Unseen gods are potentially important in all tragedies: their inferred, suspected, or belatedly revealed or understood interventions contribute to the dynamic of puzzlement and understanding that applies in different ways to characters, chorus, and interpreting audience. In a number of plays, however (less often in Sophocles than in Aeschylus and Euripides), divinities are represented visibly as characters of the drama.
Such visibility is one of the available conventions for distinguishing the represented world of the performance from ordinary life, and the realm of heroic myth from contemporary history. Visible gods on stage are partly analogous to the gods who appeared in contemporary sculpture and vase-painting, such as the Athena who stands by Heracles or Theseus in depictions of their labors, the Apollo who extends his arm over the battling Lapiths and Centaurs, the observing gods who witness the preparations for Pelops’ chariot race, and the gods who appear on the margins of vase-painting scenes or in a higher band (and divine participants and observers must also have been shown in lost large-scale paintings). On the stage, however, the gods are not just observers or helpers, but interact more directly with humans, in the mode of epiphany, and (given the public nature of the represented space of the action) sometimes with a wider audience than would be normal for an epiphany. The example set by epic poetry and narrative elements in archaic choral poetry must also be taken into account. Whether there was also a ritual origin for the acting out of the role of a god by a masked human is hard to determine with confidence, but that origin, if any, probably had small relevance in the changed and developed context of the fifth-century Attic theater (see, however, Sourvinou-Inwood 2003).
Despite the analogies that make visible gods on stage a reasonable choice, it is clear that as the genre matured it placed limits on such portrayals. Outside of a few special cases (apparently early) to be discussed shortly, gods tend to be located at the margins of the action, in prologue and exodos. Tragedy’s interest in human action, human decision-making, and the dramatic force of uncertainty and open-ended struggle is usually better served by keeping the gods out of sight and by revealing the disparity of knowledge and power gradually and belatedly. For this generic tendency, we may compare both Aristotle’s dislike of deus ex machina solutions (Poetics 1454b1-6), his depreciation of the visual element (opsis: 1450b16-20, 1453b1-11), and perhaps his low ranking of plays involving Prometheus and events in Hades (1456a2-3: corrupt and obscure) and Northrop Frye’s differentiation of tragedy’s high mimetic mode from myth or romance (Frye 1957, 33-34). Finally, the possibility that satyr-plays more commonly featured visible gods as characters of the drama offers a relevant counterpoint to the tragic norm.
Of the tragedies that are exceptional in the use of divine characters, Aeschylus’ Eumenides is the boldest experiment. After the dense and in part obscure or paradoxical allusions to divine will and divine favor in the first two plays of the Oresteia, the third play of the trilogy brings the conflict to a whole new level in order to craft a solution. The supporting and persecuting gods become separately visible on stage in Apollo (and probably Hermes) and the Erinyes, as does the reconciling goddess Athena, and in an unusual way they interact very directly and on the same physical level with the human beings - not only Orestes, but all the silent extras representing the Athenian jurors and the members of the final procession. Both the vituperative argument between Apollo and the chorus in Delphi and the trial scene in Athens reveal that a readjustment and accommodation on the divine level is required if the chain of wrongful rights (or rightful wrongs) is to be broken. Thus the presence of the divinities has the double purpose of showing the significance of the event for Zeus’ regime over the other gods and over mankind and of lending solemn weight to the new aetiology of the Areopagus council that Aeschylus is creating. The Prometheus plays - the surviving Prometheus Bound and the lost Prometheus Unbound, about which the surviving fragments and testimonia tell us a good deal - similarly concern events of cosmic significance, with the earlier play showing Zeus as a newly installed and insecure ruler with the characteristics of a tyrant and the latter bringing a reconciliation with Prometheus. In the end, Zeus avoids indulging his lust for Thetis as he had in the case of Io, and the terms of human life under Zeus’ reign have apparently improved through the world-pacifying feats of Heracles and perhaps through some greater philanthropy in Zeus himself. Unlike Eumenides, these two plays present locations far from human habitation, and the participation of human characters is limited to Io in one play and Heracles in the other.
