Chōra before Plato: Architecture, Drama, and Receptivity Lisa Landrum Chora 7: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, ed. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016, pp. 323-58 Chora Cho-ra before Plato Hold back what would be ruinous to my chōra Send forth what will benefit my city … –Athena to the chorus of Furies1 Stranger, in this chōra of fine horses you have come to earth’s fairest home … Here the nightingale, a constant guest, trills her clear note under the trees of green glades, dwelling amid the wine-dark ivy and the god’s inviolate foliage, rich in berries and fruit, unvisited by sun, unvexed by the wind of any storm. Here the reveler Dionysus ever walks, companion of the nymphs that nursed him … Nor have the choroi of the Muses shunned this [chōra] nor Aphrodite of the golden rein … –A chorus of elders to Oedipus2 this essay initiates a new approach to the architectural interpretation of chōra by considering the pre-philosophical meanings of chōra as an inhabited “region” or “land,” and by drawing attention to certain situationally transformative scenes from Athenian drama in which chōra appears in the script. Through this approach, I intend to reveal the relatively ordinary meanings of chōra from the time just before Plato recast it, in Timaeus, as a highly enigmatic entity fundamental to cosmological formation and human making. Unfortunately, Jacques Derrida, whose philosophy of deconstruction influenced architectural theory in the 1980s and 1990s, generally ignored and even dismissed the “ordinary” meanings and contexts of chōra, in favour of its more abstract “paradoxes and aporias.”3 This essay counters that tendency with a hermeneutic approach. By taking a fresh look at primary sources, I aim to recover an understanding of the common, yet complex, world in which chōra originally came into being as a philosophically and architecturally suggestive concept. I believe this approach can help us recognize not only where Plato’s notion of chōra was coming from, but also how chōra may remain relevant for present-day architects striving, amid politically and ecologically vexed circumstances, to engage and engender meaningful change. 324 Lisa Landrum By dipping into pre-Platonic sources, I also aim to reinforce some of the links between chōra (χώρα) and choros (χορóς): between a broadly integrative yet regionally grounded understanding of space, place, and human situations (chōra) and the performative medium of collective dance, poetic speech, music, and song (choros, plural choroi) which, for the Greeks, involved the chorus (the group of dancers accompanying the principal actors in tragedy, comedy, and satyr plays) as well as the full institution, social practice, and setting of drama.4 In examining these links between chōra and choros (words with different etymological roots),5 the following observations build on crucial insights of Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Dalibor Vesely. In their respective studies of architectural representation, these scholars have postulated a situational and experiential resonance between chōra and choros, while seeking to recover the cultural and symbolic unity of place and event.6 The present study adds to this work, less by extending their arguments than by uncovering significant details beneath them. As a further preliminary, I must briefly consider the pre-philosophical meaning of hypodochē, the name Plato first gives to chōra (Timaeus, 49a). In the context of Plato’s discussion of chōra, hypodochē is usually translated as “receptacle.” Elsewhere, however, hypodochē refers to a social occasion: a hospitable and festive “reception” held in honour of gods and guests. To offer the most pertinent example, the City Dionysia, during which most of the extant Greek plays were performed, was understood as an elaborate “reception” for Dionysus.7 The City Dionysia was a reception in several interrelated ways. At the start of this annual festival, Dionysus himself (in the form of a statue) was ceremoniously received into the theatre in a grand procession that recalled the original reception of the god into Athens.8 Just as importantly, this festival was a reception in the sense that the city of Athens physically received and actively hosted thousands of people (including citizens, immigrant-metics, slaves, released prisoners, male children, and arguably women, as well as foreign visitors and ambassadors) for collective feasting, revelry, and reflection on their shared (and contested) customs, stories, and concerns. During this week-long event in early spring, the theatre’s orchēstra, the level “dancing ground,” further received a great variety of official participants (priests, generals, diplomats, and soldiers, as well as some twenty-eight poets, twenty-eight producers, twentyfour masked actors representing a range of mortals and gods, more than 325 Cho-ra before Plato Fig. 15.1 Dionysus aboard a ship cart, escorted by aulos-playing satyrs, as depicted on a skyphos from Acrai Sicily, British Museum, B 79. Ludwig Deubner, Attische Feste (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1932; reprinted 1966), plate 14.2. a thousand well-rehearsed and elaborately attired dancers, and dozens of musicians), together with their diverse performances: preliminary processions, inaugural rites, public announcements (declaring honours to deserving citizens and the names of freed slaves), civic displays (of troops and tributes), dithyrambic dance contests, up to seventeen plays staged in competition (three tragic trilogies, each followed by a satyr play, plus five comedies), culminating revelry, and a closing political meeting (to ratify pending peace treaties, and to issue fines to those who had misbehaved during the festival).9 This diversely comprehensive receptivity of the festival was further intensified by the theatre’s representational mutability, as it would become a plethora of places during the staging of many different plays. For the three days of Tragedy, the orchestra would momentarily become a variety of exceptional places from the mythic past: the sacred grounds before a temple, the sovereign grounds around a palace, the battlegrounds outside a city, or the burial grounds of a king. With the afterpiece of a satyr play, which culminated each day of Tragedy, the orchestra would become a series of liminal places eccentric to human society: a distant seashore, a wild mountainside, a mysterious grove, or a volcanic island and cave (as in the land of the Cyclops). On the last day of the Dionysian festival, the day of Comedy, the very same performance area that previously had represented exceptional and liminal places became a variety of contemporaneous common places: the open area of the agora 326 Lisa Landrum (the Athenian market-place), the democratic area of the Pnyx (where the Assembly met), the public area just outside the Propylaea (the gateway to the Acropolis), or an urban stretch of street before a citizen’s home. Occasionally, the comedic orchestra did become more uncommon and otherworldly places: the dreaded underworld (in Aristophanes’s Frogs), the nebulous region of the sky (in Aristophanes’s Birds), and the heavenly halls of Zeus (in Aristophanes’s Peace). However, even when such extraordinary settings were manifested (and regardless of genre), the festive orchestra always remained the very same place: the profoundly mutable and radically receptive Theatre of Dionysus. When viewing the archaeological remains and reconstructed plans of this ancient theatre, we must not forget the full interactive variety of life that it received.10 By considering the diversely inclusive and broadly shifting scope of such a festive “reception,” via sources composed before Plato presented chōra as an “all-receiving” hypodochē (49a, 51a), this study intends to recover some of the sociopolitical and mythopoetic premises underlying Plato’s thinking about these influential terms. In doing so, this study further suggests that these same premises (or variations of them) ought to remain fundamental to our thinking about architectural representation and architecture’s receptivity. Before delving into specific passages from the extant corpus of Athenian drama (ranging from Aeschylus’s Persians of 472 bce to Aristophanes’s Wealth of 388 bce), it is helpful to rehearse the discursive situation leading up to the point midway through Timaeus when the interlocutor who lends the dialogue its name digresses to introduce what has since become a notoriously enigmatic concept: chōra. CHŌRA in TIMAEUS Plato’s Timaeus begins with Socrates recalling and summarizing the topic of yesterday’s discussion: the constitution of an ideal city (17c).11 Socrates ends his summary by expressing his desire to see this city “alive” and in action, “engaged in some struggle or conflict,” or else “to hear someone tell of our city [Athens] carrying on a struggle against her neighbors” (19b–c). In response to Socrates’s desire, Critias recounts a “strange but true” story he remembers hearing in his youth about the Athenians “of old” engaging in a “great and wondrous” conflict with invaders from the lost island city of Atlantis. Critias’s story, a legend handed down through 327 Fig. 15.2 Plan of the theatre and sanctuary of Dionysus.Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Emil Reich, Das griechische Theater: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Dionysos-Theaters in Athen und anderer griechischer Theater (Athens: Barth & von Hirst, 1898), plate 1; reprinted in Ernst Fiechter et al., Das Dionysos-Theater in Athen, vol. 1, Die Ruine (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1935). Lisa Landrum many generations (from Egyptian priests to Solon, to his great-grandfather, to his grandfather, then to Critias himself), tells of how Athens – due to the “greatness of her actions,” the “magnanimity of her words,” and the “fairness of her constitution” – defeated the Atlantic invaders, thereby liberating all of Europe, Libya, and Egypt from oppressive external rule (19c–26e). Socrates is pleased with this story of the exemplary beginnings of Athens. He also finds Critias’s story to be most appropriate to the occasion that has brought the interlocutors together: a festival in honour of Athena.12 Socrates and his companions then prepare to “receive” the next “feast of speech,” to be offered by Timaeus (27b). Whereas Critias relayed how Athena originally ordered Athens (24c), Timaeus discloses a prior ordering. Turning to a constitutive event well before the formation of cities, Timaeus describes the likely constitution of the cosmos: how a knowing creator or demiurge (literally, a “worker for the people”) first fashioned the world by mingling fire, earth, air, and water in due measure and proportion, and by shaping all sensible things after timeless patterns. For this primordial event of making, Timaeus initially identifies two distinct realms: “being” and “becoming” (27d). According to Timaeus, the former, “being,” is that which is eternal, unchangeable, and apprehended only by reason (the stable realm of ideas, from which the creator-demiurge draws ideal patterns), while the latter, “becoming,” is that which is ephemeral, corruptible, and apprehended by imperfect opinion and sensation (the fluctuating realm of physical reality and human experience). However, in the midst of this story, Timaeus admits that these two kinds of reality, “being” and “becoming,” are insufficient, so he begins again by positing a “third” that he initially calls the “receptacle” (hypodochē, 49a). This “receptacle,” “reception,” or situation of receptivity is presented as fundamental to every event of making, for it is “that in which all the elements are always coming to be, making their appearance, and again vanishing” (49e). Striving to explain this “reception,” Timaeus likens it to an array of remarkably ordinary artifacts, agencies, and mediums: to a mirror, a mixing bowl, a mother, a winnowing fan, an odourless liquid, and a neutral plastic substance.13 But such analogies and metaphors, it seems, can only ever approximate chōra, which, as Timaeus contends, remains highly ambiguous, “difficult,” and “obscure.” Whereas “being” is invisible and “becoming” is visible, this third kind of reality is only “dimly seen.” Partaking of both the intelligible and the 329 Cho-ra before Plato irrational, chōra must be apprehended by a “spurious reasoning … as in a dream.” Whereas “being” consists of immutable forms and “becoming” of variable copies, chōra is a formless open entity that receives, nurtures, and sustains all things and all change. This dream-like chōra is, according to Timaeus, “the nurse of all becoming,” “the recipient of all impressions,” and that which is “eternal and indestructible, providing a seat for all created things” (49a–52b).14 Having introduced chōra as fundamental to the making of the cosmos, Timaeus then describes in detail the constitution and workings of the human body, as well as many correspondences among the body, city, and cosmos. For the purposes of this essay, however, I must leave this summary of Timaeus here. CHŌRA as inhabited land Before chōra gained its uniquely mysterious philosophical definition in Plato’s Timaeus, chōra served as a common term for an inhabited “region,” “territory,” or “land.” Chōra first appears in this conventional sense in Homer’s Odyssey, when the Phaeacian king implores Odysseus to share his stories of the diverse chōras experienced on his travels.15 In the extant written records of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, chōra as “land” appears hundreds of times: throughout the historical works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; in the speeches of Isocrates, Demosthenes, Lysias, Lycurgus, and Aeschines; and on official public inscriptions announcing diverse matters of common concern, such as political alliances, destinations of envoys, arrivals of foreign ambassadors, locations of international assemblies, sources of imported grain, and decrees concerning the collective “defense of the chōra.”16 Chōra also appears in its conventional sense in the Hippocratic texts,17 in lyric poetry,18 and throughout the extant dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (as we shall see below). Though there are variations in detail,19 it is chōra’s meaning as an inhabited “region,” “territory,” or “land” that is by far the most prevalent in classical Greek sources. Even Plato’s own dialogues make frequent use of chōra in this most basic and common sense: as in Timaeus, when Critias explains how the tale of conflict between Athens and Atlantis had been preserved by the Egyptian chōra (22e).20 330 Lisa Landrum Where, then, is Plato’s specialized cosmogonic concept of chōra coming from? Surely his appropriation of this term was neither arbitrary nor disconnected from its pre-philosophical meaning, for Plato easily could have chosen a more obscure word to name this most “difficult” and “obscure” kind of reality. Alternatively, he could have crafted a suggestive neologism, as he sometimes did for key terms in other dialogues.21 Instead, Plato appropriated a well-known word with real-world geographical and sociopolitical connotations. It is necessary to investigate these everyday meanings of chōra before considering how the term figures in the performative and situational medium of choros. Though chōra could imply any inhabited region, in the classical sources that have come down to us chōra frequently referred to the very “region” in which Plato lived: Attica, the roughly triangular peninsula extending south from the Parnes mountains, with the summit of Sounion at its tip and Athens at its core. This territory, which included a major political centre (Athens) and a topographically and demographically diverse countryside, constituted the geographic scope of the polis, the citystate. Indeed, the poets, historians, and orators noted above sometimes used chōra synonymously with polis, as both terms implied a cohesive human society: an entire political unit consisting of both towns (astu) and territory (agros), together with their overlapping and mutually sustaining defensive, agricultural, and ritual practices.22 Yet, as scholars of the classical polis have argued, the town was not only territorially and culturally bound to its countryside; rather, “the whole political, social and religious structure of the Greek city was shaped by its countryside.”23 Mythically and historically, the unification of the chōra preceded the development of Athens as a prominent urban centre and was a necessary precondition for both the formation and perpetuation of democracy. According to Thucydides, when Theseus became King of Attica (a generation before the Trojan War) he “reordered the chōra,” dissolving autonomous councils in the various towns and establishing in Athens a single council chamber (bouleuterion) and public hearth (prytaneion), where representatives from the outlying areas would gather periodically for collective deliberation and communal dining (2.15.2). This legendary founding of a cohesive community, by establishing shared institutions among otherwise disparate and dispersed people, was celebrated in an annual festival that aimed to perpetuate social order by regularly recalling 331 Fig. 15.3 Map of Attica. Richard J.A.Talbert, ed., The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), detail of plate 58; reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. its originary event.24 Theseus’s legendary unification of the chōra underlies the actions of later political reformers: notably, Solon, who made land ownership (instead of nobility) the basis of political involvement;25 and Cleisthenes, who (in 507 bce) further transformed the political landscape to promote the equality and comprehensive diversity of political involvement. As Aristotle tells us, Cleisthenes “divided the chōra” into 30 districts (trittyes), consisting of 139 communities (dēmes). These districts were assembled into 10 tribes (phylai), with each tribe having equal representation from the town, the coast, and the inlands. The intent was to “inter-mingle” the people, resisting oppressive tyranny by enabling more comprehensively representative and proportionate participation from the region’s diverse districts and communities.26 332 Lisa Landrum Following the reforms of Cleisthenes, whom scholars have called an “architect of democracy,”27 this more regionally articulated chōra became conspicuously manifest not only in democratic processes, as each of the ten tribes sent fifty members to participate in the Council of Five Hundred (the Boulē), but also in dramatic festivals, as each tribe sent two fiftymember choruses (one of boys, one of men) to perform dithyrambs at the City Dionysia.28 During this same festival, the mixed political body of the chōra became manifest in a number of other ways: in the composition of the panel of dramatic judges (one from each tribe, selected by lot prior to performance); in the public displays of elected generals (one from each tribe), who poured inaugural libations; and through the configuration of spectators, who likely sat on the hillside arranged by tribe, with the Five Hundred councillors at the centre. Residents of other chōras from the greater Panhellenic region also had their place during the festival: seated on the extreme left and right sides of the assembly.29 Thus, the distribution of people within the bowl of the theatre would have appeared as an ordered microcosm of the Athenian polis situated amid her regional allies: a lively social image, persuasively demonstrating an ideal (if propagandistic) synthesis of the mutable and heterogeneous chōra.30 When Plato composed Timaeus (sometime between 365 and 347 bce) some of the symbolic and political aspects of the Dionysia had become diluted.31 This erosion of the festival’s cultural meaning and political efficacy reflected corresponding losses in the chōra. Over the course of several fractious decades, many of the crucial bonds between the town and countryside of Attica had been weakened to the point of mutual collapse. During the Peloponnesian War (431–404 bce), Pericles’s defensive strategy urged farmers to abandon their fields and take refuge in the walled city of Athens, while his offensive strategy focused on naval operations and foreign exploits. During this time, the neglected chōra suffered repeated invasions: fig trees, olive trees, and grape vines were mutilated, croplands scorched, homesteads plundered, and livestock and farm equipment stolen.32 When the defeated, starving, and humiliated Athenians surrendered in 404, many displaced farmers, especially those of the “middleclass” – whom Aristotle would call hoi mesoi33 – were