In this fascinating and accessible book. David Wiles introduces ancient Greek theatre to students and enthusiasts interested in knowing how the plays were first performed. Theatre was a ceremony bound up with fundamental activities in classical Athenian life and Wiles explores those elements which created the theatre of the time. Actors rather than writers are the book's main concern and Wiles examines how the actor used the resources of storytelling, dance, mask, song and visual action to create a large-scale event that would shape the life of the citizen community. The book assumes rlo prior knowledge of the ancient world, and is written to answer the questions of those who want to know how the plays were performed, what they meant in their original social context, what they might mean in a nlvdet-11performance and what can be learned from and achieved by performances of Greek plays today. DAVID WILES is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. In addition to nl~merousarticles on classical drama, he has published n e Afasks of hfenander: sign and meanin'g in Greek and Roman performance (Cambridge, 1991) and Trage4 zn Athens: Pefoormance space and thtatncal meanzng (Carnbridge, 1997).He also writes on festive aspects of Tudor drama and has published The Ear& PEays of Robzn Hood (1981),Shakespeare's clown: actor and text in the Elizabethan plavhouse (Cambridge. 1987) and Shakespeare's almanac: 'A illidsummer Night's Dream: marriage and the Elizabethan calendar (1993).He has contributed a chapter on Roman and medieval drama to the Oxford Illustrated H~toryof nzeatre (1995). GREEK THEATRE PERFORMANCE An Introduction DAVID WILES CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS P U B L I S H E D B Y THE P R E S S S Y N D I C A T E O F T H E U N I V E R b l l Y O F (:AMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trurnpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom C A M B R I D G E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cn2 mu, UK 40 West 20th Street, New Ynrk, h~ IVOII-4211.USA lo Stamford Road, Oakleigh, VIC 3166,Australia Ruiz de ,Uarcon 13,28014 Madrid, Spain Dock Housc, The Waterfront, Capc Town 8001, South Africa 0Cambridge University Press 2000 The book is in copyright. Subject to Etatutor). exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may takr place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2000 %, Reprinted 2001 Printed in the [Jnited Kingdom at thc University Press. Cambridge Typeset in Baskerville 11/12.5pt [CE] A catalogue re(.ordjir this book Is availablefrom [heBntbh Library Librap oJCongrw Cataloguin,: In Publicat~ondata Wiles. David. Greek theatre performance: an introduction / by Uavid Wiles. p. cm. Includes index. rsBN o 521 64027 x (hardback)- ISBN o 521 64857 2 (paperback) 1. Theatrr - Greece --Production and direction - History. 2 . Greek drama - Histo~yand rritirism. 3. Theatre - Greece - History. I. Title. ~ ~ 3 2 0 1 . ~ 5 32000 792'.0938 - d c z ~ 99-043723 ISBN o 521 64027 x hardback lsnN o 521 64857 2 paperback List of illustrations Acknowledgements Note on the text Introduction I Myth 2 Ritual 3 Politics 4 Gender 5 Space 6 The prrformer 7 The writer 8 Reception Chronology Notes Further reading Index Contenis page vi x Illustrations Illustrations PLATES Orestes and Electra in ?heOresteia, directed by Page 46 Karolos Kourz, 1982.(Photo: Argyropoulos.) Silhouettes of the Furies on the roof of the house at 72 the start ofAgamenznon: from ?he Oresteia, directed by Silviu Purcarete. Limoges, 1996. (Photo: G. Lewis. Courtesy of Sharon Kean Associates.) Maenads worshipping Dionysos. (Photo: Soprintendenza 79 archaeologica di Napoli. Museo Nazionale, Naples, 2419). Aristophanes, Women at the Ihesmophoria. A relative of 82 Euripides disguised as a woman holds as hostage a baby which turns out to be a wineskin. Parody of a scene from Euripides, Telephus. (Photo: K. Oehrlein. Martin von Wagner Museum, Universitat Wiirzburg.) Dancers from the chorus of Iphigeneia in Aulis: the first 87 part of LesAtrides. (Photo: Martine Franck. Magnum.) The restored theatre at Epidaurus. (Photo: G. Wiles.) 103 The relationship of actor and chorus: exclusion. "37 Euripides, Electra, directed by Costas Tsianos for the Thessaliko Theatro, with L. Korniordou as Electra. 1989.(Photo: courtesy of Costas Tsianos.) The relationship of mask and body. Classical masks I I I designed and made by Thanos Vovolis, used in a production of 7he Dibbuk. Stockholm, 1994.(Photo: Thanos Vovolis.) The power of thc doorway. Euripides, Electra, directed 119 by Costas Tsianos. 1989 (Photo: courtesy of Costas Tsianos.) The command position in the centre of the circle. 121 K. Paxinou in the role of Electra. Sophocles, Electra, directed by D. Rondiris in 1938,was the first modern production at Epidaurus. (Photo: courtesy of the Theatre Museum, Athens.) The 'Pronomos' vase. (Photo: Soprintende~~za 129 archaeologica di Napoli. Museo Nazionale, Naples 3240.) Dressing-room scene: a mosaic from Pompeii. (Photo: 132 Soprintendenza archaeologica di Napoli. Museo Nazionale, Naples 9986.) G. Lazanis as Dikaiopolis sitting in the Assembly: I5O Aristophanes, Acharnians, directed by Karolos Koun, with masks by Dionysis Fotopoulos. Athens, 1976.(Photo: Argyropoulos.) Masks by Thanos Vovolis for the chorus in Aeschylus, 152 Suppliants: Epidaurus, 1994. (Photo: Lina Fange. Courtesy of Thanos Vovolis.) Name vase of the Choregos painter: about 350 BC. '57 Apulian Red-figured bell krater. Terracotta, height 14%inches. (Photo: Bruce White.J. Paul Getty hiluseum, Malibu, California.) 'The 'Oedipus' vase: figures on a stage wearing tragic 158 costume but not masks. About 330 BC. (Photo: E. W. Handley. Institute of Classical Studies Photographic Archive.) Oedipus enters with a blindfold to signify bloodstained 163 eyes, in a tableau modelled on the pediment of a temple. From the first production of a Greek play in the People's Republic of China: Oedipus, directed by Luo Jinlin and Du Haiou. Central Academy of Drama, Peking, 1986.