When John Winkler died in 1990, at the age of 46, he had already established himself as one of the foremost classical scholars of his generation. He published first on Apuleius, then on Heliodorus and Lollianus. However, it is for his work on ancient sexuality and gender that Winkler is now best known, especially the essays gathered in The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (1990). He was also the co-editor, with Froma Zeitlin, of Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (1990), a book that perhaps did more than any to other to establish the ascendancy of the New Historicist approach in the field. Alongside these monuments of scholarship, and many devoted friends and colleagues, Winkler left behind a manuscript, which David Halperin and Kirk Ormand have now brought to publication.
At the heart of Rehearsals of Manhood is a thesis that Winkler first expounded in a 1985 article: ‘The Ephebes’ Song: Tragôidia and Polis’ published in Representations; a substantially revised version, included in Nothing to Do with Dionysus, has become canonical. Winkler suggested that the City Dionysia as a whole, and its dramatic performances in particular, were ‘the occasion for elaborate symbolic play on themes of proper and improper civic behavior’. That this statement now reads as uncontroversial, even banal, is testimony to the impact of Winkler’s work. More provocative, however, was the claim that, in this festival context, ‘the principal component of proper male citizenship was military’, and at its core was the figure of the ephebe. On the evidence of the Pronomos Vase, Winkler argued that the dramatic choruses were exclusively recruited from the ranks of these beardless youth. These tragōidoi, or ‘billy goat-singers’ (Winkler proposes a derivation from tragizein, a verb used by Aristotle to describe the ‘bleating’ of a breaking voice) would dance in the orchestra in rectilinear formation, quite unlike the circular (‘dithyrambic’) choruses of boys and men; the obvious visual parallel, for an Athenian audience, was the military drill performed in the same theatre by the whole ephebic cohort during their formal military training. Hence, Winkler suggested, ‘one might perceive the role and movement of the tragic chorus as an aesthetically elevated version of a close-order drill’.
This argument, which Peter Wilson has dubbed ‘the ephebic hypothesis’, was immediately controversial. For Winkler, however, the essay was a mere preliminary study: in a note, he declared his intention to produce a fuller account of Greek drama, placing the ephebe in a ‘larger web of social meanings and practices’. Invited to give the Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College in 1988, Winkler organized this expanded material into four parts; these lectures, revised largely by other hands, are now presented as the four chapters of Rehearsals of Manhood.
In the first, ‘Hippokleides Dances: Military Training and Other Dramas of Masculine Display’, Winkler illustrates and expands the central argument of ‘The Ephebes’ Song’ by looking at performances outside of the theatre.[1] Winkler begins with a snapshot of the overexuberant Hippokleides, who, competing with other suitors at the court of Kleisthenes, ‘dances away his marriage’ (Hdt. 6.129.4); he then plunges into the aetiology of the Apatouria (an Attic kinship celebration which recognized the coming manhood of sixteen-year-old boys) and its relationship to the Dionysia. Returning to Hippokleides, Winkler places his transgression in the context of Greek competitive dance culture, and especially the ‘pyrrhic’, a proto-military dance in armour that was apparently the climax of young men’s gymnastic education. It is to this climax, for Winkler, that tragedy also belongs, with its chorus of ephebes displaying their ‘athletic-aesthetic skills’ (51). A final section of the chapter brings us back to the symposium and Kleisthenes’ ‘theatre of excellence’, where the ‘poetics of manhood’ include some ‘not-so-serious fooling around’ (60) with the polarities of gender.
Chapter 2 (‘Phallic Theatrics: Staging the Body Politic’)[2] focuses upon a second polarity, that between the ‘slack’ and the ‘taut’. Both Aristophanes (Nub. 1009-18) and Xenophon (Cyn. 12-13) contrast the weak and flabby bodies of the new, sophistic schools with the broad-shouldered, slim-waisted product of traditional, gymnastic training—in other words, the aristocratic, ephebic ideal. The opposition is mirrored in the costumes of Attic comedy and tragedy, as seen in vases from Athens and Apulia. This ‘political’ reading of dramatic costume, as expressive of contemporary social practices, is pitted against an older, ritualist tradition, which would make these padded dancers, with their conspicuous phalloi, a mere survival from ‘primitive’ fertility rites. Winkler points us instead to the sculptural phallos that graces the columnar foot of every herm. These anonymous monuments are ‘a levelling sign’ (85), marking the masculinity common to all Athenian citizens.
