Greek Tragedy, Sophocles and Euripides

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Greek Tragedy, Sophocles and Euripides

• Week 15

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Theater of Dionysus???????
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Theater of Dionysus
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Theater of Dionysus
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Tragedy Goat song The word tragedy literally
means "goat song," probably referring to the
practice of giving a goat as a sacrifice or a
prize at the religious festivals in honor of the
god Dionysus.
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• Aeschylus
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• Sophocles
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Thespians

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Sophocles??

• 496B.C406B.C
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?????(Sophocles, 496B.C. - 406B.C.)

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Sophocles??

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Sophocles??

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• ?????(Ajax c.450B.C)
• ?????(Antigone c.442B.C)
• ?????(Trachiniae c.413B.C)
• ??????(Oedipus Rex c.425B.C)
• ?????(Electra c.410B.C)
• ??????(Philoctetes c.409B.C)
• ??????????(Oedipus at Colonus
• c.401B.C)

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Sophocles

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Euripides

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???????(Aristophanes)?????(Menander)?

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  ),?????(Sopholes),?????(Euripides),???????(Aristop
  hanes)?????(Menander)?
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  Lay),????????,??????????????????

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Recurrent Themes in Tragedy

• P.148
• Von Reden, Sitta. Exchange in Ancient Greece.
  London Duckworth, 1995.

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First

• There is a general reflection upon the tension
  between nature and civilization which thought to
  be controlled by marriage, sacrifice, and
  agriculture.

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Secondly

• There is a vital concern about the relationship
  between oikos and polis and their conflicting
  claims to the loyalty (philia) of their members

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Thirdly

• There is an extended debate on the relationship
  between Athenian law and divine nomos

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Fourthly

• Most plays contain a self-reflexive debate on
  linguistic exchange, the power of logoi and their
  manipulative force on society and its individual
  members

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Finally

• They are framed in a discourse which uses Homeric
  imagery and mythology for the discussion of
  contemporary problems.

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All these themes are interlocked.

• This not only ties together scenes which seem at
  first unconnected, but also gives a complex
  meaning to every individual image.

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From Aeschylus to Sophocles

• Aeschylus belonged to the generation that fought
  at Marathon his manhood and his old age were
  passed in the heroic period of the Persian defeat
  on Greek soil and the war that Athens fought to
  liberate its kin in the islands of the Aegean and
  on the Asiatic coast.
• Sophocles, his younger contemporary, lived to see
  an Athens that had advanced in power and
  prosperity far beyond the city that Aeschylus
  knew.

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Involvement in citys affairs

• The league of free Greek cities against Persia
  that Athens had led to victory in the Aegean had
  become an empire, in which Athens taxed and
  coerced the subject cities that had once been its
  free allies.
• Sophocles, born around 496 B.C., played his
  parta prominent onein the citys affairs.

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treasurer

• In 443 B.C. he served as one of the treasurers of
  the imperial league and, with Pericles, as one of
  the ten generals elected for the war against the
  island of Samos, which tried to secede form the
  Athenian league a few years later.

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A special committee

• When the Athenian expedition to Sicily ended in
  disaster, Sophocles was appointed to a special
  committee set up in 411 B.C. to deal with the
  emergency.
• He died two years before Athens surrendered to
  Sparta.

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129 plays

• His career as a brilliantly successful dramatist
  began in 468 in that year he won first prize at
  the Dionysia, competing against Aeschylus.
• Over the next sixty-two years he produced more
  than 120 plays.
• He won first prize no fewer than twenty-four
  times, and when he was not first, he came in
  second, never third.

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No acting in his own plays

• Aeschylus had been an actor as well as a
  playwright and director, but Sophocles, early in
  his career, gave up acting.
• It was he who added a third actor to the team
  the early Aeschylean plays (Persians, Seven
  Against Thebes, and Suppliants) can be played by
  two actors (who of course can change masks to
  extend the range of dramatis personae).