(Photo: courtesy of LuoJin Lin.) Prometheus: 1927.(Photo: courtesy of the European 184 Cultural Centre of Delphi. Sikelianos Museum.) 10the cow-woman pursued by Zeus in the 1927 '87 Prometheus. (Photo: courtesy of the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. Sikelianos Museum.) FIGURES Dionysos in I h e Frogs wearing the lion skin of page 9 Elerakles. The slave Xanthias carries his baggage. From a vase of about 375-350 BC. A rhapsode reciting Homer at the Panathenaia, watched 16 ... Vlll Illustrations by a rival in the competition. From an oiljar of about 510 BC. A chorus of women lamenting a death. Tomb painting from Ruvo. A half-chorus of six men dancing in front of a tomb, probably to raise a ghost. Athenian wine mixing bowl of about 490 BC. Brecht's Antigone (1948).Antigone after her arrest confronts Creon and the chorus. The male Athenian audience. Some mature men and a youth admire a young acrobat at the Panathenaian festival. Late 500s BC. Map of the world at the start of the classical period, based on Hecataeus' map of 500 BC. Map of Greece showing the major settings of Greek plays. Map of Athens at the end of the classical period, showing major public buildings. The Theatre of Dionysos, after the building of the Stoa at the end of the classical period. The multipurpose performance space at Thorikos in the classical period. The crowd of suppliants approaches Oedipus in Max Reinhardt's production in the Zircus Schumann, Berlin. The theatre of Athens in relation to its environment: from a coin of the Roman period. The Theatre of Dionysos, after the rebuilding by Lycurgus in about 330 BC. An early portrayal of actor/leader and chorus. Vase of the late 700s from Argos. A stage tradition records that the characters of Superior Argument and Inferior Argument in Aristophanes, Clouds, were played by fighting cocks in a cage. This vase from the classical period may depict the contest between those figures. Characteristic dance poses of tragedy in about 450 BC. The interior made exterior: in Ninagawa's production Medea and the chorus draw red ribbons from their mouths in a sign of pain taken fromJapanese puppet theatre. .&fedea,409ff. Tjl Illustrations 19 The opening scene of Oedipus the King in 1585,from a 181 fresco in the theatre at Vicenza. noa-c Electra: 1966,1971, 1986. '93-4 Most of the drawings are taken from photographs. A few are adapted and modified from modern drawings: figure 6 after Dictionnaire des antiquitir; figure 11 after Richard Leacroft; figure 12 after Emil Orlik; figure 14 after George Izenour; and figure 2 0 after Yannis Kokkos. Acknowledgements Note on the text I am grateful to those who have commented on parts of this book in draft form. Richard Seaford offered advice on five of the chapters. Colleagues at Royal Holloway have read shorter sections: Lene Rubinstein (who gave invaluable help on the subject of Athenian politics),Jacky Bratton, Richard Cave, Richard Hawley, Dan Rebellato, and Rosalind Thomas. I have learned much from my students, and it is their questions which I have tried to answer in this book. Eugenia Arsenis helped in obtaining photographs from Greece, and I am also grateful to Eric Handley, Costas Tsianos and Thanos Vovolis. I have profited from reading unpublished dissertations by Katerina Arvaniti, Marina Kotzamani, Karina Mitens, and Elizabeth Papacostantinou. Vicki Cooper at Cambridge University Press has been a continuing source of encouragement and support. Gayna Wiles provided the drawings and tutored me in visual awareness. Translations in this book are my own, unless otherwise stated. There is an international system of standard page/line references for Greek texts based on the first manuscript or edition, which allows almost any academic translation to be consulted. I have given references to two useful collections of primary material in translation, though I have used my own translations in this book: ALC Ancient Literary Criticism: the principal texts in new translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford University Press, 1972) COAD Contexts of Ancient Dmma, ed. Eric Csapo and William J. Slater (University of Michigan Press, 1995) I also refer frequently to three collections of essays: M T A G Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal Naquet, Afyth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, tr. J. Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990) JV7DIVD Nothing To Do With Dionysos? Athenian drama in its social context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma Zeitlin (Princeton University Press, 1992) CCGT ?he Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragei); ed. P. E. Easterling (Cambridge University Press, 1997) Greek names are nowadays sonletimes transliterated according to the traditional Latin system (e.g. Aeschylus) and sometimes directly from the Greek (e.g.Aiskhylos).Since we do not know quite what the Greek sounded like, I have used the form that felt most familiar. I have also used the translated titles that seem most recognizable, e.g. xii Note on the text Aristophanes, Women at the irhesmophoria rather than ?hesmo~horiazousae (the Latinized Greek title) or irhe Poet and the W m e n (Penguin edition); Sophocles, Oedipus the King rather than Oedipus Qrannus (Latinized Greek), OedipusRe.x (Latin),or Oedipus [he Qrant. Introduction Does the new crntury need a new introduction to Greek theatre? Therr are good books on the market. Several are written by directors of Greek plays, who are particularly well equipped to show you how to read plays in accordance with their sole original purpose: lo make sense in performance. 