1.1 Aeschylus’ Narrative Drama
1.1.1 Why Narrative Drama?
Elusive plays. Reading the earliest surviving tragedies is an experience rich in every regard, including ambivalences. We approach Persians, Seven against Thebes, Suppliant Women, and even Prometheus Bound (which is of doubtful authenticity)1 as archetypes of drama, and yet these plays conflict with quite essential rules of the genre of which they are foundational. They are archetypical inasmuch as in the absence of earlier documents they represent for us the birth of drama and because, from the fifth century BCE until today, they have continued to be included in the selective corpus which defines tragedy as such.2 On the other hand, these texts also defamiliarize us from drama as we are accustomed to conceive of it due to models and discourses which became almost normative shortly after Aeschylus and remained such indefinitely.3 In many ways, they differ from the models which were set by Sophocles and Euripides, enforced by the authority of Aristotle’s Poetics, and which continued to be re-cast, stereotyped, or challenged through the history of drama and criticism. According to such models, drama would enact rather than narrate the events, characters, and feelings it represents (praxeis, ēthē, and pathē), and would do so in dynamic fashions. In these regards, the father of tragedy appears to desert his very child.
The aim of this study is to construct (Part 1) and apply (Part 2) ad hoc frameworks which help us reappraise some of the most striking features of the earliest surviving tragedies and of one plausible imitation of their style. The focus is on Aeschylean narrativity seen as an ensemble of features which correlate with the presence and use of narrative in drama. As for the theoretical frameworks, Chapter One discusses why well-established notions of drama may be counterproductive when it comes to understanding Aeschylus, and looks for solutions with the help of extant and new approaches to genres. On the other hand, Chapter Two historicizes the notions of narrative, drama, and their middle ground by considering the different ways in which ancients and moderns have discussed them. Coming to the applications, Chapter Three analyses the four plays under investigation in their narrative, enactive, and responsive components. Finally, building on these findings, Chapter Four tackles conspicuous features of the plays, such as the enhanced capacity of the tragic narratives to elicit responses and reactions from the internal narratees, the creative ways in which they are dramatized, and the freedom they encourage in the construction of dramatic plots.
What motivates a fresh take on these features is not so much that they have escaped the attention of scholars until now as that they have not yet been recognized as interdependent manifestations of narrativity and accounted for accordingly. The reason for this blind spot is that said features elude the interpretative frameworks which have been tailored to a quite different kind of drama. For example, it is widely acknowledged that embedded narratives make up a surprisingly large part of Aeschylus’ tragedies (and of some later tragedies as well), that in inverse proportion there is little action, and that the plots develop along awkwardly disjointed or paratactical lines. The tendency, however, is to explain such phenomena as symptoms of some immaturity of the tragic genre at such an early stage—and to overlook how disjointed plots and other Aeschylean hallmarks also depend on narratives which are scarcely related to the dramatic action.4 This reasoning is anachronistic because it does not center on features which, while losing part of their importance to drama after Aeschylus, were essential to him, but implicitly or explicitly assumes later tragic models as benchmarks for a different period in the life of the genre. Accordingly, our goal is to find more suitable lines of interpretation for those conspicuous features of Aeschylean drama which cause frictions with inherited expectations. We acknowledge that narrativity was not a by-product but the essence of the tragic genre in the 470s–460s BCE, and that the related phenomena deserve to be investigated on this premise.
What narrative drama is and how it helps. Public opinion experts know that
for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see […]. We pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.5
Categories and their definitions are more than inert taxonomical grids: they are culturally shaped, inherited constructs which form and colour our understanding of reality. This applies to literary studies too, where genres’ labels and discourses influence the interpretation of texts. In the present study, the label “narrative drama” is not meant to indicate that the plays under investigation are expressions of an extra-diegetic voice or instance—like most kinds of drama, Aeschylus’ tragedy entirely consists of character speech (Figurenrede).6 Instead, this artificial category helps us de-contextualize Aeschylus’ tragedy from later notions of genres and re-think it in the hybrid terms of a narrative-based kind of drama. This can fine-tune our perspective on some ostensibly “undramatic” characteristics shared by Persians, Seven, Suppliant Women, and Prometheus, such as the fact that a large part of these works consists of embedded narratives and responses to the narratives, that they opt for representing storyworlds through narrative even when action might be another viable option, and that they tend to inform relationships between play characters (including the chorus) as relationships between internal narrators and narratees.
Yet what exactly is distinctive of narrative drama in comparison to cognate categories or sub-genres? H.-R. Jauß (1977) has demonstrated that distinguishing traits of literary genres should be identified neither with normative (ante rem) nor with classificatory (post rem) procedures, but by observing the texts themselves and comparing them with one another (in re). This is what Chapter Four will attempt to do by analyzing and mutually comparing Persians, Seven, Suppliant Women, Prometheus, and to a lesser degree other works as well. More specifically, said chapter will look for features that are, at the same time, shared by the four case studies and quite specific to them, meaning not or only partially shared by other tragedies or poems. It will observe, for instance, how narrative dramas display an unusually large number of embedded narratives, how these narratives elicit responses and reactions from the internal narratees more than in other plays, how they have a greater impact on the construction of the plot and on the dramaturgic economy, and how they are dramatized in peculiarly creative ways.
Scholarship on genres understands the traits which distinguish genres from each other as pointing towards tendencies and typicalities, meaning that these traits can manifest themselves in less or more pronounced ways in different samples of the same genre. Along these lines, the narrative qualities of the plays will be assessed in a scalar rather than binary fashion: for example, we will observe that although the amount of tragic narrative is remarkable in all of the four plays under investigation, it still varies significantly from play to play. In this as in other regards, Aeschylus’ Persians will strike us as more narrative than Suppliant Women and as even more narrative than Sophocles’ Oedipus the King—just as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is more fantasy than G.R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, even though both these works somehow partake of the genre of fantasy novel. Also, embedded narratives are important to narrative drama, but it is not their bare presence which makes a drama narrative, just as dragons do not make a novel fantasy: the point is rather what narratives or dragons do, what effects they produce, and how they interplay with other elements of the genre. The scalar understanding of drama’s narrativity aligns with the notion that genres are not discrete but porous categories, meaning that
participation in a category is often a matter of degree, and […] categories frequently have a radial structure with central good examples, secondary poorer examples and peripheral examples.7
Thus, the distinguishing traits of genres are best understood as that which L. Wittgenstein called “family resemblances” (Familienähnlichkeiten).8 As such, they do not single out genre-distinguishing features by abstracting them from others, but as clusters of structural relationships (e.g., reciprocal, complementary, contrastive). As a matter of fact, structuralism-inspired approaches have proven helpful for scholarship on classical literatures and particularly on the poetic genres of archaic and classical Greece.9 Accordingly, there is no such thing as one single trait which is in itself sufficient or necessary to ascribe any poem to a genre; it is rather consistent families of traits which work as criteria. And while four plays hardly make for a genre or sub-genre in their own right, together they serve well as documents of a more narrative-based type of tragedy which, to judge from Aeschylus’ prizes and reputation, was successful in the second quarter of the fifth century BCE. Of course, embedded narratives such as messenger speeches continued to be important to Attic tragedy even thereafter. Euripides, for instance, staged messenger speeches of a considerable length and represented pivotal events of the plots by means of narrative: in Bacchants—posthumously staged sixty-seven years after Persians (405 BCE)—it was a herdsman and a messenger who reported on turning points in the plot. Even so, Persians, Seven, Suppliant Women, and Prometheus strike us as being differently and all in all more narrative than later tragedies.
Heuristic purposes: de-Aristotelizing Aeschylus. How can an alternative genre notion like that of narrative drama have an impact on our understanding of Aeschylus? The answer to this question ultimately has to do with the possibility of using categories as heuristic means. As considered above, categories impinge upon and interact with the objects they organize. Literary genres are a case in point: for authors, they work as “models of writing,”10 while for readers, they suggest interpretative frameworks because “reading […] is always reading as.”11 We thus turn again to scholarship on genres, and more specifically to the processes which shape the readers’ “conscience of genre”12 and their “horizon of expectation” (Erwartungshorizont):
As there is no act of communication which does not relate to some general, social or situational norm or convention, in the same way it is inconceivable that a literary work is set in an informational vacuum and does not depend on a specific interpretative situation. This is why every literary work belongs to a “genre,” which means nothing more and nothing less than that for every work there must be a pre-constructed horizon of expectation […].13
In this sense, genres are cultural categories which produce “expectations of continuity”14 and help the readers in making sense of texts:
As elements of the collective memory which are culturally informed and which in turn inform culture, generic models should be understood as specific ways of structuring knowledge which pre-organize the process of making sense of texts and which can therefore also contribute towards the homogenization or disambiguation of literary and aesthetic polyvalences.15
These positions illuminate how an inherited knowledge of literary genres affects our perception of texts and influences the premises on which we formulate judgements about them—including the ways in which we assess aesthetic qualities and relate texts to each other when constructing literary histories. For example, Plato’s writings strike us as foundational masterpieces in the genre of philosophical dialogues and in the sub-genre of the Socratic dialogues, but they have not worked as well in their capacity as dramas even though they have undeniable dramatic qualities, lend themselves to being read as dramas, and have in fact been staged as such in ancient and modern times.16
Moreover, Jauß’s notion of dynamics of genre (Gattungsdynamik) describes genres as “historical families”17 which, since resulting from traditions and processes of selection, tend to exhibit different traits in different periods and cultures.18 The production of new literary works, the (re)interpretation of extant ones, and generic interactions (e.g., hybridization, super-genres, Kreuzung der Gattungen)19 constantly re-design the nature of genres. In addition, the very criteria which identify genres—that is, the qualities which the readers prioritize when relating different texts to one genre rather than another—can change over time.20 In these ways,
the genre becomes unrecognizable […]. [A] static definition of a genre, one which would cover all its manifestations, is impossible: the genre dislocates itself; we see before us the broken line, not a straight line, of its evolution—and this evolution takes place precisely at the expense of the “fundamental” features of the genre […].21
By emphasizing the transformational nature of genres, discourses about dynamics help enhance the readers’ awareness about the historically and culturally specific angles from which they look at texts. In classics, these discourses have supported valuable attempts to reconsider poetic genres from likely emic perspectives (see Chapter 2.2.2).22 With regard to Aeschylus, it has been pointed out that a “study of [Aeschylean] tragedy is […] inevitably a study of genre as well,” because “it is through genre that literary tradition impinges on the individual work”23 (although the impinging tradition was actually one of performance more than literature).
On these premises, re-thinking Aeschylean tragedy in the hybrid terms of narrative drama is not for the sake of alternative genre taxonomies, but to encourage readers to try and disentangle Aeschylus’ work from their own notions of drama. The category—which is purpose-made, and hence less burdened with expectations—facilitates a shift in the perspective from which we look at Aeschylus’ texts and locates them at a crossroads between dramatic and narrative forms. Recontextualizing these plays into a different region within our own map of literary genres brings to the fore a hiatus between Aeschylean tragedy and later developments in the genre. This is ideally conducive to a more generous understanding of those aspects which strike us as “non-dramatic,” such as extensive narratives and choral responses to them, scarcity of action, and a dramaturgy which is not uncompromisingly plot-driven.
