Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis: Greek Drama Conference: Papers 8879490265, 9788879490269

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Buch_Sommerstein_et_al_1993_1
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«le Rane» Collana di Studi e Testi

STUDI - 11

TRAGEDY, COMEDY ANDTHEPOLIS Papers from the Greek Drama Conference Nottingham, 18-20 July 1990 edited by ALAN H. SOMME'RSTEIN STEPHEN HALLIWELL JEFFREY HENDERSON BERNHARD ZIMMERMANN

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Caver pic1w·e: Paestan bell-crater. Museo Provinciale, Salerno.

LEVANTE EDITOR! - BARI ' ' 'i

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«le Rane» Collana di Stu.di e Testi

CONTENTS

a cura di Francesco De Martino

con: Marco Fantozzi, Enrico V. Maltese, Pierpaolo Rosati, Alan H. Sommerstein, Onofrio Vox, Bernhard Zimmermann Preface ................................................................... ·..... . pag. Introduction (Alan H. Sommerstein) ............................. . "

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0) 'I do not necessarily mean the paradigm of an immortal (e.g. Dionysos in Euripides' Bacchae) but any paradigm, since a paradigm as such is immortal. Thus to play even a humble role might be seen as overreaching. 11 Aaron 1986 offers a brilliant and subtle analysis of stage fright among modern actors. He argues that stage fright is essential to the art of acting and an element of successful performance. I am aware of no ancient testimony of stage fright, but I see no reason to suppose, as has been suggested to me, that it is a culturally determinate phenomenon unknown to the public and oral culture of the ancients. At Pro Cluentio51 Cicero states that, whenever he begins to speak in public, he experiences intense fear, since he feels

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Thus the ancient performer can be regarded as a kind of hero, and insofar as he received public honors for his performance he was so regarded. Both the performers and the most important characters of the tragedies were heroic. But the heroic characters of the tragedies and the heroic theater artist were not as a rule heroes of the same kind, for the performers were not tragic heroes. If I may propose a reductive but I hope useful schema, the tragic hero can be regarded as a kind of performer who wins recognition by seeking identification with a certain paradigm, often but not always a divinity". He is typically «godlike» and he may even wear a costume or prop that identifies him with a god or at least places him in a role 1'. Thus kings like Agamemnon and Menelaus manifest their authority by displaying the scepter of Zeus, Hippolytus wears hunting garb like that of Artemis and imitates her virginity, the veil of Phaedra identifies her as a modest wife!,which may be illustrated by this quotation from his introductory chapter (Van Gennep 1960: 3-4): isee De Marinis 1987 and Carlson 1990. As P.D. Arnott 1989:24 points out, many of the spectators at the Athenian City Dionysia will have had experience in choruses and thus will have felt able to share the emotions of the performers.

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by the performance. In other words, from the performance in the orchestra the spectator provides himself with a scenario that he enacts in performing his role as a spectator. Thus the audience of drama attends with the intention of participating in an experience of performance, of molding its attention as much as possible to a scenario, just as the performers in the orchestra do. In watching tragedy the audience undergoes an experience of humbling as it empathizes with the wretched and with the performers who enact the wretched; like Odysseus in Sophocles' Ajax when the raving Ajax is revealed to him, it recognizes itself in the victim and learns of its own wretchedness". Odysseus perceives that «all of us who live are nothing more than images or empty shadow» (d'owA[a] .. ,1J xouq,l')vcrx,av 126) , suggesting an analogy between human life and role-playing (both of them transient and insubstantial), and the audience of tragedy may· simultaneously recognize the fragility of the characters' roles, the performers' roles, and of its own role as a spectator feeling self-induced empathy. But unlike the tragic hero, and like the tragic performer, the audience can take pleasure in this experience, because it undertakes it willingly and survives it, because it shares its misery with a lot of company, and perhaps also because it feels it is fulfilling the social duty of , initiation 39 • This initiation, however, probably should not be thought of as a true initiation of the traditional sort, because after undergoing all the transitions of the performance neither the performers nor the audience seem to have arrived anywhere. They have divested themselves of a series of roles without ultimately finding one to keep. This inconclusiveness in the quasi-initiatory scenario of the performance may be reflected in the ironies that disturb the conclusions of the comedies of Aristophanes and such satyric or On Odysseus in the prologue as the spectator of tragedy see Cresci 1974:217-218. In initiations sometimes only representatives of the initiated group would actually perform the ritual; thu:",the division of roles between performers and audience in the Athenian theater need not have excluded the spectators from participation. For evidence of representative initiates in Sparta see Brelich 1969: 192-193. At Eleusis the initiation of mystai was observed by an audience of the already initiated, the epoptai: Burkert 1985a:287. Ja

