The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE

Abstract

The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE seeks to upend conventional thinking about the development of drama from the fifth to the fourth centuries. Set in the context of a theatre industry extending far beyond the confines of the City Dionysia and the city of Athens, the identity of choral performers and the significance of their contribution to the shape and meaning of drama in the later Classical period (c.400–323) as a whole is an intriguing and under-explored area of enquiry. Drawing together the fourth-century historical, material, dramatic, literary, and philosophical sources that attest to the activity and quality of dramatic choruses, the book provides a new way of talking and thinking about the choruses of drama after the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. Having considered the positive evidence for dramatic choral activity, the book provides a radical rethinking of two oft-cited yet ill-understood phenomena that have traditionally supported the idea that the chorus of drama ‘declined’ in the fourth century: the inscription of χοροῦ μέλος‎ in papyri and manuscripts in place of fully written-out choral odes, and Aristotle’s invocation of embolima (Poetics 1456a25–32). The book goes on to explore how influential fourth-century authors such as Plato, Demosthenes, and Xenophon, as well as artistic representations of choruses on fourth-century monuments, have had an important role in shaping later scholars’ understanding of the dramatic chorus throughout the Classical period. The book’s conclusions, too, have implications for the broader story we wish to tell about Attic drama, and its most enigmatic and fundamental element, the chorus.