The term ‘‘marginal’’ assumes a center against which the margins are defined. For any group of people, those belonging to the center can be considered ‘‘insiders,’’ while those who are excluded are ‘‘outsiders.’’ Outsiders are defined by not being insiders, but insiders would not be insiders without outsiders to define them as such. The boundary between them may at times be emphasized to reinforce the distinction, but at other times it may be open for crossing in either direction. In this sense the boundary can be imagined as a space, a liminal area that divides but also links inside and outside. The margin, then, can be considered the point or zone of interaction between insiders and outsiders. Tragedy creates an opportunity for such an interaction in its performance generally, and especially in its portrayal of marginal figures.
In fifth-century BCE Athens, the center of the polis was the body of free, legitimate, adult, Athenian male citizens, and these same men were the intended audience for tragedy. In fact, these qualifications are somewhat redundant, since by definition one could not be a citizen of Athens without being Athenian by birth (with very few exceptions), free, adult, legitimate, and male. Conceptual oppositions existed between categories such as Athenian and foreign, adult and non-adult, male and female, free and slave, legitimate and illegitimate, citizen and non-citizen, and created a notional margin that separated and defined insiders and outsiders. Greek tragedy includes many types of marginal figures, characters who are outsiders from the perspective of the Athenian center: foreigners, slaves, women, and others excluded from citizenship in Athens, such as pre-adult boys and bastards. These categories differ from one another in significant ways, but they can all be marginalized when opposed to the center.
The act of defining through opposition works in both directions: Athenian citizens are also defined by what they are not. Such a phenomenon is found in many cultures: ‘‘It is a commonplace both of sociological theory and of everyday experience that a human group often perceives and defines itself partly in terms of that which it is not - the Other’’ (Browning 2002, 257). But the boundary that defines both insider and outsider allows for an interaction that calls these distinctions into question. Tragedy is
Indeed often described in terms of this interaction: it is said to involve an exploration of the Self through the Other.
Through this exploration, tragedy as a genre also stages the interaction occurring on the margin. Seeing the Self through the portrayal of the Other necessarily involves crossing what seems in other times and places to be a clear-cut boundary between the two. As Charles Segal has said, ‘‘Both tragic hero and tragic performance partake of the freedom of marginality’’ (1981, 48). The ‘‘freedom of marginality” refers to the power of tragedy to explore and question these definitions of the center while remaining a civic institution, oscillating between oppositions, at the boundary we may call marginal or liminal.
Tragedy is neither wholly civic nor wholly subversive in its nature; it is simultaneously inside and outside, or, rather, somewhere in between. Michelle Gellrich has noted that tragedy is as powerful as it is because it does not lie on either side of these oppositions, but rather occupies the margin, the place in between: ‘‘the vitality of tragedy as I am describing it would have to be linked with a place neither totally within nor totally without the polis; it would be neither simply ideological or purely nonideological, but a performance opening up some space in between’’ (1995, 48; see also Segal 1981,47-51; and Croally 1994,11,43-45). The dynamic of tragedy is to be neither/nor as well as both/and when it comes to common cultural oppositions and definitions: tragedy may resist the categories it appropriates and explores, but it does not obliterate them entirely. Arguing for the nonpolitical or even antipolitical nature of tragedy, Nicole Loraux identifies the significant role of oxymoron in tragedy: ‘‘tragedy, using oxymoron to play on the contradictions presented by civic discourse, defines its specificity by combining elements usually contrasted in political discourse’’ (2002, 66-67). The contrast is still present, however, as it must be if the combination is to have any effect.
Marginal figures in tragedy operate within this context of opposition and combination taking place on the margin. Other genres may maintain the strict oppositions that I have enumerated between insiders and outsiders, but in tragedy these outsiders break down difference even as they create, mark, and signify it. The boundaries they define they also cross, and these seemingly contradictory actions co-exist, as we will see in the tragedies examined below. The Self is explored through the Other, but is not subsumed by the Other. Instead, a dynamic interaction occurs between the two.
One of the paradoxes of tragedy is that marginal figures can take center stage. A great deal of scholarship has focused on women as the predominant Other in Greek tragedy (see, among others, Zeitlin 1996, Foley 2001, and Griffith and Mossman, chapters 21 and 22 in this volume). In my examination of the significance of marginal figures I will focus on such categories as foreigners, slaves, and bastards, each ofwhich exemplifies in diverse ways the interaction on the margins that plays out in tragedy.
