Greek tragedy

• 1. Introduction

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  Greek tragedy is a theatrical form born in Athens during the 5th century BC, and it planted a question that has haunted artists and scholars ever since: what happens to a person when they are destroyed not by accident or weakness, but by the very forces that make them human? The word tragedy itself carries a puzzle inside it. The ancient Greeks called it tragodía, which breaks down into "goat" and "song." Whether that meant a prize goat awarded to the winner, a chorus dressed as goat-like satyrs, or something else entirely remains contested to this day. Aristotle traced it to the dithyramb, a hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and theatre. Other scholars traced it to adolescent voice-change, or to a beer-harvest chant involving the barley grain known in Greek as tragos. Jane Ellen Harrison proposed that tragedy was originally "the harvest-song of the cereal tragos, the form of spelt known as 'the goat.'" The debates still run. What is certain is that from those disputed origins, a form emerged powerful enough to fill a theatre seating approximately 17,000 people in Athens, to outlast the empire that created it, and to shape almost every dramatic tradition that followed.

• 2. From Hymn to Stage

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  Aristotle wrote in the Poetics that tragedy began as an improvisation by those who led off the dithyramb, and the earliest versions were brief and burlesque in tone because they carried elements of the satyr play. Over time the language grew more serious, and the meter shifted from the trochaic tetrameter to the iambic trimeter, which Aristotle described as the most natural meter for speech. The lyric poet Arion of Methymna is credited in Herodotus's Histories with inventing the dithyramb itself. A Greek chorus of up to 50 men and boys danced and sang in a circle, probably accompanied by an aulos, a double-piped wind instrument. The Greek word for actor is hypocrites, meaning "answerer" or "interpreter." As scholar Easterling explains, the actor answered the questions of the chorus and evoked their songs. Ruth Scodel identifies the minimum conditions for tragedy as we know it: somebody combined a speaker with a chorus, put both in disguise as characters drawn from legend or history, embedded that performance in the City Dionysia at Athens, and set regulations to govern how it would be managed and paid for. The tradition credits Thespis as the first person to represent a character in a play. That event took place in 534 BC during the Dionysia established by Peisistratus. According to the 4th century AD writer Themistius, Thespis also invented the prologue and the spoken passage known as the rhesis. Other early playwrights competed alongside him, including Choerilus, who is said to have written roughly 160 tragedies and won thirteen victories, and Pratinas of Phlius, whose fifty works included thirty-two satyr plays. Phrynichus, another playwright of that era, introduced dialogues in iambic trimeter, included female characters for the first time, and brought historical events into the genre with his play the Capture of Miletus. His first contest victory came in 510 BC.

• 3. The Three Great Tragedians

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  Aeschylus established the basic framework of tragic drama. He is credited with inventing the trilogy, a sequence of three tragedies told across a single day from sunrise to sunset, with a satyr play staged at the end to lift the audience's spirits. He introduced the second actor, which for the first time made dramatic conflict between characters possible. His younger rival Sophocles pushed the form further. Plutarch, in the Life of Cimon, recounts how Sophocles won his first triumph against Aeschylus in an unusual competition that ended without the customary draw for referees, and prompted the voluntary exile of Aeschylus to Sicily. Sophocles introduced a third actor, raised the chorus membership to fifteen, and brought scenery and scene divisions to the stage. He earned at least twenty triumphs across his career. Aristophanes of Byzantium counted 130 plays attributed to Sophocles, though 17 were considered spurious. Euripides brought a different orientation still. His experiments are visible in three specific choices: he turned the prologue into a monologue that briefed the audience on the story's background, introduced the device of the deus ex machina, and gradually reduced the chorus's role in favor of solo songs sung by individual characters. His heroes are often insecure and troubled by internal conflict, a contrast with the more resolute figures in Aeschylus and Sophocles. Euripides used female protagonists such as Andromache, Phaedra, and Medea to portray irrational impulses colliding with the world of reason. The Suda counted either 75 or 92 plays attributed to Euripides, of which eighteen tragedies and the only complete surviving satyr play, the Cyclops, remain. Aeschylus, by contrast, had at least seventy-nine known titles, but only seven texts survive, including the Oresteia, the sole complete trilogy to come down from antiquity.

• 4. The Stage and the City

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  A spectator attending a Greek performance in the latter half of the 5th century BC would have sat in the theatron, a semi-circular curved bank of seats. The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, with its seats rising up the south slope of the Acropolis, held approximately 17,000 people. Below the seated audience, in the most prominent position, was the throne of the priest of Dionysus, who presided over the performance. At the center of the circular dancing floor, the orchestra, stood an altar. Behind the orchestra rose the skene, originally a wooden structure that served as backdrop and dressing room. Its facade typically represented a house, a palace, or a temple. The skene had three doors for actors' entrances and exits. Directly in front of it was the proskenion, the main performance platform. Plays were staged at the Great Dionysia, a feast held in the month of Elaphebolion, near the end of March. The Athenian state organized the festival; the eponymous archon selected three of the richest citizens to pay for the productions, a practice tied to the Athenian civic institution of liturgy, by which wealthy citizens funded public services. The archon chose three playwrights, each of whom submitted a tetralogy of three tragedies and a satyr play. A jury of ten citizens, selected by lot, awarded prizes for best choir, best actor, and best author. Each juror placed a tablet inscribed with their choice inside an urn, after which five tablets were drawn at random. The highest vote-getter won. The passion for tragedy ran deep enough that Athens, as critics noted, was said to spend more on theatre than on the fleet.

• 5. Aristotle's Framework

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  Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving critical study of tragedy. He had access to first-hand documentation of theatrical performance in Attica that later scholars cannot reach, which makes his testimony invaluable even where it is open to doubt. Two concepts anchor his analysis. The first is mimesis, meaning imitation: Aristotle described tragedy as "an imitation of a noble and complete action... which through compassion and fear produces purification of the passions." The second is catharsis, the Greek word for cleansing. What exactly Aristotle meant by emotional cleansing has divided scholars for centuries. Gregory argues that catharsis involves the transformation of pity and fear into essentially pleasurable emotions in the theatre. Lear describes what he calls "the most sophisticated view of katharsis" as one that "provides an education for the emotions." On that reading, tragedy supplies the appropriate objects toward which to feel pity or fear. The three Aristotelian unities, of time, place, and action, became influential later, during the Renaissance, though Aristotle himself only insisted on unity of action. He noted that tragedy strives to take place within one revolution of the sun, while epic poetry is unlimited in time. These rules were considered central to theatrical art for centuries, yet authors including Shakespeare, Calderon de la Barca, and Moliere did not always observe them. Friedrich Nietzsche, writing at the end of the 19th century, reread Greek tragedy through a different lens. He identified two competing forces: the Dionysian passion that overwhelms the character, and the Apollonian imagery of visual spectacle. In his account, these drives go side by side in open discord, provoking each other to new and stronger births, until the Hellenic will pairs them and produces Attic tragedy, which he called as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian artwork.

• 6. Survival and Survival Gaps

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  Of the many tragedies known to have existed, only 32 full-length texts by three authors have come down to us. More than 300 additional works are known from fragments alone. Seven plays by Aeschylus survive out of roughly ninety total works. Seven plays by Sophocles survive out of 123 or 130, depending on the ancient source. From Euripides, eighteen tragedies survive. The satyr play portion of Sophocles' Trackers was recovered at the beginning of the 20th century on a papyrus that preserved three-quarters of the text. Aeschylus alone produced at least 70 further works that exist only in fragments. Among the surviving plays, Aeschylus' The Persians, performed in 472 BC, stands at an unusual intersection of history and drama. Staged eight years after the battle of Salamis, while the war with Persia was still in progress, the play tells the story of the Persian fleet's defeat and has the ghost of former Persian king Darius accuse his son Xerxes of hubris against the Greeks. The play asks its Athenian audience to see Salamis through Persian eyes. Euripides' Orestes, produced in 408 BC, drew on fifth-century Athenian political rhetoric and factional conflict with an immediacy that connected directly to contemporary events. The chorus, as an institution, tracked the political and social makeup of the demos. Tragic choruses were typically unified in social position, age, gender, nationality, and class. Female choruses, along with choruses representing enslaved or foreign individuals, lacked the civic status of male Greek choruses. A female chorus in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes was criticized in the play itself for being bad for citizen morale, a detail that shows how deeply the question of who belonged to the demos was woven into the fabric of the performances.