Scholars led by Aristarchus, and later by Zenodotus, arranged the Iliad in accordance with the instructions of Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens, and corrected it as they saw fit. Since the poem is so long and hard to read the whole way through, and therefore boring, they divided it into many books (Eustathius Commentary on the Iliad Vol. 1, p. 9). In fact, whereas Pisistratus ruled Athens in the 6th century B.C., Zenodotus was head of the Library at Alexandria in the 3rd century, and Aristarchus in the 2nd.
Zenodotus excised Iliad 3.423–426 because they describe Aphrodite carrying a chair for Helen, a humble task he considered beneath the dignity of the great goddess. Decorum mattered to the scholars. Another critic, Aristonicus, was offended by Odyssey 11.525, in which Odysseus tells the ghost of Achilles how he had been given the responsibility of opening and shutting the door of the Trojan Horse: this line should be excised as being undignified, for that is the task of a slave doorkeeper.
Just as a man turns a sausage full of fat and blood now on one side, now on the other over a big hot fire, eager to have it cooked as soon as possible, just so did Odysseus toss and turn, plotting how he, alone against many, could get his hands on the shameless suitors (Homer Odyssey 20.25–30). Many Homeric similes are reworked by later epic poets, but not this one: it seems that only Homer himself could get away with such a splendidly vivid image. But perhaps he comes perilously close to crossing the line into bad taste when he describes the Trojan chariots rattling back home empty while their drivers “lie on the ground, much dearer to vultures than to their wives” (Iliad 11.162).
Some people are quite obviously insane, such as those who claim that Homer’s two poems are about the elements of the universe and about the laws and customs of mankind. They make out, for example, that:
Agamemnon is the upper air.
Achilles is the sun.
Helen is the earth.
Paris is the lower air.
Hector is the moon.
Demeter is the liver.
Dionysus is the spleen.
Apollo is bile.
(Philodemus On Poems 2)
Demetrius of Scepsis wrote thirty books of commentary on a little more than sixty lines of Homer, that is, on the Catalogue of the Trojans [Iliad 2.816–877] (Strabo Geography 13.1.45).
Eratosthenes declared that it will be possible to trace the route of Odysseus’s wanderings when the cobbler is found who stitched up the bag of winds [given to Odysseus by Aeolus to assist him on his voyage home] (Strabo Geography 1.2.15).
Zoilus gained a reputation by whipping the statue of Homer (Galen On the Method of Curing 10.18). Hence he was known as Homeromastix (“Homer Whipper”). He read his attacks on the Iliad and Odyssey to Ptolemy Philadelphus, but the king saw that he was merely abusing the father of poetry and the founder of philology, who was not there to defend himself, so he was angry and made no reply (Vitruvius On Architecture 7 Preface 8).
Zoilus and others like him have made no useful contribution. They just barked pointlessly at Homer, sneering at his poetry and disparaging it (Tzetzes Iliad p. 3). When Zeus balances the destinies of Achilles and Hector in his golden scales, Zoilus asks if the destinies were made to sit or stand in the weighing-pans (Iliad 22.210), and when Patroclus’s ghost disappears under the earth like a wisp of smoke, he points out that smoke dissipates upward (Iliad 23.100), crass and distracting inanities at two supreme moments in the poem. When Circe changes Odysseus’s men into pigs, Zoilus describes them as “weeping wee piggies” (Ps.-Longinus On the Sublime 9.14).
Zoilus’s death has been variously reported: either he was crucified by Philadelphus, or he was crucified on Chios after being stoned, or he was thrown alive onto a pyre at Smyrna. However he died, he thoroughly deserved it (Vitruvius On Architecture 7 Preface 8). Chios and Smyrna were two of the poleis that made particularly insistent claims to being Homer’s birthplace.
Among the lesser poems attributed to Homer are The Battle of the Frogs, The Battle of the Spiders, and The Battle of the Cranes. These have perished, but The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, a rather disappointing parody of martial epic, survives complete. Fragments of The Battle of the Weasels and the Mice have also been found (Michigan Papyrus 6946), but it is not actually attributed to Homer.
