Passing now to the raison d’être of this practice I will first mention some minor considerations. The paucity of actors in Greek drama (see [p. 182], below) made any representation of mass effects, such as a battle, quite impossible. The lack of complicated stage machinery prevented the melodramatic actualism that modern audiences love so well. Being thus unaccustomed to the more difficult feats of realism, the ancients had not learned to demand it in lesser matters. Without a sigh they dispensed with that which everyone knew to be incapable of actual enactment before their eyes. Furthermore, in the absence of a drop curtain (see [pp. 243 f.], below) it would have been necessary for characters slain upon the stage either to rise and walk casually off, as in the Chinese theaters of today, or to be carried off. The first alternative is unthinkable in ancient Greece and the second would have been too monotonous.
It has also been claimed[237] that the use of masks, each with its own unchanging features, would have been an insuperable obstacle to scenes of violence, as normally presupposing great and rapid changes in the facial expressions of the characters. But in connection with other scenes the Greeks frequently ignored and frequently evaded the difficulties caused by the immobility of their masks (see [pp. 222 f.], below); so there is no reason to believe that the use of masks would by itself have driven incidents of this nature from the Greek stage.
Ludovico Castelvetro (1570) alleged that the high and narrow stage of the Greek theater was too cramped for the dignified representation of violence. Whatever plausibility this suggestion may previously have enjoyed has been lost since Dörpfeld has shown that the fifth-century theater at Athens had no raised platform for the exclusive use of actors and that actors and chorus stood alike in the broad expanse of the orchestra (see [pp. 79] and [117], above) (Figs. [22 f.]).
It is customary to explain the Greek avoidance of violence upon aesthetic grounds; to assert that the susceptibilities of the Greeks were so refined as to have been offended by scenes of bloodshed. That which would be disagreeable or painful to see in real life should never be presented to an audience. This is the French position. In the first place the French took over the Greek practice on faith. It was only when they were called upon to explain it that they proceeded to evolve this justification. Then the logic of their argument carried them beyond their models. “A character in <French> tragedy could be permitted to kill himself, whether he did it by poison or steel: what he was not suffered to do was to kill someone else. And while nothing was to be shown on the stage which could offend the feelings through the medium of the eyes, equally was nothing to be narrated with the accompaniment of any adjuncts that could possibly arouse disagreeable sensations in the mind.”[238] They were therefore under the necessity of attempting to paint the lily—“they took exception to the way in which Philoctetes speaks of the plasters and rags which he applied to his sores; and equally so to the description which Tiresias gives in the Antigone of the filth of the ill-omened birds which had fed on the carcass of Polynices.”[239] I would not be understood as altogether rejecting this aesthetic explanation; doubtless the practice of the Greek playwrights created, if it did not find ready made, such taste concerning these matters. It certainly applies to cases of blinding, which, whether self-imposed (Sophocles’ Oedipus the King) or wrought by others (Euripides’ Hecabe), always take place off-scene—the later sight of the bloody masks and ghastly eyes is harrowing enough and to spare. Nevertheless, however strong a case may be made out for it, the aesthetic interpretation cannot, because of one cogent objection, provide the real, ultimate reason for the convention. Is suicide so much less revolting than homicide that the same taste can consistently shrink from the sight of one but tolerate the other?
The same objection lies against another suggestion, viz., that the theater precinct was sacred ground which would be polluted by murder, though done in mimicry. To those who remember the taint which the Greeks thought to be brought upon a land by manslaughter, this theory will not, at first, seem lacking in plausibility. But unfortunately, accidental homicide and suicide were thought to involve pollution no less than did murder. Even a natural death, in the Greeks’ opinion, brought a taint. Consequently, this suggestion fails to explain how suicides and natural deaths could occur on the Greek stage.
My own interpretation of the phenomena under consideration is somewhat similar to that just mentioned. Not only was the theater sacred ground but all who were connected with the dramatic performances—those who bore the expenses (the choregi; see [p. 270], below), poets, actors, and chorus—“were looked upon as ministers of religion, and their persons were sacred and inviolable.”[240] Even the audience shared in this immunity. Any outrage at such a time and in such a place was not viewed in its usual light but was visited with severe penalties as an act of desecration. Thus, when Demosthenes acted as choregus for a dithyrambic chorus in 350 B.C. and was assaulted by Midias, he wished the latter to be punished, not merely for assault (ὕβρις) but for sacrilege (ἀσέβεια).[241] In the speech which he prepared for this suit Demosthenes cited some of the precedents (§§ 178-80). He reminded his auditors how Ctesicles had been put to death for striking a personal enemy with a whip during the procession and how in 363 B.C. the archon’s own father had only by a natural death avoided punishment for having violently ejected a spectator from a seat which he had unwarrantably occupied. In like manner the person of an actor was for the time being sacrosanct. Of course, the Greeks were not fools; they knew that a single blow in genuine anger was a greater outrage than murder itself in make-believe. Convention allowed the audience to express their disapproval of actors or of their performances by pelting them with figs, olives, or even stones. Custom had dulled their sanctity to this extent. Nevertheless, the taboo which had been derived from ancient ritual prevented one actor from murdering another upon the stage. But this taboo did not protect an actor against himself or against the assaults of nature or of the gods. Hence suicides and natural deaths were permissible within the audience’s sight, though homicides were not.
In comedy the influences which tended to prevent the enacting of scenes of violence were partly nullified by the fact that one of the purposes of the comus and other fertility rites had been the expulsion of malign powers by violence, not only of language but also of conduct (see [p. 37], above). Of course the comic playwrights rarely had occasion to treat of death or murder. But scenes of physical violence and horseplay, such as the lashes administered to Xanthias and Dionysus (at his own festival!) in Aristophanes’ Frogs, vss. 644 ff., are common.
That most wonderful of Greek dramatic instruments, the chorus.—Gilbert Murray.