This chapter examines secondary or subsidiary choruses in Greek tragedy, illustrating the manner in which ancient playwrights staged multiple choruses in conflict. I argue that secondary choruses complicate the standard model of the tragic chorus as a single and static entity by forcing spectators to confront various choral groups. My discussion focuses on the two modes enabled by these supplementary choruses across tragedy, comedy and satyr play: how these secondary collectives, when in the presence of the main chorus, create a ‘swarm’, and when they are not, act as ‘spectres’ that ‘haunt’ and inform audience perceptions of the main chorus. It offers extended readings of two plays which employ secondary choruses to achieve maximum dramatic effect: Aeschylus’ Suppliants, where the playwright uses the Danaids’ respective meetings with the secondary choruses of Egyptians and Argive soldiers to chart the women’s path to Greekness, and Euripides’ Phaethon, which uniquely brings together choral spectre and swarm in a remarkable scene in which the main chorus is forced to witness, silently, an alternative version of itself, as another chorus sings the song that they themselves had longed to sing.

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.

The Athenian experience may help us to sharpen several decisive questions of our time: In what form do the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that run through a group build a true society that is more than the sum of its disparate networks? Conversely, by what processes does a society come to tear itself apart, or even disintegrate? How do heterogeneous social arenas and temporalities coexist within it? Under what conditions should the fervor of exceptional situations be maintained without sinking into totalitarian unity? All these questions unfold with clarity in one quite singular moment of the history of Athens: the civil war of 404/3 BC.

The sources mention many Athenians who settled abroad during the troubles to quietly go about their business, or remained in the city, secluded in their oikos, without joining either camp. To take an interest in these ‘nonaligned’ individuals is to give their place in history back to the many protagonists who resisted the all-encompassing logic of the stasis and the contradictory injunctions that it gave rise to: Choose your side, comrade! But not everything is political in the same way and with the same intensity, either today or in the past: Even in the midst of turmoil, politics does not invest all spheres of existence and all the different layers of society in equal measure. Indeed, orators readily stigmatized the Athenians expelled by the Thirty who, instead of rallying to the democrats in Piraeus, had preferred the comfort of exile; symmetrically, many Athenians who remained in the city tried to demonstrate that they had not participated in any way in the exactions of the oligarchy. Socrates represents in this respect a case that is both common and exceptional: common, in that he was far from being the only one not to take sides during the civil war; exceptional, in that he declared this neutrality loud and clear, even if it meant arousing suspicion on both sides. A final question remains: Did all these ‘neutral individuals’ form a chorus in their own right? What links can be established between people who have remained outside the field of political confrontation – strangers to the ‘bond of division,’ to paraphrase Nicole Loraux? To put it another way: Is it possible to ‘make community’ out of abstention, even if it is an active choice?

Throughout this book, we have suggested that the notion of choruses offers a metaphor through which these diverse collectives can be understood. Granted, this metaphor is not a typical concept that historians ordinarily use to describe community life, such as the association or the network, which seem at first sight to offer a more stable descriptive framework. We nevertheless argue that the choral reference makes it possible to obtain fine-grained knowledge of the modulations of the Athenian city in 404/3, since it is anchored in Greek thought and social practices. Indeed, viewed through the lens of chorality, the Athenian community landscape appears in a new light, defined by plurality and contingency. Legal status is no longer a fixed barrier assigning place to individuals once and for all: Divergent temporalities constantly overlap and weave together the polyrhythmic fabric of the city. The question that guides the whole of our investigation is ultimately about the choral essence of the city. Is it possible to see the Athenian polis, and all the groups of which it is composed, as a choral song? Illustrating the scope of the Athenian social space does not consist only in describing its polyphony, but also in listening to the harmonics, be they consonant or dissonant, which cut across it.

