GREEK DRAMA II
The works of histories greatest playwrights and poets are often very difficult to understand at first.  The works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Milton, Spencer, and many others tend to seem like collections of long, impenetrable, maybe even unnecessary speeches and descriptions.  But stay with these works long enough, and they undergo a miraculous transformation.  You begin to understand a little of what these writers are doing, then more and more, until at last these furies that torment poor undergraduate students become Eumenides, kindly ones--real treasures.  There is a deep wisdom in these works.  "Wise is Sophocles, wise is Euripides," said the oracle, "but the wisest is Socrates."  Fond as I am of Socrates, I'm inclined to disagree.  The works of the great Greek tragic playwrights have every bit of the wisdom one sees in Socrates--though expressed differently.

One of the impressive things about the Greek playwrights is that their work is so consistently good.  Of the plays that survive, there is not a bad play among them, and (apparently) the selection we have is a bit arbitrary.  We have the plays especially worth preserving for pedagogical purposes, not necessarily those most effective on the stage--though, of course, they are all very effective stage plays too. 

The Oresteia of Aeschylus is the only complete trilogy that survives.  It's impressive in the way it presents a fundamental problem: how does one break a cycle of bloodshed, vengeance, and more bloodshed?  The Orestei suggests and answer not only for Orestes, but for larger society.  The play affirms the rule of law and trial by the court of the Areopagus: a wonderful alternative to private vengeance.

Aeschylus was apparently able to bring about similar resolutions of fundamental conflicts in his other trilogies.  Prometheus Bound is the middle play of a trilogy in which Aeschylus resolves the conflict between force and reason, and (again) his resolution would have been an affirmation of Athenian democracy: a system where (ideally at least) force works alongside reason.

Aeschylus wrote another trilogy of which we have only the first play: The Suppliant Maidens. This trilogy deals with the potential conflict between law and love. Fifty Egyptian sisters have fled from marriage with their 50 cousins that they don't love.  They've taken refuge in Argos.  The issue: can the Argives protect them when, legally, they should marry their cousins?  And is it prudent to protect suppliants at a potential cost to one's own safety?  Suppliant Maidens affirms the rightness of protecting women from an unwanted suitor. 

We don't have the next play of the trilogy, but we know the basic story.  Somehow, the women have once again come under the power of their unwanted suitors.  They'll have to go through with the wedding, but they all vow to kill their husbands on the wedding night.  They do: and (apparently) once again there's an affirmation of the idea that women shouldn't be compelled to marry men they don't love. 

One of the women, though, breaks her vow.  She doesn't kill her new husband, and, in the final play of the trilogy, Hypermnestra is on trial for breaking her vow.  In the end, though, with the help of Aphrodite, she escapes penalty.  The claims of love over law are vindicated, this time in a different way.

There's yet another Aeschylus trilogy in which only the last play survives, a trilogy based on the family of Oedipus.  The issue here has to do with how one deals with prophecies of future danger. 

The first play (not extent, unfortunately) centers around Oedipus' father Laius.  Prophecies warn Laius that the baby his wife is carrying will kill him and marry his mother.  To avert this, Laius does something wicked: he orders that the baby be killed.  I suspect (but don't know) that there is a major struggle with his wife Jocasta about this.  I wish we knew: women were often ordered to expose their babies in the ancient world, and we don't know nearly enough about how they reacted to this situation. 

The second play (also not extent) centers around Oedipus.  Oedipus hears a prophecy that he will murder his father and marry his mother.  To escape this, he runs--not knowing that couple he things of as father and mother and that he loves aren't really his father and mother at all.  He ends up running right into the thing he feared, and does end up unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother.

The final play (which we do have) is the Seven Against Thebes.  Here, Eteocles, Oedipus' son, has to deal with the prophecy that he and his brother will kill each other.  What does he do?  He does his best to do exactly what he should do, staying in Thebes in its hour of need and protecting it from outside invasion.  He does end up killing his brother, and he does die at his brother's hand, but Eteocles dies a hero: he's saved Thebes.

It's a great treatment of the story of Oedipus and has family, but it's not a story told for the last time.

Twenty years later, Sophocles, a younger rival of Aeschylus returned to the story of Oedipus and his family, giving us the play Antigone. Ten years later, Sophocles wrote a play on Oedipus himself, a play we call Oedipus Rex or Oedipus the King.  And then twenty years after that, and nearing the end of us life, Sophocles again gave us an Oedipus play, Oedipus at Colonus. 

These three plays together are often called the "Theban Trilogy," but this isn't a trilogy like those of Aeschylus.  As we follow the story of Oedipus family, Antigone, the first written of these plays, takes place after Oedipus' death.  Oedipus, the 2nd of the plays written, deals with earlier events, while the last play written, Oedipus and Colonus, deals with events between those of Oedipus Rex and Antigone.

Athenian theater had changed quite a bit by the time these plays were written, and Sophocles himself had a hand in making the changes.  Aristotle tells us Sophocles introduced the 3rd actor to the stage, and that he introduced painted scenery.  The chorus was enlarged somewhat (moving from 12 to 15 members) but the choral passages tended to be shorter.  Perhaps the biggest change is that, while the competitors still wrote 3 tragedies and a satyr play, no longer were the tragedies parts of trilogies.  Each play was a stand-alone work.

[In class, we discuss the "narrative essentials," plot, character, theme, setting, and tone and note what Sophocles does that's impressive in each of these areas.  In particular, we try to figure out the theme of the play.  Is it about fate?  Probably not.  Aeschylus had done that in his Oedipus trilogy.  More likely, the play has to do with the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of truth no matter what the cost.  It might also teach us something about patience: don't be so quick to curse or condemn people.  They might be trying to do their best by you.  And the person you curse just might be you!  Finally, we talk about catharsis.  Aristotle's idea was that seeing the fall of a great but imperfect man did something important to us, "through pity and terror effecting the purgation of these emotions."  Maybe there's a cure here for our temptation to envy the apparently successful.  Or, just perhaps, the catharsis involved has something to do with Oedipus' heroism.  He does in the end find the guilty party and makes sure he doesn't hang around Thebes.  He's saved his people--and at enormous personal cost.]