Athens and Performance Culture

Athens performed. It was a city rich in festivals: to participate in those was to be a citizen. And, of course, the theatrical festivals of Dionysus were among the high spots of the citizen-year. Fifth-century Athens was also a city very aware of its own identity, and part of that self-imaging dwelt on the culture, the connoisseurship, the sophistication - or, more simply, the sophia, the skill and experience to recognize value and make distinctions where others would fall short. Logos was here a key concept: logos in the sense, as we would translate it, of ‘‘reason,’’ the capacity to think things through; and particularly logos in our sense of ‘‘speech.’’ This was a rhetorical culture, one in which listening to speeches - performances - in the assembly or the law-court was another central part of citizenly behavior. Listening required evaluation too, evaluation both of skill (that sophia again) and, much more important, of the substance of the case: is this speaker’s proposal really the right thing to do, did things really happen the way he says, is he really as innocent as he claims? This is a city of words, of mouths, of ears - and of minds. And all this is to be a citizen: all these are roles which citizens perform.

Or so we are often told.1 Perhaps, in fact, Athens was not so much more of a ‘‘performance culture’’ than many other cities. Spartan citizens had to perform too, though in very different ways; and was Athens really any more performance - or self-image-conscious than, say, Rome, with its spectacles, its elaborate religious ceremonial, its celebrity culture? (Probably not.) Than Nazi Germany? (Doubtful.) Or even than the political culture of Britain or America today, with television as the new medium and testing-ground of choice? (Probably, yes, but not by much.) What, anyway, is ‘‘performance,’’ and where does it stop? Most of our behavior is ritualized in some way; most of it plays up to, or plays off, roles that are expected or constructed. It is all too easy for these categories to broaden in such a way that they are drained of interpretative value.

But that is indeed too easy a step, and we cannot ignore the insights that a stress on performance has brought - in Homeric studies, for instance, where the concentration

On oral composition has been supplemented by more sophisticated reflection on the conditions of performance and on the audience expectations of oral discourse; in choral lyric, where performance and particularly reperformance enact the recognition of an achievement and secure its eternal fame; or in Athenian rhetoric in all its forms, where the elite politician and the citizen audience both have roles to play and expectations to fulfill. Analogous questions have purchase in tragedy too, whether one concentrates on the political - how far is it citizenly behavior to celebrate the city in the theatrical festival? How far is that celebration qualified by, and how far does it embrace, and even prescribe, a problematization of a citizen’s duties? Or the social - how far is the construction of the free citizen male defined by reflection on the slave, the foreigner, the female? Or the religious - how far, and simply how, does the Dionysiac perspective of the festival interact with the themes of the plays themselves? How does the ritual go with the myth?2 Not that those aspects are separate: the religious is the political, the political is the social. Nor, either, that we need apply a one-size-fits-all categorization to all tragedies. The festival context may affect the way we read Euripides’ Bacchae in a way that it does not affect Sophocles’ Electra or Aeschylus’ Persians, just as it may affect Aristophanes’ Frogs differently from his Knights or Clouds. But those are all good questions.

Here, however, the theme is tragedy, rhetoric, and performance, and that ‘‘and’’ is to be taken strongly, for I will concentrate on the way in which these three areas, rhetoric included, interact. In particular, Athenian pride in their rhetorical connois-seurship - this ‘‘city of words’’ (cf. Demosthenes 19.184; Goldhill 1986a, 57-78) - co-existed with a considerable readiness to feel distrust of rhetorical skill: a clever speaker was a suspected speaker (Dover 1974, 25-28; Ober 1989, 165-77; Hesk 1999 and 2000, 202-91). That links with ‘‘performance’’ in several ways. The audience’s response to rhetoric on stage will draw on their extratextual experience oforators in real life, in those performances in the democratic polis where the roles of politician and citizen, speaker and evaluator, were so central: that is clear, for instance, in the description of the assembly in Euripides’ Orestes, where a series of familiar oratorical types contributes to what becomes a travesty of a trial (852-956; Willink 1986, 223-25, 229-31; Pelling 2000, 165-67). In that case as in others, the form these suspicions may take is of sensing that speakers are affecting a role or an attitude: they are ‘‘putting on a performance’’ or ‘‘putting on an act.’’ That last phrase may be even more apposite, for such a performance may have a hint of the metatheatrical, with someone acting a role - Clytemnestra acting as a faithful wife, or Orestes as a messenger bringing news of his own death, or the Creon of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus as a concerned relative; or manipulating others to play out the roles they have cast for them - Dionysus creating a part for Pentheus, or Odysseus staging and directing the plot of Philoctetes (Lada-Richards 1998). True, it is not clear that the audience would figure such cases as ‘‘theatrical’’ or ‘‘role-playing’’ quite as readily as we use those metaphors today,3 but the analogies with the way the theater itself functions are still worth exploring.

