Color in Ancient Drama in Performance

The range of colour terms used in archaic Greek poetry was quite limited, leading to Gladstone’s infamous conclusion that the Greeks of Homer’s time must have been colour-blind (1858). The spectrum of colour terms used by the tragic poets was similarly small, with an emphasis on the contrast between light and dark and a smaller number of words for hues that correspond to our conceptions of “red”, “yellow”, “purple”, “blue”, and “green”. The playwrights applied colour terms to props and costumes visible to the audience (e.g.

The political dimension of Aeschylus’ Suppliants interrelates gender, sexuality and race. The underlying problem is one of insider and outsider, defined by gender and ethnicity/race. While the violence against the maidens is explicitly sexual, there is also a racial dimension to it. The title of this paper is meant to be somewhat provocative: woman of color is a term that came into usage at a particular time responding to perceived problems in the way feminism ignored race.

One might expect the stereotypical skin color of Greek women, whiteness, to play a key role in the gender disguises of Aristophanic comedy. I argue that another function of white skin color is to link women to male professional craftsmen. While much has been written about the plays' transvestism and the gender-blending character of Agathon, little attention has been paid to the role of skin color or to the significant ties between women and craftsmen made on this basis.