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 considers some aspects of the intertextual and intervisual dynamics of Euripides’ Cyclops with particular reference to the cave represented by the skēnē. The particular links of the Cyclops to Sophocles’ Philoctetes are used to explore a network of allusive possibilities in both plays going back to Homer’s ‘Cave of the Nymphs’ in Odyssey 13 and embracing the lost Philoctetes plays of Aeschylus and Euripides. The powerful mediating role of Homer’s cave is seen to be transferred to the caves of drama as the boundary between the seen and the unseen, between the past, present, and future, and as a strongly suggestive marker of the difference between epic narrative and dramatic representation. As the Homeric cave had separate entrances for mortals and gods, so did the Athenian stage. In exploring some of the richness of ‘intertextual allusion’ in fifth-century drama, the chapter also contributes to the appreciation of the differences in allusive practice between tragedy, comedy, and satyr play and of how poets acknowledged and exploited those differences.