines the murder plot does the scene shift to the palace, where the play concentrates on his gaining entrance and exacting vengeance. At the end of Choephori, however, Orestes finds himself haunted by the spirits of vengeance he himself has invoked, and he flees in madness. His homecoming proves all too brief, and he must await purification at Delphi and a trial at Athens—the action of Eumenides— before he can return home to stay. What does Aeschylus gain by utilizing two complementary settings in Choephori? As noted in the postmurder scene in Agamemnon, lament for the dead king gradually creates a ritual space that changes the dramatic mood, softening the hostilities between the Chorus and Clytemnestra. Applying Kenneth Burke’s scene-agent ratio,39 we could say that the scene shifts from one of murderous display (dominated by the house and controlled by Clytemnestra) to one of public grieving (dominated by the corpses and led by the Chorus), with concomitant changes in behavior in the two parties until Aegisthus’ entrance establishes a new ratio based on his narration of the palace’s past. In Choephori the initial scenic focus is firmly on the tomb, and the effects of that environment stay with Orestes throughout the play. Announcing his homecoming at the grave (3), he identifies home with ritual obligations to the dead, duties he belatedly performs (4–9).40 When the scene shifts to the palace, the orchestra-tomb “disappears,” and the focus moves from crimes past (represented by Agamemnon’s grave) to the murders to come (in the interior of the house). But even as the grave effectively vanishes, Orestes comes to personify it. He gains entrance by announcing his own death, as if his identity had merged with the dead. After the murder of Aegisthus, the Servant cries out that “He who is dead has killed the living!”

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(886). Just before the matricide, Clytemnestra realizes that the son she pleads with has “no more life than a tomb” (926).42 The tomb serves an additional function, opening up what I have called self-referential, or metatheatrical, space. When Orestes perceives women dressed in black, led by Electra, approaching the grave, he and Pylades withdraw to watch. Agamemnon’s tomb remains a site of ritual activity, but it also becomes a theatral area that the two hidden characters observe in secret. Because the audience knows of their presence, Aeschylus ensures our complicity with Orestes, a relationship developed further when the scene shifts to the palace and the plot moves from plan to action. At that point, the scenic and extrascenic spaces continue to operate as such, but they also function metatheatrically until Orestes’ murder of Aegisthus strips him of his disguise. The materiality of the palace emerges in almost comic fashion when Orestes and Pylades actually knock at the gate, leading to an exchange with an offstage servant, like the Porter scene of Macbeth in reverse.43 While highlighting the shift in scenic space from tomb to palace, the comic touch also underlines the audience’s collusion in the plot. We remain “in the know,” attuned to the various ironies of situation (Orestes announcing his own death to his mother) and of expression (“Perhaps / I’m speaking [of his death] to those who are not concerned. / I do think his father should be told,” 688–90). However, by moving the action from the center of the orchestra back to the facade, Aeschylus distances the audience somewhat from Orestes’ matricide, suggesting its ambiguous nature. After Aegisthus’ offstage death cry (869), the Chorus expresses in spatial terms what many in the audience feel emotionally: “Let us stand back till the fighting is done, / and we will seem guiltless” (872–73). Regarding the extrascenic space, recall that Clytemnestra dominates the central doorway in Agamemnon, but characters crisscross the threshold in Choephori so frequently that the notion of control seems absurd. Orestes leads us to expect that Aegisthus will emerge when he and Pylades approach the palace (572–76, 666–67), but it is an offstage Servant and then Clytemnestra who greet the guests on their arrival. After Orestes, Pylades, and Clytemnestra first enter the palace, we witness an unprecedented sequence of entrances and exits: the surprising appearance of the Nurse (732), sent by Clytemnestra to bring Aegisthus, and her eventual departure out an eisodos (782); the subsequent arrival of Aegisthus via an eisodos (838) and his exit into the palace shortly thereafter (854), followed by his death cries (869); the servant’s exit from (875) and return to (889) the palace, announcing Aegisthus’ death; the appearance of Clytemnestra from the palace (885); the subsequent appearance of Orestes and Pylades (892); the trio’s exit back into the palace (930)—mirroring its first exit inside (718)—so that Orestes can kill his mother by the corpse of Aegisthus (904–7); Orestes’ return to the

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stage with the two bodies on the ekkukl¯ema (973); his flight from the theater out one of the eisodoi (1063), followed by the Chorus’s departure at end of the play.44 By having the palace threshold crossed so frequently in both directions, Aeschylus undermines the audience’s sense (carefully developed in Agamemnon) that the house of Atreus is an inescapable magnet, luring both the unwary (Agamemnon) and the fully aware (Cassandra) slowly and inexorably to their doom. Consider by contrast Aegisthus’ entrance into the house in Choephori only 17 lines after his arrival onstage. His is the shortest stage life of any named character in tragedy, less than one-fifth of his dramatic career in Agamemnon. “It’s hard to fool a man [literally, “a mind”] whose eyes are open” (854), he says, and we hear his ignominious death cries from offstage only 15 lines later. Those of Agamemnon occur 370 lines after his entrance into the palace. Let us compare Aegisthus’ brief appearance with the previous scene, an encounter between female slaves of the palace—the Nurse and the Chorus— that reveals important aspects of the way space operates in the play. The Chorus calls the Nurse by name, Cilissa (732), pointing to her origins in Cilicia (on the Mediterranean coast of what is now southern Turkey), a source of real slaves in fifth-century Athens.45 The Chorus itself is composed of prisoners of war (75–81), who also appear to hail from Asia Minor (423– 28).46 They intercept Cilissa on her way to fetch Aegisthus, persuading her to have him come alone, a crucial detail for Orestes’ plan, and “a surprising and unusually bold use of the Chorus as an actor in the drama.”47 Recall, however, that this is the second time the women of the Chorus challenge Clytemnestra’s orders and alter the direction of the plot. After the parodos, they convince Electra to change Clytemnestra’s offerings from propitiations at Agamemnon’s tomb into prayers for the return of an avenging Orestes (84– 163), setting up the recognition scene that follows. Moreover, in the kommos the Chorus drives the two siblings to abandon their irrational wishes for a different past and face the “harsh demands of Dik¯e.”48 In short, foreign female slaves, with no blood ties to the palace, play a surprisingly important role in restoring it to health.49 In Agamemnon, resistance to Aegisthus’ tyranny centers on the ineffectual, albeit well-intentioned, elders of the Chorus who, although natives of Argos, have no immediate relationship to the house of Atreus (recall that they scatter to their homes at the end of the play). By contrast, Choephori paradoxically offers “internal resistance” by foreign slave women who live and work inside the oikos. Raised outside Argos by the Phocian Strophius, even Orestes remains a xenos ‘foreigner’—used of him in disguise at 560, 562, 563–64 (he and Pylades will adopt the Phocian dialect), 575, 668, 674, 682, 700, but prophetic of his fate—until he is purified of matricide and allowed to return home after the trial in Eumenides. Electra, too, complains that she and

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Orestes have been “sold like slaves . . . / by our own mother, who bought in exchange a [new] husband /, Aegisthus.”50 As we shall see, the play between internal and external agents, and the crossover between foreigners and natives, proves central to the ultimate resolution of the trilogy.51 Like Cassandra before her, the foreign Nurse offers us a glimpse into the palace interior of the past, and her child-rearing duties open up an even more intimate interior space, that of the baby Orestes, whose “young insides are a law unto themselves [autark¯es]” (757). That an Asian slave in an ancient Greek city was familiar with the workings of the bowels of her mistress’ child is not surprising, but that these “revelations”—her language directly invokes prophecy (758–59, followed by the Chorus at 777)—occur at a crucial juncture in a revenge plot in tragedy is little short of amazing. We find an epic parallel in Homer’s Phoenix (Il. 9.485–95), who describes caring for the toddler Achilles. As Richard Martin points out, both Phoenix and the Nurse are metanastai, outsiders who have resettled in homes not really their own, a situation that offers them valuable insights on their new communities.52 We have moved from distant Cilicia to the palace at Argos and finally to the internal needs of the baby Orestes, which bound “washerwoman and child nurse to the same duty” (Cho. 760). When Clytemnestra bares her breast before her grown son (Cho. 896–98), the play opens up in the opposite direction, moving from the body outward. Clytemnestra’s gesture—both maternal (Hecuba to Hector at Iliad 22.79–83) and erotic (Helen before Menelaus in Little Iliad, fr. 17 Allen)—momentarily stops Orestes.53 For the first and only time in the murder scene he refers to Clytemnestra as “mother” (m¯et¯er 899), and it takes the oracular pronouncement of the heretofore silent Pylades (900–902) to recall him to the matricide. Standing as his name suggests by the palace entrance (Orestes puns on “Gateman” and the palace gates earlier at 560–61), Pylades invokes the most prominent distanced space in Choephori, Delphi. The inescapable mandates of Delphic Apollo recur throughout the play, and Pylades brings the oracle to the fore with such brutal economy that Orestes hesitates no more. He takes possession of the palace by sharing in its sordid history of shedding the blood of its own. Orestes’ subsequent appearance with the twinned corpses of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra mirrors the end of Agamemnon, affirming its harsh conclusion: “the seed is glued to ruin” (Ag. 1566). But something radically different happens, for Choephori does not end with Orestes’ reentry into the palace as its rightful occupant and ruler. His nostos is so tainted by his mother’s blood that he flees from his home, out the very eisodos through which he and Pylades entered at the start of the play, a “frightful duplication” as Fraenkel puts it.54 We recall the scattering of the Chorus at the end of Agamemnon; now the protagonist of its sequel runs for his (mental) life out of the theater. The self-proclaimed xenos has become truly estranged, a matricide who faces a life of renewed exile. Orestes does

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not return to the scenic space of his home, as the play has led us to believe, but back to the distanced space of Apollo’s temple at Delphi. The temple provides the initial setting for Eumenides, but during the play the scenic space shifts twice from Delphi—first to the Acropolis in Athens, where Orestes takes refuge at the cult image of Athena, and then to the open-air court on the neighboring hill of the Areopagus. 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 Choephori, to the triple scenic locations in Eumenides—mirrors the trilogy’s movement from a fixed mythic past toward the open-ended contemporary world of the audience. As the title Eumenides suggests, the nostoi to the house of Atreus—Agamemnon’s return from the Trojan War, Orestes’ return from exile—provide the foundation for a far more significant and lasting homecoming, that of the Furies, transformed into kindly spirits and given a permanent dwelling in the earth of Attica. But Aeschylus manipulates space in Eumenides beyond simply shifting the scene from place to place. As critics attentive to staging point out, Aeschylus seems to have experimented with the depiction of extrascenic space as well. It appears likely that the interior of the temple of Apollo was represented not behind the facade but in the orchestra, with the omphalos placed orchestra center.55 This is precisely the relationship that obtains when the scene shifts to Athens, where the orchestra represents the interior of Athena’s temple and the cult image stands at the center. In a canceled entry (like Euripides’ Suppliant Women), Orestes and the Furies take up their positions in the orchestra, the latter covering their masks with their robes. The Pythia stands upstage by the facade to deliver the first part of her prologue, unaware of the scene in the orchestra. The fact that the audience sees what the Pythia does not introduces a dramatically intriguing irony that affects how we hear her neatly ordered genealogy and opening prayer (1–33). She “enters” the temple by walking into the orchestra, but, at the sight of Orestes at the omphalos and the Furies asleep around him, she scrambles back to where she stood before (34–38). The scene she then describes (39–63) remains visible to the audience but frozen in tableau, changing only when Apollo enters to rouse Orestes to leave for Athens. After they depart, the dream image of Clytemnestra appears, waking the Furies who lie asleep on the orchestra floor, their inarticulate groans enhancing the sense that a primal force is being called up from the bare earth. The Furies’ full manifestation is all the more powerful for taking place before the audience’s eyes. This staging avoids several dramatic problems that arise from the generally accepted scenario, in which the scenic space at the opening represents the temple’s exterior, and the interior of the temple is revealed via the ekkukl¯ema. With Apollo, Orestes, and a (movable!) omphalos occupying the roll-out platform, insufficient room is left for the full company of Furies. When and

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from where do the others enter? Does Clytemnestra’s shade address her exhortations (94–139) to a few Furies asleep upstage on the ekkukl¯ema?56 This arrangement severely limits Clytemnestra’s movements around the Furies, because of the acoustic problems presented by an actor speaking with his back to the audience in the early theater of Dionysus.57 Or does Clytemnestra play her entire scene offstage, with some of the Furies visible, as Flickinger suggests?58 Adapting this idea, Taplin argues that no Furies are visible to the audience until line 140.59 But what of Apollo’s clear indication to Orestes (and the audience) that the Furies are asleep around him: “You now see these maddened women overcome, / fallen into sleep” (67–68). To make matters worse, Taplin dispenses with the temple interior and omphalos altogether, imagining that Apollo and Orestes begin their scene “mid-dialogue,” strolling out the temple door, with all the Furies still offstage.60 But surely we are inside the temple, for Apollo later upbraids the Furies “Out, I command you, and fast. Get out of this house, leave the prophetic inner sanctum!” (179–80). In privileging a delayed “arrival” of the Furies at the expense of theatrical common sense, scholars have been seduced by the late testimony of Aeschylus’ Life, which claims that the Furies’ “sporadic entrance” raised havoc in the audience, even causing spontaneous miscarriages. For all its melodramatic theatricality, this late evidence offers little help (and no little harm) in reconstructing the original staging. Recall that the Pythia describes the Furies in great verbal detail (46–59) before they reveal themselves fully to the audience. They appear to be women, then Gorgons, then wingless harpies, black, disgusting, noses dripping, eyes oozing a horrible fluid, and dressed in a way that defiles the sanctuary—a description far more horrifying than any visual revelation could be in the large fifth-century theater, where “only a minority of the audience” could be expected to see the details of their masks.61 The alternative staging proposed here maximizes the impact of two far more significant visuals—the sight of the polluted Orestes clinging to the omphalos (visible from the outset), and the image of the dream of Clytemnestra moving among the sleeping Furies, trying to rouse them from the orchestra floor. Placing the cult image of Athena in the same place as the omphalos at Delphi emphasizes Orestes’ shifting dependence from Apollo (and his oracle) to Athena (and Athens). By staging crucial scenes in this central location, the strongest acting area in the ancient theater,62 Aeschylus uses theatrical space to emphasize similarities and correspondences across the trilogy: the choral recreation of the sacrifice of Iphigenia midorchestra in Agamemnon;63 the grave site recognition of Electra and Orestes, and their invocation (guided by the Chorus) of Agamemnon’s spirit in the kommos of Choephori; the appearance of Orestes clinging to the omphalos, surrounded by sleeping Furies, at the opening of Eumenides; the waking of the Furies by the dream of Clytemnestra, who once again arouses the spirit of vengeance; Orestes’ supplication

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at Athena’s bretas around which the Furies perform their “binding song”; and, finally, the culminating scene in which Athena converts the Furies into benefactors of her city. The actor who appeared earlier as Clytemnestra’s shade, railing at the Furies to wake their anger against Orestes, also played Athena, who urges exactly the opposite, namely that the Furies “lull to sleep your black wave of bitter anger” (Eum. 832). The transformation from Clytemnestra-Furies to Athena-Eumenides gains enormously if both scenes are staged in the same area.64 If my reconstruction is correct, then Aeschylus presents the temple of Apollo “inside out.” What normally would be extrascenic (offstage) space has become the play’s (initial) setting. The audience sees fully inside the temple, as we clearly do when the scene shifts to the temple of Athena Polias in Athens. In effect, Aeschylus takes the facade—crucial to Agamemnon, less so in Choephori—and inverts it in Eumenides. In so doing he moves the trilogy beyond what lies hidden behind the sk¯en¯e, setting up the final scenic transformation to the plein-air court on the Areopagos, open to the land and natural environment of Attica, which receives the Furies’ blessings.65 At the end of Choephori, Orestes’ destination becomes the initial scenic space of Eumenides, a pattern that continues when the action shifts from Delphi to the Athenian Acropolis, then to the local distant space of the Areopagos, and finally out of the theater itself into the extratheatrical world that is Athens, a group exodos that mirrors the Panathenaic procession. These enlarging transformations reflect the openness necessary to embrace the Furies as permanent residents in the land they had threatened to destroy. Setting up the first scenic transformation, Apollo exaggerates how far Orestes must travel on his way to Athens, “over the wide mainland . . . across the sea and past the island cities” (Eum. 75–77, reemphasized at 240 and 249– 51). The actual distance between Delphi and Athens is not great, and the journey hardly requires a long sea voyage. Spatial exaggeration works here as a symbolic cure, a means of removing Orestes’ pollution. The distance traversed also suggests the passage of time, part of the temporal movement of the trilogy from the archaic past of mythic Argos toward the contemporary world of Athens. The Furies play a role in this transformation, leaving the theater to track down Orestes, one of only five examples of the Chorus vacating the orchestra during the course of a tragedy. Emptying the theater allows for a bona fide change of setting—as we shall see in our discussion of Ajax in chapter 3—beyond the “refocusing” that occurs in Choephori. After the Furies’ departure, we next see Orestes running into the empty theater and embracing the cult image of Athena in the orchestra, establishing the new location as the goddess’ temple in Athens.66 After her arrival from the distant Troad (398–402), Athena announces the formation of a new court to try Orestes, preparing for the next scenic shift to the “local” distanced space of the Areopagos.67 The reentrance of Athena and arrival of the jurors and

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herald (566), the sound of the herald’s trumpet (569),68 the appearance of Apollo (574), and the bringing on of the urns (and possibly benches for the jurors) establish this change of setting. Significantly, Aeschylus now aligns the scenic space with the out of doors, reflecting the fact that homicide trials in Athens took place in unroofed courts (like that of the Areopagos) to avoid placing the judges under the same roof as a possible murderer.69 This spatial pattern fits perfectly with an often admired aspect of Aeschylean dramaturgy, the realization in concrete, physical terms of what previously has only been imagined, described, or hinted at. The ubiquitous legal and judicial language leads to an actual trial; the beacons from Troy and the firebrands that Clytemnestra lights after her nightmare give way to the torches carried in honor of the Furies in their procession out of the theater;70 the spirits of vengeance referred to in Agamemnon and seen by Orestes at the end of Choephori take the stage as Furies in the final play; the oft-repeated net imagery takes physical shape in the robe that traps Agamemnon (displayed with his corpse, and spread out at the end of Choephori), and then comes to life in the Furies’ “binding song” performed around Orestes (Eum. 299–396); Clytemnestra disparages dreams (Ag. 274, 491), invents them (891), finds herself haunted by one (Cho. 32–41), and finally appears onstage in someone else’s nightmare, the manifest image of the Furies’ troubled sleep;71 and so on. In the process, Eumenides moves out of the mythic past of the Trojan War and house of Atreus and into the polis of Athens. With the institution of the Areopagos court and ongoing rites for the Furies, Aeschylus suggests that the most important space at the end of the trilogy is reflexive, as fifth-century Athens temporarily takes the stage.72 The Oresteia weaves a skein of anachronisms involving contemporary references and practices that bear no historical relationship to the mythic-heroic setting of the plays. In this Aeschylus is no different from the other tragedians, who employ “language that will fitly accommodate things undreamed of in the world of the epic heroes,” as Easterling puts it.73 By moving the setting to Athens, however, Aeschylus builds a particular relationship to the democratic polis, along the lines of Euripides’ Suppliant Women discussed in the introduction. Alluding to contemporary political and civic activities, to religious and ritual practices, to scientific and medical speculations, and to theatrical performance itself (self-referential space), the Oresteia moves temporally toward its audience as it moves spatially toward the Athens of the Acropolis, the Areopagos, and the theater of Dionysus. Prominent references to fifth-century political concerns and practices include Agamemnon’s calling a meeting of the assembly (Ag. 844–50), and the Chorus’s response to his offstage cries, engaging in a debate—each of the twelve members speaks two trimeter lines—over the “proposal” (gn¯om¯e, 1348) to intervene against murderous tyranny, with reference to deliberation (1359) and voting (1353, 1370), a council meeting in miniature.74 The Ar-

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give (as opposed to Mycenean) setting of the first two plays points toward the Argive-Athenian alliance of 461 promoted by Ephialtes and Pericles (who had served as chor¯egos for Aeschylus’ Persians in 472), a pact suggested by Orestes when he first calls on Athena (Eum. 289–91), reiterated by Apollo (667–73), and guaranteed by Orestes when he returns home to Argos (762– 74).75 The references to the Amazon’s mythical invasion of Athens (685–90, also 627–28) exploits its iconographical connection (in temple sculpture and vase painting) with the Persian invasion of Attica, particularly the razing of the Acropolis in 480 and again in 479.76 The Furies’ claim that Athens will guard the altars of Greece (919–20) refers back to the Athenian-led defeat of the Persians and the city’s role in the Delian League, and forward to the Athenian-sponsored Panhellenic Conference (ca. 448), where Pericles championed Athens as the “guardian of the altars of the Greeks and the delight of the immortals.”77 Finally, Eumenides is the sole Greek tragedy in which Athens has no king, and the citizens appear to rule themselves, anticipating the democratic polis to come. Scholars have canvassed the plays—particularly Athena’s “foundation speech” for the Areopagos court (Eum. 681–710)—to determine Aeschylus’ stance on the Areopagos reforms of 463 promoted by Ephialtes, who was assassinated in 460, only two years before the Oresteia premiered.78 We know from Thucydides (1.107.4) that in 458 or 457 antidemocratic Athenian oligarchs encouraged the Peloponnesian army (in Boeotia at the time) to invade Attica and overthrow the democracy before the completion of Athens’ Long Walls, then under construction. The plan miscarried, but as Sommerstein concludes, “Never between 508/7 [the establishment of the democracy via Cleisthenes’ reforms] and 411 [the temporary reign of the 400] was Athens in more danger of plunging into a bloody civil conflict.”79 This possibility may account for the repeated warnings from Athena and the “kindly ones” that Athens avoid civil strife and the excessive behavior that engenders it.80 The Long Walls may protect the city from external attack, but Athena’s court will provide “a bulwark for the land and safety for the city, / such as no one has ever known” (Eum. 701–2). When Orestes reaches Athens, he calls on Athena at her various haunts (287–98), including Lake Tritonis in northern Africa, where she stands armed for battle, “bearing succor to her friends.” The year before the Oresteia premiered, Athens and its allies sent an expedition of two hundred ships to Cyprus as part of the ongoing war with the Persian Empire. When much of Egypt revolted against Persian rule, the Athenians diverted their ships to aid that rebellion. Sommerstein reasonably concludes that the original audience understood Orestes’ reference to Athena’s presence in the “land of Libya” (the Greek term for the African continent) in terms of “the vast Athenian and allied expeditionary force which in 458 B.C. was operating in Egypt.”81 In fact, Athena arrives from Troy, where she has taken possession of the land

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assigned to her and Athens “in perpetuity” (es to pan, 399–402). Athens’ first historical colony, Sigeum, was located near Troy, and Athenian forces fought there in 465/4. Athena’s claim to the area in perpetuity seems to justify her city’s influence over the territory—Sigeum was a member of the Athenian alliance during the 450s (if not before)—and may hint at Athens’ growing sense that its alliance was something it ruled over.82 Given Athenian extraterritorial activity in 459, concerns with its empire do not seem farfetched. Thucydides (1.103–6) tells us that by 459 the Athenians were fighting the Corinthians in Megara, challenging Spartan and Corinthian interests after seizing the port of Naupactus, and besieging the town of Aegina, all in “the first year of what is now usually called the First Peloponnesian War.”83 Turning to contemporary interest in the science of medicine and health, the trilogy deals with rival theories of conception and procreation,84 and the characters use medical language we later associate with the Hippocratic corpus. For the Watchman, dreams fail to “visit” (episkopoumen¯en) his bed; fears “stand by it” (parastatei) instead of sleep (Ag. 13–14)—vocabulary used for a doctor watching over a sickbed. Developing the metaphor of curing disease, the Watchman “incises the remedy of song as an antidote to sleep” (17; i.e., “sings to stay awake”). Agamemnon applies similar surgical language for healing the body politic (848–50), as does the Chorus in explaining why Clytemnestra sends libations to Agamemnon’s grave, “hoping they will cut away her disease” (Cho. 539). In the kommos, the Chorus describes the house as providing a plug of lint to keep the wound open till it suppurates and heals from within (Cho. 471–73), “one of the most certain cases of borrowing by Aeschylus from medical terminology.”85 Clytemnestra applies the same metaphor of a suppurating wound to explain the bloodlust in the race (Ag. 1477–80), “a reflection of contemporary medical usage,” as Page observes.86 In similar fashion, the leprous plagues and bodily torments with which Apollo threatens Orestes (Cho. 279–696) reflect current medical understanding.87 The original audience hardly consulted the Hippocratic corpus as it watched the plays, but the contemporary medical vocabulary made the diseases of the house of Atreus seem to afflict the city that dramatized their story, demanding an antidote. Moving from medicine to civic and judicial institutions, the trilogy utilizes a rich legal vocabulary—much of it specific to democratic Athens—that culminates in the founding of the court of the Areopagos. Agamemnon views the fall of Troy in terms of a divine jury casting its votes in the “guilty” urn (Ag. 810–17); the jury of citizens that judges Orestes adopts this future Athenian practice, filing past the two urns of guilt and acquittal and casting ballots accordingly (Eum. 707–10, 742–43).88 After Agamemnon’s murder, the Chorus repeatedly charges Aegisthus with bouleusis (Ag. 1614, 1627, 1634), akin to “conspiracy to commit homicide,” a legal action familiar from Andocides.89 The Chorus in Choephori praises Electra and Orestes for offering

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tim¯ema (Cho. 510) for Agamemnon, “legal compensation” or “assessed damages” in Attic law. In claiming Aegisthus’ murder needs no defense, because he “suffered the penalty for adultery [aischunt¯eros], as is the law” (990), Orestes follows the legal code of Athens.90 Certain “pretrial” passages in Eumenides—Orestes’ failure to swear an oath (429), in particular—seem to have close parallels with the anakrisis (“preliminary investigation”) in Attic law.91 Explaining the new institution to her citizens, Athena employs the technical term pl¯eroun for convening a lawcourt session (570), and when Apollo urges Athena to begin the trial, he also uses the technical eisage (“bring [it] on,” 580–81), the injunction with which the archon basileus opened trials on the Areopagos. Athena obliges with the full phrase, “I open on the case” (eisag¯o de t¯en dik¯en, 582).92 Even the Furies seem cognizant of the fine points of Attic law, pointing out (653–56) that a man guilty of blood crimes is polluted and can take no part in the rituals of the phratry, a religious and neighborhood community of Athens’ historical period.93 Although not a formal legal procedure, the Furies’ binding song, humnos desmios (Eum. 306), refers to the common Attic use of curse tablets to damage an opponent before a trial.94 Turning to the world of religion and cult, the common rituals of sacrifice, weddings, and funerals manifest continuities over space and time (part of what constitutes a ritual) that make it difficult to identify particular fifthcentury Athenian variations. Nonetheless, it is significant that the Athenians in the audience would have found themselves perfectly at home in the normative rituals of the trilogy and horrified at their manifold perversions.95 Less than a decade before the Oresteia’s premiere, however, Athens established a particular institution, the patrios nomos, discussed in the introduction.96 The cremated remains of fallen soldiers were returned to Athens for state burial, as opposed to the earlier practice of burial on the battlefield. The Chorus of Agamemnon recounts the grief of Greek families who take back urns of ashes instead of the men they sent to Troy, (Ag. 433–44), a dramatically effective way of bringing the costs of a mythic foreign war home to the fifth-century audience. References to the Mysteries at Eleusis (a cult open to all Greek speakers, but one with close physical and administrative ties to Athens), the Attic cult of Artemis Braurona, the cult of Zeus Sot¯ ¯ er (credited with saving Athens from slavery during the Persian Wars), even the curbside cult of Apollo of the Ways (noted above) move the heroic world of the trilogy toward Athens.97 The anachronisms sketched out here (there are many others) encouraged the spectators to see the theater of Dionysus as a place that reflected their contemporary and future city, even while enacting a mythic narrative of the distant past. Part of that reflective process involves self-referential space, when the trilogy calls attention to its theatrical nature and reminds the audience members of their role in the performance. For example, Agamemnon opens with the

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Watchman’s colorful prologue, establishing the scenic space as the house of Atreus (Ag. 3) and locating it (with some contemporary relevance, noted earlier) in Argos (24). But a prologue delivered by a solitary character accomplishes more than setting the scene, revealing a character, or laying the groundwork for thematic and imagistic development. It is also inherently theatrical, in that the implied audience is not some other dramatic character but those gathered in the theater to watch, fully aware that they are being spoken to. Like the Watchman who keeps his eyes peeled for a beacon fire against the heavenly lights, we are asked to keep our focus simultaneously on the foreground of the story and the background of its wider context, a performance at the City Dionysia. The Watchman’s announcement that the beacon fire brings “celebration and dance” back to the city (23–24), and his offer to “dance a prelude” (31) in honor of Agamemnon’s homecoming, set up the arrival of the Chorus (40), which starts the dance of the play in earnest, taking up the story that the Watchman self-consciously abandons: “For the rest, silence. A great ox is standing / on my tongue” (36–37). This double focus sharpens considerably in Choephori, where the audience is granted privileged knowledge of the events in train. As noted, our relationship with Orestes and his plot allows for situational ironies to operate in the recognition scene with Electra, in Orestes’ first encounter with his mother, in the Chorus’s scene with the Nurse, and in Aegisthus’ appearance before his murder. On these occasions, the audience watches—in effect—short plays within the play, for we know (more or less) what really is going on within the larger plot. The irony that results differs in kind from that found in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, where we watch Oedipus and the others struggle to discover what we know before we enter the theater. Lacking such a totalizing framework, the irony in Choephori depends on the relationship with the audience that the performance establishes, on what Herington calls “the dramatic here and now.”98 By having Orestes and Pylades stand aside to watch Electra and the Chorus, and by having the two men appear in disguise at the palace, Aeschylus establishes a theatricalized irony in which we view the action with the superior knowledge shared by the play’s protagonist, as if we had been written into the script. Our sense of the theater as a “self-aware” space comes to the fore in the final play, beginning with the literal double focus at the opening. The Pythia’s prologue is an appropriately self-conscious and platitudinous public prayer, culminating in her wish that the god grant her fortune greater than all her “previous entrances” (t¯on prin eisod¯on, 30). Orestes (hands dripping blood at the omphalos) and the Furies (their nostrils flowing and eyes oozing) turn her “best entrance” into a scramble on all fours to get away. We may think back to the last older woman we have seen onstage, the flustered Nurse, recalling her struggle with the baby Orestes and his bodily fluids. Like the Nurse, the actor performing the Pythia has been given something wonder-

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fully theatrical to play, full of physical energy denied in her opening thirty– line prayer.99 It may seem farfetched to point to the Pythia’s split performance as an example of the ancient theater’s self-referentiality. But critics of Greek tragedy pay insufficient attention to the different kinds of dramatic energy (and even acting styles) that a given tragedy demands moment to moment. Aeschylus sets the Pythia up for a comic fall, and for a brief moment the theater is simply about the actor’s playing it.100 Coming to recognize what we already see, the Pythia confirms our “spectatorial superiority” in a highly theatricalized moment. Just the opposite happens when Orestes and the Furies depart for Athens, for they leave the theater empty of all performers. Looking down on the vacant orchestra, the audience confronts nothing but the theater and the city beyond, encouraged to imagine what might transpire once the play “reconvenes” in Athens. Here Aeschylus invites the audience to view theatrical space as such but also to consider its metatheatrical and reflexive possibilities. What does the play hold in store? Who will enter the space this time, and how will they be received? What difference will it make for Athens? The play “begins again” with Orestes’ arrival in the city of the audience. As he clings to the image of Athena, the Chorus announces its intention to bind him with song. The “binding hymn” (306) opens with a reference to its own performance: “Come, let us join our dance [choros], since / we are resolved / to display our hateful art [mousan]” (307–9). It is not uncommon for a tragic Chorus to refer to dancing, but here its words extend beyond the immediate dramatic situation, for the song has no palpable effect on Orestes.101 However, its performance presents the audience with a striking image of the Furies dancing around a central religious icon of their city, just as earlier they surrounded the Delphic omphalos. Ironically, the effect of their spellbinding dance is to bind the Furies to Athens. When Aeschylus “recreates” this scene after the trial, Athena stands in place of her icon in the center of the orchestra, and the angry Furies dance around her, at first cursing the land and then gradually falling under the goddess’s spell (thelkt¯erion, 886; thelxein m’ eoikas, 900) until they accept her offer of a new home. At this point we understand that the nostos theme finds its fulfillment not with the return of Orestes to Argos, but with the homecoming of the Furies to Athens. The “binding song” realizes its theatrical function only belatedly, when—in Taplin’s memorable phrase—“Orestes goes. The Furies stay.”102 The Furies manifest their new status by donning the purple robes worn by resident aliens in the Panathenaic procession (1028).103 Signaling their incorporation into the world of the audience, the Furies take on their role as “metics” (metoikoi, 1011, 1018, 1044), who “dwell with” Athena (xunoik¯et¯or, 833, 916) and “share in this space” (ch¯oras metaschein t¯esde, 869) as “landholders of the soil” (gamoroi chthonos, 890).104 In their public transformation,

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the Furies make physical the metaphorical references to resident aliens earlier in the trilogy.105 Agamemnon and Menelaus cry out for war like eagles who have lost their young, winged “metics” in the gods’ heavenly realm (Ag. 47–57). The idea of lost young resurfaces when Orestes brings Clytemnestra news of her son’s death, asking if she wants to have him buried in Phocis, “a resident alien, a stranger always and forever” (metoikon, eis to pan aei xenon, Cho. 684).106 The Chorus of slave women calls the Furies “metics in the house” (metoikos dom¯on, Cho. 969–71) who have been cast out by Orestes’ return.107 With the establishment of Athena’s court, the Furies fear that they will be driven out, and that murderous havoc will result (Eum. 499–516). Just the opposite transpires. The court of the Areopagos, based on the Furies’ own principles, guarantees prosecution for homicide,108 and the Furies themselves inherit a cave sanctuary near the Acropolis (806–8, 854–57). It is fitting—and hardly a sign of debasement, as critics often claim—that the chthonic Furies dwell underground.109 To the autochthonous Athenians, a home in the earth of Attica was no small honor: “Alone of the Greeks we can call her [our city] not only native land but mother and nurse.”110 In their new dwelling the Furies receive firstfruits at childbirth and marriage (834–36), such that “no house will thrive” without them (895). By transforming the character and domain of the Furies, Aeschylus makes a powerful case for the public significance of the crimes against marriage we have witnessed earlier. Patterson demonstrates that the trilogy treats the adultery and violence of Clytemnestra not simply as an offense against patrilineage or patriarchal authority (the contemporary critical consensus), but— like the adultery and violence of Agamemnon—as a public crime, “an offense against the oikos/household itself, which is itself a microcosm of the polis.”111 In a literal sense Athena has politicized the Furies, giving them a home and ritual honors in the polis of Athens. Unlike other homecomings in the trilogy, however, that of the Furies does not constitute a return—their status as resident aliens formally acknowledges this fact. In the family of Athens but not of it, the Furies are freed from the double edge that affects other homecomings in the trilogy: the voyage “doubling back” to Greece that destroys the fleet (Ag. 343–44); the “double goad” of war the Herald must report, mixing public and private pain and tainting victory with disaster (Ag. 638–45); Agamemnon’s triumphant arrival that delivers him to the inescapable consequences of his own actions; Orestes’ return to his native land, bringing him back to the maternal source he must destroy and condemning him once again to exile. The Furies’ homecoming, by contrast, embeds these time-honored gods in a new place, outsiders who dwell inside the city, their old law incorporated into a new legal context, and their blessings as “old virgins” (68–69, 1033) guaranteeing fruitful weddings among the young.112 Like other foreigners crucial to the trilogy—the Chorus of household slaves, the Nurse, Pylades, Cassandra—the Furies represent a

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powerfully committed third party, but one that comes to dwell permanently in the land they have reached.113 This observation addresses a problem in Griffith’s important article on the trilogy’s aristocratic bias.114 He notes a falling off of “lower class characters” in the last play, although admitting that the Furies may fill that role. However, the fact that their incorporation into Athens comes “only at the level of metics, not citizens” means for Griffith that the play replicates the hegemonic discourse it ostensibly questions. Perhaps, however, “citizen Furies”—an odd concept for gods—would do worse! The non-Athenianness of these new residents may constitute part of their gift to the city, like such non-Attic “heroes” as Orestes (whose grave will protect the city from Argive invasion), or Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus, a metic whose incorporation in Athenian soil brings great benefits to the city.115 The Oresteia ends with a spectacular procession, in which the purplerobed Holy Ones (1041) are escorted to their new homes by Athena, the priestess of Athena Polias, other female attendants to Athena’s cult (some of whom bear torches), the twelve male citizens who served as jurors at Orestes’ trial, and even a sacrificial ox or two (1006), representing the offerings made to Athena at her temple on the Acropolis.116 Aeschylus cleverly conflates the journey to the Furies’ new home with the route of the Panathenaia, whose destination was, in fact, the scenic space of the play’s first scene in Athens, the temple of Athena Polias.117 Having threatened to destroy both the crops and children of Athens (782– 87 ⳱ 812–17), blighting all things that bear fruit (831), these chthonic deities take up their dwelling in Attic soil, blessing the land and its people. The Furies’ role as guarantors of justice merges with their power over the natural forces of generation. “Preserve the seed of mortals,” Athena says, “for like a shepherd watching over crops, I love this race of just men” (Eum. 909–12). In this celebration of human and telluric fertility, the trilogy opens up beyond the court of the Areopagos, out to the fields of what Solon called “the greatest and best mother of the Olympian deities, Black Earth.”118 Recalling Gibson’s notion of serially connected vistas, with each new view opening as the other closes in behind, the space of Attica has become the vista of the audience. As the final procession begins (literally) to occupy it, the reflexive space of the theater and the natural landscape merge. Athena knows that if the Furies “find the road [hodos] of blessings,” then “both land and city [will keep] on the straight path of justice [orthodikaios]” (989–94). The Furies themselves claim to “walk straight in the path of justice” (312), and Aeschylus may be alluding to an early meaning of dik¯e, “way or path.”119 The idea of Athenians as “pathbreakers” features in the Pythia’s account of the devolution of divine power at Delphi, ending with Apollo, whom the “road-building [keleuthopoioi] sons of Hephaistus [i.e., Athenians] escorted” from Athens to the sanctuary. At the end of Eumenides, Athenians

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again escort a divine power, but this time to a place of worship on their own soil. Combining legal, religious, political, and social implications, the homecoming procession closes the trilogy with a spatial representation of the city on the right road, the Furies transformed into agents who deter violence within the polis at large, and not just within kinship groups tied by blood.120 The processional closing redeems the spatial breakdown with which Agamemnon and Choephori ended—usurpers taking over the palace, a disaffected Chorus scattering home, a distracted Orestes racing away from the scene. As the Athenians escort the Furies out of the theater and into the city, they ask the audience to raise a cry that echoes their closing song (1043, 1047). If the audience members chose to respond,121 then they answer the Watchman’s “If this house could speak . . .” (Ag. 37), giving the theatrical house an even fuller voice than that offered by the characters in the drama. As many critics insist, whatever the sound of that voice, it was not univocal.122 The play of space across the trilogy, culminating in the strange homecoming of the Furies, suggests that Aeschylus heard the plurality of those voices long before his critics.

Heracles and Home Foolish people imagine that what they imagine is somewhere else. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Heracles tells of two homecomings: the nostos of the Panhellenic hero who returns from his labors to rescue his family from the tyrant Lycus; and Heracles’ second homecoming to Athens, following his exile from Thebes as the murderer of the very family he had come home to save. Heracles’ initial situation resembles that of Homer’s Odysseus. Each arrives from afar after a long and adventurous absence, including a trip to the underworld; wife, father, and son(s) await them both, remaining loyal in the face of civic turmoil abetted by a self-serving, wasteful aristocracy (HF 588–92); each hero uses deception to make his way home and restore order, performing purification rites after exacting vengeance; and their featured weapon is the bow, which “sings” in the act of use (Od. 21.405–11, HF 1063–64). With the appearance of Lyssa and Iris midplay, however, Euripides reverses the comedic pattern of the Odyssey by converting the savior of his family into its unwitting destroyer. Struck mad by a jealous Hera, Heracles carries out the actions against his own wife and children that the tyrant Lycus had hoped to perform. In dramatizing this radical peripeteia, Euripides recalls the (failed) Odyssean prototype in a variety of ways, perhaps none more memorable than Heracles’ appearance tied to a broken column of his house, much like

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Odysseus bound to the mast in the episode with the Sirens.123 The complete reversal of dramatic expectations gives way to the equally unexpected intervention of Heracles’ friend Theseus, who offers the distraught hero a new home in Athens. How does Euripides’ use of space affect these violent twists and turns on the nostos plot? The tragedy opens in the center of the orchestra, with Heracles’ wife Megara, their three young sons, and his father Amphitryon discovered in supplication at the altar of Zeus Sot¯ ¯ er (“savior”), built by Heracles and dedicated to the god after his victory over the Minyans (48–50, 521– 22).124 The altar provides the family a temporary, islandlike refuge from Lycus, who has cut them off from the extrascenic space of the palace by sealing shut the doors (53–54). He also has closed off the Theban borders (82–83), further isolating the scenic space by denying rescue from afar. Megara can find “no passage [poron, the accepted conjecture] that leads to safety” (80–81; also 54), and the situation worsens when Lycus sends woodsmen to Helicon and Parnassus to chop down trees for a bonfire to burn them at the altar (240–46).125 With Lycus in control of the geographical territory and willing to run roughshod over the rights of suppliants, the only space left for the family is that most distant of places, Hades, where they will join Heracles among the dead. Moved by the certainty of her husband’s fate and her family’s imminent death, Megara imitates Heracles’ courage: “I won’t reject the example [mime¯ ma] of my husband” (294), she says, preferring action within the harsh limits imposed by Lycus to Amphitryon’s empty hopes and vain words (307– 11). She persuades the tyrant to unseal the doors and allow her to array her family for death, and Lycus promises to give them “over to the underworld” on his return (327–35). The simple act of opening the doors effectively “unfreezes” the action, breaking the theatrical immobility symbolized by the suppliants huddled around the altar. Until this point the play has remained static,126 and the arrivals (such as they are) add to the mood of ineffectual passivity. In the parodos, the Theban elders of the Chorus reflect on their old age, past prowess, and current impotence, embodying their weakness by leaning on wooden staffs, and on each other, as they enter the theater (107– 29). Lycus appears to bring new energy to the stage (140), but the rhetorical bluster that marks him as a stage tyrant degenerates into a debate with Amphitryon about Heracles’ heroism and the relative merits of the hoplite versus the archer (150–205). In the context of the hero’s nostos, their exchange is a nonsequitur,127 a dramatized “miss” that fails to engage the situation on the ground—the tyrannical assault (via usurpation and assassination) against the religious, political, and social order, epitomized by the suppliants’ predicament. Significantly, Megara stays out of this “towering up of words” (pepurg¯osai logois, 238), preferring actions to empty talk. Her bold initiative opens up the

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space by unlocking the palace, and so prompts a reverse sequence of exits. First, Lycus and his henchmen depart by an eisodos (335), then Megara leads her children into the house (338), and finally, after an outburst against Zeus for failing his suppliants, Amphitryon follows (347). Three successive exits are rare in tragedy, occurring elsewhere only in Euripides’ Ion.128 The spatial effect highlights the speech of the last character to leave, the ancient equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy delivered after the stage empties. Interestingly, Amphitryon’s diatribe against Zeus for abandoning his son’s family has much in common with Ion’s soliloquy of growing disgust with the gods (including Zeus), who rape mortal women and forsake their offspring (Ion 429–51).129 By abandoning the god’s altar and its hope of divine salvation, the family paradoxically paves the way for Heracles’ long-delayed return.130 Alone in the orchestra, the Chorus echoes the play’s new mobility by recounting the labors of Heracles in an ode “unparalleled in length and formality among the plays of Euripides.”131 The Theban elders emphasize the sweep of the hero’s travels to the limits of the Greek world: from the barbaric northern lands of Thrace (the mares of Diomedes), to the west as far as the setting sun (the apples of Hesperides and the Atlas mountains), and to the distant east (the Amazons). Heracles’ labors are marked at significant junctures by rivers or bodies of water: the Peneius (368) witnesses Heracles’ defeat of the Centaurs; the hero crosses the Hebrus (386) on his way to defeat Cycnus by the springs of Anauros (390); he travels down the Mediterranean to the west (400), establishing peace for sailors (401–2); he amasses a great expedition and crosses into the Black Sea (410), attacking the Amazons “where many rivers flow” (409).132 The references to rivers and water culminate in Heracles’ journey to the underworld. The hero sails to Hades (427), where, as tradition has it, he crosses the river Styx to retrieve Cerberus from the lord of the dead. Marking the change from eulogy to lament, Euripides transforms rivers into tears—Hades is poludakruon (426), “many teared,” the word in exact metrical responsion to polupotamon (409), “many rivered.”133 Likewise, the Chorus shifts its focus away from Heracles’ final labor (from which he “will not return,” 429) to the fate in store for his family: “Charon’s oar awaits / your children, a godless / unjust journey of no return [anostimon]” (431– 33). The path without nostos leads both Heracles and his offspring to the same final destination. By juxtaposing Heracles’ journey to Hades with the imminent death of his sons, the Theban elders effect a remarkable confluence of distant space with what lies immediately before them. Describing (in anapests) the procession of doomed children who reenter from the palace (442–50), the Chorus joins extrascenic and scenic space with the imagined world of Hades. Far from standing aloof from the situation of the play, as Barlow believes,134 the stasimon dovetails with the impending action as closely as any in Euripides. Dressed in black as if mourners at their own funeral, Heracles’ family walks

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into the very place where his labors have (apparently) delivered him, the liminal space where the living meet the dead. With her children clinging to her legs, Megara guides them back onstage like a trace horse (444–47).135 She compares her family to a yoked team pulling toward death (453–55), one of several binding and harnessing images where the strong support the weak. Asking for an officiating priest and sacrificial knife, Megara construes the return to the altar as a maimed ritual that confuses sacrificial, nuptial, and burial rites. Instead of the marriages she would have made for her sons, she finds them locked in a union with “the fiends of death” (K¯eras, 481); the bridal bath has become a “bath of tears” (482); and the wedding feast is arranged with Hades, the children’s new father-in-law (484).136 As noted earlier, the choral lament after the murders in Agamemnon evokes rites for the dead, and the ritual ambience opens the way for other significant transformations, in particular the change in Clytemnestra and the unexpected arrival of Aegisthus. Euripides uses the perversion of marriage, funeral, and sacrificial rites to a similar end, setting the stage for Heracles’ return.137 Although long overdue, the first peripeteia is the one we have expected all along—Heracles’ arrival, which dramatically changes bad fortune to good. Popular in the cosmic melodramas of contemporary Hollywood (with the fate of the human race dependent on heroic action against impossible odds and some version of a ticking clock), the plot was no stranger to Greek epic and tragedy. Only at the last minute, after the Trojans burn the first ships and threaten the Greek nostos, does Achilles allow Patroclus to return to battle in the Iliad. Mitigated somewhat by his disguised presence as a beggar (like a folktale king who learns by living with the poorest of his realm), Odysseus still reveals himself at the “last moment,” during the contest for Penelope’s hand in the Odyssey. Perseus in Euripides’ lost Andromeda also arrives in the nick of time to rescue the beleagured heroine, and ancient literature offers many variations on this basic narrative device for increasing the dramatic tension. The reversal of plot and fortune in Heracles, however, assumes a particularly strong spatial dimension. Returning from his final labor in Hades (pon¯on teleutan, 427), Heracles intercepts his family members on their way to join him there; his anodos ‘way up’ reverses their kathodos ‘way down’. He tells Megara and the others to remove their death clothes, unveil their heads, and look up at the sun (562–64), converting their seemingly fatal exit from the palace into a triumphant homecoming: “You see, don’t you, how your going in [eisodoi] is happier than your coming out [exodoi]?” (623–24). The theatrical terms exodos and eisodos encourage the audience to view the scene as the closing first act in a two-part drama that now shifts from return to revenge.138 While the reversal in space mirrors the reversal in plot, it also signals a

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surprising reversal in roles. Earlier Megara imitates (mim¯ema, 294) Heracles by an act of brave acceptance; now Heracles resembles Megara by assuming the role of family protector and valuing that task above all others: “Whom should I defend more than my wife, / my children, my aging father? Labors, farewell! / If I don’t save them I’ve accomplished nothing” (574–76). He questions the purpose of his famous toils against wild beasts “if I don’t [also] labor death [away] from my children [t¯on d’ em¯on tekn¯on / ouk ekpon¯es¯o thanaton].139 How shall I be called Heracles the noble victor [kallinikos] as before?” (580–82). The term kallinikos, the most important honorific applied to Heracles in cult and literature, also occurs frequently in epinician odes praising the victors in festival games.140 That Heracles himself applies the term to the defense of his family marks a significant departure from the traditional conception of heroic excellence. Euripides again represents this transvaluation spatially, as Heracles leads his children by the hand back inside the palace, “like a ship towing smaller boats in its wake” (631–32). Mirroring the stage picture and the verbal description of Megara’s earlier actions, Heracles conjoins heroic, paternal, and maternal roles as he walks his family home, his nostos complete. Heracles’ entrance into the palace also reconfigures the idea of heroic vengeance. Initially he proposes immediate action, vowing to raze to the ground the home of Lycus, decapitate the tyrant, and feed his corpse to the dogs (565–68). Heracles then vows to take on the disloyal Thebans, filling the river Ismenus with their corpses and making the pure stream of Dirce run red with blood (571–73). The Iliadic parallels are striking, from the threatened mutilation of the dead to a river clogged with corpses.141 In the first stasimon rivers provide the geographical markers for Heracles’ labors, moving from the known world to the unknown, and finally down to “unseen” Hades. Signaling his return home, the twin rivers of Ismenus and Dirce suggest the very different civilizing labor that awaits him there.142 Deception within must replace frontal attack from without, the spatial inversion of his prior labors, where he traveled across the known and unknown world to accomplish the required tasks. Now Heracles must ambush the tyrant inside his own home, after Amphitryon lures Lycus in by claiming that Megara and the children have moved their supplication from the altar of Zeus Sot¯ ¯ er (in the orchestra) to the altar of Hestia within (712–15). There is special point to Amphitryon’s earlier encouragement that his son “go inside now and greet the hearth god / and let yourself be seen in your ancestral home” (599–600). Not only have the oikos and its defense become the highest heroic calling, but the house itself provides the means for Heracles to deceive, and defeat, his enemies. This new version of Heracles’ heroism depends on a mythic as well as a spatial peripeteia, a radical break from the received tradition. In prior versions of the legend the hero undertakes his labors after the death of his

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children, usually as punishment and purification for their unintentional murder.143 Euripides reverses this sequence, dissociating the cause of Heracles’s labors from the Hera-sent madness that goads him to filial violence. Iris highlights the shift in the order of events by emphasizing that Zeus himself kept Hera from harming his son until the completion of his last labor (827– 30). Only then can the goddess wreak havoc on the undeserving hero. As befits suppliants at the altar of Zeus Sot¯ ¯ er, the family frequently invokes the Olympians, especially Zeus, for salvation. However, Amphitryon comes to doubt the efficacy of his prayers (339–47), even claiming that he has called on Zeus—“with hands upraised to heaven”—in vain (498–502). Heracles’ miraculous return seems to vindicate the gods, and the Chorus praises Zeus for his union with Alcmene, producing a mortal hero who can escape “the [bridal] chambers [thalamon] below the earth” (798–808), and whose victory over Lycus proves that “what is just still pleases the gods” (809–14). At precisely this moment Iris and Lyssa arrive from Olympus (815), the lofty counterpart to the subterranean world from which Heracles has escaped. But the unexpected appearance of the goddesses shatters the moral backbone of the play, replacing the Chorus’s confidence in divine concern for justice with a Hera-inspired invasion from on high.144 Stinton captures the radical nature of her new dispensation: “The fact remains: this is the one Greek tragedy in which divine phthonos is totally divorced from dik¯e. . . . [T]he curious result [is] that the whole concept of divine retribution is turned upside-down. The ‘retribution’ is seen to be mere spite; the man is vindicated and the god arraigned.”145 Although arriving together via the m¯echan¯e, the two goddesses are not of one mind. Iris shares Hera’s anger at Heracles (832, 840–42), but Lyssa protests that the hero is a friend to the gods, standing alone against impious men who overthrow their honors (849–53). She refers to Heracles’ labors on behalf of humanity, “taming the trackless lands and the wild seas” (845), and, perhaps, to the vital help he gave the Olympians when they battled the Giants.146 The roof of Heracles’ house provides an appropriate place to consider the divine justice due him—a theatrical space usually reserved for Olympian epiphanies, but linked directly to the domestic space where his culminating labor against the monstrous Lycus has just occurred. Iris, however, brushes aside any such calculus with a brutal rejoinder, reminding Madness that “the wife of Zeus didn’t send you here to exercise rational selfcontrol” (857).147 Reverting to the role to which she was cast, Lyssa releases Iris back to tread her “noble foot on Olympus,” while she descends to the dirty work of bringing Olympian chaos into the palace (872–73).148 “Smashing through the roof and assaulting the halls” (864), Lyssa drives Heracles mad so that he “sends his sons across Acheron, / sped on by his own bloody hands” (838– 39). Returning from the underworld to save his family, Heracles proves its

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unwitting executioner, caught in a divine plan that pulls the apparently opposed worlds of Olympus and Hades together, unloosing hellish forces within his home. Hera and her charges expose the unbridgeable gap that separates even the best of mortals from the worst of the gods, against whom “humanity appears an embattled species defending an uncertain perimeter with inferior forces.”149 In masterful fashion the Messenger articulates the steps of Heracles’ mania, giving the lie to Iris’ claim that madness and reason have nothing in common. The “method” in Heracles’ madness involves a carefully worked out correspondence between the extrascenic space of the palace interior and important distant places in Heracles’ earlier life and travels. To appreciate the spatial play of the tragedy as a whole, we need to look closely at this set of correspondences. The onslaught of Heracles’ frenzy takes place at the altar of Zeus Herkeios (922)—literally, “of the fence,” “enclosure”—located in the middle of the courtyard, mentioned earlier in its connection with Hestia, the goddess of the hearth (523, 599, 715).150 The two epithets for the interior altar suggest its double role: the hestia function involves the centripetal force drawing the oikos toward its center, whereas the herkeios function provides the countervailing centrifugal force that keeps what is dangerous at the perimeter, forming a virtual defensive ring around the heart of the house. The altar represents the interior counterpart to the altar built by Heracles and dedicated to Zeus Sot¯ ¯ er (48–50), located in the orchestra, that provides the focal point earlier in the play. To lure Lycus inside, Amphitryon tells him that the family has moved its supplication to Hestia’s altar (712–15); after the tyrant’s murder, the altar serves as the site for Heracles’ purification rites, removing the pollution of bloodshed from the house and restoring ritual propriety.151 Heracles officiates these cleansing rites, surrounded by Megara, Amphitryon, and the children “in perfect order” (choros de kallimorphos, 925– 26), an ideal image of the family, reconstituted at the central altar of the home. As the madness works its course, however, Heracles abruptly postpones the rites until he has hunted down the Argive Eurystheus, moving against Mycenae to tear down the city’s walls of the man who assigned him his labors.152 In his first concrete fantasy, Heracles “mounts a chariot” and lashes its invisible horses as if holding a goad in his hand. Beginning with imagined objects created out of air, his delusions become increasingly consonant with the reality of his physical situation, however misconceived.153 Interior space provides referents to the external world, until at last the palace of Heracles maps out a mental geography of Greece, signposts for his journey into madness. What is true of objects in space is more horribly true of people: in Heracles’ mind, Amphitryon becomes the father of Eurystheus (967– 68), his own children Eurystheus’ sons (970–71, 982, 989), leaving no role

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for Heracles other than that of Eurystheus himself, the very man he wishes to destroy. Moving through his own house on his “journey to Mycenae,” Heracles enters the andr¯on (men’s dining room), which he identifies as the town of Megara (954), and there he reclines on the floor and prepares to feast (955– 57). His identification has architectural logic (dining in the dining hall), but it also makes geographical sense, in that Megara lies half-way between Thebes and Mycenae. Continuing his journey, Heracles next imagines he has reached the isthmus of Corinth (site of the Isthmian games), where he strips down for a wrestling match, engages an imaginary opponent, and proclaims himself the victor (958–62). Calling himself kallinikos (961), Heracles unconsciously parodies the other uses of that honorific term in the play,154 particularly his own rejection of the epithet if he fails to “accomplish [avert] the death of my children” (580–82). The mad, self-proclaimed kallinikos stands on the verge of accomplishing precisely that. Reaching Mycenae, Heracles mistakes Amphitryon for Eurystheus’ father and shoves him aside. His sons flee in terror, one to Megara (972), one to a roof pillar in the courtyard (973), and one to the altar where the madness began (974). The children run to the symbolic cornerstones of Greek domestic life—mother, house, gods—but none provides safe haven. The manner of each child’s death eerily recalls Megara’s hopes for his future marriage and rule (462–79). The first son was to inherit Eurystheus’ palace (462–66); now his father chases him around the central pillar, convinced it is Eurystheus’ palace and his intended victim Eurystheus’ child (977–83). The second son, destined to rule Thebes (467–69), supplicates his father at the altar of his Theban home (984–89), until the club he used to play with as a boy (470–71) comes smashing down on his skull, wielded by Heracles like a “blacksmith striking red-hot iron” (992–94). The last son, in line to rule the city of Oechalia “taken by the far-shooting bow” of his father (472–73), dies along with his mother by a single arrow from that bow (1000). Each son gains a shadow image of his inheritance, his destined future home reduced to the deadly interior of the palace. When Heracles decides to march against Mycenae, he vows to uproot with levers and pickax the carefully built Cyclopean walls, “fitted with masons’ hammers and red chalk” (943–46). Attention to architectural detail characterizes this scene of destruction: roofs (891, 905, 987) and columns (973, 977, 1006, 1011, 1037–38); doors, door panels, and posts (997, 999); altars and altar bases (921, 927, 974, 984–85 [kr¯epida]); orthostate stonework (979–80) and foundation course (1008); levers, pickaxes, and mason’s tools (944–46, 999); courtyard and hearth (922–24), dining room (954), and inner chambers (996). When Athena strikes him with a rock to end his madness, Heracles reels back against a half-smashed roof column lying on

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the raised pavement (kr¯epides) that supported the inner colonnade (1006–8). Amphitryon and the servants tie him to this pillar (1011, 1094–97), until he recovers his sanity. Using architectural metaphors to grasp what has happened, Heracles explains the destruction he has wreaked as the effects of his father’s tainted past: “Whenever the foundation [kr¯epis] of a race is not laid down / right, the offspring must suffer the evil that comes” (1261–62). He himself has put a “capstone of evils upon the house” (d¯oma thrigk¯osai kakois, 1280) by murdering his own sons. Merging with the oikos he has brought down, Heracles finally views himself as a building that Hera has undermined, “turning upside down the foremost man of Greece, foundations and all [autoisin bathrois]” (1305–7). When faced with Lycus’ torments, Megara wishes to draw all her griefs together—like a honey bee gathering nectar—and distil them into a single tear (487–89). This remarkable simile suggests Euripides own method of pulling the various spaces of the play together, then gradually reducing them to an essential image. Returning from the ends of the earth, Heracles concludes that his labors count for nothing if he cannot save his own family. In a moment’s insight, the vast spaces of Heracles’ travels draw together and merge into the home he has come to restore. The creaking door that once excited the children (77–79), sealed up by Lycus (53–54), reopened by Megara (330–32); the altar erected by Heracles (48–50, 521–22); the pillars, the floor, the walls (922–1012)—these are the essentials of Heracles’ world. Even the roof supports the gods who decide his fate and eventually uproot his life. The house must “hold” Heracles’ madness, because nothing else can manifest its devastating consequences. The distillation of distant and proximate spaces reaches its purest form when the mad hero appears on the ekkukl¯ema, bound to a column of the house he has destroyed. A single column in Greek art frequently stands for the house, but here the symbolism goes further, for the column is damaged (“half-shattered stone, once carefully worked,” 1096), and the master of the house, himself a broken man, is fixed to it, surrounded by the corpses of his wife and sons.155 In Iphigenia among the Taurians, Iphigenia recounts a dream in which an earthquake destroys her former home in Argos, leaving only the central pillar standing, which comes to represent Orestes, the sole surviving male of Atreus’ line (IT 42–58). In Heracles, however, the column is broken, and the future of the line lies dead around it.156 By rolling out the ekkukl¯ema, Euripides does more than expose the extrascenic space. When Heracles awakes and sees the corpses, he thinks he has returned to the land of the dead: Can it be I have gone down again to Hades, having doubled-back from Hades already . . .? But I don’t see the great rock of Sisyphus, or Pluto,

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or the scepter of Demeter’s daughter Persephone. I am struck off course, I can’t recall where I am. (1101–5)

The picture of a living hell continues, as Amphitryon fears untying his son who seems “a Bacchant from Hades” (1119).157 Iris urged Lyssa to make the palace infernal so that Heracles would speed his sons to Acheron (837–39). With Amphitryon’s help, Heracles slowly realizes that he has done just that. A vision of the underworld appears onstage earlier, when the family members return to the altar in the orchestra dressed in their “robes of Hades” (480–84, 525–26, 562–64), only to be raised up by Heracles who arrives from Hades in the nick of time. That confluence of distanced and scenic space reoccurs in its distilled form in the exposed “interior space” represented by the ekkukl¯ema. In the final peripeteia, Theseus arrives unexpectedly from Athens. He has left his hoplites nearby (1163–65), realizing that battle against Lycus is no longer the issue. To use a cinematic parallel, the cavalry arrive to rescue the besieged fort only to find that the film it has galloped into is no longer a Western. Theseus acknowledges as much when he sees the corpses: “Who could kill these children? / Whose wife is this I see? / No, young boys don’t stand in the ranks of battle” (1174–76). Amphitryon points to the same disjunction: “My child, you waged war, unnatural war, against your children” (1133). In one of the most moving scenes in tragedy, Theseus abandons the military option and struggles to bring Heracles back from the dead, replicating symbolically the anabasis that Heracles once performed on his behalf. Asked by his father on his return “Did you really go to the house of Hades?” Heracles describes his descent to the underworld and rescue of Theseus (610–22).158 When Theseus appears in person (1163), he comes to return the favor, to repay Heracles “for saving me from below” (1170), “bringing me back into the safety of the light” (1222), offering comfort to a friend whose disasters reach “from down below up to the heavens” (1240). Heracles, however, prefers to die, “to go back underground from whence I came” (1247), reversing the journey he made to bring back “the threeheaded dog who guards the gates of Hades” (1276–77). As the destroyer of his own house, Heracles can imagine no other home than that of the dead below. In spatial terms, Theseus rescues Heracles from suicide by transcending accepted ideas about the relationship of pollution to proximity (1213–34).159 First he unveils Heracles, exposing him to the light, much as Heracles did for his own children when he threw off their burial garments earlier. Despite his friend’s protestations, Theseus ignores the possibility of contagion by touch or by sight, to the point of offering Heracles a home in Athens.160 “Disyoked” (apozeugnumai) from his wife and children (1374–75), Heracles finds in

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Theseus a “yoke of friendship” (zeugos philion, 1403). He helps Heracles to stand, taking his hand and leading him off like a boat in tow.161 This powerful image ties Theseus’ rescue to the similar actions of Megara and Heracles with their children. Although Heracles considers Theseus a son (“Bereft of sons, I hold you like a son,” 1401), his dependent relationship on his friend casts him in the role of the child helped by his father, taking the first steps of a journey he cannot make on his own. The destination of that journey is the distant space of Athens, the city whose theater has so radically recast the story of Heracles. In a symbolic sense Theseus arrives as spokesperson for the spectators in that theater, expressing their sympathy for a hero who has suffered so cruelly from the gods. Theseus’ arrival from Athens, his invitation for Heracles to live in Athens, and their mutual departure for Athens merge the distanced space of that city with the theatrical space of the audience, opening up the kind of reflexive possibilities we explored in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Built around the nostos pattern of return and rescue, Euripides’ play undermines the expectations built into that scenario, as if Homer’s Odyssey were to follow the death of the suitors with Odysseus running amok, turning his bow on Penelope, Telemachus, and Eurycleia. Until the appearance of Lyssa and Iris, we remain committed to the melodramatic plot. The scene where Amphitryon lures Lycus into the palace locks us into that frame, for we know Heracles waits within to give the tyrant his fatal comeuppance. So confident is Amphitryon of the outcome that he goes inside with the express purpose of watching Lycus become a corpse (731–32), and the Chorus, too, wants to “spy out” (skop¯omen) Lycus’ demise (747–48). Along with Heracles and the audience, the Chorus also ends up seeing more than it bargained for. If the basic plot of Heracles misleads us, then we may ask if other parts of the play raise questions about the story’s unfolding. Desperate for Heracles’ return, Megara puts off her children’s entreaties about their father with stories: “I distract them by telling them mere fables [logoisi mutheuousa]” (76– 77).162 Amphitryon advises her to keep the children calm by “cheating them with stories [kleptousa muthois], wretched deceptions [klopas] though they are” (100). If Megara’s tales represent a “theft” of the truth, covering up what is really the case, then what of the larger myth of return and rescue? Dostoevsky’s disturbed narrator in Notes from the Underground suggests something of the process by which even fictional characters use art to gloss over the intractable nature of their world: “Everything always finished up to my satisfaction in an entrancingly lazy transition into art, that is into the most delightful forms of existence, all available and ready for me, heartily pinched from poets and novelists, and adaptable to every possible demand and use. For example, I triumph over everybody.”163 The Chorus also comes to question its part in poetic (mis)representation. The first three stasima draw on the contemporary encomiast tradition, com-

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bining elements of thr¯enoi (praising the departed Heracles) and epinikia (celebrating Heracles the kallinikos.164 When Heracles returns from Hades to save his family, the encomia seem justified; after Hera unleashes insanity inside the palace, however, the poetry of praise is glaringly inappropriate. In the astrophic dochmiacs that follow the Messenger speech, the Chorus compares Heracles’ bloodshed with the Danaids’ murder of their husbands and Procne’s murder of Itys (1016–23), traditional paradigms of violent crime. But these poetic exempla pale before the horror of Heracles’ filicide, leading the elders to question their ability to perform a lyric adequate to the tragedy they now witness: “What groans, / what wails, what song for the dead, / what dance of Hades shall we echo forth?” (1025–27). During the subsequent kommos, Amphitryon continually begs the Chorus to be quiet (1042–44, 1047–50, 1053–54), fearing it will wake Heracles. Here Euripides throws traditional choral function up against the demands of “realistic” character and action, a self-conscious enjambment of competing modes of representation that raises doubts about them both. The Chorus never again sings or dances in the play, meaning that the last stasimon with responsion (734–814) occurs just before the appearance of Lyssa and Iris. Given the radical turn of events that those divinities set in motion, it is perhaps not surprising that the Chorus answers its own question—“What song for the dead shall we echo forth?”—with self-dismissive silence.165 If Megara’s stories are lies to encourage the false hopes of her children, then Theseus tries a similar ploy with Heracles, reminding him that even the gods endure adultery, oppression, struggles over power, physical binding (1313–21), “assuming the tales of the poets are not false” (aoid¯on eiper ou pseudeis logoi, 1315). To an audience that has watched god-sent disaster overwhelm Heracles, it seems absurd that he could draw strength from the gods’ example. In fact, Heracles claims these “wretched tales of the poets” are utterly false: “if a god is really a god, he lacks nothing” (1345–46).166 By attacking the traditional accounts of the Olympians, Heracles calls into question the very story that he finds himself in, and from which he cannot escape. A jealous god has driven him mad and blasted his life: “We all have been destroyed,” he says, “struck down and ruined by a single ‘event’ [tuch¯ei] from Hera” (1392–93).167 Functioning self-referentially, the theater holds up to scrutiny both the given myth of Heracles and the radical new version that the play unfolds. By trying out and rejecting earlier models of plot structure, choral function, and mythic sequence, Euripides uses the theater to question traditional mythic representations as well as the ideology that supports them, encouraging his audience to engage in metatheatrical problematics as a means of reflecting on its own situation. In this light, let us consider the distanced space of Athens that serves as Heracles’ final destination. Theseus offers Heracles purification and a home in the city, where he will receive a share in Theseus’ own estates, as well as

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precincts given him by the citizens, transferred to Heracles and called in future by his name (1324–30).168 After Heracles’ death—“when you go down to Hades,” as Theseus puts it—Athens will exalt him with honors, including sacrifices and “massive stone constructions” (la¨ınoisi t’ exogk¯omasin, 1331– 33). Theseus may invoke what was, in fact, the architectural reality of Athens at the time of the play’s performance, where Heracles’ labors appeared on the metopes of the Hephaisteion and his apotheosis on its eastern facade. He also may have featured as the reclining male figure witnessing the birth of Athena on the east pediment of the Parthenon.169 Alternatively, the “massive stone constructions” might refer to Mycenean tombs appropriated as hero cults, to the uncarved stone slabs that marked heroic graves, or to mounds such as that constructed at Marathon, suggesting Heracles’ distance from the now discredited Olympian divinities honored in temples like the Parthenon and Hephaisteion. Cult sites dedicated to Heracles were numerous in Attica, many within the walls of Athens, and his temenos at Kynosarges lay just outside the walls within sight of the theater.170 On the simple human level, a common inscription over Attic doorways honored the hero, announcing “The noble victor Heracles, son of Zeus, dwells in this place. Let no evil enter” (ho tou Dios pais kallinikos H¯erakl¯es enthade katoikei· m¯eden eisit¯o kakon).171 Given the dramatic emphasis on Heracles as destroyer of his oikos, Euripides manipulates this apotropaic warning to bitter tragic effect. Reconstructing the spatial dimensions of Heracles’ move to Athens, we see a typical nostos story of a hero’s triumphant homecoming from a distant place (Hades) to the scenic space of those he rescues. The homecoming culminates in the recovery of the extrascenic space of the house, but madness sent from distant Olympus causes it to “implode.” The subsequent exposure on the ekkukl¯ema of the house interior reveals the hero bound to a remnant column, surrounded by the corpses of his victims, turning the scenic space of the theater into a second Hades. With the arrival of Theseus, Athens replaces the underworld as the destination of the play. A now dependent Heracles departs for his new home, led “like a little boat in tow” toward the distanced space in which his story has just been told. The play of space manifest in its telling articulates a series of radical reversals and recoveries, leaving the audience to contemplate how, if at all, those mutabilities can find a home in Athens. Near the end of the play, at a crucial existential moment (there is no better word for it), Heracles wishes he could become a rock (petros) and so forget all the horrors that have happened (1397). Heracles expresses the desire to lose all feeling and all access to future feeling, to become dumb earth, to leave the “being-for-itself” of consciousness and the “being-for-others” of interpersonal relations and return to the primal “being-in-itself” of nonconscious matter. Under Theseus’ calm insistence, however, Heracles abandons an insensate future, picking up his bow and quiver and leaving for his new home. In so doing, he accepts that physical distance provides no escape, for

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the fatal weapons will beat against his skin, a constant reminder of his deadly acts against his own family. Instead of becoming a rock, Heracles will confront his own image in carved stone, as will the Athenians who leave the theater, exposed to a new Heracles whom they now cannot escape. Like the bow rubbing against Heracles’ chest, the Athenians face a constant reminder in their city of the cruel and arbitrary nature of the gods, once the “lies of the poets” have been stripped away. The “Olympian beyond” remains, a distant place with its own kind of theater, where “the glorious wife of Zeus dances, / striking the bright floor of Olympus with her dancing shoes” (1303–4). Euripides does not deny Hera her celebrative performance, but he does not dramatize it. Instead, he presents a transformative image of two archetypal Athenian heroes, traditional exemplars of the competitive virtues of “violence rewarded,” now bound together by the cooperative virtues of mutual assistance. Theseus repays Heracles “for saving me from below” (1170), “bringing me back into the safety of the light” (1222). He leads Heracles—whose disasters reach from Hades to the heavens (1240)—to a new home in Athens, a nostos beyond all expectation. Their physical relationship—Theseus helps Heracles up and leads him by the hand—recalls not only Megara leading the children out of the house, and Heracles leading them back inside, but also the Chorus of Theban elders, who cling to each other for support as they enter the orchestra in the parodos (107–30). From impotent old men to a desperate mother with her children, from a family reunited to a radically reconfigured set of heroes, Euripides reveals the transformative power of human contact as the means of restoring—as best one can—a meaningful sense to the tragic spaces from which there is no escape.

CHAPTER THREE EREMETIC SPACE Empty is not nothing, but a bringing forth. —Martin Heidegger

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HE TERM “EREMETIC,” from the Greek er¯emia ‘desert,’ ‘desolate area,’ ‘wilderness without people’, has entered our vocabulary primarily via the monastic tradition of the Christian hermits, spiritually driven to deny themselves normal human society in order to escape its temptations and godlessness. For the Greeks of the fifth century B.C., however, no such positive valence existed for hermetic isolation. On the contrary, eremetic space in tragedy stands in opposition to the valorized space represented by nostos, the subject of the previous chapter. The association of “desert” with “deserted” indicates that a barren landscape is so by virtue of its lack of human beings and not because of its physical and geographical characteristics per se. It is primarily in this sense that Herodotus marks the limits of the inhabited world (oikoumen¯e) by the term er¯emia.1 The Athenian general Nikias expresses a similar sentiment regarding the built environment, reminding his troops during the disastrous Sicilian expedition that “men make the city, not walls or ships without men in them.”2 In the prologue of Oedipus Tyrannus, the priest addressing Oedipus extends the notion to the very idea of political rule: “If you would govern this land as you have, / better to rule it with people than emptied of them. / A city tower or a ship is nothing / deserted [er¯emos] of men who dwell within it” (OT 54–57).3 It stands to reason that an area deserted of humans usually finds its way into Greek tragedy as a distant space evoked by a character or chorus—the island where the Greek army exiles Polymestor (Eur. Hec. 1285), the desolate beach where Hippolytus meets his fate (Hipp. 1198), the lonely cave where Creusa abandons her illegitimate child (Ion 1494), each designated as er¯emos. In Antigone, with which this chapter begins, Sophocles vividly evokes two such distanced places, the wasteland where Polyneices’ corpse lies exposed and the cave in which Creon immures Antigone. Eventually these two er¯emiai infect the palace where the play takes place. But tragedy does more than refer to unseen eremetic places; occasionally they provide the dramatic setting itself. In Ajax, the location shifts midplay from the tent of Ajax to the deserted beach where he commits suicide. Sophocles goes further in Philoctetes, setting the entire play on the uninhabited island of Lemnos. Having marooned Philoctetes there, the Greeks temporarily “repopulate” the island,

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only to abandon it again when they take the wounded hero with them to Troy. The chapter concludes with Prometheus Bound, set in the desert wilds of Scythia at the ends of the earth, where the chained demigod serves as a cosmic magnet, drawing both divine and human forces into his field.

Antigone: Desolation Takes the Stage Distance is not consumed. It is abolished. —Georges Poulet, Proustian Space

Antigone unfolds as a series of wrongful placements that bring the story of Oedipus and his kin to its disastrous close. Teiresias epitomizes their nature in his prophecy to Creon: You have sent below one who belongs above, lodging a living soul dishonorably in a tomb, and you have kept here one who belongs below, against the gods—a dispossessed, unmourned, unholy corpse. (1068–71)

The spatial inversions, highlighted by the juxtaposition of “above” (an¯o, 1068, 1072) and “below” (kat¯o, 1068; kat¯othen, 1069), join the two most prominent distant places in the play, the dusty plain where Polyneices’ corpse lies exposed and the subterranean cave where Antigone is buried alive. As Lowe points out, these two spots seem to lie along the same route, reached from the scenic space of the palace via one of the eisodoi; the other eisodos allows for entries from and departures to the town, used by the Chorus (100), Haimon (631), and Teiresias (988, 1090).4 If this relationship holds, then Haimon makes his emotional exit (765) out the opposite eisodos through which he entered, signaling with visual clarity that he sides with Antigone and her unburied brother. The stage action also links these two distanced sites when Creon leaves with his entourage to undo the damage (1114). He departs down the same path that the Guard (223, 331, 384), Haimon (765), and Antigone (97, 384, 943) took before him, the road that leads to the corpse of Polyneices and onto the cavern that holds Antigone. Journeying to these desert places, Creon returns a desolate man, driven down “wild, savage paths” (agriais hodois) until his joy is “trampled underfoot” (1274–75), a merging of the metaphorical and literal that marks Sophocles’ spatial language. Antigone introduces a potentially disruptive offstage area at the outset, when Antigone informs Ismene of the different fates that befall their two dead brothers—a lavish funeral for one, exposure to ravenous dogs and vultures for the other (21–30). She draws her sister “outside the gates of the

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palace courtyard” so that she “might hear of this alone” (18–19), implying that palace interior (the extrascenic space of the play) offers no safe place for them to talk. At the end of the scene, Ismene returns inside but Antigone departs for her brother’s corpse, marking in clear spatial terms the breach between the sisters,5 much as Haimon’s exit does later vis-`a-vis his father. Following hard on Creon’s public decree outlawing Polyneices’ burial (198–210), the arrival of the Guard (223) brings the place of the corpse into imaginative view. He describes the actual site: dry, hard, unbroken ground with no sign of human interference; the corpse bestrewn with dust, in violation of Creon’s orders; the body as yet unsavaged by animals (249–58). The spot clearly lies within the city’s borders,6 allowing the Thebans to contrast the public treatment of the two rival brothers (192–206). Creon makes the viewing of the mangled corpse central to his mandate: “leave the body unburied, to be eaten and ravaged by birds and dogs, for [all] to see [idein]” (205–6).7 As far as we can tell, however, no citizen freely takes the opportunity to view this desecration. That dubious privilege is reserved for the “watchmen” that Creon orders to enforce his mandate—skopoi (215), episkopoi (217), h¯emerskopos (253), terms emphasizing the act of looking at, or watching over.8 In his unexpected return to the stage, the Guard brings with him an additional witness from the place of the body—Antigone. Creon asks (literally) “How was she seen?” (kai p¯os horatai, 406), and in his response the Guard indicates how invasive the corpse of Polyneices has become. He describes the clammy remains under the dust that he and his fellow guards wiped away, and then the stench that they avoided by posting themselves on a ridge upwind (407–12). There they kept vigilant watch until “the shining circle of the sun” reached its zenith and the midday temperature rose (415–17), increasing our sense of the body decomposing in the heat. Suddenly a whirlwind sweeps across the plain, blotting out the sky, stripping the trees of their foliage, and forcing the guards to “shut [their] eyes and keep out this godsent plague” (421). When the wind drops, Antigone “is seen” (horatai, 423, answering Creon’s question at 406) standing over the body like a mother bird over her despoiled nest, orphaned of its young (423–27). Scooping up dust from the dry earth, wailing over the corpse, and pouring funeral libations, Antigone undertakes the burial rites for her brother, until the guards shift from onlookers to agents and descend to make their arrest. In the Guard’s account, the place of Polyneices’ body resembles a distant stage where a strange sequence of events unfolds before an audience of episkopoi, marked by the vocabulary of visual and other sense perception. The powerful conjunction of natural, supernatural, and human elements reveals that the eremetic space of the corpse cannot stand in isolation but spreads to other places in the play. When Antigone stands before Creon, she personifies the power of the offstage body to decenter the scenic space of the palace, challenging the political and domestic order it represents.

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Confronting the defiant Antigone, Creon recalls having just seen her sister “raving and beside herself” (492), and he summons Ismene from the palace (526–30). He accuses her of “lurking in the house like a snake,” of “having a share in this burial” along with Antigone (531–35), a charge Ismene chooses not to deny. Although Antigone rejects her sister’s belated solidarity—their exchange (536–60) resembles the prologue in reverse9 —Ismene’s willingness to accept responsibility for the act indicates that the “spatial disequilibrium” has spread from the offstage area of the body (where Antigone made her first exit) into the palace (where Ismene made hers). Creon had vowed to root out all conspirators and fellow travelers, even if they proved members of his own family worshiping at the altar of Zeus Herkeios (486–88); now he must face the fact that the isolated corpse has symbolically infiltrated his own home. Creon tries to put the spatial lid back on his domain by commanding his slaves to imprison both sisters inside: “From now own they must be women, and not roam free” (577–79).10 He fails to acknowledge the true source of unrest, the “deserted” corpse of Polyneices, itself locked out of its proper space beneath the earth. In the encounter with his son, Creon fully reveals his autocratic view of political power. He asks rhetorically whether he is to rule the city for himself or for others (736), claiming that the city “belongs to its ruler” (738). Haimon prophetically proclaims “You would rule well as the lone monarch [monos] of a desert [er¯em¯es . . . g¯es]” (739). Framing the challenge to his power in terms of female rebellion within the oikos (648–62, 677–80), Creon accuses Haimon of siding with Antigone (740, 746), indeed of being her “household slave” (756). He vows to “hide her away in a rocky cavern, leading her down a track deserted of mortals [er¯emos . . . brot¯on stibos]” (773–74). Echoing the words Haimon aimed at him, Creon condemns Antigone to be “left alone and deserted” (mon¯en er¯emon, 887), once again asserting political, domestic, and gender dominance in spatial terms. Unlike the givens of Polyneices’ exposure, however, the audience is “there at the creation” of this second wasteland, the one that eventually destroys Creon utterly—the prison-cave where Antigone will waste away in a living death. The distant space of Antigone’s punishment represents a confused amalgam of normally discrete places: a rock-hewn cave (774), an underground cavern (818, 891, 920, 1100), a bridal chamber (804, 891, 1204–5), a burial mound (848), a walled-in habitation (885–86, 1216–17), a tomb (891, 1215, 1220), a prison (775–78), a dwelling place for the dead (888, 892–94, 1241), a terminal home for the living (774, 811, 821–22, 888, 919–20), a grave (849, 1069), a deserted site (773, 887). In an apostrophe to her final destination, Antigone suggests something of its manifold functions: “Oh tomb, oh bridal chamber, oh ever wakeful / dwelling underground” (891–92). Here, as elsewhere in her departure scene, Antigone engages in a spatial version of the “definitional fondling of the truth” that Jones observes in other Sophoclean protagonists.11 The path she takes to her deso-

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late dwelling is the “last road” (tan neatan hodon, 807) leading her from the sun, the “prepared path” (tan hetoiman hodon, 878) down which she must walk in a mock wedding that resembles a procession to the grave:12 Now he leads me by force, seizing me by the hand, no marriage bed, no wedding hymn, with no part in married life or the raising of children . . . desolate [er¯emos] of loved ones, ill-fated, still living I go to the grave-dug world of the dead. (916–20)13

The link between the scenic space of the palace and the distanced space of Antigone’s prison takes physical form in her final procession out of the theater. Departing out the same eisodos she took to accomplish the burial and down which the Guard led her back as a captive, Antigone visually connects the place of her “crime” with that of her punishment. The path joins two mangled rituals: the burial denied her brother, and her own funereal wedding. Creon is now responsible for creating two unnaturally desolated places within the city: the site where a corpse lies ringed with guards, preventing the familial community that should gather at a proper grave; and the tomb that walls off a young bride from the oikos she should create with her new husband. The magnitude of Creon’s spatial upheaval becomes clear in his scene with Teiresias. Unlike the prophet’s appearance in Oedipus Tyrannus, where Oedipus summons him against his will, Teiresias in Antigone comes on his own initiative, answering no royal summons.14 His unexpected arrival down an eisodos—led by a boy, a clear sign of Teiresias’ identity—indicates a heightened state of emergency, confirmed by his oracular imperatives: Creon must “obey the prophet” (992) and “yield to the dead” (1029), ending the violence he inflicts on Polyneices’ corpse and the still-living Antigone (1068– 73). As befits a blind seer, the evidence reaching Teiresias involves nonvisual perception, beginning with the “barbaric shrieking” of birds, whose cries and flapping wings indicate they “are tearing at each other with murderous talons” (1001–4). Burnt offerings abort, and Teiresias understands that carrion from Polyneices’ body has polluted the sacred altars of the city, spread by dogs and birds (1005–19). Creon’s guards, it appears, can protect the site from further human intervention, but they are powerless to stop animals from spreading putrefied scraps of the body. Creon intended some such desecration, as his emphasis on animal despoliation suggests (203–6). However, natural forces do not simply ravage the corpse where it lays. Oblivious to the political isolation of the body, the dogs and birds violate its hermetic setting and mock Creon’s pretensions to control the space of the dead. Ironically, Creon’s decree results in Polyneices’ corpse returning to the nat-

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ural world, whose laws and customs include decomposition by exposure to the sun and conversion into food via birds and animals. Burial represents one way that human cultures guide these processes spatially, insuring that decay occurs away from the sight of the living. Something of this subliminal desire emerges in the frequent metaphor that figures death as an act of “covering” (kalupt¯o) and burial as the subsequent act of “covering in the earth.”15 For the ancient Greeks, burial guided the manner of corporeal breakdown without denying it; the “matterification” of the dead simply took place underground, or on a funeral pyre.16 When sufficiently embedded in a culture, a funerary protocol such as burial comes to resemble an act of nature, the “natural” means of marking the transition after death that differentiates humans from animals. This is precisely the separation that Antigone wishes to maintain when she challenges the decree that leaves her brother’s body “unwept, unburied, a sweet treasure / for vultures to feast their eyes and stomachs on” (29–30). At the sight of the unburied corpse, Antigone “utters a piercing cry, / like a bird who sees her empty nest, / the bed orphaned of her nestlings” (423–25). The Guard compares her compulsion to bury her brother with the instinctive response of a mother bird to her lost chicks. The “unwritten laws” to which Antigone later appeals (450–60) involve human practices—worked out in the spatial terms we come to view as customary—that seem indistinguishable from the natural world. They engender instinctive responses from the community, unless countervailing forces inhibit their expression. The fact that Antigone cannot help doing what she does (in a strong sense) complicates the romantic image of her as a willful political rebel; rather, she seems to stand for her beliefs instinctively.17 Her instincts, however, have political roots and carry strong political implications. As Patterson argues, Antigone’s traditional duties do not derive simply from family loyalty: “as a female member of her brother’s anchisteia, Antigone has a public (polis) responsibility to carry out burial rites for her nearest relative[;] . . . the polis authorizes her ritual care of the dead even as it forbids it through Creon’s decree.”18 However we view Antigone, Teiresias establishes categorically that natural forces are spreading the pollution of Polyneices’ corpse, with devastating results for the city. By allowing these forces free access to the dead, Creon unwittingly undermines his own political rule, conceived as the power over where things “go.” Although he isolates the corpse from its normal human community (both living and dead), its contagion will not stay put. It moves (in graphically material form) to pollute the city’s sacred spaces, ultimately cutting Thebes off from access to the Olympian gods. No prayers or sacrificial smoke can rise up to reach them; down from above, divine communication via bird augury becomes hopelessly garbled (1019–22). As for the gods below, Creon’s actions deprive them of their due (451–52, 519, 942–43) and

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spark their inexorable revenge (1072–76).19 Over the issue of burial (discussed in the introduction), social norms join theology, nomos fuses with phusis, as nowhere else in ancient Greek culture. For Teiresias, the infection involves the material contagion of religious pollution. But, as Haimon indicates, Antigone’s defiance also spreads through the body politic. Via an infectious process of fellow feeling, the city comes to sympathize with her actions (693–700, 733). As if emanating from the corpse, “the dark rumor [i.e., ‘Antigone was right’] silently gains ground” (700),20 until Creon decides to imprison Antigone in her own “desert space” (773). Following Teiresias’ prophecy, the Chorus subtly suggests that this spot may hold more importance for Creon than the desolate plain where Polyneices’ corpse lies rotting: “Go and raise up the girl from her underground / chamber, and [then] build a tomb for the unburied body” (1100– 1101). The fact that Creon reverses the order—understandably, given Teiresias’ emphasis on the pollution spreading from the corpse—means that he arrives too late to stop the suicide of Antigone, and of his own son.21 Entering from the eisodos that leads to both Polyneices’ body and Antigone’s prison, the Messenger reports what has happened at these two sites. He first revisits the distant place of the “high plain” (1197), where the corpse lies “ripped apart by dogs” (1198). There Creon and his crew wash what’s left of Polyneices, cremate the remains, and “pile up a lofty burial mound of native earth” (1201–4). In seven swift lines, the original cause of the tragic action is removed, as Creon restores the proper spatial relationship to the corpse. The remainder of the Messenger’s speech—indeed, the rest of the play—deals with tragic events at the second point of desolation, the fatal bridal chamber. Like the theatralizing of Polyneices’ corpse (recall the episkopoi who take in the view), the site of Antigone’s imprisonment also resembles a kind of stage. Here, however, the “spectators”—Creon and his men—catch sight of a scene that has almost played itself out. In the process, Sophocles carefully closes the gap between the “actors” and “audience,” until Creon himself obtrudes into the playing area. The sound of distant grieving from the cave first reaches the ears of the men, who run back to report this intelligence (s¯emainei, 1208) to their master. As Creon himself draws near, unintelligible (ase¯ ma) shouts surround him (1209–10), and he cries out in fear, “Am I a prophet?” (1212). His language recalls that of Teiresias, who understands the “not unintelligible [ouk as¯emos] whirling of wings” (1003–4) and predicts the disastrous scene that Creon is about to witness. “Am I walking down the most accurst path of all the roads I’ve ever walked?” (1212–13), Creon asks, approaching the er¯emia where he has sentenced Antigone. Terrified, he orders his men to provide him with surrogate eyes and ears:

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Move nearer, quickly; approach the tomb and look there at the opening where the stones have been removed, and reaching the actual entrance, see whether I heard Haimon’s voice, or if the gods deceive me. (1215–18)

The halting syntax and confused spatial layout suggest Creon’s fear of confronting what he had hoped to isolate at a distance. Answering the command that they “Look!” (athr¯esath’, 1216), the Messenger dutifully reports “We looked” (¯ethroumen, 1220), and “at the furthest end of the tomb / . . . we saw [kateidomen]” (1221). The scene they describe—Antigone hanging by her veil and Haimon clinging to her, bewailing his loss (1220–25)—finally reaches Creon, who at last “sees” (horai, 1226) for himself.22 In a Freudian sense, Creon experiences the “primal scene” of Oedipal desire played in reverse. Instead of the son witnessing his parent’s lovemaking, sparking the desire to replace his father and possess his mother, a distraught father breaks in on his son’s wedding night. Seeing Haimon embracing his dead bride, Creon fears the worst (“What deed have you done? What / possessed you to do it?” 1228–29). Outraged at his father’s role in Antigone’s death and his violation of their final intimacy, Haimon spits at Creon and then tries to kill him. Failing miserably, he turns the sword on himself, and his father watches in horror as his son and bride “consummate” their marriage.23 The Messenger narrates Creon’s conversion from the distant creator of a living burial into the trapped spectator of a fatal wedding. Leaving the scenic space of the palace, Creon journeys to tragic awareness along the path that leads to the two er¯emiai he has populated. Spurred by Teiresias’ prophecy, the tyrant abandons the aloofness of political power, where the impact of his decisions remains at a distance, and confronts the reality of their consequences. Creon’s initial decree emphasized that the desecration of Polyneices’ corpse must be visible (idein, 205–6). After becoming the actual spectator of the tragic events he has set in train, Creon takes his place as the object of others’ gaze in the closing scene of the play. Before dealing with Creon’s return to the stage, let us consider briefly another character forced to act the role of audient. Creon’s wife Eurydice emerges from the palace to hear the Messenger’s report, explaining her presence out of doors in a nine-line speech (1183–91), all that she says in the play. After hearing of Haimon’s and Antigone’s deaths, she returns inside without a word, an ominous silence that prompts the Messenger to follow her in (1244–56). By this action, an eyewitness from the distant places of the play enters the extrascenic space of the palace, as the news of suicide invades Creon’s home.

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The subsequent death of Eurydice demonstrates how completely the two er¯emiai have infected the drama’s other significant spaces. By committing suicide at the altar of Zeus Herkeios,24 Eurydice stains the symbolic heart of the household with the family’s maternal blood, emphasized by the term pamm¯et¯or ‘all mother’, ‘true mother’, used for her by the Messenger (1282). Before her sacrilege, Eurydice curses Creon as a “child killer” (1305), responsible for the deaths of Haimon and their other (previously unmentioned) son, Megareus, sacrificed to save Thebes from the Argive invasion (1302–5).25 Although the play tells us nothing of the circumstances surrounding Megareus’ suicide, we do know how Creon’s imprisonment of Antigone draws Haimon to his death. Eurydice imitates both her sons, stabbing herself with a sword as Haimon did, and dying like a sacrificial victim at the altar, in the manner of Megareus.26 Within the extrascenic space of the palace, Eurydice’s death replicates domestically the citywide effect of Creon’s refusal to bury Polyneices. Scraps of his corpse spread by the birds pollute the shrines and holy places of Thebes; by shedding familial blood at the altar, Eurydice fouls the sacred center of Creon’s home. In her silent withdrawal at the Messenger’s news, Eurydice epitomizes the ideally socialized woman, a tamed female and reticent wife.27 However, such appearances prove deceptive, for in her ultimate reaction to the loss of philoi, Eurydice resembles Antigone. She “laments . . . the empty bed of Megareus” (k¯okusasa . . . kenon lechos, 1302–3), recalling Antigone “who shrieks out a lament [anak¯okuei] . . ., / like a bird who sees her empty [ken¯es] nest, / the bed [lechos] orphaned of her nestlings” (423–25).28 Like her erstwhile daughter-in-law, Eurydice also refuses to remain inside the palace. When Creon returns with the dead body of Haimon in his arms, the queen in effect “comes out” to greet them. “You will soon see other evils [from with]in the palace” (1279–80), the Messenger announces, and the Chorus insists, “She is there [for all] to see, no longer [hidden] in the inner recesses” (1293). Draped over the altar on the ekkukl¯ema, Eurydice’s corpse exposes to the outside world the pollution within the palace.29 In terms of the spatial divisions of the play, the revelation of the interior scene marks an invasion of male public space by the domestic space of women. In her fatal protest at the loss of her sons, Eurydice demonstrates how Creon’s public actions have led to the death of his own oikos. His transpolitical standard fails precisely because Creon ignores the essential way in which, as Patterson puts it, the “Classical Athenian polis structured itself on the model of the family.”30 Given the dominance of distant er¯emiai through most of the play, we might view the corpse-polluted altar as the final manifestation of the places Creon has peopled with the dead—initially distant and out of sight, then within the palace, finally revealed for all to see. Creon’s effort to seal off Polyneices from the earth and Antigone from the sun collapses in on his own lived space, making it, too, a desert. He finds himself

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terribly at home, not far from the “implacable harbor of Hades” (1284). Like Antigone on her way to prison, Creon moves as one of the living dead, a man “who exists no more than no one” (1325). And, like Haimon, he arrives to find his partner dead by her own hand, his oikos robbed of its future. Surrounded by the dead members of his family, Creon stands exposed in the theater of Dionysus as if rotting in the sun. The various spaces of the play now merge with the theater, for Creon has become the object of the audience’s gaze. Horrified at what he sees (1295, 1299, 1341–42) and desperate to get out of others’ sight (1324, 1339), Creon finally is led inside. As the familial world overwhelms the civic, we see clear spatial evidence for the rightness of Antigone’s actions. By challenging her own seclusion within the house and by violating the decree that exposed Polyneices’ corpse, Antigone sends out ripples that eventually reach her sister, her fianc´e, his mother, and the entire city of Thebes. The cumulative effect forces Creon to visit the desolate places he had set aside for others, and ultimately to face a living death in his own home. Via the physical and metaphorical movements of Antigone, the various unseen spaces of the play “come into view,” until they finally cohere in the lonely figure of the ruler. As the gaping hole of the palace swallows Creon, we see a father and husband deprived of his family, and a tyrant marooned in the city he has made a desert.31

Ajax: Alone in Space, In and Out of Time Space reaches out from us and translates the world. —Rilke, “The One Birds Plunge Through”

In the second half of Sophocles’ Ajax, the scenic space shifts from Ajax’ tent in the Greek camp at Troy to a desolate part of the beach. Ajax announces he will bathe by the seaside meadows to remove his pollution and there “find a place where no one has ever stepped” (mol¯on te ch¯oron enth’ an astib¯e kich¯o, 657) to bury the sword that Hector gave him. His words suggest both a naturally deserted spot and a sacred place off limits to humans,32 subtly anticipating the ritual-like suicide he will perform there. To establish fully Ajax’ isolation for his final act, Sophocles has the Chorus of Sailors leave the orchestra to search for their leader, facilitating the scenic transformation from army encampment to desolate beach. Entering an empty theatrical space, Ajax commits suicide “in the presence of the audience only—a unique episode in extant Greek tragedy.”33 In Eumenides, the Chorus of Furies also leaves the orchestra, allowing the scene to change from Delphi to Athens, where Orestes arrives at the temple of Athena. Recall, however, that both scenic spaces represent a temple interior, indicated by the omphalos at Delphi and the image of Athena in Athens.

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That is, the focus in Eumenides is not on the facade, but on the center of the orchestra. In the other three cases where the Chorus vacates the theater— Euripides’ Alcestis, Helen, and Rhesus—it reenters the same scenic space from which it left: before the palace in Alcestis and Helen, in front of Hector’s tent in Rhesus. Only Ajax among extant tragedies “eliminates” a scene-setting facade, creating an onstage er¯emia during the course of the play.34 Ironically, the “untrodden ground” becomes a place of intense human activity. After Ajax’ suicide, Tecmessa, the Chorus, Teukros, Eurysakes, Menelaus, Agamemnon, and Odysseus arrive in turn to settle the fate of Ajax’ corpse. When the issue of burial finally is decided, the space of the play expands beyond the eremetic setting to include Athenian cult and politics, rehabilitating and appropriating the memory of Ajax. For all the differences separating the two settings, Sophocles develops important similarities between them. At bottom they involve a community’s struggle to survive war, madness, death, and the breakdown of civic values. Putting aside the place of Ajax’s suicide for a moment, let us consider the play’s initial setting in these civilizing terms. The tent represents Ajax’ oikos, incongruously located in the camp of the Greek invaders. In the Iliad, Achilles’ tent also offers a glimpse of “domestic” life within the Achaean camp, a place of hospitality, feasting, conversation, and even retiring scenes where the host sleeps beside his “wife.”35 These glimpses of an oikos world are exceptional,36 for Homer generally characterizes the Greeks in terms of their distance from home and their hunger to violate the oikoi of their Trojan enemies.37 In Ajax, the hero’s tent houses a family less anomalous than that of Achilles, including Ajax’ wife Tecmessa and son Eurysakes.38 But the extrascenic space also contains the carnage that remains from Ajax’ madness, the cattle that he mistook for his hated Greek allies, shepherded inside (61–65), and hacked to pieces. The central pole of the tent—a symbol of domestic stability akin to the main pillar of a great hall (see chapter 2)—holds the mangled body of a ram that he bound and tortured, taking it for his archenemy Odysseus (105–16, 237–44). An oikos turned abattoir, the tent houses butchered domestic animals, denied their proper function as victims for sacrifice and food for human sustenance.39 Tecmessa pleads with her husband to value his familial responsibilities more than the shame he feels at the hands of Athena and the Greeks (485– 524).40 By modeling her appeal on Andromache’s speech to Hector (Il. 6.406–39), Sophocles underlines the presence of an oikos—like those of the Trojans—within the Greek camp.41 Arguing from experience, Tecmessa chronicles the harsh fate that has bound her to Ajax, who destroyed her home in Phrygia and took her as his war bride (487–90, 515). Standing before, and on behalf of, her new oikos, Tecmessa reminds Ajax of his duty to his parents in distant Salamis, who long for his return (506–9). She invokes the marriage bed she shares with him, reminding Ajax of the pleasure he has

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taken from it (491, 520–22, set up by the Chorus at 210–12).42 She appeals to the son she bore him there (510–14), Eurysakes, whom she removed from the tent during the night, protective foresight that indicates the family can survive Ajax’ temporary insanity (527–44). In answer to his father’s calls, Eurysakes (“Broad Shield”) enters down an eisodos, led by an attendant.43 This small child walking into the vast theater of Dionysus offers a compelling image of the fragile strength of Ajax’ family. Ajax bestows on his son the famous shield that gives the boy his name, implicitly acknowledging the inherent paradox of an oikos set in a military camp. While hoping that Eurysakes will emulate his own military prowess (545–57), Ajax advises his son to “feed on gentle breezes, nursing / your young life as a joy to your mother” (558–59). Through this small child, Ajax also reaches out to his extended family. He promises that his half brother Teukros will bring Tecmessa and the boy into the oikos of his parents in Salamis, Telamon and Eriboea, whom Eurysakes will care for in their old age (560–72). The scene comes to an abrupt halt when Ajax returns to the slaughterhouse within (578–95), forcefully excluding his wife and child. He demands that Tecmessa “shut tight the dwelling, with no tears or lamentation / outside the tent . . . / Shut it closed, quickly!” (kai d¯oma paktou, m¯ed’ episk¯enous goous / dakrue . . . pukaze thasson, 579–81).44 In the despondent lyric that follows, the Chorus ignores Ajax’ prohibition against lamentation, as it imagines his mother at home, grieving over her son like a woman at a funeral (621–34). With the hero shut up inside, his wife and child shut out and silent, and the Chorus evoking the underworld (Hades is prominent at 607 and 635), we know what to expect: a Messenger will announce that Ajax has added his own blood to the carnage within. Surprisingly, this scenario does not eventuate, for the hero emerges on his own power, not on the ekkukl¯ema (as he did before, surrounded by his victims). Appearing with the sword of Hector, Ajax removes the enemy weapon from his tent as if purging the oikos of its evil influence. He vows to purify himself and make amends, returning Tecmessa and Eurysakes to their home (684–86), reversing his prior action of keeping them out. As he leaves for an untrodden area of the beach to bury the sword and wash himself clean, Ajax gives every appearance of restoring his oikos, an illusion that events will soon unmask. Until this point in the play, Sophocles masterfully exploits the potential for concealment and revelation offered by the scenic and extrascenic spaces. During the opening sequence, the play of opacity and perception takes on vertiginous qualities. Tracking Ajax to his tent, Odysseus tries to determine if he is the culprit and whether he is inside or not (1–8, 18–20, 31–33). Visible to the audience but not to Odysseus (14–17), Athena emphasizes that she sees her prot´eg´e (1,3), even as she orders him to stop peering inside the tent (11), where the guilty Ajax is (9–10, 39, 53–65). Having already

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“cast baneful notions upon his eyes” (ommasi . . . balousa, 51–52), Athena calls Ajax out, and he enters fully able to hear and see the goddess, but unable to perceive Odysseus, who can see and hear him. The audience, of course, hears and sees them all, aware of Ajax’ blindness to Athena’s game of cat and mouse and of Odysseus’ discomfort at having to watch it (83–93).45 During this sequence, we witness the horrific gap between the god’s-eyeview and that of the human characters caught in the drama.46 Recoiling at the divine perspective he is forced to share, Odysseus sympathizes with his mortal enemy: Although he hates me, I pity him in his great distress, yoked hard as he is to an evil fate. I see here my own situation as much as his, for each of us who lives is no more than a phantom or an empty shadow [kouph¯en skian]. (121–26)

Odysseus may mean that humans—seen in their true light—resemble walking shades who mistakenly think they are cognizant of their real situation.47 The process of concealment and revelation is also manifest in the various accounts of the previous night: the sighting of Ajax by the Greek scout (opt¯er, 29–31); the sketchy version of events by Odysseus (18–33); the fulsome narration of Athena (39–65); the gruesomely humorous description by Ajax himself, still convinced he is torturing his Greek enemies (91–113); the Chorus’ hearsay of Ajax’ mad behavior in the parodos; Tecmessa’s confirmation of those rumors and her own detailed account, first in a lyric kommos (201–62) and then in speech (284–330), of the very scene the audience witnessed earlier, when Athena called Ajax outside and taunted him in the unseen presence of Odysseus (237–44, 301–6). From her offstage vantage, Tecmessa describes how Ajax seemed to converse “with some shadow” (skiai tini, 301–4), whom we know to have been Athena, hardly a shade but a character present onstage. And yet Tecmessa’s attribution has a certain prescience, given Athena’s shadelike invisibility to Odysseus, and her deceptive appearance to the unsuspecting Ajax. Similar narrative repetition and overlay recurs throughout the play: in Ajax’ four great speeches, dealing with the causes and consequences of his madness; in the double account of the Messenger, first at length to the Chorus (719–83), then in summary to Tecmessa (784–802); and in the scene over Ajax’ body, where Teukros debates both Menelaus and Agamemnon, each a double of the other. The process of multiple narration emphasizes the partiality of any individual point of view, establishing the audience as the privileged witness of all versions and arbiter of their significance, provided it waits till the final word has been spoken and the last image

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revealed. As the Chorus chants in the closing coda, “Mortals can judge many things after having / seen them [idousin]; but before seeing [idein], no one / can prophesy what will happen in the future” (1418–20). Beginning with Ajax’ pathetic offstage cries (333–43), the mode of revelation shifts from the testimony of third parties to the anguish of the perpetrator, culminating in his reappearance onstage. “See now,” Tecmessa announces, “I open the tent. Now you can look / straight at what he did, and how he himself is” (346–47). Vision joins verbal description as Ajax rolls out on the ekkukl¯ema, surrounded by the animal carcasses he once thought were living Greeks.49 In the opening sequence we saw a crazed Ajax blind to the real Odysseus; now we see a sane Ajax confronting the all-too-visible evidence of his delusion. It is little wonder he addresses the forces of concealment as his preferred mode of revelation: “Ah, darkness, my light! / Ah, deadly gloom that shines brightest for me” (395–96). When mad, Ajax was at one with his world and actions; sane, he sees himself as the unwitting agent of unspeakable deeds (259–77). As Tecmessa explains, Ajax’ recovery is worse than his delusions: “To look on your own calamities / when no one else had a hand in them / intensifies the pangs of unbearable pain” (260–62). Discussed in the introduction, a shameculture like that of the ancient Greeks necessitates internalizing cultural values from the outside, seeing oneself as others might, precisely what the mad Ajax cannot do. Revealed in the extrascenic tableau, however, Ajax is fully cognizant of what he has done, and therefore sees himself as an object to be looked on (351, 364, 422) and laughed at (367, 382, 426–27, 454). As in Heracles, the ekkukl¯ema provides the perfect theatrical means for such bald exposure, disclosing an interior scene that has been described verbally but concealed from sight. Although Ajax provides the focal point for others’ mocking gaze, he himself gains nothing from seeing others, “no longer worthy to look on the race of gods or men, to any purpose” (398–400). The gloating Odysseus, on the other hand, “sees all and hears all” (379), or so Ajax believes. The irony is instructive, for Ajax remains unaware that Odysseus did in fact “see and hear all” of his first appearance onstage, but did so without a trace of mockery. Forced against his will to watch his deluded enemy, Odysseus could not help but see himself (indeed, all mortals) in Ajax’ place. In terms of contemporary discussion of the “gaze,” we could say that Odysseus moves away from voyeurism and toward “regard.”50 Odysseus does the same thing at the end of the play when he stands up for Ajax’ right to burial: “someday I too will come to the same need” (1365). Moving from how others see oneself to how one sees oneself as another, Odysseus makes a leap into self-awareness beyond that available to Ajax.51 In her great speech, Tecmessa appeals to this Odyssean possibility—“And think of me also” (520). She hopes that her endurance of greater loss and shame than that facing Ajax will encourage him to live, and

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that the fate awaiting her and her son will make him take pity and save them. Viewed from Gibson’s ecological perspective, the dislocations that Tecmessa has endured allow her to put herself in Ajax’ position, and she appeals to him to do the same.52 A spatial explanation as to why Ajax refuses this option (at least for his own person) involves his growing sense that he has nowhere to go, and nowhere to stay: “Where can one flee to? / Where can I stay once I’ve gone?” (poi tis oun phug¯ei; / poi mol¯on men¯o; 403–4). It seems likely that Ajax leaves the ekkukl¯ema after his lyrically complex kommos with the Chorus (348– 427). If so, he marks his return to himself in the opening syllables of his first sane speech (430–80), crying out “aiai” (“Alas,” 430) and so linking his name, Aias, to his fate.53 Reclaiming his identity by “testing the space” in front of him, Ajax moves into the orchestra where he considers places he might go to escape. Thinking of leaving Troy for home (460–66), he realizes that he would face his father’s reproach if he returned “naked [gumnon], without the prize of valor” that Telamon brought back from his Trojan expedition (464–65, following on 434–40). The distanced space of Ajax’ home in Salamis—also evoked by the Chorus (134–35, 596–98) and by Tecmessa (201–4, 505–9)—will only compound his shame. Ajax next considers a single-handed assault on Troy (466–70), only to realize that this suicidal onslaught would bring a double joy to Agamemnon and Menelaus—more dead Trojans and a dead Ajax. Like Achilles (Il. 9.328–63), Ajax no longer can define himself against the “official” Trojan enemy; unlike Achilles, however, he finds no comfort in the prospect of abandoning the war and sailing home.54 Faced with these aporetic alternatives, Ajax initially returns to the squalid scene of the crime, withdrawing to his tent. However, after his surprising reappearance, he moves in an altogether different direction, departing out an eisodos toward the (local) distanced space of an untrodden beach. Thus begins the transformation to a new setting, and—as some critics think—to a different kind of play.55 Ajax’ apparent change of heart breaks through the play’s tent-bound claustrophobia,56 and, in response, the Chorus invokes distant places and gods who seemed absent before: Pan the wanderer and lord of the dance, Apollo across the Icarian sea, the great Zeus, even Ares (in an odd role, dispersing “dark distress from the eyes”), the snow-capped ridges of Cyllene, Mysia in the Troad and Knossos in Crete, the sacred island of Delos, and flashing sunlight on seagoing ships (693–719). The arrival of the Messenger down an eisodos furthers the sense that the important action has moved away from what is visibly present. He brings news of Teukros’ return to the Greek camp and of Calchas’ prophecy that Ajax will survive if he stays inside his tent that day, after which Athena will cease her anger against him (750–57; also 131– 32). Here, the tragic trope of a “single day,” what critics call “barrier time,” takes a definite spatial form.57 The Messenger repeats the prophecy three

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times to Tecmessa, that Ajax not go “outside” (thuraios, 793), that he not leave “the shelter of the tent” (sk¯en¯es hupaulon) and be left “alone” (monon, 795–96), that he not undertake “so fatal a departure” (t¯ende d’ exodon / olethrian, 798–99). Ironically, if Ajax had remained in his self-imposed exile inside the tent (where he once sat “fixed” or “rooted,” 192–94), he would have guaranteed his own survival. Rarely in tragedy has extrascenic space received such attention: tracking down Ajax, Odysseus tries to peer into the tent (6–7, 11–12); Athena calls Ajax outside twice (71–73, 89–90); he returns within to continue torturing his victims (“I go back to work!” 116–17); leaving the tent, Tecmessa describes Ajax’ comings and goings during the night, as well as the horrific scene within; Ajax cries out from offstage (333, 336, 339, 342–43) and then is revealed with the butchered animals on the ekkukl¯ema (346–47), exposing the tent interior for nearly 250 lines (348–595); against Tecmessa’s pleas, Ajax returns within, demanding to be closed up inside; he leaves the tent and then heads for the beach, but not before insisting that Tecmessa and Eurysakes go back inside; mother and son reemerge from the tent to hear the Messenger report that Ajax must stay inside to survive. The importance placed on Ajax’ extrascenic presence only highlights the significance of his departure. The play’s irony depends on such bad timing—if only Ajax had stayed inside this one day. But, as Paul de Man notes, “the hour of truth, like the hour of death, never arrives on time, since what we call time is precisely truth’s inability to coincide with itself.”58 Calchas’ prophecy requires that Ajax observe spatial and temporal limits— physical enclosure for a specific length of time—in order to escape death. In his deception speech, however, Ajax draws a very different picture of time (646–83), emphasizing its part in the cyclical change of the natural world: the inevitable turn of the seasons, the diurnal flux of night and day, the change from storm to calm, the fact that “all powerful sleep / releases those it has bound, not able to hold them forever” (675–76). Ajax does not point to “instants” of change, but to the fact that change occurs in a pattern.59 Unlike the single day during which a mortal might avoid divine wrath—“A day brings down or raises up all mortal things,” as Athena puts it (131–32)— cosmic time eschews the punctual. Sophocles may be juxtaposing the Hippocratic idea of krisis—a day when a patient either recovers or dies—with a sense of celestial time, where no such “moment of truth” can emerge.60 Because cosmic time is ceaseless, patterned change, the only way for Ajax to effect cessation is by dying himself, funneling all change into an irrevocable instant. Such a resolute fixing of temporality requires privacy beyond the interior of the household tent. The isolated beach proves necessary to Ajax’ suicide, an unencumbered space that allows him to take time into his own hands. Ajax’ thoughts on the cycle of natural change bring to mind Parmenides’

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fragment B-9: “The whole is full of light and obscure night together, both equal, since neither has a portion which is nothing.” Parmenides suggests that we view temporal alteration as taking place within a greater—and continuous—whole. For him, temporal change from one thing now to its opposite later is simply a deception, since all is really one.61 In a different but relevant vein, Anaximander’s concept of to apeiron (see the appendix) represents the order prior and superior to its changing elements, one that guarantees the progress of the seasons and the alternation of dominance and submission, strength and weakness, birth and death, along symmetrical and reversible poles. Ajax, however, cannot reconcile himself to the unity of categories on whose clear opposition he has based his life, particularly those of friend and enemy.62 Because time reveals the boundaries between echthroi and philoi to be permeable, Ajax realizes “the harbor of friendship cannot be trusted” (683). As Hazlitt says of Hamlet, “his habitual principles of action are unhinged and out of joint with the time.”63 A world in which friend and enemy prove to be one and the same defines precisely “the time” Ajax cannot endure. In Thracian Women, Aeschylus’ (lost) dramatization of the Ajax story, a messenger reports the hero’s suicide.64 Sophocles, however, enacts the death onstage, emptying the orchestra to emphasize Ajax’ isolation. We in the audience are the sole witnesses, along with Zeus, Hermes, the Furies, and the natural elements to which he pointedly refers.65 Alone on the beach, Ajax finds a strange ally in the enemy sword he has fastened in the ground, using forms of the verb p¯egnumi (pep¯ege, 819; ep¯exa, 821; p¯ekton, 907) as he did when ordering Tecmessa to “fasten tight” the tent (paktou, 579).66 Abandoning the confines of his tent-oikos, Ajax fixes himself even more securely to the land he has fought to destroy. Having acknowledged earlier that “Troy and this whole plain hate me” (echthei de Troia pasa kai pedia tade, 459), he sees “the hostile earth of Troy” (en g¯ei polemiai t¯ei Tr¯oiadi, 819) as the proper place to end his life, for it holds in its terrestrial grip the gift of “that most loathed, most hated [echthistou, 818] Hector.” Ajax’ death will resemble that of a soldier, killed by an enemy sword on enemy soil.67 In his early kommos on the ekkukl¯ema, Ajax says farewell to Troy (413–22): “The shore break, the sea caves, the coastal pastures have held me long, long, too long at Troy [polun polun me daron . . . amphi Troian chronon]”; the streams of Scamander “no more will see this man” (417–22). In his final speech, Ajax bids farewell once again, but only after his thoughts move across the expanse of the cosmos and the distant spaces of his absent home. He invokes Zeus, who sits over all, to help Teukros secure his burial; Hermes, who moves between Olympus and Hades, to ensure a quick death; the Furies, who dwell beneath the earth, to take vengeance on the Atreidae; and Helios the sun, “bridger of space,” to carry news of his fate to his parents (824–51).68 Ajax addresses the sacred plain of his homeland Salamis and

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glorious Athens with its people (859–61), but he ends where he will end, with the alien land he has made his own: “And I call on these sacred springs and rivers, these plains / of Troy—greetings, you that have sustained me! / This is the last word Ajax speaks to you” (862–64). The rest belongs to Hades, the “unseen” place (cf. 607) where the silence of Ajax was legendary (Od. 11.543–64). Of the many scenarios suggested for staging the suicide, the most efficient and effective involves the ekkukl¯ema.69 Replacing the site of the exposed tent with a copse on the beach, the platform allows Ajax to fix the blade before his final appearance (avoiding any fumbling with the sword in sight of the audience), and its proximity to the central door enables the actor playing Ajax to withdraw unseen after the suicide—most likely when Tecmessa covers the corpse (915–19)—in order to take on the role of Teukros. Either a dummy or silent actor replaces the original actor on the platform, for the dead body remains covered but present during the closing scenes of the play. The opening lines in Ajax’ monologue support this arrangement, for they clearly are not written to “cover” an entrance down an eisodos: “The sacrificial blade stands ready, where it will prove / sharpest, if one had time for such thoughts, / a gift from Hector” (815–17). This means that Ajax first appears on the beach when the ekkukl¯ema is revealed, mirroring his earlier revelation on the platform surrounded by his animal victims, where he delivered his initial farewell to Troy. This central position provides a powerful contrast to the Chorus’s divided departure out the two eisodoi (805–6), and subsequent return the same way (874–78). In their exits and reentries (874–78) the sailors physically enact the dominant image of encirclement, but they close the circle only to discover that Ajax has escaped by taking his own life. Before doing so, he prays that his body “not be seen first by some enemy,” who would deny it burial (829–30). Discovering his corpse before anyone else, Tecmessa cries out “He must not be seen [outoi theatos]. No, I shall / cover him fully, wrapping this cloak around him” (915–16). Upon his arrival, Teukros uncovers the body to view the full horror (1003), revealing Ajax on the ekkukl¯ema a third time, where he silently holds the stage for the rest of the play. But how does the scenic space shift from the tent to the untrodden beach? Ajax’ description of where he plans to go before he exits, the evacuation of the orchestra when the Chorus and Tecmessa leave to find him, Ajax’ reentry into the now empty theater, and his final monologue all help to establish the change of setting. But what happens to the tent, represented by the sk¯en¯e facade? Scholars generally assume some change in wooden panels on the sk¯en¯e, indicating the scene is now an empty beach. Although feasible, this solution would prove dramatically deadly—after the excited exits from the orchestra, the action must stop for stagehands to enter and reset the scene, after which they leave and Ajax appears alone.70 The text indirectly suggests a

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more satisfying solution, in Tecmessa’s speech of anger and despair at her husband’s deception (803–12), immediately before his reappearance. “Ah, me!” (oi ’g¯o, 803), she cries, “deceived by that man” (ph¯otos e¯ pat¯emen¯e 807), “oh god, what shall I do? (oimoi, ti dras¯o; 809). Tecmessa instructs the Chorus, attendants, and perhaps even the Messenger to various tasks: one group (probably the Messenger) must hasten Teukros’ arrival, the other (the Chorus) must divide in two, searching the western and eastern bends of the shore. Tecmessa herself joins in the pursuit, and we imagine a rapid exit in which the group splits, departing down the right and left eisodoi, opening up the center of the stage for Ajax’ appearance on the ekkukl¯ema. I suggest that just before she rushes off, during her anguished outburst at Ajax, Tecmessa rips down the tent fabric that marks the setting, a desperate action that accords with her sense that Ajax’ absence means the death of her oikos. Perhaps she does so after crying out, “I am finally cast out [ekbebl¯emen¯e, 808] from the grace [charis ‘care’, ‘favor’] I once knew!” Dragging the fabric off with her, Tecmessa eliminates the need for a break to change the set; her action could reveal preset elements suggesting the beach that lay under the cloth of the tent. A stage action of this sort harnesses the emotion of the moment to serve both the dramatic and pragmatic needs of the play. An obvious difficulty for this scenario involves Eurysakes, whom Tecmessa addresses at 809. Most commentators believe that he returns inside the tent when the others exit, requiring that stagehands change the scenery before Ajax’ entrance, or that Ajax’ suicide takes place elsewhere in the theater, leaving the central tent facade visible for the rest of the play. Recall, however, that in the crisis of the previous night Tecmessa placed her son with attendants away from Ajax’ home, a strategy she could repeat here, with an attendant (the same one who accompanied his arrival) leading Eurysakes down an eisodos during the general departure. Later Teukros learns that the boy is “alone by the tents” (monos para sk¯enaisin, 985), the plural opening the possibility that “tents” refers to the camp of Ajax generally and not to his specific dwelling.71 Teukros commands Tecmessa to fetch the child at once (hoson tachos), rescuing him from possible harm at the hands of Ajax’ enemies (985–89). Mother and child return 170 lines later, “just in time” (es auton kairon, 1168), suggesting that they have made haste. Given the emphasis on speed and the time it takes for their return, it seems unlikely that Ajax’ tent remained visible as the central facade during the suicide and its aftermath. Ajax’ death seems to demand a complete scenic break from the camp and not a simple move to the side of the sk¯en¯e.72 Besides confusing our sense of the setting, such an off-centered arrangement would skew the subsequent debates over burial, where the corpse provides the focal point and is best located along the central axis. However Sophocles accomplished the scene change, the untrodden beach where Ajax takes his life provides the setting for the last six hundred lines of

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the play. Just as Odysseus hunts down Ajax in his tent (1–8, 18–19, 31–33), so Tecmessa and the Chorus “track” Ajax to the eremetic ground of his suicide (866–90), followed by Teukros later (994–97). By striking out alone, Ajax leads the way for the others. As Knox puts it, “when Ajax moves, the whole play follows after him.”73 Whereas the original setting could not withstand the counterpulls of war and family, of public shame and private responsibility, the desolate site of Ajax’ suicide offers his philoi safety beyond their expectations. On an empty beach, around a dead body, human values and familial structure reemerge and civilize, projecting the hero’s memory into the future. As Burian and others demonstrate, Ajax’ body represents something to be protected from the Atreidae and a source of protection against them.74 At Teukros’ suggestion (1168–81), Tecmessa and Eurysakes sit as suppliants by the corpse, where they remain for more than two hundred lines until Teukros carries it off for burial (1403–17). Their silent presence as suppliants, guardians, ritual observers of the dead, and guarantors of its curse (1168– 81) testifies to the aura of the body, anticipating Ajax’ transformation from traitor to sacred hero.75 Teukros may well join them by the corpse before Odysseus’ arrival, moving into place as he warns Agamemnon, “if you throw out the body, you will have to throw out our three corpses [Teukros, Eurysakes, Tecmessa] along with his!” (1308–9). During their subsequent exchange, we witness a tableau of Ajax’ reconstituted family gathered around his body to fend off those who would deny it burial. In both a metaphoric and a theatrical sense, Ajax’ suicide creates a space around the body that extends beyond its physical presence. On the practical level, the actor who originally performed the role of Ajax also played his half brother Teukros. It seems reasonable to assume that fifth-century audiences recognized actors behind their masks; the three-actor rule, the preperformance proag¯on, the selection of judges from the audience to award prizes (including best actor), and the oral-aural nature of the culture make this conclusion all but inevitable.76 As discussed in Euripides’ Suppliant Women and Aeschylus’ Oresteia, role-doubling allowed the playwright-director to take advantage of similarities and differences among characters played by the same actor (in the early days, even by the playwright himself), generating some troubling comparisons and disturbing ironies. In Sophocles’ Trachiniae, for example, the same actor plays Deianeira, the loyal wife who inadvertently murders her husband, and Heracles, the besotted philanderer who burns alive in the vestments she unwittingly poisons.77 Similarly, in Ajax, the actor playing the title role, a self-centered character who fails his family, returns as Teukros, who provides for his family’s safety and risks his life for his brother’s burial.78 We can think of the doubling function as a theatrical manifestation of selfreferential space. When role-doubling is clear, as in the case of Deianeira-

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Heracles, Pentheus-Agave, and Ajax-Teukros, it exploits the audience’s awareness of theatrical convention and brings it into a more self-conscious relationship to the play. Given a theater built on fictional representation, any audience of the play would recognize that the body to be buried is, and is not, Ajax. The original fifth-century audience also would have known that it was not the body of the actor who had played Ajax. Similarly, any audience would recognize that the actor struggling to secure the funeral is, and is not, Teukros, but the original audience also would have known that it most definitely was the actor who had played Ajax. In this light, let us consider the initial encounter between Teukros and his dead brother: Oh most painful sight of all the sights [theamat¯on] my eyes have looked upon, oh path that I just now walked, you pain my heart more than all other paths I’ve traveled. Oh Ajax, closest to me [philtat’], now I know I was pursuing, tracking down, your death. ........... Oh god! Come, uncover him so that I might see the total horror. Oh hard to look on [dustheaton] face, full of bitter courage. (992–97, 1002–4)

Teukros confronts the pain of discovery, even as the actor who plays him describes the afterimage of his previous role, present in the corpse on the ekkukl¯ema. We cannot know how much of the body the audience actually saw. Was the face visible? Did the dummy (or silent actor playing the corpse) wear Ajax’ mask? Was the revelation conveyed by Teukros’ language and gesture, and not by audience autopsy? Whatever the answer, given the role divisions that the play demands, for Teukros to emerge as a speaking presence in the play, Ajax must disappear (at least as a speaker), adding resonance to Teukros’ line “now I know / I was pursuing, tracking down, your death.” A similar situation applies to the actor playing Tecmessa, who leaves to fetch Eurysakes (989); on her return, a different (silent) actor must play her role, allowing her original actor to play either Odysseus (or both Odysseus and Menelaus) or Agamemnon (or both Agamemnon and Menelaus). In any of these cases, the original Tecmessa actor also must confront—in the guise of a new character—the silent image of the role he played earlier, the (now mute) Tecmessa kneeling with her son as a suppliant over Ajax’ body. Role-doubling in Ajax fits perfectly into the pattern of repetition and multiple narration discussed earlier. When Teukros confronts Ajax’ corpse, he asks “Where can I go?” (poi gar molein moi dunaton; 1006), just like his brother did when facing an impossible future. Teukros, too, decides that

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returning home to Salamis offers no hope, and for the same reason—the dread reaction of their father, Telamon (1008–21).79 Troy also offers no haven for Teukros, for it contains no allies, only enemies (1021–23). The continuity of the actor’s voice enforces the similarity of situation that confronts the two brothers, and their similar responses to it. Sophocles’ use of the same actor projects Ajax into the future of a world he appears to have left behind. His dead body remains present as the primary focus, and his voice, moving through the character of Teukros, keeps alive his story of heroism, his betrayal at the hands of the Atreidae, and even his bloodthirsty curse against the Greeks (835–44/1389–92). Although critics frequently discuss (often with disapproval) Teukros’ twin debates with Menelaus and Agamemnon,80 they generally ignore the fact that it allows Ajax to manifest a theatrical afterlife through his half brother. The “double act” conjoins issues of performance with Ajax’ rehabilitation, pointing toward his eventual cult status in Athens. Using the terms favored in this study, self-referential space—the theater appearing as such, here via pointed role-doubling—opens up the reflexive space of the play, wherein the Athenian audience finds itself represented and exposed. As Teukros does verbal battle with Menelaus and Agamemnon over the fate of Ajax’ corpse, the “heroic temper” of the first half of the play gives way to the rhetoric of public debate, with fifth-century lawcourts, assembly, and forensic display providing the cultural background.81 Menelaus’ view that states and armies depend on fear (1071–86) suggests contemporary theories of statecraft held by Athens and Sparta;82 Teukros’ anti-Spartan sentiments (1100–1108) tap an “enormous reservoir of anti-Spartan hostility” in the Athenian audience;83 the twinned parables that end their scene (1142–58) echo fifth-century proverbial speech;84 Agamemnon’s opening salvo challenging Teukros’ right (as a barbarian son of a slave woman) even to speak (1226–35), and his closing comments on the same subject (1259–63), reflect the restrictions practiced in Athenian lawcourts;85 and so on. Of all the distant spaces in the play, Athens and Salamis dominate. As noted earlier, both Ajax and Teukros imagine returning to Salamis, and just before he dies Ajax bids farewell to his former home and to Athens, as well as to Troy. His mother Eriboea waits for his return “with a foreign allotment of many years” (508), a striking metaphor drawn from contemporary politics.86 Based on the land granted to Athenian colonists, kl¯erouchon (508) suggests the post-Homeric political link between Athens and Salamis. In the sixth century, Athens annexed the nearby island, sending out settlers (kl¯erouchoi) and forcibly relocating the natives to southern Attica. Of course, Salamis was the site of the great Athenian naval triumph over the Persian fleet in 480, a victory due in part to the help of Ajax and his genos (Hdt. 8.64). In gratitude, the Athenians dedicated three Phoenician triremes—to the goddess Athena, the god Poseidon, and the mortal hero

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Ajax (Hdt. 8.121)—and they instituted or expanded Ajax’ festival on Salamis, the Aianteia.87 These connections may explain why the Chorus of Ajax’ comrades-in-arms comprises sailors, not land soldiers, as we would expect from the Iliad, where Ajax is herkos Achai¯on, “the fence [or bulwark] of the Greeks.”88 Tecmessa first addresses the sailors as “you who serve on the ship of Ajax / from the race of earthborn Erechtheus” (201–2), and Ajax greets them as “the race who serves by navigating the ships, / who board and row the oars at sea” (357–58). In the last lines of the final ode, the Chorus signifies its desire for home, reflecting a sailor’s-eye-view of the looming promontory of Sounion: “Take me, take me / near that forest headland, approaching the sea-washed / crag of Sounion, / and let us greet again / holy Athens” (1216–22).89 By making Ajax’ companions into an Athenian-loving crew, Sophocles reflects the importance of the fleet to his own city. The Athenian navy consisted primarily of rowers for the triremes, the majority of whom were th¯etes, the lowest of four economic classes in Solon’s constitution. During the decades following the Cleisthenic reforms, this group of citizens gradually achieved benefits from the polis—paid service as rowers and as jurors in the lawcourts, land grants in the cleruchies, subsidized public works—which helps to explain its support for the more radical aspects of Athenian democracy.90 Given the fleet’s traditional pro-imperial stance, the sustained antiwar outcry by the sailor-Chorus in the final ode carries special weight: How long? When will it end— the wandering season, the ceaseless blizzard of spears speeding its death over the broad fields of Troy, shame to all the Greeks. That man who invented war, why didn’t the sky take him, or Hades swallow him in a common grave? He showed Greece the weapons of hate, of war spawning war, sparing none. That man murdered humanity. (1185–98)91

Stuck “in miserable Troy” (1210), the Chorus bemoans the loss of life’s pleasures—parties and drinking, companionship, music, the delights of love, a simple night’s sleep (1199–1206)—which the scholiast (as well as modern commentators) links specifically to Attic symposia.92 As the play moves toward its close, Sophocles recalls the basic tension implicit in the opening setting—a military tent serving as domestic oikos. With the tent gone, the

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Chorus of invaders confronts the futility of its expedition and longs for home, the “sea-washed crag of Sounion” and “holy Athens” (1216–22). As a magnet for friend and foe alike, the corpse on the deserted beach spreads its influence beyond the scenic space, drawing in the Chorus, Tecmessa, Teukros, Eurysakes, Menelaus, Agamemnon, and finally Odysseus. And yet Ajax’s departure for the untrodden beach was an effort to escape the world that surrounded him with shame. Odysseus “circles around” (kuklount’) Ajax in the opening scene (18–19), and Athena describes how the maddened hero stood in the middle of the herd with his sword drawn, “cleaving spines in a widening circle” (kukl¯oi rhachiz¯on, 55–56). Visibly ringed by the carcasses on the ekkukl¯ema (348–429), Ajax likens his fate to a “wave propelled by a bloody surge that encircles me all around” (amphidromon kukleitai, 351–53). His sense of the inescapable extends to the heavens, observing that the “dread circle of night” (nuktos aian¯es kuklos, 672) gives way to the day, with everything trapped in an eternal cycle of diurnal and seasonal change.93 Far from escaping his environment, however, Ajax in death reconvenes around him those who circumscribed his life. Even his physical wound “spreads,” moving out from the single sword thrust (831– 34, 906–7, 1024–25) to release multiple channels of blood (1411–13). Ajax has “fixed” his body to the Trojan earth, but Teukros comes to lift it off Hector’s sword (1024–25) and carry it out of the theater in a funeral procession (1409–20). The point of death, the place of the body, the status of the dead man all move expansively outward, a process that culminates in Ajax’ future role as a civic hero of Athens, his story told in its theater and his cult celebrated in the agora.94 In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus’ future status as a cult hero provides the “cornerstone of modern criticism of that play.”95 A similar dynamic operates in Ajax.96 After his death, the hero who divided the Greek camp is honored in a public (polis) cult, a process that effectively converts a kin-based funeral ritual (signaled in the play by Odysseus’ exclusion from the burial rites) into a communal rite celebrating polis solidarity.97 Ajax also provided the name of one of the ten Attic tribes—Aiantis—created during the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508/7, and his name appears in Attic sympotic songs.98 Throughout the fifth century, leading Athenians—Miltiades, Cimon, Thucydides, Alcibiades—traced their ancestry back to him, either through Eurysakes or another son Philaios, not mentioned in the play.99 The associations of Ajax with democratic Athens and its political ideology—an “eminently combative arena of persuasion and struggle,” as Rose puts it— converts Sophocles’ hero into a highly problematic example of “the democratization of an aristocratic ideal.”100 Against such a background, Ajax’ restoration over the course of the play “spills over” into the Athenian audience. The cort`ege bearing his body out of the theater of Dionysus moves the action away from Troy and into the world

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of Athens. The eremetic setting, the now empty ekkukl¯ema, and the vacant orchestra are left behind as the corpse of the rehabilitated hero enters into Athenian civic and religious life, where—in a theatrical sense—the Ajax of the play has always been. The dissonances of space and time so powerfully dramatized in Ajax’ madness, realized in his recovery and suicide, and repeated in the battles over his body, finally resolve themselves in the permanent locus of his hero cult, and his ongoing life in the city.