ruined. “Middle” citizens who managed to re-cultivate their “fields,” their chōrion,34 found themselves marginalized by increasingly urban-based political practices, while others relinquished their former ways, joining state efforts to fortify the agonized countryside with defensive walls.35 As a result of all this, 333 Cho-ra before Plato the fertile chōra, which once had sustained an involved and vigorous population, waned; and the people of Attica grew increasingly dependent on foreign grain imported via the sea.36 It has been argued that Plato and Aristotle were so troubled by this loss of agrarian livelihood and prosperity that they placed the “defense of the chōra” and “egalitarian landowning at the center of their reactionary philosophical utopias.”37 This backstory of chōra helps us recognize both the appropriateness and the meaningfulness of chōra as a complex living metaphor and model in Timaeus. In the ears of classical Athenians, Plato’s chosen term would have been far from neutral and abstract, recalling not only the political origins of Attica (including Theseus’s original unification and Solon’s and Cleisthenes’s later transformations of the chōra), but also a more general premise: that regional cohesiveness, brought about by the proportional and reciprocal participation of disparate entities, remained crucial for both the constitution and the preservation of good cities. We must recall that Plato’s Timaeus, though ostensibly concerned with the speculative origins of the cosmos and the corresponding formation of the human body, was both motivated by and framed by prior and anticipated discussions of the polis. As noted above, at the start of Timaeus, Socrates recalls that yesterday’s discussion had concerned the composition of the best city and citizens (17c); and Critias promises that, after Timaeus speaks, he will continue their collective project to “transfer” (metapherō) the fictional city and citizens, fashioned yesterday in words, into reality (26d–27b). Timaeus’s own middle discourse, with its digressive presentation of “being,” chōra, and “becoming,” must be taken as both advancing and preparing the way for these political discussions, while regrounding them in a strangely familiar arena that was both more fundamental and more cosmological. Accepting that these political (and metaphorically layered) premises frame and ground the dialogue of Timaeus, and acknowledging that Plato was writing in a politically charged time due to prior regional turmoil, it is likely that Plato modelled his cosmic chōra on a regional chōra, thereby appropriating what had been commonly accepted as the sociopolitical precondition for good cities and citizenry, and recasting this common topos as the originary ground for the human cosmos as a whole. In other words, the demiurge in Timaeus shapes the world in a pre-existing chōra, much as exemplary statesmen (Solon and Cleisthenes) had shaped Athens within a pre-given and preunified “region.” Plato, of course, does not admit that this regional chōra 334 Lisa Landrum was his model. Instead, he argues through Timaeus (and other dialogues) that the mimetic relation between divine and human realities operates more in the opposite direction: that the composition of cities and mortal selves ought to follow patterns and dynamic rhythms of the eternal cosmos (88d–e). Nevertheless, the everyday semantic context of chōra and the conflictual world in which Plato’s Timaeus was composed cannot – or, rather, should not – be ignored.38 For architectural interpreters, what matters most is neither the simple reversibility of these mimetic relations nor the apparent polarity of human and cosmic constructs, but rather their vital “fusion” and “reciprocal determination” within an ever-receptive and politically (and mythically) dynamic chōra.39 Plato’s Timaeus invites us to consider cosmic, social, and individual bodies as performing not in fixed binary and hierarchical relations but in complexly striving reciprocity: each part dynamically attuned to the other and to the whole, with chōra acting as the primary receptive milieu for bringing about, making apparent, and sustaining this full set of vital correspondences. Plato’s appropriation of the common chōra, together with its layered regional, sociopolitical, and mythic connotations, is significant for the history of ideas; however, this observation offers us only so much in our theoretical and disciplinary quest (somewhat like that of Socrates) to see chōra in action – namely, to regard chōra’s receptivity to situational transformation and architectural beginnings. To consider these more architecturally suggestive receptions we must turn to those dramatic scripts in which chōra appears, and thus to the links between chōra and choros. These scripts are relevant for us not simply because they provide evidence of the events that transpired in the theatre, but also because they attest to how the collective production of choros (which we may take as an intensified representation of life in all of its complexity) helped the people of Attica maintain meaningful participation with the many chōras that were active in shaping and sustaining both their cities and themselves. CHŌRA in action in athenian drama At first glance, chōra does not seem to bear any obviously charged conceptual significance in Athenian drama. When chōra figures into an actor’s speech or a chorus’s song it usually refers simply to a particular inhabited “region,” “territory,” or “land.” For instance, in several tragedies, addresses are made to the king, lord, or ruler of this or that chōra. Such 335 Cho-ra before Plato addresses serve partly to establish the specific narrative and politically charged setting of the play.40 In each of these scenes, the ostensible geographic reference (to such-and-such a place, or to the land of so-and-so) is denotatively clear, yet significant ambiguities and tensions emerge when considered in dramatic context. First and foremost, we must recognize that when uttered in performance, chōra takes on layered and reflexive significance due to a basic situational duplicity inherent to dramatic representation. Performers often present the “land” in question as “this land,” thereby implicating not simply the play’s (often remote) geographical setting (Thebes, Delphi, Argos, Thrace, Troy, Susa, Egypt, etc.),41 but also, somewhat paradoxically, the very land within and upon which the performers were acting: the beaten dirt floor of the orchestra at the foot of the Athenian Acropolis in the heart of Attica. Even in the absence of an actor’s allusive gesture and emphatic “this,” the surrounding chōra of Attica remained the primary, ever-present setting for each play staged in the festival, as the open hillside of the theatron, literally the “seeing place” of Dionysus, provided the assembled spectators with comprehensive (and immersive) views of Attica’s natural and cultural topography. The spectators looked not only down at the orchestra, up to the shifting skies and around at one another, but also out over the full sanctuary of Dionysus and other familiar districts of southern Athens and, further still, toward the fortified port of Piraeus and the Sardonic Gulf, with the (then) rival Peloponnesian chōra perceived (however dimly) in the distance beyond. Each visible feature of the Attic chōra – the temples and sanctuaries, city walls and gates, river valleys and plains, delimiting mountain ranges and seacoast – bore layered significance for the people gathered in the theatre, as each feature was in some way tied to familiar myths, historical events, and common civic practices.42 The extraordinary events dramatized in the orchestra were always viewed together with this relatively ordinary yet comparably storied terrain. In other words, the remote mythic chōra conjured during performance became meaningfully mixed with the local chōra of Attica, reinforcing their interdependence and their analogous potential for both persistence and change. This comparative transference and layering of distant and local settings – through the performative interaction of chōra and choros – becomes most salient during significant arrivals and departures: when an actor addresses the chōra while crossing the perceived limits of the performance space to enter or exit the story. For instance, soon after arriving 336 Lisa Landrum Fig. 15.4 View south from the theatre of Dionysus, with Mount Hymettos to the far left and the Hill of the Muses rising to the right.The tree-covered sanctuary of Dionysus lies just behind the orchestra. Photograph: © Lisa Landrum 2011. on the shore of the Cyclops at the beginning of Euripides’s satyr play, Odysseus asks Silenus, “What is this chōra and who are its inhabitants?” (113).43 Here the land of the Cyclops is instantly brought to Athens, just as the “inhabitants” of the theatre are all simultaneously delivered to the land of the Cyclops. With this situationally transformative question, the play’s central ethical and existential problems – concerning the receptivity of a place and its people to others and to otherness – are brought forcefully to bear on both chōras. A reciprocal phenomenon can happen at the termination of a play. At the close of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, as the eponymous hero leaves Lemnos, the deserted island that had harboured him during his ordeal, he bids farewell to “this chōra” (1452). Philoctetes’s farewell to “this chōra” as he exits the orchestra brings closure to the theatrical event, but also renews attention to the representational function of the festival. As Philoctetes’s story comes to an end, so too does the theatre’s provisional presencing of Lemnos, but not without leaving a residual influence on the audience’s understanding of their own situation. In this dramatically influential way, Philoctetes, with his descriptively detailed and surprisingly affectionate closing speech, returns the spectators’ awareness to their own local situation in Attica, re-opening 337 Cho-ra before Plato “this chōra” for renewed participation and interpretation, in light of the lingering tragedy of Lemnos. Although meaningful and productive tensions between a represented chōra and a local chōra are readily apparent in any given play, other situations also can enter the mix, particularly when dramatized events resemble contemporaneous situations. In Euripides’s Trojan