10

Seeing Together
Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy
A. C. Duncan

10.1 Introduction

To focus spectators’ attention upon a significant part of a busy stage is a core

challenge of the theatre.1 Faced with a dense, dynamic, and multi-sensory
presentation, theatre-goers are continually tasked with establishing provisional
and fluid hierarchies of significance to make sense of a production. In today’s
theatre, spotlights and other lighting effects often assist spectators visually in this
endeavour, but these are relatively recent innovations. It is suggestive that soon
after its technical introduction in the eighteenth century, the ‘spotlight’ became a
common metaphor in English for delimited attention within and beyond the
theatre.2 The widespread theatrical and figurative use of the spotlight in our
modern era raises the question of how ancient dramatists focused their audience’s
attention without such devices.3
In this chapter, I propose that such spotlight effects were often achieved
through processes of social cognition and could be signalled by certain verbal
phrases. Such ‘sight invitations’, as I will call them, lead the audience to see
together, practising a focused and self-conscious form of joint attention at
moments of special dramatic importance. In addition to reducing spectators’
‘attentional load’ by marking certain aspects of the performance as significant,
these moments of seeing together often blurred distinctions between the internal
(i.e. ‘fictional’) and external (‘real-life’) audiences. By exploiting the cognitive
mechanisms of joint attention, sight invitations enriched the experience of Attic
tragedy, involving theatre-goers more deeply within the epistemic, emotional,
and thematic issues raised in the plays.

1 The task of directing audience attention falls, unevenly and in different ways, upon playwrights,
directors, and actors alike. On attention in theatre generally, see Hamilton 2018; on actors and atten-
tion in particular, see Blair 2008, 61–2.
2 Oxford English Dictionary s.v. ‘spotlight, n.’ 1.b; cf. the earlier ‘limelight, n.’
3 For a complementary but rather different approach to this question, see the discussions of
Meineck 2011 and 2018b, especially 96–8.

A. C. Duncan, Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy In: Minds on Stage: Greek Tragedy and Cognition.
Edited by: Felix Budelmann and Ineke Sluiter, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192888938.003.0010
174 A. C. Duncan

The ancient Greek theatre had a busy stage. Even in the most austere concep-
tion of Attic drama, the totality of performers, costumes, properties, movements,
and sounds inevitably overwhelms theatre-goers’ cognitive capacity for detail.4
Unable to process the whole in full, ancient spectators, like their modern counter-
parts, were compelled to become selective in their attention. This focus must be
intelligently managed by playmakers, especially those working within a genre
such as tragedy that demands more than desultory engagement from its audience
for its fullest effect. To follow the narrative and thematic essentials of a developing
play, theatre-goers must be guided through a series of crucial junctures and
events. Readers must depend upon words alone, but those in the theatre follow
not only the performance onstage but also the collective gasps, head-turns, and
other social behaviours that cascade across the audience. Group psychology, that
is to say, shapes theatrical attention in ways that literary theorists, both ancient
and modern, have tended to overlook. Recent scholarship on theatrical cognition
has explored methods by which both ancient and modern theatre-makers help
focus individual spectators’ attention, but the significance of collective—and,
more precisely, joint—attention in the theatre has, until very recently,
eluded study.5
Joint attention is a basic, robustly studied feature of human social behaviour
that may be distinguished from the somewhat wider concept of ‘shared’ atten-
tion.6 To attend jointly to something, it is not sufficient for multiple subjects to
attend to the same object at the same time, as individuals across a hemisphere
might regard the same moon. Rather, for conditions of joint attention to obtain,
two or more individuals must attend to an object in a way that is ‘mutually mani-
fest’ to each participant, as when those gathered around a fire gaze at its flame.7 In
practising joint attention, subjects not only are aware of others attending to the
same object but also believe those others to be reciprocally aware of the subjects’
own attention. Such an ‘intersubjective’ state both entails and facilitates some
level of coordination, however slight or implicit, among participants. It also serves
as a dynamic basis for joint activities of various sorts, from simple expressions of
emotion to complex deliberations. Archetypally a visual phenomenon, joint

4 In cognitivist terms, theatrical performance presents a high perceptual load. On focused atten-
tion in such a context, see Lavie, Beck, and Konstantinou 2014.
5 For instance, Budelmann and Van Emde Boas 2020, 76–9 consider ‘asymmetrical’ joint attention
between the audience and the Greek tragic messenger, taking an approach broadly complementary to
this chapter’s. On theatrical attention in general, see especially Blair 2006, 168–9 and 2008, 61–2,
McConachie 2008, 23–32, Tribble 2011, 35–40, McConachie 2013, 40–1; regarding Shakespearean
theatre, see Lyne 2014.
6 Theorizing digital media, Shteynberg 2015, 581 offers a definition of ‘shared attention’ he believes
more accurate, efficient, and generally applicable than joint attention as classically defined by Baron-
Cohen 1995. Although many of Shteynberg’s observations about shared attention have application to
Attic drama (especially in our increasingly electronic age), here I retain the established, narrow
definition.
7 Sperber and Wilson 1995 (first edition 1986) introduced this compact, alliterative phrase.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 175

attention has been observed or hypothesized across the other senses as well.8 Joint
attention has been studied most extensively in relationship to developmental
psychology and autism spectrum disorders, but as practised among mature neu-
rotypical subjects, studies suggest joint attention has broad implications for
Theory of Mind, common knowledge, cooperative action, emotional response,
and even language itself.9
The theatrical ramifications of joint attention are wide-ranging. Applicable to
performance in general, joint attention is especially pertinent to the conditions of
ancient drama, when plays were performed in broad daylight, enclosed within a
roughly semi-circular seating area where spectators simultaneously observed one
another as they watched the performance onstage.10 Although it has become
something of a truism to note, it is nevertheless telling that the Greeks called this
place, so favourable to joint attention, the theatron, the ‘seeing-place’, and its
attendees theatai, ‘spectators’. These words reflected and shaped ancient cultural
attitudes about dramatic experience and reveal that Greek theatre-goers recog-
nized themselves as an important, even integral, part of the spectacle. In theatres
of the ancient Mediterranean, far more than those of today, vision was manifestly
collective and attention, correspondingly, joint. Although our understanding of
its neurological mechanisms remains inchoate, empirical studies demonstrate
that joint attention promotes information processing, improves memory, and
generally enhances what might be called ‘engagement’.11 Laboratory findings are
not always applicable ‘in the wild’, nor are the dynamics of something as complex
as visual attention unaffected by culture or convention.12 Still, by adhering to a
minimal definition—namely, mutually manifest attention—the concept of joint
attention provides a useful framework for considering cognitive processes pertin-
ent to the ancient theatre.13

8 On joint attention (henceforth ‘JA’ in the notes) and communication, see Clark 1996, 50–67. On
JA and music, see Cochrane 2009 and Zangwill 2012; on JA and touch, see Batero 2016.
9 On JA, autism, and Theory of Mind, see Baron-Cohen 1995. JA has many intentional effects,
from advancing discourse (see Clark 1996) to anticipating collective remembrance (see Seeman 2016).
Eilan et al. 2005 provide several chapters on the broader relevance of JA. On group attention and
emotional intensification, see Shteynberg et al. 2014. On JA and literary studies, see especially Tobin
2008, Currie 2010, 86–108, Polvinen 2013, and Lively 2016.
10 Rehm 2002, 37–44 observes that the theatre was similar in both form and function to other
archetypal locations of joint activity in Athens, such as the pnyx or bouleutêrion.
11 Seeman 2011 offers a useful overview of core issues regarding JA. On JA and information pro-
cessing, see especially Kim and Mundy 2012, 1–2. On JA and working memory, see Gregory and
Jackson 2017. On the ‘amplification’ of shared experiences entailing JA, see Clark et al. 2014. For an
overview of the potential consequences of the related concept of ‘shared attention’, see Shteynberg 2015.
12 Gibson 1979 issues the classic warning of difficulties encountered when assessing cognition ‘in
the wild’, although Hutchins 1995 revisits the issue more optimistically. On the difficulties of applying
laboratory models of attention to theatrical experience, see Hamilton 2018, 216–18.
13 It is generally assumed that the modern minds, which form the empirical basis of current neuro-
scientific research, are sufficiently close to those of the ancient Mediterranean: see, for instance,
Larson 2016, xiii. But as culture undeniably determines (social) vision, caution must be exercised
when extrapolating laboratory findings not only onto the stage but also onto ancient minds. On the
composite nature of tragic vision, see Noel 2019b.
176 A. C. Duncan