The present study can count as an(other) attempt to de-Aristotelize our view of Aeschylus, whereby we will observe that the problems lie more in Aristotelizing traditions than in Aristotle’s Poetics itself.24 In particular, Chapter Two will discuss how post-classical to modern practices and discourses regarding genres have educated readers to see fundamental differences between drama and narrative, and how the dynamics of tragedy have impinged upon our understanding of a few earlier plays which history and handwritten tradition have left quite unexampled. Reading Aeschylus’ plays as narrative dramas is no antidote to this conditioning, but does more justice to the circumstance that rigid oppositions between narrative and drama became established after Aeschylus’ day, while musicopoetic practices dating to his period inhabited more fluid generic domains.25 For all the shortcomings which etic and artificial notions may have, interpreting his tragedy as narrative drama can be an exercise in decontextualizing it from later narratives of the genre (no pun intended) and in repositioning narrativity at the core of tragedy, which is where Aeschylus had it, instead of relegating it to its peripheries.
There is no doubt from an emic perspective—that is, in the eyes of Aeschylus and his original audience—that Persians, Seven, Suppliant Women, and Prometheus qualified as pure dramas and that they qualified as such because they were performed in dramatic ways and on dramatic occasions. At least until the end of the classical period, poetic “forms” (eidē) were forms of performance, and were distinguished from each other on the basis of criteria such as the occasion of the performance, the styles and aesthetic qualities of the music and dance, the gender, age, and number of the performers involved, and so on.26 The present work is therefore greatly influenced by past and current debates about the performance genres of ancient Greek poetry in their original contexts.27 At the same time, it combines these (quasi) emic perspectives with unapologetically etic ones in an attempt to cope with the generic expectations which readers inevitably bring into play when interpreting texts. The synthesis is between two diversely unsatisfactory perspectives, namely emic tragedy as a performance genre which is as such largely unknown to us and etic tragedy as a literary genre with which we especially familiarize on the basis of post-Aeschylean dynamics. It is true that “to compare early Greek [poetry] to later literature is to steer a difficult course between the Scylla of a misleading kind of anachronism (to ignore the difference between performance and reading) and the Charybdis of romanticism,” but F. Budelmann and T. Phillips have shown that there is a range of “interpretative acts” which can apply to the textual remains of the original performances on literary premises.28 To borrow two terms from today’s performance studies, in which approaches to performances of the past are a major issue of investigation, our take on early tragedy can be described as reenacting as opposed to reconstructionist inasmuch as it activates different historically specific (e.g., emic, fourth-century BCE, and modern) perspectives on genres in the process of interpretation instead of privileging the supposedly original perspective over later ones.29 While the advantages of the emic approach are apparent, the etic approach opens up a more neutral space within our own system of literary genres to embed the textual remains of Aeschylus’ performances. Such a move is legitimate and has hermeneutic potential. As Michael Silk has observed,
it is our “right”, and even duty, to make, or consider, proposals on a textual basis. We can propose that in textual terms it makes more sense to think of (say) certain Euripidean
τραγῳδίαι as examples of “romantic melodrama” than as examples of “tragedy”—or vice versa. These plays are stillτραγῳδίαι : that is a contextual given; but from this contextual given no specifiable textual consequences follow.30
Thus, a generic re-orientation can counterbalance the interpretative bias produced by the readers’ horizons of expectations. As the next section will consider, we expect drama to be largely narrative-free and regard embedded narratives as some kind of minor evil to which playwrights resort when lacking more dramatic means. This notion applies well to a significant part of Western drama but conflicts with the plays which heavily rely on narratives to complement and even replace dramatic action. The tendency to project back onto Aeschylus notions of genre according to which narratives were ancillary in drama affects the way in which the sheer amount, dramaturgical uses, and musicopoetic variety of Aeschylean narratives are usually accounted for. Frictions between Aeschylus’ drama and the readers’ expectations are chances to reconsider the tragedy of his time as a hybrid genre of telling-and-enacting stories—a genre very much concerned with staging narratives and the responses which narratives elicited from the internal narratees.
1.1.2 Past and Current Approaches to Tragic Narratives
Narratives as epiphenomena: a historical sketch. Messenger speeches, prologues, teichoscopies, and other forms of narrative in drama have long been attracting scholarly attention, which is not surprising considering their sheer number and length. Traditionally, scholars in the fields of Classical, Literature and Drama Studies have considered narratives as foreign bodies which drama borrows from narrative genres—especially epic—for cogent reasons. Accordingly, the point of narratives in drama would be to inform internal and/or external audiences about events which cannot be staged on technical, ritual, or other grounds. Narratives thus count as some sort of makeshift to which playwrights have to resort when more dramatic options are not available: for example, to keep killings offstage, to time-lapse long strings of events, or to render mass scenes and natural catastrophes.31 Technical literature reflects these tenets; for example, textbooks on drama and drama theory refer to embedded narrative as a lesser sort of action, such as “disguised action” as opposed to “manifest action” (verdeckte vs. offene Handlung), and specialized dictionaries explain messenger speeches as expedients which sheer necessity imposes on the playwright.32 These explanations, however, are not satisfying when it comes to plays in which narratives constitute dramatic elements in their own right which playwrights dwell on and audiences manifestly relished.
One reason why reductionist takes on tragic narratives are well ingrained is that they go back to influential ancient sources. Actually, Aristotle did not mention narratives when considering the practical (and financial) challenges involved in the staging of difficult scenes;33 but Horace, for instance, understood them as elegant alternatives to shocking or repulsive scenes such as blood crimes:
Aut agitur res in scaenis aut acta refertur.Segnius inritant animos demissa per auremquam quae sunt oculis subiecta fidelibus et quaeipse sibi tradit spectator; non tamen intusdigna geri promes in scaenam multaque tollesex oculis, quae mox narret facundia praesens.Ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet,aut humana palam coquat exta nefarius Atreus,aut in avem Procne vertatur, Cadmus in anguem.Quodcumque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi.
An event is either enacted or reported on stage.The things that enter through the ear stir the soul more faintlythan that which is put under the faithful eyes and whichthe spectator presents to himself. Yet even so, do notbring upon the stage what is fit to be acted behind the scenes, and spare the eyesfrom many things which eloquence may soon narrate in the presence.Let not Medea slay her sons in plain sight,nor shall the execrable Atreus prepare human entrails in public,nor shall Procne be turned into a bird, nor Cadmus into a serpent:Whatever you show me in such way, I distrust and detest. (Hor. Ars P. 179–188)34
Being greatly indebted to the classical authors, early modern poetologists regarded embedded narratives as epic elements in the body of tragedy.35 A much more recent tenet is that the actor’s Ur-rolle was that of a bard-like messenger (
As a matter of fact, Aeschylus often dramatized narrative materials from the Trojan and Theban epic cycles, and he did so by means of thematically cohesive trilogies and tetralogies which allowed longer stories to unfold—as for example in the Oresteia, in the Achilles trilogy, based on several books of the Iliad, and in the presumed trilogy Psichagogoi, Ostologoi, and Penelope (followed by the satyr play Circe), inspired by the last part of the Odyssey.38 As Oliver Taplin has pointed out, “[t]he fact that Aeschylus composed an Achilles trilogy that closely followed the structure of the Iliad is not given the recognition it should have in the history of tragedy.”39 While these circumstances set the premises for reconsidering narrative as intrinsic to tragedy, this change has not yet materialized. There is still a tendency, as Chapter 2.2.3 will exemplify,
to view message narrative as though it were an evolutionary weakness in what “should” be a fully dramatic form, producing a narrow discussion in terms of functional necessity.40
If one were to summarize the most influential approaches to the narratives of Attic tragedy over the past three centuries, the following pattern might roughly emerge. Erudite approaches dating to the nineteenth and early twentieth century took a special interest in Euripides’ messenger speeches and technically discussed similarities with the style and language of epic, for example with comparisons of vocabularies, epithets, and verbal augments.41 The second half of the twentieth century, under the influence of Formalism, paid special attention to the structure and morphology of messenger speeches and reasoned on the relevance of messenger scenes within the overall architecture of surviving tragedies as well as lost tragic prototypes.42 Since the last decade of the twentieth century, ushered in by the study of Irene J.F. de Jong (1991), narratology has become a factor in readings of Greek tragedy and classical literature more generally.43 This seminal study, like others inspired by Genettian narratology, privileged close-readings of narrative passages within tragedies, analyzing them in straightforward narratological parameters.
Currently, an eclectic range of narratological approaches co-exist alongside more orthodox ones also in the field of classics. Building on multidisciplinary and transgeneric premises, such approaches apply narratological concepts to genres that have been traditionally regarded as non-narrative, including drama.44 Thus, scholarship on Attic tragedy has produced a number of narratology-oriented studies on individual scenes and plays, thereby favouring the angles of focalization and anachronism,45 but also with forays into less predictable areas such as the narrator’s (un)reliability in the context of messenger scenes.46 The idea of drama being “narrative” in itself has also been proposed,47 even though in this context there is some concern that the applicability of narratological categories to a dramatic text might pass for evidence of larger issues.48 Yet in spite of these openings, narratological takes on Attic tragedy continue to focus on minute analyses of narrative techniques and close readings of selected passages. Basic issues of dramatic narrativity remain out of this focus—so much so that the more relevant studies are actually pre- or non-narratological.49
Narrative in vs. of drama. One fundamental difference between more orthodox narratological approaches to drama and transgeneric ones is in the way they understand narrative itself. In a narrower sense of the term, there is no narrative without a primary narrator or “frame of storytelling” of the sort which is usual in, say, epics and novels.50 This position has authoritative endorsers in, among others, G. Genette and I. de Jong.51 On the other hand, narrative is understood more broadly as any kind of representation of storyworlds, independently of the presence of a primary narrator and regardless of the codes, media, and genres through which the representation is realized. Scholars aligned with this broader definition feel free to consider film, comics, and—relevantly to the ancient world—also drama, music, and dance.52 According to these different positions, one can speak of narratology in drama, which focuses on discrete narrative elements within the non-narrative body of drama, or, alternatively, narratology of drama, which understands drama as being essentially narrative inasmuch as it is committed to representing storyworlds. As M. Fludernik sums up, “one will tend to include drama among the narrative genres on account of its plot, but exclude it from narrative because of the missing narrator/narration function.”53 For the purposes of the present book, schematic oppositions of narrative in vs. of drama would be limiting: while transgeneric narratology equips us to read tragedies as narratives on a broader scale, we will also delimit narrative passages from less or non-narrative ones in order to investigate their mutual interactions.
