SOURCE: Arnott, Peter D. “Character and Continuity.” In Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre, pp. 162-92. London: Routledge, 1989.

[In the following essay, Arnott contends that, because actors played multiple roles in the same production, some continuity in Greek theater was provided by the mask and costume, but that any given dramatic situation was meant to be taken essentially in isolation.]

We have suggested that, far from providing the rigid format that the neo-classicists attributed to it, the Greek theatre furnished an ambience that was infinitely flexible. In this imaginative world, the normal laws of time and space were suspended. Both were controlled by the wit of the dramatist.

To a large extent, this free-floating environment conditions plots that are themselves flexible, and can reshape themselves at will, no less than the setting does. We see this most conspicuously in comedy, which does not even have the parameters of a known story to act as a controlling factor. In Aristophanes, the plot may change direction without warning. The first half of The Frogs is built on Dionysus' passionate desire to resurrect Euripides. This motivates his journey to the Underworld, and carries him through many hazards to the gates of Hades. Only Euripides will do. He has no time for any other dramatist.

This takes us through to the parabasis. But when the principal characters reappear, the plot has radically changed direction. We are informed that Aeschylus and Euripides intend to hold a trial in the Underworld, to determine which is the better playwright. Dionysus has agreed to resurrect the victor. No reason is given for this sudden change of mind. It simply happens. The god who was so passionately devoted to Euripides gives the honour to his rival, and dismisses the younger playwright with a flippant quotation from his own works.

A similarly arbitrary change appears in The Birds. This comedy begins with two old Athenians on their way to Birdland; they persuade the birds to build a wall, and starve the gods into submission by cutting off the scent of sacrifices. The scheme works; Prometheus, himself a notorious opponent of the gods, announces that a divine embassy is on its way to treat for peace. Out of the blue, a new element is introduced. Not only must Pisthetairus, the proponent of the plot, take over Zeus' sceptre; he must also marry Sovereignty, Zeus' daughter. The introduction of this figure is unprepared for; it brings a new theme to the comedy when the play is almost over, prompting some scholars to suggest that the marriage element belongs not to drama but to ritual.

Other plays of Aristophanes behave in a similarly disjointed fashion. Scenes follow scenes at random, without logic, almost by free association. It was this apparently unclassical regard for form and structure that condemned Aristophanes to obscurity for centuries. While the influence of Greek tragedy was enormous, the comic writer had few imitators. His work could only be appreciated when a context of humour was provided which made his writing viable again.

This did not occur until the middle of the twentieth century, and coincided, significantly, with the rise of the electronic media. Radio comedy broke away from the literary script to provide a surreal world in which humour defies space, time, and logic. All things are subordinated to the immediate joke, the immediate moment. A context created by suggestion and allusion may change at will. The world of the classic radio scripts—of Fred Allen, of Tommy Handley, of the Goon Show—is very close to that of Aristophanes. Its emergence caused a reappraisal of humour, broke away from the circumstantial, literary anecdote of the nineteenth century, and enabled an ancient dramatist to be rediscovered. The Marx Brothers performed the same function in film: their anarchic mélange of parody, satire, and sight-gags, interwoven with direct addresses to the audience, recaptures the spirit of Aristophanes at his most potent, and reveals the same basic characteristic: the sacrifice of consistency of plot to the humour of the immediate moment.

In Greek tragedy the inconsistencies are less apparent, because the story acts as a controlling factor. Drawn from the publica materies of myth and legend, it is not the dramatist's invention; it brings its own logic with it. Even here, however, the liberating ambience of the Greek theatre makes departures from strict logic possible. As in comedy, the plot may change direction without warning. We have already seen this in the tragedies that critics label diptychal: plays which do not proceed as a linear narrative but instead embody two actions, two points of view, intended to be matched against each other with a point made by the contrast. Medea proceeds to its mid-point, stops, and goes backwards; Hecuba offers two distinct stories built around the same protagonist. Even in plays which do proceed by linear narrative, we find loose ends, unanswered questions, gaps of logic, sudden jumps from one scene to another. In Oedipus the King, why has Oedipus, apparently, never heard how Laius met his death until the play opens? And why, later in the action, do Jocasta and Oedipus not realize that each is telling substantially the same story? In Antigone, how has the heroine heard the edict about Polyneices' death before the play opens, when everything in the play assures us that the decision has been kept secret?

These things are not problems; or, rather, they are only problems if we let them be. They are problems only if we let ourselves believe that Antigone was written not by Sophocles but by Ibsen: that is, placed in a simulacrum of the actual world, and governed by the logic of that world. Greek tragedy does not work that way. Freed from such constraints by an anonymous environment, it tends to work from moment to moment, from scene to scene. The immediate dramatic point is all-important, and one scene need not necessarily cohere, in every detail, with the next. The details may adjust themselves for greater cogency. A fact important in one section of the play may vanish from consideration in the next. The facts, like the imagined setting, are fluid and flexible.

By the conditions of their art and training, Greek actors contributed to this conception of a play as a series of individual moments. Some of the other features of the Greek performance that we have studied can easily be paralleled from other cultures. The free-flowing use of time and space characterizes the Elizabethan public playhouse also. Antony and Cleopatra carries its action across the ancient world of the Mediterranean, and Doctor Faustus tells a tale of twenty-four years. But on the Elizabethan stage, the characters provided continuity. The personality of Lear bestrode his play; although, in the mind's eye, the setting changed from England to Scotland, from blasted heath to Dunsinane, the consistent and coherently developing characters of Macbeth and his lady gave continuity and progression to the drama. It seems unlikely that this was true for the Greeks, or that Oedipus, for example, was regarded as a three-dimensional and fully integrated character in the way that we think of Hamlet.

Several considerations suggest that the Greek approach to characterization was quite different. First, there were the mechanics of casting. Our theatre recognizes doubling and tripling of roles, but for specific reasons. Sometimes this is done to display an actor's virtuosity: Louis Jouvet, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, have shown themselves masters at this. More often, it arises from necessity: too many roles for too few actors. It has been wisely said that the minor lords in Shakespeare's historical plays address one another with such scrupulous exactitude of title because the audience had already seen the same actors in three or four other roles already, and might be confused. In either case, however, the normal rule is one actor, one role.

For the Greeks, however, doubling was a way of life. With only three actors, at most, to portray a much larger cast of characters, it was normal for them to appear in several parts throughout the play. Nor need these parts be sequential. Antigone provides a good example. The prologue is played by Antigone (actor A) and Ismene (actor B). Both exeunt. After the parodos Creon enters, probably played by actor C. He makes his inaugural address. Then the Guard enters, to report the burial of the body. Who plays the Guard? Creon (C) is still on stage; it must be therefore A or B. Assuming that it was desirable to keep the same actor as Antigone throughout (though this is by no means certain), the Guard must be played by B, who previously played Ismene. Creon and Guard exeunt; there is another chorus; and Guard, B, enters with the captured Antigone, A. Enter Creon to interrogate her; the Guard is dismissed, and Ismene is summoned—B again, presumably, as A and C are still on stage. On this analysis, actor B turns out to be very busy indeed, alternating two quite different roles with minimal time for costume changes. Other permutations are possible, but each requires a similar versatility.

It seems likely that this doubling may at times have had a thematic relevance. In the first half of The Madness of Heracles, the hero saves his family from the tyrant Lycus. In the second half, he murders them himself. By a callous and arbitrary switch of fortune, the saviour has become the oppressor. It can hardly be accidental that, in the easiest and most probable role division, the parts of Heracles and Lycus must have been played by the same actor. (They never meet on stage: Heracles goes in to confront the tyrant, and we never see them face to face.) Similarly, in The Bacchae, it seems likely that the same actor played both Pentheus and Agave, his mother, who kills him; and that Agave made her entrance with, as it were, her own head in her hands.

