Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy - Eds. Renaud Gagné & Marianne Govers Hopman

CHO RAL MEDIAT IONS
I N G R E E K T R AG E DY
This volume explores how the choruses of Greek tragedy creatively

combined media and discourses to generate their own specific forms
of meaning. The contributors analyse choruses as fictional, religious
and civic performers; as combinations of words, music and dance; and
as objects of reflection in themselves, in relation and in contrast to
the choruses of comedy and melic poetry. Drawing on earlier analyses
of the social context of Greek drama, the non-textual dimensions
of tragedy, and the relations between dramatic and melic choruses,
the chapters explore the uses of various analytic tools in allowing us
better to capture the specificities of the tragic chorus. Special attention
is given to the physicality of choral dancing, musical interactions
between choruses and actors, the trajectories of reception, and the
treatment of time and space in the odes.
r e n a u d g a g n é is University Lecturer in Classics at the University

of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College, where he specialises
in early Greek poetry and religion. He is the co-editor of Sacrifices
humains: Perspectives croisées et représentations (Liège, 2013) and the
author of Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013).
m a r i a n n e g o v e r s h o p m a n is Associate Professor of Classics and
Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where she
specialises in ancient Greek and Latin poetry and mythology. She is
the author of the book, Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox (Cambridge,
2012) as well as articles on Homer, Greek tragedy and Greek hymns.
C HORAL MEDIAT IONS
IN GREEK TRAGEDY
edited by
RENAUD GAGN É AND
MARIANNE GOVERS HOPMAN
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Choral mediations in Greek tragedy / edited by Renaud Gagné and Marianne Govers Hopman.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-03328-3 (hardback)
1. Drama – Chorus (Greek drama) 2. Greek drama (Tragedy) – History and criticism.
I. Gagné, Renaud, 1976– II. Hopman, Marianne Govers, 1974–
pa3136.c484 2013
882 .0109 – dc23 2012045649
isbn 978-1-107-03328-3 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
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websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of figures page vii

List of contributors viii
1 Introduction: the chorus in the middle 1

Renaud Gagné and Marianne Govers Hopman
2 Choral polyphony and the ritual functions of tragic songs 35
Claude Calame
3 Chorus, conflict, and closure in Aeschylus’ Persians 58
Marianne Govers Hopman
4 Choral intertemporality in the Oresteia 78
Jonas Grethlein
5 Choreography: the lyric voice of Sophoclean tragedy 100
Simon Goldhill
6 Conflicting identities in the Euripidean chorus 130
Laura Swift
7 The choral plot of Euripides’ Helen 155
Sheila Murnaghan
8 Transcultural chorality: Iphigenia in Tauris and Athenian
imperial economics in a polytheistic world 178
Barbara Kowalzig
9 Maenadism as self-referential chorality in Euripides’ Bacchae 211
Anton Bierl
10 The Delian Maidens and their relevance to choral mimesis in
classical drama 227
Gregory Nagy
v
vi Contents
11 Choral persuasions in Plato’s Laws 257
Lucia Prauscello
12 The comic chorus and the demagogue 278
Jeffrey Henderson
13 Dancing letters: the Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias 297
Renaud Gagné
14 Choral dialectics: Hölderlin and Hegel 317
Joshua Billings
15 Enter and exit the chorus: dance in Britain 1880–1914 339
Fiona Macintosh
16 “The thorniest problem and the greatest opportunity”:
directors on directing the Greek chorus 352
Peter Meineck
Bibliography 384
Index 424
Figures
1 The Aegean and the Black Sea page 184

2a and b Chersonesos on the Crimea. Remains of the Roman and
Byzantine City. The Greek city was on the other side of the
peninsula. Photographs by Angelos Chaniotis (2010) 192
3 The ancient theatre at Chersonesos. Photograph by Angelos
Chaniotis (2010) 193
4 The temple of Artemis Tauropolos at Nas, on the island of
Ikaria. Photograph by Karin Kowalzig (2004) 195
5 Regional maritime network of cults of Artemis linked to the
legend of Iphigenia (Ikaria, Patmos, Leros, Samos) 196
6 Cults of Artemis in Attica, the Euboian and the Saronic Gulf, in
the majority linked to the legend of Iphigenia 206
7 View of the tip of Euboia, where Karystos was located, from the
shrine of Artemis Tauropolos at Halai Araphenides. Montage by
Barbara Kowalzig 207
vii
Contributors
anton bierl is Professor of Greek Philology at the University of Basel.

joshua billings is Assistant Professor of Classics and Humanities at Yale
University.
claude calame is Directeur d’Études at the EHESS and a senior member
of the Centre AnHiMA in Paris.
renaud gagné is University Lecturer in Classics at the University of
Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College.
simon goldhill is Professor in Greek Literature and Culture at the
University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College.
jonas grethlein is Professor in Greek Literature at the Ruprecht-Karls-
Universität Heidelberg.
jeffrey henderson is the William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Greek
Language and Literature at Boston University and the General Editor
of the Loeb Classical Library.
marianne govers hopman is Assistant Professor of Classics and
Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.
barbara kowalzig is Associate Professor of Classics at New York
University.
fiona macintosh is University Lecturer in the Reception of Greek and
Roman Literature at the Ioannou Centre, a Supernumerary Fellow at
St Hilda’s College and the Director of the Archive of Performances of
Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford.
peter meineck is Clinical Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient
Studies at New York University.
viii
List of contributors ix
sheila murnaghan is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania.
gregory nagy is the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature
and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and the
Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington.
lucia prauscello is Senior University Lecturer in Classics at the
University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall.
laura swift is Lecturer in Classics at the Open University.
chapter 1
Introduction
The chorus in the middle
Renaud Gagné and Marianne Govers Hopman
There is something distinctive about choral mimesis in Greek tragedy. The

tragic chorus is never just a group of old men or captive women, never just
a ring of ships or dolphins or the circle of stars of its imagery, or masked
citizens dancing in the theater – never just one chorus. It will rarely be
entirely circumscribed by its fictional character, narrative, or performance
at any one moment. In a genre defined by impersonation, it can push
the referential limits of embodiment and enactment beyond any strict
equivalence. Its boundaries, like its movement, are always shifting. If the
central characters are simultaneously here and there, on stage and in the
play, the chorus can simultaneously be here, there, and elsewhere, now and
then, this and that, meld one into the other, and pass freely between these
different levels through the semantics of word, sound, and movement. Its
well-known ability to reference itself and its own dance in performance,
or to ‘project’ itself on other, distant choruses, is part of a much wider
pattern of mimetic transfer set in motion by the choral song.1 Without
ever breaking the dramatic illusion, the chorus can radically shift the focus
from one level of reference to another and create greater depth through a
superimposition of semantic layers.
The choral odes of tragedy deal in dense interweavings of correspon-
dences and highly integrated parallel meanings. Most choral songs paint
an intricate tableau of multiple embedded messages; their verses typically
follow many different paths at the same time and the richness of their
This volume grew out of the conference Choral Mediations in Greek Drama, which took place at
Northwestern University on October 30–31, 2009. The event could not have been organised without
the generous support of the Loeb Classical Library Foundation and the Alice Kaplan Institute for
the Humanities. We would like to warmly thank Albert Henrichs and Froma Zeitlin, our valiant
copyeditor Michael Carroll, as well as Michael Sharp, Elizabeth Hanlon, and the two anonymous
referees of Cambridge University Press, for their most helpful comments and criticisms. We are also
grateful to the Cambridge Faculty of Classics and the Northwestern Department of Classics for their
support in publishing this book.
1 For ‘choral self-referentiality’ and ‘choral projection’ in drama, see Henrichs 1994/5 and below p. 25.
1
2 Renaud Gagné and Marianne Govers Hopman
allusions quickly leads the spectator to a state of cognitive overload. They
revel in abrupt transitions and oblique side glances, the lure of roads
not taken and the overabundance of possible interpretations. Dionysos
is their true ‘nominal audience’. Behind every simple level of meaning
hides another one, and every level comments on the next. The refer-
ential complexity of the average ode is staggering, the stimulus over-
whelming; it communicates information at a greater entropy rate than
any other part of drama. Although every chorus ultimately shapes a spe-
cific voice for itself, no two spectators will hear or see the exact same
ode, and no audience member will be able to seize all the possible layers
of thought and imagery, the nuances of connotation, the implications,
the indices and citations, and the contradictions of the temporary world
opened by the song in the rapid cut and thrust of sound and move-
ment, the total spectacle of theatrical performance. But most will notice
the remarkable multiplicity of dimensions at play in the choral song, the
exuberant richness of correspondences between them, something of the
common direction they take, bridges with the other odes of the play, con-
tinuities and discontinuities, and echoes that span over the rest of the
drama. The choral song sets up a vast range of correspondences between
realities.
Choral poetry carves its own unique register of representation in tragedy.
It does not just adapt the forms and grammar of older and contemporary
choral lyric, or reflect ritual, or echo performance, and it obviously does not
just act or comment on characters ‘in character’. The referential shifts of the
chorus are not necessarily a reflection of ritual, and they often enough have
nothing to do with Dionysos, at least on a surface level; the ability of the
ode to link different realities cannot be reduced to its Dionysiac or cultic
dimensions, as important as they might be, or to the putative legacy of its
origins. Whatever its deep cause, the special communicative power of the
tragic ode is grounded in its ability to freely link and combine, to serve as a
direct intermediary between various levels of reference, and incorporate all
strands into the rest of the choral narrative and the whole of the play. This
is what we would like to call ‘choral mediation’. Choral mediation is an
umbrella term encompassing all the mimetic transfers that allow different
levels of reference to interact and complete each other. The dramatic chorus
can mediate between actors and audience. It can mediate between words,
rhythm, music, and dance. It can mediate between genres. It can mediate
between authorities. It can mediate between the conventions of drama and
ritual. It can mediate between the many spaces and temporalities of story,
tradition, and performance. All these levels of reference are intertwined
with one another, and their integration into one poem makes for language
Introduction: the chorus in the middle 3
of remarkable density. The extent of this figurative flexibility is a distinctive
characteristic of the chorus in drama.
Euripides, Electra 699–746

It seems appropriate to begin with a concrete example. Let us take the
second stasimon of Euripides’ Electra to illustrate the process of choral
mediation.2
taln3 Ëp¼ †matrov ìArge©wn†
½rwn pot klhdÜn4 700
n polia±si mnei jmaiv
eÉarm»stoiv n kalmoiv
Pna moÓsan ¡dÅqroon
pnontì, grän tam©an,
crusan rna kall©pokon 705
poreÓsai. petr©noiv dì pi-
stv krux «ace± bqroivá
ìAgorn gorn, Mukh-
na±oi, ste©cete makar©wn
½y»menoi turnnwn 710
jsmata †de©mata.5
coroª dì† ìAtreidn grairon okouv.
qumlai dì p©tnanto cruslatoi,
selage±to dì nì stu
pÓr pibÛmion ìArge©wná 715
lwt¼v d jq»ggon keldei
klliston, Mousn qerpwn,
molpaª dì hÎxontì rataª6
crusav rn¼v †p©logoi†
Qustouá kruj©aiv gr eÉ- 720
na±v pe©sav locon j©lan
ìAtrwv, trav kkom©-
2 The text reproduced here is that of Diggle’s OCT with some modifications. Although it is obviously
corrupt at places, the basic meaning of all lines is relatively secure; see the recent discussion of the
main textual problems in Willink 2005.
3 For taln instead of talv, see Denniston 1939: 137–38; Willink 2005: 12.
4 The (debatable) fact that klhdÜn and jmh are ‘virtually synonymous and interchangeable’ is not a
compelling reason to follow Willink’s intervention in the text (2005: 13). The transmitted meaning
is indeed intelligible as it stands.
5 Although the metre is problematic in this line and the next, it seems preferable to keep the transmitted
de©mata instead of the emendations de©gmata or dein, and coroª instead of coro±<sin> or the
more radical kämoi; see Denniston 1939: 138–9; Cropp 1988: 150; Willink 2005: 14–15.
6 Although the p©logoi of the next line is certainly corrupt, the transmitted text of that line is clear
enough without the ‘rival songs’ suggested by Murray’s terai (adopted by Kovacs); cf. Cropp 1988:
150–1; Willink 2005: 16.
zei pr¼v dÛmataá ne»menov dì
e«v g»rouv ute±
tn ker»essan cein 725
cruse»mallon kat däma po©mnan.
t»te d t»te <tv> jaen-
nv strwn metbasì ¾doÆv
ZeÆv kaª jggov el©ou
leuk»n te pr»swpon oÓv, 730
t dì spera nätì laÅnei
qerm jlogª qeopÅr,
nejlai dì nudroi pr¼v rkton,
xhra© tì ìAmmwn©dev drai
jq©nousì peir»drosoi, 735
kall©stwn Àmbrwn Di»qen stere±sai.
lgetai <tde>, tn d p©-
stin smikrn parì moigì cei,
stryai qermn lion
cruswp¼n dran llxan- 740
ta dustuc© brote©
qnatv neken d©kav.
joberoª d broto±si mÓqoi
krdov pr¼v qeän qerape©an.
æn oÉ mnasqe±sa p»sin 745
kte©neiv, kleinän suggenteirì deljän.
Eur. El. 699–746
Once on a time a tender lamb taken from its mother
in the Argive mountains
(so runs the tale in our age-old legends)
did Pan, warder of the fields,
breathing sweet-voiced music
on well-joined reeds,
bring forth, a lamb with lovely fleece of gold.
And standing on a platform
of stone a herald shouted,
‘to assembly, to assembly,
men of Mycenae,
to see the august portent
of your blessed rulers!’
And choruses hailed the house of the Atridae.
The altars7 of wrought gold were strewn,
and in Argos fire gleamed
7 It is difficult to see how qumlai can be read as ‘temples’ (so Kovacs) rather than ‘altars’; see Denniston
1939: 139; Cropp 1988: 150; Willink 2005: 16.
on many an altar.
The pipe, servant of the Muses,
gave forth its fair melody.
And lovely were the songs that swelled in praise
of the golden lamb because of the words of
Thyestes: for with illicit love
he won over the dear wife
of Atreus and removed
this portent to his own house, and then coming
into the assembly he cried out
that he had in his house
the horned lamb with fleece of gold.
Then, then it was that Zeus changed the bright courses of the stars,
the light of the sun
and the pale visage of the dawn
and made it march to the West’s expanse
with its divine and burning heat.
The clouds heavy with rain went toward the Bear,
and the dwelling place of Ammon wasted away
dry and bereft of water,
robbed of the lovely rain that falls from Zeus.
That is the story men tell, but the credit
it receives from me is but slight,
that the gold-visaged sun should turn,
altering its torrid station
to cause mortals grief
for the punishment of their wrongdoing.
But tales fearful for mortals are a benefit
for the worship of the gods,
the gods you forgot, kinswoman of glorious brothers,
when you murdered your husband. (trans. Kovacs, modified)
On one level, the poem is fully integrated to the narrative progression of the
play. As Orestes sets out to kill Aegisthus and Electra prepares the trap for
her mother, the chorus sings of the mythical background that prepared the
present calamity in the previous generation. The group of young Argive girls
presents a distinctive perspective on the events. It condemns Clytemnestra
and shows a direct engagement on the side of the two siblings. Its tone and
motivation are perfectly adapted to its fictional identity. The chorus, here
as elsewhere, participates in the action of the drama and functions, up to
a certain point, as a character in the play.
Up to a certain point, then. For the limit of the analogy between chorus
and character is of course very quickly reached. Beyond such superficial
correspondence of action, no member of the audience would ever confuse
the choral ensemble and the cast of characters.8 Visually, the chorus dom-
inates the tragic spectacle, with its fifteen members forming a persistent
background for the evolution of the three actors. Able to speak in unison,
in sequence, or in discordant tones, it embodies the voice of a group, a
collective, in contrast to the emphatically individual voice of the characters.
The presence of the group on stage when all the characters have left evolves
in a different space than the rest of the play, one no longer entirely bound
to the dramatic fiction. There is no deixis of immediate location in the
choral ode, the chorus doesn’t mention the fictional space of the action,
and its words at first are seemingly not addressed to any internal audience
within the play. Yet the chorus is right there in the space of performance.
As it sings of other times and places, it forfeits all reference to its immediate
surroundings, as if it were no longer contained by any one location.
The choral ode is entirely danced, a choreography that further separates
the group from the characters, the immediate narrative sequence from the
dramatic space. Its words are accompanied by the music of the aulos, and
the aulētēs stands in the orchestra, in plain sight of the audience, dressed
in bright, colourful robes that make him stand out from the chorus – the
‘unsung hero of the genre’, in the words of Peter Wilson.9 It is a song that
the music and the dance modulate. Its lyric metre, melody, and rhythm
completely distinguish it from the regular iambic speech of the characters.
The Doricising dialect of the verses also contrasts with the purely Attic
language of the trimetres. There is a deep formal difference between the
choral ode and the character speeches that frame it. The ode weaves its
words in a complex web of song, music, and dance. Word echoes song and
step. In contrast to the naked simplicity of the characters’ acted speech, its
aesthetics are based on a multiplicity of correspondences between media –
or intermediality, a distinctive form of choral mediation.10
The semantics of the ode follows a similar principle of multiple refer-
ences. The song’s expression of space, for instance, simultaneously points in
different directions. The ode relates the tale of the golden lamb given to the
Atreids a generation ago. In its narrative of the event, it describes a move-
ment from the mountains of Argos, where the beast is given by Pan, to the
heart of the city. It is on the ‘platform’ (bqra) that the herald proclaims
the presence of the golden lamb, conveying the entire city to witness it in
8 See Baur 1997. 9 See Wilson 2005: 186.

10 The use of the term ‘intermediality’ in this volume follows the definition of Wolf 2005. It is strictly
limited to the dialogues between media – what Wolf calls ‘semiotic complexes’ – set in motion by
choral odes. The intermediality of the chorus, in this perspective, is a type of choral mediation.
the agora.11 The open, public space of the agora is followed by a reference
to the altars of the city, gleaming with gold for the celebration of the event
as the city rejoices. The golden lamb is a phasma (711), a ‘vision’ of kingship,
or rather tyrannies, to come.12 The gold of the sacrificial animal is echoed
in the gold of the altars, and the vision of the divine gift paraded for all
to see.
But what does it all mean? The public spectacle of the phasma is inter-
preted in the light of the songs that are sung at the altars throughout the
city, and these songs present the lamb as a sign of Thyestes’ rule. These
songs of joy are utterly wrong. For the animal has been stolen, the ode tells
us, in secret. Thyestes has seduced the wife of Atreus kruj©aiv eÉna±v and
brought the golden animal in his own house. Going back to the agora, he
proclaims that the lamb is in his house (723–6). That däma is obviously
distinct from the oikos mentioned earlier as the object of public praise and
celebration performed by people in the agora. ìAtreidn is not an inaccu-
racy, an attention slip from the poet, as commentators puzzled with the
reference to the sons of Atreus at this moment in the poem have struggled
to explain, but a link to the palace of Atreus as the seat of a different
line, opposed to the line of Thyestes. The poem articulates a clear tension
between oikos and agora, and between the houses of Atreus and Thyestes.
A first movement brings the lamb from the mountain to the city. A
god, Pan, leads the animal from the wilds, and a herald introduces it to
the agora. The great rejoicing of this spectacle is presented in terms of
altars bedecked with gold throughout the city – the gift is to serve as an
affirmation of power and an occasion for communication with the gods.
The result is a disaster. The hidden seduction that took place within the
oikos has corrupted the gift of the gods. Possession of the beast has passed
from one house to another because of the adultery of a man and a woman.
The secret deception of what took place behind closed doors completely
denatures the meaning of the spectacle presented for all to see in the agora,
on the altars, in song. The agora is inside the city, but outside the house.
This is the pivotal space in which the contest for power is played out for
all to see. But the determining event takes place behind closed doors. Beast
and adultery are intrinsically linked in that tale. The entry of the animal
from the savage outside inside the civilised space of the city is directly
paralleled in the intrusion of the closed space of the oikos on the open
11 See Roisman and Luschnig 2011: 183–4.
12 On the golden lamb in the play, see Rosivach 1978. The second stasimon is no ‘escape ode’, pace
Csapo 2009: 98–9. The first strophe begins with the separation of the tender lamb from its mother
and it continues with misunderstanding and terror. The ode is ominous from the first to the last.
space of the agora. The outcome is a public lie. The songs of the civic
choruses sing a premature, misdirected joy. The adultery of Thyestes with
the wife of his brother is in fact an affront against the communal bonds
that hold the world together. The hidden crime of the household will have
cosmic dimensions. What started out as a gift from the gods will lead to
divine punishment.
Zeus reacts immediately (t»te d t»te . . . ) to Thyestes’ proclamation
on the agora by changing the very course of the universe. The direction of
the stars, the winds, and the sun is reversed.13 What used to go east now
goes west, what was south now is north, what was humid now becomes
dry, the sun now rises in the east. This state is a calamity, an enduring
sanction for the infortune of all mankind. The transgression of one man in
the hidden space of a house has consequences for the whole of the cosmos
and all that live in it. The fundamental categories set in place by the golden
lamb have been overthrown by one crime.
In fewer than fifty lines, then, the second stasimon of the Electra is able
to bring the audience from the mountains of Argos to the agora, from
the recesses of the household to the movement of the stars and the four
corners of the world. The ode contains no reference to the immediate
surroundings of the action in the play. Rather, it relates a narrative set
elsewhere, and quickly brings the tale from place to place in an abrupt
succession of locations. Contrary to the song of the first stasimon (452–3),
the story is not subordinated to any perspective; it can evolve anywhere,
and transport the audience with it.
A striking feature of the ode’s expression of space is the chorus’ ability to
ground all of these locations in the here and now of performance. When it
sings of Pan blowing sweet music in his harmonious pipes, a direct link is
established between the sound of the poetic reeds and the sound of the aulos
in the orchestra. The celebrations that sweep through the city following
the introduction of the golden lamb are also accompanied by the sound
of the reed: ‘the lwt»v flute, servant of the Muses, was singing its most
beautiful song’. As the scene changes from the wild mountains of Pan to
the public space of the city, the wind instrument continues to be heard,
and both reeds of song are embodied by the aulos of performance. The
lwt»v of city celebrations accompanies the songs of joy of the Argives at
the news of the prodigy. These songs are referred to as molpa©, the specific
13 For the early traditions of the feud between Atreus and Thyestes, see West 1987: 254–5; Cropp 1988:
151; Gantz 1993: 545–50.
dance and song combination of choral performance.14 The ode emphasises
that these molpa© are indeed sung by choruses. The rejoicing in the city,
furthermore, takes place around the golden altars ‘spread out’ for the event,
and these altars are described as qumlai.15 Qumlh is a remarkable word
for the occasion, as its main association is with the theatrical space of
the orchestra, most probably with the altar that stood right in the middle
of it.16 The choral dance of drama, in particular, is often described as a
movement around the altar, with strophe turning one way, antistrophe
turning the other, and epode sung without movement.17 Again, the space
of the song finds a direct correspondence in the space of performance.
The words coro© and qumlai are placed at the end and the beginning of
two strophes, right when the molp of the chorus changes direction. As
the ode relates the image of choruses singing and dancing their molpa©
at the sound of the flute around the qumlh, the sound and movement
on stage function as an embodiment for the tale. The dominant usage
of the imperfect in these lines allows for a closer identification between
the unfolding narrative and its enactment by the chorus. As the fictional
location of the dramatic space disappears from view, the ode establishes a
strong connection between the presence of the chorus in the orchestra and
the distant events it depicts.
As the story moves from place to place, the ode marks a certain conti-
nuity. The gold of the animal is reflected in the gold of the altar, reflected
in turn in the gleam of the fires that shine on the bwmo© of the city, and
the gleam of the stars and the sun that shine in the sky.18 The sound of the
rustic flute of Pan echoes the sound of the flutes that rhythm the sacrificial
celebrations in the city, and the chorus of civic festivities is followed by
the chorus of the stars. As the ode sings of the civic choruses in the first
antistrophe, its circular dance turns in one direction around the altar.19 As
it sings of the new ‘roads’ of the stars in the second strophe, it reverses that
14 The effect of the musical references in the text would have been particularly striking if the ode is
indeed a distinctive example of the New Music style, as Csapo 2009 argues. The contrast between
the emphatically modern sound of the aulos in the orchestra, the rustic flutes of Pan, and the ancient
sounds of the aulos in mythical Mycenae would make for an interesting effect.
15 Attempts to identify the specific type of qumlai evoked in the image (e.g. Denniston 1939: 139) as
portable altars of a certain sort impose a precision that the text does not demand; cf. Willink 2005:
16. The basic image of the line is that of altars bedecked in gold throughout the city.
16 See still Gow 1912: 233–7; Park Poe 1989.
17 See Färber 1936: 14–18; D’Alfonso 1994: 20; Csapo 2008: 280–1.
18 crusan 705; cruslatoi 713; selage±to 714; crusav 719; cruse»mallon 726; jggov 729;
cruswp¼n 740.
19 For the possibility of circular choral dancing in tragedy and comedy, see Ferri 1932/3; Davidson
1986; Csapo 2008: 282–4; Meineck in this volume: n. 12.
direction. The change is emphatically marked by the reduplicated t»te
at the beginning of the strophe (726). The song tells of the reversal of
direction imposed by Zeus on the sun and the stars. While they previously
went one way, they now go the other way. That change of direction is
formally mirrored by the change of direction of the choral dance, and the
location of the story, again, embodied in the space of performance. The
ability of the chorus to freely project location outside the space of the drama
and ground it here and now by recurrent reference to its own movement
and the space of the theater is one of its most distinctive characteristics.
The chorus constantly moves between levels of reference. It can evolve in
different spaces simultaneously.
It also has the ability to juxtapose different temporalities. The tale it
tells is set in the past, removed in time from the moment of the dramatic
action. It is not now within the play. The narrative follows a sequence,
with the different stages of the story clearly demarcated. The entire tale
of the ode, more remarkably, is framed as a rumour of the past, a distant
riddle.20 The story of the golden lamb is something that ‘remains’ (mnei)
in ‘grey-haired legends’, says the beginning of the song. If it is old from the
perspective of the Argive chorus, it is truly ancient from the perspective
of the Athenian chorus. The persistence and stability of this hoary legend
contrasts with the movement of the hoary Pan and the hoary beast and the
energetic dance of the chorus. The last antistrophe of the song questions
the veracity of the tale it has just related, the stars’ change of course. As the
chorus reverses direction once again at the beginning of a new stanza, it
brings attention to the illusion of tradition and its function. The reversal
of direction of the strophe echoes the stryai of the sun.
The tale whose truth is denied is told anonymously, without any agent:
lgetai (737). It offers only little credence to the chorus, a p©stiv smikr.
The singular parì moige contrasts the voice of the individual chorus
with the nameless tradition. The plural broto±si follows in the gnomic
statement of the next sentence, expanding the significance of the chorus’
statement to all mortals. Fearful stories, the joberoª mÓqoi (743), are a
profit for the service of the gods.21 They are old, they have no witnesses,
no p©stiv. These myths are not true. But they are useful. Their narrative
20 See Moreau 1991 on the rich meaning of klhdÛn as an enigmatic code.

21 Cf. the de©mata of line 711. It is interesting in that regard to note that there is not even the hint of a
mention of the unholy meal of Thyestes in the ode, surely one of the most striking elements of the
tradition, and the most frightful. It simply does not belong to the perspective of the chorus and its
focus on adultery; see Roisman and Luschnig 2011: 181.
of punishment serves the purpose of divinity. The universe has been turned
upside down for a crime. Zeus has inflicted a disaster on all mortals
(brote©) because of a mortal fault (qnatv). That is the warning that
Clytemnestra should have remembered. In not heeding these mythoi, in
not heeding the gods, in killing her husband, Clytemnestra has committed
an affront against the gods, even though she is the sister of the Dioscuri
(745–6).
The second antistrophe ends with a direct address to Clytemnestra.
The entire tale is presented as a warning she should have heeded, and an
illustration of the paradigmatic moral she has broken. What stands out of
this final address is the fact that Clytemnestra is nowhere near the action at
this point, and that the song is framed by episodes that focus all attention
on Aegisthus, not Clytemnestra.22 Orestes is sent off to murder Aegisthus
at the end of the episode that precedes the ode, and the episode that follows
relates the killing in detail. The entire song is about the story of Atreus and
Thyestes, the uncle and the father of Aegisthus, whose past actions have
nothing to do with Clytemnestra per se. The address to Clytemnestra stands
out; it gives an unexpected light to the text. One of the things that the
chorus does by bringing attention to the agency of Clytemnestra, rather
than Aegisthus, is to assert the gendered nature of its voice. It is a group
of young Argive girls that sings and dances, and their concern with the
actions of a married woman takes precedence over all the other aspects
of the story. The song is built on a contrast between the hidden crime
of the house and the public spectacle of its consequences. By pointing so
emphatically to Clytemnestra at the end of the ode, it highlights adultery
as the true object of its execration. The address to Clytemnestra leads us to
return to the earlier verses of the ode and recall the hidden beds of adultery,
the anonymous ‘dear wife’ (locon j©lan 721) of Atreus, who has been
‘convinced’ (pe©sav) by Thyestes.23 It is, in the end, that passive crime of
seduction that is the cause for the cosmic upheaval of the story, just as
Clytemnestra’s seduction is the cause for the murder of Agamemnon.
By channelling the meaning of the tale on Clytemnestra, the chorus
of young Argive girls is pointing back in time to earlier moments in the
play, namely the first stasimon, which also ends with a direct address to
Clytemnestra. After a reference to the ships of the Greek army sailing to
Troy with Achilles and Agamemnon and a rich choral ekphrasis of Achilles’
first shield, the ode abruptly turns to an accusation:
22 See Papadimitropoulos 2008.

23 For the emphasis placed on Thyestes by the enjambment, see Cropp 1988: 151.
toiändì nakta dorip»nwn
kanen ndrän, Tundar©,
s lcea, kak»jron k»ra.
toigr so© potì oÉran©dai
pmyousin qantou d©kan.
tì ti j»nion Ëp¼ dran
Àyomai a³ma cuqn sidr.
Eur. El. 479–86
The lord of warriors like these,
Tyndarid, girl of evil thoughts,
your adultery has slain.
For this the gods will send upon you
the judgment of death.
One day, one day beneath your neck
I shall see blood spilled upon the ground by the sword.
(trans. Kovacs)
The ambiguity of Tundar© invites a fleeting reference to Helen, but the

passage is clearly addressed to Clytemnestra.24 The martial glory of
the expedition, the life promise of divine-born Achilles, the strength of
the supreme commander Agamemnon, have all been rent asunder by the
power of a soiled bed. The lcea of the adulteress literally kill. Answering
the image of the female monsters vanquished by males that are depicted
on the shield (Gorgon, Sphinx, Chimaera), a woman has destroyed the
might of men.25 It is remarkable in this light to notice that in the midst
(n . . . ms) of the female monsters on the shield are depicted the circle of
the sun (kÅklov l©oio) and a chorus of stars (strwn . . . a«qrioi coro©)
at the beginning of the second antistrophe.26 The association between the
course of the astral bodies and the primordial danger of females that will
come back to the fore in the second stasimon is powerfully prepared by
this choral imagery in the words and movement of the first stasimon.27
Just as in the second stasimon, Clytemnestra, the Tyndaris, is defined by
her original kinship ties – that is, not by her marriage(s).28 More strikingly,
she is called a kora by the chorus of young girls (481), as if she were one of
their coevals. The mother of Electra is a monstrous model of anti-marriage
24 See O’Brien 1964: 16–17; for the idea that the Tundar© of line 480 is in fact Helen, see Jouanna
1998; for ‘ambiguity as part of the design’, see Csapo 2009: 105.
25 See Morwood 1981; Cropp 1988: 129; Morin 2004; Csapo 2009: 100.
26 See Csapo 2008: 275–80. The chorus of stars follows the image of a chorus of Nereids and dolphins
earlier in the ode (432–7).
27 On the complementary relationship between the ‘dithyrambic’ first stasimon and the second stasi-
mon, see Walsh 1977; Csapo 2003; 2008: 275–80; 2009.
28 See Burkert 1990: 67.
for the Argive girls. It was in fact in order to announce the festival of Hera
to Electra that the chorus first appears in the play, a festival celebrated by
choruses of nÅmfai parqenika© with dance and sacrifice for the wife of
Zeus, and patron goddess of the city.29 Electra had refused to join in the
dance and lead the chorus (178: oÉdì ¬stsa coroÆv) in the lyric exchange
that serves as a parodos, just as she will still refuse to dance after the murder
of Aegisthus (859–79).30 The lawful, ordered world of ritual marriage and
sacrifice represented by the festival of Hera is denied to Electra. A kora, she
has remained a virgin after her forced union with the peasant.31 She cannot
belong to the group of her maiden friends. Just like her mother, Electra
is both married and not married, and her anomalous status highlighted
by contrast with the maiden chorus. Her situation reflects the profound
upheaval brought upon the world by the adultery of that house.
Yet when the chorus channels its attention on Clytemnestra at the end
of the second stasimon, it is not only pointing back to the earlier parts
of the play, of course, but also preparing the way for later developments.
It allows the play to keep a larger perspective open and a clear focus on
Clytemnestra, even as the whole movement of the action is then pointing
specifically to Aegisthus. The reference to her noble siblings, in particular,
prefigures the epiphany of the two brothers ex machina at the end of the
play (1238–1356).32 The Dioscuri appear after the murder of their sister and
impose a settlement on all the characters. They distribute lots and trace the
future of the action beyond the end of the play. It is no coincidence that the
marriage of Electra and Pylades plays a very prominent role in the resolution
of the gods in the final scene, as the consecration of the apparent return
to order that follows the breakdown of war and adultery. While it began
with Electra’s enduring virginity and her refusal to celebrate the nuptial
dances of Hera’s festival, and Clytemnestra was lured to her death at the
false news that she had borne a child, the play ends with the announcement
of her gmov and the unveiling of Zeus’s plan. There was no place in the
sacred festivals and the choruses for Electra, and she had been promised as
a wife to Castor (310–13). Now, with the announcement of her marriage,
the Dioscuri fulfil the order of Zeus and the world is set aright. The two
brothers answer for the actions of their two sisters, and their protection
of purity and piety contrasts with the actions of Atreus and Thyestes and
the despair of Orestes and Electra. It is this fundamental role played by
29 See the fundamental contribution of Zeitlin 1970 on the question.
30 See Henrichs 1994/5: 86–90.
31 See the discussion of Electra’s ‘social displacement’ in Papadimitropoulos 2008.
32 Compare the opposing views of Marshall 1999/2000 and Gärtner 2005, with bibliography.
the two gods that the chorus prepares for the audience by contrasting
Clytemnestra with her brothers in line 746. By naming Clytemnestra as
kleinän suggenteirì deljän, the young Argive maidens set the stage
for the intervention of the two brother gods. Just as the direct address to
the mother of Electra links the ode to earlier scenes and the beginning of
the play, it also points ahead to later developments. Placed right in the
middle of the tragedy, the second stasimon simultaneously looks back and
forward to earlier and later narrative time.
Its immediate environment in the play, however, is even more promi-
nently reflected. At a moment when the dramatic action revolves around
the imminent murder of Aegisthus, the ode narrates the tale of Atreus’
and Thyestes’ animosity, and sets up the generational background that
explains the hatred that pits Aegisthus against Agamemnon, and Orestes
and Electra against Aegisthus. The seduction of Atreus’ wife is presented as
an antecedent to the seduction of Clytemnestra, and the events of today as
a reenactment of the events of the past.33 The ode creates a direct resonance
between the generations. The theme of the sacrifice is a case in point.34 The
initial song of the chorus had already presented the festival of Hera as an
occasion for qus©a (172), and it is on the occasion of the sacrifice of a bull
that Aegisthus’ murder is plotted right before the stasimon. The sacrificial
imagery of the ode, with its qumlai and bwmo© bedecked in gold, and the
golden lamb brought between mountain, house, and agora, directly echoes
this theme, and the association between sacrifice, marriage, and order
deepened and strengthened. The adultery of Thyestes has thoroughly cor-
rupted the sacrifices of the premature, ominous celebrations depicted by
the chorus in the ode. The disruption of the privileged moment of contact
with the gods is presented as a continuation with the past in the song,
something that later scenes will recurrently reflect. The famous messenger
speech that follows the stasimon, in particular, will relate the sacrificial
slaying of Aegisthus at length, a murder on the altar that will meticulously
be described as the horrible travesty of a proper sacrifice (810–43).35 The
collapse of boundaries expressed in the story of the golden lamb provides
a background and a commentary for all the sacrifices of the play, and an
immediate preparation for the murder of Thyestes’ son.
Another degree of temporal reference staged by the ode is suggested by
the framing of the tale. The chorus presents the song as an old fmh, a
mÓqov handed down from the past to inspire fear.36 The young girls deny
33 See Mulryne 1977; Eisner 1979; Goff 1999. 34 Zeitlin 1970; Mirto 1980.
35 See Henrichs 2000: 187–90.
36 Denniston 1939: 142; Stinton 1976: 79–81; Cropp 1988: 152; Roisman and Luschnig 2011: 185.
its truth, saying it has no p©stiv. The tale of the previous generation, the
temporal background of the play’s action, is depicted as a useful fiction.
The supernatural elements of the tale rob it of all credence. This recalls
the reaction of Electra to the suggestions of the old man, the idea that she
could recognise her brother by his lock of hair, the imprint of his foot, or
a piece of cloth that she wove for him when he was a child. It is, of course,
the tradition embodied by the Choephoroi of Aeschylus that is explicitly
rejected by Electra.37 It is not plausible to imagine that the hair of brother
and sister can be identical, that imprints can be left on the rock and a
brother’s foot shape point to that of his sister, or that the cape of a child
still be worn by a man. Just before the second stasimon, then, Electra is
shown as a critic of credulity, and her refusal to believe is directly continued
by the similar sentiments expressed by the chorus in the ode. A clear link
is made between her deduction talents and the doubts of the chorus. A
fact that stands out in this is that Electra’s doubts were in the end not
founded. Tradition, and the interpretation of the old man, were actually
correct – those are the tokens of Orestes. Could it be that the chorus is also
expressing doubts that are not founded? That its dismissal of the p©stiv
of the old mÓqoi is as mistaken as Electra’s reasoning? The apparition of
the Dioscuri ex machina, and their revelation that what happened has
indeed been caused by the events of the past (1305–7), points back to this
issue at the end of the play. The last scene returns to the question, then,
and it shows that the crimes of the earlier generation are directly tied to
punishment and the present situation. The doubt of the chorus, like that
of Electra, was not founded in the end. The incredulity of the young Argive
girls about the past is corrected by the direct intervention of the gods and
their intimations of the future. It sets the stage for a resolution.
But nothing is as it seems in the world of the play. The understanding of
mortals is based on illusion. Helen, Clytemnestra’s sister, was in fact never
at Troy (1278–83).38 The accusations of the chorus against her (213–14) are
groundless, just as the accusations of the entire tradition of choral invective
against Helen it echoes were, such as the famous passage of Agamemnon
681–98. The songs of joy of the old Argive choruses celebrated a lie. What
do the songs of the Athenian chorus reflect? If the chorus’ doubt about
the veracity of the old mÓqoi tells us something about the group of young
girls as characters in the play, it also indicates something about the nature
of mÓqov itself. As the chorus sings of the lack of p©stiv of the old mÓqoi,
37 See e.g. Jouanna 1997; cf. Halporn 1983. For echoes of the Odyssey, see Dingel 1969.
38 See Papadimitropoulos 2008.
of the great age of the grey fmai that have come down from the past, it
is commenting on its own song, and on the very nature of dramatic truth.
The old fmai are implicitly associated with the sound of the flute that is
depicted in the story and enacted here and now in performance.39 The ode
opens a level of meaning that functions beyond the simple declaration of
the chorus as a character and addresses the audience directly. The statement
of the ode on the credence of the old rumours is a statement about its own
status as a receptacle of tradition and about the mythical material of tragedy
in general.40 In this, again, the chorus deploys a rich web of intertwined,
distinctive meanings, simultaneously juxtaposing and combining different
layers of reference in the same message.
The crime that takes place in the hidden recesses of the oikos determines
the speech of the herald in the agora and the celebrations of the people
at the public altars. It affects the very nature of the universe. As the stars
change direction, the choruses of the story turn and counter-turn over the
joyful songs of a lie. Their praises of the house of Atreus become molpa©
for Thyestes when the criminal adulterer reveals in the agora that he now
has the lamb. The first strophe gives honour to the oikos of the Atreids, while
the first antistrophe revolves around the songs that glorify Thyestes and
the claims of his däma. There is a chiastic structure agora-chorus-chorus-
agora in the episode, where the first pair expresses a close link between the
proclamation of the herald in the agora and the choral celebrations that
follow, and the second pair expresses a close link between the ‘songs of the
lamb’ and the proclamations of Thyestes in the agora. The movement of
the chorus from one side to another, mirrored in the changed movement
of the stars, perfectly captures the reversal of choral praise in the narrative,
and the crime it embodies for the public stage. While the old choruses of
the story were wrong, the chorus of the play sings an old tale it does not
believe. Its song tells a story that is not true. Just as the error of the old
choruses serves as a warning for the dangers of deception and premature
celebration, then, the false song of the ode serves a purpose and exemplifies
the role of tradition and narrative in instilling the fear of the gods, and the
thin authority on which it rests.
The terrifying lesson of crime and punishment is addressed directly to
Clytemnestra by the Argive chorus within the play. But it is also meant
as a statement for the audience outside the play. The Athenian chorus
is staging a story about the nature of civic power at that point in the
39 Lines 701–2: n polia±si mnei jmaiv / eÉarm»stoiv n kalmoiv.
40 Do the ‘songs of the lamb’, the molpa© . . . rn¼v (718–19), become a reflection of the ‘goat-song’,
tragd©a itself? For rn¼v being governed by molpa©, see Willink 2005: 16.
drama. The lamb, a gift from the gods, functions as the channel of political
authority in the city. Its role is defined both by who possesses it in the
oikos, and by who proclaims it in the agora. It is a phasma, a sign or portent
‘of the blessed rulers’ (makar©wn . . . turnnwn 709–10).41 The phasma is
meant to be seen (½y»menoi 710) by the body politic, the assembled citizens
(Mukhna±oi) gathered in the agora. Yet it is also hidden in the oikos. The
public spectacle of speech that takes place in the agora, the declamation
(«ace± 707) of the herald or the proclamation of Thyestes (ute± 724),
proceeds from the custody of the lamb by a house. Power in the city
derives from the possession of the divine sign and its manipulation. The
public proclamation and the acclamation of the people are a direct result
of adultery in the hidden bed. Power in the city is based on a crime in the
home, the corruption of marriage, the rending of the kinship group, and
the strife of brother against brother. If the phasma can be manipulated to
turn in one direction and then the next, it immediately provokes a response
from the gods. The clear alteration of the universe performed in the sky for
all to see contrasts with the manipulation of the phasma in the agora. Yet
that is precisely the part of the story that the chorus refuses to believe. The
narrative illusion of this chorus, in the end, is as tenuous as the old choruses
of the story were wrong – a vertiginous thought. Until the intervention of
the Dioscuri, the power struggle that is ripping apart household and city
unfolds in the darkness of human doubt and limitations and the pist©a
of myth. Words come and go in the house, in the agora, on stage. It is
impossible to know where true justice lies. The agora of the old Argive
kingdom is as distant as it is near for the audience. The exercise of power
and the teaching of tradition lock house, agora and heaven in a constant
conflict of clashing perspectives. If the message fulfils a topical role within
the drama, it also addresses the Athenian citizen here and now.
The second stasimon of Euripides’ Electra is a poem of forty-seven lines.
Fully incorporated in the immediate course of the drama and integrated
to the larger body of the text, it says something about a specific moment
in the play as well as about its entire plot. It simultaneously evolves in the
past of the dramatic time, in the more distant time of an earlier generation,
and in the contemporary time of performance. It enmeshes the sound
of the aulos with the direction of the dance step and the meaning of its
words. It embodies the space of the dramatic location together with other
spaces within and outside the city, the movement of the stars in the sky
41 Cf. the conflicting usages of tyrannos at lines 93 and 877, and the similarly ironical usage of makar
and makarios in lines 994 and 1006.
and the four corners of the world, and the tangible, physical presence of
the orchestra. It reflects itself and other songs. It negotiates the conflicting
meanings of kinship, power, and punishment for the characters and the
audience; it opens a perspective of interpretation that can be applied within
the drama to enrich character and focalise a certain position in contrast
with others, or rather serve as a bridge for the audience outside looking
into the play. The chorus combines all of these levels of reference in the
same breath. Every level reflects every other level in one coherent whole,
allowing the chorus to establish multiple correspondences between these
different layers of meaning. Placed at the centre of a complex network of
parallel messages, it merges them all into one poem. This is what we mean
by the umbrella term ‘choral mediations’.
Tragedy as a choral genre

The approach to dramatic choruses exemplified above draws on several
related assumptions about the nature and function of Athenian drama that
have progressively emerged over the past thirty years or so. Perhaps at the
most fundamental level is the now well established but once radical idea
that the written words transmitted under the names of Athenian dramatists
should not only be approached as autonomous texts, as formalist critics
advocated, but that they take on a rich significance when viewed as traces of
singular events, which it is the critic’s role to recreate in their richest possible
complexity. A dramatic event happens in a certain space, in the presence of
a given audience, and in a distinctive social, political, and cultural context.
In addition to the words spoken by the performers, it involves a wide range
of stimuli, visual and auditory alike, which fundamentally inform the
spectators’ experience. The scholarly recreation of a dramatic event is thus
a resolutely historicist project requiring a double focus on socio-political
context and staging.42 In addition, such an approach raises questions about
the pragmatics of the performance – its cognitive and emotional effects
upon the audience – which studies more strictly focused on authors and
their intentions tend to leave aside. As such, the appreciation of plays as
events is directly related to the application of the wide-ranging notion of
performance to drama studies.43
In recent years, our understanding of classical Athenian drama has
been reinvigorated by studies that explored non-verbal aspects of dramatic
42 Goldhill 1999: 15–16.

43 On modern performance theory in relation to classical Athens, see Goldhill 1999; Bierl 2009 [2001]:
1–82.
communication such as space, sound, music, and dance;44 the inclusion
of the theatrical contests among ritual celebrations for the god Dionysos
involving a specific sequence of events before and after the plays;45 the
complex relation between Athenian drama and democracy, with its dis-
tinctive agenda of balancing the claims of individual aristocrats and the
demands of the dēmos;46 and the composition of the Athenian audience,
among other aspects.47 For Anglophone audiences especially, the turn to
an emphatically contextualised approach to Athenian drama may be epit-
omised by the essays grouped in the collective volume Nothing to Do with
Dionysos?, significantly subtitled Athenian Drama and Its Social Context.48
Among other important contributions, contextualised studies of Athe-
nian drama have led to a radical reevaluation of the plays as largely choral
events, thus putting the chorus (back) in the interpretive centre of the
dramatic texts. That insight marks a sharp departure from a long tradition
of scholarship informed by Aristotle’s Poetics and shaped by the idea that
Athenian drama reached its full level when it broke away from its choral
origins (Poet. 1449a10–15); that tragedy is the ‘representation of an action’
whose most important parts are plot and character, while lyric poetry and
spectacle come last (Poet. 1450a–b); that the chorus should be regarded as
one of the actors (Poet. 1456a25); and that, starting with Agathon, choral
odes were treated as mb»lima, ‘interludes’ detached from the plot (Poet.
1456a30).49 By contrast, the contemporary emphasis of scholarship in look-
ing at tragedy, comedy, and satyr-play as choral genres is in great part the
product of a new interest in chorality, largely inaugurated by the 1977 pub-
lication of Claude Calame’s Les Choeurs de jeunes filles en Grèce archaı̈que,
and which has since spread from the archaic choruses of Sparta and Lesbos
to Pindar and Bacchylides’ odes, paeans, dithyrambs, and dirges, and the
more elusive choral performances of fifth-century Athens.50
The idea that the chorus stood at the conceptual centre of Athenian
drama relies on evidence of various kinds, including first the nature of
44 See for instance Taplin 1977, Edmunds 1996, Wiles 1997, and Rehm 2002 on the spatiality of
Athenian drama; Ley 2007 on dance; Wilson 2005 on music.
45 Pickard-Cambridge 1968: 57–70; Goldhill 1990.
46 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988 [1972]; Griffith 1995. For a different view, which downplays the
democratic setting of the plays, see Rhodes 2003.
47 On the thorny issue of the presence of women at the Athenian dramatic festivals, see Henderson
1991; Goldhill 1994; Hughes 2008.
48 Winkler and Zeitlin 1990.
49 See Scattolin 2011. On the idea that the confusions in the modern debate about the tragic chorus
partly at least are a legacy of Aristotle, see Halliwell 1998 [1986]: 251–2.
50 See e.g. Zimmermann 1992 on the dithyramb; Rutherford 2001 on paeans; Kowalzig 2007b, etc.
That is of course not to say that there was no interest in dramatic choruses before the performative
turn of the 1990s (see e.g. Kaimio 1970, Burton 1980), but that these earlier works study the odes
from a literary viewpoint, independently from other choral genres.
the theatrical space in Athens. According to the ninth-century ce lexicon
of Photios of Constantinople, before the city performances of dithyramb
and tragedies were moved to the precinct of Dionysos, they took place in
a part of the agora called the orchēstra.51 The term, which literally means
‘dancing space’, indicates that accommodating a chorus was the defining
criterion for the area.52 Furthermore, the archaeological evidence suggests
that after the translation to the south slope of the Acropolis, the theatre
of Dionysos continued to be centred on the orchēstra, now complemented
with a banked theatron and a wooden stage-building or skēnē.53 No physical
remains of a separate acting stage for the actors have been found, and most
scholars now agree that the once popular idea (mainly derived from Pollux
4.123) of a wooden stage rising above the orchestra level in front of the skēnē
applies to Neronian rather than classical theatre. In fifth-century Athens,
actors evolved in the same performing space as the dancing chorus. Drama
physically happened as an extension of a choral dance.
Approaches sensitive to the staging of Athenian drama have further
emphasised the sheer theatrical power of the chorus performance, with
its distinctive intermedial combination of music, singing, and dancing.
The specifics of choral dancing are irretrievably lost to us. Whether the
chorus danced in a circular or rectilinear formation, or perhaps more
probably a fluid combination of both, is still fiercely debated.54 ‘Hand
gestures’ (ceironom©a) and ‘poses’ (scmata) seem to have played an
important role, suggesting that choral dancing included a wide variety of
figures and possibly mimicked the actions evoked in the lyrics, but the
details of those movements are unknown.55 Yet the comparative evidence
offered by some contemporary productions of Greek drama as well as other
performance traditions gives us at least an idea of the radical impact that
a collective of choreutai singing and dancing together may have had upon
their audiences.56
Further evidence for the importance of choruses in Athenian drama
comes from the economics of the contests and especially the practice of
chorēgia, the institution whereby prominent members of the community
51 Photius s.v. ½rcstra.

52 Pickard-Cambridge 1988: 37–8; Camp 1992 46; Rehm 2002: 43.
53 Scullion 1994; Rehm 2002: 38; Ley 2007: 8.
54 See Lech 2009 for a recent treatment and Foley 2003: 9–11 for a good summary of the evidence on
both sides. For the hypothesis that the rectangular formation may have been emphasised in the late
fifth and fourth century, see Wiles 1997: 96 and 2000: 134.
55 See Lawler 1964 and Naerebout 1997 on choral dancing. A good survey of modern approaches to
Greek dancing can be found in Ley 2003.
56 Macintosh 1997.
were appointed by the leading civic officer, the Eponymous Archon, to
fund a dramatic chorus.57 A poet who was hoping to compete ‘asked for a
chorus’ (cor¼n a«te±n, cf. Ar. Knights 513) from the city represented by the
Archon, who ‘gave it’ (cor¼n did»nai, cf. Arist. Poet. 1449b; Kratinos fr. 17
K–A; Pl. Rep. 383c). Thus a playwright’s opportunity to put on a play was
synonymous with and depended on his ability to secure a chorus from the
polis. Furthermore, the language of comedy suggests that the chorus was
conceptually at the centre of the victory, even though it is unclear whether
the judges inscribed the poet’s or the chorēgos’ name on their tablets: the
chorus of Aristophanes’ Clouds enumerates the benefits that the panel of
judges will receive ‘if they help this choros, as is just’ (1115–16).58 Unlike actor-
driven contemporary shows, the logistics of Athenian drama emphasised
the chorus’ role in a given production and largely credited it for its eventual
success.
Genetic arguments about the origins of Athenian drama occupy a dis-
tinctive position in the scholarly reevaluation of tragedy and comedy as
choral genres. Aristotle famously says in the Poetics that tragedy originated
from the leaders of the dithyramb and comedy from the leaders of the
satyr-play; that Aeschylus first increased the number of actors from one
to two, reduced the choral parts, and gave speech the leading role; and
that the third actor came with Sophocles (Arist. Poet. 1449a10–15). In the
Aristotelian context, these statements support an argument that deflates
rather than emphasises the importance of the dramatic chorus. Operat-
ing on a teleological rather than genetic logic, Aristotle identifies as the
‘proper nature’ (fÅsin) of tragedy the state that it reached after a number
of developments rather than its original features. Yet Aristotle still tells
us a story according to which tragedy and comedy originated in choral
dances to which actors were gradually added. His statement is corrob-
orated by the extant scripts: most of Aeschylus’ plays seem to require
only two actors, but his last extant production, the Oresteia, requires
three. In addition, the chorus drives the plot of several of our earliest
extant plays, including Aeschylus’ Persians, Supplices, and Choephoroi, but
seems to play a lesser role in the action of most of Sophocles’ tragedies.
Such observations form the basis of an evolutionary view of the develop-
ment of Athenian drama through the gradual amplification of a choral
performance.59
The hypothesis that tragedy and comedy originated from choral perfor-
mances offers additional support for, but is not necessary to the argument
57 Wilson 2000. 58 Wilson 2000: 102–3. 59 See for instance Ley 2007: 7.
emphasising the centrality of choruses in Athenian drama. Origins do not
necessarily explain or foreshadow later developments. Furthermore, as crit-
ics have pointed out, the historicity of Aristotle’s statement is questionable.
Aristotle’s ideas about the development of poetic genres are based on theo-
retical considerations rather than empirical information.60 Yet read against
the grain, as it were, the Poetics may tell us something about fourth-century
popular ideas about drama. The idea of choral origins that has been so influ-
ential is mentioned only in passing. It departs from, rather than reinforces,
Aristotle’s notions that tragedy is the ‘representation of an action’, whose
most important parts are plot and character (Poet. 1450a–b), and that
Homer, understood as the author of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Mar-
gites, revealed the possibility of both tragedy and comedy (Poet. 1448b35).
Overall, Aristotle minimises the role of choruses in his description of the
most dignified type of tragedy (Poet. 1449a10–25). The brief mention of
the choral origins of tragedy and comedy thus occupies a complex position
in Aristotle’s argument. It does not support his demonstration and thus
may rather be a concession to conceptions commonly held among Aristo-
tle’s readers, thus suggesting how much attention fourth-century audiences
paid to the choral component of Athenian drama.
That last point is supported by the structure of Plato’s Laws, which
discusses whether dramatic poets and performances should be allowed in
the Platonic city in the context of a larger section about the role of core©a
(817e). A small dose of comedy and other forms of dancing representing
the ignoble movements of ugly bodies (814e) is allowed on the ground that
it is impossible to learn the serious without some awareness of the comic,
but with the provision that those dances be performed by slaves and foreign
hires and not paid much attention (816d–e). The presence of tragic poets is
addressed last, a position that perhaps reflects the anxiety of legislating on
an immensely popular cultural form (817a–d). Significantly, the Athenian
speaker appropriates rather than dismisses tragic poetry by metaphorically
redefining the citizens as tragic poets, whose city is a mimesis of the best life.
Thus tragic poets are viewed as the citizens’ rivals, whose presence needs to
be authorised by magistrates upon careful comparison of the formers’ and
the latters’ songs (dv). The section on chorality ends on provisions for
comic and tragic poets to be granted a chorus. Even in the fourth century
bce, Plato still conceptualised tragedy and comedy as fundamentally choral
events.
60 Halliwell 1987: 78–84. See also Scullion 2002 about the possibility that Aristotle’s reconstruction
of the origins of tragedy and comedy in relation to the more ostensibly Dionysiac dithyramb and
satyr-play is an aetiology for their performance during the festival of the wine god.
A multi-layered medium
Scholars of Greek drama have long been aware of the fact that the odes
of Athenian tragedy formally resemble the songs of melic poetry.61 Yet the
reappreciation of drama as choral performances parallel to the melic events
not only in form but also in social context, has opened up new avenues in
our understanding of Athenian drama. Our (admittedly complex and frag-
mentary) extant sources suggest that the choruses performing for Dionysos
in Athens functionally took over at least some of the social, religious, and
civic roles fulfilled by melic choruses in other city-states.62 While dithyra-
mbic and dramatic choruses performed regularly and on a huge scale at
the City Dionysia and the Lenaia, the Athenian record of non-Dionysiac
forms of choral activity is sparse. Evidence for male choruses include a
few epinician poems by Pindar and Bacchylides; testimonia about paeans
composed by Phrynichus (Ath. 6.250b = TrGF i.3) and Sophocles (Suda
815 = iv.401.24 Adler); suggestions that men and boys performed paeans at
the Thargelia;63 and evidence that Athenian choruses performed paeans on
pilgrimages to Panhellenic sanctuaries (Pind. Paian 5 S–M). Performances
of female choruses in Athenian public life are even more poorly attested.
The festival for Artemis at Brauron may have been a medium for female
choral training, for instance. We know that the ‘bears’ (rktoi) took part
in various activities including dance, which makes it reasonable to suppose
that their service to Artemis would have culminated in some kind of pub-
lic performance.64 Even so, non-Dionysiac choruses seem to have played
a much lesser role in Athens than in other classical city-states. From an
evolutionary viewpoint, the dramatic and dithyrambic choruses of Athens
take over the performance position that melic choruses occupy in other
cultural contexts.
The idea that Athenian audiences experienced the dramatic contests as
choral performances has played an important role in recent discussions
of tragic and comic choruses. Among other consequences, it raises the
possibility that some features of melic choruses that have recently come to
light in the scholarship may be applicable (but to what extent?) to dramatic
choruses as well. Starting with Calame’s Choeurs de jeunes filles, a number
of studies informed by anthropology and pragmatic linguistics have shown
that in archaic and classical Greece, song-and-dance ensembles of maidens,
men, or women were fundamentally social and civic events integral to an
61 See e.g. Parry 1978. 62 Nagy 1994/5b; Calame 1999; Kowalzig 2004.
63 Rutherford 2001: 33; Parker 2005: 182. 64 Parker 2005: 183, 243, and 230–1.
elaborated system of self-presentation and communication centred on the
polis. Work on the phenomenon of deixis, whereby a song refers to its
extra-linguistic circumstances of performance, has shown that the songs
of Alcman, Pindar, and other lyric poets point at a wide range of social
institutions and practices.65 The linguistic signs take on their full meaning
in relation to other, non-linguistic signs that notably include religious and
civic rituals.
Many if not most melic performances were offerings to the gods: the
hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, and sacred chants of Pindar, Bacchylides, and
Simonides are cultic songs that often include aetiological myths about
their cultic context of performance.66 Victory odes arguably belong to the
category of religious songs since they were often staged in the context of
public festivals and shared many formal features with the songs addressed
solely to the gods.67 Like the divine choruses led by Apollo on Olympos in
the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (186–206), human choruses notionally include
the gods among their addressees. Their song unfolds both in the specific
time of the performance and in the cyclical temporality of ritual.
In addition, melic choruses are closely connected to the community for
and on the behalf of which they perform. According to Plato, choruses
represent the lawgiver’s strategy for impressing on all the idea that just
behavior is equated with happiness (Leg. 664c–d ). This idea of choruses
as both reflection and model for the community has been thoroughly
explored by Eva Stehle, who showed its relevance to songs as wide-ranging
as Alcman’s Louvre partheneion (1 PMGF = 3 C), a Rhodian swallow-
song (Athenaios 8.360c–d = PMG 848), and Pindar’s paean 9 for the
Thebans (52k S–M).68 A melic chorus is not just the medium for an
artistic performance; it also, and crucially, contributes to a religious ritual
and stands as a representative of the civic community.
Hence the analogy between dramatic and non-dramatic choruses has
led to a more acute sensibility for the multiple layers of meaning at work
in the choruses of tragedy, both within and without the fiction. First, it
supported a new scholarly emphasis on the ritual context of the dramatic
contests that put the old question of the relation between drama and
ritual, formally explored by the Cambridge Ritualists at the turn of the
twentieth century, on an entirely different level of understanding. Just as
other choral performances were offerings to the gods, the tragic and comic
contests were performed in the context of festivals dedicated to the god
65 See for instance the collection of articles in Felson 2004.

66 Kowalzig 2007b: 1–55 and passim. 67 Kowalzig 2007b: 3, with bibliography. 68 Stehle 1997.
Dionysos. The performance of the masked choreutai singing and dancing
in the orchestra may thus signify both within the dramatic fiction, and
in relation to the festival of the wine god. This idea that the context of
the festival of Dionysos potentially infuses the choral utterances with a
ritual significance is a premise of Albert Henrichs’ influential argument
that all instances when the chorus refers to its own dancing in extant
tragedy may be interpreted in terms of its extra-dramatic identity as a
performer of the ritual dance.69 In a subsequent article, Henrichs further
developed the influential concept of ‘choral projection’, referring to the
chorus’ ability to depict other distant dances and dancers as an extension
of its own performance in the here and now. For Henrichs, the ritual
dimension of the theatrical experience, both diachronically, as a memory
of its origins in choral cult celebration, and synchronically, as a direct
dialogue with contemporary ritual practices and imagination, lies behind
the complementary capacity of the dramatic chorus for projection and
self-reflexivity, and the elusive figure of Dionysos looms large as a common
denominator of this heightened play with ritual and illusion. This research
has opened the way for a much greater appreciation of the specificity of
tragic choral mimesis. It has taken the chorus out of the strict confines
of the dramatic illusion, placed it between projection and performance,
and shown how the chorus of drama is able to evolve in different levels of
reference simultaneously.
Chorus and audience

If the chorus simultaneously partakes in a ritual for Dionysos and performs
in a work of fiction, it also stands as a collective impersonated by Athenian
citizens and thus entertains a special relation with the Athenian audience.
In an article originally published in 1969 and reprinted in the 1972 Mythe
et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, co-authored with Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jean-
Pierre Vernant suggested that the chorus stands as a representative of the
city on stage. Working with an idea of tragedy as the staging of the tensions
and limitations of the democratic ideal, Vernant argued that the contrast
between the collective chorus and the individual actors reflects on demo-
cratic anxieties about the respective roles of the group and the individual.70
His highly influential model was later taken up notably by Oddone Longo,
who speaks of the chorus as a representative for the collective citizen body,
69 Henrichs 1994/5. Other important works that rely on the double identity, ritual and fictional, of
dramatic choruses include Calame 1999 and Bierl 2009 [2001].
70 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1972: 27.
promoting through its unity the community cohesion constantly at risk in
the highly differentiated and stratified society of fifth-century Athens.71
The notion of a special connection between chorus and polis is further
supported by the fact that the choruses of Athenian drama were made
of non-professional citizens. Even though the exact numbers are unknown
and varied over the course of the fifth century, the Dionysiac festivals clearly
involved massive numbers of choreutai. At the Great Dionysia, each of the
city’s ten tribes produced a chorus of fifty boys and a chorus of fifty men
for the dithyrambic contest;72 the choreutai involved in the tragic contests
probably varied between thirty-six to forty-five (depending on whether
the chorus included twelve or fifteen performers); and the comic contests
introduced in 486 bce seem to have involved five (and then three) choruses
of twenty-four.73 It is thus likely that a large proportion of the citizens sitting
among the audience of a play would themselves have previously been part
of a Dionysiac (dithyrambic, if not dramatic) chorus, an experience that
opens up the possibility of a privileged tie between chorus and audience.
The chorus is not only a group of performers, but also, and crucially, a
group of Athenian citizens.74
Yet for all its appeal, the appreciation of dramatic choruses as repre-
sentatives of the polis tells only part of the story. Among other problems,
it glosses over the fact that unlike the choreutai singing dithyrambs or
other types of melic songs, tragic choreutai are masked, and that the mask
introduces a fundamental distance between stage and audience.75 Not sur-
prisingly, then, what came to be called the Vernant model (a term perhaps
more suited to the simplified versions offered by followers than to Vernant’s
original formulation) was later challenged by John Gould and others who,
looking at the chorus from the perspective of the represented action rather
than the external context of performance, stressed that the chorus speaks in
non-Attic dialect and often impersonates marginal figures such as women
or slaves.76 Subsequently, Gould insisted that the dramatic chorus be anal-
ysed primarily in terms of its dramatic identity. For Gould the choreutai
introduce into the fiction a particular voice, that of collective wisdom, that
contextualises the tragic action performed by the actors.
71 Longo 1990: 16–19.
72 IG II2 2318.320–4; Hesperia 37 (1968) no. 51, frr. a–b, col. 2, 1–24. Cf. Csapo and Slater 1994: 115–17;
Swift 2010: 36–9.
73 Pickard-Cambridge 1968: 234–6.
74 For the controversial idea that performing in a chorus was part of the military training and social
integration that define ephebeia, see Winkler 1990. On the chorus’ authority as an object of tension
and negotiation among the individual actors, see Hawthorne 2009.
75 Calame 2005a: 118–31. 76 Gould 2001 [1996]; Foley 2003.
At the core of the Vernant vs Gould debate are fundamental questions
about the authority of the choral voice and the possibility that the Athenian
audience identified with the collective on stage. Yet as Simon Goldhill has
stressed, one position does not need to be emphasised to the expense of
the other.77 Rather, the chorus of a given play may have the potential to
shift in register between its privileged function of choros as a ritual and
civic institution, and the specific character that the group embodies in the
play. It may precisely be that capacity to shift that defines the specificity
of the choral voice. Accordingly, Donald Mastronarde has offered a multi-
layered model of the various factors that favour or impede the authority of
the choral voice. Mastronarde argued for a diachronic evolution whereby
Euripides goes beyond Aeschylus and Sophocles in weakening factors that
favor audience identification and exploiting opposing factors, but also
showed how the chorus of a single Euripidean play (Euripides’ Andromache)
can display a mixture of involvement and aloofness, authority and error.78
On the basis of a comparison between the roles of male and female choruses
in the extant tragedies, Helene Foley has further argued that although old
men are often more firmly linked with political concerns, and female
choruses with domestic or religious ones, gender does not clearly correlate
with inactivity or lack of assertiveness, and that the chorus’ fictional identity
may fade progressively or intermittently in the course of a single drama.79
Thus scholars working concomitantly with different models and
methodologies have concurred to stress the instability of the choral part.
Two concepts, ‘identity’ and ‘voice’, have mostly and sometimes inter-
changeably been used to describe that proteiform nature. From a mimetic
perspective, the chorus oscillates between two identities, an intra-dramatic
identity as a fictional group of slaves, soldiers, or captive women, and
an extra-dramatic identity as a ritual, civic, and institutionalised collec-
tive performing in the festival of Dionysos.80 From an enunciative view-
point emphasising the dramatic communication between a sender and a
receiver, the chorus combines the voices of the poet and that (or those)
of the spectators.81 According to a classification based on the functions
of language, the choral voice seamlessly fuses three functions – ritual and
performative, hermeneutic, and emotional.82 Changes in stylistic intensity
(defined as density of imagery, rhythmic play, and other creative surprises)
offer yet another ground for variation in the choral parts.83 If, as Jean-Pierre
77 Goldhill 1996. 78 Mastronarde 1998; Mastronarde 1999.
79 Foley 2003. For other studies discussing possible correlations between the fictional identity of the
chorus and its role in the action, see Dhuga 2005 and especially 2010, and Hawthorne 2009.
80 Henrichs 1994/5. 81 Calame 1999. 82 Calame 1994/5. 83 Silk 1998.
Vernant has suggested, the language of tragedy itself is notable for its poly-
semic ability to refer to several codes, religious, juridical, and political, the
chorus epitomises that polyvalence perhaps more clearly than any other
part of tragedy.84 The same choral variability that so often used to be seen
as a problematic inconsistency to be explained and justified, offers in fact
an important window into the nature and function of Athenian drama.
From Athens to the American stage

This volume represents a collective attempt to explore the multiformity
and polyvalence of tragic choruses through a wide range of perspectives and
methodological practices. The contributions refrain from offering a general
theory on the tragic chorus but rather view it as a medium whose rich
potential is handled differently from one play to another. The collection
opens with a theoretical paper by Claude Ca l a m e, ‘Choral polyphony
and the ritual functions of tragic songs’, which reflects on the various
tools and methods previously used in the scholarship to conceptualise the
variability of the choral voice. Calame revisits his own earlier distinction
between the three semantic levels (performative, hermeneutic, emotive) at
work in what he calls choral polyphony, and the distinction between the
fictional and ritual identities of the chorus; he argues that the performative
voice corresponds to the chorus’ identity as a character, the interpretive
voice to its identity as a ritual agent, and the emotive voice to its position
as an intermediary between character and audience. Taking as his main
examples the binding song of Aeschylus’ Eumenides and the final thrēnos
of Persians, Calame looks at how the chorus’ performance of ritual draws
attention to its embedded, double identity as character and institution.
Picking up on the example of Persians discussed by Calame but explor-
ing it through a different set of analytical tools, Ma r i a n n e Go v e r s
Ho p m a n argues in ‘Chorus, conflict, and closure in Aeschylus’ Persians’
that the performance of the Persian chorus challenged the conceptual
opposition between Greeks and barbarians in at least two respects. Focus-
ing first on the chorus as a narrator, she shows how its perspective on the
war markedly differs from the actors’ in its capacity to focus on a wide
variety of objects and to consider the viewpoint of various constituencies,
Athenian included. Turning to a discussion of the chorus as a character,
she suggests that it partakes in a plot culminating in a sequence of opposi-
tion to and reconciliation with the protagonist, Xerxes. Through a survey
84 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1972: 35.
of comparable sequences in Athenian tragedy and comedy, she highlights
the closural effects of Persians’ final kommos and the possibility that some
spectators may have been drawn into the lament sung by the performers.
Through a series of close readings of the Oresteia, Jo n a s Gr e t h l e i n
explores a number of tropes that interweave temporal layers in Aeschy-
lus’ choral odes. As he shows, similes, parables, and other instances of
metaphorical speech create a temporal panopticon whereby the past,
present, and future of the mythical action are integrated with each other;
maxims (gnōmai) claim to a timeless validity and thus tie events from the
vagueness of heroic times to the democratic present; mythical paradigms
evoke a mythical plu-past hermeneutically connected to the mythical past
and hence call attention to the potential relevance of the mythical past
to the present of the performance; finally, the ritual staged at the end of
Eumenides integrates the audience into the performance and blends the
internal and external communication systems. Grethlein thus concludes
that the Great Dionysia as a whole provides a time-out whereby the demo-
cratic present enters in a dialogue with mythical time.
Turning from Aeschylus to Sophocles, Si m o n Go l d h i l l argues in
‘Choreography: the lyric voice of Sophoclean tragedy’ that metre, especially
the transition and juxtaposition between lyric voices and iambic voices, evi-
dences the emotional, intellectual, and physical transitions enacted by the
chorus in the course of a single drama. Through a reconstruction of the
vocal score and soundscape of passages from Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyran-
nus, and Trachiniae, Goldhill shows how variations in the choral voice
amount to a narrative that organises the interaction between chorus and
actors: moving along constantly shifting lines, it oscillates between sym-
pathy and distance, proximity and alienation, authoritative generalisation
and character-led specificity. The chapter reacts against monolithic views
of the chorus and stresses the experimental nature of Sophocles’ handling
of it.
The next four papers highlight some aspects of Euripides’ distinctively
self-conscious use of the multi-referentiality of the chorus. In ‘Conflicting
identities in the Euripidean chorus’, La u r a Sw i f t shows how Euripides
uses the multi-dimensional identity of the chorus to promote a reflec-
tion on group identity. As she argues, the plot of the Medea depends
on the chorus’ prioritising gender over local identity so that the Theban
women remain silent while Medea destroys the royal house of Corinth, yet
double-entendres and self-contradictions in the chorus’ position encour-
age the audience to question the validity of this type of prioritisation.
Conversely, in the Ion, Euripides explores the problems that result from
the chorus’ confusion of its double identity as members of the Athenian
polis and the Erechtheid household. The chorus’ inability to differentiate
between the two underscores the troubling risk that national identity could
be used to support personal interests.
In ‘The choral plot of Euripides’ Helen’, Sh e i l a Mu r n a g h a n
explores the double status of the chorus as musical form and experience in
the Helen and other plays. Tragic plots self-consciously exploit the formal
status of actors and choruses as displaced participants in a festive choral
performance, and the experience of chorus leaders in myth provides a pat-
tern for the struggles of the tragic protagonists. Numerous plays recast the
successful ritual passage from maidenhood to marriage (facilitated in real
life by participation in a chorus) as an unsuccessful transition where the
woman is supported by a sympathetic female chorus. The Helen casts the
eponymous character as a dislocated chorus leader but envisages in choral
projections a few brighter situations when Helen hypothetically reassumes
her leading position in the choral group.
In ‘Transcultural chorality: Iphigenia in Tauris and Athenian imperial
economics in a polytheistic world’, Ba r b a r a Ko w a l zi g is interested
in Euripides’ use of the tragic chorus as a space for mediating between
the religious cultures of different Mediterranean polytheisms. Using the
Iphigenia in Tauris as a test case, she shows how the chorus functions
as a tool of religious thought for expressing the meeting of distinct cultic
traditions and their transformation into a new hybrid transcultural religious
imaginary. She explores the myriad ways through which this religious
conceptualisation of the transfer of Taurian Artemis from the Crimea to
Attica reflects the ‘transnational economic encounter’ of imperial Athens,
and discusses the special ability of the chorus to embody the cultural
exploration of identities that results from it.
As An t o n Bi e r l argues in ‘Maenadism as self-referential chorality
in Euripides’ Bacchae’, finally, the Bacchae presents a unique case where
the ritual identity of the chorus as worshippers of Dionysos at the Great
Dionysia and their fictional identity as Asian bacchants newly arrived to
Thebes virtually coincide. Euripides’ multiplication of choral references
and projections, whereby the chorus simultaneously impersonates a group
of Dionysos’ followers and Theban women who previously resisted the
god, both demonstrates and enacts the presence of the proteiform god
Dionysos. The medium of the performance coincides with its message.
Put together, these case studies suggest among other things that choral
polyvalence provides tragedy with a means to reflect upon Athenian prac-
tices and concepts. The multi-layering of the choral voice may bridge
over traditional dichotomies or conversely expose internal contradictions
within important civic concepts. Furthermore, tragic plots often put the
multi-layered identity of the chorus to various uses by casting the pro-
tagonist as a displaced chorus leader who may alternatively be separated
from or reintegrated into the choral group or even fully take on the role of
chorēgos.
The specificity of tragic choral mediation can be understood much
more sharply against the background of other non-tragic forms of choral
mediation, both diachronically and synchronically. The lyric antecedents
of the tragic chorus present us with particularly significant elements of
comparison, contrast, and insights about the genesis of tragic chorality.
The parallel, often radically different experiments of comedy with the
dramatic chorus offer indispensable points of reference for considering the
distinctive nature of the tragic experience. The great narrative shifts of
the parabasis and the generic commentaries of paratragedy stand out in
that regard. Another important point of reference is Plato’s Laws, which
contains a uniquely sustained reflection on the role of the chorus in the
city, and its use in mediating emotions and the teachings of tradition for
the population of the ‘second best city’. The only classical discussion of
any length on the function of the chorus in the polis, the ideal of the tragic
chorus, and the effect of its spectacle on the audience, it opens a fascinating
window on the question from a completely different perspective. Although
other ancient points of reference could have been considered, of course,
most notably the choruses of satyr-plays, this volume will limit itself to
looking at some particularly relevant aspects of lyric antecedents, the Laws,
and Old Comedy. Four chapters are concerned with that wider background
of choral mediation.
In ‘The Delian Maidens and their relevance to choral mimesis in classical
drama’, Gr e g o r y Na g y examines the cultural conditions that made
possible the transformation of choral lyric into the three composite genres
of Athenian drama. As Nagy argues, the fact that tragedy, comedy, and the
satyr-play combine solo performances with a wide variety of chorals songs
is a function of choral mimesis as a form of reenactment. The interaction
between the chorus of the Delian Maidens and the blind singer of the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo shows that a chorus can reenact a solo performance
and that a soloist can reenact a choral performance. Furthermore, the
mutual empathy between chorus and audience involved in the process of
choral mimesis accounts for the fact that dramatic choruses can bridge the
gap between the archetypal there-and-then of the actors and the here-and-
now of the audience.
In ‘Choral persuasions in Plato’s Laws’, a view on related questions from a
synchronic perspective, Lucia Pr a u s c e l l o looks at the civic dimension
of choral mimesis in Plato’s Laws, the earliest and most extensive discussion
of chorality from the classical period, and considers anew what it means for
Plato to describe Magnesia as a mimesis of ‘the best’, ‘most beautiful’, and
‘truest tragedy’. She discusses the roles ascribed to the rhythm and order
of choral song and dance in Plato’s city, charting the chorus’ ability to
bring together emotion, perception, and reason through ‘vocal and kinetic
activity’, and its effect, both as performance and as representation, on the
education and socialisation of the citizens – a double mediation between
individual and collective, on the one hand, and human and divine, on the
other. She further shows how the specific image of tragedy that emerges out
of Plato’s appropriation of dramatic chorality for his philosophical project
can only be understood against the wider background of civic chorality
painted by the text.
Turning to another contemporary witness, Je f f r e y He n d e r s o n
considers how the concept of mediation can be useful for comedy in
‘The comic chorus and the demagogue’. He follows distinctively comic
forms of choral mediation in some of the early plays of Aristophanes, most
notably Banqueters, Babylonians, Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps. Particular
attention is paid to the comic chorus’ ability to mention contemporary
political figures in the play, in and out of the parabasis, as well as to its
capacity for embodying affiliations and viewpoints current in the city, and
integrating these views from the world of the poet and the audience in
the fictional world of the story. Henderson shows how vast is the range of
choral identities that comedy could accommodate, and how exceptionally
flexible.
In ‘Dancing letters: the Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias’, Renaud Ga g n é
looks at the unique play of media interaction between word, movement and
image at work in a fragmentary comedy of the later fifth century. The play,
he argues, orchestrated an elaborate reflection on the nature of dramatic
sound in its relation to writing, and opened a humorous perspective on
the metrical syllabification of the choral ode – a literal deconstruction
of the dramatic text, possibly one of the most radical experiments of
paratragedy imagined in the classical period. The chapter looks at the
specific role of the chorus as an instrument of poetic retrospection in the
play, the various strategies deployed by the chorus of the parodic comedy to
represent its tragic counterpart, and the spectacular staging of intermedial
correspondences it set in motion.
Following these four essays on the ancient parallels of tragic choral medi-
ation, the last chapters of this volume are devoted to aspects of its modern
conceptualisation and experience. It goes without saying that the modern
reception of the ancient chorus is an inexhaustibly rich topic; giving it any
kind of justice would require a book-length study, and this is not the aim
of this collection. Yet, if only in order to better situate the ideas of this
collection by contrast, it seems necessary to take some space to reflect on
how choral mediation has been imagined at different moments – not in
terms of reconstructing the teleological stages of an evolution that leads
to a precise destination, but as examples of how the experimentations of
different periods with the idea of the chorus as a mediator answered the
different imperatives of their time. The three following chapters explore
facets of three particularly significant moments in this respect: German Ide-
alism, Victorian choreography, and contemporary American performance
arts.
In ‘Choral dialectics: Hölderlin and Hegel’, Jo s h u a Bi l l i n g s looks
at how German thinkers from the end of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth completely transformed the modern under-
standing of the ancient Greek chorus, laying the foundations for all further
reflection on the specificity of the chorus and its ability to mediate between
different levels of reference. After discussing the relationship of their work
to Aristotle and the influential ideas of Schiller and Schlegel, he proceeds to
investigate the choral theories of Hölderlin and Hegel as a privileged space
for the deployment of tragic dialectic, especially in their readings of the
Antigone, and how their interpretation of the chorus as an expression of the
‘collective in societal transition’ reflected, in great part, their understanding
of the French Revolution.
In ‘Enter and exit the chorus: dance in Britain 1880–1914’, Fi o n a
Ma c in t o s h looks at the profound interest in the revival of ancient Greek
dance that took hold in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century and
the beginning of the twentieth. She traces the development of the entirely
unprecedented and short-lived enthusiasm for the experience of ancient
chorality in the period, and its many correspondences with the radical
corporeality explored by theatre of the time. The chapter investigates the
moral and political dimensions of the new fascination for ancient choral
performance of those years, and the original perspectives it opened on
the tragic chorus as a three-dimensional experience. It also considers the
conditions that led to the abandonment of this dynamic view of the chorus
at the time of the First World War.
In ‘“The thorniest problem and the greatest opportunity”: directors on
directing the Greek chorus’, Peter Me i n e c k moves ahead yet one more
century and looks at the experiments of four prominent American directors
in staging the Greek chorus at the end of the twentieth and the beginning
of the twenty-first: Richard Schechner, Anne Bogart, Will Power, and Mark
Adamo, all of whom have been interviewed for the essay. In a discussion
that combines the reflections of the four creative artists on the adaptation
of the Greek material to the modern stage, and recent advances of classical
scholarship on ancient choral performance, Meineck looks at how the
chorus has been used to mediate dramatic territory and cultural lines in
the present period, and how these modern experiments can help illuminate
the ancient material.
Taken as a whole, the volume emphasises the variety of discourses and
media mobilised by tragic choruses. The chapters analyse choruses as fic-
tional, religious, and civic performers; as combinations of text, song, and
dance; and in relation and contrast to the choruses of comedy and melic
poetry. As a result, the volume offers both a synthesis of previous studies and
directions for further work. The chapters fully integrate the implications
of earlier analyses of the social context of Greek drama, the non-textual
dimensions of Athenian tragedy, and the relations between choral genres.
In addition, they show how new analytic tools, including attention to
the physicality of choruses, their musical interactions with the actors, or
the treatment of time and space in the odes, allow us to better capture the
specificity of tragic choruses. As a result, the volume offers a wide range
of original contributions looking together at the tragic chorus as a highly
specific, complex, and metamorphic medium.
Apart from the last three chapters, all dates are bce unless otherwise
indicated. All Greek is translated. Proper names are mostly spelled follow-
ing standard English practice, and transliterations are internally coherent
within each chapter. Abbreviations follow the standard conventions of the
Oxford Classical Dictionary and the Année philologique.
chapter 2
Choral polyphony and the ritual functions

of tragic songs
Claude Calame
In this past decade, the role of the choral group in classical Attic tragedy
has often been addressed in terms of identity – social identity. With regard
to the status of the choral group as an actor, as well as to its spatial position,
this role can be interpreted through the general and instrumental con-
cept of ‘mediation’ understood as intermediary between different levels of
reference; and, as far as the power of the choral voice as medium in a pro-
cess of (musical) communication is concerned, it can be made more precise
through the particular and instrumental concept of ‘intermediality’. Gener-
ally speaking the tragic chorus as a protagonist invited to sunagwn©zesqai
(to speak with Aristotle)1 has a status which leads it to interact with the
actors of the heroic and dramatic action: the choral group is integrated
in the time and space of the plot, of the mythos (still in the Aristotelian
meaning of the word) enacted in front of the skēnē. This is its dramatic
mediation. But the choreutai are also Athenian; they are chorally educated
citizens, singing in Greek in fifth-century Athens. Secondly – spatially –
the chorus members dance in the orchestra, which has an obvious inter-
mediary position between the place (not yet the stage) on which the heroic
action is dramatized and the rows of seats where the audience is sitting and
participating in the musical performance: this is their social mediation,
on the mode of the intermediality. Moreover, from that second viewpoint
of mediation, the mask plays an important role as mediator between, on
the one hand, the heroic time and space of the palaia dramatized in the
theatre and, on the other, the historical, political and social reality of the
actors; which is also the reality of the audience.2 Both the mask and the cos-
tume, with their ritual aspect, refer to a third mediation: just as tragedy, as a
1 Arist., Poet. 1456a25–7, with the commentary of Gentili 1984/5: 33–5 and Bierl 2001: 37–41. Many
thanks to Rachel Bryant-Davies for her help with the English of this paper and to Nadine Le
Meur-Weissman for her useful reading.
2 In my 1995 study I tried to show that the classical tragic mask does not identify a person, as generally
assumed in the anthropological theory on the mask (Calame 1995).
35
36 Claude Calame
musical performance, is integrated into a ritual agōn dedicated to Dionysos,
the space of the dramatic performance is integrated into the sanctuary ded-
icated to Dionysos Eleuthereus.3 Along with the choreography implied by
the sung performance the mask of the choreutai offers a religious mediation
between the audience and the worship of Dionysos. But from the notion
of ‘mediation’ let us move to that of ‘intermediality’.
1. Tragic choral identities

Tragedy as ritual and musical performance, the songs of tragedy as drama-
tized melic and choral performances: the recent interest in ancient theatre as
a performative art has focused the attention of a few scholars in Classics on
the pragmatics of Greek tragedy. Tragedy no longer seen as a (literary) text,
then, but as theatrical performance; choral parts not only read as poems,
but as songs with their melody and their metrical rhythm corresponding to
a choreography. We have to consider in this light the performative aspects
of choral songs in tragedy along the three functions of mediation just men-
tioned: dramatic, spatial and religious. This ‘intermedial’ function of the
tragic choral songs refers us to the mode of their enunciation, the positions
of the choral I/we speaker in space and time in relationship with the voice
of the singers hic et nunc. As in melic poetry, the choral group not only
uses self-referential statements to offer its songs as speech acts, and thus
as ritual song acts, but, in a striking expression of polyphony, it takes on
different roles to react emotionally to the action played on the stage, to try
to influence it or just to give a commentary on it. The scholar’s sensitiv-
ity to the pragmatics of these enunciative procedures of the tragic chorus
requires a linguistic aptitude that is focused on discourse and combined
with the anthropological and ethnopoetical point of view required by the
study of song performance and ritual.
Such is the perspective I would like to adopt in the following introduc-
tory remarks, insisting on the different intermedial roles of the polyphony
of the choral songs in Attic tragedy; and that in relationship with the gen-
erally marginal identity conferred on the choral group in the heroic action
dramatized ‘on stage’. In a second part of the study I will illustrate my
general reflections, drawing my examples mainly from Aeschylus’ Persians
as this tragedy offers a fourth mediation in putting the heroic victory of
the Athenians at Salamis in the perspective of the defeated barbarians.
Relying in these introductory and general remarks on numerous studies
3 The ritual aspects of the tragic performance in the theatre and sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus
in Athens are recalled by Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 67–99; for the theatrical role of Dionysos in the
tragic performance, see for instance Bierl 1991: 111–71.
Choral polyphony and ritual functions of tragic songs 37
offered mainly by participants to the present collection of essays, my own
discourse also has to be considered as polyphonic.4
If the choral songs of tragedy work as dramatic mediations between
the heroic action and the hic et nunc of the musical performance in fifth-
century Athens, as spatial mediations between the stage, orchestra and the
theatre in which the audience is sitting, and as religious mediations, does
that mean that the choral group of tragedy can be considered, as has been
suggested in post ’68 Paris, as the incarnation of the city? Is it fair to say that
the chorus was ‘the mouthpiece of the city, which through its movements
paid its respects to the altar of Dionysus, the god who, of all the Olympians,
was the one most foreign to the city’ and that ‘tragedy could be said to be
a manifestation of the city turning itself into theater, presenting itself on
stage before its assembled citizens’? (translation Janet Lloyd).5 In terms of
a more precisely Marxist interpretation, the choreutai of Attic tragedy have
become the representatives of the whole of the citizen-body, supposedly in
opposition to the action played on the stage and to the heroic code which
would represent the ‘alterity’, the ‘other’, in Athenian tragedy.6
But we should not forget that the author of my first quotation from
the French adds on the same page: ‘Even if the chorus expresses collective
and civic opinions, it is hardly composed of average citizens, that is to
say male adults in age to bear arms’ (translation Janet Lloyd). And that
is precisely the problem surrounding the dual identity of the choreutai
in Greek tragedy: they simultaneously have both a civic and a dramatic
status. Independently of the civic role played by the choreutai as both
Athenian citizens and singers ritually honouring Dionysos Eleuthereus,
the social and sexual identity of the choral group implied in the dramatic
action is a complex one; as we will see, it has a decisive impact on the
authority of the tragic choral voice, on its semantic, enunciative and musical
polyphony.
In a recent paper, a scholar from Berkeley noticed that 59 per cent of
the attested tragedies by Aeschylus feature a female chorus; this proportion
rises to 68 per cent in plays by Euripides, but drops to 38 per cent in those of
Sophocles’ tragic dramas which are known to us.7 He proposed interpreting
4 À propos my own enunciative position in this chorus of scholars, I would like to quote my address
for the inaugural paper at the conference at Northwestern University and to thank the brilliant
organizers of the event which led to the present volume, Marianne Hopman and Renaud Gagné: my
role as a kind of korufa±ov was required by the formal exercise of this ‘keynote address’ but all the
colleagues quoted in the first part of the present chapter have to be considered as sug-coreuta©.
5 That to take over a double definition given by Vidal-Naquet on one hand and Vernant on the other
in their common book of 1986: 159 and 22.
6 Longo 1990: 16–19.
7 Mastronarde 1998: 61–6; see also Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 265–75.
38 Claude Calame
the female character of the majority of tragic choral groups as a sign of
marginality and dependence; this marginal character would, however, be
little different than that of the male choruses, formed of elderly people
as in the Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles, or even of foreign bodyguards
as in Aeschylus’ Persians! Mainly on the basis of Euripides’ Medea (with
its chorus of Corinthian women and where Medea is herself an exile), the
same scholar assumes that, at least in that tragedian’s dramas, the choral
voice is heterogeneous, and that the chorus is incapable of expressing a
coherent judgement. For him, the lack of cohesion in the part sung by
the chorus has a cause that goes beyond the heroic action played on the
stage, one that is related to the social crisis in Athens at the end of the fifth
century.
The apparent inconsistencies of the choral voice in Attic tragedy, how-
ever, are to be related less to an external situation, to a particular historical
and political context, than to the fact that the performative, emotional and
interpretive reactions of the chorus follow the dramatic movement of the
play, as in the rule stated by Aristotle himself in the Poetics; its musical
interventions follow the different tensions and reversals of the dramatic
action. Continuing the statistical approach that points to the tragic focus
on the chorus and its action within the play, it is important to remember
that, out of the nine of Phrynichus’ tragedies whose titles are known to us
(and without taking into account the special case of the Capture of Miletus),
five derive their title from the name of the chorus, three from the main
character, and one has a double title (character and chorus). For Aeschylus,
the proportion is analogous: out of his six or seven surviving tragedies, four
have a title corresponding to the name of the chorus and three of those
titles correspond to a female group (not taking into account the exception
offered by the Persians, Choephoroi, Eumenides and the Supplices in which
the Danaids, as suppliant women, are the main protagonists of the tragic
action); and around half of the surviving titles of tragedies by Aeschy-
lus derive their title from the name of the choral group. Of Sophocles’
surviving tragedies, only one has a title deriving from a (female) chorus:
Trachiniae; and from around eighty of his tragedies whose titles are known
to us, only fifteen correspond to the name of the choral group. Finally, as
far as Euripides is concerned, of his surviving plays only four titles derive
from the name of the chorus and they are all female (Supplices, Phoenis-
sae, Troades, Bacchae).8 These figures have to be put into perspective with
the increase in the number of the actors and of the importance given to
8 See the detail of the statistics given by Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 266–9.

narrating the heroic action; with Attic tragedy, we move, between the begin-
ning of the fifth century and its end, from a rather melic performance to a
more epic one.
However that may be, in a collective volume focused on Tragedy and the
Tragic, one of the contributors pays attention to ‘the dramatic role of the
chorus within the fictional world created by the performances themselves’.
From the outset he had to acknowledge that the fictional world – the ‘pos-
sible world’ constructed and dramatized on the stage – is ‘interpenetrated’
by the real (musical and ritual) performance. Nonetheless, from an internal
point of view the tragic choral group, on the one hand, partly participates
in the heroic identity of the characters, the protagonists of the tragic action,
while, on the other, it quite often assumes a position of ‘social marginality’:
the choreutai are generally women, slaves or foreigners (see for instance the
choral group in Euripides’ Phoenissae).9 It is also important to notice that
the tragic chorus adopts the diction of the great melic poetry in its songs.
This means that, with regard to the particular rhythm, dialectal colour and
specific lexicon of its poetic expression, the choral group keeps its voice
at a certain distance from the more prosaic Attic spoken/recited by the
characters.
Sensitive to the nuances of gendered roles in Greek poetry, a recent study
has offered further relevant reflections on the evident social marginality of
the choral groups in tragedy which consist of women, slaves, foreigners, or
old men. In these cases, the tragic choreutai cannot represent the audience
of Attic tragedy, much less the politico-religious community to which
they would belong, in one way or another.10 Considered in the different
modes of their commitment to the dramatic action, the choral voices of the
classical tragedies known to us afford a very wide-ranging and rich musical
image. Differing according to both the poet of the tragedy and the ‘gender’
criterion, the choral groups show emotional and moral attitudes which are
mainly determined by their social status and situation in the dramatic plot.
Representing a kind of ‘authoritative cultural memory’ through references
to other heroic examples (which we call ‘myths’) and with their frequent
gnomic statements referring to traditional wisdom, the tragic choruses are,
generally speaking, engaged with both female and male characters playing
on the stage. This is especially true of the female choruses who have
more authority and more aggressive expression in Euripides’ dramas. From
9 Gould 2001: 382–4 and 402 for the quotations.
10 Foley 2003: 19–25; the question of the participation of women in the audience of the mousikoª
gänev of the Great Dionysia is still controversial: see, among others, the studies by Henderson
1991, and by Goldhill 1994, with additional references in Calame 1997: 183 n. 4.
40 Claude Calame
the point of view of mediation, this would mean that ‘establishing links
among separate worlds or mediating between male and female or Greek
and foreign characters seems to be particularly, if not exclusively, common
to female choruses’.11 Finally, in their choral action, groups of older men
would be rather more concerned with political issues, and female choruses
with domestic and religious affairs. This is probably not a real surprise,
but it does mean that the poetics enable the tragic poet, in the creative
moment, to imagine the gendered perspective corresponding to the social
identity of a female group.
In a book published in the same year as the essay just mentioned, the
author pointed out not only the position of the chorus in the dramatic
action, but also its identity as a performer at a civic festival and as a
representative of the city at the ritual level. Rightly refusing the idea of the
‘otherness’ of the tragic chorus, she assumes the variability of the identity
and authority of the tragic choral group. Being mimetic and ritual, the
persona of the choreutai is not static and would shift as the performance
progressed. In fact, the tragic chorus would be quite close to the world of
the audience and therefore play a central role in what tragedy was about,
i.e. ‘the exploration of the problems that arose at the interstices of the
religious discourse of the polis’. Independently of her very hypothetical
reconstruction of the origin of the tragic performance in representing, and
then problematizing, essentially Dionysiac myths, she suggests that the
identities of the choreutai would originally have been divided between their
dominant persona in the ‘here and now’ of the ritual and the ‘“reenacting
of the past” facet of their persona’.12
Starting out from these different statements, it would probably be more
useful to speak, as far as the persona and the role of the tragic chorus
is concerned, of a combination, in a choral and thus collective voice, of
two identities: a ritual identity in relationship with the hic et nunc of
the poetic and cultic performance, and the heroic identity required by its
intervention in the dramatic action staged in another time and, generally,
in another space. Even with its ritual collective identity as choral group,
contrasted with the singular identity of protagonists who are situated by
their proper names in the time and spaces of the heroic world, the tragic
chorus does not represent a ‘collège de citoyens’; its collective voice does
not have the communal authority of the democratic polis either in its
dramatic and heroic, or in its ritual identity. In response to the proposition
concerning the chorus’ social marginality, on the other hand, a critical voice
11 Foley 2003: 23. 12 Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 276–84.
has proclaimed that the tragic choral persona cannot be placed under the
heading of ‘otherness’, even with its different modalities (female, foreign,
slave, elder).13 Marginality does not mean absence of authority. One has
to be conscious that the composition and the performance of choral songs
of tragedy depended on the musical education of the Athenian citizen and
on a culture of choral and ritual performance.
Despite the social marginality of the singers as protagonists in the heroic
action, the tragic choral voices, in their variety and flexibility, draw their
authority from a broadly shared musical and ritual poetic tradition which
belongs to the political and religious culture of the city. We might say
that it is through the choral and ritual performance that the tragic chorus,
relying on the treasury of traditional wisdom and on examples to be drawn
from that tradition of heroic narratives we call ‘mythology’, also sings in
the name of the broad audience. On that particular point one should
remember a very relevant conclusion:
The chorus requires the audience to engage in a constant renegotiation of
where the authoritative voice lies. It sets in play an authoritative collective
voice, but surrounds it with other discussing voices . . . The chorus thus is a
key dramatic device for setting commentary, reflection, and an authoritative
voice in play as part of tragic conflict . . . [it] is one of the most important
ways in which tragedy engages with democracy.14
In a previous study for an earlier choral meeting on ‘The Chorus in

Greek Culture’, I tried to refer to the complexity of the voice of the tragic
choral group entailed by its dual identity: on the one hand as collective
actor engaged in the heroic action with its specific time, space and ideology;
on the other, as performer of rituals related to the hic et nunc of their own
religious culture which correspond to the religious practices of the audience.
To this end, I tried to distinguish three different ‘semantic’ dimensions in
the tragic choral voice, each corresponding to a particular position and
function of the tragic chorus. In a purely instrumental way, and taking as
examples the powerful parodos of the Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus
and the dramatic parodos of the Phoenissae by Euripides, it follows that
the different functions assumed by the tragic choral group in the orchestra
correspond to three different voices: first a ‘performative’ voice, insofar as
the choral group quite often adopts and transforms the traditional forms
of melic poetry (hymn, paean, hymenaios, thrēnos and so on) in order to
react to, participate in and have a ritual influence on the dramatic action;
13 Goldhill 1996: 252–5. 14 Goldhill 1996: 255.

42 Claude Calame
as such, the choral group behaves as a collective agent implied in the heroic
and tragic action staged in front of the skēnē, which in the classical period
at Athens is still at the same level as the orchestra.15 In its pragmatic effect,
the voice of the tragic choreutai also takes on a strong emotive dimension,
which has its reflection in the meter used and thus probably in the rhythm
of their dance; ‘intermedial’, this emotive voice situates the tragic chorus
between its position as a collective actor who sunagwn©zetai and its
position beside the audience reacting emotionally to the dramatic action.
Finally, the commentaries the choreutai give of the action they see unfolding
on the stage define a ‘hermeneutic voice’; taking on an ethic move, this
interpretive voice relies on the traditional wisdom and patrimony of heroic
figures and examples, which were the twin foundations of the standard
political and religious culture in fifth-century Athens.16
On this last point, à propos the role of the choral group in Sophocles’
tragedies, I would fully agree with a scholar who told us that the songs
of Attic tragedy offer hypotheses to interpret the action played ‘on stage’:
‘Unlike a choral song that is actually part of a performed ritual in non
mythic space, a tragic choral ode often constitutes a hypothesis about
meaning at a particular stage of understanding rather than a final assertion
of meaning.’17 But I would add that, conveyed by the hermeneutic voice,
these interpretive statements depend, firstly, on sung and ritual speech
acts which imply the emotional and, secondly, on the pragmatic voice of
the chorus. The actual combination of the hermeneutic voice with the
performative and the emotive ones forms a threefold polyphony which I
will call ‘content polyphony’ or ‘semantic polyphony’. The complexity of
the tragic choral voice in this kind of counterpoint corresponds both to
the multiplicity of the functions assumed by the voice of the tragic chorus
and to the multi-layered substance of the social and gender identity of this
same choral group. This complex identity of the tragic choruses has been
well highlighted in the different studies I just mentioned. Relying on the
distinction between ‘intermediality’ and ‘mediation’, I will revisit my first
distinction between the interpretive, the affective and the performative
15 See here the introductory study by Renaud Gagné and Marianne Hopman with the bibliographical
references given in n. 53.
16 See the conclusions I draw from my comparative study, Calame 1997: 201–3; on the ritual forms
taken on by the expression of the emotions in Greek tragedy, see Di Benedetto and Medda 2002:
266–78; in the perspective of the Rezeptionsästhetik, see now Gruber 2008: 17–27 and 44–70. Insofar
as the traditional forms of melos are transformed on the tragic stage by the performative voice of
the chorus, their presence cannot be interpreted in terms of reference and allusion to autonomous
‘lyric’ genres as proposed by Swift 2010: 29–34 and 367–71.
17 See Segal 1995a: 196–8, who speaks here, in reference to Sophocles’ tragedies, of the chorus as
‘participant character’.
voices of the tragic chorus to show how they are intertwined and active on
the semantic level.
The polyphonic content of the tragic choral songs, considered from
a semantic viewpoint, relies on an “enunciative polyphony”. In my 1999
study, I focused on the intermediality of the tragic choral voice in terms
of the scheme of communication revisited from an enunciative point of
view: to the figures of the ‘real’/empirical author, performers and audi-
ence of tragedy are to be added the figures constructed in the tragic
discourse itself: speakers and addressees, virtual/implied author and vir-
tual/implied spectator. The combination of the three voices of the chorus
leads to the conclusion that, in the choral songs of tragedy, the ‘you’ of
the addressee is often invited to take on the ‘I/we’ position of the (choral)
speaker or singer. We will now proceed to this double semantic and enun-
ciative polyphonic play of the tragic choral voices on the basis of a few
examples.
2. Choral procedures of enunciative polyphony and pragmatics

ge d kaª cor¼n ywmen, peª
moÓsan stugern
pofa©nesqai ded»khken,
lxai te lch t katì nqrÛpouv
Þv pinwm stsiv m.
Come let us join in the dance (choron hapsōmen),
for we are ready to perform
our grisly song (mousan)
and to tell how our ensemble (stasis)
apportions lots among mortals.
(trans. Albert Henrichs)
Such is the beginning of the famous dsmiov Ìmnov sung by the chorus of
the Erinyes as the first stasimon of Aeschylus’ Eumenides.18 It starts not only
with a traditional incentive ge d, ‘let’s go here and now’, with the verbal
gesture of deixis implied by a d referring to the external time and space
of the performance; but the form of the hortatory subjunctive ywmen,
alluding in the first-person plural to the beginning of the choral song, also
reminds us of all the forms of the ‘performative future’, with its intentional
value, which characterize the beginnings of the choral forms of melic poetry.
To quote examples drawn from melic poems sung by a female chorus, let
18 Aesch., Eum. 299–396 (307–11).

44 Claude Calame
us think of the form tinxw, ‘I shall shake (my golden hair)’, occurring in
the prelude and invocation to the Muses of the “second” Partheneion by
Alcman; and let us mention also the forms Ëmnsw and mimsomì oida±v,
‘I shall hymn (the all-glorious house of Aioladas)’ and ‘I shall imitate
in my songs (the Siren’s loud song)’ found in the first part of a Theban
partheneion by Pindar. With these verbal forms, including a verb of the song
or the dance, the choreutai describe in the first-person singular or plural the
choral activity and musical performance they are currently engaged in. In
the terms of pragmatic linguistics, these utterances correspond to ‘speech
acts’; they are more exactly ‘song-acts’ and, as they are included in a ritual
of which the performance of the melic song is a part, they are also to be
considered as ‘cult-acts.’19 Performative in the exact meaning of the word,
these verbal forms make of the melic song a ritual act; because of the use
of the first person they can be considered as ‘self-referential,’ and I would
speak in the case of melic poetry of a ‘performative self-referentiality’. The
rituality of the hymn is underlined by its complex rhythmic structure.
Out of four, the three first strophic pairs composing the binding song are
divided by a so-called ephumnion of around six lines; all three ‘refrains’ are
based on a rhythm made of cretics. This hymnic procedure reinforces the
incantatory function of the choral song of the Erinyes.20
The song, performed by the Erinyes, as an incantation against the crim-
inal Orestes they would like to condemn to a corrupted sacrifice, is typical
of this performative (melic) self-referentiality. But it is also self-referential,
according to another meaning of the concept. The choral song is intro-
duced in iambic trimeters, by the koryphaios or by the whole choral group
itself, as Ìmnon . . . t»nde dsmion; with the use of Âde this implies a gesture
of verbal deixis, a demonstration of proximity: with a prooimion performed
in anapaestic rhythm, the binding song follows immediately. To that first
self-referential designation, the choral group adds in its own song another
gesture of deixis; in a kind of refrain the Erinyes refer again to the song
they are just performing not only as Ìmnov dsmiov, but also as t»de mlov!
This means that, when located into the orchestra of the theatre consecrated
to Dionysos, the ritual melic song can be designated and isolated as such
by its own singers. Identified in a recent and fundamental study, this self-
referential gesture is taken to its logical conclusion by the desperate chorus
of the Oedipus Tyrannus in the famous question t© de± me coreÅein, ‘why
19 Alcman, fr. 3, 1–9 Page-Davies, Pindar fr. 94b, 11 and 15 Maehler; the question of the temporal value
of the ‘performative futures’ in Pindar has been studied again by D’Alessio 2004 : 284–94; see also
Calame 2004a: 427–31, and above all Bierl 2009: 31–47.
20 For the complex metrical structure of this choral song, see Sommerstein 1989: 138 and 288–90.
should I dance?’ This kind of reflexive choral self-referentiality is rather
frequent in the choral songs of Attic tragedy. I would call this type of
commentary by the chorus on its own musical performance ‘dramatic (or
mimetic) choral self-referentiality’.21 It is often quite self-critical towards the
song just being performed and in Sophocles’ tragedies these commentaries
by the chorus on its own performance are regularly related to its Dionysiac
identity. In this, it could also deserve the designation of ‘meta-theatrical
self-referentiality’, as has been also suggested concerning the interventions
of Dionysos in various choral songs of tragedy.22
It is interesting to point out that, in the first part of their choral song,
the Erinyes use enunciative procedures which are quite common to melic
poetry: a performative verb indicating the choral activity they are engaged
in (cor¼n ywmen, 307), indifferent usage of the first persons singular and
plural (ywmen but m, in the same first anapaestic section), a reference
to their choral dance with an allusion to the institution of the chorus,23
self-designation of the choreutai as witnesses (for the crimes) just as the
young girls of Pindar’s Partheneion claim when they sing ‘as a faithful wit-
ness for Agasicles I have come to the dance (¢luqon v cor»n),’24 and,
finally, a hymnic invocation to Night, their own mother. It is only in the
refrain that the song is in some way ‘objectivé’ with a deictic gesture such
as t»de mlov (329 = 341). There we hear that it will be sung without the
musical accompaniment on the phorminx (f»rmiktov, 332 = 344), and
we learn that it is sung by the Erinyes; in the third person, they name them-
selves as authors of the choral song. This authorial self-referential gesture
reminds us of the different forms of sfrag©v, of signature made familiar
to us by the elegiac lines of Theognis or in the prelude of Herodotus’
Histories.25
From the standpoint of the polyphonic content of the choral songs of
tragedy, it would be quite simple to relate the performative self-referentiality
of the choral group to its pragmatic and performative voice, and to link the
dramatic self-referentiality of the tragic choral song reported mimetically
on the stage to the interpretive voice of the choreutai singing it. In the
21 The study is by Henrichs 1994/5, who refers in the title of his exhaustive paper on dramatic
self-referentiality to Soph., OT 896; see also, for the tragic chorus in general, Calame 1999: 130–2.
22 Bierl 1991: 111–72.
23 On that particular point see the excellent commentary by Henrichs 1994/5: 62–3 (with the bibli-
ographical references given in n. 38). Moreover, see the conclusions drawn by Kaimio 1970: 150–7
and 177–9 on the collective value of the tragic I/we, and of the I of the koryphaios, who generally
sings as a member of the group.
24 Pindar fr. 94b, 39 Maehler.
25 On the different forms of the poetic ‘signature’, see Calame 2004a: 13–23, with numerous biblio-
graphical references.
46 Claude Calame
first (performative) self-referential position, the choral group would sing
qua character with the persona implied in the tragic action; in the second
(dramatic) position, qua actor and ritual performer. Supporting both these
voices, the emotive choral voice would work as a kind of intermediary
between these two positions; so it would imply the characters of the tragedy,
on the one hand, and on the other, through the musical performance, the
audience paying honour to Dionysos. The choral emotive voice would
thus work as an expression of the tensions provoked by the confrontation
between the staged heroic and fictional action and the politic, religious and
cultic reality in which the choreutai as performers are engaged along with
the audience. ‘We believe we practise straight justice: against him who can
display clean hands there comes no wrath from us, and he goes through
life unharmed’ (312–15; trans. Sommerstein) – so the Erinyes must sing
to reassure the audience, stating that their hateful and revengeful binding
song is addressed only to Orestes, the main protagonist of the heroic action.
From the perspective of the chorus’ external relationship with the audi-
ence (to which we will return in conclusion), it is important to point
out that the various gestures of verbal deixis which punctuate the choral
interventions in Attic tragedy with words in -de can actually have a double
reference, as is the case in the different forms of melic poetry: not only
an internal (anaphoric or cataphoric) reference, corresponding to what the
German linguist Karl Bühler calls the Deixis am Phantasma; but also an
external one corresponding to the demonstratio ad oculos.26 Thus on the
one hand an intra-discursive demonstration requires the imagination of
the hearer/reader as when, at the end of the Eumenides, the goddess Athena
refers to what the chorus of the Erinyes is about to realize as tde (‘do you
hear, bulwark of the city, what these words [they just sang] are about to
accomplish?’, 949–50). But there is also, on the other, an extra-discursive
demonstrative reference when the same Athena speaks of the actions which
she just mentioned (tde, 927) and which she is about to accomplish
(prssw, 928) out of favour for ‘these’ citizens (to±sde pol©taiv): both
the citizens implied in the dramatic action and, above all, their successors
in the audience, hic et nunc; for them the Erinyes of the tragedy are now
the Eumenides, since in Athens they were honoured in a cult at Colonus.27
In this case, as in the use of t»de (mlov, 327 = 342) in the repeated first
‘refrain’ of the Erinyes’ binding song, the dramatic staging of the heroic
26 Cf. Calame, 2004b: 420–3, with the different studies published in a special issue of Arethusa, 37,
2004.
27 See Sommerstein, 1989: 6–12 and 275–8.
action and its presentation to the audience with actors as I-speakers, con-
trary to melic poetry, can play on the ambiguity in the reference of the
deictics formed on -de: whether internal or external; whether related to the
action played in heroic space and time, or to the actual ritual performed
for Dionysos Eleuthereus, here and now.
This ambiguity between dramatic action and ritual act is even more
marked when the heroic action is staged in Athens itself, as is the case
in the Eumenides, and when the tragic chorus sings both as a character
with its marginal social status and also as a member of the broad Athenian
community. Its threefold semantic polyphony is underlined by a strong
enunciative polyphony which refers to the hic et nunc of the musical
performance in its religious, political and cultural context.
3. Enunciative ‘intermedialities’ of the tragic chorus

What, then, are we to make of the semantic and the enunciative poly-
phonies of the chorus in Aeschylus’ Persians? What is specific about the
modes of mediation and intermediality of a tragedy whose action is situ-
ated in a barbarian country? The question is even more interesting given
that, from the title given to the tragedy, the chorus of Xerxes’ personal
guard is the main character of the action; but the question is rather
more complicated since these Persian choreutai sing in Greek melic dic-
tion with its lexicon, rhythms, music and ritual forms; in a foreign space,
but staged in Athens; and, above all, in a time which is not the usual
heroic time of ‘myth’, but a time quite close (eight years) to the nunc
of the performance. If the space of the heroic action coincides with a
barbarian and enemy city, its temporality corresponds to a past in which
part of the audience itself, as Athenian community, has been a living
protagonist.28
The group of Persian choreutai not only opens the drama, merging the
prologos and the parodos. It also takes on the start of the dramatic action that
begins with the dialogue with Atossa (155); reacts before the queen to the
news of the disaster of the defeated Persian army (256–289); provokes the
apparition of the phantom of Darius (656–671) and, finally, in a particularly
long exodos, it gives a sung echo to Xerxes’ ritual lament. The dimension
which prevails in this omnipresent choral voice is the voice of emotion. This
28 A summary on the role of the chorus in the Persians is in the commentary by Broadhead 1960:
xxiv–xxvi, with a reference to the study of Kranz 1933: 171–2; for Kranz, the chorus gives to the
dramatic action the meaning the poet wants to offer to the audience; see also now Gruber 2008:
107–55. For the question of the parodos, see Taplin 1977: 61–70.
48 Claude Calame
emotional voice takes on a performative turn that gives the final lament
the ritual forms of the thrēnos. This is especially the case in the kommos
which, in a melic exchange between the King and his advisors, concludes
the tragedy, giving it a very long exodos. I will focus this case study on the
choral polyphony and on the performative pragmatics of that impressive
melic song. As a start, let us just give the form and rhythmic structure of
this very elaborate choral song:
r prooimion (908–30): choral introduction (the chorus and Xerxes) in
anapaests
r str./ant. 1 (931–47): introduction in a form of a kommos to the thrēnos –
anapaests + dochmiacs
r str./ant. 2/3 (948–1002): catalogue of the captains/heroes of the Persian
army – anapaests + dochmiacs + paroemiacs
r str./ant. 4/5/6/7 (1003–65): a kind of melic stichomythia (reciprocal
laments) – iambi + cretics + choriambi
r epode (1066–77): proper exodos – iambi + anapaests + dochmiacs29
In the exodos of the Persians the arrival on stage of the defeated Xerxes
raises the painful affliction of the choreutai; rapidly they express their desire
to utter ritual laments. The intention to give tragic grief a ritual expression
in song corresponds to the musical and cultic function of any choral group.
Linguistically, this purpose is expressed by the use, in the first part of this
long choral song, of a set of verbs of speech in the form of the so-called
‘performative future’:
r ‘I shall do so indeed, honouring the sufferings of the army’ (¤sw, 944)
r ‘truly I shall cry forth the tearful wail of mourning’ (klgxw, 947)
r and above all ‘I shall send forth, send forth with many tears the shout
of woeful words . . . ’ (pmyw polÅdakrun «acn, 940)
The choreutai here use forms of the same verb pempein so often used
in Pindar’s Epinicians; it refers to the delivery of the choral poem praising
the trials and the glory of its addressee. These lines offer good examples
of what I call ‘performative self-referentiality’. The analogy with Pindar’s
poems is even more striking as the choreutai of Aeschylus relate their own
song to the mournful voices of the Thracian singers of thrēnoi, well known
in the musical tradition of Ionia. The Mariandynoi were famed for singing
a funerary lament to mourn the untimely death of a local hero named
Bormos. That figure evoked, for Greece, the figure of Linos if not that of
Hymenaios, and the songs attached to the names of these young heroes
29 See the rhythmical study proposed by Belloni 1988: 259–62, and the detailed metric study by
Broadhead 1960: 294–7 (for the morphology of the kommos: 310–17).
dead in the flower of their youth.30 Moreover these Mariandynoi were said
to have given their name to a special flute for the musical accompaniment
of threnodies. The evocation of the death of the Thracian hero Bormos
provokes the performative declarations of the choreutai about their inten-
tion of lamenting ritually and these appeals to start singing the thrēnos are
actually followed by a choral mourning song. After the allusion to the death
of the heroic figure Bormos, the deaths of the captains fallen during the
battle of Salamis are evoked. In a sharp contrast, these heroes were already
sung and praised by the same choreutai in the parodos (21–57) before the
messenger’s report of their fight and their death (302–28). In such a way,
in the form of the kommos and during a melic dialogue with Xerxes, the
thrēnos of the chorus takes over the positive epic catalogue of the Persian
soldiers which opens the tragedy and transforms it in a tragic reversal.31 It
lends this catalogue the performative dimension implied by speech acts as
for instance poqoÓmen (‘we deplore’, ‘we miss’, 992). As at the beginning of
the tragedy, for their praise, this pragmatic effect of the catalogue inserted
in the lament is underlined by the sonorities of the barbarian names. In
the parodos – as it has been very recently noticed – the chorus of elders
anticipates both the p»qov (‘longing’) provoked throughout Asia (62; see
512: in the city of Susa) by the absence of the Persian soldiers and the
lament that the women in Susa and other towns will sing if the army does
not return.32 To Xerxes singing (987–91):
ugg moi dtì
gaqän trwn nakine±v
lastì lasta stugn pr»kaka lgwn.
bo bo moi melwn ndoqen §tor.
You do stir up in me
a longing for my brave comrades,
speaking of unforgettable, unforgettable things, hateful beyond hatefulness.
My heart cries out, cries out, within my body!
30 See for instance Pindar fr. 128c Maehler.

