The Chorus in Greek Life and Drama

Author(s): Helen H. Bacon

Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics , Fall, 1994 - Winter, 1995,
Third Series, Vol. 3, No. 1, The Chorus in Greek Tragedy and Culture, One (Fall, 1994 -
Winter, 1995), pp. 6-24
Published by: Trustees of Boston University; Trustees of Boston University through its
publication Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20163562

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The Chorus in Greek Life and Drama
HELEN H.BACON

T
A HE musical form of Athenian drama, in
its ever-present chorus, reflects the fact that it
flourished at a time when the Greek world, altho
ning to move toward the predominantly literate c
its culmination in Alexandria, was still largely co
traditions of the primarily oral culture of its re
past. The centrality, for Greek audiences, of t
music and of the chorus, which from our mo
appears secondary to the fate of the individual a
doubt, as the few examples immediately follo
What needs further scrutiny is the meaning of th
context of its times. This paper argues that Greek
have experienced the choruses of Greek dram
necessary form of human interaction which the
and participated in since childhood, a social reality
artificial artistic convention they seem to us.
The official language used to describe the pro
makes clear that for the Athenians of the archaic
ods a play, whether a tragedy or a comedy, was f
a chorus. A poet who wished to produce a play
Athenian magistrate and, in the official phr
chorus." If his play (in the case of tragedy usually
approved, he was "granted a chorus," financed by
zen to whom the city assigned this task as a civic
official records of Athens he is called khor?gos,
The poet himself is always referred to as didaska
of the chorus).1 Participation in some state-spon
like other forms of public service, exempted the
military service.2 As central to the drama as the
Dionysiac occasion for the performance, whether
great annual spring festival in Athens or lesser fe

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 Helen H. Bacon 7

or the Attic countryside. Impersonation in drama, like wine and

ecstatic dance and song, over which Dionysos also presides, effects
a kind of liberation in both spectators and performers, a tempo
rary escape from their restrictive everyday identities.
Fifty years after Aeschylus' death and a year after Euripides and
Sophocles died, the Dionysos of Aristophanes' Frogs still thinks of
drama in terms of a chorus performing a needed public service.
Since all the good dramatists are dead, he wants to bring one back
from Hades "so that the city may be saved and stage its choruses"
( 1419). To the god of drama, the dramatist is first of all a composer
of choruses and the welfare of the city is somehow dependent on
the staging of these choruses.
If drama is first of all choral, it follows that dramatic choruses
should be seen as an integral part of the action, and not, as many
modern readers and critics and most theatrical directors tend to
see them, as a source of interludes and peripheral lyrical commen
tary on an action performed by the actors. Even in the mid-fourth
century, when playwrights were beginning to downplay the
chorus, Aristotle observes {Poetics 1456a), "One ought to consider
the chorus one of the actors. It should be part of the whole and par
ticipate in the action not in the manner of Euripides but in the
manner of Sophocles." Clearly, in spite of his failure to discuss the
chorus in detail, he too viewed the chorus members as actors,
although he never explains why he thought Sophocles' way of
making them part of the action was better than Euripides'.3
It is Aristotle again who tells us that tragedy was believed to
have originated with the improvisations of the leaders of another
kind of Dionysiac choral performance, the so-called dithyramb
{Poetics 1449a). About the early form of these choruses that gave
rise to tragedy perhaps a century before the birth of Aeschylus, we
know very little beyond the fact that they consisted of elaborately
costumed choruses of fifty each, ten of men and ten of boys, repre
senting the ten tribes of Athens, which, like the dramas, were
funded by a khoregos, trained by a didaskalos, and staged at festi
vals of Dionysos. Like many other choruses they may have involved
some impersonation, although they were not masked. Originally
they perhaps performed traditional choral songs and dances with
some improvised solo singing by the chorus leader. Such mimetic
song and dance becomes drama when instead of narrating or sing
ing about an event the dancers enact it. This transformation
apparently took place when the leader, separating himself from the

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 8 THE CHORUS IN GREEK LIFE AND DRAMA

group, impersonated an individual with whom the chorus, imper

sonating a group of individuals, could engage in spoken and sung
dialogue. At the point in this evolution when improvisation and
traditional song gave way to specially composed and rehearsed
music, words, and dance, drama as a "literary" form began to take
shape.4 The next step was the addition of an actor to interact with
chorus and chorus leader. In time a second and then a third actor
were included. Three remained the limit in the state supervised
competitions in which tragedies were presented.
Although female characters and choruses abound in tragedy,
the dithyrambic tradition of only male performers was maintained;
their numbers, however, were drastically reduced?from fifty to
twelve in earlier tragedy, then slightly increased to fifteen.5
Choruses rarely leave the stage, and when they do (as in Sophocles'
Ajax and Aeschylus' Eumenides) their absence is brief. From their
entrance (which occasionally begins the play but more often is pre
ceded by a prologue of a hundred or so lines spoken by one or two
actors) until the end of the play, when they usually speak the last
lines, they are a constant presence, in some way participants in
every onstage event, even when they are silent.
The events that furnish the occasion for the presence of a chorus
in a tragedy were taken, for the most part, from the traditional sto
ries we call myths. These were not thought of as fictions but as
memorable events of the distant past, whose meanings choral per
formances re-created for later generations. Very occasionally a
contemporary event received such dramatic treatment. The only
extant example is Aeschylus' Persians. It dramatizes, seven years
after the event, the defeat of the Persian army and navy which King
Xerxes led against Greece. Xerxes' and Persia's tragedy?the loss
of the Persian army and navy and the king's humiliation in the eyes
of his people?is by implication Greece's triumph. But like the
events of the legendary past the event has meaning not just for
those directly concerned but for all individuals and peoples who,
like Xerxes and the Persians, greatly dare and greatly come to
grief. Tragedy is never simply about the fate of individuals. The
presence of a chorus is a sign of the wider significance of the
enacted event, of the involvement of other human beings in the
meaning, sometimes also in the consequences of its outcome. In
the more individualistic society of the fourth century, tragedy with
its chorus and its mythological stories was largely displaced by a
new kind of drama, without chorus, about contemporary middle