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quasi-satyric plays as the Cyclops, Alcestis, and Helen of Euripides. These ironies suggest to me that the plays of the Athenian dramatic festivals were not expected to complete a transition to a new status for the participants. For in the city of Athens, what new status could that have been? It is true that the Athenian polis, like any ancient· society, maintained distinctions of status between slaves and free men, citizens and non-citizens, men and women, men and boys. However, the relatively lax observance of status distinctions was considered a special mark of the Athenian character. The Old Oligarch, for example, states that the Athenians have established isegoria between slaves and free men and between metics and citizens (Ps.-Xen. Ath. Pol. l. !2), and while this exaggerates the true situation, it shows how that situation could be interpreted. Pericles makes the same general point about Athens in the Funeral Oration, where he praises the Athenian character by showing that the Athenian citizen was not restricted to the narrow pigeonholes that applied in other polities: members of any economic class could hold office if they had the ability; eccentric pleasures could be cultivated without fear of public disapprobation; work was frequently interrupted for· recreation, in public or at home; the taste of the Athenian consumer embraced not only local products but products from all over the world; Athenians could perform brilliantly in battle without practicing all the time for it; nobody specialized in philosophical contemplation, or money-making, or politics; Athenians could both discuss policy and make decisions (Thuc. 2.37-41). Pericles culminates his account of the Athenian tropoi by suggesting that each individual Athenian could apply himself to the widest range of activities and do it with exceptional grace (xcx0' fxom-covOoxe.rv &vµot -rOvo:U'tOv &vOpe< rco:p'~µWvE:rCL n:AeTcr't' Y.vel'o71 xcd µe:t!Xx,ocp('twv µl'.XAtcr-c' &v e.U-cpo:1tO.wi; 't0 crWµcx o:U'tapxei; rcapix,e.cr8m, 2.41.1). Plato seems to have the same idea of Athenian versatility in view in the description of the democratic character in Republic 8, where Socrates disapprovingly describes a man who engages in a wide range of activities at whim, stating that this man is «full of a very great number of personalities» (itAe(,mvvi)0wv µecr~6v56le). It would appear front these passages that the Athenians regarded themselves

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as typically changing roles and thus as existing in something like a permanent state of transition. Among such people a traditional civic initiation would have been somewhat anomalous, for the traditional categories of civic status had lost a fair degree of meaning. To some extent, among the Athenians transgression was the norm, and the theatrical experience may have prepared them for this norm 40 • This is not to say that the Athenians lived in a state of anarchy, or that their dramatic poets intended to encourage such a state. The Athenian dramas seem to prepare the citizens for a condition of order, but one that does not depend upon fixed social boundaries. Instead it depends upon a feeling of affection for one's fellow mortals arising from a recognition of the humbling bodily experience one shares with them, and from the pleasure of their company on a fine occasion like the City Dionysia. As the comedies of Aristophanes show, this recognition was supposed to make the Athenians a critical audience for glamorous generals and politicians, especially those who sought to foster division within the community, and to give the Athenians the flexibility to play a variety of roles as situations might require, especially the role of friend to a former enemy. But the drama's perspicacious vision of the transient human self behind all its costumes and roles was difficult to achieve and maintain, because the human head is after all part of the body, and it is ultimately not more beautiful or perfect than any other part. Thus it would not have been possible for the Athenian dramatists to initiate their people irreversibly into the dramatic idea of citizenship. The people would have to struggle one by one and day by day against

