Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy

Objects as Actors

Objects as Actors

Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy

MELISSA MUELLER

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Melissa Mueller is associate professor of classics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31295-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31300-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226313009.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mueller, Melissa, author.

Objects as actors : props and the poetics of performance in Greek tragedy / Melissa Mueller.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-31295-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-31300-9 (ebook) 1. Greek drama (Tragedy)—History and criticism. 2. Stage props. I. Title.

PA3203.M84 2015

792.02'50938—dc23

2015014455

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Props and the Poetics of Performance

Props and Deixis

Organization and Chapters

PART I

1 Epic Weapons on the Tragic Stage

Exekias’s Ajax

From Text to Performance: Reading the Sword in Sophocles’ Ajax

The Deception Speech (646–92)

Hector’s Revenge (815–65)

A Riddle Resolved

Weapons and the Poetics of Reperformance

Philoctetes’ Bow as a Haptic Actor

Conclusion

2 Tragic Textiles and the House of Atreus

Electra in Rags

Playing Priam in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon

Silver-Bought Textiles and Sensory Overload

Textilizing Agamemnon: Aeschylus and the Dokimasia Painter

The Weaver Woven: The Tapestry Scene Re-played

From Costume to Character

Conclusion

3 The Material Poetics of Tragic Recognition

Euripides’ Ion and the Power of the Replica

Objects and Interpellation

A Mother’s Symbola

Containing Time in an Ageless Basket

Autopsy, Recognition, and Collective Memory

Signatures of the Self: Signet Rings and Secret Signs

Putting Tokens to the Test in Euripides’ Electra

Grafting Culture onto the Body

The City’s Test: Recognition as Dokimasia

A Nature-Culture Hybrid

Falling into the Present: Recognition and Embateusis

Conclusion

PART II

4 Electra’s Urns: Receptacles and Tragic Reception

Receptacles and Reception

Electra’s Urn and The Haunted Stage

Hidden in the Bushes

Somatic Memories and Mourning

Temporal Materialities

Props as Props: An Intermedial Turn

Props, Pathos, and Nachleben

Conclusion

5 Ajax’s Shield: Bridging Troy and Athens

Ajax’s Shield as a Second Skin

Eurysakes the Shield-Receiver

Solon’s Sakos

Ajax’s Exodos

Conclusion

6 Tragic and Tragicomic Letters

The Deltos from Dodona: A Hidden Prop in Sophocles’ Trachiniae

Co-opting the Plot: Phaedra’s Deltos and Aphrodite’s Revenge

Reading Phaedra’s Deltos as a Defixio

Epistolary Dysfunction in the Iphigenia Plays

The Rape of the Tablet in Iphigenia at Aulis

Conclusion

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

General Index

Index Locorum

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of a long period of reflection on objects in Greek tragedy. It is a pleasure to thank here the colleagues and friends who offered support and guidance over many years, and to acknowledge the institutions that enabled the book’s completion. A residential fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, in 2009–10, gave me the time and the courage to envision the project anew. I’m grateful to CHS director Gregory Nagy and the senior fellows for making the resources of the Center available to me and to my cohort of fellow researchers for their stimulating conversation and camaraderie. The College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, generously provided the supplementary funding that made my stay in DC possible.

Individual chapters of this book have been read and judiciously critiqued by Joshua Billings, John Gibert, Justina Gregory, Mark Griffith, Debbie Felton, Donald Mastronarde, Alex Purves, Antonia Syson, and Oliver Taplin. I’m also indebted to the anonymous readers of two previously published articles: "Athens in a Basket: Naming, Objects, and Identity in Euripides’ Ion," which appeared in Arethusa (43:365–402) in 2010, and "Phaedra’s Defixio: Scripting Sophrosune in Euripides’ Hippolytus," which appeared in Classical Antiquity (30:148–77) in 2011. I acknowledge with gratitude the permission granted by the Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of California Press to include portions of these articles in chapters 3 and 6, respectively.

Audiences at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Toronto, the American University of Paris, Brandeis University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Leiden University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Smith College, and Yale University heard early versions of several chapters, and provided valuable feedback.

