Greek tragedy forges powerful emotion and complexity of thought. Its actions can be the most violent imaginable. Actions that many cultures avoided mentioning publicly the Greeks put on the stage: matricide, patricide, infanticide, incest, madness, suicide, and mutilation. To balance the atrocities and avoid disgust, Greek drama employed formal elements that gave aesthetic distance and acceptability to its plots. Sometimes the plays even ended happily. Such controlled shock had an exportability, a clarity, and a relevance that fascinated many later civilizations.
Like later Western theater, its conventions derived from religion. At first, Greek drama was a celebration and rite of the god Dionysos. Etymologically, “tragedy” means the “goat song” sung at the sacrifice of a goat and perhaps was the dithyramb (hymn to Dionysos) or the satyr play (a burlesque) honoring that god. The use of masks and the acting may have originated in attempts to become Dionysos. This worship of the Greek god evolved into more secular theater, but the antiphon (verse and chorus) between priest and congregation continued in the form of the actors and chorus. As in the Christian commemoration of the Crucifixion, violence was offstage; messengers related to the audience the tragic action. Plays marked certain festivals during the Greek year, such as the three-day spring City Dionysia, and were not confined to Athens. Each dramatist had a day to present four plays, three tragedies in a trilogy, connected or not connected, and a lighter drama (satyr play). They were competitive, and prizes were awarded.
In the beginning (the sixth and early fifth century BC), song and dance dominated. Much effort and expense, at a cost to rich citizens, was needed for the training of the chorus. The perhaps legendary Thespis is said to have invented the play form: one actor responding to the choral odes. Aeschylus added a second actor and Sophocles a third. The first actor is called the protagonist, the second the deuteragonist, and the third the tritagonist, after the agon, contest or struggle, in the plays (cf. English “agony”). The “three-actor rule” may have resulted from the difficulty of following too many actors in masks. But masks allowed actors to take on multiple roles. Later tragic plots became more central than choral odes. Men acted all the parts.
Plays were performed in the day, outdoors, not in the cavelike darkness of modern theaters. Tragedy was public drama: Five thousand spectators with a strong sense of community watched in the open air. The actors stood, perhaps on a slightly raised platform, before a one-story wooden building (skenế, our word “scene,” literally, “tent”) with a door, sometimes representing a palace. Inside was the eccyclema, a wheeled platform (5´ x 7´) and prop. Entrances were on both sides and through a door in the center.
The chorus (twelve, or later fifteen, members) danced and sang to the double pipe (aulus) on the orchéstra, the (circular, rectangular, or trapezoidal?) dancing space in between the action and the audience, who watched from raised seating in the theatron, “the seeing place.” It should be kept in mind that the audience always sees the chorus in front of the action. Most of the music and all the choreography have been lost. The chorus was a unique institution. The meter changes from dialogue to various sung lyric forms, though the chorus leader speaks his part. The choral odes have two or three stanzas: strophe (turn), antistrophe (counterturn), and sometimes epode (after-song). Strophe and antistrophe correspond metrically. Choral songs signal a shift in perspective. The chorus was often the concerned voice of society reacting to the action. They are usually conservative, holding to old-school views (and older poetic forms) in the age of fifth-century intellectual disruption. They voice traditional folk wisdom and echo old Olympian religious views that create tension by jarring against the complexities of the hero’s action—like Polonius. They can generalize a situation into traditional mythology as well as accent the emotion for the audience. They can take sides and give advice, but they are not the guide to final interpretation. The choragos, leader of the chorus, can act as an actor in an episode.
In addition to masks, which allowed actors to assume more than one role, the actors wore raised footwear and elaborate costumes. They often sang “monodies” or duets. There may be a kommós, a lament shared by actor and chorus. Later attempts in Renaissance Italy to recapture Greek tragedy invented opera, which is similar to Greek tragedy in its formality and its alternation of rhythmic recitation and song. The dialogue was in double iambic trimeters (˘ —˘ —˘ —˘ —˘ — ˘ —), a line of six feet. A long syllable may be substituted for a short syllable in the first, fifth, ninth, and last position. Greek meter measured the length of the syllable, not stress as in English. A long syllable had twice the duration of a short syllable, as in music two quarter notes equal a half note. The state paid the actors. The winner wore the ivy of Dionysos.
The form of Greek drama, including comedy, usually took the following pattern with few variations, alternating action and choral song (cf. the later five-act play):
Prologue (spoken by one or more characters)
Parodos (choral ode sung by the chorus entering the theater through the “side passages,” parodoi )
First Episode (dialogue and action between the actors)
First Stasimon (choral ode)
Second Episode
Second Stasimon
Third Episode
Third Stasimon
Exodos (final scene after the last stasimon)
Throughout the plays, the conscious and elevated use of rhetoric, the high style, is evident. But the sections of the play gave variety to the expression of language and changed the point of view. Sometimes, to vary the drama, the action among the characters alternated with lyric passages. The chorus often related the action to more general patterns of myth or turned the action into image and metaphor. Messenger speeches often provided a more distanced view of the action. Dialogue could be emotionally intensified by shifting from long speeches to single sword thrusts of alternating lines (stichomythia) or to dropped lines (antilabé—i.e., split between characters). At times, the language shifted to a debate (agon), an essay (rhesis), or a story (messenger speech). Each shift could shorten or extend the aesthetic distance between character and action. A messenger, for example, may be an outside observer telling a short story whose vivid aural power stirs the audience’s imagination, while an agonist might lament his or her life. A god could be brought down on a crane over the stage.
Most tragedies use older mythological tales for their plots, often the Trojan War or the royal House of Thebes. Like the language, the action and the characters are thus elevated above the quotidian. The plots may scrutinize the old Homeric code in the light of the new city-state (polis), shifting between that heroic world and contemporary urban life. They concern themselves with problems within the family, between family and state, and problems in marriage. They also focus on women, fate, free will, morality, foreigners, and identity. The heroes or heroines often seek revenge or knowledge, and they sometimes journey to self-knowledge. Usually, they end in defeat and death, but not without demonstrating great courage and resolution in a conflict with fate. Often the plays interrogate and complicate more than easily resolve conflicts. The protagonist courageously suffers in a mysterious web of nature, society, and the divine. In The Poetics, Aristotle pointed out that tragedies gain power from an anagnorisis (recognition or discovery) and a peripety (reversal of fortune) (1449a). He also thought that tragedy stimulates fear and pity in the audience (1452a) and ends with a final cartharsis (emotional cleansing; release from tension) for the audience (1449b). Overall, we can add that tragedy transforms another human being’s pain into order, pleasure, and, in the largest sense of the term, beauty.