31 On that point, see Hopman 2009: 362–3. The proper names of the Persian captains in the three cat-
alogues punctuating the dramatic action are analyzed by Kranz 1933: 90–3; see also the commentary
by Groeneboom 1960: 17–22, 76–88 and 188–91, and for the relationships of the names mentioned
in these three catalogues with Iranian onomastics, see Belloni 1988: 80–3. Saı̈d 1988, has shown the
tragic reversal these catalogues provoke between parodos and exodos.
32 See Hopman 2009: 362–4. Irigoin 1992/3, underlines the phonetic play which, in the rhythmic
catalogue of the parodos, gives a phonic substance to the choreographic movements of the chorus;
the names of the captains of the Persian army are extremely rich in neologisms: see Citti 1994:
21–37; if their names sound Persian, their definition as heroes in the blossom of youth is Iliadic:
cf. Dué 2006: 57–90.
50 Claude Calame
the choral group replies (992–1001):
kaª mn llouv ge poqoÓmen,
Mrdwn ndrän muriotag¼n
Xnqhn, *r©wn tì %gcrhn
Diix©n tì dì %rskhn
¬ppinaktav,
†khgdadtan† kaª Luq©mnan
T»lmon tì a«cmv k»restoná
tafon tafon oÉk mfª skhna±v
trochltoisin Àpiqen pomnouv.
And there are others too that we miss,
Xanthes the commander of ten thousand Mardians
and Anchares of the Arians,
and Diaı̈xis and Arsaces,
lords of the cavalry,
and Egdadates and Lythimnas
and Tolmus, never surfeited with battle.
I am amazed, amazed, that they are not following
behind your wheeled tent.
(trans. Alan H. Sommerstein)
The melic and threnodic catalogue of the generals fallen during the battle
is followed by a long melic dialogue which takes the form of a stichomythia
between Xerxes and the chorus (1003–65 = str./ant. 4 + 5 + 6 + 7). In
the first part of their melic exchange with the defeated king, the Persian
choreutai combine their ritual and performative voice with a hermeneutic
one: they accuse Xerxes of causing the death of so many young men and
the defeat of the whole country, and they allude to the power of the daimōn
(918–930). In the second part of the exchange, it looks as if the king will
join in the lament of the chorus and take over the role of the koryphaios
or, rather, of the melic chorēgos of this group of his counsellors. In the
first strophes, the chorus repeats almost word for word the moans and
the laments of the defeated king (1003–1037). And in the last two pairs of
strophe/antistrophe, the king invites the choreutai to carry on their own
lament: ‘cry out now in response to my cries’ (1040 and 1066), ‘raise a song
(mlov) of woe joining it together with mine’ (1042), ‘cry out in response
to me’ (1048), and so on. Repeating his invitations to sing in the following
lines, Xerxes alludes to a Mysian song (1054) that the Greeks also used to
associate with their thrēnos.33
33 See Belloni 1988: 250; for Xerxes as exarchos of the thrēnos, see Kaimio 1970: 121–4 and 219.
The invitation to carry on the king’s lament is then repeated at the
beginning of the epode of the whole song (1066); this epode concludes the
tragedy as a proper exodos with a performative statement which confirms
the leading role given to Xerxes: ‘Yes, I will escort you (pmyw to© se, 1077;
cf. 940) with loud wails of grief (dusqr»oiv g»oiv)’ sings, in conclusion,
the Persian chorus in a Greek song. The choreutai answer the appeals of
the Great King not only with the laments he asked for, but also with an
affirmative and deictic tdì rxw (‘this is precisely what I am about to
do’, 1058), which underlines the performative value of the funerary song
with its amoebean form. The chorus has already had occasion to show the
efficiency of its songs twice over: in the hymnic invocation addressed to the
divinities of the underworld, then in the ritual appeal to Darius, father of
king Xerxes, while Atossa was offering libations (623–80): ‘as for us, with
songs we will ask for . . . ’ (¡me±v qì Ìmnoiv a«ths»meqa . . . , 625). The last
choral statement of the tragedy is to be understood along the same lines:
with the performative form pmyw it not only achieves the transformation
of the laments of the chorus, led by the defeated king into a ritual thrēnos,
but it makes of the whole tragedy a ritual funerary song, a dramatic dirge,
on the mode of melic and performative self-referentiality.
On the basis of that typically Greek melic and ritual self-referentiality,
what then should we say about the social identity and the enunciative
position of this very active choral group? It has often been noticed that,
despite their barbarian costume and the exotic localization of their action,
the protagonists and choreutai of Aeschylus’ Persians speak and sing in
Greek, in a language which is particularly Athenian-sounding from both
the formal and semantic points of view. Going over from the performative
to the dramatic and mimetic choral self-referentiality, we have to enquire
about the role of a chorus which is barbarian from the point of view of
the space of the dramatized action, but Athenian under the aspect of its
time. To confine ourselves to the long funerary song which is the exodos
of the tragedy, I would point out the fact that morally Xerxes presents
himself from the outset as the hero of an Attic tragedy: he is the victim of
his destiny (mo±ra, 909; cf. 917) and he endures the deepest sufferings. In
consequence, the defeated Great King addresses Zeus to ask for death as
an answer to the tragic question par excellence: t© pqw tlmwn; (‘What
am I to do, wretched me?’, 912).34
34 Belloni 1988: 234–5, gives a dozen parallels for that tragic question on the human destiny; he points
out also the epic colour of the words pronounced by Xerxes. On the Greek nature of the terms and
of the ideas expressed in the Persians, see Broadhead 1960: xxx–xxxii; Hall 1989: 69–100, refers on
the contrary to the specifically barbarian traits of the Persians staged by Aeschylus.
52 Claude Calame
In the first stasimon, the choreutai also address their first lament to
Zeus; their mourning is provoked by the news of the destruction of the
Persian army. The song itself (in iambic and Aeolian rhythm mixed with a
few dochmiacs) is introduced by a prooimion sung in anapaests. In this first
prelude the grief expressed in the different towns of Persia is first mentioned;
the gestures of mourning of the Persian women are also described. In their
transition from the they-forms to the I-form (kgÛ, 546), the chorus gets
involved in a speech act (arw, “I shoulder”, 547), and its voice becomes
performative (532–6; 541–7):
å ZeÓ basileÓ, nÓn <d> Persän
tän megalaÅcwn kaª polundrwn
stratin ½lsav
stu t¼ SoÅswn dì %gbatnwn
pnqei dnofer katkruyav.
...
a¬ dì br»gooi Pers©dev ndrän
poqousai «de±n rtizug©an,
lktrwn eÉnv broc©twnav,
clidanv ¤bhv tryin, fe±sai
penqoÓsi g»oiv korestottoivá
kgÜ d m»ron tän o«comnwn
arw dok©mwv polupenq.
O Zeus the King, now, now by destroying
the army of the boastful
and populous Persian nation
you have covered the city of Susa and Agbatana
with a dark cloud of mourning.
...
and the soft, wailing Persian women who yearn
to see the men the lately wedded,
abandoning the soft-coverleted beds they had slept in,
the delight of their pampered youth,
grieve with wailing that is utterly insatiable.
And I too shoulder the burden of the death of the departed,
truly a theme for mourning far and wide.
(trans. Alan H. Sommerstein)
With such words does the choral group introduce the lament song which
directly follows.
Interpreters of this tragedy have wanted to see behind this figure of
the overall reigning god an interpretatio graeca of Ahuramazda.35 But Zeus
35 See the references given by Hall 1996: 15, and by Garvie 2009 ad loc.
dominates the Persians, often as unique god, as he also reigns over the
Agamemnon. The formulaic address to the god by the guardians of Xerxes
(å ZeÓ basileÓ, 532) is just the same as that sung by the elders of Argos in
the Agamemnon (355).36 On the other hand, the stasimon just mentioned
ends in praise of the freedom of speech attached to the liberation from
the yoke of the Persians who had fallen in front of the Island of Ajax
(i.e. Salamis); these lines give us a perspective which is, obviously, entirely
Athenian (591–7). In the same way, during his epiphany, Darius denounces,
in terms which are completely Greek, the lack of a sense of measure shown
by Xerxes: the hybris of the king, his son, results in the atē, the mental
blindness which leads to the error announced by the oracles and sanctioned
by Zeus; the god is the avenger of audacious and impious projects, he is the
avenger of thoughts which transgress the limits assigned to mortal men.37
Again at the end of the third stasimon, the choreutai acknowledge the fact
that they have to bear (fromen, 904) a situation which is the result of the
god’s will.
In the mouth of the choreutai, the complete reversal in fortune which
knocked down Xerxes is close to Attic tragic irony. In the parodos, the
advisers of the Great King do not hesitate to tell Xerxes that he is ‘a
mortal equal to the gods’ («s»qeov, 80): as Persian, he is the descendant
of Zeus through Perseus (‘the son of the golden rain’, 80) and the divine
son of Darius, himself considered as the god of the Persians (157). In the
exodos, however, the Persian chorus recognizes that the power of Xerxes
has been pulled down by a daimōn (something between Destiny and a
god; 921); in their praise of the king’s mother Atossa, the choreutai already
anticipate the intervention of this ‘old’ divine power (da©mwn palai»v,
158) as they do in the introduction of their first thrēnos in the first stasimon
(dusp»nhtov da©mwn, 515, echoing both the messenger who mentions
the theos who ‘blasted the Persians with afflictions’, 514, and the queen,
Atossa: å stugn da±mon, 472). In front of Xerxes who himself recognizes,
along with his own responsibility (Âdì gÛn, 931), the action of the daimōn
(da©mwn Âde), the choreutai also adopt an Athenian perspective when they
describe Asia kneeling down. Just as, at the end of Sophocles’ Oedipus
Tyrannus, the hero finally sees in the origin of his sufferings not only
destiny and Apollo, but also himself, the miserable one (gÜ tlmwn,
36 On that point see Bacon 1961, 15–63, with all the references given by Belloni 1988: xiv–xvii. On the
role played by Zeus, see Winnington-Ingram 1973: 210–19, and, more generally, Lloyd-Jones 1971:
79–103.
37 That logic of retribution underlies other tragedies: see the few parallels given in the commentary by
Groeneboom 1960: 170–4; generally speaking, see Saı̈d 1978: 96–118 and 318–61.
54 Claude Calame
1329–33), Xerxes understands the three agents at the origin of his action
and his ruin (the daimōn, Zeus and himself ): not the double, but the triple
motivation. Already the thrēnos of the chorus in the first stasimon mourns
the destiny of a hero and character of a typically Greek tragedy.
So the musical performance of the thrēnos in the exodos of the Persians
makes of Xerxes, through ritual means, the paradigm of the Greek tragic
hero as victim of the reversal in his fortune. As Herodotus states at the
beginning of his enquiry into the Persian wars, this reversal of fortune
threatens universally mortal men and their cities, and, according to Aristo-
tle’s critical reflection about Attic tragedy, it is at the core of any good tragic
action.38 In the Persians, the emotional effect provoked by the reversal is
even more marked when, at the end of the tragedy, its principal victim,
Xerxes, starts the long lament song of the choreutai, his own advisers and
faithful elders. In such a perspective, the debate between the ‘moral’ and
the ‘amoral’ meaning of the tragedy becomes irrelevant: as a Greek tragic
hero, Xerxes is punished for his act of hubris and in his punishment,
accomplished by Zeus, he is the victim of his daimōn. The lament of the
Persian king, as suffering chorus-leader of the tragic Persian chorus, can
be considered as assumed by a Greek voice, even if it sometimes seems
to break the rules of the ritual Greek thrēnos.39 As such the final lament
of the Persians certainly raises the feeling of terror and compassion in the
audience, according to the suggestion made by Aristotle on the conclusive
catharsis-effect of Attic tragedy; and that even more so if it offers some
characteristics of barbarian exaggeration.
4. Between choral polyphony and performative self-referentiality

In the voice of the tragic chorus, the combination of semantic and dramatic
polyphony with enunciative and formal polyphony leads to a multi-layered
identity which is – to different extents – socially and spatially marginal. This
double displacement is particularly accentuated so far as the choral group of
Aeschylus’ Persians is concerned. On the one hand, the onstage identity of
the choreutai as a collective character involved in the dramatic action lends
them the social status of guardians and elders subordinated to the Great
King; furthermore, they belong to the barbarians defeated by the Athenians,
38 Cf. Herodotus 1, 5, 4 and 32, 4 (Solon: pn sti nqrwpov sumfor), and Arist., Poet. 1451a9–15
and 1452a12–21; the role of the tragic reversal (metabolē or metastasis is studied by Saı̈d 1988: 324–41).
39 On the terms of the debate, see Garvie 2009: xxii–xxxii; for the effect on the audience of the
corresponding conclusive lamentation, see Swift 2010: 326–9; see also Pelling 1997: 13–19 for the
Persians presented by Aeschylus as sympathetic and alien altogether.
at the new political centre of continental and maritime Greece. But their
performative voice is mainly Greek, particularly in the ritual forms of the
lament they use, insofar as the Persian choreutai act like Athenian women
whose tears, according to Thucydides, were expected in war situations
and official funerals for dead soldiers.40 On the other hand, with their
Greek interpretive voice, the Persian choreutai evaluate the dramatic action
in classical Greek ethic terms and interpret it according to something
approximating the Delphic male moral and religious thought; on this level
they act rather like Athenian ‘average citizens’. The ‘Hellenization’ of the
Persian chorus in the last thrēnos of Aeschylus’ tragedy has been highlighted
very recently again.41 Between the performative and the hermeneutic moves
of the choreutai, the emotive voice has the intermedial function of a kind
of universal language forming a bridge which spans Persian and Greek,
and male and female, identities; this voice of the emotion expresses general
grief for the woes of the war and the reversal in fortune to which mortal
men are in general submitted;42 it addresses the Athenian audience in a
universal way, hic et nunc.
Moreover, the songs of the tragic choreutai who bear the mask and the
costume are an important, if not the most important, part of the mousikos
agōn dedicated to Dionysos Eleuthereus in his sanctuary and theatre.
Singing and dancing in the orchestra and referring with their hermeneutic
voice to the ‘Delphic’ theological and ethic wisdom, they are spatially and
intellectually quite close to the audience which is also paying ritual hon-
ours to Dionysos. Thus far, one would agree with A. W. Schlegel’s famous
statement: ‘Der Chor ist mit einem Wort der idealisierte Zuschauer.’43
But the pragmatic perspective which has developed around the problem
of the identity of the ‘lyric’ I has led to two important distinctions in the
performance of the ritual forms belonging to the great genre of melic poetry
(and here I indulge myself in keeping my solo voice joined with the mixed
academic chorus of colleagues well versed in Greek chorality, in accordance
with the collective I/we of the present paper). A first distinction has to be
40 Thuc. 2.34.4: The female character of this kommos as ‘un-Athenian, effeminizing song’ is contro-
versial, as pointed out by Hopman 2009: 373 n. 26, opposed to Hall 1996: 168–9; see also Gruber
2008: 145–55, and Swift 2010: 328–32, who stresses the gendered and ethnic differences offered by
the conclusive kommos of the tragedy.
41 The ‘Hellenization’ of the chorus’ song at the end of the Persians is shown by Hopman 2009: 272–6;
she concludes: ‘The Persian dirge spills over from the stage into the Athenian polis.’
42 For the extension of the pathos to the audience in the Athenian State Theatre, see Nagy 1994/5b:
51–2, and Segal 1996: 157–68; see also Calame 1999: 147–53.
43 ‘The chorus, in a word, is the idealized spectator’ (Schlegel, 1846b: 76–7). He adds that the members
of the chorus are actually standing for the whole of humanity; see Gruber 2008: 1–16, and the chapter
of Joshua Billings in this volume.
56 Claude Calame
made between, on the one hand, the different forms of an I which in
choral poetry is often expressed in the forms of a collective we and which
refers to the verbal position of the speaker and, on the other hand, the
author considered in his ‘author-function’ as a poet at the service of a civic
community rather than in his historical, psycho-social reality; and secondly,
a distinction between the person of the poet, with this social function as
composer of the story, and the actual performer of the poem, whether
individual singer or choral group. From that enunciative point of view,
on the one hand, the instances corresponding to the various grammatical
positions of the I/we-speaker develop through the poem to construct a
persona loquens – or rather, a persona cantans – who has a verbal and
generic character; they are parallel to the different you-forms constructing
the generic addressee of didactic poetry: Perses in the Works of Hesiod,
Cyrnos in the Theognidea, and also, probably, Atthis in Sappho’s poems.44
Moreover, from the point of view of its (self-)referential identity, this
persona cantans may sing, with the authority of the I-speaker, as author-poet
as well as choral group. In melic choral poetry, and particularly in Pindar’s
epinicians, the enunciation of the poem is marked by the procedure of
the ‘choral delegation’; the I-poet gives its voice to the we-chorus. This
choral delegation leads, as mentioned, to the enunciative polyphony of the
collective poetic voice taking on the utterance of the melic composition.
In such a way, the voice of the I-speaker, with its temporal and spatial
parameters, can refer to the various protagonists of the performance of the
song, hic et nunc.45
When the melic songs are transferred to the orchestra of the theatre
and put mimetically in relationship with the dramatic and heroic action
unfolding on the stage, the ritual play for Dionysos introduces, with the
mask, a certain distance in the twofold polyphony of the choral voice.
Compared with the melic choruses, the song-acts of the tragic choral
group are mediated through the dramatic mimesis. When the tragic choral
voice is not directly implied in the heroic action played ‘on stage’, its
performative self-referentiality can become dramatic and mimetic, if not
‘meta-theatrical’. From an intermedial point of view, neither the poet nor
the choreutai as citizens sing directly through the polyphonic voice of the
44 Calame 2004b: 1–7 and 2005a: 11–19 (on the ‘fonction-auteur’). See in particular Silk 1998: 24, who
states that ‘The different varieties of choral lyric style that a given chorus presents, even perhaps
within a single ode, themselves constitute different voices, de facto’; Silk takes over the reflections
presented by Gould 2001: 381–401, who asks the question of the identity of the tragic chorus in
terms of fiction and fictionality.
45 For the very striking example of complex choral delegation given by the sophisticated enunciative
polyphony of Pindar’s Olympian 6, see Calame 2008a: 135–41.
I-speaker. Qua real personae their voice is to be heard only as that of
the implied author or of the implied audience. Insofar as the biographical
author acts mainly as chorodidaskolos, and inasmuch as the more prominent
members of the audience had a strong musical and choral education, one
can imagine that the voice of the tragic poet and that of his imagined public
converge in the voice of the tragic chorus, taking on not only its enunciative
and semantic polyphony. These various modes of musical intermediality
are necessary to represent, not only through the narrative mimesis, but
also through the dramatic mimesis, a heroic action directly in front of
the audience honouring Dionysos musically.46 Through the polyphonic
intermediality of its collective voice, the tragic chorus is the vehicle of a
complex mediation between the poet of the play with his ‘author-function’
and the audience in its multi-layered composition.
Recall Herodotus and the anecdote he tells us, in his enquiry into the
origins of the Persian wars, about the tragic representation in Athens of the
Capture of Miletus by Aeschylus’ predecessor Phrynichus. Represented only
a few years after this event in which the Athenians were direct protagonists,
the tragic action was temporally too close to the audience; the public
burst into tears at its mimetic representation, and Phrynichus was fined a
considerable sum.47 Aeschylus certainly learned the moral of the story. As it
was impossible for him to transfer the recent event of the victory of Salamis
into heroic time and thereby make of it a palaion, he transformed the
temporal distance in a geographical one: seen from Susa, the victory became
a tragic defeat. Through these different temporal, spatial and semantic
mediations, the tragic action dramatized ‘on stage’ can become exemplary.
From an intermedial point of view, the Persians who narrate the disaster,
and react to it, speak and sing in Greek and the issue of the battle becomes
the paradigm for the disastrous consequences of the violation of dikē by
hubristic acts, and of the sudden reversal of fortune, which are at the centre
of the Athenian conception of mortal existence.48 Hence the long choral
thrēnos concluding the Persians in a barbarian polyphonic voice which
sounds terribly Greek: mediation through the Persians by the way of a
Greek, or rather an Athenian intermediality.
46 Calame 1999: 147–53; see also 2005b: 222–30. For the comparison with melic forms of poetry, see
Herington 1985: 103–24.
47 Herodotus 6, 21 = Phrynichus test. 2 Snell (cf. Hopman 2009: 376).
48 On this geographical décentrement see the studies of Zeitlin, in particular 1993: 154–71. On the
temporal mise en abyme of Darius’ speech, and on the perspective of tragedy as an act of memory,
see Grethlein 2007.
chapter 3
Chorus, conflict, and closure in Aeschylus’ Persians

Marianne Govers Hopman
In the past fifteen years or so, several studies attentive to the performative
context of Athenian drama have highlighted a number of elements thought
to support the authority of dramatic choruses. It has been pointed out, for
instance, that the social importance of melic choruses likely influenced the
perception of their dramatic counterparts (Bacon 1994/5; Gruber 2008: 28–
43); that dramatic choruses were central to the organization of the dramatic
contests (Wilson 2000); that as ritual performers dancing for Dionysos,
the choreutai mirrored the experience of the audience celebrating the god’s
festival; and that the chorus’ function as an internal audience further
replicated the spectators’ position. Even though tragic choruses often took
the identity of marginal groups like slaves, women, or foreigners, their
special status outside the fiction could foster some form of identification
with the audience.1
What happened, however, when the chorus impersonated characters
who did not belong to the realm of myth but to the historical reality of
Athens, and more precisely to the most dangerous people that the Athe-
nians ever had to face – i.e. Persians? In spite of the unexpected and
spectacular victory over Persia at Salamis and Plataea, Persia was not a dead
issue even after 480 bce (Pelling 1997: 12); in fact the very foundation of
the Delian league assumed that the Greek states still needed to join forces
to repel the enemy. In that tense context, Aeschylus’ display of an Athe-
nian chorus dressed as Persian males right at the opening of his 472 bce
play was a daring and, as far as we know, unparalleled gesture. The chorus
of Phrynichus’ 476 bce Phoenician Women, on which Persians was partly
based, was probably made of Phoenician widows or slaves at the Persian
1 For a thorough discussion of the parameters that can affect the relation between chorus and audience,
see Mastronarde 1998 and 1999, which build on the work of Gould 2001 [1996] and Goldhill 1996.
For a subtle discussion of the concept of identification in Athenian drama and its possible application
to the satyr play, see Griffith 2002. I use “chorus” when referring to the medium in general, and
“Chorus” when referring to the specific ensemble in Persians and other dramatic works.
58
Chorus, conflict, and closure in Aeschylus’ Persians 59
court. In addition, Phrynichus’ play did not start with the Chorus won-
dering about the outcome of the war, but with a eunuch reporting Xerxes’
defeat.
Thematically, Persians belonged in a context of active commemoration
of the Persian defeat through celebratory offerings, inscriptions, funer-
ary epigrams, and elegiac battle poems. Unlike these monodic discourses,
however, the play evokes the war in the fundamentally choral medium of
Athenian tragedy.2 As a counterpoint to earlier studies that highlighted
the polarization between Greeks and Persians in Aeschylus’ tragedy, this
chapter focuses on aspects of the Persian chorus that arguably challenge
the ethnic contrast.3 I first analyze the Chorus as a narrator of the war
against Greece and show that it offers a perspective unlike the actors’ in
its wide range of objects, viewpoints, and ideologies. That breadth of per-
spective, I further argue, is fostered by a plot that progressively constructs
the Chorus as Xerxes’ antagonist and thus partly aligns its interests with
those of the Athenian audience. Consequently, I suggest that the final
reconciliation between king and Chorus may have spread to the audience
and encouraged the spectators to emotionally, if not effectively, join in
the Persian lament. Besides shedding light on the much-debated prag-
matics of Persians’ 472 bce production, I hope to make two larger points
about dramatic choruses: that the narratological concept of perspective can
help us grasp the complex referentiality of some choruses, and that our
understanding of tragic choruses can gain from a comparison with comic
choruses.4
Choral perspectives
In the last few years, several analytic tools have been put forward to analyze
the multi-layered performance of the chorus (see Introduction to this
2 For useful surveys of the different modes of commemoration of the victory in the 470s, see Barron
1988 and Raaflaub 2004: 60–6.
3 The idea that Aeschylus’ play contributed to an Orientalizing construction of Persia as an ultimate
form of otherness was most forcefully argued by Hall 1989 and 1996. See also Harrison 2000.
Although I emphasize features of Persians that challenge some of Hall’s argument, the fact that her
work has so forcefully shaped the debate about Aeschylus’ play testifies to the power of her analysis.
However, neither she nor Harrison takes into account the specificity of the choral medium in their
discussion of the pragmatics of Persians.
4 Current scholarship on the play’s 472 bce production falls into two groups. Some – most recently
Edith Hall 1996 and Thomas Harrison 2000 – read the play as an Athenian auto-celebration suffused
with chauvinist overtones and Orientalizing clichés, while others – notably Desmond Conacher 1996
and Nicole Loraux 1993a – view it as a surprising vehicle for identification with the enemy whereby
cultural and military polarities are overcome by a shared experience of loss and death. For a recent
summary of the debate, see Garvie 2009: xx–xxii.
60 Marianne Govers Hopman
volume). The chorus’ double role within and outside of the fiction –
simultaneously a group of slaves, soldiers or captive women, and a ritual
and civic collective performing in the festival of Dionysos – has been
described in terms of a double identity (Henrichs 1994/5; see also Bierl
and Swift in this volume). Furthermore, the notion of voice has helped
to highlight the complexity of the chorus’ enunciative position between
poet and spectators, while the semantic diversity of the odes has been
described through the concept of registers (Calame 1999: 128–9 and this
volume). The validity of these concepts is a function of the insights that
they yield and may vary from play to play, just as each chorus represents
a unique experiment with the medium. In what follows, I propose that
some specificities of the Persian chorus may be grasped by analyzing it as a
narrator of the war against Greece and by putting the narratological idea
of perspective to bear upon its utterances.5
A fundamental notion of narratology, the concept of perspective (or
focalization) was first introduced by Gérard Genette in 1972 to describe
“the second mode of regulating information, arising from the choice (or
not) of a restrictive ‘point of view’” (Genette 1972: 203). The notion is
fraught with difficulty and still fiercely debated.6 As Genette’s sentence
implies, “perspective” is perhaps best defined negatively as that which
restricts the information offered by a narrator. Positive definitions are
more difficult to offer. As post-Genettian critics have made clear, the
concepts of “point of view” and “perspective” go beyond the strictly visual
significance originally envisaged by Genette to embrace a wide array of
non-sensory filters, including but not restricted to cognitive, emotive, and
ideological orientation (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 71). Drawing on the work
of Seymour Chatman and other critics, I therefore propose to analyze
the perspective of the Persian chorus under the four categories of Object
(what is of paramount importance to the narrator?); Zooming (how closely
5 Formal (as opposed to structural) narratology was originally elaborated to study novels or epics, i.e.,
genres involving a narrator who turns a story into a narrative through the categories of time (what
is the relation between time told and time telling?), voice (who is speaking?), and mood (what is
the narrator’s perspective?). While drama involves the transformation of a story into a narrative, it
does not have a narrator, and thus the relevance of narratology to the analysis of entire plays is still a
debated topic (Jahn 2001; Nünning and Sommer 2002). By contrast, the application of narratology
to dramatic sections with strong information content is relatively uncontroversial, as demonstrated
by Irene de Jong and James Barrett’s analyses of messenger-speeches (de Jong 1991; Barrett 2002).
Along similar lines, I propose to apply narratological tools to the narrative content of the Chorus’
utterances. For a comparable application of narratological concepts, viz. the distinction between
performance time and narrated time, to the odes of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, see Grethlein in this volume.
6 For a sample of works on the question, see Chatman 1986; Jahn 1999; Peer and Chatman 2001;
Herman, Jahn and Ryan 2005 s.v. Focalization (M. Jahn), with further bibliography.
does the narrator consider those objects?); Filter (from or through whose
consciousness are the events perceived?); and Slant (what is the ideological
attitude of the narrator or the character filter(s)?).7 With these tools, I hope
to emphasize the highly visual quality of the Chorus’ utterances and the
remarkable diversity of the images conjured by the choreutai.
(a) Objects of focalization

Throughout the play, the Chorus highlights a remarkably wide array of
peoples and lands, using catalogues of both anthroponyms and toponyms
to tread vast expanses through Asia and Greece. In the parodos, the choreutai
recall the spectacular departure of the Persian, Egyptian, Lydian, and Baby-
lonian contingents from Susa to Greece (16–58), glimpse at the Hellespont
(65–71) and imagine the men proceeding into Greece in Xerxes’ wake (74–
85), but also stress the anguish of the wives and parents left behind (61–4).
In response to the messenger’s report, they vividly imagine the Persian casu-
alties dying in the waters surrounding Salamis (576–7; 595–6) as well as
Xerxes and the survivors rushing through the Thracian plains (565–7). The
third stasimon nostalgically evokes the prosperous days of Darius’ rule and
surveys states that were formerly ruled by Persia, including Thrace, north-
western Asia Minor and the Hellespont region, Aegean islands, Cyprus and
the Greek cities in Asia (864–900). Lastly, in the Xerxes scene, the choral
catalogue of Persian casualties embraces the disaster in its manifold human
consequences (955–86).
(b) Zooming
The Chorus’ geographical and temporal breadth of interests combines
with various ways of zooming in on peoples and scenes. As a result, we
get striking and often poignant close-ups of individuals, most of whom
engaged in scenes that the choreutai did not see in their counselors’ persona
but rather imagined in their “prophetic heart” (10–11) or in the wake of
the messenger’s report. Such images include Xerxes on his Syrian chariot
leading the army and casting a snake-like glance (74–85); parents and wives
counting the days, shuddering as time goes by and soaking their beds with
7 This typology does not propose to make a theoretical contribution to narratological studies, but only
to offer a convenient and relevant grid to grasp the specificity of the Chorus’ voice in comparison
to the individual actors. The first two categories of Object and Zooming involve what is seen rather
than who sees and therefore fall out of the scope of most narratological studies. For the notions of
Filter and Slant, see Chatman 1986.
tears (63–4; 134–7; 579–83); or Persian corpses mangled by fish (576–9). In
addition, speaking as Elders left in charge of the royal palace, the choreutai
sometimes offer “teichoscopic” views projecting outwardly from the walls
of the Persian capital.8 They notionally use city walls as their outlook
point as they describe Xerxes’ contingents “forsaking Sousa and Agbatana
and the ancient ramparts of Kissia” (16–58) or reminisce of Darius taking
cities without leaving his hearth (866) and of men returning home from
wars. E contrario, the city walls figure negatively in the final scene when
they do not see the return of the men who left from Agbatana (961).
Occasionally this teichoscopic perspective expands, shifts axis, and morphs
into a bird’s-eye view whereby the choreutai survey places and events from
above, thus offering cartographical images of the tribes converging toward
Xerxes from all over Asia (16–58), of the Asian land grieving and yearning
(61) or of Darius’ empire expanding around the Aegean (865–900).9 Finally,
the Chorus also offers a few images shot sub specie aeternitatis in gnomic
utterances that are not shaped by a specific outpost but embrace human
experience in its universal, timeless and spaceless dimension: thus, Atē
deceives man by first fawning at him and then trapping him into her nets
(92–100).
The Chorus’ variety of objects and zooming modes strikingly contrasts
with the perspective of the all-Persian cast of actors. The messenger certainly
is expected (246; 294) and does in fact attempt to give a full account of
the Persian defeat in Greece (pn naptÅxai pqov, 254; cf. 294): his
catalogues of dying Persian leaders (302–28) and places crossed by the
retreating army (481–95) offer a wide range of objects of interest, while his
insistence on the unspeakable quality of the events further opens up his
account (329–30; 513–4). Like the Chorus, the messenger combines broad
strokes creating an “overpowering vision of vast landscapes and events”
(Herington 1986: 69) with vivid and poignant vignettes of Matallos’ beard
changing color as he fell into the sea (314–16), Xerxes tearing his robes
when he saw the disaster (465–70) or the ice of the Strymon river melting
under the first rays of the sun (495–504). In addition, the messenger seldom
8 Although relatively foreign to us, teichoscopic views must have played an important role in the
lives of walled-city dwellers. See for instance Helen and Priam’s discussion of the Greek and Trojan
contingents fighting in the plain of Scamander in Iliad 3 (161–244), and the fearful glances that the
Chorus of the Seven Against Thebes cast from the walls down to the Theban plain as they sight the
seven chieftains marching against the city (78–180).
9 On poeticized cartography as an important Aeschylean technique, see Hall 1996: 144 ad 480–514,
with bibliography. It may not be coincidental that Hecataeus, whose Periegesis has often been offered
as a possible source for Aeschylus’ information about Asia, was also the author of a map, probably a
response to and a refinement of Anaximander’s map. On Hecataeus’ Periegesis and map, see Pearson
1939: 27–96; Branscome 2010: 6–7.
mentions his own post during the battle and refers to the Persians in the
third person, which further contributes to his construction as an omniscient
narrator looking at the events from multiple vantage points at once (Barrett
1995: 546–50). Yet his interests are more temporally and spatially limited
than the Chorus’, solely focusing on the time span between the Battle
of Salamis and the Persian retreat, and limiting himself to the events in
Greece, saying virtually nothing of the Asiatic section of the journey (508–
11; cf. Hall 1996: 144 on Pers. 480–514). No gnomic statement attempts to
derive universal conclusions from the Persian defeat.
Even more striking is the contrast between the Chorus’ and the royal
family members’ perspectives. The Queen obsessively focuses on her son
and considers the war through his interests, thus offering close-ups pri-
marily centered on Xerxes. Unlike the wide choral views of the parodos,
her version of the expedition in the first episode consists of a symbolic and
highly pared-down dream report featuring only four characters – Xerxes,
Darius, and two women personifying Asia and Greece – and stressing the
son’s shame in front of his father (197–9; cf. 753–8). Similarly, she responds
to the defeat by worrying about the survival and psychological well-being
of the King. Upon hearing the news, she breaks her long silence only to
inquire about the survival of the leaders (290–8); the information that
Xerxes is still alive seems to entirely relieve her of her worries (301); upon
exiting to fetch libations, she recommends that the Chorus console and
escort Xerxes to the palace (529–31).
Darius’ perspective is spatially and temporally broader than the Queen’s:
he contextualizes the defeat within the history of Persian monarchy,
announces the pending defeat at Plataea (803–20) and gnomically casts
the events as an illustration of divine retribution for excessive hybris (821–
2). Yet his vision is still centered on Xerxes as leader and king: he inquires
which of his sons led the campaign (717), interprets the disaster as a con-
sequence of Xerxes’ foolish attempt to enslave Poseidon (743–52), worries
that his economical legacy may be wiped out (751–2) and highlights the dis-
continuity that Xerxes has introduced among seven generations of Persian
rulers (759–86). Darius’ emphasis on rulers (pantev ¡me±v, o° krth td'
scomen, 785) contrasts with the Chorus’ concern for the Persian people
(Persik¼v leÛv, 789). The Queen views the war as an Oedipal plot10 and
the King envisages it as a cosmic dual, whereas the Chorus sees it as the
adventure of a whole people.
10 For a psychoanalytic reading that emphasizes family tensions in Persians, see Kuhns 1991.
(c) Filters
As the choreutai focus on a wide range of objects apprehended through
various levels of proximity and distance, they activate and embrace the
perspective of different characters.11 Some of these constituencies can be
described in terms of concentric circles expanding from the choreutai out-
wards. The choreutai (often through the koryphaios) speak in their royal
counselors persona as they announce their intention to “engage in care-
ful thought” (142) or reminisce about Darius’ successes (852–906). By
contrast, the teichoscopic views listed above describe experiences that the
Elders notionally shared with Susa’s other inhabitants. Expanding still fur-
ther, the Chorus sometimes conveys the perspective of the whole Persian
people, for instance when they describe Salamis as an “utter catastrophe
for the Persians” (pnta Prsaiv pagkkwv, 282) or when they ask Dar-
ius for advice about how the Persians can fare best (787–9).12 Finally, like
many tragic choruses, the Persian choreutai have a special connection to
the land.13 Xerxes left them in charge of his palace and land (cÛrav, 7)
and that rootedness translates into a special understanding of the grief of
the “Asian land” (psa cqÜn %sitiv, 61).14 In other words, the Cho-
rus’ range of interests and insights activates the whole spectrum of their
various identities as royal counselors, inhabitants of Susa, Persians, and
Asians.
More strikingly still, the Chorus occasionally embraces the perspective
of Persian constituencies to which the Elders do not belong. The odes go
beyond what the choreutai can technically know in their fictional identity
and embrace others’ perspective on the Persian expedition as they mention
the shuddering of parents and wives (63) and the loneliness of Persian
widows (289). The Chorus’ empathic ability to transcend its fictional iden-
tity is perhaps most obvious in two passages when the Elders impersonate
the voice of Persian women.15 In the anapestic introduction to the first
stasimon, the choric dirge and its accompanying gestures are projected
upon women who are imagined tearing their veils, weeping, and grieving
11 My use of the term “filter” here overlaps with the concept of “identity” that some scholars use to
describe shifts in the choral voice. I find the term “filter” more suitable to describe rapid changes in
the Chorus’ perspective within a short interval of performance time.
12 On the use of compounds on the pan- root to express the magnitude of the disaster, see Saı̈d 1988.
13 On the rootedness of tragic choruses, see Gould 2001 [1996].
14 Although some commentators understand the term cÛra as a reference to the royal domain, the
context of the play makes it more likely to refer to the Persian land as a whole (cf. 67, 271, 493, 857,
cÛrav nqov 925).
15 On the idea of choral empathy, see Peponi 2009. On the chorus’ ability to perform a mimesis of
other choruses, see Nagy in this volume.
(537–47).16 More strikingly still, the parodos includes a vivid impersonation,
in direct speech, of the laments that the Chorus fears will be voiced by the
women (115–25):
taÓt moi melagc©twn frn mÅssetai f»b
½ PersikoÓ strateÅmatov toÓde m p»liv pÅqh-
tai, knandron mg' stu Sous©dová
kaª t¼ Kiss©wn p»lism' nt©doupon setai,
½, toÓt' pov gunaikoplhqv Âmilov pÅwn,
buss©noiv d' n pploiv ps
lak©v.
This is why the black robes of my heart are rent with terror –
“oa! – the Persian army!” – lest the city, the great citadel
of Sousa, become emptied of men and hear this cry.
And the Kissian city will sing in response,
“oa!” – this is what the massive horde of women will call out,
tearing their linen gowns.17
The demonstratives toÓde and toÓto simultaneously mark anaphoric
deixis and deixis am Phantasma and merge the voice of the Elders with
that of the imagined women.18 For a brief moment, therefore, the chorus
of Elders ventriloquizes two antiphonal female choruses. The passage is
remarkable in at least two ways. Intertextually, the stanza may allude to
and competitively engage with the female chorus of the Phoenician Women
composed by Aeschylus’ predecessor Phrynichus. Generically, moreover,
the passage enacts the polyphony of the dramatic chorus in a particularly
vivid manner that crosses over time, age, and gender. The odes do not reflect
the perspective and ideas of a single entity, albeit a collective one. Rather,
they combine a plurality of perspectives and voices, weaving the Elders’
with others’ views into plural, polyphonic and multi-focalized songs.
(d) Slant
The Chorus’ ability to transcend boundaries culminates in its references to
Athenian civic practices that are foreign to the individual Persian characters.
The Chorus’ stichomythic exchange with the Queen in the first episode
demonstrates a precise knowledge, further underscored by her ignorance,
of the Athenian resources in silver (238), hoplite technique (240), and
16 For the concept of “choral projection”, see Henrichs 1994/5: 75.

17 Here and throughout, I quote Persians in the text and translation of Hall 1996.
18 On the distinction between three types of deixis (deixis ad oculos, anaphoric or textual deixis, and
deixis am Phantasma), see Bühler 1934.
democratic government (242). In the first stasimon, the Chorus’ highly
emotional response to the messenger’s news (548–83) is soon followed by
a cold-hearted analysis of the political consequences of the defeat that
is phrased in distinctively Athenian concepts and includes the end of
tribute, abolition of proskynesis, and re-establishment of frank speech
(584–94). Even more remarkably, the abrupt questioning to which the
Chorus submits Xerxes in the final scene is reminiscent of the practice
of frank speech (parrhēsia) that defines Athenian democracy.19 The Elders
angrily list the names of fallen Persians and ask Xerxes where they are
(967–73):
o«oio± <b»a>, poÓ soi FarnoÓcov
%ri»mard»v t' gaq»v;
poÓ d Seulkhv nax
£ L©laiov eÉptwr,
Mmfiv Qrubiv kaª Mas©strav,
%rtembrhv t' d' <Usta©cmav;
tde s' paner»man.
Oioioi – cry it out; where are your Pharnouchos
And noble Ariomardos?
Where lord Seualkes
Or Lilaios of noble birth?
Memphis, Tharybis and Masistras,
Artembares and Hystaichmas?
I put the question to you again.
The catalogue is reminiscent of earlier lists of departing or fallen Persians
(21–58 and 302–30, respectively) but is now embedded in direct interroga-
tive clauses introduced by the interrogative adverb “where” (poÓ, 967 and
969; cf. 956 and 957) that give it an angry significance. Earlier utterances
in the drama construct frank speech as a practice that does not belong
in the Persian Empire. In the first episode, the Queen emphasizes that
Xerxes is not accountable to his subjects (oÉc ËpeÅqunov p»lei, 213). The
limitation of free speech in Persia is forcefully enacted in the Darius scene.
After singing the kletic hymn that constitutes the second stasimon, the
Elders find themselves unable to speak to Darius face to face “on account
of [their] old fear of [him]” (694–6). As a result, most of the conversation
with Darius is performed by the Queen who informs him of the recent
19 On the distinctively Athenian overtones of the Chorus’ criticism of Xerxes, see Kranz 1933: 550,
who viewed it as the poet’s voice, and Broadhead 1960 xxiv–xxvi, who finds it “out of character”;
Broadhead’s phrase perfectly captures the fact that the Chorus cannot be adequately described as a
character only.
disaster and Xerxes’ expedition (703–58). The Chorus’ abrupt questioning
of Xerxes in the final scene therefore represents a strong departure from the
Persian practices described and performed earlier in the play.20 They speak
as Athenian citizens questioning a magistrate rather than as Persian subjects
enthralled by their king. The Chorus’ views of the economic, military and
political implications of the war differentiate it from the royal family and
carry distinctively Athenian resonances.21
In melic poetry, the first-person pronoun is a polysemic signifier whose
shifting meaning depends on whether the chorus speaks to or on behalf of
the community.22 The dramatic chorus of Persians draws on and redefines
that fluidity in the narrative context of Athenian drama.23 In comparison
to the more restricted perspective of the actors, the odes focus on a wide
variety of objects, considering them from various degrees of proximity or
distance, and activating the viewpoint or ideology of different character
groups to whom the choreutai may or may not belong. As a result, seemingly
incompatible ways of thinking, perceiving or reacting, are unified under
the voice of a single performative entity. The parodos juxtaposes prophetic
utterances that correctly sense and already lament the impending Persian
defeat (92–100; 115–25) with some triumphant statements of confidence
and hope in the success of the army (86–91), and sheer ignorance about
the status of the expedition (140–9). The first stasimon combines highly
emotional and graphic close-ups of Persian corpses lacerated by fish (576–
8), images of parents lamenting the death of their offspring (579–83) and
pragmatic considerations involving key concepts in Athenian politics (584–
96). Through the seamless blending of various perspectives into a powerful
song-and-dance performance, the multi-referential chorus complicates and
challenges polar divisions between old and young, male and female, and
Greek and Persian.
A choral plot
The plurality of perspectives described above is not unusual of tragic cho-
ruses, but it is further enhanced by the plot structure of Persians. Besides the
20 For the suggestion that the Chorus’ examination replaces the eÎquna to which Atossa said that
Xerxes was not subject, see Griffith 1998: 125.
21 On the interweaving of Greek and Persian ideas and customs in Aeschylus’ play, see Broadhead
1960: xxx–xxxii and Calame in this volume. Hall 1989: 69–100 by contrast views the Greek/Persian
pair as an unbridgeable polarity.
22 Calame 1977 i: 436–9; D’Alessio 1994, with further bibliography.
23 On the transformations of the melic chorus resulting from its transfer to the dramatic stage, see
Calame 1994/5; Nagy 1994/5b.
war story often thought to be its main topic, Persians thematizes a second
set of events located in Susa and largely centered on the Chorus: the Elders
wait for the return of Xerxes and the army (parodos), hear about the defeat
(first episode), conjure up Darius in an attempt to thwart further losses
(second episode), learn that further woes await the Persians at Plataea (third
episode), confront Xerxes and finally mourn with him (exodos). Unlike the
war story that took place in a distant space and time, the characters in this
choral plot are impersonated by the performers on stage. Its duration –
about an hour – coincides with the duration of the performance. Its loca-
tion, Susa, is the space presented on stage.24
The staged events may be less memorable than the Persian defeat, yet they
still amount to a causal sequence unified by the Chorus’ desire to see the
army back.25 Indeed the Elders’ longing for “the homecoming of the King
and his gold-bedecked army” (8–9) motivates the entrances and exits of the
actors:26 the Queen’s dream narrative amplifies the Chorus’ anxiety; the
messenger’s entrance fulfills their longing for news; the libations poured by
the Queen (624) and the kletic hymn performed by the Elders (634–80) are
motivated by their wish that Darius find a remedy to prevent further losses
(219–25, 521–6, 631–2); and Xerxes’ entrance visually enacts the disaster and
irrevocably sanctions the end of the Chorus’ hopes. While the Elders are
no more than spectators in the war story told in the embedded narratives,
they actively shape the action happening in Susa and represented on stage.
Aeschylus’ extant plays offer at least two other examples of chorus-
centered plots.27 In both Supplices and Eumenides, the chorus’ desire (for
virginity or revenge) triggers and organizes the action of the actors. Supplices
is centered on the Danaids’ hope to escape marriage with their cousins.
The girls flee with their father from Egypt to Argos, successfully beg the
Argive king Pelasgus to give them asylum and resist the herald who attempts
to seize them on the Aegyptids’ behalf: Danaus speaks for his daughters,
Pelasgus helps them, and the herald opposes them.28 Similarly, Eumenides
24 For a full analysis of the narrative structure of Persians, with special attention to its combination
of a war story and a pothos story, see Hopman 2009. Garvie 2009: xxxii–xxxvii similarly points out
that the play is not only concerned with “the tragedy of Persia” (i.e., the war) and that the “tragedy
of Xerxes” is equally important.
25 For desire as a fundamental narrative trigger, see Brooks 1984.
26 On the nostos pattern underlying the staged events, see Taplin 1977: 124–7; Hopman 2009: 362–8.
27 On the central role of the chorus in the plot of Supplices and Eumenides, see Rosenmeyer 1982:
146. Murnaghan 2005 sees that prominence as an inheritance from the early origins of tragedy. By
contrast, Friis Johansen and Whittle 1980 i: 26 and Sommerstein 1996: 153 view it as an innovation.
28 For the terminology of desiring subject, helper, opponent, sender, and receiver, see Greimas 1966:
174–85 and 192–212. For the idea that Danaus is hardly differentiated from the Chorus and may
play the role of a chorēgos to his daughters’ chorus, see Murnaghan 2005.
is structured around the Erinyes’ wish to avenge Clytemnestra’s murder.
The Queen’s ghost urges the Chorus to avenge her death, Orestes seeks to
save his life, Apollo purifies him of the murder and Athena organizes the
trial that leads to his acquittal: Clytemnestra is the sender who prompts the
Chorus to act while Orestes, Apollo and Athena are its opponents. Thus it
is not unusual that the chorus occupy the main plot position in Aeschylean
drama.
Although some critics have dismissed the Persian choreutai as helpless
old men, in fact the comparison with the only other extant Aeschylean
chorus of elders in the Agamemnon brings their performative prominence
to the fore.29 The plays are similar in many ways (Taplin 1977: 125). Both
are nostos plays concerned with the departure of the King. Both feature
a dialogue between a chorus of old men and the Queen, followed by the
arrival of a messenger. Yet while the Argive Elders seem barely tolerated
in the palace, the Persian Elders are directly connected to power and
knowledge. Their close ties to the royal family are underscored by the
recurrence of terms derived from the words p©stiv, “trust” (2, 171, 528,
681) and bouleÅw, “take counsel” (142, 172) in relation to their identity
and function. While the Argive old men provide no self-introduction in
the parodos but immediately launch into a lyric narrative of the Trojan War
(Ag. 40–263), the Persian choreutai confidently highlight their position
in the opening anapests (Pers. 1–7). The Argive Elders associate old age
with lack of strength and compare it to a withered leaf faltering forward
like a dream (Ag. 72–82).30 By contrast, the Persian Elders tie seniority
with authority and invoke their age as the reason why Xerxes entrusted
his domain to them (kat presbe©an, Pers. 4); they only complain that
their long life forces them to hear about the Persian defeat (262–5). The
contrasting self-presentation of both choruses finds a striking confirmation
in their respective interaction with the Queen. While the conversation
between the Argive Elders and Clytemnestra demonstrates the superior
control of the latter, whose network of beacons immediately informed
her of the fall of Troy, the Persian Elders conversely provide Atossa with
information, interpret her dream and tell her about Athens (215–45). The
29 For the Elders as helpless, see Georges 1994: 89 (who calls them “ultimate slaves”), Hall 1996, and
Harrison 2000.
30 On representations of old age, see Falkner 1995. On the relation (or absence thereof ) between the
chorus’ fictional identity and dramatic role, see Foley 2003. For a critique of the assumption that
choruses of elders are normally ineffective, see Dhuga 2005 on the chorus of Oedipus at Colonus
and Hawthorne 2009, who argues that the elders of Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus constitute a
“rhetorical audience” whose approval is sought by the individual characters.
Elders’ comparison with the Agamemnon Chorus highlights their relative
empowerment and potential influence upon the spectators.
The Elders’ active role on stage is memorably encapsulated in the ghost-
rising song, which the god Dionysos of Aristophanes’ Frogs highlights as
one of the two most enjoyable sections of the play (Ran. 1028–9).31 By
conjuring Darius’ ghost, the Elders attempt to act upon their wish to
see the army back. The scene highlights their agency and success. The
Elders take on a strikingly active role by performing the chanting normally
expected from the person pouring libations.32 Their success is stressed by
the many internal references to the difficulty of the task (634–9; 688–
90) and further comes across in contrast with the Choephoroi, where the
kommos sung by Orestes, Electra, and the Chorus ultimately fails to bring
back the dead Agamemnon. The technical language used by the King as he
appears over his funeral mound (qrhne±t’, 686; yucagwgo±v ½rqizontev
g»oiv, 687) emphasizes the ritual correctness of the choral performance.33
The necromantic hymn is also striking for its meta-poetic significance.
Generically, it amounts to a mise en abyme of drama – just as drama gives
new life to people from the heroic age through actor impersonation, so
does the necromancy reverse time and bring the dead back among the
living (Grethlein 2007). The Elders’ awe and speechlessness at Darius’
sight thus enact past, rather than present, relations of power and authority
at the Persian court. The Chorus’ ability to conjure Darius’ ghost through
chanting and beating the ground thus puts it in a position parallel to the
poet’s, whose words and music give a new life to the old myths.
Viewed as a choral drama centered on the Chorus’ desire to see the
army back, Persians culminates in the Chorus’ final confrontation with
Xerxes.34 As the action progresses and makes it clear that the army will not
come back, the Chorus increasingly comes to view Xerxes as the cause of its
frustration and losses. In that respect, the first and second halves of the play
31 On the textual problem raised by the crux ¢kousa per« at Fr. 1028, see Dover 1993 ad loc. On the
excitement generated by the necromancy, see Hall 1996: 151 on 623–80. On the problem of staging
the ghost rising, see Broadhead 1960: 309.
32 Broadhead 1960: 306.
33 As Lawson 1934 emphasizes, it is not necessary to believe with Headlam 1902 that the Chorus has
special magic powers. The necromancy is not a foreign ritual, as Aeschylus’ Psychagogoi and the
archeological evidence assembled in Dakaris 1963 demonstrate. The Chorus’ mention of barbarian
language can be explained by the need that the invocation be performed in Darius’ native tongue.
See Broadhead 1960 on 633–9. On ritual in Aeschylus, see Else 1977.
34 For similar emphasis on the kommos as the dramatic climax of the play and its confrontational
mood, see Garvie 2009: xxxv and on 908–1077. By contrast, scholars who primarily view the play
as a retelling of the Persian expedition treat the encounter between Xerxes and the Elders as an
afterthought (Adams 1952).
offer a striking contrast. Up to and including the messenger speech, the
Elders, the messenger, and the Queen explicitly attribute the (intuited or
witnessed) Persian defeat to the responsibility of a jealous daimōn (92; 354;
472) and implicitly allude to the valor of the Greeks (237–48; 384–407).
By contrast, the second half of the play increasingly highlights Xerxes’
responsibility. In the first stasimon, the Elders tie their grief to Xerxes’
actions and emphasize his responsibility by hammering his name as the
subject of destructive verbs (546–54). In the second episode, Darius further
criticizes Xerxes, attributes the defeat to his son’s mental sickness, and offers
a model of hybris and retribution that emphasizes individual responsibility
(800–31). In the third stasimon, the Elders’ nostalgic evocation of the good
old days of Darius’ rule amounts to an implicit but nevertheless strong
criticism of their current ruler.
Thus the Athenian-like frank speech performed by the Chorus at the
beginning of the final scene belongs with a plot whereby the Elders pro-
gressively identify Xerxes as the cause of their woes. The confrontational
dynamics of the first half of the final scene may have been emphasized in
the staging, with Xerxes standing at one end of the orchestra facing the
Chorus at the other.35 The tense verbal exchange further contrasts the wide
perspective of the Chorus to the narrower approach of the actor. The Cho-
rus cares for the army as a whole (strativ, 918; Àclov, 956); it approaches
the defeat from the political perspective of Persia, now deprived of its pres-
tige (919), and from the even broader ecological perspective of the land
devoid of its offspring (922–30). By contrast, Xerxes’ initial concerns are
emphatically self-centered. First-person pronouns or verbal forms pile up
as the King laments the unexpectedness of his fate, worries about his future,
and wishes for death (909; 912; 931; 974). Xerxes requests that the Elders
lament the reversal of his fate (da©mwn gr Âdì aÔ / mettropov pì mo©
mettropov p' mo©, 942–3), while the Elders reply that they will sing in
honor of the people’s suffering (laopaq, 945). The visual and performa-
tive contrasts between individual actor and collective chorus are mirrored
in their respective concerns.
The beginning of the Xerxes scene thus marks a remarkable reversal in
the Elders’ position in and out of the fiction. The King’s close counselors
have become his violent critics, in which the old men emphatically dressed
in eastern garbs echo the Athenian practice of public examination of the
conduct of officials (euthuna). More strikingly still, the chorus’ confronta-
tion with the Xerxes actor may have mirrored the anger that the Athenians
35 Rehm 2002: 249; Garvie 2009 on 908–1077.
felt at the real-life king for their own human and material losses. Like the
Elders, Aeschylus’ spectators could have used catalogues of names – albeit
Greek rather than Persian names – to blame Xerxes for their own past
and future dead. Through its choral plot, Persians challenges simple ethnic
polarities and partly aligns the Chorus’ position vis-à-vis Xerxes with that
of the Athenian spectators. In this play, the ability of tragic choruses to
speak alternately as poet, fictional characters or spectators becomes a crucial
element of the plot.
Choral closure
The Elders’ collective perspective sustains the conflict with Xerxes but also
brings that confrontation to an end. A turning point in the choral plot
occurs in the third antistrophe of the kommos as Xerxes expresses longing
for his fallen comrades (987–91):
ugg moi dt'
gaqän trwn nakine±v,
<last'> lasta stugn pr»kaka lgwn.
bo bo <moi> melwn ndoqen §tor.
You stir up in me longing
for my noble comrades,
telling of unforgettable – unforgettable – and loathsome evils
beyond evils.
My heart cries out – cries out – from within my limbs.
By expressing concern for the fallen army, Xerxes moves away from a
primarily self-centered lament to an embrace of the collective perspective
of the Chorus. From a plot perspective, he thus leaves the position of
the Chorus’ opponent to become its helper, share its grief and mourn its
losses. Consequently, the Elders’ response immediately changes. The meter
switches from lyric anapests to lyric iambics (1002–78); the antiphonic divi-
sion of strophes between King and Chorus gives way to a sung exchange of
individual lines; the second-person verbs that the Chorus used to question
the King are replaced by verbal forms in the first person plural; the Chorus
stops incriminating Xerxes and mentions unnamed daimones as the cause
for the disaster (1005–7). Subsequently, they renew their allegiance, call
him “master” (dspota, 1049) and escort him to the palace (1078).
That political reconciliation of Elders and King coincides with a generic
shift. The second half of the kommos departs from the differentiation
between chorus and actor characteristic of drama and comes closer to
the integrated relation of chorus and chorēgos that defines melic poetry
(cf. mlov, 1042).36 Xerxes virtually takes on the role of a melic chorus-
leader as he leads the Elders’ song and dance. He offers musical directions
emphasizing the high pitch (1050; 1058) and the antiphonal nature of
the dirge (1040), as well as physical directions instructing the Elders to
walk toward the palace (1036), wave their hands in a rhythmic oar-stroke
(ress’, 1046), tear their beards (1056) and tread softly (brobtai, 1073).
Although the choreography of the kommos is irretrievably lost for us, Xerxes’
intimation that the Chorus “proceed towards the palace” (pr¼v d»mouv
d' qi, 1038) probably suggests, as Edith Hall points out, that the Cho-
rus begins to arrange itself around or behind him.37 The wail otototoi at
line 1042 is probably delivered simultaneously by Xerxes and the Chorus
(cf. ¾moÓ tiqe©v, 1042). Hence the funeral procession of the thrēnos mirrors
the procession of the departing army described in the parodos (propom-
pän, 1036) and brings closure to the performance. Xerxes is reintegrated
into the community, albeit as chief mourner rather than military leader.38
The conflict between Chorus and King ends in a thrēnos jointly sung and
led by the protagonist.
Athenian drama offers several parallels for that sequence of antagonism
and reconciliation between chorus and actor. In Aeschylus’ Eumenides,
the Erinyes, furious to have been superseded by younger gods, ventilate
their rage and curse the land until Athena integrates them into the polis.
As in Persians, that sequence of conflict and conciliation is performed
musically. In the first epirrhematic exchange between Athena and the
Chorus, the Chorus curses Athens in strophes and antistrophes, while
Athena reasons in iambic trimeters (Eum. 778–891). By contrast, after a
transitional stichomythia between Athena and the koryphaios (Eum. 892–
915), the Erinyes accept Athena’s offer and bless the land in a second
epirrhema whose strophes and antistrophes include both some choral lyrics
and some anapests uttered by Athena (Eum. 916–1031). In that exchange,
Athena refers anaphorically to the lyrics of the Chorus (948 td’; cf. 927
36 It has long been recognized that the final part of the exodos is a formal thrēnos. Xerxes’ choregic role
was already emphasized by Kaimio 1970: 25–6 and 219; see also Swift 2010: 328. However, neither
of these scholars discusses the implications of that generic shift for the dramatic plot.
37 Hall 1996: 175 ad loc. For a survey of contemporary attempts to reconstruct tragic dancing, see Ley
2003.
38 It is difficult to assess whether Xerxes’ integration among the Chorus also involves a renewal of his
royal authority. The question largely depends on non-textual signifiers like Xerxes’ costume, which
the play repeatedly associates with his kingly status (Thalmann 1980). Since the script does not
allude to the Queen’s re-entrance with a new robe for Xerxes, I find it more likely that the drama
ends with Xerxes in rags (Taplin 1977: 121–2) and thus highlights his new identity as chief mourner
rather than king. For a different view, see Avery 1964.
and 968) as if she were acting as their chorēgos. In other words, Chorus and
actor now complement rather than compete against one another (Scott
1984: 132). Subsequently, the play and the trilogy end in a grandiose finale
arranged by Athena (1021–47) whereby the Erinyes are integrated into a
larger chorus including the Areopagites, Athena, sacrificial victims, and
female attendants.39 The seemingly unending sequence of murder and
revenge in the house of Atreus finds closure in the integrative quality of a
choral song.40
That capacity of dramatic choruses to challenge and subsequently rein-
tegrate the protagonist is further illustrated in Aristophanic comedy.41 In
both Wasps (422 bce) and Lysistrata (411 bce), a chorus initially hostile to
the hero is won over after the agōn; both plays end in a revelry whereby one
or more actors become the chorus leader. In Wasps, the chorus of jurors
initially opposes Bdelycleon’s attempt to reform his father from his addic-
tion to law courts, but switches side after the agōn. The comedy ends in a
revelry (kōmos) featuring the Chorus, Philocleon, and the dancer Carcinus
and his sons; at the Chorus’ request, Carcinus becomes chorēgos and leads
the choreutai out of the orchestra. Similarly in Lysistrata, the half-chorus
of old men is initially hostile to the women’s attempt to end the war but
eventually reconciles itself with its female counterpart to form a single cho-
rus (Lys. 1043–71) – the final scene features Athenian and Spartan delegates
singing hymns in turn and leading the choral dance.
An even closer parallel for the dynamics of the Xerxes scene comes
from the 425 bce Acharnians. Dicaeopolis’ private treaty with Sparta leads
him into a conflict with the chorus of belligerent Acharnians but their
antagonism disappears after the agōn (Ach. 204–625). As in the Xerxes
scene, the conflict and dramatic division between actor and chorus dissolves
in the final choral song led by the protagonist. Dicaeopolis introduces the
refrain “hail the champion!” (tnella kall©nikov, 1227 and 1231), which
is then taken up by the koryphaios (1228, 1230) and the entire chorus
(1233). Like Xerxes, Dicaepolis now leads the dance and organizes the
procession (pesqe, Ach. 1231), while the Chorus follows him (y»mesqa,
1232). Structurally, therefore, the thrēnos that closes off Persians works as
a tragic equivalent for the comic kōmoi. The kōmoi use joyful exuberance
39 For the reconstruction of the final procession, see Sommerstein 1989: 275–8 on 1021–47, who
calculates that 35 performers were on stage at that point.
40 On the semantic relevance of the final procession to the progression of the Oresteia, see Taplin 1977:
415.
41 On the sequence of choral rivalry and revelry in Aristophanic comedy, see RE s.v. Aristophanes
(Gelzer).
and the thrēnos sorrow to close off the previous conflict between chorus
and protagonist.
Strikingly, three of the examples of choral reconciliation discussed above
also encourage the audience to join the final song, as if the inclusive capacity
of the choral medium extended from the choreutai through the actor(s)
to the spectators. The chorus of Wasps explicitly invites the audience to
take part in the revelry and “cry ooh” (Vesp. 1526–7). The final song of
Acharnians, which is not transmitted in the manuscript tradition, is likely
to have been an Olympic victory-hymn attributed to Archilochus (fr. 119
Bergk = fr. spur. West) and thus familiar to the audience (Sommerstein
1983: 215). Most strikingly, the ending of Eumenides fuses the fiction with the
present of the performance (see also Grethlein, this volume). As the Erinyes
don red robes similar to the outfit worn by metics at the Great Panathenaia
and the procession as a whole is modeled on the Panathenaiac procession
(Headlam 1906), the Chorus becomes part of a community extending
beyond the stage to the audience (Rehm 2002: 97). Consequently, it is
likely that, as Alan Sommerstein suggests, the audience was invited to
join into the song:42 pandame© (1039) is too broad to refer only to the
Areopagites, and the second utterance of the refrain ½lolÅxate nÓn pª
molpa±v (1047), which is also the final line of the trilogy, makes it possible
for the entire audience to join in. In all three plays, deictic allusions to
the extra-fictional world dissolve the boundary between performers and
spectators. The fiction spills over the world of spectators and gives way to
a ritual in which the spectators are invited to take part.
The inclusiveness of those choral songs can be explained through the
findings of comparative anthropology. Generically, an actor-led choral song
signals the recession of the narrative or descriptive function of drama and
the foregrounding of its ritual aspects. The performers are still wearing
masks, but the fiction spills over the here-and-now of the audience to
produce a sort of hybrid between the fiction of drama and the ritual of
melic poetry. Such a combination is therefore conducive to generating
among actor, chorus and audience the kind of “solidarity without con-
sensus” that anthropologists have highlighted as a distinctive feature of
ritual.43
42 Sommerstein 1989: 286 on 1047: “the Oresteia ends with a united cry of triumphant joy from over
ten thousand mouths as all Athens hails the birth of a new era.”
43 See the classic statement in Fernandez 1965: 912: “ritual can achieve integration on the social level
of interaction, between participants who on the cultural level – the ideological level of beliefs,
rationales, interpretation of symbols – in fact, lack consensus.” For an application of the notion of
solidarity without consensus to Athenian drama, see Griffith 2002.
There were of course important differences between tragic and comic
choruses. Comic choruses were larger and tended to step out of their
fictional role more often than their tragic counterparts, most famously in
the parabasis. Since comedies were performed at the Great Dionysia since
486 bce, however, it seems likely that the dynamics of one genre influenced
the audience’s experience of the other. Most importantly, the choral closures
discussed above depend on features – the contrast between the collective
chorus and the individual actors, and the chorus’ intermediate position
between actors and spectators – that generally defined Athenian drama
throughout the fifth century.44 As far as choral closures are concerned,
therefore, Aristophanic comedy may shed light on Aeschylean tragedy.
The endings of Eumenides, Wasps, and Acharnians are thus important
witnesses of what dramatic choruses could do for their audiences, and
what may be at work in Persians. Among other things, they show that
final songs that marked the end of a conflict between chorus and actor
were especially conducive to audience participation, and that audience
participation could be further encouraged through deictic pointers and
memorable refrains. Against that horizon of expectations, a possible effect
of the Xerxes scene was to invite the audience to notionally if not literally
join the final thrēnos. Onomatopeic repetitions make the lament easy to
join in and memorable enough for Dionysos to echo the choral exclamation
«w (Pers. 1071 and 1072) in the 405 bce Frogs (ìIauo±, Ra. 1029). Moreover,
like the exodoi in Acharnians and Eumenides, the ending of Persians tends
to break down the dramatic illusion. As the choreutai depart and tramp
the ground of the orchestra, they complain that ‘the Persian earth is hard
to tread” (Persªv a²a dÅsbatov, 1070 and 1074). In other words, the
Elders mention the Persian land while physically pointing at the ground
of the theater of Dionysos. The deixis thus merges the dramatic space set
in Susa with the scenic space of the theater, itself grounded in the reflexive
space of the Athenian landscape (Rehm 2002: 20–5 and 250). As the actor
becomes the chorus leader and as the boundaries between fiction and reality
dissolve, the narrative function of drama recedes and its ritual dimension
comes to the fore to encourage “solidarity without consensus” among the
Persian characters and the Athenian audience. While some features of the
thrēnos may have sounded unusual or foreign to the Athenian audience,
as Edith Hall has argued, its position in the choral plot had the potential
to encourage at least some degree of identification between performers
44 For an important discussion of the function and effects of the satyr plays in the Athenian experience
at the Great Dionysia, see Griffith 2002.
and spectators.45 Through the complex handling of the chorus, Persians
exposed its audience to a wide range of contradictory stimuli.
The tragic chorus of Athenian drama is a complex and powerful medium.
As a collective, polymorphic, polyphonic, and multi-focalizing performer,
it can interweave a variety of perspectives crossing over the barriers of
ethnicity, age, and gender. Unlike the viewpoint of the protagonists, the
chorus’ perspective is not limited by its fictional identity but can embrace
the views of other communities or even the anonymous and boundless
truth of gnomic utterances. Furthermore, its generic continuity with melic
choruses allows it to entertain various relations with the protagonist, rang-
ing from opposition to inclusion. Just as a ballet soloist can dance with or
independently from the corps de ballet, so can the protagonists of Greek
drama oppose, concur with, or lead the dramatic chorus.
Persians takes full advantage of those possibilities to complicate and chal-
lenge the binary opposition between Greeks and Persians both within and
outside of the fiction. The Elders are ostentatiously dressed in eastern garbs
and emphatically introduce themselves in relation to their ethnic identity,
yet they also offer a range of perspectives on the war that goes beyond
their identity as royal counselors to embrace the more marginal voices of
women in the Persian empire and even echo some Athenian political con-
cepts. That pluralized view of Persians as an ethnic group is epitomized in
the initial tension of the final scene, which exposes the divergence of the
Chorus’ and the King’s respective concerns.46 Furthermore, the evidence
provided by later Athenian plays suggests that such sequences of conflict
and reconciliation between chorus and actor(s) often encouraged the audi-
ence to join in the final song. By constructing its polyphonic chorus as
a temporary opponent to Xerxes, Persians opened to the Athenians the
possibility to mourn with the Persian characters.
45 For the lament as an un-Athenian, effeminizing song that constitutes the climax in the play’s
Orientalizing strategy, see Hall 1996 on 908–1078. Hall’s argument rests on the idea that Athenian
mourning practices had been effectively restricted by Solon’s legislation and that laments were
normally sung by women in fifth-century Athens.
46 By contrast, on the role of simplifying stereotypes in Orientalism, see Said 2000.
chapter 4
Choral intertemporality in the Oresteia

Jonas Grethlein
One of the most salient aspects of the chorus in Greek tragedy is its
mediation between the play and the audience. Schlegel’s view of the cho-
rus as ‘ideal spectator’ has recently been taken up and refined by Claude
Calame, who argues that, besides embodying a specific group in the dra-
matic action, the chorus also merges the voices of the author and the
audience.1 The mediation between the actors and the audience is obvi-
ous in the spatial position of the choreutai who, after the parodos, come
to stand in the orchestra. Here, between the stage and the theatron, they
sing, dance and follow the dramatic action. In this paper, I would like
to turn to time and argue that, though less obviously than space, time is
also crucial to the mediating function of the chorus. It is a commonplace
that tragedy brings together a heroic past with the democratic present.2
While ‘heroic vagueness’ marks the time of the action as different from the
present of the performance,3 ‘zooming-devices’ establish links to the world
of the spectators.4 The distance of the heroic world as well as polyphony
allows tragedy to negotiate issues controversial in the polis of Athens. At
first sight, the chorus, often representing marginal groups5 and using the
Doric of Greek lyric in their songs, may seem to distance the action from
The Greek text of Aeschylus follows West 1998; the English text is based on Lattimore’s translation in
Grene 1953. I wish to thank Marianne Hopman and Renaud Gagné for their stimulating comments
and suggestions.
1 Calame 1999, and in this volume.
2 For a classic formulation of this position, see Vernant 1988.
3 On the term ‘heroic vagueness’, see Easterling 1997b, who in an earlier article emphasises the
avoidance of anachronisms in Greek tragedy (1985).
4 The term ‘zooming-device’ was coined by Sourvinou-Inwood 1989. To give an example: in the
Aeschylean Supplices, the assembly mentioned by Pelasgus, particularly the vote by show of hand
(604, 607, 621) is strongly reminiscent of democratic Athens and ‘the ruling hand of the people’
(dmou kratoÓsa ce©r, 604) even seems to allude to the word dhmokrat©a. The heroic past is
thereby linked to the presence of the performance.
5 This is emphasised by Gould 2001 [1996]. See also, however, Foley 2003 on the fluidity of choral
identity.
78
Choral intertemporality in the Oresteia 79
the world of the audience. At the same time, the ‘song culture’6 of ancient
Greece provides the audience with a frame in which choral songs have direct
significance. In exploring the complex temporality of the Greek chorus, I
would like to show that the choral odes contribute much to the dialogue
between past and present enacted in tragedy, that intertemporality is an
important aspect of the chorus’ mediation.
My test-case will be the four songs of the chorus in Aeschylus’ Agamem-
non, complemented by the central stasimon of the Choephoroi and the
ending of the Eumenides. The songs of the Agamemnon illustrate that,
engaging in anachronies, the chorus set up a panopticon in which various
levels of time intersect with one another (I). Through general reflections,
the choreutai create a horizon of meaning that extends this panopticon to
the present of the performance (II). The first stasimon of the Choephoroi
and the ending of the Eumenides show further aspects of choral intertempo-
rality, the former that choral songs can serve as a mise en abyme: the relation
between the dramatic action and myths invoked by the chorus mirrors the
relation between the present of the performance and the past enacted on
stage (III). At the end of the Eumenides, the special temporality of rit-
ual makes the time of the play merge with the time of the performance
(IV). Despite its traditional form, the chorus is crucial to the dialogue
between ‘heroic vagueness’ and democratic present staged in the theatre of
Dionysos (V).
I. Anachronies: a panopticon of times past, present and future

In a first step, I wish to demonstrate the temporal complexity of choral song
concerning the sequence of its narrative. A dense net of anachronies, both
to the past and the future, some explicit, others implicit, evokes different
times to be seen in light of one another. The singing of the choreutai
transcends the present of the action and delimits time. Given its length
and richness, the parodos of the Agamemnon will be at the core of my
exploration, but also the first and second odes furnish good examples for
this aspect of choral intertemporality.
The parodos of the Agamemnon is the longest and arguably most complex
choral song in extant tragedy. The dense metaphors and riddles have given
scholars many a headache. The embedding of two long direct speeches,
by Calchas and Agamemnon, is unique.7 Particularly complex is the ode’s
6 Herington 1985: 3.
7 On direct speech in choral odes, see Bers 1997: ch. 1; Fletcher 1999: 31–2; Rutherford 2007: 17.
80 Jonas Grethlein
temporal organisation on which I shall focus for the purposes of this paper,
but let me first sketch its content: In the first, anapaestic part of the parodos,
the chorus starts with the Greek expedition to Troy, which is envisaged in an
extended vulture simile (40–67). The statement that no form of sacrifice
can turn away a fated end (68–71) leads the old Argives to a reflection
on their own age which has made them childlike and prevented them
from joining the expedition (72–82). They then address Clytaemnestra,
inquiring about the reason for the sacrifices which are being made (83–
103). The lyrical part of the parodos, probably starting with the arrival of
the choreutai in their place in the orchestra, consists metrically of three
parts which do not exactly map onto the structure at the level of content.
In a dactylo-iambic triad (104–59), the chorus returns to the topic of the
Trojan expedition and reports the omen at Aulis, two eagles feasting on a
pregnant hare, which Calchas interpreted as a prediction of the capture of
Troy, while also alerting the Greeks to the wrath of Artemis. The first three
of four trochaic stanzas contain the so-called Hymn to Zeus, a reflection
on the power of the highest god (160–83). A fourth trochaic stanza and
three pairs of iambic-choriambic stanzas are then devoted to the narration
of the sacrifice of Iphigenia and conclude the song with a reflection on the
opaqueness of the future (184–257).
Seen as a whole, the parodos offers a chronological account of the depar-
ture of the Greek army to Troy. From the perspective of the characters, the
chorus looks back to their past; if we view the action as taking place
in ‘heroic vagueness’, then the chorus engages with a past embedded
in the past, a ‘plu-past’.8 Interspersed with the report are comments of
the choreutai on their present, as on their own old age (72–82) and on the
sacrifices of Clytaemnestra (83–103), and general reflections, namely on the
use of sacrifices (68–71), on the power of Zeus (160–83) and, finally, on
the impossibility of divining the future (250–7). This entangling of the
past with the present9 comes to the fore in the speech of Calchas which
is punctuated by the refrain alinon alinon e«p, t¼ dì eÔ niktw (139)
[sing sorrow, sorrow: but good win out in the end].10 Whereas the speech
belongs to the past, the deictic centre of the refrain is in the present.
In addition to this switching between past and present, several
anachronies are embedded in the chronological account of the Greeks’
8 On the idea of a ‘plu-past’, see the contributions to Grethlein and Krebs 2012, which explore the
‘plu-past’ in ancient historiography.
9 Cf. Court 1994: 183, who speaks of a ‘Schwebezustand’. See also Duchemin 1974: 123.
10 On this refrain, see Moritz 1979: 196 that the two-sidedness is highly apt to reflect ‘an ambivalent
situation in which the proportion of good to evil remains uncertain, and any good will almost
certainly comes at the price of some ill’.
departure.11 The pathos of Iphigenia’s death, for example, is heightened by
an analepsis to dinner-parties at Argos in which she participated. Iphige-
nia’s joyful singing at Argos contrasts with her enforced silence at Aulis
(245: aÉd 238: naÅd mnei), and the image of a proper feast, first
sacrifice, then dinner to be followed by a paian which would lead to drink-
ing, highlights the perversion of the sacrifice as which Iphigenia’s death is
envisaged. In implying the word ‘bull’, the very rare adjective taÅrwtov
(245) evokes the victim of proper sacrifices as a contrast. The flashback
evokes a past even previous to the ‘plu-past’ embedded in the heroic past,
three levels of past being grafted upon one another.
More striking than this analepsis are leaps into the future. They can be
divided into external and internal prolepses.12 While the former refer to
events that, at least from the perspective of the chorus, are still to come,
the latter constitute a future past, a time that is future at the level of the
‘plu-past’, but already past for the chorus. The devouring of the pregnant
hare by the two eagles is interpreted by Calchas as an omen predicting the
fall of Troy (122–30). Ironically, this event is not only future for the Greeks
at Aulis, but is also envisaged as future by the Argive elders, although it has
just taken place. The audience already knows from the prologue that Troy
has been captured, news that the chorus is going to learn in the epeisodion
following upon the parodos.
Calchas predicts a further event which is a future past for the chorus
(131–8):
o²on m tiv ga qe»qen knef-
s protupn st»mion mga Tro©av
stratwqn. ok<t> gr p©fqonov *rtemiv gn
ptano±sin kusª patr¼v
aÉt»tokon pr¼ l»cou mogern ptka quomnoisin,
stuge± d de±pnon a«etän.
Only let no doom of the gods darken
upon this huge iron forged to curb Troy –
from inward. Artemis the undefiled
is angered with pity
at the flying hounds of her father
eating the unborn young in the hare and the shivering mother.
She is sick at the eagles’ feasting.
Calchas goes on to elaborate on Artemis’ care for young animals (140–4)
and appeals to Apollo to ‘remedy’ the Greeks when Artemis is calling for
a ‘second sacrifice unholy, untasted’ (150–1), which turns out to be the
11 For a closer look at the temporal structure of 184–217, see Barrett 2007: 262–3.
12 On external and internal prolepses, see Genette 1972: 109.
82 Jonas Grethlein
killing of Iphigenia, narrated by the chorus after the Hymn to Zeus. In this
second part of Calchas’ omen, the entanglement of different levels of time
is particularly complex and has not failed to puzzle scholars. The killing
of the pregnant hare adumbrates the future capture of Troy, especially the
atrocities committed against the young, but nonetheless arouses Artemis’
anger against the Atridae in the present and seems to necessitate the sacrifice
of Iphigenia before the event signified by the omen has taken place. Present
and future are tightly interwoven, partly in a causal, partly in a non-causal
way. Semiotically speaking, the bird omen works as an indexical as well as
an iconic sign.13 Through similarity, the killing of a hare by two eagles refers
to the capture of Troy by the two Atridae (icon). At the same time, the
feasting upon a pregnant hare angers Artemis who can only be appeased by
the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter. The bird sign is linked to the death
of Iphigenia in a cause–effect relation and is therefore also indexical.14 If
we assume that what the omen iconically signifies, that is, the fall of Troy,
is the cause of its indexical significance, namely the sacrifice of Iphigenia,
then causality is reversed, a later event causing an earlier one.
The semiotic complexity is heightened if we also take into account the
first occurrence of birds in the parodos. Scholars have not failed to notice
the correspondence between the eagle omen and the simile of the vultures
in the anapaestic part of the parodos (49–59):15
tr»pon a«gupiän o¯tì kpat©oiv lgesi pa©dwn
†Ìpatoi† lecwn strofodinoÓntai
pterÅgwn retmo±sin ress»menoi,
demniotrh p»non ½rtal©cwn ½lsantevá
Ìpatov dì ¹wn ¢ tiv %p»llwn £ Pn £ ZeÆv
o«wn»qroon g»on ½xub»an tände meto©kwn
Ëster»poinon pmpei parabsin ìErinÅn.
. . . as eagles stricken in agony
for young perished, high from the nest
eddy and circle
to bend and sweep of the wings’ stroke,
lost far below
the fledglings, the nest, and the tendance.
Yet someone hears in the air, a god,
13 I here draw on Peirce’s concept of signs: an icon denotes an object by virtue of similarity, e.g. a
portrait resembles the person portrayed; an index denotes an object through an actual connection
as for example smoke derives from fire; in a third category, called symbol, the denotation is based
on convention.
14 On Artemis’ anger, see Peradotto 1969: 240–2; Gantz 1983: 73 with further literature.
15 E.g. Lebeck 1971: 8.
Apollo, Pan, or Zeus, the high
thin wail of these sky-guests, and drives
late to its mark
the Fury upon the transgressors.
What I find striking is the direction of the semiotic process: first, the
birds serve as a metaphor for the Atridae; then, they leave the discourse
of language and become a sign in extra-linguistic reality, the bird omen,
which finally transcends its status as mere signifiant when it angers Artemis
and leads to the sacrifice of Iphigenia. In the course of the three stages, the
sign arrogates to itself more and more the character of something real –
a sign, it seems, is more than a sign.16 Not only does time make the
process of signification unstable, but the border between signifiant and
signifié, between sign and reality, between language and world becomes
blurred.17
The simile of the vultures deserves closer attention. Several scholars have
pointed out that the killing of the nestlings corresponds not so much to the
abduction of Helen, who is called a polunwr gun (62),18 as to the killing
of Iphigenia.19 Building upon this observation, Ferrari has elaborated on the
polysemy of the simile.20 She argues that demniotrh p»non ½rtal©cwn
½lsantev (54) can be taken to mean ‘having destroyed the labor of nurture
spent over the nestlings’, adumbrating the death of Iphigenia. g»ov, the
lament over dead, ties in badly with the abduction of Helen who is still
alive. Moreover, she notes, in late archaic and classical Greece it is limited
to women, just as qromai, which figures in o«wn»qroon (56), is only
applied to female voices. While not matching the tenor of the Atridae,
the female articulation of lament evokes the choruses of the Choephoroi
and Eumenides who are, just as the vultures, both called mtoikoi (Cho.
970–1; Eum. 1011). If we follow Ferrari’s reading, then, besides representing
the Trojan expedition, the vulture simile also alludes to the sacrifice of
Iphigenia, the murder of Agamemnon, Orestes’ revenge and his chase by
the Erinyes.
The significance of metaphorical speech for choral intertemporality is
also highlighted by the lion parable in the second stasimon. In the first
antistrophe, the chorus sings that the wedding song for Helen at Troy was
16 This may be fruitfully compared with the carpet scene which has raised the question whether or
not Agamemnon is punished for stepping on the carpet. In itself, the stepping on the carpet may
be harmless, but it is ominous as a sign for transgression.
17 See Peradotto 1969 on cledonomancy in the Oresteia. 18 Cf. Ferrari 1997: 30.
19 Owen 1952: 65–6; Peradotto 1969: 13; Lebeck 1971: 8–9. 20 Ferrari 1997: 30–5.
84 Jonas Grethlein
transformed into a dirge. In the second strophic pair (717–36),21 the chorus
presents as a foil for this the parable of a lion cub which was reared in a
house with much love. Once grown up, the lion cub carried out a bloody
massacre:
This thing they raised in their house was blessed
by God to be priest of destruction. (735–6)
Many temporal layers can be found in the lion parable, the polysemy of
which was elucidated by Knox in 1952. The chorus introduces the parable
as a foil to Helen, who was welcomed and adored by the Trojans, but
then caused them havoc. At the same time, some elements of the parable
invite the recipient to see in the lion cub also a cypher for other members
of the royal family whose heraldic device was the lion. For example, the
reference to marriage ceremonies in the phrase n bi»tou protele©oiv
(720) suits Menelaus better than Paris, and indeed Helen brought not only
the Trojans, but also the Argives much ruin.22 Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra
and Aegisthus are all called lions somewhere in the trilogy and fit the bill
of the parable in one way or another.
Most strikingly, however, the parable not only blends together various
events in the past, but it also extends to the future. It is Orestes who
corresponds most closely to the lion cub. His nurture is referred to several
times in the trilogy;23 as a matricide ‘he showed forth with time the character
of his parents’ (727–8); and the words glakton and fil»maston (718–
19) will resonate both with Clytaemnestra’s dream of breastfeeding a serpent
which she had born (Cho. 526–9) and with her attempt to soften her son by
baring her breast and reminding him of her nurture (Cho. 896–8). Thus,
what for the chorus is an analepsis, an old story which highlights the past
of the Atridae, works simultaneously for the audience as a prolepsis to a
future still unknown to the chorus. The parable superimposes not only
various past events, but also refers to the future. Together with the vulture
simile in the parodos, the lion parable illustrates that metaphorical speech
is particularly conducive to intertemporality. Like prophecies and signs,
metaphors are highly polysemic and thereby lend themselves to bringing
together various events.
Returning to the parodos, what can we conclude about the intertempo-
rality of choral song? The chorus emphasises its authority to narrate the
Greek expedition to Troy (104–7):
21 Whereas the third and fourth strophic pairs consist mainly of iambics, the second pair is metrically
more complex, combining glyconics, pherecreteans, lecythia and priapeans with dactylic half-verses.
Cf. Fraenkel 1950: 328.
22 Cf. Knox 1952: 19. 23 Cf. Knox 1952: 23.
kÅri»v e«mi qroe±n Âdion krtov asion ndrän
ktelwn – ti gr qe»qen katapneÅei
peiqÛ, molpn lkn, xÅmfutov a«Ûn . . .
I have mastery yet to chant the wonder at the wayside
given to kings. Still by God’s grace there surges within me
singing magic
grown to my life and power . . .
Besides this claim and the metrical form of the passage – the numerous
hexameters and the prominence of dactyls –, the embedding of direct
speeches and the use of the Homeric vulture simile evoke the image of an
epic bard; in some respects, however, the narrative power of the chorus
is also reminiscent of that of a seer like Calchas in the Iliad, ‘who knew
all things that were, the things to come and the things past’ (Il. 1.70), or
like Cassandra who will later go through both the past and future of the
Atridae.24 Besides inserting references to the present into the account of the
departure of the Greeks, the choreutai present the past as a panopticon in
which various levels of time are tangled up with each other. While stressing
the opaqueness of the future, they nonetheless play with the ‘future past’
and, what is more, their words unwittingly adumbrate what is still to come.
The indeterminacy of language and dissemination of meaning through
signs raise the temporal complexity of the parodos. The various murders
in the regal family of Argos, past and future ones, are projected one over
another and reveal the merciless logic which underlies the lethal chain.
A similar panopticon in which various times are made to intersect is
set up in the first stasimon of the Agamemnon (355–488). This ode follows
upon a conversation in which Clytaemnestra explains the significance of
the beacon signs to the chorus and precedes the arrival of a messenger from
Troy. This position firmly embeds it in the tension between confidence
and insecurity that characterises the chorus in the Agamemnon. The chorus
starts in anapaests with an invocation of Zeus and Night who have wreaked
havoc on Troy (355–69). The following lyrical part consists by and large
of iambics, thereby formally harking back to the account of Iphigenia’s
sacrifice in the last three strophic pairs of the parodos. In an extended gnomic
section (369–98), the old Argives stress that the gods do not pass over crimes
(369–73). Who aims too high, will fall, whereas the wise one will content
himself with little (374–80). Wealth provides no protection for those who
violate the rules of Zeus (381–4), but sinners are invariably brought down
24 Rutherford 2007: 3 rightly contrasts ‘the chorus’s partial and uncertain exploration of the past,
characterised by doubt and anxiety’ with ‘the clear vision of the prophetess Cassandra into past
and future’. However, the extended references to both future and past align the chorus with the
prophetess who, as Rutherford admits, expresses her insights in rather unclear terms.
86 Jonas Grethlein
by Atē and her child Peithō (385–7). A coin simile underscores that crimes
do not remain undiscovered and leads to the final point that the gods
are unmoved by the prayers of sinners (387–98). These general reflections
are then illustrated by the case of Paris (399–408). After the abduction
of Helen, proftai announced the sorrows of Menelaus, missing his
wife (408–26). The choreutai (or the proftai) add the sorrows of the
Greeks who, shattered by the deaths in the ensuing war (427–47), have
started criticising the Atridae (448–57). This leads to a second gnomic
section stating that the gods do not overlook success built upon injustice.
Therefore the chorus wants neither to sack cities nor to be sacked (458–74).
In the epode, the Argives call into question the reliability of the news about
the fall of Troy (475–87).
Commentators have emphasised the change in the mood of the chorus.
They first present confidently the fall of Troy as the divine punishment of
Paris, but in the end, after elaborating on the opposition against the Atri-
dae, cast doubts on whether Clytaemnestra’s interpretation of the signs is
correct.25 This wavering of the Argives between confidence and doubts con-
verges with the blending of different times into one another that gives the
ode an intricate temporal structure. The reflection on divine punishment
in the first gnomic section is marked as a foil to the abduction of Helen
(399: o³ov kaª Priv). Lebeck has argued that at the same time it refers
to Agamemnon.26 While I am not entirely convinced that for example
pne»ntwn me±zon £ dika©wv (376) contains an echo of the winds at Aulis, I
agree that the implications of the first gnomic section for Agamemnon are
made clear at the end of the ode, particularly by the second gnomic section.
Both the preceding verses on the anger of the Greeks against the Atridae
and the following wish neither to sack a city nor to be sacked27 indicate
that the second gnomic section is meant to shed light on Agamemnon.
Simultaneously, it echoes the first gnomic section and thereby bears out
the similarities between Agamemnon and Paris: ‘The gods fail not to mark
those who have killed many’ (461–2) reworks the point that the gods pun-
ish mortals ‘who trampled down the delicacy of things inviolable’ (371–2).
The suspicion against too much success (468–9) echoes the warning against
excess (376–80). The thunderbolt of Zeus (469–70) is reminiscent of the
bolt which Zeus shot at Paris (363–6). Moreover, at the verbal level, lk
25 E.g. Goldhill 1984: 48. See also Fletcher 1999: 32–3, who argues that ‘the chorus first presents the
war in epic terms, then in more realistic terms’ (33).
26 Cf. Lebeck 1971: 37–44; Gantz 1983: 79 n. 46. See, however, the critique by Fletcher 1999: 34 with
n. 16.
27 The excessive praise in 468–9 anticipates the honours soon to be bestowed on Agamemnon by
Clytaemnestra. 472 ptolip»rqhv will be echoed in 782.
(467) takes up palxiv (381), neu d©kav (464) dikaiwqe©v (393) and trib
(465) tr©b (391).28 In leaving aside the temporal and causal link between
the fates of Paris and Agamemnon, the chorus unveils a deeper level of
significance which aligns the two opponents with one another.
Like the parodos, the first stasimon also contains a direct speech, namely
the comment of the proftai. Besides the question of whether the speak-
ers are in a marked sense ‘prophets’ or, as I think is more likely, ‘spokesmen’
in a general sense,29 discussion has focused on the extension of the speech.
The minimalist approach taken by Wilamowitz restricts the speech to the
exclamation in the first two lines,30 others have it end after the prediction
of the rule of a phantom (414–15),31 most also include the reflection on
statues and dreams (416–26):
eÉm»rfwn d kolossän
cqetai criv ndr©á
½mmtwn dì n chn©aiv
rrei psì frod©ta.
½neir»fantoi d penqmonev
preisi d»xai frousai crin mata©aná
mtan gr, eÔtì n sql tiv dokän ¾rn,
parallxasa di cerän bbaken Àyiv, oÉ meqÅsteron
ptero±v ½padoÓsì Ìpnou keleÅqoiv.
Her images in their beauty
are bitterness to her lord now
where in the emptiness of eyes
all passion has faded.
Shining in dreams the sorrowful
memories pass; they bring him
vain delight only.
It is vain, to dream and to see splendors,
and the image slipping from the arms’ embrace
escapes, not to return again,
on wings drifting down the ways of sleep.
Lucia Athanassaki even argues that the speech extends until 455, therefore
taking the sorrows of the Greeks as the object of a prediction.32 Instead of
making a case for any of these suggestions, I would rather emphasise the
vagueness of the extension of the speech which leads to a blending of the
28 Two further echoes link the Greek opposition towards the Atridae to Menelaus’ sorrow about the
abduction of Helen: eÎmorfoi (454) eÉm»rfwn (416); s±g tiv (449) sigv (412).
29 For the bibliography see Fletcher 1999: 34–5, who also opts for the translation ‘speakers’.
30 Wilamowitz 1914b.
31 Murray 1955 in his text; Thomson 1966: ad loc.; Lattimore 1953 in his translation. See also Campbell
1906 who uses the end of the strophe in 419 as demarcation of the direct speech.
32 Athanassaki 1993/4.
88 Jonas Grethlein
voices of the proftai with the voice of the chorus. The proftai as
well as the chorus could elaborate on Helen’s phantom governing Argos,
the insufficiency of statues as a replacement of the beloved and the fleeting
nature of dreams. Athanassaki’s argument is not entirely cogent, but if
we are willing to accept the futurity of several present tense forms without
further marking,33 then it cannot be ruled out that even what the communis
opinio takes to be a description by the chorus of the status quo is a prediction
of the proftai. The vagueness of the extension of the speech also blurs
the boundaries between different times.34 Depending on the voice, the same
words can be a description in the present or an analepsis or a prolepsis. Just
as in the case of Paris and Agamemnon the similarity between their deeds,
here the ambiguity of voice blends past and present into one another.
To sum up: in the first three choral songs of the Agamemnon, anachronies
invoke past and future events that illuminate the present situation and
resonate with each other. Some anachronies are full-fledged narratives like
the report of the Greek departure in the parodos, some, for example the lion
simile in the second stasimon, are only encapsulated in metaphors which
through their highly polysemic character are very conducive to establishing
intertemporality. Taken together, the anachronies embed the action in a
broad temporal horizon, presenting a panopticon which refracts various
levels of the heroic past.
II. General reflections: blurring the borderline between

past and present
The panopticon set up by the chorus is not limited to the heroic past, but
also extends to the present of the performance. I will first return to the
first three odes of the Agamemnon, which illustrate that general reflections
and gnōmai create a kind of meaning that is transtemporal and thereby
blurs the borderline between the past of the play and the present of the
performance.35 Then I will have a look at the third stasimon that can be
read as a reflection on the limits of gnōmai.
In the parodos it is particularly the so-called Hymn to Zeus that delimits
the heroic past and opens it to the present of the performance. While
33 For this and other objections to Athanassaki’s reading, see Fletcher 1999: 37.
34 Fletcher 1999: 38–42 elaborates on the ambiguity of the voice, but I am unconvinced by her argument
that the dream sequence in 420–6 is ‘double-voiced’, i.e. that it refers at the same time ‘to the past
grief of Menelaus and the present grief of the Argives’ (39). Indeed, the reflections in 420–6 are
general, but coming after the sorrows of Menelaus it is natural to see in them a foil to them and not
to the grief of the Argives which is clearly separated by the juxtaposition in 427–8.
35 Cf. Cuny 2007 on general reflections in Sophocles, especially 165–76, in which she shows how the
chorus uses general statements ‘pour rattacher les circonstances particulières de l’action à l’universel
de la condition humaine’.
featuring conventional elements of prayers and hymns such as the indefinite
pronoun (160) and the conditional clause (161), the Hymn to Zeus does
not, despite its name, fully qualify as hymn or prayer.36 Lacking an address
in the second person, it is rather a reflection on Zeus, a reflection that, as
we shall see, implies the reason why it is not a prayer. Standing between
Calchas’ prophecy and the account of Iphigenia’s death, the Hymn to Zeus
has a retarding function in the narrative. The beginnings of the first two
stanzas markedly juxtapose Zeus with human beings (160–2; 168–70):
ZeÅv, Âst©v potì st©n, e« t»dì aÉ-
t f©lon keklhmn,
toÓt» nin prosennpw.
Zeus: whatever he may be, if this name
pleases him in invocation,
thus I call upon him.
oÎqì Âstiv proiqen §n mgav
pammc qrsei brÅwn,
oÉd lx<et>ai prªn ßn.
He who in time long ago was great,
throbbing with gigantic strength,
shall be as if he never were, unspoken.
In both cases, the process of signification is unstable, but whereas the refer-
ence to human beings can only be temporary because the object is subject
to changes, the being of Zeus eludes signification. As Hans Blumenberg
has pointed out, naming is an attempt at subjecting the named to some
sort of control.37 The impossibility of naming Zeus, on the other hand,
expresses his unapproachability which is the reason for the deviation from
the form of the prayer. There is no point in addressing an inaccessible god,
just as the chorus states earlier that no kind of sacrifice can prevent what
has been fated (68–71).
Zeus’s identity cannot be grasped by a name, but nonetheless the chorus
sets out his rule of pqei mqov in terms whose clarity is thrown into
relief by the obscurity of the preceding and following stanzas. Zeus thus
embodies at the same time the indeterminacy of meaning and provides
an origin and a ground.38 The indefinite pronoun tiv (174) and brotoÅv
(176) underscore the general truth of pqei mqov which applies not only
to the heroic world, but also to the present of the dramatic performance.
36 Cf. Smith 1980: 14. See also Fraenkel 1931, who elaborates on the background of ritual songs which
can still be grasped in the parabasis of comedy. On hymns in tragedy, see below, n. 74.
37 Blumenberg 1979: 40–67.
38 On the Zeus as origin of meaning in the Agamemnon, see Goldhill 1984: 59–62.
90 Jonas Grethlein
Eduard Fraenkel, a scholar certainly free of any inclination towards fancy,
overtheorised readings, notes:
In the first stanza of the hymn prosennpw and cw must of course be
understood of the elders of Argos. But there is no doubt that far more is
included in that ‘I’. The chorus speak also for the citizens of Athens, to
whom they belong, and above all for the poet. It would be quite wrong to
assume that the hymn does not form an organic part of the surrounding
narrative . . . But it is true that eulogy of Zeus is intended to be valid beyond
the limits of any particular situation.39
General reflections and gnōmai like the comments on ‘learning through

suffering’ blur the boundaries between ‘heroic vagueness’ and democratic
present. Whereas ‘zooming-devices’ establish a link between past and
present by embedding specific concepts and words of the world of the
audience in the dramatic action, gnōmai set up a horizon which embraces
both ‘heroic vagueness’ and democratic present.40 Thereby the heroic past
is opened to the present of the performance: the doctrine of pqei mqov
proclaimed in the orchestra transcends the division between stage and
audience.
The gnōmai in the first stasimon have a similar effect: the reflections
on the justice of the gods and the danger of hybris apply not only to the
heroic past, but also to the present of the audience. Of course, the present
tense and gnomic aorist forms are uttered by the chorus in the frame of the
dramatic action, but the content of the gnōmai is timeless as the references
to broto© (370), nr (382) and tiv (423) illustrate. There may be one
‘zooming-device’ in the first stasimon which reinforces this transcendence
of ‘heroic vagueness’: The chorus mentions the ashes of the dead which are
brought from Troy (438–44). Jacoby pointed out: ‘But nobody will seriously
doubt that the singularity is due to a typical and deliberate anachronism
after the Athenian custom which had been introduced but a few years
earlier.’41 Normal Greek practice was to bury the war dead right on the
spot; only the Athenians institutionalised some time after the Persian Wars
a public burial of the war dead on the Kerameikos. Jacoby’s point has
not remained unchallenged,42 but I think it is buttressed by the following
verses (445–8):
39 Fraenkel 1950, II: 114.

40 On the universal significance of the messages of tragedy, see Segal 1995a: 15–26.
41 Jacoby 1944: 44.
42 Gomme 1941–1981, II: 95: ‘I do not believe that he [i.e. Aeschylus] was given to deliberate anachro-
nism of this kind.’ Against his objection, see Leahy 1974: 4–5.
stnousi dì eÔ lgontev n-
dra t¼n mn Þv mcav driv,
t¼n dì n fona±v kaläv pes»ntì –
llotr©av diaª gunaik»v.
They praise them through their tears, how this man
knew well the craft of battle, how another
went down splendid in the slaughter:
and all for some strange woman.
The chorus obviously sings here of individuals praising the dead, but it is
not unlikely that the words of the eÔ lgontev would also bring to mind
the eulogies delivered on behalf of the polis. The reference to a distinct
contemporary practice, the burial at Athens, would not have failed to
draw the audience closer into the world of the play and to underscore the
applicability of the gnōmai to the present.
The second stasimon takes up and reworks some of the gnōmai pre-
sented in the first. The reflection on the reproduction of hybris within
a family harks back to the warning against excess: The juxtaposition of
insatiable with modest men (374–80) is transformed into a juxtaposition
of godless and just houses (758–762) and the contrast between poor and
rich households (774–81) sharpens the notion that wealth does not protect
against ruin (381–4). While the first stasimon zooms in on the impossibility
for crimes to remain hidden, the second stasimon turns to the preceding
phase of the pqei mqov circle laid out in the parodos, the emergence
of crimes.43 As in the other choral songs, the chorus sets up a frame of
wisdom which serves primarily as foil to the dramatic action, but at the
same time lays claim to a timeless truth which is still valid in the present
of the performance. The imagery of reproduction (e.g. 764: t©ktein) and
organic growth (e.g. 756: blastnein), phenomena bound to no historical
period, underscores the general applicability of the gnōmai.
As these examples illustrate, the blending of different times into one
another within ‘heroic vagueness’ paves the way for bringing together
the heroic past and the democratic present through general reflection.
Projecting the dramatic action into a horizon which the audience shares
with the heroes opens the past on stage to the present of the performance.
This delimiting function of gnōmai is reinforced by their presentation
in choral songs. Of course, the choreutai remain part of the dramatic
action, but the performance in the orchestra with an empty stage as well
as the tradition of non-dramatic choral songs suggest that the audience
43 This regressive movement in the odes of the Agamemnon is emphasised by Duchemin 1974: 123.
92 Jonas Grethlein
would have no difficulties applying the reflections beyond the frame of the
dramatic action.
The third stasimon of the Agamemnon (975–1034) provides us with
another set of gnōmai that not only bridge the gap between the past of the
play and the present of the performance, but also yield a reflection on the
limits of gnōmai. The anxiety and insecurity transparent in all the choral
odes culminate in this final stasimon.44 The carpet scene leaves the chorus
disturbed, trying to figure out the reason for their anxiety.45 In the first
strophic pair (975–1000), the old men note that their disquiet ties in badly
with the lucky return of the victorious army and pray that ‘all this expecta-
tion fade as vanity into unfulfilment, and not be’ (998–1000). Searching for
an answer, the chorus consider four gnōmai in the second strophe (1001–16):
first, that sickness is a near-neighbour of health; second, that a fortunate
man can hit an unseen reef; third, that a ship can be saved from drowning
by throwing ballast over board; fourth, that abundant agricultural gifts of
Zeus can free from famine. The second antistrophe (1017–33) starts with a
fifth gnōmē stating that death is irreversible, a point evidenced by Asclepius
who was punished for his attempt to revive Hippolytus. In closing, the
chorus comment on their inability to express their feelings.
The gnōmai take up the topic of wealth that has been the object of
reflection before (381–3; 774–81), but the transmitted text does not make
any references to d©kh and its enforcement which loomed large in the
gnōmai of the preceding odes.46 In addition, the gnōmai deviate from those
in the other songs at a more general level. While also projecting experiences
onto a timeless horizon, the gnōmai in the third ode highlight the limits
of such general reflections. The first two gnōmai reveal that the chorus
is turning towards the wisdom stored in gnōmai to explain their sense of
disquiet. They are worried despite good fortune – both the proximity of
sickness to health and the reef unseen by the man with unswerving destiny
draw attention to the fragility of good luck. While the third gnōmē takes
up the naval imagery and envisages the possibility of fending off blows of
fate, the fourth, significantly switching to the register of agriculture, even
demonstrates that Zeus can turn bad into good situations. In harking back
to the imagery of the first gnōmē, the metaphor nstin . . . n»son (1017)
underscores the volte-face from the fragility of bliss to gifts from Zeus. The
fifth gnōmē, however, makes the series end on a sombre note: whereas the
44 On the metre, see Fraenkel 1950: 442–3.

