For some years past there has been a welcome change of emphasis towards the consideration of staging in books published on Greek tragedy; and yet with that change also a curious failure to be explicit about the central problem connected with all stagecraft, namely that of the acting-area. In this study two scholars with considerable experience of teaching classical drama in performance consider this problem of the acting-area in close relation to major scenes from two Greek tragedies, and suggest some general conclusions. The article must stand to some extent as a critique of the succession of books that has followed the apparently pioneering study of Oliver Taplin, none of which has made any substantial or sustained attempt to indicate where actors might have acted in the performance of Greek tragedy, though most, if not all, have been prepared to discard the concept of a raised ‘stage’ behind the orchestra.

Hippolytus (428 BC) is the earliest of the surviving plays of Euripides to involve three speaking actors in one scene. Both Alcestis (438 BC and Medea (431 BC almost certainly require three actors to be performed with any fluency, but surprisingly present their action largely through dialogue and confrontation — surprisingly, perhaps, because at least since 458 BC and the performance of the Oresteia it is clear that three actors were available to any playwright.

These words are as true today as when they were written by A. E. Taylor over fifty years ago. Despite some very important contributions to our understanding of the dialogue, it is precisely because the dramatic aspects have either been misinterpreted or, even worse, failed to draw attention that the misunderstandings have continued until today. And, of course, Taylor himself was one of the worst in this respect. Not only did he believe that the hiccough incident was intended merely to be amusing (a view shared by many); he even attributed no purpose to Aristophanes' speech other than to be entertaining.

These remarks are occasioned by the virtual neglect allotted to the dramatic action which is most important to our understanding of the dialogue, the scene which occurs at the beginning before any of the speeches are made. It is true that a few critics have sensed the significance of these episodes, and certainly the methodology of how to interpret dramatic action in Plato has been well understood; but the episode itself has never received a complete or proper interpretation.

In Propertius 4.5 the lena (‘procuress’) Acanthis gives advice to nostra arnica (‘my girlfriend’, 63), almost certainly Cynthia, to cultivate rich lovers and avoid the poet who offers only verses. For Georg Luck the purpose of Propertius' ‘caricature’ of Acanthis is a moralizing condemnation of Rome's decadent demi-monde. According to Judith Hallett, ‘Propertius and his ideals are vindicated’ when at the close of 4.5 ‘Acanthis dies penniless and unmourned.’ Gordon Williams remarks on the poem's ‘vividness and drama’, the active effort it demands of the reader, through ‘the gradual revelation of the lena's death and the realization that the poet is actually standing on her grave’. Margaret Hubbard rightly challenges the overly dramatic readings made by many scholars and insists that the point of the poem is not ‘a genre picture of a bawd’ but an expression of ‘the lover's reactions’, his fear of Acanthis' powers conveyed by the lines leading up to her speech (1-20) and his relishing of her death at the poem's close (63-78).

As a pastoral prose romance, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe is something of an anomaly in a genre dominated for centuries by verse. Yet the work is quintessential pastoral, less because of its shepherd protagonists than because of the author's narrative strategy, with its mixing of genres and the cool distance it establishes between character and reader. Crucial in establishing this distance is the author's emphasis on the pastoral scene as artifact, a crafted work to be viewed and admired by the connoisseur.

The stress on artifact appears from the start. Rather than plunging his readers into the story or vouching for the veracity of what is to follow by presenting himself as an eyewitness or participant, Longus identifies himself, in a narrator's preface, as a sophisticated outsider, and informs his readers that what they are about to read is an extended ekphrasis, a literary description of a work of visual art:

The narrator's first words identify him as a hunter rather than a shepherd, no matter how literary. In fact he ranges himself alongside the urban gentlemen holiday-makers and hunters whom his readers will soon meet within the frame of the story (the Methymnean youths, the young master Astylos whose very name proclaims his urban identity — astu is the word for city) and whose aesthetic values they undoubtedly share.