And scandal-loving still is womankind, etc.
[Vss. 193 ff.; Way’s translation]
As intimated at the beginning it would be possible to extend this chapter indefinitely. One more point must suffice. The belief was widespread among the Greeks that if a man’s body failed of burial his shade was forced to wander for a season on this side of the river Styx and was thus cut off from association with the great majority of departed spirits; the obligation of attending to the funeral rites rested upon the nearest kin of the deceased. It was inevitable that a doctrine so intimately connected with the life of the people should frequently appear in their literature. Thus the Iliad does not close with the deaths of Patroclus and Hector, but two whole books are devoted to an account of their funerals. Likewise in the Odyssey, however unsympathetic has been his delineation of the suitors’ conduct, nevertheless Homer does not pass by the final disposition of their bodies in silence (cf. xxiv. 417). In tragedy, which often involves the death of the hero, naturally this matter is frequently mentioned. In Sophocles’ Antigone it provides the mainspring of the action. Because Polynices fell in arms against his native country, Creon forbade his burial, but before the call of a duty so sacred Antigone deemed not her life precious and performed the formal rites for her brother’s body in defiance of the king’s command. According to modern feeling, when the hero falls upon his sword at vs. 865 of Sophocles’ Ajax, the dénouement must have arrived and the ending be close at hand; as a matter of fact, the play continues for over five hundred verses. To the Greeks no less important than the fact of his death was the treatment which was to be accorded his corpse, and the honors which Ajax received in Attica as a “hero” in the technical, religious sense of that term made this a matter of far more moment than would have been true even in the case of an ordinary man. Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes concludes with a dirge between Antigone and Ismene over the bodies of their two brothers, and an altercation between a public herald and Antigone in which she declares her intention of defying the state edict by burying Polynices. The genuineness of these scenes has been assailed on technical grounds but in my opinion unwarrantably (see [p. 175], above). They have been charged also with carrying the play (and the trilogy) past the natural stopping-point and to an inconclusive close. But despite any considerations which can be urged in its support, this objection ignores the Greek feeling concerning the paramount importance of interment and cannot be allowed. Even modern audiences have sometimes felt a certain sympathy with this point of view. “The typical Elizabethan tragedy does not deal with the mistakes of a night, but with the long—often life-long—struggles of its hero. Such a play must have an appropriate ending. After the audience has sympathized with a Hamlet or a Brutus through many a scene, it is not satisfied with a sudden death and a drop of a curtain with a thud. It asks to see the body solemnly and reverently borne off the stage as if to its last resting place. And this was the respect which the honored dead received on the Elizabethan stage.”[353]
I find them one and all to be merely examples of a new artificiality—the artificiality of naturalism.—Gordon Craig.
CHAPTER VIII
THE INFLUENCE OF THEATRICAL MACHINERY AND DRAMATIC CONVENTIONS[354]
We have already noted that the Greek theater had no facilities for the direct representation of interior scenes (see [pp. 237-42], above). Of the many subterfuges there mentioned as available for or utilized by the ancient playwrights it is now in place to elaborate upon one. I refer to the eccyclema, one of the strangest and most conventional pieces of machinery that any theater has ever seen.
If it were desired to disclose to the audience the corpse of someone who has just been done to death behind the scenes, perhaps with the murderers still gloating over their crime, or to set any similar interior view before the faithful eyes of the spectators, the simplest device was to fling open the appropriate door of the scene-building and thus to display the desired objects or persons close behind the opening. Whatever may be said for such a method under other conditions, in the Greek theater it ran afoul of certain practical considerations. For example, the wings of the auditorium extended around so far ([Fig. 22]) that spectators seated there could have obtained no satisfactory view through the opened doors of the scene-building. Nevertheless, during the last quarter-century not a few scholars have maintained that this was the sole means which the Greek playwrights employed for such a purpose. But the ancient commentators often speak of a contrivance which was used to bring a supposedly interior scene out of the opened doors and more fully into the view of the audience. This device is sometimes described as “turning” or “revolving” (στρέφειν)[355] and sometimes as being “rolled out” (ἐκ, “out” + κυκλεῖν, to “wheel”). And though eccyclema (ἐκκύκλημα) was used as the generic term I am persuaded that there were in fact two types of machine corresponding to different conditions in the Athenian theater.
When the first scene-building was erected, about 465 B.C., it must have been simple and unpretentious, having neither parascenia nor proscenium. Probably it consisted also of but a single story, though in [Fig. 74][356] I have given it a low clerestory with small windows for the admission of light into the scene-building. The roof would thus have been better suited for the occasional appearance of actors upon the housetop, as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (458 B.C.). In addition to the usual doors in the front of the scene-building (A, C, and E in [Fig. 74]), I believe that a butterfly valve, to the base of which a semicircular platform was attached, was used to close one or more other openings. In [Fig. 74] one of these is shown closed and not in use at B and another open and in action at D. The size of the semicircular platform would be limited only by the depth of the scene-building and the space between the front doors, and there would be ample room for several persons upon the eccyclema at a time. Therefore when a deed of violence had been committed indoors it was possible, by revolving one of the valves after a tableau had been posed upon its platform, to place a quasi-interior scene before the spectators. This is Mr. Exon’s theory of the eccyclema, and it admirably fits the conditions in the Athenian theater at an early date.
