Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds. Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy.

Dunn, Francis

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 417. $69.95.

Recent criticism encourages us to explore interstices, the interactions between cultures, for example, or the interpenetration of genres. This collection of essays, drawn from a conference at Cambridge in 1996, pays attention to the overlap of drama, oratory, inscriptions, and music. The approaches are varied, asking why Athenian drama became so popular outside Athens, or what orators expected to do by quoting Homer, and taken together they help us to see Athenian society as a continuum.

The editors want the volume to do more. Simon Goldhill in the introduction "Programme notes" sets out his expectations: "When the Athenian citizen speaks in the Assembly, exercises in the gymnasium, sings at the symposium, or courts a boy, each activity has its own regime of display and regulation; each activity forms an integral part of the exercise of citizenship. This volume suggests that `performance' will provide a useful heuristic category to explore the connections and overlaps between these different areas of activity, and, moreover, that these connections and overlaps are significant for understanding the culture of Athenian democracy" (1).

The expectation that performance will be a central and productive concern is reinforced by the titles of subsequent sections ("The performance of drama," "The drama of performance" etc.) and by Goldhill's extended overview of performance studies (10-20). Yet most essays deal with "performance" only in the formal sense that they discuss some aspect of Greek tragedy or comedy, while others deal with it in the vacuous sense that anything can be labeled performance: a study of honorary decrees is titled "Inscribing performance" simply because decrees were voted by the Assembly, and actions of the Assembly are in some vague sense performances.

Goldhill gives a useful account of Greek terms for display and spectacle (agon, epideixis, schema, and theoria), and it is clear that his interest is not in performance studies (he swiftly dismisses Turner, Schechner, and Blau for their lack of historicity) but in a neo-Foucauldian criticism of Athenian culture as a coherent regime. In this historicizing emphasis several essays do meet his expectations: we learn how attitudes toward the oboe or aulos reflect Athenian values concerning decorum and gender, for example, or that speakers quoting Homer must negotiate the conflict between elite authority and egalitarian values. Yet a fair number of essays address the democracy and its values tangentially or not at all. The following summary illustrates the wide variety of topics and approaches represented in the collection.

Oliver Taplin in "Spreading the Word Through Performance" reviews evidence for the staging of Athenian drama outside Athens and considers the degree to which Athenian plays evoke or celebrate Athenian and non-Athenian locales. He concludes that Athenian tragedy is not closely tied to Athenian values, and that its spread was largely due to the Greek belief that it offered universal insights into the human condition. Thus the opening essay rejects Goldhill's insistence upon the controlling regime of Athenian democracy.

Peter Wilson in "The Aulos in Athens" explores the place of this reed instrument in Athenian myth, practice, and ideology. The myth of Athena and Marsyas is double-sided, explaining the importance of the aulos while stressing how it mars the appearance. In practice, the aulos was most frequently played by foreigners and was often associated with strong emotion, both of which point to the "alterity" of the aulos (Wilson downplays its role in the elite symposium). In Athenian ideology, the aulos plays a transgressive role in representations of Alcibiades and Socrates.

Edith Hall in "Actor's Song in Tragedy" tries to map rules for who may sing onto rules defining civic identity. If free humans may sing while slaves and gods (generally) do not, this reflects ambiguous attitudes toward song in the symposium. And if singing actors are (generally) women or foreigners, this coincides with the civic category of non-citizens. These rules assume that Orestes, Heracles, Oedipus, Creon, Peleus, and Philoctetes are marked as foreigners; that Ion and Hippolytus are marked as non-citizen youths; and that Theseus and Ajax are somehow exceptions. The expectation is that this will uncover an ideology of song and not simply attitudes about the expression (in song) of strong emotion.

Claude Calame in "Performative Aspects of the Choral Voice in Greek Tragedy: Civic Identity in Performance" argues against viewing the chorus as idealized spectator, and proposes a more active or participatory role. He begins with an idiosyncratic version of speech act theory, describing as "performative" speech by the chorus that is ritual in form (or self-reflexive, or spoken in the first person), as "hermeneutic" speech that gives information (or asks questions, or delivers gnomic reflection), and as "affective" speech expressing emotion. To these loose categories Calame adds the generalization that hermeneutic speech casts the chorus as author, affective speech as spectator, and performative speech as actor (as if agents in the action do not feel emotion, and spectators never moralize). A discussion of Oedipus the King and Hippolytus leads to the conclusion that these categories break down, and therefore that the chorus plays an intermediary role.

