BTS BONUS Conversations: A Peek Behind the Ancient Scenes, the Culture of Theatre w/ CW Marshall

It's time for another 'Back to School' BONUS!... That is, we're re-sharing some fun and (extra) educational episodes because there's always more to learn... This episode originally aired in January 2024. Liv speaks with returning guest CW Marshall about ancient Greek Theatre! Toph goes through the culture of it all, the festivals, the winners and losers, how and why a play gets made, and who pulls the strings... Plus, Euripides is the best, as always. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

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• 2:01Liv Albert?

  Hi, hello there. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, back with returning guest, C.W. Marshall, also known as Toph. Toph joined me from UBC, which is always such a thrill. It is just over the water from where I live. And we talked about theater.

• 2:25Liv Albert?

  Just theater. I specifically asked Toph to come back to talk about this because I have had so many incredible questions from all of you, both on my Patreon really specifically and elsewhere, but just about the culture behind ancient Greek theater. The festivals, the actual, the ways in which these plays were performed, who funded them? Why? What was the whole, like, the actual, real people aspects of this ancient entertainment? The ancient tragedy, but theater broadly. We do talk about the comedians as well. Aristophanes, fine. But we had, this was an incredible conversation.

• 3:10Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, I learned so much and it did inspire me to, next summer, we're going to do a whole month on Euripides, like, both some plays, but also the person, the culture, him as a tragedian and his, oh, cannot wait. Anyway, that's for future time. Today is just about theater itself. So many fascinating intricacies and details about the culture of it. I won't try to say more because the conversation is just too good.

• 3:54Liv Albert?

  Conversations. A peek behind the ancient scenes. The culture of theater with C.W. Marshall.

• 4:16Liv Albert?

  I'm so thrilled to have you back, for one, but also just, yeah, Greek tragedy broadly. I've already talked outside of the episode about how obsessed I am with Euripides. But I just, you know, I think something that, that listeners don't often understand without the background of this is the, the fuller context of

• 4:35Liv Albert?

  Athenian tragedy, I should say, rather than Greek, but of, you know, what was kind of going on, the festivals where these were performed, the fact that there were so many tragedians whose work doesn't survive, you know, all of the, the wins and losses and content or contests and sort of everything. So.

• 4:52Speaker 06

  I eat that stuff up.

• 4:53Liv Albert?

  Good. That's why I have you. It's very exciting. Um, yeah. So, I mean, maybe starting with the festivals and maybe the, the, the creation of the plays themselves. So you mentioned funding. I'd love to hear more about sort of the, the logistical aspects of how, how these things were created, you know, for what like original kind of purpose? Is that enough of a prompt?

• 5:17Speaker 06

  There we go. Well, it's, it's great to be here. Um, so the festivals, uh, one, one thing we know about Athenian tragedy is that it was performed at festivals. And, uh, we know about the city Dionysia, and generally we tend to think that the city Dionysia was it, that when the tragedians were putting plays forward, they were putting them forward in groups of four, three tragedies with a seder play. Sometimes people argue that maybe the seder play wasn't always fourth, but I think it was always fourth, that the experience of watching tragedy at the Dionysia, which was this festival that was held roughly in March, um, was to see all four of these plays as a unit. They might not have been narratively

• 6:02Speaker 06

  connected, but if they weren't narratively connected, they could have been thematically connected. We know that Euripides's plays in 415 were all linked with the Trojan War. But I also think that sometimes they were, uh, intertextually connected, that if Cyclops was performed as the seder play in 408 with Orestes, for example, if you look at the plays that they're alluding to, both Orestes and Cyclops are engaging with Eurystheia. Both of them are engaging with Hecuba. Both of them are engaging with the same set of sort of paratexts. And so I think at different times, the playwrights try different ways of connecting their plays up.

• 6:44Speaker 06

  But that's just one festival. And the bit that uh starts to be really fun to think about is when we realize that the playwrights put on plays at other festivals too.

• 6:55Liv Albert?

  Uh huh.

• 6:56Speaker 06

  In addition to the March Festival of the Dionysia, there was a festival in January. And that's the Dionysia, uh sorry, the Lenaya. Um, and the Lenaya Festival, uh, we don't, we're not completely confident we know where it was staged. We can talk about theater spaces later if you want, but the Lenaya, we tend to think of as a comic festival because we know we've got plays of Aristophanes that were performed at the Lenaya. The Frogs was performed at the Lenaya, the Acharnians was performed at the Lenaya.

• 7:28Speaker 06

  But there was also a tragic competition at the Lenaya. Um, and it appears based on epigraphic records that survive, that there would only be two competitors. And that they'd put forward a pair of tragedies. So no Seder plays, but just two tragedies back to back. And that that was what was voted on for the tragic competition at the Lenaya. The Lenaya competition started probably in the four forties. So the Dionysia had been uh going full tilt for fifty, sixty years at this point. We've got this festival, but they wanted to have more theater in their lives over the course of the year. And so they, they set up this other competition.

• 8:08Speaker 06

  And while our records tend to foreground the comedies, just because we've got plays by Aristophanes and, and he's got a lot of support materials behind him. Um, we know that there was a tragic competition at the Lenaya too. So if we start thinking about the number of tragedies that are getting performed in a year, we've got three tragedies from three competitors. That's nine at the Dionysia and two by two at the uh Lenaya. So thirteen new tragedies every year.

• 8:40Speaker 06

  Is four in thirteen of the tragedies that survive from us, Lenaya plays? It might not be that high, but I think there's good reason to think that maybe some of the tragedies that we've got aren't Dionysia plays at all.

• 8:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 06

  And that some of them were performed at the Lenaya or maybe at another festival, because there were also local Dionysia festivals also earlier in the year. Now, these are sometimes called rural Dionysia. Sometimes they're called dem Dionysia. Athens was divided into a hundred and thirty nine or whatever deems villages or neighborhoods. And some of them had theater spaces. And we can talk about individual theater spaces if you want, but if you ever go to Attica and you're heading down south to the temple of Sunion on the coast, really close to there is the dem theater of Thorakos. And Thorakos is.

• 9:39Liv Albert?

  Someone told me about this. Yes.

• 9:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, you've got to go. It's amazing.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  So Thorakos, it's just, you know, on the side of the road. Sometimes the gate's just ajar, sometimes it's a little person sitting in a house, but you go in.

• 9:56Liv Albert?

  Love Grace for that.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  There's, but here's a fifth century theater space for us. It's one of these dem theater spaces. And it was a theater space that was probably used by Thorakos and the neighboring deems as well for their Dionysia. They may have pooled together, but we've got inscriptional records saying that there were dramatic contests there, too. We don't know all the workings of them. But if there's, let's say, a dozen different dem festivals scattered around Attica, too, during this local Dionysia celebration or rural Dionysia celebration.

• 10:32Speaker 06

  That adds even more plays. I'll talk a little bit more about Thoracostus for a sec because it's it's right by the entry to the Lorian Silver Mines. It's

• 10:44Speaker 06

  this long sort of rectangular orchestra. There's no the the the grounds drops off quickly, so there's barely room to set up a a stage building. And if you do set up a stage building, that makes the orchestra even more narrow. But it's not this gorgeous, perfect circle or or whatever we might imagine. It's just the local countryside, and this was the space that they had to build a theater. And they built it, it's preserved, it's being excavated. And and it's a great place to visit just for breaking away from the assumptions that we get when we just look at the theater of Dionysus, or we just look at a Pita Ross.

• 11:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I have, okay, so many quick things based on what you've said. One, so I remember Thoracost was mentioned by Hannah Parker came on my show. She does TikToks, amazing TikToks about the ancient world. And then she mentioned it because she had just been there. And is it like, it's oddly shaped, right? Because of what you're talking about, how it was just like they just used what they had and created what they could. So so it's it's quite unique, is it?

• 11:45Speaker 06

  It is very, it's almost like a a J that's on its side. So there's a a a long rows seats that sort of curve over on one side and one side only. There's room for a temple on the other side. But but it's it's not even symmetrical.

• 12:02Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  And yet it was a site of theater competitions. And we've got these great records that just scattered hints throughout antiquity. But for example, I think it's Elion writing in Rome. He's got this anecdote of Socrates, famous Socrates, going to the Piraeus whenever Euripides puts on a play there.

• 12:29Liv Albert?

  Good.

