Ancient March Madness
Reading Greek tragedy.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the ancient Greeks had their own version of March Madness, a competition that held the attention of its audiences with, one might imagine, something of the fascination that excites college basketball fans today. The arena was not athletic but theatrical, its focus the art of tragedy, so that the contestants pursued the thrill of victory by representing on stage the agony of defeat. (Zeus, the chorus warns us early in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, “lays it down as law / that we must suffer, suffer into truth.” Such suffering afforded the dramatists their field of play.)
Ceremonial as well as dramatic, the tragedies were written for state-sponsored annual religious festivals held in spring in honor of the god Dionysus; they invoked the strife of legendary figures to steep the community in the grief of individual destinies, the unfathomable energies of the gods, the agonizing emergence of civilizing impulses.
As I’ve said, the performance of the tragedies was competitive, enacting a contest among a trio of playwrights who each presented a trilogy of tragic plays, plus a concluding, unrelated comic entertainment called a satyr play, over a three-day period. The lasting influence of these battles is incontestable: Greek tragedy casts a long shadow across the Western mind. From Aristotle to Freud, Seneca to Racine to Stravinsky, Shakespeare to The Sopranos, its intuitions about human existence have remained relevant, enduring long after its lightning-like illuminations of fate, morality, and mortality first enlightened ancient audiences. What’s especially astonishing is that such a small body of extant work — some thirty-odd relatively short plays — has supplied readers with such a large legacy of wisdom, and that this wisdom springs from the imaginations of just three playwrights: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (the last of whom is responsible for more than sixty percent of this dramatic estate). Despite being authored by men, the tragedies depict women — Antigone, for example, and Clytaemnestra, the Eumenides, the Trojan women — as powerful moral agents and civic presences in ways that testify to a broader vision of human experience than that captured in ancient epic or philosophy, or, for that matter, in most pre-modern literature.
In honor of the Festival of Dionysus, then, here’s a short enthusiast’s guide to the styles of these ancient players, and to some of the plays they left for us to ponder.
Aeschylus
Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 BC) is the only festival trilogy that has come down to us complete (although its satyr play has not survived). Its three plays — Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides — depict the murderous intrigues of the royal family of Argos, a cycle of violence the characters inherit and expand. In Agamemnon, the title character’s wife, Clytaemnestra, kills him for having sacrificed their daughter, Iphigeneia, to win the gods’ favor for his expedition to Troy. In The Libation Bearers, Clytaemnestra is killed by her only son, Orestes, who acts to avenge his father’s death; his mother’s Furies drive him mad. In the final play, the goddess Athena empowers a group of men to judge Orestes’s case, instituting a court of law in which the ideal of justice can prevail over the visceral impulses of vendetta; she enlists Orestes’s pursuers, too, in this transformation, changing their names from Furies to Eumenides (Kindly Ones) and inducing them to protect Athens and its people.
No summary can convey the elemental forces that animate Aeschylus’s trilogy. “The Oresteia is our rite of passage from savagery to civilization,” write Robert Fagles and W. B. Stanford in the essay that introduces the former’s majestic translation. Even on the page, its vivifying alertness to the terrifying possibilities of human nature and culture is evoked with a stark and indelible power; one can only imagine what it was like in ancient performance. Informed by the imaginative richness of the myths and epics that preceded it, its wisdom looms like an awesome natural wonder over the philosophical reasoning that Plato and Aristotle would leave in its wake. The truths The Oresteia tells are as ineluctable as fate, and just as enduring.
Other works by Aeschylus include The Persians (472 BC), Seven Against Thebes (467 BC), The Suppliants (463 BC).
Sophocles
A man of means and a figure of civic stature as well as a dramatic genius, Sophocles lived through nine decades that coincided with the flowering of intellectual, political, and artistic brilliance that would make his native Athens the cultural seedbed of the Western world. He wrote more than 120 plays, only seven of which have come down to us complete. He won the theatrical competition at the city’s annual festival of Dionysus twenty times, and never placed lower than second. His enigmatic but vivid vision of the tragic hero has exerted a penetrating influence on the imaginations of readers, writers, and thinkers — including the good doctor, Sigmund Freud, who would trademark Oedipus for his own purposes — for more than two-and-a-half millennia.
“How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be,
When there’s no help in truth.”
Younger than Aeschylus by some thirty years, Sophocles extended the reach of the stage tradition he inherited, adding characters and a more evocative sense of scene. Aeschylean tragedy mapped a course of progress from savagery to civilization under the guidance of the gods, Sophocles designed moral puzzles in a tighter and inescapably human frame. His protagonists act in fields of shifting moral forces that are often hidden from their view, and the irreconcilable realities of luck and fate define their circumstances. “How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be,” says the blind seer Tiresias in one of the plays, “When there’s no help in truth.”
