DID EURIPIDES’ ANDROMACHE PREMIERE OUTSIDE ATHENS?

Abstract

This article re-examines the scholium on Euripides, Andromache 445, which several scholars have used to support the claim that Andromache premiered outside Athens, and concludes that both the scholium itself and a remark in the play's hypothesis rather suggest that the play was produced in Athens as part of a dramatic competition.

According to an ancient scholium, the Andromache of Euripides was not performed in Athens and therefore could not be dated precisely.¹ Taking this statement at face value, several scholars have concluded that the play premiered outside Athens. Accordingly, Andromache features prominently in the growing corpus of scholarship on theatre beyond Athens,² its performance located in such diverse places as Thessaly, Argos or the court of the Molossians in Epirus.³ Yet scholarship contains little discussion of the scholium as a whole, and few attempts have been made to understand the relationship among the individual statements that are made in it. This paper reassesses the scholium, both in its own right and in the light of the fragmentary remains of Athenian didascalic records and ancient scholarship on them. My conclusion is that the scholium does not point to a non-Athenian premiere of the play, but rather offers clues to the existence of an Athenian performance during Euripides’ lifetime. The scholium, I argue, bears traces of an ancient debate and of Callimachus’ research on Athenian didascalic records. In its general outline, this view is not entirely new.⁴ It is here revived with several new arguments, taking into account recent scholarly work on relevant materials, especially the inscriptional records of Athenian drama.

I report here the text of the scholium in its entirety with a minimal apparatus:

ὦ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποισιν ταῦτα ἐπὶ τῷ Ἀνδρομάχης προσχήματί φησιν Εὐριπίδης λοιδορούμενος τοῖς Σπαρτιάταις διὰ τὸν ἐνεστῶτα πόλεμον. καὶ γὰρ δὴ καὶ παρεσπονδήκεσαν πρὸς Ἀθηναίους, καθάπερ οἱ περὶ τὸν Φιλόχορον ἀναγράφουσιν. εἰλικρινῶς δὲ τοὺς τοῦ δράματος χρόνους οὐκ ἔστι λαβεῖν⋅ οὐ δεδίδακται γὰρ Ἀθήνησιν. ὁ δὲ Καλλίμαχος ἐπιγραφῆναί φησι τῇ τραγῳδίᾳ Δημοκράτην. ἑξῆς δὲ αὐτοὺς εἴς τε τὰ ἄλλα καὶ φιλοχρηματίαν κακῶς λέγει. καὶ Ἀριστοτέλης δὲ τοῦτο ἱστορεῖ ἐν τῇ τῶν Λακώνων πολιτείᾳ καὶ τὸ ὑπὸ θεοῦ αὐτοματισθὲν προστίθησιν ἔπος ‘ἁ φιλοχρηματία Σπάρταν ὀλεῖ, ἄλλο δέ γ’ οὐδέν’. φαίνεται δὲ γεγραμμένον τὸ δρᾶμα ἐν ἀρχαῖς τοῦ Πελοποννησιακοῦ πολέμου.

δεδίδακται Cobet: δέδεικται codd. | εἰλικρινῶς … Δημοκράτην om. A

[Most hateful] to all [among mortals, inhabitants of Sparta]: It is Euripides who says this through the character of Andromache, blaming the Spartans because of the current war. For indeed they had violated the truce with the Athenians, as Philochorus records (FGrHist 328 F 124). Yet the date of the play cannot be clearly established, for it was not staged in Athens; but Callimachus (fr. 451 Pfeiffer) says that the name of Democrates was attached to the tragedy. In what follows he (sc. Euripides) criticises them for other reasons and especially their greed. Aristotle too relates this in his Constitution of the Spartans and adds the verse uttered by the god: ‘Greed will ruin Sparta, and nothing else’ (Arist. fr. 544 Rose = 550.1 Gigon, cf. Zen. Prov. 2.24, Diod. Sic. 7.12.5). The play was evidently written at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war.