‘‘Rhetoric’’ too poses problems of definition, and there are again dangers of broadening the term so widely that it ceases to be illuminating. There is an important sense in which everything said is rhetorical: everything is cast to persuade, everyone tries to find the style most appropriate to its function. In that sense, Caesar’s narrative is as rhetorical as Velleius’, and Ajax’s speech in Iliad 9 is as rhetorical as Aelius Aristides. But that is not the sense in which rhetoric aroused distrust, any more than the passionate outpourings of Achilles in the same book of the Iliad or of Philoctetes in Sophocles’ play would excite any suspicion of disingenuousness. It is rhetoric in a narrower sense that is here in point: the rhetoric that shows signs of contrivance, artificiality, acquired technique, especially when articulated in formal and public speeches. There are adequate indications that such characteristics formed a recognizable cluster in fifth-century Athens: Cleon’s dazzlingly rhetorical attack on dazzling rhetoric in Thucydides’ Mytilenean debate is enough to show that (3.37 with Gomme 1945-56 ad loc; Yunis 1996, 90-92; Hesk 2000, 248-56); so is Aristophanes’ Clouds, especially its confrontational debate between Right and Wrong (8891112). And it is hardly coincidence that in each case a clever speaker, with a full range of rhetorical techniques in his repertoire, is negatively characterized.

It need not follow that every ‘‘rhetorical’’ speaker is felt as rhetorical in quite the same way, or has the same real-life resonance: those speakers in the debate of Orestes may not be seen as the same sort of rhetorical performers as the nurse in Hippolytus, and any real-life counterparts or models of those performers would be different too; and we will see cases below, especially Ajax and Agamemnon, where the rhetoric of a speech has less of the slickness of contemporary fashion, but is no less disquieting for it. Doubtless there are illuminating generalizations that can be made - that rhetoric tends to be uneasy because it strikes a public and political tone in contexts where the personal would be more appropriate (Halliwell 1997); that Euripides is less inhibited than Aeschylus or Sophocles in adopting contemporary mannerisms and formulations (Bers 1994, 181-82), and makes his characters more explicitly self-conscious about speechmaking (Lloyd 1992, 21); that confidence in the healing power of peitho (persuasion) on the whole diminishes as the fifth century goes on (Buxton 1982, 187); that Euripides becomes more flexible, fluent, and deft in his handling of rhetorical form in his later plays (Collard 1975b); that the engagement with rhetoric must be seen as part of a wider concern with the problematics of language and communication (Goldhill 1984, 1986a, 1997b). Those generalizations themselves point to the variety of effects which a sense of rhetoric can give: that, and the variety of ‘‘suspicions’’ too, will also be this chapter’s theme.

For speech points in three directions at once, to the speaker, to the person addressed, to the features in the world it describes: and each of these directions can be felt as skewed. Sometimes the distortion is speaker-based in that people conceal what they know, feel, or want; sometimes it is hearer-based in that it misleads by its seductiveness - or possibly that it persuades too little rather than too much, that audiences have made up their minds already; sometimes it looks more to the features in the world which are mis-described or travestied. Some of our most interesting cases are where these different sorts of suspicion do not come together, where a speech makes claims that are unlikely to persuade but are nevertheless not clearly inaccurate, or where it says things which are clearly false but which the listener wants to hear, or things which are true but in ways that hearers, or even speaker, will misconstrue. Only a series of sample analyses can bring out the range of techniques which the tragic poets employ, as well as giving us a clearer idea of what markers point to different types of suspect speech.