posted with permission:

Performing Greek Comedy. By Alan Hughes. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv + 311. Hardcover, £55.00/$99.00. ISBN 978-1-107-00930-1.

Reviewed by G. M. Sifakis, University of Crete and New York University

This is an extraordinary work about the performance of Greek comedy placed in its historical and social context from the time it first “came to sight” (as Aristotle puts it) and down to Hellenistic times. Alan Hughes is an emeritus professor of theater arts (British Columbia) and formerly a theater artist himself. He was a specialist in Shakespeare and the English theater of the 19th century when he turned his attention to Greek drama and its archaeology, where he found a good number of images comparable to modern theatrical pictures. 

As Hughes suggests, such images of actors, costumes, sets etc., often are more revealing about the theater of their own time than texts. Moreover, as we have no description of “how the komodos sat, stood, walked, gestured, … our best resource [for his style of movement] is the static figurines and pictures on vases that show actors in characteristic action” (147). This is the reason he decided to spend many years of studying not photos, but the dramatic monuments themselves (mostly Athenian terracottas and South Italian “phlyax” vases) in no fewer than 75 museums and private collections all over the world. As he writes, “I have never examined a comedy vase without learning something new” (xiv). His “Catalogue of objects discussed” lists more than five hundred dramatic monuments.

Unlike Classical scholars and archaeologists-since the time of Webster, Trendall and their successors-who tried to learn from theatrology in order to understand ancient dramatic monuments, modern theater critics and artists have usually moved in the opposite direction: they have been using ancient plays and theaters as vehicles for their own creative ideas and ‘original’ performances. Exceptions are few and far between, although a famous exception that confirms the rule, Peter Hall’s Oresteia (1981), must be mentioned in this connection.

Another unprecedented exception is Hughes’ scholarly work that began appearing in academic journals in 1996-when his seminal paper on “Comic Stages in Magna Graecia” (Theatre Research International 21) was published-and eventually resulted in the publication of the comprehensive work under review.

The book includes chapters devoted to general subjects such as the origins of comedy, festivals, theaters, and comic poets, because the author apparently wants his work to be useful to theater arts students and scholars. But its most original parts are those devoted to actors and acting style, masks and costumes, gestures and body language, and women on the stage. All suggestions and conclusions are based on specific images perceptively interpreted with regard to dramatic action.

The author begins with the symbolic notion of the passage from poet to actor and from lyric to the “double consciousness” (the term is borrowed from the French actor François-Joseph Talma (1763-1826)) of the actor, who does not “build a character from within” but has to act various parts, sometimes in quick succession. Obviously, masks encouraged “doubling,” and by transferring expression from the face to the whole body also encouraged creativity in regard to an acting style that was not representational but presentational and metatheatrical. The appearance of the actors (masks with distorted features, padded costumes, artificial phalli) was emblematic of the social inferiority of comic characters as opposed to the socially superior tragic heroes and stories (spoudaioi and phauloi, respectively, as Aristotle has it) (170-1).

When discussing attitudes and gestures, Hughes uses the behaviorist term ’emblem’ to distinguish between “symbolic, culturally specific action that expresses an idea rather than an emotion” (154), and affective gestures which are more difficult to decode. However, because ancient comedy was highly conventional in terms of its characters and plot structures, and the author has a great power of observation, his analysis of images is impressive. This is true of general examinations of the evidence, say, for comic costumes and how they were donned or manipulated on stage, or for wooden stages which could be dismantled and reassembled, but could not be carried by traveling troupes from city to city, and which, therefore, it has to be assumed belonged to the cities themselves. Occasionally, a single image may be enough to support a valuable conclusion, e.g. the “Perseus dance” on a low wooden stage illustrated on an Attic oinochoe (Athens ΒΣ518, c. 420), which shows that such stages originated in Attica (the same picture also offers a unique indication of a theatron opposite the stage).

Character types are identifiable by mask and “the generalized style of body language” (147). “Low” types may have been perceived as such “simply because they kept their bodies close to the ground. Actors cultivated this impression by adopting an angular, knee-bending walk, or by stooping and crouching” (151). Yet “portraits from Taras show how, within the comic convention of inverted ideals, actors could set their individual stamp on old types.” A wonderful example is “an old fellow named Derkylos [who] dances a ‘soft shoe,’ gracefully pointing his toes. A charming figure with black mask and tights seems to shrug, looking over his shoulder as he sidles” (150: Apulian situla, 360-350, Getty Museum, 96.AE.118).