Today, the number of the supporters of a narratology of drama is increasing54 along with the awareness that, while modern narratology emerged from analyses of novels, it assimilated ancient theories of mimēsis which prominently dealt with drama.55 What produced this change was the recognition of a disproportion between the relevance of drama’s narrative phenomena on the one hand, and the inadequacy of subject-related investigations on the other. In this context, Shakespeare has been a favoured field of observation:56
Strangely enough […] the ubiquity and importance of narration in Shakespeare’s plays stands in stark asymmetry to the attention it has received in literary criticism. Even narratology has largely neglected the analysis of narrative elements in drama. Contrary to the generally accepted view that drama does not tell a story but shows or scenically represents one, the narrative rendition of stories takes on an extraordinarily important role in Shakespeare as well as in a host of modern and postmodern plays.57
As a consequence,
narrative transmission in drama may not be reduced to […] a surrogate function: Trying to by-pass stage restrictions by telling what cannot be shown can hardly be considered the sole motivation for the use of narrative techniques in drama. In fact, the tendency to employ narration in drama and the establishment of complex structures of epic communication are so pronounced […] that they by far exceed what is considered necessary for reasons of dramatic economy. The diversity of different narrative strategies […] cannot merely be regarded as compensation for the well-known restrictions of the Shakespearian stage […]. Rather, this diversity needs to be considered as evidence of the […] dynamic interaction of telling and showing […].58
What has been observed regarding Shakespeare and other modern playwrights is even more true for the ancient Greek ones, because explaining the earliest and most striking instances of dramatic narrativity in the terms of “surrogate functions” impairs our understanding of drama history altogether. In the field of classics, Nick Lowe’s study of what he calls “the classical plot” across a variety of genres in Greek literature may count as a contribution to transgeneric narratology. A special merit of said study is that it contextualizes Attic tragedy within the narrative culture of its time and recognizes that the genre was informed by culturally specific narrative agendas and aesthetics:
Tragedy’s historical position […] is due […] to a conjunction of four factors: tragedy’s unusual status as an invented medium; the remarkable hegemony of myth in early Greek narrative culture; the close relationship the new narrative form seems to have sought with Homeric epic; and its unprecedented and institutionalised productivity. [… M]any of what we think of as the defining characteristics of fifth-century tragedy are the product less of ritual, ideological, or sociohistorical factors than of primarily narratological pressures arising from these four circumstances—specifically, from the attempt to adapt what the fifth century admitted in Homeric narrative to the alien medium of theatre, and from the resulting intensive exploration of the technical differences between epic and drama as carriers of narrative.59
In this sense, Lowe’s approach to Attic tragedy prefigures the entanglements between “transgeneric narratology, genre theory, the study of narrative as the study of culture, and drama history” for which the aforementioned fringes of English Studies have recently advocated.60 On the other hand, his focus is on plot-driven mimēsis and, apparently, on one (Aristotelizingly) idealized kind of plot of which a large part of ancient Greek literature—Aeschylus included—is scarcely representative.61 If compared to Lowe’s, the scope of the present study is, at the same time, narrower and broader: it focuses on a tiny fraction of Greek literature, yet it examines types of plot which Lowe and others have cast aside, as well as dimensions of mimēsis other than plot itself.62
1.1.3 This Book’s Approach
In a nutshell. This book seeks to better understand why and how narratives were important to Attic tragedy in the 470s and 460s BCE. The focus is on four plays which make manifest the narrative qualities of this time’s tragedy, namely Aeschylus’ Persians, Seven against Thebes, Suppliant Women, and the allegedly spurious Prometheus Bound (on which see below), that will be compared to each other and occasionally set against other plays to stress relevant differences. This will not produce a narratological analysis but illustrate how several traits that are distinctive of Aeschylus’ drama correlate with narrativity. Unlike other studies on tragic narratives,63 the present one does not privilege messenger speeches over prophecies, teichoscopies and teichoscopy-like reports, reports by named characters who are neither messengers nor scouts, mythical digressions sung and danced by choruses, and so on.64 Sensitive questions to be addressed include: through which lens do we look at the relationship between drama and narrative today, and how did post-Aeschylean developments in tragedy and in the related discourses shape this lens? What kinds of interaction can be recognized between narrative and non-narrative parts of the four plays under investigation, and between play characters who work, respectively, as internal narrators and narratees? Above all, what exactly do narratives contribute to Aeschylean dramaturgy?
We will observe how notions of drama inherited from Aristotle and Aristotelizing traditions engendered expectations regarding, for example, the prevalence of action over narrative and the development of plot rather than atmospheres, and portrayed these traits as almost ahistorical (transcultural) hallmarks of drama. In classical scholarship, tragedies and comedies that allow us to question these tenets usually count as exceptions to the accepted rule. These views have impinged on interpretations of Aeschylus’ tragedies, which rely heavily on embedded narratives and occasionally even opt to narrate events which actors and choruses might be able to enact, and which often linger on narratively evoked atmospheres instead of driving the plot further.65 Scholars have especially criticized the plays preceding the Oresteia for being actionless, slow, disjointed, or altogether undramatic. At some fundamental level, such interpretations are ex negativo since they focus on that which readers perceive as missing in Aeschylean tragedy more than on that which is quite conspicuously there, and anachronistic inasmuch as they resort to post-Aeschylean models of the genre as implicit—or very explicit—terms of reference.
A process of devising alternative lines of interpretation begins by reassessing narrativity not as a by-product but as a cluster of family resemblances which correlate with the presence and use of narrative and which, collectively, were distinctive of the tragic genre as Aeschylus and his audience experienced it. On the one hand, the book takes an etic viewpoint to look at Aeschylean tragedy as a hybrid genre that easily qualifies as narrative rather than dramatic according to the modern sensibility about these categories, because this shift of perspective adjusts our horizon of expectations—which is significantly shaped by our own notions of genre—based on the Aeschylean evidence. On the other hand, classical sources and research approaches which shed light on the emic understanding of tragedy will help us better historicize tragedy’s proximity and interaction with musicopoetic genres that had eminently narrative agendas.66 Since Herington (1985), it is widely acknowledged that tragedy arose as a creative synthesis of diverse poetic traditions, yet this is true also with specific regard to coeval arts of storytelling. The history of Attic tragedy reads like an experimental process of reworking and further developing narrative/mythical repertoires for and on the stage, whereby ‘repertoires’ indicate not so much text corpora such as mythographies as growing bodies alive with multimodal realizations—performed, impersonated, danced, musical, visual, and oral.67 The plays under investigation stand out as compelling documents of how by the 470s–460s BCE tragedy was contributing to these repertoires as a sophisticated art of telling stories and enacting responses to the narration. They encourage us to reconceptualize Aeschylean drama accordingly.
Devising responses. The frontispiece illustration lends itself to symbolizing the kind of (assuming there can be such a thing) programmatically ingenuous take on Aeschylus which is here proposed. Painted by John George Brown in 1886, A Tough Story captures a moment of narrative practice—embodied, communal, and thus quintessentially theatrical. This is quite different from the view of narrative as text suggested by the covers of important volumes on ancient narrative cultures: by depicting the readers of books and scrolls, these covers also illustrate a strong propensity to equate ancient narratives with works of literature.68 Instead, Brown’s young narrator delivers his story in words no less than expressive gestures, gazes, and poises. He narrates the tough story with his entire self, from the pensively tilted head to the self-confidently outstretched legs; and he does so for an equally physical audience of chorus-like peers. The body language of the children attests not only to the engaging qualities of the narrator, but also to the varying responses with which different narratees meet the same narrative. This diversification brings to our eyes how the task of making sense of narratives inevitably falls on the narratees, who reactively or proactively take parts, make decisions, and exert hermeneutic agency. In an allegorical reading of the painting, the narrator may stand for Aeschylus as a theatre-maker in love with narratives, while the young narratees represent different scholarly approaches to him. The child on the right, whom the name carved into the blacking box identifies as Pat (one of Brown’s favourite models),69 displays a critical attitude. Pat scrutinizes the narrator with an interrogative look: by clasping his own knee, he refuses to make contact with the peer group and makes his sitting position uncomfortable. In his unease, and in the irritation with which he responds to the narrative, this particular narratee can be likened to readers of Aeschylus who question the purpose of exceeding narrativity. On the other hand, the two little boys sitting in the middle, who admittedly look more naïve than Pat, bond with each other and with the narrator—as emphasized by their mutual physical contact. The narrative does not appear to conflict with their expectations, and thus, they are in a better position to enjoy it. The two boys can represent this study’s attempt to distance us from inherited expectations of drama and to start on the premise that narrating profusely was a basic rule in the art in which Aeschylus excelled.70 Ideally, the mediation between Aeschylus’ and Pat’s understandings of drama puts us in a better position to understand them both despite their frictions.
The literary-historical value of Prometheus. The debate about the authorship and date of Prometheus has been lively and at times a bit rough over the past decades; today, it is in the process of exploring known facets of the problem with new tools.71 The issue commands attention even in a study which is not concerned with the question of who created the play, but rather with why the author created it the way he did. To recapitulate the essentials, the ancients never doubted that Aeschylus was the author of Prometheus, not even when the “judgment of poems” (
The case of Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, which has reasonably been presumed to be the earliest surviving tragedy until a papyrus fragment proved otherwise, illustrates how a learned sensibility about the historical development of tragedy is not enough to make strong cases about the periodization of a play.75 As far as Prometheus is concerned, the strongest arguments against Aeschylean authorship have been metrical and theological.76 The theological arguments concern the bad image of Zeus and have been very much scaled back by more recent scholarship. Griffith himself has emphasized how Zeus should be seen as “a participant in the dramatic action, not an object of abstract theological discussion”77 and how Zeus’ characterization is dictated by the play’s inner logic more than by the religious feelings of the author (incidentally, Prometheus Unbound probably rehabilitated Zeus’ image). As for the metrical arguments, which are more cogent, the most important are the presence of dactylo-epitrites and the relative scarcity of choral songs by Aeschylean standards.78 The question is, thus, whether the figures measuring metrical phenomena can tell an uncontroversial story. The problem with Aeschylean standards is that less than one tenth of Aeschylus’ production survives and that this evidence demonstrates his openness to experiments; both factors make concepts of norm and deviance somewhat slippery.79 Comparing metrical phenomena in quantitative terms is notoriously not the most reliable criterion for dating plays. To stick to the previous example, Suppliant Women features significantly more choral song than Persians (61 % and 49 % respectively, according to Griffith), yet was staged a decade or so thereafter; and the trochaic tetrameter, which according to Aristotle was the original metre of tragedy, is well-attested in Persians and rare in Sophocles but has a comeback in Euripides’ later plays.80 In the face of these and similar circumstances, the unexpected qualities of Prometheus can serve as stimuli to ask questions not only about the play but also about established notions of Aeschylean typicalities, tragic periodizations, and about how dissonant elements might harmonize in a more nuanced picture.
If spurious, Prometheus is a most extensive, invaluable document reflecting an emic understanding of Aeschylus’ art and living memories of Aeschylean performance or early reperformance. Unlike Aristophanes in Frogs, the author of Prometheus was committed to imitating Aeschylus in a very plausible fashion, and indeed convinced theatre judges and audiences who had first-hand knowledge of Aeschylus’ work. What is especially important for the present purposes is that Prometheus shares characteristics with the other plays under investigation which are only found in Aeschylus, such as the taste for representing storyworlds through narrative rather than action and the construction of character relationships as relationships between internal narrators and narratees. If Prometheus was created by an imitator of Aeschylus, it demonstrates that both playwrights and theatre-goers at some point in the fifth century BCE perceived these and other qualities involved with narrativity as typical of Aeschylean tragedy. Clearly, doubts about the authenticity of Prometheus affect the literary-historical value of the play, but they do not diminish this value—and they compel scholars to find out how to work with it.81
1.2 What Narrative Drama Can and Cannot Help With
1.2.1 Approaches to Narrative Performance
Performance, reperformance, and materiality. This study starts from the premises that ancient tragedy was a genre of musicopoetic performance more than literature, that the ways in which narratives and responses to them were staged greatly contributed to tragedy’s meaning, and that modern notions of literary genres can be productively combined with ancient notions which regarded chiefly (not exclusively) genres of performance. For these reasons, our theoretical frameworks for the reappraisal of Aeschylus build on the performance-related venues of research on Attic tragedy and other musicopoetic genres.
