Introduction

For a fifth-century Athenian who regularly attended the tragic productions mounted at the City Dionysia each spring, there will have been few theatrical roles more familiar than that of the satyr chorus. Whatever identities the chorus may have assumed in the preceding three tragedies, the end of the day would find these citizen-performers transformed into satyrs—the mythical creatures, half-horse, half-man, who served and celebrated Dionysus and whose presence was the defining feature of each playwright’s final submission to the tragic competition: a satyr drama. We know very little about the origins of the so-called ‘three-plus-one’ format, which paired three more serious, ‘tragic’ plays with a ribald and zany final flourish. However, although the process of the disassociation of satyr drama and tragedy seems to have started already in the fifth century bc, the three-plus-one structure continued to form the backbone of the tragic competition at the City Dionysia well into the fourth century.1 Thus, not only was the dramatic carnality of the satyr chorus an important component of theatrical performance in fifth-century Athens, but satyr drama itself was an integral part of the playwright’s business. If, as seems likely, exceptions to the three-plus-one format were relatively rare at the City Dionysia in the fifth century,2 we should calculate that around one quarter of the output of any ‘tragedian’ working in this period was in fact satyric.3 This relatively uncontroversial observation, when taken seriously, carries far-reaching and destabilizing implications not only for our definition of classical tragedy, but also for our understanding of the styles, range, and concerns of its practitioners

Archaeology · Art · Chorus · Drama · Literature · Quarter (Canadian coin · Tragedy (event · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theater, Performance, and Music History