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Every surviving tragedy but one is set in the world of myth, and myth was a fundamental part of Greek culture. There is no genre of poetry that does not make some use of it, and since poetry was one of the foundation stones of education, a Greek child would have grown up steeped in this world from an early age. Myth also provided a rich array of themes for the visual arts, from fine temple sculpture to painted pottery used at drinking parties, and so a Greek would have been surrounded by mythological images as he went about his daily life. This chapter will explore the role myth plays in Greek tragedy, the impact of setting plays in a world of well-known stories and characters, and the degree to which the poets themselves could adapt and vary the myths.
Why myth?
To a modern reader it may appear strange that the tragedians contented themselves with the mythological world. One of the challenges facing a modern playwright is the need to invent a compelling story with interesting characters, but we know of only one fifth-century tragedy whose plot was invented by the poet (Agathon’s lost play Antheus). From another perspective, however, one might ask why the poets should bother making up a plot when myth provided them with characters familiar to the audience and stories to suit every possible taste. Moreover, myth provided advantages that new plots could not. Its familiarity meant that minimal time was required to explain who the characters were, and the audience could take pleasure in seeing what the poets could do with these trusted favourites. The rising popularity of fan fiction in the age of the internet demonstrates that we moderns are not immune to the appeal of telling stories with pre-existing characters and situations, and that an established imaginary world can be a spur to creativity rather than a hindrance. As we shall see later in this chapter, it is certainly not the case that knowing the stories made Greek tragedies predictable or dull.
A possible alternative to myth was to use a plot based on history. Our only non-mythological play – Aeschylus’ Persians – adopts this strategy and tells the story of the Greek victory at Salamis from the perspective of the defeated Persians. Persians was not the only play to take this approach, and Herodotus tells us of a play by the poet Phrynichus that dealt with the recent capture of Miletus by the Persians in 494 BC (6.21). However, his account also demonstrates why historical plays could be risky. When Phrynichus’ play was performed (the exact date is unknown, but is believed to have been shortly after the sack of Miletus), the Athenians were so upset to be reminded of troubles close to their hearts that they fined the poet and forbade any re-performance of the piece. Dramatizing the suffering of fellow Greeks was clearly too much for an Athenian audience: Athens had close ties with Miletus, and the play could be taken as criticism for not helping the Milesians. Moreover, at the time of the performance Persia was an imminent threat to the rest of the Greek world, and part of the Athenians’ distress may have been fear of what awaited them. Setting a play in the world of myth avoided these problems. While the Greeks may have believed (at least to some extent) in the truth of their myths, they regarded them as separate from the historical world. Myths took place in the so-called ‘heroic age’, whose exact chronology relative to the contemporary world was vague. This creates a sense of distance, and so offers a safe space to explore painful ideas. Euripides’ Trojan Women, for example, deals with similar topics to Phrynichus’ Sack of Miletus, the destruction of a city and the fate of its inhabitants. These were pressing issues in the ancient world, where defeat in battle could mean the enslavement of your family, and Euripides offers a harrowing depiction of the suffering of the women and children left behind. However, using the mythological city of Troy to depict this avoids these ideas becoming unbearable, since it gives the audience a way of distancing it from their own lives.
Suspense and surprise in mythological drama
A common misconception is the idea that because the audience knew the myths, it was impossible for a tragedian to create any real suspense. As we shall see in the next section, this idea relies on the false premise that myth was fixed. However, even where the audience did know broadly what would happen (as they did in many cases), poets could use this to make the drama more rather than less exciting. The film director Alfred Hitchcock, himself a master of creating suspense, offers a clear explanation of how knowing the facts can increase the suspense of a narrative:
There is a distinct difference between suspense and surprise and yet many pictures continually confuse the two, I’ll explain what I mean. We are now having a innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the décor. The public can see that it is quarter to one. In these conditions the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene.
The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen, ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!’
In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed.
