1.1 The ‘inside’ and the ‘deep below’ in scholarly approaches to the Persians

The use of a skene-building in the production of the Persians was first questioned by Wilamowitz. Based on the assumption that the skene could only represent a palace or an official inside space (such as a council chamber), Wilamowitz suggested that the Persians (like the Seven against Thebes and the Suppliants) did not use a skene, since none of its characters ever enter or exit from any such building.Footnote ³ This suggestion gained considerable support from Taplin's magisterial monograph The stagecraft of Aeschylus, which argued that in the early plays of Aeschylus the skene was ‘not used as a building nor its door as an entrance way’ and therefore most likely it did not even exist.Footnote ⁴ Both scholars rejected the chorus' deictic reference to a nearby building (τόδε … στέγος ἀρχαῖον) at Pers. 140–1 as evidence for the presence of a skene,Footnote ⁵ on the basis that this στέγος was not realised as ‘inside’ during the play. This argument was regarded by many as conclusive. Although subsequently several scholars used different rationales to argue in favour of the presence of the skene, none of them made a decisive case for the use of its interior.Footnote ⁶ As a result, the argument that the skene was absent from the Athenian stage prior to the Oresteia has remained widely accepted, and the rich symbolism of the interior in Aeschylus' final trilogy is generally treated as an innovation on the part of the playwright.

Concerning Darius' apparition from the underworld, Taplin argued for a vertical entry. He based his argument on his central framework about the significance of the provenance and direction of the characters' entries.Footnote ⁷ He thus posited the use of an underground passage dug from the back end of the orchestra and leading to Darius' tomb.Footnote ⁸ This tentative, though daring, reconstruction did full justice to the theatrical space constructed by the text. Passages such as the following one show clearly the importance of the space below the earth's surface in relation to the portrayal of Darius:

As we shall see further in the following sections, the space deep below the feet of the characters is repeatedly emphasised before, during and after Darius' apparition, and is clearly integral. Nevertheless, the lack of archaeological evidence for any sort of dug tunnel in Greek theatres before the Hellenistic times constituted a significant problem for this theory, which eventually failed to convince.Footnote ⁹

In the following years, most scholars focused on practical problems of stagecraft, such as what kind of stage property would have represented Darius' tomb, how the actor playing the ghost would have been brought into the orchestra mid-play and how the parts would have been divided between the actors. Amidst a renewed focus on these important, but slightly different issues, Taplin's emphasis on the space in the earth below gradually faded from academic discourse.Footnote ¹⁰

1.2 The theory of Darius' appearance on the roof of the skene

A theory that previously seemed to provide a solution to such practical problems has recently found renewed support. This theory maintains that the skene was in existence at the production of the Persians and that it represented Darius' tomb (the disputed τόδε … στέγος ἀρχαῖον, 140–1). Most distinctively, it argues that the roof was used for the appearance of the dead king.Footnote ¹¹ Besides solving the problem of the distribution of the actors' parts, this theory has several other advantages: the use of the tomb as an imposing structure which dominates the stage is plausible given that the shadow of Darius' heritage looms symbolically over the action and accentuates Xerxes' failure in particular.Footnote ¹² The fact that house-tombs are well known in Persian, Lycian, Phrygian and Greek funerary architecture offers further evidence for this idea.Footnote ¹³ So does other literary testimony about assemblies taking place near the tombs of local heroes, as Darius is presented to be.Footnote ¹⁴ Furthermore, the appearance of the ghost on the building's roof could represent Darius' ‘rising’ from below and reflect his divine status (cf. Pers. 643, 651, 655). Rosenbloom (Reference Rosenbloom2006: 89), in particular, has likened Darius to a deus ex machina.

By integrating the skene in the spatial system of the play, especially in relation to its vertical axis, this theory has made a strong case for its existence and use in the production of the Persians. However, dramaturgical ingenuity aside, it posits a skene that functions very differently from the skene we know from fifth-century theatre. As Taplin has noted, the skene-building's main function in extant Greek drama is first and foremost to represent and enact the spatial category of the ‘inside’. Other categories are secondary to this.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, no surviving play uses the skene without making use of its interior. ‘Interior’, of course, should not be understood solely in pictorial/realist terms (i.e. as the physical ‘inside’ of a building), but as encompassing additional culturally validated symbolic associations connected with fundamental issues always at the heart of ancient drama.Footnote ¹⁶

Another problem would seem to be that there is no convincing explanation for why Darius should emerge on the upper level of the vertical axis, at such a high point above the ground. Aeschylus portrays Darius as a chthonic power who inhabits and exercises powers in the underworld (Pers. 219–23, 691). In particular, as Hall and Mikalson have convincingly argued, Darius is constructed in many ways as a chthonic hero:Footnote ¹⁷ as a deified ancestor, he is considered to protect his land, to avert evil, to be appeasable with libations and to send up blessings from his tomb.Footnote ¹⁸ The following passage is particularly telling of Darius' status in this regard:

Furthermore, as this and other passages show, Darius is not treated individually but as one of the νέρτεροι, powers residing in the depths of the earth. These are collectively invoked by the Queen and the elders (cf. Pers. 523–4, 619–22) as Persia's last recourse for averting the demise of its prosperity and livelihood.Footnote ¹⁹ The space imagined as occupied by the dead, the chthonic powers and the heroes is the earth and especially its depths, not the upper world. Garvie, the latest commentator of the Persians, is right to object to the theory of Darius' appearance on the roof (2009: l), since the spatial semantics of the scene and of his status do not justify his appearance there.Footnote ²⁰ Garvie's objection is strongly supported by the fact that no character of Greek drama who emerges from Hades can be convincingly demonstrated to appear on the upper level.Footnote ²¹

