What made Athenian fifth-century drama so powerful a medium that neither time nor change of language has managed to render it obsolete? The fundamental reason, certainly, is that the dramas deal with the most intractable aspects of human existence: uncertainty about the future, fear of injury, deprivation, suffering, and death. In the ancient world, war, instability, and untimely death were constants of everyday existence; it was necessary always to be on guard, against either military attack, sudden outbursts of anger or insanity, or diseases and infirmities for which there were no cures. No terrifying possibility is omitted: sudden death, suicide, terminal illness, betrayal, loss of a loved one or of many loved ones. The tragedies helped their ancient audiences to see how it might be possible to face and survive such challenges, and there is still much that modern readers can learn from them. They not only speak to the causes of human despair; they also provide the words that can bring at least a partial remedy. And they still can help us understand how to endure many of the burdens that modern medicine cannot cure, not least the isolation imposed by loss and defeat. The tragedies provide illustrations of the solace that can be offered by friends and even strangers. Alongside humanity’s greatest weaknesses, the tragedies also allow us to see its most remarkable strengths: empathy, compassion, and the ability to endure even in the face of physical suffering and deprivation.
But ancient audiences were able to learn more from the tragedies than we can today, because of their connection to traditional Greek religion. Rituals held in honor of Dionysus could require worshippers to wear disguises and play roles, to abandon routines, to leave the safety of their homes to go out into the wilderness, to expect the unexpected. It was Dionysus in particular who could make mortals see what was not there, or prevent them from seeing what was right before their eyes. Tragedies, like other Dionysiac rituals, are by nature illusory and unreal, fictive representations of actions in the past. But the illusions that they created helped to remind the audience of the insufficiency of human knowledge, and of the contrast between human understanding and that of the immortal gods. Athenians liked to believe that their city was dear to the gods, and that the gods would protect them from their enemies. But the dramas warned them not to count on retaining the gods’ favor, and not to suppose that they could understand what might be done by forces beyond their control in order to change the courses of their lives. The mortals who fared best in such a hostile world were those who sought the advice of seers in order to determine what the gods might wish them to do, and who were scrupulously pious in honoring them. But the dramas demonstrated that even such proper actions did not always produce the results that the petitioners sought to obtain.
The dramas were exciting to watch, even though many members of the audience would already have known how the stories they depicted would end. Most of the plots were based on material from the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other epics now surviving only in fragments. The dramatists did not seek to change the outcomes of the traditional myths, because these stories were for them a kind of history; but they were free to refashion the old narratives in any way they chose, and the ingenuity with which they devised new plots brought excitement even to familiar narratives. We still possess four dramas that offer different versions of a story outlined in the Odyssey, about how Orestes, returning home from exile to avenge the death of his father, Agamemnon, killed his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Each of the dramatists puts a different emphasis on this narrative, adds new characters, and comes up with a distinctive ending. Aeschylus in his drama Libation Bearers and Sophocles in his drama Electra characterize Orestes as a dutiful son who follows the orders of the god Apollo and returns home to Argos to avenge the death of his father. But in Euripides’ Electra, Orestes is as keen to recover his patrimony as he is to avenge his father’s death. In Euripides’ Orestes (not included in this volume), Orestes believes he has been abandoned by Apollo and so is prepared to kill Helen and her daughter, Hermione, until Apollo himself intervenes to stop him.
The four dramas about Orestes’ revenge, as does virtually every other surviving Greek drama, describe a crisis that affects the family of a royal house. The dramatists appear to have been particularly interested in the plots and murders that plagued the house of Atreus in Argos: Atreus; his brother, Thyestes; their sons, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Aegisthus; and Agamemnon’s children, Orestes and Electra. Another favorite narrative (mentioned only briefly in the Odyssey) concerns the house of Laius in Thebes: Laius’ wife, Jocasta; her son/husband, Oedipus; and Oedipus’ children by Jocasta, Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles, and Polynices. Aeschylus’ drama Persians, although based on recent history rather than myth, describes the suffering of the family of Xerxes, king of Persia, whose great army was defeated by the Greeks in the battle of Salamis. Perhaps the Athenians believed that the autocratic power wielded by royal families was more likely to bring about disaster than was their own democracy, in which officials were elected instead of obtaining their office by inheritance, and authority was shared among the male citizens. But it also would have been easier for audiences to understand the effects of disaster on individuals within a family than on an undifferentiated group, if only because each of them was a member of a family and so potentially able to understand the conflicts and rivalries that arise among close relatives.
Most dramas involve a reversal of expectations and of fortune, a shift either from prosperity to disaster or from misery to happiness, as Aristotle saw (see appendix D). More often than not, good fortune is the result of divine rather than human action. But humans bear some measure of responsibility in the case of changes for the worse, usually because of a misjudgment on the part of some individual. Aristotle called such errors in judgment hamartia. That word is often mistranslated as “tragic flaw,” which suggests that the mistake arises from a character fault on the part of the hero of the tragedy. A person with a calm temperament might not have struck the old man who roughly pushed him off the road, but Oedipus’ quick temper led him to strike back and kill the old man who (unknown to him) was his own father. Oedipus’ hamartia, however, was not his violent response, but his assumption that he could avoid the prophecy that he had just heard at Delphi, that he would kill his father and marry his mother. In the process of evasion, he made the prophecy come true by taking the road to Thebes, encountering the old man who was his father, and marrying the old man’s widow after he arrived in Thebes. Greek tragedy teaches that human error is inevitable, and even though a person’s character can make him or her more likely to err in judgment, the gods either ensure that mortals will make mistakes or fail to prevent them from doing so.
