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Resonance: Aeschylus' Persae and the Poetics of Sound

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Sean Gurd
Sean Gurd*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
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Extract

Scholars tend to agree that Aeschylus' choice of material for the Persae was overdetermined: the battle at Salamis and its lead-up constituted a moment of the highest trauma and pride for the Athenian demos, one that could be accommodated to a well-known narrative framework (that of great pride followed by a great fall) and exploited as an exploration of the relations between (Athenian) Greek and Persian other. But in this essay I propose to set aside the tragedy's ethical or ethno-political engagements. I want to focus instead on its auditory aesthetics—what it says about sound, and how it works with it. I think that the Persae is intensely and persistently engaged with sound; so much so, in fact, that at moments it comes closer than any other Athenian drama to a kind of ‘absolute’ music. In the final 40 lines of the play, for example, when extralinguistic cries increasingly predominate, the ‘script’ starts to read more like a score, prescribing the timbral and rhythmic part of a music whose pitches have been lost. Though I will not treat its engagements with the Persian ‘other’ directly, I do think that the Persae's interest in sound is related to its choice of setting and theme. Locating the action in Persia allowed Aeschylus to explore a poetic diction that could flirt with the thick edge of signification by invoking linguistic otherness; this facilitated a way of writing in which the materiality of language, that is, its status as sound, could become more palpable. In choosing to depict the Persian court as it learns the news of the defeat at Salamis, Aeschylus had the opportunity to represent an extreme form of lamentation, and by ideologically jacking up the stakes and transforming one military defeat into the fall of an empire, Aeschylus could go to the limits of language and beyond: the play ends with an extraordinary near-abandonment of signifying language in favour of non-verbal cries. Finally, Aeschylus' version of the battle of Salamis included the Greeks using sound as a psychological tactic; the story of the battle that is the kernel around which the play crystallised was itself a story of sound and its effects.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 42 , Issue 1-2: The Enigmatic Context: Approaches to Greek Drama , 2013 , pp. 122 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 2013

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References

NOTES

1. Conacher 1974; Rosenmeyer (1982), 318-20; Saïd (1988).

2. See, on the (geo-)political concerns of the Persae, Stoessel (1952); Kitto (1961), 33-45; Podlecki (1966); Kitto (1969), 160-65; Gagarin (1976), 29-56; Winnington-Ingram (1983), 1-15; Goldhill (1988); Hall (1989), 76-100; Georges (1994), 86, 102-09; Hall (1996a); Griffith (1998); Harrison (2000); Hall (2002), 176f.; Rosenbloom (2006); Mitchell (2007), 113f. There was also the important fact that Aeschylus did not invent the theme: The Phoenissai of Phrynichus was performed only a few years earlier, and it is generally believed that Aeschylus drew much of his inspiration from that play.

3. Porter (2010) has done much to provoke further attempts to take seriously the important role that perception played in the theory and practice of art in the archaic and classical periods; in paying attention to how sound works in the Persians I hope to deepen some of his insights.

4. See Luhmann (2000) and Porter (2010), 4-7, but in fact the insight is fundamental and pervasive.

5. The bibliography on the history of the senses is very large. A good starting point would be Howes (2003); Howes (2005); Smith (2007). On auditory culture, Bull and Back (2003) collects excerpts from many of the founding statements; worth individual attention are Johnson (1995); Corbin (1998); Smith (1999); Schmidt (2000); Stewart (2002), 59-106; Weiss (2002); Picker (2003); Rath (2003); Sterne (2003); Erlmann (2004); Riley (2004); Smith (2004); Ihde (2007); Nancy (2007); Szendy (2008); Erlmann (2010).

6. On presence and its relationship to embodiment (and its difference from ‘meaning’) see Gumbrecht (2004); Gurd (2007).

7. See Hall (1989), 76-80.

8. See Garvie (2009), ap. crit. and notes ad loc.

9. At 302-27, 958-61, 967-72, 981-85, 993-99.

10. I am thinking of words like ἰά (Aesch. Pers. 936; Eur. Hip. 585); ἰαλέμος (Aesch. Suppl. 115; Eur. Her. 110; Eur. Phoen. 1134f.); ἰαχέω (Eur. Her. 349, 783; Tro. 515, 827; Or. 826, 965), and ἰαχή (Aesch. Pers. 940; Eur. Ion. 499; Or. 1474; IA 1039).

11. Porter (2010), passim; besides the material Porter gathers, the belief is commonplace in the presocratics.

12. See Anaxagoras A 106 DK; Democritus B 128 DK; [Hippocrates] Regimen 1.36; On Fleshes 18; Archytas A 1 DK (fourth century but reflecting fifth century speculations).

13. See Anaxagoras A 106 DK; Diogenes of Apollonia A 16 DK; Democritus A 93, 126 DK.

14. See Porter (2007); Porter (2010).

15. Aristophanes, Frogs 923–27, 1378–1413Google Scholar.

16. Used with devastating effectiveness (and pioneered?) by Aeschylus in Ag. 1343-46; Cho. 869; Eum. 117-30. Of a different form, but equally important, are the sounds from outside the walls of Thebes in Aesch. Th. 77-180, 245-49. Euripides takes things much farther: see Hip. 565-90, 776-79; Med. 1-200, 1270a-92; Her. 750-61, 886-909; Or. 1296-1312, 1353-60; El. 1165-74.

17. ϰελαδέω is used of the Trojan host shouting at Il. 8.542, 18.310, 23.869; for the din of battle, the noun appears at Il. 9.547, 18.530, 18.576, 21.16.

18. Burkert(1972), 378.

19. Philochorus, FGrH 328F23 = Athen. 14.42 637F-638A.

20. See Empedocles A 86 DK = Theophr. Sens. 8-10; Anaxagoras A 92 DK = Theophr. Sens. 27-30, 37, 59; Diogenes of Apollonia A 19 DK = Theophr. Sens. 39-45; [Hippocrates] Places 2 (279L); On Fleshes 15 (603-4 L).

21. Noted by Garvie (2009) ad 390-92.

22. For parallels, see Garvie (2009) ad loc.; the closest are in Pindar, e.g. O. 9.21f., and cf. I. 7.23, N. 10.2, Eur. Phoen. 1377.

23. Il. 2.459-73.

24. See Hall (1989), 68f.

25. Theophr. Sens. 10, with B 107 DK.

26. See, for example, the theory of Diogenes of Apollonia, who is in general very different from Empedocles but who does think that thinking and sensing are both matters of disturbances of the air, and thus comes very close to an identical account of how we are aware of our senses. Democritus would give these ideas canonical and systematic formulation. Gorgias developed them in the Encomium of Helen.

27. See Regimen 2.61; On the Sacred Disease 13.18.

28. Demonstration of this will have to wait for another occasion. See Damon A 10 DK (= Plato Rep. 424c), B 6 DK (= Athenaeus 628C), B 7 DK (= Aristid. Quint. II 14). Damon's importance is waning, and is likely to wane more: see Barker (2007), 47 n.18. On Damon, see especially Wallace (1991); West (1992), 246-49.

29. Il. 4.504, 5.42, 13.444, 15.421, 16.401, 16.599, 16.822, 17.311, 20.388; Od. 22.94, 24.525.

30. Il. 4.455.

31. Od. 5.401, 12.202.

32. Il. 10.354, Od. 16.10.

33. Il. 12.289.

34. Il. 16.635.

35. Page (1972), 11.

36. See, for example, 270, 283, 927, 1039; at 331 it is in the line, but at the beginning; 673 could well be extra-metric (this is an epode).