• 12:29Speaker 06

  It's a weird thing to invent.

• 12:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 06

  You're not going to make that up. But it suggests that, at least in Elean's day, it would be assumed that one of the big three, Euripides, would be regularly, at least more than once, putting on plays at this one particular Dean festival.

• 12:53Speaker 06

  And there's another theater in the Piraeus, but that Socrates, the point of the anecdote is that Socrates was a big Euripides fan, and he's going to walk all the way down to the harbor in order to see a Euripides play. It's not weird that Euripides is putting on a play there. That has to be presumed for the story to be interesting. So, again, do we have records of Euripides actually performing there? No, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if all of the playwrights were occasionally, maybe they've only got one or two plays that they've written in that year that they want to put on that aren't working as a tetralogy, that aren't Dionysia plays, that someone else got selected for the Dionysia, so they've got, they're going to put two of the plays on at the Linaya.

• 13:36Speaker 06

  Or maybe they just get paid really, really well to go down to the Piraeus. But I think we need to break free of this assumption that, you know, you're trying out material in the Catskills.

• 13:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 06

  Before you bring it to the big city, or that it's an encore performance. If you win, you get to tour the provinces. I think neither of those is as likely as just these were opportunities to put on plays, and everyone is putting on plays all the time.

• 14:03Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Well, yeah, I mean, if you think about how many we know each playwright had, like, obviously, most of them don't survive, but we know so many, like, it seems that logistically, this seems like something that, yeah, you'd need more opportunity than just the Dionysia, because if there's, we only know of the plays of these three, well, of course, we know about more, but like, you know, we think of these three and the volume that they had, but they weren't always performing every year. They didn't always get in, you know? And so, yeah, like, and, and so before I forget to ask this, because also apologies if I'm misremembering, but you came on my show to talk about the Helen, which is.

• 14:39Liv Albert?

  Stuck with me forever. It's incredible. I just started talking about Ifegania among the Torians and the introduction. There's some note about it being like often kind of connected with the Helen and in sort of theme. And I'm like, oh, I'm so excited. But did you argue that that the Helen and Andromache could have been Linaya plays? Or am I misremembering?

• 15:01Speaker 06

  No, you're not Andromeda.

• 15:03Liv Albert?

  Sorry, thank you.

• 15:04Speaker 06

  I had thought I was going to be arguing that Helen and Andromeda were both Linaya plays. And that was a doublet. That when I started writing my book on Helen, that's what I thought I was going to be arguing. Unfortunately, I talked myself out of that particular example. But that doesn't mean that there aren't other Linaya plays in amongst

• 15:25Speaker 06

  the plays that survive. And it's not that it's impossible in the case of Helen and Andromeda. I just think the balance of probabilities in that case argues against it.

• 15:33Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 15:34Speaker 06

  But I think being open to that possibility.

• 15:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 06

  Is something that I want to be and I want to recognize the full performance calendar. That sometimes you want to open a play in Chicago rather than New York for various reasons. That sometimes you want to target a particular audience and that particular audience is going to be found somewhere else.

• 15:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I think as Canadians, we can identify with it.

• 16:01Speaker 06

  Just a little bit, maybe.

• 16:03Liv Albert?

  I say having been wished happy Thanksgiving multiple times this week.

• 16:09Speaker 06

  So

• 16:12Speaker 06

  we're talking about the big playwrights putting on plays at these Dean level festivals. We actually have a really cool inscription and we don't know what the inscription means, but I think I can, I can tell you the whole details of the inscription. It was, I think it was found in 1954. It's the base for a bronze statue that was found in.

• 16:39Speaker 06

  A deme called Anagairos. The deme is on the coast. Uh, you can see the monument itself or the base itself in the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, which is just sort of around the side of the big National Archaeological Museum.

• 16:55Liv Albert?

  Why didn't I know that was a thing? Now I'm mad at myself, but good to know. Okay.

• 16:59Speaker 06

  Good, good to know. I don't use the phrase as exciting as the Epigraphic Museum in Athens often.

• 17:05Speaker 06

  But I find it thrilling. Um, but anyway, so in there, there's this monument that was set up by the Corregos, the producer. And so the Corregos has won. And what he gets to do as a victor is set up a statue to me. Look how awesome I am. And what the stat, what, what the inscription says is Socrates dedicated this. Euripides was the didascalas. Didascalas is our word for director. Doesn't say Euripides was the playwright. And then it lists the tragedians, uh, tragoidoi. And then it gives 14 names. Um,

• 17:46Speaker 06

  and so there's a Melitas, there's an Emporion, there's a Lysias, there's a Sone. Sone is a really rare name in Greek. It's uh, S O N.

• 17:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 06

  But uh, we know of a Sone from Anagairos, uh, from another inscription. And so these are the local boys who were in a chorus for a tragedy that Euripides directed. And that this guy Socrates, not the famous Socrates, but some other Socrates. And if it wasn't some other Socrates, it was that other Socrates's grandson. So

• 18:23Speaker 06

  there, there's a couple of candidates on who the Socrates could be.

• 18:25Liv Albert?

  Love it.

• 18:26Speaker 06

  Um, but Socrates is the, is the producer, we would say. Euripides was the director and here are 14 choristers. And that's all it says. So look what we can get from this information. First off, no mention of what festival it is. If you're looking at the statue, you can work it out or you know, that's not what's important.

• 18:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 06

  What's important is that we won. What were the plays? Not important.

• 18:54Speaker 06

  We don't need to commemorate the playwright at all. And in fact, Euripides isn't commemorated as a playwright.

• 18:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 06

  He's commemorated as Didascalus. He's a director. In with the Oscars, we care more about the best director than the best adapted screenplay.

• 19:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 06

  But we but here in terms of the dedications. It's not the poet, the adapted screenplay. It's the director that is being commemorated. And we can make a little aside here if we want. We know in the case of some comedies that Aristophanes, for example, doesn't direct all his own plays. And he gets other people who are specialists. You get, you know, someone who understands this type of comedy to direct this type of the play.

• 19:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 06

  Or maybe when Aristophanes is acting in his plays, he gets another director. We don't know. But anyway, so we know the Corregos, we know the director, we know fourteen tragedians. We don't know the festival. We don't know the plays that won. We don't know the actors. The actors aren't being identified on this. They're being paid. They're separate from this. The Corregos, the producer is only bragging about the stuff that he put forward.

• 20:06Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 20:07Speaker 06

  And so all sorts of information we would want to have.

• 20:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Speaker 06

  We need to guess at, but it shows us what was important, at least from the production side.

• 20:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 06

  If you win win Best Picture, you know, you always, again, thinking of the Oscars, you know, the crowd of people who come up for Best Picture, you don't know who those people are. Sometimes there's an actor there or two. But but the people that you're seeing are the people backstage or the people who have roles that don't make it onto the screen.

• 20:36Speaker 06

  So, uh, is this evidence that there was a dramatic contest at Antagoras? Maybe.

• 20:45Speaker 06

  And Benjamin Milas says that this is evidence that Euripides was competing.

• 20:51Speaker 06

  Not early in his career, but late in his career.

• 20:56Speaker 06

  With a one off play at Anagaurus and that he wins.

• 21:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:01Speaker 06

  And maybe it's kept coming in and, and you know, maybe it's a little unfair if Euripides comes in at age sixty five. Having won at the Dionysia at least a couple of times, but you know.

• 21:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 21:12Speaker 06

  So maybe.

• 21:14Liv Albert?

  I like this idea of the, of the Oscars because it's, it's a great way to kind of connect it, like thinking of like Scorsese jumping in with like a bunch of up and coming directors and you're like, well, that's not totally fair, I guess, like.

• 21:24Speaker 06

  Or when Scorsese does the Netflix stuff, right?

• 21:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 21:29Speaker 06

  That's exactly, that's exactly right. So did all the choristers come from the same dean? Is that why they're not given their father's names and not given their dean associations? If there were fifteen choristers, where's the fifteenth? Some people have suggested that he was a professional and so we don't, you know, if we're paying him or he's the chorus leader. And if we're, if we're paying him, he doesn't get his name written down. But it's also possible he just came from another dean and we don't care about him as much. And that we're only celebrating the local boys.

• 22:02Speaker 06

  It's also possible that this is celebrating a victory at the Dionysia.

• 22:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 06

  But where we wanna brag about it is in our hometown.

