This coda concludes with a reflection on some of the wider political implications and affordances of the choreographies that were presented in this book. It discusses how choral fragmentations and augmentations might model the politics of group formation in and against the city. It also suggests that the chorus’ spoken and sung contributions explored in the accounts of interruption and interaction likewise reflect the chorus’ capacity to embody political concerns.

This chapter presents the chorus’ ability to interact and participate directly in dramatic action and dialogue as an overlooked aspect of the chorus’ polyphony. The chapter begins by tackling modern assumptions about ancient tragic performance, including the myth of the tragic coryphaeus, the chorus leader figure who allegedly spoke on behalf of the collective, to whom modern editors assign all choral speech. It then analyses the various lyric dialogues that are found in the surviving corpus of each of the three major tragedians, illustrating how the chorus’ extensive range across the various modes of delivery (sung, recitative and spoken) maps onto tensions of exchange and violence that are typical of Greek drama. The chapter ends with an extended examination of the dynamic interplay between actors and chorus that Sophocles stages in Electra, Philoctetes and Antigone. In the case of Antigone, Sophocles features a silent chorus who refuse to engage with Antigone’s and Creon’s mourning, a silence which reflects the creative ways in which tragedians can direct the chorus’ lyric interactions with actors.

This chapter focuses on various forms of choral disruption: choral exits mid-action, dramatic and textual manifestations of choral silence, as well as off-stage cries as phenomena which ‘interrupt’ the chorus. This chapter explores how the chorus is (dis)embedded in the flow of dramatic narrative, while accentuating choral conventions and expectations. Among the standard conventions of Greek tragedy is the continuous presence of the chorus on stage following their entrance in the parodos. The chapter thus analyses the five plays in the surviving tragic corpus that feature a chorus which exits the stage mid-action: Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Sophocles’ Ajax, Euripides’ Alcestis and Helen, and the fourth-century tragedy Rhesus. It also examines how tragedians disrupt the rhythm of choral performance in crises of emotion or action, from scenes in which a literal interruption on stage silences a chorus to those where an expected choral ode is delayed or cut short.

Extant Greek tragedy contains several instances of choral division, scenes when the chorus appears either to split into individual performers (as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon) or, more commonly, to divide into small groups (semichoruses). As these scenes involve the (always temporary) disintegration of tragedy’s emblematic collective, a collective that is customarily conceived of as a unified group, this chapter frames such scenes in terms of fragmentation. These various states of fragmentation illustrate not only the way in which tragedians play with the chorus’ ability to slide towards and away from uniform collectivity but also the assumptions about wholeness which have implicitly informed critical and editorial approaches to both tragedy and the chorus. In addition to examining these divisions in tragedy, the chapter analyses similar divisions in satyr play, comedy and Rhesus, the only surviving example of fourth-century tragedy, demonstrating how the divisions of the comic and satyric choruses are more readily accepted by critics.

This introduction outlines current understandings and paradoxes of the chorus. It discusses the single and formal role that various critical traditions have assigned to the tragic chorus over the centuries, and how a focus on the chorus’ fragmentations, augmentations, interruptions and interactions is better suited to capture the varied activities that the tragic chorus undertakes in fifth-century Athenian theatre. To justify why a new account of choral performance is necessary, the introduction also examines the relative neglect of the chorus in scholarly accounts of ancient performance, the history and transmission of dramatic texts, and studies exploring the politics of tragic and literary form. It also offers an overview of choral knowns and unknowns, including the chorus’ size and composition, their delivery and performance, and their arrangement on the ancient theatrical space.