Is This The Real Life or Is It Just Dionysus: The Role of Theatrical Performance in Understanding Social Norms and Religious Belief in Athens in the 5th century BCE

Is This The Real Life or Is It Just Dionysus The Role of Theatrical Performance in Understanding Social Norms and Religious Belief in Athens in the 5th century BCE

Neha Rahman, McGill University, Class of 2020

Abstract

Athenian society was organized around ritual performance; it was a fundamental religious act that helped communities both reinforce ideas of social hierarchy and order as well as occasionally challenge them. Performance provided worshipers of Dionysus with socially sanctioned means of exploring the perspectives of the “other.” For the purposes of this paper I examined the literary record of ancient tragedies, comedies, and satyr drama to understand the possibilities of their performance. I argue that as a function of Dionysian religious ritual, theatrical performance was able to simultaneously reaffirm and challenge normative ideals within the Athenian polis. I look to how performance enables patriarchy by examining the ways in which women had strictly circumscribed participation in public religious rituals, but also featured heavily in the cast of characters about whom Athenian playwrights chose to tell stories. I then consider how this tension is resolved within the physical theatre, which I emphasize as a purpose-built religious space. Finally, I synthesize theories of performance with Athenian conceptions of otherness to understand the limits of performance as a means to generate empathy for those who are otherwise deemed socially inferior.

The ritual of theatrical performance was a tool to reinforce social order and reexamine religious belief in Athens in the 5th century BCE. As an institution of Greek religion, the theatre itself was a sanctuary space which allowed communities to undergo rigorous intellectual and spiritual exercise that simultaneously renewed and challenged their relationship to the divine and their community. 1 Through works of drama, namely tragedies, comedies, and satyr dramas, Athenians were able to create public, normative belief systems about the gods. However, these dramatic performances were usually staged festivals to Dionysus, a divinity who embodied the transgression of social norms. In this capacity, the religious experience of performance divorced participants from their normal existence and facilitated experiences of otherness and change. The ideas and stories that were expressed as performance in the 5th century BCE are left to us now in text. For the purposes of this paper I imaginatively extend the literary record of ancient tragedies, comedies, and satyr drama to understand the possibilities of their performance. Thus, I argue that as a function of Dionysian religious ritual, theatrical performance was able to simultaneously reaffirm and challenge normative ideals within the Athenian polis. Though these processes of affirmation and subversion happened concurrently, to best demonstrate how this worked, I will explain first the creation of these social norms and then their dissolution.

There were four main festivals of Dionysus during the year. Three of them, the Lenaia (took place around January), The Rural Dionysia (celebrated the winter solstice, usually around December) and The Greater City Dionysia (commemorated the spring equinox, sometime in March or April), all featured dramatic performances. 2 These were all occasions for the community to gather 1 Paga, Jessica. “The Greek Theater.” In A Companion to Greek Architecture, M. M. Miles (Ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 368. 2 The Anthesteria, the fourth festival, which took place around February was the only one to not feature any performance, and was rather a festival focused on drinking wine, another part of the manifold identities and offices associated with the god Dionysus. Evans, Nancy. Civic Rites: Democracy and Religion in Ancient and to carry out special rites in honour of the god. Though each of these festivals had their own particularities, in this paper, I will refer to all three collectively as the “Dionysian festivals,” as I am most concerned with connecting all three as public rituals that featured performance as a mode of honouring Dionysus. These theatrical displays were religiously significant because often an effigy of the god would be present as a witness in the theatre space, the stories were deeply concerned with mythology and the divine, and the very act was dedicated to the god. 3 Performances varied based on genre, but for tragedies no more than three actors appeared on the stage at a time, wearing masks, and they interacted with a masked chorus. In comedies and satyr plays, casts could be larger, with up to four or five speaking characters. 4 Performance also had a great deal of social capital, as Oliver Taplin writes, “ancient Greek societies were extraordinarily performanceful.” 5 These festivals were wildly popular in Athens and they were attended by people from all over the Greek world. 6 Performances allowed communities to come together around sporting events, legal oratory, philosophical treatises, parades, and processions. 7 They provided an opportunity for the majority of the population to drink, enjoy meat from sacrifices, and, as audience members of theatrical performances, to watch stories about gods and heroes. The Dionysian festivals were part of what Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has described as “polis” or “city” religion. She writes, “the Greek polis articulated religion and was itself articulated by it … Ritual reinforces group solidarity and this process is of fundamental importance in establishing and perpetuating civic and cultural, as well as religious,

