by Epistate

The Story of the play | The Structure - on Ancient Greek Tragedy

Hephaistos Among the Nereids is based on a little-known episode in Greek mythology that describes the birth and early years of Hephaistos, the god of fire and metal-working.

The story begins with the birth of Athens' patron goddess, Athene, who sprang fully grown--and clad in full armor--from the head of her father Zeus, the ruler of gods and men. Angered that her husband has produced a child independently, Zeus's perennially jealous wife, Hera, decides to create a child without him. Her first attempt results in Hephaistos, who is clever, creative, and gentle, but physically unattractive. A second try produces Ares, the seductively alluring god of war whose vicious inner nature mirrors his brother's lack of external beauty.

But a goddess is no less susceptible than a human when it comes to seeing only what's on the surface. Disgusted with Hephaistos's appearance, Hera casts her firstborn off the heights of Mount Olympus, expecting him to fall to his death. Instead, only his legs are shattered by the impact. Hephaistos survives, although he will always walk with a severe limp.

The fallen god is picked up by Thetis, a sea nymph with troubles of her own. Thetis has been exiled from the presence of the gods because Zeus has fallen in love with her, but a prophecy claims that if he impregnates her, he--and the entire pantheon of Olympian gods along with him--will be overthrown and driven from power.

Thetis takes Hephaistos to the underwater grotto that she shares with a group of Nereids, the maidens of the sea. Safe from the eyes of Hera, Hephaistos grows to maturity. With Thetis's encouragement, he sets up a workshop beneath the waves where he lives happily, peacefully perfecting his craft as a smith.

Eventually, however, news of Hephaistos's skill reaches Olympus, and the gods want him to live and work among them. They lure him back by... Never mind! We don't want to give away the entire story.

Thetis is compensated for the loss of her foster child by being granted the right to bear a son of her own. She will be given in marriage to a mortal, King Peleus of Phthia. Her son will not usurp his father, though he will exceed him in power and stature; instead, he will succeed to his father's throne in the ordinary way of mortals through his father's natural death.

As anyone familiar with the Iliad is aware, Thetis's son by Peleus will be the glorious hero Achilles.

The Story of the play | The Structure - on Ancient Greek Tragedy

The Structure

Hephaistos Among the Nereids is structured as a traditional Greek tragedy, with each of the necessary components shortened to accommodate the challenges of performing drama in a virtual environment.

The play follows the "three actors" rule: according to Aristotle, it was the tragedian Sophocles who established a standard of no more than three actors on stage at a time, not counting the chorus. In Sophocles' day, this would have meant that three versatile actors were hired and that they would use a series of masks so each of them could play several characters as necessary. It has been calculated that in Sophocles' Antigone the same actor would have been required to play Antigone's sister, Antigone's fiancé, the prophet Teiresias, a palace guard, and Antigone's aunt, the Queen of Thebes! Here at HistoryWalker we've made life simpler by assigning each character to a different actor.

A classical tragedy consists of a number of elements. The prologos ("word before") is an optional speech or conversation involving one or more actors, which is used to explain the situation and set the action into motion. If a prologos is used, immediately afterwards comes the parodos, the first entrance of the chorus. The word parodos is not related etymologically to the English word "parade," though it might as well be, since classical choruses could number up to fifty people! It must have been quite a sight to watch them streaming into the theater! At HistoryWalker, we've decided to cut back on potential headaches by limiting the number of people in the Hephaistos chorus to an easily manageable two.

The prologos and parodos are followed by a series of episodes and stasima. An episode is a scene in which the principal actors speak with one another, and a stasimon is a song sung by the chorus. The stasima may or may not be directly related to the action. Sometimes the relationship is merely thematic; at other times it seems altogether nonexistent, with the choral ode becoming an isolated song of praise to some deity or other.

The kommos, a song of lamentation performed primarily one of the actors, is another optional element. The actor may sing it all alone, or with the help of the chorus. Thetis's kommos when she learns that she will lose Hephaistos to the gods of Olympus is pretty short, but we decided she ought to have one, so there it is.

Lastly, the tragedy concludes with an exodos, a word that literally means "the road out." This is the final scene, which ends with the chorus singing a processional song. This song should contain some kind of uplifting message to resolve the action and, hopefully, establish some kind of order in a world that may seem pretty bleak after a series of tragic events.

One last set of terms that are associated with the parts of tragedy are the words "strophe" (turning) and "antistrophe" (turning back). All of the songs assigned to the chorus were divided into an equal number of parts (two, four, six...the exact number didn't matter) that balanced each other exactly in line length and meter. There are probably two reasons for this: first, it made the songs easier to remember, and second, since dancing and rhythmic movements accompanied the choral odes, the chorus could use the strophe parts to move one way across the stage and the antistrophe parts to move in the opposite direction.

Okay, I'll admit the stophes and antistrophes in Hephaistos Among the Nereids don't actually balance each other out metrically. You can have your three obols' admission back if that really bothers you.

The final background note I want to include is a mention of the two other major players in tragedy, the two most important people behind the scenes.

The first of these is the didaskalos, who was the author of the play. I personally prefer to use the feminine suffix and call myself the didaskale, although of course there was no such thing in the male-centered world of classical Athens. The writing of the tragedy, however, was only the beginning, since the didaskalos was then expected to direct the actors and chorus and to teach them their lines. The word didaskalos literally means "teacher." It must have been a complicated task. We don't have reliable statistics on general literacy in classical Athens, but there's a high probability that at least some of the actors and chorus members were illiterate. Thus, the didaskalos would have had to teach them the correct words and movements through recital and repetition. Memory was aided by the rhythmic dancing of the chorus, and the fact that all of the tragedy would have been written in meter.

The second behind-the-scenes player was the choregos, the wealthy citizen or resident foreigner (metic) who financed the production. This was considered an honor, but it was also required as a compulsory public service. If the tragedy took the prize at the competition, the award went to the choregos and not to the didaskalos, since it was the choregos who was considered ultimately responsible for that particular tragedy's existence. Depending on the depth of the choregos's pockets--or the depth of his generosity!--the tragedy might include elaborate special effects and expensive, glamorous costumes. The choregoi for Hephaistos Among the Nereids are Lys and Anko, whose generosity's depth is rumored to be bottomless, so as you might imagine the production values for this performance are going to be mighty impressive.

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