In general, while masks often divide women into “three broad categories” (maiden, wife and crone), depictions in vase scenes situate women in relation to men in terms of modesty (158). However, in the chapter on “Comedy and Women” the author discusses the introduction of leading female roles to comedy (Lysistrata, Praxagora), which were individual cases since there was no tradition behind them; and because such heroines inverted “custom and propriety by abandoning the woman’s realm (oikos) for the man’s (polis)” the author wonders whether their appearance was also inverted so as to make them appear attractive in order to be taken seriously by the audience (204).

Lysistrata and Praxagora were played by Aristophanes’ protagonist actors, but Hughes believes that real women were also used as performers in mute roles of dancers, musicians, and allegorical abstractions. He lists a dozen or so cases from Aristophanes, of which worthy of special note is the aulos player brought home by reveling Philokleon at Wasps 1326, because Bdelykleon recognizes her as person (not a character of the play) and mentions her name, “Dardanis.” Does a reference to a real (and perhaps renowned) aulêtris amount to cogent evidence for her presence on stage? 

I remain skeptical about the possibility of mixing real young women with the grotesque and sexually repulsive old men of comedy, inasmuch as such a practice seems to me incompatible with the style of comic performance. Indeed, as Hughes elsewhere says, “given the way female characters are defined, surprisingly few scenes express even muted sexuality” (158). On the other hand, I recognize his point that certain of the above figures have some rejuvenating effect on protagonists (add Ach. 1198, Eq. 1390). Besides, sexually explicit paratheatrical performances featuring dancers and tumblers in partial or total nudity have been documented by Xenophon (Symp. 2.1-2, 8, etc.) and by phlyax vases, and the author refers most of them to acrobatic and mime shows, although in a few cases some relationship to comedy is also possible. Regarding the unnecessarily vexed question of whether women were admitted to theater as spectators, Hughes reasonably sides with those who believe that they were admitted.

The value of this remarkable book lies in the close examination of a multitude of dramatic monuments interpreted, not as archaeological objects, but as pictorial evidence for the performance of Old and Middle comedy in Athens and South Italy and Sicily. This kind of approach–and achievement–was possible precisely because the author is a professional theater historian and self-taught–though by no means an amateur–archaeologist.

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]

posted with permission:

An Environmental History of Ancient Greece and Rome. By Lukas Thommen. Translated by Philip Hill. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp xi + 186. Paper, $29.99. ISBN 978-0521-17465-7.

Reviewed by Jeremy McInerney, University of Pennsylvania

Thommen’s work illustrates both the strengths and shortcomings of a short handbook designed to introduce readers to the study of the environmental history of the Greek and Roman worlds. Constraints of the handbook format, especially length, make it unfair to compare it to more theoretically sophisticated works like Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea, or more exhaustive tomes such as Sallares’ magnificent 1991 volume, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World, and in the space of a scant 142 pages of text Thommen is able to touch upon a broad range of topics, from deforestation to changes in shore-line, with short chapters on topics as varied as Fire, Water, Animals and Food, which is not to exhaust the list. Also, the work has a very thorough summary, in the Introduction, briefly noting various modern works devoted to environmental history. Thommen is admirably lucid in laying out the key ancient and modern terms used for discussing environmental matters. The section on further reading is also very helpful and the volume will be a good jumping off point for undergraduates working on environmentally-themed term papers.

A more difficult question to answer, however, is whether such a format is really desirable for a topic as immense as the environmental history of the Ancient Mediterranean. Time and again questions are raised, or more commonly, assertions are made, that one would like to have seen more fully teased out. For example, after a half-page discussion of the Greek understanding of climatic zones and meteorology, Thommen declares, “No concrete effects of this teaching on settlement activity are apparent” (25) This is strictly not true. Lothar Haselberger has shown quite convincingly that classical urban planning took account of Aristotelian notions of the winds. [[1]] Rather than a closed avenue, as Thommen’s comments suggest, this is a new line of inquiry that deserves much more attention. Similarly, a statement such as “During the Augustan period, the poets Vergil and Propertius praised the superior strength of the Roman Empire precisely because of its better environment” (76) borders on oversimplification. Debellare superbos et parcere subiectis is not an environmental manifesto!

