black-dressed peasants around a market square, who give sudden murder or the vengeance of the gods its social
meaning. The tragic action fixes them like a photographer's flashlight.
Many the transformations of the gods:
and many things they judge as we do not:
and what appeared was not what was fulfilled;
the god found a way through the unlikely.
And that was how this matter concluded.These lines occur as conclusion of a number of Euripidean tragedies, including his Alcestis, and they do represent
the stupefied, reverent, and somewhat dark attitudes of the chorus to events. One should be careful not to identify
any chorus with the tragic poet, although there are times, for instance late on in King Oedipus, when they certainly
speak for the audience. But the chorus can have many different functions. Sophocles varies the use of his chorus as
he does the construction of his plays. In the Prometheus the chorus are Airs, Winds, divine beings. At the end of
the Agamemnon they threaten violence. In another play they are Suppliant Women. Euripidean choral lyrics are
often exotic and simple at the same time. Their geography and some of their other allusions are bizarre. Aeschylus
is a great lyric poet in a more authoritative sense; he is Pindar's contemporary. But throughout its development the
Greek tragic chorus was most austerely restrained, compared to later interpretations and revivals. It can never now
be recreated. Even if all its conventions -were rediscovered and re-enacted, they would not be conventional to us.
The text of tragedies was fixed by being written down and learnt by heart, though actors' interpolations do exist in
tragedies, and much worse producers' interpolations. A stage direction survives from a late production of the
Agamemnon: 'Enter the chariots, the army, and the spoils of Troy'. That is not the style of Greek tragic poetry,
which was lavish only in messenger speeches, in conjuring the imagination of an audience, and in certain choral
lyrics. The plots were given a new direction, a new meaning, quite boldly by every new treatment, and as much by
Aeschylus and Sophocles as by Euripides.
The bones of the verses are what today -we call rhetoric. Whenever we read the dialogue of tragedy, with its line-
for-line correspondence and apparently artificial figures of speech, we should remember that this imitates a reality.
Properly read aloud, it ought to sound like a quarrel between fishwives: I suppose I mean Greek fishwives. Both
the continuity of the underlying rhythm and the sharp breaks, the mutual parodies and ironies, are precisely real.
The fact that later teachers offered to classify every syntactic figure and every device of argument or persuasion
should not affect our views. But ancient tragic poetry is rhetorical only in a subtle sense, and each of the great
poets is his own rhetorician. The day of common rhetorical rules mechanically applied began in the fourth century
B.C., with its dead characters, its foolish plots, and its wooden tragic poetry.
A few marginal elements in tragic production in the fifth century are still important enough to merit some notice.
One which is quickly disposed of has to do with the theatre of Dionysus at Athens. Leaving aside all the arguments
about the raised stage and the stone house for actors and the high places where gods appeared, all of which are
much later than people used to believe, we should consider a great rock that stuck out into the acting space until it
was in the end removed on architectural grounds. How could the Athenians have permitted it? They accepted it
tranquilly, they adapted it, and used it. It became the rock of Prometheus and other famous crags. They used it
because it was to hand, just as their fathers would have done, acting round a cart in the agora. Of the original
stones of the theatre of Aeschylus' time at Athens there are fewer than seven that still survive. They are hard to find
and hard to recognize; only their simplicity makes them moving.
But in the course of the fifth century at Athens there arose an art of scene-painting which two or three centuries