One type of interaction is an overlapping of or equation between outsider categories. Such an overlapping is not surprising even outside of tragedy: foreignness and slavery, for example, could be associated, because many slaves were also foreigners. In tragedy, however, the definitions of marginal categories can be confused and exploited to the point where they are exposed as arbitrary. Similarly, the distinction between categories may be blurred, because the space outside is not further defined or delineated. Once defined as any kind of outsider, a marginal figure can then be associated with all other outsiders as well.
An example of this lack of distinction between marginal categories is found in the character of Teucer in Sophocles’ Ajax. Teucer is known to us, and would also be known to the ancient audience, from the Iliad, in which he figures as an archer and the illegitimate brother of Ajax, son of Telamon (see Ebbott 2003, 37-44, for more on the Homeric Teucer). His illegitimacy arises from his mother’s status as a captive, foreign woman awarded as a prize to Telamon, but in the Iliad it is no impediment to Teucer’s participation in the Greek warrior community. In Ajax Teucer’s illegitimacy is underscored once he becomes suspect in the eyes of the Greek leader Agamemnon because of the actions of his brother. Agamemnon insultingly calls Teucer the son of a spear-captive woman (Ajax 1228), a slave (doulos, 1235), and a speaker of barbarian language (1263), and treats him as less than a free man (1260-61). Earlier Teucer had imagined that his father Telamon, blaming Teucer for Ajax’s death, would also insult him and turn him out of his home, calling him a bastard (nothos, 1013), attacking his manhood (cf. kakandria, cowardice, 1014), and making him appear more like a slave (doulos, 1020) than a free man. One form of marginality is combined with others, and as Teucer’s situation worsens, the marginality of his illegitimacy is amplified to classify him as a foreigner, a slave, and less than a man. In tragedy (unlike epic), Teucer’s borderline status slips ever further into the margins and is there linked with other forms of marginality.
That Teucer, who is undeniably a free man, worries about being called a slave should caution us against interpreting these marginal categories too literally. The categories seem too easily combined with one another to be understood as strictly applied; moreover, they do not present us with a picture of social reality. In fact, the category of slave seems to function most often as an exploration of what it means to be free. Both Teucer’s imagined encounter with Telamon and his real one with Agamemnon involve the term doulos, but there is never any actual threat that Teucer will be enslaved. Instead, the term becomes a means of imagining a reduced state of existence, reinforcing the difference between free and slave even as a free man is equated to a slave.
When we do see ordinary household slave characters in tragedy (a category that excludes newly enslaved captive women, whose situation is a vast topic I must leave aside), they in fact often speak or enact cultural ideals, especially when free characters pose challenges to prevailing norms. When, for example, mothers are portrayed as dangerous to the family, female slaves are presented as maternal, taking on the culturally approved role for free women. In Euripides’ Medea, Medea’s nurse affirms her gender solidarity with Medea, but she also expresses concern for the well-being of the children (89-95, 98-105, 116-18), substituting as a maternal figure while their mother becomes a threat to them. An elaborate example comes from Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, when Orestes pretends to be a messenger bringing news of the death of Orestes to his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Although Orestes’ nurse plays an extremely small part in moving the plot along, she is given a long speech about how the news of Orestes’ death has affected her and her masters. Clytemnestra, she says, ‘‘in front of the servants put on grief with sad eyes, concealing her laughter that matters have turned out well for her’’ (737-40). In contrast to Clytemnestra’s barely hidden joy at the news, the nurse proclaims that she has never yet suffered such pain as the report of the death of Orestes brings to her (747). Her detailed account of her intimate familiarity with the body of Orestes in his infancy through nursing and cleaning him calls to mind a mother’s lament for a dead child, and it heightens the contrast again when Clytemnestra, facing death at the hands of her own son, claims the same bodily intimacy by bidding Orestes to have respect for her breast at which he nursed (896-98). These maternal female slaves are foils for the threatening mothers.