Odysseus’s men as pigs.
Pigres of Halicarnassus added a pentameter after every line of the Iliad, making it an elegiac poem. He was the author of the Margites and The Battle of Frogs and Mice, which are attributed to Homer (Suda s.v. Pigres).
Sotades of Maroneia wrote a version of the Iliad in a meter largely of his own devising, the Sotadean. Only six lines of his poetry survive, and all but one of them are doubtfully attributed. By far his most notorious line is a criticism of Ptolemy Philadelphus for marrying Arsinoe, his full sister: He is pushing his prick into an unholy hole (frg. 1). His second, and longest, fragment is no more edifying: Uncovering the hole in his back passage, he pushed out through the wooded gorge an idly resounding thunderclap, the sort that an old plowing ox releases. He is said to have been punished for his attacks on royalty by being thrown into the sea in a leaden jar (Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 621a).
Timolaus of Larissa was a rhetorician and a pupil of the philosopher Anaximenes of Lampsacus, but he also had an interest in poetry. He added another line after every line in the Iliad and called his composition Troicus (Suda s.v. Timolaus; the Suda attributes the same tour de force to Idaeus of Rhodes).
Nestor of Laranda rewrote the Iliad, omitting alpha from the first book, beta from the second, etc. Triphiodorus of Sicily perhaps did the same with the Odyssey, but Eustathius reports that he may have omitted only sigma, to ensure that his speech defect did not inhibit his pronunciation (Commentary on the Odyssey Vol. 1, p. 2). The Greeks had a word for such omissions: “lipogrammatic,” literally “leaving out writing.”
Almost nothing has survived from these reworkings and adaptations of Homer, but the loss to literature is probably not great. In the 1st century A.D., Attius Labeo translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey into Latin word for word. That in itself is a curious achievement, but “his translation was so atrocious that not even Labeo himself could understand it unless he had been purged with hellebore [to treat his insanity]” (Cornutus on Persius Satires 1.50).
XIII
DRAMA
It was customary in Athens to release prisoners on bail for the duration of the Dionysiac and Panathenaic festivals
(Scholion to Demosthenes 22.170b).
Over a period of three consecutive days at the city Dionysia in Athens, there were twenty performances by dithyrambic choruses, nine tragedies, three satyr plays, and at least three comedies. It is difficult for the modern theatergoer to imagine, in particular, the cathartic pity and terror of a tragic trilogy, followed by a mood-altering satyr play. Neither Wagner’s Ring Cycle nor even the Sturm und Drang of an international cricket match (thirty hours’ play over five days) requires anything like so much stamina from the spectators.
Decamnichus led the conspiracy against Archelaus [the king of Macedonia], who had once handed him over to Euripides the poet for a whipping. Euripides was offended when Decamnichus said something about him having bad breath (Aristotle Politics 1311b).
I think my accuser could demonstrate the extent of my poverty more clearly than anyone else: if I were appointed to finance a tragic performance and challenged him to an exchange of property, he would prefer to put up the funding for a theatrical performance ten times rather than exchange property once (Lysias On the Refusal of a Pension 9). Might Lysias be echoing Medea’s famous utterance: “I would rather stand three times in the battleline than give birth once” (Euripides Medea 250)? If an exchange took place, the person originally called upon would then finance the undertaking. It is not clear precisely how, or how often, such transfers of property took place.
Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse, received an oracle that he would die when he had defeated his betters. He assumed that this referred to his war with Cartha
ge, so he withdrew his forces whenever victory seemed assured. He had delusions of being a great poet, but his poems were mocked both at the Olympic Games (see p. 116) and in his own court. He was, however, victorious in one of the Athenian dramatic competitions and died of drinking too much wine in celebration. This was interpreted as a vindication of the oracle, the other poets in the contest being better than he was (Diodorus Siculus The Library 14.109, 15.74).
