Greek Tragedy

Scope: This lecture pursues the idea that the three great Athenian tragic dramatistsAeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripidesreflect the developing intellectual life of the city in their
plays, particularly regarding the nature of the gods and their relationship with humanity.
Aeschyluss Oresteia concerns a series of difficult choices which are resolved in the
Athenian institution of trial-by-jury and a belief that Zeus leads humanity through
suffering into wisdom. For Sophocles, in Antigone, the gods are part of the furniture of
the universe, but they have their own concerns and cannot be counted on to create or
validate human morality. Euripidess Medea suggests that the Greek gods are merely the
forces of nature; the most uncontrollable of human passions anthropomorphized into
deities. Medea, whose overwhelming desire for revenge in the play includes killing her
own children, demonstrates this idea by becoming a deity at plays end.

Outline
I. The origins of Greek theater are treated in other Teaching Company courses such as Greek
Tragedy, Masterpieces of Ancient Greek Literature, and Age of Pericles.
A. By the 5th century B.C.E. there is a fully developed theater in Athens featuring the two
kinds of plays that would remain standard in Western drama until the time of Ibsen:
comedy and tragedy.
B. We will deal in this lecture only with tragedy. Tragedy is a serious drama in verse that
deals with the lives of characters of significance and usually carries a protagonist from
happiness to unhappiness.
C. Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living; tragedy was one of the ways
the Greeks examined their lives, especially in terms of their understanding of the
relationship between humans and the gods.
II. Aeschylus (c. 524456 B.C.E.) is the most religious and patriotic of the three great tragedians,
and also the greatest poet.
A. His trilogy, Oresteia, is based on the myth of the House of Atreus and goes back to events
just after the Trojan War. It reinterprets old stories in order to illuminate contemporary
life.
1. The trilogy is organized around a series of difficult choices.
2. In Agamemnon, the first play, we are reminded of Agamemnons dilemma of 10 years
earlier: being forced to choose between his family and his army, either one of which
carries both human and divine sanctions and either of which will doom him.
3. In The Libation Bearers, the second play, Agamemnons son Orestes is forced to
choose between avenging his father by killing his mother or leaving his fathers
murder unavengedagain, a choice with terrible sanctions either way.
4. In Eumenides, the third play, Orestes is acquitted for killing his mother after a trial
before a jury of Orestess peers, arbitrated by Athena.
5. In Eumenides, the difficult choice is resolved by the institution of trial-by-jury, in
which the law of vendetta is replaced by a court of law and a system of communal
justice.
6. Aeschylus sees this as evidence of the way Zeus leads humans through suffering into
truthmaking him the most religious and patriotic of the three playwrights.
III. Sophocles (c. 496406 B.C.E.) played an important part in Athenian public life, but in his
plays he expressed more skepticism than Aeschylus regarding the participation of the gods in
human life and their concern for humans or human morality.
A. He never doubts the existence of the gods, but he finds no support from them for human
morality or conduct, which humans always have to create for themselves.
1. In Antigone the protagonist is forced to make another difficult choice: loyalty to the
state or loyalty to her family. Again, there are sanctions on both sides of the choice.
2. She chooses her family by burying a brother whom King Creon had commanded
should lie unburied. She is caught, imprisoned, and anticipates starving slowly to
death by committing suicide.
3. The gods are remarkably silent until too late, and the king suffers punishment as a
result of his own actions, not divine interference. The gods do not endorse or validate
human morality.
B. Moses Hadas suggests that for Sophocles the spheres of the gods and humans are separate,
and that humans must create their own moral codes without expecting divine assistance.
IV. Euripides (c. 480406 B.C.E.) was the most private of the three playwrights, the most
modern, and the most skeptical of the existence of the gods as they were conceived in ancient
Greece.
A. He was influenced by the Sophists, who argued that mannot the gods, nature, or
universeis the measure of all things, and thereby introduced a radical subjectivity
into Greek thought. Characters like the Chorus in Hippolytus and Talthybius in Hecuba
echo this Sophist position.
B. Medea is a play made out of this kind of skepticism. A tailpiece to the story of Jason and
the Argonauts, it is drawn from Greek myth and set a generation before the Trojan War.
1. The play attacks traditional Greek attitudes about foreigners and women, echoed in the
relationship between Medea and Jason.
2. The play makes Medea into a masculine tragic hero who is given the same kind of
treatment that Achilles or Hector received in earlier Greek literature.
3. The play suggests that the gods are simply personifications of the most powerful forces
in nature and the most powerful human passions.
4. In this play Medea becomes a deity and is whisked away in a reverse deus ex machina
(usually a device used to bring a god onto the Greek stage to solve some otherwise
insoluble problem but here used to carry Medea off the stage).
5. Medea is deified for killing her own children, the king of Corinth, and his daughter,
Jasons betrotheda stunning idea in Athens in its time.
C. Where Aeschylus sees the gods participating in human life and working toward a greater
good, and Sophocles sees them as simply part of the furniture of the universe whose
involvement in human life is minimal, Euripides sees them as anthropomorphic
projections of our own uncontrollable lusts.
1. In this way, tragedy in Athens Golden Age was part of the examined liferaising
questions and debating current issues in the intellectual life of the city.
2. These are all intellectual positions that will recur in the Western world beginning with
the Renaissance.
Essential Reading:
Aeschylus, The Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, Eumenides), Robert Fagles, trans.
Euripides, Mdeia. Euripides: The Complete Plays, Carl R. Mueller, trans.
Sophocles, Antigone.
Supplementary Reading:
Moses Hadas, Introduction to Classical Drama.