Interview with François Truffaut, published as Hitchcock/Truffaut 1967
Hitchcock’s scenario transfers nicely to Greek tragedy, where the bomb under the table represents the audience’s knowledge of what will happen in the story. One might think, for example, that the story of Oedipus and his quest to find the killer of Laius would be more exciting if we did not know that Oedipus himself was the culprit. It is no doubt true that the final revelation at the end of Oedipus the King would be shocking, the equivalent of an unexpected explosion. However, Sophocles relies on the audience’s awareness of Oedipus’ identity to create a masterpiece of tension and irony. We see him persisting in his quest for the truth, though we know it will bring about his ruin, and we see the scenes where he speaks affectionately to Jocasta with horror, since we know that this is a sexual relationship between mother and son. When Oedipus and the chorus express excitement about uncovering the truth of Oedipus’ birth, we know that their hope will soon turn to revulsion, and this greater knowledge makes us feel greater pity for the characters, whose optimism we know to be unfounded. The tragedians sometimes rely on the audience’s greater knowledge, by alluding to events to come after the play has ended, or by having a character anticipate what will happen during its course. For example, Euripides’ Hippolytus begins with Aphrodite revealing the main events of the play: Phaedra has fallen in love with Hippolytus, her love will be revealed, and Hippolytus will be killed by his father’s curses. When we then see Phaedra struggle to retain her dignity, our knowledge of Aphrodite’s plan makes us wonder how she will succumb and reveal her love. We watch the Nurse’s attempts to wheedle Phaedra’s secret from her with more anxiety, and we know that Phaedra’s trust in her will be ill-founded. By having the goddess reveal the story at the start, Euripides has not arbitrarily given away a plot twist, but rather encourages us to engage emotionally with the characters’ struggles, as we see how their best efforts inevitably turn to disaster.
Variability in myth
While the basic plots and characters of myths were well known, they were far from being set in stone. The famous figures of myth existed across the Greek world, but the stories told about them varied in different locations, and in any given place, details varied according to the genre and medium it was told in. It is important that we rid ourselves of any idea that there is a ‘correct’ way to tell a myth, or that the tragedians were doing anything unusual when they adapted one to suit their ends. The versions of myth in tragedy tend to be darker than those we find in other genres. For example, in the Odyssey, Homer tells the story of how Orestes avenged the death of his father Agamemnon (e.g. 1.30–43), but does not mention that this involved killing his own mother, a central part of the myth as we know it from tragedy. Instead, Orestes is held up as an example of how a good son should behave, and there is no suggestion that he did anything problematic. Also in the Odyssey, we learn that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, but in the epic he continues as king of Thebes despite this terrible revelation (although his wife/mother does commit suicide in shame), and the poem implies that this mistake was discovered before he could beget incestuous children (11.271–7). In some cases, we know that the tragedians selected the nastier of two rival versions. For example, Orestes committed matricide in the lyric poetry of Stesichorus, and all three tragedians adopt this rather than the more upbeat epic version. In other cases, they seem to have adapted myth to make it more troubling. It is generally thought that Euripides was the first to make Medea kill her own children: in earlier accounts we know of, they either die by accident or are killed by the Corinthians in revenge for Medea’s actions. Changing details of the myth could change the slant of a play. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, for example, Oedipus blinds himself in horror at what he has done, and the blinding becomes a symbol of his guilt, and of the limitations of human knowledge. Euripides also wrote an Oedipus, and in this version Oedipus was blinded by the servants of Laius, in anger at his murder of their previous master. This version of the story puts less emphasis on Oedipus’ discovery of his responsibility and his reaction to it, and makes us think more about how the revelation affects other members of the Theban community.
The tragedians are selective as to which type of myth to base their plays on, and show a preference for those that focus on dysfunctional families. The quests of the great heroes tend to feature as background for their troubled personal lives. For example, of the three plays in which Heracles appears, two deal with the saddest moments in his life. In Euripides’ Heracles, he returns triumphant from his labours but is driven mad and murders his family, and in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis he returns from years of absence only to be killed by his wife. Similarly in Euripides’ Medea, Jason is not presented as the daring captor of the Golden Fleece but as a fickle and manipulative man who abandons his family for a more prestigious marriage.