Even more extraordinary may have been the dramatic portrayal of gods in Aeschylus’ lost Psychostasia, which, in imitation of an epic motif {Iliad 8.69-74, 22.209-13) perhaps already used in Arctinus’ epic Aethiopis, included a weighing of fates or souls to decide the outcome of the duel between Achilles and Memnon before Troy. Plutarch’s reference to the play {How the Young Man Should Study Poetry 2 = Moralia 16F-17A) suggests that Zeus himself appeared. This would be unique for tragedy {although a disguised Zeus may have appeared in Sophocles’ satyr-play Inachus): otherwise, as in epic, the gods who directly communicate with mankind are minor deities or Olympians other than Zeus, while Zeus sits remote, acting through agents. Plutarch’s language also suggests that Thetis and Eos supplicated Zeus while their sons were engaged in battle.3 The second-century ce lexicographer Pollux { Onomasticon 4.130) refers to the appearance of Zeus and ‘‘those with him’’ {this idiomatic phrase means either the two mothers or, conceivably, the mothers plus additional mute gods) on an upper level that he calls the theologeion, and it is reasonable to assume that he is referring to the same Aeschylean scene as Plutarch and not another play. This would then be an early use of the vertical distinction in playing level that is well established later in the fifth century: gods above on the roof or crane, mortals below on the stage and orchestra. Wilamowitz imagined this scene as the prologue of the play, with no humans present, and this is the most attractive solution, since it seems less likely to posit a temporary departure of the chorus and actors in mid-play. It must be mentioned, however, that some have doubted the applicability of the late testimonia {Taplin 1977, 431-33). Such skepticism seems to me overdrawn, but one must concede that if the scene of weighing occurs in the prologue, those who are skeptical of the use of the upper level during Aeschylus’ career could place the action on the stage itself, with a change of scene to the Trojan plain in the rest of the play.
Apart from these exceptional examples, visible gods in tragedy may be roughly grouped into those who punish, those who save, and those who inform. The motif of a punishing god disguised as a mortal is seen in Euripides’ Bacchae. The audience is informed of the disguise in the prologue, and at the end Dionysus appears in open godhead in the higher position above the skene and perhaps with some change of mask and costume. This motif may have figured in Aeschylus’ lost Edonoi as well, where Lycurgus confronts a captive Dionysus with insults {Aeschylus fr. 61). Other Dionysus plays may have used the device, but the fragments provide insufficient evidence. If it is correct to combine a remark in Plato, Republic 381d with other clues {fr. 168), in another play by Aeschylus Hera adopted a disguise to deceive Semele into asking Zeus to appear to her in his full divinity. Divine punishment need not, however, be linked to the use of disguise. We now know from papyrus fragments an impressive scene of Sophocles’ Niobe (fr. 441a-442) in which Artemis (on the roof of the skene?) is encouraged by her brother Apollo (also on the roof?) to shoot arrows at the daughters of Niobe, first inside and then outside the skene. Niobe’s sons had been killed by Apollo earlier in the play, and their father Amphion had confronted Apollo in a contest of archery and lost his life (perhaps one or both of these events were reported in a narrative rather than seen on stage).
In the prologue of Sophocles’ Ajax, Athena displays the overweening and maddened hero to his enemy Odysseus. She has simultaneously saved her favorites from Ajax’s onslaught, but the goddess is shown taking more delight in Ajax’s humiliation than Odysseus can muster, and there is a decided contrast between the goddess’ rigid position and the human pity expressed by Odysseus, anticipating the juxtaposition in the final scenes of the play of the unattractive Atreids with the temperate and conciliatory Odysseus. Sophocles leaves implicit the same sort of objection to excessive harshness in a hostile god that is often expressed by Euripidean characters. Likewise, Athena’s parting maxim, that ‘‘gods love those who are self-controlled and detest those who are bad’’ (132-33), has a simplicity that is out of harmony with the complex interplay and deconstruction of human values illustrated in the rest of the play - another contrast that can be paralleled in Euripides. It is also significant that the goddess does not justify her disapproval of Ajax’s excess in more detail in this scene. Instead, after the pathos-generating sequence of scenes involving Ajax and his family and just before the suicide itself, crucial details of Ajax’s past prideful behavior are given in the report of Calchas’ advice to Teucer. Another unsettling feature is the belated revelation that Athena’s wrath will pursue the hero for this day only: is this a sign of moderation in the goddess, or a cruel joke, a merely apparent choice, like Heracles’ alternatives of meeting his death or being ‘‘free of toils’’ once a certain span of time has elapsed (Women ofTrachis 79-81, 166-68)?