'There has not been any avalanchc of new discoveries, new hard information. The ancient world has not changed ... How could it? Yet we have changed. Our assumptions are different, and our questions are different. Here are some of my own assumptions that led me to embark on this book. (I) A new r~adershiphas emerged from the new academic discipline of theatre studies. I have written supposing that the reader of this book knows nothing about ancient Greece, but has some sophistication in the analysis of performance. 1 hope that readers coming from classical studies will nevertheless find themselves interested by questions that emerge from a different academic agenda. I regard this book as an interdisciplinary study. (2) As soon as theatre studies emerged as a discipline, it became clear that no one within the discipline actually knew what 'theatre' was. Performance reaches into all areas of life and it is an arbitrary convention which dubs one activity 'theatre', another circus, a wrestling match, ajob interview. There is a danger of circularity. We know what 'theatre' and 'drama' are because we derive those words and concepts fi-om the Greeks; armed with that knowledge, we return to the Greeks and analyse their 'theatre' accordingly. I have not, in this book, assumcd that I know where theatre stops and mere 'performance' begins. I have tried to understarid tragedy and comedy as two activities within a remarkable culture that fostered many types of performance. (3) Practitioners of theatre must not claim too boldly the privilege of knowing how their artistic medium works, for Greek theatre was 2 Greek theatreperformance Introduction 3 not understood as 'art' in any recognizable modern terms. We can no longer study the history of Greek theatre in conceptual isolation. Theatre was an integral part of Athenian culture, whose values and practices differed profoundly from those of the modern west. This anthropological premise lies behind much important recent research within classical studies; it is shared, for example, by the contributors to the Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. (4) I do not believe that Greece was the cradle of my civilization because I inhabit an increasingly globalized culture. In many ways Greek civilization seems to me much closer to India or Japan, in its attitude to the harmony of mind and body for example, and its assumption that the universe is inhabited by gods and demigods. The idea that we should study Greek plays because that is how 'our' theatre began seems less and less compelling. The main reason now for studying Greek plays is the opportunity which they provide to create performances in the present. Of course, their ability to communicate today is tied to their history, and the fact that they are familiar. Geographically Greece is a place where east meets west, and it is not today a hegemonic power like the land of Shakespeare, so the drama of Greece is well placed to become a shared cultural possession, a vehicle for communication. (5) To study Greek theatre anthropologically, i.e. as a social practice, is to throw out the old separation of form and content. It is no longer good enough to think we can first study the context - i.e. the Greek world-view, the conventions of performance, the historical facts - and then move on to the plays themselves, to see what the plays are saying. The form of Greek plays is inseparable from what they meant and mean. (6) History can never be objective. As a way of establishing meaningful links between bits of data, we tell stories about the past, and those stories reflect how we see our own world. To describe the past is partly but not exclusively to describe ourselves. Theatre poses acute problems for the historian at the best of times because it is always finished and lost before anyone can put into words what it was. In order to create my personal picture of how Greek theatre was, I return unavoidably to the way Greek theatre has been performed in the twentieth century. Each modern performance embodies a new understanding of the past, and offers a new perspective. My sense of how things were in the past is informed by my sense of what theatre can do in the present, and my dreams of what it might do. The theatrical culture which I inhabit is, if not a thriving one, at least a pluralist one, with no single dominant notion of how theatre ought to be, so it is easier for me than for a scholar ahundred years ago to weigh and evaluate different possibilities, and to probe the boundaries which separate modern practices from the radically different practices of the past. (7) I share widespread contemporary embarrassment at the notion of 'great art' because I know that the aesthetic taste of one generation, class or culture is rarely shared by the next. I prefer to say that I admire Greek plays because they have so many possibilities. They can be handled as movement pieces, performance poetry or intellectual arguments. They confront themes like war, gender, democracy and the limits of materialism which seem to matter in the present. The unique qualities of Greek dramatic writing are bound up with the uniqueness of the Greek political experiment, which engaged the public as participants in rather than spectators of all public events. (8)The true authors were the Athenian public. The conflicts and perplexities of some 30,000 men were articulated through a small number of writers and a rather larger number of performers. My shortest chapter is the one devoted to the handful of Athenians who served their city as dramatic poets, for I see theatre as a collaborative process. Without the skills of the performers and the emotional commitment of the spectators, the scripts that we now read could not have been written. (9)It is an accident of history that our knowledge of Greek drama has been transmitted by words on papyrus, and not by the tomb paintings of the Egyptians, the picture writing of the Aztecs or the celluloid and magnetic tape of the twentieth century. The first half of this book is devoted to modes of performance in classical Athens: (1) the recounting of stories or 'myths'; (2) ceremonies