The Greek Plays

by The Greek Plays- Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles

  Yet despite the limitations imposed on them in real life—or perhaps because of them—women as represented on the tragic stage could serve as mouthpieces for values and concerns that were too easily trampled by men, or had been left out of their agendas. In Euripides’ Medea, the heroine is, to be sure, outraged that her husband has abandoned her for a younger woman (this all-too-familiar story being the focus of many a modern production); but attentive readers will notice that what bothers her even more than this blow to her vanity is the fact that Jason has broken the oath he took when he married her. It is this betrayal—the betrayal of words and their connection to action—that she incredulously refers to throughout the play. There is an irony here that, it is hard not to suspect, would have struck the original audience of the play in 431 B.C.—the year in which the Peloponnesian War began—with uncomfortable force. For here, it’s the woman (and, indeed, a non-Greek) who champions the integrity of language, the connection between words and deeds, while her Greek husband—a legendary hero, no less!—is portrayed as a glib opportunist whose mortifying sophistries (“I’m leaving you for your own good and the good of the children!”) convince no one.

  Similarly, in the same playwright’s Trojan Women, produced only months after Athens carried out a brutal reprisal against a rebellious ally during the course of the Peloponnesian War, the mothers, wives, and daughters of the brutally conquered Trojans of myth become, in abject defeat, triumphant symbols of civilization itself. As Cassandra, the prophetess daughter of the murdered Trojan king, Priam, reminds the Greek “winners” of the great war have in fact lost, because they have abandoned the moral, ethical, and cultural values that make humans civilized. By contrast, she observes, the defeated Trojans have maintained their values and traditions and are thus, in some larger sense, the real victors. The fact that this moving case is made by an unmarried young woman—which is to say, a member of Athenian society who was unable to participate in the political decisions that set great wars in motion in the first place—lends a complexity, even an irony, to the Trojan Women’s pronouncements about war and civilization.

  Complexity; irony. I don’t want to suggest that a lively awareness of the social and civic conditions that produced Greek drama should lead us to exchange one reductive kind of reading (Antigone is a moral heroine, Creon is a political villain) for another (Antigone’s resistance would have been frowned on and Creon’s edict would have been unambiguously applauded by the original audience, who were, after all, watching these plays as part of a patriotic festival). Rather, the considerations highlighted above should deepen and complicate our readings of Greek tragedy.The tension between the celebratory civic ceremonial that preceded the plays and the acts of defiance and opposition to authority and social norms that furnish so many of those plays’ plots surely created a space for fruitful consideration of the complexities of life as a citizen. Every polity, to recur once again to the example of Antigone, must find a way to balance the concerns of the state with the concerns of individuals and their families: the point of Sophocles’ play—one that emerges more crisply when we give due consideration not only to the play’s text, but to its context—is not that Antigone is “right” and that Creon is “wrong,” that the individual and the family are valuable and state control is pernicious, but rather that each character has a valid point to make. The problem—and the source of interest to a great playwright like Sophocles—is that each character’s preoccupation with the value of his or her own viewpoint prevents him from seeing the value of the other’s. Each is mistaking the part for the whole.

  This consideration takes us very close to what it is that makes Greek tragedy “tragic.” A play about an unambiguously heroic young woman, someone’s mother or sister or daughter, squaring off against an unambiguously villainous general or king, a man greedy for military renown or for power, is a melodrama, not a tragedy. What gives the Antigone and Agamemnon and the other plays collected here their special and unforgettable force, a force that can still be felt after twenty-five centuries, is that they present the irresistible spectacle of two worldviews, each with its own validity, harrowingly locked in irreducible conflict. And yet while the characters in these plays are unable to countenance, let alone accept, their opponents’ viewpoints, the audience is being invited to do just that—to weigh and compare the principles the characters adhere to, to reflect on the necessity of seeing the whole and on the difficulties of keeping the parts in equilibrium. Or at least to appreciate the costs of sacrificing some values to others when the occasion demands.

  It is in this way—by sensitizing its audience to the dreadful ironies and irreducible complexities, the agonizing choices and painful prioritizations, that come with being both an individual and a citizen—that Athenian tragedy strove to educate the members of its audience. For this reason, it was indeed a genre that could, at least in theory, “save the city.” As we know, tragedy failed in the end to save Athens. But during the great century of its efflorescence, we cannot doubt that the astonishing invention that was Athenian drama provided many thousands of citizens with opportunities to reflect on themselves and their remarkable city.

  APPENDIX B

  MATERIAL ELEMENTS AND VISUAL MEANING

  David Rosenbloom

  Drama enjoyed widespread popularity in antiquity. In towns and cities throughout the ancient world, theaters were landmarks essential to the idea of community. Stone theaters cropped up throughout the Greek-speaking world from the fourth century B.C. onward; towns and cities in the Hellenistic and Roman periods built, remodeled, and expanded their theaters. As a result, many surviving theaters date from a much later time than their original construction and over the years were adapted for spectacles and uses besides drama. The reconstruction of theaters as they were in the fifth century B.C. presents challenges.