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 Helen H. Bacon 9

class Athenians, striving for personal happiness, usually in the

form of romantic fulfillment combined with financial security.
Classical tragedy, then, with its mythological subject matter, is
distinguished from most later forms of drama by the presence of
the chorus. What happens in such a play cannot be fully under
stood without taking into account the nature and function of this
group of individuals, singing with accompanying dance and ges
ture, occasionally speaking, and always there. Much of what is
said here about the tragic form of choral drama will also apply to
comedy as composed by Aristophanes and his predecessors and
contemporaries.
Although the choral mentality seems to us alien and artificial, it
is a natural human phenomenon that occurs in some form in many
societies, including our own, as well as in that of ancient Greece.
A clue to the human reality that underlies it and to the special
nature of choral identity is provided by the alternation between
"I" and "we" which is characteristic of choral song, both nondra
matic and dramatic.6 Chorus members are more or less homoge
neous in age and sex and social status, and these shared conditions
of life give them a common interest in the event they celebrate, but
they retain their individual identities. On the issue that has
brought them together they speak with one voice, sometimes in
the plural, sometimes in the singular. They represent not the com
munity at large but some segment of the community specially
concerned in the event, what we might call a constituency. Such
self-definition by a group speaking with a single voice, whether as
individuals or collectively, about an issue of common concern,
seems alien to us. But we take for granted the many groups in our
society that get together to voice their views about issues that
affect not only their personal lives but what they understand to be
the moral and/or physical welfare of our society?abortion, rac
ism, nuclear power, environmental issues. Although not necessar
ily homogeneous in age and sex, like an ancient chorus they
continue to function as individuals while a common experience
makes them speak, or sing, with one voice on the issue that brings
them together. And like an ancient chorus they are as likely to use
the choral singular, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming
of the Lord," as the plural, "we shall overcome."7
A more striking example of contemporary choral behavior, this
time in a primarily oral enclave of our culture, occurs in Tony
Morrison's Song of Solomon (127-29). Morrison intertwines nar

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IO THE CHORUS IN GREEK LIFE AND DRAMA

rative description of Hagar's periodic seizures of thwarted passion

and the "choral" reactions of Hagar's fellow townspeople in a
manner that evokes the combination of narrative with emotive
commentary and exclamation found in many choral songs. Their
deeply personal response also parallels what seems to have been a
traditional choral response to witnessing the excesses of female
passion. The agonies of Io in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, of
Phaedra in Euripides' Hippolytus, of Medea in his Medea, pro
voke the sympathizing female choruses in these plays to reflections
on love's moderate and immoderate manifestations, and, in each
case, to expressions of intensely personal longing in the first per
son singular, to be spared its more overwhelming form. "Eros,..."
sings the chorus of Hippolytus, "never appear to me disastrously,
do not come upon me without measure" (525-64, cf. Med., 627
41, PV 894-907). Here, rather drastically abridged, is Morrison's
choral version of love's madness:

As regularly as the new moon searched for the tide, Hagar

looked for a weapon and then slipped out of her house and
went to find the man for whom she believed she had been
born into the world. Being five years older than he was and his
cousin as well did nothing to dim her passion. In fact her
maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so
it was more affliction than affection.. . .
Hagar was energized by the details of her mission. She
stalked him. . . . when any contact with him at all was better
than none, she stalked him. She could not get his love (and the
possibility that he did not think of her at all was intolerable),
so she settled for his fear.
On those days, her hair standing out from her head like a
thundercloud, she haunted Southside ... and the people who
saw her passed the word along that Hagar "done took off
after Milkman again." Women watched her out of their win
dows. Men looked up from their checker games and won
dered if she'd make it this time. The lengths to which lost love
drove men and women never surprised them. They had seen
women pull their dresses over their heads and howl like dogs
for lost love. And men who sat in doorways with pennies in
their mouths for lost love. "Thank God," they whispered to
themselves, "thank God I ain't never had one of them grave
yard loves."

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 Helen H. Bacon 11

So Hagar's forays were part and parcel of the mystery of

having been "lifed" by love.

Morrison's townspeople witnessing and responding with one

voice to Hagar's obsession are referred to in the plural as "they,"
but they, as it were collectively, use the choral "I" to voice the pas
sionately felt and shared thought that links them to the choruses of
Aeschylus and Euripides?"Thank God I ain't never had one of
them graveyard loves." And in the narrator's phrase "the mystery
of having been iifed' by love" the verb "lifed" is theirs. In Mor
rison's less stylized version, choral identity does not seem so
unfamiliar.
It is not so much choral mentality, then, as the particular styl
ized musical form of performance that makes tragic choruses seem
to us alien and unnatural. An Athenian audience would have seen
this form not as an artificial artistic convention, a vestigial survival
of tragedy's dithyrambic beginnings, but as a representation, more
or less stylized to be sure, of a social reality omnipresent in Greek
culture.8
Our problems with the chorus come largely from a failure to
appreciate the pervasiveness and importance of music and dance in
what John Herington has called "the song culture" of archaic
Greece.9 In this culture, as we will see in more detail later, music,
which included dance and poetry, still usually sung or recited to
musical accompaniment, was an indispensable part of most social
events and public rituals. In particular, music?that is, song,
words and dance?was the normal way of giving structure and
coherence to utterances of groups like those that participate in
Greek tragedy. The Athenian audience conditioned in this culture,
which was only gradually giving way to the manners of literacy,
would have understood such lyrical participation as a natural part
of the events of the drama.10
Kevin Crotty gives an idea of the nature of such lyrical partici
pation in discussing Greek lyric poetry in general, and in particular
Pindar's choral odes in honor of athletes victorious in the Panhel
lenic games:11

The epic poet sings about a world distant from his audi
ence and the occasion which has brought poet and audience
together; the lyric poet makes his song out of that very
occasion.