devoted to the gods; (3) speeches designed to sway an assembly towards the speaker's point of view; and (4) everyday life, with the particular example of how gender is performed. These modes of performance shape both the form and the content of Greek drama. Since theatre is a relationship between actors and spectators at one moment in time, I consider in chapter 5 the physical basis of that relationship. Chapter 6 is perhaps the core of the book, for the live and spectacular presence of the performer distinguishes theatre and dance from other artistic media. The fact 4 WeeK toeatreperformance that theatre does not need writing is precisely what makes the writer an interesting figure to study in chapter 7. I finish by trying to unravel some of the issues that arise when performers now try to understand their theatre then. CHAPTER I Myth SUBJECT M A T T E R According to Aristotle - and we agree there - narrative is the soul of drama. (Brecht)' For the philosopher Aristotle the life-spirit of a play was its mythos - a word we can variously translate as story, plot, narrative, myth or simply an act of speaking. I shall start this analysis of Greek theatre with its storytelling - the core skill that kept an audience on the front of its wooden seats through a long day. It is sometimes stated that Greek audiences knew the stories, and knew what was fated to happen. This is misleading. The myths of classical Greece were highly malleable, and the job of the dramatist was not to reproduce myths but to recreate them. Compared with today, there was more possibility of surprise for there were no reviews, no published texts, and plays were written for a one-off performance. There is also the simple fact that good theatre relies on suspense. The expert storyteller can hold a listener who has heard the tale many times before. Take this account of a scene by Euripides: Remember how Merope in the tragedy raised her axe against her son because she mistook him for his own murderer. When she cries: 'This blow will cost you dearer than the one you gave!' what uproar she causes in the auditorium, lifting them to their feet in terror, in case she does the boy an injury before the old man can stop her.' This may be a folk memory of the first performance. More likely it describes an effect regularly reproduced after the play had become a classic known to all, thanks to the skill of the dramatist and actors, and the quality of audience involvement. 6 Greek theatreperformance Gods Thc Greek terrn myfhos covered a spectrum of meanings from a palpable falsehood to a story of deep symbolic and religious significance. The tragedians had at their disposal a stock of 'myths' or traditional story lines about gods and heroes, and a short introduction to these more-tlla11-human beings is essential. The presence of the divine can be accepted, rationalized or simply eliminated in modern performance. In 1968 Richard Schechner's adaptation of The Bacchae challenged the audience to question their humanist assumptions and accept the divine. The actor playing the god Dionysos introduced himself by giving his own name: Good evening,I see you found your seats.My name is William Finley. I was born twenty-seven years ago and two months after my birth the hospital in which I was born burned to thc ground. I've come here tonight for three important reasons. The first and most important of these is to announce my divinity. The second is to establish my rites and rituals. And the third is to be born, if you'll excuse me. During the birth ritual, Finley continued his cornmcntary: Now I noticed some untoward snickeringwhen I announced the fact that I was a god. I realize that in 1968it is hard to fathom the idea that gods walk the earth again. Howzvzr. to say that I am not a god would be the same as sayingthat this is not a theatre ...Now for those of you who believe what I just told you, that I am a god, you are going to have a terrific evening. The rest of you are in tro~blc.~ With this warning in mind, let us consider how the modern mind can relate to the Greek gods. At one extreme were the Olympians, whom we may consider the highest form of divine life, victors in a long process of natural selection, looking and behaving like humans, and residing - at least notionally - on top of Greece's highest mountain, Olympus. Then there were demons, like the Furies or Erinyes whom Aeschylus describes as black, tangled with snakes, eyes oozing blood.4 These demons were of greater antiquity than the Olympians, and lived within the earth. It was a major innovation when Aeschylus asked human actors to impersonate creatures that could scarcely be imagined in any human form. At a further level of abstraction, forces such as Ati (blind destruction), Dike (justice) and Ananke [compulsion)could be imagined as semi-personal deities. The system was fluid enough to allow Euripides, for example, to stage creatures called Death and Madness - part divinities, part allegorical symbols. There are diCTerent ways of urlderstanding the Olympians. Th,c urnplest-... . approach is biographical. Zeus, king of the gods, came to power at a certain point when he ousted the previous regime of Titans. He rules as lord of the manor alongside his wife Hera, and goes around fathering children upon the female tenants of his earthly estate. His underemployed children by different liaisons Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Athene, Aphrodite, Dionysos, Hephaistos, Hermes - quarrel amongst themselves and create chaos by dabbling in human affairs. His siblings rule lesser estates: Hades the underworld, Poseidon the sea, Demeter the cornfields, Hestia the indoor world. It follows that we can also associate the Olympians with different aspects of space. Zeus rules the skx his weapo11 is a bolt of lzhtning, and he fertilizes the female earth with rain. Artemis the huntress roams in the uncultivated wilderness. Hermes is concerned with movement