10 Thus· I differ from Goldhill 1990, who identifies Athenian civic values with hoplite service and argues that the dramaquestions and subverts these values. Both Goldhill

and Winkler 1985 appear to overestimate the centrality of military service in the Athe-

nian notion of citizenship. Pericles' Funeral Oration- a speech at a military funeral and a locusclassicusof civic ideology - gives great prominence to non-militaryactivities and particularlystresses that the Athenians are capable of fighting effectively without spending all their time preparingfor it as the Spartansdo. A civic ideology that closely identified citizenship with military service would not have been Athenian, and therefore in questioning the values of such an ideology the Athenian dramasdo not place at risk the values of their own city as Goldhill suggests. For criticism of the view that warfarewas central to the ancient Greek polis, see Humphreys 1971:191-193.

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the deception, self-deception, pride and hatred that were just as inescapable a condition of their humanity as humility and love. But a few times a year the dramatic poets and performers could provide help by sharing with them an especially intense and memorable experience of the contradictions that go with being human".

Suzanne Sa'id (New York)

Tragic Argos The purpose of this paper is to locate Argos in the «mental map»' of the Greeks. I shall start with two qualifications. First, I shall only consider the surviving plays in which the action is set in Argos, that is to say the Suppliants and the Oresteiaof Aeschylus, the Electra of Sophocles and the Electra and the Orestesof Euripides. Secondly, I shall concentrate on Argos as a toposin a literal sense, that is a geographical site'. In Greek tragedy, Argos, like every other city, is given a textual reality. It is defined by its names, its distinctive geography and its monuments. Accordingly, I shall begin by presenting the different views of Argos in the different plays, for «each tragedy has its own mythical topography and flexible 1t6A,,concepts»'. Argos has also a theatrical reality, both as a staging and as a theatrical direction that extends beyond the stage limits. It is sometimes represented by one of the eisodoi, whereas the other one leads abroad, to Egypt in the Suppliants, to Troy in Agamemnon, to Delphi in the Choephoroi.But in Sophocles, Electra as well as in Euripides, Electra and Orestes,the stage directions are less straightforward and Argos extends in both directions. Of course this Argive reality has to be comprehended in its framing, in relation to the other places that are alluded to in the play.

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I borrow this expression from Easterling 1989:5.

I shall exclude the figurative sense of the word and shall not examine, as F. Zeitlin did for Thebes, Argos as a «commonplace)), that is «certain clusters ofideas_, themes and problems ... that can be identified as proper to Thebes» (Zeitlin 1986: 102). For a study 2

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Thanks to Professors David Konstan, Phillip T. Mitsis, Dolores O'Higgins, and Thomas G. Rosenmeyer for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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of Argos as a geographical place in Greek tragedy, see Bernand 1985: 36-43, 105-106, 245-256. . 'Willink 1986:267.

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obscure ~ouv,,; as a synonym for yrj', Aeschylus clearly associates the «Apian land» ('A1t(0Eil1t6AL00,.(II. 8-11, 12-18)".

EuitOAL,'A07Jvctfo,·loi6e by Euripides, however, does not date back to .412, as indicated ib., but possibly to 422; cf. Lesky 1972: 368. Collard 1981: 2. Treu 1971 expressed himself in favour of 423. Metrical reasons point to 416, a date based on the analysis of fragments; cf. Cropp and Fick 1985: 79 f. - The «lonely reader>}was found by POhlmann 1988: 15 on two vase~paintings from as early as the first quarter of

the fifth century: ARV'

= Beazley 1963) 452 and ARV2 231, 83, without

being allowed

to speak of a developed literacy here.