• 22:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 06

  So we know that like Panathenaic, no, I'm sorry, I've, I've, sorry, Dithyrambic victories. Get celebrated in the city. If you're representing your tribe, you set up your monument for the Dithyramm. Close to the theater of Dionysus, but maybe for dramas you don't, maybe for dramas you brag about. Winning at the big festival by setting up. A, a statue to yourself.

• 22:41Speaker 06

  In in your hometown, because that's where people are going to go, oh, yeah, no, he's one of ours.

• 22:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, or maybe this guy felt like he grew up a loser and he just really specifically wanted to like, celebrate himself and like, maybe it wasn't even a tradition. It was just like him being like, nah, I'm gonna make them know.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  And and I'll say the fragmentary nature of the evidence means we can't tell between those. But that's exactly right. So so thinking about what the producer gets out of it. You know, the producer gets that as their payoff. If they win, they get to set up a statue. And that's true whether they're at the Dionysia, whether they're at the Lenaya, or whether they're at a local Dionysia. But I think recognizing the possibility that our playwrights,

• 23:24Speaker 06

  particularly Sophocles and Euripides, uh, once there are more and more contests in the second half of the fifth century, uh, with the Lenaya starting, you know, maybe four forty-two, give or take three or four years.

• 23:39Speaker 06

  We've got, we we've got this increasingly busy theater calendar. And they're finding opportunities. They're not always going to be at the Dionysia. And, you know, we happily accept that for the comedians already. We know the comedians split their time. We know the comedians found other directors. Maybe it was more common than we want to think for tragedy as well.

• 24:01Liv Albert?

  I mean, it makes perfect sense if you think about it in terms of just like general human nature. You know, like, it, you know, even writers and stuff like you're gonna write a big novel, but that doesn't mean you're not gonna like, write an article here and there. Like, people need to make money, you know? The idea that that these playwrights would only produce something once a year and as their livelihood seems like kind of unlikely.

• 24:24Speaker 06

  But also, uh, sometimes you just don't get the publisher that you want. Or you might not be selected for the festival and and you want to find alternatives.

• 24:32Liv Albert?

  Got to self-publish.

• 24:35Speaker 06

  So just start putting on plays in the, in, in the Agora. See what happens. But I, but I, but I like thinking in terms of, of what these roles are. So if the Corregos gets that as their reward. We know that the Corregos sort of gets drafted into this as part of the Athenian tax system.

• 24:54Speaker 06

  They are performing a public service by paying for a chorus. They are, they is a core idea. And this is the way elite Athenians show off their wealth. Either by sponsoring a chorus or by sponsoring a trireme. Those are the two major ones.

• 25:17Liv Albert?

  They're so different.

• 25:18Speaker 06

  And there are some boys who will want to support the military and some who will want to support the arts. I think that's always been the case.

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• 27:36Speaker 06

  But you're allowed to volunteer if you want, right? We think Pericles volunteered in 472 to produce Aeschylus' Persians. And that trilogy. But, you know, here he is, a young, rich guy. This is the way he's making his introduction to himself. He sees, you know, a likely winner. And him in his twenties, he says, "Look, I'll be the Corregos for this production." And because it wins, he gets cultural capital.

• 28:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it benefited him in the end. Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  He did all right.

• 28:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, he did okay.

• 28:13Speaker 06

  Young Pericles, yeah. So, so thinking about that in terms of the Athenian tax system, thinking in terms of whether you are conscripted to pay a Corrigeia and whether you're trying to go cheap or whether you fully embrace being selected and, and, and you shell out in order to have a better chance of winnings, means that so much of what happens in the production is what the director, the didascalas, can get out of the Corregos. And I imagine that there's always this negotiation.

• 28:52Speaker 06

  Between Euripides as director and saying, "Look, I want a second set of costumes."

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:00Speaker 06

  They've come on as hunters. Now they're gonna come on as maidens. It's gonna blow their minds. And the Corregos is going, "Well, you know, can we go cheap on the costumes?" "No, we can't go cheap." You know, and but but those sort of negotiations seem to be endemic in theater that I've been part of.

• 29:18Speaker 06

  And and it's worth thinking about what, you know, what, who pays for what?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 06

  And there's some indications, you know, like who pays for the chorus? The chorus is paid for by the Corregos, and that includes the rehearsal time. We've got this, this essentially a wrongful death lawsuit. Is it okay to do more legal things? I know this.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, all of this. This is great.

• 29:45Speaker 06

  So Antiphon is a hired speechwriter who has written one side of a law court speech for a case where a boy chorister has died. So this isn't for a play, but it's for a diorama. But a boy has been, you know, basically sent away to boarding school for several months to practice singing in this boy's choir. He had a sore throat. He was given something to gargle with, and he dies as a result. So who is responsible? Is nobody responsible? Is the boy responsible? Is the guy who gave him the gargle responsible?

• 30:28Speaker 06

  Is the guy who hired that guy responsible? Or is the Corregos who hired the guy who hired the guy who gave him the gargle responsible? And where do we assign legal responsibility for this very unfortunate death of a small child who was just trying to sing better?

• 30:47Speaker 06

  That speech tells us so much about the rehearsal process for a chorister. Just because it's dealing with the, it's a ditheramic chorister, but still, you know, we've got these boys who are going off, leaving their homes for extended periods of time to live on somebody's rich estate, to be trained by professionals in order to sing so that their dean or their tribe will have a chance to win the ditheramic competition. And so again, we can look at, uh, the, these, these speeches don't answer questions, but they raise all sorts of exciting questions for us.

• 31:25Speaker 06

  And so, uh, we, that speech gives us some indications of what the chorus, what the Corregos pays for in terms of the chorus. He also pays for costumes. And so if we want fancy costumes, if we want lots of extras, if, uh, in Helen, when the king shows up, maybe he's riding horses, they're returning victorious from the hunt. How elaborate is the hunt scene? They're only on stage for, you know, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. We don't want to keep all those animals on stage in case things go wrong, but for that brief entry of the king, how magnificent can we make it? For how cheap? And I'm sure again, there's a tension there that the Dascalas and the Corregos were negotiating.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  So that when Theoclemus comes on in Helen, it can be a spectacular entry without having unexpected comic side effects.

• 32:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah. That's so interesting. I, I, I want to know everything.

• 32:29Speaker 06

  So do I.

• 32:30Liv Albert?

  Great God. I mean, it, you know, you were, when you're talking about it earlier, the, the, um, the monument that was set up, um,

• 32:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:38Liv Albert?

  It, it's just, I, I absolutely love the mysteries involved, like the fact that, you know, he didn't, didn't care what the play was, like, you know, this, this idea that like, this stuff that we so desperately want to know, we just never will because they didn't care. And that's so fascinating. Like obviously it's infuriating too, but it's so.

• 32:57Speaker 06

  It's infuriating too. But again, we can, we can read what certain big studios are doing in terms of releasing or not releasing their films.

• 33:06Speaker 06

  Things that have been in the news recently in terms of it's it's not the content that the studio cares about. They they care about the profit.

• 33:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 06

  The choreos in some cases is going to care about, you know, do I win? What what's the play that's going to win? Not what's the play that's going to make the greatest artistic statement?

• 33:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 06

  The one that's going to be entering into the mythographic tradition. Cause, cause that's not something that they're they're framing their thoughts in.

• 33:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. It's just so interesting. Do we know any kind of like? Do we have any kind of actual proof examples of like? Of a play that say got better funding that that had good costumes like any of those details?

• 33:53Speaker 06

  There, there's some jokes in Aristophanes that we can interpret that way. So for example, in Frogs, the the chorus has two identities. First, they're frogs and then they are the initiates. And they're usually the initiates.

• 34:10Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 34:13Speaker 06

  There's been some discussion as to whether there are singing and dancing frogs in a play called Frogs. I think there are. If there are frogs in Frogs, by which I mean there are people that we see singing and dancing on in the orchestra. Even though Dionysus doesn't see them and the comic potential there, I think is is clear. Later on, when the chorus return and they're in torn initiate robes. We've got a joke that that's all the choreos could afford.

• 34:44Speaker 06

  So some people without a sense of humor.

