The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Classic Greek drama was written in verse, usually in an elevated and formal style. It was presented in the open air at the yearly festival at Athens in honor of the god Dionysus. That means the plays were part of a religious ceremony, attended, as a civic duty, by ali or most of the citizens. The plays were given as trilogies, followed by a shorter play of a comic nature, and the dramatists competed with one another for the laurel of victory. Aeschylus's Oresteia is the only com­plete surviving trilogy.

It is hardfor us to visualize these ancient Greek sunlit pro- ductions. They incorporated music, dance, and chorai song, and doubtless words were declaimed or chanted in a manner quite dissimilar to our modern realistic convention. As the plots were usually reworkings of famous legends, they ojfered no suspense; everyone knew the story in advance. Two features, among others, that seem strange to us were the Chorus, which acted as a kind of commentary on the action, and the Messenger, who recounted ojfstage events, particularly if they were of a violent kind. As we approach Greek drama we must try to keep in mind that it is religious in origin and partly so in ejfect; and that its language and action are not in our sense "realistic.")

Though he did not "invent" Greek tragedy, Aeschylus is generally considered its earliest leading practitioner and so the ancestor of ali Western tragic drama. He lived through the great days of the growth of the Athenian democracy and him- self helped in its ascendancy, for he fought at Marathon and perhaps at Salamis. Born in Eleusis, near Athens, he spent most of his life in and around Athens, dying in Gela, Sicily, from the effects, says an improbable story, of a tortoise dropped by an eagle on his bald head. Of his ninety plays, seven survive.

Best of these is the trilogy known from its central character as the Oresteia. Its theme is one frequently encountered in Greek legend, family blood-guilt and its expiation. The Agamemnon is a play about murder, the murder of the returned hero Agamemnon by his faithless wife, Clytemnestra. The Choephoroe (Libation-Bearers) is a play about revenge, the revenge taken on Clytemnestra by Orestes, Agamemnon^ son. The Eumenides (Furies) is a play about purification: the tormenting of Orestes by the Furies and his final exoneration by a tribunal of Athenian judges and the goddess Athena. The entire trilogy is a study in the complex operations of destiny, heredity, and pride, which produce a tragic knot untied by the advent of a higher conception of law and order.

As the word for Homer [2] is noble so the word for Aeschylus is grand. He cannot be read as modern plays are read. His language is exalted and difficult; it struggles magnifi- cently to express profound ideas about guilt and sin, ideas that have become part of the world of imaginative literature right up to our own day with 0'Neill [115] and Faulkner [118]. Aeschylus is much more akin to the author of the Book of Job than to even the best of our contemporary dramatists. He must be approached in that spirit.

C.F.

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SOPHOCLES

496-406 B.C.E.

Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

Sophocles was born in what we would call a suburb of Athens, of upper-class family. He held high office; he was a constant victor in the dramatic competitions; he developed in