across boundaries from place to place, whilst Dionysos dissolves boundarics, moving frecly from drinking partics to wild mountain tops. This spatial analysis is more satisfactory than the biographical mode because it recognizes that the Greek gods were a rqeans of describing the world and explaining it. The gods c a n also be understood as social and psychological projections. ~;&le experience is associated with a series of goddesses - Hera: the frustrations of the married state; Athene: the asexual world of domestic production; Hestia: seclusion in the home; Aphrodite: the exercise of erotic attraction; Demeter: reproduction; Artemis: the wildness of adolescence, the pain, fertility and taboos associated with menstruation. Male experience incorporates Zeus as power, Hermes as travel, Ares as fighting, Dionysos as drinking, Hephaistos as manual labour, Apollo as artistic and intellectual endeavour. Of course, male aspects impinge upon women, and vice versa. Each god has a complex series of attributes which resonate in many directions. A comparison between Apollo and Dionysos will illustrate some of these complexities. Dionysos shared Apollo's holiest shrine at Delphi, and reigned in the four winter months whilst Apollo retreated to a sunnier clime. Apollo is associated with light, thus intellectual enlightenment, and far-sighted prophecy. Dionysos the wine-god is associated with darkness, with nocturnal drinking bouts, and the loss of mental clarity in moments of collective emotion, with the loss of bourldaries around the self experienced in a crowd, and the hiding of self behind a theatrical mask. Apollo makes music with the measured chords of his lyre, whilst the instrument of Dionysos is 8 Greek theatre performance Myth the haunting double obor which can whip up wild dances. The worshippers of Apollo tend to be male, those of Dionysos more often female. In the field of performance, Apollo is responsible for epic poetry, which is to say the disciplined recitation of a classic text by a single performer. Dionysos is responsible for theatre, with its collective performance, its freedom of bodily expression, its unpredictable content, its anarchic assemblage of different verse forms, and its projection of a moral void. It is often said that there can be no such thing as a Christian tragedy. Christianity posits that God is good and does not contradict himself; hence in every moral dilemma there is ultimately a right and wrong. In Greek religion, the gods have no morality, and represent irreconcilable opposites. In Greek tragedy conflict amongst humans is often mirrored by conflict amongst the gods: for example, Artemis (chastity) opposes Aphrodite (sexual fulfilment) in the Hippobtus. These gods are powerful and have to be honoured, but they have no concern with the criteria of right and wrong. They usually like their worshippers to be pure, not physically polluted by a crime like murder, but that is not the same thing as morality, a sense developed by human beings alone. Tragedy allowed Greeks to extrapolate from the anarchy of their religion a viable moral code. Modern readers are often shocked by the cruelty or (in comedy) the ridiculousness of Greek gods, and wonder if the author responsible was an atheist or a blasphemer. This is to miss the point, for the only true crime against the Greek gods was to dishonour them by denying their power. Although modern criticism has yielded techniques for rationalizing the Greek gods, we must remember that gods are, ultimately, gods and it is their nature to resist explanation. Translators of Greek plays have a serious problem with the gods, since they are forced in some measure to standardize a host of variant names. The translator's dilemma is whether to strip much of the religious content from the text so it becomes comprehensible, or to lace the text with beautiful and exotic names that create an aura of numinous mystery Directors also have to take a stance. David Rudkin and Ron Daniels opted for rationalism in their version of the Hippobtus presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1978, a period much less sympathetic to mysticism than 1968. Rudkin argued: 'It is quite natural for man to make human form of the abstracts and intangibles he feels in his experience.' 'Thus 'Greek tragedy does not deal with mythology at all. It deals with the world.' Figure I Dionyos in 'The Frog5 wearing the lion skin of Herakles. The slave Xanthias carries his baggage. From a vase of about 375-350 BC. Rudkin arrives at a troubling paradox: 'we can only approach the original "Greek" experience of the play by expunging all that is culture-specifically Greek in it.'5 The assumption that Artemis and Aphrodite are merely aspects of psychological experience resulted in a certain quality of performance. Juliet Stevenson played both roles, a still, human presence in the middle of an intimate theatre, voicing thoughts. By contrast, Silviu Purcarete's Romanian production which visited England in 1995 offered an Artemis who paced restlessly about the stage swathed in bandages from head to toe with no eyes visible. Here was a figure that could not be explained in any rational terms, barely human, with a menace that suggested the power of a totalitarian regime.6 Heroes Whilst gods hover on the margins of Greek tragedy, the plots focus upon heroes, men and women of a distant time that can neither be Greek theatrefiefomance called myth nor history. 