Work in the cognitive sciences typically seeks to identify and isolate specific
consequences of joint attention, but here I am concerned with joint attention’s
composite effects. In particular, I aim to explore ways playwrights might use joint
attention to involve spectators more deeply within the dramatic experience. I use
the word ‘involve’ since it captures the social and affective consequences of joint
attention central to the claims of this chapter.14 Socially, by definition, joint atten-
tion places theatre-goers within intersubjective networks based upon their com-
mon focus, involving individuals within established or emergent communities of
viewers. Affectively, joint attention fosters conditions in which theatre-goers feel
themselves personally involved in issues dramatized by the play: entangled in
passively witnessing a coup, for instance, or groping through the fog of an
ambiguous report. Aligning (or contrasting) the mental experiences of spectators
not only with their fellow theatre-goers but also with those of the minds repre-
sented onstage, joint attention’s ramifications affect the phenomenology of theat-
rical experience in ways impossible to disentangle.15
Although joint attention is operative to some degree during the entire theatri-
cal experience, its scope may be narrowed for special effect. Theatre-makers cre-
ate such ‘spotlight’ moments through diverse means, the majority of which fall
outside actors’ lines—and therefore, for the study of ancient drama, (mostly)
beyond analytical reach. Some methods, however, are verbally encoded. It is a
certain set of these expressions, which I will be calling ‘sight invitations’, that this
chapter draws upon to frame and illustrate joint attention’s special effects on
Attic drama.
Let sight invitations be defined as capaciously addressed verbal utterances, the
ostensible goal of which is to direct visual attention towards a discrete target
within space. By ‘capaciously addressed’ in a theatrical context, I mean that even
when an individual or group onstage is the ostensible recipient of the invitation,
the utterance leaves open the possibility of involving further hearers (including,
I will suggest, theatre-goers) who consider themselves addressed and are in this
way ‘hailed’ by the utterance.16 Although relatively simple in its expression, this
definition applies to such a large and varied set of phrases in Greek drama that it
confounds systematic study. Many methodological obstacles stand in the way of
establishing a clear boundary for the set: not only are numerous lexemes involved,
most obviously so-called ‘verbs of seeing’ (e.g. horan, skopein, leussein, etc.) and
their compound forms, but these verbs may also be couched in a variety of syn-
tactical constructions, including imperatives (e.g. ‘Look!’), interrogatives (‘Don’t
you see?’), and hortatory subjunctives (‘Let’s see . . .’). Beyond or in conjunction

14 I also owe the term to Hedreen 2007, whose study of Athenian eye-cups has many intersubjective
resonances.
15 On theatrical phenomenology, see especially States 1985; for a phenomenological approach to
the space of Attic tragedy, see Weiss 2020.
16 On ‘hailing’ in Attic drama, see Jacobson 2011, 16.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 177

with such phrases, deictic expressions also direct visual attention; however, much
like seeing verbs, demonstratives cannot always be determined as having visual
significance unambiguously.17 Despite the lexical and grammatical variety of
sight invitations, unity may be found in what speech-act theorists call the expres-
sion’s illocutionary force—that is, the speaker’s perceived intention in speaking.18
Sight invitations openly direct the visual attention of an indefinitely-sized audi-
ence, and are therefore a primary means of focusing joint attention in the theatre.
Although the ability to locate a common target in theatrical space is essential
for sight invitations’ ability to focus spectators’ joint attention, the object itself can
be immaterial. To return to this chapter’s opening metaphor, I am concerned here
with the spotlight itself rather than the objects it illuminates. Indeed, sight invita-
tions may even focus joint attention on invisible objects. Take for example the
well-known soliloquy in Act II of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which the Scottish
chief asks, ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ Although Macbeth is alone
onstage, the speaker’s capaciously addressed question invites hearers to attend
visually to what (in most productions, at any rate) is a physically absent target,
fixed in dramatic space only by the actor’s gaze and gesture. Macbeth’s sight invi-
tation involves theatre-goers powerfully in the first of several hallucinations in
the drama, and the scene is of crucial dramatic importance. Putting differences in
dramatic conventions between Elizabethan and fifth-century Attic theatre aside,
the fame of this example from Macbeth not only demonstrates the impact sight
invitations can have on audiences, it also hints at their particular usefulness in
calling attention to characters’ altered mental states—a point to which we
shall return.
Rather than attempt a systematic study of sight invitations in Attic tragedy,
here I offer close readings of a few well-known and exemplary scenes, insights
from which may be generally applied. First, a speech from Aeschylus’s Libation
Bearers introduces sight invitations in their fifth-century dramatic context, dem-
onstrating how a series of ambiguously addressed directives gradually involves
theatrical audiences within intersubjective networks that seem to include those
in the play. Next, two scenes from Sophocles’ Women of Trachis show how sight
invitations may entangle theatre-goers not only within a community of spectators
practising joint attention but also in the drama’s core thematic concerns of know-
ledge and vision. Third, two passages from Euripides’ Bacchae reveal the ironies
and epistemic limits of joint attention in cases when, as with Macbeth’s ‘air-drawn
dagger’, the speaker’s vision differs significantly from his or her addressees’.
In scenes bookending the fall of the Theban royal house, sight invitations

17 In Roman drama, the Latin demonstrative ecce is far more frequent than imperative forms such
as vide(te), etc., and almost supersedes them entirely as a sight invitation.
18 Austin 1965, 98–9, introduces and defines the concept of illocutionary utterances, which are
expanded by Searle 1969; see my discussion below, Section 10.2.
178 A. C. Duncan

underscore the ‘doubled’ or ‘blended’ nature of theatrical vision, as it becomes

clear that attention which is ostensibly joint is, in fact, practised upon radically
different premises. Yet, even when its epistemic and social benefits are called vio-
lently into question, joint attention retains its affective power. Its resolution
underscores the emotions of a particularly horrific recognition scene. Altogether,
examples from across Athens’ three major playwrights illustrate the diverse ways
joint attention involved audiences in fifth-century tragedy; commonalities
between these scenes, furthermore, suggest how sight invitations first developed
to exploit spectators’ cognition in theatre had an important afterlife as a literary
trope capable of conveying a characteristically tragic combination of vision, inter-
subjectivity, and extreme emotion.