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12 THE CHORUS IN GREEK LIFE AND DRAMA

The lyric poem is not "about" a subject, in the way that

epic is "about" Odysseus or Achilles. The symposiastic poem
is not "about" the symposium; rather, it is a part of the cele
bration. No more is erotic poetry "about" love; it is itself a
part of the lovers3 relationship, a move in the lover's strategy
to win the beloved. Similarly, the epinician is not a disinter
ested account of victory, nor is it a narrative concerning the
victorious athlete; the poem?addressed to the victor?is
itself the recognition and acknowledgment that is vital to the
completion of the victory. [Emphasis mine]

The performers of lyric, whether solo or choral, are, by definition,

an essential part of a drama, an event. The tragic chorus is as nec
essary to the onstage event as Pindar's epinician chorus is to the
real-life event of the athlete's victory.12
Loring Danforth, in his study of death rituals in a contemporary
Greek village, gives an eyewitness account of such lyrical partici
pation by a group of women who come together in a village ceme
tery near the end of the day to remember and mourn their dead.13
Like an ancient chorus, the women not only engage spontaneously
in improvised song, both solo and choral, but also modulate natu
rally from speech to song and back to speech.

Each woman sat on the grave of her husband, parent, or

child, tending the candles and talking quietly with women at
nearby graves. They discussed their crops, the weather, or the
long-awaited summer visits of their children working far
away in Athens, Germany, and the United States....
One woman sat near the head of a grave, staring at a photo
graph of a young woman. She rocked gently back and forth,
sobbing and crying. Suddenly she began to sing a lament in a
pained, almost angry tone of voice. Before she finished the
long, melismatic line of the first verse she was joined by other
women. The intensity of emotion in the women's voices
quickly increased. The verses of the lament, sung in unison by
the chorus of mourners, alternated with breaks during which
each woman shouted a personal message addressed to her
own dead relative.
"Ah! Ah! Ah! My unlucky Eleni."
"Nikos, what pain you have caused us. You poisoned our
hearts."

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 Helen H. Bacon 13

"Kostas, my Kostas, the earth has eaten your beauty and

your youth."
These cries were interrupted by the next verse, as singing
resumed. When the first lament ended, a woman sitting in the
far corner of the graveyard immediately began a second.
Finally, after singing three or four laments lasting perhaps fif
teen minutes in all, the women stopped.
The loud songs and cries were followed by quiet sobbing
and hushed conversations.
Several women stood up, crossed themselves, and
announced that it was time to leave. Two or three of the most
grief-stricken women said that they would stay a few more
minutes, until the candles burned out; but the other women
continued to urge them to leave, saying: "In the end we'll all
come here. Even if we sit here all night, the dead still won't
return from the grave." After several such exchanges all the
women agreed to leave. About an hour after their arrival, they
filed out of the graveyard one by one and returned slowly to
their homes, to the world of the living.
This sequence of events was repeated daily with only slight
variation during my stay in Potamia.

Modern lyric poems resemble Crotty's description of lyric by

maintaining the fiction that they are part of an event, an action in
response to an occasion. But in archaic and early classical Greece,
as in Greek village culture from that time to this, this is no fiction
but an important social reality, a means of sharing, of coming to
terms with and assimilating the joyful, sorrowful, in each case per
haps threatening, crises of human life. An age-old tradition of
songs and dances, familiar to everyone from childhood, not from
books but from watching, listening, and joining in, makes possible
both spontaneous choral performance and improvised choral and
solo song such as Danforth describes. Contemporary cultures in
Africa and Oceania provide many additional examples of these
and other kinds of musical interaction.14
From earliest times, long before Homer, long before alphabeti
cal writing, the visual arts of Greece abound with figures singing
and dancing, singly or in groups, in long dances, round dances,
processionals. And these persist into historical times, augmented,
from Homer on, by verbal references. The new ways of communi
cating that the alphabet made possible and the new attitudes that

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 14 THE CHORUS IN GREEK LIFE AND DRAMA

they fostered did not easily displace the ways of an orally condi
tioned society, that, in Bruno Gentili's words, "transmitted its
messages publicly, through the medium of performance," a soci
ety in which, he continues, "the composer of choral songs for festi
vals and the poet-performer of solo pieces for various social
occasions in the life of the community were agents in the diffusion
of a culture that used the resources of poetic language and the har
monies of rhythm and melody to facilitate listening and memoriz
ing."15 This singing-dancing culture, rooted in choral tradition,
was still part of Greek life throughout the fifth century. For nearly
three hundred years after the introduction of the alphabet this tra
dition remained dominant. Poetry as primarily performance,
recited, sung, or in the case of choral lyric, sung and danced as part
of an occasion, was the principal means of transmitting informa
tion, ideas, and values. Words, melody, and dance, when not part
of a public oral tradition, were all the province of the poet, who
composed both words and music for solo and choral songs, cho
reographed the dances, trained the choruses, and often performed
with them as chorus leader, or in drama as an actor. It was only in
the fourth century that literature began to be something experi
enced on a page rather than witnessed in performance.16
It is difficult for us after nearly two and a half millennia of cul
ture based on the written word to realize the importance, in such a
society, of music in its widest senses?words accompanied by mel
ody and dance. It is both a principal means of education and the
medium through which mortals can relate to the gods and affirm
and share with each other the values of their society. The central
role Plato assigns to it in the state, which he imagines into exis
tence in the Laws, accurately reflects the conditions of Plato's own
youth near the end of the fifth century?conditions that he nostal
gically tries to re-create in this work of his old age, when a more
individualistic kind of society is coming into being {Laws 653c
654b, and 672e). Because, Plato explains, life tends to make human
nature slack and corrupt:

the gods took pity on the suffering inherent in the human

condition. They ordained festivals [heortas, ritualized feast
ing, song, and dance] as relief for mortals, as a way to associ
ate with the gods. And they gave mortals the Muses, and
Apollo, leader of the Muses, and Dionysos to share in the fes

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 Helen H. Bacon 15

tival and keep them straight, and [to provide] the nurture [of
the spirit] that celebrating with the gods affords.

"Other creatures," he continues a little farther on:

have no sense of order in their movements (or of disorder), of

what we call rhythm and melody, but [for human beings
things are different] those gods whom we said were given us
as fellow dancers [i.e., Apollo and Dionysos] are the ones who
have given us awareness and enjoyment of rhythm and mel
ody. Through this faculty they arouse us and lead our choral
dances linking us to each other with songs and dances, and
have named them in accordance with their inborn joy fulness
[he is punning on the similar sound of khorous, choral
dances, and khar?s, joys]. . . . Can we assume, then, that an
uneducated person is one with no experience of choral dance
and an educated person is one who is versed in choral dance}
[Emphasis mine]

The answer, of course, is yes. And farther on, as he sums up the

gifts of Apollo and Dionysos (melody and rhythm), and prepares
to deal with that other aspect of dance (physical skill and fitness),
he remarks, "[We have found] choral dance is the whole of educa
tion" (emphasis mine). For Plato then, dance and song distinguish
human beings from animals, culture from nature, linking mortals
to the gods and to each other through orderly and harmonious use
of body and voice.17
Plato grew up in a world in which music was a major integrative
force. In this world, memorization of long passages of Homer was
the basis of formal education, solo singing was a social obligation
of guests at symposia, and all significant public and private
events?weddings, funerals, prayers of thanksgiving or to avert
calamity, military or athletic victory celebrations, the turning
points of the agricultural year, the feasts and sacrifices with which
mortals affirmed their solidarity with each other and with the
gods?were celebrated with choral performances, sometimes
improvised, sometimes traditional, sometimes, like Pindar's vic
tory odes, commissioned, composed, and rehearsed for the occa
sion. The chorus members were ordinary citizens like the
performers of the dithyramb, who since childhood had witnessed
the songs and dances for all occasions that were their common

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 16 THE CHORUS IN GREEK LIFE AND DRAMA

inheritance. Certainly most citizens had on occasion sung and

danced in some form of choral performance, in the rituals of birth,
adolescence, marriage, and death, or in local cults and festivals.
Only the specially gifted would have been picked for commis
sioned performances such as Pindar's epinician choruses or great
public celebrations or competitions.18
Frequently a chorus participates in an event by giving it context
and meaning in terms of traditional values so that it can be under
stood and become a permanent possession of the society. Pindar's
first Pythian ode, for Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, is an exemplary
instance of such choral participation in a real-life event.19 The
"occasion" it celebrates includes not only Hieron's victory at Del
phi but his founding of a new city on the slopes of Mount Aetna,
and the recent near simultaneous victories on land and sea of
Greeks over non-Greeks?over Persians in the East, over Cartha
ginians and Etruscans in the West. Pindar gives those victories cos
mic significance by equating the non-Greeks with the giant
Typhon, who, impervious to the harmonizing spell of the Muses'
choral song, rebelled against Zeus' rule and threatened the order
of the cosmos. Quelled by the thunderbolt, he lies imprisoned
under the weight of Mount Aetna, belching flame. Such, says
Pindar, is the fate of those who do not respond to the Muses' per
formance. This analogy links the Greeks who participated directly
or indirectly in these battles (those who died, those who survived,
and the families who mourned or rejoiced) with each other and
with the gods who maintain order in the universe, in one great act
of harmonious affirmation whose ultimate source is represented in
the poem as the dance and song of the Muses, led by Apollo, at the
feasts on Olympus. Led by the poet, who is inspired by this divine
chorus, the dancing-singing mortal chorus gives meaning and per
manence to transient events.
Ancient scholars refer to another poem of Pindar, a hymn to
Zeus, now lost, which told how the Muses came into being. When
Zeus had finished the great task of organizing creation by
assigning each god a cosmic domain he asked the gods if they
lacked anything and, in the words of a second-century A.D. critic,
"the gods themselves begged him to bring into being for himself
some gods, who would set in order with words and music [i.e., cel
ebrate by giving meaning and order, katakosm?sousi] these great
creations [i.e., the cosmos] and all his arrangement of them."20 In
the Greek way of thinking, Zeus and the other gods are not the ere

