A Cultural History of Tragedy in Antiquity

Emily Wilson, Rebecca Bushnell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350416529
• eBook ISBN: 9781350154889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments, and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be, and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage.

Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual, and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

CHAPTER ONE

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Forms and Media

NAOMI WEISS

What was Greek tragedy? Despite modern productions and adaptations of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we tend to see tragedy as text, presented to us in a book to be read and studied. In antiquity it was read and studied too—indeed, in Aristophanes’ Clouds, reciting Euripides is presented as a marker of the “new” type of education in late fifth-century Athens, and from the Hellenistic period onwards school texts frequently included selections from this tragedian’s work.¹ But for the audience in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, tragedy was a multimedia, multisensory experience, combining music, dance, speech, costumes, props, and special effects. It also interacted with multiple other art forms, both those within the theater and those beyond it, from wedding songs to speeches in the assembly. And it was an experience that was closely connected to the civic fabric and identity of the city itself. Since we are unable to immerse ourselves in the life of fifth-century Athens and its performance culture, our understanding of what tragedy is—and what it does—is inevitably limited.

To make matters worse, even the texts that survive represent only a tiny fraction of the thousands of plays that were produced in classical Athens. We have about ten percent of the roughly 300 dramas apparently composed by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.² There were many other playwrights competing in tragic competitions before, alongside, and long after these giants of fifth-century theater, but their works are lost except for a smattering of fragments. Such different degrees of survival are no accident, but a result of a canonizing process, whereby Athenian tragedy came to be represented by the three “greats.”³ This began even before the fifth century came to a close, as we can see from the competition between Euripides and Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ Frogs (produced in 405 BCE), at the end of which Aeschylus, the winner, demands that Sophocles take his chair in the underworld.⁴ In 330 BCE a law was passed ruling that their statues be erected in the Theater of Dionysus and official copies of their scripts be deposited in the state archives, and it may have been from these texts that Hellenistic scholars eventually made their own editions.⁵ At some point between the third and fifth centuries CE, collections of the plays were produced with a selection of ten for Euripides and seven for Aeschylus and Sophocles respectively. Nine more of Euripides’ tragedies survive thanks to a section of a complete collection of his works, ordered alphabetically, which was copied in the medieval period. It is primarily upon these thirty-three texts that we base our idea of Greek tragedy today.

The combination of the limited number of surviving plays and our unfamiliarity with their performance context means that we often think about tragedy as a self-contained, discrete genre. Another significant reason for this impression is the influence of Aristotle, whose Poetics systematically lays out tragedy’s formal aspects, as if there were a model to which all tragic plays should adhere. But tragedy was a much more capacious and malleable genre than his discussion might lead us to assume. To see this, we must move away from the bare texts that survive and look at other literary and visual sources that refer to aspects of tragic performance and its place within Athens. We must also closely examine the texts themselves with an eye (and ear) open to their multimedia, hybrid character—for, as we shall see, they contain numerous references to their own live production within the theater, as well as to a wide range of other performance genres. And we should appreciate the long lifetime of tragedy beyond fifth-century Athens, and how it was transformed both through the Hellenistic period and in Republican and imperial Rome.

ARISTOTLE AND THE FORMAL ASPECTS OF TRAGEDY

While the Greek tragedies that survive today demonstrate a great range of styles, narratives, and plot patterns, they also share a basic structure. Their production involved two or three actors (Aeschylus was said to have added the second; either he or Sophocles introduced the third), a chorus (Sophocles apparently increased its size from twelve to fifteen members), and a player of a set of double pipes called the aulos. Each play contains a mix of speech and song. Dialogue and extended speeches are generally performed by actors in iambic trimeters (a “spoken” meter; the trochaic tetrameter was also used), though sometimes the leader of the chorus speaks as well. Most plays include a long messenger speech, describing an offstage event that is critical to the plot. Songs are typically performed by the chorus in a variety of lyric meters, but occasionally actors sing in a lyric exchange or even perform arias of their own. Choral songs are generally strophic—that is, they are composed in pairs of metrically matching stanzas (strophes and antistrophes). Between song and speech are “marching” anapaests, which both actors and choruses regularly perform, often as a prelude to singing in a fully lyric meter. The choral songs would regularly punctuate each part of a drama, dividing it into acts or “episodes”; the length of both songs and episodes can vary enormously. A play usually begins with a spoken prologue, often opening with a monologue. This is followed by the chorus’ entrance song (parodos); subsequent choral odes are termed stasima. The remaining drama following the final choral song is called the exodos.

Aristotle provides us with a different way of approaching tragedy’s form, beyond these basic structural units. Indeed, many of our assumptions today about what makes a play a tragedy derive from his theoretical discussion of the genre (and of poetry more generally) in the Poetics. Yet this treatise, which became so influential after it was rediscovered in the Renaissance, does not appear to have been well known in antiquity.⁶ It should not, then, be interpreted as the theoretical lens through which readers and theatergoers in the ancient world typically tended to view tragedy. It is still invaluable, however, in recording ideas about this type of theater by someone who experienced tragic performances in Athens within fifty years of the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides, and who was drawing on debates and assumptions about the genre stretching back well into the fifth century.

In chapter six of the Poetics Aristotle defines tragedy as “a mimesis of an action which is elevated, complete, and of magnitude; in language embellished by distinct forms in its sections; employing the mode of enactment, not narrative; and through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions.”⁷ He then lists its constituent parts in the order of their importance: plot structure, character, diction, thought, lyric poetry, and spectacle. As his ranking demonstrates, he is above all concerned with plot structure, which for him is not just tragedy’s most defining feature but also the one which, more than any other, is able to have a powerful emotional impact on the audience, producing pity, fear, and catharsis (he is famously ambiguous regarding the precise meaning of this term). He devotes much of the Poetics to the principles of a “complex” structure—one which involves recognition and/or reversal (peripateia). The most successful form of the latter, Aristotle claims, is when a character falls from prosperity to adversity as a result of a mistake or fallibility (hamartia), though he acknowledges other patterns as well, and indeed one of the tragedies he cites most often is Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, which is often called an “escape tragedy” on account of its happier ending.

While Aristotle clearly states the preferred type of each of these plot devices, his discussion reveals a keen awareness of the broad range of ways in which they could be effected. This awareness must have been shared by the audiences of fifth- and fourth-century theater, as we can see from the surviving plays themselves. The recognition scene in Euripides’ Electra, for example, parodies the equivalent one in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, with Electra ridiculing the validity of the tokens that in the earlier play convince her of her brother’s presence.⁸ The humor here relies on the audience’s knowledge not just of Aeschylus’ tragedy but of this type of recognition scene in general—one which Aristotle deems inferior, preferring instead a recognition that comes about through the events themselves. And indeed the parodies of Aeschylean and Euripidean drama in the comedies of Aristophanes demonstrate that fifth-century audiences were well-versed not only in the stylistic and structural features of tragedy as a whole but in the distinctive characteristics of each tragedian.⁹

The remaining five constituent elements of tragedy receive far less attention in the Poetics. By “character” Aristotle means not psychological depth but primarily the ethical qualities of a protagonist (tragedy is a mimesis of not only ethically serious subjects but “those superior to us”)¹⁰ and the appropriateness and consistency with which these are portrayed. He mostly passes over “thought,” referring instead to his discussions elsewhere of rhetoric, with which this category...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• SERIES PREFACE
• Introduction
• 1 Forms and Media
• 2 Sites of Performance and Circulation
• 3 Communities of Production and Consumption
• 4 Philosophy and Social Theory
• 5 Religion, Ritual and Myth
• 6 Politics of City and Nation
• 7 Society and Family
• 8 Gender and Sexuality
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Copyright