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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter VII: Sources: Homer, Hesiod & the Tragedians

Greek Tragedy and Myth: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides

Greek tragedy and myth: the City Dionysia, masks and choruses, and how Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides reshaped the myths, with how their plays survived.

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Greek tragedy was a form of drama created in Athens in the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE and performed at festivals of Dionysus. Almost all tragedies retold myths — the stories of Troy, Thebes, Argos and the heroes — and the three tragedians whose work survives, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, gave many of those myths the shape in which they are best known today, often altering earlier versions to explore justice, suffering and the ways of the gods.

The religious roots of the theatre and the god in whose honour plays were performed are discussed in Dionysus and the Bacchae; this article concentrates on the plays as sources for Greek myth.

Tragedy at the City Dionysia§

Aristotle believed that tragedy grew out of the improvisations of the leaders of the dithyramb, a choral song for Dionysus, and later tradition named Thespis as the first to set an actor against the chorus, around 534 BCE. How much of this is reliable is debated. What is certain is that by the early fifth century tragedy was a central part of the City Dionysia, a spring festival held in the month Elaphebolion (March–April), with processions, sacrifices and several days of performances in the theatre of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis.

The festival was civic as well as religious. The archon chose three tragic poets and "granted them a chorus"; wealthy citizens called chorēgoi paid for training and costumes; judges were selected by lot; and before the plays the city displayed its allies' tribute and paraded the sons of citizens killed in war. Tragedy was performed before the assembled citizen body, and its myths were shaped with that audience in mind. For the wider festival system see Greek Sacrifice, Festivals and Temples.

Choruses, Masks and Tetralogies: How the Plays Were Made§

Each competing poet presented a tetralogy: three tragedies and a satyr play, a burlesque with a chorus of satyrs. The tragedies could form a connected trilogy, as in Aeschylus' Oresteia, or treat unrelated stories. The cast was small: two actors in Aeschylus' early work, three after Sophocles introduced the third, all men, who played several roles each by changing their masks and costumes. A chorus of twelve and later fifteen sang and danced lyric odes between the spoken episodes, commenting on the action and often voicing the community's fears and prayers.

All performers wore full masks, and the sung parts were accompanied by the aulos, a double reed pipe. Scenery was simple, though a crane (the mēchanē) could bring gods into view from above — the origin of deus ex machina — and a wheeled platform could reveal bodies after a killing, which by convention happened offstage.

Aeschylus: The Oresteia and the Justice of Zeus§

Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BCE) fought against the Persians at Marathon, and the epitaph said to have been written for his grave in Sicily mentions his courage there rather than his plays. Of perhaps seventy to ninety plays, seven survive: the Persians (472 BCE), the only surviving tragedy on a recent historical event; Seven against Thebes (467); the Suppliants; the Oresteia trilogy (458); and Prometheus Bound, whose authenticity many scholars doubt. A later anecdote has him describe his plays as slices from Homer's great banquets.

The Oresteia — Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and Eumenides — is the only complete trilogy to survive. It follows the curse on the house of Atreus: Agamemnon's murder by his wife Clytemnestra on his return from Troy, her killing by their son Orestes on Apollo's command, and Orestes' pursuit by the Furies (Erinyes). In the final play Athena founds the court of the Areopagus to try him, the votes are equal, Orestes is acquitted, and the Furies are persuaded to become honoured powers of Athens. Aeschylus thus turned a chain of blood vengeance into a myth of the birth of civic justice. His choruses dwell on the justice of Zeus and the idea, summed up in the phrase pathei mathos, that mortals learn through suffering.

Sophocles: Ajax, Antigone and Oedipus§

Sophocles (c. 497–406 BCE) won his first victory in 468 BCE, defeating Aeschylus, and went on to win more often than any rival; he never came last. He was also a public figure, elected general alongside Pericles, and according to later tradition received the healing god Asclepius into his house when the cult came to Athens, a story told in Dodona and the Cult of Asclepius. Seven of his roughly 120 plays survive: Ajax, Antigone (c. 442), Oedipus the King, Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes (409) and Oedipus at Colonus, produced after his death in 401 BCE.

