Theatre in Ancient Greek Society

J. R. Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134968800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

In Theatre in Ancient Greek Society the author examines the social setting and function of ancient Greek theatre through the thousand years of its performance history. Instead of using written sources, which were intended only for a small, educated section of the population, he draws most of his evidence from a wide range of archaeological material - from cheap, mass-produced vases and figurines to elegant silverware produced for the dining tables of the wealthy.
This is the first study examining the function and impact of the theatre in ancient Greek society by employing an archaeological approach.

1

INTRODUCTION

Early Athenian theatre – setting and context

Condamnés à expliquer le mystère de leur vie, les hommes ont inventés le théâtre

Louis Jouvet, Témoignages sur le théâtre

To our eyes and ears Greek tragedies seem complex in both structure and thought, yet the establishment of the genre happened almost unbelievably quickly. According to tradition, Thespis first distinguished an actor from the choral group which lay at the basis of tragedy some time about 534 BC.¹ Aeschylus, who was born only a decade later, began producing tragedies very early in the fifth century and had his first victory in the dramatic contests in 484 BC. Our earliest surviving tragedy dates to 472 BC, our latest to 405 BC. We have no complete tragedy written after that date and it would seem that scholars of Late Antiquity did not think later pieces worth preserving. Our surviving classical comedies are from an even shorter period. Aristophanes’ Acharnians was produced in 425 BC, his Plutus in 388 BC.

If one asks the question how it is that the development to so sophisticated a style of drama could have happened in so short a period, the answer must surely lie not simply in the genius of the playwrights involved but, since playwrights create for their public, in the importance given to theatre, in its reception, in the role it had in Athenian society of this period.

In attempting to discover this role, it is worth considering at the same time why it may have been that Athenian tragedy of the years after Euripides was not thought worth preserving. The fourth century was not without men of genius, and there is good evidence that theatre remained popular – indeed our evidence strongly suggests that it became more popular. It is clear that comedy, while slower to develop a sophisticated form, changed its style to suit new conditions; but in changing its style it changed its function. It may be that tragedy was not able to change so radically so effectively and that it lost its direction as a major force.²

In the course of the well-known debate that Aristophanes concocted between Aeschylus and Euripides in the latter part of his Frogs of 405 BC, the two agree (lines 1008–1009) that ‘one should admire poets … for their cleverness and advice, and because we make men in cities better’. A few lines later (1031), the character Aeschylus claims that noble poets are ‘beneficial’ to society, in part because they represent admirable figures and invite their audience to emulate them. Aeschylus is made to present his own mind as moulded by the ‘godly Homer’. ‘By Zeus, I didn’t create sluts like [Euripides’ characters] Phaedra and Stheneboia; in fact, nobody knows of my creating a woman in love at all’ (1043–1044). Aeschylus (as re-created by Aristophanes in a comedy) sees a corrupting influence in Euripidean tragedy. At some points in the debate Euripides is presented as the kind of dramatist who selects from the common body of myths stories of people in shameful situations (such as women in the grip of illicit passion) but presents them in a realistic and sympathetic way. It is, then, taken as a given that the theatre has an educative function, but at the same time the case is presented by a figure who represents the old school, and one has the impression that by the later fifth century this attitude with regard to publicly performed poetry is a slightly old-fashioned even if deeply ingrained one.³

Plato, who seems to have been becoming involved in philosophy about the time Frogs was produced, should to some extent represent the reactions of the new generation. Certainly by the time he wrote his Republic (towards 380 BC) he seems to be looking at the figures of epic poetry and tragedy by reference to norms of good and bad character, such as bravery, self-control and their opposites. He is concerned with the long-term effect of poetry on the moral character of the citizen-audience (Republic 377–401, 603–608). (One might compare the debate about the effects of watching violence on television, particularly on the young.) All this may well reflect a new consciousness of the role of publicly performed poetry, and, perhaps more importantly, a serious questioning of what was assumed in Aristophanes, that the older poetry (at least from Homer to Aeschylus) was necessarily good and improving in its effect. In the Hipparchus (228 B–C), attributed to but surely not by Plato, it is simply stated that Hipparchos, the son of the tyrant Peisistratos, organised the rhapsodes’ recital of Homer and brought over Anacreon and Simonides ‘in a desire to educate the citizens, so that he might rule over the best possible subjects, since he was so good and noble that he did not think he should grudge anyone wisdom’.

