THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 81

Memory, Mimesis, Tragedy:

The Scene Before Philosophy

Paul A. Kottman

“Life is the non-representable origin of representation.”

—Jacques Derrida

The historical complicity of Greek tragedy with the emergence of the Athenian polis
has interested political thinkers and classicists alike for some time.1 Among classicists,
this interest has tended to manifest itself either in an analysis of particular dramatists;2
or certain thematic, conceptual, or linguistic patterns within individual tragic works.3
In short, the political stakes of the theatre have derived from the exegetical analysis of
the theatrical works themselves in relation to their context of origin.4 The pre-
dominance that this sort of exegesis continues to enjoy is due not only to the
philological care and attention with which classicists, especially, tend to proceed but
also to a tendency to understand the dramatic work itself (both the textual artifact, and
whatever the archives retain of its context of origin) as the repository of political or
social meaning. And this means, consequently, that the political nature of tragedy is
implicitly regarded by such a methodology as an effect of the mimetic character of the

Paul A. Kottman is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Albany, and Adjunct Professor of
Performance Studies at New York University. He is currently revising his first book, tentatively entitled
Between Actors and Witnesses: A Politics of the Scene. His recent publications include the
Introduction to Relating Narratives, by Adriana Cavarero, and articles on Shakespeare and literary
theory that have appeared in Shakespeare Studies and The Oxford Literary Review.

1
See, as a start, Karen Hermassi, Polity and Theater in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1977), and J. Peter Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1986), and The Tragedy of Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990); some of the essays in John Winkler and Froma Zeitlin, ed., Nothing to Do With Dionysus?:
Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
2
See, for example, Charles Segal’s work on Euripides. I will return to Segal later in this article.
3
One might think, for example, of the various political readings of Antigone over the past thirty years
or of Froma Zeitlin’s and Nicole Loraux’s work on gender, myth, and ritual in the Greek context.
4
For a good account of the German roots of this philological methodology, as well as its relation to
more archaeological approaches to interpretations of Greek tragedy, see Simon Goldhill, “Modern
Critical Approaches to Greek Tragedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E.
Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 324–48. Even the most philosophically
inclined classicists tend to insist upon the exegetical character of their labor. Notably, Jean-Pierre
Vernant has offered a number of eloquent and convincing defenses of careful contextual analysis of
classical Greek works. See especially Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpreta-
tion,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1970), 273–95.

Theatre Journal 55 (2003) 81–97 © 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
82 / Paul A. Kottman

dramatic work. The determination of tragedy as first and foremost a mimetic work in
turn reduces the political essence of tragedy to the legible features of this or that
production.
Among political thinkers, the situation is perhaps more complex. Hannah Arendt, in
an exemplary and influential discussion of the origins of tragedy, declared that “the
theater is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life
transposed into art.”5 For Arendt, the political essence of the theatre arises from its
“pre-philosophical” presentation of human affairs.6 By “pre-philosophical,’’ Arendt
simply means that the theatre is an experience of speech and action as pure actuality,
through which each actor reveals “who” s/he is by speaking and acting among others.
Indeed, from Arendt’s perspective, the theatre—like the praxis it imitates—is also pre-
political, for it is precisely the interaction that adheres in speaking and action among
a plurality that opens the space of the polis.7 Thus, what makes the theatre political, in
Arendt’s view, is not the imitative or mimetic quality of the work as such; rather it is
the fact that tragedy “imitates” “man in his relation to others.”8 Put simply, it is the
relationality of the scene that lends the theater its political sense.
Given these seemingly contradictory approaches to the problem, one is thus left to
wonder: does the political essence of the theatre arise from a pre-philosophical
theatrical experience as such? Or, does the political nature of theatrical experience
come from the mimetic or imitative quality of the dramatic work, as the philosophical
tradition since Plato defines it?
Before addressing these questions myself, it may be helpful to recall that already
with Aristotle, one finds significant resistance to the Platonic definition of tragedy as
poetic production (poiesis) or mimeseos en ontos. Indeed, it was precisely in order to
assert a political sense for tragedy—over and against Plato’s banishment of the
tragedians in the Republic—that Aristotle defined tragedy in the Poetics as mimeseos
praxis.9 For unlike the mimeseos en ontos which, for Plato, made the theatre a poetic
production or work, based on mere appearances that lead its audience astray from the
onto-theological order of Ideas—Aristotle sought to orient the theatre toward praxis.
This is why, as Jacques Taminiaux has demonstrated, Arendt’s take on tragedy might
be read as a partial recuperation of Aristotle’s rejoinder to Plato.10 It is therefore
important to note that the debate over how to account for the political essence of
tragedy—is it a function of the mimetic, poetic work, or does it adhere in the scene of
action?—is a problem that is inscribed in Aristotle’s agon with Plato over the term
mimesis itself. For this reason, and others, the terms mimesis and mimetic can hardly be

5
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 188.
6
I take the phrase “pre-philosophical” from Hannah Arendt’s The Life of Mind (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1971), 129–40.
7
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 179–89. For an excellent discussion of Arendt’s views on
action and the theatre, see Jacques Taminiaux, “From Aristotle to Bios Theoretikos and Tragic Theoria,”
in The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 89–
121.
8
Arendt, The Human Condition, 188.
9
See Aristotle, Poetics, tran. Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998), 1449b, 25.
10
See note 5.
 THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 83

used in any univocal way; where I use them in what follows, I have in mind primarily
Plato’s use of mimesis in Republic X.
It is not my intention here to rehearse Aristotle’s riposte to his teacher in any detail;
it has already been the topic of numerous studies.11 Nor am I interested in taking sides
in order to simply privilege Aristotle’s views over those of Plato. Given the history and
character of the problem, which I would like to bear in mind throughout this essay,
one can hardly hope to offer anything like a final solution.
Instead, having outlined the problem of how to relate the theatre to politics in a
broad—albeit cursory—fashion, I would like to approach it from another perspective,
for it may become clear along the way that the parameters of the ancient debate itself
can be shifted. In this spirit, I would like to consider another way in which to articulate
a “pre-philosophical” (i.e. not simply imitative or representational) political essence of
theatrical experience—one which would be irreducible to the mimetic work, and
adhere in the living scene as such—by returning to an ancient anecdote.
Around 493 BCE one of the very first works of Greek tragedy—The Fall of Miletus by
the tragic poet Phrynichus—was staged in Athens only two years after the events with
which it dealt actually occurred.12 No script of the play is extant, but it appears to have
been a theatrical representation of a military defeat that the Milesians suffered at the
hands of the Persians.13 The play was therefore received not as a representation of a
familiar myth, or distant legend.14 Rather, the play presented something that the
audience members themselves remembered, and in so doing both brought about and
confirmed this living recollection.
Indeed, so unsettled were the Athenians by what they saw that they were reduced
to weeping. Herodotus provides the following account of the audience’s reaction to
the performance:

The Athenians . . . showed their profound distress at the loss of Miletus in a number of
ways, but in none so clearly than in their reception of Phrynichus’ play; for when
Phrynichus produced his Fall of Miletus, the audience in the theater burst into tears, and the
author was fined a thousand drachmae for reminding them of a disaster which touched them
so closely [hos anamnesanta oikeia kaka]. A law was subsequently passed forbidding anybody
ever to put the play on stage again.15

While this account is, as far as is known, the first surviving report of the earliest
performance of a tragedy of which we are informed, The Fall of Miletus was certainly

11
Two good places to start are: Gerald Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1986), 74–88; and Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 109–38, 331–36.
12
For more on the date, see Joseph Roisman, “On Phrynichos’ Sack of Miletus and Phoinissai,”
Eranos 86 (1988): 15–16. The timeline at the end of Easterling’s The Cambridge Companion lists
Phyrnichus’ Fall of Miletus as the first tragedy on record, 352.
13
See William Ridgeway, The Origin of Tragedy (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1966), 66. See also,
Malcolm Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (London: Duckworth, 1987), 67.
14
See Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, “Problems of Early Greek Tragedy,” in The Academic Papers of Sir Hugh
Lloyd-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 230–33.
15
Herodotus, The Histories, tran. Aubrey de Selincourt (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 366,
emphasis mine.
84 / Paul A. Kottman

not the only play of its time to represent historical events within living memory.16
Phrynichus himself returned to historical material about fifteen years later with The
Phoenician Women (476?) and Aeschylus’ The Persians (472), the oldest extant work of
tragedy, portrayed the defeat of the Persians at Salamis in 484. The obvious difference
between The Fall of Miletus and these later historical plays, of course, is the fact that the
latter did not (as far as is known) lead to this sort of weeping; additionally, their
authors were not fined and the plays were not banned.
Although it is true that Herodotus says that this reminder then led to the ban and
fine, I shall be more concerned in what follows with the weeping of the Athenians than
with the fine and the ban that were subsequently imposed, since the act of weeping
spontaneously occurred on the scene itself. The fine came next, according to Herodotus,
while the ban came later; they may have been anything but spontaneous.17 Thus, for
the moment, I would like to focus on the scene of the actual performance that
Herodotus describes: namely, the performance of The Fall of Miletus and the tears
produced by the reminder of catastrophe. This may seem a counter-intuitive way to
proceed, given that the ban and the fine have received the most attention from readers
of Herodotus’ account. However, given how little we know about the actual motives
for the fine and the ban, I would like to focus instead upon the more immediate
connection, manifested on the scene described by Herodotus, between the Athenians’
memory of the catastrophe and their tears.
It is, of course, hardly surprising to find an audience weeping at the close of a
tragedy. What is striking, however, is the way in which the tears described by
Herodotus do not appear to be a manifestation of katharsis, nor do the tears seem to
result primarily from the mimetic force of Phrynichus’ play. Indeed, already a certain
revision of Aristotle’s account of tragedy in the Poetics is in order; for the tears that
resulted from the performance of The Fall of Miletus are not reducible solely to the
effect of its “imitation of action” let alone to the plot or script of Phrynichus’ play.
Evidently the lamentation was not kathartic; it didn’t appear to have educated,
instructed, or instilled some moral; nothing was learned from Phrynichus’ play.18 Nor
does it seem, according to Herodotus, that the audience wept because they were
simply affected emotionally by what they saw, the way a contemporary audience
might be affected by a play about the Second World War. Rather, it seems that their
lamentation was the result of a shared recollection of a suffering that was theirs—oikeia

16
For more on the authority of Herodotus’ account, see Joseph Roisman, “On Phrynichos’ Sack,” 16–
17, especially n. 7.
17
Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones has suggested that the ban and fine were imposed because of “an event
connecting Phrynichus with the archon Themistocles,” who wanted the Athenians to prepare for war
against the Persians (“Problems,” 233–38). Joseph Roisman has suggested that this “interpretation of
the Phrynichus affair in terms of the politics of the time has proved unsatisfactory . . . nothing is known
of the play to indicate whether it was pro- or anti- Persian in tone and message” (“On Phrynichos’
Sack,” 16). In any event, the ban and fine—like most acts of censorship—may likely have had motives
that extend far beyond the performance of Phyrnichus’ play itself. My interest here, rather, is the
specific interaction of the scene as such.
18
Obviously, the term katharsis would require a more lengthy interpretation than can be provided
here. For a good overview of the problem, see Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 350–57; Andrew
Ford, “Katharsis: The Ancient Problem,” in Performativity and Performance, ed. A. Parker and Eve Sedgwick
(New York: Routledge Press, 1995), 109–32; also see Jonathan Lear’s contribution to Essays on Aristotle’s
Poetics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 315–40.
 THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 85