45 Cf. Taplin 1977: 316, who argues the other way around, namely that the agitation of the chorus
testifies to the puzzling features of the preceding scene.
46 There is, however, a reference to d©kh before the string of gnōmai in 996: nd©koiv fres©n.
other gnōmai all dealt with reversals, the last points out the irreversibility
of death.47
The quick sequence of gnōmai, the variety of messages and the wealth of
imageries show both the agitation of the chorus and their despair of finding
an explanation for it. However, the plundering of wisdom’s treasure-box
does not satisfy the Argives, it leaves them even more distressed than before.
The incapability of the gnōmai to clarify their forebodings leads the chorus
to a reflection on the relation between their heart and tongue (1025–33).48
The chorus’ references to their own singing culminating in these verses
underscore the failure of the gnōmai and of language in general to express
their feelings: In the first strophe, the elders speak of their song (979:
oid), in the second strophe their thymos chants a dirge (990–1: Ëmnwde±
qrnon). The song may be unsolicited and unpaid-for and the dirge may
be performed by the self-taught thymos without a lyre, but nonetheless the
elders use the proper vocabulary for song. After the failure to elucidate their
anxiety with the help of gnōmai, the chorus states that their heart ‘roars’
(brmei) in darkness (1030).49 The slip from song to inarticulate sound
illustrates the disillusionment with language.50 While in the central ode of
the Choephoroi the chorus will claim that it is ‘not unfitting’ (624: kairì
oÉd)51 to add Clytaemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon to three mythical
exempla for female violence against men, the old Argives harbour no hope
of ‘performing something fitting’ (1032: ka©rion ktolupeÅsein).52
It is emblematic of the irony inherent in all choral odes of the Agamemnon
that the gnōmai have more significance than the chorus is aware of.53 The
rich goods mentioned in the third gnōmē, for example, correspond to
the exhibition of wealth in the carpet scene (948–9; 958–62), and it has
47 As far as the underlying tenor of the gnōmai is concerned, I cannot follow Thalmann’s otherwise
lucid discussion of the ode (1985). I cannot see that they all treat some kind of excess followed by a
reassertion of limits (112). The idea of reversal is more prominent than the notion of excess and also
marks the difference from the fifth gnōmē.
48 Thalmann 1985 makes a strong case that the two mo±rai refer to kard©a and glässa. This does
better justice to the syntax of the sentence and makes more sense in the context than the various
attempts to identify the mo±rai with different ‘sorts’. On these, see Thalmann 1985: 100–2; 117–18;
Judet de La Combe 1982, 2: 257–68. Against the thesis that the chorus fully knows the upcoming
murder of Agamemnon and here is trying to explain why he does not warn their king, cf. Scott
1969: 342–3; Thalmann 1985: 101.
49 As lectio difficilior, brmei, the reading of F2 and Triclinius adopted by Fraenkel, West, Bollack and
Judet de La Combe, Denniston and Page, clearly deserves preference over blpei, given by F1 and
argued for by Young 1964: 14–15. Nonetheless, Young has helpful comments on the meaning of
brmein.
50 The fifth gnōmē reveals yet another limit of song which cannot help resurrecting the dead (1021).
51 The transmitted text ka©rwv d is corrupt, but the sense of the sentence is still recognisable and
Stinton’s conjecture (1979: 260), kair’ oÉd, adopted by West, convincing.
52 On the translation of ktolupeÅsein, see Fraenkel 1950: ad loc.
53 On the capacity of general reflections for tragic irony, see Cuny 2007: 242–50.
94 Jonas Grethlein
even been argued that the ‘dark blood’ in the last gnōmē, resonates with
the carpet and starts a whole series of references to spilling blood.54 It is
however important to notice that even for the audience the significance
of the gnōmai is far from clear-cut. Does the irreversibility of death look
back to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, as Scott believes, or does it anticipate
the murder of Agamemnon, thus Judet de La Combe and Thiel?55 Gnōmai
set up a horizon which arches over both ‘heroic vagueness’ and democratic
present, but, as the third stasimon reveals, their power to elucidate a given
moment is limited.
III. Mise en abyme: mirroring the enactment of the heroic past

The first stasimon of the Choephoroi illustrates an aspect of choral tempo-
rality in addition to the blending together of times and the transcending of
‘heroic vagueness’ in gnōmai. The evocation of myths as foil to the action
can be read as a mise en abyme, defined as ‘toute enclave entrenant une
rétention de similitude avec l’oeuvre qui la contient’.56 That is, the relation
between the heroic past enacted on stage and the present of the audience
is mirrored in the relation between the ‘plu-past’ of the embedded myths
and the heroic past.
Unlike most other analepses in the choral odes of the Agamemnon, the
parable in the second stasimon harks back not to an earlier event of the
story of the Atridae, but to something that is not part of the plot. Other
than parables with anonymous characters, such analepses to extraneous
events are given by embedded myths featuring specific characters. They are
far more common in Euripides than in Aeschylus who, like Sophocles, has
the chorus rather refer back to the prehistory of the plot,57 but the Oresteia
offers one prominent case, the first stasimon of the Choephoroi that features
three mythical exempla: Althaea, who killed her son by burning a brand
on which his life depended (602–12); Scylla who was induced by a golden
necklace from Minos to cut off the hair of her father and thereby to kill him
(613–22); the Lemnian crime (631–8). The significance of these stories is
manifold. At a first level, they illustrate the disastrous force of qhlukratv
prwtov rwv – a passion to which both humans and beasts are subject, be
it ‘unnatural passion which conquers women’, ‘unnatural female passion
that conquers’ or ‘unnatural passion that gives women power’.58 Erotic
54 Goheen 1955: 118–19.
55 Scott 1969: 339; Judet de La Combe 1982; Thiel 1993: 282. See also Thalmann 1985: 117 on the
ambiguity of this gnōmē and the different perspectives of audience and chorus.
56 Dällenbach 1977: 18.
57 Rutherford 2007 discusses lengthy narratives in choral odes. For a list, see Rutherford 2007: 33–4.
58 On the rich semantics of the phrase and these possible translations, see Garvie 1986: 599–602.
aspects, however, are not prominent in the mythical exempla. They are
missing entirely in the first story, as Althaea kills her son to take revenge
for the murder of her brothers. In the second myth, the golden necklace
may allude to the love for Minos which prompts Scylla to betray her father
in later sources,59 but it is not referred to explicitly. Unlike the two other
myths, the Lemnian crime is only mentioned, but not spelt out. Thus, the
three myths are evoked as exempla not so much for the danger of female
lust as for the consequences of female passion in general.
Nonetheless, the reference to the murder of Agamemnon (623–30) indi-
cates that, more concretely, Althaea, Scylla and the Lemnian women serve as
foils to Clytaemnestra. They are all women who, like Clytaemnestra, have
killed the men closest to them, be it relatives or husbands. This use of the
myths as foils to Clytaemnestra is not without irony, for the chorus’ reflec-
tion on fearful phenomena seems to be triggered by her dream, but is then
illustrated by female transgressions that parallel her own crime. The true
horrors, it turns out, are not monsters like the snake to which Clytaemnes-
tra gives birth in her dream, but women like Clytaemnestra herself.
This does not exhaust the significance of the myths. Anne Lebeck
has made a strong case that they also refract the murders committed by
Agamemnon and Orestes.60 The story of Althaea parallels the sacrifice of
Iphigenia as the murder of a child by his parent, but reverses the gen-
der relation. At the same time, it reproduces the mother–son relation of
Clytaemnestra and Orestes, while exchanging perpetrator and victim. The
Scylla-exemplum, on the other hand, is the murder of a parent by a child
just like the killing of Clytaemnestra by Orestes, but again reverses the gen-
der relation. Concerning the gender relation, it mirrors that of Agamem-
non and Iphigenia, while turning the direction of violence upside-down.
‘The first two exempla give back a looking-glass reflection of the parallel
crimes committed by Agamemnon and Orestes, reversed in such a way that
woman’s treachery comes to the fore each time.’61 Thus, while homing in
on Clytaemnestra’s crime as female transgression, the myths also allude to
the murders of Agamemnon and Orestes.
In Lebeck’s eyes, the Lemnian story forms the climax in that it refers to
two crimes. As Herodotus has it, there are two Lemnian crimes, first the
murder of the Lemnians by their wives during the reign of Thoas, then, at
a later time, the killing of the imported Athenian women by the Pelasgians
of Lemnos (6.138). Thus, ‘the last exemplum reflects the mysterious way in
which crime follows crime and one generation pays for another’s wrong’.62
59 Cf. Garvie 1986: ad 613–22.
60 Lebeck 1967. See already Winnington-Ingram 1983 [1948]: 115 n. 69.
61 Lebeck 1967: 183. 62 Lebeck 1967: 183.
96 Jonas Grethlein
The reference of the chorus is very vague and an allusion to the second
crime cannot be ruled out, but given the focus on female transgressions
the exemplum primarily evokes the assassination of the Lemnian men. The
exemplum of the Lemnians owes its role as climax rather to the extent of
the crime – not an individual, but all male inhabitants of an island are
the victims – and to its close correspondence with Clytaemnestra’s crime:
while Althaea and Scylla kill their kin, the Lemnians equal Clytaemnestra
in murdering their husbands.
The myths invoked by the chorus in the third stasimon are not directly
linked to the plot of the Oresteia, but intersect with it through a complex
set of similarities and differences. The ‘plu-past’ duplicates the heroic past –
it adds a past to the dramatic action just as the dramatic action stages a past
for the audience. In both cases, a past is invoked which is not temporally
linked to the present, but nonetheless sheds light on it. Just as the dramatic
performances refract and rework aspects of the democratic present, the
embedded myths serve as foils to the heroic past. The reference to the assault
on Agamemnon makes explicit the foiling function of Althaea, Scylla and
the Lemnian women, but, as we have seen, the significance of the foil is
manifold. In the same way, the interaction of tragedy with contemporary
reality is complex. Instead of giving clear cut answers, tragedy sheds light on
current issues from various angles. While narratives and metaphors create a
panopticon of different events and gnōmai extend the song’s significance to
the world of the audience, mythical mirror stories illustrate how the tragic
past interacts with the presence of the performance. They establish a meta-
poetic dimension and endow the panopticon with a self-referential note.
IV. Ritual: blending together past and present

The self-referential aspect of the chorus in Greek tragedy comes to the fore
in choral comments on rituals they enact, as Albert Henrichs has shown
masterfully.63 Rituals are performed by the chorus within the frame of
the dramatic action, but this dramatic performance itself takes place in
the ritual setting of the Great Dionysia. Since choreutai are involved in
ritual action both as characters in the internal communication system and
as performers in the external communication system, their references to
rituals which they perform tend to apply not only to the dramatic action,
but also to the dramatic performance. Rituals can thus be seen as a point
at which the times of the heroic past and the democratic present of Athens
63 Henrichs 1994/5; 1996a.

intersect.64 There is often a strong contrast between the perversion of
rituals in the plays65 and the proper performance of the Great Dionysia.
The closure of the Oresteia, on the other hand, provides us with a case
where the rituals in the internal and external communications systems
seem to merge and thereby to erase the boundary between the past on stage
and the present of the audience: ‘In the last part of the Eumenides past,
present, and future are curiously blended and fused.’66
As noted by commentators, the Eumenides is remarkable for opening the
dramatic action towards the world of fifth-century Athens at the levels of
space and time.67 Apollo sends Orestes from Delphi to Athens where the
second part of the action takes place.68 The convergence of the space of
the dramatic action with the space of the dramatic performance comes
to the fore in the numerous deictic pronouns referring to ‘this city’, ‘this
country’ and ‘this place’ which work both in the internal and the external
communication systems.69 At the level of time, three charter myths estab-
lish a close link to the present: the newly founded court is presented as
the Areopagus; the military help promised by Argos anticipates the con-
temporaneous alliance with Argos; the Erinyes are integrated into Athens
as Semnai theai, goddesses with a cave sanctuary close to the Areopagus.70
This opening of the ‘heroic vagueness’ towards the present of the perfor-
mance is underscored by several marked references to the future of the
three institutions.71 The ‘here and forever’72 of the charter myths ren-
ders the closure of the Oresteia particularly significant for the Athenian
audience.
Two ritual actions go even further and not only open the internal to
the external communications systems, but force them to merge. When
Athena manages to appease the Erinyes by offering them honour and cult
in Athens, they ask her what ‘spell to put on this country’ (902) and then
present a song of benedictions in an amoibaion with the goddess (916–
1020).73 Such hymns invoking the goodwill of gods seem to have been a
common feature in various settings in archaic and classical Greece.74 The
64 Cf. Henrichs 1994/5: 68. See also Calame (this volume), who concentrates on the identity of
the chorus and their multiple voices, whereas I focus on the temporal dimension of the choral
performance.
65 On the perversion of rituals in the Oresteia, see e.g. Seaford 1994: 369–75.
66 Solmsen 1949: 208.
67 See e.g. Chiasson 1999/2000. 68 On the change of place, see Grethlein 2003: 219 n. 72.
69 Cf. 834; 852; 884; 890; 902; 915. 70 Cf. Grethlein 2003: 216–18.
71 Cf. Grethlein 2003: 219–22. 72 Chiasson 1999/2000: 149.
73 The prominence of lekythia together with iambics and trochaics aligns the singing of the chorus
with the second stasimon (490–565). For a metrical analysis, see Sommerstein 1989: 292–3.
74 Cf. Jaeger 1936: 325; Solmsen 1949: 211. On such hymns in ancient Greece in general, see Norden
1939: 268–74. On hymns in Greek tragedy in general, see Furley and Bremer 2001: 273–9.
98 Jonas Grethlein
blessings at the end of the Eumenides are embedded in the dramatic action,
but since they are directed at the very polis which organises the dramatic
festival, and since they are directed towards a future including the present,
they apply to the Athens of the performance as well as to the Athens within
the action. Hence, the ritual on stage fuses with the ritual of the stage, the
internal and external communication systems are blended together and the
borderline between heroic past and democratic present is blurred.
The play closes with a procession which leads the Erinyes, called
mtoikoi, to their new home.75 Particularly the red robes put on by the
chorus evoke the procession of the Panathenaea in which the metics wore
red.76 The zooming-in on a ritual detail of a contemporaneous festival
opens the dramatic action towards the present of the Great Dionysia, but I
think the procession may have challenged the boundary between dramatic
action and performance more profoundly. As described by Athena, the
procession is also joined by the Athenian people. It is possible that the
Athenian people were represented by actors on stage, it is possible that
they were not. In the latter case, reinforced by the opening of the heroic
past to the present and by the blending together of the two, the audience
could have represented itself, the people of Athens. Such an integration of
the audience into the play would have made the presence of the Athenian
people an act of representation, fusing the internal communication system
entirely with the external. This scenario is nicely complemented by Wil-
amowitz’s suggestion that the audience joined in the ololygmos.77 At the
end of the Oresteia, the spatial convergence of action and performance and
the temporal opening of the heroic past towards the future ground provide
the ground on which the time of the rituals enacted on stage merges with
the ritual time of the stage.
V. Conclusion
Tragedy makes the heroic world confront the contemporary reality of
fifth-century Athens. The concept of ‘zooming-devices’ has elucidated an
important mechanism by which ‘heroic vagueness’ is rendered significant
for the audience in the theatre of Dionysos. The reference to the urns of
ashes returning from Troy in the first stasimon of the Agamemnon and the
allusions to the Panathenaea in the closing of the Eumenides illustrate that
75 On the procession, see Sommerstein 1989: ad 1021–47. On the hymn of the female servants as an
‘apopemptic hymn’, see Furley and Bremer 2001, I: 295–6.
76 Cf. Headlam 1906; Thomson 1966 ad 1027–31; Bowie 1993: 27–9.
77 Wilamowitz 1914a: 185. See also Belfiore 1992: 27. On the ritual dimension of the refrain, see Moritz
1979: 209–12.
choral odes can ‘zoom in’ on the world of the audience. The majority of
‘zooming-devices’, however, occur in epeisodia, whereas the language of
choral odes marks a gap between the world of the heroes and the everyday
world of the audience. The ‘intertemporality’ of the chorus, the temporality
by which the chorus mediates between stage and audience, works along
different lines. We have seen that the chorus of the Agamemnon in their
songs create a panopticon in which events cast in ‘heroic vagueness’, from
various levels of the past including the future past, shed light on one
another, partly by intention of the characters of the chorus, partly beyond
their means of understanding. On the ground of this dynamic interaction
between past, present and future, the delimitation of time is extended
beyond the ‘heroic vagueness’ through gnōmai which lay claim to timeless
validity. The practice of singing and listening to gnōmai in extra-dramatic
choral performances would have made it hard for Athenians not to consider
the general reflections in tragic odes also outside of their dramatic context.
In addition to creating a horizon which embraces the heroic past as well
as the democratic present, the choral odes also provide a mise en abyme
for the dynamic interaction between the past of the dramatic action and
the present of the performance. In the first stasimon of the Choephoroi, the
chorus invokes three myths as a foil to the murder of Agamemnon. The
significance of the embedded myths for the dramatic action is manifold
just as tragedy provides no clear-cut messages for the present. In illustrating
the hermeneutic possibilities and limits of myth, the choral odes underscore
the reflective character of tragedy.
The merging of the rituals and the blending together of internal and
external communication systems at the end of the Eumenides is unusual for
Greek tragedy.78 It nevertheless alerts us to the special temporality of ritual.
Ritual transcends linear time and establishes a time of itself, a time-out
beyond the everyday world. The Great Dionysia provides such a time-out
in which the democratic present can enter into a dialogue with the heroic
past. In combining the roles of dramatic characters and ritual performers,
the chorus is more essential to this dialogue than its traditional form may
reveal at first sight. We can even say that traditional features, particularly
gnōmai and rituals, are at the core of the choral contribution to the relevance
of ‘heroic vagueness’ to the democratic world of the fifth century.
78 Compare for example the binding song in the Eumenides as analysed by Calame (this volume).
Calame notes a subtle oscillation between the ritual and heroic identities of the chorus, but there
is not the kind of merging that we can observe at the end of the Eumenides: the intention of the
Erinyes to bind Orestes is limited to the world of the play.
chapter 5
Choreography
The lyric voice of Sophoclean tragedy
Simon Goldhill
For Friedrich Hölderlin, struggling between the inevitable loss of the Greek
past and his idealistic longing for it, the lyric voice of Greek tragedy
embodied a paradigm of expressiveness towards which he yearned.1 Richard
Wagner, a generation later, but also obsessed with the sublime of Hellenic
art, re-conceptualized the orchestra of opera as the chorus of tragedy, an
emotional and expressive counterpoint to the tragic action of the characters
on stage.2 For Matthew Arnold, a further generation on, it was particularly
in the chorus of Sophocles where the master’s steady and whole vision of
things was in evidence, untrammelled by the messy specifics of politics,
law, conflict. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the chorus and
particularly the chorus of Sophocles, provides the transcendent poetry of
the classical ideal.
For Hölderlin, Wagner and Arnold, Greek tragedy was fundamentally
an exercise of the imagination. The number of performances of Greek
tragedy across Europe was small, especially in the earlier part of the cen-
tury, and, as performances, such productions were rarely celebrated as
capturing the sublime – with a tiny handful of obvious exceptions such
as Mounet-Sully’s Oedipus in Paris.3 The twentieth century, by contrast,
saw an immense increase in productions, and there were – and continue
to be – so many stagings of tragedy both in the professional theatre and
in university settings that the theatrical revival of Greek tragedy is a phe-
nomenon that calls out for explanation. One consequence of this buoyant
performance history is that the chorus has become a problem. The modern
theatre has struggled to find adequate modes of representation for a collec-
tive on stage, let alone a collective that sings and dances. The solutions are
often painful: a severe monotonal chanting; a Hollywood-tinged singing
1 See Billings in this volume. There is a potentially huge bibliography on this and many other topics
alluded to in this chapter: I have deliberately kept the bibliography and footnotes to the minimum.
2 See Goldhill 2011: chapter 4; Goldhill 2012: chapter 7.
3 See in general Hall and Macintosh 2005, and Goldhill 2012: chapters 6, 7 and 8.
100
Choreography: the lyric voice of Sophoclean tragedy 101
and dancing; the reduction of the chorus to a single figure or to a pair or
three; abstract dancing with handbags; embarrassed bystanders to passion-
ate grief – though the successes of a Mnouchkine, say, or Harrison/Hall, or,
from the earlier years of the century, Reinhardt, also have each created an
extended afterlife of influence.4 The anxiety about the performance of the
chorus is mapped by critical discussions in the academy, which have moved
from the nineteenth-century notion of the ‘ideal spectator’, to anthropo-
logically informed concepts of ritual bands, to recognitions of the chorus
as a collective within the ideological understandings of community specific
to democracy. If for Hölderlin, the loss of lyric sublimity underlies his
pursuit of the choral voice, for modern production it is the otherness of a
collectivity lost in modern alienation and social atomization that grounds
the pursuit of choral experience.
The argument of this chapter is located between the chorus as great
poetry and the chorus as performance – and sets out to bring the two
arenas of criticism together. I use the term ‘choreography’ to indicate the
way in which the chorus moves through a performance – not in the sense
of its specific dance steps, which are almost entirely lost to us, but in the
sense of the emotional, intellectual, and physical transitions enacted by
the chorus through the course of the drama. I add the term ‘lyric voice’,
however, because I also want to focus on how a specific mode of lyric
utterance is integral to that choreography. The dense, sung poetry of lyric
is an elemental voice of tragedy, and its place in the soundscape of the
genre and the soundscape of the city needs attention. I have three initial
areas of debate. First, I want to investigate the way in which the chorus,
and especially the chorus in dialogue with the heroic actors, engages in
the narrative of the play. As well as exchanges of intricate verbal texture,
some of the finest poetry in the corpus, there are in these scenes dramatic
narrative sequences of considerable sophistication – narratives of power
relations, and emotional contacts and disruptions. One term I will be
using for these exchanges is ‘score’ or ‘scoring’: I mean this primarily in
a musical sense, treating the words and the metre as a notation to be
activated in performance.5 But I will also be using it in a more extended
sense for the emotional or intellectual passage of the chorus and actors
over the scene. This is an area of Sophoclean dramaturgy that is strikingly
under-appreciated by modern directors, in my experience, and by all who
4 See Goldhill 2012: chapter 7, for discussion and bibliography – and in particular Macintosh,
Michelakis, Hall and Taplin 2005 s.v. chorus; Hall, Macintosh and Wrigley 2004 s.v. chorus.
5 An extended sense of ‘scoring’ as a critical term goes back at least to Goodman 1968; see for critical
discussion Worthen 2010: 8–12.
102 Simon Goldhill
work from translations, which so often fail to note a move into lyric, let
alone changes of metre within it. It is also an area where modern criticism
is under-developed. This first concern could be summed up as an extended
gloss on Aristotle’s claim that Sophocles made a character of the chorus.
How do the chorus get a piece of the action of drama?
Second, I want to demonstrate the extraordinary experimentation in
form that we can see in Sophoclean handling of the chorus. The flexibility,
dramatic variation, and semantic richness of the form of tragedy is often
lost in discussions that generalize about the genre of tragedy, and the chorus
is one of the most important areas for such an enquiry.6 I am particularly
concerned to read the specificity of choral writing in each particular play
before reverting to generalizations about ‘the chorus’: the specific form of
the chorus in each play is integral to the drama. I will be concentrating on
how Sophocles adopts and adapts elements of choral writing from other
genres, and uses other voices for his choruses, and in particular at the
relation between iambic verse and lyric verse in the choral voice. It is a
striking fact that, as far as we can tell, it is only in drama that a chorus both
speaks and sings: in other genres, epinician, say, or hymns, the lyric voice
is uninterrupted. The speaking and singing chorus is a new element in the
soundscape of the polis: and Sophocles plays a series of brilliant variations
on its formal possibilities.
Third, I want to argue that my enquiry into choral performance and
choral voice will together let us develop a more profitable route for under-
standing the political importance of Sophocles’ writing for the chorus.
How the choral voice functions as a collective, with what authority, and in
what relation to the individuals who lead it or threaten it, are questions that
go to the heart of the democratic process.7 But to appreciate the political
thrust of these questions, we need to move beyond the rather unnuanced
generalizations that want to see the chorus as always the survivor, or always
as the voice of the community or of tradition.
I. The construction of the choral voice

How, then, is the lyric voice constituted, and how should the institution of
the chorus be understood? Although I declared above that my discussion
will be led by the specifics of particular plays, as it will, there is a long-
standing critical debate about the status of the chorus and its utterances,
6 This is surprisingly underdeveloped in Gardiner 1987, Burton 1980 and Goward 1999.
7 A discussion taking its starting point from Gould 2001 [1996] and Goldhill 1996.
in and against which my arguments will find a place. I want first thus
to express in lapidary form four assumptions, of increasing complexity
and importance, that underpin the following discussion, and thereby give
something of a view on the status quaestionis. Each of these four claims in
barest expression is easy enough to agree with, and may even seem self-
evident; but each also has far-reaching and highly contentious implications
once the business of reading Sophocles gets under way.
The first two assumptions have already been explicit in what I have
written. First, to understand the tragic chorus, it is important to be aware
of other choral forms in Athens and in other cities, not just by way of
institutional or formal contrast, but also because tragic writing for the
chorus picks up and manipulates elements from other genres of choral
form.8 The dithyrambic competition, for example, although it involved
more performers than the tragedies at the Great Dionysia festival, and had
strong tribal basis in its institutional organization, has all too rarely been
made part of the discussion even of the Great Dionysia. In Sophocles’
repeated use of the kommos, too, we can see how tragic choruses sound
against performances elsewhere in polis life, and this is a crucial part of
how the choral performance engages with or reflects or redeploys the social
life of the city. As Vernant paradigmatically emphasized, we need to see
‘how tragedy assimilates into its own perspective the elements it borrows’.9
Second, choral form adapts and changes over the course of time, and
there is a history of the genre, for all that our lacunose sources make it hard
to outline with absolute confidence. Aristotle’s teleological declaration that
in his day tragedy had introduced embolima, that is, inset odes between
scenes, which could be sung for any play, and thus were not necessarily
linked to the play’s thematics in any significant way, and which were an
integral aspect of the travelling repertory companies of actors in the fourth
century, who could perform thus with a local chorus, has had a profound
effect on the history of criticism of choral stasima.10 Recent scholars have
made an industry of demonstrating that choral odes are ‘relevant’ (although
no-one in the last fifty years has actually made a significant case for the
irrelevance of any extant stasimon, and even in the nineteenth century,
when an Aristotelian teleology was more dominant, there are fewer serious
claims for the irrelevance of any particular ode than one might think,
especially for Sophocles).11 I will not be emphasizing how any particular
8 As Laura Swift has recently discussed: Swift 2010.
9 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988: 8. 10 Arist. Poet. 18 (1456a).
11 Particularly relevant for this chapter is Kitzinger 2008, who has extensive bibliography; see also Segal
1981.
104 Simon Goldhill
ode ‘picks up’, ‘echoes’ or ‘anticipates’ linguistically any particular earlier
or later scene, except in so far as such a claim is necessary for my argument.
The focus on the thematic connections between stasima and the rest of the
play has been integral to understanding the richness of tragic discourse,
but has also had the effect of obscuring the formal experimentation of the
use of the chorus in tragedy. If my first assumption requires us to look
outside the genre of tragedy to see the relevant frames of comprehension,
my second suggests that an internal history of the form of the chorus is
still inadequately articulated within classical studies.
My third assumption is that whatever other terms we use to discuss the
chorus, it is a grounding principle that the chorus, as an institution and as
a performance, foregrounds a dynamic, or a tension (to use a Vernantian
keyword), between a collective and an individual hero. This dynamic has
been very differently evaluated. The collectivity of the chorus has been
used to argue for their role as an idealized spectator, though few critics
today would take this as a fundamental model. The chorus regularly is
far from ideal, far from directive and even alienated from the audience in
the theatre. More commonly, the chorus has been taken to represent the
collective in the theatre, a figure for the dēmos. This model too has been
roundly criticized: most choruses are marginal figures – women, slaves,
slave-women – and even when they seem to speak as citizens, they are
also markedly a subset of the citizenry.12 The Old Men of the Antigone,
for example, are elderly advisors to the king, but the Guard and even
Haimon offer different models of citizen political engagement at work in
the play, and there are discussions in the play about the collective of the
polis which bypass the chorus. What’s more, the archaic or Homeric setting
of almost every tragedy introduces a potential distancing from the present,
which must complicate any lines of identification between contemporary
audiences and the action – nor can it be assumed that audiences identify
only with figures like themselves, collective to collective, rather than with
individual heroes.
The interrelation between the chorus as a group and the heroes on stage
is also structured in very different ways, even at the most basic level of
affiliation. So, Aeschylus can make the chorus a leading figure in the action
and debate (as in Supplices or Eumenides), opposed quite aggressively to
the individual actors. Euripides can construct a chorus which is apparently
tangential to the actors, the action and the setting – the foreign virgins
caught in transit in Phoenissae, say. So too he can create a chorus uncertainly
12 See Gould 2001 [1996].
drawn towards and alienated by the hero (Medea). In Sophocles’ case, in six
of the seven extant plays, the chorus is closely connected to the lead figure
of the play (Ajax and Neoptolemus with their respective crews; Electra’s
and Deianeira’s female supporters; the political advisors of Oedipus in the
Oedipus Tyrannus and Creon in Antigone). Even in the apparent exception
of the Oedipus at Colonus the chorus of citizens are closely connected
to Theseus as ruler, to the local environment in which the play takes
place, and, gradually, to the figure of Oedipus. But whatever variations of
relationship between chorus and actors any play develops – and the variety
is evident even from these oversimplified comments – the chorus acts as
a collective, and mobilizes ideas of communality.13 And since democracy,
the political context for the institution of tragedy, makes such a noise, in
theory and in practice, about the relation between the individual as such
and the collective as such, few critics have resisted the temptation of seeing
an analogy between the structuring dynamic of tragedy and the structuring
principle of democracy – even if the politics of such an analogy are fiercely
contested.14
The concerns of this chapter are initially more closely focused. The
relationship between a chorus speaking iambics and singing lyrics is partly
a question of individual voice versus collective, especially if we agree, as
most critics do, that some iambics at very least are spoken by the koryphaios,
the leader of the chorus, an individual singled out from the collective. So
too, the kommos, as a process of mourning, dramatizes the ritual whereby
a group comforts an individual mourner, or mourners, and brings the
individual(s) back into the social group from the isolation of their grief
and loss. Both of these topics, that is, enact at a microcosmic level the
detailed interaction of group and individual, and consequently the wager
of this chapter is that through detailed analysis of such scenes a clearer
view of at least the complexity of the question of community and hero will
emerge.
The fourth assumption follows closely from the third. The tragic chorus’
voice is constituted by a tension between its role as collective with the drive
towards authority, and its role as a specific group, with a voice mired in the
doubts, evasions and hopes of everyday communication. That is, the chorus
can sing with the authority of a tradition, generalizing, mobilizing mythic
narrative, the voice of the past, constructing the exemplarity of the present
13 See Budelmann 2000.

14 See e.g. Goldhill 1990, 2000 with the criticism of Griffin 1999 and now with full bibliography and
range of discussion Carter 2011.
106 Simon Goldhill
within a frame of the city’s understanding.15 Yet a chorus can also perform
the happenstance of a moment – being a character, as Aristotle would put
it. When the chorus of the Ajax jump for joy after Ajax’s Trugrede, it is
markedly the utterance of a group of sailors, delighted that their leader
has pulled back from the brink. In their previous ode, they have sung
of how they are terrified on their own account by Ajax’s disaster; later,
their first response to his death is (900) ßmoi män n»stwn, ‘Alas for my
homecoming’: their fear is that his death threatens their own safe return.
Here (693) they believe he has changed his mind about suicide, and they
are delighted with a personally motivated and explicable joy. The audience
is distanced – to whatever degree – from the chorus’ misunderstanding.
When the sailors sing frixì rwti, ‘I am thrilled with passion’ (693), it is
the excitement of a moment, and not the reflection on the role of erōs that
the chorus of the Antigone, for example, construct: rwv, n©kate mcan,
rwv Âv . . . ‘desire, unconquered in battle, desire, which . . . ’ (781–2). Now,
even this choral ode in the Ajax turns to the comfort of generalization: pnqì
¾ mgav cr»nov mara©nei, they sing (714), ‘All things great time withers.’16
But not only is this a cliché which is related directly and immediately to
their miscomprehension of Ajax (‘since, at any rate, Ajax has unexpectedly
[x lptwn] changed his mind from his rage and great rows with the
Atreidai’ [716–18]), but also it is marked as a cliché in contrast to Ajax’s
own powerful lines to which they are responding and which they echo as a
trivializing mirror: panqì ¾ makr¼v knar©qmhtov cr»nov fÅei tì dhla
kaª fannta krÅptetai k½uk stì elpton oÉdn, ‘All things, long and
countless time brings to birth in darkness, and hides after they have been
revealed, nor is anything unexpected’ (646–8). Their desire to locate Ajax
within a generalizing discourse is itself placed as the specific failure of a
particular group of sailors to appreciate the hero’s tortured commitment,
and the audience in the theatre responds to this méconnaissance.
When, by way of contrast, the chorus of Antigone sing the so-called and
much celebrated ‘Ode to Man’ (Ant. 332–75), alone on stage, there is no
direct reference to the action that has preceded it, nor to the other characters
of the drama (for all its extensively discussed thematic relevance to the
play). It takes the widest framework, the very nature of man as a social and
intellectual being, and universalizes through reference to the oceans and sky
and the city as an abstract entity. The ode on erōs, by contrast, although it
too generalizes at the widest level about love’s power over the whole natural
15 See Goldhill 1996; Budelmann 2000.
16 My point here is not affected by the textual problem: the MS adds te kaª flgei, which as Jebb
(1896) notes is almost certainly an interpolation. More cautiously, Finglass 2011: 350 ad loc.
and physical world, at least puns on the name of Haimon in its reference to
t»de ne±kov ndrän xÅnaimon, ‘this family [xunaimon] argument of men’,
as it links its generalizing discourse to the preceding scene by the deictic,
‘this’. As scholars have carefully traced, the ‘Ode to Man’’s generalizing
language echoes previous literary tradition, especially the central ode of
the central play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia (Cho. 585–651), as well as Homer,
Hesiod and the moralizing tradition of wisdom literature, and places such
ideas in a new context of contemporary political thinking.17 What is more,
the chorus alone on stage, expressing such broad ideas, is easy to place in an
institutional tradition of choral performance connected to the education
of the young, and to the circulation of the normative repertoire of mythic
narratives as charters of traditional thought, or rather as the continuing
performance of traditional thought. Here the authoritative, collective voice
of the chorus as institution and as performance is privileged.
The sailors’ joy in the Ajax and the Old Men’s reflections in the Antigone
stand at opposite poles of a continuum of happenstance and universaliza-
tion; but most stasima are more intricately poised between authority and
insecurity, as the choral voice shifts and slides between authoritative gen-
eralization and character-led specificity. And this has led to much critical
disagreement, as different aspects of the choral voice are emphasized by
different readings. The shift between lyric and iambic voices is one place
where this tension is most obviously insistent. In their iambic utterances
the chorus or the koryphaios act most directly as engaged participants in
a scene, even and especially when they tend towards ameliorizing com-
mentary in the face of the more heated conflicts of the heroic actors. The
shift in and out of lyric towards iambics is partly a move towards and away
from the role of the chorus as embodiment of traditional, mythic wisdom:
so in the scene that follows the ‘Ode To Man’, the chorus first announce
in anapaestic metre and in emotional, judgemental language the arrival of
the apprehended Antigone, ‘captured in folly’ (376–83), then comment to
Creon in iambics on Antigone (471–2), ‘It’s clear that this girl is the wild
off-spring of a wild father; she does not know how to yield before trouble’ –
a personal judgement on Antigone’s temper and her father’s character.
These four assumptions – that tragic choruses need to be heard against
other choral lyric forms; that the genre of tragedy experiments with choral
form; that the tragic chorus is integrally bound up with concerns about
the relation of individual and community or collective; that the chorus
can reach towards both the authoritative voice of tradition, education, the
17 See e.g. Segal 1981: 152–7; Crane 1989; Nes Ditmars 1992; Kitzinger 2008.
108 Simon Goldhill
group, and towards the specific utterance of a character in a situation –
will be more fully explored in what follows, and represent in a general
form what I believe the majority of contemporary critics would agree to
be suitable starting points for the study of the chorus. There are several
ways we could go on to explore the plays from these starting points. In this
chapter I want to discuss only one of them, namely, the interplay of iambic
and lyric verse. This is essential to the construction of the lyric voice. My
aim even with this narrower focus will not be an exhaustive coverage of the
topic or the possible examples (which would make for a very long chapter
indeed). Rather, the cases will be chosen because they provide particularly
telling or pointed paradigms.
My treatment of the interrelation of the form of the chorus and the
tragic narrative will, I hope, take forward current debates on the role of the
chorus. But it is also an argument developed out of what I regard as the most
telling recent criticism on Sophocles. In particular, the relation between
ideas of collectivity and the language of Sophocles have been excellently
analysed by Felix Budelmann’s study of communality and communication:
my argument shares many concerns with his, and, although it moves on
a different trajectory, we end up with similar general questions about the
politics of tragic language.18 The relation of lyric voice and the actors has
been beautifully analysed by Sarah Nooter’s very recent volume on the
singing voice of actors.19 Her concern is fundamentally with the moment
when heroes burst into song; mine with the role of the chorus. But there
are evident overlaps, where our questions and analysis of the lyric voice of
tragedy are complementary. Edith Hall, thirdly, is one of very few critics to
look seriously at metre in tragedy from a political angle. She has tried both
to link specific metres and singing itself to characters defined through class
and gender, and, more recently, to investigate the politics of genre through
metre.20 My interest is located rather in terms of metre and dramatic story-
telling, and how this might be related to a political thrust of tragedy. But
we share the conviction that modern scholarship has underappreciated the
semantic power of metre. There are, of course, many scattered comments
and arguments from which I have learned and which will appear in my
footnotes and my discussion. But it is worth stressing from the outset that
my argument is to be placed within these current issues of how the collective
18 See Budelmann 2000. 19 Nooter 2012.

20 Hall 1999 redrafted in Hall 2006: 288–320. Scott 1996 following on from the more impressive
Scott 1984 made a full-blown attempt to link metre and sense, but I find his readings of the play
(e.g. ‘cheerfulness . . . in the final scene’ [152] of the Electra) and his focus solely on the stasima
unsatisfactory.
choral voice speaks to the audience in the theatre and to the other characters
on stage; of how the shift of voice in Greek tragedy between spoken and
sung forms is explored by Sophocles; of how metre itself, thus, becomes
part of the signifying repertoire of tragedy.
II. The voice of the chorus: metre and the slippages of song
It is fully familiar that the chorus both sings lyric stasima and also utters
a set of iambic lines in the scenes, which are often dismissed as fillers, a
profoundly misplaced sniffiness in the case of the scripts of Sophocles. It is
usually assumed that iambic lines attributed to the chorus are spoken by the
koryphaios, and lyrics are sung ensemble, and, as we will discuss, it is also
generally thought that anapaests, particularly so-called marching anapaests,
may have been chanted in recitative, as it were – a third voice. The evidence
for these near universally asserted assumptions is both surprisingly late and
regrettably exiguous. The term koryphaios barely occurs until well after the
classical period. There is no explicit statement in any ancient source on
whether the iambic lines of the chorus were spoken only by an individual,
or were chanted by a group. There is no statement on whether only the
koryphaios would speak or whether other chorus members might have such
solos. It is generally believed that there are (at least) three basic delivery
styles – but even the standard modern handbooks on metre are opaque as
to what these styles might have sounded like, or how clearly demarcated the
divisions between them were.21 There are a few passages where it is clear that
the chorus is divided: in lyric there are hemi-choruses in conversation; in
iambics, there is at least one debate with multiple voices.22 But it is unclear
how often such devices were utilized, and editors are both arbitrary and
divided amongst themselves as to when and how such separate voices should
be indicated in the text. There is even a suggestion by modern scholars that
some choral lyrics might have been sung solo by a chorus member, rather
than by the ensemble, though again there is no explicit statement from
ancient sources that this was ever an option.23 In this section, I intend to
look at some detailed interplays between speaking in iambics and singing
or chanting in lyric metres. I am particularly interested in change of voice
and what these changes may indicate. I will not indicate at every point that
the evidence for these basic structuring units of performance is in itself so
thin; for the moment I will write under the assumption that the remarks
21 See West 1982; Maas 1962. 22 See Aj. 866–80; Aesch. Ag. 1346–71.
23 So e.g. Barrett (1964) on Hippolytus ad 362–72; and ad 565–600.
110 Simon Goldhill
delivered in iambics attributed to the chorus were spoken by a single
speaker, for whom the term koryphaios will be adequate. I will, however,
indicate moments where these assumptions are particularly strained or at
risk.24
The first example, central to Sarah Nooter’s project also, will indicate why
I think this interplay between lyric and iambic voices can be an important
part of Sophoclean dramaturgy. The chorus of the Ajax enters with verses
in marching anapaests (134–71) and move into their first stasimon (172–
200). At this point, they are joined by Tecmessa: both she and they sing
in lyric, an exchange about their intense worries for Ajax. They address
each other; the chorus question her and she answers; they express their
fears and she responds. They follow this lyric exchange with a dialogue in
iambics in which the situation is outlined for the chorus by Tecmessa, but
this conversation is interrupted by the off stage cries of the hero, and then
the ekkyklēma, if we trust the scholiast, wheels Ajax into view. He cries out
three times, and his fourth utterance is a pair of iambic lines (342–3), calling
for his brother Teucer. It is this that prompts the chorus to comment that
he seems to be sane (344 nr oiken frone±n, ‘the man seems to be in his
wits’), and to call for Ajax to be brought forth. It is this exposure of Ajax
that interests me.
As Nooter has stressed, it is, first of all, significant that Ajax is now the
one who sings lyric. In the prologue, he spoke iambics with Athene. He had
even called for Teucer in iambics. Something has changed. He will at the
end of this exchange revert to iambics with his exposition of his situation
and his announcement of his decision to die in the first of his long and
famous speeches (430–80). He will sing no more. Five of the six strophes
and antistrophes which Ajax sings here, begin with iō, a cry of grief. His
first great speech begins aiai (430), a cry of grief. But this aiai leads not
so much into another outpouring of despair as into a reflection on how
the cry sounds like his own name Aias, and the rational articulation of his
situation. But for now, between his iambic conversation with Athene and
his self-lacerating iambic account of his current dilemma, we have the less
expected sight of the taciturn warrior of Homer breaking into song. Ajax’s
lyric voice marks a specific passage of transition for the hero.
But the chorus, who have been mainly singing, stay resolutely in iambics
throughout this scene – which are presumably spoken by the koryphaios.
The anticipation of seeing Ajax produced emotional collective lyric, but
24 ‘The modern literature on the subject of methods of delivery in Greek drama is as immense as the
evidence is slight and inconclusive.’ Pickard-Cambridge 1968: 246. For his own account see 156–67.
his appearance stimulates apparently calmer speech from a single voice:
maybe faced by a reality that is sobering; maybe to heighten the effect of
Ajax’s singing; maybe dramatizing their fear of or withdrawal from their
maddened captain. So, Ajax begins by addressing the sailors as his philoi
and as the only ones to stand by him in his disaster (348–51):
«Û,
f©loi naubtai, m»noi män f©lwn
m»noi tì mmnontev ½rq n»m,
desq mì . . .
Io!
Friends, crewmen, alone of my friends,
You alone stand by me obedient to how things should be;
look at me . . .
The command desq is the theatrical gesture par excellence, the creation
of a spectator. But the chorus do not reply to Ajax (although they had
addressed him in absentia throughout the parodos). Instead, they address
Tecmessa, reflecting on their previous conversation (354–5), or rather the
koryphaios alone speaks for them:
omì Þv oikav ½rq marture±n gan.
dhlo± d toÎrgon Þv front©stwv cei.
Oh! It seems you were all too right in your account.
The fact shows clearly that he is in no sane condition.
In terms of contact, the chorus are aligned with Tecmessa, and separate
from, distanced from Ajax, like doctors observing a patient.25 Although
their use of ½rq ‘right’, barely echoes Ajax’s ½rq n»m, which I trans-
lated ‘obedient to how things should be’ (‘according to right law’), their
comment, like their metre, puts a distance between them and him. Ajax
addresses them again even more insistently (359–61):
s toi s toi m»non ddor-
ka poimnwn parksontì
ll me sundixon.
You! you! alone of my carers I see
As sufficient.
Please help me die!26
25 Behind my use of the term ‘contact’ lies Mastronarde 1979.

26 The MSS read poimnwn. phmonn is Reiske’s emendation. Lloyd-Jones and Wilson to their own
surprise follow Kamerbeek and Stanford against Jebb, Dawe, Wilamowitz and Pearson in accepting
112 Simon Goldhill
s . . . s ‘you! you!’ is abrupt, commanding, and he demands they help
him to kill himself violently. This time the koryphaios does respond to him
(362–3):
eÎfhma fÛneiá m kak¼n kak didoÆv
kov plon t¼ pma tv thv t©qei.
Speak decently! Don’t add ill to ill,
And don’t make the disaster of your doom a worse pain.
He rebuffs Ajax’s demands with imperatives that he should avoid such
uncontrolled, ill-omened speech, and should not threaten to make a ter-
rible situation even worse. The chorus’ iambic distance and attempt at
restraint is set in opposition to Ajax’s emotional appeals and despairing
outbursts.
But this pattern begins to shift. For the second strophe (which runs from
356 to 376) is broken at 367–71 by four iambic lines and an extra metrum
scream (364–72):
Ai. ¾rv t¼n qrasÅn, t¼n eÉkrdion,
t¼n n da©oiv treston mcaiv,
n f»boiv me qhrsª dein¼n crav;
omoi glwtov, o³on Ëbr©sqhn ra.
Te. m, dspotì Aav, l©ssoma© sì, aÎda tde.
Ai. oÉk kt»v; oÉk yorron kneme± p»da;
a«a± a«a±.
Co. å pr¼v qeän Ìpeike kaª fr»nhson eÔ.
Ai. à dÅsmorov Âv . . .
Aj. Do you see me, the bold, the brave,
The undaunted in fierce battles,
Terrible in strength against fearless wild beasts?
Alas, a laughing-stock! How I have been humiliated, I realise.
Te. Oh lord Ajax, don’t say that, I implore you.
Aj. Outside! Go away from me!
Aah! Aah!
Ch. By the gods, yield and be in your right mind!
Aj. Oh, ill-fated, I who . . .
This is an intricately scored passage. Ajax begins in lyric (364–6), asking
the chorus to look on him, once so great and now a victim of humiliation.
But at 367, he speaks in iambics with a moment of intense self-recognition,
marked by ra. Speaks – as one would assume with iambics? Or possibly
the possible significance of the pastoral metaphor in this context. The scholia already comment on
the metaphor.
somewhere between speech and song? The change of metre is abrupt: how
abrupt is the change of voice? But his voice, I assume, does mark this change
of metre, this transition.27 At this point, Tecmessa, who has been silent and
unnoticed or at least unaddressed by Ajax, comes in with a supplication,
imploring her master, as the crewmen had, not to say such things. But
he sharply orders her out of his sight in a brusque iambic line followed
by a scream: direct contact, but only to break it. The chorus address him
directly with a wish that he should be in his right mind (fr»nhson [371]
recalls front©stwv [355] and frone±n [344]) but this only leads to Ajax
singing again, and singing of and to himself – a break in the contact that
the iambics offered. Ajax seems to approach the expressive normality and
self-recognition of iambics, only to be provoked by Tecmessa’s appearance
into even more intense grief.
The same metrical scheme occurs, of course, in the antistrophe, and
again it is the (self-)recognition of laughter and abuse, the gestures of his
humiliation, that lead him to the utterance of iambics (379–82):
Ai. «Ü pnqì ¾rän, pntwn tì eª
kakän Àrganon, tknon Lart©ou,
kakpinstat»n tì lhma stratoÓ,
§ pou polÆn glwqì Ëfì ¡donv geiv.
Aj. Ah, you see all, the instrument of all
Evil, child of Laertes,
Foulest knave of the army,
For sure, you are laughing long and loud in delight.
The iambic last line here, with its strongly affirmative § pou, ‘Aye, for
sure’ again marks Ajax’s acute sense of humiliation. But this iambic line
continues the grammar of the lyric verses. How does the voice change
here? What slippage is there between lyric and the verse closest to human
speech? Is this Ajax sliding from his wilder emotional world to a moment
of realization? The chorus’ ameliorating interventions that follow are not
acknowledged by Ajax, and seem to pass him by as useless generalizations,
locked as he is into his own despair. His next line is an iambic verse (384),
‘Just let me see him, even though I am so ruined . . . ’, but it is broken off
(and Lloyd-Jones and Wilson punctuate it as an aposiopesis) with another
cry of grief, and he slips back into lyric. As he turns again to lyric, the
chorus comment – but receive no reply – ‘do you not know what point of
misery you have reached?’: they dismiss his self-recognition, though he will
27 This shift in metre is surprisingly not commented on in Finglass (2011).

114 Simon Goldhill
show all too clearly in the following scene that he is fully aware of where
he has come to. The final lyrics of Ajax have him address the rivers and
landscape of the Trojan plain, no longer seeking help from the chorus or
rejecting Tecmessa: alienated in lyric solitude and despair.
Ajax is singing a sort of lament here, and one might expect there to be
a formal pattern of sympathy and solace from his collective listeners and
Tecmessa. The comments of the chorus and Tecmessa receive short shrift
from Ajax, and cannot echo his grief, nor frame it in mythic parallels:
their disjunction from him, the failure of the kommos, is marked by the
failure to share metre, the dramatic disjunction between the lyric voice in
the mouth of the singular hero, and iambics in the mouth of Tecmessa
and the representative of the collective, as well by the failure of contact
between the characters. But the transition which this scene marks, from
the violent madness of the prologue to the rational despair of the second
scene, is also performed in the slippage into iambics by the hero, precisely
at moments of self-recognition and contact with his philoi. The voice of
the hero is moving; and the beginning of the second antistrophe, starting
with the paradigmatic lyric outburst of iō but ending with the iambic line,
enacts this gradual hardening of the voice into bitter self-awareness and
reasoning, before he returns to lyric, emotional alienation. The disjunctive
and expressive use of metre, in short, is integral to the semantics of the
drama, to the representation of the changing voice of the hero, struggling
with his sanity and self-awareness. And to the chorus, in their dependent
relationship with him. The chorus’ shifts of metre contour the hero’s, as
they enact their role as horrified philoi drawn towards and alienated from
their master. This is the central dynamic of the scene.
This variety of metrical delivery continues in Ajax. When the chorus
return from looking for Ajax in two hemi-choruses, itself a dramatically
bold move, and enter a conversation with Tecmessa, we see a dialogue which
swings between iambics and lyrics, and between the two half choruses (the
first of which begins in lyrics [866–71], the second in iambics [872, 874] –
if these lines are not spoken by a single koryphaios, it would be a good
case for iambic lines spoken by a group rather than an individual). The
whole chorus together also sings (879–90); the koryphaios (892, 894–5)
speaks; and an individual actor, Tecmessa, engages them in dialogue in
both lyrics and iambics. The confused shifts of mood of hunting for the lost
hero, anticipating and then recognizing disaster, the dispersed action, are
embodied in the dispersed voices. Snatches of iambic conversation (904–7)
are intercalated with lyric expressions of shock and grief (900–3, 908–14).
This is a very striking use of multiple metrical forms to dramatize a confused
scene of multiple shifts of emotion and viewpoint. It encapsulates – for
dramatic effect – in the briefest of scenes the full range of the soundscape
of tragedy.
Equally intriguing is the use of single iambic lines within an otherwise
lyric stanza. When the chorus are thrilled that Ajax appears to have changed
his mind, they sing two stanzas of joy. Each stanza begins with a single
iambic line that directly sums up their hope (693: ‘I am thrilled with passion;
and aloft with great joy’; 706: ‘Ares has loosed this terrible grief from his
eyes’.) Each of these opening iambic lines is followed by a wild exclamation:
694: «Ü «Ü Pn Pn, ‘Oh! Oh! Pan! Pan!’; 707: «Ü «Ü nÓn aÔ nÓn, å ZeÓ,
‘Oh! Oh! Now, again, again, O Zeus.’ It is as if the choral stanza begins in
the flattest of metres and then explodes into a scream of joy. I wonder if the
metrical contrast is to be fully articulated in performance to capture the
outburst of their feelings? Iambic trimeters can, of course, appear in lyrics,
but the only other example in Sophocles of stanzas beginning in this way
with an iambic line is the parodos of the Philoctetes, where the sailors (again
a subordinate group of men) enter to take their orders from Neoptolemus,
but there the iambic lines flow grammatically and metrically into the rest
of the stasimon.
Now, scholars have catalogued scenes where actors’ monodies are com-
bined either with iambic speeches from the chorus (starting from Aeschylus’
Cassandra) or with iambic speeches from other characters.28 They have also
listed scenes where actors shift between lyric and iambics (again starting
with Aeschylus’ Cassandra); other dialogues in different metres too have
been collected. In Euripides’ IT 827–99, Ion 1439–1509, Helen 625–97, three
recognition scenes, in each case it is a female who sings lyric and a male
who responds in iambics. This may suggest a generalized attitude towards
the greater emotionalism of females,29 though in each of these plays there
is also an emotional asymmetry between the characters for other reasons
too: in Ion, Creusa, who has lived long with the aftermath of her encounter
with Apollo, is telling her son of her rape: he is only recently engaging
with his family history and is listening to rather than sharing the emotions
of her story; in Helen Menelaus is keen to know about Helen’s departure
from Sparta, and she has to re-count a personally difficult story to her
husband. In IT, both Orestes and Iphigeneia have barely escaped death,
but it is Iphigeneia who breaks into an emotional account of her sacrifice
and unmarried life among barbarians. But it may be that these scenes of
28 See e.g. Finglass 2007: 117–21; 470–1; Dale 1967: 106–7 ad 625–97.
29 So Finglass 2007: 470 ad El. 1232–87.
116 Simon Goldhill
female lyric and male iambic restraint should be seen as a contrast with
the Ajax, where, as Nooter has emphasized, it is the man’s man Ajax who
is singing, lamenting, humiliated, and the female prisoner and concubine,
and the collective of ordinary sailors, who speak the iambics encouraging
and displaying restraint. When Ajax sings, the chorus and Tecmessa are, as
it were, reduced to iambics, and this change of voicing is fundamental to
the scene’s meaning in and as performance.
A second exemplary passage shows a similar technique in a single remark-
able exchange, which has not been adequately appreciated, and which offers
a further light on how Sophocles manipulates the potential of such met-
rical and thus representational possibilities. Although it does not involve
the chorus directly, it shows how Sophocles uses the lyric voice itself for
extraordinary dramatic effect – and will turn out finally to raise a question
about the chorus’ silence.
The recognition scene of the Electra juxtaposes a continuous lyric out-
burst from Electra (strophic, unlike the Euripidean scenes), and iambic
lines from Orestes enjoining silence (Electra 1231–88). This juxtaposition
has been noted many times by commentators, and, typically for this most
contentious of plays, interpretations vary between those who see this as
a proper and expected female emotionalism in contrast to a proper and
expected male efficiency and order, and those who see it as yet another
wild explosion of Electra, out of place and dangerous verbally as ever,
and a morally obtuse and even cruel Orestes, ignoring the opportunity
for fraternal embrace.30 The juxtaposition is clearly significant, however
played, and strongly emphasized by the fact that Electra also talks about
her overwhelming feelings throughout, whereas Orestes not only is more
restrained, but also repeatedly demands restraint (1236, 1238, 1251–2, 1259),
and specifically comments on her dangerously excessive emotional display
(1251–2, 1271–2). Electra’s emotional response is motivated by more than
her gender. It is Electra who has gone through the horror of believing
her brother dead and the shock of finding him alive, whilst Orestes has
been in command of the deception; and, it is Electra who has suffered
daily anguished argument and bullying, as she says, while Orestes has been
prepared for revenge over many years of exile.
What is more, the calmness of Orestes in the face of matricide is the-
matized, much as is Electra’s violent psychopathology. So, Electra herself
declares to the chorus that in her current circumstances ‘neither self-control
30 See Goldhill 2012: chapter 8.

nor piety is possible’ because in ‘evil times, evil must certainly be prac-
tised’ (307–9), and she has proclaimed to her mother that her ‘disgraceful
behaviour has been thoroughly taught from the disgraceful behaviour’
around her (621). Electra is fully aware of her own disgrace, her own
unpleasantness, it seems. How like her mother Electra becomes, how wild
and how decent she is becomes a question in the play – a question which
goes to the heart of the troubling morality of the drama as it explores the
costs of a consuming passion for revenge. Similarly, in contrast with the
Orestes of Aeschylus or that of Euripides, Sophocles’ Orestes is notably
unreflective, unconcerned even, about the morality of matricide, a silence
which grounds both the critical position of those who conclude that thus
there is no doubt about the rectitude of the revenge, and also the opposite
critical position of those who argue that it is precisely the failure to doubt
in the face of matricide that constitutes the horror of Orestes’ violence. The
recognition scene’s juxtaposition of Electra’s emotional lyrics and Orestes’
iambic restraint thus emblematizes this thematic nexus. This formal struc-
ture of monodic lyric and spoken iambic exchange as a form is fully and
integrally part of the semantics of the play.
The contrast itself is picked up and mirrored in reverse, as it were, in the
murder scene itself. As the cries of the dying Clytemnestra are heard from
inside the house, not only is Orestes silent – we can hear neither doubt from
him, unlike the Aeschylean Orestes, nor imprimatur from Pylades – but
also the chorus screams out in emotional lyrics in horror, while Electra in
iambics comments (1406) bo tiv ndon. oÉk koÅetì, å f©loi, ‘Someone
is shouting inside. Do you not hear, friends?’ ‘Someone’, tiv, sounds as if
she does not recognize her own mother’s voice or cannot anticipate who
might be screaming or why. This use of the indefinite tiv is ‘primarily
menacing’,31 when it is directed at a particular person in conversation (its
usual form, as in ‘someone’s going to get it’). But here she is addressing the
chorus, and her menace is for her own pleasure – perhaps a chilly calm at a
moment of long-awaited revenge, which is set in contrast with the chorus’
dismay at a son killing his mother – an emotional and a moral contrast,
I would suggest. The restraint of iambics in Electra’s case is not a sign of
swfrone±n and eÉsebe±n, ‘self-control and piety’, but a sign of a dangerous
passion differently manifested.
This thematic focus on speech, control, passion and its relation to moral
action makes the recognition scene’s dialogue of monody and iambics
especially charged. But there are two further questions about this exchange
31 Bond 1981: ad Eur. Her. 747–8
118 Simon Goldhill
which have been less commonly debated. First, there is one small break in
the pattern of iambics and lyrics (1275–80):
Hl. . . . m t© me, polÅponon ædì «dÛn
Or. t© m poisw; Hl. m mì posters
v
tän sän prosÛpwn donn meqsqai.
Or. § krta kn lloisi qumo©mhn «dÛn.
Hl. xunaine±v; Or. t© mn oÎ;
Hl. å f©lì, kluon n gÜ oÉdì n ¢lpisì aÉdn.
El. Don’t, now you’ve seen me like this in despair . . .
Or. What should I not do?
El. Do not deprive me
Of the pleasure of your face, don’t take it away.
Or. For sure, I would be angry if I saw someone else attempt it.
El. You concur?
Or. Of course.
El. O dear one, I have heard a voice that I could never have hoped for.
Orestes asks Electra what her broken and grammatically incoherent

demand is: ‘what is it that you don’t want me to do?’. t© m poisw;
is the first half of an iambic line (which Finglass analyses as the first half of
a syncopated, and thus lyric, iambic – though the syncopated part is not
expressed).32 She replies with a line and a half of lyric, which are iambic
trimeter catalectics – iambic trimeters with an extra final syllable, as it were –
asking him not to leave her again (it is almost as if she completes the met-
rical expectation of his half line – but goes beyond it). He concurs (with
a single iambic line). But when she asks if he really does agree (xunaine±v,
metrically a bacchiac), Orestes replies t© mn oÎ; ‘of course’, ‘why indeed
not?’, a bacchiac to match hers. Now a bacchiac can appear in an iambic
line before the caesura, but this appears to be a metrical response to Electra’s
question. It is as if her direct demand prompts an emotionally heightened
grace note from him (which might be anticipated in 276 if Finglass is right
that this half line has a lyric timbre). His verse – his metre – seems to be
infected by her emotional lyric, as even the strong man of revenge slips
into a more emotional if laconic utterance. As he utters this three-word
lyric – does he sing? does he break down? – Electra sings in response, ‘I
have heard a voice that I could not even hope for.’
This line of Electra’s has prompted a good deal of discussion. One prob-
lem is whether the vocative is å f©lì, ‘o dear one’, addressed to Orestes; or
32 Finglass 2007: ad loc.

å f©lai, ‘o dear ones’, addressed to the chorus. This has been inconclu-
sively debated. Finglass adds reasonably enough, but also without settling
the matter, that one might expect a superlative, å f©ltate, as an address
between brother and sister in a recognition scene (it is inconclusive not least
because Electra does address Orestes at 1285, two lines later, and a change
of addressee so quickly here in the same speech would be surprising).33
We will see in a moment that who is addressed also changes the semantics
of the scene. The second and more pressing problem is the referent for
aÉdn: what voice is she referring to? Jebb argues it is ‘unquestionably’ the
‘living voice’ of the returning Orestes. Kaibel argued that it means ‘story’
and refers to the tale of Orestes’ death. Wilamowitz took it to indicate
his agreement to her request.34 The question might be raised most sharply
by asking why the voice is mentioned here, almost at the very end of the
exchange, after more than sixty lines of dialogue. Perhaps it should be seen
as also a response to the three-word lyric utterance, that is, Orestes’ briefest
of slips into emotional symmetry, as well as his unexpected appearance.
Electra did not expect to hear a lyric voice from Orestes.
The single phrases t© m poisw; and t© mn oÎ; constitute the limit
case for the transition between lyrics and iambics. The context could not
be more marked, since not only is the pattern of male iambics and female
lyrics strongly established, but also the thematics of emotion and control
have been significantly underscored throughout the play. Is this a moment,
as in 1174–5, where Orestes lets slip his self-control? Is this a moment when
Electra’s lyric outpourings finally persuade him to make an emotional
connection with her?
The second brief point I wish to make on this scene takes us back to
the chorus and concerns its silence. When Electra, wonderingly, is first
sure she recognizes Orestes, she begs the chorus to look at him: ¾rtì
ìOrsthn t»nde, ‘Look at Orestes, here!’ (1228). ‘We see him’, they reply,
and ‘a tear of joy runs from our eyes’ (1230–1). But through the recognition
lyrics, and then the next scene of iambics between Orestes and Electra and
then the Paedagogus’ intervention, and their exit into the palace, the chorus
say absolutely nothing (1232–1383), nor are they addressed (unless the text
of 1280 is read as o philai, and even if that reading were accepted, they do
not respond). By way of contrast, the recognition scene in the Choephoroi
is ended by five iambics from the chorus (Cho. 264–8), and the scene shifts
into the three-way kommos sung between Orestes, Electra and the chorus
33 Finglass 2007 ad loc., with a conspectus of opinions.
34 Kaibel 1896: 268 (followed by Campbell, Lloyd-Jones and Wilson, and Kamerbeek). Jebb 1894 ad
loc. Wilamowitz 1921: 514.
120 Simon Goldhill
(Cho. 306–478). In Euripides’ Electra, after the unwilling recognition, the
chorus break into brief but excited lyrics (Eur. El. 585–95). Here, however,
in Sophocles the chorus remain silent.
This silence does create an unbroken emphasis on the brother-sister
meeting, but I do not think that this is its sole dramatic function. Nor do
I think that the chorus are just being functionally helpful to the avengers,
keeping silent to avoid revealing the plot to those in the palace, even
though Orestes and the Paedagogus both demand silence from Electra
(unsuccessfully) to this end. Rather, this silence may also be understood as
an example of what may be termed ‘the audience on stage’.35 That is, the
chorus are not just silenced and forgotten but are there watching (¾rte)
the recognition (and following scene), and we watch them watching. We
get two very different responses to the recognition from its leading actors,
Orestes and Electra, and the chorus’ silent observation encourages the
audience in the theatre to see the difference, but gives us no guidance in
how to read it. Their watching silence helps set up Electra’s and Orestes’
different responses as a problem for spectators in the theatre. What do they
see here, or rather what do we see them seeing? The chorus of the Electra,
I would suggest, inhabits an increasingly difficult place as the murder
approaches and takes place, and their silence here may well be part of that
dramatization.
The flexibility and dramatic potential of the variation of iambic and lyric
are also expertly manipulated by Sophocles at the highly dramatic moment
of the entrance of the blinded Oedipus in the Oedipus Tyrannus, another
scene where Nooter has discussed the actor’s singing tellingly. The exangelos
announces the gates are opening to display Oedipus, a sight (qama) to
make even an enemy pity (1294–6). The sight («de±n 1297) does indeed
overwhelm the chorus, who sing a passionate lyric of pity, addressed to
the king (1297–1306). They are overcome by trembling (fr©khn 1306). The
metre they use here is often described as ‘marching anapaests’ (‘recitative
anapaests’, ‘chanting anapaests’) to distinguish it from the more highly
wrought melic anapaests, in which Oedipus, as he stumbles in, cries out
his pain (1307–11). It is often hard to distinguish with any rigour between
the two forms, however (and in this case Pearson’s OCT maintains some of
the Doric features typical of melic anapaests (tlmon 1299, mak©stwn 1301,
dÅstanì 1303), as found in many manuscripts, while Lloyd-Jones and Wil-
son’s OCT emends them all away to help enforce the distinction (tlmon,
mhk©stwn, dÅsthn)). But even so the repetitions of the chorus (å dein»n/å
35 See Goldhill 2009.
dein»taton; t©v/t©v; feÓ/feÓ; p»llì/poll/poll), their excited ques-
tions, and strongly articulated emotions, have great intensity – anapaests
are also strongly associated with mourning, the obvious emotional and
ritual framework here – and it is not even clear that this passage reveals
‘a more level and subdued strain of sorrow’ rather than an intense shock.
But in response to Oedipus’ undoubtedly emotionally heightened opening
lyric, the chorus – the koryphaios, presumably – utters a single iambic line
(1312):
v dein»n, oÉdì koust»n, oÉdì p»yimon.
To a terrible place, beyond hearing, beyond sight.
Oedipus has asked where he is going, and the chorus answers. But the
horror of their opening anapaests (whether chanted or sung) is replaced by
the bare awfulness of the single iambic line by a single voice. The chorus of
the Ajax had sung a frightened lyric of anticipation before the appearance of
Ajax, but when they address their mad and lyrical master with iambics, they
have been engaged in a long iambic dialogue with Tecmessa immediately
before the display of Ajax. Here, the shift of voice from collective singing
to an individual’s spoken line is even more marked and dramatic. It is like
a stage direction.
Oedipus opens the first strophe still crying out in lyric (1312–14), the
dochmiacs of high emotion, but he too shifts surprisingly and suddenly
into iambics (1316–18):
omoi
omoi mlì aÔqivá o³on e«sdu ma
kntrwn te tändì ostrhma kaª mnmh kakän.
Alas
Alas once again. How the stab of these goads
And the memory of evils sinks over me.
The phrase omoi mlì aÔqiv, ‘alas once again’ looks rather strange in
English. It does not just indicate that the speaker is repeating omoi. Rather,
it is usually used when there is some specific doubleness at stake. Aeschylus’
Agamemnon cries out ßmoi ml aÔqiv specifically when he is ‘struck a sec-
ond blow’ (Aesch. Ag. 1345). This is echoed when Sophocles’ Clytemnestra
is hit for a second time too: pa±son, e« sqneiv, dipln, ‘strike, if you have
the strength, a double blow’ (El. 1415–16). Hyllus cries omoi mlì aÔqiv
(Trach. 1206) when he realizes that his father’s command is asking him to
become both his father’s killer and polluted with his blood (Trach. 1207).
122 Simon Goldhill
Here the double omoi marks the double pain, the physical anguish from
the blinding and the mental anguish from the recollection of the bad things
in his life. As with Ajax’s transition into iambics, the transition takes place
specifically at a moment of self-recognition that takes the character beyond
lament into reflection.
The chorus, still in iambics, pick up this sense of doubleness (a key note
of the incestuous discourse of the Oedipus) immediately (1319–20):
kaª qaÓma gì oÉdn n toso±sde pmasin
dipl se penqe±n kaª dipl frein kak.
Aye, no wonder amid so many pains
That you lament double and bear double evils.
This engagement with his words and suffering prompts from Oedipus
immediate counter-recognition in the antistrophe: å f©lov, ‘O friend!’ In
this antistrophe too, Oedipus first sings out, and then, as one would expect
from the metrical responsion, reverts to iambics – which is also constructed
as a moment of recognition (1325–6): ‘You are not concealed from me, but
I know your voice at any rate clearly, in darkness though I am’, and the
chorus again responds in iambics (1327–8), desperately asking about how
Oedipus could have come to such a self-mutilating deed. But their next
response to his continued lyric outpouring is harder to place (1336):
§n taÓqì Âpwsper kaª sÆ fv.
Things were as you indeed say.
This is an iambic dimeter (and there is a corresponding dimeter at 1356:

qlonti kmoª toÓtì n §n, ‘I also would have had things thus’). Between
these two dimeters, the chorus have another pair of iambic trimeters (1347–
8), separating two stanzas of Oedipus’ lyrics. How are these dimeters to
be voiced? They could be seen as broken iambic trimeters, as if the chorus
cannot complete a whole line in their shock – and both dimeters are
lines that express a flat or numbed assent to Oedipus’ intense and painful
account. Or could they mark (also?) a raising of the emotional tenor of the
voice – into recitative or even singing? Dimeters are a regular part of lyric,
and the chorus may even be echoing Oedipus’ lyric dimeters (1332/52).
Collectively articulated or individually? Again, even if we cannot be sure
of how the change of metre precisely marks a change of voice, we can see
an implicit stage direction.
This section of the Oedipus Tyrannus is a useful example of what I mean
by choreography. The chorus begin collectively in trembling lyric mode
at the appearance of Oedipus, revert to a single, shocked iambic line, an
individual’s voice, and then respond to his mixture of lyrics and iambics
with iambics of sympathy and questioning horror. As Oedipus sings, so too
the chorus start to mix iambic dimeters and trimeters in their responses –
dimeters that express a numbed assent. The collective lyric voice becomes a
single voice of response, which may become something else again with the
dimeters. The scene has sometimes been likened to a kommos, where one
would expect a pattern of alternate lament, a performance of sympathy.
What we see is an emotional counterpoint where Oedipus sings a more
and more articulate and pained account of what has led him to where
he is, and the chorus respond with increasing restraint and even distance.
‘How I wish I had never known you’, they state at the beginning of the
final antistrophe (1348), and in that last stanza Oedipus no longer addresses
them as philoi (as he had at 1321, 1329, 1339), or indeed addresses them at
all. They introduce the next scene tellingly by declaring to Oedipus that
his decision was bad, and he would be better off dead than living blind
(1367–8). There is a narrative here, not just a reflection on Oedipus’ life –
a narrative of how the chorus’ response to the blinded king is changing,
as well as how Oedipus is retelling the story of his life. Again, the form of
exchange, the shifts in and out of the lyric voice, is integral to the narrative
development.
My final example in this section is also an almost kommos, and is par-
ticularly tricky. At an extremely tense moment in the Trachiniae, after
Deianeira has entered the house in silence and the chorus has sung an
uneasy ode, a scream is heard inside, and the nurse comes out with the
news of Deianeira’s death (862–95). There are several small but vexatious
issues in this passage, which I will need to discuss briefly, but the overrid-
ing point is simple and clear. For at least the majority of the scene, and
probably all of it, the chorus sings in lyric, asking distraught questions,
and the nurse replies in iambics. Unlike the scenes we have focused on so
far, which highlighted Ajax’s lyric voice against the chorus’ and Tecmessa’s
iambics; or the chorus’ silence while Electra sang and Orestes spoke; or
Oedipus’ lyric outpourings responded to primarily by a chorus’ iambics
trimeters and dimeters; here in Trachiniae it is the chorus which has the
lyric voice in the exchange and the actor who speaks. The nurse’s direct
message and repeated blunt assertions that she is being direct (875, 876,
892) are set in dramatic contrast with the chorus’ emotional confusion –
the single, speaking character, whose previous scenes with Deianeira colour
her role as messenger, in contrast with the collective singing of the chorus.
As the chorus finally realise what the Nurse is saying, they too speak in a
124 Simon Goldhill
single iambic line (898), which leads into the Nurse’s long account of the
queen’s death. Sophocles’ dramaturgy again makes the formal qualities of
the exchange, its different metres or voices, an integral part of the dramatic
narrative.
There are, however, two specific issues which need to be built into
this picture, each of which raises questions of considerable importance for
our understanding of the choral voice in Sophocles. The first concerns the
opening lines of the chorus (863–70) which cranks up the tension by hearing
some commotion in the house, wondering what it is, and then seeing the
nurse come out in distress. The lines are iambic trimeters with two parallel
insertions (t© fhm©; ‘what am I to say?’ [865], xÅnev d, ‘Mark!’ [868]).
Jebb assigns 862–5 to one hemichorus, 866–7 to a second hemichorus,
and 868–70 to the chorus – that is, he imagines three different groups of
voices speaking. Pearson’s OCT divides the lines slightly differently but
also proposes three separate voices, as does Easterling’s commentary. The
new OCT of Lloyd-Jones and Wilson suggests no division of speakers,
and Davies, unhelpfully making no judgement, prints the new OCT and
merely notes that ‘some scholars . . . envisage a change of speakers’, without
further discussion.36 The response of the chorus to the death cries of
Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is usually seen as ten separate
voices, a fragmented scene which dramatizes both the chorus’ doubt and
inefficacy in a striking manner, and also vividly represents the dissolution
of social bonds which the murder in the palace constitutes. In Euripides’
Hercules Furens, Diggle’s OCT, and many other editions, suggests that
three voices might be used: particularly at 815–21, where the chorus panic
at the appearance of Iris and flee in confusion, there is a special import
to the fragmentation; but in the stasima that precede this coup de théâtre,
where there is a particularly complex interweaving of iambic and lyric
passages, different speakers are also indicated by editors, to express, as
in the Agamemnon, a multiform response to a murder in the palace from
outside – though in this case, of course, responses in support of the killing.37
Here in the Trachiniae too the chorus is responding to the sound of a royal
death within the house, and is responding in confusion, a confusion that
will be the keynote of their response to the nurse. So there is certainly
36 Davies 1991: ad loc.; Easterling 1982: ad loc.

37 ‘It is fashionable with scholars of the present time to multiply instances of this [multiple choral
voices] by splitting up choral systems into individual ejaculations, but this may easily be overdone,
and the process is anyway guided mainly by the scholar’s personal fancy’: Pickard-Cambridge 1968:
245.
a good enough reason for those scholars who divide the lines between
different speakers.
But there are two general points that this discussion underlines. First,
between the choral collective, lyric voice (sung or chanted), and the
koryphaios’ individual speaking voice, there is the potential for another
element in the soundscape, the fragmented collection of individual voices.
We can see dialogue within the chorus, or even, as in Hercules Furens
815–21, the possibility of a confused babble of individual voices in panic.
This technique is used sparingly and for moments of particularly high
tension, where the collective voice fragments into multiple responses to
the dramatic events off stage. Second, this technique, I would argue, is
not only part of the experimentation with the potential of the chorus but
also part of the politics of tragic representation: there is in democratic texts
a considerable anxiety about dissension within the collective and how it
is managed.38 The representation of the fragmented chorus, the collective
breaking into individual voices under social pressure, is an integral aspect of
how the chorus can be said to represent the collective within a democratic
framework.
The second issue also concerns the division of parts. In the following
lines (871–95), the confused chorus ask for information about the death of
Deianeira and the nurse provides the answers. But the manuscript sequence
is difficult to follow in detail and several solutions have been proposed,
of which Henderson’s has justly received the most support from recent
scholars.39 The fundamental question is whether 882–8 are given wholly
to the chorus, or whether they are divided between the chorus and the
Nurse. Jebb and Pearson’s OCT, typically for prewar editions, split 882–8
between the Nurse and the chorus. Lloyd-Jones and Wilson, Easterling
and Davies follow Henderson in giving the lines all to the chorus. What
interests me is one of the arguments on which those who give all the lines
to the chorus rely, namely, Paul Maas’s claim that ‘characters of low social
standing (except the Phrygian in the Orestes) are never given lines in sung
metres, but are given instead anapaests, like the Nurse in the Hippolytus,
or hexameters like the Old Man in the Trachinae’.40
Now Maas is a very fine scholar of all things metrical, and his handbook
on Greek metre is a fundamental work, and it would be a rash person who
disagreed with him without great caution. But this dictum (and there is
no more argument offered by Maas than this quotation nor any counter
case considered in his book) does need a little more nuance. First, for
38 See Barker 2009; Ober 1999. 39 Henderson 1976. 40 Maas 1962: 53–4.
126 Simon Goldhill
clarity’s sake, by ‘characters’ obviously Maas must mean individual actors,
since many choruses are made up of figures of low social standing who
sing lyric. Second, one must be rather generous in one’s understanding
of ‘social standing’. The boy who sings in Andromache is the son of a
slave, and would be certainly not of good status in Athens; but he is also
the son of Andromache, a Trojan princess, and, especially in the heroic
world of tragedy, may well be regarded at very least as touched by nobility.
Even so, it is striking to have a child sing lyric, and since the play is
also concerned with this child’s status, his singing may be seen within that
frame of contention. Similarly, in Aeschylus’ Supplices, the chorus exchange
lyrics with someone whom they address in the singular (836–70), and the
most likely candidate is the Herald who is certainly on stage unannounced
at the end of the lyric exchange (873). Here, Maas proposes a chorus of
Egyptians as the addressee, and Henderson, seeing the weakness of the
case for a battle of choruses, suggests weakly – to save the rule – that
Heralds may not be really of low social standing, even if they are clearly
not heroes or kings (it is hard to justify this on social terms even if a herald
is sometimes associated with the poet, and is treated with some respect by
virtue of his role).41 The Supplices is also a play obsessed with the social
status of its characters and especially the chorus. Nor is Polymestor who
sings pained lyrics in Hecuba, of aristocratic status (as Hall points out),42
nor Greek (as Barner incomprehensibly suggests).43 Indeed, his ambiguous
status grounds Agamemnon’s treatment of him. Third, one must also note
that it is not wholly clear whether the Phrygian Eunuch is an allowed
exception, rather than a full-scale counter-case, because he is Phrygian (but
barbarians sing on stage), or because he is a Eunuch (but this is untestable),
or just because Euripides liked to shock.
Another obvious possible exception, however, is in the transmitted text
of this passage of the Trachiniae. The lyric phrase (886) ston»entov n
tom sidrou, ‘by the cut of iron that brings grief ’, is given to the Nurse
by the manuscripts (as is 883–4 by some editors), but it is re-attributed to
the chorus by Paul Maas himself, so that thus the Nurse is not allowed
to sing. It would seem that some special pleading is necessary to maintain
the ‘rule’ of ‘low social standing’, and it might be better to admit that
the exceptions are broader and more dramatically motivated than Maas
envisaged. Even here the Nurse at 892 still has a single bacchiac (safhn)
in response to the chorus’ bacchiac question (t© fwne±v;). This need not
41 Henderson 1976. 42 Hall 2006: 317–8. 43 Barner 1971: 262–3.

sink the general observation, however, but encourage us rather to see the
playwrights working with such a tendency. So, for example, Teucer in Ajax
is dismissed by the Atreidae because of his low birth, and he indeed never
sings, even when he joins in the kommos over the body of Ajax. The chorus
there do sing lyrics; and he responds with extra metrum cries of grief and,
otherwise, iambics (exactly when one might expect an antiphonal response
in lyric). This representation of iambic mourning may prepare us for the
Atreidae’s snobbishness, as well as contrasting Teucer with Ajax. Teucer’s
performance, that is, his voice confirms the status the Atreidae denigrate
him with. Similarly, Ion in Euripides’ Ion appears first as a temple attendant
sweeping the steps, and, though of lowly status, he sings lyric – but as we
already know from the prologue and will see fulfilled in the course of the
play, his real identity is very starry indeed. Again, his lyric voice may well
prepare us for the identity which is to be revealed.
But it is a fourth point where I think most care is needed. To give
Maas’s claim its full weight, one must also feel very clear about the division
between (marching) anapaests and melic anapaests, and feel very clear about
whether it is the social status of the character which keeps them from full
lyric, or whether other attendant causes are more relevant. We have already
seen how a text can be emended to help enforce the distinction between
marching anapaests and other melic anapaests, and we have seen too that
there are places where the status of the anapaests is harder to categorize
than Maas’ strictures would suggest.
So, it is worth recalling how often the scenes we have considered have
involved asymmetrical exchanges which are not necessarily based solely on
social standing. The case of the Nurse in Hippolytus certainly presents us
with a division of social standing – but the opening scene’s long exchange of
anapaests has different levels of speech and singing (if it does) because the
queen is represented as mad, and out of control, while the Nurse is arguing
rationally with her and trying to find out what she wants. Similarly, if there
is a difference in quality of voice in the anapaests of Heracles, Hyllus and
the Old Man in the Trachiniae (974–1003), and it is far less clear in this case
how strongly marked such a difference is, it is not a question so much of
social standing as of the anguish of the dying, monstrously great Heracles
in contrast to the grief of the Old Man and the grief and guilt of Hyllus.
It might be better to conclude not that there is a hard and fast rule that
characters of low social standing do not sing lyric, but rather that lyric’s
intensity is usually reserved for the characters having particularly intense
experiences (who are not usually individuals of lower social standing in the
128 Simon Goldhill
hierarchical world of Greek tragedy), and that the playwrights explore the
differences of different styles of utterance for dramatic purposes, to create
specific contrasts and colours.
Now, on the balance of evidence, it seems to me that Henderson’s
emendations (with or without Lloyd-Jones and Wilson’s small correction
of 881) construct the most likely text of Trachiniae 879–95 – but the better
reason for this reading is not because the Nurse can’t sing according to
a postulated law about social standing, but rather because the scene is
constructed as a dialogue between a confused and emotional chorus, and a
figure, the nurse, who is about to deliver a long messenger speech describing
the death of Deianeira and who in this introductory passage as in the scene
to come is direct, in control, and sharply articulate. This conclusion is
based on the balance of probabilities, however, not on a certain rule; and
counter arguments (a nurse struggling to control emotions and slipping
between lyric and iambic, for example) are evidently available.
We do not know exactly how any actor delivered iambics in contrast
to marching anapaests in contrast to melic anapaests; we do not know
what differences in articulation there were between different styles of ana-
paests or, indeed, how much they overlapped and were played with in
performance; nor can we be sure how strongly articulated the movements
between lyric and iambic verses were in a single actor’s performance. Ps.-
Aristotle’s Problems claims that parakatalogē is especially tragic (Prob. 19.6),
and this is usually translated as ‘variation’, which may direct us towards an
ancient recognition of change of voice as a particularly dramatic resource,
and a particularly moving part of tragedy’s repertoire. But ancient sources
are all agreed that specific metres are associated with specific genres, with
particular emotional registers, and with precise forms of stimulus for an
audience. This should encourage us to be especially attentive to how the
tragic playwrights worked their uniquely variegated medium.
What I have tried to suggest in this chapter is that Sophocles manipu-
lates transitions and juxtapositions between lyric voices and iambic voices,
between sung and spoken voices, between collective and individual voices,
and even between sequential or fragmented individual voices and collective
choral voice, in order to construct a score in which the chorus interrelates
with the actors in a fully and integrally dramatic manner. Metre, as an
essential element of the choral voice, acts as a system of stage directions
for the chorus’ narrative. There is more flexibility and experimentation
with the lyric voice, than is customarily allowed, especially by generaliza-
tions about The Greek Chorus, and this flexibility and experimentation
is an integral element of the polyphony of Athenian drama within the
soundscape of the city.44
44 Thanks to the organizers of the conference at Northwestern University in Evanston, and to the
audiences there and on a later occasion in Princeton where short versions of this paper were
delivered. For discussion, criticism and help my thanks are gratefully recorded to Pat Easterling,
Felix Budelmann, Sarah Nooter and Edith Hall. Another version of this chapter appears in Goldhill
2012.
chapter 6
Conflicting identities in the Euripidean chorus

Laura Swift
Studies of the tragic chorus have often focused on the forms of identity
which the chorus can embody. For when scholars claim that the chorus
represents the ‘ideal spectator’, the ‘voice of the polis’ or the ‘marginalised
other’, their arguments relate not only to the persuasive role which the
chorus occupies, but also the authority which we attribute to the chorus as
an institution.1 This authority ultimately derives from the role of the chorus
in ritual life, and the wisdom with which it is presumed to speak, and these
factors are crucial to the concept of choral mediation. The authority of
the chorus relies on the perception that it possesses its own institutional
identity as a chorus, separate from the individual or collective identities of
the individuals within it, and it is this which allows the chorus to mediate
between the dramatic world and the world of the audience. It is the tensions
inherent in the distinctions between these forms of identity with which
this paper is concerned.
There are two aspects to a tragic chorus. Firstly, the chorus represents
an internal grouping within the world of the play (for example, old men of
Thebes, Trojan women); secondly, it plays the role of a chorus qua chorus,
drawing on the long tradition of choral performance in Greek society and
its role in affirming accepted morality.2 Thus the identity of the tragic
chorus is intrinsically fluid, and this flexibility makes the chorus a valuable
tool with which the tragedian can explore the nature of belonging to a
group.3 The chorus provides important insight into these concepts for two
further reasons. Firstly, the chorus lacks any individual identity on the part
of its members: they speak with a single voice, and are defined entirely
1 ‘Ideal spectator’: originally suggested by Schlegel (1846a); ‘voice of the polis’: Vernant and Vidal-
Naquet 1988: 310–11; ‘the other’: Gould 2001 [1996]. The notion of inherent choral authority is
an important contribution to this topic: see Goldhill 1996; Mastronarde 1999; Foley 2003, and the
papers of Calame, Nagy, and Hopman in this volume.
2 For the chorus in Greek society see Herington 1985; Bacon 1994/5; Wilson 2000: 21–43; Kowalzig
2007b: 43–55; Swift 2010: 36–9.
3 For analysis of this fluidity, see Calame 1999; Mastronarde 2010: 89–98.
130
Conflicting identities in the Euripidean chorus 131
by the grouping which the poet has chosen to give them.4 As such, the
chorus can easily be used to investigate the phenomenon of group identity
and how identities are formed through belonging to particular groupings.5
Secondly, the choral grouping is never fixed by the myth, but is the free
choice of the poet. This freedom is not an irrelevant embellishment, for
the choice of choral group profoundly influences the telling of the myth
and the presentation of the characters.6
This chapter will investigate the presentation of social groupings through
the filter of the chorus, whose own loyalties are manipulated by the poet to
enhance these themes. As we shall see, the fluidity of choral identity allows
the tragic chorus to hold a range of alternative identities (choral, familial,
gendered, local); the tensions created by these potentially conflicting iden-
tities enhance the play’s exploration of associated ideas. Hence, approaches
which focus on a single aspect of the chorus’ identity fail to recognise the
unique opportunity represented by the chorus: we should acknowledge the
multiplicity of viewpoints represented by tragic choruses, and the inter-
pretative benefits which this brings. In this chapter I will examine two
tragedies where these issues are presented with particular force: Euripides’
Ion and Medea. Both plays depict choruses whose identity as members
of their polis-community comes into conflict with other aspects of their
identity. Euripides uses the fluctuating identity of the chorus to explore
ideas about what it means to belong to a particular group, and the benefits
and hazards which result from such affiliation.
Both Medea and Ion follow the basic model of the chorus as representa-
tives of its own Greek community (though in Ion importantly this is not
the location where the play is actually set): a model which draws on the
civic functions of non-tragic choruses and which has led scholars to see the
4 Of course there are cases in tragedy where the Chorus split into sub-groups debating what to do (or
in the case of Aesch. Ag. 1346–71 into the individual voices of its choreuts). However, the level of
individuation is superficial: the effect is to create atmosphere, not to suggest any serious individuality
on the part of the Chorus members.
5 The phenomenon of forming a group-based identity is an important sociological area: see Brown 1971:
204–26; Sunstein 2009, discussions of the effects of group similarity on individual self-presentation.
Cf. also Bacon 1994/5: 9 on modern group identity: ‘like an ancient chorus they continue to function
as individuals while a common experience makes them speak, or sing, with one voice on the issue
that brings them together’.
6 One might imagine, for example, how different a play Antigone could be if the Chorus did not consist
of male citizens initially loyal to Creon but of Antigone’s own handmaidens. Similarly, Medea comes
across as a far more sympathetic figure than Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon largely because
the Chorus’ sympathy and loyalty in Medea provide the protagonist with confidantes to explain her
perspective, whereas the male Chorus in Agamemnon regards Clytemnestra with fear and suspicion:
a response which inevitably influences our perspective on her character.
132 Laura Swift
chorus as representative of the polis more broadly.7 While this interpreta-
tion has been challenged, it is nevertheless true that a locally based chorus
is usually presented as having the community’s interests at heart.8 Thus,
for example, in Oedipus Tyrannus, the Chorus repeatedly identify them-
selves (or are identified by others) with the city of Thebes (513, 911, 994,
1200–1, 1523), and their loyalty to Oedipus springs from their belief that he
is concerned for his citizens’ well-being (504–11, 694–6, 1197–1203). The
presence of a Theban Chorus not only helps the audience to see the posi-
tive aspects of Oedipus’ character by reminding us of how he has benefited
his city in the past; it also reminds us of what is at stake in discovering
the killer’s identity. Similarly, in Oedipus at Colonus we are shown a Cho-
rus with a strong local attachment, who are suspicious of a stranger who
insists on flouting their local religious beliefs (113–37, 161–9). The Chorus
sing of the beauty of Colonus, and in doing so emphasise their own ties
with the locality (668–719). This sense of local identity is central to the
dramatic action, for through it we come to empathise with the difficul-
ties and dangers in reconciling Oedipus, the dangerous outsider, to this
community.
Conversely, it is easy to make the opposite claim about a foreign chorus:
that they are used to create a sense of an alien grouping, possessing values
which may be at odds with the community in which the play is set. Thus in
Aeschylus’ Supplices, the foreign Chorus’ abnormal rejection of marriage
endangers the Greek city which takes them in. Similarly in Euripides’
Bacchae, we are shown an Asian Chorus who, far from empathising with
the troubles of the local royal house, exalt in the downfall of its king and
uphold the values of Dionysiac worship over the safety and stability of
Thebes. The other main defining category of choral identity is that of
gender, and here scholars have also sought patterns of behaviour across
gender-groupings as well as local ones. Thus, for example, critics have
noted the role of female choruses in forming a gender-based bond with a
female protagonist (obvious in both Medea and Ion), while male choruses
may be more likely to speak on behalf of the polis-community (for example,
in Oedipus Tyrannus or Antigone).9
7 Most obviously the work of Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988: 310–11; however many other scholars
have stressed how the chorus is represented as rooted in the local community: see Gould 2001: 226–7;
Goldhill 1996: 246–7.
8 As Mastronarde 2010: 100 notes: ‘There are two broad categories into which choruses may be
classified: the chorus may represent the communal group residing in the general location of the
action, or the chorus may consist of comrades or dependents of a main character.’
9 See Hose 1990/1: 17–20; Mastronarde 1998; Foley 2003: 19–20; Mastronarde 2010: 101–4.
Yet while these observations contain much of value, it is important to
note that each of these aspects of identity is only one axis along which the
chorus may form its grouping. Hence attempts to find general patterns of
behaviour run the risk of oversimplifying the characterisation of particular
choruses. Rather, as I shall argue, Euripidean choruses can demonstrate
a cluster of alternative identities which can operate as motivating forces:
factors such as the Chorus’ age, gender and nationality are important in
determining their actions and loyalties, yet it is the conflict between these
facets of identity which is particularly revealing.10 In Medea the Chorus’ ties
to Corinth, and the wider issue of civic loyalty, are regularly mentioned,
yet these are overturned in favour of their gender-based alliance with a
foreigner. Conversely, in Ion the Chorus advocate an aggressive attachment
to their Athenian identity, yet on analysis they have difficulty separating the
competing claims of oikos and polis. In both plays, the Chorus represent
themselves as motivated by a range of different loyalties; as we shall see, both
plays present self-definition by the group as a critical factor in motivating
its behaviour.
Medea
Early in the play the Chorus of Medea are presented with two alternative
forms of identity: their polis-identity as Corinthian, and their gender-
identity as a group of women. The latter identity is of course shared with
Medea, who famously manipulates it in her opening speech (discussed
below), and the Chorus’ choice to prioritise this gender-identity over their
loyalty to their own polis is of critical importance to the action. While
scholars have explored the issue of Medea’s own foreignness at length, the
importance of the Chorus’ own native identity has been less discussed.11
Yet, on analysis, the role of the community and the Chorus’ attitude to
their status as Corinthians are highly relevant to how Euripides presents
their developing relationship with Medea.
The Chorus’ relationship to their city is inextricably linked to their
attitude to Medea, a foreigner who poses a threat to it. In their first words
10 Cf. Vidal-Naquet 1997: 115: ‘the tragic poet . . . has at his disposal a series of codes which 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’.
11 For Medea’s ethnicity as a theme in the play, cf. e.g. Page 1938: xviii–xxi; Knox 1977; Hall 1989: 203;
Rabinowitz 1993: 136–7; Lawrence 1997; Allan 2002: ch. 3; Mastronarde 2002: 22–6.
134 Laura Swift
in the play, the Chorus acknowledge Medea’s foreign status as they express
their feelings towards her (131–9):12
{Co.} kluon fwnn, kluon d bon
tv dustnou Kolc©dová oÉdpw
¢piov; llì, å gerai, lxon.
mfipÅlou gr sw melqrou g»on
kluon, oÉd sundomai, å gÅnai,
lgesi dÛmatov,
pe© moi fil©a kkratai.
{Tr.} oÉk e«sª d»moiá froÓda tdì ¢dh.
[chorus: I have heard the voice, I have heard the shout of the wretched Colchian
woman – is she not yet calm? Tell me, old woman! For I have heard her
lamentation within the double-gated house, and I take no pleasure in the
suffering of the house, lady, for I have mixed the cup of friendship with it.
nurse: There is no house. It has gone.]
The Chorus refer to Medea not by name but as ‘the Colchian woman’,
which creates a sense of distance between them, while also stressing Medea’s
foreignness. Although they go on to describe their friendly feelings towards
Medea, the terms in which they do so are suggestive, for they present a
picture of friendship between houses and hence within the establishment
of the wider Corinthian community.13 It is not Medea’s personal suffering
which moves the Chorus, but that of the house as a whole (lgesi dÛma-
tov, 137), and it is the friendship of the house they value (138). In other
words, the Chorus lead us to believe that their friendship with Medea is
based on communal and civic ties. Another type of loyalty is implied in
the metaphor of kkratai with its associations of male bonding within the
political class, for kernnumi is most commonly used of diluting wine with
water: an image which recalls the symposium.14 This language stands in
contrast to Medea’s later appeal to the Chorus on the basis of shared femi-
ninity, for kkratai hints at a relationship between aristocratic males, and
so suggests that the Chorus at this stage accept the patriarchal structures of
their community. The Nurse’s reply oÉk e«sª d»moi (139) is therefore signif-
icant, for it draws on the Chorus’ own language, implying that their locally
12 The Greek text is that of Diggle’s OCT. All translations are mine.
13 Scholars of tragedy frequently focus on the potential conflicts that arise between oikos and polis,
an issue explored by many plays. Yet it is important not to neglect the degree to which oikoi and
the relationship between them were structurally integral to the wellbeing of the wider polis. For
ancient discussion, cf. Arist. Pol. 1252b–1 253a, which describes the polis as ultimately arising from
a partnership between oikoi.
14 Cf. Hom. Od. 24.364; Eur. Cycl. 557; Aristoph. Eccl. 1123: see LSJ sv kernnumi.
derived loyalty is no longer relevant. When the Nurse claims that the house
no longer exists, she indicates not only the dissolution of Medea’s marriage
(specified at 140–2) but also her position within the community. Medea’s
impending exile means that she will no longer be bound to Corinthian
society, so that the bonds of loyalty between oikoi become still less relevant.
Thus the Chorus’ first words hint at the degree to which they are still bound
to the conventions of their own polis, and set up their relationship with
Medea as one which operates within this framework. The closing words
of the parodos return to this theme, as the Chorus imagine her journey to
Greece (208–12):
qeoklute± dì dika paqoÓsa
tn Zhn¼v ¾rk©an Qmin, nin basen
ëElldì v nt©poron
diì la nÅcion fì lmurn
P»ntou kldì perntou.
[Having suffered injustice she cries upon Themis, goddess of oaths, Zeus’s
daughter, who brought her over the sea to Greece, through the dark seawater
over the salty barrier of the Black Sea, so difficult to cross.]
The Chorus dwell once more on Medea’s foreign identity, imagining the
long voyage she made from her homeland. Their focus on the Symple-
gades is significant, for the Clashing Rocks symbolise an impassable barrier
between Medea’s world and theirs, emphasised by the description of the
rocks as a literal ‘bolt’ (kldì, 212). This is further developed by the posi-
tion of perntou as the word on which the song ends, which implies
a naturally ordained separation between Greeks and foreigners. The Sym-
plegades’ symbolic importance has been established by the Nurse, who
mentions them in the lines which open the play (eqì ßfelì %rgoÓv m
diaptsqai skfov / K»lcwn v a²an kuanav Sumplhgdav, ‘if only
that ship the Argo had not winged its way through the dark Symplegades
to the land of Colchis’, 1–2). The Symplegades thus symbolise not only
distance but dissolution of social ties, for it is Medea’s journey through
the Symplegades which marks the irrecoverability of her homeland, yet
the difficulty of this journey also raises questions as to whether she can be
truly integrated into the Greek world. The Symplegades remain a motif
throughout the play (434–5, 1263): a repeated reminder of the differences
between Medea and the Greek community which shelters her.15
15 For the Symplegades as a significant motif, see also Boedeker 1997: 139, who sees them as reflecting
Medea’s character.
136 Laura Swift
The Chorus’ initial attitude to Medea, then, leads the audience to expect
friendly interest rather than personal commitment. While the Chorus
express their pity and concern for Medea, they present her as a foreign
outsider, of interest to them only through the institutionalised loyalties
between oikoi within the Corinthian community. Yet these expectations
are overturned as Medea forms a bond with the Chorus which allows her
not only to punish her husband but to attack the fabric of Corinthian
society, via the destruction of its ruling house. Medea’s opening speech
is critical in re-evaluating the Chorus’ perception of their own identity;
throughout the speech we see her creating a shared female bond which
overturns the Chorus’ Corinthian identity.16 The opening words of her
speech, Kor©nqiai guna±kev (‘women of Corinth’, 213) draw attention to
the duality inherent in the Chorus’ identity. Demarcating the Chorus as
Corinthian women draws our attention to the Chorus’ relationship with
their polis.17 It is telling that the adjective Kor©nqiai is used here for the only
time in the play to describe people; elsewhere the word is used to describe
the land of Corinth itself (10, 70, 702, 706, 916). Similarly, this is the only
point in the play where the Chorus members’ polis-identity is marked in
the terms with which they are addressed: elsewhere they are called simply
guna±kev (‘women’, 1043, 1293) or f©lai (‘friends’, 227, 377, 765, 797, 1116,
1236). It is therefore not surprising that Medea goes on to acknowledge
her foreign status in the first part of her speech, as she describes the gulf
between an immigrant and the city’s native inhabitants (cr d xnon mn
krta proscwre±n p»lei, ‘A foreigner must be especially compliant with
the city’, 222).18 Yet as the speech continues, Medea argues that the mutual
relationship as guna±kev is of greater importance than the division implied
by Kor©nqiai, for it is the shared bond of female experience which she uses
to gain the Chorus’ complicity.
Much has been written about Medea’s presentation of gender-politics
in her opening speech, and it is sufficient here simply to note that she
creates a new group identity for the Chorus – that of women – which
she uses to override the gap in ethnic identity which separates them from
16 Luschnig 2007: 127 argues that the Chorus’ decision to side with Medea is a political decision based
on their sense of justice, and that the Chorus are presented as politically active citizens in contrast
with the tyrant Creon. However, since Euripides makes Medea appeal to the Chorus not on abstract
grounds but on the basis of gender, it seems unlikely to me that the audience would interpret their
stance as a political one rather than a demonstration of female bias.
17 Cf. Mastronarde 2002: 205 on 214: ‘it . . . prepares for Medea’s careful deployment of her status as a
non-Corinthian’.
18 For Medea’s appropriation of rhetoric associated with the polis, see Friedrich 1993; Lloyd 2006:
118–21.
her.19 For not only does Medea appeal to the Chorus as women, she
explicitly compares the competing claims of nationality and gender, and
asks them to prioritise the latter. This conflict in identity-groups is made
particularly apparent in the final part of her speech (252–66):
llì oÉ gr aËt¼v pr¼v s kmì ¤kei l»gová
soª mn p»liv qì ¤dì stª kaª patr¼v d»moi
b©ou tì Ànhsiv kaª f©lwn sunous©a,
gÜ dì rhmov poliv oÔsì Ëbr©zomai (255)
pr¼v ndr»v, k gv barbrou lel
smnh,
oÉ mhtrì, oÉk delf»n, oÉcª suggen
meqorm©sasqai tsdì cousa sumforv.
tosoÓton oÔn sou tugcnein boulsomai,
¢n moi p»rov tiv mhcan tì xeureq (260)
p»sin d©khn tändì ntite©sasqai kakän
[t¼n d»nta tì aÉt qugatrì ¤n tì gmato],
sign. gun gr tlla mn f»bou pla
kak tì v lkn kaª s©dhron e«sorná
Âtan dì v eÉnn dikhmnh kur, (265)
oÉk stin llh frn miaifonwtra.
[But the same argument does not apply to you as to me: for you have this
city and your father’s home, the benefit of life and the company of friends,
but I, deserted and citiless, am treated outrageously by my husband, taken
as booty from a barbarian land, with no mother, no brother, no relative to
give me anchorage in this disaster. And so I ask to gain this much from you:
if a way or means should be found for me to punish my husband for these
evils [and the bride’s father and the bride] to keep silent. For in all other
matters a woman is full of fear, cowardly when it comes battle or to looking
upon steel; but when she is wronged in her marriage bed there is no other
mind more bloodthirsty.]
Having spent the first part of her speech building a shared identity with the
Chorus by drawing on the common problems of women’s lives, and con-
tinually using the first-person plural to emphasise this sense of community
(231, 241, 247, 248–9), Medea now separates herself from the Chorus by
explaining the differences between their situations. Significantly, the ben-
efits which the Chorus possesses and which Medea lacks are those which
accrue from belonging to a polis: as well as the familial structures pro-
vided by the paternal oikos and the support of other relatives,20 Medea also
19 For discussions of Medea’s manipulation of gender dynamics in this speech see e.g. McDermott
1989: 43–64; Rabinowitz 1993: 128–9; Sourvinou-Inwood 1997: 257–8; Foley 2001: 258–9; Kuch
2005; Luschnig 2007: 134–43.
20 For the importance of the oikos as a concern of tragic women, see Mossman 2005: 358; Mastronarde
2010: 254–5.
138 Laura Swift
suggests a wider social circle (f©lwn sunous©a, 254), and she twice men-
tions the role of the polis, contrasting the Chorus’ immediate sense of
polis-identity (soª mn p»liv qì ¤dì, 253) with her own ‘citilessì state (po-
liv oÔsì, 255). This extensive ‘safety net’ represents the range of ways in
which the Corinthian social structure aims to protect its own, and serves
to highlight the importance of civic identity. Medea, as an immigrant
about to be exiled from her new community, lacks these structures, and
this is why, she argues, she is forced into a position where she has to take
action herself. By Medea’s logic, the benefits which the Chorus derive from
their own polis ought to make them doubly sympathetic to her because
of her lack of resources: she mentions the protection the city offers in
order to request their complicity in her revenge. Yet while the Chorus are
convinced by Medea’s rhetoric, and promise their silence, members of the
audience may be less enthusiastic, for they are in a position to recognise
the broader ramifications of Medea’s argument. Medea raises the bene-
fits of belonging to one’s own native community in order to argue for a
new form of gender-loyalty which supersedes community-loyalty. In other
words, Medea’s argument here makes clear the degree of obligation which
the Chorus ought to feel to Corinth (and hence to the ruler of the city),
even as she persuades them to renege on this obligation. While the political
ramifications of Medea’s revenge at this stage seem limited, the Chorus are
certainly colluding in an attack on the man who is soon to be a member of
their ruling house. When Medea later reveals that she also intends to destroy
the Corinthian royal family (374–5), the Chorus’ jubilant response is still
more chilling (410–30).21 The Chorus’ enthusiasm for Medea’s vengeance
might be troubling on any level, but it is doubly disturbing coming soon
after an exploration of the benefits of polis-identity.22
The opening interaction between Medea and the Chorus therefore sets
up the conflict between the Chorus’ dual identity, as Corinthians and
as women. Within the play-world, Medea offers a straightforward choice
between these roles, and persuades the Chorus to prioritise their identity
as females. Yet from the perspective of the audience, it is immediately
apparent that this polarisation of identity is problematic. The Chorus’
21 This reading presumes (along with most modern editors) that line 262 is an interpolation. As well as
the grammatical arguments against the line’s authenticity, it is rhetorically more effective for Medea
to win the Chorus over before making clear that her revenge involves an attack on the Corinthian
ruling house. For a discussion of the other problems with the line, see Mastronarde 2002 ad loc.
22 Easterling 1977: 178 sees the Chorus’ support for Medea despite her threats against their royal family
as logically improbable, but something the audience would accept for dramatic purposes, yet in fact
Euripides takes trouble to show us how Medea wins the Chorus over, and as I argue here, gaining
their complicity is a thematically important aspect of the play.
changed attitude to their loyalties is most clearly expressed in the first
stasimon, which can be understood as their own rhetorical response to
Medea’s earlier persuasion. The ode opens with a striking image of the
natural order overturned (410–20):
nw potamän ¬erän cwroÓsi paga©,
kaª d©ka kaª pnta plin strfetaiá
ndrsi mn d»liai boula©, qeän dì
oÉkti p©stiv raren.
tn dì mn eÎkleian cein biotn stryousi fmaiá
rcetai tim gunaike© gneiá
oÉkti duskladov fma guna±kav xei.
[Uphill flow the streams of sacred rivers, and the whole order of justice is
overturned: men have deceitful thoughts, and their pledges made by the
gods are no longer firm. But rumour will turn my life around, so that it has
a good reputation: honour is coming to the female race, and no longer will
ill-sounding repute grip womankind.]
The Chorus’ description indicates the degree to which they have become
embroiled in Medea’s rhetoric of gender identity. They imagine an inversion
in the reputations of women and men, fuelled by the example of Medea
and Jason. This language of shifting beliefs is appropriate in the context
of the Chorus’ own shift in perception, and their claim that this sets
the stage for wider social change. Yet on analysis their language is not as
straightforwardly triumphalistic as it at first appears; and we are encouraged
to question the validity of the female unity Medea has created.
A troubling element enters the ode early, with the Chorus’ statement
that ‘the whole order of justice is overturned’ (kaª d©ka kaª pnta plin
strfetai, 411). For while d©kh can be used simply to mean ‘custom’,
‘law’ or ‘the natural way things are’, the word usually contains normative
overtones, implying that the established order is not only customary but
correct.23 Thus to find the phrase d©ka . . . strfetai used in a positive
sense is unexpected, and implies that the Chorus’ understanding of moral
terminology is flawed. Moreover, the imagery of the natural order over-
turned suggests that the superior position of men is a natural one: an idea
which sits uneasily with the claim that the current system is an age-old
injustice which needs redress.24 In the second stanza the Chorus anticipate
a change in the way women and men are sung about, complaining that
women are unfairly maligned in poetry: ‘The long ages have much to say
23 Cf. Dover 1974: 184–7; for the strange use of d©kh in the ode see Luschnig 2007: 145.
24 Cf. McClure 1999: 389.
140 Laura Swift
about our lot as well as that of men’ (makr¼v dì a«Ün cei / poll mn
metran ndrän te mo±ran e«pe±n, 429–31). Yet portraying men’s faith-
lessness as a longstanding truth previously concealed seems incompatible
with the language of change and inversion set up at the start of the ode.25
Moreover, when we reflect that the mechanism by which women’s reputa-
tion will be reclaimed appears to be the murders of Creon and the princess,
the incompatibility becomes particularly stark.
Thus Euripides encourages the audience to question the Chorus’ self-
definition as part of a female alliance, as their support for Medea’s cause
is undermined by troubling elements in the way it is presented. The first
half of the ode also foregrounds a further conflict within the Chorus’ self-
presentation, as their identity as women is set in tension with their identity
as a chorus and hence as representatives of the tradition of choral song.
The Chorus draw our attention to their own choral status by a metapoetic
comment on female performance (424–8):26
oÉ gr n metr gnÛm lÅrav
ßpase qspin oidn
Fo±bov gtwr melwná peª ntchsì n Ìmnon
rsnwn gnn.
[Phoebus, leader of songs, never thrust the divine music of the lyre into our
minds; for otherwise I could have sounded a song to answer the male race.]
Commentators have often responded to these lines by noting that the
Chorus ignores the fame of female poets such as Sappho or Telesilla.27 Yet
we appreciate the function of the Chorus’ claim if we examine it not for
its literal truth but rather for the poetic effect it achieves, for it reminds
us that the Chorus is in fact singing a lyric song in order to utter these
words. As with other examples of tragic ‘choral projection’, the passage
draws our attention to the inherent conflict within the Chorus members’
identity: should we understand them as Corinthian women speaking their
mind to Medea, or as a chorus of Athenian males participating in an act
of ritual mimesis?28 Alluding to the Chorus’ own song reminds us that
they are a chorus, and so encourages us to interpret their song in the
light of the traditions of choral performance. Yet when we do so we find
25 Mastronarde 2002 on 430–1 notes the unbalanced feel of the construction here, which perhaps adds
to the sense of a problematic argument.
26 For the metapoetic function of these lines, see Hopman 2008: 155–7.
27 Cf. Page 1938, Mastronarde 2002: ad loc.
28 On choral projection see Henrichs 1994/5; Henrichs 1996a. For the irony evoked in these lines, see
Gagarin 1992: 365–6.
further jarring elements, for the Chorus seek to represent their song in a
way which inverts the norms of lyric poetry. In these opening stanzas the
Chorus are concerned with praise and blame: the blame now due to men
(ndrsi mn d»liai boula©, 412) and the newfound praise of women
(tn dì mn eÎkleian, 415). Both praise and blame are traditional subjects
of song; moreover, the Chorus’ belief that it is through the medium of
song that their reputation will be reaffirmed evokes the connection made
in praise song between great deeds and eternal reputation, as poetry is
the mechanism for guaranteeing kleos.29 Thus when the Chorus uses the
language of praise, poetry and reputation, they encourage the audience to
recall the conventions of encomiastic lyric, and to understand their song
in that mould.30
Yet the use of this encomiastic imagery is odd, for it is deployed in a
song whose purpose is to achieve blame as much as praise. The Chorus
present praise and blame as linked: the honour they envisage for women
will come about by attacking the reputation of men. However, the poetic
tradition usually distinguishes praise and blame poetry as two separate
genres: the former is choral, lyric and high-flown, while the latter is vul-
gar and personal. The idea that praise depends on blame fundamentally
undermines the ideology of praise poetry, which seeks to present itself as
arising naturally from the greatness of the laudandus’ achievements, rather
than the need to attack and diminish the reputations of others.31 Thus
the Chorus highlights its own choral heritage only to blur the boundaries
between different categories of song. The combination of epinician-style
dactylo-epitrites with Ionic dialect perhaps suggests this confusion, as we
see the poet mixing the diction of encomiastic lyric with the dialect of
iambic blame-poetry.32 The confusion in their concept of what constitutes
praise acts as a further warning that their support for Medea’s vengeance is
misguided. Moreover, if blame speech constitutes a transgression of normal
female speech patterns, the conflict between the Chorus’ forms of identity
becomes more marked, for they evoke a tradition of blame-poetry which
29 Cf. e.g. Pind. Ol. 11.4–8, Pyth. 1.93–4, 6.5–9, 9.103–5, 12.28–9, Nem. 3.6–8, Isth. 3.7–8, 6.56–62;
Bacch. 1.181–4, 5.16–33.
30 For further discussion of the encomiastic overtones of this passage see Swift 2010: 120–1.
31 The ideology of praise poetry and the strategies which poets use to please their patrons is most
extensively studied with regard to epinician: see e.g. Kurke 1991; Willcock 1995: 12–20; Hornblower
2004: 28–33.
32 Alternatively, of course, the Ionic diction may be influenced by epic. For a discussion see Page
1938: 104 on 423; Boedeker 1991: 109 n. 53; McClure 1999: 389. For the literary impact of epic
resonance here, see Hopman 2008: 169–70. The argument here is not that the song itself needs to
be understood as a piece of blame poetry, but rather by evoking blame simultaneously with praise
it undermines its status as a praise-song.
142 Laura Swift
clashes with their gender identity within the play.33 An alternative form of
identity is raised only to be dismissed: the Chorus allude to their choral
status as singers and guardians of traditional wisdom only to reject it and
to prioritise their commitment to Medea.
The first half of the ode, then, expresses the Chorus’ adoption of Medea’s
gender-based identity, yet does so in a way which calls this allegiance into
question.34 The second part of the ode rehearses once again the reasons
for the Chorus’ sympathy towards Medea: the dissolution of her marriage
and her imminent exile (435–8); Jason’s wicked disregard for his oath (439–
41); Medea’s lack of a paternal house to protect her (441–5). Yet here too
the Chorus choose language which undermines the credibility of their
case. The account of Medea’s journey to Corinth differs from Medea’s own
account of her arrival: whereas she portrayed herself as ‘taken as booty from
a barbarian land’ (k gv barbrou lel
smnh, 256), they now describe
her as ‘sailing from her father’s house with a maddened heart’ (sÆ dì k
mn okwn patr©wn pleusav / mainomn krad©, 432–3), an account
which recalls the Nurse’s similar language at the start of the play (rwti
qum¼n kplage±sì ìIsonov, ‘her heart struck with passion for Jason’, 8).
This latter description subtly undermines Medea’s own account of her
situation, and reminds the audience that her problems are ones partially
of her own making. The Chorus once again mention the Symplegades
(434–5), and so once more suggest a natural separation between Medea’s
world and that of Greece. The story of Medea’s journey therefore serves to
undermine Medea’s earlier insistence on the similarities between her fate
and that of ordinary Greek women, and in this way undercuts the gender
alliance the Chorus have made.
Having established this dynamic between Medea and the Chorus,
Euripides returns to the themes of identity and belonging later in the
play. In the second stasimon, the Chorus lament the destructive power
of Eros, yet move from this to dwell on ideas of exile and community
(645–53):
å patr©v, å dÛmata, m
dtì poliv geno©man
t¼n mhcan©av cousa duspraton a«änì,
o«ktr»taton cwn.
qant qant prov dame©hn
mran tndì xanÅsa-
33 For female blame-speech as a form of gender inversion, see McClure 1999: 374–6.
34 For the paradoxical relationship between the ode and the preceding scene, cf. Williamson 1990: 28.
saá m»cqwn dì oÉk llov Ìper-
qen £ gv patr©av stresqai.
[O fatherland, o house, may I never be without a city, a life of helplessness,
difficult to endure, most pitiable of sufferings. In death, in death, may I be
laid low before that, putting an end to the daylight of my life. For there is
no burden greater than to be deprived of one’s homeland.]
The Chorus are thinking of Medea’s unfortunate position and how unbri-
dled Eros has led her into disaster: their thoughts on the importance of a
homeland presumably relate to Medea’s own situation and her vulnerabil-
ity. Yet the passage may take on more significance to the attentive audience
member, who is in a position to interpret it in the light of the earlier
negotiations over the Chorus’ loyalties. Once again, the Chorus have mis-
understood the implications of their own rhetoric, for if there is no trouble
greater than losing one’s native land, it follows that one’s emotional attach-
ment to one’s land must also be of the strongest kind. Again they follow
Medea’s lead, alluding to the obligations which accrue from their political
identity but subjugating them to their support for Medea.
The Chorus’ belief in a unifying form of gender identity is challenged by
Medea’s revelation of her plan to kill the children. As scholars have noted,
Medea’s decision is presented as a conflict between her masculine desire
for honour and vengeance, and her maternal love for her children.35 The
Chorus doubt whether Medea will be able to carry out her plans (856–65),
and Medea herself in her monologue dwells on her tender feelings for the
children (1040–8) before rejecting them out of longing for revenge and fear
of mockery (1049–52). As Medea kills the children, the Chorus sing an ode
in which they suggest that it is best not to have children at all, because of
the uncertainty and pain that they can cause (1081–1115). The ode begins
with the claim that there exists a Muse of women, from whom the Chorus
derive their wisdom (1085–9):
ll gr stin moÓsa kaª ¡m±n,
¥ prosomile± sof©av neken,
psaisi mn oÎ, paÓron d gnov
(<m©an> n polla±v eÌroiv n swv)
oÉk p»mouson t¼ gunaikän.
[But there is a Muse for us as well, who keeps us company to give us wisdom:
not all of us; the group of women who is not Muse-less is a small one (you
would find perhaps one among many).]
35 See Burnett 1973; Foley 2001: 243–68.