Unfortunately, to be certain of this, we need to know whether the audience could identify the same actor in both roles; perhaps by some trick of voice, perhaps a particular mannerism, perhaps by an announcement of casting made at the proagon, the ceremony which opened the dramatic festival. And these, unfortunately, are things that we shall probably never know. Nevertheless the suggestion remains tantalizing. There also appear to be some thematic values in two-actor plays. In Medea, which is a play about one woman against the world, one actor presumably played Medea, and the other everybody else with whom she comes in contact. In Alcestis one actor presumably played Admetus throughout, and the versatility demanded of the other was enormous. He played at least Alcestis and Heracles, two roles which could hardly be more different; probably the old Servant as well; and either Death or Apollo in the prologue.

By the same token, a major role could be apportioned among several actors. Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus presents this problem at its most crucial. If a fourth actor was to be avoided, the role of Theseus must have been shared between the existing three. … in the Oresteia, Aeschylus did not play any of the major roles throughout. Although he played Clytemnestra in Agamemnon his role in The Libation Bearers is more likely to have been Orestes, leaving Clytemnestra to one of his assistants. This division emphasizes the dialectical structure of the trilogy at the expense of continuity of characterization. A modern actress in the role of Clytemnestra sees the three plays as a whole; she traces the psychology of her character from the blood-lust of the first play, through the wariness and satiety of the second, to the rancour and frustration of the third. Aeschylus probably saw his participation in the play as involving three different parts of a component whole. He was more interested in structure, his modern counterpart in characterization.

This fragmentation of the actor's personality demanded some kind of continuity, if the story were to make sense. Such continuity was provided by mask and costume: in a real sense, they were the character. In our manuscripts, the cast list is entitled ta tou dramatos prosopa, ‘the masks of the drama’. We know virtually nothing about what fifth-century masks looked like, but we can assume that they were simple and easily identifiable. Behind the mask, the actor would have changed without detriment to the role. To this extent, as in the classical theatre of Japan, the external manifestations are the character and the actor is merely the temporary means that gives these manifestations speech and movement. Though the actor may change, the persona remains constant. Aristophanes utilizes this fundamental characteristic of his theatre in the beating scene of The Frogs. Dionysus has assumed the club and lionskin of Heracles. To anyone who meets him in the Underworld he is, therefore, Heracles. When threatened, he passes the costume to his slave Xanthias, master and man assuming the character in turn. Whoever wears the club and lionskin is for that moment Heracles and taken to be so by the other characters. The costume dictates the comic logic of the scene. Just as, in performance, the tragic costume imposes its own personality on the wearer, so, in the comedy, the Heracles costume dominates its wearers to the extent that their individual personalities seem to blur and mingle. Dionysus is infected by his slave's mortality. He, no less than Xanthias, cries out when beaten.

If we accept this equivalence between mask and costume and persona, certain interesting consequences follow. It seems likely, for instance, that a dead character could have been represented by an actorless mask. Thus, in Euripides' The Bacchae, a probable candidate for the severed head of Pentheus is the mask which the actor has just worn—in the simplest role-division, as we have seen, the actor who has just finished playing Pentheus and now plays Agave.

This device may have been anticipated by Aeschylus in The Libation Bearers. Near the end of this play, Orestes displays the slaughtered Clytemnestra and Aegisthus to the chorus, crying:

See here the double lordship of this land
Who killed my father and laid waste his house.(1)

It is usually assumed that the stage picture here parallels the similar tableau near the end of Agamemnon. There, Clytemnestra stood in triumph over the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. Here, Orestes stands over his mother and her lover. There are strong arguments in favour of such an exact visual parallel, with the robe in which Agamemnon was slaughtered providing a link between the two. It may well have been displayed in the first play, and certainly is in the second. When Orestes commands the chorus ‘Take it, spread it in a circle round’ the equation is made between the bloodstained robe and the red-purple carpet on which Agamemnon walked to his death. Given the intricate pattern of repeated images around which Aeschylus constructed his tragedy, it seems desirable that this one should be repeated too. Yet there is some suggestion that the tableau is not exactly duplicated. Earlier in the play, the chorus encourage Orestes by telling him:

And with Orestes' mind combine
The heart of Perseus; for your friends
On earth and under it, perform
This favour, though it sting you sore.(2)

Perseus decapitated his victim, the Gorgon; and from the language of the chorus after the event, it seems that Orestes may have done the same:

For you brought liberty to all who live
In Argos, when you came upon
This pair of snakes and cut their heads off clean.(3)

Is this to be construed literally? Did Orestes make his entrance holding up the severed heads of his victims? And are these heads then the empty, eyeless masks?

In Greek practice the equation between mask/costume and persona indicates a convention whereby any impairment of the former presages some damage—usually death—to the latter. In a theatre which creates its characters from the outside in, the destruction of the costume implies the destruction of the character. Pentheus' fate in The Bacchae offers an obvious example. In this play the ritual pattern of sparagmos, of tearing apart the sacrificial victim, both underlies and dictates the action. It is foreshadowed by the reference of Cadmus to the fate of Pentheus' cousin:

Remember Actaeon. Take his tragic fate to heart.
The mighty hunter. Greater, so he boasted,
Then Artemis herself. Deep in her forest sanctum
The goddess heard and punished. He was torn to pieces
By hounds that had eaten from his hand. Avoid
His ending. Come here, let me crown your head
With ivy. We shall praise the god together.(4)

Pentheus does not avoid Actaeon's ending, despite further warnings which grow more insistent as the play proceeds. The sparagmos motif next appears in the ‘palace miracle’, the earthquake which delivers Dionysus from bondage:

But the god had not yet finished. Bacchus showed his power anew,
Shook the house to its foundations. Desolate the palace lies.(5)

Soon after this comes the Messenger's report of the action of the women on the mountain:

They fell upon a heifer lowing,
With her udders swollen with milk; while others of the women
Fell on our cows and tore them apart.
You could see the pieces flying: scraps of carcase
And cloven hooves were scattered far and wide,
Torn, bleeding flesh caught dangling in the branches;
Proud bulls, that but a while before had tossed
Their angry horns now lay spreadeagled on the ground,
Felled by a myriad blows of young girls' hands.(6)

So to Pentheus' change of heart, his rapid transformation from Dionysus' antagonist to his dupe, with the change externalized as change of costume:

PENTHEUS
What kind of costume will you put on me?
DIONYSUS
Hair for your head first, long and flowing.
PENTHEUS
What will the rest of my apparel be?
DIONYSUS
A hobble skirt, a fillet for your hair.
PENTHEUS
No! I could never wear a woman's dress.
DIONYSUS
There will be bloodshed if you fight the Bacchae.
PENTHEUS
True. First of all I must survey the ground.(7)

Pentheus thus becomes the simulacrum of Dionysus, and of his mother Agave; but what more nearly concerns our present argument is that by divesting himself of his kingly robes, and perhaps of his mask too, Pentheus disassembles his own persona and prefigures his sparagmos at the hands of the women on Cithaeron. Dionysus makes explicit the equation between costume change and death:

Now I go in, to dress him in the robes
That will serve him as his shroud when he is dead
Slain by his mother's hands.(8)