The performance turn is longeval and still prolific. It originated in the 1960s and 1970s with artistic practices which, while revolutionizing the concept of art itself, explored the interactions between performers and audiences instead of presenting works of art as self-contained objects to be enjoyed by consumers.82 Collaboratively or following suit, scholarship in the broader field of the Arts and Humanities (e.g., semiotic, ritual, and reception studies) developed discourses which helped to make better sense of performance quite generally; in particular, the newborn field of theatre studies shifted the focus of attention from drama and text towards theatre and performance. Greek studies absorbed these trends quickly, followed by Latin studies; in the same years but largely independently of these trends, they also produced new approaches to choral poetry-and-performance which will be discussed separately.83 Although the Greek scholar Benedetto Marzullo had already institutionalized a full university degree programme on music, spectacle, and the arts by 1971,84 it has become customary to see the pioneering book of Taplin (1977), which deals with the actors’ entries and exits in Aeschylus’ theatre, as the starting point of the performance turn in the field of classics. Since then, the number of studies about performance-related aspects of ancient poetry has been steadily increasing until booming over the last two decades or so.85
Today’s studies in reperformance and materiality can be seen as shock waves of the performance turn. As manifestos of these trends in classics, we might think of two remarkable volumes, one dealing with reperformance in/of ancient lyric and drama (Hunter / Uhlig 2017), the other investigating material aspects of Attic tragedy (Telò / Mueller 2018). The interest in reperformance, remake, and reenactment—ushered in by research on cultural memory and the related practices—is very much alive in various sub-fields of performance studies.86 As for the material turns, they navigate the liminal waters between objects, bodies, and spaces on the one hand and their cognitive and cultural meanings on the other.87 One may wonder how the research on performance, reperformance, and materiality could establish itself so well in classics, for which (notwithstanding the significance of archaeological evidence) texts are key sources and virtually every approach risks becoming a “textual tactic.”88 In truth, a major interest in performance and reperformance has kept its momentum in the discipline ever since Milman Parry reinvented the study of Homer and the rhapsodic tradition in the comparatist light of oral practices and repertoires. Recently, this interest has grown stronger even with regard to choral, hymnic, and symposial poems, post-classical theatre, and imperial pantomime, for which all reinterpretations of earlier works were crucial.89
Navigating the turns. If ancient cultures deserve to be studied as performance cultures, their narrativity should be investigated not only in its literary manifestations, but also in its practices and performance-related aspects. A way towards this goal is to exploit the synergies between scholarly foci which, while having been individually productive in the field of classics, still resist mutual influences: on the one hand the performative/reperformative/material turns sketched above, on the other the narrative turn, and particularly the intermedial and multimodal fringes thereof.90 In recent years, these different turns had good opportunities to aid a better understanding of the ancient performance arts whose agendas can be called narrative, mimetic, or representational (e.g., theatre, pantomime, choral and hymnic forms); yet wide-ranging investigations of narrative performance and its place in ancient cultures are rare. Attic tragedy is an excellent field of observation: although several studies have tackled it from narratologically inspired perspectives,91 they have usually neglected the performance-related aspects of staged, sung, and danced narratives,92 their ties with coeval practices and arts of storytelling,93 and their impact on the mythical repertoire in its multimodal manifestations.94 While in these regards the idea that Greek theatre was an art of telling-and-enacting stories promised potential, the relevant issues turned out to be disproportionate for the limits of a book section because of their complexity, diversity, and sheer number. I have therefore focused on performance-related aspects of Aeschylean narrativity in separate publications which virtually complement this study.95
1.2.2 Evolutionary Models of Tragedy
Evolutionary readings of genre history. Poets are candid about how “art never improves,”96 but scholars of poetry seem to disagree. Beliefs about the qualitative development of literary forms over time have traditionally abounded in classical scholarship. Also fuelled by Aristotelizing ideas about the development of living organisms, they have teleologically orientated histories and periodizations of ancient literature, encouraging discourses about primitivism and immaturity not only in Aeschylean criticism. According to models in literature’s historiography which may be dubbed as evolutionary, early samples of a genre would be prone to imperfections which make them less congenial to the “true nature” of the very genre they are supposed to initiate or stand for (it is hard to escape circularity here), whereas later authors appear to be in a better position to achieve the genre’s maturity. A related problem is that such evolution is often imagined to follow linear patterns of progression—a picture which, as Taylor 2003 demonstrates, is far too neat to represent the transformative entanglements of any repertoire.97
Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women is a case in point, illustrating how evolutionary models can be particularly insidious when it comes to works which challenge the accepted notions of genre dynamics. If Suppliant Women has long been regarded as the earliest surviving tragedy, this is not so much because it stars the singing chorus as its main character as because it seemed logical that the importance of the chorus would decrease by degrees, following an imaginary parabola which originated from the “total chorality” of tragedy’s beginnings (as suggested by Aristotle) and ended with the presumed decline of the chorus in post-classical drama.98 To summarize the circularity of the argument,
we know that Supplices must be an early play because it contains so many archaic stylistic and structural features; we know that these features are archaic because we find them in Supplices, which is known to be an early play.99
Given the scarcity of evidence, imaginative efforts are naturally helpful in writing histories of genres as hypothetical architectures. Yet in order to stand to reason, new hypotheses tend to conform with accepted notions instead of problematizing them. With some luck, when hypotheses turn out to be wrong they can trigger re-discussions of the architectures: the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2256 compelled the experts not just to post-date Suppliant Women but also to nuance their assumptions about the chorus’ transformation through the history of tragedy.100 In this sense, “the example of Suppliant Women should be a sufficient warning against the arbitrary picking out of features assumed to be primitive”;101 while at the same time, the prolonged reticence to rewrite tragic history according to the evidence attests to the profound influence of mainstream narratives about genres.102
Evolutionary models are still in the process of being challenged or dismantled. Two studies published in 2000 have warned against the bias of such approaches with regard to Greek comedy. The first is a monograph by Michael Silk which criticizes “the neo-Aristotelizing of Aristophanes,” that is, attempts to adjust Aristophanes’ comedies to expectations about drama inspired by the reception of Aristotle.103 In a comparable spirit, Eric Csapo has argued that features which possibly continued to surface throughout ancient comedy have been selected as distinctive of specific phases only, whereas
[t]o reconstruct the evolution of comedy from the selected plays is merely to rehearse the logic of the selection. It is a circular argument.104
For example, when a scholiast considered Plato Comicus (roughly contemporary of Aristophanes) to be a representative of Middle Comedy because his plays lacked invectives against individuals, the scholiast followed and re-enforced a version of comic history, according to which such invectives were peculiar of Old Comedy as opposed to Middle and New Comedy.105 In recent years, the study of fragmentary comedy systematically undertaken by Bernhard Zimmermann and the research group led by him has confirmed that traditional periodizations of Greek comedy are inclined toward a similar bias.106 Evolutionary models have been applied even more widely to Greek tragedy, which is a most favoured object of observation through an Aristotelizing lens, even though today these models are at a lower ebb. Lucy C. Jackson, for instance, has recently questioned the common view that the quantity and quality of choral performance declined in theatre of the fourth century BCE, dissecting the evidence and presumptions which underlie this view.107
The present study aligns with ongoing efforts to (re-)write multiversal histories of Greek tragedy. It considers anew traits which have traditionally counted as peripheral, if not detrimental, to (good) drama, and accounts for their significance in a historically and culturally specific manifestation of tragedy—that of 470s–460s BCE Athens. The focus is on tragic features which, while being documented by Aeschylus and possibly by an archaizing imitator of him, did not meet the desiderata of later trends in the genre and were, metaphorically speaking, relegated to the footnotes of subsequent aesthetics and histories regarding drama. Periodizing phrases such as “early tragedy” may be used as shorthand but should not obfuscate the circumstance that by the time Aeschylus’ tragic career began (reportedly around 500 BCE), he could look back on previous generations of tragedians, and by the 470s–460s BCE he himself had already gained decades of stage experience and success.108 Such relativity of course applies to other careers and periodizations as well. Sophocles, for instance, had been collecting first prizes at the City Dionysia since 468 BCE when he brought Ajax onto the stage, which has prompted a thought-provoking observation: “Imagine Mozart had lived into old age: we’d be referring to The Marriage of Figaro, the Requiem, and the Jupiter Symphony as early Mozart.”109
Narrativity and periodizations. Far from being exempt from evolutionary interpretations, narratives embedded in Attic tragedy have played a considerable role in the ways in which the genre’s history was periodized and in the thorny debate about the so-called birth of tragedy. As mentioned above, one accredited view holds that when the chorus leader (or a chorus member) detached himself from the chorus and began playing the actor, his original role was that of a messenger (
Due to this background, the notion of narrative drama might be perceived as suggesting that, through the history of Attic tragedy, the decrease of embedded narrative followed the pattern of a steady decrease from the peak at the time when the actor’s Ur-rolle was the messenger, until around the 450s BCE when tragedy reoriented itself towards the less narrative (and more enacting) directions indicated by the Oresteia and by Sophocles, with the narrative drama of the 470s–460s BCE conveniently placed in between. This picture, however, would be unverifiable/unfalsifiable to a large extent and inaccurate for the rest. As far as we can see, narrativity does not univocally correlate with the initial or with any other self-contained period in tragic history, and several studies have shown that narratives continue to be very important to Sophocles and Euripides as well.111 Indeed, messenger speeches in Euripides reach a considerable length and—to mention one case to which Chapter 4.4.3 will return—Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (first staged ca. 429 BCE) is a superb dramatization of narratives which develop through each other. Even the four plays under investigation will confirm that a later date does not automatically translate into less narrative and/or more action. All in all, narrativity does not lend itself to corroborating theories about linear developments in tragedy, segmentation of the genre’s history into self-contained phases, and chronological arrangements of undated plays.112
On the other hand, a cluster of traits which, as we will observe, correlate with narrativity is especially prominent in the three tragedies which survive from the 470s and 460s as well as in the one play which, if composed later, imitated more old-fashioned ones, while the same traits become less or differently conspicuous in tragedies composed in subsequent decades. This circumstance indicates that a certain type of narrativity was and was perceived as being typical of the tragedy of the earlier period—so much so that a fifth-century imitation of this kind of tragedy, in order to be plausible, would feature qualities which had become quite obsolete by its own day. The 450s and 440s BCE first present us with plays which point to less narrative-centred trends in tragedy. This shift is attested by different and in fact competing authors, Aeschylus and Sophocles, who draw inspiration from each other with regard to substantial issues including the use of skēnai, additional actors, and arguably embedded narratives, and whose artistic exchanges confirm that the dynamics of genre are social practices (e.g., imitative, reworking, collaborative, antagonizing). It would be nearsighted to try and put the finger on specific plays as though they worked as game-changers or watersheds. A complex transformation, the transition from more narrative towards more enacting drama should be imagined as an experimental process. The very notion of family resemblances, which has been helpful in describing the cluster of traits which are distinctive of narrative drama,113 implies that these traits are not either present or absent (aut … aut) in a play or self-contained period in the history of tragedy, and that plays and periods can be more or less narrative, and narrative in different manners depending on which choice and mix of traits they realize. Thus, while narrativity never disappeared from tragedy, it changed along non-linear patterns through the dynamics of the genre. The tragic corpus shows quantitative and qualitative variations in narrativity concerning, for instance, the varying capacity of narratives to elicit responses from the internal narratees and to promote interactions between the play characters, the different means by which narratives enriched the plot and dramaturgic texture, and the performance features of narrations in themselves. If more tragedies had survived, they would probably present us with an even more complex picture of experimentation rather than with more dots connecting along straight lines. Accordingly, the purpose of focusing on Aeschylus’ narrativity is not to downplay the role of narrative in later tragedy and in cognate genres but to delimit a more homogeneous field of observation which, though being stretchable in its chronological and generic boundaries, presents us with a set of narrative phenomena which existing evidence indicates to be typical of this period’s tragedy.
