Fortunate bridegroom, the marriage you prayed for
has come to fruition. You have the maiden for whom you prayed.
: : And you, your form is graceful, your eyes
like honey. Eros pours over your beloved face
: : Aphrodite has rewarded you extravagantly.
Sappho, fragment 112, trans. John Daley
While we may have come to think of the Lesbian/lesbian poet Sappho as an individual, a solo voice singing of erotic longing, in fact many of Sappho’s verses were written for choral performance. Among them are the epithalamia, “wedding songs,” like Sappho’s here. There were many forms of chorus in archaic and classical Greece, not restricted to the dancing and singing in drama, in tragedy, satyr play, and comedy. The Greek word khoros actually refers most literally to “dance.” It can be extended to denote a group, a “choir,” which dances and sings, and even a dancing floor, a place for dancing. According to one etymology, noted by Hesychius (LSJ), khoros means kuklos, “ring, or circle.”
In this chapter, I first discuss the centrality of the chorus to ancient Greek ritual and performance occasions, and then argue that the work of Louis Althusser on dramatic form can contribute to the understanding of choruses in ancient Greek drama. I look at recent work on choruses, at the tragic chorus, and then turn to the only extant satyr play to consider its chorus. I recall the scholarly privileging of tragedy, and then move to comedy’s choruses, especially those in which swarms of animals figure, and to scholarship on comedy.
Homer’s Iliad, in perhaps the first mention of such performance in western European civilization, refers to a chorus in the description of the shield of Achilles, newly forged for the weaponless warrior by the smith god Hephaistos at the request of Achilles’ mother, the goddess Thetis.1 This marvelous defensive weapon contains a world, itself incorporating conflict, resolution, and pastoral harmony:
On it he [Hephaistos] also fashioned a vineyard, lush with clusters,
fine and golden; black the bunched grapes, while the vines
were propped up throughout on silver poles. Around it
he set a ditch, done in cobalt enamel, and outside that a fence
made of tin, with one path to the vineyard, on which
the grape pickers went to and fro when harvesting the vines:
and he had girls and boys, all innocently light hearted,
carrying the honey-sweet fruit in wicker baskets,
while in the midst of them a boy with a clear-toned lyre
made sweet music, and accompanied his own singing—
soft and exquisite—of the Linos Song, while they,
stamping the beat and shouting, danced along after him.2
The Greek historian Herodotus connects this song with Linos, a legendary musician, the first human being given the gift of singing by the gods, and then murdered by a jealous Apollo (Herodotus 2.478). The late Alexandrian lexicographer Hesychius adds that khoros also means stephanos, “something that surrounds or encompasses,” (LSJ), as in the wall that surrounds a city, and then “crown, or wreath,” and so the khoros is thought to be a circular dance, a “ring dance.”
Homer’s description of the shield also refers to the “sacred circle” of the agora:
There was a crowd
of citizens drawn to the meeting place (agora): a dispute had arisen
between two men . . .
the elders were sitting
on polished seats of stone in the sacred circle.
(Iliad 496–504, trans. Green)
We might see the audience, and even the chorus, of the later classical Athenian theater as another form, a microcosm even, of this circle that becomes the assembly, in the fifth century, of the polis, the classical democratic city.3
The fact that khoros originally referred to a group of dancers reveals how much our understanding of the performance of the choruses of the ancient city relies on partial information. We have little or no sense of the music that accompanied the dances of the choruses, and what shreds of knowledge we have of the dancing of the choruses relies on internal references in the words that have survived, allusions to turns and counterturns, for example, or on material evidence in the archaeological remains, of dances depicted in painting on vases, or the excavation of dancing floors such as the orchestras of theaters.4
There are many kinds of choruses in ancient Greek performance, including the dancing implicit in Alcman’s Partheneion, dance and song of Spartan maidens: “This our choir of ten sings as well as eleven girls: why, its song is like that of a swan on the waters of the Xanthus” (Alcman frag. 1, 98–101, trans. Campbell). Other varieties of chorus survive, the text of songs that choirs of dancers and singers performed for ritual and festival occasions. One of the most significant is the genre called “dithyramb,” songs celebrating the god Dionysos. Aristotle relates that tragedy developed out of dithyrambic choruses, when a chorus leader stepped forward, out of the group, to become a single voice, and then a character in what became tragedy.5 The chorus precedes drama as we have received it.
Choruses in drama have a special status, and although there is a wide variety of choruses, of membership, and their role in the dramas, they are often subordinated in analysis to the actions and speech of the characters who stand alone and pronounce their speeches, speak to other characters, or engage in exchanges with the members of the chorus. One of the pressing issues I want to illuminate here is that the chorus, which embodies lines of flight, of escape from the confinement of text in performance, can gesture toward a more pluralistic conception of the polis, the inhabited city and its territory, many varieties of spaces, and the demos, which included the citizens, as well as many varieties of others—slaves, foreigners, Greek and not, and women.6 Theirs is what Althusser calls “non-dialectical time,” and they occupy an alternative temporality to that of the plot, the linear narrative of the dramatic action.
Louis Althusser’s famous essay on the Piccolo Teatro relies on his views about ideology, interpellation, the “hailing” of persons, and on what seems to me a complex and illuminating model of thinking about the ways in which persons are caught up in the political structures of their present.7 Althusser provides a model that allows for a formal analysis of the theatrical object that shows contradictions being represented theatrically, rather than as the conscious positions of a playwright, and that can cast light on the structure of ancient Athenian tragedy and comedy, characters and chorus.
Althusser describes a sort of tragedy, a melodrama in dialect, set in the nineteenth century in Milan, El Milan Nost, written by Carlo Bertolazzi. Althusser sets out before us a theatrical performance of the first part of the play, as directed by Giorgio Strehler, marked by two different moods, two different temporalities. The plot of the drama concerns a young woman, Nina, in love with a circus clown, who dies. She is gradually forced into prostitution, as her father attempts to save her, killing her lover; in the second part of the play, Nina enters into high society. The first part of the drama, entitled “The Poor,” La povera gent, was staged by Strehler, and is the object of Althusser’s analysis. Under Strehler’s direction, it is as if the group of workers presented on stage inhabit a “chronicle,” as Althusser calls it, while the characters, including the tragic heroine, Nina, live in “tragedy”:
It is precisely this opposition which gives Bertolazzi’s play its depth. On the one hand, a non-dialectical time in which nothing happens, a time with no internal necessity forcing it into action; on the other, a dialectical time (that of conflict) induced by its internal contradiction to produce its development and result. . . . The issue here is the play’s latent structure and nothing else. Bertolazzi’s explicit intentions are unimportant: what counts, beyond the words, is the internal relation of the basic elements of its structure. I would go further. It does not matter whether Bertolazzi consciously wished for this structure, or unconsciously produced it: it constitutes the essence of his work.8
Althusser is describing, in addition to a call for disregarding “authorial” intention, an incommensurability, a lack of relation between two elements of Il Milan Nost. The silent proletariat performs its silent presence, while the tragedy occurs in between, in another time: “Nowhere can it [the structure] be perceived directly in the play as can the visible characters or the course of the action. But it is there, in the tacit relation between the people’s time and the time of the tragedy, in their mutual imbalance, in their incessant ‘interference’ and finally in their true and delusive criticism. It is this revealing latent relation, this apparently insignificant and yet decisive tension that Strehler’s production enables the audience to perceive without their being able to translate this presence directly into clearly conscious terms.”9 Althusser is discussing a twentieth-century theater production of a nineteenth-century drama; he describes a tragedy, not a comedy; he gives us a tragedy set in the proletariat environment of nineteenth-century workers’ Milan. While this is not ancient drama, there is much of value and pertinence in this analysis, especially as Althusser describes an incommensurability between different elements of the staging of this tragedy, an incommensurability relevant to the presence of choruses in ancient Athenian dramatic performance. A recognition of rupture, a fracturing of the dramatic form, might begin to address what I have identified as a neglect of the chorus, not only in the Poetics of Aristotle, but in the theorists who come after him.
Recent classical scholarship has tried to open up these questions, to give a fuller account of choruses, not only in tragedy, little in comedy, but in other circumstances of choral performance in the ancient city and after. In a valuable recent volume, Choruses, Ancient and Modern, Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona Macintosh, as editors and contributors, consider the varied sorts of ancient Greek choral forms, and their descendants in modernity.10 There are a few discussions of a few of the plays of Aristophanes, in particular the play in which Aristotle treats tragedy, the Frogs.11 Yet the only entry in the index for comedy is the Comédie Française.
The introduction to the book argues, contra my view of Old Comedy, that the notion of choruses as revolutionary bodies is “not one at home in most accounts of ancient choruses, which, on the whole, tend to see the chorus as harmoniously aligned with cosmic, social, and political order. Even the weaker notion, which makes an appearance in various modern periods, of utopia-seeking choruses, while closer to standard models of ancient chorality, nevertheless is at odds with them because of the gap it programmatically opens up between the chorus and the current state of the world” (4). And further, “it would be productive to think through the notion that already in Archaic and Classical Greece choral songs demonstrate a hankering for the impossible (note the habit of Greek choral texts to imagine performances by other, often mythical choruses)” (5). Especially in the choruses of comedy, as I intend to show in chapters that follow.
One of the most valuable and provocative essays in this volume is Edith Hall’s “Mob, Cabal, or Utopian Commune? The Political Contestation of the Ancient Chorus, 1789–1917,” which does, refreshingly, take issue with the introduction’s perspective on the chorus:12 “The revolutionary potential of Greek theatrical chorality was more clearly realized than ever before in revolutionary Russia, but it was of course built into the medium from the moment of its genesis. The Greek tragic choruses that have survived are the products of democratic Athens, a society that had recently given more political power to more—and poorer—people than any previously” (283). Hall recognizes the potential of the chorus, but mentions only tragedy. She discusses the “landmark mass choruses of the French revolution, the ‘voice of the cities.’” “The illiterate could learn catchy songs in which to ‘express their longing for bread and security, their will to build a better social order’” (286).13
Hall focuses on the class identifications with the ancient tragic chorus: “The chorus did without question offer a promising paradigm in imagining a univocal Volk or compatriots within the emergent ideal of the unified nation state. But surely it is of equivalent significance that it could also look like a threatening rabble or a utopian projection of an egalitarian commune, depending on your class-political perspective?” (286).14 Acknowledging the ambiguous nature of the choral swarm, Hall nonetheless traces an impressive and inspiring legacy of the tragic chorus of ancient Athens into modernity. The “semi-official anthem of the Russia Revolution” was Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which featured a color organ that generated light of different colors projected onto a screen, and a “wordless chorus,” that sang only vowels, no consonants “that demarcate one language from another” (307).