We see briefly the new Pentheus, leaping, dancing, the image, so Dionysus urges, of his mother; and so we pass to the Messenger's description of the king's dismemberment, in which costume and body elements are curiously intertwined:

His mother flung herself on him.
Thinking she would spare him if she once but saw his face
He bared his head to her, and caressed her cheek,
Crying ‘Mother! It is I, your son!
Pentheus! In my father's bed you bore me.
Have pity on me. Pardon my offence
And do not kill me. Do not kill your son!’
But she was foaming at the mouth, her eyes
Were wild and rolling, and her wits were gone.
The god was in her. Deaf to all his pleas
She seized his left arm by the elbow, thrust
Her foot against his ribs, and with one blow
Pulled the arm clean from its socket. She never would
Have had the strength alone, but god was in her hands
And made light work. On the other side knelt Ino.
Picking his flesh. Then Autonoe was upon him
And the whole pack at her heels. As one they cried,
Pentheus screaming, while he still had breath,
And the women bayed their fury. One tore off
An arm, another a slipper, with the foot inside it still;
They tore the very flesh from off his bones,
          and with their hands dyed red
Tossed the bleeding baubles to and fro.(9)

The sense of this speech supports the possibility that when Cadmus brings the fragments of Pentheus on stage, what we see are the elements of the dismembered costume. And the play ends with the culminating sparagmos, the riving of the city when, after Dionysus' judgement, Cadmus, Agave, and the chorus go their separate ways.

A partial parallel to the action of The Bacchae is offered by Rhesus. Although this play's date and authorship remain problematical, the motif of the costume change resembles that in the more famous work. Rhesus, set in Troy, draws its plot from the intrigues surrounding the arrival of the eponymous hero, a prominent Trojan ally. As the play opens, Hector is seen sending out Dolon on a spying mission among the Greek ships. Dolon announces that he intends to disguise himself. Under Hector's questioning, he reveals that he will wear a wolfskin, and go on all fours. In Rhesus we do not see the change. We are simply told that Dolon will assume the wolfskin over his own armour. As in The Bacchae, however, the nature of the disguise is related to the character of the wearer, and is attended with the same ill fortune. When Odysseus and Diomedes enter Troy on their own spying mission, we learn from their conversation that they have killed Dolon. We learn also that they bring his armour as the spoils of war. Rhesus therefore offers interesting similarities to The Bacchae. In both cases, a change of costume is followed by disaster. In Rhesus certainly, and in The Bacchae possibly, the presence of an empty costume on stage suggests a dead body.

Symbolic dismemberment thus prefigures actual dismemberment, and a change of costume marks a change of state. A similar device appears, with more explicit irony, in the earlier Euripidean The Madness of Heracles. As the play opens, Amphitryon, Megara, and her children by Heracles huddle by the altar vainly seeking sanctuary from the tyrant Lycus. Accepting the inevitable, Megara submits, asking only that she may have permission to array her children and herself for death:

MEGARA
And I beg you, to this favour add another;
Be double benefactor to us both.
Open these doors, for they are barred to us,
And let me dress my children for their death,
The only legacy their father's house can leave them.
LYCUS
I agree to that. Open the doors, men.
Go in and dress. I do not grudge you clothes.
When you have robed yourselves, I shall return
To make a present of you to the Underworld.(10)

Whether or not Amphitryon joins them in the costume change is unclear. He does not accompany them immediately, but has another speech first; and when the family reappears, the language is ambiguous. In the light of what follows, it is tempting to assume that Amphitryon does not change. Megara and the children, however, certainly do:

CHORUS
See, they are coming now, and they have shrouds
Upon them. These are the sons
Of Heracles, who once was mighty,
And the wife he loved: she leads them
Like horses yoked in harness. And the old one
Heracles' father.(11)

So Heracles, on his entrance:

But what is this? My sons before the house
In winding sheets, heads chapleted with flowers—
These men assembled, and my wife among them,
My father weeping?
These are death's wrappings. Take them off your heads.
Look up to the sun, and let your eyes
Enjoy its welcome. Forget the dark below.(12)

Thus Heracles, at the last moment, brings apparent salvation. He leads them in and, off-stage, slaughters the oppressor. But it is too late. Megara and the children have already been marked for death. They have changed their costumes, their characters have been metaphorically destroyed, and the reprieve can be only temporary. The visual metaphor gains urgency from the fact that they change into real shrouds, not, like Pentheus, into a symbolic one. Once Heracles is touched by madness, they must die. Amphitryon alone survives. The vagueness of the text about his costume may therefore be purposeful. We may be entitled to assume that he does not change when the others do, and that this visual differentiation shows that he will live.

It does not follow that Greek characters invariably change clothes before they die. But if they do, the chances are high that they will. Nor need the change be total. In Euripides' Hippolytus, Phaedra, making her first entrance on her sickbed, cries for her crown to be removed:

Prop up my body, raise my head
I have lost all will to move, my dear.
How thin my hands and arms are. Hold them.
This crown is too heavy. It hurts my head.
Take it off, and let the hair fall free.(13)

This removal of the crown suggests, on the simplest level, Phaedra's renunciation of the noblesse oblige of queenship; the Nurse is quick to remind her of it. In addition, however, the physical disarray becomes the outward expression of the spiritual disorder, and divestment looks forward to coming death. We see, quite literally, a character gradually falling apart.

In Agamemnon, Aeschylus offers an example with more complex ramifications. The conqueror, returning to his palace, is tempted by Clytemnestra to walk on the red-purple carpet. After initial refusal, he submits with trepidation:

Then if you wish it so, let someone loose
These shoes from off my feet, these servile ministers
That we do tread on; and I pray
Let no far glance of envy fall upon me
As I set foot upon these tapestries.(14)

There seems no reason to doubt that the act of removing his shoes is actually performed: the eight lines between Agamemnon's command and his entry into the palace seem designed to allow for this, in the usual Greek manner of covering business with dialogue. Shoeless, then, and diminished, he goes to his doom. How literally he is diminished is an interesting question involving the long debate about what Greek actors wore on their feet. The traditional conception of kothurnoi boots with high platform soles, designed to add stature to their wearers in the vastness of the Greek theatre, is now generally discredited, partly because of the ambiguity of the evidence and partly because of the impracticality of the device. It is often argued that high-soled kothurnoi would impede the movement of the actor. This is demonstrably untrue. If Japanese onnogata actors can cope with geta, there is no reason to suppose the Greeks less proficient.

The Agamemnon scene does raise a specific problem in that, if kothurnoi indeed gave the actor extra inches, Agamemnon would have shrunk when his shoes were removed; by realistic standards this would clearly be objectionable. But realistic standards are not necessarily the ones that apply. Considered as a simple stage convention, the effect is surely an appropriate and desirable one. At the very moment in the play when Clytemnestra decisively establishes her dominance over him, Agamemnon shrinks till he is shorter than his wife. We might compare similar effects from other periods of theatre. In the Cambridge (UK) Festival Theatre which flourished before World War II, a production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII had Wolsey, in his eminence, mounted on buskins underneath his cardinal's robes. At his fall from grace the buskins were removed, so that he appeared visibly to shrink. A reverse effect is reported for Edwin Booth when appearing as Richelieu in Bulwer-Lytton's drama of that name. When delivering the ‘curse of Rome’ he rose sur les pointes under his robe; simultaneously, the rest of the cast sank to their knees; and it was as if the cardinal had suddenly assumed gigantic stature. More recently we have Patrice Chereau's staging of the death of Fafner in his controversial Bayreuth Siegfried. First, the dragon takes Siegfried's sword through his heart; second, the dragon is replaced by the giant who has been masquerading in this shape; third, the enormous kothurnoi worn under the giant's robe are removed so that as he dies, he dwindles. There is of course no way in which we can assert that this device was used in Agamemnon, but the parallels suggest interesting possibilities. Whatever arguments may be raised against high-soled kothurnoi on philological or archaeological grounds, the arguments from practicality do not deserve to be taken seriously.