In the next chapter, ‘Scenarios of Risk: Cockfighting and Kindunos’, Winkler turns his attention to the ‘trials of manhood’ played out in the Theatre of Dionysus. First, however, he considers the importance of cockfighting in Classical Athens. Lucian has Solon tell us that attending cockfights was compulsory for young Athenian men; Aelian records that an annual cockfight was instituted, in the theatre, after Themistocles had pointed out the exemplary competitive spirit of these birds. Ephebes were expected to be cocky. Like modern Mediterranean youths, Winkler suggests, ‘the ideal ephebe was at once admirable and dangerous’, and his assertion of manhood—whether in sport, combat, or a court of law—was ‘a kind of theatrical event’ for the rest of the community (113). Plays, like legal trials, focus the city’s attention on such moments of masculine jeopardy: Aeschylus’ Persians and Euripides’ Ion serve as examples. Winkler’s prize exhibit, however, is Iphigenia among the Taurians, where ‘the scenario of risk is aestheticized into a form whose extrapolation from Athenian social life is less recognisable’ (123); Orestes’ perilous adventures nevertheless ‘trace a fundamental schema of personal excellence’, one that serves as an aetiology for various Attic ‘rituals of risk’, at Halai, at Brauron, and on the Areopagus (126).
Winkler’s final chapter (‘An Oscar for Iphigenia: The Canon According to Aristotle’) presses the salience of this melodramatic tragedy for our understanding of the genre. In the Poetics, Winkler demonstrates, the best tragedies are those whose plots come close to a comedy of errors, where catastrophe is averted by a last-minute recognition (as in Euripides’ IT or Kresphontes). If such plays are rarities in the surviving corpus, the evidence of ancient plot summaries (especially Hyginus) suggests that they were not at all unusual. Aristotle’s plot-prescription is not merely formal, however. Winkler argues that Aristotle’s Poetics is animated by a commitment to social distinctions of class: the surprising, and repeated, dismissal of spectacle (opsis) is a means to trivialize what tragedy and comedy have in common; focusing on plot allows Aristotle to emphasize their differences. Principal among these is the class of the characters (spoudaioi vs phauloi), and the corresponding seriousness of the impending calamity. Comedy is akindunos, as Theophrastus suggests, a ‘non-dangerous concatenation of events involving persons in private life’ (151); in tragedy, it is young men of public note who dance with disaster.
Winkler’s argument dances with disaster, too. For all of its rehearsals and revisions, it remains a provocative thesis. In this final version, the existence of an institutionalised ephebate in the fifth century is no longer insisted upon; the etymological theory about ‘the breaking voice’ of the tragōidoi has been despatched to an appendix; the schematic treatment of ephebic themes in the extant tragedies, a central part of the 1985 article, is gone altogether. Yet these are only half-concessions. For Winkler, it is the very ‘absence of an organized, city-wide ephebate in pre-Lycurgan Athens that … led to the multiplication of other occasions’, including tragic drama, ‘on which issues of manhood … could be acted out’ (50-51). If the breaking-voice etymology is not defended, it is not recanted either, and Winkler remains convinced that the choristers are passing through a ‘social puberty’. The removal of the survey of tragic themes, meanwhile, only accentuates the radicalism of Winkler’s approach: for the first hundred pages of this book, we are treated to a range of contextual material, much of it admittedly ‘late’, ‘incomplete’ and ‘ambiguous’ (2); we scarcely encounter a dramatic text until chapter three. Comparing the Attic theatre to an art museum, Winkler declares that he is ‘not concerned with the individual paintings but … with the question[s] of how they were originally hung and framed and lit’, and ‘by what criteria they were awarded prizes’ (3-4). Despite the intervening decades, this unconventional approach to the gallery of Greek masterpieces feels bracingly fresh; its conclusions remain attractive, and there is, as Winkler put it in 1985, ‘a reasonable chance of [their] being true’.
