De Gruyter (2017) h/b 198pp £81.99 (ISBN 9783110561166)
This book presents the evidence for the ways in which Greek tragedy, from its invention in Athens, spread across, and became embedded throughout, the Greek world in the fifth and fourth centuries. L. focuses on reperformance—plays (at least those which were thought any good) were not put on once and then forgotten, but repeatedly performed, eventually becoming a ‘canon’—and sets it in the context of ‘cultural mobility’ (as people travelled, the ideas went with them); she claims this as a new approach.
According to L, scholars used to think that plays were always once-only performances up to 386 BC, when a stone inscription carries the first record that an old play (a palaion drama) was included in the City Dionysia; she argues, convincingly, from the circumstantial evidence that this belief was wrong, and that plays were being reperformed, including elsewhere in the Greek world, from the time of Aeschylus onwards.
The book’s argument is structured in four parts. First, there is the evidence of travelling by poets and other men of ideas both away from and to Athens, especially the trips of Aeschylus and Euripides to Sicily and of Euripides to Macedon. If the Vita Aeschyli is right, Aeschylus directed a reperformance of the Persians there at the court of Hieron I, as well as writing a play based in Sicily, the Aetnaeae, and died there during his second visit, giving rise to a hero cult which used his tomb for tragic performances; Thucydides tells how Sicilians helped Athenian prisoners and escapees after 415 if they were able to quote passages from Euripides.
The second section looks at the political use that could be made of travelling actors and performances and how this probably encouraged the reperformance of ‘old’ plays, quoting Aristophanes, Pericles’ sponsorship of the Persians, the politics of the choregiae, the private performances arranged by Philip and Alexander in Macedon, etc.; certain actors (Satyrus, Neoptolemus) were clearly able to wield effective diplomatic ‘soft power’ in Philip’s court.
Thirdly, L. explores farther the travelling of actors, and how, from the second half of the fifth century, they were able to make an increasingly good living (just as modern pop stars do); in this context she discusses the important question of the texts they used and to what extent they were altered by actors, perhaps to fit different audiences. That this happened is clear from the attempt of one Lycurgus (according to Plutarch) to have standardised copies agreed and kept officially by the polis. The evidence suggests that textual alterations may mostly have been due to ancient scholarly commentators rather than the actors themselves.
Finally, L. presents the evidence from vase painting, which often shows knowledge of the plays and, in a few cases, named portraits of the actors and others concerned with the production; the examples quoted, some of which are from Sicily, are shown in plates at the end (a small gripe here: better quality photos, showing the name ‘tags’ of the characters, would have been helpful).
This is a scholarly account with a full complement of notes, references and bibliography. References quoted in the text are given in the original Greek as well as in translation. Altogether it is a thorough piece of work and the case made is highly plausible. Unfortunately, as so often with classical studies, the evidence is scantier than one would wish and much of the interpretation inevitably hypothetical, so that the text is littered with ‘could be’s’, ‘might have’s’ and ‘may have been’s’ etc. But that is of course not L.’s fault, and one is left with a strong feeling that the true picture was probably much as she supposes.
Colin McDonald