The Theatre of Ancient Greece I: Background, Plays and Playewrights

Politically and culturally, between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, “Greece” was a collection of loosely allied city-states, which included Athens, Sparta, Thebes and Corinth.  These states rivaled each other for dominance.  Athens in 508 BC became a democracy; not a perfect democracy, as the only “citizens” who could vote were male landholders, no women need apply, nor slaves. Still, compared to other systems of governance in those days, Athenian democracy was enlightened and forward-looking.  Athens was also the artistic center of Greece.  The most powerful city-state militarily was Sparta.  At the turn of the fifth century BC the Greek city-states were attacked by the formidable empire of Persia.  Sparta had to withdraw from the fight because of internal problems, forcing Athens to take military control. Athens defeated the mighty Persians on land and sea, and thereafter Athens became the major power in the Mediterranean, for nearly all of the fifth century BC.

In that century Athens entered a “Golden Age” reflected in its democratic government; its art and architecture; its philosophy – the tenets of humanism were most succinctly expressed by Protagoras, when he proudly proclaimed that “man is the measure of all things;” and of course in its theatre. 

The dithyramb competitions were the central event of a festival held each spring in Athens to honor Dionysos, called the City Dionysia, but in 534 BC an addition was made to this important festival.  In that year a contest for tragedy was instituted, and a man named Thespis won the contest.  While he is popularly known as the first actor, Thespis was the author of a tragedy, who

happened to perform in it as well.  When Thespis stepped out of the chorus line and “answered” the chorus, it was for theatre something like the invention of the wheel -- a fundamental step (“one small step for Thespis, one great leap for western theatre!”), because it involved a change from a narrated work to one which at least partially involved dialogue. 

   

Tragedies at the time were written only in Athens for this particular festival.  In fact, historian Jacques Barzun has pointed out that the term “Greek tragedy” is something of a misnomer.  There’s no evidence of this form in the city-states that made up the rest of Greece, argued Barzun, it should really be called Athenian tragedy.  Whatever we call it, very few tragedies remain of over 1,000 written in the fifth century BC. Of that number only 31 complete tragedies still exist -- the work, and by no means all the work, of three very important men in theatre history: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

   

Aeschylus (525-456 BC) is the oldest of the three.  Born in 523 BC he entered his first contest at the City Dionysia in 499.  He wrote at least 79 plays, but only 7 have survived.  The earliest, called The Persians, deals with the threat to Greece which Aeschylus himself helped stave off.  Everything else he wrote were pieces of (and in one case an entire) trilogies:  Seven Against Thebes (467), The Suppliants, Prometheus Bound (dates of the last two unknown, but probably after 468, and only one complete trilogy -- The Oresteia (458 BC), consisting of the plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides.

The Oresteia deals with several events that transpired in house of Atreus, the first of these the murder of Pelops by the founder of the family, his father Tantalus. He had Pelops killed, then cooked and served to the gods, but the gods brought Pelops back to life by the Pelops’ sons were Atreus and Thyestes – what a pair! Thyestes fell in love with Atreus’ wife and seduced her.  In revenge Atreus, true to the style of Tantalus, killed two of Thyestes’ sons, boiled them and served them as dinner to Thyestes. 

Atreus had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus.  The latter had the ill luck to be married to Helen, who was abducted by Paris, a

prince in the kingdom of Troy.  Agamemnon led an attack on Troy to avenge his brother’s disgrace, but the goddess Artemis stopped his army from sailing until Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia, his daughter.  Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra was understandably didpleased, and during Agamemnon’s 10-year absence during the Trojan War, she sent away their son Orestes, made life miserable for their daughter Electra, and took a lover named Aegisthus, who happened to be the youngest son of Thyestes. Aegisthus had escaped the boiling pot in which his uncle Atreus had cooked his brothers!

Agamemnon’s return from Troy marks the beginning of the first play of the trilogy. This is what is known in the structure of a play as a LATE point of attack, because much of the story has already taken place when the play begins. Agamemnon is immediately murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, who thus avenges his dead brothers and father. 

Electra hates Clytemnestra and Aegisthus for what they did to her father, and prays for the return of Orestes. He does so and kills both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra...his own mother. That’s the subject of the second play in the trilogy.

Because Orestes killed his mother, the nightmarish furies hound him relentlessly, until the god Apollo pleads the case of Orestes

before the goddess Athena, placing the blame for the matricide on himself. But Orestes takes responsibility and admits his guilt, then asks Athena to release him.  When she does, she replaces revenge as justice with a new law based upon judgment and mercy. The malicious furies are transformed into benevolent judges, or Eumenides (for whom this last play of the trilogy is named) and the curse on the house of Atreus at last is ended.