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The third actor

• In the Oresteia, Aeschylus has taken advantage of
  the Sophoclean third actor this makes possible
  the role of Cassandra, the one three-line speech
  of Pylades in The Libation Bearers, and the trial
  scene in The Eumenides.
• But Sophocles used his third actor to create
  complex triangular scenes like the dialogue
  between Oedipus and Corinthian messenger, which
  reveals to a listening Jocasta the ghastly truth
  that Oedipus will not discover until the next
  scene.

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Seven extant plays

• We have only seven of his plays, and not many of
  them can be accurately dated.
• Ajax (which deals with the suicide of the hero
  whose shade turns silently away from Odysseus in
  the Odyssey) and Trachiniae (the story of the
  death of Heracles) are both generally thought to
  be early productions. Antigone is fairly securely
  fixed in the late 440s, and Oedipus the King was
  probably staged during the early years of the
  Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.).

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Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus

• For Electra we have no date, but it is probably
  later than Oedipus the King.
• Philoctetes, a tale of the Trojan War, was staged
  in 409 B.C.
• and Oedipus at Colonus, which presents Oedipuss
  strangely triumphant death on Athenian soil, was
  produced after Sophocles death.

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Intellectual revolution

• Most of these plays date from the last half of
  the fifth century B.C. they were written in and
  for an Athens that, since the days of Aeschylus,
  had undergone an intellectual revolution.
• It was in a time of critical reevaluation of
  accepted standards and traditions that Sophocles
  produced his masterpiece, Oedipus the King, and
  the problems of the time are reflected in the
  play.

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Mysterious contemporary

• The use of the familiar myth enabled the
  dramatist to draw on all its wealth of
  unformulated meaning, but it did not prevent him
  from striking a contemporary note. Oedipus, in
  Sophocles play, is at one and the same time the
  mysterious figure of the past who broke the most
  fundamental human taboos and a typical
  fifth-century Athenian.
• His character contains all the virtues for which
  the Athenians were famous and the vices for which
  they were notorious.

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Pecicles and Oedipus

• The Athenian devotion to the city, which received
  the main emphasis in Pericles praise of Athens,
  is strong in Oedipus his answer to the priest at
  the beginning of the play shows that he is a
  conscientious and patriotic ruler. His quick rage
  is the characteristic fault of Athenian
  democracy, which in 406 B.C., to give only one
  instance, condemned and executed the generals who
  had failed, in the stress of weather and battle,
  to pick up the drowned bodies of their own men
  killed in the naval engagement at Arginusae.

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I must know!? Know thyself!

• Oedipus is like the fifth-century Athenian most
  of all in his confidence in the human
  intelligence, especially his own.

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EURIPIDES

• 480-406 B.C.

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Medea

• Euripides Medea, produced in 431 B.C., the year
  that brought the beginning of the Peloponnesian
  War, appeared earlier than Sophocles Oedipus the
  King, but it has a bitterness that is more in
  keeping with the spirit of a later age.

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Modern sense

• If Oedipus is, in one sense, a warning to a
  generation that has embarked on an intellectual
  revolution, Medea is the ironic expression of the
  disillusion that comes after the shipwreck.
• In this play we are conscious for the first time
  of an attitude characteristic of modern
  literature, the artists feeling of separation
  from the audience, the isolation of the poet.

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rejected by his contemporaries

• The common background of audience and poet is
  disappearing, the old certainties are being
  undermined, the city divided.
• Euripides is the first Greek poet to suffer the
  fate of so many of the great modern writers
  rejected by most of his contemporaries (he rarely
  won first prize and was the favorite target for
  the scurrilous humor of the comic poets), he was
  universally admired and revered by the Greeks of
  the centuries that followed his death.

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Private and intellectual life

• It is significant that what little biographical
  information we have for Euripides makes no
  mention of military service or political office
  unlike Aeschylus, who fought in the ranks at
  Marathon, and Sophocles, who took an active part
  in public affairs from youth to advanced old age,
  Euripides seems to have lived a private, an
  intellectual life.