kaka, “something bad that touched home”; the play “reminded them” [anamnesanta] of
what they already remembered.
At the very dawn of the Western theatrical tradition, therefore, it is possible to
glimpse an effect of tragedy that differs markedly from the way in which theatrical
experience gets described by Plato and Aristotle more than a century later, descrip-
tions which have characterized thinking about the theatre ever since. That is to say, it
may be possible to discern a singular, unrepeatable and un-representable—and
therefore “pre-philosophical” scene—the features of which are irreducible to the work
that is performed.
Clearly, Herodotus is describing a highly unusual scene. Were Phrynichus’ play
performed today, or even one hundred years after Phrynichus’ death, weeping from a
shared memory would be an unlikely result. This is not simply due to the fact that
such historical tragedies gained wider acceptance among the Athenians; the point here
is not simply that Phrynichus or the archon Themistocles failed to make the material
palatable to the audience—although it is true that, “after a perhaps tactful interval of
fifteen years or so” and after the defeat of the Persians themselves in 480–479,
Phyrnichus, and then Aeschylus were able to stage historical dramas successfully.19
Rather, according to Herodotus’ account, the tears had to do precisely with the
uniqueness of that audience. Apparently the tears were the manifestation of a lived
recollection of a traumatic event, a memory that of course died with the people who
bore it. The memory in question is, of course, not an individual or private recollection
of a psychic injury or trauma—but rather a shared, public, mortal memory of a
“catastrophe” [kaka]. The term “memory” therefore needs to be understood in this
context as designating an essential part of the singular, finite relation of the
spectatorship—for it is this shared memory that, in large part, distinguishes them from
all other potential audiences of the play. Indeed, what Herodotus’ description of the
scene makes clear above all else is the singularity of this relation among witnesses.
Thus, although Phrynichus was fined and the play censored, we ourselves might
hesitate before blaming the tears exclusively on the play or dramatic work itself.
Phrynichus’ production no doubt “imitated a complete action” (to use Aristotle’s
definition) that called to mind something that those Athenians who saw it wished to
forget. But this “imitation of action” in and of itself would, again, not result in an
identical reaction were it performed elsewhere, or at another time, before a different
group of spectators. What is decisive in Herodotus’ account is not the work by the poet
Phrynichus, nor the form or content of the theatrical oeuvre, but rather the scene of its
singular performance as it is recounted by the historian.
Moreover I would like to suggest that this makes possible an analytical distinction,
which I will try to elaborate in what follows, between the scene and the work. That is
to say, by relying upon Herodotus’ testimony we can see clearly that the scene itself—
the actual enactment of the play and spontaneous weeping that followed—is ulti-
mately irreducible to the work that was performed, to any archival content or remnant
that could survive the lives of those on the scene.

19
But then, what would explain the fact that “no known Greek tragedy after Aeschylus’ Persians
dealt with a contemporary theme centered on historical events”? See Paul Cartledge, “‘Deep Plays’:
Theatre as Process in Greek Life,” in Easterling, The Cambridge Companion, 24–25.
86 / Paul A. Kottman

In this spirit, I shall not begin with an exegesis of Phrynichus’ play itself, nor shall
I attempt to analyze the particular mode of its performance.20 Such an analysis would
be impossible anyway, since no copy of the play’s script is extant. It may seem
somewhat disingenuous to take advantage of that fact; one would hardly like to rejoice
in the loss or destruction of a play. But in this case, the very lack of the work, or text,
provides a certain window of opportunity, or, rather, the occasion for a critical and
methodological purchase. That is to say, it produces a state of affairs in which one is
forced, as it were, to consider the theatrical experience of the scene itself, through
Herodotus’ testimony, as distinct from the play or work.
Of course, Herodotus himself gives us little to go on. We do not learn how
Phrynichus’ play was performed, or what in the actors’ speech or gesture would have
been particularly unwelcome to the Athenians. In fact, it is as if Herodotus intuitively
grasped that the significance of the scene lay not in the performance as such, but rather
with the reaction of the Athenians. While this paucity of information might generate
some frustration, it is here something of a bonus. For, in this case, Herodotus’
narration stands, interestingly, in contrast to the sort of historical discourse of which
he is, according to Cicero, the “father,” since his focus is not so much on what
happened but rather on the lived scene of that happening.21 It is the spectatorship, and
not the spectacle, which is decisive here. Or, better, it is that particular spectatorship
which is decisive, for it is of those who constituted a community of witnesses, in that
they collectively recalled the events recounted by Phrynichus’ play upon seeing it
performed.
The Fall of Miletus was what we might call a reminder that triggered this remem-
brance—but it was not itself fully responsible for it, since, after all, the memory was
already in the hearts of those Athenians well before they attended that ill-fated
performance. Indeed, the fact that an audience today would most likely not react in
the same manner means that those Athenians were already, prior to the performance,
a unique polity—or potential community. Their shared remembrance of the capture of
Miletus itself is what distinguishes them from any other potential audience and what
makes their reaction so singular. This singularity is in fact what Herodotus’ account of
the scene leads us to consider, for it becomes clear that the tears of those Athenians
confirmed their collective recollection of the original battle.

20
Obviously, the fact that there is no extant script of Phyrnichus’ play gives me an excuse to “refuse”
to read it. Nevertheless, even if the play were extant, I would want to proceed with a methodology that
differs somewhat from that of classicists who interpret Greek drama based upon textual traces from
the period and the philological or social contexts of the plays themselves. For my purposes the point
is not to debate the extent to which a comprehensive reading of a play by Sophocles, for example, is
possible. Rather, I would simply note that—in the case of Herodotus’ account of Phrynichus, we are
not reading the play itself—but rather trying to come to terms with Herodotus’ testimony regarding
one particular scene. As a result, I cannot hope to offer an account of Herodotus’ testimony that would
derive from our current understanding of Greek tragedy in its context, for the context of the memory
of the original battle is illegible and irretrievable. Rather, one might begin to look for ways in which the
possibility of such understanding is perhaps put into question by the anecdote Herodotus provides.
21
Cicero, De legibus I, 5; De oratore II, 55. I take my cue here as well from a lecture on Herodotus given
by Hayden White at U. C. Berkeley in the Fall, 1995. White suggested that Herodotus, rather than
simply imparting facts or focusing on the events themselves, creates memorable scenes through
sophisticated narrative techniques.
 THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 87

