Week 12 (Dec 2-4) Greek Tragedy PDF

December 2nd, 2024 Greek Tragedy Cont. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King In the city of Thebes, king Laius and his wife Jocasta receive a horrible prophecy from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. Laius was told that he was fated to die at the hands of his son. Thus, Laius decided to get rid of his newborn...

December 2nd, 2024 Greek Tragedy Cont. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King In the city of Thebes, king Laius and his wife Jocasta receive a horrible prophecy from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. Laius was told that he was fated to die at the hands of his son. Thus, Laius decided to get rid of his newborn son. The Greeks had a strong belief in ‘pollution,’ a kind of sacred impurity which would follow transgressive events, like slaying one’s own family. To avoid pollution, Laius and his wife mutilate Oedipus’ foot and give him to a herdsman to ‘expose’ the infant on a mountain outside the city. The herdsman instead gives the infant to a herdsman from Corinth, whose king was childless and in search of an heir. Thus, Oedipus was raised as the son of the King of Corinth. Oedipus comes of age as the prince in Corinth, but when he is on the threshold of manhood, he is at a banquet and hears people talking about him not being the real son of the Corinthian king. Oedipus goes to the oracle at Delphi to resolve the matter but is told that he is going to kill his father and marry his mother. He is horrified, and to avoid this fate he leaves Corinth and hits the road towards Thebes. Thebes is having its own issues, as it is being haunted by a sphinx, a composite monster imported from Egypt with the head of a woman and the body of the lion. The Sphinx would ask passersby a riddle, and when the passerby failed to answer correctly, she would kill them. King Laius sets off to figure out what to do about the Sphinx and him and his retinue set off for Delphi. They encounter Oedipus on the road, and after an altercation (but before anyone can exchange their names) Oedipus kills Laius and his men, fulfilling the first half of the oracle. Oedipus then encounters the sphinx, and immediately solves her riddle, and she casts herself off of a nearby cliff. Oedipus is welcomed into Thebes as a hero, and he is married to the recently widowed Queen Jocasta and made the king of Thebes. The beginning of the play actually starts 15 years later, after Oedipus has already had 4 children with his mother/wife. At this time Thebes has been stricken by a plague, due to a pollution of some unknown source. Oedipus sends off his brother-in-law Creon to Delphi to try and figure out what is going on. The oracle tells him that the city needs to be cleansed from its pollution to cure the plague, and the cause of the pollution is that the killer of Laius has gone unpunished. Oedipus vows to find and punish Laius’ killer, cursing this unknown man, not knowing it is himself. Oedipus’ quest quickly becomes one of finding his own identity, rather than finding Laius’ killer. After an investigation, Jocasta realises the truth before Oedipus, and she flees from the room. Oedipus realises soon after and chases after her with his sword drawn. If he intends to kill her, he is too late, as she has hanged herself. Oedipus takes a pin from her dress and gouges out his own eyes. He emerges blind, a fallen king. Sophocles’ plays are difficult to accurately date, with a few exceptions. Sophocles’ style never really develops, he has a stunningly consistent authorial voice. Scholars (maybe over)confidently date the play around 425 BCE, because Sophocles’ description of the Theban plague echoes writings about the Plague of Athens from 430. The play is often seen as a model for tragedy. The reading people tend to give is quite wrong, but this play is really hard to interpret. One scholar said, “there is no meaning in the Oedipus Tyrannos.” (Waldock). That’s probably wrong, this play is about something. General Interpretative Considerations Did Oedipus deserve his fate? What does the play say about the relationship between gods and humans? The play does not answer these kinds of questions, but it certainly makes us think about them. We get what we deserve The common reading of the play is that Oedipus suffers because of his character and gets what he deserved. He is seen as a hotheaded and hubristic, doubts oracles, and displays hyrbis, which is seen as his fatal flaw of character. In Aristotelian terms, he is guilty of hamartia. Aristotle gives an idealised picture of the tragic hero: an idealised person of high stature who falls from prosperity into adversity through a big hamartia (Poetics 13). Oedipus and Thyestes are his two examples. Hamartia The term Hamartia is much misunderstood, and in early Christian literature it is typically translated as ‘sin.’ This concept of sin acquires a certain kind of cultural status, pertaining to certain kinds of crimes and transgressions. Thus, Hamartia is a heavy-duty word in the European tradition. The problem is that this is not really what it means in early Greek periods. In Homer, the term referred to ‘falling short of a target’ or ‘missing the mark.’ It eventually comes to mean ‘error’ or ‘mistake.’ Nobody in the play is critical of Oedipus’ character, and in fact, the community of Thebes in the play remain loyal to Oedipus to the very end. If something is important in the text, the author will draw attention to it. The text tells us what is important, and Oedipus is portrayed as a good man and honourable king, so to say the problem is his character is not necessarily true (cf. the documentary fallacy). In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers a definition of hamartia: “an offence committed in ignorance of some material fact and therefore free from poneria and kakia.” Thyestes is an interesting example of hamartia. Thyestes was the brother of Agamemnon’s father Atreus. Thyestes wanted his brother’s kingship and tried to seduce Atreus’ wife. Atreus found out and invited Thyestes to lunch and fed the unwitting Thyestes his own sons. Learning what he had done, Thyestes was psychologically destroyed. We pity Oedipus because he suffers horribly and didn’t know any better, even if he did horrible things. This is what makes him tragic. If Oedipus had decided to kill his father and marry his mother, we wouldn’t pity him. Aristotle’s model of tragedy becomes very popular, but the ideal of the ‘fatal flaw of character’ is a misunderstanding of Aristotle. Could Oedipus have avoided his fate? The short answer is no. The wording of the oracle in Sophocles’ play is unconditional, so it was going to happen no matter what. In other tragedies about this myth we see other examples of the prophecy that are conditional. In one, the oracle says to Laius, ‘if you have a child, you will die by your child’s hands.’ There is some wiggle room for fate here. Aeschylus presents Oedipus’ doom as the result of a hereditary curse thanks to Lyas’ bad actions that passed down to his kin. Is Oedipus the victim of unavoidable doom? Is the play a ‘tragedy of destiny’ as Freud described it? Fate is an important factor, but the Greek view of fate is complex. Do we have free will or not? Greeks, as with many cultures, see both fate and free will co-existing. When we look retrospectively, we talk about events in terms of fate, but when you’re at a crossroads and have to make a decision, you feel that you are capable of free will. At the beginning of this play, Oedipus has already done everything wrong. This play is focused on the consequences of his actions and his fate. Some argue that the gods force on Oedipus the knowledge of what he has done, but the striking thing is Oedipus’ free will. Oedipus chooses to seek out the knowledge of the oracle. Why does Oedipus blind himself? He does this to cut himself off from humanity; he cannot accept life or death. Why does he do this if he is innocent? He wouldn’t have been convicted in any Athenian court, but Oedipus cannot forgive himself or let himself off with no punishment. He accepts fully what he has done and takes responsibility for it. December 4th, 2024 Oedipus the King Cont. Is Oedipus the King a justification of the actions of the gods? In human terms, no, but it’s not a criticism of the gods either. This play is not interested in justifying the ways of gods to humans. The oracle of Apollo is everywhere in the story and determines the fate of many. However, no one blames the gods for their fates in the play. Characters in other Greek tragedies were willing to criticize the gods for their suffering, but not here, which implies that divine justice is a topic that Sophocles isn’t really interested in exploring. The play strongly upholds the structure of traditional religion in which the gods are an unalterable fact of life and people must give them proper reverence. The gods are also beyond human comprehension. The gods are there and they rule over the Greeks. They know everything, including what was, what is, and what will be. We tend to want to understand the gods in human terms, but the Greeks are much less prone to this idea of the accountability of divinity. We are prone to judge some things good, and some things bad, but from the view of the gods, all things are in a perfect harmony and everything is just and fair in a way which humans cannot comprehend. Sophocles does not attempt to justify the world, but explore how we understand the world and how we face our fates and what happens to us. In Sophocles we see a dramatic tension between ‘humanism’ and ‘the world of the gods.’ Oedipus is the solver of the Sphinx' riddle, he is the ‘one who knows,’ but even in the end didn’t know who he was. Oedipus confronts his fate with a sort of integrity and courage, seeking it out in spite of the warnings of others. Human greatness is set against the fragility of human life in comparison with the gods. The Greeks were aware that circumstances beyond our control profoundly controlled our lives. Oedipus’ self-blinding is a form of acceptance of what he’s done. Greek Comedy Talking about ancient comedy and humour is really tricky, more so than tragedy. Tragedy touches on universal things, like suffering. Comedy is much more specific and subjective. As a result, trying to analyze humour in ancient texts is very hard. A quote by E.B. White illustrates this well: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” Our sense of what is funny changes a lot over time and is culturally dependent and historically fixed. The things that the ancients found funny are seen as crude and offensive by modern standards. It’s important to analyze though, as it’s a profound reflection of ancient