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Questioning the received ideas

• Younger than Sophocles ( though they died in the
  same year), he was more receptive to the critical
  theories and the rhetorical techniques offered by
  the Sophist teachers
• his plays often subject received ideas to
  fundamental questioning, expressed in vivid
  dramatic debate.
• His Medea is typical of his iconoclastic
  approach his choice of subject and central
  characters is in itself a challenge to
  established canons. He still dramatizes myth, but
  the myth he chooses is exotic and disturbing, and
  the protagonist is not a man but a woman.

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The citizen rights?

• Medea is both woman and foreignerthat is, in
  terms of the audiences prejudice and practice
  she is a representative of the two free-born
  groups in Athenian society that had almost no
  rights at all (though the male foreign resident
  had more rights than the native woman).

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Anti-social

• The tragic hero is no longer a king, one who is
  highly renowned and prosperous such as Oedipus,
  but a woman who, because she finds no redress for
  her wrongs in society, is driven by her passion
  to violate that societys most sacred laws in a
  rebellion against its typical representative,
  Jason, her husband.

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Earth and Sun

• All through Medea the human beings involved call
  on the gods two especially are singled out for
  attention Earth and Sun.
• It is by these two gods that Medea makes Aegeus
  swear to give her refuge in Athens, the chorus
  invokes them to prevent Medeas violence against
  her sons, and Jason wonders how Medea can look on
  Earth and Sun after she has killed her own
  children.

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The Magic Chariot

• These emphatic appeals clearly raise the question
  of the attitude of the gods, and the answer to
  the question is a shock.
• We are not told what Earth does, but Sun sends
  the magic chariot on which Medea makes her
  escape.

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rejected by most of his contemporaries

• Euripides is the first Greek poet to suffer the
  fate of so many of the great modern writers
  rejected by most of his contemporaries (he rarely
  won first prize and was the favorite target for
  the scurrilous humor of the comic poets), he was
  universally admired and revered by the Greeks of
  the centuries that followed his death.

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Iconoclastic

• His Medea is typical of his iconoclastic
  approach his choice of subject and central
  characters is in itself a challenge to
  established canons.
• He still dramatizes myth, but the myth he chooses
  is exotic and disturbing, and the protagonist is
  not a man but a woman.
• Medea is both woman and foreigner, that is, in
  terms of the audiences prejudice and practice
  she is a representative of the two free-born
  groups in Athenian society that had almost no
  rights at all (though the male foreign resident
  had more rights than the native woman).

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great intellectual power

• She is not just a woman and a foreigner, she is
  also a person of great intellectual power.
• Compared with her the credulous king and her
  complacent husband are children, and once her
  mind is made up, she moves them like pawns to
  their proper places in her barbaric game.
• The myth is used for new purposes, to shock the
  members of the audience, attack their deepest
  prejudices, and shake them out of their
  complacent pride in the superiority of Greek
  masculinity.

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Finds no redress

• The tragic hero is no longer a king, one who is
  highly renowned and prosperous such as Oedipus,
  but a woman who, because she finds no redress for
  her wrongs in society, is driven by her passion
  to violate that societys most sacred laws in a
  rebellion against its typical representative,
  Jason, her husband.

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Earth and Sun

• All through Medea the human beings involved call
  on the gods two especially are singled out for
  attention Earth and Sun.
• It is by these two gods that Medea makes Aegeus
  swear to give her refuge in Athens, the chorus
  invokes them to prevent Medeas violence against
  her sons, and Jason wonders how Medea can look on
  Earth and Sun after she has killed her own
  children.
• These emphatic appeals clearly raise the question
  of the attitude of the gods, and the answer to
  the question is a shock. We are not told what
  Earth does, but Sun sends the magic chariot on
  which Medea makes her escape.

