GREEN, J. R., Carcinus and the Temple: a Lesson in the Staging of Tragedy , Greek, Roman and 
Byzantine Studies, 31:3 (1990:Fall) p.281 

Carcinus and the Temple: 
a Lesson in the Staging of Tragedy 

]. R. Green 

~Et o£ 'tou<; 1.1:uSou<; cruvtcr'tavat Kal 'tU A.t;n cruvaxepy<iCecr9at 
on JlUAL<J'ta 7tp0 OJ.l.JlU'tCOV n9EJ.1EVOV. o-\hro yap O.v ivapyecr'ta'ta 
[o] op&v ID<J1tEp xap. aU'tOt<; ytyYOJlEVO<; 'tOt<; 7tpa't'tOJlEVOL<; EUptcrKOI. 
'tO xpexov Kal iiKtcr'ta O.v A.av9<ivot ['to] 'ta uxevav'tta. <JTIJ.l.Etov 
()£ 'tOU'tOU 0 E1tE'ti.Jl&'to KapKtVq>. 0 yap 'AJ.l<ptapao<; t; iepou avflet, 
0 Jllt op&v't. O.v 'tOV Sea'tftV eA.<iv9avev' exl ()£ 'tTt<; <JKTIVTt<; 
t;£xecrev oucrxepavav'trov 'tou'to 'trov Sea't&v .1 

Aristotle, Poetics 1455a22-29 

This passage has been noticed a number of times, but its 
implications for staging have not had much thorough discussion 
and I am not sure that scholars have visualized the situation 
properly and drawn the appropriate conclusions. 2 Carcinus' 
dates are not entirely clear, but he was certainly writing in the 
370s: the Suda puts his floruit at 380/376 and credits him with 
some 160 plays, in itself no mean record and surely implying a 
fairly long career. He was grandson of the Carcinus made fun of 
by Aristophanes; his father Xenocles (apparently one of three 
or perhaps four precocious children) must already have been 
writing tragedies to win the distinction of having a line parodied 

1 "One should compose the story and work it out with the language, so far 
as possible with it visualized in the mind's eye; in this way, seeing it quite 
clearly, with the action as it were happening in front of him, the poet will 
discover what is fitting and most readily avoid the contrary. Evidence of this 
is the charge laid against Carcinus: his Amphiaraus came up out of a temple. If 
the episode had not been staged, it would have escaped notice, but when it 
was put on the stage, it shocked the audience and he was thrown out." 

2 See e.g. D. S. Margoliouth, The Poetics of Aristotle (London 1911) 191f; T. 
B. L. Webster, Hermes 82 (1954) 300; D. J. Allen, CQ N.S. 21 (1971) 84; B. Snel~ 
TrGF I 210ff; W. Romani, Poetica d'Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (Rome 
1978) 481f; G. Xanthakis-Karamanos, Studies in Fourth-Century Tragedy 
(Athens 1980) 19 n.6 (on Carcinus see also 20 nn.2f, 87, 98). The passage does 
not seem to be discussed by S. Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics (London 1986). I 
am most grateful to E. W. Handley for alerting me to the possibilities of in­
terpretation of this ancecdote. 

281 



GREEN, J. R., Carcinus and the Temple: a Lesson in the Staging of Tragedy , Greek, Roman and 
Byzantine Studies, 31:3 (1990:Fall) p.281 

282 CARCINUS AND THE TEMPLE 

in the Clouds. 3 According to Aelian, the poet's Aerope moved 
Alexander of Pherae to tears, and that tyrant was in power from 
369 to 358.4 Carcinus' name is restored in /G II 2 2319 +Agora I 
7151, commemorating a victory at the Lenaea, perhaps in 376. 5 

It is also restored in /G IP 2325, reporting eleven victories at the 
Dionysia. 6 By this period theatre, at least in Athens, had reached 
a quasi-professional status; contemporary actors such as 
Theodorus were commanding huge fees; and performances 
attracted a large public, presumably a discerning one, even if­
by Aristotle's rather conservative standards-they were too 
much taken with spectacle and with actors who pandered to a 
taste for the over-dramatised.7 Everyone makes mistakes, but it 
is not easy to see how in such an environment a third­
generation playwright with quite a good and extensive record 
could come to commit a blunder of proportions awful enough 
to have him eliminated from the competition 8 and remembered 
as a bungler for centuries to come. At least the tragic actor 
Hegelochus had confused weasels and calm seas by a slip of the 
tongue CE Eur. Or. 279). 

Of the difficulties in the interpretation of this passage, not the 

3 Clouds 1261ff (see Dover ad loc.); Wasps 1501ff (with the dance of the 
sons of Carcinus I ending the play; see MacDowell ad loc.); Peace 782, 864; 
The sm. 169, 440. On the family see recently D. F. Sutton, AJP 108 {1987) 17f. 

4 Ael. V H 14, 40. As Snell points out, however, such stories were a 
commonplace, and there is no particular reason to believe this one ( TrGF I 
211); but whoever invented the story believed it could be taken as possible. 