• 34:49Speaker 06

  Say, ah, clearly the frogs didn't appear earlier because the choreos is poor. Or though. Just as plausibly, and I would have said more plausibly, we've just seen elaborate singing flippers and frog costumes. And this is a bonus costume for the rest of the play. And what these old things, bah. And, and all of a sudden, we get the joke that of course, the Corregos is shelling out. And the playwright has written into the script that the Corregos is shelling out. You're not going to insult your own Corregos if you're trying to win a prize.

• 35:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that seems most likely is that like, the joke is that the frogs were so elaborate.

• 35:31Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 35:31Liv Albert?

  Oh, well, it's like, he prioritized the frogs and rightly so, you know?

• 35:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. I, um, okay, this might be just like a total leap, but it's the first thing I thought of my, my listeners. I think, gosh, I'm being funny and I don't even know it. Um, I, my listeners have asked like more about, you know, I, I've talked briefly about things like the, you know, the crane, which I'm going to forget what its actual name was.

• 35:57Speaker 06

  The mechane, yeah.

• 35:57Liv Albert?

  They, oh my God, it's so easy, like duh. Um, like where we get the word machine? God, um, the, so something like that, is that something that's sort of always going to go along with plays? Or does that depend on the funding like?

• 36:12Speaker 06

  Oh, I see. This is, that's a great, great question because, um, here's what we know about the mechane. Um, so, you know, the crane can swing on people, uh, either for flying or bring a god on at the end.

• 36:25Liv Albert?

  Or a dragon drawn chariot with dead children.

• 36:28Speaker 06

  With, for, for Medea. Interestingly, that's the one that has the biggest, uh, load that needs to be carried of the extant plays. It's also the earliest of, so, so I, I think, you know, they, they had, they were a little too ambitious when they were doing that one and they scaled it back afterwards.

• 36:47Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 36:49Speaker 06

  Uh, but, so if we, we were just talking about what the Corregos pays for. Does the Corregos pay for the crane? And I think he doesn't.

• 36:59Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:00Speaker 06

  They're all he's, right?

• 37:01Liv Albert?

  Of course, yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 06

  I, I, I think he doesn't. I think that if we've got a mechane. That is, you know, we're setting up a crane, it's being attached to the scane in order to be solid. That is an expense of the festival. And if the crane is available in one production, it's available to everyone in that production. Or in, in, in, in that festival.

• 37:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  Well, not just to Euripides. So now that, that's just sort of a common sense thing in that it has to be attached to the scane that everybody is using.

• 37:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 06

  But also, uh, there's reference in Aristophanes at one point in peace, we call it the mechane poias, the crane worker.

• 37:48Speaker 06

  But the, his name is Derek.

• 37:53Speaker 06

  The, but the crane worker, mechane poias is, um, is, is being given instructions. Is he part of the production team? Or is he part of, let's say, the, the theater building in-house staff?

• 38:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 06

  And I think he's the latter. I think the mechane poias is, you know, you're not, how, how many times do you have to rehearse? In the theater itself, we don't know of anyone rehearsing in the theater itself. You don't want to give away surprises and things like that.

• 38:30Liv Albert?

  Totally open.

• 38:32Speaker 06

  But they do have, the, the festival has someone who works the crane. And if you want the crane as part of your production, you let the Archon know at the beginning of the year. You then tell everybody who's competing that year, oh, there's a crane. Did they build a crane every festival? They may, maybe did, maybe it was a default at the Dionysia that there was a crane every year. Maybe it was just every two years and maybe that might be a reason you didn't put in one year. Because you got a spectacular crane ending that you want. And they're, they're just not shelling it for a crane this year. But one observation that was made, and it was made in, uh, I guess the late eighties or early nineties, um, by an Aristophanes scholar.

• 39:15Speaker 06

  Rousseau identified that for Aristophanes, all the plays that use the mechane were Dionysia plays. And that none of the Lanaya plays use the mechane.

• 39:32Speaker 06

  And that was, I'll say, sort of independent of the flipping of the two plays from four eleven, the Thesmophoriasis and the Les Sistrada. Thesmo needs a crane, and now it's generally accepted that that is a Dionysia play. The Sistrada doesn't need the Meconae, it's now generally accepted to be a Lanaya play.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  That reversal of festivals for those two plays in the scholarship was made completely independent of the issue of the crane. That wasn't being factored in, so that provides a little extra confirmation for Russo's hypothesis. But if Russo is right, Lanaya plays don't have the crane.

• 40:15Speaker 06

  Probably the rural Dionysia or the local Dionysia don't have the crane.

• 40:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:22Speaker 06

  But that at least sometimes at the Dionysia, you do have the Meconae.

• 40:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:27Speaker 06

  And I think that also makes sense in terms of who's paying for it, that it's not a Corregos expense, it's a festival expense, and so a city or archon expense. That it's something that is brought forward at one festival, but not at every festival, and typically not at the Lanaya or at the local festivals.

• 40:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it makes sense that it would be like the big budget festival, right? Like, the city Dionysia is the biggest one, it is one with the most plays performed, it is one with the highest budget, like.

• 41:01Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 41:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it just makes sense. I mean, because also, the, you know, I think I've sort of briefly talked about it in other episodes of, the Dionysia was a big production even beyond the productions, right? Like, it was, there was a whole procession through the city, and it was like a big city thing more even than just a tragic festival, right? Like, there was more going on around it, is that right?

• 41:25Speaker 06

  So, yeah, this is one of the things that, sort of the focus on social history that got introduced to scholarship in the late eighties, early nineties, sort of introduced, was seeing the Dionysia as an expression of Athenian civic identity. I think we're now moving more to.

• 41:46Speaker 06

  An understanding of tragedy as being a Mediterranean-wide cultural export and and we see it arriving in different polies and different places at different times. And there's a focus now on tragedy in Sicily, tragedy on the Black Sea.

• 42:02Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 42:02Speaker 06

  Things, but but when scholarship was focused particularly on understanding the social history of Athens.

• 42:11Speaker 06

  There was some great work done that again pulls together disparate accounts.

• 42:18Speaker 06

  That talk about things that are happening outside of the competition. So I can sort of run through.

• 42:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 06

  Some of those at least really quickly, whether these happened every year, not all of them did. So we've got three tragedians, each competing with a tetralogy on three separate days. It looks like we've got five comic playwrights. Though it has been argued that during the Peloponnesian War, sometimes there were only three. Uh, comic playwrights, that there was a reduction.

• 42:53Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:54Speaker 06

  Uh, we can talk about whether that makes sense or not. I there's reasons to like that idea.

• 42:59Liv Albert?

  I mean, it makes seems to make sense just in terms of like money, just the basics of.

• 43:03Speaker 06

  Well, also, who who are the actors?

• 43:05Liv Albert?

  Right. Oh, gosh.

• 43:06Speaker 06

  How how many comic actors do you have kicking around town?

• 43:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 06

  Are there really that many more goofy actors than serious actors? And and and that for me is is is where the numbers start multiplying. But but you know, do do you have the resources to adequately fund five different comedies at two different festivals? Throughout the fifth century, and it'd be great if you did, I like comedy, but but there's reasons to think it could be reduced to three. In some cases, you also have, we've talked about the ditherams. So each of the 10 tribes. Puts forward two choruses of fifty fifty men and fifty boys. Each of those try and so each of those is a separate choregia.

• 43:54Speaker 06

  Each has a different chorego.

• 43:58Speaker 06

  But the did the rabbit contests are singing these narrative songs. But were they memetic? Were they always memetic or sometimes in terms of people taking individual roles? Or they tell them stories? We've got hints of these things. We can look at a couple of poems of Akilides to look at examples of did the Rams. But I I wouldn't feel comfortable fully generalizing as to what the content of the of all the did the Rams always was. But again, this competitive context, in addition to the plays competing, but the tragic competition and the comic competition. There's the boys did the Rams and the men's did the Rams all competing.

• 44:42Speaker 06

  There's a preview. This seems to have happened every year, at least once, certainly from the four forties on. At the Odeon. So the Odeon is this big building that's set up as part of the Periclean Building Program. It's a square building that sort of is right at budding the theater and even cutting into the wedge of where the audience sit.

• 45:07Speaker 06

  It's it's a there's lots of pillars inside, so the sightlines aren't great. But it was in that building that the proagon took place, which seems to have been sort of like a preview. These might be trailers for the dramatic festivals that were to come. But we've got a story, for example, of when Euripides dies.

• 45:29Speaker 06

  And Sophocles is competing.