The tragedians were competing to win a prize, and creativity with myth was important for impressing the judges and keeping the audience entertained. At its extreme, this could involve significant changes to what the audience thought they knew. The clearest example is Euripides’ Helen, where Helen was neither Paris’ willing accomplice nor his abductee, but a respectable Greek matron who never went to Troy at all. In the play, the Helen who went to Troy was a phantom sent by the gods, while the real Helen spends the Trojan War in Egypt. Menelaus and Helen are reunited, resolve the misunderstanding over Helen’s role in the war, and escape from the dastardly Egyptian king who wishes to marry Helen himself. Thus Euripides takes the most hated woman from Greek myth, a byword for female fickleness and uncontrolled sexuality, and turns her into a figure like Penelope, a loyal wife who uses her intelligence and beauty to benefit her marriage. Aristophanes parodies Helen in his Women at the Thesmophoria, describing it as the ‘new Helen’ (850), a testament to how original Euripides’ presentation was felt to be. However, Euripides did not invent this myth wholesale. The story existed by the time of lyric poet Stesichorus (late seventh to mid-sixth centuries BC), who composed a poem known as the ‘palinode’, in which he retracted the slander of Helen and acknowledged that she had never been to Troy. Earlier in the fifth century, Herodotus had discussed the tradition that Helen spent the war in Egypt, and argued that it makes more logical sense than the usual version, since it is hard to believe the Trojans could have been stupid enough to let their city be destroyed for the sake of a runaway wife (2.120).
Mythological innovation need not require such drastic changes, and no two tellings of the same story were ever identical. The possibilities for variation can be seen in Euripides’ two versions of the Hippolytus myth. Our surviving Hippolytus was Euripides’ second play on this theme, known in antiquity as Hippolytus Garland-Bearer, after the scene where he offers a garland to Artemis. This appears to have been written in response to the negative reaction to his first play Hippolytus Veiled, in which Phaedra directly attempted to seduce Hippolytus, who covered his head in shame. Phaedra was depicted as a shameless and bold woman, in contrast to the surviving play, where she struggles nobly with her desire for Hippolytus, and her love is revealed against her wishes. A more sympathetic Phaedra complicates the presentation of Hippolytus, since his furious reaction to her love becomes less straightforward. Whereas we might expect that the first play portrayed the untrustworthiness of womankind, the second one encourages its audience to reflect on the limitations of human free will, and how we should behave when put in an impossible position.
Comparing the Oresteia myth
The doomed house of Atreus was a popular theme in tragedy, and we are fortunate to have at least one play based on this myth cycle from all three tragedians. Comparing tellings of the same story helps us see the choices a poet had to make when he composed a tragedy. Aeschylus’ Oresteia was already a classic by the time of Sophocles and Euripides, and so the other two poets had to set their versions of the myth against Aeschylus’ great achievement, and find ways to set their own stamp on the story.
The myths associated with a character or family may include many incidents over a long time period, but the action of the play deals with one particular occasion (usually within the confines of a single day). In the case of the Oresteia, Aeschylus’ liking for trilogies allows him to trace the story down the generations, but Sophocles and Euripides, who composed stand-alone plays, had to choose a focal event. Being creative with this choice could bring new aspects of the myth to the fore: for example, Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis dramatizes the decision made by Agamemnon that formed the catalyst for subsequent events, namely his choice to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to allow the fleet to sail to Troy. Euripides thus tells an origins story that explains Clytemnestra’s hatred for Agamemnon. While Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra is a frightening woman with whom we feel little sympathy, the Clytemnestra of Iphigenia at Aulis is a much more human figure. She begins the play as a mother excited about her daughter’s forthcoming wedding, and we see her horror as she learns that this was a trick to entice Iphigenia to her death, her desperate attempts to save her, and her despair when these fail. At the other end of the story comes Euripides’ Orestes, set in the aftermath of Orestes’ murder of Clytemnestra, which deals with the political and familial fall-out such an act would cause.
The closest comparison we can make is between plays that deal with the same moment in the myth. Orestes’ killing of Clytemnestra is told in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Electra. All three have the same basic plot: many years after the death of Agamemnon, his son Orestes, now grown to manhood, returns from exile in a foreign land. He is reunited with his sister Electra, who also hates their mother, and together the siblings avenge their father, killing Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Each of the plays deals with the ethics of this vengeance, the relationship between the siblings and between Electra and Clytemnestra, and the choice Orestes has to make. However, each poet finds a fresh perspective and so leaves the audience feeling they have seen something new.
Figure 3.1 ‘Orestes killing Aegisthus and Clytemnestra’, by Bernadino Mei (1654). (Photo by Sergio Anelli/Electa/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images.)
Electra and her family
The first part of all three plays portrays the situation in the palace, the position of Electra and the reunion between sister and brother. Electra herself plays a major role, unlike the Homeric version of the myth, which focuses on Orestes’ actions. The Electra of Libation Bearers is the most passive of the three, and while she prays for vengeance, she leaves the stage before the murders take place and plays no further role. Libation Bearers depicts the limited control a young girl has over her situation. Electra has been sent by her mother to pour libations onto the tomb of her father, in an attempt to ward off his angry spirit, but her opening words make it clear that she finds this task reprehensible, and feels it would be hypocritical to pretend Clytemnestra is honouring her husband as an ordinary widow might. Electra asks the chorus to advise her how to deal with the situation, and the only suggestion they can make is to pray for an avenger to come on her behalf (118–21). When reunited with Orestes, Electra joins his prayers to Zeus, but she is then sent inside the house and does not reappear (554, 579).
The Electras of Sophocles and Euripides are more dominant characters, and it is no coincidence that they give their name to both plays. Aeschylus’ Electra says she is abused by Clytemnestra (444–50), but in Sophocles’ play, Electra’s feelings of neglect and her hatred for her mother are explored at length. She is dressed in rags and so wasted with grief that Orestes finds it hard to believe that this is his sister. Whereas Aeschylus’ Electra is tentative about expressing her anger and asks the chorus’ advice on what is appropriate (84–105), Sophocles’ has spent most of her life in ostentatious mourning for the death of Agamemnon, and rejects the chorus’ suggestion that no good can come of such implacability (254–309). While Orestes is the sibling who commits the killings, it is Electra’s emotions that dominate the play. The poet stages a bitter confrontation between mother and daughter, where Electra confronts Clytemnestra with her behaviour (516–629). Electra’s loathing for her mother is also explored through her more moderate sister Chrysothemis, who urges her to bury her feelings for the sake of a quiet life, advice that Electra finds deplorable (341–68). Sophocles’ play is as much a study of the corrosive effects of grief and rage as of the issue of vengeance and matricide.
The emotional centrepiece of Sophocles’ Electra is Electra’s recognition of Orestes (1174–1287). While in Libation Bearers this happens quickly and without preamble, Sophocles delays this moment and makes it more fraught by having Electra overhear the lie that Orestes has been killed in a chariot race, which is intended to lull Clytemnestra and Aegisthus into believing they are now safe. This sends Electra into despair, as she thinks that her last hope is gone, and she gives a moving lament over the empty urn she believes to contain her brother’s ashes. Orestes realizes who she is and reveals the truth, and her grief is turned to intense joy. The lying tale gives the play more emotional twists and turns, and allows the actor playing Electra to show off his skill. Conversely in Euripides’ Electra, the recognition scene is handled with characteristic self-consciousness (487–584). In Libation Bearers Electra guesses her brother’s identity through two signs: the lock of hair he left at Agamemnon’s tomb (very similar to her own hair); and the garment Orestes is wearing which contains weaving she did as a girl. Euripides takes these recognition tokens from Aeschylus’ play, but has Electra mock her old slave’s suggestion that they could reveal Orestes’ identity. This Electra applies contemporary logic to the world of myth, pointing out that it is absurd to think that two similar locks of hair must belong to brother and sister, and that it makes no sense for Orestes still to be wearing clothes made for him as a baby. This is a recognition scene laced with irony and aware of its place in the tragic tradition.
Euripides’ play also undermines the usual depiction of Clytemnestra as a cruel mother. His Electra complains of her bad treatment, but as the play goes on, we start to question the veracity of what she says. Unlike other versions, where Electra is kept unmarried in the palace, this Electra has been married to a peasant in order to prevent her bearing aristocratic children who will avenge Agamemnon. However, the peasant reveals that the marriage was Clytemnestra’s way of saving Electra’s life, since Aegisthus wished to have her killed. Electra complains that her mother hates her, but she lures her to her death by claiming to have just given birth, since she admits Clytemnestra will be concerned for her health and come to see her. When Clytemnestra appears, she and Electra argue about the justice of Agamemnon’s death, as in Sophocles, but Clytemnestra is humbler and kinder than her Sophoclean or Aeschylean counterparts. She acknowledges the validity of Electra’s feelings, and even expresses regret for her actions (1102–10):
My child, it has always been in your nature to love your father. This is how things are: some children belong to their fathers and others love their mother more than their father. I shall be patient with you. Indeed, child, I do not take much pleasure in what I did. Alas, how wretched I am because of my plots. How much greater was the anger I felt for my husband than it should have been.
In contrast, the Electra of this play is the harshest of the three. Whereas Sophocles’ Electra overhears the killing of Clytemnestra and urges her brother on with the cry ‘Strike twice as hard, if you have the strength’ (1414), Euripides’ character joins in the killing herself, grasping Orestes’ sword with him, and appears spattered with blood at the end of the play (1172–3).
Justice, vengeance and matricide
Killing one’s own mother, even in a justified cause, is a terrible deed, and all three plays must grapple with the issue of matricide as vengeance. How to balance duty to father and to mother is a central theme of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. In Libation Bearers, Orestes reports the terrible punishment Apollo has threatened if he does not avenge his father (269–96), but the reality of what this vengeance involves becomes clear when he confronts Clytemnestra. When Clytemnestra bares her breast and begs him to respect the bond between mother and child, Orestes temporarily loses his resolve, and needs his comrade Pylades to remind him of his duty to obey Apollo (899–902). His final words as he drives Clytemnestra into the house acknowledge the wrongness of what he is doing as well as its necessity: ‘You killed the man you ought not, now suffer what you ought not’ (930). The killing of Clytemnestra is the climax of the play, followed by the chilling scene where Orestes sees the Furies and realizes the consequences of what he has done.
In Euripides’ play, Orestes and Electra are not confronted with supernatural beings but with their own feelings of horror and shame. While the siblings begin the play confident in the virtue of their cause, when they reappear after killing their mother, they are stricken with guilt as they describe Clytemnestra’s pleas for mercy (1177–232). The play ends with the gods Castor and Pollux prophesying their punishment, exile and separation from each other. The relatively sympathetic presentation of Clytemnestra also makes the killing more troubling. Euripides even manages to make the murder of Aegisthus (elsewhere presented as a wicked and cowardly usurper) problematic, by having Orestes sneak up on him from behind while he conducts a religious sacrifice (839–43).
Sophocles, on the other hand, confronts the issue of matricide much less directly. The order of the killings is switched, making Aegisthus’ death rather than Clytemnestra’s the last event in the play, and Orestes and Electra express little concern about their decision to kill their mother. Nor does the play depict Orestes’ punishment by the Furies, and it ends abruptly as he follows Aegisthus inside. The apparent insouciance with which Sophocles handles the matricide has divided scholars. Some have used it to argue that Sophocles presents it as ethically unproblematic, with the early twentieth-century classicist Gilbert Murray famously calling the play ‘a combination of matricide and good spirits’, while others have tried to find darker elements, pointing to allusions to the Furies and troubling elements of Electra’s characterization. It is striking that Sophocles has chosen to tell a myth whose central element is a matricide, and yet is able to downplay that in order to prioritize other aspects of the story: the relationship between the siblings, for example, or Electra’s journey from despair to hope.
Greek myth, then, should not be seen as a static backdrop to tragedy, but as something that constantly evolves in a dynamic relationship with the plays that tell it. Far from limiting the creativity of the tragedians, it provides them with fertile ground, since these ancient stories encapsulate some of the most powerful issues in human life. When in the modern age we see playwrights or film-makers drawing on and adapting Greek myth to create their own stories, we should remember that they are doing nothing new, but are following in the footsteps of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.