In Timocles’ comedy Women Celebrating the Dionysia, probably written in the third quarter of the fourth century bce, an unknown character delivers a speech arguing that tragic drama can provide its audience with ‘‘consolation’’ (parapsuchai) and a means of coping with life’s inevitable sufferings. While watching a tragedy performed,
... the mind forgets its own problems And finds itself engrossed in others’ afflictions,
Then goes home edified as well as pleased.
(Timocles fr. 6.5-7 PCG)
Tragedy shows us, on this account, that heroes suffer greater misfortunes than ourselves; Niobe’s story, the speaker suggests, will comfort anyone who has lost a child, while Philoctetes’ will have the same effect on the lame. By the date of Timocles’ play, Attic comedy had an established convention of casting sidelong glances at its sister-genre tragedy. Such material, as we shall see with Aristophanes’ Frogs, always needs interpreting circumspectly. But the juxtaposition of life and theater in Timocles’ fragment, though not without a humorous slant, provides an illuminating glimpse of some possible attitudes to tragedy in the late classical period. Building on the folk wisdom that life is hard, the speaker construes tragic myth as a magnified reflection of the scope of human suffering, a reflection that affords spectators a perspective on their own lives and makes their troubles seem more endurable. But Timocles’ speaker also identifies a double element in the immediate theatrical experience of tragedy: first, an imaginative-cum-emotional enthrallment, psuchagOgia (6; literally, ‘‘soul-conjuring’’), that is presumably related to the pleasure, hedone, of line 7; secondly, a process of edification or enlightenment. This last point looks, at first sight, synonymous with the ‘‘benefit’’ (Ophelein, 9) that the speaker goes on to illustrate through a series of exempla. But there is reason to suppose it extends further. The spectator leaves the theater having been edified or ‘‘educated’’ (pai-deutheis, 7), which ought to imply that the watching of plays is itself instructive. Moreover, the spectator departs, literally, ‘‘with pleasure and having been educated at the same time,’’ as though pleasure and understanding are somehow interwoven in the viewing of tragic drama.
All the themes just touched on exhibit links with more discursive classical sources. Coping better with one’s sorrows by contemplating the greater woes of others is an idea found in Democritus: one should aim at tranquility of mind, the goal of Atomist ethics, by ‘‘contemplating ( theOreein) the lives of the wretched and dwelling on their sufferings’’ (DK 191). Democritus is not known to have applied this principle to tragedy as such, but Timocles’ fragment intimates that others may have done so (as too, with a new twist, some Stoics would later do). The notion of psuchagOgia, metaphorically extended from ritual conjuring of souls (as at Odyssey 11.24-50), was employed earlier than Timocles to denote the spellbinding effects of tragedy and other art forms. Aristotle unselfconsciously uses such terminology twice in the Poetics, attaching it to the components of‘‘complex’’ plots (1450a33) and also to the gripping potential of spectacle (1450b16-17). ‘‘Soul-conjuring’’ could clearly encompass various aspects of tragedy’s capacity to compel the minds and imaginations of its audiences. The idea distilled a culture of emotionalism (scrutinized, with an ironic eye, at Isocrates 4.168 and Andocides 4.23) that undoubtedly surrounded tragedy in classical Athens and was rooted in the psychological intensity of the plays themselves.
Of related importance is Timocles’ reference to the tragic audience’s emotional absorption in the ‘‘suffering of others,’’ pros allotrioi.. .pathei (6). (The well-known story at Herodotus 6.21 exemplifies how a tragedy could fail if it openly reminded the city of its own sufferings.) This phrasing resembles a passage of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen where poetry’s hearers are said to experience fearful shudders, tears of pity, a longing for grief, and a personal passion that responds to ‘‘the affairs of others’’
( allotrion pragmaton, DK 11.9); it also has affinities with Socrates’ account of what the tragic spectator’s soul undergoes at Plato, Republic 606b, a text itself probably influenced by Gorgias’ Helen. Gorgias and Plato concur that tragedy’s audience is exposed to a concentrated, soul-transforming experience. Beyond that, however, their viewpoints diverge: Plato’s text emphasizes the dangerously irrational consequences of such emotional expenditure, while Gorgias considers the experience a paradoxical medium of insight. Gorgias anticipates the line taken by Timocles’ character, whose contention that the tragic spectator is ‘‘educated’’ matches a wider classical conception of poets as ‘‘teachers’’ of their communities.
If Timocles’ fragment opens a comically oblique window on ideas of tragedy current in classical Athens, it is to Gorgias we must turn for the earliest critical model of tragedy we can directly identify. Gorgias’ views must be reconstructed principally from two pieces of evidence: first, the passage of his Encomium of Helen, noted above, that describes the pity, fear, and other passions the soul undergoes or ‘‘suffers’’ (paschein) when listening to poetry; secondly, his riddling remark, specifically on tragedy, that ‘‘the one [that is, the poet] who deceives is more just than the non-deceiver, and the deceived [spectator] is wiser than the undeceived’’ (DK23). It is one thing to assume these elements belonged to a coherent conception of tragedy; quite another to translate the conception into full-blown theory. The strands of Gorgias’ argument are intricate. At the outset (1-2) he affirms that the excellence of all logos (speech, argument) - including, therefore, his own - consists in truth, and implies that (some) poets propagate falsehood (pseudesthai) about Helen. In section 7 he states that if Helen was the victim of force she deserves to be pitied, not blamed, for what she suffered (paschein). In section 8, immediately before his reference to the emotive power of poetry, he couples the notions of logos as persuasion and as deception, a combination which illustrates the twin powers of discourse to arouse and control emotion (‘‘to stop fear.. .and augment pity’’). In section 10, immediately after the reference to poetry, Gorgias speaks of‘‘inspired incantations’’ (a phrase evocative of poetry itself) which can induce pleasure, reduce sorrow, and by bewitchment and magic (traditional Greek metaphors for the potency of poetry) persuasively transform the listener’s soul; magic, he adds, involves ‘‘deceptions of belief’’ (doxes apatemata). Finally, in section 14 Gorgias draws an analogy between words and drugs, reiterating the former’s emotional efficacy (grief, joy, fear, courage are mentioned this time) and equating the force of persuasion with soul-medicine and soul-magic.