1.3 The space ‘deep below’ in the Persians

Although these objections do not amount to a conclusive refutation of the roof theory, one should also consider the fact that the dramaturgy of the Persians is far more focused on the lower end of the play's vertical axis than on the upper end. This heightened stress is not present only during the apparition scene. It consistently informs the dramaturgy of the play for nearly five hundred verses before, during and after the appearance of the dead king. Indeed, from Pers. 175 onwards the space in the earth below is elaborated through a cluster of spatial signifiers including imagery, ritual action (described, planned or enacted), the positioning of the actors' bodies and deictic references. An examination of the sustained, repeated and emphatic emergence of this nexus will help us recognise how important this space is for the development of the play and its central themes: upon her first entry, the Queen relates to the chorus a dream (Pers. 175–200) which is understood as having been sent by the powers below Footnote ²² to foretell Persia's catastrophe. The Queen repeatedly acknowledges the need to pour libations into the earth in order to propitiate these nether powers, both on her own accord (Pers. 201–4) and, following the frustration of her first attempt (Pers. 205–11), at the chorus' encouragement (Pers. 219–23, 228–30). The Queen's renewed intention to pour the libations (Pers. 229) is cancelled for a second time at Pers. 246 due to the arrival of the Messenger. This action, repeatedly cancelled and then re-attempted, takes on great dramatic significance through its deferral. When it does finally take place (nearly four hundred lines later), the drink offerings to the earth, the dead and the other chthonic powers are accompanied by an intense anacletic hymn that envisages Darius' rise from the earth below (Pers. 623–80). As the hymn comes to an end and as the chorus beg the chthonic powers to release Darius, they fall on the ground and beat it with their hands, an act emphasised by Darius himself in his very first words after his entry (Pers. 681–3). This series of events inscribes the earth with an intense symbolic focus, which is further emphasised when Darius repeatedly invokes the space deep inside the earth at the moment of his appearance (Pers. 688–92) and at the point of his departure (Pers. 839).

The earth below, therefore, is a very significant space in a large part of the play and particularly in the resurrection scene. But how was the resurrection from this space represented? As we have seen, the archaeological evidence contradicts Taplin's theory about the use of an underground passage. The approaches that posit a mound of earth or another construction concealing the actor somewhere in the orchestra contain the requisite emphasis on the space below, albeit, admittedly, not as well as Taplin's approach. However, they encounter the problem of having to conjure the actor playing the dead king unnoticed behind the tomb.Footnote ²³ Although neither theory can be rejected outright, their difficulties suggest that there is still room for reconsideration. In fact, a more economical solution to the problem exists that is better harmonised with the spatial tradition of Greek drama, and which integrates its spatial grammar best with the thematics of the play. This is the hypothesis that Darius emerges from the interior of the existing skene.

2.1 The ‘inside’ as ‘deep below’: interiority, the transverse axis and varieties of the ‘deep’ in Greek tragedy

This view has rarely been taken seriously, though it has some critical precedent.Footnote ²⁴ The tradition of Greek drama, however, strongly speaks in its favour. The use of the interior in several fifth-century plays suggests that there was an established connection between the inside space of the skene and the depths of the earth, fashioned variously as the Underworld, Tartarus, Hades, the land of the dead and the seat of the earth's powers. Some scholars, most notably Padel and Wiles, have drawn attention to the use of the interior for the symbolic representation of Hades.Footnote ²⁵ However, this material has never been considered in relation to the Persians, and, more importantly, it has not yet been integrated into broader cultural and anthropological understandings of interiority in ancient Greek culture. As I shall show below, interiority and its spatial parameter of depth are key to our understanding of Darius' apparition. Their dramaturgical function can elucidate much more comprehensively the semantics of the scene in the context of the play.

In order to appreciate the connection of the interior with the ‘deep below’, we need to keep firmly in mind that in Greek theatre, space has both representational and symbolic functions, which make it essentially polysemous. The skene is a good case in point. On a pictorial level, its interior represents the interior of physical spaces, including a palace, a temple, a cave or a tent. Its function, however, does not end there. The skene's interior often acts as a spatial embodiment of symbolic ideas like the private, the hidden, the dark, the unseen, the past and the female.Footnote ²⁶ Thus, many Greek dramas would use the spatial antithesis of interior and exterior to stand in for conceptual polarities such as public–private, seen–unseen, light–dark, present–past, male–female.

One important element of theatrical space that facilitates this symbolic variety is depth. Depth has been widely discussed in performance studies but has not yet been sufficiently appreciated in scholarship on Greek drama. In theatrical semiotics, spatial depth (mapped onto foreground and background zones, including both interior and exterior spaces) has been studied mainly in relation to proxemics and the construction of relationships between characters.Footnote ²⁷ The only study to have discussed the symbolic importance of depth in Greek theatre is Kampourelli (forthcoming), which argues that this category should be explored well beyond proxemic requirements. Kampourelli has noted that depth is connected with the interior of the dark skene and, through that, with all the associated categories of thought listed above: the female, the dark, the hidden, the private, the past, the unseen. Based on this observation, Kampourelli has reworked Wiles' acclaimed methodological system of the ‘east–west’ and vertical axes and posited a third axis to capture spatial depth (see Fig. 1, my own interpretation). This ‘transverse axis’, which runs from the audience space across the orchestra floor and through the skene door makes Wiles' model more consistently three-dimensional, encompasses the polarity ‘inside–outside’ and adduces extra symbolic value to the interior. The spatial system of Greek theatre thus not only becomes more internally consistent but also unlocks unrealised potential for the analysis of the symbolism of depth in Greek drama.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 1.

The transverse axis (in white), which captures spatial depth

Kampourelli's third axis provides a powerful hermeneutic tool for appreciating a common dramatic convention in Greek drama: the use of horizontal depth, such as through the interior of the skene, to represent the vertical depths associated with the earth. As I shall discuss below, in a considerable number of extant Greek plays, the interior of the skene is symbolically identified as some version of the underworld and as a cipher for the recesses of the earth more generally, despite lying on a horizontal level in purely pictorial terms. In other words, the horizontal ‘deep’ is recognised by the audience as signifying the vertical ‘deep’ that is imagined to be below the earth. It is noteworthy that the dimension of the ‘deep’ is often stressed on a pictorial level, too, since the skene is identified with a physically dark and deep space, such as an oracular mychos, a grove, or a deep part of a house, like a thalamos.

