Violence onthe Athenian Stage

Athenian tragedies are littered with physical force, violent encounters and violent deaths. Even the historical tragedies, about which we know little and of which only one survives, seem to have depicted violent moments from the recent past.

The corpus of extant tragedies from the fifth century bce often represents the tensions evident in the relationships between the community and the individual or family, and the desires of each to suppress the power of the other, usually set in mythological contexts. Thus, violence is portrayed in terms of retribution and revenge in Homeric terms, inviting further retalia­tory violence, in both a vicious cycle and a zero sum game at the same time. Scholars see this in both voyeuristic as well as educational terms. William Allan argues that the same motives that drove contemporary Athenian desire for punishment had equally applied to the heroes of the past seeking retribu­tion, vengeance and justice, but that the law had become a central tenet by which such retribution was achieved. Vengeance therefore remained an important theme of justice on the fifth-century bce stage and by association in Athenian courts.

Similarly, Athenian comedy is replete with violent acts. Scholars naturally consider that the purpose of the representation of violence on stage is to create audience superiority and solidarity as well as in crude terms to provide voyeuristic and indulgent entertainment to its spectators. Like tragedy, comedy aimed to entertain (as does modern cinema), and violence (like sex) sells. The combination of sex and violence is a common theme in so- called Old Comedy, produced in Athens in the fifth century bce. Thus, not only did representations of sexual violence augment audience solidarity, but, it has been suggested, also aided ‘audience affirmation, re-masculinisation and compensation for the loss of masculine power' in an age in which the Athenian community submerged or appears to attempt to submerge the powers of the traditional oikos and its traditional head, the kyrios. In sum, both tragedy and comedy functioned as outlets for unrequited desires as much as they did as entertainment for their community.

Beyond the dramatic stage, the world of fifth- and fourth-century Athens was, it seems, a violent place even with the law courts and an array of juridical procedures in place. Our evidence suggests nothing like the kind of state infrastructure or mechanisms in place to prohibit physical abuse even between citizens, theoretically protected by the law as they were, let alone those thousands of residents of Attica, women, children, metics, foreigners and slaves denied access to state legal protection. Status, and with it personal power, remained paramount in enabling violations against others and in protecting persons and property. This is no better illustrated than in the story of Alcibiades' refusal to allow his wife to file for divorce with the Archon Basileus.