State of the art and assessment of the new material

Chapter II. Assessment of the new formulation

2.1 State of the art and assessment of the new material

Past explorations of the relationship between Aeschylean tragedy and the comic have mainly been channelled in three directions—and none of the three channels has been very much frequented in recent years.¹⁶⁵In the first place, though quite a long time ago now, there was a tradition of attempting to seek in Aeschylus' earlier plays, or what were thought to be his earlier plays, supporting evidence for Aristotle's assertion that tragedy started ‘frompetty plots and ludicrous diction … [and] acquired grandeur at a late stage’ (Poet. 1449â 19–21). This tradition was struck a hard blow by the discovery that Suppliants, once regarded as typical of very early tragedy, actually belonged to the 460s,¹⁶⁶ and the apparent discovery that the much-admired Achilles trilogy may have been written very early in Aeschylus' career—though one would be more ready to believe those who confidently assert that artistic evidence establishes a date for it close to 490, or even before,¹⁶⁷if they took on board what is an inevitable consequence of that thesis, namely that this trilogy did not win first prize when it was performed (since Aeschylus' first victory only came in 484).

Secondly, the Suppliants papyrus (P. Oxy. 2256 fr. 3) stimulated an attempt in the sixties, principally associated with the name of John Herington (especially Herington 1963), to turn Aristotle's claim almost on its head, and to argue that it was Aeschylus' latest work that betrayed strong comic inﬂuence; the case for this was

165 I am most grateful to all participants of the Corpus Christi Classical Seminar who took part in the discussion, especially Ian Ruffell and Martin West.

166 Garvie (1969) provides inter alia a detailed post-mortem on this tradition.

167 Such as Döhle (1967), Kossatz-Deissmann (1981: 106–14), Shapiro (1994: 18–20), Garzya (1995: 46–7).

mainly based on plot structure and ethos rather than diction, and it was necessary to assume, against such little evidence as we have, that in plot structure and ethos the Athenian comedy of the 460s (dominated by Magnes) was not too different fromthat of the 430s (dominated by Cratinus). And thirdly, the category of ‘comic relief’, invented to justify certain scenes in the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries that offended against what were thought to be fundamental aesthetic canons, was from time to time applied to Aeschylus' plebeian characters, especially those in the Oresteia—the Watchman, the Herald, the Nurse, and the Servant.

I do not wish to reopen any of these channels. I do not believe that Aristotle's statement about the ‘late’ development of tragedy refers to any distinction perceived by himbetween earlier and later works of Aeschylus; indeed the very word which he uses to describe this development, ἀπεσεμνύνθη, with its strong echo of the Frogs,¹⁶⁸ suggests that Aristotle, like Aristophanes, perceived the major break as coming not within Aeschylus' career but at its outset by comparison with his predecessors,¹⁶⁹ and that ‘late’ only means ‘signiﬁcantly later than the ﬁrst appearance of the genre’—just as when Aristotle says ‘even the well-known myths are well known only to a few’ (Poet. 1451^b 25–6), by

‘few’ he means ‘signiﬁcantly less than 100 per cent’. I do believe that Herington was right to see some analogies in structure between certain late Aeschylean tragedies, especially their endings, and the Old Comedy of a generation later, but that may merely indicate that comedy, not for the last time, had been trying to remodel itself to

168 Cf. Ar. Ran. 833 ἀποσεμνυνεῖται πρῶτον, 1004–5 πρῶτος … πυργώσας ῥήματα σεμνὰ καὶ κοσμήσας τραγικὸν λῆρον.

169 It is common ground between ‘Aeschylus’ and ‘Euripides’ in the Frogs debate that Aeschylus' work can be compared as a whole with that of a predecessor like Phrynichus (Ran. 909–10, 1299–1300) and that the Achilles plays are a typical example of his technique (Ran. 911–13, 924–37, 1041, 1264–5). Note that Aristotle couples the ‘late’

advance of tragedy to ‘grandeur’ with a change fromthe <trochaic> tetrameter to the iambic 〈trimeter〉 as the typical non-lyric metre of tragedy (Poet. 1449^a 21–4), and any such change almost certainly predated all, or almost all, the Aeschylean plays whose texts were available to him: the evidence of the Aeschylean fragments, which contain at most two trochaic tetrameters (Aesch. frr. 60, 296) attributable to tragedies rather than satyr-plays, indicates that Persians cannot be regarded as typical in this respect of Aeschylus' style in any period for which we have any knowledge of it—and even Persians has only 113 tetrameters compared with 429 trimeters. Cf. E. Hall (1996: 120):

