Greek tragedy

Greek tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and Asia Minor. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy. Greek tragedy is widely believed to be an extension of the ancient rites carried out in honor of Dionysus, and it heavily influenced the theatre of Ancient Rome and the Renaissance. Tragic plots were most often based upon myths from the oral traditions of archaic epics. In tragic theatre, however, these narratives were presented by actors. The most acclaimed Greek tragedians are Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.The poet, who first tried his skill in tragic verse for the paltry prize of a goat, soon after exposed to view wild satyrs naked, and attempted raillery with severity, still preserving the gravity of tragedy.As to the reason of the name, many theories have been offered, some even disputing the connection with ‘goat’.'Three innovations must have taken place for tragedy as we know it to exist. First, somebody created a new kind of performance by combining a speaker with a chorus and putting both speaker and chorus in disguise as characters in a story from legend or history. Second, this performance was made part of the City Dionysia at Athens. Third, regulations defined how it was to be managed and paid for. It is theoretically possible that all these were simultaneous, but it is not likely.'The Greek word for “actor” is hypocrites, which means “answerer” or “interpreter,” but the word cannot tell us anything about tragedy’s origins, since we do not know when it came into use.There is .. much to be said for the view that hypokrites means 'answerer'. He answers the questions of the chorus and so evokes their songs. He answers with a long speech about his own situation or, when he enters as messenger, with a narrative of disastrous events ... Naturally, the transformation of the leader into an actor entailed a dramatization of thechorus.Katharsis, on this reading, will denote the overall ethical benefit that accrues from such an intense yet fulfillingly integrated experience. Exempt from the stresses that accompany pity and fear in social life, the audience of tragedy can allow these emotions an uninhibited flow that ... is satisfyingly attuned to its contemplation of the rich human significance of a well-plotted play. A katharsis of this kind is not reducible to either ‘‘purgation’’ or ‘‘purification.’’'Both drives, so different from each other, go side by side, mostly in open discord and opposition, always provoking each other to new, stronger births, in order to perpetuate in themselves the struggle of opposites which is only apparently bridged over by the common word 'art'; until, finally, by a wonderful act of Hellenic 'will,' they seem to pair up and in this pairing, at last, produce Attic Tragedy, which is as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian artwork.'A spectator of a Greek dramatic performance in the latter half of the fifth century B.C. would find himself seated in the theatron, or koilon,a semi-circular, curved bank of seats, resembling in some respects the closed end of a horseshoe stadium. ... Below him, in the best location in the theatre, is the throne of the priest of Dionysus who presides in a sense over the whole performance. The theatron is large-in fact, the one in Athens, in the Theatre of Dionysus, with its seats banked up on the south slope of the Acropolis, seated approximately 17,000 persons. The bulk of the plays in this category are by Euripides. Strains of fifth-century Athenian rhetoric, sketches of political types, and reflections of Athens’ institutions and society lend plays of this category a distinctly fifth-century Athenian flavor. The emphasis in Euripides’ Orestes on political factions, for example, is directly relevant to the Athens of 408 BCE. Greek tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and Asia Minor. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy. Greek tragedy is widely believed to be an extension of the ancient rites carried out in honor of Dionysus, and it heavily influenced the theatre of Ancient Rome and the Renaissance. Tragic plots were most often based upon myths from the oral traditions of archaic epics. In tragic theatre, however, these narratives were presented by actors. The most acclaimed Greek tragedians are Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. 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, which is inaccessible to scholars today. His work is therefore invaluable for the study of ancient tragedy, even if his testimony is open to doubt on some points. According to Aristotle, tragedy evolved from the satyr dithyramb, an Ancient Greek hymn, which was sung along with dancing in honor of Dionysus. The term τραγῳδία, derived from τράγος 'goat' and ᾠδή 'song', means 'song of the goats,' referring to the chorus of satyrs. Others suggest that the term came into being when the legendary Thespis (the root for the English word thespian) competed in the first tragic competition for the prize of a goat (hence tragedy). Alexandrian grammarians understood the term τραγῳδία as a 'song for the sacrifice of the goat' or 'song for the goat', believing the animal was a prize in a race, as attested by Horace's Ars Poetica: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0} There are other suggested etymologies for the word tragedy. The Oxford English Dictionary adds to the standard reference to 'goat song', that: J. Winkler proposed that 'tragedy' could be derived from the rare word tragizein (τραγίζειν), which refers to 'adolescent voice-change' referring to the original singers as 'representative of those undergoing social puberty'. D'Amico, on the other hand, suggests that tragoidía does not mean simply 'song of the goats', but the characters that made up the satyr chorus of the first Dionysian rites. Other hypotheses have included an etymology that would define the tragedy as an ode to beer. Jane Ellen Harrison pointed out that Dionysus, god of wine (a drink of the wealthy classes) was actually preceded by Dionysus, god of beer (a drink of the working classes). Athenian beer was obtained from the fermentation of barley, which is tragos in Greek. Thus, it is likely that the term was originally meant to be 'odes to spelt,' and later on, it was extended to other meanings of the same name. She writes: 'Tragedy I believe to be not the 'goat-song', but the 'harvest-song' of the cereal tragos, the form of spelt known as 'the goat'.' The origin of Greek tragedy is one of the unsolved problems of classical scholarship. Ruth Scodel notes that, due to lack of evidence and doubtful reliability of sources, we know nearly nothing about tragedy's origin. Still, R.P. Winnington-Ingram points out that we can easily trace various influences from other genres. The stories that tragedy deals with stem from epic and lyric poetry, its meter — the iambic trimeter — owed much to the political rhetoric of Solon, and the choral songs' dialect, meter and vocabulary seem to originate in choral lyric. How these have come to be associated with one another remains a mystery however.