A book dedicated to the chorus is a welcome addition to scholarship on Greek tragedy and confirms that it is now virtually a truism to say that choreia was central to Athenian drama. This volume's focus is ‘choral mediation’, but it soon becomes clear that this is an all-encompassing term: as G. and H. state in the introduction, it refers to the ability of a tragic choral ode ‘to freely link and combine, to serve as a direct intermediary between various levels of reference, and incorporate all strands into the rest of the choral narrative and the whole of the play’ (p. 2). As such, it can apply not only to the chorus' role as mediator between actors and audience, the skênê and the theatron, the myth of the play and the present of the performance, but also, as the editors' commentary on Euripides' Electra demonstrates, to its ability to combine different events and temporalities within the play itself.
C. Calame's essay acts partly as a second introduction, expanding on his earlier work on the different semantic dimensions of the tragic choral voice (‘performative’, ‘emotive’, ‘hermeneutic’) by considering how they combine in the ‘binding song’ in Aeschylus' Eumenides and the kommos in Persians. The rest of the volume is split roughly into three parts: the first half mostly concentrates on the role of the chorus in particular tragedies (Sophocles unfortunately receives little attention beyond Goldhill's essay); the next four chapters consider ‘choral mediation’ through the broader generic lens of archaic lyric, comedy and Plato's Laws; the last three explore the reception of the tragic chorus, from German Idealism to the modern day.
H.'s chapter on Aeschylus' Persians shows how, unlike the actors, the chorus of this play assume a variety of perspectives, including a distinctly Athenian one, through which they align themselves with the spectators (her argument complements Calame's examination of how the ‘Persian’ chorus communicate with the Athenian audience). She then argues that the plot is driven by the chorus' desire for the army's return, and suggests that it follows a pattern of conflict followed by ‘solidarity without consensus’, though I do not see so sudden a shift from antagonism between the chorus and Xerxes to their reconciliation at the end of the play. J. Grethlein discusses ‘choral intertemporality’ in Oresteia, whereby the chorus blur temporal boundaries, both within the trilogy itself and between the heroic action and Athens' ‘democratic present’. I would have liked some consideration of how tragedy inherits the ‘intertemporality’ of nondramatic choral lyric (e.g. Pindar's Nemean 5); I also expected some mention of the work of A. Henrichs and B. Kowalzig in his discussion of the dissolving of temporalities through ritual.
Turning to Sophocles, S. Goldhill's essay on the interplay of lyric and spoken voice between chorus and actor brilliantly demonstrates how metre works as ‘a system of stage directions for the chorus’ narrative' (p. 128), while also shaping the audience's emotional responses. His introductory section on the choral voice is an extremely useful overview of ways of thinking about the tragic chorus more generally.
The next four essays focus on the Euripidean chorus, beginning with L. Swift's discussion of two cases of conflicting choral identities: Medea, in which the chorus’ identities as both Corinthians and women problematise their relationship with Medea; and Ion, in which the chorus' polis-identity dominates over that of gender. S. Murnaghan then offers a compelling analysis of the ‘choral plot’ of Helen, arguing that Helen's situation is initially presented as that of a dislocated chorêgos, but the play tracks and is shaped by her return to more orderly choreia back in Sparta. Her discussion of how tragedy uses the configuration of chorus and leader found in other genres in order to generate narrative is essential reading for anyone interested in the links between dramatic and nondramatic choral lyric.
B. Kowalzig's impressive chapter on Iphigenia in Tauris demonstrates how the chorus work Artemis Tauropolos into a network of myth and rituals across the northern Aegean and the Black Sea, thus reinforcing a conceptualisation of religious and economic integration at a time when Athens' access to the region's ports was vital. This essay not only furthers our understanding of IT as an aetiology but also suggests that other tragedies can be interpreted in terms of such mediation of transcultural economic relations (the address to the Phoenician ship in the third stasimon of Helen might make a particularly interesting comparison). A. Bierl discusses the crossover of the chorus' dramatic and performative roles in Bacchae. Drawing on his earlier work on choral self-reference, he shows how the chorus perform as both Lydian-Asiatic maenads and the off-stage Theban ‘chorus’, thus expressing the ‘ritual totality’ of choreia.
G. Nagy then expands on his previous discussions of mimesis to argue for the theatricality of the Delian Maidens' performance in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and the response to them by the aoidos. He suggests a continuity between this mimetic choral interaction and the mediation between actors, chorus and audience in tragedy. This essay complements A.-E. Peponi's suggestion of a link between the hymn's narrative ‘chorography’ and the spatial dynamics of the classical theatre (in Thumele [2004], pp. 303–22).
Turning to Plato's discussion of choreia in Laws, L. Prauscello's beautifully argued essay shows how the socialising and educative function of choreia in the ‘second best city’ lies in instilling the ‘correct’ physiology of pleasure and pain, and that through this training the rational converges with the irrational as a result of humans' innate ability to perceive and rejoice in orderly movement and sound. She also suggests that, though Magnesia is represented as a mimesis of the ‘truest tragedy’, on a performative level the ideal model of chorality is to be found in lyric, non-dramatic choreia.
J. Henderson considers choral mediation in comedy, arguing that, unlike its tragic counterpart, the comic chorus' identity was extremely flexible, shifting between that of ‘an involved or partisan character, the generic comic chorus, the poet's own chorus, or the chorus of a past play’ (p. 296). As other essays in the volume demonstrate, the tragic chorus could also have multiple identities, but the contrast is nevertheless a useful one in thinking about choral mediation in both genres. G. continues the focus on comedy by looking at the ‘intermediality’ of the dramatic chorus, specifically in terms of the performance of writing. This engaging piece argues that Kallias' Alphabetic Tragedy dramatises ‘a moment of education through letters’ by means of its 24 choreuts, each representing and performing a letter of the alphabet, and tentatively suggests that a Sappho figure is meant to be the teacher in PCG test. 7.
The contributions by J. Billings and F. Macintosh are nicely complementary, each showing how judgements concerning the tragic chorus' ‘relevance’ are politically and historically contingent. Billings explains how both Hegel and Hölderlin saw the chorus in terms of the societal transition they witnessed with the French Revolution: for Hölderlin, the chorus is a site for Umkehr towards republicanism; for Hegel, the collective form of the polytheistic chorus breaks down into individuality and bourgeois society. Macintosh makes the important link between scholarship on the tragic chorus and contemporary performance (or lack thereof) by exploring the short-lived popularity of dance – especially ‘Greek’ dance – in Britain from the 1880s until 1914, when it began to be seen as dangerously ‘cosmopolitan’.
The last essay is P. Meineck's stimulating discussion of how the chorus can communicate with the audience, both in contemporary performing arts and in fifth-century Athenian tragic theatre. His observations on the chorus' interaction with their physical environment are particularly illuminating, and he demonstrates convincingly that the Greek chorus would have been physically present within the ‘public gaze’ throughout a tragic performance. His use of the concepts of ‘embodied empathy’ in the work of Anna Bogart and the neural ‘mirror-system’ to suggest a crossover of choral spectatorship and participation in the Greek theatre could have benefited from some reference to the much-discussed theory of ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ in Dance Studies (e.g. S.L. Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance [2010]). This might also be productively linked to Nagy's suggestion that the chorus mediate pathos through mimesis (pp. 249–50) and Prauscello's discussion of the anticipatory value of rhythm (pp. 272–3). That these other pieces are not mentioned here is indicative of the lack of interaction between the chapters in general – the main fault I find with this otherwise excellent volume.
