A high proportion of the surviving tragedies present one or more main characters taking an extreme or intransigent stand against some authority that appears to threaten the hero’s or heroine’s independence, honor, and happiness, and may also threaten that of his or her philoi. In some cases, the hero’s resistance and self-assertion are blatantly misguided and futile (Pentheus’, or Ajax’s, or Clytemnestra’s, or Hip-polytus’): yet more often than not the attempted resistance - and the manner in which it is attempted - still command the audience’s respect, admiration, and even sympathy, because the principles upon which this resistance is based have some validity, and because the energy, language, and aspirations of this hero are recognizable as being in some sense ‘‘superior.’’ (As Aristotle puts it, they are ‘‘greater and better than us,’’ spoudaioteroi.)
Within the make-believe world of the theater, as we have seen, the audience is invited to witness and judge, and also to some degree participate in, a scene ofconflict and resistance that offers a large range of different subject positions for them to adopt. But almost invariably by the end of the play they find themselves experiencing a perspective closer to that of the minor characters or chorus than to that of the hero, as they all witness the main character’s misery, while they themselves survive the catastrophe and prepare to resume their lives, relatively undamaged, even strengthened, by the shocking conflict that they have just witnessed. This process, even as it may often reveal the excessive ambitions, or dangerous blindness and fixation, of the protagonists, simultaneously reinforces the audience’s sense of its own powerlessness, and perhaps also its sense of gratitude toward, and dependency upon, those powerful few who take the risks and suffer the consequences so that the larger community can survive and prosper. Such a dynamic (as Brecht noted with disapproval, in contrasting ‘‘Aristotelian’’ theater with his own ‘‘epic’’ theater) seems most often to result in a response of acceptance and resignation rather than any impulse toward social action or change on the part of the spectators.
This is not to deny or belittle the significance and impact of the many various representations of social and political resistance that we encounter in Greek tragedy: a considerable advance has certainly taken place from the Homeric world, in the frequency and outspokenness with which a minor character in tragedy may express disapproval, even rejection, of the policies or commands of a superior (for example, the guard in Antigone, the nurse in Hippolytus or Medea, the messenger in Bacchae); and likewise the most powerless and marginalized chorus may express thoughts of astonishing independence and insight.
Above all, the plays performed in the Theater of Dionysus gave women extraordinary prominence, and often an extraordinary moral authority as well. Such leading characters as Antigone, Deianira, and Andromache - even smaller roles such as Cassandra or Eurydice - all provide opportunities for cross-dressed male actors to articulate points of view, adopt positions of resistance, and even carry out actions that are in explicit and overt defiance of male authority. Furthermore, a high proportion of tragic choruses are female; and the combination of the authority intrinsic to choruses and the extraordinarily evocative and adventurous lyric expression that characterizes particular odes gives these female groups a biting and disturbing power to criticize the doings of a political leader or a whole army or even the gods. How do we account for this tragic license? What is the significance of such (imitations of) female resistance to male authority and such disruption of conventional gender relations? And why is it so often women, rather than men, who are allowed to utter the most vehement criticisms of political and military authority?
Recent criticism has gone back and forth over the question of whether the presence of active and articulate female heroines, and of highly sympathetic female victims, along with the recurrent presentation of direct conflict between male and female on the tragic stage, signals a positive engagement with and indirect amelioration of the repression of women in Athenian society; or whether to the contrary these plays enact a foreclosing of any such possibilities through the predictable defeat, victimization, silencing, or vilification of most of the female characters who venture too far outside the conventional.
To take just one striking example: what are we to make of the chorus of Asian bacchants, as they describe the liberating powers of Dionysus for rich and poor, high and low alike, in Euripides’ Bacchae (417-32)? What is the force of hearing such ‘‘wisdom’’ emanating from a female, foreign group of exotically dressed and musically marked witnesses? On the one hand, these women appear truly liberated and empowered in ways that must have struck fifth-century Athenians as challenging and shocking; yet it is also true that this chorus is completely dependent on their male leader (Dionysus), that at the end of the play they will depart with him from Thebes and resume their travels (that is, they will not be effectively integrated into any stable political structure), and that the other females in the play who leave their homes and challenge male authority meet with an appalling fate. Unfortunately, there seems no sure way to answer the question of how the original Athenian audience reacted to such bold and transgressive scenes - though the mixed success of Euripides’ plays in particular testifies to the variety of responses that tragedy could and did arouse. And modern audiences can be seen likewise to react in diametrically opposite ways to performances of the same play, depending on the style of production and the context of reception.
What is undeniable is that the continuity of tragic performance itself was never interrupted, and that legislation about the content of tragedy (in contrast to Old Comedy) seems never to have been required or proposed in Athens (outside the pages of Platonic dialogues). Tragedy was not apparently felt to be disruptive of civic order in the way that comedy could be. However shocking and disturbing any particular presentation of tragic resistance to patriarchal or divine authority might be, nobody seems either to have taken serious offence or to have attempted to bring about political or social change as a result. The festival of Dionysus permitted and encouraged recurrent resistances, even as it also foreclosed on those resistances and returned the audience to an essentially unchanged reality once the plays were over. (And it is important to remember that the tragic playwrights always concluded their sequence of plays with a satyr-play, whose emphasis on male dominance, happy endings, master-slave distinctions, and divine benevolence was relatively much more reassuring and complacent.) Tragic resistances to authority, as we have seen, come in many guises and with the support of multiple rival authorities, yet the authority, and the conclusion, of the festival itself appears to have remained unaltered from year to year.
Does this mean that nothing was changed by the plays that were performed and experienced in the theater each year? If so, their authority as forms of expression and communication would seem rather small. But this is not necessarily the case, even if the resistance depicted within the plays always seems to end in defeat, or at least in stalemate. For in truth the possibilities of resistance raised in each play, and the question of whether and where that resistance ends, lay - and still lies - with the audience. The play is never entirely over, even after the final words have been spoken. Antigone’s defiant stance and uncompromising words, or the choral portrait of a warlord’s mental torments as he contemplates butchering his own child to further his own political ambitions - such images and phrases (and for the original Athenian audiences, the melodies and gestures too) continue to resonate within the memories of their audiences for weeks, months, years to come. And subsequent performances and re-readings reopen still further possibilities of new authorization and interpretation, from directors, designers, actors, readers, and the audience themselves - the ultimate authorities.
World History