Philoctetes: The Island er¯emia A neighbor to himself alone . . . —Philoctetes 691

In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, an eremetic space—the island of Lemnos—provides the setting for the entire play. As frequently noted, Sophocles alters both poetic tradition and historical fact by portraying the island as unpopulated. Known to Athenians as a way station on the grain route to the Black Sea, Lemnos already was “well peopled” in the heroic age (Il. 21.40). Associated with Hephaistos (Il. 1.590–94, Od. 8.282–24), the island served as a major provider of wine for the Achaeans at Troy (Il. 7.467–75) and as a market for their captured Trojan slaves (21.40–41, 24.750–53).101 In the earlier Philoctetes of both Aeschylus and Euripides, the Chorus consists of inhabitants of Lemnos, and in the latter, a character named Aktor, a confidant of Philoctetes, is himself a Lemnian.102 The anomaly in Sophocles is so striking that commentators from the scholiast on assume that Philoctetes (wounded and only haltingly mobile) has been marooned on an inaccessible part of the island, cut off from the populated centers.103 However, as Jebb observes, “Everything that is said of Lemnos throughout this play would naturally suggest a wholly uninhabited island.”104 The various myths surrounding the island’s early history eventually link its population to Athens. In one version, the native women of Lemnos slay their husbands for taking Thracian concubines and then marry the Argonauts.105 In Aeschylus’ lost Cabiri (possibly also in Sophocles’ lost Lemniai), Lemnos provides the first landfall of the Argo on its outward journey, where the Argonauts apparently get drunk on Lemnian wine like their Greek counterparts at Troy in the next generation.106 In another version, the Lemnian men seize Attic women from Brauron as concubines. The captive women raise their bastard children in so “Athenian” a manner that the men kill both the children and their mothers. After these violent beginnings, the myths converge around the Pelasgians, indigenous inhabitants of Attica, who expel the descendants of the Argonauts from Lemnos. In the historical period, the Persian Otanes, under Darius, decimates the island, and during the Ionian

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revolt the Athenian general Miltiades expels the survivors. Finally, between 450 and 446 Athenian cleruchs settle the island, later dedicating a “Lemnian Athena” sculpted by Pheidias on the Athenian Acropolis.107 If Taplin is right that “very few places outside Attica . . . had closer links [with Athens] than Lemnos,”108 then Sophocles may have voided the island of its Attic-based inhabitants only to have the Athenian theater audience “take their place,” watching what transpires there in their absence. In addition to the mythical, historical, and commercial links with Athens, for the audience of 409 (when Philoctetes premiered) Lemnos signaled the contentious area of the Hellespont, where key naval battles had recently taken place.109 After the Sicilian debacle in 413 and the subsequent Spartan occupation of Decelea in Attica, Athens appeared highly vulnerable, prompting the oligarchic coup of the Four Hundred in 411. The Athenian navy at Samos remained loyal to the democracy and “seceded” from the new government, threatening to sail into the Piraeus and take Athens back by force. With the return of Alcibiades as its commander in 410, the navy won a remarkable string of victories against the Peloponnesians near the Hellespont, particularly at Cynossema, Abydos, and Cyzicus.110 This reversal of fortune in the east Aegean gave Athens new life in the Peloponnesian War and secured the grain supply from the Black Sea,111 for which Lemnos provided a key landfall. Despite keen Athenian interest in Lemnos and the east Aegean at the time of Philoctetes’ production, “the word er¯emos tolls like a bell” through the play.112 Paradoxically, the eremetic setting provides Sophocles the opportunity to explore contested political issues and social values more freely. Cook speaks of the play as “a model history . . . [raising] the question of ends and means in a simple form and with a minimum of three active people.”113 For Segal, the uninhabited island offers an appropriate place for exploring the polarities of savagery and civilization.114 Vickers sees the setting as a geographical correlative for the marooned Philoctetes, who dissociates himself from the corrupt values of the Greeks who had abandoned him, in effect “exiling that society” from his island world.115 Vidal-Naquet views Odysseus and Neoptolemus’ mission to Lemnos in terms of the Athenian ephebeia, a male rite of passage linked to military training, in which boys spent ritually structured time away from the city in preparation for entering the hoplite ranks.116 In this scenario, Philoctetes’ journey to Troy represents the reintegration of the wild man into the city, signaled by his farewell to Lemnos (1451–68), in which he transforms the once wild island into a locus of the pastoral.117 Unfortunately, Vidal-Naquet overlooks the fact that Athens had not yet inaugurated the ephebeia when Philoctetes was performed, and he fails to mention that the hero’s return to “civilization” (along with Neoptolemus and Odysseus) involves the uncivilized destruction of Troy. Offering a more sustained and persuasive analysis, Rose interprets the play

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in terms of the social anthropology of the Sophists, intellectuals (mostly of foreign descent) who worked in Athens in the last half of the fifth century.118 Exercising powerful influence on the way Athenians framed political and ethical issues, they taught rhetorical skills to elites who no longer could rely simply on their aristocratic background for political influence.119 Contrary to popular perception, important aspects of Sophistic teaching aligned closely with the egalitarian ideology of Athenian democracy. In particular, Sophists argued that human society developed from an isolated presocial state, in which mere survival was the goal, to a form of social contract within which humans could develop in mutually agreed ways, pointing ultimately to the rise of the polis.120 From the fragments of Democritus, Protagoras, Hippias, Antiphon, Prodicus, and Gorgias, we can piece together the view that this social environment allows persuasion to substitute for brute force, until communal values—nonaggression, cooperation, pity, like-mindedness, the idea of a common good—become accepted currency.121 During the Peloponnesian War, however, this classically “liberal” program collapsed into arguments based on self-interest and expediency, reflecting the schism between left-wing “democrats” and their right-wing opponents, manifest in antidemocratic coups of the Four Hundred in 411 and of the Thirty in 404.122 This Sophistic context helps account for the play’s desert island setting, and for Sophocles’ innovative inclusion of the young Neoptolemus, on and through whom the educational transformation works. Rose argues that Lemnos—uninhabited save for Philoctetes, who must fight for survival— accommodates the presocial stage; the growing solidarity between Neoptolemus and Philoctetes points to an emerging “social compact,” dependent on pity (to oikteirein), affection (philia), and persuasion (as opposed to force); and, finally, the manipulative Odysseus personifies Sophistic “degeneration” in late fifth-century Athens, dominated by self-interest and an instrumentalist view of others.123 As a site for such evolutionary investigations, Sophocles’ Lemnos fits Foucault’s notion of a heterotopia, a place outside standard social and cultural mores, and free of conventional relationships to time. For Foucault, colonies represent a class of heterotopias that lie beyond a state’s borders yet offer “a reserve for that society’s imagination,”124 a description that applies to Sophocles’ fictional island. Sharing qualities with Bakhtin’s carnival (“time in the mode of the festival,” as Foucault puts it), such a place allows for freedom and excess, including the enjoyment of various transgressions not readily available in the day-to-day world.125 Odysseus encourages Neoptolemus to just such a view: We will manifest ourselves as honest men another time. But now, for one single day of shamelessness,

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give yourself up to me; then, for the rest of time, let them call you the most righteous of men. (82–85)

Whereas Lemnos allows the two soldiers “time-out” from normal constraints, for Philoctetes it represents a place of enforced isolation where historical time effectively stops. Like Rip Van Winkle, Philoctetes has been cut off for years, emphasized by his joy at meeting Greeks (234–35) and his eagerness to learn what has happened in their ten years at Troy (238–56, 322–42, 407– 50). The brief career of Neoptolemus on Lemnos best reveals the transformative possibilities of Sophocles’ island. Beginning as an obedient servant of the Greek mission led by Odysseus, the young man develops a growing sympathy for Philoctetes, until he openly rebels against the instrumental use of his new friend for ends not of his own choosing. Adopting the (early) Sophistic notions of Hippias and Prodicus, Sophocles demonstrates that nobility does not arise from inborn aristocratic excellence. Rather, education releases— and, in some sense, accounts for—noble character. As Rose observes, this process of socialization stems far more from Neoptolemus’ contact with the wounded Philoctetes than with the glib Odysseus: Despite all the . . . emphasis on Neoptolemus’ inherited nature, Sophokles has controlled the action in such a way as to dramatize the educational dictum of Antiphon: “One must necessarily become, with respect to character [tous tropous], of the same sort as the person with whom one spends the greatest part of the day.” (DK 87 B 62)126

The heterotopia of Lemnos is truly “another space,” but one linked intimately to the notion that the theater offers a paideutic arena for the city, a place to enact, represent, and impart hard lessons for the Athenian audience. In this regard, Easterling is only half right in claiming that the play lacks “polisconsciousness.”127 To be sure, Philoctetes contains little of the political vocabulary and fifth-century anachronisms we find in the Oresteia or Antigone. We hear next to nothing of civic gods (Odysseus’ invocation of Nik¯e as Athena Polias at 134 is an exception),128 and the eremetic setting insures that no polis intrudes directly on the action. Nonetheless, as Rose demonstrates, an evolutionary view of values tied to the polis helps account for the Lemnian setting. Sophocles questions those values by emphasizing that Troy, the most significant polis in the play, is destined for destruction. The fact that Odysseus, Neoptolemus, and Philoctetes all perform important roles in the sack of that distant city complicates the play’s resolution, viewed by many critics as a celebration of Philoctetes’ reintegration into the Greek military and his “cure at Troy.”129

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The scenic and extrascenic space receive a detailed description in the prologue, introducing the “full interdependence of man [Philoctetes] and place” that characterizes the play.130 “This is the shore of the land of Lemnos,” Odysseus announces, “surrounded / by the sea’s flow, uninhabited, untouched by the foot of man” (1–2). Neoptolemus quickly discovers Philoctetes’ cave, currently unoccupied, but obviously his. The interior is bare (er¯ema), save for a mattress of leaves, a rough-hewn wooden cup, some kindling for a fire, and wound-infested rags drying in the sun (29–39). The fact that Neoptolemus violates the extrascenic space at the outset colors our view of the later scene in which Philoctetes invites him in, “so that you can actually see what kept me alive. . . . For I don’t think anyone who simply caught sight of it could endure it, except me” (534–37). The poignancy of the invitation— “and you I will lead in” (kai se g’ eisakz¯o, 674)—increases our sympathy for Philoctetes, given that Neoptolemus is not innocent of the cave’s contents, having already seen them on his own. The cave has a double entrance (16, 19, 159, 952), assumed by most commentators to mean that a tunnel extended from the central “door” in the sk¯en¯e facade back through the other side, allowing for unseen access into the cave from behind the stage building.131 Significantly, Odysseus first informs us of this “two-mouthed [distomos] rock cave” (16), and his layering of language onto landscape reinforces the play’s concern with double talk, lying, and deceit.132 Recalling his last visit to the island ten years before, Odysseus describes the cave “like a house-agent, implying that its desirability mitigated his cruelty,” as Webster puts it.133 Odysseus’ euphemistic account of Philoctetes’ dwelling jibes perfectly with the doublespeak that recurs throughout the play, as Neoptolemus, the Chorus, and the “Merchant” lie their way into Philoctetes’ trust. The duplicity of the Greek mission finds its clearest spatial form in the plethora of deceptive entrances, exits, arrivals, and departures.134 Consider the false exit of Neoptolemus, when he pretends to leave for Troy and abandon Philoctetes (461–68); the feigned departure of Odysseus with the bow, pretending that Philoctetes’ presence at Troy is immaterial (1054–69);135 the apparent exodos of the Chorus (1179) after its kommos with Philoctetes, creating the illusion that the play is drawing to a close; and, most surprisingly, the false exit when the reconciled Neoptolemus and Philoctetes leave to sail for home, only to be stopped by Heracles’ appearance on high. We also witness a feigned landing on the island by a Merchant from Troy (542), bringing news of other imminent (and equally fabricated) arrivals—that of Phoenix and Theseus’ sons, come to fetch Neoptolemus (561–67), and that of Odysseus and Diomedes, sent from Troy to seize Philoctetes (570–77, 620–21). Sophocles also uses space deceptively in a series of unexpected entrances: Odysseus arrives suddenly to ensure that Neoptolemus’ purpose remains firm (974–75); intent on returning the bow, Neoptolemus comes

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back unexpectedly, pursued by Odysseus (1220–58); and Odysseus surprisingly appears once again, in a last-ditch effort to force Philoctetes to sail for Troy (1293–1302). To these examples of spatial ambiguity and misdirection we can add the “missed departures” of Neoptolemus with the bow at 855–66 (while Philoctetes sleeps), and at 963–73 (before Odysseus reenters to “decide” the issue). In the last instance, the extraordinary play on the question ti dras¯o; (“What shall I/we do?”)—“the tragic problem,” as Vernant puts it136 —underlines the bewildering effect of these spatial moves and countermoves. Philoctetes pleads with Neoptolemus to give him back his bow and his life,137 prompting the Chorus to ask its leader, “What shall we do?” [ti dr¯omen;] . . . sail or accede to [literally, “come close to,” prosch¯orein] Philoctetes’ pleas?” (963– 64). Neoptolemus can respond only by repeating the question, “What shall I do?” (ti draso; 969), and a few lines later, “What shall we do, men?” (ti dr¯omen, andres; 974).138 Arriving just in time, Odysseus finishes Neoptolemus’ line by turning it back on the young man: “Most villainous of men, what are you doing?” (ti drais; 974).139 The spatial turns of the play keep that question alive, even after the final reversal and the apparent resolution offered by Heracles. When Odysseus appears “out of the blue” (at 974), he discloses his presence to Philoctetes for the first time in the play. His entrance proves most effective if he appears at the mouth of the cave (974), having entered the cavern via the back route,140 demonstrating his command over Philoctetes’ space. The Greeks control the sea, his dwelling place, his means of survival (Neoptolemus has the bow), and his future destination, for Odysseus tells Philoctetes that the Greeks “will take you [to Troy] by force” (biai stelousi se, 984). An even greater surprise occurs when Odysseus suddenly reappears to stop Neoptolemus’ handing back the bow again (1293). This time Odysseus vows that he himself “will convey” Philoctetes “to the plain of Troy by force” (s’ es ta Troias pedi’ apostel¯o biai, 1297). The verbal echoes resonate most strongly if Odysseus reappears at the cave mouth.141 On the second occasion, however, Philoctetes has his weapon in his hands, which Neoptolemus has returned, and he sends Odysseus fleeing out the back of the cave.142 Having recovered his bow, his dwelling, and something of his former prowess, Philoctetes can consider leaving the island on his own terms. These false arrivals and departures open up the distanced space of the play, otherwise limited by the fact that, according to Philoctetes, no sailor approaches Lemnos of his own free will. The island offers no anchorage (oute euormon, 218; ou gar tis hormos, 302) or trading opportunities (oud’ . . . exempol¯esei kerdos), and it lacks the hospitality that sailors enjoy (302–3). When the occasional ship does land, the crews might leave Philoctetes food and clothes, but they never offer him passage home (305–11). And yet on this day not only have Odysseus and Neoptolemus sailed to the island, but

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Philoctetes is asked to believe that a Merchant also has arrived from Troy, anchoring (hormistheis, 546) close enough to Neoptolemus’ ship to meet up with one of his crew.143 The near-simultaneous arrival of two ships on a deserted island is curious, given that the Merchant was not sailing to Lemnos for any expressed purpose but simply going home to Peparethos—an island not far from the Thessalian coast where Philoctetes calls home—having sold wine to the Greeks at Troy (542–52).144 Even more surprising is the fact that the Merchant announces that two more ships are bound for Lemnos, sent by the Achaean camp. It appears that the uninhabited and rarely visited island of Lemnos faces a veritable onslaught of Greeks sailing from the distanced space of Troy. But the Greek encampment at Troy is not only the source of new arrivals on Lemnos; it also represents the ultimate destination of these Greek visitations, both real and fabricated. Not surprisingly, Philoctetes expresses a desperate curiosity about Troy, particularly the fate of his friends (Achilles, Ajax, Nestor, Antilochus, Patroclus) and foes (the Atreidae, Diomedes, Odysseus, Thersites), with whom he originally sailed from Aulis. That his allies have died and his enemies have prospered offers evidence that “the gods are evil” (446–52), magnifying Philoctetes’ horror at the thought of traveling to “the hated land of Troy” (1175).145 He would rather dwell in Hades than in Troy (624–25), as his attempted suicide at the prospect of enforced passage makes clear (994–1005). He leaves no doubt about his disgust for the Greek cause,146 and he wishes an end to Troy and “all those beneath her walls” who drove him away (1200–1202). He would obliterate the city from his future: “Escort me home, child, / and do not delay, nor speak ever again of Troy; / for me, enough words have been spoken” (1399–1401). Easterling observes that “Troy can be used as a symbol both of the corrupt unheroic world of politics, which we applaud Philoctetes for rejecting, and of society, into which we want him to be reintegrated.” Similarly, for Neoptolemus, Troy stands for both the temptation to adopt Odyssean instrumentality and the “opportunity for the exercise of his aret¯e in action.”147 The Greek camp certainly represents corrupt political practices, of which Philoctetes singles out wordmongers like Odysseus (who “puts his tongue to any evil proposal, to any villainy, provided he might achieve some unjust end,” 407–9) and Thersites (“who was never content to speak once and be done,” 442–44). As in Ajax, political corruption focuses on the awarding of Achilles’ armor. We know from Iliou Persis that Odysseus gave up the armor to Neoptolemus after bringing him from Scyros; the cooperative nature of Odysseus’ and Neoptolemus’ mission to Lemnos indicates that the play also adopts this version.148 However, Neoptolemus tells Philoctetes the lie (following Odysseus’ instructions at 58–65) that the Greeks lured him to Troy by claiming

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that without him the city would never fall; on his arrival, they denied him his father’s arms, having given them to Odysseus instead, and Neoptolemus has decided to return home (345–84).149 Philoctetes clings to Neoptolemus’ fabrication as proof of their mutual hatred of the Greeks (403–6), and he cannot understand why the young man would want to rejoin the war effort after having been treated so poorly (1361–67). Neoptolemus glosses over the illogicality of his position (“What you say is reasonable; nevertheless . . .,” 1373), and he fails to correct the lie even after the appearance of Heracles.150 Awaiting Philoctetes at Troy is the revelation that Achilles’ armor was never a source of conflict between Neoptolemus and Odysseus and, more importantly, that Neoptolemus had never considered abandoning the war. But what of Troy as a place for Philoctetes and Neoptolemus to achieve heroic status? To address this question, we need to shift focus from the Greek camp to the city itself and look more closely at the glory promised Philoctetes and Neoptolemus there. The city is invoked invariably as the place the Greeks will “seize” (helein at 347, 997–98, 1434–35, hal¯onai at 1340–41, 1439–40) or “sack” (forms of perth¯o or porthe¯o at 69, 611–12, 919–20, 1334–35, 1428, 1441). In its clearest and most brutal formulation, Odysseus tells Philoctetes that he “must seize Troy and overthrow it by violence” (Troian s’helein dei kai kataskapsai biai, 998). Heracles clarifies the precise form that Philoctetes’ aret¯e will take, once healed of his debilitating wound: “Selected first in valor [aret¯ei te pr¯otos] by the army, / you will rob Paris of his life with my bow, / Paris who was the cause of all these evils. / Then you will sack Troy” (1425–28). Philoctetes will return home to Oeta with spoils for his father, a part of which he must dedicate at Heracles’ pyre to honor the sacred bow that brought down Paris and his city. In Heracles’ prophecy, Neoptolemus is no less necessary if Troy is to fall (1433–37), but an ominous warning hangs in the air: “Keep this in mind, when / you sack the land—honor the things of the gods; / all other things father Zeus considers secondary” (1440–42). Let us compare these promises and warnings to what we know of the fall of Troy from other sources. No student of Greek myth would believe Heracles’ claim that Philoctetes will emerge “first in aret¯e” among the Greeks at Troy. In fact, the tradition regarding Philoctetes’ post-Lemnian future is slim, summed up in Heracles’ prophecy noted earlier. As Winnington-Ingram concludes, “the subsequent history of Philoctetes is of no legendary interest.”151 His slaying of Paris represents a talismanic achievement more than an act of military prowess. Paris himself does not constitute a particularly formidable opponent, as we know from book 3 of the Iliad, so his slaying per se cannot account for Philoctetes’ glory. Scholars link the use of Heracles’ bow at Troy to events like the Greek capture of the Palladion, the Trojan’s talismanic statue of Athena, a manifestation of trickery and symbolic magic more than a

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military accomplishment. In fact, a painting by Polygnotos in the Pinakotheke on the Athenian Acropolis juxtaposed the scene of Odysseus stealing Philoctetes’ bow with that of Diomedes stealing the Palladion.153 As for Philoctetes’ skill with the bow, Odysseus was a far more famous archer in antiquity, as his success in the bow contest and subsequent battle with the suitors in the Odyssey testifies.154 In the play Odysseus himself refers to his abilities with the bow, and on this score—if nowhere else—we might take him at his word. Threatening to keep the sacred weapon in his own possession and use it at Troy, Odysseus vows that he will win for himself the geras ‘prize’, ‘possession of honor’ that should go to Philoctetes (1061–62).155 Given what we know of his future reputation for masterminding the fall of the city, Odysseus’ boast carries some weight. Were we to ask a fifth-century Athenian (or even his modern counterpart), “What Greek hero gained the most renown for the sack of Troy?” Odysseus surely would be the answer. His device of the Trojan horse—both effective talisman and successful military stratagem—represents the means by which the Greeks took the city, as told in the Odyssey, in the epic cycle, and elsewhere.156 In fact, the Athenian Acropolis boasted a bronze version of the Trojan horse cast by Strongylion and erected in the last quarter of the fifthcentury, not far from the date of Philoctetes.157 Significantly, however, Heracles says nothing of Odysseus’ role in the sack of Troy or the fame that would result. Were audience members at the City Dionysia to extrapolate beyond the play, they would realize (based on the Trojan legends they knew) that Philoctetes would arrive at Troy to find Neoptolemus in possession of Achilles’ armor, and he would live to see his role in Troy’s defeat eclipsed by Odysseus, the man who had left him, ten years before, “alone, deserted, and friendless” (monon, / er¯emon h¯ode ka’philon) on Lemnos (227–28).158 If the future belongs to Odysseus, so does the past. We have seen how he exploits the double-mouthed cave, using his prior knowledge of its hidden access. But Odysseus has “gotten there first” in a more comprehensive way, via the epic poem that charts his nostos from Troy. Davidson observes many similarities between Philoctetes’ Lemnos and various landfalls Odysseus makes in the Odyssey. Calsypso’s island “surrounded by the sea”; the goat island near that of the Cyclopes, “untrampled by men” with its “well-watered meadows”; the forbidding coastline of rocky Scheria, with its “pounding shore break”; even “the headlands and bays” near the harbor of Phorcys on Ithaca—all share descriptive vocabulary with Philoctetes’ island.159 Philoctetes’ cave resembles the cavern of Polyphemus (both lie at “the far reaches”) and also the cave on the goat island, with its spring flowing near the entrance. His cave also recalls Odysseus’ makeshift shelter on Scheria; both are exposed to inclement weather, feature a bed of leaves, and deal with the need for warmth, so the hero might survive “like a seed of fire” in Odysseus’ famous simile.160 Returning to the two entrances, we find an Odyssean antici-

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pation of Philoctetes’ cave in that of the Naiads on Ithaca, with its twin openings, north and south, and—like the cave on the goat island—a proximate spring (Od. 13.109–11; Ph. 16–21, 1455–56). Out of this loose skein of intertextuality emerges a clear sense of Odysseus’ epic priority. As for Neoptolemus, we know from a variety of sources that he was far more reviled than respected for his violence at the sack of Troy. By slaughtering Priam at the altar of Zeus Herkeios, he commits an act of outright sacrilege. In most accounts, he also slays Hector’s son Astyanax, either by pushing him from the ramparts or by smashing his head against the very altar where Priam takes refuge. After the sack of the city, Neoptolemus sacrifices the princess Polyxena, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, at the grave of his father (see chapter 4). This “newcomer to war”—as the name “Neoptolemus” suggests—proves a quick study, growing into “an especially pitiless, bloodthirsty fighter,” “a merciless butcher.”161 Given Sophocles’ emphasis on educative change, the future actions at Troy—implicit in Heracles’ warning, explicit in the “inherited conglomerate” of the ancient artistic tradition—disturb the play’s resolution. It appears that the time Neoptolemus spends at Troy will override any “positive” influence from his contact with Philoctetes. The same conclusion applies to the ultimate effects of the young man’s genealogy—no simple guarantee of noble actions, as demonstrated by the pointed contrast between Achilles’ treatment of Priam in Iliad 24 and his son’s butchery of the old king at the altar of Zeus in Iliou Persis.162 On Attic vases, the most frequent representations of the sack of Troy link it directly to acts of sacrilege—the rape of Cassandra by Ajax, son of Oileus, as she supplicates at the cult statue of Athena; and the murder of Priam (and often Astyanax) at Zeus’ altar by Neoptolemus.163 Sophocles’ lost Ajax Locrus deals with the first episode, as does Euripides’ Trojan Women, which (along with his Hecuba) also treats of Neoptolemus’ butchery.164 In fact, tragedy generally presents the Greeks’ behavior toward the defeated Trojans as a litany of cruelty, exemplified by two passages in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The Herald boasts of “altars smashed, temples rubble, / the seed of the land destroyed” (Ag. 527–28); and Agamemnon compares his conquest to “a lion leaping the walls / and lapping up the blood of kings” (Ag. 827–28). Sophocles may have had this Aeschylean image in mind when Heracles compares Neoptolemus and Philoctetes at Troy to “two lions seeking their prey together, / each one the protector of the other” (1436–37).165 Taken as a whole, the surviving tradition expresses serious doubts (and sometimes outright disgust) at the Greek destruction of Troy, as opposed to the aret¯e of the Achaeans during the city’s long siege. In Philoctetes, many of the actions that take place on Lemnos replicate or anticipate events at Troy. The island suffers a Greek invasion, marked by a sequence of unexpected arrivals on its deserted shores. As at Troy, Odyssean subterfuge and deceit opens its inner sanctum, represented by the cave of

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Philoctetes, which both Neoptolemus and Odysseus occupy. By “showing reverence” (proskusantes, 533) for his lowly dwelling, Philoctetes suggests that its violation by the Greeks is a sacrilege. Neoptolemus extends the sense of the holy to the island itself, urging Philoctetes to “bid solemn reverence to the land” (proskusas chthona, 1408) as they leave. What transpires on Lemnos, however, undermines any sense that the members of the Greek mission conceive of it as sacred.166 Neoptolemus uses similar religious language for the bow, “offering it reverence like a god” (proskusai th’ h¯osper theon, 657), a sentiment repeated by Philoctetes (proskuson, 776) when he hands over the sacred weapon. However, in the end the Greeks treat the bow much like they do the Palladion (in the lost epics), not as a sacred image to be revered but as an object whose capture guarantees the fall of the city. A similar instrumental attitude applies to Lemnos, as we have seen in Neoptolemus’ and Odysseus’ appropriation of Philoctetes’ cave. In a poignant lament, Philoctetes imagines Odysseus “sitting / on the strand of the grey sea, / mocking me, and brandishing / the source of my livelihood” (1123–26).167 The vision of a warrior alone by the sea brings to mind the figure of Achilles in the Iliad, who withdraws from battle only to return and wreak havoc on Troy.168 The image of Odysseus sitting on the shore of Lemnos suggests that he has dispossessed Philoctetes of his place as well as his bow. In an earlier passage, the Chorus imagines how Philoctetes lived “alone, / listening to the waves that broke / around him, as he sustained / his tear-drenched life” (687–90). Dependent on both the island and his bow for survival, Philoctetes considers them sacred; for their new master, however, they are simply the means to an end. Other events at Troy are mirrored even more closely on Lemnos. The reported capture of the Trojan Helenus—“seized, brought in chains, and displayed in the middle of the Achaeans” (heile, desmion t’ ag¯on / edeix’ Achaiois es meson, 608–9)—is precisely what Odysseus has in mind for Philoctetes, who fears his nemesis will “bring me [from here] and display me in the middle of the Argives” (deixai . . . agont’ en Argeiois mesois, 630). Realizing Philoctetes’ worst fear, Odysseus indeed binds him with the help of his henchmen, converting him into an “Achaean Helenus” by holding him prisoner in the presence of the Greek crew on Lemnos (1003–54). Philoctetes supplicates Neoptolemus, appealing to Zeus Hikesios, protector of suppliants (484–85), just as Priam will do (unsuccessfully) at the altar of Zeus Herkeios during the sack of Troy. And, like Priam imagining his own dogs devouring him after his death (Il. 22.66–76), Philoctetes knows that without his bow he will become food for the animals he used to frighten (954–60, 1153–62). Although Philoctetes escapes Priam’s fate, his rescue and cure depend on his joining the Greek campaign (1423–24, 1437–39) and securing the destruction of Priam’s city (emphasized by Neoptolemus at 1329–35 and 1344–47). If the argument presented here has merit, then the fate of the distant space of

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Troy looms larger by virtue of our seeing its seeds in the violations perpetrated on Lemnos. To be sure, the play entertains wishful projections of what Troy and its myth might have been. In his dialogue with Neoptolemus (403–6, noted earlier), Philoctetes inquires about the fate of the Greek heroes at the war he has missed. He learns that the good (Ajax, Antilochus, Patroclus) have died, and the bad (Odysseus, Diomedes, Thersites) have prospered, causing Philoctetes to despair of the gods, who so clearly reward evil (447–52). At the play’s close, Heracles offers an alternative view (1409–44): the purposes of Zeus bring glory to good men (Neoptolemus and Philoctetes). As for Philoctetes himself, the gods guarantee that Troy will be the site of his cure and the point of embarkation for his triumphal journey home. As we have seen, this picture of what might (or even should) have been runs into mythic reality— the presence of Odysseus and Neoptolemus who bring the doomed world of Troy with them to Lemnos. With this in mind, let us look at two other distant places in the play— Philoctetes’ home on the mainland at Oeta and Neoptolemus’ on the island of Scyros—that represent the respective nostos for which each longs. Until Heracles’ appearance, Philoctetes maintains an unwavering desire to return to Malis, his home and fatherland and the place (on Mount Oeta) of his connection to Heracles and the famous bow.169 Philoctetes even argues that Neoptolemus will win “a magnum prize of glorious fame” (pleiston eukleias geras) if he takes him home (478–79). We know, however, that the young man will head to Troy and win a very different kind of geras. As for Neoptolemus’ longing, his first words to Philoctetes proclaim “I am of the race from sea-girt / Scyros, and I am sailing home” (239–40). Later he insists that “rocky Scyros is all I want / for the future, taking pleasure in my home” (459–60). These lies cover an unconscious wish that Neoptolemus reveals under duress. Disgusted at his own lies and deception, Neoptolemus cries out in a moment of truth, “I wish I had never left / Scyros, since I suffer so over what is happening” (969–70). In the closing lines of the play, his Scyriote sailors of the Chorus pray for the “safety of nostos” (1471), implying a return not to Troy but to their native island. However, we know from the lost epic cycle and from lyric poetry that Neoptolemus never makes it home to Scyros, but settles with his war bride Andromache in Molossia after the fall of Troy. He is killed shortly thereafter at Apollo’s altar at Delphi, a mirror image of his murder of Priam at Zeus’ altar, the source of the proverbial phrase Neoptolemios tisis, “the payback of Neoptolemus.”170 As Taplin concludes, “if . . . we follow through the nostos of Neoptolemus, there is no doubt where it leads: Delphi. The glory, health, and s¯ot¯eria attained by Philoctetes are joined arm in arm with the shadow of the future which darkens Neoptolemus.”171 Sophocles’ exploitation of self-referential space derives from the deceptive

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plotting that lies at the roots and runs through all but the topmost branches of Philoctetes, with a thoroughness that distinguishes it from all extant tragedies except the Bacchae. Philoctetes remains the implied audience of the various performances—those of Neoptolemus, the merchant, Odysseus, and even the Chorus. Although we know the frame for each event, it seems to expand and contract as the scene unfolds. For example, Odysseus announces in advance that he will send a sailor disguised as a Merchant if Neoptolemus fails to persuade Philoctetes in timely fashion. When this character arrives, he is played by the same actor who performs Odysseus, so we view the scene through a complicated set of reflecting mirrors. In fact, the Merchant describes Odysseus in such monstrous terms that we are hard pressed to know whether this is part of Odysseus’ original plan, or if the sailor playing the Merchant has gotten carried away, or if Odysseus himself has taken the part and is enjoying a game of monstrous self-representation. When issues of acting—who’s playing the part? for what audience?—emerge so prominently, then the theater calls attention to itself as a space for competing representations.172 A similar play of self-reflexivity occurs in the first (and only true) stasimon, sung while Neoptolemus and Philoctetes have retired to the extrascenic space of the cave.173 For the first and only time in the play, the Chorus performs solely before the audience. The sailors sympathize with Philoctetes’ misery in a manner perfectly consistent with their part in his overall deception. However, they shock us in the final antistrophe, lauding Philoctetes’ good fortune at meeting Neoptolemus who will convey him home to Malis. Have the sailors—touched by Philoctetes’ suffering—suddenly changed their minds and concluded that he ought to return home? This seems reasonable, given the fact that they are alone onstage and have no reason to lie to the audience. Tycho Wilamowitz has argued that we witness here tragedy’s flexible treatment of choral identity.174 In this view, during the final antistrophe the Chorus ceases to represent Neoptolemus’ crew and simply reflects the audience’s sentiments back on itself, or expresses the real thoughts of Neoptolemus,175 or even of Philoctetes.176 However, the crew of sailors in Philoctetes manifests a remarkably consistent character (except, perhaps, for this passage), cooperating fully in the plan to lure Philoctetes to Troy. As Tarrant observes, “a sudden and complete loss of identity would be wholly at odds with Sophocles’ overall handling of this chorus.”177 To address the problem, scholars from Jebb onward have posited an early return of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes at 718, prompting the sailors to make their antistrophic aboutface.178 However, we would expect a more overt reference in the text to such a disruptive entrance “mid-stasimon.” Attentive to the frequent references to being overheard in the play, Tarrant argues that the Chorus performs the entire ode for Philoctetes, assuming that he can hear it from within the cave.179 Frequently tragic lyric takes on special relevance by virtue of a character

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remaining onstage while it is sung—the Ode to Athens in Medea, for example. But if Tarrant is right, then the stasimon in Philoctetes is unique, intended for the listening ears of someone offstage. Whether the Chorus drops its “character,” or manifests an unexpected authenticity, or purposefully plays to the visually absent Philoctetes, the final antistrophe of the stasimon raises questions about performance per se. Those in the audience must contemplate their own part in what transpires in the orchestra, as the theatrical space merges with the scenic and extrascenic spaces. We cannot watch the effect of the Chorus’s lyric on Philoctetes, who is inside the cave, and yet we cannot be sure that we are the implicit target for its sentiments. Our relation to the action becomes problematic. If we are simply the “excuse” for a lyric ruse actually aimed at Philoctetes, then the reflexivity of the theater catches us out. Our uncertainty about where the truth lies extends to the appearance of Heracles on high. As with the Merchant, the actor playing the god also performs the role of Odysseus, a doubling that suggests that the character before us is not simply Heracles tout court. Errandonea long ago suggested that the divine epiphany was Odysseus’ ultimate trick, and the text provides some support: “Think [phaskein] that you hear the voice / of Heracles and that you look on his face” (1411–12), the character begins enigmatically, appealing to Philoctetes’ imagination and leaving a trace of doubt about the speaker’s true identity.180 Heracles’ authoritative claims on the future seem to undermine the idea, cultivated gradually over the course of the play, that Philoctetes must go to Troy of his own free will. Significantly, Philoctetes utters his acquiescence in terms of obedience and not persuasion: “I will not disobey your words” (ouk apith¯es¯o tois sois muthois, 1447). The litotes recall the muted response in Euripides’ Ion to an equally surprising deus, Athena. The goddess insists that Apollo is Ion’s father, a claim the young man finds ouk apistos, “not unbelievable” (Ion 1606, 1608).181 If in Philoctetes Heracles appears not from on high but at the mouth of the cave, as Segal thinks,182 then the doubling with the actor playing Odysseus takes on spatial overtones, for Odysseus also arrives “out of the blue” (974, 1293) from the cave mouth. Too many questions remain unanswered, however, for us to conclude that Heracles is simply Odysseus in disguise. For a start, we would expect a better crafted speech from the Odysseus we know earlier in the play. As Kitto observes, “Nowhere in the whole of Sophocles is there a speech less impressive than this one which he wrote for Heracles.”183 We also may wonder how Odysseus manages to appear like a demigod and gain access to the theologeion (if that is where he appears).184 Even if Odysseus fools Philoctetes, does he fool the audience as well? If so, then the point is moot, for only the critic in his library can see Odysseus through Heracles. If not, then the ending is a harsh joke at Philoctetes’ expense, one that demands a hero so gullible that we lose interest in his future, wherever it may take him.185

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That we hear the voice of the actor who gave us Odysseus echo in the persona of Heracles contributes sufficiently to the ambiguity of an ending that has generated—even among those who countenance no Odyssean presence—endless debate. We are left with the question raised by Gill: “Why has Sophocles constructed his play in such a way that the natural conclusion of the human characters’ interaction is in direct contradiction both to the divine plan and the traditional myth, and needs (as it may seem) to be awkwardly reversed by a deus ex machina?”186 The coup de theatre of Heracles’ appearance on high moves the play, once again, into a self-referential space. How long we remain in that space determines our interpretation of the scene. For those who hold to a metatheatrical sense of the ending, Sophocles late in life has fallen under the influence of the ironic Euripides (his ex machina endings of Electra, Ion, Orestes, Iphigenia in Aulis), with Heracles’ intervention an unabashedly theatrical performance that tops the deceptions that precede it. For those who return to the scenic space of Lemnos, the ending appears “straight,” a manifestation of divine philia from a demigod and friend. For those who waver between the two, Sophocles may seem to nod (somewhat awkwardly) to the demands of the myth, allowing at the last minute for Philoctetes to fulfill his fate. No matter how we interpret the arrival of the deus, Heracles’ appearance points toward the distant space, and problematic future, of Troy. Let me be clear that such metatheatrical play, which surfaces frequently in dramas built on deception, does not constitute the subject or telos of the tragedy. Philoctetes’ physical anguish and desperate emotional state continually check what might otherwise appear a game of mimesis, a clever shuffling of levels of representation. As Seale observes, “Just as everything that Philoctetes says is free of deception, so the spectacle of his suffering is ‘real.’ ”187 His diseased foot, personified and addressed as if it were his inseparable twin (786, 1178–79, 1187–89, 1204–7), literally grounds the tragedy.188 In a rare occurrence in the tragic theater, Philoctetes sinks to the orchestra floor—“Oh earth [¯o gaia], receive me as I die, now, / for the pain will no longer let me stand” (819–20)—and there passes into unconsciousness. As he sleeps on the bare earth, the Chorus sings a short lullaby, then urges Neoptolemus to leave with the bow before Philoctetes awakes. Earlier the Chorus performs its own hymn to the earth—“Mountain goddess, Earth [Ga] who nurtures all, / mother of Zeus himself” (391–92)—asking her to witness again how Neoptolemus was cheated of his father’s armor (391–402), a clear deception, as noted earlier. For the Chorus, the Earth represents an abstraction it can use to further its mission.189 For Philoctetes, however, it offers the environment in which he must live, a place of physical contact and natural exchange, the ground that supports his body when he can no longer stand, and that will join with him in resisting Odysseus’ command that he raze the city of Troy: “Never! . . . as long as this steep base of earth [g¯e] is mine” (999–1000). His

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extraordinary apostrophe to the surrounding landscape when he discovers his betrayal reveals a man bound intimately to the land he inhabits: “You bays, you headlands, you mountain beasts / that share this dwelling place, / you jagged cliffs—/ to you I call out, / my habitual companions, / for I know no others to whom I can speak” (936–39). We witness the same relationship when Philoctetes bids farewell to the island (1453–64), a poignant acknowledgment of his experience on Lemnos, “land surrounded by sea.” Philoctetes’ relationship with his eremetic space differs radically from that of the Chorus of sailors, the Merchant, and the two leaders who come for a day, take what they need, and leave. The difference finds its verbal gestus in the scene with the Merchant, in which Philoctetes’ interrupts the newcomer’s aside to Neoptolemus: “What is he saying, boy? Why is this sailor bargaining [diempola¯o] with you over me, using words in the shadows?” (579–80). The verb diempola¯o suggests “traffic,” “trade,” “barter,” vocabulary fitting the Merchant’s commercial identity (547–49). Although fooled by the scene as a whole, Philoctetes’ instincts are on target—he is a pawn in a game of unnatural exchange, in which his own desires and place in the world count for nothing. Ironically, his transformation in the eyes of Neoptolemus from an object to an agent gathers momentum in the long episode depicting the onset and aftermath of his seizure (730–866). As befits a work in which physical suffering plays so prominent a role, direct bodily contact between Neoptolemus and Philoctetes marks a crucial stage.190 Having occupied Philoctetes’ cave without his knowledge, Neoptolemus now gains proximity to the man, and with it a growing sense that more is at stake than he imagined. We have traced Philoctetes’ relationship to the space around him primarily through his body (a subject dealt with more fully in chapter 4), noting the transformative effect his physical anguish has on Neoptolemus. When the consuming pain overwhelms Philoctetes (783–90), he begs Neoptolemus to hurl him into the famed “Lemnian fire” of the Moschylos volcano (799–801; also 986–87), replicating his own service on Oeta, where he lit the pyre for Heracles (801–3, also 670, 727–29, 1428–33), who was burning alive in the poisoned cloak dipped with Nessus’ blood.191 Structurally, the healing of his fiery disease at Troy requires that Philoctetes “leave” it there—in the form of the flames that consume the city after the Greek victory, a dominant feature in stories of the sack.192 As we know from Agamemnon, the fire does not simply consume sacred Ilium. It returns to Greece, via Lemnos—the Hermaean peak (Ph. 1459), highpoint of the island—which serves as the beacon station between Ida and Athos, bringing the news of Troy’s fall (A. Ag. 283– 84, discussed in chapter 2). When Philoctetes departs with the Greeks at the end of the play, Lemnos returns to its prior state of “natural” er¯emia. Distant Troy, however, awaits his arrival, and together with Odysseus and Neoptolemus, he will turn it into an unnatural wasteland. In the postconquest world of Euripides’ Trojan Women, Troy has suffered the fate of “desolation,”

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er¯emia (Tro. 15, 26, 97, 564), and Hecuba describes herself as “city-deserted” (er¯emopolis, 603). Using the perspective offered by a nearly uninhabited, heterotopic Lemnos, Sophocles encouraged his fellow citizens to view the events on stage reflexively, moving between the fictional world of Philoctetes and the wider stage of contemporary political ideology. We notice a few Athenian-specific references, particularly Odysseus’ invocation of Athena Polias and Nik¯e (134);193 the Merchant’s (false) claim that the “sons of Theseus” are in pursuit of Neoptolemus (562), introduced “to effect an Athenian connection”;194 and the echo in the Chorus’s “lullaby” for Philoctetes (827–32) of contemporary hymns to Asclepius. Introduced to Athens only ten years before the play’s premiere, the cult of Asclepius may have included Sophocles among its adherents.195 A much stronger force in the transformation from scenic to reflexive space involves the prominence of politically motivated speech, the importance of education in developing civic and individual responsibility, and the interplay of persuasion, deception, and force in achieving military ends. Although these issues are general enough to apply across the fifth century, they have a particular resonance in 409 when the play premiered, a year after the restoration of democracy in Athens following the oligarchic coup of 411. Sophocles himself played an important role in these affairs, and Philoctetes reflects that involvement. His earlier public life exposed him to the east Aegean, when he served as one of the treasurers (hellenotamiai) in charge of allied tribute in 442, and as strat¯egos with Pericles during the Samian War between 441 and 439.196 After the Sicilian disaster of 413, the Athenians chose a ten-man board of elder statesmen, probouloi, given the task of overseeing the straitened Athenian finances. Appointed to the board, Sophocles supported the brief rule of the oligarchy of the Four Hundred, but he “turned away from the extreme oligarchs when their deceit and failure became clear.”197 A moderate oligarchy of the Five Thousand replaced the Four Hundred in the early fall of 411, but the democratic Athenian fleet never recognized either of these governments. Buoyed by its surprising victories in the Hellespont, the fleet pressured Athens until democracy was restored by the early summer of 410. However, the restoration led to its own excesses, including the assembly’s rejection (in the same year, spurred by the demagogue Cleophon) of a peace offer from Sparta to end the Peloponnesian War.198 Philoctetes premiered some nine months later, in the spring of 409. Jameson speculates how these events affected Sophocles as playwright and public figure: “For men like Sophocles, who had served Athens faithfully in various political climates, who had tried to strengthen Athens by internal changes, we would suppose a double sense of betrayal and failure—first at the hands of the oligarchic extremists, and then with the unchastened, emboldened democracy.”199 The interrelated deceptions of the politically savvy Odysseus, the neophyte Neoptolemus, and the Chorus of sailors speak to the

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environment of deceit and mistrust operating at fever pitch in Athens from 411 to 409. We might find in the ending of the play, where only a coup de theatre can force Philoctetes to join in the sack of Troy, a reflection of the contemporary view that renewing the war with the Spartans would prove— at best—a glorious disaster.200 The reflexive moments in Philoctetes do not mirror Athenian civic institutions (like Orestes’ trial in Eumenides and Adrastus’ funeral oration in Suppliant Women), nor do they resemble debates in the assembly, lawcourts, and agora (like the exchanges between Theseus and the Theban Herald in Suppliant Women, between Menelaus and Teucer in Ajax, and between Odysseus and Paris in Euripides’ lost Philoctetes).201 Nonetheless, we can speak meaningfully of reflexive space in Sophocles’ play if we extend the idea to the theater audience as a whole. Athenians in 409 would be hard-pressed to view Philoctetes through lenses other than those reflecting their own highly charged political and military circumstances.202 However, the existence of an overriding context does not constrain the drama to serve only as an allegory of contemporary Athens, any more than its epic subject matter demands the audience can only lose itself in heroic myth.203 Rather, the play of space presented here suggests that the specific context and subject are perfectly well met on the island of Lemnos, represented by Sophocles in the theater of Dionysus with its Athenian population “removed” and reconstituted as the audience. At the play’s close they watch a procession out of the theater, including Neoptolemus, his crew of Chorus-sailors, and Philoctetes, with the unseen Odysseus waiting on board. From Lemnos they are off to Troy again, ten years after their first stop on the island, a new generation joining the old. The anapests at the start of Heracles’ speech (1409–17), in Philoctetes’ initial response (1445–47), in his farewell to the island, and in the Chorus’s final lines (1452–71) help “march them off to war.”204 What seems like a new beginning, however, only repeats what has happened before. “Troy must be taken a second time by my bow,” Heracles announces (1439–40), reminding us that he and his sacred bow were there at the first sack of Troy, prior to the Achaean expedition.205 Heracles passes the torch to Philoctetes, who abandons his island to devastate a land he has never seen. Cognizant of the lessons of the Trojan myth, and aware of their own recent experience of war and political turmoil, would it be surprising if members of the original audience muttered under their breaths, “Here we go again”? William Empson once said that first audiences usually are invoked to justify deplorable readings,206 and that may be the case here. Nonetheless, it seems hard to believe that many Athenians would have celebrated the end of the play as “a final sign of Philoctetes’ integration back into human society, . . . lending a sense of finality and harmony to a solution which is not at last illusory.”207 The play of space outlined here—from a deserted Lemnos, to a Troy awaiting desolation, and from both to the theater of Dionysus in 409— strongly suggests otherwise.

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Prometheus Bound: The Ends of the Earth For the ancient Greeks, actuality was the criterion of worth; for the moderns, values reside solely in what has been thought and felt. For the ancients even “imaginaries” [Phantasiebilder] are “of bone and marrow.” Sensibility and concept are not fragmented, they are not severed from daylit fact. —George Steiner, Antigones, on Goethe’s essay, “Winckelmann and His Century”

This chapter has traced the representation and function of eremetic space in three plays of Sophocles. In Antigone, the two eremetic outposts—Polyneices’ body, Antigone’s cave—remain in the distance, drawing focus from the scenic space until it assumes its own desolate qualities, personified by Creon. In Ajax, the er¯emia moves onstage when the scene shifts to the beach, where we again witness the paradoxical attraction of “untrodden ground.” The place of Ajax’ suicide offers a site for private grief, public debate, and a surprising reconstitution of community. In Philoctetes, the deserted island of Lemnos provides the setting for the entire play, inspiring a Greek “invasion” that restores the island to its previous state, once Philoctetes and the Greek party sail off to annihilate Troy. Prometheus Bound goes further, as the opening lines indicate: “We have come to the furthest end of the earth, / to the Scythian edge, an untraversed desert [er¯emia]” (1–2). The scenic space constitutes the quintessential er¯emia: “untrodden” (abatos, 2), “far from human beings” (apanthr¯opos, 20), “lacking the sound or shape of mortals” (21), a “deserted [er¯emos] crag devoid of neighbors [ageitonos]” (270), “the furthest place of the earth” (gas eschatos topos, 416–17).208 The prologue pointedly enacts Prometheus’ enforced isolation,209 as three characters march him through the eisodos into the orchestra, bind him to a rock in full view of the audience, and then depart.210 The long exit of Hephaistus, Kratos, and Bia highlights the solitude of Prometheus, as if Sophocles had begun Philoctetes by showing Odysseus abandoning the sleeping archer on Lemnos ten years before. Left alone with nothing but the elements, Prometheus faces eternal separation from the Olympian deities he helped to gain power and from the mortal race he saved from extinction.211 Doubts over Aeschylean authorship have resulted (unintentionally) in a weakening of interest in Prometheus Bound, one of the greatest plays about tyranny and oppression that the theater knows.212 Defects in dramatic structure, oddities of expression, and anomalous metrical patterns have displaced earlier critical interest in the great sweep of the drama, achieved paradoxically by immobilizing the protagonist at the outset. Chained to a desert landscape at the end of the world, this lone figure inspires a series of strange

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visitations: the ocean nymphs, Oceanus himself, the tortured Io, Hermes the front man of the new tyrant Zeus, and finally the very elements of earth, air, and fire unleashed in the apocalyptic finale. By binding Prometheus to the rock, Zeus attempts to petrify the rebellious Titan who threatens his power. But Prometheus is a child of the earth to which he is fastened (18, 209–18, 873–74, 1091), and he assumes the qualities ascribed to his mother G¯e.213 He takes comfort from the fact that his secret knowledge, hidden away like the things underground, can never be taken away. The vast distances before him stand as mute evidence of his own power, which resides (as does the earth’s) in patient endurance over time. Like Antaeus drawing strength from the ground, Prometheus’ rock-bound state gives him special knowledge of the earth’s furthest reaches, enabling his mind to move freely over lands both known and barely traveled. In the discussion of visual perception (see the introduction), we noted that humans take in the world as an extended surface or “layout,” where one thing appears behind another, rather than as “depth” perceived abstractly. Converted into the temporal structure of dramatic performance, this perceptual scheme takes the logical form of sequential narration. Gazing over the (imaginary) landscape, Prometheus reveals one thing after another, from the progressive steps of human development to the geographical landmarks that signal Io’s route into the future. As the play unfolds, neither space nor time escape the fixed point where Prometheus stands bound to the earth that bore him. The growing attention that Zeus pays to the Scythian er¯emia suggests that the fate of the gods and the dispensations of Moira (511–25) are pinned to the outcrop in the center of the orchestra.214 But Prometheus knows that his future lies elsewhere, in the mobile character of Io, another victim of Zeus, who must wander the terra cognita of the Greek world.215 She, too, embodies the junction of space and time, carrying in her young woman’s body the gestation of an alternative future, anticipated in her desperate request: “Show . . . the end [terma] of my wanderings, / the time [chronos] that is [set] for me in my misery” (622– 23). In his response, Prometheus also compacts space and time, revealing the temporal limit of her anguish in terms of the distance she must travel toward her destination. Her suffering will end after she traverses Ethiopia—in the southernmost region of the world, the geographical antipode to the Scythian wilds where she asks about her fate—and reaches Canopus in Lower Egypt.216 There Io will “come to term,” giving birth to Epaphus (“Born by Touch”), the first in the line of offspring that eventually leads to Heracles. Io’s arrival at the opposite ends of the earth provides the genesis of Prometheus’ release, returning us to the setting of the play in the distant future.217 The idea of generation offers the temporal equivalent of Io’s geographical wanderings, projecting her into the future much as her travels draw her across the globe. Successive births—three plus ten generations (774) cul-

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minating in Heracles—locate the source of Prometheus’ salvation in the body of this young maiden. Recall that Zeus fears he will engender a son stronger than himself, replicating his own overthrow of his father Uranus. Greek myth, however, tells us that Zeus is not dethroned; rather, he evolves into the primus inter pares among Olympians.218 Strife across generations is no more inevitable than the oppressive male hierarchy that Zeus seems keen on reproducing. Rather, Prometheus’ open secret about Io’s “horizoned” travel and its “vertical” extension via human offspring does not guarantee the inevitability of conflict, only the necessity for compromise.219 Returning to the spatial terms in which the play dramatizes this possibility, let us consider Io’s travels in detail. When confronted with the dream sent by Zeus, Inachus pursues “distant knowledge,”220 inquiring first at the (relatively) nearby oracle of Apollo at Delphi, then at the more distant oracle of Zeus at Dodona.221 Eventually, Io makes her way to “Foreknowledge” himself (Pro Ⳮ m¯etis), who prophesies her long passage from the northernmost eschatos topos of the play’s setting to the far east, and then to the extreme south.222 On the way, Io must avoid certain groups and cultivate others, most notably the Amazons. Typically construed in Greek myth as uncivilized and antinatural, these warrior women will deal kindly with Io, presumably out of sympathy for a fellow victim of male hubris.223 By doing so, they support Io’s nonviolent and noncombative form of spreading civilization,224 manifest in her providing the names and narratives that come to be associated with places along her path—the Ionian sea (836–41) and the Bosporos (“Cowcrossing” or “Ox-ford,” 729–34). Two points deserve emphasis. First, Io does not name the Ionian sea in order to claim it as her own; the body of water takes on her name by virtue of her passage, a spatial event of importance that finds its place in mythic history. Second, she does not travel as a colonizer, moving out to the margins in order to expropriate the territory of others. To adopt modern critical parlance, Io represents a Greek who is herself “Other,” a subject explored more fully in chapter 6. Victimized by Zeus, outcast from home, exiled from Argos, transformed into a half beast, and pursued by god-driven tormentors, Io personifies alienation “from the center.” In this she resembles Prometheus, a god cut off from other immortals (both the earthborn Titans and the Olympian deities) and punished for siding with a different race. That the Amazons befriend Io is a significant detail, for it restores these quintessentially “other women” to a place of (temporary) honor.225 By helping Io, the Amazons manifest those civilizing impulses that enable humans to cooperate against hostile and frequently mysterious forces. In this sense Io’s journey is both transgressive (crossing all the borders on the ancient map) and ecumenical (finding sustenance and deliverance among foreigners). As with Prometheus, the locus of both Io’s suffering and her resistance lies in the body, where Zeus has unleashed his punitive measures. That the god’s

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lust for Io is what leads, in due course, to the birth of the hero who will rescue Prometheus underlines a central irony. Prometheus’ fate is tied to Io, but so too is that of Zeus. We know Zeus cannot forget the er¯emia of his immortal foe, but he is no less free of the space of Io’s wandering body. The weak human race—the line that Zeus would have destroyed—holds the key to Prometheus’ future, thanks to Zeus’ inability to control his desire to unite with a mortal maiden (589–91, 647–54, 736–40, 848–52). The future lies in Io’s womb, the one space in the play that opens fully into time.226 We will explore more deeply the interrelationship of space and the body in chapter 4. The vast distances indicated by the setting, conjured in the language, and evoked in Io’s dance eventually shrink before the common miracle of birth. We might think of Io’s body as absorbing the journey, converting spatial expanse into a vertical branching of the human race over generations. The natural impulses of childbirth find their corollaries in other, less celebratory forces of nature—a medical condition like ulcers or tumors, which responds to treatment only when the disease has reached its crisis (375–80); a volcanic eruption from the depths of the earth that cannot be contained (353– 74). The point of comparison lies in the irrepressibility of these events, not in their outcomes per se.227 The instinctual human processes of pregnancy, birth, and child rearing differ utterly from Prometheus’ gifts of intellectual, technological, and prophetic knowledge. And yet thanks to the acts of gestation and parturition, an enfeebled race that seemed incapable of helping their immortal benefactor (82–87, 545–51) eventually sets a limit on his suffering. Transforming the aleatoric spaces of her wandering into the purposes of time, the young body of a possessed girl does for Prometheus what he cannot do for himself. Perhaps Io and her offspring—rather than Prometheus and his gifts—release the true “blind hopes” (250–53) that allow humans (and those who care for them) to face the future.228 Fleeing any which way from the gadfly of Hera, Io arrives in the Scythian desert as if by accident: “Tell me where / on earth I have wandered [peplan¯emai] in my misery” (564–65).229 In a series of forward and backward predictions that mirror the twists and turns of Io’s passage to Egypt, Prometheus prophesies her future (707–35, 790–815), explains the travels that brought her here (823–43), and outlines the route that leads to her ultimate destination and the future of her line (844–74). Prometheus’ rebellion finds its human counterpart in Io’s decision not to commit suicide (seriously considered at 747–51) but to continue her wild lurch toward “Contact” with Zeus, challenging his omnipotence by bearing his child. Her seizures in the orchestra (566–608, 877–86) offer a visual image of the journey behind and ahead of her. Between Io’s wild leaps (skirt¯emata, 599; also 675) and the still point of Prometheus, Zeus himself is trapped. He sends his bully Hermes, whose arrival from Olympus brings that distanced space before us for the first time. Recalling the torture of Prometheus in the prologue by Force,

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Violence, and Hephaistus, Hermes projects a future of even greater physical suffering, the beginnings of which we see in the play’s final moments. Leaving aside the problematic issue of how Aeschylus staged the apocalyptic ending, we should note that it conjoins the basic elements of early Greek science and the hierarchical strata of ancient cosmology.231 The lightning bolts of Zeus add the element of fire to those already present: water (represented by the Chorus and Oceanus), earth (the earthborn and rock-bound Prometheus, and the earth-wandering Io), and the lofty air of Olympus (Hermes, who descends from the heavens). The description of Prometheus sinking underground to the depths of Tartarus (1016–29, 1050–52) evokes the vertical abyss, moving down from the lightning originating in the upper atmosphere (aith¯er, 1043–45), the hurricane winds from the sky (agrioi anemoi, 1045–46), the earth blown off its base (1046–47), and the ocean waves thrown against the heavenly stars (1048–50), a cataclysmic chaos of natural elements. We have seen earlier how the er¯emia of the play’s scenic space focuses psychological and political anxieties, pinning Zeus to the spot as much as Prometheus. At the play’s end, however, the magnetic power of Prometheus’ er¯emia extends to the material of the universe itself, drawing together with implosive force the four elements and the vertical planes on whose separation the order of the cosmos depends. During the apocalyptic climax, the Chorus of ocean nymphs remains with Prometheus (1063–79), an act of extraordinary solidarity given the nature of the group. Timid and full of maidenlike propriety (526–35), the Oceanids feel compelled to explain their (initially) unaccompanied presence, far from “the innermost cave” of their ocean home (130–35). They seem particularly ill-suited to a desert setting, as does Oceanus (“Ocean”), who Prometheus cannot believe has dared leave “the flowing stream that bears your name and the rock-roofed / cave that you yourself built, to come to the dry earth, / mother of iron” (300–02).232 The surprising appearance of these watery characters may account for the Chorus’s strange mode of travel, flying in on the backs of seabirds (115, 124–35).233 Far from indicating airborne entrances, as some critics believe, the “flight” of the nymphs probably signals the nature of their dance in the parodos, moving into the orchestra like a flock of birds (initially behind Prometheus), and then separating as they settle around the central figure, like sea gulls perched on the rocks.234 The effect of their arrival depends on—and arises from—the absence of any extrascenic space in the play,235 reminding us that dualistic hermeneutics based on onstage and offstage, inside and outside, public and private, seen and unseen are inadequate to the spatial dynamics of Greek tragedy. This applies especially to a play like Prometheus Bound, with its expansive setting, interest in foreign lands, and arrivals from and departures to the distance.236 We learn from the Chorus that it comprises the sisters of Prometheus’ wife, Hesione (558–60), and of Io’s father Inachus (636), making them Pro-

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metheus’ sisters-in-law and aunts to Io. Oceanus is both Prometheus’ half brother (Gaia or G¯e [Earth] is mother to both) and his father-in-law. Io, as we know, is the ancestor of Prometheus’ future liberator, Heracles, who will prove to be Zeus’ own son.237 These familial ties of blood and marriage may seem out of place in a cosmic drama, but they remind us of the thorough anthropomorphism of the Greek deities. Zeus may wish to eliminate anthr¯opoi, but the ties that bind humans together also operate among the gods. Marriage, in particular, looms large over the course of the play. The nymphs of the Chorus recall Prometheus’ wedding, where they served as bridesmaids for their sister, singing both the wedding hymn and the epithalamium (555– 60). While they evoke the marriage ritual, Io enters unannounced, a surprising juxtaposition that links the world of immortals with that of humans. Zeus himself offers a kind of “marriage” to Io (647–54, 739–40), and we know from Prometheus that a future marriage threatens his rule (764–74, 907–10, 947–48). Represented by sexual desire (Zeus), loyalty to relatives (Chorus), and resistance via endurance and procreation (Io), the idea of marriage provides the basis for hope that Prometheus one day will be freed from his anguish.238 The ocean nymphs pray that they never find themselves forced to wed above their station (887–907), reasserting their faith in the hierarchies against which Prometheus has rebelled. By the end of the play, however, they change their position, having watched Prometheus in agony, heard of his gifts to mortals, witnessed Io’s mental and physical torture, learned of her past and future, and—perhaps most important—observed firsthand the brutality of the new regime in the person of Hermes. When Zeus levels his worst, the nymphs join Prometheus in defiance. Although the eremetic space will swallow them up, they do not scatter like the seabirds they resemble at the outset but stay with their brother-in-law to the bitter end. Although they did not benefit from Prometheus’ gift of fire, the nymphs respond with sympathy and solidarity we can only call human. Their response mirrors that of the audience, which would find it hard to reject Hephaistus’ claim that “kinship and companionship have a strange power” (39). At the edges of the world, in the face of cosmic violence, the instincts of philia—“blood-ties,” “friendship,” “solidarity”—motivate a surprising act of courage and resistance from an unlikely group of unmarried nymphs.239 We have concentrated on the magnetic pull that Prometheus exerts on distant bodies, drawing deities, demigods, mortals, natural elements, and the primal forces of the universe into his eremetic wasteland. In such a cosmic merging of scenic and distant spaces, what role—if any—do self-referential and reflexive (Athenian) spaces play? 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

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fixed for observation—a theama dustheaton (69), “a sight hard to look at,” “a spectacle no one wants to see,” in Hephaistus’ oxymoron.240 References to looking, to being seen, and to escaping the gaze of others recur throughout the play. In both his first utterance and his last, Prometheus cries out that nature herself must look on his suffering: Oh bright sky of heaven [¯o dios aith¯er] . . . . . . . . . . all-mothering earth, and all-seeing [panopt¯es] circle of the sun . . . behold [idesthe] what I, a god, suffer from other gods. (88–92)241 Oh holy mother [earth], oh sky of heaven that revolves the light common to all [koinon phaos], you see [esorais] the wrongs I suffer. (1091–93)

Seeing uncoupled from understanding is the first in Prometheus’ list of miseries that afflicted humans before he rescued them: “First, although they had eyes to see, they saw in vain, / and although they heard, they failed to understand” (446–47).242 Implicit in his appeal for the earth and heavens to look on his suffering is that they see what it means, that they bear witness and not simply gape. Prometheus seems split between his desire for others to see his mistreatment and his fear that they only want to stare and ridicule. He suspects that the Chorus has come as “sightseers to my suffering” (pon¯on em¯on the¯oros, 117),243 and he accuses Oceanus in similar terms: “So then, have you, too, come / to inspect my anguish? [kai su d¯e pon¯on em¯on / h¯ekeis epopt¯es] . . . / . . . / to see the sights [the¯or¯es¯on]?” (298–302). The English verb “visit,” derived from Latin videre ‘to see’, captures Prometheus’ sense that others simply come to look. He would rather be buried deep in Tartarus than hung out in the sunlight for others to mock (153–59). On the other hand, Prometheus’ opening lines (quoted earlier) take the form of a prayer (88–100), bidding the forces of nature to “behold!” (idesthe, 92) and “look at!” (derchth¯eth’, 93) the anguish he suffers. When the Oceanids arrive, he orders them to “Look at me [derchth¯et’], behold [esidesth’] / what chains fasten me / to this . . . lookout [skopelos] . . . / where I must keep my hateful watch [phroura]” (140–43).244 In this richly convoluted imperative, Prometheus tells the Chorus to take note that he himself cannot stop looking. On enforced “guard duty,” he must gaze out over the distance, which from his position in the theater of Dionysus means gazing at the audience. The image of a perceiver being perceived suggests a central fact of theatrical performance, the presence of the actor whom the audience must observe if the actor’s observations are to matter. The Player in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead speaks of the humiliation actors experience when

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“tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable— that somebody is watching.”245 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. In his opening monody, for example, Prometheus addresses the panoptic sun that sees all, including the audience. In a primal sense, the same orb that burned over Scythia in the ancient dawn of the rule of Zeus also crosses the Athenian sky during the performance. This “elemental drama” uses cosmic material common to the imagined world of the stage and the lived world of the audience, calling attention to the physical reality—earth, sun, sky—that they both share. On the level of performance, the aulet¯es who accompanied the lyric sections of Prometheus Bound provided an important link between the two worlds of the stage and the audience. As well as setting the rhythms for the choral dance, he accompanied the monodies of Prometheus (during his opening soliloquy, 88–127) and Io (on her entrance, 561–608). If we assume Aeschylean authorship, Prometheus Bound is the earliest extant tragedy in which two actors perform monodies.246 The prominent references to the sound of pipes in the play suggests a merging of the performed and the dramatic worlds, as in Io’s entry song. Arriving unannounced, this “startling apparition” dances out the attack of the gadfly that has driven her to this desolate spot, the agitated rhythms reflecting her distracted torment. It seems likely that the aulos accompaniment played an important role in communicating Io’s mental and physical state.247 She refers specifically to musical pipes with their “sleep inducing melody” (575–76), perhaps recalling the panpipes of the hundred-eyed shepherd Argos who had tormented her, or the music that Hermes used to lull the monster into his fatal slumber.248 In either case, Io calls attention to the sound of pipes even as she dances to the aulos played in the orchestra. This self-referential gesture resurfaces in the Chorus’s short lyric reaction (687–95) to Io’s presence, when it feels “goaded” (692) by her torment and expresses the sensation in a metrical pattern drawn from her monody and accompanied by the aulos.249 The same gadfly-buzzing sound echoes in the orchestra again, when the stinging madness overwhelms Io and drives her away (877–86). In both her entrance to and exit from the scenic space, the aulet¯es signals the onrush of the (invisible) gadfly, an important part of the plot that also calls attention to its performance. Aeschylus accomplishes a similar fusion of scenic and metatheatrical space in Prometheus’ opening and closing utterances, when he invokes the natural elements viewed by performers and audience alike. Aeschylus frames the emergence and disappearance of both Io and Prometheus by highlighting their presence in the same (theatrical) space as those gathered to watch. Moving from self-referential to reflexive space, critics long have com-

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mented on the Sophistic tone of the play.250 On giving humans the wherewithal to survive, for example, Prometheus proclaims: “I made this mistake purposefully on purpose” (hek¯on hek¯on e¯ marton, 266), apparently referring to the idea (later associated with Socrates) that no one errs knowingly but only from ignorance.251 Both Oceanus (336) and Prometheus (1080) contrast logos ‘word’ with ergon ‘deed’, the conventional antithesis exploited in sophistic rhetoric.252 In fact, Kratos (Force) and Hermes both call Prometheus an outright Sophist (sophist¯es, 62, 944),253 and we witness his mastery of the verbal skills associated with epideictic oratory in his account of the cultural evolution of the human race (445–504).254 Inverting the Hesiodic tradition of historical decline, Prometheus’ progressive version fits well with what we know of Sophistic anthropology.255 It may be that Prometheus’ verbal mastery exemplifies an implied telos of human progress, the achievement of spoken eloquence. If so, the play exposes the vanity of such verbal accomplishment when divorced from will and action. In this light let us look at the Oceanus-Prometheus scene, an encounter that strikes critics as dramatically problematic, and even incompetent.256 The scene certainly seems anomalous when compared with its surroundings: the enacted binding in the prologue; the description of Prometheus’ gifts and their consequences for humans; the teleological account of Io’s wanderings, punctuated by her theriomorphic seizures; and Hermes’ performative threats that bring about the apocalyptic events of the play’s close. By contrast, Oceanus is just a talker, generating a mental world with little relationship to physical reality. The nature of his element, water, is to take the shape of its container, marking him as a compromiser and suggesting the spill of his language. In his first speech in iambics, for example, Oceanus uses the word kai ‘and’, ‘so’) in precisely the same metrical position (second beat of the third foot) in the opening six consecutive lines (307–12). The effect is a near parody of parataxis, compulsive logorrhea where one thing follows another to no ultimate effect. Combining naivet´e with an inflated sense of his own importance, Oceanus claims he can persuade Zeus to soften his anger if Prometheus will only control his tongue. Oceanus forgets that Zeus punishes Prometheus for rebellion, not free speech; as a teacher (didaskalos, 322, with similar vocabulary at 382 and 391), his lesson that Prometheus must simply “calm down” (h¯esuchaze, 327) overlooks the fact that his interlocutor has been fettered like an animal, then brutally bound to a rock.257 For Prometheus, Oceanus’ rhetorical claim to “bravery and an eagerness to help” (381) amounts to “the illusion of toil and sweat from an air-headed fool” (mochthon perisson kouphonoun t’ eu¯ethian, 383).258 This judgment prompts a verbally crafted response typical of Oceanus: “Allow me to remain diseased by that disease, since / it profits those with their wits about them to appear witless” (384–85). The double polyptoton—t¯eide t¯ei nos¯oi nosein, “diseased by that disease,” and

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phronounta m¯e phronein, “witless wits”—displays the polished features of a rhetorical Sophist, as if Oceanus had somehow catapulted the tortured protagonist from the Scythian desert to the Athenian agora. Like the Lycus-Amphitryon bow debate in Heracles, the sophistry contributes to the drama primarily by its stark contrast with the reality around it. What does it mean, in a primordial scene of timeless desolation, to mouth well-meaning nonsense as if it mattered? It is not that language per se is pointless in such an environment, or that Oceanus alone employs Sophistic rhetoric. But we can differentiate Prometheus’ verbal dexterity from Oceanus’ empty aphorisms and clich´es. Consider Prometheus’ response (340–76), in which he expresses deep sympathy for his brother Atlas and fellow Titan Typhon, whose physical torments jibe with his own. Here, as elsewhere, Prometheus joins language to feeling, and feeling to action, for he predicts Aetna’s eventual eruption. Caused by Typhon’s imprisonment (363–72), the volcanic explosion suggests that change for Zeus will not come from an Ocean-like ebb and flow of empty words but from grounded, long-term, physical resistance. Keeping in mind the materiality that differentiates performance from text, let us examine the manner of Oceanus’ actual appearance onstage. He arrives mounted on a griffin—a four-footed flying beast with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle—perhaps descending via the m¯echan¯e, but more likely riding into the orchestra on a griffin-cart, like the chariot entrances in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Persians.259 Oceanus steers his cart/ mount “by the force of [his] mind, without using a bridle” (284–87). His “no reins” technique fits a character free with advice but unwilling to get his hands dirty. Griffins were hardly a commonplace on the ancient stage, and it is worth noting that Io, on her journey east, also must deal with them. Prometheus warns her to avoid the race of griffins who fight with the oneeyed Arimaspians over gold from the river Pluto (Wealth) (802–7), an account derived from Aristeas’ lost Arimaspea, a seventh-century poem of the author’s “travels.”260 How do we square Oceanus’ griffin with the mythical beasts of Prometheus’ exotic narrative? Although actually present (in some form), the stage griffin seems far less substantial than the verbally evoked monsters lurking in the distance. This paradox reveals a peculiar relationship that sometimes obtains between distant and self-referential space—the “prop-griffin” fools or frightens no one, but the griffins on the banks of a distant river appear ominous. Why does the not-physically-present seem more real? Part of the answer lies with the play’s emphasis on Io, who listens with a purpose as Prometheus unfolds the strange things that lie ahead. Linked to a sympathetic character and part of a teleological narrative, the “absent exotic” seems real enough. But when it appears as a stage prop, serving a character who comes from far away only to retrace his steps (387), the exotic seems at best

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“theatrical.” The griffins by the gold-bearing stream ask us to think about distant lands and the struggle to traverse them; Oceanus’ griffin asks us to think about the theater. His mount’s eagerness to leave (394–96) prompts Oceanus to depart, and, according to Griffith, “the scene ends on a lame, almost ridiculous note.”261 If his judgment persuades, it does so without proving that Aeschylus suffered a dramaturgical lapse. On the contrary, the play consistently unfolds as a series of broad contrasts—between a thought-guided stage griffin and an orchestragrounded stage rock; between an ineffective rhetorician and an eloquent rebel; between a watery character of “unbridled” freedoms (both literally and visually) and a mangled Titan, bound and immobilized. Both Prometheus and Oceanus are theatrical images, but one compels sympathy and projects a future, the other seems ridiculous and lays out a mirage. As is typical in the theater, the ridiculous takes the form of the overly theatrical. Consider Aeschylus’ Pythia (discussed in chapter 2), or the more obvious example of the Phrygian slave in Euripides’ Orestes, whose wild, sung messenger speech— reflecting the “new music” of Timotheos—soars with theatrical excess.262 Interestingly, this Phrygian exponent of the latest in Athenian music also invokes Aeschylus’ primordial rhetorician, “the horned Oceanus, who / with arms wide, swirling back / and forth, circles the earth” (Or. 1377–79). The theater knows its own best, and the fifth-century Athenian theater was no exception. The evocation of reflexive space in Prometheus Bound is not limited to the Oceanus scene. The play’s depiction of Zeus also reflects fifth-century Athenian concerns, particularly regarding political rule.263 Anticipating the Theseus-Theban Herald debate in Euripides’ Suppliant Women, Zeus demonstrates Creon-like traits of a tyrannical ruler: dependence on force and violence—literally, in the prologue—to maintain his power; harsh and unpredictable behavior; denial of free expression to his subjects; paranoia that makes even his supporters afraid; lust that must be satisfied, no matter what the cost.264 That Zeus, the father of the gods, resembles a tyrant shocked readers a century ago, and their reaction exerted early influence on the authenticity question.265 Because the play’s date remains uncertain, it seems unwise to try to identify specific political references, beyond the obvious fact that Prometheus’ rebellion fits the general ideology of radical Athenian democracy. In a different vein, Aeschylus peppers the dialogue with the contemporary vocabulary of disease and diagnosis, as if Prometheus—who gave humans the art of healing (478–83)—represented the “cutting edge” of fifth-century medicine.266 As the only Greek city of note to house a cult dedicated to Prometheus, Athens had a special relationship to this immortal savant and rebel. To commemorate his gift of fire, the city held annual torch races linked to Prometheus’ altar in the Academy just outside the city walls (later famous

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as the site of Plato’s school), the same place from which the statue of Dionysus was brought in the procession that launched the City Dionysia.267 Although the scenic space remains the Scythian wasteland throughout the play, the discourse uttered there derives from the Athenian agora, the lawcourts, the Hippocratic “schools,” the city’s rituals, and the theater itself. It seems appropriate that this most radically eremetic of tragedies—set at the “ends of the earth”—should feature an Athenian hero-god, whose rebellious actions both directly and indirectly account for the performance itself. The myth offers an aetiology of human survival and progress, meaning that the very existence of the audience in the theater of Dionysus results from Prometheus’ resistance to Zeus. The audience watches its own destiny worked out in the mythic past, by characters who sound like they dwell in the here and now. We note in particular the interplay between the desolate setting and the metatheatrical and reflexive spaces of Athenian polis life. We also observe how resistance to divine persecution spreads out over space and time—from one end of the earth to the other—in the character of Io and her offspring. This interaction between scenic and distanced spaces, projecting future salvation out of present torment, is figured on the bodies of Prometheus and Io.268 The enchained protagonist depends on the theriomorphized maiden to wander the world until “contact” with Zeus will open the future. The next chapter explores this relationship more fully, focusing on three plays of Euripides, Hecuba, Electra, and Bacchae.

CHAPTER FOUR SPACE AND THE BODY I challenge anyone to explain anything without the body. —Diderot, El´ements de physiologie

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HAT THE BODY is important in establishing and transforming space in the theater is evident. In Antigone, the distant bodies of Polyneices and the entombed Antigone lead to the deaths of Haimon and Eurydice and the display of their corpses, the culminating image of Creon’s onstage desolation. The hero’s corpse in Ajax turns the deserted beach where he dies into a place of contending forces, as does the diseased, talismanically charged body of Philoctetes on Lemnos. In Prometheus Bound, the physically ravaged Prometheus and Io testify to the tyranny of Zeus but also to the instability of his rule. The body of the actor also plays a transformative role: the fact that the same actor performs both Ajax and Teukros gives Sophocles’ protagonist theatrical afterlife following his suicide; the fact that a single actor plays Odysseus, the Merchant, and Heracles complicates our sense of whom these fictional characters represent in Philoctetes. That bodies in extremis dominate tragedy borders on a definition of the genre. As Adrian Poole says, “the physical presence of the mortal body is one of the most powerful arguments for the peculiar purchase which the theatre has on tragedy.”1 But we should consider more closely the relationship between corporeal suffering and the idea of space. In Gibson’s view, we locate and orient ourselves by reference to our physical environment, an “outward move” that takes us beyond ourselves. But our ecologically based visual perception also involves an awareness of our own sensate reality, what Gibson calls “proprioception.” In perceiving the world we (literally) perceive our own bodies. Gibson’s observation fits well with the ancient Greek view that the body (broadly speaking) constitutes the beginning and end of each person’s existence. Unlike followers of monotheistic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and of such polytheistic religions as Hinduism, the Greeks (excepting Plato) did not conceive of the self as an essential soul that exists beyond its immediate human incarnation. For them, what happens to one’s body is what happens to oneself. We understand that Oedipus stabs his eyes because he has proved himself to be “blind,” just as his name “swollen foot” conjoins physical fact with personal identity. The Achaeans maroon Philoctetes because his putrid leg offends, and his cries of pain disturb their religious rites. Philoctetes

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cannot be separated from the effect that his body has on others, until the crisis at Troy overwhelms these considerations and makes a cure possible. Put simply, the fates of Oedipus and Philoctetes are inextricably “embodied”—in a sense, each one “is” his wound. To arrive at this point, we have moved from the social and political worlds implicit in the notion of return and homecoming, to the isolated realms of er¯emia, and finally to the place of individual physical bodies on the stage. In this chapter, we deal with the formative and transformative function of physical corporality in terms of our six spatial categories. Having glimpsed these processes in previous chapters, let us outline a basic approach that we can apply to specific tragedies: the body per se as spatial; the body as a representation or symbol of a place or places; the actor’s body as a locus of conflicting spaces. Lefebvre reminds us that “each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space.”2 This situation applies a fortiori in the theater, as discussed in the introduction. In the case of choral lyric, for example, the active presence of the chorus may reveal its physical and psychological state, as when the slave women in Choephori mark their grief with gashed cheeks, rent clothes, veiled faces, cropped hair, and beaten breasts (Cho. 22–31, 82–85, 423–28). On the other hand, by harnessing the power of human bodies in a group, the song and dance of Greek lyric can evoke distant worlds (the so-called escape odes of Euripides), or reenact past events (the sacrifice of Iphigenia in the parodos of Agamemnon, or the hero’s mythic labors in Heracles), or charge the theater with new physical energy that enables the plot to move in a different direction (the shield of Achilles’ chorus in Electra). Without the presence of the chorus and characters before an audience (ideally in the theater, at minimum in the imagination), Greek tragedy reverts to a text read like a novel, denied its phenomenological potential. How a dramatic character treats his or her body helps create that character’s reality, establishing a dramatic context and “fleshing it out.” Orestes cuts off a lock of hair and places it on his father’s tomb, merging the funeral ritual with the initiatory rites of a young man becoming an adult. The bodily evidence of his footprints and hair convert the tomb into a place of reunion (Cho. 166–211) and a wellspring for the forces of vengeance. Other compulsions working on Orestes include Apollo’s threat to infect his body if he fails to act (Cho. 270– 90), and the news that Clytemnestra mutilated Agamemnon’s corpse (439– 43).3 His mother’s dream, in which she suckles a snake that drinks her milk and blood (523–25), anticipates the physical action of Clytemnestra baring her breast to her son (however represented by the original male actor), which momentarily stalls Orestes (896–99). The display of her corpse at the end of the play brings on the Furies, eager to suck Orestes’ blood in a reverse image of Clytemnestra’s dream (Eum. 183–84, 263–68). Their frightening

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bodies and powerful dance release extraordinary energy in performance, enabling the no less remarkable transformation at the end of the trilogy. The body when dressed or undressed evokes different spaces and different worlds, as the Furies’ donning red robes at the end of Eumenides illustrates. Gibson observes that the ecological self does not equal the biological self, because we usually perceive people (including ourselves) with clothes on. By extending the body, garments can carry their own meanings, a fact the theater long has exploited, from the shield sequence in Seven against Thebes (“the gradual masking of the human form behind metal”)4 to the undressing and reclothing of Shakespeare’s Lear, from the rags of Euripides’ Electra to Gogo’s dropped trousers in Waiting for Godot. Consider the jarring appearance of the Chorus wearing black at the sanctuary of Eleusis in Suppliant Women; the young bride Evadne and Sophocles’ Antigone (in her final appearance) incongruously dressed for their weddings; Menelaus arriving alone and in rags at the Egyptian palace in Helen.5 The fact that Orestes appears barefoot in Choephori recalls his father’s homecoming, when he removes his shoes before walking on the tapestries (Ag. 944–46). Agamemnon’s symbolic action prefigures Cassandra’s removal of her prophetic robes, signaling that she abandons the god (Apollo) who has abandoned her. In the other direction, Orestes and Pylades disguise themselves with their traveling cloaks at the palace in Choephori, marking themselves as xenoi ‘outsiders’. This short-lived homecoming (Orestes flees Argos for Delphi) finds its dramatic fulfillment only when the Furies, dressed in their new robes like metics at the Panathenaia, take up residence in Athens. Transformative effects of the body multiply when recognizable gestures combine with appropriate speech and costume to open up different worlds. In tragedy, these might include the realms of supplication, sacrifice, prayer, initiation, childbirth, exile, military training, funerals, weddings. As Mary Douglas observes, “rituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body,” giving visible expression to the social relations enacted in the various rites.6 Frequently these gestural worlds fit the scenic space of a tragedy perfectly—that Megara and her family in Heracles supplicate at the altar of Zeus Sot¯ ¯ er makes sense, given that they are besieged outside their home. But when the Nurse supplicates the Tutor in Medea, pleading that he divulge the latest gossip (Med. 65), something is amiss. Euripides sets these household servants against the legendary figure of Jason, whose life-or-death supplication of Medea led to the recovery of the Golden Fleece (Med. 492–98).7 By these suppliant acts (there are others in the play), Euripides’ conflates the domestic and heroic worlds, questioning the assumptions that underlie them both.8 Dead bodies possess a special power to transform the spaces of tragedy, because the human corpse (as such) does not revert immediately to nature, but remains a part of culture.9 The recovery of the corpses of the Seven leads

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to Adrastus’ funeral oration in Suppliant Women, moving the audience’s perception of the setting away from Eleusis and toward the Athenian Kerameikos. The corpse of Eurydice, revealed on the altar of Zeus Herkeios in Antigone, collapses the public world of Thebes into the broken home of its erstwhile ruler. In Ajax, we have seen how the hero’s body transforms a desolate beach into a place of protective power and public contention. In contrast, the appearance of Astyanax’ corpse in Trojan Women (1173–99) underlines the futility of the play’s political and moral debates. The Chorus joins Hecuba in preparing the body for burial (Tro. 1200–1250), the ritual sign that the civilization of Troy has expired, with no hope of recovery. The boy’s funeral pyre merges with the burning city, and the Trojan women take their bodies—now chattel of their Greek masters—down to the ships (1260–1334). In Agamemnon, the proliferation of the distant dead makes the murder of the returned king seem inevitable.10 The Greeks burn Troy to ashes (Ag. 818– 20), but only after the cremated remains of numerous comrades are sent home in funeral urns (433–44), and other Greeks leave their “lovely bodies” (eumorphoi) buried in the land they ostensibly conquered (452–55). The Herald lingers over the physical discomforts of war (heat, damp, cold, lice; Ag. 555–66), before reporting the storm that made the Aegean “flower with Greek corpses” (659–60). In her account of waiting at home for her husband’s return, Clytemnestra emphasizes the bodily details spread by rumor: Again and again rumor spilt his blood ...... If he were wounded so many times, his flesh would have more holes than a fishing net. Or if he had died as often as they said, he would be three corpses now, a second Geryon, and it would take three mounds of earth to cover his death. (Ag. 863–72)

These imaginary deaths, requiring three bodies to hold the wounds and three graves for the corpses, lead to the thing itself, the revelation of Clytemnestra standing over her dead husband and his concubine Cassandra. As noted in chapter 2, the presence of the king’s corpse eventually transforms the mood in the theater from murderous celebration to communal grief. The full executive power of a body to transform space—effecting a change in real behavior, outside the theater—must wait for Eumenides, when Orestes vows that his corpse will guarantee the historical alliance of Argos and Athens. As Cassirer observes, “The body is by no means indifferent to the place in which it is located and by which it is enclosed; rather, it stands in a real and causal relation to it.”11 But the body also “provides a basic scheme for all

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symbolism,” as Douglas demonstrates, and this is especially true in the theater.12 Bodies in Greek tragedy exercise this symbolic power in three interconnected ways—via synecdoche (a part for the whole), anthropomorphism (the body extended beyond the human), and the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm (a form of synecdoche in which the “part” is a miniature). Starting small, the tragedians employ the common Greek practice of addressing a character in terms of a key anatomical part, particularly the head (kara) and eye (omma).13 Such habits of speech occur across cultures, varying only in regard to the favored part that stands for the person: head, hair, eyes, mouth, heart, hands, sexual organs. Moving to a wider field, tragic characters often substitute a person for his or her family: Electra and Orestes view themselves as the symbolic remnants of the house of Atreus, the saving seed (Ag. 235–36, 502–5) and rootstock of a royal line (260–63), the corks that keep the net afloat (506–7). Paraphrasing Andromache’s speech to Hector in Iliad 6, Aeschylus’ Electra addresses Orestes as her dead father, as a replacement for her hated mother, as the object of the love she once had for her sister Iphigeneia, and finally as the biological brother he in fact is (Cho. 235– 44). Tecmessa characterizes her relationship to Ajax in similar terms (see chapter 3), a single body representing family members both distant and dead. Turning from bodily synecdoche to the anthropomorphism integral to Greek culture, we begin with the ancient penchant for using the human form to describe elements in the natural world. A river, bay, or cave can have a “mouth” (stoma); a mountain has a “foot” (pous), “limbs” (kn¯emoi, either lower slopes or a projecting “shoulder”), “neck” (deiras, upper slope or ridge), “brow” or “eyebrow” (ophrus, crag), and “head” (kara, kar¯enon, peak); the sun has a “face” or “countenance” (pros¯opon) and an “eye” (omma, ophthalmos, blepharon), as does the moon, the dawn, and the night.14 When the Oceanids mourn for Prometheus, they imagine the peoples of the world adding their voices, until the earth herself joins in: And the waves of the salt sea cry out as they break, and the ocean depths groan, even the dark abyss of Hades roars underground, and the streams of the pure-flowing rivers lament your bitter suffering. (A. PV 431–35)

So great is Prometheus’ pain that the Chorus hears the natural world joining its lament.15 But nature also takes delight in humanlike responses, as in the myth of Orpheus, where the poet’s song entices the trees and animals to move and dance like their human counterparts. So, too, man-made artifacts can assume human attributes. In his monograph on making auloi, for instance, Aristoxenus identifies the differently

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pitched instruments as parthenioi (“girl-type”), paidikoi (“boy-type”), teleioi (“grown-up-type”), and huperteleioi (“super-grown-up-type”).16 Architectural columns reveal metaphorical—and occasionally mimetic—links to the human form, and ceramic vases could possess lips, necks, shoulders, ears [handles], bodies, and feet.17 Some vase shapes directly imitate parts of the human body, such as the female breast in the mastos (nipple) and mastoid cups and male genitalia as the base for some eye cups.18 Moving from shape to painted decoration, drinking cups often bear depictions of human eyes, so that the symposiast displays a painted, masklike visage when he tilts back his kylix to drink. Some cups have bottoms painted with a face, so that the upturned vessel replaces the face of the drinker. Functioning like a theatrical mask, these cups emphasize the performative aspects of the symposium, a festive occasion (like the theater) tied to the god Dionysus.19 As well as personifying natural objects and human artifacts, the Greeks worshiped anthropomorphic deities, ubiquitous in a city like Athens with public buildings bearing their sculpted representations. By using fully human images for their pantheon, the Greeks differed from their Mediterranean neighbors, the Egyptians, Persians, and Jews.20 On the tragic and comic stage, the Greek gods appeared “in the flesh,” enacted by human performers. Not only were canonical deities humanly configured; lesser-known divinities and more abstract forces also took personified form, like “Madness” (Lyssa) in Heracles.21 “Destiny” (Aisa) forges its armor like a bronzesmith (Ag. 646– 47); the “far-seeing Curses” (Arai) must be grappled with like a wrestler (Cho. 692–93); “aged murder” (ger¯on phonos) bears children in the house (Cho. 805); “time” (chronos) walks through the doors of the palace (Cho. 965–66).22 Most significant, the spirits of vengeance in the Oresteia finally appear as human-shaped Furies, moving from horrific apparitions to the prosecutors of a homicide trial. By taking up residence among the autochthonous citizens of Athens, the Furies metaphorically sow the anthropomorphic impulse they represent back into the soil, guaranteeing the earth’s fertility, the people’s procreativity, and the health of the city as a whole. The Furies’ transformation reflects the tendency of the early cosmologists (discussed in the appendix) to conceive the phenomenal world as a living being, analogous to a human body.23 A relationship of macrocosm to microcosm obtains when the social institutions of oikos and polis take on human features, an analogy of function rather than form. The Watchman conjures a speaking house (Ag. 37–38), and the Chorus hopes that it can raise itself up from its fallen position (Cho. 963– 64). Like any mortal body, the city can fall sick, and the Chorus imagines that Argos will find its way back to health (Cho. 471–74). Agamemnon personifies his city as a diseased patient (Ag. 848–50), but he remains unaware that he is to be part of the cure, belated homeopathy for the brutality his father Atreus worked on the bodies of Thyestes’ children.24 Finally, Agamemnon’s exposed corpse symbolizes the end of the old political order of Argos,

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killed off by Aegisthus, who will never (as Agamemnon did) “call general assemblies and hear all sides” (Ag. 844–46). What happens to a tragic body can extend to the house or city that it comes to represent.25 In Aeschylus’ Persians, for example, Atossa refers to “the lord of the house” as its “eye” (168–69), but Xerxes stands for more than that. When he returns from Greece with empty quiver and tattered clothes (stol¯e, 1017, both “garments” and “fleet”), the bedraggled emperor provides the physical correlative for his ruined empire, the wasted finery and useless weapons representing the lost riches of Persia (A. Pers. 1017–23).26 We see a graphic demonstration of this relationship in Euripides’ Bacchae, where the dismembered Pentheus is homologous with the fragmented city he once ruled. The symbolic extension of a ruler’s body to his domain—the figurative basis for the plague in Oedipus Tyrannus—was not limited to tragic myth. Kimon’s recovery of Theseus’ bones and their reburial in Athens (ca. 475) indicates that the Athenians recognized the political power implicit in viewing a hero’s body as an allegory for the polis at large.27 Turning to the presence of the actor, we discuss in previous chapters how role-doubling can call to mind an absent character previously played by the same actor: Athena (Aethra) in Suppliant Women, Teukros (Ajax) in Ajax, Athena (Clytemnestra and her “dream”) in the Oresteia. In Sophocles’ Trachiniae, Deianeira seems to live again through Heracles, who is carried into the orchestra lying on a litter, “racked with unceasing [labor] pains [odunai],” his body veiled like a woman’s (S. Tr. 986, 1078). He “weeps like a girl” (h¯oste parthenos / bebrucha klai¯on, 1071), a “wretched womanly thing” (th¯elus . . . talas, 1075), crying out against his wife, “a woman [gun¯e], a female [th¯elus] unmanly by nature” who killed him “without a sword” (1062–63).28 We know that Deianeira has, in fact, killed herself with a sword, in the extrascenic space of the house (915–42). By means of role-doubling, Sophocles blurs the spatial separation and social difference between men and women. Heracles suffers like a woman in childbirth, but he does so outside in the public world. Deianeira dies “in the middle of her marriage bed” (en mesoisin eunat¯eriois, 918), but she does so by driving a male weapon through her body (930–31).29 Certainty in role distribution frequently eludes us,30 but it seems likely that significant male-female pairings also occur in Aeschylus’ Seven (brother-sister, Eteocles and Antigone) and Persians (mother-son, Atossa and Xerxes), in Sophocles’ Electra (Orestes and Clytemnestra), and in Euripides’ Hippolytus (wife-husband, Phaedra and Theseus) and Bacchae (son-mother, Pentheus and Agave). In their different combinations, each play transforms the spaces associated with men and women, overlaying one on the other. A rough pattern emerges in which the male character returns from a distant war or adventure while the female character waits at home, but role-doubling implicitly complicates that spatial division. In the case of the Bacchae, the spatial inversion is made explicit.

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In Euripides’ Heracles, the doubling of Lycus and Heracles forcefully juxtaposes conflicting spaces, especially when Lycus returns to finish off Heracles’ family (HF 701–25). Amphitryon urges Lycus to enter the extrascenic space of the house, where the family has moved to the altar of Hestia (715), discussed in chapter 2. Blindly self-assured, Lycus boasts that Heracles “is not present now nor will he ever return” (718), a spring-loaded double entendre given Heracles’ presence offstage, lying in wait, and the presence of the Heracles’ actor onstage, appearing as Lycus. On entering the extrascenic space, the protagonist “switches roles” and becomes Lycus’ assassin. The irony turns tragic when Heracles’ madness sets him against his own wife and sons, accomplishing what Lycus had planned to do from the outset.31 Heracles forces his family to take refuge at the very altar where they had pretended to be clinging for safety from the tyrant. The infernal transformation of his home opens the abyss at the heart of the play, but Euripides suggests the basic instability earlier, by having the same actor play the usurper, the savior, and the savior-turned-destroyer. On more than one occasion, the actor who delivers the messenger’s account also plays the character whose suffering he describes.32 In Hippolytus, the Hippolytus-actor returns as the Messenger, bringing news of the young man’s agony on the shore. The actor who reports the miraculous sacrifice in Iphigeneia in Aulis has just played the heroine, departing for her death only twenty-one lines before returning as the Messenger. The Handmaid in Alcestis, who describes her mistress’s farewell to her house and marriage-bed, is played by the same actor who enters thirty lines later as Alcestis herself. The events from the extrascenic or distanced spaces literally come together in the actor onstage; in the process the spectators become aware of the self-referential space that role-doubling implicitly exploits. We have sketched out some of the ways the body on stage creates a sense of place, which it can then transform—via its physical presence, as a source of recognizable gesture and behavior, as a symbol of larger entities and forces (including the divine), and as a multiple-role-playing actor. Let us apply these observations to three heavily “embodied” plays, Euripides’ Hecuba, Electra, and Bacchae.

