Aeschylus as oral performance: rhythm, structure, and meaning in the Persians

This study presents an experimental approach to the rhythmic and semantic interpretation of the text of the Persians. This approach interprets the lines of the play as a series of self-contained utterances, called tone groups, rather than according to the metrically regular lines of the traditional texts. Tone groups are to the spoken word what punctuation is to the written word; they organise the material into discrete semantic units. The effect of analysis by tone group is to show that the play is composed of a series of self-contained statements from which meaning is constructed. These statements commonly scan to word-end as recurring rhythmical units. A metrical system is tentatively proposed on this basis. It is argued that this approach represents the text according to the oral-aural qualities of the original performance. The thesis contains a general introduction that canvasses the issues pertaining to oral tradition and the dictates of the oral-aural performance context of early tragedy, followed by an introduction to tone-grouping as an interpretive praxis, and a detailed methodological statement. There follows a chapter (Tables of Measures and Nomenclature) that describes the recurrent rhythmical units with a theoretical statement of the implied principles of their generation. Two new texts, a Working Text and an Experimental Text, are generated from the analysis by tone-group of the selected portions of the play. These texts are experimental and should be regarded only as a first steps toward a text of the play that better represents its origin in oral performance. The bulk of the thesis consists of four chapters of metrical and interpretive commentaries, one for each of the four principal types of poetry used in tragedy. There is a separate discussion of analysed portions of the kommos (Appendix V). The central conclusions are then presented, along with a survey of directions for further study.