Some Tragic Newsbringers

The inspiration for this paper is a piece published by Richard Green in 1999: ‘Tragedy and the Spectacle of the Mind: Messenger Speeches, Actors, Narrative, and Audience Imagination in Fourth-Century bce Vase-Painting’, 1 which elegantly illustrates the productive interconnections that his work has often traced between artefacts and texts. Green discusses the presence, on many South Italian (mainly Tarentine) vases which deal with tragic subjects, of a figure usually to be identified as a family retainer, who is typically elderly and bent, carries a staff, and ‘makes the speaking gesture with his right hand’. 2 This is his regular pose: he is telling the awful story of the events represented on the vase.