Women, the Spartan island of Melos, though never mentioned in the play, is made tangibly present in the theatre. In this Euripidean tragedy, the defeated chorus of captive Trojan widows, having accepted their fate to be taken from their destroyed homeland as slaves, somehow manage to express hope that they at least might be taken away to Attica: to “the famous and blessed chōra of Theseus” (208–9). This longed-for “chōra of Theseus” stands in idealized contradistinction to the play’s setting: the utterly destroyed and still smoldering city of Troy, which is vividly conjured through descriptive language at the start of the play by Athena and Poseidon – the very gods who built Troy, but then destroyed and abandoned it (1–97). Such stark juxtapositions of a venerated Attica and a desecrated Troy (and of the creative-destructive forces acting within and upon them) would have demanded critical reflection on the fate not only of the two named regions, but of other volatile situations familiar to the spectators: notably, to Melos. Just a few months prior to the staging of Trojan Women (in 415 bce), the Athenians had ravaged the island of Melos over a dispute related to the ongoing Peloponnesian War. After refusing to accept the Melians’ peace treaty, the Athenians executed the men, enslaved the women, and colonized the city.44 With this fresh atrocity in mind, Euripides’s audience may have been moved to view the suffering of the mythic Trojans in light of what the nearby Melians had actually endured; and further, to recognize in themselves the less than honourable victories won by the mythic and present-day Greeks. Since Euripides’s plot reveals the ironic status of the mythic Greeks (ironic because, as Cassandra predicts, the ostensible victors are doomed to endure grave dangers when they return home),45 the tragic poet may have been pressing his audience for a critical revaluation of such egregious actions as had just taken place at Melos, while questioning the extent to which even the wellfounded – but neglected and war-torn – “chōra of Theseus” may yet suffer destruction, like Troy. This subtle mixing of mythic and contemporaneous situations in Trojan Women points to an important basic function of Greek drama, whereby 338 Lisa Landrum tragic poets treated ongoing regional conflicts indirectly, through the mimetic lens of dramatized mythic struggles.46 This mixing of situations also demonstrates what Rush Rehm has called the “complicated inclusiveness of ancient Greek drama,”47 whereby a great variety of real and imagined places were made tangibly present, less through changes of scenery (which were always minimal and typically negligible) and more by the performers’ suggestive words and interactions. Aside from the basic duplicity of (re)presented chōras and the multiplicity of comparable situations drawn in by the power of self-reflexive allusion (as to Melos, in Trojan Women), other distant and concealed places were manifested through a diversity of dramatic means. For instance, the descriptive speeches of messengers brought forth the (frequently horrendous) events taking place out of sight: either at a remote location from which the messenger had just returned (another chōra, a nearby harbour, etc.) or within an interior space behind the wall of the skēnē (which might represent the threshold to a temple, palace, house, cave, or grove).48 Alternately, the actors’ formal manner of argument and debate could transform the theatre into a comparable democratic institution (such as the Pnyx or a court of law) while transforming the spectators into liable witnesses and judges.49 More eccentrically, the chorus, through imagistic odes, might transport a willing audience to an idyllic “elsewhere” just before a moment of doom or project themselves into mythic and hypothetical situations – into “a far-off chōra” – sometime before or beyond the dramatized events.50 Such comparative layering of partially present, partially obscured situations – dream-like situations always coming into being, appearing and vanishing in the persistently present theatre and chōra of Attica – would have been palpably experienced and remembered by a receptive audience, even if the meaning of such fleeting impressions and correspondences may have remained (like those of Plato’s chōra) apprehensible only through a “spurious reasoning.”51 As suggested above, the festive theatre “received” not only a variety of representative people and places but also a complex web of meaningful conflicts – which is precisely what Socrates wishes to see in Timaeus (19b–c). Much like Attica herself, each dramatized chōra was either caught in the midst of an ongoing crisis, verging on catastrophe, or anticipating an uncertain transformation due to dilemmas confronting not only representative leaders but the community as a whole, as typically represented by the collective body of the chorus.52 The mutual well-being 339 Cho-ra before Plato of both chōra and chorus was bound to the fate of their troubled leaders, usually exemplified by the protagonist. If a protagonist prospers, the chōra prospers and its inhabitants thrive. If the protagonist falters, the chōra withers and its inhabitants suffer. This comprehensively layered reciprocity – between striving individuals, communities, places, and plots – is implicit in several plays, both tragic and comic. In comedy, the actions of Aristophanes’s heroes are often aimed at “saving the chōra” from basic dangers embedded within the community: from the bellicose behaviour of men,53 from the ineffectual bickering of politicians,54 and even from the bad poetry of Aristophanes’s own rivals, which threatens to debase the audience, city, and chōra as a whole.55 Such plots of comic salvation tend to culminate with a metatheatrical exit song with which the comedic chorus leads the rejuvenated performers (with spectators in tow) out of the orchestra and into a revived chōra.56 In tragedy, characters, choruses, and chōras reciprocally grapple with more mysteriously ironic and metaphysically intractable dilemmas that probe the very limits of intelligibility. Episodes from the life (and death) of Oedipus, as dramatized by Sophocles, exemplify this tragic bond. In Oedipus Tyrannus, the chorus recalls how Oedipus had been made King of Thebes for relieving the Theban chōra of a deadly plague, by out-smarting the Sphinx.57 Ironically, the chorus remembers this positive bond a moment before Oedipus is stripped of his rule and banished from Thebes for afflicting the same chōra with barrenness, by his ill-fate and ignorance.58 After wandering in exile for many years, Oedipus ultimately brings ruin to Thebes and prosperity to Attica by dying in a foretold place: a sacred grove in the deme of Colonus, just outside Athens (as described in the ode quoted at the beginning of this essay). In spite of his blindness, Oedipus recognizes this place as his “terminal chōra” (89), while the precise grove (and grave) where he will be “received” into the earth is an unseen “sacred chōros” (16, 37, etc.).59 This mysterious dramatization of Oedipus’s death, in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, is saturated with symbolism concerning locality and involves chōra (and other cognate terms) more frequently than any other extant Greek play.60 Together with the transfiguration of Oedipus (from an ill-fated exile to an honoured hero), his protracted “reception” into and by the chōra constitutes the primary agon of the drama. The chorus of elders, called the “guardians of this chōra” (145),61 deliberates and ultimately chooses to “receive” Oedipus into their land in spite of his infamy. The chorus thus 340 Lisa Landrum upholds Athenian traditions of welcoming strangers and integrating exiles. Their decision to incorporate Oedipus into their land – together with the remembrance of his troubling story – will keep their whole chōra safe, content, and free from sorrow, while causing tragic consequences for other chōras elsewhere.62 Whether explicitly named or not, conflicts involving a chōra’s receptivity are central to most tragic plots. Such conflicts are represented not only through situational arguments and interactions, but also through contrastingly peaceful imagery in which receptivity, the integration of difference, is described with images of elements mingling in dynamic strife. Fig. 15.5 The “inviolate foliage” of Colonus, northwest of central Athens. This is also the site where Plato founded his Academy in the early fourth century Photograph: © Lisa Landrum 2009. BCE . 341 Cho-ra before Plato In Euripides’s Medea, for instance, the distraught heroine who had been banished from Corinth implores King Aegeus of Athens to “receive me into your chōra” (813). The chorus then projects this potentially receptive chōra as animated: with sacred rivers, temperate breezes, and fragrant roses; with the Muses, Harmonia, Wisdom, and Love; but also with strong opposition to murderers such as Medea (835–48). In another tragedy of displacement, Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women, a vulnerable chorus of refugees appeals directly to the chōra of Argos: “To what more friendly chōra than this could we come … receive as suppliants this female band, and may the chōra show them a spirit of respect” (19–30). Having been so “received” (however temporarily), they celebrate the receptive place in song, praising its “rivers that pour their tranquil waters through this chōra … propitiating the soil with their oil-smooth streams” (1025–9). In Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, when the chorus begins to acquiesce, agreeing to “receive” Oedipus into their land, they too describe their receptive chōra as complexly saturated with song, shade, foliage, revelry, and affection, but also with a formidable capability deterrent to enemies (668–703).63 Finally, in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Athena persuades the chorus of vengeful Furies not to poison her chōra (479, 720, 787, 817) but instead to show “goodwill towards [her] chōra” and, once reformed, to be received into her land (968). Athena then portrays the anticipated prosperity that would follow their agreement with images of cooperative elemental agencies: earth, water, wind, and sunshine, mixed with mortal prowess in war (903–15). More examples could be given, but these suffice to show how chōra’s receptivity to