Christopher Pelling (Ed.) - Greek Tragedy and The Historian - Oxford University Press, USA (1997)

Greek Tragedy and
the Historian
<>
EDITED BY
Christopher Pelling
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

Greek Tragedy and
the Historian
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ISBN 0-19-814987-5
Jacket illustration: actor and mask, 1832, Martin

Von Wagner Museum, Universitat Wuzburg.
(Photo: K. Oehrlein)
Preface
It was a hot summer afternoon in 1970. I was being interviewed for an award in
ancient history, after writing a long-extraordinarily long, given the nature of
the subject-essay on fifth-century Boeotian politics. One of the interviewers
was A. N. Sherwin-White: he asked, 'Might there be another type of source
which you've neglected?'-more than a hint of nonne there. He meant, of
course, tragedy; and the next question was, 'What are the difficulties of using
tragedy as evidence?' Whatever I said could easily be decoded as 'Search me';
but it remains a good question twenty-five years later, and various approaches
to answering it are offered by the contributors to this volume.
Those twenty-five years have turned it into a different, and even better,
question. 1 One development has been a gathering awareness of the centrality of
tragedy to Athenian polis-experience: tragedy was no mere diversion, but a
focal part of being a citizen. Another has been a shift of interest from author to
audience, with critics less concerned to use the plays to reconstruct the religious
or political views of Sophocles, but more ready to explore how they might
illuminate the mentality of those who heard them: in other words, any light
tends to be shed on 15,000 minds rather than on one. A third development has
made the approach more difficult and delicate, the readiness to regard tragedy
as a problematizing and exploratory genre, one which gives the audiences as
many moral challenges as moral answers; generalizations about 'what the
audience thought' about issues can easily seem facile and flat, as we increas-
ingly posit an audience sensitive to moral complexities, and ready to question
and test its own assumptions.
Unsurprisingly, this is not the first collection stimulated by these develop-
ments; particularly useful and influential have been Nothing to do with
Dionysos?, edited by Winkler and Zeitlin in I990, and Tragedy, Comedy, and the
Polis, edited by Sommerstein, Halliwell, Henderson, and Zimmermann in I993.
Now we also have History, Tragedy, Theory, edited by Goff in I995, which
appeared too recently for any of the contributors to take it into account. If there
is anything distinctive about the present volume's emphasis, it is captured by
the title of the 1992 Oxford seminar series on which it is based: 'Tragedy and
the historian: methods and pitfalls'. That series was given for ancient historians
rather than literary critics, though in the hope that it might do something to
I For some thought-provoking reflections on these shifts in critical tendency, see now Taplin
(1995).
VI Preface
bond the two groups. Contributors were encouraged to dwell, not merely on the
value of historical approaches for illuminating the plays, but also on the
methodological difficulties of using them as a historical 'source' -or better, for
'source' may carry misleading implications, of drawing whatever illumination
they might offer to a historian of fifth-century Attic society.
The editorial process was greatly eased by my tenure of a research grant
from the Leverhulme Trust, and I am most grateful to the Trust for their
support. I also thank Simon Goldhill, Judith Mossman, and Oliver Taplin for
very helpful advice, and Hilary O'Shea for her unfailing support. The con-
tributors have collaborated with good humour and harmony. Among them, a
special word is due to Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood. She and I were College
colleagues at the time, and jointly ran the original seminar series; and I have
constantly benefited from her scholarship and insight during the editing, and
indeed during five years of convivial comradeship.
C.B.R.P.
Uni'versity College, Oxford
January 1996
Contents
List of Plates IX
Abbreviations x
Contributors Xl
I. Aeschylus' Persae and History

CHRISTOPHER PELLING I
2. Constructing the Heroic

P. E. EASTERUNG 21
3. Tragic Filters for History: Euripides' Supplices and Sophocles'

Philoctetes
A. M. BOWIE 39
4. The Theatre Audience, the Demos, and the Suppliants of Aeschylus

ALAN H. SOMMERSTEIN
5. Leading th,; Tragic Khoros: Tragic Prestige in the Democratic City

PETER WILSON 81
6. The Place and Status of Foreigners in Athenian Tragedy

PIERRE VIDAL-NAQUET 109
7. Between P<lblic and Private: Tragedy and Athenian Experience of

Rhetoric
STEPHEN ::iALLIWELL 121
8. Gods Cruel and Kind: Tragic and Civic Theology

ROBERT PARKER 143
9. Tragedy and Religion: Constructs and Readings

CHRISTIANE SOURVINOU-INWOOD 161
10. The Ecstasy and the Tragedy: Varieties of Religious Experience in

Art, Drama, and Society
ROBIN OSBORNE
VI11 Contents
II. Conclusion
Tragedy as Evidence 2I3
Tragedy and Ideology 224
CHRISTOPHER PELLING
References 237
Index of Passages Cited 257
General Index 26 5
List of Plates
1. ABV 76.1, Florence 4209 (detail). Courtesy of the Soprintendenza Arche-

ologica di Firenze
2. ABV 108.5, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund,
1931 (31.11.11). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art All rights
reserved
3. ABV 156.8 I, Louvre F75. Courtesy of the Musee du Louvre; photograph,
Chuzeville
4. ABL 222.27 /FD L3 1 , New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of
Samuel G. Ward, 1875 (75.2.21). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. All rights reserved
5. ABL 247·IOIFD L3 0 , Louvre MNB 2039. Courtesy of the Musee du
Louvre; photograph, Chuzeville
6a-b. ABV 504.r81FD L37, Eleusis 2409. Courtesy of the 3rd Ephoreia of
Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, Athens
7. FD L4 2 , Kerameikos, Neg. DAI Athens, Ker. 9054/9055. Courtesy of the
German Archaeological Institute, Athens
8. FD LI6, Sion, Musees cantonaux, Sion; photography, H. Preisig
9a-b. ARV 2 462.48/FD LS3, Berlin F2290. Courtesy of the Antikensamlung,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz
loa-b. ARV 2 62I.341FD L4, Boston 90.155, Anonymous Gift. Courtesy of
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
II. ARVl 1I5I.2/FD LIS, Naples H2419. Courtesy of Hirmer Verlag
Munich
12. ARV 629.8, Boston 01.8083, H. L. Pierce Fund. Courtesy of the Museum
2
of Fine Arts, Boston

13. ARV 2 629.19, Boston 01.8082, E. P. Warren Collection. Courtesy of the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Ab breviations
ABL C. H. Haspels, Allie Black-Figure Lekythoi (Paris, 1936).

ABV J. D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figu1~e Vase-Painte1"S (Oxford, 1956)
ARV2 J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd edn., 2 vals.
(Oxford, 1963)
CEGi P. A. Hansen, Cannina epigraphica graeca saeculorum VIII- V
A.ehr.N. (Berlin and New York, 1983)
CEGii P. A. Hansen, Carmina epigraphica graeca saeculi IV A.ehr.N.
(Berlin and New York, 1989)
FD P. Frontisi-Ducroux, Le Dieu-masque: Une figure du Dionysos
d 'A thenes (Paris, 199 I)
LIMCii Lexicon Iconographicum MYlhologiae Classicae, ii (Zurich and
Munich, 1984)
LSCG F. Sokolowski, Lois sacrees des cites grecques (Paris, 1969)
LSCGS F. Sokolowski, Lois sacrees des cites grecques: Supplement (Paris,
19 62 )
ML R. Meiggs and D. M. Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscrip-
tions, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1968)
Para J. D. Beazley, Paralipomena: Additions to Auic Black-Figure Vase-
Painters and Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, I971)
Contributors
ANGUS BOWIE is Lobel Fellow in Classics at The Queen's College, Oxford, and
author of The Poetic Dialect of Sappho and Alcaeus (New York, 1981) and
Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy (Cambridge, 1993).
PAT EASTERLING is Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge and a Fellow of
Newnham College. She is one of the General Editors of Cambridge Greek and
Latin Classics, to which she has· contributed a commentary on Sophocles'
Trachiniae. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, which she has edited,
is appearing at the end of 1996.
STEPHEN HALLIWELL is Professor of Greek at the University ofSt Andrews.
His publications include Aristotle's Poetics (1986), The Poetics of Aristotle:
Translation and Commentary (1987), commentaries on Books 5 (1995) and 10
(1988) of Plato's Republic, and the first volume of a new verse translation of
the plays of Aristophanes (to appear in 1997).
RCOBIN OSBORNE is Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University and
Fellow and Tutor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is author of Demos:
The Discovery of Classical Attika (Cambridge, 1985), Clnssical Landscape with
Figures: TIle Ancient Greek City and its Countryside (London, 1987), and Greece
in the Making: 1200-479BC (London, 1996).
ROBERT PARKER is Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at Oxford Univer-
sity. He has written Miasma (Oxford, 1983) and Athenian Religion: A History
(Oxford, I996).
CHRISTOPHER PELLING is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at University College,
Oxford. He is author of commentaries on Plutarch's Antony (Cambridge, 1988)
and Philopoemen-Flamininus (Milan, forthcoming), and has edited Character-
ization and Indi'liduality in Greek Literature (Oxford, 1990).
ALAN SOMMERSTEIN is Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham.
_He has edited Aeschylus' Eumenides (Cambridge, 1989) and eight of Aristo-
phanes' comedies, and is the author of Aeschylean Tragedy (Bari, 1996) and of
many articles on Greek tragedy and comedy.
CHRISTIANE SOURVINOU-INWOOD is Reader in Classics at the University of
Reading. Her last two books were 'Reading' Greek Culture (Oxford, 1991) and
'Reading' Greek Death (Oxford, 1995). In 1994 she delivered the Jackson
X11 Contributors
Lectures at Harvard, and these are to be published as Tragedy and Athenian

Religion: A Discourse of Exploration.
PIERRE VIDAL- N AQUET is Directeur d'etudes at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales and Directeur of the Centre Louis Gernet in Paris. He is
the author of many books on ancient history and also on modern history and
politics. Le Chasseur noir (1983; 3rd edn. 1991) was translated into English as
The Black Hunter (1986); Politics Ancient and Modem (1995) is a partial trans-
lation of his La Democratie grecque vue d'ailleurs, but with two new contribu-
tions. Many of his articles, along with those ofJ.-P. Vernant, are included in the
two volumes My the et Tragedie en Grece Ancienne (1972 and 1986), translated
into English as Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (1988).
PETER WILSON has taught at University College, Oxford and is now a
Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. He is writing a book on the
Athenian khoregia and a translation of four Sophoclean tragedies.
I
Aeschylus' Persae and History
CHRISTOPHER PELLING
THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS
Writing for men who had fought in the barrIe, as he himselfhad done, it was impossible
for [Aeschylus] to depart from the main outlines of known fact or even from such minor
details as a substantial part of his audience would have remembered. This was drama
concerned with the living past, in which he and his audience had been and continued to
be intimately concerned, and so the picture of recent events which the play gives must
have been substantially true to life.
Thus Podlecki, and many scholars have prefaced their discussions of Salamis
with similar statements of principle. 1
That principle is a clear one: Aeschylus could not get away with falsifying
before an audience which knew the truth: ifhe had tried, a portion (as Fornara
puts it) would not have 'appreciated the jest'.2 Yet this seems a little naive. For
one thing, fighting is a confusing business. A common soldier or sailor might
have vivid personal memories, but how much could he know of the course of
the whole battle? But the important point concerns dramatic elaboration and
stylization. Take the analogy-admittedly, by no means an exact one-of the
war-film. It was not the case that World War II veterans, watching films eight
years later, made it impossible for producers to get away with falsification:
veterans were not always impassive, but they naturally understood that art
provides only a version of reality.3 Aeschylus too provides a version of history,
one which is fashioned, stylized, and elaborated according to some generic con-
ventions and audience expectations. For, in Aeschylus' case too, we can at least
be certain that such generic expectations existed. We can tell very little of
1 Podlecki (1966), 8-9; cf. 131, citing Macan. Similarly Goodwin (1882-3), 246; Lattimore
(1943), 87; Hammond (195 6), 40; Broadhead (19 60),3 22; Fornara (1966), 5 I; Kierdorf(1966), 64,
79-80; Frost (1980), 133-4; Morrison-Coates (1986), 58; Lazenby (1988), 185. Contra, Hignett
(1963), 222. Some of these scholars' conclusions sit oddly with their premisses; thus PodIecki
(p. 141) countenances the notion that Aeschylus fabricated the Sicinnus story, and Fornara regards
the Psyttaleia episode as tendentious fiction (below, n. 31).
2 Fornara (1966), 5 I.
3 My father had worked as a prisoner of war on the Burma railway, and was certainly enraged by
the 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai. Yet that was not because it was false, but because the whole
texture was false, it was not even a version of something that could have happened. For him this was
a failure, not of truth, but of verisimilitude.
2 Christopher Pelling
Phrynichus' Sack of Miletus and Phoenissae,4 but they do demonstrate that

there were some analogies and precursors.
The difficult task is to recover these generic limits and expectations, for we
have to try and infer them from the text itself, with an inevitable danger of
circularity. Herodotus can help a little, but only a little: there is always a possib-
ility that he himself may be influenced by Aeschylus, and anyway he too has
doubtless remoulded material for his own purposes. s It· is as if we had to try and
disentangle the factual element in a war-film simply on internal evidence, and it
is immediately clear how difficult that would be.
One principle might be to operate a sliding scale of suspicion. We cannot be
certain that any particular detail is true or false; but suspicion arises most
readily when we find motifs or elements which clearly serve particular literary
purposes-the things which, artistically, fit too well. Let us take two polarities
which are important to Aeschylus' presentation, first the contrast of light and
dark, secondly that of land and sea.
First, light and dark. Here it is interesting how many of the traditional
problems of the battle centre on dawns and dusks. When did Sicinnus arrive
with his message? Before nightfall in Aeschylus (357), after nightfall in
Herodotus (8. 70. I, 75-6), and this has provoked various speculations.6 Next
dawn, battle begins; Aeschylus describes the way in which the Greek ships
'quickly' became 'clear before us' (398), and it is vital to most reconstructions
to identify where they were coming from, which headland they were coming
round. Finally, Aeschylus makes the battle, or at least the slaying, go on until
dusk (428). That is another detail that some commentators find hard to take. 7
Matters become clearer if we take into account the play's recurrent use of
imagery of light and dark, and day and night: this has been well analysed by
Kakridis. 8 Aeschylus uses the day/night division to articulate the account, and
the transitions from one to the other are strongly expressed (355- 60, 364-7,
376-9, 382-405,422-30). Day and light tend to be reserved for Greek actions,
and to suggest hope and victory: the Persians move in the dark. This combines
with a second, very natural contrast, whereby the dark is connected with
furtiveness and deception, the light with openness. Herodotus is also sensitive
to similar contrasts, but he does not develop them in quite the same way: he
4 The Sack of Miletus, traditionally but insecurely dated to 493/2: Hdt. 6. 21. 2. Phoenissae:
hypoth. Aesch. Pers. Cf. recently Roisman (1988); Hall (1989), 62-9, 73; Rosenbloom (1993). I am
unconvinced by the suggestion that the hypothesis to Persae was mistaken, and the play in question
was a different work by the same author (thUS Lloyd-Jones (I990b), 234 = (1966), 24; Taplin
(1972), 68 n. 36 and (1977), 63 n. 2); but it would not affect the present point.
s Herodotus~ knowledge of Aeschylus: cf. e.g. Lazenby (1988: 185) on verbal echoes, not all of
them plausible; the clearest example is the echo of Aesch. Pers. 728 at Hdt. 8. 68y. Herodotus' own
remoulding: for possible examples cf. pp. 3-8 below.
6 C£ e.g. Hammond (1956),51; Hignett (1963), 403-4; Burn (1984), 450; Lazenby (1988), 170
and (1993), 17 0 -1.
7 Cf. Hignett (1963),23 1, and works cited there.
8 (1975), esp. 147.
Aeschylus' Persae and History 3
does not develop the association of Greeks with day and Persians with night,
and in his scheme night marks not merely deception9 but also the nervous,
irresolute Greek discussions which punctuate the days of activity (8. 56-64- I;
70 . 1 - 2 )-
(I) Sicinnus in Aeschylus comes before night falls. He is here a 'Gre~.k', an
aviJp ~'EAA7]v (355): Plutarch makes him a Persian prisoner of war, Them. 12.4,
but even if this dubious tradition went back to Aeschylus' day one can see why
he had to be a Greek here, in a play where the contrast of Greek and Persian is
so strongly articulated. 10 As a Greek, he naturally moves in the light. But dusk is
the appropriate time for dark and dusty deeds of derring-do. ll Sicinnus
promises one sort of dark doing for the night, the furtive and dishonour able
Greek dispersal, and suggests that the Persians steal out to frustrate this; but in
fact the night turns out to cloak a very different sort of dark doing, one of
Greek deception, and the tables are turned. A mission in the light, and a (decept-
ive) promise for the dark: these are just what Aeschylus' imagery demands, just
as Herodotus' picture of a night mission in turn fits his portrayal. 12 Both
versions fit too well, and the historian would be rash to be confident of either.
(2) Next, the dawn.
Kat 7TQ.VVVXOL Sij Stli:7TAOOV Ka8iuTaaav

vawv aVaK'TES 7TavTa vavTLKov AE"Wv.
Kat vvg €XWPEL, KOV p.a>.: ~EA>':rjvwv O'TpaTOS
Kpv<paiov €K1TAOVV ovSaJLrj Ka8[o'TaTO'
ETTE[ yE" f.L€.V'TOL AEVK01TWAOS" TJf.LEpa
7Tcioav KaT€'cx€ raiav Evif>eYYiJs laEiv,
7TPWTOV /-LEV ~xti KEAaSoS' ~EAA:1}VWV 1Tdpa
fLOATT"I8ov EVq,iJfL7JUEV, op8tov S" afLQ.
d.V771"\ciAa~E V'Y/GLWTLOOS 7TETpnS" 390
1}Xw, ¢6{3oS" BE 7Tci(TL {3ap{3dpoLS" 1Tapijv
YVWJ.L7JS a7ToatP aAE [OtV· ou
ydp ws cPvyil
1TaLciv Eq,V/-LVOVv GEfLVOV ~'EAA1]VES" TOTE,
S
dAA" ES JLaX7Jv OPJ.LWV'TES" EuynJXCP 8pcioEL.

a(i.~7TLyg 8' durn 7Tciv;' EKEiv' i:1TEcPAEYEV' 395
Ev8vs OE KW7T7JS po8uioos ~VVEJLf3oAil
9 This aspect is prominent enough to discourage speculation based on 8. 76. I) the Persians
setting sail 'at midnight'. This is the climax of the secretive preparations, and midnight is the most
appropriate time. Scholars take this too literally: cf. Hammond (1956), 43 n.41 and 52; Lazenby
(1988), 171. Burn (1984: 450 and 452 n. 3) is more cautious.
10 Cf. Kakridis (1975), 153 n.27, and on the prisoner of war tradition Frost (1980), 143-4.
Herodotus' OlKETTJS 8i Kat 1Tat8aywyos . . _ TWV B£l.ttU'TOKAEOS 1Tai8wv, 8. 75- I, conceivably implies
that Sicinnus was a slave (though his later citizenship at Thespiae (ibid.) is hard to reconcile with
that); once again Aeschylus could not accommodate that version in a play where the free/slave anti-
thesis is also strong Ccf. especially 402-5).
11 Cf. Vidal-Naquet (I986a), ch. 5-
12 Sicinnus' mission belongs straightforwardly in the night in Herodotus' account, as an act of
deception (by it Themistocles deceives both Greeks and Xerxes), and as one which follows on and
frustrates the nervous Greek discussions.
€7TUtaaV aA/-L7Jv !3puxLOV €.K K€A€vfLa'TO~.

Bows BE 1TavTeS" ~aav €'Kq,avEfS" i8efv'
TO 8€~LOV fl-Ev 7TPW'TOV €V'T(lK'TwS" K€par;
7jyeiTo KOUfLt.p, BeVT€pOV 8' 0 7HiS' O'TOAOS 400
€1T€~€XWP€t, Kat 1TapiJv OJ.LOV KAV€LV
7ToAA1}v {JOr/V· {(~Q 7Taioer; ~EAA:rlvwv, l'T€
€Aev(}epOVTE 1Ta'Tpi~/, €AEU8epOUTe OE
1Taioas yvvaiKas 8€wv T€ 1TQTpcfJWV EO.."
8r}KUS 'T€ 7TPOYovwv· VUV v7TEP 7TctVTWV ciywv. "
Then all night long the captains kept their cre\vs
patrolling in the fairway, up and down,
and night wore on, and still the Grecian fleet
had made no move to slip out stealthily,
but when the white horses of day at last
came over the earth, lovely to see
first from the Greeks a sound of voices rose,
-voices of men singing; and loud and strong
rang back again out of the island rocks 39 0
Echo; and fear fell on our eastern host.
Something was wrong. These were no men in flight,
these Greeks who sang the awful Paian then,
but going out with valiant hearts to war.
Then trumpets over there set all on fire, 395
and the sea foamed, as oars together swinging
beat on the salt surface in ordered time,
and quickly, clear before us, there they were!
The right wing first, in ordered line ahead,
led forth, and after it the whole array 400
came following on; and now was to be heard
a mighty shouting: 'On, sons of the Greeks!
Set free your country, set your children free,
your wives, the temples of your fathers' gods
and ancient tombs; now they are all at stake.'
(382-405, trans. A. R. Burn)
Thus at 398 Aeschylus has the Greek ships 'quickly' becoming 'clear before us'
as day breaks: (Jow~ OE: 7TaVT€S ~aav13 €K4>av€i~ iO€fv. Some have taken this to
demonstrate that the Greek ships were moored out of sight, and various recon-
structions have them coming out from behind one obscuring promontory or
another: that is claimed as an 'essential point' by Hammond (1956: 46 and
n. 50).14 Yet surely this is all part of the picture of the spreading dawn, and there
is no reason why the ships should not already be there in Aeschylus' portrayal,
13Or, perhaps better, nuav; West (1990b), 84.
14C( Goodwin (1906: 78), 'a most important point', quoted approvingly by Pritchett (1959),
25 8; Broadhead (1960),333-4; Kierdorf(I966), 69; G. Roux (1974),76,82-3; Burn (19 84), 45 6-7;
Morrison-Coates (1986), 59.
moving forward quickly out of the gloom, terrifying as the rays spread over
them. 15 It may be the light, rather than the movement, which brings them into
sight. Notice that marvellously orchestrated move from sound (the first thing
that took the Persians by surprise, 388); through the arresting 395, aQ.A1TLY~ 0'
durfj 7TQ.VT' EKELV' €7T€cPAEY€V, 'set on fire', a striking phrase which picks up
c/>A€ywv ('burning') of the sunlight at 364; then finally to sight, with this
€K~aVEis {SELV (,clear to see'). That is virtually a ring with Et)(PEyyijS {OELV (387),
'bright to see', of the day-break which makes it all possible. Once again, it all fits
too well; the day is the Greeks' time, and they are there and ready to seize it.
Once again, too, it is incompatible with Herodotus, who has the Greeks put to
sea some time after day-break, once Themistocles has had time to encourage
them (83);16 and once again any inferences about historicity would be most
precarious.
(3) Finally, the following dusk.
¢uytj 8~ dKOOP.WS 1Taoa vauS' TJP€OO€TO,

OaaL1T€p ~oav {Jap{Japov OTpaTEvp.aTOS.
TOt o·
WOTE 8vvvovs 1] Ttv'lxBvwv {3oAov
dyaiot KW7TWV 8pavp..ao{v T' EPEI.7T{WV
€7TatOV €PpaXt'ov, ot/Lwyij 8' OJ-Loti
KWKvp..aoLv KaTEiXE 7TEAay{av nAa,
€WS K€AQ.LvDv VUKTOS ofLfL' dc/>EiAETO.
And flight broke out, all order lost; and all

our eastern ships rowed hard to get away.
But they-as men gaff tunnies or some shoal
of fish-with broken oars and bits of wreckage
smote and split heads; and shrieks and lamentations
spread with their doleful sound over the sea
till night came down, and darkness hid the sight.
[lit. 'the black eye of night']
(422-8, trans. A. R. Burn)
So the killing and the wailing continue until the black eye of night hides the
sight (428)-a most paradoxical phrase, for OJ-Lfta, 'eye', would normally
connote visibility and clarity, not darkness. Yet the paradox is suggestive, with
this 'eye' pointing to the rescuing, lightening elements: night this time comes as
a welcome relief to the Persians. They had seized it as their element twenty-four
hours earlier, but it is all so different now. Sound-words are again important
15 Thus Wheeler (1902: 137-8), arguing that the Greeks were previously concealed by 'the gray
of twilight'; cf. Lazenby (1993), 184. Pritchett (1959: 258 n. 59) thinks that this thesis depends on a
particular identification of the phases of the moon: that implies too literalist a view of Aeschylus'
historical fidelity.
16 Night, as we have seen (above, p. 2-3), is the time for Greek irresolution in Herodotus, and it
would not have fitted to have their decisive activity begin before dawn; Themistocles' encourage-
ment, elegantly restrained as it is (83. 1-2), changes the tone ready for the activity of daytime.
in this bravura description: here the sound is that of the shrieks and lamenta-
tions at 427, which the ~eye of night' takes away. Thus the interplay of sound
and light is felt at dusk just as at dawn, and another ring is complete. And can
\ve infer that the fighting really lasted all day?l7 That is certainly Aeschylus'
picture, but again it all fits too well,18 and the historian should not feel com-
fortable.
Of course, the light-dark contrast is not limited to this passage. There is an
interesting reprise of several aspects at the river Strymon (495-507), where
again the sunlight comes to the Greeks' help, melting the river as the fugitive
Persians cross. That, perhaps understandably, is not a passage which historians
have taken very seriously;19 but it is just as insecure to base any historical con-
clusions on our three earlier cases, where light and darkness have played an
equally suggestive role. Immediately we assume that there were some licences
and freedoms for the poet, it is very likely that such elaboration lay within their
limits, and the ~artistic' rather than 'historical' explanation of the details is
adequate.
Some may here object: literary texts are polysemic, and different approaches
are possible; why should the details not be both historical and dramatically
effective? We can allow Thucydides his large-scale effects-contrasts and com-
parisons of Pericles and Cleen, say, or Pericles and Alcibiades-without deny-
ing that these were historical people and historical events. Why should not
Aeschylus be doing the same here, exploiting things which were historically
accurate rather than fabricating? Is not that distinction between 'literary' and
'historical' approaches too slick?
There is some force in that, and we can certainly not infer that any of these
things are false. Take Sicinnus, for instance, and the timing of his mission. As
we saw, it could just as well be that Herodotus has delayed him, for his own
purposes. All we can say is that, if either author is falsifying, we should not be
surprised or indignant. But, for the historian, 'we cannot be sure that this is
false' is surely not enough. That does not provide secure 'evidence" any more
than a war-film gives evidence for the facts it adopts and remoulds. As soon as
the strong possibility is raised that these might be elaborating fabrjcations, they
move to the doubtful end of our sliding scale, and we must abandon them.
Let us move on to the second polarity, that of land and sea. The Persians are
a natural land power. That is underlined by the recurrent 'TO~O- and i1T1TO-
language, compounds with 'bows' and 'horses', in the sonorous register of their
names. 20 It is also reflected in the notion of 'yoking' the Hellespont, so emphas-
ized early in the play (70-1) and underlined by the recurrence of the yoking
\\lith e.g. Hignett (1963), 231; G. Roux (I974), 87 and 89; and Lazenby (1993),195.
17
We should also bear in mind (as Judith Mossman reminds me) that 'fighting all day' is a
IH
familiar epic pattern: cf. II. 2. 385,11. 279,17.384,18.209,18.453, 19.168.
19 Cf. Broadhead (1960), 138; Hignett (1963), 268.
20 TO~- 26, 30, 55. 86; later 147, 278, 556, 926; cf. Hall (1989), 85-6. [7T1T-: 26, 29, 32 , 97; later
126, 302, 996.
image: 21 the Persians' natural ploy is to link two continents, and to do so by

turning the sea into land. Here we should observe the similarity but also the
contrast with Herodotus. In Herodotus the point is Xerxes' more elaborate con-
frontation of the facts of nature, as he tries both to turn the sea into land (the
l-Iellespont) and the land into sea (Athos);22 in Aeschylus it is the Hellespont,
not Athas, which matters, as Xerxes rashly tries to extend his authority, natural
and established on land, over the recalcitrant sea, and link the two land masses
,vhich nature had divided. In the parodos thoughts of the sea provoke unease
and disquiet in the chorus's minds, and they are quite right. 23 It is then some-
thing of an irony that they stress the hoplite power of Athens at the famous
passage 235-45: that is one of several ways in which their view is slightly off-
key.24 Now the sea battle duly destroys them. Their distinctive bowmanship is
no use (278); finally they are indeed like fish out of water (424-8), killed by the
sea implements they are so ill adapted to employ.
In the main battle we clearly see the maritime ineptness of the Persians, and
t.his may explain Aeschylus' distinctive treatment of the cramping 'narrows'.
lierodotus, famously, emphasizes the topography of the straits, and the con-
sequent 'cramping' of the battle in such a narrow theatre. 25 But in Aeschylus
(4 13) the cramping is largely a result of the Persian ships fouling one another,
part of the disorder and confusion which the poet is emphasizing, and it does
not look as if the confined space is playing a significant part the Greek ships
have room to cruise around the outside (417- 18).26 It is in fact the familiar con-
trast of lumbering landsmen outmanceuvred by the natural seamen, and the
(ireeks are able to perform a version of the surrounding tactics Xerxes origin-
ally planned for the Persians (368).27 Nor has there been any question of
21 Hellespont: 70- 2, 13 1, 722. 736~ cf. 744-50,798-9. More generally: the yoking of Greece, 50
and the extended image in Atossa's dream at 181-99, esp. 191 and 196; the yoke of domination
which this catastrophe undermines,s 94; the yokings of marriage partners which are destroyed, 137
and 54 2 . Cf. Fowler (1967), 3-10; Anderson (1972), I 67 -8; Taplin ( I 977), 78; Pad uano (19 78)~ 46-
9~ 80-1, 99; Goldhill (19 88 ),19 1 ; Fisher (199 2 ), 257·
22 Cf. Pelling (199 1 ), 136-9, esp. 138 n. 73 for the comparison with Aeschylus; for Aeschylus'
reasons for concentrating on Athos, Kitto (1966: 101-2).
23 Cf. 93- 1 00 (whether that is correctly placed after 89-92 as in the manuscripts, or after 107-
14 with O. Miiller); I 15- 18 in any case continues the unease; 13-19 similarly follows thoughts of
the Hellespont. Cf. Hall (1989), 85, and more generally Anderson (1972), 171-2; lvleier (1993), 64,
67,73-5·
24 This is not to deny the continuing importance of hop lite fighting to Athenian ideology, and the
appropriateness of a contrast with the Persian bow (Goldhill (I988: 190». There is still a tension
between the expectations of both queen and chorus and the reality which swiftly emerges; just as
the queen's Persian mind~set assumes that numbers and wealth must be the key to Athenian
Inilitary strength, so the chorus can only correct her with assumptions drawn from the past, espe-
cially from the hoplite fighting at Marathon (cf. 244). The sequel, with ships rather than hoplites
playing the decisive role) is not anticipated, and it is bad method to introduce a supplement along
the lines of 'naves babent satis validas' (Page, tentatively) in the presumed lacuna after 235.
25 8. 6ofj, a more successful re-enactment of the strategy of Thermopylae and Artemisium (7.
"(75-6, 21 I. 2).
26 Doubted by Lazenby (1988: 182-3; I993: 192).
27 This reversal, noticed by Lazenby (1988: 175), may explain Aeschylus' choice of language at
drawing the ships into the narrows: there is no backing water, we have simply
seen the Greek ships advance, a quite different picture from that of Herodotus.
That of course suits Aeschylus' stress on the inspirational fight for freedom
(402-5), and indeed on the early morning fright of the Persians (39I) and con-
fidence of the Greeks (394): he wants to have the Greeks advance proudly and
alarmingly, just as Herodotus wants the picture of wily Themistoclean deceit.
But again one cannot possibly tell which picture is the more likely to be histor-
ical: one could also say that Herodotus' picture of the cramping narrows suits
his leading themes, as the land and sea themselves, the brute geographical facts
of Greece, conspire to defeat the advancing Persians.28 Each author again has
the version which suits his wider presentation, Persian maritime clumsiness in
Aeschylus, hostility of terrain in Herodotus; and it is again hard to tell which, if
either, is true.
This land-and-sea theme is relevant if we turn to the problem of the island of
Psyttaleia,29 and the part it played in the conflict. Aeschylus makes a good deal
of this phase (447-64), and also differs from Herodotus on the composition of
the Greek force. Herodotus 8.95 makes it a separate detachment of infantry,
whereas Aeschylus has a force who don hoplite armour after finishing their
duties in the naval battle (456-7): 'the men were marines'.30 Again, much is
made of this in the modern discussions, especially by those who stress that
Aristides (unnamed by Aeschylus, just as Themistocles is unnamed) was in
command on Psyttaleia: could this be some contribution, scholars wonder, to
political controversy in 472? (Though if it were, it is hard to see exactly what
sort of contribution it might be: pro-Aristides and pro-hoplite, because
Aeschylus plays up Psyttaleia, or pro-Themistocles and pro-navy, because he
stresses it as an appendage to the main battle achieved by a marine force?)31
This all seems misconceived. Aeschylus' presentation ofPsyttaleia suits what
we have already seen. This is not a separate and distinct hoplite engagement,
but the Athenian sailors come from the sea to surround the Persian nobles, who
368. Scholars have often found that initial 'circling) plan bemusing: cf. e.g. Goodwin (1882-3),248;
Broadhead (1960), 329; Marg (1962), 116-17; G. Roux (1974), 63-4; Lazenby (1988), 171 and
(1993),174-5·
28 Pelling (199 1 ), 13 6-9. Herodotus' emphasis on the narrows was canonical by the time of
Thucydides I. 74. 3, but that could be due to Herodotus' authority; cf. Hornblower (1991: 119;
1992: 146), rightly stressing that' Thucydides expects his audience to be familiar with the
Herodotean analysis.
29 The question of the island's identification does not affect the points made here. On this cf. esp.
Wallace (1969). -
30 Fornara (19 66 ),5 2 : cf. esp. Broadhead (1960),331-2; Hignett (1963), 237- 8; Lazenby (1993),
195·
31 Hignett (19 6 3: 23 8), Salanitro (1965), Burn (1984: 467), and Masaracchia (1977: 194) all have
Aeschylus glorifying Aristides or the hoplites; Fornara (1966) thinks that this action was fictional,
that the original purpose of the fabrication was pro-hoplite, and that Aeschylus' version presents a
less tendentious modification (52 n. 7, cf. Loraux (1986a), 161). Melchinger (1979: 19) sees the play
as striving to be even-handed to both Themistoc1es and Aristides. Podlecki (1966: 24-5), Kitto
(1966: 89-90), and Said (I993b) have some sensible remarks.
are now as helpless as their maritime counterparts were 40 lines earlier: they
are surrounded, just as the ships were in the strait (KVKAOUVTO at 458, c( KUKA4J
7TEPL~ €8€LVOV at 418). This anticipates the wider truth that 'the sea catastrophe
destroyed the land power' (728),32 and here we see this in a vivid and immediate
sense: the land engagement re-enacts the sea equivalent, but the sea starts it all.
The Persians are finally defeated at their own game, even falling to the bow-
manship which should have been their strength, as they fall 'victims to the
bowstring', TO~tK~~ ••• a?TO (JWJLLYYOS (460-1).33 One can see why Aeschylus
makes so much of this: these are the Persian nobles who die, something which
will bring the suffering especially close to home to the chorus and the queen,
and that is especially appropriate at the end of the account: it is evocative, too,
to have the Persians so outclassed at their own game-but only at the end, and
only because the sea battle has gone the way it has. It is therefore most fitting to
have the marines come from the sea and the naval battle. That captures in
concrete terms how the sphere of the sea has come to impinge ·on that of the
land, and to do so with decisive influence. As for history, it would be odd ifPsyt-
taleia played no role at all, or at least any such radical suspicion should belong
at the other end of our 'sliding scale'; but, as for the details, who can possibly
tell?
POLITICS
The search for historical evidence has so far proved elusive. Will matters prove
easier if we shift forward from 480 to the play's production date of 472, and ask
if it casts any light on the political exchanges of its own day?
We might again begin from the presentation ofPodlecki, who conveniently
brings several arguments together. 34 Themistocles was in trouble by 472: this is
not the place to discuss the tangled problems of chronology, but it does seem
that 47 I/O became canonical for something, either the ostracism or the exile. 35
The play is therefore (says Podlecki) to be seen as a gesture of support for the
victor of Salamis,36 encouraged by its choregos the young Pericles. Podlecki
goes on to tie this into an elaborate scheme of a conflict of historical ideologies:
which battle mattered more, Marathon or Salamis? Cimon and the con-
servatives made a lot of Marathon, the hoplite victory, and tried to play down
the 'democrats" victory of Salamis, the victory of the (Jpav[7TJ~ A€W~, the
'ordinary rowing-bench people'. This ideological battle of the battles is
32 C£ Kierdorf (19 66), 71; Said (1993 b) brings out the importance of the land-and-sea theme
here.
33 Cf. Said (1993b), 68. Fornara (1966: 52 n. 7) thinks that these bows reflect Aeschylus' modi-
fication of the conservatives' hoplite Tendenz; Goldhill (1988: 190 n. 16) claims that the bows were
probably used by allies, not Athenians. Both views are possible, neither is necessary.
34 Podlecki (196 6), 8-26, followed by Loraux (I986a), 161 and (largely) by Euben (1986a).
35 Gomme (195 6), 400-1; Cawkwell (1970),47; Frost (1980), 189-90.
36 Cf. Dodds (1973),49 n I - (1960), 22 n. I.
certainly something that we can trace in Plato (Laws 4. 706b-c)-though there

is evidently a question whether Plato is good evidence for views almost a
hundred years earlier. That, claims Podlecki, is why so little is made of
lV\arathon, and indeed Plataea, in Persae. That also affects (again according to
Podlecki) the way the Ionians are treated in the play: their presence on Xerxes'
side tends to be played down, and Podlecki associates this with Themistocles'
repeated attempts to win them over from Xerxes' cause.
There is some disentangling to be done here. Some of our earlier principles
can be extended to this as well: when a theme or motif can be explained
perfectly well in dramatic terms, then we have to be very careful in assuming a
political aspect. The playing down of Marathon and Plataea,37 for instance,
looks much more like the continuation of the land-and-sea theme, with Xerxes
meddling with a medium which is not his own; and there are further reasons in
each case. With Marathon, we should remember the way in which Aeschylus
elaborates the contrast between the prudent leadership of Darius and the rash-
ness of Xerxes;38 too much remembrance of Darius' own failed Greek
adventure would blur that contrast. As for Plataea (8 r6-22), there are good
dramatic reasons for a single rather than double climax: 39 we might compare
the battles of Actium and Alexandria in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,
where Actium is decidedly underplayed and Alexandria climactic. And the
Ionians? On any view Aeschylus is developing a strong and evocative contrast
afEast and West, the natural slaves and the natural free. Readers may differ on
how far he qualifies and deconstructs that firm distinction of the Greek and the
Other; but it is hard to doubt that the distinction is at least initially a strong one,
and the presence of the Ionians on the Persian side would be an uncomfortable
blurring. Nor can we be sure that Pericles' role as choregos has anything to do
with the play's emphases. It is rash to assume that choregoi dictated plays'
political texturing;40 it is rasher still, and assumes an over-simple patterning of
Athenian politics, to think that the young Pericles would have thought it desir-
able or prudent to support Themistocles in 472. •
We might still be left with the simple point that Themistocles was in trouble
in 472, and this can fit into the ideological battle of the battles. But here again
scepticism is called for. It is partly that Themistocles is not named. That is prob-
ably to be explained in the terms outlined by Goldhill,41 with civic ideology
37 Not that Plataea is as inconspicuous as all that: cf. Kitto (1966), 83, 102-4.
}R Esp. at 555-7,653-7, and 854-907; Darius' own critical tone is in accord with this, e.g. 719-
25, 744-5 0 , and 78 1. Cf pp. 14-15 below.
39 Cf. Lattimore (1958), 30- I n. 4; Kierdorf (1966), 71.
~o Cf. Rosenbloom (1993), 169 n. 32. Even ifThemistocles was himself choregos for Phrynichus'
Phoenissae in 476 (cf. Pluto Them. 5. 5, but the inference is anything but certain), we know nothing
of that play's political texture: cf. Roisman (1988).
~l (1988), 192 -3; cf. also Euben (1986a), 366-7. There may also be a point about dramatic veri-
similitude: the Persian messenger cannot know in detail what happened on the Greek side. Still, had
Aeschylus wished to make a Persian know something ofThemistocles, he could have done so (most
Aeschylus' Persae and History I I
requiring this to be a victory of the polis rather than of any named individual;
but that is a point not merely about Aeschylus' composition but also about the
play's reception, for the audience are not primed to take this as a comment on
anyone leading individual rather than the city as a whole. And even without
naming, Aeschylus could have done more to draw attention to the distinctively
Themistoclean parts of the story of 480: the building of a fleet in the first
place;42 the role in preventing fragmentation; the recurrent wiliness, not just in
the first Sicinnus message; and, above all, the fighting in the narrows. If this is a
way of making an audience dwell on the soterial crafts of the great individual, it
is surely a very odd way.43
And this ideological 'battle of the battles'? The evidence for this does not
amount to much. It does look as if Cimon was making a good deal of
Marathon: 44 that is hardly surprising, given that he was son of the victor
Miltiades, and there is no reason to tie it into a wider ideological construct. A
good deal of the evidence for this 'battle of the battles' comes from art, and
specifically Pausanias' description of the Stoa Poikile (I. 15), built (it would
seem) around 460.45 Pausanias lists its four scenes: a battle between Athenian
infantry and Spartans in Argive Oenae; Theseus fighting against the Amazons;
a scene from the Trojan War, concentrating on Cassandra and her abductor
Aias; and the battle of Marathon. There is a problem anyway for those who
explain the choice of scenes in terms of Cimonian, pro-hoplite ideology. It is
natural to relate Oenoe to a battle in the late 460s or 45os,46 following the
famed alliance with Argos in 462- I, and in that case this should be a great
democratic success. One is then forced into the reconstruction of Loraux, with
democrats appropriating an artistic creation which was originally Cimonian
and conservative, and incorporating a recent triumph of their own;47 and the
best evidence for this 'battle of the battles' turns out to be something which
does not quite fit. Salamis' absence from the Stoa is indeed noticeable, but there
obviously in his account of the first Sicinnus message, 355-60, where the dviJp . .. "E>..A7Jv must of
course be Sicinnus rather than Themistocles: above, p. 3).
41 True, the mention of the silver-mines at 240 might recall Themistocles' role in the building of
the fleet (c( Hdt. 7. 144), even though the passage is silent about the navy (cf n.24 above): so
Broadhead (1960), 92. But, as Goldhill (1988) stresses, all the emphasis there falls on the Athenian
collective, not on any leading individual: c( esp. line 242.
-13 For a different view, Sommerstein (below), pp. 69, 73.
44 Cf. esp. Amandry (19 60 ).
-45 For recently discovered remains, supporting the traditional date, cf. Shear (I984), 5- 19; for
full discussion (not all of it cogent), Castriota (1992), esp. 76-89, 127-33.
46 Cf. especially Meiggs (1972), 96-7 and 469-72; Andrewes (197S); and, briefly, Badian (19 88),
3 11 - 1 2 = (1993), 97-9. Francis-Vickers (I98 Sa , 19 85b), followed by Castriota (199 2 ), 78-9 and
260-1, argue that this 'Cenoe' was in fact the village near Marathon, and this represented a second
Marathon-scene, misinterpreted by Pausanias. Jeffery (1965) also believed that Pausanias mis-
reported the battle, which she took to belong to the mythical past. Stier (1934) took the battle to be
Oenophyta; Pausanias' specification of 'Argive' Oenoe will then, once again) be an error. On all
these views our only evidence has to be explained away as mistaken, and that is methodologically
dissatisfying.
47 Loraux (19 86a ), 61-4 and 372 nn. 281-2, largely following Meiggs (1972), 96, 469-72.
may again be good artistic reasons. The Stoa seems to be suggesting the con-
tinuity of Athenian achievements from the heroic to the present,48 and recent
hoplite battles were what were needed to echo the land fighting of the distant
past; and sea battles are anyway hard to portray in successful art, at least with
the sort of human detail which would have dominated the other scenes.
Reasons of artistic coherence are therefore sufficient to explain the absence of
Salamis from the Stoa, and of Marathon from the Persae; nothing else needs to
be assumed, and we can believe that from the outset both Marathon and
Salamis became Panathenian themes, themes which all Athenians would thrill
to, not the stuff of partisan ideology.
Perhaps we should not exclude all contemporary relevance from the Persae,
but it is tempting to look in a different direction. Persia was not a dead issue: it
may even be that Persian preparations for the Eurymedon campaign were
already starting in the late 470s,49 and that Athenians were getting wind of
them. If so, the memories of Persian aggression might certainly seem a live
theme, especially when Darius warns his people against any further attacks on
Greece (790-2): a sort of 'zooming', perhaps, bringing the play close to the
audience's immediate concerns.50 If so, it is one which rests on the general back-
ground rather than on any allusions to specific events. It is a contemporary
resonance, no more. And we should be clear how little this is really saying. It is
difficult, for instance, to distinguish a clear authorial stance on the issue. Is he
alerting the Athenians to the dangers, warning them and urging them to action?
Many aspects might certainly seem inspirational and militaristic, appealing to
the proud Athenian tradition of liberty (especially the cry of freedom as the
sailors join battle, 402-5); the play does recall the elements of the Athenian
character which bred success and which the Persians find so hard to under-
stand. 51 One can understand why 'Aeschylus' in the Frogs should select Persae
as a play which 'taught the Athenians always to desire victory over their
enemies' (Frogs 1026-7). But in that case the several clear hints of the recent
weakening of the Persian empire are more surprising:52 those would seem to
minimize any threat, accentuating the decisiveness of the Greek victory eight
years earlier. Nor is it easy to take the playas jingoistic, urging a further
national crusade against a demoralized foe; any element of sympathy for the
Persians (even for the shattered Xerxes at the end), any alertness to a universal
pattern of divine punishment for hubristic aggression-such aspects tell against
48 Rather as Simonides described Plataea-another land battle-in ways which evoked the
Trojan War, as we can now see from the new fragments: c( Parsons (1992),32-3; West (1993),6.
49 So Cawkwell (197 0 ), esp. 47-9; cf. Avery (1964), 173, 182-4. That assumes a dating of the
Eurymedon in the first half of the 460s, but this is plausible enough: cf. recently Hornblower (1991),
153; Badian (1987),2-8 - (1993), 2-12; (1988), 292 n. 6 - (1993), 203 n. 6.
50 The cinematic analogy is drawn by Sourvinou-Inwood (1989): see also below, pp. 228-9.
51 Cf. above, n. 24.
52 Esp. at 584-97. The list of islands at 880-902 is also suggestive-islands which would be liber-
ated soon after 480, as the audience would know. Cf. Broadhead (1960), 220 n. 2; Podlecki (1966),
17-18; Gagarin (1976), 32.
a recommendation to bellicosity.53 Ifwe find a contemporary resonance of this

sort, we shall simply be finding a further reason why the audience should find
this theme rich, engrossing, lively. Yet it would be an odd critic who ever
doubted the vitality of the theme, less than a decade after the great victories
\vhich were already becoming the stuff of legend, and which (at least in
Plataea's case) Simonides could already describe in the tones of Homeric
heroism. 54 Such a 'resonance' does not take us far.
IDEOLOGY AND NATIONAL STEREOTYPES

l"here is more to say about the final scenes and their impact on the audience, as
they touch wider questions of national and civic ideology, matters which the
historian will find very interesting indeed. Edith HaUSS brings out the pervasive-
ness and subtlety of the presentation of the Persian 'Other' in this play.
Persians are what the Greeks are not, and particularly what the Athenians are
not, tyrannical and tyrannized, populous, wealthy) materialistic, daintily
luxurious, cruel, land-based, hierarchical, insensitive to freedom: construction
of Greek and construction of barbarian, as usual, closely intermesh. And, again
as usual, such constructions begin by positing a simple polarity of Self and
()ther, Us and Them. Yet there is an intrinsic paradox in the presentation of a
play with nothing but Persian characters. It is rare for any drama to proceed
without some emotional engagement with some of its characters. 56 As
characters, particularly characters responding to disaster, the figures of Persae
may invite audience engagement, association, perhaps even a form of identi-
fication; yet as Persians who are strongly differentiated from Greeks, they
would seem to repulse any such emotional involvement.57
To notice this duality is one thing; it is a further question how far it qualifies,
even deconstructs, the strong polar differentiation of Self and Other. Here
critics will vary, and the variations will be especially clear in their response to
the final, shattered Xerxes. 58 Some have taken this as an exercise in Schaden-
freude, with Athenians revelling in the discomfiture and humiliation of a hated
enemy; Xerxes' own words AV7Tpa, xcipp..a'Ta Sll €X(Jpo[~ (,painful, but joys to our
53 Thus Melchinger (1979: 35-6, 39) had some reason for taking the playas a warning against
Athenian expansionism. But that too is crude. C( Gagarin (197 6), 53; Hall (1989), 72.
54 Above, n. 48. IfSimonides died in 468/7 (Mann. Par. 73), the poem's composition cannot be
long after Persae and may well be before.
55 (19 89), 56- 100•
56 Cf. esp. Heath (1987: esp. 90-8), developing the idea of a 'focus' which may shift from one
character to another. Heath's category addresses emotional engagement, sympathy with one
character rather than another; it should be distinguished from Genette's narratological category of
'focalization', which is more a question of cognitive engagement, viewing events through a
character's eyes. Paduano (1978: esp. 20-1,27-8) represents an explicit attempt to apply Genette's
categories to Persae. 51 Cf. Paduano (1978), esp. 9-13, 66-7.
58 Cf. the summaries of views at Paduano (1978), 12, 15-16, and esp. Hall (1989), 70-2. Hall
herself accepts the view that Xerxes' emotionalism is extreme (pp. 83-4), but she recognizes 'a
genuinely tragic pathos' (p. 100) which excludes too one-sided an interpretation.
I4 Christopher Pelling
enemies', I034) can serve as a motto for this approach. Such critics can fairly
emphasize the extremity and self-centredness of his lamentation, so different
from the civic focus and restraint of Athenian public grief;59 this would not be
the only tragic case where the intensity of a lament becomes expressive and
thought-provoking. 60 On this view, the audience refuse to give Xerxes the
sympathy which his lament might naturally invite, and the categories of Self
and Other remain strong and unblurred. But it has become more fashionable to
see Xerxes as eliciting some sympathy as he confronts the magnitude of his
catastrophe. On this second view one might rather emphasize the formal
similarities between Xerxes' cries and the lamentations of Greek private
bereavement, even if it remains a crucial difference that these cries are here
uttered by a male. 61 The audience would still hear cries like these in the funerals
of familiar Greek life; the thought that grief is universal, that a shattered
Persian is not so different from a shattered Greek, would not be far to seek.
That second view comes more readily to the gentle modern sensibility, but
here our own perceptual filters can easily lead us astray. It is all too easy to
claim that the text will only work if the audience respond in the way we choose
(talk of the 'reader inscribed in the text' is then close at hand); all too easy, too,
to speak as if an audience would respond as a monolithic whole-even despite
any personal experience we may have of the varying vindictiveness among the
World War II generations towards their former foes. As Goldhill sensibly
remarks, it is '[not] hard to imagine a variety of reactions to its performance, as
critics have reacted to it so variously since'.62 Perhaps matters will be clearer if
we first consider a subtle but less emotionally problematic scene, the appear-
ance of Darius' ghost.
In some ways, the distancing of Persian from Greek assumptions is here at its
most acute. Darius is invoked by the chorus in a prayer with strong kletic
elements. It is an open question quite what implications would be drawn from
this blurring of the line between the human and the divine: would, for instance,
the audience (or some of them) think of this as a possible explanation for the
rashness, arrogance, and ultimate failure of Persian aggression? What is clear is
that the audience would here notice the distance from normal Greek religious
assumptions,63 and the differentiation of the two worlds is very strong. The
59 C£ Hall (1989),83-4; Hoist-Warhaft (1992), 130-3. On the Athenian public Epitaphios see
also Conclusion, pp. 229-33 below.
60 Cf. esp. Foley (1993), and see below, pp. 230-3.
61 C£ Alexiou (1974), 13, 83-4, 134-8, IS I; Benedetto (1978), 29; Holst-Warhaft (199 2 ), 133.
Hall (1989: 83-4) comments on the similarity to laments elsewhere in tragedy (cf. her pp. I 19, 13 1-
3), and on the important difference that this one is delivered by a male: thus also Holst-Warhaft, loco
cit. For the similarities with other tragic laments cf. Reiner (1938), 27-8 n. 5; for the distinction
between public and private laments for war-dead cf. Sourvinou-Inwood (1995), 19 1-5.
62 (1988), 19 2 ; cf. Goldhill (I 990a), I 15.
63 On Darius as divine c( Hall (1989), 89-93. Taplin (1977: I IS) remarks that 'the Persians' view
of Darius as divine cannot be regarded as barbarous blasphemy or as mere oriental colour, since the
audience also is obliged to accept it'. 'Accept it', yes, in the sense that the invocation works, and
Aeschylus' Persae and History IS
\vords that Darius speaks again articulate the defining Persian traits which
have become familiar: at least, a preoccupation with wealth and prosperity
(751-2,826,842). But we should also notice the way in which Darius' reactions
to Xerxes' enterprise map closely on to natural Greek assumptions.64 Xerxes
\vas a fool (EIl-WpaVEV, 719); it must have been a great daimon which made him
unwise, even mad (p,ij ~pov€iv KaAws, 725); but the gods help humans along
the paths they choose themselves (740-2). Xerxes w·as young, with a young
rnan's rashness (744,780). It mus.t be an ailing of the mind that led him to think
t.hat, mortal as he was, he could overcome the gods (749-50). Divine oracles
command respect (800-2); now the remaining army will pay for their and
Xerxes' hybris and 'godless thoughts' (808), especially their devastation of the
(}reek temples (809- I 5). The moral will be the necessity for humans to accept
the proper boundaries of their thoughts and aspirations (... ws oux tJ'tT€pCP€V
fJV'Y}TOV ov-ra xpTj ~povEiv, 820). That is the cycle of hybris, ate, and destruction
(821-2), presided over by Zeus (827). Nor is the unexceptionable quality of
Darius' words limited to his comments on Xerxes' folly and punishment: else-
where too he thinks like a Greek. Human life is a vulnerable affair (705-7);
when he thinks of possible threats to his nation's stability, his thoughts turn
immediately to u-raaLS 7TOA€L, 'dissension falling upon the city' (715, cf. 682).65
rrhere is nothing distinctively Persian there, nothing for instance to suggest
that Xerxes' behaviour fitted into a wider pattern of Persian expansionism.
rrhat is a clear contrast with Herodotus' presentation.66 Aeschylus' Darius is
astounded that Xerxes should have 'yoked the Hellespont' (723); yet Herodotus
tells us Darius himself 'yoked' the Thracian Bosporus (4.83, 85, at.), just as he
went on to yoke the Danube (4. 89, 97, al.), and this is just one of the subtle
ways in which Herodotus intimates the continuity between father and son-at
least between their actions, if not between their characters. Yet Aeschylus'
Darius stresses how different Xerxes is from ·his predecessors, especially from
Darius himself (759-86): Xerxes' aggression is here seen as an aberration, not
as the Persians' national game, and Darius distances himself from it.
Thus, even while Darius by nature of his continued, posthumous, divine
existence is distanced from Greek thoughts, there is a good deal in what he says
which the audience can appropriate as their own. Both limbs of our paradox are
in fact active: the audience remain utterly aware of the difference between the
Greek and barbarian worlds; at th~ same time even a Persian character can
Darius appears: the point is not one of cosmological efficacy. Thus far the audience enter into the
thought-world of the court they see on stage. But they would not accept it in the sense of accepting
this as a normal, comfortable, and ordered view of the boundary between human and divine.
i\1elchinger (1979: 23) goes astray in assimilating Darius' status to that enshrined in Greek hero-
(;ult.
64Thus, rightly, Hall (1989), 70; see Fisher (1992), 258- 63.
65Cf. also Vidal-Naquet, p. 114 below.
66 Cf. Kierdorf(19 66), 60-2; Paduano (1978), 25,91; Said (1981); Hall (1989),71; Rosenbloom
(1993), 190 ; Meier (1993),7 2 -3.
articulate responses and insights which the Greek audience can share) he can
serve as their 'focus', and those responses and insights can be seen as transcend-
ing national boundaries.
This may give some clues for the final scenes. Once again, Xerxes' distance
from Greekness is clear: this is anything but a Greek public lament. At the same
time, his cries, like Darius' words, contain elements which the audience could
hardly dismiss or deride-though this time these elements are less concerned
with a shared mental outlook, more with a shattering experience and an agon-
ized suffering which transcend national limits. The play has pervasively set the
Persian disaster against the background of the gods' cosmic order. 67 Xerxes
overreached, he forgot his humanity, and he fell. This happened to Xerxes and
Persia; there are human reasons why it did, and why it happened then. It still
reflects a cosmic pattern which could afflict any human or nation at any time
(one of the reasons, as we have seen, why it is difficult to interpret the playas
projecting a plea for Athenian aggression against a weakened enemy). 68 Xerxes
can hardly be seen as Everyman, a typical example of suffering humanity, still
less as Everygreek: his qualities remain too distinctive and too distant from the
audience's norms. Indeed, one effect of the differentiation of Xerxes from his
predecessors is to make him even more distinctive, atypical of Persia as well as
the antithesis of Greek self-knowledge and restraint. But his fate can still
capture something of the human condition, and exemplify a human vulner-
ability which the audience can recognize as their own. Greek cities, too, had
been known to indulge in catastrophic aggression; less spectacular forms of
self-destructive over-confidence could recur even in personal life. In that sense
his fall, even if not Xerxes as a person, can be seen as inviting audience
empathy. In the terms of Aristotle's Poetics, there can be 'fear' here, fear that
Xerxes' fate could provide a model for something which could happen to
them. 69
What, though, of 'pity', Aristotle's linked demand of the tragic experience
(Poet. 1449b27, etc.)? That is more problematic. The usual preconditions for
pity are partly, but only partly, present. Greek pity often contains a large
element of self-direction, with once again the feeling 'it could happen to me,:70
67 On this cf. esp. \Vinnington-Ingram (1973) "" (1983)~ 1-15, and Paduano (1978), 71-84, and
on the intermeshing of human and divine strands Kitto (1966), 74-115.
68 Above, pp. 12- 13.
69 In some ways, indeed, something which had happened to them: Rosenbloom (1993: 191)
observes the ways in which the Persian palhos is phrased 'in terms appropriate to the evacuation
and sack of a city', something which recalls the Athenians' own experiences of 480. Here too one
can imagine different audience responses, some delighting in the sight of the biter so appropriately
bit, others more sensitive to the pattern of suffering humanity which, Iliad-like, links friend
and foe.
70 The most familiar passages are Soph. Ajax 121-6 (below, p. 18, and cf. Parker. below, pp. 152-
3) and Hdt. I. 86. 6; cf also Arist. Rhel. 138SbI4-15, Soph. Trach. 296-306, Phil. 500-6, and La
Rochefoucauld's definition of pity, 'c'est une habile prevoyance des malheurs ou nous pouvons
tomber'; and see further E. B. Stevens (1944), 5-6,9, l\1acleod (1974), 391 n. 22 "'" (1983), 58 n. 22,
Halliwell (1986), 170, 176-7, Heath (1987), 159 and n. 80, and Meier (1993), 174 on 'generalised
it is not surprising that 'fear' and 'pity' are so often closely linked in Greek
thought. If the argument here is correct, the audience of Persae could indeed
feel that "if, or at least a small-scale version of such self-inflicted, god-driven
catastrophe, could happen to them. It is also commonplace to notice that the
very magnitude of a person's fall can intensify the pity:71 the higher the initial
pinnacle, the greater the emotive impact, and Xerxes' pinnacle had been very
high. But Aristotle also points out that pity is increased when the sufferer is
close to the observer in 'age, character, dispositional traits, status, or family'
C-Rhet. 1386325-6), something which would be far from true here; and he also
demands that pity should be reserved for those suffering undeservedly (Rhet. 2.
8, esp. 138ShI3, 1386h6; cf. Poet. 1453 a 4-5 and e.g. 1soc. 16.48). True, Aristotle
nlay not here be giving an accurate reflection of rhetorical practice or popular
nlorality:' several speeches do try to elicit pity for the undeserving.72 But it is
evidently true that deserved suffering is less pitiable, and thus Xerxes' claim for
pity is much weakened. 73 This, surely, is a case where we should not think of the
audience responding monolithically. Some would put more weight on the
human suffering, some on the degree to which it was deserved; some would be
nlore moved by the shared vulnerability to universally active gods, some would
find their bitterness and vindictiveness too great. In some minds relish would
defeat pity, in some it would not.
In these final scenes we therefore have tension, which would be resolved
differently by different spectators. There are aspects which retain the strong
polar differentiation of Self and Other; equally, there are aspects which
transcend and challenge that differentiation, where a Greek audience can gaze
on barbarians and recognize responses and agonies which are universal. That, it
should be stressed, is not to deconstruct the polarity itself: Greek conceptualiza-
tion found it unproblematic to retain a strong polarity while recognizing the
existence of marginal cases, or cases which belong on both sides of the divide,74
just as here human suffering and fragility is common to both Greek and barbar-
ian. The polarity is simultaneously challenged and aserted. And, paradoxically,
those spectators whose emotions crossed the Greek-barbarian divide most
completely could simultaneously feel themselves as most completely fulfilling a
national stereotype: for was not pity a distinctively Athenian virtue?75
nlutuality'. I hope elsewhere to explore the interesting variations introduced by Thucydides in the
l\1ytilenean debate at 3.40.3 and the MeHan dialogue at 5· 90 .
71 Cf. Dover (1974), 197; Halliwell (1986), 172.
72 Cf. e.g. Dem. 24. 170-1,25.76; Lys. 28. I I; Dover (1974), 198-9; Halliwell (1986), 174; on the
several senses of 'deserved' and 'undeserved' tragic pity, Heath (1987), 82-6. For the more usual
linkage of pity and desert cf. E. B. Stevens (1944); Dover (1974), 196-7; l\1.acleod (1977), 245-
6 = (1983), 121-2,
;3 Thus Lattimore's question (1958: 38) has some purchase, 'is there anything dramatic about a
nlan getting so precisely what he deserved?' Cf. Paduano (1978), 87; Fisher (1992), 262.
74 C( esp. G. E. R. Lloyd (1983), 44-53, and more generally G. E. R. Lloyd (1966). I intend else-
where to discuss the application of this principle in Herodotus and Thucydides.
75 Cf. esp. PI. Menex. 244e, Eur. Supp., esp. 187-90, and Soph. DC, esp. 1125-7; Isoc. Paneg. 112,
So the national polarity survives; but that is not to deny that it is explored,
and explored in ways which the audience would have found arresting. Not
many, as they entered the theatre, would have foretold that there would be
even a possibility of empathizing with the fate of Greece's greatest enemy; not
many would have expected to enter imaginatively into a thought-world which
viewed the great national triumph in a wholly different light.
It remains a question how shocking and disturbing the audience would have
found this, and that is a question which cannot be answered from the text alone.
Some general considerations might come into play. Aeschylus knew his
audience, and knew too that there were bounds to the degree of emotional
shock they would accept; he knew that Phrynichus had been fined for remind-
ing the audience of 'their own troubles' in his Fall ofMiletus (or 'the troubles of
those close to them': oiKijLa KaKa., almost literally 'troubles close to home', Hdt.
6.21.2). But that does not take us far. Whatever the Persae is doing-and, like
most or all tragedies, it does remind the audience of 'their own sufferings' in the
sense that it points a universal pattern of human sutTering which might some
day, in some form, be the spectator's own-it is not reminding them of their
own suffering in anything like so direct away. The deaths of allies and kinsmen
in Phrynichus' play would come much 'closer to home': that was the audience's
own suffering in a more immediate sense. All we can infer here is that
Aeschylus would not have written a play whose shockingness reached the point
where it might alienate audience favour; but that simply rephrases the
question-how far would an audience expect, even enjoy, an emotional
challenge to their most cherished prejudices, at least in this privileged locus of
the tragic theatre?
This book will represent some attempt to explore that question of generic
expectation. In this particular case, other genres may help. For the pattern
we have noticed in Persae is not new: indeed, it has close analogies with the
Iliad itsel£76 That poem began with people who seemed very different from
one another, with the Achaean war-machine and the domesticity of Troy,
the grim silence of the marching Achaeans and the excited Trojan chatter.
By the end, there as here, it is the similarities rather than the differences that
come to be felt as most challenging, as Achilles explores with Priam the
human misery and vulnerability which they share. Elsewhere too we find
such compassionate insight recurring in tragedy, notably when Sophocles'
Odysseus proclaims his pity for his enemy Ajax, for he points the fragility
which they share (Soph. Ajax 121-6). A half-century after Aeschylus, a
related pattern will be seen in the Histories of Herodotus, where the text
elaborates with such subtlety the discrimination of Greek Self and barbarian
Lys. 2. 14, Dem. 24. 170-1, 25. 81, Pluto Praec. reip. ger. 799 C; E. B. Stevens (1944), 15- 19;
Dover (1974), 200-1; Macleod (1975), 47-8 and (197 8), 7 2 - (19 8 3), 74-5,9 6.
76 Cf. Goldhill (1988), 191 n.35.
Other;77 yet the final chapters of the work explore the gathering similarities
between Persian expansion and that of the new Athenian empire, and once
again a national polarity is overlaid by, and interacts with, a disturbing univer-
sal pattern. There too an audience, particularly an Athenian audience, would
find a thought-provoking discovery of Self in Other and Other in Self. 78
Thought-provoking, yes; but the very Iliad parallel suggests that the
thoughts provoked were not so unfamiliar and shocking as all that. There are
limits on how much literature can discomfit, limits on how much it can shock.
In Persae, a pointed community of suffering with one's greatest enemy doubt-
less retained its challenging aspect; but it is an intense version of a familiar, in
some ways almost a comfortable, challenge-much more comfortable (doubt-
le:ss) than Phrynichus' depiction of Miletus' fate. In later tragedies, we shall find
national and civic ideology submitted to sterner tests than we have seen here?9
77 Cf especially Hartog (19 88); for some important qualifications and further steps see Dewald
(199 0 ); Cartledge (I990a) and (1993), esp. ch. 3.

78 The phrase of Greenblatt (199 I: I 27) in the course of a most sensitive discussion of
Herodotus.
79 This paper was given in St Andrews in November 1993 as well as in Oxford; my thanks to both
audiences, to Edith Hall for allowing me to see proofs of her commentary (1996) in advance of
publication, and also to Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, Michael Comber,judith Mossman, Michael
Flower, and David Kovacs for very useful comments on an earlier draft.
2
Constructing the Heroic
P. E. EASTERLING
The historian looking for contemporary evidence of fifth-century Athenian

mentalice might reasonably think there is something to be learned from Greek
tragedy about how (if not precisely what) the playwrights and their audiences
thought about the community they lived in. After all, the plays were designed
for the benefit of the community, for performances at public festivals in the
presence of large audiences, and they were presented on the community's
initiative and behalf, with state funding, both direct and indirect, and citizen
performers. So it certainly makes sense in general terms to look to the plays for
some kind of refraction of the society that provided the context of production;
but it is much harder to go further and attempt to read the signs in detail.
Relating any kind of fiction to specific historical circumstances is difficult
enough-though we do it all the time as we read modern literature-but in the
case of Greek tragedy there is the special difficulty that all the surviving plays
(and no doubt the overwhelming majority of lost plays) are given a heroic
setting of some kind l and go to great lengths to evoke a distinctively different
world from that of the original audiences. What can have been the purpose of
all this imaginative effort?
I begin with some discussion of how 'the heroic' is constructed and how this
construction is made to work in the tragedies that have survived; I then move
on to a question of more directly historical interest, which is how as modern
readers we can try to trace patterns of what may have been contemporary
meaning for the original audiences, recognizing that although the dramatists'
general methodology may remain pretty consistent, the language and situation
chosen for a particular play may have been designed-or felt-to have time-
specific resonance. 2 Of course there are enormous gaps in the evidence: with
virtually nothing known about the detail of particular productions the modern
interpreter lacks most of the signals that would be immediately recognizable to
contemporaries. But there must be some clues if we know where to look.
The first point to stress is that the temporal setting is not typically an indeter-
minate illud tempus but a period associated through precise genealogies
1 Even Persians is distanced by its remote setting, grand language, and absence of Greek
characters from the world of the Athenian spectators.
2 Cf. Loraux (1973) and Croally (1994), ch. 4, for interesting discussion of the general issues.
22 P. E. Easterling
preserved in epic poetry with the Trojan War and the events of the preceding
and succeeding generations, with what happened at Thebes from its founding
to the time of the Epigonoi, with the expedition of Jason and the Argonauts or
the exploits of Heracles and Theseus. Some stories are set even further back in
time, like the tales of Cadmus, 10, or Creusa and Ion, and when the action takes
place among gods, as in the story of Zeus punishing Prometheus, there is a
sense of a still more remote era. But these are not free-floating stories: they have
credentials in epic poetry, and they deal in named persons and places which
more often than not have a life and tradition of their own. 3
So the heroic world of tragedy is designed to be identifiable, however indeter-
minate many of its details, and however freely a dramatist could reshape or
redefine the tradition. 4 Identifiability, it seems, brings advantages. One obvious
benefit of a setting elsewhere, whether in time or space, is the convenient
creation of distance, which helps avoid the danger of immediate political reper-
cussions; but if distance were all that mattered it would be just as effective to
use an anonymous and unlocalized 'once upon a time', whereas here the
specific echoing of the language, characters, and stories of epic-and lyric-
poetry is taken to quite elaborate lengths of allusiveness and opens up multiple
ironic possibilities.
There must have been several reasons why the formula was felt to be
attractive. Since all earlier Greek poetry had used specific examples from the
past to articulate its ideas there was the advantage of using a familiar logic, and
the fact that the Homeric poems in particular make nostalgic backward refer-
ences must have been important, too. For Homer's audiences the glamorous
world of godlike men and women in a rich and beautiful material setting was
already past and ready to be charged with paradigmatic significance;5 in the
fifth century these images of 'miserable mortals' at their most civilized,
brilliant, and extravagant (and in close touch with the gods) were evidently felt
to be as appropriate to tragedy as to art and cult, which accorded the heroes
remarkable prominence and prestige. As Herington has suggested,6 audiences
in the early days of drama must have felt a special stimulus in actually 'meet-
ing' the heroes as living and breathing beings rather than hearing them sung
about or seeing their images in sculpture and painting.
Along with names and situations the tragedians could appropriate glamour.
This certainly seems to be one of the functions of the distinctive idiom spoken
by tragic characters, which casts a special sheen over what they say and do .
.3 Even minor characters, if named at all, usually have 'non-fictional' names, like Lichas in Tra-
chiniae; cf. Hes. fro 25. 22 M-W.
4 A striking example of reshaping is Sophocles' Philocteles, set in Lemnos, which, contrary to all
tradition and to the way the story was told by Aeschylus and Euripides, is made into a desert island,
with important implications for the political interpretation of the play; cf n. 47 below.
S The most famous example of such paradeigmata is perhaps Achilles' reminder to Priam of the
story of Niobe at II. 24.601-20. C£ W'illcock (1964).
6 (198 5), 133-5 0 •
Surprisingly, such refined and artificial language does not seem to be at odds
with tragedy's preoccupation with situations of extreme violence, horror, and
danger; it may even have been felt to be the defining aspect of the genre, as the
pervasive use of paratragic language in comedy certainly suggests. 7
It is striking that so little notice has been taken of the idiom of tragedy by
interpreters interested in the ideology of Attic drama. The fact that the play-
wrights took so much trouble to develop a special vocabulary and characteristic
patterns of word order and syntax-heavily coloured by epic, it is true, but
certainly not just a pastiche of Homer-must surely tell us something about the
way in which they and their audiences viewed the genre. If we also take into
account tragedy's avoidance of vulgar or trivial language and subject-matter
and its well-known concern to keep out overt anachronisms the conclusion is
inescapable: getting the heroic ambience right was a serious matter, even in
plays where the emphasis was on the radically unheroic behaviour of the
characters. In Euripides' Orestes, for example, the dignified atmosphere is sub-
verted in all kinds of ways, but not without using the traditional idiom and style
of tragedy, and indeed there are places in the play where newly created heroic-
seeming expressions add to the ironic effect without sounding exactly like
parody.9
lv\ark Griffith 10 has recently made a fascinating attempt to account for the
persistence of heroic plots and characters in Attic tragedy, offering a per-
suasively political analysis of the social groupings that find their place in the
plays, particularly the aristocratic family networks, typified by the relationship
of Orestes and Pylades in the Oresteia, that seem to evoke the world of the
participants in the festivals-choregoi, poets, musicians-whose wealth and
education enabled them to exert enormous influence on these democratic occa-
sions. Contrasted with the elite (whose role is one of leadership, risk, and self-
sacrifice, often, indeed, represented through stories of 'out-of-control tyrants
and doomed dynastic families') are the 'lower-class' groups, which are repres-
ented sometimes favourably, sometimes not, despite the fact that the plays
were designed for performance before mass audiences and should certainly be
understood as expressing civic ideology.l1 What interests Griffith is the
complex relationships between these groups: he writes of 'mutual mystification
by elite and mass, in which the old stories are told in terms that make the best
available sense (given the traditions of mythical narrative and the public
context of the Theater) to an author and audience both of whom continue to
take for granted the inequalities and privileges to which they are accustomed
... and neither elite nor demos probably realizes to what extent they are
collaborating in the affirmation of social hierarchy and inequality.'12
It is an attractive idea that by drawing attention to the interaction of the
7 See GoldhilI (1991),201-22, and Silk (1993) on paratragedy. 8 Cf. Easterling (I 985).
9 Cf. Willink (1986), pp.lii-liv. 10 Griffith (I995).
11 Cf. Wilson '8 paper, Ch. 5 below. 12 Griffith (1995), I I 1-12; cf. 64.
24 P. E. Easterling
different social groupings the dramatists were able to offer something for
everyone in the audience and a chance to promote 'solidarity without con-
sensus':13 there is certain evidence, after all, that success in the dramatic com-
petition was seen as the decision of the community, even if it was made
indirectly through the judges on the community's behalf, and the winning plays
must have been capable of appealing across the \vhole social range. It helps us
to understand the importance of the role of choregoi) and it offers an interesting
approach to the dynamics of the festivals. But it is surely too limiting a view of
the heroes and the heroic setting. Griffith is quite right to stress the oddity of
this tradition ('Given that tragedy reached its acme under the new democratic
system of which the Athenians were so proud, the persistence throughout the
fifth and fourth centuries of these elite-oriented plots is indeed quite remark-
able'14), but there are several complicating factors that need to be taken-.into
account.
1.From Homeric poetry onwards it had been well understood by audiences

that the heroes could serve as paradigms for anyone to identify with-the
evidence of 'low' genres like iambic poetry illustrates how variously the heroic
figures could be appropriated, and there is also the point made long ago by
Gernet 15 that the Athenian citizens could easily see themselves as a group of
'best people'. It is interesting that choruses) \\lho might seem to function as the
perfect analogue for the audience, are often referred to in terms suggesting
their elite status, and when the Corinthian women of Medea reflect on the
ancient good fortune of the 'Erechtheidae' (824-5) they mean all the
Athenians, not just the descendants of Erechtheus. 16
2. The fact that the heroes were a familiar part of life in terms of art and cult
must have some bearing on the way in which Athenians of the fifth century
looked at the past In choosing to put on a play about Ajax, for example, a
dramatist at least had the option of implicating the events of the story with the
contemporary experience of worshippers of Ajax and his family in Attica. The
'meaning' that could be elicited from stories of this sort was thus exceptionally
fluid. 17
3. Most important for my present purpose is the special idiom used in. the
texts of tragedy to evoke the place and time in which its stories are set. This
more than anything must have been what enabled audiences to project them-
13 Griffith (1995) I 14. 14 Ibid. I J 4.

15 (1968), 333-43 - Gernet (193 8).
16 Cf. Aesch. Sept. 30 3, where both people and city are called Kadmogenes. In Soph. El. Electra
calls the women 'offspring of noble parents' (YEvt€8ACl YEvvaiwv, 129) and later 'women of the city'
(7TOAin8E!)) I 277)- At OC 728 Creon flatteringly calls the old men of Colon us 'well-born inhabitants
of this land'; cf.I348, where Oedipus addresses them as demouchoi. Cf. Ant. 842-3, 937-40, and
1183, where there is some imprecision over who exactly is being addressed, but the general point
remains valid. RosIer (I993b: 91-3) offers an interesting reading of the passages in Ant., which
would be helped by the notion of 'heroic vagueness'.
17 On Ajax see now Henrichs (1993b) with earlier bibliography.
Constructing the Heroic 25
selves collectively into a shared imaginative world which was firmly linked with
both past and present but strictly represented neither and could be constantly
redefined.
What I want to suggest is that the use of this special idiom was important as a
means of helping audiences to define 18 themselves. The plays they watched
were distinctively Attic in dialect and style, close enough to contemporary
speech to be easily accessible to them, but also identifiable, through their mani-
fold links with epic and lyric poetry, as part of a large, rich, and extremely self-
conscious tradition with a strong Panhellenic pedigree. So tragedy could claim
to be the true inheritor of epic, and to have discernible links, too, with the
choral traditions of the wider Greek world, at the same time as being a truly
Athenian invention. 19 The tragedians' habit of using an admixture of epic
language, and of making pointed allusion to epic sources while avoiding epic
formulas and epic dialect, may be paralleled by the gesture towards literary
Doric that they make in the choral odes. In neither case is it a matter of imita-
tion or pastiche; tragedy can be said to stand clear of its predecessors as well as
in a sense to appropriate them. This complex relationship with the literature of
the past is best understood, perhaps, in the context of a bid for cultural hegem-
ony. When allied and foreign ambassadors) businessmen, and visitors saw per-
formances at the City Dionysia they may have been implicitly encouraged to
view the plays as the modern equivalent of the greatest literature of the past
and therefore of great interest and importance to the whole Greek-speaking
world.
Then there is the huge advantage of 'heroic vagueness' in making it possible
for plays to be understood (to take over Griffith's point) as offering something
for everyone in the audience. The fact that political, legal, and social issues are
dealt with in language carefully integrated into the heroic setting enables prob-
lematic questions to be addressed without overt divisiveness and thus to be
open from the start to different interpretations. What it does not mean is that
hard questions are avoided or made comfortable because expressed in these
glamorous and dignified terms.
One or two examples will perhaps make the point clearer. Ajax offers a neat
illustration of the way 'heroic vagueness' is used both to gloss over an issue and
to make it prominent within the same play. This is the matter of the status of a
concubine and her child: Tecmessa and Eurysaces, Teucer and his mother.
Much is made in this play of the theme of Teemessa's total dependence upon
Ajax. She was born a Phrygian princess, daughter of rich Teleutas, but now she
is a slave: Ajax made her his captive when he destroyed her city (210-12; 487-
90). Her dignity is established by the Chorus when they first greet her; OE AEX0S"
Sovp,aAwTov (]TEp~as ciV€XEL ()ovp,os Aias (212), which ]ebb translates as 'to
thee, his spear-won bride, bold Ajax hath borne a constant love', rightly bring-
Ing out the rather grand style of lechos dourialoton as a synonym for
18 Cf. Meier (1993), 44-5 0 . 19 Cf. Herington (1985); Nagy (1990), esp. 40 4-5.
26 P. E. Easterling
'concubine'. (A more 'workaday' and specific term like pallake would give a
quite different impression.)20 Tecmessa's speech of appeal to Ajax (485-524)
echoes the most dignified of epic models, Andromache's speech to Hector in the
Iliad (6.407-39). Ajax, moreover, has no wife waiting for him at home: every-
thing combines to make the audience take Tecmessa very seriously, and one is
not supposed to find oneself wondering about the legal status of the child
Eurysaces. 21 But later in the play the question of bastardy is given great pro-
minence in relation to Teucer, who fears rejection by Telamon if he returns
home without Ajax and is offensively abused by Agamemnon for having a bar-
barian mother (1228, 1259-63). So the play can have it both ways: in 'fact'
(presumably) there was no difference in status between Tecmessa and the cap-
tive Resione, concubine of Telamon and mother ofTeucer, herself a Phrygian
princess and daughter of Laomedon, no less (1301-3), but this analogy is not
drawn, and emphasis is laid instead on Telamon's Greek wife Eriboia (566-70).
The vagueness of the language relating to the heroic setting thus allows the
dramatist freedom from distracting socio-Iegal considerations in places where
they are inappropriate; but it is worth noting that the play does have a point to
make out of the matter of origins. The status of Tecmessa and the status of
Teucer's mother are dramatically linked in that both relate to the fundamental
theme of friends and enemies. Ajax has started behaving like an enemy to
people who should be his friends;22 kills himself with the sword of his enemy
Hector; recognizes at last the possibility of change from friend to enemy, enemy
to friend. And this theme is strengthened by reminders that Tecmessa is a
Phrygian captive, Teucer's mother was a Phrygian captive, and ironically even
Agamemnon is descended from the 'Phrygian' Pelops (1292).
A similar point can be made about Antigone. The questions that have
exercised critics for so long-the status of Creon's decree and its relation to
contemporary Greek, especially Athenian, practice in the case of traitors 23 -
have tended to obscure the fact that the action takes place in an essentially
fictive world in which 'real-life' considerations may be set aside with compar-
ative ease, helped by the judicious use of 'heroic vagueness'. In this case the
effect depends less on the use of particular words than on the avoidance of any
precise and specific account of Creon's decree.
Creon is presented as a legitimate monarch, perfectly within his rights to
issue a decree denying burial to the traitor Polyneices, but at the same time
his action is revealed to be profoundly shocking and problematic. This is
partly because refusal of burial in itself raises difficult questions, such as how
far the punishment of the dead should be allowed to go-the same issue as is
confronted in Ajax, in a spirit which owes something to Iliad 24-but the
20 Cf. Segal (1994) on the status of Iole in Trach.

21 Cf. Winnington-Ingram (1980), 30 n. 57.
22 Cf. Blundell (1989), ch. 3.
23 See e.g. Cerri (1982).
problem is made even more acute here because no mention is made of the
possibility of throwing the body out beyond the boundaries ofTheban territory
and so avoiding the danger of pollution that an unburied corpse would bring on
the city.
When epic poetry deals with the idea of exposing a corpse to the ravages of
dogs and birds, as a way of subjecting the dead enemy to an extreme form of
outrage,24 the language sometimes implies 'throwing out' as a preliminary to
such exposure, as at Odyssey 3. 258 f£ where Nestor describes what Aegisthus
would have suffered if Menelaus had come back to punish him for the murder
of Agamemnon: 'The dogs and birds would have devoured him as he lay on the
plain far from the cit), (hekas asteos)' .25 One might have expected 'throwing out'
to be specified in Creon's decree in Antigone, as it is in the versions given at
SeiDen against Thebes 1013-30 and at Phoenissae 1630. But in fact the details
are left extremely vague (although much is made of the motif of exposure to
dogs and birds 26 ); nothing is said by Antigone or Creon when they cite the
decree, and when indications of locality are given they add very little. At 41 1
the Guard describes himself and his companions who were set to watch over the
corpse as 'sitting on the brow of the hill'; at I I Ie the place of exposure is 'in
view' from where the speaker, Creon, stands talking to the Elders; at 1 197 the
corpse lies 'at the furthest/highest point of the plain'. The most specific detail
comes at 1203 f£: when the corpse of Polyneices is duly buried the Messenger
speaks of the 'high mound of native earth' (roJ.Lf3 ov opOoKpavov oiKEias x8ovos)
that is raised to him.
We are forced to infer (if we think about it) that the corpse of Polyneices has
not been thrown out; but as Hester has rightly emphasized,27 no one in
Antigone is allowed to suggest the simple removal of the body beyond the
Theban boundaries as a means of reducing the danger of pollution (an action
which in 'real life' could even have opened up the possibility that the corpse
might be rescued and discreetly buried, as was supposed to have happened in
the case ofThemistocles, Thuc. I. 138). The issue is simply never brought to the
surface: the confrontation between Creon and Antigone can thus be portrayed
in the purest and starkest terms possible, which do not exactly match any situ-
ation that we know of from the fifth century.28 On the other hand, the nearby
presence of the unburied, decomposing corpse casts a disturbing shadow over
the play, and Cerri may perhaps be right to suggest that there is some reflection
24 Cf. Vernant (19 82),68.

