8/1/07 - Classical Literature - Introduction to Classical Literature 1B

What is Greek tragedy?

Structurally, Greek tragedy begins happily and ends badly. Greek comedy is vice versa: it begins badly and ends happily.

According to Aristotle, a tragedy must arouse the tragic emotions of pity and fear. Charles Batteux said that tragedy had to achieve sensibility or purification. However, some tragedies have happy endings and do not fulfil the qualities that are required by Aristotle and Batteux.

Later, tragedies were perceived as plays which reflected on the nature of the human condition. The Spanish philosopher Unamuno wrote his Tragic Sense of Life in the twentieth century.

For Greeks, a tragedy was a play written for the Athenian theatre. The plays were written to be performed, not to be read. The performances were open air performances during daylight. The audience could reach 15,000 people. The stage was called an orchestra. At the back of the stage was a skênê. This was a small building which the actors used to dress, yet it was also used as a backdrop, to represent the place in which the play was set. The skênê had two entrances for the actors to enter and exit the orchestra.

There were only two or three actors in each play: at first only two actors were used but this number soon increased to three. There was also a chorus, of 12 or 15 people, and they sang and danced. Tragic poets had the varied job of composing the music and the choreography as well as writing the play. However, the music and choreography of the dramas are lost to us. Half of the tragedy would be performed by the chorus and half by the actors.

Tragedies were performed on a particular day in the Greek calendar, during the festival of Dionysus (or Great Dionysia), which fell at the end of March. Dionysus was the god of wine, sex, literature, music and ritual madness. He was renowned for ringing both happiness and destruction. In myth, Dionysus would make someone very drunk and then drive them to murder and suicide. There were several other festivals in the Greek calendar: Lenaia Festival, Great Dionysia, Anthesteria and Rural Dionysia. The former two were the occasions when tragedies were performed.

For poets, staging the first tragedy of the festival was the winner's prize of a competition between many poets. A group of Greek officials (jury) decided which poets could hold their performances, and in which order. Such performances were the only performances of the year, and they were held for the entire community. The jury had rules about what the tragedies had to entail, and consequently they were sponsored by the jury. Tragedies were based on heroic myth. It is predicted that 534 BC was the year of the first tragedic performance, but the first known year that we have found from evidence is in 472 BC, which was Aeschylus' Persians.