The authority of the past, and of traditional knowledge and wisdom in its various forms (myths, names and genealogies, cults, and institutions), is another essential ingredient in the web of structures and meanings encountered in a performance of an Athenian tragedy (see Anderson, chapter 8 in this volume). The audience knows the story in outline already; and as the play unfolds, all involved in its production are constantly reminding, suggesting, confirming, and modifying bits of shared cultural knowledge that are indispensable to the audience’s understanding and enjoyment. Of course, in drama the writer does not appear in his own persona as author, nor does any individual character, not even the chorus, speak directly in the author’s voice. Furthermore the facts and traditions of Athenian cultural memory and expectation are far from uniform or consistent. So any presentation of reality and the truth (alOtheia, etuma) in tragedy is necessarily always provisional, and more or less indeterminate. Nonetheless, the cultural authority of tragoidia and of the festival of which it is a part always brings some degree of validity - however temporary - to the story that is being represented and to the ‘‘facts’’ and meanings that are thereby being (re)established; and within the plays themselves there are sometimes particular moments and dramatic conventions that possess a special authority of their own.
Some Greek traditions were felt to be more authoritative than others. Thus in fifth-century Athens the Iliad, while not unassailable in its details, could never be disregarded, and could usually be accepted as true, whereas the career, marriages, and old age of Oedipus or the parentage of Odysseus were available to be told in any number of different versions, since no single version had emerged to eclipse all others. Certain local cults, monuments, and institutions might be unmistakably real and thus accepted as true (the Court of the Areopagus, the cult of a local hero), but the explanation of how they came to be named and authorized was always open to retelling, and the authority imparted by a new or renewed tragic aetiology or etymology might vary greatly (valid? ironic? deconstructive? paradoxical? absurd?).
Furthermore, certain particular tragic performances and texts clearly acquired a more conspicuous and enduring cultural authority than others, even after their initial production in the festival of Dionysus. Several of these have survived into the modern era - for precisely this reason (notably Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Electra; Euripides’ Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae); we know that others that have not survived nonetheless made an especially large impact (Aeschylus’ Niobe, Euripides’ Telephus and Andromeda). In all of these cases, the given or expected ‘‘facts’’ of the story were irrevocably altered by that first performance, and particular visual images or behavioral traits of major characters became fixed for all time. Doubtless there were other plays too that made significant cultural impact, though the traces are no longer detectable. In any case, the subsequent selection of the three major tragedians into the Alexandrian canon and the Hellenistic school curriculum ensured that these representatives of Athenian tragedy would permanently exercise their authority for many generations to come.
Within each play, certain modes of expression and representation, including physical enactments and speech acts, might be more authoritative than others. The lyric utterances of a chorus, for example, often carry a special authority of their own, by reason of the traditional function of choruses as performers of communal wisdom and memorialization, even though in any particular play the chorus members, qua characters, might be relatively ignorant, low-class, and unreliable. (Thus the slave women of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers appear at times obtuse, at other times brilliantly insightful and knowledgeable; and the Phrygian women of Euripides’ Bacchae alternate between panic, vindictiveness, and philosophic wisdom). Messengers too, through a convention that is indebted in part to epic, may be at almost the same moment panic-stricken observers and virtually omniscient narrators of key events that nobody could in fact have so completely witnessed. Their authority as witnesses is crucial to the audience’s appreciation of what has happened, even as their narrative skill is enjoyed as yet another facet of the (actual) author’s dramatic skill.
One particular form of certainty and authorization of the events of the play is often provided by the familiar yet elusive Greek notions of ananke (necessity), themis (what is allowed), dei, chre, and the like (what must be) - terms that often serve to divert inquiry or criticism concerning human or divine agency and responsibility, while leaving largely up in the air the nature of the authority that may underlie and enforce them. For the most part, such phrases merely imply that a certain outcome is inescapable (at least in the opinion of the speaker), and that some external authority has already determined that any further resistance would be futile and misguided.
One of the chief pleasures of Greek tragedy (as Aristotle first observed) is the spectators’ awareness of a major character’s ignorance, and their witnessing of the sequence of events through which that character eventually comes to recognize certain key pieces of information. The audience is thus placed in the position of experiencing the action from more than one perspective; that is, of both sharing the character’s expectations and ambitions (identifying with her or his subject position) and at the same time looking ‘‘down’’ on that character (literally, from their seats in the theater; and symbolically, from their god-like level of superior knowledge). Yet at the same time, because these major characters are of such high social status, they are distinguished quite sharply from the ranks of the more ordinary members of their imagined community (guards, messengers, nurses, heralds, choruses), and from the mass of the theater audience too, with the result that we may posit yet a third angle of relationship for the spectators, one of looking ‘‘up’’ at these individuals with admiration and some degree of awe - even though those feelings may often be tinged also with horror or disgust at the excesses committed or attempted by those elite characters during the course of the play. That is to say, the spectators are brought to share (at least intermittently, and to some degree) the subject position of those inferior and more ordinary characters in the play who view their leaders and masters with respect, admiration, and even dependency, even as these spectators rest secure in the knowledge that, like the minor characters and choruses, they will always end the play safe and sound, while these more brilliant dynasts come crashing down to spectacular ruin and disgrace.
This mixture of responses depends crucially on the multiplicity of the kinds of ‘‘authority’’ that we have been exploring, and on the kinds of resistance to authority that are presented in Athenian tragedy, that most transgressive yet conservative of cultural forms. The final section of this chapter will be devoted to these issues.
World History
