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GREEK DRAMA
Introduction to Western Drama
DRA 100
Spring 05
David Birn, Instructor

The assignment for today was to read Oedipus and Medea, two plays which despite their 2500 year age have a remarkable familiarity.  To quote H W Jansen, the characters do not seem so much “strangers from a strange land as older members of our own family whom we recognize and understand immediately.”  Their thoughts, concerns, feelings, issues are extraordinarily close to things we think and feel.  We can understand them and so empathize with their plight.  At the risk of cliché, we can “relate” to them.   

Ms Cody and Ms Paredez will analyze the texts in some detail next class.  What I would like to do today is to help you understand a little bit about the cultural, physical, and visual circumstances which both shaped and were shaped by these Dramas.

By background and temperament, I am a designer.  I have spent most of my life thinking about the way artifacts, both physical and cultural, effect experience.  Ms Cody and Ms Paredez suggested last class that neither History nor Texts can ever be “neutral”.  I would go further, and suggest that experience is never neutral.  It is always shaped by a complex set of cultural and personal contexts that act as a lens filtering and conditioning our experience.  There are in fact three strands we must try to keep separate as we venture to explore the rich and fascinating tradition of Western Theatre of which we are the inheritors.   There is the historical event as it was experienced by the participants from within their own contexts, there is how we understand each of these events as seen through the lens of our own, utterly different context, and, laying transparently but importantly between the two, the process of selection that conditions our reception of the evidence we receive.  Now the first of these stands is in fact impossible to access.  The factors that shaped the experience of the historical Greeks disappeared with them….

Evidence is fragmentary, intrepretaion is frought with difficulty.

It is my firm belief that in order to understand where we are going we have to understand where we have come from.  Thus, it seems both interesting and important to me to try as best we can to understand the experience of the Greek audience at the time these plays were written.           

If, as I have just said experience is never neutral, and many factors outside of the theatre proper affect an audience’s experience of the drama, it seems appropriate to talk a little bit about the audience and its frame of reference. 

Citizens of Athens.  I will leave it my critical theory colleagues to discuss the complexities of how we are to understand this statement from our own position in 2002.  Suffice for today to say that the primary Audience of the Drama were the franchised citizens of an powerful and accomplished civic body proud of who they were and what they were doing. 

For centuries a major source of tension in Greek culture was the friction between the occupants of Ancient Greece and their neighbors across the Aegean Sea to their East (The siege and sack of Troy described in the Iliad of Homer is a mythologized account of a part of the history of this tension).  But at the Battle of Marathon in 490 and decisively at Salamis and Platea in 479, the Greeks led by the Athenians defeated the numerically superior Persians and became for all intents and purposes the superpower of the Mediterranean.  For reasons no one can really explain, these victories marked a profound and explosive change in the culture of Greece in general and Athens in particular.  Radical, shockingly radical, new ideas were proposed, examined, and most surprisingly of all, implemented in an extraordinary flurry.  Democracy, first attempted in the late part of the previous century, found its first full expression in Athens shortly after the final defeat of the Persians.  By 430, less than 50 years later, it was the dominant form of government throughout the Greek world. What we now think of as Scientific thought, the attempt to find understandable natural causes for natural phenomenon, also begun in the previous century, gathered tremendous inertia for the first time during this period, as did the emergence of what has become know as the study of History and Philosophy and Mathematics. 

Although the new ideas covered a broad range of inquires and were played out in a wide variety of forums, I think it is possible to characterize all of them as marking a paradigm shift from Man as subject to the forces of the world to Man as Subject.  

So ubiquitous is this way of thinking now, and so foreign is it for us to imagine any other way of thinking, it is difficult for to grasp just how radical these changes really were at the time.  Fortunately, we have the great and somewhat durable cultural mirror called art.  One of Art’s primary functions in any culture is to record and preserve that cultures sense of self and self-image.  The art of the period we are now discussing is no exception to this, and I would like to look at a bit of this now in the hopes of making more concrete the radical nature of what was going on.
580 BCE  stable, formal, solid, inactive 
460 BCE  active, dynamic, and muscular
A shift from the simplicity of a flat diagram to the complex topography of a body twisting through space.


The tragedies played on the 3rd day of one of the biggest celebration of the Athenian cultural, religious, and political year.  In our own age of separation between spirituality, civic display, and entertainment, the quality of the Great or City Dionysia is hard to understand.  We can’t ever really know what this must have been like, but if you were to imagine the civic pride and patriotism of a 4th of July parade, the sacred ritual of spiritual rebirth of an Easter Mass, the friendly but passionate civic rivalry of the World Series, and the excitement generated by musicians exchanging licks in a battle of the bands, I think you would have a fair approximation of what the event must have been like. 