‘Aeschylus may …well have selected the metre at will for exclusively aesthetic reasons’ (also ibid. 158).

some extent on the basis of tragedy. And while I shall be concentrating mainly on the Oresteia, I shall not be focusing particularly on the low-life characters: the comic features of language that I shall be identifying are by no means to be found solely, or even predominantly, on their lips. Indeed of the 30 or so instances of such language that I shall discuss,¹⁷⁰ only two are uttered by characters of low status.

I deﬁne a comic feature of language, for this purpose, as a feature that is common in comedy (and/or in other low-register forms of verse, such as iambus) but very rare or unknown in tragedy. One advantage of concentrating on language is that while it would be foolish to pretend that we know much about the structure or ethos of comedies being produced in Aeschylus' last years, it is reasonable to suppose that the typical linguistic register of comedy at that time was at any rate no higher than that of comedy in Aristophanes' time. Aristophanes' own claim that his drama was more intellectual and sophisticated than that of his rivals¹⁷¹—about which we might well be sceptical if it rested on his own word alone—is supported by the casual, disparaging comment of Cratinus fr. 342,¹⁷²and more broadly by the fact that Aristophanes is the only comic dramatist of his time known to have praised himself for this particular merit (Sommerstein 1992); and his characterization of Magnes in Knights 520–2 suggests that Magnes was remembered as being strong on sound effects, innovative costumes, and the like, but weak on the verbal side of comedy (τοῦ σκώπτειν).

There is no untragic vocabulary to be found in the early part of Agamemnon. The Watchman uses a vivid phrase or two (‘this watch has thrown me a triple-six’ 33, ‘a great ox has stepped on my tongue’ 36–7) but these phrases are made up of words common in all registers of the language; the Herald may complain of having been plagued with lice in the camp before Troy (562),

170 See the table on pp. 167–8. The third column of the table gives the number (or in some cases the details) of occurrences of the word (or of the root underlined in the previous column) in Aristophanes (or, where Aristophanic instances are lacking, in other comedy); the fourth, those in tragedy outside the Oresteia ; the ﬁfth either speciﬁes whether the passage was spoken by, to, or about the Erinyes, or refers to a mention of them in its neighbourhood (see pp. 163–4). Information given in the table is not necessarily repeated in the text or footnotes.

171 Ar. Nub. 518–62; Vesp. 55–66, 650, 1043–59; Pax 734–61.

172 Where a ‘smart spectator’ is spoken of as ὑπολεπτολόγος, γνωμιδιώκτης, εὐριπιδαριστοfανίζων.

but the language in which he does so is impeccably reticent (ἐσθημάτων τιθέντες ἔνθηρον τρίχα); and Klytaimestra herself maintains the dignity of her language as ﬂawlessly as she maintains her pretence of being a loving and loyal wife.

The first sign of something different comes, significantly, just after the murder. As Klytaimestra stands, bloody sword¹⁷³ in hand, over the corpses of her husband and Kassandra, she describes in quasi-erotic terms (cf. Moles 1979) the pleasure she felt on being showered with his blood (1389–92)—and we can be sure that we are not being anachronistic or prurient in calling it quasi-erotic, because that is how Sophocles read the lines, as we know fromhis adaptation of them in his description of the last embrace of Haimon and Antigone (Ant. 1238–9). And in this passage, Klytaimestra speaks of the dying Agamemnon as ἐκfυσιῶν ὀξεῖαν αἵματος σfαγήν, ‘puffing out a rapid spurt of blood’. Now it must be admitted that fυσιάω is attested only once in comedy (Epicharmus fr. 10.2 D.-K.). But it belongs to a semantic class (that of verbs denoting bodily noises) that is thoroughly at home there, and its distribution in tragedy contrasts markedly with that of its synonym fυσάω: only four occurrences in all of the verb and its derivatives, two of themin this passage and its Sophoclean imitation, the other two both in Eumenides and both with reference to the Erinyes, once in their own mouths (248) and once in that of the Pythia (53). In view of the many gruesome descriptions of the dying in tragedy, should we not expect this lexeme to be rather more frequent there if it were truly part of the tragic linguistic register?