5 J. McK. Camp, Hesperia 40 (1971) 302-07 and pl. 62; H. ]. Mette, 
Urkunden dramatischer Auffuhrungen in Griechenland (Berlin 1977) 146, IV 
D1 col. 5.16. 

6 Mette (supra n.5) 162, V A1 col. 3.9; see also A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, 
The Dramatic Festivals of Athens 2, rev. J. Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford 
1968) 112; P. Ghiron-Bistagne, Recherches sur les acteurs dans la Grece 
antique (Paris 1976) 53ff. 

7 See more recently 0. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford 1977) 
477ff; Halliwell (supra n.2) 337-43, esp. 342f. 

8 £~i7ttO'tV probably means that he (or his production) was hissed off the 
stage, which would also mean that he was eliminated from the competition. 
Cf. (as E. W. Handley points out to me) Dem. 19.337, £~t~aA.A.tt' autov 1ea\ 
£~tO'uphttt • £1e trov Statprov; 18.265, tpttayov iatttc;, tyro o' t8ec.Opouv. 
t~btmttc;, tyro o' EO'Uptttov; Antiphanes, Poe sis fr.142 K. (in the context of a 
dramatist's error). One might compare the a7ttroa9Tl of P. Oxy. XXXV 2737, 
where the sense seems to be that Plato Comicus was demoted from 
competition in the Dionysia to the Lenaea: see D. F. Sutton, BASP 13 (1976) 
125ff and ZPE 38 (1980) 59-63; G. Mastromarco, RhM 121 (1978) 19-34; W. 
Luppe, ZPE 46 (1982) 147-59 and 54 (1984) 15f. 



GREEN, J. R., Carcinus and the Temple: a Lesson in the Staging of Tragedy , Greek, Roman and 
Byzantine Studies, 31:3 (1990:Fall) p.281 

J. R. GREEN 283 

least is concerned with what actually occurred. (I leave aside the 
question of the text and interpretation of 0 ~il op&v't' ... 
£A.av8avEv: the purport of the passage seems sufficiently clear 
from the context for the present purpose.) In attempting to 
reconstruct the events, the force of avflEt is the critical question 
and it seems best to follow Margoliouth and Romani in giving 
the word its full and literal sense of 'rising up'. The term for 
coming down onto the stage (i.e., in the direction of the 
audience) seems tO have been KCl'tCl~CllVEtV, and UVCl~CllVEtV 
meant moving upstage (in the direction of the skene ).9 What 
Carcinus did, then, was to have Amphiaraus coming up, 
resurrected from a temple rather than a tomb, an action not 
only illogical but possibly somewhat blasphemous. The resur­
rection of heroes of the recent past to give good advice to the 
living was of course a theme with a long history in Athenian 
drama. We have evidence in vase-paintings for three, perhaps 
four such tragedies in the earlier part of the fifth century; we 
also have the Persae of Aeschylus, perhaps his Psychagogoi, and 
we know about Sophocles' Polyxena.10 A theme with a long 
history arouses certain expectations in the audience and one 
could expect the spectators to be alert to the way it was 
handled. The logical way to stage the appearance of a figure 
from a tomb in the time of Carcinus was through the central 
door of the stage, a feature that could also serve as the doorway 
or gates to a palace or the entrance to a temple (as, for example, 
it must have done in the recognition scene of Iphigenia in 
T a uris). That is, the actor playing Amphiaraus would have 
emerged from the same place onto the stage whether he was 
coming from tomb or from temple. What Carcinus had failed to 
do was make it clear to the audience that the central door at this 
point in the play was to be imagined as a tomb, not a temple. 

On this basis one can hypothesize two further points. First, 
that no scenery was involved. This is not the place to become 
involved in this notorious discussion, but in general I remain 
sceptical of its use beyond perhaps, at some point in the history 

9 Margoliouth and Romani (supra n.2); C. P. Gardiner, TAPA 108 {1978) 
75-79. 

10 On the archaeological evidence see J. R. Green in J HS (forthcoming); on 
the literary evidence see the excellent study by F. Jouan, "L'evocation des 
morts dans Ia tragedie grecque," RH R 98 {1981) 403-21. In the Frogs, faced 
with the crisis for tragedy, one is by contrast taken down to meet the heroes 
instead of having them come up. This must have been a conscious twist of the 
tradition on Aristophanes' part. 