We are dealing, therefore, with a scene wherein the political identity of the
participants is not simply defined through a pre-existing membership, class, or
national affiliation—although those attributes clearly play a role here—nor through
anything that they might have in common outside remembering the fall of Miletus and
witnessing its theatrical representation. In fact, this is borne out of a close reading of
Herodotus’ own account—in which the nature of the recollection itself (hos anamnesanta
oikeia kaka) hinges upon how one reads oikeia kaka, “their own catastrophe.” As David
Rosenbloom points out, in the period in question (478–456 BCE), “the relation between
the inside and the outside of the city, between oikeia and allotria” was undergoing a
kind of transformation; what “one’s own” means here is very much in question.22
Indeed, the very fact that the Athenians could identify themselves so strongly with the
Milesians, such that the Milesians’ catastrophe (kaka) refers “to the Athenians’ own
troubles and misfortunes,” underscores the extent to which the polity—in its emergent
form—is defined not by fixed borders, allegiances, or blood-ties.23 Rather, the polis
emerges here, to borrow Arendt’s phrase, as “a kind of organized remembrance.”24 Put
simply, what defines and distinguishes that spectatorship of Athenians from all other
potential (or actual) spectatorship of the play is the remembrance they shared, and
their ability to confirm that remembrance to one another.25 Or better, what defines their
relationship is not something that could be abstracted from, or that is foreign to, the
scene itself; rather, it arises from the living confirmation—the actual relation—of a
shared remembrance made possible by the scene.
Now, it could be objected that my choice of Phrynichus’ The Fall of Miletus is
somewhat disingenuous, given both its peculiar content and the fact that the text did
not survive. What about, at the very least, Aeschylus’ The Persians, which is an entire,
extant example of a tragedy whose subject matter was within the living memory of its
audience? In a sense, they make a natural pair. And admittedly, any comparison of the
two ought to begin by asking why the earlier work was banned and its author fined,
while the later work won first prize at the festival? What was it that made The Fall of
Miletus so disagreeable in comparison to the well-received Persians?
Interesting as they are, however, I would like to refrain from pursuing them here
since my aim is not to analyze the works themselves, but rather to focus on the scene
of one particular performance. Indeed pursuing these questions presupposes that the
tears produced by The Fall of Miletus can be attributed, at some level, to the content or
the form of Phrynichus’ work—and that Aeschlyus’ play succeeded, as it were,
because of some discernable difference between the works themselves.26 This is, again,

22
See David Rosenbloom, “Myth, History and Hegemony in Aeschylus,” in History, Tragedy, Theory,
ed. Barbara Goff (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 102. Roisman points out that oikeia is
“patently contrasted” with allotria throughout Herodotus, which makes Rosenbloom’s argument all
the more pertinent for the passage in question here (“On Phrynichos’ Sack,” 17–18).
23
Roisman, “On Phrynichos’ Sack,” 18–19.
24
Arendt, The Human Condition, 198.
25
It has been suggested that the Athenians wept not just out of memory, but in anticipation of a
similar disaster. However, there is no evidence to support such a view. On the contrary, a close reading
of Herodotus’ own text appears to suggest, precisely, that the conflation of memory and political
belonging are very much at stake here. See, again, Roiseman, “On Phrynichos’ Sack.”
26
Such differences could be characterized in any number of ways. Vernant, for example, suggests
that the events presented by Aeschylus were not regarded by the Athenians, in contrast to their
88 / Paul A. Kottman

precisely the presupposition that I wish to challenge. By focusing on Herodotus’

narrative about a non-extant play—as opposed to reading The Persians—I would like
to strip bare some of our assumptions about locating the political sense of tragedy in
the legible features of any given work. The point, from my perspective, is not finally to
determine why the Athenians wept at seeing The Fall of Miletus, while The Persians was
lauded. Given how little we know about the former, any explanation would be
speculation anyway. Put simply, I am interested instead in the fact that they wept, and
the fact that this is the focus of Herodotus’ account of the scene. Rather than compare
the two plays, therefore, it seems to me that a certain analytical purchase can be gained
by insisting here on the difference between a singular scene, like the one to which
Herodotus draws our attention, and a particular work like The Persians.
Obviously, it is not always (though it is sometimes) the case that the performance of
a dramatic work stages something that corresponds so recognizably to the lived
memory of the spectators. Admittedly, the story that Herodotus provides is hardly the
most typical sort of theatrical experience. Nor for that matter, is Aeschlyus’ The
Persians. Indeed I might imagine an ulterior objection to my guiding example: What is
the political sense when what is performed, while it may recount a familiar story, does
not correspond to anyone’s living memory, for instance, in the case of a legend like
Oedipus, or a morality play like Everyman, or for that matter, one of Samuel Beckett’s
enigmatic short works? One might safely assume that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or
Luigi Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore does not actively recount actual events
that any potential spectator could remember as part of their own lived experience.27
What, then, could be said—from the position proposed in this essay—about the
political or communal significance of a performance of a purely fictional work? Does
it even make sense to speak, politically, of a rigorous distinction between historical
works (like The Fall of Miletus or The Persians) and manifestly fictional works?
What I would like to argue is that the political sense of the theatre is not to be found
in the distinction of any genre, form, or content of the work, nor even in any possible
referential relation between the play and an outside reality or history upon which it is
closely or loosely based. As far as the political essence of tragedy is concerned, the
relation between the artwork and reality, or between discourse and its outside, is not
decisive. What is decisive is the relation that is brought into being by the scene—
through the action and speech of those present, or through the performed affirmation
of a shared recollection.
Consequently, it does not matter whether a play is pure fiction (Beckett) or a history
play (Shakespeare’s Richard III or Henry V). The genre of the work it is not essential

reaction to The Fall of Miletus, as “their own” (Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and
Tragedy, tran. Janet Lloyd [New York: Zone Books, 1990], 245). My point, however, is that whatever
differences one traces, the fact remains that the singular scene recounted by Herodotus is not reducible
to any describable features of Phrynichus’ work.
27
Symptomatically, motion pictures produced in the United States still make disavowals of this sort
by claming that any relation between the characters and events of the film and actual persons or events
are coincidental. This disavowal, of course, seeks in principle to affirm (or hide behind) a rigorous
distinction between fiction and truth—while at the same time admitting, or responding to, its possible
confusion.
 THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 89