'The Greeks knew that the heroes existed not only from innumerable tales, but also because they could see the vestiges of their palaces built of gigantic boulders, and the grave mounds beneath which they were buried. It was felt that such ancestors could exert some power upon their descendants, so heroes were often worshipped at these graves. The difference between heroes and gods was that gods live for ever. Euripides in his play Orestes shows Apollo transforming Helen of Troy at death into a star - but this is not the same thing as living forever, for as a star Helen can no longer intervene in human affairs. The unique instance of a hero who successfully became a god is Herakles. As a hero, this man of incomparable strength is at the centre of two surviving plays; as a god, he makes a brief appearance in the resolution of Philoctetes, and in Alcestis he straddles both categories, fighting a god in order to save the heroine. The plays that survive are dominated by three story cycles. (I) The war against Troy: two brothers, Agamemnon, king of Argos and Menelaus, king of Sparta, lead a Greek expedition to Troy on the Turkish coast, where they fight to recapture Helen, wife of Rlenelaus. After a siege of ten years, the Greeks destroy the city amidst scenes of much brutality. (2) The Orestes story: the same Agarnemnon returns to the city of Argos, where his wife Clytaemnestra has taken up with another man. Clytaemnestra murders her husband in his bath, and in punishment is murdered by her vengeful son Orestes, who is aided and abetted by her daughter Electra. (3) The Oedipus story: in the city of Thebes Oedipus, having unknowingly killed his father, unknowingly fathers four children upon his mother. The curse of Oedipus destroys the next generation. His two sons fall out, and one leads an army from Argos to lay siege to Thebes, where the pair kill each other in single combat. These three story cycles, containing two wars and every permutation of intrafamilial conflict, provided the material for hundreds of plays. There were always new points of view to be found, new shifts of sympathy, new interpretations of motive, and new moral dilemmas. Although other story cycles were used - cycles associated with figures like Herakles, Theseus founder of Athens, Cadmus founder of Thebes and Jason the Argonaut, the number of stories was finite. Dramatists kept returning to the same core narratives. The dramatists found infinite variety in these stories through superimposing the present upon the template of the past. In theory the plays are set in a distant bronze age milieu, but the characters inhabit the mental universe of the audience, and their values are substantially those of the democratic ~eriod.We might compare the way Shakespeare set his history plays in the feudal era, but used them to discuss an Elizabethan regime. An extreme example of this double-time-scale is provided by Euripides' Orestes. In earlier tellings of the story, Orestes killed his mother in pursuance of the unwritten laws of vendetta, but in Euripides' play Orestes is castigated for not referring the matter to a democratic law court. A modern society based upon the rule of law is superimposed upon an ancient society based upon codes of honour. In more subtle ways, all Greek tragedies observed the same principle, refracting the past through the present to make old stories generate an infinite number of new meanings. The first tragedies about which we know anything useful dealt with recent history: the great wars in which the united Greeks fought off the Persians. Aeschylus' Persians survives, depicting how news of final defeat was brought to the Persian court. Another early tragedian wrote a play about genocide in the Greek city of Miletus. The audience wept, and the author was fined for 'reminding them of a disaster which touched them so closely'.' Empathy was all too easy when the Athenians lay under the same Persian threat, and tears did not fortify the spirit of resistance. Mythic subject matter was not a residue of old tradition, but was introduced into tragedy as a means of generating critical distance, so issues of the moment could be turned into issues of principle. By transferring immediate political hopes and fears to the world of myth, tragedians encouraged their audience to judge as well as to feel. Or rather, to feel fram~ more than one point of view, with tears born of sympathy, not empathy. MYTH AS P E R F O R M A N C E The Greek tragedies that we possess were, so far as we know, written for the city of Athens, and date from the years 472 BC (the performance of Aeschylus' Persians) to 406 BC when Sophocles and Euripides died8 These dates fall close to two major political turning points, the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks in 479 and the fall of Athens to Sparta in 404. For convenience of reference, I shall refer to this as the 'classical' period. I 4 Greek theatreperfoonnance beat their rhythms. A dance of the kind which we see in Bacchae would have become monotonous if performed twenty times, and it seems that many different myths were recounted under the pressure of pleasing a panel of amateur judges. The proverbial phrase 'Nothing to do with Dionysos!' emerged in response to the fact that stories sung and danced in honour of this god strayed outside his own cycle of myths. Epic The recitation of epic poems was an old performance art that continued to flourish during the classical period. Homer's Iliad dealt with the siege of Troy, and events that stemmed from the anger of Achilles, the most charismatic warrior in the Greek army. Homer's Odyssey dealt with the return of the Greek warrior Odysseus to his island home after Troy had fallen. The subject matter of the Iliad gave it special cultural importance, for numerous Greek states sent contingents to the Asian city of Troy, and the Iliad thus opened up questions about collective Greek identity. Odysseus served as a Greek everyman thanks partly to the fact that he came from an island of no political significance. Set down in writing two or three centuries before the classical period, Homer's poems were not a bible, but helped to fix a collective understanding of the gods. The Greek gods were worshipped under many titles in many different sanctuaries, and different statues embodied different visual images, but Homer implied that behind these local practices lay in each case a single figure of