144 Laura Swift
The reference to a female Muse directly contradicts the Chorus’ earlier
claim that Apollo did not offer poetic inspiration to women (424–8), and so
by including this passage Euripides encourages the audience to connect this
ode with the first stasimon. Moreover, as in the first stasimon, the Chorus’
reflections on poetic inspiration act as a metapoetic device, and draw our
attention to their role qua chorus (and hence as purveyors of wisdom)
rather than qua Corinthian women. When we consider this ode in the
light of the first stasimon, its thematic function becomes more apparent,
for the Chorus’ self-contradiction highlights the way in which this ode acts
as a wider rejection of the concepts they previously espoused.36 Whereas
the first stasimon formed the high point of the Chorus’ commitment to a
female alliance and their self-definition based on gender-loyalty, Medea’s
murder of the children has been presented as a rejection of her feminine
side. The Chorus’ claim that life would be best without children not only
flies in the face of traditional morality, but also undercuts their own identity
as women, for women’s reproductive capacity is usually presented in Greek
thought as the supreme telos of their lives.37 Hence we see the Chorus
question the validity of their gender alliance at the moment in the play
when Medea has made her final decision and the murder of the children
becomes inevitable.
Thus in Medea we see the various aspects of the Chorus’ identity explored
in order to problematise their relationship with the protagonist. The open-
ing of the play presents the Chorus both as Corinthians and as females,
and we see Medea acknowledging the former status while manipulating the
latter. The Chorus’ own adoption of Medea’s rhetoric of gender identity
is couched in troubling terms, and depicted in language which undercuts
the validity of this type of prioritisation. Moreover, the Chorus alludes
to its own identity as a group of choral performers: a strategy which fur-
ther highlights the multifaceted role they play, and the incompatibilities
they uncover in trying to assert one form of identity above another. The
play stresses polis-identity, and the bonds that arise from being part of
the grouping of local citizens, yet depicts the Chorus as setting the ties of
gender above those of community to the extent that the Chorus become
complicit in the destruction of their own royal house. Moreover, their self-
assertion as part of a female axis proves to be hollow, for Medea’s murder
of the children is portrayed as a violation of femininity, and an act which
sets her apart from the community of women.
36 Cf. Foley 2001: 265: ‘Pitifully their reasoning leads them to lose their grip on their one certainty,
their commitment to maternity.’
37 See Pomeroy 1975: 62–5; Blundell 1995: 100–5.
Ion
In Ion, Euripides uses the Chorus to explore similar ideas about group
identity and values, but the situation depicted and the effect achieved is very
different. Once again, we see a Chorus of women loyal to the protagonist,
yet Euripides suppresses the concept of gender-loyalty in favour of polis-
loyalty. As in Medea, the Chorus’ support for the protagonist is presented
as problematic, yet this support is couched in terms which validate the
primacy of the polis as the focus of an individual’s loyalties: a concept
central to Athenian ideology.38 Yet from the audience’s perspective, the
Chorus’ understanding of Athenian identity is flawed, for despite their
claims to polis-loyalty, the Chorus’ hatred of Ion and support of Creousa’s
vengeance plan go against much of what Athenians believed was special
about their city.
The Chorus of Ion do not consist of freeborn citizens, but Creousa’s
female slaves. Their loyalty to Creousa is unsurprising, for slaves in tragedy
are usually depicted as caring deeply about the troubles of their masters, but
their bond with Athens is more unexpected. Despite their unfree status,
they perceive themselves to be members of the polis-community, and the
play never suggests that their self-identification as Athenians is incorrect.
Thus the topos of the slave’s loyalty to his or her own household is extended
further into the polis as a community of oikoi: part of the way in which
Ion depicts a multifaceted Athenian community represented by women
and foreigners, where the foundling Ion turns out to be the only true male
Athenian in the play.39 Identity is an important theme of Ion, as the play
explores Ion’s discovery of his own true identity and his acquisition of a polis
community. The nature of Athenian identity is of particular importance,
for it is Ion’s Athenian destiny that is the play’s ultimate outcome. Yet Ion’s
Delphic setting means that Athens is always portrayed at a distance, and
defined in relation to the non-Athenian present. As in Medea, the Chorus’
commitment to its own self-determined identity is used to investigate these
ideas.
The Chorus’ self-identification as Athenian is evident from their opening
words, as their wonder at the sculptures of Delphi takes the form of a
comparison with Athens (184–9):
38 Of course loyalty to the polis was a central part of ethics for all Greek cities, not just Athens (on this
issue see Rhodes 2003). However, since Ion is a play which deals specifically with the question of
what it means to be Athenian, performed before an Athenian audience, it is reasonable to interpret
the Chorus’ political ideology as having special reference to Athenian identity: for further discussion
see Swift 2010: 55–60.
39 Cf. Loraux 1993b: 201; Swift 2008: 78.
146 Laura Swift
oÉk n ta±v zaqaiv %q-
naiv eÉk©onev §san aÉ-
laª qeän m»non oÉdì gui-
tidev qerape±aiá
ll kaª par Lox©
t LatoÓv didÅmwn prosÛ-
pwn kalliblfaron fäv.
[It’s not only in holy Athens that there are temples to the gods with beautiful
columns and the worship of Apollo Agyieus takes place: at the shrine of
Loxias too, Leto’s son, the beautiful glances of light shine from the double
face of the temple.]
The praise of Delphi is undercut by the Chorus’ parochial surprise that
anywhere outside Athens could possess fine architecture. The Chorus’ pride
in their Athenian identity is firmly established; these opening lines serve
as allusive praise of Athens just as much as scene-setting at Delphi.40 The
Atheno-centric vision of the Chorus is reinforced by their comments on
Athene later in the parodos (209–11):
{ – } leÅsseiv oÔn pì ìEgkeld
gorgwp¼n pllousan tun . . . ;
{ – } leÅssw Palldì, mn qe»n.
[– So do you see, shaking her gorgon-faced shield over Enceladus . . . ?
– I see Pallas, my goddess.]
The Gigantomachy, usually a pan-Hellenic image of order triumphing over
chaos, is here redefined as an event with particular resonance for Athens,
while the Chorus regard Athene as a local patron goddess rather than in her
universal Olympian role.41 The Chorus’ Athenian identity is heightened
by their presence outside Athens, as they seek to define what makes their
polis special, and to locate it in relation to their current environment. Thus
their patriotism is a strategy for constructing an image of Athens for the
audience, and alerts it to the importance of polis-identity to the play’s
action.
As well as being Athenians, the Chorus members are also women, and
their female identity is foregrounded by their recollection of being told
40 For a discussion of how the imagery of the parodos relates to the play’s central themes, see Rosivach
1977. For the Athenian origins of the temple-myths the Chorus describes, see Goosens 1962: 481;
Immerwahr 1972.
41 For the way in which the play appropriates the Gigantomachy myth as an Athenian one, see
Athanassaki 2010.
the stories they see around them (196–8): rì Áv ma±si mu-/ qeÅetai par
pnaiv, / spistv ìI»laov (‘Is it he whose story is told as I am at my
loom, Iolaus the shield-bearer?’). Weaving represents the Chorus’ female
identity, and their responsibilities as women. Yet by incorporating the
stories of public myth, the Chorus present their private female activities
as connected to the outside world. The story of Heracles and his comrade
Iolaus, here depicted as a piece of public art representing the victory of
order over chaos, can be told equally well within the sheltered world of
handicrafts; weaving acts as a forum for the dissemination of these civic
morals. The Chorus resist a separation of their civic and female identities,
presenting the two as connected and mutually enriching. Yet as we shall
see later in the play, this blurring of distinctions can prove to be a much
more negative force.
The Chorus perceive Athene, Athens and the house of Creousa as indis-
tinguishable, part of a whole from which their own identity is also derived.
This is made clear in their response to Ion’s question as to which house they
serve: Palldi sÅnoika tr»fima mlaqra tän män turnnwná (‘the
nurturing house of my masters is the one which dwells with Pallas’, 235).
While in literal terms the Chorus’ comment is explained by the observation
that the Erechtheum was also the shrine of Athene Polias, their words also
carry symbolic connotations, as they envisage their civic, domestic and
religious identities as a nexus of ideas combined in a single household. The
Erechtheid house’s relationship to Athene, and hence to Athens itself, is
construed as its defining feature. The loose and ambiguous phrasing height-
ens the sense of an interconnected and complex set of ideas crammed into
a single unit, as the house is described as sÅnoika tr»fima mlaqra, with
Athene and the Erechtheids themselves at either end, end-stopping and
defining the house’s identity. The word sÅnoika itself implies an intense
connection with Athene, envisaged as analogous to a marriage-partner,
while tr»fima reflects the nurturing role of the family oikos: an important
theme in the play as Ion grapples with the concept of parenthood in a
situation where biological parentage and nurture are separated.42
The Chorus’ conflation of religious, political and familial identities is
continued in the first stasimon, which begins with a plea to Athene to cure
Creousa’s childlessness (452–8):
s tn Ýd©nwn locin
neile©quian, mn
%qnan, ¬keteÅw,
42 Cf. Zeitlin 1989: 146–8; Swift 2008: 52–8.
148 Laura Swift
Promhqe± Titni loceu-
qe±san katì krottav
korufv Di»v, å †mkaira† N©ka,
m»le PÅqion o²kon,
[O you who have never shared in the pains of childbirth, my Athene, I

supplicate you, you who were born from the head of Zeus by the Titan
Prometheus, o blessed goddess of victory, come to the Pythian house.]
The appeal to Athene is constructed as an inappropriate one, for before

the Chorus even name her, they highlight her lack of expertise in the
relevant sphere. We are reminded that Athene, as a virgin goddess, has
never experienced the pains of childbirth herself (452–3); moreover her own
asexual birth removes her entirely from the female lifecycle (455–7). Unlike
other virgin goddesses (for example, Artemis), Athene is usually portrayed
in Greek literature as possessing masculine rather than feminine traits: she is
less a perpetual parthenos (and hence a potentially desirable female) than an
asexual being.43 The justification for invoking this unlikely goddess is the
Chorus’ personal attachment to her (mn / %qnan, 453–4); the Chorus
further stress personal loyalties towards the end of the stanza when they
envisage Athene and Artemis interceding with Apollo for Creousa’s fertility,
despite their own status as virgins, because of their familial relationship with
Apollo himself: dÅo qeaª dÅo parqnoi, / kas©gnhtai †semnaª Fo©bou†
(466–7). The intermeshing of religion, family and polis is indicated once
more at the end of the stanza, where the Chorus’ wish is finally articulated:
the provision of children for ‘the ancient race of Erechtheus’ (t¼ palai¼n
ìErecqwv / gnov, 469–70). Whereas Creousa’s childlessness had previously
been presented as a personal or family matter, the Chorus now hint at
political ramifications, for the Erechtheid house represents the community
of Athens as a whole, as indicated by Creousa’s story of the sacrifice of
the Erechtheids for the benefit of the city (278), and by the Erechtheids’
autochthonous origins, which physically link them to the soil of Attica.44
In the early stages of the play, the Chorus’ use of Athenian language
might simply appear to be a means to engage the Athenian audience, but
43 Cf. her famous comment on her support for the male in Aesch. Eum. 736–8: mthr gr oÎtiv
stªn ¤ mì ge©nato / t¼ dì rsen a«nä pnta, pln gmou tuce±n, / panti qum, krta dì
e«mª toÓ patr»v. This is no innovation by Aeschylus, for Athena’s role among the gods is that of
representing and enforcing the rule of Zeus: cf. Allan 2006: 20–1, while her prominent role in battle
sets her apart from other female goddesses.
44 For the importance of the autochthony theme, see Mastronarde 1975; Saxonhouse 1986; Zeitlin
1989; Seaford 1990:158–9; Zacharia 2003: ch. 2. For the wider cultural ramifications of autochthony
myths, see Loraux 1993: 37–71.
once Xuthus’ adoption of Ion is announced the function of the Chorus’
Athenian identity comes more sharply into focus. The ode which the
Chorus sing draws a connection between the world of the family and
that of the wider community, yet we see their civic loyalty harnessed to
justify the hatred which they first admit to on familial grounds. The ode
begins by imagining Creousa’s grief at learning the news (676–80), and
goes on to wish ill to Xuthus (695–701) and to Ion himself (702–8) for the
pain they will cause her. Creousa’s suffering is conceptualised as relating
to her position within her oikos: the emotional effects of childlessness
(leleimmnh tknwn, 680) and her betrayal by the husband on whom
she depended (695–8). The Chorus refer to Creousa as ‘my queen’ (m
tÅrannov, 678) and ‘my mistress’ (m despo©n, 695), and so stress their
domestic connection with her: their loyalty, it is implied, is to the mistress
of the oikos in which they serve. Yet the end of the ode demonstrates a
shift in perspective, as the Chorus use their Athenian loyalty to justify their
hostility to Ion (719–24):
m <t©> potì e«v mn p»lin ¯koiqì ¾ pa±v,

nan dì mran polipÜn qnoi.
stegomna gr n p»liv coi skyin
xenik¼n sboln <
>
†l©sav† ¾ prov rcag¼v àn
ìErecqeÆv nax.
[May the boy never come to my city, but may he die and leave his young
life behind. For the city would have a reason to protect itself against foreign
invasion . . . the previous king Erechtheus gathered his forces.]
At the point at which the Chorus moves from general ill-will to specific
death-threats towards Ion, their Athenian motivation is foregrounded.
The phrase mn p»lin echoes their previous attachment to Creousa,
underscoring their conflation of the personal and the political. Once more
Erechtheus is evoked, this time as a symbol of Athenian purity and of the
polis at arms, as the Chorus imply that Ion’s arrival is not simply an insult
to Creousa but a matter of national security. Yet while we see Athenian
patriotism used as a justification for violence, it is the Chorus’ inability to
distinguish between civic and familial identity which fuels their venom.
Indeed, the Chorus’ hatred of foreigners flies in the face of real-life Athenian
ideology, where we regularly find the idea that Athens is welcoming to
outsiders, supported by the myth-pattern of Athens incorporating fallen
150 Laura Swift
heroes from other cities.45 Hence the Athenian audience is in a position
to observe how the Chorus’ defence of Athens misrepresents the values
central to Athenian self-belief.
We see a similar pattern in the build-up to the murder attempt, where
the Chorus continue to voice their hatred of Ion in Athenian terms. It
is noticeable that the language of national identity is used only by the
Chorus: Creousa and her Old Slave regard the vengeance as springing from
Creousa’s personal sense of distress and betrayal as a wife and mother. When
Creousa asks the Chorus to tell her what news the oracle gave to Xuthus,
she addresses them as guna±kev, ¬stän tän män kaª kerk©dov / doÅleuma
pist»n (‘women, faithful slaves of my loom and shuttle’, 747–8), calling on
their identity as females and as members of her oikos to gain their loyalty.46
Upon learning the news, Creousa laments the loneliness of her house
(rhm© dì ½rfanoÆv d»mouv o«ksw, ‘I shall dwell deserted in an orphaned
house’, 791), while the Old Man focuses on Xuthus’ betrayal (808–16) and
the undermining of Creousa’s position as legitimate wife and mistress of
the oikos (836–56). While he acknowledges a broader political issue in
Ion’s potential inheritance of the kingship (turann©dì aÉt peribale±n
melle gv, ‘he intended to invest him with the kingship of the land’,
829), his focus remains primarily on Creousa’s status. Creousa’s initial
instinct is to order the murder to take place at the point at which Ion
enters her home (dämì Âtan toÉm¼n m»l
, ‘when he comes to my house’,
1021), a symbolic reflection of the threat to her household which she
believes Ion to pose, while the Old Man echoes this logic by describing
the murder as equivalent to expelling Ion from the house (kaª sumf»neue
kaª sunexa©rei d»mwn, ‘join in slaughtering him and driving him from the
house’, 1044). Yet it is left to the Chorus once again to identify the affairs of
the Erechtheid oikos with the affairs of the Athenian polis more generally
(1056–60):
t tän ìErecqe·dn
d»mwn faptomná
mhd potì llov ¤-
kwn p»lewv nssoi
pln tän eÉgenetn ìErecqeidn.
45 Cf. e.g. Aesch. Eum.; Soph. OC; Eur. Her., Hcld., Suppl. Stories of Athenian hospitality to vulnerable
foreigners are regularly used by Athenian speakers as a source of the city’s glory: e.g. Lys. 2.11–16;
Isocr. 4.54–60, 5.34; Dem. 60.8; Hdt. 9.27.
46 Rabinowitz 1993: 218–19 shows how Creousa gains strength from participating in a community of
women. For gender issues in Ion cf. also Dunn 1990.
[[Direct the poison] against the man who comes to lay hands on the house
of the Erechtheids; may no one ever come from elsewhere and rule the city
except for the noble Erechtheids.]
The subversion of the house and the invasion of the city are to the Chorus’
mind identical: a rhetorical stance which fits with their earlier conflation
of their Athenian identity with their service to Creousa’s house. As the ode
continues, the Chorus describe Creousa’s own motivations before implicitly
contrasting them with their own (1069–89):
oÉ gr d»mwn gì trouv
rcontav llodapoÆv (1070)
zäs potì <n> faen-
na±v ncoitì n aÉga±v
tän eÉpatridn gegäsì okwn.
a«scÅnomai t¼n polÅu-
mnon qe»n, e« par Kallic»roisi paga±v (1075)
lampda qewr¼v e«kdwn
nnÅcion upnov Àyetai,
Âte kaª Di¼v sterwp¼v
nec»reusen a«qr,
coreÅei d selna (1080)
kaª pentkonta k»rai
†Nhrov a¬ kat p»nton
enaän te potamän†
d©nav coreu»menai
tn crusostfanon k»ran (1085)
kaª matra semnná
¯nì lp©zei basileÅ-
sein llwn p»non spesÜn
<¾> Fo©beiov ltav.
[For while she lives, she could never bear strangers from abroad ruling her
house in the bright rays of the sun, she who is born from a noble house. I
feel shame before the god of many songs, if he [Ion] should be a sleepless
onlooker and watch the night-time torch procession on the twentieth day
beside the streams of Callichoroe, when the starry heaven of Zeus itself
takes up the dance, and the moon dances and the fifty daughters of Nereus
dance in the sea and in the eddies of the ever-flowing rivers, in honour of
the maiden of the golden crown and her holy mother. This is where he
hopes to become king and invade the work of others, that wandering boy
of Phoebus.]
The Chorus’ account reflects Creousa’s concern for the oikos and her
position within it, yet they also misrepresent her motivations, for they
152 Laura Swift
portray her distress in national rather than domestic terms. Whereas we
have heard Creousa lament for her position as a wife and a childless
woman, the Chorus present her as concerned primarily for her Athenian
and Erechtheid status, and resentful of the prospect of foreigners infiltrating
the ultimate Athenian lineage. They go on to stress their own anxiety
about the wider civic and religious ramifications of Ion’s arrival in Athens,
attempting to exclude him from participation in the Eleusinian mysteries.
Yet the narrow-mindedness and jingoism of the Chorus’ perspective would
have been apparent to the audience, for the Eleusinian mysteries were not
an Athenian-only rite, but open to all Greek-speakers.47 The mistake in the
Chorus’ position mirrors the irony of their desire to kill the boy who is in
fact the only heir to the Erechtheid throne. The Chorus seek to represent
Ion’s arrival as violent (spesÛn, 1088), and in opposition to the beauty of
Athens’ festival; a harmony emphasised by the imagery of the stars, moon
and Nereids joining in the religious rites. Yet these images of unity with
nature serve in fact to underscore the inclusive nature of the Eleusinian
mysteries, and so undermine the Chorus’ argument.
In Ion, then, the Chorus’ adoption of a polis-identity is presented as
troubling. Ultimately the play’s optimistic ending means that the disturbing
elements fade away: Ion’s true identity is revealed, and the play ends with
rejoicing, while the possibility of a non-Athenian king is not forced.48 Yet
the Chorus’ attitude to Athenian identity, and the ease with which it is
turned to violence, surely strikes a disturbing note in a play which also
foregrounds the advantages of being Athenian. Through the figures of the
Chorus, we are shown the dark side of national identity as well as its benefits,
just as the hereditary Gorgon’s blood Creousa owns can be used both for
healing and for destruction (1010–17).49 Despite its pro-Athenian message,
Ion also explores the negative aspects of identity; the play imagines the
possibility of Athenian pride leading to destructive violence in place of the
welcoming of suppliants and immigrants upon which Athens traditionally
prided herself. The problematic presentation of identity is heightened by
putting the fiercest attachment to Athens in the mouths of the female slave
Chorus. Yet while the Chorus’ belief in the primacy of polis-identity may
superficially appear to reflect Athenian ideology, the play in fact shows
47 See Zeitlin 1989: 162–3. Burnett 1971: 116 also describes how the ode ‘is composed so as to keep the
listener in awareness of the singers’ error’.
48 Hoffer 1996 argues that the play’s ending does not negate the possibility of further strife in Athens,
yet this seems to run against the tone of the final scene. Athene’s speech makes it clear that Ion’s
rule is divinely ordained, and hence inevitable, and so reassures the audience that he will inherit the
Athenian throne (cf. esp. 1569–75).
49 See Burnett 1962: 98; Goff 1988: 48.
their flawed understanding of the separation between different identities
and loyalties, for they appropriate the language of the polis in defence of
their mistress’ oikos and her status as a wife. Just as the Chorus seem unable
to distinguish between the Erechtheid house and the wider community, so
too the audience may choose to see the Chorus’ jingoism as exemplifying
the need for a separation between the aristocratic oikos and the wider civic
good: an impossible dilemma in the mythological world, where acceptance
into Creousa’s oikos entails rulership of the polis, and where the ruling
house is literally sprung from the soil of Attica.
Conclusion
In both Ion and Medea Euripides uses the figures of the Chorus to explore
themes of identity, belonging and the loyalties which individuals owe to
different social groupings. Both plays present Choruses whose attitude to
these loyalties is problematic, and who misappropriate the language of
group identity. The Chorus of Medea are required to define themselves
either as women or as Corinthians: a dichotomy set up by Medea to
manipulate the Chorus, creating an alternative form of identity to contrast
with their obligations to the polis. The Chorus willingly adopt Medea’s
framework, yet the language they use to describe this gender-alliance, and
their later comments on the importance of the polis, call their decision into
question. Thus Euripides uses the Chorus to explore the multiplicity of
identity, and the potential conflicts between rival forms of loyalty. Whereas
the Chorus of Medea separate their identity into two distinct strands, the
Chorus of Ion attempt to merge separate forms of attachment into one, as
we see them using their loyalty to the Athenian polis to reinforce their anger
at the damage done to the Erechtheid oikos, and to Creousa’s status as a
mother and wife. Throughout the play the Chorus attempt to appropriate
the language of Athenian identity for their own ends, and this polis-identity
becomes an increasingly threatening force.
More generally, this chapter has aimed to highlight the complexity of
choral identity, and the impact which this has on choral mediation. This
range of identities possessed by a tragic chorus makes choral mediation a
more complex process, for the choral voice itself becomes more than an
intermediary between the contemporary world of ritual and the dramatic
world. Rather, the conflicting identities of the chorus can act as a challenge
to choral authority, and so cause the audience to question the perspec-
tive from which the chorus speaks. The chorus is defined by its mimetic
grouping: a status which at first sight appears to be a simple pigeonholing,
154 Laura Swift
but on analysis becomes a fraught process. The absence of any individuation
of the chorus beyond the group which unites them is not a limitation but
an opportunity, for it allows the poets to explore identity from a variety of
perspectives. Group membership is an inevitable part of human identity,
for every individual participates in a range of networks and affiliations, yet
the very multiplicity of these identities can lead to conflicts of interests or
confusions as to their boundaries. Thus the identity and loyalties expressed
by tragic choruses should be regarded not simply as a mechanism for driving
the plot, but as a form of insight into these vital issues of social belonging.
chapter 7
The choral plot of Euripides’ Helen

Sheila Murnaghan
In ancient Greek culture, the chorus was a social and religious institution, a
musical form, and a medium for the telling of stories, but also a situation,
an event, an experience, about which there were stories to be told. As
the tragedians transformed traditional choral performance into the acting-
out of mythical narratives, they drew on those stories, both directly and
indirectly, as sources and models for dramatic action. My concern here is
with the chorus as a subject of tragedy as well as feature of tragic form,
and with the place of choral experience in the inner world of the tragic
plot. Most theories of the tragic chorus go outside that world to find
the chorus’ meaning: the chorus is identified with the playwright, whose
views it supposedly voices; with an ideal audience (most influentially by
Schlegel); or with the original fifth-century audience, whether as citizens of
the polis (Vernant), ordinary observers of the rich and famous (Griffith),
soldiers-in-training (Winkler), or regular participants in religious rituals
(Henrichs).1 But the circumstances of being in a chorus, or of being an
individual who interacts with a chorus, are also significant as elements
within the fictional scenarios acted out on the tragic stage.
The hexameter narratives that constitute our earliest surviving Greek
texts contain several accounts of choruses, some of them descriptions of
the chorus as an institution, in its recurrent, timeless, uneventful aspect.
In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, we find permanent, canonical choruses
in both the divine and the human spheres: the Muses on Olympus (189–
206) and the Delian Maidens in the world of mortals (156–64). But in the
following example from the Iliad, the chorus figures as the situation out of
Versions of this paper were delivered at the Choral Mediations conference at Northwestern in October
2009, at conferences on “Moisa Epichorios: Regional Music and Musical Regions in Ancient Greece”
(Ravenna, October 2009) and “Choruses: Ancient and Modern” (Oxford, September 2010) and at
UCLA (February 2011). I am grateful to the audience members on all of those occasions for their
helpful comments, and to Andrew Ford and Deborah Steiner for sharing their unpublished work on
the lyrics of the Helen.
1 Vernant 1988: 33–4; Griffith 1995; Winkler 1990; Henrichs 1994/5.
155
156 Sheila Murnaghan
which a narrative develops. This is a brief story embedded in the catalogue
of the Myrmidons in Iliad 16:2
The next battalion was led by warlike Eudoros, a maiden’s
child, born to one lovely in the dance, Polymele,
daughter of Phylas; whom strong Hermes Argeiphontes
loved, when he watched her with his eyes among the girls dancing
in the choir for clamorous Artemis of the golden distaff.
Presently Hermes the healer went up with her into her chamber
and lay secretly with her, and she bore him a son, the shining
Eudoros, a surpassing runner and a quick man in battle.
But after Eileithyia of the hard pains had brought out
the child into the light, and he looked on the sun’s shining,
Aktor’s son Echekles in the majesty of his great power
led her to his house, when he had given numberless gifts to win her,
and the old man Phylas took the child and brought him up kindly
and cared for him, with affection as if he had been his own son.
(179–92, trans. Lattimore)
This episode neatly illustrates the function of the chorus as the site where a
character, and in particular a female character, enters into narrative. Poly-
mele’s timeless epithet cor kal, ‘beautiful in the dance,’ is instantiated
on a specific occasion, when her beauty in the dance causes her to stand
out, to be noticed and to inspire the love of an onlooking male. From
that point on, things begin to happen. A man catching sight of a beautiful
woman is a trigger for the onset of desire which, as Peter Brooks points
out in his influential study, Reading for the Plot, is the principal engine of
narrative. This might occur in a number of settings: in the bedroom of
an eastern king, as in the Gyges story, which initiates the entire narrative
of Herodotus’ Histories, or at an Athenian funeral, as in the reality-based
narrative contained in Lysias’ First Oration, On the Murder of Eratosthenes,
but in the Greek world in general, the most likely and the most socially
sanctioned setting for this event is a choral performance by a group of
young women, in which one in particular is the leading, or outstanding
member.
What follows in Polymele’s case is a condensed and sunny version of
a familiar plot, or rather of two familiar plots that are often combined: a
woman’s entrance into marriage and a mortal woman’s abduction by a god,
with whom she becomes the mother of a hero. In most versions, these stories
are more fully elaborated and more complicated, involving the conflicts and
2 For further discussion of this passage, see Lonsdale 1993: 224–6, Murnaghan 2005: 185–6, Murnaghan
2006: 103–4.
The choral plot of Euripides’ Helen 157
unexpected developments that make fictional plots interesting. A woman’s
entrance into marriage does not always go smoothly, and being chosen by
a god can lead to disgrace, exile, secret suffering, or even death, as in the
stories of Danae, Io, Creusa, and Semele. The combination of a divine and
a mortal mate brings multiple complications, with Hermes often figuring,
not as the divine lover, but as a mediating figure who helps to move women
between other mates; and the woman’s father rarely is so ready as Polymele’s
father Phylas is to accept her semi-divine son.
Book 6 of the Odyssey offers a more famous and more complexly handled
instance of the integration of a choral scenario into epic narrative. Nausicaa
emerges as a distinctive character with a role to play in Odysseus’ nostos in
a scenario that is not literally a chorus, but that is closely similar to, and
explicitly modeled on, a choral performance. Athena, the architect of the
plot, motivates Nausicaa’s presence at the seaside by playing on Nausicaa’s
status as a woman on the verge of marriage; Nausicaa goes to the shore to
wash clothes in anticipation of her marriage, with a group of companions,
among whom she is the clear leader. Once the laundry is done, they play a
game with a ball that is an only slightly displaced version of choral dance.
The poet actually labels the game a dance – a molp – as he also identifies
Nausicaa as its leader, “among them white-armed Nausicaa led the dance”
(101). This line is followed by a simile, in which Nausicaa is compared
to Artemis. In the simile, Artemis is not literally in a dance either; she
is playing in the mountains with the nymphs and wild animals. But the
choral resonance of this scene is clear from the description of her happily
watching mother:
Leto rejoices in her heart
for the head and brow of Artemis rise above all the others,
and she is conspicuous among them, but all are beautiful.
(106–8)
Artemis is clearly different, but not too different.

The significance of Leto’s fond watching is evident from Artemis’ iden-
tity as the mythic prototype of the maiden chorus leader, as in the Olympian
choral performance at the beginning of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (197–
9, 204–5, cf. Hymn to Artemis 11–20, Hymn to Aphrodite 117–20), and from
the analogous human situation that Odysseus invokes when he praises
Nausicaa shortly afterwards. After comparing Nausicaa to Artemis for her
beauty and stature, he goes on to surmise that the spirits of her mother and
father ‘are perpetually warmed with happiness because of you, / seeing such
a shoot joining in the chorus’ (156–7). In his own simile, and in the speech
he gives to Odysseus, Homer acknowledges the musical occasion that is the
source of his plot motifs, which have been integrated into heroic narrative.
In borrowing those motifs, he also adapts them. Both the possibility that
Nausicaa might be abducted by a god, and the possibility that she might be
married to a distinguished human, are evoked in Odyssey 6, but Nausicaa is
given a different fate, becoming a helpful accomplice to Odysseus’ return
to Ithaca and to Penelope.3
Like epic, tragedy adapts and reuses the scenarios of nondramatic choral
lyric, but more complexly, because tragedy is itself a choral performance:
it represents an adaptation of nondramatic lyric both in its form and in its
content. Formally, tragedy represents a reworking of the choral configu-
ration of chorus and leader. This reconfiguration is described by Aristotle
in his terse account of the origin of tragedy p¼ tän xarc»ntwn t¼n
diqÅrambon, “from those leading off the dithyramb” (Poet. 4.1449a10–11).
It is not possible to assess the accuracy of Aristotle’s assertion here and,
even if true, this is clearly not the whole story of how the complex hybrid
form of tragedy came into being. But it is undoubtedly telling as an aeti-
ological construct that indicates how its maker understood the developed
phenomenon whose origins he was projecting.
Whatever he might be able to tell us about the history of tragedy, Aristotle
here highlights the way that tragedy combines a chorus with individuals,
who are distinguished, separate, even isolated, but who always play out their
stories in association with larger groups. This understanding is also evident
in his subsequent comment that the chorus should be understood as one
of the actors and should sunagwn©zesqai, “participate in the action,” or
“make a positive contribution to the play,”4 as in Sophocles rather than
Euripides (Poet. 18.1456a25–7). Aristotle’s historical narrative – his plot
of tragedy’s birth through the leaders stepping away from the group –
captures one movement in the dynamic of shifting closeness and distance
between chorus and characters that contributes to the dramatic unfolding
of individual tragedies.
In adapting choral forms, tragedy increases the separation between cho-
ruses and leaders. Actors’ speeches differ formally in their dialects, meters,
and musical register from the songs of choruses; within the myth, choruses
are assigned roles in which they are more different from the main characters
than are typical nondramatic chorus members, who are closely similar in
3 On the episode as a reworking of motifs related to the roles of dance and play in courtship, see
Lonsdale 1993: 206–10; on the episode as a “displacement of eighth-century festival life,” see Ford
1992: 118–19.
4 Lucas 1968: 193.
age, status, and local origin to their leaders. It is now a truism that tragic
choruses take on the roles of socially marginal figures – women, foreigners,
slaves, the old – although it is also increasingly acknowledged that chorus’
marginal identities do not restrict their voices or cancel their traditional
ability to speak from the cultural center.5 In part, marginal identities help
to further tragedy’s focus on the chorus-leaders-turned-protagonists. To
sharpen that distinction, the chorus is shifted into a more distant relation-
ship through imagined differences of status, locality, or age. But marginal
choral identities are also a reflection of the fact that these choruses have
been pulled, along with the characters, into the mythic plot. Tragic cho-
ruses are caught up in fictional situations in which marginalizing things
happen to them, as they do not to real choruses: they are captured, enslaved,
deported, left behind; time passes and they grow old.
The fictional scenarios into which tragic choruses and characters are alike
incorporated involve a further displacement of their underlying choral situ-
ation. Tragic plots place their characters in settings in which choral singing
and dancing, as a festive occasion that brings pleasure to mortals and does
honor to gods, is unthinkable. Tragic choruses, because they are not as
thoroughly in character as the actors and retain the self-referentiality of
nondramatic choruses, often call attention to the impossibility of choral
performance under the circumstance in which they find themselves; this
is a defining feature of tragedy, which has been illuminated especially in
the work of Albert Henrichs. Tragedy is built on the paradox that its cho-
ruses sing and dance in circumstances in which festive singing and dancing
are inappropriate, and this paradox is expressed in multiple ways: in the
famous question of the chorus of the Oedipus Tyrannus who respond
to seeming evidence that oracles are going unfulfilled and criminals are
going unpunished by asking t© de± me coreÅein; “why should I dance?”
(896); in falsely euphoric choruses which are moved to dance and sing
because they misunderstand the circumstances in which they find them-
selves (for example, the chorus of Sophocles’ Ajax, overcome with an
impulse to dance and sing when it wrongly believes that Ajax has decided
not to kill himself (693–717)); in what Henrichs terms “choral projection,”
accounts of joyous choral performances located in other, more suitable
times and places; and in onstage choral performances that are tinged with
the mournful strains of lament, a form of music often figured as anti-
musical.6
5 Gould 2001 [1996], Goldhill 1996, Foley 2003.
6 On choral self-referentiality, see Henrichs 1994/5, Henrichs 1996a. Swift 2010 surveys tragedy’s
allusions to other choral genres, concluding that those allusions are “usually ironic . . . used to create
Again without making assumptions about the origins of tragedy, we
can turn to satyr play for a model of how drama’s transposition of
the personnel of a chorus into a mythic plot has the effect of putting
them in a situation in which they cannot fully be themselves. In Euripi-
des’ Cyclops, the recipe famously articulated by François Lissarague, ‘take
one myth, add satyrs, observe the result,’7 yields a situation in which
a satyr chorus has been injected into the world of Odyssey 9 as slaves
of the Cyclops Polyphemus. As a result, they find themselves trapped
in what their leader Silenus calls an coron . . . cq»na “a land without
dances” (124, cf. 63–4), exiled from the festivity that is their proper ele-
ment. That is not to deny that the satyr chorus, like the tragic chorus,
nonetheless dances and sings: the chorus of the Cyclops enters dancing
their signature dance, the sikinnis, but their dance is flagged by their
leader Silenus as strange and out of place (37–40), and it meshes with
their fictional activity, doing double duty as the frantic chasing of unruly
sheep.
In the case of tragedy too, the formal status of actors and choruses
as dislocated participants in a festive choral performance is sometimes
echoed in the fictional circumstances of the characters, whether choruses,
who may look back in memory or forward in imagination to occasions
of dancing outside the action of the drama (what Henrichs terms “choral
projection”), or protagonists, especially female protagonists, who may be
identified as displaced chorus leaders. One example of a displaced chorus
leader is Hecuba in Troades. Alone on stage after the departure of Athena
and Poseidon, Hecuba sings a song that she defines as moÓsa . . . to±v
dustnoiv, “the music of the wretched”: tav kelade±n coreÅtouv,
“to cry out disasters that do not let us dance” (120–1). There she mea-
sures her misfortune through her physical displacement and the decline
that goes with it, from her past offstage status as flourishing leader of
ritual performances in the house of Priam to her present onstage con-
dition as miserable leader of impromptu lamentation beside the tents of
Agamemnon.8
a sense of mismatch between the ideals of the genre and what the audience sees happening onstage”
(372); as she notes, lament is the one such genre that is not evoked ironically (323). On lament as
a form of anti-music, see Sappho’s admonition that a thrēnos would not be proper in a house that
serves the Muses (fr. 150 V) and Segal’s account of tragedy’s self-presentation as “negated music”
(1993: 16–20). On the tragic chorus’ exile from festivity in relation to tragic politics, see Murnaghan
2011.
7 Lissarague 1990: 236.
8 On this passage in the context of the play’s pervasive identification of the fall of Troy with the
destruction of Trojan (“Phrygian”) music, see Battezzato 2005b: 80–3.
ßmoi, qkouv o¯ouv qssw
skhna±v fdrouv %gamemnon©aiv.
doÅla dì gomai graÓv x okwn
penqrh krtì kporqhqe±sì
o«kträv. llì å
tän calkegcwn TrÛwn locoi
mleai, koÓrai dÅsnumfoi,
tÅfetai ï Ilion, a«zwmen.
mthr dì Þse© tiv ptano±v,
klaggn xrxw ‘gÜ molpn,
oÉ tn aÉtn o¯an pot d
skptr Primou diereidomnou
pod¼v rcec»rou plhga±v Frug©ouv
eÉk»mpoiv xrcon qeoÅv.
Alas, what sort of place do I now sit in,
hard by the tents of Agamemnon!
I am taken away as an aged slave from my house,
my head ravaged in grief
pitiably! But, O
unhappy wives of the Trojans with swords of bronze,
women unblest in your husbands,
Ilium is burning: Let us wail aloud!
Like a mother bird to her winged brood,
I lead off the song of lamentation,
not at all the same song
that I led off, as Priam leaned upon his scepter,
with the confident beat of chorus leader’s foot
in praise of Troy’s gods. (138–52)9
Like epic, tragedy draws on choral situations as generators of narrative.

It reworks those situations as occasions of significant action, while drawing
out their darker dimensions and their capacity to go awry, so that they no
longer fulfill their expected social and ritual functions. The experiences of
chorus leaders provide patterns, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly,
for the struggles of tragic protagonists, whether men who are military
or political leaders or the women embarking on marriage who are the
focus of this discussion, figures whose stories are defined by extreme and
consequential versions of the distinction and separation from others that
belong to leaders of choruses.
The cases of Hecuba and, as we will see, of Helen in the Helen, represent
the explicit use of choral experience in the construction of tragic scenarios.
9 Quotations from the plays of Euripides are taken from the Loeb editions by David Kovacs (1999,
2002).
An example of the implicit rehearsal of choral dynamics is provided by
an episode in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, Deianeira’s meeting with Iole, the
captive woman with whom Heracles is in love. As Deianeira is forced to
look with her own eyes on her replacement as Heracles’ wife, she enacts
a bitter version of the experience of seeing one woman stand out from a
group. When news arrives of Heracles’ impending return, the chorus of
Trachinian women sings a misguided ode, envisioning a joyous remarriage
of Heracles and Deianeira, at the end of which a group of young women
appears. This group is pointed out by the chorus and acknowledged by
Deianeira with a redoubled stress on her own vision. “I see them, friends;
my watchful eye / did not fail to catch sight of that company” (225–6). She
asks Lichas who they are, and he identifies them as a group of captives,
a role often assigned to tragic choruses.10 Lichas then gives a strategically
edited account of the sack of Eurytus’ city, suppressing Iole’s role as the
object of Heracles’ desire and goal of his campaign. Once that is over,
Deianeira reverts to the group of captive women. She pities them all but
zeroes in on Iole, in effect overriding Lichas’ attempt to keep Iole from
standing out and attracting notice.
å dustlaina, t©v potì e² nean©dwn;
nandrov £ teknoÓssa; pr¼v mn gr fÅsin
pntwn peirov tände, genna©a d tiv.
L©ca, t©nov potì stªn ¡ xnh brotän;
t©v ¡ tekoÓsa, t©v dì ¾ fitÅsav patr;
xeipìá pe© nin tände ple±ston ktisa
blpous ì, Âsper kaª frone±n o²den m»nh.
Unfortunate one, who among girls are you?
Still unmarried, or already a mother? From the way you look,
not yet experienced in all of that, but clearly someone of noble birth.
Lichas, whose daughter is this stranger?
Who is her mother? Who is the father who begot her?
Tell me. For she is the one among these girls I pitied most
when I saw her: she is the only one who knows how to feel. (307–13)
Deianeira’s first bland-seeming question, ‘Unfortunate one, who are you?’
starts the process of differentiation: Iole is one, unidentified but particular,
individual (tiv) among girls (nean©dwn). She stands out, in a way that is
hard to specify, earning Deianeira’s particular pity and somehow showing a
unique consciousness of her circumstances, being the only one who knows
frone±n, “how to feel.” It is hard to say exactly how Iole distinguishes herself,
10 Dué 2006: 16–25.

aside from somehow seeming noble, and commentators have variously
concluded that she is the most demonstrative, or the most restrained,
among the suffering girls.11 This confusion points to the way that it is the
very fact of being distinguished that is at issue here. Lichas tries to deflect
Deianeira’s question, but his response nonetheless contains a roundabout
clue to the mystery: “What do I know? Why are you asking me? Maybe
/ in birth she is not among the humblest people in that place” (314–15).
Deianeira then tries to get Iole to speak up and identify herself, as if she
were an actor who could step out of the chorus and take a leading role in
the play, but Lichas, once again ready to discourage Iole’s emergence as an
object of attention, assures Deianeira that it would be out of character for
Iole to say anything, since she has only been able to grieve and weep since
she left her father’s house: “Well, (if she does), she will emit an utterance
(disei glässan) not at all comparable to what has been in the past”
(322–3). Only after the girls have silently entered the house, does Deianeira
learn the bitter truth of Iole’s distinguished name and particular attraction
for Heracles from the messenger.
Deianeira undergoes the wrenching, humiliating experience of recog-
nizing Iole as her own replacement by noticing that she stands out among
a group. Deianeira’s act of noticing is both an index of her own empathetic
nature and a bitter variant on the mother’s delight at her daughter’s dancing
or the bridegroom’s discovery of his mate in the most brilliant member of
the chorus. It recalls Deianeira’s own experience of being singled out as a
bride, which represented for her, not a happy initiation into a new phase
of life, but the onset of unremitting troubles. When she describes in the
prologue the contest for her hand between her terrifying suitor Achelous
and her seeming savior Heracles, she recalls her fear “that my beauty would
someday bring me grief ” (24). The play traces the painful consequences of
eye-catching beauty in the fortunes of both Deianeira and her double and
rival Iole.
To be the woman who stands out is, in the context of the chorus, to
occupy the privileged position of the chorēgos; in the context of the tragic
plot, it is to be in a situation that is full of danger, and tragedy realizes
this danger in its many explorations of how a woman’s entrance into
marriage can go wrong.12 The rest of this discussion focuses on one such
exploration, Euripides’ Helen. The Helen features a protagonist with an
especially pronounced choral identity, and so illustrates well the twofold
11 See Easterling 1982: 117.
12 On marriage and its discontents as a prominent theme of tragedy, see Foley 2001, Seaford 1987,
Seaford 1988, Ormand 1999, Rehm 1994.
role of the chorus in shaping tragic plots. The presentation of Helen and
her circumstances is promoted both by the idea of the chorus as an offstage
phenomenon, repeatedly invoked throughout the play, and by the actual
onstage chorus, which has its own role in communicating Helen’s story.
Helen is the mythological figure who best exemplifies the dangers of
conspicuous female beauty, both for herself and for others, and also a
figure with strong choral associations. As Claude Calame has detailed,
Helen played a prominent role in Spartan myth and cult as “the incarnation
of the choregos,” and Richard Martin has suggested that Helen’s identity
as a chorus leader underlies aspects of her portrayal in Homer as well.13
Helen’s beauty is so powerful that, for her, to be the one who stands out
and is chosen is not a transient stage of life leading to the obscurity of a
successful marriage, but a recurrent syndrome. As a child or young woman,
she is the object of rape or attempted rape by Theseus and Perithoos. As a
bride, she is first chosen by almost all of the Greek heroes, then assigned to
Menelaus, only to be chosen all over again by Paris. In the version of her
story dramatized by Euripides, she is protected from the consequences of
being chosen by Paris by the substitution of the phantom who goes to Troy
in her place and by her sequestration in Egypt, but in Egypt she attracts
notice and is chosen all over again, this time by the boorish Egyptian king
Theoclymenus, which leads to the crisis with which the Helen opens.
Throughout the play, Euripides casts Helen’s story as that of a dislocated
chorus leader. Her removal to Egypt is closely modeled on the motif of a
woman’s abduction by a god, and in particular on the story of Persephone,
as Foley and others have shown.14 Helen has been brought to Egypt by Her-
mes, who often figures as an agent in such stories;15 she was picking flowers
when Hermes snatched her away, as Persephone was when snatched by
Hades in the version of her story told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In
making this situation the subject of narrative, the Hymn to Demeter slightly
displaces its choral character, as the Odyssey does in the case of Nausicaa:
Persephone is simply playing (pa©zousan, 5, cf. 425) with her compan-
ions, the Oceanids.16 But Euripides, in the second stasimon of the Helen,
gives Persephone, or rather gives Persephone back, a choral setting. The
13 Calame 1997: 191–202; Martin 2008: 121. She is also celebrated in that role in Theocritus’ epithala-
mium for her (Id. 18).
14 See Foley 2001: 306–7, and the bibliography cited at 306 n. 9.
15 For example, in the false tale Aphrodite tells Anchises about how she was snatched from dances in
honor of Artemis at Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 117–20.
16 The Oceanids provide the identity of a fictional tragic chorus in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.
When Persephone lists her companions at 418–24, she includes Artemis, the archetypal Olympian
leader or sponsor of choruses. Lonsdale registers the choral associations of this scene by translating
pa©zomen at 425 as “playing and dancing” (1993: 222).
Great Mother, who is also a version of Demeter, is described as searching
for “the daughter snatched from the circling dances of maidens” (1312–13).
Further, as Laura Swift has recently shown, the Helen is pervaded through-
out by the language and themes of the traditional partheneion, or maiden
song.17
Through mythological exempla, Helen herself articulates the choral
pattern of her story. In one of her many laments and bitter comments on
the burdens of being conspicuously beautiful, she compares herself to other
women of myth who also suffered for their beauty, but not as much as she
does, because those other women were turned into animals and so were
freed from the ordeal of consciousness.
å mkar %rkad© pot parqne
Kallisto±, Di¼v lecwn p-
bav tetrabmosi gu©oiv,
Þv polÆ khr¼v mv lacev plon,
morf qhrän lacnogu©wn –
[Àmmati labr scma lea©nhv] –
xallxasì cqea lÅpavá
n t potì *rtemiv xecoreÅsato
crusokratì lafon Mropov Titan©da koÅran
kallosÅnav nekená t¼ dì m¼n dmav
ßlesen ßlese prgama Dardan©av
½lomnouv tì %caioÅv.
O lucky maid of Arcadia long ago
Callisto, who left the bed of Zeus
with limbs that go on all four,
how much your lot surpasses mine
since by taking the form of a shaggy beast
[with violent eye, the form of a lioness]
you have put from yourself the burden of pain!
And you too, Titan daughter of Merops, are blest,
you whom Artemis once chased from her band as a golden stag
because of her beauty. Yet my loveliness
has ruined, ruined Troy’s citadel
and the Greeks, doomed to death. (375–85)
Helen’s first example is Callisto, whose name alludes to her exceptional

beauty, who was raped by Zeus. Her second is an otherwise unknown
figure, the daughter of Merops. In this case, the misfortune that is caused
by beauty and mitigated by metamorphosis is described, not as abduction
by a god, but rather as expulsion from the chorus. The rare and precise
17 Swift 2010: 218–38.

term used for this experience, xecoreÅsato, attested first here and hardly
anywhere else, accentuates the element of separation from her companions
that goes with a woman’s selection for either marriage or abduction, and
the myth gives it a particular cause, the anger of Artemis.
While we know nothing more about Merops’ daughter, the anger of
Artemis does figure in the story of Callisto, from which we can extrapolate
the elements that were probably present in both myths.18 Callisto was a
companion of Artemis, to whom she had sworn a vow of chastity. When
Zeus had made her pregnant, Artemis was enraged and cast Callisto out of
her band of virgins, after which she was transformed into first a bear and
then a star. She gave birth to a heroic son, Arcas, who in some versions was
given by Zeus to Hermes’ mother Maia to raise.
The details of Helen’s two exempla combine to provide a double account
of a woman’s separation from her companions because of her fateful beauty:
she is both pulled away from them by Zeus, who singles her out and
seduces or rapes her, and pushed away from them by Artemis, for whom
she is no longer a fitting companion. These myths provide an Olympian
paradigm for the process of female coming-of-age, with Zeus as the desiring
bridegroom, Artemis as the perennial chorēgos, and Hermes as the figure
who helps make the story work out, in this case by lending his own mother
Maia as a foster mother for the heroic child. The motif of Artemis’ expulsion
makes the young woman’s inevitable estrangement from her companions
into the result of a purposeful and punitive act, underscoring the isolation
that is often her fate and that is especially foregrounded in tragedy.
In another myth, told by Pausanias, Artemis succeeds in preventing for
herself the experience of rape that leads, for her transient mortal compan-
ions, to departure from her band.
[The river-god] Alpheios fell in love with Artemis. When he realized that he
would not be able to win her with persuasion and pleading, he dared to plot
violence against her. So he went to an all-night festival in Letrinoi, which
Artemis was conducting along with the nymphs who were her playmates.
But Artemis suspected Alpheios’ plot and smeared mud on her own face
and on the faces of the nymphs who were with her. So Alpheios, when he
arrived, could not distinguish Artemis from the others, and since he wasn’t
able to pick her out, he went away without succeeding in his attempt. (Paus.
6.22.8)
Artemis realizes a god’s freedom from change by cleverly avoiding the
distinction that she punishes in others. The layers of mud that make
every member of Artemis’ band look the same provide a suggestive model,
18 On the mythology of Callisto, see Henrichs 1987: 254–67.
or aetiology, for the masks of dramatic chorus members, which make
individual performers indistinguishable.
The mythical analogues of Persephone, Callisto, and the daughter of
Merops define Helen’s unhappy situation in Egypt as an experience of
disturbed or distorted choral performance. When that situation is resolved,
and the closing sequences of the play set a happy ending in motion, Helen’s
future is defined explicitly as a return to orderly, recurrent, festive choral
performances, with Helen’s reinstatement in her former position as a chorus
leader in Sparta. As she and Menelaus make their escape from Egypt, the
play’s chorus of Greek captive women voices a prayer for Helen, which
takes the form of choral projection.
§ pou k»rav n potamoÓ

par ì o²dma Leukipp©dav £ pr¼ naoÓ
Palldov n lboi,
cr»n xunelqoÓsa coro±v
£ kÛmoiv <Uak©nqou
nÅcion v eÉfrosÅnan,
Án xamillhsmenov
troc¼n trmona d©skou
kane Fo±bov, e²ta Laka©-
n g boÅquton mran
¾ Di¼v dì e²pe sbein g»nová
m»scon qì n l©petì okoiv
<drkoitì n ëErmi»nan,>
v oÎpw peÓkai pr¼ gmwn lamyan.
I think she will find the daughters
of Leucippus by the river or before
the temple of Pallas,
as she arrives home at the time of the dances
or revels of Hyacinth
and their nightlong feasting,
Hyacinth, whom Phoebus,
trying to hurl far the round discus,
killed, and thereafter to the land
of Lacedaemon the son of Zeus
gave order to keep a day of sacrifice.
And <she may see> the calf she left
in the house, <Hermione,>
whose marriage torches have not yet gleamed.
(1465–74)
Helen’s projected future condenses and combines several choral situa-

tions and resonates closely with archaic Spartan music as we know it from
various sources, notably the poetry of Alcman, and as we have come to
understand it through the seminal analysis of those sources by Claude
Calame. In particular, Helen will reassume a leading position among cho-
ruses of women constituted around the transition to marriage, providing
a mythic prototype for the many such choruses that characterized Spartan
religious and musical life. She joins forces with a pair of sisters – effectively
the rudimentary core of a chorus – the Leucippides who, as the daugh-
ters of Tyndareus, are her cousins and, as the wives of the Dioscuroi, her
sisters-in-law.19 Like Helen, the Leucippides had strong associations both
with maidenhood and with marriage and served as the mythic prototypes
for choral performers in certain Spartan rituals.20 She will also celebrate
the Hyacinthia, a major Spartan festival, in which there were choral per-
formances involving all classes of citizens, including young women.21 Like
an ideal chorus leader, and also like the mother who closely watches the
dance, Helen will stand by an unmarried girl, her own daughter Hermione,
repairing the loss caused by her abduction.
This composite vision of Helen’s future fixes her simultaneously in the
roles of marriageable leader of a maiden’s chorus and married woman look-
ing on as her daughter performs in such a chorus, omitting the rocky transi-
tion between those two roles that motivates Helen’s appearances in narrative
and dramatic plots. Euripides’ Helen will return to a multi-layered exis-
tence that answers to the nostalgia voiced by Homer’s Helen when she tells
Priam that she wishes she had never gotten involved in the plot of the Iliad:
Þv Àfelen qnat»v moi de±n kak¼v ¾pp»te deÓro
u¬· s p»mhn qlamon gnwtoÅv te lipoÓsa
pa±d te thlugthn kaª ¾mhlik©hn rateinn.
and I wish bitter death had been what I wanted, when I came hither
following your son, forsaking my chamber, my kinsmen
my grown child, and the loveliness of girls my own age.
(Il. 3.173–5, trans. Lattimore)
Here too a timeless idealized stasis, involving several life stages at once,
serves as a foil to Helen’s participation in a narrative, specifically the
masterplot of Greek mythology, the “plan of Zeus,” in which the Trojan
War is a major episode.
The gap between involvement in narrative and choral celebration is
further evoked in the festivity through which unconnected Spartan revelers
19 On “family association” as “a semantic feature essential in defining the band of young women,” see
Calame 1997: 31.
20 Allan 2008: 322; Calame 1997: 185–91. 21 Petersson 1992: 9–41.
mark the painful circumstance of Hyacinthus’ killing by Apollo. When
mythic characters like Helen and the Leucippides become prototypical
choral celebrants, they must be divorced from their troubled histories. The
Leucippides’ story also involves abduction, as they were snatched from
the altar by the Dioscuroi, on the verge of marrying a pair of Messenian
princes, but this traumatic circumstance is evidently resolved by their happy
marriage to the Dioscuroi.22 In the case of Helen, her return to her choral
role goes hand in hand with denial that she ever left it in any significant
way. This is emphasized at the end of the ode, when the chorus calls on the
Dioscuroi to “strike from your sister’s name / the reproach of a barbarian
marriage” (1506–7).
Once the Helen’s action is over, Helen will retrace her steps to the musical
setting from which she was diverted when Hermes snatched her up to play
her part in Zeus’s plot, much like the satyr chorus of the Cyclops, who will
escape their bondage to Polyphemus and return to their joyful service to
Dionysos – both she and they freed from their entanglement in adventures
modeled on a richly plotted epic narrative, the Odyssey.23 Through this
projected offstage conclusion, and the play’s many other choral allusions
(only some of which have been treated here), Euripides, like Homer in
Odyssey 6, points to the lyric sources of his own genre. Helen’s return to
Sparta is also a musical return, to one of tragedy’s points of origin, in the
nondramatic choral lyric of the Peloponnesus.
Euripides’ interest in revisiting tragedy’s origins within tragedy, partic-
ularly in the later stages of his career, is most evident in the Bacchae, and
the Dionysian elements foregrounded there tend to dominate our under-
standing of the Peloponnesian lyric elements in tragedy. We focus on the
dithyramb and on the contributions of Corinth and Sicyon, pointed in
those directions by Aristotle, with his claim that tragedy derived from
the dithyramb, and by Herodotus, with his tale of Cleisthenes of Sicyon
transferring tragic choruses from Adrastus to Dionysos (Histories 5.67).
The Helen contains multiple allusions to the dithyramb, among them the
dolphin chorus summoned up to escort Helen home at the beginning of
the same ode.24 But in his account of Helen’s happy return, Euripides lays
particular stress on the partheneion, a form that was as much associated
with Sparta for the classical Athenians as it is for us.
22 Calame 1997: 188.

23 On the Odyssey as a significant intertext of the Helen, see Burian 2007: 9–11 and the further
bibliography cited at 9 n. 21.
24 On the dolphin chorus as a representation of dithyramb, see Csapo 2003.
For evidence of the Athenian identification of Spartan music with the
partheneion, we can turn to the song that ends Aristophanes’ Lysistrata
(1296–1315). There, as the successful outcome of the sex strike is celebrated
with joint singing and dancing, the Spartans are enjoined to perform a
song of their own. The result is a song that both represents Spartan music
in its formal features, including its markedly Spartan dialect and its many
allusions to the partheneia of Alcman,25 and offers an explicit account of
Spartan music in its content. The chorus calls on the Mōa Lakaina, the
Spartan muse, to travel from Laconia and make an appearance in Athens,
sounding the same notes as the chorus of the Helen does. The Spartan
muse is asked to honor the local objects of cult with whom Helen will also
reconnect: Apollo of Amyclae, Amyclae being the setting of the Hyacinthia;
Athena of the Bronze House, before whose temple Helen might meet the
Leucippides; and the Dioscuroi themselves. And the chorus proposes to
celebrate Sparta specifically as the scene of young women’s dances: “Let us
sing in praise of Sparta, / where choruses for the gods / stamp their feet
/ where girls like fillies / kick up the dust / on the banks of the Eurotas,”
culminating in a vision of Helen as their chorus leader: “and Leda’s daughter
leads them / the holy, upright choragos” (1305–15). This epiphanic image
encapsulates the identity that Euripides’ Helen is finally able to reclaim
after her enforced wanderings and Egyptian ordeal: an honorable, revered
figure, who represents Spartan women in their roles as wives and potential
wives and who stands as an emblem of Spartan music, an avatar of the
Spartan muse.
In the Lysistrata, a plot hatched on the Athenian acropolis, which is led
by an exemplary Athenian woman, and which echoes Athenian cults and
institutions, frees the Spartan muse from the inhibiting effects of war and
revives Spartan music. In the Helen, a similar result is achieved through
another Athenian institution, tragedy itself, a fictional mimesis that is
performed on the slopes of the Acropolis even if it has the more exotic
setting of Egypt. Euripides’ plot frees Sparta’s muse-like heroine from her
damaging association with the Trojan War and sends her back to preside
over a restored musical culture. Euripides here reverses the direction of
musical history, making tragedy, Athens’ innovative form of choral drama,
the source and guarantor of the nondramatic lyric genre that it has borrowed
and adapted.26
25 On the song’s relationship to the poetry of Alcman, see Bierl 2011.

26 Thus music of a type viewed with nostalgia by critics of the new music is made to follow from the
Spartan muse figure’s participation in Euripides’ new-fangled kain ëElnh (Aristoph. Thesm. 850).
The large contribution to tragedy of young women’s song of the
kind associated with Sparta is evident from the preponderance of female
choruses,27 a feature of early tragedy that Euripides embraced in his later
plays,28 and from the many tragic plots concerned with women’s transi-
tions to marriage, which are at least as common as male-centered plots
drawn from the heroic legends of the Troy cycle. Play after play recasts
the successful ritual passage from maidenhood to marriage as an unhappy
tale of a woman whose transition to marriage is incomplete, threatened, or
flawed, and who is supported in her difficulties by a chorus of sympathetic
young women. Some of the most obvious examples include, in addition
to those already discussed here (the Helen and the Trachiniae), Sophocles’
Electra and Euripides’ Electra, Medea, Hippolytus, Ion, and Iphigenia in
Tauris. Aeschylus’ Supplices is a further example, in which the chorus itself
figures in the role of troubled bride.29 Those female protagonists often
express their disturbing distinction by highlighting their difference from
groups that are constituted as choruses, whether the chorus of the play or
an analogous onstage or offstage group. In the Trachiniae, for example,
Deianeira greets the chorus of younger, unmarried women by expressing
the wish that they should never have to experience what she did, then
launches into an account of her painful entrance into marriage (142–3).
In Euripides’ Bacchae, Agaue, in her deluded belief that she has hunted
down a lion cub when she has really dismembered her own son, enters
the stage by herself boasting to her father that she has outperformed her
sisters, a group of women with strong choral associations both inside and
outside Euripides’ play (1234–5).30 Not only is the maiden song a major
element in the poetic mix that constituted tragedy, but it is one that had
to come from elsewhere, since Athens itself lacked a strong tradition of
choral performances by actual women, as opposed to the prominent fictive
women of its dramatic choruses.31
By making his heroine traverse the space between the tragic stage and
the nondramatic ritual chorus, Euripides reaffirms the continuities between
the two genres at a point in the evolution of tragedy at which it seemed
Deborah Steiner (2011) makes a similar argument about the musical imagery that runs through
the entire third stasimon. On her reading, that imagery retrojects the new musical style of late
Euripidean tragedy onto a series of archetypal, originary choruses, “making it seem that what is
musically/chorally new more properly restores choreia to the form and structure which it – in the
late fifth-century imagination – originally possessed.”
27 Foley 2003: 12–13, Mastronarde 2010: 101–5.
28 Euripides’ use of female choruses in most plays from the 420s on can be related to their greater
suitability for the musical and emotional extremes of the new music. Csapo 2000: 424–5.
29 On the choral plot of the Supplices, see Murnaghan 2005.
30 Murnaghan 2006: 104–5. 31 Parker 2005: 182–3; Stehle 1997: 59–60.
to be leaving its choral roots behind. As one of Euripides’ later plays,
the Helen exemplifies the attenuation of tragedy’s choral element that was
characteristic of the period and linked to the emergence of new music,
with its stress on passionate solo song performed by increasingly virtuoso
actors.32 In its fictional role, the chorus of the Helen exemplifies the general
obscurity of tragic choruses. They are ordinary Greek captives, and while
Helen suggests she will try to arrange their return to Greece, their future is
not an urgent matter like her own. Formally, they exhibit the diminished
role characteristic of late Euripidean choruses. The number of their lines is
relatively few, and they are silent for a large stretch of the action. They share
the parodos with Helen, whose role involves in general a large component
of song, in an anomalous structure of alternating strophe and antistrophe.
After this, they sing only a few scattered lyrics until the first stasimon,
which begins only at line 1107.
And yet the chorus of the Helen is hardly negligible. When they do finally
start performing odes, they sing three memorable stasima, all with strong
musical themes: the first an invocation of the lamenting nightingale; the
second telling the myth of the Great Mother and her daughter; the third
forecasting Helen’s homecoming in Sparta through a sequence of images
with rich choral associations, of which Helen’s imagined return to Spartan
festivals is only one.33 That account of Helen’s return is indispensable,
since it completes the play’s presentation of Helen’s story as a sequence of
separation from the chorus, miserable isolation, and happy reunion. Only
through the chorus’ powers of projection does the essential element of
nostos enter the Egypt-bounded space of the tragic plot.
Not only does the Helen’s chorus articulate Helen’s return to her role as
chorus leader, they also anticipate it, in their own role as Helen’s supporters,
a loyal and sympathetic group of temporary companions that substitutes
for the close kinswomen that she will ultimately rejoin, keeping alive in
exile, in an attenuated form, the identity as chorēgos that Helen has lost
along with her friends, her husband, her daughter, and her reputation.34
This is characteristic of the tragic chorus, which serves in part to represent
in a muted key, even under the direst circumstances, happier aspects of
experience from which the protagonists are in danger of being wholly cut
off: community, survival, successful ritual, and musical performance. This
32 Allan 2008: 39–41; Csapo 2000: 409–14.

33 For further discussion of the Helen’s thorough-going engagement with musical themes and musical
history, see Barker 2007, Ford 2010, Steiner 2011.
34 On the Helen’s chorus as substituting for her lost companions, see Allan 2008: 300–1; on the chorus
of the Ion as performing a similar function for Creusa, see Murnaghan 2006: 110–11.
quality of the Helen’s chorus is reflected in the clustering of their songs late
in the play. As Helen begins to emerge from the entanglements of Zeus’s
plot and moves towards a renewed choral role, she is attended by a chorus
that is itself more overtly choral. But it is also evident in the chorus’ earliest
appearance in the parodos.
After the initial episode of her meeting with Teucer, Helen is left alone
on the stage. There she sings a lament for her overwhelming troubles, in
which she stresses the burden of solitude, and longs for the answering voice
of a mourning chorus; she appeals in particular to a group of mythical
singing maidens, the Sirens, to join her. Helen’s strophe is answered in the
antistrophe by the entrance of the play’s actual human chorus.
kuanoeidv mfì Ìdwr
tucon lik tì n cl»an
fo©nikav l©
pplouv crusais©n
< tì n > aÉga±si qlpousì
mfª d»nakov rnesiná
nqen o«ktr¼n Âmadon kluon,
luron legon, Â ti potì laken
<lampro±sin> a«gma-
si stnousa nÅmfa tiv,
o³a Naºv Àresi fÅgda
n»mon ¬e±sa goer»n, Ëp¼ d
ptrina gÅala klagga±si
Pan¼v nabo gmouv.
Near waters of deep blue
and shoots of tender green I chanced
to be drying on standing reeds
my deep-dyed
dresses in the sun
<and> its golden rays.
There I heard a noise to stir my pity,
a lament not fit for the lyre, uttered
in <loud> complaint
by some wife:
so would a Naiad in flight
on the mountains utter a woeful plaint
as in some rocky glen
she cried out that she is being ravished by Pan.
(170–90)
The antistrophe ends with one of the play’s many comparisons of Helen
to the victim of rape by a god, in this case a solitary nymph who cries out
as she is chased by Pan. But first the chorus explains that, when they heard
this cry, they were at the water’s edge doing laundry. They are thus doubly
positioned as the group of companions from which a chosen woman is
typically snatched away: the Sirens, for whom they substitute, figure in
some versions of the Persephone myth as Persephone’s companions;35 their
own activity identifies them with Nausicaa’s companions in Odyssey 6.36
These comparisons reinforce Helen’s depiction as a woman who has been
isolated and caused to suffer by multiple iterations of abduction; but by
responding to her cry the chorus also mitigates her isolation and sorrow.
Her return to her own companions is still in the future, but Helen’s
restitution to her proper role as chorus leader is already anticipated as the
play’s chorus reacts to her voice, comes to her side, and answers her song.37
A fundamental constituent of tragic form, the entrance of the chorus,
enacts in advance the outcome that the tragic plot will only gradually and
incompletely bring about.38
In a recent discussion, Andrew Ford illuminates the relationship of
this fictional sequence to the play’s pervasive engagement with musical
history. The chorus’ answer to Helen’s outburst dramatizes the conversion
of emotion into art, as a rough cry generates a piece of music, and thus
forms a first step in the evolution of fully developed ritual performance.
Taken together, the songs of Helen intimate a genealogy that traces song
to the inarticulate grieving of abandoned women. Solitary cries of pain are
converted into musical art when others come to share the mourner’s burden:
a chorus gives articulation and shape to a soloist’s lament and creates the
possibility of future repetitions, formal and controlled, in which ceremonial
choirs of women elaborate that first cry into an art which can be repeated
at regular intervals to please the gods.39
Through the musical resonances of its action, the Helen clarifies what
tragedy achieves by reconstituting choral performance as fictional mimesis.
35 Barker 2007: 10–11, Swift 2010: 225.

36 This parallel is noted by Foley 2001: 306 n. 10, Burian 2007: 202, and Ford 2010: 294.
37 Swift compares Helen here to the chorus leaders in Alcman’s surviving partheneia, Hegesichora,
Agido, and Astymelousa (2010: 223).
38 Other tragedies in which the entrance of the chorus is fictionalized as a sympathetic response to the
troubles of a protagonist (whether rumored, overheard as a cry, or forming the basis of a summons)
include: Sophocles, Ajax, Trachiniae, Electra; Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris, Medea, Heraclidae,
Hippolytus (where the chorus has heard the news of Phaedra’s suffering while doing laundry, 121–
30), Andromache, Troades. In contrast, Iole’s inability to emit any glässan (Trach. 323) in her
extreme grief is related to the way she does not emerge as a tragic character, although Deianeira’s
sympathetic interest and Iole’s distinction among a group of women are signs that, in a different
play, she might.
39 Ford 2010: 285.
Leaders and choruses are alike shifted out of the protected, uneventful
setting of overt ritual festivity to undergo the hazards of particular experi-
ences; they undergo those experiences in tandem, but without necessarily
enjoying the close and perfectly calibrated relationship that is built into
their roles in performance. Yet, because they enter the plot together, they
are capable of retaining or reconstructing some approximation of that rela-
tionship; when they do, they temper tragedy’s presentation of individual
suffering with intimations of the communal solidarity and continuity that
choral performance represents.
The female lament, a heartfelt, spontaneous, form more linked to private
experience and uncontrolled emotion than the full-fledged male-authored
thrēnos,40 provides an apt model for the skewed, provisional chorality
found within the tragic plot, much as the partheneion, a form designed to
promote the departure of its leaders, provides an apt model for tragedy’s
amplification of the distance between chorus and characters. If female
lament, as depicted in epic and tragedy, is not an ideal musical occasion,
its particular combination of performers and its pronounced antiphony
do nonetheless suggest the definitive choral configuration of an individual
surrounded and supported by a group among whom she stands out.41
In lament, the individual stands out for her suffering rather than her
excellence, but the myths of Helen and others show how closely interwoven
those two forms of distinction can be, and the group, through its presence
and its echoing expressions of sympathy, serves to mitigate the individual’s
isolation.
The parodos of the Helen has a darker double in the parodos of Troades,
which begins with the monody sung by Hecuba quoted above (98–121).
Hecuba, bereft of country, children, and husband, rolls back and forth in a
wretched anti-dance,42 and voices troubles “that do not let us dance,” which
are identified with the destructive acts of Helen (131–7) – here infamous
reality rather than the false rumor bewailed by Helen in the Helen. But like
the Helen of the Helen, Hecuba manages to assemble a chorus to mitigate
her solitude. Her call to the unhappy Trojan wives to join her lamentation
(142–5) is answered by the entrance of the chorus, who arrive in two half-
choruses that then merge into a single band. The entrance of both groups
is motivated by concerned response to Hecuba’s cry: “Hecuba, what do
you utter, why do you cry aloud? / What is the meaning of your speech? /
40 On the distinction, see Swift 2010: 304–22.

41 On the antiphony of traditional female lament, see Swift 2010: 306–7; Alexiou 2002.
42 Battezzatto 2005b: 80–1.
Through the walls of the tent / I heard the cries of woe you are uttering”
(153–5, cf. 176–8).
For the duration of the play, Hecuba and the other Trojan Women form
a temporary choral group through which to better confront and articulate
their wretched fate. The temporary character of this group is tied up with
the wretchedness of their fate, for they are destined to disband as each
member is sent off with a new master. This theme is highlighted already
in the parodos, as the chorus speculates about possible destinations and
expresses preferences among them (197–229), and further developed in the
subsequent scene in which Talthybius reveals which Greek victor each of
the most prominent Trojan women has been allotted to, and the chorus
members wonder out loud about their own assignments (230–93). The
temporary character of the analogous grouping in the Helen is cause for
rejoicing rather than grief, reflecting the altogether different and happier
resolution of the Helen’s plot, but both of these chronologically close
(Troades 416, Helen 412), musically self-conscious plays call attention to
the distinctive way in which tragedy reimagines the relationship of chorus
leader and choral group in its imitation of pathos.
The difference between these two versions of fictional chorality is also
softened by the “surprisingly favorable terms”43 in which the chorus mem-
bers of Troades envision their futures in the Greek settings of Argos, Phthia,
Corinth, Sicily, and Thurii – just as long as they are not sent to Sparta
(208–29). This positive note may be related to the positive advocacy in
both of these plays of new musical forms that share the emotional inten-
sity of lament. Furthermore, Easterling has suggested that the envisioned
futures of the Troades’ chorus members represent a form of choral projec-
tion, alluding to future performances of the play in a variety of locations,
including the Greek west.44 If that is the case, the post-play future of this
chorus inverts and complements the post-play future envisioned for Helen
in the Helen, projecting the future dissemination of contemporary tragedy
throughout the Greek world rather than looking back to tragedy’s archaic
roots in Sparta.45
The lament improvised by Helen and a fortunately-met group of Greek
captive women on the banks of the Nile is not an ideal choral performance,
43 Goff 2009: 46.
44 Easterling 1994. Cf. the similar ode at Hecuba 448–74, in which one of the chorus’ possible futures
involves joining the Delian maidens.
45 The complementarity between Troades, with its many similarly suffering female characters, and the
Helen, with its more singular heroine, is perhaps suggested at Helen 1113–16, where the chorus calls
on the nightingale to help them sing laments on two themes: “Helen’s grievous troubles / and the
sorrowful fate / of the daughters of Troy / at the hands of Greek spearmen.”
such as those delighted in by the Muses or by the Delian maidens or by
Helen herself with the women of Sparta. The Helen’s fictional chorus
cannot make up for the closer choral groups whom Helen has lost, and she
will not really be herself again until she is reunited with her daughter and
her sisters-in-law. But their joint song is a work of art that imposes order
on pain and a step in the process by which grief is converted into renewed
enjoyment of life. And the stranded captive women, together with Helen,
do exemplify the partial, differently constituted version of chorality that
occurs when choruses and their leaders have been transposed to the tragic
plot, subject to the temporal and spatial dislocations of narrative: a new
configuration in which the leader is dangerously prominent and registers
the consequences of that prominence, most often in extended dialogue or
passionate solo lyrics, but also, as here, in shared song. That song may take
the bitter form of lament in sad circumstances, but it enacts nonetheless
the essential symbiosis of leader and group that is a definitive feature of
choral mousikē.
chapter 8
Transcultural chorality
Iphigenia in Tauris and Athenian imperial economics
in a polytheistic world
Barbara Kowalzig
1. Introduction
‘The most distinctive feature of Greek tragedy is . . . the chorus’ writes
Simon Goldhill emphatically in his short introduction to the staging of
Greek tragedy.1 That the chorus is something very characteristically Greek
is a widespread, unspoken assumption within the discipline of Classics
and beyond. As so often, this view has been conceptualised, and brought
into focus, for us by the writers of the Second Sophistic. Ewen Bowie, in a
recent discussion of imperial views about classical chorality, calls the chorus
‘a cultural form perceived as essentially Hellenic’: ‘Choroi were perceived
as an important component of being Greek, . . . displaying a Greek in two
capacities that distinguished him or her from barbaroi: as an orderly and
participatory member of a Greek polis, and as a worshipper of Greek gods’.2
The chorus features as an emblem of, and medium for communicating,
Hellenicity, here defined firstly by civic identity, and secondly by religious
practice.
I shall attempt to argue quite a different case in this paper: I shall
look at the chorus as mediating between cultures, and at the tragic chorus
in particular as mediating between different religious traditions in the
wider Mediterranean – in other words, at the tragic chorus operating in
a world of interactive polytheisms. I draw attention to the plural -s in
the word ‘polytheisms’, for the ancient Mediterranean consists of a set
of interconnected polytheistic systems, with very significant overlaps, and
This essay is slightly revised from versions delivered fully or in parts at Barcelona, Northwestern
University, NYU, Brown, London and Abu-Dhabi. I am indebted to the many suggestions and ideas
from these audiences. In particular, I thank Philomen Probert, Tim Rood, Ian Rutherford, Oliver
Taplin and Froma Zeitlin for their comments on earlier drafts, and David Braund for his guidance on
the Russian and Ukrainian bibliography. I am pursuing separately the two broader topics touched upon
here, of interacting Mediterranean choralities and of religion and cross-cultural trade in antiquity, and
am grateful to the editors for making possible this initial foray into both by treating them jointly here.
1 Goldhill 2007: 45, italics mine. 2 Bowie 2006: 65.
178
Transcultural chorality 179
ultimately elusive boundaries between them. The ‘power’ of chorality lies in
its ability to integrate diversity, to pool into the common dance people and
values that are not normally the same. The tragic chorus peculiarly floats
between fiction and reality, past and present, myth and ritual, spectacle and
audience, the local and the Panhellenic. It is in this constant mediation
between discrete cultural reference systems that the special experience of
Greek drama, often assimilated to ritual, lies.3
My test case for this study of the chorus in the world of transcultural
religions will be Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. Conventionally dated to 414
bc, the play’s mythic storyline builds up to a transfer of Taurian Artemis and
her choral rites from the Crimea on the Black Sea to Attica. My central point
is that this play’s chorus mediates, and ultimately integrates, discrete cultic
traditions into religious hybridity, which constitutes a highly profitable,
cultural middle ground in which religious imagination and contemporary
economic interests of the Athenian empire in the Black Sea converge.
Recent research into the mechanisms of cross-cultural trade engages
with the interdependence between the organisation of trade and cultural
beliefs as a basis for a relationship of trust and obligation between business
partners.4 I argue that the IT and the way it relates mythical narrative
to the contemporary cultic world were central to the cognitive processes
underlying the establishment of economic ties to the Pontos in the context
of the late fifth-century Athenian empire. The play, and perhaps classical
tragedy at large, played a key role in the conceptualisation of the tran-
scultural economic encounter between Greeks and others. Local Greek
song-culture such as that of the somewhat earlier Pindar, Bacchylides or
Simonides had an active share in social and historical processes within and
between the cities of archaic and classical Greece;5 we shall see that tragedy
may be understood as its imperial successor. Here, chorality operates as an
integrating power not just within Greece but on a ‘global’ level and in a
system of interacting polytheisms – hence ‘transcultural chorality’.
To make this case I shall first look briefly at the associations that chorality
held for the Greeks, especially in the context of other Mediterranean cul-
tures (section 2); then I shall unravel how the IT’s plot construes a maritime
Artemis concerned with travel, trade and the cross-cultural encounter by
sea (section 3); in a further part I investigate the figure and cult of Artemis
3 For the relationship of drama and ritual see the contributions in Csapo and Miller 2007.
4 Greif 2006; refined by Trivellato 2009; both build on earlier work by Curtin 1984 and approaches of
New Institutional Economics made popular by North 1990. For the concept of the ‘middle ground’
see White 1991, put to work by Malkin 2011, ch. 5; index s.v.
5 Kowalzig 2007b.
180 Barbara Kowalzig
Tauropolos in particular, proposing ‘transcultural integration’ as her special
power (section 4). The final section (5) will show how Artemis’ chorus over
the course of the play deploys her powers of transcultural mediation in
drawing together ritual and emerging contemporary patterns of trade with
the Euxine.
2. The Greek chorus in a Mediterranean context

What are the choruses’ qualities, as perceived by the Greeks? ‘Citizenship’
and ‘worshipping Greek gods’ were the two things singled out by Ewen
Bowie as associated with them by writers of the Second Sophistic. It is
certainly true that dancing in the chorus marked you as a citizen of a
given polis; chorality and civic community were close associates, topped
by civic cohesion and integration. Chorality and civilisation is another
popular pair of mutual associations: we find the link from Plato’s trenchant
assertion that choral training and culture of the Athenian citizen are deeply
intertwined, to Polybius’ remarks about the environmental determinism
of the Arkadians, who turned from rustic highlanders into an integrated
society through choral education. Strikingly perhaps, Alexander the Great,
among the more conspicuous enthusiasts of Greek civilisation, celebrates
his triumphs in the choral voice: on his return from the East Alexander
was feasting with sacrifice, procession, choral contests (kyklioi choroi) and
tragedy. Or, pointedly, when re-enacting Dionysos’ mythical journey on
the way to conquering India he supposedly exclaimed ‘I want victorious
Greeks to dance (again) in India’. Alexander’s trip to the East is of course
the reverse journey of Dionysos’ himself returning – ex oriente lux – from
the East to ‘civilise’ the Greeks with his choruses; represented not only in
Euripides’ Bacchae but in many other local aetiologies of Dionysiac cult:
with dance comes civilisation.6 So chorality is in good company with its
several civic associates – even and perhaps particularly, in transcultural
contexts, for the example of Alexander already hints that it is not clear in
which direction the civilising goes.
The second assertion, that choral dancing ‘displays a Greek as a worship-
per of’ specifically ‘Greek gods’, is much more difficult to pin down in the
6 Chorality and its civic associates: citizenship – community – cohesion – civilisation: e.g. Pl. Leg.
654a: oÉkoÓn ¾ mn pa©deutov c»reutov ¡m±n stai, t¼n d pepaideumnon ¬kanäv kecoreuk»ta
qeton; ‘Shall we assume that the uneducated man is without chorus-training and the educated man
fully chorus-trained?’; ‘no chorus no culture’ is Goldhill’s shorthand soundbite (2007: 48). Polyb.
4.20–1: rustic Arkadian highlanders turn into civilians through choral education. Alexander the
Great: Plut. Alex. 29.1–2 (cf. 67.7–8); De Alex. Fort. 1.332b.
world of polytheisms that I invoked above. For a start, the Greeks were not
the only choralised ancient Mediterranean culture. Choruses were standard
in ancient ritual and worship in Bronze Age and Iron Age civilisations, in
Minoan and Mycenaean religion, among the Phoenicians and in Anatolia
and Egypt. The Hittites, for example, known for a high degree of precision
and detail in their documentary religious records, had differentiated ritu-
als featuring closely circumscribed forms of choral dance. Some festivals
featured multilingual rituals, in Hattic, Hittite, Luwian, suggesting that
liturgical cosmopolitanism was the norm and not the exception in these
multicultural societies. Iconographically, we know quite a bit about the
Egyptians, for whom choreographic hieroglyphs survive.7
Though the wider world of Mediterranean chorality has barely been
researched, it is still worth pointing out that the Greeks’ notion that
there was something special about their civic choral culture is not entirely
a construct of the Second Sophistic. In a curious, well-known passage,
Herodotus, discussing the rituals for an Egyptian Dionysos, talking about
phalloi and all kinds of other things familiar to the Greek religious historian,
also says (Hdt. 2.48.2):
Tn d llhn ngousi ¾rtn t DionÅs o¬ A«gÅptioi pln corän
kat taÉt sced¼n pnta í Ellhsi.
In other ways the Egyptian way of celebrating the festival of Dionysos is
much the same as the Greek, except that the Egyptians have no choruses.
Let us leave aside the full complexity of the Herodotean interpretatio Graeca
for the time being. But I do not think it a coincidence that it is the choroi
that distinguish the Egyptian Dionysos from the Greek. There is a notion
here, on the one hand, of Dionysos as a transcultural divinity, worshipped in
some form by Egyptians, Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples, and on
the other, of local social structures shaping specific traits of his cult. In the
Greek world choruses for Dionysos are arguably the ones most profoundly
tied to matters of civic identity and community;8 and this passage suggests
a perception that the civic character of Dionysos is not maintained in
Egypt, or at least is not communicated through the chorus. Indeed, more
generally, although there is evidence that singing and dancing were taught in
Egypt, there is no sign that the Egyptians attributed an educative function
to music and dance or associated them with specific moral qualities in
7 For the Hittites see e.g. Schuol 2004; Rutherford 2008: 73–83; for Egyptian and Greek perceptions
of the Egyptian chorus, Rutherford 2013. For ritual drama in Bronze Age Egypt, Anatolia and Greece
see Nielsen 2002.
8 See e.g. Wilson 2000; Kowalzig and Wilson 2013; Goldhill 1990.
the service of social cohesion. Rather, in Egyptian religion the performers
of song-dance were specialised, professional troupes attached to temples.
These were evidently not citizen-choruses, where participation defined
membership of the civic community. Ancient Egypt did not have the same
kind of public, notionally all-participatory song-culture that we assume for
ancient Greece.9
By contrast, in Greece such professional standing choruses are few and
far between (though there are more than one thinks). When they do
occur, though, it tends to be in connection with sanctuaries of some
‘oriental’ colour: e.g. the chorus of Lydian korai, subject of Autokrates’
play Tympanistai, in the temple of Artemis at Ephesos – an ‘orientalising’
goddess whose cult was thought to have been set up by the Amazons. There
is also the archaic chorus of the Molpoi of Apollo at Didyma, associated
with ancient Lydia. The best-known such ‘standing chorus’ are of course
the Deliades singing for Apollo and Artemis on the island of Delos. But
the Deliades too are traditionally associated with Asia Minor and Artemis
at Ephesos, though as we shall later see, the Deliades become closely linked
to choral Hellenicity.10
It is these two notions, the Hellenicity of the civic or citizen chorus on the
one hand, and the perceived non-Greekness of the standing, professional
chorus belonging to a temple on the other, that are important for the
mechanisms of what I shall call ‘transcultural chorality’ in tragedy. But
such transcultural chorality does not work flatly in order to differentiate
Greeks from barbarians, nor does it aim to reveal Greek superiority over
non-Greeks, but rather to establish connections between cultures. In the
case of the Iphigenia in Tauris these connections have a maritime character
and are specifically carried by the sea. I anticipate this point here since
the motif of seaborne travel of the worshipping chorus is a crucial, third
factor in the process of religious integration that ‘transcultural chorality’
enables. For Greek choruses have a naturally integrative, transcultural role
even just within Greece, in the context of theōria, misleadingly translated
as ‘pilgrimage’. Choral theōria, the practice of poleis sending choruses to
regional or Panhellenic cult centres, is a significant factor in Greek inter-
state relations. Such travelling choruses fleshing out the links between
communities and pooling them into a larger worshipping group are taken
extremely seriously: specifically singled out are cases where such a mission
9 Kinney 2008; cf. n. 7 and Emerit 2002.
10 Autokrates Tympanistai PCG 1 for the Lydian korai (cf. Ar. Nub. 598–600 etc., with Calame 1997:
93–4); the Molpoi: Milet. I.3 133; the Deliades and Artemis on Delos, related to Artemis of Ephesos:
Kowalzig 2007b: 118–24. On the social dynamics within the Deliades chorus see Nagy, this volume.
fails and hence the inter-state bonds are broken.11 The most conspicuous
case of choral polis-theōria is that of island delegations trekking to and from
the island of Delos in the first half of the fifth century; here singing myth in
choral ritual served to tie a great many island states into a sort of religious
community within the larger Athenian empire. This community is entirely
based on the incessant forging of a network of myth and ritual performed in
song, spanning the entire Aegean; it is continuously created and re-created
by the choruses who travel between their local sanctuaries of Apollo and
Artemis and the central shrine at Delos. So, the chorus’ journeying between
cult places, creating a system of relations imagined in myth and practised
in ritual, is relevant for its integrative role, linking up communities.12
All three ideas about chorality just discussed, the perceived Hellenicity
of the Greek chorus, the perceived non-Greekness of the standing chorus
in a sanctuary, and the image of the mobile chorus in the context of polis-
theōria, will be put to work in instances of transcultural chorality in the
Iphigenia in Tauris.
3. Maritime Artemis and cultural differentiation in

the Iphigenia in Tauris
So let me now turn to the Iphigenia in Tauris itself. As hinted above,
I shall broadly argue that the cross-cultural voyages of Taurian Artemis
and her choral rites in which the story culminates, carrying her myths
and rituals from the Pontos into the Mediterranean, open up and flesh
out a novel middle ground between the Taurid and imperial Athens, of
high economic potential in the later fifth century when the Iphigenia in
Tauris was performed. Artemis can do this job not only because she is the
choral goddess par excellence (as we know from Calame’s landmark studies
on Artemis Orthia in Sparta);13 but as we shall see she is also by nature
transcultural and mediating between diverse social groups; this is one of her
special spheres of power. In this particular play she assumes a characteristic,
but neglected, role as a goddess of the sea, protecting maritime routes and
those who are travelling them, sailors, especially merchants.
Let me quickly survey the plot in the terms relevant for my argument.
The play is set in the shrine of Artemis on the far-flung Taurian peninsula,
11 Hdt. 6.27: ninety-eight of 100 boys in a theoric chorus from the island of Chios perish during their
journey to Delphi; Paus. 5.25.2–4: a theoric chorus of thirty-five boys drowns in the Strait of Messina
on its way from Messene (Sicily) to its mother city Rhegion. See Kowalzig 2005 on the importance
of choral polis-theōria in inter-state relations; cf. further Rutherford 2004.
12 Kowalzig 2007b, ch. 2 on choral polis-theōria to Delos. 13 Calame 2001 [1977], 1997.
Olbia Pantikapaion
Phanagoria
Theodosia
Chersonesos
Sinope
Amisos
Byzantion
Herakleia Pontike
Pontika
Halai Araphenides
Brauron
Delos
Fig. 1 The Aegean and the Black Sea.
the modern Crimea (fig. 1). This is where Artemis has dropped Iphigenia
after snatching her away from Agamemnon’s sacrifice to Artemis at Aulis
on the Euboian Gulf. We remember that this sacrifice was conducted with
a view to obtaining opportune winds to sail the Greeks to Troy. Iphigenia –
guarded by the Taurian king Thoas – tends to the ‘barbarian’ goddess,
together with a group of fellow Greek parthenoi, taken into slavery (how
did they actually come to the Crimea?). All attention goes to the goddess’s
gourmand sacrificial demands: her preferred victims are Greek seafarers and
shipwrecked Greeks. Sent by Apollo, Iphigenia’s brother Orestes arrives
with his loyal cousin Pylades, hoping to return the cult image, the xoanon
of Artemis, back to Greece and obtain release from the Erinyes hunting
him ever since his murder of Klytemnestra. The two heroes arrive, but at
the moment of their presumed sacrifice to Artemis there follows instead
a touching recognition scene, and the three devise a cunning plan of
escape involving a ritual by sea (leaving behind the chorus). The ploy
almost fails, but quickly Athenian Athena appears ex machina and lends
her protection to travel, while instructing on a set of cultic resolutions
for the contemporary Attic religious landscape: Artemis is not to return
to Aulis or to Argos, but to two cult sites in Attica, to Brauron with
Iphigenia as priestess and choroi in her honour, and a little further north,
to Halai Araphenides. Here, to compensate for the failed human sacrifice
of Orestes, at her festival a young man’s neck is cut and the altar stained
with blood in Artemis’ honour, to the accompaniment of choral singing
(Eur. IT 1449–69):
Âtan dì %qnav tv qeodmtouv m»l
v,
cär»v tiv stin %tq©dov pr¼v sctoiv 1450
Âroisi, ge©twn deirdov Karust©av,
¬er»vá &lv nin oËm¼v ½nomzei leÛv.
ntaÓqa teÅxav na¼n ¯drusai brtav,
pÛnumon gv Taurikv p»nwn te sän,
oÍv xem»cqeiv peripolän kaqì ëEllda 1455
ostroiv ìErinÅwn. *rtemin d nin brotoª
t¼ loip¼n Ëmnsousi Taurop»lon qen.
n»mon te qv t»ndìá Âtan ortz
leÛv,
tv sv sfagv poinì pisctw x©fov
dr
pr¼v ndr¼v a³m tì xanitw, 1460
¾s©av kati qe qì Âpwv timv c
.
s dì mfª semnv, ìIfigneia, le©makav
Braurwn©av de± tde kl
douce±n qeá
oÕ kaª teqy
katqanoÓsa, kaª pplwn
galm soi qsousin eÉpnouv Ëfv, 1465
v n guna±kev n t»koiv yucorrage±v
l©pwsì n okoiv. tsde dì kpmpein cqon¼v
ëEllhn©dav guna±kav xef©emai
gnÛmhv dika©av oÌnekì.
When you come to god-built Athens, there is a place near the borders of
Attica, neighbouring the cliff of Karystos, a sacred place: my people call it
Halai. There build a temple and set up the statue: it will be called after the
Taurian land and your woes, the ones you suffered as you fared over Greece
goaded on by the Erinyes. For all time to come mortals will sing hymns
in honour of Artemis the Taurian-faring goddess. This is the custom you
must establish: when the people keep the feast, to atone for your sacrifice,
let them hold a sword to the neck of a man and draw blood: thus will piety
be satisfied and the goddess receive honour. And you, Iphigenia, in the holy
meadows of Brauron die, you will lie buried here, and they will dedicate for
your delight the finely woven garments which women who die in childbirth
leave behind in their homes. As for these Greek women my orders are
to escort them from the country because of the uprightness of their
hearts. (trans. here and elsewhere from Kovacs, sometimes adapted)
Needless to say, the play is among the most-mined texts for the Athe-
nians’ well-worn conceptualisations of ‘the other’. The motif of the savage
goddess with the gruesome human sacrifices pervades Greek ethnography
ever since Herodotus (4.99–103, cited below). But rather than furthering
cultural differentiation, we shall see that the Greek–barbarian opposition
played up in the tragedy is a cognitive strategy; the dichotomy is actu-
ally productive in breaking down that same dichotomy into an interactive
middle ground, where transcultural religious practice and, I maintain, eco-
nomic mobility meet. In particular, we shall see that the nexus between
religion and economy in the IT is resolved chorally; it is the chorus that
manages to collapse the opposing cultural categories.
The key to this interpretation lies in Artemis herself as she assimilates
travel by sea and exploration, trade and settlement abroad in the play.
Despite the central episode at Aulis, where Artemis can calm and hold off
sailing winds, this feature of Artemis has barely been studied, but once
one starts looking it becomes clear very quickly that her cult is full of
maritime relevance.14 Significantly, much of the tragic narrative is shaped
by the notion of this maritime Artemis. Throughout the play she retains
her close connection to, and control of, the sea; her nautical dimension
characterises choices and emphasis in the narrative and wording. The
prologue dwells on the ‘terrible aploia’ sent by Artemis, causing Iphigenia’s
sacrifice in the first place; her sanctuary in Tauris is high up on a cliff
above the sea; her lusting after Greek seafarers is reiterated again and again.
The fake purification ritual during the flight scene entails her image taking
a bath in the sea. She is recurrently invoked as steering ships; notably
Iphigenia calls upon her to bless their flight by sea with words of sōtēria
(‘saving’, ‘rescue’), playing on the ambiguity of the word used likewise in
maritime and religious contexts (1082–8).15
å p»tniì, ¤per mì AÉl©dov kat ptucv
deinv swsav k patrokt»nou cer»v,
säs»n me kaª nÓn toÅsde tìá £ t¼ Lox©ou
oÉkti broto±si di sì ttumon st»ma. 1085
llì eÉmenv kbhqi barbrou cqon¼v
v tv %qnavá kaª gr nqdì oÉ prpei
na©ein, par»n soi p»lin cein eÉda©mona.
14 But see most recently Ellinger’s popular book on Artemis, 2009: esp. 22–6; Farnell 1896–1909, 2:
428–31. Frequent maritime epithets of Artemis are Euporia (‘of safe travels’), Neosoos (‘rescuer at
sea’), Eunostos (‘of the safe return’), Ekbateria (‘of the disembarkment’), Limenoskopos (‘guardian
of the harbour’); see RE s.v. Artemis.
15 Lines 15–16: ‘but sailing was bad (dein plo©) and he did not get the right winds’; her sanctuary
is by the sea or on a cliff 69–70; 1196; 1451–2 (‘Halai’); sacrifice of Greek seafarers: 39–40; 224–8;
243–4; 276–8; 1081 (cf. 53–5, 336–7, 456–66, 775–6, 1021); fake sea-rituals 1039–42; 1191–5; conveying
a safe journey: 746–8; flight by sea 1289–92.
O lady who in the glens of Aulis saved me from the murderous hand of my
father, save me now as well, and these men too! Otherwise it will be your
fault that mortals no longer regard Loxias as true prophet. So in kindness
depart from this barbarian land and go to Athens. It is not fitting that you
should dwell here when you can live in a blessed city.
The concept of sōtēria pervades the play, and it would be interesting to
investigate the ambiguity in greater detail, not least since many gods termed
sōtēres have a close connection to seafaring.16 Furthermore, this Artemis
seems to be looking after the sōtēria specifically of merchants. Orestes and
Pylades, her future victims, are thought merchants venturing into the Black
Sea for profit, ‘favoured’ by the maritime gods (422–38). At their arrival,
a whole choral ode is dedicated to the nature of opportunistic sea travel,
with its spirit of adventurism and the ever-driving hope for profit from the
encounter with foreign territories (408–21).
§ çoq©oiv e«lat©nav dikr»toisi kÛpav
†pleusan pª p»ntia kÅmata†
nion Àchma linop»roiv <sÆn> aÎraiv,
fil»plouton millan aÎxontev melqroisin;
f©la gr lpªv †gnetì pª pmasi brotän†
plhstov nqrÛpoiv, Àlbou brov o° frontai
plnhtev pì o²dma p»leiv te barbrouv peräntev
koin d»xá
gnÛma dì o³v mn kairov Àl-
bou, to±v dì v mson ¤kei.
Have they with plashing of pine oars on either side
driven over the sea wave
their ship chariot accompanied by linen-wafting breezes
in eager quest of growing wealth for their houses?
Hope is enticing, and for their hurt
it comes insatiable to men who strive to win a weight of riches
by wandering over the sea to barbarian cities,
pursuing a common fancy.
To some the thought of wealth proves untimely,
while for others it hits the mark of moderation.
Language pertaining to this ‘contest of the eager pursuit of wealth’ (fil»-
plouton millan, 411) subtly recurs on several occasions, when Orestes
claims that there is no ‘profit’ (krdov, 506) in revealing his name; when
16 E.g. 679, 695, 751, 757, 765, 1005, 1022, 1062, 1067–8, 1389, 1413, 1489. Athena Soteira and Zeus Soter
in the Piraeus are similarly connected with seafaring: Ar. Plut. 1172–98; on the cult see Parker 1996:
238–41. IG I3 130.2–6 (Schlaifer) = SEG 21.37 (432/1 bc) with Garland 1987: 137–8 is sometimes
thought to contain a due to be paid by the nauklēros.
Iphigenia speaks of a symbolic ‘payment’ for the service of carrying her
letter to Argos (misq»v, 593), when musing about the crmata (‘riches’)
that might drown with a shipwreck (756), or the ‘cargo of calamity’ that
Orestes conveys (f»rton kakän, 1306) – but most prominently when
Orestes himself is ‘trading a cargo of misfortunes’ (¾ naustolän gr
e«mì gÜ tv sumforv, 599).17 What fortunes or misfortunes the sea can
convey clearly takes a prominent part in the broader discourse of the play.
The minute description of how the Greek ship eventually sets sail is also
part of the play’s concern with how the sea works and how to get a grip on
it (1345–57).
It is significant that the herdsmen earlier, just as the chorus when musing
about the identity of the two young men, evoke an array of sea-gods,
all concerned with navigation, such as the Dioskouroi, and especially,
in a commercial context, Ino-Leukothea.18 It is part of this same set of
cultural associations that Iphigenia keeps pointing to her failed marriage
with Achilles. While this has little bearing on the plot itself, repeatedly
reference is made to his dwelling on the island Leuke, the White Island in
the western Pontos, from where he protects and navigates sailors and traders
from all sorts of places through the Black Sea.19 Maritime language pervades
the play throughout; there are many seemingly gratuitous references to the
sea and the shore, which keep re-establishing the maritime setting whenever
the action drifts away from the shore: the story is quickly refocused, as if to
remind the audience that the sea is always close.20 The sea, how to travel
it, how to control it, and how to use it to one’s advantage is without a
question a central theme of the play.
It is in keeping with Artemis’ power over waves and winds that through-
out the play relishes in dwelling on the difficulty of sailing into the Black
Sea for the Greek heroes (who, I repeat, are seen as merchants when they
arrive). The sea itself is overwhelmingly represented as dark and threaten-
ing, near-impossible to overcome. There are numerous references to the
17 naustolw, the word typically (though not exclusively) used for merchant activity, describes their
journey: e.g. 103, 599; cf. 1487.
18 IT 270–4.
19 For the failed marriage with Achilles, see e.g. IT 24–5; 856–7; cf. Andr. 1259–62; El. 1020–3; IA
98–105. Achilles in the Black Sea, on White Island (IT 436–8; cf. Aethiopis, Procl. p. 69.21–22
Bernabé; Alkaios fr. 354 LP ‘Achilles, lord of the Skythians’ land’; Pind. Nem. 4.49), and in the
entire northwestern Pontos: Olbia, Borysthenes, Achilleos Dromos, Hylaia, Cape Hippolaos, Cape
Bejkus: Hupe 2006 and e.g. Tunkina 2007 on new finds and the ‘international’ character of Achilles’
cult on the Tendra spit. On the cult of Achilles in the Black Sea see now Parker 2011: 244–6; Burgess
2009: 126–31.
20 E.g. Eur. IT 7, 103, 213–16, 236–7; notes 260–3, where the herdsmen lead their cattle into the sea to
bathe, where they are slaughtered by Orestes (260–300).
fatal Symplegades or Kyaneiai: two rocks sitting at the exit of the Bosporos
and routinely crushing ships: so the chorus invokes ‘o . . . all who dwell by
the clashing rocks of the Hostile Sea’ (å p»ntou dissv sugcwroÅsav
ptrav xe©nou na©ontev, 123–5), and Orestes and Pylades explicitly feature
as ‘two young men, escaping the dark Symplegades in their ship’ (241–2).
We should note that these Symplegades are nowhere near the Crimea,
which sits many sea miles away on the opposite shore of the Pontos –
there is some telepathic geographical imaginary at work here, whereby the
Symplegades are metonymic for the entirety of the dangers in the Black
Sea.21
Most conspicuously, the Symplegades feature as the breaking point
between Greece and the foreign land, and more dramatically, between
Europe and Asia (393–406):
[Co.] kuneai kuanav sÅnodoi qalssav,
¯nì o²strov †¾ pet»menov %rg»qen†
xenon pì o²dma dieprasen <p»ntou> 395
%sitida ga±an EÉrÛpav diame©yavá
t©nev potì ra t¼n eÎudron donak»cloon
lip»ntev EÉrÛtan £ çeÅmata semn D©rkav
basan basan meikton a²an, nqa koÅr
D© tggei
bwmoÆv kaª perik©onav
naoÆv a³ma br»teion;
Dark confluences of the dark sea,
where the gadfly that flew from Argos
passed over the wave of the Hostile Sea
to Asia’s land,
leaving Europe behind:
who can they be then who left the reeds and plentiful water
of the Eurotas or the august streams of Dirce
and came, came to the savage land where for the maiden
daughter of Zeus
the altars and colonnaded temples are drenched
in human blood?
The redundant dwelling on the rocky sailing and difficult journey into
a Hostile Sea, conflated with the notion of a hostile land, intensely
21 Tricky Symplegades (or Kyaneiai), guarding the exit from the Bosporos, notoriously sinking ships:
123–5; 241–2; 260; 355; 422; 746; 886–91; 1388–91; cf. also Eur. Med. 1264. See Cropp 2000: ad loc.
On the Symplegades more widely see Cropp ad 124–5; for Euripides’ ‘geography’ in this play see
Hall 1987; Swift 2009 has some interesting remarks on the symbolism of geography in Euripides’
escape odes.
characterises the transcultural encounter throughout the play. In fact, the
tragedy is full of references to estrangedness: there are numerous mentions
to the axeinos pontos or gē, the ‘inhospitable sea’, ‘inhospitable land’, and
no occasion is missed to point out that the Greeks who have arrived are
xenoi.22 Iphigenia lives ‘as a stranger in a house that borders on the Hostile
Sea’ (218–19: nÓn dì xe©nou p»ntou xe©na sugc»rtouv okouv na©w);
Orestes comes ‘from the Greek land to the Hostile Sea’ (340–1: Âstiv pot
í Ellhnov k gv p»nton §lqen xenon), the return journey is through
the inhospitable straits (1388–9: xenon p»ron Sumplhgdwn). A rough
count of words relating to the stem xen-/xein yields over sixty occurrences,
an intense acoustic exposure to patterns of estrangedness for any audi-
ence. The play rejoices in the culture clash, in the mutual perception of
‘foreignness’, Greeks to the Taurians, and Taurians to the Greeks.
4. Artemis Tauropolos as a transcultural goddess

It is these cultural boundaries that Euripidean Artemis eventually collapses
with her choral rituals and across the sea. The play constitutes a large-scale
aetiology for an instance of religious integration between the Athenians
and the Taurians – which I think is ultimately geared towards a degree of
economic integration in the service of Athens’ imperial economic relations
to the Pontos.23 To make this case, we need to look carefully into the echoes
of Artemis’ real-life cult in the play.
Euripides no doubt has in mind the cult described, in slightly different
terms, by Herodotus in his lengthy account of the Taurian peninsula, whose
topography and social geography he conspicuously compares with those
of Attica (4.99). The divinity in question is that of the Taurian Maiden,
the Parthenos of Taurian Chersonesos, a central civic cult of the city (Hdt.
4.103):
Of these peoples, the Taurians have the following customs. They sacrifice
to Parthenos such shipwrecked folk and those of the Greeks they take by
putting out to sea against them [toÅv te nauhgoÆv kaª toÆv n lbwsi
ëEllnwn panacqntev]. They make the preliminary rites of the sacrifice,
and then they smash the victim’s head with a club. Some say that they push
the body down from the cliff (for the sanctuary is located on a cliff ), and
22 For example, 94: gnwstov v gn xenon (‘as a stranger to hostile land’), 124–5, 253: kraiv pª
çhgm±sin xnou p»rou (‘where the surf of the Hostile Sea breaks’), 438: Achilles’ shrine is xeinon
kat p»nton and so on – the list is very long. Cf. Eur. Hypsipyle TrGF v.2, fr. 752b; Medea 2, 1264.
23 I use the word ‘economic integration’ here loosely, in no way implying the technical sense of the
term in economic theory, where it is often used with the meaning of market integration.
set up the head on a pole. Others agree about what is done to the head, but
say that the body is not thrust from the cliff but buried in the ground. And
the deity to which they sacrifice the Taurians themselves say is Iphigenia,
daughter of Agamemnon. As for enemies whom they worst, this is what
they do: each man cuts off his enemy’s head and takes it home, where he
sets it on top of a great pole, which projects far above the roof of his house –
for the most part, above the chimney. They say that these heads hang aloft
there as guards of the whole house. These people live from plunder and
war. (trans. Grene, modified)
The cult is well attested by inscriptions from the fourth century onwards,
though none of its archaeology survives. It is generally assumed that there
was a Parthenos in the city itself, and an extra-urban sanctuary, located close
to the sea on a cliff as in Euripides and Herodotus; a recently discovered,
unidentified shrine high up on a ridge on the Taurian mountain range at
1434 m, with sight over to Chersonesos and Taurian Neapolis, has been
considered a candidate, sitting at a crossing point of key trading routes
between the sea and the mountainous inland.24
Ancient and modern authors tend to think of this divinity as Artemis
Tauropolos, though it may be relevant that the Chersonitans themselves
stuck to her name as Parthenos.25 Chersonesos (figs. 2a and b, fig. 3) was
probably founded by Herakleia Pontike and is a mixed Greek–non-Greek
settlement, according to recent views possibly in existence from the sixth
century onwards.26 Little more is known about the nature of the goddess’s
rituals beyond the notorious human sacrifice. But what is known is that this
cult was always engaged in cultural contact and mediation on the one hand,
while sharply delineating a mixed worshipping group against outsiders on
the other. Later sources, for example, tell us how vitally Parthenos protected
the city against foreign intruders. In a long list of epiphanies, she regularly
jumped to help in critical situations; most conspicuously, in the times
24 On the recent discovery of this ‘cliff’ sanctuary see Novichenkova 2002. A fourth-century sequence
of amphorai from Thasos, Rhodes, Kos, Knidos, Herakleia Pontike, Sinope and Chersonesos has
been found here, attesting the sanctuary’s broad connectivity. The identity of the divinity remains
unconfirmed. For a summary see Braund 2007b: 193.
25 See e.g. Diod. Sic. 4.44–5; Paus. 3.16.7–11; cf. Str. 7.4.2; 5.3.12; 12.2.3; Pomp. Mela Perieg. 2.1.3; Eust.
Il. I p. 395.5 van der Valk etc. For the equation, among other things through her iconography and her
appearance as a huntress, see esp. Braund 2007a: 195–6, quoting a parallel cult of the Thracian city
of Neapolis; for further attestations of the identification of Parthenos and Artemis see Wernicke, RE
ii (1896), col. 1396, s.v. Artemis; for the Lerian Parthenos-Artemis see n. 33 below. Central reading
on the cult of Taurian Parthenos includes Rusiaeva and Rusiaeva 1999, Rusiaeva 1999 and Braund
2007a, all with very ample bibliography, much of which is in Russian or Ukrainian.
26 Braund 2007a: 192 and 197–8, citing Vinogradov and Zolotarev 1990a; Braund 2009, with relevant
bibliography. The first literary reference in Ps.-Skylax 68 calls Chersonesos an emporion. On the
traditional date of the 420s see Avram et al. 2004: 942.
Figs. 2a and b Chersonesos on the Crimea. Remains of the Roman and Byzantine City.
The Greek city was on the other side of the peninsula.
Fig. 3 The ancient theatre at Chersonesos.
of Mithridates Eupator she protected the place and its mixed population
against invading tribes from the north.27 If in Euripides the ancient statue
of the goddess was a pshma from the sky, tombée du ciel, this was the first
in a long series of epiphanies sheltering the city.28 It is important to note,
then, that the goddess was apparently not an ethnically restricted goddess:
Chersonesos’ Hellenistic civic oath mentions rites not to be divulged to
either Greeks or barbarians – implying that both might be her regular
worshippers, tied together by civic rather than ethnic denomination.29
The identification of this transcultural divinity of Chersonesos with a
sort of ‘original’ Artemis Tauropolos is significant: a quick look at the many
27 IOSPE I2 , 352, 21–6 (end of second century): Parthenos, the protectress of the Chersonitans (prosta-
tousa) helps Diophantos, general of Mithridates Eupator, in defense against the Skythians and others;
Diophantos later in the decree is honoured with a statue in the temple next to Parthenos herself.
28 Eur. IT 1384; 985–6.
29 IOSPE I2 , 401, ll. 1–5; 22–8 (third century). ‘I swear by Zeus, Earth, Sun, Parthenos, the Olympian
gods and Olympian goddesses and the heroes who hold the city and territory and strongpoints of
the Chersonitans . . . And I shall work for the people and give the best and most just counsel for the
city and the citizens, and I will keep the sastēr for the people, and I will not spread word at all of the
secret rites neither to Greek nor to barbarian, which would damage the affairs of the city’ (transl.
Braund 2007a).
other attestations of an Artemis Tauropolos gives a tantalising – largely
seaborne – map of contexts of ethnic diversity. Pausanias, for example,
doubts the goddess’ arrival in Attica altogether and lists Kappadokians and
Lydians as her owners, and also tells of Persian interest in her image (Paus.
3.16.7–8):
. . . But why would Iphigenia have left the statue at Brauron? . . . Even now
the Taurian goddess has retained such a fame that Kappadokians, even those
who dwell on the Euxine, claim in dispute that the statue is among them;
so too do those Lydians who have the hieron of Artemis Anaitis. And the
Athenians, we are told, left it to be taken as booty by the Persians! For
the statue was taken from Brauron to Susa and then Seleukos gave it to the
people of Laodikeia in Syria who have it in our own time.
In particular, however, the goddess is widespread in coastal Asia Minor,
from Pergamon to Mylasa, and on the north Aegean islands.30 Instantia-
tions from a regional maritime context stand at either end of the longevity
of Artemis Tauropolos’ involvement in sailing matters and her relationship
to the myth of Iphigenia. Every traveller to the island of Ikaria will have
come across the beautiful temple at Nas on the north-western coast, facing
the Ikarian Sea, considered dangerous (fig. 4). This site has yielded materi-
als from the late seventh to the mid fifth centuries, among which is a kylix
fragment dated to the first half of the fifth century inscribed with the name
T]AUROP[.31 At the other end of the chronological spectrum, there is a
conspicuous imperial epigram of a hydrophore named Vera in honour of
Artemis Skythie, whom Orestes brought to the island of Patmos.32 Taken
together with nearby Leros’ patron deity Parthenos, similarly identified
with Artemis – whose sanctuary was supposedly in the area of the modern
village Partheni (!) – and with a (later?) cult of hers on Samos, we can
30 Phokaia: Pythokles of Samos FGrH 833 F 2=Clem. Al. Protr. 3.42.6 (mentioning human sacrifice);
Ilion: IGSK 3, no. 45.31 (second century); Metropolis (Phrygia) MAMA 4.121 (third century);
Pergamon IvP 1.13 (263 bc); Smyrna IGSK 24.1, no. 573, ll. 60, 70 (third century); Iasos IGSK 28,
nos. 2 (36, 43, 49, 54); 3 (12, 23) (late fourth century); Mylasa IGSK 36, no. 710 (imperial); no. 404.
Theangela McCabe, Theangela 8.23 (late fourth century); note a series of ‘inland’ cults, including a
fourth-century attestation at Herakleia under Latmos SEG 47.1563 (fourth century): Guldager Bilde
2003: 166–7 and n. 35 below.
31 On this cult Str. 14.1.19; Clem. Alex. Protr. 4.46.3; Arnob. Adv. Nat. 6.11 mention a wooden image.
For the archaeology of the temple, in a marshy area (see figs. 2 and 3), see Papalas 1983; 1992: 27–31.
Building materials date from the sixth century; potsherds from seventh and sixth century onwards;
a fifth-century female statue (Polites, PAE 1939, 124–38, 148–55; 137 fig. 11d for the inscribed sherd).
Cf. also SEG 42.779 no. 10. In Call. Hymns (3) 187 the cult features in a list of Artemis’ favourite
places, together with her ‘port’ cult at Aulis. Perilous Ikarian Sea: Papalas 1983: 27.
32 Patmos 4; SEG 39.855 (third/fourth century ad); a re-edition of the text and discussion of the cult
is offered by Grüll 1987. Horden and Purcell 2000: 440 briefly allude to this cult in the context of
navigation.
Fig. 4 The temple of Artemis Tauropolos at Nas, on the island of Ikaria.
certainly make out a role for this goddess as a protectress in sailing and
navigation (fig. 5).33
Indelibly intertwined with the goddess’ power over sailing seems her role
in cross-cultural mediation. To name just the most conspicuous instance,
Alexander – we remember the choral enthusiast of the beginning of this
chapter – legendarily invests in the cult of Artemis Tauropolos at Amphipo-
lis in Thrace, to ‘unite Europe and Asia’; and furthermore picks up on the
curious find at Nas by setting up for her a shrine on the island of Failaka in
the Persian Gulf just off modern Kuwait on the maritime route to India,
which he named Ikaros after Ikaria. A classical dedication found there is
addressed to Zeus Soter (!), Poseidon and Artemis Soteira, all looking after
33 The temple of Parthenos on Leros is held to be located in the area of the ancient remains (including
an ancient tower) at the bay of Partheni in the north of the island, where also an inscription referring
to the sanctuary has been found: Manganaro 1963–4: 301–2; Bürchner 1898: esp. 14–15; Benson 1963:
16–19, with earlier bibliography. Inscriptions: Leros 1985: nos. 2, 4–7; cf. Manganaro 1963–4: 306–8,
no. 3.22–23 (third/second bc); 308–9 no. 4.9 (second century bc). Aetiology of the shrine: Klytos
of Miletus FGrH 490 F 1= Ath. 14.655b–e; Anton. Lib. Met. 2.6; Ael. NA 4.42; 5.27; Suda s.v.
Meleagrides. A Parthenos Leria is mentioned in IG xii.3 440 (Thera). Pherekydes of Leros (later to
be ‘of Athens’) wrote a treatise ‘On Leros’ and one ‘On Iphigenia’ (Sud. s.v. Pherekydes). Samos:
McCabe, Samos 330 (Roman). Steph. Byz. s.v.
Samos
Artemis Tauropolos
Artemis Tauropolos (Nas)
Artemis Skythie
Ikaria
Patmos Artemis-Parthenos (Partheni)
Leros
Fig. 5 Regional maritime network of cults of Artemis linked to the legend of Iphigenia:
Artemis Tauropolos at Nas, Ikaria; Artemis Skythie on Patmos; Artemis-Parthenos
at the modern location Partheni on Leros; there is also a (Roman?) cult of Artemis
Tauropolos on Samos.
travel by sea.34 Even just these few examples suggest that the precise role
of Artemis Tauropolos in her many local and global, transcultural and
maritime contexts definitely deserves a study to itself.35
For the moment, though, let us simply focus on the transcultural aspect
of the Taurian Artemis where she promotes the integration of Greeks and
34 Amphipolis: Diod. Sic. 18.4.5 (part of Alexander’s ‘plans’); Liv. 44.44.4; Macedonian kings at this
shrine: SEG 38.534, 536; 31.614–15; 33.499. Failaka/Ikaros and Artemis in the Persian Gulf: Str.
16.3.2; Arr. Anab. 7.20.3–6 (Alexander’s cult foundation); Dionys. Per. 608–11; Ael. NA 11.9. SEG
38.1547 with Roueché and Sherwin-White 1995: 4–6 (late fourth/early third cent. dedication to Zeus,
Poseidon, Artemis); Caubet and Salles 1984: no. 201, pp. 96, 125, 149, figs. 44, 64 (second-century
stone altar with inscription to Artemis). Cf. SEG 40.1384 (third century), a dedication to Poseidon
Asphaleios, clearly also to do with sea-travel, and Roueché and Sherwin-White 1995: 13–29 for cults
of the sōtēres. Cults on Failaka: Gachet and Salles 1990; Connelly 1989; for a collection of testimonia
see Calvet 1984.
35 Artemis Tauropolos is generally not studied in this perspective: Graf 1979; Guldager Bilde 2003;
briefly Kowalzig 2006: 95–6 and nn. 69–73. Lists of her spreading cults can be found in Graf 1983:
410–15; Ehrhardt 1983: 148–55; and Guldager Bilde 2003, esp. nn. 20–4; also RE 1 (1884), p. 558 ff, s.v.
Artemis (Schreiber) but none of these are complete. The goddess also had cults in mainland Greece,
Italy and Sicily: Guldager Bilde 2003: 166–7; especially as Diana Nemorensis at Aricia: Str. 5.3.12.
Mainland Greece: Paus. 1.23.7 Athens; 33.1 Argos; 3.16.7 Sparta; 1.43.1 Megara; 2.35.1 Hermione;
7.26.5 Aigeira in Achaia.
non-Greeks. For this squares with a much better-studied aspect of Artemis.
In the by now orthodox interpretation by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Artemis has
the powers to integrate the wild and civilised within the Greek city.36 This
is the civic Artemis we know well, a characteristically choral deity, who
drives a group of parthenoi into the wild in order to then welcome them
back in a structured, civilised chorus as responsible members of the polis.
Prominent examples are the rituals of Artemis Orthia at Sparta, or the
ritual of the arkteia at Brauron in Attica. But, as we are beginning to see,
it would be a mistake to reduce this power of hers to purely civic contexts.
Indeed, Artemis-Parthenos from Chersonesos is not alone in engaging
in transcultural mediation, especially in maritime contexts. It was with
Artemis as hēgemonē, for example, that settlers from Athens crossed the
Aegean and founded cities in Ionia; and it was under the aegis of Artemis
Ephesia, who had a sanctuary originally built by the Amazons, that the
Phokaians travelled all the way westwards to Massilia in southern France
and later to Spain. Here Ephesian Artemis along with her ‘Greek rite’
offered a suitable context of acculturation and the creation of a ‘middle
ground’ between Greeks and local peoples. Tellingly, it is from one of
Massilia’s apoikiai that we have one of the few choregic inscriptions in the
West.37
We might conclude that to ‘know the other’ is not a polis concern
alone, it is an important condition in ethnic interaction. Artemis not only
unites the Greeks but also facilitates agreement with ‘barbarians’.38 In a
civic context, she famously turns ‘the other’ into the familiar – put into
a transcultural context, she renders the axeinos xeinos, makes the foreign
familiar, the stranger a trusted guest-friend. While the broader patterns
of Artemis’ powers abroad may need to be studied in greater detail, as
Tauropolos in the IT she is clearly engaged precisely in the turning of the
foreign into the familiar. However, rather than eliminating the Taurian
cult’s ‘barbarous’ traits, these are foregrounded by making the human
sacrifice part of a shared cultural reference system. This is clear from what
we learn about her ‘new’ cult at the end of the play, at Halai Araphenides
in Attica (1449–61). The little we know historically about this shrine still
36 Artemis and ‘the other’, integrating outside and inside, wild and civilised in the civic community
of the polis: most easily accessed in Vernant 1991, chs. 11–12; a central, early article on Artemis is
Frontisi-Ducroux 1981. For a short summary of this view see Parker 2011: 90–1.
37 Artemis leading Ionian colonisation: e.g. Callim. Hymn 3 (Artemis) 225–7; Artemis Ephesia and the
Phokaians on their way to Massilia and Spain: Str. 4.1.4–5. For Artemis Ephesia and the ‘middle
ground’ in the West see Malkin 2011: ch. 6, esp. 182–9; 199–204; also now Ellinger 2009: esp. ch. 6.
Choregic inscription: Wilson 2000: 310 speculates on a connection with Artemis.
38 Ellinger 2009, ch. 6, and 207.
suggests major importance to classical Athens. The site was a ‘border
cult’, at the extreme limits of Attica, as also stressed by Euripides (1450–
2). Activity at the site goes back earlier, but a temple was built there
apparently in the late sixth or early fifth century (fig. 7, below). While it
is unclear how much the state was involved in the organisation of the cult,
it certainly attracted a clientele from throughout Attica. Euripides’ aition
mentions song (1457); a fourth-century inscription lists choral contests and
suggests a theatre. Archaeological finds of the area include krateriskoi just
as at Brauron and Mounychia, hinting at initiation rites for the young,
including choral song-dance.39
The most intriguing practice devoted to this Artemis is surely Athena’s
instruction in the play (1458–61, text above): when ‘the people’ celebrate
the cult, they will draw blood from a male victim’s throat in compensation
for the unfulfilled sacrifice of Orestes – in supposedly choral orchestration.
This is not an outright human sacrifice; yet it explicitly picks up on the
practice: why? Why not just ‘Hellenise’ the rite completely, why does the
memory of the Taurian custom need to be kept up? It seems that this (as
perhaps also in her cult at Phokaia) is a consciously transcultural ritual
mode, which allows the Athenians to draw, even to labour, the link to the
goddess and customs on the Taurian peninsula. The recognition of a level
of mutual acculturation in the Attic rite forges and maintains the ritual tie
back to the Crimea. Artemis’ power of turning the ‘other’ into the familiar
is here in the service of cross-cultural assimilation, even integration, where
the goddess can turn the axeinon into something xeinon, something foreign
into something familiar. If the cult is to be explicitly located at the extreme
limits of Attica (1450–1) this is not a marginal but a central position in the
limbo of culture-contact.
5. Transcultural chorality and the routing of Pontic trade

