The Hypothesis to Euripides’s Medea records a tradition that it is a reworking of a play by Neophron that Euripides passed off as his own. The surviving fragments of Neophron’s play do have some affinities to that by Euripides.
Rejecting lines 1366–68 of Euripides’s Orestes as spurious, an ancient commentator remarks: No one could readily accept that these three lines are by Euripides. It is more likely that the actors wrote them, so that they could simply open the door of the palace to come on stage, and not hurt themselves by jumping off the roof. They inserted these verses so that their entrance through the door would seem logical. But what they say subsequently contradicts their coming through the door.
Euripides is said to have had a very strong dislike for almost all women, either from an innate aversion to their company, or because he had had two wives at the same time (the Athenians had passed a decree making that legal [because of the high number of casualties in the Peloponnesian War]), and he was thoroughly put off by his marriage to them (Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 15.20).
The unusual nature of Aeschylus’s death makes it worth recording. He went outside the walls of the Sicilian city in which he was staying and sat down in a sunny spot. An eagle flying over with a tortoise in its talons mistook his shiny bald head for a stone. It dropped the tortoise on Aeschylus’s head, so that it could break its shell and eat its flesh. By that blow the source and beginning of tragedy in its more powerful form was extinguished (Valerius Maximus Memorable Deeds and Sayings 9.12 ext. 2). Pliny refines this tale by adding that Aeschylus stayed out in open places in the hope of cheating a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object (Natural History 10.7).
This tale of Aeschylus’s bizarre demise may be inspired by one of his plays. A fragment of the mostly lost Necromancers reads:
A heron flying overhead will strike you with dung emptied from its belly. Your aged scalp from which the hair has fallen out will be made to fester by a spine from its food gathered in the sea.
(Aeschylus frg. 478a, where Tiresias prophesies Odysseus’s death)
Similarly, the story of Euripides’s death has tragic overtones. Euripides was returning from dinner with King Archelaus of Macedon, when he was torn to pieces by dogs set on him by some jealous rival (Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 15.20) In the Bacchae, one of the plays in Euripides’s final trilogy, Pentheus is torn apart by his female kinsfolk.
Sophocles is also said to have died in a remarkable way. The Life of Sophocles records that
• he choked on an unripe grape,
• he died of joy when told that his last play had been victorious, or
• reading aloud a long section near the end of his Antigone with no commas or other punctuation that would allow him to pause to take a breath put too much of a strain on his aged body.
XIV
SPECTATORS AND CRITICS
Theocritus of Chios heard a recital by a mediocre poet, who then asked him which bits he thought were good. Theocritus replied, “The bits you left out”
(Gnomologium Vaticanum 338).
The poet Timocreon of Rhodes was exceedingly arrogant. When he came forward to compete in a musical contest, someone asked him where he was from, and he replied, “You will hear where I am from in a little while, when the herald announces my victory.” This response offended the audience so much that the judge almost had to interrupt his song…. When he left the stage in defeat, the same person asked him again where he was from, and he replied, “From Seriphos” (Philodemus On Vices 10). For Seriphos as a nondescript and undistinguished island, unlike Rhodes, see p. 67.
There were officials in the theater who carried canes to ensure good order among the spectators (Scholion to Aristophanes Peace 734).
The spectators used to hoot and whistle and drum their heels against their seats whenever they wanted to clear an actor off the stage (Pollux Onomasticon 4.122).
When we are really enjoying something, we ignore everything else. People who eat snacks during theatrical performances do so mostly when the acting is poor (Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1175b).
When power was transferred from the people to just a few men and the oligarchy was in control, fear fell upon the poets. It was not possible to mock anyone openly, since those who were insulted could take the dramatists to court. Alcibiades drowned Eupolis in the sea for criticizing him in the Baptae (Platonius On Differences in Comedies frg. 1). The manner of Eupolis’s death alleged here is appropriate, because Baptae means “Bathers.”
The Athenians do not allow the populace as a whole to be the target of criticism in comedy, whereas they encourage attacks on individuals. They are well aware that a person made fun of by comedians is rarely someone in the lower orders of society, but is usually someone who is rich, well born, or influential. The few poor people from the lower classes who are attacked are either busybodies or have ideas above their station, and criticism of them in comedy is not objectionable (Ps.-Xenophon The Athenian Constitution 2.18).
The Athenians used to flock to the theater to hear abuse and criticism hurled at them, and gave prizes to the dramatists who did this best. Aristophanes and the other comedians suffered no harm for it. But when Socrates did the same thing without the obscene dances and silly songs, they did not tolerate it (Dio Chrysostom To the People of Tarsus I 9).
Just before Heraclides took part in a dramatic competition, he dreamed that he was cutting the throats of the audience and the judges. He was unsuccessful. They were not likely to give him their votes when he had cut their throats (Artemidorus Interpretation of Dreams 4.33).
There are men who entertain crowds by showing that their bald heads can withstand anything: boiling pitch being poured over their heads, a ram trained to charge fiercely from a distance to head-butt them, pottery being broken over them, lots of things that make the spectators shudder…. Watching such a performance, I counted my blessings (Synesius In Praise of Baldness 13).
