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.

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.

This chapter treats Pound’s collaboration with Eliot from 1917 into the late 1930s from the perspective of their engagement with Greek. It focuses on the interconnection between drama (whether Japanese Noh or Greek tragedy) and the ambition of the long poem; consistent with their turn to formal verse in 1917, the two poets view theater through a similarly formalist lens. The author traces Pound and Eliot’s joint obsession with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon through an examination of their essays – especially Pound’s multi-part “Hellenist Series” (1918–19) and his writings on Jean Cocteau – private correspondence, and select poetic work and translations (e.g., Pound’s unpublished “Opening for Agamemnon,” Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales”). Whereas Eliot “declines the gambit, shows fatigue” and chooses to treat Aeschylus from a distance, Pound is both more ambivalent about Aeschylus’s value and more in thrall to elements of his poetic technique and language. Though Pound and Eliot’s abortive Greek projects would lie dormant for some years, the chapter examines the attempted rekindling of their Greek collaboration in the mid-1930s, which provides the transition between the early texts discussed in this chapter and their mature work.

According to Aristotle, character or ethos in tragedy is ’that which reveals what the moral choice is like’. This kind of ethos is what this book explores in Sophocles, by examining five tragedies in which moral choice is central to the course of the drama. These choices are made within the context of traditional Greek morality, which, amongst other things, expected one to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. Closely allied to these principles is the conception of justice as retaliation. This nexus of principles provides a pervasive ethical background to most of Greek literature and is of special significance for tragedy.

In this chapter, I discuss the voice of the comic poet in the city and, specifically, Aristophanes. Two interrelated questions provide a focus: how does the comic poet ’speak out’ before the city? What is the role of parodic quotation in Old Comedy, the voice within the voice (’speaking out’)? I begin with some general remarks about the role of poetry in the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian democratic polis, that leads into a discussion of the institution of Old Comedy in the light of modem treatments of carnival and the idea of ’ritual reversal’. The second part of the chapter – focused on the Acharnians and the Frogs – looks first at the comic poet ’speaking out’ to the city through the parabasis in particular, and second at how the poet uses other voices, especially the voice of tragedy, in parodic quotation.

Greek popular thought is pervaded by the assumption that one should help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. These fundamental principles surface continually from Homer onwards and survive well into the Roman period, and indeed to the present day, especially in international relations. They are firmly based on observation of human nature, which yields the conclusion that most human beings do in fact desire to help their friends and harm their enemies, and derive satisfaction from such behaviour. Thus Xenophon’s Socrates can count benefiting friends and defeating enemies as one of the things which bring the ’greatest pleasures’.

After a brief overview of Heidegger’s motivations and interest in engaging Greek tragedy understood as a downgoing in the realm of shadows, this chapter addresses three shadow figures that mark Greek tragedy as an experience of the uncanny – Oedipus, Antigone, and Medea. Whereas Heidegger addresses the first two figures at length, there is no mention of Medea in his works. By focusing on the notion of passion for being (originally advanced by Heidegger’s reading of Oedipus), this chapter explores relations of homeliness and unhomeliness, internal and external enmity, family and polis, citizen and foreigner/stranger, love and resistance, trust and betrayal of trust in Heidegger’s reading of tragedy. Ultimately, the chapter points to Medea’s (absent) character as a needed figure to maintain Heidegger’s relation to tragedy open to the possibility of a politically and existentially non-totalizing way of thinking aligned with Heidegger’s initial ambitions when returning to Greek tragedy as a theme for philosophy.

In Euripides’ Phoenician Women, produced around 410 BCE, actor’s lyric takes on a role of unprecedented importance in the shaping of plot and in the development of character, counterposed to and to some extent replacing choral lyric. Antigone, Jocasta, and Oedipus – all singing characters – are inextricably bound up in the ruin of their house. Three of the play’s four scenes of actor’s lyric feature Antigone; through song Euripides traces her progression from a sheltered maiden to a distraught mourner and finally to a mature woman who takes charge of her own and her father’s fate. Euripides here experiments with monody not only as a structural device to shape plot and create meaning but also as a means for the development of a complex female figure through the presentation of her evolving emotional state.

In Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, produced around 414–412 BCE, the two monodies highlight two critical stages of the heroine’s emotional journey from stasis to purposeful action. In her first monody, Iphigenia mourns the unfulfilled potential of her young life, where each status was canceled, each promised doing undone. Iphigenia’s second monody, delivered after the reunion scene with Orestes, marks a shift in her mind and a crisis in the plot. Here monody becomes a site for thought and decisive action, acting as a deliberative rhesis wherein the heroine formulates a plan for the future. The two monodies in this play thus mark two points in the inflection of Iphigenia’s character as she leaves behind her status as a passive victim and finds her purpose as the functional head of her family.

Monody is an essential part of Euripides’ mature dramatic art. All the surviving examples of actor’s lyric by Aeschylus and Sophocles are songs of lamentation, where the use of solo song emphasizes the relationship between the isolated singer and the larger group. Reacting against this tradition, in his late plays Euripides reconfigures monody by blending it with the other traditional forms of Greek tragedy, such as the agon, rhesis, choral ode, and messenger speech. These reconfigurations, or “liberations,” are signaled so that attention is drawn in each case to the poet’s ingenuity. In addition to this formal innovation, Euripides uses monody as a vehicle to express emotion and develop character on the tragic stage.

In Euripides’ Ion, produced around 414 BCE, the central conflict of the play receives its most explicit expression through the diametrical opposition of passionately held views. These views are expressed at length, but in song and separately, in the monodies of Ion and Creusa. In his opening monody, Ion manifests his devotion to Apollo, his concern with purity and propriety, and his position as an orphan. At the pivotal moment of the play, the Athenian queen Creusa delivers a musical accusation against the god who once violated her and, as she believes, left their infant son to die. Is Apollo benevolent and bright, or violent and uncaring? In the two monodies, Euripides brings together the legalistic exposition typical of agonistic rhesis and the emotionality of lyric song.

The Introduction situates the monodies of Euripides’ late plays in the context of theatrical and musical innovation in Athens in the late fifth century. In plays produced after 415 BCE – in particular Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Phoenician Women, and Orestes – Euripides departs from the model of actor’s lyric established by Aeschylus and Sophocles and followed in his own previous work. Solo song is no longer restricted to women, to royalty, or to situations that call for lamentation; nor is the soloist necessarily closely tied to the chorus. In his late plays, Euripides successively redefines monody: each song takes over a traditional Bauform of tragedy and builds upon it. Monody becomes a site of formal innovation and experimentation. At the same time, solo song facilitates the creation of an individual voice of broad emotional and expressive range.