Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin (review)

I should start with an apology for the lateness of this review, whose commissioning and writing were both delayed by unfortunate circumstances. The book was published in 2008 to mark Oliver Taplin’s retirement as Tutor in Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford, and to celebrate his distinguished and happily continuing career in classical scholarship. The twenty-three essays are all by accomplished scholars, several of Taplin’s former students amongst them. The six sections reflect the three main thrusts of Taplin’s own influential research, as indicated in the book’s title. The editors’ introduction sets out this context while succinctly introducing each of the essays. There is an impressive list of Taplin’s publications as well as an Index Locorum and a General Index. Lists of references (occupying 64 pages in all) are printed at the end of most of the essays. This review is largely a survey of the contributions, with some accompanying observations.

I. Performance: Explorations

1. 1. Helene Foley, “Generic Boundaries in Late Fifth-Century Athens.”

2. 2. Ian Ruffell, “Audience and Emotion in the Reception of Greek Drama.”

3. 3. Mark Griffith, “Greek Middlebrow Drama (Something to do with Aphrodite?)”

4. 4. Peter Wilson, “Costing the Dionysia.”

5. 5. Barbara Kowalzig, “Nothing to Do with Demeter? Something to Do with Sicily! Theatre and Society in the Early Fifth-Century West.”

The first three papers address and question the “opposition” between tragedy and comedy which Taplin discussed influentially in a 1986 article. Foley suggests that in the last quarter of the fifth century bc cross-fertilization between the genres was important not just for comedy but for tragedy as well: “dramatic techniques borrowed from comedy ... and prefiguring what later became comedy may have proved for Euripides, as did tragedy for Aristophanes, a much needed source of inspiration in reconfiguring tragedy for an age in transition” (33). Griffith explores “that nebulous area between tragedy and comedy that I am calling ‘middlebrow’ drama” (63), emphasizing the great variety of styles and subjects found in early non-Athenian and in Hellenistic drama, and noting in particular the turning of satyr-drama into a sort of tragedy lite and the emergence of “tragic” material in the Greek novel. Griffith’s general argument is certainly valid but may understate (cf. 67–68 and 80) the “middlebrow” elements already evidenced in Euripides, and especially in the fragmentary plays (I survey these plots rapidly in the online Literary Encyclopedia [www.litencyc.com]). Ruffell in a perceptive paper argues that, rather than seeing tragedy and comedy as affecting audiences in distinct ways (tragedy bent on emotional engagement and universal moral reflection, comedy on disruption and mockery at the level of the particular), we should see both as having “elements of emotional engagement and abstract reflection ... [which] are carried out in different but not mutually exclusive ways” (38). Ruffell uses recent findings in developmental psychology and neuroscience very effectively to show the importance of empathy in inducing both audience engagement and reflection.

The other essays here address contexts of performance. Wilson gives detailed, if inevitably rough, estimates of income and expenditures for the dramatic performances at the City Dionysia in the year 415 bc, with some reflections on how the costs developed before and after that time. The estimated net cost in 415 bc of nearly 30 talents (a little more than half of it privately funded) “could have maintained some dozen triremes at sea for a year, and was equivalent to as much as five per cent of annual public expenditure on military activity at the height of the Athenian empire” (119). This level of expenditure on a single festival was clearly both extreme and unique. Kowalzig, in an adventurous discussion, suggests that tragedy in Sicily may have been one of several “communicative channels” (exemplified principally by the cults of Demeter and Persephone) which the Deinomenid rulers used to promote domestic stability and assert their economic and political importance in the wider Greek world. Conversely...