This linguistic impropriety is one of many signs in Klytaimestra's speech over the corpses (1372–1406) that she is setting utterly at deﬁance all the norms of proper behaviour for any human being and especially for a woman: she said at the outset that she ‘w[ould] not be ashamed’ to say the exact opposite of everything she had said up to that point (1372–3), and the whole speech indicates that she is immune to all shame (αἰδώς) whatsoever.¹⁷⁴No wonder the chorus think she is mad (1407–9, 1426–8). But her third speech in this scene (1431–47) is more shameless still. She proclaims her own adultery to the world

173 See Sommerstein (1989b), Prag (1991) (contra, Davies 1987).

174 Cf. Cairns (1993: 205–6), who does not, however, discuss the linguistic evidence of Klytaimestra's ἀναίδεια.

(1435–6) and denounces at great length the extramarital sexual activities of her husband, which in most male Greeks' view—with the sole exception of his insult to her in bringing Kassandra to her home—were none of her business.

And in the course of doing so she uses two highly untragic vocabulary items. One is the notorious ἱστοτριβής (1443), referring to Kassandra. It will be necessary to take some time over this word, in view of some of the truly desperate attempts that have been made to keep Aeschylus at this point within the commonly assumed canons of tragic diction.

M. L. West (1990a: ad loc.), with a reference to Iliad 1.31,¹⁷⁵notes coniugis nauticae nocturno muneri diurnum additur: but for one thing one could not do loom-weaving on board an ancient ship, for another, of the two words which on this view would refer to Kassandra's sexual duties, κοινόλεκτρος (1441) and ξύνευνος (1442), neither has anything in its own immediate context to suggest that she is being portrayed as a nautical consort, and for a third, and most importantly, it is absurd to make Klytaimestra climax this passage, which is dripping throughout with her jealousy of the women who replaced her abroad and the one who nearly supplanted her at home, by referring to the ordinary work of a maidservant which, far from being any threat to the mistress of the house, actually emphasizes her superiority inasmuch as she does not have to do it herself! Lloyd-Jones (1978: 58–9), building on a suggestion by Latte, sees an allusion to the practice in at least one Greek state (we do not know which) of punishing women for some offence (probably, but not certainly, unchastity) by making them sit on top of a ἱστός (more likely a loom, as Lloyd-Jones thinks, than a pole, as suggested by O'Daly 1985: 13: the object, according to Hesychius α 2576, was to humiliate, not to torment). This neatly enables us to have our cake and eat it, by allowing ἱστοτριβής to mean ‘whore’ or the like while keeping Aeschylus free from ‘an obscenity … unparalleled in tragic diction’ (O'Daly 1985: 13); but it depends on our accepting that a word referring to a very speciﬁc punishment, and not one used at Athens, would be instantly intelligible to Aeschylus' Athenian audience. This audience, too, was one accustomed to comedy (not to mention satyr-drama), and even if it wasn't yet quite as alive to the ludicrous

175 Where Agamemnon brutally tells Chryses that he will never get his daughter back till old age has overtaken her in Agamemnon's palace ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένην καὶ ἐμὸν λέχος ἀντιόωσαν.

possibilities of ambiguity or near-ambiguity as it was ﬁfty years later when the actor Hegelochos said γαλῆν᾽ ὁρῶ instead of γαλήν᾽ ὁρῶ¹⁷⁶and was never allowed to forget it, ambiguity was certainly something that Aeschylus himself knew a thing or two about. Are we really meant to suppose that he accidentally made Klytaimestra refer to Kassandra, in a sexually charged context, by a word which could so easily be taken to mean πόρνην ἥτις τὸ πέος τρίψοι (Ar. Vesp. 739;

cf. also Ar. Ach. 1149, Vesp. 1344)—and that neither he nor anyone else noticed it in rehearsal and changed the word?