With these limitations in mind, the relationship between narrativity and the periodization of Attic tragedy can be envisioned as follows. In the course of the fifth century BCE, tragedy developed rapidly in many respects, including the use of narrative. In this particular regard, the innovations documented by Aeschylus’ Oresteia and by the younger Sophocles suggest that in the 450s and 440s BCE Athenian playwrights were perceiving more narrative-centred tragedies à la Persians, Seven, and Suppliant Women as being no longer ahead of the new trends in their art. The span of time which separates these earlier plays from the Oresteia, first staged in 458 BCE, is remarkably short: only fourteen years for Persians (472 BCE), nine years for Seven against Thebes (467 BCE), and five years or so for Suppliant Women (ca. 463 BCE). Yet it appears that by this time Aeschylus was reconsidering dramatic features which had been distinctive of his previous—and successful—productions, such as long narratives which are loosely connected with the stage action and slow-paced, paratactical plots, enhancing the amount of action and concocting more dynamic as well as cohesive plots instead.114 The modified tragic recipe was palatable to coeval theatre judges, audiences, and playwrights: the Oresteia won first prize at the City Dionysia and continued to be regarded as Aeschylus’ masterpiece during (and well after) the classical period. Indeed, fourth-century BCE re-performances of Eumenides were more frequent than those of other Aeschylean plays,115 arguably because Eumenides met post-Aeschylean expectations about tragedy better than others by the same author—though not as well as plays by Sophocles and especially Euripides. We do not know whether or to what extent the Oresteia ushered in these changes, but Ajax, which appears to be the earliest surviving play by Sophocles (possibly first staged ca. 455–450 BCE) seems to confirm that by this decade the trend had also kicked in for tragedians who competed with Aeschylus—or was it rather the other way round? At any rate, through the second half of the century Sophocles and Euripides further established a tragic style which focused more on dramatic action and unitary plot than on unbridled narrative and the internal narratees’ response to it. Their masterpieces were quick to acquire status and in fact almost normative power in practices and theoretical discourses regarding tragedy. They contributed towards redirecting the dynamics of the genre towards less narrative directions with lasting consequences.
Effects of the third actor. It is easy to imagine a causal relationship between the introduction of additional actors on the one hand and the increase of action and the complication of the plot on the other hand. It is true that more actors allow the playwright to multiply the number of dramatic characters, and that more characters in turn can be helpful in creating more complex plots.116 In particular, two to three actors instead of a single one can be used to represent the characters’ mutual interaction—typically, by engaging the actors in dialogues with each other—while for staging narratives one actor suffices. One might therefore presume that drama involving more actors would emancipate itself from narrative habits and boast dramatic action and plot complexity instead. But quite the contrary is the case in Attic tragedy, where the point of introducing more actors is not to make them dialogue with each other but narrate to each other.117
The availability of new resources does not automatically translate into the exploitation of their potential. Traditions are powerful forces in (ancient) artistic practice, and by the time the second and third actor entered the stage, tragedy had a long tradition of relying on dual interactions between chorus and actor. Up to some indeterminable point, Aeschylus followed and reinforced this way of making tragedy. Although Aristotle and others credit Aeschylus with the introduction of the second actor, he made limited use of this resource and continued to prefer interaction between actor and chorus over interaction between two actors.118 In fact, we know from Aristophanes that Aeschylus was famous for not involving one of the actors (Frogs 911–929): in a way, the notoriously long silences of Aeschylean actors elevated the very absence of actor-to-actor interaction to a spectacle. While Aeschylus later experimented with the third actor as well, the agency of Pylades in Libation Bearers (to which we will presently return) illustrates how peripheral the third actor could still be to the dramaturgic economy by 458 BCE. In this regard, the incidence of dialogic actor-to-actor interactions such as stichomythia, distichomythia, and antilabē through Attic tragedy is noteworthy: Persians displays the lowest number of stichomythic lines, the Oresteia fares better, and Euripides’ plays have the highest number.119
Even so, the scarcity of actor-to-actor interaction and stichomythic lines in Aeschylus does not mean that in his day playwrights could not yet handle the novelties of the second or third actor and the related possibilities, but simply reflects the importance of chorus-to-actor interaction in Attic tragedy as it functioned at the time. The fragments of the most successful comedian of Aeschylus’ day demonstrate that he resorted quite often to stichomythia and antilabē,120 and in all likelihood, Aeschylus knew these quick actor-to-actor dialogues of Epicharmus just as Epicharmus was familiar with Aeschylus’ work—as one may expect from two theatre-makers who worked on the Syracusan stage in about the same years.121 The difference between Aeschylus’ and Epicharmus’ handling of actor-to-actor exchange illustrates how approximative it can be to see a causal relationship between stage dialogue, actors’ interaction, and eventful plot on the one hand and the number of the actors who are available at a given moment of theatre history on the other hand. It also confirms that theories about the art’s immaturity do not account for concrete artworks and individual artists.
Aeschylus’ limited use of the third actor in the Oresteia corroborates these arguments, since actors here engage in dialogues with the chorus more than with each other, and two-cornered dialogues are preferred over three-cornered dialogues even when three actors happen to be on the stage at the same time. According to Alan H. Sommerstein, in Agamemnon only 327 out of a total of 1673 lines require more than one actor on the stage, which makes Agamemnon surprisingly “Thespian” and “one-actor-like.”122 Only sixty-four lines (Ag. 914–957 and 1654–1673) show two actors dialoguing with each other, and even when the three actors playing Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, and Cassandra are on the stage (783–974), Cassandra remains disturbingly silent. In Libation Bearers, upon arriving at the palace Orestes talks first to the doorkeeper, then to Clytemnestra, and finally to the nurse in a sequence of two-cornered dialogues—meanwhile, the third actor playing Pylades is present (cf. Ch. 713). Strictly speaking, the third actor would not be necessary but for the few words delivered by Pylades at ll. 900–902.123 By this point, Orestes is ready and about to kill his mother, but stops to ask his friend what to do (
Another example is Prometheus, which begins with three actors on the stage, yet only Kratos and Ephestus are involved in the dialogue while Prometheus remains silent,124 which again depending on different positions about the play’s authenticity could point to an Aeschylean or pseudo-Aeschylean way of dealing with actors’ dialogue and silence. A quick glance at Sophocles, whom reliable sources credit with having introduced the third actor,125 reveals that most of his dialogues continue to be between two actors only, despite the fact that even the—presumably—earliest surviving tragedies by him appear to contain at least one scene involving three actors, as in Ajax (e.g., ll. 91 ff.),126 Antigone (ll. 526 ff.), and Women of Trachis (ll. 974 ff.). As Patrick Finglass points out, “the absence of three-cornered dialogue here is […] a reflex of the default mode of composition for such scenes at this period.”127 In short, the handling of the third actor in the 450s and 440s BCE illustrates how this could be a resource, a hindrance, and everything in between.
1.2.3 A plaidoyer for mimēsis
Dramatic theatre. In concluding this chapter, it is sensible to spell out the differences between narrative drama and outwardly similar concepts regarding generic hybridity and, more particularly, the combination of dramatic and non-dramatic elements in theatre. To begin with generic hybridity, this technique is usually functional to literary or metaliterary agendas, while narrative drama refers to the mixture of musicopoetic practices along the lines traced by other scholars of Greek tragedy and further developed in Chapter Two.128 Along similar lines, our notion does not nod to any stylistically motivated Kreuzung der Gattungen of the kind which Hellenistic poetry refined, to the “generic enrichments” with which erudite authors of the imperial period operated, nor to other “transgressions of genre” with eminently literary aspirations.129
The second point regards more recent discourses about the non-obvious relationship between theatre and drama, which are by no means obvious. In this context, “theatre” usually indicates the domain of stage events, performed agencies, and sensory experiences, while “drama” refers to the works’ mimetic agenda and plot-driven qualities. Building on this distinction, Hans-Thies Lehmann (1999; 2014) has conceptualized post-dramatic theatre as an art which programmatically disturbs or disrupts the traditional equation of theatre with drama. Lehmann questions the tacit assumption that theatre and drama need each other in the way representation and the represented do, which naturally produces tectonic shifts in theatre’s phenomenology and aesthetics.130 To exemplify this kind of theatre with works by two Nobel laureates, one might think of Samuel Beckett’s Breath, which consists entirely of sound and light effects and does not bring on the stage any living agents (let alone characters and plots in any usual sense of the terms); and Peter Handke’s manifesto-like Publikumsbeschimpfung. The latter proclaims:
We do not narrate anything to you. We do not do anything. We do not stage any action for you. We do not represent anything.131
Yet relevantly for the present purposes, Lehmann came to theorize post-dramatic theatre after reconsidering Greek tragedy as being pre-dramatic and largely non-mimetic.132 In classics, Lehmann’s notions have been combined with elements of ritual studies to understand Greek tragedies and comedies outside the mimetic frameworks of Aristotle.133 This approach has applied the pre-dramatic apparatus to the ritual and mostly chorally operated dimensions of Greek theatre to offer a long-due reevaluation of agencies such as dirges, prayers, and invocations. In this process, though, stage rituals have been regarded as though they were a breed apart from the genuinely “dramatic” sections of the plays—that is sections in which ostensible things happen and one can put the finger on which plot pieces are being represented.
