POETRY INTO DRAMA l~arly Tragedy and tl1e Greek Poetic Iradition By JOHN HERINGTON I Jr JI V I· llSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS ltil hl1 l · / 111 1\ 11gde1 • Lr111do11 University of California Press Contents Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1985 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Herington, John. Poetry into drama. List of Illustrations Vll (Sather classical lectures; v. 49) Preface IX Bibliography: p. I. Greek drama (Tragedy)-History and criticism. PART I: PRETRAGIC POETRY IN GREECE 2. Greek poetry-History and criticism. 3. Performing 1. Poetry as a Performing Art 3 arts-Greece-History. 4. Tragic, The. I. Title. 2. Text and Re-performance 41 II. Series. 3. The Forests of Myths 58 PA3135.H47 1984 882'.01'09 83-9146 ISBN 0-520-05100-9 Printed in the United States of America PART II: THE CONFLUENCE 4. Poetry in Sixth-Century Athens 79 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 PART III: TRAGIC POETRY 5. Some Features of Tragic Music and Meter 103 6. Old and New in Early Tragedy 125 7. Epilogue: The Enactment of a Greek Lyric Poem 151 Appendices l. Performances (Especially Agones Mousikoi) at Religious Festivals 161 II. The Rhapsodes 167 Ill. The Kitharodes 177 IV. Choral Lyric Performance 181 V. Performance of Other Kinds of Greek Poetry 192 VI. Texts in Archaic and Cla~sical Times, Down to the Beginning of the Pcloponncsian War 201 VII. Re performances of Nondramatic Poetry 207 v VI Contents VIII. Nondramatic Poems Apparently Composed for Two or More Voices 211 IX. Passages Illustrating Ancient Views on the Relationship List of Illustrations Between Tragedy and Nontragic Poetry 213 X. Similarities Between the Meters of Anacreon and Aeschylus 217 Notes 223 Bibliography 2 77 Index 287 I. Rhapsode on a red-figured amphora by the Kleophrades 2 Painter, British Museum E 270 (Beazley, ARV , p. 183, no. 15); photograph supplied by courtesy of the British Museum. The photograph is designed to bring out the face of the reciter; hence the lower half of his body appears foreshortened, because of the pronounced curvature of the vase-shoulder. See pp. 14-15. II. Kitharode on a red-figured amphora by the Berlin Painter, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 56.171.38 2 (Beazley, ARV , p. 197, no. 2); copyright by the Metro­ politan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1956. See pp. 17-19. 111. Anacreon holding a lyre, with fellow revelers, on a red­ figured kylix by Oltos, British Museum E 18 (Beazley, 2 ARV , pp. 62-63, no. 86); photograph supplied by cour­ tesy of the British Museum. See pp. 36-37 and 198-99. XIV Preface ing the city-state era, even if more details remain to be discovered. As for the Bibliography: a complete guide to the secondary literature on all the topics and authors discussed in this inquiry would plainly be im­ PART practicable on grounds of space alone. The purpose of my list of books ONE and articles is simply to supply details of those works that are referred to, normally in abbreviated form, in the text, Notes, and Appendices. All the translations from Greek and Latin are my own, with the ex­ Pretragic Poetry ception of the passage from Pherecrates quoted in the Epilogue. in Greece John Herington New Haven, Connecticut September 1982 1. Poetry as a Performing Art THE SONG CULTURE I discovered that I could get [the songs] I wanted from pretty nearly every­ one I met, young and old. In fact, I found myself for the first time in a community in which singing was as common and almost as universal a practice as speaking.... So closely, indeed, is the practice of this particu­ lar art interwoven with the ordinary avocations of everyday life that sing­ ers, unable to recall a song I had asked for, would often make some such remark as: "Oh, if only I were driving the cows home I could sing it at once!" Such were the delighted words of an English collector of folk song in the southern Appalachians during the early part of this century. He was confronted, in a purer form than he had ever seen before, with some­ thing that we may call (for convenience) a song culture: a society whose prime medium for the expression and communication of its most im­ portant feelings and ideas was song.' Certain accidents of history and scholarship long ago conspired to obscure the fact that well into the fifth century B.C. Greece also was es­ 5-o-1v sentially a spng_ cult11r~ltnough of a far more SQPhi~ticated and com­ -r 1 ,... plex kind than that of southern Appala~hia. Poetry, recited qr ~ung, was {,·{/l/i for the early Greeks the prime medium for the dissemination of politi­ cal, moral, and social ideas-history, philosophy, science (as those sub­ jects were then understood), and indeed of what Socrates was later to call "human wisdom." Even today, with all the information that is now available about the practice of oral poetry at various dates and places (including early Greece itself), it is not easy for a scholar to assimilate this fact or fully to imagine its consequences. On the shelves, chronolog- 3 4 Poetry into Drama Poetry as a Performing Art 5 ically arranged, sit the silent ranks of conscientiously edited poetic herself at first hand; as a rule, only the most significant documents will texts, from Homer through the Attic tragedians. To restore them all, in be quoted and discussed 111 the text of each chapter. the mind's ear and eye, to performance-and to contemporaneous, even Even when all d1fficulucs arc taken into account, the general picture mutually competitive, performance at that-requires an exceptional presented by the scattered evidence is clear beyond any doubt. The effort of the historical imagination. Yet that effort seems worth making, Greek nondramatic poetry that covers the period from Homer and not merely for the immediate purposes of this inquiry, but also for a Hesiod (perhaps in the late eighth century B.c.) to at least about the better understanding of the entire poetic and dramatic tradition of clas­ time ()f the death of Pindar (ca. 438 s.c.)-the main subject of these sical Greece. first three chapters-reached its public through performance. The man­ Three sources are available for a reconstruction of the performing ner, and the social context, of performance varied immensely; tosome aspect oTearly Greek poetry. First: the evidence embedded in d~p etic degree but not entirely, they can be correlated with the genre of poetry 0 texts of the song-culture era itself, supplemented here and there by con­ involved-epic, choral lyric, solo lyric, elegy, and iambic. To explore evarletles in more detail will be the buSl'ness of the rest of temporary works of art, especially vase-paintings, that show the per­ thes thi~ formers in action. Second: statements by writers of the later fifth and of chapter. the fourth centu~y s.c. (notably Plato and Aristotle), who were still in close touch with the song culture, even though it was disintegrating rapidly in their time. F~nally: reports by writers who lived in an era PERFORMANCES AT when the song culture had been almost entirely replaced by a culture PUBLIC RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS much more similar to our own, and which we may call (again, for the sake of convenience), the !?_ook cultt~re; that is, from about the last years Where temples were, there, as a rule, poetry was performed as well as 2 of the fourth century B.C. until the fall of the Roman Empire (or, in a sacrifice. At most of the innumerable temple-sites from end to end of 1 few cases, even later than that). This last class of evidence is naturally the Greek world, the poetry no doubt was of a simple and traditional the most difficult to assess. Many of the ancient writers involved were, kind: a processional as the worshipers approached the shrine; a hymn indeed, professional scholars or antiquaries with access to infinitely round the altar for the moment of sacrifice itself. ' From the earliest I more evidence about the song-culture era than is available to us. But times, however, certain sanctuaries encouraged the production of far scholars will be scholars, then as now, and all too often we must remain more elaborate and sophisticated performances, not as a part of the rit­ uncertain whether we are dealing with neat academic conjectures and ual, as cult song in the strict sense, but to do honor to the god of the combinations or with statements that were firmly based on genuine sanctuary and to rejoice his heart.4 Performances of this kind, on the documents of the song-culture era-early poems now lost to us, for ex­ whole, seem to have borne no closer relationship to the ancient ritual of ample, or the official records of the ancient poetic and dramatic con­ the god than did the sculptured offerings (agalmata, "delights") 5 that tests. The reader will therefore approach this last class of evidence cau­ were dedicated in his sanctuary, or even than the athletic games that ' ~ tiously, testing it as well as he can case by case. But I shall not exclude it often also formed part of the festival. Nor was the_content of a poem so from my account where there seems to be a reasonable likelihood of its performed necessarily restricted to the praise of the sanctuary's god or accuracy.