In 1990 Jack Winkler and Froma Zeitlin dropped a bomb on the study of Greek drama with the publication of Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Taking their departure from the narrow formalist historicism of prior scholarship, with its interest in properly historical persons, events and trends, Winkler and Zeitlin shifted their attention toward ‘the entire social context of the [dramatic] festival’ (3). Greek drama would now be a window into the sociocultural pulse of fifth-century Athens. This new praxis came to be known as ‘cultural poetics’, and its practitioners viewed Greek drama as an embedded and constitutive element of a society in constant negotiation with itself. Drama now reflected or symptomatised historical, religious and political context. As Simon Goldhill put it in the introduction to his study of the Oresteia:

Tragedy takes place…at the moment of maximal unresolved tension between…systems of ideas… It explores the different and competing ideals, different and competing obligations, different and competing sense of words in the developing polis, different and competing ideas of glory and success… It discovers tensions and ambiguities with the very civic ideology of democracy that is the context of tragedy's performance… Tragedy takes the developing notions, vocabulary, commitments of democracy and places them under rigorous, polemical, violent and public scrutiny.

The impact and aftershock of Nothing to Do with Dionysos? can still be felt today. In one way or another, we might say, we are all the children (and grandchildren) of Winkler and Zeitlin. The question remains, however, what type of children we have been in the time since (kaloi men k'agathoi, kakoi de k'aischroi?) and how we will honour their legacy as we move forward with the study of Greek drama.

All theatre is sacramental. A theatrical event establishes itself as theatre by setting aside a measured space as inviolable for a measured time. This framing effect of theatre is sacramental. Within the frame of theatre, other sacraments can be represented or performed. Part I of this paper develops conceptual distinctions necessary to understanding the sacramental in theatre, using an ethics-based theory of sacrament. Part II sets out to use the theory, applying it to open up new questions for the interpretation of ancient Greek tragedy, and using the theory to explain certain plot elements in Sophocles' Philoctetes and other plays.

Any act of theatre has a sacramental effect. The art of theatre makes ceremonies possible, and by ceremonies we are able to make things sacred. In saying that theatre is sacramental, I am not saying that it is religious. Religious ceremonies employ the art of theatre and depend on that art, but theatre does not depend on religion. I understand sacrament as an ethical concept. A sacrament sets up an ethical hedge around something—makes it wrong to touch, to tread on, or to alter the thing in question.

By ‘theatre’ I mean the art that makes action worth watching for a measured time in a measured space. This art must of necessity draw a line between watching and being watched. Drawing that line is a minor, though fundamental, sacrament. Other sacraments may take place within the frame of theatre. My theory of the sacramental in theatre stands on its usefulness for understanding and interpreting the elements of theatre—the experiences of both the watchers and the watched in actual productions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the texts that survive to represent productions of the past. If the theory is coherent and useful, then we should use it. Otherwise, not.

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, it would seem, is an exercise in closure. In the opening scene, Oedipus, worn down by years of wandering blind and hungry, arrives at the borders of Athens. Here is where his legendary sufferings—his murder of his father, his incestuous marriage to his mother, his betrayal by his sons, his exile from Thebes—are fated to end. Following his miraculous death, his body will become a sacred gift to the city that receives him, protecting it against future attack. In the closing moments of the play, everything unfolds according to plan. Oedipus disappears offstage and mysteriously descends into the earth. The king of Athens, Theseus, alone marks the spot of his disappearance, knowledge he will pass down to his sons as part of his responsibility to the city. By the end of the tragedy, then, Oedipus has made his way home to the gods in a land capable of honouring his awesome, singular fate.

The concept of ‘coming home’ is integral, as this précis suggests, to the play's logic of closure. Yet, crucially, it governs only one of the two planes on which the drama unfolds, that of the gods. Oedipus' life has been in the hands of the gods since before he was born. That they reclaim him at the end of his life gives his exit the feel of a return. By contrast, the path to Athens, for all its meandering, is not circular but linear. Athens is definitively not Thebes, as the tragedy demonstrates over and over (nor is it Corinth, Oedipus' other point of origin). Thebes is, rather, the home that Oedipus rejects, most spectacularly through his resistance to Creon's demand that he return to the city of his birth. What is more, he repudiates any relationship to the Theban throne. When Polyneices arrives to ask his father to support his bid to reclaim the kingship from his brother Eteocles, Oedipus does not simply refuse to intervene but drives his son away with curses. His refusal is a refusal not just of Thebes but of the Labdacid line altogether (he goes so far as to call Polyneices ἀπάτωϱ, ‘fatherless’, 1383; see also 1369: ὑμεῖς δ' ἀπ' ἄλλον ϰοὐϰ ἐμοῦ πεϕύϰατον, ‘you are from another and not born from me’); his pact with Theseus creates an alternate genealogy of fathers and sons. Seen in this light, Oedipus' arrival at Colonus and, ultimately, his dramatic exit become the final stages of a process not of coming home but of leaving Thebes behind and with it ‘the radical tragic terrain where there can be no escape from the tragic in the resolution of conflict or in the institutional provision of a civic future beyond the world of the play’.