Martin Revermann concludes his “Brechtian Chorality,” in this volume, with the following caveat:15 “Brechtian choruses remind us that chorality is, and was in the ancient Greek theatre, an enormously powerful theatrical device, capable of transforming an old traditional tale into a fresh, thought-provoking, beautiful and engaging challenge that forces, to the present day, its viewers to rethink fundamental aspects of what the world around them is, what it could be, and what it ought to be” (169). Of course, Athenian comedy does not transform “an old traditional tale,” but rather invents a new world, “what ought to be,” more than any tragedy. And it deploys not tales, but tails, often, possibly following on the rituals of the city, the processions of animals, beasts of various sorts, creatures connected especially with Dionysiac choral performances. The stories, animal fables, are alluded to in vases with animal processions, and offer another connection between the past of the city and its dramatic festivals, including comedy, and that, as Revermann’s remarks suggest, allow us to “rethink fundamental aspects” of the present, and of the future, in utopian imaginings that include the existence of other beings among humankind, a whole global ecology.
Other scholars return principally to the tragic chorus, when surpassing the traditional philosophical focus on character. Claude Calame usefully insists on its centrality in his book La tragédie chorale,16 beginning with Nietzsche, and with two twentieth-century Balinese festivals, celebrated almost forty years apart, festivals marked by long processions, sacrificial offerings, and culminating in dramatic presentations and choral dance. For him, these spectacles evoke the scenario of the Great Dionysia, marked in its turn by a long musical contest, including dithyrambs, comedies, and tragedies, ending with a satyr play: “These sung and dramatized manifestations are inserted into the long ritual sequence,” including procession and sacrifice. The comparison with Balinese celebration ends here, but reminds us that an ethnographic, anthropological understanding of the fifth-century BCE Athenian festival should take note of the fact that this is similarly a ritual occasion. An eyewitness experience of Bali’s festivals revealed for Calame the necessity of attempting to imagine that ritual, color, and musical rhythm to which we no longer have access in the case of ancient Athenian drama, when all we have is texts.
Calame goes on to focus on tragedy. He considers in detail the choruses of three tragedies, Aeschylus’s Persians, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Euripides’ Hippolytus. Among other crucial observations, he recalls the affinities of the Persians’ chorus with lamentation, and how the chorus of Oedipus Rex frames the figure of Oedipus himself, the principal character usually the focus of analysis, foregrounding the status of the mortal human being. His analysis of Euripides’ Hippolytus stresses the presence of two separate choruses in the drama, one made up of the citizen-class women of the heroes’ city of Troezen, the other a chorus of Hippolytus’s companions. Both choruses sing in the third stasimon, the standing song of the tragedy, and in Calame’s view point to the gender ambiguity of Hippolytus himself.
Tragic choruses take up varied positions in relation to the characters of the dramas in which they appear. They are often composed of older men, women, soldiers, or followers, groups too weak to offer much resistance to the demands, commands, positions of the characters, beholden to their masters. Sometimes the chorus seem to be paralyzed, static onlookers to the action, as in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. The later tragedian Euripides at times mocked their inaction, as they seemed to dither, and disapprove, and comment on the events or conversations conducted between the characters, without intervening in the predictably disastrous behaviors of their social superiors. At other times they seem to represent a lowest common denominator of public opinion, or some general, generic, commonsense relationship to the tragic events they witness. Some choruses seem to change course during the play, to sympathize with one character and then another as the plot unfolds. Other choruses comment soberly at the end of tragedies on the terrible spectacle they have watched. The choruses are made up of a variety of kinds of human beings in tragedy—inhabitants, bystanders, citizens, enslaved women, spectators of various sorts, or participants in the drama, and they frequently observe passively the actions of their betters.17 Are they stand-ins for the members of the audience, paralyzed or commenting, impotent or engaged in judging or intermittently identifying with the characters and their choices as they share the stage? Comic choruses, on the other hand, often take disruptive action, act out the great refusal. And for these reasons, among others, they may be left out of the political theoretical discussions of ancient drama in modernity, which are so centered on individual choices, sovereignty, the court, and the family.
Satyr plays provide a bridge between tragedy and comedy. At the end of the day of classical Athens’ dramatic festival celebration in honor of Dionysos, after the performance of three tragedies, sometimes linked, sometimes not, the tragic playwright also offered to his audience, judges, priests, and other spectators, a satyr play.18 These short plays closed off the experience of tragedy with something completely different. They seem to have had comic elements, to feature satyrs often as their choruses, and like tragedy to have been based on mythic narratives, unlike comedy. Only one satyr play, Cyclops, by the tragedian Euripides, has survived, and its group of satyrs offers some fascinating contrasts both to tragic and to comic choruses.
The chorus in Euripides’ Cyclops is made up of satyrs, part animal, part human creatures owned by the Cyclops Polyphemus near Mount Aetna; they are explicitly called douloi (24), “slaves,” these sons of their satyr father, Silenus. In their first chorus, they sing, complaining of their isolation on the island of Sicily:
No Dionysus is here, no dances (khoroi), no wand-bearing Bacchic worship, no ecstatic noise of drums. (63–66)
I, your attendant, serve this one-eyed Cyclops, a slave in exile. (76–78)19
The Cyclops, a cannibal, or carnivore monster, reassuringly claims he would not eat them. They are creatures between human and animal, but he says: “You would be the death of me with your dance steps, leaping around inside my belly” (220–21). Laughter is tinged with horror, as we in the audience recall the scenes in Homer’s Odyssey, where the Cyclops devours some of Odysseus’s shipmates raw.
In the satyr play, the wandering hero Odysseus arrives at the Sicilian home of the Cyclops, challenging the arrangements of the site; the satyr Silenus defends himself to Polyphemus, trying to protect himself and his enslaved sons by falsely claiming that Odysseus threatened to capture Polyphemus, to pull out his guts, whip him, fetter him, make him row the ship, and then sell him as a slave (234–40). Polyphemus, an atheist, indifferent to Zeus, decides to eat Odysseus and his men straightaway.
The members of the chorus offer the flesh of the human visitors to the monster in the Cyclops’s cave, but refuse to partake themselves. With some variation from the episode of Polyphemus recounted in the Odyssey, the hero describes the killing, cooking, and devouring of his companions, and offers to free the satyrs from their enslavement (douleia, 442) if they assist him in his struggle with the one-eyed creature. He will blind the Cyclops, as he did in the Odyssey with his human companions’ help. The satyrs eagerly agree: “I could lift the weight of a hundred wagons if we are going to smoke out that cursed Cyclops’ eye like a wasps’ nest” (473–74). These hybrid animal-human beings share violent tendencies with their fellows the swarming wasps.
As planned, they serenade the Cyclops, already inebriated on Odysseus’s wine, as he sings drunkenly in his cave, and then emerges:
Happy the man who shouts the Bacchic cry . . .
With a lovely glance he steps forth in beauty from the halls.
(495, 511–12)
The Cyclops drinks ever more, spurred to excess by Silenus and Odysseus. Polyphemus decides that Silenus is his Ganymede, the Trojan boy taken up to Olympus by Zeus to be his cupbearer. The monster declares a preference for boys over women; the two leave the stage together and enter the cave. Odysseus follows, intending to blind the Cyclops in his postcoital sleep, as the chorus joyously anticipates participating in the thrusting of the firebrand into Polyphemus’s single eye (608–24), and their consequent liberation from their servitude. But they then suddenly, comically, fearfully, fall prey to doubts, claim to have become lame, to have sprained their feet, to be unable to see because of ash and dust. They deny the charge of cowardice, but purport to know an incantation of Orpheus that will cause the firebrand, on its own, to set the Cyclops on fire. Odysseus gives up on them, and they tell him to send a Carian, a mercenary, instead. The chorus is comically reluctant, but also demonstrates a commitment to pleasure, even to indolence, the workers’ right to laziness that marks the difference between them and Odysseus, the “prototype of the bourgeois individual,” so described by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment.20
As the deed is accomplished within the cave, the chorus cheers the blinders on, “Whirl and pull, whirl and pull . . . ,” with an incantatory song. The blinded Polyphemus emerges from the cave as the chorus leader interrogates him. He calls out the notorious name Noman, Outis, which Odysseus used in Homer’s Odyssey to trick the Cyclops. Again, “no man” has blinded him. After having punished their enemy, having taken revenge, Odysseus and his men escape, and the chorus of satyrs, freed from the Cyclops in spite of their cowardice, has the last, ironic word: “As for us, we shall be shipmates with Odysseus and ever after serve (douleusomen) in Dionysus’ train” (708–9). Douleusomen: “We will be slaves to Dionysus.” This is the last word of the only extant satyr play, the chorus thus trading one master for another, remaining a band of slaves, a hybrid of human being and animal enslaved to the god of the theater.
The classicist Mark Griffith, after important work on Greek tragedy, turned his attention to the satyr plays, these fourth performances given at the end of the day of three tragedies written by a single playwright. Although there is only the one surviving satyr play, the Cyclops, fragments of others remain. And Euripides’ play Alcestis, which has comic elements, and is said to have been presented after three tragedies at the end of the day, has sometimes been considered as in some way a seriocomic play, a substitute for the satyr play more customarily given perhaps to relieve the anguish, or the pity and fear, excited by three tragedies in a row.