Theatre of the kind we are talking about needs a written text for it to exist at all, but we must recognise that for much of the fifth century the audience was still largely at the point of transition from being an ‘oral’ society.⁴ Most Athenians (or more accurately, perhaps, most Athenian males) were able to read, but it seems likely that before the later years of the fifth century they were not in the habit of reading extensively. Detienne has made the important point that writing had no role in the process of government of a city like Athens at this period.⁵ The results of the governing process – laws, treaties and agreements – may be recorded in writing as permanent information that could not be altered in individual memory, but day-to-day affairs and discussion were conducted by word of mouth. Writing still had a role that was restricted to the area in which it was found useful initially: one can compare the early use of computers as high-capacity mathematical calculators, before new activities were developed that were inconceivable before them. The new technology had not yet created its own programme of activity. Similarly, it is worth recalling a passage of Euripides’ Palamedes:

I invented writing and so made possible overseas letters, wills, and contracts.⁶

The play was produced in 415 BC and even at this date these items are seen as among the more obvious benefits of the technology. They are items that have an important and practical value, aimed at overcoming the tyranny of time and distance.

Written texts of any length were still comparatively new, and one may remember that Herodotus in effect published his Histories in Athens in 446 BC by reciting passages of it. His seems to have been the first written history of a discursive and explanatory nature in prose; and it has been pointed out that there is a sense in which his history represents an oral style (at least in its attitudes) put down on paper. Thucydides, by contrast, in the last years of the fifth century, had made the transition and in describing his work as a ‘possession for ever’ is conscious of the nature of what he is doing. He had literate attitudes in the closely textured, rather terse style of his composition – but he none the less introduced speeches into his narrative whenever he wanted to examine motives for action, in part because he believed in motivation by individuals rather than by larger forces, but in part because even he seems to have thought that the semblance of verbal communication brought more immediacy. It is no accident either that early in the fourth century Plato wrote about philosophy as a series of spoken dialogues.

Pericles is said to have been the first to have delivered a written speech in the courts, whereas all his predecessors had spoken ex tempore.⁷ Our source for this statement is late and unlikely to be reliable, but at an anecdotal level it still has value: it is a statement that was credible in Antiquity. It implies that some time perhaps around the middle of the fifth century, speeches began to be written. They came to be written because the arguments were becoming more complex and the style of language more highly refined. More sophisticated forms of rhetoric began from about this point, and it is against this background that we should set the visit of the Sicilian rhetorician Gorgias to Athens in 427 BC, a visit which caused an enormous stir because of the new directions in which he took rhetoric and the spoken word. But this was a style of speaking that needed careful preparation on paper.

The whole question of the existence and ownership of books in the fifth century is a very complex and difficult one, beginning with the problem of how one translates the Greek words biblos and biblion. They seem to mean everything from papyrus as a material to what we tend to mean by ‘book’, in much the same way that we can use ‘paper’, from the material, to ‘newspaper’, to ‘a paper’ (sc. ‘article’ or ‘ pamphlet’).⁸ But we should always be conscious that because of the mechanical problems of copying ‘books’ by hand, the number of copies was always limited and there may not have been the same expectation of a replica that we have automatically from printed texts; and while there was probably a sense of ownership of ideas or intellectual property, there was surely no idea of copyright as we understand it.⁹ Gian Franco Nieddu has presented good arguments to suggest that in the late fifth century the acquisition of books or pamphlets is something like the acquisition of status symbols, and he thus makes good sense of the line in the Frogs where Aristophanes has his chorus say that the members of the audience are not uneducated, because everyone has a biblion (line 1114).¹⁰ Similarly, at Frogs 1409, where Euripides is invited to get onto the scale-pan together with his books to be weighed against Aeschylus, part of the joke is that Euripides is in any case lightweight, with or without his books, but he has his books with him throughout this scene because they typify what sort of man (and therefore poet) he is. Nieddu has also made the point that at this period books are acquired by people in areas of specialisation, especially in areas of ‘science’ such as medicine, astrology, architecture, geometry and other aspects of philosophy: that is, most books were technical and rather short. He also quotes the case of the mathematician and astronomer Oinopides of Chios (in the second half of the fifth century) who uses the expression ‘not in the (book-) box but in the mind’ to admonish a young man who accumulated books so as to appear educated.¹¹ I am reminded of the analogy of one of my students who, when I asked him if his essay was anywhere near ready yet, said yes, he had photocopied the articles listed in the bibliography. In both cases there is a feeling of possession in having the information stored and at hand.

It is on similar lines that one should interpret the well-known passage in Xenophon (Anabasis VII, 5, 12–14): ‘they arrived at Salmydessos. Here many of the ships that sail into the Pontus run aground and are wrecked, for there are shoals that extend well out into the sea. And the Thracians of that area have boundary markers set up and each group plunders the ships wrecked in their section … Here were found many couches, many boxes and many written books, together with all sorts of other things that shipowners carry in wooden chests.’ This at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries. While it is not entirely easy to be sure of Xenophon’s point here, one suspects that he remarks on these finds because they represented not only Greek material found in foreign parts, but because things like symposium couches and boxes of books were particularly representative of the Greek as opposed to the foreign way of life. Even if one goes so far as to translate bibloi here as pamphlets or short texts (rather than as ‘pieces of paper’), this is good evidence that the use of papyrus and writing was common enough for sea-captains to carry, and normal enough to be taken as symptomatic of the Greek lifestyle at this period.