conflictual human affairs was often figured in dramatic poetry (as in Plato’s Timaeus) with imagery of water, earth, air, and fire mingling in balanced tension. In the plays, such dynamic imagery would dramatize chōra’s fundamental vitality, mutability, and regenerative internal strife, as well as its periodic reciprocity with the changing seasons and the analogously animated cosmos: “the dance (choreias) of the stars,” as Timaeus would put it (40c). Such imagery would also model corresponding ethical transformations underway within and among the potentially receptive people, who under the influence of persuasive language and reflective thought were in the midst of being moved, not just physically but emotionally and intellectually: either swayed, soothed, and softened or hardened, agitated, and enraged. This worldly and ethical imagery would further reflect Greek concepts of mortal health, which was 342 Lisa Landrum understood as proportional negotiations among bodily fluids or humours. Believing that one’s biological, emotional, and intellectual inner world was both part of and mimetic of the fluctuating outer world, the ancients perceived their individual and collective temperaments to be fatefully linked to the well-being of their inhabited milieu, their complexly shared chōra.64 As important as these comprehensive correspondences between worldly and bodily elements would become to future architectural theories of proportion and symmetry (first articulated by Vitruvius),65 we must also recognize that the transformative tempering of human situations already involved architectural beginnings in these early dramatic sources. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides (the final example mentioned above), Athena transforms the chōra from a fearful place of self-gratifying vengeance enacted behind closed doors to a more hopeful place of discursive debate and related democratic practices performed in the open.66 She accomplishes this transformation, in part, by receiving into her chōra the reformed Furies, whom she redirects toward regenerative aims and renames the Eumenides (the “well-minded ones”). But Athena also brings about this transformation by founding an open-air homicidal court, the Areopagus, a public institution to serve as “a defense to keep chōra and city safe” (701). Athena further accommodates the Eumenides – and the remembrance of their vengeful story – in underground chambers directly beneath this newly founded court, where (as cited at the start of this essay) she bids them to “keep down below what would be ruinous to my chōra, and send up what will benefit my city” (1007–9). Thus, somewhat like an architect, and an “architect” of democracy (as described above), Athena, with the cooperation of the people, makes a new beginning for the city by reordering the chōra: by delineating a place within the preexisting milieu where inhabitants from the region can engage one another in ways that might lead to collective prosperity; by integrating into that place disparate, diverse, and even conflictual agencies; and by inaugurating human practices that cultivate collective memory and social consciousness. conclusion: receptivity at risk Throughout this essay, I have tried to demonstrate how a relatively ordinary yet politically and mythically potent chōra, as an inhabited “region,” underlies Plato’s cosmogonic chōra in Timaeus. I have also tried to show how Athenian drama reveals certain qualities and agencies of chōra that 343 Cho-ra before Plato Plato would later adapt and intensify: such as chōra’s receptivity to heterogeneity, its inherent mutability, and its harmonic reciprocity with human and worldly strife. If any doubt remains as to the influence of dramatic choros on the development of Plato’s understanding of chōra, it should be enough to point out that Plato would have been a young man in his mid-twenties, and (in all likelihood) seated among the spectators at the Theatre of Dionysus during the performance of Oedipus at Colonus (in 401 bce) – the play that, more than any other, featured chōra in both highly conventional and profoundly enigmatic ways.67 In addition to drawing out many layered correspondences between chōra as it appeared in dramatic choros and chōra as Plato later presented it, this essay has also uncovered at least one significant difference. In Timaeus, Plato presents chōra as “eternal” and “indestructible” (52a–b) and as having always existed, even “before the heavens” (52d). Plato’s knowing demiurge neither makes nor remakes chōra, but rather works with and within the receptive (and resistive) preconditions of a found (if imperfectly perceived and unreasonably difficult) chōra: striving, therein, to bring about transformation through proportionate adjustments and interpretive mimesis. However, unlike Plato’s projection of an eternally persistent chōra, every Athenian drama cited in this essay (whether tragic, comic, or satyric) shows chōra at risk: not timeless and indestructible, but profoundly vulnerable. Considered through Athenian drama (and, indeed, almost every classical source other than Plato’s Timaeus), chōra appears as a precarious entity, rife with conflict. Susceptible to inexplicable ill-fate, intentional ill-will, and myriad erroneous judgments, chōra, the receptive precondition of human existence, must always be defended and, at times, even saved from internal and external threats. In some plays, a suffering chōra even appears personified, calling out for urgent attention. In Prometheus Bound (attributed to Aeschylus), the chorus hears “every chōra crying out in grief” over a situation of dire injustice (407); and in Aristophanes’s Peace, the goddess Peace is portrayed as longing to return to her neglected and war-torn chōra of Attica (638). Somewhat like Eumenides and Oedipus at Colonus, Peace ends with the constitution of regional well-being: specifically, with a farmer-turnedarchitect “installing” Peace (as a statue) directly in the troubled chōra. Uncovering this vulnerable chōra in dramatic poetry is no minor revelation – neither for our understanding of Plato’s adaptation of the term, nor for our comprehension of how and why chōra remains relevant for 344 Lisa Landrum architects today. As for Plato, we may interpret his transformation of chōra from vulnerable to indestructible as an expression of his optimistic desire that, no matter how troubling the geopolitical situation might become, the foundational premises of his ideal polis (such as the human valuation of justice and the universal truth of harmonic proportions) would always endure. With this transformation we may also recognize an inventive shift from geopolitical to philosophical premises as Plato’s preferred grounds for cultivating the best cities and citizens. As for relevance to present-day architects, we may regard the dramatization of vulnerable chōras as a reminder that the regional preconditions essential for good cities (and good architecture) are not stable conditions that take care of themselves, but are precariously volatile ecological, geopolitical, and mythopoetic conditions, demanding continual reinterpretation, measured cooperation, and risky proportional adjustments. In other words, understanding architecture’s tenuous bond to the vexed social and situational milieu that sustains it remains as urgent as ever. To close on another front, it is necessary to re-engage a representative antagonist: Jacques Derrida. As mentioned at the start of this essay, Derrida (along with many of his architectural followers) consistently ignored and even dismissed the basic regional and sociopolitical meanings of chōra, which this essay has shown to underlie Plato’s more enigmatic use of the term. However, at the close of an interview with Richard Kearney in New York on 16 October 2001 (soon after the tragic events of 9/11), Derrida admitted to his deferral: “At some point I am planning to examine the political consequences of the thought of khōra which I think are urgent today.”68 Derrida passed away in 2004 without (to my knowledge) having examined those political consequences beyond a few telling statements during this 2001 interview. In response to leading questions from Kearney, Derrida acknowledged the regional and reconciliatory possibilities of chōra by expressing a hope that “some chōra” (like Europe) – by its peculiar mutability, heterogeneity, and mediating agency – might enable what remains of a divided and increasingly polarized humanity to imagine, nurture, and sustain a situation of tolerance and reconciliation.69 For architects interested in chōra as a metaphor and model for architectural making and representation, adhering to Derrida’s unassimilable abstractions and deferrals is insufficient. Rather, re-engaging the basic troubled grounds of chōra, in its full geopolitical and mythopoetic scope, remains our crucial and timely task. 345 Cho-ra before Plato notes 1 Aeschylus, Eumenides, 1007–9 (458 bce). This translation of Aeschylus, like others in this essay, is adapted from Alan H. Sommerstein, Aeschylus, 3 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2008). 2 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 668–93 (406/401 bce), translation adapted from Richard C. Jebb, Sophocles: Plays. Oedipus Colonoeus, ed. P.E. Easterling (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004; first published 1900). As Jebb notes at line 692, the last pronoun “this” (nin) refers back to the general region, i.e., chōra. Other translations of Sophocles in this essay are adapted from Hugh Lloyd Jones, Sophocles, 3 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1994; reprinted 1997). 3 Jacques Derrida, On the Name (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–127, with note on 146; and Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2005, first published as Papier machine, 2001), 77–8, see also 80, 83, 93–5. Derrida’s influence on architectural theory took off after his recorded dialogues with Peter Eisenman in 1985. See Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser, eds., Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997). In later correspondence and interviews, however, Derrida criticized Eisenman’s interpretation of chōra and the vacuity and nihilism of his architecture of “absence,” which Derrida deemed “facile.” See “The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida [1990]” in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9–32, esp. 27; and “Jacques Derrida: A Letter to Peter Eisenman [1989],” trans. Hilary P. Hanel, Assemblage 12 (1990): 6–13. A summary of the influence of Derrida’s reading of chōra on architectural theory is provided by Anthony Vidler, “Nothing to Do with Architecture,” Grey Room 21 (2005): 112–27. Vidler’s summary, however, omits reference to this book series, Chora, and its affiliated scholarship, which opens lines of inquiry quite independent of deconstructivist theory. 