Topography and Material Culture in Fifth-Century Drama

For two-and-a-half plays of the Oresteia the set-building, skēnē, enacts a defined material identity as three prominent physical houses: first of Agamemnon, then of Apollo, and finally of Athena. Each occupies a different location and topography. But in the final shift to Orestes’ trial at the Areopagus (Eum. 566), the skēnē loses a clear identity and seems to go blank.

Mapping a Greek drama is practically impossible. The problem with making a clear representation of explicit and implicit references in a play is that this genre—more so than others—is constantly gesturing to outside locales and returning to the (fictional) deictic context. If one tries to visualize the sequence of place-references in a drama, as I do to begin the paper, the result is a tangled web—paths everywhere, constantly doubling back to touch home-base.

Euripides’ Alcestis (438 BC) has generated great interest among classicists of the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the issues that has attracted scholarly attention is how the marital relationship of Admetus and Alcestis is portrayed in the play. Some scholars argue for the total absence of love between the royal couple (Beye 1959; Smith 1960; von Kurz 1962; Sicking 1967; Conacher 1984; Schein 1988; Dova 2013), while others deny erotic but not marital love (Burnett 1965; Lesky 1966; Iakov 2012).

In this paper I shall show how in the Hippolytus Euripides utilizes objects and landscape to give a keen sense of the characters’ suffering and elicit the audience’s reaction to it.

Before the invention and regular use of the crane, actors appearing ‘on high’ in the Greek theater utilized the roof of the skene. In the fifth century, this roof would have been the flat ceiling of the ephemeral wooden skene, erected anew for each festival of the City Dionysia. The skene’s form for much of the fifth century was likely simple: a rectangular structure with one, or sometimes two, doors, a flat roof with a trapdoor providing access to and from the interior, perhaps a window cut into the façade, and decorated with painted canvas hangings.

This paper argues that the first stasimon of the Oedipus Tyrannus (463-511) constitutes a perverted victory ode, which functions as a fraught index of return resonant within the wider frame of dramatic action. In physically material terms suggestive of an athletic program, the chorus evokes the flight of a murderous damnandus whose very anonymity subverts the commemorative function of epinician lyric. Crucially, these furtive exercises are mapped onto a Pythian ritual space, cementing them within a context of Panhellenic athletic contest.