10.2 Sight invitations as speech acts and

catalysts for joint attention

By what mechanisms does an invitation to ‘Look!’, uttered by a fictional character

in performance, direct theatre-goers’ collective attention? The communicational
dynamics are hardly simple, as the meanings of the script quickly multiply in per-
formance. One may begin, however, by asking how the words themselves are
received by the theatrical audience. In contrast to their contemporary Old
Comedians, who revelled in flaunting the convention, Attic tragedians were
reluctant to break the ‘fourth wall’ separating actors and audience to address
theatre-goers expressly as theatre-goers.19 The question of actors’ asides and other
forms of direct address in fifth-century tragedy is relevant to the present discus-
sion, but special cases of more or less overt references to the performance context
should not distract from the broad and imaginative collusion always taking place
between theatre-goer, performer, and playwright, upon which theatrical commu-
nication ultimately rests.20
Audience address does not need not to be direct in order to be effective, and
playwrights have many tools at their disposal to steer their spectators’ gaze. One

19 Taplin 1977, 394–5 summarizes the situation: ‘there is not a single place in surviving tragedy
where the world of the play expressly acknowledged the world of the audience’, but ‘all the words of
every tragedy are meant for the ears of the audience’ (emphasis original). Semiotic accounts of theatri-
cal communication, such as that of Segre 1980, ingeniously place audience address from the play-
wright within a structuralist framework. But the simplicity and flexibility of cognitivist models, and in
particular ‘conceptual blending’ as championed by Fauconnier and Turner 2002, have begun to call
some received distinctions into question: see McConachie 2008.
20 On asides and similar practices in Attic tragedy, see Mauduit 2015 and Paré-Rey 2015 more
generally. In Anglophone circles, the classic work on the topic remains that of Bain 1977, whom
Chapman 1983, Dedoussi 1995, and others follow in using the phrase ‘dramatic illusion’ to describe
the maintenance of pretence. Since theatre-goers are in fact willing and active co-creators of the fic-
tion (a truth all of these authors recognize), dramatic collusion is the more accurate expression.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 179

such tool is to place theatre-goers in communicative positions that mirror or

extend those of characters onstage, an alignment of actor and audience that
occurs whenever characters themselves become ‘internal’ spectators within the
scene. At such moments, certain phrases may exploit the overlapping visual-
spatial circumstances of theatre-goers and fictional characters, conflating play-
internal and -external audiences in ways that—at least from a practical or
behavioural perspective—invite theatre-goers to participate in (and even partly
identify with) visual communities in the fiction of the play.
To help analyse and explain how sight invitations verbally involve spectators,
I adopt terms and concepts from the speech-act theory first framed by
John L. Austin and subsequently developed by John Searle.21 For Austin and
Searle, invitations, together with commands and requests, constitute a category of
speech act called ‘directives’. Linguists today differ on the category’s precise
boundaries, but for our purposes it will be sufficient to follow Searle in defining
directive utterances as ‘attempts . . . by the speaker to get the hearer to do
something’.22 In order to function properly, directives must be configured to
match salient circumstances of communication, known more technically as the
pragmatics of the discourse. An important piece of pragmatic information for any
directive is its addressee: those who not only (over)hear the directive but also are
intended to hear the directive and understand it to apply to themselves. In theat-
rical communication, addressees may be determined verbally by the script (via
grammatical number, vocative phrases, etc.) or through various non-verbal cues
in performance (e.g. gestures, intonation, etc.). However, ambiguities of language
and gesture often leave the identity of the addressee(s) incompletely determined.
Ancient theatre-goers, not unlike modern readers, relied on processes of elimin-
ation to determine, sometimes gradually, a directive’s addressee. In such circum-
stances, pragmatic evidence that renders a directive inappropriate (what Austin
labels ‘infelicitous’ and Searle ‘defective’) to an otherwise viable addressee offers
precious assistance in narrowing a directive’s scope.
In particular, two of Austin’s so-called ‘felicity conditions’ provide useful dis-
tinctions for interpreting the communicative dynamics of sight invitations within
dramatic performance. As systematized by Searle, these conditions are defined as
follows:

21 Outside linguistics circles, Austin 1965 and Searle 1969 remain classic works. Searle 1969, 78,
cautions against applying speech-act theory to such ‘parasitic’ forms of language as ‘play-acting’, but it
is the very parasitism of sight invitations (i.e. their ability to communicate at two different levels,
simultaneously) that is of interest here. I am not suggesting theatre-goers consider themselves directly
addressed by the fictional character’s speech act; rather, I propose that a strategic and sufficiently close
overlap of pragmatic conditions between fictional and real addressees enables theatre-goers to
imaginatively identify with (or, in the terms of Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 267, ‘selectively project’
themselves as) ‘play-internal’ spectators.
22 Searle 1976, 11.
180 A. C. Duncan

the preparatory condition: The Speaker believes the Hearer is able to do the Act; and
the essential condition: The Speaker’s utterance counts as an attempt to get the
Hearer to do the Act.23

Putting aside for a moment the knotty question of who is the ‘Speaker’ in theatri-
cal communication, the preparatory condition dictates that the vast majority of
tragic commands (e.g. ‘Stop!’, ‘Help!’, ‘Give!’, ‘Dance!’, etc.) are defective when
addressed to theatre-goers who, by well-established convention, do not interrupt
stage action. By contrast, the act of seeing not only is non-disruptive but also was
understood to be the paradigmatic act of Greek theatre-goers (theatai, or ‘specta-
tors’, as mentioned above). Sight invitations, alongside similar commands
(‘Listen!’, ‘Consider!’, etc.) constitute a special set of directives which do not fail
the preparatory condition when addressed to spectators.
Although it may at first seem banal, the ‘essential condition’ is in fact also use-
ful for framing the level(s) at which playwright, actor, and character communi-
cate as ‘Speaker’ with the dramatic audience. Scenes from Aristophanic drama
illustrate how phrases uttered in the fifth-century theatre might be interpreted as
communications originating from the character (generally), playwright (in the
parabasis, especially), or even actor onstage—sometimes in rapid, unmarked suc-
cession.24 Differences in generic conventions notwithstanding, Old Comedy
reveals the complexity of identity inherent in theatrical communication as well as
the capacity of fifth-century Athenian audiences to attribute statements to a
variety of ‘Speakers’.25 Directives which satisfy both preparatory and essential
conditions when addressed to theatre-goers have the unique potential to serve
as verbal conduits for overlapping speech acts. Operating simultaneously at
several communicative levels within a shared theatrical space, sight invitations
blur boundaries between fictional and real addressees to such an extent that sub-
jects’ visual activity may be said to be practically joint even as the conventional
mimetic boundary of the fourth wall is maintained.
Speech-act theory provides one account for how sight invitations might verbally
communicate across the fourth wall, but this is not the only mechanism by which
such expressions focus theatre-goers’ attention. Even without words guiding them,
audiences routinely follow the gaze and gesture of figures onstage, directing their
collective attention in ways difficult to distinguish from joint attention as practised
outside the theatrical context. In this process the composite or ‘blended’ figure of
the embodied actor-character is a crucial common node, linking networks of

23 Following Searle 1969, 60–71; cf. Austin 1965, 136–7.

24 Cf. Ar. Thesm. 1015 and 1060, with Sommerstein’s (1994) notes ad loc. These passages exemplify
how the layered identities of speaker, addressee, and location could destabilize the pragmatics of the-
atrical communication.
25 Within, but significantly also beyond, Old Comedy, attributions of tragic characters’ statements
and opinions to their respective playwrights suggests a low threshold for authorial communication.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 181

real and fictive viewing subjects by participating in simultaneous (although

theoretically separate) ‘mutually manifest’ attention within each group.26
In ancient drama, the fusion of actor and character was both mediated and
marked by an outsized mask—a visage which, although a patently artificial means
of signifying the fictional world of the play, nevertheless perfectly tracked the
direction of the performer’s gaze underneath.27 Peter Meineck has labelled the
Greek dramatic mask a ‘mind tool’ fashioned to direct onlookers’ visually acute,
foveal, gaze.28 If indeed the mask is so important for fostering focused joint atten-
tion in the theatre, then sight invitations, which function almost as spoken stage
directions that determine the orientation of the performers’ heads, are particu-
larly powerful (and verbally encoded) catalysts for shared attention between actor
and audience.
Whether through purely verbal or through multi-modal means, then, from at
least the time of Aeschylus sight invitations were used to activate focused joint
attention in the Attic theatre, involving audiences at moments of special dramatic
and thematic interest. It remains, now, to explore the dynamics of these expres-
sions within the context of their works.

