In this volume W. pursues her investigation into props in Greek drama (see Costumes in Greek Tragedy [2011]) and iconographic evidence for ancient theatre (see O. Taplin and R. Wyles, The Pronomos Vase [2010]). This new monograph focuses on three objects from Greek tragedy and aims to demonstrate their relevant significance for the construction of civic identity in fifth-century Athens. Her methodology builds on the ‘material turn’ combined with phenomenological approaches to citizenship in Athenian society. Her claim that objects functioned as ‘repositories for values and concepts expressed across the breadth of civic experience’ (p. 3) is not a new one (cf. O. Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action [1978], p. 98; M. Mueller, ‘Athens in a Basket’, Arethusa 43 [2010], Objects as Actors [2016]; A.-S. Noel, ‘La mise en scène du politique’, in C. Courtet et al. [edd.], Corps en scènes [2015]), but the systematic approach, the joined attention paid to literary and iconographic evidence as well as the intergeneric perspective (encompassing tragedy, comedy and satyr drama) are proven to be fecund, allowing W. to offer fresh interpretations of well-commented passages from famous plays. The book is also exemplary in making the case for the interest in ‘small things’: W. shows well how looking at apparently mundane objects leads to important questions, such as the democratic discourse or the question of drama's engagement with social and cultural aspects of the contemporary civic life.
The props chosen are complementary in mapping three spaces in which ‘citizenship could be performed’ (p. 3): the law court (voting urns and pebbles), the battlefield (sword) and the theatre itself (mask); settings in which Athenian citizens assumed different roles (juror, warrior, choreut). For each item the symbolic significance to civic identity is first established before its uses in performance come under scrutiny – not only in one production, but through a series of performances alluding to each other and re-appropriating the meanings of these objects for new ends. The astute tracking of interperformative allusions is one of the book's strengths – for instance when W. spots references to Aeschylus’ Oresteia in Aristophanes’ Wasps (44–8), and to Aeschylus’ Theoroi, Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae and Cratinus’ Seriphioi in Euripides’ Bacchae (134–47).
Another key aspect of W.'s study, in comparison with other volumes on objects recently published, is her focus on the objects’ meaning in drama and society. This semiotic approach is a pleasant change from recent works on objects in Greek drama, and more broadly Greek literature, led from the perspective of New Materialisms and Posthumanism (M. Telò and M. Mueller, The Materialities of Greek Tragedy [2018]; L.G. Canevaro, Women of Substance [2018] and ‘Materiality and Classics’, JHS 139 [2019]; E. Bianchi, S. Brill and B. Holmes, Antiquities beyond Humanism [2019]), which claim for the inner vitality of objects and their independent ontology (as living non-human entities), a stance that clearly opens debate. W. rather places her lens at the intersection of the objects’ ‘social life’ (acquired through the social exchanges in which they are involved) and their ‘dramatic life’ (built through their various apparitions in stage productions), a position that appears more methodologically sound.
The project has, therefore, much to be valued; however, some of its initial assumptions and results merit discussion. Firstly, the concentration on the external meaning of the objects (related to ‘real-life’ and, more specifically, to a pre-existing discourse on civic identity) is impoverishing when it leads to a dismissal of the internal dynamics of a given drama, which most often grants a polysemic significance to objects. W. tends to assume that objects necessarily come from outside of the theatre and that dramatists appropriate them as physical items already charged with a full spectrum of extra-theatrical meanings. This is debatable. Theatrical objects are not necessarily equivalent to their real-life counterparts: they may be literary creations, based on former literary (or visual) artworks, rather than objects coming from the poet's and spectators’ daily-life context. Their former ‘life’ is, therefore, rooted in a heterogeneous background, made up of texts, performances and possibly real-life settings, to which they are, nonetheless, never reducible. For instance, the shields in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes are less realia referring to a central piece of the contemporary hoplite's equipment than a reworking of several poetic traditions (including Achilles’ shield in Iliad 18). That stage-swords inevitably allude to the hoplite's weapon can equally be doubted.
