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4. Stagecraft

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2019

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Extract

First published in 1971, this early second-century papyrus, POxy. 2805, was soon identified as coming from Sophocles’ Niobe. It portrays the killing of Niobe's children by Apollo and Artemis during a tragic drama, the staging of which, as we will see, seems to have been among Sophocles’ most striking dramatic creations. This killing, an unvarying element of the myth, was punishment for Niobe's boast that she had borne many children (fourteen, seven sons and seven daughters, is the number specified in Sophocles’ play: fr. 446), Leto only two. A further papyrus, from a mummy case at El-Hibeh (though quite possibly written at Oxyrhynchus) and dated to between 280 and 240 bc, PGrenf. ii.6(a)+PHib. 11, is from the same drama. Aeschylus wrote a Niobe, set after the killings; Euripides is not known to have written such a play. That leaves Sophocles’ Niobe (whose citation fragments indicate that it included the killings) or a play by a minor tragedian; but it is much more likely that two papyri of a Sophoclean drama should survive, from different times and perhaps places too, than that a work by another tragedian should be so unexpectedly favoured. A decade after Barrett argued this, a hypothesis of Sophocles’ play was published which refers to the event described in POxy. 2805: case closed.

Type
II Interpretation
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2019 

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References

1 Lobel 1971; W. Barrett 1974: 171–5. For Niobe in general see Ozbek 2015.

2 Seaford 2005; Totaro 2013.

3 Cockle 1984 (for authorship see p. 28). The hypothesis is in the Addenda to TrGF IV (pp. 757–8) and (more accessibly) Diggle 1998: 64–5; Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998: 21, 229; Lloyd-Jones 2003: 228–31 (the last heavily supplemented, with translation).

4 The absence of a paragraphos (horizontal stroke) between lines 8 and 9 indicates that the cry in line 8 is uttered by the singer of the lines that follow; nevertheless, since such paragraphoi often drop out (Finglass 2014c: 443–5), the cry in line 8 might still be delivered by the stricken girl (W. Barrett 1974: 180).

5 For this convention see Sommerstein 2004 = 2010: 30–46.

6 Eur. Suppl. 1070–1; thus W. Barrett 1974: 185.

7 Mastronarde 1990: 288–9.

8 W. Barrett 1974: 184: ‘they are standing, evidently, at a height’.

9 So rightly W. Barrett 1974: 184 n. 31 (‘the audience will hardly worry their heads over the practical detail of structures to be imagined behind the scenes’).

10 W. Barrett 1974: 178.

11 Herodotus 5.92.γ.1–ε.1.

12 W. Barrett 1974: 196–7.

13 W. Barrett 1974: 196, 198.

14 W. Barrett 1974: 211.

15 W. Barrett 1974: 213.

16 Telesilla fr. 721 PMG.

17 Sommerstein 2012b: 24.

18 Crompton 2006: 51.

19 For this play, recently illuminated by POxy. 5131, see Finglass 2014a, 2016b, 2017c; it too involves divine punishment exceeding the extent of any initial offence.

20 Finglass 2007d on El. 1398–1441.

21 Davies 2010.

22 Sommerstein 2012b: 24.

23 Cockle 1984: 29. Richard Rutherford (personal communication) compares Theseus’ intervention in Euripides’ Heracles, there also after a disastrously malign divine intervention in mid-play.

24 Sommerstein 2012a: 208.

25 Sommerstein 2012b: 21–5; also Sommerstein 2012a: 197: ‘More than once…Sophocles seems to have daringly sensationalized the old story, just as he did in Ajax by coming as close as he could to bringing the hero's suicide onstage.’

26 See most recently Most and Ozbek 2015.

27 Σ p. 185 Christodoulou: ἴσως οὖν καινοτομεῖν βουλόμενος καὶ μὴ κατακολουθεῖν τοῖς ἑτέροις ὑπ᾿ ὄψιν ἔθηκε τὸ δρώμενον ἢ μᾶλλον ἐκπλῆξαι βουλόμενος.

28 Finglass 2011b on Aj. 815–65.

29 Finglass 2015c.

30 Segal 1980; Chaston 2010; Harrison and Liapis 2013; Mueller 2016 (with Marshall 2017).

31 Hahnemann 2012: 178–9.

32 Coo 2016; Marshall 1999: 200 n. 41.

33 Garvie 1998 on 915–19.

34 Hom. Il. 22.468–72; Finglass 2009e.

35 Easterling 1984; Finglass 2011b on 485–524.

36 Ormand 1996 ≈ 1999: 104–23.

37 von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1917; Lloyd-Jones 1972 = 1982: 219–37 = 1990: 401–18.

38 Webster 1936a/1969: 119.

39 A subsequent article on Philoctetes, Taplin 1987, examines the interrelation of theatrical space, off-stage geography, and the wider geography of the north Aegean.

40 Fraenkel 1950 on Aeschylus, Agamemnon 613–14.

41 Finglass 2015a; Lamari 2017; and the collections Lamari 2015 and Hunter and Uhlig 2017.