10.3 Capacious invitations and conflated addressees

in Libation Bearers

In a climactic scene from Libation Bearers, a string of sight invitations surrepti-

tiously involves theatre-goers within the intersubjective visual community of the
play. Following a tense series of events culminating in the murder of his mother
Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, Orestes emerges out of the palace and
into the public eye to exhibit the bodies of the slain. Besides their corpses, Orestes
exhibits a large piece of fabric which he claims had fatally ensnared his father. The
speech he offers at this crucial juncture is remarkable for not only its prominent
use of sight invitations but also the ambiguity of their addressee. Orestes
proclaims:

Look at the twin tyranny of the land,

the father-killing destroyers of the house…
Look again, those hearing of these evils, 980

26 On theatre as a blended space, see the chapters by Michael Carroll and Hanna Gołąb in this vol-
ume. On the blend of actor and character, see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 266–7 and McConachie
2008, 44.
27 Masks restrict peripheral vision in particular: see Vervain and Wiles 2009, 270 and Meineck
2018b, 131. Those who experienced dancing in a dramatic chorus—no small share of the Attic audi-
ence, by some accounts—would have had personal and embodied experience of the mask’s narrow,
frontal scope.
28 Meineck 2018b, 96–8 and 2019.
182 A. C. Duncan

At the device, my wretched father’s bonds,

The fetters of his coupled hands and feet.
Spread it out and, standing around in a circle,
Show the man’s coverings, so that father may see—
Not my father, but the one beholding all these things, 985
Helios (the Sun)—the unholy work of my mother,
so that he may at some point stand as my witness,
that I have justly pursued this murder,
my mother’s . . .
τ π τ
π τ τ τ άτ π τ …
τ ,τ π , 980
τ η ά η , ἀ π τ ,
π τ π .
τ τ τ π τ
τ τ ἀ , π τ ,
,ἀ πά τ π πτ τά 985
, ητ τ ,
π ά τ π τ
τ τ
τ ητ . . .
(Aesch. Cho. 973–4, 980–9)29

Orestes’ presentation illustrates the forensic value of joint attention. Like an

expert orator, Orestes uses a highly visual discourse to make post-factum wit-
nesses of his audience, bolstering his credibility and uniting his audience through
their shared subjectivity.30 Uniquely theatrical powers of joint attention, however,
are also at work as Orestes’ repeated sight invitations gradually bridge the mimetic
gap between stage characters and theatrical audience.
Through accumulating referential ambiguities, theatre-goers become entan-
gled not only within the intersubjective visual community of the mythical scene
but within its politics as well. As Orestes emerges from the palace, he utters a
plural, but otherwise pragmatically bald, sight invitation: ‘Look!’ ( , 973).
‘Who’, both theatre-goer and reader might well ask, ‘is being invited to look?’ It is
the performer’s prerogative to specify the addressee through gesture or inton-
ation; and yet, perhaps more than any other example from extant tragedy, this
scene benefits from exploiting the pragmatic ambiguity of Orestes’ sight

29 Following Page 1972.

30 On such ‘visual discourse’ in Attic oratory, see O’Connell 2016, esp. 113–18. For a cognitive
approach to the verbal imagery of this scene, see Duncan 2021. Orestes establishes what Clark 1996
calls ‘common ground’ with his audience, a concept discussed further below.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 183

invitation. Several lines later, Orestes reiterates, ‘Look, again’ ( τ , 980),

now directed towards a verbally explicit, although rather tautological, addressee:
‘those hearing of these evils’ (τ π , 980). This curious phrase has
sparked much debate over the staging of the scene and the pragmatic limits of
Orestes’ intended audience.31 But even if one settles upon a plausible addressee,
such as the Chorus or a broader (staged or imagined) Argive community, the
flatly plural command remains open to incorporating further viewing subjects, as
indeed it soon does.
Instructing his attendants to unfurl the cloth, Orestes next calls upon an
extraordinary spectator: ‘so that father may see— / not mine, but the one who
sees all these things / the Sun’ (985–6). Feinting initially towards Agamemnon’s
underworld shade, Orestes pivots upwards in an appeal to an all-seeing figure
which, in this quasi–juridical context, one might well expect to be ‘father’ Zeus.
In unexpected enjambement, however, Orestes names the viewer par excellence of
early Greek poetry, the sun god Helios, whose remarkable vision is, itself, visible
in the form of light.32 The sun’s presence in the sky, like the blended figure of the
actor-character, presents a material anchor that helps bridge the mimetic divide
between mythical Mycenae and fifth-century Athens. Moreover, as a viewer him-
self, Helios serves as a crucial node connecting intersubjective visual communi-
ties both real and imagined. And yet, by appealing to Helios’ transcendent
spectatorship in this roundabout way, Orestes hints at the presence of other
supernatural onlookers, such as Zeus, who see while remaining themselves
unseen—a position not unlike that of theatre-goers or, as soon becomes a matter
of some urgency, the Erinyes.
During his remarkable exposition of the bodies and the cloth, Orestes con-
founds the limits of his addressee to such an extent that, when he marks his
departure as a suppliant to Delphi with a final capacious sight invitation, ‘Watch
me’ ( τ , 1034), theatre-goers might question whether they themselves are
being asked to bear witness. Ironically, it is at this very moment that Orestes’ own
vision becomes idiosyncratic and hallucinatory. He claims to see the terrifying
figures of the Erinyes clearly before him ( , 1054; , 1057), a vision the
Chorus dismiss as mental disturbance. Orestes replies ‘You do not see these
women, but I do’ ( τ τά , , 1061), the linked

31 Orestes’s capacious entreaties and the awkwardness of addressing a chorus of slave women as
π , a term more naturally applied to the enfranchised male citizenry of a democratic polis, have
led some to suppose a crowd of supernumerary Argives onstage for a grand finale. Although Taplin
1977, 357–8, Garvie 1986, ad 973–1076, and McCall 1990, 25 all dismiss such grandeur, Taplin allows
for ‘an invisible audience of citizens’—a role for which theatre-goers might feel some natural affinity.
32 For Garvie 1986, ad 984–6, the reference to a father is ‘initially ambiguous’. On Helios as a para-
digmatic spectator, see Blundell et al. 2013, 35n29 and my discussion (with notes) of Soph. Trach.
99–102 below. On the Sun and the ‘notion of vision’s visibility’ widely held across the ancient Greek
and Roman worlds, see Bielfeldt 2016, 122–6. On sight and the ancient senses, see Squire 2016 and, on
reflexive vision, Grethlein 2016.
184 A. C. Duncan

pronouns and particles marking this sudden schism within the intersubjective
visual community. The chorus’ inability to see the Furies disrupts the established
visual alignment between Orestes, play-internal characters, and theatre-goers, a
dissolution of joint attention that underscores Orestes’ cognitive alterity. But as in
the dagger scene of Macbeth, through gesture and gaze (note deictic τά , 1061)
the actor playing Orestes may enter into new intersubjective communion with the
audience as they, too, visualize the Erinyes onstage.
Exploiting the theatrical potential of vague and capacious addressees, this
series of directives from Libation Bearers provides an orienting example of how
sight invitations involve theatre-goers in moments of marked and dramatically
significant joint attention. When theatre-goers’ identity as spectators overlaps sig-
nificantly with that of figures onstage whose visual space they share, distinctions
between play-internal and -external viewing communities become blurred. Aided
by common spatial orientation and shared reference points such as the panoptic
Sun, blended actor-characters and involved theatre-goers participate in meaning-
ful visual communion even across the theatre’s conventional mimetic divide.
Orestes’ sight invitations do more than leverage the forensic political power of
joint attention: they engage theatre-goers within the political and thematic struc-
tures of the play.