At the festivals in honor of Dionysus, there was keen competition for the seats, involving some of the citizens in violence and injury. So the people decided that admission should no longer be free. A charge for seating was imposed, but the poor were disadvantaged because the rich could easily afford to pay this, and so a decree was passed limiting the charge to one drachma, and they called it “the price for the plays” (Photius Lexicon s.v. Theorica, “For the Plays”). The scholion to Lucian Timon 49 says that people even occupied seats during the night before a performance to be sure of seeing the plays.
Anaxandrides was rather sour tempered. If ever his comedies failed to win, he did not revise them as most dramatists do; instead, he let them be cut up and used as wrappers in the perfume market. He destroyed many painstakingly written plays, because old age had made him disgruntled with the spectators (Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 374a). Anaxandrides’s plays are almost entirely lost. He seems to have been quite a character; Athenaeus reports in the same passage that he once rode on horseback into the theater at Athens and recited part of one of his own dithyrambs.
At his last banquet, Alexander the Great recited from memory a scene from Euripides’s Andromeda (Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 537d).
If you strip a tragic actor of his mask and his gold embroidered robe, all that is left is a funny little man hired for seven drachmas to perform at the festival (Lucian Icaromenippus 29).
A 3rd-century B.C. inscription records an actor-athlete’s victories in plays by Euripides and other tragedians at various festivals throughout Greece and also in the men’s boxing at the Ptolemaic Festival in Alexandria (Stephanis [1988] Dionysiakoi Technitai No. 3003). The combination seems the more incongruous because of the particularly bloody nature of Greek boxing (see p. 115).
A tragic actor.
THEATRICAL WORDS
• Theater: “a place for watching” (from theasthai, “to look at”). “Theory” is related, being something looked at, contemplated, and therefore thought about.
• Thespian: this rather pretentious term for “actor” refers to Thespis, traditionally thought of as the founder of Greek tragedy in the 6th century B.C.
• Drama: “a thing done” (from dran, “to do”), a specialized sense for a very ordinary term; poiema (from poiein, another verb meaning “to do”) has the same literal sense, but means “poem.”
• Tragedy: the original meaning is generally agreed to be “goat song” (from tragos and ode), either because the actors originally dressed up as goats, or because the prize for victory in dramatic competitions was a goat (goats gnawed the roots of vines, which were sacred to Dionysus, the god of the festival).
• Comedy: a song (ode) sung either in a drunken procession (komos) or in a village (kome).
• Scene: the basic meaning is “tent”; in theatrical terms it is the stage on which the play was performed. In most Greek tragedies, the whole play is performed without a change of setting.
• Chorus: the original meaning is “dance” or “group of dancers.” Their role in 5th-century B.C. tragedy was not restricted to dancing (and singing); they also conversed with the actors.
• Orchestra: the area in front of the stage where the chorus danced (orcheisthai).
• Actor: a Latin term, meaning literally “a person who does things.” The Greek word is hypocrites; the basic meaning is “interpreter,” but the modern sense of the word was already used in antiquity.
• Protagonist: it is strictly speaking incorrect to refer in the plural to the “protagonists” in a play, novel, or movie. Tragedy in the 5th century B.C. never allowed more than three performers with speaking roles, other than the chorus, to be on stage at any one time; they were known as the protagonist, deuteragonist, and tritagonist (protos, deuteros, tritos (“first,” “second,” “third”) and agonistes (“performer”).
• Catharsis: literally “cleaning.” By exciting feelings of pity and terror, tragedy cleanses us of such emotions (Aristotle Poetics 1449b).
Large bronze vessels used to enhance the acoustics in the theater at Corinth were taken as plunder when the Romans sacked the city in 146 B.C. (Vitruvius On Architecture 5.3), even though Rome itself would not have a permanent theater for another eighty-nine years.
Alexander wanted to have a stage made of bronze for his theater in Pella, but the architect refused to follow his instructions since that would ruin the actors’ voices (Plutarch A Pleasant Life Is Impossible on Epicurean Principles 1096b).
Sophocles used to criticize Aeschylus for writing his plays while drunk, saying that “Even though he composes as he should, he does so without being aware of what he’s doing” (Plutarch frg. 130).