One of the earliest and clearest examples of this association between the interior and the ‘deep’ in Greek theatre comes in the Oresteia, the first two plays of which explicitly activate the symbolic connection with Hades through a proliferation of words, imagery and action. The scene in Agamemnon where Cassandra withdraws towards her death into the skene and names the area behind the doors ‘Hades’ (A. 1291; cf. A. 1090–2, 1096–7, 1122–4, 1160–1, 1217–22, 1314) is particularly suggestive in this context:

Cassandra's withdrawal comes only two hundred lines after Agamemnon has entered the same space by walking on the red tapestries. Neither character emerges alive from the interior. As the trilogy proceeds, the ekkyklema exposes the dark innards of the skene to the eyes of the audience, showing it as a space which swallows up life and ‘disgorges’ death (A. 1372; Ch. 973). Scholars have thus noted a pervasive link between the inside of the oikos and the dark space of Hades in the first two plays.

However, this dramaturgical effect is not only intended to bolster the characterisation of the Atreid oikos as death-driven, murderous and self-destructive. The semantics of the ‘deep’ concern, more accurately, the recesses of the earth in their many different manifestations. This is suggested by the fact that every time the representational identity of the stage-building changes in the trilogy, its interior retains the symbolic association with the depths of the earth. At the beginning of the Eumenides, for example, where the stage-building is re-identified as the Dephic oracle (in representational terms), the play flags the connection of the oracular mychos with Gaia and other chthonic deities (Eu. 1–8, 39). It thus constructs a very vivid chthonic realm through an allusion to the belief that oracular knowledge emanates from the depths of the earth.Footnote ²⁹ Forty-five lines into the play, the connotations of the symbolic ‘deep’ unfold further. The same interior space, which throughout the trilogy had been envisaged as concealing in its innards the Erinyes – variously named ‘Erinyes of the earth’ and ‘Erinyes of the house’Footnote ³⁰ – is shown to gradually release them into the exterior (Eu. 46–59, 66–73, 143–77).Footnote ³¹ This and other uses of the skene suggest that, in addition to its representational function, the interior has a strong symbolic connection with the earth's dark recesses. It also emerges that the pictorial and symbolic functions of the skene often converge in capturing ‘depth’.

Sophocles' Ajax, a play of the mid-fifth centuryFootnote ³² offers further evidence for the link between interior and recesses of the earth. In pictorial terms, from line 815 onwards this interior space captures the depth of the untrodden grove (cf. Aj. 654–8, 892). However, at the climactic moment of the hero's suicide, it is also identified symbolically with Hades (cf. Aj. 660). This is proliferated through the words of Ajax himself and through the movement of the ekkyklema that draws him inexorably to his death:

As the hero is retracted into the dark, deep interior of the skene,Footnote ³³ his movement powerfully emulates a transition to a space below (cf. Aj. 657–60). As Wiles notes (Reference Wiles1997: 165), ‘Ajax's death is not presented as a single momentary act … but rather as a slow journey to another place’.

Sophocles' last surviving play, Oedipus at Colonus, also figures death as an engulfment into a symbolic ‘deep’. At OC 1555 Oedipus walks through the threshold of the skene on route to his death. The play imagines that the grove of the Eumenides conceals a path that plunges down into the Underworld (καταρράκτης ὁδὸς | χαλκοῖς βάθροισι γῆθεν ἐρριζωμένος, ‘the threshold that plunges down, rooted in the earth with brazen steps’ OC 1590–1). The interior of the skene functions in both pictorial and symbolic terms and captures the depth and darkness both of the sacred grove and of the earth's recesses. A human's return to the soil, another version of crossing into another world, is envisaged as taking place through the opening of the skene.Footnote ³⁴

Prometheus bound, a play of the mid-fifth century written in the tradition of Aeschylus, might also provide an example of the association between interiority and depth. Many scholars have argued that the doors of the skene open in the final scene of the play and that the hero is swallowed up into Tartarus.Footnote ³⁵ There is no scholarly consensus regarding this, since the very use of the skene for the chaining of the hero is contested.Footnote ³⁶ However, if the skene did feature for this purpose, as many scholars believe, then the interior would have carried important associations with the dark depths of the earth. The horizontal deep would, again, be identified with the vertical deep.

Finally, there is an extensive catalogue of plays and scenes that allude to this association, albeit to different degrees. The association is present, for example, in the references to the skene's interior at Sophocles' Electra 108–12, Trachiniae 119–21, Antigone 1284, as well as at Euripides' Electra 1144, Heracles 1101–5, Hecuba 1–2, 1031–2, 1077,Footnote ³⁷ Suppliants 990–1030,Footnote ³⁸ Hippolytus 56–7, Cyclops 397. It seems to be invoked especially in scenes where murder and death take place in the interior, as well as those that employ the ‘bride of death’ motif. This latter idea is closely connected to the idea of the house as ‘House of Hades’.Footnote ³⁹ In most of these scenes the association of the interior with a symbolic ‘deep’ is not as striking as, for example, in the Oresteia, the Oedipus at Colonus and Ajax. Nevertheless, its presence attests to an established association which the audience would recognise and feel familiar with.Footnote ⁴⁰

Beyond the tragic genre, this association is also to be found in comedy and satyr drama, as well as in comparative anthropological studies. This suggests that it is based on a culturally contingent understanding of interiority and not simply on the demands of dramaturgical convention. These parallels are invaluable in shedding light on the meaning of the ‘deep’ in relation to the concept of the ‘earth’, and they will be discussed prior to the analysis of the spatial symbolism of the Darius scene. However, before moving on to comedy, satyr drama and research outside the theatre, it is necessary to read these conclusions against the main hypothesis of this article, namely that Darius enters from the interior of the stage-building. The testing of this hypothesis will be combined with corroborative evidence from funerary symbolism in order to shed light on the representational identity of the skene. Once this hypothesis has been tested, the semantics of a character's entry from the ‘deep’ (as opposed to an entry into the ‘deep’) will be examined.