10.4 Joint attention and joint knowledge in

Women of Trachis

Although sight invitations occur in every extant Attic tragedy, Sophoclean drama,
and Women of Trachis in particular, employs the set to an unmatched degree. This
frequency reflects in part the complex, profound, and often thematically central
connections between sight and knowledge across Sophocles’ dramatic oeuvre.33
Indeed, as mentioned above, the remarkable semantic overlap between sight and
knowledge in Greek often makes it difficult to determine whether a given ‘sight
invitation’ is principally visual in its significance. A verb such as π , for
instance, might in various contexts mean ‘behold’, ‘consider’, or both simultan-
eously. Attention is practised in any event, and Sophocles exploits the slippage
between jointly seeing and jointly knowing to substantial dramatic effect. As
examples from Women of Trachis will illustrate, sight invitations (as I will con-
tinue to call them) involve spectators not only within the intersubjective networks
of the play but in characters’ epistemological quandaries as well. When deployed
at moments of special visual ambiguity or obscurity in the play, sight invitations
may call attention to the epistemic gaps of individual perception, highlighting

33 On vision in Sophocles, see Seale 1982. On vision and knowledge in Greek tragedy generally, see
Thumiger 2013.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 185

ways one’s own vision, just as another’s verbal report, may be unsubstantiated and
unreliable unless practised in the context of robust joint attention. Since vision in
Attic drama is fundamentally mediated by characters’ verbal reports, this process
has metatheatrical resonance as well, as sight invitations engage characters and
theatre-goers in simultaneous, parallel processes of interpretation.
The unstable relationship between sight and knowledge is a recurrent theme in
Women of Trachis.34 Deianeira, the wife of Heracles, introduces the motif early in
her prologue. Recalling the fight between Heracles and the river god Achelaos,
the victor of which would claim her as wife, Deianeira apologizes that she cannot
narrate an event which she could not even bring herself to view or recall: ‘The
manner of the struggle I cannot say, for I don’t know it—whoever was sitting
there not terrified of the sight, he could tell you.’35 Deianeira’s apology articulates
the affective constraints placed on individual vision, as the trauma of the event
either prevented her perception at the time or has subsequently blocked its recol-
lection. Thinking beyond her individual experience, however, Deianeira gestures
hypothetically towards an indefinite ( τ ), impassive (ἀτ ), and almost
theatrical (cf. , ‘seated’) spectator. In the tragic universe of the play that her
prologue begins to establish, public acts are framed as being open to any number
of real or imagined viewers, but with little sense of ‘mutually manifest’ awareness
between these subjects.
The unsettling combination of limited individual vision and looming panoptic
presence is further developed when the eponymous Chorus take the stage. Like
Orestes in Libation Bearers, the women of Trachis invoke Helios, here not to serve
as fellow witness, but rather to join their search for the missing Heracles, whose
belated return their mistress Deianeira anxiously awaits. The Chorus ask Helios
to disclose the hero’s location, singing ‘Speak, you who are most powerful with
respect to the eye’, but their prayer elicits no response.36 In contrast to the confi-
dence Orestes places in joint attention in Libation Bearers, in Women of Trachis,
the Sun god’s silence underscores the pervading sense of limited and discon-
nected vision within the play. Vision is simultaneously fundamental and flawed
across many of Sophocles’ works, but as dramatized in Women of Trachis, the
epistemological challenge posed by vision is essentially one of community con-
firmation. Given the unreliability of any individual’s senses, true knowledge must
be predicated upon networks of viewers and authorities. In such a context, sight
invitations become calls for corroboration as much as coordination, and joint
attention serves as a crucial check against the errancy of private perception and
interpretation.

34 On the play’s epistemological concerns, see Lawrence 1978, Roselli 1982, and Heiden 1989.
35 Soph. Trach. 21–3, τ π π | π ’· ’· ἀ ’ τ |
ἀτ τ , ’ , following Lloyd-Jones and Wilson’s 1990 text here and throughout.
36 τ τ τ , Soph. Trach. 102.
186 A. C. Duncan

The play’s first sight invitations occur in its first stasimon, at the end of a
paean to Apollo and Artemis. Transitioning away from divine praise, the
chorus-women take a sudden, Dionysian turn, adopting the personae of
maenads before turning to address Deianeira. Both transitions are punctuated
by sight invitations:

Ch. (Sung) Look, it arouses me—Euoi!—the ivy, spinning me around in

Bacchic contest! Io, io, Paean! (Spoken or chanted) See, see, dear lady! You
may look on these things directly before your eyes, in all clarity.
De. I see, dear women, and it has not escaped my regard, the sight of this band.
Χο. ἀ τ ά
,
τ
π τ
ά·
, ·
τά ἀ τ π
π πά τ .
Δη. , , τ
π ,τ τ . (217–26)

The remarkable self-reference to choral song and dance in this passage has
received much attention, but scholars have largely passed over the sight vocabu-
lary that involves theatre-goers and both frames and enables the reflexive poetics
of the scene.37 The chorus-women begin by singing ‘Look!’ ( , 217), a forerun-
ner to a rapid series of sight invitations that, in their overall effect, sustain focused
joint attention throughout the scene.38 Echoes of this initial can be heard five
lines later in the singular active imperative, , uttered as the choral lyrics draw
to a close in brief dimeters.39 Like the indeclinable interjection (and like

37 See especially Henrichs 1995.

38 Ancient texts did not mark tonality, leaving the precise meaning of the word unclear. On the
accent of , cf. Hdn. 1.417.27. Most modern editors join Lloyd-Jones and Wilson in printing an
oxytone rather than circumflex accent (i.e. , not ). The two forms are related, being the
fossilization of the earlier aorist middle imperative, (cf. French voilà, etc.): see Nordgren 2015,
20–2. By the fifth century, the interjection had become divorced from the verb’s original visual mean-
ing (cf. e.g. S. Aj. 860, LSJ s.v. II), but its etymology remained obvious. In melodic performance, a
firm aural distinction between and might have been difficult to maintain: for modern com-
parisons, see List 1961 and Wong and Diehl 2002. At any rate, the linguistic ambiguity is compounded
by the general polysemy of choral lyric and choral self-presentation, on which see Peponi 2015.
39 The hiatus preserved in the manuscripts’ at 222 has given editors pause, leading some to
print only a single command. Davies 1991 ad loc. entertains, but does not endorse, Schroeder’s
emendation, . The precise text would colour the meaning and reception of this directive in
context, but is ultimately immaterial to my larger argument, since any of these readings would meet
my definition of a sight invitation.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 187