Slaves are thus presented on stage as embodying cultural ideals of how slaves should think and act. That is, slaves are portrayed not as distinct persons but simply in their function as slaves and as reflections of the attitudes and ideology of their masters or of the dominant culture. In Euripides’ Andromache, Hermione’s nurse directs Hermione to act in a manner appropriate for a free woman, instructing her to ‘‘cover up’’ (832) and ‘‘go inside’’ before she is disgraced (877). She expresses cultural ideals for high-status wives even though she herself is not one. As we have seen with Orestes’ nurse, slaves in tragedy also often express their emotional connection to their masters. Medea’s nurse similarly says to her fellow-slave, the tutor: ‘‘For good slaves, the misfortunes of our masters fall on us heavily and reach our hearts’’ (Medea 54-55). In Euripides’ Helen, two different slaves, one belonging to Mene-laus, a Greek, and one belonging to the Egyptians Theoclymenus and Theonoe, express sentiments that would be very welcome to the slave owners in the audience. Menelaus’ slave reacts to the discovery of the real Helen by saying, ‘‘He is a bad slave who does not revere the affairs of his masters, both feeling joy along with them and feeling shared pain in their troubles’’ (726-27). Theoclymenus’ slave takes loyalty even further by proclaiming, ‘‘To die on behalf of their masters brings the greatest glory for noble slaves’’ (1640-41). These slaves express an identification with their masters’ situations and emotions and a willingness to put themselves in their masters’ place. The slaves do not seem so Other in these cases, as they articulate the same ideals, feel the same feelings, and identify their own well-being with that of their masters.
These ordinary slave characters and the words they speak reinforce social norms, so much so that Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, in her study of women and class in Eur-ipidean tragedy, concludes, ‘‘The slaves in tragedy do not represent a real class but rather respond to the desires and anxieties of the author and his audience’’ (1998, 66). That is, slave characters do not represent real-life slaves or present a challenge to the ideology or practice of slavery as such. Pierre Vidal-Naquet has pointed out that there is no myth explaining the origins of slavery similar to those that account for the subjugation of women, and he argues that this absence suggests that slavery as an institution is not troubling enough to prompt a justification as such in myth or a deep examination in tragedy (1986a, 218). The marginal slave characters themselves, then, speak with the center, and it is the idea of the change from freedom to slavery that is explored from the perspective of the insiders. Slavery is contemplated as the opposite of freedom, and this contemplation uses other types of marginal characters, as we saw with the illegitimate Teucer, to imagine slipping into slavery. The interaction on the margin denies the slave characters a separate identity while maintaining the category as a fearful alternative for the center, the free men.
The association of Teucer in Ajax with foreigners, slaves, and a lack of manhood suggests that once defined against the center, one could acquire any marginal status, or all of them at once. The emphasis on his illegitimacy also reveals the arbitrary nature of marginal status. As we have already seen, Teucer’s illegitimacy is emphasized and elaborated in that drama. Ajax’s son, Eurysaces, is in the same position, since his mother is also a foreign, captive woman, and yet he is broadly treated as legitimate. It will fall to Teucer, in fact, to present Eurysaces to Telamon as Ajax’s legitimate son (Ajax 562-70). The disjunction between the situations of Teucer and Eurysaces highlights the permeability of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate. Similarly, Hippolytus in Euripides’ Hippolytus is marked as a bastard in part because his mother is not Athenian, while Theseus’ children with the non-Athenian Phaedra are considered legitimate.
Tragedy can play with current standards in this way by applying them to the heroic past. Anachronism complicates the status of these so-called bastards ( nothoi, singular nothos), and underscores the arbitrary boundary between legitimate and illegitimate. Both Hippolytus and Ion are portrayed as nothoi in Euripides’ tragedies, although in other genres they could be considered legitimate and very closely tied to Athens. Hippolytus is the son of Theseus, the foremost hero of Athens, and Ion is the son of the god Apollo and Creusa, the descendant of founding heroes of Athens. Not only could the two young men be central in the heroic world, they are also sons of Athenian rulers, who occupy the very center of the polis. These illegitimate sons are outsiders who could easily be insiders. Their situations challenge the boundary line, asking where the distinctions truly lie and whether they are worthwhile to maintain.
