[Background of Greek Drama: Excerpts from your textbook on pg. 348-349]
Ancient Greece: The Minoans
The brilliant Minoan culture, named after the mythical king Minos, thrived on the island of Crete from about 3000-1000 BC. The Minoans were sophisticated palace dwellers accustomed to comfort, luxury, and beauty. By 1600, Minoans were influencing the entire Greek world through trade and colonization.
Ancient Greece: The Effect of Gods
As personifications of ware, plague, or earthquake, the Greek gods were formidable. Yet because they had human qualities and foibles, they were approachable and even comic. The Greeks perceived their relationship to the gods as one of mutually advantageous exchange. They often held religious festivals in honor of the gods, hoping that the gods would reward them. The most famous example of such a festival is the Olympic Games, first held in 776 BC in honor of Zeus, the king of the gods.
The ancient Greeks regarded the city of Delphi, perched dramatically on the slope of Mount Parnassus, as the “navel,” or center of the world. This was the place where Apollo, the Greek god of music, poetry, prophecy, and medicine, spoke to humans through the mouth of his priestess, the Oracle.
Delegation would come from throughout the known world to question the Oracle, especially about the outcome of wars or other political situations. They hoped that Apollo would answer human uncertainties with his divine knowledge. Private individuals also attended the monthly sessions of the Oracle, in the hope of solving life’s small but urgent dilemmas: Should I marry? Is this a good time to travel? Should I move to a new city?
The Oracle, an elderly woman, followed a strict ritual in order to give Apollo’s answers to these questions. She bathed, drank from sacred waters, descended to the basement of Apollo’s temple, climbed onto a sacred stool, and chewed the leaves of a plant, the laurel, associated with Apollo. Entering into a trance, she would answer questions with words that the god inspired her to speak. Priests would write down these words in verse that sounded like riddles.
Greek Literature
From the Dark Age of Greece came oral epic poetry that served as the raw material for Homer’s sophisticated epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two works deal, respectively, with the Greek conquest of Troy and the wanderings of the hero Odysseus after the Trojan ware. The Homeric epics convey such values of ancient Greek culture as physical bravery, skill, honor, reverence for the gods, and intelligence.
Of all the genres of Greek literature, lyric poetry loses the most in translation. Specifically, it loses its musical quality—lyric originally meant “sung to the lyre.” Nevertheless, Greek lyric poets like Sappho influences the Roman poets and still influence today’s writers.
Greek drama developed in connection with religious rituals and reached its peak in fifth-century Athens. Tragedies, which chronicled the downfall of a noble person, raised difficult questions about justice, evil, and the reasons for human suffering. In keeping with its religious origin, tragedy provided an emotional rather than philosophical resolution for the questions it raised.
As a means of making the audience feel purged or cleansed, Greek tragedy aroused them in the powerful emotions of pity for the tragic hero and awe at his or her fate. In order of birth, the three greatest Greek tragedians are Aeschylus, Sophocles, who wrote Oedipus the King, and Euripides. Although the surviving Greek tragedies are among the best works of world literature, we have available only a small percentage of the dramas these men actually wrote.
[Handout of page 460-461 of textbook]
[Introduction to Greek Drama Specifics from Powerpoint]
Greek playwright Sophocles wrote the last play in the Theban Trilogy, Antigone, around 442 B.C. The Theban Trilogy consists of Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King), Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, but the play considered the last of the three was, ironically, written first. Sophocles was born around 496 B.C. and died sometime after 441 B.C. and lived near Athens. Only seven of Sophocles' one hundred and twenty-three tragedies have survived to the modern era—with the trilogy surviving the ages intact.
This is what Sophocles may have intended when he wrote Antigone. Based on the legends of Oedipus, Sophocles may have been trying to send a message to the Athenian (Athens) general, Pericles, about the dangers of authoritarian rule and having the Gods intervene. Authoritarian rule is characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom.