Orestes’ initial directive in Libation Bearers 978, ), the addressee of is

initially ambiguous, inviting theatre-goers to share in the subjective position of a
play-internal viewer, just as the Chorus, themselves, project awareness of the
Dionysian festival context. A vocative phrase, ‘dear woman’ ( ), soon
specifies that it is Deianeira who is addressed, reasserting the dramatic space as
Trachis. Yet even as the addressee is pinned down, the intended target of her gaze
is left undetermined.
Towards what should Deianeira (and formerly hailed theatrical spectators)
now look? Fulfilling this expectation, a deictic pronoun, ‘these things’ (τά ’, 223)
opens the next verse, but this vague referent, if left undetermined by gesture or
intonation, introduces new ambiguities. The chorus-leader is curiously emphatic
about the self-evident nature of this visual target, which is described as being ‘directly
before your eyes’ (ἀ τ π ... π , 223) and ‘in all clarity’ ( , 224).
It is ironic, then, that the pronoun’s referent has proven so difficult for modern
scholars to determine. While some interpret the deictic as anaphoric, others pre-
fer a cataphoric referent, most obviously the arrival of the messenger Lichas and
his company.40 In the event that verbal uncertainty is maintained in performance,
however, this ambiguous visual target reveals another important consequence of
theatrical sight invitations. Once a directive to ‘Look!’ is uttered and a visual tar-
get is needed to complete the meaning of the scene, a collaborative and dynamic
effort begins among viewers to settle upon a commonly recognized object for
their joint attention.
This collective, provisional process of spectatorship is comparable to what
Herbert Clark identifies as a fundamental communicational imperative to
establish ‘common ground’—the mutually recognized basis for continuing
conversation.41 Although theatre is a remarkably complex and sophisticated form
of communication, it relies upon the basic need to establish clear and mutually
recognized ‘common ground’ to support the ongoing imaginative collusion between
actors and audience. Clark’s terminology is recent, but examples from our earliest
texts (most notably Cassandra in Agamemnon, but scores of other cases as well,
especially from Old Comedy) make clear that Athenian playwrights were fascin-
ated by communication breakdowns resulting from such unstable common
ground as vague pronouns, metaphorical expressions, and the like. Ambiguities
may lead to productive ironies and strategic misunderstandings in a carefully
scripted exchange, but when presented haphazardly to the audience they wreak

40 Jebb 1892, 37 and Easterling 1982, ad loc. treat τά ’ anaphorically, referring back to what Jebb
calls ‘the good tidings (180ff.) of which their [sc. the chorus women’s] minds are full’—verbal reports
that will be instantiated with the arrival of Lichas and his train. Davies 1991 and Kamerbeek 1970
suggest instead that τά ’ (or τ ) is the subject of π , 226, with Davies citing Taplin’s 1977,
174 discussion of this scene as a case where an approaching entry is announced by the conclud-
ing chorus.
41 See Clark 1996, 50–67.
188 A. C. Duncan

havoc upon a play’s intelligibility. It is a quality not only of a good theatre-maker,

then, but also of a good theatre-goer, to limit and provisionally determine chaotic
uncertainties as they occur through appealing to our collective communicative
need for common ground.
When important ambiguities are left unresolved in the theatre, they are often
settled, practically and provisionally, through the collective response of the audi-
ence—a process in which joint attention has an important role. Driven to estab-
lish common ground and to appeal to the wisdom of the crowd, individual
theatre-goers seek consensus through the audience’s socially scaffolded, cogni-
tively distributed interpretation of the stage. During a live dramatic performance
in which open verbal deliberation between spectators is not appropriate, this pro-
cess is particularly dependent upon joint attention, as individual spectators
quietly consult the reactions of their fellow theatre-goers. Sight invitations create
intersubjective communities not only through capacious addressees but through
involving theatre-goers in collective deliberative processes of interpretation
as well.
These early scenes from Women of Trachis reveal ways sight invitations involve
theatre-goers in the interpretative challenges of vision dramatized in the play. As
the tragedy goes on, however, the constant and collective presence of the chorus
(and theatrical audience) gradually re-establishes collective vision as a means of
knowledge and authority. As in Libation Bearers, sight invitations mark and
enhance the dramatic climax of Women of Trachis, drawing attention once again
to the spectacle of the mortally wounded body. In place of the corpses of
Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus however, it is Heracles, unconscious but still alive,
who is carried in upon a stretcher to be received by his adult son, Hyllus. Even
covered, Heracles’ body becomes the visual focal point of the scene and through
strategic use of an opaque shroud, the play reveals the body strategically in time
and space to enhance its dramatic effect.
As the scene begins, Hyllus guides and focalizes the audience’s vision.
Overwhelmed by even the veiled outline of his father’s dying body, Hyllus cannot
bear to keep silent while ‘looking upon this evil’ ( τ , 992).
Linking the broad semantics of to his father’s physically present (τ ) but
visually obscured body, Hyllus’ words infuse the scenic tableau with a macabre
sense of dread.42 Awakened by his son’s voice, in an emotive agony Heracles
insists that ‘no one ever can say that he saw this man behave thus before’, a claim
that establishes the hero’s earlier authority over not only his body but its specta-
torship as well.43 Recalling the words of Deianeira’s prologue near the tragedy’s
end, Heracles invokes a hypothetical visual subject ( , 1072) to
underscore the individual and indefinite nature of vision within the play.

42 On the ‘enormous interpretive range’ of , see Sluiter 2008, 4.

43 Soph. Trach. 1072–3, τ ’ π τ |τ ’ ηπ ’ τ .
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 189

Having established the unprecedented importance of its spectacle, Heracles

invites Hyllus to inspect his body:

And now, coming close, stand near your father,

consider on account of what sort of misfortunes I suffer
in this way. For I will show these things out from under my
coverings.
π τ π η π τ ,
π τ τ π
ππ · τά άτ .
(1076–8)

At first it seems that Hyllus, alone, will be privy to his father’s unprecedented suf-
fering. The imperatives τ and extend a string of singular directives,
stretching back many verses, addressed narrowly to Hyllus.44 Heracles’ earlier
reluctance to show his pain, Hyllus’ position near his father onstage, and the
established expectation of disconnected vision in the play might lead theatre-
goers to expect their own view of the suffering hero to be limited, perhaps simply
to a narrative account of Hyllus’ gaze. But this is not the case, and Heracles’ intended
visual audience suddenly expands.
Removing his coverings ( άτ , 1078), Heracles employs a new set of
sight invitations in rapid succession to reveal the gruesome spectacle of his tor-
mented body.

Look! Gaze, everyone, at my wracked body,

See me wretched, how pitifully I suffer!
, πά τ ,
τ τ τη , τ .
(1079–80)

The plural imperatives ‘gaze’ ( ) and ‘see’ ( τ ), together with the vocative
‘everyone’ (πά τ ), invite an extremely capacious viewership. Heracles uses three
verbs of seeing and three deictics in just five lines—a remarkable burst of direct-
ives capable of demanding attention to this climactic scene even from the most
distracted audiences. Indeed, the staging shares much in common with Orestes’
speech in Libation Bearers: like Orestes, Heracles uses sight invitations to claim
for himself the memorializing and validating effects of joint attention and,
like the verbally explicit but practically vague addressee ‘overhearers’ ( π ,
Libation Bearers 980), by addressing ‘everyone’ (πά τ ) Heracles offers a sly nod

44 Namely , 1064; 1066; ,τ η , and τ , 1070.

190 A. C. Duncan

towards the theatre-goers. Unlike Orestes’ exhibition of the fabric, however, the
sudden removal of Heracles’ shroud suddenly converts individual imaginings
into a collective event of mutually manifest vision—a coup de théâtre that appears
to have been a favourite feature of Sophocles’ stagecraft.45
Throughout Women at Trachis, knowledge based upon individual perception or
verbal report repeatedly proves tragically limited in its scope. Miscommunications
and partial observations caused his suffering, but in a final act of exhibition and
self-determination, Heracles insists upon making his tormented body the object
of a radically inclusive viewership. The hero’s capacious audience does not hear
about his wounds second-hand or endure the horrific sight each alone, but
through focused and communal joint attention, each and all bear shared witness
to the unprecedented spectacle of Heracles’ suffering. Even so, the body in pain is
seen in public only after it is first privately imagined in the mind. Like the fabric
unfurled in Libation Bearers, before it is removed the shroud provides not only a
common target for joint attention in theatrical space but also a blank screen upon
which each viewer may project a private image of horror. Even as Sophocles
exploits the social cognition of the ancient theatre, Women of Trachis remains
very much also a theatre of the individual mind.