In actuality, the singing and dancing through which rituals were staged made crucial contributions to the mimēsis, in many regards. To begin with, music and movement gave physical shapes to intangible but vital dimensions of the storyworlds, as for example when soundscapes and gestures contributed to expressing the inner life of the characters (see Chapter 3.1.4/Feeling the events: mimēsis intensified). Thus, scenes resounding with different melodies would strike the spectators as being familiar or uncanny, gloomy or busy, Greek or exotic, holy or desecrated, and so on, and varying movement qualities could nuance an infinity of emotional subtexts.134 For these reasons, ritual singing and dancing were particularly apt to represent different characters and their varying states of being: the dirges by, say, Heracles and Hecuba were expressions of pain that could look and sound as different from each other as a mighty hero and an enslaved queen. The sheer expressivity of physical vocabularies and the protean manifestations of voice, movement, and body were huge assets for ethopoetic and pathopoetic purposes, as I have considered with specific regard to Aeschylus’ stagecraft.135 This is particularly true for Aeschylean choruses, who never put aside their acting characters when performing rituals, but represented the characters’ psychophysical affections through the ritual songs, dances, and agencies which were essential to the impersonation of, say, frightened suppliants or defiant unmarried women, feral Erinyes or pious Eumenides. As a result, the dirges by the old dignitaries and their battered king at the court of Susa, on the one hand, and by the Theban girls who lost their king but feel safe again inside the city walls, on the other hand, sounded and looked different from each other; and a play like Eumenides relied on how the chorus impersonated their demonic, divine, and metamorphic selves by means of suitable performances of curses, spells, blessings, and processions.136 In short, choral rituals were mimetic inasmuch as they represented particular characters as these were intent on changing their own and others’ lives by performing particular agencies in particular fashions.
False friends. The best-known match of drama and narrative is probably the so-called epic theatre, with which, however, narrative drama has very little in common. Epic theatre emerged in the intellectual climate of 1920s Berlin with the experimentation of theatre makers-and-theorists such as Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. According to the latter, epic theatre discarded the idea of absorbing the audience into the play’s world, since this would make the spectators passively accept a status quo (e.g., power relationships and socio-political settings in which the characters are situated) as a given or a necessity. Instead, this type of theatre encouraged the spectators to critically observe the represented world from a distance, in order to disentangle their judgement from habit and external conditioning. To promote the emancipation of the spectators into critical observers, Brecht resorted to reports, descriptions, commenting choruses, visual captions, non-realistic acting styles, parabasis-like addresses to the audience, and other “estrangement effects” (V-Effekte, shorthand for Verfremdungseffekte).137 This unpretentious résumé may suffice to clarify that epic theatre and narrative drama share nothing but, possibly, the one point that the V-Effekte prominently included narrative forms—so much so that Brecht’s work has been dubbed “diegetic theater.”138 There is a crucial difference, though: while Brecht used narratives, comments, and choruses to disrupt the mimēsis, Aeschylus used them to construct it.139 All in all, compared to pre-dramatic and epic takes on theatre the notion of narrative drama wants to reclaim the mimetic agenda of Greek theatre. The point of Attic tragedy was not so much to reshuffle mythical plotlines as to create tragic experiences of storyworlds which were at the same time mediated and immersive, multi-sensory and putative, inherited and reenacted, and in all these complex ways mimetic.140
See Chapter 1.1.3/The literary-historical value of Prometheus.
In Aristophanes’ Frogs, probably first staged in 405 BCE, Aeschylus wins the prize as best tragedian, and in the fourth century BCE Heraclides Ponticus included him alongside Sophocles and Euripides in his treatise On the three tragedians (
Cf. Duff 2000: xi s.v. Defamiliarization: “The process by which literary works challenge and refresh our habitual perceptions of the world.” Alternatively, we could say that Persians, Seven, Suppliant Women, and Prometheus do not feel “classical” if we “use the word classical in its regular ahistorical sense to mean a way of doing things that, while not mandatory, is sufficiently paradigmatic for it to be either consciously accepted or deliberately rejected; a way, moreover, enshrined in certain canonical exemplars at the source and centre of the genre or tradition; and which, while perhaps obsolete in practice, is still perceived as a main-stream, orthodox, accepted way to proceed” (Lowe 2000: 61).
See Chapter 2.2.3.
Lippmann 1998 [1922]: 81.
On narrative as expression of an extra-diegetic voice see, e.g., Pfister 2001 [1977]: 20–22. Barrett 2002 argues that the messengers of Attic tragedy have a dual status, working at the same time as play characters and external narrators, which is fascinating but not thoroughly convincing.
Rotstein 2010: 9 f.
Wittgenstein 2001 [1953]. Rotstein 2010 explains how the psychology of categorization works with prototype theories (a branch of cognitive science), which resort to the notion of family resemblances and whose findings have also been helpful for genre theorists.
See Conte 1991: 145–173; Käppel 1992: 12 f.; Rutherford 2001: 83; Rotstein 2010: 6–8; Swift 2010: 11 ff.
E.g., Todorov 2000 [1978]: 199 f.
Rabinowitz, quoted after Neumann / Nünning 2007: 11. Cf. Baroni / Macé 2007: p. 9: “la généricité définit davantage une médiation, un ‘lire comme’, que l’identité d’un texte. Dans une perspective communicationnelle, l’horizon générique est devenu aussi essentiel que la ‘compétence linguistique’, on le conçoit désormais comme cet horizon partagé entre auteur et lecteur à partir duquel une compréhension herméneutique est envisageable. Le sens du genre est devenu pragmatique: le genre est dès lors qu’il sert à quelque chose, pour quelqu’un, et ce ‘lire comme’ est également un ‘lire pour’.”
Tynyanov 2000 [1929]: 32.
Jauß 1977: 330: “Wie es keinen Akt sprachlicher Kommunikation gibt, der nicht auf eine allgemeine, sozial oder situationshaft bedingte Norm oder Konvention zurückbeziehbar wäre, so ist auch kein literarisches Werk vorstellbar, das geradezu in ein informatorisches Vakuum hineingestellt und nicht auf eine spezifische Situation des Verstehens angewiesen wäre. Insofern gehört jedes literarische Werk einer ‘Gattung’ an, womit nicht mehr und nicht weniger behauptet wird, als daß für jedes Werk ein vorkonstituierter Erwartungshorizont vorhanden sein muß […].”
Voßkamp 1997: 655 (Kontinuitätserwartungen).
Neumann / Nünning 2007: 13: “Als kulturell geprägter und prägender Bestand des kollektiven Gedächtnisses sind Gattungsmuster als spezifische Wissensstrukturen zu verstehen, die die sinnstiftende Ausdeutung von Texten präformieren und damit auch im Sinne einer Homogenisierung bzw. Vereindeutigung der literarisch-ästhetischen Polyvalenz wirken können.” Cf. Pfister 2001 [1977]: 68–70; Conte 1991: 155; Silk 2013: 34–37. Of course, genres contribute towards shaping expectations even in fields other than literature: see, e.g., Scheinpflug 2014: 3 about film genres.
See Athen. 9.381f–382a.
Jauß 1977: 330: “den […] literarischen ‘Gattungen’ [ist] keine andere Allgemeinheit zuzuschreiben als die, die sich im Wandel ihrer historischen Erscheinung manifestiert. […] Demzufolge sind die literarischen Gattungen nicht als genera (Klassen) im logischen Sinn, sondern als Gruppen oder historische Familien zu verstehen.” Cf. also p. 339: “das Verhältnis vom einzelnen Text zur gattungsbildenden Textreihe [stellt sich] als ein Prozeß fortgesetzter Horizontstiftung und Horizontveränderung dar. Der neue Text evoziert für den Leser (Hörer) den aus früheren Texten vertrauten Horizont von Erwartungen und Spielregeln, die alsdann variiert, erweitert, korrigiert, aber auch umgebildet, durchkreuzt oder nur reproduziert werden können. Variation, Erweiterung und Korrektur bestimmen den Spielraum, Bruch mit der Konvention einerseits und bloße Reproduktion andererseits die Grenzen einer Gattungsstruktur. […] Die Geschichtlichkeit einer literarischen Gattung zeichnet sich in einem Prozeß der Prägung einer Struktur, ihrer Variation, Erweiterung und Korrektur ab, der bis zur Erstarrung oder auch mit der Verdrängung durch eine neue Gattung enden kann.”
See, e.g., Baroni / Macé 2007; Fowler 2000; Krieger 2004: 69 f.
Fowler 1979: 100. For epic as a super-genre, see Martin 2005.
See e.g., Jauß 1977: 331; Voßkamp 1977: 27; Horn 1998: 16–18; Zymner 2007. Cf. Neumann / Nünning 2007: 4: “Gattungen sind stets im Fluss und somit nur durch eine konsequente Verortung in ihrem Entstehungskontext adäquat zu erfassen.” Nagy 2020 can be read as an application of these concepts to archaic and classical genres of poetry inasmuch as it considers how these genres have responded to changes in the occasions of poetic performances.
Tynyanov 2000 [1929]: 31 f. Ahistorical approaches to genres can be helpful too, but for other purposes; cf. Zipfel 2010, 338: “epochenspezifisch differenzierte Bestimmungen des Tragischen […] können […] in ihrer Begrenztheit den Blick für epochenübergreifende Zusammenhänge verstellen.”
A good example is Käppel 1992, who also inspired further studies on the paean (Schröder 1999; Rutherford 2001: 3–136; Swift 2010: 61 ff.). See also Most 2000; Barchiesi 2001: 156; Schmitz 2002: 52–54.
Michelini 1982: 8.
On “Aristotelizing” interpretations of ancient literature see, e.g., Seeck 1985 and Silk 2000: 256–300.
See Chapters 2.1.3 and 4.4.1/Bacchylides’ fourth dithyramb.
See Chapter 2.2.2/Glimpses of emic perspectives.
Recent scholarship on generic issues in Greek drama (and comedy in particular) includes Depew / Obbink 2000; Silk 2000; Foley 2008; Swift 2010; Bakola / Prauscello / Telò 2013; Nelson 2016; Farmer 2017; Foster / Kurke / Weiss 2020; Jendza 2020. In many regards, these studies try and look at ancient genres from emic perspectives. For approaches to performance and chorality which enrich our understanding of ancient genres, see Chapters 1.2.1 and 3.1.4 respectively.
Budelmann / Phillips 2018 b: 15.
See Chapter 2.2.2/Reconstructing an emic perspective. For the differences between reconstructionist and reenacting approaches in the performance studies, see, e.g., Franko 2018; for applications in classics see, e.g., Gianvittorio-Ungar / Schlapbach 2021 a.
Silk 2013: 27 (original italics).
E.g., Di Gregorio 1967: 25–32; Bremer 1976; de Jong 1991: 117 and 2014: 199; Sommerstein 2004; Zeppezauer 2011; Rutherford 2012: 200.
Verdeckte Handlung is action out of sight of the spectators on which they receive information, and embedded narrative is a key means of conveying it: see, e.g., Klotz 1969: 30–34; Pütz 1970: 212–218; Pfister 2001 [1977]: 276–280. The definition of messenger scene in Der Neue Pauly is a case in point: “Längere Rhesis im Drama, in der den anderen Personen oder dem Chor hinter- oder außerszenische, vor oder während der dramatischen Handlung geschehene Ereignisse, die nach den Möglichkeiten oder Konventionen des att. Theaters nicht darstellbar sind, mitgeteilt werden” (Zimmermann 2006). In a monograph devoted to messenger scenes in Attic tragedy, Zeppezauer 2011 considers them as a means to represent das Schreckliche, especially killings.