Hecuba: The Body as Measure We are a landscape of all we know. —Isamu Noguchi

The manifold horrors of Euripides’ Hecuba are played out on the bodies of its characters, more so than in any other tragedy.33 After the prologue delivered by the “disembodied” ghost of Polydorus (who describes his own corpse floating in the surf), the Trojan queen enters in the rags of a slave, physically

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supported by her former subjects (59–64). When Odysseus leads Polyxena off to die, Hecuba falls to the ground (438–43) where she remains through the first stasimon (444–501).34 Hecuba recovers to hear Talthybius describe Polyxena’s sacrifice, a deed of masculine brutality against a markedly female body: Polyxena awaits the blade “kneeling naked to the waist, her breasts / lovely as a goddess’s statue” (560–61). Prepared to bury her daughter, Hecuba suffers a further shock when the body of her son Polydorus— hacked and dismembered (716–20, 781–82)—is brought on stage. The presence of Polydorus’ corpse dominates the second half of the play,35 prompting Hecuba’s wild vengeance against Polymestor. She kills his young sons, whose bodies she exposes for all to see, and blinds her former ally, reducing him to a creature crawling on all fours. The future, too, holds corporal devastation, for Polymestor prophesies the murder of Agamemnon and Cassandra, and the metamorphosis of Hecuba into a demonic hound. From a speaking ghost to his silent corpse, from an enslaved princess to a sacrificial victim, from a queen-turned-slave in the dust to a king-provedthug crawling on the ground, Hecuba presents a memorable array of tortured and suffering bodies. They offer the human measure and physical image of the larger disasters of the play: the hubris of the conquering army, the betrayal of a trusted ally, the fall of a great city, the moral degradation of its queen, and the brutality that awaits its surviving women. In the prologue the ghost of Polydorus, “youngest of the sons of Priam” (13), appears on high, far above his sea-washed body: I lie near the shore, tossed in the sea swell, borne this way and that in the waves’ ebb and flow, unwept and unburied. Having deserted my own body, now I dart around my dear mother Hecuba, hovering here these past three days. (Hec. 28–32)36

The doppelg¨anger effect—a ghost describing his mortal coil—casts an eerie shadow over the postwar world of the play. Like the city of Troy, once thriving but now in ruins, the body of Polydorus is real but dead. Only his ghost, present but disembodied, can tell the tale. Polydorus’ spirit also haunts the dreams of his mother, just offstage in Agamemnon’s tent. In a dovetailed transition from ghostly prologue to living monody, her son departs as Hecuba enters, frightened by what she has dreamed, the nightmare version of the very ghost we have just seen. This pattern continues, as the play oscillates between living bodies who try to influence events and the disembodied dead who affect the action from the “other side.” Polydorus’ ghost—that of a boy, “a child whose future does not exist”37 — describes another specter, man-killing Achilles, who has risen from his tomb to demand the blood of Polyxena before the Greeks sail for home. Ghosts are

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relatively rare in tragedy, but to have one wraith invoke another is unprecedented. In so doing, Polydorus pairs the sacrifice of his sister Polyxena at the nearby tomb of Achilles (37–44) with the murder of Priam at the hearthaltar at Troy (21–24), both performed by the “son of Achilles,” Neoptolemus (24, 224, 523).39 Polydorus describes the play’s other important places in terms of bodies already dead or soon to fall: the Thracian court where he was cut down for gold (7–15, 25–27); the sea where his own body floats in the surge (26–30, 47–48); the boundaries and towers of Troy that now lie in ruins (16–17), the men killed and women enslaved; the tent of Agamemnon where Hecuba is quartered (30–34, 52–58), above which Polydorus’ ghost appears, and where his mother and the Trojan women will kill Polymestor’s sons. In the prophecies at the end of the play, Polymestor also invokes places by their significant bodies. He introduces Cynossema (“Bitch’s Grave”) where Hecuba’s corpse will lie, after she turns into a “bitch with fiery eyes” (1259– 75), and he brings up the distant city of Argos where Cassandra will fall (1275–78) and “a murderous bath awaits [Agamemnon]” (1281). Marking out space via the bodies of the suffering and the dead, Euripides exploits a complex interplay among the physically present (the living characters), the present but disembodied (Polydorus’ ghost), the unseen but fully “embodied” by virtue of their physical actions (Neoptolemus as killer of Polyxena, Cassandra as lover of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra as butcher of Agamemnon), the unseen and disembodied (Achilles’ ghost, the dead Priam), those who leave the stage only to be brought back as corpses (Polyxena, Polymestor’s sons, Polydorus), and those who depart to a projected death (Hecuba and Agamemnon). This interplay of place and bodies (ranging from the nebulous to the graphically present) helps to fix the setting of the Thracian Chersonese (Dry Island) as an appropriate one for exploring the moral and social breakdown after the Trojan War. By its very impermanence, the transit camp constitutes a “moral no-man’sland” where the civilized values of the polis (such as they are) cannot be guaranteed.40 Even the Thracian ruler Polymestor, apparently on good terms with both the Trojans and the Greek invaders (858–60, 982–83), makes much of his having traveled from home to visit the Chersonese (963–67, 976–77). He is no more at ease on “dry island” than the Trojans and Greeks, as his armed arrival with attendants suggests.41 It is significant that Euripides sets the action here, and not at the scene of the conquered city (like Trojan Women), or the place of triumphant return (like Agamemnon), or the palace of a foreign king encountered on the journey home (like Helen). Pericles had settled a cleruchy at the Chersonese in the 450s, which paid tribute at the City Dionysia and played an important role in supplying Athens with grain.42 Perhaps this fact encouraged the Athenians in the audience to watch the play with an eye to their own city, much like the (fictionally) depopulated Lemnos of Philoctetes, discussed in the previous chapter. The Chersonese may have

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been a way station in the saga of Troy, but it had direct links to fifth-century Athens.43 At an emotional turning point in the drama, Hecuba despairs of convincing Agamemnon to allow her to take vengeance on Polymestor: If only I had a voice in my arms, hands, hair, the steps of my feet— through the skill of Daedalus or one of the gods— so that all together they took your knees in supplication, weeping, moving you with every form of plea and argument. (837–41)

In her outburst Hecuba imagines a relationship between space and the body very different from the one outlined here. Far from aligning her physical presence with the place she finds herself, she wishes that her entire body could be transformed into a persuasive voice, uniquely multitudinous, with the emotional, supplicatory, rhetorical, and rational power to “become” the message she cannot communicate in words alone.44 Caught without hope in a place that barely exists, Hecuba lets loose a utopian cry for a new artistic creation (fashioned out of herself by Daedalus or one of the gods), one that would prove so totally coherent—different elements harnessed to the same end—as to penetrate and overwhelm simultaneously Agamemnon’s resistance. Hecuba’s wish reflects her earlier failure to persuade the Greeks to spare Polyxena. One by one, Odysseus rejects her arguments: human sacrifice makes no sense (258–61); Helen would make a more fitting victim (262– 70); Odysseus should repay Hecuba for saving his life at Troy (272–78); he should pity what she has suffered (279–81); the Greeks should learn the reversibility of fortune and avoid hubris (282–85); they should sacrifice Hecuba herself (as the mother of Paris) rather than the innocent Polyxena (383–88); both she and her daughter should die together, offering Achilles’ ghost twice the Trojan blood (391–400).45 Not only does Hecuba fail to persuade Odysseus; he turns away from Polyxena and hides his right hand, preventing her from supplicating him like her mother (339–45). By scrupulously avoiding physical contact with the intended victim, Odysseus demonstrates his resistance to any form of Trojan pleading. In Hecuba’s subsequent appeal to Agamemnon, her body does not become an “all persuasive” totality. However, she finds him open to a different kind of bodily persuasion, arising from his carnal desire for Cassandra: And yet—this may seem foreign to my argument, bringing up sexual desire, but I’ll say it nonetheless— my daughter has been sleeping by your side,

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Apollo’s priestess, whom the Trojans call Cassandra. How will you reckon these nights of loving, lord? For those sweet caresses in bed, what thanks will my daughter get, or will I get on her behalf? Listen to me. Do you see this boy [Polydorus] lying dead? Do well by him, and you do well by your “new relatives.” (824–35)

Hecuba initiates one of the more sordid exchanges in tragedy, not in vocabulary (which tends to the euphemistic) but in content. The sexual violation of Cassandra—both as Hecuba’s unmarried daughter and as a priestess of Apollo—mocks the idea of the holy. The level to which Hecuba has sunk is measured on the body of her offspring, moving from the world of persuasive rhetoric and ritual supplication to the material exchange of the brothel (hinted earlier by the Chorus at 120–29).46 Hecuba’s wish for a body with irresistible persuasive power has been granted—not in her own person but in that of her daughter. Instead of a transcendent “new creation” that might convert the Chersonese into a place of unmediated communication, Euripides delivers us back to a military camp where captive women exploit their bodies for what little advantage they can. We might compare Hecuba’s “offering” of Cassandra to the sacrifice of Polyxena, a very different manifestation of the body’s erotic power to affect the space around it. By using the only physical agency she has left, the virgin girl shows the Greek army to be both cold-blooded butchers and warmblooded voyeurs. “Let no one [of you] touch my skin” (548–49), Polyxena says, keeping her person inviolable to everything except the death blow. Before the “whole crowd of the Achaean army” (521), she rips her robe from her shoulder, exposing to the blade her neck and breasts, “lovely as a goddess’s statue.” When Neoptolemus slits her throat and the “springs gush forth,” she has the self-possession to “fall modestly / hiding what ought to be hidden from male eyes” (568–70).47 The manner in which Polyxena meets her death has a powerful impact on her slayer, who proceeds “both willingly and unwillingly” (566). The Greek soldiers, too, are deeply affected, roaring assent when she asks not to be manhandled (553), then busying themselves with her pyre and funeral offerings after she dies (571–80). Euripides offers a variety of perspectives on the sacrifice of Polyxena: as an existential choice in the face of the inevitable; as a violent exhibition of male bloodletting; as a display of the eroticized female body, transforming men into rapt spectators unable to stop watching what they no longer want to see. As part of the litany of the Greek conquest, Polyxena’s sacrifice represents the violation of a defenseless female culled from the captive population. More specifically, her death exploits and perverts the socially sanctioned exchange of women in marriage. Odysseus refuses any other victim (Helen,

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Hecuba); only the blood of the nubile Polyxena will satisfy Achilles’ ghost. That the hero’s unmarried son Neoptolemus wields the knife gives the act an additional nuptial charge, as does its structural similarity to the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, whom Agamemnon lured to Aulis with the false promise of marriage to the young Achilles, dramatized in Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis.48 Details surrounding Polyxena’s death refer to several aspects of the Greek wedding, converting the erotic and procreative possibilities of marriage into their fatal opposite.49 Her murder also mocks the ritual exchange of sacrifice itself, understood as an offering to divine powers for help or in thanksgiving, discussed in chapter 1. By dedicating a human victim to a dead mortal, the Greeks collapse the essential distinction between domestic animals (the normal victims) and the gods (the normal recipients), assimilating them both to the human level of the sacrificing agent.50 Throughout these maimed rituals—supplication, marriage, sacrifice— Polyxena maintains her autonomy and dies a free woman, both offering and preserving her body at the moment of death. Her self-possession and selfrevelation enable her to avoid what her mother cannot, a descent into the moral abyss.51 By exploiting the eroticized body of her other daughter Cassandra, Hecuba prostitutes her family to one enemy (Agamemnon) in order to punish another (Polymestor). While not condemning her solicitation of the Greek leader, the Chorus acknowledges its strangeness: Strange [deinon ge], how things fall out for humans as the laws of necessity direct their course, making allies of the deadliest of enemies, and turning former friends into bitter foes. (846–49)52

The trade in flesh operates even more blatantly with Polymestor’s murder of Polydorus, betraying the sacred xenos relationship under which Priam had entrusted his son. Instead of caring for and nurturing the young man, the Thracian king turned mercenary, killing him for his wealth, mutilating his body, and trying to prevent its discovery by dumping it into the sea.53 Once again, an accepted form of social exchange suffers an obscene deformation via the commodification of the key body in question, that of Polydorus, which Polymestor “trades in” for the gold that came with it.54 If Polymestor abandons his human and xenos responsibilities for lucre, then Hecuba abandons her maternal instincts for vengeance. Earlier in the play she epitomizes motherly concern, urging her daughter Polyxena to appeal to Odysseus as a man who has fathered offspring: “You have grounds to plead, for he too has children” (340–41). When Odysseus turns a deaf ear, Hecuba tells him to kill her instead of Polyxena, because her body gave birth to Paris, the cause of the war (387–88). In her pleas to Agamemnon, she again emphasizes her bodily connection to her offspring: “You see this

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corpse, over whom I shed these tears? / . . . / Once I carried him in my womb, and gave him birth” (760–62). But these arguments have no effect. Only when Hecuba exploits Agamemnon’s sexual abuse of her child Cassandra does she gain his help in exacting vengeance on Polymestor. Until this point in the play, the extrascenic space of the tent seems like a female oasis within the military camp.55 By luring the king and his sons inside with the promise of money (1012–22), however, Hecuba and her fellow captives transform the tent into a den of death.56 Initially the women sit on both sides of Polymestor, praising the weave of his rich cloak, holding it up to the sun’s rays, and admiring his Thracian spears until he finds himself disarmed (1150–56). At the same time “all the women who had children” (hosai de tokades e¯ san, 1157) dandle his young sons, passing them from hand to hand until they, too, stray beyond Polymestor’s reach. At that point the women draw swords hidden in their robes and stab the boys, then turn Polymestor’s eyes to gore with their brooch pins. The blinding of the king seems deserved, but the murder of his sons indicates how far Hecuba and the Trojan mothers have fallen, using innocent young children as the currency of revenge. Euripides projects Hecuba’s degradation onto the body of Polymestor, who comes out of the tent “on hand and foot / like a four-legged mountain beast” (1057–58), striving to sate himself “on their flesh and bones, / feasting like a savage animal” (1071–72). Agamemnon arrives in response to “no quiet sound of Echo, / child of the mountain crag” (1109–10), but to Polymestor’s wild cries, kraug¯e, a term for any loud clamor, including the baying of hounds. If Polymestor resembles a beast, so too do the intended victims on whom he wishes to feed. He compares the murderous women to bacchantes who dismembered his children and threw the scraps to wild mountain dogs (1075–78), later describing how he leapt after them “like a wild beast chasing murderous hounds” (1173). We are but a short distance from the metamorphosis of Hecuba into the demon-bitch with fiery eyes prophesied at the play’s close. The man we see before us—with black holes for eyes and groping on all fours—offers a proleptic vision of what Hecuba will become. Her death will then transform her into a permanent feature of the Chersonese, merging with the dog-shaped headland that will bear her name, Cynossema, “Bitch-Grave” (1265–73).57 The conversion of Hecuba’s body into the Thracian landscape points back to other, less bizarre connections between human bodies and distanced places, particularly Troy. The living remnants of the wasted city—Hecuba, Polyxena (before her death), the Chorus, Hecuba’s serving woman—remind us of Troy by their very presence. So, too, does the corpse of Polydorus, whose sea-sodden robes Agamemnon immediately recognizes as Trojan (733–35). The most powerful evocation of the distant city occurs in the third stasimon (905–52), when the Chorus relives the night of Troy’s fall,

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focusing on bodies both real and metaphoric. They describe the city “shorn of its crown [stephan¯e] of towers” (910–11), personifying Troy as a mourner who has cut her hair in grief, and as a woman who has lost her stephan¯e ‘headpiece’, ‘diadem’. The phrase resembles the epic formula linking the loss of a woman’s kr¯edemnon (veil, also crenellated tower) to the fall of a city and the sexual violation of its women.58 The Trojan women also recall how they did their hair before the mirror, preparing to join their men in bed, the final intimate celebration of the city’s apparent triumph (914–26). Instead of enjoying their marriage beds (933), however, the women watch the Greeks cut down their husbands, before they themselves are dragged off as slaves. From the Greek ships they gaze back on their lost city, cursing Helen and Paris whose bodies came together in a marital union that brought an end to their own (936–51). As indicated by Hecuba’s “negotiation” with Agamemnon over Cassandra, the sexual violation of the Trojan women is the reality that underlies their presence onstage, living embodiments of the rape of Troy. The captive women also conjure the distant land of Greece, imagining their possible destination as slaves (444–83), naming Doris [the Peloponnese], Phthia, Delos, and Athens, each identified by a famous geographical or cultural feature.59 In the second stasimon they focus suddenly on the Peloponnese, imagining a young Spartan widow by the banks of the Eurotas, mourning the death of her husband at Troy (650–52). This moment of empathy for a distant enemy is remarkable in a play where friends prove hostile and moral standards collapse. Argos is the only other Greek city named in the play, when Polymestor prophesies that a “bloodbath” (phonia loutra, 1281) awaits Agamemenon on his return home. Regarding other distant spaces, Thrace and the Thracian court figure in Polydorus’ account of his own murder (6–9, 19–27), in Hecuba’s fear of (79–82) and outrage at (681–729, 768–82) Polymestor’s deceit, and most prominently in the arrival onstage of the barbarian king and his entourage (952). Polydorus’ corpse literally embodies his betrayal in the Thracian palace, and the dead bodies of the king’s sons mark the destruction of that royal house, just as the corpses of Polydorus and Polyxena signal the end of any future for Troy. As for Achilles’ tomb, its location in the transit camp seems anomalous, for we assume that the Greeks would have buried and memorialized their hero where he fought and fell.60 Mentioned by Polydorus and Hecuba, the tomb moves fully into focus during the description of Polyxena’s sacrifice, another example of bodies in extremis creating and transforming the various spaces of the play. Although lacking a representative onstage, Athens comes into view most clearly through the characters’ participation in some form of Athenian social and political practice. The assembly that considers Polyxena’s fate—with argument and debate (107–31), demagoguery from the “smooth-talking, crowd pleasing” (h¯edulogos d¯emocharist¯es) Odysseus (131–40), and a decision

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taken by vote (196, 218–19, 259)—seems modeled on the assembly meetings at the Pnyx. Odysseus even reports the Greek decision using the formula of an Athenian decree: “The Greeks have resolved . . .” (220).61 Hecuba’s outburst against political grandstanding is no less topical, attacking Odysseus and “the whole disgusting race of people like you, who crave / the glory of the demagogue . . . / and don’t give a thought to harming your friends / as long as you say something that flatters the crowd” (254–57).62 Scattered through the play we also find allusions to Athenian law and legal practice. Hecuba reminds Odysseus that “your law against bloodshed [for suppliants] is the same for freemen and slaves alike” (291–92), an apparent reference to an Athenian statute.63 The “trial” of Polymestor, with Agamemnon presiding, has some parallels with those held at the Athenian homicide courts, particularly the perfectly balanced speeches—fifty lines each—by Polymestor (1132–82) and Hecuba (1187–1237), the dramatic equivalent of equal-time allotment from the klepsydra.64 Hecuba in particular delivers a rhetorical tour de force, including a formal preamble, a point-by-point rebuttal of her opponent’s claims, appeals made to probability and moral law, and a recapitulating conclusion.65 Her forensic display, mutatis mutandis, could have been written by a professional speech writer for his client, a common practice in Athenian courts from the late fifth century. Earlier Hecuba despairs that mortals study many things but fail to acquire the most important skill, persuasion, which “one can learn by paying fees” (misthous didontes manthanein, 814–19).66 This allusion to Sophistic teaching for hire—made popular in Athens by Euripides’ contemporaries Hippias, Gorgias, Prodicus, and Protagoras—follows Hecuba’s reflection on the relative importance of heredity and education in raising a noble child (592–602), a topos of Athenian intellectual speculation.67 By their placement and context, these theatrical versions of political and legal practice do not simply mirror what happened in the Athenian polis; they call its efficacy and purpose into question. Odysseus’ persuasive rhetoric before a democratic Greek assembly—an institution on which Athenians prided themselves—is in the service of human sacrifice, an act foreign to fifth-century religion. In setting up the trial scene, Euripides “creates a situation where the standards of public policy in the assembly confront the standards of private justice in the law courts,” as Segal observes. By ignoring issues of guilt and innocence and appealing only to Greek self-interest, Polymestor confuses “a deliberative debate and bouleutic oratory with judicial debate and dicastic oratory.”68 While the scene evokes the public courts of contemporary Athens, it travesties the law from start to finish. The punishment precedes the verdict; the judge, in collusion with Hecuba (850–904), only feigns impartiality; the corpses of the young boys, on view throughout the scene, undermine a judicial process that ignores their physical reality in favor of verbal display. In each of these “Athenian moments,” the bodies in

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question (Polydorus, the Trojan women, Polyxena, Polymestor’s sons) undermine the civilized practice that would normalize or excuse their violation. At the end of the tragedy, the prophesied metamorphosis of Hecuba indicates where persuasion, education, democracy, and rule of law finally lead the protagonist. For all the civic and religious environments that the play temporarily inhabits, Hecuba’s debased body has the last word, barking and glowering with the logos of a dog. As noted earlier, Polymestor (appearing houndlike on all fours) describes his dead children as a “banquet for the dogs,” that is, for the beasts that mauled them inside the tent. In the Iliad, canines gone wild provide a frightful image of the breakdown of civilization, as Priam imagines the dogs he has raised devouring his corpse (including his private parts) before his own doorway (Il. 22.66–76). At the end of Hecuba, Priam’s wife comes to embody that very image—a metaphorical dog in the tent, and a monstrous bitch after her theriomorphic translation. As a landmark for sailors, she will stand as a signal of the collapse of civilization at Troy and at the Chersonese.69 When imagining their new homes in Greece, the women of the Chorus linger over a possible life in Athens, where they picture themselves embroidering the peplos for the city’s goddess at the Panathenaia (466–74). Conjuring the high point of the Attic festival year, the Trojan women imagine themselves playing the role reserved for virgin daughters of prominent Athenian citizens. As foreign slaves and mothers (475), however, they could never participate in the sacred weaving.70 Their future lot will resemble that envisaged and rejected by Polyxena—bought and sold like chattel; caught in the daily grind of cooking, cleaning, and working the loom; and subject to the sexual predations of male slaves (and their masters) when their work is done (360–66). Their touching evocation of a fantasy life in Athens highlights the depth of their fall into slavery, a contrast that would not have been lost on the fifth-century audience.71 As befits a play so focused on captives, slavery permeates the world of Hecuba.72 A slave by definition has no legal say over what happens to his or her person,73 any more than an amphora chooses its decoration, what liquid it holds, or where it is shipped. Given the freedom-based ideology of democracy, such powerlessness struck Athenians as anathema, prompting efforts to rationalize the enforced servitude of others. In particular, a new justification for slavery emerged after the defeat of the Persians, based on a “slave-barbarian equivalence.” Foreigners (particularly from the East) proved “natural slaves” because of their political subjugation to autocratic rulers, the effects of climate, and the influence of other environmental factors.74 But this ideology was challenged almost immediately by certain Sophists—Protagoras, Hippias, Antiphon (with views anticipated by Anaximander and Anaxago-

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ras)—popular in Athens from the mid-fifth century, who argued the natural unity of the human race.75 A papyrus fragment of Antiphon sums up this position: The laws of our neighbors we know and revere: the laws of those who live afar we neither know nor revere. Thus we have been made barbarians with regard to one another. For by nature we are all in every way made in the same fashion to be either barbarians or Greeks. That is what is shown by the things which are by nature necessary to all men. . . . [I]n all this no man is marked out as a barbarian or a Greek. We all breathe the air through our mouths and nostrils, and we all eat with our hands.76

Athenians dealt with the institution of slavery on a daily basis, employing (and often working side by side with) slaves in the home, in the fields, on large estates, as teachers and wet nurses, as prostitutes and hetairai, on military and naval campaigns, at public (temple) construction sites, in the potters’ quarter and other artisan workshops, in religious sanctuaries (such as Delphi), in the market, in the marble quarries, and (the most brutal situation of all) in the Lavrion silver mines. The Scythian archers who served as Athenian police were public slaves, as were the caretakers of the city’s buildings, street cleaners, and so on.77 Although no abolitionist movement emerged in classical Athens, the theater frequently raised the issue of slavery, often from the slave’s perspective, exploiting the tension between slavery as natural and slavery as unjust. Euripides, in particular, seems obsessed with the topic, and many of his characters condemn slavery’s unfairness and arbitrary nature. In Ion, for example, the young protagonist (and future ruler of Athens) begins the play as a temple slave, and at a later point the old Tutor exclaims, “Only one thing brings disgrace to a slave / —the name. In all else a slave is no worse / than a free man, if he is honest” (Ion 854–56).78 Baldry concludes “we are not far here from the thought that slavery is an artificial institution.“79 The focus on slavery here and in Hecuba recalls one of the most important preperformance activities at the City Dionysia, the annual announcement of manumitted slaves.80 It seems that slaves could attend the theater (household servants accompanying their oikos, for instance), and the manumission ceremony might serve to keep them obedient, on the slim chance that they, too, could one day gain their own freedom. However, when a slave character in a tragedy or comedy proclaimed his inherent equality, the effect on the douloi in the audience may have been less pacific. Given the prominence of Trojan slavery in Hecuba, it is significant that the Greeks at certain moments appear no freer than their captives. Hecuba upbraids Agamemnon for his reluctance to stand with her and Cassandra against Polymestor:

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Unbelievable! So there is no mortal anywhere who is free [eleutheros]. He is slave [doulos] either to money or to chance, or to the city’s masses, or to the law codes that keep him from doing what he wants. (863–67)81

Without straining the metaphor, Agamemnon is also a slave to his passion for Cassandra. Consider Hecuba’s successful appeal to him on her behalf; Agamemnon’s admission that he must avoid appearing to the Greeks to have plotted Polymestor’s death for the sake of Cassandra (854–56); and the Thracian king’s own prophecy of the murder of Agamemnon together with the Trojan prophetess in Argos (1275–84). Agamemnon is inextricably bound to the body of the concubine with whom he will die. We also come to view Polymestor as a slave, mastered by his lust for gold.82 And Hecuba herself, already a slave, would prefer to wreak vengeance on Polymestor than accept an offer of freedom: Agamemnon: Hecuba:

What do you beg for? Is it freedom [eleutheros] for your life? That is easily done. Not that. If I can take vengeance on evil men, I am willing to spend my whole life as a slave [ai¯ona ton sumpanta douleuein thel¯o]. (754–57)83

Freedom extends beyond controlling one’s body to exercising choice in the face of constraints both material (money, physical violence) and immaterial (public opinion, the lust for revenge). Those who choose poorly suffer a Euripidean version of Dante’s contrapasso—an embodied poetic justice where the criminal “wears” punishment that befits the crime. Seduced by bright gold into betrayal and murder, Polymestor pays with his sight.84 For killing Hecuba and Priam’s boy and dismembering the body, he loses his own sons, whose bodies also are “divided up” (diamoira¯o 716, 1076).85 As a deceptive liar and unwelcome prophet, he has his mouth gagged by Agamemnon’s men (1283–84). Finally, as an evil ruler and false friend, Polymestor finds himself abandoned and alone on a “desert [er¯emos] island” (1284–86). As for Agamemnon, he pays for his lust with death (along with his concubine), killed by his adulterous wife Clytemnestra. Already dehumanized by war and enslavement, Hecuba brutalizes herself further for the sake of vengeance and suffers physical metastasis (1266) into a beast. In the process, the queen of Troy—a city sacked by invaders from the sea—serves as a landmark for sailors to come. Only those who have been killed escape transformative justice, for their metamorphoses have ended. Their bodies await burial (1287–88), as the

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winds for Greece rise and the Trojan women make their way to the degradation that lies ahead: “Go to the harbors and tents, friends, / and discover what hardships slavery has in store. / Necessity is grim” (1293–95). In this bleak tragedy, the living body provides the space for suffering to adhere, where pain is measured and meted out, and untimely death offers the only release.

Euripides’ Electra: The Intimate Body There was Snowden’s secret, and he had spilled it all over the messy floor of the airplane. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Electra is an unsettling theatrical experience, one that depends—like its Sophoclean counterpart—on a bravura performance of its title role. Driven by surges of emotion, Euripides’ heroine pursues her revenge with frightening intensity, only to realize in the event that she and her brother have simply butchered their mother. On stage for all but two hundred lines, Electra— hair shorn, unkempt, dressed in rags—provides the focus of the play, and her insistent presence transforms the traditional emphasis on Orestes’ role as avenger. Although recent critics have tried to smooth away the harsh, and sometimes humorous, extremes of the play, Electra systematically undermines the heroic basis on which those interpretations are built. By combining the implications of the rural setting with the characters’ focus on the body, we may get closer to the play’s peculiar heart of darkness. The shift in setting from the palace and polis center of the house of Atreus (in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles) to an impoverished farmstead in the country allows for other, more intimate variations on the standard treatment of the revenge story.86 Out of the cottage appears a Farmer whose prologue eases the audience into Euripides’ version, explaining that he was given Electra in marriage but has respected her desires and not slept with her. Only rarely does tragedy reveal anything so personal about a character’s sexual life, but in Euripides’ play the heroine returns time and again to her anomalous status, wretchedly married, without conjugal fulfillment, and condemned by poverty to a life that is no life. Electra’s virgin marriage offers the bodily counterpart to her physical isolation in the country, core elements in the play’s manifold of displacements. Although critics invariably mention the unexpected rural setting, they fail to appreciate fully what it does for the play. In spatial terms, locating the

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action in the countryside decouples the site of revenge from the place of Agamemnon’s murder. The physical distancing does much to make the killing of Clytemnestra seem independent of her prior act of bloodshed, as though the world had changed so thoroughly that this matricide makes little sense. To emphasize the fact, Orestes never truly returns from exile; neither he nor Electra set foot in their father’s house during the play or in its aftermath. We learn from Castor in the deus-driven denouement that the son of Agamemnon will live in perpetual exile from his natal home, destined to found a new city in Arcadia (1250, 1273–75). Electra, too, must leave Argos and dwell in a foreign place, Phocis, with her new husband Pylades (1249, 1284–87). The Old Man’s assurance that Orestes can “seize your ancestral home and city” (610–11) proves false. The house of Atreus—along with Troy, the most important distant place in the play—finally withers away, disembodied, with no legitimate heirs to occupy it. The change in setting reverses the dramatic task of Choephori—a play that Electra consciously echoes—which requires that an incognito Orestes gain entrance to the palace. The challenge in Euripides’ version involves luring Clytemnestra away from the palace and into the rustic cottage, where a reluctant Orestes lies in wait. To accomplish this, Electra invents the ruse that she has given birth to a son and needs her mother’s help in performing the necessary rituals. That is, Electra uses her own body to provide the means of bridging the distance between the palace and the farm, between the lust and luxury of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and her own “deadly marriage” (thanasimos gamos, 247) in the country. Vernant thinks that for the ancient Greeks it was not intercourse but the biological and socially productive act of childbirth—the baby emerging from the womb—that marked the end of parthenos (virgin, maiden) status.87 By inventing a male child, Electra trades the irony inherent in her name (a-lektron ‘without a [marriage] bed’) for that of her dead sister, Iphigenia (she who causes the birth of strong offspring). In their arrivals to the scenic space, each character emphasizes its difficult physical access and out-of-the way location. Purposefully avoiding the town, Orestes limits his return (at least temporarily) to this spot near the Argive border. The region allows for quick escape, leaving him free to find his sister (“yoked in marriage and no longer a virgin”) and to learn what has transpired at the political center (94–106). The fact that he and Pylades arrive with baggage and slaves (pointedly referred to at 360 and 393–94) underlines Orestes’ status as an exile, a man who must carry his belongings and servants with him. As a point of comparison, we can hardly imagine Aeschylus’ or Sophocles’ Orestes weighed down with baggage on his arrival home.88 Similarly, the Old Man, sent for by Electra, labors up the steep path to the cottage, carrying wreaths, cheese, wine, and a lamb for the new guests. His difficulty in climbing (489–92), the rags that he wears (501), and the array of food he brings with him (aimed for immediate consumption, 494–

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99) introduce a physical reality we usually associate with Old Comedy. Did Euripides insist on a live lamb, for example, as Aristophanes doubtless did for Trygaeus’ sacrifice in Peace (937–1128)?89 The weighed-down arrivals of Orestes and the Old Man prepare the way for other encumbered bodies later in the play, transforming this out-of-the-way rural cottage into an incongruous scene of human violence. For her part, Electra enters the play carrying a jug on her head to bring water from the nearby stream (54–56). On her return, she performs the first strophe, mesode, and antistrophe (112–39) of her monody with the jug still on her head, eventually setting it down to allow her more freedom to lament (140–42).90 Perhaps this solitary jug remains in view, a silent reminder of the physical labor that Electra loves to loathe, and an image of forgotten purity—fresh water provided purification before and after sacrifice—in the midst of increasingly bloody business.91 The Chorus arrives to invite Electra to the festival of Hera in Argos, which it learned of belatedly from a “milk-drinking, mountain-roaming” herdsman (169–74). Like Electra, the women of the Chorus live at a remote distance from the city’s political and ritual life.92 They bring with them clothes and adornments for the body, offering Electra appropriate raiment and jewelry for the celebration (189–92). Although she complains about her rags and social isolation (181–89, 207–10), Electra refuses both the gifts and the invitation (175–80), indicating that a civic ritual like the Argive Heraia has no place in her world.93 In contrast to the Chorus and other characters who come on foot, Clytemnestra arrives in splendor, borne in a carriage (much like her husband in Agamemnon) with male drivers and an entourage of Trojan slaves, “beautiful possessions of the house” (1003).94 No matter who visits Electra’s cottage, they come supplied and encumbered. Electra’s “phantom” child, invented to trap Clytemnestra, exists only in the mind, but the body of Clytemnestra’s real son pulls him reluctantly into the plot. Orestes first sees his sister at line 112 (identified as Electra at 115–19), but he remains incognito for 450 lines until his recognition is forced on him against his will. Under scrutiny from the Old Man, Orestes reacts defensively: “Why is he staring like that, examining me / like some counterfeit coin? Is he comparing me to someone? / . . . / Why is he circling me?” (558– 59, 561). Earlier Electra ridicules the tokens of Orestes’ return—a lock of hair, a footprint—which the Old Man saw at Agamemnon’s tomb, and she mocks the idea that her brother could still wear the clothes she wove him as a child (538–44). But when the Old Man points out the scar over his eyebrow (573–74), Electra cannot deny that Orestes has returned. In spite of his own best efforts, Orestes’ body gives him away as the man born to avenge his father.95 Trapped in a plot he does not control, Orestes steels himself to murder Aegisthus, which he does in particularly gruesome fashion. However, when

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Electra announces that Clytemnestra approaches “resplendent in her carriage and lovely clothes,” Orestes balks: “What do we mean to do? Will we really kill our mother?” Electra pinpoints the source of her brother’s hesitation: “Don’t tell me that pity takes over, because you see the body [demas] of your mother!” (966–68). With sword drawn, Orestes confronts that body inside the cottage, and when he and Electra reemerge with the corpse on the ekkukl¯ema, we “experience the murder retrospectively through the postmortem shock of the killers.”96 We hear of Clytemnestra pleading for her life, baring her breast, clinging to Orestes’ cheek, crying out for mercy, and finally falling back onto the “limbs that gave birth [gonima melea]” (1206–17). Veiling his eyes with his cloak so as not to see her body, Orestes slashes his mother’s throat, and her blood spatters over her children (1172–73, 1221–23).97 Orestes summarizes the perverted relationship that physically binds these three bodies: “You gave birth to your own murderers” (1229). The bodies of both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra have a powerful effect on Electra, who compares their pampered life with her own physical hardships and Spartan circumstance. Describing her situation (303–13), Electra focuses on the squalor that “stables” (aulizomai, 304) her in rags, covers her with filth, leaves her nothing but “a naked body” (gumnon s¯oma, 308) unless she slaves at the loom. While she dwells in destitution, her mother luxuriates in the palace, indulged by Trojan slaves “decked out in Asian robes fastened with golden brooches” (314–18). In their later ag¯on, Electra taunts Clytemnestra for her “praiseworthy shape” (to . . . eidos ainon axion, 1062) and inner failings, which she shares with her sister Helen, another notorious adulteress. Electra accuses her mother of primping before the mirror, arranging her hair, putting on makeup, cultivating her beauty (1069–75), even before Agamemnon has lured their daughter Iphigenia to her death at Aulis (1020–23). She warns Clytemnestra when entering the cottage not to soil her beautiful clothes on the sooty walls (1039–40). As the matricide looms, Electra still focuses on the difference between her mother’s richly adorned body and her own. Electra also lingers over the physical features of the dead Aegisthus, whose corpse Orestes brings back with him as proof of his murder. This arrival is perhaps the strangest of all visitations to the cottage, more so even than the appearance of Castor and Polydeuces on the machine. To be sure, corpses— after falling in a distant place—frequently are conveyed back to the stage. Haimon in Antigone, Neoptolemus in Andromache, Pentheus in Bacchae, Menoeceus, Eteocles, Polyneices, and Jocasta in Phoenissae, and the dying Hippolytus in Euripides’ play all are returned to the scenic space that represents their home. However, after slaying Aegisthus at a rural sacrifice, Orestes brings the body to Electra’s home, an unprecedented conveyance of a corpse to a place it does not belong. What’s more, Orestes has decapitated his victim. As the Messenger reports,

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“your brother comes, / to show you not the head of the Gorgon, / but the man you hate, Aegisthus” (855–57).98 The comparison of Orestes to Perseus who beheaded the Gorgon recalls the image of that heroic deed on Achilles’ shield (457–62), and it recurs later when Orestes cannot look at Clytemnestra at the moment of death. The Chorus asks, “How did you dare to look / with open eyes on the bloodshed? . . . ,” to which Orestes responds, “I threw my cloak over my eyes / . . . / [then] buried the sword in her neck” (1218–1223).99 According to legend, those who gazed directly at the Gorgon’s head turned to stone, a mythic paradigm that lies behind Orestes’ horror at his own Gorgon-like transformation at the play’s end: “What host, what pious person / will look on my head [kara], / the man who killed his mother?” (1195–97). Indeed, the help that Castor promises Orestes in fending off the Furies (frequently linked to Gorgons, as at A. Eum. 48–49), will come from Athena, “stretching her Gorgon-faced shield over your head” (1254–57). Other heads (and their adornments) are prominent in Electra. As noted earlier, we first see Electra balancing a water jug on her head (54–59), and we do so again when she returns from the stream having filled it (107–11). She sets the jug down (140–42) in order to strike her head with her fists (148, 150),100 lamenting her father’s homecoming, crowned by his wife not with “victory garlands” (stephanoi, 163) but with a deathblow. Along with his provisions, the Old Man brings garlands (stephanoi, 496) for the feast, probably wearing them on his head as he enters. When Orestes encounters Aegisthus in the country, he is plucking myrtle “to weave as a garland for his head” (776–79), part of his ritual observances for the Nymphs. Orestes uses the term stephanos metaphorically for the victory he will win by killing the usurper (613–14); after Aegisthus’ murder, the slaves at the sacrifice actualize the figure of speech by winding garlands around Orestes’ head (stephousi . . . kara, 854). Following news of his triumph, the Chorus sings an epinician-flavored ode celebrating his “garland-bearing” (stephanaphora, 862) victory. Electra brings out more “adornments for his hair” (kom¯es agalmata), with which she will wreathe her victorious brother (steps¯o . . . krata, 870– 72), and the Chorus applauds these “adornments for his head” (agalmata . . . krati, 874). On Orestes’ arrival, Electra (re)crowns him with “garlands for the tresses of your hair” (kom¯es s¯es bostruch¯on and¯emata, 882), and she offers a garland (stephanos) to Pylades as well. It is only after this crowning ceremony (880–89) that Orestes presents Electra with the (still garlanded?) head of Aegisthus, enabling her to “say what I [always] wanted to say right to your face [kat’ omma son] / once I was free from the fears that now / have passed” (910–12).101 The image of Electra spilling out years of resentment at a head that cannot respond symbolizes perfectly the chasm between her emotional compulsion to revenge and its ultimate futility. She begins her speech with a highly rhe-

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torical prooimion: “How will I start off my diatribe, / and how end it? What will I put in the middle?” (907–8). Later she adopts a rhetorical praeteritio, addressing a topic while pretending to pass it over. Claiming that intimate subjects are not fit for a maiden (parthenos), Electra upbraids Aegisthus for his “dealings with women,” implying that he violated them (hubristes) by exploiting his power and “good looks” (kallei t’ arar¯os, 945–48). The word hubris has multiple meanings in the fifth century, including “sexual use under constraint,” or simply “rape.”102 Electra uses the word and its cognates frequently to refer to her fear of sexual violation, emphasizing again the body as the motivational source for her vengeance.103 In a bizarre expression of her own sexual frustration, Electra rejects Aegisthus’ “girlish beauty” (parthen¯opos), the kind that produces effeminate offspring fit for dancing; she prefers a manly man, who sires boys that long for battle (948–51). She ridicules Aegisthus’ dependence on Clytemnestra, impugning him for being known in Argos as “her husband,” and their children called after their mother rather than him (930–37).104 Electra even claims that Clytemnestra is unfaithful, making their private life a living hell (918– 25). Returning the head to its body (“To hell with you!”—erre, 952), she orders the corpse taken inside the cottage, so concluding a speech like none other in tragedy. In her twisted “funeral oration” over the fallen Aegisthus, Electra conjoins the art of rhetoric with the physically macabre, treating the body of her enemy like an intimate plaything to be handled and abused.105 One expects in any revenge tragedy that the act of vengeance per se will focus on the body, but Electra takes this to extremes. As noted earlier, Aegisthus’ death occurs during a sacrifice performed in the country, not far from the Farmer’s cottage (623, 636).106 The text hints at a connection between the rites Aegisthus celebrates for the Nymphs and his intimate relationship with Clytemnestra, involving children born or soon on the way (625–26, 640–45, 1138).107 Aegisthus asks the unrecognized Orestes to flay the bull-calf that has been slaughtered (779–90, 815–18), and he deftly removes the hide, exposing the animal’s deformed liver. Trading the knife for a cleaver, Orestes splits the breast-bone to release the inner organs.108 As Aegisthus bends over to examine the entrails, Orestes rises on his tiptoes and brings the cleaver down on his enemy, smashing through the backbone. Aegisthus’ body shakes “with convulsions, heaving and writhing in a hard and bloody death” (839–43).109 The sacrificial context makes this murder particularly gruesome, as Aegisthus merges with the bull-calf that has been ritually slaughtered. Tragedy frequently employs sacrificial imagery when describing a murder, but here Euripides transforms an actual sacrifice into the brutal slaying of the man who arranged it. Recent critics have claimed that Orestes’ vengeance would strike a fifth-century audience as neither ignoble nor impure,110 but their arguments fail to convince. By describing sacrificial procedure in such detail,

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Euripides creates an imaginative space of ritual propriety and community. Inviting Orestes and Pylades to join him, Aegisthus appears as a generous and open-handed host, whose voice we hear through the Messenger on five different occasions.111 The verbatim account brings Aegisthus to life in the audience’s mind, that is, until Orestes brutally splits him apart from behind. Because the murder takes place in a pastoral setting, our impression of Aegisthus differs radically from Electra’s dubious picture of a drunken lout in the palace, who stones Agamemnon’s grave and hurls epithets at the absent Orestes (326–31). Delivering the mutilated corpse to his sister, the blood-crazed Orestes encourages her worst: I return, not by words but by deeds having killed Aegisthus . . . I bring to you the man himself, dead. If you desire, throw the body out as carrion for wild beasts, or impale it on a stake as prey for birds, the children of the air. For he is now your slave, whom once you called master. (893–99)

As well as inviting further mutilation, Orestes overrides Electra’s (false) modesty (900–906) and sets the stage for her verbal abuse of the body of Aegisthus. Euripides’ focus on the misplaced bodies of the major players—Electra, Orestes, Aegisthus, Clytemnestra—reveals the distance separating highminded ideals from actual behavior, a gap traditionally conceived in terms of appearance versus reality, between logos ‘word’, ‘talk’ and ergon ‘deed’, ‘actuality’. As Orestes boasts, “It is not by words but by deeds [ou logoisin all’ ergois] that I have killed Aegisthus” (893). Earlier he marvels at the innate nobility of Electra’s husband, and he reflects on how one should judge a person’s virtue. He rejects the standard means of discernment—social status, parentage, wealth, the test of battle—in favor of “moral character [¯ethos] and the way one is with others [homilia]” (384–85). Orestes fails to realize that his speech applies to himself, that he stands exposed as the very sort of person he condemns, “puffed up through family repute” (d¯omat¯on o¯ gk¯omenos, 381), “mere flesh [hai de sarkes], empty of insight, like a statue in the town square” (387–88).112 Orestes even has to talk himself into accepting the hospitality that the naturally virtuous Farmer offers instinctively (391–400).113 From his first entry we sense that Orestes is not the noble youth of earlier versions, suggested spatially by his strategy of keeping to the margins of the territory (94–97). His refusal to step forward in his own person until compelled by the Old Man—even though he knows those around him are friends (272–73, 285–87, 553–57)—confirms our suspicions. Far from the resolute hero of Electra’s imagination (524–26), Orestes proves an emo-

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tionally unstable and reluctant conspirator. As for his sister, her spatial relocation to the country accounts for much of her physical and emotional demeanor, but she also demonstrates an obsessive sexual prurience that distinguishes her from earlier instantiations in tragedy and myth. Her blatant fabrications, feigned modesty, intense bloody-mindedness, and meanness to her well-intentioned husband make Electra an odd, if compelling, heroine. Euripides all but asks us to compare her with earlier Electras, especially when she derides the Old Man for believing that a lock of hair, a footprint, or a piece of woven cloth could signal Orestes’ return, recalling the essential role these tokens play in Aeschylus’ Choephori. If the old standards have fallen for judging individual virtue, the same applies for the larger mythic order represented by the house of Atreus and its paradigmatic place in the narrative of tragic revenge. The notorious history of the house, well known to fifth-century audiences, suggests that Euripides’ rural setting does not signal a move away from civilized values toward the intrinsically sordid. On the contrary, the scenic space of Electra, for all its poverty, represents an environment unaccustomed to the internecine violence associated with the Atreids. In particular, the Farmer’s decency to Electra, his patience with her complaints, his forbearance under her verbal abuse, and his generosity toward her guests establish his dwelling place as a civilized oasis that has been invaded by outsiders. Some in the fifth-century audience might even have found comforting the Farmer’s chauvinistic reaction on seeing Electra with strange men outside the house (341–44). The old rules of gender propriety still hold in the country,114 a fact set up earlier when Electra insists on the spatial division of their labors: You have plenty to do working outside; my job is to take care of things inside the house. A man who works hard likes to find everything shipshape when he comes through the door. (73–76)

Explaining that the strangers bring news of Orestes, Electra turns on the charm: “Oh dearest one [¯o philtat’], don’t be suspicious of me, / for you will learn the real story [onta muthon]” (345–46). The Farmer immediately opens up his hearth and home to the travelers, prompting Electra to turn on him for foolishly offering hospitality to his betters (404–5).115 But “the real story” that Electra promises to tell goes beyond her unpleasant behavior toward her husband; it involves the obtrusion of a matricidal muthos into his peaceful, rural world. Significantly, this disruption of bloodshed emanates from, and returns to, the extrascenic space of the farmhouse. As discussed, the essential task facing the avengers is to lure Clytemnestra out to the country and into the cottage. As well as housing Electra’s phantom child, the extrascenic space provides a

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place for stowing Aegisthus’ corpse and for hiding Orestes, who enters with trepidation to await his mother’s arrival: “I will go inside. I start by taking a terrible step forward, / and I will do terrible things” (eseimi· deinou d’ archomai prob¯ematos, / kai deina dras¯o g’, 985–86). After the matricide, the emergence of Orestes, Electra, and Pylades from the cottage, along with the corpses of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra on the ekkukl¯ema, offers a devastating picture of a spatial disruption. Why are all these bodies pouring out from this old farmhouse?116 If the Farmer were to return home from the fields, as he did earlier in the play, would he take comfort in Electra’s assurance that it was her job to “take care of things / inside the house” (74–75)? The rural setting also affects the treatment of distant space, “cutting off” the house of Atreus from Orestes and Electra, both of whom are exiles.117 In Electra’s view, the palace is a den of physical debauchery and sexual excess,118 manifest in Clytemnestra’s ostentatious arrival from her home. But it also houses the bath where Agamemnon was killed (155–62), its rafters and stone cornices echoing his death cries (1148–54). So powerful is the palace’s hold on Electra that, early in the play, she imagines that she still lives there: In what city, what home, oh wretched brother, do you wander leaving in your father’s chambers your pitiful sister, caught in such painful circumstances? (130–34)

So, too, faraway Troy—the most significant distant space in the play—seems to Electra almost an extension of herself: Look at my filthy hair my ragged clothes— are they suitable for a royal daughter of Agamemnon, or for Troy, that remembers how my father sacked it? (184–89)

Conflating Troy with her own person, she feels that the city would take offense at her impoverished appearance. A moment’s thought suggests that any Trojans left alive would celebrate her physical degradation, but Electra’s Troy exists only for her. Richly evoked by the Chorus in the first stasimon (432–86), the Trojan War manifests a peculiar and ultimately intimate relationship to the bodies onstage. The Farmer delivers his homespun aphorism on food as the great equalizer—“To fill their stomachs, rich and poor take just about the same” (430–31)—and walks out of the play. At that point the Chorus of country

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girls launches into a beautiful ode on the ships that sailed for Troy, accompanied by dancing Nereiads and aulos-loving dolphins, who gambol at the prows (432–41). In the “bad old days” of Euripidean criticism, the Achilles Ode epitomized the playwright’s predilection for irrelevant choruses; gradually, however, scholars have come to a rich appreciation of its dramatic function. Walsh, for example, compares the impact of the stasimon, with its radical shift in place and tone, to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, “distancing” the audience from what has just transpired.119 The comparison is apt, for the Chorus introduces a world as far removed from a farmer’s stomach as one could imagine. By shattering the mood of the previous scene, Euripides encourages us to reflect on the disparity between rural poverty and lyricized warfare, between the social and psychological reality of the characters we have seen and the aestheticized image of the Greek fleet sailing for Troy. The destructive mission for which the ships have embarked is pushed to the background by a synaesthetic fusion of sea and sound, of music and dance; the image of a peaceable maritime kingdom (sea nymphs, dolphins, ships) in celebratory motion seems disconnected from the relentless siege of a city. The brutal realities of war seep in only later, after the Chorus turns its attention to the decorated armor that accompanies Achilles to Troy. Even here, distant places and mythic figures dominate, a virtual torrent of exotic proper names: Troy (three times), Nereiads (twice), Thetis (three times), Achilles, Agamemnon, Simoeis, Euboea, Hephaistus, Pelion, Ossa, Nymphs, Hellas, Atreidae, Nauplion, Phrygia, Perseus, Gorgon, Zeus, Hermes, Maia, Pleiades, Hyades, Hector, Sphinx, Peirene, and Tyndareus. Unnamed but evoked are Chiron, Pegasus, Bellerophon, the Chimaera, Helen, and Clytemnestra. The simple piling up of proper nouns suggests the transformative effect of this ode, a dazzling invocation of far-off places and mythic names that momentarily effaces the (comparatively) mundane figures we have seen onstage. In the first antistrophe the Chorus describes how the sea-dwelling Nereiads bore Achilles’ golden armor up from the Euboean headlands, then along Mount Pelion and the meadows of Mount Ossa, to the crags of the mountain Nymphs and the cave of the centaur Chiron, where Achilles leaves for Troy. The depiction of nature, far from the built environments of men, reflects a world radically at odds with the purpose of the Nereiad’s visit, the delivery of armor for the sack of a city. In the second strophic section, the Chorus recreates the decorations on the shield (Perseus holding the head of the Gorgon, the sun surrounded by a dance of constellations), the helmet (Sphinxes with their prey), and the corselet (Bellerophon mounted on Pegasus putting the Chimaera to flight). In the epode, an offensive weapon finally appears, Achilles’ sword, engraved with galloping horses that raise a cloud of black dust behind them. Here the ode begins to lean toward the situation of the play, leaving the ebullient ocean and pristine woodlands for a dust that darkens the sky.120 In a rapid accelerando, the Chorus accuses Cly-

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temnestra and “your bed” (i.e., adultery, sa lechea, 481) of killing the leader of the expedition that sailed for Troy, and they vow one day to see “the murderous blood beneath your throat [deran] / gush down over the iron blade” (485–86). The description of Clytemnestra’s throat lost in its own gore looks back to Achilles’ shield, where Perseus holds the “throat-severed” head of the Gorgon (458–62), and ahead to Clytemnestra’s actual death, when Orestes “buries the sword into [his] mother’s throat [deras]” (1222–23). We have come a long way from dancing Nereiads and flute-loving dolphins, having caught a glimpse of the horrors at Troy in the images blazoned on Achilles’ weapons and in the Chorus’s desire to see the adulterous Clytemnestra cut down like she cut down her husband home from the war. The final lines of the ode return us—transformed—to the business and bodies of the play. Before the stasimon, the Farmer walked out an eisodos thinking of his stomach, and now the same actor—playing the Old Man—returns via the same eisodos laden with provisions. But an extraordinary lyric has intervened, its evocation of natural beauty giving way to the iron blade that waits for Clytemnestra’s neck.121 The tension between the scenic space of the play and the distanced space of the myth (Troy, the palace at Argos) is never resolved, forcing the audience to synthesize disparate spaces and the bodies they inhabit. In the second stasimon, the Chorus relates how Thyestes seduced Atreus’ wife “in an illicit bed” (kruphiais . . . eunais, 720–21), gained possession of the golden lamb of Mycenae, and seized power in Argos. This violation of both marriage and the polis order—two sides of the same tragic coin,122 replicated in the adulterybased regime of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra—generates the myth that Zeus reversed the course of the sun, shifting dawn to the east and sunset to the west, and causing the wet climate of the north and arid heat of the south. Having developed the story in detail, the Chorus undercuts it in the last antistrophe: That’s how the story goes, but it’s hard for me to believe— that the sun with its face of gold turned and changed its torrid place, causing grief to mortal men all for the sake of their injustice! (737–42)

The Chorus views such myths as useful fictions to encourage faith in the gods (743–44). By challenging prior versions of the myth of the house of Atreus (Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles),123 Euripides encourages a skeptical response from his audience like that the Chorus evidences toward the cosmic myth of solar reversal. Castor delivers the coup de grace to the mythical basis of the drama,

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announcing that the much-maligned Helen never betrayed her husband and never went to Troy.124 The bodily root of the story—Helen’s adultery and departure from Greece—proves to be a phantom created by Zeus to reduce the world’s population (1278–83). Combining elements of Stesichorus’ palinode and the Cypria,125 Euripides undermines the “physical” foundation that underlies the Trojan War. In a similar fashion, the myth that Atreus’ adultery and theft led to Zeus’ solar reversal appears, on reflection, to be simply incredible. Electra, too, creates a phantom, an impossible child given her virginity, but one that lures Clytemnestra to her death. Bodily inventions lead to tragic displacements, and the blood flows at Troy, in the Argive palace, and in a poor hut in the country. Focusing on such “bodily fictions” helps us understand the play’s pointed references to the conventions of tragedy, to nontragic genres, and to other versions of the Orestes-Electra story. We find these self-referential deictics throughout the drama: the parody of the recognition scene from Choephori, in which Orestes’ body inadvertently reveals his identity;126 Euripides’ inversion of the role played by Apollo in Aeschylus’ trilogy;127 the bizarre performance of an epinician ode to celebrate Aegisthus’ murder, as if Orestes and Pylades had returned victorious from the Olympic games;128 and the lastminute adoption of Stesichorus’ account of the events at Troy. A similar, but fully embodied metatheatrical moment occurs in the report of Orestes’ foray against Aegisthus. A despairing Electra cries out, “We are defeated, for where is the Messenger?” (759), as if she were aware of the conventions of the messenger speech in tragedy.129 When the Messenger arrives, however, Electra doubts his identity (765–69), a violation of those very conventions. As Gellie reminds us, “in the three tragedians there are 26 messengers and heralds who enter a play to give extended information. This is the only one who is not trusted on sight.”130 Once the Messenger identifies himself as Orestes’ servant (whom we saw onstage earlier), Electra knows him. “Fear kept me from recognizing your face [pros¯opon]” (767–68), she says, using the term that also means “theatrical mask” and (much later) “theatrical part.” Given that the same actor who played Orestes probably played the Messenger as well,131 we might construe Electra’s response as follows: “Fear for your survival, Orestes, kept me from recognizing you [as actor] in the mask of your servant, whose role you now are playing.” Nothing so convoluted could approximate an audience’s experience in the theater. Nonetheless, by calling attention to the conventions of tragic representation, Euripides uses the bodies of his actors (playing mutually reflective roles) to create a self-referential context in which the spectators gain theatrical perspective on the drama they are watching. The fact that Orestes heads for Athens at the end of the play (1254–72) opens up its reflexive space, anticipated earlier by a series of contemporary allusions: Electra’s reference to Athenian law at 668;132 Clytemnestra’s offer to

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Electra of parrh¯esia (1049, 1056), the right of Athenians to free public expression;133 the rhetorical elements in the set speeches of Orestes, Electra, and Clytemnestra;134 the interest in, and criticism of, athletic competition, especially the Panhellenic games;135 the closely observed detail of Aegisthus’ sacrifice, one of the fullest accounts in fifth-century literature; the importance paid to birth ritual, a common practice that rarely surfaces in tragedy;136 the plethora of everyday Attic expressions and vocabulary uttered by the characters;137 and the proliferation of material objects, odd for tragedy but well suited to a play that juxtaposes the mythically ideal with down-to-earth reality.138 Even the Dioskouroi, native to Sparta, had a sanctuary in Athens (the Anakeion), probably on the north slope of the Acropolis.139 More than any specific reference to contemporary Athens, however, it is the play’s selfreferential tone, its manipulation of the mythic tradition, its overturning of expectations that remind the Athenian audience that its perception of the events enacted onstage is far more important than the events themselves. In Electra, Euripides shows the space of his theater to be anything but empty. The bodies who inhabit it seem to know what has happened there before, and they use that knowledge self-consciously in representing their story. But self-referential space does not simply open up new perspectives on the past. In the prologue, the Farmer leaves us with a prospective challenge regarding his treatment of Electra’s body: Anyone who thinks I’m a fool for taking a nubile virgin into the house and not touching her, let him know that he uses a bad measure for good judgment, and will prove to be the real fool. (50–53)

The Farmer asks us to consider his “hands off” policy as we watch the play.140 Once exposed to Electra, we may appreciate his decision to leave bodily intimacy with her to others. The appearance of Orestes and Electra after the matricide, “empurpled with the fresh gore / of their mother’s blood” (1172–73), constitutes the play’s ultimate intersection of space and the body. “The real story” (ta onto muthon, 346), as Electra puts it, reveals children covered with their mother’s blood as if they were newborn, the reality behind the ersatz baby that Electra used to lure Clytemnestra to her death. The regrets of brother and sister over the matricide, and their bitter sorrow at the separation and exile that lies ahead, undercut Castor’s platitudes about their newfound happiness. The god offers Electra precisely what she longed for at the beginning of the play, a marriage befitting her royal status (union with Pylades, 1284–85). Castor insists that gamos ‘marriage’ (also ‘mating’) is now her chief concern (1342), but Electra shows no interest in her nuptial prospects, lamenting instead her imminent departure from her homeland (1314–15, 1334). She

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clings not to her new husband but to the brother she is losing (1321–26, 1331–33, 1339), whose presence Electra once implored with “many messengers, of which I stand interpreter: / my hands and tongue, my suffering heart, / my razored hair” (333–35).141 The “self-refutation within Euripidean drama” identified by John Jones applies perfectly to the close of Electra.142 Castor speaks from on high, but Orestes and Electra are finally grounded, now more than any other time in the play. The spatial distance between the gods on the machine and Orestes and Electra on the orchestra floor offers a telling image of the gap between the myth of matricide and its (dramatized) reality.143 So do the corpses that remain in view after the gods fly off and mortals go their separate ways: one broken-backed and decapitated; the other covered with a shroud by a repentant son and daughter, “the last of the many great evils of the house” (1232). The line, terma kak¯on megal¯on domoisin (1232), is complex; terma implies an “end” but also “completion,” the “turning point” and “finish line” of a race, its “goal.” So the line means more than “the worst is over,” for it hints that “the worst has just begun.” We translate more freely, “bringing to term the last of many great evils of the house,” joining space and the body in Euripidean fashion. The play gives birth to a false child and a false revenge, delivering the avengers back to the blood of their own mother. The chilling intimacy that results separates them from the myth they have tried to inhabit, even as the bloodshed that belongs to the house of Atreus has found its way to this isolated rural cottage lodged incongruously in the theater of Dionysus.

The Bacchae: The Theatrical Body Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. —Merleau-Ponty, The Primary of Perception

The primacy of the body in so thoroughly Dionysian a play as Euripides’ Bacchae hardly surprises. As the (anthropomorphic) god associated with physical transformation, intoxication, and various boundary transgressions (gender, class, age, ethnicity), Dionysus works in and through the bodies of all the characters in the play, radically transforming the spaces they occupy. The performance opens with a monologue delivered by the divine patron of the theater, in which he discloses to the audience the mortal disguise he has adopted. Tragic prologues in general, particularly those of Euripides, draw the audience from the preperformance world into the scenic space of the play. By addressing no one but the audience, however, the opening speaker also exploits the metatheatrical potential of the situation. This modality applies doubly to Dionysus, who by pointing to his disguise implicitly

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acknowledges the actor behind the mask, a man playing a god pretending to be a mortal. In this theatrically charged environment, the role-playing god establishes the importance of self-referential space right from the start. By virtue of his command over events, Dionysus resembles a playwrightdirector who understands the plot and everyone’s role in it, especially that of the chorus. It was the chorus’s instruction that defined the primary function of the ancient director as didaskalos ‘teacher’.144 Addressing the offstage Asian bacchantes that form his company (thiasos),145 Dionysus summons them into the orchestra as if giving stage directions for their dance: “Oh you who have left Tmolos . . . , my band of women . . . lift up your tambourines” (55–59).146 The god performs the same function later, presciently introducing the Cowherd as if he knew he were coming and what he would say: “Listen to and learn what this man comes to report, / newly arrived from the mountains with a message just for you” (657–58). Under Dionysus’ direction, the infectious rhythms of the bacchic dance and the descriptive power over distant events eventually lead to the dismemberment of Pentheus, who embodies the sole resistance in Thebes to the god’s invasion. The following categories offer a rough guide for the various spatial relations achieved by different bodies in the play: juxtaposition (disparate bodies placed in proximity), contact (the physical effect of one body on another), union (the coming together of different bodies) and fusion (that process extended to the transformation of many elements into an unexpected whole), separation (the drawing apart of formerly united or fused elements), confusion (the chaotic interaction of different elements that achieves no stability), and fragmentation (the destructive division of a primary entity, breaking it apart and breaking it down). Applying these categories to the events of the Bacchae, we can better understand the relationship between bodies (both onstage and offstage) and the creation and transformation of the play’s significant spaces. Basically an ironic or satiric device, juxtaposition depends on the continued distinctiveness of the elements placed together. The appearance in Dionysian garb of Cadmus (Pentheus’ grandfather and founder of Thebes) and Teiresias (the blind Theban seer) verges on the risible,147 for fawnskins and ivy wreaths appear ill-suited on these venerable elders.148 The incongruity takes on a metatheatrical aspect when Pentheus enters, for he launches a long diatribe against the cultic invasion without even noticing that his audience includes his grandfather and the Theban prophet, both dressed like young bacchants. An entrance in tragedy in which the arriving party fails to see other characters on stage is not rare,149 but that this lack of perception continues for thirty-three lines is. While the city leader denounces the effects of Dionysus on Thebes, a group of Asian maenads and two old men who are new followers stand in the same space and watch him in silence. Pentheus’ absorption reflects his inability to recognize what lies before him (a trait with

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fatal results), but it also sets up a voyeuristic scenario, in which someone watches someone else without being noticed. The audience in the theater, of course, watches them both. In his response to Pentheus, Teiresias occasions another incongruous juxtaposition. Dressed in a fawnskin and holding a thyrsus, the old man delivers a Sophistic rationalization that explains (away) Dionysus’ miraculous “double birth,” employing clever etymology, logic-chopping, and double entendre (266–327).150 Euripides juxtaposes the public world of Sophistic debate with the elements of Dionysiac worship, sustaining a mood of (more or less) ironic humor. The humor leaves but the irony remains when the Chorus celebrates the hedonistic pleasures of Dionysiac cult, and then concludes with a banality better suited to the Theban elders of Antigone: It is wise to keep one’s heart and mind from men who think themselves superior. Whatever the multitude of normal people think is the way to go and be, that I would accept. (427–33)

Choral identity does not require the consistency of e¯ thos and dianoia we might expect from named characters in tragedy.151 Nonetheless, young Asian bacchantes who fall to the ground before a god they cannot see (600–603) and who celebrate Pentheus’ dismemberment (1031–40, 1153–64) seem a world removed from these proponents of the clich´e “nothing in excess.”152 In the “dressing scene” of Pentheus, staged by Dionysus in the guise of the Stranger, the juxtaposition of opposites takes on a far more chilling effect. We laugh at the would-be voyeur who dresses and acts the role of a female bacchante, as if this would allow him to go unnoticed among worshipers of the god (recall that Cadmus and Teiresias wear a fawnskin and ivy, but make no attempt to disguise themselves as women).153 However, when Dionysus leads Pentheus through the streets of Thebes (974–76), where the whole city will see his delusion (840–42, 854–56), the mood becomes far more disturbing. The audience members recognize in the spectacle of Pentheus a reflection of their own voyeuristic interests, as if they were watching a deluded man on his way to the electric chair who thinks he is going to a costume ball and has dressed as a convict.154 Moving from juxtaposition to spatial contact, we leave the “poetic placement” of bodies and consider their functional interaction. The blind Teiresias needs help in going to the mountain with Cadmus, “the only men in the land to dance for the bacchic god” (195). “Take hold of my hand,” his friend says, and the prophet replies “There, clasp mine, and make it a pair” (197– 98). Holding hands, and brandishing a thyrsus in the other, the two men stand as a symbol of mutual support and contact (363–65). The god’s staff

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provides the additional prop of a walking stick, but it also suggests, far more ominously, a potential weapon. Later we will hear of thyrsi used as spears, extending human contact from the physical help of friends to the destruction of apparent enemies at a distance (762–64, 1099–1101). Although physical contact is the stuff of theatrical action, the constraints of the Greek stage—masked actors, a large playing area, acoustic considerations that require frontal delivery, and the sheer size of the audience—necessarily minimize human touch as a useful form of dramatic mimesis. In addition to simple physical support, exceptions include supplication (where the suppliant touches the chin or knee of the figure of authority), scenes of reunion or separation (involving an embrace), the transfer of personal props between characters (the bow in Philoctetes, the victory wreaths in Electra), and scenes in which a body is prepared for burial. In the Bacchae, however, characters frequently touch (or threaten to touch) the clothes, hair, and person of others, setting up the compositio of Pentheus’ broken body at the end. When Cadmus tries to crown his grandson with an ivy wreath (suggested by Teiresias earlier, at 313), Pentheus cries “Keep your hands off me!” (341–43), anticipating Dionysus’ response after Pentheus threatens to cut off his hair (493–94). However, when Pentheus demands the newcomer’s thyrsus, the Stranger no longer warns him off: “Take it from me yourself—I carry it for Dionysus” (495–96). Eventually the tables turn as the god “helps” his wouldbe tormentor in the drag scene, physically arranging his hair and showing him how to shake his thyrsus (927–44).155 The god’s gentle touch here anticipates the violent sparagmos to come. Pentheus manifests his ignorance and impiety through various forms of physical contact. To adopt the relevant vocabulary, his violation of “proxemic codes” mirrors his “discontinuity” with the dramatic situation before him.156 Pentheus imprisons, or thinks of imprisoning, the Stranger and his followers; he vows to do violence to the bacchantes; he threatens the Stranger with decapitation, hanging, and stoning; and he assaults him with his sword, unaware that the god has substituted a phantom.157 We actually see the Stranger bound and led onstage by Pentheus’ Servant, who reports his prisoner’s cooperation in his own capture, as well as the escape from prison of all his followers. The Stranger “held out his hands quite willingly” for arrest (437), while the Theban bacchantes escaped their chains and incarceration without physical contact: “The chains fell from their feet by themselves [automata] / and the door bolt flung open, moved by no mortal hand” (447–48).158 In spite of these prodigies, Pentheus continues to use physical force, binding the Stranger onstage (503–5) and again in the palace. This last effort proves illusory, for Dionysus substitutes a bull that Pentheus hobbles (613–21). “He neither touched nor laid a finger on me” (617), the Stranger announces, demonstrating again his freedom from bodily coercion. The varieties of tactile contact reach their horrifying culmination on Cit-

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haeron with the dismemberment of Pentheus. Using branches as “levers” (mochloi) and then their bare hands (1103–10), the maenads bring down the fir tree in which he is sitting. Earlier Pentheus had threatened to uproot Teiresias’ prophetic seat with levers (346–50), and use them (or his bare hands) to attack the glens of Cithaeron (945–50). When Dionysus destroys Pentheus’ palace (585–603, 623–26, 632–34), he does not need mochloi or physical effort, invoking an earthquake instead.159 By contrast, the people of Thebes remain bound to bodily exertion and suffer accordingly. With her son on the ground, Agave and the maenads pursue their gruesome work: they use “the knife edge of their own hands” against their prey (1206–7); their “blood-soaked hands play ball with Pentheus’ flesh” (1135–36); his head is brought back to Thebes “in his mother’s arms” (969; also 1163–64, 1237– 38); and, in the final scene, his body is reassembled in the lost compositio membrorum. Physical contact, sufficiently realized, can achieve the union of two—or the fusion of many—different bodies. The sexual coupling of Zeus and Semele that gives rise to Dionysus represents just such a union. Normally in Greek myth the offspring of a god and a human is a mortal hero (Achilles, Aeneas, Heracles, Sarpedon) and not a divinity.160 Dionysus punishes Thebes precisely because Semele’s sisters deny that he is a god, claiming that their sister slept with a man and used intercourse with Zeus as a cover (26–31, 41–42). Persuaded by the vindictive Hera, Semele begs Zeus to come to her in his true form (lightning), and their second union leads to her immolation (6–9, 596–99). This, in turn, produces a third union, that of Zeus and the unborn Dionysus, whom Zeus rescues from Semele’s womb and implants in his own thigh (286–96, 521–29), from which the young god is finally “born,” accounting for his “double birth.”161 A bizarre form of procreation also characterizes the Theban foundation myth, in which Cadmus arrives from Phoenicia to the site of future Thebes. There he sows dragon’s teeth in the soil, which give rise to the Spartoi, “sown ones,” among whom is Echion (Snake Man), father of Pentheus, a genealogy referred to frequently in the play.162 The intermixing of Asia and Greece, of earth, reptile, monster, and man, offers a Theban version of generative union and transformation that prepares the way (in Euripides’ chronology) for the birth of Dionysus and his cult, marked by its own fusion of mortal and immortal elements, Greek and Asian pedigrees, and primal, biological, and supernatural forces.163 The physical (and metaphysical) merging that breaks down spatial separation epitomizes the experience of Dionysiac transport, evidenced in the Cowherd’s description of the maenads in the mountain glen. Here, the interpenetration of nature and culture and the intermingling of animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds provide an idyllic image of oneness in action, quite different from later accounts (especially in the Christian tradition) of mystic union as inner experience. The fact that the Cowherd observes the scene

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from his hiding place minimizes the subjective and ineffable in his account, making this unassuming witness (at least initially) a close relative of the “ideal spectator” who keeps his aesthetic distance, a concept famously applied by Schlegel to the Greek chorus.164 The Cowherd describes a space in which human agents merge seamlessly with the world around them. The sleeping maenads seem a part of the ground and leaves on which they lie (683–86); Agave is stirred by the sun’s rays and the lowing of cattle (677–79, 691), as if waking in her natural environment; she rouses the others with a ritual, onomatopoetic cry ololug¯e (¯ololuxen, 689). With their hair down and their fawnskins bound with snakes that lick their cheeks, the maenads resemble human animals (695–98), especially the new mothers among them, who suckle young deer and wolf cubs as if breast-feeding their own (699–702). The women merge with flora as well as fauna, winding ivy and oak and byrony in their hair (702–3), and they work miracles with the earth itself. Using their thyrsi, they strike water from rock and wine from the ground, and they release jets of milk from the soil by scraping it with their fingers.165 Even their bacchic staffs of fennel bound with ivy “drip with sweet streams of honey” (704–11). Unlike the distanced space in most messenger speeches, the maenads’ glen on Mount Cithaeron—until the ambush—provides for union and fusion, a place of “amazing things, even greater than miracles” (667; also 716). Its conversion into a setting for violence involves the separation of the very elements that had miraculously come together. Earlier, Teiresias describes how Dionysus breaks down the distinctions between young and old (206– 9), and the Chorus makes the same claim for the god’s power to unite rich and poor (421–23). As “dwellers of the sacred mountain plateaux” (718– 19), the cowherds and shepherds live close to nature and animals, and they seem content to marvel at the wonders before them. It is the townsman in their group who proposes they “hunt out” Agave, separating her from the other bacchantes in order to please Pentheus (719–21). The process of separation begins with language—the maenads have not yet spoken words, only their ritual cry—when this “fellow who frequented the city and liked to work with words / addressed us all” (717–18). In his approach to language as symbolic action, Kenneth Burke argues that language introduces the negative into the natural world, not via “the idea of nothing, but the idea of no,” the hortatory command hidden behind the human call to action.166 Language takes us out of the natural flux by virtue of this implicit “no”—even an affirmative statement says, in effect, “yes to this (but not that).” The separation from the simple “is-ness” of nature has many compensations, not the least of which is the communicative and persuasive power of language vis-`a-vis other humans. As manifest by the glib townsman, however, man’s symbolic power over nature results in nonsymbolic corporeal devastation. Just prior to the intruders’ ambush, the bacchantes begin their infectious

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dance, sending out their ritual cry until “the whole mountain and the wild beasts / celebrated Bacchus with them; and with their motion, all things moved” (726–27).167 But when the Thebans attack the women, spurred on by language, what was once blissful union becomes violent separation, and the communal dance of joy turns into a deadly hunt for the enemy. Where the women drew liquid refreshment from the ground, they now cause the earth to flow with blood. In place of animals nursing at their breasts, we hear of cows, bulls, a young heifer ripped apart, “dragged down by the countless hands of girls” (745). Bits of gore clog the branches that once provided leaves for the women’s beds and wreaths for their hair. Moving down to the plain, the frenzied army of maenads sweeps over civilized spaces—pastureland, fields of grain, farming hamlets. Women who had abandoned their own children at home (217, 701–2) seize other women’s children and plunder their households. While the villagers’ spears fail to draw blood, the bacchantes inflict wound on wound, putting the men to flight by hurling their thyrsi like lances (748–64). The spatial reversal is complete: “Everything turns upside down” (pant’ an¯o te kai kat¯o, 753; also 741). The transformation of the mountain glen from a locus amoenus to a bloodsoaked battleground marks the play’s most radical shift from fusion to confusion, and from unity to separation. The next intruder on the mountain has no time to observe the miraculous merging with nature of which the maenads are capable. Dressed as a woman, paraded through the town “for the mockery of all Thebans” (854–55), Pentheus is displayed even before he arrives, and once on Cithaeron he cannot watch covertly like the Cowherd before him. As Dionysus predicts, “You will hide as one ought to be hidden / who comes in hiding to spy on the maenads” (955–56). The god sets Pentheus atop a fir tree, exposed as the object of others’ gaze: “He was seen by maenads far more than he was seeing them” (1075). When the women uproot the tree (turning against the natural world, 1103–10), Pentheus finds himself on the ground looking up in terror at his own mother, her eyes rolling, foaming at the mouth, blind to the identity of what she will tear apart (1115–21).168 In Ajax, the maddened hero slays animals that he thinks are people; in Bacchae, Agave kills a son she thinks an animal. She sees the spy as a “climbing beast” (1107–9), and then, after the sparagmos, as a lion she has hunted down (1141–42). Where there was once a fusion across species—when the women breast-fed animal cubs and drew sustenance (as animals do) directly from the earth—there is now a fatal confusion between them. Pentheus rips off the snood from his hair, names himself, begs for mercy, touches Agave’s cheek in a gesture of supplication (like that of Clytemnestra before her murderous son in Electra), but Agave can only see the animal “other.” The depth of her confusion (“she could not keep her thoughts on what she should be thinking”; 1123) defies the modes of sight, sound, and

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touch that normally align mental perception with material reality. Pentheus himself spends most of the play in a similar state, mixing up the nature of Dionysiac union with the excesses of sexual licentiousness (221–25, 352– 54, 455–59, 487–88, 686–88, 811–14, 957–58), in spite of reports to the contrary. Manipulated by Dionysus, Pentheus’ disorientation takes specific physical form when he hobbles a bull and a phantom, mistaking them for the Stranger he has imprisoned. At the height of his delusion, Pentheus sees “two suns” in the sky, and “a double Thebes, a double seven-mouthed fortress” (918–19). The two suns and two cities represent the spatial contrary to the fusion of opposites brought about by Dionysiac ecstasy, when the environment and all its elements moved as one in bacchic celebration. In Pentheus’ madness, the normal world he knows seems to split and multiply. Image and counterimage do not increase his mental “catch” but only add to his confusion, anticipating the physical division of his own person that lies ahead. For a physical entity, the ultimate form of separation is the breaking apart of its own body. Pentheus suffers just this fate, and his dismemberment is lurid in the extreme (1125–43)—a shoulder ripped from its torso; a forearm held by one bacchante, a foot (still in its boot) by another; a game of catch played with balls of his flesh; bloody remains scattered in the rocks and the trees; his head impaled on a thyrsus and carried in triumph by his mother, who thinks she holds a lion’s head.169 Pentheus’ vision of twin suns and cities has, in effect, invaded his body, moving from a division that doubles into a fragmentation that scatters and multiplies. The fractured body of Pentheus spreads through the city of Thebes, literally and figuratively. Disguised ridiculously as a woman, he goes to the mountains to spy; stripped of clothes and body parts, he returns as “a clear sign for all” (967). Not only is his head brought back through the town, but his pieces are gathered as best they can and returned to the scenic space of the palace. Before this architectural image of the polis, Pentheus’ piecemeal body symbolizes the ruined house and fragmented city that remain after the inhabitants of Thebes wake from their nightmare. In place of the dream of rejuvenation (185–89) and ecstatic union, Cadmus and his daughters face the reality of separation (1363) and exile (1350, 1354–55, 1366, 1370, 1382), an ending that recalls Euripides’ Electra. For Thebes’ original couple, Cadmus and his wife Harmonia, even worse lies ahead, for they must endure a metamorphosis into snakes (1330–32, 1359). In their bodily transmutation, the city reverts to its autochthonous origins—one of the Spartoi who rose from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus was the “Snake Man” Echion, father of Pentheus.170 After his reptilization, Cadmus must lead barbarian hordes against Greece, destroying the “altars and [hero] tombs of the Hellenes” (1355–59), including the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi (1335–38). Cadmus’ foreign campaign against his own

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people reconfigures the situation at the outset of the play, where Pentheus fought off an invasion of foreign bacchantes by waging war on his Theban subjects. Cadmus’ invasion exists on a far grander scale, and yet Dionysus offers no explanation of its rationale or goal.171 Cadmus speaks, I think, for most audiences when he says to Dionysus: “Your reprisals are too severe. . . . Gods should not resemble humans in their anger” (1346, 1348). In Rosenmeyer’s memorable phrase, “the man has been found out, in the god’s image.”172 Dionysus promises Cadmus (and Harmonia) a final translation to the (is)land of the blessed (1338–39), which would seem to guarantee the ancestral Theban couple an eternity of bliss after a life of horror. Cadmus gains immortality by virtue of his marriage to Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, meaning that he (like his daughter Semele) experiences union with an immortal. For Semele, divine coupling resulted in impregnation with Dionysus, but a second exposure immolated her in an instant, when Zeus entered her body as a lightning bolt. Cadmus’ marriage to Harmonia offers exactly the opposite future, endless temporal duration in Elysium. And yet Cadmus views this prospect with horror, for it denies him the Lethean oblivion that death gives to mortals (1360–62).173 As we shall see in the next chapter, space and memory are inextricably linked in tragedy, with characters and Chorus recalling the past by invoking a particular place, frequently associated with catastrophic dislocation. The Chorus in Agamemnon remembers Iphigenia singing at her father’s table, as it describes her awaiting his knife blade at Aulis; Cassandra recalls Priam’s altars at Troy while facing death in a perverted sacrifice at Argos; Euripides’ Electra imagines the royal palace while bemoaning her rural exile; held captive in the Chersonese, the Trojan women in Hecuba think back to their bedrooms the night of their city’s sack. In the Bacchae, memory plays an insignificant role until Cadmus helps Agave reconstruct the horrors on Cithaeron, and then faces himself the prospect of endless recollection.174 His memories will include separation from his family and political exile, the barbarian invasion he will lead against his own land, his physical transformation into a crawling reptile, and—above all—his grandson’s dismemberment on the mountain. After dancing with Teiresias in honor of Dionysus on Cithaeron, Cadmus returns “back to town, having come back within the city’s walls” (1223). There he learns of Pentheus’ murder. The old man bravely returns to the mountain to recover his grandson’s body, “torn and shredded to pieces, nothing in the same spot, / scattered through the tangled woods” (1220–21). Cadmus leaves for Cithaeron twice and returns to the city twice. Like Pentheus—but without the delusions—he sees two Thebes, before and after, and the difference between them is one he will never forget. And what of Agave? In the most disturbing scene in the play, we watch

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Cadmus lead her back to her senses, to the fact that she holds in her arms the head of her son, whom she has hunted, killed, and decapitated. As Rivier concludes, “Nulle part nous ne trouvons une peinture aussi directe, aussi physique, de la souffrance humaine.”175 From the simple perspective of plot, however, the scene is unnecessary. Agave has not appeared onstage before; the Messenger already has described the butchery on the mountain; Cadmus could recover all of Pentheus’ body; Dionysus in his epiphany could tie up any loose ends. The very presence of Agave onstage tells us much about Euripides’ dramatic method, manifesting with increasing clarity the destructive and inhuman power of a god “too close to humans in their anger.” Dressed in the fawnskin we remember him wearing earlier when he extolled his family ties to Dionysus (333–36), Cadmus returns to the palace with the pieces of his grandson. There he confronts his daughter, also in bacchic garb, holding Pentheus’ head in her arms. In a scene reminiscent of Heracles, when Amphitryon helps his son realize what he has done, Cadmus guides Agave toward an awareness of her brutal sparagmos.176 Space as a reorienting factor plays a crucial role in the recovery of her sanity (1264– 82). First, Cadmus tells her to look at the sky, to see if it has changed; she responds that it “shines brighter, with more translucence, than before.” Unlike Pentheus in his delusion, Agave does not see “two suns over Thebes” but a single sky that registers change over time, one of the primary “invariants underlying change” that Gibson emphasizes in his ecological approach to visual perception. Cadmus next asks to what household she came at her marriage, and what child she bore there. From the open sky to her domestic dwelling and then to the space of her own body, Cadmus relentlessly moves Agave toward the inevitable question: “Whose head [pros¯opon] do you hold in your arms?” (1277). Most critics agree that the object in Agave’s arms is, in fact, the mask (pros¯opon) worn by the actor who played Pentheus. In the theater of Dionysus, how better to represent the head of a character we have seen onstage?177 By physically exploiting the verbal ambiguity of the term, Euripides cashes in on the metatheatrical possibilities introduced in the prologue, when the god of the festival addresses the audience as a character in the play. In the climactic scene, the spectators find themselves sharing a Pentheus-like moment, catching sight of two spaces—one the setting at Thebes, the other the self-referential space of the theater—as the character of Agave comes to understand what we already know, the identity behind a theatrical mask. Euripides grounds this metatheatrical function by having the actor who played Pentheus also perform the role of his mother Agave. Earlier we watched this same actor play a man dressing up as a woman, practicing his drag act with the help of Dionysus. Now, that actor appears as a female character, probably wearing the same maenad’s outfit that Pentheus had worn before (his recovered body—however represented—would have little

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costume, because it returns in pieces). The only visual difference between Pentheus in the drag scene and his mother at the end is the presence of Agave’s female mask, which we see for the first time. The fact that Agave appears holding Pentheus’ mask in her arms means that the last image the audience has of the living Pentheus—costumed as a maenad—returns fully, albeit disjointedly, to the stage. The body of Pentheus also returns in the form of the dismembered bits recovered by Cadmus, and—in the compositio membrorum—Agave laments over each part of the corpse.178 Although her speech is lost, we get a sense of it by noting Cadmus’ farewell to Pentheus, which includes the following pronouncement: “no longer will you touch my beard with your hand / and fold me in your arms, calling me ’mother’s father’” (1318–19). We can assume that Agave also offered her own memories inspired by the remnant parts of her son. Reintegrating his fragmented limbs even as she remembers him in her (lost) speech, Agave joins the spaces of Pentheus’ life with his recomposed carcass.179 As noted at the outset of the chapter, a king’s body in tragedy extends beyond itself, symbolizing the society that he rules. Cadmus may collect his grandson’s scattered parts, and Pentheus’ mother may remember them literally and figuratively, but the body politic remains broken and fragmented. Separation, exile, bestial transformation, invasion, an empty palace, the end of the royal line mark the fate of the Theban polis at the end of the play. The only closure for the city seems to lie in the replicated pattern of dismemberment on Cithaeron, which Pentheus suffers just like his cousin Actaeon. “Where did he die? At home? Or in what other place?” Agave asks, to which Cadmus responds, “Where the dogs tore apart Actaeon before” (1290–96).180 When Agave leaves to find her sisters—including Ino, the mother of Actaeon—and lead them into exile, she thinks again of Cithaeron: “May I go where / bloody Cithaeron cannot see me, / nor I cast my eyes on Cithaeron, / or any thyrsus dedicated to the god to remind me” (1383–86). The most important distanced space in the play towers over its ending, not only as a place to be seen but as one with the power of sight. No matter where she travels in her exile, Agave fears she may never escape its gaze, caught in her own way like Pentheus hoisted in the tree, “seen by the maenads, far more than seeing them” (1075). Critics influenced by structuralist theory have placed the mountain at the “wild” (as opposed to the “civilized”) pole of the city, part of a set of oppositions that includes (among others) the raw versus the cooked, natural objects versus man-made tools or weapons, wild vegetation versus agricultural production, gathering versus hunting, barbarian versus Greek, female versus male, nature versus culture, each pair associated with a comparable spatial component (country versus city, high versus low, periphery versus center, inside versus outside, and so on).181 As valuable as this interpretive scheme

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has proved, there is something too neat about its application to the different spaces of the Bacchae. Consider, for example, how permeable Euripides makes the apparently firm boundary between Asian and Greek. For over thirteen hundred lines a Chorus of Asian women occupies the central polis area before the palace. It is to this unsympathetic group that the Second Messenger reports Pentheus’ death, as if Theban citizenry had been replaced by foreigners.182 When coming to fetch Cadmus from the palace, Teiresias emphasizes the Asian origins of the founder of Thebes (170–72), a motif repeated several times. Born of the Greek god Zeus and the Theban Semele, Dionysus possesses a perfectly Hellenic pedigree, and yet Euripides insists equally on the Eastern origins of his cult.183 Even Pentheus, the man most closely associated with the city, makes his first entrance not from the palace but down an eisodos, having just returned from abroad. Far from a set of spatial oppositions, the play seems to assume the interpenetration of foreign and Theban, of Asian and Greek, suggesting a spatial scheme far broader and more flexible than that of structural polarities or of dyads “conjoined.” This same permeability applies to other spatial dualities in the play. Moving from ethnic to local boundaries, no one would deny that the distanced space of Cithaeron represents a place of natural wildness counter to the walled city of Thebes proper.184 Nonetheless, the ambush on the mountain involves cowherds and shepherds who move their flocks between the lowland fields and the uplands (677–70), including one who frequents the town (714–18). Even the Cowherd-Messenger has enough political savvy to ask Pentheus for parrh¯esia, freedom to speak without fear of reprisal (668–73). After the ambush on Cithaeron, the maenads descend to the nearby villages of Hysiae and Erythrae in the upland watershed of the Asopos, whose farmlands provide Thebes with grain (749–54). The Messenger who reports the death of Pentheus traces this same journey in reverse when he describes his master’s ascent to the uplands (1043–45). The detail in these accounts suggests that the territory of Thebes—like that of Athens, discussed in chapter 1—represents much more a continuum than a set of isolated places in symbolic opposition to each other.185 Other spatial antitheses favored by structuralists prove equally unstable. The Theban females abandon their households and “their shuttles by the looms” (1236) for the mountains, where they celebrate their ecstasies. This movement marks an obvious, and heavily emphasized, reversal of traditional roles and culturally appropriate locales, manifest in striking ways: the women leave their children at home, they turn into hunters and warriors who defeat males in battle, they boast of their prowess compared with that of their men. A closer look, however, suggests that the women bring to Cithaeron much of the world they seem to have left behind, transforming it to be sure, but not in a way that establishes the mountain as the polar opposite of their domestic environment. The maenads do not indulge in sexual orgies

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or drunken revels as Pentheus thinks, reflecting what Greek men do at their symposia. The Messenger’s language implicitly contrasts the maenads’ behavior to that of male symposiasts, “drunk around the wine krat¯er to the sound of the flute, hunting the . . . delights of Aphrodite” (687–88). As Henrichs points out, Dionysiac cult offered each sex a separate attraction: to men the gift of wine and its ritualized consumption on a variety of social occasions such as wine-festivals and symposia; to women the “blessings of madness” within the institutional limits of ritual maenadism. . . . [T]he two major provinces of Dionysus were kept strictly separate: wine-drinking maenads are as unheard of in real life and actual cult as male maenads.186

After insisting that the female worshipers of Dionysus behave (when left alone) chastely and “decently” (s¯ophron¯os, 686–88), the Messenger urges Pentheus to receive the god in Thebes precisely because “without wine there is no sexual pleasure, / nor other [such] delights left to mankind” (773–74).187 Resolutely “unsympotic,” the bacchantes would take no part in such male licentiousness. The maenads on the mountain do not devour the young animals as one might expect; rather they nurse them at their breasts and procure drink for one another in a cooperative, albeit magical, fashion. When ambushed they plunder the villages, but they do not steal livestock or women as male epic heroes might. Rather, they rip cattle apart with their bare hands (frenzy rather than theft) and take as booty children and domestic goods (pots and pans), which they carry miraculously on their shoulders.188 Balancing children and vessels uncannily on their bodies represents an extension of—not an aberration from—the behavior of Greek women in their normal domestic life. The point is not that the revels on Cithaeron represent standard Greek female practice, but that we can trace a continuity in the women’s behavior at home and their actions on the mountain.189 In place of structuralist oppositions, I have suggested a set of spatial transformations based on juxtaposition, contact, union, separation, and fragmentation. These culminate in the disturbing scene of bodily reintegration, the compositio membrorum, that paradoxically signals familial, civic, and cultural breakdown. Unlike Oedipus Tyrannus, in which the pharmakos king is discovered as the source of, and cure for, the city’s plague, the ritual death of Pentheus does not right the city’s wrongs vis-`a-vis Dionysus.190 In the Bacchae, all Thebes is implicated and all Thebans punished. As for the future, the city faces (once again) destruction by invasion from without, led by one from within. We have said little about Athens and reflexive space in the play, noting only the Cowherd’s concern for parrh¯esia and the Sophistic aspects of Teiresias’ and Cadmus’ response to Pentheus. Dodds and others see the influence of Protagoras, Prodicus, and Gorgias in these speeches, suggesting that

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“the allusions to contemporary theories and controversies . . . are surely meant for Athenian ears.”191 Similarly, the contrast between Pentheus as the excitable man of action and Dionysus as a “quietist” (h¯esuchos) suggests the wartime controversy among Athenians regarding interventionist strategies.192 Far from contrasting a failed Thebes to a superior Athens, as Zeitlin suggests, the Bacchae seems to reflect harshly on Euripides’ native city not long before the poet’s death in Macedonia in 407/6.193 Although we know little about the circumstances of his relocation to the court of Archelaus in 408, it seems reasonable to assume that the wartime situation in Athens affected Euripides’ decision to leave his home at the age of seventy, never to return. Because specifics allude us, it is difficult to pursue in depth any particular historical correspondences. The Bacchae treats of spatial transgression, excessive violence, and civic breakdown, each of which moves from outside in and from inside out, a suggestive summary of the situation of Athens near the end of the Peloponnesian War. In 407 (possibly the year Euripides’ wrote the play), the Athenians welcomed Alcibiades back to their city, rescinding his exile, throwing the stele that carried his condemnation into the sea, restoring his property, and ordering the Eleusinian authorities to lift the curses pronounced against him.194 Could Euripides’ play reflect tangentially on Athens’ about-face, opening the city to foreign influence (Alcibiades’ collusion with the Persians) in order to save it? On his triumphal return, Alcibiades escorted the procession of the Eleusinian initiates from Athens to Eleusis by land, the first time since the Spartan occupation of Decelea in 413 had forced the procession to travel by sea. The cult links between Dionysus and Demeter were strong in Athens, particularly in the Eleusinian Mysteries, a fact that may reinforce the natural pairing of the two gods in the play (Ba. 274–83). Aristophanes’ Frogs, performed in 405 (within a year of Euripides’ death), also brings Dionysus onstage to address the situation of Athens, which then faced imminent defeat. Dionysus specifically asks what Athens should do about Alcibiades—Euripides rejects his return, Aeschylus supports it (Ra. 1422–33).195 Far more certain than any specific political allusion is Euripides’ masterful exploitation of self-referential space. When Dionysus appears on the theologeion, not as the humanly disguised Stranger but as a divinity made manifest, the god of the theater looks down on a scene of his own making, and a city he has effectively destroyed.196 Before him stands the Chorus of bacchantes who followed him from Asia, old Cadmus still dressed in his fawnskin, the former maenad Agave grieving over the body of Pentheus, crowned with a theatrical mask. The theater is revealed as a space where extraordinary events take place and are held up to scrutiny even as they come to presence. The audience looks at Dionysus looking at them, and in that confrontation lies the essence of the play. Although no actual bodies have been dismembered, the audience has watched its own kind break down

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and tear each other apart. Offering the image of another’s body while inhabiting their own, the performers in the Bacchae bring to life a waking dream that turns into a nightmare, where the spaces of the wide world—from the palace to the mountains and back again—come to rest in a fragmented body, through which we measure our distance from the god.

CHAPTER FIVE SPACE, TIME, AND MEMORY: SOPHOCLES’ OEDIPUS TYRANNUS The eagle, pierced by a bow-sped shaft, saw the feathered arrow and said— “Not by others, but by our own plumage are we taken.” —Aeschylus, Myrmidons . . . and time, that has long been my companion. —Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

A

S WE SAW with Euripides’ Bacchae, the body parts of Pentheus that appear onstage present a spatial nexus joining the city of Thebes (where Pentheus ruled), the distant space of Cithaeron (where his pieces were gathered), and the reflexive space of the theater of Dionysus (the pros¯opon of Pentheus’ head, and the Pentheus actor who later appears as Agave). The compositio membrorum prompts a series of private memories given public utterance by Pentheus’ grandfather and mother. Viewed as a series of objects— dismemberment literally objectifies the body—each part generates a specific recollection, the sum of which constitutes a narrative of Pentheus’ life reconstructed along with his corpse. Although we have lost Agave’s speech, Cadmus recalls how the youth protected him in his old age (Ba. 1310–12), a detail that we would not have guessed from Pentheus’ dealings with his grandfather earlier.1 Memories of the body tell a story, but one that can be at odds with, or shed new light on, the drama as previously enacted. In Oedipus Tyrannus, memory and its shadow, forgetfulness, play an essential role in driving a plot based on mistaken identity. As in the Bacchae, the body serves to prompt recollection; “that ancient wound, why do you speak of it?” Oedipus asks (1033), but only after the Corinthian Messenger calls attention to his once-pinned ankles. In Sophocles’ play, distant places and the information they hold provide a far more immediate spur to memory than the body. Delphi, Corinth, Cithaeron, the place where three roads meet—each provides a strand of recollection whose interconnection reveals the murderer of Laius, the source of the plague, and the truth of Oedipus’ identity. His anagn¯orisis depends on his putting events in the past together to uncover what has long been occluded.

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Compared with Teiresias’ simultaneous access to past, present, and future, approximating the divine view of a preexisting pattern,2 Oedipus’ recognition constitutes a job of work, an effortful joining of what has been kept apart. Reuniting characters long separated, Oedipus solves the mystery of who he is by discovering where he has been and what spaces he has violated. Even his name holds valuable clues;3 “swell-foot” (oide-pous, 1032–36) also suggests “foot-wise” (oida-pous/poda), recalling Oedipus’ solution to the riddle of the Sphinx, and also “know where” (oidi- [oida] pou), an etymology played out when the Corinthian Messenger arrives at Thebes: Strangers, might I learn from you where [hopou] is the house belonging to the tyrant Oedipus [Oidipou]? Even better, tell me if you know where [hopou] he is. (924–26)4

The original audience, and most that have followed, understand from the start what Oedipus does not, that he is the cause and cure of the plague at Thebes.5 In spatial terms, Oedipus’ ignorance arises from not knowing where he comes from—either his native city, or the womb from which he was born. By placing him against the scenic backdrop of the Theban palace, and by featuring his physical and emotional closeness to Jocasta in their scenes together, Sophocles exploits the gap between what the audience sees and knows and what his protagonist strives to discover. Oedipus’ first inkling of the nature of his ignorance occurs when the drunk at Corinth blurts out that he is not Polybus’ and Merope’s legitimate son, but a child “forged onto his father” (780). This information sets Oedipus in motion. He goes to Delphi to find the truth of his origins, only to be deflected by the prophecy that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. Vowing never to return to Corinth, Oedipus forgets that the royal couple there might not be his biological parents, and he takes the fatal road (back) to Thebes. As his reward for defeating the Sphinx, the Thebans establish Oedipus as king, “first among men in handling normal events / that befall humans, as well as those where the gods intervene” (33–34). But he is drawn inexorably back to the mystery of his origins when forced to deal with the public crisis of the plague. Oedipus pieces together the solution to these interlocking riddles by concentrating on the significant places in his life: Delphi, the three roads, Corinth, Cithaeron, the house of Laius, the polis of Thebes. Stories arising from these places come to light through the characters that represent them: the priest, the Chorus, Teiresias, all from Thebes; Creon, who arrives with the response from Delphi; Jocasta who emerges from within the house to tell her sad tale of Delphi and Cithaeron; the Messenger, who brings news from Corinth, and from the mountain that shadows over Thebes; the Shepherd, sent for from Cithaeron, who also was present at the fatal crossroads; the

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household servant, who describes the brutal scene in the royal bedroom; and finally Oedipus himself, whose story incorporates all the others, and on whose person the consequences are played out most fully. By reconnecting the significant places in his life, Oedipus matches his knowledge to that of the audience. He then performs the final act of self-discovery, exposing himself as sightless to those who have watched him grope towards the light over the course of the play. As often in tragedy, the scenic space where these events unfold represents oikos and polis alike, both the house of the Labdacids and the political center of Thebes. The space before the palace accommodates general supplication (1–77), civic business (Creon’s report from Delphi, 78–150), legal proclamation (Oedipus’ curse on the killer, 216–75), public exchange (the Chorus, Oedipus, and Teiresias, 276–462), and political accusation and defense (Creon and Oedipus, 512–623). But it also sustains the sharing of private memories between husband and wife (Oedipus and Jocasta, 696–862) and personal appeals to the gods (Jocasta’s supplication to Apollo, 911–23). In the near distance lies the city itself, reeling from a god-sent plague, indelibly conveyed in the opening scenes. Accompanied by suppliants old and young, the priest of Zeus begs Oedipus to use his skill against the blight that kills the crops, cattle, and citizens of Thebes (14–57). “Better to rule a land with people,” the priest exhorts, “than one that is empty; for a city-tower or a ship is nothing deserted [er¯emos] of men who dwell within it” (55–57). After Creon’s report from Delphi and Oedipus’ response, one set of citizens replaces another. The suppliants depart out one eisodos while the Chorus of elders enters down the other, recreating the plague in the parodos (151–215), as its reality continues to circulate through the city’s political center. The fact that the play opens with two scenes focused on the plague makes it highly unlikely that the Athenian audience saw Sophocles’ Thebes as “dramatically other than itself.”6 As noted in chapter 1, spectators at the City Dionysia could not avoid viewing the theatrical space in the context of the polis at large, much of which they could see from their seats. By having two successive groups enter from outside the theater with news of the epidemic,7 Sophocles merged the mythic Thebes of his drama with plague-ridden Athens, a city suffering at the time from the effects of “that most calamitous and awful visitation” (Thuc. 1.23).8 Thucydides provides graphic descriptions of its effect—“heavily did it weigh on the Athenians, death raging within the city and devastation without” (2.47–54)—made worse by the fact that it never seemed to end: “The plague a second time attacked the Athenians. . . . The second visit lasted no less than a year, the first having lasted two; and nothing distressed the Athenians and reduced their power more than this” (3.87).9 If we are right to assume the audience’s identification with the plagued city of Oedipus, then the Theban setting did not signal so much an anti-Athens

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as an imaginative extension of the city of Athena, suggested by the early reference to the “two temples of Pallas” (Pallados diplois / naois 20–21), where suppliants have gathered to pray for release from disaster. Commentators note that Thebes possessed several temples to the goddess, but, as Jebb observes, “It was enough for Sophocles that his Athenian hearers would think of . . . the shrines of the Polias and the Parthenos above them on the acropolis.”10 In a similar vein, Oedipus’ suspicion of a cabal involving Delphi, Teiresias, and Creon echoes two contemporary Athenian concerns: the impartiality of the Delphic oracle (frequently accused of taking bribes, especially after favoring Sparta at the start of the Peloponnesian War), and the court intrigues of the Persians, involving the king’s confidants (hoi pistoi) and scheming court magicians (magoi).11 Oedipus upbraids “Creon the faithful [ho pistos] . . . who longs to throw me out, setting against me this plot-weaving wizard [magos], this treacherous mountebank, who has insight only when it’s profitable” (385–89). In addition, Knox demonstrates that the end of the Teiresias scene and Oedipus’ subsequent encounter with Creon resemble an Athenian trial, as the theatrical space merges with the civic space of the dikast¯erion.12 So, too, the future expulsion of Oedipus as a pharmakos figure brings to mind the Athenian festival of the Thargelia and the political act of ostracism.13 For fifth-century Athenians, it seems reasonable to assume that Sophocles’ story of Oedipus at Thebes represented not a myth of difference and distance but one of commonality and proximity, with the setting evoking both the ancient Thebes of myth and contemporary Athens.14 Moving inside the scenic space to its extrascenic interior, the palace halls initially appear as a place of secrecy. When Creon returns from Delphi, he asks whether to divulge Apollo’s response in public or to “go inside” (91–92) and share it privately with Oedipus. As a paternalistic democrat (a trait typical of “good leaders” in tragedy),15 Oedipus insists that Creon “speak to all” (93), and the city learns that they must punish the killers of Laius to end the plague. Oedipus asks if the former king fell “inside the house, or in the fields, or in some other land?” (112–13), suggesting that the palace interior could breed political intrigue. This aspect of the extrascenic space broadens when Oedipus proclaims that anyone who knowingly harbors the murderer will face, like the murderer himself, social and religious ostracism, “driven from every home” (241): “If he is at the hearth of my own [house] with my knowledge, then let me suffer the curse I have just called down on others” (249–51). For Oedipus, the home represents the sanctity of the city and its gods, and its violation by the murderer will bring expulsion to the criminal and his host alike. That the walls of the house could hide the killer makes it a place of potential clandestine activity that threatens the city.16 The integral relationship between Oedipus’ identity (as “source” of the plague) and his dwelling place emerges in the scene with Teiresias. Rejecting the king’s plea to help the city, the seer counters: “You blame my passionate

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nature [org¯e], but you have not seen / your own, although it dwells [naiousan] with you” (337–38). As the reproaches fly, Teiresias soon drops the indirection: “You may have vision, but you do not see what evil you are in, / nor where you are dwelling [naeis], nor with whom you make your home [hot¯on oikeis meta]” (413–14). The palace will prove a treacherous anchorage, when Oedipus learns the nature of “the marriage hymn, into whose dangerous harbor / you sailed [by coming] into this house [domois]” (422–23). Teiresias concludes the scene by equating Oedipus with the murderer he seeks, a man who is said to be a “foreigner and immigrant” (xenos . . . metoikos), but is “native born” (eggen¯es) (452): He will be revealed as both brother and father to the children with whom he lives, son and husband to the woman [gun¯e, also “wife”] from whom he was born, fellow breeder with, and murderer of, his own father. Go inside and think about that! (457–61)

Teiresias’ imperative “Go inside!” suggests that the house itself might enlighten Oedipus, if he only could see it as the site of his birth and the source of Thebes’ pollution. However, the play does not work by means of such sudden insight. “Flashes of totality” belong to the gods and spokesmen like Teiresias, as Vernant suggests,17 but the knowledge achieved by Oedipus is of a different sort, resulting from a moment-to-moment effort to solve the problem before him. The murder of Laius—and with it the mystery of his own identity—compels him to track the truth (108–11, 220–21), truth that cannot be given but only found out (1213, 1397, 1421). Unlike Teiresias, Oedipus must retrace the paths that lead to the present, and in the process change it utterly from the thing it had seemed to be. After Jocasta’s intervention in the acrimonious scene between her brother and her husband, the Chorus urges her to usher Oedipus back inside: “Lady, why do you wait to / escort him back into the house?” (678–79). However, Jocasta insists on the openness that her husband urged earlier on Creon’s return from Delphi. She demands to hear the genesis of their altercation (680–98), an explanation then and there of why two men would stir up “private troubles [idia kaka] while the country suffers from the plague” (635– 36). Her effort at public understanding paradoxically leads to a scene of personal confession, the most intimate in the play, as both she and Oedipus share long-buried memories of the past. Following their mutual revelations, the palace seems to offer a place of comfort for the first time: “Let us go inside the house” (861), Jocasta says, trying to calm Oedipus’ fears that he might be the murderer of Laius (842–58). Jocasta returns to the stage to pray at Apollo’s altar for her husband’s peace of mind. The orchestra altar, locus for the opening supplication led by the

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Priest of Zeus, now serves as the altar of Apollo Lykeios (919).18 By distancing Jocasta from the palace here and in her subsequent exchange with the Corinthian Messenger, Sophocles emphasizes the change in fortune that seems to have come from afar. “My dearest wife, Jocasta, / why have you sent for me here, out of the house?” (950–51). Jocasta’s initial joy at the unreliability of Apollo’s prophecies dies when the Messenger informs them that Oedipus was a foundling, that Polybus and Merope were not his real parents. She rushes back inside, into the palace she now sees as a den of incestuous horror. The play is not yet done with her, however, for the Shepherd summoned from Cithaeron tells Oedipus, “your wife inside [es¯o] could best tell you” about the origins of the child he exposed (1171–72). Discovering the truth, Oedipus rushes into the extrascenic space himself, in pursuit of the mother who gave him birth. The second Messenger creates the offstage space with memorable vividness, reporting Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’ blinding. He claims that the house conceals and reveals untold pollution, such that no river could ever wash it clean (1227–30). As a household servant, he describes from within what we have witnessed from without, how Jocasta “came through the door, / ran straight for her marriage bed / . . . / and, once she entered [the chamber], slammed the double-doors shut from inside” (1241–44), as if locking in the contagion of her bedroom. There she weeps over her marriage to Laius and her incestuous coupling with Oedipus, the past lovemaking that has destroyed her and her family: “She called on Laius, long since [¯ed¯e . . . palai] a corpse, / holding the memory of those seed-sowings of long ago [mn¯em¯en palai¯on spermat¯on echousa] from which / he himself died” (1245–47). The extrascenic space prompts Jocasta’s final recollections as a wife and mother, particularly the bed where she “gave birth to a husband from her husband, and children from her child” (1249–50). Given her lament, it is hard to accept Loraux’s conclusion on female suicide in tragedy: “just before a woman leaps into the void, it is the missing presence of the man that she feels for the last time, in every corner of the thalamos.”19 Jocasta regrets not the missing presence of her husbands, but the fact that she had ever been present with them in that accursted place. Oedipus too faces the vile wave of the past when he follows Jocasta inside, crying out for a sword to kill himself (and perhaps her as well).20 Earlier Teiresias had warned of the anguished cries he would utter when he learned of the “dangerous harbor” (anormos) of marriage he had sailed into, thinking the winds were fair (422–23). Now the Chorus invokes the “one, same harbor that served both son and father, [each] who came as a bridegroom” (1208–10). The scholiast is surely right to identify the harbor with Jocasta and the marriage bed, implied in Teiresias’ earlier utterance.21 By smashing through the bolted door of the marriage chamber, Oedipus metaphorically wounds the house and assaults the marriage, exposing Jocasta who “hangs by

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the neck in a twisted noose of swinging cords” as Jebb translates (1263–64). With his wife dead and the thalamos cracked open once and for all (the Messenger and others watch the ongoing horror through the broken door), Oedipus turns on himself, stabbing his eyes with the golden pins that held Jocasta’s garments.22 The account of Oedipus’ self-directed violence—like the descriptions of Haimon’s death in Antigone and Deianeira’s in Women of Trachis—has strong sexual overtones. Oedipus undresses Jocasta one last time and turns the act of phallic penetration on himself, where the eyes move in their sockets.23 In a symbolic way he also repeats what his parents did to him as an infant, pinning together his ankle joints (arthra, 718, 1032) before exposing him. Now Oedipus “pins” his eyes to their sockets (arthra, 1270), locking them in the blind gaze of the mask the actor wears when he returns to the stage. By an act of will, Oedipus puts on the blindness he had previously failed to see.24 “You do not see [horan] the evil you are in” (367), Teiresias says, repeating later “you have sight but cannot see [dedorkas kou blepeis] the evil you are in” (413). So, too, the Corinthian Messenger tells Oedipus “it is perfectly clear you don’t know [eid¯os, literally “have not seen”] what you are doing” (1008). The emergence of Oedipus from the house (1294–96), blind and groping for support, reverses the image of his violent exit inside (1185). Instead of smashing through the bolts (kl¯eithra, 1262), he cries out for others to draw them back (1287, 1294) and reveal the spectacle (theama, 1295) he has become, the nonseeing object of others’ sight. With so much made of this revelation of offstage horror, we assume that Sophocles will have done with the palace interior for the rest of the play. Creon enters via an eisodos (1416– 21), as do Oedipus’ daughters, led onstage by attendants (1471–80), and we expect the play to close with Oedipus’ banishment (followed perhaps by Creon’s entry into the palace as its new king). Exile is first mentioned as the punishment for Laius’ murderer at line 100, and it recurs another dozen times thereafter.25 Once aware of his crime, Oedipus himself begs to leave Thebes: “Never force this city / of my father to suffer my living here among them, / but let me dwell in the mountains, that place of my own / called Cithaeron” (1449–52). And yet the play ends with Oedipus forced against his will back inside the palace, following Creon’s repeated command, “Go inside the house!” (1515, 1521). Critics point to this unexpected turn of events as evidence of Oedipus’ powerlessness, his broken exit marking the final reversal of his fortunes.26 Such readings fail to do justice to the carefully articulated stages by which Oedipus returns to the center of the drama. The process starts at the low point of the Messenger’s speech, when he describes the offstage Oedipus repeatedly stabbing at his eyes, the self-directed punishment for parricide and incest. Uniquely in Greek tragedy, the Messenger quotes no direct speech in his report,27 but the protagonist cannot remain in the third person

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for long. Oedipus enters from the palace, physically disabled but a presence nonetheless. Initially “cloaked” in a kommos shared with the Chorus, he soon takes the stage on his own, delivering a long monologue in which he insists that he acted properly in blinding himself. Moving from speech to dialogue, Oedipus holds his own with the new ruler, making demands, issuing orders, and driving the plot almost to the end. Memorably, we see him abandon his despair as he resumes the role of a father taking care of his children, embracing his daughters before the house facade. Sophocles mirrors the opening scene where Oedipus stands before the same facade as the city’s leader, calling the suppliants paides ‘children’ (1, 32, 58, 142, 147), as Gellie describes: In the final scene we meet children again, stricken with another kind of plague but similarly dependent on their father and finding available to them . . . the same forceful advocacy of their interests. Creon is back too, giving us a parody of his own performance in the first scene. He is now the man in authority but he is still Creon—kind, anxious, incapable. Then there is Oedipus, now blind and ruined, but in everything else a replica of the controlling stage-presence which in the opening scene dictated the direction in which the play would move.28

The public space has shrunk to the tainted world of his polluted family, but Oedipus forges a new relationship to that pollution, embracing it in public as his own. Gellie argues that Oedipus’ final exit into the palace marks his reincorporation into the community,29 but the fact that he so desperately longs for exile makes it seem like an additional punishment. Oedipus’ passage back inside also frustrates the audience’s sense that Cithaeron is the appropriate place for him to go. He has discovered the murderer of Laius, he has faced the horrors of his incestuous home, he stands exposed before the city, and he sees what the future holds: “for I know [oida] this much, that neither disease / nor anything else could kill me; for I would never / have been saved from death, unless for some stranger fate” (1455–57). Consistent with his own cautious character, Creon demands that Oedipus be hidden inside, indicating a deep misunderstanding of what has transpired.30 For all the recursiveness of the plot, there can be no going back on what Oedipus has brought to light, for the secret is out. His future does not lie inside the fatally wounded house but out on Cithaeron, the wild place that his parents long ago “established for him as a tomb” (1452–53). We shall come back to the dramatis interruptio marked by this final exit, but let us first look at the distanced spaces that play such an important role in Oedipus’ life: Delphi, Corinth, Cithaeron, and the crossing “where three roads meet.” Delphi appears to dominate from the outset; we learn that Oedipus has sent Creon there before the play begins (68–77), and he arrives from that distant spot to report the source of the plague (95–107). Corruption at Delphi lies behind Oedipus’ conviction that Creon and Teiresias are

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plotting his overthrow (376–78, 385–89, 555–57, 570–73, 700–706), prompting Creon to urge his accuser to “go back to Pytho and inquire of the oracle, whether I reported it truly” (603–4).31 To calm her husband, Jocasta divulges the unfulfilled prophecy that she and Laius received “not from Apollo himself, but from his underlings” (711–12) years before. Relating his own visit to Delphi to inquire about his parents, Oedipus describes how he slew a man at “the cleft road, leading to the same juncture from Delphi and from Daulis” (733–34) where Jocasta says that Laius was killed. The Delphic prophecy about Thebes’ pollution now implicates Oedipus, and the Corinthian Messenger enables Jocasta to see the cruel truth of Apollo’s earlier pronouncement to her and Laius about their son (992–1061). Delphi returns at the end of the play, when Creon sends a mission back to the oracle to ensure that the command to exile or slay the murderer of Laius still holds (1438– 45, 1518–19). Both spatially and temporally, Apollo and Delphi surround the drama, making it cohere. And yet at the end, Oedipus emerges as the new seer, revealing the cause of the plague for all to see. But this seer has no further need of Thebes or of Delphi; he knows that his future lies elsewhere, on Cithaeron. Although Apollo and his oracle cast a dark shadow over the play, the intersection of the three roads is the distant space that draws the noose tightest. Linking Delphi, Daulis, and Thebes, the crossroads epitomize Lewin’s hodological space, marking the literal turning point in Oedipus’ life. Not only do the split roads fatally bring together father and son, but they also serve as the place where Oedipus turns his back on Corinth and makes his way to Thebes. And yet for all their importance, the crossroads enter the play by accident. Jocasta’s revelation that Laius fell to robbers where “three roads meet” (716, 730) stops Oedipus in his tracks. Her subsequent account—how they pinned together their child’s ankles and exposed him on the mountain—fails to enter Oedipus’ consciousness, for he zeroes in on the junction of the roads: “Such a wandering in my spirit and movement in my brain / . . . I thought I heard you say this, that Laius / was cut down where three roads meet” (727, 729–30). Writing on space and time in Proust, Poulet notes that “places behave exactly as the moments of the past, as memories.” The same applies to Oedipus, whose memories are set off unwittingly by the mere mention of a distant place.32 Like Clytemnestra reliving the murder of her husband in Agamemnon, Oedipus recreates the fatal encounter at the crossroads as if it were happening for the first time: When I was making my way near the junction of those three roads, there a herald and a man standing in a horse-drawn wagon, just as you describe, were coming in the opposite direction. The one in the lead

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and the old one himself were trying to drive me off the road by force. In a rage, I strike at the driver, the one who was pushing me aside, and the old man sees it; waiting until I was passing the cart, he came down hard, right on my skull, using a double-pronged goad. He paid more than his share; all of a sudden, struck by a staff in this hand of mine, he rolls backwards, right out of the wagon. And I kill them all. (801–813)

The odd juxtaposition of perfect (completed) and imperfect (incomplete) verbal aspect, and the surprising shifts between present and past tense, indicate the immediacy with which Oedipus relives the encounter.33 The source of memory remains a single place, but one that signals three destinations, beyond which stretch a myriad of others outside the play. Viewed as an identity built on multiplicity, the junction of the roads represents a spatial version of the riddle posed by the Sphinx, where what is one is also three.34 In fact, it is shortly after the event at the crossroads that Oedipus solved the riddle, enabling the stranger from distant Corinth to inherit the palace and rule at Thebes. Corinth first enters the play when Oedipus tells the story of how he came to those violent crossroads. “My father was Polybus of Corinth” (774), he asserts, mistaking both his parents and his homeland. After Oedipus consults the oracle about his background, he flees “the land of Corinth, forever marking its boundaries only by the stars” (794–96). The Messenger from Corinth (ek t¯es Korinthou, 936 and 955; ton Korinthion xenon, 1119) offers Oedipus a new future in that city, announcing that “the inhabitants of the Isthmian land have named him ruler [turannos]” (939–40). But the enabling circumstance—the death of Polybus—takes Oedipus back to the past and the Delphic prediction that he would destroy his parents by murder and incest (964–72, 984–1015): “That is why Corinth has lived far away from me / for so long” (997–98). The odd inversion, with the city presented as an agent, suggests something of the executive power of place in Oedipus’ life. Having avoided his distant home these many years, he discovers Corinth was not his birthplace, any more than Polybus and Merope were his natural parents. The Messenger from his ersatz home found Oedipus in a far more mysterious place, “the wooded glens of Cithaeron” (1026). Cithaeron is the most fully elaborated distant space in the play: the site where Jocasta and Laius have their son exposed (717–19); the remote area where the sole survivor of Laius’ party sequesters himself as a shepherd (760–63); the mountain heights where the Chorus will dance to celebrate Oedipus’ divine birth (1086–95); the place where the “foundling” (1106–7)

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changes hands, from the Theban shepherd to his Corinthian counterpart (1142–45, 1156–61); and finally the destination the blind Oedipus sees as his due, a place of exile and homecoming, where his parents had planned his tomb so long ago (1451–54). Many critics think that the mountain represents uncultivated wilderness, a liminal area outside political borders, standing in opposition to the civilized centers of Thebes and Corinth.35 However, as in Euripides’ Bacchae (see chapter 4), Cithaeron proves to be more than a natural foil to human culture, or a savage space set against the logos-bound city, or liminal high ground opposed to the ordered, cultivated lowlands. As a place for exposing an unwanted child (a practice more prominent in myth than in life, at least in fifth-century Athens),36 the mountain accepts what Kristeva terms “the abject,” the throw-away stuff of the body that cannot be assimilated and yet never fully disappears. Freudians speak of the return of the repressed, locating it in a psychological space, where traumatic thoughts and experiences pushed back into the unconscious reemerge, frequently in a different form. By materializing this Freudian notion, Kristeva hypostasizes the repressed as a rejected thing or person.37 Viewed in these terms, Cithaeron offers a space for what Thebes has discarded, storing it for its eventual reappearance later. This certainly applies to the young Oedipus, “thrown out by the hands of others onto the trackless mountain” (719), who returns unrecognized to the house that expelled him. But it also fits the shepherd-servant of Laius—who begs to be sent back to the “fields and sheep pastures / . . . as far as possible from the sight of the city” (761–62)— once he sees that the new king of Thebes is the man who killed the old one. These two Cithaeronian “throwaways” go unmentioned until a crucial event brings them into Jocasta’s consciousness. To calm Oedipus’ rage at prophets and oracles, she relates the story of her son (705–26), and then brings up the shepherd who survived the violence at the crossroads (754–69). These belated memories lead to the eventual meeting of the two men before the palace that once had no place for either of them.38 But Cithaeron sustains more than the deviant, the wild, and the discarded. The mountain provides spring and summer pasturage for flocks from both Thebes and Corinth (1026–29, 1125–40), evidence for the practice of transhumance, the seasonal movement of herds between upland and lowland pasture.39 Although meat did not feature prominently in the daily Greek diet (particularly in Athens), domestic livestock played an important role in the civic and domestic religious practice of sacrifice.40 When describing the effects of the plague, the Priest mentions the “withering away of oxen where they graze” (26),41 an assault on nature per se but also a threat to sacrificial ritual. The flocks tended by the two shepherds on Cithaeron belonged to Laius and Polybus respectively (1122–27, 1138–40; also 1022, 1028), suggesting that the mountain played an important role in sustaining the public rituals of Thebes and Corinth.42

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Tragedy rarely offers a glimpse into such practical concerns as livestock grazing. Why does Sophocles do so here? The plot requires that infant Oedipus be exposed in a minimally populated area that will allow him to be found and transferred from Theban to Corinthian territory. That Cithaeron provides such a space reflects its actual geographical location, lying south of Thebes and north of Corinth, but it also suggests a place of peaceful human interaction. Compare the mutual trust established between Theban and Corinthian shepherds on the mountain with the destructive encounter between the Theban and Corinthian parties on a public roadway. Linking important “civilized” spaces (Delphi, Diaulia, Thebes), the crossroads witness a spontaneous outbreak of violence, where a solitary traveler is beaten like a pack animal (804–9) and responds by killing all but one of his attackers. In the wilds of Cithaeron, on the other hand, two shepherds from Corinth and Thebes spend six months together for three years running (1133–39), taking pity on a helpless infant and cooperating in saving its life (1016–44, 1142– 45, 1156–61, 1177–80). Words for giving and gift (did¯omi or d¯oron at 1022, 1025, 1038, 1040, 1156, 1157, 1161), for taking, holding, and receiving (forms of lamban¯o at 1022, 1031, 1039, 1162, of dechomai at 1163), emphasize the human contact that sustains the young and innocent Oedipus. A place purported to represent the raw and the savage actually promotes the cooperative virtues of companionship and pity, albeit with tragic consequences. On several occasions, characters and Chorus speak of Cithaeron as a sacred place linked to the gods. The Corinthian Messenger describes finding Oedipus “in the deep-cleft groves [napaiais ptuxais] of Cithaeron” (1026), and the term nap¯e (or napos) frequently carries religious associations. Pindar applies it to the holy sites of Delphi and Olympia (P. 5.38, 6.9) and Sophocles himself uses it for the sacred grove of the Eumenides (OC 155–64), for “the lofty wooded glens of Mount Oeta” (Tr. 436), site of Heracles’ immolation and hero cult, and for the scrub area of beach where Ajax commits suicide (Aj. 892), a place of temporary sanctuary for his family (see chapter 3).43 In the third stasimon, the Chorus suggests the sacred nature of Cithaeron by vowing to honor her with dances during the full moon, addressing her as “countryman, mother, and nurse of Oedipus” (1089–95). They wonder which divinities coupled on the mountain to engender their king— Pan, Apollo, Hermes, Dionysus (a god with strong ties to Thebes and Cithaeron), an unnamed goddess, some flashing-eyed nymph (1098–1109)? From literal mother to the fertile haunt of the gods, Cithaeron represents a place of luxuriant hedonism and effortless procreation, the antithesis of the plague-ridden city of rotting livestock, dead bodies, and stillborn babies evoked by the Chorus in the parodos. Lofty thoughts of Oedipus’ divine birth fall back to earth with the entrance down the eisodos of the old Shepherd from that very mountain (1100–18).

