“All Greek gods are violent, in their fashion. Dionysos’ specialty is to connect interior violence - violence of phrenes, distorted perception, individual emotional storm - with performed, exterior violence: violence done and seen, out in the world. His persona is the fostering link between madness and murder. Tragedy, like Athens’ physical theater, belongs in Dionysos’ precinct. It grew up while historians and scientists formulated and worked on the principle that one infers interior movement - and the movement they too were interested in was mostly violent - from external movement, movement you could see. Tragedy is this principle’s dramatic truth. Its performed violence is only nominally onstage. It happens unseen. Spectators infer it and watch others doing so. [quotation of Agamemnon’s death] This is the theater exulting in possibilities of relating inside to outside, unseen to seen, private interior experience to the external watching and guessing of others: a concrete parallel to tragedy’s personal dimension. All over tragedy, men and women suffer within, in their emotions. Other figures, and spectators, infer this unseen pain from words. One cannot see into another person’s feelings. No external mark can tell us what people are inside. We infer what is in them from how they look and what they say. The physique of Dionysos’ theater, its contrasts of unseen and apparent space, embodies the personal dialectics of Dionysos’ tragedy.”
— Ruth Padel, “Making Space Speak,” in Nothing To Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds.
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