Notes Towards a Performance Typology of Poetic Scholia

No act of speech can be acoustically, culturally, or emotionally neutral.* All live speech-acts are realized in the course of a specific time, in a specific place, in a very specific cultural context, with a specific matrix of signifiers and signified in play. So as neutral as the written record of a speech-act may appear on the page, every word must be considered for its potential impact as a spoken word, imbued with a specific character, to a specific purpose. [1]

The element of orality integral to Greek manuscripts aside, there has recently been a very fruitful (re-) discovery of the emotional content in Late Antique and Byzantine Greek rhetorical performance; we have become acutely aware of the ways in which the written word implies live performances, and of what Niels Gaul describes as “the emotional transactions and immersions that occur within and between author, and actor, and audience in the processes of writing/composing, reading/performing, and listening.” [2]

But as we awaken to the lively nature of the written word from the pre-Gutenberg era, and to its culturally embedded origins, the questions arise: How was virtuoso performance, and the intense circulation of emotional energy, made possible? When, and how, did public speakers acquire the ability to leave their audiences spellbound and deeply moved? I ask because up to now, the emphasis has been on mature rhetorical/oratorical production in Byzantium. This is easy to understand; we find mature material of greater interest than juvenilia, under normal circumstances.

I also ask because there has been a reconsideration of the concept of “authorship,” in terms of its complex origins and its self-presentation, particularly in the Middle Byzantine period. [3] There is also an increased awareness of authorship-as-craft, which draws us away from romantic-era notions of the author as a solitary genius and towards that of the rhetor/poet whose works emerge from a specific cultural milieu. [4] It is in this latter context that we recover the sense in which Greek education constituted a form of apprenticeship, with grammarians training their students in fluency in Greek, through vivid performances of the classics—providing effective performance skills as a central part of their education.

The usage of poetic citations in the course of Byzantine rhetorical works, far from being merely imitative, is part and parcel of a creative process informed by lessons in poetic performance. And the ability of mature rhetors to create and circulate a repertoire of specific emotions, on cue, was the product of years of training in poetic display.

When we consider the full sweep of the history of the elite Greek performing arts, from Antiquity through the Byzantine Millennium and beyond, it behooves us to consider the ways in which ancient genres of performance were used as the foundation for new genres, and in so doing enjoyed a nachleben well beyond their original contexts. Ancient modes of public performance—epic and dramatic poetry in particular—were transmitted, directly and orally, from one generation to the next, long after the disappearance of the Homeridae and the Technitae Dionysiou. And they formed the foundation for what was to come.

Mastery of the written language may have been an important part of the process in grammar school; but it was written from dictation, not copied out of individual schoolbooks. And as Dionysius Thrax makes clear, hypokrisia, the performance of these texts, and their proper enunciation, featured prominently. A re-examination of poetic scholia, in order to better establish their possible value as performance prompts, then, is in order.

The purpose of the present paper is to propose a reexploration of the poetic scholia from a budding composer/performer’s perspective. Let us consider the specific forms orality can take, as the basics of public performance are carefully shaped in the classroom—specifically, the grammar-school classrooms from antiquity through the Middle Ages, where the classics of Ancient Greece were memorized and performed.

Given our own modern concepts of grammar, Dionysius Thrax’s definition may seem a bit odd:

Today we make distinctions between reading knowledge and fluency in speaking a language. For Dionysius, though, the emphasis was on the spoken word. Even his treatment of ἀνάγνωσις—a term which we tend to associate with following a text on the page, usually in silence—has a decidedly performative aspect. And it is here that we see, for the first time in his text, an explicit linguistic link between the classroom and the stage. If we translate the key term in context, what we have is this:

The term ὑποκρισία was used in ancient times to designate stage performance of dramatic poetry, but it is also a term used to indicate any public performance, rhetorical performance in particular. [5] Greek grammar, then, places an emphasis on performance, in addition to the reception and, ultimately, the critique of a panoply of elite works.

The term ὑποκρισία, rendered here (somewhat awkwardly) as “performance technique,” is a contested one: already by Hellenistic times it was used by Jews as subtle, anti-Greek invective in the Septuagint, which in turn set the stage for its use two centuries later in the Gospels. [6] Outside the context of observant Judaism, however, and taking Dionysius Thrax as our witness, among Greeks the word retained an elite, and distinctly positive, connotation. [7] Careful attention was paid to performing effectively, in a wide variety of genres and styles:

The typical grammar-school student, in addition to the expected drills in orthography, parts of speech, verb conjugations, and the like, [8] was taught to regard their voice as an instrument, to be trained and “tuned” to a variety of registers. These skills weren’t realized in isolation, either; Quintilian, a great supporter of Greek education, describes a highly competitive classroom scene in which students would compete to be the best at performing the day’s lessons. [9]