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The terrifying scene that follows reunites the three characters involved in the original exchange on Cithaeron. Freud and his followers postulate a “primal scene” in which a young boy sees his parents having intercourse, crystallizing his desire to do away with his father and possess his mother.44 No such scene occurs in the bedroom of Oedipus Tyrannus,45 but an equivalent takes place in the open spaces of Cithaeron, where the decent instincts of human beings further the workings of an inhuman fate. It is the reenactment of that “primal scene” which Oedipus stages before the palace, inspired “much less obviously [by] the compulsion to act out infantile fantasies than [by] the compulsion to know the truth.”46 He focuses on the foundling whom he knows to be himself, but whom he refers to in the third person until the last moment. Questioning the Shepherd, he links the child’s identity to its location: “Where did you get it? Was it your own [oikeion ‘of your oikos’], or someone else’s? / . . . / From which of these citizens and from which house [steg¯es ‘roof’] did it come?” (1162, 1164). Under intense pressure, the Shepherd finally concedes that “the one inside—your wife—could best say how it was” (1171–72), doubly suggestive given that the actor who played Jocasta also played the Shepherd, the character who points in her direction as the source of the child.47 The distant spaces of Corinth, Delphi, the three roads, and Cithaeron each provide the setting for a memorable event in Oedipus’ past. When he brings those distant events together and holds them simultaneously in his mind, the past overtakes the present and Oedipus discovers his true identity. Bergson claims that we misunderstand the past if we see it cut off from the present by the same divide that separates the nonexistent from the existent. Rather than understanding their difference in terms of existence, we should distinguish past and present by the relationship that each has to action. Our past never goes away, we just can’t do anything about it; the present, however, can summon us to act “on” it and so open up the future.48 Bergson’s analysis of time applies perfectly to Oedipus, whose past very much exists, continually present in the significant spaces of his life. The conjunction of those spaces takes place before the palace of Thebes, revealing it for what it is (the place of his birth to Jocasta and Laius) and also for what he has made it (the site of incest with his mother). What stands in view for the length of the play holds the key to his identity. Oedipus’ past has always been there, waiting for him to remember it; when he does, his past knowledge becomes present, and he sees where he is with such clarity of vision that he must blot out its sight. Let me be clear that memory in Oedipus Tyrannus is not the “pursuit and recapture of time in experience” sought by Proust in A la recherche du temps perdu. Marcel finds his way by avoiding rational intellection, tapping involuntary memories frequently unleashed (as in the madeleine episode) through the “lower” senses of taste and smell. Paradoxically, by reuniting the past and the present, Proust breaks the grip of temporality, transforming a given par-

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ticularity into an “out of time” experience.49 As Vatsyayan points out, “Proust goes in search of the past with all the time at his disposal, so that already there is a dimension of the timeless in his search.”50 Oedipus’ task is precisely the opposite, driven as he is by a public crisis that will not wait for time to take its course. Oedipus does not make progress toward his own identity by unleashing involuntary memories and letting them run together into transcendent (and solipsistic) self-awareness. Rather he pursues a problem, puts memories together, and tries to understand events as actions in time, not causally free of their temporal order. For Proust, time and place are friends; not so for Oedipus. The plague looms, death is rampant, time runs out. The breathless quality of the play reflects both the crisis that sets it in motion and Sophocles’ concision in turning that crisis in on the protagonist. By an act of will, Oedipus manages to catch up with the person he always was, to overtake himself, and so purge the city of its disease.51 Having traced that process in terms of the interplay of scenic, extrascenic, and distant spaces, let us return to the problem of the play’s ending. When he emerges blind from the palace, Oedipus cries out in bewildered disorientation: “Where am I being carried, wretch that I am? Where / does my voice fly off to, carried on the air?” (1309–10). In his mind’s eye he faces the significant people and places of his past, retracing “the four prime locations that mark the circle of his destiny: Cithaeron, Corinth, the crossroads and Thebes.”52 Oedipus conflates the pain of their recollection with the stabbing of his eyes: “How the sting of the goads sinks into me, / together with the memory of the evils I’ve suffered” (1317–18). He names Apollo as the god that has brought about his cruel and inhuman suffering (1329). He curses the shepherd who saved his life (1349–66), and the mountain that took him in (1391–93). He faults Polybus and Corinth for covering over the festering wound of his origins (1394–97). He challenges the three roads to remember what he did there, and what he “accomplished” after following the path to Thebes (1398–1403). He assaults the marriage that proved incestuous, “everything most shameful among humans” (1403–8). In his blindness, Oedipus reprises the play we have been watching; only he sees it for the first time. Gradually Oedipus recovers his sense of direction and purpose, moving into high gear with Creon’s arrival. Oedipus confronts a man he has treated badly: “In all my past [paros] dealings with him I am discovered to have been in the wrong” (1420–21). Creon insists, however, that he has not come to mock Oedipus or reproach him for “any wrong that lies in the past [paros]” (1423). Paradoxically, the repetition of paros, “the past,” suggests that the play has moved beyond it. As an adverb, paros means “beforetime” or “formerly”; as a preposition, it means “before,” used both spatially and temporally. The compound “before” literally means “presence in front of,” reminding us that descriptions of time inevitably draw on metaphors of space.

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Waiting (a temporal activity) may be short or long (which is spatial); a moment may lie behind or ahead of us; we recall a point in, or a stretch of, time; we say “hereafter” and “thereafter” (not “nowafter” and “thenafter”); we prefer “always” to “all times.”53 In speaking of the past, Creon and Oedipus invoke the different spaces where those bygone events took place, even as they indicate that it is the future, not the past, which is at stake—the meaning of “before” as “what lies ahead [before us].” The scene between Oedipus and his daughters is a case in point. Surrounded by their adult relatives (Creon and Oedipus) and a Chorus of elders, the young girls offer an image of the future, frail and wanting protection. But behind their father’s concern for their fate we see the care of the two shepherds for the young Oedipus, and his upbringing by the Corinthian couple who were not his true parents.54 Oedipus’ desire to leave for Cithaeron recuperates the past and transforms it, opening unexpectedly onto the future. He wants to return to the place his parents had sent him to die, to make—in Freud’s terms—an “uncanny” (unheimlich, literally “unhomely”) homecoming.55 Cithaeron is certainly unhomelike, a place with no permanent residents, akin to the desolate spaces discussed in chapter 3, fulfilling the Priest’s warning that Oedipus could rule over a city “empty [er¯emos] of men who dwell together within it” (57). On the other hand, the “untrodden mountain” (abaton oros, 719) also has aspects of a sacred space, discussed earlier.56 Certainly for the infant Oedipus, the site of his exposure proved the place of his salvation, for there his ankles were unpinned and his young life set in motion. Both in spite of, and because of, the fate he was born to, Oedipus’ nostos to Cithaeron holds the best prospects for a future. We noted at the outset of the chapter that the name “Oedipus” brings together an odd collocation of “knowledge,” “sight,” “foot,” and “where.” Although Oedipus prides himself on his ability to solve riddles, he cannot see what lies at his feet, or where he really is. In the fourth century, popular anecdotes told of “wise men” (sophoi) who had no idea where they were going, like Thales falling down a well while contemplating the stars.57 Many scholars, none more eloquently than Vernant, have analyzed the pattern of reversals that characterize Oedipus, epitomized by his transformation from a sure-footed, farsighted ruler into a blind man with a stick.58 Structuralist critics place the mind-foot dichotomy on a vertical axis that opposes high and low, drawing on the traditional Greek notion that human beings exist between the Olympian deities high above and the animals below. The two parts of Oedipus’ name reflect the tension between godlike reason and beastlike physicality, between insight and earthiness, between elevated king and lowly scapegoat. In this scenario, Oedipus personifies an “intersection of contradictions, the simultaneous presence of polarities,”59 a man pulled apart by his own identity. In the appendix, I discuss the difficulty (after Newton) of speaking intel-

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ligently about the relationship between “mind” and “body,” due to our lack of clarity about what we mean by the latter—and apparently simpler—term. When early Greek thinkers conceived the cosmos, they enlivened its materiality by seeing living forces behind the processes of nature. Translated into terms relevant to the play, what we might think of as mental activity (thinking, choosing, reacting with emotion) was, for the Greeks, an inseparable part of the physical world. In other words, the relationship between understanding and walking (the mind and the foot of Oedipus’ name) were not mutually exclusive but mutually informing.60 We meet a modern version of this old idea in Gibson’s approach to visual perception, in which we take in information from the ambient optic array, information that changes when we turn our heads and use our bodies, adapting to the occlusions that close off and the vistas that open up as we move through the world. It may seem odd to apply Gibson’s work on visual perception to a blind dramatic character. But Gibson’s idea that we are who we are by virtue of the places we have been fits Sophocles’ hero like a glove. Oedipus finds himself precisely by retracing his steps, tracking down the killer and cause of the plague and so discovering who he is.61 After his blinding, he gropes his way out of the endless circularity of his life (epitomized by his incestuous liaison) by thinking ahead to Cithaeron.62 Returning to the mountain might at first glance appear regressive, one more backward turning, but Oedipus knows that his future homecoming—unlike the one that brought him from Corinth to Delphi and finally to Thebes—has not yet been scripted. Knowledge as a journey, a finding and following of the right path, occurs frequently in preSocratic thought (see the appendix), and tragedy frequently draws on the metaphor. “You have walked to the truth,” Clytemnestra tells the Chorus in Agamemnon (1551), and the procession of the “kindly ones” at the end of Eumenides fully integrates understanding with movement, constituting a homecoming with a difference. The end of Oedipus Tyrannus fits this nostos pattern, for Oedipus imagines a homecoming to the mountain that both incorporates and transforms his polluted past. The play also draws on other transformative patterns discussed earlier. As Oedipus’ future destination, Cithaeron shares the qualities of eremetic space, allowing for the new or abnormal to occur. We have glimpsed such a possibility already when Oedipus defies expectation and embraces the children of his incestuous union, challenging both the power of pollution and the conventional wisdom that it must be kept out of sight. Cithaeron offers the spatial version of this new dispensation, a heterotopic wilderness there not for conquest or colonization, but to take in a human cut off from normal society. What path Oedipus’ new life will follow remains undetermined, but we recall that Odysseus’ surprising defense of Ajax’ burial, Neoptolemus’ change of heart regarding Philoctetes, and the Oceanids’ solidarity with Prometheus each takes place in an ostensible no-man’s-land, a space open to the unpredictable.

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Oedipus will journey to the mountain tapping his way with a cane, fulfilling in Teiresias’ words the “dread-footed [deinopous] curse that will drive you from this land” (418). “What Cithaeron will not soon echo your cries?” (420–21), the seer asks before predicting Oedipus’ fate: “Blind instead of seeing / . . . / [you] will cover the ground by feeling it with a stick” (454– 56). This passage suggests the importance of the body (foot, voice, eyes, physical contact) in defining and transforming the space around it, a subject addressed in chapter 4. The image of a blind man making progress by feeling the ground revitalizes the connection, usually taken for granted, between human beings and their terrestrial environment.63 Part of the satisfaction in Gibson’s work derives from his emphasizing the obvious that has been overlooked, namely our perceptual relationship to the earth. The same applies to the walking blind: to see what’s ahead, Oedipus must touch what lies at his feet and “see it feelingly,” as the eyeless Gloucester says in King Lear. The future unfolds as that which sustains, and Oedipus must stay in close contact with it in order to make progress. His grounded future implies no irredeemable loss in perception but rather a change in its speed and precision. As the architect Louis Kahn was fond of saying, “to see is only to touch more accurately.”64 Without the ease of sight, Oedipus can move ahead so long as he never forgets what gives him “eyes,” affording apertures for progress and obstacles to be avoided. At the end of the play Oedipus is once again a man in motion, and one with time on his side. After his anagn¯orisis, the Chorus tells him that “all-seeing time [ho panth’ hor¯on chronos] has found you out against your will” (1214). But from the moment of self-discovery—when past time and space conjoined in the present—Oedipus’ relationship to space and time begins to change. As the possessor of his own identity, he now meets a future that does not inevitably lead back to his past. “You would be better no longer living than living blind,” the Chorus insists, prompting Oedipus to respond, “Don’t try to instruct me or give me advice, / that what I have just done was not done for the best” (1367– 70). Unlike Jocasta, whose corpse he cuts down, the immediacy of death is not for Oedipus; some other, strange fate lies ahead (1455–57). “Soon” (tacha, 421), Teiresias predicts, Cithaeron will echo his lamentations. Oedipus pleads for exile “as soon as possible” (tachista, 1410, 1436), and Creon assures him that once Delphi confirms the punishment, he will “receive it soon” (teux¯ei tacha, 1519).65 In spite of his being forced back into the palace, time will give Oedipus the exile’s homecoming he longs for. Oedipus’ changing relationship to time returns us to the puzzle posed by the Sphinx, “Man” is the answer, but as such it fails to address the larger implications of the riddle (ainigma, 391). Let us look at the version that has come down to us, probably predating Sophocles’ play: There is on the earth [epi g¯es] a thing two-footed and four-footed and threefooted, with one name. Of all things that creep on the earth [epi gaian herpeta],

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move through the air and over the sea, it alone changes its form [in this way]. But whenever it walks [bain¯ei] with the most feet, it is at its weakest for all its limbs.66

To solve the conundrum requires that we perceive continuity over time, the problem for someone ignorant of his own identity. Critics focus on Oedipus’ failure to understand that the answer to the riddle points not to a species (man) but to an individual (himself), a person uniquely confused about sameness and difference.67 Although true enough, this judgment overlooks the way that the riddle translates time (as the creature ages) into bodily change linked to mobility. Locomotion requires a medium to sustain it (the earth, for human beings), and it implies a destination (imaginary, virtual, temporary, or real) toward which the creature moves. However, the Sphinx’ song fails to mention any place or places that these variable limbs move toward; the only suggestion of a destination involves the passage of time. A human being moves from crawling to striding to walking with a cane only insofar as he or she moves from infancy toward old age. Therefore, the answer to the riddle is “Man” only if his destination is the future, and if he arrives there by moving over the earth. Oedipus per se is not its solution, but Oedipus tapping his way toward Cithaeron is. Considering the future as a destination recalls the classic meditation on time in book 11 of Confessions. Augustine comes to realize that time is a distension of the soul, stretching out to embrace the past and future in a mental act of attention: If the future and past exist, I want to know where they are. And if I cannot yet know this, at least I do know that wherever they are, they are there not as future or past, but present. If wherever they are they are future, then in that place they are not yet; if past, then they are there no more. Thus wherever they are and whatever they are, they are only as present. . . . Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three things exist in my mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is direct perception, the present of things future is expectation. If we are allowed to speak thus, . . . there are three times.68

Adapting Augustine, Heidegger introduces the idea of “temporality” to express the “ever current unity of future, past [having-been-ness] and present,” incorrectly understood as separate entities.69 Temporality for Heidegger is like Augustinian consciousness, a continuity that stretches over the three “times” represented in the acts of retaining (remembering), presencing (perceiving directly), and expecting.70 When we stand apart from this continuity (what Heidegger calls ekstasis, literally “standing out from”), we come to think of

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time as cut up into the segments we label past, present, and future. In Augustine’s words, “although it is incorrect, custom allows it.”71 Construed as a mental space, consciousness converts the diachronic unfolding of events into a synchronic simultaneity. As Bergson famously puts it, “We juxtapose our states of consciousness in such a way as to perceive them simultaneously: not one following the other, but one alongside the other; in brief, we project time onto space.”72 For Bergson and his followers, the spatialization of time happens in consciousness, in our mental awareness of things, events, memories, dreams. The theater—a mercifully, and mercilessly, concrete medium—projects time onto space in a far more physical manner, exemplified by Oedipus’ linking his future directly to Cithaeron. His desire to return there may seem at first symbolic, a manifestation of poetic justice that brings him back to the place of his early exposure. But the physical details of that exposure (pinned ankles, his transfer from hand to hand) and the blindness that affects his mobility at the end suggest that Oedipus’ projection of his future onto the mountain is more a corporeal acknowledgment than a poetic idea. His own cries will echo in his ears as he blindly makes his way tapping the ground with a cane, answering the riddle by living it. Unlike Jocasta dead inside the palace, Oedipus is drawn to the “not yet” of the future, the privileged ekstasis for Heidegger that reflects the human quality of “Being-ahead-of-itself,” of “Being toward the potentiality-for-Being.”73 Sartre puts the challenge more simply: “Becoming what you are,” which requires an authentic projection toward an uncertain future. For Sartre, “authenticity consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibility and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate”—a description that fits Oedipus at the end of the play.74 After the revelation that he murdered his father, committed incest with his mother, and fathered his own brothers and sisters, Oedipus goes over those facts again and again in a “definitional fondling of the truth.”75 But the truth, as the riddle of the Sphinx suggests, has a future, which Oedipus has not yet moved through. He “knows the worst, but he does not yet know everything,” Halliburton reminds us, and that fact— befitting a character who will not stop short of finding out—draws him on.76 My focus on Oedipus’ desire to move into the space of the future strains toward the existential, emphasizing the protagonist’s trajectory through time. In Le temps dans la trag´edie grecque, de Romilly links the development of subjective or psychological time to Sophocles’ concentration on individual heroic figures.77 For her, as for some existentialists, the spatial component drops away in favor of the isolated, psychological self, cut off (more or less) from the world. In a sense, the present study has followed a similar path, moving from space for returns (involving a clear relationship to the social), to eremetic space (necessarily isolated from the normal world), to the space

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of the body (individuated by definition), and finally to that most inner of relations, memory and time. As Kant construes human perception, space is the a priori condition of our experiencing the external world, and time the a priori condition of any experience whatsoever, including internal phenomena, because time determines neither shape nor position but only the relation of representations in our inner experience—which is where Oedipus seems to have brought us.78 However, the movement in tragedy from the distant spaces of nostoi to the inner spaces of consciousness does not lead to a psychic dead end. Like Oedipus, it keeps going. The external world reemerges as the manifestation of remembered, lived, and projected time—the memories of Corinth, Delphi, the place where three roads meet; the everpresent palace revealed for what it is; the re-creation of the original triadic scene on Cithaeron; and the return of the mountain as a concrete image of Oedipus’ future, calling for his slow, earthbound nostos. The spatialization of temporal relations also fits the self-referential and the reflexive spaces of Greek tragic performance, which allowed the heroic world of the plays its special purchase on fifth-century audiences. Having discussed the relationship between Oedipus, his plague-ridden Thebes, and Athens of the early 420s, let us turn to the self-referential space that the play evokes and takes advantage of. In the famous second stasimon, the Chorus considers the implications of an apparent breakdown in religious observance. If someone commits with impunity acts that should outrage the gods, “Why is it necessary for us to dance?” (ti dei me choreuein; 896), or, in Lloyd-Jones’ translation, “Why should we honor the gods with dances?” Given that the Chorus addresses this question while performing a dance at the City Dionysia, it resonates beyond its immediate dramatic context, as Dodds observes: “If they mean merely ‘Why should I, a Theban elder, dance?,’ the question is . . . slightly ludicrous; the meaning is surely ‘Why should I, an Athenian citizen, continue to serve in a chorus?’ In speaking of themselves as a chorus they step out of the play into the contemporary world.”79 In his Greek National Theatre production in the United States (performed in modern Greek), Minos Volonakis had the actors in the Chorus stop their dance, face the audience, take off their masks, and utter the lines in English—“If such crimes go unpunished, / why should I join in the sacred performance?”—after which they put their masks back on and resumed their lyric in Greek. In his review of the production, Knox does not find the gesture gratuitous but rather an attempt “to recreate in modern times a remarkable feature of the ancient play.”80 The Chorus questions the function of tragic performance generally, suddenly turning the theater into a place that challenges its own validity. How can tragedy continue if it fails to serve the gods, if it honors behavior that threatens the basis for its performance at the City Dionysia? The near impossibility of posing such a question in the contemporary theater reveals the limitations of our own metatheatrical inge-

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nuities, which rarely rise above a game-playing notion of “performance” (or “performativity”) carefully positioned for a postmodern elite. We learn in the final antistrophe that the Chorus’s fear arises from the patent unreliability of oracles, demonstrated in the previous scene by Jocasta’s proof that the prophecy of Laius’ death did not come true. The Chorus prays that Zeus restore Apollo’s credibility by preventing “the utterance of false oracles in the future.”81 If not, the elders will never again travel to Delphi or to other oracular sites for divine guidance (897–903), meaning that festival dancing and holy pilgrimage will disappear. Sacred dance represents choreography tied to language and music, a “movement event” that literally goes nowhere, but that gathers a human community around it by honoring the gods. Such is the performance of the Chorus in this stasimon, and in the next when it offers a dance to Cithaeron in celebration of Oedipus’ divine birth.82 Pilgrimage to a sacred site calls for movement of a different sort, a journey in pursuit of distant knowledge, like the visitations of Oedipus, Creon, and Laius to Delphi. This, too, will cease, if “divine things pass away” (errei de ta theia, 910). If the Chorus can find no reason to dance, then the audience has no reason to travel to the precinct of Dionysus Eleuthereus and there enter the place “where three roads meet,” the two eisodoi and the doorway that opens onto the orchestra,83 the space of the theater where the polis gathers to confront itself. By questioning the purpose of its performance, the Chorus reminds the Athenians in the audience of the stakes for their own city in Oedipus’ quest for the truth. Dubious critics point out that the word polis occurs for the twenty-fifth and last time at line 880, implying that the play discards its concern for the city’s well-being and concentrates instead on Oedipus’ selfdiscovery.84 But the ongoing presence of the civic-minded Chorus, Oedipus’ self-exposure that transforms his blinding from a personal to a public act, his insistence on his own exile to cleanse the city of its pollution, and the telling instance of choral self-reference maintain the public thrust of the play and direct it out to the audience.85 Without knowing that the blind old man will make his way to Colonus in Sophocles’ last tragedy, posthumously produced at the City Dionysia in 401, we still sense that the play of space and time in Oedipus Tyrannus moved the original spectators beyond the ironic relationship with which they started. Finding that oracles are true may justify tragic performances for the Chorus, but the audience never doubted their validity (at least as regards the play). Sophocles answers the Chorus’s question not by justifying oracles, but by taking his protagonist beyond them. He moves Oedipus back through the past of prophecy and circumstance, to the places that made him what he is. He reencounters those places, embraces the worst that happened there, and then moves on to an uncertain future, one that the audience cannot yet remember.

CHAPTER SIX SPACE AND THE OTHER The first idea one infers from two things is that they are not the same; often much time is needed to observe what they have in common. —Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality

I

N RECENT THEATER scholarship, the presentation of “the Other” has received so much attention that we stand in danger of being “othered out.” Scholars dealing with representation in fifth-century Athens have proven particularly adept; women, barbarians, Persians, Spartans, Amazons, Thebans, metics, slaves, bastards, Centaurs, satyrs, children, the noncitizen, the private (repressed) self, animals, and gods have achieved (in various quarters) the status of the “Other.” For Vidal-Naquet, “every Athenian tragedy is a reflection on the foreigner, on the Other, on the double.” Whitehead thinks of the Athenian metic as an “anti-citizen,” the negative image of what it meant to be a real Athenian. Zeitlin views the Thebes of tragedy as its own “anti-Athens,” and she construes tragic acting (particularly of female characters) in terms of “playing the Other,” where women represent the antipody to, and construction of, male patriarchy. For Hall, Attic tragedy played a crucial role in inventing the barbarian as “Other” to the Greek, marking the onset of European Orientalism analyzed by Edward Sa¨ıd. In a similar vein, Castriota claims that Aeschylus (and Herodotus after him) conceived the Persian “only as an antithesis: an other and an inferior, a foil designed to assert and validate the moral or cultural superiority of those [Greeks/Athenians] who had defeated them.” According to Cartledge, anyone not empowered by law and political franchise constituted the “Other” for an Athenian citizen male, but none more thoroughly than the slave. Adopting a psychological model, Segal argues that “the other side of the palace wall [i.e., extrascenic space] is also the side of the Other,” like “the invisible graphic space of the dramatist’s text and the hidden, interior space of the self.” For Segal, Euripides’ Pentheus hears in Dionysus “what Lacan calls a Discourse of the Other, the language of his repressed unconscious self.”1 Looking outside the human, Katz asserts that “among the Greeks . . . the realm of beasts constitutes a domain of the Other.” Some scholars extend this notion even to the gods, in spite of the anthropomorphic basis of Greek religion (discussed in chapter 4). Writing on Artemis, for example, Vernant focuses on her association with animals and childbirth (newborns are ani-

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mal-like in relation to culture), concluding that the goddess “embodies culture’s distinctive capacity for integrating what is foreign to it, and for assimilating the other without the risk of itself turning savage.” Expanding the category to that which defies integration (“the monstrous”), Vernant speaks of the “terrifying horror of that which is absolutely other, . . . the confrontation with death.”2 The impetus for such thinking derives from many sources, including Levinas’ notion of alterity, where a dominant group defines itself negatively in terms of an idealized opposition, such that the two terms are “mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.”3 It lies beyond our scope here to determine if such an operation actually accounts for group identity and self-definition, although students of history recognize that powerful elites traditionally exploit the oppositional shorthand of stereotyping to rally the population against enemies whose humanity has been denied. To take an example close to home, the United States government rails against “international terrorists,” deflecting attention from the far more pervasive terror it engineers directly or through its clients in much of the Third World.4 Given what we know about modern ideological systems, there can be no excuse for naivet´e in dealing with ancient Athens, or the play of space in Greek tragedy. But perhaps the concept of the “Other”—whether in political, psychological, ethnic, religious, or ontological terms—participates too fully in the binarism we have questioned regarding structuralist readings of space. The limitations of such conceptual dualism become clear in the theater of ancient Athens, which was simply too large and encompassing for hegemonic “othering” to work.5 Although generally limited to stories based on mythic figures, Greek tragedy nonetheless has a great many people from different places entering its real and imaginary space. The barbarian-woman-slave Cassandra unleashes a flood of impressions in Agamemnon, but few would see her as embodying the stereotypes of oriental luxury, feminine deception, or the mentality of a natural slave.6 In Ajax another barbarian-slave, Tecmessa, speaks with wisdom born of enormous suffering to her Greek husband, who refuses to respond compassionately to her situation. In the same play we meet the half-breed Teukros, a bastard born of an Asian mother, who stands by his dead brother and exposes Agamemnon’s barbarity, both in the past and the present. Teukros’ response to Agamemnon’s assault on his background represents a recurrent motif, in which a foreign character charged with savage, uncivilized behavior stands accused by a Greek whose actions condemn him (or her) of even worse. Torture, mutilation, incest, human sacrifice, hubris, tyranny, ruthlessness, emotionalism, lying, deception, licentiousness, prurience—these qualities are integral to the myths that lie behind Greek tragic characters. In our discussion of Hecuba, for example, we saw how Euripides’ treatment of slavery undermines any notion of moral superiority among the apparently “free” Greeks, and the same applies to Trojan

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Women, where the enslaved Trojan Andromache recognizes that the real barbarians are her Greek captors.7 In Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, the idea that mythical Thebes represents the defining opposite of democratic Athens opens interesting interpretive possibilities, but adopting such a scheme in production makes for an inert theatrical experience. Perhaps Athenians enjoyed watching their identities confirmed via the suffering of Theban “Others,” and they reveled in their cultural and political superiority over the benighted specimens on stage. In these (and other) “Theban” plays, however, things move too freely between Athens and the fictional setting for any such rigid opposition to hold. Does the city of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, for example, really represent “the obverse side of Athens, its shadow self,” as Zeitlin claims?8 Or is the Thebes of Aeschylus’ play not Athens’ “Other” but its analogue, where the Athenian recollection of the Persian invasion is given mythic scope? The city is described as “Greek-speaking and free,” one that resists the yoke of slavery (Th. 72–75, 792–94) and fights off invasion by a “foreign-speaking army” (166– 70). Havelock suggests that “language like this recalls the Persian threat, not a situation in which Greek meets Greek as in the Theban story.”9 The dual threat of foreign invasion and internal faction allowed the scenic space of Thebes to provide a useful mythical space in which Athenians could consider their own circumstances in 467. If theater history teaches us anything, it is that the machine of ideological reproduction is not particularly well served by live performance. The theater traditionally has had a difficult relationship with authoritarian regimes, as its frequent association (at least in the West) with social movements and political tumult suggests. As outlined in chapter 1, tragedies at the City Dionysia included a large and diverse audience (the antithesis, for example, of an elite, ideologically secure court masque); a festival environment of broad popular appeal, with many kinds of plays featuring rich poetic narrative, music, and dance; and a drawn-out production process that offered several avenues for input and engagement. To expand on the phenomenological views quoted in the introduction, live performance with several characters enacting a complex linguistic narrative in an open space before a large audience lets too many cats out of the bag to serve effectively the ends of ideological propagation based on clearly drawn cultural, ethnic, class, gender, political, and geographical differentiations. As States puts it, the theater finally is “a place of disclosure, not a place of reference.”10 This chapter views the representation of the “Other” in tragedy through our set of spatial lenses, focusing on Aeschylus’ Persians and Euripides’ Medea. In the former, the place of the “barbarian” comes to the fore; in the latter, the position of women looms large, and to a lesser extent that of slaves and children. By attending to the role of space and its transformations in these plays, we may better see the limitations of the “Other” as an interpre-

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tive category for understanding the way tragedy worked in the ancient theater.

Persians Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitude of things. —Shelley It is hardly possible to overestimate the importance for Western literature of the Iliad’s demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than of a friend or a leader, is tragic and not comic. —Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

Our earliest surviving tragedy (dated to 472), Aeschylus’ Persians is anomalous in many ways, most notably for dealing with a near-contemporary event, Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis (480) and the disastrous retreat of his expedition back to Persia (479).11 In part because of its historical focus, the setting of Persians also defies expectations, and scholars remain divided as to precisely where the play takes place. The scenic space clearly lies within Susa, the capital of Persia, but after that uncertainty reigns. Initially the Persian elders of the Chorus seem to gather outside their chamber, perhaps represented by the sk¯en¯e. When they “sit down in the ancient building” (140), however, they seem to have moved indoors; the queen (unnamed in the play, but traditionally called Atossa, the wife of Darius and mother of Xerxes) arrives in a chariot, which takes us back outside; then we find ourselves transported to Darius’ tomb; after the ghost-raising sequence—reminiscent of the kommos in Choephoroi—the grave effectively disappears, and the rest of the play takes place in an open area somewhere in the capital.12 On the basis of this variability, and lacking clear evidence to the contrary, Taplin draws the unlikely (but now generally accepted) conclusion that the pre-Oresteia theater of Dionysus lacked a sk¯en¯e.13 However, such a facade proves perfectly viable for Persians, providing the backdrop for the Chorus’s gathering, and the logical place (given the resources of the Greek theater) for the appearance of the ghost of Darius, who speaks like a god from on high.14 As with Agamemnon’s tomb in Choephori, his grave would have been located in the center of the orchestra; the unexpected appearance of his ghost on the roof—behind the immediate focus of dramatic attention—spatially highlights the power of the supernatural, lending Darius’ appearance and pronouncements added significance.15 Scholars rightly emphasize that Persians shares the typical tragic concern with an important family, in this case the house of Darius and the

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Achaemenid line. However, by not placing the action before the royal palace, Aeschylus “communalizes” the situation. In spite of the hierarchy and tyranny represented by Xerxes, his disaster signals more than the fall of a house. In this context we can compare the nostoi of Agamemnon and Heracles discussed in chapter 2, where a triumphant eponymous hero returns to his own home, only to meet unexpected disaster within its walls. Aeschylus in Persians alters this pattern: first, the king returns in utter defeat and, second, he arrives not at his own home but at a public area, where he is met not by his own family (as hinted at earlier in the play) but by the community he has failed, its importance signaled by the play’s title. Recall that at the end of Agamemnon Aegisthus stands before the threshold of his new dwelling with Clytemnestra at his side, commanding the Argive elders to leave them alone and retire to their own houses. At the end of Persians, however, both Xerxes and the Persian elders leave the orchestra together and make their way to the palace. No one owns the scenic space, for no one lives there. Lacking clearly defined scenic and extrascenic spaces, Persians directs our attention to the distant land of Greece, particularly Athens. In previous chapters we have discussed other plays that focus on the distance—in Antigone, the er¯emiai defined by Polyneices’ corpse and Antigone’s tomb eventually dominate the play, and in Agamemnon Troy comes to life in the language of the Chorus and characters (Clytemnestra, the Herald, Agamemnon), until the fallen city finally appears in the person of Cassandra. Persians concentrates even more fully on the far away, as those left behind in Susa convene in the orchestra to wait for the news from Greece. Although the totality of the defeat becomes fully clear only with Xerxes’ arrival, the play does not depend on suspense for its dramatic impact, because the original audience knew firsthand the results of Xerxes’ expedition. Instead, the tragedy works incrementally, building disaster upon disaster, grief on grief, until the size of the wave that already has broken is manifest by its negative image, the single tattered figure of Xerxes home from afar, the symbolic remnant of a once great empire. By keeping the local setting flexible and nonspecific, Aeschylus encourages the audience (along with the characters) to concentrate on the “beyond,” which for the Athenian spectators meant their own city. They hear about Greece and Athens from various sources: Atossa’s dream, with its memorable image of the yoked sisters, Persia and Greece, the latter rebelling against the yoke of tyranny (181–99); the Queen’s inquiry about Athens’ geographical and political situation (230–46); the Messenger’s account of Salamis and Psyttaleia (250–472); Darius’ warning that Persia never invade Greek soil (ignoring his own invasion and defeat at Marathon ten years before), and his prediction of the Persian disaster at Plataea (790–831). During these long narrative sections with Greece and Athens as their focus, where did the audience actually look? Some critics believe that they zeroed in on the exotic

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strangeness of the onstage Persians, their foreign costumes, customs, and unspeakable names; that Aeschylus arranged for the Athenian audience to delight in their moral and military superiority over these representative barbarians.17 Such a response may well reflect what Athenians of 472 wanted to feel, but the play’s spatial dynamics suggest that Aeschylus had something else in mind, and presented something different on stage. Avoiding a defined scenic focus, and utilizing no extrascenic space (whether a sk¯en¯e was available or not), Aeschylus encouraged his audience to look elsewhere. Outside the theater stood evidence of the Persian occupation, which had ended only seven years before. Themistocles’ plan to trust the city’s safety to the “wooden walls” of its navy required that Athens evacuate the women and children, open the city to the Persian invaders, and then defeat them at sea. Herodotus and Thucydides describe the havoc the invaders wreaked on Athens, putting the countryside to the torch, razing all but isolated portions of the city walls, destroying most of the homes (except those that quartered the Persian leaders), pillaging and burning the Acropolis (temples, altars, sacred shrines, cult statues).18 At the time of the first production of Persians, the theater of Dionysus overlooked a section of the “new” walls, thrown up hastily using the rubble from temples, public buildings, and houses. The defensive structure surrounded the inner city with reminders of the Persian sack,19 offering visual confirmation just outside the theater of the Athens evoked by the characters onstage. It is worth keeping this devastation in mind when evaluating the Greek “invention” of the barbarian. If the invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxes had not occurred, or if they had not been so massive in scale, if Xerxes and Mardonius had not ravaged the city and countryside of Attica, if their armies had not burned the holiest places of Athens and Eleusis, if their abandoned or captured possessions (gold, silver, couches, sumptuous fabrics, horses, camels, a bronze manger, Xerxes’ tent) had not surpassed anything the Greeks had seen before, then we might be surprised at the emergence of Persians as the barbarian enemy in Greek art and literature after 480 B.C.20 As it stands, it seems remarkable how restrained the Greek artistic response was, with Aeschylus’ Persians the most remarkably restrained of all. To risk a near contemporary analogy, Vietnam suffered a massive foreign invasion from the United States from 1961 to 1975, this one country bombed more heavily than all countries in World War II put together. Six million Vietnamese peasants were rounded up in “strategic hamlets” for their “protection,” others were targeted directly in “free-fire zones,” or simply slaughtered as at My Lai. A rain of napalm and other chemical “defoliants” led to the further destruction of people and the environment. By the end of the war, some two million civilians had been killed. Seven years after the Nixon-Kissinger “peace initiative” of 1972, the United States continued its oppressive involvement in the region, propping up the military government

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in Thailand, blocking international aid to Vietnam, and arming its immediate enemies. In 1979–80, responding to anti-Vietnamese pogroms from the genocidal Pol Pot regime, Vietnam invaded and occupied neighboring Cambodia, bringing an effective end to the rule of the Khmer Rouge, which the United States proceeded to support politically and financially. If the Vietnamese of 1980 viewed Americans as their enemy, exposed the horrors of the U.S. invasion and occupation, made films that stereotyped American GIs— drugged, scared, coddled with fancy equipment, cruel, corrupt, lascivious (unleashing the sex industry that has since burgeoned in the region)—who would say they created a false image, given what they had experienced? To put it bluntly, sometimes chauvinist rhetoric is justified, particularly when confronting an enemy whose dominance threatens to be total.21 The situation in Greece in 472 B.C., seven years after the Greeks defeated the Persians at Plataea and drove them out of mainland Greece, was not dissimilar. The giant power of Persia continued to pose a significant threat, and in response Athens helped to forge (and eventually dominate) the Delian League. Persians began to appear prominently in Athenian visual art, and entered literature as the “barbarians” analyzed so thoroughly by Edith Hall. However, as suggested earlier, the representation of these foreign “Others” avoids the obvious chauvinism we might expect. Unlike the Persian sculptures at Bisitun, for example, depicting an oversized Darius lording it over a row of human captives linked by ropes at the neck, the metopes on the Parthenon (to take a rough Athenian parallel) depict Greeks and Trojans, Lapiths and Centaurs, in single combat, each pair ineluctably bound together. For Trojans, read Persians; for Centaurs, read the barbaric other. But even the Centaurs are half human, prompting one critic to see in their popularity in Athenian art “a concept of humanity so broad that even elements of bestiality have their place within it.”22 Returning to Aeschylus’ Persians, Pelling notes that “it is the similarities [between Persians and Greeks] rather than the differences that come to be felt as most challenging.” And Goldhill reminds us how remarkable it is “to write a kommos for a defeated enemy,” especially one to be performed in a public Athenian festival.23 In that performance, the Chorus learns that the myriad Persians who “have departed” (the oft-repeated oichetai) are, in fact, “gone forever.”24 The threnodic leitmotiv—“gone, dead and gone”—pulls the audience back into the theater, away from the remnants of Persian occupation to the common ground that joins their own losses to those of the enemy. A sensible rule of thumb for constructing ideologically useful stereotypes is to concentrate on living examples, rather than on those who are past recovery. If death is the “absolute Other,” as Vernant claims,25 then that absoluteness arises in part from the fact that death dissolves boundaries, that its leveling embrace has the potential to draw inimical peoples together, even those who claim to share nothing but mutual hatred. From the trenches in World War I to the

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outpouring of sympathy after natural disasters today, history provides countless instances of death bringing mortal enemies together. But we need not rely on modern examples, for Greek tragedy offers its own repository. Recounting the fallen at Troy, the Chorus in Agamemnon proclaims “The same, the same / Greeks and Trojans” (Ag. 66–67). The Trojan women in Hecuba recall the disasters they have suffered “from the spear and slaughter and ruin in the home” and suddenly think of a Spartan girl mourning her beloved who died at Troy, or a Greek widow with children tearing her hair and cheeks, grieving for her lost husband (Hec. 647–57). By setting the play in Persia, but having those present invoke the distant, absent dead, Aeschylus moves his Greek audience beyond local color and ethnic differences, conjuring in the space of the theater that place from which there is no escape, for anyone.26 It seems reasonable that a culture engaged in inventing an oppositional Other—“ ‘the barbarians’ as fully fledged anti-Greeks,” as Hall puts it— would leave the dead out of it, for fear of touching this common human chord. Barring that, an ideologically driven representation might choose to depersonalize the Other’s dead, converting them into numbers: Gideon and the Israelites cut down “a hundred and twenty thousand men that drew sword,” we learn from the Hebrew Bible (Judges 8); “the body count numbered 280 enemy killed, 47 wounded,” General Westmoreland’s staff boasts from Saigon; “collateral damage may have included 50 Iraqi non-combatants,” the Desert Storm command admits after another night bombing Baghdad. While ceaselessly evoking the Persian dead, Aeschylus adopts the very different mode of “individuating” those who have died. A total of 51 Persians are called out by name, a litany of the leaders killed by the Greeks.27 Hall refers to these lists as “cacaphonous catalogues,” but a Greek familiar with Homer (as the Athenians certainly were) might recall similar lists in the Iliad, where heretofore unknown Trojans enter the poem by name, nominated into existence only to be cut down in battle, a form of epic unforgetting that makes their dying immortal.28 To be sure, the Greeks felt a great sense of accomplishment and pride in slaughtering the “barbarians” who invaded their homeland, as the accounts that have come down to us make patently clear. But what remains extraordinary about Aeschylus’ tragedy is precisely the opposite response—respect for the enemy dead and their grieving survivors. Far from emphasizing “Oriental otherness” in a chauvinistic fashion, the play ignores well-known differences between Persians and Greeks. In the dirges and threnodies, for example, the audience saw and heard lamentation similar to that uttered by Greek characters in other tragedies, and very close to that of their own funereal practice.29 The offerings Atossa brings to the grave of Darius are indistinguishable from those offered at Attic gravesites and hero cults, suggesting that her onstage ritual struck the original audience as neither exotic nor barbaric.30 In fifth-

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century Greece, the Persians were notorious for erecting no altars to the gods, worshiping instead natural elements like the sun and moon, in fundamental contrast to the Greeks, whose religion required sacrificial offerings at the altars of anthropomorphic deities.31 And yet, in Aeschylus’ drama the Persians worship Greek gods, most importantly Zeus (532–36, 740, 762, 827, and 915), and do so in a manner compatible with Athenian practice, as when Atossa prepares to offer sacrifice and libations at Apollo’s altar (201–10).32 A contemporary anthropologist might protest that Aeschylus denies his Persians their cultural distinctiveness, forcing them into the hegemonic discourse of Athenian-like grief and the religious tyranny of Greek gods. Such a judgment would mistake the purposes of anthropology for those of the theater. A play aims to affect the audience immediately and powerfully, usually from a variety of first-person perspectives; it does not strive to present an objective picture of closely observed reality, in which the prejudices of a single observer become part of what is under investigation. As Raymond Williams reminds us, “the form is inherently multivocal,” freeing the theater from the dominance of authorial stance as represented by a privileged narrator.33 By opening up the space of Greek religion and ritual to include the Persians, Aeschylus validates barbarian suffering and makes their grief available to an audience who might otherwise wish to denigrate or minimize it. Similarly, in his representation of barbarian excess, Aeschylus focuses on general moral principles relevant to Greeks and foreigners alike, rather than on specific cultural practices and peculiarities. We see this manifest in the spatial image of yoking that dominates the play, applied to animals, chariots, peoples, and continents. A common agricultural implement in the ancient world, yokes were used by Attic farmers who could afford draft animals for plowing. Carts and wagons also were drawn by yoked teams, and we hear of numerous chariots among the Persian forces.34 In her first entrance, Atossa herself arrives by chariot (150), and we may assume that the yoked team remained at the edge of the orchestra until the Queen remounted and departed (531). In addition to its practical uses, the yoke provided a simple but powerful metaphor for various interactions and social institutions. Most prominently, marriage in Athens was understood as a yoke that the wedded couple put on together.35 This symbol of marriage reflects its agricultural roots, implying sexual union for children, but it also suggests collaboration in a common task, like a team of horses pulling a cart.36 And so, when the Chorus sings of the grieving wives of Persia left alone, the Athenian audience knew exactly what it meant: Marriage beds overflow with tears, longing for their men; Persian women, softly grieving, each with deep longing

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for the bedmate she sent off with his war-raging spear is abandoned, yoked alone [monzux] in her marriage. (Pers. 134–37)37

In a less cooperative sense, the Greeks also use the image for slavery, configured as a yoke put on against one’s will, with the tacit understanding that a human is not an animal. In its catalog of Persian forces, the Chorus sings of the Lydians and their subjects “set on casting the yoke of slavery [zugon doulion] onto Greece” (49–50). When they learn of Xerxes’ defeat, the elders predict that the Asian peoples will reject Persian rule, now that “the strong yoke [zugos alkas] has been removed” (585–93). Various aspects of this image come together in the Queen’s dream (181–200), where Greece and Persia appear as two sisters, both with heroic qualities (perfect in loveliness, larger than life), initially distinguished only by their clothing and their dwelling places: “The one [from] Greek, . . . the other barbarian land” (186– 87). Atossa’s statement introduces the word barbaros into the play, her usage consistent with later occurrences where it means “non-Greek” and not “a set of degenerate attributes.”38 However, conflict arises between the two sisters, and the Queen’s son harnesses and yokes them to his chariot. The Greek sibling rebels, tearing off the harness straps and smashing the yoke in the middle, causing Xerxes to fall. As his father Darius watches, the young man tears the clothes from his body in shame. Xerxes’ effort at subjugation meets with open rebellion, and the physical image of yoking takes on obvious political significance. In spatial terms, Atossa’s dream retrospectively interprets the continental yoking that Xerxes accomplished by spanning the straits that separate Asia from Europe (67–72, 128–31). The Queen describes how their son “yoked the Hellespont” and “closed up the great Bosporos” (722–23) on his way to Greece, and then escaped in flight with few survivors “back over the bridge that yoked the two continents” (734, 736). Darius condemns Xerxes for thinking he could “bind the sacred flowing Hellespont in shackles like a slave, / and alter the divine flow of the Bosporos with hammered links of chain, / . . . / a mortal who would master all the gods, / even Poseidon” (745–50). An image complex that begins with productive agriculture and symbolizes marital union gives way to war chariots, slavery, and political repression, culminating in Xerxes’ violence against nature when, in his passion for territorial conquest, he unites what the sea god has kept apart. By this wrongful conjunction, Xerxes in effect dissolves his own kingdom; he “unyokes” the wedded couples of Persia (61–64, 133–39, 287–89, 537–45), and even the seed from the earth, as Darius proclaims: “For hubris flowered forth and produced a crop of ruin, / and from it reaped a harvest of endless tears” (821–22). Xerxes has emptied Persia of its natural growth, “this flow-

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ering of men, nourished by the whole land of Asia, dead and gone” (59–62), “the flower of Persia fallen, dead and gone” (252).39 In the play, the Persians view Darius as a deity, reflecting the actual Persian cult practice of worshiping the emperor after his death.40 However it was originally staged, the appearance of his ghost resembles a theophany, and his pronouncements have the authority of words from a god.41 Darius looks out over the distance at Xerxes’ disastrous fall, just as Atossa’s dream foretold; he connects his son’s defeat at the hands of the Greeks with divine prophecy from Zeus; and he predicts the future, from his son’s return in rags (831–36) to the disaster awaiting the Persians at Plataea (796–818). He asserts that any future Persian invasion of Greece is doomed, for “the Greek earth herself fights by their side” (790–92). We learn as much from the Messenger’s account of the Persian retreat, where the land joined in resisting the invaders. Many Persians died in Boeotia for want of “glittering spring water” in that parched land (482–84), while others expired from hunger and thirst in Thessaly (488–91). The bedraggled army in the north crossed over the “sacred flowing Strymon,” frozen and appearing to offer a solid path, the language similar to that used of the Bosporos and Hellespont yoked by Xerxes. But again the deities work through natural phenomena, as the sun god rises and melts the ice, drowning most of the party (495–507). We have the Red Sea story in reverse, a retreating army walking over frozen water, until the river’s own natural bridge melts away, and the army drowns in the current below. Darius’ oracular pronouncement about the land of Greece fighting with its people extends to the divinities linked to that land: “The violator of natural boundaries has in the end found retribution from Nature herself.”42 Xerxes’ yoking of the Hellespont and invasion of Greece serve the ends of imperialism, pure and simple. Territorial conquest means the subjugation of people; bridging continents forges the yoke of slavery; military invasion threatens tyrannical rule. Persians explores the relationship between horizontal expansion and vertical domination, clear to any population under foreign threat, as the Greeks were in 472, but strangely of little interest to contemporary critics of the play. Because he encounters unyielding resistance, as Atossa’s dream suggests and events make clear, Xerxes meets with disaster, configured (like that of Capaneus in Suppliant Women) as a fall from high to low.43 Nearly everywhere along the way, Xerxes brushes against the power of the gods—in the elements and their divinities, in the predictions of the deified Darius, and in the will and prophecy of Zeus, manifest in the Persian debacle at Salamis. Xerxes’ invasion assails the Greeks but, more than that, it assaults a principle, one that the play is at pains to bring home to the audience. By extending too far, one reaches too high, and the gods ensure that the fall is inevitable and catastrophic.44 Although thrilled at the cleverness and bravery of the Athenian victory, Aeschylus focuses far more dramatic energy on the series of spatial reversals

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that afflict the Persians. Having yoked the straits separating Asia and Europe to enable a massive land invasion (65–72, 126–32), Xerxes watches as his fleet finds itself trapped in a narrow channel off Salamis. The Persian boats run afoul and ram each other, while the Greek fleet stays outside the narrows, picking off enemy forces as they try to escape (412–28).45 Not only are Persians hacked in the water like tuna caught in a net (424–26), but their bodies are left as carrion rotting in the surf (272–77, 302–16, 419–21, 962– 66, 975–77), an utter reversal of their former status as masters of the sea, who crossed it as if walking on dry land. Now the barbarian troops provide fodder at the bottom of the food chain; for challenging the gods, the Persian armada feeds the fish (576–78).46 The Themistoclean naval strategy featured in Aeschylus’ narrative echoes that adopted earlier in the Greek land defense, where a sizable contingent of Greek hoplites met the Persian army in the narrow pass at Thermopylai. Aeschylus’ failure to mention the Greek defeat there may reflect contemporary understanding of the event, which was far more a botched defense mounted by the Spartan Leonidas than the noble self-sacrifice of later popular imagination.47 Save for one exception, Aeschylus consigns his treatment of the land war to Darius’ ghost, who predicts the battle at Plataea, where the Greek army defeats the remaining Persian forces. The single exception involves the garrison Xerxes stations on the small island in the straits off Salamis (which Herodotus calls Psyttaleia, probably modern Lipsokoutali). Placed there to slaughter shipwrecked Greeks who might swim to safety, the Persian soldiers find themselves besieged after the naval debacle. Their defense of Athenian soil proves (as one would expect) disastrous. Surrounded by Greek hoplites, every Persian to a man is killed by stones, arrows, and finally the inescapable onslaught of swords and spears (448–64). This spatial reversal anticipates the situation faced by the Athenians at Sphacteria in the Peloponnesian War, where they found themselves defending Spartan land against a Spartan attack mounted from the sea.48 These specific reversals serve the general principle dramatized in Persians—imperialism linked to territorial expansion offends the gods, and catastrophe results. Such “spatial morality” may appear broad and unsubtle, but it has certain theatrical advantages, including its relevance across a wide range of situations, people, and places. As Meiggs points out, “Athenian audiences knew from the tragedies which they watched each year that prosperity was unstable, and that reversals of fortune could be swift and sudden.”49 In that light, it seems reasonable to assume that Xerxes’ fall offered an example not only to the Persians but to Aeschylus’ audience as well. At the time of the play’s performance, Athens was consolidating its power and influence, based on naval supremacy in the Aegean and its leadership in the Delian League, formed in 478 to provide common defense against the ongoing Persian threat.50 After Salamis and Plataea, the Aegean islands and

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the Ionian cities along the coast of Asia Minor threw off Persian rule and joined the league, a foregone conclusion for the Chorus, who sings of them as already lost to Xerxes’ rule (880–907). In the person of Aristides, Athens set the first assessment of tribute to the league, payable either as ships or as money contribution.51 Thucydides provides most of our information about the early years of the league, and we should be wary of uncritically adopting his teleological view on the development of the Athenian Empire. Nonetheless, after the capture of Eion from the Persians in 476, the Athenians sent settlers to reestablish their influence in the area, which was rich in timber and metals.52 The Athenian fleet drove out pirates from Scyros, recovering the bones of Theseus (which Cimon brought back to Athens; see chapter 4), and settling cleruchs on the island. These expeditions probably raised no protest among other league members, but the same may not be said for Athens’ decision to force Carystus (a port in eastern Euboea) into the league, and to suppress the revolt of Naxos, which tried to pull out of it.53 In Thucydides’ words, “The Naxians revolted; the Athenians besieged and reduced them. Naxos was the first allied city to be enslaved contrary to the original structure of the league.”54 Although the date of the Naxian episode cannot be fixed precisely, its occurrence (between 476 and 467) close to the premiere of Persians is suggestive. If Aeschylus helped to invent the barbarian as a symbol of political tyranny and moral hubris, then he did so at a time when his own city was on the verge of emulating those very qualities.55 In its long final sequence, the play leaves the distant space of Greece to focus on Xerxes’ return. In his absence from the stage, we imagine him as an arrogant tyrant and brutal conqueror, the paradigm of barbarian excess, and we would expect Aeschylus to exploit his audience’s natural disgust at the despot who burned their city.56 We get something quite different, however, a defeated man who wears the destruction he has wreaked on his own body. In this (perhaps first) appearance on the tragic stage of a man in rags, we see the symbolic epitome of the Persian fall, the culmination of the play’s extraordinary interest in how Xerxes will appear when he returns.57 At Darius’ suggestion (832–36), the Queen retires to the palace to bring her son a robe: “Oh god, how cruel is the anguish / that invades me—but this disaster / bites deepest, hearing that shame’s clothing / hangs on my son’s body” (845– 48). According to Hall, this passage indicates “the Athenians thought that Persian queens were psychopathically heartless, status-conscious and obsessed with sartorial display,” another example of the play’s contribution to “the dangerous myth of the Orient as decadent, effeminate, luxurious and materialistic, . . . a corner-stone of western ideology.”58 Hall may be right about Western ideology, although some of us think there is more than one. As for the passage from the play, a simpler interpretation suggests itself: the tyrant’s clothes are a symbol. The theater frequently uses symbolic objects—the crown in Shakespeare’s history plays, the glass of wa-

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ter in Pinter’s Homecoming, the bow in Philoctetes—and clothes operate quite effectively in this mode (Lucky’s hat in Godot, the “lendings” in King Lear). As discussed in chapter 4, clothes are extensions of the body, and when Xerxes responds to the disaster at Salamis by rending his garments, he registers the empire’s destruction on his own person. Xerxes’ raiments are as close to the tyrant’s body as the play can get and still maintain its link to history (Xerxes survived the invasion, and he did not commit suicide on his return). Moreover, the torn robes he shows to the Chorus (stolai, 1017) share the same root as the armed expedition sent against Greece (stolos, 795), in particular the fleet (stolos, 400) caught in the straits, where the “ships’ beaks” (stoloi, 408, 416) ram one another in a scene of chaotic self-destruction.59 The Queen’s distress over her son’s tattered appearance is not finally about sartorial indecorousness or Oriental effeminacy, but about the dishonor of defeat and loss writ on the body of Persia. Xerxes’ return in rags offers an effective theatrical image of his shredded empire, torn apart by his own hands, and worn on his body to mark his shame and culpability.60 This is precisely how the elders of the Chorus receive their ruler, when he finally achieves his nostos (8, 935) walking down an eisodos into the orchestra.61 Keeping their physical distance, the elders greet Xerxes as the one who “killed the youth of the land, cramming Hades full of Persians” (922–24). Unlike their previous response to royalty—obeisance to the Queen, frightened reticence before Darius’ ghost—the elders address Xerxes freely and forcefully.62 Instead of prostrating themselves on his arrival (as they do with the Queen and her husband), they insist that the “land of Asia / terribly, terribly has been brought down on its knees” (929–30).63 The Chorus delivers a litany of those Xerxes has left behind (955–1001), echoing its opening invocation of the departing host (21–58) and verifying the Messenger’s catalog of the dead (302–330).64 The evocation of such unmitigated disaster in the presence of its cause and representative sole survivor is a daring theatrical move, undermining Michelini’s claim that Xerxes, although “central to the theme of the play, is peripheral to its dramaturgy.”65 In productions of the play I have seen and directed, Xerxes’ arrival and his kommos with the Chorus constitute the essential, devastating climax.66 Initially, Xerxes’ lyric expression is overwhelmingly self-involved, filled with first-person singular verbs and pronouns (eg¯o, em¯on, moi, emoi). However, a change occurs at 1002 and continues to the end, when single lines or short phrases and exclamations of grief replace the longer stanzas. This rapid exchange alternates between Xerxes, who leads the thr¯enos, and the Chorus, who responds to his commands. Confrontation gives way to communal sorrow, represented by a new physical relationship on stage. When Xerxes first arrives, he faces the elders from the opposite side of the orchestra, moving toward them only gradually until he is in their midst.67 The elders draw Xerxes into their world of loss, and he acknowledges his place there, adopt-

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ing for the first time the first-person plural: “We have been struck down [pepl¯egmetha, 1008] from our lifelong good fortune,” to which the Chorus answers, “Yes, we have been struck down” (1009).68 Although the play has little to say about Xerxes’ psychology, the tyrant moves from a position of self-pity to one of responsibility for his community, both the myriad dead left in Greece and those still alive in Persia. In the presence of such losses, Xerxes does the only thing appropriate for one in his position; he leads the survivors in a ritual lament for the dead, using a calland-response pattern familiar to the Greeks. He bids the elders accompany him to his home, telling them to rend their clothes (1061) as he has done (1030), uniting leader and led in the physical expression of grief and defeat.69 Xerxes’ reintegration into the community reestablishes him as leader, but in a context that the Greek audience would recognize as fitting, a funeral procession home from the grave. Moving as one, the Persians exit together out of the orchestra, demonstrating that human sorrow (at least temporarily) can break down differences based on status, wealth, age, and power. That an Athenian audience could respond with sympathy suggests that grief and loss can draw together even mortal enemies, opening a space that preempts, rather than defines, a category like “the Other.” Twice in the last seven lines (1070, 1074), as the elders of the Chorus follow Xerxes toward the eisodos, they sing out, “Ah! Ah! the Persian earth is hard to tread.” But the Persians who walk away are Athenian performers in disguise, crossing the beaten earth of their own city’s orchestra. They represent the return of the Persians to Athens, but they come only to mourn. Theatrical and scenic space merge with the reflexive and the real, and no one is laughing. Persians is not a tragedy of partisan triumph but of total defeat, a play of profound sadness about enormous waste and loss: Persia, its ambitions, its sons—gone, dead and gone. Persians is also a play about empire, as noted earlier, a warning that imperial designs eventually lead to ruin. I can think of few Greek tragedies more pertinent to the situation of my own country, the United States, a “superpower” consumed with its own Persian-like hubris: our continental yoking at Panama; the bloodbaths countenanced and paid for in Central America; the military dictators installed and armed in South America, the Middle East, Africa, southeast Asia; our support across the globe for the repression of democratic yearnings in favor of a world safe for corporate profit. From politicians and CEOs to postmodernists and cyber critics, a contemporary chorus claims that “globalization” and “terrorism” have changed everything, obliterating the old human scale with a new concept of space. Perhaps. But it has not touched the relevance of Aeschylus’ Persians to our own imperial expansion. If they were the original barbarian “Other,” then we have taken their place. We are the nation that needs to heed the play’s stern warnings against empire, that needs to acknowledge the sacred inviolability of other

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people’s land, resources, and aspirations. When the day comes that we stand defeated and judged for our manifold aggression, may there be a compassionate space for us like that which Aeschylus offered the Persians in his simple, profound play.

The Other Medea: Woman, Barbarian, Exile, Athenian But Time & Space are Real Beings, a Male and a Female. Time is a Man Space is a Woman & her Masculine Portion is Death. —William Blake, “A Vision of the Last Judgment”

According to Zeitlin, women for the Greeks possessed “a more dramatic threat and allure than any of the other ‘others,’ constituted from the beginning both in the linguistic fact of gender and in a world inhabited by gods of both sexes.”70 In this view, the gender of Greek nouns and adjectives signals a basic distinction between human females and males, both of which laid claim to power as immortals in the pantheon. Other essential elements in this mix of “threat and allure” include the social and biological compulsions to childbearing and family; the powerful force of male and female erotic attraction;71 and the desire for private intimacy and companionship, supported by the Athenian idea that an adult life lived outside of marriage was incomplete.72 Just as Sa¨ıd locates (wrongly, in my opinion) the origin of Orientalism in Aeschylus’ Persians, feminist scholars have found in Greek tragedy a powerful source for misogynist views that have dominated Western cultures. However, as Ortner and others point out, male conceptions of women’s “inferiority” sadly have infected most human societies—west, east, north, and south—for much of recorded history.73 Issues of gender have been so heavily “theorized” in contemporary scholarship that the critic who finds herself drawn to Greek tragedy as a powerful (and progressive) form of theater must walk through a maze of interpretive positions before finding a clearing from which to speak. Suffice it to say that some feminist critics of Greek tragedy find the genre nothing but a univocally male discourse, written by men and for men, interested only in male citizens and their self-image. As regards women, these texts provide both source and seedbed for offensive stereotypes, either denigrating female characters as irrational, vindictive, dangerous, intemperate, untrustworthy, wild, and worse, or validating female passivity, motherhood, uncomplaining self-sacrifice, willing subjection to male authority, social conformity, and the like. In Case’s provocative formulation, Greek tragedy and comedy were little more than “drag shows” that

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paraded such stereotypes before an audience of males, who lapped them up as confirmation of their misogynistic prejudices.74 We might compare this conception with the view of George Steiner that Greek tragedy presents “in speech and action a constellation of women matchless for their truth and variousness.”75 One critic’s “variousness” may be another critic’s “occlusion of the denial of difference.” Nonetheless, I am loathe to abandon Steiner’s point about women in tragedy in favor of adopting a metadiscourse of tragic sameness, an “always already” phallologocentrism, or a theoretical position that views tragedy as producing fictional “Others” that serve to keep real women silent and submissive. Perhaps by applying our spatial categories to Euripides’ Medea, we can move through the minefield of “woman as Other” to reach higher but no less dangerous ground, a theater that looks at its own values with such a searing gaze that it seems both foreign and true. Regarding Medea, we immediately run into the problem of identifying what sort of “Other” she is. An older school of criticism, which has its recent adherents, sees her as a barbarian, a non-Greek savage from the East, an Oriental witch.76 Others point out how Euripides works against this mythic stereotype, presenting his protagonist in terms of a recognizable fifth-century Athenian woman.77 This impression arises in no small part from the domestic tone of the play, which opens with a scene between household servants, closer to Attic comedy than tragedy. The presence of Medea’s children, returning home after playing “hoops,” lends a tone of contemporary familiarity, as does the Tutor’s overhearing the news of Medea’s exile from old men playing pessos in the town square.78 This familiar tone continues in the treatment of women in the play, whose situation resembles—sometimes quite specifically—that of their fifth-century Athenian counterparts. Euripides sets the drama before Medea’s home in Corinth, formerly shared with her husband Jason, their children, and the household slaves; two slaves open the play (1–95) and another acts as Messenger later (1116–1230). The royal palace, Jason’s new home as the bridegroom of Creon’s daughter Glauke, lies in the (local) distanced space, vividly evoked in the report of the princess’ death. At the outset, the Nurse enters from inside the house to deliver the prologue; she then is joined by the Tutor and Medea’s two sons, entering from an eisodos. This configuration sets the pattern for the rest of the play: a woman (Medea) stands onstage, and a series of males—Creon, Jason (three different times), Aegeus, the Tutor with her sons, the Messenger—arrives from the distance to engage her. Unlike Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, Medea does not control the threshold, for we learn that she faces immediate exile from Corinth. Nonetheless, once she enters the scenic space, Medea dominates it as a nearly constant presence.79 When the Messenger arrives from Creon’s palace, for example, Medea is already onstage: “And

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look now—I see the servant of Jason / approaching. He’s panting, out of breath, / which means he has some fresh evil to report” (Med. 1118–20). Like Dionysus anticipating the Herdsman’s arrival (Ba. 657), Medea knows the Messenger’s news before he speaks.80 The extrascenic space of the interior presents a rich dramatic resource that complicates any simple notion of Medea as “Other.” Let us focus on the doors of the house, and their symbolic extension beyond the playing area. On his arrival, the Tutor rather grandly queries the Nurse about her absence from their mistress inside: “Oh time-honored possession of my mistress’ house, / why do you stand alone like this, outside / the gates [pulai]?” (49– 51). The Nurse bids the children “go inside the house”, but she admonishes the Tutor to “keep them isolated from / their mother; don’t let them draw near her in her distress” (89–91). Medea’s offstage cry prompts the Nurse to repeat her warning: “Hurry, quickly inside the house / but don’t draw near her sight, / don’t approach her” (100–102). Euripides offers a verbal gestus for the breakdown of domestic space in a (well-off) fifth-century Athenian home: the Nurse outside the gates, apart from her mistress; the children trundled off inside but kept away from their mother; the wife, mother, and mistress of the house crying in despair from within and facing imminent exile when she comes out.81 Medea’s cries behind the doors carry far into the distance (131), attracting the Chorus to the orchestra: “Even within my double-gated [amphipulos] house I heard her cry out” (134–35). Alienated from her own home, Medea draws the women of Corinth out of theirs. House gates and doors seem permeable and open to women, allowing them to respond to each other’s voices with sympathy (the Chorus never speaks of Medea as foreign). This spatial relationship extends to the play’s climax, marked by the offstage cries of Medea’s children (1271–79). Not only do the women hear through the closed gates, but those crying out from behind the sk¯en¯e hear the Chorus: Chorus: First Son (off): Second Son (off):

Shall we go inside the house? We must stop the children’s murder. Yes! In heaven’s name, stop it. Now is the time. The net of the sword draws near us.82 (1275–78)

With Jason’s arrival, however, it becomes clear that Medea has barred the doors from within. In the pre-Euripidean version of the myth, the Corinthians killed Medea’s children to punish her for murdering Creon and Glauke.83 It is this scenario that Jason anticipates when he races onstage to save his sons from the Corinthian relatives of the king (1301–5). However, the Chorus enlightens him on the true state of affairs: “Open the gates [pulai], and you will see your slaughtered sons.” Jason calls out to the ser-

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vants he presumes are still inside, “Remove the bars [kl¯eidai], fast, so that I can see this double horror” (1313–15), and we expect the doors to swing open, revealing his dead sons on the ekkukl¯ema. Instead, Medea appears on high with the corpses of those she has slain, mounted in the chariot of the sun, ready to fly to freedom in Athens. Transcending the materiality of walls and doors, she taunts Jason for trying to enter the house: Why do you try to smash through the gates [pulas] seeking out the dead, and me who killed them? Stop trying. If you want something from me, speak up, but your hands will never touch me again. Such is the chariot my father’s father has given to me, a sure defense from the hand of my enemy. (1317–22)

The woman soars over the house and city that exiled her, while the man is stuck on the ground, locked out of the home he had previously abandoned, longing to touch his dead sons who remain forever out of reach.84 The idea of doors, gates, and entrances plays an important role in Medea, beyond simply affording a passage or presenting an obstacle to the extrascenic space. On the first entrance through the doors, the Nurse invokes the mythic passageway of the Symplegades (Clashing Rocks), which led Jason and the Argo to Colchis and allowed Medea, “heart stricken with passion [er¯os],” to accompany him on the voyage back with the golden fleece (1–11). Hearing Medea’s offstage curses on the man who betrayed her bed (205–9), the Chorus recalls the “murky saltwater passage and gateway [kl¯eis, also “lock,” “key”] to the Black Sea, so hard to cross” (211–12). The Chorus in Hippolytus sings of “Eros holding the key [kl¯eidouchos] to Aphrodite’s chamber,” and in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae the Chorus praises Hera, “who guards the keys [kl¯eidas] of marriage [gamos].”85 The Corinthian women again juxtapose the narrow straits with Medea’s passion and her union with Jason: “heart mad with desire, you divided the twin rocks / of the Black Sea,” only to lose “your marriage bed, and your husband’s love” (431–37). In their final reference to the Symplegades, the Chorus links the straits indirectly to Medea’s body, knowing that she is about to kill her children: “In vain the labor of childbirth, / in vain you bore beloved offspring, / you who left the dark blue rocks / of Symplegades, most inhospitable entranceway” (1261– 64). The door as metaphor for the dangerous straits of er¯os and for the physical passage of childbirth initially draws on the natural gateway of the Symplegades as its distant correlative. However, in the second stasimon, the Chorus sings of Aphrodite’s power (627–44) and its effects on Medea (645– 58), cursing anyone who “does not honor his friends and fails to open the

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pure lock [katharan / anoikzanta kl¯eida] of his mind” (660–61). As if on cue, the Athenian Aegeus enters unexpectedly, “unlocking his mind” to Medea by opening his city’s gates and offering her asylum (709–58). Athens replaces the Symplegades as the distant gateway for Medea, one that appears to lead away from her troubled past. Cursed with childlessness, Aegeus arrives onstage with this response from the Delphic oracle: “Do not unloosen the wineskin’s [askou] jutting foot / . . . / until you return again to your hearth and home” (679–81). The prophecy relates to Aegeus’ impending sexual intercourse with Aethra, the wife of his friend Pittheus, whom he is on his way to visit in Troezen (683–88). The bastard son whom Aethra will bear (unknown to Aegeus) is Theseus, the Athenian hero who will prove the unwitting murderer of his father—hence the warning “Do not unloosen . . .” From other sources we learn that Medea marries Aegeus in Athens, and she tries to have him kill Theseus when the young man visits from Troezen.86 The recognition between father and son saves the day, and Aegeus drives Medea out of his city. However, the old man commits suicide later when Theseus (himself besotted by a foreign woman) fails to change the color of his sails on his return from Crete. Thinking his son has died, Aegeus hurls himself from the cliffs into the sea that takes his name.87 Combining these prospects, we see that the doors leading to the extrascenic space of Medea’s house take on a complex set of associations, linked to other passageways, entrances, and obstacles: Jason and Medea’s journey through the Symplegades; the doorways of the Corinthian women’s homes; Medea’s erotic passion for Jason, and her labor in childbirth; Aegeus’ sexual congress and his hopes for a child; Medea’s sanctuary in distant Athens and its catastrophic results; the shutting out of Jason from his former home, and the death of his offspring. We can posit no one-to-one relationship between the sk¯en¯e door and a specific part of the human anatomy (unlike Aegeus’ wineskin, for instance), nor view the extrascenic space as a consistent symbol for the unconscious or the womb, although there are moments when such ideas come into play.88 Rather, we witness a variety of ways that extrascenic space extends into the distance, manifest both in action (Medea’s cries from within gather the Chorus) and as a metaphor that joins Medea’s past (the gates of the Black Sea, her erotic longing, childbirth) to her present (a forsaken marriage bed, her exile from home and Corinth), and points to her future (an open-minded and open-doored city offering a new home and marriage).89 The play forges an even stronger link between the extrascenic space of Medea’s home and its counterpart in Creon’s palace.90 Few tragedies create such a vivid picture of an interior space located in the distance, and it is worth examining Euripides’ motives for doing so. Initially, these two places seem worlds apart—Glauke and Jason’s palatial bedroom, ready for festivity,

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and the loveless chamber of Medea, where the night goddess Hecate dwells in the “recesses of the hearth” (395–97).91 However, the Tutor and children physically link them together, bearing gifts out of Medea’s house and into the home of her rival, a procession that mirrors part of the Athenian wedding ritual.92 Their physical action marks an essential step in the transformation of these paired interior spaces into the dead core of their respective oikoi. After gaining a day’s reprieve from exile by supplicating Creon, Medea lays out her plans for vengeance. Perhaps she will set the “new bride’s marriage chamber [d¯oma numphikon] on fire,” or “enter the palace in secret [sig¯ei domous esbasa] where the marriage bed is made and ready,” and, using a sword on the newlyweds, cut them down where they lie. Realizing that discovery on “entering the house” (domous huperbainousa) would mean defeat and mockery, Medea chooses a more indirect method—poison—to penetrate the palace (378–85). Unlike her onstage supplication of Creon, where she takes him directly by the hand (324–56), Medea’s revenge requires intermediaries capable of entering both her and Glauke’s world. She decides that her children will bear poisoned gifts from her broken home to the one celebrating a wedding. In our mind’s eye we see the contrasting images of Medea’s quarters and those of Glauke. We hear of Medea’s “barbarian bed” (591, Medea’s own sarcastic description) and “bed of death” (151–54); a bed betrayed (207, 1338) and dishonored (265, 999, 1354); one that causes suffering (1291– 92); a bed rejected by her husband (286, 436–37, 568–71, 697) and ruled by another woman (443–45). In contrast, Glauke’s “royal bed” (18, 140, 594) is fresh, new, and different (489, 641, 1367); it lies ready for the wedding night (41, 380, 886–88, 985) with a bedmate (555–56, 953, 1001) who longs for it (491). In addition to these poetic glimpses at two different worlds, the Messenger as a servant of Jason allows us an extended look inside the palace. He reports Glauke’s acceptance of Medea’s presents, the reversal of her children’s exile, and the transformation of the royal house into a place of joy, and then into an inferno. The gift-bearing males (Jason, the children, the Tutor) “enter the bridal house” (par¯elthe numphikous domous, 1137) where the servants attached to Jason, now serving in his new home, celebrate the end of his quarrel with Medea and greet his children with affection (1138–42). The embassy then proceeds into the “women’s quarters” (stegai gunaik¯on, 1143), where Jason persuades his bride (initially displeased at the sight of Medea’s children) to accept the gifts and plead with her father to rescind their exile. Taken with the alluring robe and crown (1144–57), Glauke agrees, and when they leave she tries them on, admiring herself in the mirror, checking how the garment falls on her calf, and prancing through the room in delight (1158–67). Once the poison goes to work, however, the bedroom frames a very different scene. Glauke’s chair breaks her fall as she collapses to the floor; she

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foams at the mouth and cries in pain; the servants scurry through the house for help. As I have described elsewhere, the scene represents a perversion of the wedding ritual, with Glauke becoming her own nuptial torch.93 When she falls on the ground and expires, the servants know better than to touch the corpse, but not so her father Creon, who “stumbles over the body when he enters the room” (aphn¯o parelth¯on d¯oma prospitnei nekr¯oi, 1205). Embracing his daughter, he wails in grief and cries out that he wishes to die with her. Once he has done with lamentation, however, he tries to rise from the ground, only to find that the corpse has taken him literally and will not let him go. Glauke’s charred body clings to his, ripping off his flesh until Creon, too, perishes on the bedroom floor (1206–21). The death of father and daughter in her wedding chamber locks the natal family forever within,94 presaging the death of Medea’s children in the interior of their home. But as we shall see, their corpses do not end up as ashes on the floor; they rise on high with their killer in the chariot of the sun. Other prominent distanced spaces in Medea include the town square of Corinth by the Priene spring, where the men play pessos and gossip about politics (66–72); the sacred spot dedicated to Hera Akraia, across the bay from Corinth in Perachora, where Medea establishes rites for her sons (1378–83);95 Delphi, from which Aegeus returns (667–81), and Troizen, where he is heading (683–87); Colchis, with its near impossible access (1–8, 209–13, 478–85, 1330–35); and Athens, which we will discuss in the context of reflexive space. This leaves one final distant place of importance, Hades, tied closely to Medea’s revenge. Reporting Creon’s reversal of her sons’ banishment, the Tutor assures Medea that one day they “will bring you home [katei] from exile,” to which Medea responds, “Before that, in my despair there are others I will bring home [katax¯o]” (1015–16). The verb literally means “bring or lead down,” as in “lead to the underworld.” Later Medea swears “by the avengers of Hades” not to leave her children alive for others to harm (1059–61),96 prompting the Corinthian women to consider the futility of having children at all. At any moment “death can carry the bodies of your offspring straight to Hades” (1109–11), a possibility confirmed by the appearance of the corpses at the end of the play. Their presence on high is doubly shocking—not only do we see a triumphant mother with the sons she slew, but we witness the dead (who belong to the underworld) borne aloft in the chariot of the sun. For the Greeks, looking on sunlight provided the point of contrast with the gloomy space of the dead, memorably captured by Euripides’ Alcestis in her death lyric: O sun god [Halios] and daylight, whirling eddies of sky-high clouds .......... Hades draws near,

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shadowy night creeps over my eyes. Children, children, your mother is no more. Farewell, children—look on the daylight, which is yours. (Alcestis 244–45, 268–72)

Medea’s children, unsettled when alive—sent inside but kept from their mother, exiled from Corinth, used as go-betweens to the palace—are no less out of place in death. Their corpses appear incongruously in the theophany that reveals them caught in the full light of the sun, monstrous by-products of Medea’s revenge. If “Others” are outsiders with no say in the forces that shape their lives, then these Hades-bound children exhaust the category. Earlier in the play, the underworld casts its dark shadow over the living. The Chorus describes Glauke’s gifts as “adornments of Hades” (980–81), suggesting their double function as instruments of her imminent death and as the funeral raiment she will wear below.97 Drawn from the recesses of Medea’s room (where the goddess Hecate dwells, 395–97), the golden crown and gorgeous robes allow Hades to burn brightly in the palace, leaving the charred royal corpses as spent fuel. After donning the gifts, Glauke “looked in the bright mirror and arranged her hair, / smiling at the lifeless image [apsuchon eik¯o] of her own body” (1161–62). The princess sees her death reflected back at her, but she does not recognize it. Creon stumbles over his daughter, not knowing that her death is contagious, that it is his own corpse he sees lying on the ground. In their meditation on childbirth, the Corinthian women briefly share this “perspective of Hades.” A newborn baby embodies the certainty of its demise, for at any time death can carry it off “straight to Hades” (1111). As Beckett’s Pozzo puts it, “They give birth astride the grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”98 Euripides in Medea would agree. What binds his characters to life—a husband, an oath, a bond, a home, a gift, a new wife, children—is the bright side of a deadly illusion, waiting to come into its own as a “terrible sight” (deinon theama, 1167, 1202). In this context, what are we to make of Medea’s epiphany on the machine and her departure for Athens? Spatially dwarfing Jason, she exposes him as a shadow-hero, fated to die a “miserable coward, / struck [pepl¯egmenos] on the head by a piece of the Argo” (1386–87). By prophesying his ignoble end, Medea closes off once and for all the distant space beyond the Symplegades [sun Ⳮ pl¯egas], the “striking” rocks. At the same time, she opens up the city of her future: “But for me, I am going to the land of Erechtheus, / where I will make my home [sunoik¯esousa] with Aegeus, son of Pandion” (1384–85). In fifth-century Athens, the verb sunoike¯o ‘I dwell with’ signified “living as a married couple,” used of those who “build their oikos together.”99 However, the Athenian audience knew the mythic consequences of Medea’s marriage to

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Aegeus. Like the other marital unions in the play, its promise sits only on the surface, while underneath it lies a tale of dissolution and disaster. Although set in Corinth, Athens features prominently in Medea, calling attention to the play’s fifth-century resonance. The domestic tone that permeates Euripides’ version pulls it from its heroic moorings in the direction of Athenian daily life (“Would that the Argo . . . had not sailed,” the Nurse begins). The crisis at home is domestic, involving a husband and wife’s disaffection (no wartime absence as in Agamemnon, no fearful oracle as in Oedipus); the women (Nurse, Medea, Chorus) discuss childbirth, their children’s education, the uncertain future when they leave home; Medea describes the life facing a woman in marriage (214–51), perhaps the most revealing account we have from the perspective of a fifth-century (upperclass) wife. The contemporary flavor of her opening speech encourages us to say—as Wilamowitz did of Sophocles’ Deianeira—Medea “ist eine Athenerin.” Knox points out “there is no suggestion . . . that anyone regards Medea as a barbarian, except of course . . . Jason.”100 This helps explain the immediate sympathy between Medea and the Corinthian women, who express solidarity with her both verbally (148–59, 173–83, 205–12, 410– 45, 576–78, 654–62, 996–1001, 1231–32) and in their actions (131–38, 267–70). Given the close connection between oikos and polis in Athenian society, the play’s focus on domestic turmoil cannot help but open up public issues and public spaces. Jason’s new marriage to Glauke, for example, puts Medea in a situation like that faced by foreign wives after the enactment of Pericles’ citizenship law of 451/50. Limiting citizenship to those children both of whose parents were Athenian, the law discouraged Athenian males from taking foreign-born wives and led to the dissolution of some unions with nonAthenians. This situation seems to inform the exchange at 591–97, when Medea accuses Jason of spurning a “barbarian marriage” and he responds by claiming the advantages of power otherwise denied to him.101 If we assume (as do most scholars) that the citizenship law was not retroactively applied to those born of mixed marriages before 451/450, then its impact on such preexisting marriages would have been strongest ca. 433/432 B.C., the year before Medea’s first production. At that date a “mixed” son born just after the law was passed would have reached the age of 18 without political franchise, and a “mixed” daughter would have arrived at marriageable age with little hope of finding an Athenian husband.102 As noted, the law primarily affected those born of Athenian fathers and foreign mothers, considered nothoi, a word usually translated “bastards,” but more accurately “those born of mixed parents,” whether illegitimate (like Theseus), or with a foreign mother (like the victims of the citizenship law), or the product of a union between a god and a mortal (like Heracles).103 In fact, the temenos of Cynosarges, associated with Heracles, served as a meeting place for “bastards” of mixed marriages

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after the citizenship law, and the site was probably visible from the upper part of the theater.104 In terms of more mainstream public spaces, scholars note Jason’s resemblance to a fifth-century rhetorician, particularly in his first scene with Medea. Jason calls their encounter a hamilla log¯on, a “battle of words” (546), suggesting any number of “situations in contemporary Athenian life which provided a formal context for the conflict of arguments.”105 These included trials at the lawcourts, political and diplomatic debates, and lectures by Sophists on the theory and practice of argumentation. Earlier in the play, Medea describes the disadvantages of being educated and considered “clever” (the word sophos occurs five times in ten lines), charged by the ignorant with useless knowledge, and by the envious with a false sense of superiority (294–305).106 Having “set the table,” Euripides offers a full-blown ag¯on when Medea first confronts Jason. The two deliver speeches of roughly equal length, employing the formal rhetorical divisions of proem (a self-referential introduction), narratio (development of the argument), and gnomic conclusion. They express concern for ordered logic (taxis, 476, 536, 545–46, 548– 50); they utilize fully developed hypothetical syllogisms (“if . . . then . . .; but in fact . . .”); and, in the case of Jason, the speaker seems fully aware that he is giving a performance.107 Why at this point in the play should Euripides evoke Athenian situations where words are contested in such a self-conscious fashion? The term hamilla log¯on can mean both “a battle consisting of words” and “a battle about words”;108 that is, about what logoi mean, how they are used, and what they are used for. The elaborate structure and technical vocabulary of this MedeaJason exchange call attention to its fifth-century character, particularly the ideology of Greekness that it explicitly sustains. In a key passage, Jason boasts that he has brought Medea from a barbarian backwater to civilized Greece, where law prevails instead of force, and where Medea has gained a certain reputation (534–46). Had he not rescued her from obscurity, Jason insists, “there would be no logos [words, civilization, renown] for you” (541). Being among Greeks and their logoi makes Medea “count.” As Medea knows from experience, however, she can count on that same logos to “count her out,” to strip her of her family, home, and city. Jason flouts the civilized customs that might make Greek logos something of value, a means to serve justice and not simply to justify. Judged by Jason’s actions, the cultural complex of language, oaths, supplication, marriage, and law are self-serving instruments of the moment. In fact, Jason goes so far as to blame Medea for her present predicament (446–58 and 605), while denying her agency in having saved him in Colchis (Aphrodite and Eros made her do it, 526–31). Preparing for a new wedding night with a young bride, he insists that sexual desire plays no part in his union with Glauke, that he is, in fact, doing everything for Medea’s sake and for their children (547–68, 593–

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97). Medea’s only problem, according to Jason, is that she cannot recognize her own good fortune (600–602). If Euripides has constructed “Medea as a ‘special Other,’ ”109 then he has done so in a way that exposes her systematic mistreatment by the Greek males she is ostensibly the “Other” to. As we have seen, however, the situation facing Medea resembles that of women in Athens generally, and she is not without Greek mythic prototypes in her response to it. After the murders, Jason shouts “No Greek woman would ever dare such a thing” (1339– 40). But just before Jason’s entrance (at 1297), the Chorus sings of Ino who killed her own sons, and Greek myth knows of other such women (Agave, Alathaea, Procne).110 Examples from Greek mythology do not explain Medea’s vengeance, but when we examine the reasons she gives for murdering her children, her ostensible “Otherness” disappears, and she proves all too Greek. Jason accuses Medea of sexual jealousy, pure and simple, and at the end of the play she agrees that this issue is no small matter (1367–68). But her betrayed bed is only a starting point for explaining why she murders the children. On seven separate occasions, and twice in the closing section, Medea makes it clear that she takes revenge for reasons directly connected to Greek (male) logos: “Do I want to earn the laughter of my enemies [gel¯ot’ . . . echthrous] by leaving them unpunished?” (1049–50). “You were not about to dishonor my bed and lead out your life in pleasure by mocking [eggel¯on] me” (1354–55). “My grief [over the children] dissolves, if you cannot laugh [m¯e ’ggelais] at me” (1362). Working out her plans, Medea fears capture and execution if she breaks into the palace, forcing her to endure “the laughter of my enemies” (tois emois echthrois gel¯on, 383). Urging herself to action, she insists, “You must not endure the mockery [gel¯os] of Jason’s wedding” (404– 5). Revealing her plan to kill the children, Medea boasts “I will be the conquering hero over my enemies” (kallinikoi t¯on em¯on echthr¯on, 765). “I will endure this unholiest of acts; / for I can endure even less the laughter of my enemies” [gelasthai . . . ex echthr¯on] (796–97). “I will be hard on my enemies and kind to my friends, / for such a life is filled with the greatest renown” (809–10). Medea’s professed reasons for killing her children align perfectly with a basic creed that pervaded Greek popular thought—be kind to your friends (philoi), harsh to your enemies (echthroi), and avoid the mockery of those who hate you.111 The notion that Medea is an emotional wild woman acting on jealous impulses, or a savage barbarian naturally drawn to child murder, fails to account for her consistent reference to this code of conduct. Medea may represent a gendered and foreign Other, but Euripides has her react like an Athenian male besieged by enemies, who lashes out in the perverse logic of a popularly accepted guide to behavior.112 Moral issues aside, the principle works well enough so long as the distinction between friends (philoi) and

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enemies (echthroi) remains clear. The term philoi also means “those tied by blood,” its etymology suggesting spatial proximity, those “near and dear.”113 That is, philoi and echthroi function as mutually exclusive categories provided that sufficient space separates them, precisely what is missing in Medea, where they overlap and merge. When the means to hurt enemies and avoid their mockery involves killing one’s own philoi, then the principle is hopelessly compromised and self-destructive, by definition. If Medea’s intentional filicide was not part of the mythic tradition, why does Euripides introduce it? Some critics think that the playwright does so to confirm Athenian male prejudices about the inherent barbarity of women, and the excessive barbarity of barbarian women.114 Others see the play as a pi`ece a` th`ese, demonstrating the consequences that result when a woman transgresses her socially defined space (the house, the interior) and enters the public sphere.115 More supple critics appreciate how Euripides presents Medea’s situation with sympathy, while remaining true to the dramatic realities she faces. As Foley puts it, “Medea is not so much hostile to her children as politically helpless to achieve any form of revenge which is not destructive of herself and her maternal identity.”116 This judgment, however, overlooks the fact that Medea could simply kill Jason, along with Glauke and Creon, and take her children with her to Athens, a path Medea herself considers (1044–45, 1057–58).117 More seems to be going on here, and we might better understand it by looking at our final spatial category, self-referential or metatheatrical space. More than other Euripidean tragedies (with the possible exception of Ion and Heracles), Medea calls into question the function and effect of poetry and song. The Nurse criticizes traditional poets who compose for banquets but fail to produce music that can help in times of grief. Consoling songs might profit mortals when they need it, unlike “upbeat” tunes written for occasions festive enough without them (190–203). The Nurse asks the audience to consider (if only briefly) the form and function of artistic representation, preparing the way for a more extended treatment later. The terms she employs—humnoi (hymns or songs, 192), mous¯e (music, 196), poluchordoi aoidai (many-lyred songs, 196–97), molpai (songs linked to dancing, 200)— can refer to sung poetry generally, but seem to indicate lyre accompaniment, with the implicit contrast to the aulos-led lyric of tragedy that the audience has just heard from the Chorus.118 The Corinthian women raise the topic again in the first stasimon (410– 45), identifying the male bias in traditional poetry that treats of female perfidy. “Backward to their source the sacred rivers flow” is a locus classicus of what we now call the politics of representation. If women were writing the story, the Chorus insists, then men’s dishonesty and deception would emerge as prominent, and a different set of responses would result: honor would come to women instead of ill-sounding fame (419–20). Because they have so

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little access to song, however, women cannot answer the charges leveled against them by men (424–30). As it performs in the orchestra, the Chorus asks the audience to imagine an alternative poetics from the perspective of women, one more closely aligned to the truth. The word “truth” is not hyperbolic, for at issue is the fact that men have made meaningless the oaths sworn to the gods (415–16), referring to the broken oaths of Jason condemned earlier (21–22, 160–63, 168–70, 206–9). The Chorus returns to this point in the last antistrophe: “The grace of oaths has departed, no longer in all of Greece / does shame before oaths remain” (439–40). They set the stage for the arrival of the oath-breaking Jason (446), who sings the praises of Greek logos while using it to justify his own lies, and his rejection of his wife. The idea of an alternative poetics requires a poet, and Medea appears the most likely candidate; she commands attention, and she shapes the plot of the play from material she has inherited. Her opening speech eloquently lays out the situation of women in a patriarchal society, converting the scenic space into a place for expressing contemporary concerns from a woman’s perspective. In a transformative passage, Medea reassesses the bravery of women in childbirth compared to men in battle: Men say that we women live a calm, safe life staying at home, while they do battle with the spear. They have it wrong. I would prefer to stand three times at the front with a shield than give birth once. (248–51)

In a male-dominated world, a woman must convert her valor into military terms for it to register. By appropriating the “social space” of war for the private act of childbirth, Medea becomes a model for the poet who tells the story in such a way that “honor might come to the female race” (419), as the Chorus hopes. Although trapped by circumstance, Medea does more than describe. She asserts herself as an agent in what transpires, while confessing the difficulty of escaping her situation and the assumptions about women that it replicates: “We are by nature / women, on the one hand the most deprived of means [am¯echan¯otatai] to do good / but the cleverest architects [tektones] of all things evil” (408–9). The word tekt¯on also refers to an artist, designer, or poet, suggesting that Medea has begun to craft her own play.119 The fact that she claims women can do only evil shows how far she has internalized the negative image of women, reflecting their lack of access to “the means” (m¯echan¯e) to do good. The Chorus’s ode on the need for female poets offers a more positive view of what women might be able to create. The tension between inherited self-image and creative potential erupts after the Aegeus scene, when Medea reveals that she has decided to kill her

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children in order to harm her enemies and avoid their laughter. In the ode to Athens that follows (824–65), the Corinthian women introduce a strikingly different tone from that of Medea’s pronouncement, their language drawn from the tradition of erotic and woman-centered poetry epitomized by Sappho. Elements from this tradition—which the Chorus applies to Athens as Medea’s destined haven—include references to Aphrodite as Cypris (836); personified love (Erotas, ¯ 844); the Pierian Muses (831) and their mother, “golden tressed Harmonia” (833); the phrase “stepping lightly” (bainontes habr¯os, 830), a Sapphic favorite; “beautiful flowing waters” (835); “wafting, sweet-scented breezes” (839–40); and “fragrant garlands of roses” (841).120 Coming after Medea’s “male” speech, the Chorus’s language recalls with some poignancy its search for a female voice. It is as if the audience were taken out of the play and (to use the Chorus’s metaphor from the first stasimon) carried upstream in a poetic river, finding at its source an idealized and poetically “feminized” Athens. But the child-killing Medea will shatter this dream on her arrival, polluting the city’s wellsprings. Instead of “stepping lightly through the air” (830), Medea offers deadly blows against her children (851); for garlands of roses (841), the Chorus sings of blood and more blood (phonos and cognates at 852, 855, 862, 864); in place of Aphrodite (836) and her sons, the Erotes (844), we hear of Medea paidoleteira ‘child destroyer’ (849). In spite of the impression Medea gives when announcing her plan, Euripides does not present her as a cold-blooded, calculating killer. On the contrary, he dramatizes a character caught in the throes of passionate indecision, wavering consciously and instinctively in a manner never before seen on the tragic stage. In her first scene with Jason, for example, Medea alternates between Sophistic self-control and naked emotion, which differentiates her from the nauseating self-righteousness of her husband. In their second encounter, she sublimates her anger and feigns a change of heart, enlisting the help of the unsuspecting Jason. However, on two occasions Medea breaks down and weeps (904–5, 922–28), threatening the success of her efforts, for Jason wonders why she is crying when she is getting what she asked for. Medea does not weep to deceive; her instinctive bodily reactions almost betray her, in spite of her efforts to control them. This tension between intention and instinct complicates the terms in which scholars usually frame her famous monologue (1021–80), namely as a debate between reason and passion. At the end of the speech (1078–80), Medea states that her “spirit” or “wrath” (thumos) is stronger than her “calculations” or “deliberations” (bouleumata), generally taken to mean that her irrational anger supersedes her rational capacity for self-control.121 Certainly, the choice Medea considers is straightforward—will she kill her children or not? But the answer has less to do with reason and passion than with the battle between instinct (figured in and through the body) and passionate commitment to an internalized logos. In Medea’s “divided self,” to use the

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title of Foley’s important article, her natural revulsion at filicide competes with a cultural value system that makes an enemy’s laughter the outrage that must not be endured. Nowhere in Greek tragedy, as Lesky observes, is an inner conflict so fully dramatized, and the pull of competing choices conveyed with such immediacy: The intensity with which inner experiences are portrayed here is unequalled in Attic tragedy; it also reveals human tragic potentialities from a new angle. We are not shown, as in the death of Sophocles’ Ajax, a rigid predetermination rooted in his phusis [nature] but a human being as a prey to the contending play of forces which have their source in his soul, and are struggling for mastery over it.123

We watch Medea fight to break free from her murderous vengeance and the ideology that drives it. She acknowledges that the loss of her children will remove all joy and meaning: “deprived of them / I will lead out a desolate and painful life” (1036–37). As the Chorus predicts (860–65), the sight of her children— their look, their smile, their bright faces (1040–45)—causes her to weep and abandon her plan, at least momentarily. She understands that she will be the victim of the violence she does to them in order to get at Jason: “Why must I, to cause your father grief, acquire for myself twice the evils?” (1046– 47). The financial language (ktasthai ‘acquire’, ‘possess’, 1047) indicates Medea’s awareness that her vengeance converts human beings into commodities, the very thing that Jason has done to her.124 “I will lead my children out of this land” (1045), she proclaims, imagining that she will take them to Athens, where they will live together in happiness (1057–58). However, each time Medea abandons her decision to kill the children, she is drawn back by the specter of her enemies’ mockery: “Do I want to earn the laughter of my enemies by leaving them unpunished?” (1049–50).125 After the murder of Glauke and Creon, the thought that anyone would ever laugh at Medea seems preposterous. Her fears reveal the dominance of a socialized value system that overpowers even her delight in her youngsters. She enjoys their “sweet touch,” their “soft skin and fragrant breath” (1074–75) one last time before lapsing into the discredited logos she has made her own. By thinking only of her enemies, Medea dooms herself to think just like them, and like them she destroys those she claims to love. Euripides holds out the possibility that his protagonist will not be able to perform what she has planned, that “the river” will miraculously run uphill. “If the children must die,” the Athenian audience may have thought, “it will be the Corinthians who kill them in the end.” Instead, they find themselves implicated in the crime, for it is Aegeus’ offer of sanctuary in Athens that encourages Medea to exact revenge by filicide. This new logos—as in “Euripides’ new version of the story”126 —brings the metatheatrical and reflexive

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spaces of the play into collision. The potential creator of a new song for women opens up her thoughts in a way unmatched in the ancient theater, only to opt for the old story (“women are dishonest and perpetrate evil”), rationalized in terms of a traditional code of male heroic conduct. Although the play entertains alternatives to the violence that males perpetrate on their philoi and rationalize through their logos, it abandons them when Medea takes on the role of a twisted warrior. With the collapse of the play’s metatheatrical potential for a new logos, the reflexive space of fifth-century Athens returns to prominence. Here, Euripides tapped the contemporary war fever that pitted the Greek cities of Corinth and Athens against one another in the early days of the Peloponnesian War.127 Medea does not “take up the sword” in a historical vacuum. Rather, she imitates those warriors—some of them in the audience, including the Athenian generals (the strat¯egoi, discussed in chapter 1)—who already had embarked on the great destructive conflict of the Greek fifth century. In chapter 2, we discussed the spatial axis in Greek tragedy based on nostos, when characters (usually male) come home from adventure or foreign war. Aeschylus’ Oresteia adapts the story pattern, moving from Agamemnon’s fatal return to Argos to the arrival of the Furies at Athens, nonnatives coming to a new home, bringing life-affirming blessings for their adopted city. Medea inverts that pattern, bringing to her new home in Athens the gift of phonos ‘spilled blood’, that of her children and of those about to die in a war that her twisted militarism reflects, the full-scale realization of broken oaths and of logos run amok.128 In chapter 3, we dealt with tragedy’s use of er¯emia, both onstage and in the distance, places desolate of people that force us to examine the kinds of places we make for ourselves. Although no eremetic space emerges in Medea, the protagonist on several occasions describes herself as er¯emos (255, 604, 712), bereft of the normal supports of human society. Her exile from Corinth offers a political analogue to the destruction of her oikos, leaving her cityless (apolis, 255, 644; ou polis, 656) and friendless (aphilos, 604; ou phil¯on tis, 656), as well as homeless. The murder of her children alienates Medea from the women of Corinth, formerly her strong supporters, and from most members of the audience. The play’s final image—the chariot of the sun with Medea and her dead children, rising high above the living—suggests a kind of cosmic er¯emia, in which only Medea can dwell. In chapter 4 we examined how bodies onstage create and alter the theatrical space they inhabit. This process operates with particular force in regard to Medea’s children and their relationship to their mother. The boys appear early in the play with the Tutor, serve as the gift-bearing ambassadors from Medea’s inner sanctum to Glauke’s, remain onstage through Medea’s monologue, are heard crying for help from offstage, and finally appear as corpses in the chariot of the sun. But their presence extends beyond themselves, for

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the play returns time and again to their natal source. By valorizing childbirth over battle, the creative over the destructive, Medea heroizes the common— and unique—spatial transformation that takes place within a woman’s body, where nothing becomes something and enters the world. Medea would rather stand in battle three times than give birth once, reflecting the fact that in ancient Greece (as in many societies today) pregnancy was far more dangerous to women than war was to men.129 By the end of the play, however, she has transformed these living symbols of her own bravery into the murdered image of her enemy’s laughter. When the women of the Chorus consider the advantages of never having children, they think of the suffering of their offspring and all that could go wrong in raising them—the unpredictability of character, the problem of securing a livelihood, and the tragic possibility of untimely death (1090– 1115).130 Importantly, the Corinthian women preface their thoughts with the assertion that “women also possess a Muse” (alla gar estin mousa kai h¯emin), that a few at least are “not without that creative / intellectual spark” (ouk apomouson, 1085–89). The juxtaposition of childbearing with the Muses reflects the Chorus’s earlier description of Athens as a place of art and culture, where “the nine Pierian Muses gave birth to fair-haired Harmonia” (831–34). It was not uncommon for Greeks to understand intellectual, artistic, and even cosmic creation by comparing it to a woman giving birth,131 making it doubly important that the “new story” women tell includes their role in procreation, in a way that upholds its intrinsic value. However, the city whose theater seeks a logos where “honor comes to women,” this home of the Muses and birthplace of “Unity” (Hamonia), has opened its doors to a “childdestroying” mother (848–55, 1393). As Medea puts it, “In vain [all¯os] have I raised and nurtured you, my children, / in vain [all¯os] did I go into labor, wracked with pain / in the throes of childbirth” (1029–31). She takes the “creative step” that makes her labor truly “other” (the root meaning of all¯os), rejecting the creations of her body by emptying them of life. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, Andromache utters the same line, “In vain [all¯os] did I go into labor” (Tr. 760), when the Greeks seize her son Astyanax and kill him. She describes her infant son’s “sweet breath of skin” (Tr. 758), much like Medea does in her monologue, “Oh your sweet touch! / Oh the soft skin and fragrant breath of my children” (Med. 1074–75).132 As reflections of the mothers who bore them, and as physical presences in their own right, the children’s bodies create an intimate space, calling forth a poetical discourse tied to proximity and sensuous detail. Jason himself adopts such language when the full impact of his loss hits home: “oh god, how I long for the lovely smiles / of my children, to hold them again in my arms. / . . . / I beg you, let me touch again / the soft skin of my children” (1399–1403). These evocations of young bodies share basic qualities with the poetics of Sappho mentioned earlier—sensual, proximate, emotionally intimate, vul-

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nerable, private, feminine—a prototype for Greek women gaining the power to tell a different story. By converting her young philoi into targets of violence, however, Medea substitutes the intimacies of bloodshed and the logos of war. In place of her screams at childbirth and the squalling of new life, Medea offers the cries of her children fleeing her sword and the lamentation of those who mourn their deaths. In chapter 5 we looked at the interrelationship of space, time, and memory, focusing on Oedipus and his eventual return to Cithaeron. Tapping his way with a stick, the blind Theban lives out the human riddle by marking his identity through time via his progress over the ground. As with Oedipus (in Sophocles’ posthumous Oedipus at Colonus), Medea’s ultimate destination is Athens; however, cut off from earthly contact, she leaves in a chariot of the sun. Euripides’ spellbound Pentheus sees “two suns over Thebes” (Ba. 918– 19), but at the end of Medea, it is the audience members who have this double vision. They see the chariot of Helios carrying Medea, and the real “chariot of the sun” higher in the sky, the celestial orb that characters invoke throughout the play to look down on injustice and stop mortals from committing it.133 By juxtaposing these two suns, Euripides reminds us that Medea is not a natural force. Driven by the fear of mockery, she plans her revenge, but nature knows no such fear and always has the last laugh. Although Medea in her chariot loses touch with the earthly realm of the human, she is a human product nonetheless, a blown-up image of an internalized logos that we have seen elsewhere in the play, assaulting what is natural by warring on its own. According to some scholars, Medea supports the idea that the Athens of tragedy can incorporate all comers, as if the city possessed an innate antibody to any virulent exoteric strain. On this reading, tragedy celebrates and replicates Athenian ideology in contrast to that represented by the Other: Athens is anti-Thebes, anti-Corinth, antirepressive, antityrannical, antibarbarian, antiproblematic. That the city of the audience does not (and will not) repeat the errors of other places and practices is, according to Zeitlin, precisely what Athens represents ideologically, a place that “escapes tragedy,” that can “have it all ways.” Considering Medea’s future in the same vein, Mills asserts that the “ideal city will never be damaged by an enemy like this,” because “the basic principles of the Athenian mission are so sound, . . . and ‘typical’ Athenian courage will remove any threat of danger.”134 But what if Medea is not some assimilable Other, but an accurate (albeit fictional) image of the city itself? Such enemies pose a far greater threat, for they do not benefit from spatial distance, political borders, and other neat boundary distinctions. They are already Athenian; they mouth its ideology; they offer a real (or potentially real) image of the polis to the polis in the theater. In Greek tragedy, the Other is sitting in the audience, and the play of space allows the spectators to see themselves in that role.135 But this self-

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seeing is more than a glimpse into a psychological heart of darkness inherited at birth. An art that explores where and how it is made—the function of the theater as a reflexive and self-referential space—is one that shows a world that can be changed.136 We return to the theater of Dionysus as a place of instruction, which is the most one can ask of the theater, a space always nested within other, greater spaces. Tragedy acts only by showing action within a fiction; it cannot act directly on the world outside itself. And yet, with the vista of Athens before them and their community visible around them, the Athenians knew that any story worth telling in this place always looks beyond it. Through the play of space in Greek tragedy, they saw moving images of a world strange enough to be their own, and enough their own to be transformed.

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HIS BOOK APPROACHES space in Greek tragedy from a different perspective than those favored by structuralist, semiotic, deconstructionist, and postmodern critics. I begin with the physical reality of the Athenian theater of Dionysus, including its natural and civic environment. Because Greek tragedies were performed in large outdoor public theaters, the interplay and transformation of space emerges as an important aspect of the way the dramas work. To understand the “play of space” in fifth-century tragedy, I employ six categories as a general framework for analysis: theatrical space, scenic space, extrascenic space, distanced space, self-referential (metatheatrical) space, and reflexive space. Placing such emphasis on space raises important questions about the nature of “spatial” perception. Here I follow James J. Gibson, who understands that human vision encompasses far more than an optical response to images on a flat screen. It involves the ongoing processes by which we (like other animals) locate ourselves in the real terrestrial environment through which we move. In Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception, we find that continuities are more important than change; we perceive our own bodies (proprioception) in the very act of perceiving the external world; we confront physical obstacles and move through openings; we see new vistas before us as others close behind; we occupy the same places that others have occupied before us (and vice versa); and we come to recognize that each location is nested within a larger space. Given its open-air setting, natural perspective, hill-hugging audience, beaten-earth orchestra, and the view from the south slope of the Acropolis, the theater of Dionysus lends itself to such an ecological approach. Confronting the different perspectives of the dramatic characters onstage, the (primarily Athenian) audience was encouraged to think critically about where they might choose to stand when they left the theater. Kurt Lewin’s gestalt version of “hodological space” (space that matters by virtue of connecting or separating people) also has affinities with the ancient Greek theater. For example, the sk¯en¯e facade with its central doorway connects onstage and offstage areas; the ekkukl¯ema allows for “inside-out” disclosures; the eisodoi lead to and from the distance; and the m¯echan¯e and sk¯en¯e roof, where divinities appear from on high, offers closure while exposing the distance that separates gods from the mortals on the ground. Finally, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (a place that stands outside of, or in opposition to, the “conforming spaces” of a society) helps us understand how the Athenian theater could operate self-consciously (commenting on its own

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practices) and reflexively (offering critical perspective on the fifth-century scene), even as it dramatized ancient myth. A spatial reading of Greek tragedy is only as valuable as the interpretive insights it offers on individual plays. Toward that end, I group tragedies in terms of a rough-and-ready spatial thematics: plays that feature return (nostos) as the primary spatial motif (Oresteia, Heracles); plays that involve significant isolated places (er¯emia) (Antigone, Ajax, Philoctetes, Prometheus Bound); those in which the relationship between space and the body (including both dramatic characters and performers) operates with special force (Hecuba, Electra, Bacchae); tragedy that depends on the exact confluence of space, time, and memory (Oedipus Tyrannus); and plays in which space is used dramatically to suggest the nature of the “Other” (Medea, Persians). These groupings do not represent an exclusive spatial taxonomy, for a single play can fit into more than one. As discussed in the introduction, Suppliant Women uses the bodies of the women in the Chorus and the corpses of their sons to transform Eleusis from a place of renewal into one of mourning (space and the body); the Argive effort to recover the corpses and return them to the earth aligns with the nostos theme evoked in the Eleusinian myth of Demeter and Persephone (space and returns); and the interplay between male and female, between mortal and immortal, and among Athenians, Argives, and Thebans has important spatial components (space and the “Other”). My interpretive framework begins with the “wide-angle” ideal of social reintegration represented by homecoming, and then narrows its focus to tragedies that emphasize dramatic isolation and scenic desolation. From there we zero in further to the human body onstage, discovering that it too can generate spatial play—by the manifestation of physical suffering, by the presence of corpses, by the corporeal machinations of dramatic characters, and by the multiple role playing of the tragic actor. In Oedipus Tyrannus, the conjunction of space, time, and memory leads Oedipus to recognize where—and who—he is. His self-blinding signals an apparent collapse into psychospatial solipsism, but Oedipus “comes out the other side” at the play’s end, demanding his own exile (the Delphic prescription for restoring Thebes), arranging for the care of his daughters, and embodying the Sphinx’s riddle, a human being moving toward an open and uncertain future via intimate contact with the earth. The widening focus continues in the discussion of space and “the Other.” The critically fashionable notion of alterity as a rigidly drawn and mutually exclusive category—being something (Greek, male, citizen, Athenian) by virtue of not being something else (barbarian, female, metic or slave, Corinthian or Theban or Argive)—proves inadequate to account for the complex play of space exemplified in Medea and Persians. By approaching Greek tragedy from these perspectives, we find a remarkably flexible and rich notion of theatrical space at work, more difficult to

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pigeonhole than one might assume from the dualistic readings of many structuralist and feminist accounts. Focusing on spatial transformations also keeps alive the phenomenology of presence that differentiates theatrical performance from private reading, often neglected by semiotic critics who tend to ignore the “nested environment” of the Athenian theater. By emphasizing the play of space in Greek tragedy, we can avoid the spiraling inwardness of poststructuralist readings that find nothing real “outside the text.” Finally, this book questions the constructivist gridlock that permeates many contemporary discussions of cultural production, in which there seems to be no escape from what is “always already” there, be it the Father, Big Brother, the violence of the symbolizing act, phallologocentrism, the male gaze, or the discourse of power. The spatial dynamics that I explore here suggest that Greek tragedy, like most great drama, had important things to say about the world beyond the theater. If my intepretations of specific plays are valid, then Attic tragedy accomplished this task without simply replicating the ideology of the culture that produced it. By attending to space and its transformations, we discover the peculiar vitality and complicated inclusiveness of ancient Greek drama. My hope is that this book spurs like-minded scholars and theater artists to engage more fully with the space of Greek tragedy, developing, challenging, and improving the observations offered here. Some brave soul might even extend the basic approach I have adopted to later theatrical genres and their performance spaces. Such a project would bring into clearer focus the manner in which other sociopolitical, cultural, and theatrical conditions generate very different “plays of space.”

APPENDIX

THEORIES OF SPACE We can think away things, but not the space which they occupy. —Albert Einstein, “Space-Time” Behind space, so it will appear, nothing more is given to which it can be traced back. Before space there is no retreat to something else. —Martin Heidegger, “Art and Space”

R

ETURNING TO VERNANT’S POINT (discussed in the Introduction) that the Greeks did not separate mind from matter, a question persists: do we really make that separation? Noam Chomsky explores the issue in his analysis of the “first cognitive revolution,” concluding that the conceptual transformations of the seventeenth century did not establish the mind-body problem (as often claimed) but actually made the distinction meaningless. We might say that when the dust settled after Newton, no one had a clear idea of what dust was. To be sure, Descartes distinguished human minds (res cogitans, the “thinking thing” with no physical component) from the world of things (res extensa, matter defined as spatial extension). Not bound to physical laws, minds were rational and free to choose; physical matter, on the other hand, was constrained by the laws of mechanical (“contact”) philosophy. Within a generation, however, Newton’s work on gravitation overthrew contact mechanics, radically confusing the concept of corporeal bodies. Descartes’ mentalism remained, because there clearly were occult forces operating without physical contact—initially Newton’s gravitation, but then electromagnetic forces, Faraday’s “action at a distance,” the waveparticle behavior of light, Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence, field theory, and so on. Chomsky’s conclusion merits quoting at length: It is common to ridicule the idea of the “ghost in the machine” (as in Gilbert Ryle’s influential work, for example). But this misses the point. Newton exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact. Furthermore, nothing has replaced the machine. Rather, the sciences went on to postulate ever more exotic and occult entities: chemical elements whose “number and nature” will probably never be known (Lavosier), fields and waves, curved space-time, the notions of quantum

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theory, infinite one-dimensional strings in space of high dimensionality, and even stranger notions. The criterion of conformity to common sense vanished along with contact mechanics. There is also no coherent notion of “material,” “physical,” and so on. Hence there is no mind-body problem, no question about the reduction of the mental to the physical, or even unification of the two domains.1 The contemporary orthodoxies seem unintelligible, along with the efforts to refute them.2

Long before the “first cognitive revolution,” how did Greek thinkers conceive of space? Addressing this question gives us some sense of the intellectual currents around the time that the “spatial art” of tragedy developed. We discuss in the introduction the role played by sight in Greek notions of cognition, tying together rather than separating the seer from the seen. But what of more conceptual formulations of space? Do they have anything to tell us about the ancient theater? Here, we must take care to distinguish Greek thinking about the physical world (akin to “natural philosophy”) from later scientific method, built around the twinned ideas of theory formation tested by experiment and the mathematization of natural science.3 Vernant stresses the difference between Greek scientific thinking and what we call “applied science,” the modern drive toward technology that aims to transform nature: Greek science was concerned with immutable essences or the regular movements of the heavens. It obeyed a logical ideal of deductive demonstration starting from self-evident principles. Because there was no exact way of measuring time, it did not grasp the process of becoming in quantitative terms, nor establish any connections between mathematics and physics.4

Like others living in agricultural communities with limited technology, the ancient Greeks ordered their activities on the perceived relation between heavenly bodies and the onset of earthly seasons.5 The spatial patterns of sun, moon, and stars signaled the time to undertake significant activities— sowing, harvesting, sailing,6 waging war—connected to “the seasons, which bring all things,” as Heraclitus puts it.7 We know that poets considered seasonal change responsible for alterations in human behavior; Hesiod and Alcaeus, for example, describe the effects wrought by the arrival of the dogstar Sirius in summer.8 The tragic poets turn frequently to celestial motion for images of a character’s situation, as when the Chorus in Sophocles’ Trachiniae (129–31) advises Tecmessa that “pain and joy circle around us all, like the ever-turning paths of the Bear” [Ursa major].9 The heavens could signal divine judgment on human actions; the Choruses in Euripides’ Electra (719– 36) and Orestes (995–1006) describe Zeus changing the course of the sun because Thyestes stole the golden lamb (and the wife) of Atreus, an aetiology

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explaining why the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.10 Close observation of the natural world gave rise to the notion of kairos, the “occasion,” “seasonal moment,” “appropriate or opportune time,” distinguished from chronos, time in its “passage,” and ai¯on, a specific period of human life. Such concepts distinguish the ancient sense of temporality from later, more abstract and homogenous ideas to which we will turn later.11 As we might expect, the seasonal cycle finds its way into tragedy, exemplified by the Demeter-Persephone story that lies behind Euripides’ Suppliant Women, discussed in the introduction.12 The Watchman in Agamemnon (4–7) marks out his year’s watch in terms of rising and setting constellations, the heavenly markers that announce the onset of winter and summer. The diurnal cycle is even more prominent; his nightly task on the roof of the house is circumscribed by the sun, and the beacon light that releases the Watchman “shines like the dawn” (Ag. 22–24). In contrast, consider the men-on-watch scene that opens Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the tolling clock (not the movement of heavenly bodies) signals the changing of the guard. The Ghost provokes a shift from clock time to celestial time when he disappears with the rising sun, suggesting the two worlds that Hamlet struggles to reconcile, that of manipulable abstractions and that of natural signs.13 For the Greeks, heavenly indicators proved indispensable for agricultural production, which eventually developed its own spatial protocols. Working the land required linear measurements that took the form of a bodily related standard—the Greek pous, for example, a “foot,” itself the sum of four “palms” (palastai).14 Prior to such methods and measurements, we find distance expressed in Homeric epic by rough comparison—as far as the flight of a spear, a discus throw, or the range of plowing mules, for example.15 In a similar vein, some foundation myths have the oikists mark out the new city’s boundaries or sacred temen¯e by circumambulation, as in the famous story of Romulus and Remus at Rome.16 We might compare the old English usage of “measure,” meaning “travel over, traverse,” reflecting our commonplace experience of measuring distances in daily life not by a ruler but in relation to our own bodily dimensions and capacities, as Gibson points out.17 At a glance I can see if a door affords me passage, or if a chair is too low for me to sit on. Sharing such body-scaled perceptions, the Greeks used them to develop more abstract standards of linear measurement. The need for indirect measurement at a distance influenced the development of geometry (literally “earth measure”), which allowed its practitioners to estimate length and height via relative proportions.18 Diogenes Laertius credits Thales of Miletus with determining the height of a pyramid by measuring the length of the shadow it cast at the time of day when a man’s shadow equaled his own height. The Pythagorean formula, which relates the lengths of the sides of a triangle, may have derived from Egyptian efforts to

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locate washed-away boundary markers after the Nile flood; alternatively, it might have been developed to estimate the distance of a ship at sea by noting the relative heights of its mast at different points.19 The Babylonians and Egyptians made sophisticated astrological observations and developed an incipient geometry, and comparable breakthroughs occurred in the Near East prior to the sixth century B.C. Nonetheless, we are probably right to credit Ionian Greeks with developing the idea that the universe constitutes a kosmos, “an orderly arrangement whose structure can be rationally understood.”20 Anaximander, a pupil of Thales, first drew a map of the earth and constructed a celestial sphere. Prior to the Ionian revolution, of course, we find a “bas relief” picture of the cosmos in Hephaistus’ shield for Achilles (Il. 18.483–89, 606–7), echoed later by the Chorus in Euripides’ Electra, which recalls Achilles’ “first” shield (464–69), depicting “the circle of the sun” and “the fiery chorus of stars, the Pleiades and Hyades.”21 But with Anaximander, the idea of kosmos expands (in Charles Kahn’s words) to “a concrete arrangement of all things, defined not only by a spatial disposition of parts, but also by the temporal taxis [order] within which opposing powers have their turn in office.” That is, the kosmos is not simply a spatially extended body, but “also a lifetime [ai¯on], whose phases are celestial cycles.”22 We find a theatrical version of such a kosmos in Prometheus Bound (chapter 3). Influenced by geographers (the “verbal maps” that Prometheus gives to Io), and by earlier poetic versions of divine cyclical rule (Titans, Olympians, Zeus), Aeschylus joins the two patterns of motion to a third, the process of generation symbolized by Io. In the spatial configurations of Prometheus Bound, we find a complex weave of travel conceived geographically, cosmic hegemony understood cyclically, and time reckoned both by the rising and setting of the stars (part of Prometheus’ gift to mortals, 453–57) and by the successive generation of human offspring (the mortal Io’s “gift” to Prometheus). Greeks tended to view space and time as closely interrelated, measuring the latter by the former, and vice versa. Although short distances might be reckoned “as far as the flight of a spear” or “the range of a discus,” longer distances converted into travel time—a day’s sail, three days march—construed in physical, nonabstract terms.23 Tragedy offers many examples of elapsed time expressed in terms of motion through space. The Messenger in Electra describes Orestes’ flaying the bull’s hide at Aegisthus’ sacrifice “faster than a competitor flies twice around the double-turning race course” (Eur. El. 824–25). Wearing Medea’s poisoned robes, Glauke sits dumbstruck for as long as it takes “a sprinter, running at top speed, to cover / a furlong and reach the finish line,” before she cries out in pain (Eur. Med. 1181–84).24 In a world where cyclical change appeared immanent, early calendars marked time in relation to the periodic cycles of the sun, moon, and constellations.25 Not surprisingly, tragic characters reckon time—both punctual and

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durative—by the same means. In Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon’s servant tells the time of night by the stars (Eur. IA 6–8). In Orestes, the protagonist’s exile will last “the full circle of a year” (Eur. Or. 1645). When asked how long ago Troy fell, Teukros in Helen answers “some seven circling summer harvests of years,” after the Greeks already had fought at Troy “through many moons running the course of ten years” (Eur. Hel. 111–14). So, too, the Chorus of Electra quotes Agamemnon’s protest at his murder, “having come to my dear homeland / after ten years’ seed times” (Eur. El. 1152–54). In Oedipus Tyrannus the Corinthian Messenger and the Herdsman used the same mountain pastures “for three long summers, / from spring till the rising of Arcturos” (OT 1136–37), a period of roughly six months repeated three successive years. On a smaller scale, Greek “clocks” did not “tick off” (count) discrete quantities of time, as we do with second hands, digital watches, and parking meters. In keeping with relational measurements based on geometric proportions, as opposed to the independent measurements of mathematics, the klepsydra (water clock, popular across the Mediterranean world) determined relative durations spatially, by vacating a measured volume of water from a container.26 A speaker did not run out of time in the Athenian ekkl¯esia, so much as the klepsydra (having a volume analogous to his apportioned time to speak) ran out of water.27 Onians argues that the measurement of time via the loss of water reflects the basic Greek conception of the essence of human life as a liquid that gradually diminishes, with old age viewed as desiccation, similar to parched or dying flora.28 The old Argives of Aeschylus’ Chorus describe themselves as sapless, “fallen leaves that crumble” (Ag. 79–80); Euripides’ Electra points to her own “parched body” (x¯eron demas, Eur. El. 239) as proof of her suffering; Sophocles’ counterpart will “dry up [her] life” (auan¯o bion, S. El. 819) without her brother; and, without his bow, Philoctetes will do the same (auanoumai, S. Ph. 954). The ghost of Clytemnestra urges the Furies to pursue Orestes, “drying him up” (katischnainousa) until they “wither him away” (maraine, Eum. 137–39). These images recall Homer’s famous comparison of human genealogy to the generation of leaves (Il. 6.145–50). Clearly, the analogy between humans and kosmos reflects not only the heavenly bodies and what lies beyond them, but also the natural world of earth, plants, and agriculture on which human survival and prosperity depends.29 Tragedy offers a locus classicus of this interrelationship in Theseus’ account of anthropological “enlightenment” (Eur. Su. 195–218). As well as reason and speech, the gods’ give humans an environment where they can “raise crops for food, nourished by raindrops / from the sky, which feed the earth’s offspring / and water her womb” (Su. 205–7).30 The idea of the universe as an ordered kosmos was not an abstract or mental image. Onians and others emphasize the Greek predilection for con-

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crete materiality in the objects of their thought, epitomized by Antisthenes’ statement, “I see a horse; horsiness I do not see.”31 Across the spectrum, Greek thinkers from the Pythagoreans to Aristotle viewed the kosmos as a living (even breathing) organism, manifesting the “intrinsic continuity in Greek thought concerning the natural world.”32 David Furley puts the issue concisely: Cosmogony [the origins of the kosmos] is the story of a birth, even for an Atomist. . . . Those men were materialists, in the sense that they sought for the explanation of things in the matter from which they emerged, but their materialism is rightly called “hylozoism,” the theory that matter has qualities of life in it. . . . There was never a clear-cut division, in Pre-Socratic cosmology, between the animate and inanimate world, and even the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus belong in this tradition.33

We find a similar organicism in the Stoics’ belief that pneuma, a primal compound of air and fire, holds the kosmos together, making the living world a single unit. The Milesian Anaximines seems to have anticipated Stoic pneuma, writing some two centuries earlier: “As our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air surround the whole universe” [DK 13 B 2]. Whereas we tend to reduce biology to physics and chemistry, the Greeks applied biological concepts and images to physical phenomena, “extrapolating man into the expanse of the kosmos.”34 Anaximines’ use of pneuma epitomizes the flexible nature of early Greek thinking that conceived space both as matter [air, breath] and as spirit [soul], a subject to which we will return.35 The Greek view of an animate world reflects the lack of a creator-god, meaning that Greek divinities arose in and from the preexisting kosmos.36 The gods receive their moira ‘share’, ‘piece’, ‘cut’ not by virtue of having created what they rule, but as a constantly negotiated division of powers in a world they ultimately do not control.37 We discuss practical aspects of this idea in chapter 1, in terms of Greek religious cult. Manifest in tragedy, the sense that fate is stronger than the gods, as Northrup Frye points out, “really implies that the gods exist primarily to ratify the order of nature.”38 In the compartmentalized polytheism of the Greeks, each god had a particular sphere of influence, or, more accurately, each aspect of a god had such a sphere, and humans owed a ritual responsibility toward the relevant cult. The deme calendar of Erchia, for example, lists forty-three individual deities and heroes as recipients of public sacrifice for the year, of which Apollo and Zeus each appear under six different epithets.39 Perhaps because they held their gods in relatively low esteem (compared with the Judeo-Christian worshipers of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent deity), the ancient Greeks never pursued atheism with any urgency or challenged their vitalist assumptions about the world.40

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What function, if any, did space play in the early, “animate” kosmos? For Anaximander, the primal state of matter was a “warring concourse of opposite qualities” emanating from to apeiron, “the boundless” or “the limitless,” which lies outside of but mysteriously embraces the visible world.41 “Boundless” implies either infinite external space (something with no surrounding boundaries), or the lack of internal boundaries (i.e., something without internal distinctions or separate component parts); “limitless” suggests an endless cyclical movement around a circle or sphere.42 Out of the inexhaustible source of to apeiron, opposite qualities—hot-cold, wet-dry—separate out; one emerges in temporary triumph over its counterpart, until to apeiron restores the balance. Then another triumphs, in a cyclical pattern.43 In broad outline, Anaximander’s cosmological picture resembles some contemporary versions of the recurrent Big Bang, in which the universe that expands after the initial explosion gradually cools and contracts, until the mass becomes so compacted that another explosion occurs, and the process repeats itself ad infinitum. Anaximander describes an eternal cycle with no end point or ultimate direction, a view consonant with the “seasonal regularity of celestial and meteorological processes, which best exhibits the organic structure of the universe,” as Kahn puts it.44 Tragedy continually draws on this celestial pattern, not only in the numerous references to heavenly bodies and their motion, but in the very act of its performance under the transiting sun, discussed in chapter 1. Anaximander’s idea of the cyclical emergence of conquering elements shares a pattern common to Greek myths, especially those involving the struggle for cosmic rule by the gods—in which, however, the trajectory invariably points to progress or degeneration. We find the former in the Chorus’s prayer to Zeus (A. Ag. 160–75), recalling the successive rules of Uranos, Cronos, and finally Zeus himself. We find the same progressive pattern in the emergence of determinate elements out of Chaos in Hesiod’s Theogony, but the process moves in reverse when we come to the ages of man in Works and Days (109–201), understood as a decline from a golden race into silver, bronze, and finally iron.45 Unlike Anaximander’s cosmic apeiron, however, the space that tragedy reveals is ineluctably human, and the end of time looms in the impending or remembered deaths of dramatic characters. In Euripides’ Suppliant Women, for example, the natural processes of plowing, planting, growing, and harvesting yield to a destructive cycle of human violence, where ideology feeds the instinct for revenge (see the introduction). In Sophocles’ Ajax (669–77), the protagonist describes the mutability of the natural world—day yielding to night (yielding to day), winter giving place to summer (and vice versa), storms raging and being quelled—as if the cosmos offered evidence of nature’s value-free obedience to the rule of cyclic change.

