The Development of Athenian Tragedy
The problematic relationship that Greeks believed existed between gods and humans
formed the basis of classical Athens' most enduring cultural innovation: the tragic
dramas performed over the course of three days at the major annual festival held in
honor of the
god Dionysus.1
These plays, still read, translated, and produced on stage today around the world, were
presented in ancient Athens as part of a drama contest, in keeping with the competitive
spirit characteristic of many events held in the gods' honor. The earliest tragedies
were composed in the late sixth century, but Athenian tragedy reached its peak as a
dramatic form in the fifth century.
The Nature of Tragedy
The term
tragedy2—derived, for reasons now lost, from the Greek words
for goat and song—referred to plays with plots that involved fierce conflict
and characters that represented powerful forces, both divine and human. Tragedies were
written in verse in elevated, solemn language and often based on stories about the
violent consequences of the interaction between gods and humans and of conflict among
human beings. Tragic plots frequently were mainly constructed from myths, although a
few tragedies dealt with
contemporary historical events3. The plot of a tragedy often ended with a resolution to the trouble, but only
after considerable suffering.
The Performance of Tragedy
The most important presentations of tragedy at Athens took place once a year as part
of a competition at the city's
main festival4 in honor of the god
Dionysus.5
For this festival, one of Athens' magistrates chose three playwrights to present four
plays each. Three were tragedies and one a
satyr play6, the latter so named because it featured actors portraying the half-human,
half-animal (horse or goat) creatures called
satyrs7. Satyr plays presented versions of the solemn stories of tragedy that were
infused with humor and even farce.
A board of citizen judges8 awarded first, second, and third prizes to the competing playwrights at the
end of the festival. The performance of Athenian tragedies bore little resemblance to
conventional modern theater productions. They took place during the daytime in an
outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus,9built into the slope of the southern hillside of Athens' acropolis. This
theater of Dionysus held around 14,000 spectators overlooking an open, circular area
in front of a slightly raised stage platform. To ensure fairness in the competition,
all tragedies were required to have the same size cast, all of whom were men: three
actors to play the speaking roles of all male and female characters and fifteen chorus
members. Although the chorus' leader sometimes engaged in dialogue with the actors,
the chorus primarily performed songs and dances in the circular area in front of the
stage, called the orchestra (“dancing area”). Since all the
actors' lines were in verse with special rhythms, the musical aspect of the chorus'
role enhanced the overall poetic nature of Athenian tragedy.
The Spectacle of Tragedy
Even though scenery on the stage was sparse, a good tragedy presented a vivid
spectacle10. The
chorus wore elaborate, decorative costumes and trained hard to
perform intricate dance routines11. The actors, who wore
masks12, used broad gestures and booming voices to reach the
upper tier of seats.13 A powerful voice was crucial to a tragic actor because words represented the
heart of a tragedy, in which dialogue and long speeches were far more common than
physical action. Special effects were, however, part of the spectacle. For example, a
crane allowed actors playing the roles of gods to fly suddenly onto stage, like
superheroes in a modern movie. The actors playing the lead roles, called the
protagonists14 (“first competitors”), were also competing against each
other for the designation of best actor. So important was it to have a first-rate lead
actor to provide a successful tragedy that protagonists were assigned by lot to the
competing playwrights of the year to give all three of them an equal chance to have
the finest cast. Great protagonists, who had to have prodigious vocal skills, became
enormously popular figures, although, unlike many playwrights, they were not usually
aristocrats and generally did not move in upper-class social circles, or, if they did
have aristocratic friends, they were not on an equal footing with them in terms of
social status.
Tragedians
The author of a slate of tragedies in the festival of Dionysus also served as
director, producer, musical composer, choreographer, and sometimes even one of the
actors. Only men of some wealth could afford the prodigious amounts of time such work
demanded because the prizes in the tragedy competition were probably modest. As
citizens, playwrights also fulfilled the normal military and political obligations of
an Athenian man. The best known Athenian tragedians—
Aeschylus15 (525-456 B.C.),
Sophocles16 (c. 496-406 B.C.), and
Euripides 17 (c. 485-406 B.C.)—all either served in the army, held public office
at some point in their careers, or they did both. Aeschylus fought at Marathon and
Salamis; the epitaph on his tombstone, which says nothing of his great success as a
playwright, reveals how highly he valued his contribution to his city-state as a
citizen-soldier:
“Under this stone lies Aeschylus the Athenian, son
of Euphorion ... the grove at Marathon and the Persians who landed there were
witnesses to his courage.”18
Tragedy and the Polis
Aeschylus' pride in his military service to his homeland points to a fundamental
characteristic of Athenian tragedy: it was at its base a public art form, an
expression of the city-state (polis), that explored
the ethical quandaries of human beings in conflict with gods and with one another in
the context of a polis-like community. Even though
variations on stories from the pre-polis past, such
as
tales of the Trojan War19, supplied the plots of most tragedies, the moral
issues they illuminated were always presented in the context of the society and
obligations of citizens in a polis.
Sophocles' Success
Sophocles' tragedies20 were overwhelmingly popular. In a sixty-year career as a
playwright, he competed with a series of tragedies about thirty times, winning at
least twenty times and never finishing worse than second. Since winning plays were
selected by a panel of
ordinary male citizens who were influenced by the
audience's reaction21, Sophocles' record clearly means his works appealed to the large number of
men who attended the drama competition of the festival of Dionysus. The evidence on
whether women attended is contradictory, but they probably were allowed to see
dramas. That Sophocles' plays concerned difficult ethical problems in the context of
the polis is significant for understanding the
function of Athenian tragedy. We cannot know precisely how the ancient audience
interpreted tragedies in general or those of Sophocles in particular, but the
spectators can hardly have been unaware that the central characters of the plays
were figures who fell into disaster from positions of power and prestige. Their
reversals of fortune22 come about not because they are villains, but because, as human beings, they
are susceptible to a lethal mixture of error, ignorance, and hubris (aggressive arrogance).
Sophoclean Tragedies and Athenian Empire
The Athenian empire was at its height when audiences at Athens were seeing the
plays of Sophocles. Indeed, the presentation of the plays at the festival of
Dionysus was preceded by a procession in the
theater 23 to display the revenues of Athens received from the dues of the allies.
Thoughtful spectators would have perhaps reflected on the possibility that Athens'
current power and prestige, managed as it was by human beings, remained hostage to
the same forces which, the playwrights taught, controlled the fates of the heroes
and heroines of tragedy. Tragedies certainly had appeal because they were engrossing
purely as entertainment; but they also had an educative function: to remind its male
citizens, those who in the assembly made policy for the polis, that success by its nature engendered problems of a moral
complexity too formidable to be fathomed casually or arrogantly.
Sophocles'
Ajax
The relevance that the themes of tragedy could have to issues affecting the
city-state even in plays whose plots had ostensibly nothing to do with life in a
polis shows up clearly in Sophocles' play entitled
Ajax
24,
presented in the early 440s B.C. The play bore the name of the second-best warrior
(Achilles had been preeminent) in the Greek army that besieged Troy in the Trojan
War. When his fellow
Greek soldiers voted to award the armor of the dead
Achilles25 to the wily Odysseus instead of himself, Ajax went on a
berserk rampage against his former friends which the
goddess Athena26 thwarted because Ajax had once rejected her help in battle. Disgraced by his
failure to secure revenge
Ajax committed suicide.27 Odysseus then stepped in to convince the Greek chiefs to bury Ajax despite
his attempted treachery because the future security of the army and the obligations
of friendship demanded that they obey the divine injunction always to bury the dead.
Odysseus' arguments 28in favor of burying Ajax anachronistically treat the army as if it were a
polis, and his use of persuasive speech to
achieve accommodation of conflicting individual interests to the benefit of the
community corresponds to the way in which disputes in the polis were supposed to be resolved.
Sophocles'
Antigone
In his powerful play of 441 B.C. entitled
Antigone
29, Sophocles presented a drama of harsh conflict between
the family's moral obligation to bury its dead in obedience to divine command and
the male-dominated city-state's need to preserve its order and defend its values.
Antigone, the daughter of
Oedipus30, the
now-deceased former king of
Thebes31, comes into
conflict with her uncle, the new ruler, when he forbids the burial of one of
Antigone's two brothers on the grounds he had been a traitor.
This brother had
attacked Thebes after the other brother had broken an agreement to share the
kingship.32 Both brothers died in the ensuing battle, but
Antigone's uncle had
allowed the burial only of the brother who had remained in power. When Antigone
brazenly defies her uncle33 by
symbolically burying the allegedly traitorous brother, her uncle condemns her to
die. He only realizes his error when sacrifices to the gods go wrong. His decision
to punish Antigone ends in personal disaster when his son and then his wife kill
themselves in despair. In this horrifying story of anger and death, Sophocles
deliberately exposes the right and wrong on each side of the conflict. Although
Antigone's uncle eventually acknowledges a leader's responsibility to listen to his
people, the play offers no easy resolution of the competing interests of
divinely-sanctioned moral tradition expressed by a woman and the political rules of
the state enforced by a man.
