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Wandering Poets and the Dissemination of Greek Tragedy in the Fifth

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Wandering Poets and the Dissemination of Greek Tragedy in the Fifth Wandering Poets and the Dissemination of Greek Tragedy in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC Edmund Stewart Abstract This work is the first full-length study of the dissemination of Greek tragedy in the earliest period of the history of drama. In recent years, especially with the growth of reception studies, scholars have become increasingly interested in studying drama outside its fifth century Athenian performance context. As a result, it has become all the more important to establish both when and how tragedy first became popular across the Greek world. This study aims to provide detailed answers to these questions. In doing so, the thesis challenges the prevailing assumption that tragedy was, in its origins, an exclusively Athenian cultural product, and that its ‘export’ outside Attica only occurred at a later period. Instead, I argue that the dissemination of tragedy took place simultaneously with its development and growth at Athens. We will see, through an examination of both the material and literary evidence, that non-Athenian Greeks were aware of the works of Athenian tragedians from at least the first half of the fifth century. In order to explain how this came about, I suggest that tragic playwrights should be seen in the context of the ancient tradition of wandering poets, and that travel was a usual and even necessary part of a poet’s work. I consider the evidence for the travels of Athenian and non-Athenian poets, as well as actors, and examine their motives for travelling and their activities on the road. In doing so, I attempt to reconstruct, as far as possible, the circuit of festivals and patrons, on which both tragedians and other poetic professionals moved. This study thus aims 1 to both chart the process of tragedy’s dissemination and to situate the genre within the context of the broader ‘song culture’ of the Greek wandering poet. Acknowledgements I wish, in particular, to thank my supervisors Patrick Finglass and Alan Sommerstein. Not only have they tirelessly read and commented on my work, but they have been a source of inspiration, ideas and encouragement on which I have liberally drawn. I also wish to thank Judith Mossman for her valuable support and advice on any number of issues connected with academic life at Nottingham. Finally, I must thank my parents Gordon and Teresa and my wife Louise. Their contribution to this work is of a different kind, yet no less essential or less appreciated. 2 Contents Introduction 4 1. How early? The spread of tragedy and the material evidence 29 2. Wandering in Greek culture: the circuit of fame (and money) 60 3. Athenian wandering poets: the early fifth century 108 4. Athenian wandering poets: the later fifth century 138 5. Non-Athenian wandering poets 192 6. Wandering actors 239 Conclusion 268 Abbreviations and Bibliography 272 3 Introduction 1. The Problem This work is the first in-depth study of the dissemination of tragedy in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. It aims to chart the process by which tragedy was disseminated throughout the Greek world. Most of the early dramatic performances that we know of took place in Athens and all the poets, whose plays survive intact, were Athenian. However, tragedy had become astonishingly popular outside Athens by at least the Hellenistic period, with performances taking place at an increasing number of international festivals held across the Mediterranean. When did tragedy begin to be disseminated outside Attica? How did this dissemination take place? In answering these questions, I aim to not only assemble and assess the available evidence for the performance of tragedy outside Athens, but also to challenge the prevailing assumptions regarding this phenomenon. At stake is our understanding of the context of drama, throughout the period in which the first and greatest of the tragedians were operating. Until recently scholars have tended to focus on tragedy’s place in the fifth century Athenian democracy. As a result, some have been less inclined to consider the question of tragedy’s early dissemination. Before we proceed, we will examine some of these longstanding assumptions. We will then look at some recent challenges to the traditional view, which have contributed to a growing willingness among scholars to study tragedy in contexts other than fifth century Athens. This debate has raised important questions, which demand a full examination of the available evidence if they are to be answered properly. This study aims to provide just such a comprehensive analysis. In addition, I outline a number of new approaches and methodologies that have not been previously considered in this context, but which are of crucial importance if we are to understand both tragedy and its history. 