‘Critias was indeed the most rapacious, the most violent and the most murderous of all those who were part of the oligarchy.’ In the ancient tradition, Critias is a man systematically described in superlatives. The ancient sources readily depict him as an extremist oligarch, a misguided disciple of Socrates, oblivious to the lessons of his former master. Incomparable Critias? This superlative representation deserves to be deconstructed. Not in order to rehabilitate his tarnished memory but because the man is a convenient bogeyman who acts as the singular representative of what was in reality a collective adventure. Not only does his role as leader of the Thirty remain to be proven, but this exclusive focus also tends to obscure the vast chorus that surrounded him: Far from being a lone wolf, Critias was the spokesman or, rather, the coryphaeus of Athenian oligarchs united by common habits and experiences. A poet and a virtuoso musician, Critias even promoted a true choral policy, striving to convince all the Athenians remaining in the city to align to his radical positions. Breaking with the democratic experiment and its multiple and competing choruses, the oligarch sought to create a single, distinctive and hermetic chorus, of which all the members had to dance in unison and where the slightest deviation was mercilessly punished. Better still, in the tumult of the civil war, Critias had a dream: to establish a permanent state of exception in order to forge a new brand of men entirely devoted to the cause of the oligarchy.

This chapter elaborates a contextualized account of Horace’s interests in nature and the nonhuman. It traces the connections in his lyric poetry between the nonhuman environment and various concepts of nature. Drawing on long-standing poetic traditions, as well as developments in Hellenistic philosophy, Horace forges a poetry in which distilled perceptions of the nonhuman world undergird insights into ethical concepts of nature by which humans should live their lives. The chapter finds in this poetics a complex form of nature poetry that usefully complicates that concept within the history of the lyric. In order to write this poetry, Horace authenticates his vatic status through claims about his own special relationship with the nonhuman environment and the gods. Horace’s special connection to the divine allows him to enjoy a privileged relationship with his nonhuman surroundings. And it is because of this status that he can command us with urgency and authority to attend to our environments. Horace represents himself as a supernatural poet of nature, whose literary achievement transcends nature even as it teaches about nature’s limits.

This chapter explores the relationship between the Four Quartets (1936–42) and Eliot’s roughly contemporaneous Greek-inspired verse plays, The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949). The author traces the development of Eliot’s programmatic use of increasingly distant reading, and of his implicit argument for not translating Greek. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale reveal that Eliot deliberately thought about the use of Greek prototypes in the late 1930s, assessing both his own earlier effort with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and other Greek-inspired plays. The author examines the theoretical questions that prompt and frame Eliot’s approach and that tie the plays together with his last great poetic work. She thus outlines major aspects of his late poetics which surprisingly depend on his treatment of Greek materials, showing how they bring to a close his first foray into such materials in the late 1910s/early 1920s. Finally, she suggests that Eliot’s own Herakles character in The Cocktail Party is indebted to H.D.’s portrayal of Freud in Tribute to Freud.

This chapter outlines key developments in effect pedal history since the format’s inception in the 1960s. Centered around fuzz, overdrive, delay, and modulation effects, this chapter considers the technology’s role in how electric guitarists understand tone. Additionally, this chapter details the emergence of more recent playing styles explicitly centered around liberal effect pedal use, especially involving granular or micro loopers. By exploring these various technologies and performance techniques, this chapter suggests that guitar pedals produce not only musical sounds but also knowledge about musical sounds.

Chapter 5 begins with griffins and gorgons, exploring the connections between wondrous objects and hybrids. Gorgons also prompt a discussion of gender and hybridity. This chapter juxtaposes the gorgon and other female demons who threaten mothers and children with the satyr, an exaggerated figure of the man identified by and with his penis. These matched exaggerations, by turns horrific and comic, illustrate the function of the hybrid as a projection of certain human anxieties: what if the man were no more than his erection? What if the woman were as dangerous as she is beautiful? What if a mother devoured her children instead of protecting them? Each caricature exists as a counterpoint to the ordinary men and women encountered in our daily lives, but in recognizing these alternatives the Greeks are also using the contrafactual to ask what exactly it means to be human. For this reason, transformation is a recurring theme in early Greek culture, with a wide range of applications from the stage to ritual initiation. Here too the cosmos is a space of entanglement. If a human shares some characteristic with an animal, does the divine also partake of this mutability?