3.1 Interiority and the ‘deep’ in funerary symbolism: door- and house-symbolism, and the identity of the skene on a pictorial level

My discussion has so far tried to argue for a possible alternative staging of Darius' emergence from Hades. In light of the symbolic association between the interior and the ‘deep’ in fifth-century tragedy, and given the regular identification of the interior with Hades, it seems plausible that Darius' emergence from the earth below could have taken place through the opening of the stage-building. Since Agamemnon, Cassandra, Ajax and Oedipus are represented as being engulfed into the underworld when they cross the threshold of the skene, it is legitimate to suppose that in his anodos, Darius emerged from the same space.

Textual and dramaturgical evidence from the Persians itself supports this theory. In particular, the play refers to the earth and to Hades below as interior spaces or house-like structures, such as δόμος and θάλαμος: at 624 the chorus announce that they will accompany the Queen's libations with their anacletic hymn and they ask her to send the drink-offerings ‘to the earth's inner chambers’ (θαλάμους ὑπὸ γῆς, Pers. 624). When they then invoke the earth and the rulers of the underworld, they ask for consent to Darius' leaving ἐκ δόμων (Pers. 642). These images of interiority are suggestive, and so is the fact that they occur less than forty lines prior to Darius' entry. In the presence of the skene, these δόμοι and θάλαμοι would certainly enhance the symbolic power of the ‘built enclosure’ imagery and draw attention to its culturally validated symbolism.Footnote ⁴¹

The idea of Darius' crossing a doorway in order to emerge from the dead need not alienate modern sensibilities, for there are suggestive cultural parallels for it. Various contexts conceive of the crossings of doorways as symbolic acts which represent transitions from one life to another, one stage to another, one world to another.Footnote ⁴² As we saw most strikingly in the case of Ajax and Oedipus at Colonus, the moment of the heroes' crossing the doorway of the stage-building is the moment of their transition to the other world. Funerary art and architecture offer further evidence for this use of the imagery of the doorway, where it stands in for the passage to another world and even as the point of contact with the living. The doorway is one of the most widespread motifs in funerary imagery and symbolism in Egyptian, Phrygian, Lycian, Etruscan and Roman cultures. In fact, it is so common that it has been designated as a human universal.Footnote ⁴³ Although similar visual evidence is lacking from Greek art and architecture, the imagery of the ‘Gates of Hades’ (and indeed of the ‘House of Hades’), used widely in Greek art and literature from the archaic to the classical times and beyond, suggests that key cultural ideologies revolved around the locus of the doorway.Footnote ⁴⁴

The fact that the doorway is an important symbol of funerary architecture leads us to another key observation, which concerns the skene's representational identity. Since theatrical space is essentially polysemous, the skene would have been poised between the symbolism of its interior as Hades and the deep earth more generally, as well as its co-existent pictorial identity. The doorway may well stand for a symbolic passage to and from the depths of the earth, but it may equally well represent the door of a funerary monument. For this we need to look no further than the suggestion of Rehm, Rosenbloom, Kampourelli and others,Footnote ⁴⁵ that the skene-building of the Persians was identified with the tomb of Darius.Footnote ⁴⁶ A close examination of the deictic references to Darius' tomb in the apparition scene, for example at Pers. 684–8, confirms that they are consistent with identifying the stage-building near which the Queen and the elders are standing:

Furthermore, the house-like appearance of the skene is entirely suitable for its identification as Darius' tomb. House-like architecture, including, as mentioned above, the door symbol, are prominent characteristics of Persian, Lycian and Phrygian sepulchral architecture, including the tombs of Persian kings of the Achaemenid period (for example, Cyrus' house-tomb and Darius' rock-cut tomb).Footnote ⁴⁷ Kampourelli has argued perceptively that multiple avenues of cultural contact existed between Greeks and Persians even prior to the Persian wars and, in particular, that the dissemination of travellers' and workers' knowledge throughout society would have ensured that many Athenians could recognise such cross-cultural allusions.Footnote ⁴⁸ Even if we did not wish to base the argument on the cultural knowledge of a fifth-century Athenian audience concerning Near Eastern burial practices, the ‘house’ association of tomb structures was not confined to the Near East. Excavations in the Kerameikos and other areas of Attica provide evidence that house-tombs (albeit of a different architectural style and size) continued to be constructed in late archaic and early classical Athens.Footnote ⁴⁹

If we accept the pictorial identification of the skene-building with Darius' tomb, the much debated τόδ[ε] στέγος ἀρχαῖον at Pers. 140–1 acquires a valuable new meaning. Considering the tomb as a house-like structure removes any doubt that this deictic reference to a present στέγος early on in the play refers to the skene. Footnote ⁵⁰ Furthermore, there is no need to posit the representation of a council-chamber or of a changing identity for the skene, since the relation of the στέγος to the space used by the chorus and the Queen during official deliberations is confirmed by literary and historical evidence for councils regularly taking place near tombs of local heroes.Footnote ⁵¹ It should be noted, however, that these associations would probably become clear to the audience only gradually. The phrase στέγος ἀρχαῖον is perhaps intentionally vague, suggesting a resistance to a more precise identification of the skene at that early moment of the play.Footnote ⁵² The delay of this characterisation imbues the building that looms in the background during the first half of the play with a certain enigmatic quality. Its dramatic significance increases commensurately when its identity finally comes into clear focus at the climactic moments of Darius' appearance and Xerxes' subsequent return. It is then that the building becomes a strong visual focus for the symbolism of the glorious past of the royal oikos and Persia's people,Footnote ⁵³ a past which is being swiftly swept away.

4.1 Generative and deadly spaces (houses, deep interiors, earth) and the spatial movement inwards and outwards: Evidence from drama and structuralist anthropology

Using evidence taken from Greek theatre practice and from the text of Aeschylus' Persians, it has thus far been argued that Darius could have emerged from the interior of the existing skene. However, in order to discuss the symbolic significance of this space in relation to the play as a whole, we shall need to go back to our discussion of spatial depth and consider even more closely the symbolism of the ‘deep’ in relation to the interior. The ‘deep’ will first be examined in relation to scenes from Sophocles' Ichneutae and Aristophanes' Peace, where we find an emergence from that space, as in the Persians, rather than a withdrawal into the deep, as was the case in the other tragedies we surveyed earlier. Through this examination it will emerge that ‘depth’ captures the twin concepts of the deadly and the generative. Aristophanes' Peace will illustrate especially how the interior could mediate between these polarities, alongside insights from anthropological studies on interiority. Ultimately, these insights will put us in a better position to explain the fashioning of Darius' apparition as a chthonic anodos, namely a movement in space which symbolically evokes the powers of the earth.