The polyphony of the scholium was unravelled by Bergk.⁵ Commenting on the anti-Spartan tirade that opens Andromache's speech to Menelaus (445–63), the scholium opens with a blunt statement: that the character is just a mouthpiece for the anti-Spartan sentiment of Euripides himself, who would be railing at Sparta ‘because of the present war’. The scholium then refers to the Spartans’ ‘violation of the truce’, presumably the Thirty Years’ Peace, the breach of which started the Peloponnesian War.⁶ The remark on the uncertainty of the date responds to this political interpretation, which requires Andromache to be a product of the war's early years. After a further remark on Democrates, ascribed to Callimachus (more on which soon), the scholium goes back to Euripides’ criticism of Sparta. A final sentence returns to the date, concluding that the play was written at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. The phrasing here, especially the vague φαίνεται and the ‘bookish’ γεγραμμένον, indicates that this is likely to be a secondary inference, and at any rate not a statement based on a record of the play's performance.

The central portion of the scholium, εἰλικρινῶς … Δημοκράτην, interrupts the linear progression from the previous discussion of Euripides’ anti-Spartan sentiments to the following reference to his denunciation of the Spartans’ greed. Therefore, the two remarks contained in this portion are likely to be additional takes on the same issue, and possibly responses to what precedes. This is clear in relation to the first sentence (εἰλικρινῶς … Ἀθήνησιν), as we have seen; and there is no reason that the second (ὁ δὲ Καλλίμαχος … Δημοκράτην) should introduce an unrelated topic.

The phrasing of the first sentence combines performance location and dating in a way that unmistakably indicates that the play was not to be found in the Didascaliae: as these recorded the results of the dramatic competitions at the City Dionysia and Lenaea year by year, any Athenian performance at those venues would have been datable.⁷ Taken in isolation, the statement could indicate either (a) that the scholiast was somehow aware that the play was not performed in Athens, and concluded on those grounds that it would not be found in the Didascaliae, or (b) that the scholiast (or his source) had looked in vain for the play's date in the Didascaliae, and its absence had led him to conclude that it was not performed in Athens. At first sight, (a) seems to be literally what the scholium states. However, the fact that the scholiast does not say where the play was staged, but uses a negative sentence, strongly suggests that his conclusion is based on an argument from silence: it was the play's absence from the Didascaliae that indicated it was not performed in Athens.

The following sentence, ὁ δὲ Καλλίμαχος ἐπιγραφῆναί φησι τῇ τραγῳδίᾳ Δημοκράτην, confirms this interpretation. The meaning of ἐπιγραφῆναι is crucial here. While the verb itself may well indicate authorship of a work (LSJ V 2), a remark on authorship would be inexplicable here. This statement only makes sense within the logic of the scholium if it is related to the dating issue.

In the context of dating, and attempted dating through didascalic records, ἐπιγραφῆναι is likely to refer to the dynamics of theatrical production. Both ἐπιγράφω and its cognate⁸ ἐγγράφω can indeed be found in several passages concerning Aristophanes’ collaboration with Philonides and Callistratus in the production of some of his comedies.⁹ For example, the anonymous treatise On Comedy states that Aristophanes staged comedies for the first time during the archonship of Diotimus (428/427 b.c.e.) ‘through Callistratus’ (ἐδίδαξε δὲ πρῶτος ἐπὶ ἄρχοντος Διοτίμου διὰ Καλλιστράτου), and that Callistratus and Philonides produced his political plays and those against Euripides and Socrates respectively. Only after acquiring a reputation for himself was Aristophanes ἐπιγραφόμενος to his own comedies.¹⁰ The inevitable implication is that Aristophanes was not ἐπιγραφόμενος to the plays he produced through Callistratus and Philonides, who, in turn, were ἐπιγραφόμενοι to several Aristophanic plays. In other words, ἐπιγράφω indicates the name officially associated with a theatrical production, that is, the name of the producer, which usually coincided with that of the author, but did not need to.¹¹

