SCS-23: Drama and Performance

Among the staged houses of Attic tragedy, the Oresteia’s fury-infested house has garnered most frequent critical recognition for a trajectory that strikingly entangles with human characters’. While the house’s arc of intensifying personifications throughout Agamemnon (36–9, 962, 1087, 1090–1, 1307) and Libation Bearers (471–3, 698–9, 807–11, 841–3, 961, 963–4, cf. 32–6) merits dedicated study (Noel 2023 adduces most of the passages), this paper establishes the continued theatrical career of an expressive tragic house in Euripidean drama.

This paper spotlights the capacity of actors to lead choruses in the performance of Greek tragedy. It argues that actors periodically step outside of their primary role as individual characters up on the stage and interact especially closely with the choral group singing and dancing down in the orchestra. While each dramatic chorus formally had its own internal chorus-leader ('koryphaios'), I argue for a multiplicity of chorus-leaders on the tragic stage, as part of a broader phenomenon that I term “layered leadership.”

This presentation will consider a new geometric theory around the intertextual nexus in the musical design of 5th century Greek tragedy. This “coronal” nexus is formed from four areas of choral composition–in metrical design (Scott 1984), pitch accents (Conser 2021), geometric formalism (Franklin 2013), and metamusical themes in lyric (Weiss 2018). This theory will illustrate–with visuals–how the songs of tragedy fit into their plays not only in their sequential order, but in interwoven patterns across the soundtrack which create new networks of meaning.

The literary value of fourth-century tragedy has been debated since Bruno Snell’s 1971 collection of tragic fragments and Georgia Xanthakis-Karamanos’ 1980 study on fourth-century tragedy because of the scanty number of fragments from this period in Attic tragedy. Liapis and Stephanopoulos (2019, 63-5) argue that there is no significant stylistic period which can be called fourth-century tragedy, which in their interpretation is a mere chronological period which serves as a transition from the fifth century to Hellenistic tragedy while retaining stylistic similarities with the former.

In the absence of stage directions, Athenian tragedy has deictic pronouns – ὃδε, οὗτος, and ἐκεῖνος. These words serve similar functions, usually indicating to the actors and the audience where a person or object is located. The proximal pronoun ὅδε normally points to objects in the speaker’s immediate vicinity, or sometimes even to the speaker themself; ἐκεῖνος, in contrast, usually refers to something or someone offstage, or otherwise distant from the events of the drama.