r ILLiad TN: 346307 4 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 Borrower: H LS Call#: WID WIDLC PA3061 a.P54 Lending String: HLS 2003x Location: H LS 3/18/2010 10:07:54 AM Scan&Deliver Patron: Graduate: Naomi Weiss Shipping Address: Journal Title: Poetry, theory, praxis :the social life Harvard University - Widener Library of myth, word and image in ancient Greece : Interlibrary Loan essays in honour of William J. Slater /edited by Eric Harvard University Csapo and Margaret C. Miller. Cambridge, MA 02138 Volume: Issue: Fax: Month/Year: 2003Pages: 69-98 Ariel: Odyssey: 206.107.43.109 Article Author: E. Csapo MaxCost: Article Title: The Dolphins of Dionysus Imprint: Via Scan and Deliver Service NOTICE: THIS ITEM MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT LAW (TITLE ILL Number: 3462626 17 U.S.C.) 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 THIS IS NOT AN INVOICE! DO NOT SEND PAYMENT NON-IFM LIBRARIES WILL RECEIVE AN INVOICE UNDER SEPARATE COVER FOR THIS TRANSACTION FROM HARVARD UNIVERSITY ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE IN 4-6 WEEKS -;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; PLEASE DO NOT SEND PAYMENT UNTIL YOU -~ RECEIVE AN INVOICE! 4 The Dolphins of Dionysus Eric Csapo I remember reading William Slater's "Symposium at Sea" in my first year a a graduate student, and feeling that I had discovered an unfamiliar type of scholar hip (which, happily, has since become more common). That article, like many other Wi lli am has written, showed that even the most haphazard metaphor could give acce s to the distinctive and sometimes surprisingly alien manner the Greek had of organ­ izing experience. But what impressed me most of all was the way he went about hi s business, evidently thinking nothing of kicking aside fixed academic di cipl inary boundaries, pursuing his metaphor, not just in texts of very different genres, but in art, in myth, and in every manner of cultural expression, right to its source in the activitie and experience of real life. Years later, after I got to know Wi lliam per ona ll y and listened to his learned rants, I realized that, for all his traditional philologica l cxpcrti c, Slater was always after the connections between ocial thought, reprc entation, and practice. Through his influence I have also come to believe that thi i by far the be t means of understanding and learning from Classical antiquity. In tribute to the man who taught me the importance of reading texts in the broad context of ocial life and thought, I would like to investigate, in the territory which "Sympo ium at ea" fir t mapped out, one more point of intersection between the realm of Diony u and the ea. 1 Dolphins and Nereids, alone or together, surface frequently, but fleetingly, in Greek literature and art. Most scholars are content to study them as a purely literary or iconographic motif or symbol. I will argue that one cannot understa nd their role in either art or literature without exploring their role in real life experience, and particularly in the practice of cultic dance and in dramatic and paradramatic performance. 1 The theme is picked up and nicely developed by Davies 1978. I would like to thank P.E. Easterling and R. Seaford who provided helpful commentary on earlier written versions of this paper, M.C. Miller and M. Steinhart who commented on this one, and al o M. Depew, D. Depew, R. Fowler, R. Ketterer and audiences at Bristol and Iowa City, who reacted to various spoken versions. Also, I thank M.C. Shaw for the usc of her drawing (my Figure 4.9). 70 Eric Csapo 1. Dancing Dolphins and Nereids in New Music I will begin with orne examples of what many have identified as a "literary topos." The e bits of text are, however, only records of a type of performance performed in uch disparate venues as the orchestra of the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens and the anctuary of Poseidon at Tainaron. What they have in common is a style which is a ociated with the "New Music." New Music revolutionized Greek music between 430 and 380 BC. 2 It flourished in the theatre, where New Music's chief proponents numbered among the most popular poets and perfonners of their day, including such light a Euripides, Agathon and Timotheus. For this reason it most affected the theatre genre of dithyramb and tragedy. We do not often enough think of dithyramb a a theatre genre like tragedy. In origin a cultic song and dance, sung in procession or at acrifice in honour of Dionysus, dithyramb came in the fifth century to be a ociated primarily with the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens, where at each Dionysia twenty were performed by choruses of fifty men or fifty boys, all dancing to the music of pipe in circle around the altar of Dionysus. Mo t