ABSTRACT
The nearest anyone today can come to the action and performance of a play from the Athens of Aeschylus is not through the words which have survived in formal text but through the postures of Athenian art, even when the figures adorn scenes which have no direct connection with any known dramatic sequence. Pollitt would go further: 'Sculptors and painters seem, in fact, actually to have borrowed some of the technical devices which had been developed in dramatic performances to convey character and narrative action-for example the formal gestures of actors, the masks which were designed to express at once an individual character and a basic type, and perhaps also a dramatic sense of timing'2 •
This is a refreshing claim which helps free the drama from its isolation as an art form. It is also a slightly damaging one for the ease with
which it permits the unobservant to relegate the real nature of the Greek theatre to that of the fossil.