Griffith’s arguments concern what he sees as a sort of “split identification,” possibly characteristic of theater spectatorship in general, in which the audience responds with identification that shifts from one character or even to the chorus as a dramatic presentation proceeds. In discussing tragic performances, Griffith had previously “proposed a model (derived partly from the political sociologist David Kertzer, and ultimately from Emile Durkheim) of ‘solidarity without consensus’ within an Athenian theater audience.”21 Members of the tragic audience might experience a variety of “subject positions,” significant for the politics of the city, identifying at one moment with aristocratic, elite, heroic characters, then with “feelings of admiration, disgust, or pity, approval or disapproval, anxiety or relief, expressed by the minor characters and chorus” (9). Griffith brings this model to the study of the satyr play, and greatly enriches the tradition of scholarship on this genre, often dismissed as crude and vulgar, a sop for the masses who needed a sort of slapstick diversion from the high seriousness of tragedy. Griffith extends his understanding of the Athenian audience to speculation about the male citizen’s experience of the satyr play, using the analogy of blackface minstrelsy in nineteenth-century America, which “may provide helpful insights into the ways in which the hyper-active, musically and choreographically adventurous, sexually transgressive, and verbally impertinent satyrs may have appealed to Athenian men who were constantly subjected to expectations of good behavior, proper speech, and modest deportment in their lives outside the Theater” (11). Griffith cites Eric Lott’s book, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.22 Making this analogy entails some risks, of which Griffith is well aware. The history of racialized slavery in the US, and the racism that continued with Jim Crow and subsequently, make this an imperfect model. And in fact the question of slavery, the slavery of the satyrs in the Cyclops, seems to me to be a matter that might merit further exploration.23
But Griffith’s description of a variety of subject positions, a changing reaction within single audience members to the spectacle of theater, complements the work of Althusser, and that of classicist David Kawalko Roselli on the heterogeneity of that audience, made up in Roselli’s view not only of priests of Dionysos, city officials, and elite members of the demos, but also working-class citizens, the poor, even women and slaves.24 The antics of the Cyclops, with its enslaved half-animal, half-human-being chorus, serve as an interval, or a link, between the sobriety and high decorum of classical tragedy, and the wild, sometimes ecstatic animal and female choruses of Greek comedy. The complexities of identification within the original audience may still be a matter of debate, but the appeal of satyr plays, comedies, and their choruses nonetheless has its potential for the politics of our present, the possibility of empathy, even, as these nontragic genres provide mockery and ridicule of the powerful as well as moments of solidarity, collective complicity, and laughter.
Tragedies’ choruses, as noted, are formed by human beings of various sorts. The personae of the Cyclops are sketchily, comically drawn, the chorus carrying with it the hybrid quality of the human and the animal. The choruses of comedy, in contrast, are sometimes human, but often composed of other sorts of living or even inanimate creatures, such as the clouds of the play named for these meteorological phenomena, and treating comically the supposedly airy and otherworldly concerns of the philosopher Socrates and his school.
Can a reading of comedy that gives equal, or more, weight to the chorus than to the characters, especially to the so-called comic hero, alter our perception of the play as readers or viewers? Scholarship on comedy long concentrated on identifying, or even deciphering, the diction of the plays, and on references to contemporary political events and figures in the city. In 1964 Cedric Whitman published Aristophanes and the Comic Hero, which devoted the same kind of attention to the central character in comedy as scholarship and analysis had devoted to the tragic hero in the past. In his essay in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, Ralph M. Rosen reminds the reader of the mixed reception Whitman’s arguments received, with their emphasis on comedy’s central persona, his or her individualism, isolation from society, and “inner-directed” nature.25 Rosen points out that Whitman’s focus on a roguish, antisocial, villainous central character, although of course such a characterization does not fit a persona such as Lysistrata, who is none of the above, “was probably a response to a perceived blandness in American culture of the 1950s, and to the post-War boom in technology and science that seemed to threaten deep-rooted strains of individualism in American history.”26 As time goes on, this threat seems to have been met with an ever-increasing atomization and individualism in American culture, rather than its contrary. And the focus on the comic hero, in fact, corresponds to these developments, rather than challenging them, as the predicament, the desires and schemes of the individual “heroes” of ancient comedy appeal to readers who have come to see only individual experience as authentic. Whitman’s emphasis on “the salvation of the self” in his heroes is perfectly consistent with contemporary fixations on private experience, as exemplified in best-seller lists containing memoirs and thinly disguised accounts of individuals who triumph over daunting circumstances. Whitman’s discovery of the comic hero does not in fact go against the grain of American culture, but rather points the way toward an increasing individualism and narcissism in the twenty-first century, both exacerbated and at the same time compromised to some degree by new social media.
A person like Lysistrata in the comedy named for her does have heroic dimensions. She manages to effect a peace treaty between the warring enemies—the Spartans and their allies, and the Athenians and theirs, the audience of the first performance of the play.27 Lysistrata is clever, even devious, but she is also noble, committed to peace, and an altogether non-narcissistic, non-roguish “hero.” A challenge to this version of heroism lies in the potential represented by the comic chorus, which might be seen in relation to Althusser’s description of the Piccolo Teatro, as a contradictory counter-presence, sometimes there to echo and support the central character, the “hero,” in other cases ready to mock and ridicule and undermine the characters, and notorious inhabitants of the city. They may, in the dénouement of the comedy, become reconciled to the views of the persona central to the linear narrative of the play, if one can even discern such a thing in many comedies. But in the course of their entering, dancing, singing, they can also oppose the central character, mock audience members, speak for the playwright himself, comment on current events in the life of the city, and in general present an unruly collective body, even an alternate universe, a utopian space, as they dance and sing, often obscenely.
Comic choruses differ in many ways from those of tragedy, although they too perform choreography and songs, and like the choruses of tragedy, often consist of females embodied by transvestite boys and men. If we assume that the chorus in some sense is representative of the citizen body, of the demos, like the jury standing for the whole of the community, as well as of all the residents of the city—metics, foreigners, slaves, women—then what does it mean that at times it is represented by these nonhuman beings? How can we understand the swarms of wasps, birds, clouds, frogs, clouds, or even letters in comedy?28
In his valuable work on animal choruses, Kenneth Rothwell discusses the brief window during which ancient Athenian comic playwrights began again to use brilliantly costumed animals in their dramas.29 This followed an earlier period (510–480 BCE) when animals had appeared in the choruses of comedy, a practice that became less common until the final third of the fifth century, in the 420s and 410s, when the comic writers returned to them. Although the reasons for the revival are unclear, Rothwell points out that the sophists and the pre-Socratics, protophilosophers of the fifth century, made analogies between the lives of human beings and those of animals, as Aristotle did later, and that the comic writers may have been responding to their anthropologies. And attendees of symposia, elite occasions of festivity and eventually political conspiracy, sometimes included revelers dressed in animal costumes.30
Extant or fragmentary insect comedies include a chorus of bees, two with ants as their chorus, one with “ant-men,” and two with wasps, the play attributed to Aristophanes and another by Magnes (although the evidence for this is somewhat uncertain). There seems to have been a comedy, now lost, by Pherecrates, called Myrmekanthropoi (The Ant-Men). The latter comedy may have told the tale of the flooding of the earth at the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and a story, recounted earlier, of the re-creation of humankind by Zeus, who turned ants into human beings, for the sake of the repopulation of the island of Aegina after its devastation.
Mel Chen’s fascinating work Animacies, although not focused on mythic representations of animal-human hybrids, calls attention to the linguistic category of “animacy,” the attribution of soul, “anima,” not just to human beings, or even animals, but also to things that are customarily considered to be inanimate, stone, features of the natural landscape, chemical pollutants.31 Animals, and hybrid animal-human creatures, are given “animacy,” and feature prominently in Greek art and myth. Centaurs, half human and half horse, for example, appear on temple friezes, and on innumerable Greek vases, often drinking with Heracles, attempting to carry off human women, or their most distinguished mythic character, Chiron, instructing the hero Achilles.32 These beings may owe something to Egyptian or Mesopotamian representations of beings who share human and animal corporeal traits, like Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-headed god, assistant to Osiris in the process of judgment of the dead after mummification.
Aristotle, proponent of what A. O. Lovejoy called “the great chain of being,” sees a hierarchy of creatures inhabiting the earth, with free human males at the top of a ladder.33 And in his Politics, Aristotle defines animals as one of the proper objects of human beings’ attention and use: “Plants exist for the sake of animals and the other animals for the good of man (anthropon), the domestic species both for his service and for his food, and if not all at all events most of the wild ones for the sake of his food and of his supplies of other kinds, in order that they may furnish him both with clothing and with other appliances. If therefore nature makes nothing without purpose or in vain, it follows that nature has made all the animals for the sake of men” (Politics 1256b15–23).34 This is human-ism, an argument for instrumentalizing all other animate beings on earth, and subordinating them to human needs. And Aristotle justifies war here too, as a way of mastering those human beings who refuse to be subjected by others: “Even the art of war will by nature be in a manner an art of acquisition (for the art of hunting is a part of it) that is properly employed both against wild animals and against such of mankind as though designed by nature for subjection refuse to submit to it, inasmuch as this warfare is by nature just” (Politics 1256b23–27). Defeat of enemies, capture of slaves, those “designed by nature for subjection,” and the hunting of animals all resemble one another, and the use of slaves and animals is proper to human beings. Yet the deployment of animals in comic choruses seems in some ways to contradict this understanding of the necessary and inevitable subjection and use of these other beings. In several such cases the comic chorus forms a swarm, a people (demos), and a city (polis).