Unless we emend,¹⁷⁷we have no alternative but to accept the obscenity. It may be alien to tragedy, but it is far from alien to this particular tragic character. The whole point about Klytaimestra, especially in this scene, is that she breaks all the rules; and this word, prominently placed at the beginning of a line before a pause, is the culmination of her rule-breaking. What is more, by using it she contrives to perpetrate a maximal insult to Kassandra and Agamemnon at once. If, as the comic parallels suggest, ἱστοτριβής would be taken as meaning approximately ‘one who gives hand jobs’, then on the one hand the princess and prophetess Kassandra (to whom Klytaimestra was so elaborately sympathetic in 1035–46) is being downgraded to the level of the meanest slave in a Peiraeus brothel, and on the other hand it is being insinuated that Agamemnon had been suffering from erectile dysfunction and had needed manual assistance to overcome it. All this, let it be remembered, is being said as we and the chorus gaze at the bodies of Kassandra and Agamemnon, the latter enveloped in a multicoloured robe that reaches to his feet (cf. Cho. 998)—to a ﬁfth-century Athenian much more like a feminine than a masculine garment; and the message is probably reinforced when Kassandra is called Agamemnon's fιλήτωρ (1446), a noun of masculine and agentive formation that implies that she rather than Agamemnon was the active partner in their relationship.¹⁷⁸

After this, as O'Daly (1985: 14–15) rightly saw, παροψώνημα

176 Making Eur. Or. 279 (‘After the stormy waves I see calm weather again’) into ‘After the stormy waves I see a weasel again’: cf. Ar. Ran. 303–4, Sannyrion fr. 8, Strattis fr. 1, 63.

177 Diggle (1968: 2–3) proposed κοιτοτριβής : but after κοινόλεκτρος and ξύνευνος this would be a triﬂe monotonous.

178 Until fairly recently the same effect could have been created in English by speaking of her as his ‘lover’; but the sexual revolution of the last half-century has done away with the old convention whereby this noun, when singular in number and sexual in reference, invariably denoted a male.

(1447) will have similar connotations; indeed it neatly unites the spheres of sex and ichthyophagy, whose close relationship in Greek and especially Athenian thought James Davidson (1993, 1997) has documented so well. The noun ὄψον is very rare in tragedy (probably only Eur. fr. 467.2, from The CretanWomen, since Aesch. fr. 309 is likely to be satyric), and ὀψωνεῖν is not attested there at all; while in comedy παροψίς and παροψωνεῖν are capable of having sexual overtones, meaning either, in modern idiom, ‘something on the side’ (Ar. fr. 191, in reference to the lover of a married woman; so also perhaps, but not certainly, Ar. Eccl. 226) or ‘foreplay’ (Plato Com. fr. 43). Lloyd-Jones (1979: ad loc.) thought that Klytaimestra was saying that ‘the pleasure of having killed her husband's concubine [w]ould heighten her own sexual satisfaction’; but ἐπήγαγεν and παροψώνημα indicate that she is speaking of something that has been

‘acquired’ and ‘brought 〈home〉 in addition’, in other words that the phrase εὐνῆς (or should it be εὐνῇ?) παροψώνημα τῆς ἐμῆς χλιδῆς is a description (yet another!) of Kassandra whomAgamemnon acquired at Troy and brought home as an ἐπακτὸς γυνή (cf. Soph. Ajax 1296 ἐπακτὸν ἄνδρ᾽), that τῆς ἐμῆς χλιδῆς refers to the pleasure Klytaimestra can give rather than to the pleasure she can get, and that Agamemnon is the subject of ἐπήγαγεν. O'Daly says that this ‘change of subject … would be harsh, and unintelligible to an audience without some explanatory word, e.g. a pronoun’; he forgets that Agamemnon is present on stage and therefore gesture will sufﬁce to explain that he is meant. There is probably a hint at a three-in-a-bed arrangement—picked up, perhaps, by Sophocles in the words of that transformed Klytaimestra, Deianeira, at Trach. 539–40,¹⁷⁹ a passage that Easterling (1982: ad loc.) calls

‘metaphorical’ but which is perhaps better thought of as rhetorically and emotionally hyperbolical.

