What we learn from Greek tragedy

Tragedy was an art form which the city valued. However, we don’t know if women were allowed to watch it – this was a patriarchal society. Unfortunately, slaves were a part of that society, too, and we don’t think that they were allowed to watch it. But this city cared about its male citizens, even the lowest class, in a way that not even 19th century Victorian England did.

If you couldn’t afford a seat, the city let you in free by giving you a token, so the State certainly valued having its citizens watch tragedy. Everybody loved watching it. They said it was open air; people sat high up on these stone seats and needed to bring a cushion. It was a competition, and the audience watched for three days. At the end of the third day, there was comedy, as a form of relaxation from the three days of tragedy. Each tragic poet produced three plays, a trilogy, and then a little satire play, which commented on it. Everything was in poetry, but it was in poetry of different kinds.

The chorus represented ourselves; they were the audience. The choral odes were very intricate musical choral songs, usually in verses. One verse would be in a particular rhythm, and then another verse would exactly mirror those syllables, those rhythms. The chorus would probably dance while they sang and do various movements, first on one side, and then on the other, as the theatre was in a circle. They would mirror their movements on each side, so the gestures would follow the syllables of the words.

Choral art was very intricate and something which everybody felt part of. The chorus might have wonderful images, but they might also say important things like that it’s right to honour your father – maxims which everybody would agree with. Yet, at the same time, they might tell long-ago myths of people who exemplified these maxims. This was sung in a different dialect from the dialect – the iambic line – in which the characters argued.

Euripides writes The Trojan Women around 416 BCE, during a time when Athens was at war and doing things – enslaving other populations, Greek populations – which it should not be doing. A lot of people in Athens were very upset about this. Euripides produces a version of the sack of Troy from the point of view of the victims.

The Trojan Women is an extraordinary and heartfelt examination of the damage that war does. In this play, there is an argument between Hecuba – the wife of the slain Trojan king, who has seen all her sons killed, her daughters sold into slavery and is now enslaved herself – and Helen, the Greek queen, who is the cause of the Trojan War because she ran away with Hecuba’s son Paris. This is an incredible way of teasing out the difference between divine responsibility for human harm and human responsibility for your own destructive actions.

Helen says: Look, it wasn’t my fault. Aphrodite, goddess of sex and love, made me go off with your son to Troy. Hecuba replies: Don’t blame the Cyprian goddess for your own fault. My son was outstanding in his beauty. Your mind seeing him was made into the Cyprian goddess.

Hecuba is really saying that a part of our mind becomes a god, and you’re using the god for your own excuse. In this way, Euripides is fantastically subtle in portraying the difference between gods and human beings.

Aristotle, the first great literary critic, lived a century after the great tragedians, in the 4th century BCE. In his poetics, he says that when we watch tragedy, we feel catharsis, which is both a religious and a medical metaphor – it comes from the word “to purify”. We feel purified. We feel cleansed. Why? Because we feel both pity and fear.

For example, look at Sophocles’ play Ajax. Ajax thought he could fight the Trojans on his own without asking for Athena’s help, so she makes him mad for insulting her. Madness is one of the most important experiences in tragedy, which tragedy investigates as the cause of harm. Ajax is also very jealous of Odysseus, another Greek hero, and the one who really represents intellect and wiliness rather than beauty and brawn, which is Ajax. The two have contested each other for the armour of Achilles, and Odysseus has been awarded it.

Ajax is very jealous. He thinks he’s the best, and he wants to murder Odysseus. Athena makes him mad, and instead of murdering Odysseus, Ajax cuts the throat of a lot of cattle. We see him surrounded by blood and gore. In his madness, he thinks he’s been magnificent in killing other people and is going to torture his enemy.

Athena then brings Odysseus and says: Look, Odysseus. See him there in his madness. Odysseus looks at Ajax, aghast. Although he is the man who Ajax is planning to kill and torture, he says: I pity him, although he is my enemy and he is hostile to me. For, looking at him, I see myself as well. I see we are, all we people who live, just images, and an empty shadow.