This last third of the fifth century, was, then, a period of rapid change in these respects as in so many others, and it was the change itself that fostered the final flowering of tragedy (before it wilted), and a style of comedy that one suspects became more sophisticated with Aristophanes. It was a period when writers and thinkers were exploiting the advantages of written culture while the advantages of the more traditional ‘oral’ culture still survived. It was a time when most members of the audience were used to listening intently and acutely and were used at the same time to remembering the spoken word. (We should remember too that they were not subjected, as we are, to radio, television, records and the like, with all those words which in sheer self-protection we only half hear, thus building in a habit of not treating spoken words all that seriously. We have an often naive faith in the printed word, as if written were somehow better.) In the fifth century one is dealing with a society which was still used to a great deal of its information storage being in people’s heads, not on paper or in books.

The transmission of one’s culture is a fragile thing, and even more so when it has no independent storage, for example on paper. In a pre- or proto-literate society, education (or the transmission of one’s culture) did not involve the teaching of abstract ‘facts’ which were to be absorbed without immediately practical aim. It lay rather in the passing on of experience whether by example and/or practical training (as in social behaviour – where we are more used to such an approach – or hunting, or farming or fighting) or by word of mouth.¹² With the latter, the use of myth and legend seems to have been particularly important in Greek society, and this is apparent in their art as well as in the surviving literature. Thus as a warrior, Achilles can be the paradigm for a young man’s behaviour, and when we see an arming scene on a vase, there seems to be a ready transference between an ‘everyday’ arming and that of a hero, and in pictures of battle scenes it is often difficult to tell the difference between the combats of mortals and those between, say, Achilles and Hector. It is typical of many societies that story-telling (whether by word of mouth or through what we call art) has the effect of binding those societies or communities together. The common experience these stories represent reinforces the communal aspect of their life. It is experience shared, and the expression and arousal of the fears, the pleasures, the sorrows and the laughter involved in the stories strengthen this binding process and give the more straightforward knowledge-aspect some context, and further, and perhaps more importantly, can teach the hearer how the community expects him/her to react in a given situation.¹³ One aspect of this communal experience is the history of the community, which, with the Greeks as with many other societies, was often related genealogically to what we would call mythical figures, figures who were therefore integrated into the real life of the storyteller and his audience.

Much of this story-telling was done in verse, because poetry through its rhythm was more readily memorable in the long term than prose and thus more readily transmitted from one generation to another as part of an inherited experience or education. It was in this way that the Homeric legends had such an important place in Greek society. Another vital factor in binding a community together was its shared rituals. These normally had a religious setting, that of honouring or propitiating a divinity, but it has often been observed, particularly among so-called more primitive societies, that the ritual itself is just as important as the object of that ritual: the process of ritual involves shared knowledge of an important routine at important times of the year or critical times of life, and meeting as a community under these terms can develop a sense of group identity and pride.¹⁴ The Greeks combined both these elements – the telling of stories and the ritual occasions – and developed meetings (often festivals) when the telling of stories became vital elements in the proceedings. There has rightly been a good deal of emphasis in recent scholarship on the performance aspect of early poetry, and therefore on the interpretation of that poetry in terms of the circumstances in which it was presented.¹⁵ We need not pursue the details here, but it is worth emphasising that poetry in the earlier periods was not created in the study for the studious, but that, even as it came to be written and slowly became more ‘literary’ in its approach, the setting for its transmission (or its ‘reading’) was still that which had been habitual in an oral society. And second, that theatre was not the only kind of poetry to be designed for public performance; rather, theatre developed in a context where a level of ‘public’ performance was the norm, and where stories were heard rather than read. Third, it evolved in a situation where the role of the poet was to some degree thought of as educational, even if in a very broad sense, a sense that was based on tradition. And finally, theatre was at the same time a product and an aim of community activity.

The fifth-century Athenian was able to see major theatrical performances twice a year, at a festival called the Lenaia in January and at the City Dionysia in late March. Earlier in the winter period, in December, were celebrations of the Rural Dionysia at local theatres around Attica. These were the cooler times of year (indeed December and January are, nowadays at least, the rainy period), but the more important point is that December–January is not a very urgent period in the farmer’s year. By late March he could also afford to take time off because the seed should be sown, and indeed coming through the ground. We know comparatively little about the Rural Dionysia except that it seems to have originated as an agricultural festival, and historical evidence of a background in a fertility festival is to be seen in the processions with phallos-poles. Celebrations were organised in each local area or deme and the equivalent of the local mayor (or demarch) seems to have been responsible for the practicalities. We do not know at what period theatrical performances were first incorporated in the festivities, but there is evidence for the performance of both tragedy and comedy by the middle of the fifth century, and one could speculate that comedy, at least, could well have had an early if informal background in such a context. Inscriptional eviden...