THE WRITINGS

Both written and archaeological sources concerning the Greek theatre are generally well known. Ronald Vince has discussed them at some length in Ancient and Medieval Theatre; more recently, Eric Csapo and William J. Slater have covered much the same body of material in The Context of Ancient Drama. It may then seem redundant to chew over the same information …, but one has only to compare the readings by Vince with those of Csapo and Slater to see that each researcher places his own emphasis and interpretation on what is essentially the same body of material. Since my conclusions are based largely upon differing interpretation of the evidence, I hope that I may be forgiven for retracing the admirable work done by the above authors.

There has long been a tendency to enshrine the sketchy and often inaccurate Greek theatre testimonials that survive to the present age. Snippets of information gathered from hither and yon have been bundled together under the assumption that all “ancient” materials possessed equal degrees of reliability and authenticity. But, as Oliver Taplin writes, there is still a tendency “to regard any information written in Ancient Greek (or Latin) as above criticism.”¹ Thus, the library-bound scholars who wrote The Suda some fourteen centuries after the premiere performances of the surviving plays have often been accorded much the same degree of credence as verifiable evidence dating from the Classic period. Fortunately, this unquestioning acceptance of words on the page or scroll has diminished as archaeological evidence assumes greater importance.

This [essay] looks at the limitations of written materials available to the researcher. The virtues and shortcomings of these documents are examined, with a few warning signs posted along the pathway leading to a reconsideration of Greek theatre in the fifth century.

THE PLAYS

MANY SCRIPTS, BUT ONLY A FEW SURVIVE

By the middle of the fourth century, Athens and possibly all of Greece must have been awash with playscripts. A single festival, Athens' Great Dionysia, presented at least fifteen new scripts each year, none of which received second performances at the festival until well into the fourth century (and then only the plays of Aeschylus). Assuming that these contests were held annually for a hundred years (as they certainly were), 900 tragedies, 300 satyr plays, and more than 300 comedies would have been presented, making a total of 1,500 original scripts written in the course of one century for that single festival. Three or even four other festivals in Athens, the Anthesteria, Lenaia, Rural Dionysia, and possibly the Panathenaia, also presented plays, presumably using different scripts than those of the Dionysia.

Other city-states may have had playwrights creating still more scripts. Roughly two hundred known theatre sites have been uncovered, but while stone records (didaskalia) offer confirmation of theatrical performances for some, there is no firm evidence that the majority were used for play production; theatron means “a seeing place,” but exactly what events were seen is uncertain. Nevertheless, the presentation of plays, new or old, in these “theatres” may be reckoned a firm possibility.

There would have been at least a few original scripts written to please the local populace. Such cultural centers as Syracuse needed to fill part of their dramatic diet with plays focusing on their particular hopes and aspirations, rather than staging a steady run of plays celebrating Athens' triumph over the Persians and comedies roasting Athenian politicians and generals.² An active production program outside Athens would have produced a further abundance of scripts: if any extended extrapolation is attempted from the one-century total of scripts presented at the City Dionysia, the figure becomes mind-dizzying.

Writing was prized, and many of these plays would have been preserved—at least for a while. One ruler of Pergamum decreed that all the writings in his kingdom be requisitioned for his personal library, and the fabled library at Alexandria contained, by James Diggle's estimate, “100,000 or so volumes.”³ But with a decline in learning, papyrus scrolls lost their value; some were used as mummy wrappings, and others may have served to start the morning cooking fires.

THE SURVIVING PLAYS

A total of forty-four complete plays and some fragments have survived the perilous journey through the millennia. This represents less than 3 percent of the 1,500 scripts presumed to have been composed during one century for the City Dionysia.⁴ Moreover, these surviving scripts, chosen more for literary than theatrical values, offer a distorted view of typical Athenian dramatic fare.