Philoctetes is the most ethically complex of all Sophocles’ plays. Philoctetes, Odysseus and the background figure of Achilles present various paradigms for the young Neoptolemus, who must decide in the course of the play which, if any, to adopt as his model. Philoctetes and Odysseus are both endowed with established convictions, but Neoptolemus’ moral character is still in the process of formation. Moral argument and choice take on a peculiarly dynamic role in the plot as we see him exposed to the influence of each of the two older men in turn. Odysseus has come to Lemnos to steal Philoctetes’ invincible bow, which, according to the oracle of Helenus, is necessary for Greek success at Troy. But he knows that Philoctetes hates him bitterly (75f.), so his plan requires the cooperation of Neoptolemus. Odysseus characterises the scheme as a joint one (25), but also makes his own controlling role quite clear. Neoptolemus is to serve (15), and to listen while Odysseus explains his plan (24f.).

Until late in the twentieth century, formal analysis of Mozart’s operatic ensembles (chiefly those of the Da Ponte operas) was heavily skewed towards the invocation of instrumental models, and pre-eminently sonata form. Additionally, the pursuit of “absolute correspondence between the unfolding of music, text and stage-action” (Abbate and Parker) came to seem increasingly suspect. The Magic Flute is a Singspiel, rather than an opera buffa, and its ensembles are complicated by the existence of “ensemble characters” (the Three Ladies and Three Boys) who generally function collectively rather than individually. This chapter offers analyses of the Act 1 and 2 quintets and the Three Boys’ Act 2 terzetto, seeking to destabilize readings that appeal to models such as sonata rondo and reading tonal structures closely against libretto structure. Evidence from Mozart’s autograph informs the concluding discussion of vocal scoring in the Act 2 choruses and the final moments of the work.

The Afterword considers the ways the Chorus to Henry V focalizes the temporal and representational resonances of Shakespeare at war, in his own time and across the succeeding centuries.

The second chapter explores the music behind the poetry of Homer, looking at the melodic part of poetry – that is, the part that makes poetry song – in the Iliad, Odyssey, and two Homeric Hymns. It suggests that the early conceptualization of music borrows from the fields of artisanal objects and animal sounds, using these two different kinds of materiality to enact the presence of melody avant la lettre. These modes of conceptualization both place song within the material world, suggesting a presence that can shift and change, but that it will persist by way of such change.

The Chorus in Milton's Samson Agonistes are framed as Milton's friends. In the mold of friendship in this era, they are therefore his peers, his counselors, his advisors, and his allies. They are both companions and neighbours. They also make common cause with Samson in resisting both women, the larger nation of Israel, and especially the Philistines. By showing male friends as creators of a boys-only clubhouse, Milton invokes the local chorographies and regionalism of his day. In making friendship both racist and sexist at its core, Milton also makes his closet drama a tool in exclusive and localized patriarchal networks. Juxtaposed with Thomas Fuller's Worthies of England and Pisgah-Sight of Palestine, Milton's Samson Agonistes is deliberately ungenerous to outsiders or larger loyalties.

The Chorus of the Agamemnon depict death and the afterlife in diverse ways, both in their dramatic role as the Elders of Argos and in their more universal choral songs. This chapter examines the ethical and political values their contradictory references imply, whether any affect their actions as characters, and how each links to other themes in the trilogy. The Elders go further than the Herald by not only treating death as oblivion at some points but even actively wishing death at others. In what way does this seeming escapism, contrasted with their emphasis on a good death as glorious, affect their resistance to the coup d’état? How does their story of returning casualties color the Argive critique of the Trojan War? The choral songs introduce different types of afterlives into the trilogy: in the memory of the living, at the grave, through the psyche that survives after death, in the possibility of resurrection, and even as a realm of punishment for ethical wrongs. The rest of the Oresteia significantly develops many of the Elders’ wide-ranging speculations.

Numerous Elizabethan philosophical and theological treatises deplored the duplicity, waywardness, and treachery of the imagination. Even Spenser participated in this, filling the chamber of Phantastes with freaks, monsters, and dangerous deceptions. Yet in the new commercial playhouses, from the late 1580s onwards, audiences were increasingly exhorted to ‘imagine’ or ‘suppose’, in a type of speech that we can dub the ‘imagine’ chorus. Originally a device to cover time and space in history plays and travel plays, the ‘imagine’ chorus began to be used not only to conjure unseen spectacles in the mind, but also to celebrate the powers of the imagination. This essay argues that it arose from the unprecedented experience of collective imagining in the new playhouses, and produced new thinking about the imagination as a magical and exhilarating creative force, as explored with particular sophistication by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V.