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r P.E. Easterling (London)

The end of an era? Tragedy in the early fourth century This short paper considers the problems involved in the writing of intellectual history, or - to be less grandiose - in the attempt to give an account of Attic tragedy in the first half of the fourth century B.C. Not surprisingly, it poses questions rather than offering answers. The period I have in mind, roughly that of the first couple of generations after the Peloponnesian War, is poorly represented by surviving evidence. No tragedy of the period, apart perhaps from Rhesus, has been preserved for us complete, and what we have, in quotations and papyrus fragments, is not easy to evaluate. This is in striking contrast with the fascinating range of material surviving from the last decade of the fifth century: Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, Orestes, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Bacchae and perhaps also Ion and Phoenissae. The absence of primary material in the shape of complete plays makes the tendency to generalise irresistible, and it is worth looking critically at some of these stories that we tell ourselves about what happened to tragedy after the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. Not so long ago the leading story was one of rapid growth and decay: in the short span of the fifth century tragedy developed from the comparative primitivism of Aeschylus to the perfection of Sophocles and degenerated into the perversity and mannerism oflate Euripides, after which its progress was downhill all the way. This model can of course be traced back to ancient scholarship, as in the Aeschylean Lije 1, and might be seen as being adumbrated in Frogs, 1 At least the notion of the 'perfection' of Sophocles is made explicit there (Life of Aeschylus16: 'Anyone who thinks that Sophocles was a more perfect (nAeWnpoi;)writer

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when Dionysus says that he is looking for a dexios poetes in Hades, because that is where they all are (71-2)'. It is certainly a view to be found - with variations in the treatment of Euripides - in plenty of books written in our own century, and I quote a rather melodramatic sample from an otherwise very sober and well-balanced study, The Greek TragicPoets, by D. W .Lucas': When in the spring of 406 B.C. Sophocles produced his last plays, he dressed his Chorus in mourning at the preliminary parade, for the news of the death of Euripides in Macedonia had reached Athens not long before. Perhaps he suspected that their black clothes could well sJmbolize grief not only for the death of a great poet, whom he must soon follow,but mourning for tragedy itself. He must have known that, though Athens had tragic poets in plenty, there was among them no successor to himself or Euripides. Agathon, the best of them, had gone off to Macedonia.It was not without reasonthat Dionysuswent down to Hades to fetch a real tragic poet at the Great Dionysia of the next year, when Sophoclestoo was dead. The stereotype of sudden and total collapse is easily discredited, but the analysis on which it is based is more complex and persuasive: we know, after all, that important changes - in music, for example - were already taking place during the fifth century itself, that certainly by the time the Lycurgan theatre was built in the 330's Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were the acknowledged, pre-eminent classics, whereas we have no complete play by any of even the most popular tragedians of the fourth century, Astydamas, Carcinus or Theodectes. These developments have often been explained in terms of artistic change, of tendencies that were ultimately inimical to serious tragedy and led in the direction oflight entertainment characterised by decorativeness, affectation, triviality, of tragedy is correct, but he should consider that it was much harder after Thespis, Phrynichus and Choerilus to bring tragedy to such a pitch of greatness than it was, coming afterAeschylus, to reachthe perfection of Sophocles'). 2 Some sort of exception seems to be made for lophon (73-9), but Dionysus is joking about lophon's dependence on his great father, and it is hard to gauge whether any appreciationof his work is implied. 'Lucas 1959: 244.

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sensationalism and the slickness of professional show business. In parallel with this artistic change it is common to trace changes in social attitudes and perceptions, as public opinion became--m~re secularised, myth was felt to have less sacred power, and prose genr(;s like philosophy and historiography took over tragedy's didactic role, while the style and ethos of fourth-century Athenian life became less po/is-centred, more absorbed in private experience. The difficuity with this kind of approach is that nowadays, thanks to the critical work of the last twenty years, we feel bound to take full account of the relation between the world of the theatre and the world of the polis, which leaves us trying to reconcile two not altogether congruent stories. For if the social structure created by the democracy in the fifth century was particularly favourable to the development of tragedy, as Vernant and others have taught us to believe', then we have to explain why in the restored democracy after the Peloponnesian War these conditions no longer obtained (if it is true that they didn't), and why one should no longer expect to find tragedy questioning, criticising, challenging or redefining the structure of the polis as well as 'inventing' and celebrating Athens. How can we be sure that there were no longer such things as tension between loyalty to the city and loyalty to the family, to mention one of the many conflicting claims that we talk of nowadays as constituting the subject matter of tragic discourse? One way of tackling the question has been offered by Frank Kolb 5, who considers it from the point of view of the playwrights. Only, he suggests, in the period between Marathon and the Peloponnesian War could drama find an optimistic voice, so that tragedians felt encouraged to discuss decisive political questions and comic poets to believe that through criticism of day-to-day public affairs they could influence the destiny of the city. The Peloponnesian War taught them better: they discovered that it was not possible, by composing and putting on plays, to have a decisive effect on the political and moral ideology of the citizens. The polis,