THE TRAGEDIES

The majority of surviving tragedies are “school” plays used in the teaching of Greek, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean. In terms of numbers, the school plays are a fairly balanced selection from the Hallowed Three: seven plays each by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and nine (of the seventeen surviving scripts) by Euripides. These particular plays were chosen by Byzantine scholars on the basis of their literary qualities, not their stage-worthiness. Here, as elsewhere in history, the entertainment appetites of the populace and the literary/dramatic tastes of the cognoscenti differ considerably. Consider Medea, for example: although part of a last-place entry in the City Dionysia, the tragedy has been preserved in the school plays—while not one of the six tragedies from the winning and second-place tetralogies has survived. If a sequence of prize-winning scripts from even one year of the Dionysia had been preserved, some light would be shed upon the theatrical tastes of fifth-century audiences—assuming that the judges (we know little of their qualifications beyond being male and being Athenian citizens) usually expressed the sentiments of the audiences. Lacking a volume of Prize-Winning Plays, we can only wonder whether the Byzantine scholars paid any attention to the entertainment preferences of the Athenian citizenry and/or its judges when making their selections.

Of much greater value in the study of Athenian popular entertainment is a group of tragedies that were not chosen for literary merit. These are ten plays by Euripides which, judging from their alphabetical arrangement by title, comprised part of The Complete Plays of Euripides. “This is of great importance since the plays are not selected, but a fair sample of Euripides' work,” according to Donald William Lucas.⁵

These plays are part of an Alexandrian papyrus edition of Euripides, the titles ranging from epsilon to kappa. Six other plays of Euripides, known only by title, are missing from this alphabetical sequence, but their absence does not indicate that a selection process excluded them. According to Bruno Snell, one play, Thersites, was lost before the Alexandrian edition, and the other five were copied on a single papyrus roll that has vanished.⁶The Bacchae, since its title begins with beta, is clearly not part of the epsilon to kappa grouping, but neither is it part of the school play selection. The course of preservation for this tragedy remains unclear; G. Zuntz calls it “the riddle of The Bacchae.”⁷

While not totally indicative of typical Athenian theatre fare, the scripts from the alphabetical sequence do provide at least a valid sampling of Euripides' theatrical output, rather than a later selection of his “masterpieces.” They are definitely not a collection of Best Plays: Cyclops is a satyr play, the only complete one in existence; two others, Ion and Helen, would be classified as comedies in the modern if not the ancient sense of the word.⁸Elektra conforms somewhat to the Aristotelian preference for an unhappy ending, but despite the guilt that Orestes experiences after killing his mother, a reasonably cheerful postscript finds the young man embarking on a clearly defined pathway to expiation, while Elektra is given a suitable husband and a promising future. Iphigenia at Aulis has a suitably unhappy ending only if the play is allowed to conclude with the probably spurious ending which has Iphigenia lying dead upon the altar; the more probable melodramatic conclusion has Artemis substituting a deer for the young virgin just as the sacrificial knife begins its downward course. Only one play from this group, Hekuba, has a single protagonist whose fortune worsens in the course of the play. Not surprisingly, this play, with a plot that Aristotle would have sanctioned, is the only one of the alphabetical listing that was also chosen for the Byzantine school selection. (Apparently, the later scholars were willing to ignore Aristotle's dictum that women and slaves were not suitable subjects for tragedy.)

The remaining five plays in this volume are literarily flawed, changing characters and plot lines between the first half of the play and the second. They are broken-backed, lacking the “spine” that unifies the better-regarded tragedies. These “shockers,” to use Richmond Lattimore's designation,⁹ are laden with sensational events: Herakles arranges his own funeral pyre after his devoted wife kills herself because she has inadvertently poisoned him; the many fatherless children of the Suppliant Women keen their sorrows as a distraught Evadne prepares to hurl herself onto her husband's funeral pyre; the Taurian Iphigenia is tearfully reunited with her brother only after first preparing to kill both him and his companion; in Herakleidae, Makaria eagerly allows her virgin blood to be spilled for no very good reason, a doddering old Iolaus is led into battle on the arm of an attendant, and Herakles' mother positively salivates over details of the forthcoming execution of her persecutor. Most sensational of all is Hekuba, with ghosts, virgin sacrifice, eye gouging, and an ending prediction that the former queen of Troy will “climb the masthead” of Ulysses' vessel, be “changed to a dog, a bitch with flaming eyes,” and plunge to her death.¹⁰

These plays are among the literary discards, seldom making the assigned reading lists of literature classes. However, as a sampling of Euripides' total output, they reflect the typical theatre fare of fifth-century Athens more accurately than do the more literarily meritorious plays chosen by the Byzantines.