here, nor is the dramatic work itself. For the Athenians, at least in Herodotus’ view, the
political value and significance of that peculiar early performance of Phrynichus’ play
lay in the relation among those gathered, rather than in the Aristotelian elements of the
performance itself (mythos, lexis, opsis, etc.) or the historical meaning of the capture of
Miletus. Indeed, the relation that is inaugurated by a shared remembrance of the
original scene is the theatrical scene that Herodotus describes—quite apart from any
consideration of the artistry, representation, or imitative quality of Phrynichus’ The Fall
of Miletus.
It is clear, after all, that the scenes recounted by Herodotus, both the battle itself and
its ill-fated theatrical resurrection—like any singular scene worthy of the name—are
not reducible to representation, imitation, or artistry. While this may seem counter-
intuitive, given the fact that we tend to think of a scene as that which is representable
or repeatable by definition, it is nevertheless the singular unrepresentability of the
scene that distinguishes it from the work or the artifice. Indeed, it could even be said
that a scene becomes a work or an artifice precisely when it is abandoned to repetition
or re-presentation—the work being in some sense the consequence or effect of this
“iterability” or continual re-staging.28
In contrast, while the events of the battle of Miletus (or, for that matter, the Trojan
war, the French Revolution, or the killings in Jenin) can be re-staged or represented
(theatrically, verbally, televisually) ad infinitum, well beyond the lives of those who
were there, the lived relation of those on the scene—which results from the actions
themselves, and the shared memory they leave behind—absolutely resists representa-
tion or repetition beyond their life span. Put formulaically, while any word or deed
(praxis, lexis) can be archived, recorded, or even re-enacted (visibly, audibly) well
beyond the time and place of the event itself, in a potentially infinite way, the relation
of those on the scene is mortal and cannot be archived. It resists representation.
For this reason, I wish to argue, it is the relation—always unique, each time brought
into being either through words and deeds, or through a shared, living (and therefore
potentially utterable) memory—which constitutes the scene as such, and is the most
essential condition for any political sense. In short, a political account of theatrical
experience ought to begin not so much with an analysis of what is performed (whether
the play is fictional or historical)—but rather with an understanding of the relational
aspect of the scene itself. In the same way, what happens in a historical or journalistic
sense ought not to be the final place for contemporary political meaning, for it is
precisely the reduction of politics to the representable content of this or that event,
which obscures the mortality and fragility of the political relation, the lives, which are
at stake.
Back to the place of theatre in all this, it could be said that the performance of a
fictional play or theatrical work—as witnessed by this or that spectatorship—is also
first and foremost itself an actual event that is immediately political regardless of its
form or content. In other words, prior to any consideration of its form or content, a

28
Here and throughout this discussion, I have in mind Jacques Derrida’s work regarding the
constitutive nature of repetition or representation, particularly as in regards to the literary work. See,
for instance, Derek Attridge’s interview with Derrida in Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge Press,
1992).
90 / Paul A. Kottman

theatrical performance—like any combination of action and speech—is political only

if, and insofar as, there remains ex post facto more than one person who can speak
together in memory of having been on the scene with others.
To return to the essentiality of the scene, therefore, means to return to the relation
that is brought about by the shared, living memory of what is collectively witnessed—
a memory that is, through a paradoxical temporality which will need to be explored,
constitutive of the scene itself, even as it appears to be merely its consequence.
Whereas a work or representation survives through its radical indifference to the lives
of the witnesses, the scene is nothing other than a lived relation that is—like the words
and deeds from which it springs—absolutely mortal and contingent. Unpredictability
and mortality are in fact constitutive of the scene, for in order to be what it is a scene
requires—without any prior guarantee—that someone speak in its memory, especially
to and for another who also bears that memory. Therefore, this subsequent testi-
mony—the speech that follows action—is not ontologically separate from the scene,
no matter how much time passes between scene and testimony. Rather, the subsequent
testimony is the scene’s most essential trait.
With all of this in mind, I would like now to situate that anomalous performance
recounted by Herodotus within the distinction between scene and work that I am
elaborating. For, in my view, this is a distinction whose emergence is contemporane-
ous, both historically and conceptually, with the birth of tragedy in the traditional
sense. Tragedy is born, according to tradition, precisely when the work breaks with the
living scene and appears to stand alone as mimetic, over and against the sociality of
life—in tension with life, but always at some distance from it.
Where does the performance of Phrynichus’ play, which occurred alongside the
birth of tragedy, fit within this history? Is there something within the logic of the scene
Herodotus describes that resists the conventional wisdom regarding the bond between
tragedy and the polis? Let me first give a brief summary of the dominant view.
Now, at first glance it might appear that the sort of “common grief” (koinon achos)
provoked by Phrynichus’ play resembles the sort of public weeping that has come to
be understood as one of the defining characteristics of Greek tragedy, as it developed
especially in the works of Euripides and Sophocles.29 According to Charles Segal, for
instance, the staging of “rituals of lamentation” marks the emergence of a polis that
recognizes and confirms itself through the theatrical performance of communal
practices, such as collective grieving.30 The difference between this sort of performance
and the scene recounted by Herodotus, of course, lies in the fact that Phrynichus’ play
did not (as far as we know) stage this common grief within the performance itself;
rather the performance actually produced it spontaneously among those gathered. In
this sense, the response of the audience is itself part of the action of the scene, over and
beyond the unpredictable character of the performance itself. In other words, there
was no artifice, no ritualistic character to their grief.31

29
Koinon achos is a phrase taken from the chorus at the end of Euripides’ Hippolytus, tran. Rober Bagg
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 1462.
30
See Charles Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
31
Again, this is why we are more interested in analyzing the singular scene that Herodotus describes
than we are in interpreting the particular character of Phrynichus’ work.
 THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 91

Nevertheless, it is worth pausing briefly to consider the difference between

Herodotus’ account of Phrynichus’ play and more contemporary accounts of subse-
quent works of Greek tragedy, which often contain scenes that explicitly perform or
imitate acts of communal lamentation. This will help make clearer the difference I am
trying to articulate between what I am calling the scene and the work to which it
remains irreducible.
The connection most frequently drawn among modern scholars between the
evolution of tragedy and the theatrical appropriation or representation of communal
life begins from the fact that a number of Greek tragedies appear self-consciously to
appropriate communal rites of lamentation, or burial.32 In Sophocles’ Antigone and
Euripides’ Hippolytus, for example, we find climactic scenes in which lamentation is
both performed within the drama and implicitly elicited from the audience as well.33
To tarry with the example offered a moment ago, we might briefly recall Segal’s
analysis of Euripides’ Hippolytus. In Euripides’ play, as Segal argues convincingly, the
performance of “rituals of lamentation” can be regarded as characterizing and
reflecting an emerging polis that is “conscious” of itself as a community and cognizant
of the theatre as an artifice through which that community is both represented and
constituted. Segal suggests, for instance, that the chorus at the close of Hippolytus
reveals that “koinon achos is the emotion proper to a theater that has become conscious
of itself as a uniquely communal form.” Indeed, the shift in Hippolytus from the private
grief of Phaedra that opens the play to the “common grief” with which the play closes
seems to suggest, as Segal puts it, that “personal grief is lifted from the level of
individual response to the level of self-consciously communal reaction.”34 What Segal
wants to underscore is the fact that tragedy represents an important moment in the
formation of the polis’s own self-awareness, an awareness that only emerged through
the work of tragic representation. Ritual commemoration or suffering, he argues, was
imitated in order to “reflect on the ways in which Greek society represents itself
through such collective expressions as myth, rituals, festivals.”35
Now, what is important for our purposes is not so much Segal’s ostensible focus on
rituals of lamentation or the fact that the Greeks represented their own rituals to
themselves through the performance of tragedies. Again, the perspective I am