  Some painted, sculpted, and molded images provide useful indices of what a production might look like; but most of these postdate the fifth century, and their creators were uninterested in accurately representing dramatic performances. The stuff of fifth-century theater—the appearance of the stage house and its decoration, the shape of the orchestra, the color and texture of the costumes, the look of the masks, the gestures and vocal delivery of the actors, the choreography of the dances, the melodies of the songs, the composition of the audiences—are either lost to us or have been reconstructed from a small body of evidence.

  Tragedies also survive as texts of the words and lyrics composed for performance. These manuscripts were copied and recopied for as many as nineteen centuries before they were printed in books. In some cases, they contain interpolations from later productions. And while they offer no stage directions or blocking instructions, the texts do tend to signal entrances and exits and to give indications, however ambiguous, of what is visible to the audience. We need not endorse the fourth-century B.C. philosopher Aristotle’s view that reading and watching a tragedy are essentially the same thing; something is lost and something is gained by reading tragedy. But we need all available evidence, including later performances and adaptations, to take the full measure of Greek tragedy, both as evanescent sensory experiences and as enduring documents of an extraordinary verbal art.

  Tragedy at Athens was performed in the Theater of Dionysus, dedicated to the god of wine, evergreen vegetation, mysteries, madness, and illusion. Situated in the god’s precinct just north of his temple and altar, this open-air theater was dug into the southeastern slope of the Acropolis, an outcrop of limestone some five hundred feet above sea level that functioned as citadel and location of the community’s most cherished property—temples, treasuries, commemorations. The theater’s position sheltered spectators from northwesterly winds that blow across the Acropolis; its shape retained the sun’s warmth. These were important considerations, for in the fifth century the Athenians staged tragedies in the months of Gamelion (January) and Elaphebolion (March/April) at festivals honoring Dionysus. The preeminent of these festivals was the City Dionysia.
Held annually after the vernal equinox, when the seas were navigable, the festival attracted spectators from all over the Greek-speaking world. Around 440 B.C., tragedies were also presented at a winter festival celebrating Dionysus, the Lenaea.

  The Greek word for theater, theatron, literally means a “place for viewing.” Throughout the fifth century, the city hired theatropōlai, “sellers of theater seats,” to furnish wooden planks for spectators to sit on during dramatic festivals. A stone theater seating as many as seventeen thousand would not be completed in Athens until the Lycurgan period (338–324 B.C.). The plays in this volume (with the possible exception of the Prometheus Bound) were produced in a theater that could seat between four and six thousand spectators. Front row seating, prohedria, was reserved for the priest of Dionysus and other dignitaries. In front of them, at the edge of the orchestra, sat the ancient wooden statue of Dionysus brought to the theater in ritual procession from Eleutherae in Boeotia. The god was the theater’s most honored spectator. Precisely in what proportions the rest of the audience was comprised—rich and poor, male citizens, resident foreigners, visitors, slaves—is unknown. Whether women attended performances of tragedy in the theater is controversial but impossible to ascertain given our evidence. Each reader may well ask how women’s presence or absence might affect the meaning and reception of a play.

  By all accounts, audiences in ancient Athens and throughout the Greek-speaking world were passionate spectators of tragedy. They signaled their appreciation of playwrights and performers by applauding vigorously. But they were also exacting critics, and they tolerated nothing short of excellence. Athenians insisted that the subject of tragedy be distanced from them in time and place—tragedy is about other people’s suffering, not the audience’s. An early fifth-century production of a historical event—the Persian sack of Miletus, a city in Asia Minor that was an ally of Athens, ending a war the Athenians helped to start but were unable to finish—cut too close to the bone and reduced the audience to tears. The Athenians decreed that this play never be performed again.

  Technical errors could pique an audience’s ire, as when a tragedian had a character exit from a side entrance and then return to acting space through the stage house: his production was hissed from the stage. Bored audiences showed their displeasure by clucking and hissing, putting an abrupt end to a performance, especially if the playwright tried to cram too much narrative into a play. Aristotle notes that it was at times such as these—when a play dragged on—that theatergoers, unruly in the best of times, increased their consumption of food and drink while watching. Ever sensitive to the effect of the masses upon culture, the philosopher Plato termed the role of the audience in the theater theatrokratia, “the rule of the spectator.”

  The orchestra, a “place for dancing,” was the centerpiece of the fifth-century theater. Here actors performed, choruses sang and danced, and musicians played the aulos, a double-reed pipe that accompanied actors’ monodies and the choruses’ singing and dancing. Whether the orchestra of the fifth-century theater was circular or polygonal is uncertain. A theater with wooden planks for seating could not form the arc of a circle; joining rows of planks would impose a polygonal form. A polygonal orchestra would suit such a theater better than a circular one; and this is the shape of orchestras found in village theaters such as the one at Thorikos.

  Most scholars agree that the fifth-century theater had no stage raised above the orchestra; the orchestra was the acting space. It was entered and exited via two side routes (parodoi), one to and from the east (stage right) and the other to and from the west (stage left). An altar or hearth, called a thymelē, may have stood in the orchestra in the fifth century; we do not know when or why it came to be there. The aulos player took up a position at it. Later uses of the adjective “thymelic” to designate “musical” and “non-dramatic” contests may indicate that the thymelē originated in competitions among musicians.