25 This is related to the common idea of the shame attached to dying far away from one's philoi;
cf e.g. Ii. 19.421-2, 22. 88-9, 508, 24. 21 I, and for discussion Segal (1971).
26 Ant. 29-3 0 , 20 5-6, 697- 8, 1016-22, 1198; cf. 1040-1 and 1080-3.
27 (197 1 ),20-I.
28 Despite Cerri's claim (1982: 127) that the specific contents of Creon's decree find parallels in
the institutions and events of the 5th century. Leaving a corpse unburied on the plain cannot be
precisely equated with throwing the corpse of a traitor into the barathron: the ritual significance of
the two actions must surely be different.
P. E. Easter ling
here of contemporary unease and controversy over the proper way to deal with
dead offenders. 29
At all events, the debate is not allowed to turn on points of legality; and the
play makes no attempt to suggest ho",' the initial problem could have ,been
avoided or solved. Still less does it dramatize any straightforward conflict, for
example between city and family loyalties or between state and individual,
although it has often been read as if it did. The vagueness of the language relat-
ing to the setting helps to make possible a more ambiguous, elusive, and
suggestive treatment of an issue so vast that Antigone has had limitless reper-
cussions in European culture: Steiner sums it up as 'the discourse on man and
society'.3o The success of this technique is clear from the very many different
adaptations and imitations of Antigone which audiences have had no trouble in
relating to their current situations: the emblematic nature of the conflict
between Creon and Antigone makes itself felt with absolute directness, and the
only problem for critics is the precise resonance of the denial of burial for the
original audience.
IMAGES OF THE COMMUNITY
It will be clear from the argument so far that 'heroic vagueness' is liable to
make it exceptionally difficult for us to trace patterns of contemporary mean-
ing in these plays set in heroic times. 'fhe more conscious we are of this point,
and the more we are attracted by Griffith's principle of 'something for every-
one', the more willing we should be to accept that right from the start the plays
will have been open to very diverse political readings. 31 So it is futile to look for
univocal 'messages', and the best one can hope to do is to catch something of
the flavour of contemporary debates by comparing variables within different
plays.
One way of trying to do this is to take a couple of sample plays composed at
around the same period and look for the different models they offer of such
fundamental structures as the community itself. We can start from the simple
observation that epic poetry was familiar with the notions of a king addressing
the demos and of consultations among a privileged group of leaders like the
Greek chieftains at Troy, but there are a great many possible variations that
can be played on this model, and we need to take note also of the following:
(i) the presence or absence of citizens;
(ii) the civic institutions that are implicit or explicit (assemblies, trials, etc.)
and the terms used for social and political ideas;
(iii) the physical features of the setting, e.g. famous landmarks or sacred
places associated with a particular polis;
29(1982), 123, 12 9. 30 (1984), 108.
31WTould everyone in the original audience have reacted in the same way to the 'heroically
vague' use of monarchia at Ant. I 163~ for example?
(iv) the divine ambience in which the events take place;

(v) intertextual reference to other plays. (It would certainly be wrong to
imagine the plays functioning in a vacuum, sealed off from political and
artistic interaction with other works.)
Two plays close to one another in date are Eurpides' Orestes (408) and
Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, which was presumably composed fairly soon
before the death of Sophocles in c.406, though not staged until 401. Both give
prominence to civic communities, but in contrasting ways that offer food for
thought.
Orestes, set at Argos soon after the deaths of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, is a
play about a community'S decision-making. Everything, it seems, depends on
what the sovereign assembly of Argive citizens will decide is to happen to
Orestes and Electra as killers of the city's rulers. In the event the vote is in
favour of their execution, but Apollo's intervention turns the whole situation
around: now Orestes is to succeed to the throne of Argos (after a year of exile
and then acquittal at Athens, 1643-52) and Electra is to marry their friend
and fellow conspirator Pylades, who is destined to have a prosperous future
(1658-9). Most tellingly, Apollo will 'set to rights' Orestes' relations with the
city (1664-5). So the old order is paradoxically reasserted; but critics from
antiquity onwards have been disinclined to read the playas a simple endorse-
ment of traditional values, political or mora1. 32 The sense of paradox, even
absurdity, at the end is strongly brought out by the contrast between the vio-
lence of the conspirators-the firing of the palace and the intended murder of
Hermione-and Apollo's 'pacific' commands (it was Apollo, after all, who told
Orestes to kill Clytemnestra and Agamemnon).
(i) Beginning with the citizens of Argos, we should ask where they are to be
found in the action of the play, and how they are described. They are certainly
not represented by the Chorus, who as Electra's friends speak and sing only of
the family (by contrast with the women of the Euripidean Electra, who have
more to say about the community at large, e.g. at El. 699 ff.). Only one example
of an ordinary citizen appears on stage, the 'honest countryman' who gives an
account of the crucial meeting and vote in the Assembly (866-956). Otherwise
the citizens are an off-stage group on whose decision hangs the future of the
main characters. There is insistent emphasis on the voting process, and there
are plenty of favourable terms like polis, astoi, leas,33 used of the sovereign
people, but these good images are counterbalanced by references to factions
(represented by Oeax, the aggrieved brother of the murdered Palamedes, 43 1-3;
Aegisthus' party, who are hostile to Orestes and currently wield most power,
32 See de RomiUy (1972); Zeitlin (1980); Euben (1986b); Willink (1986); West (1987); Hall
(1993)·
33 Polis and politai: 49, 427,431,436,437,73°,756; aSloi: 442 (if genuine), 536,746; leas: 846.
30 P. E. Easterling
435-8, 889-94; and an unscrupulous speaker suborned by Tyndareos to argue

for a penalty of public stoning, 902-1634).
Two passages in the scene between Orestes and ~1enelaus are particularly
telling: Orestes' remark at 444-6 (later confirmed by Pylades at 760-2) that all
escape routes from the city are blocked by armed men, and Menelaus' words at
69 6-7 01 :
DTav ydp ~f3g. OijILos edt; opyr,v 1TEUWV,
OJLOLOV werrE 7TVP KaTaafiiaat Aciflpov·
o·
EL ~avxws itS' avrov EViEivOVTL fL€V
XaAWV V1TEiKOt, KatpOV EVAa{3ovp.EVOS,
raws av
EK1TVEVGEL'· OTav o·
dVij 1TVOcit;,
nlXOts" avath·ov Pq.o{wS' Buov 8€A€Lt;·
For when the people turns angry and is rampant, it is like having a raging fire to put out.
But if one gently slackens oneself and gives way so long as it strains, taking care with
one's timing, it may wen blow itself out, and when it abates, you may easily get all you
want from it. (trans. M. L. West, 1987)
There is thus a strong sense that the real power is in the hands of an unseen,
indeterminate populace which at a whim can decide what is to happen to the
characters who appeal for the audience's sympathy; but it matters greatly who
says what about the people. The speaker of lines 696-701 is Menelaus, a very
equivocal figure in the pl ay 35 whose subsequent action confirms the suspicion
expressed by Orestes and Pylades that he is not to be trusted (7 I 8-24, 736-54).
Unfavourable judgements like his on the people's arbitrariness thus need to be
treated with care: Menelaus implies at 700- I that he knows how to get the
people to do what he wants, but in the end he does not even turn up at the
Assembly (1058-9). And in the account of the debate itself the most serious
criticisms are directed at manipulative speakers (e.g. Talthybius, who goes in
for dichomutha (,double talk'), 887-97) and the man who is suborned by
Tyndareos, 902-17) rather than at the voters themselves. 36 It is worth adding
that the word ochlos, which could carry pejorative meaning,37 is used rather
neutrally at 871 and 885, as at 612, leaving the audience the option of under-
standing it either more or less favourably.
(ii) The account, of the assembly vividly evokes the cross-currents of feeling
and the vested interests that motivate the speeches; but it is important to
34 The scholia on 9 0 3 and 9 0 4 discuss the possibility that this last speaker was meant to be recog-
nized as Cleophon. Cf. West (1987) on 772.

35 Note that he is king of Sparta; cf. the remarks of Menelaus at Ajax 1071-90 and the unfavour-
able response he gets there (esp. I 102). West (1987) is surely wrong to cite Wedd here with approval:
'This passage doubtless gives the results of Euripides' own observation of the Athenian democracy.'
36 Cf. the interesting exchange between Orestes and Pylades at 772-3: (Orestes) 'The many (hoi
polloi) are formidable when they have bad leaders.' (Pylades) 'But whenever they find good ones,
they make good decisions.' The deletion of these verses proposed by Willink (1986) is unconvincing;
see ~'est (1987) ad loco
37 Cf. e.g. Hec. 607.
remember that the newsbringer himself is not immune from bias: his sketch of
himself as a poor but loyal countryman (866-70) is very like that of the high-
minded farmer he describes at 917 ff., who argues that Orestes deserves to be
crowned at public expense for having avenged his father and killed a wicked
woman. Everything said by Orestes and Electra suggests that this is too simple a
view of what they have done, and the farmer is in some ways as extreme as
Tyndareos and the would-be stoners. From the speaker's point of view there is
also a positive image of an aristocrat, that of the noble (anax) Diomedes, who
piously recommends a penalty of exile (898-900). This more moderate position
is what Tyndareos initially argued for. Tyndareos, however, has been so
incensed by Orestes that he has carried out his threat to overwhelm the
Assembly with his plea for a public stoning ('I will go to the convocation of the
Argives (EKKATrrov ;4PYE{WV oX'\ov) and drive (€7TL(]€{aw) the city, willing and
unwilling, against you and your sister', 612-14). His arguments, so fully
presented to Orestes, are not elaborated in the account of the assembly, but
9 14- 16 and 944-5 give a strong impression of how a fanatical speaker (or his
spokesman) can sway popular feeling. Yet there is no unequivocal condemna-
tion of the people as such.
All this suggests that we should be sensitive to the vantage point 38 from
which the different speakers offer views on the people (and on the elite), and
that there is no unambiguous position from which the audience is invited to see
the events of the play. This complex impression is certainly helped by 'heroic
vagueness', as in the use of ochlos, and by the way in which metaphor is made to
link the opposing positions. The word E7TLGELW, as Willink explains on 255-6, is
used of shaking the reins of a chariot-team: the idea of driving the people
furiously, willing and unwilling at the same time (if that is the correct meaning
of EKovaav oux €KOVaav 39 ) is comparable, in that it evokes a driver and a
chariot-team, to what Menelaus implies at 698-9 when he talks of 'slackening'
when the people 'strains'. Thus even if this attitude to controlling the people is
put in question in the case of Menelaus, in the case of Tyndareos it is shown to
have real power. The fact that €7TLG€iw is first used in the play by Orestes, when
he begs his dead mother not to drive the Furies against him (255-6), is also
relevant: in both contexts there is a sense of terrifying power unleashed, and
there is dramatic point in the linking of these irrational forces.
The language of civic procedure is insistent in the play, as the stress on
voting, and the use of the appropriate terminology for the conduct of the
debate in the assembly, make clear.40 There is no suggestion that decisions have
been arrived at by any hut constitutionally correct means, although the descrip-
tion of the assembly puts so much weight on the 'hidden agenda' of the various
speakers. -Alongside this analysis of personal and factional motivation there is
38 Cf. Griffith (1995),7 2 - 81 .
39 Cf. Willink (1986) on 613-14; West (1987) on 61 3.
40 Voting: 46-5°,440,756,846-8,857,975, 1013, 1328; procedure: 884-8.
32 P. E. Easterling
also compelling political argument: Tyndareos' points about the importance of

law at 49 I -525 make a very strong case against Orestes and Apollo, and
conversely the cheerful way in which Pylades treats loyalty to friends as more
important than ordinary moral sanctions (I085-1 I52) shows how difficult it 1S
to arrive at a fair judgement of the conduct of the three conspirators. The arg"C-
ments can be set out either way, but the decisions remain desperately prob-
lematic. 41 There is a similar effect in Hecuba and Phoenissae: when Hecuba
pleads with Odysseus42 in terms of the gratitude he owes her for having saved
his life at Troy he answers with arguments that are patently immoral but have
overwhelming force, just as it is clear in Phoenissae that Jocasta's admirable
views on homonoia will have no effect on her warring sons:B
(iii) What is particularly disturbing about the presentation of Argos is the fact
that apart from the description of the place of assembly itself (see below) the
city as a physical setting is almost uncannily featureless: none of its monu-
ments, sacred places, or presiding deities is mentioned,44 and the only visual
image relating to it is of roads blocked by armed men, who hem in Orestes ~nd
Electra and later Pylades as well (444-6, 760-2). Outside the city the most
important landmark is Clytemnestra's tomb, the focus of the plot to capture
Hermione and the focus on a symbolic level of many of the play's problematic
relationships. The opening lines evoke not the civic context but the fearful
picture of Tantalus hovering in mid-air in perpetual terror. Tantaius and the
tainted history of his descendants will recur as a significant thread in the play's
complex network of causes and events, but the city, which could be an eve:1
more crucially important presence, is not treated so vividly. This is in striking
contrast with the Argos of Aeschylus' Suppliants, for instance, in which shrines,
altars, and landmarks abound, and with them goes a strong sense of the divine
beings that are part of the lives of the citizens. 4)
(iv) As for divine presences in Orestes, there is a frightening sense of the
closeness of the Furies and all they stand for, while Apollo plays the part almost
of impresario-highly ironic and self-conscious, and more or less detached from
the community of Argos and its well-being. In the Euripidean Electra, by
contrast, the ritual life of the community, particularly the festival ofHera,4 6 is
of great importance for an understanding of the action of the play. The absence
of association with the sacred places and the cults of Argos may make Orestes
more 'free-floating' and easier to apply paradigmatically to any place, any time,
but it may also convey an uneasy sense of a void where the city ought to be. 47
41 It is interesting that the ancient hypothesis saw Pylades as the one virtuous character ('apart
from Pylades all of them were bad'). In a recent production of Orestes at the Gate Theatre in
London (1995) Tyndareos' arguments commanded very serious attention; it was not difficult for
the audience to relate the debate to contemporary events in Bosnia.
42 Hec.27 2 -33I. 43 Phoen. 528- 6 37.
H Said (1993 a: 172-4) discusses the geographical details.
45 Esp. 188-90,212-22,242,493-6,954-61,1018-29.
46 See Zeitlin (1970); c( Foley (1985), 43-5; Easterling (1988), 101-8.
[See opposite page for n. 47]
(v) If there is anything to evoke a sense of the traditions, values, or bonds that
hold the community together in Orestes it must be found in the description of
the off-stage assembly-place, which seems designed to have intertextual
reSona:1ce: · I saw a cro\vd coming and taking seats on the hilltop where men say
L:anaus, standing trial against Aegyptus, first assembled the people for a joint
sitting' (871-3). Whether this evokes the trial in Aeschylus' lost Danaids or a
play by Phrynichus on the same story,48 one point of the allusion may be to
mark the difference between the 'good old days' of early tragedy and early
democracy on the one hand, and the degenerate present on the other, when
popular decision-making is at the mercy of faction and demagoguery. Mention
of Danaus perhaps also recalls the Argive assembly (reported by Danaus) in
Aeschylus' Suppliants, where Pelasgus, who has insisted on the importance of
the king's consulting the people, is rewarded by a unanimous vote in favour of
his motion to support the Danaids (605-24). But so idealized 49 a picture of
democracy, as we have seen, finds no place in Orestes.
If we read its logic on these lines \ve can perhaps account for why a playas
seerr:.ingly lacking in 'polis-consciousness' as Orestes became immensely
popl~lar-a staple of the tragic repertoire after Euripides' time and an enduring
classjc for readers in late antiquity and the Byzantine period. Perhaps its
~mcdernity' in terms of ironic detachment, and its capacity to heighten political
a\V8.reness through cynical and sometimes witty deconstruction of illusory
ideals, enabled it to offer an appropriate sort of image of the community for the
troubled Athenians of 408 Be but did not compel either the contemporary
audience, or any later spectators or readers, to identify themselves too closely
with that image. And the rich range of intertextual allusions evoking earlier
drama could appeal to a different kind of 'audience solidarity', the sense of a
shared cultural identity.50
r This, it could be argued, is what is suggested by a closely contemporary play, Sophocles'

Philoctetcs, in which the action takes place on a desert island with no local community as in the
versions of Aeschylus or Euripides. The chorus of sailors is emphatically subordinate to Neoptol-
emus, and there is no sign of an attempt to create a setting for a debate between equals. The only
spokesman for the claims of the polis is Odysseus, whose representation of the situation is deeply
suspect. The only inlage of a community as now existing for the persons of the play is the Greek
army at Troy, with all its political strains; [he sense of the city's absence is strengthened by the
nostalgic longing expressed by Philoctetes and Neoptolernus for a time when men like Achilles and
Patroclus were alive (331-4o~ 410-50), and there is no reference to city gods who might help to
define a community'S identity .
.. 8Cf. ~'il1ink (1986) and West (1987) ad loco
49 See Sommerstein, pp. 75-6 below, for a different view. Cf. also Podlecki (1993),72-9, and (on
the voting) Easterling (19 85), 2-3.
:i0 Contrast (e.g.) Euben (I9 86b: 247): 'tragedy and city disintegrate under the relentless pressure
of centrifugal forces no leader can forestall and no dramatist contain.' A close comparison could be
made with the nearly contemporary Phoenissae, another play that had enormous later popularity
and influence. A remarkable effect of detachment from the beleaguered city of Thebes is achieved
here through the identity of the Chorus. Although the play is full of references to earlier drama,
especially Sept.) A.nt., and OT, it stands in sharp contrast to all of them, with a Chorus that is sym-
pathetic but not implicated, a group of Phoenician girls on their way from Tyre to Delphi to be
34 P. E. Easterling
Oedipus at Colonus is so obviously different from Orestes that a detailed com-

parison might seem pointless. But by looking at the play under the same head-
ings as Orestes we can see how the use of 'heroic vagueness' is closely similar,
though serving very different ends, and how this play too is designed to offer
'something for everyone'.
(i) In OC the community is present in the shape of the Chorus, the old men of
Colonus, who turn out to be able to speak for the whole of Athens (most
memorably at 668-719) and not just for their own locality. Their role vis-a.-vis
Theseus is handled with great delicacy. At 64 Oedipus asks whether the place
that he and Antigone have reached is inhabited; when told by the Stranger that
it is, his next question ('Do they have a ruler, or is logos [presumably the power
to discuss and decide] with the people?') introduces the idea of democratic self-
determination. The Stranger's answer ('these things are ruled by the king in the
astu') is evidently not taken by Oedipus to cut out the second of his alternatives,
because he goes on to imply (68) that the king uses logos as well as might
(sthenos), and the idea of democratic decision-making is taken up at 78-80,
when the Stranger says he will report Oedipus' arrival and message to the
demotai here, not in the astu, and they will decide whether he may stay. (It is
convenient that demotai can mean 'men of the deme' and 'men of the people'
with equal propriety.) At 47 the Stranger had said that he dared not make
Oedipus leave without the agreement of the polis; it seems that polis can be
used to apply both to the community represented by the inhabitants of Colon us
and to the larger community over which Theseus rules. It is this subtle indeter-
minacy that allows Colonus and Athens to be constrasted and merged at the
same time, as critics have often noted. 51
At 292-5 the Chorus tell Oedipus that they are satisfied to delegate to
Theseus the job of deciding what to do with him. So the men of Colonus are
shown as responsible for collective decision-making, but of their own volition
they delegate the task to the 'lords of this land'. Perhaps the use of the poetic
plural anaktes makes the democratic flavour stronger; it could conceivably
refer to an aristocratic group which advises the king, but there is no suggestion
of a group of 'elders' elsewhere in the play. It will be Theseus who will carry
responsibility and who has the physical resources to rescue Antigone and
Apollo's temple servants. They combine detachment from Theban politics with a detailed know·
ledge of the early history of the city: their own links with Thebes are traced to the Phoenicians'
descent from Cadmus' kinsman Agenor, a link which also ties them to the Argive side as
descendants of 10. The effect is complex: these Tyrians bring an exotic foreign (and probably inter·
textual) element into the play and at the same time give the audience a sense that the warring cities
are essentially alike, an impression also conveyed by the treatment ofPolyneices and Eteoc1es and
by Jocasta's unsuccessful attempts to reconcile them. There is no coherent polis centre here, despite
the elaborate references to the landmarks and the history of Thebes, and although (by contrast with
Orestes) the play is full of gods we are given a sense of too many possible explanations for the mean-
ingless strife that drives the action. In the midst of all this detail there is no emphasis on the Theban
community as such or on its decision·making, only on an army at war with the Argives.
51 C£ e.g. Segal (1981), 362-408; Allison (1984); Kirkwood (1986).
Ismene and protect Oedipus, while the Chorus are helpless to resist Creon's
violence on their own. But there is no implication that because they are old men
they have no stake in the life of the community, and their witnessing of the
events of the play is crucial to the understanding of what is happening to
Oedipus and Athens. 52
(ii) In addition to the procedures of decision-making the play offers glimpses
of other institutions and famous features of the life of the Athenians. Oedipus
claims (and he has to be taken seriously) that Athens is known for its piety, fair-
ness, and truthfulness (1 I25-7); Creon plainly gets it wrong when he claims
(944-9) that the Areopagus would not allow an incestuous parricide like
Oedipus to find refuge in Athens. There is also the fame of the city for its
military might, particularly its cavalry and fleet, its olive production, its
festivals, and above all its divinities, sanctuaries, and cults (see below).
Along with the emphasis on democracy there is a certain 'aristocratic' appeal
in the stress on the cavalry (particularly 707- IS and the reference to the
'knight Colonus', 59). The elite bond of xenia is evoked, too, when Theseus,
having questioned Oedipus, announces his intention to receive him as a suppli-
ant, stressing the importance of the xenia that links their two families. But the
phrase he uses at 632-3 (OT<tJ ... ~ OOPV~EVO~ KOLVi] 1Tap:lijp..iv aiEl! eGTLV EGTia,
'who as ally has the right of access to our hearth (and we to his)') could also
refer to the koine hestia of the fifth-century city.53 When Oedipus and Theseus
meet there is a strong sense of shared values and 'nobility' (569), but Oedipus'
'nobility' is something the Stranger can recognize too (76), and perhaps this
should be seen as one of the respects in which the play offers something for
everyone, like the repeated prayers for the welfare of Athens (38,642, 1124-5,
155 2 -5).54
This emphasis on shared ties may help us to interpret what Theseus says to
Creon about Thebes at 919-23: 'It was not Thebes that trained you to be evil.
The Thebans are not in the habit of rearing unjust men, and they would not
praise you if they learned that you were robbing me and robbing the gods, too,
in dragging their suppliants off by force.' Theseus makes a careful distinction
here between Thebes as it ideally was, or should be, and its debased repre-
sentatives, Creon in particular. This recalls his expression of surprise at 606
that a time might come when Athens and Thebes would be enemies, to which
Oedipus replies with his famous speech on time and change (607-28). These
passages allow the audience to see the events in a double perspective, making it
possible for them to apply what happens in the drama to their own times, but
not forcing a single interpretation. If what is happening at Thebes can be a
52 Cf. 1348, where Oedipus addresses them as ciVOPES rijuo£ 0TfJ.L0VXOL X8ov6~.
53 Cf. VidaI-Naquet in Vernant-VidaI-Naquet (1988), 347.
54 There is a good example of convenient 'heroic vagueness' in the use of empolin at 637 to
characterize Oedipus' status (Musgrave's emendation must be right) despite the arguments of
Vidal-Naquet in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (1988),342-9): he is receiyed into the city, but can still be
called xenos, and the ambiguity of his position is not threatened by this term.
P. E. Easterling
paradigm for what might happen to any city, Athens included, as Mary Whit-
lock Blundell has suggested,55 then the extreme vulnerability of the polis is
strongly marked, particularly for spectators who had participated in varying
ways in the events of 4I I at Athens. But the contrast between the 'true Thebes'
and its debased representatives could also have had a different contemporary
resonance in relation to the complex historical relationship between Athens and
Thebes, though without knowing the exact date of composition we are hard put
to it to be more precise. By the time the play was staged, in 40 I, there had been
a rapprochement between the two cities, and the passage could even have been
understood as allowing a new and more tolerant view of old enmities. At all
events the important point is the way 'heroic vagueness' allows a range of
possible interpretations to coexist.
(iii) and (iv) By contrast with Orestes this play is full of references to the
physical surroundings of the community, in this case to Colonus and Athens,
and almost all the references are intimately connected with cult.56 The deities
mentioned-the Eumenides, Poseidon, Prometheus, Colonus, Dionysus,
Demeter and Kore, the Muses, Aphrodite, Zeus Morios, Athena, Pythian
Apollo-are all introduced in relation to the place and its sanctities, and these
details, along with sacred landmarks like the Brazen Threshold (57, 1590- I)
mentioned in the Messenger's speech, convey a strong sense of value and rever-
ence. Of course there is a good reason why the details so lovingly identified
should have special appeal for an Athenian audience, but plays set elsewhere
sometimes evoke the significance of a community through its physical
surroundings, and particularly its cults, in the same sort of way: the Argos of
Aeschylus' Suppliants, for example, or the Thebes of Antigone and OT
(v) OC is a play rich in intertextual resonance. The echoes or allusions that
relate most closely to the image of the community are the associations with
plays about Thebes, particularly Antigone and OT.57 The most painful moment
comes at 1769-72, when Antigone asks Theseus to send her and Ismene back
to 'ancient Thebes' (er}{3a~ Td~ wyvyiovs) in the hope of preventing their
brothers from shedding each other's blood. Theseus of course agrees, and there
is a strong impression at the end of the play that even the best of the human
beings are dangerously limited by their humanity: life will go on, the Seven will
attack, and the whole sequence that we know from Antigone and Phoenissae
will take its grim course. Cities will always be vulnerable as well as precious, and
they will need protectors whose power goes beyond the limits of political
discourse.
Without wishing to end in mystification I think it is worth stressing a point

made earlier (p. 24) that we need to bear in mind, in thinking about the heroic
ss Blundell (1993). S6 Krummen (1993).
57 There were also plays lost to us that the audience would be able to recall, e.g. Euripides'
Oedipus and Antigone.
world of tragedy, that the heroes had a continuing life in cult. 58 This is one
reason why a socio-political model in terms of mass and elite is liable to be too
limiting, though I should not want to suggest that the cults of a polis were not
deeply implicated in its political life. Another reason is the richness and open-
endedness of the dramatic tradition itself, which encouraged audiences to find
cultural if not political identity through the shared language and shared models
of the past.
58 Cf. Seaford (I994), ch. 4.

I am grateful to Paul Cartledge and Mark Griffith for last-minute advice.
3
Tragic Filters for History: Euripides' Supplices and
Sophocles' Philoctetes
A. M. BOWIE
Scholarship has something to make good here. It should do justice to the products of
genius. But here, as so often, false ingenuity has presumed to illuminate its dimmed
object by flashes of impertinent inspiration; picking out, for example, isolated words or
phrases and relating them to facts (often imaginary) outside the poet's creation. 1
So Zuntz 1 trenchantly on the question of tragedy's reference to con-

temporary events. He would be pleased that nowadays this 'false ingenuity' is
much less practised, when there are fewer who would seek a tragedian's views
on contemporary events through 'des mouvements ephemeres dans l'humeur
ou la n!f1exion du poete'2 detectable in the plays; fewer who see in KAtrrav O~
d.J.L4>E7TEt~ '!raA{av (Soph. Ant. I 119) an allusion to the founding of Thurii. 3
Suggestions of such references are now made almost apologetically, even for
plays which have especially figured in discussions of the problem in the past.
Recent attention has been concentrated on tragedy.'s representation of
broader aspects of polis ideology rather than on specific events.4 To turn back
to the study of reference to contemporary events may therefore seem retro-
gressive, and to imply a false distinction between 'political' and 'historical', or
indeed to use 'historical' in a crude sense. However there is a small category of
tragedies that do seem to refer specifically to particular recent events, which I
shall take as justification for this approach. Having looked at the evidence for
these 'historical' tragedies, I shall discuss two such plays, and consider the way
that the events are neither simply reproduced in mythical form nor subjected to
straightforward commentary, but are presented through 'filters" in one case
religious, in the other literary, which make possible a complex series of
audience reactions to them. This is therefore essentially an exercise in inter-
textuality.5
I (1955), p. ix.
2 Delebecque (195 1 ), 3 2 ; this book and Goossens (1962) are the most striking exponents of this
school.
3 Schmid-Stahlin (19 2 9-48), i. 2. 166 n. 7.
4 e.g. the essays in Winkler-Zeitlin (1990); Meier (1990), (1993).
5 Cf. Worton-Still (1990); on Classical literature, Conte (1986); on historical texts, Bennett
(19 8 7).
A. M. Bowie
ANCIENT EVIDENCE
The evidence for the fragmentary tragedians is sparse. All of I'hespis' titles are
mythical, and later evidence suggests great matters were not treated: Solon
asked indignantly how Thespis dared TfjALKaVTu tPEVSOfLEVOS . , . f-LETa ITUlQtr:l<;
AiYELV ('to put forward such lies so frivolously'),6 and Vita .L4eschJ'li 10 says that
it was a much greater task for Aeschylus to raise tragedy to the heights he did
from what it had been in the time ofThespis, Phrynichus, and Choerilus, than
for Sophocles to raise it to TEAEL6T1]~ (,completeness') after Aeschylus. Of
Choerilus, we have one, mythological title. Phrynichus wrote a play with the
unusual triple title L1iKaLoL ~ [JipaaL ~ .Evv8wKaL (The Just .Alen or TIze
Persians or Those Sitting Together); we know no more and the temptation to
take this as a historical play is mitigated by certain Hesychian glosses which
may suggest a mythological subject.? Phoenissae of 477/6 was historical: ~it
began with a eunuch preparing thrones who announced the defeat of Xerxes;
Aeschylus used it for his own Persians. 8 Most famously, Phrynichus \vrote the
Capture of Miletus, probably in 492, for which he was punished for reminding
the Athenians of olKiJfa KaKa ('troubles close to home'). It is tantalizing that \ve
cannot tell whether this was a crucial moment at which tragedy moved away
from contemporary topics and concentrated on refracting the city's KUKU
through more remote mythological tales, or whether Phrynichus had breached
an already existing convention that disasters involving Athenians ,",,'ere in-
appropriate for the Dionysia.9 Two ancient testimonia state that Pratinas
referred to Thaletas' freeing of Sparta from plague,10 and that Ion of Chios
(who began writing tragedy c.450) wrote these lines in annoyance at the
Spartan reaction to Chian requests for corn in a time of shortage: 'Sparta does
not pride itself on words, but when fresh war assails its men., counsel leads the
way and action lends a hand'.l1 However, these may be unwarranted scholarly
inferences from particular passages of the kind Zuntz deprecated, and are not
enough in themselves to point to historical tragedy. Finally, an Aristophanic
scholion says that Xenocles KW/Lt.pO€[Tat wr; dtE(]TOS EV rfJ 7TOt7]OEL L Kat
ci""1JYOpt.KOS".J ('is mocked as unpolished in his poetry and allegorikos').12
Unfortunately, when the final word was added is unclear and its meaning here
uncertain: in their earlier uses, allegoria etc. describe texts where words say one
thing but mean another; they do not begin to replace huponoia as the word for a
text's hidden meaning until the first century BC. 13 Finally, Theodectas (mid-
6 Pluto Sol. 29. 6.
7 apTdo£S" o{ OiKatot, U1TO Mciywv and apTa[Ot· oc fjpW€S, wapd llepaau; (a 7472 f).
8 TrGF 3 F 8; c£ Aesch. T 4 f. (DID B I and Arg. Pers.).
9 Cf. Rose (1992), 281 f.; Knox (19 83), 8. Aeschylus avoided any reference to the devastation of
Athens in Persae. 10 [plut.] De 1nus. 42 ('ex Aristoxeno?, TrGF 4 F 9).

It ou yap ..\ 6')'0 'S' AdKatVa 1TvpyouTaL 1ToALS, I d"\"\' nh' av ~;4p'1s VEoXfLoS EfLTTiurJ oTpaT<jJ, t f30vAiJ
JLEV apX£L, X£ip 0' E1T£e£pyci'ETat (TrGF 19 F 63); c( Critolaus ap. Sext. Emp. Ad'v. math. 2,23-
VR
12 TrGF 33 T 5 (L Ar. Frogs 86; 1..J desunt in R).
13 Kennedy (19 89), 85 ( Whether therefore Xenocles used mythology allegorically of con-
Tragic Filters for History 41
fourth century) \\lrate a tragedy on Mausolus,14 Moschion (died C.300) one on

'fhemistocles,15 and Lycophron, author of the lllexandra, a Marathonioi. 16
rrhe information from the Adespota is beset by uncertainties over dating.
'There are two relevant vases and three obscure fragments. A Corinthian hydria
c.f c.460 depicts a barbarian king on a pyre, attendants in distress, and a flautist
i 1 Greek dress: 'a lost tragedy, surely, with an Oriental, probably a Persian,
subject'.17 Croesus is an obvious candidate, and Page l8 connected the picture
\vith the Gyges found on papyrus,19 which seems to rework Herodotus' version
of the story.zo We have the Chorus saluting the Queen, her revelation of
C:andaules' crime, a narrative of that incident, and her discussion with Gyges.
Page suggested that, as in Herodotus, the two episodes were connected: the
(]yges 'could not have stood alone. In a tragedy of that period, the crime of
Ciyges and the Queen will not have been left unpunished: there must have been
c. sequel, in which retribution overtook them or their family; and the obvious
t nd of the story was the fall of Croesus. ,21 Unfortunately, whether the play is of
h.eschylean or Hellenistic date has been much disputed. Secondly, an Apulian
crater of C.340-30 shows Darius on a podium listening to a messenger;
l1EPIAI is inscribed. 22 ]ahn suggested this showed a scene from Phrynichus'
jJersae, but others see a representation of a Hellenistic treatment. Taplin has
vvarned that such 'titles' on vases are not necessarily those of actual tragedies,
but he allows that rrEP~AI here does look like one. 23
Of the fragments, TrGF 646 treats a Macedonian subject, which Maehler
related to one of Euripides' Nlacedonian plays (Archelaus, Temenus, Temen-
idae);24 68 5 has the cry w
yevos tJj IlEpawv ('0 race of the Persians', fro 3. I),
E.nd fro I concerns the Lydians; and 733 has an intriguing dramatic dialogue on
the death and perhaps immortality of Alexander the Great.
We turn briefly to the major tragedians, concentrating on the more
uncontroversial examples. For Aeschylus,25 obviously 'historical' are Persae 26
End Eunzenides. 27 Aetn(ae)ae, written for Hieron's foundation of Aetna in
47615 shows tragedies could be written for specific events outside Athens.28 It
rnoved around the cities of Sicily in a remarkable fashion, and told of the birth
of the Sicilian gods, the Palikoi, from Zeus and Thalia, but how it related to the
kmporary events as did some comedians, such as Cratinus in his Dionysalexandrns, remains a
D1ystery.
1-" TrGP 72 F 3b (= T 6.7 (). 15 TrGF 97 F 1. 16 TrGF 100 F lk (- T 3).
17 Beazley (1955),3 1 9. 18 (1962). 19 TrGF ii. 664, q.V. for bibliography.
20 Hdt. 1. 8 f( 21 Page (1962), 49.
?:! Napoli 3253; TrGF ii. 8 ( (with bibliography). 23 Taplin (1993), 25 f.
24 Kannicht and Snell reject this since 'in eis ipsos Macedones chori partes egisse vix credas'. Cf.
Schmid-Stahlin (1929-48), i. 3. 626-30.
25 In general, c( Podlecki (1966); Meier (1993), 62-166.
21) Cf most recently Meier (1993), 62-78, and Pelling, above, Ch. I.
2" Cf l\'ladeod (1983); Meier, (1990), 82-139; (1993), 97-137; Bowie (I993b).
lX Vil. /lesch. 9: ~IEpw"ot; lOT(: ri]v ALTV7]V KTl'oVTOS bT€8€tgaTo TaS ArTVaS' OlWVL~6,u.€voS' Piov
dya80v TO[~ (J"tJVOLK[~ouaL riJv 71"o'\,v; cf. TrGF iii. 126-30.
42 A. M. Bowie
foundation is not clear. Portus suggested that Oreithuia was written for or in
response to the dedication of the temple of Boreas, whose blowing helped the
Athenians before Artemisium in 480.29 Simon30 has supported this on the
grounds of the similarities between representations on early classical-period
vases and Acusilaus' version, both of which she traces back to Aeschylus. She
sees it as a 'Festspiel' ,31 but the examples of Persae and Eumenides might rather
suggest it needed no special occasion beyond the Dionysia.
The dates of almost all Sophocles' plays are unknown, which makes
historical discussion problematic;32 Philoctetes (of 409) has been discussed in
terms of the return of Alcibiades, and to it we shall return. An obscure note on
the Epigonoi 33 about poets quietening strife ends Kat TO L'o</>o [KAEOVS EV TO ]is
'E7TLy6vots[ ('and Sophocles' [...] in the Epigonoi'). Radt suggests that 'non
dramatis personarum litem sed Atheniensium discordias sedavit' ,34 but I see no
reason to think this. Finally, Pollux 35 tantalizes with his comment that speaking
to the audience is all right for comedy, 'but it is not tragic. None the less,
Euripides did it in many plays ... and Sophocles too did it rarely (as in the
Hipponous) out of rivalry with him'. What these 'parabasis-like' passages were
and how far they were on historical matters is unknown.
Euripides has been the subject of most speculation in this area: 36 Supplices,
Troades, Orestes,37 Heraciidae,38 and Heracles have figured most prominently
in a long debate which we cannot discuss here: the first three are the most
promising cases. Archelaus was written for the Macedonian king and celebrated
his eponymous ancestor.
Thus, in this 'historical' category, we have up to eleven 'historical' plays on
Persian subjects; four on Macedon, but none certainly historical; one each on
Sicily, Mausolus, and Alexander; Eumenides on Athens;39 plus the strongest
candidates among the other extant plays, Sophocles' Philoctetes, and Euripides'
Supplices (?424-420, relatable to Delium), Troades (415, relatable to the
massacre at Meles), and Orestes (4°9, relatable to recent events in Athens).
Excluding plays apparently written for specific rulers and occasions, all those
left either are on Persia, or concern Hellenistic figures of almost legendary
stature, or deal with other momentous events. The defeat of the Persians was
important enough to be depicted on temples alongside mythical victories, such
as Gods over Giants, and seems for the same reason to have become the subject
of tragedies: exceptional circumstances called for exceptional tragedies?
29 TrGFiii.377. 30 (I967),II7-2I;cf.Hdt.7.I89.3. 31 Simon(I967),II8f.
31 Cf. however Ehrenberg (1954).
33 Philodemus, De musica, 1. 35. 31 Rispoli"'" 1. 30.31 Kemke (cf. 4.20.7).
34 TrGF iv. 18 4. 3.S 4. 1 I 1.
36 Cf. Schmid-Stahlin (1929-48), i. 3. 417-62; Delebecque (195 I); Zuntz (1955); Goossens
(1962); for the testimonia, cf. Kovacs (1994), 1-14 I.
37 Cf. Hall (I993)and Easterling in this volume, pp. 29-33 above.
38 C( Wilkins (1993), pp. xxxiv f.
39 Eumenides would thus be the first known 'historical' tragedy on events other than those
involving the East.
It is also clear that, though tragedy was a means of display for the wealthy,40
unlike other art forms, such as painting and architecture,41 it was not used for
propaganda purposes.42 There is nothing to connect Cimon with such tactics.
Aeschylus is connected with Themistocles, but Persae is not especially pro-
l"hemistoclean: it does not even name him. Contrast Plutarch's account of
Simonides' description of Salamis in his lyric poem The Battle of Salamis: 'that
noble and famous victory, than which neither amongst the Greeks nor barbar-
ians was ever known more glorious exploit on the seas; it was won by the
common bravery and enthusiasm of the men who fought in the sea battle and
by the intelligence and astuteness of Themistocles. '43
What other genres say of tragedy does not suggest any strong connection
with particular historical events: comment on contemporary events is comedy's
sphere. It is perhaps significant that only in Acharnians in extant comedy does a
comic figure feel the need to don tragic garb to speak on contemporary events:
'I:omedy uses the authority of tragedy to bolster its claims to free speech, and
goes on to use this license to accomplish what tragedy did not undertake-for
there were few tragedies based on recent historical events'.44 In Frogs, the criti-
cisms of tragedy are largely 'literary' or concerned with its effect on the
audience; Thesmophoriazusae is concerned more with comedy's greater merits
and flexibility as a dramatic genre of social comment:~5
Philosophy offers us little more. In the Republic, Plato's criticisms are mainly
concerned with the truth of tragedy and the moral consequences of participat-
ing in and seeing drama, and he has little to say about tragedy's relation to
history.46 The Laws complains of the 4theatrocracy' which exists in the matter
of artistic judgement, but this has nothing to do with the historical aspects of
the plays.47 In the Politics, Aristotle occasionally quotes the tragedians to
support his points,48 but not in connection with actual historical events. In the
Poetics, he allows the possibility of historical tragedy: 'the poet is a poet qua
maker of mimesis and the objects of his mimesis are actions. Even if it is
incidentally true that the plot he makes actually happened, that does not mean
40 Cf. e.g. Pluto Nic. 3. 2 f.
41 Cf. Francis (199 0 ).
42 Contrast Cleisthenes of Sicyon's manipulation of choral performances for political purposes
(Hdt. 5.67 f). After war with Argos, wishing to minimize the influence of the Argive hero Adrastus,
especially revered by the Sicyonians, he stopped the Homeric recital competitions because the
Argives were praised so often, and introduced the statue and cult of Melanippus, Adrastus' enemy.
fIe transferred the rpaylxoi x6pOt, which celebrated the 7TdOfa of Adrastus, from his cult to that of
I)ionysus. It is not certain, however, exactly what these 'tragic' choruses were (cf. Pickard-
Cambridge (1962), 101-4).
H Them. 15. \'Xlhat effect the juxtaposition of ~historical' plays with the others in their trilogy or
tetralogy might have been is also worth considering: how did the Ph incus and Glaukus POlnieus
affect the reception of Persae which came between them?
·H Foley (1988), 47 .
.. ~ Cf. Zeitlin (1981); Bowie (I993a), 205-37 .

.J6 Cf. 568a- b for the idea that tragedy praises tyranny as "god-like', also [pl.], Afinos 320e-2Ia.
.J7 7o oe -7 0 1 a.
.JH Cf. 12 77<18- I 2, 128 I a 42 _b 3 for the state as a dramatic chorus.
44 A.M. Bowie
that he is not its maker.'49 The formulation, however, suggests that such plays
were not common.
The orators do not often bring tragedy into political discourse. Lycurgus
praises Euripides for the Erechtheus that acted as a model for the citizens of
love for one's country,50 but this is essentially the 'poet as teacher', not histor-
ical comment. Tragic quotation is found in political debate, but not in the
manner we seek.51 A sense of the difference between events on the tragic stage
and in 'reality' is sometimes put to rhetorical use. Aeschines says the relatives of
those who died because of Demosthenes' actions would weep less at the suffer-
ings of tragic heroes than at the city's blindness in honouring Demosthenes. 52
Demosthenes complains that the Athenians would never have behaved with
such favour towards the actor Neoptolemus nor such hatred of himself if the
events had happened on stage. 53 Conversely, Andocides says the audience have
no idea whether tragic crimes are true or not but react to them, yet, though they
know Alcibiades has been acting illegally, they show little concern. 54 Sig-
nificantly, Isocrates remarks that great men today cannot expect to be
honoured in tragedy like the heroes of the Trojan War.55
Finally, how far did the ancient commentators, working from the third
century Be onwards, read the plays in terms of specific contemporary event.s?56
For the most part they concentrate on specific lines rather than the effect of
whole plays. The vetera on Aeschylus, Bum. 290 comment that 'the Argives
were then allies of the Athenians', and on 398 recount the conflict between
Athens and Mytilene over Sigeum, suggesting that Aeschylus is encouraging
the Athenians to seize the place again. On 484, 8iJaw, they remark that the
Areopagus still continued in Aeschylus' day, and on 566-9 note an anachron-
ism put into history from the present day. That on Supp. 485 notes that the
people generally blame their leaders in a crisis. There is nothing of note in the
testimonia to Sophocles, and little more in the scholia. That on E1. 62 remarks
that it is 'critical of his contemporaries, which was more fitted to comedy'. A
few contemporary events are mentioned: the hostility between Athens and
Boeotia (Oe 92); that Oedipus would save the Athenians in the Peloponnesian
War (Oe 457); that the Spartans did not, when raiding Attica, damage the
sacred trees (OC 698, with reference to Archidamus, and 70 I). OT 222 is
related to metics in Athens and Phil. 99 is said to slander contemporary orators
for their use of rhetoric in politics. For Euripides, we have nine examples from
the plays with scholia, essentially claims of attacks on demagogues and refer-
49 145 1b27-32 (trans. Hubbard). so Leocrates 100 f.

51 Cf. esp. Aeschin. I. 152; Dem. 19.243-50, 18. 180. 52 3.153.
53 5.7. Note how Demosthenes' appeals to tragedy often occur in speeches against people who
were actors.
54 4- 23; cf. Wilson in this volume, pp. 81-5 below.
55 9. 6; cf. also Antill. 136; Panath. 124; Archidamus 106.
56 We have little evidence for actual ancient audience reaction: cf. Pickard-Cambridge (1988),
274 f.
ences to a few episodes of the Peloponnesian War. Demagogues are detected

under the 'unappetizing race' of Hec. 254 and the 'folly of the leaders' of
I)hoen. 393. Cleophon is mentioned on Or. 772 (one scholiast is not so sure)57
and 903. The three passages in Andromache which the scholia refer to Athenian
hostility to Sparta follow naturally from the anti-Spartan tenor of parts of that
play; the scholia's claim is less relevant to Or. 371 (cf. 1682). Although the
scholia do not find extensive political allegory, the remark on Hec. 254 that
'this is Euripides' custom, to attribute aspects of his own time to that of the
heroes and to mix the periods together', suggests that allegorical reading of
mythological stories in Euripidean tragedy may have been a more important
feature of Hellenistic criticism than now appears.
Our main finding is that, if we leave aside the claims for historical inter-
pretation of individual passages, tragedy concentrates its historical interests on
a very few major events, either of almost cosmic importance, like the defeat of
the Persians, or of considerable contemporary impact. I pass now to my two
examples of the latter, and how tragedy represents such events.
EURIPIDES, SUPPLICES
l~he first example concerns historical events which are viewed (though not
exclusively58) through religious filters. A major difficulty facing the historian
reading Supplices is the uncertainty about its date, but there is general agree-
ment that it post-dates Delium.59 The metrical evidence also suggests the late
420S,60 and 'it would be very remarkable indeed if a play which other indica-
tions place in the middle or late 420's, and which dramatises refusal of burial to
slain warriors as a moral issue between Thebes and Athens) should not have
been prompted by ... the Theban refusal to relinquish the Athenian dead for
burial after the campaign at Delium in November of 424'.61 The similarities
between the events at Delium and the plot of the play are striking, and in
addition there is an unusually prominent series of references to contemporary
aspects of Athenian society and culture; both of these focus the play onto the
fifth century. The differences, such as that between the fifth-century Thebans'
willingness to hand over the bodies if the Athenians left the temple, and the
mythical ones' refusal to hand them over at all, mean the play is not a simple
parable based on the recent events, but do not disqualify it as a consideration of
the issues raised by those events: once the parallelism is established in Aethra's
prologue, it is the similarities and differences that permit the audience to view
57 C( Willink (1986), 231; Vidal-Naquet (below), Ch. 6 n. 47.

58 The play is strongly political: cf. Burian (198S), and also Zeitlin (1990b), 146 f.
59 Cf. Collard (197S a: 8 f.) for a list of suggestions.
60 Its 14.2 % of resolutions suggest Supplices belongs to the late 420S: cf. Hipp. 5.6% (428), Andr.
12% (?42S), Erech. 20% (?423 or 422), Hee. 14.7% (425/4), Tro. 21.296 (415) (Collard (197sa), 1 I).
61 Collard (I97S a), 10.
A.M. Bowie
the different aspects of recent events in different ways by comparison and

contrast.
The similarities are briefly as follows. The Athenian plotting to establish
democracy in the Boeotian towns with various Boeotian exiles mirrors the aid
given by Adrastus and the Seven to the cf>vya~ Polynices to gain power in his
own city (14-16). The subsequent events revolve around temples, of Apollo at
Delium and of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis. In each case, there are
religiously problematic actions: the Athenians occupy the temple, cutting down
the vines surrounding it, and, the Boeotians complain, acting as if on secular
ground; Adrastus' failure to observe religious niceties before his expedition
justifies Theseus' initial refusal to help (131 ff., 21 I ff.). Defeat is the result in
each case. Each incident involves two battles, the two victories of the Boeotians
over the Athenians, and the defeat of the Seven and Theseus' avenging of it.
These battles do not correspond, since the Athenians had no revenge, but this is
not the significant fact: rather, the parallelism is between the first Boeotian
victory and Theseus' vindication, which is dramatically more powerful, since it
allows the play to concentrate on a glorious Athenian victory, but at the same
time to lay bare the crucial difference between myth and reality. The pattern of
the battles is strikingly similar .62 In each one, the right wings defeat the left
(Thuc. 4. 96. 4, c( Supp. 703-6), and Pagondas and Theseus bring aid to their
faltering left wings in a move that secures ultimate victory (Thuc. 4. 96. 5) cf.
Supp. 708 ff.).63 The Boeotians and Thebans refuse to return the bodies.64 An
Athenian herald went to seek the Athenian dead, but was turned back by a
Boeotian one bringing their complaint against the Athenians; the Athenians
then sent their herald, but he did not achieve anything (Thuc. 4. 97. 2, 99).
Theseus is about to send his herald to Thebes to demand the bodies of the
Seven, when the Theban Herald comes in and forestalls him (395-8). The
bodies are eventually returned and given burial with a funeral oration. 65
As for the 'anachronistic' references to contemporary Athens' ,66 the very
question of the return of bodies, though obviously of concern to all Greeks, had
a special resonance for the Athenians, who after the Persian Wars 67 returned
the ashes of dead warriors to Athens instead of burying them on the battle-
field. 68 Theseus gives Adrastus a disquisition on different types of citizen
61 Cf. Giles (1890),98; Kuiper (1923), 102 ff.; Goossens (1932),9 ff.; Gregoire (1950),92-4.
There are of course differences: cf. Collard (1975 a), 277-9.
63 The Iv1.essenger refers to 7Tapat{1ciTat (677-9), a type of warrior found in central Greece in the
fifth century and said to have been at Delium (Diad. 12.70).

M On the religious aspects of refusal of burial, cf. Parker (1983),41-8,162,190.
65 For the spectacular Theban celebrations, cf. Diad. 12.70; Demand (1982), 106-16. On the
importance of Delium (combined with defeat at Amphipolis) in Athenian willingness to discuss
peace, cf. Thuc. 5. 14. 1.
66 On 'anachronisms' in tragedy, cf. Easterling (1985); on Suppiices, cf. Fitton (1961), 432 f.;
Smith (1966), 154; Croally (1994),213.
67 On the date, c( Strasburger (1958), 20 f.; Jacoby (1944), 55.
68 C( Diod. 13. 10 1. 1 and PI. Menex. 243C6-7 on Arginusae.

(238 ff), whose contemporary relevance is clear,69 and Aethra's plea to her son
(297 ff) is reinforced by the language of the fifth century?O Theseus' reply
describes the political structure of his city in terms that are remarkably close to
that of fifth-century Athens. 71 In his dialogue with the Theban Herald, the
references are more direct. The respective merits of democracy and autocracy
are debated: the Herald's query 'who is tyrant of the land?' (399), and Theseus'
reply that 'the city is not ruled by one man, but is free' (404 f.), immediately
bring mythical and fifth-century cities together. Theseus refers to Athens'
yearly offices held by rich and poor alike (406-8). The Herald replies with criti-
cisms of rhetoric, bribery, and deception and expresses pertinent worries about
the difficulties those with livelihoods to win face in taking part in a democratic
system: 'the man who labours in the fields, even ifhe is not without intelligence,
could not concern himself with public affairs because of the demands of his
\\'ork'.72 In Theseus' reply, the 'written laws' (433) are the most striking
'anachronism', with which compare the inscription on the tripod at Delphi
(1202-4); he also paraphrases the words used to invite contributions in the
Assembly.'3 Later, he will employ contemporary scientific thinking (53 r-6).
Finally, Theseus emphasizes the polupragmosune that characterizes both his
city and Euripides' (339, 342).
Either, then, Euripides was remarkably prescient, or the play is a reflection
on the events at Delium. How is the historian to react to this? In the past,
scholars have tried to determine Euripides' message in the play: should Athens
have an alliance with Argos? However, such readings do little justice to the
complexity of the play and indeed do not give much account of large parts of it.
A, more fruitful approach might be to consider exactly how the play represents
and considers the events of Delium with particular emphasis on the religious
aspects, which have not received anything like the attention given to the
politica1.74
We shall consider later the specific religious framing of the play, but will
begin here with the broader religious questions. Alleged impiety was at the
heart of the dispute at Delium. The Boeotians argued that the Athenians had
violated the convention that invaders should respect temples, and
had fortified Delium and were living in it. They were doing all the things there that men
do in unconsecrated ground; they were drawing and using in the ordinary way water
69 Its terms are fairly general, but NB 243, 1TpOGTUTWV (cf. Alh. Pol. 28.2).
70 3 I I, vop.Lp.d Tf 1Tda'YJS aUYX€OVTaS 'EAAd8os is a common charge in Thucydides (e.g. 3. 56. 2,
59, 67; on Delium, 4. 97· 2 f, 98. 2; c[ 98. 8). Lines 31 B f., 321 f. show language reminiscent of
hoplite warfare (cf Collard (1975a), 192); 324 f. reflect the political theme of fUAd/3ftaliJavxia (c£
\,fillink (1986), on Or. 698).
71 349-53 (cf. Collard (197Sa), ad loc.).
71 ya1Tovos 8' dvr,p 1TfI'T]!;, I €i Kai Y€VOtTO fLTJ ap.a0-r1!;, epywv UuO I OUK av 8vvatTo 7TPO!; Tn KO(V'
a:TTo{1A€'TTfLV (420-2).
73 Ti~ ayopfvfLV {1ouAETat; (e.g. Ar. Ach. 45) becomes Ti!; 8iAf' 1TOA.€( I XP'YJGTOV it /3ouAfVfL' ES
p.Eaov cPiPfLV EXWV; (438 f.).
74 Cf now Krummen (1993); also Conacher (1956).
A.M. Bowie
which Boeotians never were allowed to touch except for the washing of hands before
sacrifices. It was therefore for the god as well as for themselves that the Boeorians, in the
name of the divinities of the place and of Apollo, warned the Athenians first of all to leave
the temple and then to take back what was their own. 75
The Athenians replied that they intended no harm to the temple, but had
occupied it in self-defence;76 they had used the water under compulsion not out
of hybris (Thuc. 4. 98. 5) and 'it was reasonable to suppose that even the god
would look indulgently on any action done under the stress of war and danger'
(98.6).'7 The Boeotians were acting truly sacrilegiously in wanting, under no
constraint, to exchange the bodies for the temple. Clearly, the actions of both
sides could be represented as problematic in religious terms. Gomme argues
that the Athenians successfully rebut the charge of sacrilege.7s However,
although the Athenian reply is obviously a plausible one, neither side could
claim full knowledge of divine attitudes, and the Athenians' subsequent defeat
may suggest the gods' rejection of their argument: 79 when Megacles massacred
Cylon and his conspirators, seers interpreted Athens' subsequent defeat by the
Megarians as an expiation of that sacrilege.so
Furthermore, the play is not simply contrasting Athenian piety with Theban
impiety, because at first Theseus does not accept Adrastus' suppliancy. The
stichomythia of I 13 fI provides an account of Adrastus' misfortunes, which
lays emphasis on his religious mistakes. He had misinterpreted an oracle
concerning the marriage of his daughters (132 ff), and had then not only
omitted to take omens before engaging in his expedition (155 f.), but also
rejected the seer Amphiaraus' advice (158 £): as Theseus sums it up, he went
without divine goodwill (157), and more with over-confidence than with sound
sense (161). There is a clear suggestion that Adrastus' defeat and subsequent
troubles are the result of understandable divine displeasure: the parallels
between play and history, then, discomfortingly for the Athenians, allow for a
similar possibility in their case.
Adrastus' emotional rejoinder, based on his hopeless position and the suffer-
ings of the Chorus, stands as it were as an Athenian reply to Theseus' position,
7S Thuc. 4.97. 3 (trans. Warner, as generally).

76 Thucydides has Pagondas refer to the Boeotians' pre-battle sacrifices (TO[S i£pois a. Tjp-iv
8vaap.EvoLS KaAa cpa(v£Tat, 4. 92.7); such a reference is rare in Thucydides (cf. Gomme (1956), ad
loc.), but it is probably far-fetched to relate the absence of any comparable Athenian sacrifice, or
indeed mitigating ritual, in the full description of their activities on taking over the temple, to
Adrastus'mistakes.
77 On 'sacred space' generally, cf. Parker (1983), 160-70.
78 (195 6), on 4. 99.
79 NB however Parker (1983: 45), 'it looks as if in the late fifth century fear of supernatural
punishment was a rather weak and remote deterrent against maltreatment of the corpse': not that
this made it trivial. Jordan (1986: 130) goes too far in calling the Athenian reply 'one of the most
blatant pieces of sophistry in all Thucydides'. On divine unknowability, cf. Sourvinou-Inwood,
below, pp. 162-3.
80 Plut. Sol. 12. Cf. similar ideas in Supp. 731-3, 734 ff.
and he gives it particular poignancy by ending with praise of Athens as the only
city that could undertake the task reliably, not least because Ta or' OlKTpii yap
oeSopKE ('it has witnessed pitiful events', 190).81 The Chorus add their own
appeal through pity (193 f.).
Euripides, however, maintains the uncomfortable suggestion of divine
displeasure in Theseus' reply. The tone is detached and philosophical, as he
begins with an outline of man's development under the gods' benevolence and
ends with a disquisition on political theory_ In between he goes over Adrastus'
errors yet again: the gods let us read the future by signs (2 I I - 13), but Adrastus
has spurned this (230); he has tried to be cleverer than the gods and been
punished for joining his family with the wrong men, as if the gods were willing
that marriage (219 fE).82 As usual, the gods have damaged the innocent in their
eagerness to punish the guilty (226-8), and so Theseus is unwilling to involve
Athens with Adrastus. The repetition of Adrastus' and so the contemporary
Athenians' errors reinforces the latter's discomfort: does one hear an echo of
the Athenians' claim of divine indulgence for their occupation of the temple in
Adrastus' presumption that divine favour was on his side? This scene invites a
complex response from the audience: pity, for Adrastus' and the Mothers'
failure to secure help over the bodies, much increased perhaps as he leads them
off, telling them to leave their suppliant-branches so Demeter will know they
have been unsuccessful (258-62); unease, with Theseus' disinterested tone, but
equally agreement with him on the religious and political unwisdom of involv-
ing Athens in alliances with those apparently unloved by the gods; and finally,
awareness, that contemporary Athens, at least as far as Delium was concerned,
rnay be one of the unloved. Pity for Adrastus thus articulates Athenian feelings
about Delium; Theseus' reasoning challenges at the outset any sense that the
Thebans were uncomplicatedly wrong, the Athenian behaviour simply justifi-
able.
The Mothers' tears are matched by Aethra's (284 - 286), who discreetly
makes a case for acceptance of their plea. Though largely based on the political
advantages to Theseus as an individual and the city as a whole,s3 it is framed by
religious considerations: she begins by warning Theseus to think whether he
himself may be acting unwisely towards the gods (30 I f.), and ends by express-
ing her confidence that the god will bring things full circle (331). Theseus'
refusal to help Adrastus regain the bodies risks not only imitating both
Adrastus' initial miscalculation in attacking Thebes and the Theban refusal,
but also incurring the wrath of Demeter in whose sanctuary suppliancy is being
rejected. Theseus acknowledges his mistake (336), and claims that even if battle
is needed, this will not involve divine cPe6vo~ ('envy', 347 f.), a claim to divine
81 Note the (lacunose) self·reflexive statement that poets can only write successfully as the result
of experience (181 f). On pity as an Athenian virtue, c£ PelIing, above, p. 17.
82 Reading Scaliger's SOVTWV in 221.
83 Cf. Fitton (1961), 435; Croally (1994), 186.
50 A. M. Bowie
support that events will justify. The loosing of Aethra's bonds (359-61) then
marks visually the end of this scene, and foreshadows the release of the
warriors' corpses.
Henceforth, Theseus becomes more of an embodiment of what one may
presume were contemporary Athenian attitudes to the refusal of the bodies. 84
The religious correctness of his actions is stressed all the more, though the
contrast with the recent debacle, when the Athenians were defeated after the
refusal of the return of the bodies, remains as a counterpoint to the glorious
aspects of Theseus' actions: mythical and contemporary Athens are bound
together and yet separated by the play. In the debate with the Herald, the
religious matters raised with Adrastus recur, this time with Theseus used to put
the opposite case to his earlier one. The Herald's role is to state the case against
the Seven, and to emphasize the sacrilegious aspects of their actions. By
implication therefore his words put into question the propriety of the actions of
the Athenians. He asks whether Capaneus' punishment was not deserved, since
he wanted to take the city 'whether the god wished it or not' (496-9), and
suggests that to disagree that the Seven were justly punished is to claim a
greater wisdom than Zeus' (504 f.; cf. 216 fT.). Theseus, however, attempts to
reveal the shallow and unsatisfactory nature of this claim. He appeals first of all
to the common laws of Greece (524-7), and then considers the Seven
specifically. The Thebans should relent: they have had their revenge and the
attackers their deserts (529 f.). Turning again to philosophical discourse, he
asserts that it is natural for a man's body to return to earth whence it came
(534-6).85 It is not only Argos that is affected by the Thebans' action, since the
whole of Greece may suffer if the dead are deprived of their due: men will be
deterred from fighting bravely if they cannot be certain of proper burial when
they are killed (537-41). Then comes a reductio ad absurdum: 86 the dead are
unlikely to cause any more trouble or to bear children in the earth to gain their
revenge. He ends with a claim to be upholding the 'ancient law of the gods'
(561-3). The interests of men and of gods and common sense are all used to
suggest the wrongfulness of refusal of burial, either absolutely or as a
bargaining-counter.
The gods' concern for justice is prominent in the subsequent lines. Theseus
hopes he will have on his side 'the gods who revere justice', and whose aid will
ensure victory (592-7), and the Chorus say (a little tentatively) the gods are just
(610,614). The Athenian victory which instantly answers the Mothers' prayers
suggests the divine attitude to the refusal of burial: the Herald had ascribed to
the gods the punishment of the Seven (495, 504 f.), and the logic of this points
84 Theseus' wish for the approbation of the city he had made a democracy (la6"'TJ4>o~)
dramatizes this unifying of attitudes (349-55). .
85 rr,v OpE«/Jaaav in 536 links the general truth and the particular case in point.
86 Disingenuous, perhaps, given the future role of the Epieoo01
Tragic Filters for History 5I
clearly to divine displeasure with Thebes for its actions.87 Adrastus comments
that both Argos and Thebes acted hubristically and suffered accordingly at
Zeus' hands (734-44). This 'replay' of the battle of Delium thus represents as it
were a mythical/theatrical 'rectification' of recent events-one might even say,
since the play is enacted at a religious festival, a ritual one. 88 On the other hand,
it is only in the mythical version that religious justification and the possibility of
territorial expansion led to success: 89 the lack of recent success must continue to
trouble therefore, and the relationship between the old and recent Athens
remains a problem.
In the most striking approximation to fifth-century Athens, the last third of
the play closely recalls Athenian public funerals: 'the sequence simulates, as far
as dramatic form and the theatrical practicalities allow, a real-life funeral:
exposure and solemn carrying-out of the dead, attended by the mourners;
pronouncement of the grave-side eulogy; cremation and then bestowal of the
ashes, with further show of grief'.90 Apart from the eulogies, there are a
number of things that imitate Athenian practice. Theseus' invitation to
Adrastus to speak the eulogies recalls the criteria used, according to
Thucydides, by the city in choosing an orator: €l7TE 0) tVS ao!f>wT€pOt; v€otatv
acrTwv TWVO'· f:7TtaTijf-tWv yap El (842 f.) ('as a man of greater talent, speak to
the youth of the citizens; you have understanding'); compare aviJp iJp7JJ-t€VOS
v7ro Tijs 7TOAEWS, os av yvwfLTJ T€ OOKij fLTJ a~uvEToS' Elvat Kat a~Lf.iJa€L 7TpOTJKrJ ('a
man chosen by the city for his intellectual gifts and for his general reputa-
tion').91 Thucydides mentions the presence of female relatives,92 and the beds
(€uvai, 766) on which Theseus lays out the Seven on robes and covers them
recall that, beside the ten chests for the ashes of the members of the ten tribes, a
bed (KAiv7]) was bedecked with robes and a garland for those whose bodies
could not be found. 93 At the end, the ashes are borne in for the Mothers to
lament, as happened at the end of the Athenian ceremony.94 'Then the Sons join
the Chorus to complete the simulation of a family mourning in all its genera-
tions.'95 The end of the play must thus have had an extraordinary effect, with
the bereaved Sons and Mothers combining in lament. Again, there is a kind of
repetition of the historical events, this time of the burial of the Delium dead,96
87 Cf. the Chorus's warning to the Herald: egapK£fJas ~v ZlV~ 0 TtfLWPoufLlvor;, I vfLaS o·u{3p['f.'V
OUK EXpiJV TOLavS' {J{3p,v (5 I I f); and Theseus at 555-7.
88 Cf. Easterling (19 88).
89 Adrastus' mention (in what seems to be a Euripidean invention) of Eteocles' offer of a com·
promise J.L£'TPLQ 8l),.ov'To~ (739 f), though often taken as referring to Spartan overtures in 425,
might equally be read as a reflection on Boeotian demands that the defeated Athenians should leave
the temple.
90 Collard (I97S a), 26, cf. 308 ff., 323 ff.; Collard (1972), 39-53; Wilamowitz (1899), 13-19.
91 Thuc. 2.34. 6, of the orator chosen to deliver the Athenian public Epitaphios. ~The Oration is a
parainesis directed also to contemporary Athenians' (Collard (1972), 50 n. 8; cf. 40 for the emphasis
on the upbringing of the Seven).
92 Thuc. 2.34.4. 93 Ibid. 2.34. 3. 94 Ibid. 2.4 6. 2 . 95 Collard (I97Sa), 27.
96 Pausanias saw their tomb in the Ceramicus beside those of other war-dead (1. 29. 13).
A.M. Bowie
and in the more propitious circumstances of a victory rather than a defeat; they
receive the honour of association with the Seven, worshipped at Eleusis
possibly since the eighth century.97
Once again, however, the similarities are accompanied by differences. 98 In his
oration, Adrastus concentrates on the men as individuals, unlike the extant
funeral orations,99 but these portraits reflect 'those virtues that are most
indispensable to the greatness of Athens and to the normal functioning of its
democratic institutions'.lOo The order of cremation followed by eulogy is also
reversed. These differences have been well studied by Foley, who notes that the
rites on stage represent a middle way between the fifth-century state funeral,
with its collective mourning, 'controlled funerary behaviour', and funeral
oration, and the archaic funeral that concentrated more on the individual and
his family. 'They resemble neither precisely, however, in the exceptional
repression of the female role in the burial, exceptional it seems, even by the
standards of public funerals in Athens.' By reversing the order of cremation and
eulogy, 'the emotions produced by the contact with the bodies are not
contained by the rhetoric of the oration'.lOl Euripides seems to be juxtaposing
the emotional connection of the Delium dead With the Seven and a funeral
service in which excessive grief is forbidden. Thus we may understand the scene
with Evadne: 'Evadne's act seemingly embodies a suicidal tendency that
Theseus tried to discourage in the earlier lamentations by the women and
Adrastus.'102 Throughout, the themes of the laments are 'often subtly at odds
with the rhetoric of the public funeral oration and thus with the public ideology
of Athens'.103 The play contrives to re-present the events at Delium in a highly
emotive fashion and yet to have Theseus work to deny the excessive expression
of that emotion on stage, especially to the Mothers who have suffered the most.
Foley wonders what the significance of 'this increasingly self-conscious re-
problematization of the funeral lament' might be in historical terms, and
tentatively suggests 'strains of the war'.104 Another possibility might take us
back to the whole question of tragedy's relation to contemporary events: in
summoning memories of the catastrophe at Delium, Euripides is dangerously
close to the olKrJi'a KaKa whose representation got Phrynichus into trouble.
97 Mylonas (1961 ), 62 f.; Coldstream (1976), I!. Perhaps the Sons' promises to be avengers
(1143-51) look forward to Athenian vengeance on Thebes.

98 Collard (197Sa), 323 f.; cf. (1972), 47; Foley (1993).
99 Collard (197 2 ) seems to me to refute well those who have claimed there is parody or criticism
of the genre (cf. Fitton (1961),430; Collard (1972),49 n. I for bibliography).
100 Collard (197 2 ),43. Cf. ibid. 41 that all speeches (if899 f. are deleted), bar the mutilated one to
Tydeus, end with reference to 'civic pride and duty': 870 f., 879-8 I, 887, 897 f. Note also the con-
temporary touch in Parthenopaeus the 'metic' (892) in Argos, praised for his behaviour towards the
citizens: there were metics in Hippocrates' troops (Thuc. 4. 90. I).
101 All Foley (1993), 123.
102 Ibid. 12 5 f. On Evadne, c( Collard (I975a), 354 f.; Seaford (I987a), 121 [.
103 Foley (1993), 128.
104 Ibid. 142 .
Does the restraint exercised on lamentation in the play act as a similar brake on
sorrow for recent events, thus allowing Euripides to represent them without
incurring the same disfavour as Phrynichus?
\YJe have so far looked at the relationship between the mythical refusal of
bodies and the historical, and at the religious discourse that informs them, but
the play also considers this question within another framework. In her
prologue, Aethra explains that she had come to Eleusis to carry out a sacrifice
(28-3 I):
'TVyxtivw 8' inrip x8ovos

apoTov 1Tpo8vova~ EK OOfLWV el\8ouo' €J.Lwv
1TpO~ -rOVSE 07]KOV, EvOa 7Tpwia 4>a[V€Tal.
4>p(~a~ V7TEP yij~ rijao€ Kap1Tl.fLo~ aTcixv~.
I am in the process of making sacrifice for the tilling of the soil; I left my palace to come
to this shrine, where first the fruitful corn appears bristling over the earth.
No name is given to this festival, b~t of those of the historical period the
Proerosia, held at Eleusis on 6th Pyanopsion about twelve days after the
EI.eusinian Mysteries,105 is the closest in concept. 106 Again, as with political refer-
ences, tragedy does not retroject into mythical time precise descriptions of the
festival's institutions;107 furthermore, in the play, the Mysteries appear to be
about to follow, since the Mothers have come 1TP€u{3€VJ1-ar' OU .dl]J1-TJTpOr; €S J.Lva-
tYJpta ('not as ambassadors to Demeter's mysteries' , 173).108 The Proerosia was a
festival that involved the ploughing of the Rarian Plain,109 where Triptolemus,
to whom Demeter taught ploughing, had his threshing-floor and altar;110
Demeter (as Deo) was the foundress of the festival, 111 which was interpreted as
ensuring successful agriculture. 112 According to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,
lOS On the festival, cf Deubner (1966),68 f.; Casabona (1966») 103-8, esp. 106 £; Parke (1977),
73-5; Brumfield (198 1),54-69. On the date, c( Dow-Healey (1965), 14-20; LSCG 15 f.; Mikalson
(1975), 67-9; Brumfield (I98I)~ 59; IG ii2. 1363.2. Mikalson suggests it was not a state festival; if
true, this would mirror the choice of setting in Eleusis not Athens; cf. however Dow-Healey (1965:
15, 17), who suggest it was in the state calendar because of the prorrhesis made in Athens.
106 Cf. Krummen (1993), 203-8. The relationship between the play and the offerings of first-
fruits at Eleusis instituted around this time is problematic given the uncertain date of IG i3.
78 - ML 73: 422 is possible but very uncertain. Note that strictly the corn was collected for the
Mysteries not the Proerosia, as some claim; cf. ML 73.24-6, K£A£VETO SE Kai ko ht£po4>aVTES Kai [0]
Oat86Xos fL v UTE pi 0 t S d,1Tapx£u8at TOS' hiAA£vaS' TO Kap1TO KaTa Ta 7TaTpta Kai TEV f.LavTEiav TEv Ei'
LfEAtPOV). None the less, the myth of the foundation of the Proerosia acted as the justification for the
Athenian claim to the aparchai of the harvest (Dow-Healey (1965), 17).
107 The description of the Choes day of the Anthesteria in Eur. IT 947-60 is not exactly the same
as the 5th-cent. custom (for which, cf. esp. Burkert (1983), 216-26).
108 Cf. 47 0 where the Herald orders Theseus to expel Adrastus AvaavTa UEfLvd uTEp.f.LaTWV
fLuaTiJpl.a (for the interpretation of this line, c£ Diggle (1994), 61 n. I I).
109 Plut MOT. 144a. On sacred ploughings, cf.Jameson (195 1).
110 Paus. I. 38. 6; cf. Marm. Par. 13.
III :l: Ar. Pluto 10 54.
112 Eur. Supp. 28 f.; Suda S.V. npoTJPoaiaL. On the agricultural aspects of Proerosia and
Mysteries, cf. IG i3. 78. 44-6, [roi]s Sf TaVTa 1TOtOUL 1ToAAa dya8d ivaL Kat EVKap1Tiav Kat
54 A. M. Bowie
Demeter went to this Rarian Plain after she had regained Persephone and there
met Rhea who told her of Zeus' agreement that she should have Persephone for
two-thirds of the year; the sterile plain burst into fruitfulness as the goddess
abandoned her wrath. 113
The scene of the play is before the temple of Demeter and Persephone at
Eleusis (I-3, 33),114 and the myth of the Eleusinian Mysteries has obvious point
in a play about Mothers seeking the return of the bodies of their children. I IS
Aspects of Eleusis, its Mysteries, and mythology are referred to at a number of
points. In her search for Persephone, Demeter dressed herself in mourning
black,116 and the Mothers are similarly attired (7T€1TAWf.1-a T~ ou 8€WpLKa, 'not in
festive robes', 97). Demeter disguised herself as an old woman and sat beneath
an olive tree: l1 ? the Mothers are old and wear olive garlands (258 f.). Demeter
turns to the daughters of the king and becomes a servant of the queen, the
Mothers turn to the mother of the king. The altar where we find Aethra was
built by Celeus after the revelation of what Demeter was doing to Demo-
phon;118 it was here that Demeter herself sat for a year longing for her
daughter. 119 Adrastus calls Demeter the 'fire-bearing goddess' (260), referring
to the torches carried in her search.120 Theseus places his army at the famous
well called Callichoron (392; cf. 619), where Demeter rested. 121 Above it she
commanded her temple to be built,122 and here 'the Eleusinian women first set
up a dance and sang in honour of the goddess'.123
Mothers and Demeter are thus in comparable positions. The problem of the
war-dead is refracted not only through the myth of the Seven who were buried
at Eleusis but also through the myth of Eleusis' great festival. The Athenian
dead are thus figured not only as the heroic Seven but also as Persephone,
1TO Av K np 17 {a [v, ho{]nvfS' av [/-L] ( dOtKOOt ~8€va{os J..UOE T€V 7TOAtv TEV ;48Eva{ov fLEOE TO (h6;
Burkert (1987), 20.
113 H. Hom. Dem. 450-9. Burkert (1983: 292) suggests that at the Mysteries ~the crowd perhaps
flocked to the field called Rharion', comparing Hermesianax 7.17 on Antiope, 'the mythic model for
the priestess of Demeter', brought from Hades by Iv\usaeus: fj TE 7TOAUV fLVUTllCHV 'EA£VU[VO~ 1Tapa
7Ti~av I €VaUfLOv KpvrPiwv igEq,0PEL AOY{WV I ~PdptOV 0pYELwva vOfLi.p tOLQ1TOt1TVVovaa.
114 On the topography of Eleusis, cf. Richardson (1974), 326-30.
115 C( Krummen (1993: 205), 'it is a time of sterility, an idea to which the constant images of
childlessness and infertility seem to refer.'
ll6 H. Hom. Dem. 42,183,302-7,319,360,442.
117 Ibid. 100-2; the olive is sacred to Demeter (Richardson (1974), 182).
liS H. Hom. Dem. 270-2,297 f. (cf. Richardson (1974), on 270). At 63-5, the Mothers say ouiwS'
OUX, U7T' dvdyKa~ O€ . .. EJ.L0AOV • .• 8€wv 8vfLEAas' lX0P.f.V 0' EvoLKa. Why they are acting ou{ws oUX
is disputed (cf. Collard (197Sa), 124); the most obvious solution lies in the disruption of Aethra's
rites. The prohibition on making suppliancies at the Eleusinium in Athens during the Mysteries (c£
Andoc. 1.116), may also have provided a filter.
119 H. Hom. Dem. 302-7.
120 Ibid. 47 f.; cf. Richardson (1974), 165-7.

121 Cf. Callim. Hymn. 6.15, fro 61 I (with Pfeiffer (1949), ad loc.); Nicander, Ther. 486; Apollod.
I. 5. 1; in H. Hom. Dem. 99 it is the well Parthenion, but this may be the same as Callichoron (cf.
Richardson (1974), 3 26- 8).
122 H. Hom. Dem. 27 2 .
123 Paus. I. 38. 6.
Tragic Filters for History ss
whose return inaugurated the state of the world as it now is: 'there is no victory
over death. . .. Life has gained the dimension of death, but this means that
death contains a dimension of life.' 124 Theseus has referred to the inevitability
of the return to earth of the dead (531 f£), but this myth also promises a future
in the form of children, either like the war-orphans who had paraded in the
theatre before the plays,125 or like the Sons of the Seven, the Epigonoi, who
come on stage at the end of the play and who will in future exact vengeance on
the Thebans for the deaths of their fathers.
The play thus presents the catastrophe at Delium in terms not only of
punishment for failure to observe correct behaviour towards the gods, but also
of the need after that punishment to put the dead where they belong. It
contrasts the unwisdom and misery of war with the national glory that it can
bring. It displays powerful emotion, but has Theseus prevent the excessive
display of that emotion. Finally, the events at Delium are refracted through two
myths, one of which casts the dead as heroic figures and gives them what
amounts to a second grand funeral, while at the same time highlighting
unfortunate parallels and significant differences between myth and history.
The other offers some hope for the future, though even this will involve more
conflict.
The play closes on a religious note. Theseus sends Adrastus and the Chorus
on their way with the request to remember the things Athens has done for
them, of which Zeus and the Olympians are witness (1165 fI). Athena,
however, appears on the scene to insist that this memory must be corroborated
by an oath, sworn over pieces of sacrificial animals: 126 the description stands for
the performance of the act. The sacrificial knife is to be buried at Eleusis to act
as a deterrent to any Argive attack on Athens. 127 The uncertainty over the
play's date means its relationship with the actual treaty of July 420 must
remain unclear, and what might have been a useful test case for the question of
tragedy's treatment of contemporary events is unavailable to US. 128 However,
this scene provides an ending that is symbolic in important ways. Krummen
suggests that the (presumed) continued existence of the tripod in Delphi stands
as a reminder of the splendour of Athens' military and moral leadership. 129 We
124 Burkert (1983), 26I. Cf. Krummen (1993: 205 f.) on how the agricultural metaphors in the
play support the idea that the cycle of crops and the cycle of war are homologous.
125 Cf. Aeschin. 3. 1 54; and Krummen (1993: 207) on possible connections between Eleusis and
ephebes.
126 C( Burkert (1983), 25 0 -4.
127 Cf. Stengel (19 20: 16 f.) for burial of important implements.
128 Many have felt the force of Zuntz's ideas (deployed for purposes of dating) that the Argives
are not represented in the way one might expect for a people who had signed a treaty of friendship,
and that the treaty is a 'wholly one-sided obligation such as in reality could only be dictated to a
completely vanquished enemy' «1955: 75); though cf. Diller (1960),23 2 ; fG i3. 83 and Thuc. 5.47,
82. 5 for the historical treaty). Tragic treaties and agreements do, however, emphasize the benefits
to Athens: cf. Aesch. Eum. 767-74; Soph. DC 1518-34, Eur. Held. 1030-44.
129 (1993), 201.
A. M. Bowie
may add that the friendship of Athenian Theseus and Theban Heracles offers a
mediation between the two cities that have clashed over bodies in mythical and
contemporary history. The gift of the tripod to Apollo not only fulfils Heracles'
request to Theseus, but also constitutes an offering to the god whose temple
was at the centre of the events and conflicts at Delium.
PHILOCTETES
Philoctetes was produced at the Great Dionysia in two years after

409,130
Alcibiades had been recalled, at a time when turmoil at home was made worse
by reverses abroad.131 Alcibiades was seen as the sole hope of salvation, not least
because of the Persian aid he promised to bring with him. He was elected
strat.egos by the fleet and, after Thrasybulus' defeats of Spartan forces at
Cynossema and Abydus, led them to a spectacular victory at Cyzicus in May
410.132 Further successes were to follow. He was elected strategos for 408/7,
and at the Plynteria of 408 he returned in triumph to an unlimited command. 133
Unfortunately, the Plynteria was not an auspicious day on which to arrive, and
his career had not long to run. 134
Prima facie, a play about the return of one seen as the salvation of his former
comrades could reasonably be read as in some way allegorical of Alcibiades'
return. However, no such possibility is referred to in the ancient commentators,
and first occurs with Lebeau in I770' Scholars have divided on whether the
play has any historical reference. Wilamowitz firmly opposed the idea 135 and
Jebb agreed,136 but recently political reference has been more readily counten-
anced.137 The subtlest treatment is that of Rose,138 whose main interest is in
Sophocles' analysis of Athenian society in terms of the different Sophistic social
theories. He does, however, argue against references to specific historical
events: 'what could be further from the grim isolation and utterly uncom-
promising integrity imparted to the dramatic character of Sophocles'
Philoctetes than the truly amazing array of manipulations and tergiversations
of Alcibiades' whole career - especially between 413 and 41o?'139
We have however already seen with Supplices that differences between the
mythical and contemporary events do not preclude their being considered as
reflective one of the other. It is always a central problem of intertextual reading
to decide at what point the differences between two or more 'texts' so outweigh
the similarities that they cannot legitimately be related together, but in this
130 Second A'lIumenl. 131 Thuc. 8.81. 132 Xen. Hell. I. I. I I ff.
133 Ibid. 1. 4- 1 I ff. 134 Plut. Ale. 34. 1.
13~ 'Kein Vers weist aus dem Drama heraus aufirgend etwas in der Gegenwart des Dichters ...
Ein gelungenes, zeitloses Kunstwerk': (1917),316 f., quoted by Calder (197 1), 153.
136 ( 18 9 8), p. xli.
137 e.g. by Calder (1971); Jameson (1956); Craik (1980).
l38 (199 2 ),266-33°, esp. 32 7-3 0 .
139 Rose (1992), 32 9.
case, differences in career and temperament between the two men do coexist
with notable similarities beside that of the offer of salvation. 140 Both have an
almost Achillean self-regard and insistence that they get what they think are
their deserts. Thucydides first introduces Alcibiades as especially ambitious
(q,polJ')7fLaTL cPLAoVLKWV, 5. 43. 2) and angered because he was insufficiently
valued, both at Athens because of his youth, and at Sparta despite his plans for
the revival of the Spartan proxenia which had lapsed in his grandfather's time.
Once alienated from Athens, he wasted no time in supporting her enemies.
Philoctetes has a similar concern for reputation,141 and will not countenance
any help for the Greeks who abandoned him on Lemnos; twice he even curses
to a fate similar to his own those most responsible for his suffering. Alcibiades'
influence rested not a little on his extraordinary physical toughness which
allowed him to put up with a lifestyle of anomalous excess,142 and Philoctetes
has survived ten years of appalling torment. 143
More significantly perhaps, there is a religious aspect to each case, involving
the slight to one or more deities. Alcibiades was accused of involvement in the
Hermocopidae episode 144 and of profaning the Mysteries by enacting them at a
banquet in his house. 145 Philoctetes transgressed onto Chryse's sacred ground
and was punished by her snake, as Neoptolemus explains and interprets (191-
200):
ov8€v TOVTWV 8avp.aoTov €!-,oi.

8Eia yap, Ei7TEP Kayw TL q,povw,
Kat Tn 7Ta8fJp.4T4 KEivo. 1TpOS avrov
rrj~ WJ.LOc/>pOVOS XpVOTJ~ E7TEPT},
Kai VVV a 7TOVEf otxa K1]OEP.6vwv,
OUK £a9~ WS ou DEWV TOV ILEAE71],
TOV JLiJ 1TpOTEPOV 'TOVS- E1Ti Tpoig.