When Aigisthos arrives on the scene (1577 ff.), he gives a plausible but highly slanted account of his father's quarrel with Atreus, which is expressed with proper tragic dignity, despite its increasingly horrendous subject-matter, until 1599, when he unnecessarily mentions that Thyestes vomited out the ﬂesh of his slaughtered children (ἀπὸ σfαγὰς ἐρῶν), incongruously combining a tmesis that is more epic than tragic (let alone comic) with a verb which, like its synonym ἐμεῖν, tragedy systematically avoids, and

179 καὶ νῦν δύ᾽ οὖσαι μίμνομεν μιᾶς ὑπὸ | χλαίνης ὑπαγκάλισμα.

whose use is all the more improper given that the speaker is claiming a throne and that the man of whose degradation he speaks is his own father. This slip gives us a ﬁrst clue to the coarseness of the man, well before we see his tyrannical reaction to the Elders' deﬁance, which nearly leads to their massacre.

The next signs of vulgarismcome when Orestes and the Erinyes are juxtaposed for the ﬁrst time—that is, when Orestes tells Electra and the chorus of Choephoroi of the threats of the Erinyes' wrath that accompanied Apollo's command to him to avenge his father. One of the menaced evils is a skin disease (279–82) whose effects include λευκὰς … κόρσας: κόρση is not otherwise found in tragedy—though a derivative, ἀποκορσοῦσθαι, is cited fromAeschylus' Hypsipyle (fr. 248)—and we know that τύπτειν ἐπὶ κόρρης (cf. Pherecrates fr. 165) was a phrase that could be censured, or apologized for, as unﬁt for polite conversation (Pl. Grg. 486 C). Apollo's warnings culminate in a picture of the delinquent's dying despised and friendless ‘wretchedly pickled (ταριχευθέντα) by a death that wastes himall over’

(296)—a phrase that compares a man to cheap preserved ﬁsh. Words fromthe root ταριχ- occur twice in the tragic corpus, in Sophocles' Triptolemos (fr. 606) and in one of his Phineus plays (fr. 712), but in both cases there is independent reason to believe that the plays may be satyric: at any rate Triptolemos contained a mention of garum sauce (fr. 606 again) paralleled in the tragic corpus only in Aeschylus' satyr-play Proteus (fr. 211) and falls, besides, with its theme of the origin and spread of agriculture, squarely in the tradition of satyr-plays about ‘marvellous inventions and creations’

(Seaford 1984: 36–7), nor does it seemvery likely that a character in a tragedy could say that someone's ‘eyes are as shut as a tavern¹⁸⁰door’ (Soph. fr. 711, fromone of the Phineus plays).

An allusion to a comic linguistic technique of quite another kind occurs when Orestes, in explaining his plan of campaign, says that he and Pylades, when they come to the palace, will speak like Phokians from Parnassos (563–4).

As is well known (Colvin 1999), it is typical of comedy, in all periods we know about, for non-Athenians to be represented as speaking in their native dialects;

180 καπηλεῖον occurs only here in the tragic corpus: other derivatives fromthe same root do appear in tragedy (Aesch. Sept. 545, fr. 322; Eur. Hipp. 953), but only in the generic senses ‘(be a) petty trader’ or ‘(be a) dishonest advertiser’, not in the speciﬁc sense ‘(be a) tavern-keeper’ known fromcomedy (e.g. Ar. Thesm. 347, Eccl. 154, Plut.

435), oratory (Isoc. 7.49, 15.287) and other texts.

similarly, barbarians in Old Comedy can speak broken Greek or foreign-sounding gibberish.¹⁸¹It is possible, though the state of the text makes it hard to be sure, that the Egyptians and/or their herald were treated in this way in Suppliants (825 ff.). In Choephoroi, as has often been noted, nothing of this kind actually happens—but the arrival of Orestes and Pylades at the palace is presented in a partly comic mode just the same. Orestes, rather than address the chorus as arrivals froma distance in tragedy normally do, goes straight to the door and knocks at it, a practice, as Taplin (1977b: 340) notes, ‘hardly used again in surviving tragedy’, calling παῖ παῖ in regular comic style—and possibly producing, in 654, a trimeter without any recognizable caesura¹⁸²—though in the same breath using some decidedly

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