• 45:33Speaker 06

  In his old age, that he brings his actors out in mourning gear. So so I think that took place at this proagon. That this is the first time we're seeing.

• 45:47Speaker 06

  The playwright, the didasklos, the director, the actors. That's the time to show mourning for your fallen colleague.

• 45:59Speaker 06

  Because boy, does that get the sympathy votes then. Oh, how respectful. Applaud, applaud. And and it shows that he's honoring Euripides.

• 46:11Speaker 06

  But it's not something that's happening during the plays or on the competition day itself.

• 46:15Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 46:16Speaker 06

  This is making the public statement for a guy you've been competing with for fifty years, right? Like, they're they're genuine. I'm not trying to reduce the genuineness of his feeling for the loss of Euripides. And the respect that he had for his fellow competitor. But there's a place to do that, and I think the place is in this Proago. We actually know Aristophanes wrote a play called Proago. Um, it was produced in four twenty two. Wouldn't it be great to have that? But just imagine the meta theatrical jokes that are going on. About the event that people had just seen three days earlier.

• 46:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 06

  And this is what uh the the play seems to be about. So all those things happen more or less every year.

• 47:05Speaker 06

  The other sort of cultural activities are it's harder to quantify how frequent they are, but they could parade out the orphans that the city is paying paying for. And so you bring all the orphans into the orchestra and then you get to clap for your city. Uh, and the the rearing of young people.

• 47:28Liv Albert?

  Really?

• 47:29Speaker 06

  Do you do that every year? It's just occasionally when the Archon wants to make a particular statement. You bring out the tribute. So again, the Athenian Empire is based on tribute from the police, particularly in the islands.

• 47:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 06

  Um, and we've got tribute lists. We know roughly how much. It was. I don't have the numbers at the top of my head.

• 47:51Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 06

  But I once sort of did a back of the envelope calculation that if you allowed one square meter in a twenty five meter wide orchestra that was roughly circular, you would have a talent for every square meter. So just filling up even symbolically, just imagine, you know, look at the wealth that Athens has inherited. Plunk, plunk, plunk. And you put down these bags, one beside each other per square meter. Fill, you know, however long that procedure takes place, that that is a huge political message.

• 48:34Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 06

  That that is sending. There are other ways that we can mark Athenian civic identity too. But that gives an idea of some of the things that maybe occurred. But but it's like the entire festival is a cultural performance. In addition to the individual entries in each of the competitions. And of course, in other, in other cities, at other festivals, you have different types of competition. You might have music competitions where Kither Rhodes, I think there's a Kither Rhodes competition at Delphi.

• 49:09Speaker 06

  But then again, what gets celebrated, what are the events that we care about? Different events get cared about at the path at Panathenae. It's not a dramatic festival, but there we have athletic contests and we have musical contests there too. So, so, so thinking about the festival life and the cultural life of Athens and seeing the place of any individual play, any individual play in that. Messages are being built that are completely separate from the content of the plays. And that's not to denigrate or say the content of the plays is unimportant, but it makes its meaning.

• 49:54Speaker 06

  In different ways.

• 49:55Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 49:56Speaker 06

  And some plays do get exported. And some of them seem to get exported fairly quickly.

• 50:02Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 50:02Speaker 06

  Uh, when we look at the comic vases from South Italy. The plays that we've been able to identify on the comic vases of South Italy. Aren't, again, these Pan-Hellenic comedies, they're really Athena centric ones.

• 50:18Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 50:18Speaker 06

  They're ones that are drilling down. So, you know, either Thespeforia's, I have Aristophanes, or Eupolis's Deems, where the chorus is made up of maybe individuated neighborhoods in Athens.

• 50:33Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 50:34Speaker 06

  You would think that that's, you, well, this is it. You'd think that that was local interest only.

• 50:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 06

  But what

• 50:43Speaker 06

  the cities in Magna Greca are wanting to see is the stuff that's resonating with the Athenians.

• 50:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 06

  And so we see that, you know, those plays have an afterlife. Tragedies have an afterlife too. And again, we, we talked about Helen and Andromeda.

• 50:59Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 50:59Speaker 06

  Andromeda certainly enters into the subsequent performance repertoire.

• 51:03Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  Helen seems not to. Helen doesn't make it into the, but, but Andromeda was a great play. But again, they're, they're entering into the performance repertoire separate from their original context.

• 51:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  As a pair of plays or as a tetralogy. Individual plays get exported. And people cared about seeing Andromeda or Perseus fall in love at first sight with Andromeda. And it was that romantic story that captured the imagination of the painters who are painting South Italian vases in the fourth century that capture, you know, this, there's anecdotes from the Roman Empire of about, you know, people touring productions of Andromeda. Andromeda, we know, continued to be performed, at least in the Roman East. Uh, but in being performed, um, you know, that is.

• 51:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, that is laying, it is cementing its position in the canon at the expense of other plays.

• 52:06Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:06Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, when, you know, when, when the Globe puts on Hamlet, when the original Globe put on Hamlet, what were the other plays that other playwrights put on that year?

• 52:17Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:17Speaker 06

  I'll say, nobody cares.

• 52:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 06

  Because that one play has sort of displaced the others in, in the cultural memory or leer or whatever it is.

• 52:28Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:28Speaker 06

  But then again, maybe because, you know, a play didn't have quite the cachet it had originally, because it made it into the first folio, say, that might give it a prominence that it wouldn't have had otherwise. And so it still enters into the performance canon just a little bit later.

• 52:48Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:48Speaker 06

  But thinking about, uh, well, recognizing that there's a narrowing of all the plays that get performed in subsequent performance, some of them are being used educationally. Some are being, you know, taught in schools. They're the Macbeth you reading grade nine or whatever it is.

• 53:05Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:05Speaker 06

  Some are entering into the performance life.

• 53:08Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:09Speaker 06

  And Ifenai among the Torians is one of those that we know keeps being performed.

• 53:14Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 53:14Speaker 06

  Andromeda by Euripides is one we know keeps being performed through the Hellenistic period, through the fourth century, through the Hellenistic period into the Roman period.

• 53:23Liv Albert?

  And not long enough for us to have it.

• 53:27Speaker 06

  It came close, though.

• 53:28Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 53:30Liv Albert?

  That's so interesting that that one so specifically we know about its lasting nature. And then yet still it is a lost play. Like, I think that's such a great example of how we still, like, it doesn't matter how popular it was during certain time periods. Like, sometimes it just won't make it to us.

• 53:46Speaker 06

  Well, Eupolysus' Deems is a comedy like that, too. Um, we've got three pages. It was on a codex in Cairo in the fifth or sixth century CE. I don't remember which. But, uh, but it made it into a book.

• 54:02Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:03Speaker 06

  With Menander. And, and, you know, here we are, late antiquity, almost on the verge of, of getting into the manuscript tradition.

• 54:12Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:12Speaker 06

  And Menander and Eupolysus' Deems doesn't make it.

• 54:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:17Speaker 06

  But, but we've got this one fragment. Well, it's, it's a pretty extensive fragment. It's three pages of this codex. From Deems, which is the play that we know was performed in South Italy in the fourth century. We can see it had a lasting impact. It was available to, you know, to, to authors like Lucian in the, in the second century C.

• 54:39Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 54:40Speaker 06

  When they are looking back at Attic drama, they're looking to plays like Frogs, to plays like Deems.

• 54:49Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  In terms of their comic inspiration. And so Deems is another one that almost made it.

• 54:55Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Oh, it's so interesting.

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• 57:08Liv Albert?

  I just am so obsessed with the idea of just all of the different things that had to happen for us to have things, have all of these surviving bits and pieces. So hearing about these specific ones, we know were so popular and yet we don't have them. Just so fascinating.

• 57:23Speaker 06

  So the story that we have for Andromeda. Well, first off, Andromeda is the play that Euripides, that Dionysus is reading in Frogs. That's what gives him the yearning for Euripides, is the yearning felt by Perseus falling in love. And so at the end of the 5th century, Andromeda is already being held up as this play for longing. We know that there's an anecdote about it being a scene being performed by Nicobulae, who wrote anecdotes

• 58:04Speaker 06

  about Alexander getting drunk. And that Alexander, the night of his final dinner, performed a scene that he had memorized from Euripides's Andromeda. Now again, it's not important whether that's true or not. What's important is that when someone was telling stories about what Alexander would be doing on his last night, that's what he'd... Focus on in that person's mind, it might be true, but but but less more more interesting is the cultural place that Andromeda holds, that that's the detail that gets preserved.