Athens, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, 193. 3 Ibid, 192. 4 Ibid, 192 5 Taplin, Oliver. “Spreading the word through performance” in Goldhill, Simon, and Robin Osborne. Ed. Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 33. 6 Evans, 192. 7 Taplin, 33.

identities.” 8 Thus, theatrical performance as a public religious ritual was a means by which such “civic and cultural identities” and norms could be expressed through the medium of storytelling. Such public spectacles, specifically the religious festivals, often served to reinforce social hierarchies and norms within these communities through the process of elite euergetism (or benefaction, generosity). 9 Public religious activity, i.e., sacrifices and theatrical performances, were all financed by the elite, and while providing a public service, their name was broadcast to the whole community in a positive light. This could benefit them in their own political ambitions and their general standing and regard in Athenian society. 10 These elites had a stake in making sure these festivals reinforced certain ideas about society that would be amenable to keeping them in their position. Namely, these festivals and theatrical performances served to promote and religiously sanctify patriarchal and elite-centered perspectives of the world. They circumscribed the societal norms by which people were expected to live.

The playwright’s role was both politically and religiously significant. It is important to note that the credited authors of these tragic, comic, and satyric scripts were always men. Moreover, playwrights were educated men of a certain wealthy and aristocratic background. It is necessary to examine the texts of ancient plays as a tool through which a patriarchal society presented their worldview as the norm and reinforced them through divine authority. In the tradition of Homeric composition, they justified their work as divinely inspired by the Muses, and therefore belonging to an important social and religious canon. Through this inspiration from the Muses, the written words of these men were divinely sanctioned. Sarah Iles Johnston writes,

“This freedom to innovate upon gods’ and heroes’ biographies enabled poets to create stories that did a particularly good job of showcasing qualities that made those gods and heroes engaging characters. Many of these stories underscored the message that the gods and heroes would be able to help worshippers when they needed it.” 11

One of the best examples this is apparent in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, when the god Apollo provides legal counsel to Orestes. He says, “I will not betray you: I will be your guardian to the end, whether standing close to you or a long way off, and I will not be soft towards your enemies.” 12 In this story of a god helping a mortal, the stage manifests a fantasy for the worshippers. Johnston reminds us, “the ancient Greeks believed that these characters 8 Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane.. “What is Polis Religion?” in Buxton, R. G. A, ed. Oxford Readings in Greek Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 22. 9 Miller, Jacob. “Euergetism, Agonism, and Democracy: The Hortatory Intention in Late Classical and Early Hellenistic Athenian Honorific Decrees.” in Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 85, no. 2, 2016, 385. 10 Ibid, 386 11 Johnston, Sarah Iles, ed. Religion: Narrating Religion. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2017, 150 12 Aeschylus. Eumenides. Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein. Loeb Classical Library 146. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. ll. 64-66 really existed.” 13 Let us first examine Athenian tragedy to understand how these texts reinforced ideals of behavior in society in order to see how they portray women, a subaltern class within the community. 14 In tragedy, these concerns are couched in a serious tone and stories about women are designed to inspire feelings of pity and fear. 15 For patriarchy to function, it relies on this production of fear to supplant rigorous intellectual justification of the systems that subjugate such a large number of the population. Despite women having less authority in the public sphere, they were ubiquitous in theatre. Women were participants in choruses but omnipresent major female characters, individual speaking roles, were likely always portrayed by men. 16 As tragic characters, women were the constant subject of male anxiety. An example is at the very beginning of Sophocles’ Antigone. This play opens with two sisters Antigone and Ismene meeting alone, and Antigone saying, “I summoned you out of the gates of the / courtyard because I wished you to hear this alone.” 17 The sight of two women speaking privately would have immediately clued the audience to the fact that something was wrong and triggered a feeling of fear. Not only are these women conspiring alone, but they are doing so intentionally, and the topic of their conversation is critical of the actions of the male ruler and head of their family, Creon. The idea that women could be discussing political matters is further concerning to men in the audience. Sophocles unsettles his audience by framing his tragedy around the breaking of a social norm; in doing so he indirectly points to what the social norm is,that women should not be discussing political matters in public. This scene reminds us of the religious context of this play once again because it lends more authority to Sophocles’ claims— they are being made in the name of Dionysus.