Sophocles’s two greatest plays are Antigone (ca. 442 BC) and Oedipus the King (ca. 426 BC). While the former takes place after the events dramatized in the latter, it was written some sixteen years earlier, when the author was in his mid-fifties. Its title character is Oedipus’s daughter, and the action unfolds in the aftermath of a bloody conflict between her brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, for the throne of Thebes. Their rivalry has proven fatal for both of them, and their uncle, Creon, has become the Theban king. Because Polynices led an army against the city, Creon rules that he does not deserve the proper burial rites and forbids anyone from interring him, on pain of death.
While the sentries guarding the body of Polynices sleep, Antigone secretly violates Creon’s order; the body is quickly exhumed by the authorities, but Antigone is undeterred, and returns to rebury her brother. Not only is she caught, but in her confession she is unrepentant, accusing Creon of defying the gods by his refusal to allow Polynices to be laid to rest. Invoking the primacy of civil order and civic duty over familial piety, Creon — despite the pleas of his son, to whom Antigone is betrothed — sentences her to be walled up alive “in a vault of stone.” In the face of prophecies by Tiresias that his stubborn cruelty will bring curses down upon Thebes, Creon will not be swayed from his stubborn righteousness.
It is easy to see the battle of wills between Antigone and Creon as a struggle between conscience and power, liberty and tyranny, individual courage and the brutality of the state. Many modern readings of the legend (including the mid-twentieth-century restagings by Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht) do so. Yet such an interpretation does not do justice to the complexity of Sophocles’s drama, in which the importance of public allegiance over private fealty is strongly argued, even while Antigone’s steadfastness is forcefully portrayed. Nevertheless, the bravery and terrifying severity of her conviction makes her tower over the calculating Creon, who at last will yield to her resolve, too late to prevent calamity for all concerned. In this, as in all of this author’s plays, virtue is as uncertain as circumstance, and every moral impulse is duplicitous; the essence of his tragic figures is not their character, but their human presence in the midst of incompatible and often overwhelming truths.
Oedipus the King (often translated as Oedipus Rex) opens in a plague-stricken Thebes many years before Antigone; having appealed to the oracle at Delphi for guidance on how to alleviate the suffering of the city, Oedipus learns that his kingdom’s fortune will turn only when the murderer of Laius, the former monarch, is discovered and exiled. Oedipus consults Tiresias, who is provoked to assert that the present king himself is the culprit.
What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?
Sophocles’s original audience would have known full well the entire tale of Oedipus, a tale of which Oedipus himself, through most the play, knows only part: how he was sent away from Thebes as an infant because of a prophecy that he would prove dangerous to his father (Laius) and mother (Jocasta); that, after being raised as a prince in Corinth without knowledge of his true identity, he left upon being warned himself by the Delphic oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother; that he had in fact unknowingly killed Laius in a roadside confrontation, before arriving in Thebes to become a hero — and then king — when he dispelled an earlier curse on the city by solving the riddle of the Sphinx (“What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?” The answer: man, who crawls as a baby, walks upright in maturity, and uses a cane in old age). It is a measure of the playwright’s mastery that the suspense is screwed tighter by the tragic irony created by the audience’s foreknowledge.
And there is another level of irony that is even more striking: Oedipus is not brought down by a tragic flaw, but rather by his unrelenting application of his most commanding and commendable traits. An effective and civic-minded man of action, he fiercely pursues the truth about Laius’s killer even as the evidence accumulates against him. Every action he undertakes is impelled by good intentions and a desire to escape the crimes and perils that have been prophesied. To no avail, alas: recognizing at last the extent of his unwitting sins, he blinds himself and begs to be banished from Thebes.
Oedipus the King presents its author’s tragic sense of life with a fearsome and visceral clarity, reworking a legend until only the quandary of the human circumstance remains. While fate is everywhere, not a god appears: Oedipus himself is the agent of his own undoing, and it is his fundamental honor that impels him toward his ruin. The faster we run from torment, the faster we may approach it.
Other works by Sophocles include Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes (none of which can be accurately dated), and Oedipus at Colonus, written just before the author’s death at ninety and performed posthumously at the Festival of Dionysus in 401 BC.
