Reperforming Greek Tragedy

Theater, Politics, and Cultural Mobility in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC

Anna A. Lamari

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783110559866
• eBook ISBN: 9783110559934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An inexplicably understudied field of classical scholarship, tragic reperformance, has been surveyed in its true dimension only in the very recent years. Building on the latest discussions on tragic restagings, this book provides a thorough survey of reperformance of Greek tragedy in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, also addressing its theatrical, political, and cultural context. In the fifth and fourth centuries, tragic restagings were strongly tied to cultural mobility and exchange. Poets, actors, texts, vases, and vase-painters were traveling, bridging the boundaries between mainland Greece and Magna Graecia, boosting the spread of theater, facilitating theatrical literacy, and setting a new theatrical status quo, according to which popular tragic plays were restaged, by mobile actors, in numerous dramatic festivals, in and out of Attica, with or without the supervision of their composers. This book offers a holistic examination of ancient reperformances of tragedy, enhancing our perception of them as a vital theatrical practice that played a major part in the development of the tragic genre in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

1Traveling poets in Attica and beyond

Tragic drama is prestigious, mobile, gripping and manifold, easily communicable to large numbers of people at any one time, [and] surprisingly Panhellenic despite various degrees of in-built ‘Athenianness’.56

1.1Introduction

Reperformance in ancient Greek culture is closely linked to travel. This premise forms the basis for this chapter, in which I will examine the interaction of two key fifth-century cultural practices: that of poetic mobility, and that of dramatic reperformance. By the time dramatic reperformance appeared as a fast-developing cultural practice, poetic itinerancy was already well-established. During the fifth century, Greek drama developed a panhellenic character, and started to be reperformed across the Greek world, addressing itself to variable audiences. The theater business was mobile, with poets, actors, and choruses traveling around Greece in order to restage popular performances or to revive plays, which had premiered elsewhere, in Athens itself. In a reciprocal relationship, just as the spread of Greek drama encouraged poetic mobility, at the same time theatrical tours boosted the genre’s dynamism.

Traveling poets and cultural mobility had early origins in Greek culture. From Herodotus’ mythical narration of how Arion of Methymna rode a dolphin and miraculously landed on Taenarus and taught Corinthians the dithyramb,57to the generic characteristics of choral poetry that was performed beyond the poets’ poleis, an impressive sum of poetic ‘itinerancy’ is sketched out as one of the sixth and fifth centuries’ prevailing cultural characteristics. The elegist Xenophanes traveled from Colophon to Zancle and Catane and composed a poem about the foundation of Elea,58while western poets like Eunomous of Locri and Ariston of Rhegium contested at Delphi,59and Ibycus of Rhegium performed in Samos.60With traveling so deeply imbedded in the poetic lifestyle of the sixth century, it would be bold to deny that the tragedians would not have been exposed to such prospects. Evidence for poetic travel is indeed more generous for the cases of Aeschylus and Euripides, who traveled to Sicily and Macedon respectively in order to reperform their plays and stage new tragedies. As for Sophocles, inscriptions show us that he traveled around Attica, but what is perhaps more important is the fact that ancient sources find Sophocles’ loyalty to Athens remarkable enough to comment on, making reperformative theatrical mobility more likely.

The culture of poetic travel coexisted with the culture of dramatic reperformance. Most scholars consider the practice of tragic reperformances beginning soon after Aeschylus’ death as highly possible.61As I have elsewhere maintained, restagings of tragedies started sporadically whilst Aeschylus was still alive, and perhaps became more systematic after his death.62Poets would have traveled to different venues all over Greece in order to produce their plays, and their heirs or other producers would have overseen their plays’ posthumous productions.63In the first part of this chapter I will discuss the culture of travel and reperformance as set out by evidence regarding the mobility of poets who do not belong to the classical tragic triad. Carcinus, Empedocles, Pratinas and Ion of Chios all provide examples of cultural movement to and from Athens in order to perform their art to ever-growing audiences. The second part of this chapter focuses on the poetic mobility of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides around the Attic demes, but also as far as Sicily and Macedon, and in general on the reperformance of their plays outside Athens.