The apparent anxiety about women in public spaces is further expounded in comedy. Aristophanes is one of the last surviving authors of Old Comedy, which was a form of the genre based in political invective and rooted in making fun of the idiosyncrasies of Athens in particular. In Lysistrata, he writes a fictionalized account of a sex strike that was put forward by Athenian women during the Peloponnesian War (431 — 405 BCE) in an effort to make the men stop fighting. This episode represents a rare moment of female political action and public agency manifested in denying males access to the female body. Such a deliberate, effective, and politically cunning act is framed by Aristophanes as entirely co

13 Iles Johnston, 145 14 The term subaltern is taken from postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak. In her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? she provides a useful rhetorical category with which to refer to members of a society who are subjugated in terms of their agency and ability to participate in the decision making processes of their community and broader society. Women in ancient Greek society of all classes fit this term. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 1988, 271-313. 15 Aristotle, Poetics. Translated by Stephen Halliwell, et al. Loeb Classical Library 199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 1452a 16 Calame, Claude, Derek Collins, and Janice Orion. Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece : Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Function. Greek Studies. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997, 26-27. 17 Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library 179. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ll. 639- 50

medic. This is demonstrated by the leader of the women’s chorus, when she asks why it is that women cannot have a say in public affairs if they contribute to the city and participate in public affairs in other ways. She says,

“Citizens of Athens, we begin / by offering the city valuable advice, and fittingly, for she raised me in splendid luxury. / As soon as I turned seven I was an Arrephoros; then when I was ten I was a Grinder / for the Foundress; / and shedding my saffron robe I was a Bear at the Brauronia; once, when I was a fair girl, I carried the Basket,wearing a necklace of dried figs. / Thus I owe it to the polis to offer some good advice. And even if I was born a woman, don’t hold it against me if I manage to suggest something better than what we’ve got now.” 18

The chorus-leader’s speech reveals the many ways elite young Athenian women could take part in public religious ceremonies throughout their lives. Aristophanes’ chorus leader demonstrates her service to the city by expressing her gratitude for being given these public roles, and her opinion on its political affairs is something she is attempting to offer in payback for what the city has given her. The male leader of the chorus immediately dismisses this as hubris, and the whole request is denounced for being completely ridiculous. 19 By writing these valid questions and concerns about the lack of female participation in politics in a comedy, Aristophanes reasserts this patriarchal norm, that it would be ridiculous to ever seriously consider women taking deliberate political action or making political decisions. Male authors thus justify the exclusion of women from political roles even when they have designated public roles in religious festivals. Patriarchal control carefully demarcated women’s mobility within the public sphere. Perhaps, then, the logical conclusion for women is to find a space away from men entirely. Alternative forms of religious activity, like cults, offered options for all-female participation in something widespread and not necessarily taboo. However, male anxieties about such rituals are present in theatrical works. Men wanted to emphasize the idea that women were not necessarily to be trusted outside of the sight of men. Expected religious performance was public, and though women were excluded from positions of power in this public realm, for women to turn to private practice was still cause for worry. For an example we may revisit Aristophanes who, in his comedy Women at the Thesmophoria, writes about the cult surrounding the myth of Persephone’s kidnapping by Hades and Demeter’s search. 20 This play “tells us very little about the actual rites [of the festival]. The audience merely learns that the rites were secret, restricted to women, held at night, and that slaves were not admitted once the ceremonies began.” 21 The chorus repeatedly names and invokes the “Thesmophorian” deities saying,