Comic choruses included twenty-four members, while the choruses of tragedy had only twelve.35 The animals chosen by comic writers to represent the group, the anonymity of the citizen body, analogous to the demos, including the “others” in the city, are often animals that swarm, that move collectively in groups—frogs, wasps, birds. Ritual concerns may come into play here; as noted earlier, the swarming animal and insect creatures in the comic plays may refer back to the practices of animal processions, of sacred time, cult ceremonies summoning another temporality, the suspension of linear time in collective celebration and festivity.36
There may be some evidence for animal choruses on extant Greek vases. For example, the Birds, produced in 414 BCE, won second prize at the Dionysia festival. An illustration on a vase from the fifth century BCE, owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, shows two theater performers facing one another, dressed as birds, but they wear identical costumes, and some scholars contend they do not show actors from Aristophanes’ play, although their presence on this vase is evocative of the theater.37 Another vase (Michael C. Carlos Museum, Atlanta 2008.4.1) shows a similarly dressed figure, this time appearing alone on the vase, actively seeming to move, with his customary phallus, a bird’s tail, and more phalluses attached to his boots like spurs. As Eric Csapo intriguingly remarks, “A single figure better represents the unity of a chorus than it does a confrontation.”38 Clearly this figure cannot embody a confrontation, but does the unity of a chorus emerge in such a representation? If the chorus of the Birds contained twenty-four dancers and singers, each dressed as a different bird, then perhaps not. The oscillation between part and whole, the metonymic stature of a single chorus member who stands for the whole of the chorus, is explored in the rhetorical moment of the parabasis, when the leader of the chorus steps forward, addresses the audience directly, breaking the illusion of the theatrical space, and when he she or it often appears to speak in the voice of the playwright himself. The Birds, a comedy that will be more fully discussed in chapter 4, on utopias, is unusual for many reasons, and in particular because in this play the parabasis does not break that illusion, but has the leader of the chorus continuing to speak as a bird, explaining the history of birds and justifying their claim to rule over all. Is the single bird on the vase in Atlanta the leader of a bird chorus, speaking in the name of his fellows, or of the poet who composed his speech, given animacy as human and animal by the painter?
Later Roman and modern comedies owe much to what has been called Greek “New” Comedy, that is, the form of comedy that comes to dominate the theatrical stage of the ancient polis in the fourth century BCE, after the defeat of Athens’ “radical” democracy of the fifth century.39 The most successful practitioner of “New Comedy,” Menander, wrote plays very different from those of Old Comedy. They lacked the scatological, abusive, free-speaking attacks on prominent individuals in the city and in the audience, and the chorus so characteristic of the strong tradition of comedy in the fifth century. Menander wrote plays about domestic life in the new circumstances of the polis, no longer governed by a democratic assembly, but by the Macedonians, heirs of Philip and Alexander, who had conquered the classical Greek populations of the mainland in the fourth century BCE and had left behind garrisons and governors to rule, in a regression, perhaps, to the monarchic and aristocratic forms that had preceded the institution of democracy, in Athens in particular, in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE.
Menander’s plots focused on domestic life, with young couples in love whose consummation of their romances was briefly, for the course of the comedy, prohibited by circumstance, by paternal opposition to their union, to differences of status between man and woman. The eventual happy ending was brought about at times through the intervention of a wily slave, who manipulated the opposers to marital bliss, or who revealed the true status of one of the partners so that inequality of social position was no longer an obstacle to marriage. The only fully extant play of Menander, the Dyskolos, concerns a grumpy old man, and has no chorus.40
Can we interpret this absence as a symptom? A symptom of the end of “radical” democracy, of the end of the experimentation in politics that marked especially Athenian culture in the fifth century? A chorus, if it in some sense “represents,” or alludes to, contains or even embodies the collective, the group, the demos or polis in the widest sense, not merely the body of citizens; then how can the absence of the chorus not signify a great shift in the ancient city’s understanding of itself? Susan Lape has written about the politics of Menander, showing how even his emphasis on domestic matters, on marriage and family and a closed middle-class world, has implications for the world beyond that family, a family embedded in Mediterranean struggles, where soldiers return from war, where slave captives abound.41 In her view, Menander defends democratic legal traditions, and argues for the independence of Greek polis culture even as it has been surrounded by the Hellenistic kingdoms with very different political arrangements.42 Nonetheless, the energy and wild anarchic attacks of the choral swarm in the fifth-century comedies seem to have been tamed, domesticated, and even eliminated by the time of Menander’s productions.
In fact, the performances of so-called Middle and New Comedy may have included choruses, but these fall away from the scripts passed on from antiquity, and may have been indicated simply as interludes of dance and song in the performances of these very different theatrical productions, interludes like the ballet scenes sometimes inserted into operas, no longer authored by the playwrights themselves. The parabasis, for example, the direct address to the audience, sometimes seemingly in the voice of the playwright himself and crucial to the comic practice of Aristophanes, and to almost all of his extant plays, falls away in Middle and New Comedy, in part perhaps because performances of the plays occurred eventually around the Mediterranean basin, no longer limited to the amphitheaters of mainland Greek cities, and Athens in particular.
In these later plays, including Wealth, attributed to Aristophanes, probably first performed in 408 BCE, the choral passages are indicated, but not recorded, not extant in the preserved text. It may be that later ancient editors considered these parts of the plays insignificant, unworthy of conservation, or that the comic playwrights themselves did not provide language for their choruses. Sometimes the surviving texts give a stage direction: “chorus,” without any further indication, and it may be that these were meant to be improvised, or optional, or relying on some standard forms of dance and song that were thought not to be needed in the finished text.
The question of the parabasis touches on parrhesia, “freedom of speech,” which will be discussed more fully in chapter 5, but its growing absence as comedy evolves after the fifth century BCE also points to its previous embeddedness in the imperial or radical phase of the Athenian democracy. Choruses that performed this direct address to the audiences were integrally bound up with the democracy, with the flourishing of its developed form in the fifth century. After the defeat of the Athenians and their allies by the coalition led by the Spartans, at the end of the fifth century, comedy, and its choruses, took on a different shape.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, in his brilliant work on ancient drama, drew attention to the interactions between chorus and characters, even as his published writings rarely acknowledged ancient comedy, tragedy’s festival partner. Vernant’s insights into Greek drama connected its performances with the religious and political context of the Athenian polis, redirected scholarship away from purely formal questions, away from issues of authorship, or historical reference, or the body of a particular tragedian’s production, and allowed a new generation of scholars to attend to the cultural significance of ancient drama. In an especially influential passage in a seminal essay entitled “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” he discussed the dialectical relationship between choruses and characters, with the assumption that what is at stake is tragedy: “[The] debate with a past that is still alive creates at the very heart of each tragic work a fundamental distance that the interpreter needs to take into account. It is expressed, in the very form of the drama, by the tension between the two elements that occupy the tragic stage. One is the chorus, the collective and anonymous presence embodied by an official college of citizens. Its role is to express through its fears, hopes, questions, and judgments the feelings of the spectators who make up the civic community.”43 Note how Vernant begins with the chorus, this “collective and anonymous presence” of citizens. Of course, as discussed previously, the chorus appears in many other contexts in Athenian society, in the performance of hymns, dithyrambs, the songs sung in honor of Dionysos, and in comedy as well as tragedy, and may have represented not only citizens, but also other residents of the city, its foreigners, its slaves, its women, all of whom may have been present in the audience at dramatic festivals and other choral performances. Vernant continues, emphasizing the copresence with the chorus, of the characters in drama: “The other, played by a professional actor, is the individualized character whose actions form the core of the drama and who appears as a hero from an age gone by, always more or less estranged from the ordinary condition of the citizen.” In the case of comedy, this “character” is not “a hero from an age gone by,” but an invented character who drives forward the plot of the drama, a thinly disguised person familiar in the everyday life of the spectators, or even one of the gods, like the Dionysos of Frogs. Vernant goes on to comment on how the chorus uses language “that carries on the lyrical tradition of a poetry celebrating the exemplary virtues of the hero of ancient times.” Can we see a similar paradox in the comic chorus, which at times reaches lyrical heights that refer back to the aristocratic past, but at other times seems to speak directly to the audience in the voice of the playwright himself?
I cite this passage at such length because it has had such an impact on the study of ancient tragedy since the essay’s publication. In Vernant’s formulation concerning tragedy, the characters represent the great figures of the Greeks’ past, historical and legendary, characters such as Theseus, Oedipus, Ion, Athena herself. These are the beings of myth and legend, and as such emerge out of the oral tradition, laden with extrahuman significance and powers. As Vernant demonstrates, they paradoxically use a language that although metrical resembles the everyday speech of tragedy’s audience, without the lyrical flourishes and elevated language of archaic poetry. It is from the mouths of the chorus, an anonymous group that dances, sings, exults, and laments, that the language of the past emerges, in another dialect, signifying archaism and the legacy of an aristocratic past. Although this passage is cited frequently as laying out the chiastic form of tragedy, that is, the X, with the chorus speaking aristocratic archaic lyrics, and the characters more contemporary prosaic language, the whole creating a sort of centripetal energy that binds the city together as it makes itself into theater, the democratic collective entwined with the archaic past, there is no such exploration of the potential for comedy to create a similar chiastic centripetal force.
Some of Vernant’s most important work, profoundly influential in the field of classics, in classical literary studies, was, significantly, collected in the volume he coauthored with Pierre Vidal-Naquet entitled Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece.44 In this work, he continued to present a progressive account of the transition from archaic to classical culture, suggesting that tragedy, then “reason,” replaced myth, a position that he later revised, perhaps convinced against his will by arguments such as those of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who insisted that pensée sauvage, once considered “primitive” thought, was as complex and rich as philosophical reflection. But it is also important to note that in Vernant’s account, the emphasis is on myth and tragedy, tragedy as the representative genre of the high classical age of Athens. Comedy, with its characters and choruses, does not figure in his account. In Myth and Tragedy, which contains essays by both Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, the comic playwrights are barely mentioned, appearing only when the authors discuss the Frogs, which, as remarked earlier, presents an extended commentary on the tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, and is an early example of the literary criticism of tragedy, and not a typical comedy.
In the work of Nicole Loraux, another brilliant historian and scholar of classical Greek culture, the polis, and the Athenian philosophical world, there is a similar emphasis on tragedy to the near exclusion of comedy from consideration.45 Her work is crucial for understanding the role of the chorus, especially in tragedy, where the emphasis on lamentation, on song, on grief, and the inarticulate expression of sorrow greatly enriches our understanding of the original performances of tragedy, so remote from the disembodied and abstract presentations of the genre by moderns such as Hegel, who reduces Antigone in some work to an unnamed cipher representing the individual in the family.