TEivat ora OEWV dl-uIX71 Ta {JEAT],
-rrpiv 80' EP7KOt xpovos, c/J AEYETat
xpfJval (1~~ V1TO TroVOE 8aJLTjvat.
None of these things surprises me~ They come from the gods, if I understand aright, and
these sufferings have beset him because of cruel Chryse. What he now suffers far from
friends inust result from some god's care that he should not draw his divine, invincible
bow against Troy before the time comes when it is said it must be destroyed by him.
1"0 On this motifin the play, cf. 109 (Odysseus on the imponance of TO ow87jval.), 31 1,488,494-
6, 528 f., 919 f., 1391, 1395 f. 1470 f. (Avery (1965), with 296 f. 'Appendix on the Theme of Salva·
tion'). On 'safety' as a political leitmotif at this time, do Bieler (195 I).
1"1 Cf. 254 ff., 1348 ff. also 575,654 (Avery (1965),296 n. I).
1"2 Thuc.6. 15. 4, 'nj~ Kf1Ta TO awp.a TTo.pavop.tas ES rr)v 8tatTUv.
10 A ship was sent in each case: the Greeks to bring Philoctetes to Troy willingly; the Athenians
'to order Alcibiades to return to make his defence in Athens but not actually to arrest him' (Thuc. 6.
61. 5).
1.... Cf. Osborne (19 8 5).
I"S Cf. Andoc. I. 11-33 (with MacDowell (1962) ad loc.); Pluto Ale. 22..3; on their significance, cf.
Parker (1983), 168-70.
A. M. Bowie
The prophecy of Helenus, recounted by the Emporus, also points to divine

planning (610- 13):
O~ 07) rei T' ciAA' aVTO[Ul 1Tavr' '-(}E01TtUEV
Kat Ta7Ti Tpo[q. 7TEPYUf..L' W~ OU fLYJ 1TOTE
7TEPUOLEV, El J.i:i] rovo£ 7TE{aaVTE)' A6y~

ayolvro v'ljoov Tijao' e<p' ~S' vaLEl rei vuv.
Helenus told them much and especially that they would never sack Troy's citadel unless
they persuaded Philoctetes and brought him from the island where he now dwells.
The severity of the problem of being EvaY7JS, under some form of curse or
divine disapproval, is not to be played down.146 It was the marked sign of divine
disfavour in Philoctetes' wound, which caused his horrible and ill-omened cries
to make libation and sacrifice impossible (9- I I), that forced the Greeks to
abandon him on Lemnos. As an Alcmaeonid on his mother Deinomache's side,
Alcibiades would naturally be associated with the curse that was placed on that
family because of the massacre of Cylon and his supporters, and was politically
convenient to throw at the descendants of Megacles on many occasions later.
Furthermore, Alcibiades was formally cursed after the Hermocopidae
episode,147 and his name was entered on the list of the sacrilegious at Eleusis. 148
In view of the alleged parody of the Mysteries, his escorting of the procession to
Eleusis for the first celebration of the Mysteries since 413 made an obvious
point. 149
Alongside the many political and moral issues, the play thus poses also the
religious questions of how a man who has been separated from his fellows
because of religious problems can be reintegrated into his society, and whether
what look like serious crimes are perhaps part of some divine plan whose end is
cloaked in obscurity. The play can thus become an examination of the problem
of Alcibiades and even a ritual preparation for his return.
However, the possible refractions of Alcibiades need not stop there. Jameson
pointed to similarities between Odysseus and Alcibiades, though 'only to cast
doubt on the comparison with Philoctetes'. In Odysseus, 'the poet draws on a
store of feeling against an unsavoury array of political figures: Cleon,
Alcibiades, Antiphon, Theramenes, Peisander ... can all be seen in one trait or
another of this Odysseus, depending on the spectator's own political view-
point.'150 Such a reading is possible, but for our purposes the parallel with
Odysseus is instructive and not to be easily dismissed. As Jameson himself says,
both men have in common 'the subordination of all else to victory (Ph. 81,
1°52), the clever mind and false tongue so apparent in the Samian dealings
(Ph. 96-99, 109, 119) and ... the chameleon-like adaptability, [Alcibiades']
chief instrument in the hunting of men' .151 I see no reason why both identifica-
146 Cf. Parker (19 83), 191-206. I am grateful to Noel Worswick for help with this subject.
141 Pluto Ale. 22.3, cf. 33. 3.
148 Cf. MacDowell (1962), 7 1.
149 Pluto Ale. 34.
150 Jameson (195 6), 21 9 f. He refers to I: Phil. 99, mentioned above.
151 Jameson (1956), 219; cf. Pluto Ale. 23.4; Satyrus ap. Athen. 534b; Nepos, Ale. I I. 3 f.
tions cannot stand together. Schemata are presented by Sophocles that offer
contrasting yet complementary views of Alcibiades: the potential saviour,
perhaps held back by the gods until the appropriate moment, and yet the
ambitious schemer who would subscribe to Odysseus' dictum Vf.KaV yE jI.-£VTOL
1TuvTaxov xpfl~wv €cP vv Cit is in my nature to want to be victorious in all things',
I052).
Even Neoptolemus can be used to view Alcibiades. One link is their youthful-
ness: 152 'in Sophocles too Neoptolemus is the young opportunist, attractive,
clever, a realist through and through, like Alcibiades, unencumbered by
conscience'.153 This is an unnecessarily one-sided characterization, since
Neoptolemus is a complex figure in the play, yet his putting of personal con-
siderations before the interests of the frequently mentioned 'whole people of
the Greeks' ,154 who are relying on him, allies him too with Alcibiades. The
individualism of Neoptolemus, whether or not it would anyway have been less
attractive to its contemporary audience than to a more individualistic age,
would have shone less brightly when considered in terms of Alcibiades'
activities.
There are however other literary refractions of these mythical and historical
figures. Phi/oetetes is a remarkable cento of intertextual relations not only with
the Philoetetes of Aeschylus and of Euripides, which we cannot discuss here, but
with the Embassy to Achilles of Iliad 9 and the Cyclops episode of Odyssey 9,
w~ich further change our perceptions of the characters. 155 The parallels have
been discussed or adumbrated before,156 but their significance for the historical
aspect of the play has not been fully examined.
The Embassy is recalled in Neoptolemus' reference to Phoenix' coming with
Odysseus to bring him to Troy (343-7).157 The parallels are straightforward.
Odysseus leads both expeditions to a staunchly heroic individual alienated but
crucial to success. 158 Each hero gives a friendly welcome, and expresses hatred
of deception and its practitioners (9. 3 I 2 - 344, 375). Questions of kleos lie at
the heart of the problems in each work: 159 Achilles will be honoured like a god
and gain 'great glory' (9. 300-3); Neoptolemus tells Philoctetes he will be called
the 'best of the Greeks' and have the 'highest renown' after sacking Troy
152 Alcibiades was about 40 at this time, but seems to have traded upon his youthfulness through-
out his career.
153 Calder (197 1), 168 f.
154 1226, 1243, 1250, 1257, 1294. Consider too the exchange at I I I - I 5. One wonders what
Neoptolemus told them of his time on Lemnos.
155 Also significant are the episodes with Thersites (NB 438 ff., where Neoptolemus misinter-
prets Philoctetes' description of him as one of Odysseus) and the Doloneia: cf. also Schnebele
(1988).
156 Beye (1970); Garner (1990), 28-40 .
157 Cf. the Merchant's story of Phoenix and the sons of Theseus coming to Lemnos for Neo-
ptolemus (561-6).
158 The names Chryses, Chryseis, and Chryse form a further link.
159 For Phil. cf. 476, 1420, 1422, etc. For TLJ.L1] cf. 319,605-10, 1028; yi.par; 334,344,367,478
(€tjKAfiar; YEpa~) (Odysseus links them in 106 I f., Kat nix' av TO (JOV Yf pas I T LJ.L -r, v €fLoi vfiJ.L€LfV.
60 A. M. Bowie
(I 344-7). Furthermore, Achilles is kept before our minds by frequent refer-

ences, not least in Neoptolemus' insistence on following his father in his choice
of character, and the fact that he is called Neoptolemus only twice (4, 241), but
addressed or mentioned twelve times with circumlocutions involving Achilles.
In the episodes of Polyphemus and Philoctetes, the initial situation is the
same: Odysseus confronts the cave of a dangerous figure with a companion or
companions chosen for the occasion. 160 Each figure lives in a similar cave:
Polyphemus' is 'on the edge of the land (eGxa'TL77), by the sea, tall, and over-
shadowed by laurels' (9. 182 f.); Philoctetes' is also on the eGxaTLG. (144), 'on
the shore in an overarching rock' (272), and 'high up' (29; cf. 1000 f.); both are
said to lack the tracks of mankind (9. I 16 ff. .- 2, 221, 300 tI). Both are empty
of their inhabitant (9.216 f. .- 31), and contain a bed (9.427 f. - 33) and rustic
cup (9. 346161 - 3S f.). Polyphemus and Philoctetes are both markedly dif-
ferent from mankind, neither is involved in agriculture (9. lo8-1 I - 708 f.;
Philoctetes has not tasted wine for ten years, 714 f), and both are essentially
cannibalistic (cf 957 f.). In each case, trickery is essential, and involves a rela-
tionship of ironic or true philia. The solution to each problem is sought through
an instrument owned by the cave-dweller, the club of Polyphemus and the bow
ofPhiloctetes. An approach to the instrument is made when the victim is asleep,
and the sleep of each man is accompanied by a nauseating description of his
physical condition (9.371-4 -- 820-5). An oracle overhangs both sets of events
(9. 50 7 - 60 4 fT.).
How then do these Homeric reminiscences affect the play's relationship with
contemporary events? Obviously, they introduce greater complication than
when one considers the plot of the play aside from the intertexts. The evocation
of the Iliadic Achilles acts as a reminder that his individualistic attitude brought
disaster to himself, death to his closest friend, and near destruction for the
Greeks, which reflects badly on Neoptolemus, and provokes further reflection
on Alcibiades' pursuit of his own interests. (Incidentally, his return, like that of
Achilles, did not in the end bring him the glory he might have expected.) Our
views of Philoctetes can undergo changes too. Like Achilles, he wishes to
choose the alternative which he thinks suits himself, but is luckier than his
model because his divine mentor corrects his error before too much harm is
done. The parallel with the Cyclops underlines the abnormal, inhuman position
which he is insisting on preserving.
Odysseus is the figure of greatest complexity here. In some ways, his qualities
appear more creditable than is sometimes allowed. The episodes depict him as a
central figure: he is included in the Embassy, and the Cyclops episode is the
clearest demonstration of his intelligence bringing himself and his comrades to
160 9. 195 f. (Odysseus' best men) .... 72 f. t c( 93 f. (Neoptolemus had nothing to do with the
original expedition.)
161 Cf. Athen 477b on the KLUUV!3LOV.
safety.162 His range of talents-persuasion, force, and cunning-are all recalled,

along with his ability to select the right one: however uncomfortable the play
makes us with this trickster, the Homeric intertexts show up the merits of such
talents. Remembrance of the Cyclops episode makes his cunning easier to
accept: for the audience with its knowledge of Horner, Odysseus has been in
front of this cave before; last time he wandered straight into the dangers, and he
is not going to make the same mistake again. At the same time, the Homeric
intertexts also highlight shortcomings in his position: as with the Cyclops, he
ignores the advice of his companion and succeeds only after initial disasters,
and Achilles is not persuaded at all. Most chillingly, the curse on him by
Philoctetes at 314-16 condemns him to the same kind of cave-centred exile as
Philoctetes: unwittingly, he is seeing his own future. Cunning is no panacea.
The stratagems of Alcibiades are thus, in some ways prophetically, refracted
through those of mythology'S greatest trickster.
Alcibiades and the political world of Athens are thus filtered not only
through the myth of Philoctetes but also through epic stories which provide
different perspectives and lines of thought. Alcibiades had been planning
behind the scenes for his return. Such Odysseus-like cunning and changeability
may merit suspicion but the Homeric intertexts suggest that where open
dealing is problematic, trickery and cunning may have their place, especially
when the salvation of the state is at issue or one seeks reconciliation with those
one has harmed; the possibility of failure is also left open. The very difficulty of
knowing at any stage during the play what is true and what false, what bluff
and what sincere, provides an atmosphere of uncertainty which well mir~ors
the perplexity felt by Athenians looking at the current political situation. The
ostensibly open politics of the Assembly had been replaced by more underhand
methods: Thucydides says of Antiphon that he had 'a most powerful intellect
and was well able to express his thoughts in words; [but] he never came forward
to speak in front of the assembly unless he could help it, or competed in any
other form of public life, since the people in general distrusted him because of
his reputation for cleverness'.163 So, for the audience, watching or reading the
Philoctetes has something of" the quality of trying to understand Athenian
politics. It is a world of deception and covert action, in which there are no
certainties. It is not only Odysseus but his author too who has decided that
06AOS" is the only way to cope with the situation, and the overlaying intertexts
let Alcibiades' own actions share in the general uncertainty.
In these two plays, therefore, particular historical events are made homologous
with mythical stories in such a way that the action of the dramas provides
various models for viewing the events. There is no straightforward preaching of
162 He is also chosen as the obvious partner by Diomedes for the night sally and his treatment of
Thersites stops the Greek flight.
J63 Thuc. 8. 68. I.
A. M. Bowie
a particular line, and because it is the structures of the events and the myths that
are similar, we can avoid Zuntz's strictures on 'impertinent inspiration's'
consideration only of isolated words or phrases: it is the plays as wholes which
provide the different articulations, in the differing relationships between the
historical and tragic events.
4
The Theatre Audience, the Demos, and the
Suppliants of Aeschylus 1
ALAN H. SOMMERSTEIN
The tragedies and comedies composed for production at the Athenian dramatic
festivals in the fifth and early fourth centuries Be are priceless historical
documents. For much of the period they are, apart from inscriptions, the only
contemporary documents we possess emanating from Athens itself. Their
historical interpretation is problematic, of course, in many ways, some of which
are discussed elsewhere in this volume. The particular issue that I am going to
take up may be approached by considering the question which, it has been said,
historians should always put to themselves in respect ot-every
\
document they
use: who wrote it, for whom, and why? In the case of Greek tragedy and
comedy, we usually know the answer to the first question, and we also know the
answer to the third: the plays were composed with a view to being successful in
a competition, before a small panel of judges whose identity was not known at
the time of composition but was known at the time of performance, and who
thus, even if their actual voting was secret, in practice (as many remarks in
comedy make clear 2) were very liable to be influenced by the attitude of the
mass of the audience. And as to the remaining question-'for whom'-we know
the answer to that too. Essentially the plays were written to be seen, to be heard,
to be judged, to be appreciated by those who sat in the Theatre of Dionysus
when they were first staged. There might be other audiences later. Plays seem
often to have been reperformed at deme theatres in various parts of Attica.
They had begun to be performed abroad, too, as early as Aeschylus' time, and
convincing arguments have recently been advanced 3 that in the second half of
the fifth century there were frequent productions of Athenian tragedy at least
in southern Italy. It was no longer necessary for the Athenian masters to go and
produce their plays in person, as Aeschylus had done in Sicily; at any rate there
1 The first half of this paper is the same, with minor variations and revisions, as the first half of
my paper 'The Theatre Audience and the Demos' (Sommerstein, forthcoming). I am grateful both
to the editor of this volume and to Juan Antonio Lopez Ferez for allowing and indeed encouraging
me to publish both versions of the paper; and also to all those who commented on the two versions
when they were presented, respectively, at Oxford in October 1992 and at Madrid in March 1993.
2 Cf. Ar. Knights 546-50; Birds 445-6; Eeel. 1141-2; and the criticism ofP!. Laws 659a.
3 Taplin (1993).
Alan H. Sommerstein
is no record of Sophocles doing so, nor Euripides until the last year or two of his
life, and presumably there were by now people in various centres who possessed
the necessary skills to produce a tragedy from its script-as was being done at
Athens in the same period, in posthumous restagings of plays of Aeschylus:~
The copying of play-scripts may have begun because of the needs of such
producers (and also to some extent of other poets), but by the 420S an embryo
reading public probably existed for drama, and by 405 Aristophanes can take
the existence of such a public for granted. 5 But except in rare cases (such as
Aeschylus' Women of Aitna, first produced at Aitna itself 6) all these other
publics were derivative from and in a sense parasitic on the original Athenian
audience. A play by an Athenian author that did not get performed in the
Theatre of Dionysus normally did not get performed anywhere else, nor did its
script get copied. 7 To understand fifth-century Athenian plays we need to
understand the fifth-century Athenian theatre audience-and no other.
The subject of this paper, then, is: how was this audience composed, and did
its composition change during the period to which our surviving tragedies
belong? This question has not been discussed as much as it might have been in
recent scholarship, where there has been a strong tendency, more often implicit
than explicit, to equate the theatre audience with the citizen body of Athens. 8
Such a tendency (from which I do not pretend that I have always been immune)
is very understandable. It has often and rightly been emphasized that the
dramatic festivals were civic as well as religious and artistic occasions. Comedy
explicitly, and tragedy not infrequently by indirect means, can treat its
audience as though it were identical with the body of adult male citizens which,
perhaps within a few days, would be meeting again on the Pnyx to debate and
decide major political issues. Obviously this was not literally true. Whichever
particular dramatic performance we consider, we can be sure that many who
were adult male citizens did not attend the performance, and that many who
were not adult male citizens did. It may well be that the latter can be largely
discounted. On the sorts of political and social issues that usually concern the
historian, the children who certainly constituted a substantial fraction of the
audience may safely be ignored; not that their reaction to a play would neces-
sarily be without effect on the judges,9 but it would be likely to be influenced by
" Aesch. test. 71-7 and 1. 51-2 Radt.

5 Cf. Ar. Frogs 53, 943, 1114; Dover (1993), 34-5.
6 Aesch. test.!' 33-4 Radt.
7 Hence the great contrast in productivity between dramatists of the sth cent. and those who
lived later, Aristophanes for example writing an average of one play a year throughout his career
(40 between 427 and C.386 Be), Menander, with plenty of opportunities for getting plays produced
abroad, composing something between three and four plays a year (105 or more between 32 I and
c.292: Proleg. de Com. 3.60 Koster, Apollod. ap. Aul. Gell. 17- 4.5). 'Just as Athens in [Menander's]
age imported dramatists, she also exported plays' (Gomme-Sandbach 1973: 1-2).
8 Exemplified by many of the contributors to Winkler-Zeitlin (1990), including notably Goldhill
(I 990a), Ober-Strauss (1990), and Henderson (1990).
9 Cf. Ar. Clouds 538-9; Men. Dysk. 967, Sam. 733.
Audience, Demos, and Aeschylus' Suppliants
different kinds of factors, among which, in the case of comedy, costume, music,
and slapstick might well be prominent. The question of whether there were
women among the theatre spectators, and if so whether a significant proportion
of them were of citizen status, remains controversial, but for our present
purposes I do not think it matters very much. Jeffrey Henderson has argued
persuasively for a revision of the accepted view on this question;lO but he does
not dispute that comedy, from the fifth century to the third, normally treats the
audience as if it were all male, and appeals for the appreciation of males of all
ages but not of females. We have no comparable evidence for tragedy, because
the conventions of tragedy forbid it to take explicit notice of the audience's
presence at all, but there is no reason to doubt that the attitude of tragic
dramatists was the same. In any case, I think there is good reason to be sceptical
as to the likelihood of there having been any large number of citizen women
present at the dramatic performances. In comedy it is more than once taken for
granted as normal that a husband goes to the theatre and his wife does not: the
adulterer in Ar. Birds 793-6, as soon as he sees his mistress's husband in the
councillors' seats, knows that she will be alone at home-he does not need to
cast his eyes up or round to the women's section to make sure she is not there;ll
and when it is comically suggested that the mothers of outstandingly valiant
men should be given public honours, the proposal made is that just as a man
might be awarded privileged seating (7TpoeCJp{a) at such festivals as the
Dionysia, so these women should be awarded 7TpO€Sp{a ... at the Stenia and
Skira, women-only festivals. The woman speaker's statement in Ar. Thesm. 386
that she has 'seen' how women are vilified by Euripides is not such decisive
evidence as Henderson claims,12 since the verb 'see' in such contexts (especially
in the exordia of Assembly speeches, on which the passage in question is
modelled) is an oratorical cliche often having little to do with literal vision. 13 At
any rate, whether or not their audience actually was all male or even nearly so,
the dramatists do seem to regard it as such. They waver rather more over
whether to regard it as exclusively Athenian: occasionally we can definitely
detect them taking an interest in non-Athenian spectators, as Euripides may be
doing when he emphasizes the common ancestry of Athenians and Ionians in
Ion. 14 But on the whole it is true that the dramatists, tragic and comic alike,
wrote as male Athenian citizens for male Athenian citizens.
But which male Athenian citizens? Here we come up against a significant
fact of which surprisingly little notice has been taken in recent discussion of
IO Henderson (199 I).

II Cf. also Ar. Thesm. 395-7 where a woman complains that husbands coming home from the
theatre 'eye us suspiciously and straight away make a search, in case we've got a lover hidden in the
house'.
12 (199 1), 142 -3.
13 See e.g. Ar. Eeel. 176; Thuc. 6. 20. I; Oem. 5. 1,9. I, 14. 3, 16. 2, Prooem. 5. 1,6. 1,44. I.
14 Cf. also Sommerstein (1977: 117-18), on Aristophanes' City Dionysia plays, and Cassio (198 5:
105-18) on Peace.
66 Alan H .. Sommerstein
'drama and society' .15 In one important respect the dramatic festivals arguably
were not civic occasions of a normal kind. Every spectator, citizen or alien, had
paid to attend. 16 We are so used to the idea of paying to attend a performance
that we do not immediately perceive how abnormal this was in the context of
Athenian democracy and indeed of Greek society generally. Nowhere was it the
case that a citizen had to make payment for exercising a civic function. Of
course in many places he might have to have a property qualification in order to
do so, and in most, perhaps all, he would sooner or later be debarred from civic
activities ifhe did not pay his taxes and other debts to the state; but rules such
as these are quite another thing from being required to pay a fee each time one
entered an assembly or sat on a jury. At Athens in particular, moreover, at least
from the time of Ephialtes or soon after, the expectation was the other way
round: the exercise of a large and increasing number of civic functions-those
of the courts, the council, many of the magistracies, and later on the ekklesia
too-involved a payment, not by the citizen, but to him. Nor again was it at all
normal to require a money payment from citizens before they could participate
in one of the religious festivals of the community.17
Eventually, as is well known, the theatre did succumb to the logic of
Athenian civic ideology, with the institution of the theorikon. This did not
however occur until the middle of the fourth century; 18 and when it did occur,
the change took the form, not of abolishing the admission charge, but of provid-
ing from public funds the money with which it could be paid-money which the
recipients could not be prevented from spending on other things if they chose to
do SO.19 Even when it was thus subsidized, attending the theatre remained an
option, not a duty. In the fifth century it had been an option with a far from
negligible cost. Two obols was a third of an oarsman's or building worker's
daily pay,20 or two-thirds of a juror's; alternatively, it was the price of four
pieces of meat each large enough to fill the maw of a Herakles. 21 And two obols
was the price per head; and while the head of a household would normally not
15 \XTilson (this volume, Ch. 5) is a heartening exception.
16 For the ancient evidence see Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 265-8.
17 It was not for nothing that these festivals were officially described not just as 'of the demos'
(OTjp.6ola) but as 'paid for by the demos' (O'YJ!.LOT£)t1j, cf. Thuc. 2. 15.2; Dem. 21. 53; Deinarchos fro
18. 3 Conomis). 18 Ruschenbusch (1979).
19 These are two reasons why I find it hard to accept the suggestion of Wilson (Ch. 5 below) that
the admission charge and the theorikon were from the start closely connected and designed to
signalize the distinction between members of the citizens' club (who did not have to pay the charge)
and others (who did). See, however, pp. 70-1 below for a suggestion that an increase in the admis-
sion charge in the mid-5th cent. may have been coupled with a compensating increase in state
misthoi paid to citizens.
20 Oarsman: Thuc. 6. 31. 3; building worker: e.g. IG i3. 475. 253-6, 272-285.
21 Ar. Frogs 553-4. Dover (1993: 264) thinks (comparing Eup. fro 156.3) that 'half-obol' portions
of meat were rather small; but the Eupolis fragment does not necessarily have that implication, and
Dover's claim that ~it is entirely in character tha~ the Innkeeper should think of such a [small]
portion as fair and proper' finds no positive corroboration in anything else she or her companion
says. If these innkeepers are being presented as stingy and grudging caterers, how comes it that they
serve meat (normally a special-occasion food) at all?
Audience, Demos, and Aeschylus' Suppliants
be taking his wife along,22 the evidence of comedy shows clearly that his sons
would expect to be taken once they were old enough to enjoy the performances,
and there might often also be an elderly father (retired, like Aristophanes'
Philokleon, from the active management of the household) who would not
much appreciate being left behind. The charge seems likely, too, to have been
payable for each day of attendance; we hear nothing of the issue of tickets or
tokens on the first day which could be used to gain free admission on sub-
sequent days, and we know 23 that when the theorikon was first introduced its
amount \vas not two obols but a drachma, perhaps (as Pickard-Cambridge
suggested 24 ) to cover the three days of the tragic competition. Thus in the fifth
century, to see the whole of the tragic and comic contests, lasting three or four
days, might involve admission costs, for a family of four males, of up to thirty-
two abols or more than five drachmas. Chicken-feed, of course, for most of
those whom we meet in the pages of the orators, but a substantial sum for many
a poor citizen, and perhaps also for some quite prosperous peasants if they did
not participate, or participated only marginally, in the money economy.25
Metics, on the other hand, being mostly craftsmen or traders, and living over-
whelmingly in the city and the Peiraeus, will in general have been much more
cash-oriented, and it is quite possible that the proportion of metics in the
theatre audience was higher than in the free population of Attica as a whole. Is
it an accident that already in the second quarter of the fifth century, two surviv-
ing plays of Aeschylus-Suppliants and Eumenides-are about a community
which welcomes the arrival of a group of 'meties', explicitly so described?26
Thus even if we confine our attention henceforth to that part of the theatre
audience which consisted of adult male citizens-and once we subtract
children, women if any, visitors, and metics, we may well be left with less than
half of the whole audience-we still cannot regard it as a representative sample
of the citizen body. It consisted of those who had paid; in other words, of those
who wanted and could afford to come. We cannot take it for granted, as Dover
once did,27 that 'the audience which had acclaimed Knights proceeded to elect
Kleon general'. Neither the audience nor Kleon's electorate was the whole
citizen body. They were both parts of it, and overlapping, not identical parts.
Nevertheless, they could both be addressed as if they were the whole, in the
same way that a speaker addressing a jury-a much smaller portion of the com-
munity, and likewise unrepresentative in that it excluded men under thirty-
could use the second person plural indifferently to denote the instant jury, a
22 Above, p. 65.
23 Philochoros, FGrH 328 F 33.
24 (19 88), 26 7.
25 The contrast between urban cash-economy and rural barter-economy is interestingly
discussed, with particular reference to Aristophanes' Acharnians, by Olson (1991). The hero of
Achamians claims (35) that in his home village the word 'buy' was unknown.
26 Aesch. Supp. 609,994; Eum. 101 I, 1018.
27 (1968a ), p.lvi.
68 Alan H. Sommerstein
differently constituted jury in another case, the ekklesia, an Athenian military

or naval force, and so on. 28
Can we say anything with any approach to confidence about the social com-
position of that portion of the citizen body who could be expected to attend the
theatre? One or two things, perhaps. On average they will certainly have been
more affluent economically than the citizen population as a whole. On average,
too, they will have been better educated; Aristophanes) compliments in Frogs
and elsewhere to the intellectual and literary sophistication of his audiences 29
need not be taken at face value, but he did devote half of that play to a contest
in technical skill and ethical merit between two tragic poets-and what is more,
it was the second half, the part that would be fresher in the judges' memories-
and the play did win him first prize. The political biases of Old Comedy are fully
in line with this view of the balance of its audience; as de Ste Croix and
Cartledge have shown in the case of Aristophanes,3o the dramatists regularly
adopt a position of hostility to those politicians whom they present as relying
strongly on the support of the poorer citizens-in the 4308 to Pericles, in the
420S to Kleon, after his death to Hyperbolas, and so on-and of some degree of
sympathy for those who were perceived as their enemies, such as Thucydides
son of Melesias,31 Archeptolemos,32 or Nikias (in Eupolis' Marikas).33 The 'anti-
war' stance of Old Comedy, which is not confined to Aristophanes (consider
Kratinos' Dionysalexandros, in which, we are told, Pericles was 'very effectively
satirized by implication as having brought war upon the Athenians'34), should
be regarded as part of the same pattern; our evidence strongly suggests that the
wars which Old Comedy regarded as 'bad' were those which subjected Attica to
enemy invasion and devastation (and in which, therefore, those who owned
land lost out by comparison with those who did not), while there is virtually no
condemnation of external wars of conquest-at least not until after they have
failed. 35
All this points, certainly for the period of the Peloponnesian War, to an
audience distinctly 'right-wing' by comparison with the population as a whole. 36
28 Cf. e.g. Aischines 1. 173 (where ~you' denotes both the present jury and that which had tried
Socrates 54 years earlier), 3.86 (an expeditionary force to Euboia about 20 years before the date of
the speech), 3. 12 5 (a meeting of the ekklesia).
29 Ar. Knighls 233, 505-6; Clouds 521, 527, 535, 575; Wasps 1013-14; Frogs 676, 700,
1109-18. 30 de Ste Croix (1972),355-76; Cartledge (1990b).
31 Ar. Ach. 703-12. 32 Ar. Knights 327, 794-5. 33 Eupolis fro 193 K-A.
3-t POxy 663 (= CGFP 70 D Kratinos, Dionysalexandros test. i K-A), adfin.
35 In Lysistraza, produced in 411, the decision to launch the Sicilian expedition is regarded as an
act of folly (Lys. 39I-7 and perhaps 5 I 7-18, cf. 589-90); in Birds, produced three years earlier
while the campaign was in progress, the only (implicit) criticism is of Nikias' dilatory generalship
(Birds 640).
36 I define a 'right-winger' as one who favours the active use of the power and institutions of the
state to maintain or extend privilege and inequality among those under its jurisdiction, and a 'Ieft-
winger' as one who favours the active use of the power of the state to reduce or eliminate such
privilege and inequality. Strictly, therefore, all Athenian politicians were right-wing, since they all
supported legal discrimination against slaves, women, and aliens. But I will follow their own practice
Audience, Demos, and Aeschylus' Suppliants 69
For earlier periods things are more difficult. The passing of a decree in 440/39
which restricted in some way the freedom of comic satire 37 suggests that the
gap between Assembly opinion and theatre opinion already existed then. Going
back beyond 440, the evidence of comedy more or less dries up, since it now
seems likely that almost all the plays of Kratinos of which substantial frag-
ments survive belong to the 4308 and 420S.38 A window of more or less reliable
~~nformation in the 470S and 460s suggests a somewhat different picture. In that
period the theatre seems to have been something of a political battleground. In
476 Themistokles was the victorious tragic choregos,39 in 472 Pericles40 (whose
father, Xanthippos, had succeeded Themistokles as commander of the
Athenian fleet in 479 41 ); probably on the first occasion,42 certainly on the
second, the successful production was wholly or partly devoted to the Persian
War, in a notable departure from the conventions of the genre, and both times
with strong emphasis on the naval side of the conflict, so closely associated with
Themistokles, who had created the navy and who had contrived the stratagem
(recalled in Persians 353 fT.) that had won the victory of Salamis.43 This does
suggest that at that time the theatre audience was not felt to be prejudiced
against 'left-wing' personalities. On the other hand there is the well-known
anecdote in Plutarch's life of Kimon44 about the competition in 468, when
Aeschylus was defeated by Sophocles after the audience had allegedly
demanded that Kimon and his fellow generals be appointed judges of the con-
test; this, however, is not only of dubious historical value,45 but even if true it
and confine the universe of discourse to adult male citizens, which is only what we always do when
we speak of classical Athens as a democracy.
37 L Ar. Ach. 67; the historicity of this decree is accepted by Halliwell (19 84: 87; 1991: 57-9),
despite his scepticism regarding the reliability of ancient notices of similar decrees said to have been
enacted c.415 or later.
38 There are 2S plays ofKratinos of which four or more fragments survive. Kassel-Austin (1983:
112-267) offer or report suggested dates for 19 of these; only one of these dates (that for
Drapetides, which may be associated with the foundation of Thourioi in 444/3) is earlier than 439.
See, however, Mastromarco (1992: 368), who places three anti-Periclean plays of Kratinos in the
late 440S and sees them as partly motivating the decree of 440.
39 Pluto Them. 5. 5. 40 IG iil. 2318. 9-1 I.
41 Hdt. 8. 131. 3, 9. 114-21. It was Xanthippos who, having captured Sestos, brought back to
Athens the cables of Xerxes' bridge over the Hellespont, of which so much is made in Persians (68-
72,109-13,130-1,722-6,736,744-51).
42 The victorious dramatist was Phrynichos, and it is generally supposed (though it cannot be
proved) that his production on this occasion included his Persian War play(s)-the celebrated
Phoinissai and possibly also iliKal.OI. fj llEpaal. 7j Ivv8wKOL (ef. Lloyd-Jones (199 0 b), 233-
4 = (19 66), 22-3)·
43 I discuss the political aspects of Persians more fully in Sommerstein (1996), 410- I 3. For a
sceptical view (and references to other discussions) see Pelling, Ch. I above.
44 Pluto Kimon 8.8-9.
45 The suspicion inevitably attaching to anecdotes of this kind in the absence of early evidence in
their support (on which see Lefkowitz (1981) ) is deepened by a chronological point raised by Muller
(1984: 70 fT.). It is known that Sophocles' first victory was in 468 (Mann. Par. A 56); and Muller
argues that Aeschylus is not likely to have been competing against him then, since Aeschylus
produced the Theban tetralogy in 467 and tragic dramatists do not normally appear to have put on
productions at the City Dionysia in successive years.
Alan H. Sommerstein
would not in itself show that the theatre audience had a 'right-wing' bias in 468,
since Kimon was also at that time a dominant figure in Athenian politics gener-
ally. Nothing in the evidence we have is inconsistent with the hypothesis that in
the 470S and 460s the theatre audience more or less faithfully mirrored the
balance of political opinion in the population as a whole (or at least in that part
of it which normally attended the Assembly), whatever that balance might at a
given moment happen to be.
Yet by 440-in a period when, despite occasional successes for their
opponents in the lawcourts, the Periclean 'left' was in complete command of
the Assembly-the theatre audience had become preponderantly 'right wing'
and anti-Periclean. It no longer contained an even cross-section of the civically
active citizens: the poorer, more strongly democratic part of the population was
less well represented in the theatre than it had been a generation before. Why
should there have been this change? May it be that the theatre admission
charge, which I have suggested acted in the later fifth century as a deterrent for
some of these poorer classes, had been less of a deterrent in the 470S and ~460s?
Not that a charge of two obols is likely to have been significantly more afford-
able in the 470S than it was in the 430s. Rather the reverse, if anything: in the
470S Athens was still recovering from the Persian devastation, there was no
public building programme and no state pay except on campaigns. It is more
plausible to suppose that the admission charge itself was then lower. One can
understand why it might have been raised at some stage. Between the 470S and
the 430S there was a very substantial increase in the population of Attica, both
citizens and, we may be sure, rnetics toO.46 During the same period the City
Dionysia in particular became more and more an international event, especially
when the centre of the Delian League was transferred to Athens and the
Dionysia became the occasion for the delivery of tribute. These developments
must have put pressure on the capacity of the theatre. The first reaction, in the
460s, may have been to expand the capacity; the details are uncertain, but we
know from the plays themselves that the theatre underwent some sort of
physical remodelling in the late 460s,47 and this may well have involved an
enlargement of the spectator space. The site, however, imposed physical limits
to any further expansion, and meanwhile Athens went on becoming ever more
populous, more prosperous, and more visited. In these circumstances there
were only two things that could be done. One was to ration demand by regula-
tion (for example by limiting the number of foreigners or of children who could
attend); the other was to ration it by price. As any successful football club can
witness, the former alternative would have been an administrative nightmare,
46 The most useful attempt to establish population statistics for classical Athens is Hansen
(19 8 5).
47 The skene, the ekkyklema, and, in my view, the mechane all make their first appearance at this
time; see respectively Taplin (1977), 452-9; Garvie (1986), pp. Iii-liii; and Sommerstein (1989),
153·
Audience, Demos, and Aeschylus' Suppliants 7I
and it seems that the latter was chosen. Perhaps at the same time some of the
1nisthoi paid (to citizens only) from public funds were increased in compensa-
tion, and this may be the explanation of the claim in some sources that the
lheorikon was instituted by Pericles; for the change we are talking about must
have happened after the start of Pericles' ascendancy, and probably after the
rnove of the League treasury to Athens in 454/3.
Clearly Pericles and his supporters cannot have intended to turn the theatre,
vvith all its prestige, into a platform for their political opponents. Obviously they
reaiized that fewer people would attend the theatre, but it did not occur to them
that this would change the socio-political make-up of the audience-par-
ticularly if, as I have suggested, the increase was effectively subsidized for the
poorer citizens. They may have forgotten two things: first, that the cost of
attending had to be thought of in terms not of individuals but of families (or at
least of all the males in a family); second, that people's positive reasons for
attending the theatre varied considerably, that a sharp rise in price would force
them to re-examine those reasons, and that the slighter their education, and the
tighter their financial circumstances, the more likely they were to decide that
they had better things to spend their money on, subsidy or no subsidy. At any
rate this was apparently the result. It will have taken a year or two for
dramatists (mainly comic dramatists, no doubt) to notice the change in the
balance of audience reactions and to adjust their political 'angle' accordingly.
J~nd by that time it was too late to do anything about it. Comic sniping became
an unavoidable fact of life for 'left-wing' politicians, and it was protected both
by the parrhesia typical of democratic Athens in general and by the special
parrhesia which, as Halliwell has argued,48 was associated with festal occasions.
Occasionally a politician might try to bite back, as Pericles probably did in
44049 and as Kleon did when he tried to prosecute Aristophanes in the 4208,50
but on the whole they seem to have accepted the situation. In the end it proved,
under normal circumstances, not to be as threatening as all that; to paraphrase
:Dover,51 the theatre audience acclaimed Knights, but that couldn't prevent the
.I\ssembly from electing Kleon general. It could no more be anticipated that one
day a restaging of Frogs would help procure the execution of a Kleophon 52 than
:tt could be anticipated that one day a lingering memory of Clouds would help
procure the execution of a Socrates.
From all this it follows that there are considerable, though not insuperable,
difficulties in the way of using the texts of tragic dramas as an index of public
opinion at the time when they were produced-quite apart from the difficulties
48 Halliwell (I 99 I ).
49 See n. 37 above.
50 Cf. Ar. Ach. 377-82 with scholia, 502-3 with scholia, 630-2; Wasps 1284-91; Ar. test. J. 19-
21 K-A. That at least one prosecution was actually anempted cannot be seriously doubted; see
,Mastromarco (forthcoming).
51 See n. 27 above.
52 See Salviat (1989); Sommerstein (1993).
inherent in the nature of the genre itself, whose conventions did not allow direct
reference to contemporary persons and events. The public whose opinions
mattered to the dramatists was not the same as the public whose opinions
mattered to the politicians. A play which seems to us to have a distinct political
'slant', and which might have made the same impression on a representative
sample of Athenians, may in reality simply have been reflecting, rather than
seeking to influence, the views of the decidedly unrepresentative sample of
Athenians who were actually likely to see it. In some cases, however, more
positive conclusions may be possible.
Taking first the later period when the composition of the audience was
skewed 'rightwards', added significance automatically attaches to any play or
plays that can be seen as having political implications which such an audience
would not be likely to find congenial-bitter hostility to Sparta, say, or robust,
principled defence of democracy, such as we find respectively in Euripides'
Andromache of about 42553 and in his Suppliants of 423 or 422.54 In such cases
two main lines of explanation are open to us. One is that the dramatist held a
particular view so strongly that he was determined to put it before his audience
even at the risk of failure in the competition. The other is that the view in
question had such overwhelming support among the population as a whole that
it was in fact the majority view of the theatre audience as well. In the two cases I
have mentioned the parallel evidence of comedy each time suggests that the
second explanation is preferable. In Aristophanes' Acharnians, which must be
very close in date to Andromache, the hero, Dikaiopolis, while explicitly and
repeatedly emphasizing that he is pleading 'on behalf of the Spartans' ,55 feels
compelled nevertheless to insist that he hates them and desires their destruc-
tion. 56 As a matter of fact hostility to Sparta seems to have been both deep and
constant in Athens from the 440S, if not earlier, to the end of the century. The
Spartan Menelaos, who is quite an attractive character in the Iliad and
Odyssey, in surviving tragedy is invariably presented as a fool, a knave, or a
coward. 57 And even in Euripides' Trojan Women, which has often been seen as
an attack on the aggressive, expansionist spirit that was soon to launch the
Sicilian expedition, and which was produced at a time when Athens and Sparta
were at peace, the chorus go out of their way58 to express their special loathing
of the thought that they may find themselves living as slaves at Sparta of all
53 EUf. Andr. 445-53,594-600.
54 Eur. Supp. 426-55; for the date of the play see Collard (1975a) 8-14, Cropp-Fick (1985),23.
55 Ar. Ach. 309-14, 35 6, 36 9, 482, the last three times each marked by the striking anapaestic
rhythm (in iambic trimeter verse) of the phrase t'nTfp AaKE8aLfLov{wlI.
56 Ar. Ach. 509-12.
57 The relevant plays are Sophocles' Ajax and Euripides' Andromache, Trojan Women, Helen,
Orestes, and Iphigeneia at Aulis.
58 Eur. Tro. 2 I 0-13_ In contrast with the tirades in Andromache, the tone of this passage cannot
be attributed merely to 'wartime' feelings; when Trojan Women was being written and produced,
Athens was not at war with Sparta but only with Melos (and that campaign had probably ended by
the time the play was performed) and, in a desultory way, with Corinth (Thuc. 5. 115. 2 ).
places. As regards Theseus' defence of democracy in Suppliants, it has often

been noted that while Old Comedy, and Aristophanes in particular, frequently
criticizes aspects of the Athenian democratic system which seemed dispensable
but \vere really crucial to its effectiveness (such as the payment of jurors, or the
activities of the 'demagogue' and the 'sykophant'), there is no open criticism of
the system itself: 59 it may from time to time be insinuated that there is some-
thing absurd about poor citizens holding high office,60 it is never suggested that
there is anything wrong with their having an equal vote in the Assembly. This
sort of evidence about the degree of public support for particular attitudes and
policies can be of real value. We know a fair bit (though, of course, not as much
as we would like) about the decisions that were taken on various issues by 'the
Athenians' in, say, the last third of the fifth century. We only rarely know by
\vhat margins the decisions were taken; in particular, the procedure of the
Assembly made the recording of voting figures impossible, and it is exceptional
for us to be told, as we are by Thucydides about the vote on the fate of
Mytilene,61 that a decree was passed by a narrow margin.
When the theatre audience is a skewed sample, then, as it was in the 430S and
later, a play which seems to be slanted against that bias may be of considerable
significance to the ancient historian even while another play with an equal and
opposite slant might tell us, politically speaking, little or nothing that we did not
know already. In Aeschylus' time, when the theatre audience may (as we saw
earlier) have reflected fairly closely the current balance of political opinion in
the population as a whole, there is likewise much to learn from plays whcse own
political standpoint is not, or not unambiguously, that which seems on our
other evidence to have been currently most popular. To some extent we are
hampered here by the notorious chronological uncertainties of this period. Was
J\eschylus in Persians seeking in some measure to defend the record of
'Themistokles at a time when he was already under threat, or was he paying to a
popular hero a tribute for which he could expect popular endorsement? We
cannot be sure, because we do not know exactly when Themistokles was
ostracized,62 nor for how long feeling had been building up against him. It is
perhaps, however, significant that Aeschylus felt it necessary in 473/2 to return
to a theme which had been handled by Phrynichos, with memorable success,
probably only four years earlier, and which, if it was going to have an effect on
people's attitudes to current political leaders, would certainly help Them-
istokles, the architect of victory, as against Kimon whose personal role had
been no greater than that of many an ordinary citizen.
59 A point made strongly by Dover (1972), 33-4.
60 Particularly, it seems, when poor men serve as ambassadors: cf. Ach. 614-17 (Lamachos and
the aristocratic but allegedly insolvent Megakles) and Wasps 1267-74 (Amynias).
61 Thuc. 3.49. t.
62 'The dates of Themi stocles , ostracism and condemnation [for treason] cannot be established'
(Rhodes (1970), 398); see more recently Podlecki (1975), 198 (ostracism in 472/1), Lenardon
(1978), 106 (476-470); Frost (1980), 187-92 (condemnation 471/0, ostracism a year or two
earlier), Hornblower (1991), 220 ('some time in the late 47os-early 460s').
There is of course a lot to say, and I have said a lot before now,63 about the
political implications of the Oresteia. Here I only wish to draw attention again
to the remarkably strong backing given in Eumenides, in words put into the
mouths of no less than four superhuman powers-Athena, Apollo, the Erinyes
(alias Semnai Theai), and Orestes in his capacity as a future cult-hero-to an
adventurous, aggressive, pro-Argive and therefore anti-Spartan, foreign policy
for Athens,64 even to the extent of wishing war upon the Athenians as a blessing
(864) and naming Ares as one of their special patrons (918). Coming as all this
does at the end of the trilogy, repeated as it is over and over again, it would have
made so powerful an impression on the audience and the judges, and been so
impossible for them to ignore, that one is almost bound to conclude, not only
that Aeschylus himself was strongly in favour of this policy with all that it
implied, but also that not just a majority of Athenians, but a very large
majority, favoured it too, despite the heavy casualties it had already incurred. 65
Otherwise we would have to suppose that Aeschylus was seriously jeopardizing
his chances of success in the competition merely in order to rub home by repeti-
tion a message already delivered with perfect (and in terms of tragic drama,
highly abnormal) clarity.
I want to end, however, by considering another play of Aeschylus, The
Suppliant Maidens. Here we are again in the grip of chronological uncertainty,
since we do not know for sure the date of the play itself, but I think it may be
possible to use two features of the play to help establish that date. These
features are both connected with the play's most important character,
Pelasgos, king of Argos: they are his insistence on the democratic character of
the city he rules, and the means by which he persuades that city to grant asylum
to the Danaids even at the risk of war with Egypt. George Forrest in a well-
known article66 associated the portrayal of Argos in this play with the welcome
Argos had given to the suppliant Themistokles some years before:67 the political
message which he saw in the play was that Argos 'had been prepared to fight
the right wars and had had the right constitution'-and, by implication, that
Athens ought to follow her example~ How far I do and do not agree with this
will become evident presently.
As is well known, the group of persecuted suppliants appealing to the ruler of
a city is a frequent feature in tragedy.68 Usually the ruler (especially if
Athenian) readily grants them asylum. Pelasgos has all the more reason to act
63 Sommerstein (1989), 25-32; cf. Bearzot (199 2 ), who draws attention to the anti-democratic
language which Aeschylus puts into the mouths of Klytaimestra (Ag. 883-5) and Aigisthos (Ag.
1617-18)-in contrast, we may note, with his Agamemnon, who, when his attention is drawn to
possible political difficulties awaiting him at Argos, replies that they will be the subject of delibera-
tion in public assemblies (Ag. 844 fr.).
64 Aesch. Eum. 289-95,397-402,667-73,762-77,864-5,913-15, 9 18- 21 ,1008-9.
6S For these cf. IG P. 929 - ML 33.
66 Forrest (1960).
67 Thuc. I. 135. 3; Pluto Them. 23. I.
68 See Kopperschmidt (1971); Taplin (1977), 192-3.
thus when he learns that, far from being aliens from another continent as their
appearance suggests, they are themselves of Argive descent (Supp. 274-326).
lie is, however, reluctant to do so, and argues (365-9) that as the Danaids have
taken refuge at an altar belonging to the city rather than to him personally, it is
the city that must decide what is to be done. To the Danaids this is a distinction
\vithout a difference (370-5): is not Pelasgos the ruler of the city, and can he
not therefore act on behalf of it, as Theseus (say) often enough does in tragedy
on behalf of Athens? But he will not: 'I will not make a definite promise before I
have consulted all the citizens on this matter.... I have already said that I will
not do this without the people's consent, even though I have the power (ouaE
jTEP KpaTwv), lest hereafter the people should say, if something untoward were
to result, "Yau set store by a band of aliens, and ruined your city'" (368-9,
398-401). Even when the Danaids attempt to blackmail him by threatening
suicide (455-65) he agrees only to bring the matter before the people (5 17- I 9),
,~hich he had in effect already agreed to do before the threat was made. He is no
coward desperately seeking a way to avoid war: that is shown by the way he is
ready to face the even greater danger of the wrath of Zeus Hikesios (cf. 347,
359-64, 385-6, 413-16, 478-9) rather than commit his city without
consulting its people. When the assembly is held, too, emphasis is put on aspects
of its procedure which resemble that at Athens,69 particularly the vote by show
of hands (604, 607, 621), the formal language of decrees (609-14), and even
the typically Athenian punishment of dTLJ.L{a or loss of citizen rights (614,
liTtf-LOV ElvaL). The very word 'democracy' itself, as Victor Ehrenberg pointed
out more than forty years ago,7° appears thinly disguised twice in the play (604,
8iJfLOV Kpa'TOVaa XEip; 699, TO OafLl.OV 'TO 7TTOALV KparoV€l.) for what may be the
first time in any surviving Greek text.71 This is the proper way for a polis to take
a major decision: by vote of the assembled people.
And yet Pelasgos is shown as obtaining this decision by blatant manipulation.
(:areful preparation is made for the assembly meeting: suppliant-branches are
:0 be placed on the city altars for all to see (48 I ff), but the men escorting
:Danaos into Argos are ordered not to divulge anything about him until the
assembly meets (502-3). When it is held, Pelasgos persuades the people to grant
asylum to the Danaids by warning them of the wrath of Zeus Hikesios if this is
not done, without saying a word about the danger of war with Egypt if it is
(6 15 -20). Having the decision, as it were, in his pocket, he then defies the
-Egyptian herald and accepts the declaration of war in the name of his people
1:942 f£) without further consultation. And we know the result: this war, though
fought apparently in the holy cause of protecting suppliants, ended unhappily
both for the Danaids and for Argos: the Danaids were left with no alternative
69 Cf. Friis Johansen-Whittle (1980), ii. 487-5 0 1.

70 (195 0 ), 522.
71 In remarkable contrast, SrjJ.LO~ and its derivatives are entirely absent from the Athenian
portion of Eumenides, where the Athenian people are called the A£w~ or uTpaTos.
Alan H. Sommer stein
but to accept marriage with their hated cousins, Pelasgos was almost certainly
killed, and Danaos (who already has a bodyguard at 985 f£) probably became
tyrannos of Argos.72 What we see is a democratic state, very like Athens itself,
deceived with 'tricks of oratory' (623, o1Jf.1.:rly6povs ... oTpo¢>as) into voting
for a war that was to prove disastrous-a war which, to judge by Pelasgos'
tactics, they never would have accepted if the issue had been put to them
honestly. None of the 'almost cheerful militarism'73 of Eumenides heret
Let us be a little more precise. The political leader of a democratic state
comes before its Assembly together with a lone foreigner, who has made
himself a suppliant at the city's altars and asked for the city's help. The
foreigner claims a personal connection with the city. He seeks the city's
assistance against enemies from his own country, in a cause whose justice is by
no means clear cut (note the question raised by Pelasgos in 387-9I, which the
Danaids do not answer; and note also the probability, raised in important recent
articles by Sicherl and RosIer, that Danaos has in reality quite different motives
for seeking Argive protection against the Aigyptiads, never avowed in this
play74). The politician presents a carefully crafted case to the Assembly, in
which some crucial facts are suppressed (among them the dubious justice of the
suppliant's cause), and secures the passage of a decree giving the city's full
support to the foreigner and those on whose behalf he had made his supplica-
tion. This involves the city in a dangerous and ultimately humiliating military
campaign, and in the end the foreigner becomes its tyrannos.
Now this synopsis, all but the last clause, is extraordinarily similar to a series
of events that occurred at Athens, probably in 462.75 The political leader was
Kimon. The lone foreign suppliant76 was Perikleidas the Spartan, who may well
have been a proxenos of the Athenians at Sparta (as Kimon was of the Spartans
72 Garvie (19 6 9), 19 8-9; Friis Johansen-Whittle (1980), i. 43-50; Winnington-Ingram (1983),
57 = (1961 ), 142.
73 Sommerstein (1989), 253.
74 Namely, to keep his daughters unmarried because an oracle has warned him that he will be
killed by his son-in-law (the crucial evidence for the relevance of this version of the ~egend is L
Supp. 37, Std 'TO J1.TJ 8ava'Tw87jvat 'TOV TTa'TEpa): see Sicher! (1986) and RosIer (1993a), Who argues
powerfully that for this and other reasons it is likely that Supp. was the second play of the Danaid
trilogy and that its audience knew about the oracle because it had been mentioned in the preceding
play, Aigyptioi.
7S For the appeal cf. Pluto Kimon 16.9-10, Ar. Lys. 1138-44; for its consequences, Thuc. 1. 102-
5. Since the Areopagos council was stripped of its political power, on the initiative of Ephialtes,
while Kimon's expedition was in the Peloponnese (c£ Pluto Kimon 15.2-3) in the year 462/1 (Arist.
Arh. Pol. 25.2), the expedition must have been sent in the campaigning season either of 462 or of
461; the former is more likely, given that the earthquake at Sparta, which triggered the helot revolt,
occurred at about the same time as the Athenian disaster of 465/4 at Drabeskos (Thuc. 1. 100.2-
101. 2; for the date, Thuc. 4. 102.2-3 with l: Aischines 2.31 (p. 64. 206-7 Dilts), cf. Diad. 12.3 2 .3;
Hornblower (1991), 154-7). See however n. 90 below.
76 ~ Ar. Lys. 1144 actually refers, in connection with Kiman's expedition, to a suppliant-branch
(lK£TTJP£a), presumably placed on an altar by Perikleidas; this detail is not mentioned in Aristo-
phanes' text and probably derives from a 4th-cent. historian, perhaps Philochoros (so Henderson
(1987) 201, comparing 1: Lys. 1 138 - Philochoros FGrH 328 F 117; it is more than 'merely a para-
phrase of Ar.' as Jacoby terms it in his note ad loc., FGrH iii b (Suppl.) (1954); i. 455 and ii. 365).
a-r Athens 77 ) and had named his son Athenaios (as Kimon had named his
Lakedaimonios).J 8 The threatening enemies from his own country are the
'slaves',79 or helots, or Messenians, at Ithome. The campaign that followed-
the first which Athenians had ever fought in the Peloponnese-ended in the
Athenian force being ignominiously sent home, as if they were hired labourers
\\,ho were no longer needed. Soon afterwards Kimon was ostracized-and no
doubt there were those who said that had he not been stopped, he would have
turned the Athenians into subjects or slaves of the Spartans.
If the similarity between the two episodes is not coincidental, it would imply
that the Danaid trilogy was produced not long after the Perikleidas-Ithome
episode-perhaps in the spring of 461, and quite possibly just before the vote of
ostracism was due to be held 80 (the holding of such a vote will have been
decreed two or three months earlier, and had probably been anticipated for
nluch longer than that). The date usually assigned to the trilogy is 463, the
archonship of Archedemides; but this depends on the assumption that AP[ in
])Oxy 2256 fro 3. I is the beginning of the archon's name rather than of his title
of office, an assumption which, as West notes, finds no support in the didascalia
of Laios which occurs in another fragment of the same book. 81 In my view a
stronger objection to a date as late as 461 wou~d be the absence in Suppliant
Maidens of any sign of a skene; there is evidence for a visible skene not only in
the Oresteia but also in the testimonia and fragments of two or three other late
Aeschylean productions,82 and it is therefore prima facie surprising to find no
such evidence in a play produced only three years before the Oresteia. We may
note, however, that there are parts of the Oresteia itself in which the skene is
ignored, namely the first half of Choephoroi (where the action is centred on the
tomb of Agamemnon, and the palace is supposed to be somewhere off-stage)
and the greater part of Eumenides (if Rush Rehm is right to suggest that the
image of Athena, which Orestes clasps, is at the thymele in the centre of the
orchestra, where he can be entirely surrounded by the chorus as they weave
their binding-spell about him 83 ). It may be that the Danaid trilogy resembled
the Oresteia in this respect,84 and that the odd emphasis on housing provision
77 Theopompos, FGrH 1 IS F 88; the family's proxenia is also mentioned by Andokides 3- 3 in
the course of his wildly inaccurate summary of Athenian-Spartan relations in the 5th cent (trust w
ingly copied out in Aischines 2. 172).

78 Athenaios: Thuc. 4. 119. I; Lakedaimonios: Thuc. 1.45.2, Pluto Kimon 16. I.
79 So termed in the Athenian-Spartan alliance treaty of 421 (Thuc. 5. 23. 3, cf. Thuc. I. 101. 2).
80 The decision whether to hold an ostracism was made in the sixth prytany (Arist. Alh. Pol. 43.
s); the ostracism itself was probably held in the eighth prytany (see Jacoby, FGrH iii b (Suppl.)
(1954: i. 3 1 6), on Philochoros 328 F 30). •
81 West (1990a: 125), comparing POxy 2256 fro 2 (Aesch. test. 58 Radt) E7Ti apxoVT(os)
(Beai' ]s:vjSov.
82 See Taplin (1977: 455-6), who finds evidence for a skene in Hiereiai, in the satyr-play Theoroi,
and, less securely, in Edonoi (part of the Lykourgos tetralogy).
83 Rehm (19 88), 297- 8 (which appeared too late to be taken into account in Sommerstein
(19 8 9»).
84 As in some other and more important respects: see Herington (1970), and now Rosier (I993a),
Alan H. Sommerstein
towards the end of the surviving play (Supp. 957-61, 1009-11) may look
forward to later scenes in which a house became a crucial part of the action-no
doubt the house within which forty-nine bridegrooms were murdered in a night
(a record which makes the palace of Atreus, with a mere six murders in the
space of a generation, almost virtuous by comparison).
If RosIer's reconstruction of the Danaid trilogy85 is on the right lines, there is
a positive argument in favour of bringing its date down as low as possible. He
envisages the final playas containing a trial of Hypermestra, accused by her
father and acquitted after Aphrodite intervenes. Such a scene would require
three actors,86 which is not known to be true of any other genuine Aeschylean
scene before the Oresteia. s7 The introduction of the third actor might have
coincided with the creation of the skene or might have been subsequent to it: it
may have taken a little time for dramatists to become aware that the new con-
figuration of the acting area, with the possibility of entries from, and exits in,
three directions instead of two, and of keeping a character in a house just off-
stage from which (like Klytaimestra in Agamemnon) he or she could appear
repeatedly at short notice, created a wealth of new dramatic options for which
the old two-actor rule, designed for a different theatre, could not cater. At any
rate there is distinctly less Aeschylean evidence for a third actor than there is
for a skene, and correspondingly more reason to assume a late date for a trilogy
in part of which a third actor has to be posited.88
I conclude, therefore, that there is no positive reason to reject the view that
the Danaid trilogy was produced in 461, and that aspects of its action were
designed to recall recent events involving Kimon and Athenian-Spartan
relations and to strengthen feeling against him ahead of the ostracism vote. 89
who revives (mainly on the basis ofPaus. 2. I9. 6) the idea that a trial ofHypermestra, the Danaid
who did not kill her husband, was a central feature of the final play.
85 See nn. 74 and 84 above.
86 Even on the assumption that Lynkeus, Hypermestra's husband, played no part in the trial. He
must, on the Sicherl-Rosler view, have been a crucial figure in the trilogy's conclusion, since he is
the only son-in-law of Danaos who is in a position to fulfil the oracle and bring about Danaos' death.
I am, however, sceptical about the whole hypothesis of an on-stage trial·scene in Danaids; for an
alternative reconstruction of this play (using two actors only) see Sommerstein (1995), 123-30.
87 I take it that the present final scene of Seven is spurious, and that Prometheus Bound is either
(and more probably) spurious (see Griffith (1977); West (1990b) 51-72; Bees (1993» or, if genuine,
later than the Oresteia. On Psychostasia see Taplin (1977), 431-2, and note that Pluto Mor. 17a,
AlaxvAos . .. TTapaarfJaas TatS TTAaa7Tyg, TOU ,LIU)S' Ev8fV J-LEv 'TiJV BETtV, €v8€v ot ri}v 'Hc», does not
necessarily imply that Plutarch believed that the ~weighing-scene' took place on stage (any more
than Ar. Lys. 187-9, Tlv' OpKOV 0PKWCELS 1TOO' ~J.LaS;-OVTLVa; fls d01Tla', W01Tfp, cpao{v, AlaxvAos
,"OTE, J.LY}Aoocpayova«S', implies that Aristophanes believed that in Seven against Thebes the oath of
the Seven was taken, and a beast slaughtered, on stage).
88 That the surviving Suppliant Maidens does not require three actors is not in itself counter-
evidence: in Agamemnon a third speaking actor is used only for the Kassandra scene, in Choephoroi
only for the trifling part of the Servant (875 ff).
89 The assertion by RosIer (1993a: 22 that 'es ist gewi& kein Zufall, sondern hochsignifikant, daS
wir auf solche IdemokratischeJ Akzenten gerade im zeitlichen Umkreis der Reform des Ephialtes
treffen~ becomes even more to the point if the trilogy was indeed produced in 461 rather than, as
RosIer assumes, in 464 or 463.
On this occasion, as he had done in 472 and was to do again, I believe, in 458,
and as Phrynichos had done before him, Aeschylus was using tragedy as a
political weapon, and using it in the cause of that demokratia which may have
been coined as a political catchword about this very time, a catchword whose
echo is heard in the text of Suppliant Maidens. 90 It was left for Aristophanes-or
maybe for others who used him-to exploit the name and fame of Aeschylus,
fifty years later, in Frogs for the purpose of undermining that same demokratia,
before an audience who could still be addressed as if they were the demos of
Athens but who in reality no longer properly represented it.
90 The essential features of the above argument would not be affected if one were to accept, with
Badian (1993: 89-96), the evidence ofPlut. Kimon 16.4-17.3, combined with L Ar. Lys. 1144, that
Kimon led two expeditions to aid Sparta against the helot-Messenian revolt, the first of them in
468/7, and that Perikleidas' mission was on the earlier occasion (when Sparta was in real and con-
siderable danger). In this case the Danaid plays could, from the point of view of their political
subtext, have been produced at any time between 466 and 461 inclusive; there is of course no
difficulty in supposing that, like Persians and like the Oresteia, they may have referred back to
events of several years before which remained vitally relevant to current political debate. We can be
fairly sure that enemies of Kimon had been endeavouring, though unsuccessfully, to bring about his
ostracism (or otherwise remove him from the political scene) well before 4621 I. An earlier date of
production than I have assumed in the text would also make it unnecessary to raise any questions
about a skene or a third actor. I am grateful to the editor for drawing my attention to Badian's
d~scussion.
5
Leading the Tragic Khoros: Tragic Prestige in the
Democratic City!
PETER WILSON
And remember Taureas, who was a khoregos competing against Alkibiades with a boys'
dithyrambic khoros. The law states that anyone may remove a khoreutes in the
competition who is a foreigner, though it is not permitted to prevent someone who has
undertaken a performance. In front of you, in front of all the other Greeks who were
~1atching in the theatre and with all the current arkhons in Athens present, he drove him
out with blows. The spectators were on Taureas' side and hated Alkibiades, and so they
were praising Taureas' khoros and refused to listen to his; but he got no further for that,
[§ 2 I] as the judges of the competition, some through fear, others through a desire to
ingratiate, pronounced Alkibiades the winner, thinking less of their oath than of him. But
I think it's only to be expected that the judges should give in to Alkibiades, seeing
l'aureas, who'd spent so much money, was being treated with contempt, while they saw
Alkibiades committing such gross transgressions and wielding enormous power. You are
the ones responsible, because you don't punish perpetrators of hybris; you chastise those
~lho do wrong in secret, but adore those who flagrantly commit acts of violence. [§ 22]
l'hat's why the young don't spend their time in the gymnasia but in the lawcourts, and
why old men fight our battles while young men make speeches-they take this man as
their model, who carries his criminal excess so far that, after recommending that the
Ivlelians be sold into slavery, he purchased a woman from among the captives and has
had a child by her-a child whose birth is more transgressive than Aigisthos', since his
parents are each other's bitterest enemies and his family is divided between those who
have committed and those who have suffered the most extreme wrongs. [§ 23] It's worth
clarifying still further his recklessness: he has a child by this woman whom he turned
from a free woman into a slave, whose father and male relatives he killed, and whose
polis he has obliterated, so as to make the son as bitter an enemy as possible to himself
and to the polis: so powerful are the constraints of hatred that bind him. When you watch
such things in tragedies you regard them with horror, but when you see them taking
place in the polis you think nothing of them. Yet in the case of tragedy you don't know
whether the events have actually taken place or were fabricated by the poets; but with
I This chapter presents in outline issues which I discuss in greater detail in a forthcoming book
on the Athenian khoregia. My warmest thanks for assistance at various stages of this work go, in the
first instance, to Simon GoldhilI, who guided the doctoral research on which it is based; and to Paul
Cartledge, Pat Easterling, Eric Handley, Richard Hunter) David Konstan, Nicole Loraux,
Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, and Oliver Taplin for invaluable advice and criticism, as well as to
the editor. Earlier oral versions were delivered to seminars in Cambridge and Oxford, and I thank
all who participated in them.
Peter Wilson
these you have a clear knowledge that they were committed in this transgressive manner,
yet you treat them \vith casual indifference.
'EvBup,iJ07]TfE oE Tavpiuv, as aVTLxopTJYOs ~v :AAKt#ici.07JL 7TUtat. KEAEVOVTOS' DE TOV vOfLOU
TWV XOPEUiWV E~6.YEtV ov av itS {3ovArrrut gEvov aywvL'ofLEVOV, OUK Egdv E1TLXELpi]cravTa
KwAVEtv, EvciVTlOV vf-LWV Kat TWV ciA-Awv ~EAAiJvwv TWV (}EWpOVVTWV Kat TWV cipX6vTwv
d 1Ta VTW V 7Tap6vTw~1 (TWV) EV Tijt ?TO"-E! rV7TTWV €g~AucrEv aViOV, Kat TWV 8EaTWV OVfLqH-
AOVLKOVVTWV EKElVWl Kat /-UOOVVTWV TOV70V, waTE TWV XopWV TOV f-LEV E7TULVOVVTWV, TOU S'
UKpoaoaofJul OUK EBEAOVTWV, OUOEV 1TA-Eov €7TpugEV' [§ 2 I] aAA-a iWV KplTWV at fLEV
cP0{30V/-LEVOL aE OE xapt'OfLEtIOt VLKQV €Kptl'UV aVTov, 7TEpt EAurrovos 1TOtOVfLEVOt TOV OPKOV
-Yj TOViOl'. EiKOTWt; Of j1.0t oOKovalv aE KplTal v1TEPXEa8at :AAKl{JLCi01}v, 0PWVTES' Tavpi.av
/LEv Toaauia XP1JJ-LaTQ avaAwoavTu 1Tpo7T1JAaKlC6}-LEVOV, TOV DE TOlaUTa 1TapavoJ-LouviU
fLEYLaTov ovvdfLEVOV. at-nOt o· UfLEtS, OU TLf.LWpOUJ.LEVOL TOUS v{Jpi'ovTas, Kat TOUS' /-Lev
Aa(JpaL ciOLKOVVTas KoAci'oVTES', TOUS' OE cPavEpwS' aOEAyaivovTas 8auJ.Lci'ovTES. [§ 22]
TOLyapioL TWV VEWV at oLaTpL{3ai OUK £V -rois YV/-LvaOtOLS', ciAA~ EV TOtS' OLKUOTTJptOLS Elai,
Kai O'Tpa'TEuov-rul /-LEV ot 1TpEofJviepoL, 0YJ/-LTJYOPOVOL oE ot VEW'TEPOL, 7TapaoEiYfL Q iL
TOVTWL XPW}-LEVOL, OS' T7]ALKuVTas 1TOtEiral TWV aflapT1]/-LaTwv V1TEp{30AG.S', warE 1Tepi TWV
MTJAiwv )'VWfL7JV a1TOc/>1}va/-LEVOS' Egavopa7Tooi'eo(}Ul, 7Tpuip.EVOS yvVutKa TWV alXJLaAw-
TWV viov ig avTIjS' 7T'E1TOi1}TQt, OS' ToaOVTWL 7TapavofLwTEpWS' Atyta(Jou YEYOVEV, WOT' EK
TWV iX8{OiWV ciAA~AOtS' 7T€fPVKE, Kal iWV oiKEtOTaTWV V1TapXEL aUTwL Tel EoxaTu TOVS' /-LEv
7TE7ToL1}KEvaL TaUS DE 7TE1Tov(JEvaL. [§ 23] ligLOV oE riJv T6Af-Lal l aVTov aacPEoTEpOV iTt
DtEA6eiv. EK TfiVT77S' yap 1TULOO1ToLEiTaL rij) yvvat.KOS, ijv ciVT' EAEvBEpas SOVA1}V
KaTEaTTJcrE~ KaL ~S' 'TOV 1TaTEpa Kat TOVS' 7rpooijKOVTUS a7TEKTELVE, Kat rilv 1ToALV avaoTuTov
7TE7TohlKEv, wS' viov EX8pOV EaVTWL Kat 'TiJt 7ToAEt. 1TOlTjOELE· TooaVTatS'
av P.ciAlOTU Tal'
civciYKaLS KaTEiATJ7T'TaL fLLOEiv. ciAA' VfLEis EV fLEV TaiS' TpaYWlO iaLS TOlaUTa (h::WPOVVTES'
OELva VO/-Li{ETE, YLYVO/-,Eva 0' EV rijl 7ToAEt. OpWVTES OUOEV cPPOVTt'ETE. KatTOt EKetva fLEV
OUK €7TtOTQO(JE 1TOTPOV OUTW YEyiv'Y/TaL ~ 7TE7TAaOTUt U7TO TWV 7TOl1]TWV' TaVTa OE oae/)(ns
EeODTES' OVTW 7TupavofLWS' 7TE'rrpaY!1€va pat.8vf.LwS' ¢ipETE.2
This piece of eloquence from the hand of a faceless oligarch-'pseudo-

Andokides'-writing 'Against Alkibiades' vividly represents the dynamic
working of the khoregia in Athenian society, a dynamism operating on a base of
conflict and contestation.
The legal control which the polis exercised over its Dionysian khoroi here
collides with a licence arrogated in this public and highly visual civic space by
Alkibiades as khoregos. His khoregia itself becomes a performance whose
symbolic meaning is not lost on this author: prestige, power, and the dynamic
deployment of wealth are all very clearly at stake. The theatre becomes the
place for the dramatic, symbolic enactment of social tensions: of Alkibiades'
'lust for tyranny',3 of the agonistic relations between the pre-eminent 'Big Men'
of Athenian public life and between these and their audience of the demos. This
account of Alkibiades' performance construes it as a symbolic trampling
underfoot of democracy-a demonstration of his own confident sense of his
2 [Andokides] 4. 2 0-3.
3 See §§ 16,24, and 27 of this speech and cf. Thuc. 6. IS, 6. 28. 2, 6.53; on the lineage of the
topos of the 4l us t for tyranny' see McGlew (1993), 30-2, 81-2.
Leading the Tragic Khoros
superiority over the judges of the festival competition, selected by a carefully

controlled process to represent the ten phylai of Attike;4 over the laws of the
city; and over the demos itself Alkibiades manipulates in his own interests the
law of 'civic purity' which debarred foreigners from participation in Dionysian
khoroP-here specifically the ten fifty-strong dithyrambic khoroi of boys, icons
of the precious rising generation of future citizens. His assault on fellow
khoregos Taureas-or rather, to translate this inherently conflictual term more
faithfully, his 'anti-khoregos' (avTl.xoP1'Jy6s) Taureas-at first causes his
audience to side with Taureas and despise Alkibiades, an emotional response
which is translated directly from the men to their khoroi (see the waTE ...
clause in § 20); but this, according to 'pseudo-Andokides', gives way to a
seduced mass response of mesmerized admiration for public transgression. And
it is this compliance of the demos, displaced only momentarily onto the judges of
the competition (§ 2I), which is construed as the enabling condition for
Alkibiades' tyrannical transgression of the social order.
The double depiction of Alkibiades in this passage as both transgressive
khoregos and tragic transgressor is eloquent indeed, and the close juxtaposition
of these two images seems hardly fortuitous. While the notion of tragedy
deployed here is clearly a polemical and tendentious one,. it demonstrates at a
minimum one way in which tragedy could be interpreted by those who
themselves participated in its performance regularly as spectators, khoreutai,
and, in this case at least, as khoregos. 6
.: See Pickard-Cambridge (1988),95-9; Pope (I986).
~ On the legal situation see A1acDowell (1985); what Alkibiades is actually alleged here to have
done in relation to Taureas is obscure (§ 20): KfAfVOVTOS' DE Tot; VOJLOU T<VV XOPEVT<VV EgciYHV av au
TLS' {3ouAT}Tac gE~/OU aywvL'0J.LEVOV, OUK Egov ErrLXfLpiJaavTQ KwAufLV, ... My translation represents
an interpretation of this difficult passage that sees Alkibiades having driven out from his rival
Taureas' khoros a non-Athenian khoreutes: foreigners were not allowed to participate at the Great
Dionysia, but (according to this interpretation) the law stated that once a performance had begun,
an alleged foreigner could not be expelled: see L Ar. Wealth 953; MacDowell (1985), 68-9, 72-7.
Hcwever, a quite viable alternative translation makes Taureas the one attempting to remove a
foreign khoreutes from Alkibiades' khoros: the second clause would then read 4it is not permitted to
hirlder someone who has attempted to remove someone thus ...' Both Ostwald (1986: 120-1) and
MacDowell (1990: 362) favour this reading. The story told by Plutarch, Phokion 30, in which
Demades brings a hundred foreigners into the theatre as khoreutai, along with the appropriate
I oo,ooo-drachma fine, might also be taken as support of an interpretation which sees Alkibiades as
having introduced the xenos here, since in the case of Demades such action is dearly construed as a
transgressive display of power and wealth of a kind that would fit well with what we know of
Alkibiades-or at least of antiquity'S representations of Alkibiades.
II At [Andokides] 4.4 2 the author doses his speech with reference to three victorious leitourgiai
of his own, in euandria, lampadephoroi, and-lastly-tragedy, with an explicit allusion back to the
.bu5iness with Taureas by adding: 'and I did that"without striking my rival khoregoi, and without
feeling belittled that I was less powerful than the laws.' cr. fG ii/iii:t, 1138.21-4 for a khoregia by
Andokides with a boys' khoros at the Great Dionysia; this was likely to have been won before his
exile in 392, and was very probably commemorated by an elaborate memorial, described in The
Li'ves o/the Ten Orators 2. 17 = [Plut.] Mor. 835h. On his other services see Missiou (1992), 28-32;
cf. Amandry (1977), 175 n.17. [And.] 4 is, however, generally not regarded as the work of
Andokides: see Furley (1985) for full bibliography. FurIey himself (with Raubitschek (1948») is one
of a minority of scholars who maintain the probability or at least strong possibility of Andokidean
Peter Wilson
The principles of inclusion and exclusion so central to Athenian political

ideology and practice inform this representation throughout: on the one hand
there is the law of 'civic purity' manipulated by Alkibiades; on the other the
trope of transgressive, 'tragic' generation is turned against Alkibiades to
exclude him in polarized isolation from the civic collective, as confounder of the
social order, murderer of citizens, breaker of the fundamental polarity of free
man/slave, annihilator of a polis, a paradigm (7TapciSetY/La, § 22) for the
inversion of the norms appropriate to the generations-norms no doubt partly
inculcated, as they had been for centuries of Greek culture, by participation in
khoroi structured by age classes/ as with the dithyrambic khoroi of paides and
andres at the Great Dionysia. The date at which these events are generally
supposed to have occurred-even if only imaginatively-would have seen\
Alkibiades well under the age of 40, and the Aristotelian Ath. Pol. (56. 3)
records the requirement that a boys' dithyrambic khoregos be at least 40 years
old.s It is normally assumed that this is a fourth-century measure, not applic-
able to this fifth-century case;9 but perhaps Alkibiades' actions even before
reaching the theatre had also been transgressive. For even if it was not, strictly
speaking, illegal for him to be a boys' khoregos at this date (in the later years of
the fifth century), there would surely have been a social consensus of some kind
that preceded the formalization into law and which preferred to see Athenian
boys who were dancing at the Dionysia in the care of older men; and the young
Alkibiades, we can safely assume, would hardly have been the type for whom
the Athenians would have felt comfortable in making an exception to this rule.
Alkibiades carries his tragic mode of action from the theatre into daily life.
From his paranomia in the orkhestra it is an easy shift to the massacre of the
Melians and his tragic performance there. lO And once again 'you' are to blame,
for the demos is under the sway of representations and oblivious to the real
horrors around it The distinction drawn between the demos' alleged responses
to tragedy in the theatre and 'tragedy' in the city equally implies a confusion, or
authorship. Further on the rhetorical manipulation of tragedy in this and other passages see Wilson
(1996).
7 See the pioneering work of Calame (1977) on Spartan khoroi of young women; and his pre-
decessors Jeanmaire (1939); Brelich (1969); also Nagy (1990); Sallares (1991), 160-92; Lonsdale
(1993). I approached the subject of the khoregia from a strong sense of dissatisfaction with the
established scholarship on the tragic khoros, which had to a very large extent ignored the material
aspects and social functions of Athenian dramatic khoroi in favour of a literary and largely formal·
ist approach. More recent work has gone some way in addressing this problem: in addition to the
works just cited, see Goldhill (1986), 267-74; Winkler-Zeitlin (1990), esp. the contributions of
Winkler, Longo, Goldhill. It is in keeping with the goals of this project of recontextualizing the
tragic khoros that I have preferred throughout to transliterate xopos and related terms rather than
to use latinized forms.
S See Davies (1971: 29) for the date of c.430-415; Pickard-Cambridge (1988: 75 and n.4) on
the law.
9 See the references cited in the previous note.
10 paranomia is very much the keyword of this speech; see Ostwald (1986), I 17-2 I; and for an
attempt to place the work in context, Furley (1985).

a sense that the power of fictive representation is recognized and feared within
the field of tragic representation but not in the actions of those who pay for it:
Lin incipient or implicit critique, perhaps, of the dangers involved in the public
institution of tragic representations of a kind which did not go unvoiced by
l\.thenians of various periods and ideological persuasions.
In 'Athenian history'-both ours and theirs-Alkibiades is a figure exemplary

of th~ problematic continued need under the democracy for an aristocratic
rnod~l of the individual: the khoregia, I would argue, testifies to the same need
at the level of central cultural institutions. It is a paradox typical of tragedy that
the khoros, the collective represented on stage, was" funded by and closely
associated with an outstanding individual, while the dramatic individuals, the
actors, were provided and paid by the collective par excellence) the Athenian
polis.ll
This is not an image which has made its way into the economic histories of
l\thens to which the khoregia and the other leitourgiai are normally con-
signed. 12 Traditionally regarded as something of a curiously irrational piece of
ancient economics or given brief mention in literary studies under the rubric of
'staging', the essential social dynamism of the khoregia has been passed over.
'iet the thematics so evidently involved in the above account of Alkibiades and
'"raureas-the dynamic social operation of wealth, power, and prestige-all
suggest other methodologies of which they are the familiar subject-matter-
such as sociology or cultural anthropology.13
In this chapter I shall be exploring these aspects of the khoregia in brief
compass. The significance of this particularly Athenian form of 'choral leader-
ship' as a site for what might be c"alled 'social performance' has not been recog-
nized,14 but as the passage of pseudo-Andokides (among others) shows, the
khoregia was itself potentially a kind of paradramatic performance taking place
alongside, and in intimate relation to, the institutionally recognized forms of
11 In his work which so reoriented the study of tragedy Vernant emphasized many of the differ·
ences-the tensions-between khoros and actors: Vernant-Vidal·Naquet (1988), esp. chs. I, 2.
Although he refers to the opposition between the actor, a professional, and the khoros, 'an official
college of citizens' (p. 34), he does not point out this further difference at the material level of fund·
ing. This picture must also be refined by reference to important changes over time-for example, it
is only from (c. )449 that the polis chose and allotted the three protagonists. Before this, the poet
chose (or was) the protagonist: Pickard·Cambridge (1988), 93-5; Ghiron·Bistagne (1976), 125-34.
12 The standard treatment of the khoregia is still Pickard-Cambridge (1988),75-7,86-91. The
fundamental historical study of leitourgiai as part of Athens' 'public economy' is still Boeckh
(1886), i. 26 5-87, 533-54.
13 The writer who has contributed most to understanding leitourgiai in their dynamic social
context is Veyne; see Veyne (1990), 70-101) to whose discussion lowe much; for critique ofVeyne
~ee Andreau-Schmitt-Schnapp (1978); Gauthier (1985), 7-10.
14 Cf. Andreau-Schmitt-Schnapp (197 8), 3 19: 'Enfin, en decrivant l'evergetisme etranger a la
logique politique, ... Veyne laissait entendre qu'if pouvait avoir une fonction symholique, mais
nulle part il ne developpe ce qui pourrait etre un aspect essentie1 de l'evergetisme: une etude de
l'evergetisme comme representation sociale et pratique symbolique reste afaire.'
86 Peter Wilson
dramatic performance in the polis. Although the poor state of the evidence for
the khoregia, even concerning the most straightforward details of its operation,
does not allow for an exclusive and systematic focus solely on the tragic
khoregia, it is possible to set out some salient distinguishing features of this
particular form of 'choral leadership' , and in attempting to do so here I recog-
nize the inadequacy and heterogeneity (both across time and media) of the
available evidence, while at the same time emphasizing the importance of the
attempt to recreate some idea of this lost immediate material context of tragic
production: for the very issues implicitly raised by a sociological study of the
khoregia-such as the proper uses and evaluation of wealth, and the role of the
pre-eminent individual in society-are ones that form a fundamental part of
tragedy's dialectic between past and present.
The Athenian system ofleitourgiai was at the material and ideological heart
of the polis, channelling vast resources of private wealth into the celebration of
numerous Attic festivals and crucially underwriting the maintenance of the
fleet while simultaneously furnishing it with leaders.15 And the way the
performance of leitourgiai is exploited by members of the socio-economic elite
before audiences of the demos or represented among the narrower circles of the
likes of the 'Old Oligarch) reveals a great deal about the contested formation of
ideologies in Athens. 16
In the rhetoric of the orators the khoregia figures prominently in the nexus
of tapoi which refer to public service and democratic civic-mindedness
deployed by elite speakers before mass audiences. Through this rhetoric there
emerges a plurality of motives which are important to consider in an attempt to
evaluate the status of tragic production in civic ideology. The other prominent
discourse in which the khoregia figures in the fifth and fourth centuries can be
dubbed 'oligarchic'. According to this, the leitourgist is the victim of the greedy
demos, the leitourgic system a means of popular extortion. Both of these
images-often adopted more or less wholesale by modern writers-tend to
suppress, for their own different purposes, a third position, and the one which
interests me most-of the khoregia as a site for ostentation, power, and self-
representation for its performers.
Thus in contemporary fifth- and fourth-century discourse one does not find
immutable positions and stable terms-the khoregia is always constructed
rhetorically. A particularly clear further illustration of this is to be found in two
major public speeches of the mid-fourth century. These two adjacent speeches
in the Demosthenic corpus both focus on leitourgiai in different ways. In
Demosthenes 2 I, the speech Against Meidias, Demosthenes accuses his
15 Another central element in the material and economic base of drama, the lheorikon, will be
considered briefly below and in greater detail in my forthcoming book.
16 See the important works of Davies (1967), (1971), pp. xvii-xxxi, (1981); Lauffer (1974);
Finley (1983); Ober (1989); more recently on the avoidance ofleitourgiai in particular and anlidosis
Christ (1990).
opponent of hubristic behaviour, the culmination of which is a punch in the

face delivered by Meidias in the middle of the orkhestra when Demosthenes
\vas acting as dithyrambic khoregos at the Great Dionysia of 348-another
case where social tensions broke out during, and were reflected in, the perform-
ance of a khoregia. Speech 20, Against Leptines, of some seven years earlier,
\vas directed against a proposed law which was to do away with the customary
exemptions extended to leitourgists, such as the grant of a period of a year free
from service after the performance of any major leitourgia.
In Against Meidias one of Demosthenes' strategies for arousing the indigna-
tion of his demotic audience is to produce strenuous arguments to the effect
that the office of khoregos is a religious and thus sacrosanct one. In striking him
in the precinct of the god Dionysos whom he was serving, Meidias was thus
committing an act of impiety and not just personal assault. The allegation that
Meidias had committed an act of impiety, daE{3Eta) is central to the speech as a
\vhole (cf. esp. § I), but the very fact that Demosthenes needs to argue at such
length for this religious function of the khoregia implies at a minimum that it
cannot have been felt with great immediacy by his audience, that it was not
necessarily a normative view that 'went without saying'. Demosthenes supports
this line of argument by citing various oracles which demonstrate the divine
imperative for the establishment of khoroi, and he couples these with human
law:
If, men of Athens, I hadn't been a khoregos when Meidias treated me in this way, one
\vould have condemned his actions only for hybris. As it is, I think it would be proper to
condemn them for impiety too. You know of course that you hold all these performances
of khoroi and hymns for the god not only in accordance with the laws concerning the
I)ionysia, but also in accordance with the oracles, in all of which, whether they have
come from Delphi or from Dodona, you will find a solemn injunction to the polis to set
up khoroi after the ancestral custom, to fill the streets with the savour of sacrifice and to
\vear garlands. I7
It is perhaps not surprising that historians of the Great Dionysia have paid
little or no attention to these oracles as reliable evidence concerning the estab-
lishment of the festival. 18 While they are thus neglected evidence for the way in
vv'hich a certain image of the festival could be created in the rhetorical ambit of
the courts in the mid-fourth century, they have a tenuous relevance to the
historical institution of the festival. MacDowell, who writes 'They are not all
closely relevant to Demosthenes' argument, but perhaps they are the most
relevant that could be found,'19 points out for example that the first oracle does
not refer to activities in the theatre, but in the streets, and is not about a regular
l)ionysia, but an extraordinary festival for Dionysos in thanksgiving for the
17 Dem. 21. 51. Translations of this speech are based on MacDowell (1990) with some
adaptation.
18 See MacDowell (1990), 270-5; Raubitschek (19 85).
19 (1990), 27 0 -1.
88 Peter Wilson
harvest. The oracles refer to the participation of 'all mixed together' (§ 52)-
and to the wearing of garlands by free men and slaves (§ 53)-and this
emphasis on the absence of divisions and distinctions within the festival parti-
cipants is one which is decidedly out of place for the Great Dionysia as we know
of it in the classical period. 20
The conclusion Demosthenes wants to establish from these religious argu-
ments is this:
Therefore in the case of all the khoroi that are constituted, together with their khoregoi,
during the days on which we meet for the competition, these oracles make it clear that we
wear our garlands as your representatives, all of us alike, both the one who is going to be
the victor and the one who is going to come last of all; it is only for the day of the victory
celebrations that the victor receives his own special garland. 21
There is evidently a lot of rhetorical sleight of hand here, particularly in

Demosthenes' attempts to elide the differences between the general-and non-
competitive-religious sense of stephanos as it appears in the oracles~ and the
agonistic sense. 22 By a similar move Demosthenes conceals semantic and
historical change behind the verbal continuity of the word XOpTjy6s, which
signifies something very different in a fourth-century Athenian context from
the religious, 'timeless' time of these oracles. 23
In Against Leptines (of C.355), on the other hand, Demosthenes expends
nearly as much energy and ingenuity on exactly the opposite position-he
works hard to establish a distinction between tEpa and ATjLTovpy£aL. He is here
afraid his opponents will claim that leitourgiai are sacred and thus that
exemptions from them are unthinkable: 'For ifby appealing to the name of the
gods they seek to justify a robbery which they have no other means of justify-
ing, won't that be most impious and terrible conduct?' (§ 126) His extensive
pre-emptive retorts give a totally secularized, civic image of leitourgiai, in
which they are clearly opposed to-indeed they stand virtually as the opposite
of-tepa:
Now, that there is a difference between exemption from religious duties and exemption
from public services, and that the defendants are trying to deceive you by transferring
the name of public services to religious acts, I shall adduce Leptines himself as my
witness .
• • . D'TL 5~ OUI( EGTL TaUTOV l€pwv ciTEA.€LaV €XeLV Kai ATjLTOVPYLWV, ci'\'\'- Ot5TOL TO TWV
'\7JLTOVPYLWV avoIL· £1Ti 'TO TWV iepwv JL€Ta<pEpOVT€~ E,a7TaTav '''1'TotiaL, A€1TTiv7]v V/-L[v
aV'TDV Eyw 7TapaaX'7(JOJ-LaL J-LtipTVpa. 24
20 However, see the powerful recent interpretation of Dionysos and the polis by Seaford (1994:
ch. 7). At p. 246 he refers to these oracles within the context of his broad argument for the integrat-
ive function of Dionysos and his festivals at the level of the entire polis.
21 Dem. 21. 55. 22 See Bond (1981),239 (on Eur. Her. 677).
23 Similar manipulation of older senses of the word appear in other authors. See my further
general discussion of the term below and of another example in the epigram Anlh. Pal. 13. 28.
24 Dem. 20. 126.
Demosthenes is now afraid that his opponents will seek to deceive the demos by
confusing sacred and civic spheres. Should ei.ther of these images of the
khoregia be regarded as representing a dominant evaluative discourse? And
why is it that the 'leadership' of Athenian khoroi is open to such contestation?
"[his total reversal of arguments is an eloquent contradiction indeed and very
clearly illustrates how the khoregia is always a contested site, always rhetor-
ically inflected.
In a passage of the Politics concerned with the selection of civic offices,
,Aristotle explicitly addresses the difficulty of defining or locating the khoregia
in relation to arkhai in the strict sense-a problem which is both symptomatic
of its ambivalent status under democratic conditions and which resonates in the
light of historical developments in Athens after 322:
~~or is it easy to define this-which of the arkhai are properly so called; for the political
community requires many officials, and so they are not all to be reckoned arkhontes,
whether selected by vote or by lot-first, for example, the priests ... and further khoregoi
and heralds..... 25
~~ristotle is here emphatically not placing the khoregia under the sign of the
legitimate wielding of civic power, arkhe, while at the same time clearly
recognizing that it does represent an exercise of power in the civic sphere. The
khoregia certainly lacks many of the features of democratic arkhe which
}\ristotle regarded as definitive: for instance, selection of khoregoi by lot was
impossible; in all probability it lacked the essentially democratic control of
euthynai (and, for that matter, of dokimasia );26 and its fundamental principle of
selection was a straightforward qualification by wealth.27 It is difficult indeed
not to look for a resolution of the tensions in the rhetoric and practice of
leitourgiai which runs the risk of teleological determinism. For the post-
democratic assimilation of arkhai to leitourgiai seems almost to represent a
]ogical progression under the changed political and economic conditions (in
light of which Aristotle was writing),28 while at the same time evincing a thread
of continuity with the status of khoregiai under the democracy-a point to
which I shall return.
I certainly do not wish to suggest that such rhetorical construction of the

khoregia is in any sense superficial, (purely rhetorical'. On the contary, in the
25 Arist. Pol. 1299aI5-20.
26 Hansen (199 I: I 1 I) writes that leitourgists had to undergo eUlhynai at the end of their office,
citing Aiskhines 3. 19; however Hansen does not make it clear that this passage-significantly-
only refers to trierarkhoi, not khoregoi. In the trierarkhia military office clearly did overlap with
Ieitourgia, and lrierarkhoi regularly had under their control equipment provided by the polis.
27 For argument that 'the Athenians had put into practice [in the 4th cent] the democratic ideal
that any citizen should be able to hold a magistracy' see Hansen (1991: 108), citing Arist. Pol.
r 317bI9-20.
28 See here Veyne (1990); de Ste Croix (1981), 305-6, quoting Arist. Pol. 6.7, 132Ia31-42.
90 Peter Wilson
legal and political debates before the Assembly, the courts and the Council
which deal with leitourgiai, questions of citizenship and democracy are always
at stake in a vital, not peripheral way. A delicate balance of reciprocal benefits
was constantly being renegotiated in the exchanges between the demos and its
elite members. Put very crudely, the demos received a large degree of cultural
and military security in the form ofleitourgiai; while the perspective of the elite
has been succinctly formulated by Davies: 'The motivation was cPtAOiLp,[a, the
objective AalJ.:1Tp677J~' and the reward a steady income of xapt~ from one's
fellow-citizens, to be exploited as a lever to office and as a refuge in times of
trouble.'29 It was this structure of balanced 'gifts' that officially accommodated
khoregic performance within the democratic society among many of whose
principles it sat uneasily. Yet this same medium of democratic discourse
produced some telling peculiarities. For instance, one finds here a systematic
strategy of self-representation by the very upper tier of the Attic socio-
economic elite which constructs them as ideal citizens. From at least as early as
Antiphon the non-, or indeed (as in the case of Antiphon) the anti-democrat
used his leitourgic record to construct a public image at once emphatically
democratic yet with attributes which could never be shared by the demos-as
provider of important military and economic funds and know-how, public
banquets,30 warships,31 loans, and of course brilliant khoregiai. The rhetoric
which aims to bring him nearer to the demos and its sympathies in so doing
unavoidably points to the ineradicable social and economic gulf separating
them.
Numerous speeches could illustrate the point. The locus classicus is from· the
mouth of the not obviously democratic speaker of Lysias 2I. He opens his
defence,32 on the capital charge of receiving bribes while in office, with an over-
whelming barrage of services rendered the city, heading the list with a tragic
khoregia, a men's khoregia at the Thargelia, a pyrrhic khoregia, a men's
khoregia at the Great Dionysia, a cyclic khoregia at the Lesser Panathenaia,
seven trierarkhiai, a gymnasiarkhia at the Prometheia, a boy's khoregia, a comic
khoregia, another pyrrhic khoregia, money for a trierarkhic race, plus various
other lesser leitourgiai and eisphorai. All of this from a 26-year-old; and it is all
prefaced simply by the plea: 'And further, please listen, I as·k you, to some other
considerations, so that you might know the kind of man I am as you cast your
vote' (aKovaa, S€ Kal1TEpi TWV a:A"WV ufLa~ d.~,wJ i'v' €7TioTrJo8E 7TEpi oi'ou T'VO~
DV'TOS €fLoiJ t/r1JQJLEfu8E).33 'What kind of man I am ... ' The speaker could
scarcely be clearer that he wishes and expects his conduct as a democratic