32
As a start see Charles Segal, “Euripides’ Alcestis: How to Die a Normal Death in Greek Tragedy,”
in Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elizabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993), 213–41; Charles Segal, “Lament and Closure in Antigone,” in
Sophocles’ Tragic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 119–37; Nicole Loraux,
Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
33
Charles Segal has written about the cues within both Antigone and Hippolytus that call the audience
to respond with pity and fear at appropriate moments in the play (“Lament and Closure,” 120, and
“Catharsis, Audience and Closure,” in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. M. S. Silk [Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996], 149–72). See also P. E. Easterling’s response to Segal’s piece in the same collection.
34
Segal, Euripides, 127. See also Segal, “Catharsis, Audience and Closure,” in Tragedy and the Tragic:
Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. M. S. Silk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 157. In this latter piece, Segal
seeks to expand Aristotle’s notion of katharsis by giving “greater emphasis to the collective . . .
communal experience.” That is, Segal seeks to understand the participatory nature of lamentation as
something that opens up katharsis beyond the individual’s experience of pity and fear, examined by
Aristotle in the Poetics.
35
Segal, “Catharsis,” 157.
92 / Paul A. Kottman

proposing is neither anthropological nor hermeneutical. Rather than focusing on what

was represented, or how the polis represented itself to itself through dramatic works, it
is important to recognize simply that Segal’s thesis presupposes that the polis found
itself—that is, it seems to have accomplished a certain self-identification and organiza-
tion—through whatever was represented to it. Indeed, Segal’s analysis leads us to
conclude that the emergence of Greek tragedy marks a fundamental shift in the
formation of community, a shift that is manifested especially in the city’s nascent
reflection upon itself through tragic representation. Put simply, the very fact that
Greek tragedy develops through a self-conscious appropriation of the communal
experience of lamentation signals, for Segal, a shift away from a community that was
constituted through the spontaneity of lived ritual as such, towards a community that
gathers around a shared representation of the act of mourning.
The peculiarity of tragedy, from this perspective, is that it emerges as a communal
experience in which the communal itself is ex-propriated by the dramatic work or
spectacle.36 Or put another way, with the birth of tragedy, communal life itself appears
to have been given over, and henceforth subjected to, the order of representation.37
With the birth of tragedy the community of spectators begins to find itself in, and in
fact to constitute itself through, the work of a shared self-representation.
Of course, this self-representation is more than a mere self-reflection. For the Greeks,
according to Jean-Pierre Vernant, tragedy did not simply offer an uncritical mirror of
the polis; rather tragedy was the putting-into-question of the polis itself. That is to say,
tragedy “depicted the city rent and divided against itself” in at least two senses38: first,
insofar as the tragedies themselves—in both form and content—presented the polis
undergoing various crises, and second, insofar as the dramatic representation itself
could be seen as taking on a life of its own, quite apart from the lives of the spectators,
even as that representation also played a crucial role in the social life of the polis, at
city-sponsored competitions and festivals.39 In other words, the order of tragic
representation played a constitutive role in the organization of social life, paradoxi-
cally by maintaining an essential distance from, or indifference to, that living reality.

36
For this reason, the phenomenon of Greek tragedy already brings about the expropriation of lived
community that Guy Debord postulates as the mark of contemporary society. At the beginning of his
treatise, Debord claims that “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” Is this
not also the very shift that defines the emergence of Greek tragedy, for instance as it is traced in the
work of Jean-Pierre Vernant? See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, tran. Donald Nicholson-
Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12.
37
It is true that, in the context we are discussing, this order of representation is manifestly
spectacular or dramatic. However, it ought to be understood as implicitly discursive as well. Indeed,
Aristotle himself is already disposed toward considering the dramatic or theatrical as reducible to
discourse (lexis), especially where the question of mimetic representation is concerned. See Aristotle
Poetics, chapter 3; Halliwill, Aristotle’s, 128; and Domenico Pesce’s excellent introductory essay to the
Italian translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (Milan: Bompiani, 2000), 26.
38
Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 33.
39
Vernant and others have shown that the very form of Greek tragedy, for instance the lexical
difference between the chorus and the protagonists, depicts the structural distance between the social
life of the polis and the dramatic representation that is essential to tragedy. See Vernant and Vidal-
Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 29–48 and passim.
 THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 93

Vernant has offered perhaps the most articulate account of this phenomenon,
regarding the origins of Greek tragedy. For him, the polis acquires its democratic form
precisely at the moment in which it learns to find itself through what it represents to
itself. But this self-finding now has the paradoxical character of a “putting into crisis.”
For that which is found is now at once the most familiar and intimate being of the
community and its ex-propriated representation.
Indeed, Vernant claims that the newly democratic polis “turned itself into a theater”
through the performance of tragedy in festivals or contests, at the same time putting
itself “into question.”40 Like Arendt, or Aristotle for that matter, Vernant sees the polis
itself as emerging like a sort of stage whereupon the cultural phenomenon of tragedy
served to open the city up for debate.41 Noting, for example, that Greek tragedy “takes
heroic legend as its material,” Vernant emphasizes that tragedy presents the hero not
as a model, like in epic, but instead as a problem or subject of debate.42 First of all,
Tragedy does this, of course, by setting the heroic or tragic figure on stage, before the
eyes of the spectator, as opposed to relying upon verbal narration. Thus, the tragic
heroes “are made to seem present, characters truly there, although at the same time
they are portrayed as figures who cannot possibly be there since they belong to
somewhere else, to an invisible beyond.”43 The tragic performance is therefore
regarded as in some way both familiar to and distant from the spectatorship—familiar
enough to allow for identification and distant enough to allow for reflection, critique,
and subsequent discussion.
In this way, too, writes Vernant, tragedy “played a decisive role in man’s apprehen-
sion of ‘fiction,’”44 for the characters that were presented on stage, before the eyes of
the public, were afforded at once a phenomenal reality and a fictitious status.
According to Vernant, a certain “consciousness of fiction” emerged in fifth-century
Athens; one that remained “essential to the dramatic spectacle,” such that “it seems to
be both its condition and its product.”45 That is to say, while it is impossible
unconditionally to locate the origin of tragedy in a nascent “consciousness of fiction,”
or vice-versa, it is nevertheless impossible to dissociate fully the former from the latter.
Each appears as the condition for the birth of the other.46

