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Present-day remains of the Theatre of Dionysos, site of the original performances of the surviving Athenian tragedies. The remains are of a Roman-era remodeling.

Athenian tragedy—the oldest surviving form of tragedy—is a type of dance-drama that formed an important part of the theatrical culture of the city-state of Athens, which invented theatre. Having emerged sometime during the 6th century BCE, it flowered during the 5th century BCE (from the end of which it began to spread throughout classical Greece), and continued to be popular until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. No tragedies from the 6th century and only 32 of the more than a thousand that were performed in during the 5th century have survived. We have complete texts extant by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The origins of tragedy remain obscure, though by the 5th century it was institutionalised in competitions (agon) held as part of festivities celebrating Dionysos (the god of wine and fertility). As contestants in the City Dionysia's competition (the most prestigous of the festivals to stage drama) playwrights were required to present a tetralogy of plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play. The performance of tragedies at the City Dionysia may have begun as early as 534 BCE; official records (didaskaliai) begin from 501 BCE, when the satyr play was introduced. Most Athenian tragedies dramatise events from Greek mythology, though The Persians—which stages the Persian response to news of their military defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE—is the notable exception in the surviving drama. When Aeschylus won first prize for it at the City Dionysia in 472 BCE, he had been writing tragedies for more than 25 years, yet its tragic treatment of recent history is the earliest example of drama to survive. More than 130 years later, the philosopher Aristotle analysed 5th-century Athenian tragedy in the oldest surviving work of dramatic theory—his Poetics (c. 335 BCE).

Origins

Little evidence survives to support any account of the origins of tragedy. The word "tragedy" appears to have been used to describe different phenomona at different times. It derives from tragôidiâ (Classical Greek τραγῳδία), contracted from trag(o)-aoidiâ = "he-goat song", which comes from tragos = "he-goat" and aeidein = "to sing". Some scholars have suspected that this may be traced to a time when a goat was either the prize in a competition of choral dancing or was that around which a chorus danced prior to the animal's ritual sacrifice. "Unfortuntatley though," Vernant writes, "this goat, the tragos, is nowhere to be found"—not only is there no evidence of any sacrifices of goats during the Dionysia, but when the god Dionysos is associated with a goat the word used is always "she-goat" (aix) and never "he-goat" (tragos).

Contemporary scholarship argues that a combination of a wide range of influences contributed to the development of the dramatic art-form:

[C]ontemporary ritual, including funeral lamentation, hero cults, and initiation rites; earlier forms of artistic performance, including song, dance, poetry, and Homeric recitation [...]; Dionysiac worship, ranging from folkdances linked with the harvest to ritualized impersonation, from drunken revels to formal initiation into the Dionysiac mysteries; anthropological paradigms, such as the worship of a cyclical ‘year-god’ who suffers, dies, and comes back to life with the changing seasons; intellectual, spiritual, and creative energies cohering in a ‘tragic’ vision, epitomized in Nietzsche’s brilliantly speculative The Birth of Tragedy; or political and cultural forces aimed at promoting civic loyalty, democratic ideology, and social cohesion.

In the "performance culture" of classical Athens, one performed activity in particular played an important part in the development of tragedy: sometime in the second half of the 6th century BCE, the semi-dramatic recitation of the epic poetry of Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey) by rhapsodes was instituted in an official competition at the Panathenaic festival. As well as providing a model for many of the plots and character types of tragedy, the Homeric poems greatly influenced tragedy's "spirit, sensibility, and ethos." The philosopher Plato indicates the similarity between a rhapsode and an actor in his Ion.

• Else's theory of origin of tragedy in rhapsode's performance; need to unpack Homer influence better (role in education and degree of familiarity apart from rhapsodes' recitation) and separate more clearly from rhapsode as model for hypocrites relationship.

Writing in 335 BCE (long after the Golden Age of 5th-century Athenian tragedy), the Greek philosopher Aristotle provides the earliest-surviving explanation in his Poetics, in which he argues that tragedy developed from the improvisations of the leader of choral dithyrambs (hymns sung and danced in praise of Dionysos):

Anyway, arising from an improvisatory beginning (both tragedy and comedy—tragedy from the leaders of the dithyramb, and comedy from the leaders of the phallic processions which even now continue as a custom in many of our cities), [tragedy] grew little by little, as [the poets] developed whatever [new part] of it had appeared; and, passing through many changes, tragedy came to a halt, since it had attained its own nature. (1449a10-15)

Dramatic text

Textual history

Books were not widely-circulated in classical Greece until the end of the 5th century BCE and the earliest evidence for regular publication of play-texts comes from the 4th century. Early tragic texts were written on long, cumbersome rolls of papyrus and had no word separation, punctuation, lineation, nor stage directions, and often no speech headers. Scholars have speculated that the archon eponymous, the official who oversaw the City Dionysia festival, may have kept a copy of each of the competing tragedies.

From 386 BCE some 5th-century tragedies were re-staged regularly at the City Dionysia. In order to curb interpolations by actors, the politician Lycurgus passed a law c. 330 BCE that decreed the preparation of official versions of the 5th-century tragedies and required actors to adhere to them. Writing in the 2nd century CE, Galen reports that a century after their creation Ptolemy III Euergetes stole the official versions from Athens on the pretext of having them copied for his library in the Musaeum at Alexandria in Egypt.