Like Oedipus, the mortal characters in the dramas at first believe that they know what they are doing and presume that they have some control over their destinies. But soon they learn that their plans will not succeed, or begin to suspect that their present prosperity will be replaced by suffering or even death. Oedipus, whose courage and intelligence allowed him to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, supposes that he can also determine who murdered his predecessor, King Laius, only to discover that the culprit is himself. In other cases the principal characters think that there is no way for them to escape from their present predicament but suddenly discover that there is a solution, often provided by the intervention of a god, as in the case of Helen and Menelaus in Euripides’ Helen, in which Helen’s brothers, the twin gods Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux), arrive just in time to guarantee them a safe voyage from Egypt to Sparta. Gods appear suddenly at the ends of some dramas to explain what the characters could not know about the past or the future. Such information can also be conveyed by a seer who can interpret the omens, dramas, and other signs that the gods have sent to him, a role often played in dramas set in Thebes by Tiresias, the seer who was said to have lived through seven generations of men.
Even when the gods choose not to send direct signals, there are clear indications that they are present, although the characters often do not seem to be aware of them. Perf
ect timing is often a sign of divine intervention. In Euripides’ Medea, for example, Aegeus, the king of Athens, shows up and offers Medea a place of refuge, just when she most needs it. The heroes and heroines of the dramas in which the gods do not intervene are in particular need of compassion, like Hecuba in the Trojan Women, since no one comes to tell her whether she will be able to find any release from her suffering in the future.
In surviving dramas, the gods who intervene are almost always the children of Zeus, most often his daughter Athena, but never Zeus himself. Invariably the gods arrive without warning, adding to the excitement. But with the possible exception of Athena, as characters, the gods seem cold and distant. When they come to help or to punish, their interactions with mortals are brief, even when the people they have come to advise are close relatives, like Helen, or special friends, like Hippolytus—in Euripides’ drama, the goddess Artemis speaks to him as he is dying but leaves in time not to be polluted by his actual death. In this way the dramatists remind the audience that mortals cannot expect much sympathy from the gods, or anything more than an intermittent and evanescent happiness. Only a few extraordinary individuals (who also happen to be children of gods, such as Heracles, a son of Zeus) could attain immortality, and then only after extraordinary loss and hardship. The best that anyone else can expect is some kind of lasting memorial, some remembrance in the form of ritual and song.
But the brief interactions between gods and mortals portrayed in Greek drama are always set in the remote past. In the fifth century, few Athenians would have supposed that a god had any reason to take the kind of direct interest in their lives that he or she showed for the royal families of the past, many of whom were the gods’ close relatives. Nonetheless, by setting the dramas in the past, the dramatists could allow their audiences to step briefly outside themselves and away from the particular problems of their own lives. That remoteness has the advantage of making the dramas relevant to any time or place, including the times and places that we live in now.
Not only do the settings of the dramas seem unfamiliar and even strange; in the dramas, women in the royal families are often the central figures in the action, displaying great heroism and speaking eloquently about political and moral issues. When they are wronged (like Medea or Electra), the dramatists showed how these women could find ways to punish their enemies, or devise clever plots to escape from them, like Helen in the Euripides drama that is named for her. They could display the greatest courage, like Alcestis, who volunteers to die so her husband can live, or like Hecuba and Andromache, who manage to endure the loss of all their loved ones. Women’s prominence and eloquence onstage contrast notably with the more limited roles played in real life by women in Athens, who could not own property, had no training in rhetoric, and played no role in public life. We do not even know whether they were allowed to watch the performances of the dramas in the Theater of Dionysus.
The conventions of Greek drama also helped to emphasize the distance between the action onstage and the daily existence of the members of the audience. The architecture of the theater, with its circular orchestra, separated the actors and chorus from the spectators. No one could see the actors’ faces because they wore masks. Heavy costumes and specially elevated shoes kept the actors from moving easily around the stage. All the roles in any drama were played by two or three male actors, who indicated who they were by changing masks that marked them as young or old, male or female. Since there were no program notes, all the characters (including the Chorus) needed to identify themselves or be identified when they first came onstage. Violent action never took place in view of the audience. Instead, the audience learned of such events from messengers who described in animated detail what had happened offstage. The static nature of this type of presentation meant that the actors needed to generate excitement by words and gestures.