Peace was performed at the City Dionysia in 421 BCE, just days before the signing of the fifty-year treaty known as the Peace of Nikias, which brought an end to the first ten years of the Peloponnesian War. The negotiations that led up to this definitive moment for Athens and Sparta had been initiated the previous summer by the simultaneous deaths of Cleon and Brasidas at Amphipolis, who had been, according to Thucydides, ‘the two principal opponents of peace on either side’ (5.16.1). These unexpected deaths created a power vacuum which was filled by more moderate politicians on both sides of the conflict—Nikias and Pleistoanax, respectively—each of whom had his own personal reasons for desiring peace, apart from alleviating the battle fatigue felt keenly throughout the Greek world by this point. At Athens, the break in military action occasioned by this transference of power put the focus back on the political situation at home, and it was during this break that Aristophanes produced his cautiously optimistic play Peace, which, in its celebration of this fortuitous turn of events, also displayed a renewed interest in the well-being of the Athenian home front at this time.

The frequent assumption that they [the Persians] were as greatly concerned on these levels [historically, culturally, strategically] with Greece [as they were with the east] is a misconception which stems from our own western view of the world and from the unfortunate fact that Greece has given us our main literary sources of information on the Achaemenids. It was the Greeks who were fascinated by Persia, by Persian mores, and, yes, by Persian court art and luxury goods—not the reverse. If only the Persians had spawned the likes of Aeschylus and Herodotus, our perceptions of their preoccupations would be quite different.

Athenians were indeed fascinated by Persia as their art and literature attest. The fascination was both cultural and political, but not without tensions. Part of that fascination manifested itself in the allure of Persian kings and what they represented. The kings ruled over a vast empire, larger than any the Mediterranean world had yet seen. They sought in their iconography and building programmes to exert a particular identity for themselves and the Achaemenid dynasty. Although the Athenians were not imperialists of the type we see in Persia, Rome or the figure of Alexander, they did build for themselves a small, Hellenic empire (archē) and they adopted a number of Persian mechanisms of power and some aspects of Achaemenid iconography for representing their power. Aeschylus' Persians, produced in 472 BCE, helps us understand the Athenians' developing archē, specifically how the representations of the two Persian Kings in the play helped the Athenians differentiate and define their power vis-à-vis the Great Persian Menace and, more importantly, the rest of the Greeks. By understanding better the engagement by the Athenians with Persian culture, we can better understand how the Athenians conceptualised their own power and position in the Aegean in the early 5th century BCE.

As Martin Revermann forecast in 1999, the reception history of Greek drama has become ‘big business’ and, as the present volume demonstrates, we are indeed trying to move beyond the ‘Atheno-centric civic ideology approach to Greek drama, which has, fruitfully, been dominating our mode of thinking for quite some time now'. Nevertheless, like Revermann, I believe that work on the reciprocity between social context and theatre that Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (1990) so well exemplifies has been and continues to be an important approach to the field. Examining plays not simply as literary works, but as integral parts of social and political systems, remains a useful method of inquiry. Indeed, one strand of useful research may build on the work that has been done to situate Greek drama in Athens to ask similar questions about theatre outside Athens.

In the case of South Italy and Sicily, the problem is particularly pressing. This is not only because of the traditional separation between the fields of philology, epigraphy, history, archaeology, art history and political science, which made comprehensive examination of theatre as a social and political phenomenon difficult in Athens, but also because of competing histories of the development of theatre in the ancient Greek world. In particular, the history of Athenian theatre, both from the literary perspective and now from the socio-political perspective, is so dominant that it often incorporates into its own narrative what evidence there is for theatre outside Attica. Likewise, from the later period, Roman theatre includes the evidence from Sicily and South Italy into its own history, though to a lesser extent. Nothing to Do with Dionysos? may nevertheless serve as a model for the development of a vital, and still missing, perspective on the theatrical evidence that remains from the West. How did drama and the theatre fit into the socio-political contexts of Greek cities outside Attica? Is it possible to write the history of Sicilian and South Italian theatre, or were these new world cities only recipients of the Attic theatre and stepping stones to that of Rome?

I attempt below to set out a few of the questions that, I think, frame the debate. This is a preliminary, tentative examination of some of the problems that arise in this field, and it is not in any way exhaustive.

The study of the ancient world has often come under scrutiny for its questionable ‘relevance’ to modern society, but Greek tragedy has proven rather resilient. From tragedy's perceived value in articulating an incomplete but idealised state of political and ethical being in Hegel to its role in thinking through the modern construction of politics and gender (often through a re-reading of Hegel), tragedy has loomed large in modern critical inquiry into definitions of the political and the formation of the subject.’ This is another way of saying that the richly textured tragic text has in some respects laid the foundation for subsequent theorising of the political subject.