1.2A culture of travel and reperformance

It should be beyond reasonable doubt that by about 350 BC Athenian tragedies were being performed on quite a regular basis in the Greek cities of southern Italy, such as Tarentum, Thurii, Metapontum and Heraclea, as well as widely in Sicily. It is, indeed, plausible to claim that even by 400 BC such performances were already quite widespread and frequent. And, while the fascination with theatre does seem to have been specially strong in Sicily and Magna Graecia, it is also likely that the spread from Athens in the period 450 to 350 extended to all corners of the far-flung Hellenic world.64

These are the first words of Oliver Taplin’s excellent chapter on performances of Athenian tragedy in the Greek West. Texts were certainly ‘traveling’ in the fifth century, and, along with them, a manifold cultural ‘business’ which introduced Athenian theater to the Greek West and reciprocally brought western influence back to the East. The fifth-century tragic poet Carcinus was an Athenian from Thorikos who had come to be considered an Acragantine. His grandson Carcinus II was probably born in Acragas and was more closely associated with Sicily.65According to Aristotle, the tragedian Empedocles, grandson of the philosopher, moved to Syracuse upon the arrival of the Athenian expedition and composed political tragedies there.66In the context of cultural panhellenism, traveling troupes of actors and poets would have been organizing performances in theatrically-active Sicilian cities such as Syracuse and Gela. At the same time, non-Athenian early tragic poets frequented Athens, like Pratinas of Phlius and his son Aristias, Achaeus of Eretria, a satyr-play composer and a tragedian, Ion of Chios, to mention a few.

Pratinas came from Phlius, a city in the northwestern Argolid, but succeeded in playinga major role in the Athenian theatrical scene. The Suda informs us that performances of his plays predated the construction of the theater of Dionysus:

Πρατίνας, Πυρρωνίδου ἢ Ἐγκωμίου, Φλιάσιος, ποιητὴς τραγωιδίας· ἀντηγωνίζετο δὲ Αἰσχύλωι τε καὶ Χοιρίλωι ἐπὶ τῆς ο´ (70) Ὀλυμπιάδος (499/96), καὶ πρῶτος ἔγραψε Σατύρους. ἐπιδεικνυμένου δὲ τούτου συνέβη τὰ ἴκρια, ἐφ᾽ ὧν ἑστήκεσαν οἱ θεαταί, πεσεῖν, καὶ ἐκ τούτου θέατρον ὠικοδομήθη ᾿Aθηναίοις. καὶ δράματα μὲν ἐπεδείξατο ν´ (50), ὧν σατυρικὰ λβ´ (32)· ἐνίκησε δὲ ἅπαξ.

(TrGF I 4 Test. 1)

Pratinas, the son of either Pyrronides or Encomius, from Phlius was a tragic poet. He competed against Aeschylus and Choerilus in the seventieth Olympiad (499/96) and was the first to write satyr plays. When he was presenting his plays, the planks on which the spectators stood fell down, and on account of this a theater was constructed by the Athenians. He staged fifty plays, thirty-two of which were satyric. He won once.67

Pratinas was usually identified as a satyr-play poet, rather than a tragedian, and the anecdote about the bleachers collapsing during a performance of his indicates that he was one of the very first composers of the genre.68His plays were (re)performed posthumously under the direction of his son, as did happen in the Dionysia of 467 where Aeschylus was granted the first prize and Aristias the second:

ἐπὶ ἄρχοντ(ος) Θεαγ]ενίδου Ὀλυμπιάδος [οη´ (78) ἔτει] α[′

ἐνίκα Αἰσχύ]λος Λαΐωι, Οἰδίποδι, Ἑπτὰ ἐπὶ Θήβας,

Σφιγγὶ σατυ ] δεύτερος ᾿Aριστίας ταῖς τοῦ πατρὸς Πρατίνο]υ τραγωιδίαις. τρίτος [Πο]λυφράσμων ] Λυκουργε[ίαι] τ̣[ετρ]αλογίαι.

(TrGF I Did. C 4a)

When Theagenides was arch(on)] in the first year of the [seventy-eighth] Olympiad, [Aeschylus won] with Laius, Oedipus, Seven Against Thebes, [and the satyric Sphinx.] Second was Aristias with his fa[ther Pratina]s’ tragedies. Third was [Po]ly[phrasmon] [with the] Lycurge[ia] t[etr]alogy.

In one of the first surviving examples of posthumous restagings, the above Didascalia reveals how a non-Athenian poet, Pratinas, was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Traveling poets in Attica and beyond
• 2 Reperformances in a political context
• 3 Tragic reperformances and traveling actors
• 4 Reperformances and Vase-painting
• Conclusions
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• Bibliography
• List of Plates/Image Credits
• Plates
• General Index
• Index of Passages