In assessing the relationship between art and the theatre in the ancient world, we must be clear about a number of issues, not least the importance of theatre itself in ancient society, since it was surely its perceived importance above all that prompted echoes of its activity in more permanent form.

From the perspective of the audience, Greek theatre possessed a number of significant attractions. They included the very spectacle of the presentation, with its processions, colourful costumes, music, and the element of competition between the writers, between the sponsors and between the actors. It was presented at key religious festivals which were themselves highlights in the communities' annual calendar. The audience therefore participated with a heightened sense of awareness and it must have recalled the festivals in much the same way. Important in the plays themselves was the enjoyment of the dramatic situation and of the competing agendas and motives of the participating characters; but one should not forget, either, the visualization of events, their instantiation before the eyes of the audience. We in our society have become so used to the process, so sated with images from cinema, television, newspapers, books, magazines, billboards in public spaces, that we tend to blot them out of our consciousness in self-defence at the overload of information. Classical Greeks had no such experience. Paintings were comparatively rare, and when they did exist - as in the Painted Stoa in Athens - they were found striking and became famous. The rarity of visual media also helps explain the importance of architectural sculpture in friezes and pediments, items that are by and large out of fashion in modern society where the need for images is catered for by other means. In a similar way, this search for a means of creating images of another world (that was at the same time their own) helps explain the way that pictures on pottery became such an important medium in the archaic and classical world.

In The Messingkauf Dialogues, Bertolt Brecht analyses the 'commerce' between stage and auditorium, the exchange that occurs between the actors and the spectators during a performance. In the ancient theatre of Greece and Rome, festivals usually provided the context in which that exchange took place. But what was a festival, and what sorts of festivals included theatrical performances? How did these festivals change across time and place, and how were those changes reflected on stage? What was asked of the audiences in these varying circumstances, and what did they ask for in return?

What was a festival?

Festivals in the ancient world were religious occasions, in the root sense of religio, Latin for the 'tie' that binds people and places to the gods. The Greeks and Romans almost always characterized these deities as immortal anthropomorphic beings, more powerful and inscrutable than their human models. Given their power, the gods may have welcomed protestations of faith, but they required of their worshippers specific actions (rituals). These usually involved blood sacrifice or other offerings, performed in particular places and times as the means to please or placate them. Festivals provided important public occasions for such ritual worship.

Given the changing forces of nature (all ancient cultures lived close to the land) and the wide variety of human experience, polytheism represented the Mediterranean norm – many gods for many things, each god with several aspects. In the great Athenian theatre festival, the City Dionysia, the city honoured the god Dionysus under his cult title Eleutherios, ‘from Eleutherai’, a border town between Attica and Thebes. The Athenians associated this traditional home of the god with eleutheria (freedom).

Introduction: the question of authenticity

In 1987 Harvard University Press published a newly authenticated slave narrative, titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jean Fagan Yellin was the editor of this admirable new edition, because unlike other historians and scholars - such as the historian John Blassingame and scholar Robert Stepto - she believed the author, “Linda Brent” (Harriet Jacobs), and the original editor, Lydia Maria Child, when they said that the narrative was true. Searching through various archives, Yellin was able to find solid documentary evidence, in the form of letters, newspapers, and official state papers, as to the truth: that the incidents recounted in Incidents had actually occurred.

By proving that Harriet Jacobs had indeed composed the narrative, and that the events in it were more or less true, Yellin had single-handedly changed the book's status and the shape of what could be understood more broadly as “authentic” slave narrative, which I will discuss later in this essay. Indeed, although Incidents had been known to scholars and historians for years (it had, indeed, never really been lost), few regarded it as genuine; its value as a slave narrative was questioned or doubted, and for a host of reasons. Most critics who worked with slave narratives had labeled Incidents fiction. Indeed, Yellin herself had originally accepted “received opinion” and had “dismissed it as a false slave narrative” (Incidents, p. vii). Why?

Not very long ago, students taking a standard Survey of American Literature course that covered the years up to the Civil War would have encountered just one slave narrative, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, first published in 1845. These days, students in that course are likely to encounter two slave narratives - or rather, one complete narrative and about one-seventh of another. Both The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865 and The Heath Anthology of American Literature - Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865 include exactly six of the forty-one chapters of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Heath Anthology also includes the work of four other African American writers, all collected together with Douglass and Jacobs in the section entitled “Race, Slavery and the Invention of the 'South.'” In this volume of the Norton Anthology, Douglass and Jacobs are the only African American writers represented. Students who continue in the survey might encounter one or two other narratives - perhaps Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery (1901), for example. Most students interested in American literary history, then, and many of their teachers, will encounter fewer than a handful of narratives that will represent a genre that includes an estimated 6,000 texts - including books, periodical publications, and oral histories and interviews. Even in courses not burdened by the constraints of historical coverage that makes any survey course a challenge, Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Jacobs’s Incidents (read in its entirety) are often the only slave narratives assigned; similarly, a great deal of scholarship on American literary and cultural history includes significant discussions only of Douglass (most often) or of Jacobs, or of the two together.

Slave narratives are famously or, more precisely, infamously surrounded by the voices of white men and women. Their function is to vouch for the integrity of the narrator and to authenticate the facts of her narrative lest a suspicious reader think that a slave remembers too much, writes too well, or has had experiences too romantic to be believed. Ironically, such attestations of truthfulness seem to be required by narratives whose very plots are founded upon lies, secrecy, and identity theft. Lydia Maria Child's introduction to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl (1861) perhaps most fully embodies this defensive strategy of framing the narrative by anticipating objections to the slave's integrity and honesty. Child frankly states that she has undertaken the task of making public Jacobs's story of compromised womanhood, at least according to conventional Victorian sexual norms, “with the hope of arousing conscientious and reflecting women at the North to a sense of their duty in the exertion of moral influence on the question of Slavery.”

While making the case for the virtuous character of the slave, the truthfulness of her narrative, and the necessity for the reader, in the language of Harriet Beecher Stowe, to “feel right” and assume an antislavery position, these introductions, prefaces, appendixes, and testimonials also instruct the reader on how to read the narrative.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was the greatest polymath of antiquity, whose aim was to create a systematic science of everything. He wrote about social policy, personal morality, logic and cosmology, but is perhaps most impressive in the field of biology. For two millennia, no one would improve upon his applied research into the different forms of animal life. Amidst this huge intellectual output, we find at the end of his Collected Works a set of condensed lecture notes on poetry. Little read in antiquity, these notes would exercise a huge influence upon the Renaissance, and on later generations of playwrights. Known as the Poetics, the notes attempt to do two things: firstly, they compare tragedy to epic in order to argue that tragedy is the highest form of literary art, and secondly, they offer a guide to a would-be writer in how to write the best possible tragedy. Aristotle regards tragedy as a biological 'organism' (Poetics xxiii.1), and the way to study an organism is to see how its different bodily parts interrelate.

In recent years, film theorists have continued to study and admire the Poetics, because of the emphasis which Aristotle gives to narrative, described as the invisible 'soul' of the organism (vi.14). A Hollywood story analyst in 2002 published Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization as a guide for aspirant writers. Theorists of performance, however, have wanted to assert that 'liveness' differentiates theatre from cinema, and have often baulked at Aristotle's uncompromising view that the power of tragedy is the same with or without performance and the actors (vi.19).

Frederick Douglass was the most famous African American of the nineteenth century and one of its greatest writers and intellectuals. Over the course of his long life from 1818 to 1895, he published three autobiographies, one novella, and a dozen or so speeches in pamphlet form. He delivered thousands of lectures and was one of America's best orators, at a time when public speaking was a major form of entertainment. For sixteen years, he edited, under three different names, the longest-running black newspaper in the nineteenth century. And thousands of photographs and engravings of him were in circulation, in forms that ranged from frontispiece engravings to daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, cartes de visite, and cabinet cards. He sat for his portrait at least as much as Walt Whitman, who was famous for visually creating and re-creating himself. As early as 1860, his “likeness” was familiar to virtually every American.

Douglass became an American icon through art. He brilliantly used the power of the word, voice, and image to write himself into public existence and remake himself while seeking to reform his nation. He was widely called “a Representative Man”: his close friend, the black abolitionist and physician James McCune Smith, referred to him as a “Representative American man” because he continually transformed himself; he “passed through every gradation of rank comprised in our national make-up and bears upon his person and his soul everything that is American.”

synonym See SAVE / In 1798 Venture Smith, the eldest son of an African prince, dictates the narrative of his life, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America. Related by Himself, to Elisha Niles, a Connecticut schoolmaster. Approximately ten years later, in 1810, itinerant preacher George White publishes the story of his life, appropriately titled: A Brief Account of the Life, Experiences, Travels and Gospel Labours of George White, an African; Written by Himself and Revised by a Friend. While the two narratives reflect vastly different experiences of bondage, both Smith's and White's autobiographical stories highlight acts of redemption: Smith and White consciously try to recover and restore what is lost and stolen from them by the institution of slavery. By charting the literary influence of the captivity narrative and spiritual autobiography tradition on Smith's and White's narratives, we can see a common rhetorical strategy both men employ: using conventional Anglo- American literary genres to tell unconventional African American stories. To fully understand the genre of slave narrative requires a familiarity with the other literary genres that have influenced the slave narrative form and that have also been transformed by the slave narrative tradition. In exploring the influence of the captivity narrative and the spiritual autobiography on these two texts, we can use Smith’s and White’s narratives to illuminate the literary interconnections that exist, on a lesser scale, in most all of the texts in the slave narrative tradition.

Definitions and methods

Aristotle's definition of tragedy may seem odd to modern viewers for whom psychological drama is the norm:

Yet the formulation deserves renewed attention in light of the advances made by critics and theorists in the last few decades. Tragedy - and, we might say, drama as a whole - is primarily about action. Aristotle's own reference to the etymology of the Greek word drama (from the verb dran, 'act, do') asserts this in another way, although he simply includes the suggestion in his report on possible non-Athenian origins for theatrical activity (Poetics 1448a30-38).

To say that tragedy, comedy and satyr play are actions is not to deny that they are also masterpieces of verbal artistry. For readers since late antiquity, it is as texts that these dramas have most often been encountered. Well into the twentieth century, the fascination and power of Greek plays have been found in their textual qualities, whether imagery, rhetoric, sound or structure. (The comparative undervaluation of Roman drama in the twentieth century stems from this fixation, abetted by New Criticism and related interpretive modes.) At the same time, however, the increasingly fruitful rediscovery of classical drama as live performance, starting in the late nineteenth century, has generated a body of valuable work, by scholars and producers, on stagecraft, spectacle, the actor's body, masking, the meaning and use of space and other features of theatre beyond the purely verbal.

Slave narratives were dynamic, responsive, hybrid writings that evolved within a range of diverse dialogues, debates, and arguments. The interest which they continue to inspire is due, in a large part, to the challenges we face as modern-day readers attempting to bring ourselves closer to the historical moments and discursive practices within which these urgent stories were forged. The responsive nature of the slave narrative means that in order to understand its features and tropes we must explore the literature to which it reacted and by which it was often constituted.

While proslavery debates presented the most racist and virulent arguments to which the narratives had to reply, abolitionist discourse and literature offered representations of slaves and black people, combined with antislavery opinions and views, which became interwoven in the fabric of the slave narratives. This interconnectedness was not always, however, due to an agreement on antislavery strategy or even to a coincidence of perspective: for example, often abolitionist writing could be as racist as proslavery writing, offering negative images of black people as ignorant and morally undeveloped. In Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe opposes Eva “the fair high-bred child” and Topsy “ the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil and vice,” suggesting a racial difference between white and black not to be overcome by the abolition of slavery itself. In his second narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass describes his frustration at being used by the abolitionists to repeat his story “month after month”: “'Give us the facts,' said Collins, 'we will take care of the philosophy.'”

In an interview published in New Theatre Quarterly in 1994, Ian Watson asked the American theatre historian Bruce A. McConachie whether he believed that theatre history was 'no longer an hermetic history of playscripts, performances, and/or personalities but, rather, their history in the light of their social and cultural milieu'. McConachie's response raised a number of issues relating to the nature of 'historical facts' as they may be reflected in the study of acts of theatre, leading to the assertion that '...for the theatre, one needs to go beyond empiricism and formalism to get at larger issues of how theatre works in history, how it works in society and culture'.

Until relatively recently, with a few notable exceptions, the study of Greek and Roman theatre was tied to the study of its texts. Not surprisingly this left a residue of feeling that classical theatre suffered from a kind of inverted Darwinism. Its zenith, history seemed to be telling us, was with Aeschylus, descending, gradually at first, and then by leaps and bounds, to end up with the grotesqueries of the Roman arena and the eventual excommunication of the mimes. That may be a fair comment on the drama as art, theatre as an aesthetic experience. From a historical perspective it is nothing like the whole story, though what that story is has to be gleaned not from a treasury of the world's greatest plays, but from threads and patches, anecdotes and incidentals. Most of the classical historians wrote of the major events: Herodotus, the conflict between Greece and Asia; Thucydides, Athens' great war against Sparta; Livy, the early years of Rome; Tacitus, the reigns of the first emperors; Plutarch, across the board. The theatre and, in McConachie's words, 'how it works in society and culture', until well into the time of the Roman empire, has to be distilled from less targeted sources but is maybe none the worse for that. With a throwaway art the unguarded comment can often be more revealing than the systematic narrative.

'Menander and Life! Which of you imitated which?' Aristophanes of Byzantium

The third-century scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, one of Alexandria's greatest figures, certainly knew Greek literature and how to read it, but his oft-quoted epigram has not been especially helpful to Menander's reputation. Finding in the conventional (some have said 'hackneyed') plots and characters of Menandrean comedy, where citizen boy will get citizen girl even if he is a rapist or she a foundling, an adequate reflection of 'life' as commonly lived on this planet, requires powers of generalization that not every critic is willing to apply. His genre may itself be partly to blame: New Comedy's canvas is said to be too small, its vision too narrow, its artificiality too apparent. When comedy lost its active engagement in the loud and vigorous life of the fifth-century polis, the assumption goes, it embraced all too thoroughly an effete and superficial, perhaps even decadent, dream of bourgeois life in the backwater that was post-classical Athens.

Literary critics had little incentive to question this view. New Comedy's limitation was also seen as its salvation. Aristophanes may have been brilliant, but Old Comedy's persistent focus on the political, social and cultural concerns of fifth-century Athens rooted the genre so deeply in its own society that any appeal beyond Attica was decidedly limited. A play like Women at the Thesmophoria (Thesmophoriazousae), spun from the peculiarities of an Attic festival and the mannerisms of an Athenian playwright, could hardly interest audiences beyond the boundaries of its time and place. Comedy became exportable only in the course of the fourth century as it gradually unmoored from the specific preoccupations of Athenian society and generalized its themes.

Summarizing the condition of Southern blacks following the Civil War and Reconstruction's end, W. E. B. Du Bois was uncharacteristically terse: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” In Du Bois's compressed account of African American history, one phase blurs so easily into the other that the distance separating slavery from freedom is difficult to fathom. The phase during which the “slave went free” and then passed that liquid “moment in the sun” could seem to augur not just the transformation of socio-political circumstances for African Americans, but also the expansion of aesthetic options beyond the realm of personal testimony and the slave narrative. For generations, African American writers had been duty-bound to the conventions of these forms, which had been instrumental in the protracted campaign to end the Atlantic slave trade and to abolish slavery. But inasmuch as the abolition of chattel slavery did not make real Emancipation's proclamation that all former slaves would be “henceforth and forever free,” the slave narrative continued to play a dominant role in African American letters from the end of the Civil War until well into the 1920s. But to observe that the slave narrative remained a viable form well into the 1920s is not to say that African American writers accepted uncritically its salient tactics or conventions. Even as they advanced the genre's political drives, along with its fervent commitments to forging social change, African American writers continually grappled with the generic conventions of the slave narrative. At one level, that grappling offers us an excursion into the dynamics of continuity and change observable in the historical development of any literary genre, but the struggle of African American writers with this distinguished form went beyond generic matters: it bespoke a vexed relationship to the institution of slavery itself.

The slave narratives were intensely political documents. Although one may find many motivations behind their writing, all were published to play a role in the fight against slavery. Encouraged by the rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s, the narratives quickly became that movement's most essential texts, providing eyewitness accounts of slavery's brutal reality. Most of the authors were themselves active abolitionists who had told their stories on the platform prior to setting them down in print. Both they and their colleagues believed the narratives could strike a telling blow against slavery.

The narratives' political purposes also contributed to their shape and content. Written to serve the abolitionist cause, the narratives quickly developed a set of rhetorically effective conventions with great political resonance in antebellum America, based on significant, systematic political ideas.

The political character of abolitionism was itself a complex matter. The movement's roots, and those of the slave narrative, lay in efforts to oppose slavery that had appeared both in Britain and its American colonies by the 1680s. During the eighteenth century, and into the era of the American Revolution, such former slaves as Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Job ben Solomon) and Olaudah Equiano, their works well known on both sides of the Atlantic, recounted their experiences in order to further that opposition. Still, both in Britain and the United States, the development of the slave narrative as a form was closely connected to the rise of American abolitionism as an organized force, formally marked, beginning in 1833, by the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), led by William Lloyd Garrison, Robert Purvis, and others.

In the late eighteenth century, important cultural and philosophical changes facilitated the rise of antislavery movements. These developments are rich, complex, and usually fall under the rubric of “Enlightenment” ideology. The historian David Brion Davis has identified three of them. One was the rise of secular social philosophy, based on humanitarian principles and contractual terms for human association and government, found in such thinkers as Baron Montesquieu and John Locke, which drastically narrowed the traditional Christian rationale for slavery as the natural extension of the “slavery” of human sin. Another important development was the rise of sentimentalism in the eighteenth century, which, related to evangelical religion, popular fiction, and urban cultures of refinement, raised the importance of the virtues of sympathy and benevolence as well as the cultural refinement accompanying them. A third development, especially important in the 1790s, was the proliferation of more radical and revolutionary ideas about natural rights vis-à-vis state and social forms of authority.

The slave narrative first emerged during the 1770s and 1780s in the context of these transatlantic political and religious movements which shaped the genre's publication history, as well as its major themes and narrative designs. These late eighteenth-century works reveal what Paul Gilroy calls the “transcultural international formation” of the “Black Atlantic” – that fluid geographical area encompassing the West African littoral, Britain, British America, eastern Canada, and the Caribbean – through which black subjects traveled as free persons and as slaves.2 The conditions and contexts for publishing these early narratives were in many ways unique. Evangelical Christian groups often sponsored and oversaw their publication. By the 1780s, new political organizations, like the English Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787) and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (1775/1784), dedicated to the abolition of the slave trade, also played a role in encouraging and publishing these narratives.

In this chapter I will argue that the 'socio-political dimension' of fifth-century Greek tragedy amounts to its engagement with the collective ideology and competitive ethos of the democratized classical polis on the one hand, and more traditional Homeric and mythic conceptions of religion and heroic self-assertion on the other. In addition, I will consider the Greek tragedians' interest in framing dilemmas of action with debates over the merits and meanings of certain key fifth-century socio-political concepts. I will address the pressing question of how far Greek tragedy's 'socio-politics' speak to watching Athenians and their guests from other Greek states as polis-dwellers in general as opposed to singling out the democratic aspects of the Athenian civic experience. We will see that while Greek tragedy sometimes used tales of monstrous royal goings-on and heroic extremism to highlight the civilized values of Athens, this city's democratic citizenry rarely watched a play which would not have unsettled their senses of social and political well-being. However, any claim to the effect that Greek tragedy had real socio-political 'bite' for its audience has to be tempered with a recognition that Greek tragedy's overarching mythical idiom should preclude any reading of it as a vehicle for specific messages or manifestos.

Having dealt with the case of classical Athens, I will briefly argue that the social and political force of tragedy did not diminish after the classical period. Neither the facts of Hellenistic or Roman 'appropriation' nor the paucity of available evidence should prevent us from realizing that Roman Republican tragedy spoke provocatively and productively to its audience's specific sociopolitical milieu.

JEWS AND PERSIANS

Jews and Persians had coexisted in Mesopotamia, mostly peaceably, for some 750 years before the Sasanian dynasty took over from the Arcasids in 224 C.E. They would continue to do so for more than another four centuries, including the entire amoraic period (220-500 C.E.). As the late third-century R. Huna put it, the Babylonian “exiles” were at ease in Babylonia, as the other exiles - those in the Roman world - were not (B. Menahot 110a). The Persian emperor wanted it that way. Jews were a significant minority in a vital province; Mesopotamia was both the breadbasket of the empire and the province most vulnerable to Roman invasion; unlike Christians, who might become a fifth column once Christianity became a tolerated religion in 313 C.E., the Jews would support the regime if they were left alone.

At the same time, the official religion of the Persian Empire, Zoroastrianism, was comfortable and even familiar to the Jews, with its theological doctrines of creation by the benevolent and omniscient Ohrmazd, the fight against evil, reward and punishment, heaven and hell, judgment, creation, the coming of three pivotal “messianic” figures, the ultimate defeat of evil, the resurrection of the dead, and the renewal of creation. This was true of its ethical system as well, with its emphasis on right thought, speech, and action, and its ritual system, with its stress on the avoidance of idolatry, its hatred of sorcery, “wasting of seed,” and contact with menstruant women and dead bodies.