Aphrodite in Euripides’ Hippolytus is just as determined a foe of the man who has insulted her. The young hero enacts in his dialogue-scene with the old servant (88-113) the very disrespect that Aphrodite has adduced in the prologue as her reason for punishing him, and he exhibits elsewhere some qualities that many critics take to be unattractive. Nevertheless, apart from the old servant’s futile prayer that suggests the goddess is too harsh (114-20), along with the beauty of Hippolytus’ devotion and integrity and the sympathy expressed later by other characters, Aphrodite’s own self-presentation marks her as harsh, particularly in her indifference to Phaedra’s involvement in the disaster. She may be felt to stage-manage the plot more directly than Sophocles’ Athena, and her harshness is also underscored by the parallelism with Artemis, which is reinforced by details of imagery and staging4 and evident also in Artemis’ promise to destroy one of Aphrodite’s favorites in turn (1420-22).
A curious variation on the punishing goddess is offered by Euripides’ Trojan Women. Athena arrives in the middle of the divine prologue to recruit Poseidon for a planned punishment of the Greek victors that will occur after the end of the play. Here it is Poseidon rather than a human character who comments on arbitrariness and excess: ‘‘Why do you jump in this way to different behavior at different times, and hate and love so excessively whoever it happens to be?’’ (67-68). This privileged communication to the audience casts a somber irony over the feeling ofabandonment expressed by the suffering Trojan women (whose sufferings are not, however, lessened thereby) and over the sense of control displayed by the Greeks, who dispose in turn of Polyxena, Astyanax, Andromache, and Helen. The tragic significance of such portrayal of the gods is at least twofold. First, the connection of supernatural power to morality as human beings understand it is subjected to doubt, and human values themselves appear unhappily contingent. Second, the aristocratic code of honor is queried: the gods always have the power and always feel entitled to honor, but in several tragedies they are shown to be reluctant or unable to modulate their great power with a voluntary restraint - the very restraint that is often necessary in human interactions if social structures are not to collapse into savagery.
The visible punishing god is most likely to appear in the prologue (in the case of Heracles the mid-play appearance begins a second half, in many respects the mirror-image of the first half of the play), while the saving god is normally a deus ex machina. Athena’s intervention at the close of Odyssey 24 is a kind of epic model for such a saving intervention, and Athena has a similar function in Eumenides, bringing help to the troubled house of Atreus in its surviving representative Orestes and then to Athens and the Olympian dispensation by handling the angry Erinyes. It would be fascinating to know whether Aphrodite's participation in the resolution of Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy (fr. 44) was handled like Athena’s in Eumenides or more like the typical deus ex machina as attested in Euripides. Some common features of the deus ex machina include (1) appearance on the upper level, above the human characters and chorus; (2) suddenness of arrival (sometimes the reaction of the humans and the references to the god's locomotion strongly support the use of the theater-crane, but in other cases the actor may simply have emerged onto the roof from a ladder within or behind the skene); (3) stopping-function, that is, an initial command to the humans not to carry out a contemplated action, especially violence (perhaps Sophocles' Peleus; Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians, Helen, Antiope, Orestes; the command is to a god, Poseidon, in Erechtheus), but also simple intentions like Ion's insistence on asking the oracle directly about his parentage (Euripides' Ion), Theseus’ bidding farewell to Adrastus and the Argives he has helped (Euripides’ Suppliants), the departure of Philoctetes and Neoptolemus for home instead of Troy (Sophocles’ Philoctetes); (4) dispositions for the future (burial, fate of the survivors, cult aetiology), sometimes accompanied by consolation (Artemis to Hip-polytus, Thetis to Peleus, Dioscuri to Orestes and Electra) or blame (Artemis to Theseus, Dionysus to Cadmus and Agave). The deus ex machina thus partakes of the role of informing god as well. Divine epilogues often encourage acceptance or resignation in the face of terrible misfortune, both for the surviving characters and for the audience, and at the same time serve for the audience to weave the events just presented, novel though they may have been, back into the fabric of well-known stories and to relate them to monuments and cult practices surviving in the audience’s world.
