Demetrius’ definition of satyr-play as tragOidia paizousa (‘‘tragedy at play,’’ On Style 169) neatly sums up the position of the genre between tragedy and comedy. The satyr-play is closely connected to tragedy not only structurally, as part of the tragic tetralogy, but in many other aspects as well. Authors, actors and chorus, costumes and props, language and meter, dramatic form and structure are either completely or to a great extent identical. Both tragedy and satyr-play, in contrast to comedy, take their subject matter from mythology. On the other hand, satyr-play is very far removed from the essence of tragedy. Its tone and atmosphere, happy ending, and emotional effect move it close to comedy, with which it also shares many stock characters and stories.3
Comedy and satyr-play also have in common the use of certain dramatic motifs and situations such as courtships and weddings, thefts and ruses, banquets and competitions. Sciron as pimp (Euripides’ Sciron), Polyphemus as cook (Euripides’ Cyclops),
Silenus as boastful miles gloriosus (Sophocles’ Trackers, Euripides’ Cyclops) and in particular, of course, the satyrs and Silenus in their stereotypical role as funny and crafty, impudent and cowardly, useless yet lovable slaves, who stand beside the hero and are later rewarded with freedom - all these figures have their analogues in comedy.
In both genres a happy ending is obligatory; in both poetic justice rules, whereas in tragedy a different principle, the incommensurability of guilt and punishment, holds sway. Both genres ultimately have the same aim: to get the audience to laugh. Yet the nature of the ridiculous, the methods whereby the common aim is achieved, and the quality of the intended laughter are fundamentally different.
Satyr-play shares with comedy a preference for the comic representation of commonplace situations, activities, desires, and anxieties; it does not, however, present these realistically in a way that mirrors the daily life of the audience, but at a mythical distance. The comic effect results in no small measure from the fact that great mythological figures are reduced to the petty roles of ordinary life: Heracles is shown as a slave (Euripides’ Eurystheus or Syleus), Hermes as a thief (Sophocles’ Trackers), Polyphemus as a cook (Euripides’ Cyclops), Odysseus and Silenus at a typical symposium with the uncivilized Cyclops (Cyclops again).
As in comedy, the audience laughs about aesthetic and moral faults and shortcomings that are ultimately harmless: ugliness and physical defects, undependability and laziness, curiosity and cowardliness, impudence and lecherousness. The spectator recognizes the satyr in himself and in his neighbors. The mythical distancing, however, removes any sting of scorn or reproach from the representation of these faults and vices. The laughter is accordingly more relaxed and cheerful, less critical and bitter than in comedy.
The fact that direct and indirect attack on contemporaries - a striking feature of Old Comedy - is almost entirely foreign to satyr-play points in the same direction. Political attack, social satire, critical caricature are not the business of classical satyr-play. Its tone is not biting and hurtful but light-hearted and cheerful; mocking, but not derisive. The corollary is that the term ‘‘parody’’ should not be used in reference to satyr-play. As far as we can see, satyr-play does not aim at a distorting parody of familiar myth; rather, it selects cheerful or at least unproblematic subjects or dramatizes a happy episode from the life of one of the tragic heroes. From the Greeks returning from the Trojan War it selects Odysseus (Euripides’ Cyclops) and Menelaus (Aeschylus’ Proteus), not Agamemnon. From the life of Oedipus satyr-play chooses only the hero’s victory over the Sphinx, from the career of Heracles only the triumphant successes. Satyr-play stages funny stories, but does not make fun of them.
Satyr-play no more parodies tragedy than it does myth. In this respect, too, it differs significantly from contemporary comedy, in which paratragedy looms large (Rau 1967). There is nothing in the surviving texts of satyr-plays that is equivalent to the Aristophanic parodies of Euripidean tragedy. Even in those tetralogies where there is a demonstrable connection (at the level of content or theme) between the three tragedies and the satyr-play, the satyr-play does not parody the tragedies that preceded it. Rather, the satyr-play presents a light-hearted aspect of the same problem (Aeschylus’ Amymone) or a light-hearted episode from the myth (Aeschylus’ Sphinx or Net-Haulers) without making fun of the tragic dilemma or the tragic hero.
World History