Conversations and correspondence with Roberto Alejandro, Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, Emily Baragwanath, Yelena Baraz, Lilah Grace Canevaro, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, Francis Dunn, Petra Kalshoven, Andromache Karanika, Naomi Rood, Tyler Rowland, Seth Schein, Janine Solberg, Barry Spence, and Antonia Syson renewed my enthusiasm and nuanced my thinking at critical junctures. My classics colleagues at UMass-Amherst were patient with me as months of revisions stretched into years. And Maria Bulzacchelli and Debbie Felton made Amherst into a home away from home during much of that time.

My writing has benefited immensely from the interventions and incisive comments of six readers who critiqued drafts of the manuscript in its entirety, at various stages. Egbert Bakker sharpened the analysis, style, and structure of the whole; Helene Foley wisely urged me to rethink and rewrite the Oresteia chapter; Leslie Kurke helped me see where the theatrical and the political intersected; Laura McClure encouraged me to simplify and to summarize; Mario Telò introduced me to the affective turn, significantly expanding my sense of what objects can do, while Donald Mastronarde made many improvements to both the style and substance of a penultimate draft. I also wish to thank Reader B, one of the three readers chosen by the University of Chicago Press, for a set of comments that challenged me to deepen my engagement with theater and performance studies. I’m especially grateful to Susan Bielstein for seeing the project’s potential at an early stage, and for expertly shepherding it through the review process at the Press. I’d also like to thank James Whitman Toftness for his help in securing permissions and preparing the manuscript for production and Kathryn Krug for her excellent copyediting. All errors and infelicities are, of course, my own.

I have been wonderfully lucky in having had teachers who were as generous as they were exacting. Here I single out three who have significantly shaped this work. Helene Foley, Leslie Kurke, and Donald Mastronarde not only provided inspirational models for how to read tragedy, but also acted as daimones ek ponōn eparōgoi—steering me safely to shore on more than one occasion. I have been fortunate also in my friends. Larry Kim and Sira Schulz, Dylan Sailor, and Joëlle Tamraz have sustained me for more years than I care to count, reminding me of what really matters. No words can capture what I owe Egbert Bakker, who has had to live with a work in progress for far too long. I thank him for reminding me to look to the end, and for showing me the way. I dedicate Objects as Actors to my parents, Alfred and Julia Mueller, who have waited forty years for the thesis to become a book.

INTRODUCTION

As actors, stage objects vest nonhuman elements in the tragic text with a physical presence. Once we imagine these in their materialized form—once, that is, we fully reanimate them as props—objects can be recognized for doing what they do best: provoking surprising turns of plot, eliciting unexpected reactions from viewers both inside and outside of the theatrical frame, and furnishing us with some of tragedy’s most thrilling moments of pure theater. When we see objects as actors, we discover that they are vital to the performance and reception of tragedy in Athens during the second half of the fifth century BCE.

Props get to the heart of what is humanly—and nonhumanly—possible. Previous scholarship has tended to downplay the role of the nonhuman in several key episodes where props take on uncanny agency. For example, readers of Sophocles’ Ajax have often assumed that Ajax must be speaking deceitfully when he professes to have changed his mind about suicide. Deception has been invoked to smooth over the perceived illogicality of his subsequent behavior, namely, the fact that he then goes on to kill himself. Yet, if his sword (the gift of his enemy-turned-friend, Hector) is duly registered as a physical presence, one that shapes both what Ajax says and how we hear his words in this troubling speech, the hero’s ultimate failure to spare his life becomes less baffling. The sword’s hostility—the lingering traces of Hector’s animus reified—manifests itself as a distinctly negative force in the plot’s unfolding, providing the basis for the new reading of Ajax’s suicide in chapter 1.