29 (197 1), p. xvii; cf. Ober (1989), 226-4 0 .
30 On these see the excellent study of Schmitt-Pantel (1992).
31 On the trierarkhia see now Gabrielsen (1994).
32 It has often been supposed that the opening of this speech is not preserved: see Blass (1887),
497-502; and it has been suggested that it may be an example of the circulation of only that part of
a speech which was regarded as likely to interest 'the general reader': Dover (1968b), 160.
33 Lys. 21. 1.
citizen to be construed on the basis of his leitourgic expenditure-and the list

\vhich follows includes the vast sum of nearly two and a half talents spent on
the choral leitourgiai alone.3~ In light of the charge to which this defence is
supposed to reply-bribe-taking in office-another passage of Lysias is par-
ticularly suggestive: 'There are some who spend money in advance [that is, on
leitourgiai] ... in order to obtain a return of twice the amount once they are
{~lected to office by yoU.'35 The kind of dealings one might expect to produce
such returns to a person in office are precisely those which would come under
the head of (,WpoooK{a. There is a certain fragility in an argument used to
demonstrate one's civic rectitude when it can so easily be turned to suggest a
subversive use of democratic office for personal ends. It is as though the charge
of bribe-taking in particular called for the most elaborate self-defence based on
leitourgic 'gifts' to the de,nos since in a sense OWpo80Kta is the inverse of
leitourgic donation. Here the rhetoric of indifferent service-in civic office and
by lavish expenditure-collides with the marked potential within such activities
for the enhancement of individuals' image and socia-political stature.
The polemical claim that some people spend money on public services in
order to recoup it twice over when elected to office suggests at a minimum that
this was not considered a normal practice, and it certainly cannot provide the
full rationale behind such vast outlay: the speaker of Lysias 2I claims to have
spent 3,000 drachmas on a single tragic khoregia, which according to Davies is
ten times as much as a contemporary skilled workman might have earned
annually.36 Further explanation for this phenomenal scale of expenditure,
,;vhich soon came to shock some ancient observers,37 is to be sought at the level
of what Bourdieu has called symbolic capitaL 38 As far as is known, a victorious
tragic khoregos was awarded only an ivy garland, unlike his dithyrambic
counterpart, who received a tripod made at the expense of the pOliS. 39 This may
suggest that the prestige of a tragic victory was its own reward,40 but it is clear
at any rate that the material return was inordinately out of scale to the
expenditure required to achieve it. In the Cavalry Commander Xenophon
recommends giving prizes for displays of proficiency in the hippie art in order
1"0 harness the powerful Athenian spirit of competition, adding by way of
supporting comparison that 'with khoroi great efforts and huge expenditures
34 The calculation is by Podlecki (198 I), 95-

35 Lys. 19. 57.
36 Lys. 21. I; Davies (197 I), p. xxii. The notion of "annual wages' is, however, quite alien to the
classical context.
37 Cf. Dem. 20.26; Isokrates 7.54; Arist. Pol. I309aI8-2I; Pluto .A10r. 348b-349b.
38 (1977), 17 1-83.
39 That tripods were paid for at public expense is shown by IG iil. 1635a A. 33-4, of 375/4. One
khoregos at least improved on the standard-issue tripod by having his silver-plated: IG ii/iiiz. 3043
(= Philokhof9s Atthis 6, FGrHisl 328 F 58): ... Alaxpaios ;4vayvpdaLOS ciVE87JK€ TOV trrrEp TOU
t1fdTpOV Tp[1To8a Ka'Tapyvpwaas, V£VLK7JKWS XOPTJ"wv 1T4l0i, Kai E1TEypa.p£lI E7Ti n)v KaTQ'TofLTJv rijs
7TfTp a S.
40 C( Lawler (1964), 24-
92 Peter Wilson
are outlaid for trifling prizes'.41 The very obvious intangibility of the return to
the khoregos for his money and efforts is evidence that at other levels the
return must have been very real; that the symbolic capital involved was
considerable.
One last example: the speaker of Lysias 7 is defending himself before the
Areopagos against the serious charge, punishable at this date (some time after
397) by exile, of removing the stump of a sacred olive-tree from his land. He
asks his hearers not to put greater trust in what his enemies say than in things
with which they themselves are familiar. Instead, he asks them to base their
considerations on what he has said 'and from the rest of my conduct as a
citizen'-for such must be the sense here of Kat EK Tijs aAA1]S" 1To'\t'T€iaS".42 He
continues: 'For I have performed all the duties laid upon me with greater
enthusiasm than was required by the polis-as trierarkhos, taxpayer, khoregos,
and in the rest of the public services, my lavishness was second to none of any
other citizen.'43 Here the speaker quite explicitly presents his 'life as a citizen' as
based on his performance of leitourgiai-more enthusiastically, of course, than
officially' required. In a socia-linguistic context where one's life and livelihood
are regularly equated, this construction of one's politeia on the basis of one's
donations to the city comes as no real surprise: yet when the radically anti-
egalitarian implications of such a definition of politeia are considered,
subsequent historical developments seem all the more intelligible. During the
oligarchic domination of the 400, the right to citizenship-to politeia-was,
according to the Aristotelian Alhenaion Poiiceia,44 reserved for those Athenians
'most capable of being leitourgists in their persons and in their wealth ... ' -TOLS
aW/-Laatv Kat ToiS" xpiJJ.Laatv. 45
The close association in this last phrase between the body of the citizen and
his resources is, I think, vital in understanding another important facet of
Athenian conceptions of the khoregia. In accordance with a fundamental tenet
of civic ideology the citizen perpetually hold.s his body in readiness to give it to
the city, in peace as in war.46 This notion of the 'expenditure of self' is made to
serve the rhetoric of adequation of the super-rich between themselves and the
ordinary citizen, often through the idea of the universal inviolability of every
citizen's body.47 The extent to which an ideal of individual, personal participa-
tion is crucial to leitourgic service, is reflected in the very term xop1]y{a itself. 48
~l Xen. Ca'vairy Commander 1. 26: O?jAOV be TOUTO Kai iv Tois xopois WS j1.tKPWV a:8AWV (VEKa
1ToAAOi {Lev 1TOVOl, j1.eydAat Of 8a1Tdvat Tt:AoVVTat.
42 See LSJ s.v. 2: t he daily life of a citizen'; Bordes (1982), 112; cf. fro 35 Forster (1927).
4
43 Lys. 7. 30-I.
44 [Arist.] Alh. Pol. 29. 5. In the 4th cent. the principle of restricting all political activity to those
with a high property qualification was applied more insistently by the Macedonian overlords: it was
20 mnai in 322 under Antipater, 10 mnai in 317 under Kassander.
45 For this and similar expressions, and for the extension of the sense of ATJlTOVp'YEiv to mean
generally 'to serve (the city), see Lys. 31. 15; Rhodes (1981 ), 383.
46 C( e.g. Arist. Pol. 1337328-31; see Loraux (1982) .
.p See Wilson (1991). Cf. esp. Lys. 3.47, 18. 7, 21. 3; Dem. 21. 106, 126, 19. 282.
[See opposile page for n. 48]

Leading the Tragic Khoros 93
rrhis is generally explained as a survival from a time before the professional

differentiation of tasks between the khoros-Ieader in a 'practical' sense49-1ater
usually known as the xopODtDaUKaAos or Kopu</>ai'os-and the financier who
himself hired such a person. Survival or not, the term khoregos-'leader of a
khoros'-inscribes an implicit aristocratic ideology of non-professionalism,
eliding differences in reality which many khoregoi were evidently keen to
conceal themselves. 50 It is worth noting that the older, undifferentiated sense
survives in fifth-century drama in a few places where the Doric form xopayos
js used, but usually-and no doubt significantly-of gods or heroes. 51 This
ideological tenor of the term is made explicit in a passage from the 'Old
()ligarch', a text which ostensibly attacks the demos while its intended audience
seems to be, as Flores well puts it, 'collaborationist oligarchs'.52 The writer
complains that the demos has done away with the proper observance of athletic
and musical activities because it does not consider them KaA6v 53 -a term
l.oaded with the connotation of aristocratic worth-and is no good at them
anyway:54 (TOUS OE YVf.LVa~Of.LEVoVS" aUiaet Kat ri)v fLOVULK-YJV €1T(.'TTfO€UOV'Tas
'CQrUAEAVKEV 0 Oijp..os, vOf.Li~wv raVia au KUAOV Elvat, yvovS" OT(' OU ovvaTOS"
55
·raVia EUi(.V €1T(.'T7]OEVELV. )
There is a clear point of cultural, and-most importantly-of ideological
resistance here, a question of 'taste', in which the alleged degeneration of
48 As also in the term TpLTfpapxia. In the case of the crierarkhia, service 'in person'-on board the
ship itself-was, ideally, very direct indeed. It is, however, extremely difficult to gauge how often
and under what conditions trierarkhoi did actually serve in this way; cf. [Dem.] 50. 21; Lys. 2 I. 1 I;
(iabrielsen (1994). Vidal-Naquet (1986a: 93) has pointed out the paradox that the fleet allowed the
employment of the thetes while at the same time mobilizing the upper class, as trierarkhoi.
49 This is the sense of the word (Doric xopaY05;) in e.g. AIkman 1. 44; 4 fro 6. 2; lob. I I, 15-16
PJrIGF; Adespota I027d PMG; such usage persists in tragedy in lyric contexts (see n. 51 below). It
also continues to be the sense in later passages such as PI. Laws 653-4; cf. Athenaios 633h.
50 An example is to be found at Antiphon 6. 1 3.
51 Soph. Ant. I 147; Eur. Hei. 1454; Ar. Lys. I 315. Cf. also the tantalizing title of Nikokhares'
comedy Herakles Khoregos (dated usually to 404 or thereabouts: see Edmonds (1957),93°,933). It
seems fairly certain that the use of XOpTJYos in the title must draw on the leitourgical sense. Another
very surprising and fascinating appearance of the word and, so it would seem, the Athenian
phenomenon is on the Apulian bell-krater which appeared only in 1988 and was first published in
Trendall (1991), and more fully in Trendall-Cambitoglou (1992). See the important discussion of
Taplin (1993: ch. 6), who argues, against Trendall, that the word XOPHrOE which appears over
the heads of the two male comic figures in this clearly theatrical context must refer to the Athenian
institution, rather than being an identifying label referring to their function as 'khoros-leaders', in
the sense of koryphaios.
52 (1982 ),3 1- 2 . Cf. Vegetti (1977); Gabba (19 88).
53 [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1. 13; unless the clause vop.i'wv TOViO ou KO,AOV Elva, means 'because it
considers this state of affairs [- the (exclusive) control of athletics and mousike by the rich] not
good'. This is less attractive, since it ascribes a more nuanced judgement as to what is or isn't kalon
to the demos, and the 'author of this text is careful to keep such loaded value-terms to their 'proper'
poles: on the reading in the text, the implication is almost 'because it doesn't appreciate what is
kalon'. On any interpretation, however, the whole passage is fraught with difficulties.
54 Cf. the attitudes expressed in e.g. Ar. Wealth J 162-3, Clouds 960-1023; Eur. Hipp. 1013-20;
PI. Grg.5I5e.
55 See the apparatus of Kalinka (19 1 4).
94 Peter Wilson
culture is equated with its democratization-understood as its simple appropri-

ation by the demos.56 The ruination seems to lie in the fact that democratic con-
ditions have put an end to the exclusively upper-class monopoly on athletic and
musical activities. The terms of an aristocratic' claim to special cultural know-
4
how and interest observable elsewhere surface here, \vith the further element
that the addition of demotic involvement in itself has put an end to this 'noble
tradition'. The clear implication of the following remark, a continuation of the
passage cited, is that not only khoregoi, but the members of khoroi too should
be, and once (in predemocratic days) were, members of the elite:
1\1oreover, in the khoregiai and gYl1znasiarkhiai and l1ierarkhiai, they know that the
wealthy act as khoregoi/lead the khoroi, while the demos is provided with khoroi/is led in
khoroi, that the wealthy provide for athletic contests, but the demos is presided over in
the triremes and in the athletic competitions.'
,.... ~ ;..... " . . . ,. ., "!" ....
EV -ratSxop1JytalS av Kat YUJ.LlluOtapxtalS Kat TpC1]papxtulS YLYVWOKOVOLV OTt Xop'IyouaL

fLEV ot 7TAouaLoL, xopYJye[Tat Se 0 oijjLOS, Kai YVj.Lvaatapxouat ot 7TAOVatOL, 0 Sf S'fJJLOS
Tpl7]papxeLTat Kai YV/l-vaOLapXELTuL
The rich lead in khoroi, the denlos is led: as the outline of a position of power,
the whole expression, with its stark contrast of active and passive verb-forms, is
lucid. However, the hegemony implied by the expression is, according to the
'Old Oligarch', tempered by the demos' coercive demand for money:
The denlos certainly sees fit to take money for singing, running, dancing, and sailing in
the navy, so that it may become \vealthy and the \\lealthy poorer.
dglOL yovv a.pyVplOV Aap..j3dvEtV <5 SijjJ.os Ka! atSwv Kai TpEXWV Kai dPXOVJ.1-EVOS Kat
7TAEWV EV TUCS vavaiv, I'va aUTOS T€ EX1Jt KaL OL 7TAovOlOl 1TEVEUTEPOL Y{YVWVTUl.
The latter remark Finley aptly termed 'a mere debating-trick' ,57 but this
passage does put in its clearest form the standard oligarchic complaint that
leitourgiai were an oppressive imposition on the wealth of the rich. It also
focuses this complaint on a particular feature of khoregic expense which was
most repellent certainly to this author: the khoregos (and other leitourgists) had
to pay his khoreutai for their services; for it cannot be argued that they are
'tak.ing money' from any other source (namely the polis); and the notion that
the language could mean, in a general way, that they are 'getting money out of'
khoregoi or the like, rather than actually being paid, does not do justice to the
concreteness of the expression, even in an author who has no trouble bending
language to suit himself. Yet it may be possible to get further behind this
indignant and somewhat obfuscating tone and its rigidly polarized rhetoric. For
the 'Old Oligarch' puts himself completely outside the entire system of
relations in the democratic city, and would certainly not acknowledge anything
about a democratic institution like the leitourgiai that might very well have
56 Cf. Bourdieu (19 84). 57 (1983), 34.
'~ervedthe ends of some of his peers, happy enough (as evidently many were) to
transfer the habits of aristocratic patronage to members of the demos .58 The
various stories about khoreutai being well looked after (sometimes accom-
modated in the house of the khoregos himself), and especially well fed, suggest
what one would expect: that relations between khoregos and khoreutai were
much more personal than other relations of 'pay'.59
In case it might be thought that the evidence of the 'Old Oligarch' is of too
eccentric or extreme a position, I draw attention in addition to a passage from
one of the many derisory attacks of Demosthenes on Aiskhines for, among
other things, his involvement with the theatre. In comparing the conduct of his
own life to Aiskhines', Demosthenes in the speech On the Crown (§ 265)
produces an antithetical list of their occupations which are respectively active
and passive, praiseworthy and demeaning. Among these are:
You were a schoolmaster, while 1 attended; you ministered for initiates, I was initiated [or
perhaps, with a play on [elos, '1 payed taxes']; you were in a khoros, but I was a khoregos;
you were a clerk, while I addressed the Assembly; you played the parts of the tritagonist,
while I \vas a spectator; you were hissed off stage, and I did the hissing.
Eo{oaaKE~ [yptifLfLaTa], EYW o~ €¢OiTWV. €T€AEL~, EYW o· ET€AOV/-LTJV,
EX6PEVES, Eya, o~
€xopiJyovv. eypuJLfl-Ui€UES, eyw s~ ~KKA7]a{a~ov. €TpLTaywviaTEL~, eyw o~ EfJEWpOVV.
Eg€1Tt7TTE~, EyW o~ eovpPLTOV. oo
It is telling that such a tone of contempt, for all its rhetorical overkill, could be
introduced in this way to a description of the power relation between khoreutes
and khoregos. Nor is it often noted that at the Great Dionysia alone some 1,165
58 The point of the 'Old Oligarch's' distaste would appear then to be that the practice of
patronage has been transferred to an area which was the exclusive province of the well educated
and 'good' and thus in no need of patronage of any kind. The demos' 'demand' has thus introduced
a note of coercion into social relations that prided themselves on their 'liberality', equality, and
freedom from any such demands.
59 Finley (19 83: 34) saw that the operation of the leitourgic system can justifiably be called
patronage; cf. Millett (1989: 18) on the suppression of opportunities for and evidence of patronage
in classical Athens. Demetrios of Byzantion (in Athenaios 14. 633b; cf. 14. 617b-c) uses the
:xpression TOUS' fLLU8oUfL€VOUS' TOUS' xopouS' ofkhoregoi. Whitehead (1986) and Rhodes (1986: 139)
have pointed to the links forged between khoregos and khoreutai, especially at the deme level, and
in general to the khans of demesmen towards a successful khoregos.
60 It should be added, however, that the relevant paired contrast is almost universally not printed
in editions of the speech; the apparatus of Blass (1885, Teubner) reads: 'post €TEAOUfLTJV omisi
EX6PEU£S', €yw 8' €xoP1JYouv, cum S pro L, rhetoribus omnibus qui locum afferunt, praeter Greg.
Cor. VII, 1257 sq. W.' While its manuscript authority is not beyond doubt, nor, I would stress, are
the reasons for its exclusion (see Wankel, quoted below), and its insertion in the text poses questions
:>f interest about attitudes to khoreia, at whatever stage that took place. Wankel (1976: 1162) writes:
'Nach €TEAOUfL7JV steht in aUen Hss, auger S noch die Antithese EXOPEVES, €yw o' €xop.,zyovv. Bei den
Rhetoren findet sie sich nur bei Hermog. Meth. p. 43 I, 2oR. (codex Vc) und danach bei Greg. Cor.
vii p. 1257, 8W. (vgl. die uErklarung" p. 1258, 18-26). Es ist otTensichtlich eine Interpolation. Das
\Vortspiel ist albern, und der Gegensatz zwischen xopniuv (des Kultdieners Aisch.? Vgl. €7TOP-
)(OVfLEVOS § 260) und xopTJYEiv (§ 257) ergibt keine Pointe im Sinn der Reihe.' Aesthetic judgements
as to the quality of the wordwplay are bound to have a subjective component; while the point of the
,:ontrast will, I hope, be clear from my larger argument.
Peter Wilson
citizens were needed each year to serve in the choral contests. 61 A substantial
percentage of the citizen body was thus effectively under the pay of private
individuals in this way for a few months at least every year.
Without making an extended detour through the debate concerning the nature
of the ancient Greek economy, it is important to stress the degree to which the
leitourgic system is only fully comprehensible as an element in a socially
embedded economy where prestige is a more desirable goal than the simple
accumulation of wealth, or at the very least is a crucial adjunct to it. In the rest
of this chapter, I shall look briefly at the role of competition and prestige and
focus on what distinguishes tragic choral leadership and the prestige that goes
with it from other forms. For the khoregia is very much more intelligible by the
terms of an economy of prestige than it is in the accountancy of a strictly
market economy. The classic signposts of Greek notions of prestige are all
present-a fiercely contested 'zero-sum' competition under the gaze of a wider
audience, an obsession with victory and its memorialization, with time, with
kleos and all its trappings.
In the first place, among the many different kinds of khoregia, the tragic
khoregia evidently occupied a high position on a scale of prestige. Its relative
rarity ensured its value: whereas at the Great Dionysia (clearly the most
prestigious of Athenian festivals involving choral agones) there were twenty
dithyrambic khoregiai each year and roughly a hundred festivalleitourgiai of
all kinds, there were only three for tragedy at the Great Dionysia. According to
the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia the second duty of the eponymous arkhon
after coming into office was the appointment of three of the very richest men
from among all the Athenians as tragic khoregoi for the Great Dionysia, follow-
ing only his formal proclamation that all men shall retain their possessions and
powers until the end of his office.62 Thus the first practical task of the leading
civic officer was to appoint the three wealthiest Athenians liable for the'duty as
impresarios for the tragic dramas which were still a full eleven months away_
Moreover, the tragic khoregia at the Great Dionysia is the only one of which it
can be said with any confidence that its principle of selection was never
restricted to any subgroup of the Athenian citizenry: Aristotle writes with clear
emphasis that the tragic khoregoi were chosen 'from all the Athenians'. The
twenty dithyrambic khoregoi of the Great Dionysia were officially identified
with their phylai and even the comic khoregoi came at some point in the fourth
century at least to be nominated by the phyiai, though it is unclear whether
61 The figure of 1,165 is based on: 20 dithyrambic khoroi x 50 (of which half, being 1Ta.CSes,
should properly be called 4future citizens'); 5 comic khoroi x 24; 3 tragic/satyric khoroi x 15. The
evidence of Arist. Pol. I 276bl-9 that comic and tragic khoroi could be composed of the same men
does not alter this point. Aristotle's remark lacks any firm context. What is interesting about it is
that the heterogeneous type and homogeneous composition of dramatic khoroi are used as an
analogue for a polis.
62 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56. 2 -3.
they thereby were felt in any sense to represent them. 63 The tragic khoregos
remained entirely untouched by any such affiliations.
Furthermore, from some time quite early in the fifth century tragedy was
clearly perceived in and beyond Attike as the Athenian poetic performance par
excellence. It rapidly came to occupy a privileged place in the range of cultural
representations that helped to constitute Athenian polis-society; it was, in
Humphreys's phrase, 'the main symbolic form of classical Athens.'64 Whereas
many, indeed most, dithyrambic poets were of non-Athenian birth,6S the
reverse is true of tragedians. 66 And in the programme of the festival and its
official memorialization of victors, tragedy occupied the final, climactic
position. 67
A further important indication of the great value attached to tragedy by the
city itself, and to the agones of the Great Dionysia in general, is to be found in
the institution of the theorikon, which I wish to discuss briefly at this point. This
will also provide a counterbalance to my primary focus on the material con-
tributions of individuals to the performance of tragedy, since it is an instance of
the enabling contribution of the collective polis itsel(68
Our sources for the theorikon are even more fragmentary and of uncertain
interpretation than those for the khoregia. However, it is none the less clear
that there are problems with the current interpretations of such evidence as
there is. 69 In the standard English-language treatment of the subject,70 there is a
conspicuous silence concerning the possible significance of the very fact that
during the period of classical Attic drama, a fee to attend the agones of the
Great Dionysia was charged at all. Pickard-Cambridge's treatment of the
subject begins: 'The only explicit evidence about the cost of a seat is ... '71- an d
63 In logistical terms, five comic khoregoi are more easily distributed across the ten phylai (cf. the
situation at the Thargelia, where five khoregoi represented ten phylai) than are three tragic
performances. Needless to say, this is in itself no sufficient explanation of why the tragic khoregoi
remained outside any affiliation with the phylai.
64 (19 8 3), 18.
65 Herington (1985: 94 and n. 74) can find three Athenian dithyrambic poets at most; cf. Plut.
Mor. 348b-c; [Pl.] Minos 321a.
66 TrGF i lists c. 10 5th-cent. tragedians of non-Athenian origins.
67 The so-called Fasli or Victors' List: IG ii/iii~. 2318, erected C.346; best seen with supplements
known from other sources in Mette (1977: 1-42). For the debate about the order of events in the
agonistic part of the festival see Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 101-7, 361; Luppe (1972); Mastro-
marco (1975).
68 The theorikon plus leitourgic contributions do not exhaust the elements of the economic base
of tragedy. Considerable funds must have been forthcoming from the treasury for many other
aspects of the festival as a whole-the actors' pay, the poets' remuneration, sacrificial animals, and
so on. The hestiasis needs to be added here as a further leitourgia operating in conjunction with this
and other festivals: see Schmitt-Pantel (1992), esp. 117-43, 179-208. Another leitourgia, or quasi-
leitourgia, connected to the Great Dionysia is that of the ten ETTtfLEA:rrro.i, whose main concern was
the procession (TT0J..L7T7]). These were originally selected by the people, but at some point after the
middle of the 4th cent., were appointed by their phylai: thus [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56. 4; c[ Rhodes
(198 I), 627-8.
69 See now also Sommerstein in the present volume (Ch. 4), for a rather different interpretation.
70 Pickard-Cambridge (19 88), 26 5- 8 ,27 0 . 71 Ibid. (19 88 ), 26 5.
Peter Wilson
he shows no awareness that the fact that there was a charge to enter the festival
at all may itself be surprising and worthy of analysis. Yet this surely is the
earliest known instance of a charge being made in the Greek world to enter a
festiva1. 72 However~ the fact that that charge seems to coincide with the birth of
western dramatic production should not be allowed to mislead us. Pickard-
Cambridge's starting-point is surely another instance of the unthinking
transfer of a familiar, but anachronistic mentality to the ancient Greek context:
an ~spect of modern theatre-practice based on entrepreneurial notions of
recouping financial outlays and making profits. 73 I would argue that it is vital to
consider the motivations for the institution of the entrance fee at the same time
as one analyses the theorikon.
There seems in fact to be an essential connection, if not a complete iden!:ity,74
between the two; between the fee charged to enter the festival agones and the
money distributed for this purpose. They are both covered by the term
f}EwPLKOV (sc. apyvpLoV): '(money) for a spectacle'. The analogy with the
EKKATjuLauTLKov, SLKauTLKov, and {3ovAEVTLKOV points in this direction, with its
implied emphasis on participation in civic institutions. 75 Furthermore, all the
money which was paid to enter the festival seems to have returned ultimately to
the polis, in that it was kept by the apXLTEKTWV, the person to whom the polis
leased the theatre and who was responsible for its upkeep?6 Under this aspect,
the theorikon can be seen as the city's way of assuring the quality of the
material conditions for the performance of its drama at the same time as
inviting itself to attend.
One explanation for the theorikon given by Libanios and repeated in various
guises by ancient and modern writers links its institution to a democratic desire
not to see the poor disadvantaged: 77 this of course in general presupposes that
the fee to enter pre-dates the issuing of theorika, a fact which as I have
suggested is at the very least open to doubt. However, as Buchanan notes, those
writing on the Greek theatre accept this 'aid for the poor' interpretation as
72 77zeorika were issued for the Panathenaia: IDem.] 44. 37; cf. Hsch. S.v. 8EWptKd XPr,fLQTa.
There seems to be no evidence that an entrance-fee was charged at the Panathenaia. Whitehead
presumes that there must have been an entrance fee for the Rural Dionysia, while pointing out that
we know of no local equivalent to the theoric distributions of the Great Dionysia. His argument
rests mainly on the evidence that exists for theatre lessees at the rural theatres, as at Peiraieus (IG
ii2. I 176), from which he derives a principle of entrepreneurship; cf IG ii/iiil. 1206 and Pickard-
Cambridge (1988), So; Whitehead (1986), 222.
73 This attitude is widely assumed in discussions of the lheorikon: C.g. Buchanan (1962),86 and,
in extreme form, Walton (1977), (1980), ch. 3.
74 There is limited evidence to suggest that theoric distribution may-at some period-have
exceeded the amount required to be paid over to enter the theatre, perhaps in order to cover
'private expenses' (thUS Ulpian on Dem. I. I: El~ ioiav TP0cPYJV),
75 Libanios, writing the hypothesis (§ 4) to Demosthenes' First Olynlhiac, links the institution of
the entrance fee with that of the lheorikon.
76 C£ [Arist.] Alh. Pol. 47. 2; Photo and Suda S.V. eEWpl,KOV Kai BEWptKTJ; de Ste Croix
(1964), 191.
77 Libanios, hypoth. (§ 4) Oem. 1: iva ot JLTJ OOKWOlV oi 7T£V71TES niH aVllAWjLan AU7TEia8at £K TaU
J
871fLoaiov ),afL{3d.vEtV €KaCTTOV £To.X87} TOV~ Suo d{3oAou~.

fact. 78 It would seem, however, to represent a type of democratic idealization

(not necessarily with a positive evaluation) common in our sources, and often
repeated unquestioningly by modern writers. 79 It is assumed that there is
operating here a charitable ethic of relief for the poor which is in fact more at
home in a later era. Some time ago Bolkestein pointed out the strong contrast
between the essentially ci~'ic nature of assistance in antiquity and the Christian
notion of charity for the poor: in antiquity, the citizens as such were the
beneficiaries of any assistance, redistribution, and so on.80 The phrase ascribed
by Plutarch to Demades is appropriated as the catch-cry of the 'democratic'
view of the theorikon: Demades was said to have called the theorika the 'glue of
the democracy'-KoAAav ... nj~ 01J,uoKpaTia~-though to what aspect of its
history he was allegedly referring is notoriously unclear. 81 There is a very
strong tendency for modern writers to discuss the theorikon as a democratic,
egalitarian means of enabling the poorer citizens to enjoy the cultural riches of
the polis. Thus Webster writes of it, together with the khoregia, as 'institutions
which made for the spread of culture' (from the rich to the masses).82 Not
surprisingly, an institution with such potential for claims to egalitarianism was
at some stage ascribed to Perikles. Plutarch is our earliest source here, where
the inflection is hardly positive, and he describes it as a political measure to
please the demos in an attempt to counter Kimon's lavish dispensing of his
private wealth. 83
Yet this line of debate still leaves uninterrogated the reasons why the
lheo,ikon was necessary-namely, why a charge was introduced to enter in the
first place. 84 The fact is that the theorikon was available to all Athenian citizens,
irrespective of wealth, and that rich people could declare without any apparent
embarrassment that they had drawn it. In fact, Demosthenes goes so far as to
say (10. 3885): 'All the well-to-do go to receive their share of this, and rightly so'
(o[ yap EV1TOPOL 7TaVTES EpxovTaL P.E(}i.gOVT€S TOVTOV, Kat KaAws- 7TOtOVOLV). In
78 (I962), 52.
79 Cf. Meier (1990 ), 88.
!iO Bolkestein (1939). Nicolet (1976: 253) further notes that when special distributions of corn
were made in Athens in the 5th and 4th cents., there is no indication that the poor were favoured:
'La participation it la distribution. au contraire, etait hautement affirmee comme la preuve d'un
privilege, Ie statut de citoyen.'
81 Pluto Mot. 101 lb.
S2 (1973), 48; WTebster finds himself in the company of Grote (1846-56), 8. 123: 'we shall be
satisfied that the tastes, the sentiments, and the intellectual standard of the Athenian multitude,
must have been sensibly improved and exalted by such lessons.'
83 Pluto Per. 9.2-3: TOl.iTOLS 6 n£ptKAijs KaTa07Jpo:YWYOV/LEVOS Tpl1TETat 7TpOS n}v nov S"1J.Looiwv
StaVOfL'1v, OUJ.LfJoVA€VOaVTOS fl1.hwL .dafLwvioov TOU "Oa8fv, WS itpto'To'TEAT}s la'Top"1K£" Kai Taxv
f)eWptKO[S Kat SIKaOTtKOis A1JfLfLaatV aAAats T£ I-l.LfJ8o¢>opais KQi xopTJyiats fJUVOEKaoas TO 1TAij8o~
EXPiJTO KaTa rijs E~ :4P£LOV 1Tdyotl {lovAijs. Cf. Pluto Mor. 818c-d; Ulpian on Oem. I. I; Suda and
Photo S.v. 8£WpIKd.
84 Polacco (1983: 8) adduces the highly practical reason of the need to keep order in entry to the
theatre. However, this can hardly be an exhaustive explanation of the phenomenon in itself, and of
the particular form it took.
85 Cf. Dem. 44. 37.
100 Peter Wilson
other words, the amount of money which the city might hope to have accrued
from entrance fees must always have been quite low; given that the great
majority of theatre-goers must have been citizens, that majority could always
have had its entrance fee supplied by the polis. Here I think is where the point
behind the theorikon is to be found, although I recognize that my argument too
must remain one possible interpretation of our very inadequate evidence. The
sources give no indication that it was ever a problem to fill the theatre-indeed,
the opposite is true. 86 At the same time there was evidently a desire to control
the composition of the audience, although here too the evidence is rather
indirect and slender.87 Those who would be liable to pay the entrance fee are
the various minority groups about whose presence in the audience it is
notoriously difficult to speak with confidence: metoikoi, foreigners, perhaps
slaves and women. And so the theorikon thereby neatly inscribes the principle of
'civic membership' in yet another-and highly significant-field.88 Whatever
the restrictions may have been, entrance to the Great Dionysia was certainly
not restricted in principle only to citizens. However, the theorikon was evidently
another mechanism of pointed exclusion, of subsidizing civic participation in an
event of international renown where relations between the Athenian polis and
its 'Others' were very much at stake. Drawing one's theorikon through the
deme mechanisms 89 on days when the standard civic /-LLu8ocpopal were not
forthcoming was another form of participation, of affirming one's position in
the polis. The theorikon was not a cultural dole, but another means of
redistributing the city's surplus to the citizens through a civic institution, and it
is well described by Humphreys as 'a ritual symbol rather than a key element in
the Athenian economy'.90
Returning, however, to the fundamental role played by individuals in the
material base of dramatic production, I want to consider the particular form of
prestige that may have attached to tragic 'choral leadership' for that tiny
subgroup of citizens who were able to perform it. 91 One important feature
differentiating the tragic from the dithyrambic khoregia is that the latter was
undertaken on behalf of one's phyie, and the competition between the ten
dithyrambic khoroi was clearly in part at least designed to foster a healthy
R6 I do not think that Pluto Mar. 122d can be regarded as evidence that the thearikan was needed
to assure full audiences: 1TAEiovS' av rOOtS' (Kfi 8faTciS, 01TOU 8EwptKOV Tt yff.!ETat TO[S ouvwtJOtY,
W07TEp ~8'1jv'10t.
87 e.g. Dem. 18. 28: in the heated arguments between Demosthenes and Aiskhines over the treat-
ment of the Macedonian ambassadors, Demosthenes defends his resolution to grant them what was
presumably pJ oedria. The fact that the point could have been sensitive is illuminating.
4
88 An analogous institution to the theorikon, almost its converse, is the metoikion, the flat-rate
poll-tax on metoikoi which, as Finley (1981: 90) notes, by its very existence marked the free non~
citizen off from the citizen, and was more significant for its psychological effect than its financial
burden.
89 Whitehead (19 86: 10) argues that theon'ka were distributed not merely by demes but actually
at meetings of deme assemblies, to demesmen presenting themselves in person.
90 (19 83), 30 .
91 On any calculation, this represents less than 1% of the citizen body.
rivalry within the citizen body between these subdivisions of the democratic)
post -Kleisthenic system. In the case of tragedy, however, the khoregos is acting
as no one else's representative, and has only the poet to vie with for the store of
available kleos. In fact, it is clear from inscribed memorials that the khoregos is
often in a position to subsume even the poet's glory into his own. In such private
dedications-set up, of course, at the expense of the khoregos, not the polis-
the name of the khoregos is frequently set above that of the poet, and, where it
is included, often also above that of the current arkhon. 92 The practice was
sufficiently common to provide the basis for the joke in Theophrastos'
caricature of the aneleutheros: 'The illiberal man is the sort of person who to
commemorate a victory at tragedy sets up to Dionysos a headband made of
wood and puts only his own name on it.,93 The 'illiberal' man excludes any
mention of the other personnel responsible for the victory from its most lasting
memorial. By this behaviour, mean in itself-wood compromising a future that
marble might have secured-the generosity of public-spiritedness is pushed
aside by a selfish demand for solely individualistic self-advertisement. It is
important to recognize to what extent the victory of a tragic competition
belonged, or at least could be regarded as belonging, to its khoregos as much as,
or indeed more than, to its poet. We are really quite ill-informed as to the
criteria on which the judges were supposed to award the prize, and the point
seems to be that in different contexts the victory could be appropriated by those
who had some claim on it, a fact well illustrated by variations in dedicatory
practice.94
In an economy of prestige the central 'commodity'-prestige itself-is
fundamentally elusive and unquantifiable. After all-unlike wealth-it is
conferred by others. It needs to be reasserted constantly, since it is something
which by definition comes into existence in the regard of others. 95 The evidence
relating to the khoregia illustrates this phenomenon perfectly. Indeed, since its
sphere of operation is the theatron-the place in the city for the gaze-it is a
privileged example indeed. 96 Emphasis is laid in our sources on the brilliance of
92 See Themistokles' tragic pinax described by Pluto Them. 5.5; many inscriptions, e.g.IG ii/iiP.
3090, 3091, omit mention of the arkhon altogether, and where his name is present (often in a
smaller script) it seems to be for little more than administrative' purposes.
4
93 Thphr. Char. 22. 1-2.

94 For a (virtually unique) example of an arkhon-the Basileus, so the competition must have
been at the Lenaia-seeking to maximize symbolic capital from dramatic victories which took place
under his office, see the unusual herm of Onesippos, SEG xxxii. 239; Edmonson (1982). It is, I
think, significant that in this inscription it is the comic khoregos who is identified as the (metic)
trader-Sosikrates XClAKo7TwA7]s-while the tragic khoregos is identified further only by his
patronymic. Given the marked elite prejudice against those involved in commercial activity, this
imbalance may be regarded as further evidence that there was a hierarchy of prestige at least in
certain contexts among the various khoregiai.
95 See Leppert-Lincoln (19 89) for a theoretical introduction; on the Greek material see as a
selection Gouldner (1965), esp. 41-132; Petre (1969); Winkler (I990b) esp. 47; Vernant (1991), esp.
107; Goldhill (199 I), ch. 2.
96 In terms of this prestige conferred by being seen the khoregia is thus also rather more
102 Peter Wilson
the costume of both khoros and khoregos, and the khoregos is evidently often
keen to associate himself closely with his khoros. It is as though he, as much as
his khoros, had an important part to play in the performance. It was he, after
all, who was responsible to an important degree for the visual aspects of the
tragic performance itself-in particular of course for the costuming of the most
dominating physical presence on the stage, and perhaps also for other ~visual
effects'Y7 Two recurrent keywords are Aaf.L7Tp6TT)~98 and 8avJ.Lci~w, both
referring to the 'brilliantly' visual nature of the khoregia and the position of the
khoregos in the view of a vast audience.99 Thus the references to the gold
garlands and robes which Demosthenes was having made by a silversmith not
only for his khoros but also, apparently, for his own 'performance' as
khoregos. 10o Similarly a fragment of the fourth-century comic poet Antiphanes
describes an Athenian plousios riddled with anxieties over the precariousness of
his wealth who, when chosen as khoregos, furnishes his khoros with gold robes
and wore rags himself. 101 Athenaios provides a fascinating account of the kind
of behaviour to be expected of Alkibiades in the pompe of the Great Dionysia:
'Whenever he was khoregos, taking part in the procession, he entered the
theatre in a purple robe and was admired (€8aV/-Ld.'ETO) not only by men but
also by women.' 102 Moreover, in the theatrical context purple is a colour pre-
eminently associated with tragedy. In the lVikomakhaian Ethics Aristotle
illustrates the behaviour of the banausos by describing him as the type who,
when khoregos for comedy, 'brings on purple in the parodos, like the
Megarians' .103 Sifakis is surely right in arguing that this purple is that of the-
for comedy-excessively lavish costume of the khoros, representing a vulgar
and inappropriate expenditure characteristic of the banausos. One can well
imagine that Alkibiades' entrances to the theatre in purple may well have been
preludes to tragic performances. 104
In order to be truly brilliant a khoregia had to be victorious, for victory was
attractive than the other most prominent leitourgia, the llicrarkhia. ~Iloreover, the l1ierarklzia,
through its association with the navy, a crucial base of demotic power, may have had something of a
"populist' character which the khoregia, firmly related to cultural practices of a non-democratic
past, clearly did not share.
\), See Arist. Poet. I453bI -8 with Taplin (1977), 477-9~ under the rubric of 1Tapaxopr,Yl"Jp. a may
have come additional khoroi, extras without speaking parts, etc. Cf. Blume (197 8), 33-4.
98 e.g. Thuc. 6. 16. 3, 5; Antiphon I. /3. 12; Dem. 2 I. 159, 45· 78; Lykourgos I. 139; Arist. Elv
I 122b23, II 23a20.
99 On Aap.7Tp6TTJ~ as something sought after in the political tield see Rahe (1984), 282; Carter
(19 86 ),13,24- 5; Cozzo (199 1), 61-2.
100 Dem. 21. 16, 22. However, MacDowell (1990: 245-6) regards the most important piece of
evidence for this 'an imaginative composition made in a later age'.

101 Antiphanes fro 202 K-A. Cf. Isokrates 7· 54.
101 Athenaios 12. 534c.

103 Arist. Elv 1123319-24.
104 Sifakis (197 1). Cf. the comic fragment of Philemon (105 K-A): Tn S' apyupwfLaT' eaTiv ~ TE
TToprPupa, Eis TOV~ TpaywLoov~ Eu6ET', aUK Els TOV Plov. Also Pollux 4. I 16. With these transgressive
uses of purple cloth one might compare the tragic locus classicus of iv 1Top¢upiSt ElUlfVat,
Agamemnon in Aesch. Ag.
Leading the Tragic Khoros I03
the ultimate guarantee of prestige in an arena where one's gains corresponded

exactly to the losses of one's peers. 105 One could cite the poor record of one's
forensic opponent in competitive leitourgiai as evidence of a contemptuous
attitude towards the democracy, as the speaker in Isaias 5 does when quoting
Dikaiogenes' fourth place in a dithyrambic competition and a last place in
tragedy and the pyrrhic dance.106 Yet to whatever extent success as a dramatic
khoregos might have been open to construal in the appropriate context (when
on trial before the demos, in particular) as an indication of one's adhesion to the
dominant ideology of the polis, the occasion and circumstances of the khoregia
itself very clearly provided a possible context for the garnering of a highly
individualistic and personal form of glory.
Competition among khoregoi was often acrimonious. It seems that
disputes among them were so routine and expected that their settlement
became a matter of institutional control. 107 There is also the evidence of
curselike 'binding spells' inscribed on small lead tablets, dating from the fifth
and fourth centuries, and directed against rival khoregoi and khoroi. It has
been convincingly argued that these were employed before, not after, the
event as 'pre-emptive strikes' against formidable opponents rather than as
measures of vengeful spite. 108 Two Attic lead discs show binding curses
against men described as oLSaaKaAoL and U1TOOtOaUKaAOL.; one of these
identifies the men as 'those who are with Theagenes', and Faraone plausibly
suggests that this Theagenes was the khoregos. If so, the khoregos emerges
once again as the focalizing figure of the performing ensemble, the one who
is perceived as responsible for the potential victory and thus the individual
who is the target of attack-most probably, of course, from his rival
khoregoi. The motive force of this competition was </>"AOTLj.Lia, 'love of
honour' and the related c/>C.AOVtKia, 'love of victory'. As the passage of
pseudo-Andokides with which I began demonstrates, <p,>"ovLKia could de-
generate in the theatre, as it so regularly does in our manuscripts,109 into
4>LAOV€tKia, 'love of strife'.
In conclusion I shall consider an epigram which has made its way into the
manuscript tradition of the Palatine Anthology l10 although it seems virtually
certain to be an example of a dedicatory inscription designed to commemorate
lOS See Osborne (1993) on the importance of competition in Athenian festivals more generally.
106 Isaios 5. 36.
107 [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 3.4.
108 Faraone (1991); see also Gager (1992),47, 7 6-7.
109 Examples of manuscript 'confusion' of ¢LAov(£)LK- terms are legion: e.g. Thuc. 5. 43, I I I;
Lys. 3.4°,22.8,33.4; Xen. Hell. 6.3. 16; Dem. 20. 144; PI. Rep. 545a, 550b; Arist. Pol. I 306bI; see
further LSJ S.v. cPLAOVLKOS 2; cf. Aesch. Ag. 1378 with Fraenkel (1950), 646. My thanks to Chris
Pelling for showing me his work on Pluto Philopoimen where the distinction, or its lack, between
these terms continues to be an important issue.
110 Anlh. Pal. 13. 28. The origins of book 13 of the Anthology are particularly obscure: see
Buffiere (1970), 4-10.

10 4 Peter Wilson
a victory of the Akamantid phyle 111 in the men's dithyramb at the Great
Dionysia in the early fifth century.Il2
rrOAAaKL ol} cPVAd.~ :AKaj.laVTiSo~ El' xopo[UI.V rQpuL

dvwA6'\v~av Ktaao4>6pot~ E1Ti od}vptiJ-Lf30t~
at LlLOl'VOLtiOES, p.(TpatGt OE Ka.i POQWV awrOLS"
oo4>wv aouSwv eUK{aaav At1Tapciv Ef)ELpnv,
Ot TOl'OE Tpirrooa Gq,iol. J.LdpTvpa BaKxiwv dE8AWV 5
197JKav. KEivovS" o~
:Av'nylv17 S EOioaOKEV civopas.
EV o~ irl.81JvEfTo YAvKEpav Dna LJWp{OLS' :ApiOTwV
:4PY€LOS' ~ov 1TV€u/-La X£wv Ka8apois EV avAoiS"
rwv EXOP1JYTJUEV KVKAov fLEAiy"7pvv 'J1T7TOVtKOS"
Lrpovf)wyoS" vios, aprj.LaULv iv Xap{rwv cPOpT}8EiS'J 10
at ot £.'1T av8pw7ToVS' Qvop.a KAUrDl' liYAaav iE V{Kav
6ijKav lOOT€</>avwv 8EaV EKaTL MOLuav.
Often indeed the Seasons of the Dionysia have shouted for joy among khoroi of the
Akamantid phyle at the ivy-bearing dithyrambs, and with headbands of finest roses have
shadowed the shiny hair of skilled singers, who have set up this tripod for themselves as
witness to their Bakkhic prizes. Antigenes trained these men; and Argive Ariston fostered
their sweet voice well, blowing a sweet strain on his pure, Dorian aulos. Hipponikos son
of Strouthon was khoregos of their honey-voiced cyclical khoros, borne in the chariot of
the Kharites, who set a glorious name and bright victory on men by the grace of the
violet-garlanded goddesses, the Muses.
The strategies of prestige at work in this epigram are clear: one needs in the
first place to re-create imaginatively something of its original physical setting;
for doubtless this epigram is in itself only the disembodied literary remnant of a
more elaborate monumental complex by which its commissioner intended to
express himself. This evidently incorporated a tripod (c( 5 TOVOE Tp {7TOO a ) or
tripods won by the khoregos and his phyle. As the meticulous study of Amandry
has shown, the prize tripods awarded to victorious khoregoi in men's
dithyramb were of formidable proportions: his calculations suggest a height in
the region of five metres. II3 Lines 5-6 seem to state quite plainly that it was the
members of the khoros itselfwho set up the tripod (and hence the monument as
a whole). Some accept this at face value, but while not ruling out the possibility
111 A phyle which (on the extremely scanty evidence) seems to have enjoyed some considerable
success in the dithyrambic competitions: see Mette (1977\ 239 S.V. ;4KafLav'Tis. To which add the
evidence of ceramic: a fragment of an amphora (c.4 70-460), ARV 2 p. 1581, 20, shows on the top
step of a three-tiered plinth supporting a tripod the formula which was current in khoregic dedica-
tions engraved on stone: i4Ku.udv'T(s EJ·iKa <pUAi; see Pickard-Cambridge (1988), fig. 31; Amandry
(1976: 16-19) discusses an extremely fragmentary further example.
112 Wilamowitz (19 1 3: 222) dates the epigram to C.490-48o; cf. Page (1981: I I), whose text I
cite, except for line 5 where he reads Kat for or; line 6 where he obelizes the first two words on
metrical grounds; and line 12 which he obelizes entire, again because of eccentric metre. It has,
however, been argued that one of the principles for the collection of the epigrams in this book was
that of metrical variety and interest.
113 (1976), esp. 7 0 .
Leading the Tragic Khoros ros
altogether, 114 I suspect it is in fact another strategy by which to associate khoros

and khoregos intimately, as being both jointly responsible for the victory and its
Inemorialization: the relative 'TWV in 9, 'of them Hipponikos was khoregos',
t hen picks up-as if (fittingly, for this kyklic khoros) in ring-composition-the
relative of of 5 used of the khoreutai, powerfully reinforcing the link between
'leader' and group. The monument had perhaps some sculpture or relief of the
kind known to have surmounted similar inscriptions,115 and was doubtless
erected in an appropriately conspicuous public setting. Clearly the most
popular place was the ancient street called 'Tripods' which Pausanias
Inentions,116 and which led from the Prytaneion across the north side of the
J\'kropolis, bending around its eastern slope to reach the sanctuary of Dionysos
to the south. 117 It may even have been erected in the immediate environs of the
theatre itself. For instance, the KaTaTofLTJ, the artificial cutting made in the rock
above the top rows of seats, was a favoured location within the theatre-space
itself for khoregic monuments, from which their formidable presence could to
some extent dominate the theatron below. 118
In the inscription, the khoregos is associated intimately with the members of
his phyle's khoros, with the poet Antigenes-the probable author of the
epigram-and with the Argive trainer and auletes Ariston. Opening with a
reference to the many previous victories of the phyle in elaborate language,119
the poem shifts unobtrusively in verses 4-5 from the generalized aor/>wv
aotSwv to a specific reference to the current victorious personnel;120 the
epigram thus manages to invest the victory of the present choristers with the
accrued store of kleos laid up to the phyle's distinguished collective record.
114 With subscriptions from fifty khoreutai, such a collective dedication is feasible, but it does
tend to go against most of what we know (which is little enough) about the nature of the khoregos-
khoros relationship.
115 The more famous are those of Nikias, Lysikrates, Thrasyllos; but there is evidence of a large
number of such elaborate monuments, some in the shape of small temples. See Travlos (197 I), 348-
5 I, 562 -3, 5 66- 8, and the recent survey of Khoremi-Spetsieri (1994).
116 Paus. I. 20. I. C( Isokrates 5. 41; PI. Grg. 472a; Pluto Nikias 3· 3.
117 On this street and its excavation see Welter (1922); Travlos (1971), 566-8; Kazamiakes
:1994); Khoremi-Spetsieri (1994). It was very probably along this street that the pompe of the Great
Dionysia made its way.
118 See n. 39 above; cf. Pluto Arist. 1.3; Lex. Thel. p. 270,21 Bekker (Phot. s.v.) glosses the word,
inter alia, with ij p.ipot; Tt TOU 6la.TPOU KaTlTJ.l;r18TJ, E1T£i EV 0Pf.L KaTEUKEVaOTal. Froning (1971), 16-
28; Amandry (1976). The katalome was also, if we can believe Hypereides, a favourite haunt of
Demosthenes: cf. 5 col. 9 Kat KaOiJf.LEVOS Ka.TClJ 117TO rii' Ka'TaTop.ijt, OUTTEP E'WOE Ka8ija8al J £KlAElJE
MVTJO£OEOV TOV XOpEUriJV ipwTTjoaL 'TOV ';4p1TaAov, onaaa EL7] Tn xpr,p.aTa Ttl civoto87]uop.Eva els TTJv
ciKp61TOAtv (supplements here of Sauppe, Kenyon). It is fascinating that here Hypereides locates
Demosthenes in this theatrical position as he allegedly negotiates with Harpalos-using a khoreutes
as an intermediary!-with a view to making off with Macedonian gold.
119 Note the Bakkhic and victory associations of d.voAoAv~W (1. 2) in particular: see e.g. Aesch.
Ag. 587 with Fraenkel (1950) on 1236, Eur. Bacch. 24; Henrichs (1995 - 80-1, 104-5); Taplin-
Wilson (1993), 172 with further bibliography.
120 Page (19 81 : 12) calls this an 'intolerably abrupt' transition. Understanding dot8wv, as I do
(with Wilamowitz (1913), 219; cf. Taplin-Wilson (1993), 180 n. 37), as referring to khoreutai
removes any such problem.
106 Peter Wilson
Further, it is a unique example of an epigram composed (more or less) in the

style of the genre it commemorates-the dithyramb 121 -and if Antigenes was
indeed the poet, this fact too no doubt enhanced its prestige as a memorial.
The self-conscious reference to the conferral of glory by the Kharites in the
concluding verses focuses the spotlight directly upon the khoregos Hipponikos,
named significantly by patronymic rather than (and without) demotic. His
name is, indeed, one of the most aristocratic in Athens, and its aristocratic
quality is (again, perhaps significantly, given line Io-see below) indicated by
the aristocratic achievement par excellence-victory with horses. 122 His descrip-
tion as 'khoregos of their honey-voiced circle' uses an unusual direct object
with the verb XOP"7YELV (a dative is the normal practice),123 implying, I would
suggest, an intimacy of 'choral leadership' which is ideologically valued if
historically anachronistic. For this seems to evince a desire to keep the sense of
xoprryELv here suspended a little uncertainly between the narrowly leitourgical
sense of 'providing a khoros' and the more traditional one of full participation
in-at the head of-the khoros. Some scholars-among them Sir Arthur
Pickard-Cambridge and Sir Denys Page 124-have even thought that the
'chariot of the Kharites' which is said to have carried the victorious khoregos
here was a real chariot, raising the striking possibility of a khoregos in a
democratic choral competition involved in some kind of victory parade through
the polis and transported, moreover) in a vehicle of indelibly aristocratic associ-
ations. 125 While I find this not only unlikely in itself but also an extremely
perilous deduction from a piece of poetry such as this,126 it is suggestive indeed
121 Such assessments will tend to be impressionistic given the paucity of fragments securely
identifiable as dithyrambic, and of approximately contemporary date. See Page (1981), I I: 'The
victory of a dithyrambic poet is here celebrated in verses which strongly reflect his customary
manner of writing-the exotic metre, the exuberant language, and the choral lyric dialect combine
to create something unique in our records-an epigram composed in the style of the dithyramb.'
For a sound assessment of dithyrambic linguistic characteristics see Seaford (1976-7), esp. 88. I
shall argue in my forthcoming book (see n. I above) that another surviving khoregic inscription (IG
ii 2. 3 101 )-a dedication for comic victories by father and son-has a markedly.' comic' tone to it. If
so, this further sharpens my argument about (the absence of) tragic khoregic dedications below.
122 See Davies (197 I: 256) for his probable relation to one of the richest. and most socially
elevated of all Athenian families, that of which Kallias was one of the most prominent members.
Speculation on the possibility of a play on the name 'Hipponikos' during a seminar led Ian
1\1acauslan to point out to me that Hipponikos' father, Strouthon eSparrow'?), is a-suspiciously-
appropriate name for the father of a victorious khoregos of a 'honey-voiced' khoros.
123 See Wilamowitz (19 1 3),220; Page (1981), 14; for the more usual dative cf. e.g. IG ii2. 3090,
3091; Lys. 21. 1. 114 Pickard-Cambridge (1962), 16; Page (1981), 14-
125 Knowledge that an Athenian engaged in horse-rearing on a scale sufficient to allow him to
compete with a chariot-entry at Panhellenic festivals instantly places him in the very highest level
of wealth: see Davies (1981: 29, 31, 97-105), with a discussion of Alkibiades' famous self-
justification of his exercise of power at Thuc. 6. 16.1-4 where he cites, inleraiia, his entry of seven
chariot-teams at the Olympic games of 416.
126 Especially given that the poetic image of a victor's chariot is not confined to this epigram: see
Simonides Anth. Pal. 6.213 (- Page (1981), no. 27), although this is often regarded as a Hellenistic
composition. Its last line reads, addressing in this instance the poet, 'you mounted the bright chariot
of glorious Victory [fifty-six times]'; see also Pindar, e.g. Olympian 3, where the poet's chariot is
harnessed to celebrate Theron's chariot-victory. See Newman-Newman (1984), 181-2.
Leading the Tragic Khoros 10 7
that such imagery at least could be employed of a khoregos in this specific

context. By invoking the Kharites as divinities externally responsible, as it were,
for the conferral of 'a famous name and bright victory' on Hipponikos-and
themselves acting, moreover, as the agents of the Muses (12, €KaTL MOLoav)-
the epigram obscures, one might appropriately say misrecognizes, 127 the social
dimension of the victory. Under the guise of an easy, 'natural' association
between the Kharites and the khoregos there thus lies hidden the coercive
binding power of a 'politics of grace' .128
If a dithyrambic khoregos, who is, strictly speaking, representing his phyle,
can thus appropriate the prestige of a Dionysiac victory, surely the return in
individualistic glory would be all the greater for a tragic khoregos. A somewhat
facetious question poses itself here: namely, what would a commemorative
epigram composed in the style of tragedy look like? A facetious question,
perhaps, but it does reflect on a serious issue about the relative absence from
the material record of commemorations in the polis of tragic khoregic victories
\von at the Great Dionysia. There are cogent practical reasons why memorials
for dithyrambic victories should be more prominent-among them are the
statistical superiority in the number of annual performances and, most signific-
antly, the fact that the polis awarded a tripod to the victorious dithyrambic
khoregos which he was evidently expected to set up. And that the dithyrambic
competition was conducted between collective bodies (phylai) that were vital
subgroups of the democratic socio-political system must be the most determin-
ing factor in legitimizing and promoting the memorialization of victories won
in it. In a field such as this it would be perilous to lay too much weight on an
argument from the silence of the material record, when it is silent about so
rnuch else besides. 129 I certainly do not wish to turn my back on my own argu-
Inents concerning the desire of tragic khoregoi for self-representation, but an
attempt to answer the facetious question does raise significant issues about the
status of tragic representation in the polis. In the case of dithyramb, it is quite
unproblematic to pass, as it were, from the khoregic sphere to the poetic: the
khoregos, as Hipponikos shows, can happily harness the kleos of dithyrambic
song to glorify his victory. With tragedy the situation is quite otherwise: the
relationship of tragic khoregos to his production is rather more problematic.
'fhis most troubling of all Athenian cultural performances, which was so
concerned with the dangers and allure of excessive individualism and which, as
l~: Bourdieu's expression. See Bourdieu (1977), 17 1-7.
118 Cf.lvieier (I987); Loraux (1986a), 81; Kurke (1991: 103-7,154-9, 174-5) has an excellent
discussion of khans in similar terms in relation to the aristocratic ethos of gift-exchange in Pindar.
One should also note the presence together of the Horai, Kharites, and 1\1ousai in some of the loci
classici of Olympian choral dance: e.g. Hes. Th. 63-74; H. Hom. A.p. (Pyell) 182-206.
119 Ghiron-Bistagne (1976: 97) argues that the prizes (perhaps) awarded to victorious dramatic
khoregoi-a goat for tragedy, figs and wine for comedy (the evidence for this is, however, very
controversial)-were of a nature not to invite dedication (because consumable and perishable) but
this will certainly not do as a complete explanation, as Theophrastos' 4illiberal' man's wooden fillet
and Themistokles' pillax (Plut. Them. 5.5) show.
108 Peter Wilson
my opening passage from pseudo-Andokides indicated, could be reductively

troped in other civic contexts to stand for behaviour antithetical to the order of
the polis, was entrusted to these prominent men, 'officially' chosen simply for
their great wealth, crucial to the community yet often virtually alienated from
it by their very prominence, their vast wealth, and their political ideology. It is
easy to imagine how in their case the bridging of such a gulf would be rather
more perilous.
6
The Place and Status of Foreigners in Athenian
Tragedy
PIERRE VIDAL-NAQUET
Can we use Attic tragedy as a source to illuminate the status of foreigners in the
Greek world?l A century ago Michel Clerc, in his classic monograph on the
Athenian metic, answered this question with a firm 'no', and criticized the argu-
ment of Wilamowitz to the contrary:
We shall not make any use of these passages of the tragic poets; in them the word
f.1.ETOLKOS is practically always used in a much wider and vaguer sense than in official
language. Furthermore, the very nature of the events that are dealt with makes the
parallel with events in the real world either inexact or artificia1. 2
Yet a reading of the works that have followed makes it clear that Michel
Clerc's doctrine was not universally accepted-in particular those of
P. Gauthier, D. Whitehead, C. Vatin, M. F. Baslez, B. Bravo, and M. H.
Hansen,3 not to mention those studies whose principal object of inquiry is
tragedy itself,4 or those which were presented in Nancy during the first col-
loquium on The Foreigner in the Greek World. 5 All these works try to integrate
tragic and other sources in a direct way, and make comparisons between one
category of source and another.
It was thus possible and legitimate for R. Lonis to compare a passage in
Herodotus (6.70), explaining how the Spartans attempted to seize Demaratus
who was in exile at the time and eventually joined Xerxes, and a passage in
1 This is a slightly adapted version of a lecture given at Nancy in September 1991, then in
Oxford in November 1992: I have developed certain arguments and taken account of references
unknown to me in 1991. I thank all those who participated in the discussions which followed both
papers, and Catherine Darbo-Peschanski for very valuable help. The French version was published
in L'Etrangerdans Ie mande grec (Nancy, 1992),297-313, with an appendix by Annie Belis.
2 Clerc (1893),225 n. 2. Clerc is referring to the classic study ofWilamowitz (1 887). By a slip, he
claims that Wilamowitz 256 ff. is discussing the Supplices of Euripides; in fact, the passage deals
with Aeschylus' play of the same name.
3 Gauthier (1972), esp. 54-5 and 133-4; Whitehead (1977), 34-8; Bravo (1980), esp. 769-78;
Vatin (1984), 170-2; Baslez (1984); Hansen (1991), even though concentrating on a quite different
period.
4 I am thinking especially of RaIl (19 89); see the review of Buxton (1991). Nippel (1990), treat-
ing a neighbouring theme, mentions Sophocles and Euripides only briefly (pp. 22-3).
5 Levy (19 88) and Lonis (19 88).
110 Pierre Vidal-N aquet
Euripides~ Heraclidae (139-43), where the Herald, in the name of the king of
Argos, claims that a Greek city has a right of seizure of its own citizens even if
they reside beyond its city boundaries.6 But it remains true that tragic discourse
is different from that of the documents relating to legal or political practice,
even though it takes them as a point of reference: that is acknowledged by most
of the authors I have mentioned. 7 Gauthier, for example, has convincingly
shown that the proxenos in Aeschylus' Supplices is not a proxenos in the classical
sense of the word. The daughters of Dana us are Egyptians, and Egypt is clearly
not a city that could be represented in Argos by a proxenos. They claim to have
Argive origins, but again this ancestry does not imply the right to a proxenos. 8 In
that case we are dealing with a word which is used in documents, that is in
practical life, and also in the language of drama; but the tragic authors create
their own language as well. To what legal reality, for example, does a word like
d7T6g€vo~ refer? Perhaps created by Aeschylus, who uses it of Orestes' double
exile, and used again by Aeschylus with regard to the Erinyes, the word is used
by Sophocles to describe an inhospitable port.9
So far we are dealing with clear-cut examples. It is much more difficult to
explain a word like OOPV~€vos. Does it refer to a friendship made in war, as
tragic usage seems to imply, or to an archaic institution, as mentioned by
Plutarch in the case of Megara?lO
Let us ask a few simple questions concerning this question of tragic vocabu-
lary. When Aeschylus, followed by Euripides, makes the Arcadian Partheno-
paeus, son of Atalanta, a metic in Argos, II it is clear that they are taking the
Athenian institution as a direct point of reference. However, Sophocles'
Antigone, even though she compares herself to the Phrygian foreigner Niobe
(824), is a 'metic' between the living and the dead (850-2) only in a metaphor-
ical sense. 12 And it is not just the immediate context which needs to be under-
stood, but the entire dramatic movement of each play, What, for example, is the
status of the Erinyes in the Oresteia? They appear without further qualification
in the Agamemnon (1 189) as a KWfLo~ settled in the palace of Atreus. In the
Choephori (97 I), they are metaphorically 'metics' at home in this very palace,13
In Eumenides (884) Athena proclaims that she will not exile them from Athens.
6 Lonis (1988), 78-82.The Euripides passage is also discussed by Bravo (1980), 773-4.
7 Cf. Bravo (1980), 748.
B Cf. Gauthier (1972), 54-6.
9 Aesch. Ag. 1282, Cho. 1042, Eum. 884; Soph. OT 196. Sophocles also uses the word a7Togfv6w
in the sense of 'banish' (El. 777); cf. Fraenkel's note (1950: 596) on Ag. 1282 and Garvie's (1986:
342-3) on Chao 1042-3.
10 Tragic examples: Aesch. Ag. 880, Chao 562 and 914; Soph. El. 46, OC 632; Eur. Med. 687,
Andr. 999; see also Aristophanes of Byzantium, pp. 191-3 N~uck. For the .'1egarian institution cf.
Pluto Quaesl. gr. 295b; cf. Fraenke1 (1950), 395-6, and Herman (1987), 10-1 I, 57, 166.
11 Aesch. Sept. 548; Eur. Supp. 89 2 .
12 Levy (1988) has not persuaded me that in all its classical occurrences fLfTOLK€iv retains the sug-
gestions of its most probable etymology, migrate'. Cf. the discussion in Casevitz (1985), 179-82.
4
13 The text presents problems which are set out in Garvie (1986: 31 5-16). I accept Scaliger's cor-
rection j.LETOlKOt 86J.Lwv.
Place and Status of Foreigners in Tragedy I I I
But what does become of them? Athena promises the Erinyes that she shall be
J'af.L6po~ x(}ovos (890), that she shall rightfully have a share of the Attic land.
Mazon understands this as 'It is open to you to have the right of citizenship in a
city which will honour you for all time to come.'14 Do they then become citizens
of Athens? Yet xwpns fL€TaaXE[v (869) does not mean, as Mazon's translation
suggests, that they become citizens, because Athena goes on to invite the people
of Athens to lead 'these metics' on the way, TaiaSE fLE'TOiKOLS (101 I); then the
chorus itself speaks of its j.LETolKia (1018). Have the Eumenides then become
metlcs with yijs €YKT1]OLS, and should we add this example to those gathered by
]. Pecirka?l5 It is clear that these divinities do not easily fit into the rigid forms
of Athenian law. Even if this law serves as a point of reference, it is none the less
necessary to take into account a certain vagueness in tragic discourse. 16
Let us take another example. What is the status, first at Corinth and then at
Athens, of Euripides' Medea, that barbarian inheritor of a character who
originally was perhaps Greek?l7 Threatened by King Creon with expulsion
from Corinth (yaia~ TEpf-LOVWV E~W, 276), Medea is a7ToAl~ (255, 644), whereas
Jason is henceforth a citizen of that same city. But at no time is there a question
of a transition to the status of metic. Creon, however, spares the children of
Medea and Jason: they are to have a city and a home (I 02 I -2). On the other
hand, in Athens Aegeus has committed himself to being her proxenos (1TELpaao-
ILai aou 7TpO~EVEiv 8iKatO~ wv, 724), in the same way as Pelasgus for the
I)anaids in Aeschylus' Supplices: it is therefore perhaps possible to regard
Medea as entering Athens as a metic. Yet we must also notice Aegeus' promise
never to expel his guest from the city, 18 something which evidently does not
correspond to the position of a metic at Athens.
Let us then proceed cautiously, though still aiming to be as thorough as
possible; in other words, let us deal with the entire extant tragic corpus, thirty-
two tragedies to which we can add without major difficulty the Cyclops, the
only complete surviving satyr-play, and investigate this corpus carefully as a
\vhole.
Now, some basic statistics will convince us, if demonstration is needed, of the
fundamental importance of the subject. Of these thirty-three Athenian dramas,
\vritten and performed for Athenians, there are only four which are set partially
(Eumenides) or entirely (Oedipus at Colonus, The Heraclidae, and Euripides'
I.)upplices) on Athenian soil. It is remarkable that all four plays deal either with
the judgement passed on an alien (Orestes) in Athens, or with the Athenians'
reception of one or more foreign suppliants who are threatened either by their
14 'II t'est permis de jouir sans conteste du droit de bourgeoisie au milieu d'une cite qui it jamais
t 'honorera.'
15 Pecirka (19 66).
16 On this 'heroic vagueness' see also Easterling, above, Ch. 2.
17 Cf. Hall (1989), 35. The Agamede of the Iliad (11. 741), who knows all the phannaka which
the earth produces, is Peloponnesian. She is probably Medea's prototype.
18 Med. 74 6-53.
112 Pierre Vidal-Naquet
fellow citizens or by men of a hostile city. Ifwe go on to take the whole corpus
into account, we can note that there is not a single play in which the opposition
between Greeks and barbarians,19 or between citizens and aliens, does not play
a significant role. Though there are no foreigners among the characters of
Seven against Thebes, the foreigner is on the other side of the walls, and his
soldiers, resembling as they do barbarians more than Greeks, are described at
length. Euripides displays even more subtlety by introducing a Phoenician
chorus when he treats the same tragic plot. Conversely, we may notice. that only
one tragedy does not make use of the word ~€VOS or one of its derivatives:
Aeschylus' Persians. Even where the subject of a play does not naturally call for
an alien or barbarian presence, the tragic poet introduces it into his play. Thus
in Euripides' Orestes, set in Argos but with the old Spartan Tyndareus as one of
the central figures, the cowardice of a Phrygian slave is opposed at length to the
courage of the Greeks. 20
None of this is very surprising. The world of heroes cannot, by definition, be
contained within the space of a single city. In Euripides' Heracles Megara, the
hero's wife, dwells on the destinies originally planned for her sons whom Lycus
now intends to kill. One was to rule Argos, the second Thebes, the third Oechalia,
while their wives were to be found respectively from Athens, Sparta, and Thebes,
without the slightest trace of political endogamy.21 That intimates with a baroque
7TOLKf,A.{a a type of destiny which is quintessentially that of the tragic hero.
If four tragedies are set on Attic soil, that is not for the purpose of staging a
political debate. Athens in tragedy is one city of one mind. Through the mouth
of Theseus Athens welcomes Oedipus and the children of Heracles; it enjoins
Thebes to grant burial to the Seven; and, if the jury is divided on the issue of
Orestes, that only allows Athena to express once again the restored unanimity
of the city.22 But what are the other settings of tragic action and do they signify
anything? Three cities stand out from the rest and form three subgroups, with
respectively six plays (Thebes),23 five (Argos),24 and four (Troy and the
Troad).25 The remaining plays can be divided according to whether their setting
is 'central' in the political sense-Delphi, Trachis, Corinth, Sus a-or whether it
is remote or marginal, such as the Caucasus, Egypt, Taurica, Lemnos, Trozen,
etc. Aulis is evidently perceived as an intermediate location between Greece and
19 Even if one disagrees with the main thesis of Hall (1989), as expressed in her title Invenling the
Barbarian, her book remains the central work on this subject. The interesting article of Said (1989)
also gives some suggestive statistics: 101 examples o~ {36.p{3apot; in the eighteen tragedies of the
Euripidean corpus, 7 in the fragments. The figures are much lower for Aeschylus (14) and
Sophocles (6).
20 Or. I 110,1366-1526.
21 Her. 4 60 -79.
22 Cf. Vidal-Naquet in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (1988), 332-3.
23 Aesch. Sept.; Soph. Anl., aT; Eur. Phoen., Her., Bacch.
24 Aesch. Supp., Ag., Cho.; Soph. El.; Eur. El.
25 Soph. Ajax; Eur. Hec., Tro., Rhes. The case of Ajax is clearly different from the others. The
setting of Hec. is a Troy in exile, namely in Thrace.
Place and Status of Foreigners in Tragedy I13
the Troad. The chorus of Iphigenia in Aulis is made up of Chalcidian women

who have crossed the Euripus:
We have sailed through the running tide

Of Euripus, and beached here on the sandy shore
Near the seaport of Aulis.
Our city is Chalcis, across the narrow channel,
Nurse of the streams that flow
From the clear spring close to the brine,
Far-famed Arethusa. And we have come
To see the Achaeans, heroes descended from gods;
To see the Achaean army and their fleet of oared ships.
With a thousand keels of pine, our husbands tell us,
They are sailing to Troy, led by tawny Menelaus
And noble Agamemnon ... 26
I shall come back to some of these settings. Let us simply note a few points.
Froma Zeitlin has shown in great detail that Thebes in tragedy functions as an
anti-Athens,27 a city (1 have myself added) destined to division, to stasiS. 28 Let us
take for example Euripides' Heracles, a Theban play which was not treated in
detail by Zeitlin. 29 Amphitryon, who opens the play, is an Argive in exile in
Thebes, whereas the king Lycus (not a Cadmean but a Euboean, even though
he boasts about his Theban origin) has established his power through stasis
(26-34)-stasis, furthermore, that he has not succeeded in calming. There is no
need to dwell on the other plays: the conflict centring on Oedipus is repeated in
the following generation, and salvation comes to the city only after the death of
the Labdacids and the sacrifice of the spartoi.
Argos, on the other hand, occupies an intermediate position: that is clearly
shown in Euripides' Supplices, a play that involves all three registers, Athenian,
Theban, and Argive. 30 In tragedy, Argos is a place that is plastic. In Euripides'
Orestes it is the equivalent of a divided city; in Aeschylus' Supplices it is a place
of welcome, like the Athens of Euripides' play of the same name; in Agamem-
non, Choephori, and the two Electras it is a place of confrontation and division.
And both Thebes and Argos are cities that will not perish, whereas Troy,
though only a besieged city in Ajax, is (along with neighbouring Thrace where
Hecuba is set) the city of wealth, of death, and of bereavement in the Troades,
Hecuba, and Rhesus. Troy acts as a permanent reminder of the fact that cities
are mortal: that was already the case in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, where the
26 Eur. fA 164-77, trans. P. Vellacott. On the musical aspects cf. the appendix of Annie Belis to
the French version of this paper (above, n. I).
27 Zeitlin (I 99 0 b).
28 Vidal-Naquet in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (19 88), 334-5. I am not convinced by the contrary
arguments of Judet de 1a Combe (1988).
29 Though cf. Zeitlin (1990 b), 1 37 n. 4, 144 n. 16.
30 Cf. Zeitlin (I990b), 146-7.
theme of the destruction of Troy intermingles with that of the crimes commit-
ted at Aulis and in the palace of the Atreids. The prophecy made to Laius
announces the end of the Labdacids, that made to Hecuba announces the end
ofTroy.31 There is no doubt that Troy is in fact a polis, though to demonstrate
that it is not sufficient to show that the word itself is used to describe it, and
used as early as Aeschylus' Agamemnon;32 for the same argument could be used
to show that the Persian empire or Taurica were also poleis, and the barbarian
Medea also refers to her native polis. 33 It is therefore much more important to
notice that, though it is barbarian in the same way as Thrace in the Rhesus,34
Troy rejects Thracian cruelty: for instance that ofPolymestor in Hecuba, which
is the antithesis of Greek practice. 35 In the Troades Cassandra, in a speech that
is only superficially 'delirious', contrasts the madness of the Greeks who died
'not fighting for the boundaries of their land nor for their high-walled country'
(375-6) with the Trojans who had obtained KaAALurov KAEOS, the glory of a
'good death'.36 Euripides' Cassandra reads the Iliad as we ourselves read it,
opposing the city of Troy, with its women and children and homeland soil, to
the anny which besieges it. True, at this point we are in 4 15 BC, perhaps on the
eve of the Sicilian expedition; but I have already pointed out that as early as 458
BC the total destruction of Troy in the Agamemnon-by night, and including its
temples of the gods-appears as a crime even if it was the will of Zeus: and it is a
crime which leads to the punishment of the leader of the Greek army. The fact
that it is Clytemnestra and then the herald 37 who convey the idea is an aspect of
tragic irony that Aeschylus, even before Sophocles, knew how to use. Con-
versely, do we not see the Greeks 'invent un-Greek cruelties,38 and Menelaus
grow barbarian?39
There are times when we can and must analyse with precision these settings
for tragic action both within and outside Athens, these places where representa-
tion of the Other always becomes an issue. Some years ago I discussed Oedipus
at Colonus and insisted on a theme present throughout the play which to a
certain extent defines the place of the action-the theme of the frontier. 40
Many other tragedies also take place on the fringes of the city, possibly even
on the fringes of the civilized world, as opposed to those which take place on the
31 That was the theme of Euripides' Alexandros, on which see Jouan (1966), 111-42.
32 e.g. at 331 and 53 2 .
33 For Persia cf. Aesch. Pers. 682, 715; for Taurica, Eur. IT 1214; cf. also Eur. Med. 166.
34 Cf. Eur. Rhes. 404, 833.
35 Cf. Hec. 12 48 and the fine study of Segal (1990). It seems to me simply false to claim, with
Baslez (1984: 201), that ~the cruel barbarian is a modern notion, certainly later than the Germanic
wanderings whose Furor Barbaricus brought in its train the fall of the Roman empire'.
36 Eur. Tro. 386-7. The 'good death' is a Greek notion illuminated by Loraux (1977), repro in
Loraux (1989), 77-92 with important bibliography.
37 Ag. 338-4°, 52 4-37.
38 Eur. Tro. 764.
39 Eur. Or. 38 7,48 5.
40 Vidal-Naquet in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (1988), 354-6.
Place and Status of Foreigners in Tragedy lIS
acropolis, before a temple or a palace. This is even truer of satyric dramas,

~Those fringe characters-the satyrs-lie precisely between the wild and the
civilized world.41 Far from the temple, far from the palace: such is the case with
Aeschylus' Supp lice s and Prometheus, with Sophocles' Philoctetes, with
Euripides' Heraclidae (Marathon)42 and to a certain extent with his Supplices
(Eleusis). However, the most extreme and singular example is that of Euripides'
Electra. The poet's predecessors had set the action in the palace of the Atreids;
Euripides chooses something different. Electra, the nominal wife of a peasant
(autourgos), lives on 'the distant boundaries' (TrJAop6s, 25r), in the fields. Yet
her meeting with Orestes does not take place in a random rustic setting. 'And
now" says Orestes, 'I do not set foot within their walls, but combining two
purposes in one 1 come to the borders of this land ('TTpOS T€p/-LOvas yrjs -rijaoE,
96): first, to flee to another land, if anyone should see and recognize me; and
secondly to find my sister.'43 That is the way Voltaire acted in Ferney.
Let us take this further. The tragic poet, far from playing with the single
register of the opposition between citizens and non-citizens, Athenians and
foreigners, Greeks and barbarians, an opposition which in itself allows quite a
large variety of combinations, has at his disposal a series of codes that he can
manipulate as he pleases: opposition between sexes, opposition between age
groups, opposition between free and slaves and, more subtly, opposition
between the values of kinship and those of citizenship: the Danaids are not only
Egyptian women in barbarian dress, they also have a distant link of kinship
with the Argives, as the Heraclids do with the Athenians.44 This 'kinship' was an
effective instrument in diplomatic exchanges between city-states: that has been
recently shown by an extraordinary inscription.45
At the risk of stressing a triviality, I might also add that Medea is not only a
barbarian but a woman who, as she addresses the nurse, appeals to feminine
solidarity.
The code of slavery is used just as frequently. In the Ajax Teucer cannot be
taken for a citizen since his mother is Trojan, but Agamemnon takes him down
a further level, calling him the 'captive-woman's son' (1228): that makes him
into a slave who needs the help of a free man to plead his case (1260), and who
speaks only a barbarian language (I263). Teucer retorts that the Atreids are
themselves a Phrygian family (1292).46 Similarly, Admetus' father Pheres
41 Cf. Lissarrague (I990b), a study which summarizes and synthesizes several earlier articles.
42 Held. 37-8: ~1arathon is there defined as opos and as T€PP.OVES of Athens: I thank Michel
Casevitz for drawing my attention to this passage and for allowing me to see an unpublished study.
On the setting of this play at Marathon and on the hidden role played in it by Athenian ephebes, cf.
Wilkins (1990).
H Eur. El. 94-8. The most complete recent study of Electra which I know, that of Basta Donzelli
(1978), briefly mentions this (p. 79) without comment. The theme of the frontier recurs elsewhere
in the play, and I intend to trace this in a further paper.
44 Aesch. Supp. 274-32 4; Eur. Held. 202-12. 45 Published by Bousquet (19 88 ).
46 According to Said (1989: 36), this theme of the Atreids' barbarian ancestry originates with
Euripides (IA 952 f.); that overlooks the Sophoclean precedent.
I16 Pierre Vidal-Naquet
insists on underlining his social status in Euripides' Alcestis: he is 'no Lydian

nor Phrygian, bought for money', but 'a Thessalian, free-born in wedlock of a
Thessalian father' (675-8). That is a more elevated and dignified equivalent of
the insults familiar from fourth-century oratory.47 As for the Phrygian slave in
Euripides' Orestes, he is neither woman nor man: OUTE yap yvvij 1TE¢VKas OUT'
EV civopaOLv au y' El (I 528). We might also compare the military code of the
Persians, contrasting Greek hoplites and Persian archers. 48 Teucer is not only
half-Phrygian, he is also an archer.
It will perhaps be no surprise if I now emphasize one of those registers which
may not be as original and fundamental to tragedy as some have claimed,49 but
is still used regularly by the three tragic poets: the register of age groups, and
particularly the opposition of ephebe and adult. What, exactly, is an ephebe? He
is a temporary alien, just as he is a temporary woman. There are many
examples. Before becoming an Athenian, the young Ion was first an infant
found and reared in Delphi; then he became a son ofXouthos, the metic \vhose
warrior skills won him the hand of a daughter of Erechtheus (Ion 293). As
Xouthos' son, Ion defines himself as 'doubly affiicted', son of an 'imported'
father (€1Ta KTO v, 592) and himself a bastard (vo Ooy€v7] s): 'nothing, son of
nothing' (592-4). Delphi functions in Euripides' playas a sort of antechamber
of Athens. And that is not the only example of this sort of relationship. Let us
turn to Hippolytus, and the problem of the mythical focus of tragic representa-
tion which was one of my starting-points. 50 Hippolytus is defined by Aphrodite,
the goddess to whom the young man refuses to sacrifice, in terms of his lineage:
Theseus is his father, and the Trozenian Pittheus his great-grandfather; how-
ever, his mother is an Amazon, a savage being; and by his citizenship he is 'one
of the citizens of this land of Trozen', which is the setting of the action. The
Athenians knew Trozen well, for they had taken refuge there during the second
Persian War; their wives and children had found shelter there, and according to
Plutarch schools were even provided for the children, with teachers paid by the
city.51 In the third century the famous 'decree of Themistocles', found at
Trozen,52 must have revived this memory. Trozen is thus an independent city.
Theseus, grandson of King Pittheus of Trozen through his mother Aethra and
in exile from Athens for a year after the massacre of the Pallantidae (34-7), is
nevertheless at home in his birthplace Trozen. When he is away, Phaedra and
Hippolytus live there. The tragic and mythical Trozen has almost completely
47 Euripides' Orestes shows the same sort of thought-pattern (cf. 347). In the same play the
orator who opposes Orestes (according to the Scholiast he is modelled on the demagogue Cleophon:
cf. Bowie, p_ 45 above) is described as ~py(ioS' OVK ~py([oS', 'a non-Argive Argive' (904).
48 The most revealing contrast is at 239-40 , where it is followed by a contrast of free men and
slaves. See also Pelling ( above), p. 7.