human appearance. A goddess called Aphrodite, for example, emerged from the poems with distinctive physical features (golden hair) and a distinctive psychological character. Even here, though, the Greeks had to balance Homer against another epic poet, Hesiod, who provided Aphrodite with a quite different ancestry. For Homer, she is the daughter of Zeus; for Hesiod she is born from the semen of Zeus' grandfather, the sky-god. Homer appears to construct a self-portrait when he depicts the blind bard Demodokos singing to the lyre in a royal court where Odysseus is being entertained. Outdoors, the bard sings another tale of the gods whilst athletic young men interpret his story in dance." However, these pictures belong to an earlier society, and have little bearing on the urbanized classical world, where a 'rhapsode' performed competitively before a huge public audience. The rhapsode stood on a platform, with a rod in his hand to give him presence and prevent the use of gesture. Everything turned upon the unaccompanied voice. Plato has left us a vivid portrait of a professional rhapsode returning victorious from a competition in honour of the god Asclepius, ambitious to win in the Panathenaia, Athens' greatest festival held in honour of the city's patron Athene (see p. 153 below).13 Homeric recitation was a centrepiece of the festival, perhaps because Homer belonged to all the Greeks and Athens wanted to make a statement about cultural supremacy. 111the later classical period, performance probably took place in the Odeon, a hall next to the theatre where some 6,000 people could sit and listen, shaded from the summer sun, though some could not see for the pillars. The competitors had to have the complete text of both poems committed to memory, and had to take up at whatever point the previous competitor in random sequence left off. It is likely that the present form of the poems, each divided into twenty-four books, derives from the Panathenaic contest. In addition to vocal skills and the ability to create suspense in an audience that knew the text intimately, the rhapsode also needed skills of character building, for much of Homer's text takes the form of direct speech. The rhapsode had somehow to assume the character of the person speaking. Homer was seen as a founding father of tragedy.14 The tragedians drew from his work a distinctive milieu: a heroic world in which gods from time to time reveal themselves to mortals, an aristocratic society unlike the present and thus ripe for challenge. The horror and glory of war collide in Homer, but enough glory remains for dramatists to question his vision. Although Greeks triumph over Asiatics in Homer, they do so through greater cunning and a higher level of divine support, but not superior moral virtues. Homer thus prepared the way for tragedy where rights and wrongs are evenly divided. The tragedians also learned from Homer the technique of compressing action into a narrow timeframe, for much of the Iliad is packed into four days. They learned the art of constructing dramatic situations, but for the most part avoided using Homer's actual stories. Though Homer's text was not sacred, his interpretation of events was too powerful to meddle with, and the playwrights drew most of their material from a corpus of lesser poems, all now vanished, dealing with the Trojan war, Herakles, Oedipus and the city of Thebes. Here dramatists could tinker freely with contexts, Greek theatre performance Figure 2 A rhapsode reciting Homer at the Panathenaia, watched by a rival in the competition. From an oiljar of about 510 BC. motives and the order of events, creating a new interpretation of the past that would carry as much authority as the older account. The convention of the 'messenger speech' owes much to the art of the rhapsode. At the climax of almost every Greek tragedy, a single speaker's voice describes a violent death: how Oedipus blinds himself, Hippolytus is killed by a bull that charges from the sea, or Pentheus torn apart on the mountain by his female relatives. These speeches are not a sign that tragedy lacked enough visual resources; rather, they were an opportunity for the actor to display an ancient skill. Messenger speeches have great emotional power. Having accepted a certain storyline, having visualized certain characters, the spectator was forced by words alone to imagine the unimaginable. L@ amidst myth The phrase 'a forest of myths' has been coined to evoke the world of the classical Greeks.I5 Images from myth met the eye on personal jewellery, on drinking cups, on statues in the street, and on wall paintings in the market place. Myths were associated with every form of ceremony. Roland Barthes has used the term 'mythologies' to evoke the complex of messages emanating from television, film, magazines, posters and cookery books in French bourgeois culture.16 The Greeks were subject to the same kind of saturation, and life outside the parameters of myth was inconceivable. In what sense, then, did the Greeks 'believe' in their myths? We could dismiss the question as irrelevant. People whose perceptions of life today are shaped by Hollywood do not in any meaningful sense believe in Hollywood. Yet there are differences between then and now. Greek myths told of heroes whose graves were physically present. The historical notion that there was once a war against Troy and a king of Thebes called Oedipus lay beyond dispute. It was in relation to the gods that the question of belief became sensitive. Plato is a helpful guide to Athenian opinion. Here is part of a lecture that he imagined himself giving to a hot-headed young atheist: Neither you nor your friends are the first to have held this view of the gods. The disease is a constant, though not the number of sufferers. I've met a great many. Let me assure you that no one convinced early in life that gods don't exist has ever retained that belief into old age. Two feelings