There is a reasonable chance of the opposite, too, and not all readers will be convinced. The proto-military interpretation of Greek tragedy is said to rest on three facts, ‘like the poles of a teepee’ (xxii; cf. 1990: 21): the rectangular formation of dramatic choruses; the identity of tragōidoi as young men; and the ephebic drill in the theatre detailed in [Aristotle] Ath. Pol. 42. Since 1990, each of these poles has been wobbled. The (very late) evidence for rectilinear dancing relates specifically to choral entrances; certain tragic songs seem to require the chorus to surround a protagonist (Aesch. Eum. 307-89; Eur. IA 1475-1532); Euripides and Carcinus are both mocked for a ‘whirling’ style associated with the New Music (Ar. Ran. 1314, 1349; Pax 864). The compulsory youth of the tragōidoi, meanwhile, is suggested only by the exceptional Pronomos Vase. Considering the Athenian sensitivity to age-classes, it is surprising that there is no literary trace of this drastic restriction on the ability of chorēgoi to recruit the best singers available, including those who had some years of experience. (These two problems have been raised by Eric Csapo and Peter Wilson, scholars whose corroborations of Winkler’s ideas—on the rectangular shape of the orchestra, for example—are regularly cited in the editors’ notes. It is odd that their scepticism about his central theses is ignored.[3]) As for the ephebic drill: John Dillery has persuasively argued that the Theatre of Dionysus is far too small for a whole cohort to dance in formation; Pseudo-Aristotle’s en tōi theatrōi refers rather to the closed end of the Panathenaic Stadium.[4] It seems unlikely that the dramatic theatre was ever a venue for military exercises.
At a more general level, one might question the extent of the connection between choral dancing and military training in Classical Athens. Most of Winkler’s evidence for this relates to non-Athenian traditions, which he implies reflect universal Greek practice; according to Pericles, however, Athenian education is distinguished from others by the absence of painful exercise in pursuit of manliness (Thuc. 2.39.2). It is true that Plato’s Stranger, in the Laws, promotes the Athenian pyrrhic as useful preparation for battle (796c). Yet this kind of ‘gymnastic’ education is explicitly differentiated from ‘musical’ dance, and in fact the Stranger, like Socrates in the Republic, takes a very dim view of contemporary dramatic compositions. Xenophon suggests a comparison between choral and military discipline, but might Nicomachides not articulate a more popular view, when he protests that ‘there is no analogy between managing a chorus and managing an army’ (Mem. 3.4.3)? Why, in fact, is Dionysiac dancing consistently associated with peace rather than war (e.g. Ar. Ran. 1419), while Ares’ revels are held ‘without aulos’ (Eur. Phoen. 790)?
Were Winkler still alive, he would surely have answers to these questions, answers that would be erudite, provocative, and stylishly expressed. The book—beautifully produced and almost error-free—is a pleasure to read. As a younger scholar working in a more cautious era, one cannot help but envy its easy flair, and marvel at its ambition; its faults, such as they are, reflect the author’s characteristic embrace of kindunos. Winkler was out as a gay man when few scholars were and campaigned energetically for minority rights throughout his career. In an afterword, Kirk Ormand notes the bravery with which he confronted his AIDS diagnosis, using his own case to educate others in the community. Three decades after his untimely death, we should be grateful to the editors for bringing this daring and inspiring work into the academic orchestra, for our entertainment and instruction.
Notes
[1] A version of this lecture was published separately: Winkler, J. J. 1989. ‘Women in Armor, Men in Drag’, Stanford Humanities Review 1.1 (Spring) 6-24.
[2] A version of this lecture, too, has already been published: Winkler, J. J. 1990. ‘Phallos Politikos: Representing the Body Politic in Athens’. In D. Konstan and M. Nussbaum, eds. Greek and Roman Sexuality = differences 2.29-45.
[3] P. Wilson, The Athenian Institution of the Khorēgia, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 77-80; E. Csapo, ‘Imagining the Shape of Choral Dance and Inventing the Cultic in Euripides’ Later Tragedies’. In Choreutika: Performing and Theorising Dance in Ancient Greece, ed. L. Gianvittorio (Fabrizio Serra, 2017), 119-158.
[4] J. Dillery. “Ephebes in the Stadium (Not the Theatre): Ath. Pol. 42.4 and IG II2.351.” CQ 52(2) (2002): 462–70.