49 Winkler (I99 0b, first published in 1985). I have expressed my reservations in Vidai-Naquet
(19 86b).
50 On Hippolytus I have found nothing more illuminating than Segal (1965).
51 Hdt. 8. 41; Piut. Them. 10. S.
52 ML 23-
Place and Status of Foreigners in Tragedy II7
overlaid the historical Trozen. Some Athenian myths and rituals are located in
'frozen,53 and when Claude Calame wished to define the place ofTrozen in the
Theseus legend he could not do better than call it 'a miniature Athens'-an
entirely apposite phrase. 54 When Euripides' Phaedra addresses the chorus, she
defines their city as an EaxaTov, an extreme place (that is, with regard to
Athens), and as a TTPOVW7TI.OV, a forecourt or threshold of the land of Pelops
(37 I -4)-again a place of boundary.55 When Hippolytus, exiled by his father,
wants to bid farewell to Trozen, he cries out W 7T€OOV TPO'fjVLOV I ws iYKa8TJ-
f3iiv 7T6A"~ €X€LS €VOaLp.ova I Xaip€ (1095-7), '0 soil of Trozen, how full of
delights you are for one's youth: farewell!' The verb Ej'Ka8TJf36.w is a hapax
legomenon, but it is formed from the word ijf3TJ. In other words, Hippolytus was
an ephebe in Trozen, and this corresponds to what we know of the role of the
frontier in the life and the rites of ephebes.56 When Theseus sentences his son to
exile, he forbids him to go to Athens or stay within the boundaries of his king-
dom (973-5). Hippolytus is now a7ToALS (1029). When he is fatally wounded,
the messenger brings the dreadful news to Theseus and 'for those citizens who
dwell in Athens and in the bounds of Trozen-Iand'.57 And Theseus responds by
talking of 'the two neighbouring cities' (I 16 I). Yet the polis of which Hippo-
lytus speaks, the polis from which he is exiled, is Athens: cPEv~OV/-LEa(Ja 01) I
K"ELVd~ ;481Jvas (1093-4); and when he dies it is the territory defined by the
boundaries of Athens (op{a/-LaTa) which is plunged into mourning (1459-60).
Trozen functions in the playas a place apart from Athens, and when Hippo-
lytus leaves Trozen he arrives in a desert land (Ep1]J.LOV xwpov, 1198)-a
threshold of a threshold. He is thus doubly estranged from the city where his
father is king and from the city where he was an ephebe.
The opposite progression is in fact more common in tragedy, that in which a
man arrives as a stranger in a city and then reveals it to be his homeland. Such is
the lot of Oedipus, who kills Laius in Phocis (OT733) and who hears Teiresias
predict that the slayer of Laius, thought to be a metic (glvos ... p.,ETOLKOS), will
in fact be revealed as a Theban by birth (432-3), king by right and not by
chance. Contrast Orestes, returning to Argos with the Phocian Pylades in
Aeschylus, with Pylades and a paidagogos, minister of death, in Sophocles, and
again with Pylades in Euripides: he returns consciously to the land of his fore-
fathers, but under the appearance of a foreigner. 'Resembling a foreigner',
'imitating Phocian speech', that is behaving like an actor, in Aeschylus;58
53 Cf. Schmitt (1977), 1059-73.
54 Calame (1990), 227- 8.
55 Has this tradition influenced the legendary name ofTrozen's first king, Oros (but not Horos)?
Paus. 2.30.5 makes this king an Egyptian, which shows that he was sensitive to the word-play. The
laXG.Tov ofTrozen may be compared with the EUxano.{ of Lemnos (Soph. Phil. 144), the setting for
Philoctetes' abandonment and for Neoptolemus' ephebic exploit: c( Vidal-Naquet in Vernant-
Vidal-Naquet (1988), 161-80, and (1986b) .
.56 Cf. Vidal-Naquet (1986a), 107- 1 1.
51 Kat y7jS' Tlpp..ovaS Tpo'TJlI{o.s (1159).
~8, Cho. 560 -4.
accompanied by a pseudo-Phocian in Sophocles;59 a Thessalian on his way to

Olympia when confronted with Aegisthus in Euripides' Electra 6°-Orestes,
that is to say the 'man from the mountain', who uses deceit and does not face
the enemy like a hoplite: this is a man who clearly places himself within the
register of the ephebe,61 and he is an ephebe who comes to manhood through
murder. That is true of all the tragedies in which, along with Electra, he is the
hero. 62 Thus, in Sophocles, he has been ordered by Phoebus to act 'without
shields, without armed host, but by furtive deception' (36-7). In Euripides, he is
banished, and again using deceit he kills Aegisthus, who is reigning over the
city, after joining with him in a sacrifice (8 10-5 I). Naturally Orestes and
Electra use the metaphor of slavery. In Aeschylus both have been sold, and
Electra describes herself as 'as good as a slave' (dVTioOVAOS ).63 Orestes even
claims (if we follow the difficult reading of the manuscripts) that 'he has been
sold twice (S,xws), he, the son of a free man'.64 Then there is the confusion
between the sexes, the twinlike similarity between Orestes and Electra: this
reflects one of the major features of Aeschylus' play, and in an ironic mode of
Euripides' toO.65 At least we can say of Orestes that he passes through all the
stages which separate the slave from the free man, and even from the king, and
that these stages include that of the ephebe. In this progression, the status of the
alien foreigner provides an essential moment. In Choephori Orestes tells
Clytemnestra that, foreigner in those lands as he was, he had met a stranger,
Strophius of Phocis, who asked him to announce Orestes' death to his parents.
Should his remains now be restored to Argos, or is the son of Agamemnon
doomed to remain an alien resident (fl-€TOLKOS ..• ~€VOS, 684) in Phocis? If we
remember that this speech is delivered by a man in disguise, it will be clear to
what extent this 'disquieting strangeness' is one of the principal moving forces
in tragic action. In fact, is it not the main moving force? A foreigner at the head
of a foreign band, Asiatic, effeminate, masked, an actor playing his own natural
role and destined to do so for ever-the Dionysus of the Bacchae will in fact
turn out to be a Theban, first cousin to I(ing Pentheus, who goes on to imprison
him in the name of the masculine and warlike values of the hoplite. Dionysus
disguises Pentheus as a woman, makes him see double, and leads him to what is
in tragedy the mountain frontier par excellence, the Athenian border with
Thebes, the forest where the shepherds of Corinth and of Thebes meet in the
59 El. 45- 6.
60 Eur. El. 76 I -2.
61 I suggested this more than twenty years ago in connection with Aeschylus' play: cf. Vidal-
Naquet in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (1988), 154-6.

62 I leave aside Euripides' Oresles, whose action takes place after the murder of Clytemnestra
and Aegisthus.
63 Cho. 13 2 -5.
64 Cho. 9 1 5. No wholly satisfactory explanation of StXWS has been put forward: see Garvie
(1986), 297-8. Some editors correct SIXWS' to dfKWS', 'shamingly'.

65 In Sophocles' case we should speak rather of an inversion of male and female roles.
Place and Status of Foreigners in Tragedy 119
Oedipus Tyrannus-Mount Cithaeron.66 And when his grandfather Cadmus, a

l:lhoenician, bids farewell, he announces that he will be a metie, old man as he is,
among alien young men (1354-5). Every Athenian tragedy is a reflection on the
foreigner, on the Other, on the double.
116 For the interpretation of Bacchae I essentially follow Segal (1982). See also Segal (197 8);
Vernant in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (1988),381-412; Zeitlin (r990a); on the mask (1Tp6ou)7TOV) of

l)ionysus in the Bacchae see now Frontisi-Ducroux (1991), 225-9.
7
Between Public and Private: Tragedy and
Athenian Experience of Rhetoric 1
STEPHEN HALLIWELL
Classical Athens is the most intensely rhetorical culture known to us from

antiquity, and perhaps from any time or place. When the Thucydidean Pericles
offers the Athenians an image of themselves as people who think that speeches
do not damage action, but form the necessary deliberative preparation for it, or
when Demosthenes describes Athenian political life as grounded in speeches
and arguments (logoi),2 they characterize a principle which was embedded in
civic institutions at every level from deme locality to the central organs of the
polis, and which consequently sustained a mentality whose implications
ramified into many areas of cultural activity. Demosthenes' point, moreover,
reveals the double-edged status of rhetoric. 'There is no greater harm that
anyone could cause you', he states, 'than by speaking falsely. For how could
those whose political life is grounded in speeches be politically secure if these
speeches are not true?' As this warning, set within the occasion of an
adversarial debate, helps to suggest, the intensity of the Athenian culture of
rhetoric rested on no blind or uncritical commitment. On the contrary, it
constituted an intrinsically and self-consciously ambiguous sphere of experi-
ence, in which an appetite for and appreciation of the formal spoken word sat
uneasily alongside a suspicion of its possible artifices, snares, and partialities. It
has become a commonplace to acknowledge that democracy, and the climate of
thought which democracy fostered, turned the Athenians into connoisseurs of
public speeches and arguments. But the locus classicus for that connoisseurship,
Cleon's rebuke to the Assembly at Thucydides 3. 38, in the course of the
reconvened Mytilenean debate, provides an apt way of broaching some of the
complexities and misgivings which existed within the Athenian experience of
rhetoric.
Clean claims, of course, that the Assembly is vulnerable to the stratagems of
clever and corrupt speakers. He alleges that it is itself to blame for this
1 Versions of this paper were read to the West Midlands Classical Seminar, and the Classics
Departments of Exeter University and University College Dublin, between July and November
1994: I am grateful for constructive criticism on all these occasions.
2 Thue. 2. 40.2, Dem. 19. 184= the former should be read dialectically in relation to e.g. Thue. I.
84· 3, 3· 37· 3-4-
122 Stephen Halliwell
weakness because of its vicious addiction to treating rhetoric as a contest or

competition (KaKw~ d.YWVOOETOVVTES). 'Your habits', he tells them, 'make you
spectators of speeches, and mere hearers of action', and he goes on to condemn
their attachment to rhetorical novelty before comparing them, famously, to the
audience of a sophistic display. The interest of the passage is many-layered. In
the first place, Cleen's account of attitudes to rhetoric moves from an initial
suggestion that it is the domain of the educated and 'clever', rather than the
masses, to the apparent admission that the Assembly as a whole manifests the
same disposition towards public speakers.3 Moreover, Thucydides describes
Cleon himself, in the introduction to this speech, as 'highly persuasive'
(1Tt8avdrraTos, 3.36.6), and gives him language which possesses not only great
rhetorical vehemence but also quasi-Gorgianic features of style in the very
section where Cleon inveighs against the city's susceptibility to specious
oratory. On any reading of these ambiguities and ironies (and regardless of the
strict historicity of this element in Clean's speech), the passage supplies a
revealing indication of a potentially tortuous Athenian ambivalence about
rhetoric. The very idea of a powerful, successful political speaker warning his
audience about the dangers of other speakers constitutes an acute symptom of
the suspicion of rhetoric which lay cheek by jowl with the institutionalized
Athenian reliance on the medium of public speech. Such suspicion is, of course,
repeatedly attested, indeed turned into a topos which can be deployed at
various levels, in both the political and the forensic oratory of the fourth
century.4 And it is no coincidence, as I hope my later argument will make it pos-
sible to see, that distrust of skilful rhetoric is frequently voiced in tragedy toO.5
There is a further detail of particular interest in Clean's criticism of the
Assembly. In calling the Athenians 'spectators of speeches', he uses a term,
8EarfJ~, which has unmistakable theatrical associations, and this suggestion is
reinforced by the verb aywv08E'TEiv, 'to organize contests', which evokes
musico-poetic competitions of the kind represented by the dramatic festivals of
Athens. 6 Such language gestures towards an affinity between rhetoric and
theatre, and Thucydides was not alone in perceiving this connection. Plato,
with of course a good deal of antidemocratic animus, makes a similar point in
3 At 3. 37. 3-5 the love of rhetoric is associated with the educated and 'clever" those who, by
implication, would feel able to criticize the details of a rhetorical performance (37. 4). But the
sweeping criticisms which follow in ch. 38 apply to the Assembly as a whole: NB everyone would like
to be a speaker himself (38.6).
4 Some evidence on Athenian suspicion of rhetoric is collected by Dover (1974), 25-6, Ober
(19 8 9), 16 5-77.

5 On tragic occurrences of this motif see n. 34 below.
6 Cf. Thucydides' use of aywv for musical as well as athletic events at 3.104.3-6, and ciywvtOfLa
(,prize speech') in the famous comment on his own history at 1.22.4. aywv and cognates were of
course readily applied to debates, especially forensic trials: e.g. Antiphon 5. 3,6.3; Soph. El. 149 2 ;
PI. Ap. 24C6; on Euripides' usage see M. Lloyd (1992),4-5. It is none the less a point of emphasis,
culminating in the special nuance of aywvo(JETE[V, that Cleon is given six such terms between 3· 37.
5 and 38. 6; cf. also 40 . 3·
Tragedy and Athenian Rhetoric 12 3
grouping together the audiences of drama and political oratory on account of

the highly charged atmosphere of massed crowds and popular feeling which
allegedly typifies such contexts: this is also part of what he conveys, in the
Gorgias, by depicting the relationship of tragic drama to its audience as one of
~rhetorical demegoria'? Plato's comparisons suggest that theatre shared a sense
of occasion and performance with the major communal opportunities for
rhetoric. s The implications of this affinity for our interpretation of Athenian
culture are multiple. Some recent scholarship, for example, has elaborated the
idea that structural parallels between theatre and Assembly helped to
accentuate the status of drama as a forum for the articulation and testing of
civic ideology.9 The questions which I propose to pursue in this essay belong to
a kindred area of enquiry, for what I wish to explore are some of the ways in
which not only the specific forms but also and more importantly the ethos and
psychology of rhetoric exercised a shaping but problematic influence on the
imagination of tragic poets.
That tragedy is, in some sense, a highly rhetorical genre is an old and familiar
observation which no critic or historian would be likely to dispute, and the
necessity of relating this dimension of the genre to the wider culture of the
Athenian polis has been well rehearsed. iO But it is particularly desirable that we
should avoid the temptation to regard the influence of rhetoric on tragedy as an
automatic reflex on the part of poets who merely responded to a general
cultural taste for set-piece oratory or eristic exchanges. Yet that is the
impression sometimes left by modern commentators on tragedy who speak in
terms of an Athenian 'liking' for rhetorical debates; or of the 'natural' and
'instinctive' use of rhetorical techniques in the composition of tragic contests. i1
The shortcoming of such judgements is that they render tragic rhetoric
something culturally unproblematic, and close down the possibility of asking
more searching questions about its bearing on the special qualities of Athenian
7 Grg. 502b- d; on mass audiences see esp. Rep. 6. 492b-c.
8 For Athenian audiences this parallelism must have been partly apparent in the kindred aspects
of voice-projection and ~delivery') v1T6KpLat~) shared by orators and actors: this point is registered at
Arist. Rhel. 3. 1-2, a text neglected in the discussion of rhetorical acting at Walcot (197 6: 63-74).
9 See Ober (I989), esp. 152-5, and Ober-Strauss (199 0 ).
10 The most commonly cited recognition of this point is Dale (1954: pp. xxiv-xxix), but her
remarks need qualifying in two respects. First, her strong distinction between ~the rhetoric of the
situation' and psychological characterization discounts the possibility that rhetoric can itself
become a habit of cultural psychology and a way of constructing character: Dale p. xxii comes
perilously close to equaling ~psychological complexities' with ~the creation of character'; later she
contrasts character with ~the rhetoric of the situation' (xxv), though admitting rather belatedly that
the latter need not precrude the former (xxviii). She says nothing of Aristotle's close coupling of
ethos and dianoia, on which see esp. Blundell (1989), 16-25 (,there is no intrinsic conflict between
ethos and rhetoric', 21), and Blundell (1992): this is all the more surprising in view of her own (later)
discussion of this combination in Dale (1959). Secondly, Dale's analogy between poet and speech-
writer ('the poet is ... a kind of logographos who promises to do his best for each of his clients',
xxviii) misleadingly implies that tragic poets use rhetoric in a consistent manner for all their
characters.
11 See Kells (1973), 122; P. T. Stevens (1971), 118.
experience of rhetoric. But it is very hard, for example, to grasp what could
have been 'natural' or 'instinctive' about the numerous cases of powerful and
disturbing rhetoric given to female characters in tragedy. Nothing could be
further from the truth than a supposition that the power of rhetoric was an
unexamined force in Athenian society; and if that is right \ve should scarcely
expect its presence in tragedy, where it is so often associated with scenarios of
extreme tension, conflict, and vulnerability, to alnount to a transparent
medium of dramatic significance.
The evidence for Athenian views of rhetoric in the Classical period
frequently lays emphasis, as illustrated by my opening citations from
Thucydides and Demosthenes, on the fear of deception. 12 But this fear belongs
to a larger complex of concerns, which revolve around the awareness that
rhetoric is inherently formal, artificial, and therefore manipulable. The
'formality' of rhetoric is a matter not just of a repertoire of verbal sophistica-
tion, but of the considered and self-conscious use of language to structure situ-
ations which depend upon an overtly defined relationship between speaker and
audience. This leads to a cultural sense, attested repeatedly within surviving
oratory, that rhetoric lends itself to preparation and contrivance, designed for
the exploitation of those public occasions where it finds its paradigmatic
setting. 13 A strong sensitivity to the essentially public, formal, and preconceived
nature of rhetoric encourages in turn a conception of its tendency to occlude or
suppress the possibility of very different kinds of speech-speech that leaves
room for privacy, informality, immediacy, and intimacy. Although such
categories were and are necessarily open to contention,14 they can, I believe,
help to illuminate rhetoric's involvement in areas of Athenian experience where
the relationship of public to private was encountered as a persistent challenge.
It is above all in tragedy, whose rhetorical formality of discourse is so often
superimposed on situations of an acutely personal nature, that contrasts of this
kind acquire cardinal importance.
In pursuing some of the ways in which tragedy can be read as embodying the
instabilities inherent in Athenian experience of rhetoric, I shall be adopting a
deliberately generous conception of rhetoric itself Much of what has hitherto
been written on rhetorical aspects of tragedy has concentrated, quite under-
standably, on features which can be linked to the mid-fifth-century theorization
of rhetoric as an 'art' or techne. 15 But however distinctive this process of
12 Cf. the Athenian Assembly's curse on deceptive speakers: Ar. Thesm. 356-67; Dem. 18.282,
23· 97·
13 Cf. e.g. the pejorative use of TTapauK£vi) etc. in Athenian oratory: e.g. Lys. 19.2; Isae. I. 17,8.5;
Dem. 27.2,34.48; Aeschin. I. 193,3. I; Lycurg. I. 20.
14 Contrasts of this kind remained important to the ancient rhetorical tradition as a whole: this is
shown above all by rhetoric's own recurrent attempts to arrogate such properties as naturalness,
plainness, and lack of dissimulation.
15 This is especially true of writings on Euripides (cf. n. 45 below), but less so of the general study
by Buxton (1982). Goldhill (1986: ch. 9) emphasizes that tragic rhetoric was no mere reflection of
sophistic culture, but a parallel symptom of a fundamental concern with the power of language.
theoretical-cum-technical development may have been, it can be viewed to a con-

siderable degree as a systematization of resources which, in many respects, had
long been pragmatically recognized in oratorical practice. 16 Even if'Sicilian' and
sophistic theorizing as a whole created something which was acknowledged as
novel by the coinage, probably around 400 Be, of the term rhetorike itself, we can
legitimately continue to see the kernel of rhetoric in a much older responsiveness
to the formal demands of public speech.17 To rely on this more flexible concept of
rhetoric, as I intend to do, is to adopt an approach that is broader than one based
on the specific techniques of handbooks or sophistic teaching, but narrower than
a notion like that offered by Victor Bers, in his recent discussion of tragedy and
rhetoric, of 'anything that is said with the intent to persuade any person who
shares the stage with the speaker, or even the speaker himself' .18
Unlike a definition as capacious as the latter, the basic model offormal public
speech allows us to attend with particular interest to tragic situations which in
some way echo and evoke, as well as those which directly dramatize, the political,
bouleutic, and forensic settings in which rhetoric was culturally normal for
Athenian audiences. At the same time, this approach turns the idea of rhetoric
into an issue which potentially concerns all surviving tragedy, and is not confined
to the heightened use of certain types of rhetorical components in Euripides: it is,
indeed, with a view to sustaining this point that my paper will give more space to
Aeschylus and Sophocles than to Euripides. Tragedy's reliance on the rhesis or set
speech, which provides the most salient general marker of rhetorical influence, is
a feature already well established by the mid-career of Aeschylus; indeed, the
'invention' of the rhesis was apparently described by Aristotle as a key innovation
ofThespis himself, and one which, to judge by references to the learning and reci-
tation of tragic rheseis, came to be recognized as a major element in Athenian
experience of tragedy. 19 It is pertinent to notice that when, in Poetics 6, Aristotle
draws a distinction between politike and rhetorike, he does so in the course ofindi-
cating that they overlap or are continuous in precisely their concern with formal,
public speech-making.20 One way of identifying my own position is to say that I
16 Cf. e.g. Dover (1968 b), 179. The more radical view of T. Cole (1991), that conventional
accounts of the ~Sicilian' pioneers in rhetorical theory should be jettisoned, goes too far.
P To the possible objection, put by Dover (1968b: 175), that such a definition unnecessarily
blurs the distinction between rhetoric and oratory, I would answer: first, that 'intellectual study'
imposes too narrow a limit on the concept of rhetoric; secondly, that it seems peculiar to speak of,
say, Sophoclean oratory, but not of Sophoclean rhetoric. The fundamental character of rhetoric as
public discourse is reflected in the presentation of Gorgias at PI. Grg. 452el-8, 454b5-7; cf. Isoc. 3.
8 ( ... 15.256), 'we call rhetorikoi those who can speak before mass audiences'.
18 (1994), 183; in the earlier part of his essay, Bers also makes use ofa sophistic model. Cf. the
comparably loose definition of 'oratory' at Dover (I968b), 175.
19 Aristotle on Thespis: Themist. Or. 26. 316d; learning/recitation of rhiseis: e.g. Ar. Clouds
1371, Wasps 579-80, Frogs 151; Aeschin. L 168, PL Laws 81 1a; Ephipp. fro 16 K-A; Thphr. Char.
IS- 10,27. 2; Men. Epitr. 1125; Herodas, Mim. 3.30-1. Manhsperger (1971) supplies the data of
tragic speeches.
20 Poet. 145 0b6 - 8: for the 4th-cent. background to Aristotle's contrast between older and
modern poets in this passage see Xanthakis-Karamanos (1979). It should be added that the
shall interpret rhetoric' in a sense which embraces the whole domain

4
demarcated by Aristotle's two terms.

The connection between the rhetorical and the public is not simply
reflected by tragedy, but becomes tested and modified under the peculiarly
severe pressures of tragic action. It is to this fundamental fact that we can
ascribe tragedy's value as an indirect but subtle source of evidence for
Athenian attitudes to rhetoric. Given that tragedy typically sets its individual
characters before an internal audience,21 and represents the occurrence· of
extreme crises, dilemmas, and sufferings within settings which carry a sense
of social or civic relationships, the function of rhetoric is subject to special
forces which throw into relief the axis between public and private, political
and intimate, outward and inward. 22 In the following sections of my paper I
shall consider in turn three distinct but related ways in which tragic rhetoric
mediates a kind of dialectic between these contrasting spheres. I shall look
first at two contexts in which rhetoric serves as an index of the collapse of
political authority into the consciousness of personal tragedy; secondly, at one
major instance of rhetoric as a medium of exploited confidence and emotional
duplicity at the very heart of human relationships; and, thirdly, at two scenes
in which rhetoric is used as an expression of the estrangement brought about
by a breakdown of philia. In each case my aim is to show how an alertness to
the intricacies, uncertainties, and tensions of rhetorical speech is a crucial
element in the response to certain kinds of tragic experience.
Rhetoric is necessarily yet ambiguously involved in contexts where an

individual realization of tragedy comes about \vithin a public space which
represents the communal heart of the polis. 23 I intend to pursue this point by
considering passages from two Theban plays, Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes
and Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, in which a sharply personal awareness of
tragic status overwhelms a figure whose position was initially defined in terms
of political leadership and authority. In both of these works, the protagonist-
ruler begins the play \vith a display of commanding and confident authority
relationship between rhetorike and politike, both here and elsewhere in Aristotle, is not unprob-
lematic: I have discussed some aspects of this question in Halliwell (1994).
~l Although there are important exceptions (where e.g. a special confidentiality exists between a
character and the chorus), the chorus's presence normally engenders a sense of semi-public space.
But the evocation of a rhetorical context is not \",holly dependent upon this factor, as we can see
from many tragic prologues.
22 Given the complexities of the tragic material with which I am concerned, a reductive
definition of any of these terms would not be profitable: for general Athenian conceptions of public
and private spheres see Cohen (199 1), 70-97.
~3 The polis of tragedy is, of course, very rarely democratic, but, where rhetoric (as so much else)
is concerned, this does not reduce tragedy's capacity to make indirect contact with the experience of
its Athenian audience.
Tragedy and Athenian Rhetoric I27
which is strongly marked by the eloquence of formal proclamation. Eteocles'

opening speech, which combines the acceptance of political responsibility with
the issuing of military exhortations, is addressed to an imagined gathering of
the citizen body of Thebes; it is a consciously assured and vigilant statement of
the public control of crisis. Similarly, the manner in which Oedipus is seen
responding keenly and pityingly to his people's supplication by delivering, first,
a declaration of his determination to do everything he can for the city, and then,
in the following scene, a 'legal' announcement of intent to track down the
killer(s) of Laius, stamps an image of deliberative mastery upon his appear-
ances outside the palace. In both cases the ruler is subsequently overtaken by
events which reveal the precariousness of his control, and what I wish
specifically to emphasize is how this transformation is communicated in part
through the medium of rhetoric which was initially used to project the
character's power.
In the Seven, the great sequence of speeches in which Eteocles responds in
turn to the reports from each of the city's gates supplies a framework of
political and military leadership within which the emergence of the protagon-
ist's personal tragedy, and more importantly his realization of that tragedy,
takes on an extreme irony. When we reach the climactic point at which Eteocles
discovers his own destiny in the impending meeting with Polyneices, everything
that has gone before places us in a position to detect the subtle change which
now takes place in Eteocles' rhetoric. It is not that his final speech breaks with
the note of unflinching boldness struck repeatedly in the earlier passages. On
the contrary, his combination of fatalism (the curse cannot be avoided) and
self-righteousness (justice is on his side) gives his final response to the
me~senger a resolution which builds on the accumulated defiance embodied in
the preceding speeches. But the difference lies in a movement away from the
overtly political perspective which Eteocles had hitherto adopted as ruler of
Thebes, to a mood of individual wilfulness and recklessness. Whereas the
opening speech of the play was conspicuously communal in its consciousness of
the citizen-audience, the danger to Thebes, and the complementary roles of
king and people, and while each of the six subsequent speeches contained the
announcement of a military decision that was framed with the city's interests in
mind,24 the final speech contains a cry of isolation and anguish whose implica-
tions tend towards a kind of tragic solipsism. Personal tragedy is exposed
within, but also against the grain of, the political authority which publicly
defines itself through rhetoric; here, as so often elsewhere, tragic rhetoric is a
vehicle of paradox.
Particularly expressive of the new tone of Eteocles' rhetoric is the effusion of
apostrophes at the very start of the speech (6S3-s)-expressive not only in
their passionate intimations of determinism, but also because, in a manner
24 The word 7T(T)6A.,S' is used five times in Eteocles.' opening speech; later, there are explicit refer-
ences to the interests/defence of the city at 408, 416,449,477,621.
which we shall see again in Oedipus Tyrannus, they mark an intensely inward-
looking state of mind which characterizes certain tragic figures who become
cocooned in a virtually private sense of their fate. 25 Eteocles then abruptly pulls
back from the public voicing of passive, defeatist grief,26 in order to steel him-
self for the confrontation with his brother (656): after his initial lament that a
father's curses are moving to their destiny CTEAEa¢6poL, 655), he now switches
to defiantly and sardonically questioning what TEAOS-- 'destiny' or 'end' -is
portended by the emblem ofJustice on Polyneices' shield (659, 07TO! TEA€f). But
in the tirade against his brother into which this leads, there is less sense, until
the call for armour at the end (675-6), that he is actually addressing anyone
with his impassioned utterance than in any of the earlier speeches. The scathing
indictment of Polyneices' entire life, hyperbolically hammered home by the
reference to every stage from birth onwards (664-9), is framed to persuade no
one other than Eteocles' himself that justice must be on his own side, not his
brother's. The status of the passage as a piece of self-persuasion is ironically
sharpened, and in a manner which repays sensitivity to rhetorical nuances, by
the formally trenchant shape of his argument-with a counterfactual inference
followed by the heavy insistence of anaphoric assertions, and concluded by a
reinforcing inference that is spiced with mocking word-play (662-7 1).27
Eteocles' attempt to explain his will to confront Polyneices in terms of combat-
ing injustice has a force whose significance is private to his own psychology:
who else could perceive or feel the iniquity which has allegedly marked every
moment of his brother's life?
Eteocles convinces himself (672) because his logic is designed only for
himself. The solipsistic strain in his rhetoric is exhibited by the perverse course
of emotion along which it carries him, from the aborted grief of 653-5 to the
tragically grotesque nature of his rhetorical question, 'who else could be a juster
opponent (to Polyneices)?' (673). Instead of transmitting a decision as in his
previous speeches, Eteocles is now recklessly enacting one, coming to terms
with it, in his own mind; and it is a decision which shows no trace of any
continuing concern with strategic consideration for the city's safety. Despite a
final reference to his political position (674), the status as ruler which has so far
determined Eteocles' deliberations and orders is now overriden by his identity
as brother to Polyneices and member of the doomed family of Oedipus. As a
result, we could say, Eteocles effectively abandons the principle which he had
himself enunciated in the very first line of the play-a principle which situates
25 In addition to Soph. OT 1391-14°8 (p. 129 below), see esp. Aesch. PV 88-92, Soph. Ajax
859-65, Phil. 936-53; there are lyric instances at Soph. Ajax 412-27, Ant. 844-9, Phil. 1081-94.
Such passages belong to the material analysed by Schadewaldt (1926), though his emphases are
somewhat different from mine.
26 See Hutchinson (1985: 150) on 656 for the idea of public grief as unmanly, and cf. PI. Rep. 10.
603e-4d with Halliwell (1988), 137-8.
27 The character of EteocJes' rhetoric is also coloured by overtones of oratorical diaboli, as
Hutchinson (1985: 15 I) on 664-9 shrewdly notes: cf. n. 43 below.
Tragedy and Athenian Rhetoric I29
rhetoric firmly within a framework of political responsibilities-of 'speaking

what is timely' (AEYELV Tei Ka{pl.a ).28 This shift in the nature of his rhetoric is
completed by the ensuing exchange with the chorus, where Eteocles' belief in
the inescapability of his fate makes him deaf to their entreaties. The reversal of
the earlier scene where Eteocles tried to impose order on the panicking women
(18 1-202) is embodied in a tragic inversion of persuasive roles between king
and people. 29
In the case of Oedipus Tyrannus, there are both interesting parallels with,
and important differences of detail from, the features of the Seven which I have
cited. The change from a confident, authoritative ruler who addresses his
people with political concern and deliberative "foresight, to an individual who
turns in on his consciousness of his own and his family's tragic destiny, is
broadly similar in the two plays. In addition, the reversal of persuasive roles
which occurs in the Seven is matched by the moment in Oedipus Tyrannus
where the king bluntly refuses the (retrospective) advice of the chorus (1369-
70 ).30 That moment is at the start of the great rhesis where Oedipus begins by
justifying his self-blinding (137 1-90), and then pours out a great series of apos-
trophes to the places and figures which mark the decisive junctures in his life-
story (139 I - 1408). It is unnecessary to show in detail how different Oedipus'
rhetoric now becomes from the magisterial pronouncements of either the first
scene of the play or the great proclamation concerning the killer of Laius, but
what is worth stressing is the nature of the shift which, as I have just indicated,
takes places within the speech at 1369- I 408.
That shift is analogous to the central claim which I made about Eteoc.les'
final speech in the Seven. It is a movement, a withdrawal, from outer to inner
consciousness-in Oedipus' case from rational self-justification in the face of
the chorus' abhorrence, to the remorseless apostrophizing of his tragically
transmuted and newly understood past. What is remarkable is how the
moment of transition from the first to the second state of mind is so· finely
captured by Oedipus' rhetoric. The incisive arguments of the first half of the
speech, in which Oedipus defends his self-blinding by a strikingly sequentiaPl
28 In addition to Seven I and 6 I 9 (possibly spurious), other occurrences of this principle in

tragedy are Aesch. Ag. 1372 (p. 134 below); Eur. IA 829, Soph. DC 808-9 (n. 38 below); the same
phrase has, however, a rather· different, and essentially non·rhetorical, application at Aesch. Supp.
446, Cho. 582. According to Dion. Hal. De compo verb. 12, Gorgias (= fro 13 DK) was the first to
theorize the principle of Katp6s.
29 The change is underlined by Eteoc1es' final line ('when the gods decree, you cannot escape an
evil destiny', 719): contrast the balanced sentiments of 1-9, reflecting the rhetoric of a political
authority that, while mindful of religious piety, is none the less committed to its own responsibility
for action.
30 Note, however, the contrast of sequence between the two passages: where Seven has a defiant
rhisis followed by an epirrhematic exchange in which Eteocles refuses choral advice, OThas a long
lyric exchange between protagonist and chorus (1297-1368) leading to the choral judgement which
Oedipus repudiates at the start of his speech.
31 In the carefully marshalled sequence, and the categorical conclusions, of 1371-86, we see a
Stephen Halliwell
consideration of his relationship to Laius,jocasta, his children, and the physical

symbols of Thebes' identity as a city, lead up to his longing to 'seal off' his body
by deafness as well as blindness, in order that his mind might be impenetrably
enclosed in a world of its own (1386-90). It is precisely this thought of total
isolation which is immediately followed by the change from arguments that
acknowledge his Theban audience, to cries of tragic recognition that are
addressed only to the absent places and people of his past. 32 So this speech not
only underscores in a general way the collapse of Oedipus' status from its
former political authority, but also represents in a very exact respect the
impulse of his mind to turn irretrievably in upon itself. And this is a dramatic
point which acquires a particular poignancy from the rhetorical means of its
expression: for the rhetoric of the speech, with its shift from relentless rational-
ity to tortured self-laceration, starkly exposes how Oedipus' loss of power and
leadership has come about within the very realm, before the gaze of Theban
citizens, where his former identity was defined.
At the darkest moment of recognition, Oedipus' words acquire an anguish
which speaks only to an absent and imaginary audience-yet, like those of
Aeschylus' Eteocles, they do so inevitably in public, indeed in the heart of the
Theban polis. This 'overheard' solipsism is perhaps possible only within the
world of tragedy, where rhetoric is available to lend an intense inwardness to
characters whose eloquence no longer has the political meaning with which it
was originally endowed. 33 It is because it marks the loss of the paradigmatic
voice of public speech that this species of tragic declamation can take on such a
paradoxical status-simultaneously heightening the use of rhetoric for the
expression of extreme emotion, yet signalling the distance between the
communicative function of public speech and the privacy, even isolation, for
which a certain kind of tragic consciousness craves.
The power of rhetoric is double-edged. This is not only because of the intrinsic
capacity of language to deceive as well as to inform, to blind as well as to
illuminate, but also because of the particular factors of projection, artifice, and
calculation which arise in situations where words are shaped with a direct
consciousness of a transaction between speaker and audience. As I emphasized
final exhibition of the qualities of mind and speech which Oedipus repeatedly showed in the earlier
parts of the play: cf. in particular the insistent, anaphoric passages in the proclamation (e.g. 238-40,
253-4, 259- 61 , 27 0 - 1), a proclamation which he now remembers himself because of its newly
acquired significance (I 38 1-2). On the structure of Oedipus' speech, and in particular its crescendo
of pathos, see Schadewaldt (1926), 80 f.
32 When Oedipus speaks to the chorus again at 1409- I 5, he looks to them to provide the escape
which he cannot achieve himself(I4IO-12): and the very fact that he has to speak to them, as well
as to Creon, is a further painful symptom of his inability to find the isolation which he longs for.
B Such quasi-solipsistic inwardness becomes a much more prominent feature of Senecan
tragedy; but whereas there it comes almost to be the staple mode of dramatic psychology, in Greek
tragedy it is characteristically set against the foil of a genuinely public rhetoric. On this aspect of
Seneca see esp. Braden (1985).
at the outset, the evidence of various sources reveals Athenian experience of

rhetoric to have been never very far from the fear of duplicity. Tragedy itself
frequently allows this fear to be heard, though sometimes with ironic effect. 34
But the most disturbing cases of tragic deception, and the ones which place the
nature of rhetoric in a particularly uncertain light, are those which involve
\vhat can be called a perversion of intimacy-the premeditated abuse of a
personal trust or emotional closeness between two characters. In instances such
as Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Medea, the audience is placed in a
position to follow the workings of such perversion from conception to
execution. But I would like to consider an example, from Aeschylus' Agamem-
non, where the dramatic effect of emotional exploitation is all the more chilling
for being only imperfectly or obscurely readable by the audience, as indeed by
other characters within the play. What I want to suggest is that the presentation
of this exploitation requires and deepens a critical alertness to its rhetorical
basis.
It is worth saying, in the first place, that an unnerving command of public
speech is a central component in the characterization of Clytemnestra. It is part
and parcel of her man-like deliberative disposition (I I), and of the style in
which she is seen to wield po\ver, KpaTO!; (258), in Agamemnon's absence. At
the end of her great beacon speech, the chorus praises her, however
ambivalently, precisely for speaking with the judgement of a man (35 I), and in
almost every scene of the play in which she appears she stamps her unsettling
presence on the situation by at least one large, formal pronouncement: the
beacon speech itself, with the almost clairvoyant proclamation of victory which
is attached to it (28 1-350); the triumphant statement of vindication, in the face
of the chorus' scepticism, after the messenger has confirmed the fall of Troy
(587-614); the reception of Agamemnon outside the palace (855-913); and the
final, exultant celebration of success (1372-98 etc.) which she makes standing
over her h us band's corpse.
Perhaps the most rhetorically telling of these performances is the first part of
the confrontation with Agamemnon himself The king's own home-coming
speech, which very deliberately starts from an elaborate prayer of thanksgiving
(810-29) before proceeding to acknowledge the chorus's avowal of loyalty
(830-54), is a careful, shrewdly subdued utterance. It is the statement of a ruler
who, after so long an absence, is alive to the unreliability of political support
and therefore judiciously postpones a full celebration, as well as further
deliberations, to a future occasion (844-50). This is a rhesis whose formality
encapsulates a combination of religious gratitude with political circumspection,
and these qualities make all the more jarringly ostentatious the speech which
H This is so e.g. with Creon's suspicions of Teiresias at Soph. Ant. 1045-7, and Pentheus' of
Dionysus at Eur. Bacch. 489-91. Other tragic criticisms of rhetoric occur at e.g. Soph. DC 76 1-2,
794-6,806-9, Eur. fried. 580-3, Hipp. 503-5, Hec. 1187- 94, Phoen. 469-7 2 , IA 333 (with p. 136
below), Bacch. 266-71,489-91.
Stephen Halliwell
Clytemnestra then delivers. Hers is a declaration which is longer and

deliberately more fulsome than her husband's. It derives a crucial part of its
eerie resonance from the way in which, at its very opening, it seems to confound
public and private, political and personal, by mixing a sense of an official occa-
sion with the professions of an ostensibly faithful wife:
tivOP€S 7ToAirat, 7Tpeo{3os :4.py€iwv r68e,

OUK aLaxvvovp.aL TOVS' cPlAdvopas TpOrrOVS
AigUL 7TpOS vILaS'. (855":"'7)
Men of the city, noble body of Argive elders,
I shall not be ashamed to describe to you
The love I cherish for my husband.
Clytemnestra's prooemium uses a formula apt for a male speaker addressing a

representative gathering of the citizen body, yet she makes this the gambit for a
potentially embarrassing (because out-of-place, untimely) affirmation of wifely
devotion. Moreover, it is a specifically rhetorical gesture that she should
announce her virtue to the city, not pledge it immed.iately to Agamemnon
himself: 35 this is not a case of personal words overheard, so to speak, in public,
but of a determined flouting of the norms of shame, and a wilful exposure to
public scrutiny of (supposed) emotions which might have been expected to
remain private.
In keeping with this introduction, the shape of the speech as a whole displays
a kind of instability between ceremonial fullness and personal intimacy. Even
after Clytemnestra has addressed Agamemnon directly, to inform him about
Orestes' whereabouts and assure him of how she lay on her bed weeping
endlessly for her husband (877-94), she turns back to her audience to deliver
effusive, third-person praises of the king (895-90r),·before finally speaking to
Agamemnon once again in terms of overt affection (905). Clytemnestra
simultaneously, and for the same reasons, exploits rhetoric and perverts
intimacy. And the disorientating effect of her confusion of public and private
overlaps with, and is reinforced by, a further contradiction which emerges as
her speech unfolds. Clytemnestra portrays herself as a defenceless, long-
suffering, Penelope-like figure, who has 'sat in the house alone' all these years
of her husband's absence (862), and has been prey to fears about the safety of
herself, Agamemnon, and their son Orestes. Yet this image of female isolation
and psychological vulnerability sits uneasily alongside the rhetorical boldness,
indeed bravura, with which she now dominates the formal occasion of the
king's return.
The rhetorical bravura of the speech manifests itself in a number of features:
35 Cf. Denniston-Page (1957) ad loc., who make the further point that Clytemnestra speaks like
someone entering a defence to a charge not yet made. Compare Creon's address to the chorus,
before he speaks to Oedipus himself, at Soph. DC 728 ( (with p. 138 below).
Tragedy and Athenian Rhetoric 133
in the macabre humour of the imagery with which Clytemnestra pictures

Agamemnon's body as full of holes as a net, and dubs him a 'second Geryon'
requiring three burials for his several bodies (866-73); in its explicit but
uncalled-for disavowal of deception (886); in its hyperbolical explanation of
why Clytemnestra has no tears left to shed for Agamemnon (887-91); and in its
ambiguous allusions to the Queen's dreams of Agamemnon's sufferings (891-
4). The uncanny extravagance of these features conveys a control of public
appearances which is both sophisticated and enigmatic. This effect culminates
in the quasi-epideictic richness with which she applies an elaborate, asyndetic
series of epithets to her husband: 36
AiYOLfL' av av8pa TOVS€ TWV Gia(}j.LwV Kvva,

owrijpa vaos- 7TPOTOVOV, vt/J'fJ)..'rj~ O'TEYTJ)
OTVAOV 7TOSiJp7], fLOVOY€VES TEKVOV 1TaTpi,
dOOL1TOPctJ 8U/J<.iJVTl 1T1Jya[ov PEOS,
Kat Y"lV cPav€ioav vavT{AoLS Trap' EA7Tioa,
KaAALoToV ~f1-ap €iOLSEiv EK X€ifLaTos' (896-9 01 )37
I would call this man the watchdog of the house,

The saving mainstay of the ship, the tall roofs
Firm-based pillar, a father's only child,
A flowing spring for a thirsty traveller,
And the unexpected sight of land for sailors-
A day of radiant beauty after a storm.
The audience of this speech, like the chorus within the play, must hear
Clytemnestra's words against the attendant atmosphere of hidden intentions
which has been built up since the start of the play. Consequently, the perturbing
intermingling of public and private created by Clytemnestra's rhetoric
matches, in ominous fashion~ the larger dramatic theme of fearful uncertainty
about the relationship between the secret reality inside the palace and the
queen's ostensible behaviour outside it. However, like the tapestry scene into
which it leads, the speech is anything but an uncomplicated piece of deception.
Its control is too expressive of the determination which drives Clytemnestra's
usurpation of power for that. To those with a premonition of the darker
background, it discloses her steely character at the same time as it conceals her
ulterior motives. Yet Agamemnon himself is the one interpreter of the speech
who lacks any depth of context for it. When he mocks Clytemnestra for the
length of the speech (914-16),38 he draws attention in only a very superficial
way-the only way which he himself can observe-to its rhetorical elaboration
36 The connection made by Arist. Rhel. I413bI7-21 between asyndeton and acted delivery is
piquantly pertinent to Clytemnestra's performance; cf. ibid. 14061 10-18 on the excessive use of
epithets.
37 I quote from Page's 1972 OCT, leaving aside textual problems in the passage.
38 Length of speech is itself a rhetorical concern: see the passages cited by Fraenkel (1950) on
Ag. 916, and cf. e.g. Aesch. Eum. 585, Soph. OC 808-9, Eur. IA 378,400, Thuc. 4.17.2.
and to the irony involved in the making of such a public, indeed political,
statement by a woman. 39 Clytemnestra herself will later acknowledge, as she
stands over Agamemnon's corpse, that all her earlier \\Fords had been 'spoken to
suit the occasion' (KQLPiws ELpiJJ1-EVWV, 1372). That passage contains a cynical
echo of the speech of welcome itself: \vhere Clytemnestra had told the Argive
elders she would not feel ashamed to speak of her devotion to Agamemnon
(856), she subsequently declares that she feels no shame in contradicting her
earlier sentiments (r 373). And in that echo we need to discern a chilling
admission of her grasp of a precisely rhetorical formula of speech:~o The
principle of Kalpos, which later becomes so familiar in Isocrates and other
rhetoricians, is brazenly brandished by Clytemnestra in a way which leaves no
doubt about the perverted opportunism of her rhetorically manlike mind.
lV1y contention, then, is that the very idea of rhetoric, with the penumbra of
mistrust that attaches to it, is potently brought into play by the nature and
context of Clytemnestra's extraordinary speech of welconle. This is a
manipUlative public statement-a performance-apt for the appreciation of
those who know what it i's to live by, but also to live in wary suspicion of,
rhetoric. Moreover, while the horror of Clytemnestra's behaviour lies partly in
its transgression of the expected norms of the female, it must be stressed that
the dangerous power of rhetoric which she is seen to wield is borrowed from the
\vorld of male discourse. Clytemnestra usurps this discourse, just as she usurps
the 'lnale' po\ver of deliberation and action. If that tells us something about why
she could be perceived as monstrously deviant, it also tells us something about
Athenian experience of rhetoric itself.
The institutions of Athenian culture framed rhetoric as a predominantly

oppositional and antagonistic medium. In the forensic sphere, for which the
Athenians developed an addiction which infiltrated even their popular self-
image as well as their reputation with others,41 the connection between rhetoric
and conflict was tight and inescapable-no less so, of course, for the creation of
a tapas by which litigants disavowed the motive of personal hostility.42 But the
centrality of conflict must often have seemed just as conspicuous in the rhetoric
of political life too, as such images as those projected by Aristophanes' Knights
and the Mytilenean debate in Thucydides tend to suggest. Moreover, from the
mid-fifth century at least, the nature of rhetorical contention was recognized as
particularly encouraging an ethos of personal acrimony and recrimination
\\Thich is broadly denoted by the term Ol.a{3oAfJ and its cognates. Given the
3':1 Cf. Eur. fA. 829-30, where Agamemnon tells Clytemnestra 'you haye spoken well, but it is
indecent for me to engage in argument with women.'
40 On KaLp6s cf. n. 28 above.
41 Ar. Birds 39-41, Xen. A1em. 3.5. 16-17 reflect the self-image~ on the reputation with other
Greeks, Thuc. I. 77. I, alluding principally to dealings with allies, is telling.
42 See e.g. Antiph. 5. 57; Lys. 1. 4, 43; Dem. 5.6,23. I. Aeschin. I. 2 admits to priYate enmity but
pleads ~public interest' as its justification.
extent to which the language and tone of fHa/3oAiJ are reflected in tragedy,43 as
well as comedy, it is clear that this dimension of rhetoric impinged sharply on
Athenian consciousness, and engendered an awareness that if rhetoric could
ideally be construed as the carrier of a commitment to open dialogue, delibera-
tion, and rational persuasion, its practice was often a force for the pursuit of
discord, strife, and outright hostility.
The importance of conflict in Greek tragedy makes it unsurprising that, in
general terms, tragic rhetoric predominantly grows from feelings of rancour
and alienation. Since tragic conflicts occur archetypally not between
established or natural enemies, but between those who are, or have been, bound
by close ties of philia,44 their rhetoric is correspondingly a discourse of failure,
actual or threatened, in the closest of human relationships. Many of these
scenes have been well studied, particularly as examples of the tragic agon,45 and
there is no need here to reiterate their main features. Instead, I shall limit
myself to looking at two examples which will make it possible to give substance
to the idea that such contexts can intimate a troubling sense of rhetoric's
aptness as an expression of the severest forms of estrangement. There is a
peculiarly tragic poignancy in the use of rhetoric as a medium of communica-
tion between those who are ceasing, or have already ceased, to speak effectively
to one another: in such cases, rhetoric's power can be seen to operate where,
and because, other kinds of speech have become unavailable to the parties
concerned.
I take first an instance where the strain placed on a relationship of philia
stops short of the irretrievable. In Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis Menelaus
enters at 303, clutching the letter he has intercepted from Agamemnon to
Clytemnestra, and threatening violence on the servant who is trying to recover
it. When Agamemnon emerges from his tent, the servant retires and the two
brothers face one another in what soon becomes a markedly rhetorical style.
Menelaus initiates the confrontation by demanding that Agamemnon look him
in the eye, and giving notice of his intention to make a candid allegation: 'look
straight at me, so I can start to put my argument.' But the tone of rhetorical
inquisition and allegation, reinforced by Menelaus' use of E~€"€YXELV (,convict'
or 'expose') at 335, is no formal superimposition upon the psychological reality
'ofhis animosity. Rather, it functions as a means by which Menelaus can try to
throw Agamemnon onto the defensive, consolidate his own sense of having the
upper hand because of his interception of the message, and give his accusations
a note of ruthless candour. Besides, it is crucial to Menelaus' position that he
believes he has hit on a machination which needs to be publicly exposed (324),
43 Examples of tragic ota{3oAiJ are cited and discussed by Duchemin (1968), 206-7; Koster
(1980),62-71, M. Lloyd (1992), 26-7, 81; c( n. 27 above.

44 Arist. Poet. 14. 14S3bIS-22 is germane here.
45 Work of this kind is well represented by Duchemin (1968), Collard (I97Sb), and M. Lloyd
(199 2 ).
Stephen Halliwell
and his rhetorical demeanour is therefore not a dramatically artificial pose, but
a precise expression of his state of mind: he speaks as someone who indignantly
believes he has exactly the basis for a 'case', a 'charge' against his brother, and
is, so to speak, rehearsing the statement of it before he takes it to the army as a
whole. Rhetoric ar:d psychology of characterization, far from being conflicting
modes of presentation, blend into one another here. Above all, the nature of
Menelaus' rhetoric pointedly conveys the distance, the sense of a philia
threatened by secret double-dealing, which has been unexpectedly placed
between himself and his brother. There is, consequently, a specific interaction
between rhetorical formality and the crux of the situation: because of the way
in which he dwells on what he sees as the implications of Agamemnon's
behaviour, past and present, for the possibility of effective phiiia,46 Menelaus'
rhetoric woulc\ hardly have the same force if he spoke as someone unrelated to
Agamemnon. We need not hesitate to suppose that an Athenian audience could
have heard Menelaus and Agamemon speaking in a manner redolent of
litigants, and could therefore visualize the scene as a quasi- or potentially
forensic encounter, while feeling that this was no stylistic conceit, but a key part
of the personal dynamics of the quarrel. 47 The more general point which this
serves to exemplify is that a culture which places rhetoric near the centre of so
much of its public life can come to experience the very formalities of the mode
as the aptest embodiment of certain kinds of friction or rupture in human
relationships.
Correspondingly, when Agamemnon tries to pre-empt Menelaus' full
statement of his allegation by accusing him of glib sophistication ('you've put a
fine-sounding gloss on your own -mischief; a clever tongue is an invidious thing' ,
333), we can legitimately say that this is both a clear echo of contemporary
rhetorical practice, and ~n intelligible (if ineffectual) defensive ploy on
Agamemnon's part. I take this to be typical of the most important way in which
Euripides makes use of terms, techniques, and strategies which have the
resonance of recognizable elements of a rhetorical repertoire. Far from being a
superficial embroidery on the surface of the argument, the rhetorical resonance
enriches the dramatic moment in a way which connects with the specific
stances of the participants. Because he has been taken abruptly by surprise, and
thereby thrown onto the defensive, Agamemnon resorts to a sort of deflecting
tactic, to hold off Menelaus' probing assault on his good faith and judgement as
a leader. He answers his brother's accusations with the counter-accusation of
verbal posturing, not because he is incapable of sustained rhetoric himself, but
because his defensive position gives him reason to try to deflate the pressure
which Menelaus' unexpected intervention has placed him under. That aspect of
46 See 344, 347, 4P4, 408, 414.

47 C( e.g. the way in which the agon between Medea and Jason exploits rhetoric (including both
parties' alertness to it: Med. 522-5, 579-85) to give particularly apt expression to the bitter
recriminations and self-justifications of alienated lovers.
the scene is duly underlined by the relationship between the two speeches which
the brothers go on to deliver.
Though there is much that might be said about the detail of these speeches,
what is most significant about the exchange, for my purposes at least, is the way
in which the two men offer entirely incompatible narratives of the events
leading up to this point in the expedition. Menelaus' recriminations are based
on a vividly sequential narrative whose shape is meant to clinch the charge of
unstable judgement and unreliable philia: Agamemnon lobbied for the
leadership, then changed his style once he had obtained it (337-44); he at first
gladly agreed to the sacrifice oflphigeneia, and has now stealthily gone back on
his decision (350-64).48 Agamemnon scarcely answers his brother's specific
allegations, though he does gibe allusively at some of his suggestions. 49 Instead,
he turns to counter-attack, in a speech which, after a disingenuous claim of
restraint (378-80), delivers a volley of furious questions to match his brother's
animosity (38r-4) and goes on to place the original blame for the expedition on
L\1.enelaus' own folly and failure as husband of Helen. The estrangement
between the two men is now embodied in the fact that they look at what has
happened from wholly irreconcilable angles, like litigants who give utterly
distinct versions of a chain of events. It is worth stressing that although
Agamemnon's strategy, as I have already suggested, can be read as an attempt
to deflect and deflate, that does not mean that he needs to be perceived as
having no convincing answer to Menelaus. On the contrary, it is central to
lVienelaus' position that he accuses Agamemnon of having agreed happily to
the sacrifice of Iphigeneia; but that claim contradicts what Agamemenon
himself said earlier in the play, and as an audience we are in no position to
decide between these divergent accounts. 50 This creates a degree of
interpretative opaqueness which can be seen in many other tragic agones, and
which it is reasonable to suppose was a common phenomenon in the Athenian
experience of forensic rhetoric. Where there is no independent source of
evidence, disparities and contradictions between rhetorical narratives confront
an audience with a dilemma for which there can be no secure or final criteria of
judgement. Part of what Euripides captures in this scene is the common
capacity of adversarial rhetoric to reduce the possibility of discovering any
resolution within its own terms of reference.
That effect is not, however, an inevitable result of dramatized rhetorical
48 A notable feature of Menelaus' narrative is his triple use of connective (lTa (343, 358, 363,
and cf. 367) to underscore Agamemnon's alleged fickleness: for the possibly colloquial character of
this detail, and its rarity in tragedy, see Dover (1.987), 28-9.
49 Line 385 glances back at 342, 390 at 3S I, and 3948 perhaps at 368/375; 388 is of <;ourse, in
nuce, a rebuttal of the main charge.
50 See 97-8 for Agamemnon's version: these lines belong to a passage thought probably spurious
by many scholars (including the latest editor, Diggle in his 1993 OeT), though not al~ (see Knox
(1979), 275-94). But, in any case, Menelaus' words at 361 ('not under duress-no, don't try to
claim that ... ') seem themselves to acknowledge the possibility of a different interpretation of
events.
Stephen Halliwell
antagonism, as we can see by turning to my second example, the confrontation

between Oedipus and Creon in Oedipus Coloneus. Unlike the breach between
Menelaus and Agamemnon, which is in due course healed,sl the antipathy
between Oedipus and Creon is carried to the extreme of tragically incurable
hatred. Moreover, in Sophocles' play the rhetoric of the characters is presented
in a way which makes any kind of neutrality towards the two sides impossible.
IJong before Creon has arrived with his retinue of soldiers, we have heard
Ismene's warning of Creon's motivation (396-415). We are therefore well
placed to read his language, from the start, with an alertness to the relationship
between surface impression and ulterior intention, and part of that alertness
needs to involve a recognition of the specific deployment of a rhetorical
strategy that certainly expresses a will to deceive, but arguably something more
subtle as well.
The encounter takes place against the background of Oedipus' conscious
realignment of friendships and hatreds. It is the Athenians who are now his
dearest philai, as he urgently signals while Creon approaches (724); and the
implications of that for his attitude to Creon are fundamentaL52 The basis of
Creon's strategy is a piece of attempted diplomacy. But the manner in which he
turns first to the elders of the chorus, with a circumspection and formality
worthy of a herald or envoy) should perhaps not be treated as merely devious. It
is both a recognition of necessary proprieties, from the point of view of his
presence with attendants on Athenian territory, and also, more delicately, a
revealing way of dealing with the acute awkwardness of his relationship to
Oedipus. By turning first to the Athenians, Creon avoids turning immediately
to Oedipus himself. He uses rhetoric not only to give prominence to his own
official status as a delegated representative of Thebes, but also to broach his
business in a public manner) as though the return of Oedipus to Thebes could
only be executed by a piece of interstate negotiation. But in doing so he is forced
to admit that the task which faces him is to persuade Oedipus himself (735-6),
and that he comes not as a pure negotiator but as a kinsman of the blind exile
(738-9). If Creon's preamble) then, is in one sense diplomatic, its rhetorical
rationale is also indicative of a failure of philia, a sheer absence of intimacy,
between himself and Oedipus.
That failure is only intensified by the sense of dissimulation which increases
when Creon does address Oedipus, at 740 ff. Yet if his profession of pity rings
hollow, the two arguments which frame it-that Thebes has a juster claim to
Oedipus than Athens, and that the plight of Oedipus and Antigone is a reproach
(OVELOOS) to the entire family-sound somewhat less SO.53 Creon's claim that the
51 When Menelaus later relents (473-503), moved by pity to reassert his philia with his brother,
he seems to be partly influenced by Agamemnon's earlier arguments: see M. Lloyd (1992), IS.
52 Cf. 607, 891, for the signalling of philia with Theseus, and 421 ff. for Oedipus' correlative
hatred of his own kin.
53 This is perhaps acknowledged by Oedipus in his rejoinder that Creon is someone who would
'exploit every just argument to make a guileful stratagem' (761-2).
whole of Thebes calls for Oedipus' return (741-2) picks up his statement to the
chorus that he comes as an appointed envoy for the city (737-8). This
connection helps to show the limitations on the personal factors which Creon's
appeal can bring to bear on Oedipus, but it is none the less consistent with what
Ismene had earlier said: her references to the plan to get Oedipus back for
burial close to Thebes' borders seemed to ascribe the motive to the city in
general, not just to Creon and the two brothers. 54 Equally, the appeal to the
shame of Oedipus' and Antigone's wanderings and beggary is a consideration
whose force is not altogether undercut by Creon's cunning. Given the details of
Ismene's earlier warning (399-400), we are bound to convict Creon of callous
disingenuousness. But that does not turn the entirety of his speech into an
outright act of deception like that of Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, since we
have no grounds-not even, I think, when we eventually learn of the seizure of
Ismene-for doubting that Creon \vould prefer to persuade Oedipus to leave
}\ttica. Creon's arguments mix concealment \vith specious emotion, but also
with the best arguments that he can muster on behalf of Thebes. What they
cannot do is to bridge the gulf of estrangement, the breakdown of active philia,
bet\veen Oedipus and himself Indeed, it is precisely Creon's use of such
rhetorical sophistication which seals Oedipus' condemnation of him, even if
this condemnation is itself voiced in a tour de force of rhetorical emotion.
Oedipus' rhetoric is far more uncompromising than Creon's: where Creon
tried diplomatically to approach Oedipus via the chorus, Oedipus does not
address the chorus at all in his great speech. Nor does he respond formally to
Creon's individual points, except for his brief rebuttal, at the very end (798-9),
of the idea that he and Antigone deserve to be pitied or rescued. But Oedipus
possesses both the information and the moral indignation to launch a remorseless
attack on Creon's hypocrisy and its enactment through cunning rhetoric. He does
this, above all, by constructing a narrative indictment of his kinsman-by telling
the story of his past in a way which foregrounds Creon's hollowness (765-74).
This highlights a point of rhetorical and dramatic subtlety about the scene.
W'hereas in the Iphigeneia in Aulis, as in many other tragic agones, we saw the
opposing parties put forward alternative narratives to ground their claims and
counter-claims, Oedipus' response to Creon compels us to notice that Oedipus
has a narrative to tell where Creon had none at all. The strength of Oedipus' posi-
tion stems as much from his ability to tell a story which Creon had suppressed-
the story of Creon's original thwarting of his wishes-as from the information
communicated by Ismene. Once this narrative is supplied, Creon's whole
demeanour, which had depended on the ostensible attempt to uphold a bond of
philia with Oedipus, is fatally undermined; and despite his vestigial appeal to
philia (8 13), it does not take him long to turn to violence.
54 Although 392 could refer directly to the brothers, or at least the ruling house, 389,402-5, and
409-1 I have a broader import. Theseus~ later allegation, at 919-23, hardly impugns Creon's
original status as a representative of Thebes.
Stephen Halliwell
Oedipus' is a clear victory in rhetoric, and one which turns Creon from a
pleading diplomat into a kind of 'accused' whose own actions are entirely
exposed and impugned. But it is also a victory with a tragic dimension, since in
laying bare the counterfeit nature of Creon's appeal to philia Oedipus cannot
avoid exposing his continuing hatred for his own sons, with whom Creon is
associated (789-90)55_a hatred whose consequences will be a perpetuation of
the destructive cycle by which Oedipus' own life has been blighted. The
Oedipus who three times in the play exculpates himself for his past by a plea of
ignorance (273, 548, 976) now assumes, with full knowledge, the status of an
avenging spirit against his own kin and people (788). The potency of Oedipus'
emotions derives crucially, and in a way which is psychologically paradoxical,
from his repudiation of kinship as the basis of philia. 56 If Creon spoke harsh
things in a soft manner (774), Oedipus himself speaks with the force of
unassuageable detestation. The shallowness of Creon's contrived diplomacy is
rebutted by a fervour whose own terrifying language summons up the horror of
sufferings still to come: the weakness and the strength of rhetoric are mixed
together in the tragic expression of incurable alienation.
Classical Athenian culture was, from many points of view, a culture of

rhetoric-so much so that, by the early fourth century, while fictionally
recreating a milieu of perhaps fifty years earlier, Xenophon feels able to depict
an Athenian citizen who claims that with the help of his family and friends he
regularly rehearses and role-plays the activities of forensic, epideictic, and
symbouleutic oratory.57 But the intensity and pervasiveness of Athenian
experience of rhetoric also came to generate an awareness of what rhetoric
inhibited, conflicted with, and made problematic. Although this was a complex
realm of experience, one of its central tensions was between what can broadly
be called public formality and personal intimacy. That tension manifests itself
in a variety of areas. Thus, the many litigants in surviving speeches who claim
to be unused to public speaking, and who request corresponding sympathy or
indulgence from Athenian juries, are implicitly appealing to a contrast of the
kind in question; and the significance of their doing so is heightened, not
reduced, by the fact that it is commonly a professional speech-writer who has
fashioned the claim for them in suitably eloquent terms. Equally, if very
differently, it was a recognition of such a contrast which helped to shape Plato's
attempt to distinguish philosophical 'dialectic' from rhetorical display. When,
for example, the Platonic Socrates responds to his personal embarrassment
55 Blundell (19 89: 23 2- 8) gives a close reading of Creon's and Oedipus' contrasting conceptions
of philia, but she ignores the tragic price which Oedipus must pay for insisting on his.
56 Line 77 I implicitly separates objective kinship from subjective philia, and 775 reinforces the
implication.
5? Xen. Oec. 11. 23-5: Ischomachus' activity serves some practical value (prospective self-
defence against sukophantai) but clearly takes on an inte(est of its own; ch. 25 apparently implies
that Ischomachus' wife might share in this play-acting.
Tragedy and Athenian Rhetoric
\vith Protagoras by exclaiming, 4I thought there was a great difference between

intimate conversation (avv€ivat aA,\7],\OtS OLaA€yofLEVOVS-) and public oratory
(81]"'" TJyop€iv)' ,58 he expresses an idea which may have special implications for
philosophical method; but one of the impulses behind Plato's inclusion of the
point was none the less, I suggest, a reaction to the constraints of rhetoric of the
sort which had much wider currency in Athens.
Since rhetoric is among the most basic categories with which we interpret
ancient cultures, it is important that we constantly refine our appreciation of
how its forms and modes of discourse permeated well beyond the official
frameworks of political and civic institutions, and impinged upon larger habits
of thought, feeling, and imagination. The case of tragedy sets an exceptionally
taxing challenge in this respect, though one which, given the parallels and
overlaps between theatrical and rhetorical performance, is indispensable to our
understanding of Athenian culture. I have argued in this paper that tragedy not
only has to be understood against the known background of, but itself provides
vital testimony to, the ambivalence and instability which underlay Athenian
experience of rhetoric. I have tried to show, in necessarily selective detail, that
the scope of this proposition encompasses much more than those familiar,
especially Euripidean, contexts in which tragic characters explicitly comment
on .or impugn the standing of rhetoric. In all three types of material I have
examined, rhetoric is involved in the dramatization of moments where the
separation of the public and the private, the political and the personal, is seen to
be fraught with difficulties and obscurities. If I am right, we can and should
read the rhetoric of tragedy in ways which go beneath the surface of style or
technique to the latent patterns, and the lurking anxieties, of a cultural
mentality which sustained and mistrusted rhetoric in equal measure. One of the
most valuable results of such a perspective should be a deeper grasp of why,
within and beyond the workings of rhetoric, Athenians felt a need which they
could not always fulfil for other ways of speaking.
58 Prl. 336bI -3: with the metaphorical use of 87JfLTJyopeiv, cf. esp. Grg. 502C12 (p. 123 above)
and Laws 817C4, both of which refer' to drama's relationship to its mass audiences. It is important
to notice that the verb GUV€iVUL, harking back to auvovaia at 33Sb3-S, suggests face-to-face
intimacy and co-operation: it shows that there is, dramatically speaking, no technical force to
Socrates' use of otaAiy€o8aL here. For the antithesis of co-operative dialectic and agonistic rhetoric
see esp. the famous digression at Tht. 172C-7c. And in view of my earlier discussion of rhetoric as an
expression of estrangement between philoi, we should notice that at Meno 7Sd3 Plato links
(Socratic) dialogue specifically with a sense of ph ilia.
8
Gods Cruel and Kind: Tragic and Civic Theology
ROBERT PARKER
l'he gods protect us: that proposition, so far from self-evident to most modern
readers of Greek tragedy, was none the less in some contexts of public speech in
Athens a truism. It is said that under the ancien regime in France it was an
article of popular faith that the king himself was good and a friend to the
people; his ministers, that was where the problem lay.l An identical faith is
characteristic of the Athenian democracy, if one substitutes 'the gods' for 'the
king', and 'politicians' or (when a politician is speaking) 'my political
opponents' for the king's ministers. The theme echoes out with remarkable
consistency over 250 years, starting with Solon: 'Our city will never perish by
the destiny of Zeus or the other blessed immortal gods: such a protectress, ...
daughter of a mighty father, Pallas Athena, is holding her hands out over it. But
the citizens themselves want to ruin the great city in their folly.' It is taken up in
Clouds-comedy, we note, sides with oratory against tragedy-where the
chorus claim to have tried to protect Athens from Cleon by thundering during
an election meeting, but the Athenians in their folly chose him general all the
same: 'for they say that foolish decisions are typical of this city, but the gods
turn for the best whatever mistakes you make.' They then suggest drastic
action against Clecn as a way of 'turning the mistake for the best'. 'For they
say': the idea of the gods' active benevolence to Athens, mentioned again in
Ecclesiazusae as a piece of proverbial wisdom, was evidently a cliche. It comes
up again repeatedly in Dem~sthenes. 'I think anyone who judges the gods'
services to us fairly would feel great gratitude to them, bad though our situation
is in many ways. The fact that we have lost so much in the war ought to be
ascribed to our own carelessness, but the fact that this did not occur long ago,
and that an alliance has now become available, if we take advantage of it, that
will counterbalance Philip's strengths, I count as a benefit due to their favour.'
That passage is from the first Olynthiac; the second Olynthiac opens with the
claim, 'There are many signs of the goodwill of the gods to our city, and not
least the present situation.' In the speech On the Embassy Demosthenes
actually quotes the passage of Solon from which we started. The same theme
could, of course, be turned against him by Aeschines: 'didn't the gods warn us,
1 Cf. Veyne (1988), 91.

144 Robert Parker
didn't they give signs in advance, doing everything short of speaking in human
voice? I've never known so clear a case of a city being protected by the gods but
being betrayed by some of its politicians.'2
The proposition that Athens was 'dear to the gods' was evidently one that
every politician had ceaselessly to affirm, never to question. In the satire of
Aristophanes' Knights, the demagogues compete with escalating claims about
the benefits that 'the goddess herself' under her various titles intends to 'pour
over the people'. This too was a theme constantly stressed in the mythology of
the city, with its very concrete instances of divine favour: Erechtheus nursed by
Athena, Demeter visiting Eleusis, Athena and Poseidon actually competing for
possession of the land ... 'Our city deserves to be praised by all mankind, not by
us alone, for numerous reasons, but first and above all because it is dear to the
gods' the ironic Plato makes his funeral orator say.3 The French peasant's belief
in the fundamental goodness of the king was a protection against ultimate
despair: ministers can change, but to live under a bad king is to live in an
irredeemably bad world. It was equally important for Athenians to believe that
their troubles came from Demosthenes or Aeschines, not the everlasting gods.
Active benevolence is scarcely an obvious characteristic of the gods of
tragedy. Thence arises the antithesis 4 of the title of this paper, between gods
cruel and kind. That very crude opposition is intended only as a point of
departure, and we can now look at various ways of reacting to it and refining it.
It is not a question of picking the one correct solution and rejecting all others:
almost all the approaches we will look at have some virtue.
One possibility is to eliminate the antithesis by removing one pole: by dis-
qualifying, that is, either tragedy or oratory as a witness to 'real religion'. In
principle, obviously) either pole could be removed. But a case for writing off the
religion of the orators as somehow unreal seems never to have been made
(often though it is ignored in practice). 5 So what this option entails is in practice
the elimination of tragedy. The strongest and most challenging form of this
thesis is perhaps that summed up in an aphorism of Northrop Frye: 'the state-
ment "all's well that ends well" is a statement about the structure of comedy,
and is not intended to apply to actual life. '6 That is to say, the world view of a
2 Solon fro 4 (cf. 11. 1-2) West; Ar. Clouds 587-9, Eeel. 473-5 (cf. Peace 211-12: the gods offer
peace, the Greeks choose war; note too Pluto 725-6, and on 'Soteira' Frogs 380-r); Dem. 1. 10,2. I,
19.254-6; Aeschin. 3. 13 0 ; cf. Dem. 18. 153, 195, Aeschin. 3.57 and, with 'luck' instead of gods,
Dem. 1. 1,4. 12. Note still Moretti (1967), 33. 29, of 196/5 Be. Solon's position is that of Hom. Od. I.
32 -43.
3 Ar. Knights 109 0 -5, 1168-89; PI. Menex. 237C-d. Athens is regularly 'sacred' (e.g. Ar. Knights
582, Peace 1036); cf. the allusion in a funerary epigram of (?) the 4th cent. to at Si 8EOiol. ILdAloTa
</>iAal. OV7lToiai T€ ~O'1va, (IG iil. 10510, CEG ii, no. 606.8).
4 To which]. D. Mikalson in particular has drawn attention, in Mikalson (1983), esp. 58-60, and
(1991), e.g. 18-19.
5 Even in such a great book as Dodds (195 I), for instance, the orators are little regarded.
6 Frye (1965), 48: cf. id. (197 6), 13: 'imaginative structures ... are independent of belief.' The
position of Heath (198T 49-64) is comparable. On the similarities between literary and theological
'story-telling' cf. Kermode (1967), and more generally on plots Brooks (1984), ch. I; the same
Gods Cruel and Kind 145
literary work is a function of genre and plot. Tragedy requires cruel gods just as
comedy requires kind gods; but the same audience at the same festival was
presented with both the one and the other; both sets, therefore, are distinct
from whatever theological conceptions the audience may have entertained
outside the theatre. Such by implication is the position of Aristotle, for whom
objections to the portrayal of the gods in tragedy can be countered by the argu-
ment 'such is the legend'. The heroes of tragedy, it can be argued, do not suffer
in order to illustrate theological truths; the plays acquire a theology (as
Aristotle might have said) in order to illustrate the sufferings of the heroes. If
Phaedra is to be wretched, Aphrodite must be cruel. Again, theology has a
narratological function) as a way of conferring shape and cohesion (or a
planned incoherence) on a sequence of events. This position too the ancients
partly anticipated, in their almost unanimous treatment of the deus ex machina
as a structural device. Is not the plot sequence 'divine justice questioned-
divine justice vindicated' which in part structures) for instance) the Ion of
Euripides a mere frame on which to hang a tale? Are not the 'rough and tangled
paths of the mind of Zeus' at bottom just the plot) in all its twists and turns?
~Zeus' has of late been accorded a new title of honour) as 'the divine trope'.7
The best critics of Greek tragedy often stress that the poets are not primarily
concerned with problems of theology or theodicy.8 Yet one might concede this
point to Frye and wish to resist on another. Plots are plots, not credos) we may
allow: but do not beliefs impose certain constraints upon plots? If the misery of
Phaedra, caused by the cruelty of Aphrodite, is to be credible) must not the
cruelty of Aphrodite fall within the range of forms of divine behaviour
acknowledged by Greek belief? At this point the theology of tragedy and of
civic speech are still potentially in conflict. To eliminate the conflict, one must
go on to deny that any need was felt to accommodate tragic representations of
the divine to conceptions held outside the theatre; belief then would not impose
even constraints upon imaginative structures.
No one, of course) should doubt that some such constraints did exist. A poet
exercising absolute freedom t~ represent the gods just as he pleased would be
simply incomprehensible. But on this view the constraints, that are also condi-
tions of comprehensibility, are those of a wholly literary and mythological
tradition. Aphrodite's cruelty to Phaedra makes sense because she has already
been cruel to many other men and women in many other plays and myths.
aperfu is present, with the terms reversed, in the common Renaissance and later image of God the
playwright (Battenhouse (1941), 123-6; Williams (1979),22-4).
7 By Rosenmeyer (1982), 280 (cf. id. (1955), 242-60). Aristotle: Poet. 1460b35-7. Deus ex
machina: Schmidt (1963), ch. I; Brink (1963-82) on Hor. AP 191-2; it is already seen as a plot-
device in PI. Gral.425d.
8 Easterling (197 8: 15 2 ) writes 'as usual, [Sophocles] is more interested in the fact of human suf-
fering than its cause'; yet more emphatically, Reinhardt (1979), 134. The same point is made about
Euripides by de Romilly (1961), 106-7. Such claims do not contradict the observation made later
about the tendency of characters in tragedy to look for explanations and justifications.
Robert Parker
This argument (which we can call 'the dissociative argument') raises difficult
theoretical issues. It is obviously true that some elements in literary works make
sense to readers or viewers not in terms of personal experience but of generic
expectations and conventions.9 To take an easy example, the many divine
epiphanies near the end of plays by Euripides create in the spectator a sense of
recognition, of arriving at familiar ground. But that sense is primarily based not
on a feeling that this is, indeed, ho\v gods behave but on the recognition of a
familiar convention at \vork. Similarly, the spectator's anticipation that any
prophecy by Tiresias will prove correct is based not on a general faith in seers
(regular objects in fact of scepticism and mockery) but on Tiresias' particular
reputation, canonized in earlier myth and literature, as one seer who 'has never
spoken falsehood to the city'.l0 It was, again, only as a narrative pattern that
threatening oracles and instructions to perform human sacrifice were familiar.
And of course large chunks of tragedy's distant, mythological world lacked con-
temporary equivalents.
The problem surely is to know what elements would be understood by an
audience by reference to convention, and in what degree. This last qualification
is necessary because the choice is very seldom a simple either/or. We have just
classified the deus ex machina and the infallibility ofTiresias as clearly conven-
tional; but Greeks of course acknowledged that both epiphanies and true
prophecies could occur. And it is the observer, not the Greek, who maintains
that 'threatening oracles' occur only in narratives. it There are, no doubt,
theoretical concepts and discriminations that could be of use. The best that can
be done here is to stress how many aspects of the presentation of religion in
tragedy discourage the kind of response merely in terms of literary tradition
that the dissociative argument assumes. The postulates of the plot are often
fabulous, the treatment tends towards the realistic and contemporary. Indeed it
might be said in a crude general way that while the political world of tragedy is
'pre-historic, with contemporary intrusions', its religious world is 'contempor-
ary, with pre-historic intrusions'. Tragic characters pray, make sacrifice, bring
offerings, and dedicate spoils very much (so far as we can judge) in accord with
fifth-century formulas and protocols;12 like Athenians but unlike men of the
9 On the different ways in which readers 'naturalize' (make sense of) literary texts cf. Culler
(1975), 44-63. 'Personal experience' too is shaped by expectations and conventions which, Don
Fowler points out to me, many recent theorists would wish to characterize as story-patterns; thus
the distinction between literature, supposedly shaped by narrative structures, and 'real life' , sup-
posedly experienced without mediation, collapses. But it remains true that certain types of plot
appear to be Jargely confined to literature, and that the Greeks explicitly recognized generic peculi-
arities of tragedy (such as the deus ex machina; and cf. n. 58 below).
10 Soph. Ant. 1094; cf. Sourvinou-Inwood (1989: 137), and more generally on this feature of
tragic characterization Goldhill (1990b: 109). On tragic seers cf. Mikalson (199 1 ), 95.
11 Such oracles were given e.g. to Laius, Aleus father of Auge, Acrisius. Note, however, that
stories of this type were also told about historical figures (such as Astyages grandfather of Cyrus).
12 These sweeping claims can only be briefly documented here. On tragic prayers and offering
formulas see Ausfeld (1903); most of his parallels come, inevitably, from other literature (those
heroic age (at least as portrayed in Homer) they venerate heroes, perform con-
sultative sacrifices before battle, and devote much attention to tendance of
their dead. 13 Of the numerous declarations they make about the operations of
the gods, of the turns of phrase they use that betray theological assumptions,
very many find parallels outside the theatre. 14 The basic articulations of the
divine world, the categories by which the gods are classified and powers
assigned to each, are those of ordinary civic religion. 15 Several well-known
historical instances of the religious dilemmas created by supplication show how
close here tragedy is to life. 16 The doubts and difficulties that tragic characters
(particularly those of Euripides) express about divination and miraculous
events and divine control of the world are often echoed or countered in fourth-
century sources; and tragedy is in fact a prime source for unorthodox religious
thought in the fifth century.17 But not for unorthodoxy alone: again and again it
echoes traditional religion's central concern to establish with the gods a relation
of mutual benefit, chans, a continuing interchange of gifts and services. The
ideal of charis is fundamental to civic religion, fundamental too to the religion
of tragedy. 18
from comedy are particularly valuable), but for extra-literary attestation of familiar prayer-
formulas cf. e.g. PI. erat. 400e (concern to establish the god's correct name), Lys. 2. 39: iKETEiat
8EWV ~ BVOLWV aVQj.Lv7]oELS'. Note too e.g. Fraenkel (1950) on Aesch. Ag. 508 ff. (address to gods on
home-coming: add Plaut. Amph. 180-4); Eur. Ale. 334-5 with Fraenkel's note on Aesch. Ag. 350
and Fraenkel (1957), 138 n. 4 (prayer for preservation of blessings); Eur. Ion 704 fT. with Versne1
(19 8 5); Soph. Phil. 528 with Fraenkel (1977),59. On sacrifice see Denniston (1939) on Eur. El.
79 1 ff. (but tragic sacrifices tend to be of a heroic grandeur, as in Soph. Traeh. 760-2); on purificat-
ory sacrifices Parker (19 83), 370-4.
13 Heroes: Aesch. Ag. 516 (see FraenkeI (195 0 ) on the mixed Homeric/contemporary character
of this speech); sacrifices: Eur. Held. 399-400, 673, Phoen. 1255-6, cf. the crossing-sacrifices in
Aesch. Sepl. 378-9, Eur. Hypsipyle fro 1. iv. 29-32. Even the polluting demons of tragedy now have
a striking parallel in the fifth century purificatory law from Selinus published by Jameson el al.
(1993)·
14 Note e.g. Dover (1974),258-60, on divine justice; Aesch. Sept. 266, 596, Supp. 753-4, Eur. El.
193-7, Held. 766 -9, Hel. 759-60, Supp. 594-5, IT 910-11 with Xen. Hell. 2.4· 14,3.4. 11, Anab.
3· 2.10, on the need for divine friendship in crises, especially battles; Aesch. fro 315, 395 Radt, Eur.
El. 80-1, fro 432 Nauck with Xen. Cyrop. 1. 6.6, god helps those who help themselves (cf. Dover
(I974), 259; Versnel (1981 ),24); Soph. OT28o-I, fro 919, Eur. Ion 374-7 with Xen. Cyrop. I. 6.46,
gods reveal only what they themselves choose. And see now Iv1ikalson (1991: 183-201), especially
the conclusion on 201.
15 For such classifications in Aeschylus see Ag. 88-90, Supp. 23-5, Sept. 271-3: note too the
common occurrence throughout tragedy of such categories as 'city-holding' (e.g. Aesch. Ag. 33 8,
Sepl. 185, Supp. 493), 'of the territory' (EYXwptOS') (Aesch. Supp. 482, 520, Ag. 810; Soph. El.67),
'ancestral' (Aesch. Sept. 1010, 1017; Soph. El. 1374-5), 'standing before' (7Tpo(JTarr]pws) (Aesch.
Sept. 449; Soph. Trach. 20 9, El. 637), and 'before the door' (Soph. El. 1374-5, cf. Aesch. Ag. 519)
gods; and above all the ubiquity in tragedy of Zeus in his two domestic aspects as Herkeios and
Ktesios.
16 See esp. Hdt. I. 157-60; 6. 108. 4; Thuc. I. 24. 6, 126-8, I 36; 3. 75, 80- I, with Gould (1973).
17 Cf. n. 51 below. The doubts about certain 'incredible' features of myths expressed by
Euripidean characters, e.g. in fA 793-800, Hel. 21, EI. 737-44, anticipate the methods of rational-
izers such as Palaephatus (though c£ Stinton (1976)); those about manlike (cf. ReI. 744 fT.) or
others like them are answered in texts such as Xen. Eq. Mag. 9. 7-9, Cyrop. I. 6.46; those about
divine morality anticipate 4th-cent. philosophical developments.
18 Cf. Parker (forthcoming); for an excellent brief discussion see Yunis (19 88 ), 101-11.
Robert Parker
Tragedy, of course, is not an amber in which fragments of real life are

preserved intact. Since literature is an artefact, not even the most 'realistic'
item can enter it unmediated by literary shaping. To take a simple example, it
would be naive to think that the frequency with which characters in tragedy
invoke the gods can teach us very much about extra-dramatic practices: a
prayer is too useful a device for revealing a character's state of mind, or simply
bringing a scene to a powerful close. 19 One should not be misled by the
semblance of realism: tragic characters can distinguish in a plausible-sounding
way the circumstances in which human sacrifice is and is not justifiable, while
in the actual Athenian world it was unthinkable in every circumstance. 20 We
cannot encapsulate the relation of tragedy to 'real religion' in a simple formula.
Tragedy is complex and heterogeneous; 'real religion' too is not that simple and
(as it were) solid and almost material thing that one may in unguarded
moments suppose, but is itself a jostling mass of competing beliefs and values
and interpretations and uncertainties (of which the images of the divine pre-
sented in tragedy are themselves a part). And it is wrong to suggest (as this dis-
cussion has perhaps implied) that the spectator of tragedy sorts its religious
content into two heaps, one of realistic and one of mythological or fantastic ele-
ments. References to Zeus Ktesios are natural because the god is familiar from
life; the infallibility of Tiresias or the necessity of sacrificing Iphigeneia are
natural because they correspond to mythological convention; but in the world
of the play the two forms of naturalness are not felt as distinct. 21 There, every-
thing is equally true and equally false.
These qualifications are irrelevant, however, for our present purpose. By no
means is the religious world of tragedy simply that of everyday experience; but
one need not claim that it is in order to argue that the one was felt to have some
bearing on the other. All that is needed is to show that the two worlds cannot be
clearly separated in the way that the dissociative argument requires. Such a
dissociation would in fact surely be a paradox, when ·so many tragedies issue
precisely in the foundation of a civic cult. And there is in Plato a conspicuous
counter-case to the hypothesis that audiences necessarily distinguished clearly
between (in the terms of a later distinction) 'mythological' (or 'poetic') and
'civic' theology. The contrast on this point between Aristotle and Plato is very
striking, as has often been observed. 22 For Aristotle, the theology of tragedy is
so much a matter of poetic tradition that it really does not matter what the
dramatists say about the gods. For Plato it matters very profoundly, because it
is precisely through poetry that mistaken popular views of deity find their most
powerful and most dangerous expression.
19 Cf. Rosenmeyer (1982), 264-6; Mikalson (1989), 85 n. 24.