4 From its earliest use, choros included the dance, dancers, and dancing ground (Iliad, 18.590–606; Odyssey, 8.260). As Steven H. Lonsdale emphasizes, “choros means, in addition to the choreographic activity, the group that performs it and the locus of performance, implying an indissoluble bond among the participants, the ritual act, and the sacred space.” Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 346 Lisa Landrum University Press, 1993), 40. In the classical period (ca 480–338 bce), the theatre’s dancing ground was known as the orchēstra, while choros named the chorus, their choral performance, and institution. See Peter Wilson, The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, The City and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 6. 5 The origins of these homophonic words have not been uncovered with certainty, but the spelling of chōra (χώρα), with a long “o” or “omega” (ώ), and of choros (χορóς) with a short “o” or “omicron” (ο), suggest different semantic roots. Chōra has been linked to cháos: see Aristotle, Physics, 208b28–33, and Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7–11. Choros has been linked to chara, “joy”; chairein, “to rejoice”; and cheir, “hand,” especially the expressive hand of a dancer, a chorus-leader, or one who votes “by show of hand.” See Plato, Laws, 653e–654a; and Claude Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece, trans. Derek Collins and Janice Orion (Lanham, md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 19–20. See also Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: Histoire des mots (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968–80), and H. Frisk, Griechisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. 2 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 1973). 6 Dalibor Vesely, “Architecture and the Poetics of Representation,” Daidalos 25 (1987): 22–36. Here, Vesely emphasizes that “both chorus and chōra refer to the same symbolic situation of becoming, creating, and rebirth” (36). He elaborates on this correspondence in his discussion of “the mimetic nature of architecture” in Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2004), 370. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, in a seminal essay in this book series, has shown how the involved “distance” between spectators and actors in the theatre modelled the formative space between being and becoming in Plato’s Timaeus, and further “enabled a participation in the wholeness of the universe.” See “Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation,” Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, vol. 1, ed. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 1–34. See also “Chōra as Erotic Space,” in Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2006), 44–51; and Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, “Vision and Depth,” in Architectural Representation and the Perspectival Hinge (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1993), esp. 330–9, where the authors suggest correlations between Plato’s philosophical chōra and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological 347 Cho-ra before Plato “flesh.” Pérez-Gómez’s understanding of chōra, as a choros-like space of human creation and participation that is distanced from, yet reconciled with, the transcendent cosmos, underlies a primary argument of his book Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1983): that toward the end of the eighteenth century, a “preconceptual spatiality” became obscured by a rationalized, demythologized, and homogenized notion of “geometrical space.” 7 Aristophanes, Peace, 530. Hypodochē also can refer to a reception for returning troops (Herodotus, Histories, 1.119) or an intimate family reunion (Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, 1229). The noun derives from dechomai and hypodechomai, common verbs meaning “to receive” and “receive (from below),” especially by welcoming strangers into one’s house (Homer, Odyssey, 16.70), foreigners into one’s city or group (Euripides, Bacchae, 770, 1172), and suppliants into one’s chōra (Euripides, Children of Heracles, 757). On the philosophical significance of “receptivity” to “the very reception of being,” as Plato presents it, see John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), esp. 12. See also John Sallis, “Reception,” in Interrogating the Tradition: Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy, ed. Charles E. Scott and John Sallis (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 87–93, esp. 91. 8 According to myth, when a priest from Eleutherai first arrived in Athens with a statue of Dionysus, the god was not “received” with honour. Enraged by the cool reception, Dionysus afflicted all Athenian men with an erectile dysfunction. When the citizens consulted an oracle, a cure was pronounced: “introduce the god with all due honor.” Dionysus’s statue was brought back in a great procession, culminating with hospitality (feasting, wine drinking, and dramatic storytelling). Large phalluses were also fashioned and paraded by the Athenian men, in memory of the malady they had suffered. In light of this myth (known from the scholion to line 243 of Aristophanes’s Acharnians), the Dionysian festival has been interpreted as a recurring enactment of atonement, providing Dionysus each year with the proper reception he was initially denied. In other words, the festival enacted the god’s original reception as it ought to have occurred. For evidence and interpretations of this myth, see A.W. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd ed., revised by J. Gould and D. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 57–8; Robert Garland, Introducing New Gods: The Politics of Athenian Religion (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University 348 Lisa Landrum Press, 1992), 159; and Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion (Lanham, md: Lexington Books, 2003), 106–20. 9 On the spectators, performers, and order of events for the City Dionysia, see Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals, 57–101, esp. 65–6; Jeffrey Henderson, “Drama and Democracy,” in The Age of Pericles, ed. Loren J. Samons II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 179–95, esp. 180; Rush Rehm, The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 48–54; and David Roselli, Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). On the significance of the various representative displays to Athenian democracy, see also Simon Goldhill, “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1987): 58–76, reprinted in John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionysus: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 97–129; and Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds., Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10 For recent scholarship on the configuration of the Theatre of Dionysus during the fifth century bce, see Rehn, Play of Space, 37–41; Hans Rupprecht Goette, “An Archaeological Appendix,” in The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies, ed. Peter Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 116–21; and Peter Meineck, “The Embodied Space: Performance and Visual Cognition at the Fifth Century Athenian Theatre,” New England Classical Journal 39, no. 1 (2012): 2–46. 11 This is likely an allusion to Plato’s earlier dialogue, the Republic (Politeia). See Sallis, Chorology, 14; and Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 3, Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 171. 12 The dialogue takes place during a “general assembly” and “sacrifice” for “the goddess” (21a, 26e). For interpretations of the festival referred to here (perhaps the annual Lesser Panathenaea or Plynteria), see A.E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 45. 13 These metaphors provide tangible approximations of chōra’s receptivity: as a mirror that “receives likenesses of objects and gives back images of them” (71b, 46a); as a mixing bowl (krater) that receives the elements that the demiurge “mixes” (41d); as a mother who receives and nurtures the father’s seed of their child (50d); as a winnowing fan that receives, shakes, separates, and disperses the grain (52e–53a); as an odourless liquid that receives 349 Cho-ra before Plato any scent for the making of perfume (50e); and as a neutral plastic substance such as wax that receives impressions (50d). 14 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Timaeus are by Benjamin Jowett in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (New York: Pantheon, 1961). 15 “But come, tell me this and declare it truly: whither you have wandered and to what chōras of men you have come; tell me of the people and of their populous cities, both of those who are cruel and wild and unjust, and of those who are kind to strangers and fear the gods in their thoughts.” Odyssey, 8.572–76, trans. A.T. Murray, revised by George E. Dimock (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1995). This extended request shows places, people, and practices to be integral to chōra. Summarizing the various uses of chōra in Homer is beyond the scope of this paper. For an important study of this topic within architectural discourse, see Maria Theodorou, “Space as Experience,” AA Files 34 (1997): 45–55. 16 See the entry for chōra in H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). On the “defense of the chōra,” see Aristotle, Athenian Constitution, 43.4, with the appendix of inscriptions in P.J. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 231–5. See also Aeschines, On the Embassy, 2.167, and Xenophon, Ways and Means, 4.52. 