A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama

Ian C. Storey, Arlene Allan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118455111
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

This newly updated second edition features wide-ranging, systematically organized scholarship in a concise introduction to ancient Greek drama, which flourished from the sixth to third century BC.

• Covers all three genres of ancient Greek drama – tragedy, comedy, and satyr-drama
• Surveys the extant work of Aeschylus, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander, and includes entries on 'lost' playwrights
• Examines contextual issues such as the origins of dramatic art forms; the conventions of the festivals and the theater; drama's relationship with the worship of Dionysos; political dimensions of drama; and how to read and watch Greek drama
• Includes single-page synopses of every surviving ancient Greek play

1

Aspects of Ancient Greek Drama

Drama

While ancient Greek drama appears first during the sixth century bc and can be traced well down into the third, most attention is paid to the fifth century at Athens, when and where most of the nearly fifty plays that we possess were produced. In this study we shall introduce the three distinct genres of Greek drama: serious drama or tragedy (traditionally instituted in 534), satyr-drama (added ca. 500), and comedy (formally introduced at Athens in the 480s, but which flourished at the same time in Syracuse).

Drama is action. According to Aristotle (Poetics 1448a28) dramatic poets “represent people in action,” as opposed to a purely third-person narrative or the mixture of narrative and direct speech as found in Homer. We begin appropriately with the Greek word δρᾶμα (drāma), which means “action” or “doing.” Aristotle adds that the verb drān was not an Attic word (“Attic” being the Greek dialect spoken at Athens), Athenians preferring to use the verb prattein and its cognates (pragma, praxis) to signify “action.” Whether this was true or not does not matter here – that drān is common in Athenian tragedy, but not in the prose writers, may support Aristotle's assertion. Both Plato and Aristotle, the two great philosophers of the fourth century, defined drama as a mimēsis, “imitation” or “representation,” but each took a different view of the matter. Mimēsis is not an easy word to render in English, since neither “imitation” nor “representation” really hits the mark. We have left it in Greek transliteration. For Plato mimēsis was something disreputable, something inferior, something the ideal ruler of his ideal state would avoid. It meant putting oneself into the character of another, taking on another's role, which in many Greek myths could be a morally inferior one, perhaps that of a slave or a woman. Plato would have agreed with Polonius in Hamlet, “to thine own self be true.” But Aristotle considered mimēsis not only as something natural in human nature but also as something that was a pleasure and essential for human learning (Poetics 1448b4–8): “to engage in mimēsis is innate in human beings from childhood and humans differ from other living creatures in that humans are very mimetic and develop their first learning through mimēsis and because all humans enjoy mimetic activities.”

Drama is “doing” or “performing,” and performances function in different ways in human cultures. Religion and ritual immediately spring to mind as one context: the elaborate dances of the Shakers; the complex rituals of the Navajo peoples; the mediaeval mystery plays, which for a largely illiterate society could provide both religious instruction and ritual re-enactment as well as entertainment. Drama can also encompass “science” – the dances of the Navajo provide both a history of the creation of the world and a series of elaborate healing rituals. Dramatic performances can keep the memory of historical figures and events alive. Greek tragedy falls partly into this category, since its themes and subjects are mainly drawn from an idealized heroic age several hundred years in the past. Some of the subjects of Greek tragedy are better described as “legendary” rather than “mythical,” for legend is based on historical events, elaborated admittedly out of recognition, but real nonetheless. The Ramlila play cycles of northern India were a similar mixture of myth and history, and provided for the Hindus the same sort of cultural heritage that Greek myths did for classical Greece. An extreme example are the history-plays of Shakespeare, in particular his Richard III, which was inspired by the Tudor propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting the last of the Plantagenets. Finally humans enjoy both acting in and watching performances. Aristotle was right to insist that mimēsis is both innate to humanity and the source of natural pleasure. We watch plays because they give us the pleasure of watching a story-line unfold, an engagement with the characters, and a satisfying emotional experience.

