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Vita Aeschyli 9: Miscarriages in the Theatre of Dionysos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

William M. Calder III
William M. Calder III
Affiliation:
The University of Illinois at Urbana
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Extract

Anonymous, Vita Aeschyli 9 ( =TGF 3 T Al.30–32 Radt) preserves the following startling report concerning Aeschylus:

Some say that at the performance of the Eumenides, by bringing on the chorus one by one, as he did, he terrified the audience so that children swooned and fetuses were aborted.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , December 1988 , pp. 554 - 555
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1988

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References

1 Haigh, A. E., The Attic Theatre3, edited by Pickard-Cambridge, A. W. (Oxford, 1907), p. 327Google Scholar.

2 Pickard-Cambridge, A. W., The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford, 1953), p. 268Google Scholar: ‘a story…in vented’.

3 von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich, Aischylos Interpretationen (Berlin, 1914), p. 249Google Scholar (translation is my own).

4 Lefkowitz, Mary R., The Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore, 1981), pp. 71–2Google Scholar. Her conclusion is in part anticipated by Taplin, Oliver, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 1977), pp. 372 n. 2, 438 n. 2Google Scholar.

5 I first learned of it from Professor Dr Werner Habicht (Würzburg), the Shakespearian scholar.

6 Schütze, Johann Friedrich, Kanzleisekretär, Kgl. dänische, Hamburgische Theater-Geschichte (Hamburg, 1794), 208–9Google Scholar, cited by Savits, Jocza, Shakespeare und die Bühne des Dramas: Erfahrungen und Betrachtungen (Bonn, 1917), p. 31Google Scholar. The translation is my own.

7 That Secretary Schütze would have read Anonymous, Vita Aeschyli and invented history to agree with it is what the late Sir Denys Page would have called ‘the remotely conceivable alternative’.