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The way that ancient texts were preserved means that classical literature is dominated by a small number of ‘big names’. All Greek tragedy that survives was ascribed to one of the three great playwrights – Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – although this attribution is false in the case of Rhesus and possibly also for Prometheus Bound. These poets were prolific, and their work accounts for roughly 25 per cent of all the tragedy performed at the Great Dionysia during their lifetimes: 70–90 plays by Aeschylus, 120 by Sophocles and about 90 by Euripides out of a total of about 1,200 plays from Aeschylus’ first performance in 499 BC to Sophocles’ death in 406 BC. They were also extremely successful, and even in their own lifetime were regarded as the greatest tragedians, as shown in Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs, produced the year after Sophocles’ death, which depicts a contest in the underworld for the throne of tragedy. By the time of Frogs, the plays of Aeschylus (who had died fifty years previously) were regarded as classics, while the audience would have been used to seeing new work by Sophocles and Euripides, both of whom had died recently. Aristophanes presents Aeschylus as an old-fashioned conservative and sets him in conflict with Euripides, who is depicted as a radical innovator. Sophocles does not appear in the play (he may have died too soon before its production to be fully incorporated), but we are told that he is an easy-going man who respectfully yielded to Aeschylus as the father of tragedy. Frogs was influential in shaping the perception of these poets, and still makes its mark on the way they are taught in modern schools and universities. It is therefore an important source for anyone seeking to understand the tragedians and their legacy.
Aristophanes presents the three poets as representing the rise and fall of tragedy as a genre: Aeschylus (reactionary and sombre) marks its origins, Sophocles (classic and restrained) its high point, and Euripides (newfangled and shocking) its development and decline. This model fits with the mood of the times, since Frogs was performed the year before Athens’ defeat that marked the end of the Peloponnesian War. Thus the end of the great era of tragedy is entwined with the end of Athens’ own greatness. This pattern of rise, pinnacle and fall is one we find often used in analyses of literature and history, and is linked to the idea of a ‘golden age’, but approaching the poets in this way risks oversimplifying. As we shall see, there are elements of truth in Frogs, but Aristophanes’ analysis needs to be approached with caution – after all, the play is a comedy, which aims to stereotype for the sake of humour.
This chapter will explore what we know about the three great tragedians from their plays, from Aristophanes and from other sources. In each case, we must remember that only a tiny proportion of their work survives (about 10 per cent of Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’, and 20 per cent of Euripides’), and this makes it dangerous to make generalizations about ‘Aeschylean’, ‘Sophoclean’ or ‘Euripidean’ drama. The popularity of Frogs meant that Aristophanes’ views about what was typical of the authors influenced which plays were selected as the best examples of their art, and so which survived to the modern day. Thus we cannot necessarily use the surviving plays as evidence independent of Aristophanes’ jokes, and nor can we be sure that they represent the full range of the poets’ style. Moreover, these poets had long careers, and we would expect their technique and interests to develop and change over their lifetime. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify characteristic elements of the poets’ style, and so to guess at what an Athenian might have anticipated when going to see a new play by one of these authors.
Aeschylus
As with all ancient poets, we have many anecdotes about Aeschylus’ life, but few can be trusted, since ancient biographers tend to make up stories based on lines of the plays or jokes in Aristophanes. Thus the ancient Life of Aeschylus is a mixture of factual data (such as his number of victories) and absurd anecdotes, such as the story that the poet was killed by an eagle dropping a tortoise on his head. Aeschylus was born in 525 BC, and his poetic career spans many of the events which determined Athenian national identity: the Persian Wars, the formation of the Delian League (which became the Athenian Empire) and the rise of radical democracy. Thus we should be suspicious of Aristophanes’ portrayal of Aeschylus as a gruff anti-intellectual living in simpler times, and see it as a caricature intended to generate humour by contrasting him with Euripides. In fact, Aeschylus lived through a time of great intellectual development, as Athens became a powerful imperial city, attracting artists, philosophers and thinkers from across the Greek world, and his work reflects these changing times just as much as the other tragedians. The most important political events of Aeschylus’ lifetime were the Persian Wars, in which he took part, and his epitaph commemorates his role in the battle of Marathon in 490 BC:
This marker conceals the body of Aeschylus son of Euphorion, who died at wheat-rich Gela. Ask the plain of Marathon about his manhood and fame, and the long-haired Persians, who know about it.
It may seem surprising that Aeschylus’ epitaph makes no mention of his dramatic career, focusing only on his role as a citizen-soldier of Athens. However, the Greek conception of male excellence gave pride of place to military endeavour and community service (especially in democratic Athens), and so we should see the poem as reflecting these ideals rather than suggesting particular humility on the part of the poet. As the epitaph shows, Aeschylus had particular connections with Sicily, where he is said to have died, and he was commissioned to write a play, Women of Aetna, in honour of the new city of Aetna founded by Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse.
In a career of just over forty years (his first play was performed in 499 BC, and he died in 456 BC), Aeschylus wrote between seventy and ninety plays, which means he would have competed in about twenty Great Dionysias, and he won first prize thirteen times. Seven plays survive under his name, though scholars have doubted the authenticity of Prometheus Bound. The surviving plays were written within a fourteen-year span, and belong to the later part of Aeschylus’ career. Though tragedy already existed by Aeschylus’ time, he is widely regarded as having shaped the genre into the form we know it. As we saw in Chapter 1, he is credited with having introduced a second actor. Although we cannot be sure that this was Aeschylus’ own innovation, it was crucial to the development of tragedy into drama as we understand it, since it opened the possibility for dialogue, and assisted the creation of a self-contained world within the play.
Aeschylus’ speciality as a tragedian seems to have been his use of connected trilogies and tetralogies. We know of at least four certain tetralogies, and a further seven which are possible or likely. Only one complete trilogy survives (the Oresteia), but two of the other surviving plays belonged to a trilogy: the Danaid trilogy, from which we have Suppliant Women; and the Theban trilogy, from which we have Seven Against Thebes. There is no evidence that this practice was common in Aeschylus’ day or widely imitated by other poets. We have evidence for only one other tetralogy contemporary to Aeschylus, by the poet Polyphrasmon, on the theme of Lycurgus (which came in third place behind Aeschylus’ Theban tetralogy in 467 BC). We know that Sophocles composed a cycle of plays about the hero Telephus, and Euripides composed three plays on Trojan themes in 415 BC (including Trojan Women), but the connection between the latter group was loose, and we do not find the continuity of plot and situation of Aeschylus. Aeschylus also wrote stand-alone plays (for example Persians, which was performed alongside two tragedies set in the world of myth), but he seems to have been particularly fond of the opportunities offered by connected plays.
The Oresteia demonstrates the potential of this form. By continuing the story across three plays, the poet can develop themes and ideas to great sophistication. The Oresteia is an exploration of vengeance and how we should respond to wrongs committed against us. The play puts forward the idea that ‘the doer suffers’; in other words, that committing an act of violence, even if it is in justifiable retaliation for a previous wrong act, generates further punishment. Over the course of the trilogy we see how the desire for vengeance creates an inescapable cycle that continues down the generations. This cycle can be broken only by establishing a new system of justice, based on third-party arbitration through a legal system, rather than leaving matters in the hands of aggrieved individuals. The fact that we see the old broken system wreak havoc on the house of Atreus through the first two plays means that we understand the consequences of tit-for-tat vengeance, and so appreciate the resolution and new hope offered at the end of the last play, Kindly Ones, when Athena’s court acquits Orestes, and the vengeful Furies are pacified and incorporated into the new system.
The trilogy form also allows ideas to be developed through metaphor and language. The Oresteia makes extensive use of animal imagery that becomes richer as the trilogy progresses. Early in Agamemnon, the chorus report the omen that symbolized Zeus’ wish for Agamemnon and Menelaus to invade Troy: a pair of eagles, which represent the justice of Zeus, feeding on a pregnant hare (114–20). The eagle imagery is picked up in the next play, Libation Bearers, where Orestes and Electra describe themselves as orphaned eagle chicks in the clutches of a viper (247–51). As Agamemnon’s children they are the offspring of their eagle-father, but their mother is not another eagle but a snake, which is trying to crush and kill them. The eagle and the snake are natural enemies, and so by introducing this idea, Orestes tries to minimize his relationship with Clytemnestra and align himself entirely with Agamemnon, thus lessening his guilt in murdering his mother. However, later in the play, it is Orestes himself who becomes a snake, as the chorus describe Clytemnestra’s dream that she gave birth to a snake and held it to her breast, only to be bitten by it (527–33). The snake imagery here is used to express the dark side of Orestes’ vengeance, and how he is not only the eagle of Zeus, carrying out divine justice, but also a kin-killer, like his mother. But at the end of the play the snake imagery takes on new life as the vengeful snakes appear in the hair of the Furies (1050), and they are described as ‘snakes’ in the final play, Kindly Ones (127–8). As the snakes become literal rather than purely symbolic, they represent how the violence continues to perpetuate itself and becomes such a dangerous force that the gods must intervene to end it. Using this strand of imagery across three plays enables the audience to make connections between them, and allows the ideas to become increasingly sophisticated.
This complexity comes at a price, however, and Aristophanes mocks Aeschylus for the slow pace of his dramas, and claims they are full of pregnant silences and interminable speeches. Aeschylus’ dramas revolve around a single action or moment and are relatively static, especially when we compare them with the many twists and turns we find in Euripidean tragedy. In Agamemnon, for example, the main event of the play is Agamemnon’s murder, with everything else building up to or responding to it, while in Libation Bearers, the play slowly builds up to the killing of Clytemnestra. Aeschylus also has fewer speaking characters than Sophocles or Euripides, and he makes more use of the chorus than the other two playwrights (this ranges from 34 per cent of the total lines in Kindly Ones and 55 per cent in Suppliant Women, compared to an average of 17 per cent in Sophocles and 15 per cent in Euripides). Aeschylus gives his chorus longer and more complex odes than Sophocles or Euripides, and is less inclined to give his characters solo songs. In Frogs, Aristophanes jokes that Aeschylus’ plays are ponderous and barely comprehensible. It is certainly true that Aeschylus’ style and language can be challenging; he uses densely packed imagery in a way we find rarely elsewhere in Greek poetry. For example, in Agamemnon Cassandra tells the chorus she will make her prophecies clearer, and packs three separate metaphors (marriage, wind and water) in just a few lines (1178–83):
Now my prophecies will no longer gaze through a veil like a newly married bride, but will rush down from the sunrise clear as a fresh wind, so as to break upon the beach like a wave of sorrow far greater than this one.
This density of language certainly makes Aeschylean tragedy daunting to study, but explains why his work, and in particular the Oresteia, is considered by many the pinnacle of classical literature.
Sophocles
If we measure a playwright’s success by how often he won at the Great Dionysia, Sophocles has the best claim to the throne of tragedy, since out of his thirty festival entries (120 plays) he won first prize twenty times, and never came in last place. Sophocles was born in Colonus (just outside Athens) around 496 BC, the son of a wealthy manufacturer of armour. His career spanned from at least 468 BC to his death in 406 BC, and his last play, Oedipus at Colonus, was produced posthumously in 401 BC. Thus Sophocles would have competed against both Aeschylus and Euripides. Only two of his plays can be accurately dated (the other is Philoctetes, produced in 409 BC), and attempts to date the other five rely on subjective issues such as style, language or connections to events in Athenian history, and we can often go no further than guessing what decade they are likely to have been first produced in.
Like Aeschylus, Sophocles is said to have been an innovator, and is said to have introduced the third actor. As we saw in Chapter 1, there is evidence that this development took place during his lifetime, whether or not we can say for sure that he was responsible for it. He is a master of stagecraft, and his skilled handling of structure and plot makes the plays particularly appealing to modern tastes. For example, in contrast to the prologues of Euripides, where a character typically narrates the ‘story so far’, Sophocles conveys this information subtly. In Antigone, Creon’s refusal to bury Polynices is told by Antigone to Ismene, rather than given to the audience in a monologue, thus embedding this important information into dialogue which also reveals the personalities of the two sisters and their relationship. Similarly, Ajax opens with a discussion between Athena and Odysseus, which explains Ajax’s anger with the Greeks and his madness, but also introduces Odysseus as a character, and foregrounds the idea that human frailty should make us feel compassion, which becomes crucial once more at end of the play.
Scholarship on Sophocles often describes his preference for plays which revolve around a central hero (discussed further in Chapter 4). Thus Oedipus, and the decisions he must make, dominate Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, while the focal issue of Ajax is whether the hero will go through with his wish to commit suicide, and what will happen after he does so. We must not take this ‘recipe’ for Sophoclean drama too literally, however, since not all the surviving plays fit this model: Women of Trachis, Philoctetes and Antigone have more than one important character and it is artificial to ask which the ‘true Sophoclean hero’ is. Aristotle’s preference for plays of this type means that they were more likely to be selected for school curricula, and so survive, and this means that our perspective on what is typically Sophoclean is inevitably distorted. Aeschylus and Euripides too were fascinated by powerful heroes, and Sophocles is not the only author to write plays dominated by one character (think, for example, of Euripides’ Medea). Nevertheless, Sophocles is interested in the figure of the hero – the larger-than-life and uncompromising individual – and his plays pay particular attention to characterization and decision-making. In Oedipus the King, for example, the chain of events which drives Oedipus to uncover his fate also reveals the type of person who would do what he does. Oedipus’ intelligence and dynamism make him want to discover the truth and are what allowed him to outwit the Sphinx (and so marry Jocasta and become king of Thebes), but his bad temper, which we see in his treatment of Creon and Tiresias, also brought about his murder of Laius. Similarly, Women of Trachis explores how a loving wife can end up causing her husband’s death, while Electra depicts the damaging effects of prolonged grief.
This interest in human decision-making goes hand in hand with an interest in the role of the divine in human life. Sophocles portrays gods on stage much less than Aeschylus or Euripides, and their will is knowable only through omens and prophecies, which human characters frequently misunderstand or disregard. A central theme is therefore the extent to which humans are in control of their own lives. For example, the first part of Ajax is dominated by the hero’s decision as to whether to commit suicide out of shame. Later, after he has already left the stage to kill himself, we learn of a prophecy that Ajax will die that day. Thus Ajax’s death is doubly determined, by the hero’s own apparent free will, but also by the gods. Conversely, in Oedipus the King, the hero learns of the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother and runs away from home to avoid this coming true, but it is his attempt to escape his fate that makes it come to pass. This kind of tragic irony is characteristic of Sophocles, who frequently plays on the gap between the audience’s knowledge of what will happen in the myth and the characters’ failure to understand before it is too late.
Euripides
Euripides was the youngest of the three tragedians, probably born in the 480s BC. His first production was in 455 BC, the year after the death of Aeschylus, and he composed about ninety plays between then and his death some time before early 406 BC. Two plays, Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis, were produced posthumously. Nineteen plays come down to us under his name, although one, Rhesus, is almost certainly the work of an unknown fourth-century poet. He is reported to have spent the last two years of his life at the court of King Archelaus in Macedon, and he certainly wrote a play (Archelaus) which was designed to please the king by stressing his Greek ancestry and legitimizing his claim to the throne (Archelaus had actually usurped power). The ancient tradition tells us that Euripides was torn to shreds by the king’s dogs, though we are no more obliged to believe this than Aeschylus’ unfortunate encounter with the tortoise. The careers of Euripides and Sophocles thus ran in parallel, and the poets competed regularly. Indeed, we are told that Sophocles dressed the chorus of his last play in 406 BC in mourning garb to honour the death of Euripides.
Euripides appears or is mentioned in several of Aristophanes’ plays, and the comic poet presents him as the enfant terrible of Greek tragedy. In Frogs he is the young pretender who rejects Aeschylus’ traditional approach to tragedy and insists on a new and shocking way of doing things. In Women at the Thesmophoria, Aristophanes jokes that Euripides’ obsession with presenting wicked women has led the women of Athens to plot his downfall, and that his depiction of cruel gods has damaged the business of those selling religious paraphernalia, since the Athenians no longer wish to worship them. The image of Euripides as a radical is still pervasive in scholarship, but in recent years it has been increasingly questioned. It is certainly true that Euripides did much less well than Aeschylus and Sophocles in terms of victories at the Dionysia. Of the twenty-three festivals he competed in, he won first prize just four times, a success rate of only 18 per cent, compared to 56 per cent for Aeschylus and 67 per cent for Sophocles. However, we should be cautious of ascribing this relative dearth of first prizes to his plays being too shocking for the Athenians, since the fact that Euripides was so often selected for a slot at the Dionysia shows that his work was well regarded. Moreover, the aspects of Euripides’ work that Aristophanes picks out as shocking can be found in the other tragedians. Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, for example, is as transgressive and frightening as Euripides’ Medea, while Athena in Sophocles’ Ajax behaves with similar malice to Aphrodite in Euripides’ Hippolytus.
Nevertheless, the style of Euripides’ tragedies is distinct from his rivals in a number of ways. For a start, his plays are more self-conscious in style. Euripides’ gods may not behave very differently to other tragic gods, but they appear on stage much more (discussed further in Chapter 5). When gods discuss their wishes and motivations in front of the audience, it forces them to confront divine morality more directly than if we are left to infer it just from observing what happens to human beings. Similarly, we find overt allusion to themes of contemporary interest (for example, philosophical debates such as whether nature or culture is more important in determining human character, see Chapter 6). Sophocles and Aeschylus handle intellectual and philosophical themes too, but do so less overtly, and use fewer contemporary buzzwords. All the tragedians innovated with myth, but Euripides takes it particularly far (see Chapter 3). Thus he presents a world where Helen did not go to Troy (Helen), or one where Orestes is convicted of matricide rather than acquitted (Orestes). The heroic age in Euripides is gritty and downbeat, and it is this tendency Aristophanes mocks when he accuses Euripides of bringing on his heroes dressed in rags. He makes particular use of monody (lyric song performed by an actor), and his characters are often given emotional arias, which allowed the actor to show off his vocal technique. These songs can be flamboyant and innovative, the best example perhaps being in Orestes, where instead of a traditional messenger speech, we get a surreal song performed by a Phrygian slave, packed with metrical fireworks and exotic Greek (1368–1502).
An accident of history means that far more of Euripides’ plays survive than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. For the other two poets we have only a sample of those plays selected by ancient scholars for their excellence. For Euripides, as well as ten ‘select’ plays, we have a manuscript that preserves a further nine. These are often known as the ‘alphabetic plays’, because the section that survives contains plays whose title in Greek began with the letters eta through to kappa. This means that in the case of Euripides we have access to a group of plays selected randomly rather than through the filter of what scholars considered worth preserving, and this gives us a fascinating insight into the diversity of tragedy (as we saw in Chapter 1). Several of these non-select plays are ‘escape tragedies’ or ‘rescue plays’: plays with an upbeat ending that focus on romance, mistaken identity, and reunions. Helen and Iphigenia among the Taurians depict the rescue of a Greek heroine from a bizarre foreign land, while Ion tells of how a foundling rediscovers his long-lost mother and becomes king of Athens. Others have a strongly pro-Athenian slant, which to a modern reader can seem jingoistic or parochial: Children of Heracles and Suppliant Women both describe occasions when the Athenians rescued those in need and won a great victory by doing so. Optimistic plays therefore represent a significant proportion of Euripides’ work, and these went on to influence the development of New Comedy in the following century. However, we should be cautious of assuming that this variety was limited to Euripides, since the range of moods outside the selection is a salutary reminder of how Aristotle’s preference for serious plays has narrowed our perspective on the tragic genre.
When generalizing about the tragedians’ work, we should recall that nearly a century passed between the first play of Aeschylus and the last of Sophocles and Euripides, and we would not expect tragedy to remain static over that period any more than we would expect the novels of 1916 to be identical in their style or their interests to those of 2016. Moreover, all three tragedians were prolific, and we would expect variety within their work, especially since the competitive framework of drama rewarded poets who kept the audience engaged by presenting something fresh. Though we only have a fraction of the poets’ original output, we can nevertheless identify particular patterns that seem to be distinctive: for example, Aeschylus’ liking for slow-burning trilogies, Sophocles’ fondness for dramatic irony, Euripides’ self-consciousness. Nevertheless, these differences should not obscure the many similarities that unite Greek tragedy, in terms both of style and content. Tragedy deals with the difficult questions in human life: how should we live in a family or a community, how can we make tough decisions, and above all, why do people (including good people) have to suffer? The rest of this volume will look at these overarching themes shared by all the tragedians, and will look at the questions posed by Greek tragedy, and the answers it suggests to them.