Arist. Poet. 1453b1–8:
Cf. Schol. ad Soph. Aj. 815 Papageorgiou (
E.g., Castelvetro 1968 [1570]: 297 a–b: “Ma perche quando s’introduce messo o propheta si passa nel campo dell’epopea, & nel modo narrativo forse percio Aristotele non ha fatta mentione di cio,” cf. Hornung 1869. Contra Fischl 1910: 38–46.
E.g., Di Gregorio 1967: 33–54 held that tragedy developed out of the alternation of messenger speeches and choral songs (hence the epirrhematic forms; contra Taplin 1977: 85), with reference to comparable positions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further examples are Barrett 2002 (e.g., pp. 23–55 about the relationship of messenger speeches to the epic tradition); Schadewaldt 1974; and Dickin 2009: 45 f.
Schadewaldt 1974: 119.
Cf. Sommerstein 2008 (vol. 3, Fragments): 178–181.
Taplin 2007: 83.
Goward 1999: 18.
E.g., Hornung 1869 (e.g., pp. 9–13); Rassow 1883; Bossi 1899: 50–89; Fischl 1910 (e.g., pp. 38–46); Henning 1910; von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1926: 15; Lesky 1972 [1956]: 204 (“Botenberichte als epische Meisterleistungen”); Bergson 1959. On these approaches, cf. Di Gregorio 1967: 11–16; Barrett 2002: 46–48; Perris 2011: 8 f.
Keller 1959; Erdmann 1964; Di Gregorio 1967; Mannsperger 1971; Schadewaldt, 1974; Longo 1978; Michelini 1982; Seeck 1984. Cf. Swearingen 1990: 185 ff.; de Jong 1991: vii note 3; Dickin 2009: 1–11 (with an overview of the definitions of messenger speech during past decades).
Among the earliest works which apply narratological frameworks to classical literature are Fusillo 1985; Winkler 1985; de Jong 1991 and 2001. De Jong 2014: 9 summarizes how classicists have assimilated these frameworks.
E.g., Lowe 2000; Grethlein / Rengakos 2009; Grethlein / Huitink / Tagliabue 2020; Gianvittorio-Ungar / Schlapbach 2021 b.
E.g., Markantonatos 2002; de Jong 2014: 197–223.
E.g., Barrett 2002. Needless to say, there are also studies on tragic narratives which are not (profoundly) influenced by narratology: such as Green 1996 and 1999; Dickin 2009; Perris 2011; Zeppezauer 2011: 111–158.
Goward 1999: 12 f.; Lowe 2000; Das 1995; Markantonatos 2002: 1–7; and apparently Gould 2003. For overviews of the relevant positions, see Schmitz 2002: 14–20; Strasen 2002; de Jong 2014: 6–11.
Cf. Radke 2003: 318: “Es genügt nicht, allein deshalb, weil man feststellt, daß sich auch in der griechischen Tragödie Elemente finden, die modernen Dichtungskonzepten […] verwandt zu sein scheinen, sich gerechtfertigt oder—aus einem Modernitäts- oder Innovationszwang gegenwärtiger Diskurse—genötigt zu sehen, mit denselben Kategorien wie bei der Interpretation moderner Texten zu arbeiten. Und es genügt auch nicht, diese modernen Ansätze auf gut Glück einfach auszuprobieren, ob wohl etwas bei der Interpretation ‘herauskommt’ […], was vielleicht […] uns hilft, die alten […] Texte […] in einem ganz anderen Licht zu sehen. Denn dieses neue Licht kann auch trügerisch sein […].” Schmitz 2014 argues for a quite opposite view.
E.g., studies on tragic reuses of mythical and epic materials (e.g., Kannicht 2004; Michel 2014; cf. Csapo 2000: 118; and West 2013: 46 for comedy of mythical subject) and the aforementioned studies of the morphology of tragedy as informed by narrative (e.g., Di Gregorio 1967; Schadewaldt 1974; Michelini 1982).
See, e.g., Fludernik 1996: 341 (frame of storytelling); Stanzel 1979: 15–38 (Mittelbarkeit); Rajewsky 2007: 40–42; Sommer 2008; Nünning / Sommer 2011: 204–206; Hühn / Sommer 2014; Andronikashvili 2009: 17.
E.g., Genette 1994 [1972–1983]: 201; Das 1995; de Jong 1991, 2004: 1–10, 2013, 2014: 17 and 197 f.
For dance’s narrativity see, e.g., Foster 1996 and, with regard to Greek and Roman antiquity, Gianvittorio-Ungar / Schlapbach 2021 a, with references.
Fludernik 2008: 358.
E.g., Segre 1981: 15; Ong 2012 [1982]: 136–152; Richardson 1987, 1988, 2000, 2001, and 2007; Hardy 1997; Lowe 2000; Jahn 2001; Nünning / Sommer 2002 and 2011; Gould 2003; Korthals 2003; Rajewsky 2007 (rather critically); Fludernik 2008; Nünning / Sommer 2008; Sommer 2008: 122 f.; Andronikashvili 2009: 36–46; Dunn 2009: 342; Bowie 2010 (who also adapts conversation analysis to the study of dramatic texts); Tönnies / Flotmann 2011; Claycomb 2013; Bierl 2019; Schwanecke 2022.
Richardson 2007: 142; Fludernik 2008: 355; Kukkonen 2017 (chapter 1). See also Todorov 1969, who with the neologism narratologie indicated a “science du récit” in the widest sense of the word including film, theatre, etc.; and the narratological film analyses by Chatman 1980 and 1990. Cf. Ryan 2008: 288 on Bremond’s and Barthes’ positions on the matter.
For similar views cf. Fludernik 1996: 347–358; Hardy 1997: 24–30; Schwanecke 2022. Cf. Richardson 2007: 151: “For many years, it was widely assumed that fiction was narrated, while drama was merely enacted […]. The twentieth century, however, is filled with compelling examples of narration in drama, both on and offstage.” Drama was defined as a “story without a story-teller” as early as Scholes / Kellog 1966: 4.
Nünning / Sommer 2011: 201 f.
Nünning / Sommer 2011: 216 f.
Lowe 2000: 157 (original italics).
Schwanecke 2022: 8.
It is intriguing how two books published in the same year and country, Lowe 2000 and Silk 2000, tackle the issue of Aristotelizing vs. non-Aristotelizing plots from quite complementary angles.
See, e.g., Chapters 3.1.4/Feeling the events: mimēsis intensified and 4.3.2/Narrative and plot enrichment.
E.g., Di Gregorio 1967; de Jong 1991; Barrett 2002; Dickin 2009.
Cf. Easterling 2014: 226: “there is no need […] to single out messenger speeches as having a specifically privileged status” in analyses of tragic narratives, and Bowles 2010: 171–193 on play characters as narrators.
For example, Chapter 4.1.2/Reading the data will consider how it is possible for Aeschylus to stage and enact battles and assembly deliberations but, on occasion, he opts to have these events narrated instead.
E.g., heroic epic, hymns, (historical) elegy, dithyramb, and other forms of choral poetry. The ties of Attic tragedy to choral genres have been investigated in many specialized studies, though narrative angles are rarer: e.g., Nagy 1994–1995; Calame 1995; Perusino / Colantonio 2007; Swift 2010; Rodighiero 2012; Bagordo 2015; Andújar / Coward / Hadjimichael 2018. To mention a few examples regarding the ties of tragedy to other genres, see for epic Di Gregorio 1967; Goward 1999; Barrett 2002; Seeck 2000; for historiography and (historical) elegy Grethlein 2007 a and 2010: 47–104; for elegy Mattison 2020.
Gianvittorio-Ungar / Schlapbach 2021 b.
E.g., the cover of de Jong 2014 depicts Isaac Israel’s Woman Reading on a Couch; von Contzen / Tilg 2019 shows A Reading from Homer by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, in which a youth reads Homer from a scroll (while a magnificent cithara remains unused); and the cover of Grethlein / Huitink / Tagliabue 2020 shows Hans Joachim Staude’s Germain, Vasco and Felice as they share a book.
Coffey 2015.
Cf. Heath 1987: 79: “If we […] continue to apply the unhistorical assumption that all literature must really be like ours, then our interpretations will inevitably be distorted, and our literary applications of texts—which means also: the range of our aesthetic experience and enjoyment—will be arbitrarily limited.”
E.g., Manousakis 2020.
On
See Maehler 2000 for an overview of relevant positions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Griffith 1977 and 1983: 31–35; Taplin 1977: 240–275 and 460–469; West 1979, 1990 (Aeschylus, with the eloquent subtitle cum incerti poetae Prometheo), 1990 (Studies): 51–72; 2007. Eventually, also Bees 1993; Marzullo 1993 and 1995; and others doubted the authenticity of Prometheus. For more cautious approaches see, e.g., Page 1972: 288 (de auctore Aeschylo dubitatur); Conacher 1980: 141–174; Podlecki 2005: 195–200; Bollack 2006; Ruffell 2011: 16.
E.g., Herington 1970 and 1986: 157–179; Pattoni 1987; Latacz 1993: 147–158; and the reactions to Griffith 1977 recalled in West 1990 (Studies): 51–53. Conacher 1980: 167 ff. recognizes that the hypotheses of Griffith 1977: 242 ff. about possible mistakes by the Alexandrine grammarians in attributing Prometheus could theoretically apply to any classical play. For bibliographic surveys on the topic see, e.g., Pattoni 1987: 15–32; Bees 1993: 4–14; Andrisano 2019.
Cf. Chapter 1.2.2/Evolutionary readings of genre history.
Regarding the fragility of the lexical arguments, see, e.g., Conacher 1980: 155 f.; Pattoni 1987: 167–219 and 241–251; and Bees 1993: 28–72.
Griffith 1977: 250. Cf. Herington 1965: 398 ff.; Conacher 1980: 120–137; Podlecki 2005: 34–37.
Griffith 1977: 123, with West 1990 (Studies): 54 accepting these measurements. However, Conacher 1980, 149 ff. believes that Griffith’s interpretation of the metrical data is not thoroughly impartial, and Pattoni 1987: 33–152 is even more critical in this regard.
Even detractors of the authenticity point this out, such as Bees 1993: 73–119.
Arist. Poet. 1449 a 21, cf. Rhet. 1404 a30; see Broadhead 1960: 297.
E.g., I have discussed elsewhere how the issue of authenticity may be relevant to the performance of the Io scene, because this is one of the play’s best chances to display the choreographic skills for which Aeschylus was renowned (Gianvittorio-Ungar 2021: 132–134). If Aeschylus composed Prometheus himself, a dance by Io would do justice to this reputation, while if another tragedian wanted to imitate Aeschylus convincingly, he probably had to bring at least (this) one impactful dance on the stage.
Fischer-Lichte 2004.
See Chapter 3.1.4/Response and the chorus.
Andrisano / Tammaro 2019.
E.g., Walton 1980; Easterling / Hall 2002; Ley 2007; Marshall 2007; McDonald / Walton 2007; Wiles 2007; Revermann / Wilson 2008; Csapo 2010; Wyles 2011; Hughes 2012; Harrison / Liapis 2013. For a survey of the history of performance-oriented scholarship about ancient theatre, see Liapis / Panayotakis / Harrison 2013.
