The Greek Plays Themselves
A Quick Overview of The Most
Important Dramas
Agamemnon by Aeschylus
• First a little about Aeschylus:
– He lived from about 520 to 456 BC. He wrote the earliest
plays that we have. He added a second actor; before that there
was only one actor and the Chorus.
– Of the 90 plays that he wrote, we have only 7, including three
plays (a trilogy) telling a single story, rather like a mini-series
on television.
– The first of this trilogy is Agamemnon, telling about the
murder of King Agamemnon, the second, The LibationBearers, tells how his son Orestes killed Agamemnon's
murderers, and the third, The Eumenides, is about the
terrifying goddesses of justice, called Furies, who chased
Orestes until the gods put everything right.
– Agamemnon is considered Aeschylus' greatest work. . .Of the
plays in the trilogy, Agamemnon contains the strongest
command of language and characterization. The poetry is
magnificent and moving, with skillful portrayal of major and
minor characters alike (Douthat, Parsons)
Agamemnon
The events of Agamemnon
take place against a backdrop
that would have been familiar
to an Athenian audience.
Agamemnon is returning from his victory at Troy, which has
been besieged for ten years by Greek armies attempting to
recover Helen, Agamemnon's brother's wife, who was
stolen by the treacherous Trojan Prince, Paris.
The tragedies of the play occur as a result of the crimes
committed by Agamemnon's family. His father, Atreus,
boiled the children of his own brother, Thyestes, and served
them to him. Clytemnestra's lover, Aegisthus (Thyestes's
only surviving son), seeks revenge for that crime.
Moreover, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to gain a favorable
wind to Troy, and Clytemnestra murders him to avenge her death.
The weight of history and heritage becomes a major theme of the play, and
indeed the entire trilogy, for the family it depicts cannot escape the cursed
cycle of bloodshed propagated by its past.
The play's mood carries a heavy sense of impending doom.
From the Watchman's opening speech through the Chorus' foreboding words and
Cassandra's prophesies, the drama prepares the audience for the King's
murder.
The actual act of violence occurs off-stage, a traditional practice in Greek tragedy.
Thematically, the murder of Agamemnon must be understood in the context of
three other acts of violence, all of which precede the action of the play.
1. The theft or kidnapping of Helen and the Trojan War—the chorus blames
Helen for this.
2. The sacrifice of Iphigenia which justifies Clytemnestra's resolve to murder
her husband.
3. Atreas gruesome murder of his nephews which justifies Aegisthus’ murder
of his cousin.
But in a broader sense, it is the source of the ancestral curse that pervades the
trilogy, as one act of violence leads to another.
About the Play’s Action
• The title character, Agamemnon, appears only briefly,
and comes across as a cold husband and arrogant king.
• Clytemnestra, with her icy determination and fierce
sense of self-righteousness, is far more attractive to the
audience;
• The audience feels sympathy with her for much of the
play.
– However, her entanglement with the odious Aegisthus
– and her murder of the innocent hapless Cassandra remind us
that, in the larger context of the trilogy,
– she is not an avenger but an adulteress and a murderer whose
crime leads inexorably to Orestes' vengeance in the next play.
– Note the powerlessness of the chorus throughout the play.
Medea by Euripides
• First a little about Euripides:
– Author of some of the most disturbing Greek
dramas. The Bachaai" or the "The Bacchantes" (as
it is listed in Dr. Rearick’s site) is a powerful its
dark vision of divinity.
– Media, meanwhile, features probably one of the
most unpleasant of heroines in literature.
– Euripides was born about 480 BC and died in 407 BC
– He wrote about 90 plays, mostly tragedies. We still have 17
of these tragedies and one satyr play.
– He wrote about some women in Greek myths, like Electra
and Medea. He made men and women from the myths
seem quite ordinary and not at all grand. He showed
Electra, who was a princess, dressed in rags and living in a
hut.
– Meanwhile Euripides' standing as a dramatist has often been disputed,
especially during his lifetime.
– While Aristotle heralded him "the most tragic of poets," he also
criticized Euripides' confused handling of plot and the less-thanheroic nature of his protagonists.
– Aristophanes, a comic dramatist, constantly mocked Euripides'
tendency towards word-play and paradox.
– Euripides' role as a dramatic innovator, however, is unquestionable:
the simplicity of his dialogue and its closeness to natural human
speech patterns paved the way for dramatic realism, while the
emotional vacillations in many of his works created our
understanding of melodrama. Admired by Socrates and other
philosophers,
– Euripides also distinguished himself as a free thinker; criticisms of
traditional religion and defenses of oppressed groups (especially
women and slaves) enter his plays with an explicitness unheard of
before him. More than edifying pieces of art, works such as The
Bacchae, Trojan Women,Iphigenia at Aulis,Alcetis, and Electra
would become basic components of the Athenian citizen's political
education.