Verbal allusion heightens our sense of how the sword continues to act out its past life. Giving embodied form to the nexus of past relationships from which they draw their theatrical livelihood, the sword and other tragic weapons destabilize viewers’ sense of where on the continuum between human and nonhuman they belong. The actions undertaken by human characters are inseparable from the physical expression of those weapons, as the lively on-stage interactions between props and people remind us. But as animated actors of the inanimate, objects also enable the recycling and repurposing of material elements, both within and across productions. In this sense, objects are actors whose formative presence and agency becomes part of the very texture—the plot, pacing, and poetics—of certain tragedies.

In Image, Music, Text, Roland Barthes (1977, 146) describes the text as a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture. Every work of art, whatever its medium—whether visual, verbal, musical, or some combination of all of these—draws from a repertoire of similarly assembled creations. The tissue metaphor is particularly apt, however, as it signals that quotation need not imply purely verbal artifice. Intertextuality has until recently confined its scope to verbal allusion, but the theater does not privilege words over all its other means of communication. Costumes can quote one another visually just as characters draw upon the words of other characters.¹ Sights, sounds, even in some cases evocations of smell and touch, can cite other sensory data of a related type. Theater’s equivalent of the full-knowing reader, whose presence Pucci (1998) has demonstrated is central to the mechanism of textual allusion, would thus be the experienced theatergoer.² The concept is not a new one, but it has not yet been fruitfully applied to the interpretation of tragic objects.

The institutionalized aspect of the state theater in classical Athens, where regular attendance at festivals could produce sophisticated and attuned audiences,³ should certainly be taken into account. But audience skills were honed not just from watching but also from actively participating in the performance culture of classical Athens.⁴ When we try to imagine ancient theatergoers, we should not think of passive consumers but rather, of sometime performers with experience in singing and dancing before a huge audience.⁵ The insights gleaned over years of watching, acting in, and living in close proximity to drama helped fashion a viewer who was attuned to the various languages and perceptual registers mobilized by theatrical productions, a viewer with a holistic orientation toward tragedy, as both an aesthetic and an intellectual experience.⁶

Experienced theatergoers would be able to anticipate where a plot was headed. They would pick up on cues embedded within the artifactual design of a tragedy (i.e., its use of costume, props, and settings) while also appreciating the subtleties of its verbal script, its choreography, and its musical score.⁷ Ancient audiences must have been highly sensitized to the visual and material dimensions of tragic performance. The overlapping demographics between spectators and performers, as well as the theatergoing habit financed by the Athenian polis, created conditions that can only be described as close to ideal for the intertheatrical readings of tragedy I pursue here.⁸

Art always makes itself out of other works of art (to paraphrase Barthes’s insight), yet some artists make a point of more consciously flagging their restructuring, recycling, and repurposing of components familiar from elsewhere. In The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Marvin Carlson (2001, 4) suggests that we are able to ‘read’ new works—whether they be plays, paintings, musical compositions, or, for that matter, new signifying structures that make no claim to artistic expression at all—only because we can recognize within them elements that have been recycled from other structures of experience that we have experienced earlier.⁹ The House of Atreus offers a case study in the dynamics of this sort of intertextual spectatorship. First introduced to theatergoers in Aeschylus’s memorable Oresteia production of 458 BCE, the Atreid clan’s dynastic travails continued to haunt the stage and engage audiences for the rest of the century and beyond—thanks to reperformances of Aeschylus as well as the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides that explicitly revisit this trilogy (the two Electra plays, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Orestes). Critics have cultivated an interest in the metapoetic and self-reflexive aspects of this particular set of tragedies (see especially Torrance 2013). Yet stagecraft and production elements remain underexplored territory even here.

Consider, for example, the purple tapestry from Agamemnon to which the returning king reluctantly sets foot as he steps from his chariot. It is a central element of that play’s staged action, a material trope that has been appreciated by the trilogy’s readers and that can be played out to visually stunning effect on the stage. But the theatrical afterlife of this textile is equally fascinating. The distinctive materiality of Agamemnon’s purple textile gets etched into the repertoire, creating a dynamic and complex nexus of sartorial allusions between the Oresteia and the later Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides.