Because modern, Gutenberg-era education emphasizes textbooks and writing, with teachers burning the midnight oil to mark up students’ papers, it is easy to forget that oral delivery was the most immediately useful part of Greek education back in the day. This training in poetic performance, in turn, was the foundation for training in rhetoric, an explicitly oral art form, in which students composed and performed their own material. [10]

Like all good teachers, grammarians used a wide variety of strategies, which were geared towards internalizing and performing Ancient Greek fluently, with attention to the various modes of delivery you see above. Given Dionysius’ delineation of specific genres of poetic delivery, and given that the scholia were seen as integral to instruction in these genres, the question for us is how to assess the value of these marginal notes as, in the final analysis, performance prompts.

Approaching Ancient Greek education as I do from the perspective of a longtime theater artist and critic, one of the most striking aspects of Greek grammar schools is its resemblance to the modern-day rehearsal room. True, Greek students were expected to write down poetic passages, and have their writing corrected as a part of the process; but they wrote from dictation, and recitation of the texts once written and memorized was fully integrated into their schooling.

The theater is, arguably, a unique legacy of traditional oral transmission; especially in the case of “classic” plays, actors today are expected to memorize their lines with an eye towards understanding the nuances of delivery required for their characters. Today, they are aided in this effort by an entire team of production assistants: dramaturgs with lexicons handy, movement specialists, voice coaches, dialect specialists—even, on occasion, historians.

In the Greek grammar classroom, all of these functions were served by the grammarian, who provided students with a wide variety of information in the service of understanding, precisely, the meaning of what they were memorizing. The grammar school scene, with its solo instructor, was not unlike that of original dramatic productions at the Dionysia, in which the poet—the διδάσκολος—taught everyone their lines. Even a cursory review of the scholia reveals that the grammarian’s concerns varied wildly—from historical and geographical information to questions of dialect, motivation, as well as what a character might be thinking.

One key difference, however, is that there is no evidence for the staging of school plays, even in the Hellenistic era, when Greek education was first established at an international level and standard editions of the classics were first copied for distribution. For grammar students, the stage itself was irrelevant, ditto costumes, ditto scenery, ditto the assignment of specific parts. We don’t have stories about precocious emperors-to-be playing Oedipus or Medea, and the class biases against professional performers—from the Hellenistic to the Roman era and beyond [11] —seem to have precluded what we might regard as the “proper” use of a dramatic text. Even less do we have evidence that students were assigned only individual roles. This creates the distinct possibility that students, if school productions did exist, would have been expected to perform all genres and all characters, from start to finish, by themselves. Without classmates to perform other parts, grammar students adopted all the voices, gestures, etc., required as they transitioned from one dramatic character to the next. The resulting performance, in everyday dress (not costume), would bear some resemblance to the one-actor rendition of a novel or a play on the modern stage. And with the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, grammar-school performances of this kind would have been excellent preparation for the composition and performance of saints’ lives, as well as the homily, both of which genres assume a solo celebrant at the pulpit.

The absence of any reference to the use of masks, moreover, adds another distinction between the stage and the classroom; unlike performers at the Dionysia, students had to find ways to perform dramatic poetry using their own facial expressions. Masks, in performance, have the benefit of allowing the performer to focus on vocal production; audiences can project emotions onto the character, using just the sound and musicality of the voice. [12] Without a mask, the performer’s facial expression now has to complement if not amplify the emotional content produced by the voice.

Given the rarity of manuscripts in pre-Gutenberg times, it’s hardly surprising that the student’s first task was to memorize entire poems from start to finish, using their writing skills in the aid of that task. This need for memorization helps to explain, perhaps, why the scholiasts give their prompts line by line, often word by word. This micromanager’s approach to poetry may strike us as odd, but in this context it was an absolute necessity: for it was only after the poetry was in the student/performer’s memory locked, and properly interpreted, only after it was in their veins, so to speak, that critical analysis could begin.

What follows in this paper is a series of initial observations, following typologies which in some cases have already been established but which, in others, are simply suggested by the material itself. I am focusing, admittedly idiosyncratically, on Homeric and Euripidean scholia which appear to have the greatest relevance to the performance of certain texts. Taken together they are intended as an invitation to more detailed, broader-based study.

The ideas here are preliminary, and inescapably so. Because the scholia have been systematically isolated from their source texts for centuries, and because we have no edition, either critically edited or in translation, of a single poetic manuscript with the scholia fully intact, we are not, as yet, in a position to fully judge their performance value. What little I have gleaned so far, however, indicates that analysis of the scholia from a performer’s perspective—borrowing, cautiously, from the experience of modern-day professional actors and singers where appropriate—is long overdue.