20 Eur. EI. 1020-9, fA 965-7, cf. Soph. EI. 566-76 for a defence of Iphigeneia's sacrifice; on
human sacrifice, Henrichs (1981) and Hughes (1991).
21 C[ n. 9 above and Veyne (1988), 20-1.
b
22 Arist. Poet. J46o 35-7; PI. Rep. 377b-383e. 'Later distinction': c[ Feeney (1991),45-5 I.
We revert noVv' to our antithesis and another way of dealing with it. An
ingenious theory accepts and insists on the divergence between the worlds of
tragedy and of the city. Tragedy, it explains, takes place in not-Athens; the
heroes who sin so greatly are men of a different mould, the cities on which they
bring down such terrible vengeance are far removed from Pericles' pious and
democratic polis. Tragedy is a negative example for the contemporary
Athenians, on a grand scale. 23 Thus the Oresteia, for instance, moves from the
ancient sufferings and crimes of the royal house of Argos to a vision, which
bridges the gap between past and present, of an ordered existence in a kingless
Athens, dear to the gods.
As it happens, the attitude to heroic legend which this theory attributes to the
tragedians is occasionally explicit in the fourth century. According to Isocrates,
for instance, it is one of the glories of Athens that crimes such as those of
Oedipus and Orestes happened elsewhere. Even an incident from the diplo-
matic history of the 360s can be cited: the Athenian politician Callistratus
warned the Arcadians not to ally themselves with Thebes and Argos, the cities
of polluted Oedipus and Orestes: but where did those heroes end their lives,
Theban Epaminondas asked in reply.24 But this approach perhaps over-
simplifies a complicated relation, as if the mythological world of Thebes and
Argos were wholly contrasted with contemporary Athens and in no sense
bodied it forth. It is true, indeed, that there is no surviving tragedy in which the
cruelty of cruel gods is displayed ~gainst Athens itself, and it is hard to believe
that such a tragedy ever existed. The gods' love for Athens is a sacred doctrine,
beyond direct challenge even on the tragic stage. The worst communal disasters
are set not merely outside Athens but outside Greece, at Troy or, in Aeschylus'
play, among the Persians. When by contrast, in the experimental early phase of
tragedy, Phrynichus portrayed the Sack of Miletus (a city allied to Athens and
supposedly even colonized from there), he was fined by the Athenians for
'reminding them of their own afflictions'.25 But we should not conclude that the
Athenian spectator could thenceforth survey the errors and disasters of not-
Athens with a detached complacency, without a sense that the afflictions of
not-Athenians could also be his own. That would be the perspective of an
Isocrates, not a Sophocles. In tragedy, it has been well argued, Troy is a symbol
of the grim truth that even a city-any city-could be morta1. 26 If divine wrath
in tragedy is exercised only outside Athens, the antithesis between tragic and
civic theology is softened and veiled, perhaps, but not removed.
The approaches discussed so far allow that some conflict exists between the
two theologies, and seek to resolve it. Another possibility is to offer a different
23 This is implicit in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (1988), chs. 1-7, passim; cf. ibid. 244-5, 308-10; on
Thebes as anti-Athens see Zeitlin (I990b), with the comments of Easterling (1989), 11-14.
24 Isoc. Panath. 121-2; Nepos, Epaminondas 6. 1-3 ~ Pluto Reg. apophth. 193C-d, Praecep. reip.
ger. 810 f;Justin 11. 3. 11.
25 Hdt. 6. 2 I. 2.
26 Cf. Vidal-N aquet, pp. I I 3- 14 above.
ISO Robert Parker
account of tragic or civic theology, or of both, which will show them after all to
be consistent. We may begin with tragedy. It is obvious that the crude initial
claim that the gods of tragedy are cruel is open to drastic revision; obvious too
that a huge subject can only be treated here in the form of a sketch.
'VfvTe have just noted that the angry gods of tragedy are never angry with
Athens. There are in fact a number of places embedded in tragedy where, in
regard to Athens, the goodwill of the gods is stressed just as in political speech:
far from contradicting the civic theology, tragedy here very powerfully conveys
it. Most conspicuously, at the end of Eumenides the Erinyes address the
Athenians: 'greetings, people of the city, seated close to Zeus, dear to the
maiden dear to Zeus: the father reveres you as you sit beneath Pallas' wings.'
The Athenians have direct access, therefore, via Athena to the favour of Zeus,
and the city is accordingly 'most dear to the gods', 8EOr!>t)..EaTQ7IJ' Similarly,
famous choral songs in Medea and Oedipus at Colonus stress the gods' love for
Athens and Colonus respectively, the latter containing also an assurance of
Zeus' protection of the land. In Persae we hear (from an enemy) that 'the gods
protect the city of goddess Pallas', in Heraclidae that Athenian arms cannot
lose since 'Pallas will not endure to be defeated (VLKWfLEV7J)'; this latter claim is,
as it were, a logical truth, since she was worshipped at Athena under the title
'Victory'. Euripides' Supplices ends with the rousing statement of Theseus that
'Queen Athena, I shall obey your advice. You set me straight so that I do not err.
I ask only that you guide me. For if you show favour to the city we shall live in
safety from now on. '27 In none of these cases is the cheerful claim devalued by
the context or the subsequent development of the plot.
Here tragic and civic theology converge. Elsewhere, their concerns may be so
different that it is simply not necessary to confront the two genres. The relation
that is at issue in oratory is that of the gods, collectively, with the city of Athens.
The issue in tragedy is very commonly that between the gods or an individual
god and an individual or individual household, not the city. To take an extreme
instance, the case of divine malevolence so drastically dramatized in Heracles is
Hera's revenge against Heracles, not against the city of Thebes; the problem of
theodicy posed by Andromache is the treatment of Neoptolemus by Apollo; and
so on. Where in tragedy it is stressed that the gods involved are gods 'of the
city', there these civic gods tend to stand by the city concerned. The model case
here is Seven against Thebes, a play which contains the remarkable expression
8EOi 7ToAi'TaL, formally perhaps 'gods of the city' but surely also by suggestion
'citizen gods' (253). The play opens with Thebes under siege, and this worst of
all crises in the life of a city is presented very much in terms of the ties of mutual
27 Aesch. Eum. 868-9,996-1002 (cf. 916-21); Eur. Med. 824-45; Soph. DC 668-719; Aesch.
PeTS. 347; Eur. Held. 35 2 ; Supp. 1227-31: cf. Soph. El. 707; Eur. Hipp. 974. For other flattering
references to Athens see Eur. Ion 29-30,589 £, Ereehlheus fr. 50.5-13 Austin, Held. 69 (all endors-
ing the myth of autochthony) and e.g. Soph. Ajax, 861, Eur. IT 1088, Hipp. 1094, Tro. 207-8,
796 ff. (the myth of the first olive).
Gods Cruel and Kind
obligation and benefit that link a city to its gods. Eteocles reminds them that the
safety of the city is a matter of 'common interese, since it is a 'prosperous city
that honours the gods' (76-7). A chorus of young Theban women then runs to a
precinct of all the gods and makes desperate appeal. The gods are urged to
'remember public offerings' and show that they are 'city-loving' (r 76-7); they
are begged to 'hold protection over' the city (2 r 4), and asked what better city
they could hope to find (304) (for 'it is said that the gods of a captured city
depart', 2 r 7- r 8). Epithets such as 7TOAtOaOvxoS', 'city-holding', are repeatedly
applied to them, and the descent of the Thebans from Ares and Aphrodite is
stressed (r 35-44). But of course the relation that receives such emphasis in this
play does not in the end break down. Indeed it is crucial to the whole dramatic
balance of the second half of the play that the death of the brothers, tragic
though it is, is the means by which the city is saved. 28 As in the Oresteia, so here
the great counterbalance to the affiiction of a household is the welfare of a city.
Of all the many instances of apparent divine cruelty and injustice that are
commonly discussed by critics of tragedy, only one concerns the relation of
gods to a city. We will leave aside for the moment this one-admittedly most
important-exception, Euripides' Troades.
It may be objected that this distinction between the relation of gods to
individuals and to cities is too sharp: a power that can be cruel and arbitrary to
one can be so likewise to many. The objection has force, but the issue of the
gods' relations with individuals is much too large to be confronted here. 29 One
point, however, can be made. In many cases where the tragic gods appear harsh,
they are none the less acting in accordance with principles that were wholly
accepted in civic theology. The harshness of the tragic gods is normally
associated, if in complex ways, with considerations of justice; they are
punishers and avengers, not forces of arbitrary cruelty. More randomly mali-
cious modes or motives of divine action-'envy' of human prosperity,30
28 See e.g. 71, 764-5, 815-17, with Winnington-Ingram (1983), 16-54; on the Oresteia, Meier
(1990 ), 90 - 1; Macleod (1982) = (1983), 20-40; this approach is central to Seaford (1994), e.g.
344-62 .
29 Such a discussion would need to consider, in particular, questions of time-scale (Cadmus in
Bacchae, for instance, is promised long-term compensation for immediate suffering) and the con-
trasting perspectives ofmeo and gods. For one study in these terms see Sourvinou-Inwood, Ch. 9 in
this volume.
30 Divine envy is mentioned in Hdt. 1. 32. I, 3. 40.2, 7. 100.2, 7. 46. 4, and Pindar, Isth. 7· 39,
Pyth. 10.20 (some, however, see these as a 'moralized' divine resentment). It is explicitly rejected in
Aesch. Ag. 750-62 (cf. Eum. 532-8) and by implication through the contrast of Pers. 362 and 808-
IS (see Winnington-Ingram (1973) - (1983), I-IS); vast prosperity is still, however briefly, seen as
dangerous in Ag. 1005-13, Sept. 768-71 (cf. Ag. 468-70 on good repute). In Sophocles I find only
the textually problematic Ant. 613-14, where the chorus perhaps (but if so, perhaps misguidedly)
treats great prosperity as dangerous; Soph. El. 1466 in Aegisthus' mouth proves nothing, and may
be corrupt (BEOU for q,96vou Nauck). The old doctrine seems to creep back in Euripides, though
mostly without great emphasis: the 4>B6vos 8«iJv in Eur. Supp. 348 and fA 1097 is a justified resent~
ment, but in Or. 974-5, in Electra's mouth, sounds like envy; cf. Eur. Hee. 58, Polydorus' ghost to
Hecuba, dVTLu7JKwaas Si UE I q,8EiplL Of.WV TLS 'T7js 7TapOtO' EV7Tpagias, and the precautionary
Robert Parker
'trick-devising deceit' ,31 ensnaring of the innocent 32 -though often mentioned

in tragedy, are seldom endorsed. But the possibility of divine revenge, often
ferocious, was of course one of an Athenian's basic theological presumptions
outside the theatre. This was not perhaps a side of the divine nature that was
much stressed in morale-boosting political speeches; but it was taken for
granted when, for instance, orators discussed the future prospects of their
impious adversaries at law and other opponents. Ate too, the madness sent by
the gods in punishment of a crime, was not a condition to which tragic heroes
alone were subject: many Athenians suffered from it, at least according to their
political enemies. 33
The contrast between tragedy and oratory lies in the way in which the two
genres treat the theme of divine revenge, not in the belief itself. In public
speech, the world is divided into the good-the speaker and his audience-and
the impious, the speaker's opponent and people like him. For them no suffering
could be too bad. But in tragedy a victim of divine punishment very seldom
seems merely to have got what he or she deserved. The madness of Sophocles'
A;ax, for instance, is due to 'the wrath of sacred Athena', provoked as the
prophet Calchas reveals by his own arrogant boast that he could secure glory
even without divine aid (756-77). In the prologue, Athena displays A;ax in his
madness to Odysseus, invites him to revel, as she herself does, gloatingly, in an
enemy's downfall, and draws a conclusion of simple piety: 'Seeing this, never
yourself utter any arrogant word against the gods ... the gods love the moder-
ate, and hate the bad' (127-33). Odysseus, however, reacts to Ajax not as a
terrible warning of the consequences of arrogance, but as an example of the
pitiable weakness of all mortals: '1 pity him, enemy though he is, because he is
bound to a terrible ruin ... I see that all of us who are alive are nothing but
phantoms or empty shadows' (121-6). Athena's interpretation is not wrong,
nor is she criticized for it;34 but she reacts as a goddess, Odysseus with the
formula in Ale. 1135. For enlightened thinkers, 'phlhonos stands outside the divine chorus' (PI.
Phaedr. 247a7, c( Tim. 2gel-3): the great exception in tragedy is the portrayal of Hera in Eur. Her.
31 It is mentioned in Aesch. Pers. 93, cf. Ag. 273, 478, Soph. Ant. I 2 17, but shown in action only
in [Eur.] Rhes. 637 ff.
32 The famous lines of Aeschylus' Niobe (fr. 154a 15-16 Radt), according to which god 'plants a
fault in mortals, when he wishes utterly to destroy a house" referred in context to the punishment
of a guilty house, a point notoriously ignored by the indignant Plato who cites them (Rep. 380a): cf.
Theog. 151-2, and the works cited by Radt in his note on Aesch.loc. cit., also Fraenkel (194 2 ), 239.
33 See references in Parker (1983), 16 n. 73; c( Ober-Strauss (1990) on the use of 'tragic para-
digms' by the opponents of Andocides cited in Andoc. Myst. 29, 113-14: they suppose that the
orators are directly influenced by tragedy. Richard Rutherford reminds me of the explicit allusions
to tragedy or tragic myth in Andoc. 1. 129, Antiphon 1. 17 (cf. Knox (1979), 22-3), Dem. 21. 149-
though opponents could ridicule such TpaycpSia or bombast (LS] S.v. TpaycpS€w II, TpaycpBia II. 2).
34 Gill (1990: 21) speaks of Athena's 'crude moralizing about Ajax's lack of "self-control''';
Heath (1987: 171) and Blundell (1989: 62) argue that her real concern is with divine privilege rather
than human morality. But note her valid stress on the instability of human life (131-2), and
Winnington-Ingram's strong argument (1980: Ch.2) that Ajax's character is indeed flawed by a
megalomanic pride: Ajax is a victim of himself, only secondarily of Athena.
sympathy of an enlightened man, in a way that very pointedly underlines the

different values (products of their different situations) of immortals and
mortals. It is with the man that we, mortals ourselves, must inevitably identify,
even if we simultaneously accept the justice of Athena's words. This scene of
divine vengeance has recently acquired two partners, from papyri that are
convincingly ascribed to Sophocles. 35 In one, Athena reacts with furious anger
to the rape of Cassandra by Locrian Ajax; and here it is doubtful whether any
sympathy for her victim would have been in place. But it is impossible not to be
horrified by a scene in which Apollo eggs on his sister to shoot Niobe's helpless,
cowering daughters: 'Do you see that one hiding inside in terror, cowering
secretly by herself in the store-room among the jars? Fire an arrow at her
quickly, before she manages to hide!' In Bacchae and Hippolytus, Euripides
goes further in treating the victims of divine revenge pathetically; and a note
not merely of awed pity but of pained protest makes itself heard. Already in
Aeschylus (though the issue bears' no central dramatic weight) the doomed
Cassandra must earn all the audience's pity when she asks her divine lover
Apollo, whom she has admittedly wronged, why he has forsaken her.36
A similar contrast can be drawn between the treatment of delayed divine
punishment in the two genres. For Solon, it is part of the justice of the gods that
they punish the innocent descendants of guilty ancestors: such delayed
punishment is not a problem but the solution to a problem, and the world would
be a less fair place without it. This is still the view ofLycurgus, that other touch-
stone of civic religious attitudes, in the fourth century.37 The position in tragedy
is much more complicated, in a variety of ways. On the one hand, ancestral guilt
is seldom seen as a simple and sufficient explanation of any character's mis-
fortune;38 and delayed divine punishment occurs by way of normal patterns of
human motivation, not as a bolt from the blue. In Seven against Thebes, the
burden of the past is indeed upon Eteocles and Polyneices, but it works through
their own free decision to engage in unnatural single combat with a brother;39
while in the Oresteia, Aegisthus' finally satisfied passion for revenge against
Agamemnon, the son of his father's enemy, is the human correlate, and vehicle,
of the 'late vengeance of the gods'. To this extent, Aeschylus implicitly
mitigates the harsh Solonian doctrine of the punishment of 'the innocent' by
35 Fr. IOC Radt CAias Lokros); fro 44Ia Radt (Niobe).

36 Ag. 1269-76: c( Reinhardt (1949), 10 3.
37 Solon fro 13.25-32; Lycurg. Leoer. 79; for a famous protest see Theog. 731-42 (cf. Eur. fro
980); and c£ in general the works cited in Parker (1983), 186, 198-201.
38 Rosenmeyer (1955: 250) goes only a little too far in saying: 'the divine curse which bangs over
a house is not the cause of its catastrophe; it is the tragic vehicle which allows the spectator to
become wholly absorbed in the disaster.'
39 Gantz (1982) plays down the importance of the idea too much, because he treats inherited
and personal guilt (which he rightly also detects) as mutually exclusive (for similar scepticism see
Gagarin (1976), 62-4): cf. Garvie (1986), p. xxviii; also Daube (1938), 159, 166-78 (who notes
that the element of personal guilt is more clearly worked out among the Atreids than the
Labdacids ).
154 Robert Parker
'the gods' (as Plutarch was later to do explicitly, in his treatise on the theme 40 ).
On the other hand, he portrays with hideous actuality the plight of those who
belong to a polluted house, whose acts freely performed in the present turn out
to be co-determined by the curse of the past. A famous chorus in Sophocles'
Antigone goes even further in portraying the Labdacid house as one in which
not so much guilt as suffering is endemic over the generations. (Antigone, in
fact, is perhaps the closest that the Attic stage offers to an innocent victim born
of an unlucky stock. But even she has inherited a dangerous temperament from
her father which has contributed to her downfalL 41 ) Thus here again the
tragedian invites a response in terms of horrified fellow-feeling to the mortals
upon whom the divine justice is worked out. A great divide separates such
tragic portrayals from the easy moralism of oratory and, one must suppose,
conventional piety. But it is the same belief in divine vengeance that is being
handled in such strikingly different ways.
Before turning back to oratory, we should pause over the exception already
noted, the extreme instance of a portrayal in tragedy of divine hostility to a
community. What is presented in Troades is nothing less than ultimate disaster,
the sack of a city. In the prologue we are shown the city's divine patron,
Poseidon, leaving, in a terrible actualization of the grim saying that 'the gods
depart when a city is taken':42 'for when evil desolation overtakes a city, religion
sickens, and the gods no longer wish to be worshipped' (26-7). The Trojan
survivors stress, again and again, that they have been betrayed by the gods, that
the bonds they hoped to have established (through sacrifice, and even, this
being the world of myth, through marriage) have simply been ruptured. 43 It was
on evidences of just the kind that are here shown to be illusory that the
Athenians' faith in the gods' love for Athens was founded. The Trojan women's
complaints are unjustified only to the extent that Poseidon is not in fact
indifferent but helplessly regrets the city's fate; this he ascribes not to the
justice of Zeus but to the hatred of Hera and, above all, of Athena, which is
nowhere in the play given any further justification. 'Farewell, once prosperous
city with your finely wrought walls. You would still have stood firm on your
foundations, had not Pallas the daughter of Zeus destroyed you.' The play's
desolate atmosphere is only intensified by the revelation (also contained in the
.;0 Pluto Ser. num. 'l)ind. 2 I, s62e-563b. On Aeschylus' relation to Solon cf. Reinhardt (1949: 15-
17), who says, ~Aischylos reigt die Lucken auf, die die Solonische Theodizee verdeckte.'
41 Soph. Ant. 582-603, on which see Easterling (1978), 142; cf. II. 1-6, 49-57, 856-66, and for
Antigone's temperament 471-2; also OC 367-70,964-5, 1299. Note that the chorus who sing this
do see Antigone as guilty: a one· sided but not completely mistaken view (cf. Lloyd-Jones (1983b),
117; Sourvinou·lnwood (1989), 139-40). For ancestral guilt in Euripides see references in Parker
(1983: 199 n. 53), adding Supp. 835-6, 1078; for discussion see Said (1978: 223-35), who argues
that the presentation in Euripides criticizes and undercuts this form of explanation.
42 Aesch. Sept. 218: cf. Hutchinson (1985) ad loc., Pelling (1988) on Plut. Ant. 75.4, Diod. 13· 59.
2, and Soph. fro 452.
43 469-7 1,536 with 560-1, 597,612-13,696,775-6,821.-58,1060-80,1242, 1280-1,1287-
92; cf. Eur. Andr. 1009-27 (contrast 1251-2), and Yunis (1988), 81-7.
prologue) that Athena has now turned against the Greeks because of their
impieties committed during the sack, and \vill bring them to grief during the
journey home. Whatever the content of the two previous plays in the quasi-
trilogy which Troades concludes, it is hard to believe that any theological justi-
fication offered there for the Trojans' fate could have withstood the tide of
pathos that sweeps through the final play:~4 Troades does, it seems, defy civic
optimism with a shocking force. Of course, the city \vhich the love of the gods
failed to defend was not Athens, but the spectator would have been complacent
indeed who did not feel that it might have been.
We revert to the other pole of the antithesis. Can it be shown that civic theology
was less optimistic than the blandest formulations make it appear? The surviv-
ing texts scarcely suggest it. No text directly raises the possibility that the gods
might turn against Athens, nor even that they had done so at particular periods
in the past. Could an Athenian have envisaged an equivalent to Tacitus' 'deum
ira in rem romanam'45 as a principle of historical explanation? It would
certainly have been more normal to see the downfall of (as it might be) Critias
as a mark of the gods' favour than to see his reign as an expression of their
wrath.
The closest we come to the idea of gods working against Athens' interest is
when specific defeats or failures are ascribed to divine opposition-and even
here in rather veiled terms. 'You lost your heroic souls in battle, not through the
might of the enemy, but one of the demigods came against you ... to your hurt
... and has made the fulfilment of oracles certain for all men to heed in future':
that is not an extract from a tragedy, but a public epitaph set up for the dead at
(probably) the battle of Coronea in 447/6. Similarly, on the victims of the
Sicilian disaster: 'These men won eight victories against the Syracusans, while
the favour of the gods was equal on both sides.' And in funeral speeches
Athenian defeats are laid at the door of a daimon or luck or fate: Isocrates even
goes. so far as to speak of the gods' 'carelessness' or 'indifference' (cifL€AEta ).46
There is, however, a good reason why it is precisely in funerary speeches and
epitaphs that the Solonian rule of 'don't blame the gods' is violated: in these
contexts, it is obviously unthinkable to apply Solon's alternative 'blame the
men'. The partial lapse from civic optimism is as contextually determined as
that optimism itself normally is. And even here, there is a tendency to identify
the hostile force very vaguely as daimon or tyche, not 'the gods' and still less a
44 Cf. de Romilly (196 I), 122 n. 2; lvleridor (1984), 2 I I; but contrast Lefkowitz (1989), 79-80.
45 Annals 4. I and elsewhere. 'A striking and ominous phrase, but no confession of a creed', says
Syme (1958: 521); in truth, Romans like other peoples preferred to be reassured of divine favour,
even it seems, strikingly for our argument, in tragedies (Plaut. Amph. 41-4, to which Peter Wise-
man drew my attention).
46 CEG i, no. 5 "" IG i3. 1163; 'Euripides' ap. Pluto Nic. 17.4 = Page (1981), 156; Isoc. Panath.
186-7. Funerary speeches: Dem. 60. 19,21,23; Lys. 2.58 ('the fault of the commander or the will of
the gods'); cf. Dem. r8. 192-3, and Loraux (1981), 140; and from earlier, Hdt. 5. 87- 2.
Robert Parker
particular named Olympian. The whole of De most henes' De corona is a defence

of a policy that failed. Responsibility for the failure has to be diverted from the
man Demosthenes, but it is put on a quite unspecified 'the god' or an
impersonal 'fortune' rather than on any malevolent povver:P Another possib-
ility ¥/as perhaps to acknowledge past divine hostility in order to stress that it
had come to an end: some may wish, hO\\TeVer, to disallo\\' the only instance,
coming as it does in a speech ascribed by Thucydides to Nicias, a figure he
handles in the tragic mode. For what it is \vorth, Thucydides has Nicias assure
his men late in the Sicilian campaign (very pathetically, given the outcome):
'The enemy have enjoyed good fortune enough, and if our expedition here was
resented by any of the gods, we have been punished enough by now ... we can
reasonably hope to be more kindly treated now by the gods (for we deserve pity
from them by now rather than resentment).,48
Of course, very few public speeches survive, and we can be quite certain that
others were made which had occasionally to acknowledge that all was not well
in relations between the gods and the city. According to Thucydides, for
instance, the Athenians decided in 421 to restore the Delians to Delos, 'mindful
of the misfortunes they (the Athenians) had suffered in battle'. They suspected,
therefore, that Apollo's displeasure had been in part responsible for their
military difficulties. In the time of the plague too they had feared Apollo's
hostility and had performed numerous fruitless supplications. 49 We can only
guess at the tone adopted by speakers in the Assembly on such occasions: seers,
possibly, allowed themselves a more threatening note than did politicians. But it
is surely likely that the disfavour of a god was only acknowledged (perhaps
euphemistically, perhaps with stress that other gods remained friendly) as a
preliminary to proposing a means of bringing that god round.
We have failed, therefore, to discover a 'further voice' beneath the surface
optimism of civic speech. The tone of all these passages is quite different from
that of tragedy at its most plaintive and accusatory, or pathetic: in so far as
divine opposition is mentioned at all, the gods are an explanation or excuse, not
an object of blame. The reproachfulness and bitterness often shown by tragic
characters was apparently a note that it was simply not acceptable to raise in
political speech. Thucydides makes Pericles say of the plague with unenquiring
resignation, 'We must accept what comes from the gods (Ta DaLft0VLa) as inevit-
able'.50
We have also failed, therefore', to bring tragic and civic theology into
complete harmony: a notable difference of tone, at least, remains. 'What then
did the Athenians really think?' The enlightened reader will not
.p Dem. 18. 192-5, 200, 207-8, 245, 303, 306-]: cf. i\1ikalson (1983), 59-60. Alcibiades on his
return to Athens in 408 blamed his misfortunes not, except mildly, on the Athenians but on athou
Tl~ roXTJ 7TovTJpd Kai ~80VEPO~ oaip.wv, according to Plut. Ale. 33.2.
48 7. 77. 3-4.
49 Thuc. 5. 32 . 1, 2.47· 4, 2. 54· 4.
50 2.64. 2.
expect an actual answer to such a question: as if all Athenians thought the same,
or any Athenian thought the same on all occasions, or indeed could think with
dogmatic clarity about such an issue on any specific occasion. The best that can
be done is to indicate the special biases of the different genres, the factors that
cause them to differ in so far as they do. The first point to be made about
oratory is that it is by definition public speech; and all public speech even in the
freest society in the world is censored speech, governed by elaborate communal
codes of possibilities that may and may not be publicly acknowledged. The gods
do not exist, the gods are indifferent to mortal affairs, the gods are indifferent
to justice: these are three propositions about the divine that were certainly
thinkable in fifth-century Athens, but were certainly not speakable in a civic
context. One way in which we know that they were thinkable is that such
propositions are occasionally mentioned-though not, it must be allowed,
endorsed-in tragedy. It is characteristic that in the very first surviving tragedy
we find a casual allusion to practical atheists, people who hold that, whether the
gods exist or not, their grip on human affairs is so uncertain that in practice
they can be safely ignored; and there are several further references in tragedy
to various sceptical attitudes, of a kind which no competent public orator would
have dreamt of mentioning without elaborate expressions of pious horror. 51 It is
possible in fact to reverse the terms of the common opposition between oratory,
supposedly real, and tragedy, supposedly unreal: tragedy, it can be argued,
imitates the more immediate, uncensored play of emotion, and reveals the
private realities behind oratory's public fa~ade.52 To take a small but clear
example: the possibility that daytime action might be influenced by dreams is all
but ignored by oratory,53 abundantly attested by almost every other kind of
source, and by tragedy most of all.
Then there is the compulsory optimism which is so conspicuous a character-
istic of political speech. No one who aspires to leadership can allow that a situ-
ation is, quite simply, desperate. The recent British Chancellor who declared, at
the end of a chaotic and humiliating day wh.ich had seen the devaluation of
sterling in reversal of his own policy, that he was 'still singing in his bath' was
striving-a little clumsily, perhaps-to strike the obligatory nil desperandum
note. To turn from Mr Lamont to the sublime, the more Demosthenes abuses
the Athenian people and reminds them that the situation is dire, the more care-
ful he is to insist that it is not hopeless. Scandalously though Philip has been
allowed to advance, he can still be checked, if the Athenians will only make an
effort at last. The argument from the goodwill of the gods is for Demosthenes
51 Aesch. Pef3. 497-8: cf. e.g. Aesch. Ag. 369-72; Eur. IT 476-7,570-5, Hec. 488-9I, Supp.
549-55· Cf. Veyne's ingenious detection (1988: 31-2) of popular atheism in Ar. Knights 32.
52 Cf. Carey (1994), 175 on the 'coyness' of oratorical language.
53 The public consultation of Amphiaraus (Hyperid. Euxen. 14-17) is a special case. Demos·
thenes' appeal to a dream, a most unusual tactic, is ridiculed by Aeschines (3.77, 219)-who, how·
ever, allows some significance to the dream of a priestess (2. 10). It is only from Aristophanes'
mockery (Knights 809, 1°90-1) that we know that Cleon too adduced dreams.
Robert Parker
part of this strategy of reassurance, of insistence that at the deepest level

grounds for hope still remain. One might compare the appeal to 'the basic
health of the British economy' sotnetimes made by its erratic stewards during
the recent recession. The real culprit, they often insisted, was the global
recession: the luck of Athens, which in itself is good, has been a victim of the evil
luck afflicting the \vhole of mankind, says Demosthenes. 54
Finally, we must stress the contrast between \vhat might be called the
theological opacity of oratory and the transparency of tragedy. Oratory never
invites the listeners to believe that they can gaze at Olympus and penetrate the
counsels of the gods. The claims it makes about divine motivation are almost
invariably vague and general; they concern 'the gods', not named individuals,
and it would have been inconceivable for an orator to pretend, for instance, to
describe a clash of will between Poseidon and Athena. 55 But insight of just that
kind into the workings of Olympus was claimed by tragedy, in various ways
and at various levels, most obviously by actually bringing gods on the stage.
Oratory in consequence knows too little about details of the divine will for
speculation about hard cases of divine justice to have any point. The
tragedians know a lot about Olympus-Sophocles least, but even he some-
thing-and issues of theodicy acquire a corresponding urgency. If critics of
Greek tragedy constantly find themselves discussing the justice or injustice of
the gods, this is not because they import anachronistic theological preoccupa-
tions, or not merely so: the plays themselves raise these issues with a notable
insistence. Indeed one might almost advance as a defining characteristic of
Greek tragedy that it is a genre in which the characters assume that divine
justice is or ought to be visible in all the circumstances of life. Hundreds of
passages, in the mouths of otherwise most diverse characters, voice such an
expectation. The strangeness of this presentation has perhaps scarcely been
appreciated sufficiently. 'We have committed no crime against the gods for
which you should die', complains Admetus to his doomed wife Alcestis. 56 But
untimely death was a commonplace occurrence in Athens, and as far as we
know was normally accepted with resignation. The characters of tragedy reject
the mute and necessary stoicism of actual living and insist on the need for
explanations. 57 'To think of the gods' care for men is a great relief for me from
pain. Deep within me I have hopes of understanding; but when I look around at
what men do and how they fare I cannot understand', sing the chorus in
Hippolytus (1 102-6), in what could be a kind of motto for the whole of tragedy.
This characteristic of the genre is doubtless connected with the plays' mytho-
logical setting, in a time when men and gods were still close and their dealings
54 18.253.
55 C( lviikalson (1983), 66-73.
56 Eur. Ale. 245-6.
57 ~ot invariably, certainly: ciTdp Tt TaUTa; Oft <pEpftV Tei TWV 8HOV, Eur. Phoen. 382; cf. e.g. ibid.
1763, Her. 309-1 I, 1228, Ale. 1071, And,.. 851-2.
with one another clear. It is also no doubt one reason why, in the fourth
century, anyone who applied portentous and artificial religious explanations to
actual life could be accused of 'talking tragedy'.58
The question arises here too whether opacity or transparency is more true
to life, and this question too is unanswerable. In one sense, obviously, opacity is
more realistic. An ordinary Athenian was quite unable to express informed
opinions about the wishes and intentions of particular gods. But the fact that
activities on Olympus were unobservable does not mean that none was
believed to take place. The whole mantic art in all its ramifications was an
attempt to penetrate the veil, and the tragic poet can be viewed as a kind of
honorary seer, capable of conveying not literal truths but what might be true,
ora QV yEVOl.TO, about the unseen world. The practices of Greek religion
implied the existence of a realm about which mortals knew, in the strong sense
of the term, almost nothing. A prime function of myth was to present credible
representations of that realm, and the prime vehicle of myth in Athens was
tragedy.
It is wrong, we conclude, to disregard the corrective to civic optimism that
tragedy provides. Tragedy expresses some part of what it was like to believe in
Greek gods no less than prose texts do. What, one may wonder, was the mood of
normally pious Athenians when the gods could not, after all, be forced to
display their supposed goodwill in any active way, when they really seemed
indifferent or deaf? 'In saevos populi convicia divas', as Lucan calls them, were
often raised by angry men against unheeding gods in later antiquity, as when
for instance temples were stoned after the death of Germanicus. No source
mentions such conduct at Athens, and of course such sentiments were inad-
missible in public speech. (The famous ithyphallic hymn which in the 2908
combined praise of Demetrius Poliorcetes as a 'visible god' with abuse of the
deaf Olympians raises special problems, not to be tackled here. 59 ) But in tragedy
characters do often complain about the gods, and even in extreme cases
threaten them. What were people saying during the plague years in Athens,
when according to Thucydides 'supplications at shrines, consultations of
oracles, and other such expedients all proved unavailing, and in the end they
abandoned them, overcome by the evil'?60 It must follow from all that has been
said so far that the political classes were finding ways of assuring the demos that
the gods' goodwill to Athens was still there, deep down, and would re-emerge in
due course. But in order to come close to the popular mood of that time one
58 Cf. Parker (1983), 15.

59 Powell, Coli. Alex. 173-4.
60 Thuc. 2.47.4. Complaints in tragedy: c£ Schadewalt (1926), 118-40 (with 120 n. 2 on earlier
precedents); Heath (1987), 5 I; threats: Eur. Her. 1242-3, IT 974-5; c( Ion 972-5. 'Populi con-
vicia': see Versnel (1981),37-42; Veyne (1991), 281-90; Lucan 7. 725. The danger of such anger is
a recurrent theme of Epictetus, e.g. 1. 22. 15-16, 1. 27. 13, 1. 29. 17,2.5.12,4.1. 109, and esp. 2. 22.
16-18 (c( Rutherford (1989), 213 n. 96); Epictetus' own attitude is anticipated in Eur. fro 1078:
whatever happens it is wrong Tf.8vj.Lwa8al. 8f.ois.
160 Robert Parker
would perhaps do well not to forget ·tragedy's recognition that the worst can
indeed happen. 61
1'.1 Cf. Gould (r 985), 24-33. I have thankfully incorporated numerous valuable comments made
on the oral predecessor to this paper by audiences in Oxford and Exeter~ I am most grateful too to
Don Fowler and Richard Rutherford for advice, and to the editor and Christiane Sourvinou-
Inwood for encouragement.
9
Tragedy and Religion: Constructs and Readingsl
CHRISTIANE SOUR VINOU -INWOOD
TRAGEDY AND RELIGION: STRATEGIES OF READING
The relationship between tragedy and religion is important both for the reading
of tragedy and for the reconstruction of religion. If we are interested in
attempting to recreate as much as possible the meanings which the ancient
audiences created out of the tragedies, and also the religious assumptions that
are articulated in, and articulate, these tragedies-and I believe that both these
enterprises are, up to a point, possible-it is necessary to avoid reading
strategies conducive to the creation of meanings which make perfect sense to
modern scholars but are very different from those interactively constructed by
the tragedian and his contemporaries who had shared his assumptions. 2 Since
texts are made sense of through perceptual filters shaped by culturally deter-
mined assumptions, before we try to make sense of a tragedy we must first
reconstruct the relevant ancient assumptions-while avoiding the danger that
circularity will seep into the enterprise. For if the ancient assumptions are not
deployed to shape the filters through which we make sense of the tragedies, we
will inevitably read through our own modern assumptions by default; and as
these are very different from those of the ancient Athenians they will inevitably
produce very different meanings from those constructed by the ancient
audience. In the cases in which religion comes into play this will also lead to the
distortion of the reconstruction of the religious assumptions articulated in the
play and thus of ancient religion.
It is not illegitimate to use tragedies as 'documents' from which to extract
information about Greek religion, to attempt to reconstruct the religious
assumptions that are articulate in the tragedies, provided this is done with great
methodological caution. 3 Let us look at the dangers. Of the tragic passages that
can be used for the reconstruction of religious assumptions some pertain to
ritual practice and others to what we may call 'theology and belief'. In the case
of 'documents' pertaining to practice our aim is to reconstruct the ritual
1 I am grateful to Professor Robert Parker for discussions relevant to this paper.
2 I have discussed these matters elsewhere (Sourvinou-Inwood (1989), 134-48; (1991), 3-2 3;
(1995), 1-9)·
3 On the reconstruction of the religious assumptions that help shape a text cf. also Sourvinou-
Inwood (1995), 10-16.
I62 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
knowledge that is articulated in the text. This is a complex operation; for the
tragedy may not be presenting a straightforward normal version of the ritual; it
may be altering the normal and well-known procedure of (say) sacrifice for
some specific reason pertaining to its overall aims and strategies; for example,
the notion that the world of the play is seriously disordered may be articulated
or stressed through the description of a rite in which the normal procedure
which was well known to the audience was reversed or otherwise altered. The
audience, who shared the tragedian's assumptions, registered this as a reversal
of the norm and made sense of it accordingly; while we, if we are not careful,
are in danger of misreading the text, missing the reversal, and incorrectly
identifying this abnormal construct as a ritually acceptable variation of the
normal procedure of that ritual. Thus, for example, I am arguing elsewhere 4
that the fact that in Euripides' Hecuba Hecabe performs a burial does not
constitute evidence for the notion that women could take the ritual respons-
ibility for burying the dead in fifth-century Athens, but is correlative with, and
expresses, the savagery and abnormality of Hecabe within the disordered world
of this particular tragedy.
This brings me to another methodological fallacy that underlies the creation
of many of the modern constructs that distort radically the ancient realities: the
reading of tragic passages out of the context which had determined their mean-
ings within the discourse of the play. This fallacy has led to a variety of misread-
ings, including the notion that if a character in a tragedy says something bad
about the gods this constitutes evidence for the poet's distrust of traditional
religion even when this character proves to have been misguided and the
tragedy to have upheld the traditional order of things. Of course, the fact that
such thoughts were articulated says something about the questions that could
be and were being asked at that time, it helps set the parameters of religious
discourse; but, we now understand, it does not constitute evidence for a
challenge to established religion. Such readings, generated in symbiosis with
certain other assumptions, have now been rigorously discussed and criticized.5
In the case of passages pertaining to theology and belief the situation is even
more complex. While cult practices were something concrete and determinate)
beliefs were-within certain parameters-more fluid and variable, ambiguous,
and ambivalent. They were also ultimately perceived to be uncertain, to be but
one particular set of representations of, and responses to, a divine world which
was ultimately unknowable. Greek religion had no divinely revealed know-
ledge, no revelation, no scriptures, and no professional divinely anointed
priesthood. Correlative with this absence is the notion of unknowability, the
belief that human knowledge about the divine and about the right way of
behaving towards it is limited and circumscribed. This notion of unknow ability
is, in my view, a central category in Greek religion. Here, then, it is not a case of
4 In a forthcoming book entitled Women, Religion, and Tragedy.
5 C( esp. Lefkowitz (1987), 149-66; (1989), 70-82.
Tragedy and Religion
reconstructing the knowledge behind the texts, as is the case with ritual. The
established religious beliefs and collective representations provided the
parameters within \vhich poetic creativity operated. Texts touching on religious
belief refract, are shaped and determined by, the society's established beliefs in
complex ways. They are articulations of particular perceptions, determined by
a variety of factors, including their place and role in the texts, and the nature,
conventions, and aims of these texts; they may be exploring the interstices of
established belief and/or giving a particular form to an ambiguous concept-or
stressing one facet of an ambivalent one.
GODS IN TRAGEDY AND IN LIVED RELIGION: THE PROBLEM
l\1.y aim in this paper i~ to explore one particular aspect of the relationship
between established beliefs and tragic articulations, a relation~hip which I am
exploring in depth elsewhere. 6 The aspect that concerns me here is very basic:
the examination of the validity of the perception that has been articulated in
modern scholarship that the gods of tragedy are 'artificial' literary creations
that had little relationship with the gods worshipped by the Athenian polis.
Since this is a modern construct, it seems to me that the best strategy for focus-
ing this investigation and conducting it with conceptual clarity is to concentrate
on one particular articulation of this perception7 and examine it, together with
its underlying assumptions, methodological strategies, and implications, in as
much detail as is possible here. I will thus focus on an articulation that is both
recent and also intelligent and rich,]. D. Mikalson's Honor thy Gods: Popular
Religion in Greek Tragedy.s The book's thesis can be briefly illustrated by his
follo\ving statements:
'The religion found in Greek tragedy is, like the language of Homer, a
I.
complex hybrid, a hothouse plant which never did and probably never could
exist or survive in reallife.'9
6 In Tragedy and Alhenian Religion: A Discourse of Exploralion, the book based on the Carl
Newell Jackson lectures, delivered at Harvard in April 1994, to be published by Harvard University
Press. I discuss the relationship between tragic performances and the festival as a religious event
both in that book and, briefly, in Sourvinou-Inwood (1994), 269-90.
7 A very much more moderate, but not totally unrelated, variant of this is presented by Yunis
(1988); in so far as he thinks that some licence was probably afforded the tragedian to present what
might elsewhere be considered scandalous or even impious and cause serious social distress or
havoc, he defaclo characterizes religious articulations in tragedy as partly removed, insulated, from
lived religion.
8 Mikalson (199 I). Such a strategy offends against some (culturally determined) preconceptions
about what is perceived as (overt) polemic. But, in my view, the use of rhetorical manipulation to
disguise the confrontation between two approaches (not, in most cases, and certainly not here,
between two scholars) makes for lack of clarity and a blurred focus and does not allow the discourse
to bring into the open the different sets of assumptions underlying different perceptions of the rela-
tionships between tragedy and religion, and to reveal them, and their implications, to the reader's
scrutiny.
9 Mikalson (199 1 ), p. ix.
Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
2. 'We do not know whether an Athenian, as he made his morning offering

at the little shrine of Zeus Ktesios in his house, thought of Homer's thunder-
bearing, cloud-gathering Zeus. There is no evidence that he did, and the two
deities, both named Zeus, are very different in both appearance and function.
Athena Palias was the namesake and mistress of Athens, with t\VO major
sanctuaries, the Erechtheum and the Parthenon in the Acropolis, but one is
hard put to demonstrate that in cult she was assigned any of those features
which most characterize the Athena of Sophocles' Ajax or Euripides' Troades.
Likewise the Aphrodite of Euripides' Hippolytos appears quite unlike the
Aphrodite worshipped in Athens. And conversely, there are among the major
divine actors of tragedy no deities similar to Zeus Ktesios, Zeus Herkeios,
Demeter, Athena Hygieia, Asclepios, and most other deities central to Athenian
worship.,lO
3. 'To Athenians Athena Polias, Athena Skiras, and Athena Hygieia were
separate, for all practical purposes independent deities.' 11
4. 'The deities of poetry were well known, they were loved and hated in the
literary context, and they were praised or criticized by poets and philosophers
for ethical and theological reasons, but they were not worshiped as cult deities
were. In the form that Homer and the tragedians present them, they did not
have temples, sanctuaries, or altars in Greek cities. They did not receive dedica-
tions, sacrifices, or prayers. The gods of poetry are, I would claim, the products
of literary fantasy and genius, not of the Greek religious spirit. Criticisms of
these gods and of the myths encompassing them need not be criticisms of con-
temporary religion and its beliefs and practices.' 12
LIVED RELIGION: DIVINE EPITHET AND DIVINE PERSONALITY
I shall begin with Mikalson's assumptions about the nature of divine personal-
ities, for they structure his perceptions of the relationship between tragedy and
practised religion. Thus, his belief that the absence among the major divine
actors of tragedy of deities central to Athenian worship like Athena Hygieia,
Zeus Ktesios, Zeus Herkeios, and-Demeter constitutes an argument in favour
of the alleged separateness and artificiality of tragic religion depends on several
incorrect assumptions pertaining to religious matters. For it is not the case that
these divinities or cultic personae that were important in practised religion
were ignored in the world of tragedy. For example, Euripides' Suppliants takes
place in the forecourt of the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis;
Zeus Herkeios is mentioned, for example, in Sophocles, Antigone 487, Zeus
Ktesios in Aeschylus, Suppliants 445; and in Agamemnon 1038, where, as
F raenkel remarks,13 in the context, K7IJ aiov f3 wfLoV evoked the altar of Zeus
Ktesios. If those divinities and functions had been ignored, that may have
10 Mikalson (199 I), 4- 11 Ibid. 10; cf. also 204, 222, and passim.
12 Ibid. 4-5. 13 (195 0 ),47 0 on 10 38.
constituted a significant absence to be assessed. But since this is not the case,
.~ikalsan's argument depends implicitly on two independent assumptions.
First, the a priori assumption that the relationship between tragedy and the
world of the polis is such that a one-ta-one comparison can be made between
them; and that therefore the tragic religious discourse can only be related to
fifth-century religion if it can be shown to be a simple reflection of everyday life
discourse, a representation of life in fifth-century Athens simply projected back
to the heroic past and articulated in the idiom of tragedy. It will, I hope, become
clear in' the course of this paper that this image is mistaken. The second
assump.tion can also be shown to be wrong: it is the above-cited assumption that
Athenians considered each cultic persona of a given deity as a separate deity;
that Athena Hygieia was perceived to be different from Athena, that there was
no perception of a goddess Athena, of whom the individual cultic personae were
simply manifestations. I will try to show that this assumption is wrong. But first
I want to stress that even the mere possibility that it may be wrong makes
Mikalson's approach methodologically dangerous, since the validity of his
analysis depends on the validity of this assumption.
I will now try to show that the claim that the Athenians considered each
cultic persona of a given deity as a separate deity is wrong. This claim is not
only relevant to the argument pertaining to the absence of deities like Athena
Hygieia as major actors; it is central to Mikalson's interpretation of tragedy and
of the relationships between the divinities of cult and those of tragedy, for it
underlies, and sustains, his belief that the generalized Athena or Artemis is a
creation of the tragedians, while the gods of cult were always particularized as
Zeus Phratrios or Herkeios and so on.
The view that the Athenians considered each cultic persona as a separate
deity, which-among other things-implies that the divine name 'Apollo' or
'Athena' was of little significance, can be shown to be wrong. I cannot here
present the case against it in the detail that is ideally required; I shall mention
briefly a few of the arguments that, in my view, show it to be invalid. To con-
sider this question properly> and also to get out of the impasse of culturally
determined abstraction, we need to concentrate on all aspects of practised cult,
including those that can be reconstructed through the consideration of the
archaeological evidence. 14
Let us leave aside entirely statements in texts that make clear that each divin-
ity was perceived as one across his or her different cults,15 and also the very
existence of hymns such as the Homeric hymns or Kallimachos' hymns, that
indicate the same perception; for in those cases a determined sceptic could
14 lViikalson has neglected the archaeological evidence-both in lviikalson (1991) and in the
earlier work (1983) on which his comparisons with tragedy were based.
15 C[ e.g. Xen. Symp. 8.9. (In my view this statement is not contradicted by Xen. Anab. 7. 8.4-6 ,
for the point there surely is not that Zeus Meilichios is a separate god, but that one should not
neglect any aspect of the god's persona.)
r66 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
conceivably claim-however unconvincingly-that they do not represent

popular religion. The following arguments still build up a cumulative case
suggesting that there \vas indeed a perception of (for example) a goddess
Athena, of \vhom the individual cultic personae \vere perceived to be simply
manifestations, each putting the emphasis on certain particular aspects of the
goddess, and thus also putting the emphasis on her catering for certain particu-
lar needs; that there \vas a semantic field ~ Athena' and that its individual
manifestations were perceived through the filters of the main traits of that
semantic field, of which the goddess's Panhellenic personality was a strong
component.
First, if Mikalson!s thesis were right, it would not have been possible for
Greek deities to have had a common iconographical type, a Bild'Z)orstellung
common to their different cults, to have been represented through the same
basic iconographical schemata in their different cults ·and on images not
connected with particular cults) such as on vases for the symposium. Yet this is
in fact the case. The common Bildvorstellung both articulated and crystallized
the fundamental aspects of the dominant traits of each divinity; for example,
Artemis as a young girl with bow and arrow, with or without a deer. This does
not, of course, mean that the Greeks thought this is what the gods looked like
always, that they did not take other forms. On the contrary, the notion that the
gods could change shape, and they could even assume the form of animals, is an
important part of Greek religious perceptions. To take just two examples, Zeus
Meilichios could be represented in the form of a snake, and Dionysos was also
invoked as a bull in cult. This zoomorphism or part-zoomorphism is one way of
expressing the otherness of the gods, their distancing from human bodies.
Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic, or partly zoomorphic, forms coexisted for
the same deities at the same time. They stressed different aspects of the divine
personality. The fact that the gods could change shape is correlative with the
fact that they were not perceived to be equivalent to their bodies in their human
or any other form; they were not perceived to be constrained by their bodies.
Their human bodies, in their superhuman version of the human, were the
preferred form; but the fact that those bodies could take different forms,
including non-human, was part of the superhuman nature of their human-
looking bodies. 16 This is why the notion 17 that the fact that Zeus Ktesios is very
different in both appearance and function from Olympian Zeus suggests that
he was perceived as a different god is wrong. IS Furthermore, whether or not
Zeus Ktesios was also represented in human form, certainly Zeus MeilichiosI 9
16 On divine bodies and divine representations cf. Frontisi-Ducroux (I986b), 193-21 I; Loraux
(1986b), 335-54; Vern ant (19 86 ), 19-45·

17 Mikalson (1991), 4.
18 The notion that Zeus Ktesios and Zeus Meilichios are different from the Olympian Zeus is not,
of course, new (c£ e.g. Harrison (1922), 17-22,642).
19 On Zeus Ktesios and Zeus l\1eilichios c( Nilsson (1967), 403-6, 411-14. On Zeus l\1eilichios
cf. also Jameson-Jordan-Kotansky (1993),81-103; cf. also 132-6.
was represented either as a snake or as a male seated human figure,20 a version

of the schema used for Zeus in his other cults, and this invalidates further the
belief that the snake form of Zeus Ktesios shows that Greeks thought of him as
a different divinity.
Secondly, on Mikalson's system it would be difficult to make sense of the fact
that there is a core aspect of a divinity that includes genealogy as well as Bild-
vorstellung, and which consistently appears in the different cults. For, to take
an example, how could cultic hymns, which were inscribed in sanctuaries so
that their cultic identity cannot be doubted, refer to Apollo, the son of Leto and
Zeus, as, for instance, Aristonoos' Paean to Apollo at DelphFl does, if each
Apollo was perceived as a different divinity?
Thirdly, it would also be difficult, on that hypothesis, to make sense of the
fact that cultic regulations prescribing the performance of certain rites can use
the deity's name alone with no epithet Of, in the same regulation, refer to some
deities by name alone and to others by name and epithet. 22 It is not relevant to
our argument that the context would have made clear to the ancient reader
which particular cult, and thus which particular persona of the deity, was
involved. 23 What is important is that this pattern of naming the recipient deity is
correlative with a perception (and thus indicates that the parameters of selec-
tion that shaped the choices of those who wrote the regulations included the
assumption) that, for example, Athena, was one deity, with her different cults
stressing particular aspects of her nexus of f~nctions. This is especially evident,
I submit, in documents such as IG ii2. 33424 where th~ formulations clearly
indicate a perception of Athena as one deity with different cults. Side A speaks
of arrangements pertaining to the use of revenues from the territory referred to
as Nea to be used for the celebrations of the Less~r Panathenaia 01TWS QV nil.
~ 87)vut 1J 8voCa W S KaA;\loT [1] ~l. n ul!a8Tjva{otS Tois 1-'] t.KPO(S eso that the
sacrifice to Athena should be as glorious as possible at the Lesser Panathenaia').
On B are prescribed specific sacrifices to be performed at the Lesser Pan-
athenaia, to Athena Hygieia, Athena Polias, 3;nd Athena Nike; the formulations
are: on 11. B 9-10, Duo (}ua[as n]v T€ Tijt.] :407!VQL rrjl. I'Yyt.€lal. Kat Tijv EV Tau
up [Xalwt VEWL 8VOfLE]V7]V Ka8a7TEp TTpOTEpOV ('two sacrifices, one to Athena
20 It has also been suggested that certain stones may be aniconic representations of this god (cf.
esp. Jameson-Jordan-Kotansky (1993), 100- 1).

21 Colin (19 0 9- 1 3), no. 191. To be precise) this particular paean speaks of Apollo as the agalma
of Leto and Zeus, an articulation which takes for granted knowlec;lge of the parentage of ~the' god
Apollo.
22 Cf. e.g. LSCG 21 A 4-5 'to Apollo', 'to Hermes'; LSCG 2 A 9-10, prescribing a sacrifice to
Athena at the Plynteria. For an example of variation between name and name and epithet c( e.g.
LCSG 4: sacrifices are prescribed to 'Hermes Enagonios' on I. 3, 'Poseidon' and 'Artemis' on 1.4.
23 Thus in LSCG 4 the Eleusini:an context makes clear that the cults of Poseidon and Artemis
involved were those of Poseidon Pater and of Artemis Propylaia; ~nd in LSCG ~ A 9-10, which
prescribes a sacrifice to Athena at the Plynte~ia, the context makes c;lear that the cult of Athena
involved is that of Athena Polias. Of course, in some c;ases it is impossible to ten whether this is
indeed the case (cf. e.g. LSCG 146.3 (to Hera a~d Deme~er).
24 LSCG 33; cf. Deubner (1966), 25-6; P~rke (1977), 47-9.
Hygieia and one carried out in the Old Temple as before'); on 11. I9-22, €iT'i TWt
f3WfLWL n]~ :A8"7v6.~ T£i.H ft€]yaAWL., JLiuv DE E1Tt rij~ N{KTJ~ ..• Ka'i (JvaaJ)T€~ n] [t
:AO.."vdt TijL] IlOAL<i8t Kat njt ;487]vaL Tijt NiK7]t ('on the great altar of Athena,
and one on the altar of Nike ... and after sacrificing to Athena Polias and
Athena Nike ... '). In my view, t~ese formulations and their parameters of
variation make clear that in the assumptions that shaped these choices Athena
was one goddess who had different cults as she had different altars, and who is
referred to as 'the goddess' in, for example, 11. B 6 and 33. Most clearly, the
prescription in 11. 19-23, that all but one of the cows are to be sacrificed at the
great altar of Athena and one at that of Nike, indicates assumptions in which
the altar of Athena Polias was thought of and could be referred to as the 'great
altar of Athena' as opposed to other altars of the same goddess 'Athena', such
as that of her in her persona as Nike. 25 This conclusion based on the pattern of
naming the recipient deities in cultie regulations gains, I suggest, strong con-
firmation from the fact that in dedications too only the name of a deity may be
used, without an epithet referring to a particular cult. Thus, on the Athenian
Acropolis, where there was more than one cult of Athena, archaic and classical
dedications often referred to Athena as 'Athena' without cultic epithet or, even
more significantly, as 7Tais L1LOS' or KOPTJ .::::ltDS' ('child' or 'daughter of Zeus'),26
which referred to the divine personality nexus 'Athena', the goddess in all her
facets, who is thus shown to have indeed had a cultic reality and not to be an
artificial generalization created by the tragedians.
Fourthly, only the concept of divine personality that involved the perception
of a goddess, for example Artemis, of whom the individual cultic personae were
simply manifestations, can explain the fact that important cultic elements were
shared between different sanctuaries of the same divinity with different
epithets. For instance, in the case of Attic Artemis the rite of the arkteia was
performed in both the sanctuaries of Artemis Brauronia and of Artemis
Mounichia; and, even more strikingly, a cultic element associated with the
arkteia, the dedication of vases of a particular ritual shape (the krateriskoi) took
place not only in these two sanctuaries but also in other Artemis sanctuaries in
Attica, in which the goddess was worshipped under a different name and which
were not connected with the practice of the arkteia-for example, the
sanctuary of Artemis Tauropolos at Halai Araphenides and the sanctuary of
Artemis Aristoboule in the deme of Melite. 27
2S An example of a later regulation that makes even more explicit this perception that the differ-
ent epithets and cults pertain to one divine personality is a cultic regulation dating from 129/8 Be
concerning the cult of Apollo in Athens (LSCGS 14), which makes clear that Apollo is thought of as
one deity, the son of Zeus and Leto, with different cults and epithets.
26 C[ e.g. Athena referred to as 1Tais LiLOS, or KOpYJ Alas: CEG i. 180,181, 182, 183, 190 , 195,
243; as Athena or pOlnia Athena: 189, I97, 202,253, 254, 260, 281; as Pallas: 179, 194, 20I, 203,
240; as Pallas Athena: 205. For dedications to Athena poliouchos: c[ e.g. CEG i. 198, 235, 282; to
Athena Ergane Polias: 759.
27 Cf. Kahil (1965), 23-4; (1977),88; (I98 1),254-5; cf. also Sourvinou-Inwood (1988), I I6-17.
Finally, on Mikalson's thesis it would be difficult to make sense of mytho-

logical representations on temples.28 Let us take the concrete example of one
sanctuary, the Athenian Acropolis. 29 Mikalson simply assumes that the
Parthenon as well as the Erechtheion belonged to Athena Polias; this may well
be right. However, it is also possible that Athena Parthenos may have con-
stituted a discrete cult of Athena, intimately connected with, but not identical
to, that of Athena Polias, especially since new research has revealed a shrine
with altar pre-dating the 'Old Parthenon' and respected by, and incorporated
and rebuilt in the north pteron of, the Parthenon.3o But in any case, and most
importantly, it is clear that on his view Athena Nike and Athena Polias would
have to be different divinities: it is then impossible to make sense of the mytho-
logical representations on and in these temples. For which of these Athenas
would have been perceived to be represented in the Gigantomachies? Let us
attempt to apply Mikalson's criteria. In the case of the peplos offered to Athena
Polias at the Panathenaia, Mikalson would have to claim that it was not
'Athena' (who he thinks did not exist in cult), but Athena Polias who was
involved. On his classification, Athena on the metope in the Gigantomachy
series on the east side of the Parthenon and also Athena in the Gigantomachy
on the inside of the shield of the statue of Athena Parthenos, would have to be
Athena Polias. But Athena in the Gigantomachy on the east pediment of the
temple of Athena Nike, a short distance away on the Acropolis, would, on this
view, have to have been perceived as Athena Nike-as a different Athena from
that in the Gigantomachy on the pep/os,31 involved in the most central rite of
the Athenian polis-as would Athena in the company of Zeus in the Assembly
of gods on the east frieze of the same temple of Athena Nike. Furthermore, this
also involves the implication that Athena on the metope in the Gigantomachy
series on the east side of the Parthenon, who has a Nike flying beside her, and
also the divinity represented in the statue of Athena Parthenos who is holding a
Nike, were perceived as a different goddess from Athena Nike who was
28 These are at the very centre of practised cult, an important part of lived religion, the
theological perceptions of which they helped crystallize. In a temple like the Parthenon, we should
notice the intimate connection of the sculptural decoration's themes not only with the temple's cult
in general but also with the cult statue in particular, which disproves the notion that the mythologi-
cal representations in such architectural decoration were somehow not cultically significant. That
notion reflects culturally determined preconceptions.
29 On the cults and images of Athena on the Acropolis cf. most recently Ridgway (1992), 119-42.
On the iconography of Athena in general cf. LIMe ii. 955-1044 (P. Demargne and H. Cassimatis).
On the cult, sanctuary temple,"and parapet of Athena Nike cf. Mark (1993); Stewart (1990), 165-7;
Ridgway (1992), 135-7; Jameson (1994), 307-24, with further bibliography. On the cult statue of
Athena Parthenos: cf. e.g. Ridgway (1992), 131-5; Stewart (1990), 157-60; for a good short discus-
sion of the Parthenon frieze and metopes with further bibliography (to which add Jenkins (1994);
Connelly (1996) cf. Stewart (1990), 154-7. Heintze (1993: 385-418; 1994= 289-31 I) attempts to
relate particular personae of Athena, such as Athena Ergane and Athena Hippia, to different parts
of the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon.
30 On the shrine cf. Arch. Rep. 1988-9, 8-9; Ridgway (1992), 125. On the cult of Athena
Parthenos c£ most recently Ridgway (1992), 131-5.
31 On the Gigantomachy woven into Athena's peplos cf. now Ridgway (1992), 123-4.
worshipped and represented a short distance away. This extremely implausible

scenario, which makes nonsense of the way in which meaning is created out of
images, is further invalidated, I suggest, by the fact that, as we have seen, it was
possible to refer to dedications to Athena on the Acropolis as just 'Athena', or as
'child of Zeus', or 'daughter of Zeus', which referred to a divine personality-
'Athena', the goddess Athena in all her facets.
GODS IN TRAGEDY: RECONSTRUCTING ANCIENT 'READINGS'
Introduction
I shall now discuss briefly a few particular deities in particular tragedies and
investigate a very small sample of the claims and conclusions on which rests
Mikalson's belief that the gods of tragedy are abstractions created by the
tragedians. In the process I hope to set out the parameters that shaped the
perceptions of the fifth-century audience of the deities that come into play in
two tragedies, Euripides' Hippolytos and Iphigeneia in Tauns.
In the case of Artemis and Aphrodite in the Hippolytos, Mikalson thinks that
they are abstracted from cult and representatives of psychological forces. 32
Elsewhere he says,33
The disassociation and antagonism of Aphrodisiac and Artemisian elements in the
Hippolytos result because Euripides made the deities into something they were not in real
religion ... The abstraction of Artemis and Aphrodite from their delineated roles in time
and place, and the resulting formation of their personae and their antagonism, are liter-
ary creations and become part of literary or poetic religion. Whatever criticisms are
levelled against them in this form, have no bearing on the Aphrodite and Artemis of con-
temporary cult and popular belief.
And again,34 'The Artemises of Euripides' Hippolytos and Iphigeneia among the
Taurians are each carefully delineated but have almost nothing-apart from
their names-in common.'
My starting-point for examining these claims will be, and the bulk of my
argument will consist of, an attempt to reconstruct as nearly as possible the
ways in which the articulation of the relevant divinities would have been
perceived dynamically, in the course of the tragedy, by the Athenians who were
making sense of that tragedy through their assumptions of shared religious
knowledge. My discussion will by necessity be brie( I begin with a methodo-
logical point. Mikalson's method, which involves first the investigation of what
he calls popular beliefs, in Athenian Popular Religion, then of religion in
tragedy, and finally a comparison between the two, appears prima facie rigor-
ous and neutral. However, even if we leave aside the question of the validity of
his analyses and conclusions in Athenian Popular Religion, his strategy involves
two serious flaws that invalidate it. First, he discusses the tragic passages out of
32 Mikalson (199 I), 204. 33 Ibid. 146-7. 34 Ibid. 10.
Tragedy and Religion 17 1
the context which had determined their meanings. And secondly, the fact that
he considers religion in tragedy on its own entails that he inevitably makes
sense of the articulation of religious matters in the tragic texts through per-
ceptual filters formed by assumptions that are radically different from the
assumptions shared by the tragedian and his audience, which in its turn entails
that he reads these matters in radically different ways from theirs. For when the
ancient audience made sense of (say) Artemis in a given tragedy they did not do
so through neutral filters, they did not construct the goddess ex novo on the
basis of the material presented in the play alone, as we would do an alien deity
in a science fiction film; they made sense of the Artemis presented in the
tragedy through their assumptions about Artemis, about gods and religion, and
so on; it was an interactive process. Thus, if we try to make sense of that tragic
Artemis outside this complex process, we will inevitably come up with results
that are radically different from those created interactively by the tragedian
and his ancient audience.
Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris

1 will first discuss briefly the presentation of Artemis in Iphigeneia in Tauris.
rrhe goddess does not appear in person; she first comes up in the words of
lphigeneia in the prologue (1. 9), when the latter speaks of her sacrifice at Aulis.
rrhis sacrifice was part of Athenian cultic assumptions, for it was part both of
Panhellenic myth and of Attic cultic myth focused on the sanctuary of Artemis
at Brauron, where Iphigeneia shared in the cult. 35 Even more specifically, the
way Artemis is referred to in 2 I, cPwacp6PWL 8VU€LV BEat ('to sacrifice to the
torch-bearing goddess'), relates the goddess of the play directly to the Attic cult
of Artemis, especially the Brauronian and the Mounichian cults, that is to the
specific cultic aspect of the goddess which is relevant to the context of the tragic
passage. For the torch-bearing Artemis, the iconographical representation of
Artemis with the epithet Phosphoros, is one of the most frequently encountered
types among the votives, especially votive reliefs, found in the Brauron
sanctuary:36 that shows that this persona of Artemis was important in the
Brauronian cult, just as it was in the goddess's Mounichian sanctuary, which
was intimately associated with that of Brauron. 37 Thus we do not have here a
random epithet of Artemis associated with a random aspect of her persona,
rather the association of epithet and cultic aspect is the same as that in Attic
cult. This, I suggest, would have 'zoomed'38 the Artemis presented in the
35 Cf. e.g. Kearns (1989),27-33; Lloyd-Jones (1983a), 91-6 "" (1990a), 313-20; Brule (1987),
179-222; Sourvinou-Inwood (I99 0a), 52-4.
36 Cf. e.g. Kahil (1983), 233.
37 On Phosphoros at Brauron cf. Kahil (1979), 77-8; at Mounichia: Palaiokrassa (1991), 36-8,
5 -3,9 1 ,95.
2
38 On zooming devices and distancing devices as strategies that manipulate the relationship
between the world of the play and the world of the audience cf. Sourvinou -Inwood (1989), I 36.
Through the construction of such devices I am trying to articulate explicitly what was part of the
prologue to the goddess of Athenian cultic reality, so that the Athenian

audience ,"'QuId have perceived the Artemis articulated here as a representation
of the Artemis worshipped in Athens with the emphasis on her aspect as
Brauronia-a very ilnportant polis cult.
The zooming continues until after the reference to the fact that Iphigeneia
was saved by Artemis; then (30 ff.) Iphigeneia mentions that Artemis took her
to the land of the Taurians, which is strongly distanced from the Greek world
through the formulation 015 yijs aVaaOE[ /3apj3apoLuL j3ap{3apos I Boas (,where
Thoas rules the land, a barbarian ruling barbarians '). This distancing sets the
frame for what follows. Artemis made Iphigeneia the priestess of her cult in this
barbaric land where unspeakable sacrifices were offered to the goddess. If 38-9
are genuine 39 the audience would already hear here of the custom to sacrifice to
Artemis any Greek who came to its shores. If, as is more likely, they are not, the
distancing would have been somewhat less dramatic, but still radical. For
Iphigeneia's comment at 36-7, ' ... the festival only the name of which is fair,
but as for the rest I stay silent, for I fear the goddess', sets out the distancing
between this ritual practice and Greek perceptions before any more specific
reference to the practice. In this context, even without the activation of the
audience's mythological knowledge about the barbaric practices in the Tauric
cult of Artemis, the perception that a4>ciYLa ... app1'jTa (the 'unspekable
sacrifices') referred to human sacrifice would have been formulated. Thus the
Tauric Artemis is distanced from the Greek cult of Artemis; but what is
distanced is her cultic persona among the Taurians and the ways in which she is
perceived by the barbarian Other. It is in this way that the Tauric Artemis is a
different Artemis from the Greek. But in the most important sense she is the
same goddess as the Greek Artemis and would have been so perceived by the
audience, since she is the same person whom they had first perceived as the
Attic Artemis. Consequently, they would not have seen her as a different
goddess, but as a different aspect of the same goddess pertaining to this
barbarian land. The savage Artemis was 'the same person' as the goddess
Artemis worshipped by the audience, perceived and worshipped differently,
savagely, by the Taurians, at a double distance from the audience's own world,
in the heroic past and in another, savage, land.
At 22 I -8 Iphigeneia contrasts the cultic acts that she would have been
performing as a normal parthenos in her homeland-celebrating Hera with
song and dance and weaving the image of Athena in the Titanomachy (both
activities especially appropriate to parthenoi)-to her present situation in
complex interactive process of meaning creation and reaction that did not necessarily involve this
zooming and distancing registering at the conscious level, but contributed to the process through
which the audience made sense of the tragedy.
39 Cf. on this Platnauer (1938: 63-4 ad loc.) and esp. Diggle (I994: 28-33), who excises 38-9 and
reads EOP'TiJS ..• KarapxojLat, '1 consecrate the festival ... , while the infamous sacrifices are the
care of others inside the temple' (p. 31).
Tragedy and Religion 173
which, in this barbarian land, she is performing a horrific cultic role in the
course of human sacrifices to Artemis-whom she does not name. The worship
of Hera at Argos is, of course, the obvious cuI tic service for the daughter of the
king of Argos to be performing. The reference to \veaving the image of Athena
in the Titanomachy inevitably evoked for the Athenian audience the weaving
of the peplos of Athena to be presented at the Panathenaia by the Ergastinai
and the Arrhephoroi,40 and this, I suggest, would have zoomed what would have
been Iphigeneia's normal fate to the reality of the Athenian audience whose
own virgin daughters wove Athena's peplos as Arrhephoroi and, especially and
more relevantly to Iphigeneia's age group, as Ergastinai.41 Here, then, the
Tauric cult of Artemis is not only distanced from, but also contrasted to, cultie
{Jreek normality and especially the cultic normality of the Athenian audience.
Because the normal Greek cults mentioned do not include one of Artemis,
i\rtemis is here implicitly aligned with her Tauric cult, though this is somewhat
played down in so far as she is not mentioned by name here. As we shall see, this
alignment is unstable and will change in the course of the play.
Further sustained references to impending human sacrifice increase the
distancing, but the distance between the Taurians and the Greeks of the heroic
past is closed again by the references to Iphigeneia's sacrifice at 338-9 and
especially, in Iphigeneia's own mouth, at 357-77. This leads on to a most
important passage (380-9 I), in which Iphigeneia starts by reproaching Artemis
for rejoicing in human sacrifices and ends by speculating that the human
sacrifices offered to Artemis by the Taurians were not something that Artemis
really wanted, but what the Taurians, who were ciVOPW1TOKTDVOL ('human-
killing'), thought she wanted because they ascribed to her their own inclina-
tions.42 This attempt to make sense of what appear objectionable practices from
the viewpoint of a relatively enlightened worshipper, and the solution which
consists in the view that people project their own cultural norms onto the gods,
though not new in Greek thought, had a deep resonance in a religion which
acknowledged the ultimate unknowability of the divine world. Here, as else-
where, the exploration of the problem takes place at a distance, in the world of
the barbaric Other that has been contrasted to the Self But the distance is
transparently deceptive, and this is made virtually explicit through the fact that
Iphigeneia intertwines this speculation concerning the ascription by the
Taurians of their own inclinations to Artemis with the expression of disbelief
~o On the weaving of Athena's peplos cf. Barber (1992), 112-16; Ridgway (1992), 123-4.
41 The fact that it is the Titanomachy rather than the Gigantomachy (as in the peplos offered to
Athena at the Panathenaia) that Iphigeneia would have been weaving marks the fact that what is at
issue is zooming, not identification; the double distancing, non-Athenian and of the heroic age, is
not elided, simply diminished.
42 This passage is now discussed by WoItT (1992: 3°9-12), who sees it as Iphigeneia's 'effort to
regenerate the goddess Artemis' which is 'incomplete and compromised' (p. 312). What 1 am
suggesting is that the audience, making sense of this passage through perceptual filters shaped by
their particular relgious and cultural assumptions, would see it as an exploration that might well be
right.
that the gods would have eaten a child's flesh at the banquet offered them by
Tantalos. This presentation of the human sacrifice as not desired by Artemis
but reflecting the barbarity of the Taurians frames the subsequent references
to, and preparations for, the impending human sacrifice, and thus distances the
goddess Artemis from this particular cult, without of course eliminating the
connection-especially since the audience may have found Iphigeneia's specu-
lation convincing but had no \vay of kno\ving \vhether it was right.
At 977-86 Orestes repeats the oracle given him by Apollo that in order to be
free of his madness he must steal the statue of Artemis that had fallen from the
sky and set it up in Athens. Iphigeneia then asks how can she elude Artemis in
order to achieve this; in other words, she assumes that Artemis will not wish her
statue to be taken from Tauris; but Orestes reasons that if this stealing of the
statue was displeasing to Artemis, why would Apollo have told him to take it to
Athens? At 1082-8 Iphigeneia invokes Artemis as the goddess who saved her
from her father's killing hand and asks her to save her again together with
Orestes and Pylades. She thus puts the responsibility for the human sacrifice
entirely onto Agamemnon who took the decision to carry it out, while the fact
that it had been Artemis who had requested it is elided, and Artemis is only
credited with Iphigeneia's salvation; all the guilt has drifted to the father and all
the credit for the salvation to the goddess. This is the way Iphigeneia apportions
the blame for her sacrifice elsewhere in the play too, though not in as strikingly
expressed and contrastive a manner as here. Thus the savagery associated with
the cult of Artemis in Greece is played down. The play then zooms Artemis to
her Greek cultic persona at 1097-1 lOS with the chorus's expression of longing
for an Artemis firmly placed in the Delian cultic context;·B then a distancing is
effected again at I I 12- I 6, where the chorus refer to Artemis' Taurian cult.
At 1435 Athena appears and addresses first Thoas and then Orestes and
Iphigeneia:~4 At 1439-41 she says that Orestes came to take the sacred statue to
her, Athena's, land. At 1449-67 she orders Orestes to take the statue and set it
up and found a sanctuary at Halai where Artemis shall be worshipped as
Tauropolos; at her festival, as a compensation for Orestes' escape from
slaughter, the sword shall be held to a man's throat and blood spilled, for form's
sake and so that the goddess may receive her due honours.~5 Iphigeneia is to
become the kleidouchos priestess of Artemis Brauronia and will die and be
buried in the sanctuary, and receive the dedication of the clothes of women who
die in childbirth. In Greek religious terms this means that Iphigeneia will be
heroized and receive cult; this in turn implies-what was in any case, to the
Athenian audience, ritual knowledge pertaining to the important cult of
43 Cf. Platnauer (1938), 15 2 -3 on the "arious references.

44 This part of the play has been recently discussed by \'Colff (1992), 312-24, 330-1 (with
extensive bibliography).
45 Cf. also on this rite and associated perceptions Graf(I979), 33-41; Lloyd-Jones (1983a), 96-
7 = (1990 a), 320- 2; Hughes (1991), 81.

Tragedy and Religion I75
Artemis Brauronia-that Iphigeneia was to be the founder of this cult of

Artemis Brauronia, according to the schema 'heroic figure founds a cult'. This
segment of Athena's speech, then, zooms the world of the play very strongly to
the world of the audience, to the cult of Artemis Tauropolos at Halai Ara-
phenides and of Artemis Brauronia at Brauron, that is, to the particular cult
and persona of the goddess to which she had first been zoomed at the beginning
of the play. This segment of Athena's speech performs an important function
pertaining to the present, representing these two cults as founded by heroic
figures at the behest of the poliad goddess of the city, Athena. It is Athena
rather than Artemis herself who orders the foundation of these cults, because in
this way Athena, the poliad divinity of Athens, is shown as sanctioning, and
participating in, the foundation of the two cults. And this is a representation of
a strong anchoring of these cults in the mythical past. This co-operative role of
Athena is further stressed in Athena's last words, 1488-9, when she says that
she will go with Orestes to keep safe her sister's statue.
In these circumstances, we may conclude that Artemis in /phigeneia in Tauris
\\rould have been perceived by the Athenian audience as a representation of the
goddess Artemis worshipped in Athens, with a special focus on her cult and
persona of Brauronia and Tauropolos. Her Tauric cult and the persona of
Artemis implicated in that cult are intimately connected with her Attic cult both
in the assumptions of the audience and through the strong activations and
zoomings of the play. Thus, though that Tauric cult and persona are indeed a
construct, the Athenian audience would not have perceived it as a 'literary'
construct of little or no relevance to their own cultic reality, as Mikalson thinks,
but as an exploratory construct, through which aspects of their cult are articu-
lated, problematized, and explored. Among other perceptions articulated in this
exploration are that the spilling of blood is a milder form of a savage custom of
human sacrifice, which in another time and place had been thought appropriate
for Artemis; that the foundation of this milder rite and of the cult of Artemis
l'auropolos, which is presented as an acculturated version of the Tauric cult,
was ordered by Athena; that the present Athenian cult and perceptions of
Artemis are a superior version of those in the barbarian Other and also in
certain respects of those in the heroic past. In these perceptions is articulated
the notion that the Attic cult of Artemis Tauropolos includes aspects that are
not unrelated to savage rites, in myth negatively distanced to the Other, rites
which express the dark side of Artemis and of Greek divinities in general.
Euripides' Hippolytos
Artemis in the Hippolytos 46 is first presented in the prologue through Aphro-
dite's words, who says47 that Hippolytos worships and honours Artemis whom
46 This does not, of course, purport to be a reading of the Hippolylos, or indeed of the role of
Artemis and Aphrodite in the Hippolytos. I am only trying to set out the main parameters for the
perception of these deities in the play by the 5th~cent. audience. 47 At 15-16; C( 17-19.
he considers the greatest of divinities. Aphrodite refers to Artemis as cl>oi{3ov D~

dDEA4>iJv ~;4PT€J.LtV, JLOS' KOp7JV (,Phoebus' sister Artemis, daughter of 'Zeus',
15), thus evoking the invocation forms and zooming Artemis towards cultic
reality, as well as placing her in the divine hierarchy and family; whether or not
Barrett is right that on Aphrodite's lips the words take on a tone of contempt,48
they have the effect of evoking Artemis as a recipient of cult in the audience's
everyday reality. Then Aphrodite refers to Artemis as parthenos and presents
her as associating with Hippolytos in hunting in the woods. This of course is the
most fundamental core aspect of Artemis' persona, the virgin huntress roaming
the woods, a familiar figure from cultic iconography-and this, I suggest, had
the effect of sustaining the zooming to the audience's cultic reality. At the end of
her speech Aphrodite announces that Hippolytos is coming with a 1TPOO'7TOAwv
. . . KWjLOS ('band of attendants') who shout forth hymns honouring Artemis.
They enter after she has left, and Hippolytos urges them to follow him, singing
of the daughter of Zeus, ovpaviav ~~PTEp..LV (,heavenly Artemis'), 'in whose care
we are' (58-60). This last statement corresponds to the audience's cultic reality,
in that they are ephebes and hunters, a group who is indeed in the special care
of Artemis. Since, to my knowledge, Artemis did not have the cult title ourania,
while the cult of Aphrodite Ourania was an important Athenian cult, I submit
that, though of course all Olympian divinities were ovpavLoL, 'heavenly', in this
context Hippolytos' use of Aphrodite's cult title ovpavia to refer to Artemis
would have registered with the audience as illustrating his unbalanced privileg-
ing of Artemis at the expense of Aphrodite that Aphrodite had just spoken of.
In the parodos (141 ff.) the chorus asks whether Phaedra is ailing because she
is possessed by Pan or Hekate or the Korybantes or the Mountain Mother, or
(145-7) whether she is 'wasting from some fault concerning Diktynna of the
wild things', for neglecting to offer a bloodless offering. 'For she ranges over
the Mere and across the dry land of the open sea [that is, a sand-bar], amid the
wet eddies of the brine.' Diktynna is a Cretan goddess who is often perceived as
a persona of Artemis in her function of goddess of the wild. The references to
the Mere and the sand-bar zoom this Diktynna to the Troezenian cult of
ArteII}is, since the Mere is a lagoon behind the sea-shore north ofTroezen, on
the shore of which there was a sanctuary of Artemis Saronia. 49 This reference,
then, both zoomed the Artemis of the world of the play to real-life cult and also
reinforced the aspect of Artemis' persona in the play that involved her associ-
ation with wild things and wild places. But in 166-9, in the epodos of the same
ode, a different function of Artemis is articulated, Artemis as protector of
women in childbirth, €VAOXOV, oupaviav . .. ';4pTEJ.LLV: the use of the description
ovpav{av here would have been perceived to have been different from Hippo-
lytos' use earlier because the adjective is here separated from the name, so that
it does not unavoidably function as an epithet-and also because here the
48 (I 964), I 57 on I 5.
49 Cf. on all this Barrett (I 964: 190- I on 148-50), whose translation I am also using here.
context is neutral rather than charged with an Artemis v. Aphrodite contrast as

the earlier one was. It is possible that for the Athenian audience this function of
Artemis as protector of women in childbirth may have evoked more generally
her role as protector of women, the most important cult of which in Athens was
that of Artemis Brauronia-which was also associated with hunting and wild
animals. At 7 I 3-14 when the chorus swear an oath to Phaedra they do so by
Artemis, to whom they refer as aEJ.1.vTJv 'ApTE/-LtV, Lhos KOp7JV ('august Artemis,
daughter of Zeus'), thus, I suggest, evoking the goddess as a whole; and this
choice may again have brought to the fore in the eyes of the audience Artemis'
role as a women's goddess. 50
At 1283 Artemis appears above the house and speaks to Theseus, revealing
to him the truth about Hippolytos and Phaedra. In I424-5 she promises Hippo-
lytos that she will give him TLJ.LG.S J.lEyiaTas ('the greatest honours') in the polis
of Troezen; that a cult will be instituted to him, in which the Troezenian girls
""ill cut their hair before they marry, and dedicate it to Hippolytos; there will
also be mourning rites for him, and songs sung by parthenoi. 51 This announce-
nlent of the institution of a cult to Hippolytos zooms the world of the play to the
world of the audience in two ways: it zooms it by evoking in an indirect way the
Athenian cult of Hippolytos,52 which was different from the one described in
the play; and it zooms it directly, to the cult of Troezen which was not
Athenian, but was a real present-day cult.53
In my view, in considering the nature of Artemis and Aphrodite in Hippo-
(ytos, the only question that has any meaning is 'how did the fifth-century audi-
ence make sense of them?'; unless one wishes to construct modern, culturally
determined readings,54 it is necessary to attempt to reconstruct the ways in
which the ancient audience did this through filters shaped by their assumptions
about Aphrodite and Artemis and divine beings and religion in generaL55 I do
not have the space here to go through the presentation of Aphrodite in the
[iippolytos 56 in detail, to reconstruct the ways in which the ancient audience
would have constructed her. But it is surely not controversial to state that she is
50 On Artemis as a women's goddess in this passage cf. also Zeitlin (1985), 69-70.
51 Cf. Barrett (1964),412-13 on 1423-30. The institution of this rite and its place and meanings
in the HippalylOs are now discussed in detail by Goff (1990), I 13-29.
52 On the Athenian cult of Hippolytus cf. Kearns (1989), 173; Aleshire (1989),22 and n. 4. For
the association of Hippolytos with Aphrodite in Athenian cult c( esp. Pirenne-Delforge (1994),
40-6.
53 Cf. Barrett (1964), 3-4.
54 Valid though they may be in their own place, if the tragedy is read as a floating text. Luschnig
(1988: 93-1 I I, cf. also 75-90), for example, discusses very interestingly the ways in which human
knowledge and divine revelation operate in the Hippalytos, and also the ways in which the
audience's knowledge affects their perception of the characters, but constructs the audience as a
timeless 'we', and thus does not relate the discussion to ancient perceptions.
)5 The diversity of the audience does not alter the fact that there were common parameters of
determination of their knowledge and assumptions.
56 For a subtle and penetrating analysis of the workings of Aphrodite in the Hippo/YIas cf. Zeitlin
(1985), 58-64 and passim.
presented as the goddess of erotic love with all the associated powers and func-
tions;5 7 and that this aspect of Aphrodite is her most important, strikingly
central aspect~ both in her local cultic personalities and in her Panhellenic
persona. 58
In order to try to reconstruct the ways in \vhich the ancient audience per-
ceived the deities in this tragedy \ve also need to deploy a particular type of
configuration of assumptions which I call schemata:59 these are particular
models of organizing experience \vhich structure myths, collective repre-
sentations, and texts-such as the 'patricide' schema, which structures all
myths involving patricide-and are themselves structured. by, and thus
express, the society'S beliefs, realities, collective representations, and ideo-
logies, its cultural assumptions. Among the schemata-the deployment,
manipulation, and interaction of \vhich directed in the main lines the audi-
ence's perception and reception of the tragedy-the following have a direct
bearing on our attempt to reconstruct the ways in which the ancient audience
made sense of the deities in the Hippolytos. 6o One, 'neglect of the worship of a
particular deity by a comtnunity or an individual is a serious transgression
that brings punishment'. Two, "Eros as destructive fLavia'. A third schema-
that the deity most directly offended by a human transgression acts most
directly to inflict punishment, but acts on behalf of the divine and cosmic
order-is explored through the rivalry between Aphrodite and Artemis,
through the creation of a version of ~neglect of a deity' in which the neglect is
'balanced' by an over-privileging of another deity, whom the transgressor sees
as antithetical to the neglected one, which also brings into play the concept of
philia between deity and morta1. 61 This over-privileging has its ovvn dynamic
and brings into play here the 'failed ephebeia' schema,62 which helps articu-
late more clearly the consequences of the neglect of one deity and his/her
sphere of responsibility. I shall return to this exploration below.
57 On the presentation and imagery of eros in the HippolylOs cf. also Pade! (I992), 1 22~ for eros
in the Hippolytos, and in Greek collecti\'e representations in general and its location in the realm of
Aphrodite, cf Goff (1990), 28-38.
58 For a study of the different cults of Aphrodite, in Athens and elsewhere, cf. now Pirenne-
Delforge (1994).
5l) On schemata cf. Sourvinou-Inwood (1991), 247 and 246-61 pasi11l~ Sourvinou-Inwood
(19 89), 136-7, 14S~ c( also Sourvinou-Inwood (1979),8-18.
60 These schemata are very different from Goff's paradigmatic narrati\'es (1990: 37-9, 59-60),
which are 'culturally shared narrative models that already assume certain kinds of response in
others', which have a stereotypical quality, and in which characters in the Hippo/ytos inscribe them-
selves; schemata are articulated by a society's representations, are flexible through the generation
of different versions and interactions with other schemata, and their dynamic articulation helps
direct the main lines of the audience's perception and reception.
61 Though, of course, there are strict limits to this philia: Hippolytos cannot see Artemis, a fact
that stresses the distance between mortal and immortal. On Hippolytos' inability to see Artemis cf.
also Segal (1988a), 58; (1988b), 268-9.
62 On 4failed ephebeia' in the Hippolyeas cf. Vidal-Naquet (I986a)~ 118-20; on this ~failed
ephebeia' and the associated "father-son hostility' schema in a version which ends in disaster cf.
Sourvinou-Inwood (199 1), 250-9.
The particular combination of these schemata in the Hippolytos, the complex

schema ~a woman's adulterous and destructive eros for an inappropriate object
as a fJ.-uv{a, the notion that a monstrous, adulterous passion can be explained as
a fLav{a sent by a deity as punishment for a transgression committed against
that deity and through this against the divine/cosmic order by one of the males
involved', also appears in Euripides' Cretans. 63 Indeed, in HippolYlos 337-8,
Phaedra compares her adulterous love for Hippolytos to that of her mother
Pasiphae for the bull, and to that of her sister Ariadne, whom she calls
'Dionysos' wife', thus referring to the version of the myth in which Ariadne"s
love for Theseus was adulterous. This comparison clearly aligns Phaedra with
her adulterous mother and sister. In addition, the comparison of Phaedra's
passion to Pasiphae's love for the bull would have activated the audience's
knowledge of the latter's story, especially in the form in which it had been
articulated in the Cretans, and that would have invited further comparisons
and brought out the similarities and differences between the two stories. Both
Pasiphae's actual adultery and her daughter's unfulfilled adulterous love are
negatively polarized forms of adultery which lead to catastrophe, in the first
case the birth of a monstrous son, in the second the death of a normal and good
son. In both, the object of the woman's desire was supremely unsuitable, but in
diametrically opposite ways: in Pasiphae's case because it was too alien, too
removed, an animal; in Phaedra's case because it was too close, near incestuous,
her husband's son. In both myths adultery leads to disaster, for the man and his
o£kos as well as for the woman; this corresponds to the Athenian perceptions
that a woman's adultery threatens the integrity of the oikos, and that a man's
wife is his point of maximum vulnerability.
The fact that in the Cretans it is Poseidon who sent the erotic fLavia that
made Pasiphae fall in love with the bull, the fact that there is a schema 'a deity
sends destructive erotic p.av{a to a woman as punishment to a man that has
transgressed against him/her' shows that the notion that Aphrodite in Hippo-
l)Jtos is the cosmic power that caused Phaedra's downfall, a principle and not a
person,64 and similarly Mikalson's notion that she is a representative of a
psychological force, are culturally determined readings that do not correspond
to the ways in which either Euripides' composition of Hippolytos or the
audience's making sense of it would have functioned, since in cases this
st.ructuring schema would inevitably have come into play. If we compare this
schema structuring the extant Hippo lytos , 'a deity sends destructive erotic
mania to a woman as punishment to a man that has transgressed against her,
and vvhen the woman's advances are rejected by the young man she accuses
him of rape', to the schema structuring the plot of the first Hippolytos, 'a
63 Cf. esp. fro 82 Austin (Pasiphae's speech).

6.$Cf. e.g. Dodds (1929), 102. It is beyond my scope here to survey opinions about the role of the
gods in HippolYlos. C( a very brief recent survey in Goff (1990), 71 n. 25, and for a survey of views
on Artemis ibid. 106-9.
180 Christiane Sourvinou -Inwood
shameless woman makes advances to a young man and then takes revenge on
him for rejecting her advances by accusing him of rape or attempted rape', it
becomes clear that the transformation of the shameless Phaedra of the first
Hippolytos into the virtuous victim of the extant play 65 can be seen as the result
of, and was based on, the deployment of a version of the schema structuring the
Cretans to reshape the myth of Hippolytos. The fact that the Cretans is earlier
than Hippolytos is significant. 66 In Hippolytos the 'punishment fits the religious
transgression' modality, \v hich is well established in Greek mythology, takes a
different form from that in the Cretans, where Pasiphae fell in love with the
bull that Minos had vowed, but failed, to sacrifice to Poseidon; in Hippolytos,
where the deity is offended through neglect, and thus the undervaluing of her
area of competence, eros, the offender is punished by means of the unleashing
of eros' destructive power. The schema 'immoderate eros overtakes the person
who refused eros and/or scorned Aphrodite' is not unusual in Greek my tho-
logy.67 In my view, the schema structuring the Hippolytos can be seen as the
result of the interaction between the schema 'immoderate eros overtakes the
person who scorns Aphrodite' and the schema in the Cretans-with the woman
who had not transgressed against the gods being the vulnerable vessel that is
taken over by this inappropriate eros.68 This schema, this religious representa-
tion articulated in the Cretans, is explored further in the Hippolytos through the
presentation of this other myth of catastrophic eros as also resulting from a
deity's revenge for transgression against her. In the context of, first, the central
Greek religious notion of the ultimate unknowability of the divine world, and
second, of Greek tragedy as a crucial locus of religious exploration,69 these two
tragedies explore the possibility that this is how such destructive and self-
destructive eros can be explained, as a deity's revenge.
However, the notion that the shameless Phaedra of the first Hippolytos was
transformed into the virtuous victim of the extant play needs redefining, since
such transformation was far from complete, and this has serious implications
for the assessment of Aphrodite in Hippolytos. For a very important component
of the version of the 'bad woman' schema deployed in the first Hippolytos, 'the
scorned woman takes revenge on the innocent young man who rejected her
advances', plays an important part in the construction of Phaedra, and of the
plot, in the extant Hippolyeos. Phaedra presents the main motives for her
actions as being the desire to protect her good name and her children's
honour. 70 Modern critics privilege this explanation and perceive her accusa-
65 Cf. on this Barrett (1964), 30-1; Zeitlin (1985),52-6.