The visual resonances are particularly striking in Euripides’ Electra, where the textile appears to have migrated to the body of the flamboyantly dressed Clytemnestra; in one of the final scenes of the play, Clytemnestra approaches her daughter’s humble cottage. It is clearly a remake of Agamemnon’s tapestry scene. But this time, wearing a visual echo of the garment with which her Aeschylean counterpart had seduced the king, she walks to her own death, following in her husband’s footsteps. Props, as this example shows, forge connections between plays, thematizing seemingly disparate fragments of a performance tradition into a coherent, if inevitably discontinuous, narrative whole.

The invisibility of props in Euripides’ Orestes and Electra is a notable feature of their dramaturgy, as is the fact of Apollo’s palpable absence. The two are interrelated, and mark where these tragedies deliberately depart from the production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. There the recognition tokens were fully materialized and Clytemnestra’s Furies—like the god Apollo—were visible in the flesh, at least in the final play of the trilogy. Yet what this shift in staging signifies and what a prop, such as Orestes’ bow, or his lock of hair, communicates through its absence are questions that are only now beginning to be asked.

Early on in the Orestes, the hero seeks the help of Apollo and his bow (Or. 268–76) in fighting off his mother’s Furies: Give me my gift from Loxias, my horn-tipped bow, with which Apollo told me to fend off the goddesses! (δὸς τόξα μοι κερουλκά, δῶρα Λοξίου, / οἷς μ᾿εἶπ᾿ Ἀπόλλων ἐξαμύνεσθαι θεάς, 268–69).¹⁰ But there is little reason to assume that the god’s gift actually materializes on stage. Its ‘reality,’ as C. W. Willink (1986, ad loc.) notes, is of the same mythic order as that of the Furies themselves, and here rightly takes tangible form only in Orestes’ demented mind.¹¹ Likewise, in Euripides’ Electra, the three physical tokens from Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, tokens which viewers assume will persuade Electra of Orestes’ return, remain offstage; Electra recognizes her brother, in a notable departure from Aeschylus’s production, by an inconspicuous scar on his face.

T. B. L. Webster (1971, 34) faulted Euripides’ Electra for removing the story from the epic-aristocratic world of family hair and family feet and putting it into the realistic world of the fifth century. All tragedies participate, to a greater or lesser degree, in this sort of conceptual updating. Tragedy generally encodes mythical story lines into a language and material idiom that was calculated to speak to its audiences. Props, costume, and stage-sets not only helped translate disembodied narrative into the engaging 3-D and multisensory medium of the theater, but also invited viewers to reflect on what was new, providing tangible cues and visible pointers as to the redesign of well-known stories and characters.

Props and the Poetics of Performance

As material entities, props elide text and context. The realm of myth as it was shaped by poetic and iconographic sources, previous dramatic performances that continue to haunt similarly themed plays, and the world outside the theater, in its social, economic, and political complexity, all figure, at various points, as referential nodes for the props we will consider. By focusing on where the cultural meets the theatrical, looking, that is, at where the use of props as tools for staging texts intersects with their mediating role as sites for cultural negotiation, we will experience something of the vibrancy and dynamism of these objects in their original contexts. With trajectories arcing both forwards and backwards, props afforded their (contemporary) spectators an experiential journey through time. Props variously pulled viewers into a vividly conjured past and catapulted them into a future that they would have recognized as their present. They are one of the primary media exploited by tragedy for bringing viewers into spatial, visual, and cognitive contact with the materials of the past as they were being used to explain the present.¹²

Various prop-related strategies can be grouped loosely under the heading of poetics. Originating with Aristotle’s similarly named discussion, poetics at its most basic refers to the analysis of a text through the study of its formal constitutive elements, including plot, character, diction, meter, and visual effects (opsis). But the theoretical reach of poetics has grown in recent years, in recognition of the fluid boundaries between art and culture, text and context. A New Historicist approach to cultural production, of which Cultural Materialism and Cultural Poetics are offshoots, seeks to trace the circulation of social energy between these notionally separate yet politically interconnected realms.¹³ That literary texts are participants in the cultural debates that they reflect and record is hardly a matter of controversy these days, but there has been a notable lag in ascribing to stage objects a similar sort of cultural agency. Readers of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, for example, are likely to be familiar with the notion that the purple fabrics strewn before Agamemnon’s feet at his homecoming evoke violence and bloodshed. Yet not every modern viewer will be aware of the sheer cost of the purple dye as something that complicates the fabric’s symbolism.