ancient music critics were violently, even "hysterically," opposed to New Mu ic, though the critical backlash included some of antiquity's most sober minds, am ng them Plato and Aristotle. They treated the New Music as nothing less than the annihilation of traditional culture. Plato characterized New Music as a complete dcpatture from music's cultic roots. But in a recent article ( 1999-2000), I argued that, de pite Plato, ew Mu ician ought to recreate or reinvent the cultic and Dionysiac character of dithyrambic and tragic mu ic. Though they introduced much that was new, they at lea t thought their innovation consistent with, and even sympathetic to, the cultic and Diony iac atmo phere they were trying to create. More to the point, the style and imagery of their ver e puts heavy emphasis on traditional cultic and Di ny ·iac form . The mannered and arcbaizing tendencies of the verse must be seen in the conte t of the rapid evolution of Dionysiac religion in the later fifth century, and in particular it yncreti m with orgiastic cults imported from Asia Minor or Crete, and with rphic and mystery cult spreading mainly from Western Greece. Many element of ew Mu ic' supposed cultic revival were deeply influenced by the music and dance of the e orgia tic and mystery cults. I therefore use the term cultic "revival" with orne re erve. The ew Musicians were actively inventing a tradition for them el e , ju t a much a were their critics. But they did not invent their traditions out of whole cloth. In making thi claim, I drew on the work of Albert Henrichs (1994-1995, 1996a, 1996b). Henrich call attention to a phenomenon which is especially characteristic of the choral ode in Euripide . Thi is called "choral projection." "Choral projection" is -. hen a choru de cribes another choru in their song. This occurs with increasing frequency in Euripide ' later works. In my article I noted that, when Euripidean choru e (or indeed monodi t ) describe music and dancing, the music and dancing ' As I di cuss the context, tyle, practice and reception ofNew Music in detail in Csapo (forthcoming), my presentation here i - ummal) and concise. The Dolphins ofDionysus 71 frequently have a cultic or Dionysiac character. The effect of this is to give cultic or Dionysiac colour not only to the choruses in the song, but to the choruses that sing. In a recent article Scott Scullion (2002) assails me and anyone else who claim that drama has anything to do with Dionysus. He denies a special connection with Dionysus not just to tragedy but even to satyrplay (he is oddly silent about comedy). His argument boils down to this. Earlier predramatic ritual outside of Athens could be attached to other gods. In a later period and outside of Athens drama could be attached to the festivals of other gods. There is, therefore, nothing "essentially" Diony iac about drama. Now this is all absolutely true, and irrelevant. The language of "essences" belongs to alchemy and metaphysics and has no place in cultural studies. Culture is arbitrary. Not that the connection which Athens made between drama and Dionysus was less real or meaningful. For our present purposes it is enough to note that in Classical Athens there clearly was a strong connection made between drama and Dionysus. Drama was only ever performed at festivals of Dionysu , "for Dionysus" as the inscriptions state, principally in theatres attached to the sanctuarie of Dionysus, and, in the case of the City Dionysia and Lenaea, at least, with Dionysu ' icon as the guest of honour, watching, front and centre of the first row of eat . Scullion's case seems to me a hopeless one, but I mention it because he attack my claims about the use of cultic imagery in late Euripidean tragic choruse . The immediate target of Scullion's Dionysus-denial is (his own thesis-advi er) Albert Henrichs whose above-mentioned ideas about choral projection are ubjectcd to sparagmos. But he also mishandles some statistical table I presented to how that most "projected" choruses in Euripides have a cultic or Dionysiac character. While doing so, he points out that, though they may dance to pipe and tympana, many choruses perform not for Dionysus, but for the Magna Mater, or Eleu inian Demeter or Sicilian Persephone, showing that I was not explicit enough about what I meant by "Dionysiac music." He also faults me because in enumerating dancer with a cultic or Dionysiac character in Euripidean odes, I named dancing dolphins and Nereid , merely footnoting (Csapo 1999-2000.422, n. 22) that I hoped to demonstrate this elsewhere. This is what I want to do now. Dancing dolphins appear in three Euripidean choral odes. The earlie t of these is the first strophe of the first stasimon of Euripides' Electra (432-41, the underlining is for future reference).3 KA£tval.