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Tragedy, an art form used by renowned Greek poets to comment on contemporary life, culture, and the human condition evolved from a goat dance. What began as a Dionysiac ritual developed and changed over time to become a method of reaching and affecting educated audiences of Greek citizens. The poets who created the dramas brought to them their own unique ideas, beliefs, attitudes and innovations which resulted in many classic plays, some of which are still studied today as examples of great writing. The most influential of these dramatists were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, each of whom brought his own individual personality to his work and effected substantial developments in Greek tragedy.
One aspect of tragedy on which most historians are in agreement is the fact that its origins are hard to pin down. In The Ancient Greeks, M.I. Finley states that “the origins of tragedy are obscure.”[1] MacDonald and Saxton, in Four Stages, claim that Athenian drama probably began with the festival of Dionysus.[2] While author Arthur Pickard-Cambridge actually began his studies forDithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy, in order to examine the evidence and conclusions drawn about the origins and early history of the Greek drama and found that “the result has too often been to show that no conclusions are possible.”[3] Obviously, the exact origins of Greek tragedy cannot be established definitively but the majority of sources are in agreement as to their most probable birthplace being the Great Dionysia.
In Greece and the Hellinistic World, John Boardman states that “the origins of tragedy are certainly ritual and religious.”[4] Since Athenians held festivals celebrating the community, and these involved competitions between tribes, during which ritualistic dances and chanting were performed, it makes logical sense that tragedy grew out of these celebratory festivals. The combination of lyric poetry and Dionysiac ritual is generally accepted as the explanation for the pre-history of tragedy. [5] The conventions of dramatic presentations must have grown out of these Greek social and religious ceremonies. Boardman feels that the dithyramb, a processional and choral lyric performance with narrative themes, which was the central part of the Great Dionysia, is “the obvious direct ancestor of theatrical choral lyrics.”[6] Dionysus was the god of wine and fertility and was also known as the Goat God. Spring festivals involved priests dancing and chanting while wearing goat hides. MacDonald and Saxton explain that, “from this confusion a formal presentation gradually emerged in the form of the dithyramb, a leaping dance accompanied by mimes and dramatic hymns of praise to Dionysus.”[7] Pickard-Cambridge feels that this quote from Plutarch, ‘the dithyrambic of mixed voice should accompany the revels of Dionysus’ clearly shows the connection of dithyramb with Dionysus.[8] This evolved further and eventually became more structured to the point where dancers and singers were selected and trained; dialogue was added which related to Dionysus’ life and the performance was given at an officially designated location.[9]
Most tragedies were first performed at the Great Dionysia in Athens in early spring, which was the most magnificent of the four annual Athenian festivals.[10] The dramatic festivals of the Athenians seem to have been representative of the newly democratic times of the early fifth century since they celebrated citizenship and the community as well as the god himself. In Athens the dithyramb was danced and sung by a chorus of 50 males arranged in a circle around the altar in the orchestra. The choruses competed against each other as tribes. Pickard-Cambridge explains, “At the Dionysia each chorus was drawn entirely from one of the ten tribes and as five choruses of men and five of boys competed, all ten tribes took part.”[11] Thus it was a combination of competition between tribes, celebration of the god and gathering of community. Hundreds of men and boys took part in the festival and thousands came to be entertained. It became a special occasion for celebration but it followed strict rituals and rules. Ironically there were no requirements that the plays had to relate to Dionysus himself and most did not The original dithyramb had evolved and led the way for plays about other popular gods and heroes. Eventually these were written and performed during an official drama festival, which involved a competition for the best tragedies.
Festival requirements imposed strict limits on the artists, such as the number of actors, use of chorus, and choice of themes and structure of plays.[12] Many poets entered with hope for success but only one playwright’s works were performed per day over a period of three days. These plays were written by educated men for an audience of educated citizens. These were poets who “had been vigorously schooled in the craft of dramatic writing and who had penetrating insight into the strengths and weaknesses of their fellow man.”[13] The dramas were accepted and understood by the audience because they were already quite familiar with the legends, heroes and gods depicted in the plays. In Athenian education memorization was an important part of training the mind therefore students were required to learn lines from Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. [14] The dramatists could then write with the assumption that their audience was familiar with the content, but this made it awfully difficult to write new and interesting plays. This placed an added stress on the competitors in the festival since “theatre demands freshness; old stories demand intellectual versatility.”[15]
The purpose of the Athenian education was to produce the “complete man” who was an inquiring, articulate, alert citizen. The result of this focus was a population that would eventually question and grow sceptical of the concepts in Homer’s writing. As dramatists were a part of this educated group, “the playwrights, sensitive to the changing attitudes of their audiences began to examine the relationship of man to his fellows, his society, and his gods."[16] Dramatists commonly used real life concerns, current issues and moral situations as the basis of their tragedies. This made their plays popular with the audiences who were not only familiar with the contents but could now relate to the themes as they touched on their own lives.
