Texts of the plays and images on painted pottery indicate the use of movable props, such as the urn holding Orestes’ “ashes” in Sophocles’ Electra or Hector’s shield, which serves as Astyanax’ makeshift casket in the Trojan Women. Such props often condense complex verbal meanings and potent emotions in a single visual image. Cassandra enters carrying a marriage torch in the Trojan Women: this image indicates the baleful unity of Paris’ birth and marriage to Helen, Cassandra’s rape and “vengeance,” and the razing of Troy that concludes the play.
Dyed and decorated fabrics were likewise essential components of tragic spectacle. Scenes of robing and disrobing—such as Cassandra’s contemptuous removal and trampling of her mantic costume in the Trojan Women or Dionysus’ ritual dressing of Pentheus as a maenad prior to his diasparagmos (being torn limb from limb) in the Bacchae—constitute major moments in the plays. Dramatic poets sought to make emotion visible. The Persians repeats the gesture of tearing linen robes in sorrow and shame multiple times in song and narrative before enacting it at the end of the play in the onstage lament between Xerxes and the Chorus. In the Oresteia, Agamemnon’s trampling of crimson-dyed tapestries reenacts before the audience the crimes he committed at Aulis and Troy. The precious ooze that dyes the fabrics suggests the blood that stains Agamemnon’s hands, sullies his wealth, and pollutes his house; the fine fabrics resemble the nets of delusion and divine punishment that bind mortals in disaster. Agamemnon’s royal mantle, which Clytemnestra uses to render him powerless before the kill, extends the imagery. Orestes reveals the mantle to the Sun after he avenges Agamemnon, addressing it as his father and decrying it as an instrument of vicious criminality.
Finally, tragedies and satyr plays were not the only spectacles audiences watched in the Theater of Dionysus. Immediately before tragedies were performed in the theater, the city of Athens staged a pageant of its wealth, power, and military resolve. Athens exacted monetary tribute from numerous subject city-states, and functionaries carried this tribute, which was due at the time of festival, into the orchestra of the theater for the audience to view with awe. The names of benefactors of Athens were read aloud, and they were presented with golden crowns as a token of the city’s gratitude and to encourage further contributions to the city. Children whose fathers died in war (Athens was at war continuously during the period in which the tragedies in this volume were presented) were raised by the state. Upon coming of age, they were presented with an infantry soldier’s arms and armor in the Theater of Dionysus before the performance of tragedies. The city thus made a spectacle of its generosity while also displaying the determination of the sons of the war dead to avenge their fathers. It is well worth contemplating the dissonance between individual tragedies, which typically stage the moral and religious liabilities of wealth, power, and multigenerational vengeance, and the pre-play ceremonies, which extravagantly display Athens’ riches, power, and ambition.
APPENDIX C
PLATO AND TRAGEDY
Joshua Billings
Plato grew up in an Athens in which public performances of tragedy were among the most important forms of collective culture. Born around 425, he could have been in the audience for the late masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides. The fact of poetry’s central role in the life of the city is essential to understanding Plato’s critique of poetry in general and tragedy in particular. For Plato was operating not with conceptions of “high art” or aesthetic autonomy, but with a view of poetry as a civic institution with a role to play in the formation of citizens. The writings of poets formed a central part of Athenian education, and performing in a chorus was one of the important ways that young men were socialized into their role as citizens. Wisdom was often sought in poetry, and dramatists were regarded as teachers of the populace. Against this traditional reverence for poets and centrality of poetry to Athenian life, Plato responds with a biting critique of tragedy.
The late fifth century was a time of intellectual upheaval, as new currents of thoughts associated with the “sophists” (teachers of philosophy and rhetoric) were making themselves felt in Athenian culture and casting doubt on received ideas of wisdom and morality. Among these intellectuals was Socrates, who was well known for his eccentric investigations of nature and virtue as well as for his somewhat suspect friendliness toward the young men of the city. Plato became one of a group of followers of Socrates—many of them, like Plato, from aristocratic families. There is a story—probably apocryphal—that in his youth, Plato aspired to be a tragedian, but after hearing Socrates speak, he burned his tragedies and turned himself wholly to philosophy.
