Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

The Prologue 361
2. Simple Prologue of one speaker: Agamemnon, Choephori
(with Pylades dumb).
3. Complete exposition-scene with two or more characters
Septem : Eteocles and Messenger.
Eumenides : Pythia : change of Scene : Apollo, Orestes and
Ghost. (Unless indeed the Dance in the strict sense begins by
the Chorus being seen within about v. 35.)
Prometheus :
the
elaborate scene with Kratos and Bia has
apparently been introduced to meet the need of nailing the
gigantic figure on the rock.
In Sophocles stage (1) disappears altogether, and so practically
does (2). All the plays without exception begin with regular
exposition-scenes involving two or more characters. It is notice-
able, however, that two of the latest plays, Trachiniae and
Philoctetes, start this exposition-scene with a quasi-Euripidean
Prologue, addressed confessedly or half-confessedly to the audience.
That is, Sophocles regularly works in stage (3), but in his latest
work begins to be influenced by a further stage. What this is we
shall find in Euripides.
Euripides has practically always an exposition-scene—so
much is a natural concession to the growing complexity of
drama—but in front of the exposition-scene he has a formal
speech addressed to the audience by one quiet and solitary
figure ; a figure, also—and this is what I wish to emphasize
which is either confessedly supernatural or at least somehow
charged with religious emotion.
Let us take first the plays which happen to omit the ex-
position-scene altogether. To do so is, of course, a kind of
archaism :
a
return to a less complex kind of drama, in which
the sacred dance followed immediately on the Prologue-speech.
It occurs, if we disregard the Cyclops as not being a tragedy, in
only two dramas, and those naturally enough the very two that
are most formal and nearest to their respective forms of Sacer
Ludus, the Bacchae and the Supplices. The Bacchae has been
already dealt with :
the
:
—
Sacer Ludus behind all the Suppliant
Plays seems to me to have been a ritual only second in its
influence on tragedy to that of the Year-cycle itself. I will not
now discuss the subject at length, but I can understand the origin
of the Suppliant Plays best as a ritual intended to keep alive