The Callimachean remark must refer to a similar case. Correcting the previous statement that Andromache was not performed in Athens, the sentence indicates that a Euripidean performance of Andromache could not be found in the Didascaliae because the name of Democrates was attached to it instead of that of Euripides. Neither a dispute about the play's authorship¹² nor a reference to a later, post-Euripidean revival by Democrates¹³ would fit the logic of the scholium, which therefore provides not evidence that Andromache was not staged in Athens, but clues as to an Athenian performance, which someone had failed to locate in didascalic records because the recorded didaskalos was not Euripides.

This interpretation of the scholium implies that when poet and didaskalos were not the same person, only the name of the didaskalos would be attached to the performance in official records; or, at least, that this was the case with Andromache. Unfortunately, no recognizable example of how the Didascaliae treated such cases survives. A seminal article by Capps concluded that, in such cases, the official records would include the name of the poet;¹⁴ but the validity of this conclusion is limited to the Victors’ Lists (IG II² 2325A–H), where a single example is available. This inscription probably records Aphareus and his two victories at the City Dionysia in the mid-fourth century b.c.e. (Ἀφα]ρ̣εύς followed by the number ‘two’ at 2325A.46), but we know from [Plut.] X orat. 839D (TrGF I 73 Test. 2.18–19) that he performed διὰ Διονυσίου. Moreover, the so-called ‘Roman fragments’ (IGUR 216, 215, 218), which record all finishings of Athenian comic poets in chronological order, seem to have reported, in one case, both the name of the poet and that of the didaskalos (IGUR 218.9 [- - - διὰ Ἀνα]ξίππου in the section on Anaxandrides, mid-fourth century b.c.e.).

Neither inscription, however, is indicative of how a performance would be recorded in the official records, or in the Didascaliae and Fasti. Millis and Olson have underscored the peculiarity of the Victors’ Lists in this respect, as their ‘implied audience […] would seem to be more interested in a summary accounting of the accomplishments of great figures from Athens’ literary and dramatic past than in pedestrian or technical questions’ on the performances, such as the identity of the chorêgos and didaskalos of each production.¹⁵ As for the ‘Roman fragments’, this inscription is thought to derive from Alexandrian work, as the reference to plays’ survival at IGUR 216.9 makes likely. Körte even suggested that the inscription might be a copy of Callimachus’ Πίναξ καὶ ἀναγραφὴ τῶν κατὰ χρόνους καὶ ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς γενομένων διδασκάλων, mentioned in the Suda.¹⁶ Therefore, neither the Victors’ Lists nor the ‘Roman fragments’ can be used to ascertain how the official records treated cases of substitute didaskaloi. Conversely, the Fasti are believed to reflect more closely the official records, as they were compiled earlier (between 347/6 and 343/2)¹⁷ and record the chorêgos and the producer: a typical entry would include ‘X ἐχορήγει’ and ‘Y ἐδίδασκε’ for both the winning comedy and the winning tragedy of a given year. While, again, we have no clear example of whom the Fasti would record when the didaskalos and the poet did not coincide in the fifth century, the extant records do contain one instructive example. For the year 387, the Fasti report a victory of Araros, Aristophanes’ son, at the City Dionysia (IG II² 2318.1004), but the Suda (α 3737 s.v. Ἀραρώς = Araros PCG Test. 1.2–3) states that he won his first victory in the hundred-and-first Olympiad (376/372 b.c.e.). Araros is known from hyp. Ar. Plut. IV to have been in charge of the production of his father's late comedies Cocalus and Aeolosicon, and it is reasonable to conclude that in 387 Araros won with a play by his father. This is a good indication that, at least in some cases, the official records, which the Fasti are likely to reflect more directly than the Victors’ Lists or the ‘Roman fragments’,¹⁸ did not include the name of the actual poet; but other more casual channels such as contemporary gossip, book circulation and later research could shed light on authorship even in such cases.¹⁹ The original performance of Andromache seems precisely to be a case in which a Hellenistic scholar reconstructed the dynamics of the play's production by supplementing didascalic information with data drawn from other sources. That this scholar was Callimachus is perfectly in line with his compiling a chronological catalogue of didaskaloi and with his criticism of the Didascaliae in chronological matters, as known from a scholium on Aristophanes.²⁰ Callimachus, the Andromache scholium suggests, traced the slate of Euripides’ Andromache in the Didascaliae, which someone else failed to find because they did not realise that Democrates had acted as didaskalos for that performance, the name of Euripides not being reported in the official records on that occasion.

