“Pain has taught me much and it has taught me
The wisdom of rituals.
I know when I have license to speak
And when to be silent.” (Eumenides, Hughes 161)
The actor walked backward, counting his steps, mindful of the robe swirling about his ankles. He had stumbled over the hem in rehearsals, but must not do so now, when the god was watching. Four, five, six… the shadow of the skēnē closed over him, and he felt the dresser’s hands upon him instantly. The actor closed his eyes with relief. He let the man work.
The dresser whisked off the cumbersome robes of the priestess. Up came the stifling mask. For the span of several long breaths the actor felt cool air on his scalp, felt the release of the mask’s weight from his shoulders and the crown of his head. Behind him there was rustling as the dresser arranged the next costume. The dresser’s boy patted sweat from actor’s face with a sponge. This heat! So unusual for April. The actor prayed he would not faint or, worse, forget his next lines.
For a moment it seemed his prayer had doomed him – his head swam, his ears rang. Then, from outside, he heard the aulos again, and the voice of Apollo singing to its notes:
“They will hunt you through the mountains
And over the continent,
They will hunt you from island to island,
City to city.
Wherever earth can be trodden, they will pursue you.
Do not weaken.” (Eumenides, Hughes 150)
He knew the next lines, remembered the melody of the song. There was time yet to collect himself, the actor realized. Apollo would sing, then Orestes, then Apollo, and then he, the actor, must make his next entrance as the ghost of Clytemnestra. He began to murmur his lines as the dresser maneuvered him into the next costume, then began to tie the next mask into place, adding the veil that covered the actor’s shoulders, and last the crown – no pure metal, of course, but still heavy.
The actor lifted the skirts of the dead queen’s robes and stepped carefully onto the ekkyklema as the dresser and the dresser’s boy supported him. When he was in the center, they smoothed down the robes, checked that his mask was secure, and took up their positions at the back. They all listened as the story unfolded outside, waiting for the moment when the actor would be wheeled out into the light of day, to give glory to the words of the poet, to the city, and to Dionysus.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 27: The Oresteia, Part 2 – Deus Ex Machina. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.
This is our second episode on The Oresteia, the tragic trilogy of plays by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus. As I said in our last episode, Aeschylus is the first of the ancient dramatists we’ll be getting to know in the coming year – in fact, the bulk of our summer – May, June, and July – will be spent on Greek drama, covering Sophocles, Euripides, and the comic playwright Aristophanes. This episode will look at how Greek theatre worked in practice: where it might have started, what the theatre was like (and who was in the audience), how the actors prepared, and how it all connected to religious and civic beliefs.
I guess I should say Athenian drama instead of “Greek” drama, really. While other cities had theatre, nobody did it earlier than, or raised it to quite the same heights as, the Athenians. The plays we have come from an incredibly small slice of Athens’s history: a magical 100-year period that lasted from 509 BCE, when Athenian democracy was first established, to 404 BCE, when the Athenians were defeated by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. (Mendelsohn in Lefkowitz and Romm 790)
In “Saving the City: Tragedy in Its Civic Context”, an essay published in Lefkowitz and Romm’s The Greek Plays, scholar Daniel Mendelsohn writes of tragedy like this:
“Invented at Athens, this uniquely Athenian genre flourished in tandem with the Athenian state – and withered and died with it, too.” (Mendelsohn 790)
And one thing that keeps striking me as I work my way through our reading list is how lucky we are to have any of this to read at all. Aeschylus and his contemporaries were incredibly prolific playwrights. Sophocles, for instance, is credited with having written 123 plays, far outstripping the 45 or so we know of from Aristophanes and even eclipsing the 90 we know of from Aeschylus. In each case, only a precious handful of works from each of them have survived to the present day – seven each from Sophocles and Aeschylus, 11 from Aristophanes, and 19 from Euripides (who himself wrote somewhere between 90 and 95 plays, depending on the source you consult).
The wearing away of time is part of this, but so is the ephemeral nature of the plays themselves: as wild as it may seem, all of these plays were meant to be experienced once, at the Great Dionysia, and then set aside. Thankfully, people thought the texts worth preserving, and the legacy they’ve left us is a rich one. These plays are the foundation of what we think of today as scripted entertainment. From the storytelling conventions to the staging choices, basically everything we expect from a piece of theatre, a film, or a television show – sometimes even of video games –is here in embryo.