In its various parts the book should also make it clearer that the objects’ meanings are not exhausted by their possible political relevance. For instance, the analysis of the voting urn and pebbles tends to over-emphasise the relevance of these objects for an external discourse on democratic procedures to the detriment of the interpretation of how these objects contribute to the dramatic construction and effects of the plays, especially in the Oresteia (by contrast, see C. Mauduit, ‘Le suffrage d'Athéna’, in A. Borlenghi et al. [edd.], Voter en Grèce, à Rome et en Gaule [2019], a volume that would have been helpful for W.). On pp. 39–40 the connections of the voting urns with other related objects seen or spoken of throughout the trilogy are too partial. W. ignores Ares’ urn of ashes (Ag. 443–4) and the funerary urn mentioned by Orestes (Cho. 686–7 – an object that had a later, momentous, theatrical life in Sophocles’ Electra), whereas textual echoes call for interpretation. In contrast, seeing an interperformative allusion to the voting urns of Eumenides in the water-pot of Euripides’ Electra seems far-fetched (p. 48). The rich textual and visual connections between Electra's vessels in the three versions of her story by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, have been recurrently noted and analysed by scholars (including P. Easterling, ‘Form and Performance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy [1997]; S. Miles, ‘Accessoires et para-tragédies’, in B. Le Guen and S. Milanezi [edd.], L'appareil scénique dans les spectacles de l'Antiquité [2013]; A.-S. Noel, ‘Femmes au vase’, Eugesta 4 [2014], among others). But the connection here is hard to make (the substantive τεύχος is too vague to build any consistent verbal reminiscence, p. 48). Moreover, in selecting only dramas featuring voting objects as props, W. fails to mention plays containing important scenes of trial and voting (such as Aeschylus’ Suppliants, Euripides’ Hecuba, Trojan Women, Ion and Orestes). Even though those scenes were not represented on stage, the ‘cultural discourse’ on the democratic vote (as well as, arguably, the ‘theatrical life’ of voting objects, in the plays where they were mentioned) was also built through these productions, even in the absence of material props.
Two other assumptions deserved deeper critical engagement. W. does not adopt a ‘new materialist’ frame of references, but she often assumes that objects have an ‘agency’ of their own (p. 4), for example, can act and exert a power independently of their human users (see p. 17, the pebbles possess a ‘power to bring calm’). It is rather the process of voting as a whole (under the crucial control of Athena) that is represented as socially soothing. It is similarly disputable to attribute agency to voting pebbles in Aeschylus’ Oresteia whereas the ‘human agency’ is certainly more at stake (as W. acknowledges, p. 41). Her case studies could have been better exploited as opportunities for discussing and refining conceptions of objects as agents, instead of importing the fashionable, but vague, notion of agency into the reading of dramatic texts.
Another aspect that weakens the argument is the rather summary concept of the theatrical audience, who, as W. posits, was engaging with props on stage and prompted by these objects to self-consciously reflect on Athenian civic identity. Nowhere in the book is there an informed discussion of who attended the performances (in terms of socio-cultural categories, gender, age, ethnic origin; on this, see e.g. T. Roselli, Theater of the People [2011]; J. Robson, ‘Humouring the Masses’, in L. Grig [ed.], Popular Culture in the Ancient World [2017]). The audience in classical Athens was, in fact, heterogeneous and not reducible to Athenian male citizens. It would have positively enlarged the scope of the book to, at least, envisage that objects could have elicited responses from a broader portion of the audience than the restricted body of Athenian citizens. As for the impact of theatre on the spectators and how it affected their extra-theatrical life (a claim I am sympathetic with, but hard to document), W. seems limited to hazardous guesses, in the absence of a real critical discussion on ways to advance research.
In spite of these reservations, it is fair to acknowledge the important contribution of W.'s book to building a critical discourse on objects: many, if not all, fields of inquiry can be refreshed by the new questions prompted by an informed interest in objects and materiality.