The lack of interest in comedy is surprising, even though it is consistent with the long tradition of privileging tragedy in modernity, described in chapter 1. In fact the performances of comedy were even more linked to the flourishing of Athenian democracy than were tragedies, which continued to be composed after the defeat of the fifth-century imperial and radical democracy by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. Yet these scholars, so attentive to the context of so-called literary objects, that is, the ancient Greek dramas that were performed as religious offerings to the god Dionysos, as meditations on the politics of the polis, as Vernant puts it, “the city calling itself into question,” curiously neglect the centrality of comedy to the ritual and political occasions of the city.46
Pierre Vidal-Naquet suggests that the chorus in tragedy represented the citizens of the city itself:
The chorus was collective while heroes, whether Creon or Antigone, were individuals. Both the chorus and the heroes wore costumes and masks, but the members of the chorus, like the city hoplites, were dressed in uniform. . . . The masks and costumes of the actors were individualized. Thus, in its own way, the chorus, confronting the hero marked by his immoderation, represented a collective truth, an average truth, the truth of the city. . . . It was the chorus, the mouthpiece of the city, which through its movements paid its respects to the altar of Dionysus.47
Yet Vidal-Naquet also paradoxically notes that the chorus of tragedy is often composed of groups alien to the city, not citizens themselves: “It is hardly ever composed of average citizens, that is to say male adults of an age to bear arms.” Women (that is, male chorus members dressed as women) frequently made up the chorus, in nine of the tragedies, and they are sometimes slave women; in other tragedies, the chorus is composed of old men. Vidal-Naquet comments: “Whether less than citizens, or more than citizens, women of Trachis or demesmen of Colonus, these figures were marginal to the city.” So if, formally, the chorus represents a collective, an anonymous group, on the other hand, in tragedy at least, they are often also outsiders, not representative of the city at all.
The neglect of comedy may seem surprising for these scholars who are focused on the context, the whole, the cultural situation of the ancient Greek polis. After all, comedy did coexist with tragedy, comedies were presented on the same stage, at the same festivals of Dionysos, performances financed through committees of the city, priests of the god, wealthy patrons who paid for the choruses to be trained and who were honored in the case of comedy, unlike the playwrights, as only the best of the plays presented was rewarded.
There is a body of invaluable and important work on comedy, an exception to the rule of the privileging of tragedy over its comic partner and rival. David Konstan’s Greek Comedy and Ideology, published in 1995, is one major text that reflects seriously on comedy.48 He calls his readings of several Aristophanic (and Menandrian) comedies “ideological,” attentive to “the ways in which the plays respond to cultural issues, shaping the narratives by which Athenians defined and understood themselves” (4). A literary text is for Konstan “a site in which social tensions or contradictions are enacted,” and he cites the work of John Frow, Fredric Jameson, Mieke Bal, and Pierre Macherey, “attending to the seams and sutures in the construction of ancient comedy, the places where the fusion of incompatible elements becomes visible” (5). Rejecting a view that the plays were aimed solely at “entertainment,” he refuses also the idea, citing Simon Goldhill, that there is “an author’s voice speaking out from beyond the comic interplay” (6).49 In the plays of Aristophanes that he analyzes, Wasps, Birds, Lysistrata, and Frogs, Konstan identifies “a profoundly egalitarian or utopian impulse, which is capable of imagining an ideal of universal citizenship, the equality of women, the emancipation of slaves, or the abolition of property and class divisions” (8). Yet he finds these utopian impulses paired with conservative notions, in “a hankering for a simpler time that cannot pose a viable alternative to the hierarchies embedded in city-state life” (8). As he sums up the section of his book on Aristophanic, Old Comedy, Konstan reflects on the five plays he chooses to analyze: “The specifically literary operation of the work has been located precisely in the overdetermination of the characters’ motivations and social positions, and in the hiatuses or seams in the surface narratives” (90). Significantly, his focus is on character and plot; there is no entry in his index, for example, for “chorus.”50 Yet I have found Konstan’s work immensely valuable as I consider the resources of ancient Old Comedy for the present, and the place of the chorus as a model of collective energy.
More recently, in Comic Democracies, Angus Fletcher relies on the work of political scientists and ancient historians for his understanding of democracy, and the value of ancient comedy to debates concerning democracy in the present. He identifies the aspects of ancient demokratia that might be pertinent to contemporary politics, in which “new democrats” have turned away from a “liberal-electoral” model toward pluralism, pragmatism, and empiricism in efforts to change the world.51 He identifies these same “core practices” in ancient demokratia, and argues that the Athenian institution evolved as a response to crisis, and continued, often successfully, to improvise pragmatic solutions to the city’s difficulties, even to extend the franchise beyond the traditional citizen body in crises of the Peloponnesian War. Fletcher focuses on what he calls “the Ionian trilogy,” the three Aristophanic plays performed near the end of that war.
Fletcher is interested not just in ancient Athens, but also, as a comparatist, in the legacy of Old Comedy as passed down through New Comedy, Roman and Renaissance comedies, and into the works of Cervantes, early modern novelists, Thomas Jefferson, the maker of the American Declaration of Independence, and finally, its appropriation by such figures as Washington Irving and Frederick Douglass.52 Although Fletcher shares many of my concerns, his admirable work on ancient comedy, focusing especially on the “Ionian trilogy,” Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, and Frogs, dismisses Ecclesiazusae and Wealth, as late and lacking the pragmatism he finds in the earlier comedies: “Aristophanes’ final two plays . . . are rooted in more abstract concerns: the women in Ecclesiazusae complain vaguely that the ship of state is adrift, while the characters of Wealth fret that virtue is not always materially rewarded.”53 These late plays are for me, intensely interesting, not “vague” or fretful. And furthermore, persuasive as Fletcher’s arguments are, he like others neglects the chorus in the comedies, citing only the characters, mentioning the chorus only when it comments on the characters, dismissing the chorus elsewhere: “The material girls of Lysistrata leverage their sartorial skills to end the war.”54
One of the most illuminating scholars on the matter of the chorus, and especially the comic chorus, is G. M. Sifakis, whose book Parabasis and Animal Choruses was published in 1971.55 Sifakis is interested in the theriomorphic, animal choruses of some of Aristophanes’ and other comic writers’ plays. He brings to bear on this question archaeological evidence, especially vases that depict such creatures as riders on dolphins, ostriches, human beings dressed as birds, arguably depicting figures for the stage.56 According to the lists of titles of comedies, often named for their choruses, as noted earlier, there were choruses made up of frogs, gall-flies, beasts, ant-men, goats, griffins, centaurs, fish, nightingales, and bees, as well as Aristophanic storks, and the more familiar creatures of extant comedies, frogs, birds, and wasps. Some scholars have argued for the totemic nature of these animal costumes (Sifakis, 79–80). Others suggest that the animal choruses derive from “begging-processions,” in which the needy requested and expressed gratitude for gifts (81). Sifakis finds these theories unsatisfactory. Evidence from vase painting suggests that some choruses may have entered the stage covered by himatia, cloaks that concealed their animal costumes, and these overgarments may have been shed in a moment of surprise, to reveal the novelty of their dress and to permit freedom of movement in the dance, or that the himatia disguised the joining of the animal bodies to those of the human chorus members (88). Support for the former theory comes from the Wasps, where at line 420 the slave exclaims, after the chorus take off their cloaks: “Heracles! They really have stingers!” The chorus’s animal, insectoid, swarming nature may have been concealed, then abruptly revealed to the audience.
Anton Bierl, in his important work on comic choruses, examines in detail the chorus of Thesmophoriazusae, and stresses the ritual origins of the dramatic chorus:
At the core of drama lies the chorus. Its central activity, dance, is pure ritual. The chorus is in turn placed in an original, ritual context, namely, in the performances of adolescent youth on the threshold of adulthood. In these choral groups the performance of song and dance serves as the ritual demarcation of change of status, in particular as the foundation of an education in, and introduction to, the megatext of a traditional society, myth, and ritual practice. This megatext reflects social order, it affirms the social and theological cosmos, but it also undermines it and calls it into question. The chorus of drama is brought back to these functions diachronically in its development via choral lyric and the choruses of cultic practice.57
Bierl emphasizes ritual and the dramatic choruses’ ties to traditional choral practices of devotion; I am more interested in the ways in which comic choruses engage, as he puts it, with the “megatext,” and especially with the challenges the chorus can present to the contemporary order, in their often disruptive performance, as swarms.
Bierl embeds his analysis in metrical and cultic practices that for him locate comedy in the context of initiation rites. He tends to dismiss political readings of the comic collective: “In the view of the ancients, upon which previous scholarship was largely based until quite recently, the origin of comedy is rooted in practices involving blame and begging that were supposed to even out social tensions between city and countryside, rich and poor, powerful and politically underprivileged. . . . In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such ideas of ancient class struggle naturally found favorable reception” (336). But he sees the themes of conflicts of this sort as subsumed under van Gennep’s understanding of rites of passage that address initiation, fertility, and the coming of the new year. Under the chorus’s broader “condition of marginality” (336), Bierl remarks: “One can thus not only explain the social and political tensions in political comedy between farmers and city dwellers, the poor and the rich, the disadvantaged and the powerful, but also understand practices involving ridicule and, in addition, all the phenomena of the comic and carnivalesque world, such as dressing up as animals, the staging of the Other and the foreign, phallus worship, and transvestism, all of which have their basis in so-called rites of inversion” (337). He devotes a great deal of attention to the fascinating details of the chorus in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, which indeed involves the rituals of a festival of Demeter and her daughter, the Thesmophoria, performed by actual citizen-class women of the ancient city. The chorus in the comedy is “transversally open,” engaged with the ritual depicted in the play, but also in the ritual devoted to Dionysos, the comic performance, and with the audience participating in that theatrical setting.