Media
• Medea was originally produced in 431 BC, and derived from a
collection of tales that circulated informally around all Athenians.
• Euripides’ audience would have been familiar with its general
parameters and many of its specifics.
• The play's merit consequently lies in its manner of exposition and its
emotional focus, which Euripides places squarely in the flights of
amoral passion that afflict the protagonist, Medea.
• Her infamous murders of her own children challenged the Athenian
moral universe that continually hovers in the background of the play.
• In the opening, a nurse gives exposition but at the same time
she also expresses a wish that the past could be undone.
• Medea, Jason, the chorus, and others will replay their own
versions of this futile wish at various stages in the play. Jason
and Medea each express remorse at having inaugurated the
events the nurse recounts; their past love has doomed them in
the present.
• Tragedy, as an art form, often imparts a very basic message:
actions, premeditated or not, bear consequences that must be
recognized and endured.
• Unlike Jason, who uses deceptive rationalizations to avoid
facing the consequences of his own actions, Medea simply
rides her passions unthinkingly. Even before Creon banishes
Medea, she is already a perennial exile, unconcerned with the
chains of responsibility that bind her.
• Both Jason and Medea illustrate the play's most significant
absence--accountability.
• After planting the crucial backdrop to the story, the play
immediately introduces us to Medea's total despair upon being
abandoned by Jason, offering in the process Euripides'
fundamental psychological insight that victims of an intense
emotional wound (Medea) not only turn against those who
inflict it (Jason) but against their entire world of emotional
attachments (her children).
• Against some interpretations of Medea, which claim she
struggles between her devotion as a mother and her desire for
revenge, we could infer from her first cries that her children's
murder is fated from the beginning--the natural consequence of
Medea's overwhelming emotional shock.
• The offspring of Jason and Medea, the children are presented as
naïve and oblivious to the intrigue that surrounds them. Medea
uses them as pawns in the murder of Glauce and Creon, and then
kills them in the play's culminating horror.
• Their innocent deaths provide the greatest element of pathos--the
tragic emotion of pity--in the play. Their silence as characters
without names shows their marginal role between two warring
parents.
• Medea is part of the gallery of Euripides' "bad
women." Euripides was often attacked for
portraying what Aristotle called
"unscrupulously clever" women as his main
characters; he depicts his tragic heroines with
far less apology than his contemporaries.
• We are not, as in Aeschylus' Oresteia,
allowed to comfort ourselves with the
restoration of male-dominated order. In
Medea that order is exposed as hypocritical
and spineless, and in the character of Medea,
we see who a woman whose suffering,
instead of ennobling her, has made her
monstrous.
• The play is often seen as one of the first
works of feminism, and Medea is seen as a
feminist heroine.
• However, many scholars of Greek
theatre have challenged the theory that
Medea reflects any feminist ideologies,
believing that Euripides was explicitly
mocking and describing how they ought
not to behave.
– Moderation was also a theme of the play,
and a popular value in ancient Greece.
Medea's actions were seen as erratic because
they were not in moderation, and in the time
of the play, women did not have much say
in what went on.
– Therefore, Medea's reaction was not one
taken in moderation. Moderation of
everything was one of the Greek ideas, for
example, moderation of love, the result
being balance and harmony.
Oedipus Rex and Antigone by Sophocles
• A little about Sophocles:
– It is thought that he won the first prize at the Athenian
festival eighteen times and was among the most popular
and well-respected men of his day.
– Like most good Athenians, Sophocles was involved with
the political and military affairs of Athenian democracy.
• He did stints as a city treasurer and
• as a naval officer, and
• throughout his life he was a close friend of the foremost statesman
of the day, Pericles.
– He wrote more than 120 plays.
– He lived until he was over 90, and died in 406 BC, just
after Euripides.
– We have 7 of his tragedies, and part of a satyr play.
– Sophocles introduced a third actor into his plays, and
invented scene painting.
Oedipus Rex–Oedipus the King
• The story was not invented by
Sophocles. Quite the opposite: the
play’s most powerful effects often
depend on the fact that the audience
already knows the story.
• Since the first performance of
Oedipus Rex, the story has
fascinated critics just as it fascinated
Sophocles.
– Aristotle used this play and its plot as
the supreme example of tragedy.