It was suggested earlier that the central quality of the interior spaces in the scenes of tragedies discussed above is based around the spatial category of depth, and that it is not evocative solely of death. Evidence garnered from satyr drama and comedy is crucial for understanding this important dimension of interiority. An important scene preserved in the fragments of Sophocles' Ichneutae, fr. 314.210 ff., suggests that the ‘deep below’ and not death stands at the heart of the association. There, the nymph Cyllene emerges from the skene, which represents a recess, most probably a cavern. Cyllene's emergence from the cavern is brought on by the satyrs' stamping and kicking the ground (κτύ[π]ον πέδορτον … π[η]δήμασιν κραιπνοῖσι καὶ λακτίσμασι, fr. 314.218–19; cf. line 237 τ[α]ῦτ' ἀφεῖσα … ποδῶν λακ[τίσμασιν). As scholars have noted, the satyrs' stamping clearly points to the fact that the recess is understood as lying below the ground level, because this action is associated with invocation of the powers below, including the dead and other chthonic deities.Footnote ⁵⁴

Although an apparition following pounding of the ground is particularly evocative of the Aeschylean Darius, the fragmentary nature of Sophocles' Ichneutae means that the connotations of Cyllene's emergence remain obscure and, unfortunately, cannot shed more light on the Persians. However, an extant play, Aristophanes' Peace, provides extremely valuable support both for the connection of the ‘interior’ with the ‘deep’ and, even more importantly, for the connotations of Darius' apparition in relation to the earth. Here, the interior and the ‘deep below’ are invoked during the process of hauling the goddess Peace from the underground cavern where she has been hidden, through the door of the skene.Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite the horizontality of the movement (in representational terms), scholars have repeatedly noted that Peace's emergence from the skene is represented as an anodos. Anodoi of chthonic powers are movements from the depths of the earth which symbolically evoke the processes of generation and growth. As Peace comes to the surface from the deep below (Pax 223–4, 307, 372), her arrival is portrayed as bringing up agricultural wealth, fertility and an abundance of blessings (Pax 551–600, 705–711, 1191–1206, 1312–59).Footnote ⁵⁶ Notably, her movement outwards from the interior has the opposite symbolism from that of Agamemnon's, Cassandra's, Ajax's and Oedipus' movements into the skene, which evoke death and decay.

Peace's anodos evokes the renowned mythological anodos of Persephone and other narratives known to the audience and is crucial in relation not only to the divinity's characterisation as a chthonic fertility power, but also to the characterisation of the space itself that she appears out of. The symbolic connotations of her anodos strongly suggest that in this part of the play, the interior of the skene is not to be understood merely as a pictorial representation of a cavern, nor even as a symbolic allusion to Hades, if Hades is understood solely as space of death. Rather, this deep dark space (and the associated ‘deep below’ as a whole) connotes a space associated with the growth of natural wealth and life. In other words, it plays on the double meaning of the earth, both as a source of generative forces but also as a space that houses death.

The further explanation of two issues will help us to apply this argument about depth and interiority to the apparition scene in the Persians. In the first instance, the concepts of generation and death are seen as complementary here in relation to the earth. In the second instance, this concept is associated with interior spaces. A multitude of sources from Greek literature and material culture support the first claim, since they suggest that growth and death are understood as complementary aspects of a single power schematically imagined as located deep below. These include lyric, dramatic and medical texts as well as visual and epigraphic sources.Footnote ⁵⁷ Among them, the Choephori of Aeschylus furnishes perhaps the most eloquent articulation of the concept that ‘earth’ is the space below which both generates life and also receives it in death, when it depicts Electra, prostrate and with her hands touching the ground, reflecting on this power's binary quality. The spatial conceptualisation of death and decay as an inward motion, in contrast to growth as an outward one, is clear in Electra's words:

The second proposition gains greatest support from anthropological studies of recent decades that have examined interiority in relation to the natural and the feminine in pre-industrialised societies, including ancient Greece. One of the most influential of these studies is Vernant's article ‘Hestia–Hermès’ (first published 1963; trans. 1983). Here, Vernant examines the polarities of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ and their anthropological symbolism in the context of the interior of the house. Through a study of the hearth's symbolic location in the earth, Vernant observes that female and natural productivity are strongly linked to one another and to interior spaces more generally. More recently, Ruth Padel has provided a thorough treatment of the connection between interiority and the earth in one of the most acclaimed studies of Greek tragedy's anthropological symbolism, In and Out of the Mind (Reference Padel1992). Throughout the book, but particularly in the section entitled ‘Mind, Earth, Womb, Hades’, Padel argues forcefully for the essential association between these interior spaces. She links the house, the underworld and the innards of the human body to both deadly and generative powers, natural and human alike. Padel does not distinguish between the underworld and the earth, but uses the latter term to capture the significances of both. According to Padel, ‘earth’ is a mythical, religious and especially spatial concept. As an interior, it captures the essence of the concept of ‘earth’ in emphasising both the dark space of death and the productive space of generation and growth.

It has long been demonstrated that interiors have strong symbolic and gendered associations with the earth using a cross-cultural methodology. Bourdieu's study of the cosmic and gendered symbolism of the Berber house and its spatial organisation (Reference Bourdieu, Pouillon and Maranda1970) has probably been the most influential approach, and has been followed by studies of the built environment in other pre-industrial contexts.Footnote ⁵⁸ There are, of course, vast variations between social practice, rituals and beliefs in these different contexts. However, it emerges that deep and dark spaces tend to be invested with a symbolic connection to fertility, preservation and increase of resources in relation to the ideas of the female and the earth, as well the more general concept of the natural environment. ‘Natural’ activities, including sleep, sexual intercourse, childbirth, as well as agrarian activities, cooking and calendar rites are consistently associated across cultural boundaries with the darkest, dampest and least accessible interior spaces. The human cycle of life and death is always closely linked with the agricultural cycle of growth, harvest and decay.

