Ancient Greek and Contemporary Performance: Collected Essays

By Prof. Graham Ley

This collection of published and unpublished essays connects antiquity with the present by debating the current prohibiting conceptions of performance theory and the insistence on a limited version of ‘the contemporary’.
The theatre is attractive for its history and also for its lively present. These essays explore aspects of historical performance in ancient Greece, and link thoughts on its significance to wider reflections on cultural theory from around the world and performance in the contemporary postmodern era, concluding with ideas on the new theatre of the diaspora.
Each section of the book includes a short introduction; the essays and shorter interventions take various forms, but all are concerned with theatre, with practical aspects of theatre and theoretical dimensions of its study. The subjects range from ancient Greece to the present day, and include speculations on the origin of ancient tragic acting, the kinds of festival performance in ancient Athens, how performance is reflected in the tragic scripts, the significance of the presence of the chorus, technology and the ancient theatre, comparative thinking on Greek, Indian and Japanese theory, a critique of the rhetoric of performance theory and of postmodernism, reflections on modernism and theatre, and on the importance of adaptation to theatre, studies of the theatre and diaspora in Britain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Release date: Mar 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9780859899833

Prof. Graham Ley

Graham Ley is Professor Emeritus of Drama and Theory at the University of Exeter. He has taught drama in the Universities of London and Auckland as well as Exeter, and has directed and translated for the theatre. He was dramaturg to John Barton in Tantalus directed by Peter Hall (Denver USA, 2000, UK, 2001). His particular interests lie in comparative performance theory, dramaturgy, performance in the ancient Greek theatre, and British Asian theatre. He held a Leverhulme Fellowship in 2000-2001, and was the award-holder for an AHRC-funded research project on the history of British Asian Theatre, active from October 2004 to March 2009. In July 2010 he was invited to give a keynote on British Asian Theatre at the conference Theater und Migration at the Comedia Theatre in Cologne. In January 2013 he was invited to contribute to one of a series of causeries at the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, as part of the activity surrounding the preparation of Alexandre Singh's work, The Humans. In September 2014 he was asked to compile the timeline on the history of British Asian theatre production in London for the programme of the London revival of East Is East, at the Trafalgar Studios which opened in October. His books include A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater (2nd edition, 2006) and The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy (2007). In 2014 he published Ancient Greek and Contemporary Performance: Collected Essays and Acting Greek Tragedy, a workshop-approach with an associated website at actinggreektragedy.com

Book preview

Introduction

This collection of essays stretches over thirty years, and is a selection from a larger body of material. The essays and shorter interventions take various forms, but all are concerned with theatre, with practical aspects of theatre and theoretical dimensions of its study. The subjects range from ancient Greece to the present day: the partition is indeed mostly between those two eras, although there are more than two sections to the book, since grouping writings together is, to an extent, a constructive activity in itself.

The rationale for the book lies in the fact that I have always been more inclined to write essays and construct shorter arguments than monographs, and much of my work is scattered around in journals. Some of those journals are familiar and well-scanned by those in theatre and performance studies; but many are not, notably the classical publications. So collecting them here is like publishing a monograph, I suppose, but of a rather different kind.

There is also, inevitably, some kind of claim attached to an intellectual retrospective, and my sense is that most of these issues are still live, something that surprises me. I recall in the early days being browbeaten to believe that scholars were capable of marching the subject forward, since that was what many implicitly claimed. I am not at all sure that this positivist assertion is true, nor that the contrasting relativist proposition—that each age has its fashion of perceiving and thinking, from which it gradually passes on—is much better.

What I find to be the case is that most real problems persist largely because they are wrongly or falsely framed, to suit various kinds of tendency in the schools of thought that either make up or—what is worse—seemingly control a discipline. It might be odd to think that intelligent people should falsely frame anything. But there are pressures in academic life such as are found in other spheres, like business and politics, and it is not just astronomers who can find a reason not to look through Galileo’s telescope.

Not that I would aim to stand in for Galileo, even as he is found in Brecht’s sharply ironic version of a good myth. I rarely have had the sense of creating the appropriate telescope; but I have often felt close to the nature of a problem, and also believed that the means to look at it clearly and evenly were more or less available, if one could be bothered to gather them together. There is, so often, a need to disregard the apparent offence of not following the fashionable lead, which plainly can be a serious danger if publication is the aim, which it should be.