So! The Oresteia, one of our first dramas, consists of a blood feud, a father who sacrifices his daughter, a wife who kills her husband, and a son who kills his mother. Gruesome stuff, right? And then there’s the family proclivity to cook the murdered and to feed them to your enemies...yum! Not for the weak of heart. Similar gruesome, shocking story lines can be seen in most other Greek tragedies.

   

Aeschylus is probably the most conservative of the three tragedians. He was a real patriot, fought the battle of Marathon. The inscription on his tomb, which he apparently composed, reads:

“Here lies Aeschylus of Athens, son of Euphorion who died in fertile Gela, and whose prowess the longhaired Mede experienced on the battlefield of Marathon.” (quoted in Alois Nagler, A Sourcebook in Theatre History)

In his plays Aeschylus discussed huge philosophical  & religious themes with strength and majesty.  He created characters who are often larger than life, sometimes superhuman (like Prometheus, fire-bringer), whose identifying traits are few but very clear.  Aeschylus also introduced the second actor, which made for conflict between individuals; he trimmed the chorus from 50 to 12, and he demanded complex spectacle, both in the dances of his chorus and in scenery such as chariots pulled by horses.  He directed and acted in his plays.  He died when Athens was still in its heyday, at the age of 69 in 456 BC.  How?

“His death...was an accident. An eagle having seized a tortoise and not being master of his prey, dropped it against the rocks to crack the shell.  It struck the poet and killed him.  He had been warned of his fate by an oracle which declared, ‘A heavenly missile shall slay thee.’”  (Nagler, A Sourcebook in Theatre History)

Hmmmm…This may give you an idea of why we cannot necessarily trust biographers, especially anonymous ones, even if they come from the same period as the subject! 

Sophocles (c 496-406 BC) wrote more than 120 plays but only 7 survive.  Ajax (450-440 BC?), Antigone (c 441 BC), Oedipus Rex (c 430-425 BC) Electra (c 418-410 BC) Trachiniae (c 413 BC)

Philoctetes (409 BC), and Oedipus at Colonus (406 BC).  These plays were highly successful at the City Dionysia -- Sophocles won 24 contests, in fact his first victory, in 468 BC, as over Aeschylus, and he never placed lower than 2nd.  His introduction of a third actor multiplied the possibility for conflict.  He somewhat reduced the role of the chorus by focusing on individual, psychologically complex characters who are subjected to crises which lead to suffering and self-recognition.  In these plays Sophocles mastered dramatic structure; Aristotle named him as the greatest tragedian, using Oedipus Rex as the example for the perfect tragedy. Like Aeschylus, Sophocles was a prominent citizen, tremendously devoted to Athens.  It’s said that he had a hand in founding the first public hospital in the city.

Euripides (c 480-c 406 BC) was the youngest of the three.  Before he reached middle age he saw Athens become more corrupt and watched as it became embroiled in the civil wars with Sparta that would become its downfall.  Although he stayed out of Athenian politics directly, his leanings come clear in the themes of his plays (The Trojan Women was written in the year of the ill-fated Athenian expedition to Syracuse, and commented on a brutal attack on the inhabitants of the tiny Greek island of Melos). Bitter about what Athens had come to he died in self-exile. 18 of Euripides’ 90 plays still exist, including Medea (431 BC), Hippolytus (428 BC), Andromache (c. 424 BC), The Trojan Women (415 BC), Electra (c 412 BC), The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis (the last two in 406 BC, produced after his death).  In addition, the only complete satyr play to survive to the present is Euripides’ Cyclops.

Euripides rebelled not only against Athens, but also against the form of tragic writing made popular by his predecessors.  His plays are less tightly structured than are Sophocles’ and more episodic in nature. The subject matter is often difficult to deal with, for example in his attitude towards the gods, which was not always reverent. In The Bacchae, Dionysos, the very god praised in the

City Dionysia, exacts a brutal revenge on humans. Euripides frequently resorted to flying in a god to resolve the end of a play, a device called deus ex machina, often used disparagingly. He combined the comic and the tragic, and sometimes used melodramatic and sentimental devices. For these and other reasons, Euripides was not as popular in his lifetime as were Sophocles and Aeschylus (he won only four contests), but

Alan Cummings as Dionysos

Euripides was admired tremendously in later eras. Some scholars say that the reason so many of his plays remain is because he was very popular in the Hellenistic era. Euripides remains today “disturbingly modern” compared to his contemporaries, and that may be why we admire his plays.  A final touching note on Euripides – his style and his politics differed markedly from those of Sophocles.  The two men died in the same year, Sophocles after Euripides.  In the City Dionysia that year (406 BC) Sophocles dressed his tragic chorus to mourn the death of his difficult but talented fellow playwright.

