Reappraising the Choruses of Greek Tragedy

Rosa Andújar joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book, Playing the Chorus in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 2025).

Tragedies mentioned

Aeschylus

• Agamemnon (chorus fragmentation)
• Seven Against Thebes (use of semi-choruses)
• Suppliant Women ("choral swarm" with multiple groups)

Sophocles

• Oedipus Rex (actor-chorus interaction)

Euripides

• Phaethon ( "augmentation" and secondary choruses)
• Trojan Women (chorus entering in fragmented small groups)
• Hippolytus ( subsidiary chorus appears before the main chorus)
• Orestes (unusual choral divisions)
• Suppliant Women (exceptional choral activity)

Other ancient texts

• Aristotle, Poetics (mentioned for lack of interest in the chorus)
• Aristophanes, Birds (for having a 'differentiated' chorus)
• Plutarch, On Listening (de Audiendo) 45e-f (Euripides training a chorus; a chorus member bursts out laughing)
• Antiphon 6 (On the Chorus Boy: I don't mention it by name, but this is the speech regarding the death of a choreute by performance enhancing drugs)

Modern works

• Azoulay, Vincent and Paulin Ismard. 2020. Athènes 403: une histoire chorale. Paris / 2025. Athenes 403 BC: A Democracy in Crisis, trans. Lorna Coing. Cambridge.
• Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor.
• Diggle, James. 1970. Euripides: Phaethon. Cambridge.
• duBois, Page. 2022. Democratic Swarms: Ancient Comedy and the Politics of the People. Chicago. 
• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (on choral powerlessness/inertness)
• Halliwell, Stephen. 1998. Aristotle's Poetics. Bristol/Chicago.
• Jackson, Lucy. 2019. The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE. Cambridge.
• Sansone, David. 2016. "The Size of the Tragic Chorus," Phoenix 70: 233-54.
• Uhlig, Anna. 2019. Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus. 2019.

About our guest

Rosa Andújar is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has published widely on Greek drama in its fifth-century Athenian context as well as on its modern global reception, particularly across the Americas. She is the author of Playing the Chorus in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 2025) and the editor of The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro (Methuen Drama, 2020), which won the 2020 London Hellenic Prize. 

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form