A second reservation concerns Thommen’s decision to base his work primarily on literary sources (16) and to take into account “natural-scientific investigations” (which I take to mean archaeology in its fullest sense) “only to a limited degree.” Thus we get Oliver Rackham on the capacity of pine trees to regenerate and the revisionist view that widespread deforestation was not responsible for the degradation of the Greek countryside, and a passing reference to Hans Lohmann’s Atene survey, but no mention of the Nemea Valley Area Project, the Pylos Regional Area Project or the nearly fifty year old Minnesota-Messenia Project. Similarly, on the Roman side, an influential 2010 Dutch landscape and archaeological project entitled Regional Pathways to Complexity is simply absent. Such omissions are a concern: Thommen’s analysis of Roman agriculture relies far too heavily on Columella and Varro, while his treatment of Rome as an urban environment is skewed towards Horace and Martial’s familiar complaints about the noise, traffic and smell of the city. Once again, archaeology is being reduced to a bowl of cherries, to be picked for the juiciest bits but not systematically digested. That’s a step backwards.

Even if we follow Thommen and restrict the analysis to literary sources, there’s much here to cause raised eyebrows. It is not controversial to say that “In Greece the gods took anthropomorphic form,” but recent studies have explored the animal nature of Hera and Zeus, as well as the obvious cases of Athena Hippia and Poseidon Hippios in much greater depth. Accordingly, the statement that Poseidon “was primarily held responsible for earthquakes” is not wrong but only skims the surface, since the cult of the Earthshaker was central to the religious, political and ethnic identity of central Greece. [[2]] Another lost opportunity is the omission of any discussion of the Mycenaean draining of Lake Copais, despite a short section on drainage that mentions a similar, though more modest project under Alexander the Great. One might have expected the greatest engineering feat performed on the Greek mainland in three millennia to have warranted a mention.

The second half of the book is dedicated to Rome and in particular the environmental changes associated with the growth of imperial power. The section on roads is clear, if somewhat weighted towards the physical connections made between Italy and Germany without much attention to other provinces or regions. The same can be said of an interesting section on timber that makes some keen observations about Roman forestry practices in southern Germany. Here too, however, the highly selective nature of Thommen’s argument, which is assembled somewhat serendipitously, leaves the reader dissatisfied. For example, Thommen cites a lugubrious passage from Pliny on the human dilemma: man is weak, threatened by the environment, aided only by his technical resources, which, ironically, leave him even more exposed to destruction. Yet what qualifies this passage as programmatic (an illustration of “the fundamental dilemma of people in antiquity with respect to nature” (78)) rather than, say, Sophokles’ famous ode to man from the Antigone, in which human ingenuity is seen as a continuous triumph over nature?

So light is Thommen’s engagement that at times his pages read more as aperçu than argument. Page 97, for example, begins with bans on animal fights in the arena before moving to depictions on arches and sarcophagi of animal hunts, five lines on the Piazza Armerina mosaics, Vergil on bee colonies, Pliny on zoology in general, Neopythagoreans and vegetarianism, Plutarch on animal reason, Porphyry on avoiding carnivory, and finally, the New Testament, the Lamb of God and the Good Shepherd: a veritable smorgasbord!

Overall, students will find a good deal of useful information here but despite Thommen’s laudable concern for the environment his volume can hardly be said to have ascertained “the interactive complexes of effects between people and their environment” (15) in the ancient Mediterranean. Such a work remains to be written. A final note: Philip Hill’s translation is fine, although there are occasional missteps. “For whenever anyone was belated by a sacrifice …” (51) is not a happy expression.

[[1]] Lothar Haselberger, “Geometrie der Winde, windige Geometrie: Städtebau nach Vitruv und Aristophanes,” in Stadt und Umland-Diskussionen zur Archäologischen Bauforschung 7 (Mainz,1999) 90-100.

[[2]] See Sabine Szidat, Poseidon als Erderschütterer (Munich, 2001).

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]