A further indication that Andromache was staged as part of a traceable competitive performance comes from the hypothesis prefixed to the play in the medieval manuscripts, where Andromache is said to be a play τῶν δευτέρων.²¹ This is most reasonably understood as referring to the placing of the play in a theatrical competition.²² The only parallel, τὸ δρᾶμα τῶν πρώτων, is found in the hypothesis prefixed to Hippolytus, part of a tetralogy that won indeed the first prize.²³ A similar use of πρῶτος in Athenaeus is unambiguously about placing in a dramatic contest.²⁴ At 9.373f the deipnosophist Myrtilus states that Anaxandrides’ play Tereus ‘was not judged among the first’ (μὴ κεκριμένον ἐν τοῖς πρώτοις). He then quotes an anecdote from Chamaeleon (fr. 46 Martano) about Anaxandrides’ habit of disposing of his plays if they had failed to win the first prize, and expresses surprise at the survival of Tereus μὴ τυχὼν νίκης (‘since it did not win’). The passage in its entirety clearly indicates that the sequence μὴ … ἐν τοῖς πρώτοις conveys the results of a dramatic contest, not a general qualitative judgement.

Since πρῶτος, δεύτερος, and τρίτος are regularly used in the hypotheses’ didascalic sections to indicate finishings in dramatic competitions, any other meaning of the ordinal number in the Hippolytus and Andromache hypotheses would be opaque. Moreover, each of the other options is otherwise problematic. A chronological connotation is unlikely, since Hippolytus, staged in 428, would not be chronologically far from Andromache, which modern scholars tend to date to ca. 425 on internal grounds; and with Euripides’ debut in the year 455, it seems hard to justify the use of πρῶτος for Hippolytus, unless we assume a bipartite periodization with the turning point from πρῶτα δράματα to δεύτερα δράματα conveniently falling between Hippolytus and Andromache.²⁵ Alternatively, the numeral could indicate the position of the play within its tetralogy, but there seems to be no particular interest in such a question in ancient scholarship.²⁶ A qualitative judgement has often been posited on the basis of the observation that similarly structured remarks in other hypotheses convey a general evaluation of the play. However, this is problematic for Andromache, as δεύτερος would convey a negative evaluation,²⁷ but the remark is immediately followed by a longer positive evaluation of several sections of the play.²⁸ To solve the inconsistency, Stevens suggests the meaning ‘of second-prize quality’, which he takes to be ‘a complimentary expression’,²⁹ but this is even harder to infer from the phrasing. As Stevens remarks, there are indeed numerous parallels, in hypotheses, for τὸ δὲ δρᾶμα τῶν + adjectival phrase conveying a positive evaluation, but all of them are unambiguous,³⁰ whereas δεύτερος meaning ‘deserving second prize’ is ambiguous both in isolation and in the context of hypotheses that regularly use ordinal numbers to indicate actual placing in dramatic contests.

Hence this detail of the hypothesis and the scholium on Andr. 445 concur in indicating that Andromache was indeed staged in Athens as part of a dramatic contest and won the second prize, with a producer named Democrates. On the reasonable assumption that the play premiered at the City Dionysia or, less probably, the Lenaea,³¹ we can conclude that one or three more plays by Euripides were produced by Democrates—and therefore the reason for this choice need not lie in any feature of Andromache.