A number of the surviving plays present particular problems. One such is Prometheus Bound. On the assumption that a skeenee was available to the author, whether this was Aeschylus or not, many scholars have imagined that the nailing of Prometheus to his rock must have occurred up against the stage building. Because Prometheus first hears the chorus of Oceanids rather than sees them and because they say they have flown to the spot, it is assumed that they appeared first on the skeenee roof. It makes more practical sense, however, to imagine Prometheus being ‘‘nailed’’ to some ad hoc structure in the center of the orchestra and the chorus entering, behind and unseen by him, either on some kind of wheeled carriage or with their flying indicated by the accompanying choreography. Oceanus, who subsequently tells his audience that he has flown in on a griffin, may, in fact, have been similarly earth-bound, or have possibly used the mechane. How the earthquake and swallowing of Prometheus into the earth could have been staged is another difficult problem. A neat solution would be to imagine Prometheus, fixed all along on the ekkukleema, being withdrawn through the skene door at the end of the play. However, we have no way of judging the extent of realism felt appropriate in such situations. Thus a Prometheus in a central position in the orchestra could just as easily have been surrounded and obscured by the chorus, whose choreographed movements could suggest engulf-ment, their own included.
The suicide of Ajax is another talking point, the problem being that the actor who as Ajax falls on his sword will have been required shortly afterwards to appear as Teucer and lament over the body. This question is tied up with the further question of a change of scene, normally assumed, from Ajax’s tent to a grove near the seashore. The use of different ends of the skene for the two sites is one suggestion (Pohlmann 1986, 28). With regard to the suicide, a number of solutions have been offered, such as the idea that the Ajax actor may have fallen in death through the skene door (Arnott 1962, 131-32), the body thereafter being represented by a dummy, or that a suitably adapted ekkuklema was used (Webster 1970a, 17-18). Suicide entirely out of sight of the audience has been presented as the other option (Pohlmann 1986, 27), even with no change of scene involved (Scullion 1994, 89-128). Certainty in such cases is impossible.
When we consider the texts of Greek tragedy for the light they may shed on the original performances, a whole world of living theater opens up. Yet it may be, in a sense, an idealized theatrical world. Theater does not necessarily run smoothly, and things can go wrong in any kind of performance context. While there are few records of such things associated with the performance of tragedy in ancient times, the evidence that we do have serves to remind us that Greek tragedies too were vulnerable to mishap. Perhaps the most famous case involves the actor, mercilessly twitted by Aristophanes and other comic poets, who unwittingly undercut the seriousness of a dramatic moment in Euripides’ Orestes by mispronouncing a key word: Orestes misspoke and said, not that he saw ‘‘calm’’ after his storm of madness, but that he saw a ‘‘pussycat.’’ And there is an enigmatic reference in Aristotle’s Poetics 1455a to a mistake made by the fourth-century tragedian Carcinus, who seems to have made one of his characters appear from a totally unsuitable or illogical direction, which aroused the ire of the audience and led to Carcinus’ spectacular failure in the competition. Stories such as these bring us close to Greek tragedy as living theater working through fallible human agents. At the same time, it leads to significant frustration that our knowledge is so limited and that so much about the subject remains in the realm of speculation. But what if we could travel back in time and attend the premiere of Oedipus the King? Let us conclude with the sobering reflection of one sensitive scholar (Dale 1968, 214) who suggests that perhaps if we did, ‘‘we should first have to... acquire new idioms of music and orchestic and stagecraft no easier than the language itself; perhaps harder, if the prejudices of our modern aesthetic should prove to be too deeply wrought into our consciousness.’’
World History
