DIONYSUS, THE GREEK god of wine and intoxication, may have been the party animal of the Olympians, but he’s also associated closely with tragedy. The first dramas, especially tragedies, were performed at yearly celebrations of Dionysus in ancient Greece. (In fact, the word “tragedy” comes from the Greek word for “goat,” an animal sacred to Dionysus.) Aeschylus (525–456 BCE), Sophocles (c. 496–406 BCE), and Euripides (c. 484–406 BCE) have endured as masters of this art, which the philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) defined as “a form of drama exciting the emotions of pity and fear” in order to cause a cleansing, or “catharsis,” of these feelings. Now grab some Kleenex and test your knowledge of the classic tragedies with this quick quiz.
1. Which tragic hero, featured in plays by Sophocles, fulfills an oracle’s prediction that he will kill his father and marry his mother?
2. Which 1942 play, inspired by a Sophocles tragedy of the same name, was an allegory of France under the pro-Nazi Vichy government?
3. In Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound, why is the titan Prometheus fastened to a mountain?
4. Which character from Greek mythology—a woman who helped her brother kill their mother, Clytemnestra—appears in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus?
5. Which complicated character—a sorceress who murders her children—is the heroine of a Euripides play?
ANSWERS
1. Oedipus. A character from Greek myth, he is the subject of Sophocles’ plays Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud used the term “Oedipus complex” to describe the childhood conflict of a boy’s attraction to his mother and feelings of rivalry with his father.
2. Antigone, by Jean Anouilh. The play, about a girl who faces a death sentence for defying the king, was first produced in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944.
3. Zeus is punishing Prometheus for stealing fire from the heavens and giving it to humans.
4. Electra. She is the title character of Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Electra, and she is a major character in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers in his Oresteia trilogy.
5. Medea, in the play of the same title.