Greek Drama V

Studies in the Theatre of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BCE

Hallie Marshall, C. W. Marshall, Hallie Marshall, C. W. Marshall

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350142374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Antikes & klassisches Drama

Drawing together new research from emerging and senior scholars, this selection of papers from the decennial Greek Drama V conference (Vancouver, 2017) explores the works of the ancient Greek playwrights and showcases new methodologies with which to study them. Sixteen chapters from a field of international contributors examine a range of topics, from the politics of the ancient theatre, to the role of the chorus, to the earliest history of the reception of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Employing anthropological, historical, and psychological critical methods alongside performance analysis and textual criticism, these studies bring fresh and original interpretations to the plays. Several contributions analyse fragmentary tragedies, while others incorporate ideas on the performance aspect of certain plays. The final chapters deal separately with comedy, naturally focusing on the plays of Aristophanes and Menander. Greek Drama V offers a window into where the academic field of Greek drama is now, and points towards the future scholarship it will produce.

CHAPTER 1

THE POLITICS OF GREECE’S THEATRICAL REVOLUTION, c. 500–c. 300 BCE

Eric Csapo and Peter Wilson

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Was Greek theatre political?¹ For tragedy opinion is divided, even polarized. For Old Comedy the controversy is not about politics, but whether the politics are ‘serious’. New Comedy’s ‘politics’, and even satyr play’s, are almost as controversial as tragedy’s. The lack of consensus in the case of specific genres offers little encouragement for anyone who would ask the same question about drama or ancient theatre culture in general. But we feel it is worth asking and we offer a different approach to evaluating the question.

In this paper we propose to examine the question of theatre and politics from the perspective of ancient reception. Our sources offer very little explicit comment on how they perceived the politics of drama or theatre, but we think some insight can be gained from the choices communities made in the fifth and fourth centuries as the new medium spread throughout the Greek world. Some states eagerly adopted theatre while others avoided it. Communities that did receive theatre similarly chose to accept or avoid specific theatre genres and practices. For the last twelve years we have collected all forms of evidence for theatre outside Athens.² As far as possible we tried to determine a date range for the reception of theatre in a given city. Wherever possible we inquired into the likely political orientation of the city at the time of reception. General trends emerged which help explain the processes by which theatre culture spread. But the sorting of theatre reception by political constitution surprised us by revealing striking disparities that we believe are most easily explained by supposing that politics played a significant role in each state’s perception of theatre’s benefits and risks.

A short history of the background to our question might begin with the volume Nothing to Do with Dionysos? In 1990 it was radically new, at least in Anglophone scholarship, in focusing on the question of theatre’s politics in the abstract.³ But it was also the last major contribution to scholarship that assumed with assurance that only Athens mattered (its subtitle provocatively called drama ‘Athenian’ not ‘Greek’ and more than one paper insisted that classical dramas were written exclusively for performance in Athens). The book linked the context and content of tragedy and comedy with Athenian democracy’s values and aspirations. But this claim provoked challenges: just how exclusively ‘Athenian’ or ‘democratic’ were the theatre and its genres?

The challenge to ‘Athenian’ and the challenge to ‘democratic’ followed different paths. One began to explore theatre outside Athens, to quote the title of Kate Bosher’s book of 2012.⁴ The other questioned whether theatre (and especially tragedy) could be said to be democratic or political at all. Some, like Jasper Griffin, emphasized the timeless, universal, aesthetic and philosophical quality of Greek poetry.⁵ Others, like Peter Rhodes, without abandoning the historicist agenda, looked for a deep-structuring context, not in any specific city or constitution, but in the historical formation of the Greek polis.⁶ The question becomes particularly urgent when one combines these paths. Referring to several contributions to her volume on theatre in the Greek West, Kate Bosher concluded: ‘This work shows that the widely accepted connection between Greek drama and democracy, set out in the 1990 volume, Nothing to Do with Dionysus?, for example, does not hold in the west.’⁷ Why should democracy or Athens figure large in the account of a phenomenon that embraced many cities and many non-democratic cities?

The view that theatre appealed to many states, including many with non-democratic constitutions, is well substantiated by the evidence. But this fact does not require us entirely to abandon the view of theatre as democratic. Greek theatre was Panhellenic from the fifth century, much earlier than generally thought, but it nonetheless generated a culture that was widely perceived as democratic.⁸ We will also argue that the view from outside Athens complicates things greatly and brings important qualifications to the debate, but it does not simply negate the applicability or importance of democracy or even Athens as a context for interpreting ancient performance.

It is well known that contemporary authors say little about the politics of theatre. Aristotle is largely silent. There is notoriously ‘no polis in Aristotle’s Poetics’.⁹ Athens is mentioned only three times and democracy once – all in relation to the disputed history of comedy. Less attention has been paid to Plato who definitely sees drama as an essential outgrowth of democratic culture. But in the Republic (568c) Plato claims that tragedy, at least, belongs more to autocratic culture: tragic poets ‘drag civic constitutions into tyranny and democracy’. Here the word order is deliberate: he goes on to say that tragic poets are honoured ‘especially by the tyrants, and secondly by the democracies’. But Plato is a biased witness and his perceptions do not often reflect general attitudes.

Is Plato right? A close examination of over one hundred sites outside Attica yielded credible evidence of some form of theatre culture before 300 BCE.¹⁰ We looked for evidence of a building that ancients or moderns identify as a theatre, evidence of performances of the theatre genres of drama or circular choruses (also known as men’s and boys’ choruses and less often as dithyramb), or some other strong index of theatrical culture as, for example, the prolific comic vase production of Taras which, along with statements from Plato, Aristoxenus and others, makes it more than probable that Taras had theatre throughout the fourth century. In many cases the evidence did not lend itself to precise dating for theatres or precise categorization for constitutions. Of the cities we examined, seventy-one also offered evidence of their political configuration at the date of theatre’s initial reception (Figure 1.1). We begin therefore with some broad statistics suggesting general trends but move quickly to specific examples. It must be understood that these statistics are drawn from data whose compilation sometimes involved difficult decisions, given the variable bu...