Fragment from a vellum codex of Euripides' Medea, from the 4th-5th century CE. Found at Arsinoe in 1888 by Flinders Petrie.

While Aristotle and others at the Lyceum were concerned with tracing the history of the genre, it was the scholars of the Alexandrian Musaeum who attempted to restore the original texts, to produce "editions" of the plays (called either ekdosis or diorthôsis), and to provide separate commentaries. They usually added marginal scholia to the texts. Alexander of Aetolia produced critical editions of Athenian tragedy during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, though his comments have not survivied. A little later, Aristophanes of Byzantium also worked on Athenian tragedy and some of his scholia to Euripides' plays survive, which evidence an interest in staging as well as textual criticism. Aristophanes' colometry of the texts (the way in which its verse is laid out on the page) may have divided their lyric verse into its constituent metrical cola. Many of the hypotheses (introductions to the plays that summarise their plots) in the Medieval manuscripts originate from him. He may have also written a small number of commentaries on individual tragedies. Aristophanes' work survives by virtue of its quotation by later scholars. Crates of Mallos also wrote commentaries on some of the tragic texts.

Around 250 CE, as the codex was supplanting the papyrus roll, the number of surviving plays was reduced drastically. Quotations from Athenian tragedies came to be confined to the seven surviving plays by Aeschylus, the seven by Sophocles, and ten by Euripides. As part of the revival of learning in Byzantium from the 9th century, scholars recopied this reduced set of texts and distilled the commentaries until they would fit in the margins. To the reduced classical commentaries (scholia vetera) were added comments to assist medieval readers with the archaic language of the plays (scholia recentiora). During the 13th century, the tragic corpus was reduced still further, with three plays (the "Byzantine triad") by each of the three tragic playwrights forming the majority of those copied.

The earliest manuscripts to survive date from the 10th and 11th centuries CE. A 14th-century manuscript, thought to be a remnant of an edition from Alexandria, preserves several more plays by Euripides. Western Europe re-discovered Athenian tragedy when, thanks to the printing press, its surviving texts became available in Renaissance Italy at the end the 15th century. Renaissance humanists began to translate the plays into Latin: Desiderius Erasmus translated Euripides' Hecuba and Iphigeneia at Aulis (both published in 1506), while George Buchanan translated Medea (published in 1544) and Alcestis (1556). During the 16th century, vernacular translations of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides appeared in English, French, Italian, and Spanish—though Aeschylus' were not translated until the 17th century. Robert Potter's The Tragedies of Aeschylus, which was published in 1777, is particularly notable as the first English translation of Aeschylus' drama. By the mid-1780s all of the surviving tragedies were available in English translations.

Form and structure

The play as a whole was composed in various verse meters. Explain that it's the translations that use prose, not the original plays.

The dramatic structure of Athenian tragedy shifts between two contrasting modes of presentation: a rhetorical verbal mode (the speech of the actors, usually in iambic trimeter) and a lyrical mode (the music, songs in a variety of metres, and dances of the chorus). The actor's rhetoric and the chorus' lyric are "sometimes complementary, sometimes additive, sometimes opposed one to the other," Rehm argues; the distinction enables the chorus to engage the tragedy "in an ongoing dialogue with itself." In contrast to the tradition of lyric poetry (the lyrics of Pindar and Simonides, for example), which "glorify the exemplary virtues of the hero," the choral lyrics of tragedy "express anxiety and uncertainty about him."

Most of the extant tragedies begin with a prologue (prologos) that offers exposition of previous events of the story. A párodos follows, in which the chorus (choros) enters and performs its first lyrical song and dance (choreia). The main body of the tragedies consist of an alternation between dramatic episodes (epeisodia) and lyrical odes that the chorus sing and dance (stásima). The final scene is called the éxodos, in which the actors and chorus depart.

• Strophe, antistrophe, mesode, epode
• monody
• Coryphaeus speaking in dialogue

The tragedies also include exchanges (amoibaion) between the actors and chorus in which either both sing or the chorus sings and the actor replies in speech. When it involves a shared lamentation, this type of exchange is called a kommós.

Aristotle, in his Poetics (c. 335 BCE), argues that the iambic verse-form is "most suited to speech" (lexis), since it is the form used in everyday conversation (1449a20-28).

Aristotle also indicates that towards the end of the 5th century, some dramatists began to include what he calls "things thrown in" (embolima)—songs that ... (1456a29-30).

Subject matter

Despite the association of tragedy with the god Dionysos, the majority of those that survive dramatise stories from the heroic legends that their audiences knew from other poetic accounts (especially those of epic poetry), rather than the mythological stories of Dionysos himself and "his passion, his wanderings, his mysteries, and his triumph." The Greeks understood many of those whom tragedy represents as semi-divine figures from the heroic age of their distant past, who were to be respected and venerated (particularly within the hero cults, which were, for the most part, a 5th-century development). The mythological stories of their violent conflicts, extreme crises, and emotional distress provided tragedy with most of its subject matter. In appropriating them, tragedy introduced substantial innovations to the mythological and poetic traditions, re-working the material in light of the contemporary experience of the Athenian democratic city-state. By means of the dramatic enactment of the legendary heroes' conflicts and crises, tragedy provoked reflection on Athen's fundamental cultural values and its social institutions. Central among these is its treatment of threats to the institution of the family. Tragic characters frequently kill or attempt to kill their mothers or fathers, husbands or wives, brothers, sisters, or children. The transition from youth to adulthood, particularly in incomplete or irregular forms, provides another focal point for familial crisis in Athenian tragedy. [Something about the way in which these familial crises are understood as signifying larger social and political conflicts].