10.5 Dramatizing the limits of joint attention in Bacchae

One further example from fifth-century tragedy sheds light on the sophistication
with which Attic playwrights employed joint attention when conceptualizing and
dramatizing the visual dynamics of their theatre. Euripides’ Bacchae has long
been understood to offer metatheatrical commentary on dramatic performance.46
Central to the play and its interpretation is a delirium which Dionysus, as
god of theatre, places upon the Theban king Pentheus and the queen mother
Agave. While in the god’s thrall, these characters view people and things as hav-
ing dual identities that partially and temporarily eclipse one another, a way of
‘doubled’ (or, recalling Fauconnier and Turner’s term, ‘blended’) vision with obvi-
ous parallels to theatrical spectatorship.47 What has passed unnoticed in these
visually oriented and metatheatrical analyses are the ways in which Euripides
employs sight invitations to dramatize the epistemic limits of such doubled or
blended vision. In Libation Bearers and Women of Trachis, joint attention serves
to corroborate and codify individual experience. But as a means of building

45 Cf. Soph. Aj. 866–1048, and especially 1003ff., when Teucer at last uncovers Ajax’s body. On the
presentation of the corpse in Athenian tragedy and life, see Rehm 1994, 11–42.
46 On the play’s generic self-reflection, see especially Winnington-Ingram 1948, Foley 1980, Zeitlin
1996, and Segal 1997.
47 On vision in the play, see especially Gregory 1985, Seaford 1987, Segal 1997, Thumiger 2007b
and 2013, 234–8.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 191

community and establishing truth, shared spectatorship fails spectacularly in

Bacchae, as a divinely coordinated series of events underscores ultimately insu-
perable gaps between individual mental experiences. Yet even as the epistemo-
logical benefits of joint attention are called into question, its affective powers are
boldly reasserted in a recognition scene in which sight invitations, once again,
cast a spotlight on a tragically wounded body.
Euripides bookends the fall of the house of Cadmus with two moments of
doubled vision. Midway through the play, Pentheus, enthralled by Dionysus, sets
out with the god as his guide to spy upon the Theban bacchantes who have gath-
ered in the wilderness of Mt. Cithaeron. As he is escorted offstage, Pentheus
reports seeing two suns, two cities, and even a bull’s face upon his companion
(lines 918–21)—peculiar descriptions which signal that Pentheus’ vision has
become idiosyncratic and hallucinatory. Although these lines have been much
discussed, it is worth noting here that seeing two suns upends the established dra-
matic trope, observed already in both Libation Bearers and Women of Trachis, of
referring to the sun as the supreme and constant spectator of tragic events, a
cornerstone of theatrical joint attention. Seeing two suns, then, does more than
mark Pentheus’ own delirium, it also calls into question the intersubjective net-
works of viewing underpinning dramatic communication. In response to his
companion’s peculiar descriptions, Dionysus replies, ‘Now you are seeing what
you must see’ ( , 924), a cryptic phrase that emphasizes
the god’s power (and, by extension, that of his theatre) to modulate vision.
Dionysus articulates a higher, normative order of vision ( denotes both neces-
sity and duty), established not through intersubjective networks but through per-
sonal obligation and divine fiat.48 The god addresses Pentheus alone, but his
words also have a performative function, realizing an alternate, imaginary, and, to
all but Pentheus, invisible world inaccessible to joint attention.
But seeing as one ‘ought’ in Bacchae does little to mitigate the epistemic peril of
individual perception. Soon after Pentheus’ departure from the city, a messenger
reports how Dionysus exposed his protégé to his Theban followers in the wilder-
ness, where the king was suddenly ‘seen by, more than he saw, the maenads’
( η τ ά , 1075). In an inversion of his voyeuristic fan-
tasy, Pentheus becomes himself the object of vision. Indeed, his own perception
counts for little as his mother, Agave, believing her son to be a lion, leads her fel-
low bacchantes in his ritual dismemberment. The messenger reports that at this
moment Agave’s eyes were rolling and her thoughts, demented ( τ |
, , 1122–3)—the play’s first signal that, like that
of her son, Agave’s vision has been affected by the god.

48 I follow Diggle’s 1981 Greek text.

192 A. C. Duncan

Confirming the messenger’s breathless report, Agave returns to the stage, still
delirious and brandishing Pentheus’ grisly head aloft. In an extended and disturb-
ing musical exchange, the eponymous Chorus (composed not of Theban women,
but a group of Asian bacchantes, loyal to Dionysus) toy with the queen mother,
stoking her false sense of accomplishment with strategic, euphemistic enquiries
about her ‘hunt’. After a moment of foreboding silence, the chorus-leader speaks,
goading Agave to display her ‘victorious prize’ ( η , 1200). In turn, the
queen mother invites the people of Thebes to come and look upon her ‘catch’:

Ch. Show then, poor woman, your victorious prize to the townspeople, the
one you have come back carrying.
Ag. Inhabitants of the fair-towered city of the Theban land, come so that you
may see the catch…
Χο. , τά , η
ἀ τ .
Αγ. π τ η
τ ,
ητ τ ... (1200–3)49

As observed during Orestes’ return to the stage and Lichas’ arrival, visual directives
are employed at a moment of scenic transition to reframe the dynamics of inter-
subjective vision. But whereas sight invitations in Libation Bearers and Women of
Trachis hold out the promise of joint attention’s epistemic and social benefits, in
Bacchae they call attention to the ultimately individual subjectivity of vision as it
occurs in the mind’s eye. The gulf between what different subjects ‘see’, even as they
jointly attend ostensibly to the same target in space, structures the following, final,
scene. The Chorus and Agave never disagree over terms used to refer to the head
she holds in her hand, but polysemy of both language and the theatre make this
apparent common ground the unstable basis of deeply ironic communication.
Agave’s father Cadmus soon arrives onstage and instructs servants to place the
assemblage of his grandson’s remains before the palace walls. This shapeless hor-
ror lies in marked contrast to the head Agave brandishes aloft, a focal point on the
stage Cadmus calls an ‘unhappy sight’ ( , 1232).50 Boasting her
hunting prowess, Agave invites her father to share both in her pride and in her