The legend of Plato’s turn from tragedian to philosopher illustrates the proximity and distance between literature and philosophy in Plato’s writing. Plato consistently sees poetry as the antagonist of philosophy, a rival genre that philosophy must interrogate, critique, and ultimately subsume. Though there are many passages in the Platonic corpus that invoke tragedy or use it as a metaphor, the central question surrounding the genre is whether a well-ruled city should admit performances of tragedy. The Republic contains the most sustained critique of tragedy, staged as a dialogue between Socrates a small group of interlocutors. In two separate discussions, Socrates addresses the value of poetry for the city and for the individual. Though we should be wary of equating the views expressed by the character Socrates with Plato’s own (and likewise of assuming that Plato held a single view throughout his career), the Republic at least makes a case for a sharp condemnation of poetry in general and of tragedy most of all.
Beginning in books II and III of the Republic, in which Socrates addresses the role of poetry in education, and continuing in book X, in which he discusses the value of poetry to the city in general, the critique of tragedy follows two broad strands: an ethical critique, which considers the effect of tragic performance first on the performer (in the earlier books) and then on the spectator (in book X); and a metaphysical critique, which investigates the way that tragic poetry, as an imitation of reality (mimēsis), relates to ultimate truths. Mimēsis could be translated “imitation” or “representation,” and it seems to describe the ways that poetry creates an appearance of reality without actually being the reality it represents. At the most basic level, Plato fears that we will be misled by appearances to lose sight of reality, and that this will make us worse citizens and philosophers.
Books II and III lay the groundwork for the ethical critique of tragedy. Socrates is considering how the young should be educated in an ideal city, and particularly, what kinds of stories they should hear as children. He suggests that the young are particularly impressionable and can easily be led astray by the kinds of stories they are exposed to (a concern we can recognize even today). The myths of the Greeks regularly portrayed gods and heroes acting in morally reprehensible ways, and Socrates fears that such stories perpetuate an impious and false view of divinity (an unusual and even radical view, given that most Greeks of this time seem to have considered the gods subject to human shortcomings). Even more deleterious seems to be the way that poetry depicts humans—even largely admirable ones—as acting and faring in ways contrary to reason. When we view a hero lamenting, or a bad man prospering, we are led to believe that the world is such that people fail to live up to the moral ideals that the Republic outlines. The poetic depiction of gods and humans, Socrates says, should present positive models for emulation, so that the young who witness them gain a sense of the good and just. This entails rejecting the majority (though not all) of serious poetry for the education of the young, because “poets and prose-writers speak badly about the most important matters concerning human beings” (392a).
This specific charge against mimēsis—that it confuses proper ethical understanding—is developed, in book X, into the even more general and damning metaphysical claim that all artistic mimēsis presents a false and misleading image of true reality. Socrates sets up a three-tiered hierarchy beginning with “forms” (perfect and immaterial templates for every
thing that exists), below that some material copy of the form, and at the bottom an artistic imitation of the material. A bed, for example, exists first and most fully as a form in the mind of the carpenter, then, less perfectly, as an actual bed made by the carpenter, and then, still less adequately, in a pictorial representation of a bed. At each level, something is lost from the previous one, to the point that the work of art corresponds to the fullest reality in only a vague and derivative sense. Applying this logic from the visual arts to poetry reveals that, insofar as it strives to imitate excellence, poetry—unlike philosophy, it is implied—cannot imitate the form of the good, but only its earthly manifestations. All poets are therefore merely “imitators of images of excellence” (600e), and their products cannot be considered philosophically serious. On this point, Aristotle will most strongly—if implicitly—disagree with Plato and elaborate a theory of mimēsis that does not rely on such hierarchies.