about religion can hold their grip, however, not frequently but often enough: first, the gods do exist but are indifferent to human affairs; and second, the gods do indeed care and in a moment can be won over by our sacrifices and prayers.l 7 Plato sketches out a range of contemporary positions, from atheism to superstition or an agnostic belief in gods who never intervene, and he has to look back to Minoan Crete in the heroic age to find a period of religious consensus.18 Plato's own view was a revisionist one. He was a man of deep religious sensibility,but believed the gods were fundamentally good, and thus that much of Homer and traditional mythology ought to be abandoned. Tragedy would also have to be censored. He quotes, for example, one of Aeschylus' plays in which a sea-goddess laments the death of her son Achilles at Troy, declaring that Apollo sang a song of blessing on her child, and then 18 Greek theatreperformance Myth broke his word by causing her son's death. 'If a poet says this sort of thing about the gods,' declares Plato, 'we shall be angry and refuse to let hinl produce his play; nor shall we allow it to be used to educate our children.'lg The logic of Plato's argument became notorious, namely that tragedy and comedy have no place in an ideal society. In the classical period when Plato grew up, every Greek intellectual was an expert in deconstructing myth. Back in 530 BC ~ e n o ~ h a n e swas already declaiming in Homeric style poems which stated that Homer's gods were pure fiction. If horses could paint, Xenophanes argued, they would paint the gods as horses, and cattle would paint the gods as cattle. A gulf became increasingly pronounced between the intelligentsia and ordinary citizens. For the benefit of a mass audience, Aristophanes' play The Clouds mocked the activities of free-thinking intellectuals. The philosopher Socrates was seen in the play suspended in a basket trying to view the sky more closely, having determined to worship the clouds - which are of course a nice symbol of mental vacuity. Many years later, because he had associated himself with elitist politicians, the real Socrates was brought to trial for his unorthodox religious teachings and put to death. We must avoid the trap of supposing that 'the Greeks' all shared the same core of beliefs. They did not - and that is why the plays:; so interesting. Take the example of Sophocles' Antigone: when the chorus sang of all that humans had achieved in navigation, agriculture, hunting, fishing and housing, many would have sensed a- - humanist message, a message which the play goes on to question. In the play, Antigone buries her brother in defiance of a decree that a traitor must remain unburied. Because Antigone seems to be the individual pitted against the state, following her heart rather than her head, it is rather easy for modern readers and directors to spring to the assumption that Antigone is right and her uncle Creon wrong. The play seems to demonstrate, to a consciousness informed by Christianity, that the gods, i.e. right, are on Antigone's side. In the classical period things were much more complicated. There were several decrees at the time refusing burial to traitors. Plato, who was a religious man but also an enthusiast for state control, had no qualms in urging that a religious fraudster should be cast over the border unburied." Sophocles glosses over the crucial question of borders, so the play did not turn on a technicality but was open to multiple interpretations. His plays drew their creative energy from the fact that there was no consensus within his audience about the most fundamental religious issues. MAKING MYTHS Variant versions Greek myths were endlessly malleable. The Athenians, for example, -- gradually transformed Theseus into their national hero:21 the Theseus who saved Athenian girls from the minotaur was reshaped to become the founder of a centralized democratic regime. The purpose of such myth-making was to validate political changes, and make them harder for a later generation to reverse. A famous in Athens represented Theseus rising from the earth to participate in the battle of Marathon. A line was slipped into the still malleable text of the Odyss91 in order that Theseus should appear on a roll-call of the great that all Greece respected. At the start of the classical period a politician called Kimon, who liked to associate himself with Theseus, wanted to colonize the island of Skyros and remove its native population. Having advertised the myth that Theseus was killed on Skyros, he duly excavated the bones of a longdead warrior of huge build, and ceremoniously brought them back to Athens. The tragedians were part of this ~ n - ~ o i n gprocess of mythmagrig.-- An orator remarks: 'Who does not know, who has not heard from the tragic teachers at the Dionysia about the misfortunes of Adrastus at ~hebes?'" The story in question told of how Adrastus, king of Argos, needed the help of Athens in order to recover his war dead. Increasingly the main way in which Athenians absorbed myths in the classical period was through the performance of tragedy. When written words carried no authority, the poet was seen to be a guru, the personal embodiment of knowledge. Aeschylus wrote a tragedy in which Theseus persuaded the Thebans to hand over the bodies to Adrastus, and allowed the Argive commanders to be buried on Athenian soil. Aeschylus' Theseus embodied the ideal of peace and reconciliation. In the surviving version by Euripides, Theseus goes to war for the bodies, which are finally sent home amidst fierce oaths about what will happen to Argos if it reneges on its debt to Athens. Athens at the time of Euripides' play was at war 20 Greek theatre perfoormance with Thebes, and Argos had reneged or was about to renege on its treaty with Athens.23In a new political context, the myth had to be rewritten, validating Athens' policies in a new situation. ~uri