Architectural acts: architect-figures in Athenian drama and their prefigurations

In the fifth century BCE, two Greek dramatists brought "architects" into their plays—and into performance—at the Great Dionysia festival in Athens. For Euripides, "architect" named a protagonist (Odysseus) scheming to overcome the Cyclops; for Aristophanes, "architect" qualified a comic hero (Trygaeus) daring to restore Peace. Although remarkable for being among the earliest extant "architects" to appear in Greek literature, these architect-protagonists are also surprising because architecture (as it tends to be objectified) is not their target of attention. Rather, transformative and restorative schemes are their foremost concern. While such peculiarities already commend these figures for study there are further grounds for considering their deeds: by their exemplary performances in particular situations these "architects" offer mimetic demonstrations of primary architectural acts; acts that, being subtle and ephemeral, are otherwise difficult to perceive. This dissertation interprets the actions of the "architects" in Euripides' satyr play Cyclops and Aristophanes' comedy Peace, specifically by asking: What motivated the dramatic poets to qualify their protagonists as architects? What is implied about architects and architectural acts by the manners in which they did? And, what do the dramatic plots and their mythic models suggest about the peculiar situations that architects figure into and struggle to transform? Beyond probing the plays through such questions, this dissertation also has two theoretical aims: to uncover the earliest examples of a topos, one that posits dramatic protagonists (and dramatic poets) as architects; and, correspondingly, to draw-out the performative aspects of architecting that this topos suggests. As this study unfolds, I intend to show that what at first might seem like a casual metaphor opens more profoundly onto an intricate web of mythic, ritual and metaphoric associations that are as telling as they are troubling about the representative deeds and ethical dilemmas that architects perennially enact. Furthermore, in treating Greek sources from the fifth century BCE—from a time when architects were only just beginning to gain that title and so appear as figures of cultural significance—this dissertation argues for a reconsideration of how architektons can be most fundamentally understood; that is, less hierarchically as master-builders, and more poetically and dramatically as agents of archai—as individuals who knowingly initiate, make and make apparent for others auspicious beginnings, originating conditions and exemplary restorative schemes.

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