66 Cf. also Goff (199 0 ), 93-4.
67 As Zeitlin (19 85: 106-7) has pointed out, noting the difference between this modality of
punishment and that in the Hippolytos.
68 Cf. also Zeitlin (1985: 107) for the manner of Hippolytos' death.
69 I develop this thesis elsewhere (see n. 6).
70 C[ 687-8 as well as 715 fr. On the concept of (UKA€La in the Hippolytos cf. Braund (1980),
184-5 with bibliography.
tions of Hippolytos through this central structuring filter. But a 'revenge on

Hippolytos' aspect is also articulated by Phaedra, at 728-3 I, and, I submit, for
the ancient audience this, in combination with a situation involving a woman
who made false accusations of rape against a young man who rejected her, and
\vith their knowledge of the traditional schema of the myth (especially as articu-
lated in the first Hippo ly tos ), would have evoked the schema "the scorned
woman takes revenge on the innocent young man who rejected her advances'
as one of the filters through which their perception ofPhaedra would have been
shaped. Thus Phaedra's false accusations in the extant Hippolytos would inevit-
ably have coloured her with 'bad \voman' connotations in the eyes of the
ancient audience. (Of course, all this makes the 'characterization' more
complex and the problematization more subtle, but this is another matter.)
This negative colouring of Phaedra would have been reinforced by another
schema that, I suggest, came into play for the Athenian audience: the fact that
Hippolytos, whom her actions destroyed, was her husband's son \vould have
activated the schema 'a woman's disloyalty to her husband's oikos'-which
results in catastrophe-and the related schema 'man's vulnerability to a
woman's disloyal actions in the family'.il In normative Athenian ideology a
woman who was disloyal to, and damaged, her husband's honour and his oikos
was perceived to be a bad woman. Even before her false accusations, Phaedra's
love for her husband's son-whatever the causes behind it-would have been
perceived as seriously endangering her husband's honour and his oikos. The
false accusations and activation of a facet of the 'bad woman' schema, focused
on the destruction of her husband's son, reinforced this negativity. Thus, I
suggest, the ancient audience would not have perceived Phaedra, as modern
critics often do, as a wholly innocent victim; their perception, I am arguing,
would have been structured by, and would thus have inevitably privileged, this
negative nexus of schemata that activated \bad woman' connotations?2
Nor, I submit, would the ancient audience have assumed that she had no
choice over what had happened up to that point. The notion that she had no
choice is not presented as fact in the tragedy, simply as a subjectively presented
possibility. Phaedra would have been perceived to have had the choice not to do
anything about her love for Hippolytos, a choice which she forfeited when she
revealed that love, and engaged in a discussion about it;73 in the audience's
71 I have discussed these schemata in Sourvinou-Inwood (1979), 8-13; (1990b), 409-1 I; c( also
Sourvinou-Inwood (1991), 254.
72 The fact that Ar. Thesm. 549-50 (on which cf. Sommerstein (1994), 190-1 ad lac.) suggests
that a Euripidean Phaedra evoked the notion 'bad woman' for an Athenian audience provides some
confirmation for the view that} in the eyes of its original audience, the Phaedra of the extant Hippo-
tyros was perceived as having at the very least ~bad woman' traits.
73 Goff (199 0 : 30 -9) has discussed the intimate connection between desire and its articulation in
speech in the HippolYlos. Knox (1952: 6) stressed the centrality of the choice between speech and
silence in ~he representation of human choice; but his perception of human choice in this play is dif-
ferent from mine, for he accepts the validity of Aphrodite'S self-presentation in the prologue (cf.
Knox (~952), 4 and passim)-on which cf. below. Luschnig (1988: 107) states 'Her failure to keep
182 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
perception, I submit, the double motivation would have come into play, the
notion of the deity operating through the flaw in the human character. This
entails that those critics who take Aphrodite to be a wholly cruel divinity
destroying an innocent, helpless victim have taken the goddess at face value
\\,hen she gives the impression in 47-50 that Phaedra had no choice; I suggest
that the Athenian audience-both at this early point, because they were operat-
ing through their expectations, and eventually, when they were evaluating the
operation of the divinities in the play-\vould have understood Aphrodite's
"vords to be part of her own self-presentation that stressed her powers, the
unstoppable power of love and so on; the audience would have perceived this to
be only one part of the story, not the whole picture. 74 Or at least, they would
have taken the validity of this self-presentation to be an open question.
To return to our original Problenzatik, it is I hope clear that, as with Artemis
in IT, the Athenian audience would have perceived the goddesses Aphrodite
and Artemis articulated in the Hippolytos as a representation of the goddesses
worshipped in Attic cult. I must make clear that 'representation' does not mean
identity, embodiment; the distance between the 'real' deity and her representa-
tion in tragedy is set in place in the audience's perceptions by the notion of the
ultimate unknowability of the transcendental world; this sets in place varying
distances between human articulations and divine 'reality', the representations
in ritual having much greater authority than tragic articulations in so far as
they were validated by tradition?' At the other end of the scale, the gods in
comedy were comic constructs, a perception constantly reinforced through the
metatheatricality of the genre which drew continuous attention to its nature as
comic performance.
It is, of course, the Artemis worshipped by Hippolytos that is more restricted
than the cultic Artemis, but this is part of the meaning-creating strategies of the
play. The Athenians would have perceived the Artemis conceived and
worshipped by Hippolytos as a polarization of one aspect of the goddess
Artemis as she was articulated in the play-and in real-life religion. And so they
would have understood Hippolytos as having a one-sided perception of
silence is not a vicious failure. She is anything but the typical older woman of folktale trying to
seduce the younger man.' This, in my view, takes no account of the fact that the audience's prior
knowledge of the earlier version of the myth and of the earlier play and Phaedra's false accusations
against Hippolytos would have acti\~ated precisely this schema and thus also brought out Phaedra's
similarities as well as differences from such a woman; that this schema helped shape the filters
through which the ancient audience perceived Phaedra; nor does it take into account the fact that
Hippolytos was her husband's son with (as we have seen) all that this entails in terms of acti\'ation
of the schema ~a woman's potential disloyalty to her husband's oikas).
74 Not unrelated to this is Luschnig's observation (1988: 53), in a different context, that deities in
the HippolyLOs may give a partial, simplifying account of what the audience would have perceived
as a more complex situation.
75 In complex ways, which I am exploring much further elsewhere (see n. 6), as also I am explor-
ing the notion of gods as representations in tragedy, and the complex relationship between tragedy
on the one hand and ritual and tradition on the other.
Artemis, which is what allows him to see Artemis in opposition to Aphrodite

and over-privilege the former while under-privileging the latter. Hippolytos'
Artemis is a polarization resulting from the stressing of one-albeit very
important-aspect of her persona and the underplaying, indeed ignoring, of
another facet, her concern with the transition into adulthood and full maturity,
which is a further important aspect of her Attic persona, and which, in the case
of the transition of parthenoi into gynaikes, is related to her protection of child-
birth. This facet of Artemis is related to Aphrodite. In the context of cult, which
is a context of co-operation, Artemis' role in the transition to maturity and
Aphrodite'S concern with the erotic sphere drift together and are articulated as
complementary; this is, for example, exemplified by finds in a sanctuary like
that of Artemis Mounichia, in which there is a significant number of figurines
and scenes on vases and plastic vases that belong to the cycle of Aphrodite. 76
The potential tension involved in this type of cultic complementarity is articu-
lated in some images that I have discussed elsewhere in which the girl's transi-
tion to marriage and womanhood is represented through the erotic pursuit and
abduction of a parthenos from a sanctuary of Artemis.?? It is the same potential
tension involved in this type of cultic complementarity that is activated and
transformed into conflict and hostility in this context of perversion of normal-
ity, of disorder, that is created by Hippolytos' refusal to abandon the status of
young huntsman, of ephebe, and embrace erotic love, the status of maturity,
marriage, and reproduction, the proper order of things. It is only by restricting
and polarizing Artemis that Hippolytos can over-privilege her while under-
privileging Aphrodite.
The facet of the goddess pertaining to the tradition into adulthood and
maturity is evoked in Artemis' own speech indirectly: it is woven into the
institution of Hippolytos' cult, which pertains precisely to that transition, the
transition of Troezenian parthenoi into womanhood through marriage. At
1424 ff Artemis promises Hippolytos that she will give him 'the greatest
honours' in the polis of Troezen; this clearly implies that the cult that will be
instituted to him will be within her own cultic sphere, which of course the
transition of parthenoi to womanhood through marriage was, in Athens and
elsewhere-a fact which at this point would have strongly evoked for the
Athenian audience the perception that Hippolytos' Artemis was only partial.
The fact that this is evoked by Artemis' own words here would have decon-
structed in the eyes of the Athenians Artemis' own presentation of the case,
which omits Hippolytos' guilt in neglecting Aphrodite and refusing to make the
proper transition, thus offending against the divine order and the proper order
of things. She only mentions Aphrodite'S malice. I suggest that this would have
been perceived by the Athenians as reflecting Artemis' partiality. The para-
meters within which this partiality would have been understood were, I suggest,
76 Palaiokrassa (1991), 62,68, 70, 73, 82-4, 92 n. 269, 94.
77 Sourvinou-Inwood (199 1), 58- 143 passim.
first and most importantly, that in transgressions of this kind the role of the
guardian of the proper order of things was perceived to have drifted entirely to
the under-privileged deity, backed up by the power of the divine order
represented by Zeus. Secondly, that when divinities are put on stage there is the
potentiality of articulating, and focusing on, one of the possibilities contained in
the notion that itj1.ai (,honours') are due to all the gods, by representing it in
terms of a personal rivalry between the over-privileged and the under-
privileged divinity. But this rivalry is restricted by the fact, the religious percep-
tion, that the under-privileged deity is in the right, and so her punishment of the
guilty mortal cannot be hindered by the over-privileged one; this state of affairs
is portrayed by Artemis in 1328-3 I as a principle of non-interference resulting
from a nomos presented as being policed by Zeus, that no immortal is allowed to
interfere in the plans of another. I suggest that the Athenian audience would
not have understood this as a general principle of non-interference, but rather
as pertaining to situations in which the deity against whom a mortal has trans-
gressed is exacting revenge for what ultimately is an offence against the whole
divine order.
GODS IN TRAGEDY AND IN LIVED RELIGION: CONCLUSIONS
In these circumstances, we may conclude that the thesis that these and the
other divinities in tragedy were literary constructs, which were not perceived by
the Athenians to be representations of the divinities they worshipped in cult, is
mistaken; and that the relationship between the world of tragedy and the world
of the polis is much more complex than such simplistic interpretations allow.
The assumptions of the Athenian audience situated the world of the tragedy in
a part of their own world, as a representation of a part of their world, the heroic
past in which many of their religious practices were grounded, and in which
men and gods walked together and communicated directly. The fact that tragic
characters are in direct contact with the gods is not 'a tragic convention'.78 It
was a religious reality, a religious belief, for fifth-century Athenians, that the
heroes who are implicated in their cult, and who are set in place in tragedy,
were in direct contact with the gods. This religious fact helped to ground and
legitimate their own cults, which were founded by heroes with the help of the
gods who in those days communicated with mortals both in person and through
oracles not corrupted by human fallibility.
This was the basic framing of the relationship between the world of the
audience and that on the tragic stage. But that relationship was not static and
inert. On the contrary, I have tried to show that the relationship between the
world on the stage and the reality of the audience was manipulated in the
course of each tragedy through a series of distancing and zooming devices that
78 As Mikalson (cf. e.g. (199 I), 205) claims.

operated in interaction with the assumptions which the audience shared with
the tragedian. In the sphere of religion one of the things the tragic discourse
does is to explore the interstices of polis religion, including an articulation and
exploration of problem areas. In so far as the tragic world is distanced from that
of the present, tragedy explores religious questions at a 'safe', symbolic
distance; in so far as it is zoomed to the present, it shows how these questions
are directly relevant to this world, so that they are both explored at a safe,
symbolic distance and made directly relevant.
'Exploring' must not be confused with 'criticizing'; the Hippolytos is not
criticizing the gods and polis religion. The notion that it is doing so is the result
of a culturally determined perception rigidly structured by a twentieth-century
liberal Christian intellectual perspective. In ancient eyes, in the context of
Greek religion, to which the notion of the ultimate unknowabiIity of the
transcendental \vas central, the Hippolytos-among other things-articulates
an exploration of the empirically observable fact that the world is a cruel place
and people suffer; an exploration that suggests that, despite this, the cosmos
has rules and a fundamental order, a notion that guards against the despair
generated by the fear of cosmic anomy. To present a deity as cruel is not to
'criticize polis religion', since in a religion without a devil gods have a dark
and dangerous as well as a benevolent side; the same gods and cults
articulated the dark and dangerous side of the cosmos, which Greek religion
acknowledged and articulated, as the benign and positive one. The dark,
dangerous, threatening, arbitrary, side of gods is one particular articulation of
the perception that the world is dangerous and man's life very precarious.79 In
addition, the notion that Aphrodite is especially cruel because she destroyed
Phaedra) an innocent victim who had no choice, is not a perception that
would have been shared by the ancient audience. Not only is it the case, as we
have seen, that it is at the very least arguable-in fact likely-that in ancient
eyes Phaedra did have a choice, but also the very notions 'innocent victim
since she had no choice' and 'cruel because destroying an innocent victim' are
unstable cultural constructs. Let me give a simple illustration of this in-
stability, and of the fact that 'moral' perception depends on where the 'struc-
turing centre' of the perceived situation lies. Iraqi conscripts as well as
civilians in the Gulf War, deprived of their life, or of water, food, and
medicines, were one group of people who had no choice and could thus be
defined as innocent victims; but it is not the case that in the West's dominant
ideology and collective representations their destruction and/or suffering led
to criticisms of the war; it was the price for the achievement of an aim
perceived to be righteous-in fact, the very terminology used to refer to such
79 Kovacs (19 87: 75-6) is thinking along similar lines when he notes, with reference to the gods
in the HippolYIOS and more generally in Greek literature, that the presentation of the world as one
not designed for the satisfaction of human aspiration-a fact confirmed by experience-has a
positive role to play in helping people to cope with life, given humanity's precarious condition.
186 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
casualties, ~collateral damage', stresses precisely this perception. In ancient eyes

neglecting the TLfLYJ of a god was a very serious matter.
The religion of Greek tragedy was in one inescapable way part of Athenian
religion at the most basic level that cannot be ignored, however much one may
argue about its implications: it was part of Athenian religion because it was set
in place in the course of an important religious festival. I have argued here, and
shall be arguing in much greater detail elsewhere, that tragedy was also one
locus where the religious discourse of the polis was explored and elaborated;
and that therefore the relationship between religion in tragedy and the
practised religion of the polis was symbiotic; and also that the complex and
shifting distancing between the world of the play and the world of the audience
was of fundamental importance in the operation of tragedy as a discourse of
exploration.
10
The Ecstasy and the Tragedy: Varieties of
Religious Experience in Art, Drama, and Society
ROBIN OSBORNE
This book is concerned with what sort of histories can and cannot be written on
the basis of the representations of tragedy. In this paper I want to look not just
at the representations of maenads in tragedy but also in art, and in particular on
Athenian pots, and to ask two questions: first, how do the representations on
pots relate to the representations in drama? and second, can we use these
representations to write a history of religious experience?l
E. R. Dodds had no doubt that we could talk of a history of religious
experience. He outlines what he thinks the history gfDionysian experience was
in two pages of the chapter on 'The Blessings of Madness' in The Greeks and the
ln~ational:
Dionysus was in the Archaic Age as much a social necessity as Apollo; each ministered in
his own way to the anxieties characteristic of a guilt-culture ... Dionysus offered
freedom: \Forget the difference and you will find the identity; join the f}{aao,; and you
will be happy to-day.' ... The joys of Dionysus had an extremely wide range, from the
simple pleasures of the country bumpkin, dancing a jig on greased wineskins, to the
wj.Lo</Hiyo,; xapts of the ecstatic bacchanal. At both levels, and at all the levels between,
he is Lusios, ~the Liberator'-the god who by very simple means or by other means not so
simple, enables you for a short time to SlOp being yourself, and thereby sets you free. That
was~ I think, the main secret of his appeal to the Archaic Age: not only because life in that
age was often a thing to escape from, but more specifically because the individual, as the
modern world knows him, began in that age to emerge for the first time from the old
solidarity of the family, and found the unfamiliar burden of individual responsibility
hard to bear. Dionysus could lift it from him .... The aim of his cult was ecstasis .. .. With
the incorporation of the Dionysiac cult in the civic religion, this function was gradually
overlaid by others ... in the main the cure of the afflicted had in the Classical Age passed
into the hands of other cults. 2
Dodds extended his evolutionist view to maenadic ritual:
Late Greek writers thought of the dances at Delphi as commemorative: they dance, says
Diodorus (4. 3), 'in imitation of the maenads who are said to have been associated with
1 I am grateful to Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood and Chris Pelling for their invitation to con-
tribute, and to Jan Bremmer, Simon Goldhill, Albert Henrichs, Richard Rutherford, and Richard
Seaford, and to seminar audiences in Oxford and London, for comments on an earlier version of
this paper. 2 Dodds (195 1 ),76-7.
188 Robin Osborne
the god in the old days.' Probably he is right, as regards his own time; but ritual is usually
older than the myth by which people explain it, and has deeper psychological roots.
There must ha\'e been a time \\'hen maenads or thyiads or {3uKXUt really became for a
fe\\' hours or days \vhat their name implies-\vild \vomen \vhose human personality has
been temporarily replaced by another.
Ritual oreibasia, for Dodds, is the ritualized control of what \vere originally
'spontaneous attacks of mass hysteria',3 and there is little or nothing distinctly
religious about the psychological experiences which he describes, \vhich is the
experience of oneself (as other) rather than any special experience of (a) god.
As the evolutionism which Dodds assumed has become unfashionable, so
scholars have come to doubt that Dionysiac myth can quite so straightforwardly
be translated into Dionysiac ritual practice. Henrichs has repeatedly stressed the
importance of the distinction between mythical and historical maenads which
was first made by Rapp in 1872, and has painted a much more limited picture of
historical Dionysiac ritua1. 4 Henrichs has stressed that Dionysiac rituals in which
'Nine is drunk involve only men, and that ritual maenadism involved only women.
He considers that the fixed biennial periodicity of maenadism, its regional char-
acter, and the limited membership of maenadic thiasoi are incompatible with
\spontaneous, unmitigated wantonness'.
Against exaggerated trends to ascribe to the maenads attitudes which are alien to Greek
religion, it must be emphasized that Greek maenadism with its ritual limitations of time,
place and membership \vas not the result of psychic illness or a cure for mental problems;
that it was not an infectious mass seizure which 'spread like wildfire'; and that the role of
Dionysus in connection with maenadism is not comparable to the relationship of a
modern gynaecologist to his patients. Even the possibility that maenadism was a periodic
and socially sanctioned rebellion against 'a male-dominated society' is rather remote, if
only because the percentage of women involved in maenadic rites was apparently never
high enough to have an impact on representative segments of the female population....
By all indications, the peculiar religious identity of the maenads had more to do with
sweat and physical exhaustion than with an abnormal state of mind. To exhaust oneself
for Dionysus became a ~sweet toil', a source of exhilaration and relief Once that elation
had been achieved by ritual means, the maenads came down from their mountain,
resumed normal lives, and waited for the return of the ritual t\VO years later.'
Thus for Henrichs the Dionysiac experience was not the experience of
becoming another, was not an abnormal state of mind at all, but was more a
state of body.6
3 Dodds (r95 r), 271, 272.
4 Rapp ( 187 2 ) (which already influenced Sandys so that he wrote in the introduction to his
edition of the Bacchae, 'In art, as well as in poetry, the representation of these wild states of
enthusiasm was apparently due to the imagination alone, for in prose literature we have very little
evidence, in historic times, of women actually holding revels in the open air. Such a practice would
have been alien to the spirit of seclusion which pervaded the life of womankind in Greece.');
Henrichs (1969), (1978), (1982), (1990), esp. 257-8. 5 Henrichs (1982), 5-7.
b But contrast Henrichs's e01phasis on the need to restore the divinity to Dionysos, and by
implication the experience of the divine to his worshippers, in Henrichs (1993a).

The Ecstasy and the Tragedy
Henrichs's views show the influence of a strong POSItiVIst bent, which

privileges the epigraphic evidence (from the hellenistic period), and accepts
only those parts of the literary tradition which are confirmed by, or at least
compatible with, the picture emerging from the epigraphic material. Henrichs
does not often draw attention to the date of the material which he is discussing,
and, noting that 'Theories of religious origins, however fascinating, are poor
substitutes for documented religious history',7 he shows, even in the article
entitled 'Changing Dionysiac Identities', that there is little good reason in the
literary and epigraphic evidence to form anything other than a largely static
picture of Dionysiac cult.
Other recent scholars, while closer to Henrichs than to Dodds, allow for the
possibility that practices not attested in the epigraphic record actually occurred.
Thus Bremmer, more sympathetic than Henrichs to Dodds's use of compara-
tive evidence from different cultures, while allowing that 'myth exaggerates
ritual', nevertheless is prepared to believe, on the basis of images on Athenian
pots, that snake handling was a part of real maenadic behaviour, and to argue
that maenads did enter a state of trance, achieved the more easily because of
the 'thinner air and low temperature' of the mountain topS.8 Versnel notes that
to deny historical maenads an occasional bite of 'Ie cru' on the argument that such
savage behaviour should be confined to the category of myth, is no less arbitrary than the
avid visions of raving, blood-thirsty and blood-stained maenads cherished by many a
'romantic' scholar of a former generation
and notes that none of the features of historical maenadism which Henrichs
admits 'exclude extreme forms of ecstatic behaviour in principle'.9 Versnel is
concerned with early maenadism and claims that 'there is no reason to doubt
the wide range of various forms of maenadic ritual in Greek -speaking areas as
early as the archaic and classical periods'. He uses Herodotus 4.79 ff. and 108
to show that 'in the classical period maenadic Of, more generally, orgiastic
behaviour was regarded as characteristic of Greek culture' (p. 140 ).10 Although
finally unwilling to commit himself to the historicity of stories of excess,
Versnel does allow that the nature of the cult changed over time: he talks of
'drastic routinization of maenadism in the context of the official cult practice'
(p. 145) and remarks on 'How very un-Bacchic the atmosphere had become in
later Dionysiac clubs'.ll Where Henrichs writes, 'Although a women's cult of
7 (1982), 146.
8 Bremmer (19 84). On trance see also the studies in Ghiron-Bistagne (19 88).
9 Versnel (199 0 ),135 and 0. 163.
10 Herodotus is one of the few classical literary texts which Henrichs is willing to credit, making
Herodotus 4. 79 ff. the basis for one of his rare chronological statements that 'beginning in the fifth
century BeE at the latest, men too "went mad" (mainesthai used in combination with bakcheuein) for
Dionysus and enrolled in private congregations which admitted both sexes, met in secret, and
required initiation ceremonies (teletai)', Henrichs (1982), 147 and n. 99.
II Jan Bremmer points out to me that Versnel here introduces the notion of ~routinization' from
his \XTeberian model; ~unroutinized' maenadism belongs, on current evidence, to the realm of
mythical maenadism.
Robin Osborne
Dionysus existed in late fifth-century Athens (Aristoph. Lys. I), ritual

maenadism proper was apparently not practised in Attica', Versnel remarks,
having quoted the same passage of Aristophanes, that 'We may safely assume
that Athens knew forms of maenadism comparable to that of other places. n2
The attitude of different scholars to the value of classical literary and artistic
evidence has varied, but even Henrichs incorporates some such evidence into
his picture of historical maenadism. For instance, he uses the fact that satyrs
conspicuously outnumber maenads on vases showing scenes of vintage as
evidence that the cultivation of the vine was primarily associated with males,
the throngs of satyrs and maenads surrounding Dionysos on vases as evidence
for the impressive size of Dionysian groups, and the fact that Euripides
differentiates between married and unmarried maenads in the Bacchae as
evidence that different age groups worshipped Dionysos differently and that
puberty was an important dividing-paint. l3 In all these cases the literary or
artistic evidence is taken out of context and used as of general rather than time-
specific relevance.
We do not have to share Dodds's evolutionism to feel dissatisfied with a
picture of Dionysiac cult activities which is constructed by culling choice, if not
entirely arbitrary, details from a great mixture of sources, and where one major
criterion for taking anything from a literary source is whether it happens to be
the sort of thing which gets into the later epigraphic record. It is true that many
literary critics and commentators, from Sandys on, seem to have been cowed,
first by Rapp and now by Henrichs, and have fought shy of the question of the
relationship between what is represented on stage and what was familiar to
either the poet or his audience from life. As a result they often seem to assume
that the saIne detachment prevails in the case of the Bacchae as in the case of
Aiskhylos' Suppliants, as ifin each case the audience would simply abstract the
general problem (conflicting relations within the family, conflicting obligations
to city and to god, or whatever the particular critic sees the general problem as
being) while feeling as little implicated in the behaviour of the bacchants as in
the family of the Danaids. 14 But, unless one is claiming that 'maenadism' in any
form was simply unknown (or at least as rare as suppliancy), outside myth, in
the classical Greek world, it seems impossible to ignore the fact that the chorus
of the Bacchae will have invited a whole range of comparisons and contrasts
with known contemporary activities, comparisons and contrasts which the
chorus of a play such as Suppliants would not invite at all.
12 Henrichs (1982), 144; Versnel (1990), 149. At 149 n. 21 I Versnel does note that 'we have no
decisive evidence that might definitively disprove the negative conclusion by Henrichs'.
13 Henrichs (1982), 140, 149, ISO. Eur. Bacch. 694 distinguishes between married and un-
married women among Dionysos' followers only to note that both were present, that the expected
division was not observed; see]. Roux (197 2 ), 463-4.
14 So Foley (1985: 239) writes, ~The Bacchae again asks what it means to absorb myth and ritual,
this time Dionysiac myth and ritual, into the life of a polis.' Compare also Segal (1982), or Goldhill
(1986)) ch. 11. There are of course some ways in which the audience might feel implicated in the
behaviour of the Danaids for it raises points very pertinent for the Attic epiklerate.
The Ecstasy and the Tragedy
The coyness of the literary critics is not without reflection in the work of
those historians of religion who have tackled the question of the historical
significance of Euripides' play. Scared off Dionysiac territory, the prevailing
vie\v sees the playas making an oblique comment about other cults. Acknow-
ledging that in classical Athens 'Dionysiac festivals were very different' and
that 'there was little or nothing in the official Athenian cult which could inspire
the descriptions in the irdpo8os and the messenger-speeches', Dodds suggested
that Euripides' interest in the subject may have been aroused by the fact that
'during the .Peloponnesian War-probably as a result of the social stresses
which it generated-religion of the orgiastic type began to emerge again under
other names', and particularly that Euripides was stimulated by the arrival of
the rites of Sabazius. 15 Versnel has developed this view in the language of the
sociology of religion. He suggests that Euripides is asking his audience
If the play pictures Dionysos as a ne\v charismatic god \vho after initial repudiation
finally proves his divine majesty, and it~ consequently, his followers-true sectarians in
many respects-are put to right, why should a similar eventual justification be inconceiv-
able in the case of the new and exotic gods of fifth-century Athens? .. How do you know
that Kotys, Sabazios, Bendis, Isodaites do not belong to the same category of great and
majestic gods as Dionysos except by the differences in cultic and, above all, mythical
legitimation?'
For Versnel the Bacchae
holds a more specific meaning, which must have entailed quite a challenge to the
audience. By staging Dionysos as a foreign, new god, introduced by a foreign and doubt-
ful prophet and worshipped by an unmistakably sectarian movement, Euripides inten-
tionally blurred the comfortable distinctions between the solid foundations of
institutional religion and the deviant sects on the margin of Athenian society.'16
The core of the argument here might be caricatured as follows: Euripides

must have written the Bacchae for some reason; he cannot have been using
mythical maenadism to tell us something about ritual maenadism because the
two had very little in common and there may have been no ritual maenad ism at
all at Athens; therefore he must have been trying to say something about some
real phenomenon which did have something in common with mythical
maenadism; we can conveniently locate such a phenomenon in the new cults
pouring in from the east at the end of the fifth century.
There are a number of points in this argument which might be questioned
from the literary-critical point of view-in particular the question of how far
the view is compatible with seeing the drama as an exploration of the nature of
15 Dodds (I944 /1 960), pp. xix-xxii.
16 Versnel (I990 ), 186, I89. In my view, the use of the language of analysis developed in the
context of the Christian Church is extremely unhelpful in dealing with Greek religion. It is a curious
but revealing fact that while 'Christian religion' and 'sect(arianism)' are to be found in Versnel's
Index, 'Euripides' is not.
Robin Osborne
Dionysos in that peculiarly Dionysiac context of the theatre. And there are also
a number of points which invite scrutiny from the historical point of view: were
there no orgiastic elements in the worship of Dionysos in classical Attica? to
\vhat extent were foreign orgiastic cults a strikingly new phenomenon at the
time the play was first performed? to what extent was there institutional resist-
ance to the introduction of new cults? I will end up implying a view on all these
points, but I want to concentrate first on a more general issue.
The weakness of the argument that Euripides' Bacchae was inspired by the
advent ofSabazius is shown up most clearly by noting that, although Euripides'
Bacchae is the only tragedy on this theme to survive intact, there were a
number of earlier plays on Dionysiac themes about which we are more or less
reliably informed.17 There were not one but two sets of plays by Aiskhylos on
Dionysian themes: his Lykourgeia consisted of Edonoi, Bassarai, Neaniskoi,
and satyr-play Lykourgos (and the surviving evidence reveals close parallels
between episodes in these plays and episodes in the Bacchae-especially
fragments 23 (Dionysos as bull), 58 (earthquake shaking palace), 59 (Dionysos
as Lydian), and 448 (sexual immorality of maenads)); and his Semele, Xantriai,
and Pentheus seem to have formed part of a second trilogy of plays, in which
the Pentheus seems to have covered much the same ground as Euripides' play,
although the precise nature of the full trilogy is unclear. ls A Lykourgos by
Polyphrasmon is recorded for 467, a Bacchae by Xenokles was part of a trilogy
which received first prize in 4 15, and Bacchae are also known by Iophon son of
Sophokles and by Kleophon. If maenadism was explored in tragedy by
Euripides and others in the last quarter of the fifth century, then it was also
explored by Aiskhylos and others in the second quarter. 19 If Euripides' Bacchae
is commenting on a contemporary issue, what reason have we to think that the
bacchants of Aiskhylos and his contemporaries were not commenting on a con-
temporary issue? But if Aiskhylos' plays similarly explored some contemporary
issue through mythical maenadism, was that also a non-Dionysiac issue? Are
we to suppose that behind every literary exploration of maenadism there is a
new ecstatic foreign cult?20
The irrationality of privileging Euripides' Bacchae as historically significant,
17 Seaford (1994: 275-7) points out that plays on Dionysiac themes were more common, even in
early tragedy, than plays on Homeric themes. Dodds himself, in his introduction, makes clear how
traditional the language and metre of Bacchae are.
18 Dodds (1944 /1 960 ), pp. xxvi-xxix.
19 It is important to note here that maenadism is also explored in plays which do not have a
Dionysiac theme: 'Violent frenzy of several kinds, even when caused by distinct divine forces, is
classified in tragedy under the sign of Dionysus Bacchos and is fundamentally related to him. In this
way, Dionysus is subtly included as a vigorous agent and object of reference even in those plots
where the decisive divinity is not Dionysus himsel£ The maenad as a model explicitly occurs in the
majority of the extant tragedies, and I dare to assert, implicitly also in the rest of them' J Schlesier
(1993: 101).
20 These same observations on the history of the theme in Attic drama surely count against the
view that Euripides' Macedonian experience is peculiarly relevant to the Bacchae.
The Ecstasy and the Tragedy I93
while never raising the question of the historical significance of other tragedies
in which maenadism bulked large, emerges still more starkly when the evidence
from painted pottery is taken into consideration. Dodds's own treatment of the
painted pottery in the introduction to his edition of the Bacchae makes this very
clear. He writes:
What does ... en1erge from a study of fifth-century paintings of Dionysiac subjects is that
some at least of the painters had seen women in religious ecstasy (possibly at the Lenaea).
And what they could see Euripides might see also, without going to Macedonia for the
purpose. But the painters' conception of a maenad changed as the fifth century
advanced. Those by the great artists of the age of the Persian wars breathe the most fire.
In the last quarter of the fifth century noble maenads were still created ... These do not
lack O€fLvoTI]S, but the animality and savage ecstasy of the older period is toned down-
the dXciALVOV and {3apos have given way to an ideal of tamed melodious beauty. It is the
older pictures 'Nhich best illustrate the spirit of Euripides' poem. (Dodds (1944/1960),
pp. xxxv-xxxvi)
Why is it that Euripides' Bacchae has been so privileged in the discussion?

Not only is it curious to suppose that the subsequent popularity of the play,
which was at least one of the important factors in ensuring its survival,
indicates some peculiar topicality at the time of first performance, but scholars
have long been confident that almost all the individual elements in the play-
Dionysos' imprisonment, the taunts about effeminacy, the 'palace miracles', his
epiphany as a bull, the charges of immorality against the bacchants, the
account of the raid by the bacchants on the valley farms-were paralleled in
Aiskhylos. Why, more broadly, has a literary text been privileged over artistic
images? As literary critics have made very clear in recent years, Euripides' play
does a lot of other things besides commenting on ecstatic cult practices. On the
one hand images are bound to be less complex than a play 1,400 lines long. But,
on the other hand, the interpretation of any single line of the play is controlled
by the rest of the play; the hermeneutic control which other images exercise
over any particular image is inevitably much looser. When Versnel claims that
'The problem concerning the distinction between mythical or ritual inter-
pretations of the literary evidence returns with increased vigour in the
interpretation of pictures', he is expressing the commonly held view, implicit in
Dodds and Henrichs toO.21
It is worth exploring further the question of the relative difficulties of assess-
ing the historical relevance of pictures and texts. One of Versnel's objections is
that, while the presence of Dionysos dancing with maenads might be inter-
preted as the parousia of the god among his worshippers, the presence of satyrs
'cannot but refer to a mythical reality', while at the same time the presence of
representations of Dionysos in the form of an idol must refer to ritual reality,
21 Versne1 (1990), 147.

194 Robin Osborne
since 'myth would require the consistent presence of a living god'.22 These
problematic features to which Versnel alludes pin-point the vvays in \vhich
painted images differ from texts. It is open to the artist, as it is not open to the
tragedian, to draw attention to or to draw attention away from the forms in
\vhich men or gods are experienced. An artist can paint in or paint out satyr
shorts at will, and can explore the tension Vv'hich combining men in satyr shorts
with 'natural' satyrs creates, as the Pronomos painter does on the name vase in
Naples, where one side conjures up the cast of a satyr play, the other conjures
up a scene of 'real' satyrs, and the two meet at the sides. 23 Comedy did, of
course, similarly exploit and then break the dramatic illusion in metatheatrical
play.24 But just as literary critics have become very aware of the interpretative
importance of the metatheatrical, so, rather than regretting that painted
images are not photographs, historians need to appreciate the value of
observing the choices which artists make and the ways in which images mediate
experience. If an artist combines an 'idol' of Dionysos, which clearly alludes to
ritual, with the presence of satyrs, which equally clearly allude to an Other
world, this need not show the artist to be impossibly confused between myth
and ritual, nor that, in Henrichs's words, 'in Greek art ... myth tends to prevail
over ritual' ,25 for it might equally be that the artist wishes to draw attention to
the effect of ritua1. 26
The artist's frame of reference includes both life and myth, life imitating
myth and myth imitating life give images piquancy. The dramatist in, for
example, a messenger speech, provides a narrative context but can only give
verbal cues towards a more precise picture, cues which transform themselves
into visual images only through conjuring up pictures in the mind of the
audience on the basis of the experiences and imagination of the audience. As
the experiences and imaginative capacities of the audience vary, so there must
always be considerable scope for producing alternative mental pictures. The
artist, on the other hand, provides a particular visual picture, a picture which
may entirely match the experience of the viewer, may partly match the experi-
ence of the viewer, or may be impossible to match with any experience. Where
the image only partly matches the experience of the viewer, the artist can only
give cues as to the possible narrative context(s); how these cues are taken
depends to a greater or lesser extent on the viewer's imagination.
To take a more or less straightforward example, I would maintain that when
the Q painter chose to show a woman dancing before a seated bearded figure
holding a thyrsos, and to show that woman naked but for a pair of satyr shorts
complete with erect, if discrete, phallos, s/he was choosing to present an image
which would only partly match the visual experience of any viewer. By doing so
22 Versnel (199°,148. Compare the way in which IVlcNally (1978: 104-5) seems to assume that
since the satyrs in an image are mythical. the maenads in that ilnage must be mythical too.
13 See Lissarrague (199 0a ). :!.J Taplin (1986).
25 (197 8) 154. 26 So Berard-Bron (1989); Bron (1987).
Robin Osborne
ecstatic cults else\vhere is, given the relative constancy of human physiology,
very good evidence for experience rather than pure invention to be behind the
1iterary and artistic record.
It follo\vs from the argument above that neither 1iterature nor art can claim
unique status as purveyors of ~the truth'. but also that they have com-
plementary strengths as historical documents. Where literature can provide
much more explicit narrative context, art has a descriptive completeness which
literature cannot rival. There are thus some grounds for arguing that some
sorts of deductions from images can actually be more precise than the sorts of
deductions which can be made from literary texts, and that this creates a case
for privileging images rather than texts in some aspects at least of the
discussion.
\Xlhat, then, is the history of the maenad in art?
,.I
Dionysos first appears in Greek art on the pot paintings of Sophilos and
Kleitias in around the third decade of the sixth century, in the context of first
the \vedding of Peleus and Thetis and then the Return of Hephaistos. 3o The
frontal Dionysos carrying a golden amphora of Kleitias' F ran~ois vase (PI. I)
has attracted much attention: one of the most striking things about it is the way
in which it already embodies \vhat is to be visually special about Dionysos.31
This Dionysos is accompanied by male figures with various equine features,
who are labelled £IAENOI and female figures, one with cymbals, who are
labelled NY<PAI. Although the nomenclature employed is not without interest,
and although the absence of thyrsoi in Dionysiac scenes for some fifty years
after this is worth noting, it is clear that Dionysos is here being associated with a
particular sort of musically active female just as he is being associated with a
particular sort of sexually active male.
Do these early followers of Dionysos simply characterize him-as his
amphora and frontal gaze might be held to do-or do they invoke in general or
particular terms Dionysiac ritual? As Carpenter has observed, only a quarter of
Dionysiac scenes on vases by major painters who begin work before the middle
of the sixth century include women, and when women occur they are, on all but
one occasion, accompanied by satyrs rather than alone with Dionysos.
Carpenter suggests that, since satyrs chase women in scenes that antedate the
first representation of Dionysos, 'nymphs may simply have come alone into the
Dionysian repertory as the regular companions of the satyrs. In other words,
the nymphs on the early Dionysian vases may have little or no connection \vith
the god himself.'32 But this is arguably to fail, crucially, to distinguish women
:'0 Carpenter (19 86), chs. I -2. There are also helpful remarks on black figure in Edwards (1960),
79-8 1. 3J Frontisi-Ducroux (199 1 ),177.
32 Carpenter (19 86),82. Compare also l\\cNally (1978: 117), 'maenads depend on the satyrs to
make them truly Dionysian'! On the distinction between maenads and nymphs compare the
remarks of Henrichs (1987: 100-5), who draws attention to the juxtaposition of maenads and
~nymphs~ by the Amasis painter on .1BV 15 1.21, a juxtaposition which surely draws attention both
to the sexuality and the sexual inacti"ity of the maenad, as the dramatic treatment of the maenad,
The Ecstasy and the Tragedy 197
whose narrative cue is towards the completion of the satyrs' sexual interest,
\vomen as the objects of the satyrs ~ evident sexual desire~ from women whose
other attributes, the cymbals of the Franc;ois vase, the snakes~ fawnskins, and
bunches of grapes of Lydos' krater (ilBV 108.5 (PI. 2); c[ the Tyrrhenian
amphora, 1°3.108) or, more ambiguously, simply dancing (as in ABV 64.24 or
156.8 I (PI. 3)), give a narrative cue which is independent of the sexual desire of
the satyrs.
The independence of maenad from satyr is crucial. It is not implausible that
satyrs might have been imported to Dionysiac scenes from non-Dionysiac
imagery in which they have been developed to express the bestiality of male
sexual desire, and have been imported to express by analogy the excitement
which Dionysos, in liquid or ritual form, induces. But if it is accepted that the
presence of maenads, as I shall tendentiously call them, adds an element and
does not merely serve to reinforce the satyric message about sexual desire, then
these maenads cannot stand for woman as object of male attention. But if they
are not there for their link \vith satyrs then, given that they never occur alone in
these early images, they would seem to be there for their link with Dionysos.
One way or another the maenad must be figuring the Dionysiac worshipper,
and the percussion and animals imaging some particular kind of (ecstatic)
religious experience. 33
But, if the occurrence of the 'nymph' with the cymbals of the Fran~ois vase,
and her more or less unambiguously maenadic successors, are taken as good
evidence for Dionysiac ritual as involving experiences not part of other rituals,
they should not be taken to tell us much, perhaps not anything, about the
development of such ritual. Just as the iconography of the Fran~ois vase would
imply, even if we did not have independent reasons for supposing so, that
Dionysos was no newcomer, so the arrival of the first 'maenad' on the Fran~ois
vase cannot be taken to imply that ecstatic female worship of Dionysos was
some novelty in the early sixth century. l\1aenads, even as associates of satyrs,
make their way onto only a small percentage of Athenian black-figure pots, at
least until the last forty years or s<..' of the sixth century, and it is not until the
probably in Aiskhylos as well as Euripides, would also do. The distinction between maenads and
nymphs has now been examined at length by Hedreen (1994), who denies the existence of maenads
in classical art or life. Hedreen seems to me to fail to see that 'nymph' and 'maenad' are terms that
work differently and are not mutually exclusive; to be unreasonably unwilling to allow that there
rna y be images which don't have a spoken or wri nen 'myth' behind them (esp. pp. 52 n. 3 I, 67
n. 137); and to want both to have his cake and eat it in suggesting e.g. (58) that the ritual figures of
women on the Lenaian vase which shows a baby satyr lend plausibility to the scene while denying
that they tell us anything about the ritual roles of women.
33 This has implications for histories ofmaenads which treat them as simply 'women', as if their
Dionysiac overtones were an optional extra and as if their relations with satyrs were all that
matters. So, classically, l\1.cNally (1978: 101-35), who virtually ignores vases where there are
maenads but not satyrs, objecting to those who connect maenads on pots to the Bacchae on the
grounds that there are no satyrs in the Bacchae (p. lOS)! That is not to deny that representation of
maenads are representations of women and image women in important ways which I do not fully
discuss here, but they are women worshippers of Dionysos.
Robin Osborne
last quarter of the sixth century that they appear as subjects in their own right
(i.e. without Dionysos or satyrs anywhere in attendance). If any argument from
~silence' is to be hazarded it is perhaps that female ecstatic worship of Dionysos
~'as not an issue high on the agenda at Athens, or at least not high on the
agenda of those who painted potS.3~
Around 530 there are marked changes in Dionysian imagery.35 Henrichs
suggested that ~the gradual shift from spooky nymphs to hieratic maenads in
Dionysiac scenes in sixth-century Attic vase painting, and the gradual appear-
ance of the most typical maenadic implement, the thyrsos, on Attic vases from
530 Be onwards, would seem to attest the existence of cultic maenadism which
influenced painters.'36 But it is perhaps less significant that maenadic attributes
change, since their attributes have been in flux throughout their short career to
date in black figure, than that they become massively more popular and begin
to appear on their own on vases (see Table 10.1). Whereas only some 2.5 per
cent of vases by Lydos, Exekias, and Amasis and their circles have scenes
including maenads, and only some 5 per cent of Little-Master and other cups
have a maenad, more than 10 per cent of the pots of Nikosthenes and the black-
figure 'mannerists' have maenads, some 13 per cent of those of the Andokides
and the Antimenes painter and Psiax do, and some 17 per cent of the pots of the
Leagros group, Nikoxenos, etc. have them. The numbers of pots involved in
these calculations are very large, and thus the doubling and trebling of the
proportion with maenads represents a substantial change in practice. At the
same time as the proportion of maenads grows, scenes of maenads alone,
~4 But not too much weight should be given to the relatively small numbers of maenads recog-
nized by Beazley on the pottery of this period. Some artists, and particularly the Amasis painter,
seem to have been very interested in the transformation of men into satyrs and women into
maenads in the presence of Dionysos. He is the first artist certainly to show dancing women/
maenads alone with Dionysos CABV 152.25), and he uses the same pose both for the two women
dancing together on that pot and for the maenad and satyr dancing together on an amphora with a
\'intage scene (Para 65). On the back of that vase he shows a central Dionysos flanked by dancing
women holding kantharos and oinochoe who in turn are flanked by dancing, beardless naked men.
On a further amphora (ABV 150.6) there is a similarly arranged dancing scene but with bearded
naked men. Carpenter (1986: 86), discussing these images, thinks that 'at this early stage in the
development of Dionysian imagery, there was little consensus and perhaps much confusion about
the identity of the god's companions" but I prefer to see a deliberate exploration of real-life
Dionysiac experience here through calculated substitution of men for satyrs and calculated am-
biguity about the identity of the fen1ale figures. I thus fundamentally disagree with Edwards (1960:
85), who draws from the lack of a clear distinction between maenads and other female companions
of Dionysos the conc1usion that 4It seems that the artists' conceptions of the figures they were draw-
ing constantly became blurred after the motif had been in use for a period of time, which is more
likely to happen when the scene is legendary and there is no definite association in the artist's mind
between the mythological beings whom he drew and the actual practice of cult with which he was
familiar'. On the contrary the blurring is, in my view, better interpreted as the result of such associ-
ations.
35 Carpenter (1986), 126; Edwards (I 960), 84.
36 Henrichs (197 8), 144; compare Henrichs (1987), 105: 'The sudden prominence of ritual
maenads in full gear on Attic "ases from approximately 5 50 BC on\\'ards must reflect a growing
interest in maenadic ritual'.
The Ecstasy and the Tragedy 199
\vithout Dionysos, are found for the first time, a fe\v on works of Psi ax and then
a distinct cluster within the corpus of the Leagros group and some more
doubtful examples in the work of Nikoxenos. f)ats \vith maenads and satyrs
\vithout Dionysos dominate the maenadic works of Nikosthenes and the
mannerists, as they had dominated the maenadic Little-Master cups, but they
are notably relatively fe\v in number iD. the work of the other groups of artists at
the end of the sixth century, whose maenadic scenes most regularly have the
full complement of satyrs, maenads, and Dionysos.
This pattern of maenadic pots is closely paralleled (Table 10.2) in the earliest
red-figure pots (many by the same artists). Some I I per cent of the works of the
earliest red-figure artists (i.e. in Beazley ARV 2 bk. I) have maenads on them,
with just over halfhaving maenads, Dionysos, and satyrs and some 13 per cent
having maenads without satyrs or Dionysos.37 But subsequent red-figure \~lork
has markedly fewer maenads: only around 5 per cent of pots by early red-figure
cup painters., late archaic pot painters, late archaic cup painters, early classic
small pot painters, and early classic cup and skyphos painters have maenads,
and in almost all these categories the maenadic pots are most commonly pots
showing maenads and satyrs but not Dionysos. Only in large pots do maenads
sustain anything close to a 10 per cent interest, both in Beazley's early classic
period (where there is an unusually large contingent of vases showing maenads
with Dionysos but no satyrs) and in his classic period, and this interest is
sustained into the late fifth century when small pots and cups remain relatively
uninterested in maenads at a11.38 Then in the fourth century the picture changes
again with maenads appearing on over 20 per cent of pots and almost 15 per
cent of cups.
If we are to measure interest in maenads by quantity, therefore, the high
points seem to be the end of the sixth century and the fourth century, with a
selective interest expressed in the intervening period by painters of larger pots.
This selective interest is both interesting and important, and for two reasons: it
makes clear that maenads, or satyrs and maenads, never become simply
standard motifs, and, more particularly, their absence from cups (less than 5
per cent of late archaic and early classic cups, less than 3 per cent of classic
cups) until the fourth century shows that they never become simply an
appropriate way of alluding to the Dionysiac; and it suggests that thinking
about maenads was appropriate in certain limited contexts and not in every
context, with the painter deliberately choosing images to be 'read' in particular
7
3 Compare Edwards (1960), 81-2, 85-6.
38 The lack of concern for maenads on cups is of particular interest because of the literary insist-
ence (in the Bacchae, and in Theokritos 26) that maenadic rituals were secrel (c£ also the secret
rituals in which the gerarai are involved in [Dem.) 59. 73). This secrecy gives the portrayal of
maenads an element of voyeurism, putting the viewer into the position of Pentheus, which one
might have expected would make the subject attractive for that commonly voyeuristic medium, the
sympotic cup. In fact it is difficult to see any signs of a consciousness of 'snooping' in maenadic
imagery.
N
o
o
TABLE 10. I. Statistical analysis a/the occurrence ofmacllads recorded by Beazley in ABV ~
o
0'"
5'
Chapter no. No. of vases No. of vases % of all % ofmaenads
with vases with __ ~~._. __ r_·~~~ _ _ •• _ _ _ _ _ _ •_ _ _ _ __ o
IZl
CT
maenads maenads with with with satyrs not o
...,
Dionysos Dionysos but not accompanied ::l
('!)
and satyrs but not Dionysos by satyrs or

satyrs Dionysos
- - -.. ------------~~~-~-~-~------------.~~ ---~~ .. _--_ .._--_._._- --~---.-~------~--~.--- ~ -- - ~ ~-~... . ~----- ~-~. _. ~. -~- -~ ~ -~~ - --.~~- .... - -~, ~-
1-3 849 o 0
4- 8 449 12 2·7 42 8·3 50 0
9-1 I. Lydos, Exekias, Amasis 573 14 2·4 57 14·3 28.6 0
12-14. Little-Master etc. cups 61 3 31 5. 1 22.6 9·7 67·7 0
15-16. Nikosthenes, Mannerists 337 36 10·7 3 0 .6 2.8 66·7 0
17-22. Andokidcs, Antimenes,
Psiax, etc. 1,049 140 13·4 7 0 .6 17·9 8.6 2·9
23-6. Leagros, Nikoxenos, etc. 501 87 17·4 51.8 31 6·9 10·3
27. Panathenaics 133 3 2·3 33·3 33·3 33·3 0
28- 3 I. Oinochoai 447 63 14. 1 22.2 20.6 31.8 25·4
32-4. Lekythoi: earlyw Edinburgh
ptr. 50 7 48 9·5 12·5 18.8 48 20.8
35 -7· Lekythoi: Athens 58 1 ,
Sappho ptr.) etc. 788 12 7 16. I 20·4 31.5 29. 2 18·9
38-9. Lekythoi: Haimon,
Beldam, etc. 9 68 93 9. 6 19·4 18·3 37. 6 24. 8
40. Small-neck amphorae 29 0 126 43·5 13·5 55·S 18·3 12·7
41-2. Kyathoi, mastoids,
skyphoi 3 16 21 6.6 23. 8 9·5 62 4. 8
43. Late cups 29 1 88 30 . 1 49 2·3 39. 8 9. 1
33. Miniature vases 218 2 0·9 0 0 100 0 ~
::r'
(1)
TOTALS 8,3 29 89 1 10.8
t'Ii
(')
(I'J
Important nole: this table and Table (below) rely entirely on Beazley's decision as to whether to record a figure as a maenad or not. Beazley was reasonably
10.2 r-t
~
consistent in this, but it does create anomalies (such as the exclusion of the Lenaian lekythoi but the inclusion of the Lenaian stamnoi). Beazley also failed to en
t..<
record the presence of maenads in certain stock scenes, of which the most important are the scenes of the Return of Hephaistos. No scenes of the Return of ~
Hephaistos are included in the following tables, resulting in an important understatement of the number ofmaenadic scenes on early black-figure vases. Where ::l
0..
Beazley thought a figure might be a maenad, but was not sure, the pot has been included. Maenads on fragments of pots have also been included, although this r-t
::r
may unduly increase the apparent number of pots with maenads but not satyrs or Dionysos. Beazley's listings are obviously very incomplete, but in my view he (1)
was neither systematically biased towards recording pots which showed macnads nor systematically biased against such pots. His lists can therefore serve as a ~
""1
sufficiently random sample of Athenian figured pottery. Pl
()'q
(1)
0...
~
tv
o
~
tv
o
N
10. Classic painters of smaller
pots 4 13 12 2·9 8·3 0 25 66-7
I I. Classic painters of white
lekythoi 27 0 0 0
12. Classic cup painters 65 6 19 2·9 10·5 0 84. 2 5·3
13. Classic skyphos painters 5I 0 0
14. Classic painters of stemmed
plates 101 0 0
I 5. Late 5th-cen t. pot pain te rs 334 38 11.4 42.1 7·9 39·5 10·5
16. Late 5th-cent. painters of
small pots 355 16 4·5 6·3 0 56 .3 38.5 ~
::J
17. Late 5th-cent. painters of (t)
white lekythoi 30 7 0 0 tr1

(")
18. Late 5th-cent. cup painters 199 14 7. 1 7. I 7 8 .5 7. I en
,...,.
7 p.j
19. 4th-cent. pot painters 1,375 286 20.8 44. 8 5·9 39·5 9. 8 r.n
'-<
20. 4th-cent. painters of cups 25 2 37 14·7 8.1 13·5 70 . 2 8. I jl,;;I
Appendix: Head vases 6 ::1

40 7 1.5 0 16·7 66·7 16·7 0..
M
TOTALS 20,28 I 1,37 I 6.8 ::r
(1)
~
Sccfoot1lote to Table 10.1 (abo've). """1
~
crq
(1)
0..
~
N
o
w
20 4 Robin Osborne
contexts. One might also note the all-but -complete absence of maenads from
\vhite-ground lekythoi: 3l} \vhatever one thinks about the nature of Dionysiac
mystery cults at Athens in the fifth century,-+o it is clear that Dionysiac imagery
had no place on pots made at Athens specifically for funerary use.
Counting pots is not something classical art historians have been keen to do.
But if \ve are dealing \vith mass imagery, much of it produced at low cost for
\videspread, if particular, markets, abroad as 'Nell as at home, it is surely
import.ant to discern \vhat \vere the general concerns of that market) what was
thought to be on the purchasers~ agenda and to excite their interest. Traditional
art-historical concerns must, however, also playa part in the picture. Too much
has perhaps been made in the past of the exceptional image, as of the excep-
tional drama, but how a subject is displayed may be as important as how often it
is portrayed.
One particular class of Dionysiac image has long been thought to have a
particular relationship to ritual: the so-called Lenaian vases. These have
recently been excellently studied by Francsoise Frontisi-Ducroux, and what
follows is heavily indebted to her \vork.~ 1 F rontisi-Ducroux catalogues 74 vases
as falling into the class which Frickenhaus dubbed 'Lenaeans" that is vases
which sho\v women engaged in some ritual activity around an image of
Dionysos consisting of a mask on a pole. There are two more or less consistent
groups of these images: 28 black-figure lekythoi all or almost all from a single
\vorkshop, the workshop of Haimon, and dating to the two decades before the
Persian Wars; and 25 red-figure stamnoi of which 20 fall into the date-range
460-450, four in the range 450-440, and one at around 420. There are then 22
further vases which Frontisi-Ducroux accepts as related but which, either in
shape or in imagery, do not fit into either of these groups: I I of them date to
500-4 80; 4 date to around 470; 5 (4 being stamnoi) date to around 450; one
red-figure oinochoe dates to around 430; and another red-figure oinochoe dates
to the late fourth century. Thus, with the exception of the final 'stray', all the
vases date to the first three-quarters of the fifth century, but there seem to be
two distinct foci-around 490 and around 450. These two chronological foci
are matched by distinct patterns in the imagery.
The black-figure lekythoi depict some sort of circular motion around the
Dionysos pillar-mask, seen in profile and normally double, facing both ways
:Y After a clutch of maenads on the earliest white lekythoi, which are iconographically quite
distinct from later lekythoi (ARV2) 302.1 I, 302.12, 302.18, 303.7, 306.7 +), I note as isolated
exceptions ARV 2 716.210,723.7,1003.25,1198.12, and 1198.16.
.. 0 Edwards (I 960: 84-5) suggest s that the thyrsos has its origins in mystery cult. Despite the
reservations of VersneJ (1990: 150-3), reviewing the evidence for Dionysos' mystic aspects, about
their prominence in 'continental Greece', the gold lamellae from Pelinna certainly bear witness to
their importance in Thessaly: see Graf (1993). The case for mystery cults in Athens in the fifth
century rests heavily on the evidence of the Bacchae itself: see Seaford (1981); (1987b), 76-8. The
linking of Dionysos and death is explored by S. G. Cole (1993). Outside Athens, and notably in
South Italy in the fourth century, Dionysiac imagery is often funerary .
.. ; Frontisi-Ducroux (1991).
The Ecstasy and the Tragedy 20 5
(PI. 4). Frontisi-Ducroux is able to show that there is a deliberate play of glances
bet\veen the worshippers and the mask. In many cases only female worshippers
are sho\vn (their flesh is sometimes, but not always picked out in white) but in
three cases satyrs are also present (PI. 5), in one case the women ride asses, in
one case they are seated, and in one case they are capturing a doe (PI. 6a-b).
Beazley does not classify the females as maenads, even in the last case, but one
vase, not classified by Beazley, shows three of the females wearing animal skins
(PI. 7), and that, together with the capture of the doe, suggests that the artistes)
\vanted occasionally to associate the women with maenads, and the more or less
clear dancing probably gives reason enough, even in the absence of the thyrsos,
for using, as Frontisi-Ducroux does, the name 'maenad'.
A number of the vases of other shapes seem very closely related to the images
on the lekythoi: there is a black-figure cup from the same workshop as the
lekythoi, several black-figure skyphoi, which add female players of auloi to the
personnel of the lekythoi, and there is a, much-reproduced, red-figure cup by
lV1akron (Pi. 9a-b),42 which has an altar by the pillar-mask, maenads with
thyrsoi, holding animals and in one case a skyphos, playing auloi, and adopting
distinctly ecstatic poses, with a krater standing on the ground. All these vases
belong to the period before the Persian Wars.
The imagery of the stamnos group of C.450 is rather different. The composi-
tion most frequently centres on a frontal pillar-mask of Dionysos (PI. loa). On
a table which may stand in front of or behind it, and which occurs even when
there is no pillar-mask (PI. 8), are one or two stamnoi from which a woman or
women ladle wine, presumably, into a skyphos. There are often objects which
look like loaves on the table also. The other side of the stamnos frequently
shows further women (PI. lob) who may hold a thyrsos, a skyphos or kantharos
(or less frequently some other vessel), or a parasol, and a woman playing auloi
may appear on front or back:B Although the women on the back of the vase
may move more or less rapidly, only in the later example (PI. I I) by the Dinos
painter, of around 420, does what is clearly dancing take place. On this stamnos
the female figures are named Dione, Mainas, Thaleia, and Khoreia. A small
number of stamnoi do not fit this scheme, but show a mask in profile, not a
double mask, past which ,"romen dance playing the aulas or holding some
vessel; there is one small stamnos which has a satyr facing the mask and
extending a kantharos towards it; m'Q identical stamnoi show the pillar-mask in
profile with a woman on either side, one with thyrsos and kantharos, the other
with liknon and oinochoe; and a final stamnos has the table and three women,
but one with a lyre and another with a baby, the reverse having three more
women, two with skyphoi (one also with an oinochoe) and one with a torch.
42 AR V 2 4 62 .48. 1\1.akron was unusual as a cup painter keen on maenads: 36, just under 8%, of
the 452 cups by or near him have maenads, whereas other late archaic cup painters produce only 65
cups with maenads out of 1,702 cups (rather under 4%).
43 In general, Beazley considers the figures on the front of these stamnoi lwomen', those on the
back'maenads'.
206 Robin Osborne
Should we treat these pots as a single class? Although there have been
disputes about the boundaries of the corpus, scholars have generally thought
that we should regard it as a corpus. Traditionally the images have been treated
as representing a festival, and the great debate that has dominated the
discussion has been about \vhether the festival \\'as the Lenaia or the
Anthesteria.-l 4 In 195 I Cache de 1a Ferte protested against this, suggesting that
~ Le rapport de ces scenes avec la realite est justifiable, mais, repetons-Ie, il est
fait d'emprunts imprecis et divers, auxquels s'ajoutent parfois des souvenirs
mythiques.'45 Frontisi-Ducroux lends considerable further weight to the
sceptical cause, and stresses the way in which the vases constitute a discussion
of Dionysos as mask rather than a record of a particular ritual at a particular
festival, but although she is hostile to particularizing these images to any
particular festival, at the end of the day she seems to find it impossible to
believe that we are dealing here with only 'model solutions' rather than 'real
social practices' .-l6
'fhere are actually good reasons \vhy Frontisi-Ducroux must finally opt for
these images as images of ~real social practices', reasons which lie in the way in
which she forms her corpus in the first place. For the stamnoi ,,,hich she selects
are only distinguishable from other stamnoi by the presence or absence of
relatively minor features. In particular, the final stamnos which she discusses
(her L24 which she illustrates in figs. 40- I) contains no image of a stamnos and
no table, simply six maenads-two of them holding kantharoi, one holding a
skyphos, one playing the double aulas, and one with a sprouting thyrsos:H It
appears that the only qualification for membership of the corpus which this
stamnos possesses is that a preliminary sketch reveals that originally the artist
intended to portray one of the maenads carrying a stamnos. As Frontisi-
Ducroux herself admits in a footnote,48 the scene without the stamnos is
essentially indistinguishable from the scenes on a number of other stamnoi
which similarly show three maenads a side with thyrsos, auloi, kantharoi, or
skyphoi. Only by resorting to belief in an actual ritual involving maenads with a
stamnos can Frontisi-Ducroux justify classifying the stamnoi which she
includes apart from those which she excludes.
Arguably, Frontisi-Ducroux's own argument in the end counts against the
unity of the corpus. Once one accepts that the vases constitute a discussion of
Dionysos-the-mask rather than a record of a particular event (and it seems to
me that the variations that are played on the theme, particularly in the stamnoi,
.;"* The debate is wen reviewed by F rontisi-Ducroux (199 1 ) .

.;~ Coche de la Ferte (1951).
';6 F rontisi -Ducroux (199 I). 223 - 5, and cf F rontisi -Du crou x (I 986 a ). Note ~ however, that the
implication of the arguments of Bron (1987) and of Berard-Bron (1990), both of which articles use
images to reconstruct the precise stages of Dionysiac initiation, is that there was a particular occa-
sion in question .
.\'" Frontisi -Ducroux (I 99 I), 99- I 00.
41\ Ibid. ] 00 n. 7 2 .
nlake it very attractive to see that as what is happening), then the images on the
lekythoi and the images on the stamnoi are seen to constitute very differently
focused discussions with little in common except that they are both discussions
of Dionysos-the-mask (or in the case of some stamnoi other ways of perceiving
Dionysos directly). Males are rigorously excluded from the stamnoi, but may
occur on the lekythoi. The thyrsos is normal on the stamnoi, absent from the
lekythoi. When the lekythoi become explicitly maenadic it is with animal skins
and animals, but animal skins and animals are entirely absent from the stamnoi.
l~he stamnoi always allude to wine, the lekythoi never. The lekythoi and
stamnoi which Frontisi-Ducroux presents constitute two bodies of data, not
one. And the discussions which these two bodies of data carryon are discussions
which are taken further, in different directions, by the stamnoi which Frontisi-
I)ucroux excludes.
Something of the nature of that further discussion can be seen in a group of
five stamnoi of very similar shape, all more or less certainly from the workshop
of the 'Chicago painter'. On the basis of their shape these vases were discussed
as a group by Philippaki, but she had no comment on their imagery.49 One of
these stamnoi is included by Frontisi-Ducroux in her catalogue (L21 and figs.
34-5); it shows three maenads on each side, one with a sprouting thyrsos; one
n::taenad holds a stamnos, and nearby is a table bearing a kantharos and a piece
of fruit, but there is no distribution or libation. 50 None of the other four stamnoi
is included by Frontisi-Ducroux. One, in St Louis, has a maenadic procession
with three figures on each side: one with a rhyton, one with a flower, and one
with a double aulos;51 a second in Oxford is fragmentary but similarly had a six-
maenad procession: one maenad had a kantharos, one a sprouting thyrsos;52 the
third and fourth are both in Boston, and like the Chicago example were found
in Capua: one (PI. 12) has a six-figure maenadic procession with several
maenads holding flowers, fruit, or a fern, one holding a sprouting thyrsos, and
one holding a kantharos;53 but the other (PI. 13) has no maenads at all, instead
there are six wreathed revellers, five male, some with skyphoi, and one female
and playing the double aulos. 54 It is difficult to see these vases as anything other
than conscious variations on a theme, where the artist explores the experience
of direct access to Dionysos using various combinations of elements (always
including some allusion to wine), and where, in the final Boston example, he or
she draws the attention of the viewer to the essential similarity between a ritual
occasion, where women with skyphoi are entertained by a maenad with a
double aulas, and the aftermath of a drinking-party, in which male revellers
with skyphoi are entertained by a girl playing the double aulos. 55
49 Philippaki (19 67), 111-12. 50 Chicago Art Institute 89.22 (ARV2 628-4).
51 St Louis 20.15.5 1 (ARV2 62 9.9). 52 Oxford 192 9.779 (ARV2 628.7).
B Boston 01. 808 3 (ARV2 62 9.8). 54 Boston 01.8082 (ilRV 2 62 9. 1 9).
55 I have been considerably helped in my consideration of these vases by discussion with Albert
Henrichs, although he cannot be held responsible for the conclusions to which I have come.
208 Robin Osborne
I suggest that the interesting question for the historian of religion in all this is
not 'Do vases with a mask of Dionysos give us a piece of antiquarian
information about the Lenaia or a piece of antiquarian information about the
Anthesteria?' but 'What sort of religious experience do these images explore?'
and '\Xlhat was it that made the artists of one potter's shop devote their energies
to exploring one aspect of the worship of Dionysos-the-mask in the period 500-
480 and artists of another workshop explore a rather different aspect around
450?'56 Whether or not one believes that the vases relate to any particular
ritual, it is the entry of different questions related to Dionysiac ritual onto
different artists' agendas at different times that is the really fascinating
question. And this is, of course, a question very closely parallel to the question
of why maenads were on Aiskhylos' agenda in C.470 or Euripides' in C.405.
What, then, have the images examined so far contributed to the question of
real-life maenadism? If it is accepted that, from the first appearance of
Dionysos on vases, the women with Dionysos are peculiarly characterized and
are not just there to emphasize the sexual desire of satyrs, then from the begin-
ning maenads have been peculiarly Dionysiac. The stamnoi and lekythoi of the
so-called Lenaian corpus, by the way in which both mix women with and
women without maenadic attributes among those worshipping around the
mask of Dionysos, surely confirm the continuing Dionysiac connections of
maenads. [vlore than that, both groups of pots explore a particular sort of
Dionysiac experience, the experience of coming face to face with the god. 57 And
it is surely this that is the peculiarly maenadic experience, this that invites
comparison between maenads and ecstatic cults elsewhere. The historical issue
should not be one of whether Athenian ladies ate raw meat, but rather of
whether there were circumstances of Dionysiac ritual in which the female
worshippers felt themselves transported out of this world and into another, to
be united with their god. If the cymbals on the Fran~ois vase and their
successors are good evidence for the paraphernalia of Dionysiac ecstatic cult
being familiar in Athens c.575 Be, the frontal face of Dionysos there, and the
rituals at the mask of Dionysos shown on the 'Lenaians', are even better
evidence for the reality of ecstatic cult in both archaic and classical Athens. 58
56 Cf. Richard Hamilton (I 992)~ I 38: 'The high degree of uniformi ty in icon ogra phy within the
two dominant styles, Haimonian and Villa Giulia, and the concurrent lack of uniformity outside or
between these subsets suggests that chronology and workshop are the governing factors.'
57 Dionysos is, of course, the god of epiphanies par excellence, as is stressed by the Homeric Hymn
to Dionysos and by many modern scholars, particularly Otto (1965) and Detienne (1989).
58 It must be admitted that the stamnos series, unlike the lekythos series, hails more or less
certainly entirely from Italy_ This is certainly an important observation in terms of the marketing of
Athenian pottery (for which see Robinson (1990)), but I am uncertain whether it should also be
taken into account in terms of who was familiar with ecstatic ritu a1. See de la Geniere (1987). It is
worth noting that one of very few stamnoi found in Attica is a stamnos of the Polygnotus group
with a scene of Triptolemos found in the North-West Cemetery at Eleusis (de Ia Geniere (1988),
161); and this might be taken as some justification for thinking that Attic cult practices might be
reflected on stamnoi, wherever found.
\X!hat is at stake here is not just whether there were maenads in Athens, but
\vhat it \vas to be a maenad. Against the views of Dodds, that it was a peculiar
psychological state of experiencing oneself as an Other, or of Bremmer that it
\vas a matter of trance, or of Henrichs that it was exhausting oneself in a
particular way, I want to stress maenadism as a peculiarly religious experi-
ence-the experience of oneness with the deity.59 Comparativism carries
dangers of ignoring crucial distinctions, but let me quote William James, from
whom I borro\ved my title:
This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the
great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one \vith the Absolute and we
become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition,
hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism,
in Christian mysticism, in \Xlhitmanism, \ve find the same recurring note, so that there is
about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and
think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither
birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech
antedates languages, and they do not gro\v old. 60
It is that sort of state, I suggest, rather than any particular ritual practices,
\\'hich constitutes maenadism, and it is the existence of groups which period-
ically attained such a state, and not necessarily the existence of groups which
tore animals limb from limb or handled snakes or ate raw meat, which I wish to
assert in classical Athens. All those activities, I suggest, do but image the sense
of ultimate power over the whole world which comes to those in such states.
Once we accept the 'Lenaians' as good evidence for ecstatic maenadic cult in
Athens, the doors are opened to accepting the whole range of maenadic images
on pots as relevant to Athenian religious experience. Once ecstatic worship of
[)ionysos is accepted as part of Athenian life, the Athenian viewer can
reasonably be expected to see maenadic behaviour in images as some reflection
upon the ecstatic behaviour of Athenian female devotees ofDionysos. Both the
individual maenadic images and the chC:1nging frequency of maenadic images
\vithin the whole corpus then become directly, rather than just vaguely,
relevant to the history of religious experience at Athens. But so too do stories of,
and dramas involving, maenads. Only now, instead of being viewed as somehow
unique historical moments in which Athenians devoted attention to ecstatic
59 This is not itself a new suggestion, even if it is an unfashionable one: see Rohde (1925: 25 8),
and compare the remarks of Henrichs (1993a: esp. 27-32). I do not want to deny that religious
experiences are affected by personal circumstances and social situations, or that they have a social
function, but I do want to deny that social and personal circumstances are all that there is to them.
Lewis (1971: 204) is clearly correct in identifying adversity as productive of ecstatic religious
a<:tivity, but I am less convinced that 'possession is essentially a philosophy of power'; the full
quotation is 'For if, as I am arguing, possession is essentially a philosophy of power, it also seems
tinged with Nietzschian desperation. If this is a valid inference it seems again to confirm the high
threshold of adversity to which shamanism appears to respond.'
60 James (1902), 4 19.
210 Robin Osborne
cult, they have to be situated in the long run of reflections on ecstatic cult
almost continuously present, though in different intensities at different times,
in Athenian painted pottery from the early sixth century into the fourth
century.
Having thus increased the body of \vhat we will count as evidence, can we
actually write a history of this aspect of Athenian religious experience?61 Let
me try. The earliest female followers of Dionysos on Athenian pots show
a\vareness of ecstatic Dionysiac cult among women, but the images do not in
general themselves re-create in any systematic way the experience of ecstatic
worship. The concentration in these images seems to be on the variety of
Dionysiac experiences, juxtaposing the female ecstatic worshipper with the
satyr who experiences worship of Dionysos as intoxication and sexual excita-
tion. 62 By contrast the Lenaians go some way to\vards re-creating the
experience of ecstatic worship, and mean more to a viewer \vho has some
kno\vledge, direct or indirect, of what it is like to be an ecstatic \\Torshipper than
they do to a viewer innocent and ignorant of such experiences. The lekythoi and
the stamnoi explore that experience in different ways. The lekythoi, as Frontisi-
Ducroux has shown, re-create the encircling movement of vlorshippers around
the pillar-mask, and explore the way in which the worshipper's gaze is caught
up by the gaze of the god, the way in which worshippers in a ritual are
entranced. In the stamnoi it is not the worshippers but the viewer who is faced
by the god, \vhose impact is imaged in the ladling out of his substance from the
very vessel, a stamnos, which the viewer is regarding; rather than being shown
what it is like for others to become entranced, the viewer of the stamnos is
herself being captured by the god. If we turn this difference into history, we
might see the lekythoi as belonging to a phase during which ecstatic religious
experience became much more common in Athens, so that large numbers could
be expected to know directly or indirectly something of the experience of being
entranced, a phase reflected in or possibly resulting from the greatly i'ncreased
interest in maenads, and in maenads for themselves, which the increased
proportion of maenadic scenes on black-figure pots of the late sixth century
and the earliest red-figure pots seems to show. The stamnoi would reflect a
different stage, a stage in which images treated the viewer not as one who
would be voyeur on the ecstasy of others but as one who would share others'
ecstatic experiences. This might be the stage of Aiskhylos' Dionysiac plays,
61 There have been those who have argued that there is always the same amount of mystic
religious experience about, and that it simply attracts more attention at one time than another (see
Lewis (1971: 24-6) for this view and some arguments against it). For my purposes here it makes
little difference whether the history is a history of changing extent or intensity of ecstatic cult
activity or just a history of changing public consciousness of such activity, and I am not convinced
that we have the evidence to distinguish between these two situations in this case.
62 Changing relations between satyrs and maenads on pots are perhaps best seen as explorations
of the compatibility and conflict between the liberty from constraints, which is one thing that
worship of Dionysos can offer, and the liberty which involves identification with the god which that
worship alternatively offers.
The Ecstasy and the Tragedy 2II
exploring the limits of ecstatic cult in a society where ecstatic cult was
essentially commonplace.
Can \\Fe carry such a speculative history beyond the middle of the fifth century?
The relatively limited interest in Dionysiac cult by fifth-century red-figure
painters is difficult to interpret, and may have no special significance (we should
never forget how much of Athenian life, including Athenian religious life, is never
reflected in painted pottery at all). The latest of the ~ Lenaian' stamnoi dates to
around 420 and the women on it move in a markedly more ecstatic way, but with-
out further comparanda it is dangerous to make much of this single vase. For the
late fifth century the most important evidence remains Euripides' Bacchae, but
that play can now be seen not as an isolated exploration of ecstatic cult in a society
innocent of such goings on, but as an exploration of what it is like to be an outside
observer of phenomena with which Athenian society had long been familiar. 63
\'\/hat the vases, and especially the ~ Lenaian' vases, above all establish is that not
only \vas \vornen's involvement in ecstatic Dionysiac cult not new in C.405, but
th at it was routine enough in the first half of the fifth century for painters to
devote energy not, despite A1akron's cup tondo, to emphasizing that it was shock-
ing but to the systematic exploration of what it was like as an experience. Argu-
ably, \vhat Euripides should be seen as doing in the Bacchae is not helping
Athenians to come to terms with the alien but helping them to see just how shock-
ing \vere the rituals to which they were so accustomed. 64
How does such a history of religious experience relate to broader historical
change? The Bacchae has often been thought to reflect some sort of crisis in
Athenian society brought on by the Peloponnesian War. But if the argument of
this paper is correct, then the interesting moment in which new religious
experiences were being actively explored was not the period of the Pelopon-
nesian War, but the years around 510 Be, the period in which Athens, with
Spartan help, got rid of its tyranny and the period of young democracy. It is
becoming conventional to assign major changes in religious activity to the
advent of democracy, and there is no doubt that democracy did bring with it a
revolutionary ritualization, in the broadest sense, of Athenian life. 65 But it may
be that our concentration on political life leads us to underestimate the extent
to which democracy was a product of a wider change in attitudes, a change in
which women may have played an expressive and important part through their
roles as both religious symbols and religious actors. 66
63 Compare Berard-Bron (1986), who conclude their article, in a slightly different context from
a
mine, '?\1ais si, Athenes, il n'y a jamais eu crise dionysiaque, c'est bien parce que, au depart, la cite
tout entiere etait initiee.'
64 Foley (1980: 128) is surely right to suggest that a crucial part in this defamiliarization is played
by the Dionysiac mask. which must be seen both as part of the theatrical and as part of the religious
context.
65 For the possible religious consequences of democracy see e.g. Connor (1990) and Osborne
(1993); for democracy and ritualization see Osborne (1994b).
66 I have explored another aspect of this in Osborne (1994a), 92-5.
II
Conclusion
CHRISTOPHER PELLING
TRAGEDY AS EVIDENCE
Historians like evidence. One of historiography's favourite analogies is with the
world of the lawcourt: 1 historical writers often like to see themselves as judges,
impartially weighing the material and arguments brought before them; their
critics prefer to see them in the role of advocates, deploying material as best
they can to support a particular case. Either way, the source-material becomes
analogous to forensic witnesses and exhibits, providing the raw material on
which argument and judgement can be based. This sort of evidence is typically
most interesting when it illuminates something beyond itself: we might term it
'indicative evidence', pointing to a further conclusion or allowing an inference
which might otherwise be missed. The testimony of the butler or the blood on
the candlestick not merely shows a talkative butler or a candlestick which needs
cleaning, but exposes Colonel Mustard as the murderer; Thucydides may
provide evidence for the battle of Delium or (perhaps) Aeschylus' Eumenides
for the Areopagite reforms, but those battles and reforms are not the texts
themselves but real-world events to which the texts refer, and events which,
historians hope, the texts may help us to reconstruct. 2
Drama is a particularly delicate source to use in this ",ray, but in one sense it
has a privileged position. Our texts were performed at great civic festivals;
engagement in those festivals was a focal part of civic experience for their audi-
ence. A dramatic text would therefore seem to offer unusually direct access to a
central fifth-century Athenian experience. Of course, qualifications must be
made. The text was part of the experience, but only a part; dance, music,
delivery, gesture would all have been integrated with the text in ways which
would affect the words' impact and reception; and, even if we miraculously
gained access to all those other features of performance, we would still have
nothing like immediate access to the tragic experience. It takes two to provide a
theatrical performance, a performer and an audience; and the theatrical
1 Cf. Fogel-Elton (1983), 13-15,21-2,49-50,90-5; Cameron (1989), 1-2.
2 Talk of the real world swiftly becomes theoretically bemusing, and some win wish to insist that
any real~life event becomes a 'text' as soon as one talks about it. Such an approach easily becomes
depressingly logocentric, but anyway does not affect this point: the 'text' of battle or reforms thus
reconstructed is distinct from, even if dependent upon, the texts which serve as our sources.
process is indeed t\vo-way, with the audience bringing presuppositions and

expectations-generic, ethical, religious) social-\vhich mould their response.
'Immediate access' to that response is a Inirage; every generation, including our
o~'n, has its o\vn \perceptual filters', as Sourvinou-In~'ood puts it,3 which
condition its reception of any text.
It remains true that the texts enable us to start closer to the experience of a
tragic spectator than (say) to that of a soldier at Delium; and that the explora-
tion of tragic texts should therefore be a particularly rich vein for the recon-
struction of Athenian experience, however provisional and incomplete any such
reconstruction may be. Here the notion of 'evidence' itself starts to look differ-
ent. The forensic analogy offered 'indicative' evidence which pointed to a
phenomenon beyond itself, but here the text is itself part of the historical
phenomenon. If we' talk of a tragic text as 'evidence' for the civic theatrical
experience, it is more like talking of a fragment of a pot as 'evidence' for the
original artefact: we begin from a part and reconstruct what we can of the
whole.
Several of the chapters in this book address the question of reconstructing
audience response in this way, together with the underlying audience attitudes
and assumptions-in a word, civic 'ideology', if that protean word is taken
broadly as denoting a web of socially constituted normative axioms and
thought-patterns, especially when these affect questions of political or public
interest. 4 In that inquiry, any distinction between 'literary' and 'historical'
approaches is futile. The literary critic may wish to feed into the criticism any
available extraneous information to illuminate the audience's perceptual filters.
The historian will wish to form an insightful view of the way in which the text
reflects, and also probes, those assumptions. And, as it happens, that procedure
happens to fit current critical fashion both in ancient history, where attention
increasingly falls on 'contextual' reconstructions of a distant thought-world,
and in classical literature, where New Historicism, in some of its aspects at
least, appeals to many classicists' tastes. 5
Still, it would be unrealistic to think that literary and historical approaches
are never in conflict, and they conflict most clearly when traditional questions
of 'evidence' are in point. That is illustrated by my own discussion of Persae,
where I address several passages which have seemed to offer historical
evidence, and argue that literary considerations make such inferences insecure.
3 Cf. e.g. Sourvinou-Inwood (1995), index s.v. ~perceptual filters'.
4 The definitional issue is further addressed below, pp. 225-6; and for the conceptual question cf.
Eagleton (1 99 I), esp. 1- 3 I, with sixteen possible ways of interpreting the word ~ideology'.
5 Cf. J\1.ossman (1995), 6-10. True, classicists have been reluctant (in my view rightly) to adopt
some distinctive features of New Historicism, especially its obliquity and its relish for the appar-
ently trivial and anecdotal. Most classicists are more comfortable as newly respectable Old Histor-
icists. But this should make us more rather than less open to attempts to exploit tragedy historically,
for it is precisely tragedy's central contribution to the totality of the civic experience which is in
point. A methodology that authorizes selective obliquity and favours evidence from the margins
may find the enterprise less congenial.
Conclusion 21 5
Sourvinou-Inwood and Osborne then explore reasons why a tragic depiction of

a cult practice might be a misleading guide to historical actuality.6 A tragedy
may be slanting a portrayal to suggest something distorted or disquieting, or it
may be modulating its details to make more striking use of the mythical matrix,
the presentation of dramatic events in a world of heroic individuals and distant
societies. Easterling too brings out the subtlety with which a heroic texture is
developed and maintained in the plays, and how a helpful 'heroic vagueness'
can gloss over legalistic details which, in any real-life equivalent, would blur the
most interesting issues;? and Vidal-Naquet comments on the difficulty of
mapping the 'metics' of tragedy in a one-to-one way onto the everyday institu-
tion, either in vocabulary or in wider aspects of presentation. 8 That is not to
claim that tragic representations are irrelevant to reality; on the contrary, we
have often seen that they have a suggestive relationship with the real world,
and filter and explore reality in most interesting ways. The problem is that, in
the absence ofother e~)idence, it is rarely possible to be certain what that relation-
ship is in a particular case, whether that case is a detail of ritual, or a civic in-
stitution, or the collective representation of Thebans or Spartans or Persians.
The dramatic presentation is likely to bear some relation to what the audience
might think and do in their extra-dramatic lives; but that presentation may
easily be stylized or simplified, and we must always be cautious about extra-
polating in too straightforward and one-to-one a way from such dramatic
'evidence' .
Still, we are rarely in fact operating without other evidence, and the integra-
tion of tragic with other material is often illuminating. Vidal-Naquet brings out
that, however difficult it is to extract ~evidence' for the historical institution of
1netoikia, the prominence of 1'netoikia as a tragic theme-the newly-arrived
foreigner, at once accepted and not accepted-must surely correlate with the
prominence of metics in everyday experience, with the perpetual presence of a
class who were both inside and outside, central to a state's functioning yet
defined as interlopers, at once supports and menaces to the state's integration
and strength. Osborne similarly emphasizes that the audience's awareness of
real-life maenadism must be relevant to their response to the Bacchae, and we
should not dilute this into a more diffuse point about any new exotic and
ecstatic cult. We cannot infer from this 'what the Athenians thought' about
metics or maenads, in any simple sense, any more than we can draw safe infer-
ences about what metics or maenads did. But the prominence of the themes at
least points to their centrality within the Athenian consciousness. In some cases
we can even detect elements of historical change. If Osborne is right, we can
identify the periods and contexts when maenadism seemed most interesting,
and trace the ways in which different aspects became prominent at different
times. Easterling brings out how, towards the end of the Peloponnesian War,
6 Above,pp. 162, 188-96. 7 Above, Ch. 2. 8 Above, pp. 110-11.