4 2. Tragedy at Athens: the ‘Athenocentric’ theory of tragic performance Perhaps the most influential trend in scholarship on ancient drama has been to situate tragedy within its Athenian performance context. Though writing over seventy years ago, Kitto provides perhaps the best and boldest statement of the ‘Athenocentric’ view: Greek drama is peculiarly the creation and glory of Athens. Athens and the Theatre of Dionysus are, in a very real sense, its Unity of Place. Not only were the plays performed in this theatre, not only was nearly every dramatic poet of eminence an Athenian, not only does the art as a whole bear indelibly the mark of Athenian intelligence and plastic imagination; beyond all this Greek drama is in a special degree the work of the Athenian people. All Attic drama, tragic and comic, was composed for one of the Festivals of Dionysus; this fact is capital.1 While many scholars today would probably not accept such a statement without qualifications, Kitto nonetheless articulates two basic premises from which much of the literary criticism of tragedy has begun. These are, first, that tragedy was performed entirely at Athens in the fifth century and, second, that tragedy was uniquely Athenian in character. It has long been believed, then, that Athens was not just the original but also the most important performance context. Indeed, some scholars have taken to referring to ‘Attic’ or ‘Athenian’ rather than ‘Greek’ tragedy.2 It is almost as if tragedy belonged to a special subset of Greek poetry that, unlike other forms of literature, was the creation and possession of only one city. As Edith Hall has argued: 1 Kitto (1939) 401-2. 2 ‘Attic tragedy’: e.g. Podlecki (1986); Griffith (1995) 62; Griffin (1998); Seaford (2000); Burian (2011); ‘Attic drama’: e.g. Rosenbloom (2012) 270. 5 While other ancient cities and eras had other genres – epic, lyric, biography, fiction – it was in the theatre that the classical Athenian encountered many of the roles through which they imagined themselves.3 Because of this, some have believed it unnecessary to consider whether Greeks from cities other than Athens knew of tragedy, either in the fifth century or even in subsequent epochs. As Sommerstein has put it, ‘to understand fifth century Athenian plays we need to understand the fifth century theatre audience [at Athens] – and no other.’4 The supporters of this theory allege that tragedy was intimately connected with – and even designed to play a part in – the political and social life of fifth century Athens. The Athenians not only created tragedy: it in turn played a crucial role in forming them as a people. ‘Life in classical Athens’, Hall argues, ‘informed every detail of the stage fictions it enacted; but those stage fictions informed in turn the way that Athenian life was itself conducted.’5 Many commentators point to echoes of Athenian history embedded in tragedy. According to this view, choruses in general are the Athenian citizenry at large, contrasted with and pitted against individualistic heroes who stand for the aristocratic statesmen of Athens.6 Oedipus is no longer tyrant of Thebes, but Athens herself in disguise.7 Ajax is no 3 Hall (2006) 8. 4 Sommerstein (1998) 64 = (2010a) 119. Cf. Taplin (2012) 227: ‘it seems fair to say . that “tragedy outside Athens” remained tragedy that was descended from or had been disseminated from the Athenian core.’ 5 Hall (2006) 5. 6 Longo (1990) 17 describes the chorus as ‘something like a staged metaphor for the community involved’. Cf. Goldhill (2000) 45, who claims that ‘the interplay between collective and individual, mirrored in the relation of chorus and hero on stage, is a central dynamic of democratic power in action’. Winkler (1990) argued that choruses were composed of ephebes and that choral performance had a social function in preparing them for their duties as citizens. For further discussion see Gould (1996); Goldhill (1996), (2007) 50-3; Wilson (1997) 82; Murnaghan (2011). 7 See Knox (1954) and (1998) 110-24. Cf. Zeitlin (1986) and (1993), on Thebes as a ‘mirror’ for Athens. Her views have been convincingly challenged by Finglass (2012a), who points in particular to the positive presentation of Thebes in Soph. OC 919-23. 6 longer Ajax but Cimon or Pericles and his followers have become contemporary Athenian sailors.8 And all the while, the Athenian people scan the plays for allusions to itself.9 If tragedy was fundamentally linked to Athens, then, scholars assume, it must in some way have interacted with its democratic politics. Those who support the historicist perspective have been keen to point out that both tragedy and democracy appear at roughly the same time and that both sustain each other.10 Accordingly, they claim, it was the particular historical situation that gave birth to tragedy in Athens and caused it to thrive there. In the words of Schwartz: Tragedy did not flourish until the fifth century and it did not survive the fifth century.
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