Allusions to the chorus and actors as inhabiting the world of the theater, or to the audience as spectators of a play, are now acknowledged to have a place in tragedy as well as comedy (Easterling 1991, Marshall 1999-2000; for the opposite view see Taplin 1986). These allusions include choral references to their own singing and dancing (Henrichs 1994-95) and direct address to the audience (see Sommerstein 1989 on Eumenides 1039 and 1047). There are also fleeting remarks that could be taken either way, as when Sophocles’ Electra appears to allude to the unchanging expression of her tragic mask (Electra 1309-11). Euripides appears to be unique, however, in incorporating critical comments on another playwright’s treatment ofthe same myth into his plays. In Phoenician Women (751-52) Eteocles criticizes as ill-timed the description of the shields that forms the centerpiece of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, and in Electra (524-44) Electra finds fault with the tokens that figure in the recognition scene of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers.
From the perspective of the playwright, these references are another manifestation of the pervasive intertextuality of tragedy. All the tragedians are in constant dialogue with the literary tradition, above all with epic, and they regularly evoke that tradition in a spirit that can be either laudatory or critical. It is only to be expected that they should also enter into dialogue with their fellow tragedians. In the scenes from Phoenician Women and Electra, Euripides makes explicit the implicit critique that is involved in rewriting a scene handled differently by another poet.
From the perspective of the audience, references to the theatrical context ‘‘need not be in any way disruptive of a play’s serious atmosphere’’ (Easterling 1991, 56). It is a requirement of successful theatrical viewing that the spectators experience a play on several levels simultaneously; they cannot be so immersed in the action unfolding before them that they forget they are watching a play, nor so detached that they fail to be moved by what is taking place on stage (see Lada 1996 and Marshall 1999-2000, 330 and 340-41). There is no reason why a theatrical reference - oblique or overt, fleeting or developed - should disrupt the dramatic illusion, for that illusion was not total to begin with. Members of the audience who caught Euripides’ references on the wing could presumably enjoy them with no sacrifice of emotional involvement.5
What happens when a play becomes a tissue of literary allusions? Such is the case with Orestes. One scholar has argued influentially that in Orestes Euripides reaches ‘‘a new level of self-consciousness and authorial extravagance that does not seem to have existed before’’ and that with its reminiscences of Stesichorus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Homer, and Euripides himself the play conveys a ‘‘self-conscious awareness of a tradition which has reached the end of its organic development’’ (Zeitlin 1980, 51). While intertextuality is indeed a prominent strain in Orestes, it is possible to put another construction on it. Euripides invokes the tradition as a foil to his own serious and coherent exploration of Orestes’ madness, as the allusions to Stesichorus and Aeschylus will serve to demonstrate.
When Orestes in an access of madness asks Electra to hand him ‘‘the horn bow, Loxias’ gift, with which Apollo told me to ward off the [dread] goddesses’’ (268-69), the scholiast tells us that Euripides here follows Stesichorus, who in his own version of the myth had Apollo give Orestes a bow, and adds that actors of his own day played the scene without a bow. It seems to me probable that the actor in Euripides’ day did the same, and that Euripides is making the point that for his Orestes, as opposed to Stesichorus’, the bow is imaginary (for other views see Porter 1994, 301 n. 13).
Euripides plays off the Aeschylean tradition of Orestes’ madness to make a similar point. The Aeschylean Orestes was driven mad by his fear of real, objective Furies (Libation Bearers 1448-50). For Euripides’ Orestes, however, the Furies are imaginary; as Electra tells him, ‘‘You see none of the things you think you’re so clear about’’ (259). Orestes himself believes that he has been driven mad by the ‘‘consciousness’’ of his crime (sunesis, 396), but the chorus describes Orestes’ murder of his mother as itself an act of madness, ‘‘the delusion of wrong-thinking men’’ (kakophronOn ... andrOn paranoia, 824). Indeed, delusion has long been Orestes’ companion: he admits to uncertainty that it was Apollo who ordered the matricide, as opposed to one of his own (private) demons (1668-69).
Not for the first time, Euripides’ interpretation of a myth has been influenced by contemporary thought. The Hippocratics denied that illnesses such as epilepsy were divinely caused (On the Sacred Disease 1), and in Orestes Euripides experiments with a similar explanation for his hero’s madness. Despite this striking innovation, the play remains faithful to the literary tradition in one crucial respect. It keeps returning to a fundamental aspect of Orestes’ situation that was already articulated in Libation Bearers (930, 1016-17): the fact that killing his mother was at once right and wrong (Orestes 194, 546-47, 819, 824). Driven by his demons, Orestes wanders so far from his mythical destiny that Apollo must intervene to bring him back.
It does not follow, however, that Euripides is out to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the tradition.
Throughout the fifth century tragedy was a ‘‘living and changing genre’’ (Mastro-narde 1999-2000, 27). Phrynichus, Aeschylus, and Sophocles introduced major changes (plays on historical subjects, the addition of the second actor, the addition of the third actor); Euripides made innovations on a smaller scale that have impressed some critics as cumulatively leading to a radical change of direction. This view does not, however, factor in the playwright’s reputation up to the nineteenth century, the distortions produced by relying on Aristophanes, the range of Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy as suggested by their fragments, and the conservative aspects of Euripides’ own work. The account I have sketched of Euripidean drama suggests a playwright who did not hesitate to introduce contemporary topics into his plays and to make variations on theatrical conventions, but who never ceased to respect and cherish the tragic tradition that he inherited and also did so much to shape. We would be well advised to follow the lead of Euripides’ own contemporaries, including Aristophanes, and to take all three dramatists into account when defining the range of Attic tragedy - a genre that is characterized (as Wilamowitz knew) by its fundamental seriousness, and that is sturdy and flexible enough to accommodate Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Euripides’ Orestes as well as Sophocles’ Oedipus the King.
World History