18 Ibid, 660 19 Warrior, Valerie.Greek Religion: A Sourcebook. Focus Classical Sources. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, R. Pullins & Company, 2009, 126 20 Ibid, 126 21 Aristophanes. Women at the Thesmophoria. Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library 179. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ll. 1148-1159 “The women invite Demeter and Persephone to the sacred precinct [...] Come also, propitious and gracious / Ladies to your own precinct / where men are forbidden to behold the sacred rites that by torchlight / you illumine, an immortal sight. / Come, enter, we pray, / all powerful Thesmophorian goddesses.” 22

Here, the joke is in the secretive behavior of the women and the fact that men are banned from these proceedings. Furthermore, the plot proves they are hiding something sinister in their secretive meetings. They are conspiring to punish the tragedian Euripides for his portrayal of women in his tragedies. There is a meta-theatrical moment where the women in the comedies acknowledge their own representation, but nevertheless this acknowledgement is made through the writing of a man. Aristophanes seems anxious about the way women think about themselves and how they respond to what men say about them. Their apparent agency to respond at all is still embedded in comedy, highlighting the oddity of their situation. Athenian men ostensibly fear women’s ability to gain any degree of power over them, and so they make the very idea of it ridiculous by enshrining these beliefs in ritual performance. Such performances are witnessed by a wide audience who reaffirm the distrust of women in their society. The story of this play betrays an inherent social anxiety about the religious behaviours of women in mystery cults. Through a public performance of this play, Aristophanes contributes to the development of a normative behaviour in society: that the religious activities of women are to be regarded as suspicious because they occur outside of the careful observation of men, who control the public sphere.

It is evident that Athenian drama, attempts to engage in a dialogue with cult practices. Often, because of their exclusion from holding religious offices in the public sphere, this private sphere is more attractive to women and other subaltern communities like slaves. An example is the march to Eleusis during the rites of the Eleusinian mysteries as part of the larger cult worship of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Celebrations for this cult would take place around February and would involve a ritual initiation at the temple of Demeter in Eleusis. 23 People from other parts of Greece would travel there as part of a large, deliberate procession and this would be the only public part of the ritual. Once they got to the temple, all further initiation rites were held in private and reserved for members of the cult, often coming at a financial cost as well as a commitment to alterations in behaviour and group activities. 24 Although people must have observed these traditions, and certainly accounts and artistic representations have preserved the spectacle of the event, no purposeful audience watched these women process from Athens to Eleusis. The people that most directly experienced the religiosity of this event would have been those actually processing, not chance observers. Public Dionysian festivals are different in the way that the audience is much more involved in the process of engaging with the story performed on stage. Dionysian tragic and comic performances were performed

22 Evans, 101. 23 Ibid, 116. 24 Ibid, 170.

in a contest setting,meaning after the performances were over, members of the audience would have to discuss and decide who wrote the best tetralogy, thus increasing their engagement from passive observation to proto-literary criticism and value judgement based on merit. 25

The two things that cults and public religion have in common is the centrality of space. Cults are often centered around significant sites, like Eleusis. These particular geographic locations are set up with temenoi (sanctuary spaces), and built environments help facilitate the storytelling of religious myths in cult contexts. For instance, the site at Eleusis is a temple built where the ancient Greeks believed Hades kidnapped Persephone. 26 The very structure of the public theatre space had similar connotations, as they were often set up within temenoi or sanctuary spaces, as Paga writes,

“The primary venue during the City Dionysia was the Theater of Dionysos and its contiguous Sanctuary of Dionysos Eleutherios. The theater was an integrated part of the sanctuary, and the presence of shrines near other theaters (such as at the deme theaters at Thorikos (Figure 25.5) and Ikaria) also emphasizes the close links between theatrical space and religious space, in addition to the frequent presence of an altar within the theater itself.” 27

It was not possible to separate oneself from a religious experience when inside the theatre as it was deliberately organized as a sacred space. The presence of the altar indicates the religious significance of the theatre space because it is an instantly recognizable structure of one of the most common religious rituals: sacrifice.