Whatever happens here, however, the scene adheres to the convention with which we are principally concerned. Agamemnon removes part of his clothing and subsequently dies. The same thing happens later in the play to Cassandra who, as she bewails her bitter destiny before the chorus, strips herself of the barren symbols of her prophetic art:

Why do I keep this mockery
Of trappings still, my wreaths of prophecy,
My staff? If I must go to death, then you
At least shall go before me. Go and rot.
Find someone else to enrich with your curse,
My part is done. See where Apollo himself
Is stripping me of my prophetic robes,
Who watched me when I wore them laughed to scorn
By friends who turned away from me in blindness.(15)

The allusion may be picked up in The Trojan Women, where Hecuba tells Cassandra to cast her temple keys and garlands from her, though Cassandra is not on stage at this point. In Agamemnon the robes and garlands, once thrown off, still lie there on the ground; there is no hint that they are removed, any more than is the purple carpet, whose presence now suggests a river of blood pouring from the palace doors. It is possible that when Clytemnestra justifies her double murder, the scattered garments illustrate her references to Cassandra, the symbolic standing for the actual death. Is there, indeed, any necessity to postulate dummy bodies at all here, or is this simply a device with which we have lumbered ourselves from our own more recent and more realistic theatrical traditions?

To Cassandra's action we may compare that of Hermione in Euripides' Andromache. In desperation the princess casts aside her veil, tears her robes, and tries to commit suicide. Foiled in the attempt, she leaves the palace with Orestes. Although Hermione does not die, she is as good as dead; her absence leaves a desolation in the house of Peleus, made worse by the death of Peleus' grandson Neoptolemus. We might also note that at the end of the play Peleus undergoes a partial deprivation of costume in the depths of his grief, casting upon the ground the sceptre that seems to have been the invariable token of stage royalty.

One more example deserves to be considered here. This is drawn not from stage action but from a messenger's speech, where all things are possible. Euripides, however, offers several examples of stage conventions colouring reported action, and in Medea a lengthy narration is clearly based on the convention we have described. Medea has sent her poisoned offerings to the princess: ‘a fine-spun robe, a golden diadem’. They are probably displayed to the audience as the children make ready to carry them, so that the princess assumes tangible form before our eyes and an important, though unseen, character is given a momentary on-stage presence. (In the same way, perhaps, Medea's sons, though present for much of the action, are never heard until the moment before their deaths.) The death of the princess is reported by the Messenger:

When she saw the gifts, she couldn't hold out longer
But did everything her husband said. Before the children
And their father had gone far outside the house
She took the pretty gifts and put them on,
And set the golden crown around her curls,
Arranging them before a shining mirror
And smiling at her ghostly image there.
.....From two directions the pain attacked her.
The golden circlet twining round her hair
Poured forth a strange stream of devouring fire
And the fine-spun robe, the gift your children gave her,
Had teeth to tear the poor girl's pretty skin.
She left the throne, and fled burning through the room
Shaking her head this way and that,
Trying to dislodge the crown, but it was fixed
Immoveably, and when she shook her hair
The flames burnt twice as fiercely …
The flesh dropped from her bones like pine-tears, torn
By the strange power of the devouring poison.(16)

By a logical extension of the stage convention the costume has become the character so completely that when the princess tries to remove the crown and robe, she tears apart her body too.

If a changed or impaired costume signifies approaching death, a torn or dishevelled costume may signal acute physical or mental distress. The locus classicus for this usage is the closure of Aeschylus' The Persians. We know the battle of Salamis has been lost; we have heard the consequences for the shattered landforce as it makes its way home through the barren winter; we are assured that the mighty army so triumphantly heralded at the play's beginning has been reduced to a broken handful of survivors. Of this disaster, Xerxes' ragged entrance is the visible symbol. The image of his tattered costume dominates the play's ending. It tells not of the sufferings of a single man, but of a whole host that died; it offers a contrast to the richness of armour and apparel described in the parodos; and it suggests the self-flagellation and costume-rending of extravagant mourning in the context of a choral antiphon structured on the known patterns of Athenian keening. Thus in his demonstration of the ragged monarch Aeschylus anticipates by some thirty years a device normally associated with Euripides. There is one curious feature of this scene. If earlier declarations have any meaning, Xerxes should not be wearing rags at all. The ghost of Darius instructs Atossa:

You, aged mother dear to Xerxes heart,
Go to your palace, fetch a costume he
May wear with dignity, and meet your son.(17)

The Queen clearly announces her intention of so doing:

O heaven, how my troubles come upon me.
And yet of all my woes this stings me most,
To hear how shamefully my son is clad
With nothing fit to bind his body in.
But I shall fetch adornment from the house
And take it where I hope to meet my son.(18)

From Xerxes' entrance, however, it seems that she has done nothing of the kind.

XERXES
You see these remnants of my fine array?
CHORUS
I see them. I see them.(19)

Why does Aeschylus prepare for an event that never happens? Perhaps, after all, the two sections of the play are not irreconcilable. Possibly Xerxes makes his entrance in full majesty, carrying the rags with him for display. Alternatively, Xerxes may enter in rags and be redressed by his mother as the kommos proceeds. Aeschylus might have intended to remind his audience that in 472 bc the power of Persia was not yet to be considered dead, and that, as the new costume replaced the old, a new army might easily replace the one that had fallen.

Though Aeschylus may have come first, Euripides, by virtue of the familiar Aristophanic parodies, remains the most famous portrayer of ragged heroes. What the comic playwright says is not necessarily evidence, and he seems elsewhere to have identified as particularly Euripidean devices which other dramatists are known to have used: the mechane is a case in point. Nevertheless the many instances of the costume joke suggest that, in the minds of the audience, the device was particularly associated with Euripides, and the extant tragedies offer supporting evidence. The surviving works give us Menelaus in Helen, and Electra and Orestes in the plays that bear their names; Aristophanes adds Oineus, Phoenix, Philoctetes, Bellerophon, Telephus, and Ino. The references to Bellerophon in tatters upon Pegasus are supported by the scholiast, and to the notorious Telephus by fragments from the work itself.

The tattered hero makes a complex joke. Aristophanes satirizes Euripides as ‘beggar-poet’ (ptochopoios) and ‘patcher of rags’ (rakiosurraptades) with ambiguous allusion to his threadbare heroes and his cobbled verse. In The Frogs Aeschylus charges him with using ragged costumes ‘so his characters might appear pitiable’, and this certainly seems to be the burden of the long scene in The Acharnians twenty years earlier. Is Euripides, then, merely seeking greater realism in the theatre, and substituting pathos for the higher eleos of earlier drama? If we take Aristophanes seriously, he is. But the comic playwright is always prone to take conventional effects at face value. It is a sure way of getting a laugh. Thus, for him, a deity flying on the mechane is simply an actor dangling on the end of a rope; Andromeda bound to an ocean rock is an old man in drag lashed to a post; and it is possible that, in his costume jokes, Aristophanes is simply taking another convention literally. In the light of the other examples we have considered, Euripides' supposed melodramatic innovations may be no more than extensions of, and elaborations upon, an existing convention. Spiritual disintegration of the character is signified by physical disintegration of the costume. Electra, driven to desperation; Orestes, hovering on the edge of insanity; Telephus, driven to defend himself by threat of child-murder: all are appropriately dressed. By the end of the century the joke seems to have run its natural course. Aristophanes devotes a whole scene to it in The Acharnians, but The Frogs has only a few passing references. The years between had probably seen the device exploited by others, certainly by Sophocles in Philoctetes. By 405 it was no longer unusual enough to warrant special attention.