THE COMEDIES

Judgments about Greek comedy are based largely upon the eleven scripts and fragments of Aristophanes—plus a few scraps from other comic playwrights. The remarkably scanty and obviously unbalanced selection of comic playwrights has not prevented the following unproven assumptions from assuming gospel dimensions: (1) Aristophanes' scripts are typical of Old Comedy; (2) Aristophanes was the best of fifth-century comic playwrights; according to Mary R. Lefkowitz, “The idea that Aristophanes was not only a better poet, but more elegant and less crude than his predecessors and contemporaries comes from Aristophanes' own parabaseis”;¹¹ (3) of the forty plays that Aristophanes is known to have presented on the Athenian stage, the extant eleven are (choose one or more from the following) his funniest, most typical, best reading, and/or most producible. As with the tragedies, some of these comedies are known to have failed as contest entries, in either the Dionysian or Lenaian festivals, and modern critics frequently disagree with the Athenian judges' ranking of the surviving scripts. Eugene O'Neill, Jr., felt that “the victory of The Knights, like the failure of The Birds a decade later, clearly demonstrates the whimsical instability and the dubious value of the vulgar taste.”¹² The place that Aristophanes' surviving comedies occupied in the theatre of his day must, like that of the tragedies, remain a matter for speculation. All that can be said with certainty is that the preserved comedies were popular with literary scholars of later ages.

THE SATYR PLAYS

The surviving one and a half satyr plays add a very important detail to the study of Greek popular entertainment: no matter how weighty, somber, and depressing the tragedies might have been, everyone departed for home in a cheerful frame of mind, having laughed uproariously at a slapstick travesty involving misdeeds of the gods and other mythic figures.¹³ The Greeks were apparently not prepared to retire to their homes burdened with feelings of pity and awe; they wanted the day to end with laughter.

Ending a serious entertainment with a bit of fluff has long been common theatre practice; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a short farce or comic opera regularly followed presentation of a Shakespearean tragedy.¹⁴ Laurence Olivier, not wishing his audiences to depart in a gloomy mood after his tragic performance of Oedipus, concluded the evening by appearing as Mr. Puff, in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Critic, a twin bill that became known as Oedipuff. Audiences, whether ancient or modern, do not enjoy departing the theatre carrying a heavy emotional burden. It should be noted also that many of the surviving tragedies have happy endings, and some were downright comedies …. The Dionysia was, after all, a joyous holiday, not a Greek version of Lent, Yom Kippur, or Ramadan.

THE PLAYS AS A SOURCE FOR STAGING DETAILS

The tragedies provide remarkably few particulars about dramatic production. There is no mention of settings, costumes, blocking (stage positions and movement of actors), or character descriptions—not even notations of entrances and exits. There is no punctuation, no division between words, and usually no indication of which character speaks a particular line. The imagination of the translator must be relied upon to supply descriptions of the settings, costumes, masks, and stage business. The translator is also left with the task of rationalizing the corruptions and inconsistencies that have crept into the scripts over two millennia.¹⁵

There are a few reasonably certain aspects of staging that can be gleaned from the tragedies: (1) a tabulation of roles verifies the statement of Aristotle and others that the number of actors assigned to a tetralogy was limited to three … ; (2) the near-total absence of onstage fights and killings, a stock-in-trade of later dramatists, indicates with reasonable certainty that there existed a rule forbidding onstage violence; (3) an offstage area probably existed, since the three actors needed to enter and exit, if for no other reason than to change costumes; (4) at least one practical open-and-close door was a necessity, but its location cannot be determined from the scripts.