40
Although tragedy “appears rooted in social reality,” he writes, “it does not merely reflect that
reality, but calls it into question.” See Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Myth and Tragedy,” in Essays on Aristotle’s
Poetics, ed. Amelie O. Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 36.
41
Ibid.
42
Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 23–29 and passim.
43
Ibid., 243; Segal makes a similar claim: “Tragedy combines the distancing effects of myth and
fiction, with the agonistic model of debate and conflict. It speaks to the assembled citizens of the polis
in the here and now of a time full of crises, dangers and conflicts; but it uses a frame of remote,
legendary events that enables the poet to look far beyond the passions and anxieties of the present
moment” (Euripides, 5).
44
Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 242–43.
45
Ibid., 244.
46
As if to drive this point home, Vernant notes that this “new experience afforded by the tragic
spectacle” (ibid., 242) was most likely a decisive impetus behind the theory of mimesis-as-imitation
articulated by Plato and Aristotle. Not surprisingly, theatrical experience turns out to be prior, so to
speak, to the conceptual determination of mimesis-as-imitation; indeed, the theatrical scene deter-
mines the mode of its philosophical emergence.
94 / Paul A. Kottman

Now, in my view, what is decisive in Vernant’s analysis is the way in which tragedy
works as an imitative reflection, or self-conscious performance only insofar as it
portrayed something that was already historically or temporally distant from the
audience.47 Interestingly, Vernant notes that this distance had less to do with the mere
passage of time than with the fact that the events represented by Greek tragedy did not
belong to the living memory of the Athenian spectators. Likewise, he suggests that the
representational, fictitious, or mimetic quality of the play was not simply due to the
technique of the production, the labor of the actor, or the fact that tragedy comprises
spectacle, not just speech. To be sure, all of these things played a role in the becoming-
fiction of tragedy, its break with epic, and its emerging place as the problematic
reflection of the polis. But Vernant’s analysis allows us to direct our attention beyond
these more formal qualities of tragedy to the fact that theatrical experience exceeds
myth and becomes a fictional representation (mimesis) only insofar as the events
portrayed are, a priori, understood as “happening somewhere else” or belonging to a
mythical past that is by now beyond the grasp of living remembrance.48
Put another way, it is precisely by becoming a work—giving itself over to
representation, repetition, and reproduction—that tragedy simultaneously differenti-
ates itself from myth, which is to say, differentiates itself from the immediacy between
living memory and communal life in which myth finds its home.49 The birth of tragedy
signals, if we follow Vernant’s logic, an irreparable rift between the work as it appears
before the community in dramatic representation, and the living memory of what is
being represented.
In the terms of my argument here, Vernant’s account leads to the following
conclusion: the birth of tragedy lies in nothing other than the radical separation of
work from scene. Interestingly, it is in the light of this division that Vernant names
Phrynichus’ The Fall of Miletus as somewhat anomalous. While we know of other plays

47
An important exception to this account of tragedy is the chorus. Vernant and Vidal-Naquet
suggest that the chorus embodies “the collective truth . . . of the polis” over and against the “otherness”
of the tragic hero (ibid., 243). More recently, other scholars have argued that the chorus is even more
democratic than the Athenian polis in that it included old men, women, slaves, and foreigners;
therefore, the chorus represents an ulterior and complex set of problems with regard to the relation
between the emerging democracy and dramatic practices. Given the inevitable limits of scope,
however, I cannot include a discussion of the chorus here. The interested reader could see, as a start,
the following: Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy; Oddone Longo, “The Theater of the
Polis,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysus?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John Winkler and
Froma Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 12–19; John Gould, “Tragedy and
Collective Experience,” in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. M. S. Silk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),
217–43, and Simon Goldhill’s response to Gould’s piece in the same volume.
48
Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 246 and passim. In contrast to tragedy, the
transmission of myth through epic was tantamount to the transmission of memory itself; living
remembrance, in short, is absolutely essential to epic song. For more on this, see Eric Havelock, The
Muse Learns to Write (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), especially 70–73; Albert Lord, Epic
Singers and Oral Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and The Singer of Tales (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
49
I am indebted here and throughout to Jean-Luc Nancy’s analysis of myth in The Inoperative
Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), especially 45–47, which has helped me
to understand the stakes of Vernant’s analysis in ways I otherwise would not have seen. Especially
relevant here is Nancy’s elaboration of the relation between myth and scene in the third chapter.
 THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 95

whose subject was historical, Phrynichus’ is “the first tragedy of which we are
informed.”50 For Vernant, Phrynichus’ play—perhaps because it lies at the beginning
of the tradition—represents something like an alternative to the trajectory that Greek
tragedy, in his view, seems to have followed.
On the one hand, we have the dominant tradition described by Segal, Vernant, and
others, which establishes tragedy’s emergence as fiction or mimetic art through the
appropriation of communal rituals or heroic legends that already belonged to an
immemorial past. This view, which is recognizable in nearly every theory of perform-
ance that has its foundations in classical Greek philosophy, tends to regard the
development of theatrical experience as dependent upon a fundamental mimetic
distance between the spectacle and the lives of the spectators.51 Vernant’s and Segal’s
analyses would belong to this tradition, even while attempting to account for it. They
could even be said to be the very product of this tradition, for this mimetic distance is,
according to the philosophical and critical tradition to which we belong, the most
essential feature of any artwork or discursive representation. And this distance is
generally thought to be commensurate with its foreignness to the living memory of
those who encounter the mimetic performance.
On the other hand, we have Phrynichus’ play, which was “not a legendary” tragedy,
as Vernant notes, but rather “a tragedy of contemporary events.”52 Now, Vernant
concludes that the public condemnation of The Fall of Miletus resulted from the fact
that the play portrayed events, which he says “were too close” to the lives of the
spectators. The play, he writes, “did not allow for the distancing, the transposition that
made it possible for feelings of pity or terror to be displaced into a different register, no
longer experienced in the same way as in real life, but immediately apprehended and
understood as fiction.”53 Vernant thus imagines Phrynichus’ play to be an irregularity,
which did not meet the criteria for “fiction” or “mimesis” to which the Athenians were
gradually becoming accustomed. The scene was too close to “real life.” Although
Vernant does not say so, the logic of his argument leads one to conclude that the scene
Herodotus describes cannot properly be understood as an artwork or discursive
representation. Indeed, for Vernant the censure of Phrynichus’ work was a conse-
quence of an already accepted and established “consciousness of fiction,” which was
in fact offended by a play that was too-close-to-the-bone.54 What made the play
exceptional, it would seem, was that it could not be received as mere fiction. For
Vernant, of course, this is an exception that only serves to confirm the rule, that is, to
confirm the account of tragedy as commensurate with the distance between fiction and
life.