So far we have confined ourselves to melancholy examples. Although scenes of joy and redemption do not abound in Greek tragedy, there are some instances to show that the reverse effect was possible: that, as in the Japanese theatre, the addition of garments, or the substitution of bright robes for sombre ones, could signify regeneration. One such example occurs in Helen, which we have already noted as containing the ragged Euripidean hero. Menelaus staggers ashore from the shipwreck dressed in rags, scraps of sailcloth. Both he and Helen comment amply on this. But when Helen ingeniously contrives his rescue, one of the favours that she seeks from Theoclymenus is a new suit of clothes for him to wear. As she tells us later, she has taken the rags off Menelaus' body, bathed him, and dressed him in new and splendid robes. Thus a new Menelaus has risen from the wreckage of the old. When he leaves the stage he is marked once more for kingship and for glory. Helen, conversely, has changed her white robes for black, and disfigured herself with the conventional signs of mourning for her supposedly dead husband. Her departure may perhaps be equated, in its funereal associations, with that of Hermione in Andromache; it marks the death of Theoclymenus' aspirations.

For the most powerful effect of all we may return to Aeschylus and The Eumenides. At the end of the play, Athena persuades the Furies to a change of heart. They will remain in Athens as benevolent spirits, and are escorted to their new home by a subsidiary chorus of Athenian women:

ATHENA
To all your prayers amen. I shall conduct you
By radiance of torchlight to your dwelling place
Beneath the earth, to the dark underground,
And with us go these women, whose charge it is
To minister to my image. Flower of all the land
Of Theseus, let them come forth now, a noble company
Of maids and matrons, and the older women
Banded together.
Vested in purple, let them come resplendent
To do us honour.
(or: Vest them in purple splendour.
Come to do them honour.)(20)

The passage invokes the quadrennial Panathenaia, in which the women of Athens conveyed a newly-woven robe to the Parthenon and draped the statue of the city's goddess. Does this imply an actual rerobing of the Furies on stage, to signify their change of nature? Unfortunately, text and punctuation are dubious here. It is unclear whether the women or the Furies are robed in purple. But in either case the spectacular impact of the scene is the same. If it is the Furies, they are given bright robes to cover the black they have worn since the play's beginning. Change of costume signals change of heart. If it is the supplementary chorus, the effect is collective. Robed in purple, the women surround and enfold the sombre Furies. The resulting tableau is a visual metaphor of the place envisaged by Athena for the Furies in her new dispensation. Fear must still have its place in the scheme of things, but only when vested in civic order. Athena's robes are draped upon the daughters of darkness.

The mask and costume, then, bestow continuity on a role. But behind the mask there is an actor who must continually divide himself and leap from one characterization to another. In comedy, the frenetic role changes beget a moral climate in which duplicity is a way of life; the variety of impersonations required by the performance spill over into the world of the play. In The Acharnians Dikaiopolis, trying to engineer a private peace, is pursued by the hostile, warmongering chorus. To give his arguments more pathos, he runs to Euripides for an appropriate costume of tragic rags and tatters. Returning to the chorus, he begins a sequence in which three levels of impersonation intertwine. First, he speaks as an actor—indeed, as Aristophanes himself—in a purely theatrical context, addressing the audience in the theatre:

Ladies and gentlemen, don't blame me if I come,
Dressed as a tragic beggar, in a comedy
To harangue the Athenians on what they ought to do.
Even comedy can tell the truth sometimes
And what I say may be surprising, but it's true,
Kleon at least can't prosecute me this time
For slandering our state when there are strangers present.(21)

These are in-jokes, addressed to the contemporary world of Athens, not the world of the play; the reference is to attempts made by the demagogue Kleon to silence Aristophanes because he had painted an unflattering picture of Athens when there were foreigners in the audience. But this, says Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes, is the Lenaean festival; it takes place before the waters are safe for sailing; we are all Athenians here, and I can say what I like.

Having gone to so much trouble to secure the beggar's costume, therefore, Dikaiopolis proceeds to ignore it throughout his lengthy address to the chorus and through them to the audience. Suddenly Lamachus, the general, the spokesman of the war party, intervenes. Immediately Dikaiopolis retreats behind the protection of his costume:

LAMACHUS
What! You, a beggar, dare to talk like this?
DIKAIOPOLIS
Great Lamachus, have mercy on a beggar
Who let his poor tongue run away with him.(22)

A few lines later, he is just as eager to deny what he was so eager to assume:

LAMACHUS
A beggar, talking this way to a general.
DIKAIOPOLIS
What, me, a beggar?
LAMACHUS
Well, who are you then?
DIKAIOPOLIS
I'll tell you. I'm an honest citizen.(23)

Disguises, like masks, can be lightly assumed, and just as lightly discarded. Even within the limits of the single mask, we see a similar ambiguity. In The Clouds the charlatan Socrates simultaneously humbugs Strepsiades and admits his own villainy.

Comedy clearly does not cultivate consistency of characterization. Just as characters may adopt disguises or discard them without warning, to suit the needs of the situation, the basic character itself may change. Our own theatre tends to identify one actor with one role. He sees his character as an entity, and pursues its development from beginning to end. The Greek actor, by necessity, saw his roles as a series of interlinked impersonations. He must have been more concerned with technique than with psychological identification; and the facility of change between roles induces a flexibility within roles. In comedy, quite clearly, the character can be whatever the immediate situation requires him to be.

This may extend even to physical characterization. In The Wasps the old man, Philocleon, is described at one point as toothless, and at another, as having teeth to bite through the net that binds him. Or it may involve the arbitrary reshaping of mental attributes and attitudes. Early in The Frogs we have a confrontation between the god Dionysus and the demi-god Heracles. Dionysus is presented as the parodied aesthete, the literary poseur; Heracles appears in his popular comic incarnation as the gluttonous, musclebound, mindless superman, all brawn and no brain. Dionysus attempts to explain to Heracles why he wishes to embark on the perilous journey to the Underworld: he talks of his passion for the tragedies of Euripides, now dead.

All this is incomprehensible to Heracles. He cannot understand this talk of plays. The only thing he understands is food. In desperation, Dionysus tries to appeal to him in his own terms:

Tell, me: have you ever had a mad desire for soup?(24)

The light dawns; here at last is something the demigod can relate to. ‘Soup, yes!’ he retorts. ‘A thousand times!’ Thus Dionysus explains his mission. But, at the end of the scene, the same Heracles who had apparently barely heard of Euripides can reel off a list of minor figures in the Athenian theatre:

HERACLES
What about Agathon?
DIONYSUS
Gone off and left me.
A splendid poet, and his friends will miss him
HERACLES
Gone where, poor fellow?
DIONYSUS
The Happy Hunting Ground.
HERACLES
And Xenocles?
DIONYSUS
Oh, Xenocles be damned!
HERACLES
Pythangelus?
XANTHIAS
Nobody mentions me
Although my shoulder's nearly worn away.
HERACLES
But aren't there other artsy-craftsy kids,
Ten thousand of 'em, writing tragedies
More chatty than Euripides by miles?(25)

The Frogs is rich in such examples. As Dionysus and Xanthias reach the end of their journey, they are accosted by the ferocious figure of Aeacus, the gatekeeper of the Underworld. An ogre out of Greek nightmares, he heaps abuse on them, threatens them, and finally beats them. There follows the parabasis; when it is over, Xanthias and Aeacus are seen chatting on terms of perfect amity. A justifiable transition perhaps; but one that happens with such rapidity that some scholars have suggested that the second figure is not Aeacus at all, but another servant of more amiable disposition.