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Ajax, however, enacts his radical difference from this rule by choosing when, where, and how his time will stop, committing suicide on a lonely Trojan beach (see chapter 3). Similarly, in Euripides’ Phoenissai, after Polyneices has allowed Eteocles to rule Thebes “for the full circle of a year” (477), Jocasta advises Eteocles to do the same and “honor equality” (536): Nature gave to man the law of equal rights ........ The sightless face of night and the sun’s light equally pace along the circle of the year, and neither envies that it must give way [literally, “be conquered”] in turn. So sun and night both serve human beings— then why not hold an equal part of your inheritance, sharing it with him? (Eur. Pho. 538, 543–48)

Jocasta’s appeal fails, and the resulting chaos takes physical form when she commits suicide on the battlefield, over the mutually slain corpses of her sons (Pho. 1427–59). The tragedy reveals the costs of rejecting the Anaximander-like cosmic principle whereby “opposing powers have their turn in office.”46 Unlike the later atomists, Anaximander did not abstract “boundless” space from the warring materials that emerge from it. His to apeiron is vast, but not empty. We might compare the concept to a cosmic cauldron constituted by an admixture of the very elements that it “holds”—as Kahn puts it, “place and body are here combined in a single idea.”47 The boundless constitutes a thoroughgoing mixture or blend of opposites, separated out and reabsorbed in a cycle of injustice and justice, and so simultaneously “one” and “many.”48 The idea of emergent difference (the becoming of individuation) endlessly returning to the indestructible (and infinitely resourceful) ground of being is a central theme in Greek thought, reappearing in different guises in Plato and Aristotle, who posit an undifferentiated substratum of reality out of which differentiation or definitiveness “creates” space. This idea has interesting parallels with theatrical performance. Some critics, for example, see any given production of a play—by virtue of its partiality and particularity—as committing a kind of injustice against the perfectly open potential of the text. Theatrical practitioners respond by noting that a script lacking a discrete performance may maintain its purity, but it never comes to life, like a disconcerted symphony without an orchestra that no one ever hears played. Applied to Greek tragedy, we glimpse in Anaximander’s cycle a source for the metaphysics of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and its modern variations.49 But to apeiron suggests other processes besides endless reconfiguration. “What cannot be passed over or traversed from end to end” also implies

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50

inescapability, a meaning of apeiron that Clytemnestra uses in her account of Agamemnon’s murder: “He could not flee this death nor fight against it. / Casting around him an inescapable [apeiron] net, / a rich evil of robes, I trapped him like a fish” (A. Ag. 1381–83). It is as if Agamemnon and his fate merge with the net that holds him in death, a spatial inextricability discussed in chapter 2. Hermes uses similar language when threatening Prometheus: “You will be entangled in an inescapable [aperaton] net / of destruction, thanks to your own folly” (A. PV 1078–79). Applied to religious or cultural bonds, to apeiron in Aeschylus indicates the limit to possible action, as the Danaids fear in Suppliants: Whatever is fated will be. The boundless [aperatos] powerful will of Zeus cannot be transgressed [ou parabatos]. As with other women time and again marriage will bind us. (A. Su. 1047–51)

In the event (if standard reconstructions of the trilogy are correct), the women do remain tied to marriage, but only through the wedding night, when all (but one) kill their unwanted husbands. The problem of empty space (void) seems not to have concerned Anaximander, but a century later Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school in western Greece, insisted on its epistemological impossibility: “Never shall it be proven that not-being is” (DK 28 B 7.1); “that ‘it is not’ and that ‘notbeing must be,’ cannot be grasped by the mind; for you cannot know notbeing and cannot express it” (DK 28 B 2.6–8). Influenced by Parmenidean thinking, Melissus emphasized the ontological non-sense inherent in the concept of a void: “Nor is there anything empty, for the empty is nothing and that which is nothing cannot be” [DK 30 B 7.7].51 For the Eleatics, as Jammer summarizes, there was only being, making the universe “a compact plenum, one continuous unchanging whole.” Nietzsche elaborates: The existent is indivisible, for where is the second power that could divide it? It is immobile, for where could it move to? It can be neither infinitely large nor infinitesimally small, for it is perfect, and a perfectly given infinity is a contradiction. Thus it hovers: bounded, finished, immobile, everywhere in balance, equally perfect at each point, like a globe, though not in space, for this space would be a second existent. But there cannot be a second existent. . . . Thus there is only eternal unity. In so radical a monistic system, where “space is not,” Being must be without a beginning, imperishable, and eternal in the sense of timeless.

In the Eleatics we meet head-on a recurrent issue in ancient Greek thought, the “problem” of motion. Whereas contemporary physicists confront the

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paradox of asymmetry (why in a symmetrical world of matter and antimatter should there be anything?), the Greeks (especially after Parmenides) saw motion as a comparable puzzle.52 Parmenides’ disciple Zeno exemplies the problematic in his famous paradox exposing the absurdity of motion (the race course, the arrow), along with the absurdity of infinite divisibility (Achilles and the tortoise) and of the very idea of place (if everything is in a place, then that place must have a place, ad infinitum).53 There are, not surprisingly, counteropinions to this standard reading of Parmenides. Among the most cogent is that offered by Mourelatos in The Route of Parmenides (developed recently by Curd, The Legacy of Parmenides), emphasizing the uniqueness and indivisibility of “whatever-is” as opposed to its totalizing completeness. In this version, Parmenides develops a nonholistic monism, whose enemy is not pluralism (other things) but dualism (selfdivision). “What is” is one in the sense that it cannot be divided into contrary forms, a response to the contrary-dependent systems of Anaximander and Empedocles. According to Mourelatos, Parmenides does not think motion per se impossible but only that motion which constitutes “egress” from one’s own place, motion that is self-alienating or wandering, an idea that links the Eleatics with Aristotle’s notion of natural place (place as part of something’s identity).54 Mourelatos’ title develops a key Parmenidean image, the “journey” to the truth (DK 28 B 1) and the “route [or path] of inquiry” (B 7.2). This path involves centripetal motion drawing the seeker to encircle the truth, to be “about” it, as opposed to the centrifugal spinning-off that leads one to wander astray.55 Exploiting the implicit separation between traveler and goal and the desire to close that gap, Parmenides’ hexameters take philosophical advantage of the epic story pattern of return, whose spatial permutations in tragedy engage us in chapter 2.56 To “save the appearances” denied by the Eleatics, subsequent Greek thinkers attempted to reconcile the perception of motion and change with the principle of permanent being.57 Empedocles posited a plenum consisting of four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and two powers, love and strife. Under the influence of these two powers, the phenomenal world took shape as the eternal elements assimilated (the force of philia) or separated apart (the work of neikos), with the relative presence of one element over another determining the nature (“identity”) of the phenomena. This changing arrangement presents no Parmenidean illusion; it takes place not in a void (an impossibility for Empedocles, as for the Eleatics), but in the medium offered by the air (more accurately, in that part of the plenum where air predominates in the mixture), much as a fish moves through the medium where water dominates. A similar argument against the void appears in Anaxagoras, who also believed in the substantiality of air.58 For both Empedocles and Anaxagoras, the medium provided by their respective “mixtures” is corporeal, insuring an eternal and unbroken continuum.59

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The Atomists were the first thinkers to introduce a void (or vacuum) as the necessary condition for movement. They explained the plurality of things moving in space (what we call change) as the rearrangement of unchanging permanent elements named atoms (“indivisibles”), moving, colliding, assembling, and disassembling in a void, one of the basic theoretical models adopted by modern science.60 Ironically, it took the atomists, founders of the first great materialist school, to conceive of voided emptiness, something real that is not a body. The atomists’ void influenced Newton’s views of space as independent of solid bodies and, hence, “absolute” (discussed later). For motion and change to occur, the atomists reasoned, space and matter must be mutually exclusive; atoms must be separated from each other by the absence of matter, or else the world falls back into a Parmenidean plenum.61 Because atoms were by definition indivisible (having no void within), unmediated contact with another atom was logically impossible—with no distance between them (no void), the two impacting atoms would become one. As discussed earlier, post-Renaissance contact mechanics, the heir to early Greek atomism, assumed the impossibility of action at a distance. The original atomic theory seems to imply the a priori assumption that action is, in fact, action at an extremely short distance, broadly analogous to contemporary notions of electromagnetic forces of attraction and repulsion operating at the atomic level.62 Parmenides’ plenum and the logical impossibility of change (on the standard reading) offer little help in conceptualizing such an ephemeral and kinetic activity as the theater. Plato answers Parmenides by locating reality in the nonphenomenological world, paradoxically allowing the theater and other mimetic arts at least the removed possibility of participating indirectly in, and offering an image of, the changeless world of the Forms.63 Atomic theory, however—with its individual elements moving in space, forming and reforming the world in the various shapes we recognize—does offer a useful image of theatrical practice. Staging a tragedy involves placing and moving bodies in the space provided by the theater. Whatever attractions, repulsions, aggregations, and transformations may occur reflect the contingencies of the specific play. We might think of the tragic chorus, for instance, as humanized atoms gathering around a character or particular issue, then reassembling in different guise and for different ends as the lyric shifts its focus. Such an atomistic view emphasizes the mutability and flexibility of the chorus, as opposed to its consistency of character.64 Similarly, when a tragic actor assumes different roles in the course of a play—taking on and dropping the mask, costume, and traits of the different characters—he always remains essentially (an-atomically, we might say) the same, a performer working a series of theatrical transformations.65 Among ancient thinkers, only the Pythagoreans accepted the atomists’ void, which they viewed as a principle of separation necessary for the emer-

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gence of order, structure, and proportion, expressible in terms of number. Pragmatic applications ranged widely, from early Greek medicine—aimed at maintaining and restoring the right quantitative relationship between opposing qualities—to the sympotic art of mixing wine and water in the right balance. The sculptural program of Polycleitus’ canon urged an artistic practice based on commensurable proportion, wherein every part of the body was related directly and precisely to every other part (e.g., fingers to fingers, all fingers to palm, palm to wrist to forearm, forearm to upper arm, etc.), with each individual part also related to the sculpture as a whole.66 For the Pythagoreans specifically, empty space was necessary for numbers, conceived as a series of isolated points, sequential but not continuous (like the integers 1, 2, 3, etc.), the empty space between them as that which allows each number its integrity.67 Although the Pythagoreans provide no direct link to the ancient theater, issues of harmony, balance, and proportion obviously obtain. The metrically balanced strophe and antistrophe that characterize tragic lyric, the paired exchanges of stichomythia, the rhythm of spoken trimeters and tetrameters, the organizational correspondences between dramatic agones testify to an aesthetics of form, number, and proportion. However, students of Greek tragedy long have emphasized (correctly I think) that disorder, turbulence, surprise, and excess undermine any simple notion of tragic harmony or symmetry. A more dynamic insight into tragedy derived from the Pythagorean corpus involves thinking of space as that which separates bodies, sounds, and images, allowing them to stand out in their individuated uniqueness. As Aristotle reports (Physics 4.6.213b.24–25), “it is the [Pythagorean] void that distinguishes natural objects from one another, by making a separation and division among things that are neighbors”—what trumpeter Miles Davis calls “the space between the notes,” or what Japanese Noh masters term ma, the intense silence preceding a sound, and existing between sounds, understood in part as the source of each sound.68 Attention to this “negative space”—not defined by the presence of an object but conceived as the interval between or among a plurality of objects—is an important aspect of theatrical practice, analogous to ancient Greek “music theory” that conceived of continua as ordered systems of intervals.69 Conceived in this way, space is not an emptiness that allows for occupation, but rather the necessary distance that enables the individuation (and interaction) of people and things. Consider, for example, the movement of two characters from proximity (near identity) to separation, then to individuation and uniqueness, and finally the collapse of those distinctions in the undifferentiation of death. This trajectory describes the stage career of a tragic character like Cassandra in Agamemnon, who arrives onstage as the captured subject of Agamemnon. Standing half-hidden in his chariot, she goes unnoticed in the text for over 150 lines, until Agamemnon calls atten-

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tion to her before stepping down from the chariot and entering the palace. The growing spatial distance between conqueror and victim allows Cassandra to emerge from occlusion, coming fully into her own in her scene with the Chorus. She then reverses the process during her extended exit into the palace, moving closer and closer toward the fate of Agamemnon, until she joins him in death. When Clytemnestra displays their corpses together, the stage picture parodies that of their initial arrival—spatially proximate and seemingly inseparable. No champion of the void, Plato in Timaeus introduces a very different and important conception he calls ch¯ora (52a8, b4, d3)—a receptacle (hupodoch¯e, 49a; to dechomenon, 50d) for the material world that the demiurge creates out of the container’s (prior) wayward contents (anangk¯e, 46e5, 47e/48b, 52d/53c, 68e/69a). Using his reason (nous), this divine artisan-craftsman fashions the visible and spatial images (eikones) that we wrongly think of as real. He undertakes this task while looking upon the noetic, nonspatial models (paradeigmata) that are the timeless, changeless Forms (eid¯e), the true reality, existing independently of our minds (28c2, 29a/b, 29e2, 39e, 48a2–3). Plato’s cosmology reflects many influences: Anaximander, in the sense that differentiation “creates” space (what we can measure); Pythagorean, in its mathematical and geometrical interests; Eleatic, in its sharp distinction between appearances and reality; Anaxagorian, particularly in the view that mind (nous) imposes order on the preexisting chaos of matter.70 In Timaeus we find a highly suggestive, albeit “difficult and obscure” (Tim. 49a), account of space, one that draws on the metaphor of mimetic performance. Plato’s ch¯ora (often translated “container”) is unlike our notion of space in that ch¯ora is devoid of metric and cannot be measured. More accurately, it invokes the root sense of “receptacle” as “that which receives something.” Plato uses the verb dechomai ‘accept’, ‘receive’ for what ch¯ora does, and substantives based on that verb appear as synonyms of ch¯ora. We may detect here a clever etymological move from dechomai (what accepts Becoming) to doke¯o (it seems or appears that) to doxa (what is accepted or taken to be real; mere [wrong] opinion). On this reading, Plato faults passive acceptance that “takes” the phenomenal world as ultimate reality (the reigning doxa or dogma), forgetting its relationship to the timeless, changeless Forms. Of course, the nature of that relationship—model to image, real thing to its reflection, original to its symbol (with no assumption of “likeness”), formal cause (aitia) to created object, thing to what participates in the thing (“is of it,” we might say, as “this is a drawing of something”), and so on—remains problematic.71 Given Plato’s complex desiderata, the meaning of ch¯ora includes “that which necessarily precedes what is created, in order for what is created to appear or ‘be.’ ” Glossing Timaeus 52b, Patterson observes that “a sensible [created phenomenon] must come to be in something or be nothing at all.”72

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Here thinking of einai as a locative copula (discussed earlier vis-`a-vis the Eleatics) proves useful. For something material (created by the craftsmanartist demiurge) to come to be, it must do so somewhere. We apprehend space (ch¯ora) “by some bastard reasoning” that leads us to dream that “everything that exists must be somewhere and occupy some space” (52b).73 That somewhere is eternal, uncreated, indestructible, independent of the timeless Forms that provide the model for the phenomena of the sensible world, but necessary to those phenomena as the medium through and in which they make their appearance (Tim. 48–52).74 Although the metaphysics and mathematics of Plato’s Timaeus—the “Grand Canyon of philosophical texts,” as Andrea Nightingale describes it— lie beyond my best understanding, it is worth lingering briefly over the idea of ch¯ora as a receptacle, a suggestive image for conceptualizing theatrical space. Plato explains the relationship between space and sensible phenomena in a variety of ways: space is a container in which things are held (49a6, 52e6); it is like a mirror or the reflecting surface of water onto which images are projected (49e7–8, with 50c5), a process that continues due to the ongoing relation between the images and the “self-illuminating” Forms (29b/c); it is a medium, like an odorless base for perfume (50e), or like wax that has no shape of its own but can take the imprint of any object (50c5, d4, d6); it is like a nurse (49a6) who raises and nurtures what comes into being, or like a mother (50d1–3) conceived functionally—the Greeks underestimated the importance of female ova—as the one who receives the imprint of the male seed and gives rise to a resemblance (offspring) of the original.75 In her influential study Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler concludes that ch¯ora in Timaeus constitutes “the inscriptional space of phallogocentrism, the specular surface which receives the marks of a masculine signifying act only to give back a (false) reflection and guarantee of phallogocentric self-sufficiency, without making any contribution of its own.”76 Sexism in the ancient world is not hard to find, and Plato (although better than some) is not immune. However, we should exercise caution before accepting Butler’s conclusion that Platonic ch¯ora sets the stage for the history of men “writing on” women, whose passivity they insure in order to accomplish various male significations. Regarding Timaeus, Butler fails to engage the complexity of images Plato uses to convey ch¯ora. She overlooks its independence, particularly its being prior to and ontologically free from any “inscriptional” violations. Moreover, Butler’s “passive surface” ignores the fact that Plato’s receptacle contains “traces” of the Forms, the preexisting chaos on which the demiurge imposes order by fashioning a world modeled on the Forms. Finally, her claim that ch¯ora gives back a “guarantee of phallogocentric selfsufficiency” suggests a basic misunderstanding. If the demiurge—or Plato, if he is Butler’s masculine signifier—is self-sufficient, why is he an artisan who needs material? What is his relationship to (dependence on) ch¯ora, the

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Forms, and the intractable matter with which he must work? If Butler means that the Forms are self-sufficient (Plato would certainly agree), how can they constitute a “masculine signifying act”?77 What Paul Klee says about art comes closer to catching the Platonic sense of ch¯ora: “Art does not reflect the visible; it renders visible.”78 Like the Forms, space precedes the sensibles; unlike the Forms, space itself is physical: the fire that we see is really the flaming portion of the receptacle, the water we see is the fluid part of the receptacle (51b4–6, 52d4/e1). Paradoxically, however, space is not equivalent to material extension and has no features of its own other than unchanging stability; it is not the matter out of which phenomenal objects are made, nor is it ontologically dependent on such phenomena (cf. Arist. Phys. 4.2.209b11–13). There is no Form of space, whereas there is a Form of time, which the demiurge uses as a model when creating phenomenal time—hence the famous dictum (37a) that “time is the moving image of eternity.”79 As Guthrie observes, Plato’s favorite word for describing the relationship between Forms and sensibles, mim¯em¯eta, is one “which suggests that between an actor’s interpretation of a part and the part as conceived by the play’s author.”80 Contemporary literary and performance theorists show little interest in the idea of authorial intention, to the point of denying the critical usefulness of the concept of the author itself.81 Nonetheless, we recognize intuitively that an essential (if problematic) relationship obtains for human beings between conception and realization, between imagining and performing an activity, or, at the practical end of the “idealist” scale, between intention and fulfillment. To take a real-world example, a Nicaraguan cooperative plants a field of beans, unaware that the new U.S.-backed government will seize the land before the harvest and return it to its former landlord, just returned from years in Miami. Events beyond their control render futile the intentions and efforts of the campesinos. In the realm of the visual arts, Dewey, Wollheim, and others emphasize the interaction between the artist and his or her medium, without which there is no work (taken both verbally and substantively) of art.82 In similar fashion, while contemplating the Forms, Plato’s demiurge doesn’t simply imagine the sensible world; he crafts it on a preexisting model (which he did not create), using the wayward material at hand, with no guarantee of a perfect realization. Returning to Plato’s theatrical metaphor, recall that in his youth a tragic playwright served as the director and choreographer of his plays, and probably composer as well. Early tragedians (Aeschylus, the young Sophocles) acted in their own productions, a practice that seems to have died out by the mid-fifth century. With the introduction of state funding for actors (as opposed to the financing of choruses via liturgies), the actors became professionals, distanced from the original work of the playwright.83 In this context we appreciate more fully the force of Plato’s implicit analogy between the

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demiurge and theater director, and between ch¯ora and the actor. The didaskalos confronts the intermediaries (chorus and actors) through which his intentions must be realized; the divine craftsman finds in ch¯ora the wayward material with which he fashions sensibles on the model of the preexisting Forms. Demiurge and director both work with what is already given, beyond their authorial power to originate.84 In this analogy, Plato’s ch¯ora resembles Peter Brook’s “empty space,” understood not as empty but as undifferentiated until theatrical performance brings material presence into place.85 As discussed in the introduction and chapter 1, however, the space of Greek tragedy is differentiated.86 Aeschylus did not write Persians for an “empty space” or a Broadway house, any more than Chekhov wrote Uncle Vanya for an “empty space” or the outdoor theater of Dionysus. As Lefebvre pointedly asks, “Can the space of work, for example, be envisaged as a void occupied by an entity called work? Clearly not; it is [currently] produced within a framework of a global society.”87 Nonetheless, by insisting that space for the created world is essential and prior to it, Plato provides a philosophical basis for the creative imitation that constitutes theatrical activity. Along with playwright, performer, and an “idea of the theater,” space is a sine qua non.88 Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, had much to say about space, and his highly original contribution to the subject influenced European thought into the late Renaissance.89 As with all post-Parmenidean Greek thinkers, Aristotle grappled with the issue of change or movement, kin¯esis, something clearly apparent to our senses (Sens. 437a9). If we knew nothing about movement, Aristotle argues, there would be no problem with space; we simply wouldn’t be aware of it (Phys. 4.4.211a12–14). In the introduction we discuss Gibson’s similar observation that change represents the normal condition of human perception. Along with other natural philosophers (atomists and Pythagoreans excepted), however, Aristotle firmly rejected the idea of empty space as the necessary prerequisite for that change to occur.90 Addressing the problem of change without a void, Aristotle argued correctly (for instance) that air replaced the water as it flowed out of a klepsydra.91 Nothing was ever empty; rather, something else took its “place” (topos). To avoid the third-man problem that arises if the place of a body is itself a body or is itself in a place (one of Zeno’s paradoxes, noted earlier), Aristotle conceived of topos as the boundary that contains a body but is separable from it.92 The topos of anything is “the immediately contiguous unmoved boundary of the body containing it” (Phys. 212a20). As the innermost surface of the containing body, topos has magnitude but no volume, and so interestingly becomes a twodimensional surface that surrounds the object that lies within its contact.93 Immovable and separate from what it contains, topos is not equivalent to a physical body conceived as a volume. So, for instance, the skin of my body is not the place that contains what is within; rather my skin is part of my body,

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which moves in (and through) a series of topoi that successively contain it (Phys. 4.2.209b22–210a9). As difficult as it is to imagine, an Aristotelian topos represents not a volume, but a plane. We might picture it as the surface of a thin tissue wrapped around an object, or surrounding the space of the air that lies between and separates objects. With all its peculiar complexities, Aristotle’s theory of place offers intriguing possibilities for thinking about theatrical space. The contiguous relationship between place and substance suggests their mutual interdependence, such that one cannot conceive of topoi without the corporeal and dimensional bodies that occupy them, even though topoi are not proper constituents of those bodies. Instead of space per se (avoiding Zeno’s problem), Aristotle offers places and bodies in them; if there is space, it is merely the sum total (a finite quantity for Aristotle) of all places occupied by bodies (things, water, air, etc.).94 Put simply, topoi are related to material objects insofar as every material object has a place, and vice versa. Sambursky explores the similarities between Aristotle’s place-matter dyad and the conception of space in the General Theory of Relativity, where space suggests a communion of the body and its surroundings: [I]t is the body that determines the geometry of its environment, and this geometry cannot be artificially separated from the body itself. Hence a physical point is simply a singularity in the “metric field” which surrounds it. Again, this field is not at all an empty space, but a kind of emanation of the matter in it, just as matter is a kind of “materialization” of the field.95

Applied to theatrical space, we have in Aristotle’s topos the intensive-extensive counterpart to Plato’s ch¯ora-like container (albeit devoid of metric) that holds whatever takes place. That is, a concentrated body or object seems to create the space around it, as if its place were the result of its materiality, anticipating Descartes’ equation of space with extension.96 In the ancient theater, key objects can emanate an “environment” that provides the impetus for further stage events. In Philoctetes, for example, the hero’s bow becomes more than an object of contention among Odysseus, Neoptolemus, and Philoctetes. By virtue of the power vested in it, the bow possesses an aura that helps transform Lemnos into a series of different locales, depending on who holds it—from the rugged site of lonely survival for the hero, to a second Greek camp (divided, like the one at Troy) for Odysseus and Neoptolemus, and finally to a place of mythic connection for Heracles and Philoctetes. More than a symbol, the bow allows for different dramatic places to emerge, which in turn enable significant events within the drama. We find a similar pattern in the Odyssey, where Odysseus’ bow serves as the pivot for a series of transformations of narrative space: from a palace violated by riotous guests to a house secured for its proper inhabitants; from a scene of feasting and conviviality to an indoor field of war; from the megaron of the performed

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present to one in the mythic past—Odysseus received the bow from Heracles, who had killed its previous owner after being a guest at his banquet (Od. 21.11–38), much as Odysseus will use the weapon to slay those at his own table. In Philoctetes, the visible presence of the bow manifests the traditional association of b´ıos (life) with bi´os (bow), a possibility discussed in chapter 3.97 If theatrical objects emanate a space, so too do dramatic characters, with Sophocles’ Oedipus providing a prime example. As the protagonist shifts from king to polluted criminal to daimonic presence, the dramatic space of the Oedipus plays moves from troubled polis (the opening crowd scene of OT) to befouled oikos (blind Oedipus embracing his incestuously bred daughters at the end) to an unknown locale in Athens blessed by his strangeness (the close of OC). The relationship between dramatic character and place is mutual, to be sure, and we catch an occasional trace in Greek tragedy—in both Euripides’ and Sophocles’ Electra, for example—of the social determinism that characterizes nineteenth- and twentieth-century realistic drama. The rural poverty of Euripides’ Electra and the psychic madhouse that surrounds Sophocles’ heroine hint at the systematic pressures of environment on character in Zola’s Th´er`ese Raquin, Hauptmann’s The Weavers, Storey’s The Changing Room, Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, and Mamet’s Glenngary Glen Ross. But Greek tragic characters ultimately manifest sufficient presence and agency—even our two Electras—to create and transform the space they find themselves in. The theater of Dionysus provides more stable “space-creating” material in the doorway of the sk¯en¯e facade and in the orchestra altar (or tomb) found in suppliant plays. These stage objects become foci of dramatic importance, and we might think of them as combining Democritus’ notion of void with Aristotle’s topoi, where no place is ever empty but “houses” a series of occupants.98 Although a philosophical contradiction, this hybrid of atomistic void and Aristotelian displacement opens up an interesting way to imagine significant onstage places. Consider the palace door in the first two plays of the Oresteia, for example. As Taplin demonstrates, Clytemnestra dominates the threshold in Agamemnon, most obviously during the scene in which she welcomes her husband into the palace.99 However, once she delivers her ironic prayer to Zeus after Agamemnon’s fatal exit, other characters gradually usurp her in that position: Cassandra (who enters the palace on her own), Aegisthus (who enters the palace with Clytemnestra at the end of the play), and eventually Orestes in Choephoroi, who displaces Clytemnestra absolutely. When Orestes flees the theater, driven by his visions of the Furies, the open doorway still remains. Albeit immaterial, something has taken Orestes’ place, a ghostly image of the past to which the Chorus refers in the last words of the play, “the force of destruction” (menos at¯es). This “pattern of displacement,” if we may call it such, suggests a useful interpretive application of the Democritean

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void seen through an Aristotelian lens, with the theater offering empty places waiting to be occupied, rather than empty space per se. Rarely, if ever, does a body of the exact shape and size take another’s place; we think more naturally of someone assuming the same (or similar) position, as in the case of different characters standing in the doorway. The one instance in tragic staging of exact replacement involves the convention that the same actor can play multiple roles in the course of a play, explored further in chapter 4. Athena’s replacement of Evadne on high in Suppliant Women, for example, takes on increased significance because the same actor “stepped into” both parts. Here, the different roles occupy the same place, namely the actor’s body, which in turn can take up the same position as a character the actor previously played. Aristotle also developed a theory of “natural place,” the destination of bodies with respect to their natural motion—plants grow “up,” bodies fall “down”—arguing that elemental substances have a natural tendency to move (upward or downward) toward their own special places, and to rest (above or below) in them once there.100 This tendency shows “not only that place is something [real], but also that it exerts a certain influence” [echei tina dunamin, Phys. 4.1.208b8–11].101 It is interesting that current scientific research now supports the basic idea that the universe may have an “up” and a “down,” that it is not uniform in all directions.102 Aristotle did not explicitly extend his ideas on the physics of natural place to the social sphere, although later critics of Aristotle point out the cultural biases in various Aristotelian hierarchies that result from his mode of thinking teleologically. To his credit, when writing metaphorically Aristotle tends to compare natural motion in the physical world with the human psychological drive to learn, know, and exercise that knowledge. Both comparanda manifest an intrinsic predilection that requires no external force for actualization.103 In terms of tragic space, we find a rough parallel with Aristotelian natural place in the impetus toward home examined in chapter 2, and also in the spatial restrictions on female characters that tragedy explores, discussed in chapters 3 and 6.104 More generally, the inevitability of change—what we might call “motion viewed from a conscious perspective”—is a prominent motif in Greek tragedy, linked formally to the genre’s narrative drive and thematically to the instabilities of human life. Given the nonisotropic nature of ancient space, the directionality of dramatic narrative gets “spatialized” in a nonmetaphorical way. Via its ontological dependence on discreteness and differentiation, the Greek conception of space supports Lewin’s hodological notion that space leads someplace and not someplace else (see the introduction). Aristotle’s natural place, the Epicurean-atomist belief that atoms “fall,” and the various cyclical programs of the Greek cosmologists all have their counterparts in the spatial play of Greek tragedy. While acknowledging the validity of natural place, Aristotle’s student The-

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ophrastus offered a significant alternative by ascribing no reality to topos per se. In a unique (in our ancient sources) anticipation of Leibniz, Theophrastus defined topos by the “juxtaposition and coexistence of bodies and their parts”:105 Perhaps place is not a reality in itself, but is defined by the arrangement and position of bodies in respect of their natures and powers, as is the case with animals and plants and in general with those nonhomogeneous bodies which, whether animate or inanimate, have a nature endowed with form. For in these bodies there is a certain arrangement and position of the parts in respect of the substance as a whole. Thus each is said to be in its own place through the existence of the proper arrangement, especially as every part of a body is desirous of, and strives after, occupying its own place and position.

Theophrastus foreshadows Leibniz’ understanding of space as an order of coexistences (i.e., the relationship among things existing simultaneously), just as time (for Leibniz) signals an order of successions. For things to coexist means that they stand in a mutual relationship of situations. If we drop out all simultaneous things and imagine the order of possible relations based on situations in general, we arrive at the idea of space; if we do the same for all successive particulars and imagine an order of possible relations based on successions, we arrive at the idea of time. For Leibniz, these abstract concepts, extrinsic to particular things, are imaginary. As we noted in the introduction, Gibson draws similar conclusions about visual perception: “We don’t see space, but one thing behind another.” Leibniz would agree—space is neither something nor nothing, but rather it is “indiscernible.” To be discernible, it must be occupied, but on saying that we already partake of the mistaken notion that space is a preexisting void where content and container are indifferent to each other and, hence, separable. To think this way, in Leibniz’ famous metaphor, is to mistake a genealogical tree (an organizing principle) for a real one.106 For Leibniz, if there were no objects, there would be no space. Lucretius makes a similar observation about time: “Time does not exist by itself. . . . No one perceives time in itself apart from the motion or immobility of matter.”107 Although for Leibniz the “reality of space in itself” amounts to a “chimerical supposition,”108 the relations that form the basis of this virtual map are real. They provide the material for our perceptions and experience in the world.109 Strongly influenced by Leibniz and finally reacting against him, Kant argues that space, along with time and causality, is prior to experience and a precondition for it, insofar as we experience the phenomenal world.110 Space then becomes the point of view on which we can have no point of view, a pure form of sensibility; nature must always appear to us in spatiotemporal terms. As Kant puts it, “Time is the a priori formal condition of all appearances in general. Space, as the pure form of all outer intuitions, is

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limited as an a priori condition merely to outer intuitions.”111 By representing Kant’s “external phenomena” before an audience, theatrical performance depends on the order of coexistences that Leibniz (anticipated by Theophrastus) identifies in his relational theory of space—foreground, background, and depth of field; what lies beside, below, behind, or above something or someone else (as observed by the audience); who is moving toward or away from whom, or staying at rest in relation to others; and so on. The simultaneity of experience, the spatial harmony (as opposed to the temporal melody) inherent in the simple fact of performance are among those proper values of the theater that easily get lost when plays are read as texts and not as guides to performance. Theophrastus’ views on space constitute an anomaly in the ancient world, and it was not until the early seventeenth century that a lasting break with Aristotle occurred. Philosophers and scientists began thinking of place as an independent three-dimensional volume (not a surrounding surface), prior to and wholly separate from any body that occupies it.112 Dissolving the nexus between dimensionality and corporeality (an identity basic to Descartes’ notion of space), they conceived of place like a bit of Platonic ch¯ora with no demiurgic force acting upon it. An infinity of such simultaneous places constituted space. We find here the primordial bones of Newton’s “absolute space,” a three-dimensional, immobile, homogeneous substratum, eventually understood as the infinite container for the motion of bodies whose lawful relations Newton described in his Principia Mathematica.113 As pointed out at the beginning of the appendix, however, the “occult forces” of gravitation proved so problematic that Newton finally invested space with quasi-divine characteristics that guaranteed principles of continuity, such as inertia. Newtonian space became substantial, the sensorium dei: [God] is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures forever, and is everywhere present; and, by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space. . . . God is the same God, always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without substance. In him are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other: God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God.114

Bishop Berkeley criticized this conception of absolute space on the very theological grounds that Newton justified it. For Berkeley (as for Leibniz) space was relative, “or else there is something beside God which is eternal, uncreated, infinite, indivisible, unmutable.”115 In later, less theologically driven times, scientists called that “something beside God” ether, adopting the ancient Greek term for the upper atmosphere, aith¯er, often linked with fire and light, and eventually indistinguishable from air (a¯er). Ether provided the at-

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tenuated substance needed to resolve the paradox of action at a distance, until Einstein’s work on relativity replaced ether with sophisticated field theory, based on the interdependence of space, matter, energy, and time.116 The idea that space is linked to the divine has, mutatis mutandis, ancient Greek roots, particularly in the common association of “empty space” with air, and air with the gods.117 We noted earlier Anaximenes’ choice of air as the prime cause and source (arch¯e) of all things, a position championed in the fifth century by Diogenes of Apollonia, who linked this divine and omnipresent substance with the human soul.118 Pythagoreans, Orphics, and early atomists concurred that the world was a divine creature that lived by breathing the infinite air around it. Because human life also depended on breath (evidence that the human soul itself was so constituted), Greek philosophers generally saw the relationship of microcosm and macrocosm as being very close.119 Both Anaxagoras and Diogenes of Apollonia spent significant time in Athens, and their work—particularly that of Diogenes, which connected air, mind-soul, and divinity—left its mark on Attic tragedy and comedy.120 Prometheus addresses the “divine aith¯er” (A. PV 88), although this association may simply reflect traditional beliefs.121 However, Hecuba in Trojan Women specifically conjoins the human mind and the air around the earth in the figure of Zeus: Oh bearer of Earth [i.e., air], whose throne is earth herself, whoever you are, so hard to place and comprehend, Zeus, perhaps nature’s law, perhaps the human mind, I pray to you, you who make your way in silence, leading mortals down the paths of justice. (Eur. Tro. 884–88)

Hecuba extends the traditional sense of the Olympian’s omnipresence to the atmosphere, and then to the rational nous, itself alive and ever present, albeit frequently unengaged or self-deluding, as the play makes painfully clear. In Clouds Aristophanes has a field day sending up these new, ubiquitous gods. He reveals Socrates suspended on high in a basket, contemplating the sun by mixing his “subtle mind with the kindred air” (a¯er, Nu. 223–33), praying to Air (A¯er) and Aither (Aith¯er, 263–65), and swearing by Air (A¯er) and Respiration (Anapno¯en, 627).122 Theonoe in Helen (1014–16) posits a “deathless understanding” to souls that have merged with the aith¯er after death. In Euripides’ Suppliant Women (531–36), Theseus insists that burial of the dead returns bodies to the earth and releases souls to the aith¯er, like going off to like.123 Here Euripides anticipates Aristotle’s idea of natural place, with the bodies and souls of the dead moving naturally to appropriate, separate places that can confer rest. Theseus’ argument from nature reinforces his appeal to the Panhellenic

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norms demanding burial of the dead (538–41), which echoes his mother’s impassioned plea earlier in the play (306–13). We find a similar mingling of social convention and natural place in Antigone, when Teiresias attacks Creon for not burying Polyneices’ corpse: You have hurled below a living soul, forced it to dwell dishonored in a tomb, and impiously you keep from the gods below a corpse, unburied and unblessed, who belongs neither to you nor the gods above, but those below, whom you outrage by force. (Ant. 1068–73)

Sophocles constructs Antigone on this basic spatial inversion, as we see in chapter 3. A moment’s reflection reveals how common such spatial inversions are in the arts, across historical periods. In fact, one could imagine a generic taxonomy loosely based on spatial transformations of character or situation—the upside-down satire of Dante’s Inferno, Moli`ere’s Tartuffe, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Joyce’s Ulysses; the inside(s)-out of the ribald and bawdry work of Aristophanes, Petronius, Rabelais, de Sade; the outside(r)-in sexual inversions of tragedies like Oedipus Tyrannus, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Hamlet, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling; the preposterous, back-to-front reversals of the grotesque (Bosch), the absurd (Ionesco, Magritte), and the existential (Beckett, King Lear, Caspar David Friedrich); and the downside-up of the revolutionary and redemptive (Weiss’ Marat/Sade, the Sermon on the Mount).124 It is nonetheless remarkable how frequently a simple spatial inversion provides the basis for an ancient Greek narrative. The Iliad, for example, begins with the withdrawal of the warrior Achilles from battle, with the result that the Greeks find themselves besieged by the Trojans and build a wall (Trojan-style) around their ships, a spatial reversal on which Achilles’ return to combat ultimately depends. In an extended passage that recalls the Achaeans battling to defend Trojan soil, Thucydides (4.2–14) has the Athenians fight on land to defend Peloponnesian turf against the Spartan invaders who come by sea, reversing both the normal place and preferred mode of warfare of the two great combatants in the Peloponnesian War.125 In Homer’s Odyssey, the rulerhero returns disguised as a beggar, his home invaded and occupied by its ostensible guests. While taking his revenge, Odysseus converts the banqueting hall into a bloodstained field of war, a disturbing indoor parody of the battle plain at Troy. Similar transformations provide the basis of other Greek myths, from the vertical (kathodos-anodos) axis of the Persephone story to the horizontal transgressions of such figures as Antigone, Medea, Clytemnestra, and Helen. Efforts at spatial inclusion, restoration, and/or reversal frequently

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provide the crucial interaction of plot and character in tragedy, as we have seen in previous chapters. In this sketch of philosophical approaches to space, we observe continuities and differences that reflect far more the history of philosophy than the workings of Greek tragedy. David Furley concludes that the cosmological controversies in which space plays a crucial role “set up . . . few echoes in other genres of literature in Greece during the classical period.” With the exception of a few well-known passages in Euripides and Aristophanes, “surviving plays show little knowledge of the work of earlier and contemporary philosophers of nature,” a consequence Furley attributes to the fact that ancient cosmologists through the fifth century were largely non-Athenian.126 However, we do find interesting parallels in some tragic passages with the spatial thinking of the Ionian-Milesian sophoi, just as we find tragic anticipations of the later philosophical reflections of Plato, Aristotle, and their various followers. I make no claims that the conceptions of space discussed here directly influenced the way space in fifth-century tragic theater was represented or deployed. Nonetheless, it is clear that tragedy shares the basic preconceptions that inform ancient Greek thinking about space, namely: 1. Space acquires meaning and reality in differentiation (Greek cosmology). 2. Motion (movement “through” space) is a puzzle (Parmenides, Heraclitus). 3. Space is heterogeneous, nonisotropic, and directional (Aristotle, Epicurus).

We may contrast these basic views with our contemporary understanding that space “exists” with nothing in it, that motion is unproblematic (or at least uninteresting), and that space is homogeneous, isotropic, and nondirectional. I hope this summary helps to establish what “space” meant to ancient Greek thinkers, providing certain models and categories of analysis that recur in later philosophical and scientific conceptions of space. If nothing else, the ancient thinkers provide useful vocabulary and apt metaphors that we can apply to the spatial practice of Attic tragedy—the idea of space as boundless, as a plenum, as material extension, as a void; as a prerequisite for the emergence of phenomena (“being” as “being somewhere”), as an emanation of those phenomena, or as the order of relations among synchronous phenomena; as topos, as ch¯ora, as guarantor of natural laws; as a sustainer of the cosmos (like the air we breathe); or, even occasionally, as a confusing and nonsensical abstraction.127

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1. Shaw 1975; Zeitlin 1978; Keuls 1993, 329–48; Rabinowitz, 1993; Seidensticker 1995; Bassi 1998; Ormond 1999. 2. For structuralist readings of tragedy, see C. L´evi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, tr. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (New York 1963) 206–31; Segal 1981, esp. 13–42; La musique du sphinx: Po´esie et structure dans la trag´edie grecque, tr. C. Malamoud and M.-P. Gruenais (Paris 1987); and 1997a, 27–157; Loraux 1993, 7–21, 184–236. 3. Hall 1989; Zeitlin 1990a and 1990b; Cartledge 1993. 4. Segal 1984, expanded in 1993b, 148–57, to suggest the dichotomy between public exteriority and emotional interiority for dramatic character and playwright alike. 5. Wise 1998, 210. 6. McAuley 1999, 17–35, provides useful guidance through this “terminological minefield.” 7. Edmunds 1996, 24–26; see also M. G. Bonanno, “All the (Greek) World’s a Stage,” in Edmunds and Wallace 1997, 118–19; Bryant-Bertail 1991, 103 and 110; Issacharoff 1981; and also my note 66. Cf. Scolnicov 1994, 4–6, and States 1985, 7– 12 and 23–29, who share my doubts about a semiotic approach to performance. 8. McAuley 1999, 41. 9. Burke 1966, 64; also 366–68, 410–11, and 419–69. Does McAuley’s (1999) “space” choose to act, and if so, how does it manifest its deliberative potential? 10. Algra 1995, 7–30. He identifies (15–22) three main spatial concepts (or functions) that recur in Western thought as far back as we can delve: a kind of prime stuff providing a “reservoir of physical possibilities”; a framework of relative locations; and a container, in and through which things can move. 11. In Yuasa 1987, 39, and generally at 22–24, 37–46; see also Vatsyayan 1981, 19–20. 12. One might consider architecture a better candidate, but its need to provide a pragmatic environment for human activity works against its becoming a scene for those gathered to reflect consciously on that activity. 13. Murdoch 1977, 68; also Lakoff and Johnson 1980, especially on orientational, entity-substance, and container metaphors. See also Pl. Tim. 47B, Arist. Met. 980a21– 27 (sight “is the sense which allows us to apprehend the most, and which reveals the most discriminations”), and Ley 1999, 44–51. 14. For theaomai (and cognates) used in a theatrical context, see X. Oec. 3.9, 8.3, and 8.20. Xanthias refers to the audience as “hoi the¯omenoi (Ar. Ran. 2); regarding his own situation, Prometheus tells Oceanus derkou theama, “behold the spectacle” or “take your fill of gazing” (A. PV 306, see Frye 1957, 223); Orestes asks Zeus to “become a viewer of these present actions” (the¯oros t¯onde pragmat¯on genou, A. Cho. 246); the characters in Eur. Hipp. use thea and theama as the theatrical spectacle in which they find themselves (Zeitlin 1996, 264–65); Tecmessa covers Ajax’ corpse to prevent him becoming “an object for gazing at” (theatos, S. Aj. 915). The alternate title

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of Aeschylus’ lost satyr play Isthmiastai, or The¯oroi, refers to the satyr Chorus as “sacred ambassadors” to (and spectators of) the Isthmian games (Lloyd-Jones 1957, 541–43). Theseus arrives onstage as just such an ambassador (the¯oros, Eur. Hipp. 792–93, 806–7) who returns from Delphi, as does Creon who reports on the murderer of Laius, himself killed as a the¯oros on his way to Delphi (S. OT 114–15). On the¯oros, see G. Nagy, “Ancient Greek Poetry, Prophecy and Concepts of Theory,” in Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition, ed. J. Kugel (Ithaca 1990) 56–64, and McEwen 1993, 20–22. 15. W. Jaeger, Paideia (Oxford 1946–47) xxi. The movement from an embedded and embodied sense of philosophical knowledge to the the¯oria of disembodied “contemplation” championed by Aristotle suggests that the basic relationship observed by Jaeger changed substantially over time, as a forthcoming book by Andrea Nightingale explores. 16. See Onians 1951, 15–20, and Goldhill 1986a, 184, 218–221. 17. Sambursky 1982, 18–19. At H. Il. 12.466 and 13.474, a hero’s eyes “flash fire”; in S. Ajax 69–70, Athena diverts the rays of Ajax’ eyes so that he cannot see Odysseus. See Empedocles DK 84, 109, and 31 A86; Pl. Phdr. 255c–d, and Tim. 45b–46b; Onians 1951, 73–77; Long 1965, 259–65; Vernant 1991, 135, 143, 147; and Wright 1997, 191–92, 195. Guthrie 1965 notes that the Pythagoreans also viewed the eye as active (234–38); only the atomists thought it a passive recipient of external stimuli (441–49). Beare 1906, 9–92, remains valuable, with a clear compilation and analysis of ancient theories of vision. Prier 1989, esp. 41–117, offers a phenomenological exploration of the conjunction of sight, light, and appearance in archaic Greek thought. More speculatively, see W. Deonna, Le symbolisme de l’oeil (Paris 1965), and G. Simon, Le regard, l’ˆetre et l’apparence (Paris 1988). 18. S. Tr. 96–102, Aj. 606–7, and Ph. 415, among many examples in tragedy; for Hades as unseen, see Pl. Phd. 81c and Crat. 404b, and Steiner 1995, 207. 19. Similarly, S. Tr. 1104; also Griffith 1983 on A. PV 499. 20. See Nussbaum 1986, 70–72. 21. Vernant 1995, 1–21, quotation at 12–13; see also J. Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge 1988), and review by R. Wardy, CR 39 (1989) 258–61; Oudemans and Lardinois 1987, 33–44; and Lloyd 1987, 299. 22. In Aeschylus’ Use of Psychological Terminology (Montreal 1997) 172, S. D. Sullivan concludes that in early Greek poetry “a continuum appears to run between what we call ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete,’ ‘psychological’ and ‘physical.’ For the early Greeks this continuum was non-divisible. We moderns make the distinctions that mark either end of the continuum.” See further my appendix. 23. Vernant 1995 and 1991, 20, 142, and 318–33; at 1991, 327, he approves Redfield’s claim that the epic hero “only sees himself in the mirror others hold up to him.” Gill 1996 offers an impressive study of the ancient Greek “objective-participant” conception of the “person,” revealed as “the self in dialogue.” 24. Vernant 1995, 16; Pl. Chrm. 164d-165a; J. K. Davies, “The Moral Dimension of Pythian Apollo,” in Lloyd 1997, esp. 55–56. Dover 1974, 269–71, indicates how the blanket limitation vis-`a-vis the gods helped foster an awareness of common human ground. 25. In this, and other examples, the essential quality both inhabits the subject and reflects the view of the viewer. See J. Davidson, “A Sophoclean Periphrasis,” Glotta 64 (1986), esp. 22–23.

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26. Rehm 1994b, 39–42, and Frontisi-Ducroux 1995, esp. 19–26 and 39–48. 27. Neisser 1994, 394–95; J. Flavell, S. Shipstead, and K. Croft, “What Young Children Think You See When Their Eyes Are Closed,” Cognition 8 (1980) 369–87. 28. S. fr. 774; see also OC 266–67, 437–39, 960–99; OT 1455–58; R. Buxton, “Blindness and Limits: Sophokles and the Logic of Myth,” JHS 100 (1980) 22–37; and Williams 1993, 71–72. 29. Williams 1993, especially his rewarding discussion of shame (which includes much of what we think of as guilt), 78–102; see also Cairns 1993, 14–47 and 360–70, and Lloyd-Jones 1971, 24–26. The link between “being seen” and moral consciousness extends to the modern world, as H. L. Mencken’s well-known formulation suggests: “Consciousness is the inner voice that warns us somebody might be looking.” 30. Lloyd 1993, 14–18, and Jaynes 1976, 30, discuss how retrospective narration allows the narrator to see himself as others see him. 31. Williams 1993, 81–82. See also Cairns 1993, 39 (“it is extremely doubtful that any society could exist in which no internalization of standards of social and moral appropriateness took place”) and 121–23 (Nausicaa); and Dover 1974, 268–72, and 1987, 91–96. Bolgar 1969, 37–38, reminds us of the cooperative virtues learned from Homer in the fifth-century: Glory in the Homeric world was not earned in a vacuum. The hero’s quest for personal superiority was conducted within a framework constituted by the rights and claims of others; and a schoolboy reading his Homer would learn as much about the requirements of communal living as about the supreme worth of individual pre-eminence. 32. Williams 1993, 84 and 85. A character in Critias’ lost play Sisyphus credits the man who invented fear of the gods with providing an omniscient presence that keeps men in check: “There exists [he alleged] a god who flourishes in eternal life . . . who can hear everything spoken among men and can see everything they do. If you silently plot some evil, it will not escape the notice of the gods, so present in thought are they.” Critias DK B 25, TrGF 1 (43) F 19, translation (modified) from M. Davies, “Sisyphus and the Invention of Religion,” BICS 36 (1989) 16–32. 33. Rose 1992, 300–301; see also his discussion of the “good fear” that internalizes the rule of law in the Oresteia, 253–56. Havelock 1957, 125–239, offers an extended analysis of Democritus and like-minded pre-Socratics. 34. Williams 1993, 95–97. See also the perceptive comments by C.A.E. Luschnig, Time Holds the Mirror: A Study of Knowledge in Euripides’ Hippolytus (Leiden 1988), esp. 1–14. 35. Odysseus anticipates the ethical application suggested by Socrates’ seeing the eidolon of himself reflected in another’s eye at Pl. Alc. 1.132e–33a. 36. On the importance of hearing in tragedy, see Stanford 1983, 77; Arist. Po. 1453b3–7, and generally Sens. 437a (“reasoning speech is the cause of learning because it is audible”). On sound production and internal body space, see Pinker 1994, 163–72, 354. 37. Arist. Rhet. bk. 3, 1403b–1404a. Plato (Lg. 817c) wants to keep out of the agora dramatic performances, and particularly the actors “with their dulcet tones and voices louder than our own.” See also P. E. Easterling, “Actors and Voices,” in Goldhill and Osborne 1999, 154–66, and M. Vetta, “La voce degli attori nel teatro attico,” in Lo spettacolo delle voci, ed. F. de Martino (Bari 1995) 61–78.

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38. Arist. Pol. 1336b28; see Edith Hall 1997, 119. 39. The work of Walter Ong remains important for understanding the power of orality, esp. Presence of the Word (New Haven 1967) 112–17 and 164–67, and Orality and Literacy (London 1982) 72. Rihll 1999, 11–13, emphasizes the oral nature of ancient Greek science. Onians 1951, 13, 33, 56, 67–71, and 74, treats ancient views that bind together breath, thoughts, and words, joining them to hearing and understanding. 40. K. W. von Humboldt, “Thinking and Speaking: 16 Theses on Language, 1795– 96,” tr. K. Mueller-Vollmer, in Comparative Criticism, ed. E. S. Schaffer (Cambridge 1989) 2:194–214 (quotation at 212). 41. Nagler 1974, 28–37, explores Homer’s transformation of this formula and its allomorphs, playing on different possibilities of human contact. 42. Arist. Pol. 1326b6–7; see also Thuc. 2.2 and Andoc. 1.40. Mackie 1996, 56–60, and Martin 1989, 31–37, emphasize the “directive” nature of speeches marked as “winged,” designed to make the hearer do something; also Onians 1951, 67 n.4 and 469– 70. On “unwinged words,” see J. B. Hainsworth, “Apteros muthos: A Concealed False Division,” Glotta 38 (1960) 263–68, and J. Russo, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. 3, ed. J. Russo, M. Fernandez-Galiano, and A. Heubeck (Oxford 1992), on 17.57. 43. Agamemenon (A. Ag. 1343–45), Aegisthus (A. Cho. 869), Polymestor (Eur. Hec. 1034–40), Medea (Eur. Med. 96–167) and her children (1271–79), Clytemnestra (Eur. El. 1165–67, S. El. 1404–18), Helen and Hermione (Eur. Or. 1294– 1301, 1347–48), the Charioteer (Eur. Rh. 729–31), Cyclops (Eur. Cyc. 663), Lycus (Eur. HF 749, 753) followed by the implied sounds when Heracles turns on his own family (886–908), the victim in Eur. Antiope 48.50 (ed. Kambitsis, Athens 1972), and the Nurse discovering that Phaedra has hanged herself (Eur. Hipp. 775–78, 780–81, 786–87). See Poe 1992, 132–35, and Arnott 1982. 44. See Mathiesen 1999, esp. 6–7 and 94–125; West 1992, esp. 350–55; G. Comotti, Music in Greek and Roman Culture, tr. R. Munson (Baltimore 1989; orig. Torino 1979) 32–37; Csapo and Slater 1995, 225 and 331–48 (music and instrumentation in tragedy); E. A. Moutsopoulos, “Musique grecque ou barbare (Eur. IT 179–184),” Eirene 21 (1984) 25–31; and R. W. Wallace, in “Private Live and Public Enemies,” in Boegehold and Scafuro 1994, 140–42 (the political importance of music). 45. Among many examples, see B. Goff, The Noose of Words: Readings of Desire, Violence and Language (Cambridge 1990); Goldhill 1986a, who discusses the connection between insight and blindness in Oedipus Tyrannus (“as readers and writers we fulfill the potential of Oedipus’ paradigm of transgression,” 221); and Pucci 1980, 127, for whom (re. Medea) “both internal and external violence begin in the very act of writing, for they are inscribed in the general structure of the sign that both makes possible and frustrates our desire for self-appropriation,” an idea that Wise 1998 resurrects. 46. C. Sourvinou-Inwood, “Reading” Greek Death (Oxford 1995) 1; see also Segal 1986, 50–74, for a similar interest in the texts and “megatexts” (Segal’s term) of cultural production. Nonliterary artifacts also have been converted into readable texts; see, e.g., I. Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge 1991); C. Tilley, ed., Reading Material Culture (Oxford 1990); and the panel Reading Ancient Ritual convened at the APA’s 130th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., Dec. 30, 1998. 47. Taplin 1977, 1; Halleran 1985, 1; D. Bain, Masters, Servants and Orders in

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Greek Tragedy (Manchester 1981) 1–7; Mastronarde 1979, 2–3. See the discussion in S. Goldhill, “Reading Performance Criticism,” G&R 36 (1989) esp. 174–80. 48. See Wiles 1997, chs. 6–8, entitled “Left and Rright, East and West,” “Inside/ Outside,” and “The Vertical Axis.” 49. Representative titles indicate the range of human activities now textualized and open to reading: Reading Human Geography, ed. T. Barnes and D. Gregory (London 1997); Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings, ed. L. McDowell and J. P. Sharp (London 1997); P. Werth, Text Worlds (London 1996); Text, Theory, Space, ed. K. Darian-Smith, L. Gunner, and S. Nuttall (London 1996); Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, ed. T. Barnes and J. Duncan (London 1992); J. S. Duncan, The City as Text (Cambridge 1990); H. L. Moore, Space, Text, and Gender (Cambridge 1986). The fashion extends beyond the humanities, as a headline in the science section of the San Francisco Chronicle (Dec. 15, 1994, A8) indicates: “How the Human Brain Reads Facial Expressions.” The article proceeds to confuse recognition with reading, and the visible with “vocabulary.” 50. The obvious exceptions are guidebooks for identification and immediate appreciation (trail books, nature and museum guides), handbooks for repairing or building, owner-operating manuals for such recalcitrant machines as cars and word processors, and the kind of textual commentaries that classicists consult, where the primary text remains primary. 51. H´el`ene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, tr. S. Cornell and S. Sellers (New York 1993) 19–20; Carson 1986, 50, expresses a similar sentiment. 52. For fifth-century writing as a reflection of, and prompt for, human speech, see Small 1997, 35–40; Thomas 1992, 61–73, 101–27; D. K. Schenkeveld, “Prose Uses of AKOUEIN ‘To Read’,” CQ 42 (1992) 129–41 (esp. 135); J. Svenbro, Phrasikleia, tr. J. Lloyd (Ithaca 1993; orig. Paris 1988) 1–5, 18, 35, 44–47, 53–63; W. J. Ong, Fighting for Life (Ithaca 1981) 125–27; also the classic articles by S. Flory, “Who Read Herodotus’ Histories?” AJP 101 (1980) 12–28, and W. C. Greene, “The Spoken and the Written Word,” HSCP 60 (1951) 23–59. For reading as “listening” or “hearing” (implying hearing someone read aloud), see Hdt. 1.48.1; Thuc. 1.21.1, 1.22.4; Polyb. 36.1.7, 38.4.8; and B.M.W. Knox, “Silent Reading in Antiquity,” GRBS 9 (1968) 421– 35. For later periods, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 2nd ed. (1993); J. Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge 1997); and Manguel 1996, 41–53. 53. See M. Stubbs, Language and Literacy: The Sociolinguistics of Reading and Writing (London 1980) 13. 54. See Ps.-Plu. Vit. X Orat. (Lyc.) 84IF, and R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge 1989) 48–49; for the chorus, Plu. On Listening to Lectures 46b. See Csapo and Slater 1995, 10 (no. 14) and 360 (no. 305). On the degree to which early tragedy was written out as a performance text, see J. R. Green, “Oral Tragedy? A Question from St. Petersburg,” QUCC 51 (1995) 77–86. 55. G. Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays (New York 1978) 188–90; J. Smith, “The Slightly Different Thing That Is Said,” in Barnes and Duncan 1992, 77–79. 56. Dale 1969, 248. Havelock 1982, 262–63, concurs: “We read as texts what was originally composed orally, recited orally, heard acoustically, memorized acoustically and taught acoustically.” McAuley 1999, 6–8 and 231–34, has doubts about using the “textual analogy” for “modeling theatrical function.” 57. See A. H. Sommerstein, ed. and tr., Acharnians (Warminster 1980), 14–15;

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Havelock 1982, 265; and F. S. Halliwell, “Authorial Collaboration in the Athenian Comic Theatre,” GRBS 30 (1989) 515–28 (esp. 527–28). 58. Hedrick in Osborne and Hornblower 1994, 173–74; also Havelock 1963, 39. The epigraphical style of boustrophedon (lines turning the corner and going backward, left to right, right to left, left to right, etc.) makes deciphering difficult, and stoichedon (letters aligned in vertical columns) seems to privilege ornamental effect over readability. Tragic characters frequently conceive of poetry more as a performed artifact than as a text for reading: Alc. 962–71, Med. 190–203, Ion 1143–65, HF 673–95. See P. Pucci, “The Monument and the Sacrifice,” Arethusa 10 (1977) 165–95, and Segal 1997a, 318–22. As Jack Goody notes in his introduction to Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge 1968), the “most essential service [of writing] is to objectify speech, to provide language with a material correlative, a set of visible signs.” 59. See Havelock 1963, 36–56, and Harris 1989, 65–115. According to Thomas 1992, 72, “the impact of writing [in Greece] may initially have been largely that of lending monumental weight . . . to the new political organization of the developing city.” For similar views, see Holkeskamp ¨ 1992, esp. 94–102. Although M. Detienne in ch. 2 of The Creation of Mythology (Chicago 1986) is wrong to claim that writing played no significant role in the ongoing process of governance in fifth-century Athens, we should be wary of assuming that the majority of Athenian citizens needed to read in order to govern. Some clearly did, as Munn 2000 (88–89, 170–71, 191– 92, 261–80, 296–98) and Sickinger 1998 (62–113) detail. However, Harris 1989, 78, for example, acknowledges that voting in large jury trials in Athens was organized so that jurors did not have to read or write (Arist. Ath.Pol. 68.2–4). Such realities lend little support to Segal’s theory (1984) that tragedy encodes a growing split between the oral and the written, played out as “a discrepancy between the imagined and the actual object” (47) and as “the tensions . . . between the inner cohesion of the written text and the other-directedness of the oral medium” (53). 60. Harris 1989, 295–97, and Manguel 1996, 126–28, discuss the replacement of book rolls with codex, allowing for ease of quotation and consultation. See also H. Immerwahr, “Book Rolls on Attic Vases,” in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honour of B. L. Ullman, ed. L. B. Lawler, D. M. Robathan, and W. C. Korfmacher (1964) 1:17–48; “More Book Rolls on Attic Vases, AK 16 (1973) 143–47; and Small 1997, 141–59. 61. Saenger 1997, 9–51. 62. Along the lines of recent “constructivist” theories (of the body, gender, history, nature, science, even rationality), we may expect a new genre of “death studies,” in which mortality is exposed as a cultural product that the enlightened critic can write us out of. 63. As playwright John McGrath reminds us in A Good Night Out (London 1981) 6, “The act of creating theatre has nothing to do with the making of dramatic literature: dramatic literature is what is sometimes left behind when theatre has been and gone.” 64. See, for example, Joseph Chaikin’s The Presence of the Actor (New York 1991) 21–26. Stanislavsky emphasized the actor’s “circle of concentration,” which keeps the performer focused on his character and not on the audience, part of the challenge of live performance. As Lyons 1987, 29, observes, nonmimetic theories do much better at describing the process of reading than the experience of performance, where “the

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spectator receives the text only through a physical representation delimited by human beings in an actual space.” That is, the text comes embodied, and hence already interpreted. 65. The contemporary theater artist might protest that presence is overrated as a theatrical given. Audio and video tape, laser-generated holographs, and other virtualworld technologies deny the need for physical presence. In the history of live performance, however, such exceptions prove the rule—theater (including tragic performances in Athens) depends on significant presence. In fact, some contemporary artists aggressively counter the technologically disembodied, exposing their bodies to various intrusions and excesses, as if to prove they really are present. See R. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London 1997). 66. R. Barthes, Critical Essays, tr. R. Howard (Evanston, Ill. 1972) 261–62, an interpretive model he applies to clothing in Syst`eme de la Mode (Paris 1967). Other major practitioners of theater semiotics include K. Elam, The Semiotics of Theater and Drama (London 1980); Issacharoff 1981, and his Discourse as Performance (Stanford 1989; orig. Paris 1985); Ubersfeld 1982; M. de Marinis, The Semiotics of Performance, tr. A. O’Healey (Bloomington 1993; orig. Milan 1982); P. Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New York 1983); E. Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, tr. J. Gaines and D. L. Jones (Bloomington 1992; orig. T¨ubingen 1983); S. F. Melrose, A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (Basingstoke 1994); and Wiles 1997, and 1991. 67. E. Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London 1952) 136; Bachelard 1969, 215–both quoted by States 1992, to whom I owe many of the observations on presence. Anthropologists of religion also note the impoverishment wrought by structural analyses. As Barth 1975 observes, by “dichotomizing the world in a binary mode we see only a shadow of its meaning” (171; see also 11–12, 105–6, and 207–14). In their charged complexity, I believe the same caveat applies to interpreting theatrical “symbols.” 68. Nagy 1996, 3–4, 53–58, 80–86, and 214. See also Naerebout 1997, 186 n.41. 69 Arist. Po. 1448a19–24; Pl. Resp. 3, 394b3/e5. 70. In his phenomenological study of place, Casey 1993, 50–63, speaks of the “primary placial dyad” that opposes “here” (bound up with the body) and “there.” Herington 1985, 138–44, emphasizes the revolutionary nature of early tragic performance, in which an “Oedipus” appeared for the first time, “no mere mechanical component in a famous story, but [someone] who breathed, walked, and above all spoke for himself.” From the little we know of epic performances (popular through the fifth and fourth centuries; see Pl. Ion and X. Smp. 3.6), rhapsodes were less mobile and active than dramatic actors, manifesting what might be called a “constrained” presence indicated by the staff they hold in their frequent depictions on Attic vases. 71. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. G. Spivak (Baltimore 1976; orig. Paris 1967) 12; Culler 1983, 150–51, and 166; cf. Tallis 1995, 164–77. The ontological fallout— old news, but worth repeating—is the focus on absence and the construction (via various ideological forces) of an ersatz presence. See Culler 1975, 229, and Tallis 1995, 175–89. 72. Raymond Tallis, letter to Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 14, 1997, 19; also 1995, 65–70, 82–96, 211–13. 73. See Pinker 1994, 83–125, for an accessible account of the linguistic issues.

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Christopher Norris has addressed the political ramifications in a series of important studies, including Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (London 1988), What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore 1990), Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London 1992), and The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford 1993). 74. Pinker 1994, 22–24, 404–30. 75. Peter Dews, “The Limits of Disenchantment,” Times Literary Supplement, July 12, 1996. 76. Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 27, 1996, 14. 77. R. Brandom, rev. of Points of View, by A. W. Moore (Oxford 1997) in TLS, Aug. 28, 1998, p. 6. As Segal 1995b, 11, reminds us, “the first coherent world-picture in Western thought, Homer’s Shield of Achilles, frames the works of humankind with the features of nature that are visible and constant for all humans: the earth, the heavens, with its constellations, and the sea (Il. 18.483–89, 607).” 78. In this light consider Una Chauduri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor 1995), who introduces such concepts as “placiality,” “geopathology,” “hyperinclusion,” “psychoanalysis embedded in geoanalysis,” “hypersemiotic,” and “the deterritorialized self.” See also D. Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill 1992); E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London 1989); H. Moore, Space, Text, and Gender (Cambridge 1986); and B. Hillier and J. Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (New York 1984), where space is “a morphic language.” 79. Gibson 1979, 3. 80. Gibson 1979, 100 and 131–32. 81. “It does not consist of stimuli, nor of patterns of stimuli, nor of sequences of stimuli. A perceptual system does not respond to stimuli (although a receptor does) but extracts invariants” (Gibson 1982, 399–400). 82. Gibson 1979, 149. Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989, 5, points out the basis of gestalt perception, wherein we “recognize constancy, even under changing conditions.” 83. Gibson 1979, 11 and 33–36. 84. Gibson 1979, 205. 85. Gibson 1982, 416; 1979, 197–200. As Diderot puts it, “Every attitude [pose] is false and little; every action is beautiful and true” (quoted in Roach 1993, 127). 86. Gibson 1979, 220–21. For a recent version of the “snapshot” theory that approaches vision with little concern for the continuous environment or ongoing perceptual activity, see D. D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (New York 1998). 87. Gibson 1982, 387–91; see also Neisser 1994. 88. Gibson 1982, xiii and 409–11; on complementarity, see Gibson 1979, 128 and 137–41. 89. See Neisser 1994, 396–97. 90. Gibson 1979, 34. 91. Gibson 1979, 9 and 65; 1982, 416–18; Neisser 1987, 296. Describing the social space of human beings, Lefebvre 1991, 294, adopts a similar model: They [human members of a community] act and situate themselves in space as active participants. They are accordingly situated in a series of enveloping levels,

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each of which implies the others, and the sequence of which accounts for social practice. . . . [In] a so-called archaic or peasant society, there is a body (“proxemics”), the dwelling with its “rooms,” and the vicinity or community (hamlet or village) along with its dependent lands (fields, pastures, wood, forests, etc.). Beyond these spheres lie the strange, the foreign, the hostile; short of them, the organs of the body and of the senses. 92. Gibson 1979, 239–40. In a similar vein, Chomsky 1993, 18–29, differentiates natural language from formal systems like mathematics: It is a mistake to interpret the expression “John has a thought” (desire, intention, etc.) on the analogy of “John has a diamond.” In the former case, the expression means only “John thinks” (desires, etc.) and provides no grounds for positing “thoughts” to which John stands in a relation. (18) 93. Neisser 1987, 296. In Symposium and Parmenides (and to a lesser extent Phaedo), Plato adopts a comparable strategy, emphasizing the interconnected “paths” of philosophy—the narrator has heard the story from another, who accompanied Socrates when he went to such and such a place. 94. Konrad Lorenz, quoted in Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989, 8. 95. Gibson 1982, 411. Note that Gibson (397) does not claim that we take in common “sense data,” but common information: “Perceiving is information-based, not sensation based.” Even cultural relativists like Sommer 1969, 69, agree that common perceptual endowments give rise to “certain consistencies in spatial arrangements . . . regardless of culture.” Similarly, ethnologists have identified universal patterns in human strategies of social interaction; see Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989, 19–86, 493–96, 522; and Wiessner 1996, 1. 96. Gibson 1982, 172–75. However, he rightly insists (1979, 101 and 109) on the difference between space and time: “The order of events cannot be permuted, whereas the order of parts can. We can rearrange the furniture in a room but not the happenings that occur in it. . . . That is why ‘time’ is said to have an arrow.” 97. Gibson 1982, 412. 98. From the lack of depicted landscape on Greek vases (and the testimony regarding lost wall painting), Scully 1962, 2, concludes that the Greeks in the archaic and classical period experienced landscape “only as it was, at full scale.” Open to nature, the theater of Dionysus exemplifies this disinterest in creating elaborate visual environments. See notes 104–5 for the claim that perspective painting was important in the early theater. 99. For example, we may know that our local theater is situated in a depressed part of town, but during the course of the play we forget that fact, only to be reminded when we exit the theater by the presence of police cars, panhandlers, and so on. As Green 1994, 9, observes, “the history of the theatre has to some extent been the history of the growing passivity of the audience, particularly once theatre went indoors and the stage was separated from the seating by lighting and darkness.” 100. Gibson 1982, 178. 101. Hall 2000, 28–29 and 33–36; Rehm 1994b, 40–41; and for more speculative observations, Calame 1986–87. 102. Gibson 1979, 248.

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103. See Neisser 1994, 398–99, and Gibson 1979, 248–53. 104. Padel 1990, 349–54. For a more circumspect analysis of the evidence, see A. L. Brown, “Three and Scene-Painting Sophocles,” PCPhS 30 (1984) 1–17; Pollitt 1990, 145–46, and 1974, 240–45; and Green 1990, 283–84 (skeptical of scenery and scene painting in the fifth-century theater). J. White, Perspective in Ancient Drawing and Painting (London 1956) 9–43, notes that the foreshortening found in some Attic vase painting (crucial to Padel’s argument) was not accompanied by the evolution of a vanishing point, or even a vanishing axis; that we have no external evidence to confirm Vitruvius’ attribution of unified perspective to the Athenian Agatharcus who worked under Aeschylus (61); and that the rise of perspective theory and practice should be dated no earlier than the third century B.C. (43–69). See also Green 1989, 27–28, and G.M.A. Richter, Perspective in Greek and Roman Art (London n.d.) 61 (“in the ancient theater . . . every person in the audience furnished a different point of sight”). Cf. J. Christensen, “Vindicating Vitruvius on the Subject of Perspective,” JHS 119 (1999) 161–66. Scene painting may have played a role in changing the setting from play to play, but, as Wycherley 1978, 213, points out, it was “no doubt suggestive and symbolical rather than realistic.” 105. Gibson 1979, 70–75, 196–97, 283; 1982, 13, 18–20, 175–76. In Early Netherlandish Painting (Princeton 1953) 9, Erwin Panofsky draws the relevant distinction between the “systematic perspective construction” of postmedieval art and the “perspective representation” of Roman art, whose wall painting was far more committed to perspective than Greek painting ever was. E. W. Leach, The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome (Princeton 1988) 42, concurs: Roman methods of simulating spatial recession do not produce a perfectly systematized illusion (like those of Renaissance painting) to control the spectator’s point of view. Rather, they offer an informative approximation of illusion toward which the spectator must establish his own point of view. 106. Taplin 1977, 449–51 and 472–73; also chapter 2. 107. Lewin 1936, esp. 1–75, 99, 108–9, expounds his holistic concept of psychological life space, which constitutes the interaction of person and environment via the perception of relevant “part-whole” relationships and the dynamic that operates between the sense of separation and connection. See also A. J. Marrow, The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work of Kurt Lewin (New York 1969) 32–39. 108. Poulet 1977, 40–43. 109. Foucault 1986; also 1984, 252–54. 110. Foucault’s definition of “heterotopias” is in 1984, 252. 111. These categories reflect the “inarticulate consensus according to which ‘space’ is a more general term than ‘place’ ” (Algra 1995, 20). For example, extrascenic space could include several offstage places, as in the Messenger’s description of Heracles’ madness in Eur. HF (see chapter 2). 112. Note that neither Taplin (1988, 72) nor Wiles (1997, 16) discern any useful distinction between theatrical and scenic space, failing to acknowledge the priority of the first, the fictional quality of the second, and the way that scenic space can change over the course of a play. 113. See Easterling (forthcoming) and Murnaghan 1988, 36. For stage movement,

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Fagles 1984, 283–94, makes better theatrical sense than Edmunds 1996, 39 and 50– 51, who locates both the grove and the lesch¯e on the [raised] “stage.” 114. See Willink 1986, xxix–xl, and Dale 1969, 119–29 and 259–71. 115. Lefebvre 1991, 224 and 226. Padel 1990, 337, 349, 354, 364. Compare the similar observations of Wiles 1991, 66, based on Anne Ubersfeld, L’ecole du spectateur (Paris 1981) 69: “The human psyche can be regarded as a space, and the place of performance may be its image.” Wiles then intuits a correspondence between the three doors of New Comedy and the tripartite soul of Plato and Aristotle. Zeitlin 1985, 74–78, makes a comparable physical move, using the analogy between the woman’s body (Phaedra) and the interior of the house in Eur. Hipp. Scolnicov 1994, 11–15 and 24–25, embraces the dualistic formula that outside stands for male space, and inside (her “theatrical space within”) equals female space. Williamson 1990 posits the same duality as the basis of her “spatial semantics.” 116. A more interesting, integrated dualism arises from the observations of St. John Wilson (1989), who describes the way classical buildings continue their exteriors on the inside, playing on the basic architectural facts of envelopment and exposure. 117. Patterson 1998, 3. 118. Mastronarde 1979, 20–26, and Ley 1988, 107, rightly emphasize the distinction between the relatively quick introduction or exit of a character from or into the scene building and the more slowly paced introduction or departure of a character from the eisodoi. 119. In the case of human characters—the appearance of the Watchman on the roof in Agamemnon, or of Antigone and her Tutor in Phoenissae—the scenic space simply expands, without evoking a distanced space from which the characters have come. Normally, however, those appearing on high have arrived from far off: Iris and Lyssa in Heracles, Athena in Suppliant Women, and Heracles in Philoctetes come from Olympus; Athena in Ion arrives from Athens; Thetis flies in from her home beneath the sea in Euripides’ Andromache; and so on. 120. Heath 1987, 91; de Jong 1990 expands the idea to unseen offstage characters, such as Aegisthus in Eur. El. 121. On self-reference in tragedy, Csapo 2000, esp. 417–26, Henrichs 1996 and 1995, Croally 1994, 235–48, and A.F.H. Bierl, Dionysos und die griechische Trag¨odie: Politische und ‘metatheatralische’ Aspekte im Text, Classica Monacensia 1 (Munich 1991) offer astute accounts; less helpful is Ringer 1998, where “metatheatricality” pops up everywhere. Naerebout 1997, 274–89, presents a compendium of Greek dance vocabulary, many of whose terms occur self-referentially in tragedy (as at OT 896). In his study of “metafiction” in Greek Drama, Dobrov 2001, 14–32, divides the notion into “surface play” (reference to the theater or performance), mise en abyme (embedding a minature theatrical situation within the larger dramatic framework), and “contrafact” (the transformative use of earlier dramatic material). 122. As appealing as it seems to contemporary players and audiences, the idea that pure entertainment (“escapism”) might justify theatrical performance did not seem to operate in Attic tragedy, reflecting (at a minimum) the religious and civic contexts in which ancient performances took place. See Havelock 1982, 263–64 and 267–68, and the first three chapters in Easterling 1997b. 123. Many political historians and cultural critics have examined this relationship;

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see, e.g., C. Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge 1988) 30–38, and Euben 1986 (especially Podlecki’s essay). 124. P. Rackin, Stages of History (Ithaca 1990) 94. 125. Halliburton 1988, 259. 126. Also consider Euripides’ Heracleidae, set at Marathon in the Attic tetrapolis, which “dramatizes the role played by Athens vis-`a-vis its rural demes” (Henrichs 1996, 50–51). Regarding plays like Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Easterling 1997a (esp. 33–37) identifies a strong “polis-consciousness” that builds audience solidarity. Whitehead 1986, 47, observes that Oedipus at Colonus, set in Sophocles’ own Attic deme, is “tangibly rooted in a context real to both the poet and his audience.” G.T.W. Hooker, “The Topography of the Frogs,” JHS 80 (1960) 112–17, finds a parallel in comedy, arguing that Dionysus follows a route analogous to what was visible to the audience in the theater of Dionysus. The god’s journey to Hades corresponds to Athenian topography, moving to the Herakleion at Kynosarges, then to the sanctuary of Dionysus en limnais (south of the Acropolis, between the Themistoklean wall and Ilissos, east of the road to Phaleron), and finally to Agrai, just across the river from the sanctuary en limnais, where the Lesser Mysteries were celebrated (the “glorious sunny days” and “flowering reeds and rushes,” Ra. 243–45, suggest the springtime Lesser Mysteries and not, as generally thought, the autumnal Eleusinian Mysteries). Slater 1986, 259–63, sees a closer connection, positing (unpersuasively) a separate Lenaean theater in the marshes, where Dionysus’ journey “ends up.” For criticism of Hooker, see Lloyd-Jones, Maia 19 (1967) 219–20 n.25. 127. Redfield 1990, esp. 325–26. 128. Easterling 1997a, 22. 129. For the placement of the altar, see Rehm 1989. The temple refers to the Telesterion at Eleusis; the sanctuary lacked a temple in the normal sense of a house for the cult image of a god or goddess. See K. Kourouniotes and J. N. Travlos, “Telest¯erion kai naos t¯es D¯em¯etros,” Deltion 15 (1938) esp. 59–61; T. L. Shear Jr., “The Demolished Temple of Eleusis,” Hesperia supp. 20 (Princeton 1982), esp. 131–33. Robertson 1996, 326–28, wrongly sets the play before a temple of Triptolemos, claiming that Euripides could not use the Telesterion and have “his persons come and go inside the forbidden sanctuary.” He forgets that no one exits from or enters the temple during the play. 130 Aeschylus’ extant plays prior to the Oresteia (Pers., Sept., Supp., and—possibly later and non-Aeschylean—PV), as well as later plays like Sophocles’ Ichneutae and Oedipus at Colonus, and Euripides’ lost Andromeda, require no entrances through a doorway. See Taplin 1977, 452–59. However, this does not mean they were played without a visible sk¯en¯e (see chapters 1 and 6). Other tragedies make no use of a palace or temple facade: the three Philoctetes and Eur. Cyc. (cave), S. Ajax, Eur. Tro., Antiope (lost) and Hec. (tent), and Eur. El. (a farmer’s cottage). 131. When Theseus interrogates Adrastus (110–262), he shifts the focus from the orchestra altar (where the Chorus surrounds Aethra) back to the facade (where Adrastus and the sons have gathered). Until this point the blocking reflects a spatial division along male-female lines, visible from the opening tableau (women at the altar, men by the facade). When the Chorus moves upstage to supplicate Theseus (271–85; see Kaimio 1988, 61) and he counters downstage in response to his mother’s grief (286–96), the spatial division shifts again. The Argives are united by the facade, the

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two Athenians stand together at orchestra center. For detailed analysis, see Rehm 1994b, 123–25. 132. See Poole 1994, 11–13; Michelini 1991, 18–19; and Finley 1938, esp. 33– 46 and 59–61. Greek tradition identifies Theseus as a merciful patron of suppliants; see Plut. Thes. 36.4, Ar. fr. 577 K-A, Pherecrates fr. 49K(?), S. OC 916–17, Eur. HF 1163–1418 (indirectly), and Mills 1997, 76–78, 145–48, and 166–71. 133. Line 350 may echo the words that introduce laws passed by the d¯emos in fifth-century Athens; see Walker 1995, 154, and chapter 4. Theseus’ “presentation” of Adrastus as suppliant before the Assembly takes its vote reflects actual Athenian practice (Zelnick-Abramovitz 1998). 134. It seems likely that the orchestra altar was removed (or effaced) when Aethra, Theseus, Adrastus, and the secondary Chorus of the sons depart for Athens. Few playwright-directors—as the Greek tragedians were—would leave movable furniture onstage when they have no further use for it (Rehm 1988, 264–74), particularly in the most powerful acting area in the theater. Cf. Wiles 1997, 70–72, 77–82, who reconstructs a permanent thumel¯e in the center of the orchestra. A similar problem arises with Agamemnon’s tomb in Choephoroi; after line 584, it goes unused for the rest of the play. Compare the removal of the bretas of Athena in Eumenides (accomplished by line 566, either by Orestes’ exit or some other means) when the scene shifts from the Acropolis to the Areopagos. Taplin 1977, 390–92, argues that Orestes remains on stage during this transition, taking no account of what happens to the cult image. A designer might construct an omphalos (for Delphi) that could convert into Athena’s image, and then into voting urns for the trial scene on the Areopagos. 135. The last direct reference occurs at line 470, when the Theban Herald threatens war if the Argive suppliants are still in Eleusis by nightfall. Euripides needs Eleusis here as “neutral territory”; otherwise the Theban threat would constitute an invasion of Athens, removing any dilemma for Theseus. 136. For the apparent shift in locality, see Hourmouziades 1965, 125–27, described by Zuntz 1955, 97–103, as “refocussing.” Taplin 1977, 104 (from Dale 1969, 119–20), uses Zuntz’ term to account for the changes in setting in Aeschylus’ Choephoroi and Eumenides; see further chapter 2. 137. See Arist. Pol. 1253a 2–7; Vernant 1981, 118 nn.122–23; Collard 1975 on 409–10a; L. Kurke, Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (Princeton 1999) 265–70; and chapter 6, note 78. 138. On democratic excess, see Hdt. bk. 3 and Lesky 1983, 267. For Athenian meddlesomeness, see Eur. HF 266–69 (Bond 1981 on 266); Thuc. 1.70.8 and 2.40.4; A. Michelini, “Political Themes in Euripides’ Suppliants,” AJP 115 (1994) 219–52; W. H. Adkins, “Polypragmosyn¯e and ‘Minding One’s Own Business,’ ” CP 71 (1976) 301– 27; and V. Ehrenberg, “Polypragmosyn¯e: A Study in Greek Politics,” JHS 67 (1947) 46–67 (esp. 47–54). For its “quietist” opposite, see Ion 599–601; Dodds 1960 on Ba. 389–92; Carter 1986; and W. Nestle, “Apragmosyn¯e,” Philologus 81 (1926) 129–40. 139. Croally 1994, 207–15, offers a persuasive account of the “overt use of anachronism” in this section of the play. 140. J. Diggle, “Supplices,” GRBS 14 (1973) 253–63 (⳱ 1994, 71–82), recreates the battle plan, noting in passing parallels with epic and fifth-century siege arrangements. See also Collard 1975 on 650–730. 141. The Watchman (A. Ag. 25, 31–33) has a similar response to the beacon. For

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the “performing audience” in the ancient theater (shouting, clapping, hissing, pelting), see Csapo and Slater 1995, 301–5, and R. Wallace, “Poet, Public, and ‘Theatrocracy’: Audience Performance in Classical Athens,” in Edmunds and Wallace 1997, 103–6; for similar activity in the Athenian assembly and lawcourts, see Hansen 1991, 146– 47, and V. Bers, “Dikastic thorubos,” in Cartledge and Harvey 1985, 1–15. 142. Connor 1989 argues persuasively for a political link between this Dionysiac cult and the Athenian annexation of Eleutherae, dating the formal organization of the City Dionysia shortly after the Cleisthenic reforms. Sourvinou-Inwood 1994, 273–88, offers a more religiously and mythically based explanation; see also PickardCambridge 1988, 57–60. 143. See Di Benedetto 1971, 158–62. 144. The deictic in the phrase neoisin ast¯on t¯onde (843) indicates proximity to the speaker, suggesting not only the Athenian youths in the orchestra who have brought back the corpses of the Seven, but also the theater audience itself (so Paley 1872 on Eur. Su. 843, followed by Collard 1975 on 842b–43). There is no other “city” present; Theseus uses a similar phrase, polin t¯end’ (“this city here,” 1172) for Athens. Cf. Smith 1966, 169 n.20, and Burian 1985a, 219 n.41, who believe that the phrase at 843 refers to the sons of the Seven. However, they probably were not even onstage at this point. It makes dramatic sense for the orphans to accompany Adrastus and Theseus (364) as part of the “evidence” (deigma, 354) before the assembly. No one refers to the boys subsequently, nor is there any textual indication that they do anything, until their return at 1114 (750 lines later) bearing the urns that hold the ashes of their fathers, an entrance far more effective if they have been offstage since 364. Their exit at 364 would leave the Chorus of women alone for its first stasimon, marking a clean transition between the long opening sequence and the agons to follow. Contrast the sons of Heracles in Euripides’ Heracleidae who never speak but are referred to twenty-five times during the play (Rehm 1989, 303–4). 145. See Grube 1941, 237 n.1; Di Benedetto 1971, 166–67; and WinningtonIngram 1969, 129 and 139 nn.18–19; cf. Burian 1985a, 147, and Collard 1975 on 846–56. Recall that Aeschylus wrote a version where the Athenians recover the bodies of the Seven by treaty (the lost Eleusinians); his Epigoni (also lost) dealt with the sequel that Athena forecasts at the end of Suppliant Women. 146. See Rehm 1994a, 26–27, 162 n.57, and 203 n.8. 147. See Rehm 1994b, 128–29, and 1994a, 120–21. Burian 1985a, 147–49, notes the abrupt shift in tone from Adrastus’ mournful kommos with the Chorus (771–837) to his oration proper. 148. Her suicide is a Euripidean invention; see Collard 1975 on 980–1113 (p. 355). 149. See Burian 1985a, 150. Evadne’s self-immolation suggests a further inversion of the Eleusinian muthos. In the Hymn to Demeter 231–62, the goddess hides her mortal charge Demophoon in the fire in order to “burn off” his mortality; when his terrified mother interrupts the rite, Demeter angrily reconsigns the boy to his (abbreviated) mortal span. In Euripides’ play Iphis interrupts his daughter’s leap into the flames, but he cannot stop Evadne from forever “hiding in the fire” that cremates her along with her husband. 150. Recall that Iphis also lost his son Eteoclus, one of the Seven whose body

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Theseus has recovered. Iphis originally comes to Eleusis “to bring back by sea to our native land / the corpse of my son Eteoclus, killed by a Theban spear” (1036–37), but grief over Evadne’s death makes him forget his purpose. 151. Rehm 1994a, 111 and 203 n.7. The presence of Theseus in an Eleusinian setting may suggest the hero’s visit to Hades with Heracles, a traditional story referred to in Eur. HF (606–21, 1169–71, 1221–25); see chapter 2. 152. Thuc. 4.96–101; also Collard 1975, 10–11. Earlier that year, Athenian forces from Eleusis came to the aid of Athenians fighting at Megara (Thuc. 4.68). 153. For the date of first production, see G. Mastromarco, “Per la datazione delle Supplici di Euripide,” in Studi in onore di Giusto Monaco (Palermo 1991) 1:241–50, and Collard 1975, 8–14; for the armistice, Rehm 1994a, 206 n.38. 154. For Euripides’ ongoing criticism of the war, see Murray 1946, 89–94, 107– 41; D. Delebecque, Euripide et la Guerre du P´eloponn`ese (Paris 1951); Di Benedetto 1971, 130–92; Rehm 1994a, 128, 134–35; Croally 1994, esp. 250–57. How far this attitude extended to the Athenian Empire per se remains uncertain, although parallels between the Athenian claim that might makes right in the Melian dialogue (Thuc. 5.85–111) and the Greek arguments for killing Astyanax (Trojan Women 721–39, produced not long after the Melian massacre) suggest Euripidean disgust at the excesses of empire. On the timing of the massacre and the play, see A. M. van Erp Taalman Kip, “Euripides and Melos,” Mnem. 40 (1987) 414–19 (the play was staged prior to the massacre), and H. Kuch, “Euripides und Melos,” Mnem. 51 (1998) 147– 53 (the massacre occurred a few months before Trojan Women was produced, leaving Euripides time and motivation to make connections in the text and at rehearsals). 155. Interestingly, the City Dionysia provided the occasion in Athens for the annual renewal of the treaty with Sparta, probably at the assembly meeting held in the theater to evaluate the festival (see chapter 1). See Thuc. 5.23, Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 64, and Nilsson 1972, 43–44. In 410 the oath of allegiance to the restored democracy also was sworn “before the City Dionysia” (Andoc. 1.96–98). 156. For the just war argument, see Su. 162–358, 522–43, 558–63; restraint in combat, 549–57, 722–30; peaceful resolutions, 346–47, 381–90, 476–95, 734–49, 949–54; resistance to vengeance, many of the previous passages, as well as 159–67, 229–37, and 506–10. Thucydides explores the problems inherent in cyclical, retributive violence at 2.62–64, 3.37–48, and 5.84–114. 157. Celebrated in Athens, the recovery of the corpses from Thebes would have warranted Theseus’ name in the title. Aeschylus’ lost Eleusinioi also dealt with his heroic act, as did a famous wall painting in the Stoa Poikile (misrepresented at Paus. 1.15.1 as the battle of Oinoe). L. H. Jeffery, “The ’Battle of Oenoe’ in the Stoa Poikile,” BSA 60 (1965) 41–57, aligns it with another painting in the Stoa, the “Suppliant Herakleidai,” associated with Theseus’ son Demophon. See chapter 1, and my earlier note 132. 158. LIMC, “Kapaneus,” 1:952–63 and 2: figs. 12–51. 159. Capaneus’ lightning-bolted arrogance is featured at E. Ph. 1172–86; S. Ant. 127–38, OT 876–79, OC 1318–19; and possibly at A. Ag. 469–71. The image of a mortal struck down by the gods after rising too high recurs throughout Greek literature, from the hubris of Patroclus’ assault on the walls of Troy (H. Il. 16. 698–711, 786–805) to Pentheus’ theomachia and temporary elevation in the tree above the

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Maenads (Eur. Ba. 1064–75). Historically the Persian invasion of Greece exemplified this kind of hubris, anticipated in Artabanos’ warning (Hdt. 7.10.5) to his nephew Xerxes that Zeus hurls his lightning at the highest buildings and tallest trees. See further chapters 4 and 6. 160. For the “framing goddesses” (as in Eur. Hipp.), see Scully and Warren 1995, 4–6. 161. We cannot be sure where Evadne appeared, but the roof of the sk¯en¯e seems probable. I know of no other tragedy where characters in different scenes appear on high, either on the roof or via the machine. Given the spatial juxtaposition of desperate mortal and vengeful goddess, and the disturbing content of their respective scenes, Walker’s characterization (1995, 164)—an “almost amusing intervention of the wily goddess”—seems trivial. 162. See Paus. 1.28.2; Martienssen 1964, 95; Meiggs 1975, 94–95; and Shapiro 1989, 36–39. For Athena’s identity with the state, see Schachter 1992, 40; Fitton 1961, 442, aptly calls the goddess in Eur. Su. “the consciousless voice of State power.” 163. For adumbrations of Capaneus’ hero cult, see Visser 1982, 412 and 416. Schachter 1992, 30, notes that the Theban polis assigned the spectacular (prehistoric) funeral mounds outside the walls to the Argive Seven (P. Ol. 6.15–16, N. 10.21–24). Eurystheus (Eur. Hcld. 1024–43) is another tragic warrior who receives a cult in the land he invaded (Athens). For the practice of converting defeated enemies into protectors of the city they attacked, see Visser 1982 and Kearns 1989, 54, who notes (130–31) that Aeschylus’ lost Eleusinians had the Seven buried at Eleusis; see also Pritchett 1985, 97–100. Much later, Eur. Pho. 159–60 (ca. 408 B.C.) identifies these mounds with the children of Niobe and Amphion, not with the Seven. 164. Knox 1964, 53–57. Burkert 1985, 199–208, treats the mutually dependent polarity that binds Olympian and chthonic gods and their worship. Mikalson 1983, 64–65, emphasizes that the earth-sky polarity implies no moral or ethical distinction, because deities from either place could prove beneficent or hostile. 165. See Bremmer 1994, 18–19. K. Clinton, “The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis,” in Marinatos and H¨agg 1993, 110–24, argues that the Hymn to Demeter reflects the celebration of the Thesmophoria at Eleusis, the source in his view of the later Mysteries. On the widespread popularity of the Thesmophoria, see Schachter 1992, 15, 23, 33–34, and 44–45; Osborne 1987, 169; and Whitehead 1986, 79–81. For the function of Demeter cults in conferring “religious citizenship” on women (a form of political inclusion), see de Polignac 1995, 72–74. 166. On the communal and experiential (opposed to the locally political) nature of the Mysteries, see Foley 1994, 137–50. 167. The goddess receives the epithet h¯or¯ephoros, ‘bringer of seasons’ at H.Dem. 54 and 192; her daughter is karpopoios ‘producer of fruits’ at Eur. Rh. 964. For the agricultural basis at the core of the Demeter-Persephone myth, see Foley 1994, 97– 100; S. C. Humphreys, “Death and Time,” in Mortality and Immortality, ed. Humphreys and H. King (London 1981), esp. 276–77; and Richardson 1974, 12–17 and 284–85. 168. On the Proerosia, and its links to Demeter, see A. C. Brumfield, The Attic Festivals of Demeter (New York 1981) 54–69; Burford 1993, 125–26; Robertson 1996. The importance of agriculture extends to Homeric heroes—the prizes at the

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funeral games for Patroclus (Il. 23.831–35) include enough iron for five years of plows. 169. Kannicht 1969 on Hel. 1013–16 (pp. 260–62) discusses Euripides’ interest in the split destinations of psuch¯e/pneuma and s¯oma and its philosophical background. See my appendix. 170. The play reverses the order of these events in the Athenian calendar; the Genesia (the burial of soldiers who had died in combat, including the epitaphios logos) closely preceded the Proerosia, which marked the onset of the agricultural year (Osborne 1987, 174). The temporal reversal of the ritual calendar fits other, spatial inversions of the play. 171. Euripides gives the fullest extant account in Pho. 638–89. For ancient references, see F. Vian, Les origines de Th`ebes (Paris 1963) 26–31. 172. Hdt. 5.92.2. Goossens 1962, 422, links Theseus’ attack on tyranny with the recent return of the oligarchs in Megara, who perpetrated just such a slaughter; see also Walker 1995, 157. 173. Translation by Collard 1975 on 714–17. Robertson 1996, 346–47, suggests that the offerings at the Proerosia included seed grain, symbolizing the seed sown after the fall plowing. If correct, then Theseus in combat offers his own metaphorical contribution to the Proerosia ritual with which the play began. 174. The essential in such oaths “is always the object itself and not the [speech] act of affirmation” (Benveniste 1973, 436). 175. Scully 1990, 50, points out that only two cities in Homer are said to have sacred walls, Troy and Thebes; see also his discussion of the “sacred polis” (23–36). 176. Writing on Medea, for example, Knox 1979, 306, concludes that its heroine “represent[s] some kind of irresistible power, something deeply rooted in the human situation, as dangerous as it is universal,” akin to the “eruption in tragic violence of forces in human nature which have been repressed and scorned” found in Hippolytus and Bacchae. Mills 1997, 87–97, sees the play as an encomium to Athens, where Athenian moderation is simply no match for “human nature which desires more revenge” (126). Cf. Griffith 1999 on Ant. 355: “the idea that people might acquire, even ‘learn’ different ‘dispositions’ [orgai, also “impulses”] is not uncommon.” See also Nehamas 1999, 255; Salkever 1986; and chapter 6. 177. Burian 1985, 138. Walker 1995, 164, concludes that “ambivalence is one of the main themes of the play,” and Mastronarde believes that “the play leaves no firm ground to stand on” (in Cropp, Fantham, and Scully 1986, 204). Although possessing a certain armchair validity, these judgments seem distant from the anguished experience of the play’s performance. 178. Burian 1985, 138. 179. In his funeral oration (Thuc. 2.35–46), Pericles famously characterizes Athens’ democratic institutions and culture as “an education for all Hellas.” 180. Lest there be confusion on this point, neither Aethra, Theseus, or fifth-century Athenians represent Christian notions of humility or brotherly love. Aethra alternately appeals to Theseus’ shame and pride, but the central issue remains one of upholding the Panhellenic norm of burying the dead. 181. As Michelini 1991, 30, puts it, “the flame of Thesean rationality flickers brightly in a wide expanse of darkness.”

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CHAPTER ONE THE THEATER AND ATHENIAN SPATIAL PRACTICE

1. Scranton 1965, 33. See also Bernand 1985, 17–21, on “le th´ea¯ tre ouvert.” 2. For festival travel, see Dillon 1997, 29–38. We do not know how the City Dionysia handled “front of house” (audience control, ticket collection, refreshments, etc.); see generally Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 263–78. When Lycurgus in the fourth century expanded the theater and extended the stone seating, the diaz¯oma (middle passage) halfway up the slope may have offered another audience entrance. Le Corbusier’s statement that “the pack-donkey’s way is responsible for the plan of every continental city” (quoted in Kostof 1991, 95) may well describe access to the early theater. 3. See Thuc. 2.15.3–6; Paus. bk. 1; Travlos 1971 and Boersma 1970 (s.v. for individual sites and monuments); Boegehold 1995, 3, 11, 43–44, 48–49, 91, 97–98, 135–46 (Delphinion and Palladion, which Boegehold thinks might have met in Phaleron); Guen-Pollet 1991, 91–95, and Kearns 1989, 107 (Kodrus-Neleus cult and its links to the Ionian cities); Jameson 1998, 185 (the sanctuary of Zeus Meilichios, and the shrine to Aphrodite, Theseus, and Hippolytus); Hdt. 6.116, Kyle 1987, 77–92, and Shapiro 1989, 158–63 (Kynosarges); Robertson 1992, 4–16, 21–31, 134–43, and map 1 (sanctuaries south and east of the Acropolis). For the evacuation and sack of Athens, see Hdt. 8.41.1, 8.51–52, Hignett 1963, 198–203, N.G.L. Hammond in CAH 4:563–69, and my notes 151–52 herein. 4. Nietzsche 1967, 63. 5. A. Ag. 1–24, PV 88–95; Eur. El. 54, 102, Ion 82–88, Pho. 1–6, Alc. 244–45 (Alcestis’ first appearance), Med. 56–58 (the Nurse speaks her mistresses troubles “to the earth and sky”), and 148 (the Chorus calls on “Zeus, and earth, and daylight”); S. Tr. 94–101, El. 16–22 (Tutor) and 86–91, 103–9 (Electra’s first appearance). Bernand 1985, 152–57, and Podlecki 1980, 80, discuss other references to the sun in Sophocles, “the god foremost of all the gods” (OT 660–61). Invocations to the sun do not imply that the performances began at dawn, unlikely given the logistics of audience travel, admission, seating, and so on. For all we know Antigone began in the afternoon; cf. Nussbaum 1986, 70–71, whose comments on the Antigone passage are otherwise illuminating. 6. Particularly Zeitlin 1990a, whose views on the alterity of tragic Thebes I discuss in chapters 4, 5, and 6. 7. By then the corpse was decaying (410–12), an implicit reminder of the effects of the sun. 8. Hammond 1972 and 1988 posits a mound of bedrock just off the orchestra, for which there is no archaeological evidence; see Wiles 1997, 64–65, and Rehm 1988, 270 n.34. 9. Proponents include Scully 1999; Hammond 1988, 22–23; Wycherley 1978, 207; Webster 1970b, 7; Hourmouziades 1965, 58–74; Arnott 1962, 15–41. Those unpersuaded of a raised stage (low, wooden, otherwise) include Pickard-Cambridge 1946, 74; Taplin 1977, 441–42; Garvie 1988, xliv. For a single door, see Dale 1969, 103–18; Taplin 1977, 438–40; C. W. Dearden, The Stage of Aristophanes (London 1975) 50–74; cf. K. J. Dover, “The Skene in Aristophanes,” PCPhS 12 (1966) 2–17, arguing that Aristophanes requires two doors.

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10. For the ekkukl¯ema, see Pickard-Cambridge 1946, 100–122; for the m¯echan¯e, Mastronarde 1990; for both, H.-J. Newiger, “Ekkyklema e mechan´e nella messa in scena del dramma greco,” Dioniso 59 (1989) 173–85. Note that there is no evidence for an underground passageway (under bedrock?) allowing entrances from below, pace Padel 1990, 345–46, and Taplin 1977, 447–48. 11. See my introduction and its notes 104–5. As the wooden sk¯en¯e served for all performances over the course of the festival, painting and other visual elements must have been easily removed. 12. “In no case is there evidence that the orchestra [in fifth-century theaters] had a form different from that of the space defined by the seats and terrace” (Gebhard 1974, 440). 13. Martienssen 1964, 3–5; also Scranton 1965, 13. 14. For the importance of a horizontal wall in the Greek idea of architectural space, see Martienssen 1964, 6. Following Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1886, Taplin 1977, 452–59, believes that no sk¯en¯e existed in the theater of Dionysus before Aeschylus’ Oresteia in 458, a view that now dominates the field. However, by studying the offstage cries in Agamemnon and Choephori, Hamilton 1987, 595–99, demonstrates that Aeschylus took advantage of earlier usage, indicating that the facade was introduced before the Oresteia. We have at most four extant tragedies prior to that date, which should temper generalizations about the absence of an early backdrop. The fact that the meager fragments of Aeschylus don’t prove otherwise (Taplin 457) depends on how they are read. Fr. 87, for example, from Hiereiai (“Quiet! The beekeeping priestesses are here to open the house of Artemis”) suggests a visible temple and the presence of the sk¯en¯e. So, too, fr. 58 from Edonai (“The house is frenzied with the god, the roof revels like a bacchant”) might point to a backdrop representing the palace of Lycurgus (like Eur. Ba.), which Dionysus has infected. See further chapter 2. 15. Martin 1974, 284. 16. Dorpfeld ¨ and Reisch 1896, 26–28, 366–69; Pickard-Cambridge 1946, 5–10, 15–16; Hammond 1972, 405–11; J. M. Walton, The Greek Sense of Theatre (London 1984) 45; Arnott 1989, 2–3; Scullion 1990, 58–60; L. du S. Read, “Social Space in Ancient Theatres,” NTQ 9 (1993) 316–28; Wiles 1997, 44–52. 17. See Moretti 2000, 377–78 and 389–96, and Csapo 2000, introduction, 289; Goette 1995, esp. 7–30; Green 1995, 50 (the dating of the Attic deme theater of Euonymos—with its rectilinear orchestra—to the third quarter of the fourth century “really does seem to settle the fact that the earliest datable theater with a circular orchestra is that at Epidauros”); and Gebhard 1974 (a seminal article). Also see O. Broneer, rev. of The History of Greek and Roman Theater, by M. Bieber (Princeton 1939), AJA 42 (1938) 596–98; J. T. Allen, CP 62 (1947) 259; C. Anti, Teatri greci arcaici da Minosse a Pericle (Padua 1947) esp. 55–82 (also 27–51 and 85–149); Izenour 1977, 10–14, and 1992, 4–7; E. Pohlmann, ¨ “Die Proedrie des DionysosTheaters im 5. Jahrhundert und das Buhnenspiel ¨ der Klassik,” MusHelv 38 (1981) 129–34, “Buhn ¨ und Handlung im Aias des Sophokles,” AuA 32 (1986) 23, and “Vitruvs Schalltheorie und das antike Theater,” in Beitrage ¨ zur antiken und neueren Musikgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main 1988) 145–63; Rehm 1988, 276–79; C. Ashby, “The Case for the Rectangular/Trapezoidal Orchestra,” TRI 13 (1988) 1–20, and 1999, 24– 41; Sourvinou-Inwood 1994, 276–77; and L. Polacco, Il teatro di Dioniso Eleutereo ad Atene (Rome 1990) 8 and 101–4, and 1998, 90–97.

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18. Polacco 1998 analyzes the impact of geometry and the circle on ancient Greek architecture, insisting that the theater at Epidauros (built in the second half of the fourth century) housed the first circular orchestra. On the date of that theater, see also A. von Gerkan and W. Muller, ¨ Das Theater von Epidauros (Stuttgart 1961) 77–80 (late fourth or early third); Tomlinson 1983, 85–87 (late fourth); and Lawrence 1996, 206–7 and 227 n.6. 19. Vitruvius 5.7.1, leading O.A.W. Dilke, “The Greek Theatre Cavea,” BSA 43 (1948) 125–92, to conclude that “in the designing of theatres, the orchestra had to be planned first. . . . A suitable centre is found and the orchestra circle is drawn” (127, 133). Cf. Izenour 1977, 32–43, whose comments on Vitruvius are salutary: For example, “Chapter VII is devoted to design principles Vitruvius recommends for Greek theaters; again, a literal and exact interpretation does not fit any extant buildings” (43). 20. For a recent version of this view, see Wiles 1997, 73–78. 21. H. Il. 18.607 (also 8.13), Hes. Th. 116–34 and 726–45, Thales and Anaximines (Arist. Cael. 2.13.294a29 and 295b10–16), the Epicureans (Lucretius 2.62– 232), and the atomists; see Furley 1989, 10, 14–26, and 234–35. 22. Parminides (DK B 8.42–49), Plato (Phd. 108E–109A), Aristotle (Cael. 2.13.295b); see Furley 1989. 23. On the agricultural-year ritual and threshing floors as proto-orchestras, see J. E. Harrison, Epilogomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis (New York 1962; orig. Themis, 2nd ed. 1927) 199–211, 331–34, and 341–63 (“Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy,” by G. Murray); A. D. Ure, “Threshing-Floor or Vineyard,” CQ 5 (1955) 225–30; Pickard-Cambridge 1962, 126–29; Hammond 1972, 446–47; Gould 1985, 266; Arnott 1989, 2–3; Naerebout 1997, 257 n.606. For a different view, see Rehm 1988, 276–77 and n.58; X. Oec. 8.3; J. R. Harlan, The Living Fields (Oxford 1995), 228–30; Burford 1993, 140–41. Athenaeus (v. 181 c) refers to the dithyramb as a “circular chorus” and the tragic chorus as “square,” a second-century A.D. observation that tells us little about the shape of the space in which fifth-century B.C. performers danced. An American square dance does not require a square floor, only a flat one; the same applies to dithyrambs and tragedies, both of which were performed on the same orchestra floor at the theater of Dionysus. 24. On the tholos-thumele at Epidauros (including dates), see F. Seiler, Die Griechische Tholos: Untersuchungen zur Entwicklung, Typologie und Funktion kunstmassiger ¨ Rundbauten (Mainz am Rhein 1986) 72–89, and Tomlinson 1983, 60–67. See also A. Burford, The Greek Temple-Builders at Epidauros (Liverpool 1969) 53–54 and 63–68, who notes the sanctuaries’ “exploitation of . . . hitherto comparatively little used [architectural] features, the circle and its various parts (in the tholos and the theatre) and the Corinthian order” (53); Lawrence 1996, 135–41; and Polacco 1998, 61–67. For the association of Epidaurous with contests, performances, and games prior to the new theater, see P. N. 5.95–97, Pl. Ion 530A, and other sources gathered by E. Edelstein and L. Edelstein, Asclepius: A Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (Baltimore 1945) nos. 556–63 (pp. 312–15); also Tomlinson 1983, 85 and 90–91. 25. R. Schechner, Essay on Performance Theory, 1970–77 (New York 1977) 115. Almost all Greek altars were “open to the heavens,” so the phrase is redundant. 26. Rehm 1988, 264–74; Wiles 1997, 70–73; Ashby 1999, 42–61.

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27. Wiles 1997, 210. 28. A fact acknowledged by Wiles 1997, 54 n.119. Tomlinson 1976, 17, notes that the (normal) location at the east front of the temple was designed with the god in mind, “giving the cult-image in the temple a view of the sacrifice.” That the sacrificer or attendant first circles the altar (Ar. Pax 956–58, Eur. IA 1569) says nothing about those gathered to watch. 29. For the performance schedule of the two festivals, see Csapo and Slater 1995, 103–21 (City Dionysia), 122–24 and 132–37 (Lenaia); Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 36–37, 40–42, 359–60 (Lenaia), 58–70, 361 (City); and Mikalson 1975, 109–10 (Lenaia), 123–31 and 137 (City). 30. M. H. Jameson, “The Ritual of the Athena Nike Parapet,” in Osborne and Hornblower 1994, 307. Only the “oddfellows” of the ancient world, the Orphics and Pythagoreans, rejected animal sacrifice (Humphreys 1986a, 97 n.5). Connor 1991 argues that Socrates’ critical attitude toward the practice helped spawn the perception that he posed a threat to the community. On the action-based, rather than “credal,” nature of Greek religion, see Jameson 1998 and 1999; Osborne 1994, 144; Versnel 1981a; Dodds 1973, 140–44; and J. K. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (London 1972) 33. 31. A second temple dedicated to the god has been dated to the fourth century, outside our period. See Rehm 1988, 267 and n.20 (altar), and 280 n.73 (new temple); Goette 1995, 22; Travlos 1971, 537; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 57–58; Connor 1989, 24–26; Shapiro 1989, 85–86 (cult image). 32. Travlos 1971, 537; Tomlinson 1976, 17–19, 41; Schachter 1992, 49 (theatrical area distinct from Dionysus sanctuary, both in Athens and Thasos); B. Bergquist, “The Archaic Temenos in West Greece,” in Schachter 1992, 144–45, 316; Sourvinou-Inwood 1993, 11. The Odeion of Pericles was constructed ca. 444 B.C. next to the east analemma of the theater to house the competitions in music and Homeric recitation at the Panatheneaic festival, dedicated to Athena Polias; it also held the proag¯on at the City Dionysia, a “teaser” before the festival (Erp Taalman Kip 1990, 38–41 and 123– 29). The Odeion quite possibly served as the meeting place for one of the city’s main courts, that “of the archon” (Boegehold 1995, 6, 26, 29–30, 93–94, 173–74), further exemplifying the multiple use of buildings within the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus. On the lack of distinction between the religious and secular aspects of Attic festivals generally, see Parker 1996, 76–80. 33. For dithyrambic competitions at the City Dionysia, see Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 74–79. During the annual Athenian festival of the Thargelia, the dithyrambs honored Apollo (Ant. Or. 6.11–13, Arist. Ath.Pol. 56.3, Parke 1977, 146–49). 34. For rehearsals, see Hourmouziades 1965, 4–5. Pollux 4.88 (Csapo and Slater 1995, 118) notes that a trumpet announced each new performance after the comic actor Hermon missed his entrance one year. Although late, the testimony points to backstage confusion, surely magnified in the boys’ dithyrambic competition. 35. Csapo and Slater 1995, 222. 36. We may contrast this open use of the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus with that of Dionysus in the Marshes (en limnais), the more ancient sanctuary, which opened only one day a year during the festival of the Anthesteria that honored Dionysus and the new wine. See Thuc. 2.15; [D] 59, “Against Neaira”; and Parke 1977, 110–13.

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37. The Lenaia had no dithyrambic competitions, but included three to five comedies by individual playwrights, and two tragedies each by two to three tragedians; see Csapo and Slater 1995, 122–24. 38. Thuc. 8.93–94; McDonald 1943, 42–51; Martin 1951, 251–52; Kolb 1981, 88–99; Hansen 1983, 3–6, 21; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 68–70; and Wiles 1997, 23–36, who differentiates the multipurpose function of deme theaters from that of the theater on the south slope. However, a far more varied function existed for the main theater than (e.g.) for the Pnyx (see note 32). 39. Martienssen 1964, 42, and Camp 1992, 14–15; for a historical survey, see Thompson and Wycherley 1972, 1–24. Connor 1988, 173–74, Sourvinou-Inwood 1993, 12, and Jameson 1997, 493, emphasize (correctly, in my opinion) the admixture of sacred and civic activities in the agora, against such schematic views of Athenian urban space in which the agora “mediates” between the Kerameikos and the Acropolis (N. Loraux, The Invention of Athens [Cambridge, Mass. 1986; orig. Paris 1981] 284), or the theater of Dionysus provides “a locus and mediation” between the Acropolis and the agora (D. C. Pozzi, “The Polis in Crisis,” in Pozzi and Wickersham 1991, 127). 40. Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 37–38; Camp 1992, 46; Thompson and Wycherley 1972, 126–29; Wycherley 1957, 162–63 and 220–21; and Haigh 1907, 110–11, including late testimonia regarding wooden bleachers (ikria) in the agora, whose collapse may have led to the transfer of performances to a more secure site. 41. Hammond 1972, 390–405, 447; Kolb 1981, 26–61. 42. Hammond 1972, 405. Pollux’ often repeated claim (4.126–27) that the theater’s stage-right eisodos led to the country and harbor, and the stage left to the city, has no bearing on fifth-century staging practices (Burian 1977, 91–92, and Taplin 1977, 450–51). Even when the text of a tragedy contradicts this spatial dualism (as does Eur. Ba.), translators cannot resist it; see Esposito 1998, 121–22. Wiles 1997, 133– 60, insists absolutely on the binary of “left and right, east and west” in the eisodoi. 43. Martin 1951, 290; Kolb 1981, 54–57; Thompson 1982, 136–38; Hansen 1991, 128–29; Holscher ¨ 1991, 370 (gradual differentiation of function—theater, gymnasia, assembly—out from the agora). Holkeskamp ¨ 1992, 97, sees the agora in Homer as a place “set apart for free debate and peaceful settlement of disputes,” an early version of an assembly meeting place. 44. Thuc. 6.54.7; Camp 1992, 40–42; Holscher ¨ 1991, 365; Lewis 1988, 289, 296; Boardman 1988, 415–16; Thompson and Wycherley 1972, 129–36; Wycherley 1957, 119–22. 45. Pl. Hipp. 228b1–229b1; Shapiro 1989, 125–26 and 133; Lewis 1988, 292– 93; R. Osborne, “The Erection and Mutilation of the Hermai,” PCPhS 211 (1985), esp. 48–57. The altar also served as the point from which Athenians measured the city’s distance from the temple of Zeus at Olympia (Hdt. 2.7.1). 46. For the divine sanction to hear suppliants, see Dover 1974, 247–48. ZelnickAbramovitz 1998 discusses the civic aspects of supplication at Athens (e.g., foreign suppliants represented at the assembly, as reflected in Eur. Supp.; see the introduction, note 133). 47. Hdt. 6.108; Lewis 1988, 296–98; and Gadberry 1992, 447–52. The association of this altar with the “altar of Pity” (Eleos) (Wycherley 1957, 67–74 and 119–22, Thompson and Wycherley 1972, 134–36, and Holscher ¨ 1991, 375) has been discredited. See Robertson 1992, 51–54, and Gadberry 1992, 478.

