Theater

When discussing drama, we are discussing an Athenian art. This is not because theater did not exist in other parts of Greece. Quite to the contrary, there were theaters all over the Greek world, with some of the best-preserved examples existing outside of Attica (see chapter 9). However, all of the dramatic texts that survive to this day and have been found by researchers are Athenian. As such, when discussing theater as a literary form, we must keep in mind that we are speaking exclusively of Athens.

There were three types of Attic drama: tragedy, satyr play, and comedy. The tragedy (tragos = goat + oidos = song = "goat song") dealt with mythic themes taken from Homer or the Epic Cycle. They were of a serious bent and generally ended sadly, such as when a hero discovers that he has murdered, had sex with, and/or eaten a member of his immediate family and/or alternate species. In Euripides's Bacchae, for example, the princess Agaue mistakes her son Pentheus for a lion, and she rips off his head with her bare hands before returning to sanity. In Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos, the hero murders his father and marries his mother, bringing a plague onto his people.

A satyr play was a slapstick show, featuring, among the other characters, satyrs—part human, part goat (or horse), completely lecherous males who served Dionysos. Sexually lewd and scatological humor typified such shows, of which only one—Euripides's Cyclops—survives.

There were two distinct types of comedy—Old Comedy, which appeared at the end of the fifth century b. c.e., and New Comedy, which appeared at the end of the fourth. Old Comedy showed both the world of the gods and the political world of men in irreverent light. In The Frogs, for example, the god Dionysos wets himself on stage when frightened while visiting the underworld. In the Lysistrata, the male citizens of Athens and Sparta suffer incurable erections when their wives go on a sex strike to end the Peloponnesian War.

New Comedy, on the other hand, produced in the less-than-open atmosphere of the Macedonian monarchies, was more a comedy of manners, featuring set plots of long-lost children, mischievous slaves, and love.

All drama was associated with Dionysos, god of wine, fertility, and liminal-ity. Although the origins of the art forms are in debate among modern researchers, it appears that tragedy evolved out of the lyric form of the dithyramb, which Archilochus tells us was specifically the song of Dionysos (fr. 77). This dithyramb was recited by the strophe and antistrophe, alternating with each other. Two men are credited with transforming the dithyramb into what would become tragedy—Arion of Corinth and Thespis of Ikaria. Arion, who lived around 600 b. c.e., wrote dithyrambs for a choir (as opposed to for a group of men drinking, as with Archilochus), and had them treat a specific subject. According to Aristotle (Poetics 3-5), Thespis, who performed in Athens in the mid-sixth century, brought an individual speaker out of the chorus, thus beginning the tradition of an actor who could address the chorus and audience independently of the other actors. It is generally accepted, then, that the earliest tragedy consisted of a two-part chorus that recited lyric odes, interspersed with speeches from an actor who recited the episodes (epi = around; "around the odes").

The poetic meters used in tragedies moved beyond the standard dithyramb. Thespis was said to have introduced the trochaic tetrameter, and iambic trimeter came to the fore in the fifth century for the actors' dialogues (see the "Meter" sidebar). Although the dialect of the plays was mostly Attic (being written by Athenians), there remained Doric elements, strengthening the argument that the art form first appeared in Arion's land of Corinth.

Comedy evolved out of two traditions. One was the lyric, specifically the work of the monodic iambic poets. As with tragedy, this meter was standard for the actors performing the drama. The second tradition was that of the ko-mos, or revelers' band, with the word comedy coming from the words komos oi-dos—reveler's song. The ritual of the komos was part of the general practice of carnival, a festive rite occurring throughout the world where inversion was the rule of the day. In Medieval times, a King of Fools was revered for a day, instead of the actual monarch. In the modern tradition of carnival, excess and public frivolity take the place of the workaday world. During such festivals, authority is flouted and derided, serving as a vent for public indignation without leading to full-scale revolt or revolution. An aspect of such carnivals for ancient Greece was the komoi-bands, who disguised themselves and went about the city, ridiculing the important and powerful. A further element of this practice was the phallophoros, or carrying around of a giant phallus. Display of sexual items, use of obscene language and (presumably) gestures, and insults typified the early komoi. Over time, they were organized into poetic bands, hurling poetic insults at one another as well as at society at large. In the end, they were brought into the dramatic tradition, serving as a chorus for an iamb-chanting hero/actor ridiculing society in general from the stage (Henderson 1996, 8-11).

The two main dramatic festivals in Athens were the City Dionysia, probably founded by Peisistratos (see chapter 4), and the Lenaia, established in the midfifth century b. c.e. As with most things in ancient Greece, the plays were presented in competition with each other. The competitions were divided between the tragedians and the comedians. The tragedians presented three tragedies in a row, followed by a satyr play as comic relief. The comedians would present one comedy each. Funding for the plays was provided as a required city benefit by a wealthy citizen, who, of course, was extolled along with the dramatist if the plays he funded won the competition (see chapter 5). Beyond the main theatrical events, there were also smaller venues for theater, where either older plays could be redone or new plays could be tested before the festivals.

Of all the plays that existed, only a small number have survived. These are plays written by the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedians Aristophanes and Menander (all in chronological order). Aeschylus, who wrote in the early fifth century b. c.e., was credited with introducing a second actor to the play, in addition to Thespis's one. Eventually, there were three speaking actors total, along with the chorus and the nonspeaking actors.