Let’s begin with the summaries, the comparison of which might help us better appreciate the history of the scholiast’s art. The most ancient hypotheses—attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium—are quite short; for Euripides’ Orestes, it amounts to little more than a single sentence. Whether Aristophanes was creating a sort of personal shorthand, which would have enabled him to identify a source text more easily, isn’t clear; but when the plot summaries for particular works are placed side-by-side, the tendency of later grammarians to go into greater detail becomes clear. [13]

Students were already on notice that the work at hand—epic, dramatic, lyric, etc.—required a specific register of vocal delivery. The individual plot summaries, then, acclimated schoolchildren to the basic story line and to the specific circumstances of key characters which they would soon be tasked with writing down, committing to memory, and delivering in their own voices. The vicissitudes of popular memory, moreover, may have played a role in the decision in later eras to go into greater and greater detail. [14]

The lively exchanges between grammarian and student are sometimes quite explicit in the scholia, and are written out in a traditional question-and-answer format: we often see a διὰ τί—διὰ (“why—because”), or διὰ τί—φαμὲν ὀυν (“why—we say then”), duplicating a live, in-class dialogue with students. Sometimes the grammarian/scholiast simply begins their remarks with διὰ or ὁτί, in the sense of “because,” assuming, it seems to me, the presence of the raised hand and the student’s question. [15]

Putting your best metrical feet forward, it seems, was a key feature of classical works; and even at the grammar-school level, students are taught the value of both word choice and word placement—first words getting quite a lot of attention. There’s the lengthy scholion at the very beginning of the Iliad, in the form of a Q&A, ζητοῦσι διὰ τί—διὰ (they ask why—because”) [16] discussing why the poet begins his epic with such an inauspicious word as Μῆνιν. It’s fascinating to see the scholiast offer many possible answers: to purge the listener’s soul, to perk up their ears, to prepare them for the ordeals of war to come. There’s even the theory that Homer begins with “wrath” because he doesn’t want to sugarcoat the subject, by overpraising Greeks. Each of these possibilities would have, in turn, an influence on vocal performance of just that one word.

Consider too a tragedy that opens with Ἥκω (which translates in this case as “I appear”) as spoken by Polydorus’ ghost at the opening of Euripides’ Hecuba (and by Dionysus in Bacchae). One Hecuba scholiast tells us that Ἥκω denotes the arrival of any non-physical, non-living being, ἔρχομαι being more appropriate for the arrival of the living. [17] A student, jotting down this word in their wax tablet, would be expected to consider how this information might inform the performance, and reception, of just this one word.

There are, of course, plenty of metrical scholia; as late as the fourteenth century, Elektra’s Prologue to Orestes includes a note from Demetrius Triclinius specifying the type of meters, and the number of lines involved. [18] Much has been made of the transition from quantitative to stress-based meter in poetic works, but there is evidence that this was, for Byzantine grammarians, more seamless than might be suspected. [19] Having jotted the words down, when expected to perform them, students would have little choice but to follow the rules consistently. This isn’t so that you can drum your fingers on the table as you scan the text; the metrical scholia would guide you primarily in performing it.

Some terms of grammatical art are straightforward enough, and Eleanor Dickey and Donald Mastronarde explain them quite well. Here, I offer a few examples: διαφέρει and σημαίνει are used to further clarify a word’s meanings, and expand one’s working vocabulary, [20] while γράφεται [21] indicates an alternative reading (τινὲς [22] has much the same function), evidence that there was room for variation. Then there is δεικτικῶς, [23] used to clarify who or what a character is referring to, so as to fix the image in the mind. In each case, the choice of a specific word is made clearer, and a more specific meaning activated in the mind, crucial steps in cultivating both informed performer and informed audience alike. The clarifications offered in these notes make for crystal-clear delivery, as opposed to stereotypical rote-memorization.

We also have notes emphasizing words which are implied but unspoken, as well as thoughts which—while present in the character’s mind—are left unexpressed. Scholia with λείπει [24] and its variants provide the student/performer with additional information, enabling them to use vocal inflection and enunciation to cue audiences to what can only be implied. That the entire class is listening to the same notes from the grammarian also implies that there was little room for error—everyone knew what the best delivery of a given speech might look and sound like.

There are numerous scholia written between the lines of poetic text, and here I want to focus on the shortest ones, the definite articles, designed to confirm the gender of a specific thing or person. [25] In a modern, text-based context, and in an Anglophone context especially, this can seem a colossal waste of time and space. Still, these seemingly trivial “gender-reveals” in the middle of a folio are essential if the student, who in most cases can only listen and inscribe in erasable wax, is going to write down the word correctly. It’s even more important if students are expected to spend a lifetime using this word, declined properly in each context, as part of their own discursive practice. Because as much as we may prize the performance of tragedy as an end-in-itself, students were raised to see tragic declamation as merely one small step in the direction of mature, intellectual display.

