Tragedy Performances outside Athens in the Late Fifth and the Fourth Centuries B.C. by Vesa Vahtikari

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 415 (“Pollution and the Instability of Civic Space”), the author addresses Antigone, in which Creon is consistently obsessed with boundaries and with stability. Pollution, however, is destabilizing and mobile, as the birds carry bits of the rotting corpse everywhere. In the Oresteia, to which the third chapter is devoted, pollution is closely associated with revenge-justice; each killing is seen as a purification, but the purification is simultaneously a source of new pollution. Ritual purification cannot solve the problem, because there is a wider problem of justice that neither ritual nor revenge can address. In an excursus to this chapter, Meinel argues that in Iphigenia in Tauris—which he sees as truly tragic, not a romance—the allusions to the Oresteia show that in this play, too, purification fails. If the Erinyes were not placated by the events of Eumenides, why should the audience believe Apollo’s promises or Athena’s assurances that everything will be fine now? Furthermore, the intense meta-theatricality of the escape plot, with its purification of the matricide and the statue he has polluted, makes purification a mere fiction. In the final chapter (“Pollution, Purity and Civic Identity”), Meinel points out that civic space was always defined by purity. In Aeschylus’ Suppliants, the pure space of Argos and the sacred altar at which the Danaids take refuge overlaps with the Danaids’ view of their own bodies as pure spaces; yet their purity/chastity removes them from civic life. Furthermore, the Danaids’ foreignness automatically threatens the purity of the Argives. Maintaining ritual purity requires that they be taken in, but that act in itself requires ethnic purity to be modified. Meinel thinks that the trilogy concluded with the marriage of the Danaids to Argives, but points to the violence that surely preceded this resolution. In Oedipus at Colonus, the protagonist seems to have transcended the categories of pollution entirely. In Ion, the purity of Apollo is put in doubt, both because the ritual purity of his sanctuary requires constant maintenance and because his rape of Creusa, while not technically polluting, is a boundary violation. Ion’s very concern for purity (like that of the Danaids) marks him as someone without a clear identity, not a member of a civic community. The play offers a potential alternative to the Athenian myth of autochthony as ethnic purity. Throughout this book there is much to think about. The discussions of Hippolytus, Antigone, and both Oedipus plays are especially helpful. I am unconvinced by the interpretation of Iphigenia in Tauris, however, partly because I do not think it is necessarily the case that an audience would take the undoubted use of Eumenides as backstory quite so literally or seriously. The play indeed implies that Apollo is not entirely reliable, but I am not sure that this doubt applies to Athena, or that the play’s meta-theatricality has exactly the effects Meinel attributes to it. Nonetheless, the discussion is a valuable challenge to optimistic interpretations. Again, I have my doubts about how closely connected ritual and ethnic purity really were, but the questions Meinel raises about both the Suppliants and Ion are important ones. University of Michigan Ruth Scodel Tragedy Performances outside Athens in the Late Fifth and the Fourth Centuries b.c. By Vesa Vahtikari. Helsinki: The Finnish Institute at Athens (Papers and Monograph 20). 2014. Pp. xii, 334, 21 plates. Interest in the production of drama outside Attica in the classical period is growing but the evidence remains slender and incomplete. Its paucity has, until recently, 416 PHOENIX encouraged those interested in the performance context of tragedy to focus their attention largely on Athens. Productions by Aeschylus in Sicily and Euripides in Macedonia were important early exceptions, but these appeared to prove the rule of Athenian drama being staged by and for the polis of the Athenians. Vahtikari’s monograph is the latest in a modest but steadily expanding corpus of works that attempt a reexamination of this fundamental assumption. The book is a revised version of his doctoral dissertation and the influence of Vahtikari’s examiners, Oliver Taplin and Luigi Todisco, is evident throughout. This is especially so in the focus on Italian...