But every embryo has its own origin story. Where did theatre itself – the idea of watching people pretending to be other people, often set to music – originate? That’s what we’ll cover first.
[music]
Scholars as far back as Aristotle (who is coming to this podcast in October, by the way) agree that Athenian drama is an outgrowth of religious rituals. By this they don’t just mean that the plays were originally performed during a religious festival, but that the form of the stories and the material aspects of plays themselves came out of the actions of priests during sacrifices.
One of my quote-unquote-tricks for finding sources for this show is to search for course syllabi from colleges and universities and see which works come up repeatedly. In the case of the origins of Greek theatre, it’s a 1966 paper called “Greek Tragedy and Sacred Ritual” by Walter Burkert. I’ll be relying heavily on that paper in this section.
Burkert begins by setting some very sensible expectations: “We ought not to expect,” he writes, “that we can reduce so complex a phenomenon as Greek tragedy to one single formula of origin.” (Burkert 87) Well, quite. But he’s a scholar, of course, so he’s going to give it a really good go anyway.
He then takes a deep dive into the origins of the word tragedy. You remember last episode how we learned that “tragedy” contains roots of the Greek words for “goat” and “song”? He explains that the etymology has been the subject of a multigenerational slap-fight among scholars. Apparently, there were even some 19th-century writers “who maintained that the whole thing was a fabrication of Eratosthenes,” (Burkert 94) though I sincerely hope not – I like that the goats are mysterious and important.
Burkert seems to think it wasn’t a fabrication, but doesn’t try to give a definitive answer about what the roots of the word refer to. Some scholars seemed to think that the “song” resulted in the giving of a goat as a prize. But it’s also possible that the “song” may simply have been sung at the occasion of a goat being sacrificed. (Burkert 93)
Burkert airs out other theories, such as whether the “goat” bit referred to some other creature, like a satyr, or even the great god Pan. But he ultimately decides that no, there was likely a real practice of ritual sacrifice of goats to Dionysus that developed into the tragedies performed at Athens – tragedies performed at a festival celebrating Dionysus, remember.
Our shying away from this connection is perhaps due to our unwillingness to accept that the high art of Aeschylus and his contemporaries could have roots in something we find primitive or rustic and, honestly, a bit icky. But for the ancients, Burkert maintains, it would have been “the sacred experience par excellence.” (Burkert 102)
“Society,” Burkert declares, “is built on the impulses of aggression controlled by ritual.” (Burkert 112) This seems like quite a claim, but I have been to more than one NFL game, so I’m inclined to go along with him, at least for a while. Communal sacrifice was initially a way of causing and experiencing death in a controlled, shared environment – one in which “the community is knit together in the common experience of shock and guilt.” (Burkert 112)
The community also benefits from the symbolic dissipation of a threat to their own bodies – if this creature dies, we’re protected for a while, by some imagined property of scarcity of violence. The dead goat is a lightning rod for misfortune. Mass animal sacrifices certainly persisted well into the Athenian century and beyond. There’s also evidence of them being carried out elsewhere in Greece at other festivals.
For instance, on the third day of the Olympic games, a hecatomb of bulls – that’s 100 of them, if you remember your Homer – was sacrificed on an altar that was 7 meters (or 22 feet) high and 42 meters (or 138 feet) in diameter. While I sometimes roll my eyes at the mini-documentaries they screen during today’s Olympic broadcasts – you know, the ones that are about, like, a cyclist overcoming her fear of carbon fiber so that she can chase her dreams of becoming a champion – I’d rather have them than the mass slaughter of animals.
Anyway, Burkert points out that while we don’t have direct evidence that sacrifices of goats or other animals were performed as part of the Great Dionysia, they were so common at other large festivals that it would be strange if the Dionysia didn’t have them. “The joy of the festival,” he writes, meaning any ancient Greek festival – “and the horror of death interpenetrate.” (Burkert 106)
The sacrifice had a structure and set pieces. During a sacrifice, you have a procession to the area around the altar. Then you have a victim who is presented, sung over, and killed. The bones are burned, and the meat is shared out, and you have more songs followed by a recessional. In some places in Ancient Greece, you even have a tradition of the officiants in sacrifices wearing masks, as the actors in Athenian plays did.
Echoes of these structures and set pieces are present in the Athenian plays we have left to us. Burkert singles out Agamemnon, the first part of the Oresteia, as an example of this. Iphigeneia’s murder on an altar leads to the murder of Agamemnon in his bath at the hands of his own wife after he returns from Troy (which the community initially celebrates, you may recall, with sacrifices). “Through the play the language of sacrificial ritual runs like a leitmotiv,” Burkert concludes. (Burkert 120)
Another paper that continually popped up while I investigated Greek theatre’s connections to religious ritual was B.H. Stricker’s 1955 article The Origin of the Greek Theatre. He is more concerned about the building itself, which he contends developed out of the threshing-floor in agricultural communities, but he also has an interesting section about some of the religious aspects of the Great Dionysia aside from the actual performances.
Stricker points out that theatres in ancient Greek cities were all situated near temples – in Athens, the theatre was near the temple of Dionysus. An idol of Dionysus, dressed and anointed by priests, would be borne into the theatre on the morning the plays were performed and seated in a place of honor, closest to the action.
Actors would have to be in a purified state before the performances – fasting and abstaining from sex ahead of it – and the audience would also be blessed before the shows began. Interfering with the play or harming the actors was furthermore an act of sacrilege, although, as we’ll see, it seems to have been permissible to heckle the actors if the play was bad or mistakes were made in the performance.
“The performance was not an act of free will, but was considered a religious duty,” Stricker writes. “The theatrical institution was a part of divine worship. It was liturgy and it had the function of liturgy.” (Stricker 36)
Let’s take a closer look at the stage on which that liturgy played out – literally.
[music]
The plays of Aeschylus – and Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes – were performed at the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens – “theatre” deriving from the Greek “theatron,” meaning a place for viewing – no connection to goats in that word, I’m afraid. In “Material Elements and Visual Meaning of Greek Theatre”, an essay published in Lefkowitz and Romm’s The Greek Plays, the historian David Rosenbloom describes where it was situated and how it would have looked in the 5th century BCE.
First, it was an open-air theatre situated on the southeast slope of the Acropolis, and sited in such a way that it was protected from the coldest wind and could trap the most warmth from the sun – an important consideration, given that the Dionysia took place early in the spring, in late March or early April. The plays would also have started very early in the morning and ended quite late in the evening. Both those times of day can be quite chilly at the start of spring, even in Greece.
Next, Aeschylus’s theatre would have been constructed out of wood, not stone. Stone theatres came later, in the 330s BCE – closer to Aristotle’s time. (Rosenbloom in Lefkowitz and Romm 800) The seats of the theatre, arranged in familiar concentric rings, would have been made of planks, and these descended toward the performance area, accessible via two aisles leading to the bottom. The theatre’s capacity was probably about four to six thousand people in Aeschylus’s time, while the later stone structure could seat more than 10,000. (Rosenbloom 800)
The performance area had two constituent parts. First, there was the orchestra, which was not where musicians sat. In fact, Athenian theatre only had one musician, an aulos player – an aulos is that V-shaped double flute you often see on Greek pottery – and he’d have been situated just to the side of the main performance area. Instead, the orchestra was a raised platform where most of the acting happened. (“Orchestra” is usually translated by scholars as “a place for dancing.”) (Rosenbloom 800) While the later stone theatres had round orchestras, Rosenbloom notes that the wooden theatre of Aeschylus’s time probably had a polygonal shape, which would have been imposed on it by the straight wooden planks of the seats. (Rosenbloom 801)
Behind the orchestra stood the skēnē, from which we get our word scene. The skēnē was like the backdrop and the backstage all in one. It’s where the actors would have entered and exited from, where they stored props like funeral urns, torches, and so on, and it’s also where they would have changed costumes and masks, the way our imaginary actor did at the start of our show today.
It’s not clear to me from what I’ve read whether the skēnē was a permanent or a temporary structure (maybe scholars disagree on this), and it’s also not clear when it came to be in use – Rosenbloom notes that some scholars believe the skēnē was an innovation of Aeschylus, or at least his producer, when staging the Oresteia. (Rosenbloom 801)
The skēnē seems to have been relatively unadorned during the first part of the 5th century BCE, but over time it became common to have it painted or styled to represent a major location in the play: a cave, a hut, the walls of Troy, or, in the case of the Oresteia, a palace. Ithad multiple doors at orchestra level and a hatch in the roof – this was made use of in the opening of Agamemnon, which opens with a watchman looking out for beacon fires, as you may remember from last episode.
