Spirited/Reasoning: Stagecraft in Aeschylus

Usually when I read Greek drama, I don't consider the actual theatrical performance of the plays. Instead, I think about the language and the themes. The first time the actual staging became important to me was when I was assigned large portions of Oliver Taplin's The Stagecraft of Aeschylus in my Agamemnon class at my alma mater. Taplin explains the importance of the entrances and exits of the characters and the staging.

Recently, in the Garvie commentary which I have been raving about of late, the staging has come to my attention. Garvie explores a lot of the controversial aspects of the staging of the Persians in his introduction. I ended up dealing with this specifically in my presentation today in my Persians class. Taplin (and Garvie citing Taplin) discuss the difference between the two entrances of Atossa. At the first entrance, the chorus greets the queen with a full body prostration and the queen arrives decked out in rich clothing and she presumably arrives in a chariot. In the second entrance, she arrives on foot, possibly dressed in black, and carrying a set of libations. Her change in attire demonstrates the change in fate of the empire.

The presentation went reasonably well, thanks to some help from Propertius II with regards to the meter. Now back to more Lysias (of which I have completed two pages today and am hoping to read two more tonight).

Appetitive: The Joys of Greek

Although I have had a number of pitfalls so far, ever since I started taking this graduate seminar on the Attic Orators, I've begun to really enjoy Greek. Antiphon and Andocides are quite a joy to read, although they have their frustrating moments. My reading speed (for prose, although not for Aeschylus) is increasing significantly-- it seems like the effects of Greek prose composition finally caught up with me-- and I am beginning to learn the typical terms.

Nowhere did this joy manifest itself more than in reading Plato last night with Ovid II. When I read Crito over the summer with Propertius II, I was still struggling a lot with parts of the prose and my reading speed was quite slow. Now, I can carve a few hours out of my schedule and process the Greek pretty decently before going over it. While the orators are fun in their persuasive energy and the window they provide on Greek culture, the Symposium has a bit of wonderful colloquial wit that is just fantastic.

After that, even my remaining 50 lines of Vergil did not seem so dreadful, although the battle scenes are certainly grim. I'm actually beginning to appreciate parts of Vergil, finally.

To pass my little glimmer of exuberance on, I thought I would post a link to A.E. Houseman's "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy." My professor in the Persians class passes this out to us. I had seen it many years before, but it still absolutely cracks me up.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone. I will (I hope) be posting some interesting tidbits from Antiphon.

Appetitive: Persians (line 24)

I've been reading Aeschylus' Persians lately. Unlike the majority of extant tragedy, there is no prologue that begins the play. Instead, it starts with an extended parodos delivered by the group of Persians elders that make up  the chorus. Much of the beginning of their entrance (i.e. the part in marching anapests) lists the names of the Persian commanders. My favorite line is: "βασιλῆς βασιλέως ὕποχοι μεγάλου (kings subject to the great king)" which is a sort of elegant and wonderful reversal of the phrase "king of kings."



This commentary by Garvie that we are using is fantastic, although absurdly expensive. It is supposed to come out in paperback soon, which is great.

Appetitive: The Sound of Ancient Greek

There is a fabulous sample of Greek pronunciation (of both poetry and prose) online. Since I would like to improve my Greek pronunciation significantly before graduate school. Propertius II directed me to The Sound of Ancient Greek. Stefan Hagel, the speaker, uses pitch accents as well as indicating the type of phrase (e.g. interrogative, declaratory) in tone and pitch. It's fabulous. I listened to the messenger speech from Aeschylus' Agamemnon and the introduction to Plato's Symposium just this morning; they are great. Enjoy!

Hagel uses one of the same texts that I am trying to read through, Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek. Maybe my Greek will sound like that someday!

Spirited: Sophocles and the Gods

I used to be a Sophocles hater. I know, it's sacrilege. That was, until I read the Ajax in my Greek Tragedy Class. I was hooked at the first scene, where Athena displays an incredible combination of power, maniacal superiority, and cruelty. She demonstrates this complex nature of the gods (in Sophocles' view) who demonstrate a shocking lack of humanity in their dogged pursuit of a foreign ethics. However, much of the ethics is centered around the general Greek principle of "helping friends and harming enemies," but Athena takes this to a sick extreme.

From that point, I re-evaluated all the Sophocles plays. Although Athena in Ajax the most explicit instance of the gods acting in any Sophocles I have read thus far [1], although they act in sly and interesting ways and often compel or propel the action of the plays. For example, in the Electra, Orestes explains that his plans for revenge by stealth come from Phoebus Apollo (Electra lines 33-39). The entire action of not only the play, Oedipus Tyrannos [2], but Oedipus' life stem from and are foretold by the actions of Apollo as well. Teiresias speaks for the gods, as some kind of a human intermediary between the two.

Sophocles' plays are much more interesting, in my opinion, when considered not from the perspective of Aristotilian interpretations of Greek tragedy [3] or the conflict between oikos (home and family) and polis (city and state), but rather because they paint a complex and fascinating picture of the interaction between heroes and gods. I have been told my view of Greek tragedy can be a little divine-centric, and this may be true, but the tragedians each demonstrate vastly different conceptions of the gods in their plays, which I believe not only provides rich theatrical masterpieces, but also sheds a new light on Greek religion [4].

Endnotes

1. I have read Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Colonus (although I read it twice, I didn't understand it very well either time. it needs to go back on my reading list), Antigone, Ajax, Philoctetes, and Electra.
2. The reason that I refer to this play as Oedipus Tyrannos rather than the more traditional Oedipus Rex is because I think that the Oedipus Tyrannos expresses the irony behind the play better. Rex, the Latin for king, is much more equivalent to the classical Greek Basileus (although in Homeric times this word was used for a lord, and wanax was the word for king) which means king. One of the primary distinctions between basileus and tyrannos (tyrant) was the idea that the basileus came from a line of inherited power and excellence-- the conception that the person was king by right of family. The tyrant, on the other hand, was not justified by hereditary right, but was rather someone who had taken power by persuasion or, more likely, by force. Although Oedipus is technically a basileus, because he is the hereditary heir of Thebes, he is ironically a tyrant, because he killed his father (former basileus of Thebes) and married his mother in order to gain power in the city.
3. One of my favorite secondary sources that I read in the class was E.R. Dodd's "On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex" (click this link to download the Microsoft Word version of the document from NYU. Click this link to read as a HTML file). The document is short-- only about 6-7 pages if my memory serves, but it explains the problems with the traditional viewpoints on Oedipus Tyrannos.
4. I plan on doing another blog post about Aeschylus' views on religion, which show gods with a strict social and political hierarchy, and Euripides' views on religion, which seem to show gods with similar faults and flaws of humans, but many times more powerful.