5.1 Earth, wealth and life: The chthonic powers, the ‘wealth of the earth’ and the Persian hybris

In the wider scheme of the Persians, Darius' apparition is part of a matrix that combines interiority, depth and earth as generative and deadly powers and spaces. The play contains numerous cultic, ritual, imagistic and spatial signs, which connect Darius to the earth and which need to be appreciated synoptically in order to understand the semantics of his entry. Earlier on we discussed Darius' role as an ancestral power whose tomb is believed to protect his land and its wealth, to bring blessings and avert evil. The proximity of his tomb to the assembly space of the Persian elders is also consistent with his construction as a hero. The chorus addresses Darius as belonging to the νέρτεροι, the divinities of the earth.Footnote ⁵⁹ The libations that are poured into the ground are directed as much to him as to the other nether powers (Pers. 619–22; cf. 228–30), and all are connected to the dream that warned of Xerxes' hybris and the imminent punishment for the Persians (Pers. 219–23).

The insight that Darius is depicted with a chthonic nature and collectively with the other νέρτεροι has remained relatively neglected,Footnote ⁶⁰ but is key for understanding a very important issue: namely, why it is the nether powers who are invoked to preserve Persia, rather than, for example, celestial divinities. While an orientalising depiction of the Persian religion may have something to do with this choice,Footnote ⁶¹ the key issue to grasp here is arguably the idea that chthonic powers were perceived to be the overseers and guardians of wealth and prosperity.Footnote ⁶² Indeed, at the core of the chthonic nature is a concern with the distribution and use of wealth. Furthermore, for the chthonic powers any product of the earth is a form of ‘wealth’, including material and natural wealth as well as human life.Footnote ⁶³ The preservation and enhancement of fertility, riches and the renewal of human life (that is, the bearing of young) are all perceived in the Greek religious system to be rewards bestowed by powers associated with the earth for actions that confirm the natural order. Sterility, barrenness and poverty thus become considered as punishments for its contraventions.Footnote ⁶⁴

The reason why we need to remind ourselves of the connection between chthonic powers and wealth is that the fate of Persia and its people is identified throughout the play with the fate of its prosperity and wealth (Pers. 161–8, 222–3, 249–52 (cf. 59–64), 468, 714, 753–8, 819–26, 1117). Crucially, Persian wealth is not understood merely as material. Throughout the Persians and Aeschylean tragedy more generally, human life is closely connected to, and sometimes subsumed within, the concept of wealth. When the Messenger announces the defeat at Salamis by presenting it as the destruction of Persia's wealth, his words connect the Persian ploutos with the lives of the young Persian men, the olbos of the empire:

Young life is further conceptualised as the offspring and the product of the earth in the opening part of the play and at key points later on. This concept is first introduced in the parodos, as the elders conclude their catalogue of the departed youths:

Both the Queen and Darius evoke this connection when they envisage the interconnectedness and interdependence of two types of wealth, material and human (Pers. 163–6, 842). Above all, as we shall see below, it is evoked by the image of the ‘Harvest of Tears’ (Pers. 819–26), which figures the loss of life and wealth as a lost harvest, and by the long lamentation for the wasted youth in the great kommos (Pers. 918–end). The amalgamation of material wealth and human capitalFootnote ⁶⁵ is reinforced by the economic symbolism of clothing, the tearing and destruction of which becomes symbolic of the destruction of the country's wealth.Footnote ⁶⁶

The play's discourse on Persian wealth is thus vital for our understanding of the role of the chthonic powers in the play. It suggests that a major reason for the invocation of the νέρτεροι and Darius to intervene and sustain Persia (Pers. 219–23, 608–22 and 623–32) is that, in line with wider Greek religious understanding of chthonic powers, they are connected to the earth and therefore to the primary source of wealth. As guardians of the earth, chthonic powers are perceived as overseers of the wealth and the life it produces. In the Persians the life and livelihood of Persia is at peril, so the characters turn to the chthonic powers for salvation. Darius, in particular, is invoked not only because he is Xerxes' father, nor because he is perceived as the wisest king and the principle creator of Persia's wealth (Pers. 163–4, 751–2, 755–6).Footnote ⁶⁷ Above all, he is invoked because he is worshipped as a hero who has close ties with the land whose wealth his status pledges him to protect.Footnote ⁶⁸

In spite of the Queen's and the elders' hopes, neither Darius nor the other chthonic deities actually turn their benevolent powers towards the prosperity of Persia and its people. The play shows that a violent disruption of the natural order and processes has been caused by the hubristic excess of the Persian expedition. The heavily symbolic image of the yoking of land and sea under Xerxes' rule (Pers. 66–80; 130–1; 181–196; 722; 746–8) has powerfully captured the scale of hybris against the natural order. So, although the chthonic deities go on to respond to human pleas by releasing Darius to the surface (Pers. 634–51, 688–92), this only serves to reveal the causes behind the demise of Persia's prosperity. Darius leaves no doubt of the reasons for the destruction of the Persian ploutos and olbos (Pers. 739–92) and prophesies the complete annihilation of both (Pers. 793–842).Footnote ⁶⁹ As he withdraws back into the earth, his final words provide a poignant commentary on the centrality of wealth and life to the Persian expedition:

5.2. The ‘inverted’ anodos of Darius and the ‘harvest of tears’: the reaction of the earth

To a large degree, therefore, Darius arrives in the Persians as a chthonic power concerned with the ‘wealth of the earth’. His relation to the earth, moreover, is illuminated by the manner of his apparition. Darius' movement in space is presented not merely as the result of necromancyFootnote ⁷⁰ but more specifically as an anodos, a movement that, as explained earlier in connection with Aristophanes' Peace, evokes the natural processes of generation and growth. Several elements are strongly suggestive of this, above all Darius' upward movement to the earth's surface (ἀνακαλεῖσθε Pers. 621) following the pounding of the ground by the chorus (Pers. 683). These elements are amply attested in literary and visual sources as central aspects of anodoi. Footnote ⁷¹ So is the description of the emerging chthonic deity as a potentially benevolent power, as well as the light and dark imagery which accompanies this emergence (Pers. 630, 839, cf. 222–3). Furthermore, the conspicuous agricultural imagery of the scene's climax presents Darius' apparition in the model of an anodos, as does the suggestive image of a ‘harvest’ and the associated concept of natural flourishing. However, as we shall see, Darius' anodos enacts a striking inversion of the usual patterns.