Props can invoke a sense of touch and smell alongside their stunning visual effects. The tapestry that Agamemnon traverses in Aeschylus’s tragedy of the same name is dyed a richly suggestive color, prompting many to focus exclusively on the prop’s visual meaning. Purple dye (porphyra), however, was in antiquity also associated with a pungent odor, redolent of extravagance and its follies. In chapter 2, I track the olfactory implications of the textile’s porphyra-infused materiality, and ask what role, if any, smell plays in Agamemnon’s entrapment. In Sophocles’ Electra, there is an urn which is early on described as a bronze-ribbed artifact (τύπωμα χαλκόπλευρον, El. 54); as soon as she comes into physical contact with this object, Electra is transported back to an earlier time. She imagines that the weight of the vessel she holds in her arms is her infant brother Orestes, as we will see in chapter 4. While the realm of sight remains the most important sense, the full import of stage props is by no means exhausted by their visual effects.

Andrew Sofer (2003, 50) has argued that to "register as a prop, the object must be perceived by a spectator as a sign." I wish to qualify Sofer’s statement for cases in which an object is not yet on stage. It’s no doubt true of stage objects that they must signal their action-worthiness, so as not to blend in with less remarkable features of the scenery. But because of the horizon of semiotic possibilities created by the genre’s more general reliance on stage props to create meaning, it seems, in my view, likely that regular theatergoers would have been capable of intuiting a prop’s action before seeing the object itself—before registering it, that is, as a visual sign. It’s helpful here to keep in mind that a viewer’s relationship to prophood is not constructed on the spot. Affective responses in the presence of certain objects are, to borrow Richard Schechner’s term, a restored behavior.¹⁴

My readings seek out the uncanny power possessed by stage props, even apart from their visual allure. What kind of tension can an object generate, for example, even before it is seen? The urn of Sophocles’ Electra emerges as a physical property only late in the game, yet it is around this object that the entire deception plot revolves, not to mention the unexpected reincarnation of Electra herself into a figure of maternal mourning (as we see in chapter 4). Similarly, the oracle-inscribed tablet (deltos) is an object that is frequently mentioned and palpably present throughout Sophocles’ Trachiniae, though it is never actually seen (chapter 6). It is on this tablet that Heracles transcribed a prophecy from Dodona describing a crossroads for his life’s journey. The object is currently in Deianeira’s safekeeping, its presence behind the palace doors lending a sense of oracular gloom to the play’s proceedings. Both objects, the urn and the tablet, testify to the degree to which an invisible prop can make its presence felt.

The theater is a place of disclosure, not a place of reference, as Bert O. States (1985, 4) puts it. Props engage characters and spectators in myriad ways, their meanings resisting overly rigid classification. This book’s methodology is catholic, in recognition of the fact that props will solicit different theoretical approaches, depending on their unique theatrical profiles. But given that readers may be more familiar with semiotic approaches, it’s worth pointing out that objects can also inspire sensory and embodied engagements.¹⁵ The phenomenologist’s focus, to quote States again, is "on the activity of theater making itself out of its essential materials: speech, sound, movement, scenery, text, etc. (1985, 1). Props are one of those essential materials" out of which tragic theater makes itself. They occupy a central place in the spectators’ tool-kit, helping them figure out not only what a play means, but how it means, both as a self-contained theatrical event, and as an episode within a living, ever-expanding and self-renewing theatrical repertoire.

