• 508 Athens creates first democratic constitution, but it’s immediately threatened by two Persian invasions in 490 and 480 BCE (both successfully repelled).

• Great Greek theatre by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides takes place after victories against Persia, from 479-404 BCE. Much of it took place in the great peace between the battles with the Persians and the Peloponesian war (431-404)

• The great series called the Oresteia reflects the newly created Jury system

• Most surviving plays reflect the problems facing a democracy, especially those that threaten political stability, such as conflicts between overbearing rulers and popular opinion

Greek Tragedy

Drama is thought to come from the “dithyramb,” and ecstatic choral song celebrating Dionysus. It had a chorus of 50 men and 50 boys dancing and singing.

This celebration began with a community processional. The people carried grotesque masks, sacred phalluses, and an effigy of Dionysus dismembered.

Drama was part of a contest; each playwright submitted three tragedies and a satyr play

Thespis was the legendary “first actor” who stepped out of the chorus

Birth of Drama

Tragedy or “Goat Song”All men; women were played by men wearing wigs,

masks, and robesTraditionally had only two actors playing multiple parts

(projecting in a huge out-door ampitheater was a difficult skill that required talent and training). Sophocles is said to have added the third actor; Aeschylus copies this in Oresteia

Aristotle would later say a tragedy had a noble (or moral) hero who made a tragic error (hamartia or “miss the mark”—an archery term) and whose fall allowed a community catharsis (purging through pity and fear). He believed plays should observe the “unities” of time, place, and action, but playwrights did not routine observe these rules.

P.S. Hamartia does not mean “tragic flaw”!

Tragedies deal with community tensions and oppositionsTragedy adapts mythic stories to modern urban idealsApollo represents moderation and enlightenment; Athena

represents wisdom and masculine ideas; she “sides with the men”The tragic hero’s new self-knowledge is in tension with urban

moderation; the hero discovers the capacity to feelTragedy plunges us into the “chaotic forces in the human mind,”

exploring incest, matricide, infanticide, and other taboos. Wisdom comes from suffering.

Tragedies pit men against women, young against old, god against human, ancient against modern, powerful against disenfranchised

Dionysian ritual, assumed by the protagonist, means taking community suffering on oneself to save the community

Gods no longer speak directly, but through riddles

No narrative voiceChorus has limited

knowledge; reacts without narrating

Reasons for tragic reversals (peripeteia) are not clear

Protagonist has unusual capacity to feel deeply

The Tragic Universe

Oresteia first produced 458 BCE

Examines the causes of Agamemnon’s death at Clytemnestra’s hands and the moral dilemma of his son; sets story in modern democracy

Looks at dark family history of family

The House of Atreus

• Curse of the house of Atreus: Tantalus kills his own son and serves him to gods to test their omniscience

• Thyestes sleeps with Atreus’s wife; Atreus in turn kills Thyestes’ children and feeds them to him at a banquet

• Agamemnon sacrifices Clytemnestra’s favorite daughter to sail to Troy

• Cassandra is innocent victim of Agamemnon; war prize raided from temple

• Cassandra has the curse of not being belived (she rebuffed Apollo)

Thyestes rapes own daughter to have Aegisthus

In Agamemnon, the chorus is men too old to go to Troy. They feebly protest Clytemnestra’s attitude and look on passively

In Libation Bearers, the chorus are slave women hired by Clytemnestra to bring ritual offerings to Agamnon’s tomb to appease his ghost

In Eumenides, the chorus consists of Furies (Erinyes). They represent the old goddess cult (chthonic) and resist the new sky god (ouranic). They represent primitive ideas of justice, violence, and gender.

The Chorus in Oresteia