The famous charge that mimēsis is “third from the king and the truth” (597e) relates to all artistic representation, and it condemns aesthetic mimēsis generally as a faulty path to knowledge. But there is a more specific problem with tragedy, which has to do with the way that it speaks to our baser impulses (returning to the ethical strand of argument). Socrates finds that tragedy creates a conflict between reason, which urges us to restrain our emotions, and our natural desire to express our feelings. While in everyday life, we control the emotional parts of our soul with reason, the stories depicted in tragedy allow and even encourage these emotions to gain the upper hand, and thus they make us more prone to them in everyday life. The imitative poet, then, “arouses, nourishes, and makes the [inferior] part of the soul stronger, and so destroys the rational part” (605b).
Socrates’ final argument, the “greatest charge” against tragedy, goes a step further, by considering how and why tragedy is so compelling. It is, he finds, precisely because tragedy addresses these lower parts of our soul that we enjoy it so much. The pleasure of tragedy is an inherently irrational one, and so any exposure to tragedy will have a corrupting influence, even on the most rational people. Tragic poetry, by depicting intense emotional experience, unbalances our soul, giving way to pleasurable but ultimately destructive emotional responses. We can become so caught up in the enjoyment of tragedy that we fail to evaluate it rationally. If we allow it into our city, “pleasure and sorrow will rule in the city instead of law and reason” (607a). Tragedy threatens the effort of the Republic as a whole to construct a city on the basis of reason, for it places at the center of civic life an experience that is fundamentally contrary to rational thought. Socrates’ attack is directed against the entire Athenian way of life, typefied by the centrality it grants to poetry. In the well-ordered city, philosophy must replace poetry as the source of wisdom and education.
Plato never again addresses tragedy at such length, but the genre’s role as an antagonist of philosophy remains potent in his later writings. In the late dialogue Laws, an Athenian imagines addressing tragedians as a city legislator: “Most excellent of strangers, we are ourselves to the best of our ability the poets of the finest and most excellent tragedy. For our entire constitution has been set up as an imitation [mimēsis] of the finest and most excellent life, which we say at any rate is actually the truest tragedy” (817b). The passage points to an inevitable competition between the legislator and the tragic poet, both of whom produce mimēseis, tragedians in their plays and legislators in their constitutions. Both aim at the same goal—imitating “the finest and most excellent life”—but only a properly ordered city is capable of succeeding. “The truest tragedy” is not the one played onstage, but the one lived every day by citizens guided by philosophy.
It is, then, no accident that Plato’s dialogues themselves have a dramatic form: they aspire to replace one imitation of life with another. There is an irony to Plato’s project of displacing the false tragedies that he saw onstage with the “true tragedy” of civic order. Plato aims for a complete reorientation of the sources of civic value and prestige from the empty appearances of poetry to the secure truths of philosophy—but he sees both, at least metaphorically, as forms of tragedy. In turning to philosophy, Plato could burn his tragedies without ceasing to be a tragedian.
APPENDIX D
ARISTOTLE’S POETICS AND GREEK TRAGEDY
Gregory Hays
A view of Greek tragedy still encountered with some frequency runs something like this: Greek tragedies center on a single protagonist—the “tragic hero.” While generally noble and admirable, this person has a tragic flaw that brings about his or her destruction. Often the flaw in question is excessive pride, which the Greeks called hybris. The play depicts the hero’s downfall, which plays out over the course of a single day and in a single location. At intervals a Chorus of observers sing and dance and provide commentary expressing the playwright’s view of events. The audience members who witness the play feel various emotions, predominantly pity and fear, but they emerge from the experience with a sense of moral uplift.
This farrago of half-truths and misunderstandings has proved remarkably tenacious; generations of students have dutifully debated whether Creon or Antigone is the real hero of Sophocles’ play or tried to identify Medea’s tragic flaw. Whether they or their teachers realized it, many of this distorted picture’s components can be traced back to a treatise by Aristotle known as the Poetics, an examination of the Homeric epics, some related works, and especially tragedy. Apart from the surviving plays themselves (and perhaps the comedies of Aristophanes), no ancient source about tragedy is more valuable. Yet none is more frustrating and potentially misleading.