Sophocles' heroes are isolated figures of great will — Ajax after his humiliation, Antigone burying her brother against the king's decree, Philoctetes abandoned on his island — who confront gods whose purposes are hidden. In Oedipus the King the hero's determined search for the killer of Laius reveals that he himself, fulfilling an oracle he had tried to escape, killed his father and married his mother. Comparison with earlier versions shows his choices: in the Odyssey, Oedipus' mother (there called Epicaste) hangs herself but Oedipus goes on ruling Thebes. The whole Theban saga, from Cadmus to Antigone, is told in Oedipus and the House of Thebes. Aristotle's Poetics treats the play as a model of reversal and recognition and describes tragedy as working "through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions" (trans. S. H. Butcher, 1895).

Euripides: Medea, Helen and the Questioning of Myth§

Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE) was less successful in his lifetime, winning only four victories while alive, but became the most read and performed of the three in later antiquity. Nineteen plays survive under his name, including the satyr play Cyclops and the Rhesus, whose authorship is disputed. Among them are Alcestis (438), Medea (431), Hippolytus (428), Trojan Women (415), Helen (412), Orestes (408) and the posthumous Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis. He died at the Macedonian court of King Archelaus.

Euripides was famous for questioning the myths he dramatised. In Medea, the princess from Colchis kills her own children to punish Jason; ancient commentators knew a version in which the Corinthians killed them, and many scholars think Euripides made the mother the killer. Helen follows the poet Stesichorus in claiming that Helen never went to Troy at all: the gods sent a phantom in her place while she waited in Egypt. Trojan Women shows the cost of the war through the captive women of the city. Characters challenge the morality of the gods, and in the Bacchae, discussed in Dionysus and the Bacchae, the god's revenge on his own family is terrifying. Aristotle reported Sophocles' remark that he portrayed people as they ought to be, Euripides as they are.

How the Tragedians Reshaped Myth§

Tragedy did not have a fixed text of myth to follow. Poets drew on Homer, on Hesiod, on the lost epics of the Trojan and Theban cycles and on lyric poets, and changed details freely. The clearest example is the story of Orestes' return and revenge, staged by all three: Aeschylus has Electra recognise her brother through a lock of hair and a footprint at their father's tomb; Sophocles makes Electra the centre of a drama of grief and endurance; Euripides marries her to a poor farmer and openly mocks the old recognition tokens. Each version tells the same myth while asking different questions about justice and revenge.

Tragedy also adapted myths to Athenian interests: Theseus appears as a just protector of suppliants, and Athens offers refuge to Medea, the aged Oedipus and the polluted Heracles. For later readers these Athenian dramatisations often became the standard version of stories older than Athens itself. For the earlier epic sources, see Homer and the Homeric Question and Hesiod.

How the Plays Survived and How Scholars Read Them§

Hundreds of tragedies were written in the fifth century, but only those of the three canonical poets survive complete. In the Roman and Byzantine periods schools used a selection — seven plays each of Aeschylus and Sophocles and ten of Euripides — and most copies outside it were lost. Euripides is better represented by chance: nine further plays survive from one volume of a collected edition arranged alphabetically, including Helen, Electra and Ion. Papyri from Egypt have added large parts of lost plays, such as Sophocles' satyr play Trackers. Byzantine scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries edited and annotated the texts, and the Aldine press in Venice printed Sophocles in 1502, Euripides in 1503 and Aeschylus in 1518.

Modern interpretation has varied widely. Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) found its source in the tension between Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy; the Cambridge ritualists, among them Gilbert Murray and Jane Harrison, traced it to seasonal ritual. Later scholars such as Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet read tragedy as a civic institution in which the democratic city questioned its own values through the mirror of heroic myth. The plays' afterlife in later art and psychology, including Freud's reading of Oedipus, is followed in Greek Myth after Antiquity.

Frequently asked questions§

How many Greek tragedies survive?§

Thirty-three complete plays survive under the names of Aeschylus (seven), Sophocles (seven) and Euripides (nineteen). One of Euripides' plays, Cyclops, is a satyr play, and the authorship of Prometheus Bound and Rhesus is disputed. Many more are known only from fragments and titles.

Why did Greek tragedies use myths?§

Myths were shared stories the audience already knew, letting poets focus on how events happened and what they meant, and their distance from daily life allowed hard questions about power and the gods.

What is the difference between Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides?§

Broadly, Aeschylus wrote grand choral dramas of divine justice, Sophocles focused on heroic individuals and hidden fate, and Euripides questioned traditional myths and gave voice to women, slaves and victims.

What was a satyr play?§

A short comic play with a chorus of satyrs, companions of Dionysus, performed after each poet's three tragedies. Euripides' Cyclops is the only complete survivor.

Sources and further reading§