50
David Rosenbloom, “Myth, History,” 102. For a list of other non-extant tragedies that allegedly
dealt with historical subjects, see H. D. Broadhead, “Introduction,” Persae of Aeschylus (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960), xvii.
51
In a sense, this claim calls for no justification. Since Plato and Aristotle, at least in the tradition of
thought which this article attempts to analyze, mimesis has been the key to the question of the relation
between artworks (especially dramatic works) and the world or nature.
52
Vernant, Myth and Tragedy, 244.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid. Malcolm Heath makes a similar assumption, claiming that Phrynichus’ play was censured
“because the tears were shed over misfortunes that touched the audience too closely, reminding them
of their own troubles.” See Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy, 9.
96 / Paul A. Kottman

But are things so clear? Given that Phrynichus’ play (494 BCE) is the first tragedy of
which we have any record, can it be certain that the censure of The Fall of Miletus after
this early performance was a consequence of its failure to be “immediately appre-
hended and understood as fiction?” Particularly what if, as Vernant himself claims,
this “consciousness of fiction” itself emerged partly as a consequence of the intensify-
ing consumption of tragedy? What, after all, accounts for the appetite for fiction as
opposed to real life that Vernant supposes to have existed? Why must the history of
tragedy begin with the self-reflective apprehension of mimesis?
Might it not be the case that the trajectory outlined by Vernant, Segal, and all those
who follow in Aristotle’s footsteps—which equates tragedy and the emergence of a
formal theatrical consciousness with the contemplative apprehension of tragedy-as-
imitation—presupposes a prior recognition of fiction that may in fact be the conse-
quence of a lived remembrance that distinguishes, without thought or reflection,
between the real and the imitation? Perhaps the scene described by Herodotus forces
us to consider the living scene as a condition without which something like imitation
or a consciousness of fiction would not emerge.
After all, it seems clear that those Athenians who banned Phrynichus’ play were
aware that the play was not the same thing as the events that it portrayed. That is, they
recognized the performance for what it was and quite naturally did not confuse it with
the real capture of Miletus. Indeed, this recognition is what was manifested in the
play’s censure. After all, one can only censure a work, not historical events.
And it is equally clear that this recognition of the play as an imitative performance
was not the result of a formal convention or “consciousness of fiction.” Still less does
the play’s reception seem to suggest that the performance of this tragedy signaled a
questioning of the city or anything like Aristotle’s phronesis. It could even be said,
without exaggeration, that the recognition of Phrynichus’ play as an “imitation” of
real events came to those Athenians without reflection, without a “conscious”
apprehension of fiction. Indeed, the apprehension of theatrical mimesis by the
Athenians in the scene Herodotus describes is utterly foreign to the sort of theoretical
contemplation that will come to characterize the philosopher’s noetic grasp of mimesis
in Plato’s work a century later.
First of all, therefore, this scene marks the dissociation of the apprehension of
mimesis from the act of thoughtful debate, understanding, or collective wisdom
(phronesis) that, according to Aristotle and Vernant, characterizes theatrical experi-
ence.55 Indeed, to paraphrase Arendt, it could be said axiomatically that theatrical
experience in fact antedates the vita contemplativa presupposed by classical philosophy’s
account of the theatre,56 for Herodotus’ account presents us with a scene in which the
conscious recognition of theatrical artifice fails to result in, or coincide with, the
“fictional distance” that characterizes Aristotle’s definition of theatrical experience.
Instead, the artifice presented “calamaties” that were, as Herodotus says, “too close to

55
Aristotle underscores the way in which the pleasure of watching or hearing an imitation coincides
with a sort of consciousness or knowledge regarding the imitative nature of the spectacle itself. See
Poetics 1448b14–15.
56
See Arendt’s discussion of Pythagoras in The Life of Mind, 93.
 THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 97

home” (oikeia kaka), too close to allow the play to stand as a subject for debate, or for
the feelings that it inspired to mature into detached, deliberative reflection. The
recognition of the play’s artifice, therefore, appears to be a result of the immediacy
between the mimesis of Phrynichus’ play and the living remembrance of its spectators,
rather than the result of the play’s distance from their living memory, as Vernant
supposes. It is as if the mimetic aspect of Phrynichus’ play lay not so much in the
artifice of its theatrical manifestation, but rather in the play’s function as a witness for
events that the spectators had themselves seen. The theatrical scene Herodotus
describes is constituted most essentially through the very relation between living
memory and mimetic performance that, according to tradition, characterizes myth as
opposed to tragedy.
Thus, something like an alternative account of the origins of the theatrical scene,
and consequently of the relation between mimesis and politics as well, begins to
emerge—an account whose origins lie at the very outset of the political and theatrical
tradition that we inherit. Rather than focus on a nascent consciousness of fiction or
imitation, or on the self-conscious representation of the polis in a dramatic work, it is
instead the singularity of the scene that comes to the fore here, from which the political
sense of the event (both the battle itself and its representation) arises. Revising
Aristotle’s account of tragedy in the Poetics, we could say that the mimetic character of
the scene does not lie necessarily in the event of the performance (opsis), or in the
structure of the artistic work (plot, diction, mythos, lexis). Likewise, the habit of
reducing the term mimesis to a general, essentially Platonic, determination of the
relation between “art and nature” or “imitation and reality” often obscures the term’s
own ambiguity. The problem lies in this: the political sense of mimesis—that which
relates the theatrical experience of being on the scene to political life—cannot be fully
grasped in terms of the fictional or artistic character of performance or work, and its
relation to an outside reality. Rather, mimesis acquires its political sense in theatrical
experience insofar as it corresponds to the living relation of the scene. A radical politics
of mimesis, in sum, would therefore need to move beyond the centrality of representa-
tion, of what is represented, and begin to take account of this correspondence.