• 58:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like even if you're gonna make it up, you still that place still holds the value for it to be the one that you've made up as the thing.

• 58:47Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 06

  And then Lucian, writing in the second century, has this weird story. So he's got this, this, this prose treatise on how to write history. And how to write history begins talking about, in the same way that Thucydides' history has the account of the plague of Athens. Lucian, a comic writer, writing in Rome, or writing in the period Roman times, is doing a similar sort of thing and says, "A disease hit the town of Abdura." Now Abdura is this town in the Eastern Empire.

• 59:33Speaker 06

  It was, there were Abdurite jokes. They were, they were the ones that you sort of target. So we've got a joke book from antiquity that has a whole section on Abdurite jokes. So they're already, insert your, your, your favorite or least favorite ethnic identity here.

• 59:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 59:52Speaker 06

  That's the role that the Abdurites held for at least one joke teller. But so a plague hits Abdura, and people come, get a headache, they can't sleep, and it goes away, and there's blood and all these things. And he's describing it in the same way that he, that Thucydides describes the plague. "But it affected their minds, and they all had a yearning for tragedy while they were deathly sick. And they all begin delivering poetry while yelling." So they're all, you know, barfing up blood and all these things while delivering these

• 1:00:33Speaker 06

  lines at first. And this is meant to be funny. This is, I don't believe this is a historical event. But again, Lucian is choosing, you know, this yearning for tragedy. And in particularly, they would sing the songs from Euripides' Andromeda.

• 1:00:48Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:00:49Speaker 06

  Including the story of Perseus falling in love. And so.

• 1:00:57Speaker 06

  I think there's a traveling actor, Archelaus. And it was his performance of Andromeda in the hot summer heat that makes everybody get sick. So again, just think about what that story is saying, that one, you know, you can go to a play, see someone lovesick and get sick yourself. That the fictional worlds represented are somehow contagious and permeable to the theater audience. I love that. The fact that madness is associated both with physical illness,

• 1:01:41Speaker 06

  but also with a love of poetry.

• 1:01:47Liv Albert?

  Dionysus is Dionysus, right? That suits.

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, Lord Byron had it right. But there's, but it's a fascinating story. This is the story that he begins how to write history with. And again, it's, I'm not saying this is historical. I think he's being funny here. But just the details that he's giving, he gives the name of a traveling actor. That's not going to be an accidental name. That's going to be the name of a prominent traveling actor in the second century. But he knows the fact that Andromeda is being performed in the repertoire. The story isn't, whoa, they performed Andromeda? No, this is what make, this, this is the marker that every, the entire city has gone insane is that they're reciting at the top of their voices, lines of Euripides.

• 1:02:34Speaker 06

  And we might even think of the story of, of the captured Athenian sailors after the Sicilian expedition, who supposedly get their freedom by singing songs of Euripides. Maybe that's informing this story too, right? But again, just Andromeda has this place of, again, not for what's in it really. You know, sure, it's a love story, but we still don't know what happened in the second half of the play.

• 1:03:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Speaker 06

  But it holds, you know, one scene captured the imagination.

• 1:03:06Speaker 06

  The moment when Perseus falls in love with Andromeda while he's swinging from the Maconade that somebody else is paying for.

• 1:03:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Speaker 06

  That scene so captured the imagination that the play enters the performance repertoire and whether it's being performed in excerpts with music, with extra music, all that sort of thing, we don't know.

• 1:03:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 06

  But we've got hints because we can, we can see some indications of scripts.

• 1:03:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, I just made the thing like just Andromeda generally, like I know it's also, you know, one of the, one of the plays that's mentioned in Thesmaphoriot's side. So like there's like so many different levels that even I kind of had enough connection without even thinking of this, like really long tradition of this.

• 1:03:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:48Liv Albert?

  Now lost play. Like it does, it kind of is everywhere.

• 1:03:52Speaker 06

  It really is.

• 1:03:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Speaker 06

  And, and it's, you know, it's painted on the walls, you know, frescoes in Pompeii show versions of this story. Are they Euripides' versions? Well, maybe, but they're certainly, they're part of the same cultural dialogue.

• 1:04:06Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:07Speaker 06

  Where stories from particular plays get preserved.

• 1:04:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 06

  And sometimes they're being preserved artistically. A lot of paintings, frescoes, terracottas, sometimes they're being preserved through reperformance.

• 1:04:21Speaker 06

  And sometimes they're being preserved just, you know, as written examples, which we might think of as for educational use or because they're useful for pulling quotes in your law court speeches, or whatever it is. Those, you know, there's different ways that a play might make it into an afterlife.

• 1:04:44Speaker 06

  But what are the filters that allow it to eventually enter the manuscript tradition?

• 1:04:51Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:52Speaker 06

  And it seems that performance wasn't one of them.

• 1:04:54Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:56Speaker 06

  Performance doesn't get you into the manuscripts. It might help you live till the second century.

• 1:05:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Speaker 06

  But, but the cut from that point

• 1:05:08Speaker 06

  to what makes it to the manuscript tradition, see, Menander almost makes it in.

• 1:05:13Speaker 06

  But Ifogenai among the Torians, for example, was also one of these reperformed plays. We have it among the alphabetic plays, these randomly selected or accidentally selected plays, the eta through kappa of the complete works, not because they were chosen to.

• 1:05:33Speaker 06

  Be among the ones that survived. Whereas for Sophocles and I suppose we've only got the ones that were chosen to survive. We can, we can discriminate a little bit, looking at the Euripides examples and see that Helen and the Iphigenia plays weren't picked.

• 1:05:49Liv Albert?

  So neither of Iph- Iphigenia were? Okay. I forgot to recheck that list before I started the Torians, so thank you for pointing that out.

• 1:05:57Speaker 06

  No worries at all.

• 1:05:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Speaker 06

  But all, all, all of the, uh, the H I K plays, so Heracles, Iphigenia, Helen, uh, the two Iphigenias, Kicklops.

• 1:06:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 06

  These ones survive accidentally.

• 1:06:12Liv Albert?

  Was that, none of it, I thought the Heracles one for sure. That's so interesting. Okay.

• 1:06:17Speaker 06

  No, it is. And so exactly, Heracles and Helen are probably my favorite two excellent Euripides plays.

• 1:06:23Liv Albert?

  Helen is amazing. I had no idea. And then I'll never forget that play. It's so good.

• 1:06:29Speaker 06

  It is.

• 1:06:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I forget how I brought it up recently. I don't know why it came up. I think I bring it up when I possibly can, but just like the, the Menelaus wearing a fishnet is just like, I'm going to live with that forever. You know, it's so good. Um, sorry.

• 1:06:44Speaker 06

  No, I was gonna say, we, we mentioned just roughly scripts. We've got a little hints of how scripts work.

• 1:06:50Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:50Speaker 06

  We know that roles, you know, uh, for tragedies, uh, you had three speaking actors. It was one of the ways that they created a level playing field for competition. And we have this one papyrus. And again, is, the papyrus is from Egypt. Is this representative of everything? Maybe not, but nevertheless, we don't have production materials. So we can only take what scraps we've got. But this is one papyrus, Poxi four, five, four, six. So it was found in Oxerincus. And, uh, it's just got this Poxi number four, five, four, six. And it is from Euripides's Alcestis.

• 1:07:27Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:29Speaker 06

  But it's. It, it, it, but it's a great one. And it's only Admetus's lines.

• 1:07:36Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:37Speaker 06

  That survive. We've got the rest of the play. We can tell that there were other bits. But what this is, is this is what the actor had in his hand. And the actor learned just to meet us as lines. And would wait for the other person to stop talking and then they would talk. And and you knew when each speech began, but you didn't write out for everybody, everybody's lines. One, that's incredibly expensive.

• 1:08:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 06

  Paris is expensive, copying is expensive, so you give the actors, the actors are literate.

• 1:08:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Speaker 06

  Uh, so it's it's important evidence for literacy.

• 1:08:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 06

  You give them their part and we we talk about parts uh using terms from Elizabethan theater, Jacobean theater, where actors, again, got their part. They got the lines that they say, not the lines that other people say.

• 1:08:33Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:34Speaker 06

  But that seems to have been the case, at least for this production of Alcestis.

