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THE ATHENIAN INSTITUTION OF THE KHOREGIA: THE CHORUS, THE CITY AND THE STAGE. By PETER WILSON. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xv, 435, 31 figs.
You CAN NOW LINE YOUR BIRDCAGE with the relevant pages of Dramatic Festivals of Athens2. Peter Wilson's Khoregia gives a much fuller picture of the finance and organization of choral entertainment in classical Athens. He also goes well beyond the nuts-and-bolts reconstruction of Pickard-Cambridge & Co. and makes historical sense of this complex institution.
This is the first general book1 on the choregia despite (or because of?) the rich diversity of the evidence and the institution's centrality to every major facet of Athenian culture (politics, economics, social relations, religion, civic administration, music, and drama). Wilson speaks of a "curious lack of scholarly attention" (3), but I doubt that scholarship could have put this heterogenous material into meaningful dialogue much before the late 1980s. Wilson's own treatment owes a lot to a new view of culture best articulated by New Historicism/Cultural Materialism (add Bourdieu and Turner). It provides him with a unified field on which to collate the choregia's many apples and oranges, their participation, namely, in a general discourse of power-not the undifferentiated Foucauldian sort, but power negotiated between individuals and classes with ultimately opposed interests. This is of course a large claim, if already familiar from a range of current cultural studies, but it is uniquely well suited to the choregia, which wears its concern with money, status, class-relations, politics, and power, on its institutional sleeve. In this book, at any rate, power theory is convincingly applied, if sometimes overdrawn. The theoretical apparatus should, moreover, be no deterrent to the empirically minded. Its application is unobtrusive, and combined with dose attention to the evidence, a love of detail, and superb control of all the disciplines required by a subject which invades just about every cranny of Athenian culture.
Wilson rejects the usual view. The choregia is emphatically not a "tax" upon the rich. The entire liturgical system functioned to accommodate elite aspirations, even elite ideology, within Athenian democracy. The democracy adapted the archaic and aristocratic gift-economy and included it within the system of public finance precisely to permit an arena for aristocratic status competition. On this exchange model,...