In the Painted Porch at Athens, I recently saw with my own two eyes a street entertainer swallowing a cavalry sabre with a sharp point and a vicious blade. After that, induced by a few small coins, he also inserted a hunting spear, point downward, all the way into his entrails. And then a wonderfully supple boy, whose movements were so snakelike that he seemed to have no bones or sinews, clambered along the haft of the spear as it projected over the other performer’s head (Apuleius Metamorphoses 1.4).
The Ascolia was a festival in honor of Dionysus, in which inflated skins were placed in the middle of the theater and people tried to jump on them, either hopping on one foot or using both. They made the spectators laugh by the way they fell about on the skins (Scholion to Aristophanes Wealth 1129). Such inflated skins might be greased to make people slip about on them all the more (Pollux Onomasticon 9.121).
When Simonides was dining with the rich Thessalian aristocrat Scopas, he sang a song that he had composed in his host’s honor, in which he had included many details about Castor and Pollux as a standard poetic ornament. But Scopas very meanly told Simonides that he would pay him for only half of the song; he could ask Castor and Pollux for the rest if he liked, since he had praised them just as much. Moments later, Simonides was called away to meet two young men, who wanted to see him urgently. When he went to the door, he could not see anyone, but at just that instant the ceiling of the dining room collapsed, crushing Scopas and his kinsmen (Cicero On the Orator 2.352). The young men were, of course, Castor and Pollux. Cicero goes on to relate that the corpses were so mangled that they could not be identified for burial, but Simonides distinguished them by recalling where each person had been reclining, and he records how this gruesome incident inspired Simonides to invent a system of mnemonics based on visualization.
Socrates was frequently portrayed or referred to in plays, and I would not be surprised if he was easy to recognize among the characters, for the mask-makers obviously made a very good likeness of him. But on one occasion foreigners in the audience did not know who was being made fun of, so they
began to murmur, asking who this man Socrates was. Socrates was in the theater—not by chance, but because he knew the play was about him—and he was sitting in a prominent place. He put an end to the foreigners’ confusion by standing up and staying on his feet throughout the performance (Aelian Miscellaneous History 2.13).
When Aristophanes made so much fun of him in the Clouds, someone asked Socrates if he was not upset at being the butt of comedy, but Socrates replied, “Not at all, for being teased in the theater is just like being teased at an oversized symposium” (Plutarch On the Education of Children 10d).
A proposal is said to have been made to the Spartans and their allies [after their final victory in the Peloponnesian War] that the population of Athens should be sold into slavery, and Erianthus of Thebes suggested that Athens should be razed to the ground and the land given over to sheep grazing. But when the leaders gathered for a symposium and a Phocian sang the first chorus of Euripides’s Electra, they were all moved to pity, and it seemed a harsh act to destroy and obliterate such a famous city, one that produced such poets (Plutarch Life of Lysander 15).
During a dramatic festival at Athens, the actor who was to perform the role of queen asked the producer Melanthius for a large number of expensively costumed attendants. When he did not get them, he was upset and held up the performance by refusing to appear. But Melanthius shoved him out on stage, shouting, “Don’t you see Phocion’s wife always going around with just a single slave-girl, whereas you give yourself airs and are the ruin of our women?” His words were clearly audible, and the spectators welcomed them with great applause and cheering (Plutarch Life of Phocion 19). Phocion is largely forgotten now, but he was one of the foremost Athenian politicians of the 4th century B.C., famous and exceptional for his simple and honest lifestyle.
Jason, the tyrant of Pherae, used to bury people alive, or dress them in the hides of wild boar or bears and then set his hunting dogs on them, tearing them to pieces or shooting them for sport; he had the whole adult population of two allied and friendly cities surrounded by his bodyguards and massacred while they were holding an assembly; he sanctified and garlanded the spear with which he had murdered his uncle, and sacrificed to it, addressing it as “Lucky.” But once, when he was watching an actor performing scenes from Euripides’s Trojan Women, he rushed out of the theater. He sent the actor a message, telling him not to be upset or allow his departure to affect his performance; he said he had not left because he thought little of his acting, but rather because he was ashamed to let the people see him weeping at the sufferings of Hecuba and Andromache when he had never shown pity to any of those he had murdered (Plutarch Life of Pelopidas 29).
Some say that, when Aeschylus brought the chorus members onto the stage one at a time in the performance of the Eumenides, it caused such a shock that children fainted and women had miscarriages (Life of Aeschylus 9).
Even while he was still standing in silence on the stage, a tragic actor frightened the people of Ipola, a small town in Spain. When they saw him striding across the stage wearing his high tragic boots and his awesome garments, and with the mouth of his mask gaping open, they were terrified; then, when he raised his voice and shouted out loud, most of them ran off as if a demon had put them to flight (Philostratus Life of Apollonius 5.9).
It is undignified if the producers of plays force a laugh by having the actors throw little figs and other dried fruit to the audience (Aristophanes Wealth 797–99).