49 I take ητ to extend the illocutionary force of the command , making the entire
phrase a sight invitation: compare , ά , at Soph. Aj. 1003. Note that her addressee,
... τ , cannot apply to transient foreign women of the chorus and therefore invites Attic
theatre-goers, as so often, to identify and compare themselves with the citizens of Thebes: see
Zeitlin 1990.
50 How Pentheus’ disjointed remains are displayed is unclear. Dodds 1960, ad 1216–19 and Roux
1970, 200 place them in a veil or shroud (linceul), like the bodies of Heracles or Ajax in Sophocles.
Taplin 1978, 74 prefers an open bier.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 193

way of seeing, proclaiming that she has returned, ‘as you see, carrying this prize’
( , τά | τἀ τ , 1238–9). The ensuing dialogue between father
and daughter maintains this emphasis on vision (cf. 1244 , 1257 , 1258 ).
All the while, Cadmus, rather than correcting his daughter, offers a series of
ironic, glancing blows (‘lovely is the sacrifice’, τ , 1246; ‘to a banquet’,
π τ , 1247) which underscore the epistemic failure of their apparent joint
attention. At last, Cadmus tells his daughter, ‘turn your face to this sky’ ( τ
, 1264), beginning a process that aligns Agave’s vision, once
again, with his own. This remarkable ‘psychotherapy’ scene, too, has been much
discussed, but appreciation of its dramatic power is further enhanced by recog-
nizing joint attention’s contribution to Agave’s rehabilitation. By gazing upwards—
and, crucially, away from all onlookers—Agave is released from the tethers of the
intersubjective networks sustaining her delirium. The social discontinuity and
visual pause resets the queen mother’s vision so that when Agave finally lowers
her gaze, her father’s next sight invitation, ‘Look at it properly; the effort of doing
so is slight’ ( ‧ , 1279), lands with devas-
tating emotional impact. It is not only Agave who experiences a flood of emotions
at the simultaneous recognition of her son and her own culpability; theatre-goers,
too, are released from the tension of mentally sustaining contradictory visions of
the scene during an extended, grotesquely defective period of joint attention.
‘Properly’ or otherwise, once again characters and audience meaningfully ‘see
together’.
The devastation of the house of Cadmus in Bacchae is framed by moments
when Pentheus and Agave first slip away from, and then tragically back into,
interpretative common ground within networks of play-internal and -external
viewers. The various thematic ambivalences of Bacchae hinge upon two compet-
ing hierarchies of sight: one based upon intersubjective joint attention, the other,
upon divinely inspired, yet essentially private, vision. Each way of seeing has its
own claim to truth. Cadmus’ assertion that Agave sees ‘correctly’ ( , 1279)
when recognizing her son is normative, based upon his own (and others’) appar-
ent experience. And yet, Cadmus’ pronouncement is curiously parallel to
Dionysus’ earlier statement that, in seeing two suns and two Thebes, Pentheus,
too, was seeing as he ‘must’ or ‘ought’ ( , 927).
As in Libation Bearers and Women at Trachis, collective viewership provides a
tool for establishing intersubjective truths in Bacchae. And yet, the delirium
which is at the heart of this remarkably metatheatrical tragedy reminds spectators
of the fundamentally blended experience of their own theatrical vision. Theatre-
goers, too, participate in scripted exchanges (not unlike those between Pentheus
and Dionysus, or between Agave and the Chorus) carefully designed to maintain
an illusion. The difference, of course, is that theatre-goers are not only willing
participants but also part of an intersubjective network whose creative, imagina-
tive collusion is mutually manifest to all. In a process that is arguably far more
194 A. C. Duncan

important than establishing objective truths, joint attention in the theatre creates
and sustains the intersubjective fictions that are the bedrock of dramatic mimesis.

10.6 Conclusion

To conduct the minds of one’s audience successfully across a busy stage and com-
plex plot has been recognized as the mark of a good playwright since the classical
era.51 Although attention plays a critical role in these processes, its function in
ancient drama has to date been poorly theorized, perhaps because attending the
stage is so different from attending the page. The phenomenological disparities
between seeing and reading Greek tragedy are numerous, but the collective vision
of the theatre, and the joint attention it entails, are of particular importance. At
moments when spectators’ joint attention is narrowed into a focused ‘spotlight’,
the act of markedly and self-consciously ‘seeing together’ highlights and further
activates theatre-goers’ social cognition. As catalysts for focused joint attention,
sight invitations provide valuable evidence for our understanding of social cogni-
tion in the ancient theatre. The close readings offered in this chapter demonstrate
some of the ways Attic tragedians focused joint attention to involve their audi-
ences more deeply in the performance. While I have highlighted in particular the
social and affective consequences of such joint attention, productive work remains
to be done on the connections between social cognition and—among other
aspects of the ancient theatre—chorality, cultural memory, civic participation,
and aesthetics.
Transcending their theatrical origins, however, sight invitations went on to
have a significant cultural afterlife in Athens. As something of a coda, I call atten-
tion to a noteworthy fourth-century echo of tragic sight invitations in prose: the
story of Leontius as recounted in Book Four of Plato’s Republic.52 Leontius, we are
told by Socrates, was once walking alone outside Athens’ city walls when he unex-
pectedly came upon the corpses of executed prisoners. Suddenly in the presence
of the abject dead (a familiar tragic situation), Leontius is torn between averting
his gaze or indulging his morbid fascination. He first covers his head with fabric
(π πτ τ , 440a1) but, overcome by desire, rushes towards the corpses
with his eyes wide open ( τ , 440a2). Doing so, he calls
out: ‘Look, you wretches, have your fill of the fine spectacle’ ( ...
, π ητ τ ά τ , 440a3–4).53

51 Arist. Poet. 1455a21–55b23) gives illustrative examples, positive and negative, for would-be
playwrights. Ar. Ran. 908–35 satirizes Aeschylus’ supposedly mismanaged stagecraft.
52 Pl. Resp. 439e–40a. On the episode and its connections to tragedy, see Liebert 2013 and 2017,
161–70. On the Republic and tragic mimesis, Halliwell 1984, Halliwell 1993, and several of the essays
included in Destrée and Herrmann 2011.
53 My text and translation follow Slings 2003.
 Seeing Together: Joint Attention in Attic Tragedy 195

The tragic resonances of this passage are numerous. Indeed, although used in
its original Platonic context to illustrate the divided nature of the human soul,
today the curious case of Leontius has become most emblematic of so-called
‘tragic pleasure’, the paradoxical satisfaction that comes from contemplating or
viewing things which are typically considered disturbing and disgusting. Leontius
is ‘tragic’ not simply in his psychological circumstance, however, but in his use of
language as well. Leontius’ words bear all the marks of a tragic sight invitation,
from the initial interjection, ‘Look’ ( ), to the plural imperative that directs the
gaze towards a grisly, yet aestheticized, target (compare to , Soph.
Trach. 992 and Aj. 1003). Above all, Leontius speaks to a vague addressee, ‘you
wretches’ ( ), a word that plausibly refers back to his eyes, but also
capaciously addresses a broad and layered audience (i.e. his, Socrates’ and Plato’s).
Like theatrical spectators, those hailed by these words are prompted to assess
their own lurid subjectivity and that of their imagined peers as they place them-
selves in Leontius’ affective state.
Although brief, this passage from the Republic has become crucial evidence for
understanding ancient aesthetics—especially those of tragedy. Identifying
Leontius’ words not merely as tragic, but as a sight invitation in particular, lends
further cross-generic texture to the scene.54 Like Orestes, Heracles, and Agave,
Leontius invites an indefinite spectatorship to memorialize, confirm, and affect-
ively share in his vision at a moment of extreme emotional disturbance. As the
Republic is elsewhere critical of the theatre’s effects on society’s moral develop-
ment, it is wonderfully ironic that Plato himself turns to a verbal trope developed
to exploit tragedy’s intersubjective stage in order to illustrate the pluralistic nature
of our individual souls.

Acknowledgements

This chapter is itself the result of many eyes looking over a common object. I am
especially grateful for initial feedback from fellow conference attendees in Leiden
and early direction from David J. Jacobson, Anne-Sophie Noel, and colleagues in
Chapel Hill. Anonymous readers for Oxford University Press saved me from
many embarrassing errors late in the process. The volume’s editors, Ineke Sluiter
and Felix Budelmann, offered insightful guidance every step of the way. All
remaining errors and omissions are, of course, my own.

54 On tragic subtext and parody in Plato, see Nightingale 1995, 60–92.