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The Dance of Ares

• The plains of Boeotia, called the dance of Ares
  (Mars) because many battles were fought there.
• Alexander, by destroying Thebes in 335 BCE,
  shocked Greece into accepting his power.
• The end of classical Greece 337-322 BCE

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Supplementary MaterialsSophocles Philoctetes

• Themes and discussion

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Philoctetes
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Philoctetes is leaving the island of Lemnos

• A cave had been Philoctetes home since the
  Greeks abandoned him on Lemnos.
• Philoctetes sits clutching his magic bow in his
  left hand.
• Above right is Odyssues.
• To the left are Athene and Neoplotemos.

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Lemons

• Lemnos or Limnos is an island in the northern
  part of the Aegean Sea.
• It is part of the Greek prefecture of Lesbos and
  has a considerable area, about 477 km².

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A sacred island

• For ancient Greeks, the island was sacred to
  Hephaestus, god of metallurgy, who as he tells
  himself in Iliad I.590ff fell on Lemnos when his
  father Zeus hurled him headlong out of Olympus.
• There, he was cared for by the Sinties, according
  to Iliad or by Thetis (Apollodorus, Bibliotheke
  I3.5), and there with a Thracian nymph Cabiro (a
  daughter of Proteus) he fathered a tribe called
  the Cabiroides.
• Sacred rites dedicated to them were performed in
  the island.

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LEMNOSBY PAUL HETHERINGTON

• The position of Lemnos in the northern Aegean,
  where it lies midway between the tip of the Mount
  Athos promontory and the coast of Asia Minor,
  meant that control over it was always sought
  after. Any ships entering or leaving the
  Hellespont (the Passage of Romania, now the
  Dardanelles) could do so only with the knowledge
  (and often the permission) of the current rulers
  of Lemnos.

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Lesbos

• The frequency with which their identity might
  change is a symptom of its strategic importance
  to the Hellenic would throughout its history.
• The island is now administered under the nomos of
  Lesbos.

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Two sectors

• Lemnos has an area of 476 sq km and, like a
  number of the Aegean islands, its shape indicates
  its volcanic origins, two bays to north and south
  almost dividing the island in two
• the smaller, eastern, sector was where the
  capital of the island in antiquity, Hephaestus,
  was situated,
• while on the coast of the western sector, larger
  and much more mountainous with the highest peak
  of Mount Skopia reaching 430 m, the medieval and
  modern capital of Myrina is located.

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Lemnian earth

• The low-lying and flatter areas of the island are
  quite fertile, and produce a variety of crops.
• A tradition, already current in antiquity and
  still existing in the 20th century, credited
  Lemnian earth, excavated on one day each year,
  with the power of healing many kinds of wounds
  it was exported all over the Hellenic world.

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figured both in Homeric legend and in Hellenic
history

• In antiquity Lemnos figured both in Homeric
  legend and in Hellenic history.
• Herodotus (4.145) related how the Argonauts, who
  according to legend had arrived on the island and
  left progeny there, were driven out of Lemnos
  three generations later by the Pelasgi.
• Later (5. 26) he described how Lemnos, with
  Imbros, was taken from the Pelasgi by Otanes, who
  had already occupied Byzantium and Chalcedon.
• The stronghold of Myrina figured early in the
  history of the island, as when Miltiades, having
  called on the Pelasgi to leave the islanda call
  which the townspeople of Hephaestus obeyedwas
  defied by the inhabitants of Myrina, whom he
  besieged (no doubt secure in their rock-perched
  fortress) before eventually ejecting them by
  force.

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Philoctetes on the island of Lemnos. Marble.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
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ARGONAUTS

• When the ARGONAUTS, in their way to Colchis, came
  to Lemnos, they found out that all males had been
  murdered.
• For the Lemnian women, having learned that their
  husbands had taken Thracian wives, resolved to
  kill all men in Lemnos.

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Philoctetes and Odysseus

• http//homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Philoctetes.ht
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• Only Philoctetes excelled me with the bow in the
  land of the Trojans, when we Achaeans shot."
  (Odysseus to the Phaeacians. Homer, Odyssey
  8.220).
• "Destruction shall have end when you are dead,
  the author of our bane." (Philoctetes to Paris.
  Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy 10.229).