There is evidently no skene in the early plays of Aeschylus and the locale changes easily. But in the Oresteia a skene fixes the locale, though only for what happens on the stage. In Ag. it represents an outer wall. In Choe. it is not at first in the arena of action and so not in the path of vision, but it represents the wall by 584 when Electra enters the house, or at least by 653 when Orestes shouts to (...) a doorkeeper. In Eum. 1–234 the skene represents an inner wall; the stage is an interior; and when Apollo enters from the far side at 179 , he seems to be coming from the adyton. The orchestra is still a locale unbounded as it was before. The tomb of Agamemnon in Choe. 1–651 is thought an indefinite distance from the house, not merely a lion's leap away. A temple of Athene becomes the Pnyx at Eum. 566 and then the hill of Ares at 685. (shrink)

This paper builds an argument against R. D. Dawe, who believes that one of the most famous of all stories is inauthentic and badly told. In his notes on ‘When she showed the robe, after weaving the great web, washing it so that it looked like the sun or moon, then it was that an evil spirit brought Odysseus from somewhere’, Dawe remarks that the web story ‘hardly belongs’ in the Odyssey, and asks: ‘Why “showed”? And to whom? Why the (...) otiose addition of “after weaving the great web”, as if we had not just been talking about that very thing? Answers to these questions will be given in my final paragraph. To look closely into the epics, and if possible behind them, I will say a word about distinguishing the pre-text from the text. First, oral poets would enlarge and otherwise reshape their material, not always with flawless technique. It may be true but cannot be proven that one such poet, more than any other, created the Iliad, and that the same one, or a different one, more than any other, created the Odyssey. (shrink)

This note argues that two passages are worthier of the dramatist if the audience has seen the furies than if it has not. Orestes sees the furies ; the chorus does not see them. Does the audience see them? K. O. Müller, on philosophical and antiquarian grounds, thought so. Nearly all scholars today believe not. I agree with Miiller from what Orestes now says to the chorus: μες μν οφ ρτε τσδ', γ δ' ρ . If the chorus does not (...) see the furies and the audience does not see them either, the μες μν οχ ρτε τά7sigma;δ' lacks moment; the chorus cannot find those words of any use and the audience cannot find them of interest. There is value in the words only if the audience, seeing what Orestes sees, is being reassured that the chorus does not. Line 1058, κξ μμτων στζουσιν αμα δυσφιλς, may be regarded as saying something the audience did not know from its own senses, and the same is true for με μν οχ ρτε τσδ' in 1061 if it says once more that the furies, though real to Orestes, and to the audience as well, are not real to everyone. The opposite reasoning—that if the audience has seen the furies the γὼ δ' ρ is unneeded after Orestes has already said three times that he sees them—is not countervailing. For those words are in the less emphatic position, are fewer, and are of less doubtful usefulness, since they lead to λανομαι δ κοκτ' ν μεναιμ' γ. (shrink)