Aside from these general requirements, there are some specific needs for individual plays. Some examples: the Watchman in Agamemnon is usually assumed to be stationed above the orchestra;¹⁶ a minimum of one chariot is necessary for Agamemnon's triumphant homecoming; Orestes must leave a lock of his hair on a tomb or altar; Medea needs some device, presumably wheeled, to carry off her dead children; Philoktetes requires a cavelike opening for his residence; Euripides' lines specify that Elektra live in a rude shepherd's hut, that her hair be unkempt and greasy, and that she wear garments of ragged and dirty homespun. A few other necessaries can be found in the tragic scripts, but they fall far short of justifying the elaborate scenic embellishments supplied by most modern translators. Such descriptions may add to the reading pleasure of the scripts, but one should keep in mind that they are modern additions.

The comedies suffer from the same lack of stage directions and visual descriptions as tragedies and satyr plays. But, unlike the long-ago-and-far-away environment of most tragedies, the comedies were concerned with contemporary events. Aristophanes' plays constitute a gold mine of detail for the historian, furnishing information on costuming, machinery, tragic playwrights, and acting. They also tell us what Athenians ate and drank, something of their digestive processes, their clothing, their couplings, their attitudes toward the gods, women, foreigners, and each other. If one defines realism as Kleinmalerei, the creation of a picture from many little details, comedy is much more realistic than tragedy.

The travestied use of tragic machinery for comic purposes provides a clearer picture of tragic staging than the tragedies themselves. Agathon, pictured as a transvestite playwright, is wheeled out on what must have been the near-fabled ekkyklema, a device widely hypothesized as a means for revealing the bodies of those slain offstage in the tragedies. Similarly, the mechane, apparently utilized by Euripides for ascents and descents of the gods in his tragedies, finds clear applications in the comedies: Socrates, in The Clouds, is suspended above ordinary mortals in some kind of flying device; in Peace, Trygaeus journeys through the heavens on the back of a gigantic dung beetle; in The Birds, Iris probably “flies” on and offstage; and Perseus may fly in Thesmophoriazusae.

The door suggested by the tragedies is an absolute necessity in such comedies as The Wasps, where Philokleon must be barricaded inside his house. Details of tragic costuming come from the comedies: in The Acharnians, the actors provide a cataloguing of the many tattered, disreputable costumes worn by Euripidean heroes—implying that other tragedies used a more dignified kind of attire.

WRITINGS ABOUT THEATRE

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle remains an essential primary source, not only because he is the sole surviving commentator on the drama from the Classic Age, but also because he possessed considerable powers of observation and analysis. However, three caveats should be considered when using his writings as source material: (1) although a member in good standing of that hallowed group known as “the Ancients,” Aristotle lived at some chronological distance from the events about which he wrote—The Poetics is no closer to the origin of tragedy than are present writings to the beginnings of American Colonial theatre; (2) there are questions about the authenticity and accuracy of the manuscripts, and The Poetics may be Aristotle's lecture notes, jottings by one of his students, or even the writings of someone else; (3) Aristotle's bent is essentially literary, not theatrical.

The last point needs elaboration. Henry Arthur Jones, a turn-of-the-century British playwright with literary aspirations, saw the written drama and the producing theatre as two constantly warring factions:

The drama and the theater are so often antagonistic to each other; they so often differ, if not in their body and essence, yet in their interests and aims, that we should always be careful to distinguish between them. Much of our confusion of thought in matters dramatic and theatrical arises from our constant habit of using the words drama and theater as if they were always interchangeable terms. … I have often said that the greatest enemy of the English drama is the English theater.¹⁷

Aristotle would have agreed with Mr. Jones, for both belong to that group of critics, commentators, and writers who have slight regard for the process of play production or for the persons engaged in its practice: to coin a word, they may be described as “dramateurs,”¹⁸ individuals who hold in high regard only the literary aspects of the theatre.