Props and Deixis

Since there were no stage directions in the modern sense, the only way to ascertain when a prop first becomes visible is through demonstrative verbal markers, or deictics. As Nancy Felson (2004, 253) observes, Deictics bridge the tangible world of reality and the abstract world of fantasy. Ancient Greek has three deictic pronouns/adjectives, each of which takes charge of a particular type of pointing function. In descending order of proximity to the speaking subject, these deictics are: ὅδε this-here, οὗτος that-there, and ἐκεῖνος that.¹⁶ While ὅδε is sometimes referred to as the proximal or first person deictic, and can be used for self-pointing, οὗτος is a second person, or hearer-oriented deictic. Let me illustrate this with an example from Sophocles’ Ajax (a play to which I return in chapter 1). When Ajax refers to the sword he holds in his hand, intending shortly thereafter to bury it, he calls it τόδ᾿ ἔγχος τοὐμόν (this-here sword of mine), using the proximal deictic τόδε because he points to something that he is placing before spectators’ eyes consciously for the first time (Aj. 658). The sword has been in close proximity to Ajax, but its visible presence is only now being made salient to the hearer.¹⁷ By contrast, when Ajax mentions the same sword a few lines later, he calls it τοῦτο—"For I, ever since I took in my hand that-thing there" (ἐγὼ γάρ, ἐξ οὗ χειρὶ τοῦτ᾿ ἐδεξάμην, 661), and so on. Ajax here uses a hearer-oriented deictic (a form of οὗτος), since the sword has already been introduced. It is a known entity and therefore can be verbally referenced as that sword.¹⁸

In practice, there may have been props used for which no textual indication was recorded. But these props are unlikely to have attained the status of silent, nonhuman characters. Such props and their theatrical profiles are in any case unknown to us.¹⁹ But where the textual traces are more abundant, it’s important to bear in mind that prophood was neither a fixed nor an essentialized condition. The staging of a text would have established the cognitive framework for viewers, determining what moved into and out of focus and in this way conditioning their reception of props.²⁰

In the theater deictics often actively create the specific features of the dramatic environment to which they simultaneously, or subsequently, refer. It is not a matter simply of gesturing to pre-existing objective realities. When, for example, the Tutor, as prologue speaker of Sophocles’ Electra, says to Orestes, τὸ γὰρ παλαιὸν Ἄργος οὑπόθεις τόδε (4), this here is the ancient Argos you have been longing for, he calls Argos into being, endowing the previously unmarked theatrical setting with a spatial identity. The generative force of the deictic pronoun aligns the visible area referred to as τόδε with Argos for the duration of the performance (or until a new identity takes its place). This modality of speaking, known as Deixis am Phantasma (pointing at the ghost), can be counted on to conjure into being particular cities or places; one of its lesser-known functions, however, is to do for props what it does for place. Deictically activated objects come to embody the distinctive verbal features ascribed to them, exhibiting in performance the liveliness and animacy encoded in their textual profiles.

Organization and Chapters

The six chapters are organized thematically around different categories of objects—weapons, textiles, recognition tokens, vessels, and writing tablets. While the objects in the first half of the book (chapters 1–3) tend to evoke situations from epic and earlier tragedy to which they offer a sequel, those in the second half of the book (chapters 4–6) by contrast reach out across the invisible fourth wall, linking up with contemporary practices (e.g., modes of writing, in the case of the letters chapter), or challenging well-established notions of genre and performance. The two weapons from Ajax, his sword and shield, are given separate chapters and placed in different parts of the book. Ajax’s sword pulls him and the action back into epic entanglements. His shield, on the other hand, despite its epic pedigree, enters more directly into dialogue with the Athenian audience’s democratic present: the shield offers an etiological narrative for Ajax’s own naturalization as an eponymous hero of Athens, as I argue in chapter 5.

Metaphor and metonymy provide the organizational principles for each part of the book. While the metonymical props of chapters 1–3 model themselves on well-known epic or theatrical objects (which serve as their material intertexts), the metaphorical props of chapters 4–6 either subvert or radically refurbish their source material (if there is a clear antecedent), practically beyond recognition. For example, the urn in Sophocles’ Electra grants material life to an urn from Aeschylus’s Choephoroi which was mentioned in a speech but never appeared in Choephoroi as a prop. Other metaphorical props invite viewers to connect what they see on stage with their lived experience. For example, the shield in Ajax at the moment of its bequeathal cues the shrine of Eurysakes, a site of worship located in Athens.