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Aristotle was born in 384 B.C., at Stagira, on the north rim of the Aegean. His father was a doctor with connections to the Macedonian court—both facts potentially relevant to the philosopher’s later career. At the age of seventeen he entered Plato’s scholarly community at Athens, the Academy. Departing after Plato’s death in 348 or 347, he investigated marine biology in Asia Minor and Lesbos and was employed, famously but briefly, as tutor to the son of King Philip II of Macedon, the future Alexander the Great. Returning to Athens in 335, he founded his own school, the Lyceum. Following Alexander’s death in 323, Athens became uncomfortable for those with Macedonian connections, and Aristotle thought it safest to leave the city. He died the following year.
The Poetics is often presented as a central monument of ancient literary criticism, alongside Horace’s Ars Poetica and the treatise On the Sublime that goes under the name of “Longinus.” But its importance is very much a product of the late middle ages and Renaissance. For much of antiquity, there is little evidence that the work was read by much of anybody. It did continue to be studied by philosophical commentators in the late Roman empire; like other Aristotelian works it was translated into Syriac, and from Syriac into Arabic. By this point, the second book, on comedy, appears to have become detached (the imagined survival of a single copy provides a plot point in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose but has no basis in reality). The Arabic translation and the twelfth-century commentary on it by the great Islamic scholar Averroes (Ibn Rushd) were translated into Latin in the thirteenth century; a slightly later but less widely read version was made from the original Greek. Once it was available in Latin, however, its survival and influence were assured. In the late middle ages Aristotle was a superstar, often cited simply as “the Philosopher” (just as we speak of Shakespeare as “the Bard”). The work’s impact only grew after the invention of printing, notably through an influential commentary by the Italian poetic theorist Lodovico Castelvetro (c.1505–1571). Profoundly influential on European drama, the Poetics also played a crucial role in the development of opera.
It is important to emphasize what the Poetics is not. As we have seen, Aristotle was not a contemporary of the great tragedians. When he arrived at the Academy, Euripides had been dead for forty years. Obviously the great fifth-century tragedians had not read the Poetics; a
nd their observable practice is often at variance with Aristotle’s prescriptions. Nor does Aristotle offer us a reliable guide to how fifth-century Athenians (let alone “the Greeks” in general) interpreted or responded to the plays. He represents only himself: an intelligent and enthusiastic reader, roughly as distant in time from the Oresteia as modern students are from Tosca or The Cherry Orchard.
The Poetics provides some material (though not as much as we would like) on the early history and development of tragedy. Some comments are suggestive but difficult to assess. Nietzsche was famously inspired by the remark that tragedy grew out of an earlier type of performance called the dithyramb, a genre of which we know little other than it appears to have had to do with Dionysiac celebrations. Other information is interesting and perhaps accurate: that it was Aeschylus who introduced a second actor, for example, or that Sophocles invented stage scenery. Without Aristotle we would not know that Agathon’s Antheus was not based on a preexisting myth but had an entirely invented plot. The Poetics also gives us a sense of how partial our picture of tragedy is. Familiar plays—Oedipus the King, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Medea—sit side by side with offhand references to works that are now just names to us: “Dicaeogenes’s Cyprians, where the character wept at the painting” or “the use of the boat in the Tyro.” Yet it is clear that the survival of the “big three” tragedians is not accidental; Sophocles and Euripides between them make up the majority of the examples, though many are from plays now lost.
If the Poetics preserves useful information, it has also generated much confusion. Some of this stems from the work’s nature and origins. Aristotle left behind a large number of polished literary works, many in the dialogue form pioneered by Plato; none of these so-called “exoteric” works have survived. The treatises we know today as Aristotle’s are more informal texts, which initially circulated only among his followers. Some of these “esoteric” works look like lecture notes, made either by Aristotle himself or by students at his lectures. It follows that they do not necessarily represent Aristotle’s final thoughts, or even a clear snapshot of his thoughts at any single time. They are likely to contain loose ends, points inadequately thought through, or placeholder notes used as cues to oral expansion. Some passages appear to contradict others. Notoriously, Poetics chapter 13 tells us that the best tragedies are those, like Oedipus the King, that end in disaster, while in chapter 14, Aristotle appears to prefer narrow-escape plots like that of Iphigenia among the Taurians.
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