The forging of such a ritual link, I believe, stands in a much broader
context, that of establishing, controlling and maintaining maritime routes
into the Pontos. It appears that the cultivation of connections into the
Black Sea was important within the Athenian empire during the second
half of the fifth century – and particularly during the last fifteen years
39 The fourth-century Tauropolia included a pyrrichē; honouring of local benefactors SEG 34.103;
Men. Epitrep. 445–520; 863; 1118–20 knows of a pannychis with women’s song and dance. The most
recent detailed discussions of this cult and festival is Parker 2005: 59; 241–2 and now McInerney
(forthcoming), referring to a brief accurate summary of the archaeological remains at www.archetai.
gr/site/content.php?artid=124. The standard account is Travlos 1988: 211–15.
of the century, when the Iphigenia in Tauris was supposedly performed.
This must be seen against the background of a highly volatile maritime
experience in an environment whose natural fragmentation may not have
lent itself to, and even resisted the formation of, steady trade routes as
they are often associated with Mediterranean high commerce.40 Myth and
cult play a vital role in counteracting such an environment and creating
these connections, as does Athenian tragedy in conceptualising them for
an Athenian audience, and perhaps the Mediterranean world more widely.
Religious links routinely played a significant, yet neglected role in economic
behaviour and perhaps even transactions, creating trusted networks of
communication over long distances of time and space. As we shall see,
the chorus in the Iphigenia in Tauris performs the role of joining up and
materialising these ties in its travel at the interface of cultic reality and
tragic imagination.
That the Greeks had a long-standing, economic interest in the Black
Sea does not need arguing. At least in part this was related to what was
going to become large-scale grain-trade from the Pontos, but for the ear-
lier period until the mid to late fifth century it is not clear what was
exchanged between whom and what role the grain in particular played.41
Archaic Greek settlements on the northern shore of the Black Sea were
chiefly initiated by cities of Asia Minor, such as Miletus at Olbia, while
Megarians had gone to Byzantium and Herakleia Pontike in the south.
Athenians, though, were not so daring early on. Rather, since the seventh
century and up to the mid fifth there is a persistent tradition of forging
apparent trade routes through the Aegean and the Hellespont, though not
beyond the fatal Symplegades.42 It is only Perikles in the early 430s who
first establishes cleruchies in the Black Sea itself, at Sinope and possibly
40 For this view and the problematic concept of fixed maritime routes see Horden and Purcell 2000:
89, 90, 123 and passim, commented on by Malkin 2011: 154; 216.
41 How much grain and how regularly it started coming when to the Aegean, and to Athens in
particular, continues to be a hot debate which I cannot affront here. For the sixth century see Hdt.
6.5; 26. Histiaios of Miletus capturing merchant ships from Hellespont; 7.147 Xerxes watching
grain-ships going to Aigina and the Peloponnese; 4.17 Skythians cultivating grain for sale. Bresson
2007, esp. 56 argues for some Black Sea grain for Greece from at least the late sixth century,
while Moreno 2007: 161–3, discussing archaeological evidence, only thinks of occasional and small
shiploads and rather specialised economies along the northern Black Sea coast (both list some of the
vast bibliography on the subject). A helpful, systematic survey of all literary sources on the Pontic
grain trade is Braund 2007b, with Russian bibliography. Cf. Keen 2000 on the importance of the
‘Hellespontine route’ in the seventh and sixth centuries, with all earlier western bibliography.
42 Athenian tradition of establishing cleruchies and maritime ‘stations’ towards the Hellespont: seventh
century: Sigeion and Elaious (Alkaios fr. 428 LP; Hdt. 5.94–5; Str. 13.1.38; Diog. Laert. 1.74; Elaious:
Scymn. 707–8 (‘Attic colony’); first black-figure pottery, at Berezan, Istria, Apollonia: Keen 2000:
67). Sixth century: Peisistratos and Hippias at Sigeion: Hdt. 5.94.1; at Lampsakos: Thuc. 6.59.3–4.
Miltiades the Elder in the Thracian Chersonese: Hdt. 6.34–8; followed by younger Miltiades: Hdt.
Amasis along the south coast.43 But even throughout the height of the
empire, the concern seems above all with the shaping and securing of
maritime connections to the cities of the Euxine. Lesbians in 428/7 bc,
for example, expected ships from the Hellespont carrying grain and other
supplies to be controlled by Athenians. The tribute lists of 425 bc featured
over forty cities in the Pontus; Apollonia and Herakleia are reasonably
securely restored, and a group of cities on the Kimmerian Bosporos seems
plausible.44 Further south, phrouroi (‘watchers’) guarded the Hellespont at
Kyzikos and Byzantion, and there were the famed Hellespontophylakes,
both in the 420s. Athenians clearly had an eye on trade routes to, and
eventually beyond, the Hellespont.45
In particular, however, the 420s seem to have been a tumultuous period
of Athenian interest in the Euxine, with turmoil also surrounding Tau-
ric Chersonesos. In 424/3 bc, Athenians raided the territory of its alleged
mother-city, Herakleia Pontike, purportedly to exact tribute.46 Though
evidence is scarce, allusions to Athens’ relations with Herakleia in con-
temporary comedy suggest that this only partially successful episode was
a major theme for the Athenian public. Indeed, numerous products from
the Black Sea appear in comic plays such as Aristophanes’ tellingly entitled
Merchant Ships, as if the Pontos was firmly part of the Athenian economic
map at this time.47 The incident at Herakleia used to be linked to a peculiar
6.140, also at Lemnos (cf. note to IG I3 948 mentioning Athenian tribes); possibly Imbros: Hdt. 6.41.
Chalkis on Euboia is seized by Athenians, c. 506: Hdt. 5.77.1. Early sixth century: e.g. Xanthippos
at the Hellespont and Sestos in 479 bc: Hdt. 9.101; 114–18; Diod. Sic. 11.37.4–5; Plut. Cim. 9.3;
revolt of Byzantion in 440 bc (Thuc. 1.115.5; 117.3). Aristeides allegedly dies in the Black Sea while
on public duty: Plut. Arist. 26.1.
43 Plut. Per. 20.1–2 with Braund 2005, discussing in detail the wide reach of this expedition to include
cities such as Apollonia and Olbia, Pantikapaion at the Kimmerian Bosporos and even Kolchis,
though see already Hind 1994: 491–3. Further cleruchies or colonies might have been Amisos and
Astakos in the Propontis (Str. 12.3.14; 12.4.2). See Mattingly 1996; Tsetskhladze 1997: 461–6; Burstein
2006: 143 for the full earlier debate.
44 Lesbians: Thuc. 3.2. IG i3 71.IV.127; 128; 163–70 for the possible Bosporan cities. Of these,
Nymphaion had a garrison: Aeschin. 3.171–2; Krateros FGrH 342 F 8 (mentioning one talent
of tribute).
45 Phrouroi at Byzantium and Kyzikos before 424/3 bc, at Chalkedon 405 bc: Ar. Vesp. 235–7; Eupol.
PCG 247; Hellespontophylakes: IG I3 61 (430–26/5 bc).
46 Thuc. 4.75–6; Iust. 16.3.9–12, according to which the Athenian general Lamachos lost his fleet and
made his way over land back to Chalkedon, escorted by troops from the Herakleots; see Braund’s
detailed discussion (2005: 87–9).
47 Eupolis’ Cities (c. 422 bc) PCG 235 names a Simon stealing money from the Herakleots; the
surrounding Mariandynoi feature in the Golden Race PCG 302. The responsible general Lamachos
is prominent in Aristophanes’ earlier Acharnians (425 bc). Arist. Merchant Ships (420s bc): PCG
431 on the Mossynoikian barley-cakes; 443 names a person from Phasis in Kolchis; 424 discusses
a Euathlos and his Skythian manners. See also Carusi 2008: 70–9; esp. n. 83 on the Pontic fish
production and trade; Braund 2005: 90–8 on a broader Athenian awareness and interest in the Black
Sea cities suggested by tragedy and comedy.
account of Chersonesos’ supposed foundation a year or so later (c. 422/1
bc) by Herakleia Pontike together with citizens from Delos, according to
an oracle, recorded by [Skymnos] 822–30:
So-called Tauric Chersonesos is adjacent to this area (i.e. dromos of Achilles),
a Greek city founded by the Herakleots and the Delians after the prophecy
given to the Herakleots, who live on either side of the Kyaneiai, that they
should found Chersonesos together with the Delians.
Substantial late sixth and early fifth century archaeological layers now
known at the site make it unlikely that Chersonesos first became a city
as late as the 420s bc.48 But the idea of (some?) Herakleots and Delians
jointly evading the Athenian grip and (re-)settling at Chersonesos need
not necessarily be dismissed. The Delians, famously, at this time had been
expelled from their island by imperial Athens (422 bc), while Chersonesos’
strong link to Delos in the Hellenistic period suggests a level of historicity
of this founding tradition.49 The Athenians, in turn, had just renewed
the great theoric festival for Apollo and Artemis on Delos (426/5 bc) and
re-instituted the grand ‘Ionian’ gathering as depicted in the Homeric Hymn
to Apollo, involving ‘hiera and choruses’ being sent there as part of the
state-delegations dispatched on theōria to Delos.
This reformed choral festival was very much in the limelight during
the 420s, as one instance in which the Athenian empire exploited blurred
boundaries of religious and political communities.50 What has been less
noted, however, is that this festival may also have carried an economic
dimension neatly tied into the Black Sea matters discussed here. I have
argued elsewhere that Eupolis’ Cities of 422 bc offers an economic inter-
pretation of choral polis-theōria: here a chorus of individual cities appeared
on stage parading the resources they contributed to the empire.51 Krati-
nos’ contemporary Deliades, evidently a commentary on Athenian choral
practices on Delos, mentions outdoor rituals of the Hyperboreans, those
mythical people from beyond the Black Sea. Their (agricultural?) offerings
to Apollo and Artemis on Delos, according to Herodotus in the 430s bc,
48 The interpretation of Vinogradov and Zoloayev 1990a and b, whose findings include some early
fifth-century ostraka, has now been widely accepted, but see the resistance to this interpretation by
Saprykin 1996.
49 Cf. Marcotte 2002: 247 (with previous bibliography); that dispersed Delians would settle elsewhere
is known from Thucydides (Thuc. 5.1, with Hornblower ad loc. (Adramyttium)); the Delians were
restored later (Thuc. 5.32). Chersonesos’ link to Delos in the Hellenistic period: Chankowski 2008:
108.
50 Thuc. 3.104, on the renewal of the festival and Athens’ ‘choral strategies’ see Kowalzig 2007b: ch. 2,
esp. 69–72; 110–18.
51 See preceding note.
famously travelled via the Skythians on a long route south to the island,
where later inscriptions actually attest the ‘reality’ of this tribute.52 From
Pausanias we know that the Athenians came to fudge this journey – in
the 420s? – and had the offerings travel to Athens’ cleruchy at Sinope,
and further to the Attic harbour at Prasiai, before they continued into the
Aegean (1.31.2). The imaginaire of Delian choral polis-theōria at this time
clearly had an economic profile, also, to incorporate contemporary events
in the Black Sea, including the alleged settling of Chersonesos in a joint
enterprise by the recently ousted Herakleots and Delians.
It may or may not be coincidence that there seem to be pointed allusions
to this set of circumstances in the Iphigenia in Tauris. And this is where
the play’s chorus finally returns in its own right! For in two of their odes
the chorus evokes the Delian festival, and in particular the choroi on the
island they are longing to enjoy (1094–1105):
gÛ soi parabllomai
qrhnoÓsì pterov Àrniv, 1095
poqoÓsì ëEllnwn g»rouv,
poqoÓsì *rtemin loc©an,
par KÅnqion Àcqon o«-
ke± fo©nik qì brok»man
dfnan tì eÉerna kaª 1100
glaukv qall¼n ¬er¼n la©-
av, LatoÓv Ýd±ni f©lon,
l©mnan qì e¬l©ssousan Ìdwr
kÅklion, nqa kÅknov melwi-
d¼v MoÅsav qerapeÅei. 1105
I, a bird with no wings,
vie with you in lamentation,
longing for the Greeks’ gathering places,
longing for Artemis, goddess of childbed,
who dwells by the Cynthian hill,
and the date palm with its tender tresses
and the lovely slip of laurel
and the sacred shoot of the gray-green olive,
dear to Leto’s offspring,
and the lake that swirls its water,
in a circle, where the melodious swan
renders his service to the Muses.
52 Crat. Deliades PCG; Hdt. 4.35 (cf. Call. Del. (4)) and ID 100.49; 104 (3) A 8; via Sinope and Prasiai:
Paus. 1.32.2. On the Hyperborean tribute see Parker 2005: 225.
This is a remarkably precise evocation of Delian religious topography and
its central ritual imagery known from the paeans dancing the choral theōria,
re-enacting the birth of Apollo and Artemis on the slopes of Mount Kyn-
thos, by the lake with the palm tree.53 Note also that Artemis only is alluded
to here, not Apollo, whose birth on Delos stands at the beginning of the
next choral ode.54 It is of especial consequence that the Delian festival
is chosen here as the quintessential cultic arena for the ‘Hellenic gather-
ings’ (ëEllnwn g»rouv, 1096–7). As mentioned, the imperial festival on
Delos, especially after the reform of the Delia in 426/5 bc, was one of the
most conspicuous showpieces of Athenian power, where choral and impe-
rial policy were inextricably intertwined. The fact alone that the chorus
of Taurian Artemis projects itself here into the choruses for Apollo and
Artemis on Delos hints at how highly culturally integrative ritual chorality
was within Greece, exploited perhaps especially by the Athenian empire.
At stake in this ode is no less than a Hellenic identity, expressed through
shared choral rituals on Delos.
I already hinted above that it remains unclear who Iphigenia’s fellow
parthenoi attending to Taurian Artemis-Parthenos were, and how and why
they got to the Crimea. I wonder whether the IT’s chorus, pining for the
Hellenic dances on Delos, is not somehow resonating the Delians expelled
by the Athenians in 422 bc, or is even imagined to be those Delians
themselves, a subtle hint at imperial practices beautifully integrated into the
mythical imagination. Without pressing this historicising tangent too far, it
is clear that the chorus are women dispersed and enslaved after the Trojan
War. Indeed, there is a very fine ambiguity pervading the play between
them being war captives and palace slaves, and being temple attendants,
temple slaves – and, ultimately, we might say a standing chorus! – echoing
the choroi attached to ‘oriental’ or orientalising shrines that I singled out
above. The girls’ notion of slavery deserves more scrutiny than it can be
given here, but in their first ode, for example, the word doÅla nicely elides
the boundaries between being captives, household slaves and hierodouloi
of the barbarian goddess (123–38):
eÉfame±tì, å
p»ntou dissv sugcwroÅsav
ptrav xe©nou na©ontev. 125
53 The birth story, by allusion or full explicit narrative, with its evocation of several geographical
features on Delos itself, was part of most, possibly all paeans sung at Delos: Kowalzig 2007b: 59–68.
For the topography of the twin birth see also the visual tradition: LIMC s.v. Delos.
54 IT 1234–83, which after Apollo’s Delian birth moves away from the island; on this ‘dithyrambic
stasimon’ see also Zeitlin 2006.
«Ü pa± tv
LatoÓv, D©ktunnì oÉre©a,
pr¼v sn aÉln, eÉstÅlwn
naän crusreiv qrigkoÅv,
¾s©av Âsion p»da parqnion 130
kl
doÅcou doÅla pmpw,
ëElldov eÉ©ppou pÅrgouv
kaª te©ch c»rtwn tì eÉdndrwn
xallxasì EÉrÛpan, 135
patrwn okwn drav.
moloná t© non; t©na front©dì ceiv;
t© me pr¼v naoÆv gagev gagev
Keep holy silence
all who dwell by the clashing rocks
of the Hostile Sea!
Daughter of Leto,
Dictynna of the mountains,
to your court with its lovely
pillars and gilded cornice
I walk in holy procession on maiden feet,
servant of your holy temple warder,
I who have left behind the towers and ramparts
of Hellas land of lovely horses,
and Europe with its fields well wooded,
where stands my ancestral home.
I am here: what is amiss? What worries you?
Why have you brought me, brought me to the temple
Similar ambiguity can be found elsewhere in the tragedy.55 In the course
of the play, however, the chorus turn from the temple slave chorus into a
civic chorus. This too is thematised throughout the choral odes, e.g. when
the chorus dream of being freed from their slavery (doule©av, 450) and
of dancing again in ‘their home and cities’, relishing the ‘shared grace of
blessedness’ that only the chorus affords (453–5). Here the chorus project
themselves into their civic roles. Most dramatically, the opposition and
subsequent transition is played out when, at the moment of Iphigenia and
Orestes’ flight, it looks as if the chorus are to be left behind, and their loss
of hope ever to change their destiny turns into a highly elaborate portrayal
of their civic lives in their homeland. The chorus strikingly dwell on their
social roles as parthenoi, as daughters of their mothers, emphasising their
55 Cf. 63, 638, 798, 1205 pr»spoloi (temple attendants); 1115–16 latreÅw ‘to be enslaved to’, or ‘to
render service to a god’; 143 dmwa©.
belonging to a particular age-group, evoking the image of an ideal chorus
in all its glittering beauty and luxury, as we know it most impressively from
Alkman. It is to their accustomed role in the polis that they long to return
(1143–52).
coro±v dì nsta©hn, Âqi kaª
parqnov eÉdok©mwn d»mwn
par p»dì e¬l©ssousa f©lav
matr»v ¡l©kwn qisoiv
v m©llav car©twn
broploÅtou d clidv
e«v rin ½rnumna polupo©kila
frea kaª plokmouv periballomna
gnusin sk©azon.
May I take my place in the choruses where once
as maiden of illustrious family
near my dear mother I whirled in dance,
and competing in grace
with the throng of my agemates
and vying with them in the luxury
born of soft-living wealth I put on
a veil of many hues and let down my tresses
to shade my cheek.
Froma Zeitlin has argued that the chorus’ next ode, the invocation of
the birth of Apollo Delios and his subsequent establishment at Delphi, is
a symbolic ‘rebirth’, a heralding of return to the beginning, and a vital
transformation.56 It is perhaps no coincidence then that shortly after, the
temple-chorus re-emerges as a real-life cultic chorus, having eventually
turned into the civic chorus of Artemis Tauropolos at Halai Araphenides,
as instructed in its aition (1449–61, as above). Here, after the establishment
of the temple itself ‘for all time will mortals sing hymns in honour of
Artemis Tauropolos’. As in many other Euripidean plays, here too the
cultic aetiologies present the culmination of a gradual process from myth
to ritual, from the narrative of the past to the practice of the present,
through which, in a process similar to that attested for earlier religious
song, they reconfigure the sacred landscape of Attica.57
It is at this conclusion of the play, in the cultic aetiologies and the cult
foundations in the real world, that the chorus turns transcultural and its
56 Zeitlin 2006.
57 I explore cultic aetiologies of Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedy in the context of Athenian religious
change during the empire in greater detail in Kowalzig 2006: 81; 95–6 on the IT.
Taurian Chersonesos
Amarynthos (?)
Aulis
Megara Halai
Brauron
Athens-Mounychia
Fig. 6 Cults of Artemis in Attica, the Euboian and the Saronic Gulf, in the majority
linked to the legend of Iphigenia.
integrating faculties come into full effect, as it becomes a travelling chorus,

journeying between Taurian Chersonesos and Halai, between slave and
citizen chorus, a subliminal mediator between the cult on the Crimea
and in the Attic deme. At this point the chorus floats most effectively
between the telling of myth in the play and the ritual chorality at the
real-life sanctuaries. It is the chorus, through its multiple mediations, who
ultimately manages to tie the ‘Artemis’ amongst the Taurians firmly into
a network of myths and rituals spanning the northern Aegean and the
Black Sea.
At this point, too, we see the productivity of the pervading image of
Artemis as a goddess patrolling maritime communications and control-
ling shipping lanes throughout the play. For the cult foundation at Halai
Araphenides seems to have played a role in making Artemis guarantee the
route to the Black Sea, which became especially significant in the later
stages of the Peloponnesian War. Artemis of Halai Araphenides is one
of a string, or rather a network, of cults of Artemis located around the
Saronic and particularly the Euboian Gulf, including Megara, Mounychia,
Fig. 7 View of the tip of Euboia, where Karystos was located, from the shrine of Artemis
Tauropolos at Halai Araphenides.
Myrrhinous, Brauron, Halai Araphenides, Aulis, Amarynthos on Euboia

(fig. 6). All these cults of Artemis were coastal, and in one way or another
mythologically tied into the myth of Iphigenia.58
The Iphigenia in Tauris is usually dated to around 414–412 bc, though
only on formal grounds. It may or may not be relevant that much of the
Peloponnesian War after the Sicilian expedition was fought around the
Hellespont and revolved around access to the Black Sea. That access must
have been vital for among other things, but not necessarily exclusively,
the grain-supply when not only the Western Mediterranean ceased to be
a reliable resource but also other allies, such as Euboia, seceded. It has
repeatedly been argued that with the Spartans in 410 blocking Dekeleia
and the land-route to Euboia, Attica’s northern ports suddenly became very
important.59 Intriguingly, Euripides specifically says that the cult at Halai
should be founded ‘neighbouring the cliff of Karystos’ (1451; fig. 7), as if
58 Brulé 1987: 186–95 for a discussion of these cults.
59 E.g. Braund 2007b: 51–2, though it is also clear from Xen. Hell. 1.1.35 – Agis watching from Dekeleia
merchants coming into the Piraeus – that the Piraeus continued to be a major hub. For Spartan
control of the Hellespont as a way to evict Athens: Hell. 2.1.17; cf. 5.1.28–9; for strategies of blocking
the Piraeus and make Athens starve: 2.2.9; 11; 16.
emphasising the importance of the crossing at this stage. Karystos on the
southern tip of Euboia, of course, is the site of an Athenian cleruchy along
the so-called ‘grain route’ to the Hellespont going from Karystos to Skyros,
Lemnos, Imbros, and all the way up to the Bosporos. An intensification and
elaboration of the cluster of connections in the Euboian Gulf, and the fos-
tering of the route to the Hellespont and beyond, could well be profitable –
for both Athenians and the unusual Dorian-Taurian community of Cher-
sonesos who, one might think, in light of the 420s turmoil sketched above,
had not necessarily belonged to the immediate Athenian Pontic orbit previ-
ously. We know that later Chersonesos was known for its prolific stretches
of agricultural land. It is often remarked upon that individuals of Herakleia
Pontike, Chersonesos’ supposed mother city, were active carrying grain in
late classical Athens.60
Broadly speaking, then, what seems to be forged with this unlikely
branching out into the Crimea is a ‘small world’ – a term from network
analysis that here designates a tight network of interrelated cults with
their interrelated myths, whose efficacy and intensity is determined by the
strength of their links and not the geographical distance of their participat-
ing members. This is one of many examples where the Athenian empire
strategically forged these ‘small worlds’, and it seems an important means
of familiarising the unfamiliar in a two-directional way, making the foreign
accessible but also giving the foreign access to themselves, exploiting and
diffusing myths and cults as systems of knowledge and information in
times of need.
It is in this context, perhaps, that we can begin to understand the
prominence of a maritime Artemis Tauropolos and her transcultural chorus
both in the play and in the cultic and economic realities of the Athenian
empire: this is a divinity forging a network of relations between Attica, the
Euboian Gulf and the Euxine, in keeping with the Athenian tradition of
working maritime routes up into the Hellespont; hence the many allusions
to seafaring and travel in the play. The astonishing degree of economic
language, and the musing about the fate of the seaborne merchant briefly
alluded to above, support this interpretation. It is of particular interest
that ‘maritime routes’ seem to be so central to the processes analysed
here: the decentralised world of the Corrupting Sea, with its multiplicity
of possible alternatives offered by opportunities and risks of a precarious
60 Braund 2007b: 53, with bibliography; Herakleots honoured at Athens: IG II2 408; cf. Tracy 1995:
33–4.
environment, must be seen in constant interaction with the continuous
attempt at structuring those journeys.61
On a broader level, we may have here an intriguing example of how the
flexible nature of ancient polytheisms allows for the creation of cultural
networks and the organisation of knowledge that are intimately intertwined
with forging patterns of cross-cultural trade. The forming of religious
ties and the ritualisation of economic relations are cultural mechanisms
supporting trust, credibility and reliable social bonds lasting across time and
space in a precarious Mediterranean ecology. The assimilation of foreign
rites and the creation of a transcultural religious imaginary suggest a critical
role for religion in the ‘transnational economic encounter’ in the interacting
polytheisms of the ancient world.
Euripides’ tragedy, it seems, offers fascinating insights into how this
process might have been conceptualised in imperial Athens; it delivers the
story through which religious and economic imaginary can converge, as if
cultivating the cognitive foundations for dependable and lasting bonds –
it is perhaps not least due to the tragic process that for the Athenians
the axeinos pontos eventually turned euxeinos. The language of xenia, so
very prominent in the play, leads in the same direction: contrary to what
is usually thought, the Greek institution of xenia may not, or not only,
be operative in an aristocratic not-for-profit exchange, but quite possibly
constituted a cultural framework of trusted relations within which much
larger, commercial exchanges may have been conducted.62
The chorus plays a crucial, intermediary role in the way it joins notions of
both Greek and non-Greek choralities, and collapses cultural dichotomies
and boundaries. How tragic choroi map out and conceptualise economic
relations between the Athenians and the rest of the Greek or non-Greek
Mediterranean in the early fifth century can be seen in the case of early
dramatic performances in Sicily.63 It would be interesting to examine two
further contemporary Euripidean plays of the later fifth century, such
as the Helen or the Phoenissae, in the same joint cultural and economic
perspective; these strikingly have similarly ‘foreign’, partly travelling cho-
ruses stationed in areas central to Athenian economic concerns. In the
case of the Iphigenia, we have observed that several overlapping associa-
tions are operative for the chorus to perform this function: its dancing for
61 See n. 40 above.
62 I tentatively argue this point in Kowalzig 2010, but a full study is outstanding. Herman’s key work
on xenia (1986) argues for an explicitly non-mercantile character. Note that at IT 1205 Iphigenia
evokes Greece as not trustworthy (pist¼n ëEllv o²den oÉdn) in her negotiations over Orestes and
Pylades in her faked preoccupation for Thoas.
63 Kowalzig 2008.
Artemis, who notoriously integrates the other and the self; its meander-
ing between slave and civic, between barbarian and Greek, and not least
the traditionally integrating role of the travelling, theoric chorus, bringing
different religious worlds together in their dance. All these amount to the
tragedy as one big choros, a large-scale aetiology, mediating the transcultural
economic encounter. The chorus can do what it does because of its conno-
tations with Hellenicity (the civic, the freeborn etc.); but the Hellenicity
it produces is a cultural hybrid comprising the religious imaginary of the
entire Mediterranean, including the Black Sea.
chapter 9
Maenadism as self-referential chorality

in Euripides’ Bacchae
Anton Bierl
Introduction
Drama – the action of ancient Greek tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies
that are embedded in the institutional frame of the Dionysia – is staged
in alternating choral and speech passages as a flux of scenes arising from
a mythical model.1 Beyond its ability to communicate an array of mean-
ings on the political, social, and cultural level, ancient tragedy aims at
displaying given patterns with the purpose of communalizing quintessen-
tial suffering. Since, compared to modern, naturalistic drama, it focuses to
a lesser degree on the representation of dramatic events full of suspense,
Athenian tragedy can to some extent be characterized as predramatic,
especially its chorus, something that has been picked up by many recent
trends in theater productions.2 For the last two decades, the study of the
Greek chorus and of other ritual forms of expression has been revolu-
tionized by the application of modern literary and cultural approaches.
Decisive contributions to an adequate understanding of choreia were made
by focusing on ritual and performative aspects of the phenomenon.3 These
recent developments were triggered by a number of observations. One is
Walter Burkert’s view that choral dance is a quintessentially ritual activ-
ity. He defines dance as following: “Rhythmically repeated movement,
directed to no end and performed together as a group, is, as it were,
ritual crystallized in its purest form.”4 In addition, according to Stan-
ley Tambiah, ritual – and thus choral dance – is performative in three
1 Cf. Käppel 1998: 25–38, esp. 36–7.
2 For the postdramatic theater (cf. Lehmann 2006) that has common features with the predramatic
tragedy, see Lehmann 1991: esp. 2 and Bierl 2010.
3 See Calame 1977, vol. i (in English, Calame 2001); Nagy 1990b: esp. 339–81; Lonsdale 1993; Golder
and Scully 1994/5 and 1996: 1–114; Henrichs 1996b; Stehle 1997; Wilson 2000; Bierl 2001 (in English,
Bierl 2009); Foley 2003; Murray and Wilson 2004; Calame 2005b; Kowalzig 2007b; Swift 2010. On
the subject of procession linked to chorality, esp. in tragedy, cf. Kavoulaki 1999: esp. 306–19; see also
Kavoulaki 1996. Particularly on the Bacchae, cf. Kavoulaki 2005.
4 Burkert 1985: 102.
211
212 Anton Bierl
ways: (1) as a speech-act; (2) in the multi-media presentation by which
the spectators undergo an emotional experience; and (3) in the indexical
catalogue of metonymic and synecdochic relations between parts and the
whole.5
The choral songs of the Bacchae are part of a performative and multi-
media presentation where melodic, visual, olfactory, and kinetic stimuli
converge.6 One of the decisive features of the Bacchae is the fact that it
is arguably the only transmitted tragedy where the dramatic and perfor-
mative roles of the chorus are intertwined, and, as far as dancing is con-
cerned, are practically indiscriminate and identical. Through the fusion
of different levels of form and content, the performance gains authority.
Moreover, mythical and ritual elements are blended in the performance,
and in reenactment both forms are blurred. In the orchestra of the theater
of Dionysos, the ritual and mythical identity of the maenads expresses
itself mostly in the form of choral performance, since Dionysos and his
entourage are intrinsically linked to choral dance.7 Therefore, the Bac-
chae in particular can be analyzed by looking solely at the references to
choreia.
Furthermore, the chorus supplied by the polis collectively represents the
actual citizens who, in the here and now, worship Dionysos in the Athenian
theater of Dionysos. It is well known that the chorus oscillates between
the distant past and mythic location in its dramatic role, and the here and
now, in its cultic and performative role. Like a shifter, the chorus can move
freely and alternate between multiple levels. It encompasses the communal,
5 Tambiah 1985: 128: “Ritual is a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication. It is con-
stituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts, often expressed in multiple media,
whose content and arrangement are characterised in varying degree by formality (conventionality),
stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and redundancy (repetition). Ritual action in its consti-
tutive features is performative in these three senses: in the Austinian sense of performative, wherein
saying something is also doing something as a conventional act; in the quite different sense of a staged
performance that uses multiple media by which the participants experience the event intensively;
and in the sense of indexical values – I derive this concept from Peirce – being attached to and
inferred by actors during the performance.” According to Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic triad of
symbol/index/icon a sign is a symbol when the reference to its object is based on convention; it is an
index when it is directly influenced by its object (for example a weathervane), and an icon when it
has specific properties in common with their objects (for example a portrait). These distinctions are
important in the following argument, even though icon is often simply used as the visual quality of
an object.
6 On the choral songs of Bacchae, cf. Arthur 1972. On the chorus and character in Bacchae, cf. Segal
1997; Murnaghan 2006. The text of Bacchae is cited after the edition of Diggle 1994b: 287–56; for
the translation (in square brackets) I follow, with slight modifications, Kovacs 2002b: 1–153.
7 Simultaneously, Bacchae is the example par excellence of what I call a mythic-ritual poetics; cf. Bierl
2007a and Bierl et al. 2007; for “ritual poetics” see Yatromanolakis and Roilos 2003; Yatromanolakis
and Roilos 2004.
Maenadism as self-referential chorality in Euripides’ Bacchae 213
the performative, and the dramatic voice, and according to situation and
perspective, one comes particularly to the fore.8
In choral performance, events that belong to the mythical background
can meet with anticipated facts that can be projected into the future like
thoughts.9 At the same time, in such choruses the here and now, the internal
perspective of Athens, and the “there and then,” the external perspective
of the mythical and dramatic plot, can blur.10 In such songs, choral self-
references abound that pertain to the performance, the actual singing and
dancing, as well as references to imagined choral engagements or to other
choruses of gods, nymphs or maenads, the so-called choral projections.11
The sophistic and technically refined poet designs the boundaries between
these categories as particularly fluid. Moreover, Euripides knows all about
adopting the tensions that work in the context of Dionysos and adapts
them to his dramaturgical purposes.12
By means of self-references, the choral performance as speech-act is con-
firmed in an illocutionary manner, i.e. in saying something the chorus does
something. Hence there is neither “suspension of disbelief ” nor a breach of
fiction, but instead, rituality is strengthened by performance. Through pro-
jections on other choruses, the differences between internal and external,
myth and ritual, past and future are blurred again. Furthermore, choral
self-references and projections are connected with other metatheatrical
considerations. Everything takes place in the realm of Dionysos, the god
of the theater. Such choral self-references serve to merge both instances,
namely, the communal and the dramatic chorus, in an aesthetic way and
strengthen the all-encompassing ritual and performative stage event.13
A choral reading of the Bacchae

In my book Dionysos und die griechische Tragödie, where I address the idea
of metatheater, I contend “that the Bacchae reveals the process of how
8 Bierl 2001: inter al. 62–4, 86 and index s.v. “shifter” and “Chor/Fluktuation (Ambiguität) der
Instanzen und Rollen” (in English, Bierl 2009: esp. 45–7, 67). See in this volume especially the
contributions of Calame and Swift.
9 Cf. Kavoulaki 1996: 86; for the Bacchae, cf. Di Benedetto 2004: 80, 301; Kavoulaki 2005: 97–102.
10 Bierl 2001: 38–45 and passim (in English, Bierl 2009: 24–31 and passim).
11 On choral projections, cf. Henrichs 1994/5: esp. 68, 73, 75, 78, 88, 90; on Dionysiac choral self-
references, cf. Segal 1982: 242–7; Bierl 1991: 35–6, 83–4, 99, 106–7, 129, 155, 164, 174, 190–1, 224–5, and
242–3; Bierl 2001: 37–45 (in English, Bierl 2009: 24–31) and index s.v. “Selbstreferentialität (Selbst-
bezüglichkeit)/‘chorischer Selbstbezug’.” See Calame in this volume. On choral self-referentiality
Henrichs 1994/5; Henrichs 1996a; Henrichs 1996b. On coreÅein in the Bacchae as a self-referential
expression, which simultaneously stands for the Dionysian cult, cf. Leinieks 1996: 58–70.
12 See Bierl 1991: 137–218.
13 Bierl 1991: 111–19 and Bierl 2001: 43–4 (in English, Bierl 2009: 29–30).
214 Anton Bierl
somebody [i.e. Pentheus] resists theater and how eventually he will be so
completely captivated by it that he will perish under its influence, or more
accurately from a perverted form of theater.”14 In this play particularly, the
maenads’ self-references focus on their own performativity and rituality.
Because of the chorus’ dramatic role as Dionysian maenads, metatheater is
completely absorbed in specific mytho-ritual and performative references.
In the theater Dionysos becomes manifest in the choral dance. I propose
here to look at the Bacchae from the perspective of performative chorality.
I will focus my interest for the self-referential dimensions of this play on
aspects of the chorus, in particular of the parodos, which I had left out in
my former treatment.
As is well known, the Bacchae restages the arrival and the triumphant
success of Dionysos. This marginal god, the incarnation of quintessential
“otherness,” returns now to Greece via oriental, barbarian countries where
he introduced his cult (13–22). Most of all, he comes in order to show
himself to mankind as the “coming” and “present” god. The play deals
with his feature of epiphany,15 with the revelation of his divine power (¯nì
ehn mfanv da©mwn broto±v [“so that my divinity may be made manifest
to mortals”] 22; see also fannta qnhto±v da©monì . . . 42). However, as
usual, he meets resistance. Even the sisters of his mother Semele deny the
fact that Dionysos is the son of Zeus. That is the reason why the god
punishes them with mania.
Dionysos’ vengeance is thus exacted according to the logic of the god’s
own ritual: all the women go mad and leave their houses, where they
are normally under the guard of their husbands, in the direction of the
mountains (32–8). In their movement to the outdoors, Semele’s three
aristocratic sisters become their leaders. The groups form ecstatic thiasoi
and choroi which, in their wild dancing, show reverence to Bakchos. In
doing so, they intonate the shrill scream of the ololygē. Moreover, they
put on the nebris and they carry the thyrsos entwined with ivy. In short,
the women who opposed Dionysos become by his intervention de facto
worshippers of the god – that is, wild maenads. This “second” Theban
chorus is only imagined offstage and never shown in the orchestra to the
audience. In this case, myth motivates what ritual reenacts. It is well known
that in cult women left the city in an orderly way as well in order to ritually
celebrate the oreibasia on the mountains in the festive frame of exception.16
14 Bierl 1991: 190, for an interpretation of Dionysos in the Bacchae, cf. Bierl 1991: 67–75, 177–218. For
metatheater in the play see also Segal 1982: 215–71.
15 Cf. Otto 1933: 70–80, esp. 74–80 (“Der kommende Gott”); Henrichs 2008: esp. 19 (on presence).
16 Cf. Henrichs 1978.
Their state of frenzy is the mad ecstasy that is a constitutive part of the
Dionysiac cult.
Against the mythical background of Pentheus’ resistance, mania is now
seen as a form of punishment which, beside rites of mystery initiation,17
will be used to promote the worship of the god by all Thebans. Pentheus,
however, denies the divine nature of Dionysos. In vehement opposition
he tries to lock him out and to suppress the cult in his polis. Therefore,
Bakchos wishes to prove his divinity to the tyrannos, the absolute ruler
in the city, and thus to all male Thebans. He wants to substantiate his
divine identity and to make himself manifest as a god so that his city will
receive him in hospitality.18 Finally, he asks his Lydian-Asiatic escorts to let
their bass drums roar (55–61) so that Thebes might see his arrival (Þv ¾r,
61), because such a multimedial procession would captivate the onlookers.
Dionysos announces that he will go meanwhile to the mountains in order
to participate in the choruses of the new Theban maenads (gÜ d bkcaiv,
v Kiqairänov ptucv / lqÜn ¯nì e«s©, summetascsw corän [“for my
part I will go to the glens of Kithairon, where the bacchants are, and take
part with them in their dances”] 62–3).
The parodos
How is the god’s divine power made manifest in the theater? On the stage
this manifestation is necessarily achieved by theatrical and performative
means, that is, by ritual equipment, paraphernalia, and props, which dis-
tinguish the group on the visual level, and moreover by music, noise, and
rhythm as well as by ecstatic movement.19 Since Dionysos is the choral
god par excellence, the ongoing reference to his choral dancing serves this
purpose, too. His ritual takes place in the collective choros and is thus
choreia. To introduce someone into the Dionysian cult is conceived as an
initiation into Bacchic mysteries (21–2, 40) that coincide with dramatic
choral dance in the realm of theater (tke± coreÅsav kaª katastsav
mv / teletv [“having set everything in Asia a-dancing and having estab-
lished my rites”] 21–2). The procession of the parodos (64–169) has to be
understood as a bipolar movement: it leads the Theban women outside to
17 Cf. Seaford 1981. 18 On showing: Bacch. 22, 42, 47, 50.
19 Hose 1990: 165 merely emphasizes the portrayal of the cult in simultaneously characterizing the
chorus. With the accentuation of dance, song, and music, Euripides – according to Hose – “statt
die Handlung voranzutreiben” (“instead of advancing the plot”) is only able “eine bestimmte
Atmosphäre zu schaffen” (“to create a certain atmosphere”, 171). According to Hose, the purpose of
the parodos is cult propaganda as well (Hose 1991: 166–7, 170; 332–42, esp. 338–42). For the purely
religious sense of the parodos, cf. Festugière 1956.
216 Anton Bierl
the mountains, and the Lydian bacchants inside into the city.20 To oppose
this double movement, where the god is present in each case, inevitably
means to resist Dionysos.21 In the entrance of his followers as well as in their
ritual performance, Dionysos becomes manifest. Hence, the epiphany of
the “arriving, coming god”22 is effectively acted out in a way that suits stage
conditions.
In the proōidē (64–72), the chorus describes their ecstatic movement from
outside, from Asia and Mount Tmolos toward Thebes. Their language is
full of performative markers. According to John Austin’s speech-act theory,
the group performs this action by uttering their choral voice in the first
person singular.23 The chorus is swift (qozw, 65) to perform “sweet toil
and weariness happily unwearying” (p»non ¡dÆn / kmat»n tì eÉkmaton,
66–7) in honor of Bromios, the roaring god: the dancers’ toil is the action
itself, namely, the procession and the wild dance. In a state of ecstasy,
such movements are highly exhausting and in the same time they create
happiness.24
After the illocutionary exclamation “Out of the way!” (ktopov stw,
69), by which they perlocutionarily clear the way,25 strophe and antistrophe
follow twice which mark again the up and down in space. The first strophe
(73–87) represents the content of the announced hymn, first in form of a
blessing (makarismos) (73–82). Whoever is initiated in the Bacchic mysteries
is blessed, that is, he who has dedicated himself totally to the god and in
his ecstatic religious experience has figuratively opened his “inner doors”
through dancing in honor of Kybele and Dionysos on the mountains.
Despite the focus on the actual performance in the city of Thebes, the view
turns outside toward the second imaginary chorus of Theban maenads
who worship Dionysos with ecstatic choroi in the mountains. Through
projection, the chorus entering the city is associated with other dancing
20 This fact is also recognized by Di Benedetto 2004: 302.

21 On the background of the resistance myth and the Athenian eisagōgē in the performative frame of
the Dionysia, cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 1994; Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 67–100, 197–200.
22 Otto 1933: 74–80.
23 On Austin’s speech-act theory as applied to the chorus, cf. Bierl 2001: 37–64 (in English, Bierl 2009:
24–47) and index s.v. “Austin, J. L.,” “Sprechakt und -theorie (speech-act).”
24 With reference to the third Pindaric dithyramb (fr. 70c.16 p»noi corän) and Eur. Bacch. 65–8,
cf. Henrichs 1994/5: 84. Cf. Soph. Ichneutai TrGF IV F 314.223 (metstasiv p»nwn) and Bierl
2006: 129.
25 On this subject, cf. Diggle 1994a: 3–4. He rejects the previously standard interpretation that unini-
tiated spectators should remove themselves, or at least that one in general should give way. On the
contrary, he sees the words as an “invitation to approach” (4). In my analysis, I integrate both sides
of the debate: it is about making room for the procession, which at the same time should draw the
spectator into the spell.
collectives whose leaders are the three sisters of Semele.26 These “choruses,”
which only later become violent and whose actions are incorporated by two
reports, become reality in the imagination of the spectators, and despite
the women’s punishment, their actual actions partially overlap with proper
cult practices. Jens Holzhausen is the only one, to my knowledge, who
has seen this and he thus rightly speaks of a “superimposition effect.”
Regarding lines 62–3, he expresses the idea of the blending of the two
choral groups, the outer Theban choruses and the inner Lydian chorus
as follows: “The parodos of women from Asia Minor takes the place of
these choruses in the mountains: they bring onto the stage that which is
happening simultaneously on Kithairon.”27
By mentioning Kybele (79), the great mountain-mother, another ecstatic
cult of the wilderness is blended with Dionysos. The goddess gives the
dramatic chorus its Asiatic, local color. Moreover, she is part of the musical
aetiology which will be discussed later. From the projection into their own
past and into the affairs of the Theban maenads, they turn their focus
upon the actual choral procession.28 This first, solemn entrance-song is the
model of the cult to be annually repeated, and its content is, so to speak,
the aetiology of ritual or “aitio-praxis.”
In the first antistrophe (88–104), the chorus turns from ritual, from
cultic dancing, to the myth which “gives a reason and a basis” to its holi-
ness. The perspective is shifted to the very beginning, to the scene of
birth, which Dionysos already recounted in the prologue. The aetiologi-
cal myth justifies the special divine authority and the ritual power of the
god who manifests himself in the song and celebrates his entrance. Then
the chorus speaks about Zeus’s thigh-pregnancy (94–8) and Dionysos’
second birth (99–104). At the same time, in reciting the birth myth,
the bacchants underline the ritual of entrance in a metaphorical and
iconic manner. Violence erupts twice through a bodily enclosure (from
the womb and from the thigh). The city gate and the body represent the
resisting boundaries that the baby as well as the Dionysian group will
rupture.
By admonishing the Thebans to put on the Dionysian paraphernalia
in order to adopt his cult (105–19), the chorus refers to its own visual
props that indexically stand for Dionysos, the paradox between nature and
26 Cf. Henrichs 1994/5: 68, 73, 75, 78, 88, 90 and Bierl 2001: 42–3, 77–8, 147–8 and index, s.v. “chorische
Projektion” (in English, Bierl 2009: 28–9, 59–60, 122–4).
27 Holzhausen 2003: 235.
28 On procession as choreia, cf. Lonsdale 1993: 41.
218 Anton Bierl
civilization, measure, and transgression.29 The appearance constitutes the
actual choral dance to some extent. When people align themselves with
Dionysos, “the whole land will dance at once” (aÉt©ka g psa coreÅsei,
114).30 By means of such looping effects, the chorus highlights again and
again its own choreia in which the divine power manifests itself. Following
the performance in the orchestra, the choral dancing of the entire Greek
land ensues: Hellas as well as Thebes and Kithairon and all later places will
dance and dance already, in the same way as the Athenian orchestra is shaken
by the actual dance. The pathos of choral motion is transferred to the central
land to be conquered, that is, to Greece which, in a kind of projection or
“pathetic fallacy,” is imagined to dance itself.31 Mankind and the surround-
ing space merge in the execution of choreia, whose ecstatic, performative
form becomes the determining feature of this song and the entire play. By
entering into the city, the resistance to the ecstasy, which now spreads out
universally, is broken. Therefore, Dionysos simultaneously leads (gein,
115) his thiasoi into the mountains, where the “female throng” (117) is wait-
ing for them after the women have been driven away from their looms by
Dionysos (115–19). Paradoxically the processional movement is again pro-
jected into the outside. Although the Asiatic bacchants move toward the city
in their dramatic role, they project themselves also onto the Theban mae-
nads, their counterparts who dance on Kithairon. The ongoing blurring of
perspectives and instances belongs to the ritual totality which finds expres-
sion in the choral dance. The verb gein refers not only to Dionysos guiding
the women toward the mountains, where the cult usually takes place, but
also to the fact that Bromios, the divine roarer, is notionally envisaged as
an ideal choral “leader” (corhg»v 141). The sisters of Semele (Autonoe,
Agaue, Ino) are leaders of ritually perverted thiasoi or choroi (¾rä d
qisouv tre±v gunaike©wn corän, / æn §rcì n¼v mn AÉton»h, toÓ
deutrou / mthr %gau s, tr©tou dì ìInÜ coroÓ [“I saw three covens,
three choruses of women, one led by Autonoe, and a second by your mother
Agaue, while the third was led by Ino”] 680–2), and Dionysos is the divine
authority who is imagined as the chorēgos of the Asiatic as well as of the
Theban maenads.
29 Cf. Versnel 1990 and Bierl 1991: 13–20.
30 Cf. the paean of Philodamos, ll. 19–23 (Coll. Alex., 166): psa d ì ËmnobrÅhv c»reu- / e[n Delfä]n
¬er mkaira cÛraá / aÉt¼v d ì ste[r»en d]mav / fa©nwn Delf©si sÆn k»raiv / [Parn]assoÓ
ptÅcav stav. On this subject, cf. also Kowalzig 2007a.
31 On the term “pathetic fallacy,” cf. Copley 1937. In bucolic poetry, this stylistic device of poetic,
pathetic symbiosis with the natural environment occurs especially pointedly; cf. Hunter 1999: 89.
Cf. also Bacch. 726–7, where “the whole mountain with its beasts participates in the Bacchic dance,
and everything was set in rapid motion.”
From the perspective of the cult on the mountains, the chorus now
glides into the myth which is located in the world of the mountains
as well. In the second antistrophe (120–34), by reciting the myth of the
origin of the visible and audible tympanon, which is deictically addressed
as burs»tonon kÅklwma t»de [“this drum of tightened hide”] (124),
the choreutai aetiologically speak again about the musical and rhythmical
dimension of their choral performance immediately after narrating the
events of the god’s birth. The Korybantes, who invented the tympana and
mingled it with Phrygian pipe sound, handed the percussion instruments
over to Rhea-Kybele and from her as intermediary the Dionysian satyrs
obtained them as a musical accompaniment. They connected the sound
with the Bacchic choruses (coreÅmata, 132) of the biennial festivals on
Mount Kithairon (130–4). Through this mythical narration the prehistory
of the choral performance is explained, and it gains authority from Zeus
and Rhea.32
In the difficult epōidē (135–69) the chorus members return to Dionysos
who, as corhg»v and xarcov (141), represents a projected leader of his
chorus in the mountains. The god simultaneously fulfills the same function
for the groups in Thebes (thus also for the dramatic chorus of bacchants)
as well as for the Athenian chorus in the orchestra. Again the dimensions
of myth and ritual are blurred in a paradoxical manner. Ritual highlights
myth while, on the other hand, myth highlights ritual. The chorus imag-
ines how the divine chorus-leader falls to the ground after the exhausting
performance in the landscape of Lydia and Phrygia, from where they, the
chorus of bacchants, originate and where they celebrated the rites before
(135–7).33 The wild procession represents a hunt through the barbarian
mountains where the horrible pleasures of the Dionysian rites, the sparag-
mos and ōmophagia, are performed (138–40). Most of all, they describe how
the god thirsts for the blood of a goat (a³ma tragokt»non, 139), which
was probably killed by being torn apart, and how he takes pleasures in
eating the meat raw (Ýmofgon crin, 139).34 What appears to be cruel
32 The aetiology of the tympanon as the invention of Rhea and Dionysos was already discussed in
Bacch. 59: tÅmpana, ëRav te mhtr¼v m qì eËrmata.
33 On the mistaken notion of a “male celebrant” (Dodds 1960, 82–3, cf. also 85–8) cf. Henrichs 1984;
Dodd’s opinion has now been adopted once more by Di Benedetto 2004: 304 (ad 135–40). He then
does, in fact, view the god as a leader (Di Benedetto 2004: 305 ad 141. The debate is somewhat
exaggerated, since the god, in the minds of the Bacchae and in the fiction, is a human priest, in
whose role the god has cloaked himself. The commingling of god and man here is constitutive;
¡dÆv (135) recalls p»non ¡dÆn / kmat»n tì eÉkmaton (66–7). Cf. also n terpno±v p»noiv (1053).
34 Arthur states (1972: 149) that “throughout the parodos, the wilder, more feral aspects of the worship
are played down in favor of its joy-bringing character.” She relates this esp. to the epode (ibid.
149–50), arguing that the reference in Bacch. 138–9 to omophagy is singular.
220 Anton Bierl
and horrifying in myth is the reflection of a much more harmless cult
celebrated throughout the Greek world.35 Why should the god hunt a goat
in the mountains (greÅwn, 138)? I believe that this passage refers to the
blood of the famous sacrifice of a billy-goat in Athens where tragedy or a
form of proto-tragedy was performed.36 With these words the perspective
is simultaneously shifted to the here and now of Athens and to the actual
cultic performance. At the same time, since the chorus deals already with
aetiology, it embeds and refers to the origins of the genre in a metatheatrical
manner. The myth is again the circular aetiology of the chorus’ actual tragic
performance. Furthermore, by alluding to the sparagmos and ōmophagia,
the chorus anticipates the tragic events in store for Pentheus in the gorges
of Mount Kithairon. Myth acts out the story of resistance and punishment
in horrible ways, while ritual symbolically restores certain exceptional prac-
tices by reenacting these events. The envisioned performance happens in
the medium of choreia and is choral dance.
In the dancing whirl Dionysos Bakcheus (145) tosses his hair into the air
(150), a typically indexical image of choral performance.37 Together with
ritual cries of euhoi, Bromios shouts again (pì eÉsmasin pibrmei, 151):
å te bkcai, / å te bkcai (152–3). Previously, the chorus members
had admonished themselves to depart to the mountains with the same
words (83). The cry is now projected as an appeal from Dionysos, the
chorus-leader. The call merges into another self-exhortation to keep up the
actual performance, which is thus confirmed. At the same time, the Asiatic
chorus is again notionally in the Phrygian-Lydian mountains (cf. ¬menov e«v
Àrea FrÅgia LÅdiì, 140) and even on the Lydian Mount Tmolos (TmÛlou
crusor»ou clid, 154).38 The call to sing in honor of Dionysos is directed
to the men of Thebes as well. Kadmos and Teiresias will obey immediately
after this scene. The chorus members cannot appeal directly to their female
Theban counterparts, but only in a projected form, since they are already
on their way to the mountains. Moreover, the chorus includes the Athenian
audience in the spectacle. Yet most of all, the imperative in the second-
person plural mlpete (155) is an exhortation to themselves to move in a
wild choral dance in the role of barbarian bacchants as well as in their actual
function of Athenian performers. The Phrygian voice (159) corresponds to
the tympanon and aulos, whose development was explained in the second
35 Cf. the Dionysian cult statutes from Miletus (276/275 bc), Sokolowski 1955: no. 48; Henrichs 1969:
235–41 and Henrichs 1978: 149–52.
36 Burkert 1966. 37 Cf. inter al. Alcm. fr. 3.9; Ar. Lys. 1311; Autocr. fr. 1.4 K.–A.
38 Dodds 1960: 89 and Seaford 1996: 166 relate the attribute “flowing with gold” to the river Paktolos,
which, according to Hdt. 5.101, carries gold from Mount Tmolos.
antistrophe before. According to the bacchants, the well-sounding pipes
“boom” (brm
) their “sacred dances” (¬er pa©gmata, 161–2), and the
drums are “deep-roaring” (barubr»mwn Ëp¼ tumpnwn, 156). With this
sound they merge with Bromios, the “roarer.” Moreover, the flow of ritual
language and music is “suited to” or “in concert with” (sÅnoca, 162) the
wild wanderers who are moving “to the mountains, to the mountains!” (e«v
Àrov e«v Àrov, 163).39 Almost removed from the syntactical connection, we
are confronted with these ritual cries in the same way as we were in line 116,
where Dionysos has been projected in the mountains as chorus-leader.
Finally, the dancing performance of an exemplary bacchant is brought into
focus. She moves like a colt (pälov Âpwv, 165), and with her wild leaps
she leads or moves (gei, 166) her swift-footed limb, which is due to press
ahead with the procession.40 As we have seen, the parodos is characterized by
choral self-references and projections that almost merge. The performance
confirms itself through speech-act and celebrates its holy rituality. At the
same time, in this self-referential image of the foal, the differences between
animal and man blur in the sign of the dancing god.
Choral self-referentiality in the rest of the play

The mixture of choral self-references, which confirm the performance, and
choral projections, which foreshadow the outside and envision the imag-
ined world of the mountains, is a feature of the entire Bacchae. Immediately
after the parodos, Kadmos and Teiresias take up Dionysian symbols. They
begin their first dance steps and wish to go outside into the realm of nature
in order to perform there an almost grotesque choreia.41 Pentheus, on the
contrary, tries to stop it all. He would prefer to jail the old men, but then
he lets them do as they please. However, he has Dionysos and his female
retinue put in prison. Yet the god as Lysios and Eleuthereus knows how
39 On the cult cry, cf. the epigram in memory of Alkmeonis from Miletus, late third, or second century
bce; cf. Henrichs 1969: 225–34, esp. 232; cf. also Henrichs 1978: 148–9.
40 Cf. Ar. Lys. 1307–12/13: c te päloi taª k»rai / pr t¼n EÉrÛtan / mpllonti, pukn podo±n /
gkon©wa¬, / taª d k»mai se©ontai / per bakcn qursaddwn kaª paiddwn. [“There, too,
foals and girls strike fiercely with their feet by the river Eurotas, whirling dust, and their hair flies
like that of bacchants, who swing the thyrsos staff and dance”]. On the choral dimension of Ar.
Lys. 1296–1321 and on the reference to Alcman’s Louvre-Partheneion fr. 1 Davies, cf. Bierl 2007b:
272–7 (in English, Bierl 2011: 428–33). On foals as a metaphor for the choral dance of young girls,
cf. Bierl 2001: 47 n. 85, 49 n. 89, 257 n. 416 (in English, Bierl 2009: 32 n. 85, 35 n. 89, 226 n. 416); Di
Benedetto 2004: 307 views Bacch. 164–9 only as “Quadretto ‘idillico’, con gli animali che si tengono
aparte rispetto alle agitazioni che turbano gli umani.” On Bacch. 165, cf. the foal simile in Bacch.
1056.
41 On the absurd choreia of both old men, cf. Bacch. 184–5, 190, 195, 204–9, 323–4 and Segal 1982:
245–6.
222 Anton Bierl
to burst his bonds.42 The chorus underlines the aggression against their
leader in the stasima with images taken from their Dionysian performance.
According to them, to take steps against Dionysos means to stop the cho-
rus, and this is hybris, or transgression (375). The god’s task is choreia and
festivity: Áv tdì cei, / qiaseÅein te coro±v / met tì aÉloÓ gelsai
/ popaÓsa© te mer©mnav [“these are his powers, to blend us, by dance,
with the worshipful band, to laugh to the sound of piping, and to vanquish
care”] (378–81).
Suddenly and miraculously the imprisoned girls are set free (443–8). After
the altercation with Dionysos, who allowed it to happen so that he would
be arrested, Pentheus is determined to incarcerate the strange priest (434–
518). The bacchants are desperate and try to call him. They assume that the
absent god is in other cult sites, including at last Pieria (556–65). They are
convinced that he would come to set the land in Bacchic frenzy and choral
dance, and that as chorus-leader he would lead the whirling maenads over
the river Axios (mkar å Pier©a, / sbeta© sì EÎiov, ¤xei / te coreÅswn
ma bakceÅ- / masi, t»n tì Ýkur»an / diabv %xi¼n e¬lis- / somnav
maindav xei [“happy Pieria, Euhios honors you, and he will come to
dance with his bacchants: he will lead his whirling bacchants, crossing
the swift-running current of the river Axios”] 565–70). In such projections,
the chorus dreams about freedom in remote locations. Dionysos loosens the
bonds for a second time, now on his own body, and in the so-called scene
of the palace miracle, the process of release is now acted out in a theatrical
and spectacular way by means of an earthquake. The “dance of the earth”
(cf. 114) destroys the center of Pentheus’ political power. The god, once
freed, steps in front of the ruins and recounts Pentheus’ deception (576–
641). Finally Pentheus wants to wage war against the bacchants (778–86).
He has no interest in listening to all the warnings. The play thus reaches
its decisive turn (810): Dionysos convinces Pentheus to put on a female
dress and maenadic paraphernalia and to spy on the bacchants in the realm
of the mountains (811–46). He then hands over his victim to the women
(848–61).
The interplay between choral projection and actual dance as an expres-
sion of joy becomes particularly striking after the dramatic peripeteia. Just
as with the foal in the parodos (165–9), so the fleeting and jumping deer
is projected as an image of dance in the third stasimon (866–76).43 In
42 On this subject, cf. Leinieks 1996: 303–25.
43 On the deer (lafov, nebr»v), like foals, as a metaphor for the choral dance of young girls cf.
h.Hom. 2.174–5, Ar. Lys. 1318–19 (lafov); cf. Sapph. fr. 58.16, B. 13.83–90, esp. 87, Eur. El. 860–1
(nebr»v).
the performative future tense, the chorus speaks about its actual choral
performance. They place their white feet in all-night dances and toss their
neck into the dewy air, like a fawn which has escaped a violent chase,
now when the former hunter has gotten caught in a trap (rì n pan-
nuc©oiv coro±v / qsw pot leuk¼n / p»dì nabakceÅousa, dran /
a«qrì v droser¼n ç©ptousì, / Þv nebr¼v cloera±v mpa©- / zousa le©-
makov ¡dona±v . . . [“shall I ever in the nightlong dances move my white
feet in ecstasy? Shall I toss my head to the dewy heaven like a fawn that
plays amid green meadow delights . . . ”] 862–7; see also 868–76).
The cultic performance serves as a means of punishment: the god’s oppo-
nent will put on the indices of Bacchic cult in the famous scene of costume
change and will be led out in a procession by Dionysos (912–76).44 In the
call of the Theban maenads, who are to take revenge on him, the ritual cry
v Àrov v Àrov [“to the mountains, to the mountains!”] (986) is taken up
from the parodos (116, 164). In their imagination, they themselves are the
dogs of Lyssa, of personified Frenzy, and should incite the Theban women
to the insane deed (977–1023). In his desired epiphany, the punishing god
is stylized as Dikē (992, 1011). Furthermore, in the messenger’s report of
the mythic and ritual sparagmos performed by the wild Theban bacchants,
we again encounter “choruses.”45 Before the Theban women are turned
to outrageous maenads, they behave like peaceful and idyllic choruses,
“like foals, having left the decorated yokes, they were singing antiphonally
a Bacchic song” (a¬ dì klipoÓsai poik©lì Þv päloi zug / bakce±on
ntklazon lllaiv mlov, 1056–7).46 Moreover, even the triumphant
cry of joy about the ritual slaughter that takes place behind the stage turns
out to be an exhortation to dance (nacoreÅswmen Bkcion, 1153). In a
very macabre way, this is a joyful dance celebrating a “superb victory” (t¼n
kall©nikon klein»n, 1161), which might be compared to and allude to the
victory of choral performance in the “beautiful agōn” (kal¼v gÛn, 1163)
of the actual Athenian Dionysia.
All in all, the chorus of the Bacchae provides a total mental and per-
formative fantasy concerning violence that is acted out by their Theban
counterparts and can only happen offstage according to the dramatic con-
ventions. The play ends with another choral procession, again moving from
outside to inside, that is, the choral kōmos by Agaue (cf. 1165–1201). In her
44 The ritual procession (pomp, qewr©a) is played out ironically in punishment: Dionysos says that
he himself will serve Pentheus as a “salutary guide” (pomp¼v e²mì gÜ swtriov, 965). Later, the
messenger reports that Dionysos, the foreigner (xenos) who should experience xenismos, functioned
as a “guide to the spectacle” – xnov qì Áv ¡m±n pomp¼v §n qewr©av (1047).
45 See coroÅv krufa©ouv, 1109; cf. n coro±si maindwn, 1143. 46 For the fillies, cf. 165.
224 Anton Bierl
putative victory and mania, she carries her hunting trophy on a stick –
in reality, the head of her son – and leads her wild band into the city
(1165–99, 1200–15). She is conceived again as the dancing chorus leader of
a kōmos; in strongly self-referential terms she is announced as coming with
her Bacchic, maddened dancing foot (bakce© pod©, 1230). In a fascinat-
ing way, then, she notionally becomes the leader of the Lydian chorus.
Indeed, it is worth mentioning that Agaue is the only Theban maenad
whom the audience now actually sees on the stage, whereas until now the
Theban “second chorus” has remained invisible in the offstage. Moreover,
the ongoing blending of the actual and imagined choruses culminates in
this scene, since the merger now becomes theatrically real. The Lydian
bacchants receive this revelry of Theban maenads, who carry a trophy like
a statue of Dionysos and regard them as equally celebrating in a Dionysiac
context (dxomai sÅgkwmon, 1172). In this new choral and highly perfor-
mative procession, the agony suffered behind the scenes becomes manifest
again. Finally, the projected backstage chorus merges into the actual cho-
rus in the orchestra. Agaue arrives as a “false,” imaginary chorēgos since she
actually does not lead a chorus but comes alone. The “united chorus” under
her leadership has the quality of a mock-chorus for the Lydian bacchants.
Agaue’s imaginary kōmos thus turns out to be a kind of comic chorus in
a Dionysiac tragedy which has changed into a form of kōmōidia. Further-
more, the play is characterized by the ritual structure pompē–agōn–kōmos.47
However when Agaue recognizes the real circumstances of her delusion,
she is weary of any ritual and performative action on Mount Kithairon and
wants to go somewhere else in the future (1383–6). “Other bacchants may
take care of such cultic duties” – bkcaiv dì llaiv mloien (1387). Only at
the very end does the chorus then leave the stage by the side exits (parodoi).
Conclusion
The Bacchae as a whole is characterized by an opposition between inner
and outer space, between the actual stage and what is left offstage. Only
the chorus as a mediator and shifter can cross these boundaries. The ritual
power of the Dionysian cult can be experienced in the performance of the
devotees, and in the theater of Dionysos, all of this cultic activity is identical
with choral dancing. The entrance song which makes the god manifest by
means of choreia breaks the former resistance to the god. The retained
47 Cf. Foley 1985: 205–18; Bierl 1991: 208–15; cf. furthermore the formula pompē–thysia–agōn, likewise
related to Foley, in Kavoulaki 1999: 309.
energy is released in an all the more violent manner as a consequence.
Dramatically, the initial parodos functions as an interface for the further
course of the play where the arrival in the city of Thebes simultaneously
represents the transition to the brutal events on Mount Kithairon. Thus, the
chorus of the Asian bacchants as a theatrically and aesthetically confusing
ensemble becomes the message in the rhythmical and ritual performance.
By means of this chorus, particularly through the initial procession, the
arrival of the “coming god” can be experienced in various media. Most of all,
through choral projection, the movement toward the inside simultaneously
becomes one toward the outside.48 The dimensions of time and space, as
well as other oppositions, blur in a ritual flux in the songs. Past, present,
future, and the actual time of performance are fused, and the time of myth
is reenacted in the ritual of drama. Multiple loops create a sensation of
unity and communitas in a scenario of “anti-structure.”49 In a paradoxical
way the oppositions between barbarians and Greeks, Thebes and Athens,
nature and culture, animal, man, and god, outside and inside, country and
city, myth and ritual, chaos and idyll, ecstasy and happiness, brutal rites
of sacrifice and blessed mysteries collapse in the acting out of choreia. As I
have argued, in the Bacchae, chorality functions as a dynamic field of force
between myth and ritual. On the basis of the tension between these forms
of expression, the artful and sophisticated dramatist Euripides develops
his self-referential and Dionysiac theater of coinciding oppositions that
Dionysos encompasses.
The choral songs of this play – particularly the parodos, which executes
the necessary entrance on the matrix of an implicit resistance – fulfill the
criteria of rituality and performativity defined by Stanley Tambiah – i.e.
by means of the speech-act, in the multimedia presentation, and in the
indexical enumeration of metonymic and synecdochic relations between
parts and the whole. Form and content interact closely. They possess a
rhythmical and formulaic design combined and varied by the principles of
condensation and redundancy. Most of all, ritual and myth, function and
fictive role, and the various instances between which the chorus can shift
merge and form the flux of performance.
As I noted above, Euripides, the consummate dramatic artist, is well
aware of all of the tensions that are constitutive of the god Dionysos, and
48 Segal 1982: 78–124 (“The Horizontal Axis: House, City, Mountain”), esp. 87 and 245 recognizes
that the centripetal force of the inside will be inversed by the centrifugal dynamics of the outside.
However, he does not localize the fusion of both forces in the parodos which anticipates, thus, the
course of the action.
49 On communitas, see Turner 1974: 274 (definition) and passim; on anti-structure (in relation to
communitas), ibid., esp. 45, 46, 50, 272–98 and passim.
226 Anton Bierl
he enhances them. The tragedian even constructs the revenge in such a way
that all details of Pentheus’ punishment stem from and can be identified
with cultic and mythical elements of Dionysos’ realm. The executors are
the Theban women who, although they initially resist the god as well,
tear the spy apart like furious maenads. Euripides translates the tensions
between all of the dual oppositions into a revenge plot which works on
the basis of a mise en abyme and degenerates into a cruel and perverted
anti-theater. In this artful Euripidean construct, the female devotees of
Dionysos cannot be divided into cultic, positive bacchants and mythic,
negative maenads any more, as Albert Henrichs has argued.50 Through
choreia the poet mingles them into a dramatic medium which bridges
space and time and transgresses boundaries, in particular the one between
active engagement in the plot and passive spectatorship. Thus, the cultic
chorus in its role as passive onlooker and commentator turns into an agent
in its own right. Through their violent words and songs the cultic bacchants
gradually slip into the role of a chorus which, like in the origin of tragedy,
very actively participates in the action. Thus the cultic bacchants overlap
with mythic maenads who execute the revenge through violent practices.
Through aetiology, on the one hand, myth lays the ground of ritual. On the
other hand, ritual reenacts myth. All in all, the highly self-conscious poet
creates a drama which is based on ritual as origin. Yet ritual is translated
onto the dramatic stage through choreia. Thus in highlighting choral dance
by means of metatheater, mise en abyme, self-reference and projection,
Euripides creates a highly self-referential play based on ritual and myth.
Therefore both forms are intertwined in such a way that everything is
put into question. Clear-cut ethical positions become indiscriminate from
crime, ecstasy and violence. What is left is just a vividly contemporary flux
of action which, however, is based on elements belonging to the origin of
the genre. In front of such a chorally self-aware tragedy we have to give up
exploring the specific message.51 To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan’s (1964:
23) famous sentence “The medium is the message,”52 we could say: The
choral medium is the message qua performance.53
50 Cf. e.g. Henrichs 1969; Henrichs 1982.

51 On a summary of the older scholarship on the so-called riddle of the Bacchae, cf. Bierl 1991: 177–8.
52 See also the entire chapter titled after this sentence in McLuhan 1964: 23–35 as well as the book The
Medium Is the Massage (McLuhan and Fiore 1967), an error by the typesetter.
53 See the translation to ritual studies by Rappaport 1999: 38: “The medium . . . is itself a message, or
better, a meta-message.”
chapter 1 0
The Delian Maidens and their relevance to choral

mimesis in classical drama
Gregory Nagy
Introduction
My focus is on the Delian Maidens, as represented in the Homeric Hymn
(3) to Apollo. These maidens, in verse 163 of the Hymn, are said to be
engaging in an act of mimēsis “reenactment” (hereafter written simply
as mimesis), as expressed in this verse by the verb mimeisthai “reenact,
imitate,” derived from the noun mimos “mime.” I will argue that the act
of mimesis as represented in this archaic hymn is related to the act of
mimesis as performed by choruses in classical drama – specifically, in the
composite dramatic genres of tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play.1 In
terms of my argument, the mimesis performed by the Delian Maidens in
the Hymn is a model for understanding how the classical genres of drama
assimilated various archaic genres of choral songmaking. As we will see,
this model comes to life in the interaction of solo and choral performance
as represented in the Hymn. Such an interaction, as we will also see, is an
act of mediation that proves to be the essence of mimesis in classical drama.
My overall argumentation stems primarily from the book Pindar’s Homer
(1990).2 In that work, I confronted two relevant questions: who are the
Delian Maidens and what do they have to do with mimesis? My findings
focused on the identity of the Maidens as a chorus, and on the essence of
mimesis as a mental activity performed by a chorus. A summary of these
findings was later published as the article “Transformations of choral lyric”
by the journal Arion (1994/5), in an issue dedicated to the topic of choral
performance.3 I then expanded on these findings in the book Poetry as
1 I mention here only three of the four genres of classical Athenian drama. That is because the fourth
genre, the dithyramb, is unlike tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play by virtue of the fact that it is
entirely choral. By contrast, the other three genres are composite by virtue of the fact that they are
composed of non-choral parts performed by professional actors as well as choral parts performed
by the nonprofessional chorus. As my argumentation proceeds, I will elaborate on the distinction I
make here between the professionalized actors and the nonprofessional chorus.
2 Nagy 1990b, hereafter abbreviated as PH. This and other abbreviations are listed in the Bibliography.
3 Nagy 1994/5b, hereafter abbreviated as TCL.
227
228 Gregory Nagy
Performance (1996).4 Here I will reassess this earlier work in the light of
later work done by myself and by others. In the case of work done by others,
I highlight the articles of Albert Henrichs (1996) and Anastasia Erasmia
Peponi (2009); also the book of Barbara Kowalzig (2007b). In the case of
my own later work, I highlight two books, Homer the Classic (2009) and
Homer the Preclassic (2010).5
When I use the word chorus here, I have in mind the Greek word khoros.
I understand the fundamental meaning of khoros to be “song-and-dance
group,” with emphasis on both song and dance, although I also understand
that either the song may dominate the dance or the dance may dominate
the song in different choral traditions.6
When I use the word mimesis, I understand the primary meaning of the
original Greek word to be “reenactment,” as in a chorus. What I mean by
a reenactment is a reliving through ritual. And I understand the secondary
meaning of mimesis to be “imitation.” I say secondary because I understand
imitation to be a built-in aspect of reenactment. All reenactment is imi-
tation, but not all imitation is reenactment. I say that all reenactment is
imitation because the one who relives something through ritual can imitate
predecessors who have already relived that something through ritual. And I
say that not all imitation is reenactment because you can imitate someone
or something without having to relive anything through ritual. Gradu-
ally, starting in the fifth century bce, the primary meaning of mimesis as
“reenactment” became destabilized, and the new primary meaning became
simply “imitation.” This destabilization, caused by a gradual weakening
of ritual practices in general, led to a new secondary meaning of mimesis,
which can best be translated as “representation.” Unlike reenactment as I
have defined it, representation can be devoid of ritual.7
For my working definition of mimesis, I have just used the word rit-
ual. For a working definition of this term, I reapply Stanley Tambiah’s
formulation of ritual as “a culturally constructed system of symbolic
communication.”8 Keeping in mind this broad working definition of rit-
ual, I argue that myth – or at least the performance of myth as song, poetry,
or prose – can be seen as an aspect of ritual, though of course myth is
4 Nagy 1996b, hereafter abbreviated as PP.

5 Nagy 2009 (the online version is 2008) and Nagy 2010 (the online version is 2009) are hereafter
abbreviated as HC and HPC respectively.
6 TCL 41.
7 This paragraph is a distillation of my detailed argumentation in PH 42–5, 346, 349, 373–5, 381, 387,
411.
8 Tambiah 1985:128. My original applications had been worked out in the Introduction to PH.
The Delian Maidens and choral mimesis in classical drama 229
also potentially distinguishable from ritual.9 And I add here a working
definition of myth: it is a given traditional society’s coding of truth-values
through narrative.10
The Delian Maidens in the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo

Here is the full text of the description of the Delian Maidens in the Homeric
Hymn (3) to Apollo:
pr¼v d t»de mga qaÓma, Âou klov oÎpotì ½le±tai,

koÓrai Dhlidev ëEkathbeltao qerpnaiá
a¯ tì peª r präton mn %p»llwnì Ëmnswsin,
aÔtiv dì aÔ LhtÛ te kaª *rtemin «ocairan,
mnhsmenai ndrän te palaiän d gunaikän 160
Ìmnon e©dousin, qlgousi d fÓlì nqrÛpwn.
pntwn dì nqrÛpwn fwnv kaª krembaliastÆn
mime±sqì sasiná fa©h d ken aÉt¼v kastov
fqggesqìá oÌtw sfin kal sunrhren oid.
llì geqì ¬lkoi mn %p»llwn %rtmidi xÅn, 165
ca©rete dì Ëme±v psaiá me±o d kaª met»pisqe
mnsasqì, ¾pp»te kn tiv picqon©wn nqrÛpwn
nqdì ne©rhtai xe±nov talape©riov lqÛná
å koÓrai, t©v dì Îmmin nr ¤distov oidän
nqde pwle±tai, kaª t trpesqe mlista; 170
Ëme±v dì eÔ mla psai Ëpokr©nasqai fì ¡mwná11
tufl¼v nr, o«ke± d C© ni paipaloss
,
toÓ psai met»pisqen risteÅousin oida©.
¡me±v dì Ëmteron klov osomen Âsson pì a²an
nqrÛpwn stref»mesqa p»leiv eÔ naietaÛsavá 175
o¬ dì pª d pe©sontai, peª kaª ttum»n stin.
aÉtr gÜn oÉ lxw khb»lon %p»llwna
Ëmnwn rgur»toxon Án Ökomov tke LhtÛ.
And then, there is this great thing of wonder [thauma], the fame
[kleos] of which will never perish:
the Delian Maidens, attendants [therapnai] of the one who shoots
from afar.
9 I offer the formulation “myth implies ritual in the very performance of myth” in Nagy 1989: xi and
in Nagy 1992: 317.
10 Elaborations in Nagy 1990a, hereafter GM, 8; cf. PH 313–17.
11 I read here Ëpokr©nasqai (infinitive used as imperative) not Ëpokr©nasqe (imperative). And I read
fì ¡mwn not mfì ¡mwn (both textual variants are attested in the medieval manuscript tradition).
230 Gregory Nagy
So12 when they make Apollo their humnos 13 first and foremost,
and then Leto and Artemis, shooter of arrows,
they keep in mind men of the past and women too, 160
as they sing the humnos, and they enchant all different kinds
of humanity.
All humans’ voices and rhythms14
they know how to reenact [mimeisthai]. And each single person
would say that his own voice
was their voice. That is how their beautiful song has each of its
parts fitting together [sunarariskein] in place.
But come now, may Apollo be gracious, along with Artemis; 165
and you all also, hail and take pleasure [khairete], all of you
[Maidens of Delos]. Keep me, even in the future,
in your mind, whenever someone, out of the whole mass of
earthbound humanity,
comes here [to Delos], after arduous wandering, as a guest
entitled to the rules of hosting, and asks this question:
“O Maidens, who is for you the most pleasurable of singers
that wanders here? In whom do you take the most delight
[terpesthai]?” 170
Then you, all of you [Maidens of Delos], must very properly
respond [hupokrinesthai] about me:15
“It is a blind man, and he dwells [oikein] in Chios, a rugged
land,
and all his songs will in the future prevail as the very best.”
And I16 in turn will carry your fame [kleos] as far over
the earth
as I wander, throughout the cities of men, with their
fair populations. 175
12 The particle ra / ça / r “so, then” has an “evidentiary” force, indicating that the speaker notionally
sees what is simultaneously being spoken. See Bakker 2005:12n, 80, 84, 97–100, 104, 146, 172n33.
13 On the occasion of singing a humnos, the god who is being sung in the humnos – who is the subject
of the humnos – is metonymically equated with the humnos itself: by metonymy, the god is the song.
14 A variant reading here is bambaliastus. See PH 43. The noun krembaliastus indicates the creation of
rhythm by way of musical instruments of percussion, such as krotala, and this rhythm is distinctly
choral: see the argumentation of Peponi 2009, who also adduces iconographical evidence showing
the Muses themselves in the act of singing and dancing while playing on krotala.
15 In a quotation made by Thucydides (3.104.5) from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, we find an alternative
reading in place of the phrase fì ¡mwn “about me” as attested here at verse 171 of the Hymn: that
alternative reading is fmwv. On the meaning, see HC 201n25. On the translation of the phrase
fì ¡mwn as “about me,” where I could have rendered it more literally as “about us,” see the next
note.
16 I translate as “I” the Greek word ¡me±v here at verse 174 of the Hymn, though it means literally, “we.”
In Homeric diction, the speaking “I” who is the master narrator, as in Odyssey i.1, is interchangeable
with a speaking “we,” as in Odyssey i.10. Such interchangeability is relevant to the role of the speaker
in this Hymn, as we will see at a later point in my argumentation.
And they will all believe – I now see – since it is genuine
[etētumon].
As for me, I will not leave off [lēgein] making far-shooting
Apollo
my humnos,17 the one with the silver quiver, who was born of Leto
with the beautiful hair. Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo, 156–78
Four words relating to the mimesis performed by

the Delian Maidens
I have selected from this passage four words that will prove to be essential
for my overall argumentation about the mimesis performed by the Delian
Maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo.
The first of these words is Ëmnswsin at verse 158, a form of the verb
humnein, meaning “make a humnos” or “make someone [in particular, a
divinity] the subject of a humnos.” This verb is derived from the noun
humnos, ordinarily translated in its narrow sense of “hymn.” In the present
context, the form refers to the performance of the Delian Maidens, which I
will argue is a choral performance. And it refers also to the performance of
the actual Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which is a humnos in the narrow sense
of a “hymn” as used in the conventional title Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo.
I must add that Ëmnwn at verse 178, referring to the solo performance of
the “hymn” by the speaker of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, is a form of
the same verb humneı̂n and shows the same meaning “make a humnos”
or “make someone [in particular, a divinity] the subject of a humnos.”
As I will argue, it is as if a choral performance of a humnos to Apollo
by the Delian Maidens were the same thing as the solo performance of
the actual Hymn to Apollo. When I say as if it were the same thing here,
I am referring to the mental activity of mimesis as I highlighted it in the
Introduction. I will have more to say later about the interaction of solo
and choral performances as dramatized by way of mimesis in the Hymn to
Apollo.
The second of the four words I have selected from the passage I just
quoted from the Hymn to Apollo is Ìmnon at verse 161, accusative of the
noun humnos. In the present context, it refers to the performance of
the Delian Maidens, even as it extends beyond the actual Hymn. Here
the word humnos is used in the broader sense of a “song” as we see it used
also in Odyssey viii.420, where this same word refers to the entirety of a
17 Once again, the god who is being sung in the humnos – who is the subject of the humnos – is
metonymically equated with the humnos itself: by metonymy, the god is the song.
232 Gregory Nagy
performance, as opposed to the narrower sense of a “hymn” to a divinity.18
In that narrower sense, a humnos is only a part of a performance and simply
introduces the rest of the performance.19 In terms of the broader sense of
humnos, however, the Delian Maidens are a model for the making of a
whole song, not only for the making of a hymn that introduces the whole
song. When I say model here, I am referring once again to the mental
activity of mimesis as I highlighted it in the Introduction. I will have more
to say later about the reenactment of models by way of mimesis.
The third of the four selected words is mime±sqì at verse 163. This verb
mimeisthai “reenact, imitate,” along with its derivative noun mimēsis, is the
centerpoint of my overall argumentation.20 As I have argued in Poetry as
Performance (1996) and as I argue in more detail here, these two words
convey the central idea of theatrical performance by a chorus of singing
and dancing performers.21 The wording of the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo
indicates that the choral performance of the Delian Maidens involves both
singing (verse 161 Ìmnon e©dousin, verse 164 oid) and dancing to the
rhythm of percussive instruments (verse 162 krembaliastÅn).22
The last of the four words I have selected from the passage I quoted
from the Hymn to Apollo is Ëpokr©nasqai at verse 171, which I interpret
as the aorist infinitive (used as an imperative) of the verb hupokrinesthai
“respond.” In this context, the quoted words of the Maidens in the Hymn
are in effect “responding” to the question that the unnamed wanderer is
asking: who is the best of all singers? As in the case of mimeisthai “reenact,
imitate” at verse 163, so also in this case of hupokrinesthai “respond” here
at verse 171, I will argue that this word conveys the idea of theatrical
performance by a chorus. The “responsion” conveyed by hupokrinesthai at
verse 171 is theatrical, and it is related to the usages of the same verb
hupokrinesthai and of its agent noun hupokritēs in prose, where these two
words mean respectively “act” and “actor” in the context of the theatron
“theater,” especially the theater of tragedy.23 As we will see, the theatricality
conveyed by way of the word hupokrinesthai “respond” at verse 171 is made
explicit, at verse 163, by way of the word mimeisthai “reenact, imitate.”
18 HC 313–26. 19 HC 312–13.
20 The combination of mime±sqì with sasin can best be understood by comparing the usage of o²da
in Archilochus, on which see HC 217–18.
21 PP 80–1. Here and hereafter, I use the term theatrical as a synonym of dramatic in a technical sense,
that is, related to performance in drama.
22 Peponi 2009. She notes the iconographical evidence showing Muses in the act of dancing to the
rhythm of percussive instruments. The parallelism of the Muses and the Delian Maidens in this
regard is relevant to what I have to say later about other such parallelisms.
23 HC 92–3.
The making of mimesis by the chorus

I start with an observation made by Walter Burkert about the context of
mimeisthai “reenact, imitate” at verse 163 in the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo.
He interprets verses 162–5, where the speaker of the Hymn encounters the
Delian Maidens at a festival on the island of Delos, as a reference to the
“performance of choral lyrics.”24 In my own work, I have built on this
observation by advancing the argument that the Delian Maidens in the
Hymn represent an idealization of choral lyric.25 I argue further that these
Maidens “are presented in the Hymn as archetypes meant to be reenacted
in the local ritual context of real choral performances at Delos – in which
context the choral participants would be equated, for the ritual moment,
with the archetypal Maidens.”26 Such a reenactment is mimesis in the
primary sense that I outlined in the Introduction.
So, what would be the basic form of such choral lyric performance?
A more accurate term for this form is choral song and dance. And the
choral singing and dancing was a ritual activity. The definitive work on
the ritual background of choral song and dance is a two-volume book
by Claude Calame on choruses in archaic Greece (1977).27 The subtitle
of the first volume, Morphologie, fonction religieuse et sociale, captures a
central insight concerning choruses of female performers in particular
and choruses in general, which Calame himself articulates in the course
of his prodigiously exhaustive collection of data. The insight is this: the
archaic Greek chorus has a fundamentally social and even religious function
as a holistic expression of the given society for which the given chorus
performs.28 The term religious function in this formulation can be described
in terms of ritual as I defined it in the Introduction.
A premier example of the ritual function of choral song and dance
as analyzed by Calame is Song 1 of the poet Alcman, who flourished
in the seventh century bce (my numbering follows the PMG edition
of Page). This song, the so-called Partheneion or “Maiden-Song,” was a
choral composition destined for performance in archaic Sparta.29 And the
archetypal figures in this song, including the primary archetypal figures
named Hagesikhora and Agido, were acted out by the choral participants
in performances held on a seasonally recurring basis.30
24 Burkert 1987: 54. 25 PH 43, 375–7; TCL 45.
26 PP 56; this formulation is quoted with approval by Henrichs 1996a: 58n35.
27 The definitive second edition is Calame 2001.
28 I first formulated this paraphrase of Calame’s insight in TCL 44.
29 For more on the Partheneion of Alcman, see Ferrari 2008.
30 PH 345–70; TCL 45. See also Clay 1991.
234 Gregory Nagy
The insight of Calame about the ritual function of archaic choral lyric
applies also to the classical choral lyric of Athenian State Theater.31 In all
four of the genres of drama performed in Athenian State Theater – tragedy,
comedy, satyr drama, and dithyramb – there is an analogous ritual function
in the choral singing and dancing that we find embedded in the drama. As
Richard Seaford says about classical tragedy in particular, a historical study
of the overall structure of such drama confirms that “the performance of
tragedy originated in the practice of ritual.”32
The democratizing of choral lyric

There is a major difference in the ritual function of the archaic and the
classical forms of choral singing and dancing. For an understanding of
this difference I turn to a formulation by Burkert, who notes that the
archaic chorus is aristocratic, whereas the classical chorus of Athenian State
Theater has been radically democratized.33 Burkert highlights a reference
by the “Old Oligarch,” also known as “pseudo-Xenophon” (Constitution
of Athens 1.13), concerning a lavish form of choral performance traditions
that reportedly became obsolete in Athens under the democracy: “Stripped
of its polemical overtones, this [reference by the Old Oligarch] remains an
interesting account of musical events before the democratic revolutions.”34
In predemocratic Athens, as Burkert argues, choral performance traditions
most closely resembled what we see in the archaic choral songmaking of
the poet Stesichorus, whose lifetime straddles the seventh and the sixth
century bce and whose songs are the main point of interest for Burkert. I
will have more to say later about the songmaking of Stesichorus.
In Plato’s works, the democratization in the Athenian songmaking tra-
ditions of choral lyric is conveyed by the negative term theatrokratia (Pl.
Leg. 3.701a), implying dēmokratia.35 This term theatrokratia describes the
democratized state of the arts in the classical era of Athens, in contrast with
the aristokratia of the “good old days,” as in the era preceding the Persian
Wars (Leg. 3.698b–700a), when there were still distinct eidē or “genres.”36
Five examples are mentioned, of which four are choral in nature: humnos
“hymn,” thrēnos “lament,” paian “paean,” and dithurambos “dithyramb”
31 What I say here was the main point of TCL. 32 Seaford 1984:14; PH 30.
33 Burkert 1987: 52. 34 Burkert 1987: 52.
35 TCL 47. See also Leg. 2.658a–9c, 669b–70b, and the comments by Svenbro 1984: 231n133.
36 On the appropriateness of translating eidē as genres here, see again Svenbro 1984: 225, 232n135.
(Leg. 3.700b).37 These genres, as structurally distinct forms of choral song-
making, correspond to the structurally distinct aspects of aristokratia in
Plato’s good old Athenian society (Leg. 3.701a).38
The starting point for the theatrocracy that Plato takes back in time to
the era of the Persian Wars can in fact be taken back even farther, all the
way to the earliest recoverable phases in the evolution of Athenian State
Theater in the sixth century bce.39 From a historical perspective, I offer
this formulation of theatrocracy and its effects: in the choral parts of the
composite genre of tragedy and in the other composite genres of Athenian
State Theater, namely, in comedy and in the satyr drama, we can see the
assimilation of various different genres of choral songmaking that are still
independent and unassimilated in the repertoire of an archaizing poet like
Pindar, who flourished in the first half of the fifth century bce and who is
credited with compositions that fit the distinct categories of choral genres
like the humnos, thrēnos, paian, and dithurambos.40
Such assimilation of genres, as I will argue, can be explained in terms
of mimesis as practiced in the choral parts of the composite genre of
tragedy and in the other composite genres of Athenian State Theater. And
a prototype of this kind of mimesis, as I will also argue, is reflected in the
reference made in the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo to the Delian Maidens
as practitioners of mimesis (163 mimeisthai).
Homer’s Delian Maidens and Hesiod’s Muses as models

of mimesis
At verses 161–4 of the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo, the text of which I will
examine at a later point, the Delian Maidens are described as having the
power to make a mimesis of the voices of all people. In Pindar’s Homer, I
argued that such mimesis, as practiced by the Maidens, extends to the voice
of Homer himself. In terms of that argument, the Maidens in this Hymn
are in effect offering to make a mimesis of Homer, that is, to “reenact”
him, and Homer responds by making a mimesis of them.41 I return to that
37 Further discussion of all five examples in PH 108–9, 401, 403. The fifth example, the kitharōidikos
nomos “citharodic nome” (Leg. 3.700b), can be described as a virtuoso monodic offshoot of choral
performance: see PH 86–7, 340–1, 357–8.
38 Cf. Svenbro 1984: 225. On the appropriation, by Athenian State Theater, of the songmaking
traditions of lamentation, see Loraux 1998: 10–11.
39 TCL 47–8.
40 This formulation is based on an earlier formulation in PH 403. I need to repeat here what I said at
the beginning, that the dithyramb, unlike tragedy, comedy, and the satyr drama, is not a composite
genre, since it is entirely choral.
41 PH 375–6; see also PP 82.
236 Gregory Nagy
argument here, enhancing it with further discussion. And I will focus on a
set of similarities that link the Delian Maidens as represented in the Hymn
with the Muses as represented in the Hesiodic Theogony.
At the core of these similarities is the relationship between poets and
Muses. In archaic Greek poetry, formulaic descriptions of the Muses are
closely related to formulaic descriptions of the generic poet or aoidos
“singer.”42 The characteristics of the Muses, as defined in formulas describ-
ing them, reflect the characteristics of the aoidos in a variety of performative
contexts.43
These performative contexts include situations where the aoidos is inter-
acting with a chorus. The compositions of Alcman known as partheneia
“maiden-songs” are a case in point: here we see a variety of ritual situa-
tions where the aoidos is interacting with a chorus composed of elite local
girls of Sparta who, at the moment of singing and dancing, are notion-
ally reenacting the singing and dancing of local goddesses (as in Alcman
PMG 1).44
And the Muses themselves can be idealized as a chorus of local goddesses
who perform their choral song and dance in a locale that is sacred to them.45
When the Muses in the Hesiodic Theogony are imagined as starting the
performance of their song, which is a theogony in its own right and thus a
model for Hesiod the aoidos, they perform in the mode of a khoros (this is
the word that is used), a “chorus” of local goddesses singing and dancing in
a locale sacred to them, Mount Helicon (Hes. Theog. 3–4, 70). This kind
of modeling, I argue, is the essence of mimesis as performed by the Muses.
The relationship between the aoidos of the Hesiodic Theogony and the
chorus of Heliconian Muses is matched by the relationship between the
aoidos of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and the Delian Maidens, as we see it
dramatized in the passage I quoted and translated from the Hymn. These
Maidens, described as the therapnai “attendants” of the god Apollo (157),
are addressed by the poet of this Homeric Hymn with the hymnic salutation
khairete (166), in conjunction with the god Apollo (165).46 I translate this
salutation as “hail and take pleasure”: the verb khairein is related to the noun
kharis, which conveys the idea of “favor” or “graciousness” in the sense of
reciprocated beauty and pleasure.47 With his salutation of khairete (166), the
aoidos is asking the Delian Maidens to accept the kharis “favor” of his song
and to give him their “favor,” their kharis, in return. The hymnic salutation
khaire or khairete is used in the Homeric Hymns to address the given god
42 Nagy 1979, hereafter BA, 296–7. 43 BA 301–7.
44 PH 346–7; PP 53–4, 57, 89–90, 92, 96. 45 GM 57–8. 46 GM 58.
47 Nagy 2002, hereafter PR, 82n37. See now also Calame 2005a: 26–8.
or gods presiding over the performance of each given hymn. Similarly
in the Hesiodic Theogony, the figure of Hesiod addresses the Muses with
the hymnic salutation khairete (104) in the context of naming them, in
conjunction with Apollo, as the divine sources of poetic power (94–5). In
the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo, as I argue, the aoidos who addresses the
Delian Maidens with the hymnic salutation khairete is imagined as Homer
himself.48 This way of imagining the aoidos extends into the classical period,
as we see from the testimony of Thucydides (3.104.4), who says outright
that the poet of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo is Homer.
The figure of Homer addresses the Delian Maidens with the hymnic
salutation khairete in the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo (166) just as the
figure of Hesiod addresses the Olympian Muses with the hymnic salutation
khairete in the Theogony (104). This parallelism indicates that Homer is
in effect addressing the local Muses of Delos, who are divine in their
own right. It is not a contradiction, however, to maintain that the Delian
Maidens are simultaneously envisioned as members of a local khoros of girls
or women.49 As I pointed out a moment ago with reference to Alcman’s
partheneia, the role of divinity can be appropriated by members of a chorus
during choral performance. So the Delian Maidens as a choral ensemble
can reenact the local Delian Muses.50
Homer’s dramatized encounter with the Delian Maidens is comparable
to Hesiod’s dramatized encounter with the local Muses of Mount Heli-
con (Hes. Theog. 22–34), which leads to the transformation of their local
theogony into the Panhellenic Theogony sung by Hesiod – and to their own
transformation into the Panhellenic Muses of Mount Olympus (verses 52
and thereafter).51 The Panhellenization of the Heliconian Muses is a matter
of reciprocation: they are transformed into Olympian Muses because they
transform Hesiod, who is implicitly a generic aoidos and master of kleos
“fame” (Hes. Theog. 99–101). They transform Hesiod into a Panhellenic
figure in his own right, who articulates a single Theogony that notionally
48 PH 375–6; PP 82.
49 See Peponi 2009: 54–5, 66n71. Also Calame 2001: 30, 104, 110. Thuc. 3.104.5 refers to this chorus as
gunaikes “women”; accordingly, it may be too restrictive to say “Delian Maidens,” if the categories of
choral groupings included women as well as unmarried “maidens”; in that case, it may be preferable
to use a more inclusive translation, “Deliades.” See HC 204n36.
50 HC 204–5. The use of the word therapnai (qerpnai) at verse 157 of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo
is relevant to my argument: as Marianne Hopman and Renaud Gagné point out to me, this
word therapnai could refer simultaneously to the Delian Maidens as worshippers – that is, as local
attendants in the sanctuary of Apollo – and as mythical followers of the god. This way, the Delian
Maidens are simultaneously a local khoros of Delian women and the archetypal Muses abiding on
the island of Delos.
51 GM 58.
238 Gregory Nagy
supersedes all other potential theogonies in its truth value (22–34).52 Fur-
ther, the local humnos of the Heliconian Muses has been transformed into
the Panhellenic humnos of the Olympian Muses. The Hesiodic Theogony
ultimately defines itself as one single continuous gigantic humnos.53
Similarly in the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo, the dramatized encounter
of the aoidos with the local Delian Maidens leads to the transformation
of their local humnos to Apollo (Ëmnswsin at 158, Ìmnon at 161) into the
Panhellenic Hymn to Apollo sung by a man described as “the most pleasing
of all singers [aoidoi]” (169). This aoidos is further described, in the words of
the Delian Maidens, as a blind man whose home is on the island of Chios
(172). His aoidai “songs,” as the words of the Delian Maidens prophesy,
will be supreme, performed throughout the cities of humankind (173–5).54
This aoidos of the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo, like Hesiod, is a master
of kleos: he speaks about the kleos of the hymn performed by the Delian
Maidens (Hymn to Apollo 156), and he promises that he will spread that
kleos (174) throughout all the cities he visits (173–5). The Panhellenization
of the Delian Maidens, like the Panhellenization of the Heliconian Muses,
is a matter of reciprocated kleos. And it is also a matter of reciprocated
mimesis.55
In the Hymn, the description of the blind aoidos from Chios who will
spread the kleos of the Delian Maidens throughout the cities of humankind
(172–5) starts with a quotation spoken by the Delian Maidens (172–3) in
response to an unnamed wanderer, “someone” (tis) who arrives in Delos
and asks the Delian Maidens this question: who is the best aoidos of all
(169–70)? When the Delian Maidens “respond” (Ëpokr©nasqai 171) to the
question of this unnamed wanderer, of this “someone,” it is the quotation
of their performed words that reciprocates the kleos: the quoted response
of the Maidens (173–5) identifies the best aoidos with the aoidos who quotes
their response about him, who will confer kleos on the Delian Maidens as
he wanders throughout the cities of humankind.56
In the riddling language of the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo, the unnamed
wanderer to Delos, this “someone” whose question to the Delian Maidens
is quoted in the Hymn (169–70), can be the same persona as the unnamed
aoidos of the Hymn who quotes the response of the Delian Maidens (172–3),
who is the same persona as the unnamed aoidos who will now wander from
Delos to all the cities of humankind, a bearer of the kleos that is reciprocated
between him and the Maidens (174–5). This composite unnamed persona
is the figure of Homer himself.57
52 HC 124–8. 53 HC 205. 54 HC 205. 55 HC 205. 56 HC 205. 57 HC 205–6.
The identity of Homer in the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo is expressed
by way of riddling and even mantic speech. The description of the “some-
one” who has reached Delos after arduous wanderings (167–8) antici-
pates the response (174–5) to the question “who?” (169–70). That response
(174–5) pictures the master singer who wanders throughout the cities of
humankind. But this master singer is not explicitly named as Homer.
Instead, his identity is implicit in the riddle posed by the question: he is
the answer to the question “who?” – but he is also the “someone” that asks
the question “who?” The response of the Delian Maidens is Homer’s own
response, since their response is quoted by him. The singer who leaves
Delos with an answer loops back to the singer who arrives at Delos with
a question.58 This looping effect has its own significance: each time this
wandering minstrel arrives at Delos, he becomes a regeneration of Homer
as he sings in Delos. Each time the figure of Homer is pictured as singing
in Delos, the Delian Maidens authorize him all over again. The eternal
return of Homer is made possible by the notionally eternal recycling of his
songs.59
Here I come back full circle to what I proposed at the start of this
section, that the Delian Maidens of the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo are in
effect offering to make a mimesis of Homer, and that Homer responds by
making a mimesis of them. In the mythical world of the Homeric Hymn to
Apollo, epic performance is being assimilated to a theatrical performance
by an idealized chorus of local Muses, the Delian Maidens.
In terms of the model I am building to explain the traditions of perfor-
mance at festivals, a theatrical word like mimeisthai in the Homeric Hymn
(3) to Apollo (line 171) reveals an early phase of an ongoing symbiosis of
two elements: one is the Homeric tradition as it evolved at the Athenian
festival of the Panathenaia and the other is the theatrical tradition of drama
as it evolved at the Athenian festival of the City Dionysia.60 As I argue
58 HC 206. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (168), according to the version quoted by Thucydides
3.104.5, the wanderer who arrives at Delos is described as allos – seemingly some person “other”
than the speaker. Even in terms of this variant, my formulation holds: this seemingly “other” person
becomes the same person as the speaker – once the response of the Delian Maidens to that “other”
person is actually quoted by the speaker.
59 HC 206. As I indicated earlier, I translate as “I” the Greek word ¡me±v at verse 174 of the Hymn,
though it means literally, “we.” In Homeric diction, as I also indicated earlier, the speaking “I” who
is the master narrator, as in Odyssey i.1, is interchangeable with a speaking “we,” as in Odyssey i.10. I
have by now reached a point in my argumentation where I can offer an explanation. Such an elliptic
speaking “we” implies that the persona of the speaking “I” is the latest in a succession, through time,
of previous speakers. I develop a model for such a succession of speakers in PP 214–25.
60 PP 81. The symmetry of the Panathenaia and the City Dionysia as the two most important festivals
of the Athenians is evident in a formulation by Demosthenes in the First Philippic (4.35).
240 Gregory Nagy
in Homer the Classic, such symbiosis was facilitated by the medium of the
humnos or enkōmion “encomium, celebration, song of praise” – whether
or not Aristotle is right in thinking of this medium as an undifferentiated
prototype of epic and tragedy.61
From Aristotle’s point of view, the prototype of the humnos or enkōmion
was a choral medium. This medium’s eventual differentiation into epic
and tragedy involved the individuation of its leading performers. That
is, the performances of soloists emerged out of an ensemble of choral
performers. Further, there was a differentiation of roles: a speaker of words
was singled out from among an ensemble of singers and dancers. Such
differentiation, as I argue in Homer the Classic, is conveyed by Aristotle’s
use of the technical term exarkhein, in the sense of “leading” a chorus.62
For Aristotle, the exarkhōn or “leader” of a chorus was a prototypical actor
in drama, whose lexis or “speech” was differentiated from the rest of the
singing and dancing performed by the chorus.
In the Poetics, Aristotle develops his theory of differentiation in the
broader context of reconstructing the prehistory of the four dramatic gen-
res of the City Dionysia in Athens: tragedy, comedy, satyr drama, and
dithyramb. In terms of Aristotle’s reconstruction, all four of these dramatic
genres resulted from progressive differentiations of earlier and less differ-
entiated forms of choral performances.63 By choral performances I mean of
course the singing and dancing of choral ensembles at festivals.
I draw this section to a close by emphasizing that mimesis is a feature
of both choral performance and monodic performance as individuated
from choral performance. Monodic performance can make a mimesis of
choral performance, as we see in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, but choral
performance can also make mimesis, and it can do so outside of Athenian
State Theater. Choral performance can make a mimesis of either (1) other
choral performances or (2) even monodic performances.
Choral performance as a nonprofessional activity

So far, my discussion has supported the observation of Burkert concern-
ing verses 162–5 in the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo, which include the
mention of mimesis at verse 163 (mimeisthai). I have agreed with him that
these verses refer to the “performance of choral lyrics.”64 And I also agree
61 HC 214. I note there that Aristotle’s use of the terms humnos “hymn” and enkōmion “encomium,
celebration, song of praise” is comparable to Plato’s use of the terms humnos and enkōmiazein in the
Timaeus (21a).
62 HC 214. 63 PH 384–92. 64 Burkert 1987: 54.
with his overall argument that the idealized performance of the Delian
Maidens, as represented in the Homeric Hymn, is analogous to the histor-
ical performances of choruses in the archaic period, as in the case of the
choral songmaking attributed to Stesichorus. But now I come to a point
of disagreement. Specifically, I disagree with Burkert’s view that those who
performed the singing and dancing in such archaic choruses were itinerant
professionals.65 It seems clear, especially from the evidence assembled in
Calame’s book on choruses, that performers who participated in choruses
during the archaic period were not professionals, and that the nonprofes-
sionalism of the choral participants was linked with the fact that choral
participation was grounded in the ritual heritage of the community to
which the participants belonged.66
In arguing that those who performed the singing and dancing in archaic
choruses were professionals, Burkert offers the following formulation, with
reference to the testimony of the anonymous Athenian author convention-
ally known as the “Old Oligarch”:
We have at least one piece of testimony that professional foreign musicians
performed in Athens in the sixth century: the “Old Oligarch” [pseudo-
Xenophon, Constitution of the Athenians 1.13] states that “the demos has
abolished here [= at Athens] those who performed sports and music. They
decreed this was not honorable, because (in reality) they knew (but too well)
that they could not do this themselves” [toÆv d gumnazomnouv aÉt»qi
kaª tn mousikn pithdeÅontav katalluken ¾ dmov, nom©zwn toÓto
oÉ kal¼n e²nai, gnoÆv Âti oÉ dunat¼v taÓt stin pithdeÅein].67
As I interpret the original Greek wording of this statement by the Old
Oligarch, he is saying something different from what we see in the trans-
lation offered by Burkert. However slanted the views of the Old Oligarch
may be when he speaks of the democratic State or Demos, his wording
reflects accurately the historical circumstances that provoke those views. As
I interpret the wording, he is not saying that the aristocrats of Athens in
the archaic period were professionals when they sang and danced at choral
events. It is quite the opposite. They were ostentatiously nonprofessional –
just as they were ostentatiously nonprofessional when they participated in
athletic events. The original Greek phrase toÆv d gumnazomnouv . . . kaª
tn mousikn pithdeÅontav needs to be rendered not as “those who per-
formed sports and music” but rather as “those who performed in athletic
and in songmaking events,” where the mousikē or “songmaking” includes
65 PH 362n124, with reference to the arguments of Burkert 1987: 51–2.

66 PH 85, 104, 106, 113, 188–90, 340–2, 343, 362, 379, 405. 67 Burkert 1987: 52.
242 Gregory Nagy
choral singing and dancing.68 We can know for sure that the Old Oligarch
has in mind a pairing of choral events with athletic events in this con-
text because he goes on to say (Constitution of the Athenians 1.13) that the
Demos tampered with aristocratic institutions by establishing democratic
institutions of choral leadership and athletic leadership, khorēgia and gum-
nasiarkhia, where the rank and file are being led by khorēgoi “chorus leaders”
and gumnasiarkhoi “athletics leaders” selected from the stratum of society
that is rich enough to finance these activities, and thus “the Demos thinks
it proper to get money for singing, running, and dancing” (1.13 xio± goÓn
rgÅrion lambnein ¾ dmov kaª dwn kaª trcwn kaª ½rcoÅmenov) just
as it gets money for “sailing in ships” (plwn n ta±v naus©n), that is, for
manning the warships or triremes of the Athenian navy.
From the standpoint of the Old Oligarch, the nonaristocrats who rep-
resented the democratic State or Demos did not appreciate the beauty of
nonprofessional athletic and choral events as practiced by the aristocrats,
thinking that the whole thing was not kalon, not really “beautiful” (here I
resist the translation adopted by Burkert: “honorable”), and, in their spite-
fulness, they passed legislation that was designed to commercialize athletic
and choral activities as well as the military activity of serving in the navy.
And such commercialization, as we will see, led to the professionalization
of Athenian State Theater.
Pursuing my reinterpretation, I now offer a retranslation of the relevant
passage taken from the Old Oligarch (1.13):
toÆv d gumnazomnouv aÉt»qi kaª tn mousikn pithdeÅontav
katalluken ¾ dmov, nom©zwn toÓto oÉ kal¼n e²nai, gnoÆv Âti oÉ
dunat¼v taÓt stin pithdeÅein. n ta±v corhg©aiv aÔ kaª gumnasiar-
c©aiv kaª trihrarc©aiv gignÛskousin Âti corhgoÓsi mn o¬ ploÅsioi,
corhge±tai d ¾ dmov, kaª gumnasiarcoÓsin o¬ ploÅsioi kaª trihrar-
coÓsin, ¾ d dmov trihrarce±tai kaª gumnasiarce±tai. xio± goÓn
rgÅrion lambnein ¾ dmov kaª dwn kaª trcwn kaª ½rcoÅmenov kaª
plwn n ta±v naus©n, ¯na aÉt»v te c
kaª o¬ ploÅsioi pensteroi
g©gnwntai.
The Demos here [= at Athens] has stopped those [= the aristocrats] who
practice athletics and who pursue the practice of songmaking mousikē. They
[= the nonaristocrats as represented by the Demos] express the view that
this [= the entirety of these practices] is not really beautiful, because they
know all too well that they [= the nonaristocrats] are unable to pursue
these practices themselves. Moreover, when it comes to the institutions of
68 On the use of the word mousikē as a term for the art of making poetry or song, including choral
singing and dancing, see HC 362–73.
khorēgia [= leadership of choral activities] and gumnasiarkhia [= leadership
of athletic activities] and triērarkhia [leadership of naval activities], they
know all too well that the rich are in the position of leaders in the choral
activities while the nonaristocrats are in the position of followers, and that
the rich are in the position of leaders in the athletic and the naval activities
while again the nonaristocrats are in the position of followers. And so, that is
why the nonaristocrats feel entitled to take money for singing and running
and dancing and sailing in ships. That way, they get money while the rich
keep getting poorer and poorer.
Such is the slanted attitude of the Athenian Old Oligarch, who evidently
thinks that the nonaristocrats were never really good enough to be leaders
in choral and in athletic activities on a par with aristocrats. And, although
the nonaristocrats could never even fully appreciate aristocratic activities,
they spitefully passed a law that commercialized these activities. The Old
Oligarch then goes on to highlight the irony he sees in the negative effects
that such commercialization has created for the rich, whom he equates
with the aristocrats. From his point of view, the Demos forces the rich to
allow the poor to participate in choral and athletic activities that used to
be restricted to aristocrats. And, to add insult to injury, the rich now have
to pay for the participation of the poor. Thinking in this slanted context,
the Old Oligarch equates such democratic practices as the awarding of per
diem payments or of cash prizes at festivals with a doling-out of silver to
the poor. In this context, commercialization is a mark of nonaristocrats,
not of aristocrats, and it leads to the professionalization of military service,
of athletics, and even of theater.
In Athens during the classical period, then, the practice of putting a
khorēgos in charge of khorēgia is a decidedly democratic practice, since this
khorēgos in democratic Athens has become differentiated as a nonperformer
whom the State appoints to produce and finance the performances of
choruses in Athenian State Theater.69 That is what the Old Oligarch
means, I argue, when he claims that the democratic State in Athens has
stopped the “musical” as well as the athletic performances of aristocrats:
“the Demos here [= at Athens] has stopped those [= the aristocrats] who
practice athletics and who pursue the practice of songmaking [mousikē]”
(1.13 toÆv d gumnazomnouv aÉt»qi kaª tn mousikn pithdeÅontav
katalluken ¾ dmov). And that is why the Old Oligarch can draw a
parallel between an Athenian khorēgos and the Athenian gumnasiarkhos,
who is appointed by the State to supervise the performances of athletes.
69 Calame 2001: 43–6, 48–9; cf. PH 378.

244 Gregory Nagy
This classical democratic Athenian model is a far cry from what we
see attested in other cities during the preclassical or archaic period, where
the khorēgos is simply the performing “chorus leader” of the performing
chorus.70 By contrast, the khorēgos is more of a “chorus producer” in the
context of democratic Athens in the classical period, since the State has
turned the chorus leader into a nonperformer.
So far, I have argued that the obloquy of the Old Oligarch is being
directed specifically against institutional subsidizing, initiated by the demo-
cratic State, of expenses incurred in choral performance. Such subsidizing,
I now argue further, is not in and of itself pertinent to what I maintain
is the nonprofessional status of the rank-and-file chorus members them-
selves. For an earlier, more aristocratic pattern, we may reconstruct various
different initiatives undertaken by various different aristocratic families
in the production and financing of choral events – and, for that mat-
ter, of local athletic events as well. In the later, more democratic pattern,
by contrast, the activities of producing and financing choral and athletic
events were made the ultimate, although not the immediate, responsibility
of the State.71 I propose that the eventual demise of the earlier pattern
in the case of democratic Athens had to do with the obsolescence of
the archaic choral tradition as represented by a figure like Stesichorus. I
conclude, then, that “the scale and the virtuosity of choral performance
at festivals and other such events would be different in aristocratic and
democratic settings, and that Stesichorus represents a decidedly aristocratic
setting.”72
The evolution of the choral poet-director

Although I have disagreed with Burkert when he describes as itinerant
professionals those who performed the singing and dancing in archaic
choruses, I will now argue that such a description does in fact apply to
the poets who composed the actual songs for the singing and dancing. A
case in point is the poet Stesichorus, whose lifetime as we saw straddled
the seventh and the sixth century bce. Burkert says about this poet: “one
might as well imagine a traveling didaskalos selecting his chorus for training
on the spot.”73 I agree, but I need to stress that such a poet-director
would ordinarily train local nonprofessionals for his choruses. A comparable
70 Calame 2001:43–6. 71 TCL 47. 72 PH 362n124. Cf. Burnett 1988: 129–47.

73 Burkert 1987: 61n54.
description, I argue, applies to the prototypical figure of Homer as we
have seen him represented in the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo: he is a
wandering minstrel, an itinerant professional, who is represented in the act
of interacting with the local chorus of the Delian Maidens. Homer acts as
a poet-director for the Maidens as he cues them to perform their response
to the perennial question: who is the best poet of them all? That is the
force of the expression fì ¡mwn at verse 171 of the Hymn: the Maidens are
cued “by me” to respond dialogically to a question “about me.”74 Such is
the mimesis of Homer by Homer about Homer, as performed for Homer
by the Delian Maidens.
A comparable formulation applies to the figure of Alcman, whose life-
time as we saw can be dated back to the seventh century bce: in the Spartan
tradition, Alcman is represented as a Lydian foreigner who comes to Sparta
as a poet-director of local choruses of young women (PMG 13a; also PMG
1 Scholion B; Vell. Pat. 1.18.2; Ael. VH 12.50). It is relevant to cite here the
Spartan ritual event known as tän Ludän pomp “the Procession of the
Lydians” in connection with the cult of Artemis Orthia (Plut. Vit. Arist.
17.10). We may also compare a ritual event known as the “Dance of the
Lydian Maidens” at a festival of Artemis at Ephesus (Autocrates F 1 KA,
by way of Ael. NA 12.9; Ar. Nub. 599–600). In this case, I argue that the
term “Lydian Maidens” designates a ritual role played by the local girls of
Ephesus.75
Another comparable formulation applies to a later figure, the poet Pin-
dar, who as I already said flourished in the first half of the fifth century bce.
He is represented in his own compositions as a professional poet-director
who comes as a xenos or “guest-stranger” for the training of choruses to
sing and dance in aristocratic settings:
xe±n»v e«miá skotein¼n pcwn y»gon,
Ìdatov ãte çov f©lon v ndrì gwn
klov ttumon a«nswá
I am a guest-stranger [xenos]. Keeping away dark blame [psogos] and bringing

genuine glory [kleos], like streams of water, to a man who is near and dear
[philos], I will praise [aineı̂n] him. (Pind. Nem. 7.61–63)
74 Relevant is the formulation of Bakker (2002: 21) about the preverb apo-: “In the case of verbs
denoting speech, the addition of apo- turns the sensibility to context into an immediately dialogic
sense: apo-logeomai ‘speak in return’, ‘defend oneself against’, apo-krinomai ‘reason in return’,
‘answer’.”
75 PH 298–9.
246 Gregory Nagy
We may consider Pindar a professional to the extent that he must have
received some form or forms of compensation from the rich and powerful
families that commissioned the composition of his songs and the perfor-
mance of these songs by local choruses. But local choruses who performed
such compositions, in line with the earlier aristocratic pattern, would have
been comprised of nonprofessional performers. And the relationship of
the nonprofessional chorus and a professional poet-director like Pindar
can be expressed in terms of mimesis: the chorus as a group can be the
impersonator or the actor, as it were, of the poet-director.76
The range of the mimesis performed by the chorus in Pindar’s compo-
sitions extends far beyond the individual persona of the poet-director and
the collective persona of the chorus as a chorus. For example, in the case of
victory odes composed by Pindar and by other contemporary poets such as
Simonides and Bacchylides, the speaking “I” of the chorus is most conven-
tionally figured as a kōmos, that is, as a group of festive revelers. And this
same speaking “I” of the chorus or stylized kōmos can also make a mimesis
of everyone and anyone who may be relevant to the act of praising the
victor. The speaking characters, as it were, who take shape in the process of
mimesis by the kōmos in a victory ode include such varied figures as (1) the
poet himself in the role of the laudator or giver of praise, (2) the victorious
athlete in the role of the laudandus or receiver of praise, (3) ancestors of the
laudandus, and (4) heroes whose deeds in myth are praised along with the
deeds of the laudandus.
As an example of roles enacted by the speaking “I” of the chorus, I have
already quoted the passage from Pindar’s Nemean 7 where the “I” speaks
the role of the poet as laudator. As another example, I cite the passage in
Pindar’s Pythian 8 where the hero Amphiaraos is directly quoted (43 ædì
e²pe) as speaking from the dead (44–55).
There are many other kinds of mimesis to be found in victory odes.
For example, the chorus can make a mimesis of a prototypical chorus of
mythical singers and dancers embedded within the stylized kōmos of actual
singers and dancers, as in the case of Ode 13 of the poet Bacchylides, a
contemporary of Pindar.77 It can even happen that the chorus of a victory
ode makes a mimesis of a chorus performing another genre of song, such
as a hymn: Elroy Bundy has collected a variety of examples showing the
“hymnal” function of expressions found in Pindar’s victory odes that are
cognate with expressions found even in the Homeric Hymns.78
76 PH 379. 77 Power 2000. 78 Bundy 1972: 55–7.

About the making of mimesis by the tragic chorus

Such mimesis in the choral performance of compositions by poets like
Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides can also be found in the choral per-
formance of compositions by the poets of Athenian State Theater. I have
in mind the poets of classical tragedy in particular, especially Sophocles
and Euripides, who flourished in the second half of the fifth century bce.
As I will argue, the choruses of classical tragedy are just as mimetic as the
choruses of victory odes.
In this connection, I plan to round out my essay by showing a particularly
striking example of choral mimesis as we find it in a tragedy by Euripides,
but first I need to outline some idiosyncrasies of the tragic chorus that
make it distinct from other kinds of choruses.
Idiosyncrasies of the chorus in Athenian tragedy

Though the poets of Athenian tragedy can be described as professional
poet-directors of nonprofessional choruses, the choruses that they directed
were performing in decidedly democratic rather than aristocratic settings,
the most prominent of which was the festival of the City Dionysia. It is the
setting of the City Dionysia that distinguishes most clearly the choruses
of what I have been calling Athenian State Theater, especially choruses of
tragedy.
As in the case of the choral songs composed by the likes of Pindar,
Simonides, and Bacchylides, a central feature of the choral songs composed
by tragedians in classical Athens is the nonprofessionalism of the choral
performers, but this nonprofessionalism needs to be contrasted with the
professionalism of the actors playing roles differentiated out of the ranks
of the chorus.79 In the medium of classical tragedy, the choral performers
are reenacting an archetypal ensemble that is interacting with archetypal
main characters in an archetypal world – characters acted out by the first,
second, and third actors.80
The chorus in Athenian tragedy ordinarily performs by singing and danc-
ing to the accompaniment of an aulos “reed,” while the actors ordinarily
perform by declaiming their assigned verses, without musical accompa-
niment. Meanwhile, the differentiated function of a performing chorus
79 Cf. “Aristotle,” Problems 19.15, and the comments in PH 343.

80 TCL 45–6. I also analyze there the initiatory function of choral performance.
248 Gregory Nagy
leader is further differentiated by another split in functions, with a more
distinct first actor on one hand and a less distinct chorus leader on the other.
This development is represented in the story of the primordial dramaturge
Thespis, who is said to have invented the first actor.81 The dialogue between
the Thespian first actor and the chorus leader manifests a differentiation
of the dialogue between an undifferentiated chorus leader and the chorus,
and the evolution of the second actor and third actor can be explained in
terms of further splits in function.82
The chorus represents a mediating principle between the main characters
of the archetypal there-and-then and the audience of the historical here-
and-now. The chorus reacts both as if they were the audience itself and as
if they were eyewitness contemporaries of the archetypal main characters.
The members of the chorus, who sang and danced the roles of groups such
as old men or young girls, are “on the scene” in the world of the archetypal
main characters.83
From the standpoint of tragic action, the focus of attention is on the
archetypal main characters, played by the actors. The main characters and
their experiences are central while the chorus, as eyewitness, is marginal.
Although the chorus is emotionally involved in the experiences of the main
characters, it also maintains an emotional distance by being marginal to the
drama of the tragic action and by being central to the ritual that engages
with the audience. What is passive pathos or action experienced by the main
characters within the world of tragedy is active drāma, that is, sacrifice and
the performance of ritual, from the standpoint of the outer world that frames
it. This outer world is constituted by the audience-members of the theater,
who become engaged in the drāma through the intermediacy of the chorus
and who thereby participate in the inner world that is the pathos of any
main character.84
In this sense, the pathos experienced by a main character in drama is
a primal “ordeal” while the reactive pathos experienced by the audience –
and mediated by the chorus – may be translated simply as “emotion.”
Such a distribution of translations for pathos, that is, “ordeal” for the main
characters and “emotion” for the audience, seems pervasively workable in
a reading of Aristotle’s Poetics. One commentator has put it nearly this
same way, in defining Aristotle’s concept of pathos as a “misfortune” on the
objective level and an “emotion” on the subjective level.85
81 Pickard-Cambridge 1968: 130–1. 82 PH 378. 83 TCL 49.

