The history of the text of a play by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides begins when it was first written down by the dramatist. These texts were scripts for performance, and they were not intended in the first instance for any other readership than the actors and chorus who were to realize the play under the guidance of the poet himself. In the latter half of the fifth century Sophocles and Euripides may have envisaged secondarily a reading public, particularly toward the end of the century. But Aeschylus did not (see Steidle 1968, 11).
Up until the end of the fifth century, Athenians and other Greeks made their acquaintance with literature principally by hearing and seeing it performed rather than through reading. Copies of Homer could be acquired, but most people would know the Iliad and Odyssey by hearing them recited at the Panathenaea. They encountered the work of comic and tragic poets at the festivals of Dionysus, the Lenaea in late winter and the City Dionysia in early spring, and would know the lyric poets from hearing their works sung at drinking parties or at celebrations of athletic victories. Not only were books expensive, but reading was a laborious process. Literary texts were written on papyrus rolls, which were cumbersome to use, and
The text was written without spaces between words or punctuation. We have no evidence for books being widely disseminated until the last decade of the fifth century. Our earliest evidence for a member of the public reading a tragedy comes from Aristophanes’ Frogs (52-54; see also 1005-18), which was produced in 405. There is evidence of a different kind, however, for the writing down of parts of a tragic text - a choral ode, say, or a rhesis (speech) - possibly as an aid to memory. At Frogs 151, one figure in a comic list of sinners being punished in Hades is ‘‘anyone who has had a copy made of a rhesis by Morsimus,’’ which implies that having copies made of bits of tragedy, presumably for later recitation, was a recognized activity. We hear of such a recitation at Clouds 1369-72 and Ephippus fr. 16.3 PCG. Though reading plays was not a common activity and papyrus rolls containing an entire tragedy did not enjoy wide circulation, it would seem that it was not difficult to get access to a copy of a play one admired.
Our earliest papyrus fragments of dramatic texts give us an idea of what these autograph copies must have looked like (see Turner 1987, 60-61 and 74-77). Since they were scripts meant to be realized under the poet’s own direction, the poet did not feel the need to provide anything more than the words that were to be spoken. There were no stage directions since these would be supplied orally in rehearsal. There were probably not even speaker indications, merely a horizontal line, called a paragraphos, under the first word of a speech and extending into the left margin, to show that there was a change of speaker, with a colon-like mark, if needed, to mark change of speaker mid-line. There was a tendency already in Aeschylus for significant stage action to be alluded to in the words spoken, so that ifa significant prop or gesture is used, the characters refer to it. As a result, the absence of stage directions does not seem to be as much of a hindrance as it would be for someone trying to produce a modern play from a copy that gave only the characters’ words. The medieval manuscripts all have speaker indications, and these, although not derived from the author’s autograph, are correct in the vast majority of cases, being based on inference from the text or on the tradition of performance.
It is often assumed that each fifth-century tragedy was written in principle only for a single performance. That is not the case, and there were many other venues, both in Attica and in the larger Greek world, where plays were performed and a particular play could receive a repeat performance (see Csapo and Slater 1995, 121-38). There was, however, a restriction against putting on work at the City Dionysia that had already been produced there.
The single exception to this in the fifth century was a law, passed shortly after Aeschylus’ death, that provided for the revival of his plays. A poet, wishing to produce his own play, had to ask the official in charge of the festival to ‘‘grant him a chorus,’’ that is, give him permission to compete and the requisite state funding. But by the terms of this law anyone who wanted to produce Aeschylus was automatically ‘‘granted a chorus.’’ We are told by Quintilian in the Roman period that ‘‘revised plays of his’’ ( correctas eius fabulas) were entered in the competition and that many received the first prize (Institutio Oratoria 10.1.66). It is alarming to hear that later producers so cavalierly set about to ‘‘revise’’ Aeschylus, adjusting him to the taste of their own day. We do not know the source of Quintilian’s information or whether it is accurate, but it is worth noting that Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes was at some point given a new and updated ending, designed to allude to the edict forbidding the burial of Polynices and Antigone’s disobedience of that edict as dramatized in Sophocles’ Antigone. It is at least possible that this ending is the result of a fifth-century revival.
The Athenians were inveterate record keepers, and the archon who ‘‘granted a chorus’’ to the tragic poets to compete in the City Dionysia probably kept a record of the names of the plays each poet entered in the contest, how the poets fared in the awarding of the prizes, and, after 447, who the winner of the actors’ competition was. At any rate, this is the information that Aristotle, who was interested in the history of tragic poetry, gathered together in two works, which were then the source for the production information in our medieval manuscripts and elsewhere. (The authors and plays whose production dates are known to us are summarized in Snell 1971, 3-52.) There is also the possibility that the archon kept a copy of the plays themselves. This has been doubted (Griffith 1977, 232; Mastronarde 1994, 40 n. 1). We know that an official copy of the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was made for a specific purpose in the second half of the fourth century (see below), but there might also have been archival copies of all the competing plays. This would explain how later authors could quote from so many of the lesser figures of the fifth century (e. g., Choerilus, Phrynichus, Aristias) whose plays were not popular in the intervening centuries. But even if these archival copies existed, most of the copies that circulated in the fourth century and later probably derived from other sources: actors might have lent their copies to interested persons or even participated in the mass production of copies by reciting their lines to a whole group of copyists.
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