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See e.g. Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1972, 1986; Gold.hill 1986; Winkler and Zeitlin 1990. 'Kolb 1979: 516-17.

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disregarding the advice and warnings of her poets, had fallen blindly into ruin; what followed was resignation. With the city no longer the centre of interest and source of inspiration, comedy very successfully concerned itself with private life, but tragedy sickened and wasted, celebrating its greatest successes in the revival of old plays, particularly those of Euripides. One might compare the analysis offered by Georgia Xanthakis-Karamanos, who in a careful study of the fragments of fourth-century tragedy has looked at the question from the point of view of audiences, suggesting that in the fourth century life was so full of anxieties that people 'could hardly face true tragedies". So they looked to the romantic tragi-comedies and melodramas of late Euripides as models for the light entertainment they most enjoyed: plays characterised by mild sentimentality and general refinement. Models like these are not easy to evaluate. No doubt the war did have a profound effect on Athenian consciousness, and more generally one would expect to find attitudes changing over time indeed being in a constant process of development, but if we are to gauge more finely what was happening in the first half of the fourth century we need to review the types of evidence available and ask what kinds of inference can be drawn from them. It may be best to begin, not with the fragments and their probably misleading perspectives, but with the theatre as an institution. The crucial point here is that the fourth century was a time of extraordinary vitality in the theatre, as we know from vase paintings, inscriptions, and quite extensive literary sources. And although this was a widespread development in the Greek-speaking world Athens remained the recognised centre, its drama gaining prestige from the travels of the more famous Athenian actors and from the presentation in other cities of plays by Athenian poets. Plato makes Laches remark (and no one contradicts him) that anybody aspiring to be a successful tragic dramatist naturally makes for Athens (183a-b), and in the same passage he implies that. there is

" Xanthakis-Karamanos 1980:41. For a view of contemporary morale see Levy 1976 with Cartledge's review (1978).

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plenty of money to be earned in this way'. Indeed, the amounts earned by playwrights and actors, as well as the large sums spent by choregoiand the large scale of state expenditure on theatre building, all suggest that the medium enjoyed prestige and influence as }Veilas popularity". Clearly there was an expanding market, helped no doubt by the easier availability of written texts, and it is interesting to note the sheer output of new plays at this period of supposed decline. The younger Carcinus wrote 160 plays, the younger Astydamas 240, and Theodectes (who died young) 50. All are mentioned familiarly by Aristotle in the Poetics, often in the same context as their fifth-century predecessors'. The point of all this activity can hardly have been just to worship the glorious past. The competition for new plays, and the listing of victorious playwrights, continued as late as the first century B.C., which suggests that the canonisation of fifth-century tragedy was not the all-dominant force in the theatre that the scholarship and educational programme of later antiquity might lead one to expect. There is also the evidence of papyrus fragments and literary references to show that at least some of the plays composed in the fourth century acquired 'classic' status themselves, like Astydamas' famous Hector'°. The question then arises of how we are to view the formation of the canon, a difficult issue complicated by the extremely fragmentary nature of the evidence. Too often modern scholars have simply assumed that the revival of old plays mu.st be a symptom of artistic decline; in order to look at the question with a fresh eye we need to go back to the fifth century and see the process beginning.