Readers should also find, if they choose to persevere, threads that run through this volume which may, in some circumstances, bind the past to the present in a kind of continuity; and that is a moral of the collection, that the value of the past to the present is inalienable. There is, of course, no specific value that should be enshrined: my own suggestions, which are about theatricality and what is dramatic, are hopefully clear enough, but they are not exclusive. Conversely, I am totally opposed to the belief that the present, conceived as the (now very ancient) modern or the (always rapidly dating) contemporary, can be theoretically sundered from the past or can, as in a recent turn of pretension, somehow inhabit its own history but not be a part of any other.

The essays begin with studies of the ancient Greek theatre, and this may call for some explanation, a little personal and intellectual pre-history to the writings. US readers may find these institutional terms unfamiliar, but to be plain I went to a state primary school until the age of eleven, and was entered for and won a state-funded studentship to a metropolitan public school. In English double-speak, ‘public school’ actually indicates a private school, in this case a foundation established in the renaissance, at which the study of the classical languages is retained.

Sadly, I can only account for my choice of classical languages by my inclination, at an early age, to be a panepistemon, or in brute terms a ‘know-all’. I came from a family strongly committed to English literature, and was wary of being confined to that sphere of knowledge and cultural ease, as I considered it. My father was a journalist, as had been his and my mother’s fathers, all three in their time Presidents of the National Union of Journalists in Britain. My father’s father had been a devoted, amateur Dickens scholar, and my mother became a novelist. Both my parents loved Shakespeare and the romantic poets, while my father had mixed feelings about Dickens, and my mother admired and was always amused by Jane Austen.¹

So, as I went to university, I retained and developed the mad idea of acquiring a sense of culture from the Neolithic to the contemporary. I was the first of my extended family to go to university, although this should not have been the case. My mother, who went to a grammar school in Birmingham, was expected to apply to study at Cambridge. But at that time, in order to gain a studentship from the city fathers, you had to sign up to becoming a teacher afterwards. This she was happy enough to do, but if you were to be a teacher you were not allowed to have the poor sight with which she was afflicted. So she was denied that opportunity; later, when I went to school, she studied for a Diploma in Sociology at evening college, gained a distinction, and managed to break through as a novelist. She then went on to teach creative writing, which is a fair return, I think, for bigotry and prejudice against impairment.

It is true to say that at university, as previously at the school in which I was placed, I did not feel at home with what politely I would call the establishment. I have always felt uncomfortable with the idea that there are certain ways of doing things, and that what is known as a ‘way of life’ should take precedence over the point and purpose of an activity. More positively, I did decide that I should extend my attention to the renaissance, and so chose to study at the Warburg Institute in London rather than continue with a PhD. It may seem a heresy in the current context to say that I felt at that time that PhDs narrowed knowledge rather than extended it, and that they reproduced a model of study and writing which could be sterile and forbidding.

My commitment when I emerged, finally, was to give something back rather than look for a research fellowship.² I was convinced that dialogue with those studying was essential to formulate trenchant ideas about the nature of a subject, and that writing should be addressed to a readership that included those who had an intellectual interest, rather than confined to those who were deemed to be ‘in charge’ of a discipline. I was very strong on historiography and cultural history at the time, both discursive and of the plastic and visual arts, but it was drama that picked me up, and set me to teach Greek tragedy and comedy. I had indeed directed plays independently at school and at university, but had nothing of my father’s skilled enthusiasm for amateur acting.

There are a few other components that may help make sense of what follows. Apart from Greek and Latin, I read French and Italian for my studies at the Warburg Institute, and added some halting Spanish and apologetic German. Relatively soon, I began to take an interest in translating and adapting scripts, and occasionally creating scripts for specific purposes. But, since I was teaching in London at the start of my career, I also became immersed in contemporary theatre and playwriting, adding an interest in most facets of modernism to my private reading in the medieval and post-renaissance periods.

I have to admit that I have always had something of a blind-spot in relation to nineteenth-century culture, and which I have tried heroically to counter from time to time. But I do not like the Victorians and I do not admire empire, and so I rejoice in the emergence of the post-colonial American and Australian literatures. I mention these in particular because I became determined to break out of the circle of self-reference and self-congratulation that generally characterized British theatrical culture until relatively recently. I managed in the early 1980s to find small sums of money to look at theatre in New York and Los Angeles, and was awarded an Australian Studies Fellowship to visit—and attempt to broadcast via New Theatre Quarterly—the vitality of theatre-making in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, with admittedly inadequate reference to other major centres.³ These interests also embraced Canada and New Zealand, and prominent theatrical cultures in Africa that turned the English language to their own account dramatically, notably Nigeria and South Africa. The Australian theatre ultimately prompted the only piece of outright literary criticism that I have written, on a remarkable play by Stephen Sewell.⁴

Combining classics with drama and theatre studies was immensely hard, since the two disciplines seemed miles apart, and the ways of writing for the two cachet readerships totally disjunct. Some of that evolutionary history is implicitly contained in Parts One and Two of this book. I finally achieved two different approaches to the problem, which were both then expressed in monograph form. The first was A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater, in which I attempted to distil a great deal of information with the determining principle being that of theatricality, and to reach a large and broad readership with a clear and almost plain style.⁵ The second was an attempt to link three separate eras of theatrical theory together, encouraging the genesis of ideas to emerge, but applying a critical principle of close reading to all without discrimination. This book, From Mimesis to Interculturalism, allowed me to bring antiquity into conjunction with modernity through the mediation of the enlightenment, since the renaissance theorists were too classicist to demand a place in that initiative. This book also responded to what I had found when I returned to the UK from a few years of work in New Zealand, which was a great deal of talk about performance theory, but very little explanation of what the term might mean. I found out while I was writing the book that it really meant the essays of Richard Schechner, and very little else at that time.⁶

These two books came out at the end of the 1980s and the 1990s respectively, and I continued to work on ancient Greek theatricality and performance theory, adding translations of Sophocles,⁷ a jointly-authored introduction to modern theories of performance,⁸ and finally a monograph on The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy.⁹ This book was an attempt to re-set the study of Athenian tragedy on the grounds of performance, looking at the uses of the playing-space and the singing, dancing and interaction (with the individual performers) of the chorus. It was a culmination of a great deal of thought, argument and presentation over many years. My concluding view of a discursive, danced, music-theatre was that it was an art form that we should understand better ‘if we do not expect it to be familiar’, or ‘see its value uniquely in its capacity to be assimilated to our prevalent theatrical tastes’.¹⁰

This duality of what is now called ‘research interest’, in Greek performance and in theory, was extended in the 1990s by a response to the lack of publication on one of the major world diasporic theatres, that in the UK which has gone under the name of British Asian theatre, but which for a US readership in particular might be better termed British South Asian theatre. I found that I was indignant about this critical absence, which struck me more forcibly since I myself had been absent from the British scene through overseas work and subsequent unemployment. So I adjusted the pattern of a report, which I had first used for Australian theatre, and compiled a piece for New Theatre Quarterly on the first twenty years of Tara Arts.¹¹

Further contacts suggested the need for a more thorough account of the range of activity, and a large grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council permitted research over a four-and-a-half-year period from 2004. Two jointly edited books came from this project, with a small number of other reflections and studies.¹² Those pieces which I include in the collection here participate in historiography, documentation, and theory. More recently, this work has led me into the broader field of cultural adaptation, in which the cultural practice of contemporary diasporic theatres figures largely, but which also embraces the nature of theatrical activity from all kinds of points of origin forwards, including Greek antiquity.

There is good reason to cease this preliminary narrative here, and leave further detail to the introductions to the essays in the separate sections. These introductions offer some context, but mostly concentrate on issues of methodology, which varies almost constantly but has quite specific purposes, as I try to spell out in each introduction. There are four sections, which represent accents of activity with connected methodologies. The principle is not that they are not chronologically successive to—and exclusive of—each other as phases. So although the work on British South Asian theatre forms the last section, and did indeed begin only in the second half of the overall period, its extent overlaps with continuing work on theory and ancient Greek theatricality. So it is, in different ways, with other sections.

Although this is a personal volume, intellectually I should acknowledge a strong sense of collaboration, which I value highly. Some names have already been mentioned in references. My earliest collaborator was Michael Ewans, who shared a view of Greek theatre practice with me, and we have communicated well over many years, and helped each other’s thinking forward. I must also pay tribute to Simon Trussler, whose open-minded attitude as an editor of New Theatre Quarterly has repeatedly put things on the map that have been unjustly neglected, well beyond my own contributions. I have learned a great deal from two people to whom theatricality was second nature, Chris Baugh and Teresa Rodrigues. Conversations with both Chris and Teresa over many years have communicated their enthusiasm and profound respect for the crafts of theatre. Of Exeter colleagues, I have worked most closely with Jane Milling and Peter Thomson, notably but not exclusively in their capacity as fellow editors, in an sporadic process that over the years tells you much about your own lines of thought.

Finally, the contribution brought by long periods of supervision, dialogue and problem-solving with bright and innovative PhD students is apparent in how I now feel about cultures. But, in addition, we have together worked extremely hard on finding the right kind of writing to deal with the problem or the issue, to render the PhD thesis into something highly personal but also objectively precise. I would like to think that academic writing can remain similarly flexible.

PART ONE

Greek Theatre and Theory

Preface

The first piece in this selection (Chapter One) was, for me, the equivalent of a thesis. I had written a dissertation on renaissance Italian historiography for my further degree, but that was hardly serviceable for a role teaching ancient and contemporary theatre in a drama department, which is where I found myself. So I had to gather my thoughts, and bring them to bear in what I felt was the ‘field’ of study, acknowledging existent scholarship but trying to find a point of purchase. It is a familiar story, but executed in my case without a supervisor.

The simple explanation of this starting place is that I directed attention at the actor. It seemed an obvious choice for someone in my position, but it was not the main object of studies of the Greek theatre at the time, which were overwhelmed and dominated by two books from an Oxford PhD student, Oliver Taplin.¹ I shall say more about Taplin’s approach to what he called ‘stagecraft’ a little later. My own preoccupation was with the fact that the actor/performer was clearly a major topic in theatre studies, and it seemed only fair to try to provide some kind of key to an early occurrence of this figure in Europe.

What I found is laid out in the article, which is that there were two lines of thought on the meaning of the Greek term for actor, hypokrites, one inclining to follow Plato and an idea that suited modern thought about acting, that it was ‘interpretation’. The other line laid an emphasis on function within a performance, rather than (supposedly, for interpretation) work on text or character, with the individual performer ‘responding’ to the chorus. My inclination was then, as now, to follow this line, and I felt that there was a body of evidence that had not been brought to bear on the issue, although it was contemporary.

By examining that body of evidence, I began to trace a kind of performative sense of language, and no doubt a good supervisor would have alerted me to that concept and the theory in which it was laid out. But at the time I was content with finishing at least one substantial argument, and finding a home for it in a reputable journal. Since the argument was linguistic, it had to be in a classics journal, and I was left with the dilemma of how on earth one wrote substantially on Greek theatre without remaining locked up not just in the Greek language but in the discipline of classics. This, frankly, remains a dilemma, although I am less troubled by it now than I was then.

What does stand out to me is the sense of a problematic, a word to which I have been repeatedly attracted when describing my approach or the approach I would suggest to an intellectual problem, whether concerned with the arts or not. For me, a problem is not a worry, but a way of setting out what it is that one wants to think about: if you’ll forgive me for being pedantic, that is actually what pro-blema means, something you throw out in front of yourself and others.

What I then mean by a ‘problematic’ is a probably theoretical frame in which one can hang the problem, or a set of means by which one might express it constructively. So, for me, a problematic often contains some parts of what might be an answer, and I like dealing in problematics because I think advancing them allows more people to have a crack at the problem. A problematic also helps you think about other things that are related to your problem, and may be more important to other people.

I have often been dissatisfied with ‘answers’ that are driven through too hard and too fast, on the basis of a limited body of evidence. So many potentially good answers seem to me to be dependent on other answers which may not as yet have been achieved, and a rush to be categorically certain in one place may lead to a massive distortion in another. While in the sciences the toleration of wrong answers may be temporarily necessary for moving forwards, I do not think that this is the case in relation to study or reflection on the arts, which more usefully move round on themselves than forwards.

To close that observation about the nature of much of my work, I shall recall a discussion that occurred on the mailbase of the Standing Committee of University Drama Departments, which many may know as the major electronic forum in the United Kingdom. An interesting question had been posed about the first use of the term improvisation, and the timeline had been pushed back, I believe, after many emailed contributions, to the 1960s. While thinking of commedia dell’arte, and rather guiltily wondering why we should confine ourselves to a linguistic monoculture, I remembered Aristotle’s comment about comedy arising from improvisation; checking back, I found he also applied it to drama as a whole.²

This is what I mean by (the study of) an artform moving round on itself, and for me the only way to deal with this particular topic delightfully would be to construct a problematic about improvisation, since ‘improvisation’ first occurs for us in theory.

To return to the essays—the second piece (Chapter Two) actually came a long time later, but it was only a moment in some other ways, since I had been concentrating consistently either on making theatre or on pursuing the interest in the original practice of Greek theatre that is documented here in Part Two. The occasion was some strange work I did for the director and dramaturg John Barton, on a set of plays originally intended for television but finally produced on the stage. Barton had various queries and puzzles in this epic task of writing Tantalus, and was fascinated by the idea of storytelling and how it had changed into dramatic theatre.³

This query and discussion led me back to the earlier article, and I then took the step of linking my thoughts to the concept of performatives, how a ‘response’ of the kind I had in mind—one that was decisive—would be a representation that would be compelling to a society such as Athenian democracy. ‘Words that are actions’ almost explains the politics (perhaps more accurately the polity) of Athens, but those whom the Athenians were watching were autocratic and ancient. To my mind, there was a thread linking ancient, medieval, renaissance and certain modern scripts, but the prospect of tracing it was daunting.

The third essay in this section (Chapter Three) is the first of two rather different meditations on the chorus, written partly in response to a tendency in classics that was laying rather a lot of emphasis on the idea of the author, and the author as a performing voice. But the central issue for me in this essay was the remarkable reduplication of choruses in the Athenian festivals, with the total number of artforms amounting to four: dithyramb, tragedy, comedy and satyr play. I found this reduplication puzzling, and felt that one approach to its resolution might be to consider the specific skills required of the composer in connection with these radically different forms, what it was that they assigned to the individual actors as characters. My conclusion was that tragic drama dealt in apprehension and the demand for reassurance, stemming from the chorus and directed at leading figures, who had to ‘respond’. This was the first attempt I made to detect the relative functions of the different artforms, and it was developed in my later book Theatricality.

The final essay in this section (Chapter Four) was conceived as a contribution to a debate held by classicists at Northwestern in Chicago, and it was developed as a meditation on what I called the presence of the chorus, alluding in that phrase to the modern preoccupation in theatre studies with the presence of the actor. My contention is that the presence of the chorus has many implications for our understanding of the tragic scripts, an idea which might be expressed by saying that the greater performative mass of the chorus has inevitable effects on the lighter bodies of the actor-characters. So the essay adds a further piece to the assemblage in this section, which both attempts to define the ancient Greek tragic actor by function, and to realign our perceptions by placing the tragic chorus at the centre of composition and of the performance.

CHAPTER ONE

Hypokrinesthai in Homer and Herodotus, and the Function of the Athenian Actor¹

The study of the origins and development of Attic tragedy has always relied to a great extent upon the construction of hypotheses, since they alone can provide the possibility of a coherent interpretation of the remaining plays and fragments. Once such series of hypotheses has arisen over the question of the original meaning of hypokrites, the standard Attic term for actor. Since the noun first appears late in the fifth century,² already fixed in the theatrical sense which it was to retain,³ our understanding of the original function of this ‘actor, performer on the stage’ can only come from securing an exact meaning for the verb (given in the infinitive) hypokrinesthai.⁴

The debate over the meaning of hypokrinesthai has, at certain times, attracted considerable attention. It was waged with customary acrimony in the nineteenth century, and was revived vigorously after the Second World War. This has left us, broadly speaking, with two contradictory views. This first was most fully expressed by Albin Lesky: that is, that we should understand hypokrinesthai as ‘auslegen, deuten’ (to interpret), certainly in the Attic dialect, and the hypokrites as an ‘interpreter’.⁵ The second was elaborated by Gerald Else, who in an article which concluded several studies of theatrical terminology suggested that the hypokrites was an ‘answerer’, and might well be identified with that recurrent figure of tragedy, the messenger.⁶

The arguments presented by both scholars have two related characteristics in common: they are concerned principally with the pre-theatrical meaning of hypokrinesthai, and as a result rely heavily upon the seven passages in the Homeric poems in which the verb is found. From the recent silence on the whole question, it is clear that others have accepted this approach, and reconciled themselves to a choice of views.

In contrast, my feeling is the impasse is unnecessary; but that to move beyond it requires a different, tangential approach. This can be supplied by directing the search towards the evidence that exists for the non-theatrical meaning of hypokrinesthai in general, and proceeding from that point to an attack on the main question, that of the original function of the actor.

The additional evidence for non-theatrical usage is in fact readily available in the Histories of Herodotus, and the first aim of this essay will be to determine the degree of correspondence between the meaning of the verb in that source and in the Homeric poems.⁷ This investigation leads beyond the choice that is at present offered us between the two verbal equivalents, ‘answer’ or ‘interpret’, to a determination of the full significance of the verb in poetic and historical discourse. On this broad basis I should like to propose a slight amendment to a traditional view, which may be of interest in its implications for the critical appreciation of the extant plays.

1—Hypokrinesthai in Herodotus

There are thirty-two instances of hypokrinesthai listed by J.E. Powell in his lexicon to Herodotus.⁸ Of these, two are conjectural. For the abstract noun hypokrisis five instances are given, of which two are, once again, conjectural.

The meaning of hypokrinesthai in the Histories has never been disputed. Powell follows Liddell and Scott in offering the translation ‘reply, make answer’. Correspondingly, for hypokrisis Powell gives ‘reply’, and Liddell and Scott ‘reply, answer’.

In the following investigation I shall accept ‘answer’, ‘reply’, as approximate verbal equivalents for hypokrinesthai. But in order to achieve a more accurate definition of meaning, I shall examine the evidence for usage under two headings: the nature of the action or activity designated by the verb in Herodotus, and the nature, or quality, of the agent.

The nature of the action

At I.164 Herodotus is describing the siege of the city of the Phoceans by Harpagus, the Persian commander. Harpagus sets out the conditions under which he will leave the Phoceans in peace. The narrative then continues: ‘The Phoceans, aggrieved at slavery, said they wished to debate this for a day and then hypokrinesthai’ (I.164,2). The delivery of the answer is considered as an event or action separate from the deliberation which determines its content. This distinction applies equally to individuals as to communities. The wife of the Persian noble Intaphernes, condemned to death with his children and household, after pitiful complaints to her sovereign Darius is offered the unenviable task of selecting only one of the captives for salvation. Once spoken, her reply is final, and Herodotus’ words are precise: ‘she considered and hypokrineto as follows’ (III.119,4). As we know from the frequent citations of this passage in connection with the Antigone of Sophocles, she chooses her brother.⁹

In both these examples the activity distinguished from the delivery of the answer is deliberation, represented by bouleusasthai. But the distinction may equally be made between the essence of the reply and its delivery. In I.78 Herodotus records a portent which appeared to Croesus, the King of Lydia, some time before he was captured by the Persians along with his capital city, Sardis. Croesus immediately sends to the exegetes of Telmessus, whose skill lay in the interpretation of such omens. They correctly divine that a foreign army will appear and put paid to the Lydians: ‘The Telmessians made this judgement’, followed by the substance of their interpretation. But for Herodotus the accuracy of their divination is subsidiary to the real irony of the incident, which rests upon the timing of their reply. The stingin-the-tail is that the delivery of their response by messengers came after Croesus had been captured by Cyrus: ‘The Telmessians now hypekrinanto to Croesus, but he was already captured’.¹⁰

These last three passages in themselves are a conclusive demonstration that pragmatic or psychic reflection can certainly form a part of the context of hypokrinesthai but is absolutely distinct from the activity the word signifies, which is the delivery of the ‘answer’. This is also apparent from the number of passages where hypokrinesthai as an action takes its place in a sequence of actions or events.

The sequence is seen at its simplest in an anecdote about the prelude to the battle of Plataea. Mardonius, the Persian commander, sends a herald to the Spartans attempting to provoke them into engaging in a limited contest of arms. Herodotus gives us Mardonius’ proposal in the mouth of the herald, and continues with a brief sketch of what follows: ‘After he had said this he waited for a while, but when no one hypokrineto, he went back’ (IX.49,1). The sequence of actions follows an established pattern which has the formality of diplomatic procedure: there is a moment for the reply, and it is not taken. In an account of the siege of the city of Andros the circumstances are different (an answer is given), but the sense of hypokrinesthai as an activity in a sequence is again dominant: ‘the Andrians hypokrinamenoi in this way and refusing to give money faced the beginning of a siege’ (VIII.111,3). The decision is announced, and the finality of it is plain in the consequences.

The instance which best demonstrates this aspect of the use of hypokrinesthai is another occasion on which Herodotus employs the meaning of the word to achieve a particular effect. In the course of his expedition to Greece the Persian king Xerxes has been entertained along with his whole army by a Lydian, Pythius. Relying on this lavish display of hospitality, Pythius foolishly requests that just one of his five sons, the eldest, might be spared military service. Xerxes loses his temper, and autocratically replies that for his presumption that son shall suffer death. Execution follows immediately upon Xerxes’ reply: ‘as soon as he hypokrinato in this way, Xerxes immediately ordered those with who were entrusted with this task to carry it out’ (VII.39,3). The sequence of distinct activities is thrown into the limelight by its horrific speed and consequence.

The quality of the agent

In the final example of those given above it is particularly apparent how little of the significance of the word can be rendered by the words ‘reply’ and ‘answer’. As verbal equivalents, they are inadequate. The finality of the ‘answer’ given by the Persian autocrat is horrifyingly enhanced by the power he has to execute his decision. Whether considered in terms of power or consequence, the sense of the verb in all the passages so far reviewed would be conveyed more accurately by translating ‘respond’, ‘deliver a response’. The adoption of a rendering of this kind is further justified when the quality, or status, of the agents of hypokrinesthai in Herodotus is taken into account.

The action signified by hypokrinesthai is only appropriate to those who have a particular status, and only on occasions of great moment. This is most charmingly seen in IX.16, where the occasion is a feast of impressive formality. Fifty of the noblest Persians are dining with fifty of the noblest Boeotians (Greeks). One of the latter is Thersander, the most important man in Orchomenos, a principal town of Boeotia, and his account of a conversation with a neighbouring Persian is given by the historian. It is the opening which is of interest: ‘When they had finished dining and were drinking, the Persian reclining next to Thersander, using the Greek language, asked him where he came from, and Thersander hypokrinesthai that he was an Orchomenian’ (IX.16,2). The conversation cannot be casual: Thersander is the representative of his city.

What such men do is important, certainly for Herodotus, and his use of hypokrinesthai conforms perfectly to this historical awareness, which is not always shared by the agent himself. In II.162 Apries, the King of Egypt, sends an envoy to his rebellious general Amasis calling upon him to return to obedience and to his side. Amasis is unimpressed: he rises on his horse and offers the envoy a fart as his reply to Apries. The envoy recovers his composure and reminds Amasis of the need to take royal demands seriously. The general then delivers a more telling response (hypokrinesthai) to the envoy (II.162,4): he will return, but at the head of his army. With that pronouncement Amasis becomes historical.

Both status and occasion make hypokrinesthai appropriate to the responses given by the oracle at Delphi. Enquiries often came from prestigious individuals or the representatives of a community, and the status of the oracle depended upon the reliability of the pronouncements, which were often of great consequence to the enquirer. For Herodotus the classic