– Sigmund Freud famously based his
theory of the “Oedipal Complex” on
this story, claiming that every boy has a
latent desire to kill his father and sleep
with his mother.
– The play itself is a variation of the
myth.
Major Themes
• The Willingness to Ignore the Truth
– The scene when Jocosta and Oedipus
compare notes is an extraordinary
moment because it calls into question the
entire truth-seeking process Oedipus
believes himself to be undertaking.
– Both Oedipus and Jocasta act as though
the servant’s story, once spoken, is
irrefutable history.
– Neither can face the possibility of what it
would mean if the servant were wrong.
– Thus Jocasta feels she can tell Oedipus of the
prophecy that her son would kill his father, and
Oedipus can tell her about the similar prophecy
given him by an oracle (867–875), and neither feels
compelled to remark on the coincidence; or why
Oedipus can hear the story of Jocasta binding her
child’s ankles (780–781) and not think of his own
swollen feet.
– While the information in these speeches is largely
intended to make the audience painfully aware of
the tragic irony, it also emphasizes just how
desperately Oedipus and Jocasta do not want to
speak the obvious truth: they look at the
circumstances and details of everyday life and
pretend not to see them.
• The Limits of Free Will
– Prophecy is a central part of Oedipus the King.
• Creon returns from Delphi with news of how the plague
can be stopped.
• Oedipus and Jocasta debate the extent to which
prophecies should be trusted at all, and when all of the
prophecies come true, their debate is seen as flawed.
• It appears that one of Sophocles’ aims is to justify the
powers of the gods and prophets, which had recently
come under attack in fifth-century xb.c. Athens.
• Sophocles’ audience would, of course, have known the
story of Oedipus, which only increases the sense of
complete inevitability about how the play would end.
Motifs
• Suicide caused by the horror of incest
• Sight and Blindness
Symbols
• Oedipus’ Swollen Foot—Marked by Fate
• Three Way Crossroad—the crossroads is part
of the distant past, dimly remembered, and
Oedipus was not aware at the time that he was
making a fateful decision.
The local of the Plays
Antigone
• Antigone draws attention to the
difference between divine law
and human law.
• Can be viewed as an early
feminist play—
– Ismene, her sister tells Antigone that
women can't stand up to men.
– She says that Antigone should let
the men rule, and obey them even
when they are wrong.
– Ismene is much more like real
Athenian women than Antigone.
Antigone--Analysis
• Child of Oedipus and Jocasta, and therefore both Oedipus’s
daughter and his sister. Antigone appears briefly at the end of
Oedipus the King, when she says goodbye to her father as
Creon prepares to banish Oedipus.
• She appears at greater length in Oedipus at Colonus, leading
and caring for her old, blind father in his exile.
• But Antigone comes into her own in Antigone. As that play’s
protagonist, she demonstrates a courage and clarity of sight
unparalleled by any other character in the three Theban plays.
Whereas other characters—Oedipus, Creon, Polynices—are
reluctant to acknowledge the consequences of their actions,
Antigone is unabashed in her conviction that she has done
right.
• She is very much her father’s daughter, and she begins her
play with the same swift decisiveness with which Oedipus
began his. Within the first fifty lines, she is planning to defy
Creon’s order and bury Polynices.
• Unlike her father, however, Antigone possesses a remarkable
ability to remember the past. Whereas Oedipus defies Tiresias,
the prophet who has helped him so many times, and whereas he
seems almost to have forgotten his encounter with Laius at the
three-way crossroads, Antigone begins her play by talking about
the many griefs that her father handed down to his children.
• Because of her acute awareness of her own history, Antigone is
much more dangerous than Oedipus, especially to Creon. Aware
of the kind of fate her family has been allotted, Antigone feels
she has nothing to lose. The thought of death at Creon’s hands
that so terrifies Ismene does not even faze Antigone, who looks
forward to the glory of dying for her brother.
•Yet even in her expression of this noble sentiment,
we see the way in which Antigone continues to be
haunted by the perversion that has destroyed her
family. Speaking about being killed for burying
Polynices, she says that she will lie with the one she
loves, loved by him, and it is difficult not to hear at
least the hint of sexual overtones, as though the selfdestructive impulses of the Oedipus family always
tend toward the incestuous.
• Antigone draws attention to the difference between divine law and
human law. More than any other character in the three plays, she casts
serious doubt on Creon’s authority. When she points out that his edicts
cannot override the will of the gods or the unshakable traditions of
men, she places Creon’s edict against Polynices’ burial in a
perspective that makes it seem shameful and ridiculous.