Let us consider the case of Ion in Euripides’ Ion. The son of Apollo and originating namesake of the Ionian Greeks, Ion would be a hero in a genre such as epic. For the Athenians he is an important link back to their autochthonous origins. As the son of Creusa, Ion is the last of the line of the Athenian autochthon or ‘‘earth-born’’ Erechthonius, who sprang from the earth (the mythical and plot background emerges via stichomythia at Ion 260-304). The ideal behind the myth is that the Athenians are strictly native to their city: they did not come from elsewhere to settle it, but were born from the very soil of their land. As the direct descendant of the autochthonous hero and king of Athens and of an Olympian god, Ion should possess the ultimate Athenian identity and legitimacy.
As the play begins, however, he is not only illegitimate but completely without identity. As we hear in the prologue (14-52), Ion was born in the royal house of Athens to Creusa, the daughter of the king, but in secret. He was exposed as a newborn and left to die in a cave on the outskirts of the city, but he was saved by Apollo and Hermes and brought to Apollo’s temple in Delphi, where the priestess took him in as a foundling. He now inhabits a sacred space, the temple of Apollo (315), rather than a civic one in Athens. He does not know who either of his parents is (109, 313); his lack of identity is so complete that as the drama begins he has no name: Creusa asks him his name and his reply is, ‘‘I am called ‘slave of the god,’ and I am’’ (309). Ion is as marginal as possible: a slave lacking parents, a city, and a name.
As the drama progresses, Ion will take on several permutations of identity, all variations on the marginal. Creusa and her husband Xuthus, who is not Athenian himself, have come to Delphi to inquire about a solution to their childlessness (3025). Ion is first claimed as son by Xuthus, who has been told by the oracle that he fathered a son many years ago as a result of an anonymous one-night stand in Delphi and will encounter that son when he leaves the temple (517-62). This encounter is in fact what gives Ion his name: Xuthus names him Ion - which can mean ‘‘coming’’ or ‘‘going’’ - since he came upon him as he left the temple (660-62). Ion’s name has
Precisely the opposite connotations to the Athenian ideal of autochthony, of having never come from somewhere else. Even his new name marks him as an outsider.
Ion recognizes that this marginal identity as the bastard son of a foreigner, albeit the current king, will cause difficulties for him at Athens. He knows that there is a strict definition of native or insider at Athens, and he has two strikes against him: ‘‘They say that famous, autochthonous Athens is not an alien people, so that I will find myself possessing two ailments, having an imported father and being born a bastard’’ (589-92). Ion imagines that he will encounter difficulties from wealthy and poor Athenians alike, regardless of whether he aspires to a prominent life or is content with an obscure one (592-606). Xuthus’ solution is to deny even this marginal status and introduce Ion at first as a guest (xenos) and visitor (theates) and not his son. Once again we see an instability of marginal categories as Ion slips from bastard to foreigner.
The hostile Athenian reaction to outsiders that Ion envisions is subsequently realized: told that Ion is Xuthus’ bastard son, Creusa tries to kill him. Just as Ion attempts to kill her in return, however, the priestess brings out the tokens that Creusa left with Ion when she exposed him, tokens of his true identity as Creusa’s son and as an Athenian. Thus Ion is placed in another marginal situation, as he goes from bastard son of Xuthus to bastard son of Creusa (upon discovering that he is Creusa’s son, Ion again laments his illegitimate status: 1473, 1523-27).
Ion does not return to Athens on these terms either, however. Athena commands Creusa not to make known that Ion is her son and to allow Xuthus the pleasure of believing that Ion is his (1601-2). Ion goes to Athens with a private, secret identity of the son of a god and the autochthonous Creusa, but with a public identity as the bastard son of the foreigner Xuthus. Through the events of the drama, the slave Ion has become free, the illegitimate foundling discovers he is a member of the autochthons who represent ultimate legitimacy at Athens, and the youth without a name returns home to achieve manhood. His movement from margin to center challenges the distinction between the two, and the movement is only accomplished with a crossing of the two: the son of the autochthon becomes king as the supposed son of the outsider Xuthus. The ideal of autochthony takes pride in sameness and connected origins, but only through a nothos posing additionally as a foreigner are the native, autochthonous origins of the Athenians continued and, in turn, linked to contemporary institutions of the audience (see Ebbott 2003, 80).
Ion passes back and forth through many identities, and in the end he has no one story of who he is. These complications defy the notion of a fixed line between the center and the margins, since Ion seems to oscillate from one identity to another without achieving any final sense of self. His drama, like that of Hippolytus, plays with the definition of outsider in cases of those who are so close to being insiders that the distinction between insider and outsider is questioned. But it is not only the marginal figures who are very close to insiders who cross boundaries in tragedy; such an interaction also happens with more pronounced Others, such as foreigners, or, to use the Greek term, barbarians.