• 1:08:39Speaker 06

  For other sort of backstage documents, they actually don't have them for theater. They must have existed.

• 1:08:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Speaker 06

  Um, but we do have them for other performance traditions, particularly for mime. Ancient mime uh isn't what we think of, you know, Marcel Marceau. But uh it's an unmasked performance tradition with small troops. They've still got musical instruments, they can have a couple of people on stage, but it's unmasked and women could perform.

• 1:09:08Liv Albert?

  Whoa.

• 1:09:08Speaker 06

  But yeah, I know it, we a whole other podcast. We could talk about that some other time.

• 1:09:14Liv Albert?

  That right in, oh my god.

• 1:09:16Speaker 06

  This was the genre that women could perform. This is the dramatic genre that women could perform in.

• 1:09:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Speaker 06

  But we've got scraps of things like a a running list. So over the course of a given production, there were these seven different playlists. And they're all named like Friends episodes. Uh, the one about the goths, the one, the one with the rain, um, the one with the sunshine. And so we've got the running list of seven, I think it's seven uh different little playlists or mimes that are going to be put on and then a props list.

• 1:09:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:51Speaker 06

  And again, if you've worked in the theater, you know backstage, there's all sorts of documents that on closing night get scrunched up and thrown away.

• 1:09:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 06

  It just happens that it was thrown away in a dump that got excavated.

• 1:10:05Speaker 09

  Oh.

• 1:10:06Speaker 06

  Sixteen hundred years later. And so we've got a props list. There's also one papyrus that looks like a cue list. So not, so it's the lines that the other person's going to say to lead you into your speech.

• 1:10:23Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Speaker 06

  And again, this is a different performance tradition, hundreds of years separated from classical Athens. So I'm not suggesting necessarily this exact thing existed in Athens, but there would have been documents.

• 1:10:36Speaker 09

  Hmm.

• 1:10:37Speaker 06

  And the ephemera of theater production, even the written documents that existed backstage.

• 1:10:44Speaker 09

  Hmm.

• 1:10:45Speaker 06

  They're not things that are entering into manuscript tradition. They're not things that are being saved in the library at the metro. They're not things that are being kept around.

• 1:10:55Speaker 06

  But they're documents that are used.

• 1:10:57Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 06

  Who has them? Who gets a copy of the full play before production? Maybe, you know, this also cuts down on, on, on leaks if you only have your own words that you're going to be saying, but it does suggest that the three actors who are splitting all the roles have parts with their lines. They don't have the complete play. I think there's no reason for most of the choristers to have a complete play.

• 1:11:27Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Speaker 06

  Plutarch gives us an anecdote about how rehearsals worked. Um, with Euripides singing a line and then the chorus singing it back.

• 1:11:37Speaker 09

  Hmm.

• 1:11:38Speaker 06

  Now, again, the point of the anecdote, this is the great thing with anecdotes. They don't need to be true to be useful for us.

• 1:11:45Speaker 09

  Hmm.

• 1:11:46Speaker 06

  We can, the point isn't this is the way Euripides taught, can you believe it? Euripides taught this way. The point of the anecdote was that he was using a funny musical mode and one of the choristers laughs at him.

• 1:12:02Speaker 06

  So he's doing this call and response and Euripides sings a line using the Mixolidian mode and one of the choristers giggles. And Euripides says, how dare you snicker when I sing in the Mixolidian mode? Or whatever he sounded like. But all that presumes this sort of call and response trainer, training from the didascalas, the director, that's what Euripides is celebrated for, from the director to the chorus.

• 1:12:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Speaker 06

  That they learn by memory, hearing the music. Choristers aren't being given a script and choristers don't need to be literate. Not everyone in a production needs to be able to read.

• 1:12:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  I think the actors do need to be able to read though.

• 1:12:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Speaker 06

  And so again, there's, there's a reason that some of them are separated and celebrated for one thing, others are winning actors prizes.

• 1:12:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Speaker 06

  Cause there are different sets of skills.

• 1:12:55Liv Albert?

  Ah, okay. I have, I have endless questions, but I also don't want to keep you too long.

• 1:13:03Liv Albert?

  I would love to know if anything, maybe not anything, cause we'll try to limit it. But I've just, I would love to touch upon the actors themselves if we can. And just briefly, who was and was not allowed to watch the plays? Because I know that's a question that comes up a lot. So yeah, whatever you can tell me in a brief period of time while I still have you would be so amazing.

• 1:13:26Speaker 06

  Sure. Okay. So very quickly.

• 1:13:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Speaker 06

  We honestly don't know all that much about the actors in the original productions. The actors begin to get a prize also in the 440s. And when the actors prizes are introduced is a little bit of a thorny scholarly issue, but some actors prizes begin in the 440s. Some come later for both comedy and tragedy, La Nidaeisia. Eventually by the end of the fourth century, there's prizes across the board, but how quickly they all come in, we don't know. We've got individual names. They probably were brought on board to a production in a set of three.

• 1:14:12Speaker 06

  So you know who it is, you know, they know who they're working with.

• 1:14:18Speaker 06

  And probably if you won the prize the previous year, you've got the right to get in for free. But it's not always clear to me that the playwrights get to choose who their actors are. That might be one of the allotted features. So we've got individual names. Sometimes the names are because of mistakes that they made. We know one actor who, in the course of Euripides, was a Rusty's in four oh eight, mispronounced. A breathing in one word, it's not even a breathing, it's an elision in one word. And apparently it just made the audience guffaw.

• 1:15:00Speaker 06

  And the playwright, the comic playwrights didn't let him off the hook. Aristophanes makes jokes about it. Stratus, another comic playwright, makes jokes about it, and maybe a third one does as well. I'm just not producing who it is. But the cult of the actors start to develop in the four forties, continue through the fifth century. And I think the actors really come into their own around three eighty six. Because in three eighty six, at the Dionysia, a new contest gets introduced. And new contest is putting on old tragedies. So in addition to the modern tragedies.

• 1:15:39Speaker 06

  New playwrights every year, you have an option to put on one of the classics. And one of the classics was a play by one of the big three. This helped set the performance repertoire that we talked about in the fourth century. Maybe it didn't happen every year. It happens every year by about three forty, I think it is. But in those, but but three eighty six is the first time we get this sort of state sponsored old tragedies. Competition.

• 1:16:09Speaker 06

  And that's going to be because the actor wants to play one of the great roles.

• 1:16:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 06

  The actor wants to be Helen or wants to be Euripides as Helen.

• 1:16:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Speaker 06

  And I think that's interesting, particularly for the people still writing new tragedies. That changes what it is to write a Medea play. If elsewhere in the competition, someone's going to maybe be putting on Euripides as Medea.

• 1:16:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Speaker 06

  So if there's an onus for innovation, then there's an onus for creativity. If you're writing new plays for breaking the mold, for doing wild radical things, which is what we think fourth century tragedy did. But we can see that developing out of pressures from the instantiation of a classics.

• 1:16:54Speaker 06

  Competition.

• 1:16:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Speaker 06

  But the plays that make it into the classics competition are Orestes, Andromeda, things like that. They're the ones that are going to be reperformed. Heracles is another one that we know gets reperformed.

• 1:17:07Liv Albert?

  That's so interesting. I just, it's, it's endlessly fascinating, obviously. Um, yeah, I.

• 1:17:17Liv Albert?

  I will try to wrap up. Yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 06

  You want to know about the audience too?

• 1:17:21Liv Albert?

  If, if, if we can tell, like, so the only thing I know is that, like, I know there's just debate about whether any woman was there or if she was there. Was she a quote unquote Hetera? But then I have this whole issue with like, okay, who is actually a Heteran? Who is just a woman in a space?

• 1:17:35Speaker 06

  Let's, let's not, let's not frame it in terms of whether you're a sex worker. I think that that's not helping. Whether there are women there or not. The notional audience of the playwrights is male.

• 1:17:51Liv Albert?

  Cause it's.

• 1:17:51Speaker 06

  When, when they address the crowd, they are addressed as if they were jurors. An all male group or the ecclesia, an all male group. So when we break whatever is maintaining any semblance of dramatic illusion. The group address is always to a male group. I think always to a male group, maybe there's exceptions, but so the notional audience is male. But I can't believe that there aren't women in the audience. Um, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence, there's articles uh by Jeff Henderson and Tony Podlucky, both of which conclude that there are likely some women in the audience.