• Creon sees her words as merely a passionate, wild outburst, but he will
ultimately be swayed by the words of Tiresias, which echo those of
Antigone. It is important to note, however, that Antigone’s motivation
for burying Polynices is more complicated than simply reverence for
the dead or for tradition.
She says that she would never have taken upon herself
the responsibility of defying the edict for the sake of a
husband or children, for husbands and children can be
replaced; brothers, once the parents are dead, cannot.
In Antigone we see a woman so in need of familial
connection that she is desperate to maintain the
connections she has even in death.
Greek Comedy
• The evolution of comedy is more complex than
tragedy, though as to its origin and earlier
development there is little exact information. All
that Aristotle can tell us is that it first took shape in
Megaris and Sicyon, whose people were noted for
their coarse humour and sense of the ludicrous,
while Susarion, the earliest comic poet, was a native
of a Megarian town. Add to this that it arose from
the phallic processions of the Greeks, as did tragedy
from the dithyramb, and we have about all that is
known about the origins of comedy.
• At country festivals held in celebration of the vintage it was the custom for
people to pass from village to village, some in carts, uttering the crude jests
and abuse unjustly attributed to the tragic choruses; others on foot, bearing
aloft the phallic emblem and singing the praises of Phales, the comrade of
Bacchus.
• In cities it was also the custom, after an evening banquet, for young men to
roam around the streets with torches in their hands, headed by a lyre or
flute-player.
• Such a group of revellers was called a comus, and a member of the band a
comoedus or comus-singer, the song itself being termed a comoedia, or
comedy, just as a song of satyrs was named a tragoedia, or tragedy.
What Makes You Laugh?
“Oh Great! Nothing Kills a Joke Faster than Having to Explain It!”
Rearick
• Surprise—This is why people laugh even at
course jokes, they’re surprised. (It’s also why
one hears laughter just as much as screams in
spook houses.)
• Extremes—The grotesque. Often things are
funny just because they are a bit more than
what we know is true.
• The Phallic processions were continued as late as the days
of Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE), and we learn from one of the
orations of Demosthenes that the riotous youths who
infested the streets of Athens delighted in their comic
buffooneries. Pasquinades of the most obscene kind were
part of the exhibitions. When formally established as part of
the Dionysiac festivals, the Leneas and Dionysia, it had its
chorus, though less numerous and costly than the
dithyrambic choir, and the actors, at first without masks,
disguised their features by smearing them with the lees of
wine.
• By Plato comedy is defined as the
generic name for all exhibitions which have
a tendency to excite laughter. Though its
development was mainly due to the political
and social conditions of Athens, it finally held
up the mirror to all that was characteristic of
Athenian life.
• The old comedy, dating from the establishment of democracy
by Kleisthenes, about 510 BC, arose, as we have seen, from
the obscene jests of Dionysian revellers, to which was given a
political application.
• In outward form these comedies were the most extravagant of
burlesque, in essence they were the most virulent of abuse and
personal vilification.
• In its license of word and gesture, on its audacious directness
of invective, no restriction was placed by the dramatist, the
audience or the authorities.
• The satire and abuse were directed against some object of
popular dislike, to whom were not only applied such epithets
as coward, fool and knave, but he was represented as saying
and doing everything that was contemptible, as suffering
everything that was ludicrous and degrading.
• But this alone would not have won for comedy such
recognition as it received from the refined and cultured
community of the age of Pericles.
• The comic dramatist who would gain a hearing in
Athens must borrow from tragedy all its most
attractive features, its choral dances, its masked
actors, its metres, its scenery and stage mechanism,
and above all the chastened elegance of the Attic
language - for this the audience required from the
dramatist, as from the lyric poet and the orator.
• Thus comedy became a recognized branch of the
drama, often presenting a brilliant sparkle in dialogue
and a poetic beauty in the choral parts not unworthy
of the best efforts of the tragic muse.
• Thus, also, it became a powerful engine in the hands
of a skillful and unscrupulous politician.
• In the hands of Aristophanes it gains the quality of
“High Seriousness” as defined by Mathew Arnold.
The Local of the Play
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
• A little about Aristophanes:
– We think he was born about 448 BC and died
in 380 BC. (?)
– Although he place and exact date of his birth are
unknown, he was still young in the 420s when he achieved sudden
brilliant success in the Theater of Dionysus with his Banqueters.
– He was obviously educated and must accordingly have been from a
relatively wealthy family; his deme—a portion of Greece--was
Kudathenaion (the same as that of the leading Athenian statesman
Cleon).