The regeneration of nature, the abundance of crops and the oozing of life are standard features of anodoi in poetry and drama and they are symbolically represented in vase-paintings which depict this theme.Footnote ⁷² Following usual practice, Darius' apparition in the Persians reaches its climax with imagery of agricultural production and of the superabundance of natural energies. In a unique turn away from convention, however, the flourishing in this case is not that of fertility and life, but rather of destruction, suffering and death. By evoking and inverting familiar images of agriculture and natural growth, Darius' words illustrate how the earth's energies will harm the Persians: a spring will keep gushing forth, but it will bring only evils and suffering (κακῶν κρηνίς 814–15). The earth will be offered a thick libation as sacrifice (πελανός), but that will consist of the blood of its remaining youth (αἱματοσφαγής, Pers. 816). The land will be inseminated, but by the innumerable corpses planted in her depths (θῖνες νεκρῶν … τριτοσπόρῳ γονῇ … Pers. 818–19).Footnote ⁷³ And the earth will repay the Persians, but with a ‘harvest of lamentation’:

Therefore, unlike other anodoi, such as those of Peace or of Persephone (Hom. H. Dem. 469–73, cf. 450–6), Darius' movement to the surface conjures the destructive anger of the earth rather than its benevolence.Footnote ⁷⁴ The imagery of the πάγκλαυτον θέρος, which has rightly been noticed by scholars as playing a pivotal role in the drama,Footnote ⁷⁵ powerfully conveys the idea that the Persians have become the victims of the earth's negative energies through Xerxes' hybris. Human insatiability and the hybristic contempt of existing wealth have disturbed the natural order and have led to the destruction of the Persians' ὄλβος, their material prosperity and their young men:Footnote ⁷⁶

As a chthonic divinity and a manifestation of the earth's powers, Darius transfers this reaction to the surface. As in other anodoi, what follows is its enactment in real terms. The poignant imagery of the πάγκλαυτον θέρος, the ‘harvest of lamentation’, takes place on stage in the subsequent and final scene. As the play draws to an end, Xerxes and the chorus collaborate in mourning for the wasted men (Pers. 908–1077). For nearly two hundred verses, and with gradually intensifying pathos, the play brings to pass the outcome that Darius had prophesied in the previous scene. As the earth is envisaged to lament the flower of its youth lying wasted in her depths (Pers. 922–5), the image of the lost harvest becomes more vivid than ever. Xerxes may already be kneeling on the earth at this moment (Pers. 913, 929–30)Footnote ⁷⁷ in a posture heavily symbolic of his submission to the earth's wrathful revenge. When the lamentation reaches its climax, and as the king and his subjects start walking towards the exit, their painful treading on the earth receives intense dramatic focus as the concluding stage action of the play. The same earth which the elders had beaten despairingly with their hands earlier on is now said to be hard to tread on:

The suggestive power of these final words, which the elders repeat emphatically as they leave,Footnote ⁷⁸ is enhanced by the heavy symbolism of the human foot's touch on the ground.Footnote ⁷⁹ The earth, which had earlier allowed Persian olbos to flourish, now completes its revenge. Subjected by human greed and wastefulness, it has turned blessing into suffering.

5.3. The ‘earth’ in the Persians: scenic spaces, narrative spaces and natural imagery into an all-encompassing whole

The way the term ‘earth’ has been used in the course of this paper has revealed the wide spectrum of its semantics and the multiple ways in which it is conceptualised and represented in the Persians. It is in relation to this semantic spectrum that the apparition of Darius should be understood. In spatial terms, the earth is primarily connected to depth, and Aeschylus evokes both the space below the orchestra level and the deep interior of the skene for its representation. Furthermore, this space is understood as housing both growth and death. The supernatural and chthonic presences imagined as occupying it (i.e. the chthonic deities, the dead, and all νέρτεροι) are entrusted with overseeing and regulating the growth and wealth that comes from it. The dramatic needs of the play employ the hero Darius as one of these powers. His anodos and the inverted agricultural imagery that closes the text can be understood as a vivid manifestation of the hostile reaction of the earth to the Persians' greed and their abuse of wealth.

In several places, the earth is represented physically and tangibly through a heavily symbolic use of the space of the ground. We have seen how central this space is to the dramaturgy of the play: the characters beat it, scratch it, pour libations into it, call the nether powers from its depths, kneel on it, and feel its harshness under their feet. The modes of the characters' contact with this space, either by feet or by hands, capture its symbolic potential to reflect on the human relationship with the earth.Footnote ⁸⁰ Furthermore, this space is clearly portrayed as interconnected with the spaces below and inside. The scene that is mostly suggestive of this interconnection is Pers. 598 ff., where actions involving a physical interaction with the ground introduce the entry of Darius from the interior.