However, as Paga says, “the altar seems to have been a movable item, depending on dramatic need; it may not have been a standard part of the theater in all cases,” 28 According to her, the parts of the stage that mattered the most and that were the most consistent were the theatron (the curved seating area, which was “divided into horizontal tiers” where people would generally sit based on class and monetary contribution to the theatrical performance), the orchestra (a circular area designated for dancing) and the skene (the building whose face was painted to be used as the set decoration for the action. 29 Each aspect of the theatre was designed to best facilitate the audience’s connection with the story portrayed onstage. The circular shape of the theatre, which is visible from its overarching plan (Figure 25.3), suggests the integral role of the audience and their reciprocal relationship with the figures onstage. The actors were simultaneously reaffirming and challenging things the audience knew about its society and the theatre was configured to allow this intellectual exchange between performers and audience to happen. Within the space of the orchestra, whose significance we will discuss at length later, I turn our focus to the altar, where sacrifices would have sanctified the space for its religious purpose. This interplay between the structure of the theatre and its

25 Warrior, 126. 26 Paga, 368. 27 Ibid, 364. 28 Ibid, 360-361 29 Ibid, 369 religious purpose is best summarized by Paga, who says:

“...the theater, by virtue of its use during the festivals and the presence of a broader sacred precinct, was not a profane or utilitarian structure but rather a specific type of religious building. This transformation, from a site of purely agonistic contestation to ritualized performance, was reinforced by the presence of an altar within the orchestra. The altar, in turn, bestowed divine approval or legitimacy on the dramatic performances themselves. The presence of an altar in many Greek theaters, like the presence of a nearby shrine or temple, underscores this connection between performance and religious festival by physically inserting the religious object par excellence into the very design of the theater (Arnott 1962: 43–56; Poe 1989: 137). The reciprocal relationship between the use of the space – as a venue for ritually based performance – and the design of the space – that is to say, the inclusion of an altar – underscores the close connection between form and function in Greek theaters.” 30

Having established that the stage was itself a sanctuary space, the presence of gods within said space is expected. As their shrines were nearby, in the same temenos, everything about this place would have been primed for communication with the gods. Literary evidence affirms the presence of gods in many tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. Most notably, in Euripides Bacchae, Dionysus is depicted on stage. At his own festival, opening this play, he boldly shouts, Ἥκω Διὸς παῖς τήνδε Θηβαίαν χθόνα /Διόνυσος,” “I have come to this land of thebes, the son of Zeus, Dionysus.” 31 “Ἥκω” or “I have come!” he says, establishing his patronage and his name. In this line, the actor who plays Dionysus likely engaged in a literary and performance technique known as deixis, meaning literally “to point something out.” 32 Johnston discusses this saying,

“People who tell stories about the early days of a religion sometimes engage in large-scale, more extended forms of pointing things out, which similarly persuade people that the stories took place in the real world. For example, religious rituals that reenact things that were done by gods or heroes many years earlier sometimes are performed in the very spot where the actions are believed to have first taken place.” 33

It is a tool used in tandem by the playwright and actor to make the “story world” 34 on stage even richer. Moreover, the skene (set decoration) facilitates this process of deixis as it would have been painted to look like the scene it was portraying. Archaeologically, these set pieces have not survived as they were often made of perishable materials like wood. 35 However, one can imagine how

30 Euripides. Bacchae. Edited and translated by David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library 495. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ll.1-2 31 Iles Johnston, 147-148 32 Ibid, 147-148 33 Ibid. 34 Paga, 361 35 Lada-Richards, Ismene. Initiating Dionysus : Ritual and Theatre in Aristophanes’ Frogs. Oxford England: Clarendon Press, 1999, 163

in the Agamemnon when Clytemnestra rolls out the infamous “carpet,” it would have really looked to the audience like her husband was about to tread on sacred tapestries and enter his palace, whose gates were painted on the skene behind him. According to Johnston deixis makes the illusion “more vivid,” and working together with the built environment of the theatre, it would have only become closer to reality. It is easy to see then how this stage could act as a microcosm for Athenian society at large, and be an appropriate venue on which to relitigate social norms and have it be done under the sanction of the deities, lending the performance an immense amount of social power, legitimacy, and relevance to actual life. However, this threshold between fiction and reality is also where the performance in its role of affirming social norms breaks down, and we see the ways in which it challenges these norms at the same time.