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48. Tragedies featuring supplications include A. Su., Eum.; S. Aj., OC; Eur. Med., Andr., Hcld., Hec., Supp., HF, Ion, Hel.; among fragmentary plays, probably A. Niobe; S. Aechmalotides and Second Athamas; Eur. Dictys, Oeneus, Alexander, and Alcmeon at Corinth. See Vickers 1973, 438–94. 49. See Connor 1989. 50. Mullaney 1995, 26–59. However, he underestimates the importance of theaters within London’s city walls and distorts ancient Athenian theatrical practice, claiming it was a “geographically and ideologically closed system” (8). 51. The City Dionysia had to avoid conflicts with scheduled political meetings and preexisting festivals; see Burkert 1985, 227, and generally Parker 1996, 43–56. For the internal festival schedule, see note 29. 52. Osborne 1987, 172–74; also Burford 1993, 162–63. Note that ritual celebrations linked to the agricultural cycle did not always line up; the “harvest festival” of the Thesmophoria, for example, did not take place during harvest time (Burford 1993, 257 n.173 and Burkert 1985, 226 and 245). 53. In similar fashion, the Panhellenic games—Olympic, Nemean, Isthmian, and Pythian—took place in the slack period of mid-July to early September, before the fall plowing and sowing. 54. Whitehead 1986, 213–22; Csapo and Slater 1995, 121–22 and 124–32. 55. Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 61–63; Sourvinou-Inwood 1994, 270–72; Csapo and Slater 1995, 105–6, 112–15; cf. Goldhill 1994, 361–63. 56. Parke 1977, 127–28; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 61–63; S. G. Cole, “Procession and Celebration at the Dionysia,” in Theater and Society in the Classical World, ed. R. Scodel (Ann Arbor 1993) 25–38; and Schol. Ar. Ach. 242 (kan¯ephoroi). Parker 1996, 142 and n.80, notes that the phallos dedication was not extended to the empire at large, unlike the requirement that (from the 440s) all allied cities contributed a cow and a panoply to the Greater Panathenaia, which they escorted in the procession. 57. X. Hipp. 3.2. Sourvinou-Inwood 1994, 278–88, reconstructs the route, based on her view that the cult of Dionysus Eleuthereus reflects the myth that the Athenians originally rejected the god, who then struck the men’s sexual organs with incurable disease. 58. Jameson 1997, 486–87. 59. Jameson 1999, 323, summarizing H. Hubert and M. Mauss, “Essai sur la nature et fonction du sacrifice” (1899), in their M´elanges d’histoire des religions, 2nd ed. (Paris 1929) 1–130; reprinted in M. Mauss, Oeuvres 1 (Paris 1968) 193–307, as “Les fonctions sociales du sacr´e.” English tr. by W. D. Halls, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (Chicago 1964). 60. See generally A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, tr. M. Vizedom and G. Caffee (London 1960; orig. 1909); R. Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, tr. R. Needham and C. Needham (Glencoe, Ill. 1960; orig. 1907); V. Turner, The Ritual Process (Ithaca 1977; orig. 1969) 94–97, 106–13, 165–203, and Celebration: Studies in Festival and Ritual (Washington, D.C. 1982) 26–28 and 201–18; and Osborne 1985, 171. W. R. Connor, “Tribes, Festivals and Processions: Civic Ceremonial and Political Manipulation in Archaic Greece,” JHS 107 (1987) 40–50, explores how Athenian festivals and processions articulated changing community values, also noting the “apparent convergence between festivals and political disturbances” (e.g., Kylon’s attempted coup during the festival of Zeus, Harmodius and Aristogeiton’s plot against the Pisistratids at the Great Panathenaia of 514). As a point of comparison, R. Sinos (“Divine Selection,”

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in Dougherty and Kurke 1993, 75–77) notes the heroicization in Athenian vase depictions of wedding ritual, a temporary stepping out from reality before the mundane reasserts itself (Alltag to Fest, and back). 61. M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec (Paris 1979)— Vernant’s essay “Sacrificial and Alimentary Codes in Hesiod’s Myth of Prometheus” appears in R. L. Gordon, ed., Myth, Religion and Society (Cambridge 1981) 57–79; J.-P. Vernant, “Between the Beasts and the Gods” (1974), in Myth and Society (Brighton 1980) esp. 150–67; P. Vidal-Naquet, “Hunting and Sacrifice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia,” in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1981, 150–74; Vernant 1991, 278–83. For a summary of recent sacrificial theory, see Seaford 1994, 285–93, and Foley 1985, 23–25, 30–36 (structuralist approaches), 46–56 (sacrifice and violence). 62. Burkert 1983, 1–12, 35–48, and 1985, 54–60 (an excellent summary of sacrificial practice); Vernant 1991, 290–302. 63. Girard 1977, 1–67. 64. Bloch 1992, 1–7, 21, 28–36, 64–65, and 78–79. 65. I. Morris, “Poetics of Power,” in Dougherty and Kurke 1993, 20–23, and Burial and Ancient Society (Cambridge 1987) 33, adapting E. Durkheim, Les formes e´ l´ementaires de la vie religieuse, 2nd ed. (Paris 1925); see also Jameson 1998, 174–75, 178, 180, and Versnel 1987, 77–78. 66. Wiessner 1996, 6. 67. Pierce 1993, 260. For literary support of her view, see Thuc. 2.38; Ar. Nu. 386–87, 408–11, Eq. 652–82; [X.] Ath.Pol. 2.9–10, 3.2; and Isoc. 7.29 (the d¯emos adds festivals to the calendar solely for the free meat, a food subsidy for the poor). On the general principle, G. Bowersock (in Molho, Raaflaab, and Emlen 1991, 551) observes that “the experience of symbols and rituals is what really mattered, rather than reading [interpreting] them.” 68. See Jameson 1998, 178–89, and 1999, 324–31. Evidence for the existence of a k¯omos ‘revel’ may indicate the continuation of the feasting and celebration into the night; see Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 63 and 101–3. 69. Parke 1977, 46–49; Whitehead 1986, 137. 70. “For most Athenian citizens the slave was the oik¯et¯es, the lowest member of his household” (Jameson 1977–78, 141; also chapter 4, note 73). The anecdotal evidence for the exclusion of slaves from sharing meat at a sacrifice (Ath. 6.262b–c) is late and unreliable. Some public sacrifices guaranteed distribution to metics; at the Athenian Hephaisteia, three oxen were reserved for metics to consume (IG I3 82.23–24); this may reflect Hephaistus’ close association with artisans, many of whom were foreign (Jameson 1998, 185, and Garland 1992, 110). 71. For various proposed schedules, see note 29. 72. See Giovannini 1991, 473. 73. On the choregic system, see Wilson 2000, and Csapo and Slater 1995, 139– 55. On judges and judging, see note 103. 74. Sourvinou-Inwood 1994, 271–72. 75. Over time the procession combined both aspects. All-inclusive in terms of participation, it initially was overseen—as was the entire festival—by the archon eponymous, assisted by ten board members elected by the assembly, who covered the expenses of the procession; later (ca. 340) these epimel¯etai were picked by lot, one from each tribe, and provided with public funds to handle the cost of the procession. See Arist. Ath.Pol. 56.4; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 58; Hansen 1991, 242.

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76. Wilson 2000, 68–70; Ostwald 1992, 326–38; Lewis 1988, 292–93; PickardCambridge 1988, 76, and 1962, 31–58; Haigh 1896, 20–25. 77. West 1992, 30, 81–85, and 101–7; more generally, Mathiesen 1999, 177– 222. 78. Pl. Smp. 215c, and Arist. Pol. 1341a21–27; see also West 1992, 105 n.103, and P. Wilson, “The Aulos in Athens,” in Goldhill and Osborne 1999, 58–95. 79. Ostwald 1992, 323–25; Whitehead 1977, 70; Haigh 1896, 40–42, 405–9, 418–20, and 463–72. 80. Haigh 1907, 315–17; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 101–35 and 360; Csapo and Slater 1995, 222–35; Easterling 1997b, 213–17. Plato (Lg. 817c) disparages actors as “imported” (eisagagomenoi), evidence that foreign performers were even more numerous in Athens in the fourth century. 81. Wilson 2000, 28–31; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 40–41; Haigh 1907, 26–28; D.S. 15.74 (Dionysius of Syracuse won the tragic prize at the Lenaia in 367). 82. Whitehead 1986, 212–22; for the local popularity of Dionysiac cult, evidenced by deme calendars, see Henrichs 1990. 83. Whitehead 1986, 151–52 and 215–16. 84. See C. J. Herington, “Aeschylus in Sicily,” JHS 87 (1967) 74–85; Easterling 1997b; O. Taplin, “Spreading the Word through Performance,” in Goldhill and Osborne 1999, 33–57, stressing the “international” claims of tragedy. 85. Poole 1987, 12. 86. Davies 1977–78, 116 (on Arist. Ath.Pol. 20.1, 21.2, 21.4); D. Kagan, “The Enfranchisement of Aliens by Cleisthenes,” Historia 12 (1963), 41–46 (on Arist. Pol. 1275b35–1276a7); and J. B. Edwards, The Demesman in Attic Life (Menasha, Wis. 1916) 58–61. Cf. T. F. Winters, “Kleisthenes and Athenian Nomenclature,” JHS 113 (1993) 163–65. 87. Whitehead 1977, 140–47; also 1986, 69–75 (demotics) and 81–85 (metics). 88. Whitehead 1977, 70; Arist. Pol. 1274b32–1278b5. For recent challenges to this “constitutionalist” approach to citizenship, see Boegehold and Scafuro 1994 (esp. the essays by Scafuro, Ober, Manville, and Connor), and my note 125. 89. On excessive freedom of speech and movement for metics, slaves, and women in the Athenian democracy, see Pl. Resp. 563a–d, [X.] Ath.Pol. 1.10–12, and Arist. Pol. 1313b34–1314a12. 90. Thuc. 1.143.1–2, Meiggs 1975, 439–41 (fleet); Thuc. 2.13.7 and 31.1–2, Meiggs 1975, 262–64 (hoplites); Cartledge 1993, 139 (slaves); Meiggs 1975, 271– 72, Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977, 267–84, R. Garland, The Piraeus (London 1987) 58–68, 142, 191–93, Sinclair 1988, 28–31, Hansen 1991, 116–20, and Ostwald 1992, 307–12 (wealth, economic and trading prospects); Kyle 1987, 88–92, and D. Erotikos 23 (gymnasia and athletics); Hansen 1989a, 21 (cults). Although mostly itinerant, some Sophists spent long periods resident in Athens, making them subject to legal proceedings and possibly the metic tax (metoikon). See Guthrie 1969, 35–41; Podlecki 1998, 17 (Zeno), 23–25, 32–34 (Anaxagoras), and 93–94 (Protagoras); and MacDowell 1978, 75–79 (alien statuses), 183–86 (eisaggelia), and 200–201 (Anaxagoras and Protagoras). Meiggs 1975, 263, summarizes: “Athens . . . probably made better provision for metics than in any other Greek state.” 91. Their child, Pericles the younger, became Athenian only when Pericles sought special exemption from his own citizenship law, after his legitimate sons Xanthippos and Paralos died in the plague (as Pericles himself would later).

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92. Connor 1971, 97–100; also Humphreys 1974, 93–94, and Whitehead 1977, 150, who notes that Cleisthenes, Themistocles, and Kimon—political powerbrokers in the early democracy—had foreign mothers. Rihll 1999, 9 n.29, posits an interesting link between metic status and “free-thinking.” On Anaxagoras’ trial for impiety, see Podlecki 1998, 31–34. 93. Hansen 1991, 47–49; Osborne 1994, 155; Jones 1999, 51–58 and 133–50 (on demes as both “natural” and “territorial” communities). Nilsson 1972, 162 n.40, notes the New Testament parallel—Joseph and Mary do not pay taxes where they live (Nazareth), but where Joseph’s ancestors come from (Bethlehem). The Cleisthenic reforms (allocating citizens to tribes, trittyes, and demes) may have aimed to limit the rival political influences of inherited wealth and regionalism. See E. M. Wood, “Democracy,” 72, and B. S. Strauss, “The Melting Pot, the Mosaic, and the Agora,” 259– 64, both in Euben, Wallach, and Ober 1994; Ober 1989, 68–75; Sinclair 1988, 3–4; Whitehead 1986, 67–69 and 352–60. For their effect on Attic religious life, see Parker 1996, 102–21. 94. On women and Dionysiac cult, see Henrichs 1984 and 1990, 263–64. On women in the theater, see Csapo and Slater 1995, 286–87, 290–92, 300–301, 304– 5; J. Henderson, “Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals,” TAPA 121 (1991) 133–47; A Podlecki, “Could Women Attend the Theatre in Ancient Athens? A Collection of Testimonia,” Anc.W. 21 (1990) 27–43; Haigh 1907, 323–29; cf. Goldhill 1994. Wilamowitz (on Ar. Lys. 1114) thought that women appeared on stage in nonspeaking roles (girl flute players, Theoria in Pax, etc.) in Aristophanes’ comedies; see Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 153 n.1 and 221. Recall that Athenian female choral performances took place on various ritual occasions in Attica. See C. Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece, tr. D. Collins and J. Orion (Lanham, Md. 1997) 98–101 (Artemis Brauronia), 125–33 (Panathenaia, Plynteria, Oschophoria), 138–39 (possibly at Thesmophoria and Skira). For metic attendance at theater performances, see Sommerstein 1997, 66–67. 95. Sommerstein 1997, 66–67 and 71, Csapo and Slater 1995, 287–89 and 293– 97, and Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 266–68 (theoric fund); Hansen 1991, 98–99, and Davies 1977–78, 110–11 (economic advantages of citizenship and citizen pay generally); Boegehold 1995, 20 and n.5, Arist. Ath.Pol. 27.3–4 and Pol. 1274a5–11 (dicast pay, introduced after the Ephialtic reforms of 462); Hansen 1983, 18–20, and 1989a, 97–98 (assembly pay introduced between 403 and 393). Davies 1977–78 offers an excellent summation of an Athenian citizen’s “rights.” 96. Parker 1983, 21–22, 30–31; Burkert 1985, 81–82; Hansen 1987, 171 n.575; Istros FGrH 334F 16. 97. M. P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion, tr. F. J. Fielden (Oxford 1925) 25. As Burkert 1985, 82, puts it, “the purification ritual appears reduced to a magical-instrumental function.” 98. Sommerstein 1989 on 282–83. Ignoring its role in spatial purification, Keuls 1993, 355, plumbs the “depth of . . . pig-womb symbolism” in Orestes’ action. Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries, undertaken before the initiates processed from Athens to Eleusis, also required purification with pig’s blood (Parke 1977, 62–63; Ar. Ach. 764, Pax 374–75, Ran. 337–38). 99. Rehm 1994b, 16; Goldhill 1990, 107–14, eschews comment on military decision making, focusing on the ideology of military service generally.

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100. Plut. Per. 16.3, R. Develin, Athenian Officials, 684–321 BC (Cambridge 1989) 491, and Ober 1989, 86–93; for the functioning of the Athenian command, see Hammond 1973, 346–94 (“Problems of Command in Fifth-Century Athens”). 101. See Podlecki 1966 (8–26, 125–29) and 1970 (4–11); W. G. Forrest, “Themistokles and Argos,” CQ 1960 (10) 221–41; and P. J. Rhodes, “Thucydides on Pausanias and Themistocles,” Historia 19 (1970) 387–400. 102. Isoc. de Pace 82; Aeschin. 3.153–54; Csapo and Slater 1995, 117–18. 103. Csapo and Slater 1995, 157–65. On the vote counting, see M. Pope, “Athenian Festival Judges—Seven, Five or However Many,” CQ 36 (1986) 322–26. 104. Hansen 1991, 178–265, and Rhodes 1986, 113–51, offer useful accounts of these democratic practices; on the sortition of priestesses, also see S. B. Aleshire, “The Selection of Sacred Officials at Athens from Cleisthenes to Augustus,” in Osborne and Hornblower 1994, esp. 326–27 and 332–34 (also Osborne, introduction, 10), and Garland 1992, 102–3. 105. On the didaskalos, see the introduction. 106. The City Dionysia did not award a prize for comic actors until the late fourth century; it did for the Lenaia from ca. 440, with a prize for tragic actors instituted ca. 432. See Csapo and Slater 1995, 226–29. 107. Csapo and Slater 1995, 107–8 and 117–19; Goldhill 1990, 104–5; PickardCambridge 1988, 59, 67, and 82; and Parke 1977, 133–34. 108. Aesch. 3.41–43; Is. 9.8.11–13; H. Raedle, “Freilassung von Sklaven in Theater,” Revue internationale des droits de l’antiquit´e 19 (1971) 361–64; Parke 1977, 134; Garlan 1988, 73–74. On bearing witness in Athenian courts, see Dem. 35.10–12; C. Carey, “The Witness exomosia in the Athenian Courts,” CQ 45 (1995) 114–19; Thomas 1992, 41–44; MacDowell 1978, 212–17 and 242–47. Tragic characters often ask others to bear witness—in Agamemnon, for example, Cassandra calls on the Chorus to “bear witness” and “swear” that her revelations regarding the house of Atreus are true (Ag. 1196–97). 109. Garlan 1988, 73–84; P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenai¯on Politeia (Oxford 1981) 497. As new metics, those freedmen who stayed in Athens registered with the polemarch (Hansen 1991, 117) and possibly with his deme as well. 110. Isocr. 8.82; Meiggs 1975, 234–54 and 433–34; and Goldhill 1990, 101–4. Cf. Podlecki 1998, 99, who thinks the tribute was due at the time of the festival but not displayed in the theater. 111. Thuc. 1.96–101; Meiggs 1975, 58–67. 112. On the Athenian alliance and revolts from it, see Hammond 1973, 325–45; Meiggs 1975, 205–19, 358–63; Rhodes 1992, 47–49; Andrewes 1992, 464–71; and Lewis 1992b, 382–86 and 402–6. 113. The most famous include Potidaea in 433/2 (Thuc. 1.56–66, 2.70), Mytilene in 428/7 (3.2–15, 25–50), Melos in 416 (5.84–116), Chios and much of Ionia in 412 (bk. 8). The revolt in Potidaea had a demonstrable effect on Athenian tribute (Meiggs 1975, 201–2, 252–54, 309–11, 528–29), one that could not escape notice in the annual display at the City Dionysia. Mytilene, Chios, and Melos, however, do not appear on the tribute lists; the first two supplied ships to the league, not money, and the Melian “revolt” involved the island’s desire to remain neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta.

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114. See Croally 1994, Di Benedetto 1971, Goossens 1962, Murray 1946. Cf. Michelini 1987, 28–30, for a representative dismissal of the “historicist school.” 115. On the ekkl¯esia meeting in the theater, see Kolb 1981, 92–96, and McDonald 1943, 44–65. By 338, and perhaps as early as 403/2, a young citizen had to be twenty before attending the assembly, following his two years of ephebic training (Hansen 1991, 88–89 and 129). 116. A literal translation, “equality before the gathering,” suggests the idea of “taking the stage” to address the assembly. On the size of assembly meetings, see Hansen 1991, 130–32. Socrates (Pl. Phdr. 258B) compares the assembly to a theater, and a political speaker to a dramatic poet; similarly, Dem. 5.7 (Yunis 1996, 187 and 253). Halliwell 1997 discusses how tragedy exposes the instabilities inherent in the Athenian experience of rhetoric. 117. Osborne 1985, 91–92; Giovannini 1991, 460–61; Raaflaub 1991, 569–70. 118. X. Hell. 2.3.50–56; McDonald 1943, 172–73 and pl. 3–4; Boersma 1970, 204; Thompson and Wycherley 1972, 34. 119. MacDowell 1978, 33–40; also S. Usher, Greek Oratory: Tradition and Originality (Oxford 1999) 16–26. 120. Humphreys 1986b, 72–91. 121. On the relationship between Athenian legal and theatrical practice, see Wise 1998, 119–68; R. Garner, Law and Society in Classical Athens (London 1987) 95–130 (his interpretation of the tragedies notwithstanding); Humphreys 1986b, 67 (drama and lawcourts developed “under close reciprocal influence”); and Walcott 1976, 26– 27 and 37–42. Cf. S. Johnstone, Disputes and Democracy: The Consequences of Litigation in Ancient Athens (Austin 1999) 121–22. 122. Shaw 1975; L. Lupas and Z. Petre, Commentaire aux “Sept contre Th`ebes” d’ Eschyle (Bucharest 1981); Segal 1981 and 1986; Loraux 1987, 19–24, and 1998, 24– 34; Padel 1990; Zeitlin 1985; esp. 68–79 (⳱ 1996, 243–50) and 1990b (esp. 75– 78); Rabinowitz 1993, 73–99. 123. As Humphreys 1993, 62, puts it, “The heroines of fifth-century tragedy are . . . agents in their own right, acting in opposition to men or as substitutes for them.” Herington 1985, 84, observes how a male character’s condemnation of women as a class (Hippolytus, Jason) and efforts to contain them (Creon, Pentheus) signal impending disaster. Electra (A. Cho. 446) protests at being “locked away in my chamber [muchos] like a savage dog.” See Easterling 1987 for astute comments on women in tragic space. 124. See C. Orwin, “Feminine Justice: The End of Seven against Thebes,” CP 75 (1980) 187–96. 125. Patterson 1998, esp. 5–43 and 125–29 (quotation at 129). See also Nevett 1999, 13–17; D. M. Schaps, “What Was Free about a Free Athenian Woman?” TAPA 128 (1998) 161–88; Blundell 1995, 130–49; Hunter 1994, 9–42 (a “generous evaluation of women’s sphere in Athens”); Cohen 1989 and 1991, 149–67 (a valuable corrective to assumptions of Athenian women’s seclusion and immobility) and 70–98 (on the extended notion of the oikos for understanding the public-private relationship in Athens); Foley 1982, 3–5; and A. C. Scafuro, “Introduction,” in Boegehold and Scafuro 1994, 4–7 (supporting Patterson’s model of polis membership as a doublestranded bond of men and women). See also Jones 1999, 123–33 (women and deme membership); Lambert 1993, 36–40, 178–88, 237–40 (women and phratry member-

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ship); Foxhall 1989, and V. Hunter, “Women’s Authority in Classical Athens,” EMC/ CV 8 (1989) 39–48 (women’s control over property). For married Athenian women as polis members necessary for citizen offspring (Arist. Pol. 1275b 22–23), see Podlecki 1998, 159–61; Patterson 1990, also her “Marriage and Married Women in Athenian Law,” in Pomeroy 1991, 48–72, and Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451/0 B.C. (New York 1981); and W. Erdmann, Die Ehe im alten Griechenland (Munich 1934) 261–66. Note that marriage of homometric siblings was forbidden in Athens, whereas siblings with the same father but different mothers could marry (Rehm 1994a, 54–57 and 178–79 nn.57–62). For women’s public religious activity, see H. McClees, “A Study of Women in Attic Inscriptions” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1920), documenting priestesses in over forty major cults; also Feaver 1957, 137–57; Dontas 1983, 54–55; Kearns 1989, 61 and 79; Pollitt 1990, 190; Giovannini 1991, 462–64; N. Bookidis, “Ritual Dining at Corinth” (esp. 47–50) and S. G. Cole, “Demeter in the Ancient Greek City and Its Countryside” (esp. 201–4), both in Marinatos and H¨agg 1993. For female pilgrimages to sanctuaries all over Greece (with Olympia the major exception), see Dillon 1997, 183–203. On votives and other dedications by women, see D. Harris, The Treasures of the Parthenon and Erechtheion (Oxford 1995) 224–28 and 236–38 (“it is clear that the Akropolis was open to women and should be considered one of their spheres. The sharp line between domestic and public is blurred in the sanctuaries, which are public spaces where women actively participated”); Pulleyn 1997, 168–71; and van Straten 1981, 75–77, 98–99. On women’s cults, see Larson 1995 (heroine cults, s.v. cults in Athens/Attica), Jameson 1999, 333–35, and my comments in the introduction and in notes 88 and 94 herein. For female figures carved on grave monuments representing their “symbolic and actual capital” within the oikos, see R. E. Leader, “In Death Not Divided: Gender, Family, and State on Classical Athenian Grave Stelae,” AJA 101 (1997) 683–99. On the misunderstood passage from Pericles’ funeral oration regarding “women’s silence,” see Lisa KalletMarx, “Thucydides 2.45.2 and the Status of War Widows in Periclean Athens,” in Rosen and Farrell 1993, 133–43. 126. Among a plethora of counterexamples, ubiquitous in current scholarship, see (e.g.) Case 1985, reprinted in the popular HBJ Anthology of Drama, ed. W. B. Worthen (Fort Worth, Tex. 1993) 111–16, where drama students are taught that “Athenian women were confined to the house”; Parker 1987, 188–89, who uses Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (1861) and Zeitlin 1978 to conclude that the Oresteia ultimately “denies the mother altogether”; S. des Bouvrie, Women in Greek Tragedy: An Anthropological Approach, SymbOs supp. 27 (Oxford and Oslo 1991), and Rabinowitz 1993, who tend to reduce female characters to automized “pencils” drawing ideological boundaries around themselves in order to validate the Athenian male order and “recuperate the female figures for patriarchy” (Rabinowitz 1993, 14, but cf. E. Hall, rev. of des Bouvrie, CR 42 [1992] 56–58); Seidensticker 1995, 152 (women “stayed inside”) and 167 (Athens “marginalized women further than any other Greek polis”); Walker 1995, who claims that Athenian women were “a group completely excluded from the polis” (100, 121), that the proper role of an Athenian woman was “of course, no role whatsoever” (125); etc. Cf. note 125. 127. “Hestia-Hermes: The Religious Expression of Space and Movement in Ancient Greece,” in Vernant 1983 (quotations at 187 and 128–29). The idea has proved infectious—see, e.g., Malkin 1987, 115 n.5; Hartog 1988, 122–23; J. Wright, “The

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Spatial Configuration of Belief,” in Alcock and Osborne 1994, 57–58; Croally 1994, 165–66; Walker 1995, 85. 128. Jameson 1990a, 192–95; also 1990b, 98–99 and 105–6, emphasizing the non-site-specific, improvisatory nature of Greek domestic religion. For the public hearth of Athens, located in the Prytaneion, see Gernet 1981, 328–34, and Miller 1978, 13–16 and 21–35. Regarding herms, it is possible that cheaper wooden models substituted for stone outside poorer oikoi. 129. Jameson 1990a, 187–91, and 1990b, 99–100, 103–4, and 106. Nevett 1999, 18–19, discusses the possibility (likely in my opinion) that the andr¯on also was used for family occasions. Symposia seem to have been an aristocratic or upper-class phenomenon, discussed by O. Murray, “The Greek Symposion in History,” in Tria corda: Scritti in onore di Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. E. Gabba (Como 1983) 257–72; see my chapter 4, for symposia as occasions for “Dionysiac” performance. The cramped proportions of most house andr¯ones (seven dining couches against walls fourteen feet long, an off-center door, no windows) undermine the spatial reading proposed by Lissarague (1990, esp. 19–20, 35–36, 44–45), where the mixing bowl (krat¯er) in the middle (eis to meson) “embodies all the values of the mean.” Although possibly true for larger civic andrones, in a closed-in domestic environment, the experience of “converging sightlines,” “visual reciprocity,” and egalitarian spatial focus would seem virtual at best. For dimensions, see B. Bergquist, “Sympotic Space,” in Murray 1990, esp. 37–39, although she concentrates on larger civic and ritual dining rooms. 130. Die Reisebilder des Herakleides, ed. F. Pfister (Vienna 1951) 72; on the haphazard rebuilding of Athens after the Persian sack (as opposed to Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor), see Boersma 1970, 42–45. Herodotus (7.102.1) makes the general point: “Poverty is the messmate of Hellas.” Cf. M. Vickers, “Attic Symposia after the Persian Wars,” in Murray 1990, 105–21, who imagines a very high-life Athens indeed. 131. The house “concentrates itself upon its interior, its court” according to W. Hoepfner, “Burgerh¨ ¨ auser im klassischen Griechenland,” in Palast und Hutte, ¨ ed. D Papenfuss and V. M. Strocka (Mainz 1982) 43–48 (quotation at 44). 132. Jameson 1990a, 179–82 and 186, and 1990b, 97–98 and 100; Scranton 1965, 34–35. Even in the largest homes, rarely is a room more than one room away from the courtyard. 133. Kostof 1991, 63. 134. Jameson 1990a, 175–78, and 1990b, 95–97; Arist. Pol. 7.11; and M. Hansen, in Demokratie und Architektur: Der hippodamische Stadtebau ¨ und die Enstehung der Demokratie, ed. W. Schuller, W. Hoepfner, and E.-L. Schwandner (Munich 1989) 66. 135. See W. Hoepfner and E.-L. Schwandner, Haus und Stadt im klassischen Griechenland (Munich 1994). 136. Patterson 1998, 1–4, 83–91, and 107–37; Davies 1992, 288–92; Jameson 1990a, 195, and 1990b, 109–10. 137. Thuc. 2.14–16; Jameson 1990a, 172–73, and 1990b, 102; Strauss 1986, 43– 45; Osborne 1985, 142; J. S. Traill, The Political Organization of Attica, Hesperia supp. 14 (Princeton 1975) 70–71; and Padgug 1975. 138. Thomas 1981, esp. 43–44; Osborne 1985, 185–89, and 1987, esp. 16–23, 91–92, 89–104, 130, 140–41, 178–80, and 195 (“The Classical city was embedded

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in the countryside”); Strauss 1986, 59–63; and Finley 1999, 123–49, who overrates Weber’s notion of the ancient city as a “centre of consumption, not of production.” Cf. R. Osborne, “Exchange and Society in the Greek City,” 119–45, and I. Morris, “The Early Polis as City and State,” esp. 34–40, both in Rich and Wallace-Hadrill 1991. 139. On grain imports, see Garnsey 1998, 183–200 (fourth century); Davies 1992, 300–01; Casson 1991, 70 and 87–113; Osborne 1987, 97–104; Jameson 1977–78, 130 (the biggest import was wheat, as local production was primarily barley, intended for animals, slaves, and the poor majority); Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977, 289–95; Meiggs 1975, 374; and my chapters 3, note 111, and 4, note 42. For civic ideology built on agricultural values, see Solon in Arist. Ath.Pol. 12.4; X. Oec. (esp. 5.1–17 and 19.17–20.5); Pl. Lg. 740; Wood 1988, 93–110; Burford 1993, 32–34; and (on a rather vast scale) V. D. Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (New York 1995). 140. F. Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (London 1981) 27; for the close link between astu (city) and agros (country) in tragedy, see E. Krummen, “Athens and Attica: Polis and Countryside in Greek Tragedy,” in Sommerstein et al. 1993, 191– 217. 141. De Polignac 1995. In “Mediation, Competition, and Sovereignty: The Evolution of Rural Sanctuaries in Geometric Greece” (Alcock and Osborne 1994, 3–18), he prefers “transition” (rather than “birth”) for the emergence of the polis. 142. Foley 1994, 170–72; Osborne 1985, 72–83, and 1994, 153–60; Schachter 1992, 31–33; Holscher ¨ 1991, 367–68; C. Morgan, “Ethnicity and Early Greek States,” PCPhS 37 (1991) 131–63 (esp. 142–45), and 1990, 13–14. 143. Malkin 1987, 12 and 263, his review of de Polignac 1995, JHS 107 (1987) 227–28, and his “Territorial Domination and the Greek Sanctuary,” in Hellstrom ¨ and Alroth 1996, 75–81 (de Polignac ignores colonization as foundational act, mistakes “established borders” for “changing frontiers”); A. M. Snodgrass, “Archaeology and the Study of the Greek City,” in Rich and Wallace-Hadrill 1991, 18–20, and F. Millar, rev. of Molho, Raaflaub, and Emlen 1991, in CR 43 (1993) 123–24 (de Polignac underplays military service and the much-disputed “hoplite reform”); see also R. T. Ridley, “The Hoplite as Citizen,” AC 48 (1979) 508–48. Demand 1990, 14–27, posits external military threats as crucial to early urbanization and relocation. 144. De Polignac 1995, 72–74. “There was no real community among the Greeks that was also not a religious community,” according to V. Ehrenberg, The Greek State (London 1960) 16. Burkert 1985, 254–60, discusses ritual in terms of polis and community building. De Polignac (128–41) also emphasizes the role of the hero who comes from abroad to bring order to a community, extending the notion of polis building to the incorporation of an original “outsider.” In Athens, Theseus exemplifies the phenomenon, discussed further in the text. 145. Hdt. 7.161; Thuc. 1.2.5; Eur. Ion 542. Autochthony is a common topos in Athenian funeral orations (Thuc. 2.36.1; Lys. 2.17; [D] 60.4; Pl. Men. 237). 146. J. E. Ziolkowski, Thucydides and the Tradition of Funeral Speeches at Athens (New York 1981); N. Loraux, The Invention of Athens (Cambridge, Mass. 1986; orig. Paris 1981), and 1993; A. Saxenhouse, “Reflections on Autochthony in Euripides’ Ion,” in Euben 1986, 252–73; duBois 1988, 42–45, 57–64, 169; Kearns 1989, 110– 13; F. Zeitlin, “Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self in Euripides’ Ion,” in Zeitlin 1996, 285–338; J. B. Connelly, “Parthenon and Parthenoi: A Mythological In-

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terpretation of the Parthenon Frieze,” AJA 100 (1996) 53–80, whose reading of the frieze, even if wrong in details, offers an important corrective to those like Loraux and duBois who see Athenian foundational myths as a fundamental denial of the importance of women and mothers. See also Hall 1997, 51–56 (autochthony as an antiIonian myth); Lefkowitz 1996; Saxenhouse 1992, 50–89; and Pucci 1980, 122 (“The Athenians [as descendents of earthborn Erechtheus] therefore are originally born from the earth, directly, without insemination by any male”). 147. On the link between oikist cult and the soil, see Malkin 1987, 13 and 266. 148. Connor 1996, 120; also Martin 1992, 19. 149. Connor 1996; also my chapter 6. Mills 1997 fails to engage this aspect of Theseus. On Theseus and sunoikismos, see Thuc. 2.15.1–2 and Kearns 1989, 117–19. 150. E. Vanderpool, Ostracism at Athens (Cincinnati 1970); Cartledge 1993, 99 (ostracism a “reverse election”); Jameson 1997, 490; and Wise 1998, 200–203. The ostracized person did retain his property in Attica and could draw revenue from it during his ten-year absence (FGrH 328F 30, Philochorus). 151. Hdt. 7.139–45, 8.40–96. See A. Momigliano, “Sea Power in Greek Thought,” CR 58 (1944) 1–7; Hignett 1963, 193–239 and 441–45; Meiggs 1982, 122–27; A. J. Halladay, “The Forethought of Themistocles,” JHA 107 (1987) 182–87; Hartog 1988, 42–57 and 199–204; Vernant 1991, 311–14; Casson 1991, 81–92; Garland 1992, 73–75. 152. Hdt. 9. 1–6, 13–14, 17–25, 38–40, 61–63; Lazenby 1993, 211–17; Burn 1984, 502–42; Green 1970, 233–34 and 239–71. 153. Thuc. 1.69.1, 1.107, 1.190–93 (and Gomme 1945 on these passages). By 443 Pericles saw to the completion of a middle Long Wall, close to the previous northern wall, providing a more easily defensible corridor between the astu and the port. See Boersma 1970, 45–46 (city walls), 57–58 (Long Walls); A. W. Lawrence, Greek Aims in Fortification (Oxford 1979) 114–15 and 156; also CAH 5:97, 113, and 138 (Lewis), 207–8 (Wycherley). 154. Thuc. 1.140–43, 2.13–17, 2.19–2.23, 2.55–59, 3.1; Lewis 1992b, 380–88; Casson 1991, 92–96; J. Ober, “Thucydides, Pericles, and the Strategy of Defense,” in The Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays in Honor of Chester G. Starr, ed. J. W. Eadie and J. Ober (Lanham, Md. 1985) 171–88. 155. Thuc. 2.16–17, 2.65; Ar. Ach. 26–42. Hanson 1983, 111–27, points out that the Spartan invasions of 431 to 425 accomplished “no widescale nor lasting damage to the agriculture of Attica,” but he acknowledges (143, 147–51) the psychic toll on the Athenians. By the war’s end in 404, deaths from disease, battle, and civil unrest had reduced the adult male citizen population to about half its number before hostilities broke out, from well over 40,000 in 431 to about 22,000 in 404; see Raaflaub 1991, 571 and 577, and A. W. Gomme, The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C. (Chicago 1967) 26. In a more dire account of the effects of the war on Athens, Strauss 1986, 70–86, reckons an adult male citizen population over 40,000 in 434, dropping to 14,000 to 16,250 by 404. 156. Thuc. 7.27; also 7.18, 7.28. During the first Spartan invasions of Attica (431– 425), the Athenians sent their sheep and cattle to Euboea and other coastal islands for safekeeping (Thuc. 2.14.1), retrieving them sometime before the Peace of Nicias in 421; after the occupation of Decelea, they did the same, but Euboea revolted in 412, leading to the effective loss of their herds (Burford 1993, 148–49 and 160).

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157. See Rosenbloom 1995 on Athens’ confusion between “one’s own” (oikeia) and “someone else’s” (allotria), a theme manifest in Aeschylus, and reflecting the rise of the Athenian fleet. 158. Meiggs 1975, 120–23, 159–61, 260, and 424–25, estimating some 8,000 Athenians settled abroad between 475 and 415 (p. 260). See also Rhodes 1992, 59– 61, and Lewis 1992a, 127–29. Strauss 1986, 77, reckons that 5,000 to 10,000 Athenian cleruchs and colonists were sent out under Pericles during the Archidamian War, many of whom returned to Attica as the war went against Athens. On the definition of kl¯erouchos and kl¯erouchia, see Figueira 1991b, 40–78 and 236–49. 159. Thuc. 3.50.2. 5.116.4; Meiggs 1975, 261–62 and 384; Burford 1993, 194. 160. See A. Lesky, Thalattoi: Der Weg der Griechen zum Meer (Vienna 1947) 56, 171, 200; U. Sinn, “The Influence of Greek Sanctuaries on the Consolidation of Economic Power,” in Hellstrom ¨ and Alroth 1996, 67–69; Griffith 1999 on Ant. 334–41. We know of no ancient Greek who sailed for pleasure. 161. D.S. 13.97–101 and 15.35.1; see Andrewes 1992, 492–94. 162. Thuc. 7.51–72; for Euripidean twists in Helen that undercut the romantic escapism assumed by critics, see Rehm 1994a, 121–27. 163. Nussbaum 1986, 58–60 and 73–74; Thalmann 1978, 32–38; Lebeck 1971, 106–8 and 163–65; E. Blaiklock, “The Nautical Imagery in Euripides’ Medea,” CP 50 (1955) 233–37; Goheen 1951, 44–50.

CHAPTER TWO SPACE FOR RETURNS

1. Kurke 1991, 15–34. See also Crotty 1982, 108–9. Kurke may overemphasize the problem of return in Pindar. Departure, fraught with uncertainty, also features prominently in the epinician odes. 2. Concern for homecoming recurs throughout the poem; see, e.g., Il. 2.134–41, 13.231–34, 14.65–81, 16.81–86, 17.238–39. See Anderson 1997, 75–91, on the link between destruction (persis) and nostos. 3. Rehm 1994a, 12, 18, and 155 n.8, discusses Greek marriage as a homecoming; Malkin 1987, 6 and 90, argues that “colonization signified some sort of return.” For the nostos following Greek initiation rituals, see Seaford 1994, 259–61; B. Heiden, “Emotion, Acting, and the Athenian ethos,” in Sommerstein et al. 1993, 156–61 (linking tragic humiliation to that experienced in initiation); Burkert 1985, 260–64 and 276–93; Osborne 1985, 157–79; and P. Vidal-Naquet, “The Black Hunter and the Origin of the Athenian Ephebia,” PCPhS 194 (1968) 49–64. For the return of Dionysus’ cult statue to its “home” during the City Dionysia, see Seaford 1994, 240–51, Rehm 1994b, 15, and Connor 1989. 4. “Classic” American realism treats incessantly of homecoming and its impossibility—Biff in Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Edmund in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Vince in Shepard’s Buried Child, and the Younger family in Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun; see (e.g.) Chaudhuri 1995, 91–135. Although we continue to employ the concept, the mobility to which many of us have access threatens to make homecoming in the contemporary world more a psychological metaphor than a reality of physical place. On the enforced mobility of exiles and refugees, see Bernand

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1985, 419; Sultan 1999 deals with the continuing importance of xenitia (living abroad among foreigners) in Greek culture. 5. Apparent at the opening, Od. 1.1–3; see D. Frame, The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic (New Haven 1978), for the etymological link between noos ‘mind’ and neomai ‘return home’, from which nostos derives. Solon traveled to gather wisdom and to share it (Hdt. 1.29–33), as did Herodotus. See R. French, Ancient Natural History (London 1994) 2–3, and C. W. Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley 1983) 15. Helms 1988 offers an important ethnograpical study of “distant knowledge.” 6. Taplin 1977, 124–25, 302–3; Hall 1997, 107–9. Lost return plays, with returnee in parentheses, probably include S. Euryalus, Niptra [The washing], Odysseus Acanthoplex (Odysseus); Eurysakes and Teucer (Teucer); Aleadae (Telephus), Creusa (Ion), Nauplius Pyrcaeus (Greeks from Troy), Peleus (Neoptolemus), Phaedra (Theseus from the underworld), Procris (Cephalus); S. and Eur. Aegeus (Theseus), Alexandros (Paris), Antiope (Antiope), Thyestes (Thyestes); Eur. First Hippolytus (Theseus), Cresophantes (Cresophantes), Protesilaos (Protesilaos from the underworld), Telephus (Telephus), and perhaps plays on the sons’ of Heracles return to the Peloponnese (Temenus (?), Temenidae, Archelaus). See Sutton 1984 and Webster 1967; Burnett 1971, 102 n.2; and Poole 1994, 14–15. Strangely, homecoming and return do not feature in the “story patterns” of Lattimore 1964. 7. Burkert 1985, 159–61. For the trope of katabasis among the pre-Socratics, see W. Burkert, “Das Proomium ¨ des Parmenides und die Katabasis des Pythagoras,” Phronesis 14 (1969) 1–30, and Furley 1989, 28. The mythic pattern of descent to and return from the underworld feature in several comedies, including Ar. Peace, Frogs, Wealth, and the lost Gerytades. 8. C. P. Segal, “The Phaeacians and the Symbolism of Odysseus’ Return,” Arion 1, no.4 (1962) 17–64, and B. Moreux, “La nuit, l’ombre et la mort chez Hom`ere,” Phoenix 21 (1967) 237–72. 9. For Priam’s journey in Il. 24 as a descent to the underworld, see C. H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass. 1958) 217–18; W. R. Nethercut, “The Epic Journey of Achilles,” Ramus 5 (1976) 1–17; and Nagler 1974, 184. 10. Taplin 1977, 299–300. 11. Jones 1962, 82–111, provides the classic account. 12. She mentions the “the sign of your pledge” 878 (the absent Orestes), “your danger at Troy” (882), “the beacon fires set for you” (890), and “your great sufferings” (893). 13. Halliwell 1997, 131–34, shows how Clytemnestra exploits both public rhetoric and private intimacy. 14. As Pohlenz 1954, 101, puts it, “Mit der Kassandraszene hat die Tragodie ¨ ihren Gipfel erreicht.” See also Sider 1978, 15–18; Taplin 1977, 316–22; Vickers 1973, 372–81; Knox 1972, 109–17; Lebeck 1971, 52–56; Mason 1959, 85–86. 15. See Faraone 1992, 6–7; Poe 1989, 130–37 (excellent on sources, not on staging); Mikalson 1983, 137–38 n.27; Denniston and Page 1972 on 1080; Fraenkel 1950 on 1081; Cook 1914–40, 2:160–66, and 3:1120. 16. Ewans 1982, 5 (“Kassandra’s prophetic vision gives the house, so to speak, the voice it has been craving”); see also Padel 1990, and Carlson 1990, 43.

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17. Recall Clytemnestra’s ironic image of Agamemnon as a key architectural member, the “central pillar of a great hall” (Ag. 897–98); see my subsequent discussion on Heracles. In Eumenides the lawcourt established by Athena replaces palatial walls, providing a “bulwark (eruma) for the land and protection for the city” (Eum. 701). 18. Quoted by Mason 1959, 85–86 (from Pohlenz 1954, 101). 19. In the Iliad, Cassandra is the first Trojan to see Hector’s corpse on its return from the Greek camp and call out the city to lament (24.697–708); she plays a similar role in Agamemnon for “the commander of the fleet and destroyer of Troy” (Ag. 1257), “seeing” Agamemnon’s death before it happens and mourning it in advance. See Edwards 1987, 313; Taplin 1992, 280–81; Rehm 1994a, 45–49. Cf. Anderson 1997, 124, who thinks that the image of Troy recedes with the Cassandra scene. 20. See Peradotto 1964, 389. S. V. Tracy, “Darkness from Light: The Beacon Fire in the Agamemnon,” CQ 36 (1986) 257–60, traces the similarities between the fire relay in Ag. and the beacon fires used by Mardonius in 479 to announce to Xerxes in Sardis that Athens had been sacked and burned a second time. By associating Agamemnon’s razing of Troy with the Persian destruction of Athens, Aeschylus prepares the audience for the tapestry scene (“Asiatic” references at 918–27, 935–36) and Agamemnon’s ultimate fate. See also K. J. Dover, “I tessuti rossi dell’ Agamennone,” Dioniso 48 (1977) 55–69, trans. in Dover 1987, 151–60. For fire signals used in the fifth-century defense of Attica, see Ober 1985, 196–99. 21. Bond 1981 on HF 662 notes the ominous associations of the second bend of the racecourse, applied proverbially to Hades. 22. The strongly realistic depiction of war suggests that these visions of Troy’s fall evoked contemporary fifth-century battle experience; see D. M. Leahy, “The Representation of the Trojan War in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon,” AJP 95 (1974) 1–23. 23. Wiles 1988, 83, suggests that the Chorus acts out Iphigenia’s sacrifice using an altar located in the center of the orchestra (see chapter 1), making the event even more memorable for the audience. 24. See Rehm 1994a, 50–51 and 176 n.39. 25. See Rehm 1994a, 44–49. 26. Although the “historical present” commonly occurs in narrative passages, “the many instances of the present tense from here [Ag. 1383] to 1390 are noticeable” (Frankel 1950 on 1383). We observe a similar collapse of past into present when Oedipus remembers striking the unrecognized Laius at the place where three roads meet (OT 806–7; see chapter 5). In 1998, twenty-eight years after committing a murder, Frank Koehler made the same temporal shift when recalling the event: “I’m pounding on him now. He’s a dead man. I ain’t worried about him. I ain’t worried about nothing. I’m pissed. And he’s gonna die. And he died.” See P. Gourevitch, “A Cold Case,” New Yorker, Feb. 14, 2000, p. 55. 27. For the imagery of liquid spilt on the ground, see Lebeck 1971, 62 and 80–91. 28. Clytemnestra appears as a warrior-conqueror like her husband, victorious over her enemies (echthroi, 1374) who include not only Agamemnon but also the Trojan Cassandra. Images of triumph in battle occur earlier in her decisive exchange with Agamemnon (940–43, 954–57). Cassandra also characterizes Clytemnestra as an infernal creature “breathing truceless war against her own,” crying out “as though at the turning point of battle” (1235–37). See Taplin 1977, 312–13. 29. See J. Herington, “The Marriage of Earth and Sky in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon

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1388–92,” in Cropp, Fantham, and Scully 1986, 27–33; also Xenophanes DK 29 and 33; A. Danaids fr. 25 (44); Eur. Chrysippos fr. 839, and fr. 898; Guthrie 1954, 53–61 and 67–72; Onians 1951, 229–33; Cook 1914—40, 3:451–54. Guthrie 1957, 30– 31, points out that Greek rivers tend to dry up in summer, which helps explain the emphasis on the marriage of sky (rain) and earth in Greek myth. Winnington-Ingram 1983, 111, notes the offenses of which Clytemnestra accuses Agamemnon—killing their daughter Iphigenia and taking Cassandra as his concubine—“strike at the status of women in marriage.” By subverting both her own marriage and its cosmic model, Clytemnestra’s revenge is total, if temporary. 30. As Teleios, Zeus oversees fulfillment or completion, particularly “the completion of a cycle”—crop growth and harvest, one’s destiny, marriage, initiation, death. See S. Goldhill, “Two Notes on telos,” JHS 104 (1984) 169–76; Lebeck 1971, 70–73; Cook 1914–40, 3:609, 948–49 n.16, and 1060 n.7. The verb teleio¯o implies “making perfect, completing, coming to maturity, bringing fruit to maturity,” suggesting harvest. Surveying the destruction at the end, Clytemnestra admits that it is “much to reap, a wretched harvest” (Ag. 1655). Peradotto 1964, 380–81, traces harvest imagery in the play, and Vickers 1973, 348–437, gives a sustained reading of Clytemnestra’s embodiment of antinatural forces. Her preternatural control makes her seem to “call up” the storm that destroys the fleet, first by anticipating the disaster awaiting the Greeks on their voyage home (343–44), and then by appearing (unbidden) to greet the Herald (587–612), just before the Chorus compels him to describe the storm (617–80). 31. R. Seaford, “The Last Bath of Agamemnon,” CQ 34 (1984) 247–54, esp. 248– 49. MacLachlan 1993, 133–38, explores the acharis charis—“graceless grace” (Ag. 1544, implying nonreciprocity)—in Clytemnestra’s perversion of Agamemnon’s funeral rites. See also Ewans 1982, 9–14. Ignoring the dramatic exhaustion with which this lyric encounter concludes, Roberts 1993, 576–77, thinks that Clytemnestra’s abrogation of the ritual undercuts “any closural effect that the reference to burial might have.” 32. Aegisthus is the only character to enter from an eisodos who does not come from Troy, a fact not lost on the Chorus, which calls him a woman for staying home while the men were at war (1625–26). 33. Podlecki in Euben 1986, 94–95; C. Bearzot, “Ancora sulle Eumenidi di Eschilo e la riforma di Efialte,” Prometheus 18 (1992) 27–35 (Aegisthus and Clytemnestra as antidemocratic). 34. Dunn 1996, 13–25 (esp. 21–22), observes that Aeschylus’ closing lines follow no consistent form and “are just as often sung in lyric as chanted in anapests,” noting no anomaly in the Chorus’s behavior at the end of Agamemnon Cf. the formal processions that end Persians, Seven against Thebes, Supplices, and Eumenides. 35. Taplin 1977, 330–32; Lloyd-Jones 1993, 117. 36. Lloyd-Jones 1993 suggests that the Chorus turns to the house at 623, which seems plausible, along the lines of Taplin 1977, 338–40. Although Garvie thinks the “refocussing” of the scene occurs at 583, with Electra exiting into the palace, I concur with Dale 1969, 267: “After the kommos the palace as it were comes into existence when Orestes hammers at the door.” 37. For the tautology in Orestes’ proclamation of homecoming, see Ar. Ran. 1152– 69. Cf. the palace’s prominence in the homecomings of the Herald (Ag. 503–19,

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“Palace of kings, walls that we longed for . . .”), Agamemnon (810–14, 829–31, 844– 54, “Now under my roof, at the hearth of my home, / I will honor first the gods who sent me / and brought me back . . .”), and even Cassandra (1085–1129, 1186–97, 1217–38). 38. Green 1994, 54. Before the Oresteia, the murder of Aegisthus was by far the most common scene from the Orestes myth represented on Attic vases; see A.J.N.W. Prag, The Oresteia, Iconographic and Narrative Tradition (Warminster 1985) 10–34. 39. Burke 1969, 3–20. 40. During the kommos the tomb resembles a hero cult, like that of Theseus, whose bones were returned from Scyros to Athens some fifteen years before the Oresteia (Garvie 1988 on 483–85). As Malkin 1987, 201, observes, “The grave was the easiest point of communication with the dead hero . . . [whose] powers were double-edged: retributive and protective.” Recalling his tomblike aura in Choephori, Orestes will rise from his tomb to guarantee the alliance between Argos and Athens (Eum. 762–74), predicting his own future grave cult (Lloyd-Jones 1993, 258). 41. That the dead can kill the living is a favorite trope of Sophocles: the sword of the dead Hector slays Ajax (Aj. 1027); Polyneices’ corpse kills Antigone (Ant. 871); the long-dead Centaur Nessus poisons Heracles (Trach. 1163). The irony in Choephori extends to the living agent of death, as if part of Orestes had to die for him to do the killing. On his purification at Delphi as a kind of rebirth, see Zeitlin 1978, 165–66. 42. Literally, “It seems that I, a living woman, am singing dirges to a tomb.” The statement is proverbial (Garvie 1988 on 926), implying that a corpse can’t hear lamentations made on its behalf. Clytemnestra “laments,” but Orestes is already “dead.” 43. The setup is reminiscent of Old Comedy (Garvie 1988 on 653)—for example, Xanthias and Dionysus before the house of Heracles in Ar. Ran. See also the rapid entrances and exits in the middle comedy by Antiphanes, fr. 191, 9–12, in Edmonds 1959, 257. Sophocles in his lost Alcmeon (?) may have involved Adrastus in a similar flurry (Sutton 1984, 39). 44. For the rapidity and variety of these comings and goings, see Garvie 1988 on 838–934; Taplin 1977, 346–53; Rehm 1985, 246, and 1994b, 97–98. 45. Hall 1997, 124 n.72. 46. Garvie 1988 on 22–83 emphasizes the text’s vagueness about their place of origin, a good argument for assuming that they are not Trojans whom Agamemnon brought home from the war. 47. Garvie 1988 on 730–82. 48. Garvie 1988 on 306–478 (p. 123). For the role played by the Chorus in the kommos, see also K. Sier, Die lyrischen Partien der Choephoren des Aischylos (Stuttgart 1988) 82; Winnington-Ingram 1983, 138–42; and Lebeck 1971, 93–95 and 110–30. 49. Properly understood, the ancient Greek oikos was a “practical and productive composite of persons and property,” “a household and its relationships,” not simply blood kin in the sense of a line of descent from father to son (Patterson 1998, 1–3, 100–101, and 231 n.2). 50. Cho. 132–34; see Garvie 1988 on 132–33. 51. Consider in this light Cassandra, who—although “raised across the sea”— speaks accurately of events in Argos (Ag. 1199–1201). 52. Martin 1992, 18. 53. Griffith 1988, 553–54, concludes that a Greek tragic character who disrobes

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“graphically illustrates the loss of his or her primary trait”; for Clytemnestra, it is her mannish nature she abandons, revealing herself as a woman. 54. Fraenkel 1950 on Ag. 1282, where Cassandra prophesies Orestes’ return from exile. K. A. Morgan, “Apollo’s Favorites,” GRBS 35 (1994) 121–43, explores other parallels between Cassandra and Orestes. 55. Rehm 1988, 290–301; Rosenmeyer 1982, 67–70. A similar arrangement— orchestra as building interior—may hold briefly for A. Pers. 140–49 (Dale 1969, 119–20, and Taplin 1977, 65 and 454), changing with the arrival of the Queen, and changing again with the raising of Darius at his tomb (see chapter 6). Dale thinks that a fluid or adjustable scene characterized early tragedy, a tactic that continued in comedy throughout the century. Willink 1986, xxxix–xl, notes a similar shift between inside and outside in Euripides’ Orestes, perhaps exploiting the “outside as inside” of the normal domestic courtyard (see chapter 1); cf. Seidensticker 1995, 155: excepting the ekkukl¯ema, “the ancient open-air theater knew no interior scenes”[!]. Easterling 1987, 17–18, emphasizes the flexibility of tragic space, especially in the orchestra, and doubts that the setting is always “outside.” Her suspicions are a healthy antidote to critics eager to see offstage space as symbolizing psychological interiority, or as the only proper place for tragic women. 56. Sommerstein 1989 on 64–93 and on 94–139 proposes this solution (followed, more or less, by Podlecki 1989, 12–13). Scullion 1990, 106–7 offers worse: all the Furies enter through the door of the sk¯en¯e at line 140. 57. See Rehm 1988, 281–82 nn.81–84. Sommerstein 1989 has three sleeping Furies seated on stone thrones in front of the omphalos (blocking the view of Orestes). He and others take the Pythia literally: the sleeping Furies are lochos en thronoisin h¯emenos, “a troop seated on thrones” (Eum. 47). But the Pythia earlier refers to the oracle generally as en thronois (18), meaning “at the oracle” or “at the sacred tripod” or “on the throne” in the sense of “in the seat of power”—“Zeus set him [Apollo] up as the fourth seer at this seat of prophetic power” (18). Later the Pythia announces “I will take my seat as prophetess es thronous (29), literally “upon the throne,” but perhaps “at the sacred tripod,” “at the seat of power.” Given these uses, and the Pythia’s excited state, her initial description of the Furies (46–47) could mean something like “Around that man an amazing throng of women is sleeping, seated at the sacred oracle.” Real stone thrones only get in the way. 58. R. C. Flickinger, CJ 34 (1939) 357–59; Taplin 1977, 366–67, seriously entertains an offstage Clytemnestra. 59. Taplin 1977, 369–74. 60. Taplin 1977, 363–65. 61. Bain 1977, 9 n.3. 62. Wiles 1997, 63–73; Rehm 1988, 282–83. 63. Wiles 1988, 83. 64. For Athena’s “redemption” of Clytemnestra, see Winnington-Ingram 1983, 101–31. For Athena and Clytemnestra played by the same actor, see Whallon 1980, 106; Cohen 1999, 67–69 and 99–102; and my introduction and chapter 4. 65. We might expect other examples in tragedy of such scenic inversion, in which the inside of a building is represented in the orchestra, so that the extrascenic space behind the facade is the “outside.” Taplin 1977, 430, 456 and 1972, 66–76, observes that Aeschylus’ fragmentary Myrmidons, Phryges (1977, 430), and Nereides take place

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in the tent of Achilles, represented by the orchestra—that is, the outside as inside. However, Taplin uses this reasonable reconstruction to conclude that no sk¯en¯e building existed at the time, an innovation he attributes to the Oresteia. But if Aeschylus introduced the sk¯en¯e facade earlier (as argued in chapter 1), then we may have several pre-Eumenides examples of the orchestra used to represent interior space (also see note 55). Perhaps the introduction and growing popularity of the ekkukl¯ema made such practice less desirable later; the earliest use of the roll-out machine remains unknown, and it may not have been available to Aeschylus. Even if it were, it makes poor dramatic sense for the opening scenes of Eumenides. 66. Perhaps the orchestra-center marker designating Agamemnon’s tomb in Choephori also served as the omphalos and bretas in Eumenides. A robe placed over the marker, for example—recalling the peplos woven for the goddess—could indicate the aniconic image of Athena. The fact that the statue is identified six times in the play (Eum. 80, 242–43, 258–60, 409, 440, 446) suggests that it resembled only vaguely the bretas that most Athenians would have seen. On the actual statue, see N. Papachatzis, “The Cult of Erechtheus and Athena on the Acropolis of Athens,” Kernos 2 (1989) 175–87, esp. 177, and Ridgway 1992, 120–24. A movable orchestra altar may have been used frequently in the fifth-century theater (see chapter 1). 67. The text initially designates the court as a generic “place of deliberation,” bouleut¯erion (Eum. 570), but Athena defines the setting as the hill of Ares (683–706). See Taplin 1977, 390–95. 68. Paley 1855 on 537 (old lineage) points out that a trumpet sounded before the Athenian assembly; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 67, notes that each event at the City Dionysia was announced by a trumpet. The trumpet blast at Eum. 569 (Stanford 1983, 52) may have helped “reconvene” the play by drawing on its theatrical associations earlier in the day. 69. D. M MacDowell, Athenian Homicide Law (Manchester 1963) 39; Hansen 1991, 191; Boegehold 1995, 3 and 43–47. 70. See T. Gantz, “The Fires of the Oresteia,” JHS 97 (1977) 28–38. 71. Garvie 1988 on 22–83. 72. This process reflects the political development of the trilogy through monarchy, tyranny, and democracy. See F. T. Griffiths, “Girard on the Greeks/the Greeks on Girard,” Berkshire Review 1979, 24. 73. Easterling 1985, 3; also Edmunds 1996, 8–10, and 87–148, on anachronism. Knox 1957, 61, even claims that contemporary references in Greek tragedy are so obvious “that the term ‘anachronism’ . . . is completely misleading; . . . anachronism is not the exception but the rule.” 74. See Denniston and Page 1972 on 1370; Fraenkel 1950 on 1348 and 1355; N. Spivey, “Psephological Heroes,” in Osborne and Hornblower 1994, 39–51. Other Aeschylean voting occurs at Su. 607–22, Ag. 813–17, Eum. 708–10 and 735–53. 75. See J. H. Quincey, “Orestes and the Argive Alliance,” CQ 14 (1964) 190–206. 76. The Persians used the Areopagos as a base from which to attack the Acropolis (Hdt. 8.52–53), and the Amazon-like queen of Halicarnassos, Artemisia, fought with Xerxes at Salamis (Hdt. 7.99, 8.68–69, 87–88, 93, and 101–3); also J. Blok, The Early Amazons (Leiden 1994) 181–82, and Sommerstein 1989 on 685–90. For Mardonius’ second sack of Athens, in 479, see Chapter 1, note 152. 77. Lloyd-Jones 1993, 265.

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78. See Cartledge 1993, 111; Bowie 1993, 10–12; Hall 1993, esp. 324–36; LloydJones 1993 on 693–94 and pp. 273–75; Meier 1990, 82–89, 106–8; Sommerstein 1989 on 693–5 and pp. 13–17, 25–32; R. Wallace, The Areopagos Council (Baltimore 1989) 87–93; Macleod 1982, 124–44; W. M. Calder, “The Anti-Periklean Intent of Aeschylus’ Eumenides,” in Aischylos und Pindar, ed. E. G. von Schmidt (Berlin 1981) 220–23; J. Cole, “The Oresteia and Cimon,” HSCP 81 (1977) 99–111; Podlecki 1966, 63–100; Dodds 1960a; K. J. Dover, “The Political Aspect of Aeschylus’ Eumenides,” JHS 77 (1957) 230–37 (⳱ 1987, 161–75); Solmsen 1949, 207–11; S. M. Smertenko, “The Political Sympathies of Aeschylus,” JHS 52 (1932) 233–35. 79. Sommerstein 1989, 29–31; see further Farrar 1988, 22–28. 80. Eum. 526–31, 696–703, 858–66, 976–87. 81. Sommerstein 1989 on 292–96, and pp. 28–29; also Rhodes 1992, 50–53. Proteus, the lost satyr play that followed the trilogy, dealt with Menelaus’ shipwreck in Egypt, hinted at by the Herald (Ag. 617–35). Perhaps this version of another nostos gone awry also brought to mind the Athenians fighting in Egypt. The eventual disaster for the Athenian fleet in the southern Aegean led to a very different “homecoming,” the transfer of the Delian League treasure from Delos to Athens for safekeeping, a key moment in the history of the Athenian Empire (Rhodes 1992, 50–56, and 1993, 23). 82. Sommerstein 1989 on 399–402; Podlecki 1989 on 398ff.; Dodds 1960a, 21 and n.2. For Sigeum and Athens in the late seventh century, see Hdt. 5.94; D. L. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford 1955) 152; Malkin 1987, 122; and N. Robertson, “Athena’s Shrines and Festivals,” in Neils 1996, 45 and 70 n.55. Anderson 1997, 107–32, contrasts Agamemnon’s victorious but fatal return to Argos in Agamemnon to Athena’s judicious homecoming to Athens in Eumides. 83. Sommerstein 1989, 29. 84. See A. Peretti, “La teoria della generazione patrilinea in Eschilo,” PP 49 (1956) 241–62; Sommerstein 1989 on 657–66 (an exemplary summary); R. Garland, The Greek Way of Life (Ithaca 1990) 28–29; Hanson 1990, 324–30 (esp. 314 n.27); and Rehm 1994a, 54–55. 85. Garvie 1988 on 471–73 (Collinge 1962 offers little help). See generally J. Dumortier, Le vocabulaire m´edical d’Eschyle et les e´ crits hippocratiques, 2nd ed. (Paris 1975). 86. Denniston and Page 1972 on 1477–80. 87. Garvie 1988 on 281, 282; Sommerstein 1989 on Eum. 503–7. 88. Sommerstein 1989 on 711–53. 89. Fraenkel 1950 on 1614; Andoc. 1.94; MacDowell 1978, 115–22. 90. Garvie 1988 on 990, with references. 91. Sidgwick 1902 on 429 and also p. 16. 92. Thomson 1966 on Eum. 429 and 579–80; Sommerstein 1989 on 570–73. 93. Lambert 1993, 31–32, 245 n.1; also Sommerstein 1989 on 656, and LloydJones 1993 on 655–56. 94. C. A. Faraone, “Aeschylus’ humnos desmios (Eum. 306) and Attic Judicial Curse Tablets,” JHS 105 (1985) 150–54. 95. Rehm 1994a, 29, 42–58, 171 n.62; Zeitlin 1965. 96. See the introduction; see Rehm 1994a, 162 n.57 for bibliography. 97. See Bowie 1993, 24–26 (with bibliography) for allusions to the Mysteries, and

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19–22 for the cult of Artemis Braurona in Ag.; Burian 1986 discusses Zeus Sot¯ ¯ er in the trilogy. 98. Herington 1986, 125. 99. The real-life Pythia was not some unintelligible babbler of gibberish, which a male priest reinterpreted, but a rational soul (even accused of taking bribes) who uttered the oracles from Delphi; see L. Maurizio, “Anthropology and Spirit Possession: A Reconsideration of the Pythia’s Role at Delphi,” JHS 115 (1995) 69–86, who notes that “not one ancient source suggest that anyone other than the Pythia issued oracular responses.” 100. Rosenmeyer 1982, 69: “Eumenides, of all Aeschylus’ plays, is closest in diction, tone, and spirit to the comic model.” Speaking generally, Hall 2000, 14, reminds us to “be aware of what the dramatist was asking of the actor—indeed almost what kind of acting is indicated by the text.” 101. Sommerstein 1989 on 299–366. Applying speech-act theory, Prins 1991, 190, concludes that the Furies’ binding song dramatizes “the problematic function of performative utterance.” 102. Taplin 1977, 407. The Furies in Delphi (Eum. 202) and Athena in Athens (409, 436) both refer to Orestes as xenos, as he himself does in Choephori (as noted earlier). He is a real “stranger” in Eumenides who eventually departs for home. By contrast, Athena assures the Furies that she will not drive them off as apoxenos (an “exile,” 884), used of someone forced to leave his own land (Sommerstein 1989 on 882–84). 103. W. Headlam, JHS 26 (1906) 272–74, and Thomson 1966 on Eum. 1027–31. For the impact of dressing up on the participants at the Panathenaia, see Neils 1996, 189–93. Changing clothes replicates the ritual purpose of the procession, the presentation of a newly woven peplos for the cult image of Athena (Barber 1992, 103–17, and Ridgway 1992, 122–24). 104. Sommerstein 1989 on 1044. In A. Su. 605–24, a democratized Argos receives the Danaids as metics (Johansen and Whittle 1980 on 609), offering them appropriate guarantees, just as Athena offers the Furies metic status and honors befitting their divinity in Eumenides. 105. The frequent references to metics would bring to mind the contemporary metic population in Athens (Whitehead 1977, 6 and 34–38), many of whom were in the audience (Sommerstein 1997, 66–67). 106. Aeschylus uses a similar phrase for the Persian Artabes, killed at Salamis (Pers. 318–19), as does Sophocles when Theseus threatens Creon with “permanent metic status” (i.e., death and burial in Athens) at OC 934–35. See also Eur. Hcld. 1030–33. 107. Garvie 1988 on 969–71. Until this point Aeschylus emphasizes the Furies’ immovability from the house of Atreus: Ag. 1186–97, Cho. 566, 696–99, 800–806 (Garvie on 698–99 and 800–806). 108. McGlew 1993, 190–96; Sommerstein 1989 on 990–91; Nussbaum 1986, 41–42 and 49–50; J. P. Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1981, 23–25 n.3; G. Harris, “Furies, Witches and Mothers,” in The Character of Kinship, ed. J. Goody (Cambridge 1973) 155, and S. Sa¨ıd, “Concorde et civilisation dans les Eum´enides,” in Zehnacker 1983, 97–121. 109. DuBois 1988, 68: “like the Eumenides, they [women in classical Athens] are

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buried, made insignificant in the political life of the city.” Cf. H. Lloyd-Jones, “Erinyes, Semnai Theai, Eumenides,” in Craik 1990b, 203–11, on the chthonic origin and nature of the Furies. MacLachlan 1993, 144–46, notes that the Furies’ transformation—far from the “burlesque” that Rosenmeyer 1982, 355–66, finds—“follows the traditional sequence, in ritual appropriate for chthonic deities,” accomplishing the “conversion of punishment into charis that dominates the end of the play.” 110. Isoc. Paneg. 24, Guthrie 1957, 24, and my chapter 1. 111. Patterson 1998, 84, 106, 140–48, 156–57 (quotation at 145); for the house in “soci´et´es a` maison” as a primary social agent, see Bloch 1992, 69 and 74–75. 112. The Furies return the prospects of marriage to a world where marriages have run amok—Helen and Paris, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Similarly, childbearing, if not denied outright (Ag. 115–20, 1207–8, Cho. 1006), threatens or leads to the early death of the children (Ag. 227–30, 1219–22, 1242–43, 1415–18, Cho. 242, 262–63, 503–6); alternatively, offspring grow into killers (Ag. 758–60, Cho. 527–34, 805, 896–98). 113. In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus finds the Furies only after traveling to Athens; they don’t rise up to haunt him after the murder of his father at the crossroads, recounted in Oedipus Tyrannus. Their residence in Athens seems permanent (Padel 1992, 170). 114. Griffith 1995. 115. S. OC 1518–55; also Visser 1982, 422–23, and Kearns 1989, 49–50 and 53. 116. Regarding animals on the tragic stage, recall that Agamemnon arrives on a four-wheeled cart (ap¯en¯e), pulled by some sort of draft animal(s). Sommerstein 1989 on 1021–47 (and p. 34) reckons “a total of about 35 persons,” including a herald and trumpeter from Orestes’ trial and other supernumeraries. Podlecki 1989 on 1028 (and pp. 16, 125) thinks a group representing “both sexes and all ages of Athenian citizens” joined the procession, as well as mute attendants, and the cult image of Athena, which he believes stayed onstage through the trial (followed by Wiles 1997, 211–12). The preponderance of female characters at the trilogy’s close reflects the important role women played in the Panathenaia, particularly concerning the peplos of Athena. See Lefkowitz 1996, 80–81; H. A. Shapiro, “Democracy and Imperialism: The Panathenaia in The Age of Perikles,” in Neils 1996, 220–22; and Maurizio 1998, 303–4, 308–9, and 313–17 (women in the procession). 117. Athena tells the Furies their new homes will be near her temple (855); the actual site lay between the Areopagos and the northwest slope of the Acropolis (Sommerstein 1989, 10). 118. Arist. Ath.Pol. 12.4. The first offering made by the Panathenaic procession on reaching the Acropolis went to the goddess G¯e (Earth) in her role as kourotrophos ‘nurse of children’ (Price 1978, 101–32). 119. Guthrie 1950, 6; O. Becker, Das Bild des Weges und verwandte Vorstellungen im fruhgriechischen ¨ Denken (Berlin 1937) 85–89, also 179–81, 191–92, and 203–4. Justice as a straight path also occurs at Ag. 761, and Aeschylus uses a cluster of images that associate wrongdoing with “trampling” untouchable things (Fraenkel 1950 on 372). As Clytemnestra says, “Lay out the path of red silk / so that Justice may lead him to the home he never hoped to see” (Ag. 910–11). Benveniste 1973, 385–88, emphasizes the link between dik¯e and the root *deik- ‘show’ (leading to “say”), while noting the Sanskrit root *dis’- ‘direction’, ‘region’. Chantraine 1983 (s.v. dik¯e, p. 284)

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also traces the etymology to deiknumi ‘show’, ‘point out’, with the suggestion of a “marked line.” For a similar development in S. OC from a literal to a metaphorical use of hodos, see P. E. Easterling, “Oedipus and Polyneices,” PCPhS 13 (1967) 11–12. 120. On the expansion of the Furies’ function, see Seaford 1994, 103–5 and 132– 34. My sense of the dramatic purpose of the procession differs from A. Kavoulaki, “Processional Performance and the Polis,” in Goldhill and Osborne 1999, 306–9, who argues for a postmodern, nonnormative reading of the procession as delineating “the ‘how’ ” (her term). Cf. Maurizio 1998. 121. Sommerstein 1989 on 1047 thinks they did. Athena sets the stage by referring to the audience (perhaps directly) as Athenian citizens: ast¯on t¯onde, honored “by these citizens here” (807); toisde politais, “to these citizens here” (854, 991); t¯on dikai¯on t¯ond’, the race “of these just people here” (912). 122. Hall 1997, 118–26; Easterling 1997a, 23–25; Griffith 1995; and generally Saxenhouse 1992, esp. xi-xii. Cf. Loraux 1991 and 1993, esp. 134–38, who insists that the trilogy enacts and supports hegemonic unity. 123. H. Od. 12.49–55, 177–80, 194–200; Eur. HF 1094–97, where Heracles compares himself to a ship moored by hawsers. For other characters bound to a column or pillar, see Od. 22.173, 187 (Melanthios); S. Aj. 105–6 (Ajax thinks that he’s bound Odysseus), 239–40, 298–300 (the ram); A. PV 1–87 (Prometheus to a rock); Eur. Andromeda, Nauck fr. 125 (Andromeda to a rock). Theseus mentions that the gods bind each other (HF 1316–18), and Heracles says that he “imitates” (ekmim¯esomai) Ixion bound to his wheel (1298); see also Faraone 1992, 74–75. For binding and fate, see Onians 1951, 321–37, 349–51, 378–82. 124. The orchestra altar makes spatial sense of the play’s focus on movement to and from the house; a stage altar would limit this movement and so deny the play its most significant spatial dynamic (Rehm 1988, 302–3); cf. Bond 1981, 61; Hourmouziades 1965, 27, 45–46, 61, and 75; Arnott 1962, 48 and 51–53. Foley 1985, 152, mistakenly locates the setting at “the altar of the temple of Zeus Sot¯ ¯ er.” There is no such temple, visible or implied, in the play. 125. Bond 1981 on 240ff. offers historical and literary parallels; see also Griffin 1998, 56–58. 126. Kitto 1961, 242, aptly describes the first part of the tragedy as dramatizing “the absence of the great man.” 127. The most persuasive argument for the debate’s relevance remains that of Arrowsmith 1954, 84, namely “to transform the bow of Heracles into the problematic emblem of his courage.” However, we can imagine more effective ways of developing the symbolic importance of Heracles’ bow than by launching into a lengthy legalistic disputation. Other discussions include Foley 1985, 169–75; R. Hamilton, “Slings and Arrows: The Debate with Lycus in the Heracles,” TAPA 115 (1985) 19–25; and D. B. George, “Euripides’ Heracles 140–235: Staging and the Stage Iconography of Heracles’ Bow,” GRBS 35 (1994) 145–57. 128. Halleran 1985, 82–83. 129. Amphitryon’s final judgment of Zeus will prove even truer as the play progresses: “Either you are the kind of god who lacks moral feeling, or you are not by nature just” (amath¯es tis ei theos e¯ dikaios ouk ephus, 347). On amath¯es indicating a lack of moral feeling, see Owen 1939 on Ion 916, and Dover 1974, 122. 130. Pace Burnett 1971, 159–65.

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131. Bond 1981 on 348ff. 132. Keeping the manuscript reading Euxeinon at 410 rather than Markland’s emendation axeinon, adopted by Diggle and Bond. 133. By moving from an encomium for Heracles and his twelve labors to a threnody for his (and his family’s) death, the ode comes full circle, mirroring Apollo’s shift from paean to lament with which it began (348–52); see H. Parry, The Lyric Poems of Greek Tragedy (Toronto 1979) 158–59, and Bond 1981 on 348ff. 134. Barlow 1982, 116, 119–21, and 1986, 37–38. 135. Renehan 1985, 157–58. 136. Rehm 1994a, 32. 137. The powerful emotional resonance of these rituals for a fifth-century audience helps obscure the fact that Euripides arranges for two seemingly impossible states of affairs: Heracles’ family faces death, the sentence all but carried out; and the agent of death (Lycus) is absent from the stage. 138. Megara’s similar use of exodos (83) to describe the passages out of Thebes that Lycus has closed off suggests that Heracles’ family is locked in the theater orchestra. Although we cannot establish these terms as the fifth-century words for theatrical “entrance” and “exit,” at Ar. Nu. 326, Av. 296, and fr. 403 K-A, eisodos is used for the side entrances into the theater (Taplin 1977, 449–50). In the fifth century, exodos could refer to the music that accompanied the chorus’s final exit; see Ar. Vesp. 582 (and scholia), Cratinus fr. 307 K-A, and Taplin 1977, 472–73. 139. Literally, “if I will not labor to completion the death of my children.” We construct this to mean “avert the death of my children” (although cf. Bond 1981 on 581), but the verbal irony momentarily shocks the audience. See J. M. Bremer, “Euripides’ Heracles 581,” CQ 22 (1972) 236–40. Euripides plants a seed that grows monstrously, connecting Heracles’ past labors with the one he will accomplish when, struck mad, he murders his wife and children. 140. Bond 1981 on 582; for epinician use, evoking the aristocratic connection between military and athletic conquest, see Rose 1992, 159–60, 162; D. C. Young, Pindar Isthmian 7: Myth and Exempla, Mnemosyne supp. 15 (Leiden 1971) 39–42; and Bowra 1964, 183–86. 141. Il. 1.4, 17.558, 21.214–21, 22.336, and Segal 1971, 9–56. W. R. Connor, “The Razing of the House in Greek Society,” TAPA 115 (1985) 79–102 (esp. 89–90), places this practice in its wider legal and religious context, pointing out that Heracles’ threat to Lycus’ house turns into the destruction of his own. Cropp 1986, 188, lists other parallels between the two mortal enemies. The fact that the same actor plays both Lycus and Heracles (unmentioned by Connor or Cropp) adds to the irony. 142. The choral ode that follows Heracles’ exit with his family praises the hero for “slaying the terror of wild beasts” (700). Lycus (Lukos, the “wolf”) walks in on the next line, another wild animal to destroy, but one that first must be lured into a trap. 143. Wilamowitz 1895, 1:108–10, cautiously endorsed by Bond 1981, xxviii–xxx and 62. Lesky 1983, 284, states unequivocally, “The meaning of this reversal [placing the madness and filicide after the labors rather than before] is also the meaning of the play.” 144. Hera drives the onslaught, but Zeus oversees it, protecting Heracles only for the period of his labors (827–32, 840–42, 848, 855, 859). For the gods’ use of the m¯echan¯e here, see Mastronarde 1990, 260–61 and 268–69.

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145. Stinton 1975, 251. 146. Bond 1981 on 853. At 177–80 and 1192–94, Amphitryon mentions Heracles’ fighting on the side of the gods at Phlegraia. 147. Chomsky’s ironic observation seems relevant: “There are no arguments that I know of for irrationality” (1987, 22). 148. Euripides may have had Iris step back onto the crane to “fly off,” while Lyssa enters the house through a trap in the roof, or via a ladder behind the sk¯en¯e (Lee 1982, 45). To have her in front of the sk¯en¯e and enter through the central door (Bond on 815, if I understand him correctly) seems far too polite. The chariot of Madness, mentioned by the Chorus (880–82), is surely metaphorical (see Webster 1967, 189– 90, and Lee 1982, 45–46). 149. Redfield 1975, 136. 150. For the effective equivalence of the domestic altar of Zeus Herkeios and of Hestia, see Bond 1981 on 599; Fraenkel 1950 on Ag. 1056; Cook 1914–40, 1:303 n.6, 2:259 n.0 and 317 n.2; W. Suss, ¨ RE 8:1300–1301 (s.v. “Hestia”); O. Jessen, RE 8:686– 87 (s.v. “Herkios”); and Burkert 1985, 255. The classic act of violence at the herkeios altar is Neoptolemus’ brutal murder of Priam at the sack of Troy (see chapter 3). 151. See Od. 22.437–40, 22.480–94, 23.49–57. The description of the sacrifice (922–30) provides important information on actual sacrificial practice in fifth-century Athens; also Eur. El. 791–839 (and Denniston 1939 on 791ff.), and Ar. Pax 956– 1038 (with comic embellishments). 152. HF 936–40; also 17–21, 388, 578–80. 153. So Barlow 1986, 75: “Euripides so handles setting in the messenger speech that the hero’s madness actually manifests itself in the way he interprets his surroundings.” 154. At lines 49, 180, 570, 582, 681, 789, and 1046. 155. In the Lion Gate relieving triangle at Mycenae, the single pillar stands for the entire city. See A.J.B. Wace, Mycenae: An Archaeological History and Guide (Princeton 1949) 29–31, 36; G. E. Mylonas, Ancient Mycenae (London 1957) 86, 89–93; Vermeule 1979, 68–70. In Attic vase painting a column frequently indicates a house (see, e.g., Robinson, CVA 2, p. 49 and p. 36), and the image operates in epic and elsewhere as symbolic of the entire house or its master: Od. 1.33, 6.305–9; h.Cer. 185–86; P. Ol. 1.81–82, P. 4.267; A. Ag. 897–98; Anth.Pal. 7.441. 156. Faraone 1992, 59. 157. Dionysiac imagery, now associated with Heracles’ hellish madness, recurs at 1122 and 1142, following earlier occurrences at 891–99, 966, 1027, and 1085. 158. The depiction of the underworld in the play exploits the popular Greek image of Hades as a house. Hades has “gates” or “doors” at Il. 5.646, 8.367, 13.415, and 23.71; Od. 11.277 and 14.156; Hes. Th. 773 (see West 1966, 364–65); A. Ag. 1291; S. OC 1569–70; Eur. Alc. 126, etc. It is a “house” at S. Ant. 1241 and Tr. 120–21; Eur. Alc. 25, 436–37, 626, 852, and 867; and quite literally in Ar. Ran. See my note 155; Vermeule 1979, 35–37; and S. R. Roberts, The Attic Pyxis (Chicago 1978) 182– 85. 159. See Bond 1981 on 1155 and on 1232–34; Connor 1996, 118–19; Yoshitake 1994; Parker 1983, 218–20, 308–21; Vickers 1973, 153–56. Cf. Dunn 1996, 118– 19, who claims unpersuasively that Theseus’ actions are “emptied of all force and authority,” making him powerless and devoid of respect.

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160. Note the parallel fear of “spectacular contagion” manifest by some Shakespearean characters—for example, Henry with Margaret, Henry VI, pt. 2, 3.2.73–75 (Mullaney 1995, 34). Like Creon in S. Ant. 1043, Theseus may reflect Protagoras’ claim than no mortal can pollute the divine (Bond 1981 on 1232–34). 161. It appears that Heracles first stands when he utters the imperative akoue d¯e nun (“Now listen . . .,“ 1255) and recounts his past sufferings (1255–1310), a speech too long to deliver from his knees. Heracles later sinks back down, perhaps after picking up his bow and arrows (1376–85); he is not standing when Theseus tells him to rise, and he responds that he cannot because his limbs are frozen (1394–95). For the symbolism of unveiling and standing, see Gernet 1981, 244–46 and 251–52. 162. As Grube 1941, 246 points out, “the word mutheuousa refers to fiction.” 163. Quoted by Murdoch 1977, 75. 164. H. Parry, “The 2nd Stasimon of Euripides’ Heracles (637–700),” AJP 86 (1965) 363–74, and The Lyric Poems of Greek Tragedy (Toronto 1979) 158–59; Bond 1981 on 348ff. and on 763–814. 165. Cf. the piling up off choral lyric at the end of Helen, where the first stasimon begins at line 1107 (to 1164), and two more occur in the last five hundred lines (1301–68 and 1451–1511). See R. Rehm, “Performing the Chorus: Choral Action, Interaction, and Absence in Euripides,” Arion 4 (1996) esp. 55–59. P. Wilson, “Euripides’ Tragic Muse,” in Cropp, Lee, and Sansone 2000 (esp. 434–39) discusses the “negative mousik¯e” of the play, and Henrichs 1996 (54–62 on HF) differentiates choral self-reference (calling attention to their dancing while they dance) and choral projection (when the group mentions dancing prior to or after the present moment, or refers to dancing by other choruses). 166. The debate on the meaning and significance of Heracles’ theology (literally, his “words about god”) continues. See S. E. Lawrence, “The God That Is Truly God and the Universe of Euripides’ Heracles,” Mnem. 51 (1998) 129–46; Yoshitake 1994, 140–53; Lefkowitz, “ ‘Impiety’ and ‘Atheism’ in Euripides’ Dramas,” CQ 39 (1989) 70–82; Yunis 1988, 139–71; D. Furley, “Euripides and the Sanity of Herakles,” in Studies in Honour of T.B.L. Webster, ed. J. H. Betts, J. T. Hooker, and J. R. Green (Bristol 1986) 102–13; M. R. Halleran, “Rhetoric, Irony and the Ending of Euripides’ Heracles,” CA 5 (1986) 171–81; R. Schleiser, “Heracles et la critique des dieux chez Euripide,” AnnPisa 15 (1985) 7–40; Pucci 1980, 175–87 (revealing once again the paradox at the heart of logos); A. L. Brown, “Wretched Tales of Poets: Euripides, Heracles 1340–6,” PCPhS 24 (1978) 22–30; Stinton 1976, 81–84; Vickers 1973, 320–25; Burnett 1971, 173–79; A. Adkins, “Basic Greek Values in Euripides’ Hecuba and Hercules Furens,” CQ 16 (1966) 192–219; H.H.O Chalk, “Aret¯e and Bia in Euripides’ Herakles,” JHS 82 (1962) 7–18; Arrowsmith 1954, 175–78; Grube 1941, 57– 62; A. W. Verrall, Essays on Four Plays of Euripides (Cambridge 1905) 191; and, closely related, C. Riedweg, “The ‘Atheistic’ Fragment from Euripides’ Bellerophantes (286N2),” ICS 15 (1990) 39–53. Burkert 1985, 305–32, gives an exemplary account of the rise of “philosophical religion,” in which Heracles’ speech holds a central position (318). 167. It is hard to disagree with Arrowsmith 1954, 182, that Hera becomes an umbrella term for “fate, necessity, tuch¯e, or disaster, the objective description of Heracles’ sufferings, but also . . . the unnameable power that imposes man’s condition upon him.” For Yunis 1988, 171, Heracles “recognizes how perversely the gods repaid

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his piety, and then renounces the forms and significance of the relationship between himself and immoral gods.” Cf. the dramatically deadly judgment of Strauss 1993, 116: “The stolid Herakles . . . is a Dorian of old-fashioned piety,” while Theseus represents “a sophistic wheeler-dealer.” 168. For the complicated political relationships involving the triad HeraclesTheseus-Athens, see W. R. Connor, “Theseus in Classical Athens,” in The Quest for Theseus, ed. A. G. Ward (New York 1970) 143–74; Boardman 1975, 1982, and 1988, 421–23; K. Schefold and F. Jung, Die Urk¨onige, Perseus, Bellerophon, Herakles und Theseus in der klassischen und hellenistischen Kunst (Munich 1988); Kearns 1989, 45– 46, 108, 116–24; Walker 1995, 49–53; Mills 1997, 22–29. 169. E. B. Harrison, “Athena and Athens in the East Pediment of the Parthenon,” AJA 71 (1967) 43–45; H. Lloyd-Jones, “Heracles or Dionysus,” AJA 74 (1970) 181. Later in the century, Heracles appeared with Theseus and Perithoos in the underworld on one of four three-figured reliefs that may have surrounded the altar of the twelve Gods (see chapter 1) as part of its repair. See E. B. Harrison, “Hesperides and Heroes,” Hesperia 33 (1964) 76–82; cf. Gadberry, 1992, 483. 170. Kearns 1989, 35–36 and 166; Shapiro 1989, 158–63; Burkert 1985, 207–11 (“The gods are remote, the heroes are near at hand”); S. Woodford, “Cults of Heracles in Attica,” in Mitten, Pedley, and Scott 1971, 211–25, who notes (219 n.117) the probable existence of a cult of Heracles on the south slope of the Acropolis (perhaps within sight of the theater—see also Guen-Pollett 1991, 60–61); and generally, Foley 1985, 194–95 and 199–200. 171. Burkert 1985, 211; Rusten 1983, 297; Dodds 1973, 154. Given the play’s focus on Heracles’ madness and the destruction of his oikos, the inscription would underline the tragedy of Euripides’ version when the audience returned home.

CHAPTER THREE EREMETIC SPACE

1. Hdt. 3.98 and 5.9; Heidel 1937, 16 n.36. 2. Thuc. 7.77.7, also 1.143.5. 3. For the idea that people make the city in Greek society, see A. Pers. 347, Hdt. 8.61.2, Xen. Anab. bk. 3 (in Hippolyte Taine’s memorable phrase, the Greek mercenaries constituted “a polis on the move”), Isoc. Arch. 72–84; also J. Dillery, Xenophon and the History of His Times (London 1995) 92–98; Burford 1993, 11; Owens 1991, 2; Hansen 1991, 58–59; Demand 1990, 7–8; and G. B. Nussbaum, The Ten Thousand: A Study in Social Organization and Action in Xenophon’s Anabasis (Leiden 1967), esp. 1– 13 and 147–52. In similar fashion, Thucydides refers to Athenians and Lacedaemonians, not to Athens and Sparta; see also chapter 1. Menander calls his social hermit Knemon apanthr¯opos ‘away from [other] humans’ (M. Dys. 5); Aeschylus uses the same word for the “deserted crag” (apanthr¯opos pagos, PV 20) to which Prometheus is bound. 4. Lowe 1987, 127. 5. Seale 1982, 85. 6. Easterling 1997a, 26–28, noting that Sophocles otherwise keeps the corpse’s location vague; cf. Griffith 1999 on 1196–98.

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7. “The word for seeing comes unexpectedly at the end, making it vivid and hideous” (Winnington-Ingram 1980, 124). 8. These terms also are used for “lookouts” and “spies”; see W. K. Pritchett, Ancient Greek Military Practices, UCPubClS, vol. 7 (Berkeley 1971) 128–30. 9. Reinhardt 1979, 79. 10. Seaford 1990 explores the links in tragedy between imprisonment and marriage. 11. Jones 1962, 203, applying the phrase to Oedipus’ verbal cadenza on the theme of his incest; the idea also fits the spatial perversions of Antigone’s punishment. 12. For her wedding-like consummation with Hades, see Rehm 1994a, 63–65, and Segal 1981, 179–81 and 192–93. 13. Emphasizing that Creon leads her off by seizing her hand (agei . . . dia cher¯on . . . lab¯on, 916), Antigone refers ironically to the cheir epi karp¯oi (hand on wrist) gesture of the Athenian wedding ritual (Rehm 1994a, 14–17 and 35–40). 14. Although no formula exists for the arrival of prophets in tragedy, they usually come only when sought. Seale 1982, 101–3, offers astute comments on the “new and unexpected directions” that Teiresias takes the play, as does Bushnell 1988, 45 and 56–61. 15. LSJ, s.v. kalupt¯o I.1. Instead of being covered by the earth, Polyneices’ body is “sanctified with funerary rites” (kath¯egnisan, 1081) by vultures who “bury” it in their stomachs; see both Griffith 1999 and Jebb 1900 on 1081. 16. We may compare Greek burial customs with those of Egypt, where the wealthy dead were preserved from disintegration via embalming and mummification. E. Panofsky, Tomb Culture (New York n.d.) 12–22, describes the transition in treatment of the dead from “the ‘prospective’ to the ‘retrospective,’ from the magic manipulation of the future to the imaginative commemoration of the past” that differentiates Egyptian from Greek practice. 17. Rehm 1994a, 180 n.5; Knox 1964, 91–98. 18. Patterson 1998, 112; cf. Knox 1964, 91, for the standard opposition between loyalty to blood versus loyalty to polis. 19. According to Parker 1983, 44, the extraordinary effects of the unburied corpse indicate “less a ‘natural pollution’ than a cosmic sanction operating against the violation of a fundamental social principle, the individual’s right to burial.” 20. Reading the manuscripts’ eperchetai rather than Herwerden’s and Pallis’ conjecture hyperchetai, adopted by Lloyd-Jones and Wilson 1990. 21. Cf. Gardiner 1987, 94–95 n.21, and Podlecki 1980, 72–73. 22. Seale 1982, 104–5. 23. For the sexual nature of Haimon’s suicide, and its fusion of wedding and funeral elements, see note 12. 24. See the discussion of Heracles, chapter 2. 25. For Megareus, see Rehm 1994a, 67–68. 26. Whereas Haimon thrusts the sword “into his side” (1236), his mother drives it in “under the liver” (1315), that is, into the womb, obliterating the reproductive source of her family. 27. Segal 1995a, 133–34; Rehm 1994a, 67. 28. For the correspondence between Antigone and Eurydice, see Segal 1995a, 126–27.

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29. For the use of the ekkukl¯ema here, see Jebb 1900 on 1294; Dale 1969, 122; Kamerbeek 1978 on 1293; Brown 1987 on 1293; cf. Griffith 1999 on 1293. 30. Patterson 1990, 61, and 1998, 2–4. 31. At 1080–83, Teiresias intimates the future destruction of Thebes, because Creon refuses to bury the Argive Seven, which prompts the epigonoi to return and sack the city; see Griffith 1999 on 1080–83, and my introduction. 32. Stanford 1963 on 657; March 1991–93, 30–32. 33. Stanford 1963, lxii. Cf. Scullion 1990, 162–86, who argues unpersuasively that Ajax circles back to the front of his tent and there commits suicide. 34. As noted in chapter 2, Choephori “forgets” the palace facade for the first half of the play, focusing instead on Agamemnon’s tomb. But the palace remains in the background. The sk¯en¯e, of course, remains in Ajax, but it no longer signals the tent of Ajax; see note 72. 35. See the Embassy scene (Il. 9.185–668) and the encounter between Priam and Achilles (24.448–676). Patroclus and Achilles sleep with captive women (9.664–68), and Achilles retires with Briseis (24.675–76), whom he calls his “wife” (alochos, 9.336), with a formal wedding in Thessaly in the offing (19.291–99). 36. Edwards 1987, 220–21 and 307–13, provides a masterful account of Homer’s transformations of epic conventions in these interior scenes, especially book 24. 37. Scully 1990, 26–27 and 54–64, discusses the Homeric contrast between the Greek camp and the polis of Troy, consisting of an aggregate of oikoi. 38. Although a war prize, Tecmessa seems much more Ajax’ wife than his concubine; see Stanford 1963 on 201, and Segal 1981, 115–16. On her report about the night’s events (esp. Aj. 288–94), Bers 1997, 50–51, notes that “Tecmessa lays before the audience a rarity in tragic conversation, domestic discourse between a man and his ‘significant other’ unwitnessed by chorus and audience until her report.” Cf. Ormond 1999, 110–17. 39. For the link between sacrifice and meat eating, see chapter 1. 40. Even in Ajax’ temporary oikos, “identity is a matter of active relationships, not simple genetic relation,” as Patterson 1998, 199, observes generally of the Greek family. 41. Goldhill 1986a, 186–88, is representative of critics who emphasize Ajax’ “heroic” rejection of the family without appreciating the anomaly of its presence in the first place (cf. Easterling 1997a, 25–26, on the latitude offered by “heroic vagueness”). Compare Philoctetes’ description of his cave as a “home that is no home” (oikos aoikos eisoik¯esis, S. Ph. 534), befitting the only extant tragedy with no female characters. 42. Both here and at 331 the Chorus addresses Tecmessa as “daughter of [the Phrygian ruler] Teleutas,” recalling her royal background. For the importance of the charis theme introduced by Tecmessa, see R. W. Minadeo, “Sophocles’ Ajax and kakia,” Eranos 85 (1987), esp. 21–23, and MacLachlan 1993, 27–28 and 156. 43. Some commentators think he enters from a second door in the tent; this is unlikely (see the following note). 44. Garvie 1998 on 348–595 and on 594–95 has them follow Ajax into the tent; Lloyd-Jones 1994, 87, has the two exit but not into the tent; Stanford 1963 on 595 thinks that they enter the tent via a side door. We have no clear evidence in tragedy of more than one entrance in the sk¯en¯e, and the visual effect of Ajax’ isolation is much

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stronger with mother and son outside, as the text seems to indicate (Gellie 1972, 281 n.9; Knox 1979, 163; Winnington-Ingram 1980, 32 n.65). When Ajax reemerges from the tent for his deception speech, Tecmessa and Eurysakes are already present; they reenter the tent only at Ajax’ explicit command (685–86), just before he departs for the beach. 45. Athena appears at ground-level, not on the roof: see Stanford 1963, 51, Taplin 1978, 40–41, and Garvie 1998 on 1–133. The intimate nature of her exchange with Odysseus and Ajax is far better served by her presence on the same level. To have Athena play the scene from on high ( Jebb 1896, 10, and Seale 1982, 144–49) visually undermines the ironic contrast between her visibility to Ajax and invisibility to Odysseus. 46. See Knox 1961, 2–10 ⳱ 1979, 126–34; Gellie 1972, 4–6; Podlecki 1980, 53–55; Kiso 1984, 1–17; and M. Davis, “Politics and Madness,” in Euben 1986, 144–47. Cf. Linforth 1954, 2–10. 47. Odysseus might subscribe to Virginia Woolf ’s statement from Jacob’s Room: “Life is but a procession of shadows.” Ajax also becomes “a shadow” (skia, 1257) in the eyes of Menelaus. 48. On the shifting perspectives that run through the play, see Segal 1995a, 13–25 (“Drama and Perspective in Ajax”). Their continuity undermines the otherwise illuminating reading of “the show within” Ajax offered by Dobrov 2001, 57–69. Focusing on the metatheatrical aspect of the first scene (“the minidrama”, 59), Dobrov claims it is “intellectually and aesthetically distinct from the greater body of the play in which it is set.” His concentration of the “ ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ ” (68) of Sophocles’ use of dramatic metafiction brings out the play’s artistic sophistication but perhaps at the expense of its substance. 49. The description of Ajax surrounded by his bloody deeds (347, 351–54, 406– 7) indicates that he appears on the ekkukl¯ema, revealing the interior space we have heard so much about ( Jebb 1896 on 346, and Kamerbeek 1963 on 346 and 347). Cf. Stanford 1963 on 348ff. and Pickard-Cambridge 1946, 109–10, who argue against the ekkukl¯ema, referring to Ajax’ order that Tecmessa “stay out” (ouk ektos, literally “Will you not stay outside?” 369). However, his command does not mean that Ajax must literally be inside. The convention of the ekkukl¯ema exposes an interior space, purposefully blurring inside and outside. Restored to sanity, Ajax bids Tecmessa to stay away, consistent with his later request that she close him up in the tent, alone (578–82, 593). 50. See, e.g., R. Douglas-Fairhurst, Times Literary Supplement, July 26, 1996, 18– 19, rev. of Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels, 1840– 1900, by S. Kern. 51. See Ricoeur 1992 for a valuable discussion of seeing “oneself as another.” As T. H. Irwin concludes (“Socrates and the Tragic Hero,” in Pucci 1988, 69), “it would be wrong to suggest that Odysseus’ sympathy is really just concern for himself (as Agamemnon makes it seem, 1366); rather, his concern for himself provokes genuine sympathy for Ajax.” See also Garvie 1998 on 124 (also on 79 and 1365–67) and Jones 1962, 186–91. 52. In simple physical terms, Gibson 1979, 200, reminds us that “observers move, and the same path may be traveled by any observer.” In the opening scene, Odysseus tracks Ajax’ path until he sees the deranged hero toyed with by Athena, perceiving his own position to be closer to that of Ajax than the goddess.

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53. The Chorus later calls him “Ajax of the ill-omened name” (dus¯onumos Aias, 914). See Stanford 1963, 270–71. 54. For parallels between Sophocles’ Ajax and Homer’s Achilles and Hector, see G. Zanker, “Sophocles’ Ajax and the Heroic Values of the Iliad,” CQ 42 (1992) 20–25; O’Higgins 1989; P. E. Easterling, “The Tragic Homer,” BICS 31 (1984) 1–8; and G. M. Kirkwood, “Homer and Sophocles’ Ajax,” in Classical Drama and Its Influence, ed. M. J. Anderson (London 1965) 53–70. 55. Scholars who view the plot of Ajax as a diptych—Kirkwood, Waldock, Webster, etc.—inevitably see the second “panel” beginning after Ajax’ suicide; for them, the scene change does not constitute the break. This line of criticism has diminished interest in the shift in setting, focusing instead on the change in tone following the suicide. Cf. Heath 1987, 195–97. 56. Recall the comparable change effected by Megara in HF, discussed in chapter 2. 57. For the tragic vagaries of “one day,” see Mastronarde 1994 on Pho. 1689, and Fraenkel 1955, 23–39 (English version, “Man’s ‘Ephemeros’ Nature according to Pindar and Others,” TAPA 77 [1946] 131–45); on “barrier time” as a limit set for action or disaster, see S. L. Higdon, Time and English Fiction (London 1977) 9–11. 58. De Man 1979, 78. 59. P. Holt, “Ajax’ Ailment,” Ramus 9 (1980) 29, notes that “the author of change is impersonal time (646f ), not meddlesome gods, and Ajax finds his examples of change in the natural order of the world (669–76), not in the supernatural disruptions of that order.” Rosenmeyer 1963, 155–98 (“Tragedy and Time”) discusses time in Ajax as both a container (determining and revealing character) and an aggressor (killing it). On the Greek sense of human time generally, see Sorabji 1988 (esp. ch. 12), and Fraenkel 1955, 22–39. 60. See Epidemics I (1.26), and Furley 1989, 223. 61. Furley 1989, 32–33; see also Sambursky 1987, 53–54, on the ancient view that heavenly reiterability offered a clear sign of cosmic intelligence. 62. Blundell 1989, 64–65 and 85; Davis in Euben 1986, 151–56. 63. W. Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), in Hamlet, ed. C. Hoy, 2nd ed. (New York 1992) 167. Although both Hamlet and Ajax try (one by feigned madness, the other by feigned change-of-heart), neither can live up to the advice of Theognis (215–17): “Keep your temperament that of the polymorphic polyp, which takes on / the semblance of whatever rock it converses with; / now imitate this one, and now take on a different hue.” 64. Taplin 1978, 102–4; Smyth and Lloyd-Jones 1957, 407–8; and Jebb 1896, xii–xxiii, for the suicide in earlier tragedies and the Epic Cycle. 65. On the eternal landscape against which Ajax measures human mutability, see Knox 1961, 19 (⳱ 1979, 142). Kuhn 1942, 80–83, views nature as a “receptacle for his overflowing passion,” symbolizing Ajax’ “tragic solitude and freedom.” For Parry 1957, 20–21, the tragic hero ultimately has no place in society or nature: “He cannot, like the hero of the romantic comedy, go to nature and then return, bringing its virtues with him.” 66. See Knox 1961, 20 (⳱ 1979, 143–44). 67. For Ajax’ “epicizing” of his suicide, see O’Higgins 1989, 49–52, who concludes that Ajax “ ‘writes’ his own death as the completed combat promised and denied him in the Iliad.” Easterling 1988, 96–97, observes how Ajax’ burial recalls that of Hector in Iliad 24, bringing Ajax’ wild career to an epic close.

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68. The phrase is Rosenmeyer’s (1963, 185). 69. Ley 1988, 92; Seale 1982, 163–67; Webster 1970b, 17–18; Reinhardt 1979, 29 and 238–39 (“the ekkukl¯ema resolves all the difficulties”). Stanford 1963 on 865– 66 allows for the possibility that the ekkukl¯ema was used, but prefers the suicide close to the sk¯en¯e door, as does Arnott 1962, 131–33 (with the door closing after he falls inside the doorway), Kamerbeek 1963 on 814, Taplin 1978, 189 n.5, and Seale 1982, 163. Lloyd-Jones 1994, 105, imagines the suicide at the side of the stage so the body can fall out of sight of the audience; Heath 1987, 192–94, suggests improbably that Ajax exits after his soliloquy and simply dies offstage; Garvie 1998 on 815–65 and 985–89 imagines (even more improbably) that stagehands bring out a screen that hides the sk¯en¯e door, behind which Ajax commits suicide and Tecmessa later covers him with her robe. 70. In chapter 2, we note a similar problem with the scene change in Eumenides, where the presence of stagehands would interrupt the flow of the Furies out of the theater (Apollo’s temple at Delphi) and the arrival of the pursued Orestes into the orchestra (Athena’s temple in Athens). 71. Tragic poets frequently use plural for singular (Stanford 1963, 272–73), so the issue remains open. 72. Lloyd-Jones 1994, 105, Scullion 1990 (see note 33), and Stanford 1963 on 984–85 (contradicted at 815ff.?) think that the tent remains visible—highly unlikely in my view. 73. Knox 1961, 2 (⳱ 1979, 126). 74. Burian 1972; Easterling 1988, 93–95; March 1991–93, 31; cf. Henrichs 1993, 166–68, who argues that the corpse already has achieved heroic cult status. 75. Burian 1972, 155, and my notes 94 and 96. Regarding funeral ritual, not only does the family fight for burial, but the locks that Eurysakes holds of Tecmessa’s, Teukros’, and his own hair (1173–79) make appropriate offerings for the dead (A. Cho. 6–7, and Kamerbeek 1963 on Aj. 1171, 1172). 76. See Pavlovskis 1977, esp. 113–14, and Cohen 1999, 30–53. 77. F. Jouan, “R´eflexions sur le role ˆ du protagoniste tragique,” in Zehnacker 1983, 71–73, and M. McCall, “The Trachiniae: Structure, Focus, and Heracles,” AJP 93 (1972) 142 and 162. 78. Teukros’ role as Ajax’ protector neatly reverses their relationship in the Iliad; see R. J. Edgeworth, “Ajax and Teucer in the Iliad,” Rivista di Filologia 113 (1985) 27– 31. On the play’s division of parts, see Garvie 1998, p. 17 and on 1223–40. 79. Sophocles’ lost Teukros seems to have borne this out, dealing with Teukros’ return to Salamis and forced departure to Cyprus; see Jebb 1896, xlvi–xlvii. 80. J. F. Davidson, “Sophoclean Dramaturgy and the Ajax Burial Debates,” Ramus 14 (1985) 16–29, summarizes critical opinion on the two debates. 81. As Rosenmeyer 1963, 190, puts it, “the rhetoric of the soul gives way to the rhetoric of the forum.” See also Goldhill 1986a, 194–96, and Stanford 1963, xliii–l. Language reflecting Athenian public discourse is not limited to the last part of the play: Knox 1961, 23–25 (⳱ 1979, 147–48) points out Ajax’ contemptuous use of tois polloisi, “to the many” (682), “a clich´e of Athenian democratic language.” Rose 1995, 63 and 69–74, observes that by attributing the award of Achilles’ arms to a vote of the Greek army, Sophocles “makes the decision a direct judgment by the community about its own leadership,” a democratic move that aligns with the Athe-

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nian election of strat¯egoi (see chapter 1). On the award of the armor, see A. M. van Erp Taalman Kip, “Truth in Tragedy,” AJP 117 (1996) 524–31. 82. Stanford 1963 on 1073ff., and Ugolini 2000, 102–12. 83. Rose 1995, 73–75; see also Stanford 1963 on 1102–4, Kamerbeek 1963 on 1102, Bowra 1944, 51–54, and Jebb 1896 on 1112. 84. H. Friis Johansen, General Reflection in Tragic Rhesis (Copenhagen 1959) 55; Fraenkel 1950 on Ag. 1629ff.; and Garvie 1998 on 1142–46. 85. Hall 1989, 177; Garvie 1998 on 1260–61, who also notes a possible allusion to the Periclean citizenship law of 451/50 (see chapter 6). 86. Stanford 1963 on 508–9, and Figueira 1991b, 43. 87. See Hdt. 8.21 (ships), 5.89 (festival); also Giovannini 1991, 467–68, and Shapiro 1989, 157. Salamis also played an important role in the Attic festival of the Oschophoria, dedicated to Athena Skiras (Parke 1977, 79–80). 88. H. Il. 3.229, 6.5, and 7.211. See O’Higgins 1989, 45–46, and D. J. Bradshaw, “The Ajax Myth and the Polis,” in Pozzi and Wickersham 1991, 105–6. Homer’s Ajax is the quintessential infantryman, a human wall defending his comrades, a fact recalled by Teukros (Aj. 1273–77) when Ajax “replaces” the breached wall of the Greeks in defense of the ships. 89. Kamerbeek 1963 on 1219, 1220, 1221, 1222; also see my introduction. 90. Arist. Ath.Pol. 27.1–3; Ar. Ec. 197–98; Rose 1995, 69–71; Rhodes 1992, 90– 91; Raaflaub 1991, 575, 581–82; Figueira 1991a, 297–98; Hansen 1991, 126; Meiggs 1975, 439–41; B. Jordan, The Athenian Navy in the Classical Period (Berkeley 1975) 16–20, 210–30; M. Amit, Athens and the Sea, Latomus, vol. 74 (Brussels 1965) 30–49, 57–71; Jones 1957, 7–9, 166–67; also see chapter 1. 91. My adaptation of Sophocles, Ajax, tr. H. Golder and R. Peavere (New York 1999), used in the production I directed at Stanford and Atlanta in 1996. 92. See Stanford 1963 on 1199–1206 (although th¯etes would rarely enjoy formal symposia—see chapter 1, note 129). Kamerbeek 1963 on 1199–1210 concludes that “the pleasures they yearn for are those of fifth-century Athens.” 93. A similar spatial arrangement characterizes Teukros’ return to camp. The Greeks “surround him in a circle” (en kukl¯oi . . . amphest¯esan) and rain down abuse, until he draws his sword in self-defense (723–30); finally Calchas extricates Teukros “from the circle of the royal council” (ek gar sunedrou kai turannikou kuklou, 749–50) and leads him to safety. 94. The cult may have lain within the temenos of Eurysakes on Kolonos Agoraios in the deme of Melite, connected to the Athenian tribe Kekropis and therefore outside the territory of the tribe named for Ajax (Shapiro 1989, 154). 95. A. Henrichs, “The Sobriety of Oedipus,” HSCP 87 (1983) 94–95; see also L. Edmunds, “The Cults and the Legend of Oedipus,” HSCP 85 (1981) 221–38. Cf. Griffin 1998, 52–53. 96. Seaford 1994, 129–30 and 395–402; Henrichs 1993; March 1991–93; Burian 1972; Rosenmeyer 1963, 186–89 and 197–98; Jebb 1896, xxviii–xxxii; cf. Winnington-Ingram 1980, 57–58. Future hero cults also may be intimated in Sophocles’ Electra and Philoctetes; see S. J. Harrison, “Sophocles and the Cult of Philoctetes,” JHS 109 (1989) 173–75. 97. Seaford 1994, 111–16 and 125–39, emphasizes this aspect of hero cults. On the rejection of Odysseus’ participation, see (e.g.) Roberts 1993, 583–86, who fails to

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look beyond the play to the city where it was staged. Perhaps the Athenian audience found some mitigation of Odysseus’ exclusion in the hero cult in which it could participate. 98. On the centripetal function of shrines dedicated to the tribal eponymoi, see E. Kearns, “Between God and Man: Status and Function of Heroes and Their Sanctuaries,” in Schachter 1992, 65–107, esp. 65–78; on Ajax in drinking songs, M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry (Oxford 1961) 379–80, and my note 92 on 1199–1206. 99. For the rich political and cultic legacy of Ajax and offspring in Attica, see Nilsson 1972, 29–36 and 63–65; also March 1991–93, 3–4, 25, and 33. 100. Rose 1995, 62 and 76–79. For strong reservations, see Griffin 1999, 83–89. 101. Lemnos as a slave market also occurs in Proclus’ summary of the lost epic Cypria (Davies 1989, 49). 102. For the relationship between Sophocles’ play and earlier versions, see Jebb 1898, ix–xx; Webster 1967, 61–64, and 1970a, 2–5; Calder 1979, and his “Aeschylus’ Philoctetes,” GRBS 11 (1970) 171–79; Vickers 1973, 300–303; Vidal-Naquet 1981, 176–78; Kamerbeek 1980, 1–6; Mandel 1981, 3–45 (including other versions and summaries); S. D. Olson, “Politics and the Lost Euripidean Philoctetes,” Hesperia 60 (1991) 269–83; and C. W. Muller, ¨ “Euripides’ Philoctetes as a Political Play,” in Sommerstein et al. 1993, 241–52. In Sophocles’ lost Lemniai the island is populated (Segal 1981, 307, 471 n.49, and my note 106). 103. Jebb 1898, xxx–xxxi; Taplin 1988, 72–73. 104. Jebb 1898 on 2; Gellie 1972, 145. 105. Apollodorus (1.9.16) numbers Philoctetes’ father Poeas among the Argonauts; on a populated Lemnos, Philoctetes could have met a half sibling! 106. Smyth and Lloyd-Jones 1957, 412–13; Sutton 1984, 70–71; Lloyd-Jones 1996, 204–5. For a structuralist reading of various myths linked to Lemnos, see Segal 1981, 307–14. 107. Hdt. 4.145, 5.126, 6.137–40; Garvie 1988 on Cho. 631–38, 635–36; Cartledge 1993, 24–26 (who links the Athenian women on Lemnos with the Athenian citizenship law of 451/50); Meiggs 1975, 160 and 424–25 (on cleruchs, tribute, the Acropolis dedication, and the Athenian-ness of the inhabitants); R. Parker, “Athenian Religion Abroad,” in Osborne and Hornblower 1994, 340–42, and Figueira 1991b, 253–56 (on the cleruchy and Athens). For the Pelasgians, see F. Lochner-Huttenbach, ¨ Die Pelasger (Vienna 1960) esp. 102–19. 108. Taplin 1988, 73. 109. Greengard 1987, 8–11, 15–16, and 102–3; for the upheavals in Athens of 411 and the successful Hellespont campaigns of the Athenian navy, see Andrewes 1992, 467–86. Lemnos is strategically located some fifty miles off the coast of Sigeum, slightly further from the entrance to the Hellespont. 110. Thuc. 8.104–6; Xen. Hell. 1.1.4–7, 1.1.11–23; and Diod. 13.49.2. 111. The Spartan fleet under Mindarus had posed a serious threat to the Athenian grain supply; see Andrewes 1992, 483, and Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977, 115–18. 112. Jones 1962, 217. 113. Cook 1968, 92–93, who insists, however, that the emotional effects on the audience constitute the play’s real work. 114. Segal 1981, 292–300. 115. Vickers 1973, 279.