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 Helen H. Bacon 17

ators of the cosmos, but that part of creation responsible for its
physical and moral order. Mighty as they are, they need a singing
dancing chorus to give the recently organized universe and their
role in it the coherence that makes meaning. Just as the gods'
world is not complete until the Muses come together to celebrate
it, so great events in this world, such as Hieron's threefold accom
plishment or Xerxes' defeat, call for a chorus of concerned indi
viduals to realize their full meaning.
In the same way that members of a real-life chorus were part of
the event in Greek society, the members of a stage chorus are not
just spectators or witnesses but actors, part of the onstage event.
Although to us a chorus may seem an artificial stage convention,
they represent the social reality I have been describing, that con
cerned group that comes together to respond to an event of critical
importance. When the event is of paramount concern to the chorus
members they become principal actors, as in Aeschylus' Suppli
ants and Eumenides and Euripides' Suppliants. Their role depends
on their identity and the nature of the event. They have as many
and as varied functions onstage as choruses had in real life.
Many, perhaps most, real-life choruses performed as them
selves, whether they were improvising, performing traditional
songs, or songs specially composed for an occasion. Even in the
latter case the poet gives them words that are, as it were, their own,
what is fitting for them to express as a group, individually and col
lectively, in the first person singular or plural. At times in nondra
matic choral lyric, the first person voice becomes the voice of the
poet himself speaking through his performers.21 The male citizens
of a dramatic chorus of course speak not with their own voices but
with those of the group they are impersonating. For Aeschylus and
Euripides, at least in the extant plays, they more often represent a
group of women, but whether male or female, with few excep
tions, they are characters from a legendary past, sometimes for
eigners, or slaves, occasionally divinities.
Dramatic choruses maintain the fiction of spontaneity, of an
unrehearsed choral response to an immediate situation, although
observing, especially in their more ritual gestures?such as pray
ers, curses, laments, victory songs?traditional formulae, compa
rable to the ones that make possible the spontaneous choral
mourning of the village women described by Danforth. Because
the dramatic illusion is strictly maintained in tragedy, the chorus,
being one of the actors, never explicitly speaks with the poet's

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 18 THE CHORUS IN GREEK LIFE AND DRAMA

voice, although this does not prevent some choruses from speak
ing what we can conjecture to be the poet's views. In comedy,
where breaking the dramatic illusion is traditional, the choruses
sometimes do speak in their own voices, and the poet regularly
speaks to the audience through his chorus with his own voice,
even more directly and fully than Pindar does.
Choral participation in dramatic action ranges from mere obser
vation and sympathetic comment to necessary ritual gesture and
direct involvement as important or principal actors. Ritual ges
tures, which are attempts to influence the action by involving the
gods, are one of the most frequent forms of choral action. But
whatever the nature of their participation, all dramatic choruses
are deeply involved, in the sense that their attitudes or lives will be
permanently affected by the outcome of the action. They are pre
sent, as they would be in daily life, because they are involved.
A choral performance is an action, a response to a significant
event, and in some way integral to that event. Without the victory
ode neither the athlete nor his fellow citizens would experience the
glory which his achievement sheds on him and on his city. It is in
the act of celebration, shared by performers and audience, that the
evanescent moment of victory achieves some kind of permanence
and meaning. The dead must be appeased by choral lament which
is as much their due as burial, and, just as important perhaps, the
living must come to recognize the finality of death as they speed
the dead to Hades with their songs. As Plato points out, such cho
ral acts give to events the coherence and meaning that constitute
civilization.
The dramatic chorus, then, would be seen by the Athenian audi
ence as an onstage counterpart of one of the many types of
choruses they knew in daily life. It re-creates a natural and tradi
tional response to what was imagined to be an actual past event
important enough to have implications which need to be reaf
firmed or assimilated and understood by society as a whole and by
posterity. Choral performance made the athlete's victory and glory
the common possession of his fellow townspeople. Reenactment
in dramatic choral performance made the ordeals of Oedipus and
Jocasta, of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes, or
Hecuba and the women of Troy, with all their freight of human
meaning, the common possession of the people of Athens and of
all later audiences who make the imaginative effort to grasp them
in their full choral richness.

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 Helen H. Bacon 19

The social value of musical celebration, its power to educate,

strengthen, and unite, is often insisted on in drama. In the debate
in Aristophanes' Clouds between Unjust and Just Argument, new
fangled sophistic learning is unfavorably contrasted with good
old-fashioned education through song and dance (859, 1104, par
ticularly 961-71). In his Frogs, as we have already seen (above, p.
7), the well-being, perhaps even the survival, of Athens is made to
depend on the restoration of the dramatic choruses (see further
1008-98,1418-65). In Euripides' Iphigeneia Among the Taurians,
the chorus of homesick maidens, held captive by a savage tribe on
the alien shores of the Black Sea, long for the fellowship of their
age-mates in the dances of their native Argos (1143-51). Member
ship in the chorus is the sign of their belonging. The chorus of
Athenian women in Euripides' Ion is horrified at the possibility
that Ion, an alien as they imagine, although in reality he is the
long-lost heir to the throne, should become king of Athens. They
envisage as the ultimate violation of Athenian identity the fact that
as king, this stranger would witness the nightlong, torchlit dances
that precede the initiation ceremonies of Athens' most sacred cult,
the Eleusinian mysteries ( 1074-89).22 In Eumenides, the last play
of Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, cosmic confrontation is defused
and the destruction of Athens averted when the furies, cosmic out
casts, dwellers in nether darkness, excluded from the celebrations
of gods and mortals, are integrated into the system of sacrifice,
feasting, and song that links mortals to each other and to the gods.
In accepting Athena's offer of a home in Athens and a cult (that is,
the right to take part in the feasting and song associated with their
cult sacrifices), they become members of the human/divine com
munity bound together by their shared celebrations. Now perma
nently established in the city they had threatened to destroy, they
undertake to nurture and defend it. For them, as for Iphigeneia's
attendants, a share in a choral event is a sign of belonging.23
Countless other passages in drama recognize in musical celebra
tions the same civilizing power that Plato assigns to them in the
Laws. I will end with a particularly impressive one from Sopho
cles' Oedipus the King. The Theban elders who make up the
chorus of that play, although their actions are limited to commen
tary, speculation, and prayer, are involved in two crucial ways. The
survival of their city depends on finding the source of the pollution
whose symptom is the plague that is ravaging Thebes. But even
more crucial, as the unfolding action begins to make it seem that

