We have already seen that both Plato and Aristotle have much to say about the (educative) effects of tragedy. But both, in their different ways, fail to say much about what seems to be distinctive about tragic teaching. To begin with the obvious: tragedy used stories from myth. These stories from the past - with their kings and heroes and so on - don’t at first sight seem to sit happily in the fifth-century democratic context. However, the stories may be old but the treatment given them is anything but: in the Oresteia Orestes’ murder of his mother becomes part of an examination of fifth-century conceptions of justice; the question of whether Philoc-tetes will return home or go to Troy in Sophocles’ play of the same name is told through an examination of the powers and abuses of rhetoric; Helen and Hecuba, in Euripides’ Trojan Women, debate as if they were fifth-century Sophists. No, it looks as though the past is being used to talk about the present (Buxton 2002; Goldhill 1997b, 129-30; Hall 1997, 98; note Pelling 1997b, 217: ‘‘the interaction between tragic and contemporary events [is] two-way’’). In a similar way, tragedy is peopled by characters ‘‘whose ethnicity, gender, or status would absolutely debar them from public debate in democratic Athens’’ (Hall 1997, 123). Tragedy is full of barbarians, slaves, kings, and women: we shall see that these ‘‘others’’ are important to the way that tragic teaching worked.
Froma Zeitlin has argued in two powerful pieces that Attic tragedy used the Other to examine the self. In one article her emphasis is on Thebes as a sort of anti-city to Athens (Zeitlin 1990b; see also Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, 334-38); in the second she analyzes the way women are used for the purposes of male selfexamination (Zeitlin 1990a; see also Rehm 2002, 236-69). While Zeitlin can sometimes be overschematic (Thebes, for instance, is more variously portrayed than she allows), the argument is a useful starting point and, perhaps more importantly, gains credence from the fact that it is consistent with the polarizing habit of Greek thought generally (Lloyd 1966). Greeks - and this certainly includes Athenians - tended to define themselves against a range of others. So, for instance, an Athenian citizen would have understood himself as Greek because not barbarian, as male because not female, as human because not divine or animal, as free because not enslaved (Croally 1994, 70-119; DuBois 1982; Hall 1989). What we often encounter in tragedy is a questioning of the hierarchy of these polarities: thus a barbarian acts in a more Greek manner than Greeks, a slave appears to be freer than a free person, and so on (Buxton 2002, Ebbott, chapter 23 in this volume). Furthermore, this questioning is normally situated in another time (the past) and in another place (not Athens).
The self that tragedy examines is not something physical or a person (or persons) that the audience could identify in their contemporary world. Tragedy does not work like comedy. Rather, we should see the self as something more to do with the values and beliefs held by the audience, which, for reasons of economy, I prefer to call ideology. In an earlier work I defined this as the authorized self-definition of the dominant group, that is, the citizen body (Croally 1994, 259-66). I see no reason to change this definition (see also Ober 1989; 1994, 103; Pelling 1997b, 224-35; 2000, 177-84; Rose 1995, 62), but it should be said that in invoking the term I do not mean to say that there were no conflicts within Athenian ideology, nor that it stayed the same through the fifth century. We can still say, though, that tragedy taught by examining the self (ideology) in dramatic other worlds.
My point can perhaps best be seen if we look at a very small number of tragedies which do not present a dramatic other-world of the usual sort. We know of four exceptions to the rule that tragedy used stories from myth. Early in the fifth century Phrynichus produced two plays (Phoenician Women, Capture of Miletus) and Aeschylus one (Persians) that dealt with almost contemporary events. Very much later (417-16 BCE) Agathon produced the only known example of a purely fictional tragedy (Aristotle, Poetics 1451b21). This last seems to have been a one-time experiment, and we need not linger over it. But the earlier examples are interesting, partly because they came at a time when tragedy as a genre was young.
Unfortunately, we know little of the reaction to these plays, except in the case of Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus (probably 493/2 bce). Herodotus (6.21) tells us of the distressed reaction of the Athenian audience to this play: the author was fined 1,000 drachmas for reminding them of a catastrophe - the actual fall of Miletus in 494 BCE - that affected them so deeply, and the play was never allowed to be reperformed (for discussion see Roisman 1988 and Rosenbloom 1993). This anecdote tells us that with this play the Athenians felt that they were seeing something too close to home, something not distant enough. The fact that there was possibly only one further attempt at contemporary subject matter - Aeschylus’ Persians in 472 bce - seems to confirm that fact (Cartledge 1997, 25), even though Aeschylus’ play told of Greek triumph rather than disaster. Distance between the world of the play and the world of the audience was important, at least for tragic representations. There was, for the Athenians, a certain value in the vagueness of the tragic world put before them: it enabled difficult questions to be asked without divisiveness or uniformity of interpretation (Easterling 1997b, 25), and without provoking the sorts of violent reactions demonstrated with the Capture of Miletus, a play that may have confronted too overtly the religious and political thinking of the day (Easterling 1997d, 172).
In proposing this model of tragic teaching as a questioning of ideology, as an examination of the self through dramatic other places, I am not also saying that the definitions of self, the Other, ideology, and so on are all fixed. Athenian society changed in various ways through the fifth century; so too did the representations that tragedy put on the stage. As we have seen, there was at least some attempt to represent contemporary subject matter. And Athens - the home of the self - does appear in a number of tragedies (Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides’ Suppliants and Children of Heracles), often embodied by the mythical king Theseus (Mills 1997). There are varying degrees of more or less shocking anachronism (in Aeschylus’ Eumenides Athens can daringly be represented as a city without a king, whereas in Euripides’ Suppliants it is a king who launches a stout defense of democracy [Easterling 1984, 1985a]); of contemporary allusion (Croally 1994, 231-34; Roisman 1997); of naturalism, especially in Euripides (Michelini 1987, 1999-2000); of comedy, self-reference or metatheater and inter-textuality (Croally 1994, 235-48; Burian 1997; Goldhill 1986a; Gregory 19992000; Marshall 1999-2000; Mastronarde 1999-2000; Segal 1982; Zeitlin 1980). Debates about how tragedy developed, and even whether Euripides destroyed tragedy (an old Nietzschean point, this) go on. The point is: during the fifth century there was an evolution in what could be incorporated in the tragic world, and in what ways. Tragedy’s method of teaching was not only to invent a fictional, make-believe world; it was to create one whose didactic effect depended to some extent on being different from the world of the audience. Tragedy, great ideological production itself, examined the ideology (the self) of the audience. This was its teaching.
World History