Pat Easterling in "Actors and Voices: Reading Between the Lines in Aeschines and Demosthenes" discusses references to acting in Greek oratory. When Demosthenes ridicules Aeschines for having been a tragic actor, and Aeschines mocks the grating voice of Demosthenes, the debate reflects a tension between admiration and suspicion of the actor's powers, a tension that equally applies to the powers of the public speaker.

Froma Zeitlin in "Aristophanes: The Performance of Utopia in the Ecclesiazousae" repeats her discussions of Ecclesiazousae (from Contextualizing Classics) and of Oresteia (from Playing the Other). After reviewing the debate surrounding transvestism in comedy (does it destabilize or reinforce gender roles?), Zeitlin argues that Ecclesiazousae's fantasy of a city ruled by women is based upon a myth involving Kekrops, in which the king stripped Athenian women of their civic powers. The suggestion is intriguing but hypothetical (the myth is unknown before Varro, and cannot be confirmed by Castriota's speculations) and raises questions Zeitlin should consider: Why does Aristophanes dramatize a myth of the distant past as a utopian present? Is Bamberger's interpretation of myths about the past an adequate model for understanding comic fantasy?

Jon Hesk in "The Rhetoric of Anti-Rhetoric in Athenian Oratory" begins with a tension noted by Easterling, namely between admiration and suspicion of rhetoric, and notes that such tension has limits (sophistry was never admired) that reflect democratic values (deliberate deception would betray the demos). In general, these strategies pit the speaker's "good" rhetoric against his opponent's "bad" rhetoric, but there are variations in which a speaker tries to portray his opponent's visual appearance as deception, or instructs the audience on how to see through rhetorical commonplaces.

Andrew Ford in "Reading Homer from the Rostrum: Poems and Laws in Aeschines' Against Timarchus" begins with the general implications of quoting poetry (knowledge of Homer was widely disseminated, yet quoting poetry might smack of elitism) and specific ways in which citations turned a text to new ends. He argues that close (and tendentious) reading of poetic texts enabled the (tendentious) reading of laws in Athenian courts. Lack of evidence makes the analogy hard to demonstrate: Ford has penetrating discussions of writers tendentiously reading Homer, but cannot do the same for orators reading the law, since those laws do not survive. The claim that both kinds of reading are essentially democratic needs to be tested, especially against the uses of critical reading among the sophists.

Sitta von Reden and Simon Goldhill in "Plato and the Performance of Dialogue" argue that just as the content of Plato's Laches challenges ideas about andreia or (manly) courage, the form of this discussion among Socrates and prominent Athenians includes both speech by individual authorities and democratic deliberation, only to show that both are ineffective. The authors contrast the end of Isocrates' Panathenaicus, which celebrates democratic Athens and concludes with the speaker welcoming debate and dissent. The essay begins and ends with remarks on desire in other dialogues.

Athena Kavoulaki in "Processional Performance and the Democratic Polis" raises the general question of whether ritual forms are hegemonic or subversive before turning to some literary uses of ritual, namely processions in Eumenides, Bacchae, and Birds. The closing procession in Eumenides situates the Athenians within a larger divine order; the entrance of Asiatic worshippers in Bacchae leads eventually to the destruction of Pentheus; and the return of Peisetairos at the end of Birds takes the form of wedding ritual, victory celebration, and apotheosis, and is neither affirmative nor subversive. A survey of processions in Athens tries to find political resonance: Hipparchus was killed during the Panathenaia, and after the fall of the Thirty, the democrats returned to Athens in procession.

Michael Jameson in "The Spectacular and the Obscure in Athenian Religion" gives a useful survey of sacrificial practice, and corrects the assumption that sacrifice was necessarily public and spectacular by arguing that most sacrifices had no audience and many were private or even secret. It would seem that Athens in important ways was not a "performance culture."

Robin Osborne in "Inscribing Performance" points out that honorific decrees do not give a literal or complete transcript of discussion in the Assembly, describes limits on the honors that might begranted, and notes that egalitarian values would limit individual honors. The claim that athletic victories determined the form of inscribed decrees does not seem necessary.

Franqois Lissarrague in "Publicity and Performance: Kalos Inscriptions in Attic Vase-Painting" surveys the occurrence of kalos inscriptions on vases, noting their differences from graffiti and their ornamental disposition on the vase. The central argument is that vase inscriptions generally lack names because they were meant to be read aloud at symposia, and that they acquire their full meaning only when spoken by one participant to another.

In varied and interesting ways, these essays draw attention to the absence Of a sharp divide among drama, oratory, and other aspects of Athenian culture.

FRANCIS DUNN
University of California at Santa Barbara