Given the importance placed on such figures as Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone starting with Schelling and Hegel, it is perhaps not surprising that recent work in critical theory has tended to recast these particular tragic figures in its critique of Enlightenment thought. Nonetheless, there are problems with the adoption of these figures as paradigms through which tragedy becomes a tool to represent the ancient Greek polis and to work through modern political and ethical problems. The repeated returns to certain aspects of Oedipus or Antigone have contributed to a structured silence around the issue of class relations. Along with the increasingly dominant role of neoliberalism and the continuing importance of identity politics, much recent critical theory has contributed to the occlusion of class and labour from public discourse and academic research. In such a climate, it is no wonder that historical materialism rarely figures in academic works. I wonder whether another narrative is possible through the study of Greek tragedy.

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.

We look on the totality of the past as dreams, certainly interesting ones, and regard only the latest state of science as true, and that only provisionally so. This is culture.

Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?

Reception studies in classics live a complicated scholarly life. On one hand, a healthy collection of new monographs appears on the market every year that shows the strength of this subfield, including such recent additions as Gonda Van Steen's Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands and Simon Goldhil's work on the Victorian reception of classics called Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity. Collections of essays that contribute to the field are also copiously produced. Thus two scholars could lately declare that ‘[n]o sub-field in the discipline of Classics has experienced such growth, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, over the past fifteen years or so as the study of reception of classical material’. Charles Martindale, credited with throwing down the receptive gauntlet some twenty years ago, recently wrote an essay on the flourishing state of this subfield within classics, reporting that reception studies have proven classics to be not ‘something fixed, whose boundaries can be shown.’ He adds the following:

Many classicists (though by no means the majority) are in consequence reasonably happy, if only to keep the discipline alive in some form, to work with an enlarged sense of what classics might be, no longer confined to the study of classical antiquity ‘in itself’—so that classics can include writing about Paradise Lost, or the mythological poesie of Titian, or the film Gladiator, or the iconography of fascism.

Prometheus Bound (PV) is a meditation on God par excellence, second only perhaps to the Bible or Paradise Lost. It is, accordingly, the only extant tragedy from the ancient world featuring the most characters as gods. For this reason it stands out in a genre fixated principally on human suffering, where ‘death carries overwhelmingly more weight than salvation’. Gods, of course, do not suffer like humans: Prometheus, the play's protagonist extraordinaire, may be subject to an eternity of punishment for stealing fire from Zeus, but his pain, real and visceral as it is, differs from ours in that it lacks the potential closure of death. It is perhaps justifiable then to suggest the play's focus is not just the awful things gods are capable of doing to one another (just like humans), but rather the meaning of such behaviour without the ultimate consequence (death). That is, the portrayal of Prometheus suffering and Zeus menacing redounds equally to the type of characters they are as to simply what they are. Whereas the former aspect is of psychological or political interest, the latter is a theological concern. And PV is theological in its implications as much as it is political. Hence the question: What type of theology does it convey? The answer is complex.

In the modern world PV has primarily been read for its political allegory—as a meditation on oppression, or martyrdom for the intellectual cause. Eric Havelock's translation and study of the play, to cite an illustrative example, was called The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (1950). Many critics therefore argue that the play articulates the conflict between Prometheus and Zeus in terms of freedom versus authoritarianism. As Shelley famously wrote in the prologue to his Prometheus Unbound, the imprisoned Prometheus represents ‘the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends’ (1820). Marx and Goethe felt similarly. This position aligns Prometheus with the forces of enlightenment and progress over against the brutality of Zeus's authority.

This paper is an exploration of the performance of Greek drama from the perspective of the performers, more specifically, of the chorus-in-training. The notion that khoreia constitutes an essential part of paideia and ethical instruction is an ancient one. And the notion persists, though in different forms, among scholars of the social and political context of these dramatic performances that to have participated in a chorus was in particular ways to have received training in essential perspectives and experiences of citizens: ‘the events and characters portrayed in tragedy are meant to be contemplated as lessons by young citizens.’ And yet what the members of a chorus were expected to learn, did learn, and, moreover, how they learned, have remained largely unexplored topics.

I will suggest ways that we might begin to piece together a baseline of experiences and impressions that come through learning to sing, dance and compete in dramatic festivals. Most of the experiences that I will describe are partly functions of universal properties of the human mind; of course, culture and thoughts and other aspects of shared and individual experience are highly variable. Indeed, the contents of thought are unrestricted. But there are regular, even fixed, ways in which the mind and brain appear to work. I propose to describe an approach to the ways in which the words and movements and environment of dramatic competition are universally present to and apprehended by the senses and minds and bodies of a chorus-in-training. I am not suggesting that there are not other aspects of experience that are important to the performance and appreciation of drama. Rather, I hope to establish at the very least those aspects of training and performance that are necessary and perhaps even sufficient to bring a drama (and I take the chorus to be the most important part of drama) to the arena of competition. I will consider some of the lasting effects of dramatic training and performance on the life of the performer, i.e., how every performer may be changed by his experience.