General/specific (re: univeral) as another site of struggle: Goldhill (2008, 59-60)

The chorus frequently expresses generalisations about the human condition that the subsequent action undermines or severely qualifies. Oedipus and the failure of popular morality in chorus attempts to find fault with his behaviour. Similarly, generalising statements that characters make are often revealled as "self-serving rhetoric". Goldhill argues that the tragedies "relentlessly shine a harsh light on the platitudes and general wisdom with which its characters try to come to terms with the political turmoil and personal suffering with which they are faced."

"Rather than breaking free of the past, the tragic protagonist finds himself [sic] entangled in its meshes; the weight of what has gone before bears down ineluctably on what is yet to come."

Of the surviving plays, only four represent a death on-stage.

Theatrical performance

Performance culture of classical Athens

Further information: Theatre of ancient Greece

Most Greeks of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE encountered Athenian tragedy through oral tradition and performance. Tragedy was part of a broader culture of theatricality and performance in classical Athens that included festivals, religious rituals, politics, law, athletics and gymnastics, music, poetry, weddings, funerals, and symposia. Participation in the city-state's many festivals—and attendence at the City Dionysia as an audience member (or even as a participant in the theatrical productions) in particular—was an important part of citizenship. Civic participation also involved the evaluation of the rhetoric of orators evidenced in performances in the law-court or political assembly, both of which were understood as analagous to the theatre and increasingly came to absorb its dramatic vocabulary. Not only do tragedies often reference or enact practices from the broad range of social and cultural activities that scholars identify as "performance," but the full significance of Athenian tragedy derives from that context [only not so crappily worded]. Goldhill's audience as democratic citizen, tragedy as a democratic institution.

"As a specific mode of artistic production that is civic and collective, mythological and historical, public and private, written and performed," Taxidou argues, tragedy was "an essential constituent of the collective 'dream of democracy' that the Athenian polis supposedly embodied."

Opportunities for subsequent performances of tragedies (not written for single performance).

Festival competitions

Tragedy was performed at Athen's Dionysia festivals, which were held in honour of Dionysos (the god of wine and fertility), shown here extending a cup, late 6th century BCE.

Further information: Dionysia

By the beginning of the 5th century BCE the performance of tragedy was institutionalised in competitions (agon) held as part of festivities celebrating the god Dionysos. The most important of these festivals was the City Dionysia, which was celebrated in the Greek month of Elaphebolion (middle to late March) at the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens. With audiences estimated between 12,000 to 14,000 spectators for its competitions, the festival was the largest civic assembly in the calendar of the democratic city-state. Over the course of three successive days, three competitors would stage a single performance of a tetralogy of plays (tragikê didaskalia)—though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme—that usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play. Having competed at the City Dionysia, tragedies may be performed again at one of the Rural Dionysia festivals.

Athen's archon eponymous—who was the principal civil magistrate of the nine city leaders selected each year and the official associated with its secular affairs—had administrative responsibility for the City Dionysia festival, which indicates that the performance of tragedy was understood as a secular rather than a religious activity. The archon eponymous selected the three competitors, having heard prospective candidates recite a portion of their work sometime after July or August the year before. The winner was entitled to one of the three competing places for the following year's competition.

On the first day of the City Dionysia the three competing playwrights and their actors introduced the plays they were to perform at a "pre-contest" (proagôn). After a spectacular ceremonial procession (pompê) to the temple of Dionysos on the second day (which included the bearing aloft of phalloi in honour of the god), the competitions would begin on the third day with the ritual purification of the theatre, whereby a piglet was sacrified and its corpse carried around the performance arena. On the fourth, fifth, and sixth days, the three competitors presented their tetralogies. This format was established in 501 BCE, which may also be the date from which the competition for tragedies began.

Playwright-directors

Detail from a late-hellenistic relief honouring the tragic playwright Euripides
(c. 480 – 406 BCE).

“ Schoolboys have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets. ” — Aristophanes, The Frogs (405 BCE).

The prize for tragedy at the City Dionysia festival was awarded jointly to the winning didaskalos and chorêgos, roles that approximate those of the modern director and producer. The playwright usually directed the production of his tetralogy, in which capacity he was known as its "teacher" or "instructor" (didaskalos). Brockett and Hildy argue that the use of the term didaskalos comprehends a dual function: "he was considered to be the instructor of both the performers (during the process of play production) and the audience (through the finished product)." It indicates, Rehm argues, that a tragedy was "conceived more in terms of its production than as an artistic creation on its own." It was also usual for the playwright to compose the production's music and choreograph its dances, to train the chorus, and to oversee most of its other elements.

