This volume gives expression to an emerging new vision of theatre history. It rejects the aggressively Athenocentric, democratic and propagandistic view of tragedy that found its fullest articulation in the Cold War era and still largely dominates European and American scholarship. Since 1989 the world has become more interconnected, networked, depolarised and decentred. Not surprisingly, twenty-first century scholarship has found it easier to recognise these same qualities in Archaic and Classical Greece. ‘Mobility’ is also the by-word of A. Lamari's Reperforming Greek Tragedy (2017), which appeared only months after this book and covers much the same ground. Specifically, S. argues that tragedy was Panhellenic, non-partisan, integrationist and – most provocatively – that it did not become so in the late fifth or the fourth century, but was that way from the start.
The introduction shows how traditional Athenocentrism occludes any real understanding of the process of tragedy's dissemination and Panhellenisation. But even more recent diffusionist and anti-Athenocentric approaches, he feels, fall short of shaking off the old prejudices that bind our understanding of tragedy to Athens, to democracy and to the fifth century. The book, therefore, elaborates three theses: that the content and context of the earliest tragedy was Panhellenic; that it was immediately integrated into networks of festivals already established by more than a century of Panhellenic song culture; and that the evidence shows ‘professional’ poets and actors moving along these established networks.
The first two of five chapters describe this Archaic song culture. What made it Panhellenic was the mobility of its performers and the use of myth to integrate people and localities into the broader Greek world. The Panhellenic agenda particularly latched onto myths like the Returns, with their tales of displacement, travel and settlement. S. argues that a disproportionate number of tragedies draws on just such myths and uses them to create links between Greek cities. The reflexively wide-ranging second chapter shows how Archaic and Classical Greeks, like their mythic heroes, were also highly mobile, particularly the professionals: doctors, philosophers and, most importantly, poets.
Chapters 3–6 give a close reading of the evidence. Chapter 3, ‘Tragedy in Athens, c. 500–300 bc’, discusses the (large) number of foreign participants in the Athenian Dionysia, both as spectators and participants. The next three chapters look at ‘Tragedy Outside Attica’ from 500–450, 450–400 and 400–300 respectively. Chapter 4 glances at theatre traditions in the Peloponnese, with particular attention to Pratinas and Megarian and Spartan ‘comedy’ before moving on to Sicily. S. shows how Aeschylus’ productions of Aetnaeae and Persians at Hieron's court, like Pindar's and Bacchylides’ odes, functioned to connect Hieron and Syracuse with the history and political geography of the larger Greek world.
Chapter 5, the longest, takes us immediately from Hieron and Aeschylus to Archelaus and Euripides. S. convincingly shows how Archelaus, Temenus and Temenidae do the same kind of integrative work, endowing the tyrant with a Heraclid ancestry. It is less clear, however, that these plays do the same service to Macedonians generally and ‘demonstrate the right of Macedonians to be considered Greeks’, as S. argues (p. 126). Perhaps, here politics do prevail over Panhellenism. Similar doubts arise from the discussion of Andromache in Epirus: are the Molossian people or just their ‘Aeacid’ rulers brought into connection with the rest of Greece? Captive Melanippe and Aeolus, on the other hand, do convincingly link Metapontum with Central Greek history, whether or not a performance in that city took place.
Chapter 6 allows both ‘change and continuity’ (p. 193) in the fourth century. But the change is mainly quantitative; established patterns continue. In particular, the novelty scholars usually claim for the fourth century is unsustainable. There is: no decline in tragedy's quality or popularity; no sudden turn towards mobility, internationalism or secularisation; and no fifth-century political engagement to be lost in the fourth. S. recognises that the rise of the acting profession begins only in the second half of the fifth century, but stresses gradualism in the development of the actor's art and its emergence from, and continuity with, the poet's original realm of competence. Fourth-century canonisation too has early roots. The chapter ends with a quick overview of attested performance venues. These are related to networks of Panhellenic song culture established in earlier centuries (but not specifically claimed for the Black Sea, which might be an exception). The volume ends with a short conclusion and three appendices: non-Athenian settings, foreign performers in Athens and Phrynichus in Sicily.
The volume, based on a revised 2013 Nottingham dissertation, is impressive for its clarity of argument, and above all for the breadth and depth of its research. S. reviews virtually all the literary and the most important epigraphic evidence. His use of iconography is more sparing than V. Vahtikari's Tragedy Performances outside Athens in the Late Fifth and the Fourth Centuries bc (2014), but Chapter 5 makes effective (though unillustrated) use of Lucanian vase-painting. Theatre architecture is generally unexplored because of its uncertainties. As a refutation of the Athenocentric view of tragedy, at least in its most radical forms, S. is entirely successful. The argument that tragedy assumed a place in a highly mobile and thoroughly networked Panhellenic song culture ‘simultaneously with its development’ (p. 161), while justifiable in the case of Aeschylus, seems to me less persuasive when applied to tragedy as a whole, and still more difficult when generalised to explain the spread of theatre (Old Comedy, for example, apparently also spread, and was often blatantly Athenocentric).
There is a significant difference between dramatic and lyric poets. Even if some lyric poets require choruses, their infrastructural needs fall far below those of drama. Drama's particular need for actors, theatre, stage, costumes, masks, musicians, stage-machinery, in addition to choruses, made it no easy add-on to existing festivals. There is a reason why wealthy tyrants and imperial cities like Athens dominate the evidence for the first half-century and more of theatre history. Even in the Hellenistic period many cities with important festivals could not afford drama. Scholars used to believe in a downmarket version of tragedy in the Attic demes, but the evidence suggests that even there high production standards were maintained. (Drama is attested for only two demes before 450.)
Perhaps the biggest problem is that, despite his stated aim of offering a history of the dissemination of tragedy (p. 1), S. downplays historical process altogether. Everything important appears present from the beginning, and tragedy and theatre just grew in volume without really changing. One can agree with S. (and I do) that there were no ‘seismic’ moments in the history of tragedy, but it is very difficult to believe that even purely quantitative change implies no qualitative change (especially in so capital-intensive an industry). Even S.’s discussion of quantitative change seems understated. In Chapter 3, with its coverage of 200 years of foreigners at the Athenian Dionysia, S. maintains that ‘the numbers of non-citizen performers as a whole also seem to have remained fairly constant’ between the fifth and fourth centuries (p. 85). But a close scrutiny of the statistics he supplies here and in Appendix 2 could easily lead one to the opposite conclusion, especially if one uses, not raw numbers, but percentages of known origins, as does S. Nervegna, Menander in Antiquity (2013), p. 33, in relation to comic poets: 6% foreign in the fifth century (really 0%, since the singleton Hegemon is an author of parodoi), 32% in the fourth, and 50% bridging fourth and third.
Despite any such qualms, this is an excellent and important book. S. offers us a new paradigm for theatre history, truer to the evidence than that it replaces.