Another crucial term is “theater.” Thea- in Greek means “observe,” “watch,” and while we tend to speak of an “audience” and an “auditorium” (from the Latin audire, “to hear”), the ancients talked of “spectators,” and the “watching-place.” The noun theatron (“theater”) refers both to the physical area where the plays were staged, more specifically to the area on the hillside occupied by the spectators, and also to the spectators themselves, much as “house” today can refer to the theater building and to the audience in that building. Comedians were fond of breaking the dramatic illusion and often refer openly to theatai (“watchers”) or theōmenoi (“those watching”).

Modern academic discussions make a distinction between the study of “drama” and “theater.” A university course or a textbook on “drama” tends to concentrate more on the words of the text that is performed or read. Dramatic critics approach the plays as literature and subject them to various sorts of literary theory, and often run the risk of losing the visual aspect of performance in an attempt to “understand” or elucidate the “meaning” of the text. The reader becomes as important as the watcher, if not more so. Greek drama slips easily into a course on ancient literature or world drama, in which similar principles of literary criticism can be applied to all such texts.

But the modern study of “theater” goes beyond the basic text as staged or read and has developed a complex theoretical approach that some text-based students find daunting and at time impenetrable. Fortier writes well here:

Theater is performance, though often the performance of a dramatic text, and entails not only words but space, actors, props, audience, and the complex relations … Theater, of necessity, involves both doing and seeing, practice and contemplation. Moreover, the word “theory” comes from the same root as “theater.” Theater and theory are both contemplative pursuits, although theater has a practical and a sensuous side which contemplation should not be allowed to overwhelm.*

The study of “theater” will concern itself with the experience of producing and watching drama, before, during, and after the actual performance of the text itself. Theatrical critics want to know about the social assumptions and experiences of organizers, authors, performers, judges, and spectators. In classical Athens plays were performed on a public occasion, supported from the state treasury, in a theater placed next to the shrine of a god and as part of a festival of that god, in broad daylight where spectators would be conscious of far more than the performance unfolding below – of the city and country around them and of their own existence as spectators.

Ours is meant to be a guide to Greek drama, rather than to Greek theater. Our principal concern will be the texts themselves and their authors and, although such an approach may be somewhat out of date, the intentions of the authors themselves. But we do not want to lose sight of the practical elements that Fortier speaks of, especially the visual spectacle that accompanied the enactment of the recited text, for a picture is worth a thousand words, and if we could witness an ancient production, we would learn incalculably more about what the author was doing and how this was received by his original “house.” Knowing the conventions of the ancient theater assists also with understanding why certain scenes are written the way they are, why characters must leave and enter when they do, why crucial events are narrated rather than depicted.

Drama and the poets

Homer (eighth century) stands not just at the beginning of Greek poetry, but of Western literature as we know it. His two heroic epics, Iliad (about Achilles, the Greek hero of the Trojan War) and Odyssey (the return of Odysseus [Ulysses] from that war), did much to establish the familiar versions of the myths about both gods and men. Homer is the great poet of classical Greece, and his epics, along with what we call the “epic cycle” – lost poems, certainly later than Homer, that completed the story of the Trojan War, as well as another epic cycle relating the events at Thebes – formed the backdrop to so much later Greek literature, especially for the dramatists. Much of the plots, characters, and language come from Homer – Aeschylus is described as serving up “slices from the banquet of Homer” – and the dramatic critic needs always to keep one eye on Homer, to see what use the poets are making of his seminal material. For example, Homer created a brilliantly whole and appealing, if somewhat unconventional, character in his Odysseus, but for the dramatists of the fifth century Odysseus becomes a one-sided figure: the paragon of clever talk and deceit, the evil counselor, and in one instance (Sophokles' Ajax) the embodiment of a new and enlightened sort of heroism. Homer's Achilles is one of the great examples of the truly “tragic” hero, a man whose pursuit of honor causes the death of his dearest friend and ultimately his own doom, but when he appears in Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis, we see an ineffectual youth, full of sound and fury, and unable to rescue the damsel in distress.