The status of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as the supreme Athenian tragedians has never been challenged. We tend to ignore the other tragedians who competed with them every year at the dramatic festivals in Athens, whose works survive mostly in occasional quotations by later authors and in scrappy papyrus fragments. The same tendency prevailed in antiquity:
In the year of the ninety-first Olympic Games, when Exaenetus of Acragas won the foot race [i.e., 416 B.C.; a modern writer might have said, “In the year that the Athenians killed all the adult male inhabitants of Melos and enslaved all the women and children”], Xenocles and Euripides competed against each other. Xenocles, whoever he was, won first prize…. This was ridiculous. Either those responsible for the vote were witless, ignorant, and incapable of reaching a sound decision, or they had been bribed. And yet both these explanations are strange and unworthy of Athens. (Aelian Miscellaneous History 2.8)
Aeschylus first competed in 499 B.C., but did not win first prize until 484, and Euripides had almost as long to wait for his first success, from 455 until 441. Sophocles’s career, however, is said to have started in 468 with a victory.
Sophocles’s Oedipus the King is regarded by many as the greatest surviving tragedy, but the trilogy in which it appeared was beaten into second place by Aeschylus’s nephew, Philocles, of whose hundred or so plays almost nothing survives. Sophocles was defeated by Philocles—O Zeus and all the gods! And with his Oedipus of all plays, to which not even Aeschylus himself could have had any answer! (Aelius Aristides In Defence of the Four 526).
In 431 B.C., perhaps two years before Philocles’s astounding success, Aeschylus’s son, Euphorion, won what may have been his only victory, beating Sophocles into second place, while Euripides came in third with a trilogy that included the Medea.
Some idiosyncrasies in tragedies:
• Aeschylus’s Persae is the only extant tragedy on a historical theme.
• Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound is the only extant tragedy without human characters (except the priestess Io, in the form of a cow).
• Aeschylus’s Oresteia is the only complete extant trilogy (it is, in fact, the only trilogy from which more than a single play survives).
• Sophocles’s Philoctetes is the only extant tragedy with no female roles.
• Euripides’s Andromache is the only extant tragedy not written for performance in Athens.
• Euripides’s Bacchae is probably the only extant tragedy not written in Athens.
• Euripides’s Cyclops is the only complete extant satyr play.
• Ps.-Euripides’s Rhesus is the only extant tragedy by someone other than the three great tragedians (if Prometheus Bound is by Aeschylus).
• Avenging the murder of Agamemnon is the only story treated by all three great tragedians in extant plays.
• All three great tragedians wrote plays entitled Iphigenia,
Ixion, Philoctetes, Sisyphus, and Telephus.
Sophocles was handsome as a young man, and even while he was still a boy he was an expert dancer and musician. After the Battle of Salamis, he danced around the trophy playing his lyre, naked and anointed with oil. (Some people say he wore a cloak.) When he put on his Thamyris, he personally played the lyre, and he was a skillful ball player in the production of his Nausicaa (Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 20e).
The Athenians allowed Pothinus the puppeteer to perform on the very stage on which Euripides and the other tragedians put on their inspiring plays (Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 19e).
After the disaster in Sicily, some Athenians owed their lives to Euripides. For none of the Greeks overseas yearned for his poetry more than did those in Sicily. Every time they heard a little sample of his poetry from a traveler, they learned it by heart and took great pleasure in passing it on. Many members of the expedition embraced Euripides affectionately when they reached home, since some had been released from slavery for teaching their captors whatever they could remember of his poetry, and others had been given food and drink when they were wandering about after the battle, in return for singing choral passages from his plays (Plutarch Life of Nicias 29).
After the death of Euripides, Dionysius, the Sicilian tyrant, sent a large sum of money to his heirs and acquired his lyre, his writing tablet, and his stylus (Hermippus of Smyrna frg. 94). He also bought Aeschylus’s writing tablet (Lucian Against the Ignorant Book Buyer 15).
A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities Page 12