The book starts with those tragedies whose props are deeply preoccupied with their fictional predecessors, saving an exploration of the future-pointing, prescriptive props for later chapters. In the course of our journey, we move from the mythical past into the democratic present. Chapter boundaries respect typological distinctions; yet significant disparities will emerge between artifacts of the same class, and how these are seen to operate within their fictional settings. For instance, not all writing tablets turn out to be letters, nor do they act in ways one might expect a letter to act.

Chapter 1 considers the uncanny agency of weapons in Sophocles’ Ajax, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and Euripides’ Heracles. On the tragic stage, the sword hones audience awareness of the intertextual factors conditioning the hero’s decision-making, and forces a reassessment of Ajax’s rejection of suicide. His expressed desire to be rid of this weapon, which has brought him only pain and misfortune since the day he received it, gains in poignancy when we see Ajax holding the weapon itself. A gift to Ajax originally from his enemy Hector, the sword continues to channel the animus of the unresolved duel they fought on Homer’s Trojan battlefield in the seventh book of the Iliad. The bow of Heracles in Philoctetes and the weapons in Euripides’ Heracles provide valuable comparanda for the animacy and social entanglements of tragic weaponry.

Chapter 2, focusing on the tapestry scene in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, pursues a reading of the scene that is sensitive to the textile’s qualities as a physical artifact. I consider, in particular, how the garment’s distinctive materiality gets repurposed in the later Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides. While it has often been assumed that Clytemnestra herself has woven the tapestry, I argue that the garment’s agency is not readily traceable to a single hand. The textile embodies the complex (and complexly dysfunctional) economy of the entire House of Atreus. It does not merely symbolize Clytemnestra’s guileful entrapment. The more immediate causes of Agamemnon’s capitulation are to be found in the object’s overpowering visual and sensory output, qualities it possesses by virtue of its elaborate pattern-weave and distinctive purple dye. My retrospectively framed interpretation of the tapestry scene aims to capture something of the enduringly prescriptive qualities of the mesmerizing object at its center: to this end, I take into account the prop’s material refractions, first in the Choephoroi and subsequently in the two Electra plays.

Chapter 3 tackles the use (and abuse) of material tokens in tragic scenes of recognition, taking Euripides’ Ion and Electra as its two main case studies. The tokens reuniting Ion with his mother are replicas (mimēmata) that evoke the birth of Ericthonius, a mythical ancestor to the classical Athenians. These tokens thus give a mythico-political cast to what might otherwise be characterized as a private reunion between a mother and her son. The recognition scene of Euripides’ Electra, usually read as a parody of the similar scene in the Choephoroi on which it is based, more overtly politicizes the recognition of Orestes. Rejecting the familial tokens that had secured Orestes’ identity in the Choephoroi, Euripides’ restaging has this scene instead hinge on the recognition of a bodily scar. In this way (I argue), the authentication, or recognition, of Orestes is made into a proto-exemplar for the audience of their own, Athenian practice of scrutinizing citizens (dokimasia).

Chapter 4 offers a new reading of the urn in Sophocles’ Electra, an object that casts Electra unexpectedly into the role of a mourning mother, on the model of Niobe. Before being handled by Electra, the urn, though still invisible, stands in for an already canonical dramatic tradition (i.e., the Electra plays), encouraging spectators to reflect on how Sophocles’ tragedy signals its own reception and reshaping of earlier material through props. Containers, best known for their somewhat pedestrian role in preserving goods, turn out to be an inspirational element in the composition and performance of this tragedy. While the urn equips the dramatist with a powerful tool for interrupting the linear flow of the action with a temporal flashback (analepsis), it also exemplifies the malleability of the performance medium; its association with an actor named Polus who chose to substitute the ashes of his son for the empty stage urn in a fourth-century BCE performance of Electra is, I propose, emblematic of the close collaboration between props and reception history.