the audiences of Orestes and Phoenissae (Ch. 2 n. 50) are given a detached but
disturbing insight into the forces \vhich can threaten a city and its decision-
making; how indeed a vacuum can appear where the city might have been.
There is more to be said about Jnetoikia, for \ve should also remember that
meties \vere there in the theatre, participants in the inscenation which explored
their o\vn in-between identity. Here Sommerstein's discussion of the tragic
audience becomes germane. He emphasizes that the audience were treated as
the Athenian delnos: this was a citizen experience. And yet the reality of the
audience's constitution would be very different, with a large fraction composed
of non-citizens: not merely metics but also children, and very possibly women
too. Once again we see a presence of people who are both inside and outside,
welcomed to a civic occasion, addressed as if they are part of the demos, and yet
in vital ways treated as if they do not belong; just as the plays themselves
explore the in-between status of both women and adoJescent males, prob-
lematizing the issues centring on their marginal status. Wilson in this volume
stresses the parallel between the institution of the choregia and the events
portrayed on stage, \vith an agonistic status-conflict of massive individuals set
against a background of the social community_ The parallels between theatre
and real life are again hard to escape, and those essential features of real life are
reflected in the very setting of the festival, just as those problems of in-between
status \vere reflected in the constitution of the festival audience. 9
In these cases we can sense tragedy exploring, in its register, issues which
were real-life concerns. It remains a question how closely tragedy mirrors par-
ticular contemporary e'vents. Here there are some differences among the con-
tributions to this volume. Most of us have shied from postulating a close
allusiveness to specific events. To take Euripides' war plays, for instance, it
certainly makes a difference that Athens was herself at war, that the sufferings
of \var were vividly familiar, and that some of the states treated negatively on
stage-especially Thebes and Sparta-were prominent among her enemies; but
it is another matter to trace more specific allusions to Athenian aspirations to
Sicily, or to particular Spartan invasions, or even to issues such as the Theban
refusal to return Athenian dead after Delium. Bowie brings out that clear
contemporary references seem to be limited to a few exceptional events. 10 This
cautious position is close to that argued by Zuntz,l1 and it is fair to call it the
modern orthodoxy.
Still, even if we leave Persae aside as a special case, Aeschylus' Eumenides
offers one clear example where particular contemporary issues assume import-
9 For the importance of ephebes in the formal pre-play of the festival cf. Goldhill (1990a): this is
a further aspect of the setting which puts the marginal class in particular focus. Winkler (1990b)
also argues that choral performance fell to ephebes, but the evidence seems very insecure: cf. Vidal-
Naquet (1986b), 137-8; Csapo-Slater (1995),352.
10 Above, pp. 40-5.
; I Zuntz (1955); cf. e.g. ,\1ac1eod (1982)~ esp. 131-2 = (1983), 27-8; Taplin (1986); Gregory
(199 I), 6-7; Mossman ( 1995), 1 0- I I. Not that all have followed the fashion: c£ e.g. Vickers (19 8 9).
Conclusion 21 7
ance; and Bowie himself and Sommerstein would find fairly precise analogues
to particular sequences and people. Bowie is prepared to accept the relevance of
Delium to Euripides' Supplices, and argues that Sophocles' Philoctetes hints at
Alcibiades and the issue of his recall. 12 Sommerstein finds the controversy sur-
rounding Cimon, especially the disastrous Athenian acceptance of Pericleidas'
supplication, important for Aeschylus' Supplices.13 Such readings need not
imply that the plays are allegories, that Pelasgus 'is' Cimon or Philoctetes 'is'
Alcibiades; we may similarly find the historical Cleopatra shimmering behind
Virgil's Dido without implying that the two characters collapse into one
another. 14 Nor need the plot-sequence correlate precisely with the real-life
events: Bowie emphasizes that the parallel with Delium is close but not exact;
and odd conclusions would similarly flow from too firm a correlation of the
events of Aeschylus' ,Supplices with the Pericleidas affair. is The overlap with
such particular sequences might still have a 'zooming' effect,16 and bring the
tragic plots into relation with familiar recent events.
If so, this interaction between tragic and contemporary events will be two-
way. It may be, as Sommerstein suggests, that the play invites the audience to
take a particular view ofeimon; but the audience's pre-existing familiarity with
such issues will also lead them to interpret the tragic plot in particular ways and
to be sensitive to particular strands. Tragedy affords a rnode} for reading real
life, but real life also affects the way the audience read-that is hear, interpret,
and respond to-the tragedy which they see. I7 In the Supplices case, con-
temporary experience had demonstrated how difficult supplications can prove,
and how much more problematic the issues can be than they at first appear.
When we seek to isolate the important background here, we need not choose
between Themistocles at Argos (Forrest) and Cimon/Pericleidas (Sommer-
stein):18 the more often such sequences arose, the more sensitized the audience
would be.
One way of phrasing this point is in general terms: such resonances add vital-
ity to the play's moralism. The roots of the Oresteian trilogy go back into the
past, to Troy, with Argos linked in conflict with a state that was sick; in the first
play various hints suggest that Argos was sick too, that Agamemnon's rule had
things in common with Priam's. The implications of the last play thrust
forward into the distant future, and Argos is now linked in alliance, not war,
and with a state which can guarantee its prosperity rather than share its civic
12 Above, pp. 45- 62.
13 Above, pp. 74-9.
H See esp. Griffin (1985), 18 3-97.
15 For instance, it could (on a cruder reading than Sommerstein's) be taken to imply that Athens
was simply wrong to accept Pericleidas' supplication; but the suggestions of the supplication story-
pattern, with the accepting people (usually Athens) gaining credit for humanity and sensibility
towards the gods, seem too deeply ingrained for that reading to be comfortable.
16 For the cinematic analogy cf. Sourvinou-Inwood (1989); below, p. 228.
I: Cf. Redfield (1990), 325-6; Sourvinou-Inwood (1989), 139 n. 25-
18 Forrest (1960); Sommerstein, above, pp. 74-9.
disease. The story is shown to matter still, and the contemporary tinges add to
that feeling of immediacy and conviction. Iii Similarly \vith Aeschylus' Supplices,
one could feel that problematic supplications, the dangers and the glories of
humane receptiveness and of civic pride, are not limited to the distant past.
These are timeless issues, as relevant now as then. One could again use
Sourvinou-Inwood's cinematic analogy: the resonance 'zooms' the myth closer
to the audience's sensibilities, just as the hints of a contemporary local cavalry
victory over Thebes 20 zoom the story of Oedipus Coloncus, and that too is felt to
have very direct relevance.
Implications of that sort affect a whole play, but at times the significance of
contemporary resonances becomes more specific. It is likely, for instance, that
in Aeschylus' Danaid trilogy the moral complications of the issue emerged
more clearly in the other plays than in Supplices itself. There are hints even
within Supplices of complexities which are not fully addressed, most clearly
during Pelasgus' questioning at 387-9 I, but for the moment these are no more
than hints. Perhaps Supplices stood second in the trilogy, and some disquieting
personal motives of Danaus had already been made clear;21 perhaps Suppliees
was after all the first play, and these motives will only have come out later. 22
Either way, the audience may be more sensitive to the nuances because of what
they have recently seen in real life. Those recent morally complex and perilous
supplications would naturally have encouraged a nose for danger, a readiness
to suspect that there is more to the issue than Pelasgus, for all his political
shre\vdness, may yet suspect.
In such cases the interpretative path between 'history' and 'literature' might
seem one-way, with history helping us to refine our understanding of the plays'
dramatic texture. But of course there is more to it. Just as the audience found
life and theatre interacting in a complex way, so in interpretation we find a two-
way process, and 'literature' illuminates ~history' just as 'history' illuminates
'literature'. In particular, tragedy can go further than merely illuminating what
the audience thought about, the issues they found of importance-the problems
of supplication, or the darker sides of familiar deities, or the richness and the
dangers of a democracy. Several of the papers also show that tragedy can
illuminate, not perhaps (in Easterling's distinctions)23 what, but how the
audience thought about such issues, the registers and categories which they
might naturally trigger in an audience's thinking: the binary polarities, for
instance, of Greek/barbarian, Athenian/foreign, male/female, child/adult, and
the ways in which problematic marginal cases are explored in the light of such
strong polarities.
II} This would be even truer if we accept recent attempts to trace analogies between the mythical
and cultic codes of the Oresteia and Ephialtes' reforms: cf. esp.l\\eier (1990), ch. 5~ Bowie (1993b)
20 Cf. L DC 92; this should not be doubted in view ofXen. Hell. I. I. 33, Mem. 3. 5.4, and Diod.
13· 7 2 .
21 Thus Sommerstein, above, p. 76 along with RosIer (1993a).
22 Thus Sieherl (19 86). 23 Above, p. 2 I.
Conclusion 2I9
It is 1110re difficult to address the broader question of collective attitudes: not

lnerely \vhat the audience thought about, nor how they thought about it, but-
to put it in a vvay \vhieh will immediately appear crude-what they (or most of
them) thought. This reverts to our original problem of proceeding from part of
:he dramatic experience, the text of the plays, and seeking to reconstruct
another part, the presuppositions which the audience brought with them.24
'There is perhaps no reason why this procedure should be hopeless in principle:
for \ve might at least begin with the assumption that the competitive tragic poet
would not offend his audience gratuitously. Thus any attitudes inscribed in the
text-those which the text assumes or encourages-might be expected to be in
line with those which the audience already holds.
'~le might begin from there, but complications soon crowd in. For one thing,
the attitudes \vhich the text 'assumes' may not be identical with those which it
'encourages'. Some modern theorists describe the reformative role of literature
in terms of confronting, even 'negating', prejudices;25 and the Greek conven-
tion of 'the poet as teacher' ~ enshrined in the Frogs,26 implies that a poet would
not be expected to rest content \".lith telling the audience what they knew or felt
already. A degree of challenging unfamiliarity \\Tould be part of an audience's
expectation. Both considerations complicate any attempt to read off audience
assumptions from a tragic text. But \ve should not over-press this point. It still
seems reasonable to think that moralizing, however challenging, is most effect-
ive when it does not confront audience prejudice too directly, and when it
deepens rather than replaces assumptions. We might compare recent work on
propaganda, where it is increasingly realized that propaganda works best when
it takes a pre-existent prejudice and manipulates it-exaggerating one aspect,
passing over another, providing crystallized examples, subtly extending the
prejudice to new and unexpected areas. In a similar way, moralizing too will be
at its most effective \\lhen it refines and renuances its audience's ideas, not
when it provides too stark a reversal. 27 So even with a genre as morally chal-
lenging as tragedy, \ve might still expect a text to reflect attitudes and axioms
close to those \vhich the audience might find familiar-even if that text, within
limits, goes on to explore and "de-certainise'28 them. Some relationship between
text and audience assumptions still seems a reasonable expectation.
That still leaves us with considerable problems. One is, again, the nature of
that ~some relationship'. Just as we found difficulty in mapping onto real-life
2"' Above, p. 2 I 4.
25 C[ e.g. Iser (1974), pp. xii-xiii; (1978),73.85; the train of thought is especially clear in Jauss
(19 83), 25- 8. 39-45· Fish (197 2 : 1 -2) prefers to talk of dialectically "de-certainizing' moral
assumptions, rather as the Russian formalists talked of "defamiliarization': that is a richer
approach, as we shaH see, though even here the de-certainizing can only proceed within limits.
26 Ar. Frogs, esp. 1009- 10, 1054-5. On the Frogs and tragedy's didactic role see Gregory (199 1 ),
1-17, and now esp. Croally (1994), 17-47.
T I have argued this point more fully, for the rather different but no less ethically charged case
of PI utarch' s Lit'e's, in Pelli ng (I 995).
28 Cf. above. n. 25.
actuality tragedy's presentation of a battle (Salamis) or a social institution

(nzetoikia) or a religious cult (Hera's), so tragedy might easily provide a
simplified or stylized version of an audience prejudice. The contrast between
Greek and barbarian or between Athens and Thebes is regularly introduced in
a very simple form, even if it goes on to be problematized; but it would be rash
to think that the 'everyday assumptions' of every spectator put the contrast
either as simply as we see at the plays' beginning, or in as deeply complicated a
form as we see as they develop.
Another problem centres on the degree of challenge to 'everyday assumptions'.
Phrynichus' case 29 may suggest that there were limits on the discomfort which
the audience would stand: the suffering should not come too close to home. Yet
tragedy is evidently a genre which does challenge and test prejudices. The audi-
ence would expect such tests, even enjoy them: they would expect to feel pleasur-
ably uncomfortable. It remains a question how stern a test they would stand, and
whether their tolerance of challenges varied from one part of the fifth century to
another; and our view on these questions will affect the way we reconstruct the
initial prejudices. Take, again, the Xerxes of the Persae. If the audience, or some
of them, are brought to feel pity, should we regard that as a shattering surprise to
them? If so, that would go with a view that tragedy was a deeply disquieting genre,
and also with an assumption that their initial prejudices were crude ones. In my
chapter I argue that the audience, or some of them, might find such pity less of a
surprise, and the tragedy therefore less disconcerting: on that view, the initial
prejudices would be richer-textured, with a cultural expectation of empathy
towards a vanquished foe as well as of vindictiveness. But one cannot claim that
either reading emerges unequivocally from the text itself, that there is a single
'attitude inscribed in the text'. It is only our extra-textual information-in this
case, what we may reconstruct of attitudes and expectations from other texts-
that enables us to evaluate the two interpretations.
In that case it is also wrong (if my argument is correct) to posit a single
audience response: and this raises a more general difficulty in reconstructing
collective representations. Evidently, not every member of an audience would
respond in the same way, particularly when plays addressed issues of great
emotional intensity.30 Consider Medea's famous speech on the woes of woman-
kind (Eur. Med. 214-66). Audience reaction must here be complex. Spectators
must sense Medea's rhetorical insidiousness, the deftness with which she
manipulates Corinthian housewives into militant champions of oppressed
femininity. The audience can hardly miss the audacious skill with which she
29 Hdt. 6. 21. 2: c[ below, p. 228.
30 This is not to deny the communality of the theatrical experience, the way in which being part
of an audience can unify some aspects of the collective response: c[ esp. Taplin (1995). If most of
the audience find a scene absorbing, distressing, or exhilarating, that response can readily infect the
others. But in a case like 1\1edea's speech (see below), the unity of the reaction can rest in a universal
feeling that the words are shocking and thought-provoking: it need not follow that everyone's
thoughts are along the same lines.
Conclusion 22I
presents herself as an ordinary woman sharing ordinary women's resentments

:~yetthe scene will go on to make it even clearer that she is anything but
ordinary); or the breathtaking blandness \vith which she uses her lack of family
as a pathetic ploy: 'I have no mother, no brother, no kinsman to turn to as a
haven in my catastrophe' (2S8-9)-this woman who has no brother because
she killed him herself. This is a figure of chilling menace. Yet many of her argu-
ments remain unnerving: the randomness with which the choice of a mate can
make or wreck a life's delight, the asymmetry of the male and female lot when
it comes to infidelity or divorce, the failure of men to acknowledge the pain and
dangers of childbirth-all these arguments are hard simply to deride or dismiss.
But how could every male spectator respond in the same way, for example to
her insistence that she would stand three times in the hoplite line rather than
give birth once (250- I)? This takes not merely \varfare but hoplite warfare,
central in the canon of male excellence, and questions its pre-eminence: this is,
indeed, shocking. Yet the texture of that shockingness must vary from one
observer to the next. 31 Some will find the outlandishness of such thoughts suffi-
cient to discredit them, and doubtless to discredit by association Medea's other
complaints as well. This, they will feel, must be rubbish-even if they cannot
quite explain \vhy. Others \vill find this a deeply disquieting challenge to com-
placent male assumptions. The first group of spectators will find their pre-
judices confirmed by the end of the play: Medea will be the monster they have
always thought-though even they may have found themselves uneasy at
times, perhaps for instance seeing an uncomfortable mirroring of their own
moral complacency in ] ason. As the second group of spectators leaves the
theatre, one of the most thought-provoking aspects will be their memories of
what they have been brought to sympathize with during ~he last three hours. We
can even posit a third type of spectator as well, one who finds Medea's words
convincing, not merely disquieting; he-or she, for if women were present they
might find such a response particularly appealing-would find the disquiet
coming later in the play, just as the chorus do as they see Medea's dreadful
revenge. Modern readers will generally find the second or third responses the
deeper, but one cannot claim that it is only on those readings that the play
'works': the first spectators will have had a good time too, even a thought-
provoking one. So what is 'the attitude inscribed in the text'? The play simply
works differently for the different spectators, and all find a mixture of con-
firmation and challenging of their prejudices. Any attempt to reconstruct from
the playa simple picture of 'what the audience thought about women' must
founder.
The historian will still find something of interest here. Once again we may
infer that the audience found an issue interesting, and once again one can see
the ways in which they could be brought to think about it, how they thought-
31 Some similar points are made by Sourvinou-Inwood (forthcoming).

222 Christop~er Pelling
but we should be more precise, and add 'how they thought \vhen watching
tragedy'. For comparison of other genres, especially comedy, is here intriguing.
L:ysistrata, 771eslnophoriazusae, and Ecclesz'azusae confirm that the audience
found questions of women's status fascinating: all those plays, in one \\lay or
another, bite on the contrast bet\veen the evident rationalitv of \\'omen and the
non-rationality \vhich their marginal status implies. So far comedy and tragedy
would seem to confirm one another on the question '\vhat the audience \~,;as
thinking about'. But what of our second question, 'how they thought about it'?
i\1atters immediately become more complex, and the robust register of comedy
injects elements-for instance, the standing jokes about female drunkenness-
which sit more surprisingly with the intense reflectiveness of tragedy. We have
an audience who could think in different ways on different occasions; even, in
this case of this variation between tragedy and comedy, at different stages of
the same festival.
These generic variations affect more subtle attempts to infer audience
attitudes from the plays' content, such as Sommerstein's argument for a shift in
political texture between the plays of the 460s and those of the 4205.32 He
suggests that the 460s show a radicalism which dwindles as time goes on, and
the 4208 sho\v a more conservative approach, more dismissive and hostile
towards radical policies-a shift to the 'right', as he puts it. He goes on to
explain this in terms of a change in the audience's constitution: on his view the
introduction of entry charges produced an unintended consequence, the
weighting of the audience towards the richer classes. 33 Still, here too the differ-
ences between tragedy and comedy are relevant, for Sommerstein's most clear-
cut examples from the 420S are comedies, with their hostility to populist
politicians and their relative gentleness to\vards more traditional figures. As he
acknowledges, if we compare (say) Euripides' Supplices with Aeschylus' play of
the same name, differences are more difficult to isolate. In both plays \ve find
the same commitment to democracy, but we also find gusts of scepticism con-
cerning the way democracy operates in practice: there is a\vareness of the ploys
used by the rhetorically adept, just as there is awareness of the ways in wbich
combustible crowds can be carried away into enterprises of extraordinary
hazard. 34 Should \\'e think, not of a shift in audience constitution over time, but
a shift in audience thought-patterns from one genre to another?
Still, this too only takes us so far. If \ve find such a generic shift, should we
think of it in terms of different attitudes adopted by the same people in differ-
32 Above, pp. 68-73.
33 C( also \X'ilson, pp. 97-100 above, on the theorikon grant: whenever it was introduced, this
purportedly covered the cost of entry. If Sommerstein is right to place the introduction of entrance
charges in the mid-fifth century, and Wilson is right to bring the introduction of entrance fees and
theorikon closely into relation with one another, one might have a still more pointed irony: a grant
designed to demarcate and emblematize citizen status (\'<'ilson) would have had the effect of making
the audience less representative of the citizen body (Sommerstein).
34 On Aeschylus' play cf. above, pp. 2 I 7 - I 8, and Sommerstei n, pp. 7-+-9; on E uri pides " below,
pp. 230-4, and Bowie, pp. 45-56.
Conclusion 223
ent contexts, rather as some conservatively minded churchgoers adopt a more

compassionate atittude to \vorldwide inequalities between I I and 12 o'clock on
a Sunday morning? Or should we think of it as different idioms for articulating
the same basic attitudes, more like the way in which we adopt different styles
for presenting the same views when in a pub with friends, when in a committee
meeting, or when delivering a public speech? Probably it is a little of both,
though the second approach certainly has something to recommend it. One
could see both the comic and the tragic presentation of women as articulating a
-2ombination of irrepressible passion and rationality, but each doing it in its own
way; one could see both comedy and tragedy as combining a commitment to
democratic ideology with a realism about the ways in which democracy func-
tions in practice. What does seem clear is that the two genres each impose their
own register, \vith the audience changing their mental clothes as they move
from tragedy to comedy, and that this affects any attempt to read off audience
assumptions from the way in which they are refracted in the plays.
These generic variations are even more acute if we turn to the relation
between tragedy and oratory. Wilson brings out how rhetoric derogatorily
characterizes some real-life behaviour as 'tragic'; Halliwell stresses how often
tragedy suggests qualifications or suspicions of presentations which are dis-
tinctively rhetorica1. 35 The point is not, of course, that rhetorical practitioners
and audiences distrusted their theatrical counterparts, or vice versa: the same
people constituted both audiences, at different times. It is rather a question of
one form of presentation and cluster of ideas being appropriate in one setting,
and another in another. Tragic behaviour is all very well in the theatre, but not
in the street; rhetorical presentation is just the thing for public displays, but (as
Halliwell brings out) the point of tragedy's distrust is often that oratory is
inadequate to, or in tension with, the intimate personal complexities which lie
behind a character's public pronouncements. This is the background for
Parker's demonstration of the differences between the presentation of the gods
in tragedy and in oratory.36 There are limits on what oratory can say, just as
there are \vith tragedy: distrust in divine goodwill towards the city is unthink-
able in oratory. Thus the gods of oratory often emerge as bland in comparison
with the destructive, unfathomable creatures of tragedy. But, as Parker argues,
it is naive to ask which portrayal reflects l.what the audience thought'. The
audience thought both, in their different settings; and it is clearly unsound to
privilege one setting and displace the other, to regard one as articulating 'real'
vie\\1s and the other as an artistic construct. It is the range of views, the flexibil-
ity of collective representations according to the context, to which the historian
needs to be alert.
35 Wilson, above, pp. 81-5~ together with Parker, Ch. 8 n. 33; Halliwell, above, pp. 126-41; cf.
also Bowie, above, p. 52. Contrast the emphasis ofOber-Strauss (1990), presenting the two genres
as more cosily complementary.
y, Above, Ch. 8.
\X'e have come some way from our initial search for ~evidence', at least
~indicative evidence', with its typical quest for something beyond itself-in this
case, a basic audience attitude~ a \vhat the audience thought', which is some-
hovv distinct from the tragic text itself. By no\\' \ve are using the texts ditTer-
ently, to provide illuslration:3~ illustration of \vhat the audience would think
about, and ho\v they could be brought to think, in the particular context of the
tragic festival. This is not using texts to point to something beyond themselves:
this is regarding the texts as part of a civic experience \vhich matters in its o\vn
right. That does not mean that the audience would think like this every day in
their extra-dramatic lives. We can often see some relationship to those extra-
dramatic lives, but the relationship is shifting and elusive. But the tragic experi-
ence remains part of the range of feelings and thought-patterns which
constitute the totality of an Athenian's life. That makes it historically important
in itself
TRAGEDY AND IDEOLOGY
Some of these themes-the generic differences between tragedy and rhetoric,

tragedy's socially challenging role, the way in which it often illustrates how,
rather than what, the audience thought-remain relevant as we turn to the
question of civic ideology, how Athenians thought about Athens. The most
influential recent treatments of Athenian ideology have begun from oratory,38
particularly the genre of the Epitaphios, the great public funeral speeches for
the war-dead which praised the city as a whole rather than any individuals.
That genre is celebratory and triumphalist, elevating the city as morally and
militarily superior to its rivals and foes. How does tragedy fit into this? These
are plays performed at a civic festival, celebrating the city and its ideals: yet, as
we shall see, many of the texts present civic authority as problematic
(Antigone), or allow negative insights into the way democracy functions in
practice (the two Supplices, Orestes), or present ideals of domestic harmony or
international peacefulness which clash against contemporary realities (the end
of Eunlenides, or Heraclidae, or Euripides' Supplices). One can understand why
critics have presented these plays as subtversive of civic ideology, even at odds
with the celebratory context of the festival itself. 39
37 This too can be a sort of 'evidence'. A character \vitness can illustrate the defendant's good
behaviour by giving examples of creditable actions. a political commentator can illustrate a govern~
ment's amorality by citing particular instances, and in both cases the examples provide evidence to
support a generalization. The distinction should perhaps be between 'indicative evidence) and 'il1us~
trative evidence" rather than between 'evidence' and 'illustration'. The important point is that a
distinction exists, \vith 'indicative evidence' purporting to establish something independent of itself,
and 'illustrative evidence' providing one example, along with others, of a wider whole.
38 Especially Loraux (I9 86a ), concentrating on the Epilaphios (pp. 229-33 below), and Ober
(1989), whose focus is wider. Both works extend their focus to tragedy as well (see also Ober-
Strauss (1990», but it is fair to see oratory as their starting~point.
39 See esp. Goldhill (I990a), discussed at pp. 234-5 below.
Conclusion 225
Yet this raises a fundamental question about ideology. Do we need to assume

that ideology always idealizes, alvvays suppresses awkward facts? Or can we
believe in an ideology which is broad and robust enough to accept that
awkwardnesses continue, and can explore them without abandoning trust in its
values? There are analogous problems here to those we find in the context of
Augustan Rome, where conceptions of propaganda and ideology seem much
more subtle than they appeared a generation ago. We need no longer see the
Aeneid as subversive of Augustan ideology, even though it sharply evokes the
loss caused by empire, and calls attention to the suffering which Rome's glory
has imposed on others; there we can now posit an ideology which-at least in
some genres, and in some frames of mind-places weight on the cost without
trivializing the achievement, and uses the cost to set the achievement in an
enhanced perspective. If Augustan Rome could encourage such reflective
exploration, Athens might do so even more: Athens, the city which prides her-
self on the way she copes \vith controversy and division, parading her delight in
discourse:w So much of Eumenides, for instance, centres on how divisions might
be dealt with, both divisions in a court and even divisions among the gods. If
there is celebratory self-congratulation here, that self-congratulation can focus
precisely on the way that the city processes very live, controversial issues, a
home for political discourse rather than wanton and bloody violence.41 In a city
like this, we may find it less surprising if tragedy explores and problematizes
issues. Cannot such exploration itself be authorized by civic 'ideology', the
features of the city's character which citizens regarded as its most distinctive
strengths?
It all depends what we mean by ideology. l\1.y tentative definition in terms of
'socially constituted normative axioms and thought-patterns, especially when
these affect questions of political or public interest' (above, p.214) was
intended to be broad and unexceptionable, but this is undeniably a slippery
concept. The slippage may become clearer ifvve employ a grammatical analogy.
In its simplest form ideology is a series of statements about the city: Athens is
pure, successful, ready to assume toils, energetic, resilient, generous to the
weak and to the exploited of the Greek world-the sort of statements of \vhich
Thucydides provides a slanted version at I. 70. Many of these statements are
moralistic and protreptic: Athens is merciful, for instance, for pity was en-
visaged as a peculiarly Athenian virtue;42 therefore such statements imply
imperative commands. As an Athenian one has values of mercy, self-sacrifice,
dedication, and one owes it to the state to behave accordingly. We have moved
from 'is' to 'ought'. These two elements, ideology as statement and ideology as
command, can be put in the same cluster as 'ideology as creed', a set of values
to which one subscribes as a citizen.
40 Cf. Halliwell, pp. 121-6 above. Goldhill (I986) neatly entitled a chapter ~The City of Words'.
-'I Cf. Vidal-Naquet in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (1988), 33 2 -3.
-'2 Cf. above, p. 17.
There is a third element as well, ideology as queslion: 43 these values suggest a

series of questions 'Nhich one can put to experience" and measure that experi-
ence against the ideal. To ask such questions in no way assumes that the experi-
ence \vill always match up to the ideal, and, if it does not, it need not imply that
there is anything \vrong \vith the ideal. If ideology and experience come into
conflict, then it may be experience's fault.
Ideal and experience may clash in different ways. The simplest case may be
illustrated from i\Jedea, After all those praises of an idealized Athens, so clean
and so pure, how can it be that such a city will accept Medea, the polluted slayer
of her children? The question is put explicitly by the chorus (846-50). The mis-
match bet\veen the ideal and the reality-in this case, what we might call
~theatrical reality", the fact that this glorified Athens will welcome Medea-is
strongly felt, and it shocks; but there is nothing wrong \vith Athens or Aegeus
for extending such hospitality, and the ideological value of such compassionate
acceptance need not be questioned ..l+ This is a commentary not on Athens, but
on the theatrical equivalent of real life, what is going on in the plot~ this is one of
the elements \vhich makes it so disquieting.
So far the mismatch between ideal and reality is simply a question of plot,
and is a clash within the mythical events which the play represents; the
mythical Athens and the mythical lv\edea do not comfortably mix, A closely
related+ 5 type of mismatch may feed in contemporary realities more directly:
·0 Theoretical discussions of ancient ideology tend to gloss over this questioning aspect) indeed
to exc1 ude it by definition. Thus Finley (1982: 17) defined ideology as 'the matrix of attitudes and
beliefs out of which people normally respond to the need to action, ... zvilhvu/ a process of ratiocina-
tion leading them back to the altitudinal roots orjuslificalion oflheir response . .. ' (my italics). Finley's
definition is largely accepted by Ober (1989: 38), but begs the question: the degree of ratiocination
expected or encouraged is itself an ideological construct, and will vary from one society to another.
In Athens such 'ratiocination' also features 10 ditTerent degrees in different genres, and, as Ober
himself stresses (p. 50), tragedy subjects 'attitudinal roots' to stern examination. Goldhil1 (I 990a:
97) similarly defines ideology as 'the structure of attitudes and norms ofbehaviour'~ which does not
give much away: cf. below, p. 234 and n. 87. ,\leier (1993: esp. 34-43) prefers \X'eber's category of
'nomological knowledge'-'the general, overarching and normati\'e knowledge to which we relate
an our thinking) actions and experience, and in which these must an be incorporated if things are to
seem "right''' (p. 35): that emphasis is in many ways illuminating~ but the stress on 'knowledge'
again downpJays any nomologically authorized exploration, questioning, or problematic. l\iy own
definition in terms of 'axioms and IlwugJu-pallc171s ~ at least allows the possibility of ideologicaJIy
encouraged ratiocination and self-examination, and this more capacious definition seems truer to
the Athenians' o\\'n self-image. Closest to this position is Croally (1994: esp. 43-7, 259-66), defin-
ing ideology as 'the authoritati\'e self-definition of the Athenian citizen' (this 'citizen' emphasis pre-
judges one important ideological question of a person's self-definition) but this particular
prejudgement is reasonable), and putting great weight on ideologically authorized self-examination.
That is not the same as suggesting a body of 'philosophically articulated democratic theory', which
Ober (1989: 38) may be right to deny; we are here concerned with questioning and exploration, not
\\'ith a body of theoretical dogma .
.u The audience may well remember that Athens will eventually expel ?\ledea ignominiously,
after her attempt to kill Aegeus' son Theseus: thus Sourvinou-Inwood (forthcoming). But that need
not imply that the ideal of merciful hospitality is itself undermined.
~~ Closely related, because contemporary realities are relevant even to J!edea: the more idealized
the audience's preconceptions of their city, the more the mismatch will be felt, and current ci\'ic
realities and images will play their part in moulding those preconceptions.
Conclusion 227
there may be a clash betvveen the expectations which the play seems to justify
and the realities which the audience kno\v. Take the end of the Heraclidae.
\X1ithin the plot itself there is son1e challenging redirection of sympathies, as
Eurystheus en1erges as rather sympathetic, and Alcmena is uncomfortably
casuistical in her interpretation of her moral obligations. But this redirection
also extends into the future, for \ve see the paradox that Eurystheus' Argives
may eventually be allies, and the descendants of these Heraclidae will turn into
bitter and ungrateful enemies. Given the contemporary realities of the
Peloponnesian War, the audience \vill feel that paradox with force. But that
strange turn of events is not Athens' fault; and, it is stressed, she will continue
to prosper, and Eurystheus' bones will prove a vital talisman. There is no
suggestion that .A.thens \vas \,,-'rong to accept the suppliants. It is just that these
things turned out in an unexpected \vay. In this case it was the Peloponnesians'
fault that they did; but, even in those cases \-vhere we find shadows falling over
Athens' O\~ln behaviour, it need not follow that Athenian ideals are decon-
structed. The end of EUlJlenides, for instance, presents Athens as a focus for
calm persuasion and discourse, a home for Persuasion (Peitho) rather than
stasis and violent vindictiveness. Its audience \vould recall that EphiaJtes had
been murdered bloodily only a few years earlier; stasis was to surface again only
a year later in 457, and it was probably sin1mering already. Still, this is surely a
case \vhere the clash between ideal and reality reflects the defective nature of
the reality. That ideal of calm and persuasion may not always be lived up to; it
can still remain, as an ideal and an important ideal.
In j\1.edea, Heraclidae, and EZllnenides, civic ideology is thus giving us ques-
tions to put to experience, providing a moral framework in which we might
explore it, but not prejudging whether the reality willlnatch the ideal. This is
not simply the presentation of ideology as ~creed', as statements or commands:
that is taken for granted, and goes on to provide the values which can serve as
the basic for sharp questioning. This is ideology as question, as a framework for
discourse and exploration. But so far \ve have no reason to think that such ques-
tioning extends to the ideological 'creed' itself, the image of the ideal Athens. So
far experience, not the ideal, has been found to be wanting. Are there cases
\vhere the questioning goes further, instances where the exploration leads the
audience to feel dissatisfied not merely with the reality but with the conven-
tional ideal?
Surely there are. Antigone, for instance, explores the limitations of a ruler's
insight into, and control over, questions of religion; Philoetetes takes the moral
problematic \vhich an adolescent male finds in carrying out the demands of his
commander. 46 Both are cases \vhere the authority of the state might normally
4t- ~ot that every member of the audience would generalize the issues in the same way: cf.
Easterling p. 28 above, on the variety of moral issues \'lhich Anligone might be felt to present. Both
l
examples are profitably explored by GoldhiH (I990a), who suggests that the plays, in proh-
Ienlatizing civic ideology, are expressively at odds with the celebratory civic setting of the dramatic
festival. This may not be the best way of putting it: see below, pp. 234-5-
be taken as read; but both take examples where the moral rights and wrongs are
anything but straightforward. True, there is an easy way out here. Antigone is
set in Thebes, so often the locus for rejected alternatives, the perversion and
reverse of the preferred patterns of Athens;47 Philoetetes is set in the wild, on
the margins of the civilized world ..~8 On one vie\v, the moral problelns could be
seen as exemplifying the Other, instantiating the sort of distorted relationships
vlhich \vould not happen in the sunlit fields of Athens; rather as Vidal-Naquet
has written of the ~Tay in which tragedy 'expatriates' irreconcilable political
contliet, affording an expressive contrast with the civic procedures of Athens;
where political discourse can articulate and offer reconciliation rather than
dangerous disputation. 49
Evidently, there is something in this; the settings matter. Yet we must beware
of regarding the Other as a straightforward foil to an idealized Athens. In real
life, Athens was not at all immune to the issues explored in Antigone or
Philocteles, any more than those explored in Persae;50 versions of such moral
problems could and would arise-generally less extreme and agonizing
versions, it is true, but versions none the less. As usual, an alertness to the Other
can sensitize one to analogy as well as polarity, and these rejected alternatives
have a habit of coming uncomfortably near to home. Features of the Other
usually distance, but occasionally zoom. 51
The settings in a non-Athenian Other remain relevant, but largely because
they allow moral issues to be posed in a particularly intense and shattering
register; they can become loci, not for the antithetical, but for the extreme. 52
The closer a presentation comes to home and the greater the emotional engage-
ment, the more there is a risk of a certain aesthetic distortion. One becomes too
affected to respond with appropriate reflectiveness. It is understandable that
the Athenians felt it inappropriate for Phrynichus to present troubles quite so
'close to home':53 his successors preferred to distance as well as to zoom. On one
level, the distancing from Athens thus serves as a sort of naive safety-valve;
immediately the engagement becomes too great for a spectator to cope with,
47 Zeitlin (I99 0b ); for important qualifications, see Croally (1994), 38-42.

';8 Cf. Vidal-Naquet in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (1988),161-79, and in this volume, pp. 114-15.
49 Vidal-Naquet in Vernant-Vidal-Naquet (1988), 33 2 -3.
50 Above, pp. 16- 1 9; cf. the points made by Parker, p. 149 above, Easterling, pp. 35-6 above, and
Croally (1994), 38-4 2 .
5l Sourvinou-Inwood (19 89) developed the cinematic analogy (above, p. 217) with particular ref-
erence to Antigone, arguing that Thebes was 'zoomed' to Athens in certain specific places and
'distanced' in others.
S2 Compare and contrast Zeitlin (1990b: 144-5): ~Thebes is ... the obverse side of Athens, the
shadow self, we might say, of the idealized city on whose other terrain the tragic action may be
pushed to its furthest limits of contradiction and impasse. As such, it also furnishes the territory for
exploring the most radical implications of the tragic without any risk to its own self-image.' I follow
Zeitlin on the 'furthest limits', but would suggest that she underplays the risk to the Athenian self-
image.
53 Hdt. 6.21. 2: the issues involved are discussed in this volume by Bowie, p. 40, Parker, p. 149,
and myself, p. 18.
Conclusion 229
the feeling that 'it could never happen here', or at least 'it could never happen
to that degree here', is available as an escape. On another, the displacement
allows for a differentiation of response among the audience, as I argued for
Persae and .I.:tledea.5~ Some spectators would find certain moral challenges
absorbing; those of a less exploratory mind-cast could avoid them as alien and
irrelevant to Athens. On a third level, the distancing may allow the audience to
articulate moral questions in a particularly stark manner, without the blurring
which a greater emotional involvement would give. But it would be a mistake to
regard this distancing as simply an emotional sunshade, protecting the
audience from an intensity of passion which might otherwise be too hot to bear.
Distancing and zooming are mutually reinforcing. If one has initially protected
one's comfort by feeling that distorted family relationships are the sort of thing
which happens at Thebes, then it becomes even more disquieting to see
Antigone confronting a moral issue which resists such cosy displacement; just
as it is disquieting to notice that ~1.edea's complaints cannot simply be waved
a\vay as the province of the foreigner or the female, or that the vanquished
Persian has some claim on one's pity, or that Philoctetes is more civilized than
the Greek community from which he has been expelled. To find the Self in
Other and the Other in Self 5 ) is a challenge to one's deepest sense of identity,
but it would be far less disconcerting if the Other had not first seemed distant
and clear.
If we find such fundamental exploration, we should not be surprised. This is a
very self-critical and self-analysing people. We have already noted Athens'
pride in herself as a home of discourse. In different genres, we can also see self-
criticism in comedy's jokes at the expense of Demos, or demagogues, or litiga-
tion, or refusal to learn from mistakes; or in Thucydides, not merely the
analysis to which he subtly subjects Athenian democracy, but also the way in
which he makes Pericles, Cleon and Alcibiades, even in a different way Nicias,
rebuke the demos for some characteristic features. It is indeed hard to find an
Attic genre in which self-criticism does not feature loud, even in some types of
rhetoric 56-but not in the Epitaphios, the great speeches in praise of Athens
delivered at the public funerals of the war-dead.
This is where we revert to generic differences; and we may begin to feel
hesitations about the approach to Athenian ideology developed with such
distinction by Nicole Loraux (I986a), concentrating as it does on the Epi-
taphios genre. The Epitaphios marks one end of the spectrum, that which is
most distinctively associated with ideology as creed, ideology as statement and
command, rather than ideology as question, as a tool for exploration. Her
analysis may seem less satisfying as she extends it to more complex and
54 Above, pp. 13- 19, 220- I.

ss Greenblatt's phrase: see my discussion of Persae, p. 19 above.
56 Cf Ober-Strauss (1990), 254-5. On Athens as proudly self-critical c( e.g. Croally (1994),
45- 6.
23 0 Christopher Pelling
exploratory genres. Of course there is no room for a fuB discussion here; but it is
at least arguable, for instance, that she does not do justice to the complexities of
'Thucydides, \~lith its subtle interaction bet\veen Pericles' Epitaphios and the
narrative. 57
\'(!e can see the similar problems of extending the analysis to tragedy if \ve
take the funeral speech v.,rhich is found within a play, that delivered by Adrastus
in Euripides' Supplices (857-9 I 7). This, arguably, is a case where \ve find the
more fundamental questioning, an instance \vhere an ideological creed, not
merely messy reality, is subject to exploration: in this case, the creed of public
glorification and private restraint embodied in the funeral speech itself.
Theseus has fought the Thebans to retrieve the bodies of the Seven and those
who have died with them; the bodies have been brought back, and the mothers
mourn them; then, on Theseus' bidding, Adrastus delivers his speech. Loraux's
discussion 58 forms part of her argument that the funeral speech minimized the
importance of the individual and of private loss and grief, and stressed the
importance of the more civic and positive laudation: these form 'the reassuring
certainties of the official celebration'.59 In Suppliees she claims that ,,'e should
see Adrastus' speech as supplanting the negative, private, and female elements
of the mothers' lament, which are potentially destructive to the polis. With
Theseus' intervention and Adrastus' speech, vve move out of the female \vorld
of the lament into a more male and positive world, integrating the suffering into
the civic universe; this, she claims, reproduces a version of the Athenian public
funeral. 60
This reading seems uncomfortably reductionist. Adrastus' speech is followed
by Evadne's self-immolation, the most extreme instantiation of private grief 61
there is no question of an 'integration into the civic universe' there, and that is
the exact opposite of participation in a polis-funeral. Nor should we overstate
the effect of Adrastus' speech on the Argive matrons~ their grief may be moder-
ated after Adrastus has spoken, but only by a little, and they are scarcely
integrated within an exclusively civic vision.1'l2 Furthermore, this is an extremely
odd funeral speech.63 Adrastus goes through the Seven, or five of them, as
named individuals; there is none of the collective emphasis and individual
5~ Cf e.g. Flashar (1969); 1\1acIeod (1983), 149-53~ Hornblower (r987), 62 n.66 and (1991),
295; and below~ p. 232.
~x Loraux (I986a)~ 47-50. cf. 107-9.
~9 Ibid. 28.
nO Not of course an exact one; Loraux's analysis is subtler than to claim that. For the similarities
to and differences from real-life public funerals cf. Collard (1972),46-7; Foley (1993). 117-29;
Bowie, pp. 5 I -3 above.
61 Cf. Seaford (1987 a: 12 1-2; 1994: 355) on the destruction of the oikos (both marital and natal)
which Evadne focuses. There is no public emphasis here.

02 The judgement of i'vlirto (1984: 77-87, esp. 78 n. 42) and of Foley (1993: 121 n.46, 125) is
here truer to the play.
"3 As many critics have noted, including Loraux herself (I 986a), 107-8; c( esp. Zuntz (1955),
I 3-r6; Collard (I97S a ), 323-4.
Conclusion
anonymity of the real-life E,pitaphios here; and the emphasis falls heavily on
private virtues. 64 Capaneus, for instance, is humble, uncorrupted by his \vealth,
a true friend to his friends, truthful, approachable, dutiful to his household as
\vcll as to his fellow citizens (86 I -7 I). Doubtless the polis would particularly
welcome such citizens;65 doubtless, too, this serves as a valuable model for the
young, and the didactic emphasis of this speech is one thing which links it with a
real-life Epitaphios. 66 It is still hard to accept that this is simply a catalogue of
those virtues most positive for the polis ,67 or, at least, that these virtues were
more positive for the polis than many others: private life and the household
figure too prominently. Public and private values in fact intermesh, with dis-
tinctly more space for the private than in a real-life Epitaphios. 68 It is true that
these elements are partly directed by the remoulding to fit the mythical matrix,
\\Tith its emphasis on heroic individuals;69 but one also cannot divorce it from its
context, where Adrastus delivers the speech before the families of the dead, and
the effect is as much to reflect and articulate their private grief as to move into
the less personal, civic register. The move from Adrastus to Eyadne is therefore
not wholly regressive; there are ways in which the speech and the private grief
both pull in the same direction. That does not fit the Loraux analysis at all.
Once again, there is an easy way out. Adrastus and Evadne are Argives. One
could abandon the reduction to the pattern of the Athenian funeral, and regard
this as a further exploration of the Other; this could be the extreme and non-
civic grief which marks the un-Athenian activity. But once again this seems too
facile an approach to analysing the Other?O It would be a complacent audience
indeed which felt that such grief could never be found in an idealized Athens.
That is not to say that there is no displacement at ali, or that there is any simple
audience 'identification' with the events portrayed on stage. In particular, the
extreme manner of Evadne's grieving may thus be displaced: self-immolation
was not the Athenian way. But it is hard to think that the extreme grief itself is
so displaced (any more than Xerxes' grief, as opposed to the manner of its
6-l Not that the presentation always convinces; the play has not presented the Seven as such
paragons. Cf Burian (1985), 146-9.

65 Cf. Collard (1972: 41), emphasizing that each of the notices ends by stressing the polis (except
for Tydeus~, which is mutilated); Bowie, above, p. 52 and n. 100.
66 Collard (1972), 40.
67 So Loraux (I986a: 108), fol.1owing \Xrilamowitz (1922: 208) and Goossens (1962: 45 I), and
largely followed by Foley (1993: 119-20).
68 l\\irto (19 84: 80) speaks of the 'perfetta integrazione' between Theseus and Adrastus; that
again goes too far, and we should rather think of Adrastus as occupying some middle ground
between Theseus' recommended public restraint and the matrons' private intensity.
69 Collard (1975 a), 3 2 4; Loraux (1986 a), 107. For the 'mythical rna trix' see p. 2 I 5 above.
70 Nor does Argos serve so easily as Thebes as a focus for an anti-Athenian Other; its suggestions
admittedly vary, but it is more regularly conceptualized as belonging in a middle position between
Athens and Thebes. Cf. esp. Zeitlin (1990b: 146-7), who analyses Supplices in this way, and argues
that Adrastus' readiness to admit error ultimately links him with the Athenians. On Argos as an
intermediate city or a city of plasticity, whose suggestions can vary from one play to another. cf
Vidal-N aquet, p. I I 3 above; CroalJy (1994), 40; and, in general, see also Said (1993 a).
Christopher Pelling
expression, is distanced in Persae 71 ); not in the middle of the war,72 when so

many of the audience had felt private grief so intensely; not in the middle of this
play, when Aethra has herself been moved by the Argive women's lament, and
Theseus has confessed that he is moved too (288). Loraux thinks that the audi-
ence \vrite off Evadne's suicide as a useless exercise, "a suicide serving no useful
purpose", from which both chorus and audience are alienated?3 That does seem
too simple a reconstruction of audience response. And if it is too simple for
Evadne's extreme mode of articulating her grief, it would also be too simple to
regard as straightforwardly alien .i\drastus' more formal ackno\vledgement of
private loss.
Should we, then, regard this tragic Epitaphios as simply different from its
real-life equivalents, with the real-life versions minimizing the private and the
grief-stricken, while tragedy draws attention to them? The next step might
indeed be to find tragedy subversive of civic ideology, removing those 'comfort-
able reassurances'74 which the ideologically correct real-life speeches would
give. Yet this too would be over-simple. For one thing, there are more complex-
ities of sentiment even in real-life Epitaphioi. True, Thucydides' Pericles pro-
duces only bleak comfort for the living: 'those of you who are past your prime
should regard the good life you have already enjoyed as the greater benefit, and
should reflect that the time to come will be short ... ' (2.44. 4). But this is expres-
sive even in Thucydides, with Pericles suppressing individual sentiments in a
way which will resonate through the rest of the history, and in a way which will
emerge as too demanding.?) This again points the dangers of using an explorat-
ory genre, in this case historiography, as 'evidence' for real life. There may be
little individual naming in real Epitaphioi, but they still strike a different, more
sentimental note than we find in Thucydides: the historical Pericles' 'it was as if
the spring had gone out of the year',76 or the end ofLysias 2 with its sensitivity
to the grief of the bereaved,77 or some of HypereidesJ8 In real-life Epitaphioi
the praises of the city certainly make the loss seem more worth while, less
devastating; but that can involve acknowledging the loss, not suppressing it.
Not that tragedy here works in quite the same way as the real-life speeches.
Those speeches may accept the loss, but they certainly do not focus it and make
it problematic in quite the same way as the Supplices. In the play the different
-1 Above, p. 16.
":! For the dating of Supplices (424-420 Be) cf. Collard (197Sa), 8-14.
73 Loraux(I9 86a). 108.
;4 The phrase of Loraux: above, p. 23 0 .
-~ This touches on a broader theme which may be traced in Thucydides, the ways in which
se\'eral types of increased individualism come to threaten collective ideology: cf., briefly, Pelling
(1990b), 259-60. This emerges particularly from t\\acleod's brilliant analysis of the Sicilian debate
(1975). Similar themes are traced in David Gribble's monograph Alcibiades and Athens (Oxford,
forthcoming). I intend to return to this elsewhere.
76 Arist. Rhel. 13 65 3 I -2, 141 1 2-4.
3 3
-.. Esp. Lys. 2. 70-6.

~8 Esp. Hypereides 6.4 1 -3.
Conclusion 233
\vays of articulating grief, the Athenian mode of public restraint and the Argive
register of private intensity, are set against one another. The audience will find
elements in both which strike chords, and probably elements of both which
seem less inviting.?9 That is not to say that the scales are weighted evenly, and
the Argive world may still seem more alien than the Athenian; but there is still
plenty here to disturb.
Some of this reading may be extended to the whole play.80 Despite Theseus'
rosy picture of democracy in action (426-62), the audience must find much
that is uncomfortable. The play presents a series of vivid vignettes of what
democracy is like in action: Theseus' picture of the three classes, only the
middle one of which is any use (238-45); the Theban herald's denunciation of
greedy demagogues exploiting a demos which cannot attend the Assembly
(4°9-25); the picture, t\vice, of a people who blithely take on war with a
transient enthusiasm, which will turn sour and tragic for so many (23 2 -5, 479-
9 I); the picture of a people who turn down peace terms and lust for more (739-
40). It is easier to find real-life Athenian parallels to those snapshots than to
Theseus' bland picture of participative democracy.81
True, in the play the snapshots are safely displaced, one way or another; one
again notices how distancing can allow disturbing truths to be presented more
sharply. Theseus' remarks about the three classes are phrased generally; if any-
thing, his remarks are aimed at Argos, not Athens. The herald is such an
unpleasant piece of work that we are not primed to find his remarks plausible:
they reflect the assumptions of an unenlightened Theban. 82 The Athens of the
play is not like that; the idealized portrait remains unscathed; this is democracy
as it ought to be. 83 But we cannot leave real life out of this completely. On one
79 Cf. especially the acute analysis of Foley (1993: 117-29), who argues that some aspects of
Theseus' manner, in particular his refusal to allow the mothers the crucial physical contact with
their sons' bodies, go beyond real-life Athenian public funerals in their resistance to private
emotionalism. Cf lv\irto (1984) and Bowie, p. 52 above.
80 For the following paragraphs cf esp. Macleod (19 83),147-9.
81 Cf. Macleod (1983), 149-50. Burian (198S: 139-41) stresses the integration of these passages
into their dramatic contexts; but the clustering of so many pointed insights can still retain an effect
which goes beyond the individual contexts. Collard (197Sa: 211-12) thinks the herald's indictment
of democracy (465-51 I) has 'equal validity' to Theseus' defence: so also Fitton (1961),433-4, and
Gamble (1970), 39-400. That puts it too strongly, but again one need not have total equipollence
between two viewpoints to find the hostile one disquieting.
82 Cf. Loraux (1986a), 216-17; Zeitlin (I990b), 147. Note also Easterling's remarks (P.30
above) on the similar case of Menelaus in Oresles: there too the criticisms of the demos are partly
distanced by the speaker's unlikeability, but hard to dismiss completely.
83 This raises the difficult question of Theseus' own position, as he outlines it at 349-53. A
decision of the demos is needed, but he will readily gain this if he gives the lead; his confidence is
duly justified, 393-4. This perhaps sounded less awkward to a contemporary than it does to us: cf.
Collard (1975a), 199. The mythical matrix needs to accommodate both Theseus and a democracy,
and in the play this is how leadership needs to work: there is no clash with Theseus' own parti-
cipative picture, and no feeling of unease-or, at least, any unease will centre on the mismatch
between an idealized style of leadership and the distressing contemporary realities. vs'!e inevitably
think of Thucydides' picture of Pericles (2. 65): cf. e.g. Goossens (1932) and (1962),433-6; Fitton
level the snapshots may be displaced, distanced; but so frequently they also
'zoom', seeming uncomfortably familiar. Is this Other really so Other? The
audience will be uncomfortable, and it is real life, the realities of contemporary
Athens, which will make them so.
This brief sketch suggests three conclusions. First, real life matters. The mis-
match between the idealized picture of Supplices and the real-life democracy is
essential: that does not mean that it is allegorical, or that there are any precise
contemporary allusions, but the facts of political life have to be taken into
account in interpretation. This is another case when the historian helps the
critic. Real life also helps to give the play its unity. Critics have worried whether
the Evadne scene and Theseus' political rhetoric are intrusive and inorganic.
What binds them is the real-life fact that private loss and democratic vision
were deeply interrelated parts of polis-experience, parts of what it meant to be a
citizen in the 420S. It is not coincidence that Heraclidae and Supplices, the two
plays which most strongly articulate Athenian self-awareness, both have spec-
tacular acts of self-sacrifice; we might compare the way in which sacrifice and
liberty are so closely linked in Roman thought. 84
Secondly, we have noticed ideological mismatches and clashes; but we need
to reflect on what these clashes expose, and particularly beware of the language
of 'subversion'. The idealized, mythical Athens remains ideal: the Areopagus of
the Eumenides is a real step forward; Theseus' Athens in Supplices still provides
a model of wise and restrained democracy; at the end of Heraclidae the future
may turn out in a zany way, but it is not Athens' fault, and Athens continues to
reap the benefit from it. The ideal remains just that, an ideal:85 it is usually, if
not quite always, real life which is at fault. Goldhill has argued that there is a
complex interaction between the pre-play of the festival, a glorifying projection
of civic power and duty-the libations poured by the generals, the display of the
allies' tribute, the naming of state benefactors, the march of war-orphans-and
the problematic tone of the plays themselves. 86 Much of that thesis is richly.
illuminating, but its most difficult aspect is its precise formulation, positing a
~sense of tension between the texts of tragedy and the ideology of the city' or ~ a
questioning of the terms of that civic discourse'. 87 The civic pre-play does
matter; but it simply introduces ideological matter at one end of the spectrum,
ideology as creed-and even here there is emphasis on the cost and sacrifice
(the war-orphans) as well as on the glory.88 The plays themselves then move
(196 1),433; Conard (I975 a), 198; Macleod (1983). 149-9; Croally (1994), 210-1 I; but it is rash to
insist on so precise a contemporary allusion.
84 Cf. e.g. Trankle (1965). Croally (1994) is especially acute on the way in which war sharply
focuses questions of civic self-definition.
8S Cf. e.g. Loraux (1986a), 198; Macleod (1983), 148; Winnington-Ingram (1980), 273 0.71.
Athenian self~criticism in oratory can be similar: Ober-Strauss (1990), 254-5.
86 Goldhill (I99 0a).
87 Ibid. 1 15, 126. Such formulations follow naturally from Goldhill's earlier restrictive definition
of ideology (above, n. 43). 88 l\1eier (1993),57-8; Gregory (1991), 6, 14 n. 18.
Conclusion 235
along the spectrum, and adopt ideological values in a more questioning way:
but that is a shift of register, not a tension or a clash. These are different aspects
of the same thing. As Goldhill stresses, this is indeed 'civic discourse', civic
exploration, not simply civic exposition.
Finally, what of the historian? This book began with literary and historical
approaches which were genuinely in competition: in the Persae case, literary
approaches took evidence away. Here there is no competition at all, and
tragedy provides new historical material: illustration of what it means to be a
citizen, what a citizen would feel uneasy about. There are dangers, we saw, in
concentrating too exclusively on the Epitaphios; perhaps there are dangers the
other way too, for tragedy is at the exploratory end of the generic range just as
the Epitaphios is at the celebratory. But we at least need to be sensitive to the
existence afthat range. 89 A citizen might react in different ways, and feel differ-
ently perplexed and challenged, in different settings; and viewing tragedies was
as much a civic experience as listening to Epitaphioi. Part of civic ideology, in
fact, was to feel worried about civic ideology, in the right place and the right
setting. And the tragic theatre was the right place. 90
Cf. esp. Parker, pp. 156-60 above.

89
I am grateful to Oliver Taplin, Judith Mossman, and several of the contributors for helpful
'10
comments on this chapter.

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VICKERS, .\1. (1989), 'Alcibiades on Stage: 771eS1110phoriazusae and Helen', Hisl. 38: 41-
65·
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Index of Passages Cited
All passages mentioned in the text are included. Passages mentioned in notes are
included where their content is discussed) but not when they simply form part of a list of
supporting citations.
Aeschines 684 118

1. 173 68 n. 28 91 5 & n. 64
118
2. 10 1 57 n. 1 53 971 r3
110, I
3· 19 89 n. 6 Eumenides 41-2,67,74, 7S n. 7 1 ,76,
3·57 143-4 77,111-12, 21 3,216,224-5,227,
3· 77 IS7 n. S3 234
3.86 68 n. 28 290(1:') 44
3.125 68 n.28 39 8(1:') 44
3· 153 44 484(.E) 44
3· 2 I 9 I 57 n. 53 53 2 - 8 15 1n·3 0
Aeschylus 566 -9(£) 44
Oresteia 23,78,110-11,149, lSI, 153, 86 4 74
21 7- 18 868-9 ISO
Agamemnon 78,113-14,139 869 I I I
II 131 884 110
258 13 1 890 I I I
281-35 0 13 1 9 18 74
35 1 13 1 1011 III
587-614 13 1 1018 III
750-62 151 n·3 0 Niobe
810- 2 9 13 1 fro 154a 15-16 Radt 152 n. 32
83 0 -54 13 1 Persae 1-19,41-3,73, 112, 116, 21 4,
855-7 13 2 216,220,228-9,23 2 ,235
855-9 1 3 13 1 hypoth. 2 n. 4, 40
85 6 134 70 - 1 6
862 132 235-45 7
866-73 133 239-40 116 n.4 8
877-94 13 2 240 I I n.42
886 133 27 8 7
887-94 133 347 15 0
895-9 01 13 2 -3 353 if. 69
90 S 132 355 3
9 1 4- 16 133 355-60 2, 10-1 I n. 41
10 38 164 362 151 n·30
I 189 110 36 4 5
1269-7 6 153 364-7 2
137 2 -3 134 368 7
137 2 -9 8 13 1 376-9 2
Choephoroi 77 382-4 0 5 2-5
132-5 118 387-8 5
560-4 117 391 8
Aeschylus (onl. ) 37(~) 7 0 n. 74

394 8 274-326 7~
39 8 2'-+-5 36 5-9 75
402-, 3. 8, 1:2 37 0 -5 75
-P:3 ! 3H7-9I 76 . 2IK
-+17-I~ ;,9 39~-.fOT 75
422-30 2. -::-6 445 r64
42 4- 8 7 455- 65 75
427 6 4H1tr. 75
447-64 H 4H5(~) 44
45 8 9 502 -3 75
4 6o - 1 9 5 1 7- 1 9 75
495-507 6 60 4- 2 4 33,75
584-97 12 n. 52 62 3 76
682 IS 699 75
70 5-7 15 94 2 ff 75
7 1 5 15 957- 61 78
7 1 9 15 985 fI 76
7 2 3 15 1009-1 I 78
72 5 IS O)Acschylus
7 28 5· 9
2 n. Prometheus 78 n. 87· I 15
74 0 - 2 15 Andocides
744 15 I. 29 I 52 n. 32
749-5 0 15 1. 113-1.+ 152 n. 32
75 1 - 2 15 [Andocidcs]
759- 86 15 4. 2 3 44. 81 -5
780 15 4.42 83 n. 6
790-2 12 •-\ 11 t llOlogia Pa fa li na
800-2 15 6. 2 I 3 I 06 n. I 26
808- 1 5 15, IS J n. 30 13· 28 103-7
816-22 10 Antiphanes
820-2 IS fr. 202 K.-A. I02
820 IS Ari stop ha ncs
82 7 IS Acha 111 ians
84 2 IS 35 67 n . 2 5
880-92 r 2 n. 52 67(£) 69 n. 37
SCplCm conlra 77zchas 33 n. 50, I 12, 126- 30 9- 1 4 7 2
9, I 50 - r, I 5 3 35 6 7 2
128-9 36 9 7 2
1-9 12 9 n. 29 377- 82 7 [ n. 50
76-7 IS I 482 72
135-44 lSI 502-3 7 1 n·5 0
176-7 r 51 50 9- 12 7 2
181-202 129 Birds
214 151 68 n. 35
64 0
21 7- 18 151 793- 6 65
253 ISO Clouds 71
303 24 n. 16 587-9 143-4
30 4 151 Ecclesiazousae 222
653-5 12 7- 8 473-5 143-4
656 128 Frogs 68, 7 I) 79~ 134-
659 128 553-4 66n.21
662-76 128 80 9 157 n. 53
7 19 12 9 n. 29 1026-7 12
1013-20 27 109 0 -5 144, 157 n. 53
Supplices 32-3, 36, 67, 7 4-9~ I 10- r I, Knights 67, 7 I
113,115,19°,217-18.222 Lysistrata 222
Index of Passages Cited 259
I 190 21. r 87
18 7-9 7 8 n. 87 21. If) 102
39 1 -7 68 n. 35 21. 22 I02
5 I 7- I 8 68 n. 35 21. 5I 102
589-90 6R n. 35 21. 52-3 88
I I 38 (1' ) 76 n. 76 21. 55 88
113 8-44 76-9 !Denlosthenes]
I I 44(l') 76 n. 76. 79 n. 90 59· 73 199 n. 3 8
771CSmoph011aZOUsae 222 Diodorus Siculus
3 86 6S 4· 3 18 7- 8
395-7 65 n. I I
549-50 181 n.72 Euripides
1Fasps Alcestis
I 284 -9 I 7 I n. 50 245- 6 15 8
1Fcalth 675-8 115- 16
953(L') 83 n. 5 Andromache 72, ISO
Aristotle
445-53 72
Elhica .Vicomachea
4.1123:119-24 102
594-600 72
Bacchae 118-19,153,188 n. 4.190-3,
Poelica
197 nn. 32-3,199 n. 38,21 1,215
I L.J.9t>27 16
694 190 n. 13
1 45d'6-8 12 5- 6
1354-5 119
145 I b27 - 32 43-4
Crelans 179-80
1453.14- 5 17
fro 82 Austin 179
I4 6oh 35-7 145
Polilica Electra 32, I y 3, I IS
3.1276bl-9 96 n. 61 96 lIS
3· 127t'8-J 2 43 25 1 115
3· J28J:'4 2 - h 3 43 699 f1 29
4· I 299 ay 5- 20 89 761-2 118
RhelOrica 810-51 lIS
2.138SbI4-15 16-17 Hecuba 32, 113, 162
2. 1386;125-6 17 58 15 1-2 n. 30
2. I386h6 17 254(L') 45
3. 1406<110-18 133 n. 36 27 2 -33 I 32
3·I413bI7-2I 133 n·3 6 I-Ic/en 72
[Aristotle} He rae lcs 42, I 12- 13. I So, 152 n. 30
A thenaion Polileia 26-34 113
29·5 92 Heraclidae 42, I [1-12, ITS, 224, 227. 234
56. 2 -3 96 37- 8 115
5 6 .3 84 139-43 lIe
Athenaeus 35 2 ISO
12. 534 c 102 HippolYlliS I 16- I 7, 153, 164. 170- I,
175- 8 4
Demosthenes 15- 16 175-6
I hypoth.
98-9 34-7 116
I. 10 143-4 47-50 182
2. I 143-4 54-5 17 6
5· 7 44 58- 60 17 6
10.3 8 99 141 ff. 176
18 156 145-7 17 6
18. 28 100 n. 87 166-9 176
18. 253 158 337-8 179
18. 26 5 95 37 1 -4 117
19. 184 121 7 1 3- 1 4 177
19. 2 54-6 143-4 728-3 I 181
20 87-9 973-5 117
21 86-8 102 9 117
260 Index of Passages Cited
Euripides (cont,) 435- 8 30

1093-7 r 17 444-5 30 .3 2
1102-6 158 49 -5 5 32
1 2
J I98 117 612 30
128 3 177 612- 1 4 31
1328-31 18 4 69 6 -7 01 30
1424 ff. J 77. I 83 69 8 -9 3 1
1.+59-60 I 17 7 18 - 2 4 30
Ion 145 73 6-54 30
293 Ir6 760 -2 30 .3 2
592-4 116 772(£) 45
lphigeneia in ..4.ulis 72, 135-7. 139 77 2 -3 3 0 n. 36
97- 8 137 n. 50 866-7 0 3 1
16 4-77 113 87 1 30
30 3 135 87 1 -3 33
3 2 4 135 885 30
333 13 6 887-97 30
335 135 898 -9 00 3 1
337-44 137 902 - 1 7 30
35 0 - 6 4 137 9 0 3(.E) 30 n. 34,45, 116 n. 47
37 8 - 8 4 137 9 1 4- 16 3 1
473-5 0 3 13 8 n. 5 I 9 1 7 ff. 3 1
82 9-3 0 134 n. 39 944-5 31
Iphigcneia in Toun's 170-5) 182 974-5 15 1n·3 0
9 17 1 10 58-9 30
2I 171 1085-1152 32
30ff. 17 2 1528 116
36-9 17 2 1643-5 2 29
221-8 172-3 16 58-9 29
33 8-9 173 166 4-5 29
357-77 173 1682(E) 45
380 -9 1 173 Phoenissae 32, 33-4 n. 50, 36, I 12, 216
977- 86 174 393(£) 45
1082-8 174 5 28 - 6 37 3 2
1097-1105 174 16 30 27
I I 12-16 174 Supplices 42,45-56,73,11-12,115,164,
1435 174 21 7,222,224,229-35
1439-4 1 174 1-3 54
1449- 61 174 14- 16 4 6
14 88 -9 175 28-3 1 53
Afedea 13 I, 220- I, 226, 229 33 54
166 114 63-5 54 n. 118
214-66 220-1 97 54
255 I I I 113 fT. 4 8
276 I I I 131 fT. 46
522 -5 13 6 13 2ff. 48
579- 8 5 13 6 155 ( 4 8
644 I I I 157 48
724 I I I 15 8 £ 4 8
82 4-5 24 161 48
82 4-45 15° 173 53
846-50 226 181 f 49 n. 8 I
Orestes 23,29-33,42,72, 112-13,216, 190 49
224, 233 n. 82 193 f. 49
255-6 3 1 2 I 1 ff. 4 6 , 49
37 ICE) 45 216ff. 50
43 1 -3 29 219fT. 49
Index of Passages Cited 26r
226-8 49 887 52 n. 100

23 0 49 89 2 52 n. 100
23 2-5 233 897f. 52 n. 100
23 8 fT. 47· 233 I 165 tT. 55-6
25 8- 62 49 1202-4 47
260 54 122 7-3 1 ISO
28 4 49 Troades 42, 7 2 , IS I, 154-5. 164
286 49 26-7 154
288 232 210- 1 3 72 -3
297 ff. 47 375- 6 114
301 f. 49 [Euripides]
3 1 I 47 n. 70 Rhesus 113-14
3 I8f 47 n. 70
321 £ 47 n ·7 0
32 4 f. 47 n. 70 Hermesianax
33 1 49 7· I 7 54 n. 1 1 3
33 6 49 Herodotus
339 47 L 86. 6 16 n. 70
34 2 47 4· 79 ff. 18 9
347 f. 49 4· 83 15
349-55 47, 50 n. 80, 233 n. 83 4· 85 15
359- 61 50 4·89 IS
39 2 54 4·97 IS
393-4 233 n. 83 4·108 18 9
399 47 5· 67f. 43 n. 42
4 0 4f. 47 6. 2I. 2 2 n. I, 18,4°, 149,220,228
406 - 8 47 6.7 0 109
40 9- 2 5 233 7. I 44 I I n. 42
420 - 2 47 8.5 6- 64. I 3
426 - 62 72 )233 8.60f1 7 n. 25
433 47 8.681' 2 n. 5
43 8 f. 47 8.70. I 2
479-9 1 233 8.7 0 . 2-3
1- 2
495 So 8.75. 1 3 0 . 10
50 4f. So 8.75-6 2
51 I f. 5 I n. 87 8.7 6 . I 3 n. 9
52 4-7 50 8. 83 5
52 9£ 50 8.95 8
53 1 - 6 47 Hesiod
534-4 1 50 fro 25. 22 M-W 22
53 6 50 n. 85 Homer
561 -3 So Iliad
59 2 -7 50 6.407-39 26
610 50 9·300-3 59
61 4 50 9.3 12 59
61 9 50 24 26
677-9 4 6 n. 63 24· 601-20 22 n. 5
70 3-6 46 Odyssey
708ff. 46 3· 25 8 ff.27
731 fT. 48 n. 80 9. 108-11 60
734-44 51 9. 116f. 60
739-4 0 233 9. 182f. 60
766 51 9.216f. 60
84 2 f. 5 I 9.346 60
857-9 1 7 23 0 -3 9.371-4 60
861-7 1 23 1 9.427f. 60
879-81 52 n. 100 9.507 60
Homeric Hymns 8·s68a-b 43

To Demeter TIU!aelelllS
47 f. 54 I72C-7C I..p n. 58
99 54 n. 121 Plutarch
100-2 54 Aleibiade s
27 0 - 2 54 22. 3 58
297 54 23·4 58
302 -7 33· 3 58
45 0 -9 34 58
Hypereides Cimon
4· 14- 17 157 n. 53 8.8-9 69
5 col. 9 105 n. I 18 I 6. 4- I 7· 3
79 n. 9 0
16.9- 10 76-9
IG De audiendis poetis
ii 2 • 334 16 7- 8 17a 78 n.87
Isocrates De sera lluminis vindiccG
s62e-5 63b 154
9. 6 44 Pen'cles
12. 186-7 155
9· 2-3 99
16.4 8 17
Solon
29. 6 40
Lvcurgus
17wmiscodes
. Against Leocrates
5· 5 10 n. 4 0 , 69 n. 39, 101 n. 9 2 , 10 7
roo f. 44
n. 129
Lucan 10.5 116
7.7 2 5 159 12·4 3
Lysias
IS 43
2.7 0 - 6 23 2 Pollux
7· 30 - 1 92 4. I I 1 42
19·57 91
21 90-1
Solon
2 I. I 90-1
28. II 17 fr. 4 West 143-4
Sophocles
Aias Lokros
Pausanias
fr.locRadt 153
I. IS 11-12
Ajax 72,113,152-3,164
1. 20. I 105 121-6 16 n. 70,18,152
2. 30. 5 I 17 n. 55 12 7-33 15 2
Philochorus 210-2 25
FGrH 328 F 33 67 485-524 26
FS8 9 1 n·39 487-9 0 25
FII7 7 6 n. 76 566-70 26
Plato 75 6 -7 15 2
Go rgias 107 1 -9 0 30 n. 35
S02b-d 122-3 1102 30n.35
Laws 1228 26, I IS
3·7ooe-7oIa 43 1259-63 26,115
4.706b-c 10 129 226, I IS
Menexenus 1301-3 26
237 C- d 144 Antigone 26-8, 33 n. 50, 36~ 224, 227-
Meno 9
7S d 3 141 n.5 8 411 27
Prolagoras 487 164
336br-3 I4 1 582 - 6 °3 154
Republic 6 I 3- I 4 I SIn. 30
2. 380a 152 n. 32 1094 146
I I 10 27 944-9 35
1197 27 97 6 140
1203f( 27 112 4-5 35
Electra I 13 112 5-7 35
36~7 1 18 1348 24 n. 16, 3S n. 52
45-6 1 18 155 2 -5 35
62(X) 44 1590- I 36
129 24 n. 16 17 69-7 2 36
1277 24 n. 16 Oedipus Tyrannlls 33 n. 50, 36, 119, 126-
1466 151 n. 30 30
;Viobe 222(E) 44
fro 441 a Radt 153 43 2 -3 117
Oedipus Coloneus 29,34-6, I I 1-12, 114, 733 117
137-40 ,218 1297-1368 12 9
38 35 1369-70 129
47 34 137 1 -90 12 9-30
57 36 1391-1409 129
59 35 14 0 9- I 5 I 30 n. 32
64 34 Phil. 22 n. 4,33 n. 47,42,56-61, 1 15,
68 34 13 1 , 21 7,227-9
76 35 2 60
7 8- 80 34 4 60
92(£) 44, 218 n. 20
9- 11 58
273 140 29 60
29 2 -5 34 31 60
39 2 139 33 60
396-415 13 8 35f. 60
399-400 139 72f. 60 n. 160
457(1:') 44 81 58
548 140 93[ 60 n. 160
569 35 96-9 58
606 35 99(.l:) 44, 58 n. ISO
60 7- 28 35
r09 58
63 2 -3 3S 119 58
637 35 n. 54 I 44 60, 1 1 7 n. 55
64 2 35 19 1 - 200 57
668-7 19 34,15 0 221 60
698(£) 44
241 60
701 (L') 44
272 60
7 0 7- 1 5 3S
314-16 61
7 2 4 13 8
728 24 n. 16 33 1 -4 0 33 n·47
7 28f 13 2n ·35,13 8 343-7 59
73S~6 13 8 375 59
737- 8 139 4 10-5 0 33 n. 47
738~9 13 8 43 8ff. 59 n. ISS
740 ff. 1 38-9 5 61 -6 59 n. 1 57
74 1 - 2 139 604ff. 60
761 - 2 13 8 n. 53 708f. 60
7 6 5-74 139 714f. 60
77 1 140 n. 56 820-S 60
774 140 97Sf. 60
775 140 n. 56 1000r. 60
7 88 -9 0 14 0 1052 58-9
79 8-9 139 1344-7 60
81 3 139 Trach. 22 n. 3, 26 n. 20
919~23 35 610-3 58
Tacitus 4·97· 2 46
A.nnals 4·97· 3 47-8
4· I ISS 4.9 8 .5 48
Theocritus 4·99 46
26 199 n. 38 5. Lt· I 46 n. 0)
Theophraslus 5·3 2 . I ISO
Charac{Crt:s 5.43. 2 57
22. I-2 roi. 107 n. 129 5.9 0 17 n·7 0
Thucydides 7·77· 3-4 15 6
L 70 225 8.68. I 61
I. 74. 3 8 n. 28
1.77. 1 134n·41 Vila Aeschyli
1.13 8 27
16 40
2·34· 3-6 SI
2.40.2 121
2·44.4 23 2 Xenophon
2.4 6 . 2 Sl Anabasis
2·47·4 159 7.8.4-6 165n.15
2.64. 2 156 J-lipparchicus
2.65 233-4 n. 83 1.26 91-2
3.36.6 122 Orconomicu s
3·37·3-5 122n·3 11.23-5 140
3· 3 8 121-2 Symposium
3· 40 . 3 17 n. 70 8·9 165n.15
3·49· I 73 lXenophon] (The 'Old Oligarch') 86~ 93-5
4· 9 2 . 7 4 8 n. 7 6 A I henaion Polilcia
4.9 6.4-5 46 I. 13 93-5
General Index
.\lodern scholars are included only \vhen their vie\\'s are discussed in extenso in the text.
i\'\ythical figures are included \vhen their independent existence in myth is relevant, but
not ~'hen they are mentioned simply as characters in plays.
Abydus 56 Aristotle 16- 1 7,43,89, 102. 12 5, 145, 148

Actium 10 Artemisium 7 n. 251 41
Acusilaus 42 Athenaeus T02
Aeschines ..t-t, 77 r1. 7 ~ 85· 157 n. 53 Athos 7
Aeschylus 1-19. 22 n. 4, 40 -3, 59. 6 3-4,67, Attica 24. 48, 63, 70 , 83· 97
69.73-9,110-18, 12 5-34. 15 0 - 1 ,153. Aulis 112-14
164.191-3,197 n.32, 208,210-1, 21 3-
I8. 220,224-5, 227-8, 23 2 , 235 Boeotia 44-56
see also Index of Passages Cited Bosporus 15
Aetna 6-+ Brauron 171 -5, 177
Agenor 34 n. 50 Bremmer. Jan T89, 209
Aias (Oileus) 1 1
Ajax 24 Cadmus 22, 34 n. 50
Alcibiades 6,42,44,56-61,81-5.102,217, Callias 106 O. 22
229 Callichoron 54
Alexander the Great 4 I Callimachus 165
Alexandria 10 Callistratus 149
Amasis painter 198 n. 34. J 98 Candaules 41
Amazons I I Carpenter, T. H. 196-7
Amphiaraus 157, n. 53 Cassandra 1 I
Amynias 73 Celeus 54
Andocides 44, 77 n. 77 Chicago painter 207
Andocides painter 198 Chios, Chians 40
Anthesteria 206-7 choregia, choregoi 9- I 0, 23-4, 8 I - 108, 216
Antigenes 103-7 Choeriius 40
Antimenes painter J 98 Cimon 9,11,43,69-7°,73,76-9.99,217
Antiphanes 102 Cleisthenes of Athens 101
Antiphon 58, 61, 90 Cleisthenes of Sicyon 43
Arcadia 149 Cleophon 30 n. 34,45,71, 116 n.47
Archedemides 77 Cleon 6,58,67-8,71,121-2,143,157 n.53,
Archeptolemus 68 229
Archidamus 44 Colonus 36
Areopagus 44,76n.75,92,213,234 Corinth I I 1-12
Arginusae 46 n. 68 Coronea 155
Argos 11,29) 32 -3, 34 n. 50 ,3 6,44,47,55,74- Cratinus 68-9
9,110,112-13,115,149,173,217,231-2 Crete 176
Aristides 8 Creusa 22
Ariston 104-5 Critias ISS
Aristonous 167 Croesus 41
Aristophanes 12, 40, 43, 64-5, 67 n. 25, 68, Cylon 48,58
7 1 ,73,79,134,143,157 n. 53,190 Cynossema 56
Cyzicus 56 Harpalus 105 n. I 18

Hellespont 6, IS
Darius 10,12.14-16,41 Henderson, Jeffrey 65
Delium 42, 45-6, 2 I 3- 14. 216- 17 Henrichs~ Albert 188-93- 198, 209
Delos 156 HeracIes 22
Delphi 33 n. 5°,47.55,87, I 12. 116 Herodotus 2-8, lIn. 42, 15, 18-19, .p
Demades 99 heroism and heroic settings 2 r - 37
Demaratus 109 Hesychius 40
Demetrius Poliorcetes 159 Hipponicus 103-7
Demosthenes 44,86-9, 95, 99. 102, 105 n. 18, Homer 6 n. 18, 13, 16 n.69. 18-19, 22-4,
121, 124, I43-4~ 156- 8 26,59-61,72,144,147.163-4,192
Dicaeogenes 103 n.17
Dinos painter 205 Hyperbolus 68
Diogenes 195 Hypereides 105 n. 119, 157 n. 57.232
Dionysia 25,4°,65-7°,81-108,19°, et
passim ideology 10-1 I, 13-19, 23, 39, 8 1-108, 183,
distancing, see 'zooming' 214,224-35, el passim
dithyramb 106 n. 121 10 22, 34 n. 50
Dodds, E. R. 187-95, 209 Ion 22
dokimasia 89 Ion of Chios 40
Drabescus 76 n. 75 Ionia, Ionians 10
Iophon 192
Egypt 74-9,110, 112,1 IS Isaeus 103
Eleusis 46, 52-5, 58, 16 4 Ischomachus 140
Epaminondas 149 Isocrates 44, 134, 149, 155
ephebes, ephebeia 55 n. 125, 116-19, 176, Italy 63
178, 18 3,216 Ithome 77
EphiaJtes 66, 76 n. 75, 227
Epigonoi 22 James, William 209
Epilaphios, -ioi 12, 51-3, 224, 229-34 Jason 22

Erechtheum 164, 169
Eupolis 68 Lacedaemonius 77
Euripides 22 n. 4, 23, 29-33,4 1- 2 , 44-56, 59, Lamachus 73
64-5,72-3,110-19,124-5,131,135-7,
Lamont, Norman I 57
141,145-7,151,153-5,164,170-84, Lawler, L. 195
190 - 3, I 97 nn. 3 2 - 3, 208, 2 I I, 2 1 5-I 7, Leagrus group 198-9
220-1,226,229-34
leitourgiai 8 I - I 08
see also Index of Passages Cited Lemnos 112
Eurymedon 12 Lenaea 193,206-7
eUlhunai 89
Lenaean vases 195, 204-1 I
Exekias 198 Leptines 87-9
Libanius 98-9
Little-l\l\aster 198-9
Forrest, George 74 Loraux, Nicole I I, 229-34
F ran~ois vase 197, 208 Lucan 159
Frontisi-Ducroux, Fran~oise 204-1 I Lycophron 41
Frye, Northrop 144-5 Lycurgus 153
Funerals and funeral laments 5 1-3
Lydia 41
see also Epilaphios Lydus 197-8
Lysias 90-2, 232
Gorgias 122 Lysicrates 105 n. I IS
Griffith, Mark 23-5,28
Gyges 4I Macedon 41-2, 192 n. 20, 193
Macron 205, 21 I
Haemon 204 maenads, -ism 187-21 I
Halai Araphenides 168, 174-5 Marathon 9- 12, 4 I
Hall, Edith I 3 Mausolus 4I-2
~\ \edea 1 I I Q painter 194-5

;\1egacles 48~ 58
i\\egara 48,102,110 Rarian plain 53
,\\eidias 86-8
.\\elite 168 Salamis 1 -12, 43, 69, 220
;\\elos 42,72 n. 58~ 81-2, 84 Seneca 130 n. 33
:\ 1enander 64 n. 7 Shakespeare 10
,\ iessenia 77 Sicily 41-2, 63, 114, 125, 15 5~ 216
metics, meloikia I 10- I, 2 15- 16 Sicinnus I n. I, 2-3, 6, 1 I
l\\ikalson,]. D. 163-86 Sigeum 44
1\ liletus I 8- 1 9 Simonides 12 n. 48, 13, 43
.\\iltiades I I Skira 65
J\loschion 41 Socrates 140
lviounichia 17 I, 183 Solon 40 ,143,153, ISS
1\1ytilene 44, 73, 121 -2, 134 Sophilus 196
Sophocles 18,22 n. 4, 34-6, 40 ,4 2, 44, 56-
:\"eoptolemus (actor) 44 61,64,69,110-15,117-19,125-7,131,
Nicias 68, 105 n. I IS, 15 6, 229 137-40 ,145 n. 8,149, 152-4,158, 164,
N icochares 93 n. 5 I 21 7- 18,224,227-9
~icosthenes 198-9 see also Index of Passages Cited
\"icoxenus 198-9 Sparta, Spartans II) 30 n. 35, 40, 44-5, 5 I
!\ ietzsche 209 n. 89,56,72,74,76-8, 109, 112,2 15-16
Stenia 65
Stoa Poikile I 1 - 12
Oechalia I 12 Strymon 6
Oenoe I I suppliancy and supplications 45-56,74-9
Susa 112
Pagondas 46 Syracuse I 53
Panathenaea 98 n. 7 2 , 169, 173
Panathenaea, Lesser 90, 167-8 Tacitus 155
paratragedy 23 Taureas 8 I -3, 85
Parthenon 164, 169 Taurica 112, I 14, 171-5
Peiraeus 57 Thaletus 40
Peisander 58 Thargelia 90
Pericleidas 76-8, 2 I 7 Theagenes 103
Pericles 6, 9- 10,68-70, 99, 149, 15 6, 229- Thebes 22, 27, 34 n. 50, 35-6, 45-56, 1 12-
30, 23 2 , 233-4 n. 83 13,118-19,125-30,149-50,215-16,
Persia 1-19,41-2,45-6,56,69-71,114,149, 218,220,228-9,233
21 5,229 Themistocles 3 n. 12, 5, 8-11,41, 43, 69, 73-
Philip II of lviacedon 157 4, 101 n. 92, I 16, 2 I 7
Phrynichus 2,10 n. 40,18-19,33,40-1,52- Theocritus 199 n. 38
3, 69 n. 4 2 , 73, 79, 149,220, 228 Theodectas 40- 1
Plataea 10, 12 n. 48, 13 Theophrastus 101
Plato 10,43,122-3,140-1,144,148 theorikon 66-7, 70-I, 97-100, 222 n. 33
Plutarch 3,43, 69, 99, 110, 116, 154 Theramenes 58
Plynteria 56 Theseus I I, 22
Podlecki, Antony I, 9- 12 Thespiae 3 n. 10
Polyphrasmon 192 Thespis 40
Pratinas 40 Thrace 112-14
Proerosia 53-4 Thrasybulus 56
Prometheia 90 Thrasyllus 105 n. 1 15
Prometheus 22, 36 Thucydides 6, 8, 17 n. 70, 5 I, 57, 61, 121-2,
Pronomos painter 194 124,156,159,213,225,229-3°,232,
Prot agoras 141 233-4 n. 83
Prytaneion 105 Thucydides, son of Melesias 68
Psiax 198-9 Trachis 112
Psyttaleia I n. 1, 8-9 trierarchia 89 n. 26, 90, 9 2 , 93 n. 48, 94
Troy and Trojan \X'ar 11,18,21-2,28,33 Xanthippus 69

n. 47, 44, 1 12- I 4, 149, 154-5 Xenocles 40, 19 2
Trozen 112,116-17,176-7 Xenophon 91-2, 14°,165 n. IS
Tyre 33 n. 50 Xerxes 3 n. 12,7,10,12- 1 9, 109
VersneL H. S, 189-95 Zeitlin, Froma I 13

Yirgil 225 zooming and distancing 12, 17 1-85, 2 I 7- 18,
Voltaire 115 228-9,233-4

Christopher Pelling (Ed.) - Greek Tragedy and The Historian - Oxford University Press, USA (1997)

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Greek Tragedy and

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

Jacket illustration: actor and mask, 1832, Martin

I. Aeschylus' Persae and History

2. Constructing the Heroic

3. Tragic Filters for History: Euripides' Supplices and Sophocles'

4. The Theatre Audience, the Demos, and the Suppliants of Aeschylus

5. Leading th,; Tragic Khoros: Tragic Prestige in the Democratic City

6. The Place and Status of Foreigners in Athenian Tragedy

7. Between P<lblic and Private: Tragedy and Athenian Experience of

8. Gods Cruel and Kind: Tragic and Civic Theology

9. Tragedy and Religion: Constructs and Readings

10. The Ecstasy and the Tragedy: Varieties of Religious Experience in

1. ABV 76.1, Florence 4209 (detail). Courtesy of the Soprintendenza Arche-

of Fine Arts, Boston

ABL C. H. Haspels, Allie Black-Figure Lekythoi (Paris, 1936).

Lectures at Harvard, and these are to be published as Tragedy and Athenian

THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS

Phrynichus' Sack of Miletus and Phoenissae,4 but they do demonstrate that

Kat 7TQ.VVVXOL Sij Stli:7TAOOV Ka8iuTaaav

dAA" ES JLaX7Jv OPJ.LWV'TES" EuynJXCP 8pcioEL.

€7TUtaaV aA/-L7Jv !3puxLOV €.K K€A€vfLa'TO~.

¢uytj 8~ dKOOP.WS 1Taoa vauS' TJP€OO€TO,

And flight broke out, all order lost; and all

image: 21 the Persians' natural ploy is to link two continents, and to do so by

certainly something that we can trace in Plato (Laws 4. 706b-c)-though there

a recommendation to bellicosity.53 Ifwe find a contemporary resonance of this

IDEOLOGY AND NATIONAL STEREOTYPES

(199 0 ); Cartledge (I990a) and (1993), esp. ch. 3.

The historian looking for contemporary evidence of fifth-century Athenian

1.From Homeric poetry onwards it had been well understood by audiences

13 Griffith (1995) I 14. 14 Ibid. I J 4.

20 Cf. Segal (1994) on the status of Iole in Trach.

24 Cf. Vernant (19 82),68.

IMAGES OF THE COMMUNITY

(iv) the divine ambience in which the events take place;

435-8, 889-94; and an unscrupulous speaker suborned by Tyndareos to argue

nized as Cleophon. Cf. West (1987) on 772.

also compelling political argument: Tyndareos' points about the importance of

r This, it could be argued, is what is suggested by a closely contemporary play, Sophocles'

Oedipus at Colonus is so obviously different from Orestes that a detailed com-

Without wishing to end in mystification I think it is worth stressing a point

58 Cf. Seaford (I994), ch. 4.

So Zuntz 1 trenchantly on the question of tragedy's reference to con-

Athens in Persae. 10 [plut.] De 1nus. 42 ('ex Aristoxeno?, TrGF 4 F 9).

fourth century) \\lrate a tragedy on Mausolus,14 Moschion (died C.300) one on

.. ~ Cf. Zeitlin (1981); Bowie (I993a), 205-37 .

49 145 1b27-32 (trans. Hubbard). so Leocrates 100 f.

ences to a few episodes of the Peloponnesian War. Demagogues are detected

57 C( Willink (1986), 231; Vidal-Naquet (below), Ch. 6 n. 47.

the different aspects of recent events in different ways by comparison and

fifth century and said to have been at Delium (Diad. 12.70).

68 C( Diod. 13. 10 1. 1 and PI. Menex. 243C6-7 on Arginusae.

7S Thuc. 4.97. 3 (trans. Warner, as generally).

(1143-51) look forward to Athenian vengeance on Thebes.

'TVyxtivw 8' inrip x8ovos

120 Ibid. 47 f.; cf. Richardson (1974), 165-7.

Philoctetes was produced at the Great Dionysia in two years after

ov8€v TOVTWV 8avp.aoTov €!-,oi.

TOV JLiJ 1TpOTEPOV 'TOVS- E1Ti Tpoig.

The prophecy of Helenus, recounted by the Emporus, also points to divine

O~ 07) rei T' ciAA' aVTO[Ul 1Tavr' '-(}E01TtUEV

Kat Ta7Ti Tpo[q. 7TEPYUf..L' W~ OU fLYJ 1TOTE