7 'Laches' is of course speaking in a notionally fifth-cent'ury context, but the remark looks more appropriate to Plato's own time. 8 Evidence in Pickard-Cambridge 1968; Ghiron-Bistagne 1976; Xanthakis-Karamanos 1980, especially eh. 1. 9 E.g. 1452a27 and 1455b29: Theodectes' Lynceus; 1453b33 Astydamas' Alcmaeon~· 1454b23 Carcinus' Thyestes;1455a9 Theodectes' Tydeus. Cf. also Rhetoric 1400b9; Politics .1255a37. Xanthakis-Karamanos 1980: 18-20. 10 Fragments and testimonia in Snell and Kannicht 1986; Xanthakis-Karamanos

1980: 162-9.

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Everyone knows that in the fifth century the City Dionysia and the Lenaea were designed to be the context for the single competitive performance of new plays, but there is no doubt that some plays became extremely famous and influential in their authors'lifetimes. For example, there are plenty of anecdotes which suggest that people could recite speeches or sing songs from well-known plays - and it would have been amazing if this had not happened, given the interest stimulated by the festivals 11• Re-performance of some kind however informal, private or incomplete - must surely have become normal, .but it cannot have been confined to amateurs giving their party pieces, like Phidippides in Clouds. Without allowing the actors the chance to re-perform plays we should be hard put to it to explain how the profession could have developed as it did. Actors need training and a repertoire; the institution of a prize for the best actor as early as the 440's suggests that professionalisation was already well under way, and the notion of a developing repertoire helps us explain the fact that by the end of the century theatrical festivals at the Rural Dionysia, with choregoi and competitions, had become a regular feature in some of the demes 12 • This is the background against which we should consider the well-known passage in the Life of Aeschylus which says that the Athenians 'loved him so much that after his death they voted that anyone who wanted to put on the works of Aeschylus should receive a chorus' 1'. Scholars have generally assumed that 'receive a chorus' refers to production at the City Dionysia or the Lenaea, which is no doubt correct; but it should surely not be take to imply that Aeschylus' plays were the only ones that were re performed anywhere at this date. It would be hard to account for the undoubted development of local theatrical festivals if one had to assume anything like a rule against the re-performance elsewhere of plays put on

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Cf. e.g. Aristophanes, Clouds 1353-76; Satyrus, Life of Euripidesfr.39. xix; Plutarch, Lysander 15; Nicias 29.

in the city competitions. Much the most likely situation in the demes is that the actors put on plays that had done especially well at the City Dionysia or the Lenaea, along perhaps with new ones in which they had a particular interest (up-and-coming dramatists had to get their practice somewhere). For the fifth century we have evidence for Euripides producing at Piraeus and Sophocles at Eleusis. If the productions were premieres this suggests that some of the deme festivals had acquired exceptional prestige; if (as is perhaps rµore likely) they were re-performances, they are evidence for ,,the repertoire in the making. Either way, these scraps of evidence point to an established practice which makes sense of the new development dated by the didascalic record to 386: the regular staging at the City Dionysia of old tragedies, put on by actors (1:paywtoo().Plato's picture in Republic 4 75d of devotees going from one deme festival to another is further support for the idea that the theatrical (and musical) life of Attica was well developed by this time, and it is a natural assumption that some well-known works already had privileged status, a process helped, no doubt, by the greater availability of written texts. But there are three factors which tell against the complete artistic and intellectual dominance of the old plays. I have already mentioned the first two: the continuing prestige of the competition for new plays, and the productivity and fame of some of the fourth-century dramatists. The third is the existence of family networks and traditions, like that of Aeschylus and his clan: there is a continuity of professional expertise here which must have made possible a closer and more vital contact with past material than the idea of 'revival' might.suggest. Of Aeschylus' two sons one, Euphorion, was a tragic poet, and the other, Euaion, was a tragic actor. Aeschylus' nephew Philocles I was a tragic poet and so were Philocles' son Morsimus, his grandson Astydamas I and his great-grandsons Philocles II and Astydamas II, author of some of the fourth century's most successful plays. Philocles I also had a son Melanthius who was a tragic actor. This is the most extensive dynasty attested in our fragmentary records 1', but

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Evidence in Pickard-Cambridge1968: 42-56; Whitehead 1986: 212-22. 'AOrivoJm oi 'toO'OiJ'tOV ~y y