Dionysus himself undergoes a similar transformation. At the beginning of the play he is represented as devoted to Euripides. He quotes from him; he reveres him; he has even taken the tragedy Andromeda to read on military service. Then, in the second half of the comedy, comes the trial. Confronted with Euripides in person, Dionysus professes himself baffled; ‘I don't understand’, he says, ‘what he's talking about’; and he eventually awards the victory to Euripides' arch-rival and diametric opposite, Aeschylus.

The Clouds gives us an equally inconsistent Socrates. Leaving aside the much argued—perhaps too much argued—question of the relevance of the stage caricature to the living philosopher, if we ask what kind of man is the Socrates represented in the comedy we get no clear answer. Or rather, we get three different answers. Depending on which references we select, we can build up three different pictures of the man, each at odds with the others.

First, there is Socrates the businessman, the professor who teaches for a fee. This is how Strepsiades first describes Socrates and his school:

They'll give you lessons—if you pay their fees—
In how to make men believe anything you say,
Whether it's true or not.(26)

He seems to make a handsome living out of this; the demagogue Hyperbolus is mentioned as having spent a talent to acquire his knowledge, and gone on to make a handsome profit on his investment. Admittedly Socrates does not demand money from Strepsiades, or Pheidippides. From the former he receives payment in kind. But there are enough monetary references to make it clear that, for part of the play at least, Aristophanes is concerned with picturing Socrates as a paid teacher like so many of his contemporaries. We may also note that Socrates' spokesman, Unjust Logic, advocates a life of self-indulgence. (We know of course that this is historically false; both Plato and Xenophon emphasize that Socrates taught for nothing. But that is irrelevant to the comedy.)

Secondly, we can string together another set of references to produce a contrary picture, that of a pinchbeck Socrates who is at his wit's end to make ends meet, and lives by petty theft. This is how we hear of him through his student: Socrates, lacking dinner, went down to the gymnasium and, while distracting his audience with some pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus, stole somebody's cloak. This seems to have been a favourite comic picture of Socrates. A contemporary of Aristophanes describes him as not knowing where to find a meal, and as stealing a wine flask. In the present play the chorus describes him frankly as a cheat and a thief, urging him to get all he can out of his dupe; and we see him for himself stealing Strepsiades' cloak and shoes.

Thirdly, we discern a picture which is more sympathetic, and closer to the historical truth. In certain passages Socrates appears as an amiable and absent-minded ascetic. The student tells of the embarrassing incident that Socrates suffered while ruminating on the orbit of the moon, because he forgot to look where he was walking. He is represented in this play (and elsewhere) as despising physical cleanliness. He and his disciples never shave, or rub themselves with oil, or take baths. In this Socrates, indifferent to personal comfort or sensual indulgences, we see a figure closer to the one we know from more sober sources.

How are we to combine these inconsistences within one figure? The answer is that we are not. Logic, consistency, and psychological unity are things the modern actor looks for; they have no place in Greek comedy. Aristophanes' characters are chameleons. They adapt themselves to suit the humour of each passing scene. They are not required to be consistent, merely to be funny. If there is any rule in Aristophanes it is this; that the character changes to suit the joke, not the joke to suit the character.

Let us broaden this generalization, and suggest that the nature of the Greek theatre, and the accumulated conventions of its use, produced, almost inevitably, this attitude towards characterization. The Greek theatre, as we have now seen in a number of respects, was fundamentally anonymous, a blank surface on which the author could construct whatever settings, periods, and actions were appropriate to him. As this was done primarily through language, there were no constraints upon the author other than those he chose to adopt for himself; the story could proceed in whatever direction his imagination took him. For the comic author, there was not even the constraint of a known story. He invented his plots, and could proceed by free association of comic ideas.

We have already made some analogies with film; we may make another here. Perhaps the closest equivalent to the comic world of Aristophanes is the animated cartoon. The animator starts from a blank screen, as Aristophanes started with a blank stage; and he can create on the screen whatever his imagination suggests. Even more importantly, when the point has been made he can wipe the screen clean and start afresh. There is no necessity to retain any image after its immediate comic utility has passed. The cartoon cat chases the mouse. The mouse turns and hands the cat a firecracker. The firecracker explodes; the cat's fur is blown off in the explosion. Once the comic point has been made, however, it would be redundant for the cat to remain naked. As the next sequence begins, the cat's fur has magically grown again. Events are dictated by the laws of humour, not the laws of space and time.

So things stand with Aristophanes. Does Greek tragedy offer any similarities? Both were, after all, performed in the same theatre, and under the same conditions. An obvious difference is the known story, which imposes its own logic and sequence of action. Even this constraint, however, can hardly have been binding. Tragic authors insert variants at will; Sophocles' cast for Electra is not the same as for Aeschylus in The Libation Bearers, and Euripides combines unfamiliar versions to produce what were for all practical purposes original plots.

The apparent unity conferred by the story disguises the fact that in tragedy changes may occur just as violent and arbitrary as in comedy; characters and incidents may be introduced without motivation, and disappear as rapidly when their immediate purpose is completed. In The Libation Bearers Electra is built up as a major character in the first half of the play. She dominates the stage; we see the lurid history of the House of Atreus through her eyes. But once Orestes has identified himself and announced his plans for revenge, we never hear of her again. She is not a ‘real’ person with a ‘real’ identity that demands continuous attention. She is there to serve a function in the argument; to demonstrate the personal element in the claims pressing heavily upon Orestes; and once that function is complete, she may go. Aeschylus feels able to dispose of her as readily as Aristophanes, for example, discards Euelpides in The Birds: once they have made their statement, there is no more need for them.

Entrances may be contrived as arbitrarily as exits. That of Aigeus in Medea is such a case. It seems to have offended Aristotle for this reason; but Aristotle was conditioned by the more realistic standards of a later century. Aigeus' entrance is indeed unmotivated: he comes as a pat answer to Medea's need; he simply happens to be passing through her city. But his principal function, as we have suggested elsewhere, is to mark the centre of the play, and an important division in the plot. He is important not so much as a character in his own right, but as a punctuation in the argument. Where he comes from, and where he goes, are of little concern. Similarly Creon's entrance in the prologue of Oedipus the King has been condemned as arbitrary; his mission is discussed, and he appears prompt on cue. But even to use such words as ‘arbitrary’ is to introduce realistic standards which do not apply here. The argument controls the characters, not vice versa. It is no more arbitrary for Creon to appear when he is called for than for the flute to appear in a given bar of a Mozart sonata.

As with characters, so with props: comedy and tragedy demonstrate the same liberality of usage. In The Peace Trygaius needs an altar to conduct a sacrifice and then cries, with happy serendipity, ‘Why! Here is an altar, just as we need one’. In Medea, the protagonist announces her murderous plan to the chorus: she will send to Jason's new bride the poisoned gifts, ‘a fine-spun robe, a golden diadem’. In the chorus that follows, the women urge her not to do this. Athens, the noblest of cities, will never offer sanctuary to a murderess; no mother could so violate the ties of nature as to kill her own children. After the chorus, Jason reappears as summoned. Medea lies to him, protesting her willingness to aid his new union, and her children's cause; she sends the children into the palace, to bring out the gifts.