  The fifth-century theater had no permanent buildings or scenery, but the visual dimension of tragedy imposed a degree of verisimilitude upon staging. Achilles, as Aristotle remarks, could not chase Hector around Troy in an orchestra the way he does in the Iliad. However, a messenger arriving from offstage could narrate such action; and tragedies constructed vivid offstage worlds to complement their staging. Indeed, pivotal and catastrophic events—murders, battles, shipwrecks, political assemblies—transpire outside the gaze of the audience. The locations in which the dramatic action occurs are typically places prominent in Greek myth such as Troy, Thebes, or Argos, but the range of locations is extensive. Sometimes they are outlandish: a tragedy could be set in Hades or at the ends of the earth.

  A simple and versatile solution to problems of space and setting was to erect a temporary wooden stage house (skēnē, literally “tent”) at the rear of the orchestra as needed. The date of the skēnē’s introduction in the theater is debated. Some believe that it was in use by the time of the Persians in 472, arguing that the skēnē represents a council house and the tomb of Darius. Many contend that the theater did not employ the skēnē until the Oresteia in 458. In the Agamemnon, the house of Atreus functions as a kind of mute character, encompassing in silence a history of adultery, murder, cannibalism, curse, and pollution.

  The skēnē provided a façade and interior space for actors to change costumes and masks. It could be entered and exited through one or more doors at orchestra level and a hatch on the roof. Most of the time, the skēnē represented a palace or temple; but it also depicted humbler structures, such as hovels and tents, and natural formations, such as caves or groves. The pairing of skēnē and tomb or altar in the orchestra became common, as the Libation Bearers and Helen attest. Aristotle states that Sophocles introduced skēnographia, or “scene-painting.” “Scene” refers to the skēnē (source of our word “scene,” via Latin scaena): skēnographia denotes the art of painting the skēnē to depict features with the illusion of depth. It is unlikely that the fifth-century theater used painted backdrops.

  As performed in the fifth century, tragedy required few technical devices. A wooden platform on wheels, an ekkyklēma, could be rolled out of the skēnē to disclose what had taken place in its interior—typically tableaux of murder scenes featuring corpses and killer. The Eumenides, however, employs the ekkyklēma to stage the appearance of Clytemnestra’s ghost in the Erinyes’ dream. Another important theatrical device was the mēchanē, an apparatus that enabled dramatic characters, particularly gods, to enter and exit through the air. The Latin phrase deus ex machina, “god from a machine,” derives from its use, mainly from the late fifth century onward, to bring on a god or gods at the end of a tragedy to resolve seemingly insoluble impasses in the plot. Medea makes her shocking and awesome exit from the top of the skēnē via the mēchanē as the granddaughter of the Sun. Prometheus Bound seems to use the mēchanē for the Chorus’s arrival on winged creatures and for Ocean’s entry and exit on a griffin.

  The heart and soul of tragic performances were the actors and choruses. In the first half of the fifth century, the state funded two actors to perform in tragedies. Aeschylus’ Persians requires two speaking actors, as does the Prometheus Bound. The Libation Bearers briefly employs three speaking actors, while the Eumenides (Apollo, Athena, Orestes) makes extensive use of three actors, as do the rest of plays in this volume. Aristotle in the Poetics credits Sophocles with introducing the third actor. This may have happened sometime between Sophocles’ debut in 468 and the Oresteia in 458. Aeschylus used a chorus of twelve; Sophocles increased its number to fifteen. Actors were professionals, but choruses were amateurs recruited for their talent. Their upkeep, costumes, and training were paid for by a wealthy citizen assigned to be “producer” (chorēgos) of the plays produced at the festival. From the time prizes were awarded for acting at the City Dionysia (c.449) to the time of Aristotle’s Poetics (c.330), actors became a dominant theatrical force and plays were written as vehicles for their talents. During this period, the importance of amateur ch
oruses diminished.

  Actors and choruses wore ornate costumes and linen masks styled to differentiate gender, age, status, and comportment. Males played both male and female parts. Masks linked their wearers to Dionysus, who was worshipped as a mask atop a clothed pillar; but they also permitted individuals to play multiple roles—a benefit in three-actor drama—and to assume identities incompatible with their actual gender, age, and appearance. The fixed expression of the mask made voice, delivery, and gesture paramount in tragic acting. Performers’ bodies were vehicles of visual meaning. Hecuba’s body lies in an agonized heap in the orchestra at the beginning of the Trojan Women, just like her city and fortunes. In the Eumenides, the terrified Pythia exits the oracle of Delphi on all fours when she sees the Erinyes sleeping in the temple; but when the audience sees them in this position, it senses the waning of their power.

  Entrances and exits on cars or chariots indicate characters’ statuses and circumstances. Andromache and Astyanax enter in the Trojan Women on a cart to signify their reduction to property as spoils of war. Chariots symbolized conquest and the wealth derived from it, as they do in the queen’s first arrival and exit in the Persians (compare her second entry) and Agamemnon’s entrance with Cassandra and other spoils from Troy in the Agamemnon.