In many dramas the action occurs in one place on a single day; in others, there are longer lapses of time, which are not precisely indicated. The actors stood on a raised platform in front of the stage building, the skēnē, which is where the modern word “scene” comes from. The skēnē represented a palace or other building, with doors that could open and reveal what was inside. By the end of the fifth century B.C. a rotating device known as the ekkyklēma made quick scene changes possible (see appendix B). The actors who played the role of a god were placed on a different plane of action, out of reach of mortals. They were brought into view by a crane, which the Athenians simply called a device (mēchanē), that lifted them to the top of the stage building. The Latin term for such sudden and miraculous appearances of gods was deus ex machina, “the god from the device.”
In addition to the actors, all dramas had a Chorus that sang, danced, observed the plight of the characters, and from time to time conversed with them. These choruses, composed of male actors, always represented a group of people who were not related by blood to the principal characters and who therefore could comment on their actions with some objectivity. They were also members of a group that did not have the power to intervene in the action, such as old men or women, and who sometimes shared the fortune, good or bad, of the principal characters in the play. Their role was to reflect, observe, advise, or sympathize, with whatever authority their assigned character might be thought to possess. They sang songs that reflected on the action of the drama, comparing it to other myths or events in the past. In Aeschylus’ day the Chorus had twelve members; Sophocles apparently increased the number to fifteen (we do not know why or to what effect).
Dialogue and action took place between the choral songs, in long intervals known as episōdia, “additions,” which were the precursors of what we now call scenes. The idea of alternation between the Chorus and a speaker may originally have come from ritual songs in honor of Dionysus known as dithyrambs, in which a soloist and a chorus would sing in alternate stanzas. The important roles assigned to individual speakers in drama may have been inspired by a long-standing tradition in Athenian politics in which speakers assumed roles to arouse the interest and support of their audience. Some of Solon’s famous speeches were written in iambic verse, which was the principal metrical pattern used in speeches and dialogue in the episodes between choral songs.
The diction of the dramas was formal, almost never colloquial, and always in verse. Both actors and Chorus delivered their lines to the accompaniment of an aulos (pipe). Most of the dialogue and speeches were composed of three double iambic feet (indicated by the notation ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ , where the ˘ denotes a metrically short syllable and ¯ a long one, with the long syllables held twice as long as the shorts). When heightened intensity was required, both actors and Chorus could speak in anapests (˘ ˘ ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯) or in a longer line of four double trochaic feet ( ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ). Along with the dactylic ( ¯ ˘ ˘ ) hexameter used in Greek epic poetry, these metrical patterns were later used for poems in Latin. Eventually the same patterns were adapted for use in European languages, but instead with stress on what originally had been the long syllables. Roughly speaking, the iambic meters of Greek verse became the ancestors of the iambic pentameter familiar to us from Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays.
But European poets never succeeded in imitating the metrical patterns of the choral songs in the Greek. These songs were composed in more complex metrical patterns and were set out in stanzas that followed a repeating pattern; hence the terms strophē (“turn”) and antistrophē (“counterturn”), denoting two metrically identical stanzas. Sometimes the pairs of strophe and antistrophe were followed by a closing third stanza or epode (epōidos) in a related metrical pattern. On occasion the actors might also sing, either solo or in conjunction with the Chorus. Most unfortunately, only one specimen of the music that accompanied choral song has come down to us, a few lines from a choral song in Euripides’ Orestes (a play not included in this volume). This fragment, despite its brevity, indicates that the music would have heightened the emotional effect of the mournful words that it accompanied. It is written in syncop
ated iambics called “slanting” (dochmiac), which were often used to express sorrow.
Even without the music we can recognize some significant rhythmic patterns in other dramas. The old men who form the Chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon begin their long narrative about the sacrifice of Iphigenia with several lines in dactylic ( ¯ ˘ ˘ ) hexameter, the meter of the Iliad and other epic poems. Their references to vengeance are often expressed in an iambic meter in which two short syllables replace one long syllable ( ˘ ˘ ˘ ¯ instead of ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ), a distinctive metrical pattern that surfaces again in the last play of the trilogy, the Eumenides, in the terrifying song of the Erinyes who have come to punish Orestes for killing his mother, Clytemnestra. The metrical pattern behind the phrase ite Bakchai (“come, Bacchants,” ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ ) is frequently repeated in the choral songs of Euripides’ exciting drama the Bacchae.
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In fifth-century Athens, three poets were chosen to compete against one another each year at the City Dionysia; we do not know on what grounds or by whom the selection was made. Each of the three who were chosen presented a series of three tragedies, followed by a satyr play, a lighter entertainment that usually featured a chorus of half-man, half-goat followers of Dionysus. The prizes seem to have been awarded on the basis of the best production rather than the best script. As far as we know, Aeschylus was the only playwright to base the plots of his three tragedies on the same myth; the one surviving example of such a connected trilogy is Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The first drama in the trilogy, the Agamemnon, tells the story of Agamemnon’s return and his murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus; the second drama, Libation Bearers, depicts Orestes’ revenge against his father’s murderers; the third drama, Eumenides, describes Orestes’ acquittal in Athens for the murder of his mother. Dramas by Sophocles and Euripides, however, all seem to have been included in sets of three in which each drama was based on a different myth. We have no way of knowing if there were other connections—thematic or tonal, for example—among the different dramas in these sets of three, because we now have only one complete play from any of them.
The Greek Plays Page 2