There were, of course, more than three speaking characters in a play, meaning that the three actors had to change roles throughout the performance. This was facilitated by the traditional use of masks as costume (an aspect of Dionysos's cult). Merely by changing masks and a bit of costume, the actor could quickly go from being Aigisthus to Clytemnestra. Men played all roles, both male and female, and there is debate as to whether women even attended the theater. What was probably the first play to feature all three speaking characters was Aeschylus's trilogy, the Oresteia. This tells the story of the return of Agamemnon from the Trojan War, his murder by his wife Clytemnestra, her murder at the hands of their son Orestes, and Orestes's trial at Athens. In the first play, Agamemnon, the king returns home and confronts his wife before a chorus of old men. She persuades her husband to enter the house on a wine-colored carpet (one of the earliest examples of the "red carpet treatment"), after which she stabs him as he bathes in the tub (a motif adopted by Hitchcock in modern times). At this point, the two expected speaking actors have left the scene, when a surprise third actor—Cassandra—begins to speak. This number of actors remains constant throughout Greek drama from this point in history forward.

Sophocles and Euripides were roughly contemporary, writing in the mid - to late fifth century b. c.e. Sophocles is now most famous for his plays about Oedipus (spelled Oidipous in Greek), although, contrary to modern understanding, they were not a trilogy. The first play performed was the "last"— Antigone—performed in 458 b. c.e. Oedipus the King came out in 431, and Oedipus at Colonus in 401 (Ley 1991, 75-76). Euripides produced a number of plays, including our only surviving satyr play, The Cyclops. This tells the story of Odysseus's confrontation with the Cyclops Polyphemos, recounted in Book 9 of the Odyssey. Living with Polyphemos are a group of satyrs who were shipwrecked on the island when chasing a band of pirates who had kidnapped Dionysos. After getting a bit tipsy on Odysseus's wine (itself a manifestation of

Dionysos), the head satyr asks about the Trojan War, focusing on the baser aspects of Helen specifically:

So then, when you caught the girl,

Did you all bang her one at a time,

Since she really enjoyed mating with lots of men,

The traitor? She seeing a guy wearing colorful trousers on

His legs and a gold collar on his neck

Went all aflutter, leaving Menelaus,

The better fellow. I wish there were never

Any race of women, except one for me alone!

Euripides's tragedies, like the others, focused on the traditional myths. There were clear differences among the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, though. Aeschylus wrote during the heyday of Athens, after the defeat of the Persian armies at Marathon (see chapter 4). His plays were very promilitary and, especially with Clytemnestra, rather misogynistic. By contrast, Sophocles experienced the decline of Athens in the later fifth century b. c.e. His plays, especially Oedipus at Colonus, showed the horrors of war in contrast to the peace and devotion that are (or at least should be) present in the female domain of the family. Sophocles was an idealist. He is credited with showing people as they should be and with showing the gods as supreme and inscrutable. By contrast, Euripides showed people as they were and held the gods responsible for the atrocities they committed. It is a testament to the freedom of speech in fifth-century Athens that Euripides's plays were produced, rather than being destroyed as "heresy."

The same might be said for Aristophanes's works, produced in the late fifth to early fourth centuries b. c.e. From the gods to city officials to other playwrights, no one was free from his cutting remarks. Dionysos is set out for ridicule in The Frogs, and the philosopher Socrates is maligned in The Clouds. With Aristophanes's acrimony, however, came idealism and advice for the city. During the tribulations of the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes produced Ly-sistrata, a play about the women of Greece attempting to force an end to the war. Not only do they hold a sex strike, but the women of Athens also seize control of the Acropolis and, with it, the city finances. In this exchange, Aristophanes comments not only on corruption in the city government, but on the responsible, and undervalued, role played by the city's women (ll. 486-496):

Magistrate: And really, this first I'd like to learn from them, by Zeus:

What are you hoping, barring us from the Acropolis?

Lysistrata: That we might keep the money safe and you might not use it for war. Magistrate: So we make war for money?

Lysistrata: And why all the other things are in a mess: for in this way Peisandros and the officers attached to him are able to steal it—they constantly stir up trouble. And so by this they do whatever they want. But no longer will they steal the money.

Magistrate: But what will you do?

Lysistrata: You ask me this? We shall be the treasurers!

Magistrate: You'll manage the money?!?

Lysistrata: Why do you find that so awful? Don't we manage the household finances for you?

Magistrate: That's not the same thing!

Lysistrata: How not?

Magistrate: These funds are for war!

Lysistrata: But there shouldn't be a war in the first place.

The chorus of women go on to note that they have the greatest stake in the war, for it is their sons who are killed daily. It is an interesting irony that the voice of women was heard only in drama through the pen, and mouth, of a man.

This freedom of public political condemnation came to an end with the conquests of Philip and Alexander, and the New Comedy of this era was typified by its focus on the common people, rather than on the higher-ups. The only complete play of this genre is Menander's Dyskolos, performed around 316 b. c.e. (Lesky 1996, 650). Here we meet the archetype of the old miserly man with the young, beautiful daughter who falls in love with the charming, handsome suitor. The play revolves around the suitor trying to win permission to marry the daughter, with side scenes referring to gossiping, meddlesome, and often clumsy servants. In the end, there is not one but two marriages, prefiguring the happy endings of Jane Austen. Such comedies of errors became standard in both Greek and Roman theaters until Late Antiquity, and have a revival in Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Forum.