Barbarians in tragedy elude easy stereotyping. We might expect that the Taurians of Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, who practice human sacrifice, would be portrayed as savage barbarians who engage in a taboo ritual; in fact, their human sacrifices are specifically linked to the Greek Agamemnon’s attempt to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia {Iphigenia among the Taurians 336-39). Moreover, it is their respect for Greek religious ritual that provides the means for Iphigenia, Orestes, and Pylades to escape: the Taurian king Thoas allows Iphigenia to take the statue of Artemis along with two ‘‘captives’’ to the sea to be purified. The irony is thick when the supposed barbarian Thoas, hearing that purification is necessary because the would-be victims are polluted by matricide, exclaims in shock: ‘‘By Apollo, not even among the barbarians would anyone dare to do that!’’ {1176).
Similarly, the Phrygian in Euripides’ Orestes is strongly marked as the Greek stereotype of the Asian barbarian, but the stereotype is pushed so far as to render it ridiculous. The fact that it is the Phrygian himself who calls his clothing, actions, and attitudes ‘‘barbarian’’ {1369-70, 1374, 1385, 1395-96, 1507) exposes the stereotype for what it is, and all told, the Phrygian ‘‘is never anything but a grotesque caricature of Orestes’’ himself {Said 2002a, 83). In these examples and many others, the context in which barbarian characters appear or in which statements about barbarians are made undercuts the stereotype or the opposition of the Greek and barbarian created by these markers of difference, smudging the boundary drawn by the characters or their statements.
Aeschylus’ Persians offers perhaps the most complex example of foreigners as marginal characters. Complicating interpretation of this play is the fact that Persians is the earliest extant Athenian tragedy, first performed in 472 BCE. It is also the only surviving Athenian tragedy that centers on historical events rather than those we consider mythical - and recent historical events at that: the battle of Salamis between the Athenians and the Persians in 480 bce. The characters in the drama are all Persians, including the historical king Xerxes, and the setting is the Persian royal court in Susa. Critics have argued over how to interpret this tragedy, which presents a Greek victory over their deadliest enemies, who had devastated Athens during this, their second invasion of Greece. Should we understand the tragedy as celebrating the Athenian victory over their enemies, showing that Xerxes got what he deserved for his hubristic acts in the course of the invasion? Or should we instead point to the mythical qualities of the historical event within the tragedy and understand the portrayal of the enemy to be sympathetic in some way? {See Loraux 2002, 45, for an example of one critic who has, over time, changed her opinion about the basic tenor of the play.)
Edith Hall sums up her discussion of Persians by emphasizing the polarity created in the play: ‘‘Aeschylus presents Persian characteristics as vices exactly correlative to the cardinal democratic Athenian virtues. Portrayal of the enemy has thus become self-definition and self-praise’’ {Hall 1989, 100). The Athenian self-definition and self-praise that Hall argues for, however, must arise from a self-contemplation encouraged by the play, and in this contemplation, connection as well as distinction emerges. Both Nicole Loraux {2002, 50) and Christopher Pelling {1997a, 13-17) have emphasized that the audience’s reaction would be mixed and multiple, and Persians in particular reveals how opposition and identification can co-exist in tragedy. The resolution to the question of interpretation may lie in seeing the tragic application of barbarian stereotypes familiar to us from other genres, such as history, ethnography, and oratory, as necessarily distorted by a genre that blurs as many distinctions as it sets up. The portrayal of the barbarian in Greek tragedy is complicated and warped in various ways by the generic context. This is not to say that the opposition between Greek and barbarian is not present or is somehow ‘‘corrected’’ in tragedy. But the ideology behind the stereotype does not operate in tragedy as elsewhere. As Michelle Gellrich points out about tragedy’s relationship to ideology in general: ‘‘The problem with readings of tragedy that seek to demonstrate its ideological character is that they are impervious to the ways in which performance eludes ideological constraints. In other words, such readings overestimate the role of social substructure in producing the meaning of texts’’ (1995, 50). As we will see, it is indeed in the performative context that Persians transcends the strict opposition of Greek and barbarian.