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20 THE CHORUS IN GREEK LIFE AND DRAMA

Apollo's prophecy about Oedipus was not true, the whole struc
ture of their universe is threatened. Worse than the fate threaten
ing Oedipus and the doom hanging over the city is the possibility
that Apollo cannot be believed, that Jocasta's flippant dismissal of
oracles will be justified. If that is so, sing the elders in the choral
first person singular, "what reason is there for me to dance?" (895).
And then they name shrines of the gods, beginning with Apollo's
oracle at Delphi, where it will be futile to worship if the god's word
can perish as mortals and animals perish. Their singing and danc
ing has no meaning unless it unites them in connecting the events
of this evanescent world to the incorruptible, deathless world of
the gods.24 In the tragic outcome of the play, of course, Apollo's
oracle is validated and the elders' belief in some kind of moral
order, however cruel and inscrutable, is restored. Terrible as the
event is, it is not the ultimate terror which would mean the end of
the power of choral dance and song. For through choral dance and
song the transitory anguish of individuals is placed in a larger con
text and achieves the coherence that unites the Athenian audience,
and all subsequent audiences, in assimilating the many-sided
implications of the event and integrating them into their experi
ence.25 Ultimately it is the poet, guided by Apollo, Dionysos, and
the Muses, who in his composite role as director, choreographer,
composer of words and music, by means of his dancing-singing
chorus, transforms the transient event into an enduring possession
of humanity.26

NOTES

The thesis of this paper originally came to me as an intuition arising from my

personal experience of choral behavior in the residually oral culture of contempo
rary Greek villages. I found the first solid support for my ideas about choral behav
ior in Claude Calame's Les choeurs de jeunes filles. Relying principally on his
evidence and interpretations, I delivered an early version of it as the Earle Lecture
at Hunter College in April 1983. Since then my thinking about the workings of
Greek oral culture and about tragedy as a product of that profoundly musical soci
ety has been broadened and enriched by a return to the work of Havelock conve
niently assembled in The Literate Revolution in Greece and by the appearance in
1985 of Bruno Gentili's Poetry and Its Public and John Herington's Poetry into
Drama. The basic thesis, however, remains unchanged and its most important sup
port is still Calame's initial insight into and detailed unfolding of the central and
indispensable social role of choruses in Greek culture.

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 Helen H. Bacon 21

1. For the occasions, financing, and production of tragedies, see Sir Arthur Pick
ard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2d ed. rev., John Gould and D.
M. Lewis (Oxford 1968) 57-101; on the significance of the social obligation of
financing choruses, see Eric A. Havelock, "The Oral Composition of Greek
Drama," 267-68, in The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Conse
quences (Princeton 1982) 261-312; on the tragic poet as didaskalos, see John
Herington, Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition
(Sather Classical Lectures 49, Berkeley 1985) 183-84.
2. Pickard-Cambridge (n. 1) 77 mentions only dithyrambic choruses. John J.
Winkler, "The Ephebes' Song: Trag?dia and Polis,," Representations 11 (Summer
1985) 26-62, revised and reprinted in John J. Winkler and Froma Zeitlin, eds.,
Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton
1990), pp. 20-62, argues, plausibly, if speculatively, that military exemption
applied also to tragic choruses, 40-41.
3. Aristotle's words do not conclusively justify the frequent inference that he
thinks Euripides does not treat the chorus as an actor. Perhaps he is thinking of the
fact that in certain plays like Hipp., Ion, l.T. a single actor could stand in for the
chorus because it is less strongly characterized as a group. Most recent scholars
starting with Walter Kranz in his monumental survey of lyric practice in tragedy,
Stasimon: Untersuchungen zu Form und Gehalt der Griechischen Trag?die (Berlin
1933) 171,182,220-22, have tended to treat the chorus's role as mixed, part actor,
part performer, or some combination of peripheral functions, such as poet's
mouthpiece, articulator of action through lyrical interludes, mediator between
audience and actors, and so on. Useful summaries of the scholarship in M. Kaimio,
The Chorus of Greek Drama within the Light of the Person and Number Used
{Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 46 [1970]. Societas Scientiarum Fen
nica) 9-17, and Cynthia P. Gardiner, The Sophoclean Chorus: A Study of Charac
ter and Function (Iowa City 1987) 1-7. Oliver Taplin, in spite of his salutary
emphasis on performance, treats the chorus primarily as articulators of action
rather than as participants {Greek Tragedy in Action [Berkeley 1978] 13): "it is ...
the place of choral song to move into a different world, a different register, distinct
from the specific events of the plot." Only in Aeschylus does he acknowledge that
they can, occasionally, function as actors; The Stagecraft of.Aeschylus (Oxford
1977) treats the chorus as articulators, passim, as actors, 69-70, 251-52. Thomas
Rosenmeyer, The Art of Aeschylus (Berkeley 1982), sees even Aeschylus' choruses
as intermittently shedding their role as actors to assume a generalized choral iden
tity independent of their age, sex, and social status and of onstage events, and
shared with all other choruses, 145-87, passim and particularly 163, 173, 179-80.
R. W. B. Burton, The Chorus in Sophocles' Tragedies (Oxford 1980), takes the
extreme position that the chorus's function in the odes is purely poetic. They are
actors only in iambic passages and lyric dialogue, 1-5,251-95 and passim. Among
recent scholars, Hugh Parry, The Lyric Poems of Greek Tragedy (Toronto and Sar
asota 1978), although the focus of his study is the poetry of the choral odes, insists
that the role of the chorus as an actor in song as well as dialogue is organic, not inci
dental to the drama, ix-xi, 5-46,67 and passim; Gardiner (n. 3) 188-89, also recog
nizes, although with less demonstration, that choral odes (as distinguished from
lyric dialogue) are usually not interludes but fully dramatic, contributing in their
own way just as much to the ongoing action as do the episodes. On nature and
kinds of choral involvement in action see above, particularly pp. 9, 17-18 of this
essay.