The skēnē had double doors at the front which could be opened out to reveal actors or props inside the building. These props or people were often wheeled out of the skēnē on a wooden platform called the ekkyklema. In the Oresteia, the ekkyklema is used to bring out the various dead bodies at the end of both Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers. It’s used again in the Eumenides to bring out Clytemnestra’s ghost so she can yell at the Furies to wake up and go harass her ungrateful son (Rosenbloom 801) – again, that’s the scene our actor was preparing for in the opening of this episode.
More impressive than the ekkyklema – at least to my mind – was the machēnē. This was a crane situated at the back of the skēnē which could be used to “fly” actors in or out of a scene. There was a convention in Athenian drama that actors portraying gods should be separated from the rest of the company on the orchestra floor, and the machēnē allowed them to avoid making an entrance on foot, or standing among the mortals. My reading indicates that the machēnē may not have been in use until Euripides’s time, a generation after Aeschylus – some scholars believe it was first used for the final scene of Medea.
Now, as a writer, I know how hard it is to bring a story to a satisfying ending. This was true in Ancient Greece, too. Over time, playwrights seem to have developed a bad habit of resolving tangled-up plots by flying a god in on the machēnē to sort things out in the final scene – you do get these vibes from Athena at the end of the Eumenides a bit, if I’m honest. This trope persisted into the Roman period, and it’s from them that we get the Latin phrase deus ex machina – God from the machine, a phrase that indicates a sudden inexplicable resolution to a problem.
That’s the stage. Who’s on it, though? Let’s get to know the actors and the chorus.
[music]
Athenian theatre didn’t have a cast of hundreds. The players were a relatively small group, though their numbers fluctuated over time. In the pre-Aeschylus era of drama, there were two actors and a chorus of up to fifty (Weiner 205). Later, within Aeschylus’s lifetime, the number of actors went up to three – his earlier play Persians has two speaking actors, while the Oresteia has three. (Open University) The number of chorus members, however, went down to 15, and Aristotle actually credits Aeschylus with this innovation.
When the scholars Oliver Taplin and Edith Hall discussed Greek actors in a 2009 podcast episode for the Open University, Taplin explained that there was probably a logistical reason for the limited number of actors. First, it must have been difficult to find more than a few actors with the vocal projection and physical presence who could be heard in all areas of an open-air theatre without amplification. Second, the fact that the actors all wore masks made it difficult to know who was speaking. Three actors probably made it simpler for audiences – particularly those way up at the back – to follow the action.
Everyone in this cast, regardless of how many of them there were, was a man. Actors would play male and female or young and old parts, aided by quick changes of mask and costume. At certain points it seems the actors and chorus all had to be local to the city, or at least Greek speaking, to ensure they approached the play with the appropriate religious attitudes and beliefs. The chorus members were amateurs recruited from the citizenry who were known to have good singing voices.
Actors weren’t recruited by the playwright – not Aeschylus. Shows for the Dionysia (and other festivals, but the Dionysia was the biggie) were put together by a choregos, a producer. This was a wealthy Athenian who bankrolled the whole show. He would recruit actors, chorus members and the musician, pay for the rehearsals, costumes, and masks, and cover the living expenses of the actors as they prepared for the festival. Presumably he would consult with the playwright about what was needed and get tips about which actors to hire.
Actors seem to have been semi-professional at first, then more professionalized over time, in that they spent all their time preparing for plays, even outside of the festival season, and were paid to do so by patrons. Taplin notes that while actors did not become the mega-celebrities they are in our day – it’s difficult to recognize someone who acts in a mask when they’re offstage, after all – they did gain a level of popularity or notoriety. “It is pretty likely that certain actors became famous for certain kinds of acting,” Taplin explained. “Certain actors became famous as singers. Other actors maybe became famous for playing women’s parts.”