Religious and political content in the plays was therefore unavoidable, as they were both integral parts of daily life. The religious qualities in the tragedies were illustrated through “direct reference to oracles, prophecies and gods; by the use of myth as the normal source of the story itself; by the many hymn-like passages of choral singing; by the masks and costumes and dances to which the Greeks were accustomed in their rites.”[17] Political references in the plays were also common. The Dionysian festival was “a community celebration, religion was a polis affair, and when playwrights touched on politics it was the moral implications they projected, not practical politics.”[18] The playwrights did not use their plays to voice their own political views or agendas, nor did they make comments on the politics or the leaders of their time.
Gradually, the religious interest in the festivals was on the downslide while interest in the new and innovative ideas of the poets grew. Playwrights were beginning to use their plays to reflect the times. Ideas and themes dealt more realistically with societal, human and political experiences. Individuals brought their own beliefs, ideas and life experiences to their works which now tended to reflect the times in which they were written. Aeschylus began to question the justification of the gods and their use of power. Sophocles used Antigone to deal with the conflict between personal, moral and political loyalties. Euripides used his Trojan Women to show the senselessness of war. To distance the content of the plays from real life these playwrights turned to the familiar myths, legends, heroes and gods, as the subjects of their plays. These three men are also responsible for implementing important alterations to the dramatic format, which are part of its evolution. Aeschylus introduced a second actor, Sophocles introduced a third actor and Euripides minimized the role of the chorus. [19] But it is their use of drama to explore and comment upon the human condition, individual responsibility and societal concerns for which their works are most noted.
The evolution of tragedy can be traced through three particular playwrights, beginning with Aeschylus (525-456). He was a deeply religious man whose tragedies tend to deal with the cause and origin of suffering, especially that of the innocent or undeserving. The issue, put in modern terms would be why do bad things happen to good people? Humanity has always had a problem accepting the idea of higher power(s) that allow the defenceless to suffer. The answer that Aeschylus put forward was the idea of bad fortune that can strike any man down and can carry on affecting his children in the form of a curse. For example, a father’s misfortunes and the mistakes he makes in trying to deal with them can produce a legacy of suffering for his innocent offspring. Oedipus and Agamemnon suffer and pay for the crimes of their ancestors. Aeschylus found that “pain and error have their purpose and their use; they are steps on the ladder of knowledge.”[20] The message to the audience was that suffering is useful because man learns through suffering.
The harsh reality of life was that the innocent often suffer unfairly and therefore neither the gods nor life are fair. This fact, Aeschylus felt, had to be accepted and dealt with by living life and facing its hardships. He depicted mankind as “meeting disaster grandly, forever undefeated.”[21] This belief is apparent in the words of Clytemnestra in Agamemnon:
You have reached the truth at last.
Now to the Powers that persecute
Our race I offer a sworn pact:
With this harsh deed and bitter fact
I am content: [22]
The mourning mother killed her husband and nobly confronts others with her actions.
Aeschylus’ plays also dismiss the long- held Greek belief that the gods in heaven punish earthly prosperity: “I hold my own mind and think apart from other men; not prosperity but sin brings misery.” [23] The message to the audience is that actions and consequences are the responsibility of the individual; success is not wrong but the method by which success is achieved is judged and either punished or rewarded.
Being a product of his time, Aeschylus dealt not only with the problem of unjust gods and unfair suffering, but also with the realities of war. He had been a Marathon warrior and therefore had first hand experience in battle and knowledge of its aftermath. Clytemnestra’s announcement that Troy has fallen and her description of women throwing themselves on the lifeless bodies of dead husbands, sons and brothers, juxtaposed with her description of the victorious soldiers eating a hearty breakfast must have come from the memory of an experienced soldier. In Agamemnon the playwright presents some of the realities of war rather than expounding on the glories of war. Boardman states that the play Eumenides is “perhaps as close as we can come to intellectual understanding of the problems and solutions of the late archaic Greek world.”[24] Although only seven of his plays survive, Aeschylus’ work provides us with information about the concerns and events of his lifetime.
The plays of Sophocles (496-406) dealt more with consequences and the fulfillment of prophecy. Although the theme of unfair events and their effect on the lives of innocents continued, Sophocles focused more on an individual’s predetermined fate. Oedipus, for example, left his home in Corinth in order to avoid the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Yet he kills his birth-father along the way and is rewarded with the crown and Queen of Thebes for solving the riddle of the Sphinx. His prophecy is fulfilled; one cannot avoid one’s fate. According to Boardman, “in Greek subconscious belief, punishment, affliction, plague, blindness and madness are intimately linked to the special protection and dreadful blessing of the gods for victims.”[25] The famine and death sweeping across Thebes are punishment for harbouring a murderer, so once again the innocent suffer. Oedipus decrees that the murderer must be found and exiled or killed, ensuring his own suffering. Finally, he blinds himself after finding his wife’s dead body and leaves behind his children who must suffer because of their father’s crimes. In trying to prevent the family curse from being passed on to his children, Oedipus accepts responsibility for his actions and exhibits a conscience. The unfairness of life is central to Sophocles’ plays, where he deals with the methods with which the individual deals with his fate. Rather than present characters as representative of human traits as Aeschylus did, Sophocles’s characters are studies in human nature.
Sophocles’ dramas “served the purpose of making the individual think for himself…establishing the supremacy of the private conscience.”[26] Antigone buries her brother, against the specific orders of her uncle Creon, who considered him a traitor. She knows that the punishment is death but she believes that the familial bond outweighs her allegiance to the throne. Her conscience leads her to disobey and face the consequences of her actions. Antigone retains her dignity and control when she does not beg or plead for her life. She declares, “unwept, unfriended, without marriage song, I pass on my last journey to my grave.”[27] Sophocles plays are indicative of his belief in order, temperance and reason. He finds beauty in structure and proportion, making even despair sound reasonable[28]. Antigone faces death nobly while affirming her beliefs, “the honour of life lies not in words but in deeds.”[29] Sophocles may have portrayed fate as ruling men’s lives but the heroes of his plays show the audience that those lives can be lived honourably and responsibly.
It has been said that Sophocles wrote men as they ought to be and Euripides wrote them as they were. Euripides (480-406) was the least popular of the three playwrights and is considered by many to be the most tragic of them all. He portrayed the “selfishness and cynicism of his age”[30] which explains his lack of popularity with the audiences who naturally did not want to see the negative aspects of humanity acted out on stage as entertainment. Euripides’ works allowed him to examine what he saw as the realities of human weakness. He treated the well-known mythical stories of gods and heroes as stories of contemporary life, projecting the thoughts and emotions of realistic people into the mythical characters. For example, he has Medea, the wife of the hero Jason describe the unjust fate of Athenian women:
The great question: will the man
We get be bad or good? For women, divorce isn’t
Respectable; to repel the man, not possible.[31]
Euripides uses his characters to point out the discrepancies between the moral standards implied in myth and those faced in the every day life of a Greek citizen. By the end of his plays the audience feels sympathy for the victims of the gods rather than admiration for the gods or their actions.[32]
Euripides’ plays are best understood in relation to the contemporary events of the author’s life and times. According to E. R. Dodds’ introduction to the Bacchae, it seems likely that the Pentheus-Tiresias debate scene was written with the assumption that the audience would be aware of the parallels between Dionysus coming to Thebes and the growing interest in Sabaziua and other foreign gods in Athens.[33] Euripides incorporated contemporary issues into his tragedies and used the characters found in familiar tales to deal with the controversial topics. Dodds interprets lines 201-201 of the Bacchae; “Euripides has made Teresias speak as a man of the fifth century… a warning to the audience that the debate which follows will represent a fifth century controversy transposed into the mythical past.”[34] This was not a playwright who shied away from the realities of contemporary life; instead he dealt with the political and ethical problems of daily life.
Euripides’ writing often brought gods and heroes down to the level of ordinary humans and had them question moral standards, human passions and even the existence of divine beings. [35] Some of his plays endowed the gods with human qualities like pettiness, lust, and wilfulness; weak human qualities that made them appear inferior to man. These dramas forced audiences to confront ethical issues and question long-held beliefs by reproducing problems that they had to address on a daily basis. He questioned social structures and pointed out hypocrisy. He knew that the universe was not fair or just and that suffering came to decent people just as it did to those who actually deserved it. Depicting the gods as weak forced people to question not only what they were putting their faith in, but also who was responsible for their lives and how they lived them. Euripides has been called “the unwanted voice of conscience in his age, a man unafraid to point out the lies with which a civilization comforts itself.” [36]