Those are the writers, in a nutshell. I leave deep discussion of the plays to professors of dramatic literature. But a non-playwright had something to say about the plays, a man who had something to say on nearly every subject under the sun – the philosopher Aristotle

(384-322 BC). He lived a century after the heyday of Greek tragedy, and in his analysis of poetry, The Poetics, he made a careful study of the major types of poetry: epic and dramatic.  He read all the extant Greek tragedies and from his reading formed a definition of tragedy:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. - S.H. Butcher’s translation (1902)

   

Aristotle observed the structure of tragedy:

    1. most begin with a prologue

    2. then the chorus enters (parados)

    3. then a series of episodes (3 to 6) split by choral odes (stasima)

    4. and all conclude with the departure of characters and chorus

       (exodos)

He listed common elements of a tragedy, in order of importance:

    plot, character, thought, diction, music, spectacle

and he did much more; he wrote about anagnorasis, or discovery; he wrote about peripeteia, or reversal; he discussed hubris, or pride, which leads to hamartia, or error, flaw, frailty; he wrote about catharsis, or purgation. But these terms too seem more appropriate to a dramatic literature course or a seminar in theory than in this examination of general theatre history, which must and should include performance, theatre structure, design, technical theatre, and the business of theatre as well as plays.

Tragedy was not the only kind of dramatic form that emerged in Athens, nor were the tragic poets the only extant writers.  Euripides wrote during the time of the Peloponnesian Wars and angrily protested against them in his plays, particularly The Trojan Women.  Another playwright working at the same time, Aristophanes (c 448-c 380 BC), also objected to the wars, but his protests took the form of hilarious comedy.  In one of the plays, The Acharnians, Dicaeopolis, fed up with a ridiculous war, makes

a separate peace with the enemy.  In another a group of men, tired of petty struggles on earth, transform into The Birds and make their own kingdom in the sky, once translated as “Cloud-cuckooland.”  In his finest anti-war play, he posits a sex strike by Athenian and Spartan women, spearheaded by a woman named Lysistrata.  His comedy was bold, lusty, never afraid to poke fun at

the highest officials, the wisest philosophers, the tragic playwrights, even the almighty gods.  Scholars have dubbed Aristophanes’ writing “Old Comedy” and his plays are the only old comedies that still exist. He wrote about 40, we have 11.

Aristotle didn’t write much about comedy in The Poetics.  It has been said that he wrote a second volume which discussed comedy, but if written it has been lost. Aristotle DID write that comedy grew out of improvisations by “komasts”, the leaders of the phallic songs -- there were many kinds of phallic rites (which dealt with fertility), mostly non-dramatic in nature. Wherever it came from, by 487 BC comedy had developed enough to become part of the City Dionysia.  Old comedies were structured like this:

1. a prologue sets the mood and introduces a “happy idea” - the ruling theme

(the comic premise?), usually far-fetched

    2. the chorus enters (consisting of 24, which divides for debate)

    3. the agon, a debate over the merits of the happy idea, is

        presented

    4. The parabasis, a break in the action of the play, occurs,

        wherein the author can talk about whatever he wants:

         in The Birds, he lectures on critics “when you go abroad, 

         wear your hats!”

         in The Clouds, he scolds the audience for letting judges vote

         against the first version of the play

    5. a series of loosely knit scenes occurs, showing the results of

        instituting the happy idea    

    6. in the komos, the final scene, a reconciliation occurs, and

       everyone exits to a feast and revelry

   

If this is old comedy, is there “new?” Yes indeed, but we even have one example of what some scholars have dubbed “middle” comedy.  Aristophanes wrote it after Athens had been defeated in the wars -- it was called Plutus (the god of wealth) -- there was no parabasis, there were no choral songs; it moved away from political jokes and arguments to social ones. As one of my professors used to say, “It takes a healthy society to laugh at itself,” and Athens, sadly, had been defeated in war and had grown corrupt. It became dangerous to write political comedy in that fallen city-state.

New comedy focuses on social themes, especially domestic issues – financial worries, family relationships and love. Although there were 64 writers known to have written in this style, and we know 1400 play titles, Menander (342-291 BC) is the only writer in this form whose work still exists.  Only ONE of Menander’s plays survives in complete form:  Dyskolos, or The Grouch -- and this play was unearthed only in 1951!  The story line is typical of new

comedy: an old comic father has a beautiful daughter and a handsome young man wants to marry her.  After a series of comic complications, including mistaken or concealed identity, coincidences, absurd misunderstandings; and with the help of slaves and a new character called a parasite (a person who lives on dinners offered by others, usually in exchange for information), the play ends in marriage.  New comedy was frequently adapted or just plain stolen by Roman playwrights, and variations on this plot line run through commedia dell’arte and Moliére all the way down to the present.

Greek theatre spaces next time!