– He is famous for writing comedies such as The Birds for the two
Athenian dramatic festivals: the City Dionysia and the Lenea.
– He wrote forty plays, eleven of which survive; his plays are the only
surviving complete examples of Old Attic Comedy, although
extensive fragments of the work of his rough contemporaries
Cratinus and Eupolis survive.
– Eleven of his 40 comedies still exist, including Lysistrata.
• In his comedies he makes fun of important people in Athens,
and attacks the war that Athens was fighting against Sparta,
The Peloponnesian War, for more than 20 years off and on.
• In some plays Aristophanes dresses his Chorus as animals
(frogs, wasps, birds) or even
• Hints in the text of his plays, supported by ancient scholars,
suggest that he was prosecuted several times by Cleon for
defaming Athens in the presence of foreigners and the like;
how much truth there is to this is impossible to say.
• The Frogs was given the unprecedented honor of a second
performance. According to a later biographer, he was also
awarded a civic crown for the play.
Lysistrata
• The opening scene of Lysistrata enacts
the stereotypical and traditional
characterization of women in Greece
and also distances Lysistrata from this
clichéd, housewife character
• The audience is met with a woman, Lysistrata, who is furious
with the other women from her country because they have not
come to discuss war with her.
• Lysistrata is not only angered because the women won't
prioritize war and the peace of their country, but she is
ashamed that the women won't stand up to the stereotypes and
names that their husband's give them. Lysistrata tells Kleonike,
"I'm positively ashamed to be a woman", and Kleonike
proudly admits, "That's us!"
• Images of Lysistrata
• Ironically, even though she despises the labels men give to
women, Lysistrata fits the stereotype of “the devious woman.”
• Lysistrata deviates from the Grecian male will to further the
Peloponnesian War and, with the help of other women,
essentially takes over Greece and ends the war
• Like a man, with her plan for a sex strike in mind, Lysistrata
examines women for their sexual potential. When Lampito,
Ismenia and the Korinthian Girl enter, Lysistrata scrutinizes
the women's bodies, as a male would do. Homosexuality
would have not sounded the same bells it does for us.
• Recognizing the performance practices of Ancient Greece is
vital to an understanding of Aristophanes's real purpose in the
writing of Lysistrata.
• The illusion and sexual tension of an original performance of
Lysistrata would have been undoubtedly influenced by the fact
that males played all of the female parts and that there was
only an all-male audience to watch.
• With this in mind, it seems that one
could view Lysistrata as a
chauvinist piece, with men playing
at their idealized woman.
• However there remain a few earnest arguments for
empowering women in the play.
– The shortage of men in Athens necessitated the
empowerment of women. Indeed, in the play there seems
an overabundance of women by comparison to the males.
Lauren K. Taafee points out that the conditions of Athens
in 412 and 411 BC may have actually caused such an
inequality.
– The Sicilian expedition killed many young and middleaged men.
– The male population was actually reduced by one-third in
411.
• Thus, Lysistrata complains about a real problem facing Athens
when she complains that there is a shortage of men because of
the war.
Sex Strikes?
"If men were to go on strike! and deny women sex,
in the end you would have a bunch of horny men"
• “Sex Strikes Through the Ages”
http://www.amrep.org/lysistrata/ages.html
• “No Water, No Sex: Wives Tell Husbands women
want Turkish village's system fixed”
http://www.uswaternews.com/archives/arcglobal/1no
wat9.html
• Colombian Gangsters Face Sex Ban
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5341574.stm
Sites Cited
• Ancient Greek Comedy” Wikipedia The Free
Encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Attic_Comedy 7
November 2006
• Borey, Eddie. "GradeSaver: ClassicNote: Medea
Study Guide." www.gradesaver.com. 7 November
2006. GradeSaver. 7 November 2006
http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/medea.
• Davidson, James. "Dover, Foucault And Greek
Homosexuality: Penetration and the Truth of Sex."
Past & Present 170 (2001): 3-51.
http://past.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/170/1/3.pdf
• Douthat, Ross. SparkNote on Agamemnon. 2 Nov.
2006 http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/agamemnon/
• Lusher, Lindsey. SparkNote on Lysistrata. 7 Nov.
2006 http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/lysistrata.
• Parsons, David “The Writers” Classics Teaching
Resources. 2 Nov. 2006
http://www.parsonsd.co.uk/theatre/writers.php
• Prado, Ignacio. SparkNote on Medea. 7 Nov. 2006
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/medea.
• SparkNote on The Oedipus Plays. 2 Nov. 2006
http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/oedipus.