84 PH 388. 85 Lucas 1968: 134.
The Delian Maidens as models of theatrical mimesis

What I have just reconstructed as a mediation of pathos by the chorus
of classical tragedy corresponds to a description of mimesis that we find
in an essay by Lucian. As I will argue, Lucian’s description is essential
for understanding the role of the Delian Maidens as models of theatrical
mimesis. Here is the relevant passage:
¾ goÓn painov aÉt t»tì n g©gnoito ntelv par tän qeatän
Âtan kastov tän ¾rÛntwn gnwr©z
t aËtoÓ, mllon d ãsper n
kat»ptr t ½rchst aut¼n blp
kaª pscein aÉt¼v kaª poie±n
ewqená t»te gr oÉd katcein autoÆv o¬ nqrwpoi Ëfì ¡donv dÅnan-
tai, llì qr»oi pr¼v t¼n painon kcontai, tv tv autoÓ yucv
kastov e«k»nav ¾räntev kaª aËtoÆv gnwr©zontev.
So, he [= the dancer] would get complete approval from the spectators only
when everyone viewing the spectacle recognizes those things that they can
identify with their own selves – or, to put it another way, only when the
people who are looking at the dancer recognize their own selves and recognize
the things they are used to experiencing [paskhein] or doing [poieı̂n] as if
they were seeing themselves in a mirror. When this happens, people get so
much pleasure out of it that they can barely contain themselves, bursting
into unanimous expressions of approval, since they all see images of their
own souls and recognize themselves. (Luc. Salt. 81)
As Lucian adds, the spectators that have seen such a spectacle of a perfectly
executed dance can leave the theater with a sense of having participated
in a perfect theatrical experience: kaª prcontai p¼ toÓ qetrou
te cr a¬re±sqai kaª feÅgein memaqhk»tev kaª pr»teron gn»oun
didacqntev “and they come away from the theater with a sense of having
learned all the things that they should embrace and all the things they
should avoid, having learned things that they had not known before” (Salt.
81). And such a perfectly executed dance, as we see in the present context
and elsewhere as well in Lucian’s essay, is a matter of mimesis (Salt. 82: tv
mimsewv). Further, it is a mimesis of experienced emotion, pathos (Salt.
83: m©mhsin toÓ pqouv).
Using this passage from Lucian, Peponi has compared the psychology
of experiencing such pathos, such emotion, with the psychology of experi-
encing the performance of the Delian Maidens:
qlgousi d fÓlì nqrÛpwn.
pntwn dì nqrÛpwn fwnv kaª krembaliastÆn
mime±sqì sasiná fa©h d ken aÉt¼v kastov
fqggesqìá oÌtw sfin kal sunrhren oid.
250 Gregory Nagy
They [= the Delian Maidens] enchant all different kinds of humanity.
All humans’ voices and rhythms
they know how to reenact [mimeı̂sthai]. And each single person would say
that his own voice
was their voice. That is how their beautiful song has each of its parts fitting
together [sunarariskein] in place. Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo 159–64
Taking her cue from the use of the words paskhein “experience” and pathos
“experienced emotion” in the passage I have quoted from Lucian’s essay,
Peponi says that the choral performance of the Delian Maidens and the
reaction of the audience are “mutually empathetic.”86 Accordingly, she
speaks of a choral “aesthetics of empathy.”87
I agree with this formulation, and I agree at least in part with the
explanation that follows it: “through their excellence the choral performers
achieve a holistic representation of the audience; in turn, the enchanted
audience empathizes to such a degree that they attend as virtual performers
(fa©h d ken aÉt¼v kastov fqggesqì, 163–64).”88 In an effort to clarify
further, I propose that the various people in the varied audience attending
a performance by the Delian Maidens are not just virtual performers: they
are potential performers in their own right, because it is their own various
choral traditions that the Delian Maidens can perform by virtue of their
divine status as models of all varieties of choral performance.
The Delian Maidens as models of choral performance in tragedy

In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, there is no direct indication of the kinds of
choral performance that the Delian Maidens perform at the festival of the
Delia on the island of Delos. But there are indirect indications to be found
in other sources. As we are about to see, two choral genres that actually
typify the Delian Maidens, the hymn and the paean, can become models
for imitation in the choral performance of tragedy. And that is because
mimesis, as we have already seen, can in fact extend from one genre to
another, as in the imitation of a choral hymn by a choral victory ode.
When Thucydides (3.104.5) refers to the Delian Maidens as a chorus of
local “women,” he is simply following his usual practice of downplaying
details of myth and ritual. As I have already argued, however, the Delian
Maidens who perform at the festival of the Delia in Delos are simultane-
ously Muses as well as real-life performers participating in a chorus of local
86 Peponi 2009: 67. She describes the audience’s reaction as a “spectatorship.”

87 Peponi 2009: 60. 88 Peponi 2009: 67.
girls or women, since the role of divinity can be appropriated by parti-
cipants in a chorus during choral performance. That is to say, the Delian
Maidens as a local female chorus can reenact the Delian Maidens as local
Muses.89
What is essential for now is that even Thucydides accepts the idea that
the chorus of Delian Maidens with whom Homer himself interacted in
the Homeric Hymn to Apollo is somehow a prototype for the choruses that
perform at the Delia in historical times. Relevant is the wording of Thucy-
dides where he makes these further remarks about the performances of
choruses at the Delia (3.104.6): “So much for the evidence given by Homer
concerning the fact that there was even in the remote past a great coming
together and festival [heortē] at Delos; later on, the islanders [nēsiōtai] and
the Athenians continued to send song-and-dance groups [khoroi], along
with sacrificial offerings [hiera]” (tosaÓta mn í Omhrov tekmhr©wsen Âti
§n kaª t¼ plai meglh xÅnodov kaª ort n t Dlá Ìsteron d
toÆv mn coroÆv o¬ nhsiätai kaª o¬ %qhna±oi meqì ¬erän pempon).
For city-states to send their local choruses to perform at festivals like
the Delia was considered to be part of a “sacrifice,” as conveyed by the
word hiera “sacrificial offerings” in the description I just quoted from
Thucydides.90 In fact, as I show in a study of epigraphical and literary
sources dating especially from the fourth century bce, a traditional word
for “festival” was thusia, which literally means “sacrifice.”91
There is a most relevant attestation of both these words, hiera and
thusia, in an account concerning the celebration of the Delia at Delos in
the glory days of the Athenian empire. This account, which gives a full-
blown description of the magnificent spectacle of choral performances at
the Delia, comes from Plutarch’s Life of Nikias (3.5–7):
mnhmoneÅetai dì aÉtoÓ kaª t perª Dlon Þv lampr kaª qeoprep
filotimmata. tän gr corän, oÍv a¬ p»leiv pempon somnouv t
qe, prosple»ntwn mn Þv tucen, eÉqÆv dì Àclou pr¼v tn naÓn pan-
täntov dein keleuomnwn katì oÉdna k»smon, llì Ëp¼ spoudv sun-
tktwv pobain»ntwn ma kaª stefanoumnwn kaª metamfiennumnwn,
ke±nov Âte tn qewr©an §gen, aÉt¼v mn e«v ëRneian pbh, t¼n cor¼n
cwn kaª t ¬ere±a kaª tn llhn paraskeun, zeÓgma d pepoihmnon
%qnhsi pr¼v t mtra kaª kekosmhmnon kprepäv crusÛsesi kaª
89 See also Calame 2001: 30, 104, 110

90 Relevant also is the expression anagein khorous “bring choruses” in Thuc. 3.104.3, since the verb
anagein, with khoroi as its direct object, “seems to describe a typically religious ‘contribution’.” So
Kowalzig 2007b: 71.
91 PR 40–1, 48–9, 52–3, 83.
252 Gregory Nagy
bafa±v kaª stefnoiv kaª aÉla©aiv kom©zwn, di nukt¼v gefÅrwse t¼n
metaxÆ ëRhne©av kaª Dlou p»ron, oÉk Ànta mganá e²qì mì ¡mr tn
te pompn t qe kaª t¼n cor¼n gwn kekosmhmnon poluteläv kaª
donta di tv gefÅrav peb©baze. met d tn qus©an kaª t¼n gäna
kaª tv stiseiv t»n te fo©nika t¼n calkoÓn sthsen nqhma t
qe . . .
Nikias is remembered for his ambitious accomplishments with regard to
Delos – accomplishments most spectacular in all their splendor and most
worthy of the gods in all their magnificence. Here is an example. The choral
groups [khoroi] that cities used to send (to Delos) for the performances of
songs sacred to the god (Apollo) used to sail in (to the harbor of Delos)
in a haphazard fashion, and the crowds that would gather to greet the
ship used to start right away to call on the performers to start singing
their song. There was no coordination, since the performers were still in
the process of disembarking in a rushed and disorganized way, and they
were still putting on their garlands and changing into their costumes. But
when he [= Nikias] was in charge of the sacred voyage [theōria] (to Delos),
he first took a side trip to the island of Rheneia, bringing with him the
choral group [khoros] and the sacrificial offerings [hiereia] and all the rest
of the equipment. And he brought with him a bridge that had been made
in advance, back in Athens, to fit the present occasion, and this bridge
was most splendidly adorned with golden fixtures, with dyed colors, with
garlands, with tapestries. Overnight, he took this bridge and spanned with
it the strait between Rheneia and Delos – not a very great distance.92 Then,
come daylight, he led the procession in honor of the god and brought across
the bridge to their destination the performers of the choral group [khoros],
who were outfitted most magnificently and were all along performing their
song. Then, after the sacrifice [thusia] and after the competition [agōn] and
after the feasting, he set up as a dedication to the god the (famous) bronze
palm tree . . . (Plut. Vit. Nic. 3.5–7)
This description by Plutarch, composed half a millennium after the events
described, still features the essential ritual concepts of hier(ei)a and thusia.
And we know that the practice of sending choral groups to perform at
Delos, as attested in this narrative about events taking place in the second
half of the fifth century, was in full bloom already in the first half of the fifth
century bce, when choruses sang and danced choral songs composed by
such master poets as Simonides and Pindar. The primary evidence comes
from surviving fragments of their choral songs.93
92 This spanning of the strait between the islands of Rheneia and Delos must have been interpreted as
the ritual equivalent of the earlier chaining together of the two islands by Polycrates, as narrated by
Thuc. 3.104.2.
93 This evidence has been surveyed and analyzed by Kowalzig 2007b: ch. 2.
In one of these choral songs, composed by Simonides to be performed at
the Delia in Delos, the Delian Maidens themselves are actually called upon
to shout a choral cry (F 55a3): [½lolÅ]xate Dal©wn qÅgatrev “shout the
cry of olologē, daughters of the Delians.”94
The majority of these choral songs performed in honor of Apollo can be
identified as paianes “paeans.”95 And there is an explicit reference to such a
paean as chorally performed by the Delian Maidens themselves at Delos:
paina mn Dhlidev
<naän> ËmnoÓsì mfª pÅlav
t¼n LatoÓv eÎpaida g»non,
e¬l©ssousai kall©coroiá
painav dì pª so±v melqroiv
kÅknov âv grwn oid¼v
polin k genÅwn
keladswá t¼ gr eÔ
to±v Ìmnoisin Ëprcei.
A paean do the Delian Maidens
sing as a humnos around the temple gates,
singing (Apollo) the true child of Leto
as they swirl, and they have such a beautiful khoros.
I too, singing paeans at your palace,
aged singer that I am, like a swan,
from my graybearded throat,
will send forth a cry. For whatever is real
has a place to stay in my humnoi.
Eur. Heracl. 687–9596
As we can see from this reference in a choral song composed by Euripides,

the Delian Maidens are described as performing the kind of choral song
that is known as the paian, which is equated here with the performing of
a humnos.
The equation is made clear in the syntax of the wording, which can be
analyzed in two steps. First, the verb humnein “sing a humnos” takes as its
inner object the song that is sung as a humnos, and this song is in fact a
paian. Second, the same verb humnein takes as its outer object the name
of the god Apollo, who is both the object of praise and the subject of the
song that is the humnos. When I use the expression subject of the song here,
I mean the subject matter, not the grammatical subject. In the grammar of
94 Kowalzig 2007b: 64–6 95 Kowalzig 2007b: 57.

96 For an incisive commentary on this passage, see Henrichs 1996b: 55–6.
254 Gregory Nagy
a humnos as a song, the divinity that figures as the subject of the song is in
fact the grammatical object of the verb of singing the song.
The fact that the chorus of Euripides’ Herakles refers to its choral perfor-
mance as both a humnos and a paian is a reference to its ongoing mimesis
of two different kinds of choral genre. At the moment of performance, we
see a fusion of the two distinct genres. Such fusion corresponds to the term
used by Plato, theatrokratia, in describing what he thinks is the confusion
of genres in the theatrokratia of democratic Athenian State Theater. As we
have seen, two of the five genres he mentions in his list of confused genres
are the humnos and the paian (Leg. 3.700b).
In describing the reference in the Herakles of Euripides to the perfor-
mance of the Delian Maidens, I used the term ongoing mimesis, in the
sense that the actual performance by the chorus of the Herakles is making
a mimesis of an idealized performance by the chorus of the Delian Maid-
ens at the festival of the Delia at Delos. I repeat my earlier formulation,
that these Maidens “are presented in the Hymn as archetypes meant to be
reenacted in the local ritual context of real choral performances at Delos –
in which context the choral participants would be equated, for the ritual
moment, with the archetypal Maidens.”97 There is another example of
such ongoing mimesis in Euripides Hekabe 462–5, where we see another
such reference to the performance of the Delian Maidens at Delos. These
two references to the performing Delian Maidens, as well as other such
references to the performances of other choruses, have been analyzed by
Henrichs as examples of “choral projection.”98 Here is the wording of his
overall formulation:
Choral projection occurs when Sophoclean and Euripidean choruses locate
their own dancing in the past or the future, in contrast to the here and now
of their immediate performance, or when choruses project their collective
identity onto groups of dancers distant from the concrete space of the
orchestra and dancing in the allusive realm of the dramatic imagination.99
I agree with this formulation, adding that we need to highlight (1) the
singing as well as the dancing of the chorus and (2) the ritual context of
the “distant” choral performance, which is the point of reference for the
actual choral performance.
In the case of the Herakles of Euripides, which refers to a “distant” choral
performance, at Delos, of a paean that is also a hymn, I note that the
97 PP 56; quoting this formulation, Henrichs (1996b: 58n35) adds: “This description also fits the
relationship of Delian Maidens (‘archetypes’) and tragic chorus (‘real chorus-members’) in Herakles.”
98 Henrichs 1996b: 55–6. 99 Henrichs 1996b: 27.
ritual context of such choral performance is attested in a paean (Paean 12)
composed by Pindar to be performed at Delos by a chorus sent there from
the island state of Naxos (line 2, [Na]x»qen), and that the context of this
performance of a paean is highlighted as a thusia (also line 2, qus©[]).100
In this same paean by Pindar (Paean 12), performers belonging to a local
female chorus, who are described as enkhōriai “the local ones,” are said
to be shouting a ritual cry (line 19, [ . . . ]efqgxanto dì gcÛriai). It
has been argued, plausibly, that this local female chorus can be identified
with the Delian Maidens.101 And I note that this local female chorus is
evidently interacting with the visiting male chorus sent from the island
state of Naxos.
The precise nature of such choral interaction is most likely to be mimetic:
for example, the visiting male chorus may be reenacting the performance
of the local Delian Maidens,102 much as the visiting rhapsode Homer
is reenacting the performance of the Maidens in the Homeric Hymn to
Apollo.103
Conclusions
The reference to the Delian Maidens in the Homeric Hymn (3) to Apollo
as models of mimesis (verb mimeisthai at verse 163) is saying something
that is fundamentally true about choral performance in general, which as
we know from the surviving textual evidence is highly mimetic. And this
mimeticism is fully brought to life in the reference to the Delian Maidens
by the chorus in the Herakles of Euripides.
This formulation about the mimeticism of choral performance applies
to rhapsodic performance as well: that medium too is highly mimetic, as
we see from the interaction of Homer with the Delian Maidens in the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo. The figure of Homer reenacts the Maidens by
quoting what they say, which is said not in their own choral medium but
in the rhapsodic medium of the Hymn.104 Thus the medium of rhapsodic
performance shows that it can make a mimesis of the medium of choral
performance as exemplified by the Delian Maidens, who are the absolute
models of choral mimesis. And, this way, Homer demonstrates that he is
the absolute master of rhapsodic mimesis.
100 Kowalzig 2007b: 60. 101 Kowalzig 2007b: 66–7.
102 Kowalzig 2007b: 71 argues that “the Naxians performing Paean 12 . . . themselves become, as it
were, the Deliades.”
103 On the reenacting of mythical performances of female khoroi by way of the ritual performances of
male khoroi, see again Power 2000 on Bacchyl. Ode 13; also Nagy 2011.
104 HC 206.
256 Gregory Nagy
In this connection, I see no need to set up a dichotomy between what
has been called “non-dramatic lyric” as performed by such choruses as we
see in Song 1 of Alcman and “dramatic lyric” as performed by the choruses
of Athenian State Theater. I think that both these kinds of choral lyric are
“dramatic” or “theatrical,” in the sense that both these kinds of choral lyric
are in fact mimetic. And the mimesis that we see in these two kinds of
choral lyric, as I argued from the beginning, is an act of mediation between
solo and choral performance.
In the case of classical drama, as I have argued, such mediation between
solo and choral performance bridges the gap between characters in an
archetypal past and the citizens of Athens in the present, whose attendance
at Athenian State Theater was understood to be an act of civic participation.
The nonprofessional chorus could mediate between the professional actors
who represented the archetypal characters on the one hand and, on the
other, the body of Athenian citizens who participated in the dramatic
festivals of their city by virtue of attending Athenian State Theater. The
members of the chorus who sang and danced the roles of participants in
the mythical world of the archetypal past were also participating in the
ritual world of the Athenian dramatic festivals, thus mediating between
the actors and the citizens in attendance. Such mediation, I conclude, is
the essence of mimesis.
chapter 1 1
Choral persuasions in Plato’s Laws

Lucia Prauscello
In the ‘second best city’ anthropology virtually becomes a sub-discipline

of ‘speaking about the gods’ (qeolog©a): god, the divine nous, is ‘the mea-
sure of all things’ (Leg. 4.716c4–6) and humans, because of their original
kinship with the divine (10.899d7–8 suggnei tiv qe©a),1 should aim,
throughout their lives, to assimilate themselves to it (¾moioÓsqai), doing
what is ‘dear and conforming’ to god (prxiv f©lh kaª k»louqov qe:
4.716c1–4).2 In Magnesia individual psychology (5.731d6–732e2) and col-
lective behavioural policy (5.739b8–e7) must both be equally modelled on
their divine paradigm (1.645b4–8): the citizens of the new colony must try
to replicate, on a social level, the orderly unity of the divine kosmos. The
‘dual nature’ of the man of the Laws, more than merely human but not
yet fully divine, generates a constant tension regarding the exact modal-
ity of the relationship between humankind and divinity.3 The lawgiver
(divinely inspired)4 must address men, not gods (5.732e3 nqrÛpoiv gr
dialeg»meqa llì oÉ qeo±v). The process of self-likening to the divine
must thus be enacted through a medium able to take into account what
is the most defining and individualizing aspect of human nature (fÅsei
nqrÛpeion mlista): its innate disposition to seek pleasures and avoid
pain (5.732e4–733d6).5 At the same time the assimilation to god of the civic
1 Cf. 5.726a1–3, 10.900a7; see also above all 1.644c1–645c8 (the ‘human marionette’) and 7.803c4–8:
the best element (bltiston) to be found in humanity is that man is a plaything of god (qeoÓ ti
pa©gnion . . . memhcanhmnon). On these passages cf. Laks 2000: 276–7; Jouët-Pastré 2006: 15–24,
40–5.
2 On the ¾mo©wsiv qe in the Laws, see Armstrong 2004: 177–82, Lavecchia 2006: 160–6. More
generally, for the idea of ‘god-likeness’ in Plato’s works, see Sedley 2000 and Annas 1999: 52–71.
3 ‘Dual nature’: Laks 2000: 276. On the unresolved tension between men and gods in the Laws, see
Laks 2001: 107–9; 2005: 36–7.
4 On the divine inspiration of the laws, see Nightingale 1993 (esp. 298–9), Welton 1995 and Lavecchia
2006: 158–62.
5 Cf. also 2.636d7–e3. For these passages see above all Laks 2005: 45–6 and Woerther 2008: 95–7;
cf. also White 2001: 469–76 and Carone 2003: 287–8. Whether god, too, experiences pleasure or
not is a highly controversial issue (for the Philebus’ take on it, see Carone 2000, esp. 262–4 on
257
258 Lucia Prauscello
body requires that the new politeia must be modelled on the unity, self-
likeness and oneness of the divine nous. The laws will create a community
that should be as much as possible ‘one polis’ (m©an Âti mlista p»lin
739d3–4).6 The ‘divine’ model which Magnesians will try to replicate is
that according to which its members will willingly embrace not only shared
thoughts and feelings but also shared perceptions (5.739c8–d2): Magnesia’s
citizens will ‘seem then to see, hear and act collectively’, approving and
disapproving ‘unanimously’ on the basis of their capacity of ‘rejoicing and
feeling pain at the same things.’7
The aim of this paper is to unravel some of the ways in which Magnesia’s
choral performances embody an important channel through which divine
and human dimensions are brought into closer contact. The human cho-
ruses of Plato’s ‘second best city’ will be thus used as a test case for analysing
the mediating role of choral performances in constructing the moral and
social fabric of the new colony. The first part of this contribution will focus
on the ways in which choreia, a divine gift, plays an essential socializing
and educative role by infusing into individuals the experience of a ‘correct’
physiology of pleasure and pain (2.653c7–654a5, 2.664e2–665a6). Orderly
vocal and kinetic activity will be shown to be a powerful means to connect
the rational and irrational parts of the soul, thus helping humans to experi-
ence the divine oneness and harmony between perceptions, emotions and
reason. Rhythm (çuqm»v) and order (txiv) in song and dance represent
the quintessentially ‘human’ link between the perception of pleasure and
the belief generated by that perception: the capacity of rhythm to train
and condition our future emotional responses to a given set of activities
mediates between the physical perception and the doxa it engendered. By
deriving pleasure in order humans become divine: this uniquely human
capacity of perceiving pleasure in txiv represents an innate short-cut to the
divine latent in us: it allows mankind to impose and effect order in a world
of change. Rhythmic bodily agreement creates affective bonds, a shared per-
ception of life and its ‘social time’: choral performances represent thus, via
32d–33c and Lavecchia 2006: 148 with nn. on the qe±on gnov ¡donän). I tend to agree with Carone’s
interpretation of 7.792c–d (2000: 286–91): the equation of ‘the middle state’ (t¼ mson) in relation
to pleasure and pain, which must be pursued by whoever wants to become like god (7.792d5 t¼n
mllonta sesqai qe»n), to the very ‘condition of god’ (diqesin . . . qeoÓ), i.e., a state of ‘grace’
(¯lewv), does not suggest that god’s life is entirely deprived of pleasure but only that god naturally
experiences only harmonious, pure pleasures, without the indiscriminate attitude of humans. For a
different view, see Schöpsdau 2003: 516 ad 7.792d2–5.
6 Cf. also 2.664a5–6, 8.829a1 (kaqper na nqrwpon), 12.942c1–4. On the ‘homogenization of
citizenship’ envisaged by Plato in the Laws, see Sassi 2008: 141–3.
7 o³on Àmmata kaª åta kaª ce±rav koin mn ¾rn doke±n kaª koÅein kaª prttein, paine±n tì aÔ
kaª ygein kaqì n Âti mlista sÅmpantav pª to±v aÉto±v ca©rontav kaª lupoumnouv.
Choral persuasions in Plato’s Laws 259
the collective, social nature of rhythm, the most genuine form of ‘embodied
morality’.8
The second part will develop some reflections on how the Athenian
Stranger’s plea for a ‘euphemic’ chorus (7.800c7–e3) bears upon choral
practices (especially dramatic) of contemporary Athens. In a much-quoted
passage of Book 7, the Athenian Stranger claims that the whole politeia of
Magnesia is a mimesis of ‘the best’, ‘most beautiful’ and ‘truest tragedy’
(7.817b2–3 tragd©av . . . kall©sthv ma kaª r©sthv; 817b3–5 m©mh-
siv toÓ kall©stou kaª r©stou b©ou, Á d famen ¡me±v ge Àntwv e²nai
tragd©an tn lhqestthn).9 This apparently eccentric claim has long
since attracted scholarly attention: interpretations of its significance have
varied wildly, from the ironic and/or metaphorical to the literal.10 While
some scholars have more generally seen it as a formulation of Plato’s will-
ingness to rival and appropriate the psychagogic power of tragic mimesis
qua psychological and behavioural assimilation through performance,11
others have emphasized its representational content: tragedy as a form of
discourse on ‘the best life’.12 In the following I shall argue that Plato’s
appropriation of tragic mimesis involves a concept of mimesis which is
active at both a representational (mimesis qua representation) and per-
formative level (mimesis qua enactment).13 In particular a comparison of
this passage with 7.800c7–e3 may help us to shed some light on another
aspect of the same question: this comparison suggests, I maintain, that
even if Magnesia is represented by the Athenian Stranger as the mime-
sis of ‘the best’, ‘most beautiful’ and ‘truest tragedy’, the ideal model
of chorality supported in the Laws as the building block of the social
fabric of ‘the second best city’ is mapped onto the image of the non-
dramatic, civic chorus while retaining the psychagogic force of its dramatic
rival.
8 For the ‘moral’ dimension of rhythm as a social phenomenon and its ‘synchronized temporality’
proper of rite, see Bourdieu 1977: 162–3.
9 On the self-referential character of 7.817b1–5 as ‘text’, see Adomènas 2001: 55.
10 For a survey of some scholarly interpretations of the claim by the Athenian Stranger, see Sauvé
Meyer 2011: 388 with n. 2.
11 See e.g. Murray 2002: 44 (in advocating that his own is the ‘best tragedy’ Plato would be setting up
philosophy as ‘a new and specialized discipline which had to define and legitimize itself against the
genres of discourse that had authority and currency in democratic Athens’). Cf. also Halliwell 1996:
335–7 (336 on the passage of the Laws) and Halliwell 2002: 99–108.
12 On the political and ideological import of this claim, see Laks 2010 and Sauvé Meyer 2011 (both
correctly highlight the importance of contextualizing historically the notion of ‘tragedy’ as a form
of discourse on the ‘best life’, though from different perspectives). For a more literary approach, cf.
Mouze 2005: 332–54 and Jouët-Pastré 2006: 139–51.
13 This possibility is considered by Laks 2010: 221–2 but then eventually dismissed.
1. Divine and human choreia: order, pleasure and belief

One aspect often glossed over is the specific context in which the sur-
prising claim by the Athenian Stranger takes place. It is worth notic-
ing that the claim that the organization of the civic body of Magnesia
(psa . . . ¡ polite©a)14 represents ‘the best’, ‘most beautiful’ and ‘truest
tragedy’ (7.817b2–5), since it ‘reproduces the most beautiful and virtuous
life’ (7.817b4 m©mhsiv toÓ kall©stou kaª r©stou b©ou), occurs within a
broader section (7.814d8–817e4) specifically devoted to those bodily move-
ments that may be ‘correctly’ (½rqäv) categorized as ‘dance’ (Àrchsiv:
7.814d8e2).15 The way in which the collective civic body of ‘the second best
city’ conducts itself will then represent the ‘truest tragedy’. Yet, at least at a
performative level, I maintain that the ‘truest tragedy’ is made possible only
by Plato’s careful negotiation of the mimetic status of Magnesia’s choruses,
its civic bodies. This negotiation entails a constant process of mediation
between what we can call, for convenience’s sake, a strictly dramatic (tragic
mimesis) and non-dramatic (lyric mimesis) mode of performance.16 In
the Laws the way to save the psychagogic force of dramatic mimesis and
at the same time avoid ‘being necessarily in contradiction with oneself ’
(nagkzetai . . . nant©a lgein aËt 4.719c6–7) is to equate mimesis
to an absolute identity between performer and performed, actor and audi-
ence: it is here that the model of ‘lyric’ mimesis represented by choral cultic
poetry offers obvious advantages over the ‘tragic’ form. Tragic choruses may
of course embody on stage what we can call a communal, civic voice and
identity (e.g. the chorus of the Elders in Agamemnon), yet most of the
time they represent socially marginal groups (women, old men, captives
14 I do not share Sauvé Meyer’s restriction of the Greek term polite©a to mere ‘legislation’ in its
strictest constitutional sense. polite©a refers to the whole sets of activity presiding the organization
of the public life: cf. also Laks 2010: 218 with n. 3 (‘politeia . . . can also carry a wider sense that
includes the way in which the citizens of a city conduct their lives’).
15 This is also why I find Sauvé Meyer’s claim that in 7. 817b3–5 Plato ‘deliberately strips away the
“aesthetic” elements of tragic composition’ misleading (Sauvé Meyer 2011: 399). The comparison
with Gorgias 502b1–c8 (tragedy reduced to a form of public oratory) does not take into sufficient
account the powerfully persuasive role of the vehicle through which the content is conveyed.
16 I have treated this issue in detail in Prauscello 2011. I use here the term ‘lyric mimesis’ as a
somehow inadequate but recognizable term to designate the kind of ritualized performances in
which the members of the chorus perform a song for the community to which they belong as
a body representative of that very community: that is, the performers are citizens who perform
in propria persona. On the huge question of the relationship between dramatic and lyric chorus,
see esp. Kowalzig 2004: 41–2 (from a political and social perspective), Calame 1994/5, 1999 and
2007a (on the ‘hermeneutical’, ‘explanatory’ and ‘self-reflexive’ function of the tragic chorus which
compensates for the loss of the lyric chorus’ cultic voice), Nagy 1994/5b and most recently Swift
2010.
and foreigners) and the authority of the tragic choral voice, even when rep-
resentative of a civic community, is always limited and unstable: as observed
by scholars, ‘[it] both allows a wider picture of the action to develop and
also remains one of the many views expressed’ (Goldhill 1996: 255).17 The
tragic chorus can never reach the all-compassing inclusiveness and author-
ity of the choral lyric voice.18 Differently, in Magnesia the choreut-citizens
are both speakers and recipients of the views that they promulgate, and it is
because of this identity between performer and audience that they are able
to reach the entire city. In their choral performances they can just be ‘them-
selves’: a group representative of the polis performing how to be proper
citizens (2.655d5–656a5). The adoption of a lyric modality of experiential
mimesis allows them to re-enact endlessly their own self-likeness.
Plato’s ‘second best city’ is thus a community perpetually re-enacting
through dance and song the colony’s ‘foundational myths’ (2.653c7–654a7):
the divine origin of choreia, or, better, the bestowal of song and dance by the
gods as a collective time of celebration for the whole community (2.653d2–
3 tv tän ortän moibv),19 a time in which mortals find ‘respite from
labours’ (2.653d2 napaÅlav te aÉto±v tän p»nwn txanto). Signifi-
cantly, this ‘quasi-mythical account’20 of the birth of song as a powerful
tool of socialization coincides with the origin of the ‘correct education’
(½rq paide©a),21 which is at the same time represented as a process of
‘re-education’ made necessary by the unavoidable ‘corruption’ and ‘slack-
ening’ that intervene in the course of human life (2.653c8–9 caltai
kaª diafqe©retai). The ½rq paide©a consists first of all in infusing into
individuals the experience of a ‘correct’ physiology of pleasure and pain
(2.653a5–c4). A ‘correct’ way of perceiving pleasure and pain must be already
activated before the full development of rational faculties (2.653c3–6) and
the resulting sumphōnia between emotions and reason requires a form of
17 On the limits of identification, authority and knowledge of the choral voice in drama, cf. Rutherford
2007 (esp. 16–20); Battezzato 2005a: 154–6; Foley 2003; Mastronarde 1998 and 2010: 89–106; Gould
2001 [1996]; and Bacon 1994/5. Cf. also Lada-Richards 2002a: 78–9 on how only inasmuch as the
members of a tragic chorus can be perceived themselves as ‘the human equivalent’ of the Muses
in moments of choral projection, the chorus of tragedy may be seen as the ‘paradigm image for
performance in the Greek polis’.
18 This, of course, does not mean to undermine the well-known fact that tragedy from the very
beginning incorporated and appropriated non-dramatic choral voices (see Swift 2010); what is at
stake here is the modality and context of the mimetic performance per se.
19 For the social dimension implied by the term ort, see Mikalson 1982.
20 The expression is in Murray 2002: 47.
21 Cf. 2.653a1 tn ½rqn paide©an, 2.653b7 teqrammnon . . . ½rqäv, 2.653c3 paide©an . . . ½rqäv n
prosagoreÅoiv, 2.653c5–6 ½rqäv . . . paide©av pri, 2.653c7–8 tän ½rqäv teqrammnwn ¡donän
kaª lupän. The relationship between the definition of the heortē and that of paideia is subtly
analysed by Mouze 2005: 212–20.
control that must be situated beyond the strictly subjective sphere. This
control can be accomplished only within a ‘network of inter-subjective
relationships’,22 and it is here that the socializing and educative role of
choral performances, a divine gift, becomes an essential tool. This is the
text of 2.653c9–d5:
qeoª d o«kt©rantev t¼ tän nqrÛpwn p©ponon pefuk¼v gnov, na-
paÅlav te aÉto±v tän p»nwn txanto tv tän ortän moibv [to±v
qeo±v], kaª MoÅsav %p»llwn te moushgthn kaª Di»nuson suneor-
tastv dosan, ¯nì panorqäntai, tv te trofv genomnav n ta±v or-
ta±v met qeän.
the gods, taking pity on the suffering which is the natural lot of the human
race, assigned to the mortals the recompense of heortai23 as relief from their
toils. And they gave to men the Muses, Apollo Musagetes and Dionysos
as fellow-participants in the heortai so that humankind may be set right.24
They also gave mortals the nourishments that heortai afford with the helping
presence of the gods.
Communal choral songs and dances (orta©) are the medium through
which the gap between the divine and human worlds can be reduced.25
The gods offer themselves as exemplary fellow-celebrants in dance and
song (suneortastv 2.653d4; cf. sugcoreutv 2.654a1 and 2.665a4),
guiding the mortals in their singing and dancing (corhge±n 2.654a3;
cf. corhgoÅv 2.665a4) while enforcing community bonds and bringing
joy (car) through choral performance.26 What the heortai do is to
22 I owe the expression to Sassi 2008: 129.

23 The exact meaning of the expression tv tän ortän moibv is debated: I follow Schöpsdau 1994:
259 in understanding moibv to mean ‘recompenses’, tän ortän being the defining genitive
attached to it (‘die “Entschädigung” für die Mühen besteht in den Festen’).
24 This passage is textually very tormented. I follow Kannicht (1996: 91 n. 58) in taking the men as
subject of the passive panorqäntai. Strongly in support of this reading is the parallel from the
Statesman 273d4–e4 (god ordering the universe) pointed out to me by Giovan Battista D’Alessio per
litteras: di¼ d kaª t»tì ¢dh qe¼v ¾ kosmsav aÉt»n, kaqorän n por©aiv Ànta, khd»menov (cf.
Laws 2.653c9 qeoª d o«kt©rantev . . . p©ponon) . . . t nossanta kaª luqnta (cf. Laws 2.653c8–
9 caltai kaª diafqe©retai) n t kaqì aut¼n protr peri»d stryav, kosme± te kaª
panorqän (cf. Laws 2.653d4 ¯nì panorqäntai) qnaton aÉt¼n kaª grwn pergzetai).
On the close affinity between Statesman and Laws with regard to cosmology, see the overview
by Carone 2005: 145–61. For other possible interpretations, see England 1921, I: 275 (the gods as
subject, panorqäntai as middle with tv ortv as implied object), Morrow 1960: 353 n. 193 (tv
te trofv as object of the middle panorqäntai; for a similar solution cf. also Schöpsdau 1994:
260).
25 On divine choreia as the prototype of human dance, cf. the perceptive analysis of Lonsdale 1993:
44–75.
26 Cf. 2.654a4 da±v te kaª ½rcsesin llloiv sune©rontav ‘linking each others with songs and
dances’; chorus and joy: 2.654a4–5 coroÅv te Ýnomaknai par t¼ tv carv mfuton Ànoma
(‘[and the gods] called these activities “choruses” from the noun “joy” that is inborn to it’).
establish a reciprocal network of criv, articulated through the persuasion
of songs, with the gods: singing and dancing are presented as a response
to divine authority but at the same time they also enact a call for a divine
response.27 And the vehicle of persuasion of both mortals and gods is,
literally, not only the content promulgated by the activity of singing and
dancing but also (and even prior to it) the very pleasure generated by these
activities per se.28 It is on the modality in which the pleasure of choreia
manifests itself and implements its mediating role between perceptions,
emotions and belief that I would like now to focus more narrowly.
The similarity between education (paide©a) and the ‘correct’ early train-
ing of pleasure and pain and virtue (ret) has already been explicitly
stated by the Athenian Stranger at 2.653a5–c4, that is, just before the quasi-
mythical account of the birth of choreia. In particular, at 2.653b2–6 we are
told that:
¡don d kaª fil©a kaª lÅph kaª m±sov n ½rqäv n yuca±v gg©gn-
wntai mpw dunamnwn l»g lambnein, lab»ntwn d t¼n l»gon,
sumfwnswsi t l»g ½rqäv e«q©sqai Ëp¼ tän proshk»ntwn qän,
aÌth ì sqì ¡ sumfwn©a sÅmpasa mn ret ktl.
whenever pleasure and liking, pain and disliking are instilled correctly in the
souls of those who are not yet able to grasp it rationally and, once that they
have acquired reason, these sensations concur with the reason in affirming
that they have been correctly habituated thanks to appropriate habits, this
concordance represents the whole of virtue etc.
The deployment of the ‘habituation principle’ to train the ‘spirited’ part
(t¼ qumoeidv) of our soul is no novelty and can already be found in the
Republic:29 within the educative project of the Laws ‘directed’ habituation
is now more explicitly extended also to the ‘appetitive’ component of our
psyche (t¼ piqumhtik»n), the perception of pleasure and pain.30 What is
important to observe for our purpose is that habituation of emotions in
27 Fundamental on the issue is D’Alessio forthcoming.
28 For Plato’s conception of pleasure as a kind of ‘emotional engagement’ inasmuch as it is activity-
oriented (that is, pleasure/enjoyment can be seen as a function/measure of the value that one places
on the object of enjoyment), see Russell 2005: 124–5.
29 Cf. Rep. 2.366c and 3.401d4–402a4: on these passages see Vasiliou 2008: 215–32 (esp. 225–7).
30 See Gill 1985: 11–12 (cf. also Moss 2005: 168 according to whom in the Republic ‘appetite is not subject
to positive moral education’). It may however be worth observing, with Cooper 1999: 126–30, that
already in Book 4 of the Republic Plato does not seem by any means to limit the appetitive desires
only to those immediately originated by human bodily constitution and its organs (e.g. aversion to
pain, whose complementary opposite is the inborn desire for pleasure). In this respect the continuity
between Republic and Laws in the application of the ‘habituation principle’ is greater than usually
admitted. On the relationship between cognition, ‘natural’ disposition and ‘acquired’ disposition in
the Republic and the role of the qumoeidv in it, see also McNeill 2010: 244–79.
general (that is, not via a particular medium) is described here as a process
which is indeed distinct from rational training and prior to it (cf. mpw
dunamnwn l»g lambnein: it must be activated already in early child-
hood when the rational faculty is not yet properly developed), but its pre-
rational level of apprehension does not necessarily mean an anti-rational
attitude. The training of emotions is clearly meant to be propaedeutic to
and compatible with rational understanding (cf. lab»ntwn d t¼n l»gon,
sumfwnswsi t l»g ½rqäv e«q©sqai). At the same time education is
envisaged as a life-long process where emotional training does not become
superfluous when reason supervenes: on the contrary emotional habitua-
tion continues to work as a necessary auxiliary of reason, because it already
involves, though passively, some kind of reasoning.31 As formulated by Rus-
sell 2005: 222, ‘reason is introduced not as bringing moral insight anew,
but rather as confirming and explaining the insight already present within
the emotions’: emotional habituation is per se already ‘a kind of learning’
(Russell’s emphasis), even if at the inferior level of doxa.32 This neatly dove-
tails with the fact that to implement his exercise in mass-persuasion in the
Laws Plato is ready to exploit the whole cognitive spectrum, from doxa
to epistēmē: the divine lawgiver of Magnesia ‘is interested in the feelings
that promote and are promoted by each . . . cognitive state’ (Welton 1996:
219).33
With this in mind, let us now go back to the specific example of the
habituation principle as instantiated by choral training in Magnesia. Choral
performances are ‘representations of character’ (2.655d5 mimmata tr»pwn
stª t perª tv core©av), and behavioural types are reproduced and re-
lived by the performers as a result of both their natural disposition and imi-
tative capacity (2.655d6–7 ¢qesi kaª mimsesi).34 In Magnesia self-likening
(¾moioÓsqai) through mimesis must be limited to ‘the artistic performance
31 See Hobbs 2000: 63–4 on how role models continue to be active in training emotions throughout
one’s life. For the analogy of this passage with Rep. 3.401d4–402a4, see Belfiore 1980: 135.
32 On the kribestra paide©a (12.965b1) of the ‘divine men’ of Magnesia, the guardians, see Castel-
Bouchouchi 2003 (esp. 195–206) and Lavecchia 2006: 174–9. On the role of doxa in the perception
of pleasures in the Philebus, see Delcomminette 2006: 362–83.
33 That is, opinion in general, true opinion, educated true opinion and knowledge: cf. esp. 3.688b2–4
doi d d pr¼v psan mn blpein, mlista d kaª pr¼v prÛthn tn tv sumpshv ¡gem»na
retv, fr»nhsiv dì eh toÓto kaª noÓv kaª d»xa metì rwt»v te kaª piqum©av toÅtoiv pomnhv
(discussed by Welton 1996). Similarly, at 1.644e4–645b1 the golden puppet-string of reason needs
‘helpers’ (Ëphrtai) at a pre-rational level. For a more pessimistic assessment of the role of ‘right
doxa’ in Plato’s Laws, see Scolnicov 2003: 124–5.
34 For ¢qesi kaª mimsesi as dative instrumental governed by the ensuing diexi»ntwn (and not as
coordinated with the preceding prxesi and tÅcaiv), see England 1921, I: 283 and Schöpsdau 1994:
274 ad loc.
that possesses a resemblance to the imitation of the beautiful’ (2.668b1–
2 mousikn . . . ke©nhn tn ¾moi»thta t toÓ kaloÓ mimmati).35 The
ideal choreia of the ‘second best city’ will then involve only the imitation of
states of character and actions that are proper of the good citizen: its aim
is to educate to virtue (pr¼v retn) the ‘children of law-abiding citizens
and the young’ (2.656c5–6 toÆv tän eÉn»mwn pa±dav kaª nouv).
On the one hand Plato is here certainly exploiting an experience deeply
rooted in the social fabric of the archaic and classical polis: the collective dis-
ciplining of instinctive drives and emotions through choral performances
as thematized by archaic lyric. As shown by Peponi 2007, mousik and
‘emotional’ paide©a coexist side by side already in the multiform choral
practices of the archaic polis. But the way in which this interconnectedness
between singing/dancing and emotional education is conceptualized in the
Laws has also deep and idiosyncratic connections with Plato’s own physi-
ology of ‘human’ pleasure. At 2.664b7–c2 the self-presentation of the new
colony through the choral voice of its citizens is envisaged by the Athenian
Stranger as one of the most effective means of persuasively communicating,
and at the same time enacting, the most virtuous and pleasant life (cf. also
2.662d–663c).36 Magnesia’s choruses will have as their primary function
that of ‘enchanting with song the souls of the children, still young and
tender’ (2.664b2–3 pdein . . . ti naiv oÎsaiv ta±v yuca±v kaª pala±v
tän pa©dwn). The content of this collective pd will be the divine
truth (Ëp¼ qeän . . . lgesqai) that the ‘best’ (ristov) life is also the
‘most pleasant’ (¤distov: 2.664b8).37 And the ‘best life’ is not only supe-
rior with respect to good reputation (5.733a1 krate± pr¼v eÉdox©an) thanks
to its comeliness (scmati), but also because it is superior with respect to
what we all seek: a majority of pleasure and a minority of pain throughout
the whole of life (5.733a3–5 krate± kaª toÅt Á pntev zhtoÓmen, t
ca©rein ple©w, lttw d lupe±sqai par t¼n b©on panta).
Dancing and singing, a divine gift bestowed out of pity to the toil-worn
humankind (cf. qeoª . . . o«kt©rantev at 2.653d1 and qeoÅv . . . leoÓntav at
2.665a4),38 are grounded in humans’ inborn desire for pleasure (¡don).
Choreia triggers and brings to full development a distinctively ‘human’ form
of ¡don latent in our nature, that is, the ability to perceive and, while
35 On the ‘correct’ nature of mimesis qua species of representational mimesis if and only if it successfully
represents a beautiful original, see Hatzistavrou 2011.
36 On pleasure and education in the Laws, see Russell 2005: 219–29, Jouët-Pastré 2006: 55–74, Stalley
1983: 59–67.
37 On pleasure, virtue and happiness in the Laws, see Carone 2002 and 2003.
38 For the caring attitude of gods towards men, cf. e.g. 10.902b, 902e, 903a, 905d, 906a–c.
perceiving, to rejoice at the orderliness of sound and motion, as claimed by
the account (l»gov)39 just given on the birth of choreia (2.653d7–654a5):
fhsªn d t¼ non pan Þv pov e«pe±n to±v te sÛmasi kaª ta±v fwna±v
¡suc©an gein oÉ dÅnasqai, kine±sqai d eª zhte±n kaª fqggesqai, t
mn ll»mena kaª skirtänta, o³on ½rcoÅmena meqì ¡donv kaª prospa©-
zonta, t d fqegg»mena psav fwnv. t mn oÔn lla za oÉk
cein asqhsin tän n ta±v kinsesin txewn oÉd taxiän, o³v40 d
çuqm¼v Ànoma kaª rmon©aá ¡m±n d oÍv epomen toÆv qeoÆv sugcoreutv
ded»sqai, toÅtouv e²nai kaª toÆv dedwk»tav tn nruqm»n41 te kaª nar-
m»nion asqhsin meqì ¡donv, ¨ d kine±n te ¡mv kaª corhge±n ¡män
toÅtouv, da±v te kaª ½rcsesin llloiv sune©rontav, coroÅv te Ýno-
maknai par42 t¼ tv carv mfuton Ànoma.
[the account] says that every young being, so to speak, cannot be quiet
in either body or voice but it is always seeking to move and emit sounds,
now leaping and jumping as if it were dancing with pleasure and playing
cheerfully together, now emitting all sorts of voices. The other living beings,
then, lack the perception of order and disorder in movement, whose names
are ‘rhythm’ and ‘harmony’. But to us men the gods, whom we said were
given as our fellow celebrants, are also those who have bestowed the plea-
surable perception of rhythm and harmony, by means of which they set
us in motion and lead us in the choruses, joining us with each other with
songs and dances and they named the choruses so because of the name of
joy which is inborn in them.
A similar phenomenology for humans’ unique ability to perceive

(asqhsiv)43 order (txiv) in movement and sound is repeated, with
small variation (the link with pleasure is not explicitly stated but is eas-
ily inferred from the relative contexts), in three other passages, that is,
2.664e3–665a2:
epomen, e« memnmeqa, katì rcv tän l»gwn, Þv ¡ fÅsiv pntwn tän

nwn dipurov oÔsa ¡suc©an oÉc o¯a te gein oÎte kat t¼ säma oÎte
kat tn fwnn eh, fqggoito dì eª tktwv kaª phd, txewv dì
39 On the nature of this logos, whether a truly Platonic invention or not, cf. Schöpsdau 1994: 261–2.
40 For the syntax see England 1921, I: 276 ad 2.653e4: ‘it is only the txeiv, not the tax©av to which
o³v refers: the perception of txeiv involves the perception of their opposites, and Plato will not omit
this fact; at the same time he finds the illogical relative o³v a convenient sentence-link.’
41 At 654a2 the marginal variant eÎruqmon in L is clearly wrong inasmuch as introduces ‘the further
notion of the adaptability or the careful preservation of çuqm»v’ (England 1921, I: 277 ad loc.).
42 I follow England 1921, I: 276–7 in taking par t¼ Ànoma as an instance of causal par + acc.
43 On the meaning of asqhsiv in this passage (‘elementary sensation’ that though ‘largely connected
to a physical dimension, nonetheless . . . concerns the soul’) see the analysis by Pelosi 2010: 50.
asqhsin44 toÅtwn mfotrwn, tän llwn mn zwn oÉdn fptoito,
¡ d nqrÛpou fÅsiv coi m»nh toÓtoá t d tv kinsewv txei çuqm¼v
Ànoma eh, t d aÔ tv fwnv, toÓ te ½xov ma kaª barov sugkeran-
numnwn, rmon©a Ànoma prosagoreÅoito, core©a d t¼ sunamf»teron
klhqe©h.
If we recollect, at the beginning of our discourse we said that the nature
of every young being is fiery and that it is incapable to keep still either
body or voice but always cries and leaps in a disorderly manner; whereas
the perception of order in both bodily motion and sound we said that this
human nature alone possesses and that none of the other living beings has
it. And we said that order in motion is called ‘rhythm’ and order in voice,
when acute and grave are mixed together, is called ‘harmony’ and that the
combination of the two things is called choreia.45
At 2.672b8–d3 (where the emphasis is on the perception of rhythm and

harmony as precursor to and at the same time conducive to the fuller
development of reason):
AQ. t¼ d tos»nde o²da, Âti pn zon, Âson aÉt proskei noÓn cein
telewqnti, toÓton kaª tosoÓton oÉdn con pot fÅetaiá n toÅt
d t cr»n n mpw kkthtai tn o«ke©an fr»nhsin, pn ma©neta©
te kaª bo tktwv, kaª Âtan ktainÛs
aut¼ tcista, tktwv aÔ
phd. namnhsqämen d Âti mousikv te kaª gumnastikv famen rcv
taÅtav e²nai.
KL. memnmeqaá t© dì oÎ;
AQ. oÉkoÓn kaª Âti tn çuqmoÓ te kaª rmon©av asqhsin to±v nqrÛpoiv
¡m±n ndedwknai tn rcn taÅthn famen, %p»llwna d kaª MoÅsav
kaª Di»nuson qeän a«t©ouv gegonnai;
athenian stranger: [ . . . ] but this much I know, that no living being is ever
born having that extent of reason which is proper to it to have when fully
developed. During this time in which it has not yet acquired the intelligence
proper to it, every living being is entirely mad and shouts in a disorderly
fashion and as soon as it can stand erect by itself, it leaps in a disorderly way.
Let us remember that we said that these are the beginnings of music and
gymnastic.
clinias: We remember it; how could we not?
athenian stranger: Do we not also remember that we said that it was this
origin which has given to us the perception of rhythm and harmony and
that the responsible among the gods are Apollo, the Muses and Dionysos?
44 txewv . . . asqhsin (664e6): in favour of the transmitted accusative, see England 1921, I: 310 ad
loc. and Schöpsdau 1993: 310 (‘freischwebende[r] Akkusativ’). toÅtwn mfotrwn: England 1921,
I: 310 ‘i.e. of bodily movement, and voice; this genitive depends on txewv, and that on asqhsin.’
45 Cf. also 2.672e8–673a1.
and 2.673c9–d5:
oÉkoÓn aÔ taÅthv rc mn tv paidiv t¼ kat fÅsin phdn e«q©sqai
pn zon, t¼ d nqrÛpinon, Þv famen, asqhsin lab¼n toÓ çuq-
moÓ gnnhsn te Àrchsin kaª teken, toÓ d mlouv Ëpomimnskontov
kaª ge©rontov t¼n çuqm»n, koinwqntì llloiv core©an kaª paidin
tekthn.
Well, also the origin of this play (i.e. gymnastic) lies in the fact that every
living being is accustomed by nature to leaping, whereas humankind, as we
said, having obtained the perception of rhythm, generated and gave birth
to dance; and since the song recalled and awakened rhythm, the union of
these two gave birth to choreia and play.
Disorderly movements of the body and unarticulated cries are the visible
manifestation of a psychic disorder that every young living being, human
and not human, (t¼ non pan) shares (for human infants cf. also 7.790e8–
791b1 on which see below).46 Yet human physis, and human physis alone,
has already in itself, by divine dispensation, the capacity of counteracting
this inner disorder: the ability to perceive an orderly pattern in movements
(çuqm»v) and to rejoice at it (at 10.898a we are told that also the movement
of the mind (k©nhsiv noÓ) is endowed with its own txiv).47
Similarly, at 7.790e8–791b1, speaking about the education of the soul
of the most young (infant included: 7.790c1–2 t perª tv yucv tän
pnu nwn pa©dwn pithdeÅmata; cf. also 7.790c8–9 to±v Âti newt-
toisi, 7.790d1–2 perª t neogen pa©dwn qrmmata), the Athenian
Stranger clearly equates the care of nursing ‘correctly’ their soul and body
with movement (7.790c6–7 sÛmat»v te kaª yucv tän pnu nwn tn
tiqnhsin kaª k©nhsin), and movement accompanied by some form of
music (7.790e4). Continuous and regulated motion and music do cure
46 A subtle analysis of this passage in relation to Phaedrus 254d (the movements of the black horse) is
provided by Belfiore 2006: 209–10. As observed by Pelosi 2004: 407 in Tim. 42e–44d the restlessness
of the soul at the moment in which it enters into a body is described in terms analogous to the
restlessness of the children of Laws 7.790d–791b: its movements are equally tktwv and l»gwv.
On the ‘physics of infant psychology’ as described by the motions of the soul in children at Tim.
43a–c, cf. also Sedley 2000: 798–9.
47 For the evolution of the semantics of çuqm»v from ‘changeable, fluid form in the instant that
is assumed by what is moving’ to ‘perception of a regular, fixed order in movement’ (mostly a
Pythagorean and Platonic development), see Benveniste 1951/1971 updated and qualified by Sandoz
1971: 58–77; cf. also Beekes, EDG II s.v. çuqm»v and Calame 2008b: 208–10 (esp. n. 14). Plato’s
definition of rhythm can still be considered as the minimal working definition that meets contem-
porary scholarly consensus: cf. Fraisse 1982: 150 and Fraisse 1987: 8; on Fraisse’s impact on studies of
perception of time, cf. Clarke 1999: 473–5. On the ‘bodily nature of rhythm’ in the Laws as ‘a link
between individual and social rhythms on the one hand, between social rhythms and social change
on the other’, see the perceptive analysis by Kowalzig forthcoming.
the disordered internal movement of both infants and those affected by
bacchic mania (7.790d5–e4):48
¡n©ka gr n pou boulhqäsin katakoim©zein t dusupnoÓnta tän
paid©wn a¬ mhtrev, oÉc ¡suc©an aÉto±v prosfrousin ll toÉnan-
t©on k©nhsin, n ta±v gklaiv eª se©ousai, kaª oÉ sign ll tina
meld©an, kaª tecnäv o³on katauloÓsi tän paid©wn, kaqapereª tän
kfr»nwn bakceiän «sei taÅt
t tv kinsewv ma core© kaª moÅs
crÛmenai.49
For when mothers want to lull to sleep children suffering from sleeplessness,
they do not apply to them quiet but on the contrary motion, keeping rocking
them continuously in their arms, and instead of silence they offer them a
kind of melody. It is as if they were casting charms on their children (as it
is done upon those who are mentally disturbed) by using as a remedy the
combined movements of dance and song.
The psychic disorder of infants and madmen which manifests itself in
unruly motion of the body and cries is due to a faulty disposition of
the soul, that is, ‘fear’ (7.790e8–9 sti de©mata diì xin faÅlhn tv
yucv tina). An external motion (7.791a1 xwqen . . . seism»n and ¡
tän xwqen . . . k©nhsiv), combined with music, overpowers the ‘inner
maddened movement’ of the soul (7.791a1–3: tn nt¼v fobern oÔsan
kaª manikn k©nhsin) producing a ‘tranquil calmness’ (7.791a3 galnhn
¡suc©an) over the ‘leaping’, palpitating heart (tv perª t tv kard©av
calepv genomnhv . . . phdsewv).50 We are not told here explicitly that
the counteracting movement must be orderly, yet the lulling movement
of the nurses, the analogy with the rhythmic movement of sea-voyage
(7.790c9 kaª o«ke±n, e« dunat¼n §n, o³on eª plontav) and the close
similarity, both in terms of expressions and content, between this passage
and the effects of regular movements on the body in Tim. 88d–e speaks
strongly in favour of a rhythmic bodily motion.51 This orderly motion
48 For the importance in this passage of the notion of ‘movement’ as the vehicle channelling the
interaction between music and soul, see Pelosi 2010: 17–18.
49 I follow here Bury’s text and punctuation but retain the transmitted bakceiän (on bakceiän see
Linforth 1946: 132–3): for this solution cf. also Panno 2007: 112–13 n. 84. For alternative textual
arrangements, see England 1921, II: 240–1 and Schöpsdau 2003: 511–2. tv kinsewv at 7.790e2 is
the defining genitive of core© kaª moÅs
.
50 On this passage see Pelosi 2004: 406–7 and Belfiore 2006: 207–9.
51 Cf. esp. Tim. 88e2 metr©wv se©wn and e3 e«v txin katakosm. For the regular motion of the
rocking movement imposed by the sea on the sea-voyager, cf. Tim. 89a7 ¡ (sc. kqarsiv) di tän
a«wrsewn kat te ploÓv (on the meaning of a«Ûrhsiv (‘oscillatory motion’), see Taylor 1928: 626
ad loc.). The relevance of this Timaeus passage for the Laws is now highlighted also by Pelosi 2010:
18. For the orderly nature of the motion imposed upon children and madmen at 7.790e8–791b1, cf.
Linforth 1946: 133, Belfiore 2006: 208 and Schöpsdau 2003: 510–11.
is first imposed upon them from external forces but is immediately fully
internalized in as much as it produces a thoroughly desirable and plea-
surable outcome (7.791a5–6 pantpasin gapht»n ti). Bodily therapy
through motion and sound becomes a therapy of the soul: the infants find
relief in sleep and the manic bacchants are awakened to a new state of con-
sciousness by dancing and playing music with the presence and help of the
gods (7.791a6–7 toÆv dì grhgor»tav ½rcoumnouv te kaª aÉloumnouv
met qeän)52 and are thus brought from their manic condition (7.791a8–b1
ntª manikän . . . diaqsewn) to a reasoning state of mind (7.791b1 xeiv
mfronav cein).
In the passages quoted above (2.653d7–654a5, 2.664e3–665a2 and
2.673c9–d5), txiv is represented by the Athenian Stranger not only as
the result of the act of exercising/imposing order in a world of disorder
and change but also as its premise, and a premise already latent and dor-
mant in human nature (cf. esp. 2.673d5 Ëpomimnskontov kaª ge©rontov
t¼n çuqm»n).53 The gods themselves, we are told at Phaedrus 247a3–4,
move through heaven in an orderly choral arrangement (qeoª rcontev
¡goÓntai kat txin ¥n kastov tcqh).54 By a divine gift prompted
by compassion for man’s suffering, humankind (and humankind alone)
can thus not only perceive order in movements (be it vocal or bodily),
but also rejoice by nature at this very perception.55 The pleasure generated
by choreia, since it involves the perception and recognition of order, does
not appeal only to the irrational part of human nature but represents the
closest humankind can ever get to a ‘spontaneous’ convergence between
rational and irrational.56 If there is a human form of expression of what
could be called ‘spontaneous’ rationality (spontaneous inasmuch as trig-
gered by our own physis), this is to be found in the phenomenology of
choreia and its implications in terms of the physiology of pleasure. Very
52 For Plato’s use of met qeän to indicate both the actual presence and help of the gods, see England
1921, II: 242 ad loc.
53 On txiv and physis in Plato, see Mannsperger 1969: 196–205 (esp. 197 on 664e3–665a).
54 For the image of the cosmic dance (gods stars) in Plato cf. also Tim. 40c2–3, Epin. 982e3–6.
55 For the close link between txiv, human physis and ¡don, with special reference to child psychology,
cf. [Arist.] Pr. 38.920b29–36. This of course does not rule out the possibility that non-human beings
may experience pleasure in movement qua movement, even if the movement is unruly: cf. in fact
the expression o³on ½rcoÅmena meqì ¡donv kaª prospa©zonta at 2.653e1–2 (see above). Such a
comparison, even allowing for the indirect way in which it is introduced (cf. o³on), does indeed
suggest that in all young beings already unruly, disordered movements of the body engender, or at
least can engender, pleasure. This pleasure probably consists in some kind of consciousness, even
if only sensorial, of being in motion. What the gods give us is not just the capacity of perceiving
pleasure as such in movement but that of perceiving pleasure in orderly motion.
56 Cf. Laks 2000: 277 (= Laks 2005: 48); see also Jouët-Pastré 2006: 69–71, Castel-Bouchouchi 2003:
197, Welton 1996: 218–19.
similarly, in Tim. 47c–d harmony, a divine gift whose movements are akin
to the regular movements of the soul (47d2–3), has been bestowed by the
Muses to those who use them ‘with reason’ (47d3 t met noÓ proscr-
wmn MoÅsaiv). And this gift has been given not with the view to a merely
irrational pleasure (47d3–4 oÉk fì ¡donn logon) but as an ally (47d6
sÅmmacov) of the soul to restore its order and concord with itself once it has
lost it (47d5–6 pª tn gegonu±an n ¡m±n nrmoston yucv per©odon
e«v katak»smhsin kaª sumfwn©an aut). In the same way, rhythm (47d7
çuqm»v) has been given to us as ‘helper’ (47e1 p©kourov) because of our
natural disposition which is deficient in measure and grace (47d7–e2 di
tn metron n ¡m±n kaª car©twn pide gignomnhn . . . xin).57
In Magnesia humans start learning to be divine by means of a ‘kinetics
of virtue’58 that strives to equate, as closely as possible, nature and ¡don,
nature and txiv, nature and paide©a.59 Order in movement, be it per-
ceived or conceptualized, is then literally in the ‘second best city’ a defining
category of human experience in as much it brings humankind closer to
its inborn divine element.60 This mode of being distinctly human is also a
social way of being: it integrates individuals into the community and gives
them a shared perception of life and its ‘social time’.61 Social solidarity
and cohesion are grounded in the collective experience of dancing and
singing together: rhythmic bodily agreement generates bonds, and these
bonds project beyond the immediate present of the performance. To be
able to perceive rhythm in movements does not only imply the capac-
ity to recognize a pattern of repetition but the perception of early events
in a sequence creates also expectations about later events: in this sense
the defining feature of rhythm as order is ‘the demand, preparation and
anticipation for something to come’ (You 1994: 363). The ‘moral’ dimen-
sion of rhythm is oriented towards the future (You 1994: 364): rhythm
57 The similarity between this passage of the Timaeus and Laws 2.653d7f had already been noted
by Taylor 1928: 297 ad loc. For a nuanced reading of Tim. 47d2–7 see now Pelosi 2010: 68–
89. car©twn pide . . . xin: it may be worth noting that at Laws 2.667b5–8 criv is defined as
the pleasure produced by one’s activity (cf. esp. 2.667b9 parpesqai tn crin ¥n ¡donn n
prose©poimen).
58 For the term cf. Laks 1987: 220.
59 Cases of a physis recalcitrant to the ‘correct’ education are nevertheless contemplated if only to be
dismissed on the grounds of gnoia and peir©a of what we really desire by nature: cf. 2.655e5–
656a5, 6.765e3–766a4. On the former passage, see Russell 2005: 224–5.
60 At 4.716b1–2 a human life deprived of the divine is troped as the disorderly movements of an unruly
dance: whoever does not act in a way which is dear and conforming to god katale©petai rhmov
qeoÓ, kataleifqeªv d . . . skirt tarttwn pnta ma.
61 Cf. Mauss 1969: 252–3 ‘le rythme, faculté d’ensemble, vient directement d’une action fait
d’ensemble’. For the role of rhythm in keeping Magnesia’s community united and resilient to
change, see Kowalzig forthcoming.
is an intentional state and has a perspective. I maintain that it is this
ability of rhythm to prepare, train and condition our future emotional
responses that provides the overall important link between the (human)
sensorial perception of pleasure in order and the emotional belief (d»xa)
it generates.62 At 1.644c–d the Athenian Stranger tells Kleinias that our
soul has two opposite, non-intelligent ‘counsellors’ (sumboÅlw nant©w
te kaª frone 644c6–7): pain (lÅph) and pleasure (¡don). In addition
to these advisers (1.644c9 pr¼v d toÅtoin), the soul also has ‘opinions’
regarding the future (1.644c9 d»xav mell»ntwn): expectations of pleasure
(‘hope’) and pain (‘fear’).63 This seems to suggest that pleasure deriving
from anticipation involves a propositional attitude: that is, alongside the
instinctual perception, anticipation of pleasure requires also what we can
call an evaluative belief.64 Memory plays an important role in this: because
we remember the rhythmic progress so far, we are inclined to form the
expectation of its continuation in an orderly fashion and take pleasure
in the fullfilment of that expectation.65 In fact at 2.657c3–6 the Athenian
Stranger, speaking of the psychological effects of pleasure, states that ‘it is
necessary that one who takes delight (t¼n ca©ronta) in things become
similar (¾moioÓsqai) to the things he rejoices in’ (2.656b4–5). The ‘correct’
use of the playful dimension related to song and dance (2.657c3–4 tn
t mousik kaª t paidi met core©av cre©an ½rqn) brings about an
identity between experiencing delight (ca©rein) and the self-consciousness
of ‘doing well’ (oesqai eÔ prttein):66 ca©romen Âtan o«Ûmeqa eÔ prt-
tein, kaª ¾p»tan ca©rwmen, o«»meqa eÔ prttein aÔ; män oÉc oÌtwv;
(‘don’t we rejoice whenever we think that we are doing well and whenever
we rejoice, don’t we think that we are doing well? Is it not so?’, 2.657c5–6).
That is, as observed by Welton (1996: 216), ‘pleasure is both the cause and
62 For d»xa as an essential constitutive element of pleasure, which cannot be reduced to mere perception
(asqhsiv), see Delcomminette 2003 (esp. 219–22 and 226–7 n. 27). Similarly, at Phileb. 39d1–5
Socrates introduces the pleasure of anticipation or ‘hope’ as an instance of a d»xa concerning what
is about to happen (39d1–5).
63 Cf. Rep. 9.584c7–9 on the pleasures called prohsqseiv te kaª prolupseiv which derive from
expectation (k prosdok©av): see Russell 2005: 129 on the passage. On the pleasures of anticipations
in the Philebus, see Delcomminette 2003: 229–35.
64 Cf. Russell 2005: 129 n. 47 ‘Plato . . . focuses on anticipation in order to isolate the crucial element
of intentionality in certain kinds of pleasure.’ On the Laws passage see also Sassi 2008: 131: ‘such
opinions are obviously “instinctive” in a certain sense, since they can lead to action immediately,
without being filtered by rational evaluation. Yet in this passage the term doxa none the less also
refers to a basic level of interior representation of sensible reality’. On the pleasure of expectation as
a ‘pleasure of the soul’ in Phil. 32c–d and on the role of ‘recollection’ (mnmh) and ‘desire’ (piqum©a)
in the soul determining what a pleasure is about, see Frede 1993: xliv–xlv.
65 For the important role played by memory in the perception of pleasure see Warren 2010.
66 On this passage see Welton 1996: 216–17 and Carone 2003: 292–3.
the effect of a certain kind of belief’. In the case of choreia, since rhythm by
its constitution is a future-oriented activity, to perceive the pleasure of order
in motion means at the same time also to discipline your future expectation
of pleasure, that is, to exploit ‘by nature’ the intentional state present in
pleasure in a ‘correct’ way. The mental representation of an anticipated
pleasure generates pleasure itself apart from the actual bodily perception.67
With regard to dance and song, exclusively human activities, the pleasure
in orderly motion is a divine gift, meant to reconnect humankind to its
divine origin: it is then a ‘true’ pleasure of the soul and body jointly com-
bined, inasmuch as ‘the condition of the truth of any pleasure is the truth
of the concept of pleasure we have at our disposal’ (Delcomminette 2003:
235). In this sense, the anticipatory value of rhythm contributes to create a
‘moral’ narrative by shaping movements over longer stretches of time and
giving them groundings and coherence. Order in bodily and vocal motion
brings the invisible sacred into visible corporeal reality: rhythm thus links
even closer feeling and belief and as a form of ‘spontaneous’ human ratio-
nality allows us [or humans] to bridge the gap between the training of the
appetitive and spirited parts of the soul.
2. Euphēmia vs thrēnos: Magnesia’s choruses and civic purity

Finally, I would like to turn to one more passage of the Laws where
reading Magnesia’s choreia against the background of contemporary choral
practices in the Greek polis may further our understanding of the ways
in which the choral performances of the ‘second best city’ contribute also
to projecting a strong sense of civic purity and cohesion towards both the
performers/spectators and the outside world.
After having praised the Egyptians for consecrating (7.799a4 kaqierä-
sai) every form of dance and song and avoiding any novelty the Athe-
nian Stranger urges the Magnesians to do the same: ‘let no one voice
(mhdeªv . . . fqeggsqw) anything or make any dance movement (mhdì n
½rcsei kine©sqw) that is contrary to the public and sacred songs and
the whole choreia of the young (par t dhm»sia mlh te kaª ¬er kaª
tn tän nwn sÅmpasan core©an) any more than against any other law’
(7.800a4–7). To successfully implement this decree (7.800a3 d»gma) the
divine legislator must first ‘shape with his speech’ (7.800b7 plsasqai
t l»g) some kind of ‘moulds’ (7.800b6 kaqper kmage±ì tta)
67 For the importance of logism»v in humans’ prospective faculties and ‘future-directed attitudes’, see
Warren 2010 (esp. 6–7).
which may set out the most important criteria.68 The first requirement
for the ‘holy’ songs of Magnesia’s choruses is the observance of eÉfhm©a
(7.800e10–801a4): the ‘ritually correct’ utterance to propitiate the gods.69
It is within this context that the Athenian Stranger voices the following
criticism against the perverted sacrificial and choral practices of contempo-
rary Greek cities within a broader censure of dirges or funeral lamentations
(7.800c7–e9):70
dhmos© gr tina qus©an Âtan rc tiv qÅs
, met taÓta cor¼v
oÉc e³v ll plqov corän ¤kei, kaª stntev oÉ p»rrw tän bwmän
ll parì aÉtoÆv n©ote, psan blasfhm©an tän ¬erän katacousin,
çmas© te kaª çuqmo±v kaª gowdesttaiv rmon©aiv sunte©nontev tv
tän krowmnwn yucv, kaª Áv n dakrÓsai mlista tn qÅsasan
paracrma pois
p»lin, oÕtov t nikhtria frei. toÓton d t¼n
n»mon rì oÉk poyhfiz»meqa; kaª e potì ra de± toioÅtwn oktwn g©g-
nesqai toÆv pol©tav phk»ouv, ¾p»tan ¡mrai m kaqara© tinev ll
pofrdev åsin, t»qì ¤kein don n eh mllon coroÅv tinav xwqen
memisqwmnouv doÅv, o³on o¬ perª toÆv teleutsantav misqoÅmenoi
Karik tini moÅs
propmpousi [toÆv teleutsantav];71 toioÓt»n pou
prpon n eh kaª perª tv toiaÅtav dv gign»menon, kaª d kaª stol
g pou ta±v pikhde©oiv da±v oÉ stfanoi prpoien n oÉdì p©crusoi
k»smoi, pn d toÉnant©on, ¯nì Âti tcista perª aÉtän lgwn pallt-
twmai. t¼ d tosoÓton ¡mv aÉtoÆv panerwtä plin, tän kmage©wn
ta±v da±v e« präton n toÓqì ¡m±n rskon ke©sqw.
Whenever a magistrate carries out some civic sacrifice, there arrives after-
wards not one single chorus but indeed a crowd of choruses and standing
not far from the altars, but at times right beside them pours every kind
of blasphemy on the sacred offerings. They do that by stretching the souls
of the listeners with words, rhythms and most mournful harmoniai. And
whichever chorus makes the sacrificing city weep the most on the spot,
this chorus carries off the prize of victory. Are we not going to vote against
this custom? And if it is sometimes necessary for the citizens to hear such
lamentations, whenever the days are impure and of ill-omen, then would it
not be better that some choruses of singers hired from abroad should come
instead, as is the case with the hired mourners who escort off the dead with
their Carian muse? This kind of thing would presumably be fitting also for
68 For the exchangeability of kmage±a/n»moi/tÅpoi in this passage, see Schöpsdau 2003: 537.
69 Cf. also 7.821d2–4: the citizens of Magnesia must not blasfhme±n about the gods but eÉfhme±n
d eª qÅontv te kaª n eÉca±v eÉcomnouv eÉsebäv (here proficiency in cosmology is linked to
eÉfhm©a as the ‘correct’ attitude towards the divine). On eÉfhm©a in prayers, see Pulleyn 1997: 184.
For eÉfhm©a as an ethos opposed to the qrhnädev, see Tartaglini 2003: 323–4.
70 On this latter aspect, see recently Bouvier 2008; for the prohibition of dirges in Callipolis, cf. Rep.
3.387d–388e and 10.605c–606e.
71 For the athetesis of toÆv teleutsantav at the end of the sentence at 7.800e3, see England 1921,
II: 263–4 ad loc.
songs of such kind. And presumably crowns and golden ornaments would
not be the befitting robe for these funeral songs but just the opposite – so
that I can get rid of talking about this subject as soon as possible. About
such an issue I ask ourselves again: are we pleased to lay this down first as
one of our moulds for songs?
What kind of civic event is envisaged by the Athenian Stranger? We are
told that it is a public religious occasion at which multiple choruses stand
by the altars and work up the souls of the citizens with the most sorrowful
music and rhythms. It is also a competitive performance: whatever chorus
is most successful at making the sacrificing city weep will get the prize
(7.800d5 t nikhtria). Scholarly opinions have varied but the insistence
on the ‘crowd of choruses’ mentioned by the Athenian Stranger, and the
mournful and soul-stirring character of their songs seems indeed to bear a
direct reference to the institution of the dithyrambic and tragic choruses.72
The prerequisite of every song in Magnesia is its being a euphemic act of
piety, that is literally, ‘a prayer to the gods’ (7.801a6 eÉcv e²nai to±v qeo±v73 )
asking only for what is good (7.801a8–d6); these prayers will then be hymns
to the gods (7.801e1–2 Ìmnoi qeän kaª gkÛmia kekoinwnhmna eÉca±v).
These passages have often been interpreted as reliable evidence for an early
generic categorization within lyric poetry,74 yet hymnos-related words in
both Pindar and Bacchylides refer to men and gods alike, and if a hymn
may be a prayer, a prayer needs not necessarily be a hymn.75 If Plato wanted
a hymn to be, at least at Magnesia, a ‘sung prayer to the gods’, this has more
to do with his particular agenda than with literary classification: the citizens
of the ‘second best’ city must spend their lives ‘in a dialogue with the gods
by means of prayers and supplications’ (10.887e1–2 Þv Âti mlista oÔsin
qeo±v eÉca±v prosdialegomnouv kaª ¬kete©aiv) to preserve the purity of
the civic euphemic ritual. Already in Book 2 (664c6–d1) in fact we have
been told that the euphemic song par excellence, the paean,76 will be sung
by the ‘second chorus’ of men invoking (pikaloÅmenov) Apollo as ‘Paean’
72 See Tartaglini 2003: 326–9 and Schöpsdau 2003: 538. Cf. already Taylor 1934: 184 n. 1. England
1921, II: 263 refers to Rep. 10.605d (the corrupting power of poetic mimesis even on the ‘best’ of us:
Homer and tragedy are associated in their common indulgence to grief (pnqov) and lamentations
(½durmo©). On the ban of the ‘mournful harmoniai’ (qrhnÛdeiv rmon©ai) from the musical paide©a
of Callipolis, see esp. Tartaglini 2003: 326 and 329. On the effect that ‘mournful’ music produces
on the soul of the listener, see now Pelosi 2010: 39–40.
73 Cf. also 801e1–2 and 3.700b1–2 ka© ti §n e²dov dv eÉcaª pr¼v qeoÅv, Ànoma d Ìmnoi
pekaloÓnto.
74 See e.g. Furley and Bremer 2001, I: 11–12 with further bibliography.
75 Cf. Pulleyn 1997: 43–50 (esp. 44–5 with n. 18), Willi 2003: 13–15. The difference between prayer and
hymn is in the context and modality of utterance. Prayer is a speech-act, hymn a mode of performing
a speech-act.
76 For the strict link between paean and eÉfhm©a in Greek cult and literary imagination, see Rutherford
2001: 53–5 (esp. 54 n. 69) and Stehle 2004: 129.
(‘Healer’), and praying (peuc»menov) the god to be gracious (¯lewv) to the
young and to show his benevolence through persuasion. Tragic choruses,
differently from euphemic choruses, may at times, but not necessarily,77
evoke a different set of associations and beliefs about the gods: threnos and
paian (and to a lesser extent dithyramb and paian) are often merged into
each other partially perverting non-dramatic civic rituals.78
In particular, Plato’s attack on the ‘politics of dirge’ enacted by tragedy
and dithyramb seems to reflect a specifically fourth-century concern: the
fact that tragedy was increasingly being perceived, at least from some
critical quarters, as less of a ‘civic celebration’ and more of ‘a role-based
lamentation’.79 Euripides’ tragedies were saturated with laments (choral
and monodic) and the New Dithyramb contributed substantially to exac-
erbating the threnodic element of dramatic songs.80 Later fourth-century
reflection and theorizing on tragedy as a genre seem to emphasize this
same aspect, though from a very different point of view and with a dif-
ferent agenda (the rescue of tragedy from Plato’s ‘moral’ criticism as an
‘organic’ literary product, with a neat cause–effect structure). When Aris-
totle says in his Poetics 13.1453a29–30 that Euripides is ‘the most tragic
of the poets’ (tragikÛtatov) inasmuch as his tragedies show an overall
preponderance of ‘sad-endings’,81 he is certainly being prescriptive more
than descriptive, and in so doing he is erasing one of the most fascinating
aspects of audience reception of the tragic genre, that is, its ambiguity and
open-endedness. Yet Aristotle’s comment, normative as it may be, shows
also how it may have been difficult to reconcile Euripides’ ‘poetics of sor-
row’ with a more positive civic ethos that Athenian tragedies may after all
promote.82 According to the biographical tradition the Women of Aetna
was presented by Aeschylus to the settlers of the new colony as ‘an augury
77 Tragedy too can in fact recognize the traditional opposition paian/thrēnos, cf. e.g. Aesch. Cho.
342–3 ntª d qrnwn pitumbid©wn/paiÜn ktl., Eur. IT 181–3 xaudsw / tn n qrnoisin
moÓsan . . . tn n molpa±v / +idav Ëmne± d©ca painwn.
78 See Stehle 2004 (esp. 125–6); Rutherford 1995 and 2001: 118–21; for the perverted use of paian in
tragedy cf. now also Swift 2010: 70–89 (esp. 102 civic/tragic religion). For the latent tension between
tragic and civic theology, see Parker 1997.
79 Cf. Wise 2008: 384. On the limits inherent in such an ‘Aristotelian’ view and its prescriptive nature,
cf. Mastronarde 2010: 63–4.
80 Cf. Tartaglini 2003: 328 with n. 22. For the New Dithyramb one could compare what we know about
Timotheus’ Scylla (793 PMG): cf. Arist. Poet. 1454a28f. stin d pardeigma . . . toÓ d prepoÓv
kaª m rm»ttontov Â te qrnov < ¾ toÓ> ìOdusswv n t SkÅll
.
81 For Aristotle’s use of tragikÛtatov at Poet. 1453a29 and the qualifications this term entails, see
Halliwell 1996: 333–4 (and n. 4 at 348) and Mastronarde 2010: 58 and 63. For Euripides’ frequent
sad-ending tragedies, cf. Arist. Poet. 1453a24–6 (on which see Janko 1987: 104 ad loc.).
82 Wise 2008 construes a too rigid teleological model of development for the ethos of Greek tragedy
and she is positively wrong in the emphases put on the fragmentations of tragic tetralogies in terms
of history of transmission (see Hanink 2011): it would be more correct to say that ‘civic celebration’
of a happy life’ (Life of Aeschylus 10.34 Radt: o«wniz»menov b©on gaq¼n
to±v sunoik©zousi tn p»lin). What must be avoided according to Plato
is the psychagogic, persuasive force of the lament, a ‘tragic’ quality that
we find very literally exploited in the address to the chorus by Darius’
eidōlon in Persians 686–8 Ëme±v d qrhne±tì ggÆv stätev tfou, / kaª
yucagwgo±v ½rqizontev g»oiv / o«kträv kale±sq mì (‘and you standing
by my tomb sing songs of grief and call on me piteously shrieking with
your laments that win men’s souls’). Tragic and dithyrambic choruses of
contemporary Athens are virtually presented as ‘unsuitable dirges’ for per-
formers who are first of all citizens: a criticism that clearly echoes Aeschylus’
charge against Euripides of having indiscriminately drawn for inspiration
on ‘Karian aulos tunes, dirges and dances’ in Ar. Ran. 1302–3 (Karikän
aÉlhmtwn, / qrnwn, coreiän).83 Most significant is also the equation
of mournful songs and hired choruses of foreigners (7.800e1–2 coroÅv
tinav xwqen memisqwmnouv doÅv): Magnesia’s civic purity must not be
contaminated.84 This is implicit also in the Athenian Stranger’s (negative)
emphasis on the fact that the contemporary civic system allows for a multi-
plicity of choruses, not one: 7.800c8 cor¼v oÉc e³v ll plqov corän.
This criticism clearly reflects the preoccupation of a split, divided society:
no multiplicity of civic ethos/choruses is allowed in Plato’s ‘second best
city’.85
Plato’s Magnesia will indeed perform and enact ‘the best and most
beautiful tragedy’, but Magnesia’s drama will find in lyric, non-dramatic
patterns of chorality and their mediating role between performers and
audience its truest way of expression.
was simply one of the ‘tragic’ possibilities encoded in the genre from its very beginning. For the
‘tragic muse’ tout court as muse of pnqov in its fourth-century bc reception, see Lada-Richards
2002a and Fantuzzi 2007.
83 See already England 1921, II: 263 ad loc. for the reference to the Aristophanic passage. For the
‘politics of lamentation’ in fifth-century Attic drama, cf. Swift 2010: 322–66.
84 Interesting here is the parallel with comic performances at Magnesia: cf. 7.816e5–7 (only slaves and
xnoi mmisqoi will perform comedy).
85 At a practical level of implementation the Cretan colony will have sundry choruses (cf. the trichoria
at 2.664c4–d4, choral competitions at 7.764e–765a, 8.834e–835a), but ideologically the whole city
seems to be envisaged as one and the same choral voice.
chapter 1 2
The comic chorus and the demagogue

Jeffrey Henderson
In 427 Aristophanes, then in his late teens or early twenties, made his the-
atrical debut with Banqueters, winning the second prize. Over the following
six years he consolidated this early success in a series of plays designed to
establish himself as a comic poet not only original and uncommonly sophis-
ticated but also important as a civic voice. He made his design apparent
by building into these plays a poetic autobiography, a kind of running
commentary that defended his political sympathies and revealed his artis-
tic principles in relation to the comic tradition, to his rivals (especially
Cratinus), and to tragedy (especially Euripides), which he incorporated for
both parody and emulation (paratragedy).1 Central to this program and
developed in four of the plays – Babylonians (Dionysia 426, focusing on
imperial policy), Acharnians (Lenaea 425, the war), Knights (Lenaea 424,
demagoguery), and Wasps (Lenaea 422, corruption of the courts) – were a
sustained attack on the popular leader Cleon, systematic denunciation of
Cleon’s tactics and policies, and criticism, combined with attempted dis-
enchantment, of those among the citizenry who supported Cleon. These
plays changed the nature of political comedy by making it straightfor-
wardly topical: previously, political themes (as distinct from incidental jibes
or mocking songs) were conveyed mostly if not entirely through mythical
plots and characters that might be understood allegorically;2 Cleon and
the other “new politicians” who came into ascendancy after Pericles’ death
in 4293 were Aristophanes’ inspiration for developing the new modes of
attack.4 Aristophanes’ artistic ambitions for these plays were rewarded by
1 For a survey of Old Comic self-evaluation generally see Sommerstein 1992; for Aristophanes’ incor-
poration of tragedy Foley 2008: 17–27; for earlier comic treatment of tragedy Bakola 2010: 118–79.
2 For example, Cratinus’ Dionysalexander. Some plays by Telecleides and Hermippus also had political
content, but the fragments reveal practically nothing about their plots.
3 Connor 1971 remains the classic analysis.
4 Of course “demagogue comedy” could not have appeared before there were ascendant demagogues:
for the changes in the portrayal of politicians after 429 see Henderson 2003, and for “demagogue
comedy” as a subgenre see Sommerstein 2000.
278
The comic chorus and the demagogue 279
three first prizes and a second prize (Wasps),5 while his claim to civic impact
was acknowledged by Cleon himself, who at least twice took serious legal
action against the poet and thus made the conflict personal as well as
political.6
Since the program developed in these plays required spectator engage-
ment on several levels over a span of six years, they offer a good opportunity
to investigate the contribution made by their choruses. What particular
role did the choruses play in and around the comic fiction, and how
did their relationship to and engagement with the spectators complement
what transpired on stage? In what ways were they vehicles for Aristophanes’
poetic and political agenda? And did they somehow mediate between stage
and spectators? These questions are timely, for while our understanding
of tragedy has been richly enhanced by recent work on the various rela-
tionships of its choruses to the spectators, comic choruses remain relatively
understudied in this respect, recent advances being largely confined to their
ritual/performative character7 and to features of generic or polar distinc-
tiveness potentially illuminating for tragedy.8
But attention to choral mediation in Old Comedy promises significant
rewards, and involves considering whether the concept of mediation is
more useful for tragedy than for comedy. For unlike a typical tragic cho-
rus, which possesses its emotional and gnomic authority and mediating
functions by virtue of being anonymous, generic, predictable, and in terms
5 In 422 his own play Proagon won the first prize; his only failure was Clouds (D 423), which took
the opportunity afforded by Cleon’s temporary loss of ascendancy to revisit the theme of education
treated in Banqueters. The victory-list IG ii2 2325 indicates that Aristophanes won his first Dionysian
victory (the first by a new poet in 10 years) either with Babylonians in 426 or with an unknown play
in 425; his pride in Babylonians and Cleon’s reaction make the former far likelier.
6 For attempted reconstructions of Aristophanes’ conflict with Cleon see Welsh 1978, Storey 1995,
Sommerstein 2004. Rosen (1988 and 2007) considers the conflict a mere dramatic fiction, on the
theory that comic abuse, like all other forms of poetic mockery, was a traditional entertainment
involving stock characters and modes of blame that each poet would appropriate by adding “localizing
details.” But this theory fails to account for the uniquely concentrated, obsessively specific, coherent
and persistently sustained, and vehemently defensive nature of Aristophanes’ attack; for his hostility
even after Cleon’s death in 422 (e.g. Pax 47–8); and for his abandonment, after 422, of the genre
of “demagogue comedy” that he had inaugurated with Knights and that was pursued thereafter by
other comic poets (cf. Nu. 549–60, datable to c. 418, where Aristophanes explicitly takes credit). A
referee of this paper was dubious about “a desire to discern the ‘real’ Ar.’s political attitudes from his
plays and fragments, and a somewhat naive faith in the truth of Aristophanic statements.” But to
draw a distinction between the “real” poet and the way he presented himself in his plays, as between
the “real” politician and the way he presented himself in his speeches, is an academic quibble unless
there is a good reason to think that the audience would appreciate the distinction. I do not find such
a reason, nor did anyone in antiquity; as far as I can tell, the controversy began with Gomme 1938.
7 Most comprehensively by Bierl 2001.
8 Taplin 1986, Foley 2008. For comparison of comic and tragic/satyric choruses see Taplin 1986 and
1996, Foley 2008, Bierl 2010: 47–66.
280 Jeffrey Henderson
of its dramatic status marginal or detached,9 helpless to affect the (often
predetermined) outcome, even dispensable,10 a comic chorus constructs a
dramatic character unique to the play; is as prominent and active as the
characters, not only reacting to but helping to invent, and as partisans
often determining the success or failure of, their initiatives; its leader (or
leaders, if the chorus was divided) and other choreuts often have names,
sometimes representing actual individuals or distinct entities,11 and express
personal recollections and opinions beyond their relationship to the plot,12
including opinions about working for a given poet or producer in the
past; it can usurp or parody other choral genres, including tragedy;13 in
elaborate formal structures it represents both itself and the poet in direct
address to the spectators and subsets thereof, variously praising, criticizing,
rebuking, informing, and edifying; it is conscious of the competition with
other choruses in the festival; it makes contact with gods appropriate to the
play and the festival; and it moves fluidly and explicitly between topical
engagement with democratic Athens (in its dramatic identity, often ironic
and not always sympathetic or authoritative) and the perspective of timeless
polis and theatrical values (in its authoritative identity as the traditional
comic chorus).14
In view of the emphasis since Aristotle on plot and characters in our
study and performance of fifth-century drama, we do well to bear in mind
that in Aristophanes’ time, officially and theatrically, the chorus was the
main event, as it had always been, long before the ascendancy of actors.
Its size (24 dancers for comedy), prominent placement, and spectacular
activity aside, the chorus was what the poet had “asked for” and been
“granted” for the competition and what determined victory or failure for the
production.15 And it was the choruses, competitively recruited throughout
Attica16 by their chorēgoi, wealthy liturgists appointed by the King Archon,
9 For the status of tragic choruses relative to the characters see Hall 1997, Foley 2003.
10 [Arist.] Prob. 19.48 accounts for the nature of the choral music of tragedy by observing that
the chorus, by contrast with the actors, who imitate heroes, is an “inactive attendant (khdeutv
praktov), for it merely offers goodwill (eÎnoian) to those who are present (onstage).” Foley 2003:
14–19 reviews the cases of more active choral engagement in tragic plots.
11 Even for each member of the chorus, as in Birds and Eupolis’ Cities.
12 From their own history or “contingent background” (Silk 1998: 13).
13 While the “polyphonic” tragic chorus (Calame 1999 and in this volume) can evoke other choral
genres (Swift 2010), the comic chorus includes explicit pastiche and parody of high forms along
with popular songs both traditional and original (Silk 1980, Kugelmeier 1996).
14 For the importance of general polis values as distinct from specifically democratic values see Rhodes
2003, Henderson 2007.
15 Nu. 1115–16 (the judges are asked to “help this chorus”), cf. Ach. 641–58, Eq. 545–50, Nu. 519–62,
Ve. 1048–59, Pax 736–74, Av. 445–7, Ec. 1154–62.
16 IG i3 969 is the only example of recruitment solely from a chorēgos’ own deme.
that represented the Athenians in the theater: most if not all Athenian men
had themselves done choreutic service, which had important symbolic
and educational value17 and also enhanced their theatrical expertise as
spectators or judges.18 Festival drama was a community project as well as
a platform for poets. Although the dancers were not typically from the
same elite class as the chorēgoi,19 the prestige of this service is reflected in
choregic art, which “took a greater interest in depicting a chorus as real
citizens . . . than as the anonymous mythical or fictional group of people
or creatures evoked by a dramatic narrative.”20 By contrast, the contest for
actors had only recently been introduced,21 was separate from the contest
for productions, and (like the actors themselves) carried much less prestige.
Poet and chorēgos won the prizes for the production, and the chorus won
animals for sacrifice to Dionysos in the victory celebration that closed the
festival: these epinikia were thronged gatherings22 followed by a banquet
for chorus, chorēgos, and poet as guests of the Priest of Dionysos and
(since the banquet was probably held in the temple) of the god.23 The high
prestige of choregic and choreutic achievement is amply documented in the
monuments and on artifacts (almost always large and expensive sympotic
vessels, mainly kraters), while actors begin to appear only in the 430s and
on cheap vessels.24
The plot of Aristophanes’ debut play Banqueters did not involve public
policy or the demagogues then jockeying for ascendancy (Cleon, Eucrates,
and Lysicles) – a conservative father has two sons, Temperate and Butt-
fucked, the former being given a traditional education and the latter a
sophistic one – but the circumstances of the production are interesting as
regards the chorus. The chorus leader of Clouds (528–33) states that “certain
gentlemen whom it is a pleasure even to mention,” impressed with a draft
of Banqueters, arranged to have it produced by Callistratus, who would also
produce Babylonians and Acharnians and later Birds (D 414) and Lysistrata
(L 411). This frequent partnership, like the partnership with Philonides,
producer of Wasps (L 422), Amphiaraos (L 414), and Frogs (L 405) and
17 For Plato, choral dance was the heart of education (Laws 653–4, 672), with which choros was indeed
synonymous in many poleis (Wilson 2000: 3); see Prauscello in this volume.
18 Cf. Revermann 2006b.
19 They received a stipend and are differentiated in status from the chorēgos by e.g. [X.] Ath. 1.13 and
D. 18.265.
20 Csapo 2010a: 30, concluding his review (12–23) of choregic art, including the Pronomos vase, the
best-known example.
21 In the 440s at the Dionysia and the late 430s at the Lenaea.
22 Cf. Pl. Symp. 173–4, Ar. Ec. 1141–2. 23 Cf. Wilson 2000: 102–3.
24 See Csapo 2010a: 1–37, 74–6, 103–7.
probably other plays, suggests that chorēgoi could have a say in the assign-
ment of poets, and since Callistratus continued to sponsor Aristophanes
through his political attacks in 426 and his self-defense against Cleon in
425, he must have been at least sympathetic to the young poet’s social and
political stance.
Further information about these personal connections is likely provided
by a cult-table of a society (koin»n) of thiasotai of Heracles25 based in
Cydathenaeum, Aristophanes’ deme as well as Cleon’s, one of many such
private associations in Attica that met to sacrifice to Heracles and feast in
his honor, that appealed to the upper classes, and that involved fathers as
well as sons.26 Among the 16 members listed on the table are its priest
Simon, Amphitheus, and Philonides. Simon is the name of one of the two
leaders (with Panaetius) of the chorus of Knights (Eq. 242–43) identified
by the scholiast (243d) as hipparchs; this Simon may be the author of a
treatise on horsemanship and dedicator of a bronze horse in the Eleusinium
commemorating his achievements.27 The name Amphitheus is otherwise
attested only as Dicaeopolis’ magical helper in Acharnians. And Philonides
was probably Aristophanes’ producer; his son, the comic poet Nicochares,
is independently attested as Cydathenaean.
The chorus of Banqueters represents the members of such a society:
“feasting in a shrine of Heracles and then standing up, they formed a
chorus” (test. 1). The father is from the same deme as the chorus (fr. 233)
and probably a member of their society, whose feast would be an appro-
priate venue for his sons’ contest of educations. A similar relationship
of character to chorus is reflected in such titles as Cratinus’ Archilochuses
(“Archilochus and his chorus”), Cheirons, and Odysseuses, and there is Philo-
cleon in Wasps, the chorus’ fellow juror. In contrast to tragedy, comic
choruses are often the equals or (e.g. Knights) superiors of the charac-
ters in status. Although the chorus leader in Banqueters did not speak on
behalf of the poet and/or producer in the parabasis (this first in Achar-
nians: 628–9), it is tempting to connect the play’s banqueters, the Cyda-
thenaean society, and the “gentlemen” who sponsored the play. In that
case the Banqueters and the father (unlike Strepsiades in Clouds) would
have been drawn sympathetically, and the scenario would have added res-
onance to Aristophanes’ subsequent, and frequent, self-comparison with
Heracles as a heroic fighter of monsters (like Cleon) in his comedies of the
420s.
25 IG ii2 2343 (c. 403/2) = Athens, Epigraphical Museum 10652; illustration in Lind 1990: 133.
26 Parker 1996: 333–4; for fathers and sons cf. Is. 9.30 (c. 371). 27 X. Eq. 1.1, Plin. HN 34.76.
Although we cannot determine how integral the personal dimension
of Banqueters was to the action or how it might have affected spectator
reception, the involvement of the chorus, in comedy always interested and
often partisan, must condition whatever mediatory role we hypothesize
for it. Mediators ideally occupy a middle ground, but those spectators
who were impersonated by, or otherwise felt an affinity with a chorus of
upper-class Banqueters would probably not have felt the same way about
a chorus of lower-class Jurors, and vice versa. A comic chorus, when its
dramatic identity is in play, joins the action and leaves the middle ground
unoccupied, so that spectators will respond to the chorus much as they
do to the characters, the main difference being that choruses embody
and articulate the typology of whole categories while characters represent
individual cases.
With Babylonians the following year Aristophanes launched his attack
against the ascendant popular politicians and their policies forcefully
enough to outrage Cleon, by now the most powerful among them. We do
not know Aristophanes’ motivation, but the strong and consistent political
line he would pursue until 42128 suggests both personal conviction and par-
tisan affiliations, and perhaps parochial factors as well.29 Unfortunately the
meager fragments of Babylonians reveal few specifics. For his plot Aristo-
phanes followed the pattern of earlier political satires by adopting familiar
myth (whether or not paratragically is unknown): Dionysos comes to a city,
encounters resistance and imprisonment at the hands of local authorities,
defeats them, and escapes. But whereas the earlier plays had been myth-
comedies whose political meaning was conveyed allegorically, Babylonians
is set in an explicitly topical context: the city is Athens and the authori-
ties are its leading politicians, who at one point try to extract bribes from
their prisoner before his trial and whose corruption is responsible for, inter
multa alia, the war (fr. 84), while the Athenians behave like gullible fools
(fr. 67). It is unclear how Dionysos manages to escape, but the incident
recalled by Dicaeopolis in Acharnians 4–8 (“those five talents Cleon had to
cough up, how that made me glow! And I love the Knights for that deed:
a worthy thing for Greece!”) does not, as is commonly thought, belong to
Babylonians or any other comedy: Aristophanes tells us that the Knights
played no role in comedy before Knights (Acharnians 299–302, Knights
507–11); if the incident occurred in some rival’s play he would hardly have
praised it in this way; and ancient scholars, who were very interested in this
28 Summarized and discussed by Henderson 1998: 12–23.

29 Likely frictions at the local level are explored by Lind 1990.
case, would surely have mentioned an earlier appearance had there been
one.
Aristophanes’ defense of the play in Acharnians tells us a bit more.
Dicaeopolis, speaking as the poet, says that Cleon hauled him before the
Council because of Babylonians (377–82), which had spoken ill of the polis
in the presence of foreigners, i.e. the allies attending the Dionysia (502–6).
In the parabasis, the chorus leader denies that the poet “ridiculed the polis
and insulted the people” and claims that he deserves credit for having
stopped the Athenians from “being duped by the speeches of foreigners”
(i.e. envoys from the allies, 636) and for having benefited the polis by
“showing how the people in the allied cities are democratically governed”
(i.e. by Athens: 642), so that the allies no longer lobby the Athenians to
evade paying tribute but happily pay it out of gratitude for Aristophanes’
courage in speaking fairly about them (643–5); even the Persian King has
heard of the poet’s courage, which he is sure will bring victory in the war
to whichever side has this poet as an advisor (646–55). The chorus leader’s
reminder in Peace 759–60 that the poet had “battled [Cleon] on behalf of
you [the Athenians] and the allies” must also refer to Babylonians.
The chorus were barbarian (fr. 81) slaves, branded or tattooed (frs. 71,
90), and toiling in a mill (fr. 71). If as usual the title identifies the chorus,
they were Babylonians, at that time Persian subjects; they may have been
slaves in the sense that all Persian subjects were slaves,30 or they may have
been actual slaves branded as runaways (the usual reason) before their
arrival in Athens, or they may have been enslaved after their arrival in
Athens. In any event they “have fled to Athens only to discover that they
had exchanged one form of servitude for another.”31 This was a striking
choice: choruses of barbarians32 or slaves33 seem to be vanishingly rare in
comedy, and for the Athenians Babylon was an altogether fabulous place,
not a source of slaves and mentioned only twice elsewhere in drama.34 Their
30 Especially if, as in Acharnians, ambassadors from the King figured in the play, as may be implied in
the Acharnians parabasis.
31 Welsh 1983: 144, who goes on to suggest (145–50) that a chorus of runaways was inspired specifically
by the Persian Zopyrus’ defection to Athens c. 430. His grandfather had helped put down one of
the Babylonian rebellions and was rewarded with its governorship (Hdt. 3.153–60), and his father
Megabazus had fought the Athenians in Egypt in 454. The story was known in Athens in this period,
for Cratinus mentions “Zopyrus’ riches” in his Pylaea (fr. 187).
32 Chionides’ Assyrians and Persians and Magnes’ Lydians, which date to the era of the Persian invasions;
the attribution of a Persians to Pherecrates was questioned in antiquity.
33 Candidates are Callias’ Men in Fetters (Pedetai), not necessarily slaves, and Eupolis’ Helots, not
technically slaves.
34 Aesch. Pers. 52–3 (among contributors to the Persian forces), Ar. Av. 552 (its walls).
situation rather resembles what we find in tragedy35 and particularly satyr
drama, whose outlandish chorus is often captured, put to hard labor (often
by an ogre), and then liberated, as for example in Euripides’ Cyclops. That
Dionysos was a main character in Babylonians enhances the similarity,
though Babylonians seem an unlikely choice as either his followers or his
slaves. In their dramatic status the Babylonians, much like a tragic slave-
chorus or a captive satyr-chorus, may have been less effective participants
in the action onstage than usual, while qua comic koryphaios their leader
would have the status to address the spectators and/or speak on the poet’s
behalf.
The chorus’ anomalous identity invites speculation that it somehow
represented more than simply barbarians, for example the allies, oppressed
by the Athenians as Babylonians were oppressed by the Persians. Their
brands or tattoos do evoke comparison with Samians (fr. 71) and dwellers
by the Istrus (90), but these may be incidental jokes, perhaps guesses about
who the chorus might be, and the Acharnians’ parabasis suggests rather
that it was deceitful ambassadors who represented the allies. And some
doubt that even Aristophanes would have portrayed the allies as outlandish
mill-slaves, especially in their presence at the festival and mere months
after the resistance and controversial punishment of the Mytileneans
(Th. 3.36–50).36 On the other hand, Cleon’s outrage over Babylonians sug-
gests that Aristophanes had done something arguably outrageous. Aristo-
phanes may have portrayed the allies as barbarian slaves in order to spotlight
the popular rejection of Cleon’s policy toward the allies in the debate over
Mytilene: the appeal in the Acharnians parabasis to the Athenians as both
“quick to decide” and “quick to change their minds” (630–2) must recall
this debate, in which the Athenians changed their minds about enforcing
Cleon’s harsh(er) recommendation, and in Knights the reference to Cleon
as a “slaver” (ndrapodistv, 1030) points the same way.37
35 Extant tragedies with choruses of slaves and/or barbarians are Aesch. Cho., Suppl., Eur. Bacch., Hec.,
Tro., Phoen. (female) and Aesch. Pers. (male), and many fragmentary tragedies seem to have had
such choruses; for a list see Foley 2003: 26–7.
36 Cf. e.g. Welsh 1983: 140.
37 D’Angour 1999: 112–15 attempts to make sense of the testimonia for the joke in fr. 71 about “many-
lettered” Samians by suggesting that each choreut was marked with one of the 24 letters of the
Ionian alphabet; that the Callistratus of Samos mentioned in the testimonia as having “presented
[the alphabet] to the Athenians in the archonship of Eucles” (427/6) was Aristophanes’ producer;
and that the Babylonian chorus was his way of introducing the alphabet to the Athenians “in
dramatic fashion,” perhaps in connection with a formal proposal either recent or prospective (but
unsuccessful, since this alphabet was not officially adopted until 403). If so, the letters would have
underlined the assimilation of the Babylonians to the allies, who were mainly Ionians.
It does not follow, however, that in Babylonians Aristophanes expressed
disapproval of either the empire or ally-mistreatment per se: elsewhere
Aristophanes’ attitude is that the Athenians benefit handsomely by exploit-
ing their subjects (e.g. Wasps 707–11) while the subjects are ever ready
to betray their masters (e.g. Peace 619–22), and the extermination of the
Melians makes a good joke (Birds 186). When he portrays the allies sym-
pathetically it is only as an argument against demagogues like Cleon, who
allegedly exploited them for his own enrichment at the expense of the
Athenians generally.38 Apparently Eupolis had the same high-handed atti-
tude: Cities (probably Dionysia 422) had a chorus representing the allies as
women subject to various forms of mishandling by Athenians.
Much remains unknowable about the Babylonians, but whether or not
they represented Athens’ subject allies it is safe to assume that the play took
much the same line as in the subsequent plays: demagogues like Cleon
deceive the people by flattery and fear-mongering, unjustly discredit their
patriotic opponents,39 and connive with foreigners (including accomplices
among the allies) in order to enforce policies that benefit themselves at
the expense of the honest people of Athens and in the allied cities. The
chorus’ dramatic identity, along with the involvement of Dionysos as a
character, would have provided the perspective of parties excluded from
but affected by the political fray, much as women’s choruses do in Lysistrata
and Assemblywomen. In this, their mediatory role would have been more
pronounced than that of the engaged and partisan Banqueters: as with
similarly outlandish and/or subject choruses more typical of tragedy and
satyr drama, their dramatic identity as unjustly oppressed “others” would
not have divided spectator perception, and their subordinate status would
have kept them in the middle ground between stage and audience.
In Acharnians, produced at the following year’s Lenaea, the main char-
acter, a displaced landowner named Dicaeopolis (“Just City/Citizen”: 499–
501) speaks in an unusually fluid identity also as the poet (377–82, 496–
508), as the chorus leader also speaks for the poet (628–64), to rebut
and ridicule the charges that Cleon had unsuccessfully brought before the
Council after Babylonians and that apparently threw in a personal charge
about the validity of the poet’s citizenship.40 But aside from some tough
38 See e.g. Eq. 313 (tribute), 326–7 (milking rich foreigners), 801–2, 1196–7 (bribes), 1030–4 (profiteer-
ing).
39 Portrayed in Knights as whipped and whimpering house-slaves of Demos, oppressed by a newly
bought Paphlagonian overseer (Cleon).
40 The context of the reference to Aegina in Ach. 652–55 suggests its inclusion in Cleon’s brief about
Babylonians; possibly it had been an issue (whether or not raised by Cleon) at the deme level when
talk,41 Aristophanes did not plan a full offensive against Cleon until the fol-
lowing year: as the Acharnians remark, suddenly speaking out of dramatic
character as the poet’s chorus, “I hate you even more than Cleon, whom
I intend to cut up as shoeleather for the Knights” (299–302); their victory
in an action brought against them by Cleon has already been cited by
Dicaeopolis as one of his very few delights (4–8, quoted above).42 Mean-
while, Acharnians continued the broad general attack on current policy
launched in Babylonians, this time questioning the war: both its origi-
nal rationale, focusing on Periclean policy in the years 446–431, and its
current conduct, focusing on the selfish motives of the current political
and military leadership. Once again mythology provides an ingredient: the
character of the unjustly maligned outcast Dicaeopolis contains not only
the poet but also the title hero of Euripides’ Telephos, each of whom is
ultimately vindicated.
The chorus are old men of Acharnae,43 the deme that in reality had led
the opposition to Pericles’ war plan in 431 and that the Spartans ravaged
with special severity (Th. 2.21.3). These Acharnians, vivified by personal
recollections (214) and humorous fictive names44 (220, 609–12), represent
all Athenians except Dicaeopolis (290, 493, 576–7) in wanting to prosecute
the war, identifying themselves with fatherland (289) and polis (492) and
determined to stone the traitor to death. Dicaeopolis’ righteous isolation is
a dramatic and rhetorical construct incorporating Aristophanes’ personal
experience as Cleon’s target (self-aggrandizing in that the poet thus posi-
tions himself as the Athenians’ best and most courageous advisor), the civic
role he sees for comic poets generally (500 “for trygedy too knows what
is just”), and his usurpation of a Euripidean tragic model (borrowing the
authority of myth and the high poetic tradition).
the young poet stood for citizenship, cf. Welsh 1978: 148–56. The relevant passages in Acharnians,
together with the other plays in the series, make it clear that Aristophanes was the target, not
Callistratus, whatever his connection to Samos might have been (n. 37, above). Cleon’s membership
in the Council around this time is implied in Eq. 773–6.
41 (Chorus leader on behalf of the poet) “So let Cleon hatch his plots and build his traps against me
to his utmost, for Good and Right will be my allies, and never will I be caught behaving toward the
city as he does, a coward and a punk-ass” (659–64).
42 Most likely Cleon, as a member of the Council, which had general responsibility for the Knights
and their horses and equipment, had sought to withhold five talents due the Knights, perhaps
by reducing their pay (as Theozotides is said to have proposed in Lysias fr. 6) or annual subsidy
(katstasiv), then had to “disgorge” it; Cleon may have brought the charge of dereliction of duty
(lipostrat©a) mentioned by Theopompus (FGrH 115 F 93 = S Eq. 226) on this or a different
occasion. In Knights Cleon’s denunciation of the Knights in the Council (626–9) for their conspiracy
with Sausage Seller (cf. 257, 452, 475–9) no doubt recalls his actual indictment(s).
43 Another deme-chorus, characterized as especially fond of jury service, was featured in Eupolis’
Prospaltians.
44 On such names generally see Kanavou 2010.
While Dicaeopolis’ confrontation with the chorus mirrors actual division
of opinion within the audience, that division was of course not one-against-
all (290 “you alone among us”): not only Dicaeopolis/Aristophanes but a
significant minority still questioned the war effort, for peace initiatives,
opposed by Cleon (cf. Eq. 794–96), were ongoing. The chorus’ initial
opposition, enacted in the epirrhematic sections of the play that culmi-
nate in the parabasis, is overcome by Dicaeopolis’ arguments, though not
without division in the chorus itself (557–71): half are convinced, half not,
and a fight breaks out between the two semichoruses.45 When Dicaeopo-
lis’ converts get the upper hand, the others summon their hero, General
Lamachus, but when Dicaeopolis exposes him as a profiteer, the chorus
reunites and declares Dicaeopolis the winner. After the parabasis come
episodes illustrating the superiority of life at peace (Dicaeopolis) to life at
war (Lamachus).
In the pre-parabasis section of the play (1–625) the chorus, as usual
in Aristophanes, for the most part stays in character and is prominently
involved in the action: they have about 20 percent of the lines. Of these, the
leader speaks more than 25 percent, for a comic koryphaios has a distinct
role of his own, using epirrhematic tetrameters to give his chorus their
instructions and engage with the characters onstage, and qua koryphaios to
deliver the parabasis speech. The koryphaios can have a distinctive point of
view: in the Acharnians parabasis, for example, he hopes, like the poet (for
whom he is speaking) but unlike Dicaeopolis, that the war will continue
to victory for Athens (648–55), and he would not abandon the polis to
make his own separate peace. As performers comic koryphaioi in fact seem
to have been distinct from choreuts, perhaps paid operatives rather than
volunteers46 and crucial to the success of the production.47 The special role
of tragic/satyric koryphaioi is less evident to us, since in terms of the action
they only occasionally stand apart from the choral collective.
The parabasis marks the point where the chorus’ dramatic character
fades, insofar as its conflicts and allegiances as regards the characters have
been decided, while its ritual role as the traditional comic chorus comes
to the fore, though both identities remain in play. In its generic status the
chorus gains an authority that it did not have in its dramatic character,
45 Something similar seems to have happened in Eupolis’ Marikas (rich and poor divided over support
of a demagogue). In Lysistrata semichoruses of old men and old women are antagonists until their
reconciliation late in the play, so that the parabasis is antagonistic as well and cannot include the
usual nondramatic address by the chorus leader.
46 Wilson 2000: 133, 353 n. 90. [Arist.] Prob. 19.48 remarks that in early times chorus leaders were
heroic while the chorus were ordinary people.
47 Cf. D. 21.60, Arist. Pol. 1277a11–12, and Goldhill in this volume.
particularly if it was a partisan chorus like the Acharnians, and can thus play
a mediatory role, guiding and sharing the spectators’ response to the action
and entertaining them with such traditional fare as free-form mockery of
individuals or groups. And so the Acharnians enumerate the blessings that
Dicaeopolis’ peace has brought him (enviously, for Dicaeopolis will not
share his blessings with anyone still at war), marvel at his success as a
trader and as a chef, renounce War and embrace Peace and Reconciliation,
and follow him from the theater proclaiming his victory, echoing the
famous song attributed to Archilochus (fr. 324) praising Heracles’ victory
at Olympia (1227–34). In maintaining a certain distance from Dicaeopolis,
as onlookers and not abettors, the Acharnians assume a position in the
middle, where they can guide spectator response in a positive direction.
At any particular moment, however, the voice of the comic chorus can
be hard to pin down. In their song at 1150–73 the Acharnians curse one
Antimachus for having as Lenaean chorēgos dismissed “me” without a din-
ner. We would like to know whether they are speaking as the generic comic
chorus (as at Birds 789), referring to another poet’s play; or as Aristophanes’
own chorus, referring to an earlier play of his, perhaps Dramas or Centaur,
which also featured Heracles; or as Aristophanes himself (as at 659–64),48
who might have been omitted from the guest list for some reason, perhaps
as having had no official responsibility for the production, possibly (also)
for some personal or political reason, since the omission was obviously
unexpected.
But in the larger performance context such distinctions are inessential:
the chorus’ recollection suits their present situation both dramatic (envy
at Dicaeopolis’ unshared victory feast) and actual (anticipation of their
own victory feast). For the spectators, a comic chorus is always the comic
chorus: in contrast to the tragic and satyric chorus, there was no “dramatic
illusion” or expectation of consistency in its identity or voice, which were
kaleidoscopic and liable to change at any moment: even when, early in the
play, the Acharnians most vividly inhabit their dramatic identity, they can
still take a moment, completely against character, to advertise next year’s
play (299–302).49 So also are the mediatory roles and functions of a comic
chorus changeable and various between and within plays.
As advertised, Aristophanes took full revenge on Cleon at next year’s
Lenaea with Knights, the first play that Aristophanes produced in his own
48 Suggested by Sommerstein 2001: 237, “since a chorēgos would hardly wish to offend his entire chorus
by refusing to give them the customary dinner.”
49 Dover 1993: 58–60 on the Initiate chorus in Frogs provides a detailed analysis of this kind of iridescent
complexity.
name and the first wholly devoted to attacking a single politician, and
thus launched what would become a new genre, “demagogue comedy.”50
But Cleon’s political ascendancy had meanwhile been enhanced, and the
Athenians’ resolve to prosecute the war reinvigorated, by the victory at
Pylos, so that while Aristophanes includes the war in his attack,51 his main
focus is on internal politics: Cleon, who merely “stole” the credit for Pylos,52
is an altogether unworthy leader whose removal will cure what ails Athens.
The House of Demos (Athens), now in senile decline from his youthful
glory, has been taken over by a newly bought Paphlagonian slave (Cleon),
who by violence, flattery, and trickery has alienated the master from his
loyal slaves (honest politicians), leaving him free to plunder the house.53
Inspired by an oracle revealing that Paphlagon can only be overthrown
by someone even more low-class and dishonest, two of the Slaves recruit
a Sausage Seller on the promise of supreme power in the city, and he
proceeds to out-Cleon Paphlagon, replaces him as overseer, and (having
become honest) restores Demos to his pre-war supremacy at home, on
land, and at sea. The play is a series of contests: the initial rounds, overseen
by the chorus (303–460), verify Sausage Seller’s ability to outdo Paphlagon,
and the rounds after the parabasis, staged for Demos, determine which
aspirant is worthy to manage his house.
The chorus supports Sausage Seller from the start but for its own reasons,
and in the contests it is not merely a partisan engaged with the situation
on stage but also contributes arguments from its own personal and inde-
pendent perspective. In this it differs from the choruses of Acharnians and
Wasps, reactive partisans who are then persuaded to change their minds.
Indeed the Knights, representing the elite corps of horsemen who served as
the Athenian cavalry, were unlikely allies of a politically ambitious sausage
seller, but they do have one motivation in common with the “slaves” and
with the poet: hatred of Cleon. The reason for the Knights’ hatred does
not emerge from the plot and requires no explanation from the stage: like
Aristophanes, the actual Knights had recently been targeted in the failed
action by Cleon gleefully recalled by Dicaeopolis; as their leader says in the
parabasis:
50 See n. 4, above.
51 Sausage Seller notes the hardships of war perpetuated by Cleon’s self-serving intransigence (792–
804), is confident that the people will come to their senses when they return to the land (805–9),
and furnishes personified peace treaties as the climactic blessing of Demos’ return to the good old
days (1388–94).
52 Cf. 54–7, 355, 742–5, 1200–5.
53 Thucydides similarly characterizes the politicians, none with traditional style or pedigree, who
succeeded Pericles (2.65).
If any old-time comic producer had tried to force us to face the theater
and make a speech, he wouldn’t easily have succeeded. But today our poet
deserves it, because he hates the same people we do, and dares to say
what’s right, and nobly strides forth against the typhoon and the whirl-
wind. (507–11)54
As is likely in Banqueters and Acharnians, a personal connection with the

poet may be signalled as well: Simon, along with one Panaetius a named
chorus member (242–3), is among the names recorded on the Cydathenaean
cult-table discussed above.
Slave A assures the hesitant Sausage Seller that as allies he will have not
only the Knights (“fine gentlemen a thousand strong, who detest him and
will rally to your side”) but “all fine and upstanding citizens, and every
smart spectator, and myself along with them, and the god will lend a hand
too” (225–9), and it is made clear that only the deluded, intimidated, or
corrupt would support Paphlagon. This alignment, instead of (as in Wasps)
having a character or chorus represent partisans of Cleon, is designed for
a demonstration that everyone would be better off without him, and it
enables Aristophanes to level every possible charge or complaint against
him that would appeal to any segment of the audience, even though some
of the charges will thus be contradictory, while Sausage Seller, aping Cleon,
bullies and bamboozles his way to supremacy. Aristophanes’ goal was “to
promote a sentimental unity of classes against leaders like Cleon,”55 so that
the chorus is free to include grievances particular to the Knights and other
elite victims56 while at the same time abetting the overall project.
The distinction between the Knights and Sausage Seller is drawn espe-
cially in regard to social and political divisions and the war. Sausage Seller,
like Dicaeopolis, points to the wartime hardships that afflict ordinary
people and protests the rejection of opportunities to negotiate a peace,57
whereas the Knights, in the epirrhemes of the parabasis, celebrate Athens’
military valor and claim to “want, without reward,58 to fight nobly in
defense of the city and its native gods” (565–77),59 and then offer as an
54 The chorus’ encouragement of Sausage Seller before this parabasis speech (498–502) parallels the
concluding pnigos calling on the Athenians to support the poet (544–50): in their distinct ways both
the chorus and Sausage Seller champion the poet’s own cause.
55 Dover 1972: 99.
56 The Knights, who ask the spectators not to resent them for wearing long hair and tiaras (580), are
the ones to speak for Cleon’s wealthy victims (247–8, 258–65, 326–7, 973–84).
57 See n. 51, above.
58 In contrast to Cleon, as the context (naming his father Cleaenetus) underlines.
59 Cf. also 597: although the Athenians did not engage the invading Peloponnesians in battle, they did
send out the Knights to harass them (Thuc. 2.19, 22, 3.1).
example their own victory in the recent action at Solygeia under Nicias
(595–610):60 a victory that even Paphlagon unwittingly admits showed
courage (267–8), that unlike Cleon’s victory at Pylos the Knights can
honestly claim credit for, and that vindicated them after Cleon’s attack,
especially if it had involved the charge of lipostrat©a.61
The odes that articulate these epirrhemes (551–64 581–94) capitalize on
the unusual circumstances of Solygeia, where the Knights were transported
on ships, to fashion a prayer for victory that envisions renewed solidarity of
Athenians against their enemies. The odes, composed in the style of tradi-
tional cletic hymns, invoke (ode) Poseidon Hippios then (antode) Athena
Polias.62 Though it is often hard to distinguish popular from aristocratic
cults in fifth-century Athens,63 there is no question that Poseidon was still
associated with the upper classes (cf. Birds 1570–1), especially (as here) as the
god of horses and chariot-racing. But Poseidon is invoked also as the god
of the sea and of triremes, envisioning a rapprochement between landed
and naval classes.64 Athena, invoked as guardian of the city, is asked to
bring Nike65 as “our helper in expeditions and battles, who is companion
(ta©ra) of choral songs and aids our faction (stasizei) against enemies.”
They pray for victory as at once Athenians and comic chorus, and their
enemies are not only external but internal, i.e. Cleon and company, for
the Knights’ “faction” are the same people (the Slaves, Sausage Seller, and
themselves) whom Paphlagon regards as conspirators against himself (true)
and against Athens (false).
Even after the parabasis the Knights continue to contribute to
Paphlagon’s downfall independently of Sausage Seller’s efforts. Lines 973–
84 985–96 are not the sort of mocking songs that typically articulate
episodes after the parabasis but attack Cleon from the Knights’ perspec-
tive. And they do not mean Paphlagon but the real Cleon, whose name
appears only here in the play. In the ode they pray for his destruction as
a blessing for all Athenians and sojourners in Athens except for his sup-
porters, “certain old men (i.e. jurors) of the crankiest kind” who find him
60 Cf. Thuc. 4.42–5. 61 See n. 42 above.
62 These odes are unusual in invoking only two gods, and by name not attributes; the meter was
perhaps specially associated with the cult of Poseidon Hippios, cf. Parker 1997: 72. For an analysis
of the associations evoked especially by Athena see Anderson 1995: 9–16.
63 Cf. Parker 1996: 75.
64 In a mocking song in the “second parabasis” (1264–1315) the Knights recall how a fleet of triremes
(imagined as “venerable ladies”) refused to serve under the demagogue Hyperbolus.
65 The spectators will have thought of the great image in the Parthenon depicting Athena holding
Nike in her hand; of the new Nike temple recently or soon to be completed (IG i3 36); and, since
Phormio is praised in the ode, of the statue of Nike commemorating his victory at Acarnania
(IG ii2 403, Thuc. 2.83–92).
useful “as a mortar and pestle” (i.e. for stirring up trouble). In the antode
they recall how Cleon was expelled from lyre-school, part of the education
of well-to-do boys, on account of his swinish and thievish nature. The
songs are composed in a popular meter suitable for symposia;66 no doubt
Aristophanes hoped that they would circulate independently of the play,
as Cratinus’ songs are said to do (529–30) – a mediatory effect that would
outlast the performance.
In 1111–50, when Sausage Seller and Paphlagon have gone inside to
fetch goodies for Demos, the Knights sing a private duet with Demos that
helps explain the play’s remarkable denouement and softens what would
otherwise be a pessimistic view of the democracy. The Knights express the
elite view of Demos, and the view of the play hitherto, as a man who is
powerful but easily manipulated by politicians, and conclude that “you’ve
a mind but it’s out to lunch.” Demos replies, “There’s no mind under
your long hair, since you consider me stupid; no, there’s purpose in this
foolishness of mine. I relish my daily pap, and I pick one thieving political
leader to fatten; I raise him up, and when he’s full I swat him down.” The
Knights are skeptical, but Demos reassures them: “Just watch me and see
if I don’t ingeniously trick them, and those who think they’re smart and
that I’m their dupe. I monitor them all the time as they steal, and then I
force them to cough up67 whatever they’ve stolen from me, using a verdict
tube as a probe.” And so it comes to pass in the play’s finale, with happy
results for all except Paphlagon. But would the real Demos, present as the
audience, follow suit?
Soon after the victorious production the Athenians did elect Cleon as
one of the generals for the following year, but after Pylos he could hardly be
denied. Wasps 1284–91 show that Cleon again attacked Aristophanes, that
the case was settled out of court, and that Aristophanes “pulled a little bit
of monkey-business” (1290) to avoid living up to his end of the settlement.
Assuming that he had agreed to moderate or abandon his abuse of Cleon,
the following year’s play was not the monkey-business: in Clouds (D 423)
he eschewed politics and returned to the theme of generational change
that he had treated in Banqueters. As it happened, no monkey-business
was needed this year, for the Athenian defeat at Delium in late 424 had
halted both Cleon’s aggressive war policy and his political ascendancy: he
was not re-elected general, and in spring 423, on the proposal of Laches,
the Athenians concluded a one-year treaty with Sparta and undertook
66 “Metrically, the song is aeolo-choriambic at its simplest, which is consistent with the intention that
it should catch on” (Parker 1997: 176).
67 Recalling the five talents that the actual Knights had forced Cleon to cough up (Ach. 4–8).
negotiations to end the war. But then Cleon’s fortunes revived: the defection
of Athens’ subject ally Scione to the Spartans, and the resulting diplomatic
impasse, renewed anti-Spartan sentiment, stalled the negotiations, and
returned Cleon to ascendancy; by early 422 it even seemed likely that he
would prosecute Laches.68 Aristophanes responded to this turn of events by
resuming his attack on Cleon in Wasps (L 422), thus apparently reneging
on his agreement. What monkey-business provided his excuse is unclear.69
Wasps was another play about generational conflict, but this time focus-
ing on Cleon’s cultivation of the elderly poor as his supporters in the
Assembly and especially in the courts. Cleon has won their support by
raising jurors’ daily pay from two to three obols, by championing the
poor, by serving as the “watchdog” of democracy against elite conspirators,
and by prosecuting wealthy men, which assures the supply of jury-pay;
in return his supporters can be relied on to vote as he tells them. His
fiercest supporter is Philocleon (“Lovecleon”), a man of at least 8070 who
has surrendered control of the household to his elegant and well-to-do
son Bdelycleon (“Loathecleon”), spends his days as a juror and his nights
dreaming about juries, and has never voted to acquit. After unsuccessfully
attempting to cure his father’s madness, Bdelycleon locks him up in the
house, but keeping him there proves exhausting and has aroused the wrath
of the waspish chorus, Philocleon’s fellow jurors.
Bdelycleon then challenges his father to a debate, in which he proves
that jurors, far from being powerful and well rewarded, are in reality slaves
of men like Cleon, that the defendants they convict are the real benefactors
of Athens, and that the jurors’ pay is a mere pittance; Philocleon and his
friends, whose toil made Athens unprecedentedly prosperous, deserve to
live a life of luxury, but as it is, the politicians, who contribute nothing to
Athens, dishonestly reap all the rewards. Bdelycleon offers to provide just
such a life of luxury for his father, provided he abandon the courts and stay
at home; if he likes, he can set up his own lawcourt in the courtyard.
Aristophanes now exploits the parallelism between Philocleon’s position
in the city (enthrallment by the vulgar Cleon) and his status in his own
household (dependence on his cultivated son) in order to consider what
might happen if men like Bdelycleon were to turn Cleon’s followers into
quietists (prgmonev) and introduce them to the finer things of life. At
first, the plan goes well: Philocleon is allowed to judge a case involving
68 The clear implication of Wasps 240 and 288–9.
69 Demont 1977: 477 suggests that Aristophanes let it be known that the lead character would be
named Philocleon!
70 The jurors recall military action at least as far back as 478.
two household dogs, a parody of the prospective trial of Laches: Kuon
(“Demadogue” = Cleon) prosecutes Labes (“Snatcher” = Laches) for the
theft of Sicilian cheese. Thanks to a bit of manipulation by Bdelycleon,
Snatcher is acquitted on the grounds that he is a good dog who works
hard for the people and stole only for their good, while Demadogue is
well fed for doing nothing. Bdelycleon then invites his father to an elegant
banquet and coaches him in the appropriate etiquette. But the banquet is
a disaster: Philocleon, behaving like an aristocrat but without the savvy or
self-control, becomes drunk and disorderly, insults the guests, abducts the
flute girl, and assaults every ordinary citizen he meets on his way home,
rudely rejecting every attempt by his victims and his son to settle out of
court. Bdelycleon can only look on helplessly as his father joins the wild
dance of Carcinus’ sons, whose cameo appearance closes the play.
The chorus, Philocleon’s fellow jurors and metaphorical wasps, include
five named members (230–4), and at least some of the names may be real.71
They unsuccessfully attempt to liberate their champion from confinement
by battling Bdelycleon, whom as a gentleman they view (following Cleon’s
training) as an antidemocratic conspirator and an aspirant to tyranny. But
their eyes are opened by Bdelycleon’s arguments in the debate and, moved
by his subsequent efforts to make Philocleon as comfortable as possible,
they envy their friend for having such a son and declare that Bdelycleon
is second to none in his love for the demos “at least among the younger
people” (886–90). In the parabasis (1009–1121) they recall their long-ago
service to Athens in repelling the barbarians and securing the empire,
when there was no passion, as nowadays, for oratory and litigation; nor
do they respect “drones” who live off this legacy while doing no service
themselves, and they vow henceforth to reward only those who make similar
contributions. Their conversion to the right way of thinking reminds us
of the conversion of Demos in the finale of Knights. The leader’s parabasis
speech is another defense of the poet’s career through Knights, emphasizing
his courage in standing up to Cleon and his ilk on behalf of the people, and
a rebuke for the rejection of Clouds; and in a “second parabasis” (1265–91)
he speaks as the poet, to boast of having finessed his side of the settlement
with Cleon. In their song at 1450–72, when the stage is empty just before
the finale, the chorus reflect on the events of the play: Philocleon has
moved to a better way of life, and praised be his wonderful son for his fine
character and clear argument – but will Philocleon really change his ways?
71 A man of Aegina (where Aristophanes had a connection) with the rare name Strymodorus is known
from D. 36.29, and the equally rare Euergides is attested in a casualty list of c. 411 (IG i3 1190.30).
The finale lets the question hang. It could be that the vulgarity, self-
ishness, and aggression that Philocleon displayed as a juror have not been
abandoned but only let loose on his household and on society at large.
If so, Bdelycleon’s proposal – that the ordinary folk who fight for Athens
should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their valor but leave decisions
about government to elite, and therefore wiser and truly benevolent lead-
ers – works better in theory than in practice, if the incorrigible Philocleon
is the test case. Has Aristophanes then given up on the optimism, albeit
miraculous, that animated Demos’ transformation in the finale of Knights?
Or is Philocleon a lone holdout, while the transformed chorus illustrates
the success of Bdelycleon’s decleonification? Or is it Philocleon’s personal
behavior, not his allegiance to demagogues, that remains incorrigible?
In any event there is much in Bdelycleon that reminds us of Aristophanes
and his own efforts to educate the demos. If Bdelycleon is rather unlikeable
in his humorless personality, his high-handed treatment of his father, his
snobbery, and his wealth-enabled disdain for public life, it is not impossible
that his character contains a degree of poetic self-parody or self-criticism,
which the chorus’ enthusiasm would ironically counterpoint. The question
would soon be mooted, for Cleon’s death a few months later deprived
Aristophanes of his great target, and leadership began to shift once more
to the elite end of the spectrum. Other poets would follow his example
with demagogue comedies of their own, but Aristophanes now closed that
chapter of his career and pursued different subjects.
Examination of the role of the chorus in this connected series of comedies
reveals that, like tragic and satyric choruses, it did play a mediatory role –
occupation of a middle ground between stage and spectators that enabled
the chorus to voice a detached perspective on the action and to contour
spectator response – but that its mediatory role was distinctively comic
in that it did not consistently occupy a middle ground and its identity,
like that of its prominent and to some extent independent leader, was
complex and protean, at any given moment or all at once an involved or
partisan character, the generic comic chorus, the poet’s own chorus, or the
chorus of a past play. Choral mediation in comedy was thus uniquely wide-
ranging and flexible, voicing a broad range of affiliations and viewpoints
that reached back into the poet’s own world and out into the world of the
audience, and that were limited only by the far reaches of the poet’s fantasy.
chapter 1 3
Dancing letters
The Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias
Renaud Gagné
Like the massive, ephemeral wooden structures that functioned as the