Although Bierl’s painstaking analyses are appealing, and stress the location of the chorus in the religious setting of the theater, I find them to be less convincing as they return to the themes of the Cambridge ritualists, and less to my taste than the readings he mentions that looked at class conflicts, and which he relegates to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Utopian and communalist, communist comedies such as the Birds and Ecclesiazusae, parrhesiast plays like the Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps, fit less neatly into his ritual paradigm than the Thesmophoriazusae, in any case. For example, Bierl cites “the ephebic members” of some choruses, who “temporarily return to the threshold phase of late childhood” (332). This characterization hardly suits the irascible elderly veterans of the Persian Wars who make up the chorus of the Wasps, and who are aggressively engaged in the politics of the city they inhabit.58
The thinking about democracy, and ancient Athenian democracy as its origin and invention, often focuses on the free Athenian male citizen, the only participant in the crucial institution of the democratic assembly, the voting body of the polis, the citizen-state. But the inhabitants of the city and its countryside, also part of the polis, the city-state, included many others: the citizen women, wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the citizen men; slaves, both male and female, foreign-born and domestic, Greek and barbarian; as well as free Greeks from other citizen-states, sometimes merchants who contributed to the economic life of Athens; and passersby, travelers, visitors, ambassadors from the Greek world and beyond who could, it seems, constitute part of the audiences at the Great Dionysia, one of the festivals where drama was performed.
David Kawalko Roselli has contributed a valuable new perspective on the audience of ancient Greek drama, arguing that present in the theater, and addressed, or interpellated by it in various ways, were nonelite citizens as well as women, and even slaves. And he presents evidence that in addition to a working-class, nonelite presence among the spectators in the city’s amphitheater, there were unofficial spectators as well. The structure of the theater of Dionysos at Athens, as well as that of other theaters of other cities, depended on the slopes of hills, which were incorporated into an amphitheatrical shape, in which the lower slopes comprised graded steplike rows of seats, with the priests and judges of performances seated around a central circular dancing floor, the orchestra. Behind this was the skene, an adaptable wall in front of which the characters spoke, and onto which they arrived by means of entrance and exit provided at the edges of the skene. The orchestra, closest to the audience, featured the performance of the chorus, which also entered and departed, and occupied this central line of vision for the viewers. Roselli argues that above the space of the theater itself, built into the hill, in the case of Athens the very hill topped by the Acropolis, and the great Parthenon, spectators who were not invited, not welcome, unable to pay to attend, or not supported by the state through paid attendance, could assemble and watch the spectacle.59
In addition to the complexities of multiple subject positions, multiple identifications in the spectatorship of the ancient theater, argued for by Mark Griffith, there were multiple sorts of persons, not only the male citizens typically imagined to be the audience of Athenian festival drama, and the participants in Athenian everyday life and politics. The theater’s choruses often contained representatives of such others, the women, slaves, barbarians, who made up part of the fabric of everyday life in Athens. I have discussed elsewhere the slave women of the chorus in Euripides’ Hecuba, for example, who recall, in the first-person singular, the day of enslavement at the fall of Troy:
I was setting my hair
in the soft folds of the net,
gazing at the endless light
deep in the golden mirror,
preparing myself for bed,
when tumult broke the air
and shouts and cries
shattered the empty streets. . . .
Dressed only in a gown
like a girl of Sparta,
I left the bed of love
and prayed to Artemis.
But no answer came.
I saw my husband lying dead,
and they took me over sea.
Backward I looked at Troy,
but the ship sped on
and Ilium slipped away,
and I was dumb with grief.
(922–41)60
I return to this passage again and again, because this hauntingly beautiful tragic scene stages the threat always present in the world of the Greek cities, of war, defeat, and enslavement of the women of the defeated cities. The horror of such circumstances may seem remote, set as it is here in the time of the legendary Trojan War, but in fact in the fifth century BCE the Athenians, in their pursuit of empire and its preservation, notoriously crushed the neutral city of Melos for refusing to join them, first besieging it and starving the population, then conquering it, killing its men and enslaving its women and children in 416 BCE.
Tragic choruses, as cited above in the case of Euripides’ Hecuba, could include groups of anonymous slave women, played of course by men in women’s dress. The chorus of the Bacchae is made up of barbarian women, the entourage of the god Dionysos who has traveled from India, and moves with this ecstatic troupe of devotees, along with silenoi, satyrs, and other companions of his mysteries, as he invades the Greek world to bring them wine and other liquid delights. Myths tell of the resistance of various cities, fathers, kings, and women who refuse to fall into line with the worshippers of this god, and are punished harshly for their failure to recognize his divinity. The bacchantes of the Bacchae sing of their adoration of the god; they move in the dance of rejoicing in the god’s presence, they admonish those who resist; as Pentheus, the ruler of Thebes, proves recalcitrant, trying to contain the Dionysiac energies, and the representative of the god himself, they demonstrate the irrepressibility of this divinity; and in some sense, as Dionysos has called the women of the city of Thebes onto the mountain to worship him, these Greek women, including Pentheus’s mother, Agave, become an invisible chorus themselves, identified as part of the swarm of barbarian chorus members. A messenger describes their idyll on the mountain’s top, interrupted by Theban men, as they enter the ecstatic, delirious, swarming state of a Dionysiac swarm. Agave, the mother of the king, participates energetically in the dismemberment and possible cannibalism of the swarm, as Pentheus is detected spying on the bacchantes, urged to this by the god. She enters the chorus, enters the swarm, and then gradually emerges, led by her father Cadmus, to acknowledge sorrowfully what she has accomplished. The chorus, which has celebrated many gods, including Dionysos, ends the play with a gnomic utterance, sobered as they have witnessed the tragic end of the king of Thebes, and the fragmentary final lines of the play may even seek to re-member, to reconstruct the body of the tyrant.61
Some readers of this play focus on its privileging of Dionysos over other gods, and see prefigurations of monotheism here. Others, including my student Tina Hyland, see a revolutionary dimension. The women, including Agave, in their pleasure and ecstasy, overthrow the king in what might be seen as a coup d’état, as the collective overpowers the monarch, and the anarchic democratic will destroys the ruling house of Thebes. The swarm accomplishes an assassination, and it far exceeds the conception of the chorus as equivalent to the demos defined as the male citizen body. This chorus includes barbarian women, Asiatic worshippers of the god Dionysos, and their companions in devotion and ecstasy are the women of the city of Thebes.
Old Comedy choruses, from the fifth century BCE, included women, as well as birds, insects, clouds, cities, the letters of the alphabet, and barbarian others. One of the most intriguing of the choruses performed in a lost play, the Babylonians, produced in 426, in which the chorus seems to have been made up of tattooed slaves, according to extant summaries. This play had as its theme the administration of the Athenian Empire, and it may be that the chorus stood for various inhabitants of the empire’s subjected cities and islands. The play survives only in fragments, lines cited by other ancient authors, or preserved in commentaries or etymological texts. In his Life of Pericles, the same first- and second-century CE writer Plutarch wrote: “The Samians in return for an insult tattooed their Athenian prisoners of war, with an owl on their foreheads, since the Athenians had tattooed the Samians with a samaina [a kind of ship named after the Samians]. . . . They say it is to these tattoos that Aristophanes alludes: ‘it’s the Samian demos: how many-lettered [polygrammatos]!’” (26.4). These prisoners, rather than complimented for their erudition, have been made slaves, who were often tattooed with marks that indicated ownership, or the fact that they had been runaways, and then captured and returned to their previous owners.
In extant comedy, there is a variety of choruses made up of barbarians, slaves, and women. I look in some detail at one of the stranger swarms of Old Comedy, made up of a meteorological phenomenon. This chorus illustrates the ways in which the categories of citizen ritual, citizen celebration, and democratic dancing and singing can extend beyond the community of human beings, or even animals—birds, frogs, wasps—to include what might be thought of as inanimate phenomena, swarms in the sky. The Clouds, a critique of the character Socrates and his Thinkaterium, includes a chorus of what seem to be female clouds. They arrive rather late in the play, after the character Socrates addresses them, along with Air, and Aither, seemingly alternative gods to the traditional deities of the city, his summons testimony to the sacrilegious crimes allegedly committed by the philosopher according to the “apologies,” defense speeches left behind by Plato and Xenophon. The comic character Socrates convokes the swarm, and they float in, singing as they enter:
Clouds everlasting,
let us arise, revealing our dewy bright form,
from deep roaring father Ocean
onto high mountain peaks.
(276–79)
Strepsiades, an obstreperous father like Philocleon, the father of Bdelycleon in the Wasps, greets them irreverently, answering their thunder with a fart. Socrates silences him, because “a great swarm of gods is on the move in song.” He uses the word deployed for other sorts of swarms, smenos, to describe the chorus of clouds (298). They call themselves “rainbearing maidens,” parthenoi ombrophoroi (299). They dance, or march, into the orchestra, difficult to discern at first, according to the characters; Strepsiades mistakes them for “mist and dew and smoke” (330). But they are called “goddesses,” theas (328). They inspire the airiest of poets, mocked by Strepsiades, as he punctures the illusion, saying these “clouds” “look like fleeces spread out, not like women. . . . And these clouds have noses!” (343–44). The chorus looks neither like clouds, nor women. Yet the comic character Socrates proclaims that they are the only real goddesses; the others are phonies. Such a claim reinforced the idea, reiterated in the lawsuit against the man Socrates that resulted in his execution by the Athenians, that he had committed impiety, failed to honor the city’s gods, introduced new gods.
These clouds float onto the scene, summoned by the character Socrates from Olympus, or Ocean, or the Nile, or elsewhere. Socrates addresses them as mega semnai, “most revered,” but the choral procession, with its grand eloquence, is undermined by Strepsiades’ comic deflation; he does not fear or tremble at their appearance, but needs a shit. Socrates replies with a rebuke, and asks for silence, as the great swarm (smenos) of gods is moving in song. The chorus sung by these feminine clouds is a praise of Athens reminiscent of some of the most lofty choral passages of tragedy:
Rainbearing maidens,
let us visit the gleaming land of Pallas, to see the ravishing country
of Cecrops with its fine men.