The question is, when has she found time to prepare them? She has apparently been on stage throughout. It is barely possible that the chorus' appeal is a rhetorical address only, and does not require her actual presence. But the language of the chorus is against such an interpretation.

How will this city of sacred waters
This guide and protector of friends, take you
Your children's slayer, whose touch will pollute
All others you meet? Think again of the deaths
Of your children, the blood you intend to shed.
By your knees, by every entreaty we beg you
Not to become your children's murderess.(27)

The last two lines suggest a physical presence. Where then did she find time to prepare the poisoned gifts? We cannot assume that Medea has a store of such things, ready for such emergencies. Once again, a realistic causation is not provided, nor is it needed. Dramatic necessity calls the props into being.

In tragedy a certain consistency is imposed on characters by the nature of the script. They are participants in a connected story, and there must be some logic in the sequence of their actions. Even here, however, the piecemeal character of the Greek theatre continues to assert itself. A modern actor, concerned with the psychological unity of his role, looks for smooth and plausibly realistic transitions from one emotion to another. He condemns as contrived any shift of mood that seems too arbitrary or abrupt. In Greek tragedy, as in Greek comedy, such rapid shifts are commonplace. For a striking example, we may consider Euripides' The Bacchae. In the first half of the play, Pentheus is established as the dedicated enemy of Dionysus. He denies the latter's divinity; he condemns him as a dissident who has disrupted the social structure of Thebes; he sees in him the source of anarchy and corruption. Even when Dionysus has demonstrated his powers by breaking loose from prison, Pentheus continues to bellow defiance:

PENTHEUS
Death and destruction! The stranger I held
In my stables a moment ago has flown!
But here he is, in full view of the palace!
How is this possible? How did you escape?
DIONYSUS
Stay where you are. Walk easy with your anger.
PENTHEUS
How did you manage to get yourself loose?
DIONYSUS
Did you not hear? I said someone would free me.
PENTHEUS
Who was it? All the time you talk in riddles.
DIONYSUS
He who gave the bounty of the grape to men.
PENTHEUS
To steal their minds, and turn them into beasts.
DIONYSUS
What you account dishonour is his glory.
PENTHEUS
Seal every door and gate! Let no one pass!
DIONYSUS
Do you imagine walls can stop a god?
PENTHEUS
You know everything but what you ought to know.
DIONYSUS
I know the most important thing of all.
But here is a messenger coming from the mountain.(28)

The Messenger brings word of the women waking from their Bacchic slumber, and their ravages upon the crops and cattle. Even this does not deter Pentheus. He threatens war:

DIONYSUS
A happy settlement may yet be found.
PENTHEUS
How? By letting serfs dictate to me?
DIONYSUS
I can bring the women here to you, unarmed.
PENTHEUS
What trick is this? What are you plotting now?
DIONYSUS
Plotting? Nothing—but your own salvation.
PENTHEUS
You have made a compact to preserve these rights.
DIONYSUS
I have made a compact, yes. But with the god.
PENTHEUS
So. You have had your say. Men, bring my armour.
DIONYSUS
Wait!(29)

Then occurs an extraordinary change. The word translated ‘Wait!’ above is itself unusual. It is an extrametrical syllable, a word standing alone, without a full verse line; it is a rare thing in tragedy, and breaks the normally uninterrupted musical flow of the dialogue. Its use here prepares us for the rapid volte-face that follows:

DIONYSUS
Would you like to see them, sleeping, on the
mountain?
PENTHEUS
Yes, That I would give untold wealth to see.
DIONYSUS
How has this sudden longing come upon you?
PENTHEUS
And yet not drunk. I would not see them drunk.
DIONYSUS
But you would gladly see them, all the same!
PENTHEUS
Yes. But spying on them, under cover.
DIONYSUS
You cannot hide from them. They'll scent you out.
PENTHEUS
True. Then I must go there openly.
DIONYSUS
You'll risk it then? Shall I conduct you there?
PENTHEUS
And quickly. I grudge every wasted moment.
DIONYSUS
First you must put on a fine linen dress.
PENTHEUS
You mean that I must turn into a woman!
DIONYSUS
If they spy a man among them, they will kill you.
PENTHEUS
You speak good sense, as always. I believe you.

In a mere fourteen lines, Pentheus has attained the diametric opposite of his previous position, and from this time on is Dionysus' willing slave. Although one may argue that the reversal springs from something latent in Pentheus' character—that the young king is secretly fascinated by the practice he tries to repress—this transition, in actorly terms, is unbelievably rapid, and modern actors are unhappy with it. In a number of modern revivals, directors have sought to make the transition plausible by introducing a note of supernatural command. Dionysus makes a hypnostic gesture; or a change of position or lighting reveals him as the god in his own person, and no longer as the god in man incarnate. It is doubtful whether the Greeks would have thought the transition unusual, or justification necessary. Their theatre achieved characterization by different means, and changes of mood, even in tragedy, tend to be as rapid as changes of mask.

For our final examples we return to Antigone, a play whose deceptively simple action conceals some remarkable lapses in causality and logic. How has Antigone learned of Creon's edict? Who conducts the first burial of Polyneices' body? We have suggested that these features of the play defy rational explanation, but that no rational explanation is needed: they are self-sufficient, they are justified by their own dramatic importance. We may consider two other anomalies here.

The first concerns the relationship between Creon and Teiresias. When we first see Creon, it is made apparent that he has only lately come to rule. His first speech in the play is, in fact, his inaugural address. It begins with a political platitude and an appeal to the goodwill of the council of elders, who form the chorus:

Citizens, the state has been in troubled waters
But now the gods have set us back on course.
My summons came to you, of all the people
To meet here privately, because I knew
Your constant reverence toward Laius' throne.(30)

By a brief history of the regime, Creon goes on to establish the legitimacy of his title:

And then, when Oedipus became our king
After his death, I saw their children
Secure in your unswerving loyalty.
And now this unexpected blow has taken both
His sons in one day, each struck down by the other.
Each with his brother's blood upon his hand,
The throne and all its powers come to me
As next of kin in order of succession.

He is saying, simply, this: first came Laius, and he is dead; then came Oedipus, and he is dead; then came Eteocles and Polyneices and they are dead; and now there is no one left to inherit the throne but me. Creon goes on to establish the principles by which he intends to rule. The state comes first; personal relationships or private influence cannot be permitted to intrude upon the common good; and in demonstration of this Polyneices, who outlawed himself from the commonweal, has forfeited the rights that citizens enjoy.

At this end of the play, then, we have what is obviously the speech of a new ruler, laying down the laws by which he means to govern. The speech defines Creon precisely in his social and political context. At the other end of the play, however, we are offered something different. Teiresias has just entered, with his boy to guide him, and addresses Creon and the chorus:

TEIRESIAS
Elders of Thebes, we come here side by side,
One pair of eyes between us; that is how
Blind men must go, supported by a guide.
CREON
What word have you for us, old Teiresias?
TEIRESIAS
I will tell you. Listen when the prophet speaks.
CREON
I have never yet disregarded your advice.
TEIRESIAS
And so have kept Thebes safely on her course.
CREON
I know my debt to you, and I acknowledge it.(31)

Suddenly the whole time scheme has changed, and the relationships of the characters within it. The sense of Teiresias' words is as clear as Creon's opening speech, and the two are contradictory. Creon is now set before us as a man who has been in power for some time and who has relied on the prophet for continual help and advice; this same prophet he is now about to reject.