“viewing space” of Dionysos in fifth-century Athens, stages and benches
periodically deconstructed and rebuilt for the great theatrical festival and
the several thousand members of its audience, classical Attic drama based its
continuity on a constant redefinition of the same forms.1 Athenian theater
remained a perpetually recent construction, from its earliest performances
in the later sixth century to its eventual crystallization into a tradition of
canon and repertoire – a hardening of shape similar in spirit to the replace-
ment of the old temporary wooden structures by a stable, permanent stone
building.2 Attic drama continued to rebuild itself as a radical provocation, a
cyclical, temporary challenge to the established orders of knowledge, social
cohesion, and poetic aesthetics. A striking aspect of this generic flexibility
was its unprecedented experimentation with the combination of media,
what we can call dramatic intermediality.3 Classical drama was the hege-
monic spectacle of the day. Every variety of ancient and current dance and
song, poetry, music, painting, technological skill, every type of ritual form,
was potential material for drama’s vast, all-embracing marriage of the arts,
and for its dialogue between the various languages of speech, movement,
music, and the visual.
I would like in what follows to illustrate the vitality of this ancient
theatrical play of media interaction with one recurrent figure of classical
This paper was presented at the Northwestern University Choral Mediations conference and at Queens’
College, Cambridge in 2009. I thank both audiences for very stimulating remarks and observations.
I am also grateful to Andrew Ford, Johanna Hanink, Miguel Herrero, Joshua Katz, Nino Luraghi,
Gabriella Pironti, and Froma Zeitlin, as well as the two anonymous readers of Cambridge University
Press, for their references, comments, and criticisms. All translations of Athenaeus are from Olson’s
2006–2012 Loeb edition.
1 On the architectural record of the theatre of Dionysos, see e.g. Scullion 1994: 3–66; Goette 2007.
2 See Easterling 1997c.
3 For the notion of intermediality, see e.g. Rajewsky 2002; see also the Introduction to this volume.
297
298 Renaud Gagné
drama: the performance of writing.4 I will start with a few brief considera-
tions and snapshots from texts across the dramatic genres in which letters
were performed by actors. These examples of how the representation of
writing could take shape in the speeches and dialogues of tragedy, comedy,
and satyr plays will serve as a useful background for considering the case
of one comic chorus’ performance of letters, the Alphabetic Tragedy of
Kallias. If there are many similarities between the dramatic genres in rep-
resenting writing on stage, differences abound. The satyric exploration of
early alphabetic discoveries has little to do with the tragic staging of written
miscommunications, for instance. The comic spectacle, in particular, dif-
fers from the other genres of drama in its aggressively contemporary setting,
its ability to represent the writing of everyday polis life, and its mission of
seeking laughter through the unexpected juxtaposition of things that do
not belong together. The performance of letters becomes a tool for ridicu-
lous combinations on the comic stage, incongruous links and activations of
sounds and images, ideas and texts. It also offers an opportunity for a more
sustained, explicit play of metatheatrical reflections than anything tragedy
could do. Although the variety of forms taken by the comic representations
of writing mostly escapes us, the Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias stands out
from the fragmentary record. Its chorus of 24 singers/dancers representing
the 24 letters of the alphabet presents one of the most radical experiments
of choral intermediality produced on the ancient stage. This chapter will
discuss the chorus’ role as a mediator between forms and genres in that
play.
Classical drama constantly returns to the theme of writing.5 The figure
of Palamedes, the inventor of grammata, was a popular presence onstage.6
The letters of drama are often used as a form of code in drama.7 In the
Ecclesiazusae, to take an example, the letter L, by itself, “doing the labda,”
can stand for fellatio, a sexual act intimately tied to the island of Lesbos in
the erotic imagination of the time.8 In addition to such uses of synecdoche,
written words in drama can also function as puzzles of individual sounds,
puzzles that need to be recomposed by the auditor to make any sense. In
4 On the dramatic performance of writing, see Svenbro 1988: 202–6; Slater 2002.
5 Wise 1998: 16–18 counts “at least eighty-one separate references to writing” in the surviving corpus
of ancient drama.
6 Eup. fr. 385.6 KA; Eur. fr. 578–590 Kannicht; Ar. Ran. 1451; Thesm. 768–75; see Usener 1994/5;
D’Angour 1999: 114; Falcetto 2002.
7 It is interesting to note that the discussion of dramatic letters found in Athenaeus (7.276a; 10.448b–
455c) comes from Clearchus’ treatise On Riddles; see Rosen 1999: 159–66.
8 Ar., Ec. 918–20: ¢dh t¼n p ì ìIwn©av / tr»pon, tlaina, knhsiv. / doke±v d moi kaª lbda kat
toÆv Lesb©ouv (“Poor thing, you’re already itching for the Ionian toy. And I think you also want to
do the L, like the Lesbians”); Sommerstein 1998: 217–18.
Dancing letters: the Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias 299
the satyr play Omphale, for instance,9 a work by the fifth-century tragedian
Achaios, a satyr is made to say that:
¾ d skÅfov me toÓ qeoÓ kale± plai
t¼ grmma fa©nwn, dltì, «äta kaª tr©ton
oÔ, nÓ t» tì Ô presti, koÉk pous©an
k toÉpkeina sn t» tì oÔ khrÅsseton.
Achaios, Omphale (TrGF 33 = Athenaeus 11.466e–f )
The god’s skyphos has been summoning me for a long time now
by showing me its inscription: delta; iota; third comes
ou; nu and u are there; and after them
san and ou announce their presence.
The inscribed drinking-cup, a so-called grammatikon, becomes a receptacle
for the absent presence of the epiphanic god, like an eye-cup, or a mask.
It “reveals” his name through the inscription, fa©nwn, and the last two
letters, acting as the Bacchic heralds of the god’s name, “proclaim the lack
of an absence” (koÉk pous©an . . . khrÅsseton). Through these letters,
the skyphos of the god “summons” the literate satyr, who is able to decipher
the code, and communicate it to some other character on stage. The written
name of Dionysos acts like a spell, an incantation. By separating the name
of Dionysos in a diasparagmos of letters that can only be reunited through
reading, thus reestablishing the identity of the wine vessel’s proper owner
for those who can see it, Achaios dramatizes the knowledge needed by the
internal and external audiences to correctly understand the meaning of the
cup, and to perceive the god’s presence through it.
The performance of writing opens a distinctive form of audience partici-
pation in the action. It is often used to problematize the themes of authority,
knowledge and (mis)communication.10 The most striking characteristic of
the performance of writing in Greek drama, however, is its ability to
serve as a metaphor for other modes of communication, for sound, image,
and movement, to act as a uniquely synaesthetic form of message. In the
Hippolytus, letters can famously “scream” and “sing.”11 In the satyr play
Amphiaraos, Sophocles “brought a man on stage to dance the letters.”12
Letters could be named, sung, or they could be danced. They could also
be portrayed as images through speech or other means. One fascinating
9 See Stephanopoulos 1988: 4; Krumeich, Pechstein, and Seidensticker 1999: 539–42.
10 See e.g. Wise 1998: 119–68. 11 Lines 877; 879–80; see Svenbro 1988: 198.
12 Sophocles, Amphiaraos (TrGF 121 = Athenaeus 10.454f ): kaª Sofoklv d toÅt paraplsion
po©hsen n %mfiar saturik t grmmata pargwn ½rcoÅmenon (“Sophocles as well has
a similar passage in the satyr-play Amphiaraos, where he brings a man on stage who dances the
letters”); Slater 2002: 125–6.
300 Renaud Gagné
illustration of the latter type of aesthetic intermediality is a passage from
the Theseus of Euripides recently discussed anew by Alexandra Pappas.13 In
that passage, an illiterate shepherd describes the letters he has seen:
EÉrip©dhv d tn n t Qhse± tn ggrmmaton oike poisai çsin.
botr d ì stªn grmmatov aÉt»qi dhlän toÎnoma toÓ Qhswv pige-
grammnon oÌtwvá
gÜ pfuka grammtwn mn oÉk driv,
morfv d lxw kaª saf tekmria.
kÅklov tiv Þv t»rnoisin kmetroÅmenová
oÕtov d ì cei shme±on n ms safv.
t¼ deÅteron d präta mn grammaª dÅo,
taÅtav die©rgei d ì n msaiv llh m©a.
tr©ton d b»struc»v tiv âv e¬ligmnov,
t¼ dì aÔ ttarton ¥ mn e«v ½rq¼n m©a,
loxaª dì pì aÉtv tre±v katesthrigmnai
e«s©n. t¼ pmpton d ì oÉk n eÉmare± frsaiá
grammaª gr e«sin k diestÛtwn dÅo,
aÕtai d suntrcousin e«v m©an bsin.
t¼ lo©sqion d t tr©t prosemferv.
Euripides, Theseus (TrGF 382 =
Athenaeus 10.454b–c)
Euripides also appears to have used this as the basis for the speech that
describes the shape of individual letters in his Theseus. An illiterate shepherd
is there, trying to describe an inscription that reads “Theseus,” as follows:
I don’t know how to read or write,

but I’ll describe their shapes and offer you a clear account.
There’s a circle neatly measured out, as if turned on a lathe
with a prominent mark in the middle.
As for the second letter, there are two lines, first of all,
and one more, in the middle, that connects them.
The third resembles a curling lock of hair;
as for the fourth, one line stands up straight,
and three crooked ones are propped up
against it. The fifth letter’s not easy to describe:
there are two lines that are separate from one another,
although they merge into a single base.
And the last letter’s like the third.
He portrays the letters as strokes, gramma©, straight, crooked, or curved,
lines imprecisely arranged in various awkward combinations that need to
13 Pappas 2011: 47–9 and forthcoming; see also Webster 1967: 105–9; Sutton 1978 and 1985, who argues
that the Theseus was a satyr play; Slater 2002: 118–25.
be reconstructed somehow in the mind’s eye of each viewer to decipher the
word “Theseus.” The imagery is two-dimensional. The literate members
of the audience, and, undoubtedly, the characters who are listening to
the shepherd’s speech, must make sense of the recognition token through
unusual equivalences, an operation that has to be performed over the
alphabetic ignorance of the botr. The second letter of the name is
an Ionic h rather than an Attic e.14 The description of the sigma as a
lock of hair could be seen as a reference to something else, perhaps the
lock of hair of the Choephoroi, the ultimate token of tragic recognition,
or the shaved locks of the ephebes, so closely associated to Theseus in
Athenian imagination.15 This performance of letters, more importantly,
can be interpreted as a distinctively Euripidean metatheatrical moment.
The word “Theseus,” that which the illiterate shepherd is unable to read, is
in fact the title of the play in which he is a character. The shepherd can make
out forms and relate them to other people, but he can make no sense of their
meaning.
This scene from the Theseus was so famous that it was rewritten, almost
word for word, by both Agathon in his Telephos at the end of the fifth
century, and by the fourth-century tragedian Theodektes.16 The differences
between the versions splendidly illustrate the expressive range of letters in
the dramatic performance of writing. Agathon’s version can be taken as an
example:
t¼ dì aÉt¼ pepo©hke kaª %gqwn ¾ tragdiopoi¼v n t Thlf.
grmmatov gr tiv kntaÓqa dhlo± tn toÓ Qhswv pigrafn
oÌtwvá
grafv ¾ prätov §n mes»mfalov kÅklová
½rqo© te kan»nev zugwmnoi dÅo,
Skuqik te t»x <t¼> tr©ton §n prosemferv.
peita tri»douv plgiov §n proske©menová
f ì n»v te kan»nov §san [zugwmnoi dÅo].
Âper d tr©ton §n kaª teleuta±on plin.
Agathon, Telephos (TrGF 4 =
Athenaeus 10.454d)
The tragic poet Agathon has a similar passage in his Telephos. For there as
well an illiterate person describes an inscription that reads “Theseus,” as
follows:
14 See D’Angour 1999: 121; cf. the interesting considerations of Pappas (forthcoming) on the politics
of vowels in this passage.
15 Aesch. Cho. 168–211; Vidal-Naquet 1981.
16 On Theodektes, see Xanthakis-Karamanos 1979; Stephanopoulos 1988: 13–18.
302 Renaud Gagné
The first letter in the inscription was a circle with a dot in the center;
there were also two upright bars attached to one another,
and the third letter looked like a Scythian bow.
Next was a trident turned sideways;
and two . . . were on a single bar.
The third letter appeared again as the last.
In that version an illiterate man is made to describe an pigraf. We are
probably in the presence of a monumental inscription and the imagery is
now three-dimensional. Letters are metonymically depicted as objects in
this inscription and given a vivid shape for the audience. The straight line
of Euripides, for instance, becomes a kanÛn in Agathon. These objects,
moreover, as Alexandra Pappas has convincingly argued in her stimulat-
ing discussion of “visual literacy,” also act as ideograms, icons pointing
to some essential aspect of the name’s meaning, thus expanding the logic
behind Euripides’ reference to a lock of hair in the Theseus, and provid-
ing a sophisticated counterpoint to the contemporary reflections on the
essence of names found in column XXVI of the Derveni papyrus, or in
Plato’s Cratylus.17 The trident could be seen as an allusion to Poseidon,
Theseus’ father, the Scythian bow as a reflection of the Amazon’s favorite
weapon, and the mes»mfalov, less convincingly, as an allusion to Delphi.
The intensely visual representation of writing produced by Agathon in this
speech captures the meaning of the word through a different, complemen-
tary channel. It opens an additional layer of meaning to the performance
of letters on stage, one that would invite correspondingly visual strategies
of interpretation on the part of the audience, and possibly allow them to
experience the signs as they would a monument in the round, according to
Pappas. It is no wonder that the theta, in the late rewriting of the passage
by Theodektes, appears as an eye:
kaª Qeodkthv dì ¾ Fashl©thv groik»n tina grmmaton pargei kaª
toÓton t¼ toÓ Qhswv Ànoma diashma©nontaá
grafv ¾ prätov §n malak»fqalmov kÅkl.
peita dissoª kan»nev «s»metroi pnuá
toÅtouv d plgiov diamtrou sunde± kanÛn.
tr©ton dì likt bostrÅc prosemferv.
peita tri»douv plgiov âv fa©neto,
pmptai dì nwqen «s»metroi çbdoi dÅo,
aÕtai d sunte©nousin e«v bsin m©an.
kton d ì Âper kaª pr»sqen e²pon b»strucov.
Theodektos of Phaselis (TrGF 6 =
Athenaeus 10.454e)
17 Pappas 2011: 47–9; Slater 2002: 125; see Betegh 2004: 263–4; Sedley 2003.
Theodektes of Phaselis also brings an illiterate peasant onstage, and he too
describes Theseus’ name:
The first letter in the inscription was a circle with a soft eye.
Then there were two lines of exactly the same length,
and a sideways bar in between connected them.
The third letter resembled a twisting lock of hair.
Then came what looked like a trident turned sideways;
and fifth were two bars of equal length on top,
which converged into a single base.
And the sixth was what I described earlier, the lock of hair.
The same scene recurs in three different plays, what seems to be three
different contexts, and the medium of writing serves in each case as a catalyst
to experiment with new ways of combining expressions of sound, image,
and idea on stage in competition with a predecessor. In a memorable twist of
metatheatrical logic, the illiterate characters of Agathon and Theodektes are
shown as unable to read the title of the Euripidean play on which their scene
is based. That astounding chain of rewritings should probably be a more
prominent point of reference to reflections on dramatic intertextuality.
What is certain is that it offers a tantalizing look into the many possibilities
of communication offered by the staged letters and used in the theater by
late classical authors.
The performance of writing was a major aesthetic and thematic con-
cern of Greek drama. As the very technology through which drama itself
was composed, and the now dominant, most prestigious mode of com-
munication of the polis, writing also presented the late classical playwright
with a tool for metapoetic explorations and experimentations of correspon-
dences between movement, sound, and sight, synecdoche and metonymy,
for mediations between different channels of expression. If the letters of
tragedy and satyr plays could broaden and enliven the expressive range of
words and messages in an astounding variety of ways, only in comedy does
the alphabet itself appear as an expressive figure on stage. The contempo-
rary technological medium of writing could play the part of the upsetting
discovery for the startled satyrs in satyr plays, and it always remained
somewhat of a foreign body in the heroic world of tragedy. The more
open narrative frame of comic fiction, on the other hand, made possible
more explicit, direct reflections on the nature of writing in general, the
systematic totality of the alphabet as a tool of representation, its aesthetic
potential on stage, and its present, immediate significance for the group
and the audience. It is no coincidence that the chorus lies at the heart of
those stagings of comic writing that have left traces for us.
304 Renaud Gagné
In the Babylonians of Aristophanes, for instance, the 24 slaves of the
chorus were probably shown tattooed with grammata.18 The inscribed
bodies of slaves, the symbols of the common servitude to be found on
the other end of both Persian and Athenian imperialism, could thus be
imagined on the model of the 24 letters of the alphabet as a coherent
whole, an ensemble totalizing all the signs of writing.19 The projection
of tyrannical authority dramatized by the play was able to problematize
the phenomenon of writing itself as an instrument of power on stage. The
collective voice of the chorus has been made to conjure the collective notion
of the alphabet, and use it as a visible aspect of its reflection on the nature
of imperial authority in the play. The performance of letters by the chorus
is no longer just an instrument of theme or aesthetics, or a mediation
between individual texts there, but an invitation to think writing in terms
of groups and ensembles. It opens a different, more sweeping range of
possible mediations between poetic categories. Nowhere is this clearer than
in the Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias.20
The chorus of that famous comedy was composed of the letters of the
alphabet. Each letter was represented by one of the 24 chorus-members. I
agree with Egert Pöhlmann, Ralph Rosen, and many others that the play is
most plausibly dated to the end of the fifth century.21 Whether it preceded,
was contemporaneous with, or followed the events of that year, it was very
18 FGrH 115 F 155; see the excellent discussion of D’Angour 1999: 113–14 and Henderson in this volume.
19 For the identity of the chorus, see Norwood 1930: 1–2; 4; 7; Welsh 1983; D’Angour 1999: 112–15.
Cf. n. 37 of Jeffrey Henderson’s contribution to this volume.
20 The title Alphabetic Tragedy (Grammatik tragd©a) is found in Athenaeus 7.276a and 10.448b;
see Ruijgh 2001: 271–2; Smith 2003: n. 2. It is a perfectly fitting title for a paratragic comedy. The
alternative title, Grammatik qewr©a (10.453c), could be another contemporary name of the play,
or the elaboration of a later reader who did not understand how a comedy could be called a tragedy;
whatever the case, it is interesting to note that it brings attention to the act of viewing the letters
(cf. Svenbro 1988: 206; Wise 1998: 15). There is no good reason to think that this fifth-century drama
with chorus and characters was not meant for the stage.
21 Pöhlmann 1971; Rosen 1999: 148–9; see also Welcker 1832: 152–3; Wilamowitz 1937 [1906]; Smith
2003; Slater 2002: 117. The date is based on Athenaeus’ statement that the Kallias who was the author
of this play was “a bit earlier than Strattis” (mikr¼n mprosqen gen»menov to±v cr»noiv Strttidov),
an author otherwise known to have been active at the beginning of the fourth century (see Geissler
1925: 78; Körte 1932; K.–A. fr. 3; Edmonds 1957: 813–15; Braund 2000). This makes identification
between this “Kallias the Athenian” (Athenaeus 10.448b) and the otherwise well-known comic poet
Kallias difficult, as that Kallias is thought to have been active in the middle of the fifth century (see
Körte 1919; Geissler 1925: 2; 11; 13; Schwarze 1971: 90–1), although it must be noted that that date is
actually based on rather shaky foundations (Kassel and Austin 1984: 38–9; Rosen 1999: n. 2). The
argument for identification between the two Kalliases has been defended by, among others, Webster
1936: 5; Pohlenz 1939: 152–4 and Ruijgh 2001: 268–71 (see also Brozek 1939; Wise 1998: 15–17; Willi
2008: 402). As the name Kallias was so common in Athens, and considering that the Alphabetic
Tragedy is not associated with the well-known comic poet Kallias in the Suda entry or anywhere else,
there is no good reason to believe that the two Kalliases are one and the same. There is also no reason
to believe that the play must be earlier than Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.
possibly linked to the official adoption of the Ionic alphabet by Athens
in 403.22 The Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias, then, would be almost exactly
contemporary with the Frogs of Aristophanes. But that date must remain
speculative.
The play is essentially known through one long passage from Athenaeus’
discussion of riddles in Book 10 of the Deipnosophistai.23 The informa-
tion seems to come from a single source, Clearchus of Soli’s treatise Perª
gr©fwn.24 It contains information on at least four distinct passages. The
first passage informs us that every letter of the Ionic alphabet was named
in the prologue.25
Passage 1
pr»logov mn aÉtv stin k tän stoice©wn, Án cr lgein [k tän sto-
ice©wn] diairoÓntav kat tv paragrafv kaª tn teleutn katas-
trofikäv poioumnouv e«v tlfaá
<.. lfa>, bta, gmma, dlta, qeoÓ gr e²,
ztì, §ta, qtì, «äta, kppa, lbda, mÓ,
nÓ, xe±, t¼ oÔ, pe±, çä, t¼ s©gma, taÓ, <t¼> Ô,
par¼n fe± ce± te t ye± e«v t¼ å.
Kallias, Alphabetic Tragedy (PCG test. 7 =
Athenaeus 10.453c–d)
The play’s prologue consists of letters, and when you read it aloud, you need
to follow the punctuation and bring it all full circle, ending with alpha:
The assertion found in Athenaeus that the Alphabetic Tragedy served as a model for the choruses and
plots of the Medea and the Oedipus Tyrannus as well as for the antistrophic structure used by “all the
rest” of the tragic poets (Athenaeus 10.453e–f ) is obviously the reflection of some absurdly funny
paratragic statement (see Welcker 1832 already; Pöhlmann 1971; Rosen 1999), not a technical fact
of metrical history or antistrophic melody that was somehow transmitted to Clearchus. I therefore
cannot follow the line of reasoning expounded at length by Ruijgh in his 2001 article and others
who have anticipated or followed him (e.g. Hermann 1827: 137–8; Welcker 1832: 154–5; Hense 1876:
582–3; Brozek 1939: 32–43; Koller 1956b: 30–2; Arnott 1960: 178–80). The only usable information
at our disposal for dating the Alphabetic Tragedy is the statement that this Kallias was “a bit earlier
than Strattis”; see also Marrou 1948: 228; Edmonds 1957: 177–81; Harvey 1966: 632; Svenbro 1988:
202–5.
22 On the alphabetic reform of 403 (Theopompus FGrHist 115 F 155), see D’Angour 1999; Ferrandini
Troisi 2003. Whatever the precise date of the play, it is important to note that the Ionic alphabet
was used and known in Athens before its official adoption by the state in 403 (Matthaiou 2009;
Luraghi 2010: 86–7). The idea that the play could be linked to the reform of 403 has circulated at
least since the time of Welcker 1832: 150; Pöhlmann 1971 remains its most thorough advocate.
23 On the difficulties involved in using the text of Athenaeus to read Clearchus, see Ruijgh 2001: 263–8.
24 Wehrli 1948: 77; see Brozek 1939: 10–13; Rosen 1999: 149–55; Ruijgh 2001: 268–71; Slater 2002: 118;
Smith 2003: 328.
25 On the difficult meaning of kaª tn teleutn katastrofikäv poioumnouv e«v tlfa, see Ruijgh
2001: 288–9.
306 Renaud Gagné
The letter alpha, bēta, gamma, delta, ei (which belongs to a god),
zēta, ēta, thēta, iōta, kappa, labda, mu,
nu, xei, the letter ou, pei, rhō, the letter sigma, tau, the letter u,
also the letters phei and chei, followed by the letter psei and ending
in the letter ō.
We then learn that the parodos showed the 24 letters that composed the
chorus dancing various syllable combinations, starting from beta alpha ba,
beta ei be, beta eta bē, beta iota bi, beta ou bo, beta u bu, beta ō bō, followed
by gamma alpha ga, gamma ei ge, etc., and so on and so forth to the end of
the alphabet.26
Passage 2
¾ cor¼v d gunaikän k tän sÅnduo pepoihmnov aÉt stin mmetrov
ma kaª memelopepoihmnov t»nde t¼n tr»poná bta lfa ba, bta
e² be, bta §ta bh, bta «äta bi, bta oÔ bo, bta Ô bu, bta å
bw, kaª plin n ntistr»f toÓ mlouv kaª toÓ mtrou gmma lfa,
gmma e², gmma §ta, gmma «äta, gmma oÔ, gmma Ô, gmma å, kaª
pª tän loipän sullabän ¾mo©wv kstwn t» te mtron kaª t¼ mlov
n ntistr»foiv cousi psai taÉt»n.
Kallias, Alphabetic Tragedy (PCG test. 7 = Athenaeus 10.453d–e)
His chorus consisted of women who represented pairs of letters and sang in
meter, in a lyric style, in the following way: bēta alpha ba, bēta ei be, bēta
ēta bē, bēta iōta bi, bēta ou bo, bēta u bu, bēta ō bō, and likewise in the
antistrophic portion of the song and the meter: gamma alpha ga, gamma ei
ge, gamma ēta gē, gamma iōta gi, gamma ou go, gamma u gu, gamma ō gō,
and so on similarly through each of the other syllables, all of which have the
same metrical and lyrical structure organized in antistrophic form.
The whole song was thus composed of pairs of strophes and antistrophes
built on the same metrical and lyric structures.27 This repetitive, incantatory
alphabetic song of the parodos went on for 119 syllables distributed in 17
stanzas, with the last stanza, the only one not belonging to a strophic
pair, possibly standing out as an epode. This last stanza was based on the
consonant psi, one of the two distinctive consonants of the Ionic alphabet.
The very last syllable, psi ō psō, was composed of two Ionian letters.28 The
third passage, in iambic trimeter this one, is placed after the parodos by
Athenaeus. In that scene, someone is instructing a group of women on
how to pronounce the vowels of the alphabet, and in what order:
26 See the extensive reconstruction of the text in Ruijgh 2001: 294–8.
27 Ruijgh 2001: 261. 28 See Svenbro 1988: 205; Pöhlmann 1971: 237.
Passage 3
kaª met t¼n cor¼n e«sgei plin k tän fwnhntwn çsin oÌtwv (¥n
de± kat tv paragrafv ¾mo©wv to±v pr»sqen lgonta diaire±n, ¯n ì ¡
toÓ poisantov Ëp»krisiv szhtai kat tn dÅnamin)á
DI. lfa m»non, å guna±kev, e² te deÅteron

lgein m»non cr kaª tr©ton m»non g ì re±v;
GU. §t ì ra fsw; DI. t¼ ttart»n t ì aÔ m»non
«äta, pmpton <tì > oÔ, t» q ì kton Ô m»non
lge<in se>. lo©sqion d fwnä soi t¼ å
tän pt fwnän, pt d ì n mtroiv m»non.
...
kaª toÓto lxas ì e²ta d saut llei.
Athenaeus 10.453f–454a)
After the chorus, moreover, he introduces a speech made up of vowels (you

need to follow the punctuation when you read it aloud, as with the passage
discussed above, so that the delivery-style intended by the poet is preserved
to the extent possible); it goes as follows:
teacher. You must pronounce “alpha” all by itself, ladies, and after that
“ei” all by itself. And then you’ll say the third one by itself?
student. Will I say “ēta” then? teacher. The fourth letter by itself, then
“iōta”, and the fifth, “ou”, and the sixth, “u” by itself,
that’s what you have to say. I’ll finally make you hear “ō”,
the last of the seven vowels, and then seven vowels in one verse:
...
And after having said this verse you then have to repeat it to
yourself.
The distribution of sentences can be configured differently, but the general

sense of the text remains clear in all cases.29 There is no good reason to
believe that the group of women in this passage is necessarily the chorus
of the play, even if that is clearly a possibility. The tone of the exchange
between teacher and students is intimate and didactic at the same time.
Particular attention, it is interesting to note, is paid to the letters ēta and
ōmega, which are singled out from the other letters in the passage.
The fourth passage, finally, shows a woman, possibly one of the “stu-
dents” of passage 3, describe her pregnancy to her comrades:
29 See Ruijgh 2001: 318–24.

308 Renaud Gagné
Passage 4
dedlwke d kaª di tän «ambe©wn grmma prätov oÕtov ko-
last»teron mn kat tn dinoian, pefrasmnon d t¼n tr»pon toÓtoná
kÅw gr, å guna±kev. llì a«do±, f©lai,
n grmmasi sfn toÎnom ì xerä brfouv.
½rq makr gramm ‘stiná k d ì aÉtv mshv
mikr parestäs ì katrwqen Ëpt©a.
peita kÅklov p»dav cwn brace±v dÅo.
Athenaeus 10.454a)
This author was the first to use iambic verse to describe a word that has a
rather crude meaning, but is alluded to in the following fashion:
For I’m pregnant, ladies. But since I’m embarrassed, my friends,
I’ll tell you the baby’s name by spelling it.
There’s a big letter that stands up straight, and emerging from its
middle on either side are small parts that lean backward.
Then there’s a circle with two tiny feet.
The identity of her baby is defined by its name. Shame prohibits her from
pronouncing this name, so she proceeds to describe the two letters that con-
stitute it. These letters could be seen to function as iconic representations
of a child: the first one reflects a torso with two little arms, the second legs
with two “tiny feet.” Athenaeus asserts that the name Psō is obscene, vulgar,
and scholars since the sixteenth century have read it as a diminutive for
psōa, foetidus ventris crepitus, that is, fart, or psōlē, the foreskin of a penis.30
That is very possibly part of the joke, and the name could have pointed
to one or the other, or both. Some have argued that the combination of
the letters Y and W can be seen as a suggestive representation of sexual
penetration, and others a diminutive for ywx, a bastard child of the Ionian
alphabet.31 Ruijgh argued that the woman, rather than being actually preg-
nant, was simply about to release a fart.32 Other specific identifications
have been proposed.33 Whatever the case, the fact is that the character is
not pregnant with psōa or psōlē or any other such word, but with Psō. Very
literally, if you will excuse the pun, she is pregnant with a syllable. And not
30 Daléchamp 1583 apud Casaubon 1660; Brozek 1939: 29; Rosen 1999: 156; Slater 2002: 126–9.
31 Pöhlmann 1971: 237; Svenbro 1988: 206.
32 Ruijgh 2001: 327.
33 It has been suggested that the name Yä could be related to the “rustic” onomatopoeic word yä
or its equivalent y» (Gregory of Corinth 549 S; Eustathius 855.25); see Ruijgh 2001: 327 and the
excellent observations of Coo 2011 on Sophocles F 521 Radt.
any syllable, of course, but one composed of two Ionic letters, the same
two letters, in fact, that ended the syllable song of the parodos.34 That song
ended with an emphatically marked psō, and the character of passage 4 is
pregnant with Psō. That is hardly a coincidence. The “father” of Psō most
certainly had something to do with the name of the child, and with the
shame of its mother. Who the father was we cannot tell, but this father
has, somehow, begotten a syllable. And that syllable has something to do
with the last syllable of the parodos, and with the letters of the chorus.
We cannot of course ascertain what the chorus did as the letters were
named in scenes such as passage 3 or passage 4. But there is little doubt
that this spectacle involved a dazzling combination of sounds, images, and
movement to represent the letters on stage. That performance could exploit
the double nature of the individualized chorus in old comedy, a collective
composed of distinct individuals, to represent the alphabet as a unit of
different letters.35 In the song of the parodos, for instance, as the letters
performed their sounds, it seems that the chorus acted collectively to rep-
resent the value of each one of its dancers. This must be the ultimate scene
of choral self-reflexivity in Greek drama. As each member of the chorus
was supposed to represent one letter of the alphabet, some distinguishing
mark on their costume or mask or some form of movement might have
allowed the audience to identify them. As they named themselves, the two
letters forming each syllable might have briefly taken some distance from
the group to embody their combined sound, perhaps with some sort of
characteristic dance, but what seems certain is that the chorus, as a whole,
somehow performed each individual letter and syllable.
The sound of each letter was sung by the chorus as a whole, and given
physical shape through dancing by the group. It is tempting to speculate
that the shape of each letter was actually produced on stage, a type of
movement for which the elevated seating of the theater would create ideal
conditions of perspective. The word “choreography” could not be more
appropriate for such a spectacle, a rapid reshuffling of written forms that
would make for an astonishingly difficult feat of performance, but certainly
not an impossible one. Whatever the precise movements were, in any
case, the result was a veritable explosion of synaesthetic correspondences
between syllable, image, movement, and idea, a dance of sound and letters
in three dimensions. As a single voice collectively embodying the entire
alphabet, Kallias’ chorus of grammata was able to fully realize the expressive
34 See Brozek 1939: 29; Svenbro 1988: 205; Ruijgh 2001: 278.
35 For the individualized chorus in Old Comedy, see Wilson 1977; apart from the Birds of Aristophanes
and the Cities of Eupolis, Wilson lists evidence for as many as 20 “multiform” comic choruses.
310 Renaud Gagné
potential of letters on stage. The various experiments of earlier plays in the
performance of letters were brought to another level in this production.
Formally, the alphabetic chorus of the play, with its massive range of
mediations between modes of communication, is the endpoint of a long
process of exploration spanning over all three genres of drama, the logical
conclusion of an important dramatic concern with the poetics of writing
on the Athenian stage.
Thematically, Kallias’ play also builds and expands on the web of asso-
ciations traditionally clustered around the description of writing in drama.
The Alphabetic Tragedy is fundamentally concerned with the themes of
knowledge and authority. Nowhere is this more clearly apparent than in
passage 3. We see there a character teaching a group of women how to
pronounce the vowels, and in what order they should be named. It is not
only the value of individual sounds that is taught, but their names and their
place in the system as well. This scene is one of three staged reviews of the
alphabet attested in our source. The first one, in the prologue, had all let-
ters of the alphabet presented in order by an unknown character. Whether
it was an invocation or not, on the model of the Clouds or the Birds, for
instance, it served as a proleptic presentation of the chorus. The chorus
then went on to portray the alphabet in terms of syllable combinations in
the parodos.
All parts of the play we have information for portray systematic enu-
merations of the alphabet from different perspectives. What all these per-
spectives have in common is their pedagogical nature. They all portray
familiar methods of teaching letters. Each one is based on known classroom
techniques used to teach children in Antiquity.36 The Alphabetic Tragedy
of Kallias dramatized a moment of education through letters. A number of
scenarios have been proposed by scholars over the years to make sense of
that situation and understand its precise tenor. Unless further evidence is
discovered, these attempts will remain fruitless. There is, however, one type
of evidence that can point in the right general direction. One of the oddest
statements of Athenaeus in his discussion of the Alphabetic Tragedy is his
claim that it has influenced Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Euripides’
Medea:
kaª gr Kall©an ¬store± t¼n %qhna±on grammatikn sunqe±nai
tragd©an, f ì ¨v poisai t mlh kaª tn diqesin EÉrip©dhn n
Mhde© kaª Sofokla t¼n O«d©poun. Athenaeus 7.276a
36 See Guéraud and Jouguet 1938; Marrou 1948: 211–18; Harvey 1966: 632–3.
For he records that Kallias of Athens composed the Alphabetic Tragedy, from
which Euripides in Medea and Sophocles in Oedipus drew the models of
their choruses and plots.
ãste t¼n EÉrip©dhn m m»non Ëponoe±sqai tn Mdeian nteÓqen
pepoihknai psan, ll kaª t¼ mlov aÉt¼ metenhnoc»ta faner¼n
e²nai. t¼n d Sofokla diele±n fasin potolmsai t¼ po©hma t mtr
toÓt ì koÅsanta kaª poisai n t O«d©podi oÌtwvá
gÜ oÎtì maut¼n oÎte sì lgunä. <t©> taÓtì
<llwv> lgceiv;
di»per o¬ loipoª tv ntistr»fouv p¼ toÅtou paredconto pntev,
Þv oiken, e«v tv tragd©av. Athenaeus 10.453e–f
Euripides is accordingly not only suspected of having composed his entire
Medea using this as his source, but it is also evident that he borrowed the
lyric form from it as well. And people say that after Sophocles heard this
song, he got up the nerve to put his work into verse and wrote the following
in his Oedipus:
I will cause pain neither to myself nor to you if convicted of

these crimes.
As a consequence, apparently, all the other (poets) adopted antistrophic
songs into their tragedies from this source.
Against Ruijgh and others, I fully agree with Rosen’s demonstration that
there is no factual substance to this claim.37 Following Pöhlmann, he
has shown convincingly, I believe, that these claims do not derive from
an actual historical fact of literary influence, one text being dependent
on another, but from the statements of Kallias’ text itself. Statements of
literary rivalry, what Rosen describes as typical comic braggadocio, would
explain Athenaeus’ unlikely claims. That much seems clear. But I think we
can go further than this.
Athenaeus is making one radically bizarre statement in that passage.
He is not only saying that Kallias’ text has influenced two passages from
two tragic plays. He is in fact asserting that these plays base their metri-
cal and strophic structure on the Alphabetic Tragedy, that they drew the
models of their choruses and their plots from it. The Medea, according to
Athenaeus, is entirely based on the Alphabetic Tragedy, and its lyric songs
in particular depend on it. Sophocles found the courage to put his work
into verse by listening to the parodos of the syllables, as he supposedly
37 Rosen 1999; cf. Smith 2003.

312 Renaud Gagné
acknowledged in a mangled line from the Oedipus Tyrannus cited by
Athenaeus.38 Even more, our source goes on to say that “all the other
poets (o¬ loipoª . . . pntev) adopted antistrophic song into their tragedies
from this source”: that is, the parodos of the syllables. The Medea and the
Oedipus Tyrannus are essentially mentioned as two paradigmatic plays of
current tragedy, not the precisely dated productions of 431.39 The statement
does not concern just two lines of Sophocles. What Athenaeus is saying
is that the very structure of contemporary tragedy is dependent on the
parodos of syllables of the Alphabetic Tragedy.
This goes far beyond simple comic braggadocio of the type found in the
Clouds. To understand the content of the play, on which Athenaeus, via
Clearchos, reflects in the passage, we have to pay more attention to our
source’s insistence on the chorus, and, more specifically, the parodos, as a
source of influence. The obvious answer, it seems to me, is that a claim was
made in the play about writing’s influence on metre and tragedy in general –
influence involving the chorus of letters. Perhaps the tragedians were shown
learning to read and write, Sophocles and Euripides going back to school,
perhaps one of the female students of passage 3, or the woman who is
pregnant with a syllable in passage 4, was the personification of tragedy,
perhaps this perhaps that. We can speculate endlessly, and not without
gain. What seems fairly certain, however, is that the chorus of letters was
shown as a source of authority over other authors and over tragedy as a
whole. The authority of writing was used in the play somehow to assert
new, ridiculously funny paratragic comic claims. Whether or not the play
was produced as a new public alphabet was being adopted by decree, the
chorus of 24 dancers was the perfect vehicle for embodying this alphabetic
authority.
The most enduring fact that stems from our fragments is the emphatic
authority of the chorus in the play, its role as the fount of everything else
that happens on stage. The prologue has a character that recites the names
of all letters, the first episode has a character teaching the order of the
vowels to her students, and another scene shows us a character pregnant
with one of the syllables of the parodos. It is the tragic chorus that is singled
out as receiving the influence of the Alphabetic Tragedy. The entire action
of the play revolves around the chorus. The visible presence of the alphabet
in the orchestra grounds the alphabetic discussions of the characters in the
three-dimensional sounds of the 24 dancers. The chorus is the source of
38 See the interesting phonic reconstruction of Smith 2003.
39 For the Medea and the Oedipus being mentioned together as paradigmatic tragedies, see Ar., Poet.
1453b29–31. The Oedipus Tyrannus, of course, is not precisely dated.
the knowledge communicated to the characters and to other poets. It is
through the authority of the chorus that Kallias’ comedy is able to give a
lesson to tragedy.
What the Alphabetic Tragedy pretends to teach to its tragic rivals, at
least what we have information for, is sound, versification, and strophic
structure. It proceeds to reduce each one to its basic, constituent units.
At a time when leading intellectual figures of the day were explicitly dis-
cussing the nature of sound in their texts and epideixeis, the Alphabetic
Tragedy of Kallias offered a radical deconstruction of poetic language to
its audience.40 The pedagogical reconstructions of the successive episodes
must have provided the play with a great amount of comic material. With
the meager fragments at our disposal, we cannot perceive anything of that
humorous action. But what we can do is consider the stereotyped, cultural
icons it activated.
The chorus remained the very foundation of the traditional education
for the elite citizen of the late classical city. It is not a coincidence that the
pedagogical exercises of the play, the schoolroom teaching of the inher-
ently democratic new letters, are grounded in the authority of the most
prestigious educational institution of the day, as described by Plato and
so many others.41 By its ability to embody that educational institution at
the heart of the play, the pedagogical chorus of the Alphabetic Tragedy was
able to tap into a contested aspect of the shared, collective experience of
the audience, and open another level of possible meanings and mediations
between groups.
A more significant cultural template, perhaps, is that of the chorus as a
source of knowledge and authority. It is hardly a coincidence that the 24
letters of the chorus are described as women. It is possible that they were
presented as sounds, fwna©, as in passage 3 (tän pt fwnän), but no
common Greek word for letters is feminine, and Athenaeus presents them
as grmmata and stoice±a throughout the passage.42 Whatever the case,
what the audience was shown on stage was a chorus of women singing and
dancing the very source of poetry. This obviously evoked the fundamental,
traditional paradigm of the chorus of young girls, the key figure of early
Greek inspiration and poetic authority in early Greece, such as the Delian
Maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and the prototypical chorus of
40 For late fifth-century discussions of sound (Anaxagoras 59A 106 DK; Archelaos 60A1 DK; Dem-
ocritus 68A 135.55 DK; Ar. Nub. 160–168; Thesm. 5–22), see D’Angour 1999: 118; interesting remarks
on the “resyllabification” of tragedy in the Alphabetic Tragedy in Smith 2003: 321–5.
41 Calame 2001: 221–44; see Prauscello in this volume. 42 See Ruijgh 2001: 276.
314 Renaud Gagné
the Muses, the model which lay behind all other projections of that shared
cultural template.43
In the Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias, the chorus of letters has replaced the
chorus of the Muses as the ultimate source of poetic authority, knowledge,
and teaching. A new collective voice of young girls is now shown able
to rewrite “the voice of all men,” as the Delian Maidens of the Homeric
hymn.44 Sound has become letter, song has become writing. Yet the form
remains the same. As the dramatic corpus continues to crystallize into a
set body of texts, as a new, standard alphabet is possibly being adopted
by the state, the larger alphabetic chorus of comedy is used to look back
upon earlier tradition, to rewrite song-culture, re-imagine performance as
writing. The sounds of tragedy are conceived as written words, syllables
as letters, and the comic playwright makes a humorous case for revisiting
the tragic masterpieces through this lens. The Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias
offered its audience an elaborate staging of dramatic textuality.45 It rein-
vented an old trope, the chorus of the Muses as the fount of all song, for
an uproarious dramatization of literary authority at the expense of tragedy.
The alphabet is a comic chorus, and the chorus, in this play, functions as
the channel of a massive crossing through genre and media. The building
blocks of song, staged in a flurry of associations between image, dance, and
sound, can be used to mock, enact, deconstruct, imitate, question all rivals
and predecessors. The entire baggage of song has become a written text
that can be revisited with the permutations of the alphabet – the chorus of
letters has found a way to rewrite poetic history through the comic lens.
Grammatistai, “school-teachers,” were obviously involved in spreading
the Ionic alphabet in later fifth-century Athens.46 This might be reflected
in the play. Our inability to ascertain more specifically who the teacher
of passage 3 was, however, is a particularly unfortunate gap in our knowl-
edge. There is no good reason, for instance, to accept Pöhlmann’s enticing
suggestion that it was Grammatikē herself.47 The identity of the play’s
characters is now irretrievably lost. It is, however, also possible to read what
little information we have against the cultural grid that would have shaped
its reception. The short passage emphatically underlines the gender of the
group (å guna±kev; lxas’; saut) that is being taught the order of the
vowels in these lines, and the familiar tone of the exchange suggests that
43 Calame 2001: 49–53; 75–7; 104–10; see Nagy in this volume.

44 Lines 162–4: pntwn d ì nqrÛpwn fwnv kaª krembaliastÆn / mime±sq ì sasiná fa©h d ken
aÉt¼v kastov / fqggesq ì á oÌtw sfin kal sunrhren oid.
45 Svenbro 1988: 9; 206. 46 See e.g. Marrou 1948: 145–7; D’Angour 1999: 125–6.
47 Pöhlmann 1971: 237; Svenbro 1988: 205; Ruijgh 2001: 258.
the teacher is also a woman. Our character is a woman who teaches other
women.48 She conveys knowledge about poetic sounds, versification, and
strophic structure. Her authority is linked to that of a chorus of women. If
passage 4 is related to passage 3, then her “students” would be young enough
to bear children before marriage. The lead points in only one direction.
Psappho, of course, was a prominent figure of late classical comedy.49 She
was a convenient character for staging reflections between texts and genres,
as Diphilus’ Sappho shows, for instance, where the poetess shared the stage
with Archilochus and Hipponax.50 Her association with writing is even
more noteworthy.51 In the classical period, she is one of only two authors
commonly represented with writing instruments on painted pots. Her
association with writing on the comic stage, more importantly, stands out
from extant fragments. In Antiphanes’ almost contemporary play Sappho,
for instance, the poetess presents a riddle about pregnant letters:52
n d Sapfo± ¾ %ntifnhv aÉtn tn poitrian probllousan poie±
gr©fouv t»nde t¼n tr»pon, piluomnou tin¼v oÌtwv. ¥ mn gr fhsiná
sti fÅsiv qleia brfh szous ì Ëp¼ k»lpoiv
aËtv, Ànta dì fwna bon ¯sthsi gegwn¼n
kaª di p»ntion o²dma kaª pe©rou di pshv
o³v qlei qnhtän, to±v dì oÉd paroÓsin koÅein
xestiná kwfn dì kov asqhsin cousin.
...
peita poie± tn SapfÜ dialuomnhn t¼n gr±fon oÌtwvá
qleia mn nÅn sti fÅsiv pistol,
brfh dì n aËt perifrei t grmmataá
fwna dì Ànta <taÓta> to±v p»rrw lale±
o³v boÅleq ì á terov dì n tÅc
tiv plhs©on
stÜv nagignÛskontov oÉk koÅsetai.
Antiphanes, Sappho (PCG 194)
In Sappho Antiphanes represents the poetess herself as posing riddles in this

way, while a male character tries to solve them, as follows. For she says:
It is a female creature that keeps its children safe beneath the folds
of its garments. And though they are mute, they raise a resounding cry
48 See Ruijgh 2001: 277–8.

49 Brivitello 1998; Yatromanolakis 2007: 293–312; Nagy 2007a: 228.
50 Diphilos fr. 70–71 KA; see Yatromanolakis 2007: 298–9; cf. Ephippos fr. 20 KA; Amphis fr. 32 KA;
Timokles fr. 32 KA.
51 Yatromanolakis 2001; 2007: 143–60.
52 Antiphanes was active in the first part of the fourth century (test. 2 KA); see the discussion of this
passage in Yatromanolakis 2007: 300–7.
316 Renaud Gagné
through the sea-surge and the whole mainland
to whichever mortals they wish, and even those who are not there
can hear them, deaf though their perception is.
...
Then he represents Sappho as offering the correct solution to the riddle, as
follows:
The female creature is a writing tablet,
and the children she carries around inside herself are the letters.
Even though they’re mute, they speak to anyone they want
who’s far away. And if someone else happens to be standing
nearby, he won’t hear the man who’s reading.
That text (Athenaeus 10.448b–c), strikingly enough, comes from the same
discussion of griphoi in Athenaeus where the fragments of the Alphabetic
Tragedy are cited. It is interesting to note that the passage is the only other
classical passage we have where letters are described in terms of birth and
pregnancy. In any case, whatever the reason for it, and this needs more
study, Psappho was prominently and distinctively associated to writing in
the classical imagination, and especially on the comic stage.
I am not saying that the teacher of passage 3 was Psappho, even if her
name begins with a psi and ends with an ō. That would be going beyond
the evidence. What I am saying is that, whether that character was named
Psappho or not, she was very probably modeled on the figure of Psappho.
It was the figure of an ancient, hallowed lyric poet, one closely linked
to the world of the chorus and its educational function, who was made
to channel the literary significance of the alphabetic chorus in the play.
One of the most prestigious traditional figures of lyric poetry, the ultimate
mistress of sound, verse, and strophic structure, was chosen by Kallias to
preside over the radical reinscription of literary history through writing
staged in the play. In the later classical period, the Alphabetic Tragedy thus
asked its audience to rethink literary change, contemporary poetic writing
and generic difference through the channel of archaic lyric. The poetic
presence of the chorus, by virtue of its deep diachronic cultural resonance
and its vast, cross-generic semantic register, could accommodate this added
layer of reference. By its ability to conjure and juxtapose so many different
voices at the same precise moment, it offered the only space on which the
retrospective literary history of past and present could be written. In other
words, it still knew the speech of all men.
chapter 1 4
Choral dialectics
Hölderlin and Hegel
Joshua Billings
It took a revolution to discredit Aristotle’s claim that the tragic chorus

should ‘join in the action’ (sunagwn©zesqai) and ‘be treated as one of the
actors’ (Poetics 1456a). Until around 1800, the distinctive role of the chorus
was widely assimilated to that of a character.1 Though the chorus could be
assigned different functions within the plot (the confidante, the ‘man of
honour’), it was largely understood by analogy with familiar Aristotelian
and neo-Aristotelian concepts of ēthos. In so far as its collective role was
recognized, it was seen as the remnant of a long-forsaken origin or an
expedient for preserving unities of time and space.2 Beginning in the
second half of the eighteenth century, though, thinkers increasingly sought
to formulate the unique role of the chorus, emphasizing its difference from
the protagonists, rather than its similarity. Modern efforts to define the
chorus – as a ritual body, a democratic collective, a mediating instance3 –
can be traced back to this period, when Aristotle’s authority began to
diminish after dominating discussions of tragedy for centuries.4
As the Aristotelian framework became less definitive, the chorus came
to appear as essential to tragic representation, the foundation – in an aes-
thetic as well as a historical sense – of Greek tragedy’s specificity as a genre.
Anticipating Nietzsche’s description of the chorus by nearly a hundred
years, Daniel Jenisch writes in his 1786 Agamemnon translation that ‘the
1 I try to substantiate this claim at greater length in a forthcoming article (Billings forthcoming), which
describes the shift from a theory of choral integration to one of choral exceptionalism.
2 See, for examples, Dacier 1692: 312–15 and Brumoy 1730: lxxiv–lxxvi, two of the most important (and
positive) viewpoints on the chorus.
3 See the Introduction to this volume. It is important to recognize that our interest in the mediating
role of the chorus has historical precedents – especially, though not exclusively, theories around 1800.
4 Characteristic of the move away from Aristotle is Schlegel 1989 [lectures originally given 1798–9]: 83:
‘His [Aristotle’s] rules about the essence of drama are not objectively valid.’ Cf. also Hermann 1802:
197–8, a commentary on the Poetics that begins with an explicit questioning of the Poetics’ authority
(!). His theory of the chorus (267–70) is distinctly non-Aristotelian, and shows the influence of
Idealist theories.
317
318 Joshua Billings
tragikotaton [sic] of Greek tragedy are the choral songs’.5 Increasing
knowledge of Aeschylus, who was rarely translated before 1770, was an
important factor in suggesting new paths for thinking about the chorus.
Yet it was most of all the French Revolution that led to the development of
theories of the chorus’ unique role, as philosophers and artists associated
with German Idealism considered the collective in times of crisis. Find-
ing themselves spectators to violent upheavals across the border, Idealist
thinkers became newly sensitive to ‘choral experience’, using it as a means
of articulating their own perspectives on tragedy, ancient and modern, real
and mythical.6
The extreme of investigation into the chorus’ exceptional role might be
Friedrich Schiller’s 1803 preface to his The Bride of Messina: A Tragedy with
Choruses, entitled ‘On the use of the chorus in tragedy’. Schiller sees the
chorus in terms of a broader understanding of art as a form of resistance
against reality, the creation of an aesthetic space of freedom: ‘it [the chorus]
should be a living wall that tragedy draws about itself in order to shut
itself off completely from the actual world and preserve for itself its ideal
ground and its poetic freedom’.7 The roots of this understanding go back
to Schiller’s own horrified spectatorship of the French Revolution, which
brought him a new pessimism about the possibilities of human freedom.
Schiller’s theory sees the importance of the chorus as primarily reflective,
distant and distancing from the catastrophes on stage. By interrupting the
pathos of the flow of action, the chorus allows the audience to retain its
emotional balance. Though affective regulation and detached reflection had
been considered possible functions of the chorus throughout the eighteenth
century, Schiller’s theory of aesthetic autonomy transforms these into the
very foundation of dramatic representation: the chorus’ irreality grounds
tragedy’s artistic truth. For Schiller, the chorus’ participation in the story
is only incidental; their vital importance lies in their formal role, which
creates the conditions for the aesthetic world of tragedy.
Schiller’s preface and choral practice in Bride took part in a short but
intense period of enthusiasm for the chorus in Weimar and Jena around
1800. The Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm, seem to have
played the leading role, but one sees echoes of the choral interest also in
Herder’s journal Adrastea and Schelling’s lectures on the Philosophy of Art.8
5 Jenisch 1786: xvi.

6 I draw the concept of ‘choral experience’ from Murnaghan in this volume, who describes the chorus’
role as a complex of identification and projection, which might characterize also Hölderlin’s and
Hegel’s critical perspectives.
7 Schiller 1962: 7. 8 Herder 2000: 317–20; Schelling 1989: 259–60.
Choral dialectics: Hölderlin and Hegel 319
A. W. Schlegel’s view on the chorus is most influentially formulated in his
1808 Vienna Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, which describe the
chorus as ‘the speaker of all humanity . . . the idealized spectator’.9 Though
the Vienna lectures were the first of Schlegel’s writings to reach a pan-
European audience, his thoughts on the chorus had been discussed in local
circles since his 1798–9 Lectures on Art Theory (Kunstlehre). Schlegel argues,
against Aristotle, that in so far as the chorus joins in the action, this is
only a ‘minor matter’ (Nebensache).10 The chorus for Schlegel is essential
to the ‘ideal representation’ of tragedy because it objectifies the audience’s
feelings about the drama in poetic form. Schlegel’s evaluation of the chorus
on autonomous rather than dependent criteria is one of the consequences
of the interest in choral experience around the time, and leads to a sense,
broadly shared, that the chorus serves a unique and indispensable aesthetic
function. Idealist efforts to grasp the chorus often show a strong sense of
identification, which understands the choral role more by analogy to the
reader or audience than to the characters.11
Schiller’s and Schlegel’s influential formulations point to the new pos-
sibilities for understanding the chorus that come into play around 1800.
The chorus for both is essentially static, a fixed point within the peripeteiai
of tragedy. It serves a structural role, framing the action but not impor-
tantly taking part in it. The choral theories of Friedrich Hölderlin and
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, on the other hand, understand the cho-
rus dynamically, as a matrix on which the upheavals of tragedy are visible.
In a sense, they are more Aristotelian than Schiller or Schlegel in that they
see the chorus as indivisible from the action of tragedy. Yet their ontological
theories of the genre afford the chorus a central, cognitive function that
is utterly alien to the Poetics’ discussion. Both Hölderlin and Hegel read
Greek tragedy as the representation of a kind of revolution, a comprehen-
sive social change that alters collective consciousness. Their theories place
the chorus within a temporal dialectic, in which insight emerges from the
collision of opposed forces. However, they place the chorus at different
stages within the tragic dialectic. In Hölderlin’s ‘Notes’ accompanying his
1804 translations of Sophocles, choral consciousness is the result of the
tragic process; for Hegel three years later in the Phenomenology, tragedy
is the process by which the understanding of the chorus is superseded.
For both, the peripeteiai of tragedy issue in a dialectical knowledge that is
visible in the chorus. This sense that catastrophe can be transmuted into
9 Schlegel 1846: 70 (translation modified). 10 Schlegel 1989: 87.

11 My understanding here is indebted to Güthenke forthcoming.
320 Joshua Billings
cognition is inseparable from the events of their time. Behind Hölderlin’s
and Hegel’s views of choral dialectics lie readings of the Antigone filtered
through the experiences of the French Revolution. The chorus’ role in
Antigone’s confrontation with Creon comes to represent the experience of
the collective in societal transition.
Hölderlin: republican revolution12

Hölderlin’s decision to dedicate himself to a projected full translation of
Sophocles followed directly on artistic and political disappointments. From
1797 to 1800, Hölderlin worked intermittently on a tragedy entitled The
Death of Empedocles (or Empedocles on Etna). It was never completed, and
all that survives are fragmentary sketches, drafts and a series of poetological
essays. Hölderlin’s drafts include mention of a group of citizens (in the first)
and a chorus of Agrigentines (in the second), but neither seems to play
the lyrical role of the ancient chorus. The third and shortest draft also lists
a chorus among its dramatis personae, and the last lines Hölderlin wrote
before breaking off are likely intended for them. The page is suggestively
headlined ‘Neue Welt’ [new world], a theme Hölderlin will pick up in the
prose immediately following, where he labels the chorus ‘Zukunft’ [future].
The page contains only a few lines, which suggest a choral metre in their
irregularity (the rest of the work is in blank verse), and might have been
intended as a kind of parodos:
und es hängt, ein ehern Gewölbe

der Himmel über uns, es lähmt Fluch
die Glieder den Menschen, und ihre stärkenden, die erfreuenden
Gaaben der Erde sind, wie Spreu, es
spottet unser, mit ihren Geschenken die Mutter
und alles ist Schein –
O wann, wann öffnet sie sich
die Fluth über die Dürre.13
12 All Hölderlin citations refer to Sämtliche Werke. Frankfurter Ausgabe. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe,
ed. D. E. Sattler. Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1975–2008 (cited as FHA). Where translations
are available, they are listed in the bibliography and cited, though I occasionally modify them in the
text. Since the secondary literatures on both Hölderlin and Hegel are vast, I confine myself to the
immediately relevant references and a few general suggestions for those unfamiliar with the texts.
The best English introduction to Hölderlin’s theory of tragedy is Schmidt 2001: 122–64. Further,
see Fóti 2006 and Dastur 1997.
13 Hölderlin 2008: 188; FHA 13: 946.
[And it hangs, a brazen vault, the sky over us, it cripples, the curse, the limbs
of man, and her strengthening, gladdening gifts of earth are like chaff, she
mocks us with her presents, the mother, and all is semblance.
O when, when will it open, the flood over the drought.]
These enigmatic lines find the chorus in a time of pestilence, literal or
metaphorical, hoping for salvation. The situation recalls the parodos of the
OT, in which Sophocles’s chorus turns to Oedipus with similar images of
barrenness. Some of Sophocles’s imagery recurs: nose± d moi pr»pav /
st»lov (170: my whole people is diseased), oÎte gr kgona / klutv
cqon¼v aÎxetai (172: nor do the offspring of the famed land grow).
Hölderlin’s chorus, like Sophocles’, hopes for a social rejuvenation led
by the central figure of the work – though this turns out to be possible
only through his fall. The chorus retains this forward-looking, progressive
quality in the ‘Notes’ to Sophocles: it will be the means whereby the new
consciousness of tragedy is created.
Hölderlin’s thought here must be understood in the context of current
events: the egalitarian promise of the French Revolution had degenerated
into the Napoleonic wars, which ravaged much of Hölderlin’s surround-
ings in the west of Germany.14 Frankfurt was occupied three times during
the 1790s, and Hölderlin was often forced to flee invading troops. Though
he at first nourished hopes that the French forces would support Swabian
republicans, his expectations ultimately came to nothing.15 His increasing
disillusionment with Napoleon may have been a cause of his abandoning
Empedocles, as he became pessimistic about the ability of a revolutionary
individual to bring about broader social change.16 Hölderlin had seen the
damage wrought by the fighting first-hand on his trip to Bordeaux in
the years 1801–2, when he took up, then quickly resigned, a position as a
private tutor there. The analogy between the southern French countryside
and the Greeks was strong in Hölderlin’s mind, as he writes in a letter of
late 1802: ‘The athleticism of people in the south, in the ruins of the ancient
spirit, made me better acquainted with the true essence of the Greeks.’17
14 The topic of Hölderlin’s relation to the French Revolution is highly controversial; at issue is not
whether, but how fervently and for how long he supported the Revolution. I follow Prignitz 1985 in
seeing the decisive change around 1800, as reflected in Hölderlin’s turning to his own Vaterland for
the societal transformation he still passionately desired.
15 Prignitz 1985: 33.
16 Hölderlin picks up on a strand of Empedocles’ biography that represents him as a republican. See
Fóti 2006: 55.
17 Hölderlin 2009: 213; FHA 19: 499: ‘Das Athletische der südlichen Menschen, in den Ruinen des
antiken Geistes, macht mich mit dem eigentlichen Wesen der Griechen bekannter.’
322 Joshua Billings
Odd as this comparison might seem, it speaks to the absolute contempo-
raneity of ‘ancient spirit’ in Hölderlin’s thought, and suggests an analogy
between the revolutionary spirit of France – which had once enthused all
the Tübingen students – and the Greek character. For Hölderlin, the Athe-
nians represented the ideal, republican polity, which France had sought,
but ultimately failed to restore. Hölderlin, unlike Hegel, does not give up
hope of such a democratic collective emerging in his own Vaterland, but
transmutes it into his reading of Sophocles as the poet of revolution.
Hölderlin’s political understanding of Sophocles is obvious in his trans-
lation of the title of the OT as Oedipus der Tyrann, instead of the more
common König Oedipus. He understands the OT and Antigone as works
of a transitional period in history, in which a monarchical government
and a hierarchical theology are toppled and a republican state emerges.
The OT takes place in ‘a world . . . amid plague, confusion of mind and
universally awakened spirit of prophecy, an idle time’.18 Both works, for
Hölderlin, centre on a blasphemous confrontation with the divine, in
which ‘god and man, so that no gap occurs in the course of the world, and
so the memory of the heavenly ones does not die out, communicate in
the all-forgetting form of unfaithfulness’.19 Hölderlin describes the inter-
nal dynamic of tragedy here as Umkehr, ‘reversal’ or even ‘revolution’, an
imaginative understanding of Aristotelian peripeteia.20 In Oedipus, Umkehr
takes place on an individual level; in Antigone, it will spread to the society
as a whole, and lead to the creation of something like a modern state.21
Hölderlin’s understanding of the progression between OT and Antigone
follows the chronology of the myth, though not of the works’ composi-
tion. On the other hand, he sees the OC – the last composed, though
the middle of the story – as the most modern, practically as a ‘Hesperian’
work. Hölderlin’s chronology cannot be understood literally, but creates
an exemplary reading of ancient tragedy as a representation of the process
of revolution.
Tragedy, for Hölderlin, begins with an individual act so extreme that
it causes a shift in the relation of man and god, which initiates a larger
18 Hölderlin 2009: 324; FHA 16: 258: ‘eine Welt, . . . unter Pest und Sinnesverwirrung und allgemein
entzündetem Wahrsagergeist, in müßiger Zeit.’
19 Hölderlin 2009: 324; FHA 16: 258: ‘der Gott und der Mensch, damit der Weltlauf keine Lüke hat
und das Gedächtniß der Himmlischen nicht ausgehet, in der allvergessenden Form der Untreue
sich mittheilt.’
20 Schmidt 1995: 72.
21 Ryan 1988 describes the transition in detail. Lacoue-Labarthe 1989 influentially, though to my view
tendentiously, argues that the historical development is the reverse: Antigone represents the ‘more
Greek’, Oedipus the ‘more Hesperian’.
social transition. In Oedipus’ case, the act was his interpretation of the
oracle brought by Creon. Rather than understanding the oracular utter-
ance as relating to civic order (as Creon’s first words would allow), ‘Oedi-
pus however speaks immediately following as a priest’, understanding the
issue as one of religious purification.22 This ‘too infinite’ interpretation of
the oracle leads him, in the next scene ‘actually to speak the nefas’, curs-
ing the murderer of Laius in absolute religious terms.23 By setting himself
on the level of a priest, Oedipus transgresses the limits of his religion
and initiates a confrontation with divinity, which will alter the theology
of his time. The process of Umkehr remains in motion in the Antigone.
Antigone’s excess appears in a more positive light, since it is based on
a changing understanding of the relation between god and man. In the
‘Notes’, Hölderlin characterizes her act as an appropriation of divine law,
parallel to Oedipus’ ‘priestly’ interpretation of the oracle.24 Antigone’s less
hierarchical theology places her in irreconcilable conflict with Creon, who
rigidly divides human from divine power. Antigone perishes for her refusal
to recognize this hierarchy, but ushers in a ‘more humane time’ in which
her theology ‘is valid as a secure belief born from divine fate’.25 Hölderlin’s
understanding of tragedy sees a link between individual action and its con-
sequences for the collective, which makes the role of the chorus particularly
important. Collective consciousness is transformed by the downfall of the
protagonist. Though this may be hard to see in Sophocles, it seems to come
from Hölderlin’s understanding – conditioned both by Orphic and Chris-
tian sources – of Dionysos’ sacrificial death and rebirth.26 The chorus for
Hölderlin is the site of the renewal caused by the death of the individual.
Hölderlin discusses the role of the chorus briefly in the final section of
the Oedipus ‘Notes’. He describes the ‘presentation of the tragic’ as the
depiction of a collision between god and man, resolved in a cathartic ending
in which ‘infinite unification purifies itself through infinite separation’.27
Before the epochal confrontation of man and god, the chorus’ piety is
empty. It has only a formal role, and the content of its speech appears
superficial and insignificant. The consciousness of the chorus appears as a
22 Hölderlin 2009: 319; FHA 16: 252: ‘Oedipus aber spricht gleich darauf priesterlich.’
23 Hölderlin 2009: 319; FHA 16: 252: ‘spricht . . . das nefas eigentlich aus’. This is an idiosyncratic
interpretation, to be sure, but see Menke 2009: 22–7, for an effort to justify it.
24 See FHA 16: 412 for Antigone’s appropriation of divine law (emphasized by Hölderlin’s intervention
in the translation).
25 Hölderlin 2009: 331; FHA 16: 419: ‘in humaner Zeit, [die Vernunftform] als feste, aus göttlichem
Schiksaal geborene Meinung gilt’.
26 Frank 1982: 285–307.
27 Hölderlin 2009: 323; FHA 16: 257: ‘Darstellung des Tragischen . . . gränzenlose Eineswerden durch
gränzenloses Scheiden sich reinigt.’
324 Joshua Billings
passing stage in the dialectical process of tragedy, empty of real importance.
‘Hence in the choruses’, Hölderlin writes, ‘the lamenting and peaceful
and religious elements, the pious lie (“If I am a prophet”, etc.) and the
pity to the point of complete exhaustion towards a dialogue which, in
its angry sensitivity, will tear apart the souls of these very listeners.’28
The parenthetical reference is to the Cithaeron ode, in which the chorus
blithely prophesies what will be revealed of Oedipus’ origin; Hölderlin
emphasizes the emptiness of these words, which are immediately disproven
in the following scene. Even the pity of the chorus appears to Hölderlin as
exaggerated, uncomprehending of their precarious situation. The chorus
of the OT is caught in the middle of a social and theological transition so
overwhelming that they are unable to comprehend it.
Hölderlin understands Oedipus’ downfall as a collision with divinity, a
blasphemous unification followed by a catastrophic division. The collision
initiates a process of Umkehr that will lead to a new relation of man and god.
Antigone depicts the transition into a politically and theologically egalitarian
world in the opposition of Antigone and Creon. The chorus here appears to
represent a balance between Antigone’s revolutionary theology and Creon’s
conservative one. The ‘Notes’ address Antigone’s final exchange with the
chorus, in which she is compared to Danae, who ‘zählete dem Vater der
Zeit / Die Stundenschläge, die goldnen’ [‘counted for the father of time the
hour-strokes, the golden’].29 Hölderlin admits that this is a willful transla-
tion (his edition has Zhn¼v tamieÅe- / ske gonv crusoèèÅtouv: [guarded
the gold-streaming seed of Zeus]). Though a more correct translation,
Hölderlin notes, would be ‘verwaltete dem Zeus das goldströmende Wer-
den,’ [‘guarded for Zeus the gold-streaming becoming’], he has made the
metaphor more concrete and, as often in the Antigone, changed the name
of the god ‘to make it nearer to our mode of understanding’.30 While ‘Zeus’
is an empty and exotic name to moderns, ‘Father of Time’ both removes the
god from its pantheistic context and gives the name a meaning that could
encompass both Greek and Christian divinities. This process of appropri-
ation – analogous to what Hölderlin finds in Antigone’s own theology –
is typical of Hölderlin’s translation practice, which understands Antigone
in quasi-allegorical fashion as a representation of the birth of a republican
polity.
28 Hölderlin 2009: 324; FHA 16: 257: ‘So in den Chören des Oedipus das Jammernde und Friedliche
und Religiose, die fromme Lüge (wenn ich Wahrsager bin, etc.) und das Mitleid bis zur gänzlichen
Erschöpfung gegen einen Dialog, der die Seele eben dieser Hörer zerreißen will, in seiner zornigen
Empfindlichkeit.’
29 FHA 16: 363.
30 Hölderlin 2009: 328; FHA 16: 415: ‘um es unserer Vorstellungsart mehr zu nähern’.
Danae is important for Hölderlin’s reading of Antigone because she dis-
plays, like the heroine, an extreme of isolation. The chorus sees an analogy
in the confinement of the women, and, though respecting their constancy,
also recognizes its self-destructive quality: ‘Because this firmest constancy
in the face of advancing time, this heroic hermit-like existence, really is the
highest form of consciousness, it therefore motivates the following chorus,
which is truly universal, and is the essential point of view from which the
whole must be understood.’31 The chorus’ viewpoint in the chorus is char-
acterized by its tone of warning, describing the blasphemy and punishment
of Lycurgus. This seems to be an admonition that Antigone’s individual-
ism is at the root of her fate.32 The chorus thus provides a ‘contrast to
the all-too-internal quality of this previous scene [in which Antigone com-
pares herself to Niobe], the highest impartiality towards the two opposing
characters’.33 The chorus sees both sides of Antigone: the nobility of her
‘highest consciousness’ and the dangerous closeness to the divine that it
represents. They represent a standpoint unique within the work, able to
comprehend both old and new theologies.
Hölderlin interprets Antigone, like the OT, as representing an opposition
of man and god. The ‘Notes’ describe Antigone’s action paradoxically, as
an act of pious blasphemy in which she sets herself in the position of a
god; this is in contrast to the conventional piety of Creon, who respects
the hierarchy of god and man. The chorus does not judge between the two
positions but takes both on at different times:
Firstly, that which characterizes the antitheos, when one, in the sense of
god, acts as if against god, and recognizes lawlessly [gesezlos] the spirit of
the highest. Then, the pious fear of fate, and with it the honouring of god,
as lawfully given [gesezten]. This is the spirit of the two antitheses that are
impartially placed against one another in the chorus. In the first sense acting
more as Antigone. In the second as Creon.34
31 Hölderlin 2009: 328; FHA 16: 416: ‘Weil aber dieses vesteste Bleiben vor der wandelnden Zeit, diß
heroischen Eremitenleben das höchste Bewußtseyn wirklich ist, motivirt sich dadurch der folgende
Chor, als reinste Allgemeinheit und als eigentlichster Gesichtspunct, wo das Ganze angefaßt werden
muß.’
32 Harrison 1975: 182.
33 Hölderlin 2009: 329; FHA 16: 416: ‘Gegensaz gegen das Allzuinnige dieser vorhergegangenen Stelle,
die höchste Unparteilichkeit der zwei entgegengesezten Karaktere.’
34 Hölderlin 2009: 329; FHA 16: 416: ‘Einmal das, was den Antitheos karakterisirt, wo einer, in Gottes
Sinne, wie gegen Gott sich verhält, und den Geist des Höchsten gesezlos erkennt. Dann die fromme
Furcht vor dem Schiksaal, hiemit das Ehren Gottes, als eines gesezten. Diß ist der Geist der beiden
unpartheiisch gegen einander gestellten Gegensäze im Chore. Im ersten Sinne mehr Antigonä
handelnd. Im zweiten Kreon.’
326 Joshua Billings
‘Gesez’ (in Hölderlin’s Swabian spelling) here has a negative connota-
tion, describing an unthinking adherence to custom.35 Antigone’s action
is ‘gesezlos’, a kind of divine lawlessness, while Creon’s human lawfulness
is ‘gesetzt’. Antigone’s action sets her on the plane of the divine, just as
Oedipus’ excessive oracular interpretation had, and therefore leads to her
downfall. What is new, and more advanced in the Antigone, is the per-
spective of the chorus, which recognizes the rights of both man and god,
blasphemy and piety. The choral odes encompass both sides of Hölderlin’s
theological dialectic, allowing for the new consciousness to emerge.
Whereas the catastrophe of Oedipus seemed primarily negative, a
moment of reciprocal disloyalty, Antigone’s revolution has a constructive
quality. The role of the chorus is to recognize and articulate the emerging
order. Antigone and Creon, Hölderlin writes, are seen by the chorus
equally balanced against one another and only differentiated in terms of
time, so that one mainly loses because it begins, the other wins because it
follows. In this respect, the strange chorus here under discussion fits most
appropriately [aufs geschikteste] to the whole, and its cold impartiality is
warmth, simply because it is so peculiarly proper [schiklich].36
Hölderlin explains the chorus’ relative coldness to the pathos of Antigone’s
situation as expressing the equal balance between the standpoints of human
and divinity. Their cautious ode (still referring to the parting words to
Antigone) recognizes the equal rights of theos and antitheos. It is the begin-
ning of a revolutionary, egalitarian consciousness within a previously hierar-
chical society. Though Antigone will not live to see it, the chorus’ emerging
sentiments will represent her victory, as they take on a republican conscious-
ness. Future renewal – as suggested in Hölderlin’s sketches for Empedocles –
is created as the chorus comprehends the lessons of catastrophe.
Hölderlin describes the chorus of Antigone as playing a far more essen-
tial part in the work than did the Oedipus chorus. Whereas in OT, the
chorus seemed one element within the tragic oppositions, now Hölderlin
describes it as the ground of the conflict itself. It ‘gives the infinite strife
direction or force, being the suffering organs of the divinely struggling body,
which are really needed because even in tragic-infinite form the god cannot
communicate himself to the body with absolute immediacy, but must be
35 Harrison 1975: 187.
36 Hölderlin 2009: 329; FHA 16: 417: ‘gleich gegen einander abgewogen und nur der Zeit nach
verschieden, so daß das eine vorzüglich darum verlieret, weil es anfängt, das andere gewinnet, weil
es nachfolgt. In sofern passet der sonderbare Chor, von dem hier eben die Rede ist, aufs geschikteste
zum Ganzen, und seine kalte Unpartheilichkeit ist Wärme, eben weil sie so eigentümlich schiklich
ist.’
comprehensibly grasped or appropriated in a lively manner’.37 ‘Organ’ here
is probably related to organon, implying that the theological struggle of the
work is objectified in the chorus.38 The chorus, as ‘suffering organs’, is the
element in which the confrontation of human and divinity plays out. In
the chorus, the theological confrontation takes comprehensible form. It is
essential to tragedy as as a means of grasping the divine presence within
chaos. The choral odes, by presenting both elements to the audience, make
the confrontation of man and god comprehensible. Without the chorus,
the conflict would appear meaningless and its historical significance could
not be grasped. The chorus makes the tragic dialectic possible by mediating
between god and man caught in the process of Umkehr.
The turmoil of Antigone for Hölderlin extends far beyond the con-
frontation of the protagonists, to the entire society. ‘National reversal
[vaterländische Umkehr],’ Hölderlin explains, ‘is the reversal of every mode
of understanding and form.’39 The chorus, though they are at first witnesses
to this process, will ultimately be swept up in it:
In a change like this, all mere necessities are partisan for the change; therefore,
in the eventuality of such change, even a neutral one, not only the one who is
moved against the national [vaterländisch] form, can, by a spiritual violence
of the time, be forced to be patriotic, present in an infinite form – in the
religious, political, and moral [form] of his nation [Vaterland] (profanhqi
qeov).40
Hölderlin describes the way the revolutionary spirit represented by

Antigone spreads itself throughout the world of the drama, and forces
the neutrality of the chorus (and Haimon) to become ‘partisan for the
change’.41 In seeing Antigone and Creon as equally justified, the cho-
rus breaks down the hierarchy that had previously characterized its own
37 Hölderlin 2009: 331; FHA 419: ‘die dem unendlichen Streite die Richtung oder die Kraft geben,
als leidende Organe des göttlichringenden Körpers, die nicht wohl fehlen können, weil auch in
tragischunendlicher Gestalt der Gott dem Körper sich nicht absolut unmittelbar mittheilen kann,
sondern verständlich gefaßt, oder lebendig zugeeignet werden muß.’
38 As in Hölderlin’s opposition of ‘aorgic’ and ‘organic’ in the ‘Basis of Empedocles’, and Schelling’s
System of Transcendental Idealism. See David Farrell Krell’s notes in Hölderlin 2008: 257.
39 Hölderlin 2009: 331; FHA 16: 419: ‘vaterländische Umkehr ist die Umkehr aller Vorstellungsarten
und Formen’.
40 Hölderlin 2009: 331; FHA 16: 430: ‘in einer solchen Veränderung ist alles blos Nothwendige parthei-
isch für die Veränderung, deswegen kann, in Möglichkeit solcher Veränderung, auch der Neutrale,
nicht nur, der gegen die vaterländische Form ergriffen ist, von einer Geistesgewalt der Zeit; gezwun-
gen werden, patriotisch, gegenwärtig zu seyn, in unendlicher Form, der religiösen, politisichen, und
moralischen seines Vaterlands. (profanhqi qeov).’
41 Schmidt 1995: 78.
328 Joshua Billings
thought (in OT). The Greek text refers to the final stasimon, the ode to
Dionysos, in which the chorus sings:
Werd’ offenbar! mit den Naxischen
Zugleich, den wachenden
Thyaden, die wahnsinnig
Dir Chor singen, dem jauchzenden Herrn.
[Be revealed! together with the Naxians, the wakeful Thyiads, who frenzied,
sing to you, the revelling lord: profnhqi Nax©aiv / sa±v ma perip»loiv
/ quisin, a¯ se main»menai / pnnucoi / coreÅousi t¼n tam©an acon.]42
The language of revelation in the chorus’ ode seems to anticipate the trans-
formation of the city, calling for Dionysos to free them from ‘gewaltiger
Krankheit’ [powerful sickness; n»sou].43 The figure of Dionysos for
Hölderlin is consistently associated with social and (as a forebear of Christ)
religious revolution, and here suggests the end of hierarchical monarchy,
and perhaps also, of Greek polytheism.44
Hölderlin sees the catastrophe of Antigone as a move towards a republi-
can constitution: ‘The form of reason which here shapes itself tragically is
political, and specifically republican, because between Creon and Antigone,
formal and anti-formal, the balance is held too equally. This shows itself
particularly at the end, when Creon is almost abused by his servants.’45
The impartiality with which the chorus observed the claims of Antigone
and Creon has become the reigning social principle, spelling the end of
the ruler’s absolute power. Creon’s abuse cannot but recall the treatment
of Louis XVI in the French Revolution, and Hölderlin seems wary (the
balance is ‘held too equally’) of such a revolutionary period, even as he
recognizes its inexorable force. The chorus’ hierarchical consciousness has
developed into the democratic reason of ancient Athens.46 The modernity
of their thought lies in the way it sees an equality of god and man, ruler
and subject. Greek tragedy for Hölderlin is the representation of a com-
prehensive societal transformation, which is mediated by the chorus; their
republican form of reason is the standpoint that emerges from conflict and
collision.
42 FHA 16: 385. 43 FHA 16: 385. 44 Böschenstein 1989: 14.

45 Hölderlin 2009: 332; FHA 16: 421: ‘Die Vernunftform, die hier tragisch sich bildet, ist politisch
und zwar republikanisch, weil zwischen Kreon und Antigonä, förmlichem und gegenförmlichem,
das Gleichgewicht zu gleich gehalten ist. Besonders zeigt sich diß am Ende, wo Kreon von seinen
Knechten fast gemißhandelt wird.’
46 This understanding may reflect a reading of the Eumenides, in which a similar blending of tempo-
ralities leads from mythical past to democratic present. See Grethlein in this volume.
Hegel: the crisis of the polis47

Hölderlin’s Sophocles volume was met with incomprehension and
widespread derision. Reviewers unanimously regretted the inaccuracy and
idiosyncracy of the translations, and were utterly baffled by the ‘Notes’.
Indeed, a few – presumably not acquainted with Hölderlin’s precarious state
of mind – questioned his sanity, or suspected that the work was intended as
satire.48 K. W. F. Solger, whose 1808 translation would set a new standard for
accuracy, includes a covert dismissal of Hölderlin in the preface to his vol-
umes. Writing that he will ‘develop the standpoint of the whole historically
and philosophically’, he notes that ‘the one translator of Sophocles who has
attempted something of the kind has fallen into bizarre intemperances’.49
Solger is unusual in recognizing what Hölderlin is attempting do in the
‘Notes’ – develop a philosophical theory of tragedy on the basis of Sopho-
cles’ works – though he finds it no more successful than anyone else.
One contemporary reader, though, seems to have taken Hölderlin’s
‘Notes’ seriously: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hölderlin’s classmate
in Tübingen. Though they may not have been particularly close in the
Stift, their relationship in Frankfurt in the late 1790s was intellectually
formative for both, and it is now generally believed that Hölderlin gave
some of the impulses for Hegel’s early philosophical thought.50 Together,
the two developed a strong interest in tragedy, which is manifested in frag-
ments of Hegel’s unpublished essays of the time (published as ‘The Spirit
of Christianity’) and Hölderlin’s Empedocles project.51 An early biographer
of Hegel reports that from entering the Stift, ‘he continued his reading
of Sophocles for some years without interruption. He translated them
into German and attempted later, probably as a result of his acquaintance
with Hölderlin, to translate not only the dialogue, but also the choruses
metrically, in which he did not particularly succeed.’52 If this is the case,
the translations (among which an OC is mentioned) have not survived. It
may even be that Hölderlin provided the impetus to a close study of the
Antigone, which would prove so important to Hegel. Interest in the work
is expressed later in Hegel’s surviving works than in Hölderlin’s: before the
1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s writings, published and unpublished,
mention Antigone in a single parenthesis, while the dominant model of
47 All Hegel references are to Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970 (cited as WZB).
48 Sources are collected in Jamme and Völkel 2003: 79–99.
49 Solger 1808: CXXIV (reprinted in Jamme and Völkel 2003: 94). 50 See Henrich 2010.
51 Jamme 1983: 278–316. 52 Rosenkranz 1844: 11.
330 Joshua Billings
tragedy – which appears at crucial junctures in fragments of ‘The Spirit
of Christianity’ and the 1802–3 essay on Natural Law – comes from the
Eumenides.53 In these early works, Hegel rarely considers the formal ele-
ments of tragedy, but is more interested in the genre as a representation of
crime and punishment (in the ‘Spirit’ passages) or of social change (in the
Natural Law essay). Thus, though he mentions the chorus of Eumenides as
a revenge-seeking collective, he does not consider them qua tragic chorus,
but rather as an agent within a story. It is only in the Phenomenology –
and it may be, under the influence of Hölderlin – that he addresses
the role of the chorus more generally. The Phenomenology’s discussion
of tragedy has received far less attention in English than that of the posthu-
mously compiled (and methodologically questionable) Aesthetics, yet it is
the richer, if more complex, discussion, and thus will form the basis for what
follows.54
Whether consciously or not, Hegel seems to have assimilated some of
the lessons of the ‘Notes’ into his own account of tragedy in the Phe-
nomenology – though it is also possible that the commonalities go back
further, to conversations or texts to which we have no access. It is certain
that Hegel read the translations at some point, because he is recorded as
commenting disparagingly on them in later years, seeing them as reflect-
ing their author’s incipient madness.55 The greatest commonality – and
this seems to be unique in thought of the time – is that both Hölderlin
and Hegel see tragedy as the representation of societal transition. Indi-
vidual figures and actions are subordinated to a social dimension that is
at once historical and philosophical. Though figures like the Schlegels
described historical changes surrounding and ultimately influencing the
genre, Hegel and Hölderlin find something quite different: a historical
dynamic that characterizes tragedy’s generic essence, making it the form of
social as well as individual Umkehr.56 The revolutionary aspect of tragedy
takes on different forms. For Hölderlin, Greek tragedy is a depiction of the
birth of republican consciousness, while Hegel sees tragedy as mirroring
and even bringing about the end of ancient polytheism. Hölderlin’s and
Hegel’s reading of tragedy as a document of historical change is basically
an imaginative construct (though the Eumenides does thematize such a
societal transition), but it has to be understood within the context of a
53 The one reference to Antigone comes in WZB 1, 206, a fragment from Hegel’s time in Bern. For
Eumenides, see WZB 1, 342; 2, 495 – in both of which the play has a much more important role.
54 De Beistegui 2000 is now the best introduction in English to Hegel’s thought on tragedy, emphasizing
the early works.
55 Jamme and Völkel 2003: 96. 56 Düsing 1988 is a useful comparison, focusing on this aspect.
philosophical account of tragic content, which is less interested in the
specifics of tragedies than in the general quality of ‘the tragic’.57
Tragedy is important in two sections of the Phenomenology, both of which
describe a process of societal transition within ancient Greece. The chapter
‘Spirit’ (Geist) engages with tragedy implicitly, reading the Antigone as a
document of ancient Greek ethical life, divided between civic and familial
moralities, human and divine laws, man and woman. Hegel does not
address tragedy in artistic terms, but as the representation of a stage of
ethical life. His understanding of the necessity and balance of the ethical
conflicts in tragedy is so familiar that it will not be discussed in depth here,
though it is important to note that Hölderlin had, through the figure of
the chorus, pointed to a similar equilibrium in Antigone.58 One element of
Hegel’s reading that is usually not emphasized, but that further connects
it to Hölderlin, is that the Phenomenology sees the conflict of Antigone as
belonging to the specific ethical constitution of the ancient polis, which
tragedy depicts in crisis. For Hegel, tragedy makes visible the incoherence
of ancient Greek morality, which does not reflect on the duties assigned to it
by divine forces. Both Antigone’s and Creon’s consciousnesses are deficient
in that they understand only one side of ethical life. Even Hegel’s obvious
admiration for the character of Antigone needs to be understood in the
context of her one-sidedness, the inadequacy of which becomes visible in
the catastrophic ending. Antigone does not represent an ethical ideal, but
rather a passing stage in the progress (and for Hegel it is progress) of moral
consciousness. The dialectic of tragedy ultimately attains a standpoint from
which both her and Creon’s ethical commitments appear equally partial,
and allows for a more comprehensive view of morality to emerge.
In the chapter ‘Religion’, Hegel first addresses tragedy explicitly. The dis-
cussion has received relatively little attention in comparison to the ‘Spirit’
chapter, though it is only here that Hegel offers a theory of tragic form
(rather than, as in the earlier chapter, seeing its content as exemplary of
Athenian culture).59 The larger context is again one of transition, from
the ‘art-religion’ of the Greeks to the ‘revealed religion’ of Christianity.
‘Art-religion’ for Hegel denotes a period in which the ethical and religious
understanding of a community finds its adequate expression in art’s sen-
sory representation (in which Hegel includes religious festivals and cult
worship). Hegel describes a process of increasing self-consciousness in the
forms of art, passing through plastic works to collective devotion, and
57 Fundamental on the philosophy of tragedy is Szondi 2002 (originally 1961). More recently, see
Lambropoulos 2006. A trenchant critique is Goldhill 2008.
58 Steiner 1984: 82. 59 A notable exception is Donougho 2006.
332 Joshua Billings
finally to ‘the spiritual artwork’ of language. The linguistic arts begin with
epic, which depicts humanity’s powerlessness against an alien, divine neces-
sity. This is ultimately unsatisfying, since it does not recognize the rights
of human ethical consciousness to determine its action, and so leads to the
‘higher speech’ of tragedy, which depicts ‘self-conscious human beings who
know their rights and purposes, the power and the will of their specific
nature and know how to assert them’.60 The aims of tragic protagonists,
however, are not determined by reflection, but rather by a duty that is
inherent in their mythical and religious existence. Tragedy depicts charac-
ters whose ethical consciousness is determined by a single divine impera-
tive, and is for Hegel the highest manifestation of the ‘art-religion’ of the
Greeks.
Tragedy’s foundation in the religious-ethical substance of the collective,
however, is also the point at which it reveals itself as inadequate, since
this substance does not come from conscious reflection, but from custom.
Even more explicitly than Hölderlin, Hegel sees tragedy as a depiction
and even a cause of the progress from Greek polytheism to Christian
monotheism. The role of the chorus for Hegel is to represent the primitive
polytheistic standpoint in which tragedy begins; it is ‘the general ground,
on which the movement of these figures [the protagonists] formed by
the concept occurs . . . It is the common people as such, whose wisdom
finds utterance in the chorus of old men.’61 Hegel understands this form of
wisdom as deficient in that it does not reflect on its ethical foundations,
but passively accepts what has been passed down from generations past.
The chorus understands each god of the pantheon as a separate ethical
commitment, and so ‘is unable to hold together and to subdue the riches
and varied abundance of the divine life, but lets it [divine life] all go its
own separate ways, and in its reverential hymns praises each individual
moment as an independent god, now this one, now another’.62 The chorus
fails to comprehend that the various divinities of the pantheon are all
manifestations of a single ethical substance. Against the background of the
chorus’ pluralistic theology, the protagonists are defined by their adherence
60 Hegel 1977: 444 (§733); WZB 3: 534: ‘selbstbewußte Menschen, die ihr Recht und ihren Zweck, die
Macht und den Willen ihrer Bestimmtheit wissen und zu sagen wissen.’
61 Hegel 1977: 444 (§734); WZB 3: 535: ‘Der allgemeine Boden, worauf die Bewegung dieser aus dem
Begriffe erzeugten Gestalten vorgeht . . . Es ist das gemeine Volk überhaupt, dessen Weisheit in dem
Chore des Alters zur Sprache kommt.’
62 Hegel 1977: 444 (§734); WZB 3: 535: ‘Der Macht des Negativen entbehrend, vermag es den Reichtum
und die bunte Fülle göttlichen Lebens nicht zusammenzuhalten und zu bändigen, sondern läßt es
auseinanderlaufen und preist jedes einzelne Moment als einen selbständigen Gott, bald diesen, bald
wieder einen anderen, in seinen verehrenden Hymnen.’
to a single ethical duty at the expense of all others. The protagonists’s ethical
individuality represents a more developed form of religious consciousness
than the chorus’ promiscuous praise, but is no more able to comprehend
the truth of ethical life as an indivisible unity.
In adhering to a single ethical commitment, the tragic protagonist
fails to take account of an equally valid commitment, and comes into
inevitable conflict with the injured principle. This ultimately leads the
audience, dialectically, to an understanding of the essential unity of what
had appeared disparate. The polytheistic chorus, though, utterly fails to
comprehend the ethical basis of tragic conflict, and so is left behind by the
emerging understanding of the unity of divinity. In watching the recipro-
cal destruction of the protagonists, it remains passive and self-interested,
retreating into the notion of fate to explain what it should understand
as a demonstration of the incoherence of its theology: ‘it is not itself the
negative power, which actively interferes; on the contrary, it clings to the
self-less thoughts of such power, clings to the consciousness of an alien
fate, and produces the empty desire for pacification and the weak speech of
appeasement’.63 This recalls the ‘pious fear of fate’ in Hölderlin’s descrip-
tion of the OT chorus, but seems miles away from his understanding of
its role in Antigone. For Hegel, the chorus’ refusal to take sides does not
demonstrate its superiority to the conflict, but reflects the fact that the
action now takes place on a higher intellectual level than its primitive
thought can grasp. Hegel must be thinking of the way the choral odes
often do not explicitly address the central conflict, but speak of divine
forces generally (that this is typical of tragedy would only reinforce Hegel’s
point that the genre shows the inadequacy of Greek religion). Hegel’s suspi-
cion towards the ethical understanding of the chorus in ancient Greece is a
part of a comprehensive distrust of all forms of unreflective self-definition.
The conflict of tragedy reveals the incoherent theology of the chorus.
Their religious thought is at once chaotically atomistic and hopelessly gen-
eral; it sees existence as subject to a multiplicity of forces, but has no real
understanding of what these forces are. The irreconcilability of the conflict
of ethical powers reveals the internal contradictions of polytheistic reli-
gion, which cannot differentiate between greater and lesser commitments.
The chorus, however, does not attain this objective standpoint, experienc-
ing only the subjective emotions of pity and fear. Unable to see how its
pluralistic theology itself creates the conflict of ethical powers, it cannot
63 Hegel 1977: 444 (§734); WZB 3: 535: ‘ist es nicht selbst die negative Macht, die handelnd eingreift,
sondern hält sich im selbstlosen Gedanken derselben, im Bewußtsein des fremden Schicksals, und
bringt den leeren Wunsch der Beruhigung und die schwache Rede der Besänftigung herbei.’
334 Joshua Billings
articulate an alternative to the one-sidedness of the protagonists.64 The
chorus ends the work with ‘the empty repose of submission to necessity,
whose work is understood neither as the necessary action of the character,
nor as the deed of the absolute being within itself’.65 Greek religion in gen-
eral, according to Hegel, is unable to see how the adherence to a one-sided
ethical power could bring about conflict, nor how that conflict demon-
strates the unity of ethical substance. The chorus is not an exception among
Greek religious consciousness, but the rule, and therefore Hegel (very much
like A. W. Schlegel) describes them as the ‘mass of spectators’ reflection
or even more, their own representation expressing itself ’.66 In the chorus’
impotence within conflict, the spectators should recognize a problem of
their own theology, which is divided between adherence to earthly and
chthonic powers. The chorus’ role in tragedy makes visible the immanent
contradiction in ancient ethical life, and thereby allows for the spectators
to achieve a higher viewpoint, recognizing both civic and family duties as
equally essential.
The dialectic of tragedy demonstrates the higher unity of ethical life
in the downfall of the protagonists. ‘The movement of the deed’, Hegel
writes, ‘demonstrates their unity in the reciprocal downfall of both powers
and the self-conscious characters.’67 This demonstration, we know, is lost
on the chorus, but it seems to bring about a change in the consciousness
of the audience. Because tragedy helps its viewers to move beyond their
primitive theology, its depiction of destruction is for Hegel fundamentally
progressive. In making clear the incoherence of the ancient pantheon, ‘this
fate completes the depopulation of heaven, the unthinking mingling of
individuality and essence,’ which had characterized Greek thought.68 The
chorus’ consciousness had been typified by their inability to recognize the
unified essence behind the individual gods; the tragic heroes, on the con-
trary, had mistaken a one-sided, but single individuality for the whole
of ethical substance. Tragedy wipes away both the chorus’ undifferenti-
ated piety and the protagonists’ one-sided obligations, and shows the need
for an individual, reflective relation to ethical life. This insight progresses
64 Menke 1996: 88.
65 Hegel 1977: 445 (§734); WZB 3: 536: ‘die leere Ruhe der Ergebung in die Notwendigkeit, deren Werk
nicht als die notwendige Handlung des Charakters und nicht als das Tun des absoluten Wesens in
sich selbst erfaßt wird.’
66 Hegel 1977: 445 (§735); WZB 3: 536: ‘Gegenbild oder vielmehr ihre eigene, sich aussprechende
Vorstellung.’
67 Hegel 1977: 448 (§740); WZB 3: 539: ‘Die Bewegung des Tuns erweist ihre Einheit in dem gegen-
seitigen Untergange beider Mächte und der selbstbewußten Charaktere.’
68 Hegel 1977: 449 (§741); WZB 3: 540: ‘Dieses Schicksal vollendet die Entvölkerung des Himmels,
der gedankenlosen Vermischung der Individualität und des Wesens.’
beyond the ethical consciousness of the mythical heroes, and demands an
art form that reflects the complexity of contemporary life: ‘The hero who
appears before the spectators splits up into his mask and the actor, into
the person and the real self.’69 The audience’s ethical understanding has
now progressed beyond the immediate obligations of myth and demands a
new form of representation, which would reflect on the difference between
heroic morality and real ethical commitments. This is comedy, a form of
art created by an ironic distance between the insignificant desires portrayed
on stage and the audience’s more advanced consciousness. Comedy reduces
the heroes of tragedy to egoistic individuals, undermining certainty in all
forms. The comic world is an improvement on tragedy because it entails
the possibility of criticism and reflection.
In the transition from tragedy to comedy as the dominant art form of
ancient Athens, the specificity of choral consciousness is negated. As the
heroes become everyday individuals, the difference between protagonist
and chorus is erased: ‘The self-consciousness of the heroes must step forth
from behind its mask and present itself as it knows itself as the fate of
the gods of the chorus and of the absolute powers themselves, and as it
is no longer divided from the chorus, from the universal consciousness.’70
This consciousness, though, has moved beyond the theology of the tragic
chorus. Comedy, for Hegel, is only chorus – but a chorus of individuals
who are no longer bound by the forms of ancient polytheism. Since it is no
longer confined to the forms of religious life, the dramatic chorus has lost
its basis in a real collectivity, and must ultimately split up into individuals.
‘The single self ’, Hegel writes, ‘is the negative power through which and
in which the gods and their moments, the surrounding nature and the
thoughts of their definitions, disappear.’71 For Hegel’s teleological thought,
choral existence is necessarily self-negating: in spirit’s constant progress in
self-consciousness, collective forms of thought must lose their validity, and
give way to individuality. Like Hölderlin, Hegel sees the end of tragedy as a
form of egalitarianism; he does not, though, understand this as a triumph
of the chorus, but as their destruction. Comedy’s world is individualistic
69 Hegel 1977: 450 (§742); WZB 3: 541: ‘Der Held, der vor dem Zuschauer auftritt, zerfällt in seine
Maske und in den Schauspieler, in die Person und das wirkliche Selbst.’
70 Hegel 1977: 450 (§743); WZB 3: 541: ‘Das Selbstbewußtsein der Helden muß aus seiner Maske
hervortreten und sich darstellen, wie es sich als das Schicksal sowohl der Götter des Chors als
der absoluten Mächte selbst weiß und von dem Chore, dem allgemeinen Bewußtsein, nicht mehr
getrennt ist.’
71 Hegel 1977: 452 (§747); WZB 3: 544: ‘Das einzelne Selbst ist die negative Kraft, durch und in welcher
die Götter sowie deren Momente, die daseiende Natur und die Gedanken ihrer Bestimmungen,
verschwinden.’
336 Joshua Billings
and even bourgeois, antithetical to the collective consciousness of the tragic
chorus.72
The collective represents both the birth and the death of tragedy, as
the mythical tragic chorus gives way to comedy’s everyday characters. To
Hegel, comedy represents a progress in religious consciousness over tragedy,
as the insight into the inadequacy of the pantheon leads to a playful, ironic
relationship to the divinities of polytheism. The realization that divinity
has to be understood reflectively is for Hegel the beginning of philosophical
enquiry, in which received understanding of divinity has no place:
Rational thought frees divine essence from its contingent form and, opposed
to the concept-less wisdom of the chorus, which produces all sorts of ethical
maxims and gives currency to a host of laws and specific concepts of duty
and right, lifts it into the simple ideas of the beautiful and the good.73
The chaotic generality of choral piety is replaced by reflection on the
Platonic ideas. The emergence of a form of reason from tragic catastrophe is
familiar from Hölderlin, but this is for Hegel bourgeois and individualistic,
rather than republican and collective. Humans now understand divinity
as lying within the self, something that cannot be given collectively, but
must be discovered personally. The pantheistic chorus has broken into
monotheistic individuals. Tragedy’s transitional character for Hegel renders
the chorus – understood as the theological foundation of the genre –
obsolete. The revolution that Hölderlin saw as the chorus’ entrance into
political and religious life, Hegel sees as their exit from it.
Hegel’s reading of the tragic chorus does not explicitly address its political
constitution. However, seen within the context of theories of the tragic
chorus of its time, it exhibits a definite sense of disdain for the possibilities
of the collective. This is in stark contrast to Hölderlin’s attribution of ‘the
most actual point of view’ to the chorus, to Schelling’s description of it as
‘the most masterful and thoroughly inspired discovery of the most sublime
art’, and to Schiller’s and Schlegel’s theories quoted above.74 Though Hegel
has an idealized image of ancient Greek art, he has no desire to return to
it, seeing the religion on which it is based as primitive and incoherent.
Accordingly, as his later lectures on aesthetics make abundantly clear, Hegel
72 A similar progression from republicanism to bourgeois existence is described in the Natural Law
essay and ‘Spirit’ chapter of the Phenomenology.
73 Hegel 1977: 451 (§746); WZB 3: 543: ‘Das vernünftige Denken enthebt das göttliche Wesen seiner
zufälligen Gestalt, und entgegensetzt der begrifflosen Weisheit des Chors, die mancherlei Sitten-
sprüche vorbringt und eine Menge von Gesetzen und bestimmten Pflicht- und Rechtsbegriffen
gelten läßt, hebt es sie in die einfachen Ideen des Schönen und Guten empor.’
74 Schelling 1989: 259.
has no interest in the staging of Greek tragedy, nor in reviving the tragic
chorus in modern works. The tragic chorus raises no political or aesthetic
hopes in a world where the collective is no longer the site of spiritual
meaning. Hegel’s rejection of the chorus on stage sets him apart from
Hölderlin (who hoped to see his translations staged), Schiller (who wrote
a choral tragedy), and Goethe (who finally put the Antigone on stage,
chorus and all, in 1809).75 These early attempts to realize the ‘new world’
of the chorus, though, had little impact on wider stage practice. It was not
until the Potsdam Antigone in 1841 that the Greek tragic chorus arrived on
German – and then European – stages with lasting success.76 Long before
it reached the theatre, though, the choral revolution had taken place in
theory.
A choral revolution?
German thinkers formed a kind of chorus to the events of the Revolu-
tion in France. The Schlegel brothers, Schelling, Schiller, Hölderlin, and
Hegel all watched, from a point of relative safety, as some of their greatest
hopes and fears played out across the border. The unprecedented inter-
est in the chorus around 1800, consciously or not, reflects a connection
between the events of ancient tragedy and what Edmund Burke called ‘the
monstrous tragicomic scene’ of the Revolution. Hölderlin’s enthusiasm for
the Antigone chorus is an expression of republican ideals, seeing the work
as a representation of political revolution. Tragedy realized the hopes for
‘vaterländische Umkehr’ that the French Revolution had disappointed. The
chorus of tragedy personifies for him the possibility of egalitarianism, and
so appears as the result and the aim of the tragic meeting of god and man.
The consciousness of the chorus lies in the future for Hölderlin, as a goal
that the modern Vaterland seeks to realize. Hegel, on the other hand, had
come to view ancient republicanism as a passing stage in the development
of bourgeois society. For him, the chorus was an expression of primitive
theology, a worldview that tragedy shows in crisis. The societal transition
represented in tragedy appears as the end of the chorus’ collective theology,
since with it the understanding of the divine retreats into revealed reli-
gion. For a modern society, the chorus is an obsolete entity, the reminder
of a long-discredited and incoherent religion and form of state. For both
75 See Flashar 2009: 47–57 on the Weimar productions.

