The Name and Gender The Satirical Drama and the ‘Fourth Drama’ in Greek Theatre

This book examines the structure of the dramatic tetralogy as performed at the Great Dionysia (the major festival of Greek theatre), focusing on its final slot. According to the standard reconstruction, this position was always occupied by a satyric play, a lighter and shorter pièce obligatorily featuring a chorus of satyrs (and their old ribald father Silenus), whose function was, among other things, to provide emotional relief from the three preceding tragedies. If this was the case, exactly one fourth of each tragedian’s output would have consisted of satyr plays. The book takes a fresh and extensive look at the evidence supporting this view, questioning whether the so-called ‘tetralogical rule’ of modern scholarship was really perceived as such by ancient Greek playwrights and thus invariably followed by them. To this effect, the First Part of the book (“The Name”) systematically reviews the various possible Greek denominations for ‘satyric drama’, starting from the somewhat puzzling observation that there was no single dedicated word for it, at least none comparable to ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’. The review confirms that the most widespread way of referring to a satyr play was by appending the adjective σατυρικός/-ή to its title. In ancient quotation practice, however, these additions were easily liable to omission. Thus, it stands to reason that, in the course of the transmission process, originally satyric titles and lines circulating without further definition might have become mingled with, or mistaken for, tragic ones. The Second Part of the book (“The Genre”) takes its cue from this phenomenon, but it challenges the common view that all missing satyr plays of Classical theatre – that is, the ones expected on account of the 1:4 proportion but not traced until now – are still lurking incognito among the tragic remnants. Instead, it suggests that some of them were never written, since ancient playwrights could turn to an alternative format to fill the last slot of the tetralogy: the ‘satyr-less’ fourth-place play. The only certainly known instance of this, Euripides’s Alcestis, the last play in the tetralogy of 438 BC, has been variously explained away as an exception to the ‘tetralogical rule’. Through a re-reading of the relevant ancient sources and a reassessment of the corpora of Sophocles and Euripides, the book aims to show that the ‘satyr-less’ option was, on the contrary, potentially available to all playwrights entering the Dionysian competition and in fact occasionally, if not regularly, employed. The conclusion drafts a provisional identikit of this semi-forgotten literary typology.