Greek tragedy, created in the city-state of Athens in the last thirty years of the sixth century B.C.E., is the earliest kind of European drama. Its subject matter is normally drawn from mythology, except that for the ancient Greeks “mythology” was a kind of historical saga, often perfectly credible oral history, including stories about gods and other supernatural beings, handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. The Persians of Aeschylus, describing the invasion of Athens by a huge Persian fleet in 480 and its defeat in the naval battle of Salamis, is such a play. However, tragedy is, strictly speaking, neither historical nor mythological; it is a poetic drama in the sense that poetry rises above the particulars of history and expresses human truths of a universal kind.
Origins and Evolution
According to Aristotle, tragedy originated from the improvisations of the exarchontes of the dithyramb. A dithyramb was a religious hymn in honor of Dionysus, and the Dionysiac origin of tragedy was in antiquity taken for granted, Dionysus being the god of theater as much as the god of wine, vegetation, and fertility.
It is impossible to reconstruct with any certainty the stages of evolution from religious hymn to ritual enactment, and finally to a kind of secular play in which a great variety of myths were presented in dramatic form to a theatrical audience rather than a group of worshipers. The critical stage in this line of development was the transition from ritual to theater. Ritual must be repeated more or less exactly if it is to be a religious act. But once it metamorphoses into a playful act, its religious ties are loosened and a great potential for development in form and content becomes available to creative artists.
The Term Paper on Animal Sacrifice Greek Gods Ritual
Mikey Ritualistic Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Mythology The ritual of sacrifice in Greek literature played a prominent role in societal influence, defining many aspects of their culture. Sacrifice was the foundation of moral concern, as well as an effective means of narrative development in Greek tragedy. The thematic reoccurrence of sacrifice in Greek literature reveals its symbolic importance. At ...
However, once the first sparks were struck tragedy evolved swiftly by embracing and building on earlier forms of poetry. Choral lyric was a major poetic genre in Archaic Greece, particularly among Dorian Greeks. Next, the tradition of epic poetry, shared by all Greeks, supplied the great pool of stories, often grouped in local cycles and family sagas . Finally came the actor, or hypokrites, which originally meant “interpreter” and/or “answerer”. When tragedy came to light, Aristotle notes, poets inclined to compose serious poetry now turned to tragedy, and epic poets were thus succeeded by tragedians.
The Peak of Tragedy
In representing the human life of the past, the earliest of the great dramatists, Aeschylus, tried to make sense of the inconsistencies of mythology and arbitrariness of gods in relation to the perception of moral responsibility and justice current in Athenian political and judicial assemblies. He wrote trilogies of interrelated plays extending over successive generations of gods and men, and searched for reason and a just resolution of conflicts.
Sophocles (497–406 B.C.E.), although a deeply religious man, gave up trilogies of interconnected plays and the effort to untangle religious issues, and focused on human characters, their motivation, their morality, and the uncompromising dignity with which they faced up to their predicaments. He perfected the art form in terms of plot construction and characterization, increased the number of speaking characters in a scene from two to three, and added painted scenery to the stage. Aristotle considers his Oedipus the King the perfect example of tragic composition, as it illustrates very well his concept of “tragic error” (a crime unwittingly committed, yet affecting family and city like a plague), and the sudden fall of a powerful man from happiness to disaster. However, Oedipus is neither a paragon of virtue nor immoral. Like Oedipus, the proper tragic hero should be of average moral stature: The downfall of such a person is felt to be tragic and stirs up the emotions of pity and fear in the audience. Sophocles reportedly wrote 120 plays, but only seven have survived, including Antigone, Electra, and Oedipus at Colonus.
The Essay on The Role of Tragedy in Early Greek Legacy
Tragedies have been a big and important part of Greek culture and history. Greek tragedies are dramas performed before a large audience, usually during festivities of gods, that narrate the story of a hero and all the unusual challenges and sufferings that he has to go through in order to achieve something or learn an important lesson. Tragedies usually have complex plots wherein disasters happen ...
Euripides (486–406) is the last of the great tragedians of the fifth century. If Sophocles represents the spirit and style of the Golden Age of Athens (480–430), Euripides (who as a young man had been a disciple of the physical philosopher Anaxagoras and the sophist Protagoras, an agnostic) belongs to the troubled period of the Peloponnesian War, which took place between Athens and Sparta between 431 and 404 B.C.E. He made no effort to account for the interference of gods in the life of humans; on the contrary, by having events that preceded and followed the action proper of the play merely reported or revealed in a prologue and an epilogue, spoken by a god (the deus ex machina ), he seems to expose rather than explain the arbitrariness and cruelty of gods, which had made Socrates reject the validity of traditional myths and Plato pronounce epic and tragic poetry unacceptable to his ideal republic. In fact, Aristotle calls Euripides “the most tragic of the poets”
Decline, Survival, Revival
tragedy declined after the death of Sophocles and Euripides, and the humiliation of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Although several names (and some fragments) of poets who lived in the fourth century and in the Hellenistic era are known to modern-day scholars, intellectual and political developments, as well as the changing attitudes toward old gods and traditional religion, did not favor the kind of interpretation of the human past offered by tragedy.
However, tragedy won a different lease on life in the same period, initially as an Athenian cultural export. Several theaters were built in many cities in the fourth century, including the greatest of Greek theaters, that of Epidaurus in northern Peloponnese. After Alexander’s death in 323, which marks the beginning of the Hellenistic era, a veritable theatrical explosion took place all over the Greek-speaking world. Every city in Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and South Italy and Sicily established its own dramatic festival, and theater artists set up professional unions (in Athens, Peloponnese, Asia Minor, Egypt, and South Italy) in order to respond and profit from the new tremendous demand for their services. Dramatic festivals and contests became the mark of Hellenic culture, but despite all this activity the conditions for the creation of significant new tragedies did not exist anymore. Old religion had retreated under pressure from new oriental gods. Traditional Greek mythology had lost its value as oral history of the past, and Chance (personified as a goddess) had largely replaced Fate in the mind of ordinary people. Tragedy died out when the Eastern Roman Empire was Christianized in the fourth century.
The Essay on Ancient Greek Theater And Drama
... men deep. Costumes were necessary to Greek theater, for the members of the audience ... suffered along with the heroes of tragedies and laughed with the heroes of ... Ancient Grecian Theater has influenced all forms of modern theater. Without ancient theater, we might ... Sophocles. He was born in Colonus, Athens in 497 B.C. His father ... the air, enabling them to play gods, visions or prophesies. The Periactoi ...
Tragedy began to be revived on a modest scale in the Renaissance, and fertilized modern serious theater and the creation of the opera, which was conceived as a modern form of tragedy, not only in Italy and France, but also later in Germany. Productions of Greek tragedies have increasingly carved a considerable niche in contemporary Western (and Japanese) theater, so much so that one may wonder what it is that ancient tragedy has to say to modern audiences that have no familiarity with or belief in Greek mythology and religion. It seems that the basic shape of the stories, the examples of heroic defiance, and above all the uncompromising dignity with which tragic characters accept the predicament imposed on them by superior powers which they cannot overcome or avoid, hold a universal message of humanity that is as valuable for modern men and women as it was for ancient ones.