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22 THE CHORUS IN GREEK LIFE AND DRAMA

4. For Aristotle the musical and visual contribution of the chorus was clearly as
inevitable a part of tragedy as its role as an actor. He takes this dimension for
granted throughout the Poetics by treating tragedy as a choral art not only in its ori
gins but in its perfected form. This view is already implicit in the initial classifica
tion of tragedy as one of the poetic arts, that uses both rhythm (which by itself can
characterize dance) as well as song?that is, words and music (1447b). More specif
ically he names opsis (the visual dimension) and melopoiia (the musical dimen
sion), to which choral dance and song make so large a contribution, as two of the
six essential parts of tragedy (1450a) implicit in the definition (1449b). Despite his
insistence that the tragic effect can be achieved by reading without the aid of perfor
mance (1450b, 1462a), he names music {mousik?) and visual effects (opsets) as two
reasons why tragedy is artistically superior to epic (1462a). On the centrality of the
choral and musical dimension of tragedy, see Havelock (n. 1) 312 and passim; also
Hugh Parry (n. 3) passim; on the Greek view of drama as a branch of mousik?, a
subcategory of the performing art of poetry rather than a distinct, not necessarily
poetic, genre, see Herington (n. 1,39-40); on the pervasively musical nature of the
Greek arts of communication, including drama, until literacy was widely dissemin
ated, see Bruno Gentili, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece from Homer to the
Fifth Century, trans. Thomas A. Cole (Baltimore 1985) 3-23.
5. Pickard-Cambridge (n. 1) 234-36.
6. M. Kaimio (n. 3) documents exhaustively the use of singular and plural in
utterances by and to dramatic choruses. Interestingly, he finds the singular consid
erably more common than the plural, 13,36,150,248-51. My pragmatic approach
here cannot take account of the great range and nuanced variety of usages described
by Kaimio. His evidence suggests that the singular more often indicates intense per
sonal feeling (e.g., the passages from Hipp., Med., P.V. cited on p. 10, and the
chorus of Tro. which speaks only in the singular, a fact pointed out to me by Kare
lisa Hartigan), the plural more detached and formal thoughts and feelings. But
there is no absolute rule, 150-57 and passim. Mary Lefkowitz, "TQ KAI ETQ:
The First Person in Pindar" HSCP 67 (1963) 177?254, seems to deny any such dis
tinction of usage when she calls first person singular and plural "interchangeable"
in both choral and monodic song, 226. She distinguishes the choral "I" of choral
lyric from the bardic and personal "I" that represent the poet speaking in his own
voice, officially or personally, 179?95,225-37. Claiming that the epinician lacks the
kind of communal involvement characteristic of "pure choral song," she concludes
that the first person of Pindar's epinicians is never choral, but always signals the
poet's voice, 210?37, particularly 225-37. The many celebratory songs of tragedy,
most of all those of Euripides' Herakles in which the "bardic" voice is definitely
choral, and Crotty {Song and Action: The Victory Odes of Pindar [Baltimore
1982]), make this conclusion questionable. Lefkowitz takes her theory one step far
ther in "Who Sang Pindar's Victory Odes?" AJP 109 (1988) 1-11, where she sug
gests that some, perhaps all, of Pindar's victory odes may have been monodic. See
further Claude Ca?ame on I/we of chorus in Les choeurs de jeunes filles en Gr?ce
archa?que (Rome 1977) Vol. 1,436-39; Parry (n. 3) 221-22.
7. On the tragic chorus's group identity and their deep stake in the action and its
outcome, see Cynthia P. Gardiner (n. 3) 191; Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Trag
edy: Drama, Myth, Society (London 1973) 10, describes the chorus as "closely
related to the world of each play since it represents the section of society most rele
vant to the action." Ca?ame (n. 6) 361, speaking of the social functions of real-life

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 Helen H. Bacon 23

choruses, points out that the makeup of such choruses usually has some connection
with the sphere of activity of the gods they invoke. See also Crotty (nn. 11 and 12).
8. On the way in which the members of a real-life chorus retain their individual
identities while speaking with one voice, see Ca?ame (n. 6) 439. Kaimio (n. 6) 10
11, 22-24, 150, sometimes seems to suggest something like this kind of choral "I"
in drama, but elsewhere assumes that even in its own times the dramatic chorus was
experienced as a fundamentally artificial artistic device with no analogue in social
reality, 11, and describes it as an undifferentiated "multiplied individual," 23. Gar
diner, on the other hand (n. 7), regards the chorus as having a "specific human char
acter," 191, and calls song a natural form of group expression, particularly in a
society in which choral song played such an important role, "no more unacceptable
or anomalous than the notion that members of a family speak to each other in iam
bic trimeters," 188.
9. Herington (n. 1) 3 and passim.
10. Gardiner (n. 8) and (n. 1, n. 8, and nn. 12 and 13).
11. Crotty (n. 6) 81.
12. Crotty (n. 6) 4-6, 62-75, 81-83, makes this point in convincing detail. He
classifies both the choral odes of Pindar and those of tragedy as a kind of action nec
essary to give completeness to an event, real or imagined. See Herington (n. 1)
51-57 on the way in which early Greek poetry, particularly lyric, in reperformance
became a dramatic re-creation of an actual or fictive event.
13. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece, photography by Alexander Tsiaras
(Princeton 1982) 11-12. Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition
(Cambridge 1974) studies the lament from antiquity to the present emphasizing the
continuity of ancient and modern practices. Danforth prefers to see modern prac
tices as more rooted in the very different culture of Byzantium than in that of classi
cal antiquity.
14. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford 1970); Literacy and Oral
ity: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford 1988). See also Gardiner
(nn. 7 and 8) and Spindel (n. 15).
15. Gentili (n. 4) 24. Carol Spindel, In the Shadow of the Sacred Grove (New
York 1989), gives a vivid account of her direct experience of life in a contemporary
African tribal village in which dance and song, much of it spontaneous and impro
vised, still structure many aspects of community life.
16. On the persistence of oral culture in the Greek world long after the introduc
tion of the alphabet, see Havelock (n. 1) "The Preliteracy of the Greeks," 185-207,
and Gentili (n. 4) 19-21. For a useful overview of the way oral cultures function
(with specific reference to early Greece), see Havelock's "The Oral and Written
Word: A Reappraisal" (n. 1) 3-38. For a more detailed picture, see Havelock (n. 1)
"The Transcription of the Code of a Non-Literate Culture," 89-121, and Gentili
(n. 4) 3-176. More general discussions of orality as a phenomenon in many cultures
may be found in Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word (London and New York 1982); Ruth Finnegan (n. 14 1970 and 1988); John
Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology
(Bloomington and Indianapolis 1988). For a comprehensive reformulation, in the
light of social anthropology, of the nature of the Greek oral poetic tradition, see
Gregory Nagy, Pindar's Homer; The Lyric Possession of an Epic Poet (Baltimore
and London 1990) 1-51 and passim.
17. Ca?ame (n. 6) 386-87, commenting on this passage, points out that Plato's
view of khoreia as paideia is based on the actual role of choral dance and song in

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 24 THE CHORUS IN GREEK LIFE AND DRAMA

Greek society as the transmitter of civilized order and the link between gods and
mortals. Emotional gratification and strengthening of communal bonds compara
ble to what Plato describes in this passage is also noted by Ruth Finnegan in con
temporary African choral song (n. 14 1970) 220, 233, 239-42. See also Burkert (n.
23).
18. On music (words, song, dance) as primary medium of education and cultural
interaction, see Havelock (nn. 1 and 16); Gentili (n. 4); also Herington (n. 1) on
music in education 49-50, in symposia 37-38, 195-98, in religious festivals 5-10;
on citizen performers 96-97.
19. Even if Lefkowitz's suggestion (n. 6 1988) that all Pindar's victory odes are
monodic is correct, their tone is fundamentally choral. Most of the time he voices
the thoughts and desires of a group of which he is the mouthpiece. See Crotty (nn.
11 and 12) on lyric song, both monodic and choral, as part of an event.
20. Aelius Aristides, or. JierjL QiTCOQixfj? (vol. 2 p. 142 Dindorf) = Pindar frag. 31
(Snell-Maehler). Choricius of Gaza or. 13,1 (p. 175 Foerster-Richsteig) four centu
ries later attributes the same story to Pindar. Philo of Alexandria, de plant. 30 Sec
tion 126 (t. II p. 158 P. Wendland), nearest in time to Pindar, without naming Pindar
gives substantially the same version of the birth of the muses, but, in conformity
with his own Judaic/Hellenic philosophical leanings, substitutes for Zeus the cre
ator of the whole cosmos. Pietro Pucci, "The Language of the Muses," Proceedings
of the Comparative Literature Symposium Texas Tech University 11 (1980) 163
86, to whose discussion of song as the bestower of meanings I owe my realization
of the great significance of this fragment for my argument, several times refers to
Zeus as creator of the cosmos rather than its orderer, 164?65, although he translates
Choricius' words for how Zeus acts on the cosmos, to pan arti kosm?santa, as
"ordering the whole," 183 n. 2. See also Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind:
The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge,
Mass. 1953, 2d German ed. 1948) 71-89, for a more detailed discussion of song as
the source of order and meaning in Pindar's Hymn to Zeus.
21. Lefkowitz (n. 6 1967 and 1988).
22.1 follow the interpretation of Owen ad loc. in Euripides, Ion, ed. A. S. Owen
(Oxford 1939).
23. See Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Harvard 1985, origi
nal German edition, Kohlhammer 1977) 102, "To belong to a traditional group
means to learn their dances"; and further, 103; on feast and sacrifice with attendant
song, as affirming community and social order, 54-59. On the integration of the
furies into the cosmic sacrificial community, see Helen H. Bacon, "Aeschylus and
Early Tragedy" in Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome, ed. T. James Luce (New
York 1982) vol. 1141-52.
24. Helene P. Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca and
London 1985) 187, also sees this as the chorus's central dilemma. At 149-51 she
spells out in more detail the social function of the chorus's dancing and singing.
25. Cynthia P. Gardiner (n. 3) 191-92 and passim describes how Sophoclean
choruses broaden the context of the action to its public aspects and sees this as
characteristic of all choruses. See also Rosenmeyer (n. 3) 157 and chap. 9.
26. See Herington (n. 1) 60-61 on performance as "publication" and on the fre
quency of reperformance. This is a useful reminder that the dramatists could
expect their plays to be witnessed by many more people than the original audience.

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