76 Geary 2006: 189. See also Macintosh in this volume.
338 Joshua Billings
Hölderlin and Hegel, though, the importance of the ancient chorus is con-
ditioned by their own understanding of and identification with the role of
the collective in modernity.
The interest in the chorus around 1800 draws attention to a historical
dichotomy: the chorus is at once the most distinctive element of Greek
tragedy, and the one most alien to modern concepts of drama.77 When
we consider the role of the chorus, we confront the limits of our historical
understanding – perhaps more directly than in thinking about any other
aspect of Greek literature. The chorus represents a kind of vacuum for
thought, a body that criticism has often had little means of conceptualizing
beyond the Aristotelian bromides. The difficulty of grasping the chorus
may make it particularly receptive to contemporary preoccupations and
dependent on attitudes to our own political context. Thought on the Greek
chorus has a tendency to collapse the social and the artistic, the ancient and
the modern. For Hölderlin and Hegel, theories of Greek choral experience
articulate efforts to grapple with an urgent contemporary problem: the
collective tragedy they observed across the Rhine. Attention to their choral
dialectics shows how notions of the chorus are inextricable from attitudes
towards political life. Their turn to the chorus was an effort to conceptualize
the relation between the political and the aesthetic in their time. If today
we are in the process of (re)discovering the distinctive role of the ancient
chorus, we might well ask what impulses lie behind our choral turn.
77 See Meineck in this volume on the challenge of staging the chorus.

chapter 1 5
Enter and exit the chorus

Dance in Britain 1880–1914
Fiona Macintosh
During the autumn of 1912, the English art and theatre critic Huntly Carter
made a tour to explore the ‘cultural’ highlights of Europe. Commenting
on his visit to Hellerau, the new garden city on the outskirts of Dresden,
where he saw the work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze’s Rhythmic Gymnastic
Institute, he noted:
In the first place, this dance movement is another sign that Europe is under a
rhythmic spell, that people are beginning to realise the immense importance
of rhythm in life, and that we are in/at a renascence of dancing. Something
unusual has happened; and dancing, like the Sun-God Amaterasu, has
emerged from the cave of neglect, and promises to give the light of her smile
to the world once more.1
Carter was writing some two years after the first appearance of the Ballets
Russes in London in 1911 and at a time when some of the best theatre
in Britain was striving to acquire a ‘rhythmic conception of play, player,
decoration and music’.2 But the ideal that Carter observed on the continent
was, in his view, still only at a very rudimentary stage in London: ‘Though
the theatre and drama have not yet learnt to dance, at least they are
throwing off the bonds of the conventional and attaining freedom in
perhaps a heavy and clumsy fashion.’3 ‘Learning to dance’ is what all of
Europe was doing in the first part of the twentieth century; and London
was providing public spaces, through the establishment of the thés dansants
and dinner dances at smart West End hotels, where anyone with means and
the wherewithal could dance in public for the first time.4 In the theatre,
the meaning of the play was no longer deemed to reside exclusively in
the word but in a ‘rhythm’ that encompassed word, body, set and score.
With this new fascination with the moving body in performance spaces
came a widespread interest in the singing, dancing chorus of antiquity, and
especially the singing, dancing chorus of Greek tragedy.
1 Carter 1913: 120–1. 2 Carter 1913: vi. 3 Carter 1913: vi. 4 Walkowitz 2003.
339
340 Fiona Macintosh
The ancient chorus had only rarely been deemed worthy of emulation
in the modern world before 1912: after the Italian Renaissance’s theoretical
interest in the chorus and its practical realisation as a group of singers
in the celebrated production of Edipo Re which inaugurated the Teatro
Olimpico in Vicenza in 1585, the ancient chorus was transmogrified in the
early modern period either into the neo-classical figure of the confident or
into the operatic (singing) chorus.5 Prior to the early twentieth century, the
only time that the multiple (singing and dancing) function of the ancient
chorus provoked much theoretical discussion and practical experimenta-
tion was during the second part of the eighteenth century. At this time,
innovations in dance, spearheaded and widely disseminated by the Swiss
choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre, led to hugely fruitful collaborations
between dancers and composers, notably between Noverre and Gluck,
and to the first incarnations of a singing/dancing chorus on the modern
stage.6 The immensely potent late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
German theoretical fascination with the chorus (see Billings, this volume)
was, in many ways, heralded and fuelled by these practical experiments.
In the late nineteenth century, there is an analogous confluence of theory
and practice but this time it is theory that fuels practical experimentation.
What Carter dubs the ‘rhythmic spell’ that is capturing Europe in 1912
would arguably not have happened without the theoretical rediscoveries
of the chorus made by Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy (1872) and more
generally by comparative anthropological interest in dance towards the end
of the century. This chapter charts this growing fascination with the figure
of the dancer, especially with dancing collectivities, from the late nineteenth
century onwards, and the increased desire to see the dances of antiquity
return to the modern world. The British understanding of the Greek
chorus was intimately connected to contemporary perceptions of dancing
in general and the revival of what was deemed ‘Greek’ dancing in particular.
This fascination with the chorus, moreover, is inextricably linked to the
developments within the wider political environment.
In the first part of the twentieth century, dancing maenads were ubiq-
uitous in Britain and dancing choruses proved a central challenge for early
twentieth-century directors, notably Granville Barker. As Carter explains,
the ‘rhythmic spell’ remained more an aspiration than a reality in Britain;
but what is striking is that this aspiration was markedly short-lived. The
new corporeality in the British theatre became increasingly associated with
5 Macintosh 2009: 69–81. 6 Hall 2008; Lada-Richards 2010; Goldhill 2010.

Enter and exit the chorus: dance in Britain 1880–1914 341
moral decadence and above all dangerous ‘cosmopolitanism’, once anti-
German feeling became endemic as the hostilities within Europe became
an increasing likelihood. Serious theatre eschewed corporeal performances
and ancient choruses became ossified once more, inseparable from the
Greek columns around which its members were regularly draped. In the
aftermath of the First World War in Britain, in particular, the chorus of
Greek tragedy no longer proved central to discussion of tragedy; and in
productions of Greek drama, the chorus similarly retreated to the wings
once new kinds of morally compromised ‘choruses’ began to assemble
within the political arena under the direction of the emergent fascist leaders
of Europe.
Enter the chorus

In January 1845 the Mendelssohn Antigone was staged in London, after
numerous European stagings following its premiere in Potsdam in 1840.
Much praised for its set and the quality of the performances of its star per-
formers, the London production’s chorus, by contrast, met with mirth and
derision (the famous Punch cartoon of bespectacled and plaid-betrousered
old men wrapped in white togas captures the implausibility and the
anachronicity that this particular choral group were seen to embody).7
Despite continued reservations about the Mendelssohn chorus, the pro-
duction went on to enjoy huge successes in Dublin, Edinburgh and again
in London, when the actress Helen Faucit took over the role of Antigone.
One of Faucit’s performances at a revival of the play clearly lies behind
George Eliot’s famous essay, ‘The Antigone and Its Moral’, which appeared
in The Leader in 1856. Eliot’s partner, the well-known theatre critic George
Henry Lewes, was equally and almost immediately struck by the power of
the production: unlike Eliot, however, it was not only the protagonist who
caught his imagination but the static chorus as well. Lewes’s interest in the
Mendelssohn Antigone chorus prompted a wider theoretical investigation,
founded upon his conviction that ‘there was no dancing whatever in the
Greek tragic chorus’.8
Writing for the journal, The Classical Museum, Lewes explains that ‘The
fact [that the chorus danced] has not been investigated, because it has not
been questioned. I believe that I am the first who ever questioned it, conse-
quently who ever investigated it.’9 The reason for his conclusion is that ‘the
7 Hall and Macintosh 2005: 323 fig. 12.2, and generally 316–50.
8 Eliot 1856; Lewes 1845: 344. 9 Lewes 1845: 344.
342 Fiona Macintosh
notion of the dancing is so contrary to all notions of tragedy’.10 According
to Lewes, the shift from the dithyrambic chorus to drama entailed the loss of
dance: ‘Aeschylus banned dancing, as he banished some other things, to the
satiric [sic] play’.11 Drawing on the contemporary ‘electrif[ying]’ gestural
performance style of the leading actor of his generation, Charles Macready,
and especially the ‘effective and artistic attitude into which he had drilled
his choruses’, Lewes suggests that ‘So might Aeschylus have drilled his
choruses’; and that when Athenaeus says Aeschylus introduces new dances,
he is meaning ‘gesticulation’ rather than dance pure and simple.12 On the
very few occasions when dance is mentioned in tragedy, argues Lewes, it
is because the chorus exceptionally dance (as is the case with the Bacchic
chorus in Euripides’ Bacchae); or, as in the Ode to Dionysos in Antigone
1227, it is because the chorus ‘speak about’ rather than actually dance.13
Even if Lewes’s position is an extreme one, it is not unrelated to the
general prejudice directed towards the dancer in the Victorian period. As
Thomas Dyer explained, when he argued in favour of dance in tragedy,
in his response to Lewes in the following issue of the journal: ‘We should
form a wrong estimate, then, of the notion which the Greeks attached to
dancing, if we viewed it through the light of our own prejudices.’14 Writing
against a background when the dancer and the prostitute occupied an
equivalent social status,15 Lewes was unable to understand a culture where
dance was central and prized because it was at the heart of religious ritual
and of education generally, especially in relation to training for military
service.
There were two important developments, which contributed to the
change in status of the dancer in the last part of the nineteenth century
and defended her/him especially against the dominant Christian resistance
to dance.16 First, and somewhat paradoxically, it was Nietzsche’s The Birth
of Tragedy (1872) and its identification of the singing, dancing chorus as
the wellspring from which tragic drama originally developed that led to
renewed interest in dance. For the first time in the long history of the
reception of Greek tragedy, the chorus was accorded a primary and central
role within the action. Whilst the flaws in Nietzsche’s scholarship were
damned as soon as the treatise was published and even if mainstream
classical scholarship in Britain remained broadly conservative in the last
10 Lewes 1845: 344–5. Cf. 366: ‘The Greek drama has been a favourable subject with me for some years,
and the present investigation has occupied some months of very careful research.’
11 Lewes 1845: 347. 12 Lewes 1845: 349. 13 Lewes 1845: 366. 14 Dyer 1846: 229.
15 On prejudice towards the Victorian and Edwardian dancer, see Carter 2005: 107–28.
16 Hall 2010 and Webb 2010.
two decades of the nineteenth century and shunned, as was the case in
Germany, Nietzschean-inspired insights into the ancient world, the leader
of British Aestheticism, the philosopher and Oxford don, Walter Pater
published two important essays in 1876 which shared Nietzsche’s interest
in a darker side of ancient Greece. In ‘Demeter and Persephone’ and
‘Dionysus’ (both originally published in 1876, and then together in Greek
Studies in 1895), Pater explored the Greek underworld and the irrational
and ecstatic in Greek religion.
By the turn of the century, in Cambridge in particular and under the
influence of the new discipline of comparative anthropology, the second
most important development to lay the foundations for the rehabilitation
of the figure of the dancer in Britain took place. The so-called Cambridge
Ritualists – amongst whom were the classical scholars and popularisers
of their subject, Gilbert Murray and Jane Ellen Harrison – continued
to challenge the Winckelmann-esque notion of the idealised Greeks and
again focused on the underworld and the ritual practices (especially those
involving women and those surrounding death) that informed and under-
pinned the very art works that Winckelmann and the nineteenth century
had so greatly prized as ‘rational’ and ‘serene’. If Nietzsche, Pater and the
Cambridge Ritualists drew attention to the gods of the underworld and
insisted on their equal importance (if not their primacy) in relation to the
Olympians, they were especially attracted to what became the antithetical
deity to Olympian Apollo, the god of transformation, fertility, the danger-
ous, androgynous and exotic patron of drama, Dionysos. The Cambridge
Ritualists designated dance as a form of primitive prayer and maintained
that Greek tragedy had grown out of the ritual dances in honour of the
god Dionysos. If the essence of tragedy could be located in the hitherto
neglected ancient chorus, the paradigmatic chorus became those intoxi-
cated maenadic dancers who danced in honour of Greek tragedy’s patron
god, Dionysos.
Jane Harrison had been amongst the first of the women undergraduates
at Cambridge and she earned herself a popular profile by giving public
lectures on Greek art from the outset of her career.17 According to Harrison,
it was only by studying ritual that Greek religion could be understood
(Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903)); and she maintained
that the worship of Dionysos comes from group, rather than individual,
desires and emotions (Themis (1912)). Dionysos, in Harrison’s reading, is
now Nietzsche’s ‘boundary’ breaker but he is also tied to a social collective.
17 Beard 2000.
344 Fiona Macintosh
An essay by Gilbert Murray was appended to Themis, in which he argued
that tragedy enacted the ritual pattern of the dying ‘Year-God’ (originally
Dionysos himself ), according to which the tragic protagonist’s death is
assuaged and offset by the continuing presence of the tragic chorus which
ushers in the new ‘Year-God’. Harrison, in her focus on Dionysos and his
followers, not surprisingly found herself compared in a report of one of her
lectures to a maenad ‘throwing back her head [as] she burst into a chorus
of Euripides in Greek’.18
Pater’s scholarship met with mixed response from the academy, especially
when the explicit links made between Aestheticism and homoeroticism
appeared to be founded in fact in the wake of Wilde’s trial in 1895. Despite
there being no whiff of scandal surrounding the Cambridge Ritualists,
their ideas nonetheless proved controversial within the classical academy
because of their links to James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) and their
adoption of methods from the new discipline of comparative anthropol-
ogy. However controversial within the academy, these new perspectives on
Greece were readily adopted and adapted within the wider cultural sphere
in the first decade of the new century, when things ‘Greek’ became highly
fashionable.19
Both Harrison and Murray were key mediating figures both in their
desire to communicate their ideas widely and in their involvement with
the theatre. Whilst Harrison had appeared in amateur theatricals in Oxford
and London and had even provided a reading of the Idylls of Theocritus to
accompany one of Isadora Duncan’s dances in a London art gallery in 1900,
Murray worked alongside the pioneers of theatrical modernism, Bernard
Shaw and Granville Barker, at London’s Royal Court Theatre from 1904
onwards. Murray’s translations of Euripides’ tragedies were staged from
1904 to 1907, where they were accorded equivalent status to that of new
work. As Shaw wrote in the epigraph to Major Barbara (1907): ‘[Murray’s]
English version of The Bacchae came into our dramatic literature with all the
impulsive power of an original work’.20 In this sense, classical scholarship
had, like Nietzsche’s Dionysos himself, broken through the boundaries
beyond its usual sphere. ‘Playing’ at being Greeks had been fashionable in
London since the opening of Liberty’s store in the 1880s, when Greek-style
dresses became all the rage amongst the upper middle classes.21 Now in
the early twentieth century, after two decades of dressing like a Greek in
18 Cited in Peacock 1988: 62.
19 For the literary impact of Frazer’s work, see Vickery 1973.
20 On Major Barbara, see Hall and Macintosh 2005: 488–520.
21 Hall and Macintosh 2005: 479–87.
free-flowing dresses, moving like one, especially like a maenad, became
fashionable as well.
There were at least three main routes into Greek dance at this time:
through performance in private salons; through performance in public,
often slightly morally ambivalent, venues; and thirdly, through performing
in a chorus in revivals of Greek drama. The first two, exemplified by the
careers of Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan respectively, grew out of the
tradition of the classical tableau vivant, which can be traced at least as far
back as Marie Sallé’s performance as a statue with her hair hanging loose
and her garment scandalously scant in Pygmalion at Covent Garden in
1734. This classical sculptural performance tradition had enjoyed a recent
revival through the popularisation of the expressive system of movement
devised by the French musicologist, François Delsarte. Genevieve Stebbins
had brought Delsarte’s method founded upon 12 poses based upon classical
sculpture to the United States towards the end of the nineteenth century;
and most middle-class young women received some basic training in the
Delsarte system at this time. It was this Delsartian training that Duncan
shared with Allan, who became her main rival in ‘Greek Dance’ in Britain
from 1908 onwards.22
Duncan’s professional career bears an uncanny resemblance to that
of the notoriously beautiful and beguiling eighteenth-century courtesan,
Emma Hamilton. Both Hamilton and Duncan depended upon aristo-
cratic patronage for their art, notwithstanding the scandal and tragedy
that they courted in their personal lives. Hamilton’s ‘Attitudes’ were based,
like Duncan’s solo performances, on ancient sculptures and images from
Greek vases; and her work (like Duncan’s over 100 years later) attracted vase
collectors and aristocratic voyeurs alike.23 By contrast, Duncan’s London
rival Maud Allan became a dancer by default, having gone to Berlin to
pursue a career as a concert pianist only to discover that her talents lay
elsewhere.24 But she had the good fortune to be in the German-speaking
world at a time when she could learn from the pioneering theatrical exper-
imentations of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and Max Reinhardt. When Allan
brought her ground-breaking solo dances to London, she introduced a
new freedom of expression that teetered (especially with her Salome dance)
on the brink of decadence. In this sense, her performances at the top of
the bill at the Palace Theatre in 1908 continued the risqué tradition of poses
22 Stebbins 1902; Macintosh 2010: 194–9. 23 Lada-Richards 2003.

24 For Allan’s life, see Cherniavsky 1998.
346 Fiona Macintosh
plastiques that provided the standard fare at the Palace. But with the impri-
matur of Edward VII, who had been responsible for bringing her over
from Marienbad, Allan became a star in popular and high-cultural circles
that secured her rivalry with Duncan absolutely. Allan could dance as a
‘reeling Bacchante’, making her whole body and even her skin move with
‘thrills and shivers such as are produced with the sudden contact with cold
water’.25
Choruses in performance in early twentieth-century Britain

Performing for the aristocracy in private salons in Europe and dancing at
the Palace Theatre on the fringes of Soho were, then, two possible routes
into Greek dance in the early twentieth century. The discovery of Greek
dance through the performance of ancient drama, however, was the more
common. The revival of Greek drama in the professional theatre from the
1880s onwards was intimately connected to the changes within classical
scholarship (the widening of the classical curriculum generally and the
institutionalisation of archaeology in particular), as well as to the broad-
ening of the student population with the creation of new institutions for
women (Girton College, Cambridge and Somerville College, Oxford, were
amongst the first to stage Greek plays).26 Early revivals in Oxford, Cam-
bridge and London during the 1880s boasted remarkably static choruses,
but by the early part of the new century the possibility of a singing/dancing
chorus in performance attracted much attention amongst performers and
audiences alike.
Both Ruby Ginner and Irene Mawer, who were to become the principal
exponents of Greek dance in the post-war period through the foundation
of the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama, came to Greek dance
through performing in ancient plays. Even though Duncan worked with
her pupils to stage numerous ensemble pieces and claimed that all her work
was inspired by the Greek chorus,27 her early dances in particular, like those
of Allan, were essentially solo performances. The Greek dancer for Ginner
and Mawer, however, was by definition a member of a chorus: the collective
rather than the solo performer was their preferred model. Ginner had not
been allowed to train as a dancer owing to the social stigma attached to
young women entering the profession in the late Victorian period. Instead,
she trained as an actor with the pioneer of speech and elocution training,
25 Daily Mail, 7 March 1908 and further Macintosh 2010.

26 See Hall 1999 and Easterling 1999. 27 Franko 1995: 17–20.
Elsie Fogerty, in whose productions of Alkestis (1902) and Antigone (1904)
at Crystal Palace Ginner performed as a chorus member. She began her
professional career in the Company of Frank Benson, who had made his
theatrical debut in the part of Clytemnestra in the first Oxford Greek
play, Agamemnon (1880). Increasingly recognised as a specialist in chore-
ographing Greek choruses, Ginner formed her own company of ‘Grecian
Dancers’ in 1912, which went on to perform in numerous venues over the
next couple of years.28
By 1913, as Huntly Carter notes, dance in general is beginning to come
into its own in Britain. In July 1910 in a journal called The Mask, the
pioneering stage designer and lover of Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon
Craig, proclaimed in an anonymous article that the father of the drama-
tist was the dancer.29 Indeed now dance, the cultural art form that had
struggled for recognition since its emergence from the shadow of opera
in the early eighteenth century, was finally receiving due recognition. As
Stravinsky noted in 1911, if Michelangelo were alive today, he would have
been a choreographer;30 and that summer, following the Ballets Russes’ first
London season, Britain is deemed by The Times to have ‘come of age’: ‘Alas!
Many pleasant illusions have been shattered thereby, many idols tumbled
from their pedestals; we have grown up terribly fast and lost the power of
enjoying things that pleased our callow fancies only a month or two ago.’31
London, like Paris the previous season, was now under the ‘rhythmic spell’:
mesmerised by the set, the costumes and the sheer physical energy of the
Ballets Russes’ highly charged corps de ballet. Rupert Brooke pronounced
in 1912 that the Russian Company ‘if anything, can redeem our civilization’
adding: ‘I’d give anything to be a ballet designer.’32
Everyone is talking and learning about dance as the proliferation of arti-
cles in The Times, The Illustrated London News and the cartoons in Punch
Magazine can testify. This new, energising ‘rhythmical spirit’ was in many
ways made possible by the breakdown between traditional spheres and a
new spirit of aesthetic collaboration and collective endeavour. Practition-
ers from classical ballet and the Modern Dance movement were learning
from one another. For Nijinsky, the rising star of the Ballets Russes, Dun-
can ‘dared to put liberty to movement; she has opened the door of the
cell to the prisoners’.33 Under the tutelage of Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes
sought to attain the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (which they
28 Ginner Papers, NRCD (BB/N/3 1910–1913). See further Macintosh 2010.
29 John Semar (pseud. for Craig), ‘A note on the work of E. W. Godwin’, The Mask 3 (July 1910), 53.
30 Eksteins 1989: 51. 31 The Times, 5 August 1911, 9.
32 Cited in Eksteins 1989: 53. 33 Nijinsky cited in Kurth 2001: 248.
348 Fiona Macintosh
maintained the opera had patently failed to achieve) within the ballet.
Duncan was in many ways the mediator between these independent but
also truly interdependent movements. It was she who inspired the Ballets
Russes’ choreographer, Michel Fokine on her first visit to St Petersburg
in 1905; and it was through her that Dalcroze’s ideas of Eurythmics were
popularised. When the Ballets Russes required someone to help Nijin-
sky with a particularly difficult passage of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in
1913, Diaghilev engaged one of Dalcroze’s Rhythmic Gymnastic Institute’s
brightest students, Marie Rambert.
When Max Reinhardt’s production of Oedipus Rex opened at Covent
Garden in January 1912, this broader European concern to emphasise the
sheer physicality of the performer was now in evidence in a performance of
Greek tragedy. Reinhardt’s landmark production had premiered in Berlin
and went on to be performed throughout Europe from 1910 onwards and
was one of the first stagings of an ancient drama in the modern world to
incorporate a singing and dancing chorus successfully.34 As we have seen, it
was by no means simply fortuitous that Reinhardt’s chorus should appear
at this time on the stages of Europe when the performing body, especially
the dancer, was ubiquitous in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Reinhardt was renowned for his direction of crowd scenes, and he put
those skills to a severe test in Oedipus Rex by directing a vast crowd of
around 100 extras who represented the citizens of Thebes, together with
a chorus of 20 Theban Elders (there were fewer in both the crowd and
the chorus in London than in Berlin). Few who saw the production failed
to be impressed by the sheer scale and grandeur of the formal patterns of
movement. The play began with the trumpet clarion and the entrance of
the half-naked torch-bearers, who streamed through the darkened circular
performance space. They were followed by the vast crowd who engulfed
the space in front of the palace steps and began chanting for Oedipus.
A murky blue light broke through the darkness, partially revealing the
chanting, groaning crowd; and after a strong yellow light had been cast
over the altar and steps, the entrance of John Martin-Harvey’s Oedipus
from the central doors, dressed in a brilliant white gown, was captured in
spotlight. Here was a Nietzschean-inspired production in which individual
(Apolline) suffering was to be seen against a background of the general
(Dionysiac) suffering of the chorus/crowd.
34 Macintosh 2009: 109–10. The chorus did not in fact sing the odes (merely intoned them without
musical accompaniment) until the tours in England.
Two months after the Reinhardt Oedipus Rex had opened at Covent
Garden, Granville Barker’s production of Iphigenia in Tauris in Gilbert
Murray’s translation was mounted at the Kingsway Theatre in London.
Whilst Barker had struggled to get the choruses right from at least 1907
onwards, there was a general consensus that this was never quite achieved
until Max Reinhardt had shown him the way. Critics were quick to see
the imprint of Reinhardt on the Iphigenia in Tauris: the reviewer of The
Athenaeum described Barker’s direction as being in accordance with ‘the
Reinhardt model’.35 Barker had attended the rehearsals for Oedipus Rex
both in Berlin and London; and he had helped his wife, Lillah McCarthy,
prepare for her part as Jocasta at Covent Garden. In Barker’s Iphigenia in
Tauris, she was now a statuesque and dignified Iphigenia surrounded by
primitive peoples with savage practices. The Times critic singled out for
praise ‘the rhythmic dancing of the captive women’, who ‘chanted to a
slight and charming accompaniment that never became monotonous’.36
For the rather more conservative reviewer of The Nation, ‘The symbolic,
and rather Indian, dancing, also, during the incantations, though equally
well performed, seemed too finikin and mincing – too wavy, sinuous, and
prettily intertwined.’37
The Ballets Russes may not have converted everyone to their ‘rhythmic’
method but Barker, at least, had now found a way of representing the
formal characteristics of Greek tragedy, especially its chorus, within the
proscenium arch theatre. Like Reinhardt’s surging crowd, which entered
the auditorium and ruffled some Edwardian sensibilities because it invaded
the audience’s own space, Barker’s audience witnessed the ‘rapid and tumul-
tuous entrance of soldiers, messenger and king, from the side of the stalls
instead of from the “wings”’.38 For Reinhardt’s Oedipus Rex at Covent
Garden, the first few rows of seats were removed from the stalls to accom-
modate the chorus and the crowd; and now Barker at the Kingsway Theatre
similarly removed the front rows of the stalls in order to build a forestage
out over the (admittedly smaller) orchestra pit and the stalls, upon which
the chorus of 11 captive women danced. In marked contrast to Barker’s
earlier productions, both on account of their dark purple costumes and
the new larger performance space, the chorus was no longer a permanently
static, and occasionally intrusive presence: instead it faded in and out of
the action in accordance with the dictates of the plot.39 And when Barker
went on later in the year to stage the same production in the Greek theatre
35 The Athenaeum, 23 March 1912, n. 4404, 347. 36 The Times, 20 March 1912, 11.
37 H. W. N., ‘The drama of women’, The Nation, 23 March 1912, 1020.
38 The Nation, 23 March 1912, 1020. 39 Kennedy 1985: 119–21.
350 Fiona Macintosh
at Bradfield College, not only did it transpose easily, it made Barker feel
that he would never do Greek plays ‘in a stuffy theatre again’.40
Exit the chorus

In 1912, following the success of Reinhardt’s Oedipus Rex and Barker’s Iphi-
genia in Tauris, the Ballets Russes made their second tour to London. This
year they performed L’Apres-midi d’un faune, choreographed by Nijin-
sky to Debussy’s score. Here the morally dubious dimension to the new
‘rhythmic spell’ was abundantly on show as the faun (danced by Nijinsky
himself ) concluded the twelve-and-a-half-minute piece with an orgasmic
crescendo conducted upon the scarf of one of the nymphs. For those who
had been brought up on the idea that dance was inherently morally prob-
lematic, there was further evidence emerging to confirm its decadence and
louche cosmopolitanism.41 Cosmopolitanism, of course, brought with it
other anxieties on the political front on the eve of World War One; and
the brief ‘awakening’ of Britain to other European ideas that had begun
during the early years of the first decade of the century was very shortly
to be eclipsed entirely. The dancing maenads, especially those surround-
ing Maud Allan and her Sapphic circle, had always courted controversy
and provoked the male establishment’s anxieties. Allan’s teasingly coherent
repertoire that included maenadic as well as Salome dances eventually led
to her appearance in court in 1918, where she unsuccessfully sought to
defend her reputation against the charge of leading a ‘Cult of the Clitoris’
and undermining the war effort.42 She lost her case against the right-wing,
anti-Semitic Member of Parliament, Noel Pemberton Billing and her rep-
utation never recovered. Her public besmirchment was in many ways both
a cause and a symptom of what became a widely shared view of Greek
dance in Britain as being in some ways morally compromised through
its association with ‘cosmopolitan’ (for which read German-Jewish)
culture.
The post-war British classical establishment’s apparent lack of interest in
the ancient dancing chorus, in marked contrast to its dogged focus on the
ancient tragic ‘hero’, may well be a product of this crude, late Edwardian
association. If Barker had finally managed to find a way in 1912 to stage his
chorus through Reinhardt’s example, the post-war world disapproved of
40 Barker to Murray in Purdom 1955: 144.
41 On ‘cosmopolitanism’ at this time as dangerous, see Walkowitz 2003: 373–6; and generally, Hynes
1968: esp. 254–306.
42 On the trial, see Hoare 1997.
efforts to emulate the ‘Reinhardt model’.43 Greek dancing continued under
the auspices of the Association of Teachers of the Revived Greek Dance,
where ‘maenadism’ was so thoroughly domesticated that it could be invoked
as a natural ally to British folk dance and found itself on the side of the
Aryans in current racial theory.44 In Europe the ‘Reinhardt model’ was
abused and deformed by Nazi ideology and Riefenstahl’s filmic aesthetic in
the Nuremberg Stadium.45 The ancient singing, dancing chorus does not
re-emerge in performances of Greek tragedy on the British stage again until
the final part of the twentieth century, when once again anthropological
and intercultural theatrical experimentation intertwine to produce vibrant
incarnations of the ancient chorus (see Meineck this volume).
43 See esp. Sheppard 1920: ix–x. 44 Macintosh 2010. 45 Fischer-Lichte 1999.
chapter 1 6
“The thorniest problem and the greatest opportunity”

Directors on directing the Greek chorus
Peter Meineck
In his review of Anne Bogart’s production of Antigone staged by the SITI

Company at New York’s Dance Theatre Workshop in October of 2009,
Jason Zinoman, writing in the New York Times described the chorus as
“always one of the thorniest problems and greatest opportunities when
mounting Greek drama.” Zinoman’s review reflects the prevailing modern
critical response to representations of the chorus on the contemporary
stage – that it is a problem – and this attitude to the chorus has a long and
distinguished history. As far back as 1956, Kitto, writing in the Educational
Theatre Journal, specifically addressed modern producers, advising them
that the ancient chorus not only spoke text but also sung and danced
and cautioned them that to rely only on speech was to represent in “three
dimensions a drama that was conceived in four.”1 Yet despite this attempt to
put the scholarship of a classicist at the disposal of the theatre practitioner,
Kitto began and ended his article with the same dismissive sentiment; “the
modern producer of a Greek play has to do what he can.” This view of the
chorus on the modern stage has stubbornly prevailed, and recently Simon
Goldhill elevated the state of contemporary choral representation to an
“acute problem” stating, “more modern performances fail because of the
chorus than for any other reason: if the chorus isn’t right, the play cannot
work.”2
Goldhill does point out the potential for exceptional theatre that can be
achieved by an imaginative contemporary rendering of a chorus and Helene
Foley has documented recent productions that in her opinion have helped
to revitalize choral performance and its reception.3 In this paper I wish
to attempt to move the discussion on from its current, rather entrenched
premise that problematizes the chorus on the modern stage and instead,
seek to explore different contemporary approaches to choral drama as
practiced by leading dramatic artists who have interpreted ancient theatre
1 Kitto 1956: 1. 2 Goldhill 2007: 45. 3 Foley 2007.
352
Directors on directing the Greek chorus 353
from a variety of perspectives. This modern directorial voice set alongside
our knowledge of the staging conditions of the fifth-century Athenian
theatre can add much to our understanding of the dramatic dynamics of
choral drama on both the ancient and modern stage. Four performing
arts practitioners with experience in adapting ancient Greek plays for the
stage were interviewed: Richard Schechner (Dionysus in 69, Oresteia), Anne
Bogart (Antigone), Will Power (The Seven) and Mark Adamo (Lysistrata)4 .
Their works are set against several key issues of performance that deserve
to be considered in any discussion of how the chorus might have operated
in an ancient performance. These include the Greek theatre’s roots in
collective movement; the manner by which such movement communicated
emotion and narrative; the relationship of the chorus to the performing
environment; and the use of choral devices that conflate time, topography,
and theatrical space.
Richard Schechner – collective movement and shared space

Richard Schechner has directed and adapted a number of theatrical works
influenced by ancient Greek drama including: Dionysus in 69 – based on the
Bacchae (1968); The Oresteia in Taiwan (1995); YocastaS Redux – based on the
Oedipus story (2003); Philoctetes (1962); and The Prometheus Project – based
on Prometheus Bound (1985). Schechner is both a practitioner and a scholar,
one of the founders of the Performance Studies Department at the Tisch
School of the Arts at New York University and has written several impor-
tant books on the anthropology of drama and environmental theatre.5
His interest in the ritual origins of performance led to a long-time collabo-
ration with anthropologist Victor Turner who saw a close affinity between
his own theories of ritual liminality and communitas and Schechner’s
theatrical works.6 Schechner also married his interest in creating ritu-
als for contemporary audiences with what he termed “Environmental
Theatre” where the theatre space is fully integrated into the performance
and the traditional barriers between performers and spectators, onstage
and offstage, inside and outside are systematically eroded and often totally
obliterated.7 These ideas were put into vivid practice in his production of
Dionysus in 69 in New York in 1968, a new stage adaptation based on
4 These interviews took place in New York between July 2010 and March 2011. Richard Schechner and
Mark Adamo read the manuscript and offered helpful comments and corrections.
5 Turner 1979: 494–7. Turner 1980: 141–68. Schechner 1985b: 190–206.
6 Appel and Schechner 1990, Kowalzig 2005, and Csapo 1997: 253–4.
7 Schechner 1994, originally published in 1973.
354 Peter Meineck
William Arrowsmith’s translation of Euripides’ Bacchae and presented
at the Performance Garage in SoHo, New York (the ‘69’ in the title
refers both to the sexual position and to the US presidential election
of 1968). This famous production has been well documented and was
also filmed by Brian De Palma.8 It was notable for its provocative use
of nudity, a blurring of sexual identities, powerful group movement;
communal dance that pulled audience members “on-stage” and the
arrangement of the seating by carefully designed and positioned wooden
platforms that enveloped the playing area. Schechner also kept his spec-
tators oscillating between experiencing what was “theatrical” and what was
“real” by blending fragments of the Arrowsmith translation of the Bacchae
with self-referential dialogue about the performers who had assumed the
roles in the play. Watching the performance on film some 40 years later one
still gets the impression of a compelling, dangerous, and highly physical
production.9
A striking aspect of Dionysus in 69 was Schechner’s use of his female
chorus. About 15 minutes into the performance, these women disrobed
and stood, legs apart, on a rectangular black mat in the center of the room.
Then, the male performers lay beneath them. The women began moving
together in a wave-like motion, which the men mirrored on the floor.
Together the performers created a movement sequence Schechner calls the
“birth ritual” as first, Pentheus and then Dionysos are propelled by the
rhythmic movement through the “birth canal” between the women’s legs
and over the men’s backs. Prior to being born, Dionysos introduces himself
to the audience; after his birth, he invites everyone in the room to join
him in what he terms the “ecstasy dance” in honor of his nativity. Both the
women and the men pulled audience members into a dance driven by a flute
and an Indian drum. During the dance, often some members of the cast –
and some spectators too – take off their clothes. But then Pentheus begins
to cool the room down, silencing the musical instruments and restraining
the dancers. The chorus of both men and women (leaving Pentheus alone)
scatter into different parts of the performance space, several settling among
the spectators, only to strike up their singing against the protestations of
the actor playing Pentheus. Schechner explained that he used this as a
device to convince the audience into feeling as though they were joining a
rebellion. For this sequence, he employed simple American children’s songs
to unite audience and chorus against Pentheus and in so doing hoped to
8 Schechner 1970, Schechner 1994, Shephard 1991, Zeitlin 2004, Puchner 2006.
9 Dionysus in 69 was revived as recently as 2008 in Austin, Texas by the Rude Mechanicals theatre
group.
make them feel complicit in the actions of the chorus. Then Pentheus flew
around the space trying to quiet the chorus. Pentheus became more and
more agitated as he tried to silence the chorus by means of a device that
grew out of a rehearsal exercise. Once touched, the chorus member had to
freeze for 30 seconds, when touched again – 20 seconds, then 10 and so on,
until it became impossible for Pentheus to control them any longer. The
whole sequence was an incredibly effective use of the interplay between
a principal actor, chorus and audience and created the frenetic dangerous
energy that propelled the rest of the play. In an interview for this paper
Richard Schechner talked about the creation of the chorus of Dionysus in
69 and how he worked to develop this powerful sense of choral identity:
The first thing I did was ask the women in the Performance Group, which
was just being established, to make their own community and to flee the
Performance Garage up onto the roof. One afternoon in particular we gave
the women a couple of hours’ head start and they went up onto the roof
where I thought I would find them. There they had set about establishing
their own rituals in relationship to Dionysus who we had decided was not
yet among them. Then the men were going to come up and try to capture
them and we would have a battle between the men and the women. The
chorus women represented the spirit of Dionysus and the men represented
the males of the community under the leadership of Pentheus who wanted to
reclaim the women. When we got up to the roof, the women had gone. We
men were astonished, and then we began to hear vocal calls in the distance.
They had leapt from our roof to the surrounding roofs of SoHo and they had
established themselves in what they called “the mountains,” like Cithaeron
in the play, and they were calling to each other using verbal signals that we
men didn’t understand at all. It was really kind of terrifying: the women
were out of control, out of our control, but certainly in collaboration with
each other. That improvisation set the tone of the chorus with the women
being the leaders of their own independent community.
Watching the film of Dionysus in 69, the centrality of the chorus to the
production as a whole is palpable. One is transported by their dancing
and quite mesmerized as audience members are drawn into their exotic,
trance-like dance. There is nudity and yet the undressing of some of the
chorus members seems deeply personal – an act of release not display.
These chorus women are indeed part of their own distinct community and
though the audience dance and sing with them, they remain separate and
different. When this choral singing and dancing eventually subsides, the
performers slump in exhaustion and the ensuing scene between Pentheus
and Dionysos seems like a respite from the earlier intense and highly
charged collective dance. The chorus now appears to be physically and
356 Peter Meineck
emotionally fatigued and this feeling radiates through the entire audi-
ence. The stillness that accompanies the resulting scene, the first exchange
between Dionysos and Pentheus, seems incredibly focused as if after the
sheer exuberance of the collective dancing and singing, there is a slight
sense of embarrassment and the audience seem on tenterhooks to know
what the consequences of their chorus inspired collective action will be.
With everyone in the theatre, performers and spectators alike, sharing this
same corporeal condition, Schechner’s chorus managed to fully engage his
audience by surrounding them in a choral environment and enticing them
to become not only intellectually, but physically and emotionally involved.
This kind of performative shift in energy and tone is an element frequently
lacking in modern productions of ancient Greek plays where the chorus
is more often than not portrayed as a kind of “interlude” between the
scenes played by the principal actors. In this dramatic scenario, choral
staging can seem static, irrelevant and a hindrance to the fluidity of a play.
What Schechner understood in Dionysus in 69 is that the chorus sets the
mood of a production. Their words and movements propel the narrative
of the drama and their varied emotional states, moral questions, search for
contextual points of reference, and use of topographic and mythological
imagery are all part of their function: to contribute and communicate the
emotional tonalities within the play.
Schechner did not confine his chorus, but instead let them roam the
entire space so it became impossible to discern what was “stage” and what
was “auditorium” as those traditional designations were joyfully obliterated.
The entire Performing Garage and its immediate external environs of the
SoHo streets were incorporated into the performance. The fifth-century
theatrical performance space at the Sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus
operated in much the same way. Its location on the southeast slope of the
Acropolis was selected because of its proximity to the spiritual heart of
Attica and the natural features of the hillside that provided an excellent
place for seating large numbers of people. Perhaps most importantly, the
site had a fantastic view over the sanctuary and across the old southern
city, its shrines, monuments and walls and out to the hills and low moun-
tains of the Attic countryside and to the sea.10 While Schechner’s space
had no such exterior view, he did conclude Dionysus in 69 by raising the
large steel garage doors and having the action of the play spill out onto
the downtown streets as his Dionysos led off a procession of performers
10 For a vivid description of what the fifth-century spectator would have seen from the theatron see
Rehm 2002: 35.
and audience out into the New York night. Even the temporary nature of
the elevated seating platforms was reminiscent of the wooden ikria that
formed the benches for the spectators of fifth-century tragedy. The ancient
theatron (“seeing place”) was erected specially for the City Dionysia and
then at the conclusion of the festival was quickly dismantled and rented
out to some other event in another part of the city or other deme.11 In the
fifth century, this temporary theatron at the Sanctuary of Dionysos was not
a grand stone architectural edifice but a temporary environmental space –
a grandstand for watching the performances and sacrifices that occurred at
the culminating point of a great processional event. In fact, when we con-
sider the ancient theatre we can no longer safely say that the chorus danced
in a circular orchestra or even that the theatron sat more than around 5,000
to 6,000 people (although this is still a very large performance space by
any standard).12 What is clear is that the spatial dynamics of this venue
favored choral performance. Its long wing entrances (eisodoi) facilitated
movement past a viewing stand – the theatron and created a dynamic flow
of kinesthetic action across the orchēstra that suggested both imaginary
offstage locations and established the performing area. What Kinneret
Noy has termed a “movement space.”13 Even the use of the skēnē, placed
upstage center, and stage machinery, such as the mēchanē and ekkyklēma,
were deployed to pull the focus away from the chorus and place it on the
individual actor. Behind all this was the magnificent view, which in the
fifth century was never removed from the visual field of the audience. On a
leveled playing area before a hillside overlooking a sanctuary and the coun-
tryside beyond, the chorus mediated the action of the play and the stunning
visual environment it inhabited.
Schechner concluded Dionysus in 69 with a procession through the
streets of SoHo where actors, audience, and chorus became one body of
people moving through an environment in the same direction. This act
of motional “street theatre” is akin to the kind of ancient processional
performance forms that strongly influenced Greek drama. In his schol-
arly work, Schechner emphasized the significance of the procession as one
of the earliest forms of public performance and described the moments
when processions stopped as opportunities for spontaneous performance
11 Csapo 2007.
12 One argument frequently leveled against the theory of a rectilinear orchestra is the multiple references
to the dithyramb as a kuklios choros (circle dance). However, circle dances can be staged in squares
as is apparent in any town square in modern Greece during a wedding or festival. Recent advocates
of a rectilinear orchēstra include Goette 2007 and Moretti 2000. Strident proponents of a circular
orchēstra include Wiles 1997: 44–52 and Scullion 1994: 3–66.
13 Noy 2002. On Noh space and Greek theatre see Revermann 2006a: 52–3 and 134–5.
358 Peter Meineck
“eruptions.”14 These could be impromptu dances, choral songs or narra-
tive mime shows.15 When these events occurred, spectators would stop to
watch and then move on with the procession, themselves becoming part
of the performance of the procession. In ancient Greece these spectators
were often active members of a theōria (“spectacle festival”) and the pro-
cession ultimately moved to a point of culmination where there would be
sacrifices and concluding performances. The City Dionysia was itself inau-
gurated every year by a great procession, second only in size to the Greater
Panathenaea.16 This procession was in many ways the main event of the
festival and continued to be so as a feature of the several “Rural” Dionysian
festivals in Attica. This is why the law of Euegoras cited by Demosthenes
describes the Dionysian festivals of the Piraeus, Lenaion, and City Dionysia
primarily in terms of the procession (pompē).17 These great visual displays
were part of a culture of what I have termed “symporeia” to describe public
collective movement, which includes festival and theoric processions, group
song and dance, military drill, rowing, and of course choral performance
in dithyramb, tragedy, satyr drama, and comedy.18
Walter Burkert has described the procession as “the fundamental
medium of group formation” and writes, “hardly a festival is without a
pompe”.19 A survey of Robert Parker’s extensive appendix of Athenian
festivals produces a list of at least 39 annual processional events.20 One
need only look at that most famous of Athenian artworks, the Parthenon
Frieze, which itself portrays a procession, possibly the Great Panathenaea,
to see first hand the importance of the pompē on Athenian culture. Robin
Rhodes has even described the architectural schemes of the buildings on
the Acropolis as “Processional Architecture.”21 Additionally, the narratives
of both tragedy and comedy are interwoven between the staging of sym-
poreutic performance forms such as choral entrances, dances, wedding and
funeral processions, and festival celebrations. Likewise, in comedy, proces-
sions are recreated for comic effect, including Dicaeopolis’ “Dionysia” in
Acharnians (241–62), the mini “Panathenaea” in Ecclesiazusae (730–56) and
the “wedding” procession of Peisthetairos and Basileia in Birds (1706–65).
Schechner understood the power of symporeutic performance forms to
incorporate his audience within the action of his play. Thus, we might
14 Schechner 1988: 159–60.
15 Aristotle’s use of the term aÉtoscediastikv (“improvisatory”) in describing the origins of tragedy
and comedy at Poet. 1448a10–15 recalls the kind of spontaneous performance “eruptions” described
by Schechner.
16 Parker 2005: 290–326. 17 Dem. Meid. 10.
18 Alan Sommerstein suggested the term “symporeia” to me. 19 Burkert 1985: 99.
20 Parker 2005: 456–87. 21 Rhodes 1995: 42–65.
come to view the ancient chorus with a deeper understanding of its per-
formative function if we acknowledge Greek theatre’s roots in symporeutic
performance and that the chorus was central to the experience of watching
fifth-century drama. Aristotle articulates this very idea in his description
of the origins of tragedy in Poetics:
Being a development of the Satyr play, it was quite late before tragedy
rose from short plots and comic diction to its full dignity, and that the
iambic meter was used instead of the trochaic tetrameter. At first, they
used the tetrameter because its poetry suited the Satyrs and was better for
dancing. (Arist. Poet. 1449a20–25, tr. Richard Janko)
The key term found in the passage of Poetics cited above is orchestikos
or “fit for dancing” (1449a25). Here Aristotle makes a clear connection
between the origins of tragedy and its roots in the performance of dance
(choros). In modern parlance, the word “chorus” has come to denote a
group of singers, but in ancient Greek the term has several interrelated
meanings all connected to the idea of group movement. Thus, it can mean
dancers, the dancing place, and the thing that was danced.22 In tragedy,
the chorus sang and danced and the prominence of dance in ancient
drama was reflected in the title of the wealthy citizen who received public
acclaim for producing the play, the chorēgos (leader of the dance). However,
choral dance is not the performance of an individual dancer or partnered
dancing, it is the manifestation in movement (often with song) of a highly
organized presentational group interaction with performative roots in the
procession as religious spectacle – what Guy Hedreen has described as
“an inherently visual phenomenon.”23 In Laws, Plato finds no real division
between dances and processions and posits that the ability to create ordered
movement in a chorus is given by the gods and distinguishes men from
animals (653e).24
Dance is a powerful cultural communicator for Plato and dance historian
Judith Lynne Hanna has stated, “motion has the strongest visual appeal to
attention for it implies a change in the conditions of the environment which
may require action. Used extraordinarily in the dance, motion is potently
related to the experience of arousal and motivation.”25 Yet, our modern
fallacy is to regard the chorus as static and declamatory, almost irrelevant to
the narrative of the play. Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 proved otherwise – the
chorus moves the play. This is directly applicable to symporeutic forms such
as the procession and choral drama that seek to transform their respective
22 The term orchēstra for “dancing place” is first found in [Arist.] Pr. 901b30.
23 Hedreen 2004: 38. 24 See Lonsdale 1993: 41. 25 Hanna 1987: 75.
360 Peter Meineck
environments via the use of group movement, visuality, dance, music, and
rhythm. Hanna goes on to point out that in dance, the motor/visual-
kinesthetic channels predominate instead of the vocal/auditory channels,
in that language exists in a temporal dimension, whereas dance involves
the temporal plus the three dimensions of space. Thus, the relationship
of a procession to the space it moves through is an essential feature that
links the visual display to its environment, both ritualizing the city streets
and visiting locations of religious and civic significance to imbue the event
with additional power. Additionally, the inclusion of city sights within
the rituals of the procession is an element that features strongly in drama
where mythological (in the case of tragedy) or metaphorical (in the case of
comedy) narratives are often set against the topography of the city, which
was within the actual visual field of the spectators.
The visuality of the chorus and how it operated within the differ-
ent optical parameters offered by the performance space at the Sanc-
tuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus is another important aspect of what we
might understand about choral “mediation” that is not immediately dis-
cernible from experiencing an ancient play as a text. When reading a
Greek play, the chorus can seem to fall silent during scenes between prin-
cipal characters and their constant visual presence in performance goes
unnoticed. In this case, their interjections and choral odes can seem some-
what ungainly and even a distraction to the narrative flow of the play.
This typically results in much of the choral content of a play being omit-
ted by directors and adaptors. Yet, we must consider the visual qualities
of the chorus and how they operated in the symporeutic environment
of the fifth-century theatre. As any theatre director or performer knows,
an open-air performance is a very different experience from watching a
show presented within an interior space. Outdoor venues tend to lack
the kind of focus offered by a modern proscenium or thrust stage where
the distractions available to the spectator’s peripheral vision are dimin-
ished by the darkening of the auditorium, the framing of the performance
space with the proscenium arch and the use of complex stage lighting
designs that further focus visual attention, often subliminally. As Schechner
put it,
Prosceniums are lousy places for a chorus. Unless you have stadium seating
you are looking up and not down, so you cannot see the patterns of their
movement. Secondly, no matter what you do, there is that arch – that frame,
and the audience member is put at a distance. The convention of film or
painting viewing operates. If you are going to use a chorus you have to work
in an open space.
When we watch most modern plays the actors tend to be deliberately
placed within our central or “foveal” vision. This is named after the part
of the retina at the center and back of its curve. Foveal vision focuses
on detail and scrutinizes objects while peripheral vision orders the entire
spatial view, allows us to look on large items, and helps to direct our
narrower foveal vision. Margaret Livingstone suggests looking at the world
through a small tube or our hands made into a telescope to get an idea
of how limiting foveal vision can be without the benefit of the wider
visual context of peripheral vision.26 Thus, modern theatre directors and
designers work hard to earn, and keep both our visual focus and our
mental attention, not on the peripheral sights of fellow spectators and the
surrounding environment (regarded as distractions), but on the action they
have placed before us on stage. This was certainly not the case in the fifth-
century theatre space where the open-air conditions of the Sanctuary of
Dionysos and the views available to the spectators seated there meant that
dramatists became highly skilled in manipulating the interplay between
peripheral and foveal vision. The constant oscillation of focus between
landscape, chorus, and actors in masks offered a complex multi-layered
visual experience of the theatre. This is reflective of the kind of diversity
of viewership discernible in other Greek art forms, what Lissarrague has
called “various modalities of representation” (as applied to viewing images
on symposium cups),27 and Marconi, referring to the Parthenon frieze, as
spectatorship “on the edge between visibility and invisibility, between seen
and unseen.”28
Sourvinou-Inwood wrote “that the relationship between the world of the
audience and that of tragedy was not constant and inert, but was manip-
ulated in the course of each tragedy through textual devices that oper-
ated in interaction with the assumptions which the audience shared with
the tragedian.” What she termed “distancing” devices established mytho-
logical events, far-off locales and foreign characters, whereas “zooming”
devices are references to contemporary events, local customs and the actual
topography of Attica.29 Fifth-century tragedy was performed in an environ-
ment where these kinds of contemporary cultural references were always
directly in the visual field of the spectators as they sat on the wooden
benches beneath the Acropolis and gazed out at their city and countryside
beyond.30 As noted above, it was most frequently the chorus that acted
26 Livingstone 2002: 69–71. 27 Lissarrague 1994: 12–27.
28 Marconi 2009: 156–73. 29 Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 22–5.
30 See Revermann 2006b: 111–15 who applies the Bakhtinian concept of chronotopes to Greek drama
and proposes that tragedy favors “closed fixed and linear” chronotopes while comedy is more “open,
362 Peter Meineck
to mediate between environment and play. We can observe this in action
by briefly examining the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus
(668–719). Here, the chorus representing townsmen of the Attic deme of
Colonus, begin by praising their own community, which was well known
to the Athenians as it lay less than a mile away from the city to the north-
west. They sing of the “beautiful meadows” of Colonus echoing to the trill
of nightingales, an aural reference that incorporates the sensory facilities
of the blind Oedipus. Then the focus of the song gradually expands from
the grove of the Eumenides, where Oedipus sits, to the wider landscape of
Colonus threaded by the river Cephissus which runs from the Saronic Gulf
through the Attic plain that lies to the west of the city. Although Colonus
and the Cephissus could not be seen from the theatron, its sights and ritual
places would have been embedded in the memories of most of the Attic
spectators. Then the song expands to encompass Athens and Attica as a
whole with references to fertile fields, abundant crops, and sacred olive
trees, all of which were clearly visible from the theatron. Thus, the wild
horses of Poseidon are imagined galloping on the real roads of Attica and
the choral song ends with a reference to the sea, visible in the distance to
the south.
Andreas Markantonatos has described Sophocles’ Colonus as “a micro-
cosm of Athens itself,”31 and the song is also indicative of an ecological
approach to visual perception where locations are situated with regard
to their relationship to larger places. This theory of spatial “nesting” is
successfully applied to the Greek theatre by Rehm who builds on the
work of James Gibson to emphasize the notion that attending the theatre
of Dionysos was part of a wider experiential schema.32 Similarly, Lowell
Edmunds has also pointed out how this chorus song changes focus from
Oedipus in the play to the spectators in the theatron. The initial descrip-
tions of Colonus would have had a direct meaning to Oedipus within the
world of the play, but the later references to Athens and Attica are intended
for the spectators and can have no direct narrative bearing on the predica-
ments of Oedipus or Antigone.33 This capability of the chorus to shift
between differing perspectives has been described by Edmunds as a feature
of their “ambiguous status” in Greek drama, something enhanced by their
masks, which exploited the spectator’s cognitive responses to facial ambi-
guity to forge strong emotional and empathetic connections and helped
fluid and discontinuous” (111). He rightly states that the Athenian theatre space “makes an enormous
appeal to the imaginative power of its audience” (113).
31 Markantonatos 2007: 91–3. 32 Rehm 2002: 13–19. 33 Edmunds 1996: 57–9.
to unify the 12 to 15 actors playing the chorus into a cohesive group.34 As
the chorus in Oedipus at Colonus finishes the song, their assertions of Attic
pride are immediately taken up by Antigone who asks for the protection
of this splendid place against the aggression of a fast-approaching Creon.
Now all Athenians, mythological (in the play) and contemporary (in the
theatron) are implicit in Antigone’s appeal. It is the chorus that has placed
the mythological predicament of Oedipus and Antigone within the reality
of contemporary Attica.
In 1996 Richard Schechner was invited by Wu Xin-Kino of the Contem-
porary Legend Theatre in Taiwan to direct his own adaptation of Aeschylus’
Oresteia and the opportunity of working with actors trained in traditional
Chinese opera in a large open-air space allowed Schechner to explore his
theories of intercultural and environmental theatre. The production was
mounted at the Da Ann Forest Park in downtown Taipei where the audi-
ence of 2,300 were placed on a hillside overlooking a circular performance
space with a scene building featuring a large doorway placed upstage center.
Schechner explained that he wanted to utilize what he understood as the
spatial dynamics of the ancient Greek theatre and to relocate certain scenes
to locations off to the side and create entrances and exits through the audi-
ence. In this Oresteia, Schechner deployed two choruses: one made up of
old men accompanied by a young boy, while the other depicted the furies
and were costumed as hideous manifestations of “a man’s worst nightmare
of a woman” (Schechner). The male chorus of old men wore traditional
Chinese robes and heavy mask-like make up and spoke in the old jungbai
dialect of the Beijing Opera which was only partially understood by the
contemporary Taiwanese audience and described by Schechner as “some-
where between Shakespeare and Chaucer.” To help mediate this chorus
Schechner introduced the character of an 18- or 19-year-old boy dressed
in modern clothes and a baseball cap who spoke Taiwanese, the everyday
dialect of the audience. This figure was both member of the chorus and a
meta-theatrical device able to reflexively comment on their actions directly
to the spectators.
Schechner’s production had to surmount the peripheral “distractions” of
a public park in busy downtown Taipei and create the right spatial atmo-
sphere for the presentation of this type of mythological material. In many
ways it was the chorus that achieved this in that their group movements
and mask-like faces created a distance between spectator and performer,
34 See Meineck 2010. A fine example of the ambiguous slightly heightened, yet naturalistic facial
features of the fifth-century chorus mask can be observed on the Pronomos vase of c. 400 bce in
Naples. See Taplin and Wyles 2010: Fig. 0.0.
364 Peter Meineck
which established a deliberate theatrical environment that facilitated the
creation of a mythological narrative. Furthermore, at any given moment
the chorus offered an array of differing reactions to the scenes they were
witnessing. This greatly helped direct the audience’s focus on the action
of the play rather than their fellow audience members or the distractions
offered by such an open-air environment. Yet, Schechner was not afraid
to use the peripheral opportunities afforded by his unconventional space.
Entrances were made from behind the audience, via the side and from the
stage building and the performers fluctuated between the playing space and
the audience just as the chorus of Dionysus in 69 had done in the Perfor-
mance Garage in SoHo. One such entrance was the arrival of Agamemnon
who was brought down the hillside via the spectators’ seating area. This
created an uproarious response from the audience, many of whom leapt
to their feet to catch a glimpse of the elaborately dressed Agamemnon,
who wore an amalgam of costume elements derived from Chinese Opera
and Aztec masks. In addition to his mask and costume, Agamemnon was
further separated from the surrounding audience members via his use of
the highly stylized movement of the Beijing Opera. Here, Schechner used
the shin duan, a slow walk where the feet are raised up, almost impossi-
bly high and then placed carefully down on the ground. This gesture was
used to show Agamemnon stepping on the purple carpet Clytemnestra lays
out before him. The total effect was visually compelling as Agamemnon
made his way down the hillside, through the audience, towards the chorus.
Concepts of “onstage” and “offstage” were shattered by the entrance of
Agamemnon via the audience, just as the movement flow created by the
eisodoi of the Dionysian space in Athens made it impossible to pinpoint
exactly when a performer was “on” or “off.”35 This kept the performance
space in continual state of flux and it is only the chorus within that space
that remained a constant presence.36
This fluidity of focus in the ancient theatre meant that the chorus
was never regarded as “off stage” nor diminished when they were not
fully engaged at the center of the action, dancing and singing the odes.
Instead, their perpetual masked physical presence, silently listening and
observing, and perhaps even occasionally audibly reacting to the events
taking place before them, kept the emotional force and narrative direction
35 Taplin 1983: 157.

36 It is notable that when a chorus leaves the visual field of the spectators such as in Aesch. Eum. (234)
or Soph. Aj. (814) it is accompanied by a change in location. However Scullion 1994: 89–128 and
Heath and Okell 2007: 263–380 have suggested that there is no change of location in Ajax. For
arguments against this view see Finglass 2011 on 814.
of the play within the spectator’s visual field. Even during an actor’s speech
or a dialogue scene the gaze direction of the chorus and their physical
actions would have done a great deal to contribute to the emotional inten-
sity of a scene.37 The mask helped this visual interplay allowing the chorus
to present itself both as a unified group but also as individuals with differ-
ing emotional responses and perspectives expressed in the movement of a
gesture, the tilt of a masked head or the subtle aspect of the fingers showing
tension, pleasure or pain.38 Of the 14 depictions of tragic masks that can
be dated to the fifth century, 10 seem to show chorus members and as Eric
Csapo has pointed out “it is not until about 430 bc that Attic painters
take any interest in actors.”39 One noticeable aspect of these figures is the
pronounced hand gestures shown by elongated outstretched fingers, an
indication of the physical expressiveness of masked choral movement. This
can be observed in practical mask workshops where the masked participant
is first asked to move normally, even casually, and the tragic mask seems
out of place on the body. Once the participant centers their body and
moves in clear, committed and taut movements the mask and body work
together as a visual whole. Of particular importance are the fingers – slack
fingers or small single finger gestures seem weak in a mask. The kind of
taut open hand depicted in vase paintings is typical of hand gestures made
by actors successfully working with a mask. These kinds of gestures can
also be observed in Kathakali, Balinese, Kabuki and Noh theatre.
Thus, choral odes grew from a visceral connection with the narrative
scenes, which themselves developed from the emotional atmosphere set by
the choral odes. They were not “interludes” meant to punctuate the action,
but part of a seamless expression of public gaze, collective listening, group
reaction, and shared movement.40 Furthermore, choral peripheral action
37 Representations of theatrical masks on vase paintings from the fifth century all show the eyes of the
mask containing sclerae (whites) with a small iris that was presumably left open in order that the
actor might see. Like operatic performances today and the masked tradition of Japanese Noh theatre
and Indian Kathakali, Greek masked performers may well have favored a frontal engagement with
the audience to facilitate audibility and maximum visual engagement. Therefore, we might assume
that the gaze direction of the choral mask was usually facing out directly at the spectators in the
theatron. Cognitive scientists have established that gaze direction is essential to human non-verbal
communication and the eyes of the chorus masks looking directly at the audience would have been
an incredibly important aspect of choral mediation in performance. See Meineck 2010.
38 On the relationship between gestures, communication, and cognition see McNeill 1992.
39 Csapo 2010a: 12–13. I have collected the iconography of masks in the fifth century to be published
in a forthcoming paper. There are good images and descriptions of much of this material in Hart
2010, Csapo 2010a: 1–37 and Wiles 2007.
40 Aristotle made a distinction between the chorus and the rest of the play coining the term epeisodion
(episode) to describe the part of tragedy between choral songs (Poet. 1452b20–21). See Halleran 2005
and Taplin 1977: 470–6.
366 Peter Meineck
solves the dramaturgical problem of what to do with the chorus between
odes – rather than giving place to the scenes performed by the actors,
the chorus fully contributed as a visual reactive device existing within the
peripheral vision of the spectator and adding a layer of ocular emotional
dynamism.41
Mark Adamo – music, memory, and mediation

Grafting a contemporary referent onto ancient material, such as Schechner’s
modern Taiwanese Boy, might, at first sight, seem anachronistic, even an
artistic copout, yet, this was a significant aspect found in the work of all the
artists interviewed for this article. Mark Adamo composed the music and
wrote the libretto for his new opera Lysistrata based on the Aristophanes
play, which originated at the Houston Grand Opera and was presented at
City Opera in New York in the spring of 2006. Great opera houses could be
said to have become the keepers of the flame of the notion of the dramatic
chorus – most of them possess impressive, large full time choruses made up
of highly professional singers. Yet choruses are expensive, which is why they
have become the preserve of the great opera houses and the commercial
musical theatre. Adamo decided to mount his Lysistrata without a chorus
and do away with this most “Greek” of operatic accoutrements. Instead, he
created an ensemble cast of 17 who played all the parts and came together
to form choral groups in both song and movement. By not depending on
the hierarchical structure of the opera house, where the chorus plays second
fiddle to the principal singers, Adamo energized his production with an
ensemble-based chorality that was both musical and dramatic. He was able
to fully articulate the factional gender divisions of the original play and
keep a large group of singers on stage for most of the opera as reactive
choral witnesses to the unfolding action of the opera.
In conversation with Adamo, I learned that he was experimenting with
a very different choral device for his new operatic work based on the life of
Mary Magdalene. He is developing the idea of a half-chorus of contempo-
rary people, who he envisions will comment on the action they see occur-
ring on stage in a way that he hopes will emphasize the difference between
the traditional reception of early Christian history with new material based
on his view of the Gnostic Gospels. He spoke of “wanting this chorus to
41 In a workshop with theatre lecturers at the Association of Theatre in Higher Education conference
in Los Angeles in July 2010, I placed 12 people in a half-circle around a masked performer and asked
them to just watch listen and gently respond without “pulling focus.” The result was mesmerizing
for both spectators and participants and all agreed that the added visual dimension of a responsive
chorus enhanced the words.
actively question the accounts of the gospels that I want to put on stage.
Their reactions can help prompt the audience and guide their questions
into what is very controversial material, especially if one has had any kind
of Christian religious upbringing.” For Adamo, the choral reaction and
how that is communicated to his audience is key to making his new opera
work and he wants them to remain on stage for almost the entire piece,
constantly responding, commenting, and being seen to be affected by what
is happening on stage.42
In interviews and correspondence conducted for this paper Adamo was
able to shed light on the fascinating creative process of a composer and
librettist wrestling with the question of just what a chorus means on a
contemporary stage.
I concluded very early that – ancient as is the story of The Gospel of Mary
Magdalene – the opera to be made of it has to feel of our time: a time in
which a thousand versions of any given story are available at the click of a key,
a time in which our intensely heightened awareness that we’re telling a story
becomes part of the story itself. Unsurprisingly, then, my first and strongest
intuition about the shape of this opera was, and remains, that it must include
a chorus of contemporary listeners – students, bankers, mothers, moderns
all – commenting on and arguing with this new Biblical narrative as it
unfolds. But the problem that I immediately confronted was, arguably, a
problem that confronts all contemporary musical dramatists: that, in our
increasingly atomized, micro-niche times, the chorus is that element of opera
arguably easiest to write, but hardest to make feel necessary. Professionally,
AGMA’s [the American Guild of Musical Artists – the trade union that
represents artists working in opera and dance] contract tells you that chorus
means 8 on a part: if a soprano sings solo, she’s paid as a principal, and acting,
dancing, &c – all that will cost you extra, darling. Useful, if dispiriting, for
a composer to know: but what is a chorus artistically? Is it an orchestration
or an attitude?
Adamo posed a number of questions based on his observations of how
choruses have been defined and utilized in Opera, reminding us that these
issues can be traced back to the sixteenth century Florentine Camerata. This
group was remembering and misremembering Greek drama in unequal
measure and took from that great public literature the twin principles of
massed voices and dramatic remove: concluding that the chorus, like us,
can delight in, or recoil from, but never, ever affect the actions performed by
the principals onstage. Turning to the twentieth century Adamo highlights
several operatic and musical works that have featured what has been termed
“a chorus”:
42 For a detailed description of Adamo’s Lysistrata see Meineck 2006.
368 Peter Meineck
The Male Chorus, in Britten/Duncan’s The Rape of Lucretia, is a tenor
soloist. But doesn’t his dramatic stance – removed from the action, yet
still harrowed by it – make him as choral as Verdi/Solera’s imprisoned
Hebrews in “Va, pensiero”? Yes, Puccini/Illica/Giacosa’s “Humming Cho-
rus” in Madama Butterfly was, in fact, built to show off the operatic stage’s
first functioning rheostat: but does that make that magical minute any
less convincing a demonstration of how the chorus can be at once in the
orchestra and not of it? In Sondheim/Wheeler’s A Little Night Music, why
is “Perpetual Anticipation,” with its sparse three singers, a chorus, whereas
“A Weekend in the Country,” sung by twice that many voices, an ensemble?
(Here, does dramatic stance trump vocal mass?) Adams/Goodman’s “The
people are the heroes now,” which opens Nixon in China, refreshes with ‘80s
minimalism a form of dramatic exposition familiar to Aeschylus: I offered,
in my own Little Women, uses of the chorus both as doppelgängers of the
principals and timbral memories of a perfect and irretrievable moment in
their lives. Are those four singers a very small chorus, or an un-staged quartet
of shadow principals?
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene was commissioned by the Houston Grand
Opera and right from the start Adamo envisioned a chorus that might
be capable of mediating his audience’s response to the Gospel of John
and other Gnostic texts that had undergone their own process of textual
mediation between “earlier severe, tribal, and dogmatic versions of the story
with more cosmopolitan and literary (i.e., Athenian) elements.” Adamo
continued:
I wanted to retell the New Testament as a Greek tragedy: which meant, in
part, to frame the story with the thoughts and passions of its cultural heirs.
Modern people craving some elements of their religious heritage utterly
repulsed by others: this, I thought, is a character ideally suited to choral,
rather than individual portraiture. I liked the idea of such a chorus’s remove:
it seemed truthful to our situation. (We weren’t there: we can’t know what
really happened; and, if even we did, we’re powerless to affect its legacy.)
But precisely because this conflict between craving and repulsion still roils
so, in these religiously contentious times (though what time isn’t religiously
contentious?) I didn’t want the chorus only to frame the drama of Yeshua,
Mary, and Peter. At the same time, I didn’t want to upstage them, either.
(They are, lest we forget, the main characters of the story.) I wondered: how
can I treat the chorus so that its group identity, as well as its distance from the
main events, is static enough to impart to the drama that idea of importance
to the community, that sense of social scale that classical Greek drama does
so brilliantly? Yet how can I give them enough of an inner life – a sense
that their ambivalence toward their story was pushing them somewhere –
so that the audience would be involved in them as a character, rather than
merely as a device? Could I come up with a subplot – a choral drama, if you
will – played simultaneously, that would complement, rather than distract
from, the main drama?
This draft of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene opens in a modern but otherwise
undefined space, where a quintet of seekers – two men, three women –
assemble, dressed as we are: students, bankers, mothers, moderns all. It is
sunset: there is a bonfire. Each holds a clearly recognizable Bible. They
make to fling the book into the flames. They falter: and, in desperate prayer,
entreat of the sky: “Tell me, Father: tell me why I should not burn this.” This
utterance develops detail and passion, and builds to an anguished iteration
of the same question: whereupon the main chorus – 48 voices strong, also
dressed as we are – appears to intone, “Because we can correct it (this story:)
Because we can complete it.” An electronic collage of fragments from, and
reports about, the Gnostic Gospels (unearthed in 1948) wells up from the
stage: and, as both the quintet and the Chorus wonder, “Who is she: the
Magdalene woman?” we see Mary Magdalene’s bedroom, and the story
proper begins.
This gives me a way of dramatizing traditional choral observation. In this
opening, the large chorus is making the case to the quintet that the New
Testament variation we’re about to see contains enough “correction” and
“completion” of the tradition they both inherited that there’s no reason
to abandon it. But we don’t know yet – and won’t know till the end –
whether the Quintet will be convinced. Even as the Chorus comments on
the story, or quotes the startling, but scripturally documented, premises of
scenes we’d never thought we’d see Jesus play, we have to wait till the opera’s
final moments to see if the quintet has been persuaded.
As of March 2011, this seems to me rich enough to be sustaining and yet
lean enough to support, rather than compete with, the drama: but I’m still
writing the music even as we speak. We’ll certainly know more by opening
night!
Anne Bogart: choral empathy and neuroscience

Anne Bogart burst onto the downtown New York theatre scene in the mid
1980s and immediately established a reputation for reinterpreting “classic”
works with a daring production of South Pacific that restaged this famous
musical by setting it in a clinic for the war-damaged and making its themes
directly resonate with contemporary events. In 1994 she founded the SITI
Company named for the Saratoga International Theatre Institute, initially
a summer program in upstate New York, where she worked with famed
Japanese director Tadisho Suzuki. From there, Bogart developed her own
closely knit ensemble to examine theatre from an American perspective
and based her process on the movement teachings of Mary Overlie known
370 Peter Meineck
as “Viewpoints.” These techniques formed the basis for her exploration
of how a text operates in performance and her desire to seek a different
approach to theatre than the predominant methods of American actor
training. Most of these tend to rely heavily on what she describes as “the
miniaturization of the Stanislavsky system,” which seeks to develop a highly
personal emotional response from the actor via affective recollection.43
Her work bears a direct relationship to the symporeutic foundations of
Greek drama in that the Viewpoints prioritize the body over the text to
facilitate the emergence of a “truer emotional response.” As Ellen Lauren
has described “One is simply too busy to act. When the body informs the
psychology, the language is startlingly alive.”44 Bogart’s Viewpoints fall into
nine main types: the tempo of stage movement defined as the duration of an
action; kinesthetic response that causes spontaneous reactions; repetition
within one’s own body and the adoption of another’s movements; the
shape of the body in space; behavioral and expressive gesture; architecture
and the physical environment; spatial relationship (the distance between
objects on stage and the tension that exists between them); topography and
the landscape of the stage; and stage design including floor patterns.45
In October 2009 Anne Bogart’s SITI Company staged a seven-actor
version of Sophocles’ Antigone, a new adaptation by Irish dramatist Jocelyn
Clarke, at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City. The staging was
deceptively simple, four long tables arranged to form a square with an
empty area in the middle. These tables anchored the seven performers who
wore modern business attire. Initially, the design resembled a TV political
discussion show, but then the tables were walked on, used as benches,
seats and biers and divided by light. Dance, music, and measured focused
movement were staged around the edges of the central tables. The total
effect was an intensely focused experience of Antigone and the choral parts
were delivered either by a single figure, or the entire ensemble effortlessly
morphing between roles based on their psychical actions and with little in
the way of costume changes. Bogart’s emphasis was on the actors’ bodies
moving through space and their relationship to each other, and in this
environment the text seemed fully corporeal and wholly embodied. In this
way, her entire ensemble can be compared to a Greek chorus, moving
together and connected in theatrical time and space in their common aim
of projecting the truth of a story. Watching Bogart’s work is to understand
the potential of the group to contain and communicate narrative.
43 Bogart 2001: 37. 44 Dixon and Smith 1995: 64.
45 See Bogart 2005 and Dixon and Smith 1995: 20–3 for detailed descriptions of Bogart’s Viewpoints
and how they operate in her creative process.
Bogart’s focus on ensemble is rare in American theatre and she has com-
mented, “In our (American) culture, which is rapidly spreading around the
world, collective action is suspect. We have been discouraged to think that
innovation can be a collaborative act. There has to be a star. Group effort
is a sign of weakness.”46 Her work places an emphasis not only on move-
ment, but on the space between actors and how intentions and emotions
inform that space. Central to her process is what cognitive psychologists
have called “proprioception” – the sense of the relative position of different
parts of the body in relation to each other, or what might be termed the
orientation of one’s limbs in space. Proprioception is what allows us to
walk without looking at our feet and why people who have consumed a
large quantity of alcohol and have impaired proprioception are asked to
prove their soberness by closing their eyes and touching their nose. Her
interest in the unspoken aspects of theatrical communication has led her
to explore the role of cognition in human interaction in a new play named
Who Do You Think You Are presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts
in Columbus, Ohio in October 2009. Subsequently, Bogart has started
to make strong connections between her own process using Viewpoints
and the new research coming from the field of neuroscience. In particular,
the findings regarding what has been termed the “mirror neuron system”
which, it has been proposed, forms connections between the visual and
motor cortexes allowing humans to learn behavior quickly through both
observation and kinesthetic understanding. As Bogart explains:
For your mirror neurons to fire, you have to know something about the
action you are observing. Theater is the art form that most resembles daily
life. Actors walk, sit, speak, pick up a teacup, throw a book, kiss another
person, shake hands or jump over a puddle. An audience member’s own
motor control cortex is more excited when seeing other people doing moves
that they can do than what they cannot do. Unlike watching virtuosic dance
or looking at an abstract expressionist painting, the mirror neurons of a
theater audience respond wildly to the action found in a play because of its
familiarity. And all of this happens in the unmediated live space between
actors and audience in a theater.
The activation of the mirror circuits on both sides of the footlights provides
the observer with a real experiential comprehension of the observed action.
Physiologically the observed action is literally being mapped onto the motor
system of the observer. The audience’s capability for empathy, imitation,
action understanding and intention understanding are all linked to this
action-in-restraint. The mirror neuron system is helping us to translate
46 Bogart 2001: 29.

372 Peter Meineck
what we see so that we can relate to the world. All of this is via focused
action in the body of the actor transmitted to the neuronal system of the
audience.
The theory of “mirror neurons” and their role in creating empathic
responses between the viewer and the viewed was first advanced by a
research team at the University of Parma led by Giacomo Rizzolatti in the
early 1990s. At Parma, they were conducting cognitive research on Macaque
monkeys and recording their neural responses to picking up food items.
According to what has now almost become a Neuroscience urban legend,
when a researcher inadvertently picked up the food item that had been
placed for the test, the monkeys had the same neural response.47 This has
led to an enormous amount or research to determine if humans possess this
same kind of “empathy response” and to establish if our brains will respond
similarly to both the action performed and the action shown.48 Yet, this
bold theory has not been without controversy. Though he admits that
the discovery of mirror neurons is incredibly exciting, Gregory Hickok
has cautioned against the rush to view them as transmitters of “action
understanding.” Hickok has questioned the research of the past 10 years
and proposes that mirror neurons are both more complex and more fully
integrated into an overall system of sensory motor learning where the act
of moving creates the basis for the learned or modeled behavior not the
act of empathetic watching. Yet, despite his reservations, Hickok concedes:
“Mirror neurons are a fascinating class of cells that deserve to be thoroughly
investigated in the monkey, and explored systematically for possible homo-
logues in humans.”49
Rizzolatti’s pioneering work on mirror neurons led him to divide them
into two broad categories; “somatosensory” neurons respond to actual
touch whereas “somatosensory and visual” (bimodal) neurons are triggered
only by visual stimulus that occurs in the vicinity of the tactile receptive
field. This led Rizzolatti to conclude that mirror neurons work empathet-
ically in that humans are able to learn quite complex movement actions
just by observing the motions performed by another. According to Riz-
zolatti this is the basis of how humans process the emotions of others
and are able to understand their individual predicaments and situations.50
47 Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, and Rizzolatti 1992: 176–80. Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004:
169–92.
48 A thoroughly readable guide to the major strides and experiments relating to mirror neurons is
Iacoboni 2008.
49 Hickok 2009. See also Catmur, Walsh and Heyes 2007.
50 Rizzolatti, Corrado, and Anderson 2008: 242.
V. S. Ramachandran has gone so far as to suggest that the development
of mirror-neuron systems in humans 40,000 years ago significantly con-
tributed to our evolutionary development as social beings able to under-
stand the intentions of other humans and exchange skills and knowledge
including language via imitation.51 This ability of mirror neurons to con-
trol motor goals rather than basic muscle action has been neatly summed
up by John Skoyles:
our perception of bodily movements happens not in terms of objects but
in terms of knowledge held in the motor cortex as to how our own move-
ments could carry them out. In a sense, the brain sees the actions of oth-
ers by parasitizing its own knowledge of the actions it can do with its
body.52
What many in the neuroscience community are positing is that human

cognitive abilities to imitate, learn, speak, understand, and empathize are
linked to embodiment – our minds and our bodies are connected in
experiential cognition and we process the emotion of others through a
system of “action representation.” Thus, “we ground our empathic res-
onance in the experience of our acting body and the emotions associ-
ated with specific movements.”53 If we follow this line of thought we
can see that symporeia in ancient Greek culture had a particular role to
play in human cognition and emotional intelligence beyond its usual
prescribed role of creating social cohesion and reinforcing group iden-
tity. In neural terms, movement is an essential inter-personal non-verbal
communicator of emotion and empathy. Additionally, the role of mirror
neurons in cognition has also been linked to proprioception. These con-
nections between facial recognition, emotional empathy, moving in space
and kinesthetic communication have a direct relevance to understanding
how collective movement and the mask might have functioned in the
Greek theatre where proprioception was an essential element of the per-
formance. Masked actors have no peripheral vision and cannot see their
arms or feet or even the other performers on stage for most of the time.
A heightened sense of proprioception and an acute spatial awareness was
therefore essential and elicited a direct physical response from the specta-
tors, further enhancing their emotional connectivity to the play they were
watching.
51 Ramachandran 2007 and Oberman, Pineda, and Ramachandran 2007: 62–6. See also Iacoboni
2008: 38–46 and 116–25 and Gazzaniga 2008: 158–202.
52 Skoyles 2008: 103. 53 Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau, Mazziotta and Lenzi 2003: 5502.
374 Peter Meineck
Ismeme Lada-Richards has described the Greek theatre as “the space par
excellence where the experience of the ‘other’ can be conveyed through the
tangible reality of body and flesh.”54
Greek theatre appears to be constructing for itself an “implied” spectator
who is both “engaged” in the fiction and capable of penetrating it, both
bewitched and ready to understand the subtle interplays of representation-
levels, i.e. the ways in which they interact not only with each other but with
non-fictional reality as well.55
Lada-Richards sets the experience of watching Greek drama in opposition

to her understanding of Brecht’s concept of an “epic theatre.” This favors
reason over emotion with the intention of allowing the spectator to gain an
impassioned and detached view of the drama rather than being manipulated
and overwhelmed by feelings of empathy. For Brecht, the ideal spectator
was an alienated one.56 However, Lada-Richards sets out to demonstrate
that the emotionality of Greek drama is not hostile to thought, but an
exercise in theatrical empathy “in which the entire audience is implicitly
invited to share – of the intellect as much as of emotion.”57 She suggests
that even if every spectator at Aeschylus’ Oresteia might not have been able
to fully process the complexities of the choral songs, then their sense of
pity and fear in experiencing the play was not only an instinctive response
but “cognitively elicited through their cultural acquaintance with and their
ability to speculate upon the legends as well as through the generically
aroused expectation of the potmos that waits the heroes of tragic drama.”58
If we also take into consideration the proprioception of the audience,
their cultural and personal familiarity with the dance forms and movement
placed before their eyes and the music they heard, then their cognitive
54 Lada-Richards 1993: 106. On the importance of the body to ancient acting she has also written
“what holds an ancient Greek play together on the stage is the continuity provided by the actor’s
own body,” Lada-Richards 2002b: 410. She also quotes from the letter of David Garrick (1831–1832)
on how the emotional force of the actor “like electrical fire, shoots through the veins, marrow,
bones and all, of every spectator” (2002b: 413), This vivid description might well be equated with
proprioception.
55 Lada-Richards 1993: 122.
56 For a less oppositional view, which takes a more moderate and performance-centric attitude to
Brecht’s theories see Woodruff 2008: 167–71.
57 Lada-Richards 1993: 125.
58 Lada-Richards 1993: 116. See also Henrichs 1994/5: 56–111, “As a performer of the ritual dance,
the chorus exists simultaneously inside the dramatic realm of the play and outside of it in the
political and cultic realm of the here and now” (70). Henrichs catalogs textual moments of choral
self-referentiality where a chorus is remarking on either their need to dance or the reasons they
cannot. The impetus to begin choral movement or any interruption is significant in tragedy.
response was elicited on yet another level beyond the sympathetic under-
standing of plot and character to empathy with the spectator’s entire body.
This notion is found in Plato who felt that mimesis was manifest in the
body and could be very dangerous by becoming “second nature to the
body, the speech and the thought” (Rep. 395c–95d) and that the man who
is “capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and imitating
all things” should be expelled from the city in favor of a more “austere”
poet (Rep. 398a–98b).
Though we might prefer not to agree with Plato’s position, he was
certainly on to something by placing the body first in his list of human
elements that could be corrupted by mimesis, for our ability to recognize
movement is quite remarkable. In 1973 Johansson created a series of films
of what at first sight resemble random tiny dots. In actuality, these were
light diodes attached to the joints of a human figure and impossible to
discern until the figures moved and it became perfectly clear that a human
was being displayed. What Johansson illustrated is that from this most
basic of information humans can very quickly identify people known to
them by the way they move and can even recognize themselves, which
is all the more remarkable considering that most people do not watch
themselves in motion.59 This is a characteristic of proprioception and this
ability seems to be regulated by mirror neurons that forge links between
specific movements and the visual perception of those same movements
in other people.60 This has a direct relevance to the movements of an
ancient chorus member performing in a mask who depended on chore-
ographed bodily movements and pronounced gestures in conjunction with
words and music to communicate emotional objectives. The use of the
mask may subconsciously favor the body in the eyes of the spectator, thus
enhancing emotional empathy and even visceral participation in the action
presented.61 Furthermore, studies have shown that the muscles of audi-
ence members are stimulated when watching dance performances where
they experience a kinesthetic sensation known as motor simulation.62 The
neural activity in those watching increases significantly when the dance
performed is well known to the spectator. This was demonstrated in 2005
by a team led by Patrick Haggard. In a controlled experiment, professional
ballet dancers watched ballet and then the Brazilian dance/martial art form
59 Johansson 1973: 201–11. 60 Gallagher 2005: 65–85.

61 The visual supremacy of the body over the face is reflected in Pl. Chrm. 154d where Charmides’
physical beauty is compared to that of a statue to the point where if he were to disrobe he would
have “no-face” (pr»swpov).
62 Jola 2010.
376 Peter Meineck
known as capoeira and capoeira dancers watched capoeira followed by bal-
let. The dancers watching their own dance form responded more strongly,
suggesting the influence of motor expertise on action observation. There-
fore, the neural “mirror-system” may well integrate movements seen with
movements known, and “the human brain seems to understand actions by
motor simulation.”63
The spectators watching tragedy could all be classified as “expert
dancers.” As discussed above, dance was an enormous part of Greek cultural
identity alongside the other symporeutic activities of hoplite drill, rowing
a trireme, riding in a cavalry formation, or being part of a procession. Of
the Athenians, it might be safely said that almost everyone in attendance
was highly familiar with dance from an early age, not only as spectators,
but as dancers in what was a widespread communal participatory activity
in Greek culture. Just consider the Dionysia, an important festival to be
sure, but only one among many public festivals that included some form
of symporeutic event held throughout the year. It involved 50 boys and
50 men from each of the 10 tribes of Attica competing in the dithyramb,
a total of 1,000 performers recruited exclusively from the population of
Athenian males every year. In addition, each tragedy also featured a chorus
of 12 to 15 and the comedies 24, placing around 165 dramatic chorus mem-
bers in each Dionysia (not to mention another 150 or so in the Lenaea).64
Therefore, the vast majority, if not all, of the spectators may well have
performed at least one time themselves, if not at the Dionysia or a major
city festival then at the very least in their own deme or at smaller family
events.65 Small wonder then that Plato pronounced that the uneducated
man is c»reutov “without the dance” (Laws 654a).
Can a modern audience ever watch Greek tragedy with this kind of
intense bodily knowledge of choral movement and music? There is no
doubt as to the enormous popularity and appreciation of music and dance
in drama in Athens. In Aristophanes’ Wasps (1474–1537), Philocleon breaks
out of his enforced captivity at the end of the play with what must have been
an incredible rendition of an old tragic dance of Thespis and/or Phrynichus
and challenges anyone to better his moves. This is certainly a reference to the
“new music” and dance styles that were becoming popular in the last quarter
63 Calvo-Merino, Glaser, Grèzes, Passingham, and Haggard 2005: 1243–9. See also Calvo-Merino,
Grèzes, Glaser, Passingham, and Haggard 2006: 1157–67.
64 Swift (2010: 38) calculates the total number of chorus slots available to the Athenians at the Dionysia,
Lenaea, and Thargelia each year at 1,815 which she estimates is equivalent to 5 to 10 percent of the
citizen population (37).
65 Ar. Ran. 729. Pl. Leg. 7. 814e–817e. See also Ley 2007: 150–66.
of the fifth century and Aristophanes rambunctious anti-hero performs his
ancient dance in defiance of the social re-education that has been forced on
him by his elitist leaning son. Philocleon’s dance represents freedom and he
closes the play by inviting the chorus to dance with him right “off the stage”
(1537) as if his rebellion propelled by dance will spill out into the theatron
and into the streets of Athens.66 In another Aristophanes play, the hymn
sung and danced by the women of the chorus of Thesmophoriazusae (947–
1000) illustrates this strong connection between spectator and masked
dancer as they invite the spectators to watch them form their circle dance.
It is as if their appeal to join hands reached across the orchēstra and out into
the theatron and was felt by everybody. In this sense choral spectatorship
was also choral participation.
Come on and dance!
Light feet forming the circle
Join together, hand in hand
Everyone feel the rhythm of the dance
Quicker now, move those feet!
Let everyone’s eyes everywhere
Watch the formation of our circle dance.67
Ar. Thesm. 953–8, tr. Alexander Hollmann
It should be stated that the feeling of bodily empathy generated by propri-

oception is not what Paul Woodruff calls “Theater of presence” – a term
he uses to describe the kind of performance where the spectator is fully
invited to participate in the action. Woodruff places this under the heading
of “bad watching” proposing that this occurs when
(a) the audience is not emotionally engaged with any of the main characters
(so that they have no reason to pay attention for the measured time) or
(b) the audience is engaged in a way that distracts them from the action
they are watching (so they are never really paying attention at all).
Thus Philocleon’s dance-rebellion takes place at the play’s conclusion, the
end of its measured time. For Woodruff, effective theatre spectating requires
a measure of critical distance that is informed by emotional response and
empathy.68 However, Woodruff also points out that theatrical distancing
can go too far – to the point that the spectator is not held by the action
and therefore not engaged by the characters on stage. His definition of
“bad watching” might describe any number of modern Greek play perfor-
mances that distance audiences so far from a true emotional response so
66 On the New Music see Csapo 2004.
67 On the ritual association of this hymn see Bierl 2009: 83–125. 68 Woodruff 2008: 179–80.
378 Peter Meineck
that only a critical attitude remains and this response is severely blunted by
the lack of empathy. For Woodruff, “emotions depend on understanding”
and “there is no understanding of people without empathy”; this is his key
to “watching theater well” which underscores his basic definition of theatre
as “the art of watching and being watched.” Anne Bogart’s extensive work
on the actor’s movement closely keyed to the objectives of plot, the inter-
personal dynamics of the characters on stage and the spatial environment
is an attempt to create an “embodied empathy” – an essential element
of theatrical spectatorship, which was particularly highlighted in ancient
Greek dramas where the performer’s body was accentuated by the use of
the mask.
Peter Wilson reminds us “for the Athenians, tragedy was – fundamen-
tally, predominantly, and persistently – a musical event.”69 Perhaps then
we might equate the kind of excitement Philocleon feels for his dance
steps and old-time tragic musical styles with the sheer pleasure many mod-
ern audience members might derive from experiencing staged music and
dance today. This might be the singing and dancing choruses in South
Pacific or West Side Story, or a finely crafted and well-placed ballet in an
opera such as Aida or Les Troyens. While most modern audience members
may have never had any dance training or performed at anything more
than a school disco or a relative’s wedding, they do tend to comprehend
the cultural context of the dances on the commercial theatrical stage, where
the choreography tends towards the familiar and the formulaic, executed
incredibly well. Commercial musicals tap into an audience’s conscious-
ness of particular musical and dance forms. This might manifest itself as
nostalgia for the songs of Rogers and Hammerstein or the recognition
of having once danced themselves to the music of a “jukebox” musical.
Recent offerings of this genre include Jersey Boys, featuring the 1960s songs
of Franki Valli and the Four Seasons and Movin’ Out, which set the modern
dance choreography of Twyla Tharp to the popular music of Billy Joel.
Let us not forget the global phenomenon that is Mamma Mia – a grand
formulaic musical that also winks at its material – the music of ABBA –
and creates an entire narrative from a collection of nostalgic popular songs
that serve to remind everyone, however jaded, of summer holidays and
carefree, youthful times. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Phyllida Lloyd
decided to set her musical on a Greek island, capturing the mythic and
exotic experience of a hedonistic overseas excursion – a modern version of
Dionysian liminality perhaps? Music and dance can be the most thrilling
69 Wilson 2005: 183.
and emotional part of experiencing musical theatre and the commercial
musical is currently the most successful and popular genre of live theatre.
Likewise, in the fifth and fourth centuries bce, the music and dances of
tragedy and comedy helped propel the spread of Athenian drama across the
Hellenic world.
Will Power – contemporizing the chorus

Music is the great loss when it comes to trying to fully understand the
chorus in performance. We might never know how the aulos pipes and the
voices of the chorus sounded, though it is clear just how innovative and
popular dramatic music was in the ancient world. The music of tragedy
was cutting-edge, bold and dynamic and in many respects the “popular
music” of its day. With this in mind, to conclude, we turn to the spoken
word artist and dramatist Will Power, who in the spring of 2006 staged
The Seven, his own hip-hop adaptation of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes
at the New York Theatre Workshop after developmental versions were
staged at the University of Iowa and at the Thick Description Theatre
Company in San Francisco in 2001. Will Power took Aeschylus’ work as
a starting point and used the 1961 Phillip Vellacot translation as the basis
for his own new text. In interviews, he explained that before he read Seven
Against Thebes he had very little exposure to Greek tragedy but immediately
responded to the play’s sense of the past, fraternal conflict and the shadow
of a family curse. As he explained, “I wanted to flip this story.” “Flipping”
is the notion of appropriating materials from one form, re-arranging them,
and placing them in another and is a widespread notion in hip-hop culture
where in music it is known as “sampling.” As Will Power explained, “A
Hip Hop artist can ‘flip’ James Brown and make him sing with Jay-Z.
We hear the James Brown riff again, recognize it, but now it exists in a
totally new context. It speaks to us differently.” Thus, the past can be
re-ordered and re-appropriated. An example of what he means occurs at
the beginning of The Seven. The production was fully contemporary with
a multi-level set and modern costumes influenced by hip-hop fashions.
The original music fused hip-hop with R&B, soul, and hard-driving funk,
and the lighting design reflected a night-club rather than a theatre. The
production opened with loud music and the energetic dancing of a chorus
of six performers silhouetted in backlight. Next, a DJ standing over her
turntables was introduced to the audience by means of the raising of a
special light on her station and she chanted:
380 Peter Meineck
And hey, don’t be afraid
If you’ve never heard a’ B.I.G.
And now don’t be afraid
If you ain’t heard a’ Sophocles
‘Cause we welcome all y’all here to this Hip Hop Greek tragedy, oh yeah.
Now let me tell ya who I be
The one who make Shakespeare jam with James Brown
Put Snoopy and Snoop in the same dog pound
I can transform a scratch
Into more than an itch
There are no two worlds
That I can’t mix.
I am The DJ.
Will Power talked about his use of the DJ:
This is my contemporary version of a Greek chorus. The DJ is a medium,
the DJ can channel, can combine eras of music and see what works and
what doesn’t, so it’s kind of like the DJ became the vehicle for me to
have a conversation with Aeschylus, looking back at his text and having this
dialogue span across centuries. What a DJ does is create a journey. It’s a craft,
a science, like playing a musical instrument. Coming from my community
in the Filmore district of San Francisco I was one of the storytellers that
went into the professional realm by coming to New York and learning by
sitting at the feet of some of the masters. But, I also love when people in the
community get together and just swap stories. It doesn’t have to be that they
know any professional theatre technique. The idea of a chorus as a village
just getting together to tell a story is really profound for me and something
I am very passionate about. For example, I recently watched a Vietnamese
family come together to tell a song-story about harvesting rice, it was all in
a circle, the youngest was about 11 and the eldest in their sixties and all ages
in between, about 12 or 13 people and it was so powerful. Now they weren’t
the best dancers, they weren’t the best singers – it wasn’t about that. It was
about this family just coming together and telling their story. This is what
“chorus” means to me.
Daniel Banks has placed the hip-hop DJ within the tradition of African
and African American Orature – a term used to describe different genres
of oral performance and to afford them equal cultural weight alongside
written texts.70 Banks’ list of Orature includes storytelling, proverbs, rid-
dles, chants, call-and-response, songs, gesture, and mime. Likewise, Greek
choral performance essentially combines the visual aspects of dance, move-
ment, and masking with collective song and spoken word in a performance
70 Banks 2010.
form that could also be described as Orature. Therefore, the ancient chorus
needed to present a variety of highly accomplished performance forms in
order to be fully effective in communicating with its audience. As Power
commented, “for our chorus in The Seven we needed people who could
dance, rhyme, sing and act at a very high level. We auditioned so much
for this piece and the principals were easier to find than the chorus. The
chorus was very, very hard to cast.” What Power was striving for was a
chorus that would communicate dynamically and directly to his audience,
propel the narrative action and emotional qualities of the play led by the
DJ who was positioned as a kind of meta-theatrical commentator, “emcee”
(master of ceremonies), and guide to the play. In this respect, Power’s DJ
stands directly in the tradition of the djeli, the Mande term for an oral
artist, or Griot.71 Power described his original idea for his chorus as the
“brothers and sisters you see at clubs helping the DJ set up the sound
system and then keep the room moving.” He also wanted the chorus
members who start the play as distraught Theban citizens to be able to
play the six Argive heroes that unite with Polynices against Thebes and
worked with them to place those character traits on each chorus member.
This gave them a sense of individual identity within the wider group and
helped create a “conversation” within the chorus so that they could display
an assortment of reactions and emotions to the events of the play. “Just
like I flipped the play, I flipped the chorus.” Indeed, they were both the
people of Thebes, the Argive heroes and the diverse crowd one could see
at any hip-hop club in Brooklyn or Queens in New York on a Saturday
night.
Richard Schechner talked of employing a similar device during rehearsals
for Dionysus in 69:
I approached the text by allowing the chorus members to underline phrases
or words that they felt strongly about and to only speak those lines when
they came together in rehearsal “that gave me the tone of the way the chorus
sounded, both strongly positive and strongly negative. It also made it very
thick and thin. Occasionally there was only one voice, sometimes there were
all the voices and sometimes there were sections left out. The text was what
they had chosen by themselves. We brought these words into direct contact
with the audience in two different ways: one way was that we often sang
to them, using American folk children’s rhymes and started to teach them
to the audience to get them to be rebellious against Pentheus. This chorus
then was a very, very powerful instrument, communal and collective and
not an individual.
71 Banks points out that this term is more widely known in the West.
382 Peter Meineck
Schechner’s approach helped him find a distinct community for the chorus
and give them a sense of personal ownership over the words they spoke or
sang. In a similar way he created a distinct history for each of the old men
of his first chorus in The Oresteia. Each one had a reason why he did not
accompany Agamemnon to Troy: “One was blind, one lame, one an idiot
and so on” (Schechner). This helped the audience comprehend the chorus
as elders of a Chinese village first and foremost and it created empathy.” In
a similar vein, Will Power’s concept of “flipping,” a common trope in hip-
hop culture, could be compared to Barbara Kowalzig’s description of the use
of aetiologies in relationship to choral performance. She has demonstrated
how aetiological myths deliberately transcend time in order to conflate a
mythical past with a ritual present. Thus, a sense of sacredness and age-old
practice is created by attaching myths to certain visible physical locations
and local customary practices and then, often enacted by means of a
performance. According to Kowalzig, aetiology, “transcends real (historical)
time by postulating a physical or local continuity of religious place.”72 We
can see this in action at the end of the Oresteia where Aeschylus creates a new
aetiology for the Areopagus council, marking its recently changed political
and social role in real Athenian society with an ancient foundation myth
linked to an actual physical location – in this case, Ares’ Rock in Athens
just a few hundred feet to the west of the theatre. Will Power wanted to use
the story of Seven Against Thebes to articulate his feelings about fathers and
sons in the community he grew up in and Schechner was seeking to draw
his audiences into a sense of theatrical communitas by setting the familiar
and even the mundane against the mythical world of ancient drama. It is
notable that in their works it is the chorus that more often than not acts as
the mediating force between these two positions.73
Will Power utilized pop cultural references, recognizable tropes from
African American culture and contemporary popular music to “zoom” his
audience into the world of his play. Richard Schechner evaded cultural
specificity and challenged his audience’s conceptions about theatrical envi-
ronment. Ann Bogart places great importance on the spatial dynamics that
exist between her performers and the audience and in so doing seeks to
specifically articulate the intentions and emotions she finds in the ancient
text to make it perfectly comprehensible for her audiences. Mark Adamo
created a superb piece of choral drama by initially eschewing the chorus and
72 Kowalzig 2007b: 28.
73 In a production of Agamemnon with Olympia Dukakis by Aquila Theatre in New York in 2004
I individuated every chorus member by assigning a distinct character trait to each one, a similar
technique to the one employed by Will Power. See Foley 2007: 363–4.
is boldly experimenting with new forms of choral mediation to articulate
the diversity of views about a sacred text. These artists have all found con-
temporary methods to create a relationship between their audiences and
ancient material where the lines between what is old and new, time
and place and cultural points of reference are constantly blurred, crossed
and even broken. What is left is the chorus, who in Greek tragedy is
depicted navigating its way through this mutable and mediating dramatic
territory. The chorus is at the center of ancient Greek drama – it embodies
mediation and modern directors who have understood this have managed
to produce bold, provocative, and dynamic realizations of Greek plays. At
the same time, their various techniques might have much to teach us about
how the ancient chorus operated within a culture that placed a high value
on a sense of communal symporeutic engagement.
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Index
Achaios in basic tragic plot, 224

Omphale, 299 comic, 74
actor dramatic competitions as, 36, 55, 223
lead actor and chorus, 104–5 Alcman, 168, 170, 236, 245
see also chorus-leader; singing fr. 1 PMG, 233
Adamo, Mark, 366–9, 382 fr. 3 PMG, 44
Lysistrata production, 366 Alexander the Great, 180, 195
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene production, Allan, Maud, 345–6, 350
366–9 altar, 9
Aeschylus aristocracy, 234, 241
Agamemnon, 69–70, 124 Aristophanes
40–257, 83, 84–5 Acharnians, 74–5, 283, 284, 286–9, 358
160–83, 90 chorus identity, 287
355–488, 85–8, 91 chorus role after the parabasis, 288–9
717–36, 84, 94 Babylonians, 283–6, 304
750–81, 91 chorus identity, 284–5
975–1034, 94 Banqueters, 281–3
Choephori, 70, 119 Birds, 358
585–652, 96 Clouds, 281, 293
624, 93 early career, 278–9
Eumenides, 68–9, 73–4, 75, 104 Ecclesiazusae, 298, 358
299–346, 43–7 Frogs, 277
Persians, 59–77 Knights, 289–93
115–25, 65 chorus role, 290–1
532–47, 52–3 Lysistrata, 74
686–8, 277 1296–1315, 170
908–1077, 54 Sappho, 315–16
967–73, 66 Thesmophoriazusae
987–1078, 72–3 947–1000, 377
Supplices, 68, 104, 126, 132, 171 Wasps, 74, 75, 293, 294–6
tragedy titles, 38 1474–1537, 376–7
aetiology chorus role, 295
and modern productions, 382 Aristotle, 317
birth of Dionysus, 217 Poetics, 19, 21, 158, 240, 248, 359
of the cult of Artemis Tauropolos, 205–7 Arnold, Matthew, 100
of masks, 167 Artemis, 205–9
of ritual, 217 choral goddess, 183, 197
of tragic performance, 219, 220 cult, 186, 190–8
Agathon audience
Telephos, 301–2 chorus and audience engagement, 75, 78, 98,
agōn 279
424
Index 425
chorus as internal audience, 58 educative role, 310, 313, 314–16
identification in the action, 27, 104, 282–3, mediatory role of the comic chorus, 296
288 representation of writing in, 298, 303
knowledge and participation, 299, 301, 302 see also kōmos; parabasis
relation with chorus, 39, 104 communitas, 225, 382
response to Greek drama, 1–2, 18, 374–8 community, 105, 134, 145
zooming devices, 90, 361–3 chorus and, 131, 181
see also empathy festival drama as a community project, 281
aulos, 6, 8, 247 Cratinus
authority Deliades, 201
of the chorus, 27, 40–1, 58, 130, 260–1, 312–13 cult, 219–20, 223, 224
tension in, 105 see also Artemis
cultural memory, 39
explored through comedy, 310 dance, 249
explored through the chorus, 102 Athenian comedy and, 309
audience response, 249, 375–7
Bacchylides, 246 choral dance, 9–10, 20, 211–12, 224, 359–60
Ballets Russes, 347–8, 350 choral projection and, 222
barbarian(s), 36, 47, 51, 182, 186, 197 Greek chorus and contemporary dancing,
Barker, Granville 340–1, 346–7
Iphigenia in Tauris production, 349–50 Greek dance in early twentieth-century
Black Sea Britain, 345
Greek economic interest in, 198–202, 207–8 deixis
body, 370 absence of deixis in choral ode, 6
Bogart, Anne, 369–72, 378, 382 demonstrative pronoun, 44, 65, 97, 107, 219
Antigone production, 370 melic poetry, 24
merging fiction and reality, 43, 75
Calame, Claude, 19, 23, 233 referential ambiguity, 46–7, 76
Cambridge Ritualists, 343, 344 democracy, 102, 105, 234, 242
choral ode fragmented choruses and, 125
connection with narrative scenes, 365–6 Diphilus
chorēgia, 20, 242, 243 Sappho, 315
chorēgos direct speech, 65, 79, 85, 87
Antimachus, 289 dithyramb, 26, 103, 169, 276, 376
Callistratus, 281–2 Duncan, Isadora, 345, 347–8
function in democratic Athens, 243–4, 280–1,
359 education
chorus-leader educative role of choral training, 180, 181,
actor in position of, 50, 72–5, 223–4 261–5
archetypal female chorus-leader, 163–4, 168, see also comedy
170 Egypt, 181–2
displaced chorus-leader, 160, 164, 172 emotion
divine paradigm for, 166, 218, 219, 220 audience emotional engagement, 59, 374
role of the comic, 288 chorus distance to the action, 248
tragic reimagination of, 176 chorus’ emotion, 42, 46, 47
City Dionysia, see Great Dionysia determinants of emotional attitudes, 39
city-state female characters and, 115, 116
citizenship, 180 metrical changes and, 110–16, 120–3
identity, 133, 136, 137, 144, 145, 152–3 tragic reversal and, 54
loyalty to, 145 empathy, 250
represented by the chorus, 25–6, 37, 212 mirror neurons, 371–9
comedy see also audience
comic kōmos in tragedy, 224 encomium, 240
differences between comic and tragic epic, 49, 85
choruses, 76, 279–80 epiphany, 214, 216
426 Index
Eupolis gender
Cities, 201, 286 choral identity and, 132
Euripides female choruses, 23, 37–8, 39, 40, 171
Andromache, 126 gender-identity, 133, 136, 139, 142, 143
Bacchae, 132, 169, 171, 211–26 gender-politics, 136
64–169, 215–21 German Idealism, 318
Cyclops, 160, 169 see also Hegel; Hölderlin; Schiller; Schlegel
Electra, 120 Ginner, Ruby, 346–7
479–86, 11–13 gnōmē, 10, 39, 62, 88–94
699–746, 3–18 Great Dionysia, 26, 98, 103, 239, 240, 247, 358,
Hecuba, 126 376
Helen, 115, 163–77
170–90, 173–4 hand(s), 20, 73
375–85, 165–6 gestures of masked actors, 365
1465–74, 169 Harrison, Jane, 343, 344
Hercules Furens, 124 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 319–20, 337
687–95, 254 on Antigone, 331
Hippolytus, 127, 299 on the comic chorus, 335–6
Ion, 115, 127, 133, 145–53 on the tragic chorus, 332–7
184–9, 145–6 Hellenicity, 51, 55, 182, 203, 210
196–8, 146–7 chorus communicating Hellenicity, 178
209–11, 146 Henrichs, Albert, 25, 254
235, 147 Herodotus, 54, 57, 95, 156, 169, 181, 186, 190–1
452–71, 147–8 Hesiod
676–724, 149–50 Theogony, 236, 237–8
1056–89, 150–2 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 100, 319–31, 337
Iphigenia in Tauris, 179, 183–90, 197–8, on the Antigone chorus, 324–8
202–10 on the Oedipus Tyrannus chorus, 323–4
123–38, 203–4 Homer
393–406, 189–90 Iliad
408–21, 187 3.173–5, 168
1082–8, 186–7 16.179–92, 155–7
1094–1105, 202–3 Odyssey, 169
1143–52, 204–5 Book 6, 157–8
1449–69, 185 Book 9, 160
aetiology, 190, 210 Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 155, 157, 201, 227
Medea, 105, 133–44 156–78, 229–33, 239, 249–50, 255
1–2, 135 162–5, 241
131–9, 133–5 Homer figure in, 238–9, 245
208–12, 135 Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 164
252–66, 137–8 hymn, 240, 250, 253–4
410–20, 138–9
424–31, 139–40 iambic poetry, 141
645–53, 142–3 identity
1081–1115, 143–4 character identity, 286
Orestes, 125, 126 chorus identity/ies, 27, 37, 60, 130, 131, 133,
Phoenissae, 104 140
Theseus, 299–301 heroic identity, 40
tragedy titles, 38 interplay of, 36–43
Troades, 175–6 ritual identity, 40
120–52, 160–1 collective identity theory, 131, 154
imagery, 12, 14, 67, 152, 321
focalization, 18, 60 in gnōmai, 62, 91, 92–3
see also perspective performance of, 301, 302
French Revolution, 318, 320, 321, ritual imagery, 203
337 intertextuality, 65, 303
Index 427
Kallias narrator, 59, 60
Alphabetic Tragedy, 298, 304–16 Nietzsche
kommos, 103 The Birth of Tragedy
failed kommos, 114 influence, 340, 342–3
ritual dramatization in, 105
kōmos, 74, 223–4, 246 old men, 39, 40, 69–70, 104
see also comedy opera, 366–8
orchēstra, 20, 357
Lewes, George Henry, 341–2
Lucian paean, 250, 253–4
On dance, 249 Panathenaea, 98, 239, 358
lyric poetry, see melic poetry parabasis, 76, 288–9
Lysias, 156 paratragedy, 278, 312
parody, 278, 280, 295
marginality self-parody, 296
of tragic choruses, 26, 38, 39–41, 54, 58, 104, partheneion, 44, 165, 169–70, 175, 236
159, 260 Pater, Walter, 343
mask, 26, 35, 75, 362, 365, 373, 375 Pausanias, 166–7, 194
see also hand(s) performance, 18, 36, 212, 232
Mawer, Irene, 346 abstract concepts, 309
melic poetry Persian(s), 58
channelled into drama, 39, 41, 45, 58, 73, perspective, 59–67
140–1, 234 see also focalization
civic function, 23–4 Phrynichus
comic discourse on, 316 Capture of Miletus, 57
dramatic and non-dramatic lyric, 256 Phoenician Women, 58, 65
first-person pronoun in, 55–6, 67 tragedy titles, 38
genres, 235 Pindar, 48, 235, 245–6
performative future, 43 Nemean 7, 245
tragic discourse on, 169 Paean 12, 254–5
see also dithyramb; kōmos; paean; Partheneion, 44, 45
partheneion; thrēnos; victory ode Plato
metaphor, 83, 84, 134, 217, 299, 324 Laws, 23, 24, 235, 257–77, 359
metatheatre, 45, 213, 214, 220, 298, 301, on dithyrambic and tragic choruses, 273–7
303 on mimesis, 375
metre, 101, 108, 109–10, 120–1, 128–9, 141 see also mimesis
see also emotion plot
mimesis, 227–9, 232, 235–6 choral plot, 67–77
choreia as mimesis Plutarch
of archetypal chorus, 254 Life of Nicias, 251–2
of states and characters, 264–5 poet-director, 244–6, 247
referential complexity, 1, 25 polis, see city-state
dramatic vs. non-dramatic mimesis, 57, polyphony, choral, 36, 37, 43–7, 48, 54, 65
260–1 see also identity
epic and drama, 239 pose, 20
melic poetry and drama, 174 see also hand(s)
Magnesia as a mimesis of the ‘best’ tragedy, Power, Will
259, 260 The Seven production, 382
melic poetry as, 246–7, 256 procession, 357–60
Murray, Gilbert, 344 as revelry, 223–4
music, 247, 379 contemporary performance, 356
choral references to, 8–9, 73 funerary, 73
tragedy as plot performed in, 73 merging fiction and ritual, 98
mysteries parodos, 215, 219
Bacchic, 215, 216 projected procession, 218
Eleusis, 152 see also kōmos
428 Index
production(s), modern, 100–1, 352 singing, 102
see also Adamo; Barker; Bogart; Power; actor, 128
Reinhardt; Schechner character social status and, 125–8
projection, choral, 25, 160, 213, 254 skēnē, 20, 42, 357
choral identities, 1, 140, 203, slave(s), 39, 145, 203–4, 284–5
204 Sophocles
future performances, 172, 176 Ajax, 106, 110–16, 127, 159
interplay with dance, 222, 225 348–430, 110–14
on to chorus-leader, 220 Amphiaraos, 299
pathetic fallacy, 218 Antigone
relation with fictional present, 64, 159, 216, 332–375, 106–7
218, 221 Electra
see also Henrichs, Albert 1231–88, 116–20
proprioception, 371, 373, 374–5 1406–8, 117
pseudo-Aristotle Oedipus at Colonus, 132
Problems, 128 668–719, 362–3
pseudo-Xenophon Oedipus Tyrannus, 53, 132
Constitution of the Athenians, 1294–1368, 120–3
241–4 afterlife, 321
Philoctetes, 115
register, 27, 60, 316 Trachiniae, 171
Reinhardt, Max 225–323, 161–3
Oedipus Rex production, 348, 349 862–98, 123–8
rhythm 974–1003, 127
moral effects of, 265–73 tragedy titles, 38
‘rhythmic spell’, 339 space
social bonding, 258–9 ‘environmental theatre’, 353
ritual fictional, 8–9
choreia as, 44, 58, 211, 233–4 foreign, 47
internal and external to the drama, 75, indoor and outdoor, 360–1
96–8 intermediary position of chorus, 35
mimesis and, 228–9 on- and off-stage, 224
performativity of, 211 sanctuary of Dionysus Elethereus,
solidarity, 75 356–7
structure, 224 speech-act, 44, 213, 216, 225
see also aetiology; Artemis; sacrifice Stesichorus, 234
sacrifice, 14, 251–2, 255 Theodektes, 302–3

human sacrifice, 184–6, 198 theōria, 182–3, 201–2, 358
satyr play, 160, 285, 298 Thespis, 248
Schechner, Richard, 353–8, 382 thrēnos
Dionysus in 69 production, 353–8, 359, 381–2 associations, 48–9, 50
female chorus in, 354–6 audience identification, 76–7
Oresteia production, 363–4, 382 closure, 73
Schiller, Friedrich, 318 emotionality, 48
Schlegel, A. W., 319 perverse effects, 274–7
self-referentiality, choral, 159, 213 relation with female lament, 175
Aeschylus, 43–6, 51 tragic reversal, 53–4
comedy, 309 Thucydides, 237, 250, 251
Euripides, 16, 214, 221 thymelē, see altar
ritual and, 96 time, 10, 14, 47, 78–99, 213, 225
see also Henrichs, Albert
simile, 82–3, 157–8, 221, 222–3 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 25, 26–7, 28,
Simonides, 253 197
Index 429
victory ode, 24, 246 individual and collective, 105, 121
visuality, 360–1 see also singing
voice
choral voice Wagner, Richard, 100
complexity, 27, 41–3, 60 writing
generalization and specificity, 107 performance of, 297–8, 303

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CHO RAL MEDIAT IONS

This volume explores how the choruses of Greek tragedy creatively

r e n a u d g a g n é is University Lecturer in Classics at the University

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

List of figures page vii

1 Introduction: the chorus in the middle 1

1 The Aegean and the Black Sea page 184

anton bierl is Professor of Greek Philology at the University of Basel.

There is something distinctive about choral mimesis in Greek tragedy. The

Euripides, Electra 699–746

8 See Baur 1997. 9 See Wilson 2005: 186.

20 See Moreau 1991 on the rich meaning of klhdÛn as an enigmatic code.

22 See Papadimitropoulos 2008.

The ambiguity of Tundar© invites a fleeting reference to Helen, but the

Tragedy as a choral genre

42 Goldhill 1999: 15–16.

51 Photius s.v. ½rcstra.

65 See for instance the collection of articles in Felson 2004.

Chorus and audience

From Athens to the American stage

Choral polyphony and the ritual functions

1. Tragic choral identities

8 See the detail of the statistics given by Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 266–9.

In a previous study for an earlier choral meeting on ‘The Chorus in

13 Goldhill 1996: 252–5. 14 Goldhill 1996: 255.

2. Choral procedures of enunciative polyphony and pragmatics

18 Aesch., Eum. 299–396 (307–11).

3. Enunciative ‘intermedialities’ of the tragic chorus

30 See for instance Pindar fr. 128c Maehler.

4. Between choral polyphony and performative self-referentiality

Chorus, conflict, and closure in Aeschylus’ Persians

(a) Objects of focalization

16 For the concept of “choral projection”, see Henrichs 1994/5: 75.

Choral intertemporality in the Oresteia

I. Anachronies: a panopticon of times past, present and future

II. General reflections: blurring the borderline between

General reflections and gnōmai like the comments on ‘learning through

39 Fraenkel 1950, II: 114.

44 On the metre, see Fraenkel 1950: 442–3.

III. Mise en abyme: mirroring the enactment of the heroic past

IV. Ritual: blending together past and present

63 Henrichs 1994/5; 1996a.

I. The construction of the choral voice

13 See Budelmann 2000.

18 See Budelmann 2000. 19 Nooter 2012.

25 Behind my use of the term ‘contact’ lies Mastronarde 1979.

27 This shift in metre is surprisingly not commented on in Finglass (2011).

30 See Goldhill 2012: chapter 8.

Orestes asks Electra what her broken and grammatically incoherent

32 Finglass 2007: ad loc.

This is an iambic dimeter (and there is a corresponding dimeter at 1356:

36 Davies 1991: ad loc.; Easterling 1982: ad loc.

41 Henderson 1976. 42 Hall 2006: 317–8. 43 Barner 1971: 262–3.

Conflicting identities in the Euripidean chorus

35 See Burnett 1973; Foley 2001: 243–68.

[O you who have never shared in the pains of childbirth, my Athene, I

The appeal to Athene is constructed as an inappropriate one, for before

m <t©> potì e«v mn p»lin ¯koiqì ¾ pa±v,

The choral plot of Euripides’ Helen

Artemis is clearly different, but not too different.

Like epic, tragedy draws on choral situations as generators of narrative.

10 Dué 2006: 16–25.

Helen’s first example is Callisto, whose name alludes to her exceptional

17 Swift 2010: 218–38.

Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy - Eds. Renaud Gagné & Marianne Govers Hopman

Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy - Eds. Renaud Gagné & Marianne Govers Hopman

51 Photius s.v. ½rcstra.

m <t©> potì e«v mn p»lin ¯koiqì ¾ pa±v,

§ pou k»rav n potamoÓ

pr¼v d t»de mga qaÓma, Âou klov oÎpotì ½le±tai,

epomen, e« memnmeqa, katì rcv tän l»gwn, Þv ¡ fÅsiv pntwn tän

DI. lfa m»non, å guna±kev, e² te deÅteron