Historians know the names of many ancient Greek playwrights, not least Thespis, who is credited with the innovation of an actor (hypokrites) who speaks (rather than sings) and impersonates a character (rather than speaking in his own person), while interacting with the chorus and its leader (coryphaeus), who were a traditional part of the performance of non-dramatic poetry (dithyrambic, lyric and epic). Playwrights specialised exclusively in either comedy or tragedy (though the tragic writers were required to produce a comedic satyr play as part of their tetralogy at the City Dionysia). Only a small fraction of the work of three tragic playwrights, however, has survived to this day: we have a small number of complete texts by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides (the theory that Prometheus Bound was not written by Aeschylus would bring this number to four whose work survives).

Producers

Further information: Chorêgos

The archon eponymous nominated three wealthy citizens to serve as a chorêgos, or financial producer, of the competing productions. Pericles, for example, served as chorêgos for Aeschylus' The Persians in 472 BCE. Form of patronage - relation to the state (obligation). Rehm reports that the cost involved in 411-410 BCE was 3000 drachmas "at a time when a sculptor-mason working on the Erechtheum temple on the Acropolis was paid a drachma a day." The chorêgos' responsibilities included paying a salary to the chorus and aulos-player and hosting a banquet after the performance. Status display competition for the wealthy and prominent citizens.

Actors

In addition to a fusion of the functions of playwright, director, choreographer, composer, lyricist, and designer, in its early performances in the late 6th century BCE and up until Aeschylus' time Athenian tragedy did not differentiate between the playwright-director (didaskalos) and the actor (hypokrites) either. Initially, the playwright was the only actor, playing all of the characters himself. The word for an actor—hypokrites—means "answerer" or "interpreter", in the sense of one who stands apart to confront the chorus. Most of the classical sources that discuss acting (hypokrisis) do so as part of an examination of rhetorical delivery.

Aeschylus is said to have introduced the second actor at the beginning of the 5th century. Sometime around 468 BCE, Sophocles abandoned the practice of acting in his tragedies, allegedly due to his weakening voice. At about the same time either he or Aeschylus introduced a third actor into the drama, an innovation that Aeschylus utilised in his Oresteia (458 BCE). From that point onwards, almost all of the surviving play-texts indicate that they were written to be performed by a maximum of three actors who speak (though more are often needed for non-speaking roles). High-status characters were usually accompanied by silent attendants, sometimes called "spear-carriers" (doryphorêmata).

In c. 449 BCE, the city-state assumed responsibility for paying the actors and introduced a separate prize for tragic actors at the City Dionysia, which suggests that the separation of playwright and actor had become conventional by this time. Only the leading actor—or "primary competitor" (protagonist), however, rather than the second actor (deuteragonist) or third (tritagonist)—was paid by the state and eligible for the prize. With the standardization of the acting troupes that followed in the wake of the establishment of competitions for acting (the Lenaia also instituted one c. 432 BCE), the distinction between protagonist, deuteragonist, and tritagonist formed a rigid hierarchy that became proverbial. In contrast to the performers of the chorus, the actors were professionals.

Both the members of the chorus and the three actors were male and wore masks. Possibly made of stiffened linen, the masks used for tragedy covered the head fully and had wigs attached to them, and were naturalistic in design. Vernant argues that the masking of both chorus and actors served to emphasise the oppositional distinction between them whilst simultaneously expressing an integral link. The actor's mask was individualised in contrast to those of the chorus, though this did not indicate a psychological "person" but rather membership of "a strictly defined social and religious category, that of the heroes." This marks the protagonist as "a hero from another age, always more or less alien to the ordinary condition of a citizen."

Given the inclusion of solo songs (monody) and songs sung with the chorus, actors would have had to have been accomplished singers as well as speakers. They also needed to be versatile, since they would also often be called upon to play more than one role during the course of a performance. Actors were trained at the expense of the city-state.

Chorus and its music

Further information: Greek chorus and Chorus of the elderly in classical Greek drama

All surviving Athenian tragedies utilise a chorus (choros). The tragic chorus was only one of a range of choral performances in Athenian culture; the City Dionysia festival itself also included choruses competing in its satyr plays, comedies, and dithyrambs.

The chorus in Athenian tragedy was made up of 12 performers at the beginning of its historical development, with its size possibly increasing to 15 during the 5th century BCE. The same performers played the chorus in each of the four plays performed. How these performers were selected is unknown, though all were male citizens and either amateurs or semi-professionals. All of the choral parts were sung (to the accompaniment of an aulos—an instrument comparable to the modern clarinet) and some of the actors' answers to the chorus were sung as well. The chorus also danced its choral lyrics, which, Easterling argues, is of "enormous importance" to an understanding of tragedy as an art-form. Music was provided by a single aulos-player (auletes), who was the only performer who did not wear a mask.

In his Poetics (c. 335 BCE), the philosopher Aristotle argued that tragedy developed out of choral dithyrambs; Aeschylus, he claimed, was responsible for reducing the role of the chorus and thereby making dramatic speech (lexis) the most important part of tragedy (1449a10-19). Despite this shift of emphasis, in Aeschylus' tragedies the songs and dances (choreia) of the chorus constitute the main substance of the tragic experience.

The chorus sang and danced in the orchêstra, occupying a central physical position in the space of the theatre. Through their movements they were able to represent events from the past or the future of the play's action. Need to incorporate Taplin's description of the qualities and functions of Choral lyric.

Theatre space

The theatre was in the open air, on the side of a hill (the south-east slope of the Acropolis), and performances probably lasted most of the day. The Theatre of Dionysos at Athens probably held between 12,000 to 14,000 people. It did not acquire its stone form until c. 325 BCE, right at the end of the period of the prominence of Athenian tragedy.

The three most significant parts of the Athenian theatre are its auditorium (theâtron), its large ground-level playing space (orchêstra), and its stage building on the back edge of that space (skênê).

The best-preserved example of an classical Greek theatre, the Theatre of Epidaurus, has a circular orchêstra and probably gives the best idea of the original shape of the Athenian theatre, though it dates from the 4th century BCE.

The evidence for the original shape of the orchêstra is circumstantial; it was probably circular (given that it also served for the performance of dithyrambic choruses, which were called "circular"), though some scholars argue for a rectilinear form during the 5th century BCE. It was about 20 metres in diameter. The orchêstra is thought to have contained an altar (thymelê), though it is unclear whether it was located in the centre, at the side, or indeed whether it formed a permanent feature of the theatre at all.

The size and exact location of the original skênê, which would have been a temporary wooden building ("skênê" means "hut" or "tent"), is unknown; facing the theatron, possibly 12 metres long and 4 metres high, it may be been on the edge or inside the orchêstra, and probably changed during the course of the 5th century. The inside of the skênê provided a changing-room for the actors. The skênê probably had a single, central double-leaved door that allowed the entrance or exit of an actor. Both in terms of a tragedy's fictional location and the actual space of the theatre, this door marks a threshold between the 'seen' and 'unseen'; this focal point, and the meanings that arise from which characters control it, sometimes takes on considerable dramatic significance. Along each side of the skênê was a path, known as an eisodos (also known as a parodos), by means of which actors and chorus could arrive and depart from the orchêstra. This arrangement enabled a differentiation between characters' entrances and exits through the skênê-building and their arrival and departure along one of the two eisodoi. The roof of the skênê (theologeion) was sometimes used as a playing space, usually for the appearance of gods (its name translates as "place where the gods speak").

The word theâtron, which first appears in the 5th century BCE, means "a place where things are seen." The theâtron was divided into wedge-shaped sections of seats (kerkides). One of these, the bouleutikon, seated members of the boulê, the city-state's executive council. Prior to its renovation in stone in c. 325 BCE, seating in the Theatre of Dionysos was provided by wooden benches. The distance of the spectators from the centre of the orchêstra ranged from 10 metres in the front row to 50 metres up the hillside.

organisation highlights authority and organisation of democratic polis. Spatial dynamics of audience dramatises central dynamic of Athenian social life.

Two pieces of stage machinery were particularly associated with the performance of tragedy: the ekkyklêma and the mêchanê. The ekkyklêma, which means "something that is rolled out," was a low platform on wheels that could be brought out from the skênê in order to display to the audience an interior tableaux. The mêchanê (from which the latin term deus ex machina derives) was a crane used to represent a character in flight, who could be swung into sight from behind the skênê and lowered down onto the playing space.

According to Aristotle, Sophocles was responsible for introducing scenery or "scene-painting" (skênographia) to the performance of tragedy (Poetics 1449a18-19). Rehm, however, describes this passage as an interpolation; "in the aesthetics of fifth-century production," he argues, "it is probable that scene-painting played a minimal role (if any at all)".

Audience

The audience of Athenian tragedy were called hoi theâtai, meaning "those who look on." Audiences at the City Dionysia consisted of between an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 spectators.

Scale of audience in relation to other events.

It is not possible on the basis of the available evidence to establish with any certainty whether or not women were present in the audiences for Athenian tragedy.

• Theoric fund.

Analysis and interpretation

Classical theories

Plato's anti-theatrical prejudice

“ Glaucon: Once again, I'm afraid, I don't see what you mean.

Socrates: I seem to be making myself about as clear as a tragic poet.

” — Plato, The Republic (413b).

Plato began as a tragic playwright - burnt his plays and turned to philosophy. Dramatic quality of the dialogues. Tragedy and philosophy.

"For Plato," Taxidou explains, "tragedy as mimesis relies on the basest emotions of pity and fear, it distorts reality (or the ideal world), and in the end is simply a form of bad philosophy."

Unlike Aristotle, Plato reads tragedy as a form of performance, in which its embodied enactment and collective, civic dimensions play an important part. Aristotle promotes literary appreciation (kind of).

Aristotle's analysis

Further information: Poetics (Aristotle)

In contrast to many subsequent philosophical treatments, the philosopher Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BCE) offers "a theory of tragedies, not a theory of the tragic." In it, he gives the following definition:

Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements [used] separately in the [various] parts [of the play]; [represented] by people acting and not by narration; accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.

By "embellished speech", I mean that which has rhythm and melody, i.e. song; by "with its elements separately", I mean that some [parts of it] are accomplished only by means of spoken verses, and others again by means of song (1449b25-30).

As forms of "drama," he distinguishes tragedy and comedy from other poetic genres (such as the epic poetry of Homer) on the basis of their manner of representation: rather than "narrating" the events (either by means of a narrator or speaking in the poet's own authorial voice), in drama the poet represents "doing," showing everyone "in action and activity" (1448a20-29). Another distinction he offers is that whereas epic poetry is "unbounded in time," tragedy's representation of time is more concentrated, insofar as it attempts "to keep within one revolution of the sun or [only] to exceed this a little" (1449b12-15); though originally, he adds, epic and tragic poetry shared a similar scope. On the basis of this comment, Renaissance scholars argued that Aristotle required tragedy to have a "unity of time." Tragedy is, Aristotle claims, a "greater and more honourable" form of poetry than the epic (1449a6).

While both genres of drama represent people in action (mimêsis), he reasons, they are differentiated according to the type of character portrayed (or what he calls the "objects" of the representation): "comedy prefers to represent people who are worse than those who exist, tragedy people who are better" (1448a17).

Tragedy and modernity

In its encounter with modernity, Athenian tragedy has contributed to "modern notions of ethics, the relationships between the aesthetic and the political, and modern notions of subjectivity."

Contemporary criticism

Negotiates notions of conflict, violence, pain, death, loss, and suffering.

Need to unpack the senses of the word pathos

Structuralism

Developing the work of Louis Gernet and utilising the techniques of structural anthropology, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet's structuralist analysis Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (first part published in 1972, the second in 1986) has been particularly influential in the study of Athenian tragedy.

Their approach examines the "driving mechanisms" of the plays and their dialogue with the institutions and social practices of 5th-century Athens. Rather than revealing the playwrights' intentions, the analyses attempt to describe the "communal framework of reference" that made the "structures of the play intelligible" to its audience. This framework provides "not the immediate context of each tragedy, but the horizon without which the meaning could not emerge."

But not a reflection of "context" (33); tragedy as a questioning; problem

The concept of ambiguity is central to many of their analyses. They identify ambiguity in the language that tragedy employs, where specific words are interpreted differently (and often in opposed senses) by different figures in the play; they detect ambiguity too "between the human way of proceeding in the drama and the plan decided by the gods, between what the tragic characters say and what the spectators understand; ambiguity too within the heroes themselves".

Vernant explores the duality between the tragic hero and the tragic chorus that is a major structural axis of Athenian tragedy. This is evident, he argues, in the differing use of masks in production (where the actors' masks are individualised while the chorus remains collective and anonymous). This duality corresponds to a distinction between the mythological past of the legendary heroes (celebrated in the 5th-century practice of the hero cult and familiar from the epic poetry of Homer) and the civic present of the democratic polis. That duality is matched by another in the form of the language of tragedy—where choral lyric is opposed to the actor's dramatic dialogue (whose meter is "more akin to prose"). The specific forms of each serve to present the tragic hero not as an exemplary model but as a problem to be scrutinised. Tragedy "confronts heroic values and ancient religious representations with the new modes of thought that characterize the advent of law within the city-state." The heroes are connected with values, practices, modes of thought, and types of behaviour that the democratic polis condemns and rejects, yet to which it remains connected.

Athenian tragedy and the city-state

Despite its focus on the heroes and kings of legend, ... (8); relate to Benjamin's contrast with Trauerspiel's aristocrats.

Athenian tragedy may be read as both contributing to the formation of the democratic polis while also staging an exploration, interrogation/scrutiny, and possibly critique of its assumptions, shortcomings, exclusions, violence, and barbarism.

Tragedy is seen as a site of struggle in which a debate is staged between the metaphysical and the secular; the tension of the relationships between the two defines a constituent element of tragic form. Need to relate this to Vernant's "interference."

This leads Goldhill to write that "The institution of tragedy is a machine to turn epic myth into the myths of the polis. A dialectical relationship between heroic past and contemporary world is built into ancient tragedy."

"renegotiation between practices of lamentation, mourning and the law within the workings of the democratic polis"

mourning as a topos of struggle.

Need to examine the argument about the transition/reappropriation of female oral mourning into transvestive performance conventions (8-9)

Transcendent and metaphysical readings Can I summarise Olga's critical procedures with something like: tragedy into philosophy, ritual into art, myth into history, matriarchy into patriarchy; all traditionally seen as a linear transition/narrative, whereas she reads tragedy as a site in which a struggle between each is staged. p.9-"these transitions are never fully achieved and are always unsuccessful". Again, linking up with Vernant.

tragic form staging "progress is always haunted by what it excludes or attempts to overcome" (9)

Gender

François Perrier's "The Sacrifice of Iphigenia" (17th century), depicting Agamemnon's murder of his daughter Iphigenia. This mythological event motivates the action of several of the surviving Athenian tragedies.

Further information: Representation of women in Athenian tragedy

“ Tragedy certainly does transgress and mix things up—this is its rule, its nature—but never to the point of irrevocably overturning the civic order of values. ” — Nicole Loraux.

Taking 5th-century Athenian tragedy as a whole, Nicole Loraux's Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (1985) offers a structuralist analysis of some of the unifying constants of the genre, which "can be described as shared aspects of tragic discourse—shared even when, from one author to another, they are fiercely contested." Loraux understands tragic performance as the institutional centre of a process that confuses the firm distinction within Greek culture between masculine values and feminine attributes. All of the surviving tragedies, she argues, display "virtually an unchanging tendency to think of femininity in the same terms" and its interrogation is conducted "within the same limits".

Loraux interprets the function of tragedy in 5th-century Athens as a form of civic katharsis: its fictions offer an opportunity to think "things that in everyday life cannot and must not be thought"—such as the sacrifice of virgins. Tragedy offered a "controlled pleasure afforded by an enjoyment of the deviant when it is acted out, reflected upon, and tamed."

In reflecting on tragedy's specific modes of performance, Loraux suggests that "there must have been an ambiguious thrill to the katharsis" when "male citizens watched with emotion the suffering of these heroic women, represented onstage by other male citizens dressed in women's clothes." The complexities of meaning and function generated by a body of exclusively male performers representing female figures have been examined by many other scholars of Athenian tragedy. Taxidou, for example, argues that "the study of gender cannot be separated from the general study of tragic form."

Deleuze

"What is tragic is less the action than the judgment, and what Greek tragedy instituted at the outset was a tribunal."

Performance criticism

Orthodox approach now. Attention to the stagecraft of Athenian tragedy part of most analyses. The full significance of the words of a tragedy, this approach argues, may be understood only in relation to the theatrical context provided by "the movements and stances of the participants, the objects they hold and exchange, the things they do to each other, their shifting spatial relationships, and the overall shaping of these stage events into meaningful patterns and sequences." Thus it attends to the "dramatized visible event" of tragic performance, rather than merely the mechanics involved in the staging. It draws attention to the dramatisation of "the irreducible physical aspects of life" in the visual dimensions of Athenian tragedy.

As with the structuralist approaches, with which it is roughly contemporaneous, performance criticism also seeks to understand the broader social and cultural context within which the meaning of a particular tragedy formed.

There is something to say about Taplin's author-centered model: although he analyses as an act of communication (thus the meanings understood by an audience as well as those intended by an author), still he does focus this intersubjective exchange on the playwright as the sole author of meaning in the theatrical act--no recognition of the collective nature of the meanings performed. Need to find someone who discusses this, though, for it to avoid original research.

The dispute within performance criticism over the relationship between the language and the visual dimensions of tragedy. "The words--which are, after all, almost all we have--contain and explain the visual dimension" Taplin argues.

List of playwrights

• Achaeus
• Aeschylus
• Agathon
• Choerilus
• Euripides
• Ion
• Phrynichus
• Pratinas
• Sophocles
• Thespis

Legacy

Roman fresco depicting a scene from the Athenian tragedy Andromache by Euripides.

Classical period

Need to look at Taplin's article in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy

From the end of the 5th century BCE—by which time the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were already considered "classics"—Athenian tragedy began to spread throughout classical Greece and continued to thrive until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. During this time, songs and speeches from tragedies became popular in their own right and were performed at drinking parties (symposia). Speeches were also memorised by schoolchildren and tragedy's pithy phrases (gnomai) became proverbial.

Following the expansion of the Roman Republic (509-27 BCE) into several Greek territories between 270-240 BCE, Rome encountered Athenian tragedy. It was performed throughout the Roman period and, in the later years of the republic and by means of the Roman Empire (27 BCE-476 CE), spread across Europe. From the time of the empire, all nine of the surviving tragedies of the Stoic philosopher Seneca are re-workings of Athenian originals (fabula crepidata); his Phaedra, for example, was based on Euripides' Hippolytus.

Early modern period to the present

The original works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had a more significant impact in eduction than theatrical praxis in the 16th century, when they were used to teach rhetoric and morality. The adaptations by the Roman dramatist and philosopher Seneca were generally preferred to the Athenian originals in early modern Europe; André Dacier's French-language translations of Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Electra (both published in 1692) have been identified as a turning-point in this regard, after which Sophocles came to be valued more highly.

Scaenae frons of the Teatro Olimpico, which in 1585 hosted a rare and notable staging of an Athenian tragedy.

Public stagings of Athenian tragedies were rare until the end of the 18th century—a performance of Sophocles' Oedipus the King at Vicenza was a notable experiment. This production opened on Sunday, 3 March 1585 and inaugurated the Teatro Olimpico, a theatre designed by Andrea Palladio in imitation of a Roman theatre. It was directed by Angelo Ingegneri in a translation by Orsatto Giustiniani entitled Edipo Tiranno, with music by Angelo Gabrieli, and was performed without the use of masks and in the evening. The earliest known performance of an Athenian tragedy in early modern Europe was The Persians in 1571.

Post-classical adaptations

Gian Giorgio Trissino's Sofonisba (written in 1515, published in 1524, premiered in 1562) was the first post-classical self-conscious imitation of Athenian tragedy. Many more notable dramatists since Trissino have re-worked Athenian tragedy, including Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, John Dryden, Voltaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Jean Anouilh, Eugene O'Neill, T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Ezra Pound, Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, and Caryl Churchill.

In adapting Sophocles' original, the philosopher and dramatist Voltaire produced "the greatest dramatic success of eighteenth century France"—his Oedipus (1718).

See also

• Chorus of the elderly in classical Greek drama
• Representation of women in Athenian tragedy
• Use of costume in Athenian tragedy

Sources

• Banham, Martin, ed. 1995. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 978-0521434379.
• Brown, Andrew. 1998. "Ancient Greece." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 441-447. ISBN 0521434378.
• Brockett, Oscar G. and Franklin J. Hildy. 2003. History of the Theatre. Ninth edition, International edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0205410502.
• Burian, Peter. 1997. "Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens: the Renaissance to the Present." In Easterling (1997d, 228-283).
• Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801481546.
• Cartledge, Paul. 1997. "'Deep Plays': Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life." In Easterling (1997d, 3-35).
• Csapo, Eric, and William J. Slater. 1994. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. ISBN 0472082752.
• Csapo, Eric, and Margaret Christina Miller, eds. 2009. The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 052174833X.
• Davidson, John. 2005. "Theatrical Production." In Gregory (2005, 194-211).
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. "To Have Done With Judgment." Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 126-135. ISBN 0816625697.
• Easterling, P. E. 1997a. "A Show for Dionysus." In Easterling (1997d, 36-53).
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• ---. 1997c. "From Repertoire to Canon." In Easterling (1997d, 211-227).
• ---, ed. 1997d. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge Companions to Literature ser. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 0521423511.
• Felski, Rita. 2008a. Introduction. In Felski (2008b, 1-25).
• ---, ed. 2008b. Rethinking Tragedy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 0801887402.
• France, Peter, ed. 2000. The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP. ISBN 0199247846.
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• Goldhill, Simon. 1997. "The Audience of Athenian Tragedy." In Easterling (1997d, 54-68).
• ---. 1999. "Programme Notes." In Goldhill and Osborne (2004, 1-29).
• ---. 2008. "Generalizing About Tragedy." In Felski (2008b, 45-65).
• Goldhill, Simon, and Robin Osborne, eds. 2004. Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy. New edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 0521604311.
• Janko, Richard, trans. 1987. Poetics with Tractatus Coislinianus, Reconstruction of Poetics II and the Fragments of the On Poets. By Aristotle. Cambridge: Hackett. ISBN 0872200337.
• Kewes, Paulina. 2005. "Drama." The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins. Vol. 3. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. 241-252. ISBN 019924622X.
• Kovacs, David. 2005. "Text and Transmission." In Gregory (2005, 379-393).
• Ley, Graham. 2006. A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Rev. ed. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P. ISBN 0226477614.
• ---. 2007. The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy: Playing Space and Chorus. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P. ISBN 0226477576.
• Loraux, Nicole. 1985. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Trans. Anthony Forster. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1987. ISBN 0674902254. Trans. of Façons tragiques de tuer une femme.
• ---. 1990. Mothers in Mourning. Trans. Corinne Pache. Myth and Poetics ser. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1998. ISBN 0801482429. Trans. of Les mères en deuil.
• Pelling, Christopher. 2005. "Tragedy, Rhetoric, and Performance Culture." In Gregory (2005, 83-102).
• Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur Wallace. 1927. Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. ISBN 0198142277.
• Rehm, Rush. 1992. Greek Tragic Theatre. Theatre Production Studies ser. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415118948.
• Speirs, Ronald, trans. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. By Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy ser. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 0521639875.
• Styan, J. L. 2000. Drama: A Guide to the Study of Plays. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0820444895.
• Taxidou, Olga. 2004. Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. ISBN 0748619879.
• Taplin, Oliver. 1989. Greek Fire. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0224026836.
• ---. 2003. Greek Tragedy in Action. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 041530251X.
• Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. 1988. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1990. ISBN 0942299191. Trans. of Mythe et Tragédie en Grèce Ancienne (Librarie François Maspero, 1972) and Mythe et Tragédie en Grèce Ancienne Deux (Editions La Découverte, 1986).
• Walton, J. Michael. 1997. Introduction. In Plays VI. By Euripides. Methuen Classical Greek Dramatists ser. London: Methuen. vii-xxii. ISBN 0413716503.
• Williams, Raymond. 1966. Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 0701112603.
• Winkler, John J. 1990. "The Ephebes' Song: Tragôidia and Polis." In Winkler and Zeitlin (1992, 20-62).
• Winkler, John J., and Froma Zeitlin, eds. 1992. Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in its Social Context. New edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. ISBN 0691015252.

External links

• APGRD Database (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama), University of Oxford, ed. Amanda Wrigley.
• "Aeschylus' Oresteia" - BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme.
• "Aristotle's Poetics" - BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme.
• "Tragedy" - BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme.

Resources

• History, Tragedy, Theory ed. Barbara Goff (1995); some material on gender
• "Oedipus the Queen"; and this volume of Theatre Journal in general
• Vernant "Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation"]
• Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Role-playing in Sophocles
• Sommerstein, Greek Drama and Dramatists
• Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy
• Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian (1989)
• Thomas Gould "The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy" (1990) - on Plato, Aristotle, and pathos in tragedy (expanded to book)
• Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. Silk (1996)
• Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy

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