The spatial representation of the ‘earth’ in the Persians, however, is not exhausted in the interior, the space of the ground and the depths underneath, but is even more expansive than that. Depths and surface, in fact, are important components of the way Aeschylean drama reflects on a much wider space, the natural environment, which includes not just land and its depths, but also the sea, celestial forces and natural elements. Beyond the Persians, the Aeschylean passage that best reveals an understanding of the earth's all-encompassing presence and its capacity to be simultaneously productive and harmful is the final scene of the Oresteia (Eu. 903–13). As the chthonic Erinyes accept their new abode in the depths of the Athenian land in order to send forth blessings to its people, the realm they will control as powers of the earth is portrayed as not just constituted by the land they will inhabit, but also by the sea, the weather, the winds, the sun, and other natural elements:

The ending of the Oresteia presents the elements under the Erinyes' control as parts of a larger whole which generates life and natural growth, effectively merging the concepts of ‘earth’ and ‘natural environment’ or kosmos.Footnote ⁸¹ Further support for this observation comes from the fact that this passage contains the antithetical representation of powers and elements that have been generally portrayed as hostile and destructive throughout the trilogy (e.g. A. 555–66, 650–67; Ch. 585–93).Footnote ⁸² By evoking this earlier depiction of these powers, this passage is suggestive of the binary understanding that regularly informs human thinking about the environment. As I will now argue, the Persians anticipates this vision of the ‘earth’ as an all-encompassing whole that comprises land and sea, above and below, natural forces and elements, and which generates growth and wealth but also reacts with hostility to their abuse. It does so by creating constant connections between the extra-scenic spaces that populate the narrative accounts and the scenic spaces that become invested with heavy symbolism by the characters' actions. These two spatial worlds alternate with one another as the play progresses and they also become incorporated into the all-encompassing space of the earth.

Agricultural and natural imagery, such as images of lands, seascapes, rivers, springs, ice, sun, winds and other celestial phenomena, appear constantly in the Persians in close connection with one another.Footnote ⁸³ Their generative powers are often evoked (Pers. 33–4, 59–62, 238, 487, 578, 615–18, 805–6), but for most of the play they appear as threatening and destructive. Whilst it is accurate to discern an opposition between some of the elements, particularly the sea and the land, this polarity is swiftly obliterated by the fact that they are both subjected to human domination and that they ultimately react to it collaboratively.Footnote ⁸⁴ The pairing of sea and land best captures Aeschylus' holistic conceptualisation of the environment as a global entity. Xerxes is emphatically presented at the beginning of the play as enforcing his rule over both elements (Pers. 75–80 διχόθεν).Footnote ⁸⁵ The enormous army under his control is likened to a rolling sea wave (Pers. 89 ἄμαχον κῦμα θαλάσσας) which floods through Asia. With both sea and land subjected to the domination of one man, his army and his navy (Pers. 105–13), the Asian landscape is stripped of its resources (Pers. 1–92). The imagery of the yoking of the Hellespont further stresses Xerxes' attempt to dominate the natural environment (Pers. 66–80; 130–1; 181–96; 722; 746–8). Once again, sea and land are shown as subjugated together by human rule.Footnote ⁸⁶ The gendered articulation of Xerxes' attempt to rule over the natural and the cosmic order, something that is prefigured clearly by the Queen's dream at Pers. 180–92, provides an Aeschylean meditation on the perennial human desire to dominate nature.

When the choral narrations of the parodos give way to stage action (Pers. 150) the play focuses on a different kind of space, namely the ground and the depths underneath. The references to earth and wealth on the part of the Queen and the chorus (Pers. 163–4, 178, 238) and their evocation of the disturbed powers below (Pers. 203–4, 220–3, 229), forge a strong link between the earth under their feet and the earth repeatedly envisaged as the subject of Xerxes' hybris (Pers. 61–2, 75–6, 130–1, 178, cf. 180–92). As the propitiatory libations are continually frustrated and postponed, the anger of the realms below remains unappeased. The next set of images is suggestive of the destructiveness with which this anger might manifest itself. The subsequent Messenger's account moves the focus back to the topographies of the expedition. There, the natural landscape almost comes alive and turns itself against the Persians. The sea-battle and its aftermath are presented not merely as a conflict between armies, but as a cosmic struggle between man and natural environment: Salamis' rugged shores and the Greek landscape as a whole prove too harsh for the Persian army (Pers. 272–3, 302–10, 319, cf. 965, 977). The human wave which had been envisaged as rolling over the Asian lands (Pers. 412, cf. 88–90) is blocked and the area is filled with scattered bodies (Pers. 272, 302–30, 420–1, 570–1). The sea, inhospitable to the Persian ships (Pers. 413–14), drowns the flower of the Persian youth (Pers. 274–7, 420) and its animals savage their flesh (Pers. 575–8). Ultimately, the hostile geography of the Salamis straits leaves no escape for the weakened army (Pers. 413–20, 458–64). The few Persians who are able to flee face an even more relentless landscape: even the proverbially fertile Thessalian land withdraws her generative powers and becomes barren, bringing death by starvation and thirst (Pers. 488–91). On the celestial level, the sun melts the ice of the river Strymon as the Persians attempt to cross it and condemns the remaining men to a watery grave (Pers. 504–7). Having brought about an outcome that alludes heavily to the Hellespont hybris, the cosmic/natural order manifests its revenge with irresistible force. Exhausted by the sea, starved by the land and condemned to death by elements both above and below, the Persians are subjected to the full wrath of the hostile environment which their expedition had earlier violated. The vast numbers of their dead are crammed into the depths of the earth, planting it with a sorry seed (Pers. 432, 595, 818–22; cf. 922–30).

At this devastating moment of the narrative, the dramaturgy focuses on the scenic space for one final time. As the libations are finally being poured into the ground (Pers. 609–22) the earth is beaten and the desperate cries of the elders are directed to its depths (Pers. 623–71). The dark interior of the theatrical building, silently dominating the background of the scene, is the only dramatic space that has not yet been activated in the text. Darius emerges from this space as an embodiment of the earth's oracular powers for knowledge and understanding. Above all, however, he is portrayed as articulating the earth's reaction to the humans. His prophecies of the harvest of death and lamentation (Pers. 814–26) serve as the final manifestation of the earth's wrath and revenge. While the wasted olbos of Persia is being mourned in the exodos of the play (Pers. 908 ff.), Xerxes is (probably) brought to his knees (Pers. 929–30) and the elders are made to feel the harshness of the earth under their feet (Pers. 1069–74). The relationship between man and the earth has gone awry, with man abusing the earth's wealth and the earth taking a spectacular revenge. All aspects of the earth, all powers of the kosmos, have conspired in their wrath to bring about a final and dreadful ‘harvest of tears’.