Let us consider in greater detail how the Persians are portrayed and also how the story of their defeat by the Athenians could be constructed as a tragedy before an Athenian audience. In so doing, we can see how differences are created but also collapsed by the genre and performance of tragedy. The defeat of the Persians is narrated on stage from the Persian point of view. As the play opens, the chorus, whose character is Persian elders, and the queen await news about the war. Through a series of arrivals - a herald, an apparition of the dead former king Darius, and Xerxes himself - the defeat of the Persians by the Athenians is first reported, then explained, and finally lamented.
The Persians are contrasted with the Athenians explicitly and symbolically throughout the drama. The Persians’ wealth, especially in gold, and their love of luxury; their excessive emotions, especially fear, panic, and despair; and their distinct language, dress, weapons, and political structure have all been pointed out as differences that Aeschylus establishes and exploits within the tragedy (Hall 1989, 79-100). The cumulative effect of these differences is to cast the Persians in some way as the opposite of the Athenians themselves. If, however, tragedy is an exploration of the Self through the Other, how do these theatrical Persians allow the Athenians to think about themselves beyond the opposition?
One aspect of the drama to notice is that the tragedy of the Persians is conceived in Greek terms. Greek ritual and speech forms are integrated into the Persian milieu (see Ebbott 2000 for an example), and the Persians give voice to a very Greek understanding of the events. As Pelling points out with reference to the portrayal of Darius in the play, ‘‘even a Persian character can articulate responses and insights which the Greek audience can share, he can serve as their ‘focus,’ and those responses and insights can be seen as transcending national boundaries’’ (1997a, 15-16). Much of the drama would be familiar as well as foreign, a blending of the two that would call attention to the supposed differences and might also introduce elements of commonality.
It is particularly performance, the presentation of Persian characters on stage, that produces the breakdown of difference. Tragedy as a genre calls for a different state of mind and set of reactions from the other contexts in which we find portrayals of Persians and other foreigners. Nicole Loraux, in her recent argument against an overly political interpretation of tragedy as a whole (she concedes that the chorus of male advisors to the king in Persians sets it up as a more political play than most [2002, 46]), maintains that we should not expect the same response to Xerxes and the Persians in the theater as we would in a political context:
We miss any sense of tragedy’s specificity if we think that the Athenians heard in The Persians only a eulogy for their city. If, however, as I believe, every tragedy deals with the
Staging of mourning, then we can imagine that the citizens of Athens, invited in their capacity as hearers of a tragedy to take part in a production of a drama that resembled a long lamentation, were able to respond to the latter in the appropriate manner. In other words, they were able to resist the immediate pleasure of being the cause of the suffering represented on the stage, because, in the cries of the defeated enemy, tragedy taught them to recognize something that touched them above and beyond their identity as Athenians. (Loraux 2002, 48)
I will return to the idea of tragedy as ‘‘the staging of mourning,’’ but the point I wish to stress here is that tragedy is meant to engage certain emotions and to move beyond rigid oppositions and definitions of identity. The very fact that Persians is a tragedy changes the interpretative framework for the Persians who are lamented on stage, and we can see an opportunity for moving beyond difference.
The audience witnesses only Persian characters on stage, as I have noted, but the physical staging itself also blurs boundaries, especially between actor and character. The actor wears the mask, and in the case of Persians may wear a markedly foreign costume, but the Greek identity of the actor would not entirely vanish. Claude Calame (1995, 97-115) has shown that, linguistically and physically, the tragic performance and its use of masks blend the two identities rather than substituting one for the other. In a narrative, the narrator is linguistically first-person ‘‘I’’ while the subject of the narrative is third-person ‘‘s/he.’’ In drama, Calame explains, the actor is the narrator, but the subject is represented by the mask that he wears, blending the two identities in a process he describes as shiftings-in and shiftings-out (1995, 99). The early masks in tragedy, Calame points out, were made of cloth, and so the wearer of the mask is veiled, but still visible. The mask itself is used ‘‘for cults that define and guarantee the various limits of the concept of civilization, cults of the periphery, of the passage from interior to exterior, from the self to different - and vice versa!’’ (1995, 106). Thus the mask itself is involved in marginality and acts as the margin as the Self plays the Other represented by the mask. For the spectators, the Other on stage is portrayed by a Greek male, and his identity as such is not entirely obscured but is in constant play with the identity of the mask he wears.