Intriguingly, there are also places where the scholiast has to explain why a specific gender is deployed, when the passage in question calls for another one. Consider this curious passage in Orestes:

Here, the students’ confusion involves two neuter terms which appear to be referred to, collectively, using a feminine singular article (ἧς). What complicates things is that immediately after these neuter nouns, Elektra invokes the feminine ξυμφορά/συμφορἀ, “misfortune”—as in, “god-driven misfortune” (Or. 2). The rule-of-thumb introduced here seems to be that when you have a passage invoking nouns with more than one gender, in summation the “actual” gender takes precedence. Hence the scholiast’s reply, in this instance, that “…the feminine is given preference over the neuter, and therefore he [Euripides] made agreement with it.” What’s fascinating about notes like this is that it looks ahead to the day when students will be expected to compose their own material, with strict attention to the niceties of gender in discursive practice. [27]

In the Orestes, when Euripides’ titular hero first awakes from his deep sleep, he speaks in such a way as to appear sane. This creates the need for a clarification via a voice-specific prompt, as in the scholion you see here.

Only after his mother’s ghost and the Furies come to haunt him does Orestes’ madness return, requiring delivery of his lines in a heroic, tragic tone of voice. Given the distinction here between sober and tragic delivery, it is clear that even when representing the same character, you had to master diverse modes of delivery.

Then there is the art of the paraphrase, often including specific words from the text to help identify what merits greater emphasis. [29] Today, professional actors routinely use paraphrase as a part of their rehearsal process: instead of speaking their actual lines, they offer their equivalent off the top of their heads and/or in consultation with the director and production team. It’s a way of examining the character’s inner thoughts, and to clarify the most effective delivery of the playwright’s language they will eventually use in performance.

And when it comes to specific meanings of individual words, you see glosses of various kinds—a word here, a sentence or two there, some historical background, a reference to the dialect, etc. [30] All of these notes have a direct impact on delivery, on the portrayal of character.

From our perspective, these glosses vary from being only mildly interesting to being a huge waste of time. But consider, again: when you only have the sound of the word to go on, and especially in Byzantine times when many words now sound alike, you must provide a disambiguating gloss, for example, informing the student which word is intended.

The goal was to immerse prepubescents in a vast sea of language, at first wine-dark but gradually made translucent, and to provide students with a working vocabulary as vast as their young minds could hold. Raffaela Cribiore reminds us that these young minds could hold quite a lot indeed; [31] and each variation, each neologism in your memory locked, empowered you to eventually compose and perform with a high degree of eloquence, variety, and poise.

The etymological scholia come in for some grief today because of their veneer of playfulness. The historical, factual origin of a word is what we want, but it seems the scholiasts just want to play around with nonsense syllables. [32] Still, let’s remember the context: there are hardly any dictionaries, no handouts; all you have is the grammarian’s voice as a student’s point of reference, and temporarily traced wax letters. It was critical to be able to organize the wisdom of the ages by means of sound.

As reflected as far back as Plato’s Cratylus, we can see how Greeks became notorious for their seemingly playful etymologies. The method to this madness is that the Greeks have always been aware of the arbitrariness of their signifiers. The scholiasts, anticipating Saussure by over two thousand years but refusing to surrender to the chaos he implies, used sound as a form of information technology. In an environment where reference works were rare to nonexistent, the most effective and memorable means of defining the world around them was to organize it all by sound, by the human voice; the world had to be created in speech, a concept that resonated in both Platonic and Biblical contexts.

The poetic scholia have puzzled and frustrated us for centuries. But I believe if we focus on the aural context of the classroom, we can appreciate their usefulness in the service of perpetuating an elite, living discursive practice. Every letter is there on the page for a reason. They were all cherished as vital to the project of transmitting Ancient Greek as a living language, through a (grammatically mediated) oral tradition.

Today, just about the only people who make a profession out of memorization and performance of poetic texts are actors. Granted, the skills associated with modern stage plays are quite distinct, and there are many questions yet to be answered here, not least of which is whether and how the scholia guide students in appropriate emotional display. Any analogy between Antiquity and modernity must be made with great care, but there is much to be gained from comparing and contrasting theatrical rehearsals with grammatical training. Indeed, the kinship between professional actors and rhetors was at one point openly acknowledged by Choricius of Gaza. In his sixth century oration, “The Defense of the Mimes,” Choricius refers to actors as fellow mimetic artists. [33] This wasn’t just a rhetorical flourish; it was based on an understanding that rhetorical and theatrical training overlapped in many ways, precisely because both thrived on nuanced, well-informed, oral delivery.