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2.4 Athenian Drama

1. Drama is one of the great cultural achievements of the ancient Greek culture. The center of this art was Athens. This is the theatre of Dionysus in Athens

Origin of drama. In chapter one, we mentioned in Archaic Greece there were two tyrants ruled Athens for 35 years, Peisistratus and his son Hippias promoted festivals. At the festival of Athena large parts of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey were recited. At the Dionysia, the festival of Dionysus, God of wine, tragedies and comedies were performed. Since then drama had become popular, not only in Athens but throughout the Greek world.

2. There were three dramatic genres; genre is a kind of artistic work

Tragedy is extremely sad, and often ends with the death or failure of the great man. Greek tragedy is an extension of the ancient rites carried out in honor of Dionysus; tragic plots were often based on myths from the archaic epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Plot is the series of events which make up the story. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed Dionysus represented what was unrestrained chaotic and irrational, while Apollo represented the rational and ordered. Nietzsche also believed Greek Tragedy was entirely based on suffering of Dionysus.

Comedy is intended to make people laugh. Many Greek comedies are political satires. Satire is the use of humor or exaggeration in order to show how foolish or wicked some people's behavior or ideas are. And Greek comedies were full of sexual innuendos. Innuendo is indirect reference to something rude or unpleasant. 

3. Satyr play is short, played after tragedy. It could make audiences laugh and give them some relief to the sadness atmosphere of the hour’s long tragedy. It was a kind of tragicomedy, between tragedy and comedy but more close to comedy. The stories were based on Greek mythology and epics. In Satyr plays drunken satyrs interact with gods and human, full of pranks and sexual jokes. In Greek mythology, satyrs were companions of Dionysus; usually have horse-like ears and tails, and a permanent, exaggerated erected penis. In the play actors use a prop, an object to represent a penis. In Roman mythology satyr was a goat man, Roman name faun. Have you seen the movie the Chronicles of Narnia, this goat man is a faun, named Mr. Tumnus. The only satyr play survived is Euripides' Cyclops based on Odysseus’ adventure. Cyclops are giants having a single eye.

4. Aeschylus c. 525/524 – c. 456/455 BC is often described as the father of tragedy. He wrote maybe ninety plays but only seven survived, remember the picture of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens; many of Aeschylus's plays were performed there at the Dionysia, the festival of Dionysus. He had won the first prize in nearly every year’s competition. Aeschylus was a war hero; he fought Persians at the Battle of Marathon and Salamis. His paly the Persians, was the only surviving classical Greek tragedy concerned with contemporary events.

5. Oresteia is the only survived trilogy of Greek plays. It has three parts; tells a bloody story of murder and revenge. After the Trojan War Agamemnon, King of Argos returned but soon murdered by his wife and her lover. What was the reason? Before the war, Agamemnon killed and sacrificed their daughter to the gods so that the gods would blow the winds and allow the Greek fleet to sail to Troy. Another reason was Agamemnon brought back a Trojan woman. Finally Agamemnon’ son Orestes killed his mother and her lover.

6. Sophocles c. 497/6 – 406/5 BC wrote over 120 plays but only seven survived. Oedipus the King is the most famous one. The city state Thebes was suffering from a plague. The oracle from Delphi told King Oedipus the reason of the plague was that the murderer of their former king has never been caught. Oedipus asked a blind prophet for help. A prophet is a person who is believed to be chosen by God to say the things that God wants to tell people. The prophet told the king: you are the murder, you killed the former king your father, and you married to your own mother. This was so horrible.

Many years ago, the former king and queen had a boy. A prophet told them: the child would kill his father and marry his mother. They gave the baby to a shepherd and asked him to abandon the boy on the mountainside. But the shepherd gave the boy to another shepherd and finally the boy was brought to Corinth and adopted by a couple. When the boy grew up, someone told him he didn’t know his true father. He went to Delphi for the oracle, the oracle said: you will kill your father and marry your mother. He didn’t know he was adopted. To avoid this he left Corinth, on the way he argued with a man and killed him, the man actually his father. He arrived Thebes and married the beautiful queen, his mother. When everything was clear, the queen hung herself. Oedipus took the long gold pins of the queen, stabbed into his own eyes in despair.

7. He was a blind man now and begged to be exiled as soon as possible.

8. The Riddle of the Sphinx

On the way to Thebes, Oedipus was asked a riddle by a Sphinx; a sphinx is a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion. "Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?" she would kill and eat anyone who could not answer. Oedipus solved the riddle: "Man—who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and then uses a walking stick in old age".

9. The Oedipus complex is a concept created by Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. It refers to a young boy’s unconscious sexual desire for his mother and hatred for his father or a young girl’s sexual desire for her father and hatred for her mother. Freud used this concept to analyze the Hamlet’s delay. We know Hamlet was suffered by the “to be or not to be, it is a question”. Why Hamlet delayed? Freud believed Hamlet was pressured by the thought: his uncle killed his father and married his mother, and that was what Hamlet himself wished to do. Freud’s theory sounds horrible, right?

10. Euripides c.480 –c.406 BC was the youngest of the three great tragedians. He wrote 95 plays but only 19 survived. Euripides' characters resembled contemporary Athenians rather than heroic figures of myth. He demonstrated sympathy towards all victims of society including women. Passion ruled his plays. His characters even doubted the gods: “Does someone say that there are gods in heaven? There are not, unless one chooses to follow old tradition like a fool”

Aristophanes c. 446 – c. 386 BC is "the Father of Comedy". He wrote 40 plays and 11survived. In his work Aristophanes used wit, imagination and dirty jokes to poke fun at prominent people like statesmen, philosophers, and artists even gods. In his famous comedy Lysistrata, a Greek woman called a meeting of women from all city states across Greece and persuaded them to refuse to have sex with their husbands and lovers, why? They wanted to force the men to end the Peloponnesian War and to negotiate peace.

11. Key words: Dionysia Three, Tragedians, Satyr, Oedipus the King, the Oedipus complex