This versatility was enabled by the masks. Everyone on stage wore masks – the Chorus’s masks were all the same, while the actors had individuated masks for each of their parts. Masks were made of lightweight materials like stiffened linen – materials that were also very perishable. No Greek theatre masks survive to the present day, so we can only guess what they look like from descriptions by contemporary writers or the art on Greek pottery from the time.
Oliver Taplin outlined three possible motivations for using masks when talking to the Open University. First, the practical: in a big theatre, it would be hard to see individual faces, let alone minute facial expressions, so masks helped the audience members recognize each character. Second, there is an idea that the masks were a holdover from rituals, or even a specific nod to the god Dionysus, who was often represented during ceremonies in which he was worshipped by a mask held aloft on a staff.
The third motivation is also religious, but has to do with a metaphysical idea about the weirdness of impersonation, about needing to signal, somehow, that you as an actor are not presuming to speak for a king or a warrior or a god, but merely impersonating one. The mask lets you signal that you aren’t mad or lying about your identity – you are conducting an impersonation to tell a story.
Edith Hall also noted that masks allowed actors who were, quote “old and ugly” to play young and beautiful people indefinitely – and that there is evidence of actors whose careers lasted into their 70s. Masks also let actors project their voices without having to worry about contorting their faces and distracting the audience – Hall suggests that they would have had to pull the kinds of exaggerated expressions we see on opera singers today. Very distracting during, say, a tender reunion of siblings, as in The Libation Bearers.
Acting in the Greek theatre was, by its nature, very focused on body language rather than on facial expressions, like our modern filmed entertainment. “The fixed expression of the mask,” writes David Rosenbloom, “made voice, delivery, and gesture paramount in tragic acting. Performers’ bodies were vehicles of visual meaning.” (Rosenbloom 802)
Who was watching this mannered, gesture-filled spectacle? We know very little about who was present in the sanctified audience of the Dionysia, but we can make some educated guesses based on the pre-show ceremonial that went on. Before the plays started, as mentioned before, there would be a triumphal procession into the theatre. In addition to the representation of the god Dionysus and his priests, there was a sort of patriotic pageant that showed off Athens’s greatness.
According to David Rosenbloom, minor officials would show off tribute from Athens’s subject city-states and names of benefactors of the city and festival would be read out. Additionally, the children of dead soldiers, who were raised by the state government, would also be brought out into the theatre upon their coming of age and presented with armour and weapons. Again, not to harp on American football as some kind of primitive throwback, but this is all very reminiscent of the tributes to soldiers and military-jet flyovers we see before games.
So all these worthies, and presumably at least some of the young orphans, would have been in the audience along with other citizens. It’s not clear whether women were permitted to watch, but the audience responded to the play as it was happening. The audiences at the Dionysia, according to Rosenbloom, “were passionate spectators of tragedy.” (800)
They rained down applause when they appreciated what was happening on stage, and hissed, clucked, and heckled when they didn’t. They also, according to Aristotle, could be marvellously passive-aggressive: if a play dragged on too long, the members of the audience would start eating and drinking and talking during the performance.
They expected technical and artistic excellence from the performances, not because they were fussy aesthetes, but because the entire festival was a major expression of cultural and civic pride, and performers who brought anything less than their best were letting the team down. Let’s take a closer look at what, exactly, those performers were bringing – let’s examine the content and structure of the plays.
[music]
There are many details scholars don’t know about the Great Dionysia, but one of the most significant questions they have is: who commissioned the plays, and how were the competitors chosen? (Lefkowitz and Romm xxiv) We know that the Dionysia was a state-sponsored festival, so there must have been some kind of official committee or functionary who spent a decent part of the year reading writers’ work and developing a short list to select from. We just don’t know the exact procedure.
We also don’t know how the topics for the plays were originally decided: were the writers commissioned to cover a specific topic by the organizers of the Dionysia (or possibly by whichever choregos was stumping up the cash for their show)? We do know that the audiences quite quickly showed a preference for period pieces as opposed to contemporary stories.
Rosenbloom notes that there was an early 5th-century BCE production which depicted the then-recent Persian sack of Miletus, a city-state allied to Athens. The audience sobbed and wailed during the performance, and it was decreed that this play would never be produced again. (Rosenbloom 800) Aeschylus himself probably cut it a bit close to the knuckle with his own play Persians – in general, write Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, “by setting the dramas in the past, the dramatists could allow their audiences to step briefly away from the particular problems of their own lives.”