Of the surviving thirty-three plays attributed to the tragedians, only two dramatize material from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (Euripides' satyr-drama Cyclops [Odyssey 9] and Rhesos of doubtful authenticity [Iliad 10]), but we do know of several lost plays that also used Homeric material. Homer may be three centuries earlier than the tragedians of the fifth century, but his influence upon them was crucial. Homer himself was looking back to an earlier age, what we call the late Bronze Age (1500–1100), a tradition which he passed on to the dramatists. Both Homer and the tragedians are depicting people and stories not of their own time, but of an earlier idealized age of heroes.

In the seventh and sixth centuries heroic epic began to yield to choral poetry (often called “lyric,” from its accompaniment by the lyre). These were poems intended to be sung, usually by large choruses in a public setting. Particularly important for the study of drama are the grand poets Stesichoros (ca. 600), Bacchylides (career: 510–450), and Pindar (career: 498–440s), who took the traditional tales from myth and epic and retold them in smaller portions, consciously reworking the material that they had inherited. They used a different meter from Homer, not the epic hexameter chanted by a single bard, but elaborate “lyric” meters, sung by large choruses. No work by Stesichoros has survived intact, but we know he wrote poem on the Theban story, one of tragedy's favorite themes; an Oresteia, containing significant points of contact with Aeschylus' Oresteia; and a version of the story of Helen that Euripides will take up wholesale in his Helen. Poem 16 by Bacchylides tells the story of Herakles' death at the hands of his wife, much as Sophokles dramatizes the story in his Trachinian Women, and it is not clear whether Bacchylides' poem or Sophokles' tragedy is the earlier work. Pindar in Pythian 11 (474) will anticipate Aeschylus' Agamemnon (458) by presenting Klytaimestra's various motives for killing her husband.

Why Athens?

Most, if not all, of the plays we have were originally written and performed at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries. Thus much of our study will be centered upon Athens, although theaters and dramatic performances were not exclusive to Athens. Argos had a reasonably sized theater in the fifth century, while at Syracuse, the greatest of the Greek states in the West, there was an elaborate theater and a tradition of comedy by the early fifth century. But it was at Athens in the late sixth and early fifth centuries that the three genres of drama were formalized as public competitions. Traditionally the first official performance of tragedy is credited to Thespis in 534, but as the records of the dramatic performances appear to begin around 501, many prefer to date the actual beginning of tragedy (and thus of Greek drama) to that later date. But whatever date one chooses (see the next chapter), one must understand the political and social background of Athens, both in the sixth century and in the high classical age of democracy.

In the sixth century Athens was not yet the leading city of the Greek world, politically, militarily, economically, or culturally, that she would become in the fifth century. The principal states of the sixth century in the Greek homeland were Sparta, Corinth, Sikyon, and Samos, and some ancient sources do record some sort of dramatic performances at Corinth and Sikyon earlier in the sixth century. Athens was an important city, but not in the same league as these others. By the early sixth century Athens had brought under her central control the region called “Attica” (map 1.1). This is a triangular peninsula roughly forty miles in length from the height of land that divides Attica from Boiotia (dominated by Thebes) to the south-eastern tip of Cape Sounion, and at its widest expanse about another forty miles. Athens itself lies roughly in the center, no more than thirty miles or so from any outlying point – the most famous distance is that from Athens to Marathon, just over twenty-six miles, covered by the runner announcing the victory at Marathon in 490 and thus the length of the modern marathon race. Attica itself was not particularly rich agriculturally – the only substantial plains lie around Athens itself and at Marathon – nor does it supply good grazing for cattle or sheep. But in the late sixth century Athens underwent an economic boom through the discovery and utilization of three products of the Attic soil: olives and olive oil, which rapidly became the best in the eastern Mediterranean; clay for pottery – Athenian vase-ware soon replaced Corinthian as the finest of the day; and silver from the mines at Laureion – the Athenian “owls” became a standard coinage of the eastern Mediterranean.

Map 1.1 Map of Attica. Italicized sites are known to have had a theater.

Coupled with this economic advance were the political developments of the late sixth century. The Greek cities of the seventh and sixth centuries experienced an uneasy mix of hereditary m...