Production began several months prior to the Festival with the selection by the Archon Eponymous of the dramas to be presented, and the assignment of a Choregos, “sponsor”, to each chorus.  The state paid for the actors and supplied their costumes.

The Great or City Dionysia took place in March.  Springtime.  The first day of the celebration was dedicatory. The God Dionysus in the form of his cult statue was feted, and animal sacrifices were made. Important visitors were greeted.  The tributes paid to Athens by other city-states and colonies were ceremonially presented, military might was displayed.  

The second day was focused on a choral contest. Each of the ten traditional tribes that made up the citizen population of Athens presented two chorus:  one chorus was made up of 50 Youths and one of 50 Men.   20 chorus of 50 members each makes for 1000 people.  As the population of citizens in Athens of this period was approximately 40,000, this means that 2.5 percent of the community was actively involved as a competitors.  A sloppy but perhaps illuminating analogy would be to imagine some sort of team competition here in the united states today, say a track meet or a barbershop quartet-off involving 6 million Americans. 

Please note that the celebration was conceived essentially as a contest.   Competition was a central form of cultural expression of the Ancient Greeks.  Important religious, political and cultural rituals were frequently conceived of as contest.  The Olympiad, first held in the 7th century, is perhaps the most familiar example of this phenomenon.   At a fundamental level the tragedies are artifacts of a competition, and as such must be understood in the context of a desire on the part of the performers to stand out, to be the best.  

And now, on the third day, it is time for the drama.  There will be three days of performances, each day consisting of 3 tragedies and a rough and tumble kind of after-piece called a satyr play, all by a single author. In the early years of the Dioneysia, the performances took place in the Agora, the central square which served as the hub of cultural, commercial and political activity of Golden Age Athens.  Virtually nothing is known about this early phase of the development of the Drama, but it does offer a tantalizing hint about the roots of the institution.  Might the Atheanians have thought it more like a street fair than a formal sit down ritual? By mid century, however, the festival had relocated to the precinct of the temple of Dionysus on a hillside at the foot of the Acropolis, and it here, in the theatre that saw the original productions of Aesculys, Sophocles, and Euripides that we shall try to imagine ourselves.

The performances took place in daylight.  (There is textual evidence in a number of plays suggesting that performances commenced at Sunrise.  It appeals to our sense of the epic majesty of the Greek Drama to imagine the rising action of the play being paralleled by the rising of the sun.  There are, however, a number of plays whose text indicates a beginning time of sunset, and others like Oedipus and Medea whose action doesn’t seem to relate to any time at all.)

The audience, numbering approximately 15,000, arrived on foot. Imagine this, 15,000 people!   6 times the population of Vassar.  A major event.  Imagine the hub-ub, the excitement, the sense of occasion, the civic pride, of so many peers gathering together in one place. And not just peers.  The fame and prestige of the City Dionysia was widespread.  Visitors traveled from far away to attend.   The fact of this size alone makes the event very different from what we think of as theatre.  More like going to the circus or a football game or a rock concert than the theatre. 

Wooden benches erected on the natural bowl of the hillside below the Acropolis made up the seats. (The seats during the entire Golden age were wooden. The majestic marble benches we see in the surviving architecture date from the late 4th century, over 100 years later than the last play of Euripides.)  The Greeks used the word theatron to describe the seating area alone. It was only much later, that the word came to refer to the entire facility.   The word theatre translates literally as “seeing place”, reinforcing again that the Greeks thought of drama as spectacle, something to be seen, rather than heard.  Our own word for the seating place, Auditorium, is derived from the later Roman tradition when text had in fact become dominant, and the audience’s position had become a “hearing place”.

Having clambered to your seat and perhaps spread some blankets and pillows on the bench in preparation for the long day of drama ahead, you settle in and look around you.  (Tickets indicating section and level of seating have survived, and there is reliable evidence of pillows and blankets)

First, if you weren’t among the dignataries seated in the Prohedria, the  VIP seats at the edge of the stage, you would see the heads of your fellow citizens.  The same throng which accompanied you into the theatre would occupy much of your field of vision.  Depending on your seat, you would see the backs of the heads of many of them directly in front of you, and more in your peripheral field of vision on your immediate left and right and more filling the enormous curve of the hillside.  Perhaps a quarter to a third of the entire citizenry. (Each of the ten tribes was seated in one section of seating.) As the performances happened in daylight, this continual reminder of the cultural and civic context of your experience must have had a powerful impact.