This emphasis upon the literary values of the plays is changing. Recently, J. R. Green wrote that he was

attempting to discover something of the audience's view of the theatre and the reader can, if he or she likes, contrast it with the view of the literary scholars which has the text as its central focus. For scholars approaching ancient drama from that angle, the poet's creativity is the important thing, and although scholars nowadays take some account of the performance aspects of the texts, in the history of scholarship it has traditionally meant study of the texts and appreciation of its literary value almost regardless of whether it was ever performed.¹⁹

Plato, Aristotle's teacher at the Academy and forty-five years his senior, undoubtedly nourished his pupil's disdain for the theatre. While pupil and teacher differed in their attitude toward the dramatist, neither showed much regard for the actor. While Plato treated playwrights such as Euripides and Agathon with respect, he banned actors from his Republic. Ion, a rhapsode (reciter of Homer), is the closest to an actor encountered in Plato's writings, and he is introduced only as a buffoonish straw man for Socrates to demolish. According to Jonas Barish,

The actual theater, as known to Plato and practiced by his contemporaries, can in the last analysis be allowed no virtue. It has corrupted society, and it continues to symbolize the evils which have led to Athens' downfall. And Plato's hostility toward it is destined to become the cornerstone of an anti-theatrical edifice that is only now, after two and a half millennia, finally crumbling.²⁰

Aristotle, as Plato's disciple, shows a comparable aversion to theatre folk. “Why,” he asks rhetorically, “are Dionysiac artists generally bad characters? Is it because they have least share in the theory of wisdom since most of their life is spent in arts which they practice for a living, and because so much of their life is spent in incontinence and some in dire straits?”²¹ In The Poetics, he quotes an argument advanced by the Peloponnesian Dorians that “their word for the outlying hamlets is coma, whereas the Athenians call them demes—thus assuming that comedians got the name not from their coma or revels, but from their strolling from hamlet to hamlet, lack of appreciation keeping them out of the city” (emphasis added).²²

Aristotle's “spectacle” was the major element of theatre that kept 14,000 Athenian spectators in their seats. Comprised of all the visual elements of performance, spectacle makes theatre different from other art forms; nevertheless, Aristotle had little use for spectacle, calling it “the least artistic of all the parts [of tragedy], having the least to do with the art of poetry.” With an apparent sneer he adds that “the getting-up of the spectacle is more a matter for the costumer than the poet.” He then proceeds to drive the final nail into the coffin of producing theatre: “The tragic effect is quite possible without a public performance and actors.”²³ This hallmark sentiment of the dramateur is echoed down the centuries by such literary critics as Samuel Johnson, who wrote that “a play read affects the mind like a play acted.”²⁴ T. S. Eliot, himself an occasional playwright, found that the stage actually interfered with his enjoyment of the drama: “I know that I rebel against most performances of Shakespeare's plays because I want a direct relationship between the work of art and myself.”²⁵

DEMOSTHENES AND OTHER ORATORS

Contemporary with Aristotle are the writings of fourth-century orators, valuable but often neglected sources. Disapproval is always couched in more concrete terms than praise, and while references to theatre are mostly tangential, these quarrelsome “lawyers” tend to be quite specific in making their points. Aeschines, for example, supplies a scrap of information about audience arrangements when he speaks disapprovingly of “cushioned seats of honor” being reserved for Philip's Makedonian ambassadors.²⁶

Demosthenes' orations are of special interest because he was once involved with theatrical performance as sponsor/producer (choregos) of his tribe's entry in the dithyrambic competitions. (His birth and death dates, incidentally, coincide exactly with those of Aristotle.) Demosthenes seems to have spent the greater portion of his public life fighting with one person or another about the details of specific events, with the result that his comments about staging, audiences, festival arrangements, actors, musicians, and the stresses of competition supply often-missing details of theatre production.

VITRUVIUS AND POLLUX: SOURCES OF MISINFORMATION

The theatrical writings of Vitruvius (first century bce) and Pollux (second century ce) should carry this label: “Warning! Take with extreme caution: grievous error may result from misuse.” Vitruvius' often-parroted mis-statement about the evils of a southern orientation for theatres … is a glaring example. These writers show neither any particular affinity for the theatre nor informed knowledge of how it operated. Both wrote at least as far removed in time from Classical Greece as are present-day scholars from the theatre of Shakespeare—and with much less source material to draw upon. Both are inclined to dogmatic and unsubstantiated pronouncements.