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116. Vidal-Naquet 1981. However, the formal Athenian ephebeia seems to have been instituted by Lycurgus in 336/5 B.C. See Hunter 1994, 151–52; Whitehead 1977, 82; C. P´el´ekides, Histoire de l’´eph´ebie attique des origines a` 31 avant Jesus-Christ (Ecole Fran¸caise d’Ath`enes, Paris 1962); and O. W. Reinmuth, The Ephebic Inscriptions of the Fourth Century B.C. (Leiden 1971), who notes that some organized ephebic training existed at least by the time of Aischines (371/0). Others push the date earlier, including P. Siewert, “The Ephebic Oath in Fifth-Century Athens, JHS 97 (1977) 102– 11, and J. Winkler, “The Ephebes’ Song,” in Winkler and Zeitlin 1990, 28–35; see also Goldhill 1990, 122–25. It is fair to assume that military training of young males (18–20) took place before any “citywide” program, probably undertaken by fathers as part of the initiation of their sons into their phratry. Even so, neither this activity nor the fourth-century military training of ephebes at frontier forts bears much resemblance to Neoptolemus’ journey to Lemnos or to Philoctetes ten-year isolation there, a fact ignored by I. Lada-Richards, “Staging the Ephebeia: Theatrical Role Playing and Ritual Transition in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” Ramus 27 (1998) 1–26. 117. Vidal-Naquet 1981, 179. 118. Rose 1992, 266–330, developing his earlier “Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the Teachings of the Sophists,” HSCP 80 (1976) 49–105. 119. Connor 1971, esp. 87–175; Ober 1989; Lloyd 1987, 95–104 (on the need of the sophoi to gain and hold an audience). 120. Rose 1992, 273–78. See also Greengard 1987, 81–84; Segal 1981, 295–97 and 305; and especially Havelock’s review of the fragments of early Greek “anthropologists” (1957, 104–24). 121. Rose 1992, 275–77, and Guthrie 1969, 135–47 (both with sources). 122. Exemplars include the Athenians in Thucydides’ Melian dialogue and Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias. Rose 1992, 276–78 and 305–19, properly insists that they signal a falling away from, and not the essence of, Sophistic teaching. 123. Rose 1992, 282–319; also Easterling 1988, 35–37. For Odysseus’ instrumentalism, see O’Higgins 1991; Blundell 1989, 184–90; Segal 1981, 328–30; Gill 1980, 140; Knox 1964, 124–27; Linforth 1956, 103–5, 116; W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme (Oxford 1954), 108–11; and Whitman 1951, 179–80. Bowra 1944, 267–88, concludes that Odysseus resembles those men “produced and corrupted by war” (286). 124. Foucault 1986, 27; also see A. Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism (Ithaca 1995) 43–44. 125. Interestingly, all of Foucault’s heterotopias are human creations; he fails to consider nonhuman regions as “other” places. See Bakhtin 1981, xvii–xx, 167–224, and A. Nightingale, “Towards an Ecological Eschatology: Plato and Bakhtin on Other Worlds and Times,” in Bakhtin and the Classics, ed. B. Branham (Evanston, Ill. 2001). 126. Rose 1992, 313. Language associated with learning and instruction occurs prominently (70–71, 387–88, 533–38, 917–18, 1015, 1361, 1387). Other characters (primarily Philoctetes) refer to Neoptolemus as “child” ( pais) or “son” (teknon) over 65 times in the play, indicating the young man’s potential for learning; see H. C. Avery, “Heracles, Philoctetes, Neoptolemus,” Hermes 93 (1965) 285. Blundell 1988 emphasizes Neoptolemus’ education toward virtue under the emotional and moral influence of Philoctetes; see also E. M. Craik, “Sophokles and the Sophists,” AC 49 (1980) 247–54; Easterling 1978, 34 (on Neoptolemus’ “acquisition of insight”); Knox

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1964, 122 (the importance of older figures for the fatherless youth); Reinhardt 1979, 163–67; and H. Weinstock, Sophokles (Wuppertal 1948) 126–29. 127. Easterling 1997a, 33 n.47. Philoctetes describes how Odysseus cast him ashore “friendless, desolate, without a city” (aphilon er¯emon apolin, 1018). 128. Ussher 1990 on 133–34; however Kott 1974, 172–73, notes that Neoptolemus calls on the gods (frequently generically) twenty-two times in the play. 129. So Seamus Heaney entitles his splendid version, The Cure at Troy (New York 1991), sustaining his affirmative reading of the original by removing any irony in Heracles’ appearance ex machina. Heaney has the Chorus take on the demigod’s role in a mystical epiphany, manifesting Philoctetes’ own vision: “Hercules: / I saw him in the fire. . . . / I heard the voice of Hercules in my head.” With these and other alterations, Heaney forges a gospel of forgiveness and sacrifice applicable to Northern Ireland perhaps more than to Sophocles’ play. 130. Jones 1962, 222. 131. Dale 1969, 127–29; Webster 1970a, 8; Seale 1982, 27–28 (with useful comments on the setting). Cf. J. F. Davidson, “The Cave of Philoctetes,” Mnem. 43 (1990) 307–15. Craik 1990a, 81–83, makes the interesting suggestion that the second entrance lies above, on the sk¯en¯e roof, a visual match for the references to the cave’s height (28, 814, 1002—Philoctetes’ threatened suicide from the cliff ). However, the idea of Philoctetes clambering up a backstage ladder and then down again to make his entrance from “within” seems at odds with his lack of mobility. Because there is no time for him to appear above for his threatened suicide, Craik’s staging advantages disappear. 132. “Deceit is the Leitmotiv of Philoctetes,” as Calder 1971, 171, puts it. Although few seem persuaded by his claim that the scene in which Neoptolemus returns the bow is also a ruse, Calder makes telling points about the deceitful nature of Neoptolemus, as well as Odysseus. As Greengard 1987, 5–6 n.3, points out, “What is unique to Philoctetes is that the truth is never sorted out from the fiction; there is no onstage voice of truth to pronounce which of the many secondhand and fabricated pieces of information are in the end correct.” 133. Webster 1970a on 16. 134. Taplin 1978, 67–69, offers a useful summary of “delayed or frustrated exits”; see also Seale 1982, 33–35 and 40–47. 135. Calder 1971, 160–62; Gellie 1972, 151–52; Winnington-Ingram 1980, 292– 93. The fact that critics still ponder the “truth” of Odysseus’ departure without Philoctetes at 1069 underlines how fundamentally riddled the play is with false and ambiguous information. Cf. Gill 1980, 140. 136. J.-P. Vernant, “Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore 1972) 285. 137. For the pun on b´ıos ‘life’ and bi´os ‘bow’, see Ussher 1990 on 931 and VidalNaquet in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1981, 181; cf. Webster 1970a and Jebb 1898 on 931. 138. Neoptolemus has asked the question three times earlier: at the onset of Philoctetes’ seizure (757), after the recovery (895), and when he considers handing over Philoctetes and his bow to Odysseus (908). 139. Taplin 1971, 27–28, comments on the surprise of Odysseus’ ambush. The “perfect timing” of his entrance has led some commentators to claim that Odysseus

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has been hiding onstage earlier—unlikely, given that Sophocles says nothing of it and Odysseus arrives with at least two (mute) sailors. See Ussher 1990 on 981–83 and 1003. Most commentators think Odysseus and crew move in via an eisodos, assuming (correctly in my opinion) that Neoptolemus and Philoctetes are in the orchestra. They leave the cave together at 730, Philoctetes falls asleep at 826 and awakens at 865, and they play out the scene in which Neoptolemus confesses his true plan, arguably moving further and further from the cave as Philoctetes pleads for his bow. 140. I became convinced by Eleanor O’Kell’s paper, “Enter Odysseus: Greek Theatrical Conventions and Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” delivered at the Open University conference “Greek Tragedy: Ancient and Modern,” Jan. 6, 1999 (proceedings at http:// www.open.ac.uk/Arts/classstud/classtud.htm). 141. While not proposing a cave entrance, Taplin 1971, 28, thinks “the general correspondence, and especially the way that Philoctetes hears Odysseus before he sees him, strongly suggests that the two ambushes were staged in an almost identical way.” 142. Taplin 1971, 36–37, emphasizes the comic aspect of Odysseus’ departure, revealing an innate cowardice befitting the “son of Sisyphus” ( Ph. 417, 1311). See also E. M. Craik, “Philoktetes: Sophoklean Melodrama,” AC 48 (1979) 24–27; Rose 1992, 315 n.91; and Greengard 1987, 51–61, on comic and satyric elements in the play. In my view, they underestimate how slippery and dangerous Odysseus is. 143. Recall that Philoctetes as yet has no knowledge of Odysseus’ role, or even of his presence. 144. See Jebb 1898 on 549–50. 145. Philoctetes calls the Greeks “enemies” (echthroi ) at 666, 1215 and 1386 (Odysseus is echthros at 1303); “hateful” (echthiston) at 1377 (used of Neoptolemus at 928 and 1284, after betraying Philoctetes to Odysseus); and “evil” (kakoi ) at 1360, 1361, 1369, 1371, and 1372. See Blundell 1989, 196–210. 146. Like Sophocles’ Ajax (see chapter 3), Philoctetes realizes that by fighting the Trojans he will only help the hated Atreidae and Odysseus, the cumulative effect of lines 263–65, 315–17, 403–11, 585–86, 791–95, 1020–24, 1040–44, 1213–16, 1285–86, 1302–3, 1354–72, and 1383–92. 147. Easterling 1978, 37–38. 148. Bers 1981, 500–502, and Knox 1964, 191 n.30. Davies 1989, 58–66, covers other stories of Achilles’ arms in the epic cycle. 149. O’Higgins 1991, 42: “Even as Neoptolemus accuses one man of theft [Odysseus], he himself appropriates someone else’s tragedy [Ajax]”—an act he repeats by taking Philoctetes’ bow. 150. As Blundell 1988, 146, notes, “Odyssean corruption . . . may have more farreaching consequences than any of the characters foresees.” For other misrepresentations by Neoptolemus, see Calder 1971, 154–69, and Schmidt 1973, 234–38. 151. Winnington-Ingram 1980, 302; Sophocles apparently dealt with his cure in the lost Philoctetes at Troy (Sutton 1984, 104). 152. The story of the Palladion’s capture occurs in the Little Iliad (Davies 1989, 69 and 78–79), and frequently appears on Attic vases; see LIMC, s.v. “Athena,” “Aias II,” “Diomedes I,” “Kassandra I,” “Helene,” and “Elektra III.” On its talismanic power, see Kearns 1989, 47–48, and Faraone 1992, 6–7, 103–4, 106, 136–39; on Heracles’ bow (itself a gift of Apollo), Faraone 57–61; on the Trojan horse, 94–112. 153. Paus. 1.22.6.

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154. Od. 21.336–22.121. Odysseus boasts to the Phaeacians of his prowess with the bow (Od. 8.215–28), claiming that only Philoctetes excelled him as an archer at Troy (219–20); at this point, however, he remains incognito, protecting his identity. 155. Philoctetes believes that Odysseus has done the same to Neoptolemus by receiving Achilles’ armor: “He outraged you, stripping you of your father’s geras” (1364–65). Knox 1964, 133–34, (perhaps singularly) sees no bluff when Odysseus releases Philoctetes, boasting that with the bow he alone can take Troy. 156. See note 152. As for his role in the fall of Troy, Odysseus steals the Palladion (which may have ended up in Athens—Paus. 1.28.8, Faraone 1992, 7, and my chapter 1), extracts Hellenus’ prophecy regarding Philoctetes, and masterminds the Trojan horse. See Od. 4.238–89 and 8.485–532; Il.Parv. and Il.Pers. (Davies 1989, 65, 68– 69, and 76). For early strands linking the two major defenses of Troy (Hector and the wall) with her two principal assailants (Achilles and Odysseus, via the Trojan horse), see D. Fehling, Die ursprungliche ¨ Geschichte vom Fall Trojas, oder: Interpretationen zur Troja-Geschichte (Innsbruck 1991). 157. Pollitt 1990, 72. 158. Odysseus easily eclipses Philoctetes in his attachment to colonies and hero cults linked to post–Trojan War nostoi; see I. Malkin, The Returns of Odysseus (Berkeley 1998) 62–209 (on Odysseus), 214–26 (on Philoctetes). 159. Davidson 1995, 25–27, with line references; also Greengard 1987, 64–66. 160. Od. 5.476–91, and Ph. 35, 294–99, 1456–57. 161. Calder 1971, 168; quotations by K. Ziegler, RE 16 (1935) 2460.37–38, and G. L. Huxley, Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis (Cambridge 1969) 156. See also Kott 1974, 178–79; Taplin 1983, 166 and 1988, 75–76. Davies 1989, 71–73, summarizes evidence from the epic cycle on Neoptolemus’ brutality. 162. As Rose 1992, 277, points out, the Sophists disparaged the idea of inherited excellence. 163. For the murders of Priam and Astyanax, see M. I. Wiencke, “An Epic Theme in Greek Art,” AJA 58 (1954) 285–306 and pls. 54–55, and LIMC 7(1):516–20 and 7(2): figs. 85–139 (“Priam”). For the rape of Cassandra before Athena’s statue, see C. Vellay, Les l´egendes du Cycle Troyen (Monaco 1957) 277–81; LIMC 1(1):336–51 and 1(2): figs. 16–105 (“Aias II”). 164. On Ajax Locrus, see Kiso 1984, 2–3 and 11–12, and Lloyd-Jones 1996, 12– 15. For the abduction of Cassandra from Athena’s statue, see Davies 1989, 75–76, and Eur. Tro. 65–73, 82–86, 95–97. For Neoptolemus’ slaying of Priam, see Eur. Hec. 22–24, Tro. 16–17, 481–83, 1312–14; for his sacrifice of Polyxena, see Hec. 220–24, 523–70, Tro. 39–40 (also chapter 4), and LIMC 7(1):431–35 (“Polyxene”), 7(2): figs. 17–31. 165. Jebb 1890 on 1436. Homer applies the figure to Odysseus and Diomedes in their brutal Doloneia (Il. 10.297); he also uses it in a general description of lions’ slaughtering and feeding (5.554–58). Cf. Gill’s upbeat appraisal (1980, 139) that the image supports the play’s great theme, “that heroic achievement depends on authentic friendship.” Segal 1981, 349 and 351, also finds a positive valence in the image, mitigated only by “an element of unresolved bitterness in Philoctetes’ return to the Greek host.” Greengard 1987, 94 n.53, thinks that “Sophocles’ lion team . . . unites the generations for a just and open purpose.” Winnington-Ingram 1980, 301–3, and C. Wolff, “A Note on Lions and Sophocles, Philoctetes 1436,” in Bowersock, Burkert, and Putnam 1979, 144–50, offer bracing antidotes to such readings.

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166. Scully 1990, 19–22, discusses the sanctity of Lemnos in epic and lyric poetry. The Greeks symbolically reenact Philoctetes’ (unconscious) transgression on the nearby island of Chryse, where he wandered into the goddess’ sanctuary and was bitten by a snake (1326–28; also 266–70). 167. Following D. B. Robinson, “Topics in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” CQ 19 (1969) 41, Seale 1982, 44, claims that Odysseus never touches the bow. However, a close examination of the text (974–1080) suggests otherwise. 168. Achilles is alone by the sea at Il. 1.348–59 and 24.9–13 (Edwards 1987, 182–83 and 304); he longs to “rape” Troy at Il. 16.97–100 (Nagler 1974, 10–11 and 45–54, and Scully 1990, 30–34). 169. For Malis, see lines 478–79, 490–96, 664–66, 722–26, 1040–42, 1210–16, 1429–30; for Oeta, 727–29, 801–3, 1430–32. 170. Paus. 17.4; Pi. Pae. 6.98–117; and Taplin 1988, 74–76. 171. Taplin 1988, 76. 172. For the layers of deception in the scene, including those leveled at the audience, see Greengard 1987, 24–27, and Ringer 1998, 112–15 (on “metadrama”); and Dobrov 2001, 29–32 (“extended tragic mise en abyme”). Arnott 1989, 179, observes how the multiple role changes in Greek comedy “beget a moral climate in which duplicity is a way of life.” We may catch a trace of this in the role switching of the Odysseus actor. 173. Exactly midway between these two events—the Merchant leaves at 627, the first stasimon begins at 675—we may find a direct reference to theatrical production. At 651, Neoptolemus tells Philoctetes to “bring out” (ekphere) from the cave his palliative herb for the journey home, the same verb Aristophanes uses (Nu. 19) for bringing out theatrical props from the sk¯en¯e (Ussher 1990 on 651). Perhaps this evocation of theatrical practice underlines its muted presence in the preceding scene with the Merchant and the subsequent “perjured” Chorus. 174. Tycho von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Die dramatische Technik des Sophokles (Berlin 1917) 285–87, followed by W. Kranz, Stasimon (Berlin 1933) 221; Burton 1980, 236–40; Seale 1982, 37, and others. 175. Gellie 1972, 146–48. 176. Lesky 1983, 176. 177. Tarrant 1986, 122–25, quotation at 123. 178. Jebb 1898 on 676–729 and on 718–19; Linforth 1956, 120–23; Knox 1964, 130; Gardiner 1987, 30–36, who offers a lucid summary of the various possibilities; and Stokes 1988, 159–60. It is possible that the Chorus suddenly adopts the “long view,” thinking that Neoptolemus will lead Philoctetes home after his Trojan detour. This involves taking pl¯ethei poll¯on men¯on to imply “after a multitude of many moons [at Troy]”; however, the obvious meaning is “after [Philoctetes’] multitude of many moons [on Lemnos]”—see Jebb 1898 on 722, and Webster 1970a on 721. Up to this point in the play, the issue has been framed in straightforward alternatives—take Philoctetes home to Malis or off to Troy. Choral prescience of the unexpected end of the play cannot be ruled out, but it seems unlikely. 179. Following Schmidt 1973, 130–34, Tarrant 1986, 127–28, notes that “Philoctetes is conspicuous in extant tragedy for its frequent reference to the possibility of being overheard, both on stage and off,” establishing an environment of deception and double entendre. Consider Odysseus’ plan to send a “spy” (skopos, 125), who appears as the “Merchant” to oversee the progress Neoptolemus makes with Philoctetes.

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180. I. Errandonea, “Filoctetes,” Emerita 24 (1956), esp. 77–91 (English summary at 254), revisited in his Sofocles (Madrid 1958), 273–84. See also Lattimore 1964, 44–45 and 92 n.35, and S. C. Shucard, “Some Developments in Sophocles’ Late Plays of Intrigue,” CJ 69 (1974) 135 n.20. Socrates also uses the infinitive phaskein as a mild imperative in Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus. In the first case, the Paidagogus describes the landscape to Orestes: “As to where we have come, / think [ phaskein] that you see Mycenae rich in gold / and the house of the sons of Pelops, wrought with destruction” (El. 8–10). The invitation to “think” is aimed as much at the audience as at Orestes, asking us to conjure the scenic space in the manner of the Chorus’s appeal to the “imaginary forces” of the spectators in Shakespeare’s Henry V: “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: / . . . / Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them, / printing their proud hoofs i‘th’ receiving earth” (on the parallels, see Segal 1995b, 14–15). In the second case, the command follows a counterfactual posed by Teiresias in his last words to Oedipus: “If you find me mistaken, / then think [ phaskein] that I have no wisdom in my prophecy” (OT 461–62). Because Teiresias proves anything but mistaken, Oedipus cannot think what the seer proposes. Perhaps these earlier uses of phaskein combine in Philoctetes, constituting a “counterfactual” call to the imagination of Philoctetes and the audience. 181. For the double-edged irony of Ion’s response (much like Philoctetes’), see Rehm 1994b, 146–47. 182. Segal 1981, 359, following W. Jobst, Die H¨ohle im griechischen Theater des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts (Vienna 1970) 44. 183. Kitto 1957, 105. Gellie 1972, 157, finds Heracles’ address “flat in tone, pedestrian and unappealing.” Jebb 1898 on 1424f. notes the “somewhat careless writing” of the speech. 184. Jebb 1898 on 1409 and Webster 1970a, 8, think that Heracles appears on the sk¯en¯e roof and not via the machine. 185. Stokes 1988, 165–66, raises the problem of Philoctetes’ gullibility. 186. Gill 1980, 137, whose answer (see note 165) I find less compelling than his formulation of the question. 187. Seale 1982, 49. 188. It is Philoctetes’ suffering—“five long episodes of utter anguish” (Seale 1982, 50)—and not the disease itself that draws our attention back from the dizzying game of deception. In Laocoon (ch. 4, sec. 1) Lessing reminds us of the physical impossibility of the wound as such: “A natural poison working for nine years, without causing death is infinitely more improbable than all the fabulous wonders with which the Greek has ornamented his story” (quoted in Segal 1981, 317). 189. Bers 1981 concludes that “the act of stealing the bow . . . exposes their song, which seemed to express solidarity, as an instrument of cruelty.” Stokes 1988, 158– 59, distinguishes between the Chorus’s evasiveness and perjury, of little help in the theater. 190. Knox 1964, 130–32; Taplin 1971, 27–29; Easterling 1978, 29; Mastronarde 1979, 65–66; Seale 1982, 38–40. 191. Lemnian volcano at 799–801 and 986–87; Oeta pyre at 801–3, also 670, 727–29, 1428–33. See Jebb 1898 on 800, on 927, and pp. 242–45; also S. Tr. 993– 1089 and Greengard 1987, 44–47. W. Burkert, “Jason, Hypsipyle, and New Fire at Lemnos,” CQ 20 (1970) esp. 2–11, and 1983, 190–96, examines the new fire festival

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at Lemnos and its links to the Attic festivals of the Skira and Thesmophoria. The traditional home of Hephaistus, Lemnos was the first place to receive fire; see Griffith 1983 on 7–8, and p. 284 n.8, and M. L. West, “The Prometheus Trilogy,” JHS 99 (1979) 134–35. 192. In the epic tradition, Il. 18.207–14 and 21.522–25; in tragedy, A. Ag. 818– 20; Eur. Hec. 475–79, 905–13, Tro. 4–9, 143–46, 1260–64, 1293–1326; etc. See Rehm 1994a, 135. 193. Rose 1992, 305–6 n.71 and 309, thinks the reference points strongly to democratic Athens. 194. Ussher 1990 on 562; Euripides uses the same ploy at Hec. 122–24 (see chapter 4). 195. See J. A. Haldane, “A Paean in the Philoctetes,” CQ 13 (1963) 53–56, and J. Waern, “Greek Lullabies,” Eranos 58 (1960) 4–5. For the Athenian cult of Asclepius, Sophocles’ role in its introduction, and his interest in the healing arts, see Jebb 1898 on 1437; Collinge 1962, 46–52; Parke 1977, 63–65; Radt 1977, 57–58; Podlecki 1980, 86; J. M. Bremer, “Greek Hymns,” in Versnel 1981b, 203–4; and S. B. Aleshire, The Athenian Asklepion (Amsterdam 1989) 7–12. Cf. A. Connolly, “Was Sophocles Heroised at Dexion?” JHS 118 (1998) 1–21, who claims the link between Sophocles and Athens’ reception of the Asclepius cult is a Hellenistic fabrication. 196. Meiggs 1975, 244. 197. Jameson 1956, 217–18, whose exemplary article relates the play to contemporary Athenian political concerns. See also Ugolini 2000, 184–212, who sees the return of Alcibiades behind the drama. On Sophocles as proboulos, see Ar. Rhet. 3.18.2–4, 1419a; on the deceit of the Four Hundred, Thuc. 8.65–72 (and, generally, through 8.98); Ar. Pol. 5.3.8, 1304b; Lys. 34.1–5; Stockton 1990, 145–57. 198. Diod. 13.53.1–2; Meiggs 1975, 372. 199. Jameson 1956, 218. 200. Seaford 1994, 393–95, focuses so intently on the “friendly” reconciliation of reciprocal violence (via Heracles’ gift of the bow, and Philoctetes’ eventual dedication of war spoils to his patron) that he fails to see the Trojan War as reciprocal violence writ large across the play’s horizon. 201. On the last, see Calder 1979, 57–60. 202. Gellie 1972, 138. 203. As Kott 1974, 183, observes, “Sophocles’ tragedies are not historical parables, but their contemporaneity, although hidden, does not cease to be significant.” 204. Cook 1968, 89. 205. See also Il. 5.638–42; S. Aj. 1299–1303; Pi. I. 5.34–38. 206. Referred to by Seamus Perry, TLS Aug. 8, 1998, p. 26. 207. Seale 1982, 47. 208. For Scythia as eschatia, a desert frontier marking the ends of the earth, see Hp. Aer. 17; Ar. Ach. 704; Hdt. 5.9–10; and Hartog 1988, 12–14. 209. Taplin 1977, 240–42. 210. Theatrical common sense demands an orchestra-central position for the chained Prometheus. See the cogent arguments of Davidson 1994, and S. Goetsch, Theatre History Studies 15 (1995) 219–24. Cf. Griffith 1983, 30; Conacher 1980, 180–81; and Arnott 1962, 97–98 and 129, all of whom imagine the crag abutting the door by the sk¯en¯e facade. Locating the central figure there causes catastrophic upstag-

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ing problems, aggravated in the acoustically unsophisticated theater of Dionysus where actors who turned fully upstage would be inaudible to a large section of the audience (Rehm 1988, 282–83 with notes). On the binding itself, see M. Dyson, “Prometheus and the Wedge: Text and Staging at Aeschylus’ PV 54–81,” JHS 113 (1993) 154–56. 211. On Prometheus’ isolation, see Knox 1964, 45–47, and Sider 1979, 573–74. 212. Key voices in the authenticity debate include (contra) Schmid 1929; Griffith 1977; Taplin 1977, 240–75 and 460–69; M. L. West, Studies in Aeschylus (Stuttgart 1990) 51–72 (the work of “a gifted but brainless poet” [53], possibly Aeschylus’ elder son Euphorion [67–71]); and R. Bees, Zur Datierung des Prometheus Desmotes (Stuttgart) 1993; (pro) C. J. Herington, The Author of the “Prometheus Bound” (Austin, Tex. 1970); Conacher 1980, 141–74; Sa¨ıd 1985, 9–12 and 27–80; M. P. Pattoni, L’autenticita´ del “Prometeo Incatenato” di Eschilo (Pisa 1987); Hammond 1988, 11–16; and G. Zuntz, “Aeschyli Prometheus,” HSCP 95 (1993) 107–11. Significantly, no ancient source raises doubts about Aeschylean authorship. 213. In Hes. Th. 624–28, it is Gaia (Earth) who advises the Olympians how to beat down the Titans; in Pi. I. 8.27–60, Themis (another name for Earth, as at PV 211–12) saves Zeus and Poseidon from marrying Thetis, who is fated to give birth to a son stronger than her father. See Griffith 1983, 5–6. 214. For the inclusion of Zeus within the framework of Moira, see Griffith 1983, 17–19; Vander Waerdt 1982 (esp. 27–29); and Greene 1944, 108–10 and 123–25. 215. For the link between Io’s wandering and early Greek geography and maps (showing the ends of the inhabited earth), see Heidel 1937, 14–17, 27, and 55; Bolton 1962, 44–72 and Map I; and Griffith 1983 on 696–741, 734–35, and pp. vi and 288–89. In “The Geography of the Prometheus Vinctus,” RhM 141 (1998) 119–41, M. Finkelberg argues that the play’s geographical sketch (i.e., 707–41, 788–818, and 844–74) is a late fourth-century interpolation designed to bring the original geography of Prometheus Bound “up to date.” 216. In Greek thought, Scythia, Ethiopia, and Egypt were connected alterities; see Anaximander in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983, 133–37, and Kahn 1960, 76–85; Hdt. 2.15, 2.95, 4.5, 4.7, 4.76; Hartog 1988, 14–19; Hall 1989, 114–15; and Davison 1991, 55–57. 217. The final play of the trilogy, Prometheus Lyomenos, opens with Prometheus still chained. See the reconstruction by Griffith 1983, 281–305. 218. For Aeschylus’ notion that Zeus evolves over time, see Greene 1944, 107–10, 117–25, 136–37; Solmsen 1949, 146–77, 205, 217; G. Grossmann, Promethie und Orestie: Attischer Geist in der attischen Trag¨odie (Heidelberg 1970) 74–84, 272–87; Dodds 1973, 40–44; Griffith 1983, 6–10; Sa¨ıd 1985, 326–44; Meier 1990, 92–97 and 134–35. 219. A noncatastrophic resolution seems to have marked the Prometheus’ trilogy, whether by Aeschylus or not ( Jones 1962, 71–72; Lesky 1983, 90–98 and 114; and Griffith 1983, 281–305). 220. For the concept and general discussion, see Helms 1988. 221. Euripides’ Ion (369–80) exploits the irony of consulting an oracle of the very god implicated in the problem that has led to the consultation. 222. For the etymological play on Prometheus’ name, see Griffith 1983 on 85–86. 223. Tyrrell 1984, esp. xii–xix and 76–87, emphasizes the Athenian use of the

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Amazon myth to justify patriarchy and marital submission of daughters, failing to mention its role in PV (also unnoticed by duBois 1982). In The Early Amazons: Modern and Ancient Perspectives on a Persistent Myth, tr. P. Mason (Leiden 1995), J. H. Blok discusses the limitations of various modern constructions of the ancient Amazon myth, including the structuralist, oppositional, “other”-oriented interpretations of Tyrell and duBois. See esp. 118–43, 277–78 (n.247), 364–65, and 402–3. 224. Davison 1991, 54–62; also Segal 1986, 85. 225. Larson 1995, 110–13, discusses a (possible) hero cult dedicated to the Amazon Antiope in Athens. 226. Prometheus directly connects Io’s “secret” with that of another woman, the immortal Thetis, who will give birth to a son greater than his father (755–74); see note 213. 227. However, Io does describe her condition as a sickness that needs a cure (604–9). 228. For reflections on the nature of Prometheus’ blind hopes and their relationship to tragedy, see Kuhn 1942, 52–56. 229. Forms of the verb plana¯o ‘cause to wander’, ‘lead astray’, peplan¯emai ‘I wander’ also characterize Io’s progress at 572, 585, 608, 622, 738, 784, 788, 820, 828, and 838. 230. As Buxton 1982, 91, observes, “Prometheus Bound begins, as it ends, with an act of violence.” 231. On the original staging, Conacher 1980, 187–89, sensibly argues that the words unleashed the audience’s imagination without requiring theatrical fireworks. The cataclysm engulfing Prometheus resembles that leveled by Zeus against Typhon at Hes. Th. 821–85 (compare A. PV 351–72; also Cho. 585–93). For the four elements—earth, air, fire, water—implicit in Anaximander’s primary oppositions between hot and cold, wet and dry, and explicit in Empedocles, see Guthrie 1962, 5, 120–24, 266–67; 1965, 138–43; Kahn 1960, 133–49; and Bernand 1985, 92–93 (in PV ). For the vertical plane (Tartarus, Hades, Earth, Olympus, the heavens, and the upper air), see H. Il. 8.13–16; Hes. Th. 720–25, 839–41; Guthrie 1965, 144–46 (on the association of elements with divinities, and eventually with their realms); Guthrie 1962, 68–69 (on ancient theogonies based on separation into upper and lower); 470–71 (on “higher and lower elements”), and 266–73 (on the development of the “fifth element” aith¯er and the Aristotelian notion of natural place); and Davison 1991, 58. Cf. this line of discussion with R. Seaford, “Immortality, Salvation, and the Elements,” HSCP 90 (1986) 1–26, who views the elements in PV as related to mystic doctrine rather than to pre-Socratic (natural) philosophy. 232. Ancient geographers and poets alike imagined the ocean encircling the world’s land mass like a river, as Prometheus himself states (137–40); see also H. Il. 14.200–201, 18.399 and 606–7, 21.195–99, Od. 20.65–66; Hes. Op. 565–66, Th. 776, 787–92, Sc. 314–17; Eur. Or. 1377–79; and Guthrie 1962, 58–61. 233. In his version, Robert Lowell transforms the daughters of Ocean into seabirds (New York Review, July 13, 1967, 17–24). 234. Davidson 1994, 36 and bibliography; Thomson 1932 on 130 and 293–99, followed by Taplin 1977, 252–62 (with some unease, claiming interpolations at 167– 74 and 271–83, and possibly the entire Oceanus scene [!]). Cf. Arnott 1962, 75–77; Griffith 1983, 31, 109–10, 140; and Mastronarde 1990, 267–68, all of whom have

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the Chorus appear on the sk¯en¯e roof and Oceanus descend via the m¯echan¯e. With a more imaginative, less literal reading of the text, these staging problems can be resolved without resorting to technically dubious and physically impracticable solutions. 235. If the backdrop were present as a permanent fixture for the Promethean tetralogy, then it did not represent a built structure but served to evoke the Scythian er¯emia. 236. As discussed in previous chapters, Euripides’ Suppliant Women, the first half of Choephori, probably all of Eumenides (certainly the outdoor scene at the Areopagos court), and the second half of Ajax also require no extrascenic space. The same applies to Aeschylus’ Persians (see chapter 6), Seven against Thebes, and Supplices, Euripides’ (lost) Andromeda, and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Of those tragedies that do use extrascenic space, they usually violate the dualistic frame of structuralist-minded critics. In this context, consider Euripides’ Trojan Women, Heracleidae, Phoenician Women, Orestes, and Rhesus. 237. For the complicated familial interweave, see Griffith 1983, 14–15, and on 39 and 225. 238. Note that the forebears of Heracles include the daughters of Danaus (853– 69), subject of Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy, who provide an archetype of female resistance to forced marriage. Within the context of Prometheus’ suffering, however, marriages recall happier times (his wedding to Hesione) or point to future deliverance (Heracles). 239. Vickers 1973, 70–76, eloquently describes their moral courage. 240. The Chorus also finds the mad dance of Io, tormented by the gadfly, dustheata ‘hard to look at’ (690). 241. Coleridge aptly compares Prometheus’ outburst to that of Hamlet after the Ghost’s departure: “O all you host of heavens! O earth! What else?” (1.5.92), quoted by Hoy 1992, 159. 242. Vlastos 1993, 67 n.71 (orig. 1947), points out that Parmenides (B6.5–6 and B8.54; also Heraclit. B107) uses this same state—humans wandering with “sightless eyes” and “ears full of noise”—to characterize those outside the “just” world, which lives in full accord with its own nature and the nature of Being. 243. For the¯oros as “sightseer” or “voyeur,” see Griffith 1983 on 304 and on 802; Eur. Ion 1076 (a parallel at 232–33); and Pl. Lg. 951a, 953c. 244. Hephaistus establishes the motif: “You must keep watch [ phrour¯eseis] on this joyless rock, / erect, stockstill, without sleep” (31–32). 245. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (New York 1967) 63. 246. By monody I mean an extended utterance not in standard spoken meter— iambic trimeter, trochaic tetrameter, or “entry” anapests (see Griffith 1977, 111– 12)—performed by an actor not in consort with the chorus or another character. Griffith 1977, 108–10 and 119–20, attempts to “demonodize” Prometheus’ opening soliloquy (88–127), characterized by a succession of iambic-anapestic-iambic-lyriciambic-anapestic meters. Most critics identify lines 114–17 as monodic; however, Prometheus shifts into nonspoken meters elsewhere—at 93–100 and 120–27 (anapests). Note that the need for two singing actors does not distinguish Prometheus Bound from the extant Aeschylean corpus; in Choephori, Orestes and Electra both sing

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in the kommos. Other plays with two-actor monodies include Euripides’ Alcestis, Andromache, Trojan Women, and Ion. 247. Conacher 1980, 56–57; Griffith 1983 on 566. In S. Tr, the Chorus sings in celebration of Heracles’ imminent return, addressing the aulos (216–17) that accompanies its dance, a subject it returns to in the third stasimon (640–43). For other choral references to its musical accompaniment, see (e.g.) Eur. El. 874–79 (xunaulos boa 879) and Tro. 511–59 (Libus l¯otos 544). 248. Griffith 1983 on 574. 249. Griffith 1983 on 687–95. 250. Generally Schmid 1929, and Marzullo 1993, who takes the idea to dubious extremes; see D. Bain CR 45 (1995) 430. 251. Pl. G. 488a; see Marzullo 1993, 29–37. 252. Griffith 1983 on 335–36; see also 659–60. 253. For the term sophist¯es, see Guthrie 1969, 27–34. 254. Griffith 1983 on 443–44. 255. Havelock 1957, 52–86; Guthrie 1969, 18; see also S. Ant. 353–75, Eur. Su. 196–218, my introduction, and chapter 3 (on Philoctetes). Griffith 1983 on 251 notes that the recurrence of o¯ phel¯ema (“benefiting mankind,” 251, 501, 507, 613) anticipates its use as a technical term in Sophistic discussions of human development. 256. Taplin 1977, 258–59 and 262; Griffith 1977, 115–16 (“we could, I think, cut from 270 to 439 without losing anything of real dramatic substance”). 257. The recurrent motif of instruction and teaching contributes to the Sophistic tone; see Griffith 1983 on 609–12, and Marzullo 1993, 456–57 and 469–71. For Prometheus as bound animal (cinched, bridled, bitted), see Griffith 1983, 21. 258. Literally, “excessive toil and empty-headed silliness.” However, perisson ‘too much’ might imply a show of effort on Oceanus’ part, rather than the idea that Oceanus’ embassy to Zeus would prove overly laborious and ultimately futile. 259. For the griffin, see Griffith 1983 on 286, which commentators frequently mislabel a “winged sea-bird.” On Oceanus’ entrance at orchestra level, see Davidson 1994, 36–37, and Sa¨ıd 1985, 55–63 (marred by Hammond’s imaginary rock; see chapter 1, note 8). Cf. Mastronarde 1990, 268 and 287; Griffith 1983 on 284–396; Conacher 1980, 185–86; and West 1979, 138–39, all of whom argue for some use of the m¯echan¯e. 260. Bolton 1962, 1–118. 261. Griffith 1983 on 393–96. 262. On the new music, see Csapo 2000, 401–26; West 1992, 356–72; and Willink 1986, liv, and on Or. 1366–1502. 263. Grossmann 1970, 272–90. 264. Need for force: PV 150–51, 404–5, Eur. Su. 517–27; despotic behavior: PV 35, 322–24, 941–42, Su. 429–32, 450–51; rejects free speech: PV 49–50, 178–80 (cf. 318–19, 328–29, 953–54), Su. 433–39; paranoid: PV 224–25, Su. 442–49; lusts after his female subjects: PV 737–40, Su. 452–55. See also Hdt. 3.80.5; Sa¨ıd 1985, 15–20 and 284–325; Griffith 1983, 7–8; Grossmann 1970, 138–43 and 150–54; and Podlecki 1966, 103–22. 265. Conacher 1980, 120–74, deals clearly with the “Zeus problem” and the authenticity question, as does H. Lloyd-Jones in “Zeus in Aeschylus,” JHS 76 (1956) 55–

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67 (cf. Griffith 1977, 1–3 and 8–13, and 1983, 31–33). Lloyd-Jones, however, strains credulity by arguing that Aeschylus and other tragedians raise no moral doubts about Zeus: “The poets talk not of the righteousness of the gods, but of their power, and of their insistence that we be righteous; they insist upon the excellence of their laws, but still more upon the foolishness of trying to oppose their will” (66). In my view, the emotional purchase of Prometheus and Io belies this claim. 266. See esp. PV 379–80, Thomson 1932 on 393–96, and Sa¨ıd 1985, 182–85; other references to disease and cure occur at 224–25, 249, 316, 473–83, 595–96, 606, 632–33, 698–99, 977, 1069–70. P. B. Katz, “Io in the Prometheus Bound: A Coming of Age Paradigm for the Athenian Community,” in Rites of Passage in Ancient Greece, ed. M. W. Padilla (Cranbury, N.J. 1999) 129–47, stretches things to see Io’s frenzy as manifesting the “wandering womb syndrome” that some ancient medical writers associated with the unfulfilled desire for children. On Prometheus and the “discovery of ancient medicine,” see J. Jouanna, Hippocrates, tr. M. B. DeBevoise (Baltimore 1999; orig. Paris 1992) 232–42. 267. Parke 1977, 171. For the reference to the Lampadedromia in A. Ag., see Fraenkel 1950 on 314. 268. After the cataclysm that entombs Prometheus, he eventually will reemerge into the light, only to have his body torn apart by eagles (“the winged dogs of Zeus”) and his liver eaten, endlessly (1020–29).

CHAPTER FOUR SPACE AND THE BODY

1. Poole 1987, 223. Shifting from the performer’s body to that of the Greek audience, Segal 1986, 344–45, reminds us of the “strong somatic response to the emotional quality of poetry,” evidenced from Homer to Aristotle, and magnified in the theater. 2. Lefebvre 1991, 170; also States 1985, 53, on the way bodies and language combine to create different spaces in Greek tragedy. Note that “the body,” like “space,” has become a postmodern buzzword, representing “the cultural product ne plus ultra” (Montserrat 1998, 4, whose discussion is salutary), the site where regimes of institutional power and knowledge are inscribed most graphically and legibly. Along with Norris 1993, 293–94, I remain unconvinced by this neo-Hobbesian, Leviathan-like reading of the world. Notions of cultural production, discipline, and punishment (in their current form) play little part in what follows. 3. See Paley 1855 on Cho. 431, and Jebb 1900 on S. El. 444ff. A murderer would cut off his victim’s extremities and tie them to the corpse’s armpits, hindering the ghost from taking vengeance. Commentators mention hands, feet, ears, and noses, but the male sexual organ offered prime material. See Tony Harrison, Aeschylus: The Oresteia (London 1981) 64, and Od. 22.473–76. 4. Herington 1986, 89–90 (A. Sept. 675–76); also H. Bacon, “The Shield of Eteocles,” Arion 3 (1964) 27–38; Sider 1979, 572. 5. Muecke 1982. 6. Douglas 1978, 128. For gestures associated with religion (prayer, supplication, sacrifice), see Pulleyn 1997, 188–95; D. Aubriot-S´evin, Pri`ere et conceptions religieuses

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en Gr`ece ancienne (Lyons 1992); van Straten 1981; Neumann 1965. For gestures and other actions linked to marriages and funerals, Rehm 1994a, 12–42 and 141–42. 7. See Vickers 1973, 439–46 and 476–78, for the suppliant motif in Medea. 8. Rehm 1989; 1994a, 146–49. 9. Redfield, 1975, 178–86, and Humphreys 1993, 153–56 and 161–67. For the contrast between the permanent and impermeable body of the Greek gods, and the impermanent and permeable human body, see J.-P. Vernant, “Corps obscur, corps e´ clatant,” Le temps de la r´eflexion 7 (1986) 19–45. 10. In a comic vein, Aristophanes’ Dionysos “weighs in” on Aeschylus’ penchant for theatrical corpses (Ran. 1403–6). 11. Cassirer 1979, 135. 12. Douglas 1978, 163–64, also 114–15. 13. A character is addressed as “head” or “dear head/eye” (the literalism recovers the metonymic force of the vocative) at A. Pers. 169, Ag. 905, Cho. 934, Eum. 1025; S. Aj. 977, 1004, Tr. 527, Ant. 1, 899, 915, OT 40, 950, 1207, El. 903, 1264, OC 321, 1631; and Eur. And. 406 and Ion 1261. For the “eye” as a person’s essence (what we might call “heart”), see the introduction. 14. LSJ, s.v. individual words; for geographical “mouths,” S. Ph. 16 (see chapter 3); for personified mountains, M. Clarke, “Gods and Mountains in Greek Myth and Poetry,” in Lloyd 1997 (esp. 69–71) and Griffith 1999 on 828–32; for the “face” “eye,” “countenance” of the sun, S. Ant. 104, Eur. El. 740, IT 194; of dawn, Eur. El. 729– 730; of night, A. Pers. 428 (Broadhead 1960 on 426–28), Eur. El. 102, IT 110, Pho. 543, A. Th. 390 (⳱ the moon); of the moon, S. Fr. 871.6. 15. Seeing these lines as anticipating the Stoic concept of sumpatheia, a bond existing between all parts of the universe, Greene 1944, 109 n.35, believes that Aeschylus’ anthropomorphism “sees the whole cosmos as alive and morally conscious” and therefore has no part in the “pathetic fallacy.” Kuhn 1942, 80–88 offers other insights on the pathetic fallacy in Greek thought. 16. West 1992, 89. 17. On columns (including caryatids and atlantes), see Rykwert 1996, 128–38; on vases, B. A. Sparkes, Greek Pottery: An Introduction (Manchester 1991) 79, and Lissarague 1990, 56–59, 75–80, and 140–43 (“In the hands of the potters, the vase is like a body being formed”). 18. J. Boardman, Athenian Black Figure Vases (London 1971) 188, 191, and figs. 167, 177, 274; Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Archaic Period (London 1975) 210 and figs. 284 and 305; M. Robertson, The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens (Cambridge 1992) 264. 19. See G. Ferrari, “Eye Cup,” RA 1986, 11–19, on the link between drinking cups and dramatic masks; also J. Boardman, “A Curious Eye Cup,” AA 91 (1976), 281–90 (esp. 288). Green 1994, 95–104, explores ties between symposia and the theater; Stehle 1997, 213–57, discusses the symposium as a performance occasion. 20. On “the special character of Greek anthropomorphism,” see Burkert 1985, esp. 182–89 (also 88–92, 119–81); Guthrie 1954, 27–116; Greene 1944, 10–13. A. Schnapp, “Why Did the Greeks Need Images?” Ancient Greek and Related Pottery, 3rd Symposium, ed. J. Christiansen and T. Melander (Copenhagen 1988) 568–74, emphasizes that the image was not only a category of figurative art, but also a means of apprehending and communicating with the divine. According to Faraone 1992, 10,

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“the Greeks did not clearly distinguish between the image [statue] and thing represented [god].” Vernant’s claim (1991, 35–36, 159, and generally 164–92) that Greek gods were not “conceived in the image of human beings [but] . . . rather the reverse” seems hard to imagine. If a physiognomic nonhuman model for Greek gods existed, what was it? Cf. Mussies 1988, 4–12. 21. Padel 1992, 157–59; in the visual arts, Shapiro 1993. 22. De Romilly 1971, 35–56, provides a full treatment of the personification of time in tragedy. 23. Lincoln 1986, 1–40 and 134–40, views the body and cosmos as homologous alloforms (alternative shapes) of one another. 24. For the analogy between politics and pathology, and for political metaphors using the body, see F. Lassere and P. Mudry, Formes de pens´ee dans la collection hippocratique (Geneva 1983) 441–82; also Zeitlin 1965, 501–3. Thucydides frequently compares cities to individuals, discussed in Morrison 1994. Less helpful is R. Sennet, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York 1994) 31–86, who explains the relationship between the human body and buildings in classical Athens on the analogy of hot and cold (hence his title). 25. We can trace this process back to the pre-Socratic thinkers discussed in the appendix. Regarding human life vis-`a-vis the living cosmos, Heraclitus views the analogy of microcosm to macrocosm as the informing principle; see R. Dilcher, Studies in Heraclitus, Spudasmata 56 (Hildesheim 1995) 67–69 and 90–95. 26. See chapter 6. 27. A. J. Podlecki, “Cimon, Skyros and ‘Theseus’ Bones,’ ” JHS 91 (1971) 141–43; S. Koumanoudes, “These¯os s¯ekos,” Arch.Eph. (1976): 164–216; F. Brommer, Theseus (Darmstadt 1982) 65–76; Hartog 1988, 134–38; Garland 1992, 82–98. Kearns 1989, 48–55, and Faraone 1992, 13 n.6, discuss the talismanic and protective powers of heroes’ bones. 28. For their similarities, see Rehm 1994a, 76–79 and notes. Cf. Holst-Warhaft 1992, 133: “we do not witness ‘unmanly’ behaviour in tragedy staged in Athens”— news to the actors who played Heracles, Admetus, Pentheus, Menelaus, Aegisthus, and others, not to mention their audiences (especially Plato). 29. Loraux 1987, 15–17, 23–24, 54–55. Hyllus negotiates the psychic gulf between his father and mother (1114–42), much as he moves between the distant places of Heracles’ foreign adventures and the interior, domestic world of Deianeira (82–83, 928–42). 30. Cohen 1999; on the casting of Antigone (the most uncertain case), see Griffith 1999, 23–24. 31. Cropp 1986, 188. 32. K. F. Hermann, Disputatio de Distributione Personarum inter Histriones in Tragoediis Graecis (Marburg 1840) 34 (quoted by Cohen 1999, 18–19). 33. Zeitlin 1991, 81: “No other play forces upon us with such continuing insistence the sheer physicality of the self and its component parts.” 34. Mossman 1995, 58. 35. Mossman 1995, 60–64 and 178. 36. The phrase “Having deserted my body” translates s¯om’ er¯em¯osas emon, suggesting that Polydorus’ corpse—like Lemnos or the Scythian wilds—is now uninhabited. By the end of the play, this will prove true of the Chersonese as well.

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37. Nussbaum 1986, 397–98. 38. Collard 1991 on 1–58. 39. Parallels between Priam’s and Polyxena’s deaths recur at 160–61, 420, and 550–52. Similarly, Polydorus predicts that his mother “will see two corpses of two children, / mine and her unfortunate daughter’s” (45–46), the first of several passages linking the murders of Polydorus and Polyxena. 40. Segal 1993a, 171–72; Zeitlin 1991, 53–57; and D. J. Conacher, “Euripides’ Hecuba,” AJP 82 (1961) 1–26, esp. 16–18. 41. This observation undercuts the emphasis that Zeitlin 1991, 57–61—following R. Schlesier, “Die Bakchen des Hades: Dionysische Aspekte von Euripides’ Hekabe,” M´etis 3 (1989) 111–35—puts on the play’s Thracian setting and the parallels between Polymestor and Lycurgus. Just across the Hellespont from Troy, the Chersonese (“Dry Island”) is barely in Thrace and hardly symbolic of it. 42. Gomme 1945–81, 1:276–78 and 380; Lewis 1988, 298 and 1992, 127–28; O. Murray, “The Ionian Revolt,” in CAH 4:465; Figueira 1991a, 260–62; and my chapter 1. 43. On the Chersonese’s Athenian connections, see note 42. 44. Nussbaum 1986, 415–16, finds Hecuba’s plea “a ghastly moment. . . . Like Cassandra’s body, her own is now a mere tool of the new plan [of revenge].” 45. According to Zeitlin 1991, 79–80, Odysseus’ rejection of Hecuba’s offer indicates his belief that “the self is a single unit,” a dubious position for so slippery a self as Odysseus. 46. “It is all terribly indecent. Nothing could contrast more pointedly with Polyxena’s free virgin death” (Reckford 1985, 121). Cf. Zeitlin 1991, 57 and 94 n.84, who rejects such “facile moral judgments.” What makes a moral judgment “facile” in a play concerned with the breakdown of nomos (Nussbaum 1986) eludes me. Judgments of characters and their actions are apparently not part of what Zeitlin terms “the theater’s vocation” (57). 47. Acknowledging Polyxena’s vulnerability in death, Hecuba orders that “none of the Greeks touch the corpse of my child; / keep the crowd away” (604–08). 48. For the ritual irony of Iphigenia’s purported marriage, see Foley 1985, 84–91, and her “Marriage and Sacrifice in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis,” Arethusa 15 (1982) 159–80. 49. Rehm 1994a, 167 n.34; Segal 1993a, 175–76; Rabinowitz 1993, 55–56; also R. Scodel, “Dom¯on agalma: Virgin Sacrifice and Aesthetic Object,” TAPA 26 (1996) esp. 123–26. 50. Strangely, Rabinowitz 1993, 54–62, detects no resistance to Polyxena’s sacrifice in the play: “By understanding the text’s fetishism, however, we can to some extent limit its potency” (62). Cf. Foley’s welcome corrective, rev. in CP 90 (1995) 82–86. 51. Nussbaum 1986, 405–6. Cf. Gregory 1999 on 826–30: “It is standard for parental figures in tragedy to make explicit reference to their children’s sexual lives” [!]—even if your child is a priestess of Apollo? 52. War-brides handle the realities of war better than their captors, as the comparison between Tecmessa and Ajax demonstrates (see chapter 3); see R. Scodel, “The Captive’s Dilemma: Sexual Acquiescence in Euripides’ Hecuba and Troades,” HSCP 98 (1998) 137–54. 53. Euripides’ highlights the failed xenos (guest-friend) relationship by applying

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the term (alone or in compounds) to Polymestor in the emphatic first or last position of lines 7, 19, 26, 715, 774, 781, 790, 794, 803, 852, 890, 1047, 1216, 1235, 1244, and 1247; also at 710. For Polymestor’s mistreatment of Polydorus’ corpse, see 25– 30, 47–48, 697–720, 773–82, 1021–22. Nussbaum 1986, 406–9, argues that the violation of the xenos relationship—unaffected by links of blood or eroticism—represents the “most binding tie that exists by nomos, the tie that most fundamentally indicates one human’s openness to another, his willingness to join with that other in a common moral world,” even suspending hostilities on the battlefield (the GlaucusDiomedes scene in Il. 6). Zeitlin 1991, 85–86, discusses the punishment of Polymestor via his offspring as the perfect penalty for his failure to nurture Polydorus as his own child. 54. The term chrusos ‘gold’ occurs more than twenty times, building up the distorted sense of “value” with which the play contends. See Segal 1993a, 160. 55. The shelters hide “a crowd [ochlos] of Trojan women” (880) and are “empty of men” (1017–18). 56. Mossman 1995, 64. 57. See Segal 1993a, 185–86; Gregory 1991, 85 and 110–11; Nussbaum 1986, 410–18, on the “retributive and mimetic” aspects of Hecuba’s revenge. Michelini 1987, 170, summarizes: “The perfect revenge demands reciprocity between the wronged and the wronger, so that exactly comparable wounds are suffered by each, and each becomes the image of the other.” 58. Nagler 1974, 10–11, 45–54; also Segal 1993a, 173–74, and Hanson 1990, 325–27. 59. Collard 1991 on 444–83. 60. Collard 1991, 34. 61. Gregory 1991, 88; more generally, J. C. Hogan, “Thucydides 3.52–68 and Euripides’ Hecuba,” Phoenix 26 (1972) 241–57. 62. “Euripides gives him the traits of a contemporary Athenian politician” (Tierney 1946 on 254, after the scholiast). 63. Demosth. 21.159; see Collard 1991 on 291–92 and Tierney 1946 on 291. 64. W. S. Hadley, ed., The Hecuba of Euripides (Cambridge 1904) 101. 65. See Mossman 1995, 192–93; Michelini 1987, 142–57; Buxton 1982, 181–83; Conacher 1967, 164. 66. See Conacher 1998, 58–69, on Sophistic influences in Hecuba; also Segal 1993a, 196–202, and Nussbaum 1986, 402–5, emphasizing the disintegration of moral community and language parallel to the stasis in Corcyra (Thuc. 3.82–83), which concluded in 424, the probable date of Hecuba’s premiere. 67. Collard 1991 on 592–602, with a defense of the text. 68. Segal 1993a, 210–11. 69. Cynossema was the site of an important naval victory for the Athenian fleet led by Alcibiades in 411. For canine mutilation as cultural breakdown, see Segal 1971, 32–41, and Redfield 1975, 183–85 and 190–98. Nussbaum 1986, 416, notes that Aeschylus’ Furies change from doglike creatures thrilled with the scent of Orestes’ blood into female divinities, dressed and escorted to their new home “according to nomos” (Eum. 1033). Hecuba reverses this process with the dehumanizing metamorphoses of Polymestor and Hecuba into doglike creatures, wild for vengeance. See also Forbes Irving 1990, 207–10, and D. Gall, “Menschen, die zu Tieren Werden,”

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Hermes 125 (1997) esp. 405–9. While acknowledging the savage nature of Hecuba’s revenge, Gregory 1999, xxxiv–xxxv, emphasizes the maternal association of a bitch, concluding that “Hecuba’s metamorphosis should not be interpreted as a judgment.” 70. On weaving the Panathenaic peplos for Athena, see Lefkowitz 1996, 79–81; McEwen 1993, 89–93; Barber 1992; Shapiro 1989, 38–39; and chapter 2, note 103. There may be an implicit irony in the Chorus’s thinking of where it might sail and of Athena’s peplos. Sometime after Salamis, the robe was displayed as the sail of a ship wheeled up to the Acropolis during the Great Panathenaia, an image all Athenians would know. See Ridgway 1992, 122–23, and J. Tobin, “Some New Thoughts on Herodes Atticus’s Tomb,” AJA 97 (1993) 87–89. 71. Mossman 1995, 79–81. 72. Daitz 1971, 217, counts twenty-seven occurrences of the words “slave” (doulos) and “free” (eleutheros) in the play. Among many discussions of the Athenian notion of eleutheria, see Wood 1988, 126–37; Sinclair 1988, 20–23; Farrar 1988, 30–37, 140, 236–37; McGlew 1993, 183–90 (who argues unpersuasively that the memory of the tyrants’ freedom—transformed into the citizens’ perception of themselves as their own masters—provided the conceptual model for Athenian democracy). Finley 1981, 77–94, discusses citizen freedom in the Greek world in terms of isonomia, “equality through, and before, the law.” Hansen 1991, 74 and 79–85, compares the Athenian triad of d¯emokratia, eleutheria, and to ison with contemporary notions of democracy, liberty, and equality. 73. Garlan 1988, 40–45, and MacDowell 1978, 79–83, observe that domestic slaves in Athens did have some “bodily” guarantees based on their belonging to an oikos as property of their masters, and on their classification as anthr¯opoi (human beings, not animals) vis-`a-vis the gods. Greek-speaking slaves, for example, could be initiated in the Eleusinian Mysteries. In the evacuation of Athens in 480, the assembly proclaimed that every Athenian should save his “children and household slaves” (tekna te kai tous oiketas) as best he could; most families sailed to Salamis, Aegina, and Troizen (Hdt. 8.41, and chapter 6). 74. Garlan 1988, 119–26; P. A. Cartledge, “Serfdom in Classical Greece,” in Archer 1988, 32–36; Hall 1989, 16–17, 99–100; Croally 1994, 103–15; P. Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge 1996) 1–127. 75. Baldry 1965, 24–29 and 39–45; Segal 1993a, 196–98. 76. Pap.Oxy. 1364 fr. 2.ii quoted by Garlan 1988, 123, with the first two lines (a new papyrus join, Pap.Oxy. 3647 frr. i–iii) by Hall 1989, 218–21, who suggests that this addition undermines the “natural unity” claim once attributed to Antiphon; see also M. Gagarin, ed., Antiphon: The Speeches (Cambridge 1997) 5–6. However, the fact that barbarians are similar by nature (Hall’s emphasis, p. 219) is precisely the point. Antiphon is not attacking the distinction between high and low birth, but the distinction introduced by different nomoi that separate “us” (ourselves and neighbors) and “them” (those far away). It follows that enslaving barbarians (and vice versa) manifests a failure to recognize basic human similarities. See Segal 1995b, 13–14; de Romilly 1992, 115; M. Ostwald, “Nomos and Phusis in Antiphon’s Peri Al¯etheias,” in Griffith and Mastronarde 1990, esp. 298–301; and Furley 1989, 75. The fact that Athenians continued to enslave Greeks during the Peloponnesian War (Toronaeans in 422, Melians in 416) indicates that nonbarbarians were fit for slavery. See Cartledge 1993, 136–38; Pritchett 1991, 226–34; F. D. Harvey, “Herodotus and the Man-Footed Crea-

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ture,” in Archer 1988, 43–45; and Thomas 1981, 50 (“Greeks were regularly enslaved by other Greeks”). Burford 1993, 211, notes the “egalitarianism” of Greek slavery, with no nation, region, or physical type preferred. 77. Garlan 1988, 60–73, 112–14, 145–48, and 163–73; Finley 1981, 97–115, 121–23, and 168–70; Jones 1957, 12–20, 80–81; Burford 1993, 208–22, and Jameson 1977–78 (on agricultural slaves); Hunter 1994, 70–95 (on household slaves); A. J. Graham, “Thucydides 7.13.2 and the Crews of Athenian Triremes: An Addendum,” TAPA 128 (1998) 89–114, and P. Hunt, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians (Cambridge 1998) 40–41, 83, 87–101, 175–76 (on slaves in the Athenian navy). For a review of the dominant (and mistaken) idea that Athenian democracy depended on an “idle mob” freed by means of a “slave mode of production,” see Wood 1988, 1–80 and 173–80 (with sources); also Ober 1989, 24–27 and 270–79. P. Cartledge, “Rebels and Sambos in Classical Greece: A Comparative View,” in Cartledge and Harvey 1985, 16–46, contrasts Athenian chattel slaves with Spartan helots, using slavery in the American South as a point of comparison. T.E.J. Wiedemann, Slavery, G&R New Surveys in the Classics, no. 19 (Oxford 1997), provides a useful summary. 78. The Greek Messenger in Eur. Hel. (728–33) expresses similar thoughts. See R. Kannicht, Euripides, Helena, 2 (Heidelberg 1969) on 726–33; also Papi 1987, 31–33; Eur. frr. 50–57 (from Alexandros), 511, and 831. Synodinou 1977 and H. Kuch, Kriegsgefangenschaft und Sklaverei bei Euripides (Berlin 1974), analyze these and other comments on slavery in Euripides. 79. Baldry 1965, 37. Daitz 1971, 225–26, thinks that Euripides comes close to advocating the abolition of slavery. In his Hcld. (788–89, 888–91), for example, Alcmene spontaneously frees the slave who brings news of Athens’ victory over the invading Argives. Cf. P. Vogt, Slavery and the Ideal of Man, tr. T. Wiedemann (Cambridge, Mass. 1975) 14–25. 80. See chapter 1. 81. See Vellacott 1975, 213–14; Reckford 1985, 121–23; Croally 1994, 97–103 (relating this passage to the idea that no one is free in Eur. Tro.). Gregory 1991, 91– 92, points out that Agamemnon’s reluctance to help is really “a specious plea of constraint,” one she compares with “the Athenians’ argument in Thucydides (1.75.3) that three considerations—fear, honor, and advantage—‘compel’ them to retain their empire.” Contemporary imperialists employ the same arguments to justify using military force: “we had no choice,” “our hands were tied,” “we must not be perceived as weak,” “we had to send a message,” etc. 82. Indicated at 775, 865, 1001–22, 1206–7, and 1245. Hall 1989, 107–10, views Polymestor as a dramatic “invention” designed to explore “vices stereotypically imputed to the barbarian.” 83. Collard 1991 on 756–59 defends Hecuba’s response, deleted by Diggle. Reckford 1985, 114, emphasizes Hecuba’s moral collapse, leaving only her desire for vengeance: “For Hecuba nothing else matters, because nothing else of Hecuba is left.” 84. See Nussbaum 1986, 406 and 410–14, and Zeitlin 1991, 66–72, on light and seeing (mutual, partial, eyeless) in the play. 85. Segal 1993a, 180–81. 86. Briefly suggested by P. Burian, “Myth into muthos: The Shaping of Tragic Plot,” in Easterling 1997a, 179–80. For the “telescoped” natural setting, see J. Roy, “The

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Countryside in Classical Greek Drama,” in Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity, ed. G. Shipley and J. Salmon (London 1996) 104–10. 87. Vernant 1991, 202 n.15; cf. Hanson 1990, 327–28. 88. Raeburn 2000, 154–56. The single reference to Orestes’ “attendants” at Cho. 713 (on his arrival at the palace) may reflect a later alteration geared for a more spectacular production (Taplin 1977, 341, and Garvie 1988 on 675 and 713). 89. For comedic elements here and elsewhere in Electra, see Michelini 1987, 181– 85, 197, 205–6; Hammond 1984; and Knox 1979, 251–54, who properly observes (254) that “the comic tone is used here for a purpose which has nothing to do with comedy.” On the various “realisms” in the play and the generic collisions they unleash, see B. Goff, “Try to Make It Real Compared to What? Euripides’ Electra and the Play of Genres,” in Cropp, Lee, and Sansone 2000, 93–105. 90. Cropp 1988 on 140 thinks that Electra’s imperative requires a servant: “Take this jug off my head and / set it down, so that I might raise to my father / a nocturnal lament before the dawn” (140–42); the same servant would carry the food inside for the Old Man (indicated at 500). However, it seems more likely that Electra speaks lines 140–42 to herself (Luschnig 1995, 115 n.76, Hammond 1984, 378–79 and 384, G. Basta Donzelli, Studio sull’ Elettra di Euripide [Catania 1978] 288–96), and that an attendant of Orestes takes in the Old Man’s provisions (Hammond 1984, 373). A slave on the farm would undercut the impression of poverty and raise other questions: why didn’t Electra send the slave for water, and dispatch him to summon Clytemnestra (rather than the Old Man)? According to Herodotus, Athenian women brought water from the well or fountain until household slaves became common (Hdt. 6.137.3, Mastronarde 1994 on Pho. 187); that is, slavery was invented as a substitute for female family labor (Cartledge 1993, 145). 91. Morwood 1981, 368–69, emphasizes the image of pure water (and its pollution) over the course of the play. For further symbolism regarding Electra’s pot, see Luschnig 1995, 87–93 and 153–55. 92. Zeitlin 1970, 649 n.20; Gellie 1981, 3. 93. Cf. Zeitlin 1970. For Electra’s “unbeautiful” appearance, see Hawley 1998, 48–50. 94. The slaves may have their own cart (Raeburn 2000, 163–64; Cropp 1988 on 988–97, 998–99, and 1135–38; and Hammond 1984, 374–75), but this seems too much even for Euripides. The most spectacular arrival comes later, when Castor appears on the machine with his brother Polydeuces. 95. Following Tarkow 1981, Goff 1991 contrasts Odysseus’ “man-affirming” scar (Od. 19.390–475, 21.217–20, 24.331–35) with that of Orestes, which “inscribes him firmly into a childhood and a sonship that will destroy him” (267). 96. Segal 1986, 355. 97. Segal 1986, 354–57, and Murnaghan 1988, 36, discuss “the graphic somatic images of his [Orestes’] crime.” 98. D. Kovacs, “Where Is Aegisthus’ Head?” CP 82 (1987) 139–41, claims that the “mistranslation of this pair of lines constitutes the only evidence in the play for the supposition that Aegisthus’ head is severed from the body.” There is more evidence for decapitation, as I discuss in the text. See also Conacher 1967, 207; Halleran 1985, 22; and my note 101. 99. O’Brien 1964 details the Gorgon imagery in Electra and its association with

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fear; my discussion owes much to his work. Without mentioning Electra, Vernant 1991, 111–38, offers a fascinating reading of the Gorgon as “the other of the person.” 100. Electra and others frequently refer to her filthy and/or short-cropped hair (108, 148, 184–85, 241, 335), presumably reflected in the close-cut wig attached to her mask. The hair that Orestes offered at the tomb (91, 515, 520, 527–31, 546) features prominently in the “rejected” recognition, and even Clytemnestra’s hair comes in for comment (1071). 101. For the dramatic use of the head in Electra’s speech, see D. Sider, “Two Stage Directions for Euripides,” AJP 98 (1977) 16–17, and Michelini 1987, 214–16. In productions I have staged and seen, the head posed none of the problems raised by commentators. It can be brought in on the same bier as the body, and both removed together after Electra puts it down near the end of her speech; the lines criticizing Aegisthus’ good looks gain immeasurably if she delivers them holding the head in her hands. 102. C. Carey, “Rape and Adultery in Athenian Law,” CQ 45 (1995) 408–10; Dover 1974, 207; LSJ, s.v. hubris II.2. Kovacs 1998, Lembke and Reckford 1994, and Cropp 1988 fail to suggest this possibility in their translations. 103. Electra carries her water jug to “demonstrate to the gods Aegisthus’ outrage [hubrin] against me” (57–62). She praises her husband for “not taking advantage [ouk enubrisas] of me in my troubles” (68); explaining her virginity, she reiterates that the Farmer “did not think it fit to violate [hubrizein] my ancestry” (257), prompting Orestes to ask, “Why did Aegisthus abuse [hubrise] you in this way?” (266). Electra will commit suicide rather than allow “my enemies to violate my body [s¯om’ emon kathubrisai]” (697–98). She condemns Aegisthus for desecrating Agamemnon’s tomb and “outraging [hubrizetai] Orestes in his absence” (326–31). Given the opportunity herself to “outrage a corpse” (nekrous hubrizein, 902), Electra unleashes a tirade of sexual abuse at Aegisthus. On Orestes’ first appearance, she fears for her honor: “Stay back! Don’t [dare] touch what you have no right to touch!” (253), suggesting to some scholars the “rape topos” of Odysseus appearing before Nausicaa (Od. 6.127–210). The theme of sexual violation returns when Castor attributes the founding of the Areopagos court (1258–63) to the trial of Ares, who killed Halirrhothius (Poseidon’s son) after he raped his daughter Alcippe (Cropp 1988 on 1258–63 and Kearns 1989, 145). 104. Electra ignores the fact that Aegisthus—the sole surviving son of Thyestes— has rights of his own to rule in Argos. See A. Ag. 1582–1607. 105. Seaford 1994, 372–73 n.18, indicates the reciprocal perversion of the death ritual—Aegisthus toward Agamemnon’s corpse, Electra and Orestes toward Aegisthus’. 106. Rivier 1975, 119–21, contrasts the idyllic setting of the scene with the actions that ensue. 107. Associated with fresh water, the Nymphs were protectors of marriage and childbirth; see R. Ginouv`es, Balaneutik`e: Recherches sur le bain dans l’antiquit´e (Paris 1962) 269 n.3. Burnett 1998, 233–34, stresses Aegisthus’ unsuitability (as adulterer and murderer) to sacrifice to these divinites, but she fails to acknowledge that Orestes’ human bloodletting is no less out of place at their rites. 108. Arnott 1973, 55–56, discusses Euripidean “red-herrings” that keep us unsure as to when the blow will fall on Aegisthus. 109. I wager that most audiences would find the murder excessive and disturbing; for Burnett 1998, 235, however, “Orestes can only gain in stature when his enemy dies with epic agonies.”

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110. Burnett 1998, 233–35; Cropp 1988 on 774–858 (although “an ugly event”); Lloyd 1986, 15–16; R. A´elion, Euripide h´eritier d’Eschyle 1 (Paris 1983) 131–32; Michelini 1987, 213–14, sees (here and elsewhere) only “ambiguity.” Cf. J. R. Porter, “Tiptoeing through the Corpses: Euripides’ Electra, Apollonius, and the Bouphonia,” GRBS 31 (1990) 255–80, esp. 278–79 on the desecration of murder at a sacrifice. 111. See de Jong 1990, 14–19, for Aegisthus as a focal character eliciting audience sympathy. The Messenger also quotes Orestes five times, balancing killer and victim. 112. Goldhill 1986b, 166–67 (Orestes’ “contemporary rhetorical postures . . . [demonstrate] a failure of human (self ) awareness”); Tarkow 1981, 149; S. M. Adams, “Two Plays of Euripides,” CR 49 (1935) 118–22 (“the young Argive aristocrat convicts himself out of his own mouth”). 113. Burford 1993, 167–72, discusses Euripides’ generally positive attitude toward autorgoi (“peasants,” “self-employed”), the functional name (in the singular) for Electra’s husband, which I translate “Farmer.” For the contrast between Orestes and the Farmer, see Arnott 1981, 180–81; Cropp 1988 on 364ff. notes how Orestes postpones his decision to enter. 114. See Cropp 1988 on 343–44 for the sentiment in tragedy and in Athenian society at large. 115. “You wretch” (¯o tl¯emon 404), she begins, her about-face noted by Conacher 1967, 205–6, and Grube 1941, 303–4. Given such a stark contrast, recent critics— Lloyd 1986, 9 and 14–15, Cropp 1988 on 404–31, and Burnett 1998, 231 n.20— work hard to justify Electra’s behavior. For Michelini 1987, 192, the contrasting tones “chime together in an exquisite dissonance” [!]. 116. The Farmer’s emphasis on the earth ( g¯e at 1, 3, 18, 32), the fact that he prepares for spring plowing, and the nearby stream give the cottage environment a sense of impoverished purity. Only the “soot-covered walls” inside, mentioned as Clytemnestra makes her fatal exit, hint at anything different. 117. They are described (singly or together) as exiles or wanderers at 32–33, 60– 61, 130–32, 139, 201–10, 233–36, 305–6, 1004–5, 1008–10, 1091, and 1112–13. The Farmer also is headed for exile at the play’s end (1286–87). 118. Lines 62, 166, 212–13, 314–31, 417–19, 916–27, 939–48, 1089–90. 119. Walsh 1977, 278–79; the ode stands as “one pole of an antithesis between an ideal world of the gods’ harmony and the hero’s glory, and a real one of human toil and conflict represented on stage [emphasizing] the uneasy coexistence of realistic and mythological elements” (288–89). For other astute accounts, see O’Brien 1964, 15–22; King 1980; and Morwood 1981. 120. King 1980, 207: “Of all the fearful pictures on the armor, this is the grimmest, partly because Euripides has brought the whole image emphatically down to earth.” 121. The blade, of course, belongs to Achilles’ armor, but the accelerated pace at the end of the ode collapses objects and time. King 1980, 209–10, summarizes: The mythic violence of Perseus’ “throat-cutting” joins forces with the epic violence of the “bloody” ( phoni¯oi ) sword to erupt in the “blood” ( phonion . . . haima) that the Chorus hopes to see “gushing” (chuthen) from Clytemnestra’s neck. . . . The ode’s vision of glamorous superhuman heroes leads inexorably to an unglamorous vision of human victims. 122. Patterson 1998, esp. 150–53 on Electra.

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123. Electra attacks Helen at 1062–64 and 1083–84; Clytemnestra does the same at 1027–29, and the Chorus at 213–14. 124. The current consensus dates Euripides’ Electra prior to Sophocles’, but the case is hardly airtight; Michelini 1987, 185–87 and 199–202, revisits the question, and Cropp 1988, xlvii–li, opts for Sophoclean priority. A variety of subjective (i.e., nonstatistical) arguments based on Euripides’ stagecraft support this view: the shift from the palace to the farm as the place of Electra’s emotional torture; the use of her water jug as an ironic version of the urn containing “Orestes’ ashes,” prominent in Sophocles; Euripides’ substitution of the “phantom baby” for the “dead Orestes” ruse, found in both Aeschylus and Sophocles; the bringing of Aegisthus’ corpse to the cottage and hiding it within, a variation on Sophocles’ use of Clytemnestra’s corpse to trap Aegisthus; the comedic Old Man (formerly Agamemnon’s tutor) substituted for the sober Paidagogus of Sophocles; and so on. 125. Cropp 1988 on 1280–83 and on 1282. 126. The parody troubles some scholars so much that they delete 517–44 altogether; see Kovacs 1998, with arguments at BICS 36 (1989) 67–78, and D. M. Bain, BICS 24 (1977) 104–16. Diggle 1986–94, vol. 3, sensibly prints the text as it has come down to us; Cropp 1988 on 518–44 summarizes the arguments. See also Halporn 1983, and Davies 1998, who places Euripides’ critique in a broader context, reading El. 672–93 as a retort to the kommos of A. Cho. Dobrov 2001, 18–19, discusses this scene as a “contrafact” (see introduction, note 121). 127. Aeschylus’ Apollo unequivocally demands the matricide, delivering a clarion call (via Pylades) at the moment of crisis (Cho. 900–902). In Electra, however, Orestes brings up the oracle to resist killing Clytemnestra, ultimately surrendering to his fear of being called a coward rather than to orders from above (962–87). See England 1926, 103; Vickers 1973, 561–62; and Michelini 1987, 228–29. After the matricide, both Orestes (1190–93) and Castor (1244–48) confess doubts about Apollo’s oracular pronouncements. See Kitto 1961, 330–31; Winnington-Ingram 1969, 128–29; Vickers 1973, 564–66; Rivier 1975, 123–24; and Cropp 1986, 194–96. 128. Euripides signals the genre via vocabulary and imagery, but also by the dactylo-epitrite meter, familiar in the victory songs of Pindar and Bacchylides (Cropp 1988 on 860–79). L. D. Myrick, “The Way Up and Down: Trace Horse and Turning Imagery in the Orestes Plays,” CJ 89 (1994) 131–48, treats the ode as part of the play’s abundant athletic imagery. Orestes and Pylades claim to be traveling to the Olympic games when they join Aegisthus’ sacrifice (781–82); their lie generates another, for the Chorus and Electra receive them like victorious athletes on their arrival with Aegisthus’ corpse. See Arnott 1981, 186–89. 129. Winnington-Ingram 1969, 131–32; Arnott 1973, 50–51. 130. Gellie 1981, 4. 131. Cropp 1988, xxxix n.45; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 146; Cohen 1999, 221– 22, 225–29. Cf. C. W. Marshall, “Theatrical Reference in Euripides’ Electra,” in Cropp, Lee, and Sansone 2000, 325–41, who thinks the (apparently tireless) tritagonist played the Farmer, Old Man, Messenger, Clytemnestra, and Castor (337–39). All but the Messenger would suffice. Marshall offers a useful analysis of other self-referential aspects of the play. 132. Cropp 1988 on 668, from J. H. Kells, CQ 16 (1966) 51–52. 133. See Barrett 1964 on Hipp. 421–25; Lee 1997 on Ion 672; Collard 1975 on Su.

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438–41; Mastronarde 1994 on Pho. 391–95; Ar. Th. 541; Isoc. 2.28; Pl. Resp. 557b and Grg. 461e; Ober 1989, 296 (with notes); S. Halliwell, “Comic Satire and Freedom of Speech in Classical Athens,” JHS 111 (1991) 48–70; and my comments in the introduction. 134. Goldhill 1986b; Winnington-Ingram 1969, 136. 135. See note 128. Electra praises Orestes for “not having run some pointless furlong race / but killing the enemy Aegisthus” (883–84), reflecting Athenian views regarding athletic extravagance. In 415, close to the date of Electra, Alcibiades had to defend his athletic interests before the assembly (Thuc. 6.16; also Arnott 1981, 188 and 191 n.30). On Euripides’ criticism of athletics, see Kyle 1987, 126 and 128–32; on other ancient critics, M. I Finley and H. W. Pleket, The Olympic Games: The First Thousand Years (New York 1976) 113–27, and de Romilly 1992, 39–41. 136. On the ritual’s specificity, see Zeitlin 1970, 652 n.26. 137. Burnett 1998, 229–30, with references. 138. Compare the legendary “golden lamb of Mycenae” (699–726) with the actual lamb that the Old Man brings on stage to feed Electra’s guest, or the mythical horse Pegasus (475) with the real horses that pull Clytemnestra’s cart into the orchestra. 139. Shapiro 1989, 149–50. 140. Michelini 1987, 194. Note that female sexuality (in the right context) was prized in Athens; see Ar. Lys., Pax 716–17, 892–905, X. Symp. 9.3–7, and Dover 1974, 211. 141. R. Seaford, “The Eleventh Ode of Bacchylides,” JHS 108 (1988) 135–36, notes that Electra uses the verb diazeugnumi ‘disyoked’ (1323) for her and Orestes’ departure, ironically suggesting the “unyoking” of a marriage (see chapter 6, note 35). According to Luschnig 1995, 155, “the [initial] mourning of Electra for her father, her brother, and herself becomes the [final] mourning of Orestes and Electra for their mother, themselves, and each other.” 142. Jones 1962, 246. 143. Wolff 1982, 256, speaks of the discontinuity “between the isolated, anguished human experience of the protagonists and a bland, divine reordering.” 144. Csapo and Slater 1995, 39–42; Rehm 1994b, 25–26; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 71. 145. Thiasos (56, 75, 115, 136, 221, 379, 532, 548, 558, 584, 680, 978, 1180) can mean a “group of Bacchic revelers,” but also a “religious guild,” “confraternity,” and more generally any “company” or “troop.” The term is used for the “company of the Muses” that visits the tragedian Agathon (Ar. Thesm. 41) and for an “actors’ club” in the late fourth century (Csapo and Slater 1995, 231). For the thiasos of cult, Dionysiac and otherwise, see Seaford 1994, 257–75, and Leinieks 1996, 337–40 and 351–59. 146. The opening 170 lines of the play suggest the ritual return of the cult statue of Dionysus to his temple (and eventually to the theater) with which the City Dionysia began; see chapter 1, and Mussies 1988, 16. 147. On comic elements here and elsewhere, see Seidensticker 1978. 148. Both men pointedly describe their apparel—Teiresias at 176–77 and 322–24, Cadmus at 179–85. 149. Poe 1992, 142–46. 150. See Winnington-Ingram 1969, 127 and 138, and Bushnell 1988, 14–16. 151. Rehm 1994b, 59–61.

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152. Cf. M. Arthur, “The Choral Odes of the Bacchae of Euripides,” YCS 22 (1972) 145–80, who argues for unity of character among the bacchantes based on their concern “that their thoughts and actions be wise.” 153. Pace Leinieks 1996, 53–54. 154. Seidensticker 1978, 310, speaks of “reciprocal intensification,” where the comic seems more comic and the tragic more tragic; in my view, the comedy burns itself up. In that light, R. Seaford, “The Last Bath of Agamemnon,” CQ 34 (1984) 252, and 1996 on Ba. 833, notes that Pentheus, while dressing as a woman, also dons his funeral raiment. 155. On the reversal of situation in these two scenes, see Dodds 1960 on 912–76. 156. On proxemics, Hall 1966 and Lateiner 1992; on contact and discontinuity, Mastronarde 1979 (for Pentheus in particular, 23–24, 30 n.48, 33, and 60). 157. Imprisonment at 226–32, 258–60, 355–56, 442–43, 509–18, and 615–17; threats of violence at 780–86, 796–97, and 845; decapitation at 240–41; hanging at 246–47; stoning at 356–57; assault with a sword at 627–31. 158. References to hands (cheir alone or with compounds) occur more than forty times—the audience hears the word (on average) more than once every four lines over the course of the play. 159. Above all, Dionysus works on the imagination of the audience. After the palace is reduced to fire and rubble, no one onstage—not even the sane second Messenger—notices the fact. 160. Semele originated either as an Anatolian earth-goddess who became “Bride of the Thunderbolt” (Dodds 1960 on 6–12), or as a Persephone-like figure who died and returned to life (Kirk 1970, 24–25). In the play she is sister of Agave, Ino, and Autonoe. 161. Segal 1997a, 131–32, 155–56, and 332–34. 162. Lines 265, 507, 538–44, 995–96, 1024–26, 1155, 1274–76; see N. H. Demand, Thebes in the Fifth Century (London 1982) 52–55. 163. The Chorus compares the chthonic Pentheus’ rejection of Dionysus to the earthborn giants’ rebellion against the Olympians (538–49)—Pentheus as theomachos, “fighter against the gods” (45, 325; also 795–96, 1255). This comparison does not preclude the “spatially transgressive” similarities that unite the stories of Theban and Dionysian origins. 164. A. W. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, tr. J. Black, rev. A. Morrison (London 1846) 69–70. 165. The description may reflect Sophistic conjecture about the origins of life. Archelaus of Athens, Anaxagoras’ pupil and Socrates’ teacher, thought that the earth sent an ooze like milk to nourish the animals, themselves born of the earth. See D. L. 2.17; Hippol. I.9.5 (A.4); and Guthrie 1965, 339–44. 166. Burke 1966, 9–13. 167. The passage recalls the fellow feeling of mortals and the whole earth for Prometheus (A. PV 407–24). 168. Segal 1997a, 204–6, views the sparagmos as the “defeat of male phallic power by the female,” and “Pentheus’ movement back from adult male heroism to infancy.” More interesting in spatial terms is Segal’s application of the psychological concept “primary boundary anxiety” (regarding the violation and deformation of one’s body) in Lucretius on Death and Anxiety: Poetry and Philosophy in “De Rerum Natura” (Princeton 1990) 115–70.

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169. We might compare the floridity of this passage with the Chorus’s singleword reference to the mutilation of Agamemnon’s corpse, emaschalisth¯e (Cho. 439); see note 3. 170. For autochthony in the play, see Segal 1997a, 128–40. It seems poetically appropriate that Dionysus, the shape changer (53–54, 920–24, and Forbes Irving 1990, 191–94), punishes Thebes by physically transforming its foundational couple. 171. Although the ending of the play suffers two lacunae—Agave’s lament and the reassembling of Pentheus’ body, and the opening section of Dionysus’ apotheosis— neither seems to have dealt with Cadmus’ transformation and military campaign. Kirk 1970, 130–31 and 133–35, and Dodds 1960b on 1300 and 1329 differ on reconstructing what has been lost. 172. Rosenmeyer 1963, 149. 173. Although Cadmus may get Elysium wrong—in the standard myth, the Blessed live forever without care—the point remains that for mortals in extremis the promise of eternity means their suffering will never end. Moreover, if Cadmus has no memory of his past, what aspects of him remain to enjoy eternal bliss? However we interpret Cadmus’ response to Elysium, I doubt we are meant to think of him as “unduly fussy” (so Kirk 1970, 137). 174. The ruined house and vine-covered tomb of Semele may stand in the back of the orchestra, a constant reminder of Thebes’ role in Dionysus’ birth. If so, it operates more as a physical marker than a source of specific recollection. 175. Rivier 1975, 191. 176. Heracles and Agave share similar psychological states: Heracles’ god-sent madness is compared with a bacchic frenzy, as Agave’s literally is; the father of each helps his child come to his (her) senses; a generalized gestalt therapy operates, moving from the big picture to the specific deed; and so on. 177. See H. Foley, “The Masque of Dionysus,” TAPA 110 (1980) 107–37, and Segal 1997a, 215–71 and 369–78. Tragic masks included the hair as well as the face, making them far more realistic than the neutral masks favored in modern productions. Other severed heads represented by masks may have occurred in Eur. (and possibly Sophocles’) Andromeda (Medusa), and Sophocles’ Phineus (the second wife); see C. W. Marshall, “Some Fifth-Century Masking Conventions,” G&R 46 (1999) 201 n.49. How Euripides represented the head of Aegisthus in Electra—a character who appears onstage only as a corpse—is another matter. 178. Aspines, a third-century A.D. rhetorician, reports that “Agave, rid of her madness and recognizing that her own child has been torn to pieces, accuses herself. . . . Holding each of his [Pentheus’] limbs in her hands she laments them one at a time.” See Kirk 1970, 130; Dodds 1960b on 1300 and 1329, and pp. 243–45; and C. Segal, “Lament and Recognition: A Reconsideration of the Ending of the Bacchae,” in Cropp, Lee, and Sansone 2000, 273–91. March 1989 suggests that Agave’s murder of Pentheus, her onstage recovery from madness, and the reassembling of her son’s corpse were Euripidean innovations. 179. Esposito 1998, 89, offers a useful reconstruction of part of her speech. 180. The paradigmatic story of Actaeon also surfaces at 229–30, 337–41, 1227– 28; see Dodds 1960b on 337–40 and J. Heath, Actaeon, the Unmannerly Intruder (New York 1992) 10–17. 181. C. P. Segal, “Pentheus and Hippolytus on the Couch and on the Grid: Psychoanalytic and Structuralist Readings of Greek Tragedy,” CW 72 (1978) esp. 133–39

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(⳱ 1986, 268–93); Segal 1997a, 27–157. A binary approach to Greek culture informs Lloyd 1966 (the polarity, not the analogy); Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1981; Vernant 1983 (esp. 127–75); Segal 1986, 21–74, and his La musique du sphinx: Po´esie et structure dans la trag´edie grecque, tr. C. Malamoud and M.-P. Gruenais (Paris 1987); Padel 1990 and 1992; Zeitlin 1996 (see A. Griffiths rev. Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 14, 1997); Wiles 1997. 182. On the lack of a chorus that “can speak as a community of involved fellow citizens,” see C. Segal, “Chorus and Community in Euripides’ Bacchae,” in Edmunds and Wallace 1997, 65–86; also Buxton 1992, 12. That no one but foreign bacchantes is onstage to hear the Messenger reveals the civic emptiness of Thebes. 183. Structuralists emphasize Dionysus as the god who is both outside and inside, low and high, foreign and native, etc. Cf. Hall 1989, 151–54, for the possibility that the “barbarization” of Dionysus also carried political and ideological overtones. 184. A locus amoenus is literally a “place without walls.” 185. See chapter 1, note 140. On the Bacchae specifically, Easterling 1991, 50, points out how “closely related Cithaeron is to the visible action through exits and entrances and props.” 186. Henrichs 1984, 69–70. 187. Winnington-Ingram 1997, 99: “The Herdsman’s final comment is . . . a counterpoise to the sublimity and high poetry of his own narrative.” 188. The “bronze and iron” of the text (Dodds 1960 on 755–57); recall Euripides’ Electra bearing the water jug on her head. 189. This possibility complicates the oft-repeated claim—Seaford 1994, 258–59; R. Friedrich, “City and Mountain: Dramatic Spaces in Euripides’ Bacchae,” 538–45, in Bauer and Fokkema 1990; March 1989, 61–62—that the movement from city to mountain in the play signals a shift from civilized values to their opposite. 190. That Euripides figures Pentheus’ death as a perversion of sacrificial ritual is well established; see Segal 1997a, 37–42; Seaford 1994, 293–301; March 1989, 61– 62; Foley 1985, 208–18. 191. Dodds 1960b, xl and on 201–3, 270–1, 274–85, and 890–92; also Kirk 1970, 16; Seaford 1996 on 274–85. 192. Dodds 1960b on 389–92; McDonald 1978, 267–69; generally, Carter 1986. 193. Zeitlin 1990a, esp. 131, 145, 147–48, and 153, argues that Thebes “provides the negative model to Athens’ manifest image of itself with regard to its notions of the proper management of city, society, and self.” Besides exhibiting an overly neat sense of “self and Other,” discussed further in chapters 5 and 6, this view seems an odd one for Euripides—recently self-exiled from Athens—to embrace at the end of his life. 194. Andrewes 1992, 488. 195. See chapter 1. Earlier (ca. 416) Euripides wrote an epinician for Alcibiades’ victory in a chariot race (Campbell 1982–93, 5:382–83). If the attribution is correct (Plu. Alc., but cf. Haigh 1896, 277 n.1), perhaps the playwright (like many Athenians) had a change of heart regarding Alcibiades in the last decade of the war. 196. For the view that the space separating Dionysus on the roof from his human victims below marks the gulf between human and divine, see (e.g.) Grube 1941, 418–20; Conacher 1967, 71–72; and Mastronarde 1979, 96.

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CHAPTER FIVE SPACE, TIME, AND MEMORY: SOPHOCLES’ OEDIPUS TYRANNUS

1. Segal 1997a, 211–12. 2. Vernant 1983, 353–55. As Gellie 1972, 86, puts it, “the restricted [perceptual] equipment of men converges with the unlimited vision of the gods . . . [offering] a long look into the chasm that lies between them.” 3. On names as bearers of tragic destiny, see W. B. Stanford, The Sound of Greek, Sather vol. 38 (Berkeley 1967) 11–12, and Garvie 1998 on Aj. 430–33. 4. The effect builds in the Greek—each transliterated word ends its line. On Oedipus’ name, see Knox 1957, 182–84; Benardete 1964, 6–7 and 12; Segal 1981, 223 (“To know ‘who he is’ [1036, 1068, 1184–85, 1273–74] is also to ‘know where he is’ [367, 413]. The ‘Know-Nothing Oedipus’ [297] is also the ‘Know-Where Oedipus,’ since the name can be etymologized as ‘know where.’ ”); and Pucci 1991, 11. 5. On the effect of the audience’s prior knowledge, see Erp Taalman Kip 1990, 21– 41, 71–76, and 118–20. The comic poet has a harder task: Now Tragedy’s a lucky sort of art. First the house knows the plot before you start; You’ve only to remind it. “Oedipus” You say, and all’s out—father Laius, Mother Jocasta, daughters these, sons those, His sin, his coming punishment . . . (Antiphanes fr. 191, Edmonds 1959, 256–57) 6. Zeitlin 1990a, 131; also McGlew 1993, 203–6, Vidal-Naquet 1997, 113. For a useful corrective, see Croally 1994, 38–42, 188–91, 205–7, and 213–14. Note, for example, that the Athenian leader Theseus distinguishes the good city of Thebes (S. OC 919–23) from its evil ruler Creon, expressing surprise that enmity could spread from there to Athens (OC 606). See further chapter 6. 7. The play may have opened with a “canceled entry,” but the suppliants have come from the local distanced space of the city, as their departure confirms. Burian 1977 suggests dramatic possibilities for the setting-up of such opening tableaux. 8. Although the date of the play remains uncertain, most scholars agree on 429– 25, coinciding with the outbreak and recurrence of the epidemic in Athens. Of course, circularity here is unavoidable. See Knox, “The Date of Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles,” AJP 77 (1956) 133–47 (⳱ 1979, 112–24). Cf. Burton 1980, 145–46, and C. W. Muller, ¨ Zur Datierung des sophokleischen Oedipus (Weisbaden 1984), who dates the play to 434, before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and the plague at Athens. 9. Translation by Wick (Crawley) 1982. 10. Jebb 1888 on 20. 11. Hall 1989, 194–95, and K. J. Rigsby, “Teiresias as Magus in Oedipus Rex,” GRBS 17 (1976) 109–14. For Delphi’s support of Sparta, and Athenian suspicions of the oracle and of prophets, see Thuc. 8.1; Whitman 1951, 135–37; Knox 1957, 44– 45; R. Flaceli`ere, Greek Oracles (New York 1965) 60–72; Nilsson 1972, 134–41; J. Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle (Berkeley 1978) 33, 152–59, 246–47; R. Parker,

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“Greek States and Greek Oracles,” in Cartledge and Harvey 1985, 298–326 (who finds no serious disenchantment with Apollo’s oracle); Garland 1990, 82–85 and 91; Dillon 1997, 38–40 and 85–86. 12. Knox 1957, 78–93; G. Greiffenhagen, “Der Prozess des Oedipus: Strafrechtliche und strafprozessuale Bemerkungen zur Interpretation des Oedipus Rex,” Hermes 94 (1966) 147–76; and R. G. Lewis, “The Procedural Basis of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus,” GRBS 30 (1989) 41–66. 13. Vernant 1981, 100–107 and his “Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore 1970), esp. 276–79; see also Foley 1993. 14. B.M.W. Knox, “Introduction,” in Fagles 1984, 136–43, draws out the particular Athenian-like characteristics of Oedipus, developing his earlier argument in “Why Is Oedipus Called Tyrannos?” CJ 50 (1954) 97–102 (⳱ 1979, 87–95), and 1957, 53– 77. See also V. Ehrenberg, Sophokles und Perikles (Munich 1956) 82–91, 138–43, 174–77. 15. Pelasgus in Aeschylus’ and Theseus in Euripides’ Suppliant Women exemplify the type. Vernant 1991, 306–7, discusses the tension in Athens between political discourse (built on public debate and communal decisions) and divination (undialectic, open to interpretation, requiring an expert). That Oedipus tries to unite them in his first exchange with Creon indicates his democratic sympathies. 16. Teiresias puns on this possibility when he refuses to speak what he knows: “Things will come out on their own, even if I roof it over [steg¯o] with silence” (341). 17. See note 2. 18. Some commentators (Jebb 1888 on 16; Lloyd-Jones 1994, 327) take the reference to plural altars literally, imagining several altars near the door of the palace. It seems more likely that a single altar, centrally located in the orchestra, provides the focus for both the suppliants’ opening gathering and for Jocasta’s belated intercession (see chapter 1; Rehm 1988, 264–74; Burian 1977, 83 and 91–93). 19. Loraux 1987, 24. 20. The possibility of suicide seems to lie behind lines 1183–85; once inside, Oedipus asks for a sword and the whereabouts of his “wife that is no wife” (1255– 58), suggesting that Jocasta might be the intended victim. 21. Dawe 1982 and Jebb 1888 on 1208; Burton 1980, 175. 22. Jebb 1888 on 1269. 23. Segal 1995a, 159; Rehm 1994a, 182 n.22; P. Pucci, “On the ‘Eye’ and the ‘Phallos’ and Other Permutabilities in Oedipus Rex,” in Bowersock, Burkert, and Putnam 1979, 130–31; and G. Devereux, “The Self-Blinding of Oidipous in Sophokles’ Oedipus Tyrannos,” JHS 93 (1973) 36–49. Segal 1986, 97–98, links Oedipus’ intimate memories with his penetrating the private, interior parts of the palace. 24. For Knox 1957, 194, Oedipus’ greatness at the end of the play is based not (as before) on ignorance per se, but on the recognition of ignorance, as in Socrates’ famous claim. 25. Gellie 1986, 39. 26. Bowra 1944, 210; Taplin 1978, 45–46, and 1983, 172–74; Seale 1982, 251– 55; Holland 1989, 45–47. 27. J. Gould, “The Language of Oedipus,” in Sophocles, ed. H. Bloom (New York 1990) 219. See also Bers 1997, 45–46.

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28. Gellie 1986, 40; see also M. Davies, “The End of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos,” Hermes 110 (1982) 268–79; Ronnet 1969, 67–68; Knox 1957, 185–96; Whitman 1951, 142. 29. Gellie 1986, 39. 30. Foley 1993, 533 and 536, elegantly summarizes the issue: [B]ecause the entire logic of the play has prepared us for a decisive conclusion . . . and because the death or expulsion of the murderer [commanded by Delphi] has been so strongly linked with the safety of the city, Oedipus’ insistence on banishment is instinctively convincing. . . . It is hard to avoid the impression that Sophocles has deliberately chosen to make his destroyed hero the sole champion of the expectations raised by his own plot. These anomalies prompt some scholars to suspect interpolation, perhaps undertaken to allow a joint production of Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus—in the latter, Oedipus’ banishment occurs belatedly as an unjust political act, whereas in the former the exile is ordered by Apollo. The interpolation introduces a political element, by having the new ruler Creon block Oedipus’ immediate departure for the mountain. See D. A. Hester, “The Banishment of Oedipus,” Antichthon 18 (1984) 13–23; also March 1987, 148–54. Textual critics long have suspected lines 1524–30; see R. D. Dawe, Studies in the Text of Sophocles 1 (Leiden 1974) 266–73, and 1982 on 1524–30. 31. The elders of the Chorus also invoke Delphi as a dominant distant place. They recreate the flight of Laius’ killer, with Delphi looming in the background (463–65, 473–76, 480–81), and they lament the apparent unreliability of divine prophecies, particularly those of Apollo and Delphi (897–910). 32. Poulet 1977, 14. We may compare Sophocles’ dramatic use of “natural” mnemonic detail with the memory system of Quintilian, where memories are associated with a series of loci construed as parts of a building through which the remembering agent mentally “walks” (Institutio oratoria, XI.ii.17–22), a theory that made a strong impact on Augustine (Confessions 10. 8–9) and influenced Renaissance thinking about memory (Yates 1966). Drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Quintilian developed the idea of affective embodiments (visiones) that could conjure an absent event and its concomitant emotion (book 6), a key element in theories of theatrical acting in seventeenth-century Europe (Roach 1993, 23–57). 33. In his study of aspect in Sophocles, Hutchinson 1999, 63–67, finds that “underlying the whole play [OT] is the notion of perfective solutions to imperfective [ongoing or incomplete] situations.” 34. Rehm 1994b, 110–11; Segal 1981, 213–16 and 454–55 n.21; Benardete 1964, 10 and 12; Knox 1957, 148–55. Jones 1962, 213, notes that this “festooning of quasi-mathematical symmetries is germane to dramatic intention and effect throughout.” 35. Lattimore 1958, 96–102; Segal 1981, 217–28; Buxton 1992, 2; Wiles 1997, 117–19. 36. R. Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca 1991) 151–54; C. Patterson, “ ‘Not Worth the Rearing’: The Causes of Infant Exposure in Ancient Greece,” TAPA 115 (1985) 103–23; and D. Engels, “The Problem of Female Infanticide in the Graeco-Roman World,” CP 75 (1980) 112–80 (low total numbers, with proportionally far more boys than girls exposed).

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37. J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. L. S. Roudiez (New York 1982). In The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Mass. 1992) 21–27, A. Vidler traces Freud’s notion of the uncanny (see my note 55) to Schelling’s definition of Unheimlich: “the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden, but has come to light.” 38. The slave turned shepherd was not discarded, for in granting his supplication, Jocasta says “he was worthy, as male slaves go, of receiving a far greater favor than this” (763–64). However, the play completely forgets him, until Jocasta’s unwitting mention of the three roads leads to his “rediscovery.” 39. J. E. Skydsgaard, “Transhumance in Ancient Greece,” in Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity, ed. C. R. Whittaker (Cambridge 1988) 75–86; Osborne 1987, 47– 52; and Buxton 1992, 2–3 and 6, and 1994, 81–86, on the manifold uses and meanings of oros ‘mountain’ for the ancient Greeks. 40. See chapter 1. 41. Jebb 1888 on 25 and 26. 42. Both men are shepherds, poim¯en (1029, 1040), and their herds seem to have consisted of sheep, not oxen (761, 1028, 1125, 1135). Laius’ old servant has “double sheep flocks” (diploisi poimniois, 1135), but he also is called bot¯er (1044, 1048, 1069, 1111, 1116) and nomeus (1118), general terms for “herdsman,” which means he may have tended cattle or goats as well. 43. Halliwell 1986, who notes that Oedipus also uses the term to describe the crossroads: “the hidden grove [kekrummen¯e nap¯e], / the dense trees and narrow ravine where the three roads meet, / which drank my own and my father’s / blood” (OT 1398–1401). Crossroads were numinous for the Greeks, who linked them to the chthonic deities Hecate, Persephone, and the Furies (Oedipus’ language makes the bloodshed seem like an unintentional chthonic offering). 44. The impossibility of effecting such a reversal leads the child to identify with the male in order to possess a female similar, but not identical, to his mother. See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition (London 1953–74), 5:397–40, 584–85; 7:225– 29 and 235; 9:220–22; 10:90–91, 100, 119–20, 135–37, 249–58; 21:183–84 and 225–43. 45. J. P. Vernant, “Oedipus without the Complex,” in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1981, 63–86; cf. C. P. Segal, “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious,” in Segal 1995a, 161–75. 46. Poole 1987, 90. 47. Oedipus, the Corinthian, and Jocasta appear in the previous scene, which ends as the Queen rushes off into the palace. The actor playing Jocasta returns as the Shepherd in the next scene, joining Oedipus and the Corinthian onstage. 48. Bergson 1991, 137–42; Lloyd 1993, 102. As J. J. Gibson reminds us (quoted in Neisser and Fivush 1994, 15), “perception is based on the ongoing activity of organisms that are in direct contact with their environment . . . [which] is exactly what memory is not.” 49. Lloyd 1993, 129–41. Poulet 1977 sees this “out of timeness” deriving from Proust’s fear that time in its progress seems to devour the past. By spatializing time, Proust transforms it into a container that holds the past together with the present. He thus expresses “the simultaneity of the successive; the presence, in the present, of another present: the past” (Poulet 1977, 94). See generally J. Frank, “Spatial Form in

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Modern Literature,” Sewanee Review 53 (1945), reprinted in The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick, N.J. 1963) 3–62, particularly 19–25; cf. R. Shattuck, Marcel Proust (Princeton 1974) 113–19, who emphasizes linear (chronological) progression in Proust’s 3,000-page novel. 50. Vatsyayan 1981, 28. 51. Halliburton 1988 offers perspicacious comments on overtaking as “the emergence of revelation from concealment,” a key aspect in his Heideggerian reading of Greek tragedy. 52. Poole 1987, 108. On the “map” of Oedipus’ past, see Taplin 1983, 166–72. 53. Jammer 1993, 3–4. Jaynes 1976, 60, concludes that we “absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it.” 54. Segal 1995a, 147: “Sophocles’ skillful handling of events moves us back to origins and forward to the dark future. The present is both a recapitulation of the past and a reenactment of the past in symbolic form.” 55. S. Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. B. Nelson (New York 1958) esp. 122–31. See my note 37. 56. The adjective abatos ‘untrodden’ suggests both a desolate and a sacred place, as at S. OC 167 and 675, Eur. Pho. 1751–52, Erechtheus (P. Sorbonne 2328, 85– 87 ⳱ 370 K 85–87, Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995, 172–73); also chapter 3, note 32. 57. Pl. Theat. 173e-174c. Aristophanes takes the opposite tack, literally “sending up” Socrates in Clouds by showing him in midair spouting groundless arguments (Nu. 218–38). Plato offers a more flattering version of the single-minded philosopher in Alcibiades’ account of Socrates standing stock-still an entire day and night while contemplating a problem (Pl. Smp. 220c2–d5). 58. Vernant 1981. 59. Segal 1986, 29. 60. Ogden 1932 presents a stimulating taxonomy of oppositions, and the contradictions inherent in many of them. 61. For tracking imagery in the play, see Segal 1981, 219–20. 62. On incest as a symbol of Oedipus’ tragic inability to differentiate, see Vickers 1973, 521–24; Girard 1977, 74–76; Vernant 1981, 107–9; and Segal 1995a, 141. 63. Compare Oedipus’ earthbound future with Jocasta’s midair death by hanging (1263–64). For the role of the earth in the play, see Segal 1995a, 199–212. 64. Quoted by St. John Wilson 1989. 65. Creon himself reports that Delphi sets a punishment of death or banishment for Laius’ murderer (100–101), repeated by Oedipus (308–9), who later threatens Creon with the same penalty when he suspects him of treason (621–22, 640–41). 66. Athenaeus 10.456B. On the sources for Athenaeus’ quotation and the riddle per se, see Jebb 1888, 6; Segal 1981, 454 n.20, and 1993b, 52–57; and L. Edmunds, The Sphinx in the Oedipus Legend (Konigstein ¨ 1981) 18–21 and 32 n.16. 67. Taplin 1978, 152–53; Vernant 1981, 96–97 and 109–10; and Segal 1981, 241–44, who links the problem of Oedipus’ identity to his difficulty in decoding (inherently ambiguous) language: “the very subject of the Oedipus Tyrannus is polysemicity” (1986, 68). 68. Augustine, Confessions bk. 11.20 (modified from Sheed). Lloyd 1993, 14–42 explains Augustinian time masterfully, as does Ricoeur 1984, 5–30 (“The Aporias of

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the Experience of Time”). See also J. L. Borges, “A New Refutation of Time” (1946), in Labyrinths, ed. D. A. Yates and J. E. Irby (New York 1964) 217–34: “Time, if we can intuitively grasp such an identity, is a delusion: the difference and inseparability of one moment belonging to its apparent past from another belonging to its apparent present is sufficient to disintegrate it” (226–27). 69. M. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington 1982) 266. 70. Halliburton 1988, 254–56. 71. Augustine, Confessions bk. 11.18, 20. 72. Quoted by Poulet 1977, 3–4; see Bergson 1991, 69–71, 141–50; also Jaynes 1976, 59–61. 73. Heidegger 1962, 236; Wolz 1981, 117. 74. J.-P. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, tr. G. J. Becker (New York 1948) 90. 75. Jones 1962, 203. 76. Halliburton 1988, 265, who correctly observes how Oedipus’ attitude toward what lies ahead differs fundamentally from the “ ‘willed futurity’ of the present day.” In that vein, R. P. Winnington-Ingram, “Tragedy and Greek Archaic Thought,” in Classical Drama and Its Influence, ed. M. J. Anderson (New York 1965), 31–50, emphasizes the “daimonic” in Oedipus Tyrannus, noting that “our deliberate acts are themselves in large measure the product of innumerable causes in the past over which we have no control” (47). Developing the argument (1983, 173–78), he points out that the Chorus needs “the influence of a daimon [OT 1300–1302] to explain his deliberate act [of self-blinding] . . ., a recognition that there is a given factor in human character which is no less a part of man’s destiny than those events which character may (or may not) help to mould.” 77. De Romilly 1971, 79–99. 78. Kant 1998, 174–84, also 41–44 (⳱ 1787, B 37–58). Whitehead 1927, 30–40 and 49–73, tries valiantly to determine “whether time is to be found in nature or nature is to be found in time.” For the standard critique of Kant’s view of time, see Nietzsche 1962, 97–98, quoting A. Spir. 79. Dodds 1973, 75; also Henrichs 1995, 65–73, and Knox 1957, 46–47. Winnington-Ingram 1980, 179–204, offers an insightful analysis of the ode as a whole. 80. B.M.W. Knox, “Oedipus Rex,” Grand Street 4 (1985) 203–5. 81. Gardiner 1987, 105–6. 82. On this aspect of choral performance, see H. Bacon, “The Chorus in Greek Life and Drama,” Arion 3.1 (1995), esp. 13–20. Henrichs 1996 distinguishes the passage in the second stasimon (choral self-reference) from that in the third stasimon (choral projection). 83. Taplin 1983, 157–58, who observes that “the orchestra is a fateful place . . . where journeys converge and culminate.” See also the discussion by contributors, pp. 181–83. 84. Benardete 1964, 3; Bushnell 1988, 85, writes of Oedipus’ “abandonment of the city’s cause in the search for his own identity and autonomy.” 85. On choral presence, see Gardiner 1987, 97–109. Seale 1982, 246–47 discusses the public nature of Oedipus’ punishment. Foley 1993, 529–30, emphasizes how the oracle condemning the murder of Laius—a divine prerequisite for the city’s purification—resurfaces in the play’s closing sequence (at 1410–12 and 1449–50).

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CHAPTER SIX SPACE AND THE OTHER

1. Vidal-Naquet 1997, 119; Whitehead 1977, 19 and 70; Zeitlin 1978, 153 (⳱ 1996, 90), 1990a, 131–32 and 144–50, and 1990b; Hall 1989, esp. 1–6, 10–12, 17–19, 76–133, and 1996, 6–7, 11–13, 18–19; Sa¨ıd 1978, 5–7, 9–10, 20, 56–58; Castriota 1992, 27 and 31–32; Cartledge 1993, 11–12; Segal 1986, 99–100 and 302. 2. M. A. Katz, “Buphonia and Goring Ox,” in Rosen and Farrell 1993, 157; Vernant 1991, 202 and 213 (Artemis), 196 and 205 (“death, the absolute Other”). On animals, slaves, barbarians, children, and women as “standard forms of the Other,” see F. Zeitlin, “Introduction,” in Vernant 1991, 20–22. Lissarague 1990, 10–13, discusses the experience of wine as encountering “the Other,” especially the satyr, whom he calls “a countermodel to humanity” (in his contribution to Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990, 66). 3. Cartledge 1993, 2 and 11. See E. Levinas, L’humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpelier 1972), and T. Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, tr. R. Howard (Norman, Okla. 1999; orig. Paris 1982) 247–54 (also 42–44, 75–77, 127, 190–94, and 239–41). 4. It is most important, and usually most difficult, to see through the propaganda of one’s own society. For the modern development of propaganda, its promotion, and its mind-numbing effects in the United States, see the invaluable work of Noam Chomsky, including Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (New York 1997); World Orders Old and New (New York 1994); Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (Cambridge, Mass. 1989); 1987, 121–36; and, with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent (New York 1988). 5. “Freak shows” in the old circus and carnival world, or the portrayal of the African in Jacobean masque (to take two disparate examples), created and exploited stereotypical notions of the “Other,” against which the particular audience (“nonfreaks,” the English court) found itself legitimated and confirmed. But can such a process account for the representation on the ancient stage of barbarians, women, Thebes and Thebans, Persians, bastards, slaves, animals, satyrs, and gods? 6. However, McClure 1999, 92 and 96, faults Cassandra’s “conformity to Greek social norms” and “to conventional female behavior.” For McClure, Cassandra is simply not “Other” enough. 7. Synodinou 1977, 49–58, argues that in Euripides the concept “barbarian” evolves into a category based on behavior, independent of national origins or ethnicity. In Andromache, for example, the Greek Hermione’s diatribe against “barbarians” (esp. lines 173–77) underscores her own viciousness, as Grube 1941, 201, and others point out. 8. Zeitlin 1990a, 144. 9. Havelock 1982, 293–99 (quotation at 295). Aeschylus’ Seven was performed in 467, only thirteen years after the Athenians evacuated their women and children in the face of Xerxes’ invasion. From the ramparts of the Acropolis, the Athenians who stayed behind held off the invaders for several days before succumbing. A year later, the Athenians evacuated their city again, and the Persians under Mardonius sacked Athens a second time (see note 18). The Persian threat continued until Cimon’s victory at Eurymedon, probably the year after Seven premiered (Meiggs 1975, 75–86).

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10. States 1985, 4. 11. The other fifth-century tragedies we know with nonmythic subjects, Phyrynichus’ Capture of Miletus (492) and Phoenician Women (476), also dealt with the ongoing Persian-Greek conflict (Hall 1989, 63–64, and 1996, 7–9, and Haigh 1896, 42–45). 12. For clarity in these muddy waters, see Broadhead 1960, xliii–xlvi; Dale 1969, 119 and 259–62; and Hall 1996 on 140–41. 13. See chapters 1 and 3. 14. Although modern productions shed (at best) weak light on ancient practices, this staging of Darius’ appearance proved successful in my production of Persians in Atlanta in 1990. 15. Working back from the infamous Carcinus’ incident (Arist. Po. 1455a 26–29), Green 1990, 283, suggests that Darius’ ghost might have appeared at the central doorway; I think this would have been confusing. 16. G. Paduona, Sui Persiani di Eschilo: Problemi di focalizzazone drammatica (Rome 1978) 85–103 (“una tragedia di famiglia”). 17. E. Hall 1989, 77–86, followed by J. Hall 1997, who bemoans (46–47) stereotyping in “the derogatory way that Aiskylos . . . practise[d] with regard to the Persians.” 18. See chapter 1 and in this chapter, note 9; Hdt. 8.50–53, 8.109, 9.65.2; Thuc. 1.89; Hignett 1963, 200, 203, and 211–13; Lazenby 1993, 152–55 and 212–13; and Balcer 1995, 280–82 (the siege of Athens by Xerxes in 480, by Mardonius in 479). Shapiro 1989, 38–39, and W. Gauer, Weihgeschenke aus den Perserkriegen, Istanbuler Mitteilungen supp. 2 (T¨ubingen 1968) 103–7, discuss the destroyed and rebuilt statue of Athena Promachos (originally a votive for Marathon, and rebuilt by funds derived from Persian booty, noted by Paus. 1.28.2 and 10.15.4). 19. On the new walls, see Thuc. 1.90. One can still see spolia from the Persian’s destruction of the old Acropolis temples on the exterior north wall of the sanctuary. 20. On booty seized from the Persians, see Hdt. 9.80–83; J. P. Barron, “The Liberation of Greece,” CAH 4:609–10 and 616–20; and O. Broneer, “The Tent of Xerxes,” UCPClArch 1.12 (1944) 305–11. 21. By setting his production of Persians in Iraq after the “allied” bombing campaign of 1990–91, Peter Sellars skewed the power relationships on which the play depends. In spite of Western propaganda to the contrary, Iraq (unlike the Persian Empire under Darius and Xerxes) was crushed by an infinitely stronger force, with far greater resources than it could muster. In the period 480–472—and long before, and long after—Persia was the elephant, Greece the mouse, not the other way around. For the United States during its “withdrawal” from Vietnam as a better modern parallel, see M. Ewan, ed. and tr., Suppliants and Other Dramas (London 1996) xxix. 22. S. Woodford, “More Light on Old Walls,” JHS 94 (1974) 162; see also Scully 1962, 91 and 183. For the highly programmatic “art in service of the state” of the Achaemenids, see T. C. Young, “The Persian Empire,” in CAH 4:40 and 109–11; CAH, Plates to Vol. 4, ed. J. Boardman (Cambridge 1988), 16–19 and pls. 11–17 (Bisitun relief, showing Darius trampling a rebel, with nine named rebels, hands bound and roped at their necks), and 32, 40–44 and pls. 27, 40a–c (procession of tributaries at Apadana in Persepolis). On Persepolis, P.R.S. Moorey (25) quotes with approval Curzon writing in 1892: “Everything is devoted, with unabashed repetition, to a single

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purpose, viz. the delineation of majesty in its most inspired sense, the pomp and panoply of him who was well styled the Great King.” See also M. C. Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire, Acta Iranica 19 (Leiden 1979), esp. 1–4, 15–28, and 131–61. Boardman 2000, 216–20, summarizes the monumental Persian art of the period: Persepolis was designed to demonstrate to Persians and subject peoples that the king was effortlessly all-powerful, and for this was its imagery created. The Parthenon . . . demonstrated to Athenians and allies that Athens . . . was top dog in the comparatively small kennel of Greece. But the defeated barbarian as such was not represented at all, nor the armed forces as such; this was not Bisitun . . . [which was] very much the art of a Great Dictator. 23. C. Pelling, “Aeschylus Persae and History,” in Pelling 1997, 18; Goldhill 1988, 193. Pelling’s section “Ideology and National Stereotypes” (13–19) ends with an apt phrase from Stephen Greenblatt on the “discovery of Self in Other and Other in Self.” For similar judgments on the play, see Finley 1955, 209–10; Jacqueline Duchemin, “R´eflexions sur la trag´edie des Perses,” Information litt´eraire 8 (1956) 15–18; and Thalmann 1980, 281–82. Cf. Harrison 2000, 55, who finds “only . . . themes highlighted . . . which stress the devastation wrought on the Persians, not their common humanity.” 24. Winnington-Ingram 1983, 198–99. 25. Vernant 1991, 205. 26. The underworld opens briefly (688–92, 839–42) for Darius, underlining Hades’ role as the final destination for all. 27. In particular, lines 21–54 (Chorus), 302–31 (Messenger), and 957–61, 967– 73, 979–85, 992–1001 (Chorus). 28. On Persian names, see Broadhead 1960, 318–21, and Sidgwick 1903, 66–68; on their purported impact, Hall 1989, 77–78. The fact that no one utters the proper name of a Greek suggests their unified collectivity in contrast to the invaders (Goldhill 1988, 192). For Homeric naming as creation from the void, see George Seferis, “The King of Asine,” in Collected Poems, tr. and ed. E. Keeley and P. Sherrard (Princeton 1971) 135–37. 29. Broadhead 1960, 310–17, and Rehm 1994a, 184 n.32; Hall 1989, 83–84, emphasizes its excessive nature, without acknowledging the enormity of the loss that prompts such grief. 30. On the “Greekness” of Atossa’s offerings, the ghost-raising scene, and also Darius, see Hall 1989, 89–90, and Broadhead 1960, xxvii–xxi. 31. Hdt. 1.131–32; A. Pax 406–11; on Greek sacrificial practice, see chapter 1. 32. Winnington-Ingram 1983, 1–15 (Zeus in Persians); Broadhead 1960 on 204 and 607–10 (Atossa’s offerings); Hall 1989, 143–49 (“Aeschylus did not explicitly differentiate the religious beliefs of his Persians from those of Greeks”). As well as Apollo and Zeus, the Persians refer by name to Athena (“the gods protect the city of the goddess Pallas,” 347), Hermes (629), Hades (Aidoneus, 649–50), Poseidon (750), Ares (942), Olympian irregulars G¯e/Gaia (Earth, 499, 523, 629, 640) and Ouranos (Sky, 499), and the non-Olympian Pan (449). 33. R. Williams, “Afterword,” in Dollimore and Sinfield 1994, 287. 34. Burford 1993, 126, reminds us that the poor in Attica harnessed donkeys, or

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themselves, to the plow. Hesiod (Op. 436–40) describes yoked animals quarreling and breaking the plow, a farmer’s-eye-view of elements in Atossa’s dream; on Persian war chariots, see Pers. 29, 45–48, and 84. 35. Both man and woman yoked together (A. Pers. 139, Eur. Med. 242, Arist. Pol. 1253b9–10); spouse as “yokemate” (suzugos) (Sappho fr. 213.3, A. Cho. 599, Eur. Alc. 314); Iphis wishes he had remained “unyoked in marriage” (Eur. Su. 791); “unyoked” used for unwedded girls (Eur. Hipp. 1425, Ba. 694) and unwedded men (Eur. Med. 673, IA 805, Kresphontes 66.23 [Austin 1968 ⳱ Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995, Kres. line 50]); one of Hera’s cult titles as goddess of marriage was Zygia (Yoker) (Rehm 1994a, 201 n.48), etc. 36. In a nonmarital context, Agamemnon speaks of his former allies at Troy offering “the mirror of companionship, an image of a shadow,” while Odysseus alone “took up the yoke [zeuchtheis] and pulled at my side [seiraphoros]” (Ag. 839–42). At Il. 13.703–8, Homer compares the two Ajaxes standing together in battle to yoked oxen plowing fallow land. 37. It strikes me as oversubtle, and insensitive to the realities of war, to view this passage (and others featuring the absence of men) as evidence of the systematic “effeminisation of Persia” (Hall 1996, 13). Xerxes’ expedition accomplishes what foreign wars generally do, empty beds and fill graves. If Aeschylus represents “Asia as Woman,” as Hall argues, then he does the same for Greece and Europe (Europ¯ ¯ e, 799), both grammatically feminine, the latter actually named for a woman. In the Queen’s nightmare (Pers. 181–200), for instance, Greece is the sister of Persia, sharing both her gender and her genealogy. 38. The fact that barbaros is used by Persian characters of themselves speaks strongly against Hall’s claim (1989, 5 and 9–11) that the term in Persians connoted a non-Greek inferior. Of course, by retroactively assigning the word its later pejorative sense, we could interpret its use in Freudian terms, suggesting unconscious self-loathing on the part of the Queen (and the Chorus and Messenger later). Podlecki 1970 on 187 suggests a better approach: “The text says ‘barbarian,’ which to a Greek meant simply ‘non-Greek.’ Because to us it has a strong pejorative flavor, I have translated it ‘foreign’ or ‘foreigner’ generally throughout the play.” As we know, chauvinists of various stripes depersonalize the offending group with dehumanizing epithets— “gooks,” “Huns,” “Arab extremists,” “rogue states,” “Reds,” “faggots,” “niggers,” “bubbas,” “wetbacks,” “kikes.” But terms like “Communist,” “anglo,” “Jew,” “Gentile,” “lawyer” can operate descriptively, without derogation; so, too, “barbarian,” at least as used in Aeschylus’ Persians. 39. See Wilson 1986, 51–52, and Hall 1996, 21, for the land’s loss of her men. Xerxes empties Persia (119, 718, 730, 761) and fills Hades instead (922–25). He even “unyokes’ his mother’s chariot; after learning of his defeat, Atossa makes her second entrance (598) on foot (clear from 607–9). On the image of yoking in the play, see duBois 1982, 87–90. 40. Indicated at lines 157, 634, 643, 654–55, 711, 856; also Hall 1989, 90–93, and Podlecki 1970 on 643. 41. Broadhead 1960, xxviii–xxix. 42. Wilson 1986, 57. When Xerxes invaded Greece, Thrace was under Persian control; after his defeat, the Delian League drove out the Persian governors and expelled their garrison from Eion at the mouth of the Strymon in the winter of 477/6

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(Hdt. 7.106–7, Thuc. 1.98.1, Balcer 1995, 308–10). The melting of the river’s ice, whether fact or Aeschylean invention, fits the notion that Thrace was part of Greece (but under Persian rule). 43. On hubris figured in spatial terms, see Zoja 1995, 113–14, 127–29, and 174– 75; Hartog 1988, 331; and my introduction, notes 158–59. Momigliano 1975, 130, points out that “Darius preaches the doctrine of hybris, which to us may seem very Greek; but to Aeschylus and Herodotus it was objectively true and therefore accessible to any wise man, Greek or not.” 44. Writing from the perspective of Persia, and as an apologist for its empire, Balcer 1995 (esp. 329–30, also 255–56, and 261–89) construes the Persian defeat in logistical terms. The real cause of the disaster was the “issue of distance” (329) and overextended supply lines; people fighting for their homeland played, at best, a secondary role. Balcer’s work brings to mind military historians of the Vietnam War discussing how the United States faced tough geographical obstacles, but with sufficient coordination and commitment could have “won the war.” Here, as elsewhere, when the human consequences of foreign wars are diminished, spatial hubris lurks in the background, however occluded. 45. Hignett 1963, 193–239, and Broadhead 1960, 322–38. 46. Hdt. 8.89 explains the massive drowning of the Persians on their inability to swim. The fish eating the dead recalls Achilles’ famous words to the Trojan Lycaon, on whom the fish will feed (21.122–27), a prediction that follows Achilles’ insistence that he himself will fall in battle. 47. Hignett 1963, 105–48, 371–78; cf. Lazenby 1993, 130–48. 48. Thuc. 4.12; Paus. 4.36.6; and chapter 1. For the paradox in Thucydides of land battles fought at sea, and sea battles fought on land, see S. Flory, “The Death of Thucydides and the Motif of ‘Land on Sea,’ ” in Rosen and Farrell 1993, 113–23. We find a similar spatial inversion in the Iliad, when the Greek invaders find themselves besieged by the Trojans behind the defensive wall they built to protect their ships; see Crotty 1982, 109–12; Taplin 1992, 197; and J. V. Morrison, “Thematic Inversion in the Iliad: The Greeks under Siege,” GRBS 35 (1994) 209–27. 49. Meiggs 1975, 387; see also Finley 1955, 214, and Zoja 1995, 98–101. Cf. Harrison 2000, who rejects categorically the argument that the play dramatizes anything so “naive, intellectually simplistic” as hubris (19–20). Rather Persians may represent “the high-water mark of Athens’ conviction in her imperial project” (108–10). “To observe the centrality of patriotism to the play is not to mark out Aeschylus and the Athenians as uniquely chauvinistic—but only as unexceptional” (115). If so, Persians has little to recommend it to the contemporary theater. 50. Thuc. 1.96–97; Meiggs 1975, 42–49. 51. Meiggs 1975, 50–67. 52. Thuc. 1.98–100, 4.108; Meiggs 1975, 83. 53. Meiggs 1975, 68–81, offers an excellent summary, including problems in dating; also Rosenbloom 1995, 96–98. 54. Thuc. 1.98.4. As Zoja 1995, 75, puts it, “the last of the Greeks’ efforts to defend themselves slipped seamlessly over into the first of their acts of conquest” (see also 81–84 and 109–12). 55. Rosenbloom 1995, 93–98. As Raaflaub 1991, 575, points out, Athens “learned” ideas basic to its empire from the Persians—lasting subjection of defeated

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poleis, including their obedience to authority; paying tribute (the Chorus of Persians fears this will stop with Xerxes’ defeat, 584–87); and supplying troops and material for military campaigns. 56. Note, however, that we also hear of Xerxes as a foolhardy youth (782–83, 829–31), a mother’s son (211, 227, 453, 473, 476), and the victim of bad political counsel (753–58). The prominent role played by Atossa as Xerxes’ mother proves effective in dedemonizing her son, as Michelini 1982, 153, and Podlecki 1970, 12– 13, point out. 57. Thalmann 1980, and Garvie 1978, 65–70. 58. Hall 1996, 6–7 (original emphasis); for a similar view on the Queen’s response, see Sidgwick 1903, x and on 847. 59. Thalmann 1980, 274–75 and 278, traces a parallel development of the word kosmos through the play, meaning both “adornment” and “political/military order,” the loss of the latter figured in terms of the former. 60. Thalmann 1980 demonstrates how Xerxes’ torn garments draw together other images to symbolize self-directed grief, royal humiliation, divine punishment, and the end of the empire. 61. For Xerxes’ entrance on foot, see Taplin 1977, 121–23, who notes that the Chorus’s lines at 1001–2 suggest its astonishment at the lack of attendants and carriage both. Moreover, the presence of an animal-drawn cart conflicts with the image of a man “stark naked [gumnos] of escorts” (1036). Without a driver or attendants, how would the “tent on wheels” leave the orchestra once Xerxes dismounts? His entrance on foot also fits better with Atossa’s dream, in which Xerxes is thrown from the broken chariot and rends his clothes. Cf. Hall 1996 on 999–1001 and Broadhead 1960 on 1000–1001 for the standard view. 62. On the Chorus’s newfound parrh¯esia, see Broadhead 1960, xxv–xvi; Podlecki 1970, 13, sees hints here and elsewhere of political resistance to the Achaemenid dynasty. 63. On the Chorus’s proskun¯esis before Atossa (152) and Darius (694–96), see Hall 1989, 96–97; more generally, Pulleyn 1997, 157–58 and 191–94. Earlier the Chorus fears that the Persians will refuse to prostrate themselves before Xerxes after Salamis (588–90), anticipating the Chorus’s own behavior on his return. 64. Finley 1955, 216–17, and E. B. Holtsmark, “Ring Composition and the Persae of Aeschylus,” SymbOs 45 (1970) 19–20. 65. Michelini 1982, 128–29; cf. Garvie 1978, 67, on the power of the final scene. 66. “As Xerxes enters . . . we are confronted with the brute fact of present suffering” (P. Mitsis, “Xerxes’ Entrance,” in Pucci 1988, 113). The scene’s emotional effect would have multiplied if, as M. McCall suggests, Aeschylus (who acted in his own productions) played the roles of Atossa and Xerxes (“Aeschylus in the Persae,” in Cropp, Fantham, and Scully 1986, 43–49). 67. Garvie 1978, 71. Compare the long scene between Athena and the Furies (A. Eum. 777–1047), which moves from oppositional confrontation to physical proximity and inclusion, manifest in the memorable closing lyric. 68. H. C. Avery, “Dramatic Devices in Aeschylus’ Persians,” AJP 85 (1964) 181–82. The translation (following West’s emendation) is Hall’s (1996); for textual problems, see Broadhead 1960 on 1008–9, and his appendix on 1008. 69. Herington 1986, 71–72, tracks the imagery of torn clothing, from vague pre-

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monition to specific dream; then from reported fact to onstage manifestation; and finally to enactment before the audience. Whatever splendor the original costumes possessed, their wearers defiled them in the end. 70. F. I. Zeitlin, “Introduction,” in Vernant 1991, 21. See also duBois 1988, 176 (“in Greek culture, so repressive to women, . . . women were the paradigmatic ’others’ ”), and 1982, 104 (“a civilization which excluded women from humanness and made them both invisible and analogous to animals”). Bassi 1998, 140–41, and again at 229 totalizes the dyad: “woman, the universal other.” Cf. March 1990, particularly 64–65, who raises sensible objections to the assumption that Greek society either considered or constructed women as a “race apart.” See also Faraone 1999, 165–67. 71. On heterosexual erotic attraction, consider the numerous myths involving heroes (Paris and Helen, Achilles and Penthesileia, Theseus and Ariadne, Odysseus and Penelope, Heracles for Iole, Phaedra for Hippolytus, Nausicaa for Odysseus, Agamemnon for Chryseis, Achilles for Briseis), gods (Ares and Aphrodite, many male gods for Aphrodite), and gods and humans (Zeus for any number of mortal women, Boreas for Oreithyia, Aphrodite for Anchises, Eos for Cephalus, Calyspo for Odysseus, Peleus for Thetis). The erotic compulsion for (re)union is captured memorably in Aristophanes’ speech in Pl. Smp. 189c2–d6. On female sexuality and the “mutual charis of sexual gratification,” see S. Aj. 522, Blundell 1989, 46, and MacLachlan 1993, 156–60. Podlecki 1998, 109–17, discusses the (real-life) passion between Pericles and Aspasia. Faraone 1999, 160–72, effectively challenges the standard view that the Greeks found females to be more passionate, lascivious, and irrational regarding sexual desire. See also Sultan 1999, 55–56. 72. For marriage conceived as a mutual activity and not simply male dominance, see note 35; as the telos of Athenian men’s lives, see Rehm 1994a, 32 and 165 n.14. Widowed and divorced men in Athens usually remarried, even if they already had a male heir for the oikos; see W. E. Thompson, “Athenian Marriage Patterns,” CSCA 5 (1972) 212–25 (esp. 223–25), and S. Isager, “The Marriage Pattern in Classical Athens: Men and Women in Isaios,” C&M 33 (1981) 81–96 (esp. 82–84). 73. Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Women, Culture and Society, ed. M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (Stanford 1974) 67–88, and Versnel 1987 (two anthropological perspectives); from a political and economic viewpoint, Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, 2nd ed. (Toronto 1999). 74. Case 1985; see also Keuls 1993, esp. 1–15 and 329–48; Cantarella 1987, 38– 71; duBois 1988, 140–66; Just 1989, 153–93; Rabinowitz 1993; Seidensticker 1995. 75. Steiner 1984, 237. 76. Hall 1989, 35 and 203–4; duBois 1982, 112 and 116–20; Page 1971, xviii– xxi; Hourmouziades 1965, 17 n.2. 77. Mead 1943, 15; Conacher 1967, 188–98; Easterling 1977, 180; Synodinou 1977, 32 n.2; Knox 1979, 306–11; Rehm 1989, 98–100. 78. Regarding pessos, Aristotle (Pol. 1253a1–18) describes an apolis (cityless) person as “an isolated piece in a game of pessos.” If the simile were popular earlier, as seems likely—see Eur. Erechtheus fr. 360, 8–10, and Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995, p. 178 on 9—then Euripides forges a clever link between the game the Tutor saw the men playing (pessos) and the political gossip he heard from them regarding Medea’s

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exile. See also the introduction, note 137. For domestic slaves, see chapter 1, note 70, and Griffith 1999 on Ant. 437–40. 79. Medea remains continually in view from 214 until 1250, if Reckford 1968 is correct. Kovacs 1994, 371, 395, and Gredley 1987, 33, 36–37, have her exit into the house at 823 and again at 1080; the case for the latter exit is more compelling. After her monologue Medea seems to have decided to kill her children, and her exit at 1080 would lead the audience to expect their offstage death cries to interrupt the Chorus’s anapests, much like Agamemnon’s cries break up the anapestic ruminations of the Chorus at A. Ag. 1331–42. When this does not eventuate, Medea’s return to the stage (at 1116, in advance of the Messenger) would leave the audience with the sense that the Corinthians will, as the tradition had it, kill the children (see note 83). 80. When reporting violence or death from the distance, a Messenger usually speaks to the Chorus alone (A. Th., Ag. [the Herald], S. Aj., OC, Eur. Su., Ion, Ba.). Alternatively, he may summon a character from offstage to hear the news (S. Ant., Eur. Hipp., Hec. [Hecuba, from under her cloak], IT, Pho. [first Messenger], IA). If the character already is onstage, the Messenger identifies himself first (S. Tr., El., Eur. Hcld., Hec., Tro., El., Hel.). The sole exception I can find—besides Dionysus and Medea—is Creon in Eur. Pho. (1632–34). 81. The Nurse doubts the advantages of so wealthy a house (125–28), another aspect of the play’s “domesticated” tone. 82. On the lyric play between inside and outside, see Segal 1997b, 170–75, and Arnott 1982, 39. 83. A number of scholars agree that Euripides introduced Medea’s intentional filicide, and that earlier versions had the Corinthians murder her children, or (in a different context) Medea kills them accidentally. See Segal 1997b, 168–69; Rehm 1994a, 100–101 and 198 n.18; Boedeker 1991, 109; Lesky 1983, 218 and 457 nn.20–22; Knox 1979, 295–96; Page 1971, xxi–xxv and xxx–xxxvi; Buttrey 1958, 13–14; Haigh 1896, 289–90; and schol. Med. 273 (Schwartz 1891, 159–60). 84. Knox 1979, 303–4; Arnott 1973, 59; and Luschnig 1992, 38, who concludes (her emphasis), “There is no more inside.” 85. For its erotic significance, see Barrett 1983 on Hipp. 535–41. Sophocles uses a cognate kl¯eithra for the door bolts that Oedipus smashes to break into his bedroom (OT 1262), discussed in chapter 5 (cf. Dawe 1982 on 1262, who thinks the word means “door” and not “bolts, hinges, or sockets”). From the same root comes kleitoris, first attested in the second century A.D. On Aristophanes’ sexual use of gates and passageways, see J. Henderson, The Maculate Muse, 2nd ed. (New York 1991) 137– 38. 86. These include fragments of Euripides’ earlier Aegeus (Mills 1997, 239–45, and Webster 1967, 77–80), and the version by Sophocles (Mills 1997, 234–38, and Sutton 1984, 5–6). At Plu. Thes. 24, Theseus inquires at Delphi about his father’s identity; as with Aegeus in Medea, askoi figure in the oracular response. 87. In Jason-like fashion, Theseus abandons Ariadne on his way home from Crete (besotted with Aegle, according to Hesiod) and neglects to change his sails, a prearranged sign of his survival. Other myths treat Theseus as a Jason-type, especially in his seduction-abduction of the amazon Antiope, whom he abandons for Phaedra. Mills 1997, 13–18 and 30–33, discusses these versions (with sources), but she denies their presence in tragedy and in Athenian mythic consciousness, effaced by the young

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democratic hero we find in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and Euripedes’ Suppliant Women and Heracles. However, this does not apply to Euripides’ Hippolytos, and possibly to his lost Theseus (Webster 1967, 106–9) and Sophocles’ Minos (Sutton 1984, 75–78). 88. In Euripides’ Cyclops, for example, Silenus’ dung-sweeping prologue (1–35), Cyclops’ buggery of Silenus (576–89), and the monster’s blinding (654–62) suggest other anatomical-scenic links, memorably captured by San Francisco set designer William Eddelman’s phallic-like Aetna and anal-esque cave mouth for the musical version of the satyr play I staged in 1983. 89. Cf. Wiles 1997, 121–22, who sees the sk¯en¯e in Medea operating (beyond its indicative function) as “a ‘meta-space’ . . ., an alternative representational system” in which the orchestra represents the sea, the doors the Symplegades, and the rooftop the cliff from which the Scylla pounces (Medea at the end with her sons’ bodies). Jason calls Medea a lioness more savage than the Scylla (1343–44), and Medea accepts the names (1358–59). However, both specify the Scylla of the Tyrrhennian Sea, between Sicily and Italy, seriously straining the link to the Symplegades that stand at the entrance to the Black Sea. 90. For the dynamic relationship in the play between scenic and offstage spaces, see Gredley 1987, 28–29. 91. Shrines to Hecate (a goddess often syncretized with Artemis, and associated with pathways, magic, and the moon) belong outside, frequently at crossroads; the location in the heart of the household bodes ill (Page 1971 on 397, Lee 1997 on Ion 1048). That is, reference to Hecate (a Greek, not a “barbarian” goddess) is not disturbing per se, only the location of her shrine gives pause. Knox 1979, 308, underlines the fact that Medea does not operate as an Eastern witch or barbarian; her use of poison has a long pedigree among Greek tragic heroines, including the most Athenian of them all, Creusa in Ion. 92. Rehm 1994a, 103 and 199 n.30. 93. Rehm 1989, 107–8 and 111–12, and 1994a, 103–5. 94. In their fatal union, the daughter never leaves the father, reversing the virilocal pattern of a Greek marriage, in which the bride leaves her parents and natal home to establish an oikos with her husband (Segal 1996, 34–35). It seems that Jason had moved into the palace and planned to live there after his marriage, also a break from standard practice. Hawley 1998, 44–48, examines the scene of Glauke’s death in terms of her “destructive narcissism,” a phrase that applies equally well to Jason. 95. See F. M. Dunn, “Euripides and the Rites of Hera Akraia,” GRBS 35 (1994) 103–15; S. I. Johnston, “Corinthian Medea and the Cult of Hera Akraia,” in Claus and Johnston 1997, esp. 46–52. 96. Kovacs 1994 brackets lines 1056–64; Diggle 1986–94, vol. 1, brackets 1056– 80; for a defense of the text (including other sources), see Rehm 1994a, 143–45, and B. Seidensticker, “Euripides, Medea 1056–80, an Interpolation?” in Griffith and Mastronarde 1990, 89–102. 97. In lines bracketed by most editors (1233–35), the Chorus again calls up the underworld, lamenting the fate of Creon’s daughter, who “has gone to the house of Hades on account of your marriage to Jason.” 98. S. Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York 1954) 57 (b). 99. Rehm 1994a, 18 and 159–60 n.34.

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100. U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Griechische Trag¨odien, vol. 4 (Berlin 1923) 357; Knox 1977, 210 (⳱ 1979, 310). 101. See chapter 1. One of Jason’s few defenders, R. Palmer, “An Apology for Jason,” CJ 53 (1957) 49–55, argues that the audience would have understood Jason’s position in terms of fifth-century Athenian law. For other ideas about the law’s relationship to the play, see Mead 1943, 15–20; E. M. Blaiklock, The Male Characters of Euripides (Wellington 1952) 21–22; Reckford 1968, 346 n.26 and 353–54; and Davies 1977–78, 111–12. 102. On the retroactive application of the law (unlikely), see Rehm 1994a, 197 n.5. 103. Patterson 1990, and 1998, 89–90, 110, and 199. The theme of “illegitimacy,” whether within or outside marriage, moves from Medea’s offspring with Jason to Aegeus’ future child Theseus, and on to Theseus’ bastard son Hippolytus, subject of two plays by Euripides. See Barrett 1964, 32–34. 104. Plu. Them. 1.3; Kyle 1987, 88–91 and 99; Humphreys 1974; and chapter 1 on the location of the temenos. 105. Lloyd 1992, 2–5; C. Collard, “Formal Debates in Euripides’ Drama,” G&R 22 (1975) 58–71; Solmsen 1975, 26–28. 106. For the fifth-century flavor of the passage, see Page 1971 on 304, and Reckford 1968, 350. 107. Lloyd 1992, 32–33 and 41–43; de Romilly 1992, 86–87; Page 1971 on 465ff. and 476; Finley 1938, 32–33. 108. Greek allows the genitive to express both possession and “that which the substantive concerns.” 109. The phrase appears as a section heading in both Sourvinou-Inwood’s and McDonald’s contributions to Clauss and Johnston 1997 (253, 297), adapted from Zeitlin 1990b, 68–69: “in Greek theater . . . the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other.” For a compelling counter to Zeitlin’s (and others’) claim that Greek tragedies are never about their female characters, see Griffin 1998, 45–46. 110. See Knox 1979, 310; Hall 1989, 198; and Segal 1997a, 174–77. 111. See Blundell 1989, esp. 26–59; Bond 1981 on HF 585–86; Shaw 1975, 262– 63; Dover 1974, 180–84; Page 1971 on 809–10; Knox 1966, 30–31; A.W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values (Oxford 1960) 153–71 (esp. 154–56). Without referring to this code of behavior, Pucci 1980, 152, asserts that “the drive to take revenge rules all her being.” 112. See Rehm 1989 and 1994a, 146–49, for this idea. J. de Romilly, L’´evolution du path´etique d’Eschyle a` Euripide (Paris 1961) 120, describes Medea as among those “qui ob´eissent plus qu’ils ne d´ecident et souffrent plus qu’ils n’agissent.” 113. The I-E root *phi- means “nearby or next to.” See M. Schwartz, “The IndoEuropean Vocabulary of Exchange, Hospitality, and Intimacy,” Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 8 (1982) 188–204. 114. See, e.g., Cantarella 1987, 66 (“Euripides confirms with utmost certainty the old commonplace of the woman as ‘scourge, infamous race, unspeakable misfortune’ ”), and Case 1985, 327. Although Just 1989 points out that “Medea is presented as typically feminine and typically Greek” (269), he concludes the message of the play is “that with women and the passions one is still playing with fire” (276).

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115. Williamson 1990; Shaw 1975, 258–63. 116. Foley 1975, 35 n.26. 117. Burnett 1973, 10, summarizes: “The child-murder . . . is disturbing because it is child-murder; it is distressing because it follows the other murders [Glauke / Creon] and so appears gratuitous and unnecessary; it is infuriating because it seems to have replaced the true vengeance act, the killing of Jason.” As foreigners in Athens, Medea’s children (including future offspring with Aegeus) would live as noncitizens (Hall 1989, 175–76), but that hardship seems preferable to their death. 118. See Stanford 1983, 49, and G. Lanata, Poetica preplatonica: Testimonianze e frammenti (Florence 1963) 163; on the “escapist” motif in such songs, Griffith 1999 on Ant. 150–51. 119. LSJ, s.v. tekt¯on, 3 and 4. Not attempted in my translation is the pronounced rhymes of her closing lines, a formal device rarely found in Greek tragedy and nowhere else in the play. The sound of am¯echan¯otatai (most deprived of means) / soph¯otatai (most clever) gives the couplet the tone of a formal, poetic declaration. The Chorus later prays never to know the “helplessness” (am¯echania) that comes from exile (645–48), a reference to Medea’s situation. 120. Pucci 1980, 122–25, points out the ode’s “exclusive femininity” and the “marked absence of the male and of insemination.” Rehm 1989, 106 n.33, lists verbal correspondences between the first strophe and antistrophe of Euripides’ ode and the Sapphic corpus. Cf. Hall 1989, 83 and 99, who takes the five occurrences of compounds beginning with habros in A. Pers. as evidence of the play’s Orientalizing bias. What of the word used by Sappho and by Euripides (at Medea 830 applied specifically to Athens)? Note that Glauke also “steps lightly” (habron bainousa, Med. 1164), admiring herself in Medea’s robes. 121. See J. J. Walsh, Aristotle’s Conception of Moral Weakness (New York 1963) 16– 22; B. Snell, Scenes from Greek Drama (Berkeley 1964) 45–52; E. Schlesinger, “Zu Euripides’ Medea,” Hermes 94 (1966) 26–53 (⳱ Segal 1983, 294–310, tr. W. Moskalew); H. Diller, “Thumos de kreiss¯on t¯on em¯on bouleumat¯on,” Hermes 94 (1966) 267– 75; W. W. Fortenbaugh, “Antecedents of Aristotle’s Bipartite Psychology,” GRBS 11 (1970) 233–50; C. Gill, “Did Chrysippus Understand Medea?” Phronesis 28 (1983) 136–49, and 1996, 216–26; Lesky 1983, 227; G. A. Rickert, “Akrasia and Euripides’ Medea,” HSCP 91 (1987) 91–117; Rehm 1994a, 147–49. Holding a principle is one thing, but holding it passionately such that it leads to action is quite another, as the Platonic concept of thumoeid¯es (connecting emotion to principle) attempts to explain. Medea’s “emotion” is not raw but shaped in certain directions—which includes the principle “help friends, harm enemies, and above all don’t let them laugh at you.” 122. Foley 1989. 123. Lesky 1967, 146. 124. Jason is fond of commercial language and financial metaphors (454, 461–62, 532–35, 542, 559–61, 565–67, 609–15, 960–63, 1348). Conacher 1967, 189, speaks of his “niggling sums in settling the accounts.” 125. Knox 1966, 224. 126. This “new plot” possibility may be adumbrated as early as line 37, when the Nurse says “I am afraid she may come up with something new [ti bouleus¯ei neon].” See E. McDermott, “Medea Line 37: A Note,” AJP 108 (1987) 158–61. In fact, this im-

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pulse for a new and different story begins the play, as Solmsen 1975, 66–67, observes. The Nurse utters a utopian wish that the Argo had never sailed (line 1), meaning that a very different story would eventuate if the originating circumstances had been different. 127. Thuc. 1.50–66; Meiggs 1975, 201–2; P. Deane, Thucydides’ Dates, 465–31 B.C. (Don Mills, Ont. 1972) 74–89. The battle of Athenian and Corcyran ships with the Corinthian fleet in 433 (two years before Medea premiered) was “the greatest sea battle that Greeks had ever yet waged against other Greeks” (Thuc. 1.50.2). 128. See Poole 1994, 8–9, on the connection between broken oaths in Medea and truce violations before and during the Peloponnesian War, epitomized by Thucydides’ account (3.82) of the breakdown of language and other social systems in the revolution on Corcyra. For duBois 1982, esp. 120–21, 123–24, and 129–30, the war precipitated a crisis in language and in other “categories of difference.” 129. On death in labor and the risks of childbirth in the ancient world, see Blundell 1995, 110–12; N. Demand, Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece (Baltimore 1994) 71–86; A. Rousselle, “Body Politics in Ancient Rome,” in Pantel 1992, 297–99, 318, 323 (on Rome, but the conclusions apply all the more strongly to ancient Greece). 130. The Chorus’s sentiments recall those of Kresphontes fr. 449: “It would be better for us to gather together and lament / a newborn infant, given all the evils he is entering.” 131. For female procreativity used metaphorically by the Greeks, see duBois 1988, who takes a very dim view of the practice. More descriptively, see Furley 1989, 227– 32, on the Greek cosmologists’ use of the idea, and my comments in the appendix. 132. The comparison of the two situations is instructive: as a prisoner of war, Andromache is powerless to stop the Greeks from killing her son; Medea, however, cannot stop herself from taking up arms against her own children, acting like an “enemy within.” 133. Oaths and appeals to the sun occur at 148, 746, 752, 1251–52, 1258, and 1326–28. At line 56–58, the Nurse speaks of telling her mistress’s troubles to the earth and the heavens. 134. Zeitlin 1990a, 131, 144–45, and 165–67, and 1996, 337; Mills 1997, 229 and 243. 135. In a highly “theorized” argument, Bassi 1998, 248, concludes that the Greek theater spectator, by virtue of “his passivity and inactivity, at least in principle, is defined by his failure to live up to the requirements of a normative masculinity.” The [male for Bassi] Greek in the audience became “otherized” because he had to sit and watch. If the spatial approach to tragedy I have offered here has merit, then passivity and inactivity had little to do with the audience’s experience. What the spectators watched, and the place in which they watched it, involved those gathered in the theater of Dionysus in an active and challenging play of space, opening new vistas and affordances. 136. As Wohl 1998, xvii, frames it, “what is shown to be constructed is open to reconstruction, rearticulation, reimagination.” Brecht says, more simply, “human behaviour is shown as alterable,” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and tr. J. Willett, 2nd ed. (London 1978) 86.

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APPENDIX THEORIES OF SPACE

1. In The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass. 1992) 12–26, John Searle also criticizes the mental versus physical dichotomy: “Dualists asked, ‘How many kinds of things and properties are there?’ and counted up to two. Monists, confronting the same question, only got as far as one. But the real mistake was to start counting at all” (26). 2. Chomsky 1996, 41–42. Oudemans and Lardinois 1987, 43–44, link the philosophical challenge (from Hegel onwards) to Cartesian “separative thinking” with a renewed philosophical interest in Greek tragedy. On contemporary physics, Jammer 1993, 246–47, offers the comforting reminder that advanced mathematical models (e.g., eleven-dimensional superstring) may make theoretical sense but are visually unimaginable. 3. Sambursky 1987, 241–42. 4. Vernant 1983, 284–86, who draws on the seminal study of A. Koyr´e, “Du monde de l’‘`a-peu-pr`es’ a` l’univers de la pr´ecision,” Critique 4.28 (1948) 806–23. Cf. Lloyd 1987, 215–84, who substantially qualifies the standard view that Greek science lacked an interest in, or capacity for, measurement. 5. The rising and setting of the stars indicate temporal and seasonal change at H. Il. 5.5, 18.486–89, 23.226–28; Hes. Op. 383–93, 564–73, 582–88, 597–600, 609– 23, 663–72; Pl. Resp. 527d. 6. The stars offer navigational guidance at H. Od. 5.271–77 (sailing) and S. OT 795 (terrestrial orientation at night). See Heidel 1937, 8–11. 7. DK 22 B 100 (Kahn 1979, 155–56). Rihll 1999, 10–12, notes the importance of such “pattern recognition” for Greek science. 8. Hes. Op. 582–88; Alcaeus F 347 Voigt. The common Hesiodic construction e¯ mos / t¯emos (when . . . / then . . .) establishes the relationship generally. 9. Jones 1962, 175, describes this simile as “a deep-toned reality, up there for all to see, a living power as were all the stars to the Greeks, active in bringing the seasons and not merely coming and going with them.” See also de Romilly 1971, 81–84. Greeks may have begun and ended their day with a prayer to the rising and setting sun; see Hes. Op. 339, Pl. Smp. S. OC 477, Ar. Plut. 771. At S. fr. 871 (Radt), Menelaus compares the fate of mortals to the changing faces of the moon (Sutton 1984, 166–67). 10. Cropp 1988 on El. 727–36, and chapter 4. 11. Onians 1951, 343–48, links kairos to the idea of an opening, a passage through, or a division, as at Eur. Hipp. 386; also Wheelwright 1966, 322, and Rosenmeyer 1963, 156–57 and 164–66. Race 1981 emphasizes the normative connotations of the term in tragedy—what is appropriate, effective, fitting, and only then “timely.” In a similar vein, see R. T. Otten, “Metron, Mesos, and Kairos: A Semasiological Study” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1956, 60–79 and 155–60, and Vernant 1983, 291. For chronos, Onians 1951, 248–51 and 451–53; Fraenkel 1955, 1–22; for ai¯on, E. Degani, Ai¯on da Omero ad Aristotele (Padova 1961); for time in tragedy, de Romilly 1971. 12. Cyclical patterns based on natural cycles also inform the epic; Austin 1975,

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88–253, explores Odysseus’ homecoming in terms of the seasonal return of spring. Frye 1957 explicates the relationship between mythic and seasonal patterns. See also W. Pater, Greek Studies (London 1922; orig. 1895), esp. 96–97. 13. As Hamlet puts it, “The time is out of joint. O curs´ed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!” (1.5.187–88). 14. Burford 1993, 114; Dilke 1987, 10, 23, 26; Hdt. 2.149; Hes. Op. 423ff; Lloyd 1966, 185; and my comments in chapter 4. In terms of land surveying, a Homeric simile (Il 12.417–22) speaks of two men disputing the division of land with metra (measuring rods); the middle of the verb diametre¯o, a technical term for surveying, occurs at Hdt. 1.66 and Call. h.Ap. 55–56. 15. H. Il. 21.251, 23.431–32, 10.351–53, Od. 8.124–25. See Lloyd 1966, 186, and my introduction, for the epic use of voice projection to suggest terrestrial distance. 16. Malkin 1987, 138–43. 17. See the introduction; also Neisser 1994, 396–67, and W.H.J. Warren and S. Whang, “Visual Guidance of Walking through Apertures: Body-Scaled Information for Affordances,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 13 (1987) 371–83. 18. Proclus [Euclid I, Def. xiii, p. 136 Friedlein] notes that geometers borrowed terms such as horos (the “boundary” of a geometrical figure) from nonabstract land measurement. They also named the blank area within the lines of a geometric figure ch¯ora, the word for an agricultural field (Cornford 1936, 224). 19. Wheelwright 1966, 6–8 and 47–49 (D.L. I.22–38). The Babylonians discovered the Pythagorean formula centuries before Pythagoras (Rihll 1999, 18, and I. Mueller in Taylor 1997, 295). 20. Kahn 1979, 18; Furley 1989, 10. Tradition credits Pythagoras, a Samian who migrated to Croton in south Italy ca. 530 B.C., with first calling the world a kosmos (Guthrie 1962, 208). However, Kahn 1979, 16, emphasizes the Ionian contribution: “What we find in sixth-century Miletus is a scientific revolution in Kuhn’s sense, the creation of a new paradigm of theoretical explanation . . . a revolution into science. . . . [T]he new view of the kosmos is connected both with a geometrical model and with empirical observation in such a way that the model can be progressively refined and corrected.” See also Kahn 1960, 219–30. Other important treatments of kosmos include Vlastos 1993, 132–34; Guthrie 1962, 110–11, 206–14, 247–51; J. Kerschensteiner, Kosmos: Quellenkritische Untersuchungen zu den Vorsokratikern, Zetemata 30 (Munich 1962); H. Diller, “Der vorphilosophische Gebrauch von kosmos und kosmein,” in Festschr. B. Snell (1956) 47–60; and W. Kranz, “Kosmos als philosophischer Begriff frugriechischer ¨ Zeit,” Philologus 93 (1938–39) 430–48. Dephysicalizing the idea, Mourelatos 1970, 220–21, interprets kosmos as what we now call a “conceptual scheme.” A. Finkelberg, “On the History of the Greek KOSMOS,” HSCP 98 (1998) 103–36, offers a skeptical reappraisal of the term’s use, concluding (unpersuasively) that it never signified “world” in the archaic and classical periods. 21. Clay 1992, 132–37, who notes the incipient cosmography at Il. 8.13–16. For Homer as an Ionian, see Scully 1990 96–97; Edwards 1987, 160–64; and Hardie 1985, 14–15. 22. Kahn 1960, 188–89; Anaximander and maps, DK 12 A 1 and 6; Sambursky 1987, 14; Heidel 1937, 132–34 and generally for ancient maps and their development.

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23. Lloyd 1966, 185; Dilke 1987, 23. For time reckoning generally, see Nilsson 1920, 33–37, 46–48, 72–73, 110–13, 315–16. 24. Cf. Capek 1976, xxvi–xxix, on the “fallacy of ‘spatialization of time’ ” that obscures its true nature; also see my chapter 5. 25. Kahn 1979, 17 and 150; Hes. Op. 765ff.; Hdt. 1.32, 2.4; Lloyd 1966, 186n.2. Fifth-century Athenian calendars present great complexities, particularly in the relationship between the festival calendar, which determined public sacrifices, festivals, and games (derived primarily from the lunar calendar, with twelve regular months, plus intercalaries when necessary), and the prytany (or bouleutic) calendar, which divided the year into ten equal periods (give or take a day), allotting the same time for each tribe (phul¯e) to administer the council (boul¯e). See W. K. Pritchett and O. Neugebauer, The Calendars of Athens (Cambridge, Mass. 1947), esp. 3–18 and 94–110, and Vernant 1982, 99–101. From a scientific perspective, of course, time is constituted by an event (celestial motion, mechanical action, radioactive decay), whose measurement gives us “time” in the usual sense of the word. As D. J. Price showed in his classic “Clockwork before the Clock,” Horological Journal 97 (1955), 27–35, early mechanical clocks derived from planetaria and geared astrolabes, and hence also reflected planetary motion. 26. Hecuba in Eur. Tro. 620 suggests the difference in these two reckonings, describing the ills “I can neither gauge [metron] nor count [arithmos].” See Renehan 1985, 164–65. 27. Dem. de Cor. 274.9, de Falsa Leg. 359; Aesch. Ctes. 198; Arist. Ath.Pol. lxvii. The klepsydra, of course, was popular in the Mediterranean and Near East long before the Greeks. See C. Michel-Nozi`eres, “Second Millenium Babylonian Waterclocks,” 180–209, and J. Fermor and J. M. Steele, “The Design of Babylonian Waterclocks,” 210–22, both in Centauros 42 (2000). 28. For ai¯on as a liquid, see Onians 1951, 177–78 n.9, 212–23, 229–33, 254–58, and 271–91, with primary references. Guthrie discusses the Greek thinkers who link moisture with the essence of the living cosmos: 1962, 54–62, 67, and 71–72 (Thales); 385–87 (Xenophanes); 1965, 356 (Hippon). In the klepsydra, Empedocles (fr. 100.1–9) saw the air replacing water in the chamber as a model for the link between respiration and the movement of blood (Wright 1997, 193). 29. Hes. Op. Three centuries later, Xenophon admonishes humans to “appease the gods for the sake of the produce of the earth” (Oik. 5.19–20). 30. Michelini 1991, 19–29, describes Theseus’ speech as a “resum´e of contemporary anthropological theories.” We find comparable discussions of human progress in A. PV 442–506, S. Ant. 332–75, Democritus (DK 68 B 5), Gorgias’ Palamedes (DK 82 B 11a.30), Hippocrates (VM 3), and Plato (Lg. bk. 3). See Guthrie 1969, 60–84. 31. Onians 1951, 461; Antisthenes quoted by Simplic. in Arist.Cat. 8b25. On the material nature of Greek arithmetic (arithmos means “a number of things”), mathematics, and geometry, see Rihll 1999, 7, 41–42, and 52–53. 32. Kahn 1960, 5. 33. Furley 1989, 229–33. 34. Sambursky 1987, ix., 40, 241–42; also Nietzsche 1962, 84. This tendency leads to the view that the human being constitutes a microcosm, and his political creations and institutions offer a structural analogy to the natural cosmos. Democritus apparently was the first to call man mikros kosmos (Furley 1989, 231, and Guthrie

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1965, 471–72), fascinated by the interplay between large and small (DK 68 B 245, 250, 259, and Morrison 1994, 531–32). In The Face of the Moon, ch. 15, Plutarch associates different heavenly bodies with specific human organs—for example, the sun is the heart of the universe, the earth its bowels, the moon its liver, etc. (see Sambursky 1987, 213). Herodotus (1.65) refers to the Spartan law as a kosmos, and Plato (esp. Resp. 4.430d-432a) develops the link between political and natural kosmoi (see W. K. Freiert, “Orphenus: A Fugue on the Polis,” in Pozzi and Wickersham 1991, 33). Vernant 1982, 108–29 (esp. 125–29), and 1983, 190–211, explores the analogy between political or institutional space and “the physical space in which the Milesians projected their natural cosmos” (1982, 126); also Seaford 1994, 220–28. For analogies between the polis and the human body, see chapter 4. 35. Padel 1992, 51; Sambursky 1987, 10, 132–47; Long 1986, 150–58; Lloyd 1966, 232–72; Guthrie 1957, 46–62, and 1962, 115–32. Roach 1993, 25–27 and 45, traces the influence of pneuma (via Quintilian) on “inspired” theories of theatrical acting. 36. Heraclitus DK 22 B 30; Kahn 1979, 132–38; Vernant 1995, 5–6. 37. Gouldner 1965, 121. Infinity in terms of the gods had little relevance for the classical Greeks, where “each god found his limits in another god”—D. Sabbatucci, Saggio sul misticismo greco (Rome 1965) 207 (quoted by Buxton 1982, 26). 38. Frye 1957, 208. 39. Mikalson 1983, 68–69; also see chapter 1. 40. Meijer 1981, 224. 41. Guthrie 1962, 76–89; Kahn 1960, 231–39. 42. Kahn 1960, 232–33, favors infinite spatial extension; Guthrie 1962, 84–87, thinks the term indicates no internal differentiation; according to Cornford 1936, 225–27, Anaximander refers to the “endlessness” of cyclical repetition, exemplified by the heavenly bodies. 43. Guthrie 1962, 89–91; Irwin 1989, 22–23; F. Solmsen, “Chaos and Apeiron,” SIFC 24 (1950) 235–48. Clay 1992, 139–40, applies Paul Valery’s evocative phrase “degenerating the real” to describe Anaximander’s view of cosmic origins. 44. Kahn 1960, 191. 45. See West 1966, 361; Guthrie 1957, 63–98. Vernant 1983, 3–72, argues that the passage does not describe simple decline, because the age of heros (between bronze and iron) marks a temporary improvement. Cf. K. Matthiessen, “Form und Funktion des Weltaltermythos bei Hesiod,” in Bowersock, Burkert, and Putnam 1979, 25–32. 46. In “Equality and Justice in Early Greek Cosmologies,” Vlastos 1993, esp. 60– 64 and 82–85 (orig. 1947), explores the relationship between successive supremacy in the heavens and “rule by turn” in Athenian democracy (e.g., Eur. Su. 406). See note 43. 47. Kahn 1960, 233. 48. Vlastos 1993 77–81 (orig. 1947). For Anaximander’s “outer-worldly” apeiron as a metaphysical forerunner of the “other worldly,” see P. Seligman, The Apeiron of Anaximander (Westport, Conn. 1974; orig. 1962). 49. See, e.g., Segal 1997a, 16–17. 50. Kahn 1960, 232; also Vlastos 1993, 81 (orig. 1947). 51. For the complex issue of the meanings and uses of the verb “to be” (einai)

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relevant to the Eleatic problem—existential (including vital, locative and durative uses, such as “it is alive,” etc.); possessive (“it is mine”); potential (“it is going to happen”); veridical (“it is so,” “it is the case that”); and as a copula with various nominal, adjectival, or locative predicates (“it is a mammal,” “it is big,” “it is somewhere”, the last suggesting an important link between the absolute “it is” and the locative copula of “it is somewhere [if it is to be at all]”)—see C. H Kahn’s magisterial The Verb “to Be” in Ancient Greek (Dordrecht 1973); G. B. Kerferd’s review in Archiv fur ¨ Geschichte der Philosophie 58 (1976) 60–64, and in the same issue Kahn’s “Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy,” 323–34; A.P.D. Mourelatos, “ ‘Nothing’ as ‘Not-Being,’ ” in Bowersock, Burkert, and Putnam 1979, 319–29; M. Matthen, “Greek Ontology and the ‘Is’ of Truth,” Phronesis 28 (1983) 113–35; Mohr 1985, 2; etc. Mourelatos 1970, 56–60, sees in Parmenides’ use of esti “an enriched sense of the copula as ‘speculative predication,’ as if answering the question “What is . . .?” 52. Jammer 1993, 11; Nietzsche 1962, 78; Pl. Tht. 180A; Sph. 242D; Arist. GC 325a3 (all in Wheelwright 1966); Vlastos 1993, 187 (orig. 1953); Guthrie 1965, 26– 57. Even Heraclitus, who emphasizes the fluidity of the world we encounter (DK B 12, 91, A 15), posits a single, common Logos that somehow holds together all that moves and changes (DK B 1, 2, 50, 71–73). See Kahn 1979, 147–53, 166–69, 223– 27 (flux); 93–95, 97–102, and Heidegger 1984, 59–78 (logos). 53. Cornford 1936, 223–24; Sambursky 1987, 27–29; Arist. Physics 4.3.210b22– 24, 4.6.209a23–25, 213b.23; Vlastos 1993, 189–300 (orig. 1966–75); E. Hussey, “Pythagoreans and Eleatics,” in Taylor 1997, 128–74. Grunbaum ¨ 1967, 115–40, analyzes the paradox of divisibility in terms of the paradox of metrical extension. 54. Mourelatos 1970, 115–19, 131–33; Curd 1998, 3–7, 80–89. 55. Mourelatos 1970, 75–78, 94, 134–35, 192. 56. For the influence of epic on Parmenides, see Mourelatos 1970, 1–46; for Homeric and Heraclitan anticipations of the Parmenidean use of “seeking,” diz¯esis, Curd 1998, 42–44; for the influence of Odyssean nostos (homecoming, return) and hodos (way, path, journey) on Parmenides, E. A. Havelock’s classic “Parmenides and Odysseus,” HSCP 63 (1958) 133–43. Note particularly Od. 11.100, Teiresias in the underworld: “You seek [diz¯eai] honey-sweet homecoming [nostos], glorious Odysseus.” 57. Curd 1998, 127–206; Guthrie 1965, 119–21, 271–72; Cornford 1950, 53– 62. 58. For Empedocles, see DK 31 B 13 and 14; Arist. Sens. 446a 26 and Cael. 295a17; Cornford 1950, 53–55; Guthrie 1965, 138–43, 147–83, 224–25; Long 1965, 259–60; Wheelwright 1966, 122–25; Wright 1997, 178–87. For Anaxagoras, see DK 59 A 68; Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983, 359–60, 398 n.2, 409 n.2. Hellenistic interpretations of Homer’s shield of Achilles saw the cities of peace and war as allegories of Empedocles’ cosmological principles of philia and neikos (Hardie 1985, 15). 59. In Lakoff and Johnson’s terms (1980, 26–30), this pre-Socratic use of medium involves the metaphor of space as entity (like the ocean) rather than as object (a tub or container). 60. Furley 1989, 112; Guthrie 1965, 389–413; Heidel 1937, 75–76; Cornford 1936, 229–31.

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61. C.C.W. Taylor, “Anaxagoras and the Atomists,” in Taylor 1997, 220–40; Jammer 1993, 11–12; Sambursky 1987, 20, 95; Guthrie 1965, 497–507. 62. Philoponos, Commentary on Aristotle (Physics 494.10–25, On Generation and Corruption 158.26–159.7 ⳱ DK 67 A 7); Taylor in Taylor 1997, 222–23 and 227– 28. 63. Vernant 1991, 15, admits the ambiguous status for Plato of the image as an intermediary. 64. See Rehm 1994b, 51–60, on the advantages of viewing the tragic chorus as “theatrical raw material.” 65. Like theatrical performance, Democritus’ highly original epistemology involves the unification of apparent contradictions. There is a gap between appearance (what our senses tell us of the world) and reality (the hidden, atomic nature of things), but that gap does not require we abandon the evidence of our senses. After all, they provide the data that atomic theory must explain, as well as suggesting the framework and observationally based terminology we use to describe the theory. For Democritus there exists a material link between the way atoms operate on our senses and the theory that he and other atomists postulate to explain those operations (Taylor in Taylor 1997, 228–34). Reality (atoms) impacts our senses, but it is not the reality we see, much like the hidden actor (person, body, individual) behind the mask, playing “unreal” characters. The audience watches a play in which all stage appearances are equally valid, but none of them constitutes reality, which lies beneath the theatrical performance. In a different vein, see Heiden’s observations about ancient acting in Sommerstein et al. 1993, esp. 153–54. 66. For Hippocratic medicine and Pythagorean theory, see Guthrie 1950, 40–42, and generally 1962, 306–19; for the blending of wine and water, Lissarague 1990, 6– 10. On Polyclitus’ canon, valuable discussions include Rhodes 1995, 78; Pollitt 1972, 105–10, 1974, 114–23, and 1990, 8–9 and 75–78; A. Stewart, “The Canon of Polykleitos: A Question of Evidence,” JHS 98 (1978) 122–31; and Carpenter 1959, 89– 96. In Prometheus’ invention of numbers (A. PV 459–60), the phrase arithmon, exochon sophismat¯on, “number, the nonpareil of wisdom” (459) recalls the Pythagorean rubric pant¯on soph¯otatos ho arithmos, “number is the wisest of all things,” although Griffith 1983 on 469 downplays the connection. 67. Arist. Phys. 4.6.213b.22–29. According to the Pythagoreans, this empty space must be limitless, for rational numbers continue without end. With the discovery of irrational numbers, however, the Pythagorean picture became hopelessly blurred—an infinity of division (countless numbers between numbers, all “touching”) joins an infinite extension (positive and negative numbers go on forever); see Guthrie 1962, 265 n.26, and B. Rotman, rev. of P. Nahin’s book on imaginary numbers, An Imaginary Tale (Princeton 1999), Times Literary Supplement, June 11, 1999, 30. 68. T. Takemitsu, Confronting the Silence: Selected Writings, tr. Y. Kakudo and G. Glasow (Berkeley 1995) 51–52, 56–57, 96. 69. On the idea of intervals as the basis of Greek music theory, see Guthrie 1962, 220–26 and 247–48. The idea of negative space, common in the visual arts (e.g., Gombrich 1961, 283–85, 306), surfaces in architectural history (e.g., G. Kaganov, Images of Space [Stanford 1998]). 70. Guthrie 1978, 57–58, 280, 299 (on Parmenidean influence); 276–77, 281–88

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(the Pythagorizing Plato); and 247 (Anaxagoras, DK 59 B 12–14). See also Strange 1985, and the famously critical passage in Pl. Phd. 97b/98c (⳱ DK 59 A 47). 71. For an admirably clear look into these turbid waters, see Patterson 1985, 159– 62. 72. Patterson 1985, 85. 73. Compare Cassirer 1979, 135: “All our affirmations concerning any concrete ‘what’ are always accompanied by affirmations concerning its ‘where.’ ” 74. Algra 1995, 72–120, explores the tensions in Plato’s conception between ch¯ora as space and as matter, that is, “taking the receptacle as a constitutive factor of sensible reality” (86). 75. See L. Dean-Jones, “The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek Science,” in Pomeroy 1991, 111–12 and 117–25, on female seed in ancient thought. In the Hippocratic view, menstrual fluid was seminal (R. Joly, ed., Hippocrate 11 [Paris 1970] 717); not so in Aristotle (Arist. GA I.xx.728a). 76. J. Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York 1993) 39–49. 77. Sambursky 1982, 13, offers a succinct account of the active nature of Plato’s ch¯ora; Meijer 1981, 224 and 244–45, notes that the Greek gods are not “creators,” and that Plato’s demiurge is simply a craftsman who must work with Forms, matter, and the example of the cosmos, all of which precede him. Although true that ch¯ora is only necessary for the second-order activity (vis-`a-vis the Forms) of putting material things into place, Gill 1987, 49, reminds us that “an image depends upon a Form for its nature but on the receptacle for its existence.” See further Cornford 1937, 37; Lloyd 1987, 135–40; and my comments in chapter 4. 78. Paul Klee ca. 1920, quoted by Lefebvre 1991, 125. 79. R. Heinaman, “Plato: Metaphysics and Epistemology,” in Taylor 1997, 360–61; Sorabji 1988, 20–33, 214–15; Mohr 1985, 2–3 and 80–95; Strange 1985; Patterson 1985, 27 and 84–92; Guthrie 1978, 253–70; Murdoch 1977, 47–58; Cornford 1937, 97–105. 80. Guthrie 1950, 90, a promising idea he never returned to later, so far as I can tell. Halliwell 1998, 116–21, takes up the issue of Plato’s positing “a mimetic correspondence between the material and the metaphysical,” especially in the Timaeus; see also Vernant 1991, 164–85 (“The Birth of Images”). 81. Disinterest in the author began with the antihistorical tendencies of the New Critics, grew with the universalizing claims of the stucturalists, and burgeoned in the different strands of post-structuralism represented by R. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, ed. and tr. S. Heath (London 1977; orig. 1968) 142–48; and M. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. J. Harrari (Ithaca 1979) 141–60 (⳱ 1984, 101–20). 82. See John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York 1934), esp. 46–57; also Wollheim 1980, 36–45, 114–17. 83. Rehm 1994b, 23–29; N. W. Slater, “The Idea of the Actor,” in Winkler and Zeitlin 1990, 390–91; and Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 93–95, 135–37. 84. In the modern theater, playwrights such as Beckett and Pinter have tried to register control over the production of their plays, either by directing the works themselves or by specifying what can and cannot be done to them. 85. Brook 1968, 9 and 37–38; Wiles 1997, 3–4, 61–62.

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86. Plato’s ch¯ora also is not stable, but rather identical with its own transmutations, indicated by its simultaneous separability and inseparability from what appears there (Algra 1995, 73–75 and 84–86). 87. Lefebvre 1991, 190–91. 88. For Plato’s conflicted relationship with the mimetic arts, see Friedl¨ander 1973, 118–25. Suspicious of the power of performance, Plato is perhaps the first philosopher to take the theater seriously, as his penchant for theatrical and performance metaphors, the dramatic nature of dialogues such as Symposium, and his parodic use of tragic language and conventions make clear. See Nightingale 1995, 67–92, 149– 54; N. Charalabopoulos, “Plato’s Use of Theatrical Vocabulary,” forthcoming. 89. E. Grant, “Place and Space in Medieval Thought,” in Machamer and Turnbull 1976, 137–67; Hussey 1983, xxvii–xxxii; Sorabji 1988, 199–201. 90. Arist. Phys. 4.6–9.213a12–217b28; Furley 1989, 110–11, and “Aristotle and the Atomists on Motion in a Void,” in Machamer and Turnbull 1976, 83–100. 91. For Greek practical knowledge of air pressure, see Lissarague 1990, 48–51. 92. Particularly Arist. Phys. 4.1.209a23–25, 4.3.210a14–b31. The concept “in” is aliorelative (Taylor 1928, 669–71), meaning that the relationship between body and its topos involves two different terms—wine is not “in” the wine, a bottle is not “in” the bottle, but wine is “in” the bottle. As Pseudo-Archytas argues (Sambursky 1982, 37), “It is peculiar to place that while other things are in it, place is in nothing. For if it were in some place, this place will be in another place, and this will go on without end.” 93. Sorabji 1988, 18–19, 35, 127–28, 187; Taylor 1928, 664–77. 94. Arist. Cat. 5a8–14; Jammer 1993, 17–22. 95. Sambursky 1987, 96; also Jammer 1993, 22, and Einstein’s introduction, xiv– xvii. Algra 1995, 22–29, offers a caveat regarding the essentialism in such anachronistic pairings. 96. For Descartes, space and stuff are identical—if the essence of matter is to be extended (corporeal extension), then any volume of space (spatial extension) must be a portion of matter, with no such thing as a vacuum. See Meditation 2 and The Principles of Philosophy 2, chs. 4 and 11; P. K. Machamer, “Causality and Explanation in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy,” 170–77, and W. E. Anderson, “Cartesian Motion,” 200–205, both in Machamer 1976; Sorabji 1988, 38–39; Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Descartes,” 2:351–53. 97. Heraclitus DK 22 B 48; see Kahn 1979, 201–2. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin analyzes the loss of the object’s authority or “aura” when mechanically (and massively) reproduced. To take a contemporary example, reproduced posters of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” work to replace the original. Whether true or not for the contemporary world (note, for instance, that Warhol’s iterative pop-art images fetch increasingly outlandish prices), the ancient theater took meaningful advantage of the aura of an onstage object to create and transform its theatrical world. 98. Arist. Phys. 4.1; D. Furley, “Aristotle and the Atomists on Motion in a Void,” in Machamer 1976, 88, and my notes 91–93. 99. Taplin 1977, 299–300, 306–10. 100. Phys. 3.5.205b24–35, 4.1.208b8–23, 4.4.211a4–6, etc. 101. P. Duhem, “Place and the Void according to John Philopon,” in Capek 1976,

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27–29; also Lang 1992, 98–106; Hussey 1983 on 205a8, 205b1, 205b24, 208b8. Machamer 1978 insists (based on Phys. 208b9–12) that the “influence” cannot cause motion; he proposes that natural place has the power (construed inactively) to confer rest (379). “The power of natural place is the natural unity which results when an element comes to rest and fulfillment with its like” (381). Whitehead 1927, 11, summarizes: “There was the centre of the universe as the end of motion for those things which are heavy, and the celestial spheres as the end of motion for those things whose natures lead them upwards.” See also Solmsen 1960, 127–29, 266–74, and my note 104. 102. New York Times, April 18, 1997, 1, 11. 103. Arist. Phys. 8.4.255a30–256a3 and 3.3.202b2–22; also Metaph. 9.6.1048a34, 1048b29–34, 11.9.1065b19–1066a7 (Lang 1992, 68–81). 104. Aristotle developed his views of natural place as part of a wider effort to understand motion, distinguishing natural movement from locomotion (autonomous or self-motion, linked to desire), and both of these from unmoved causes, a complicated argument beyond the scope of this work. Suffice it to say that my rough analogy blurs important Aristotelian distinctions between motion from desire and motion from nature. 105. Sambursky 1982, 12–13, who provides the translation (pp. 32–33) of the relevant passage in Simpl. Phys. 639, 15–22. 106. Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester 1956; orig. 1717), esp. 25–45 and 62–73; Jammer 1993, 50 and 117–19; Lefebvre 1991, 169– 70. 107. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.458–63; On Nature tr. R. M. Geer (Indianapolis 1965) 18. 108. G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, tr. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis 1989) 325. 109. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Leibniz,” 4:429, and “Kant,” 4:308–9. For this reason, Jammer 1993, 173, observes that the illusions of absolute (i.e., nonrelational) space and absolute time may always provide the background of our daily experience. 110. See J. V. Buroker, “The Role of Incongruent Counterparts in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism,” in The Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space, ed. J. van Cleve and R. E. Frederick (Dordrecht 1991) 315–39. 111. Kant 1998, 163 (Critique of Pure Reason, A 34). Also Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Kant,” 4:307–10; Jammer 1993, 131–37. An oft-noted irony lies in the fact that the ideal, “subjective space” of Kant possesses all the qualities of Newton’s “absolute space,” which Leibniz deemed “the idol of some Englishman.” See B. Russell, The Principles of Mathematics 1 (Cambridge 1903) 456–61. Cf. the anti-Kantian comments (from a very different critical tradition) of Konrad Lorenz: “It is as unlikely that . . . the eye determines the characteristics of light, as that the way we think and view the world has ‘invented’ space, time and causality” (quoted in Eibl-Eibesfeldt D1989, 53). 112. Sorabji 1988, 28; Jammer 1993, 86–91. 113. E. Gant, “Place and Space in Medieval Physical Thought,” in Machamer 1976, 138–61; Jammer 1993, 95–102. 114. Principia, in Capek 1976, 103–4; also Opticks (Dover ed.) 403. Jammer 1993, 40–48, discusses the influence on Newton of Henry More, who argued that divine extension permeates all space. For Newton’s developing ideas on an “inspirited” space,

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see Jammer 110–26, and A. Koslow, “Ontological and Ideological Issues of the Classical Theory of Space and Time,” in Machamer 1976, 227–28; also 233 and 240–41 on Newton’s distinguishing space from void. 115. Quoted in Jammer 1993, 112. 116. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge 1920) 18, viewed ether as an invention of modern science to provide “the substratum of events which are spread through space and time beyond the reach of ordinary ponderable matter.” For its inadequacy, see A. Einstein, “The Inadequacy of Classical Models of Aether,” in Capek 1976, 329–37, and Einstein 1952, 145–48. Note that Euclidean space and Einstein’s “space-time,” an equivalency loosely invoked in discussions of contemporary literature, are both tenseless. They involve a mathematical sense of the idea of space, viewed not as something that endures through time (a continuant), but as tenseless, and therefore susceptible neither to change nor to staying the same. So, for example, we properly say that a light-signal lies (tenselessly) along a line between two parts of space-time. See Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Einstein,” 2:469–71 and “Space,” 7:506–11. 117. Guthrie 1954, 135–43. 118. Guthrie 1962, 115–32, 143, and 201–2; 1965, 364–81; 1969, 231–34; Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983, 144–62 and 438–50. 119. Guthrie 1965, 200–202 and 258–65 (on aith¯er and the divine mind). Regarding the divinity of air, see also Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983, 198–99 and 371–74. 120. Guthrie 1965, 310–11, 323–25, 379–80; 1969, 231–34; also Eur. fr. 839 and 941 (Nauck and Snell 1964), and Ar. Pax 832–33. In his review of Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, ed. A. Laks and G. W. Most (Times Literary Supplement, April 10, 1998), R. Janko thinks that Diogenes, “by giving Mind a teleological role . . . [provides] the missing link between pre-Socratic physical speculation and the humanistic philosophy of the fourth century.” 121. As at H. Il. 16.365 and Od. 19.540. 122. Earlier Strepsiades views the equipment of Socrates’ school (Nu. 200–221), a potpourri of late fifth-century scientific tools to take the measure of the earth and heavens. 123. The idea that aith¯er holds the souls of the dead recurs at Eur. Su. 1139. 124. See generally Frye 1957, esp. “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” 131– 239; on the preposterous, Parker 1987. 125. See chapter 1 and chapter 6, note 48. Spatial inversions also operated in Athenian political life, as in the institution of ostracism, a “reverse election” in which the winner is forced to leave the city instead of taking his place at its symbolic center (Cartledge 1993, 99). 126. Furley 1989, x. 127. For the important role of metaphor in early Greek science, see Lloyd 1987, 172–81.

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Index

actors, 47, 52, 133, 287–88, 337n.100; foreign, 47–48, 321n.80; as embodied presence, 10–11, 168–69, 173, 302n.64, 303nn. 65 and 70, 400n.65; and selfreferential space, 96–97, 150, 162–63; and singing, 163, 360n.246; voice of, 6–7, 152, 299n.37; as “spatial carrier,” 22; in “unmanly” parts, 364n.28. See also dance; music; role doubling Aegina, 36, 59, 367n.73 Aeschylus —fragmentary plays: Cabiri, 138; Edonai, 315n.14; Eleusinians, 310n.145, 312n.163; Epigoni, 310n.145; Hiereiai, 315n.14; Isthmiastai, 298.n.14; Myrmidons, 215, 334n.65; Nereides, 334n.65; Philoctetes, 138, 350n.102; Phryges, 334n.65; Proteus, 336n.81; Thracian Women, 130. —Seven Against Thebes, 238, 383n.9 —Suppliant Women, 281, 335n.74 —See also titles of individual plays —Agamemnon. See under Oresteia agora, 41, 43, 71–72 (figs. 8 and 9); altar of 12 gods in, 43–44, 45–46, 318nn. 45 and 47, 343n.169; cult of Ajax in, 137; theatrical performances in, 43–44, 299n.37, 318n.43 agriculture: and Athenian grain imports, 57, 177, 327n.139, 350n.111; in Electra, 187, 371n.116; ideology of, 57, 244, 327n.139, 328n.155; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 225–26, 380nn. 39 and 42; in Oresteia, 82–83, 99; and Athenian Proerosia, 25, 312n.168, 313n.173; seasons, 45, 274, 275; in Suppliant Women, 32, 45; union of city and country, 37, 57–58, 211, 326n.138, 327n.140. See also yoking aith¯er (“upper air,” ether), 162, 293–94, 404nn. 116, 119, and 123 Ajax: corpse as focal point, 133–34, 137–38; distanced space, 128, 130–31; and encirclement, 131, 137, 349n.93; extrascenic space, 125, 128–29; and landscape, 130– 31, 347n.65; reflexive space, 135–38; repetition and multiple narration in, 126, 134–35; scenic space 20–21, 123–25,

131–32, 347n.55; seeing self as other, 5– 6, 127–28, 346n.51, 389n.71 (charis); self-referential space, 133–35; staging, 125, 128, 131–32, 345nn.43–44, 346nn. 45 and 49, 348n.69; Ajax’s suicide, 14–15, 129–31, 133, 156, 226, 333n.41, 347n.67; Tecmessa, 124–25, 132–33, 136, 237, 297n.14, 345nn. 38 and 42; Teukros, 133–35, 237, 348n.78; time as mutability, 128, 129–30; vision and invisibility, 125– 26, 127. See also Salamis Alcibiades, 139, 213, 357n.197, 366n.69, 373n.135, 376n.195 Algra, Keimpe, 2, 297n.10, 401n.74, 402n.95 altar: in Antigone, 122; in Heracles, 101–3, 104, 106–7, 339n.124, 341n.150; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 219–20, 378n.18; in orchestra of theater of Dionysus, 41, 290; in Oresteia, 93, 335n.66; in sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus, 41–42; in Suppliant Women, 25, 31–32, 308n.129, 309n.134; of Twelve Gods (see under agora); and murder of Priam, 149, 177, 341n.150 Amazons, 93, 158, 335n.76, 358–59n.223, 359n.225 anachronism (in tragedy), 24, 92, 95, 141, 151, 335n.73 Anaxagoras, 49, 184–85, 282, 285 Anaximander, 184; and to apeiron (“the boundless”), 130, 279, 280–81, 285, 359n.231, 398nn. 42, 43, and 48; and maps, 396n.22 Anaximines, 278, 294 Antigone —distanced space: corpse and cave linked, 115; infects other spaces, 114, 116–17, 118–20, 121–22; “theatralized” 115, 120–21 —exits as spatial markers, 115–16 —extrascenic space: site of surveillance, 115–16; and pollution, 122; invades public space, 122 —perverted ritual in, 117–19, 121 —scenic space desolated, 123

436 Antigone (cont.) —spatial inversions in, 115, 117–20, 295, 344n.1 Antiphanes, 377n.5 Antiphon, 184–85, 367n.76 Antisthenes, 278 architecture, 231, 297n.12, 307n.116; 400n.69; in Agamemnon, 80, 331n.17; in Heracles, 106–08, 341n.155; and early theater, 40 Aristophanes: Birds, 340n.138; Clouds, 294, 340n.138, 381n.57, 404n.122; Frogs, 60, 213, 297n.14, 308n.126, 332n.37, 333n.43, 341n.158, 363n.10; Thesmophoriazusae, 254; Plutus, 395n.9 Aristotle: on dramatic action and actors, 6–7, 11, 384n.15; city as open to land and sky, 35; metic, 49; on natural place, 291–92, 294, 402–3n.101, 403n.104; on space, 280, 284; on topos, 288–89, 402n.92 Arrowsmith, W., 342n.167 Athena: in Ajax, 125–26; in Eumenides, 91, 93–95, 97–99, 334n.64; in Heracles, 112; in Suppliant Women, 30–31, 32, 34, 312n.162 Athenian empire: allies revolt from, 53, 323nn.112–13, 328n.156; colonies and cleruchies, 45, 60, 94, 135 (Salamis), 139 and 350n.107 (Lemnos), 177 (Chersonese), 329n.158; and Delian League, 53, 93, 247, 336n.81; expansion of, 248, 387n.54; expediency and excess, 140, 311n.154, 323n.113; fleet, 59–61, 136– 37, 139, 241, 247–48; and polypragmosyn¯e (“meddlesomeness”), 27, 213, 309n.138; and tribute, 53, 248, 323nn. 110 and 113, 387–88n.55. See also Peloponnesian War; Pericles Athens: and agricultural ideology (see under agriculture); citizenship, 49–50, 53–54, 321nn. 88 and 91, 322n.95; city and country (see under agriculture); antidemocratic coups, 139–40, 154; cult of Prometheus in, 166–67; education, 33–34, 183, 313n.179; evacuation and Persian sack of, 59–60, 93, 238, 240–41, 314n.3, 326n.130, 331n.20, 335n.76, 367n.73, 383n.9, 384nn.18–20; funeral oration (epitaphios logos, patrios nomos) 28, 33, 95, 313n.170, 327n.146; grain imports (see under agriculture); layout of, 64–65 (fig. 2)

INDEX

and 72 (fig. 9); ostracism, 218, 328n.150, 404n.125; strat¯egoi (military generals), 27, 45, 50–51, 154, 348–49n.81; theaters and theater festivals, 45; walls, 60, 241, 328n.153, 384n.19. See also Athenian empire; authochthony; City Dionysia; ekkl¯esia; marriage (Pericles’ citizenship law); Peloponnesian War; under individual play titles (reflexive space) athletics, 199, 372n.128, 373n.135 atomists, 282, 291, 298n.17. See also Democritus audience: acknowledged or addressed during performance, 96, 97, 100, 310n.144, 339n.121; at City Dionysia, 14, 36, 38, 45–50, 133; response, 27–28, 309– 10n.141; internal (in Heracles) 110; as privileged witness (Ajax), 126–27. See also under individual play titles (self-referential space) Augustine, 232–33, 381n.68 aulos, aul¯et¯es (“aulos player”), 47, 163, 196, 262, 361n.247. See also music autochthony: Athenian, 58–61, 98, 327nn.145–46; Theban, 32, 207, 375n.175 Bacchae: bodily contact in, 202–4, 374nn.156–58; choral identity in, 202, 211, 376n.182; Cithaeron, 210–12, 376n.185; dismemberment, 202, 207–8, 210, 374n.168; divine coupling, 204, 208; reflexive space, 212–13; self-referential space, 23, 200–202, 213–14, 373nn.145– 46; 375n.177; spatial merging, 204–5, 211; Theban foundation myth, 204, 207 Bachelard, Gaston, 11 Bakhtin, M. 140, 351n.125 barbarian: as Greeks, 237–38, 383n.7; as stereotyped “other,” 236, 237, 368n.82, 376n.183; in Persians, 241, 245, 386n.38; as slave, 184–85. See also other; Persians Barthes, R., 11, 401n.81 bastard (nothos), 237, 255, 259–60, 392n.103. See also Heracles; Theseus Beckett, Samuel, 170, 249, 258, 391n.98, 401n.84 Benjamin, Walter, 402n.92 Bergson, Henri, 227, 233 Berkeley, George, 293 binaries and space. See structuralism

INDEX

Blundell, M. W., 353n.150 body: —of actor and chorus, 10–11, 168–69 —as analogy: for human artifacts, 172–73, 363n.17, 364n.24; for natural world, 173, 277, 363n.14, 397–98n.34; for polis, 173– 74, 207, 210, 212, 364n.24, 397–98n.34; for theater, 255, 391n.88 —anthropomorphism, 161, 172–73, 236, 363nn. 15 and 20 —and bodily functions, 88 —and clothing: in Bacchae, 206–7, 209–10, 212, 373n.148; in Electra, 170, 189–90; in Heracles, 102–3, 170, 174; in Oresteia, 97–98, 170, 337n.103; in Persians, 174, 248–49, 388nn. 59, 60, 69; in Suppliant Women, 29, 170 —eroticized, 88, 159, 161, 179–80, 186 —as food for animals, 104, 116, 118–19, 148, 169, 181, 184, 193, 247, 344n.15 —for linear measurement, 275 —and metonymy, 4, 172, 363n.13 —as narrative source, 215 —and physical contact: in Ajax, 28, 113, 133–34, 137; in Bacchae, 202–4, 374nn.156–58; in Hecuba (Odysseus’ refusal) 178); in Heracles, 101, 103, 104, 109–10, 113; Philoctetes, 153; Prometheus Bound, 159 —as postmodern buzzword, 362n.2 —as real (non-deceptive): in Philoctetes, 152– 53; in Orestes, 189, 369n.95; in Medea, 264 —and spatial transformation, 137–38, 168– 71, 177, 182, 200, 231, 267 —theriomorphic, 158, 160–61, 162, 167, 177, 181, 184, 186, 207, 208, 359n.233, 366–67n.69 —torture and mutilation: in Bacchae, 204, 374n.157; in Electra, 190–91; in Greek myth, 237; in Hecuba, 176, 186; in Heracles, 104; in Oresteia, 167, 169–70, 362n.4, 375n.169; in Prometheus Bound, 159–60, 164, 167, 362n.3 —as voice or messenger: in Hecuba, 178–79; in Electra, 200 —See also actors; childbirth; corpses; role doubling; suicide; under individual play titles boul¯e (“council”) and bouleut¯erion (“council chamber”), 30, 37, 54, 74 (fig. 11)

437 Brecht, Bertolt, 196, 394n.136 Brook, Peter, 288 Burke, Kenneth, 2, 85, 205 Burkert, Walter, 47, 342n.166, 343n.170 Burnett, Anne Pippin, 370n.107, 371n.109, 393n.117 Butler, Judith, 286–87 Cartledge, Paul, 236, 237, 369n.90 Cassandra —in Agamemnon: 237, 284–85, 383n.6; and evocation of Troy, 22, 79–80, 240; her homecoming, 81–82; and Iphigenia, 81; as prophet, witness, and voice of house, 79– 80, 323n.108, 330n.16, 331n.19, 333n.51, 334n.54 —in Hecuba, 178–79 —see also under Oresteia Cassirer, Ernst, 171, 401n.73 Chekhov, Anton, 28, 288 Chomsky, Noam, 12, 273–74, 305n.92, 341n.147, 383n.4 childbirth: and birth rituals, 46, 55, 98, 174, 188, 199; linked to space and time, 157– 59; as maker and marrer of women, 180– 81, 188, 190, 192, 251, 259; as natural force, 159, 236–37; valorized in Medea, 263, 267, 394n.129 children (young): in Ajax, 125; in Bacchae, 206, 212; and blind hopes, 159; desire for childlessness, 28, 257, 394n.130; in Electra, 199; exposure of, 379n.36; in Hecuba, 176, 179–81; in Heracles, 109–10; in Medea, 253, 257–58, 259, 263, 265, 266– 67; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 222, 230 Choephori (A.). See under Oresteia chthonic gods and forces, 31, 98–99, 157, 374n.163 City Dionysia: called into question, 234; foreign (non-citizen) participation in, 47–49; pre-performance ceremonies, 29–30, 50– 52; procession, 45–46; rehearsals before, 42; schedule, 44–47; voting for prizes, 51–52, 323n.103 Cleisthenic reforms, 42, 49, 136, 322n.93 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 360n.241 communal/co-operative virtues and values, 113, 140, 153, 161, 167, 226, 243, 250, 299n.31 Conacher, D.J., 361n.265, 366n.66 Connor, W.R., 49, 58, 317n.30, 319n.60

438 corpses: transforming space, 168, 170–71, 190; in Ajax, 133–34, 137; in Antigone, 116–20, 122–23, 333n.41, 343n.6, 344n.19; in Electra, 190–91, 193, 195, 200; in Hecuba, 176, 180–81, 365n.39, 366n.53; in Heracles, 108–9; in Medea, 266–67; in Oresteia, 78, 82–83, 88; in Suppliant Women, 27–29, 30 cycles: of the cosmos, 279; of decay (physical) 118–19; of generation, 157–58, 276, 277; of growth and harvest, 45, 279; of nature, 129–30, 276, 279–80, 395– 96n.12; of power and rule, 158, 276, 279, 280; of violence and revenge, 31–34, 82– 83, 84, 279, 311n.156 Dale, A. M., 9 dance, 45–46, 47–48, 169; in Bacchae, 201, 202, 205, 208; in Heracles, 111, 113, 342n.165; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 224, 226, 234–35; in Oresteia, 96, 97; in Prometheus Bound, 160, 163 Davidson, John, 348n.80 death (and the dead): as loss of light, 4, 257–58; as the “other,” 237, 242; in Persians, 242–43, 246; and time, 129–30. See also corpses death ritual: in Ajax, 125, 133, 137–38, 348n.75; in Antigone, 116, 118–20; in Bacchae, 210, 374n.154; in Electra (perverted), 190, 193, 370n.105; in Hecuba, 176, 182, 186; in Heracles, 102–3; in Medea, 257, 258; in Oresteia, 83–84, 103; in Persians, 243, 249–50; in Suppliant Women, 29 de Jong, Irene, 371n.111 Delphi: in Bacchae, 207; in Medea, 257; and Neoptolemus’ murder, 149; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 216, 218, 222–23, 235; in Oresteia, 85, 88–92, 337n.99; and Persian Wars, 59; in Prometheus Bound, 158; and the Pythia, 337n.99; supports Sparta in Peloponnesian War, 218, 377n.11 Democritus, 6, 397n.34, 400n.65. See also atomists de Polignac, Fran¸cois, 57–58, 327nn. 141 and 143–44 de Romilly, Jacqueline, 233, 392n.112 Derrida, Jacques, 11 Descartes, Ren´e, 4, 273, 289, 293, 402n.96 Diderot, Denis, 168, 304n.85

INDEX

Diogenes of Apollonia, 294, 404n.120 Dionysus: in Bacchae 200–201, 203, 206, 208, 213–14; and Eleutherae, 321n.82; in Frogs, 213; in Heracles, 341n.157; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 226; popularity of cult, 310n.142. See also City Dionysia; symposia Dodds, E. R., 234 doors and gates: in Ajax 125; in Antigone, 115–16; in Electra, 194; in Hades, 341n.158; in Heracles, 101, 108; in Medea, 253–55; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 220–21; in Oresteia, 79, 82, 86, 290, 332n.36; plays without, 308n.130. See also under space (extrascenic) Douglas, Mary, 170, 171–72 Dover, K. J., 298.n.24 DuBois, Page, 394nn. 128 and 131, 327– 28n.146 Earth: in Ajax, 14–15; in Electra, 371n.116; as ground (terrestrial), 13, 16, 36, 152, 200; in Hecuba, 176; as home for the dead, 15, 32–33, 115, 120; as mother (g¯e), 32, 33, 39, 60, 98–99, 152, 157, 161, 162, 173, 205–6, 277, 338n.118, 374n.165; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 231–32; and orchestra floor, 38, 39–40, 152; in Persians, 246, 250, 385n.32; in Philoctetes, 152; in Prometheus Bound 157; shape of (flat or spherical, 39. See also agriculture; autochthony; chthonic gods Easterling, P. E., 24–25, 92; on Ajax, 345n.41, 347n.67; on Antigone, 343n.6; on Oedipus at Colonus, 308n.126; on Philoctetes, 141, 144, 351n.126; on tragic space, 324n.123, 334n.55 Edmunds, Lowell, 1 Edwards, Mark, 345n.36 einai (“to be”), 286, 398–99n.51 Einstein, Albert, 273, 294, 404n.116 ekkl¯esia (“assembly”), 43, 53–54, 277, 324nn.115–16; in tragedy, 27, 183. See also Pnyx; under individual play titles (reflexive space) ekkukl¯ema (“roll-out machine”), 21, 270, 315n.10, 334–35n.65; in Agamemnon, 82– 84; in Ajax, 127, 129, 130–32, 137–38, 346n.49, 348n.69; in Antigone, 122, 345n.29; in Choephori, 88; in Electra, 190, 195; not in Eumenides, 89–91, 334– 35n.65; in Heracles, 108–9; in Medea

INDEX

(expected), 254. See also under space (extrascenic) Eleatics, 381–82, 285, 398–99n.51. See also Parmenides Electra (Eur.): as anti-heroic, 187–88, 193– 94, 197–98, 371n.119; bodily abuse in, 190–92, 193, 199, 200, 277; date of, 372n.124; distant spaces (Argos, Troy) 22, 195–98; extrascenic space, 194–95; and gorgons, 191, 370nn. 99 and 101; male and female space, 55, 194; natural purity in, 189, 196, 371n.116; reflexive space, 198–99; scenic space, 187–88, 194; selfreferential space, 188, 194, 198, 372n.126; shield of Achilles chorus, 169, 196–97, 276; and changing course of sun, 274–75. See also childbirth elements, 157, 160–61, 163, 282, 359n.231 Eleusis and Eleusinian mysteries, 213, 308n.129, 322n.98; Demeter and Persephone myth, 25, 77, 275, 295, 312nn.167–68; and Hymn to Demeter, 28, 31–32, 310n.149, 312n.165; in Oresteia 95; sanctuary burned by Persians, 241; in Suppliant Women, 28–29, 31–32, 309n.135, 310n.149 Empedocles, 3, 282, 359n.231, 397n.28, 399n.58 Empson, William, 155 ephebeia, 139, 351n.116 Epidauros and circular orchestra, 40, 316nn. 18 and 24 epinician ode, 376n.196; in Electra, 24, 191, 198, 372n.128; by Euripides, 376n.195; in Heracles, 104, 111, 340n.140; and nostos, 329n.1 er¯emia (“desert,” “place without people”), 114–15, 271, 343n.3; in Ajax, 123–24, 130, 132–33; in Antigone, 121, 123, 240; in Medea, 266; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 229, 230; in Philoctetes, 143–44; in Prometheus Bound, 156–57, 160, 161 Eumenides. See under Oresteia Euripides —in exile, 376n.193 —fragmentary plays: Aegeus, 390n.86; Alexandros, 368n.78; Andromeda, 103, 308n.130, 330n.123; Erectheus, 389n.78; Kresphontes, 394n.130; Philoctetes, 350n.102 —surviving plays: Alcestis, 21, 257–58; Cyclops, 21, 24; Helen, 177, 277, 294,

439 329n.163, 342n.165, 368n.78; Heracleidae, 308n.126, 310n.144, 312nn.163, 337n.106, 368n.79; Hippolytus, 6, 7, 61, 254, 297n.14, 395n.11; Ion, 58, 151, 185, 356n.181, 358n.221; Iphigenia in Aulis, 277; Iphigenia among the Taurians, 108; Orestes, 21, 166, 274, 277, 334n.55; Phoenissai, 280, 312n.163, 313n.171; Trojan Women, 24, 147, 177, 237–38, 267, 294, 368n.81 —See also individual play titles exile, 59, 188, 195, 199, 329n.4; in Bacchae, 207, 210, 213; in Electra, 371n.117; in Medea, 252, 256, 266; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 221, 231, 235; in Oresteia, 80, 87–89 Finley, M. I. 367n.72 Foley, Helene, 262, 264–65, 339n.124, 365n.50, 379n.30, 382n.85 Foucault, Michel, 12, 19, 140, 270–71, 351n.125, 401n.81 Freud, Sigmund: and primal scene, 121 (Antigone), 227 and 378n.23 (Oedipus Tyrannus); and repression, 225 (Oedipus Tyrannus); and the “uncanny,” 229, 380n.37, 381n.55; and sexual identity, 380n.44; and unconscious, 386n.38 Frye, Northrup, 278, 404n.124 Furley, David, 278, 296, 394n.131 Garvie, A. F., 349n.85, 388nn. 65 and 67 Gellie, George, 198, 222, 377n.2 Gibson, James J.: ecological approach to visual perception, 13–18, 168, 170, 209, 230, 231, 270, 275, 288; terrestrial emphasis, 13, 231; shared paths and perceptions, 128, 346n.52; direct contact vs. memory, 380n.48; “nested spaces,” 15, 22, 34–35, 37, 269, 272; “vistas,” 13, 15, 99, 230. See also proprioception; vision Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 80 Goldhill, Simon, 242, 300n.45, 345n.41, 371n.112 Green, J. R., 305n.99 Griffith, Mark, 99, 313n.176, 360n.246 Guthrie, W. K. C., 331–32n.29, 359n.231, 396n.20, 397n.28, 401n.80 Hades: in Agamemnon 80; in Ajax, 125, 130– 31; in Antigone, 123; in Heracles, 100,

440 Hades (cont.) 101–3, 105–6, 108–9, 112–13; as house, 109, 341n.158; katabasis and Persephone myth, 28, 32, 77, 330nn.7–9; in Medea, 257–58, 391n.97; in Philoctetes, 144; in Persians, 249, 385n.26; as “unseen,” 3, 131, 298n.18 Hall, Edith: on Persians, 248, 385n.32, 386n.37, 393n.120; on acting, 337n.100; on Antiphon, 367n.76; on orientalizing and barbarian stereotypes, 236, 242, 243, 368n.82, 376n.183 Halliburton, David, 24, 322, 382n.76 Hansen, Mogens, 367n.72 Havelock, Eric, 6, 238, 299n.33, 301n.56 Heaney, Seamus, 352n.129 Hecuba —bodies: animalization of, 177, 181, 184, 186, 366–70n.69; carnel desire, 178, 180, 186; corporal devastation, 175–76, 180, 181, 184, 186; disembodied dead, 176– 77; as language, 178. See also corpses —Chersonese: and Athens, 60, 177–78, 181; as no-man’s land, 177, 178 —distanced space, 177, 181–82 —extrascenic space, 177, 366n.55 —Greeks as barbarians, 237–38 —rape of Troy, 182 —reflexive space, 24, 182–83, 184, 366nn. 66 and 69, 367n.70 —self-referential space, 185 —sacrifice of Polyxena, 179–80, 365nn. 47 and 50 —slavery, 175, 176, 184–87, 367nn.72–73 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 4, 114, 232–33, 273, 381n.51 Henrichs, Albert, 342n.165, 382n.82 Heracles —distanced space: Hades, 100, 101–3, 105– 6, 108–9, 112, 341n.158; Athens, see below reflexive space —extrascenic space: via Messenger, 106, 341n.153; exposed on ekkukl¯ema, 21, 100, 108–9, 112, 339nn.123 —epic parallels: Odyssey, 100–101, 103, 110, 339n.123; Iliad 103, 104 —house, 104, 105–8, 340n.141, 343n.171 —maimed rituals in, 103, 340n.137 —nostos (doubled), 100–101, 110, 112 —physical contact, 101, 103, 104, 109–10, 113

INDEX

—reflexive space (Athens), 110, 111–13, 343nn.168–70 —self-referential space, 103, 110–11, 340n.n 138, 342n.165; and role doubling, 175, 340n.141 —staging, 101–2, 339n.124, 341n.148, 342n.161 Heraclitus, 360n.242, 364n.25, 399n.52 Herington, C. J., 303n.70, 324n.123 hero cult, 31, 312n.163; in Oresteia, 99 and 333n.40; of Heracles, 112, 343n.170; of Capaneus and Argive heroes, 31, 312n.163; of Ajax, 137–38, 349nn.94–94, 350n.98–99; of Oedipus, 137, 349n.95; of the Amazon Antiope, 359n.225; of Odysseus, 354n.150; of Philoctetes, 349n.96, 354n.150 Herodotus: on Athenian autochthony, 58; on household slaves, 369n.90; law as kosmos, 397–98n.34; on limits of world, 114; as metic, 49; on Persian Wars, 135–36, 241, 247, 387n.46; on tyrants, 32 Hesiod, 358n.213, 359n.231, 395n.8 heterotopia: theater as, 19, 34, 61–62, 270– 71; in tragedy, 230 (Cithaeron), 140–41 and 154 (Lemnos) Hippocrates and Hippocratic corpus, 129, 167, 364n.24, 400n.66, 401n.75 hodological space and the theater, 18–19, 34, 223, 235, 270, 291 Homer: and Ajax, 124, 345nn.35–37, 347nn. 54 and 67, 348n.78, 349n.88; distance via sound, 7, 396n.15; and Heracles, 100–101, 103, 104, 339n.123; land surveying in, 396n.14; and nostos, 76–77, 399n.56; and Philoctetes, 354nn. 154, 156, and 165, 355n.168; shield of Achilles as kosmos, 39, 276, 399n.58; and spatial inversions, 387n.48 house: assaulted by Oedipus, 221; as laid out in Athens, 56–57, 326nn. 129 and 132; column as symbol for, 108, 124, 341n.155; domain of Eumenides, 98; in Heracles, 104, 105–8. See also under individual play titles (extrascenic space, scenic space) hubris: in Electra, 192, 370nn.102–3; in Hecuba (Greeks), 176, 178, 237–38; in Persians, 245–46, 248, 387nn. 43 and 49; in Prometheus Bound (Zeus), 158; in Suppliant Women (Capaneus and Argive seven), 30–31, 246, 311–12n.159 Humphreys, S. C., 324n.123

INDEX

imperialism, U.S., 250–51, 368n.81; compared to Persians, 246; and Iraq, 243,; in Nicaragua, 287; and propaganda, 383n.4; and terrorism, 237; in Vietnam, 241–42, 384n.21, 387n.44 instrumentalism: in Hecuba 179, 189; in Medea, 260, 265; in Philoctetes, 140–41, 144, 148, 152–53 Jameson, Michael, 46, 320n.70, 326n.128, 357n.197 Jebb, Richard, 138, 150, 220–21 Jones, John, 117, 200, 233, 344n.11, 395n.9 journey (and knowledge), 230, 282, 330nn. 5 and 7, 399n.56. See also nostos; paths; travel Kahn, Charles, 276, 279, 280, 396n.20, 398–99n.51 Kant, Immanuel, 234, 292–93, 382n.78, 403n.111 Kitto, H. D. F., 151, 339n.126 Klee, Paul, 287 Knox, B. M. W.: on Ajax, 133, 348n.81; on anachronism in tragedy, 335n.73; on Electra, 369n.89; on Medea, 259, 313n.176, 391n.91; on Oedipus Tyrannus, 234, 238, 378nn. 14 and 24; on Philoctetes, 351– 52n.126 kosmos: as “ordered universe,” 230, 276–77, 294, 363n.15, 364n.25, 396n.20; as “adornment” and “political/military order” (in Persians), 388n.59 Kovacs, David, 369n.98 Kristeva, J., 225 Kurke, Leslie, 76, 329n.1 Lacan, Jacques, 236 landscape, 35, 37, 57; in Ajax, 130–31, 347n.65; as numinous in Oedipus Tyrannus, 380n.43; in Philoctetes, 152–53; in Prometheus Bound, 157. See also earth laughter (of enemies): in Ajax, 127; in Prometheus Bound, 162; in Medea, 261–62, 265, 267, 268, 393n.121 lawcourts, 35, 37, 54, 324n.121; evoked in Ajax, 135; in Hecuba, 183–84; in Medea, 260; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 218; in Oresteia, 91–93, 94–95, 98, 331n.17; in Prometheus Bound, 167

441 Lefebvre, Henri, 1, 169, 288, 304n.91 Leibniz, G. W., 292–93, 403nn. 109 and 111 Lemnos, 138–39, 350nn. 107 and 109; 356– 57n.191. See also under Philoctetes Lesky, Albin, 265, 340n.143 Lessing, G. E., 356n.188 Lewin, Kurt, 18–19, 223, 270, 291, 306n.107 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, 361–62n.265 Loraux, Nicole, 220, 318n.39, 327–28n.146, 339n.122 Lorenz, Konrad, 15, 403n.111 Lucretius, 292 madness: in Ajax, 125–27; in Heracles, 105– 09; in Bacchae, 206–7, 209, 375nn. 176 and 178 marriage —referred to in tragedy: Ajax, 124–25, 345n.38; in Prometheus Bound, 161; in Persians, 244–45 —and Furies, 98 —as homecoming, 329n.3 —as mutual act of men and women, 251, 386n.35, 389n.72 —Pericles’ citizenship law, 49, 259–60, 349n.85; 392nn.101–3 —perverted or parodied in tragedy: Agamemnon, 80–83, 331–32n.29, 338n.112; Antigone, 344nn.12–13; Electra, 187–88, 197, 199, 373n.141; Hecuba, 179–80, 182; Heracles, 103; Iphigenia in Aulis, 365n.48; Medea, 256–57, 258–59; Persians, 244– 45; Suppliant Women (A.), 281 —virilocal pattern reversed: in Demeter and Persephone myth, 32; in Medea, 391n.94 m¯echan¯e (“crane-machine”) —arrivals and departures from the distance, 22, 270, 315n.10 —reveals gap between gods and men (also on sk¯en¯e roof): in Bacchae, 376n.196; in Electra, 190, 200, 369n.94; in Heracles, 105–6, 340n.144; in Medea, 254, 257–58; in Suppliant Women, 31 —and self-referential irony: in Euripides, 152, 356n.181; in Philoctetes, 151–52, 356n.180 medicine and medical vocabulary, 94, 159, 166, 173, 284, 362n.266, 364n.24 Medea —and bodies of children, 266–68

442 Medea (cont.) —distanced space: interior of Creon’s palace, 255–57; Hades, 257–58; Athens, see below reflexive space —extrascenic space: as associative complex, 255–56, 390n.84, 391n.90; doors, 253– 55, 390n.85 —and female solidarity, 253, 262–63 —and Greek logos, 260–62, 263, 264–66, 392n.111, 393n.121 —Medea as Athenian, 259, 262, 268–69, 391n.91; as barbarous witch, 252, 262, 392n.114; dominates scenic space, 252– 53; as potential creator of new logos, 263– 66, 267–68, 393–94n.126 —mythic inversion, 24, 390n.83 —reflexive space (merges with distanced space), 24, 259–60, 266, 392nn. 101, 103, and 106 —self-referential space and poetic function, 262, 269 —staging, 252, 390n.79 —sun: as witness to oaths, 394n.133; and Helios’ chariot, 266, 268 —wedding ritual perverted, 256–57, 391n.94 Meiggs, Russell, 247, 329n.158, 350n.107, 387n.53 Melissus, 281 memory, 375n.173, 379n.32 (Quintilian), 380n.48; in Bacchae, 208; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 215, 217, 219, 220, 228, 234 messenger in tragedy, 21, 175, 198, 390n.80; in Ajax, 125, 128–29; in Antigone, 120– 21; in Bacchae, 211–12; in Electra, 198; in Heracles, 106; in Medea, 252–53; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 220–22; in Suppliant Women, 27 metics: in Athenian life, 45, 49–50, 321n.90; and Danaids in Suppliant Women (A.), 337n.104; freed slaves, 323n.109; and Furies in Eumenides, 97–99, 337n.105; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 219; as “others,” 49, 236; at sacrifices, 320n.70; at theater, 49– 50, 322n.94 Michelini, Ann, 249, 366n.57, 371nn. 110 and 115 mim¯esis, 11, 101, 104, 287, 401n.80 mind-body problem, 229–30, 273–74, 395nn. 1 and 2 motion (Greek problems with), 281–82

INDEX

Mourelatos, A. P. D., 282 Murdoch, Iris, 3 music: at City Dionysia, 7–8, 47; hymns to Asclepius, 154, 357n.195; monodies, 163, 189, 360–61n.246; new music, 166, 361n.262; as ordered intervals, 284, 400n.69 nested space. See under Gibson Newton, Isaac, 229, 273, 283, 293, 403nn. 111 and 114 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36, 280, 281 Nightingale, Andrea, 286, 298n.15, 351n.125, 402n.88 nostos (“return,” “homecoming”), 76–77, 271; in Heracles, 100–104, 112–13; and Homer, 76–77, 146, 329n.2, 330n.5; in lost plays, 330n.6; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 229–30, 234; in Oresteia, 78–82 and 177 (Agamemnon, Cassandra), 85–89 and 83 (Orestes), 89, 97–100, 230, 266 (Furies); in Persians, 240; in Philoctetes, 149; and Pindar, 329n.1; and ritual, 329n.3 Nussbaum, Martha, 365n.44, 366nn. 53, 57, 66, and 69 Oedipus at Colonus: merges scenic and reflexive space (Athens), 5, 24, 99, 137, 235, 268, 290, 308n.126, 337n.106, 338n.113; no entrances through doors, 20–21, 308n.130; and paths, 338–39n.119; and spatial semiotics, 1–2 Oedipus Tyrannus (S.) —blinding, 221 —Cithaeron: and the “abject,” 225; and nostos, 229–30, 234; as projected future, 222, 233; as sacred, 226, 229; and the “uncanny” (unheimlich), 229 —cooperative virtues in, 226 —date of, 377n.8 —distanced space: Cithaeron, Delphi, Corinth, and three roads, 22, 215, 216, 222– 27, 228; as hodological space, 223, 226; as spur to memory, 215, 220, 223–24 —and earth, 231–32, 271, 381n.63 —extrascenic space: as place of secrets, 218– 19; evoked by Messenger, 21, 220–21 —and historical present, 331n.26 —identity, 215, 216–17, 229, 232, 381n.67 —irony, 96, 216, 235 —plague, 217

INDEX

—public-private nexus, 217, 219, 223, 271, 290, 382n.85 —reflexive space: 24, 217–18, 324, 378n.14; Thebes as Athens, 217, 238 —riddle of Sphinx, 224, 231–32, 268, 381nn.66–67 —scenic space; importance of palace, 21, 217, 227; Oedipus’ “return,” 221–22 —self-referential space, 23, 234–35; as hodological space, 235, 271, 382n.83 —space and time: 227–29, 271, 277 (time via stars); different from Proust, 227–28; and existentialists, 233–34; the future as “before,” 228–29, 232–33. —See also Delphi; memory; time O’Higgins, Dolores, 353n.149 Onians, R. B., 277–78, 395n.11, 397n.28 orality, 7–8, 300nn. 39 and 42. See also reading; writing Oresteia —bodies and spatial transformation, 83, 103, 169–70, 171 —death ritual, 83–84, 103 —displaced persons: orphans and exiles, 51, 80, 87–89; captives and foreigners, 82, 87–88, 97–99, 169 —distanced space: Troy, 15, 22, 78, 80–83, 171; Delphi, 88–89, 92, 372n.127 —extrascenic space: 55, 78–79; threshold, 78, 86–87, 240, 252, 290; lacking in Eumenides, 89, 91 —marriage ritual: perverted or parodied, 80–83, 331–32n.29, 338n.112; and the Furies, 98 —nostos: of Agamemnon and Cassandra, 78– 80, 81–82; of Orestes, 80, 85–89, 93; of the Furies, 4, 78, 89–97, 100, 173, 230, 266, 388n.67 —reflexive space, 92–95, 97–99, 335nn. 74 and 76 —scenic space: flexibility of, 20–21, 85, 89– 93, 332n.36; transformation in Eumenides, 91, 97, 123 —self-referential space, 86, 95–97, 335n.68 —sk¯en¯e facade, 78, 85; inverted in Eumenides, 91 —staging, 89–91, 334nn.55–58, 335n.66, 348n.70, 388n.67; orchestra center, 85–86 (tomb), 89–90 (omphalos), 90–93 (bretas); spatial decentering in Agamemnon, 17–18, 84–85

443 —See also Athena; Cassandra the “other,” 45, 158, 206, 236–37, 376n.193, 377n.6, 383nn. 2 and 5, 385n.23. See also Medea, Persians Padel, Ruth, 18, 21 Palladion, 146, 148, 353n.152, 354n.156 Panhellenic norms, 26, 32, 294–95, 313n.180 Panofsky, Erwin, 344n.16 Parminides, 129–30, 281–83, 360n.242, 399n.56, 400n.70 parrh¯esia (“freedom of expression”), 199, 211, 212, 372–73n.133, 388n.62 paths, 15, 17–19, 35; in Ajax, 346n.52; in Antigone, 115, 117–18, 120–21; and justice, 99–100; in Oedipus at Colonus, 338– 39n.119; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 219, 230; of philosophy, 305n.93; and Prometheus Bound, 158 Patterson, Cynthia, 22, 55–56, 98, 119, 122, 324n.125, 333n.49, 345n.40 Patterson, Richard, 285, 401n.71 Peloponnesian War: Athens’ rejection of Spartan peace, 154–55; demagogues’ role, 27, 154, 183; Lemnos and the Hellespont, 139, 154, 366n.69; Medea and outbreak of, 266, 394n.127; Sicilian expedition, 114, 139, 154; Sphacteria, 247; Spartan invasion and occupation, 60, 213, 328nn.154–56; in Suppliant Women, 26, 30. See also Athenian empire; Athens; Pericles performance: in ancient world, 9–11, 301n.56; as “injustice” to text, 280; and postmodern elites, 234–35. See also actors; mim¯esis; theater Pericles, 24, 51, 60, 93, 154, 177, 328n.153. See also Peloponnesian War; marriage (Pericles’ citizenship law) Persians —distanced space: as Greece and Athens, 240–41; merges with reflexive space, 250; and nostos, 240, 249, 250 —extrascenic space (non-existent), 241 —portrayal of Persians: named, 243; similar to Greeks, 242–44, 247–48, 271; symbol of yoking, 238, 240, 244–46. See also Persians and Persian empire—reflexive space, 250

444 Persians (cont.) —scenic space: and sk¯en¯e, 239, 308n.130; not palace, 240; flexible, 334n.55; merges with reflexive space, 250 —spatial morality: 246, 247; and U.S. imperialism, 241–42, 250–51 —staging, 239, 240, 246, 249–50, 384nn.14–15, 388nn. 61 and 63 —Xerxes, 248–50, 387n.43, 388nn. 56 and 66 —See also Salamis Persians and Persian empire: Alcibiades’ collusion with, 213; art of, 242, 384n.22; court intrigues, 218; defeat at Marathon, 240; and hubris, 138–39, 245–46, 248, 311–12n.159; invasion and sack of Athens, 59–60, 93, 238, 240–41, 314n.3, 326n.130, 331n.20, 335n.76, 383n.9, 384nn.18–20, 386n.42; ongoing threat to Athens, 242, 247–48; as “others,” 236, 250. See also Salamis perspective in ancient art, 18, 306nn.104–5, 305n.98 phenomenology. See under actors (embodied presence), theater Philoctetes (S.) —and body, 152–53, 168–69, 356n.188 —and bow, 142–43, 145–46, 155, 277, 289–90, 353n.149, 355n.167, 356n.189, 357n.200 —and cave of Philotetes, 20–21, 142, 146–47 —distanced space: Troy, 143–49; and nostos (Scyros, Oeta), 149 —and Lemnos: depopulated, 114, 138–39, 177; as heterotopia, 140–41, 154; as holy, 148, 355n.166; “invaded” by Greeks, 143– 44, 147, 156; mirror of Troy, 148–49; as surrogate Athens, 60, 138–39, 155 —reflexive space, 154–55, 356–57n.191, 357nn. 195 and 197 —sack of Troy: Neoptolemus’ role, 145, 147, 149, 152–53, 341n.150, 354nn. 161 and 163–64; Odysseus’ role, 146–47 —self-referential space, 149–52, 355nn. 172–73 and 179 —staging, 142–43, 150, 151–52, 353– 53nn.139–41, 356n.184 Pindar, 76, 226, 329n.1, 358n.213 Pinker, Steven, 12 Pinter, Harold, 248–49, 401n.82

INDEX

Plato: on chˆora, 280, 285–88, 293, 401nn.77–78, 402n.86; on thumoeid¯es, 393n.121; on kosmos as natural and political, 397–98n.34; and mim¯esis, 11, 283, 287–88, 401n.80, 402n.88; on philosophic compulsions, 305n.93, 381n.57, 389n.71; use of theatrical metaphor, 287, 402n.88; on vision, 3 Pnyx, 4, 37, 50, 53–54, 72–73 (figs. 9–10), 92, 183. See also ekkl¯esia poetry (art): function of, 262–63, 268–69; misleading, 110–11. See also mim¯esis; performance; theater Polycleitus, 40, 284, 400n.66 procession (pomp¯e): at City Dionysia, 45–47, 167, 230n.75; at end of Eumenides, 99– 100; in Medea, 256; at Panathenaia, 43, 45, 99, 184, 337n.103, 338nn. 116 and 118, 367n.70; end of Philoctetes, 155; end of Persians, 250; in Suppliant Women, 29 progress (human), 140–41, 164, 167, 277, 397n.30 Prometheus Bound: authenticity of, 156, 166, 358n.212; bodily punishment in, 158, 159–60, 163, 164, 281; familial aspects, 160–61; protagonist as spectator, 163, 297–98n.14; reflexive space, 163–65, 166–67; scenic space as ends of the earth, 156; self-referential space, 161–163, 165– 66 (the overly theatrical); staging, 156, 160, 165, 357–58n.210, 359nn. 231 and 234, 361n.259; stasis and mobility in, 157–58, 166; travel and ancient geography in, 157–58, 276. See also sophists; tyranny proprioception, 14, 168 Protagoras, 184, 342n.160 Proust, 19, 223, 227–28, 380n.49 Pythagoras and Pythagoreans, 283–84, 285, 298n.17, 396nn.19–20, 400nn.66–67 reading: cuts off world and abandons presence, 8–10, 300nn.45–46, 301n.49; as interpretive metaphor, 9–12. See also orality; performance; theater; writing Reckford, Kenneth, 365n.46, 368n.83 religion (ancient Greek): cults and polytheism, 57–58, 278; gods challenged in tragedy, 105–6, 111–13, 208–9, 339n.129, 342n.166; and Moira, 157, 358n.214, 398n.37; and sacrifice, 46–47, 225, 243– 44, 278, 317n.30, 320n.61, 341n.151,

INDEX

342n.166; sacrifice perverted in tragedy, 81–82, 124, 180, 192–93, 376n.190; Olympian and chthonic aspects, 31–32 Ricoeur, Paul, 346n.51, 381–82n.68 role doubling, 174–75, 271, 291; in Ajax, 133–35, 168, 174; in Antigone, 364n.30; in Bacchae, 134, 168, 174, 209–10; in Electra, 198, 372n.131; in Heracles, 175, 340n.141; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 174–75, 227, 380n.47 in Oresteia, 334n.64; in Persians, 388n.66; in Philoctetes, 150–52, 168; in Trachiniae, 133, 174 Rose, Peter, 6, 137, 139–40, 299n.33, 348n.81, 351nn. 122 and 126, 354n.162 Rosenmeyer, Thomas, 337n.100, 347n.59, 348nn. 68 and 81 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12, 236 Said, Edward, 236, 251 Salamis: Athenian victory at, 51, 59–60, 239, 240, 246–47; and Athens, 45, 135–36, 367n.73; in Ajax, 128, 134–36, 349n.87; in Persians, 239, 240, 337n.106 Sambursky, Shmuel, 289, 347n.61, 401n.77 Sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus, 41–44, 69–70 (figs. 6–7) Sappho, 264, 267, 393n.120 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 233 Scully, Stephen, 345n.37, 355n.166 Seaford, Richard, 344n.10, 357n.200, 359n.231, 373n.141, 374n.154 Seale, David, 152, 344n.14, 355n.167, 356n.188 Searle, John, 395n.1 seasons: agricultural, 44–45; of nature, 129; and Greek natural science, 274. Segal, Charles: on Bacchae, 236, 374n.168; and Homeric kosmos, 304n.77; on Oedipus Tyrannus, 229, 377n.4, 381nn. 54, 63, and 67; on Philoctetes, 139, 151, 183; and texts, 297n.4, 300n.46, 302n.59 self, Greek sense of: at point of sight, 5; embodied, 168, 364n.33; as internalized other, 5–6, 264–65; as interplay of public and private, 2–6, 168–69, 233–34, 235, 271–72 semiotics, 1–2, 10–11, 270, 303n.66 Shakespeare, William: and anachronism, 24; and Elizabethan public theaters, 44; Hamlet, 130, 275, 347n.63, 360n.241, 396n.13; Henry V, 356n.180; Henry VI, pt.

445 2, 342n.160; King Lear, 170, 231, 249, 396n.13; Macbeth, 86; and soliloquy, 102 silence in tragedy, 29, 131, 400n.68 sk¯en¯e (“scene building”), 38, 40, 270, 345n.44; as “alternate representational system” (Wiles), 391n.89; in Ajax, 345nn. 34 and 44; in Choephori, 345n.34; earliest in theater of Dionysus, 315n.14; in Persians, 239; roof (appearances on), 22, 78, 312n.161, 376n.196; and scene painting, 18 slaves and slavery: at City Dionysia, 52–53, 285; Euripides’ attitude towards, 185, 368nn.78–79; of Greeks by Greeks, 367– 68n.76; in Hecuba, 175–76, 184–87, 367n.72; in Medea, 252; “natural slave” argument, 184–85; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 380n.38; in Oresteia, 82, 87–88, 169, 333n.46; as the “other,” 236, 237; role in Athenian life, 185, 320n.70, 367n.73, 368n.77, 369n.90; yoke of, 238, 245 sophists, sophistry: in Bacchae, 202, 212–13; as foreign residents in Athens, 49, 321n.90; in Hecuba, 183, 366n.66; in Heracles, 101, 339n.127; in Medea, 260, 264; on origins of life, 374n.165; in Philoctetes, 139–41 (on social anthropology); in Prometheus Bound, 164–65, 361nn. 255 and 257 Sophocles, 154, 357n.195; Electra, 277, 290, 356n.180, 372n.124; Ichneutae, 308n.130; Lemniai, 138, 350n.102; lost plays, 5, 333n.43, 395n.9; Philoctetes at Troy, 353n.15; Teukros, 348n.79; Trachiniae, 4, 226, 274, 333n.41. See also titles of individual plays space —definitions, 2, 296 —Greek views of: the “boundless” (to apeiron), 279–81; and kosmos, 277–79; and natural place, 291; and natural world, 274–77; as order of coexistences, 292; as plenum, 281–83; and problem of motion, 281–88; as receptacle (chora), 285–88; as separation, 283–85, 400nn. 67 and 69; summation, 296; as topos, 288–91; as void, 281–83, 288 —and narrative, 291 —perception of: auditory, 6–8, 299n.36; visual, 13–15, 157. See also Gibson —and time. See time

446 space and the theater. See also under indivdual play titles —basic relationship: 1, 288; affected by bodies, 133–35, 289–91. See also bodies —distanced space: defined, 22–23; in tragedy, 91, 149, 153, 158 —extrascenic space: defined, 21–22; not always required, 360n.236; not always used, 25 (Suppliant Women), 89–91 (Eumenides), 241 (Persians); not binary, 55, 160 —reflexive space: defined, 23–25; exemplified, 53–54. See also Athenian empire; Athens; death ritual; ekkl¯esia; lawcourts; marriage ritual; sophists —scenic space: defined, 20–21; voided, 91, 97, 123–24; “refocused,” 25–31 (Suppliant Women), 85–86 and 332n.36 (Choephori), 239 (Persians); transformed, 89 and 91–92 (Eumenides), 123–24 (Ajax) —self-referential space: defined, 23, 307n.121; Dionysiac cult, 373n.146; invocation of natural elements, 163; masks, 198, 200–201, 209–10, 375n.177; parody, 28, 188, 194, 198, 310n.145, 372n.126; prologue, 95–96, 187, 200–201, 209; theatrical vocabulary, 27, 103, 198, 340n.138, 355n.173, 373n.145; reference to choral dancing, 234–35, 307n.121, 342n.165, 382n.82; reference to music or aulos, 163, 207; theatrical excess, 96–97, 165–66; voyeurism and “spectating,” 121, 123, 127, 162–63, 202, 206, 213, 221, 297n.14. See also role doubling —theatrical space, 20, 35, 37–39 —See also spatial inversions; theater spatial inversions: in Antigone, 115, 117–20, 122, 295, 344n.11; in Bacchae, 174, 206; in Electra, 187–89, 194, 200; in Hecuba, 181; in Heracles, 112; in Oresteia, 91; and ostracism, 404n.125; in Persians, 246–47; in Thucydides, 387n.48; in various arts, 295 Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), 12 States, Bert, 238, 303n.67 Steiner, George, 156, 252 Stoppard, Tom, 162, 360n.245 structuralism (applied to Greek tragedy): and binary space, 1, 237, 270, 303n.67, 307n.15, 318n.42, 360n.236; as decoding, 8; and offstage space, 21–22; in Bacchae, 210–12, 375–76n.181, 376nn. 183 and

INDEX

189; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 229; in Philoctetes, 350n.106 Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane, 8, 319n.57 suicide: Aegeus (in myth), 255; in Ajax, 129–31, 133, 156; in Antigone, 120, 121– 22, 344nn. 23 and 26; in Heracles (threatened), 109; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 220–21, 381n.63; in Philoctetes (threatened), 153, 352n.131; in Phoenissai, 280; in Prometheus Bound (contemplated), 159; in Suppliant Women, 28; in Trachiniae (Deianeira), 174. See also body; corpses Suppliant Women: distanced space (Thebes), 25, 27; and education, 33–34; extrascenic space (none), 25; reflexive space, 24 and 27 (assembly and strat¯egoi), 28 (funeral oration), 29–30 (orphans); scenic space “Athenized,” 24–25; self-referential space, 27, 31, 291; space and time collapse, 26; staging, 25–26, 29, 31, 308nn. 129, 131, and 134. See also Athena; Theseus supplication: at altar of 12 gods, 43–44; in Bacchae, 206; in Hecuba (avoided), 178, 180; in Heracles, 101, 104, 170; in Medea, 170, 256; in Oedipus Tyrannus, 217, 219, 319n.48; in Suppliant Women, 25–26, 318n.46; in other tragedies, 55, 319n.48 symposia, 56, 173, 326n.129, 363n.19; referred to in Ajax, 136, 349n.19; in Bacchae, 212; in Cylops, 24 Tallis, Raymond, 12 Taplin, Oliver: on staging, 8, 19, 306n.112; on Oedipus Tyrannus, 382n.83; on Oresteia, 90, 309n.134; on Philoctetes, 149, 352n.134, 352–53n.139, 353nn.141–42; on Prometheus Bound, 359–60n.234; on earliest sk¯en¯e, 78, 239, 315n.15, 334–35n.65 Thales, 229, 275 theater: and presence, 10–12, 169, 238, 303nn. 65 and 67; as social, spacial, and material art, 1, 3, 233; sight and sound in, 3–4, 6–8, 297–98n.14, 299n.36; difficulty with ideological reproduction, 238, 244, 272, 383n.5; links with Greek spatial theory, 279–80 (cyclical emergence), 283 and 400n.65 (“atomistic” interactions), 283–85 (intervals and separation), 287–88 (demiurgic mim¯esis), 289–90 (objects creating space), 290–91 (patterns of displacement),

INDEX

293 (order of coexistences). See also actors; performance; space theater of Dionysus: acoustics, 6–7, 357– 58n.210; animals onstage, 99, 189, 338n.116, 373n.138; and assembly meetings, 42–43, 53, 311n.155, 324n.115; cavea, 35, 38, 63 (fig. 1); front of house, 314n.2; link with landscape, 37–39; “nested” in Athens, 15, 269, 272; orchestra representing interior space, 334n.55, 334– 35n.65, 335n.66; orchestra shape, 28, 39– 41, 315nn. 12 and 17; orchestra and threshing floor, 39, 316n.23; outdoor realities, 16–17, 35–37, 270; as paideutic space, 33–34, 141, 154, 269; view from, 14, 35–36, 63 (fig. 1), 66–68 (figs. 3–5), 259–60, 269, 343n.170 Thebes: as “other,” 236, 238; not as “other,” 213, 217–18, 238, 377n.6. See also autochthony; other; Zeitlin Themistocles, 51, 59–60 Theognis, 347n.63 Theophrastus, 291–93 theat¯es (“spectator”), theˆoros (“envoy”), theˆoria (“way of seeing”), 3, 235, 297–98n.14, 360n.243 Theseus: bones returned to Athens, 174, 333n.40, 364n.27; as founding hero and outsider, 58–59, 327n.144, 328n.149; and Hades, 311n.151; in Heracles, 109–10, 111–13; in Medea (virtually), 255, 390– 91n.87; as nothos, 259, 392n.103; as protector of suppliants, 309n.132, 311n.157; in Suppliant Women, 26–28, 30–31, 32– 34; as theˆoros (Hippolytus), 297–98n.14; Thucydides: Athenian empire, 248, 368n.81; Persian sack of Athens, 241; Peloponnesian War, 366n.66, 394nn.127–28; plague in Athens, 217; and spatial inversions, 295, 387n.48; ancestry linked to Ajax, 137 time: Athenian calendar, 44, 276, 313n.170, 397n.25; “barrier” time in tragedy, 103, 109, 128–29, 347nn. 57 and 59; Greek measurement of, 274–75, 277, 292, 397n.27; Kant on, 292–93; Leibniz on, 292; one directional, 305n.96; personified in tragedy, 173, 231, 364n.22; spatialized, 16, 91 (Choephori), 157 (Prometheus Bound), 276; spatialized in Oedipus Tyrannus, 228–29, 231–34, 380–81n.49, 381n.53, 381–82n.68, 397n.24

447 travel: to festivals, 35, 235, 298n.14; and maps, 276, 315n.215; and distant knowledge, 330n.5; in Heracles 102, 106–8; in Prometheus Bound, 158–59, 165, 315n.215 Troy: in Ajax, 128, 130–31, 136, 137; associated with Persia in Athenian art, 242; in Electra, 195–98; in Hecuba, 181–82; in Oresteia, 22, 78, 80–83, 240; in Philoctetes, 143–49, 155; fall of, 354nn. 156 and 163–64. See also Cassandra tyrants and tyranny: in Antigone (Creon), 117, 123; in Heracles (Lycus), 101, 104; in Oresteia (Aegisthus), 85, 87; in Persians (Xerxes) 240, 249; in Athens, 43–44; in Prometheus Bound (Zeus), 157–58, 166, 168, 361n.264, 361–62n.265; in Suppliant Women (Creon), 32, 361n.264 Vatsyayan, S. H., 228 Vernant, Jean-Pierre: analogy of kosmos and politics, 397–98n.34; on bodies (god and human) 363–64n.20; on childbirth, 188; on Greek science, 274; on Greek selfconception, 4, 298n.23; and Hesiod’s ages of man, 398n.45; on Oedipus Tyrannus, 219, 229; and the “other,” 236–37, 242; on Platonic images, 400n.63; on reciprocity of seer and seen, 4; and the tragic question, 143 Vickers, Brian, 139 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 139, 236 vision, 12–18; and blindness, 5, 118, 168, 219, 221, 228, 230; fundamental to understanding, 3; gap between divine and human, 125–28 (Ajax); Greek view of, 3– 4, 298n.17. See also Gibson Vitruvius, 39, 316n.19 warfare (Athenian), 45, 49, 274; and military commanders (strat¯egoi), 27, 45, 50–51, 154, 323n.100, 348–49n.81; Peloponnesian War, 60–61, 139; Persian wars, 59– 60, 247; reflected in tragedy, 246–47 (Persians), 309n.140 (Suppliant Women), 331nn. 22 and 28 (Agamemnon); training for, 29–30 and 36 (war orphans), 351n.116 (ephebeia). See also Persians and Persian empire; Peloponnesian War Watsuji, 2, 3 Whitehead, David, 49, 236 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von, 259

448 Wiles, David: ancient theater as image of psyche, 307n.115; permanent orchestra altar, 309n.134, 331n.23; scenic and theatrical space undifferentiated, 306n.112; structuralism and semiotics, 8, 27, 318n.42, 391n.89 Williams, Bernard, 5–6, 299n.29 Williams, Raymond, 244 Winnington-Ingram, R. P., 145, 344n.7, 376n.187, 382n.76 women in Athens: in Bacchae, 211–12; in Dionysiac cult, 50, 211–12, 322n.94; and misogyny, 251–52, 392n.114; as “other,” 236–37, 238, 251–52, 261, 389n.70, 392n.109; and poetry, 261–62, 266–67, 393–94n.126; as represented in tragedy, 55, 104, 251–52, 324n.123; role in Athenian life, 52, 184, 324–25n.125, 373n.140, 389n.71. See also under individual play titles writing, 301n.52, 302nn.58–59. See also orality; reading

INDEX

Xenophanes, 397n.28 Xenophon, 45, 54, 343n.3, 397n.29 xenos (“guest-friend”) relationship, 180–81, 366n.53 yoking: in agriculture, 385–86n.34; of companionship, 386n.36; in Heracles, 103, 109–10; in Persians, 240, 244–46, 386n.39; of marriage, 28, 244–45, 386n.35; of slavery, 238, 245; of tyranny, 240, 246. See also agriculture; marriage; slavery, tyranny Zeitlin, Froma: on analogy of woman’s body (Phaedra) and house interior, 307n.115; on Hecuba, 364n.33, 365nn. 41 and 45–46, 366n.53; on Orestes’ rebirth at Delphi, 333n.41; on “the other,” 236, 238, 251, 314n.6, 376n.193, 392n.109 Zeno, 282, 288, 289