At the bottom of the seats, and measuring something like 70 feet wide is the Orchestra. This was the primary performance area.  The greek word translates literally as “Dancing Place” suggesting again the choreographic origins of drama.   The commonly accepted idea of Greek theatre is of a perfectly round, marble floored orchestra.  This is completely conjectural and most likely fairly far from the truth. 

 
Parthenon  448 -432BCE  Symmetrical 
   
Erectheon  421 – 405 BCE  Asymmetrical
 

Thorikos  6th – 4th Century BCE

The only theatre site thought to reflect conditions during the golden age. No trace of skene. Altar at one side. Roughly rectangular orchestra.

 

Beyond the orchestra was the skene, a “tent” or “hut” suggesting a temporary structure.  No temporary structures have survived, however, so we have essentially nothing upon which to base a guess for what this might have been.

Beyond the skene, and visible given the audience’s viewpoint from above, the Temple of Dionysus.  Doors were opened to give the image of the god within a view of both the performance and the audience.  Central to the practice of Greek religion was the gaze of the Gods.

And finally, beyond the temple and as far as the eye could see, the Greek landscape.  Harsh and rocky, but yet for the Athencentric citizenry, a vast and one can only imagine comforting symbol of the strength of the people and their history.  It was, after all,  the harsh and dangerous quality of the land that more than any other factor allowed the Greeks to defeat the Persians.

And finally the play begins.  What do we see?  Don’t know.  We know even less about the performances of the Greek Drama than we do about the physical circumstances The reason I have spent so long building up to this point is that this background information is all we really have out of which to construct the performances.  We know the performers were amateurs, that they wore costumes and masks, and that music and dance were involved.  Beyond these few crumbs, all is conjectural. 

ACTORS   hypocrites  “answerers”   Thespis is supposed to have introduced the first character out of the Dithyrambic Chorus around 550BCE,   Aeschulus introduced the 2nd character circa 471 BCE,  and a play of Sohpocles circa 468BCE requires 3 actors. Thereafter, all plays could be performed by 3 actors, although it is interesting to note that in many cases this would require that the same character be performed by different actors during the course of a play.   The playwrights were originally their own protagonists,  but the institution of a separate prize for actors in 449BCE suggests that the craft of acting became separated from the craft of creating the drama. 

CHORUS   choros “ agroup of people who dance and sing”  The chorus originally numbered 50, but was reduced to either 15 or 12 or 10 by the middle of the century. The chorus was made up of citizens and was paid for by another citizen, the choregus . 

MASKS   We know that all Greek Drama was performed masked.  Masks were a part of the rituals surrounding the worship of Dionysus which pre-date the emergence of drama.  Their use adds credence to Aristotle’s location of the roots of Drama in the Dionysian ritual.    Although the exact nature of the Mask’s significance in the performance of Greek drama is unknown, their importance is hinted at in a tantalizing play fragment which suggests that the masks used in a winning play were dedicated to Dionysus and hung on the pediment of his temple.. 5th century vase paintings showing masks indicate that they covered the entire head and seem to be fairly life-like. 

The exaggerated features and megaphone-like mouths depicted on countless Thespian society letterheads derive from the masks used by the Romans, not the Greeks.    It is important to keep in mind that the size of the theatron caused most audience members to view the performers from a distance which must have rendered small scale details such as the facial characteristics of a mask fairly unimportant.  Think of how little facial expression matters in a baseball game. 

COSTUMES   There is evidence suggesting that costumes were an important part of the theatrical event.     5th century vase paintings showing what are probably theatre performances suggest that the costumes were not in the elegantly monochromatic style we have come to think of as “Greek” but rather were often patterned . 


We know that both statues and architecture were decorated and colored in a manner that today would be considered almost gaudy. It seems reasonable to assume that this same taste would have been reflected in the costumes.  Certainly strong color and pattern would have been useful to organize the distantly viewed stage pictures.  Again, think of how the strength and clarity of team colors allow sports fans follow the action on the playing field.

Trojan Archer from Pediment c. 480BCE
 Color Restoration by Sackler Museum

MUSIC   We are certain that music was central to the performance of the drama.  Unfortunately, the sound of Ancient Greek Music has been completely lost.  There are fragments of musical notation, but without knowing what the instruments sounded like, they are meaningless.  The metrical structures of the texts are almost certainly artifacts of the musical structures, however, and a close reading of these can give at least a sense of the variety of tonalities that must have been a part of the performances.   Two types of instruments were associated with Greek Drama, the double pipe and the lyre.

CHOREOGRAPHY   Again, we know that dance was central to the performances, but have essentially no idea of what they looked like or how they were structured.  The few vase paintings showing a chorus dancing suggest that at least some of the movement was done in unison, but little else.

In summary, then, the following key points: