Journal Prompt
Let's use these readings! What, if anything, from the Seaford reading, what from the Aristotle reading, helps explain Sophocles' Antigone?
Text Access, What to Read
Seaford, Richard, Patricia E. Easterling, and Fiona Macintosh. "tragedy, Greek." Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2016. Web page. 10 January 2024. (Online access via BU Libraries, login required)
- Read only through section II.2., "Actors and festivals."
Aristotle Poetics, excerpts. (Online access, read all)
Introductory Remarks
This assignment introduces you to Greek tragedy, with a particular focus on its origins, its practice, and one thinker's theory of it. The theoretical component is covered by selections from Aristotle's Poetics, a work dating to 335 BCE or a bit later. Origins and practice are covered by Aristotle's Poetics, but especially by Richard Seaford's entry on Greek tragedy (publication date, 2016) in the online Oxford Classical Dictionary.
What do we mean by "Greek tragedy"? Let's start with the "tragedy" part. For now, let's say that we often call things "tragedies" when they go horribly wrong or involve terrible loss: accidents, disasters, other catastrophe. Yet the origins of the word "tragedy" suggest something altogether different and puzzling. For the Greek noun tragōidia, broken down into its components, seems to mean something like "billy goat (tragos) song (ōidē)."
Whatever that term will have meant originally, evidence suggests that by the 500s BCE, the word "tragedy" (tragōidia) had begun to refer to a type of performance sung and danced by groups (choruses) and closely connected to worship of Dionysus. What was Dionysus god of? Among other things, wine, the release from inhibitions, inspiration, transformation, impersonation, dramatic performance. During this early phase, tragedy, though it likely told stories, did so without the use of individuals playing specific roles. Only later did actors get involved, and it is that later period, the 400s BCE, on which we'll focus for most of this part of the course.
What was Greece in ancient times? Greece, a territory located in the southeast extreme of Europe, would not become a single nation state until the year 1830. Athens was not, then, the "capital" of ancient Greece; it was merely one of several independent city states, or poleis — Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Sparta, to name a few —, sometimes at peace with one another, sometimes not.
What was "Greek" about "Greek tragedy"? Partly its connection to religious and cultural traditions shared by Greeks of the time; largely the fact that the language used for it was Greek. But tragedy in Greece quickly became a very specifically Athenian thing. Most surviving Greek tragedy ("surviving" because much more has been lost than survives), and all the Greek tragedies that we'll be reading, come from 5th-century BCE Athens, the time and place that saw the genre fully come into its own. We can't, then, assume that the "Greek tragedies" that we read always and only present a broadly Greek take on timeless themes of abiding interest to the whole of humanity; that is, by the way, how Greek tragedy is usually understood. Much of it reflects, and reflects on, realities specific to the city (Athens) and to the period (ca. 500-400 BCE) that witnessed its coming-of-age.*
* All but a very few of the more or less complete ancient Greek tragedies that survive come from Athens during the period 472-405 BCE. Athens and other cities continued to produce tragedy; one such play, the Rhesus, probably dates to the 300s. Another play in Greek, Ezekiel's Exagōgē, tells the story of the Jews' escape from Egypt; it probably comes from 3rd-1st century BCE Alexandria, in Egypt.
Why study the origins of Greek/Athenian tragedy? By studying those origins, we begin to gain an appreciation of what's different, maybe even weird, about the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three "greats" — plays that we've been taught to think of as "classic" and "timeless." Yet the role that the god Dionysus played, not just in the origins of Greek drama, tragic and comic, but in the ongoing creation and performance of it, very much matters and will likely alter our conception of the whole business. To be sure, it is not without reason that people treat Greek tragedy as a possession for all time, but the plays themselves come from a place (in more than one sense of the word) altogether unlike anything most of us have ever known.
tragedy, Greek (Oxford Classical Dictionary)
Online access to reading. The following are notes keyed into numbered sections of the online article. I won't explain everything, but, as with all assigned readings in whatever class, not everything is vital.
I.1. Origins
Seaford's main point in this section is that ancient Greek tragedy very likely evolved from shorter, more boisterous performances featuring choruses with a strong connection to Dionysus, god of wine, and to his cult, and aimed at laughs, not tears. Satyr dramas, which capped off performances of tragedy in 5th-century Athens, preserved/revived the spirit of these proto-tragedies. Put simply, classic tragic drama developed out of something silly to become something very serious. Yet it never lost key components of its Dionysian origins, most especially, the transformation that the performer undergoes when putting on the mask.
"because tragedy developed from the satyr-play-like (ek saturikou: see satyric drama), it was slow to become serious, abandoning its small plots and ridiculous diction"
The term "satyr play" (aka "satyric/satyr drama"), discussed in detail on the Euripides Cyclops study guide, has nothing to do satire. Nor is it comedy. Rather, satyr drama can be defined as "funny tragedy": "funny" because it's, well, funny, and "tragedy" because it employs tragic language, tragic musical and poetic forms, and tragic plot turns: hubris, reversal, etc.
(Apart from the "funny" part, ancient Greek comedy is something quite different from satyr drama.)
Satyr drama is "satyric" because it uses choruses of singer-dancers who wear the costume of satyrs, creatures part human, part horse, often drunk and sexually aroused. Satyrs form part of the regular entourage of Dionysus. In the 400s BCE, the Greater Dionysia festival at Athens had each participating tragic playwright (there would be three) present a set of three tragedies plus one satyr play — four plays, a tetralogy.
But Seaford doesn't mean that tragedy evolved from satyr plays, exactly, but from choral performances featuring satyrs and satyr-like antics. These proto-tragedies could have gone under the name of "tragedy" or "dithyramb." They probably had a something to do with processions of men dressed as satyrs to celebrate Dionysus, and in some cases carrying the phallus, an image of male anatomy serving as an emblem of the god.
"trochaic tetrameter, which was then replaced by the iambic trimeter ."
Don't worry about those terms. They refer to poetic meter, that is, regular patterns of rhythm in spoken or sung verse. Learn more about that by taking Greek here at BU!
"Some have seen an inconsistency in the development of tragedy both from the dithyramb and from the saturikon."
Dithyramb was a type of choral poem closely connected to the worship of Dionysus. It did not, however, have individual actors; it was not drama. But it arguably played a role in the evolution of tragedy; Aristotle in the Poetics says that tragedy evolved from it by adding actors. The Greater Dionysia festival at Athens featured performances of dithyramb, tragedy, satyr drama, and comedy.
"sacrifice of a goat"
Ancient Greek religion centered on killing animals as offerings to the gods. The word "tragedy" (Greek tragōidia) seems to derive from tragos ("male goat") and ōidē ("song"). It's possible, though far from certain, that winners of the earliest tragic contests received a goat to sacrifice to Dionysus.
"Another ancient tradition locates the origin of tragedy in the northern *Peloponnesus"
There are several of these "traditions," versions of the history of tragedy; we find some of them in Aristotle's Poetics. They don't all line up perfectly with each other. Plus, they're hard to keep straight. Here, Seaford is identifying performances, ones from the Peloponnese peninsula (= southern Greece), called "tragedies" as an intermediate development between the performance of boisterous satyr-play-like choral song and classic Athenian tragedy of a highly serious character.
I.2. Early history
"the City *Dionysia"
Aka the Greater Dionysia, the main Athenian festival celebrating Dionysus, in late March. The festival dates to sometime in the 500s BCE. It's the festival that saw the evolution of Greek tragedy as we know it. What matters is that early tragedies at Athens, performed at the Greater Dionysia, were mostly about the chorus, but gradually made the actors more and more important. The stuff about Thespis, Choerilus, Pratinas, and Phrynichus, early tragic poets at Athens, is mostly unimportant. Ditto competing claims by Dorians and Athenians to having created tragedy. Dionysus, though, is important.
I. 3. The dramatic festivals in the fifth century
We're talking here about Athens and nowhere else. In 400s BCE Athens, there were several festivals honoring Dionysus and featuring performances of tragedy. The main one, the Greater Dionysia (aka City Dionysia aka the spring festival of Dionysus Eleuthereus), featured, but was not confined to, competition between three tragic playwrights. Each would present, on the same day, four plays, a "tetralogy" consisting of three tragedies and a satyr drama. Wealthy citizens would sponsor the productions, one sponsor (khorēgos) per playwright.
All performances took place in the outdoor Theater of Dionysus, on the southwest slope of the Athenian Acropolis.
We have complete tragedies from three known playwrights: Aeschylus (525/4-456/5 BCE), Sophocles (ca. 496-ca. 406 BCE), and Euripides (ca. 485-ca. 406). One play surviving from this period, the Prometheus Bound, may or may not be by Aeschylus. Another play, the Rhesus, preserved among the works of Euripides, is later; its author is unknown. There were, though many other tragic playwrights in this period. We know some, not all, of their names.
"the appointment of protagonists by the state"
"Protagonist" is a technical term. It means the chief actor, not character, in a play. That actor could play multiple roles. Multiple actors could also play a single role. ". . . by the state" — the city-state (polis) of Athens had a stake in tragedies staged there. The "king archon" (a yearly official chosen by lottery) oversaw the selection of playwrights, the appointment of producers and actors, and the assignment of choruses.
"one from each of the tribes"
These tribes were an administrative fiction created by the early Athenian statesman Solon. Every Athenian citizen belonged to one of the ten tribes. They were important chiefly in selecting people to serve in the Council, on prize committees (as for the tragedy competition at the Greater Dionysia), and so on.
I. 4. Form and performance
The main thing here is that the performance of tragedy at Athenian festivals was competitive. There were prizes to win. At first, only sponsors (khorēgoi) and playwrights won prizes. In 449 BCE, prizes started to be awarded to actors. The chorus was always treated as central to the production, even later in the 5th century, when the chorus was losing importance dramatically.
Crucial here is the fact that Athenian tragedy never had more than three actors and thus no more than three individual speakers (apart from the chorus) speaking on stage at one time. All would be masked and costumed. Thus one actor could and often did play more than one character.
Things Seaford seems to fail to mention (did I miss it?):
- All parts — male, female, young, old — were played by men
- The chorus was recruited from Athenian male young adults
Men playing women as a feature of ancient Greek drama is a topic much explored in recent scholarship. What does it mean, for instance, when the chorus in Aeschylus' Agamemnon compares queen Clytemnestra, played by a man (masked, of course), to a man?
"The metrical patterns of the surviving plays show that the typical 5th-cent. tragedy was formally much more complex than most modern drama"
This highlights classical Athenian tragedy as what we'd call musical theater. Tragedy thus featured:
- Big choral numbers, singing and dancing, sometimes with the actors involved
- Solo songs performed by actors (especially in Euripides)
- Marched-chanted numbers with the chorus and/or actors
- Spoken dialogue, always in poetic meter. (Everything was always in poetic meter)
I. 5. Subject-matter and interpretation
"*Plato(1) called *Homer 'first of the tragic poets' (Resp. 607a)"
Homer (mid 800s BCE) didn't compose tragedy or drama at all. He composed epic poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yet his stories are very "tragic" in feel and furnished plots for later playwrights.
"Recent criticism has emphasized the ideological content and didactic function of 5th-cent. tragedy, linking it as a form of public discourse with debates and decision-making in the assembly (*ekklēsia) and with the speeches aimed at popular juries in the law courts (see democracy, Athenian)"
That, along with the rest of that paragraph, is crucial. It's what makes Athenian tragedy so very Athenian. We'll be talking a lot about it.
II. 1. The formation of a repertoire
Basically, this section describes how interest in specifically Athenian tragedy, and especially in plays by the big three (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), spread beyond Athens.
"The fact that only a very small proportion of the most celebrated tragedies has survived may have more to do with the constraints of the school curriculum in late antiquity and the early Byzantine period than with the intrinsic quality of some of the lost material"
The fact that a certain core repertoire survived to our day (certain plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) reflects the fact that in the Middle Ages, those plays dominated the school tragedy curriculum. Other tragedies just stopped being read. Copies of them stopped being made. Our loss.
II. 2. Actors and festivals
This mostly has to do with tragedy after its "period of greatness" in Athens. Tragedy continued to be great and popular, but its composition and performance spread all around the Mediterranean. Professional guilds, the "artists of Dionysus," took tragedy on tour; festivals outside Athens, and not all of them festivals of Dionysus, sponsored tragic performance. Sometimes excerpts from plays, not entire plays, would be performed as recital pieces.
Aristotle Poetics
Aristotle (384-322 BCE), philosopher and student of Plato, applied himself to numerous branches of knowledge: biology, physics, metaphysics, logic, ethics, etc. His Poetics is a little like a natural history of literature: it sets forth a systematic account of its subject (poetry in its various forms), and features classification (always an obsession with Aristotle), explanation of causes and purposes, critical evaluation, etc. It and certain works of Plato (Ion, Republic) present us with the earliest systematic literary theory in the Western tradition.
At the same time, the Poetics are not to be mistaken for a work of high literary polish. What we have likely collates and revises lecture notes, perhaps with passages not by Aristotle himself, stuff never really intended for reading by the general public. The style is clipped and pedantic, the organization somewhat messy — your typical professor. But it's possible, too, that his approach offers insights.
By the time that Aristotle was writing, the "golden age" of tragedy had already passed. Tragedy itself was not dead; tragedies were still being composed and performed. But there was no longer an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, a Euripides, or, for that matter, an Agathon, around to produce masterpieces. The plays discussed by Aristotle were, in his day, already "classics" of a sort. Aristotle himself knows them principally as texts, things you read, not watch — an important point.
Note that we have only part of what originally could have been twice as long as the preserved fragment. (Lost is an entire discussion of comedy.) Note, too, that what we have discusses poetry other than tragedy. Still, it all holds relevance for our topic.
Terminology
Part I
plot — this translates muthos, which elsewhere can mean "myth" or "fable." In the Poetics, Aristotle uses it to mean the dramatic "plot," the series of actions that, together, constitute the story told by a play.
imitation — translates mimēsis. The idea of poetry, all types, as imitation, like painting, sculpture, even music, is central to Aristotle's Poetics. Backstory: Plato earlier attacked imitative art as untrue. Stories, pictures, etc. can only get so close to reality, and not that close. Stories of the gods often lie, saying that they do wrong, and so on. Aristotle, Plato's student, is keen on what's redeeming about artistic imitation. It may tell fictitious tales, but if it's good, it can capture higher truths. Imitation is implanted deep in himan nature (part III).
Part II
Dithyrambs and Nomes — two types of poetry. See above for dithyrambs.
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life — this has to do with the relatability of dramatic genres. "We" fall somewhere between "better" and"worse." We relate to tragic characters as superior, socially and in other ways, to us. The misadventures of kings, etc., elicit pity and fear. Comic characters are "worse"; we laugh at them, which we don't at tragic characters.
Part III
Sophocles, the tragic poet, is like the epic poet Homer (Iliad, Odyssey) for representing characters superior to us socially, politically, and so on. Epic, however, is narrative. It is not drama, action happening on stage (drama = literally "action" in Greek). Tragedy and comedy are drama, only comedy represents characters who are beneath us.
(Messenger speeches in drama do, however, narrate action. Direct-speech dialogue in epic is often close to speech in drama.)
Part VI
End — this translates Greek telos, which in Aristotle means not simply "end," but "goal" in the sense of purpose, the end point one aims for. Thus imitation of action is the "end," the ultimate purpose, of tragedy according to Aristotle.
Margites — a lost poem.
Part IX
"But tragedians still keep to real names" — this probably means that Aristotle thought that most characters of tragedy and of myth generally, however much poetry fictionalizes them, were real; tragedy keeps their names. (Today, we can no longer confirm the historicity of any Greek mythological character I know of. But I don't think it would change anything if Aristotle thought tragic characters were pure fiction. What matters is that they represent types that are true to human nature.)
Part XIII
". . . yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty" (p. 76). "Error or frailty" translates what in Greek is hamartia, which does NOT mean "tragic flaw" but mistake or moral error or wrongful act. It's the word used in the Bible for "sin." The term comes up in ch13, which concerns the action, which is what makes up plot. In Aristotle's conception of hamartia and of plot, tragic error, the kind that best elicits pity and fear, will result from ignorance (would Oedipus have slept with his mother had he known who she was?). At the same time, character or disposition (ēthos) matters: "Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability, just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence" (p. 82).
Part XV
By deus ex machina, Latin (not Greek!) for "god from the machine," the translator renders what in Greek simply means "from the machine." What that's about is the crane that could be used to suspend or lower an actor playing a god. Aristotle doesn't approve of poets who resort to this special effect to advance or to resolve the plot, like a good witch dropping in to fix things with a wave of the magic wand. He wants there the ending to grow organically from the plot.