When a character in one of Euripides’s tragedies argued that wealth mattered more than morality, the whole people rose up together to throw both the actor and the play out of the theater, but Euripides leaped out into the middle of the stage, begging them to wait and see the evil end in store for the character who admired gold so much (Seneca Epistles 115.15).
When the audience demanded that he should remove a particular thought from one of his plays, Euripides reacted by coming forward on stage and saying that it was his practice to write plays to instruct the people, not to learn from them. This did not, however, earn him a reputation for arrogance (Valerius Maximus Memorable Deeds and Sayings 3.7 ext. 1).
Theodorus, the tragic actor, may have had a point in not allowing any other actor, even a mediocre one, to come on stage before he did, in the belief that the audience comes to appreciate the voices it hears first. The same applies to all aspects of life: we always like best what we get to know first (Aristotle Politics 1336b).
Judges, don’t let our play suffer because the lottery made it the first to be performed…. Don’t be like evil prostitutes who remember only their latest customers (Aristophanes Assembly Women 1158).
A lyre-player was giving a performance in Iasus, and all the people listened to him for a while. But when the fish market bell rang, everyone went off to buy fish, except for one man who was hard of hearing. The musician went up to him and said, “Thank you, sir, for the compliment you have paid me and for your appreciation of music. Everyone else went away when they heard the bell.” The deaf man replied, “What’s that? Has the bell rung already?” When the lyre-player told him that it had, he said good-bye, and even he stood up and went away (Strabo Geography 14.2).
When Plato read his treatise On the Soul [i.e., the Phaedo], Aristotle was the only member of the audience who stayed until the end (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 3.37).
They say that, when the distinguished poet Antimachus was reading his well known poem to an invited audience, and everyone except Plato had got up and left, he remarked, “I’ll keep reading all the same, for Plato alone is worth an audience of a hundred thousand” (Cicero Brutus 191). Antimachus salivated freely and was called “The Drizzler,” because he used to spray those with whom he was conversing (Diogenianus Proverbs 8.71).
A pompous sophist named Philagrus asked his audience in Athens to suggest a topic, on which he would then make an extempore speech. He did not know that the audience members were in possession of copies of a speech he had already delivered in Asia. They suggested that same topic, and as he began to deliver an allegedly spontaneous speech, they read it along with him (Philostratus Lives of the Sophists 579). It is not unknown for professors nowadays to deliver lectures that repeat all but verbatim their already published research.
When he was asked which of Demosthenes’s speeches he thought the best, Cicero replied, “The longest one” (Plutarch Life of Cicero 24).
When a mediocre lyre-player repeatedly asked him which part of his performance he particularly enjoyed, Stratonicus replied, “The bits before the opening passage”
(Gnomologium Vaticanum 523).
XV
BOOKS AND PAPYRI
When Socrates was asked why he did not write anything, he replied, “Because I see that material to write on is much more valuable than anything I might write”
(Stobaeus Anthology 3.21).
Pronapides of Athens [Homer’s teacher, according to Diodorus Siculus The Library 3.67] instituted the practice of writing in lines that we still use nowadays. In early times, people wrote either in coils, or in rectangles, or in columns, or boustrophedon (“as oxen turn [when plowing]”, i.e., right to left and left to right alternately) (Scholion to Dionysius Thrax Art of Grammar 183).
Ptolemy was so enthusiastic about books that he even ordered every book on every ship that came to Egypt to be brought to him. He had them copied onto new papyrus, and the copies were given to the owners of the books, whereas the originals were deposited in the libraries with the ascription “From the Ships” (Galen Commentary on Hippocrates’s Epidemics 17a.606).
The way Ptolemy negotiated with the Athenians demonstrates very clearly his enthusiasm for acquiring old texts. He gave them a security deposit of fifteen talents of silver for the authorized texts of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus, on the understanding that he would make copies and return the originals safely. He made expensive copies on papyrus of the highest quality, then kept the originals and sent the Athenians the new texts, telling them to keep
the fifteen talents (Galen Commentary on Hippocrates’s Epidemics 17a.607).
When he was contending with Eumenes, the king of Pergamum, in the acquisition of a library, Ptolemy cut off supplies of papyrus. This led to the invention of parchment at Pergamum and the subsequent widespread use of that material in guaranteeing the immortality of human accomplishments (Pliny Natural History 13.70). Parchment was originally finely scraped animal skins, and the term “parchment” is derived from charta pergamena, “writing material from Pergamum.”
Before the kings in Alexandria and Pergamum became such zealous collectors of old books, authorship was never falsified. But as soon as bounties were paid to the people employed in collecting books written by a particular ancient writer, they started to bring in many books that they falsely attributed to that author (Galen On Hippocrates’s Nature of Man 15.105).
Ptolemy Philadelphus (ruled 283–246 B.C.) summoned seventy-two Israelite elders to Alexandria and placed them in separate chambers. He then instructed each of them separately to prepare a Greek translation of the Hebrew Torah (i.e., the first five books of the Old Testament). Thanks to divine intervention, the translations the elders produced were all identical (The Talmud Megillah 9).
A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities Page 13