Vitruvius was a Roman architect and military engineer who lived during the first century bce. He is known mainly from De Architectura, the only surviving work on ancient architecture and engineering; part of this was his own writing, but he also drew upon other sources. The rediscovery of his writings during the Italian Renaissance resulted in a reactivation of the long-unused system of Roman aqueducts, lending substantial authority to his writings.

Pollux, a lexicographer, was born in Egypt and resided in Athens for most of his life; he held a chair of rhetoric there sometime after 178 ce. Certainly he had the advantage of being able to consult materials no longer available; but in evaluating his writings, some consideration should be given to the corruption introduced by later writers: the extant manuscripts “are derived from four incomplete, abridged, and interpolated copies from an early epitome possessed (and interpolated) by Arethas, archbishop of Caesarea, c. a.d. 900.”²⁷

These authors still maintain membership in the exclusive Ancients Club, that group of writers from the past whose words are often treated as Holy Writ. Increasingly, however, the dicta contained in Vitruvius' De Architectura and Pollux's Onomasticon are viewed with skepticism. Researchers nowadays have grown a little gun-shy about citing the writings of the Roman architect and the late-Greek lexicographer; there is a tendency to take more of a cafeteria approach with these “authorities,” picking and choosing what does and does not represent “truth.” Selections from this ancient cafeteria seem currently based upon the following three factors.

1. Vitruvius and Pollux are cited where a minimum of confirming archaeological evidence has been uncovered. Thus, only two verifiable sets of “Charon's steps” ascending from underground to the orchestra level, one at Eretria and the other recently uncovered in the fourth-century theatre at Argos, have been offered as “proof” that Pollux was correct in making these steps a standard feature of Greek theatres rather than occasional oddities. Reasoning from Pollux, early scholarship misinterpreted storm drains at Sikyon and Segesta as examples of Charon's steps. There are indications of two below-grade stepped entrances into the orchestra at Corinth, but their nature and purposes are not clear; the Theatre of Dionysos shows no evidence of a man-sized tunnel in the bedrock lying just beneath the orchestra.

2. Statements of Vitruvius and Pollux have sometimes been adopted without reflection. For example, Vitruvius' injunction against south-facing theatres has been frequently cited without checking to see whether this statement had a basis in fact.…

3. Their pronouncements are invoked when they agree with what researchers regard as sound theatrical practice. “Common sense” demands an Up Center (UC) entrance into the acting area, but there is no archaeological evidence to confirm this.…

OTHER WRITERS

An assortment of authors from the past recorded occasional comments on plays, performances, actors, and audiences. Athenaeus (second or third century ce) is probably the most useful of these. His The Learned Banquet (Deipnosophists), is the multivolume account of a symposium-style dinner which lasted several days. In this work, educated participants engage in a leisurely discussion of life, love, literature, politics, social customs—and the theatre. Included are excerpts from historians, poets, and playwrights of times past, many unknown outside the pages of this work. The author seems to have had no axe to grind, so these rambling conversations supply apparently unbiased theatrical detail.

Mention must be made of “The Scholiast,” the collective name for a group of scholars from various ages who deposited marginalia upon the preserved manuscripts. These library-bound scholars lacked an understanding of the working theatre. Their scribbled comments concern mainly textual matters; while of interest in solving problems of exegesis, these annotations provide little enlightenment for anyone investigating problems of theatrical production.

The Suda or Suidas should also be mentioned, as this work is often included among the works of the Ancients. This monkish lexicon-encyclopedia was compiled at the end of the first millennium of the Common Era. The few theatrical references contained therein should be treated as more fantasy than fact.

Further sources of misinformation are the Vitae, very brief biographies of the playwrights; they are of uncertain antiquity and disputed authorship. Lefkowitz has done a rather complete job of showing that most of the material contained in these Lives is based upon inferences drawn either from the plays themselves or from an enshrinement of the caricatures contained in the comedies.²⁸ The cautionary label affixed to the theatrical writings of Pollux and Vitruvius should also be applied to the Vitae.