(299–301)
These maidens, men dancing and singing in the guise of women, list by allusion the divinities who watch over Attica: Pallas Athena, Demeter and Kore, goddesses of the mysteries at Eleusis, and Dionysos, here called Bromios, the noisy one, patron of the very festival at which this play is being presented. Strepsiades asks who they are, and Socrates replies that they are not female heroes, but “divine clouds, great goddesses,” ouraniai Nephelai, megalai theai, nourishing by their mistiness various ridiculed figures who infest the city. This is a swarm like no other.
The chorus of cloud maidens provides a setting, a backdrop, a collective that nostalgically recalls these beauties, these divinities, of the physical city and its protective gods. In the year 423, when the first version of this play was performed, the Athenians had been through a plague, the death of Pericles, many deaths in war, and worse was yet to come. The comedy’s ridicule of the Sophists, mistakenly including Socrates, according to Plato in his Apology, contrasts the newfangled excesses of education with the old ways, a lost paradise that is consistent with the image of the city presented in the airy lines of the chorus’s entrance. Socrates in fact claims them for himself and for the dialectic, and their ethereal mistiness, their dew-laden smoky qualities, come to exemplify the vagueness and uselessness of the new education.
Socrates condemns himself in his own lines: “[The clouds] nourish a great many sophists, diviners from Thurii, medical experts, long-haired idlers with onyx signet rings, and tune bending composers of dithyrambic choruses, men of high-flown pretension, whom they maintain as do-nothings, because they compose music about these Clouds” (331–34). The list contains several of the frequent targets of comic scorn, including the dithyrambic musicians, seen as obsessively repeating clichés about the weather, and then fattening themselves at the banquets that followed performances. Socrates’ interlocutor in the play, the uneducated and deeply skeptical Strepsiades, mocks the appearance of this chorus. Interrupting the illusion, the vulgar hero calls attention to the ridiculousness of men posing as women posing as clouds.
Among the most militant, independent, and successful of female comic characters is Lysistrata, the male actor who leads her chorus of men posing as citizen-class women, united in resistance to the soldiers of the two opposing sides in the Peloponnesian War. The two choruses of Lysistrata are a group of old men, part of the military opposed to peace with the Spartan enemies in the war, and another chorus of old women. The women of the various cities of the entire Greek world, summoned by Lysistrata, seek to force their male partners to end the war and return to the pleasures of heterosexual life. They lament the difficulties of obtaining dildos during wartime shortages: “If we sat around at home all made up, and walked past them wearing only our diaphanous underwear, with our pubes plucked in a neat triangle, and our husbands got hard and hankered to ball us, but we didn’t go near them and kept away, they’d sue for peace, and pretty quick, you can count on that!” (149–54).62 Lysistrata calls for the older women to occupy the Acropolis, the height of Athens where the Parthenon, temple or treasury of the goddess Athena, stands high above the quotidian life of the city.
The first chorus, the old men of the city, plans to dislodge the old women even if it requires burning them on a pyre. The chorus of women fights back, bringing water to quench the flames, and they call on Athena for help:
Goddess, may I never see these women aflame,
but rather see them rescue from war and madness
Greece and their fellow countrymen!
(341–43)
The men express dismay at the alliance between the women who occupy the height of the city and their supporters, women assembled from all over the Greek world, including Spartan women, the enemies of the Athenians and their allies in the war. The occupiers of the Acropolis stand fast against the invaders. And the leader of the men’s chorus calls this collective a swarm: “This here’s a complication we didn’t count on facing; this swarm (esmos) of women outside the gates is here to help the others!” (352–53). The swarm occupying the Acropolis, sacred to the goddess Athena, seek to refuse entry to the chorus of old men, who call it “my acropolis,” just as the younger women plot to refuse entry into their bodies by their husbands. Like the wasps, in their comedy, these women form a nameless, anonymous collective that nonetheless is resistant, rowdy, and determined to accomplish its goals. The two choruses battle it out verbally.
In Lysistrata, the old women are summoned from their occupation of the Acropolis by the rebel priestess herself, who identifies them as the common people, the women of the demos: “Forward, you spawn of the marketplace, you soup and vegetable mongers! Forward, you landladies, you hawkers of garlic and bread!” (457–58). The comic poet uses two of his fabulous, invented, portmanteau words to describe these women: spermagoraiolekitholakhanopolides and skorodopandokeutriartopolides, mouthfuls of allusive syllables. These are women of the demos, of the marketplace, vendors, like the mother of Euripides, alleged to be a seller of lettuce. They are not citizens, not the reasoned actors of political theory analyzing the practices of the democratic assembly. They represent a line of flight, marking the porosity of comedy, its incorporation of the many, the poor, the women, into dramatic representation. And they scare off the police sent to remove them from their citadel.
Lysistrata herself makes a point of distinguishing her company from another sort of collective: “Did you think you were going up against a bunch of slave girls (doulas tinas)?” (463–64). These are free women, fully armed and ready to fight citizen men for the sake of peace. The leader of the men’s chorus, nonetheless, calls them animals. The leader of the women is proud to be a wild creature, and emphasizes their affinity with the old men of the Wasps: “I’d rather be sitting modestly at home like a maiden, bothering no one here, stirring not a single blade of grass. But if anyone annoys me and rifles my nest, they’ll find a wasp (sphekian) inside” (473–75). She is part of a swarm, a collective, aroused and well armed for combat with those who want to evict them. Though they are likened to wild beasts (theriois, 468) and to monsters (knodalois, 476), they promise to dance with endless energy, joining with other women to fend off danger.
These women are tough, but they have also participated in the various rites of free citizen-class women, serving Athena as little girls, working for Demeter, dancing as bears for Artemis. Their leader reminds the audience: “I have a stake in our community: my contribution is men” (651). They give the city the sons who make up its fighting forces, once upon a time cavalry, then the hoplite infantrymen, and the rowers of the fleet.63 The men’s chorus likens them to Amazons, those invaders from the East who in mythic time occupied the nearby hill, the Areopagos, seeking to retrieve their queen from the king of Athens, Theseus (678). The women compare themselves to the dung beetle that caused eagle’s eggs, once set in Zeus’s lap, to break, in a threat to the genitals of the men who oppose them. The women’s commander braces them, when they seem to be weakening in their sex strike, by oracularly comparing them to swallows, another swarm:
Yea, when the swallows hole up in a single hole,
fleeing the hoopoes and leaving the phallus alone,
then are their problems solved.
(770–72)
The swarm of women must act collectively, not peeling off to return to their husbands, not arguing, flying away from the sacred Acropolis.
In one brilliant scene, the Athenian wife Myrrhine tempts and manipulates her frustrated husband, Kinesias of Paeonidae. These characters’ names are significant: Myrrhine’s name alludes to myrrh, an aromatic used in erotic contexts. Kinesias’s name alludes to a word referring sometimes to sexual intercourse. Jeffrey Henderson, translator of the play, notes that Kinesias was “likely chosen for the pun on kinein, ‘screw,’ just as the deme name Paeonidae reminds us of paiein, ‘bang.’” She is the temptress, he the tempted.64
After Myrrhine torments her husband, Kinesias, and after more comic play about the massive erections of the frustrated men, the two choruses unite in a single song. Spartan men, suffering from the same affliction as the Athenians, appear on the scene. Lysistrata ends the war with a truce, enabled by Diallage, “Reconciliation,” a naked, silent female figure, and the joint chorus sings of a redistribution of wealth:
Intricate tapestries,
nice clothes and fine gowns,
and gold jewellery—-all that I own
I’ll ungrudgingly provide
to everyone. . . .
I now invite you all to help yourselves
to the possessions in my house. . . .
If anyone’s out of bread
but has slaves to feed
and lots of little kids,
you can get flour from my house.
(1188–1206)
This seeming generosity, however, is undercut, by the warning that coming to the door of the house will excite the watchdog waiting there. The war has brought poverty to the city, and the theme of hunger and its satisfaction also draws in the circumstances of deprivation and need, the hunger for peace in some of the audience.
A Spartan delegate arrives, compelled by the shared lust and sexual deprivation of the two armies, makes peace with the Athenian delegate, and recalls the days long past when the two cities and their allies made war together against the Persians. He invites Artemis, goddess of the wild, to join in their treaty, and calls for philia, “love,” between the two parties. The chorus, now both men and women, joins in a dance celebrating the victory and the Spartan delegate recalls his city’s ritual choral traditions:
Let’s sing a hymn to Sparta,
home of dances for the gods
and of stomping feet,
where by the Eurotas’ banks
young girls frisk like fillies,
raising underfoot
dust clouds,
and tossing their tresses
like maenads waving their wands and playing,
led by Leda’s daughter,
their chorus leader pure and pretty.
(1304–15)
Helen leads the chorus, and in an evocation of Alcman’s famed choral song, the Partheneion, performed by a swarm of Spartan girls, fillies and maenads, the delegate calls on the present chorus to begin leaping like deer, to sing for the victorious goddess Athena. Panhellenism, and the utopian scheme of the priestess Lysistrata, have triumphed, and the chorus exits dancing and singing.
David Konstan observes: “At the end of the play, with the women comfortably dispersed under the authority of male heads of household, the rival Greek states stake out their territories on the body of a woman without a thought for the ideal of pan-Hellenic citizenship proposed by Lysistrata. The utopian gesture has been recontained.”65 Nonetheless, much of the utopian scheme of Lysistrata has succeeded, as peace is declared, and if the dancing and celebration of the chorus represent a “line of flight,” an escape out of the play into the festival celebrating the god Dionysos, these then serve to enter the real world of the performers, the audience, the city and countryside beyond chorus and citizens.66
Spike Lee’s controversial musical film Chi-raq, released in 2015, transmutes the ancient comedy Lysistrata, setting it in contemporary Chicago. The Spartans and the Trojans are represented by gangs; the Lysistrata figure, lover of the lord of the Trojans, enlists women across the city to participate in a sex strike to end the rivalry and violence of their gang war. This twenty-first-century Black American Lysistrata was inspired by Leymah Gbowee, a woman who tried to end a civil war in Liberia by threatening a sex strike in 2003. Lysistrata in Chicago, along with her allies, takes occupation of an armory, and arranges a duel between herself and her lover, the leader of the Spartans, Demetrius. Whoever has the first orgasm loses their duel and must accede to the terms of the other. The Trojans’ leader “Cyclops” surrenders first, and eventually the women win a truce. This Lysistrata is a strong and victorious woman, inspired by her fifth-century BCE counterpart.