See, e.g., Schneider 2011; Franko 2018. As for the studies on cultural memory which somehow anticipated these trends, see Connerton 1989; Assmann 2011 [1992].
With regard to ancient Greek theatre, material aspects include, for example, costumes (Wyles 2011), masks (Meineck 2011), space (Meineck 2012; Weiss 2020 [Opening]), objects (Coppola / Barone / Salvadori 2016; Mueller 2016), and bodily movement (Gianvittorio-Ungar / Schlapbach 2021 a). Canevaro 2019 discusses a number of recent volumes on materiality in classical studies.
Perris 2010, 182.
For choral, hymnic, and symposial poems, apart from the papers collected in Hunter / Uhlig 2017 one may recall the studies on the so-called newest Sappho which investigate the reuse of Sapphic songs on occasions such as festivals and symposia (e.g., Nagy 2020: 36 f., with references); for re- and pre-performances of tragedy in Attic demes, see Csapo / Wilson 2020: 17 f. On theatre remakes in the fourth century BCE, see, e.g., Nervegna 2007; Taplin 2007; Csapo / Goette / Green / Wilson. 2014; Steward 2017; Liapis / Petrides 2019. On imperial pantomime, which to a significant extent reinterpreted the tragic repertoire, see, e.g., Lada-Richards 2007; Hall / Wyles 2008; Webb 2008; Schlapbach 2018.
See Gianvittorio-Ungar / Schlapbach 2021 b.
E.g., de Jong 1991; Goward 1999; Barrett 2002; Markantonatos 2002; de Jong / Nünlist / Bowie 2004; Grethlein / Rengakos 2009; Perris 2011; Zeppezauer 2011. See Chapter 1.1.2/Narrative in vs. of drama.
Noticeable exceptions are non-narratological: see, e.g., Green 1996 and 1999; Rutherford 2007; Dickin 2009.
In classical Greece (as in other societies which anthropologists used to call traditional) narrative practices and traditions shaped cultural memory and cemented cultural identities, working as technologies for codifying, passing on, and transforming knowledge. Havelock 1963 and Assmann 2011 [1992] were among the first to broach such issues in classics.
See Gianvittorio-Ungar / Schlapbach 2021 b for how mythical repertoires consisted of musicopoetic, embodied, visual, and multimodal reinterpretations of myths.
Gianvittorio 2012 b, 2016, 2017 a, 2017 b, 2017 c, 2018, 2020, 2022 and forthcoming (Theatricality); Gianvittorio-Ungar / Schlapbach 2021 a.
Eliot 1921.
A key contribution to the performance studies, Taylor 2003 reads the streamlining attempted by historiographies of performance traditions through the lens of the (power) relationships between archive and repertoire.
See the lucid analysis of Jackson 2020.
Garvie 2013: 162. On the presumedly archaic features of Suppliant Women, see, e.g., the positions recalled in Garvie 2006 [1969]: 29–87.
On the papyrus, see Garvie 2006: 1–28 and 2013. Michelini 1982: 3 f. and Lehmann 1991: 51 sketch the scholarly landscape regarding Suppliant Women before and after the post-dating of the play. Cf. West 1989; Scullion 2002.
Michelini 1982: 6.
Cf. Johansen, Whittle I 1980: 25 ff. Papers supporting earlier datations or pondering the arguments for and against them continued to be published and re-published well into the 1980s (e.g., Lloyd-Jones, 1983 [1964]).
Silk 2000: 256–300, here p. 261.
Csapo 2000: 116.
Csapo 2000: 120 f.
E.g., Zimmermann 2015: 14 argues for “die Koexistenz verschiedener komischer Spielformen schon im 5. Jahrhundert, die man nach der communis opinio erst später ansetzte, sowie das Vorhandensein von Charakteristika, die man als auf eine frühere Phase beschränkt ansah, in späteren Phasen der Gattungsgeschichte.” Other contributions collected in Chronopoulos / Orth 2015 (from which Zimmermann’s quotation comes) are in this mindset too.
Jackson 2020. For a recent example of “developmental” claims about Greek dramatic genres, see Nelson 2016.
Aeschylus produced all of his surviving tragedies in the last third or so of his long career, which according to Suda
Finglass 2019: 1.
Schadewaldt 1974. On the history and interpretation of hypokritēs, see in particular late antique and twentieth-century scholarship: e.g., Lex. Grae. 9.4.123 (Pollux, Onomasticon); Hsch. 667 Latte, Apoll. Soph. Lex. Hom. 160 Bekker; Phot. Lex. 3.217 Theodoridis, and on the modern side Kranz, 1933; Lesky 1955; Else 1959; Zucchelli 1963; Ley 1983.
To mention just some examples, see Goward 1999; Barrett 2002; and Zeppezauer 2011 on all three tragedians; de Jong 1999 on Euripides and de Jong 2014: 197–223 specifically on Bacchants; Markantonatos 2002 on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.
If M. Griffith and M.L. West are correct that Prometheus Bound should be dated to around the 430s–420s BCE, then this play would be another example because, as Chapter Four will detail, it features more narratives than Seven (first staged 467 BCE) and Suppliant Women (staged a few years before the Oresteia) and on the other hand less dramatic action than, say, Libation Bearers and Eumenides (458 BCE).
See Chapter 1.1.1/What narrative drama is and how it helps.
Significant differences between the Oresteia and other Aeschylean tragedies have also been observed with regard to other aspects, including stage techniques: see, e.g., Sommerstein 2010 [1996]: 17 ff.
Nervegna 2014: 191–193 and 2018; Gianvittorio-Ungar 2022.
Sifakis 1995 and Marshall 2003 offer dynamic takes on the so-called rule of the three actors and on likely ways in which similar rules were dealt with in the practice of tragedy. Also, things were probably different in Attic and in Sicilian comedy (see, e.g., Gianvittorio 2013: 440).
Lehmann 1991: 45: “[der Deuteragonist] dient nämlich keineswegs der Ermöglichung des Dialogs, sondern dem Bericht. Der zweite Schauspieler war der Bote, der das Spiel stofflich erweitern konnte.” Knox 1972 has argued that Aeschylus used the third actor not for the interweaving of dialogue but for climactic pronouncements after long silences.
Arist. Poet. 1449a15–17. On Aeschylus’ limited use of the second actor, see, e.g., Michelini 1982: 27–40; with regard to Persians, Broadhead 1960: xli–xliii, van Emde Boas 2017: 318 (with references); with regard to Suppliant Women, Lloyd-Jones 1983 [1964]: 47 f.; Sommerstein 2010 [1996]: 108–111; Rutherford 2012: 41. Cf. Michelini 1982: 22: “The original form of tragedy, the interweaving of actor and chorus, became functionally obsolescent as soon as the second actor appeared; but in fact forms derived from this original arrangement remained a powerful […] stylistic influence throughout the fifth century.”
Seidensticker 1971.
See Gianvittorio 2013: 439 for a comparison between the dialogues of Epicharmus and Aeschylus.
Schol. M ad Aesch. Eum. 626 Smith says that Epicharmus remarked on Aeschylus’ unusual verb
Sommerstein 2010 [1996]: 2 and 111.
At other moments when three actors are on the stage, Pylades is silent and could be played by a “mute character” (kōphon prosōpon): see, e.g., Finglass 2011: 8.
Since Pickard-Cambridge 1968 [1953]: 139, the idea that a mannequin represents Prometheus at the play’s opening has become minority view. Bees 1993: 30–33 recapitulates the arguments against it.
Arist. Poet. 1449a18–19; Themist. Or. 26.316 d (with reference to Aristotle); Diog. Laert. 3.56. However, two anonymous sources—TrGF III T1.15–16 (Life of Aeschylus) and TrGF III T108—hold that it was Aeschylus who introduced the third actor (a view which some modern scholars have credited). For a discussion of these sources see, e.g., Pickard-Cambridge 1968 [1953]: 130–132; Knox 1979: 39–55.
This scene features Ajax, Athena, and Odysseus, whom the goddess orders to remain silent but present (Aj. 87 ff.)
Finglass 2011: 9 with reference to Soph. Aj. 1316 ff.
See, e.g., Herington 1985; Swift 2010; Rodighiero 2012; Weiss 2020.
E.g., on Hellenistic Kreuzung der Gattungen, see Kroll 1924: 202–224; on generic enrichments in Vergil and Horace Harrison 2007; on generic transgressions Todorov 2000 [1978]: 196.
Lehmann 1999: 20: “Theater wird stillschweigend als Theater des Dramas gedacht. Zu seinen bewußt theoretisierenden Momenten gehören die Kategorien ‘Nachahmung’ und ‘Handlung’ sowie die gleichsam automatische Zusammengehörigkeit beider.”
Handke 1967: 17: “Wir erzählen Ihnen nichts. Wir handeln nicht. Wir spielen Ihnen keine Handlung vor. Wir stellen nichts dar.” Similar ideas recur throughout Publikumsbeschimpfung.
Lehmann 1991 and 2013: 21 f.; cf. Chapter 2.2.3/Examples from today’s criticism and Cole 2020, who discusses the role which antiquity and the field of classics play in post-dramatic practices and ideas. Of course, building bridges between ancient and modern drama has a longer history in and outside classical scholarship: see, e.g., Brecht 1967: 1009 f. (and Seeck 1976 on Brecht’s use of Aristotelian concepts); Jens 1961; Seeck 1984: 2 and 1985; Flashar 1997: 62.
See, e.g., Bierl 2009 and 2010. The research project Intermediale Ästhetik. Spiel – Ritual – Performanz (University of Basel) has explored ritual dimensions of Greek theatre and re-assessed from this perspective the centrality of the chorus as collective reenactor of rituals.
It makes a big mimetic difference if, e.g., a suppliant reaches for someone’s kin with urgency or slowly, and with a slowness expressing hesitance, deliberateness, or gravity. Similarly, a mourner who beats his or her chest in a private outburst of despair is very different from one who performs the same movement by sharing rhythms and sorrows with their choral peers.
E.g., Gianvittorio 2012 b, 2021 b, and 2024 b.
See Gianvittorio-Ungar 2022 and forthcoming (Theatricality) on these and other examples.
See especially Brecht 1973 [1948], sections 42 ff.
Puchner 2002, e.g., p. 120: “The main feature of these stagings is that they transpose the closet drama’s textual diegesis to various forms of diegetic speech, spoken by narrators, raconteurs, poets, and choruses. This transposition also lies at the heart of what I call the diegetic theater, which systematically uses diegetic figures to control, confront, and interrupt theatrical representation. For this reason, diegetic theater is a theater marked by the closet drama’s distrust of the stage and continues the closet drama’s techniques of dissociating gestures from their actors, of isolating stage props and spaces—in short, of utterly fragmenting the theater by means of diegetic language. Diegetic theater thus comes into being when the antitheatrical techniques of the closet drama are brought into the theater. The most fundamental reforms of the theater, from Yeats through Brecht to Beckett, are derived, in different ways, from the return of anti-theatricality to the stage.”
See Chapter 3.1.4/Feeling the events: mimēsis intensified and, more generally, the analysis of Aeschylus’ plays in Chapter Four.
See Gianvittorio-Ungar / Schlapbach 2021 b: 22.