Test Your Knowledge of Greek Tragedy

Greek Tragedy: A Form of Theatre from Ancient Greece

• Greek tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and Greek inhabited Anatolia.

• Tragic plots were most often based upon myths from the oral traditions of archaic epics.

• The most acclaimed Greek tragedians are Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

• Greek tragedy is believed to be an extension of the ancient rites carried out in honor of Dionysus.

• Tragedy heavily influenced the theatre of Ancient Rome and the Renaissance.

• The origin of the word tragedy has been a matter of discussion from ancient times.

• The primary source of knowledge on the question is the Poetics of Aristotle.

• Aristotle was able to gather first-hand documentation from theater performance in Attica.

• The structure of Greek tragedy is characterized by a set of conventions.

• The Greek dialects used are the Attic dialect for the parts spoken or recited by individual characters, and a literary Doric dialect for the chorus.

• Aristotle asserted that a play must be complete and whole, in other words, it must have unity.

• The three Aristotelian unities of drama are the unities of time, place and action.Greek Tragedy: A Summary

• Greek tragedy was a popular form of theatre in ancient Greece, with key elements including a three-act structure, unity of time, place, and action.

• Friedrich Nietzsche highlighted the contrast between the Dionysian and Apollonian elements of tragedy.

• Greek tragedy was a collective ritual of the polis, with performances taking place in a sacred, consecrated space, voicing ideas and problems from Athenian society.

• The Great Dionysia was a festival where a contest between three plays took place, chosen by the archon eponymous, with each tetralogy recited in one day.

• Of the many tragedies known to have been written, just 32 full-length texts by only three authors, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, survive.

• The role of the audience in a Greek Tragedy was to become part of that theatrical illusion, to partake in the act as if they were part of it.

• The chorus was often of one type of social position (in both age, gender, nationality, and class), with the citizen chorus being distinguished by status and seen as a subset of the demos.

• Greek tragedy was performative and not an attempt to approach Greek tragedy through context, with the origins based on song or speech rather than written script.

• Deus Ex Machina is a technique in which an action is halted by the appearance of an unforeseen character or through the intervention of a god, that essentially brings about a conclusion to a play.

• Character identification can be seen in many of Aeschylus' plays, such as Prometheus Bound.

• Of the many tragedies known to have been written, just 32 full-length texts by only three authors, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, survive.

• The surviving works of Aeschylus include the Oresteia, Sophocles wrote seven plays, and Euripides wrote eighteen tragedies and the only complete surviving satyr play, the Cyclops.