Another comedy featuring a female chorus, and a cast of female characters as well, is Thesmophoriazusae (Women at the Thesmophoria). The Thesmophoria was a festival celebrated in honor of Demeter and her daughter Kore, or Persephone, and was bound up with the fertility of the city-state’s agriculture and her citizen women.67 The play is among other things an attack on the tragedian Euripides, ridiculed for writing tragedies about women, and slandering them. The play itself suggests that women are all in fact quite guilty of the crimes he depicts in his plays, and that they merely resent his exposure of their libidinousness and innate tendencies toward drunken lack of propriety and adultery.
Other incidental targets of this comedy include the notoriously effeminate tragedian Agathon, whose singing is compared to “ant paths” (murmekos atrapous, 100), a suggestive metaphor for the swarming song of an Asianizing, decadent tragic poet mocked for what are represented as effeminate and overblown tendencies in life and poetic composition.68 Agathon sings, performing the roles of leader and chorus alternately, summoning his maidens, being his maidens; Euripides’ kinsman, a central character in this play, mocks his tragic song: “How feministic and tongue-gagged and deep-kissed! Just hearing it brought a tingle to my very butt!” (131–33). The comic mockery of the adult homoeroticist calls attention not only to the alleged excesses of the tragedian, but also to the transvestism of the theater itself, which will be an issue later in the play when the kinsman himself dresses as a woman to pass as a worshipper of Demeter in the rituals of the Thesmophoria.
This comedy has its affinities with the Ecclesiazusae (Women at the Assembly), to be discussed later, since here the worshippers of Demeter, in their sacred retreat, call an assembly on the second day of their festival to punish their enemy Euripides, who has alerted husbands to the many crimes of their wives. They are suspected of having lovers, chasing men, guzzling wine, and other infractions that require intensified vigilance on the part of the men of the city. The “kinsman” of Euripides, dressed as one of the women, confirms all the accusations, and adds some more, including his/her “getting banged by the slaves and mule grooms if we haven’t got anyone else” (491–92).
The kinsman justifies his free-speaking by appealing to the Athenian tradition of parrhesia (541), “saying it all,” to be discussed in chapter 5. The kinsman says: “There is freedom of speech here, and all of us who are citizens (astai) are entitled to speak” (540–41). The disguised kinsman, dressed as a woman, uses the significant term astai; he remembers to use the feminine form of the word, which refers first of all to residents of “the city,” Athens itself, or even the Acropolis itself, the astu, as opposed to strangers, or foreigners, or even rustic fellow countrymen. Does the kinsman betray his masculinity by alluding to this right, or were women too entitled to the city’s parrhesia, a right to say all?
The kinsman’s deception is exposed. The chorus rallies and threatens destruction to the deceiver. And the chorus leader sings a song justifying praise of women: “Well, let’s step forward and sing our own praises! We’d better, because each and every man has a host of bad things to say about the female race (phulon), claiming that we’re an utter bane to humanity and the source of all ills: disputes, quarrels, bitter factionalism, distress, war. Come on now, if we’re a bane, why do you marry us?” (785–89). The woman repeats the centuries-old litany of complaints against the female kind, going back to Hesiod, who described their creation in Pandora, and the miseries that follow for mankind.
The chorus leader insists, in fact, that “we’re better than you” (800). And she proposes a test (basanos), using the word for “touchstone” and “torture.”69 She verbally pairs a man with a woman, and demonstrates that each woman, whose name registers excellent qualities of skill in war and counsel, is superior to a man. Crimes of men are listed. Mothers who contribute useful sons to the city, she argues, should be seated front and center at the women’s festivals honoring Demeter; behind the worthy mothers should sit those whose sons behave shamefully, including the mother of Hyperbolus, assassinated after this play was first produced, and whose mother had been the object of mockery as a drunken foreigner and slut.
Following these lines, the play engages in some parodies of Euripidean tragedy, before Euripides himself appears on stage, in another allusion to tragedy like those focused on so intensely in the Frogs. When the kinsman’s transvestism is uncovered, he is condemned to death wearing his feminine garments. The chorus celebrates, praising the two goddesses, Demeter and her daughter, Apollo, Artemis and Hera, Hermes, Pan and his nymphs, and the god in whose honor the dramatic festival is held:
This way, Lord Bacchus crowned with ivy,
do personally be our leader:
and with revels I will hymn you,
who love the dance!
(986–89)
Meanwhile, the Scythian archer, slave policeman for the city, has been strapping the kinsman to a plank, preparing him for torture and execution. Euripides’ relative appears, in the persona of Andromeda, appealing to “dear maidens” to rescue him as the tragic heroine did, winning the aid of Perseus against a sea monster. After a lengthy exchange with the kinsman-Andromeda, Euripides himself appears above the stage, the tragedian ex machina, in the role of Perseus the rescuer.
The tragic parody is further sustained, the tragic mood undermined, by the obscenity of the slave archer:
Euripides: Why don’t you let me untie her, Scythian, that I may couch her in the nuptial bower?
Archer: If you’re so hot to bugger the old guy, why don’ you drill a hole in the backside of that there plank and buttfuck him that way? (1121–24)
The high-flown tragic language is brought thunderingly down to earth by the obscenity of the slave, and the intrusion of everyday life into melodrama.
The chorus sings and dances on, indifferent now to the imminent demise of their enemy, the kinsman of Euripides, and they invite their goddess, Athena, to join their dance:
Maiden girl unwedlocked,
who alone safeguards our city (polin) . . .
show yourself, you who loathe
tyrants, as is fitting.
The country’s female people (demos . . . gunaikon)
summon you: please come
bringing peace, comrade of festivity.
(1139–47)
The language the chorus of women uses here is significant; they speak of the city itself, a physical entity in need of the protection of its goddess, Pallas Athena. But they also distinguish themselves, as a demos, a “people,” and they further specify that they are a demos of women.
The rule by the people, the demos, democratia, the form of polity that characterizes classical Athens, in fact excluded women from the vote, jury service, all the activities of citizen men that defined that democracy. So for the women to call themselves another demos, a gendered people or city, produces a hauntingly alternate, shadow polity, one that through the chorus members, as inhabitants of the polis, challenges the claim of the other demos, the demos of men, to be the democracy. Not just in the Ecclesiazusae, where the women show up to participate in the ekklesia, the assembly, as will be discussed in a later chapter, but also here in this play focused rather on a religious festival, the women are utopically establishing themselves as a people. There is in this claim, in the activities and words of the chorus’s song, a speculative reality that undermines or exists in some imaginary space, distinct from the men’s citizen body.
And in lines that echo Sappho’s fragment 1, the chorus summons their two goddesses, Demeter and Persephone:
If ever before you answered our call,
now too, we beseech you,
come here to us.
(1157–59)
The voices of the women’s chorus in this comedy echo the syntax, the prayer, the hymn of the Lesbian poet of the sixth century BCE. The women address their prayers to the goddesses, as they do in Lysistrata, and their summons may further emphasize the fact that this chorus is made up of women, or, of course, men or boys dressed as women, engaging in the same complex transvestism as does the kinsman of Euripides when he sacrilegiously invades the ceremonies of the Thesmophoria.
“Euripides” the comic character makes a separate peace with the women of the chorus of the Thesmophoriazusae, recalling the private treaty made between Dikaiopolis and the Spartans in the Acharnians, to be discussed in chapter 5. The tragedian agrees no longer to slander the women of the city, if they will release his kinsman from bondage; the ease with which the transaction is made suggests again the desire for a wider peace, that between warring Greek states. Euripides uses as a decoy, to distract the slave archer, the Scythian who is part of the Athenians’ police force, another slave, a dancing girl who is sold to the archer. He buys, Euripides takes her off, and the play ends abruptly, with the archer chasing the playwright, and with the final song of the chorus:
Now it’s time for each woman
to go on home. May the two Thesmophoroi
reward you with fine
thanks for this performance!
(1228–31)
Tragedy and tragedians have been mocked, the slave’s satisfaction and subsequent disappointment mark the end, and we have seen the women’s demos, another city within the city, realized by the transvestite actors.
This chorus, like others made up of women, slaves, barbarians, animals, clouds, establishes temporarily an alternative reality within the drama. The slave satyrs of the Cyclops, the women enslaved in Euripides’ Hecuba, and Trojan Women, the women of the Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae, and Thesmophoriazusae, provide an estrangement from the political, public world of some of the Athenian spectators. These transposed choral bodies show themselves capable of implicit or explicit critique of the arrangements of the polity. Given the analogies between the dramatic chorus, of satyr play, tragedy or comedy, and other choruses of the city, and between the military phalanx, the forms of order established for the ephebes, the young men of the city in their training, these dramatic choruses stretch the definition of a civic corps. Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard, in Athènes 403, describe their account of the city itself at the end of the fourth century BCE as “une histoire chorale,” a “choral history,” and list Lysimakhe, the priestess after whom Lysistrata may be named, as one of the leaders of the city’s choruses.70 Singing in unison, or spoken for in the voice of the khoruphaia, the chorus leader, the actual members of the city’s dramatic choruses destabilize the norms of the city in which power lies in the hands of the citizen men who participate in the assembly or the law courts. Although their words are composed by free, citizen, male playwrights, these choruses express various degrees of distance from the received ideas, the official norms, the hegemonic ideology of the democratic city. Even the enslaved satyrs of the only extant satyr play allow for a distance from the generally assumed acceptance of the institution of slavery. In the words of Euripides and Aristophanes, strange bedfellows, as we see from the comic persecution of the former in the Thesmophoriazusae, women especially are given the power of critique and provide a telling estrangement from the accepted arrangements of the democracy. The swarm has politics of its own that can veer off from the plot, the muthos, the stated views of the personae, the “characters” of these performances, and create imaginary, vital speculative worlds.