Euripides
Out of the ninety plays that scholars agree Euripides composed, less than a score have come down to us. Nonetheless, the surviving works, written over the course of three decades, suggest a complete oeuvre as rich as Shakespeare’s in its capacity to envisage human drama; it has the same kind of sweep and unpredictability — the same messy but meaningful energy — as the infinite variety of Shakespearean invention. (Indeed, the self-consciousness of the ancient tragedian’s rhetorical ingenuity in exploring his characters’ inner lives through linguistically intricate speeches, makes it natural for us to see Euripidean “arias” — as they are sometimes called by writers on his work — as ancestors of the soliloquies of Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth.)
Again as in Shakespeare, and as opposed to what we find in the other Greek tragedians, there is something bracingly provisional in the tragedies of Euripides, as if the dramas themselves are attempts to figure things out rather than to explain a pre-existing philosophy. Reading Aeschylus or Sophocles, we know where we stand, no matter how spooky the surroundings; their works are cathedrals that evoke awe at the grandeur of the savage urgencies and moral hazards of human nature. Not so when we read Euripides: wonder is replaced by worry and wariness as we, like his characters, are surprised by life. The plays feel like emergent creations rather than settled classics; they stage life in the exact sense, and Euripides uses every theatrical means available to do so, combining the tragic and the comic, the romantic and the political, in uncanny and unnerving ways. Exalted figures, pulled from the heroic contexts of the mythological past, enter Euripides’s metaphorical present to be brought low by exigencies of circumstance and passion they cannot escape; they are noble one moment and ridiculous the next — then, often enough, noble once more.
Euripides’s Medea (431 BC) stems from the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, one of the grandest adventures in Greek mythology, in which a man who should be king, dispossessed at birth, regains his rightful place in the world by running a gauntlet of endeavor that is fabulous in every sense of the word. Abetted by a band of thrill-seekers christened the Argonauts after the vessel that conveys them to the ends of the earth, and rescued time and again by an enchantress as resourceful as he is brave, Jason returns in glory from his quest, the golden fleece in hand. The woman whose magic makes Jason a hero is Medea, with whom he fathers a family after their exploits on the Argo. When Jason abandons her to pursue a more politically advantageous match, Medea’s desire for revenge engulfs even her love for her children, who become pawns of her passion — and of Jason’s opportunism. Medea’s story, as rendered by Euripides in this fierce and unforgettable play, is nothing like the fairy tale of the fleece: it’s a tale of psychological terror with few equals in the annals of storytelling.
The Trojan Women (415 BC) picks up where the Iliad leaves off, in the days — hours, actually — after Troy’s fall to Aegean forces. The title refers to the four women who, in Homer’s epic, have mourned in turn over the body of the fallen Trojan hero, Hector: his sister, Cassandra; his wife, Andromache; his mother, Hecuba; and his sister-in-law, Helen, whose beauty sparked the war that destroyed the warrior.
Yet The Trojan Women is more than a mere rehearsal of the already ancient tale of Troy’s burning, of the slaughter of its men and the enslavement of its women and children by a savage enemy. For only a few months before this tragedy was first staged, Athenian forces had imposed the same brutal terms of slaughter and enslavement on the citizenry of Melos, in retribution for that island city’s refusal to join the alliance against Athens’s rival, Sparta. By telescoping for his audience the foregone grief of the Trojan women with the fresh suffering of their counterparts on Melos, Euripides created one of the most enduring expressions of the human costs of militarism and war, a play artful and authentic in equal measure.
Euripides’s last play, The Bacchae (405 BC), opens with a figure in a smiling mask announcing himself to the audience as a god incognito, returned to Thebes to reveal his divinity and demand reverence. He is Dionysius, and the rites he intends to establish among the Thebans are celebrations of instinct over reason, impulse over order, subversion over convention — to say nothing of the wild music, frenzied dancing, drunken orgies, and human sacrifice that are either referenced or enacted in the ensuing scenes.
Even Quentin Tarantino might pale at the violence inherent in the action of this ancient play, and it is fair to say that few dramas weirder than this one have been conceived and staged since its premiere. Fewer still have intimated so well the conflicting compulsions that contend in our psyches, from cruelty to compassion. It takes a vengeful god, perhaps — and a dramatist of genius, certainly — to force us to see so deeply into the mystery of what it means to be human.
Other works by Euripides include Alcestis (438 BC), Hippolytus (428 BC), The Suppliants (ca. 423 BC), Electra (ca. 422–416 BC.). Iphigeneia at Aulis (ca. 414–413 BC).
Although we’ll never know the precise excitement of the ancient tragic festival competitions, we can still admire the extant works today; they offer a good way to take our minds off the fate of our NCAA teams, reminding us that our own is always on the bubble.