Audiences also seemed to prefer stories about drama within famous or royal families connected with the Trojan war, which is exactly what you get in the Oresteia. If you think this seems silly of the Ancient Greeks, please take a moment to consider how many dramatizations we’ve had of events surrounding the Tudors over the years. Sometimes BBC iPlayer seems to be loaded with multiple Elizabeths flirting with Robert Dudleys and various Annes Boleyn mounting the scaffold. Give us more Plantagenet content, dammit. (xxi)
Sorry, digression. Putting the action at a remove by setting the play in the past did not mean there was nothing immediately political about the story. There are a lot of commentators today who like to imagine that there was (or is, or should be) a strict divide between entertainment (or even art) and politics, but such a separation seems to have been the exception throughout human culture and society, not the rule. Today, if the dramatized stories we consume teach us anything, we prefer for it to be experienced individually and privately. (Mendelsohn 789)
Daniel Mendelsohn calls modern theatre attendance “a kind of willed anonymity, exchanging the familiar world of lights and activity for an uncanny, hushed darkness . . .private, personal, anonymous, invisible.” (Mendelsohn 790) Nothing could be more different than the experience of watching the plays of the Great Dionysia in broad daylight, with an expectation that you would make noise, and a consciousness that the art unfolding in front of you was for the glory of your city and your religion, not just to pass the time on a Saturday evening.
“Tragedy,” concludes Mendelsohn, “became the ideal literary vehicle for exploring, and often questioning, the political, social, and civic values of Athens herself.” (791) It’s possible to trace the kinds of questions Athenians were asking about themselves over time: Aeschylus’s Oresteia ends in a much more triumphant civic mood than Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, staged some 40 years later.
As we saw last episode, the Oresteia ends with a celebration of Athens as a place where the rule of law – and therefore peace – can flourish thanks to democratic institutions. By the time of Oedipus at Colonus, Athens had been battered by plague, war, and a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Spartans – that play ultimately can’t decide whether Athens will be able to continue living up to its civic ideals at all.
So, we see what kinds of topics audiences (and possibly the commissioners) of the Great Dionysia wanted. Let’s look at the overall shape of the play. I don’t want to throw too much technical terminology at you, even if you’re listening to this podcast to help you sleep, but it’s sort of unavoidable here. I found a very handy overview of Greek drama written for a Reed College undergrad course that lays this all out very simply. If you want to check it out for yourself, follow the link in the show notes to the transcript, where you can find the link.
Every Greek tragedy starts with a prologue to set up the action. One or two actors speak, giving the audience information about when and where the play is happening and the other characters they might expect to see. (Remember, Athenian audiences were generally going into their plays cold – no information about what was taking place beyond maybe the title and who the playwright was, no program notes to refer to. As a result, there must be a lot of exposition in the dialogue and the lyrics of the songs.) Think of the watchman in Agamemnon, Orestes in The Libation Bearers, and the priestess of Apollo in The Eumenides: all of them come in to explain where we are as well as kick off the action.
Next, the Chorus enters, singing a song called a parodos. They dance, and they explain who they are representing and offer more context about the world of the story. This song itself has a sub-structure that applies to every song the chorus sings. First, there’s an ode, which is a little miniature hymn directed to a god – think of Homer and Hesiod starting their works by invoking the muses. Next, the chorus dances towards the altar that’s set up in the theatre – this part of the song is the strophe. They move back in the other direction during the antistrophe, and they wrap up their songs standing still, with a short section in a different meter or rhythm. That’s called the epode.
Once the chorus has finished, we have the first of several episodes, in which the main actors enter, introduce themselves, and speak to each other and to the leader of the chorus. After each episode, the chorus sing another song, usually while the actors are off stage changing masks and costumes.
This song is called a stasimon. The stasimon may recap what you just saw during the episode, or connect it to a broader mythological theme. It may also serve to remind you that what you’re watching is a play. In an article chapter, “The Function of the Greek Tragic Chorus,” professor Albert Weiner writes that “when the audience is most deeply involved in the mythological world, when their souls are being seared by the suffering of an Oedipus or a Heracles, then the chorus explodes them out of their nightmare and into the real world of sight and sound, into a world where they can think, ponder, contemplate, relax.” (Weiner 212)
I can’t really find examples of this third function, this deliberate breaking of the audience’s immersion, in Aeschylus, but apparently it is a feature of Euripides’s plays. We’ll see when we get there in the summer, I suppose.