attitudes. Laughter is complicated too. It can be light-hearted, positive, and uniting, but it can also be destructive, negative, and mean. There is a big difference between laughing with and laughing at something. Greek dramatic comedy has a lot of mockery and vicious attacks on people, which was laughed at, but we may not find it funny or even get the original joke. There are three phases of Greek comedy: Old Comedy - Middle Comedy - New Comedy There are also two important comic poets: Aristophanes, an Old Comic; Menander, a New Comic. Their individual humour is quite different from each other, due to changes in audience and the nature of comedy. Origins of Comedy Comedy and Tragedy are parallel words in Greek. Like tragedy (τραγῳδία = ‘goat-song’), comedy seems to have developed within the cult of Dionysus. Scholars posit two origins for comedy. Some suggest that it arose from komodia (κωμῳδία) = ‘song of the komos’, the finale of the symposium where symposiasts go to the streets and proclaim their entitlement. Others suggest it arose from the ‘song of the village (kome),’ which draws attention to the rustic connections of comedy in the rural cults of Dionysus. Aristotle tells us that comedy arose “from the leaders of the phallic songs, which remain customary even now in many Greek cities” (Poetics 4). We know that there were aspects of Dionysiac cult worship which centred around phallic displays and worship. These displays were about aggression, power, and masculinity, and there is an aggressive nature to Greek comedy as well. What is the difference between tragedy and comedy? Traditionally, it has been thought that the difference is that tragedies are sad and comedies are funny. This is not a sufficient explanation and this distinction doesn’t really work. Euripides wrote some pretty funny tragedies. The actual differences are in the way the two forms relate to their audiences. Tragedy is set in the mythic past, an objectifying distance. Comedy is set in the contemporary and specific world of classical Athens. Characteristics of Old Comedy Costumes Padded and elaborate, tilting towards the grotesque The actors wore masks, as they did in tragedy They also sometimes wore large red leather penises Chorus The chorus was much bigger than that in tragedy: 24 members in number (Tragic choruses were 12-16) The chorus was of primary importance in Old Comedy, but basically gone by New Comedy Language Elaborate and varied, and much sexual and scatological humour Plots Often fantastical and loosely structured, indifferent to reality, and with an emphasis on a comic ‘hero.’ A strong connection with the world of contemporary Athens, such as in the play Clouds, which prominently featured a caricature of Socrates, who we know attended this play. The actors in Old Comedy would also point out audience members by name, as in Clouds, where they would try to find the ‘biggest asshole’ in attendance. There were elements of social and political satire that present a fundamentally conservative outlook. Old Comedy was about reaffirming the status quo. Middle Comedy (ca. 404-321 BCE) We know the least about Middle Comedy. We have quotations from others, but no complete plays survive. Middle Comedy emerges after Athens’ defeat in 404 BCE and topical comedy like in Old Comedy grew out of fashion in this more politically precarious environment. Old Comedy became dangerous because it challenged the status quo, and so middle comedy has little political criticism. The playwrights Alexis and Eubulus were significant figures. New Comedy (ca. 320-250 BCE) Until recently New Comedy was known almost exclusively through Roman adaptations by Plautus and Terrence during the Roman Republic. The Romans weren’t translating these plays but adapting them for Roman audiences with different humor. So how do we work out what Menander was like as a writer? Luckily, in the 1950s we found substantial papyrus fragments from Menander, including a complete play, Dyskolos ‘The Bad-Tempered Man.’ This has increased our knowledge of Menander significantly. Characteristics of New Comedy In New Comedy we see the Chorus disappears completely. The 5-act structure emerged from structural changes in Old Comedy and this became the standard structure for all drama until recently. There is an emphasis on social comedy and social tensions between the rich and poor, town and country, citizens and non-citizens, free and slave, men and women, and parents and children. In this phase, there is no topical comedy, obscenity, no phalloi, etc. These are all things from Old Comedy which were dropped from the tradition. The language of New Comedy is much closer to tragedy as well. The playwright Menander’s strength was the sympathetic portrayal of many different kinds of personal relationships and the problems that arise from ignorance, misunderstanding, and prejudice. Menander has a greater interest in the integrity of the plot than we see in Old Comedy. The Papyrus of Menander’s Dyskolos (end of Act 1) In the papyri fragment from Dyskolos we see a gap left for the chorus, which at that point was a song and dance routine used as a buffer between acts, divorced from the plot of the play. The House of Menander, Mytlilene (Lesbos) This is an excavated house of someone who was a super-fan of Menander. Their house is full of incredible mosaics depicting precise moments from Menander’s plays.