To find a rational justification for this shift commentators have been forced to go outside the play. They point out that although Creon has come new to rule in Antigone, Oedipus the King informs us that he had been regent before, acceding to power as guardian of Oedipus' sons when their father abdicated. But is such an explanation justifiable? Each of Sophocles' Oedipus plays stands by itself; each was written at a different period of the author's life; and Antigone was written first. For each play, we are entitled to take only what that play tells us, and there is no mention of a regency in Antigone. This is one of the numerous details that Sophocles feels free to vary as he moves from one play to another.

In purely dramatic terms, the explanation of the discrepancy must surely be this. Each statement is justified by its immediate dramatic context. At the beginning, it is important that we see Creon as a new ruler because, like all those new to authority, he is afraid to be seen changing his mind. He fears that reversing his decision would be interpreted as weakness. Persuasion and opposition merely make him more stubborn, until he is driven into a corner where his only justification is the appeal to brute authority: he argues to Haemon, as Oedipus argues to Creon in almost identical words in the later play, that a king must be obeyed.

As the play winds into its closing movements, however, Sophocles wishes to focus on another aspect of Creon's character. He wants us to see how Creon has placed himself in the position of the rebel whose body he is condemning. Polyneices' offence was that he was the supreme idiotes, the man who set his own interests above those of the community: by declaring war on the state, he has shown his contempt for the common will. It is the central irony of the play that Creon has now placed himself in the same dilemma. We see him confronted by a series of people who try to persuade him to abandon his untenable position: the council of elders, Antigone, his own son Haemon, who clearly voices the public feeling on this issue:

But I can hear these murmurs in the dark,
The feeling in the city for this girl.
When her brother died in the slaughter, she would not
Leave him unburied, to provide a meal
For dogs, and beasts, and carrion birds of prey.
Is she not, then, deserving golden honours?(32)

Creon is deaf to all these appeals. It is surely fitting, then, at the cost of some wrenching of the evidence, to show him defying Teiresias, who speaks for the supreme authority, the gods, and, in order to show this defiance as misguided, to adjust the relationship so that Creon is seen as rejecting advice that has stood him in good stead for years. Once again, each scene stands dramatically by itself. The logical discontinuity between them is unimportant.

The other example from Antigone is a more famous one, and has long been discussed by editors and critics. It concerns the reason for Antigone's defiance of Creon. In the prologue, and in her encounter with the king after her capture, her arguments are simple, strong, and passionate. All men are equal in death; Polyneices, whatever he may have done, is as much entitled to the ultimate decency of burial as is Eteocles. This sets the tone for the exchange near the midpoint of the play:

CREON
Then why be different? Are you not ashamed?
ANTIGONE
Ashamed? Of paying homage to my brother?
CREON
Was not the man he killed your brother too?
ANTIGONE
My brother. By one mother, by one father.
CREON
Then why pay honours hateful in his sight?
ANTIGONE
The dead man will not say he finds them hateful.
CREON
When you honour him no higher than a traitor?
ANTIGONE
It was his brother died, and not his slave.
CREON
Destroying Thebes! While he died to protect it.
ANTIGONE
It makes no difference. Death asks these rites.(33)

The vivid cut and thrust of dialogue—tragic stichomythia at its best—evokes a girl who acts from an instinctive urge to protect her own; who acts without stopping to reason. Earlier in the play she has been described, in a strikingly feral image, as a bird screaming its agony over an empty nest. How ill this picture of Antigone accords with her death speech. As she is led to her tomb by Creon's guards, passion is replaced by reasoned self-justification, instinctive revulsion by a frigid logic.

Yet wisdom would approve my honouring you.
If I were a mother; if my husband's body
Were left to rot, I never would have dared
Defy the state to do as I have done.
What argument can justify such words?
Why, if my husband died, I could take another.
Someone else would give me a child, if I lost the first
But death has hidden my mother and father from me;
No brother can be born to me again.
Those are the reasons why I chose to honour
You; and for this Creon judges me guilty
Of outrage and transgression, brother mine.(34)

It is hard, perhaps impossible, to reconcile these two Antigones. The problem is compounded by the close resemblance between this speech and a passage in Herodotus, where an identical argument is placed in the mouth of a noble Persian lady whose family has been condemned to death for treason. Offered the life of any one—but only one—she chooses, she selects her brother, and justifies her choice in Antigone's terms. Some scholars have therefore been led to dismiss the speech as plagiarism by an unknown hand from Herodotus (though the reverse might equally be true; he and Sophocles were contemporaries) and excise it from the play. Even without so desperate a remedy, the difficulty remains. Antigone speaks with different voices, at different moments of the play.

We should note, first, that if we take the death speech in isolation it has a valid point to make, and one that relates powerfully to a central issue of the play. The point is that Antigone is now completely alone. Her mother and father are dead; her brothers are dead; she has never had a husband, or a child. This the speech spells out for us; and we have, only two episodes before, seen her reject her one surviving relative, her sister Ismene. Her isolation, at this moment of the play, presages that of Creon at the end. He is left, as she is left, alone. His last surviving son, Haemon, commits suicide; his wife Eurydice stabs herself; he has rejected the aid and succour of Teiresias. Coming to the central issue from opposed points of view, Creon and Antigone have reduced themselves to the same position.

The speech, then, is dramatically valid in its place; and, in the light of the other examples we have seen, the discrepancy between it and Antigone's earlier utterances should no longer concern us. Each statement is appropriate to its context. A modern sensibility, conditioned to view a dramatic character as a psychological whole, finds the discrepancy disturbing. The Greek sensibility, trained to see character as a series of disconnected appearances, would have found it merely appropriate. The tragic character, no less than the comic, adapts himself to his immediate environment.

Notes

1. Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, vv. 973ff.

2. Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, vv. 831ff.

3. Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, vv. 1,046f.

4. Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 337ff.

5. Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 632f.

6. Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 737ff.

7. Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 830-3; 836-8.

8. Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 857f.

9. Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 1,115ff.

10. Euripides, The Madness of Heracles, vv. 327ff.

11. Euripides, The Madness of Heracles, vv. 422ff.

12. Euripides, The Madness of Heracles, vv. 525-8; 562-4.

13. Euripides, Hippolytus, vv. 198ff.

14. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, vv. 944ff.

15. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, vv. 1,264ff.

16. Euripides, Medea, vv. 1,156-62; 1,185-94; 1,200-1.

17. Aeschylus, The Persians, vv. 832ff.

18. Aeschylus, The Persians, vv. 845ff.

19. Aeschylus, The Persians, v. 1,017.

20. Aeschylus, The Eumenides, vv. 1,003ff.

21. Aristophanes, The Acharnians, vv. 497ff.

22. Aristophanes, The Acharnians, v. 578.

23. Aristophanes, The Acharnians, vv. 593ff.

24. Aristophanes, The Frogs, v. 62.

25. Aristophanes, The Frogs, vv. 83ff.

26. Aristophanes, The Clouds, vv. 98f.

27. Euripides, Medea, vv. 844ff.

28. Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 642ff.

29. Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 802ff.

30. Sophocles, Antigone, vv. 163ff.

31. Sophocles, Antigone, vv. 988ff.

32. Sophocles, Antigone, vv. 692ff.

33. Sophocles, Antigone, vv. 510ff.

34. Sophocles, Antigone, vv. 904ff.