Meanwhile, the episode-stasimon structure repeats itself somewhere between three and five times until we reach the climax of the play. In the final scene, the exodos, the chorus sings a processional that sums up the themes of the show and sees the main characters off the stage. In The Eumenides, however, note that it’s Athena who has the last word, which must have been quite the crowd-pleaser for the Athenian audience. The Dionysia was a competition, after all. Giving the people what they want is an iron-clad rule for writing a hit, then and now.
[music]
Finally, a word about the transmission of these plays down the ages. I mentioned in the last episode that these plays were written as a one-off – nobody really expected them to be performed again after the Great Dionysia was over. So why were they saved? We’re not sure, but perhaps the administrative body which organized the Dionysia kept copies of the plays performed in some kind of archive.
Lefkowitz and Romm describe the current theory of how the plays were physically composed as going like this: first, your writer would draft their plays on wood tablets covered in wax, which could be scraped and erased and rewritten as necessary. Once things were in a complete draft, the text from the tablets was copied onto papyrus scrolls with pen and ink, and those copies would then be used to make further copies, and so on. (Lefkowitz and Romm xiv)
Over time, transmission introduced some errors, additions, and alterations. It’s believed the Library of Alexandria had copies of almost all the great Athenian writers’ plays, but, well, it went up in smoke in 48 BCE. The remaining body of work that managed to survive the fire at Alexandria suffered further censorship by the early Christian emperors. “In the end,” write Lefkowitz and Romm, “copies continued to be made of only a relatively small number of texts, most likely because they were judged suitable for reading and study of rhetoric.” (xxvi)
Again and again in the last year of doing this show, I’m constantly amazed by how important luck and circumstance are to our understanding of the past, based purely on the sources and material evidence that somehow managed to survive. Natural disaster, the ravages of war, ideological decisions about what should be purged or promoted – there are many forces that conspire to get between humans and their cultural history. I am glad we have at least some glimpses of how people celebrated their community through stories on those far-off spring days long ago.
That’s it for this week’s episode. I hope you enjoyed hearing about the origins of theatre in ancient Athens. While we chiefly think of scripted shows – plays, movies, films – as entertainment for individual preferences, it’s hard not to think that we do retain a little bit of that religious or civic impulse when we consume them. To take just television as an example, think of how people in the US and Britain continue to quote from their respective versions of The Office more than 20 years after those shows premiered. Or how people named their children Arya or Daenerys or Khaleesi and immediately regretted it once season eight of Game of Thrones came out.
They can’t all be timeless works of art, I guess. Or even finished works of art! While we’re going to take a bit of a break from Greek drama for the moment, we are still very firmly in the Athenian century, and we’re venturing into another genre the Greeks are often claimed to have quote-unquote invented (though the Confucians would beg to differ): history. Join me on Thursday, March 20th for episode 28: “Herodotus’s Histories, Part 1: Father of History, Father of Lies.”
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Aeschylus, and Ted Hughes. The Oresteia. Faber, 1999.
Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Edited by William Bedell Stanford. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Books, 1984.
Damen, Mark. “Actor and Character in Greek Tragedy.” Theatre Journal, vol. 41, no. 3, 1989, pp. 316–340, https://doi.org/10.2307/3208183.
Hall, Edith. Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Lefkowitz, Mary R., et al. The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Modern Library, 2017.
Morgan, William, and Per Brask. “Towards a Conceptual Understanding of the Transformation from Ritual to Theatre.” Anthropologica, vol. 30, no. 2, 1988, pp. 175–202, https://doi.org/10.2307/25605509.
Stricker, B. H. “The Origin of the Greek Theatre.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 41, 1955, pp. 34–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/3855235.
Vellacott, Philip. “Aeschylus’ Orestes.” The Classical World, vol. 77, no. 3, 1984, pp. 145–157, https://doi.org/10.2307/4349540.
Weiner, Albert. “The Function of the Tragic Greek Chorus.” Theatre Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, 1980, pp. 205–212, https://doi.org/10.2307/3207113.
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