Preface
Greek tragedy was hugely influential on the development of the Western dramatic tradition, and 2,500 years after their first performance these plays have not lost their enduring power. The tragedies continue to be performed, adapted and re-imagined for modern audiences, and are a fundamental part of our theatrical canon. Yet Greek tragedy is also a product of a culture that is in many ways very different from our own, and the familiarity of the stories of Medea, Oedipus or Orestes should not blind us to the ways in which they reveal values that may strike us as alien.
This book aims to offer an overview of what is distinctive about Greek tragedy, what defines it as a genre and what its particular preoccupations are. It will explore tragedy’s performance contexts and its place in Athenian life, and will identify some overarching themes shared by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The surviving tragedies show great diversity, and it is not my aim to argue that there is a simple formula for tragedy or that the tragedians all followed the same basic pattern. Nevertheless, this book will show that we do find deep-seated continuities which enable us to better appreciate tragedy’s role in Greek life and the central ideas that it explores.
This book is aimed for undergraduates and advanced school pupils, and assumes no knowledge of Greek (translations are my own). In a book with thirty-two plays available for discussion, I do not attempt to give detailed plot summaries beyond setting a passage in context. I have aimed to refer to a large number of tragedies in the hope of offering a holistic overview, so that students focusing on a particular play will find something to help them. Nevertheless, I go into greatest detail on the plays that are most popular on today’s school and undergraduate curricula, since these are most likely to be familiar to the reader. There are few references to secondary literature, but a list of suggested reading at the end of the volume will direct anyone who wishes to take his or her study of Greek tragedy further.
I would like to thank Bill Allan, Adrian Kelly, Roger Rees and the anonymous reader for their comments and guidance at various stages of this project, and also Alice Wright from Bloomsbury for her helpful assistance. This book has been greatly enriched by teaching Greek tragedy to undergraduates at Oxford, UCL and the Open University, as well as talks given at schools and sixth-form conferences, and I am grateful to the students whose input and reflections have taught me much about what makes Greek tragedy so special.
1
What makes something a ‘tragedy’? Nowadays it is a term we use freely to describe a catastrophic event. Calling something a ‘tragedy’ elevates it above normality, and can be a way of showing respect for the suffering of those involved. It also suggests that what has happened is extraordinary or unexpected: we would not normally describe the peaceful death of an elderly relative as ‘tragic’, although we might well use the word of someone cut off in their youth. When we approach a Greek tragedy, these cultural associations inevitably shape what we expect to see, and it is true that the plots of many Greek tragedies involve death and disaster. However, our understanding of what makes something tragic has been shaped by thousands of years of interpretation, and filtered through the views of ancient scholars and teachers, and the history of later drama. This chapter will explore what an ancient audience might have expected when they went to see a tragedy. We will investigate the origins, performance context, and stylistic features of Greek tragedy, and examine what lies at the heart of tragedy and sets it apart from other forms of poetry.
Festival, city and play
Tragedy developed in the late sixth century BC and was performed for hundreds of years, but its period of greatest flourishing – and the period that all our surviving plays date from (with the exception of Rhesus, which was probably the work of a later poet) – was the fifth century. Thus tragedy developed alongside Athenian democracy, during the time that Athens grew to be the mistress of a large empire and a cultural magnet for the Greek world. Tragedy grew in popularity across the Greek world, and by the fourth century BC many other Greek cities had their own theatres. It was, however, in its origins an Athenian genre, and despite the universal themes and wide appeal of the surviving plays, they are an art form rooted in a particular time and place. Almost nothing is known about the origins of tragedy, but the oldest and most valuable evidence is that of Aristotle, who in his Poetics links the birth of tragedy to the improvisations performed by leaders of the dithyramb, a type of choral song (1449a). Thus it is likely that tragedy grew out of choral performance (an issue we will explore in Chapter 7), and possible that it was originally a cult song in honour of Dionysus. However, even if this is true, tragedy soon broadened its range of subjects (as did dithyramb), and we should not over-emphasize the importance of Dionysiac cult for interpreting the plays themselves.
Nevertheless, tragedy remained Dionysiac in the sense that it was performed at Athenian festivals honouring the god. The most important of these was the Great Dionysia, a festival held in the spring of each year. It was also performed on a smaller scale at a winter festival, the Lenaea. Tragedy formed the central attraction of the Dionysia, and took the form of a competition between three poets, each of whom was allocated a day in which to put on a production of three tragedies followed (usually) by a satyr play: a humorous play featuring a chorus of satyrs, half-human and half-horse followers of Dionysus who were famous for their drinking and sexual antics. Before the tragedy performances came a dithyramb competition between the ten tribes of Athens, each of which had to enter a chorus of fifty adult men and another of fifty boys. The festival finished with a competition between five comic poets, each of whom produced a single play. Alongside these cultural performances were festivities in honour of the god, including a huge procession, sacrifices and feasts.
Poetry and drama therefore lay at the heart of the Dionysia, which showcased Athenian talent before the many Greeks from other cities who would have attended. The timing of the festival in late March coincided with the beginning of sea travel around the Mediterranean after the winter had closed the sailing routes, and this allowed international visitors to come to Athens for the Dionysia. This sense of display and patriotic pride is apparent in the festival, which celebrated Athens overtly through a series of ceremonies designed to show the city’s political and military power. The Dionysia was the occasion where the cities in Athens’ empire paid their tribute, which was exhibited in the theatre for all to marvel at the city’s wealth and the number of her allies. Before the tragedy performances, two further rituals reinforced the message of Athenian imperial power: first, the sons of men who had died fighting for the city took part in a parade and received a gift of armour; second, those who had benefited the city were given public honours. Thus the audience of tragedy would have been shown the link between Athens’ political power and her cultural achievements. Tragedy was never a cultural event viewed in isolation, but was rather part of a broader set of civic and religious celebrations that emphasized the importance of responsibility to one’s community and piety to the gods.
The context in which an ancient audience would have seen a tragedy was very different to our experience as modern theatre-goers. Tragedy was part of a large public celebration that aimed to unite the population of Athens and invite reflection on what it meant to be Athenian. The size of the theatre of Dionysus reminds us that tragic performances were mass entertainment. Plato estimated the size of the theatre audience as 30,000. Modern scholars have reduced this number, and the most recent estimates have suggested that the fifth-century BC theatre could have held 5,000–6,000 spectators. Nevertheless, this still represents a very substantial number of people, and it means that tragedy as an art form is closer to cinema in its scope than it is to modern theatre, whose audiences represent a small section of the population in terms both of numbers and of social class. We know that foreigners, slaves and immigrants attended the tragedy competition. There is no definitive evidence for whether women were present: scholars have sometimes argued for their exclusion, but there are passages in Plato and other authors that suggest some were present, including respectable women (if so, they would have likely had their own seating area). Thus tragedy’s audience represented a cross-section of society, and this was certainly not a genre catering only for an educated elite. The competitive format meant that tragedy had to offer something to all tastes. It could not afford to alienate the less educated in the audience, but also had to appeal to intellectuals by offering them something new and challenging. A successful tragedy contained spectacle and excitement, but was also thought-provoking. Competition also drove innovation, and the poets needed to set themselves apart from their rivals by finding ways to adapt the tragic format or the old myths.
Figure 1.1 The Theatre of Dionysus as it appears today. In the fifth century BC, the seating and stage buildings were made of wood. (Photo by A. Vergani/De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images.)
Conventions and formal features
For a modern audience used to naturalistic ‘kitchen sink’ dramas, tragedy is a highly stylized genre. Its basic structure consists of alternating episodes (spoken dialogue between actors) and choral odes (songs with dancing performed by the chorus), which divide a play into sections comparable to modern ‘scenes’. By the middle of the fifth century, a tragic poet had access to three actors (all male, funded by the public purse), a chorus of fifteen (also male, funded by a wealthy individual), and an unlimited number of silent extras, who could be used for visual effect, for example to create impressive tableaux.
Our evidence for tragedy’s development into its final form is murky. Ancient sources attribute its origins to a figure called Thespis (from whom we derive the term ‘thespian’), who is credited with ‘inventing’ tragedy by being the first to introduce an actor to what had previously been choral narrative performance. Thespis is a figure of myth as much as history, and though we have some fragments attributed to him, they are clearly later forgeries. If he existed at all, all we know is that he lived during the time of the tyrants, that is, in the late sixth century BC. Aristotle adds the further detail that Aeschylus introduced the second actor and Sophocles the third. There is a tendency in ancient literary criticism to find an ‘inventor’ for every important genre, and tragedy’s development may have been more complex and less individualized than this narrative suggests. Introducing actors could not have been done at the whim of a poet but must have required a vote from the public, since it would have involved a greater financial contribution from the state. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s analysis may reflect a truth that tragedy developed and reached its final form over time, with the gradual introduction of increasing numbers of actors as the benefits for plot and dialogue became evident. It is certainly the case that the first three surviving plays of Aeschylus (Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliant Women) require only two actors, whereas a third is needed by the time of the Oresteia in 458, whether it was introduced by Sophocles or someone else.
Since three actors had to play all the parts between them, masks were used to conceal their identity and to help the audience recognize who was supposed to be on stage at any time. Tragic masks are stylized, and represent character types such as ‘king’ or ‘old woman’ rather than attempting any level of individualism. Made of linen, the masks covered the whole head, including the hair, but had a large opening for the mouth, which allowed the actor to project his voice. Numerous terracotta replicas survive, as well as representations on vases, which allow us to appreciate the effect these must have had. Since the theatre was so large, many of the audience would have been too far from the stage to identify facial nuances or expressions. Acting in masks encourages the use of larger and more obvious gestures, which would also have been necessary in such a big space. The size of the theatre also explains why tragedy includes so much signalling to guide its audience. For example, when characters appear on stage they are introduced either by another character (‘I see Menelaus coming in a hurry’), or they announce who they are (‘I am the renowned Oedipus’).
While tragedy had some props and scenery, these were limited compared to a modern theatre, and so a great deal more scene-setting is required to explain to the audience where the play is set and what they are meant to be looking at. Tragedy did use two pieces of stage equipment: a crane (mêchanê), which allowed gods to appear flying above the stage; and a platform on wheels known as the ekkyklêma, whose purpose was to display interior scenes to the audience (for example, dead bodies within the house). However, the relative dearth of special effects and the absence of features such as lighting or a curtain also leads to a much starker form of theatre than we imagine from watching a production of an ancient play nowadays. However, we should not imagine the audience sitting in rapt concentration, since ancient evidence suggests that they were often loud and raucous. If an actor or a play failed to reach the expected standard, we hear of outbursts of shouting, banging and hissing, to the point where the actors and chorus sometimes had to leave the stage. We even know of a force of theatre police, known as ‘rod-holders’ (rhabdouchoi), whose role was to control the crowd when matters got out of hand.
Figure 1.2 Tragic actors and chorus-members celebrate their victory, still in costume and holding their masks (c. 400 BC). (Photo by DEA/ G. NIMATALLAH/De Agostini/Getty Images.)
A Greek audience would have anticipated certain formal features and conventions that governed the plot. Tragedy usually takes place within a single day (although it may refer to the past or anticipate the future), and is usually set in a single place (though there are exceptions, such as Aeschylus’ Kindly Ones, where the play begins in Delphi and moves to Athens). The location is normally just outside a house, and deaths and other important events occur off-stage and are reported to the audience by a messenger. The messenger speech, which often goes into grisly detail about the fates that have befallen the characters, is one of the most common tragic features. Others include a prologue to tell the story so far, a formal debate between characters with opposing views (known as an agôn) and a divine appearance (known by the Latin name deus ex machina). It is important not to regard these stylized elements as a straitjacket to confine the poet’s creativity, since as with any literary genre, a skilled poet uses conventions flexibly, to manipulate the audience’s expectations and achieve something new. For example, in Sophocles’ Ajax, when the hero leaves the stage intending (as the audience knows) to kill himself, and a messenger then appears, the audience might be expecting a report of Ajax’s suicide, but we in fact learn that there is one final chance to save him. Similarly, Euripides plays with the deus ex machina by devising tortuous situations from which the god is required to extricate the characters at the last minute, as in his Orestes where Apollo arrives to find Orestes about to burn down the palace and kill Menelaus’ daughter Hermione. His announcement that Orestes must now marry the girl he is holding at sword-point, and Menelaus’ immediate acceptance of him as a son-in-law, represents such a turn-around in attitudes as to be almost comic. Sometimes the characters even refer to the ‘rules’ of tragedy within the play, as in Euripides’ Electra, where Electra worries that Orestes’ vengeance cannot have been successful, as otherwise a messenger would have arrived to report on the death of Aegisthus (759). This sense of playfulness is designed to appeal to those members of the audience who have seen many tragedies before, and showcases the poet’s creative intelligence.
What makes a tragedy?
Is there, then, nothing to define tragedy beyond saying that it is a play performed in the tragedy competition and with a particular set of formal features? Since antiquity, critics of tragedy have sought a more encompassing definition for the genre, and the earliest and most influential discussion of tragedy was that of Aristotle in his Poetics (1449b):
Tragedy is a representation of an action that is serious and complete, and of a certain magnitude, using language enriched with every kind of artistic decoration, each used separately in different parts of the play. It depicts action, not narrative, and through incidents that arouse pity and fear it brings about the expurgation (catharsis) of such emotions.
While we should not assume that everything that Aristotle says on tragedy is automatically right, his views on what is typical of tragedy are worth taking seriously, especially as he had access to a far broader selection of plays than we do. According to his analysis, it is crucial that tragedy is a mimetic art form; that is, the actors represent characters and dramatize what happened to them. This sets drama apart from other poetic genres where the performer narrates what happened to mythological characters rather than taking on their roles. Aristotle also finds it significant that tragedy uses speech and song at different times during the play, and explains that this is what he means by ‘artistic decoration’. However, from a modern perspective it is noteworthy that he insists the events of tragedy must be serious and of a certain magnitude, but does not specify that the play must have a sad ending. In fact, Aristotle goes on to express a preference for plays that do end in disaster, but acknowledges that it is equally possible to have a tragedy that moves from catastrophe to a more settled situation. Several of Euripides’ plays fall into this category: for example, his Iphigenia Among the Taurians and Helen describe how a Greek heroine is rescued from danger, while his Suppliant Women and Children of Heracles begin with people in desperate straits who are saved by the end of the play. Similarly, Aeschylus’ Kindly Ones and Sophocles’ Philoctetes open in a difficult situation but resolve it during the play and end on a note of reconciliation and optimism.
The existence of these ‘upbeat’ tragedies raises the question of how tragedy survived into the modern era. The process was a mixture of random luck combined with selection. For a play to survive, it had to be copied and recopied enough times to survive through antiquity and the Middle Ages, and only a tiny proportion made this journey successfully. A single copy could survive by luck, but a play that was deemed particularly good quality was more likely to have been in wide circulation, and so had a better chance. However, we must not be too complacent that the ones that we have today must have been the ‘best’. Tastes vary between time and place: for example, in the Byzantine period the most popular plays of Euripides were Hecuba, Orestes, and Phoenician Women, dramas which are rarely performed today. The views of ancient school teachers were probably important, since plays that were selected for the curriculum (whether because of quality, content or style) would have been more likely to be recopied. It is also relevant that Aristotle preferred sad plays to ones with happy endings, since his views on what made a tragedy successful were influential in determining which were selected as the best examples of the genre. Nor is it coincidence that we have more upbeat plays from Euripides than from the other two playwrights, since he is the only poet from whom we have plays that survived by luck rather than through selection (discussed further in Chapter 2). It is therefore misleading to label these optimistic plays as ‘tragi-comedies’ or other terms that imply they are not proper tragedies, since the tragic genre was much broader and more flexible than the English word ‘tragedy’ might suggest.
Nevertheless, it is important that tragedy contains serious material, and it would be fair to describe its basic theme as human suffering. Even in plays with an upbeat ending the characters have experienced hardship, and we are encouraged to reflect on their suffering and empathize with it. Euripides’ Ion, for example, contains humorous elements and ends with a prophecy of the hero’s glorious future, but also deals with rape, childlessness and what it means to grow up without a mother. Helen ends with the joyous reunion of a loving couple, who escape danger and return to Greece, but it also depicts Helen’s distress at knowing her reputation is unfairly sullied, and her longing for her husband and family life. According to Aristotle, tragic suffering is designed to elicit a strong response from the audience: he singles out pity and fear as the emotions that a good tragedy generates, and claims that when we watch a tragedy we undergo a process he labels catharsis, by which we experience and then expurgate these emotions. We feel pity because of the suffering that tragic characters undergo, but fear because this suffering has universal relevance, and tragedy imparts lessons relevant to our own lives. Aristotle does not fully explain what he means by catharsis, but it is a metaphor derived from medicine, where it means purgation or purification of the body. Thus catharsis is some kind of emotional cleansing that follows the intense experience of watching a tragedy. Aristotle’s ideas are a rebuttal of Plato’s theory that tragedy is dangerous because of the powerful emotions it generates. Whereas Plato feared that tragedy’s power might weaken its audience’s moral fibre by encouraging them to indulge in unseemly lamentation, Aristotle reclaims it as a positive force, and the medical metaphor inherent in catharsis suggests that tragedy can heal us.
The benefits of watching tragic suffering also lie behind the idea that it is educational for the audience. This idea of ‘learning through suffering’ is made explicit in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, where it is defined as the road to human understanding (Agamemnon 176–8). Within tragedy itself, the characters learn only when it is too late, and the final scenes of many plays depict characters recognizing their earlier follies and lamenting their consequences. For example, the end of Sophocles’ Antigone depicts Creon’s bitter realization that his stubbornness has destroyed his family. In other plays, the heroes appear to learn nothing before their deaths, but other characters may learn from what has happened, as in Euripides’ Bacchae, where Pentheus’ mother and grandfather discover that he has been punished for angering a god. But ‘learning through suffering’ applies also to the audience, who are in a position to observe the characters’ mistakes and reflect upon them. This is not to suggest that tragedy can be boiled down to a crude set of moralizing lessons with neat answers, since tragedy also has to deal with the fact that life is messy, complicated and often unfair. However, whereas we moderns tend to resist the idea that great art can be didactic, the ancients would have been comfortable with the idea that poetry should teach its audience to be better people. This is the underlying premise of Aristophanes’ Frogs, where the god Dionysus goes to recover a tragedian from the underworld, and decides to take the one who offers the best advice to the Athenians. Similarly, much of Plato’s distaste for tragedy (and poetry in general) arises from his fear that it offers a rival (and in his view lesser) form of moral education to philosophy. As we shall see in later chapters, tragedy frequently depicts negative exempla, showing problematic individuals, dysfunctional families and conflicted communities. By holding up a distorting mirror to social norms, tragedy encourages its audience to reflect upon what it means to live in a family or a city, and to consider the tensions that make these relationships fail.
Tragedy, then, is a diverse art form, and one we should not attempt to oversimplify or fit into a single model. Nevertheless, at its core we can define it as a genre primarily interested in tackling the hard questions in human life, in particular, why we suffer. Tragedy likes to deal with the darkest Greek myths, selecting stories of incest, kin-killing and societal breakdown. Yet by elevating this into something beautiful, and imposing a moral pattern upon it, this suffering becomes meaningful, because of its ability to teach us something, and because it reflects some kind of broader cosmic order. Thus tragedy does not simply seek to upset us, but aims to redeem the worst experiences in human life, and to turn them into something that, paradoxically, can give us pleasure.