The orchestra was the place for the chorus, which was another integral participatory element to the drama. Groups would have been dancing and singing and engaging the audience in different kinds of performative modes of worship. The orchestra was the place in the theatre that facilitated some of the most anti-normative, and most Dionysian aspects of performance. This was the complete absorption of the self into the other, which the actor did through ritual performance. 36 The orchestra housed the chorus, which was one of the most integral parts of any theatrical performance. According to Aristotle, the origin of theatrical performance came from the choral tradition of singing dithyrambs. Singers slowly began to innovate upon this basic structure, adding characters to respond to the chorus one at a time until the “casts” of dramatic performances came to be, as we know them. 37 Choruses were a common way for people to be able to participate in theatre. These were a convention of Athenian adolescent life. 38 Most members of the community, barring perhaps the most poor, remote, or slaves, would have participated in these choruses. Claude Calame has established that alongside choruses of young men, there would have also been choruses of women present at Dionysian festivals. 39 There is even evidence of mixed-gender choruses. 40 Calame is mostly talking about dithyrambic performances as there is not much demographic data about the actors in the choruses in tragic, comedic, and satyric drama. However, the uniting feature of choruses is that much like actors they embodied totally different characters, and these could range from old wise men to terrifying Furies. In comedies, the choruses could have been of birds or frogs. In satyr plays, of which the only complete extant one surviving is Euripides’ Cyclops, the chorus would have taken the form of half-human, half-goat creatures, also known as satyrs, who were traditional servants of Dionysus. The transformative capabilities of the chorus thus existed on a range from human to divine creature to animal to something in between all of these. This process was something inherently Dionysian. Ismene Lada-Rich

36 Aristotle, Poetics 1449a 37 Winkler, John J, and Froma I Zeitlin. Nothing to Do with Dionysos? : Athenian Drama in Its Social Context. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1990. 38 Calame, 26-27 39 Ibid, 25 40 Lada-Richards, 164 ards writes “...when acting, the fluidity of [Dionysus’] mythical and cultic personality is quite naturally expressed through disguise and change of role, the only means that a professional performer has at his disposal in order to achieve a transformation.” 41 It is through the imagined power of this god that these transformations take place, but they also function as a form of worship. One of the realms with which Dionysus is associated is metamorphosis. His divine connection to wine is relevant to this, as wine could promote such a change of state (from sober to drunk), and similarly, theatre and acting are examples of metamorphosis in their own right. However, these transformations vary based on the role one plays in the theatrical performance. Explicating the specific case of the chorus’s transformations, Lada-Richards writes,

“This actor-model link is offered to the spectators’ eyes in its irreducible, primary form. I mean that, without any intervening textual role — not even the guidelines of a mere scenario, [...] the actor’s ‘self’ passes to the sphere of the ‘other’ through direct appropriation of the ‘other’s attributes and with the aim of re-enacting as closely as possible a pre-established mythical pattern (the pattern of a katabasis to Hades). [...] a performer in a pre-dramatic chorus, [...] dresses up as a goat, bird, or mythical figure in order to recreate the story in which his model was involved.” 42

Lada-Richards highlights that even the simple passing of the chorus from human into animal has the same potential as deixis, as it becomes a tool that helps reinforce the reality of what is happening on stage. This is only more potent when discussing the individual actors apart from the chorus. While evidence exists for the gender diversity of certain choruses, it has widely been accepted that the individual actors in tragedies and comedies would have been exclusively male, and that the roles of women were played by men in masks. Their “passing to the sphere of the other” is something that takes on a more potent role, especially when transgressing the boundary of gender. In dramatic performances which present women as figures to be ridiculed or feared, the men who institute these stigmas end up on the receiving end. Despite directly experiencing patriarchal subjugation through these fictionalized means, there is nothing about this transformation, once the transformed has returned to their normal state, that suggests this experience inspires them to change society to reflect what they experienced while transformed. The continued affirmation of patriarchal norms is still the main effect of these theatrical performances on society as a whole. This suggests a hierarchy within the people responsible for these performances wherein the intentions of the playwright supersede any effect of sympathy made possible by these Dionysian transformations. However, it is also likely that these transformations are not for the purpose of generating sympathy for the “other,” but for better appreciating when one returns to the self. Lada-Richards correctly doubts the power of the mask to truly change one into another, and asks if this power is located within the willpower of the actor himself:

41 Ibid, 163 42 Ibid, 169

“In the theatrical domain, the donning of a mask or costume can only cause the borderlines of the actor’s personality to blur and his own ‘self’ to be imaginatively projected towards the sphere of any ‘alterity’ his masks or costume prespresents. Rather than readily endowing the wearer with a new identity, the ‘otherness’ symbolically appropriated through a mask or costume on the stage confers upon him nothing more than the mere potentiality of acquiring one (Calame 1986:94). To put it slightly differently, when acting takes place on the civic space of the polis, the actor’s mask is not to be regarded as a talismanic object but rather as a powerful and creative instrument in the performer’s hands. That is to say, it is the actor, rather than the mask per se which is the ‘living force,’ the cause of the metamorphosis, as it rests entirely with the performer’s own skill to integrate harmoniously his mask and costume in the play’s action by exploiting to the full the entire range of their intrinsic properties. It is the actor who, as the focal point on which the multiplicity of codes traversing the performance meet [...], must learn to co-ordinate the sum of his expressive means (i.e. bodily gestures, voice, etc) to the specific mode of being of the dramatic figure suggested by his mask. In other words, the actor must train himself in such a way as to be able to attain an ideal stage of congruity or, [...] that ‘single psychosomatic level of coherence’ where dramatic role, expression of the mask, and suggestions of the costume as well as the delivery of the performer coalesce.’” 43

It is important to establish that this mask is not a talisman and that this transformation is mostly a tool by which the actor further convinces the audience of his craft. In doing this, he continues the illusion of the story on stage. In tandem with deixis, the skene, the chorus, and Dionysus, the mask and the actor behind it are all working together to express sacred myths about the gods and engage their audience with what Johnston calls “the mythic story world.” 44 It is in this world that religious belief is realized. The more that performance can convince its audience that it is real, the more it can convince its audience that the gods and their stories are real. The actor’s alterity is in itself a religious process because it aligned with the mythology around Dionysus and his position as a god between binaries. When the actor shows his capability to harness the power of the god, it is another way in which his performance reaffirms to his audience that the god is real.

Although the storylines and literary framing devices employed by the wealthy Athenian men who wrote tragedies were instrumental in cementing patriarchal norms, the act of performance itself allowed men who upheld this patriarchy to temporarily inhabit female bodies through the transformative medium of the mask. Though it is unclear that they sympathized with the ill-treatment of women, they were certainly forced to experience a temporary moment of subjection to gendered injustices. Although the result of this brief metamorphosis was not enough to make these men act critically against patriarchal norms, it rather figured performance as a tool by which religious belief was reinforced in

43 Ibid, 169 44 Iles Johnson, 147 ancient Athenian communities. Performance as a religious experience was integral to the worship of Dionysus inside of public sanctuary spaces in 5th century Athens BCE. Close examination of these practices reveals the complex ways in which ancient Greeks communicated with and understood the mythic story world that comprised their religion.

Appendix

Works Cited

Aeschylus. Eumenides. Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein. Loeb Classical Library 146. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library 179. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Aristophanes. Women at the Thesmophoria. Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library 179. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Aristotle, Poetics. Translated by Stephen Halliwell, et al. Loeb Classical Library 199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Calame, Claude, Derek Collins, and Janice Orion. Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Function. Greek Studies. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 1997. Euripides. Bacchae. Edited and translated by David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library 495. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Evans, Nancy, Civic Rites: Democracy and Religion in Ancient Athens, Berkeley:

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