17 In Airs, Waters and Places, the Ionian form of chōra (chōrē) is used whenever the Hippocratic author describes how particular features and the climate of a “region” affect the constitution of one’s disposition and health (1.8, 12.12, 13.8–15, 15.2–18, 18.24, 19.6–40, 24.7–54). A later work attributed to Aristotle, Meteorologica, similarly involves chōra in discussions of regional weather peculiarities such as variations in rainfall (360b). 18 Pindar offers a song “to glorify this chōra [of Aigina], where the myrmidons of old dwelled” (Nemean, 3.13). In another ode, Pindar calls on Apollo to “make this [land of Aitna] a chōra of brave men” (Pythian, 1.40). Elsewhere, Pindar tells his listeners to “follow my voice here [to Olympus] to a chōra shared by all” (Olympian, 6.63). In a Paean for Apollo, Bacchylides sings of how the god commanded Heracles to settle the people of Droypes in the chōra of Asine (Frag, 4.44). 19 In some instances, chōra can mean an occupied place or position at a more corporeal scale: in the Odyssey, Odysseus’s bed is firmly rooted in its chōrē (23.186, cf. 21.366, 16.352); and in the Iliad, after rising to counsel his 350 Lisa Landrum son, Nestor sits back down, returning to his chōrē (23.349, cf. 6.516). At an even smaller scale, in the Hippocratic texts, chōra can refer to the socket cavity of bone joints (On Fractures, 9.7). 20 See also 23b–c, 19a. In its conventional sense, chōra appears most frequently (more than eighty times) in Plato’s Laws (his last work), but also in the Republic and Critias: the two dialogues believed to have been composed either concurrently with Timaeus or immediately before and after. 21 On neologisms in Plato, see D.N. Sedley, Plato’s Cratylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 69–73; and Lewis Campbell, The Sophistes and Politicus of Plato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1867), xxiv–xxviii. 22 Mogens Herman Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek CityState (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. 57; Mogens Herman Hansen, ed., The Return of the Polis: The Use and Meanings of the Word Polis in Archaic and Classical Sources (Stuttgart: Franz Stainer Verlag, 2007), 67–72. 23 Robin Osborne, Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and its Countryside (Dobbs Ferry, ny: Sheridan House, 1987), 16. See also Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (New York: Free Press, 1995), 126. Hanson argues, “Agrarianism defined the nascent polis … the Greek citystate was born as a rural institution and as an agrarian ideology” (his emphasis). These authors draw from François de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, first published as La naissance de la cité grecque, 1984). Polignac argues for a “mutually fostering” relation between towns and their hinterland (154), forged largely through ritual processions moving periodically over the terrain – from a populated settlement out to a liminal sanctuary and back again – thus transforming the chōra into a great “stage” (40). For an architectural reading of Polignac’s argument, see the section on the polis and “weaving the city” in Indra Kagis McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1993), esp. 79–91. 24 On the significance of this “unification” (synoikismos) and its festival (synoikia), see Rehm, Play of Space, 58–9, with further references. 25 Solon also made it easier for people to own land by cancelling their debt (Aristotle, Athenian Constitution, 12.1–5). 26 Aristotle Athenian Constitution 21.4; Politics 1319b23–7. See also Pierre 351 Cho-ra before Plato Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian: An Essay on the Representation of Space and Time in Greek Political Thought from the End of the Sixth Century to the Death of Plato, trans. David Ames Curtis (Atlantic Highlands, nj: Humanities Press, 1996). 27 Justina Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 45. 28 Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals, 74–9. 29 Ibid., 269–70. The area for spectators is believed to have been organized into thirteen pie-shaped sections fanning out across the hillside, with the middle section reserved for members of the Boulē, the five sections on each side for the ten demes, and the two sections at either end for foreign visitors. 30 John J. Winkler has similarly described the configuration in the theatre as “a kind of map of the civic corporation, with all its tensions and balances … [a] map of the body politic.” See “The Ephebes’ Song: Tragōidia and Polis,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysus, 20–62, esp. 39–42. 31 In Plato’s Timaeus, Socrates laments that not even “the poets” could bring the ideal city to life (19d). Though the City Dionysia persisted throughout the fourth century bce, its organization became more bureaucratic and selfserving than symbolic; see Wilson, Athenian Institution of the Khoregia, 269–70. On the popularity of theatrical festivals in Plato’s lifetime (if not their crucial political and symbolic significance), see P.E. Easterling, “The End of an Era? Tragedy in the Early Fourth Century,” in Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis, ed. Alan H. Sommerstein et al. (Bari: Levante Editori, 1993), 559–69. The loss of Athenian drama’s political purpose also may be felt in Aristotle’s later Poetics. Aristotle placed little value on the social, situational, and festive aspects of dramatic poetry; instead, he emphasized its influence on an individual’s emotions and intellect. See Edith Hall, “Is There a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics?” in Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. M.S. Silk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 295–309. 32 Thucydides 2.13–17; 2.55–64; 7.27; see also Barry S. Strauss, Athens After the Peloponnesian War: Class, Faction and Policy, 403–386 BC (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 43–5. The psychological impact of the devastation may have been worse than the actual agricultural damage; see also Rehm, Play of Space, 60. 33 Politics 4.1295a36–1296a22; see also Hanson, Other Greeks, 132. 34 Chōrion (chōra in its diminutive form) denoted a plot of land, farm, or estate. Aristophanes depicts various rural characters longing to return to 352 Lisa Landrum their chōrion and doing everything they can to save it (Peace, 562, 1146, 1148; Wasps, 850; Clouds, 1123). Chōrion also may imply a small-scaled chōra. In Aristophanes’s Birds, a student in Socrates’s “Thinkery” shows off a novel representation: a map, the “chōrion of Attica” (209). 35 In his speech On the Crown (330 bce) Demosthenes boasts of fortifying not just the port or the towns, but the “whole of the chōra” (18.299–300). On the “defensive mentality” and “deep fear of enemy invasion” that plagued Attica after the Peloponnesian War, see Josiah Ober, Fortress Attica: Defense of the Athenian Land Frontier 404–322 B . C . (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985). 36 Osborne, Classical Landscape, 161–4. Osborne argues that the separation of farmers from politics (and warfare) resulted in the Greek city’s loss of its “essential identity.” 37 Hanson, Other Greeks, 194, 408. In Laws, Plato provides a detailed strategy for protecting the chōra that involves not only building fortifications and performing regular perimeter patrols but also planning recreational and educational facilities for the troops and health-restoring settings for all citizens (6.670b–673b). See also Ober, Fortress Attica, 79–80. In his work on Rhetoric, Aristotle counts the “defense of the chōra” among the five most important topics for political deliberation (1359b19–22). In Politics, Aristotle contends that “the best material of democracy is an agricultural population” (6.1318b10–12) and recommends that a city maintain close ties with its chōra to retain self-sufficiency (7.1327a). Similarly, Xenophon enumerates the many geographical benefits and resources of Attica (its natural harbours, plentiful crops, honey, timber, silver mines, quarries, clay, etc.), all of which “are due to the chōra itself” (Revenues 2.1). See also Ober, Fortress Attica, 17–19. 38 Some scholars pass quickly over chōra’s meaning as “land” in their pursuit of more abstract definitions of “space.” See Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 33–4. More positively, John Sallis briefly speaks to chōra’s pre-philosophical meaning and discusses the inseparability of political and cosmological discourses for Plato: Chorology, 116–7; and “The Politics of the χώρα” in Platonic Legacies (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), 27–45. 39 I use fusion here in the sense described by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), 306–7. For “reciprocal determination,” I follow David 353 Cho-ra before Plato Leatherbarrow, “Leveling the Land, or How Topography is the Horizon of Horizons,” in Topographical Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 114–30. 40 In Euripides’s Iphigenia at Tauris, a chorus of women refers to the Taurican leader Thoas as “lord of this chōra” (1294). In Euripides’s Children of Heracles, a herald asks, “Who is the lord of this chōra and polis [sc. Demophon, son of Theseus]?” (114). In Euripides’s Archelaus, the chorus addresses Cisseus of Thrace as “King of this fertile chōra” (Frag., 229). In Euripides’s Heracles, Theseus fears that Lycus has “seized power of this chōra [sc. Thebes]” (1167). In Euripides’s Children of Heracles, Iolaus explains that he has led Heracles’s descendants to seek refuge in Marathon (a coastal town of Attica) because they have been “banished from all other chōras of Greece” (30). In Sophocles’s Antigone, a chorus of Theban elders greets Creon as “King of this chōra” (155). In Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, a Theban priest addresses Oedipus as “ruler of my chōra” (14); later, after Oedipus’s decline, the chorus recognizes Creon as “guardian of the chōra” (1418). In Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus asks a chorus of locals, “Where is the ruler of this chōra [sc. Theseus]?” (296); he later calls on Theseus as “lord of this chōra” (1476). In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the priestess of Delphi remembers Delphus as “lord and helmsman of this chōra” (16); and Orestes invokes Athena as “goddess of this chōra [of Attica]” (288). In Aeschylus’s Persians, a chorus of Persian elders remembers how prosperous their land once was, when “god-like Darius ruled this chōra” (856). At the tragic end of Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, Orestes reveals his slain mother and her lover, saying, “behold the twin tyrants of this chōra [sc. Argos]” (973). 