Athenian tragedy

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Greek tragedy is really Athenian tragedy, beginning around 500 BCE, around the same time as democracy. In fact, Greek tragedy and democracy are twin sisters in a way. A lot of people were writing tragedy at that time and performing in the centre of Athens, but we don’t have their manuscripts.

We do, however, have a few manuscripts from three great dramatists who span the 5th century BCE. The first is Aeschylus, and we have seven plays of his today. We also have seven plays of Sophocles, who was a little younger than Aeschylus and overlapped with him. Towards the end of the century, there’s Euripides, a bit younger than Sophocles, and we have about 17 manuscripts of his. You can see a gradual progression through these works. The plays by Aeschylus are wonderfully lofty, but also really political in the way that they challenge how the Athenians, his original audience, saw themselves in relation to their city and the world.

A valued form of art

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 Greek chorus

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.

Experiencing emotion

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The god of Greek tragedy was Dionysus. He was also the god of wine and drunkenness, as well as madness. Once you went into his precinct, which was the theatre, you were in a place where seeing otherwise, whether truly or illusory, was valued. It could be good, and it could be bad, but you had to go along with it.

From Homer onwards, the experience of emotion is an experience of something coming at you from the outside. In Homer, and also in tragedy, someone will often say: a god made that happen to me; a god put that bad idea into my mind. So, all the metaphors of emotion that we meet in tragedy are our emotion as the principal impulse, which is attacking you like a daimon. It is biting your entrails; it is flooding you; it is spearing you through. This is how emotion is experienced. It’s also a model for how the gods make you do things that are bad. But there is also another element in which we are responsible for our own actions, and this is what Greek tragedy is grappling with all the time.

The Trojan Women

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 and catharsis

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.

Pity and fear

The Death of Hippolytus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1860. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Odysseus is doing exactly what Aristotle says we do when we watch a tragedy: pity the hero. We pity Oedipus when he puts out his eyes and realises that what he’s done is kill his father and marry his mother. We pity Hippolytus when he lies bleeding on the stage. Yet, we also fear, because each of these figures is somebody who is human and in whose condition we, too, can share. That is why Aristotle says there is both pity and fear: pity, because you see these people as other and you feel sorry for them, but fear, because you know it can happen to you.

Discover more about

Greek tragedy

Padel, R. (1992). In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self. Princeton University Press.

Padel, R. (1974). “Imagery of the Elsewhere” Two Choral Odes of Euripides. The Classical Quarterly, 24(2), 227–241.

Padel, R. (1992). Making Space Speak. In J. J. Winkler, & F . I. Zeitlin (Eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? (pp. 336–365). Princeton University Press.

What we learn from Greek tragedy