DIONYSUS VOLUMES I III OMNIBUS EDITION

ON THE CHORUS
by

Sir Kenneth Dover

In late antiquity there existed a work entitled On the Chorus and attributed to Sophocles himself. The attribution is very unlikely to be true, and in any case we have absolutely no idea of what the book said. We might have expected to find much more about the nature and character and function of the tragic chorus in Aristotle's Poetics, written three generations after the death of Euripides and Sophocles, but our expectation is disappointed, In his Rhetoric, Aristotle discussed at length how speechmaking actually works how it persuades, influences, captivates and the Poetics is a companion piece, an attempt to define and explain the special function of tragedy, how it arouses and resolves emotional tension in the audience. The characters, the plot, the diction all play their parts; but the modern reader is astonished to find that Aristotle has absolutely nothing at all to say about the chorus. Yet every tragedy had a chorus, and many plays took their titles from their choruses. Sometimes the title reflected what the play was about, as in Persians and Trojan Women; sometimes it gave little away, for the Suppliants of Aeschylus is about the daughters of Danaos and the Suppliants of Euripides about the burial of the heroes killed in an attack on Thebes; and sometimes it could be positively misleading, as in the Phoenician Women of Euripides, because not many people could have guessed from the title what the play is about (the conflict between Oedipus' sons, of which a group of young women from Phoenicia on their way to Delphi via Thebes happen to be witnesses). Why does Aristotle say nothing about tragic choruses? Does not a chorus reflect and comment on the action of the play? Do not its songs express the moral and religious lessons to be drawn from the action of the play? And is not this moralising, this preaching, central to the function of tragedy in the citystate? Well . . . consider what the choruses actually say. When they moralise (and they do so only some of the time), they warn us that pride leads us astray, that sin incurs the anger of the gods, and that sooner or later the sinner will suffer retribution. But does a Greek audience need to be told that? The belief that the gods rule, that they have made laws, and that if we break those laws we are in danger, was held by most Greeks most of the time. It finds powerful expression in the varied and vivid imagery of choral songs; but if we paraphrase those moralising songs in the hope of uncovering profoundly original and penetrating ideas, we may be sadly disappointed. Is that, perhaps, why Aristotle says nothing about choruses? It will certainly not do to say, as has sometimes been said, that Aristotle neither knew from his own experience nor understood from the exercise of his historical imagination the spirit in which fifth century audiences attended tragic performances. Aristophanes' Frogs, produced a year after Euripides' death and a few months after Sophocles', presents us with the ghosts of Euripides and Aeschylus (who died fifty years earlier) contending for the Throne of Poetry in the underworld. It

has much to say about their different styles and their different moral effects on the audience which saw the characters on stage as possible models for imitation but nothing about the moral or religious content of choral songs. Plato, too, in the severe criticism of tragedy which he unfolds in the Republic, attends solely to the behaviour of characters and to the ideas and sentiments which they utter. In his eyes, evidently, scandalous behaviour and immoral sentiments were in no way redeemed by elevated teaching in choral songs. It begins to look like a conspiracy: Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle. There is, however, an explanation. Tragedy was a comparatively late arrival on the scene, in the last quarter of the sixth century B.C. Behind it lay a very long tradition of narrative poetry about the heroic age, and quite a long tradition of narrative in choral lyric. We know that this choral lyric drew a moral from what it narrated; for we see that in the fragmentary parthenion (girls' choral song) of Alkman, before the end of the seventh century B.C., the narrated myth is rounded off by the words: "The gods do punish. And blessed is he who in happiness weaves to an end the pattern of a day without a tear." In other words, moralising about a myth was a longstanding conventional element simply taken over and perpetuated when tragedy brought about the change from narration to enactment. It was not, therefore, a distinctive feature of tragedy; not of interest to Aristophanes when he contrasted one style of tragic writing with another, nor to Plato, who was preoccupied with the adoption of dramatic characters as models. For Aristotle, drama was poetry par excellence (he remarks, "What epic has, exists in tragedy; but what is in tragedy is not all to be found in epic") and while ostensibly talking about poetry as a whole he was constantly drawn into discussion of the distinctive features of tragedy. In that, I think he made a mistake, through his commitment to treating poetry as "imitation" (mimesis); but we cart see why he is silent on choruses. Sir Kenneth Dover is Chancellor of the University of St. Andrews.