41 Of the thirty-two surviving tragedies, only one, Aeschylus’s Eumenides, is set in Athens (though the opening scene takes place in Delphi), and just three are set in other parts of Attica: Sophocles’s Oedipus in Colonus (just northwest of Athens); Euripides’s Suppliant Women (in Eleusis); and Euripides’s Children of Heracles (in Marathon). 42 For a more detailed description of what spectators would have seen from their places in the ancient theatre, see Rehm, Play of Space, 35–6. 43 Similarly, in Euripides’s Helen, when Menelaus arrives on the shore of Egypt, he wonders aloud, “What is this chōra?” (459, see also 414). All translations of Euripides in this essay are adapted from David Kovacs, Euripides, 8 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1994–2008). 354 Lisa Landrum 44 Thucydides, 5.84–116. 45 Agamemnon will be murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra; Odysseus, when he finally returns to Ithaca, will find his house threatened by suitors. 46 On Euripides’s tendency to dramatize “contemporary public concerns while presenting a narrative from the ‘mythic past,’” see Rehm, Play of Space, 37. See also Barbara Goff, Euripides: Trojan Women (London: Duckworth, 2009), 27–35. 47 Rehm, Play of Space, 272. See also 20–25, where Rehm defines six different kinds of spaces interacting in ancient drama: theatrical, scenic, extrascenic, distanced, self-referential (meta-theatrical), and reflexive. 48 On the revelatory function of the skēnē, as well as the “stage-machine” (mēchanē) that connected earth and heavens and the “rolling-out device” (ekkyklēma) that drew interior scenes out from behind the skēnē and into the orchestra, see Ruth Padel, “Making Space Speak,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysus, 336–65. 49 In Aristophanes’s Peace, Trygaeus, Hermes, and Peace chastise the audience for their political misconduct as if speaking directly to the Assembly (603–705). At the end of Euripides’s Trojan Women, Helen defends her conduct as if standing trial in court (914ff). Such scenes attest to how ancient theatre cultivated political consciousness and served as an influential “forum for political action.” See Oddone Longo, “Theater of the Polis,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysus, 12–19, esp. 13. 50 Aristophanes, Birds, 1482. In general, see L.A. Swift, “The Symbolism of Space in Euripidean Choral Fantasy (Hipp. 732–75, Med. 824–65, Bacch. 370–433),” Classical Quarterly 59, no. 2 (2009): 364–82. 51 For important discussions of how this special kind of reasoning prevails in spite of (or because of) chōra’s irrationality, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus,” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 156–93, esp. 179; and Richard C. Palmer, ed., The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings (Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 372–406, esp. 404. 52 On the complex identity of the chorus, including its overlapping representative, interpretive, and ritual functions, see Helene P. Foley, “Choral Identity in Greek Tragedy,” Classical Philology 98, no. 1 (2003): 1–30; Claude Calame, “Choral Forms in Aristophanic Comedy: Musical Mimesis and Dramatic Performance in Classical Athens,” in Music and the Muses: The Culture of ‘Mousikē’ in the Classical Athenian City, ed. Penelope 355 Cho-ra before Plato Murray and Peter Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 157–84; and Albert Henrichs, “‘Why Should I Dance?’: Choral Self-Referentiality in Greek Tragedy,” Arion 3, no. 1 (1994/1995): 56–111. 53 In Lysistrata, the heroine asks, “Is there no one to help us, no savior in this chōra?” (524). Her own scheme ultimately restores “order and justice to chōras” torn apart by war (565–6). 54 In Assembly Women, as Praxagora initiates her scheme to save the city, she utters a prayer: “May the gods grant success to my plans! This chōra is dear to me” (173). 55 In Wasps, the chorus chastises the spectators for failing to appreciate Aristophanes’s Clouds (which had placed third in the comic competition the previous year). They first praise their poet as “a bulwark against evil … a purifier of the chōra”; then they blame the spectators for their lack of understanding, for “making fruitless” his “sown crop of brand-new ideas” (1042–5). 56 Calame, “Choral Forms in Aristophanic Comedy,” esp. 175. 57 At the close of Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, the chorus remembers Oedipus as having “destroyed the prophesying maiden with hooked talons, and for my chōra stood like a wall keeping off death” (1198–1201). See also Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, where the chorus recalls how Oedipus had “removed from the chōra the man-snatching demon” (777). 58 At the beginning of Oedipus Tyrannus, the oracle of Apollo decrees that the Thebans must “drive out a pollution (miasma) from the chōra” (97). In the end, Oedipus realizes that he himself is the tainted one. Oedipus’s downfall is brought about not simply because he had unknowingly acted against his own kin, but because he had failed to recognize his own responsibility in allowing a past crime of regicide to go unpunished. In the continued story, Oedipus’s son, Polyneices, again puts the Theban chōra in danger; see also Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, 1048; and Euripides, Phoenician Women, 246. 59 See also 1, 24, 38, 52, 54, 644, 1058, 1520, 1540. In Athenian drama chōros typically names a divinely communicative and portentous place, including sites of potential architectural significance. For instance, Athena orders a temple to be built in a certain chōros at the edge of Attica (Euripides, Iphigenia at Tauris, 1450; see also Ion, 283–5; Hippolytus, 1198; Sophocles, Trackers, 38; Aeschylus, Eumenides, 24; and Libation Bearers, 543). Similarly, in lyric poetry, Anchises promises to build Aphrodite an 356 Lisa Landrum altar in a “conspicuous chōros” (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 100); and Apollo is said to have “built a temple” in the peaceful chōros of Telephousa (Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 244; see also 359, 413, 501, 521). Chōros (the masculine variation of chōra) has been shown to have close links to choros, based on the frequency with which chōros (a “place of contact between mortal and gods”) becomes the site for choros (dance). See Deborah Dickmann Boedeker, “ΧΩΡΟΣ and ΧΟΡΟΣ,” in Aphrodite’s Entry into Greek Epic (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), 85–91. 60 On this tragedy’s preoccupation with locality, see Richard H. Allison, “‘This Is the Place’: Why is Oidipous at Kolonos?” Prudentia 16 (1984): 67–91. Colonus is particularly significant, as it was Sophocles’s own home deme and the site of his birth. As Oedipus at Colonus was Sophocles’s last play, composed just before he died at the age of ninety in 404/05 (staged posthumously in 401), Colonus also may have been the projected site of the poet’s own grave. Colunus’s significance is furthered by the fact that Plato founded his Academy there in 387 bce. 61 This chorus is closely linked to chōra throughout the play, being qualified as “friends toward this chōra” (prochōrōn xenōn, 493), and “[men] of the chōra” (egchōrioi, 871). 62 Oedipus promises to bring “well-being” (eudaimonia) to “this chōra” (1553), providing “a protection stronger than many shields or spears” (1524–5, see also 72, 92, 459–60, 1764–5). This tragedy effectively dramatizes an aetiological myth, showing Oedipus’s grave to be refounded as a hero shrine granting protective powers. See Eveline Krummen, “Athens and Attica: Polis and Countryside in Greek Tragedy,” in Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis, ed. Alan H. Sommerstein et al. (Bari: Levante Editori, 1993), 191–217, esp. 200. 63 After singing the verses quoted at the start of this essay, the chorus of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus describe their chōra’s indestructable, selfrenewing olive tree, which, as an emblem of Athena, instills terror in their enemies (695–703). 64 These links between inner and outer milieux made chōra an apt metaphor for one’s internal seat of passions. For instance, in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the chorus of old men compare their incapacity and unwillingness to wage battle to the weak drive of a child: “The immature marrow that rules in a child’s breast is like that of an old man, there is no Ares in that chōra” (78). 65 For an important discussion of Vitruvius’s concept of proportion and 357 Cho-ra before Plato symmetry in relation to humoral theory, see David Leatherbarrow, Roots of Architectural Invention: Site, Enclosure, Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 82–92. 66 As Eumenides is the last tragedy of a trilogy, Athena’s positive transformation extends back to the preceding plays: to Agamemnon, in which Clytemnestra murders her own husband inside the palace, bringing about the “pollution of this chōra and the gods who dwell in it” (1645); and to Libation Bearers, in which Electra swears an oath “to this chōra” to help Orestes avenge their father’s murder (397) and Orestes ultimately kills his mother and her lover, “the twin tyrants of this chōra” (973). 67 In spite of Plato’s rejection of dramatic poets from his ideal city in Republic, his indebtedness to drama has long been recognized and much discussed. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Plato and the Poets,” in Dialogue and Dialectic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 39–72; and A.W. Nightingale, “The Philosopher at the Festival: Plato’s Transformation of Traditional Theoria,” in Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity, ed. Jas Elsner and Ian Rutherford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 151–80. Nightingale’s argument is elaborated in her Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theōria in its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 68 John P. Manoussakis, “Thinking at the Limits: Jacques Derrida and JeanLuc Marion in Dialogue with Richard Kearney,” Philosophy Today 48 (2004): 3–11, esp. 11. 69 Derrida specifically compared chōra to Europe, and to the mediating role it might play in the post-9/11 conflict. Ibid., 9. 358