The fifth century B.C. in Greece was a time of great advancement in philosophy, art, and government. Great writers such as Aristotle, Aeschylus, and Sophocles wrote plays, philosophy, and political tracts that would influence the world for thousands of years to come. Democracy was being established, and the first doctors were taking the “Hippocratic Oath,” written by Hippocrates the Great in 429 B.C.; this oath is the same oath taken by contemporary doctors. Attending the theater was a civic and religious duty in Sophocles’ time. By setting his play in a time period 800 years before his own, he could explore social and political issues without offending those currently in power.
Sophocles was not only a respected writer, but also a member of the government in Athens. Democracy was practiced differently in Ancient Greece than it is in the modern United States. Full citizenship, which included the right to vote, was only given to free men; women and slaves were not considered full citizens and so lacked the same rights as men. They were forced to follow a different code of conduct. Despite such inequities and restrictions, the foundations laid in the fifth century B.C. provided a framework for the founders of the United States.
The Great Dionysia is a festival in honor of the god Dionysus, the god of fertility, theater, and wine in Athens. The tragedies written by Sophocles were performed at this festival. Attending these plays was considered a civic duty, and even criminals were let out of jail to attend. Antigone won Sophocles first prize at the festival and was an enormous success. The theater of Dionysus as it survives today with the remains of an elaborate stone skene, paved orchestra and marble seats was built in the last third of the fourth century BC. This stone theater had a capacity of approximately fifteen thousand spectators.
By the middle of the fifth century three actors were required for the performance of a tragedy. In descending order of importance of the roles they assumed they were called the (1) Protagonist: first actor (a term also applied in modern literary criticism to the central character of a play) (2) Deuteragonist: second actor (3) Tritagonist: third actor. The protagonist took the role of the most important character in the play while the other two actors played the lesser roles. Initially when dramas were first performed, most plays had more than two or three characters (although never more than three speaking actors in the same scene), so all three actors played multiple roles.
Women were not allowed to take part in dramatic productions, so male actors had to play female roles. The playing of multiple roles, both male and female, was made possible by the use of masks, which prevented the audience from identifying the face of any actor with one specific character. The masks with subtle variations also helped the audience identify the sex, age, and social rank of the characters.
The fact that the chorus remained in the orchestra throughout the play and sang and danced choral songs between the episodes allowed the actors to exit after an episode. It allowed the actors to change mask and costume and assume a new role in the next episode without any illusion-destroying interruption in the play. The standard number of members of a chorus was twelve, but was raised to fifteen by Sophocles. The chorus, like the actors, wore costumes and masks.
Tragedy has a characteristic structure in which scenes of dialogue alternate with choral songs.
This arrangement allows the chorus to comment in its song in a general way on what has been said and/or done in the preceding scene. Most tragedies begin with an opening scene of dialogue or a monologue called a prologue. The theater was an open-air auditorium and, due to the lack of adequate artificial lighting, performances took place during the day. Scenes set at night had to be identified as such by the actors or the chorus; the audience, upon receiving these verbal cues, had to use its imagination.
The plot of a tragedy normally takes place in front of palaces, temples and other outdoor settings. This seemed natural to the ancient audience because Greek public affairs, whether civic or religious, were conducted outside.
There are specific stage and theatre production terms that are relevant for the 5th century drama. The word skene which means 'tent', and was used to refer to a wooden wall having doors and painted to represent a palace, temple or whatever setting was required. In modern terms, this would be the equivalent to the dressing room. A mechane is a 'theatrical machine', a crane to which a cable with a harness for an actor was attached. This device allowed an actor portraying a god or goddess to arrive on scene in the most realistic way possible, from the sky. An Ekkyklema is a ‘wheeled-out thing', or a platform on wheels rolled out through one of the doors of the skene, on which a table was displayed representing the result of an action indoors (e.g., a murder) and therefore was unseen by the audience.