So I also don't quite know what to make of Eteocles. But that's one of the great things about Greek tragedy (at least the plays I've encountered): there are no clear-cut "good guys" or "villains." The tragedies are anything but simple morality plays.

Dr. Fleming: You've intrigued me with your assertion that Aeschylus makes clumsy use of the third actor in the Oresteia. I'll be eager to hear you say more about that when we get there.

“However strong an army may be in other respects, where the fighting spirit is lacking everything else is just a waste of time” (p. 191). Odysseus in Book IX forgets that no one is willing to die for his own interests, because dead men don’t have interests. It is even more absurd to die for someone else’s interests, what Agamemnon forgets in Book I. And Achilles himself forgets that in war, the I must become a We . By the way, Van Creveld’s book, eloquently written, is indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand war and Fourth Generation War. We’re in the mess in Iraq right now because our and politicians haven’t read this book.

Back on topic: One can see why the Greeks regarded Homer as Scripture; so many of their institutions can be traced back to him. Homer is father of tragedy; the story of Achilles is not a calamity but a classic Greek tragedy with all the trimmings. He’s the father of Isocratic rhetoric, if one examines how carefully speeches are crafted. And he’s even the father of comedy: Only in the Gilgamish are the gods so risible.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that tragedy is closer to liturgy or a mystery play than regular drama. In Sophocles' Oedipus, the chorus wonder if atheists like Jocasta and Oedipus are permitted to blaspheme, ti dei me choreuein? That is, why do I have to sing and dance in this chorus?

Italian composers created opera in the belief that they were reviving Greek tragedy. Tragedies were performed in three modes: 1) spoken dialogue in either iambic trimeter or (much less frequently) trochaic tetrameter; 2) choral chant in anapaestic dimeters, often used to get the chorus of 12 or 15 on stage; 3) choral songs in complex lyric meters, often highly poetic and even mystical, annihilating the bounds of time and space and reaching toward moral and spiritual truth. Although staging in Aeschyus' day was simple, in terms of mechanics--a simple stage building, a mechane for divine apparitions--a dancing floor for the chorus to sing and dance the odes--we know that Aeschylus was famous for using dramatic costuming and effect. You are absolutely right that one cannot judge this play by the conventions of, say, Elizabethan drama, and this makes Aeschylus one of the most difficult ancient writers to appreciate.

The history of tragedy goes, I believe, something like this. By the 7th century and almost certainly earlier, Greek communities had festivals in which, in addition to epic performances, choruses of men or girls sang songs. Some were liturgical in nature; others were celebratory--Salve, festa dies etc.--while others narrated some heroic tale from the mythic past. The most prominent names are Stesichorus and Ibycus. These poems could become quite complex as we see in Aeschylus' contemporaries Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides. At some point the mob must have said, "Good grief, what is all this?" Thus a prologue might have been recited by a hypokrites, that is, an interpreter, who might also at one point have impersonated the hero and given speeches, sung a lament, and interacted with the chorus, making a bit of dialogue possible. This suggested adding a second hyopkrites, making real dialogue and conflict an important part of the play. Aeschylus is by convention credited with this innovation, though who knows? Sophocles is said to have added a third actor, which Aeschylus uses clumsily and ineffectively in Agamemnon.

More to come...

1. the Kleiner Pauly, under the entry for “Aischylos”, says that this play was part of a tetralogy, the first play about Laios, the second Oidipos, the third our play The Hepta, and the fourth a satyr play call “the Sphinx”. Is this correct? What is more, is Aeschylus the father of such tetralogical drama?

2. I preface my next question with background. Germany (and the rest of Middle Europe) has a unbroken stage tradition extending back to the Easter Play, a cultural tradition that has not be replaced by electronic media. In my own university days, my professors chastised me for treating passages in plays as they were poetry, poetry with complex imagery, the meaning of which needed to be worked out by reading and re-reading, much like the poetry of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbury, or the Pisan Cantos of Pound, with their cubist arranging of ideas. The audience, my professors said, has to grasp the image at once, because it is performed before them on a stage, not read by them in the quiet of a study. Furthermore, they said, a drama is not a text at all; all we have from the author is a script. Granted, the scripts of Tennessee Williams almost read as if they were novels, with very detailed stage instructions, yet older dramatic scripts only tell us what words the actors are to say, and little more. So, they said, a drama’s script is to be read with the eyes and ears of a producer and stage director.

Now: If Greek drama was sung (yes?) and thus resembled more our opera than drama (yes?), The Seven strikes one as resembling more an oratorio, as if it had the subtitle a cantata for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. For there is so little interaction between individual characters; in the middle part, there is a highly stylized three part arrangement repeated seven times of messenger/Etocles/chorus, all very builded; in the last part, the two sisters and the chorus respond antiphonally, and in the two sisters’ dirge, we have one line exchanges that seem to be not said to each character but rather a duet sung from a script and declaimed to the audience. In short, more fitting for musical performance than dramatic action? Does this play seem to resemble more what we know as a church service, or even a pageant, than a play?

So my question: How are we to image this work being staged?

3. In the same vein: Aeschylus is said to be the very dramatist who added more than one actor to Greek drama (though the Pauly says this claim is contested). Given that The Seven has so little interaction, may we say that Aeschylus is going back to an earlier form of drama, and one familiar to his audience?

4. A question about Dionysus: Just as drama in Middle Europe had its Medieval origins in a worship service (the Easter Play), so also with the Greeks, with the worship of Dionysus (yes?). By the time of Aeschylus, had this worship become peripheral and pro forma, no longer important for the action? Was the subsequent satyr play (a dance?) just for amusement?

5. An observation: To make so utterly vivid one of the chief characters (or thirteen!) who in fact never actually appears on the stage (or never appears alive) is a feat I’ve only seen as well done in Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

6. A final observation. There are many tensions in this play: the grace of the gods vs. a Pelagian emphasis on human achievement; men vs. women; the family vs. the polis; ate, hybris, dike (guilt, arrogance, distributive justice). Yet what struck me the most are the climax and catastrophe: The messenger makes his announcement about the battle’s outcome, and the resulting turn of the drama is amazing, wondrous, utterly unexpected – and one of the most astonishing that I’ve seen in all drama. One expects x from the choir, and one gets the opposite y I shall not be a plot spoiler and give this turn away. Instead, I vigorously urge all readers to finish the play, let this effect/affect wash over them, and then help me. Am I wrong to think that the key to the play might lie in our understanding of this turn?

We are just starting our Summer School, but I'll try to remember, tomorrow, to bring in some things written by Bruno Snell, re the Myrmidons.

Finally, it seems to me some comments have disappeared from the discussion. I'll check.