• 1:18:36Speaker 06

  But distinguishing the actual audience composition, where, you know, you might be bringing your whole family to the theater, you've brought them into the city, or, you know, this is how you're entertaining yourself when you're dispossessed of your land because there's a war on. Or whatever it is, if you've got money to spare, you might bring more people, but it costs more. And so not everyone is going to be bringing their wife. Not everyone is going to be bringing uh whatever woman is in their life. I think framing it that way, could women go in groups by themselves? Of course, they probably could. We don't hear about that though. Um, we do hear about it in Rome.

• 1:19:18Speaker 06

  We know there's an incredible diversity in the audiences of Rome, the plays attest to that. So we know what that kind of evidence could look like. But we're left with uh, you know, tantalizing hints. Again, often from comic playwrights in Aristophanes' birds. There's a suggestion that uh uh women will fly away home after or during a play in order to spend time with their lovers. Well, first off, married women aren't supposed to have lovers in the normative expectations for civic virtue within Athens. So it's not, that's really what they're doing.

• 1:20:02Speaker 06

  Is the joke that there are women in the, well, no. The joke is that they're carrying on while their husbands are staying in the theater. That seems to imply that women could be. In the audience.

• 1:20:16Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:17Speaker 06

  But it doesn't, it's, it's, it falls short of proof, right?

• 1:20:20Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:20Speaker 06

  So, you know, you build up, you know, you, you look at all those sorts of hinted at examples. For me, it leads me to believe that there were women in the audience.

• 1:20:31Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:32Speaker 06

  But that they're not a prominent group within the audience. Um, and that the group is treated as if it's all men.

• 1:20:39Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:39Speaker 06

  Because it's men who are doing the voting. It's men who are the judges who are used to all male. Uh engagements, maybe the women, it's been suggested sometimes that they sit at the back. Sitting at the back is actually pretty good.

• 1:20:54Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:55Speaker 06

  Viewing, you get to see the top down view of the chorus then.

• 1:20:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 06

  Uh, which you miss. Uh, and so, so I, I think that we don't wanna start assuming, well, we know that there's sexism happening. It happens. I'm not trying to deny that.

• 1:21:11Liv Albert?

  Really?

• 1:21:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, whole other, yeah, but, uh, but, but we don't need to just sort of import our own way of enacting sexism. Mm hmm. Onto the Athenians.

• 1:21:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Speaker 06

  They found their own ways to be sexist.

• 1:21:25Liv Albert?

  They were really good at it.

• 1:21:26Speaker 06

  They really were, and they worked hard at it. Um, but that being the case.

• 1:21:34Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:35Speaker 06

  That's not saying one way or the other, whether women were in the audience. So, so I, I, I don't know. My gut is that they were there, just not in great numbers.

• 1:21:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, that honestly, that's, that's a great way of just like looking at the, the possibilities, which frankly is really what I wanted to hear. Because I've just, I've read things of, of this kind of broad statement of like, no women. And I'm like, that seems impossible, unlikely, like ridiculous. Like I know Athens was absurd, but like, come on. So I'm, yeah, I'm glad to hear that's kind of like a, a notion of just like, hey, you know, why say definitely not? Like, uh, uh, this came up in a conversation I had recently where the idea of saying that something absolutely did not happen based on ancient evidence seems utterly absurd broadly, like.

• 1:22:20Speaker 06

  Cause we have so little evidence.

• 1:22:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Speaker 06

  In any case, you can't prove a negative. Um.

• 1:22:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:26Speaker 06

  One other piece of evidence that is sort of relevant, I guess, is Aristophanes's Ecclesiastes Zusa, in which women sneak into. The Ecclesia.

• 1:22:35Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:36Speaker 06

  They sneak into the assembly, which wasn't all male space.

• 1:22:40Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  Now, uh, do we have plays of women sneaking into the theater? We don't know of any. If we did, that would be evidence that women weren't normally allowed.

• 1:22:52Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:53Speaker 06

  We do, though, have lost comedies. We've got the Proagone. What are the roles of women in the Proagone that we talked about? The, the, the, the preview festival. Were there women there? What, yeah, what, what? Who knows? Um, nobody is the answer to that rhetorical question. Um, but there's also a comedy of Aristophanes, uh, when women setting up tents or women setting up the skeene. The stage building.

• 1:23:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Speaker 06

  That could be a women sneaking into the festival. If you wanted to make an exclusion of women from theater, I'd look at that play and start making up a plot.

• 1:23:32Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:23:33Speaker 06

  That has them sneaking in. But I, I don't think that's what the evidence shows.

• 1:23:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, I like that. And Aristophanes had some wild stuff, so you know, who, who knows with him?

• 1:23:41Speaker 06

  You never know. But I hope that's useful for you. I hope that's what, that's what you wanted, yeah.

• 1:23:46Liv Albert?

  Like, absolutely. This is, I mean, I knew this conversation was gonna be great, uh, but no. So, so good. No, uh, yeah, every question was answered in great detail. Um, so thank you so much. This is so much fun. Um, I don't know if you want to share anything with my listeners in terms of reading more or finding more, anything of that type. It's fine if not, too.

• 1:24:10Speaker 06

  You know, there, there, there's a lot of really great work being done, particularly on uh, the, the, the Dean Theaters and, uh, the additional competitions, both in Attica and in the wider Mediterranean. Um, the work of Peter Wilson and Eric Chapo, CSAPO. Um, they write together and they've got some fantastic stuff. Uh, that's, that's really opening up new worlds for, uh, understanding the place that theater had, Greek theater had, Athenian theater had in the wider Mediterranean.

• 1:24:45Liv Albert?

  Oh, that's so exciting. Well, I'm gonna go look up those names anyway, so that's wonderful.

• 1:24:49Speaker 06

  There we are.

• 1:24:49Liv Albert?

  Thank you so much for joining me again. This was like truly so much fun.

• 1:24:53Speaker 06

  It's great talking with you.

• 1:24:54Liv Albert?

  Oh, I'm so glad.

• 1:25:11Liv Albert?

  Well, nerds, thank you so much for listening, as always. I won't try to say more today. It was the joy of a conversation. Thank you to Toph for speaking to me, and it was just absolutely wonderful. Let's talk about Myths Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians, better known as the Assistant Producer. Laura Smith is now the Production Assistant and Audio Engineer. She's making my life easier with those conversations, I will tell you. The podcast is part of the iHeart Podcast Network. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Help me continue bringing you the world of Greek mythology and the ancient Mediterranean by becoming a patron, where you'll get bonus episodes and more. Visit patreon.com/MythsBaby or click the link in this episode's description. Thank you all.

• 1:25:53Liv Albert?

  As always, you are the best. I am Liv, and I love this shit.

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• 1:26:41Speaker 09

  Some days, getting the work done isn't the problem. Staying locked in is. Alpha Brain is on its daily nootropic formula for cognitive support, designed to support memory, focus, attention, and mental clarity. Its formula with science-driven ingredients include theanine and huperzine A to support focus and memory, and it's caffeine-free. So when you're deep in the work, Alpha Brain helps support enhanced productivity and tune out distractions. Get focused on what matters. Shop Alpha Brain now at ONNIT.com.

• 1:27:13Speaker 10

  It's Danny Pellegrino from Everything Iconic. Twelve celebrities, one Don, and cold, hard cash. From the producers of The Traitors comes The Mob, a new Hulu original series. The iconic Parker Posey hosts this unique reality competition show where 12 celebrity contestants shake down in an Italian villa to win a share of up to $250,000. Watch The Mob, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

• 1:27:46Speaker 11

  Enemy of My Dreams by Jenny Williamson is a historical romance novel set in the time of the late Roman Empire, where Alaric, a brutal Gothic warlord, and Julia, a Roman princess, with a love of good wine, team up to take down Rome.

• 1:28:04Speaker 12

  The much-awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome centuries of conflict to work together, or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart.

• 1:28:17Speaker 11

  And now, for a limited time, when you preorder Game of Thieves through Burning Pages Bookstore, you'll get a signed book plate and a free art print of one of Jenny's favorite spicy scenes from across the series.

• 1:28:31Speaker 12

  Get this amazing artwork only from Burning Pages at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves. Don't wait. Order your copy from Burning Pages today at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves.