Seduction and Power

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Seduction and Power

Antiquity in the Visual and Performing Arts

Edited by Silke Knippschild and Marta García Morcillo

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Bloomsbury AcademicAn imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square 175 Fifth AvenueLondon New York

WC1B 3DP NY 10010UK USA

www.bloomsbury.com

First published 2013

© 2013 edited by Silke Knippschild and Marta García Morcillo

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or

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Silke Knippschild, Marta García Morcillo and the contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this

work.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury

Academic or the authors.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 9781441177469ISBN: epub: 9781441154200ISBN: epdf: 9781441190659

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NNPrinted and bound in Great Britain

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Contents

Acknowledgements viiList of Contributors viiiList of Figures xiii

1 Seduction and Power: An Introduction 1Marta García Morcillo and Silke Knippschild

2 Power and Seduction in Babylon: Verdi’s Nabucco 9Michael Seymour

3 ‘Go East Young Man!’ Jewel-in-the-Bellybutton: Orientalism in Oliver Stone’s Alexander 21Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

4 Modern Dance and the Seduction of Minoan Crete 35Nicoletta Momigliano

5 Trojan Lovers and Warriors: The Power of Seduction in Age of Bronze 57Eric Shanower

6 Dark Ladies, Bad Girls, Demon Queens. Female Power and Seduction from Greek Tragedy to Pop Culture 71Martina Treu

7 The Eroticism of Power in Jordi Coca’s Ifigènia (2009) 85Maite Clavo

8 ‘Prince of Painters’: The Grimacing Mask of Power and Seduction in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen 95Andrea Capra and Maddalena Giovanelli

9 Redefining Catharsis in Opera: The Power of Music in Birtwistle’s The Minotaur and Amargós’ Eurídice y los títeres de Caronte 109Jesús Carruesco and Montserrat Reig

10 The Self in Conflict with Itself: A Heraclitean Theme in Eliot’s The Cocktail Party 121James H. Lesher

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vi Contents

11 Three Queens: Helen, Penelope and Dido in Franco Rossi’s Odissea and Eneide 133Martin M. Winkler

12 Claudia Quinta and Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica: Exempla virtutis in Vienna under Leopold I (1657–1705) 155Pepa Castillo

13 The Stolen Seduction: The Image of Spartacus and Riccardo Freda’s Spartaco, gladiatore della Tracia 171Óscar Lapeña Marchena

14 The Great Seducer: Cleopatra, Queen and Sex Symbol 183Francisco Pina Polo

15 Seduced, Defeated and Forever Damned: Mark Antony in Post-Classical Imagination 197Marta García Morcillo

16 Power Beyond Measure – Caligula, Corruption and Pop Culture 211Martin Lindner

17 Constantia Memoriae: The Reputation of Agrippina the Younger 225Mary R. McHugh

18 Prostitute, Saint, Pin-Up, Revolutionary: The Reception of Theodora in Twentieth-Century Italy 243Filippo Carlà

19 The Spell of Antinous in Renaissance Art: The Jonah Statue in Santa Maria del Popolo 263Rosario Rovira Guardiola

20 History, Moral and Power: The Ancient World in Nineteenth-Century Spanish History Painting 279Antonio Duplá

21 The Lure of the Hermaphrodite in the Poetry and Painting of the English Aesthetes 295Charlotte Ribeyrol

22 Seduction and Power in Postclassical Reception: Traditions and Trends 311Silke Knippschild

Bibliography 325Index 353

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8

‘Prince of Painters’ : The Grimacing Mask of Power and Seduction in Aristophanes’

Assemblywomen1

Andrea Capra and Maddalena Giovannelli

This chapter discusses the reception of Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen in Italian theatre, especially in a performance by the Milanese theatre company ATIR. The focal points are not only the representation of the individual characters in the play, but also of the metatheatrical character of ancient comedy itself. In order to fully appreciate the different aspects of the reception of ancient comedy, we first need to discuss these features in the ancient play, before moving on to the contemporary performance.

Ancient images

Ancient Greek comedy is a fundamentally metatheatrical genre, and this is one of the most important features distinguishing it from its cognate genre, Greek tragedy. Thus, Greek comedy often breaks the dramatic illusion, whereas tragedy sustains it throughout the performance. Undeniably, some scholars, with some right, think it inappropriate to use such terms as ‘metatheatrical’ or ‘dramatic illusion’ when referring to ancient theatre, and yet it is a matter of fact that tragedies never exhibit their theatrical nature, whereas ancient comedies do just that. The pictorial record neatly confirms this opposition. It is relatively easy to identify a comic production in a vase painting, in that theatrical details, including masks, costumes and props, are clearly depicted as such. On the contrary, ‘tragic’ vases are hotly debated, because it is often impossible to distinguish the representation of a given myth from its tragic production. In a tragic performance, actor and character were perceived as

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one and the same thing, and, as a result, painters tended to omit any explicit theatrical reference.2

This state of affairs explains why offstage actors are so often depicted in the act of contemplating their mask: the mask – whose very name, prosopon, means ‘face’– becomes a somewhat alarming new identity, to be looked at with some concern.3 It is probably not a coincidence that the most famous ‘classical’ portrait of a tragic actor with his mask – an Apulian Gnathia fragment (c. 350 bc) attributed to the Konnakis Painter4 – stands out for the realistic ugliness of the ‘real’ face as opposed to the marked beauty of the mask, whereas the actor himself looks perplexed as he stares at it. Seduction, then, is very much in the air when we talk about masks. What is more striking, however, is that once the mask is placed on the actor’s face, his entire body seems to be transformed. Let us look at Figure 13: beautiful female masks can easily turn a group of male

Figure 13. Fragment of Attic krater found at Taras, possibly by the Pronomus Painter, c. 400 bc. Martin von Wagner-Museum H4781, from Taplin 2007: 30.

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actors into a highly desirable group of young women, whose very bodies display unmistakable signs of attractive femininity, as if under the spell of the masks.

So much for seduction, then. Power is of course a closely related concept: as it is seductive, a mask is obviously powerful as well. Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo used to say that the very idea of an actor toying with his mask onstage gives him the shivers.5 Not surprisingly, in the extant tragedies this is never the case, the mask retaining its sacred and magical power: in Athenian tragic contests, masks were probably removed only at the end of the play (or, possibly, even at the end of the tetralogy) as a kind of ‘curtain call’.6 On the contrary, comedies freely toy with masks, and more specifically with their power. 7 One case in point is the Procne scene in the Birds (663ff.), the climax of this overtly sexual scene is no doubt the moment when Euelpides removes Procne’s mask, representing a beaked bird. The removal of that mask signals the power obtained by the human protagonist over the attractive she-bird and her beak, the latter being a focal point of costume interaction in the first half of the play.8

Masks, power, seduction and generic opposition both in genre and in gender: with these concepts in mind, let us now turn to the Assemblywomen. Along with Lysistrata, this play features the deepest entanglement between power and seduction among Aristophanes’ comedies.9 Disguised as a young orator, Praxagora seduces the Assembly and paves the way for a new regime, in which women are in charge and all goods – including sex – are common possessions and strictly administered by the power of the state. Before examining the scene that is most relevant for our present argument, one specific point should be made. The comedy opens at the break of dawn, with Praxagora waiting for the women of the chorus to wake up, rousing and threatening them, until eventually the women show up and reveal their insatiable vitality and appetites. This awakening scene is designed to evoke the beginning of Aeschylus’ Eumenides: there, too, a chorus of women slowly wakes up and is roused to action by the first actor; there, too, the chorus soon reveals all of its unrestrained force; there too, the chorus will change its outfit by the end of the story. For an Athenian audience, such formal analogies made the link unmistakable.10

Let us now proceed to our scene. By now, the bill has passed and the women are in charge. In the first iambic scene, a dishonest citizen tries to undermine the new government by ridiculing an honest man who is handing over his posses-sions to the new state. He fails, and leaves the scene with a short monologue, whereby he threatens to take part in the communal banquet without handing over his own goods. Then the stage clears for the chorus to sing, after which – according to the most likely reconstruction – enters the first actor, who has

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previously interpreted the role of Praxagora and other characters supportive of the new regime. He now plays the part of an old hag singing sexy songs, in an attempt to hook some man returning from the communal banquet. The hag has a rival: another actor plays the role of a young and attractive woman, whose intentions are just the same. The two women sing in turn, grossly insulting each other, then they disappear, only to hide under the window while waiting for a young man, possibly called Epigenes (i.e. the second actor). Arguably, the whole scene is designed to recreate the atmosphere of a brothel.11

Enter the young man: he is drunk, brandishes a phallus-like torch (or a torch-like phallus) and sings. Much like the dishonest man of the previous scene, he hopes he will be able to by-pass the new law, which prescribes that ugly and old people have a priority need for sex: in all likelihood, he and the dishonest citizen are one and the same character, played by the same actor. At first, he seems to succeed: the girl pops up at the window and responds to his song, which results in a love duet that is both sensual and grotesque. Full of hope, he rushes to the girl’s door and knocks furiously, but to his horror he finds the old hag instead, who is eager to take advantage of the new law without further ado. The two actors embark on an exhilarating and obscene dialogue. Among other insults and jokes, the young man pretends to be frightened: the hag’s boyfriend might show up any moment. He refers to this fictitious character as to ‘the prince of painters, the one who paints jars for funerals’ (995). The Greek for ‘jar’ is the familiar word lekythos, a term that shortly afterwards (1101) refers to the hag’s ugly face, presumably because the poet and his audience have leather jars in mind – creased and uneven containers, resembling the wrinkles of old human skin.12 What we have here, therefore, is a reference to the hag’s heavily made up mask: by and large, ancient Greek masks are containers, fully ‘swallowing’ an actor’s head. Moreover, the hag has already pointed to her funerary mask at the beginning of the scene, when she attracted the audience’s attention to her saffron dress (sexy and obscene, by Greek standards) and to her face ‘plastered with white-lead’ (878), the colour of Athenian funerary vases. Aristophanes is warning his audience: masks are going to be very important in the present scene.

Eventually, the hag plays her trump card: she produces the decree itself and she reads it aloud: all males are required to lie with an older woman before making love to a younger one (needless to say, Aristophanes conveys the idea in quite explicit language). The young man is horrified, but, to his temporary relief, the girl pops up again: she claims that such a law is bound to give birth to a lot of Oedipuses and scares the hag away. An interesting dialogue follows, which I give here in Alan Sommerstein’s translation13:

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FIRST OLD WOMAN [shaking her fist at the Girl]: you loathsome, loathsome creature, you were jealous of me – that was why you thought up that argument! But I’ll get my own back on you yet! [She withdraws into her house]

EPIGENES [to the Girl]. By Zeus the Saviour, sweetheart, you’ve done me a good turn, letting me escape from that old crone! So tonight, in return for your favour, I’ll be giving you a reward – a long thick reward!

[As the pair move lovingly towards the Girl’s door, a second old woman comes out of the far (left-hand) door and confronts them. She is even older than the first, heavily rouged, and brandishes a copy of the decree on sexual rights]

SECOND OLD WOMAN [to Girl]: Hey, you, where are you dragging this man, in contravention of the law, when it says in black and white that he should sleep with me first? [Epigenes starts back in fright; the Girl, even more terrified, lets go of him and flees off, left.]

EPIGENES: God help me! Where have you popped out from, damn and curse you? This evil creature is more horrendous than the last one!

SECOND OLD WOMAN [locking her arm round his neck]: Come this way!

EPIGENES [unable to turn his head, but thinking the Girl is still somewhere near]: Don’t, I beg you, don’t stand by and let this woman drag me off [There is no reply.]

SECOND OLD WOMAN [waving her scroll]: It’s not me dragging you off, it’s the law.

EPIGENES: No, it isn’t, it’s a sort of Empousa covered in bleeding blisters!

SECOND OLD WOMAN: Hurry up, softie, come with me, and stop jabbering.

Sommerstein’s otherwise splendid translation has a typically modern feature in common with all other versions I know of: the reader is invited to think of a young man confronted by two old women, the latter interpreted by two distinct actors. Each character, moreover, is dutifully registered in the – obviously post-Aristophanic – list of characters at the head of the play, and the translator/editor credits each of them with some character traits through an apparatus of captions, pointing to emotions such as fear, hope, thinking, etc. But is this really so? A number of details suggest the contrary.

To begin with, the ‘character’ known as ‘First Old Woman’ withdraws while threatening to take revenge. Note that it is arguably a general rule of our comedy that characters end up putting in practice, or at least trying to do so, the plans

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they formulate on leaving the scene.14 By and large, their exit words function like guns in a Hitchcock movie: once a gun appears on the screen, it is destined to shoot, sooner or later. According to modern scholars, however, the ‘First Woman’ just leaves the scene, never to show up anymore. To continue, the ‘First Woman’ brandishes the sex decree, and the ‘Second Woman’ produces the very same decree at once. However, the ‘Third Woman’ enters with no decree in her hands (1065): she plays tug-of-war against the ‘Second Woman’ in an attempt to drag the young man to her place, but eventually she loses the fight. This is surprising to modern readers, who take the young man’s words at face value, and thus tend to construe the apparition of the three hags as a climax of both horror and force.15 Finally, Aristophanes has the young man point to the strange look of the alleged ‘Second Woman’: she is an Empousa, covered in blisters. This means of course that her outfit is very different from the saffron vest and chalk mask of the ‘First Woman’: she is probably dressed in black, and her mask must be dotted with blood-red spots.

These surprising or slightly problematic details call for a very simple expla-nation: ‘First Woman’ and ‘Second Woman’ are not characters in the modern sense. Arguably, they are both interpreted by the protagonistes or first actor, who thus toys with his audience as actor – not as a character. The protagonistes withdraws while threatening revenge, with a decree-prop in his hands: he is actually right back with a new (superimposed?) costume and mask, brandishing the very same prop. Predictably, he tries to take immediate revenge. Since he is the first actor, it comes as no surprise that he will get the upper hand in the tug-of-war game, as he does throughout the comedy when he interprets Praxagora, Chremes and probably the Herald and Praxagora’s servant: sooner or later, the protagonistes ends up dominating the other characters – or actors. It is remarkable that all of his roles, if this reconstruction is correct, are favourably biased towards the new regime, that is Aristophanes’ own comic idea. This accounts also for the last ‘monstrous’ detail: the protagonistes is compared to Empousa, that is to a phantom or fury of Greek mythology whose metamorphic quality – or should I say histrionic? – was legendary.16

The mention of Empousa is best interpreted as a metatheatrical note: the protagonistes is right back, but his look has radically changed, and the young man’s words are in fact a praise to his ability to change costume and mask rapidly and successfully. At the same time, the ability of the women to change recalls the transformation of Aeschylus’ furies, who also change colour at the end of the Eumenides and are dressed in red, which is achieved by superim-posing a garment over their black outfits.17 We cannot rule out the possibility

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that the rapid swapping of masks was somehow visible to the audience. If so, the protagonistes, in contrast to Aeschylus’ furies who retain their identity but change their look through a superimposed red garment, would be breaking the tragedian’s taboo by openly toying with his mask and identity. Is this possible? Let us look for a moment at the famous Choregoi vase (Figure 14), dating to about 390, just like the Assemblywomen. The comic actor disguised as Aegisthus has entered (note the open door on his left), and his right hand is fumbling the top of his head. As Taplin has cautiously suggested, the actor ‘has just put on his whole-head mask and is adjusting it’.18 The same may apply, I think, to our scene. In any case, it is the protagonistes as such, rather than the ephemeral character that is usually referred to as ‘First Old Woman’, who comes back to take revenge with a new mask, so as to show his virtuoso acting while fishing for the audience’s acclamation. With a little imagination, we can almost see and hear them rise to the bait, the crowd standing up in an uproar when he returned wearing a black array and an astonishing mask covered with red blisters. Sure enough, the old poet knew how to give them the shivers!

Figure 14. Drawing of the Choregoi Vase. Apulian bell-krater, c. 390 BC, J. Paul Getty Museum 96.AE.29.

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Modern images

The kind of histrionic and metateathrical interplay between actor and audience we have been discussing is rarely seen on the contemporary stage. In most performances, in fact, the Stanislavskij approach with its character oriented perspective seems to be predominant and influences every modern actor. The aim of this acting method is to achieve total emotional identification between actor and character in order to convey the psychology of the interpreted character precisely. This methodology, the purpose of which is to construct the inner reality of the character, can hardly fit the essence of an ancient tragic or comic character.

The inadequacy of the actors and their training for an appropriate interpre-tation of a classical text is well described by the Italian director Massimo Castri: ‘When I look at our little twentieth century actor, with his typical Stanislavskij approach and his psychological attitude, and I see that he wants to read the ancient text psychologically and to declaim the text in a psychological way and he cannot sing or read in metrics, and he is even short and wears trainers, I feel a surge of anger, disappointment and desperation.’19

Summing up, this approach is quite inadequate for tragedy, and all the more so for comedy.20

The comic genre always plays open-face, and never pretends that the audience is not there, or that a ‘fourth wall’ arises between the public and the actors. Something similar happens today in narrative theatre, which includes the audience in the reality of the performance, thus influencing the communication process.21 The actor never pretends to be the character, and the character is a product of narration rather than of interpretation. This particular way of acting, which differentiates comedy from tragedy, is rarely requested by directors. That is also due to a specific prejudice: when a director chooses a classical text, he or she may feel that they had to achieve something noble and dignified. This approach clashes with the vital force and the carnal nature of comedy, which is reluctant to be embalmed.

In Italy, some directors have recently changed direction and focused their work specifically on the fluidity and freedom of action of the comic genre, trying to modulate in this way the relationship with the public. Let us return to the Assemblywomen in order to focus on a play created with this background. The play was directed by Serena Sinigaglia and performed at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro in April 2007. The theatre company, ATIR, is an up-and-coming group

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founded 12 years ago.22 Never satisfied with traditional solutions, they are in constant search of experimental theatrical forms; this does not always turn out to be a quite complete form, but is always impressive. While Serena Sinigaglia leads the way, beautiful examples of teamwork are a distinctive mark of all ATIR performances. The audience is faced by a closely-knit ensemble, which aims to create a synergy oriented towards a choral effect, in such an approach there is no room for individuality, and actors change the character they play within the performance.

The performance adopts an exaggerated mode of acting, never resorting to a more conventional tone. The women are characterized by visual means: there is always something peculiar about the way the actresses are dressed up; some of them wear cumbersome glasses, others use wooden spoons as hairpins, and they show off enormous breasts and bottoms stuffed with pillows. The acting is equally designed to alienate: it is intentionally distinctive, grotesque, and resembles the typical commedia dell’ arte style. This is, of course, a far cry from the Stanislavskij-approach. Serena Sinigaglia’s direction also requires the actors to adopt facial expressions resembling circus clowns- this is underlined by heavy make-up, evoking the ancient comic mask. This kind of make-up trans-figures features and is at the same time open about being a disguise.

As in ancient comedy, the actors do not pretend the mask does not exist; in Atir’s performances the actors engage with their transfiguration, which is all the more relevant in a comedy which is based on cross-dressing. This awareness is particularly suitable for the Assemblywomen and its disguises (above). Accordingly, Atir tackles the dressing aspect is very well.

The hags’ scene, discussed above, is helpful in understanding the use of masks as well as for other subjects raised in the first part of this chapter. In Aristophanes’ comedy, the three different hags’ masks had to visualize the increased ugliness and age of the characters. The women’s increasingly repulsive looks symbolize the paradoxical nature of the new law: the decree to give precedence to the ugliest women opens a regressus ad infinitum.23 Anyone who is about to satisfy his own sexual desire has to abide by this new law and the duties it imposes on him, over and over again. This kind of decline, in the form of a progressive physical decay represented by the masks, conveys the pivotal theme of the scene: death.

The young girl describes the hag’s overdressing as to thanàto melhma, delight for death (905). Before that, when the first hag reaches for the young man’s face, begging for a kiss, he claims that he was afraid of the woman’s fiancé, called ‘the prince of painters’, the one who paints vases for funerals (above). Death becomes,

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in some sense, an absent erotic partner. The scene can be read as a failed attempt at seduction, in which attraction and sexuality are combined with repulsiveness and a dark atmosphere. In particular, the scene parodies literary representations of seduction, in which women are the aggressors; staying with Aristophanes, Myrrhine’s role in Lysistrata is such a case.24 The most vivid example of such a seduction may well have been Euripides’ lost tragedy Hyppolitus Kaluptomenos, in which Phaedra, not as shy as in the second Hyppolitus, explicitly proposi-tioned her stepson.25

In the hags’ scene, the insistence on the mask is of course a significant detail for understanding the prevailing atmosphere of the seduction scene. The first hag, in fact, highlights it in the text. In addition, she is also dressed in yellow: a colour typically chosen by women to catch men’s attention. But the power of dress and mask achieve an effect quite different to the intended one, namely seducing the young man. On the contrary, the mask evokes funerary associa-tions: the man asks her to spread out oregano, bind fillets around her head, bring scent and water for washing as for a wedding – or, in fact, her funeral (1030–3).

The presence of the double theme – I mean seduction and death, both visualised by the hag’s face and clothing – is explicit. The opposite poles – youth and love, old age and death – are emphasized in Atir’s performance through the contrast between the young girl and the first hag.

Here, the young lover is an unprejudiced girl dressed in pink, using her body sensually and at the same time athletically. She highlights in this way that the role of the lover is appropriate for her age group and not for the hag’s. The first hag remains seated the whole time, in contrast to the perpetual motion of the girl. When the two women start to fight, they resort to dialectic ability, audacity and insolence. Sinigaglia represents the contrast between them through music – a contrast, which is in Aristophanes’ text technically a canto a contrasto, as, can be argued on the basis of the verb antadein.26 Here, the conflict between the generations corresponds to a musical antithesis. The hag switches on a vintage radio to accompany her verbal attacks on the girl with old-fashioned tunes. The girl, on the other hand, follows the rhythm, pacing her invective to a form of rap.

In Aristophanes, the young man’s fate is about to get worse. Director Serena Sinigaglia plays with disguises in order to achieve an effect similar to the ancient mask, i.e. something able to transfigure features and to evoke the image of monstrosity. The second hag appears on the stage using a walking frame. The third is in a wheelchair, completely covered with spider webs, and with a leg-prosthesis about to fall off. Contrasting with this progressive appearance of

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decrepitude and the looming of death, the three hags are very strong; when the young man leaves the stage, he is literally dragged away by the three women, unable to resist. This strength is a direct consequence of the new political power, a power symbolised by the decree the women brandish. Of course they are not realistic characters, but comic and grotesque symbolic figures, at the same time, they highlight that they are not really three hags, but three actors in disguise.

Italian critics did not appreciate Atir’s performance: the play was considered to be over-simplified and gross. The bold exaggeration, which was one of the most interesting aspects of the mise en scene, was heavily criticized.27 In fact, the bold distortion of human features is consistent with the essence of the comic genre, which is firmly situated in the aischrós. Aristotle defines the laughable in his Poetics as follows: ‘laughable is a species of the base or ugly. It consists in some blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster, an obvious example being the comic mask, which is ugly and distorted but not painful’.28

The comic genre is indeed a distorting lens, capable of altering the whole of reality, including – as in the case of the Assemblywomen – seduction and power. Through this lens, power becomes an unstoppable and terrifying mechanism, while sexuality stands for imminent death.

Notes

1 (This chapter is the result of a joint effort. However, Capra is the author of part I (ancient images), whereas part II (modern images) is the work of Giovannelli.

2 For example, in a detail of the famous Pronomos vase, one actor is about to put a satyr mask on his face, while the artist has painted an apparently ‘real’ satyr on its right, arguably the actor himself in disguise. Thus, satyr masks, and by implication tragic masks as well (satyr plays were performed as a coda to tragedies, cf. Figure 1), simply disappear once they are ‘on’. On the question as a whole, see Taplin 2007, part I.

3 As such, Greek prosopon is the object of much anthropological speculation. For a recent list of relevant publications (as well as for some interesting insights on the role of prosopon in Plato), see Romani 2006: n. 1 and 27.

4 Reproduced, for example, in Taplin 2007: Figure 3.5 For example, Fo 2001.6 Taplin 2010.7 Cf. Aristophanes, Wealth 1051 and 1065, where the description of an old face refers,

quite clearly, to the material look of the actor’s mask.8 See Compton-Engle 2007.

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9 On the role of seduction and power in both comedies see also Treu, this volume.10 Note that the Eumenides and the Assemblywomen are the only extant plays of

Attic theatre to feature what scholars refer to as an epiparodos: the chorus enters gradually without singing, and only afterwards, while leaving the scene, they sing the proper parodos song, which will take the form of an exit rather than an entrance chorale. The Eumenides were hugely popular in the first half of the fourth century, as is shown by the pictorial record: see Taplin 2007: 58–67, who discusses no less than 11 vases related to these two plays, ranging from c. 380 – c. 350. Finally, both Choephoroi-Eumenides and Assemblywomen draw from one and the same mythological background: see Zeitlin 1999. On the chorus in the Eumenides see also Treu, this volume.

11 See Halliwell 2002.12 See Lorenzoni 1997.13 1044–58; Sommerstein 1998: 125.14 See Capra 2010: 256.15 Some editors, including Sommerstein himself, go so far as to alter the natural

distribution of the roles in order to preserve such a climax. Yet the winner of the tug-of-war game can only be the ‘Second Old Woman’. See Vetta 1989 ad 1066–8 and 1094–5.

16 Frogs 285ff. is the locus classicus. Andrisano 2007 provides a number of illuminating parallels and aptly describes the metaphoric and metatheatrical quality of Empousa in this scene.

17 However, Aristophanes’ women undergo a negative metamorphosis, and the colour red is the final (negative) stage, as opposed to Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Such reversals, even from a visual point of view, are typical of paratragedy: see, for example, Taplin 1993: 40. The change of the Furies is possibly discernable in the pictorial record as well: compare items 10 and 11 in Taplin 2007: 66–7. On the symbolism of colour see also Treu and Seymour, this volume.

18 Taplin 1993: 59.19 Castri 1993: 155–62.20 Jordi Coca’s version of the Iphigenia myth (Barcelona Greek Festival 2009) steers

clear of this danger: the Catalan playwright chose to replace some female characters with faceless puppets and draped female actors in swathes of fabric, even covering faces, see Clavo, this volume.

21 Cf. Lanza 2004: 15–21.22 See the website www.atirteatro.it, and Giovannelli 2007: 49–101.23 Cf. Paduano 2001: 26.24 Cf. Taaffe 1993: 124.25 Cf. Paduano 1985: 55–77.26 Vetta 1989: 235.

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27 Cf. Sole 24 Ore, April 2007: 21 (by Renato Palazzi) and Corriere della Sera, April 2007: 21 (by Magda Poli).

28 Poetics 1449a 34–5.

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