Much the same must be said of the following generations, although tragedy clearly continued to be a central feature of Athenian cultural life at least until the disintegration of the democracy under Macedonian pressure in 322. In this period tragedy, which had begun to acquire cosmopolitan status as early as Aeschylus’ visits to Sicily, came to be performed in theaters and courts across the Greek world, celebrated in reperformances of the classic repertoire (a contest for performances of‘‘old’’ tragedies at the Dionysia was established in 386), captured in the vase-paintings of Sicily and southern Italy, and studied and imitated in higher education.
Our access to texts, however, is extremely limited; the only extant fourth-century tragedy is (probably) the Rhesus that appears to have replaced Euripides’ own Rhesus in the Euripidean corpus. This play is based on Iliad 10, in which Odysseus and Diomedes kill first the Trojan scout Dolon and then the Thracian king Rhesus, son of a Muse and a river-god, who has recently arrived to aid Troy with his magnificent horses and chariot. It contains some lively nighttime action as Dolon’s expedition is planned, Rhesus and his men arrive and are assigned quarters, the two Achaeans reach the Trojan camp after killing Dolon and are guided by Athena to the sleeping Thracians, the slaughter is reported to Hector by Rhesus’ wounded charioteer, and the Muse arrives to carry her son’s corpse back to Thrace where he will gain renewed life as a prophetic spirit. The unknown author had a fair though erratic grasp of tragic style, but his ability to develop action and characters was limited (the blustering Hector and Rhesus are unengaging as tragic figures), and he seems to have been preoccupied with creating a series of novel episodes which often digress into sterile debates - Hector arguing with Aeneas about strategy, with Rhesus about Rhesus’ failure to show up earlier, with the charioteer about the Trojans’ responsibility for Rhesus’ death, and so on. It would be unfair to take this moderately competent and derivative work as representing the best that fourth-century tragedians could do.
The two decades following the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles and the fall of Athens in 404 are particularly obscure, and only from around 380 do some figures begin to emerge more distinctly through a scattering of production records, comments in Aristotle’s Poetics, Rhetoric, and Ethics, later recollections, and an occasional papyrus or vase-painting. These include the younger Astydamas, grandson of Aeschylus’ great-nephew Philocles and winner of fifteen festival victories; the younger Carcinus, son of the tragedian Xenocles, who won eleven Dionysia victories and like Plato enjoyed the patronage of the Sicilian dynast Dion; Chaeremon, for whom no exact career details are available; and Theodectas of Phaselis in Lycia, rhetorician and tragedian, who won seven Dionysia victories before his early death and delivered a eulogy of King Mausolus of Caria at the dedication of the Mausoleum in 352/51, as well as composing a tragedy, Mausolus. From the hundreds of plays that these four composed, some fifty titles are known (almost all denoting traditional mythical subjects), and about eighty-five short fragments.
A few plays admit some degree of speculative reconstruction (surveyed by Xantha-kis-Karamanos 1980), the two most substantial cases being Astydamas’ Hector (probably the source of a Latin Hector Setting Forth by Naevius) and Chaeremon’s Achilles Slayer ofThersites. Astydamas’ play dramatized Hector’s final battle with Achilles from the Trojan point of view, and is probably represented by three papyri and a short book-fragment which give sixty-five lines from several scenes. The Trojans anticipate Achilles’ renewed attack, his approach is reported and Hector prepares to arm himself, Hector removes his helmet to converse with Andromache and Astyanax, and a messenger reports the beginning of the fatal duel. Hector thus meets his death by leaving Troy to confront Achilles rather than lingering on the battlefield as in the Iliad, and the events and discourse - and the pathos - of Iliad 6 and 22 are combined. Chaeremon’s Achilles is virtually unrepresented by text-fragments, but its essentials are probably depicted in a fine Apulian vase painted within a few decades ofits first production (see plates 17.1 and 17.2). In the epic Aethiopis Achilles killed the Amazon Penthesilea in battle and insisted on treating her body honorably, Thersites accused him of acting out of love for her, Achilles retaliated by killing Thersites, and dissension ensued amongst the Achaeans until Odysseus took Achilles to Lesbos for purification. On the vase we see the decapitated corpse of Thersites lying in the foreground, Achilles sitting in conversation with his advisor Phoenix, Menelaus restraining Thersites’ kinsman Diomedes, and Agamemnon hurrying to intervene. The play might be compared with those of Sophocles and Euripides that
Plate 17.1 The death of Thersites. Greek, South Italian volute-krater; style resembles the Varrese Painter. ca. 340 bce. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 03.804. Photograph © 2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced by permission.
Plate 17.2 Detail of plate 17.1. Photograph < duced by permission.
> 2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Repro-
Dramatized incidental episodes from the Trojan cycle and focused on conflict and debate amongst the Achaean leaders.
These two works were probably typical of the tragedy of their time in making selfpresentation and self-analysis central to their characters’ discourse. In Poetics 1450b7-8 Aristotle comments that the poets of his time made their characters speak ‘‘rhetorically’’ (i. e., like people reviewing and explaining their actions for an audience) rather than ‘‘politically’’ (like people reacting directly to real situations); Astydamas and Theodectas were both said to have studied with Isocrates (whose adopted son Aphareus was both a rhetorician and a tragedian); Theodectas was acquainted with Plato and Aristotle as well. Like some other features of fourth-century tragedy - such as the refined descriptive set-pieces which we see in a few fragments of Chaeremon - the rhetorical tendency is foreshadowed in Euripidean drama. On the other hand, a papyrus fragment of the philosopher Philodemus (first century bce) suggests that Chaeremon, at least, avoided the gratuitous portrayals of morally inferior characters for which Euripides was criticized (cf. Poetics 1454a28-29). The reduction of dramatic impact and variety which these tendencies entailed may ultimately have reduced tragedy’s popular appeal as it became increasingly a conventional and self-reflexive literary genre.
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