GREEN, J. R., Carcinus and the Temple: a Lesson in the Staging of Tragedy , Greek, Roman and 
Byzantine Studies, 31:3 (1990:Fall) p.281 

284 CARCINUS AND THE TEMPLE 

of the ancient theatre, the use of panels. 11 Certainly there is no 
evidence of the sort of scenery we are used to, scenery that 
would disguise or alter the appearance of the central door in an 
explicit way. And the so-called Lycurgan skene with columns 
across the central part of the stage building, while later, would 
imply that the earlier version as used by Carcinus was not 
designed for full-scale naturalistic scenery either. 12 To the same 
end one could argue that if there had been scenery to distin­
guish between temple and tomb, the problem would have been 
glaringly obvious to those involved in the production before 
things reached this critical point. The function of the central 
door was indicated by the script of the play and the audience 
was used to this convention. It was this same convention (that 
the physical setting for the action was defined by the words) 
that lay at the source of Aristophanes' parody in the Thes­
mophoriazusae (411 B.c.) of Euripides' Helen, which had been 
staged in the previous year, recently enough for the audience to 
remember the staging quite readily. In lines 88Sff ("you have 
the effrontery to call the altar a tomb," etc.), he mocks the use 
of the structure which usually served as an altar and as a tomb, 
as Euripides had made so crystal clear in his script at 466, 528, 
544, 547, 551, and 556. He was not one to go in for Aeschylean 
obscurity. 13 But he would not have needed to place such 
emphasis on these things if the stage setting had made it self­
evident. 

This brings us to the second hypothesis. It seems reasonable 
to assume that the central door had served as a temple in the 

11 Among more recent works, A. L. Brown, "Three and Scene-Painting in 
Sophocles," PCPS 210 (1984) 1-17, has strengthened the case for "tpt'i~ o£ xa\ 
OlCTlvoypa<piav l:o<paxA:Tj~ being an interpolation at Poetics 1449a18-19. See also 
my survey in Lustrum 31 (1989) 7-95, esp.27f. Important too is H. Eristov, 
"Peinture romaine et texts antiques: informations et ambigu"ites," RA (1987) 
118-21. 

12 The validity of Dorpfeld's reconstruction has now been demonstrated by 
R. F. Townsend, "The Fourth-Century Skene of the Theatre of Dionysos at 
Athens," Hesperia 55 (1986) 421-38; see also L. Polacca," Ancora sulle porticus 
eumenicae di Vitruvio," AttiVenezia 137 (1978-79) 719-24; F. E. Winter, "The 
Stage of New Comedy," Phoenix 37 (1983) 38-47. For arguments that the fifth­
century stage building had columns, perhaps under the inspiration of the 
captured skene or tent of Xerxes, see more .recently H. Kenner, "Zur 
Archaologie des Dionysostheaters in Athen," Ojh 57 (1986-87) 55-91; L. 
Polacca, "La fronte di retroscena del teatro di Epidauro," NumAntCl7 (1978) 
83-93, and in AttiVenezia (supra). 

tJ Note especially Frogs 1122: Aeschylus was acra<pfl<; EV "ti!) <ppacret "tCOV 
7tpayJ.La"trov. 



GREEN, J. R., Carcinus and the Temple: a Lesson in the Staging of Tragedy , Greek, Roman and 
Byzantine Studies, 31:3 (1990:Fall) p.281 

J. R. GREEN 285 

earlier part of the play and that it changed its function for 
Amphiaraus' appearance: that is, one would have expected 
Carcinus to incorporate into the script some dialogue or 
description that would prompt the audience to think of the 
door as a tomb. To judge by his record, he cannot normally 
have been an incompetent and he must normally have been able 
to create the staged effect in his mind's eye when he was 
writing. We do not know if Carcinus produced the play himself 
(it seems to have been a little less common for the playwright to 
do so in the fourth century than it had been in the fifth), but for 
present purposes it does not matter. In TrGF Snell commented 
laconically that he did not know how the producer (whether 
Carcinus or another) could fail to notice, and this is the crux of 
the problem. One could add that it seems strange that even if it 
escaped the producer in rehearsal, the deficiency escaped the 
actors as well: actors were if anything more anxious than poets 
to win prizes at this period, and their livelihood as professionals 
depended on the quality of their performances. It seems 
probable that Theodorus acted in Carcinus' Aerope (Ael. VH 
14.40). Men of such stature would be unlikely to risk their 
reputations even if the fault was not directly attributable to 
them. We can only assume that this was another case of things 
running to the last minute and perhaps of an over-hasty cut in 
the script. 14 

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY 
July, 1990 

14 Cratinus (fr.237 K.=255 K.-A.) seems to make too much of having spent a 
whole two years on his play (contrast Aristophanes' rate of production in the 
420s). More especially see A. C. Cassio, "I tempi di composizione delle 
commedie attiche e una parafrasi di Aristofane in Galeno (Ar. Fr.346 K-A)," 
RivFil 115 (1987) 5-11, where he examines Aristophanes' bid for sympathy in 
the second Thesmophoriazusae by claiming that he was ill for the four 
months immediately prior to the performance (i.e., after the award of the 
chorus). For tragedy see recently C. W. Muller, Zur Datierung des sophokle­
ischen Qdipus (=AbhMainz 1984.5) 60-77, who argues for a normal two-year 
gap betwen tragedians' productions, but he is concerned with tetralogies in 
the fifth century. To write 160 plays, Carcinus must have worked at some 
speed.