CONCLUSION

Many so-called truths about the Greek theatre have been created by over-reliance on questionable evidence. Too often contradictory testimony has been disregarded, particularly when it conflicted with established dogma. Written evidence about the Greek theatre should be treated with a degree of skepticism, keeping in mind the prejudices, limitations of viewpoint, and chronological distance of the authors from their subject—as well as the sometimes dubious authenticity of the evidence. Many opinions of present-day writers are tempered by nineteenth-century classicists who felt that one of their major tasks was to refute any evidence conflicting with the recorded views of any member of the Ancients Club.

Notes

1. Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, 436.

2. The course of Athenian drama may have been affected by other city-states: Epicharmus of Syracuse is sometimes regarded as the father of Old Comedy.

3. James Diggle, Euripides, 45.

4. Most of the surviving scripts were first performed at the City Dionysia, although some of the comedies are from the Lenaia. There is the general presumption that all of the plays received productions in Athens, but this is not wholly verifiable; Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis may have been first produced at the court of Archelaus in Makedonia.

5. Donald William Lucas, “Euripides,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1970).

6. Bruno Snell, “Zwei Töpfe mit Euripides Papyri,” Hermes 70 (1935): 119-120. The other missing five plays from this sequence are Theseus, Thyestes, Ino, and two Hippolytus plays.

7. G. Zuntz, An Inquiry into the Transmission of the Plays of Euripides, 110.

8. See Bernard Knox, “Euripidean Comedy,” in Word and Action, 250-274.

9. Richmond Lattimore, ed., The Complete Greek Tragedies, Euripides I, v.

10. 1261-1263; William Arrowsmith translation.

11. Mary R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets, 105-106.

12. Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr., eds., The Complete Greek Drama, 2:480.

13. Euripides' semicomic Alkestis was substituted at one contest for the prescribed satyr play. While its grave-humor is less farcial than either Cyclops or the partially preserved Trackers, the inclusion of a drunken god (Herakles) guaranteed that the audience would be laughing, even if not as heartily as they usually did at the buffoonish choruses of ithyphallic satyrs.

14. The practice is probably much older; an attempt to provide a light afterpiece in 1599 is recorded by Thomas Platter, a Swiss traveler to London. He wrote that after a performance of Julius Caesar, the actors “danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men's and two in women's apparel” (Ernest Schanzer, “Thomas Platter's Observations on the Elizabethan Stage,” Notes and Queries [November 1956]: 465). Schanzer argues that the entire company performed in a “Longs for four” country-dance (466).

15. Most of these “improvements” were added to the plays in the century immediately following their composition. They resulted from tinkerings by scribes and scholars and from actors seeking to fatten their roles. As copies were made from copies, there were also simple errors in transcription. See Denys L. Page, Actors' Interpolations in Greek Tragedy.

16. See Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, 276-279.

17. Henry Arthur Jones, “Introduction to Brunetière's ‘Law of the Drama,’” in Barrett H. Clark, ed., European Theories of the Drama, rev. ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1947), 460.

18. See Clifford Ashby, “The Playwright and the ‘Dramateur,’” Dramatists Guild Quarterly (Winter, 1998): 14-20.

19. J. R. Green, Theatre in Ancient Greek Society, xii.

20. Jonas Barish, The Anti-theatrical Prejudice, 28.

21. Aristotle, Physical Problems, 956b11-15. Questions have arisen about Aristotle's authorship of this work, but the antitheatrical sentiments expressed are consonant with his other writings.

22. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448a35-1448b1.

23. Ibid., 1450b17-29.

24. Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare,” in Clark, European Theories of the Drama, 189.

25. Quoted in Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action, 172.

26. Aeschines, “On the Embassy,” 111.

27. Oxford Classical Dictionary (2nd ed.), s.v. Pollux.

28. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets. Appendices include translations of the Vitae.