Sophocles appears to have made little use of the deus ex machina, although it must be remembered that we have very little useful knowledge about his lost plays. Apart from the possible use of Thetis in his Peleus to prevent further violence, there is the remarkable reversal at the end of Philoctetes, which serves to save the traditional outcome of the myth after the logic of the characters’ behavior has led to an entirely different ending. As with other indeterminate details in this play, the ending leaves it up to the audience to decide (or remain undecided) whether to view this intervention positively as a welcome device to preserve both Philoctetes’ integrity and the cure and glory that will be his in the fulfillment of Troy’s destiny, or pessimistically as a subversion of human freedom and character by external forces. The examples in Euripides are of many varieties, with different motivations for arrival, different tones of interaction, and different sorts of instructions. The most extreme reversal, which many critics view as approaching the absurd, is that in Orestes, where Apollo brings about a shift from Orestes’ holding a knife to Hermione’s throat to his receiving her father’s polite wishes for the pair’s happy marriage. Another pattern of interest is the ‘‘patriotic’’ function of Athena as deus ex machina in plays that have connections to Attica. In Euripides, she has a saving role in Erechtheus, ending Poseidon’s earthquake and settling an old rivalry for the good of Athens. In Iphigenia among the Taurians her instructions complete the Attic appropriation of elements of the Orestes and Iphigenia myths, and similarly in Ion her intervention not only saves Apollo the embarrassment of appearing himself (while simultaneously bringing his failings into the open), but also lays claim to Apolline glory for Attic origins and supports Attic aspirations to hegemony.
The informing function of tragedy’s visible gods is found both in prologues and epilogues (and indeed in mid-play in Heracles). Since tragedy often exploits the discrepant awareness of audience and characters or chorus, the device of the prologue god can be very effective in facilitating certain kinds of plots. It is essential to Athena’s pursuit of Ajax that the truth behind his mad attack on the flocks be made known, so her scene with Odysseus is important not only to the audience’s understanding but also to the Greek army and its leaders within the play. In Hippolytus, by contrast, Aphrodite’s revelations are aimed solely at the audience and cannot but condition how the audience receives all the following scenes. The characters are kept in the dark about her intervention, and Theseus is also kept in the dark about his wife’s lie because of the oaths taken by Hippolytus and the chorus. Artemis thus assumes a parallel informing function in the final scenes, using her superior knowledge both to taunt and to console the humans. The information supplied by Apollo in the prologue of Alcestis is not essential in the same way (a dialogue between faithful household slaves could have supplied the same background details), but his statement of solidarity with the house of Admetus, his attempt to persuade Thanatos to spare Alcestis, and his prediction of Heracles’ ultimate success in rescuing her significantly alter the way an audience will receive the scenes that follow. Hermes in Ion, on the other hand, is a clear precursor to the prologue gods of New Comedy, who are needed to let the audience in on the mistaken identities and misunderstandings that drive the plot. Some epilogue gods, finally, are significant not so much for revealing an unknown fact as for echoing and confirming the feelings of the characters. Thus Thetis in Andromache, although largely concerned with future dispositions, completes the theme of resentment toward Apollo that has been carried by the chorus, messenger, and Peleus; and Castor in Electra confirms the regrets and resentment of Orestes and his sister before counseling resignation and instructing them on their future (but there is one gratuitous piece of privileged information in Castor’s speech, the revelation that the Trojan War was fought over an image of Helen, adding a bitter irony to all regrets about the past).
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