As the Greeks play Persians, then, the losses and sufferings of the war recalled in the tragedy are not only those of the Persians, but of the Greeks as well, who although victorious nevertheless suffered greatly during the war. The contemplation of such suffering in the theater requires distance (Loraux 2002, 52). That is, the staging of mourning that Loraux sees as the core of tragedy cannot be too direct, but must be mediated through the suffering of the Other. This distance, an emotional cushion for the spectators, is usually accomplished in tragedy through the use of stories from the distant (mythical) past. In this case, the distance is created by the foreign setting and characters, producing a spatial and conceptual rather than temporal distance (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, 245; Calame 1995, 113). But the emotions provoked by Persians are for the Self as much as the Other: the Athenians’ own losses are contemplated through the losses of the Persians, showing a common connection while maintaining the distance and the difference that the barbarian portrayal creates and allows. (See Ferrari 2000 for another example of how the Athenians could contemplate their losses in the Persian wars by means of identification with foreigners - in that case, the Trojans.) Recalling Gellrich’s description of tragic performance opening a space in between, we can see in Persians that the momentous events of the war are contemplated within that space: neither too close to the center, nor so far as to be entirely foreign. The opposition between the Persians and the Athenians is not lost or replaced but is also not so rigid as to preclude interaction along the margins.
The significance of marginal figures in tragedy is embodied in Dionysus, the very god at whose festival tragedy is performed. Like the foreigners and nothoi we have discussed, Dionysus is on the margins of the polis. He is an insider who appears to be an outsider, a god who, we know from archaeological evidence, has a long history of worship by the Greeks but is portrayed as recently introduced (Nagy 1990, 297). He is a native god whose myth presents him as foreign: ‘‘As the myth of Dionysus evolves through the ages, it keeps attracting features that characterize what is perceived as foreign to each passing age of Hellenism; what remains as a constant is simply the foreignness of the figure, and it is this foreignness that is paradoxically native to him. Moreover, it is an old theme that he is always new: the structure keeps asserting that it is very new, when it is in reality very old’’ (Nagy 1990, 297). At any particular point in time, whatever feature is considered foreign, new, and exterior to Greek culture is associated with the myth of Dionysus.
In Euripides’ Bacchae this aspect of his myth is played out when Dionysus comes to Thebes, the native city of his mother Semele, to claim his place there and be recognized as a god. Arriving, as he says in the prologue, from Asia, Dionysus appears as a foreigner, sharing some characteristics with the then-current Asian stereotype: he has long hair, pale skin, an air of sensual luxuriousness, and a gender-bending appearance (455-58, 493-94). That is, the contemporary construct of‘‘foreignness’’ is applied to this Dionysus. In Pentheus’ view he is a dangerous outsider who disturbs the order in Thebes by introducing the worship of the supposedly new god. In reality Dionysus is very much an insider in Thebes: his mother Semele is the daughter of Cadmus, the city’s founder, and sister of Pentheus’ own mother Agave. He is neither foreign nor an outsider, and for the spectators in the Theater of Dionysus, he is no new god. The discovery of his true identity entails the destruction of those who at first denied it: the ultimate understanding of ‘‘the paradox that whatever is alien is also native’’ (Nagy 1990, 295) comes at a terrible price for the characters in the tragedy, but can be experienced by the audience with the safety of the distance provided by performance.
Tragedy may portray itself as foreign (Loraux 2002, 61) even as it is distinctively Athenian. Dionysus, the god of tragedy, eludes categorization using binary oppositions, but as Michelle Gellrich persuasively argues, it is not that Dionysus simply breaks down categories and oppositions but that he precedes or exists apart from them: ‘‘Dionysus appears to signify not a discrete being with a definable identity but a condition prior to or other than ‘identity.’ He does not so much destroy or confuse distinctions as configure the nondifferentiation out of which such distinctions eventually arise - notably, the foundational ones of female/male and nature/culture’’ (1995, 53). In the Theater of Dionysus tragic performance has the capacity to break down differences and oppositions or even move entirely beyond them, as it takes place on the boundary between these distinctions. Tragedy has the power to defy the difference between the center and the marginal or to reinforce it, and in fact, it does both. The marginal figures in tragedy, outsider roles performed by and for insiders, can also be paradoxically central in this dynamic theatrical experience.
World History