Chapter 5 returns to Sophocles’ Ajax for a closer look at how Ajax’s legendary status as the unparalleled defender of the Achaean troops in Homer is reshaped when he bequeaths his shield to his son, Eurysakes. As an artifact, the shield is carefully positioned in between the bygone world of epic and Sophocles’ contemporary Athens. Its hybrid status—part-heroic, part-hoplite weapon—allows the weapon to bridge the distance between Ajax’s demise at the hands of Hector in Troy (see chapter 1) and his reemergence as one of the ten eponymous heroes of Cleisthenes’ Athens. The object, it is argued, thus not only fills an important narrative gap in the hero’s biography, but reaches out (across the invisible fourth wall) to Sophocles’ audience, inviting them to see themselves as the beneficiaries of Ajax’s shield-based legacy as a defender par excellence.

The sixth and final chapter, on writing tablets, argues that these symbolize and embody the contested process of composing a tragedy out of various narrative threads and possible plotlines. The roles played by letter-props are dynamically varied. The Trachiniae’s oracular deltos seves as a mise-en-abîme refraction of the entire play; Phaedra’s writing tablet is more akin to a defixio (a curse tablet) than a letter and is used by the heroine preemptively to silence her stepson in Euripides’ Hippolytus. The letter Iphigenia reads aloud in Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians provokes a playful scene of recognition, while Agamemnon’s revised letter, revoking his earlier decision to sacrifice his daughter, becomes the catalyst for a burlesque tug-of-war in the Iphigenia at Aulis; in that play, it is particularly clear that control of the girl—and consequently of the plot—is what is at issue. But because of their general tendency to thematize plotting as a tragic concern, these props, more than any others, solicit metatheatrical interpretations.

A Note on Editions and Transliterations: I use OCT (Oxford Classical Text) editions for the texts of Homer, the three tragedians, and Aristophanes and other authors, when possible. The abbreviations of the names of ancient authors and works follow Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek English Lexicon. I generally adopt the Latinized spellings of Greek names (e.g., Ajax rather than Aias), with a few exceptions, as these are likely to be familiar to more readers.

PART I

1

Epic Weapons on the Tragic Stage

Greeks of the Archaic and Classical Age inhabited a cognitive landscape far removed from our own. Theirs was a world where pots and cups, as well as funerary inscriptions and statues, spoke in the first person, and where swords and shields acted as surrogates for physically absent owners.¹ For example, at the Bouphonia (or Dipolieia) festival honoring Zeus Polieus, celebrants gathered on the Acropolis to watch oxen being led around the altar of Zeus, a table-like surface on which grain cakes were spread out; the first animal to stretch its neck toward one of the cakes was dealt a fatal blow by the ox-slayer (Bouphonos), who then fled the scene of the crime leaving the guilty weapon behind to stand trial.² Pausanias (1.28.10), our source for this anecdote, even suggests a link between the Bouphonia’s ritualized murder trial and the custom of trying objects in the Prytaneion.³ There may be significant overlap in how ritual and real-life weapons are to be imagined as operating.

The special sort of accountability to which objects were held by Athenian law and religious custom finds its correlate in the theater, where weapons were also vested with a person-like status and where objects more generally allude to, or index, their sources of self-generation (whether human, divine, natural, or some combination of the three). As a material index, moreover, an object can continue to shape its surroundings, through its social interactions. Anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998, 231) has written of the diffusion of the person into the milieu, via a thousand causal influences and pathways, not all of which can be monitored and controlled, emphasizing that this is not the effect of black magic or volt sorcery, but of taking seriously the distributed nature of social agency. For Gell, the exercise of agency on the part of nonhuman entities is a manifestation of what he calls distributed personhood.⁴

Gell’s notion of distributed personhood, though developed to theorize the agency of works of art, has wider-ranging applicability. It can help us understand how what would seem to be uniquely human behavioral tendencies (i.e., the will to seek vengeance or, more benignly, empathy for others) can become embodied in and exemplified by objects. Or similarly, how the vibrancy and vitality seen to emanate from, or to reside in, objects of various types (not just weapons) can elicit otherwise hard-to-account-for