These elements of the Encomium of Helen leave a teasingly self-referential impression. Discourse (logos) can equally speak the truth or conjure deception; either way, it can manipulate the emotions of audiences. Gorgias himself uses logos to persuade his hearers that the power of persuasion is a dangerous ‘‘drug,’’ yet he poses a conundrum by describing his own speech, in its very last word, as a paignion (a game or jeu d’esprit). But his accumulated images of passionate emotional persuasion remain plausible, not least when applied to poetry, which he presents as an irresistible verbal art. Moreover, while Helen treats deception, poetic or otherwise, as potentially blameworthy, it also links the motif, through metaphors of soul-magic and soul-medicine, with the traditionally acknowledged delight of poetic ‘‘bewitchment’’ ( thelgein). This leaves enough room to infer that poetic ‘‘deception’’ may have either a positive or a negative force: negative, if it simply distorts belief, but positive if it arouses rewarding emotions and induces hearers to grasp an underlying insight beneath the surface of stories. In this light, the riddlingly commended deception of fr. 23 (paralleled in the anonymous, near-contemporary Dissoi Logoi, 3.10), can legitimately be taken to frame a serious tragic paradox, the acquisition of wisdom through an emotionally psychotropic experience. Furthermore, by his separate suggestions that Helen, if the victim of erotic violence, would constitute a suitable object of pity, but equally, if the subject herself of erotic desire (eros), could count as the sufferer of an affliction or misfortune (atuchOma), Gorgias seems to be sketching out scenarios in which Helen might, on his own terms, be made into a tragic figure - one whose story might absorb us in deep emotions that mediate insights into the human condition.
It is frustrating that we cannot do more to reconstruct Gorgias’ approach to tragedy. Scholars have surmised that his thoughts on the subject proved influential (even on Plato and Aristotle), but the evidence is incomplete. However, Gorgias demonstrates that in the mid - and late fifth century the importance of Attic tragedy had generated conceptual reflections on the nature of the genre. So too, in a very different vein, does the famous contest of tragedians in the second half of Aristophanes’ Frogs (405). Aristophanic comedy in general sets up an almost ceaseless counterpoint to tragic drama, frequently parodying it and playing metatheatrically with its conventions (as in Dicaeopolis’ visit to Euripides at Acharnians 393-488, Trygaeus’ ride on the ‘‘machine’’ at Peace 82-179, and throughout Women at the Thesmo-phoria). Comic references disclose, albeit through a distorting lens, diverse contemporary perceptions of tragedy: its status within Dionysiac festivity (Peace 530-38), the importance of masks and costumes for its performance (Acharnians 412-44, Birds 100-101, 512, Wealth 423-24), the provocative prominence of females in tragic myth (Lysistrata 138), or the controversial relationship of Euripidean drama to traditional religious convictions (Women at the Thesmophoria 449-52). But it is above all in Frogs that the versatility of Aristophanic humor prompts us to discern echoes of ways in which classical Athenians may have thought (and argued) about tragedy.
Attempts to use Frogs as evidence for contemporary ideas are, nonetheless, fraught with uncertainty. We should be satisfied if we can trace some plausible clues to the spectrum of late fifth-century attitudes, but we should avoid the temptation to reduce the play’s significance to transparent sense. Frogs, like all Aristophanes’ work, is multilayered fantasy: an exercise in inter-generic rivalry (making comedy out of tragedy), a satire on sophistic/intellectual techniques of disputation, a parody of contemporary traits of poetic criticism, including ‘‘close reading’’ of texts, and a multifarious assortment of imagery for poets and their creations. Comic complication is pervasive, not least a tension between the familiarity of judging poetry (all Athenian drama is staged competitively) and the potential absurdity of trying to validate such judgments by ‘‘objective’’ standards: when Xanthias hears that ‘‘mousike [musico-poetic art] will be measured on scales,’’ his expostulation, ‘‘What! They’ll weigh tragedy like sheep for sacrifice?’’ (798), strikes a programmatically ironic note. Moreover, most of the Aeschylus-Euripides contest relates to tragedy as a species of poetic art, technO, in general (though without ruling out the ‘‘madness’’ of inspiration, 816) and to its place in musico-poetic culture (mousike) as a whole. Hence the melange of criteria - technical, formal, stylistic, mythological, psychological, educational, and moral - introduced by the two sides. The safest inference we can draw from the second half of the play is that when Athenians argued about the merits of tragedies, there was an ample (and conflicting) choice of standards they could invoke.
Through Frogs’ fantasized dialectic of critical voices, however, it may be feasible to discover a set of tragedy-specific issues. These issues cluster around a (schematic) sense of tragedy’s evolution from an older, ‘‘Aeschylean’’ to a modern, ‘‘Euripidean’’ phase - the former supposedly marked by inflated dramaturgy, portentously obscure meaning, and audience-effects that were ‘‘deceptive’’ (910), frightening (962), yet inducive of noble, militaristic impulses (1013-42; compare 1021 with Gorgias DK 24 for a possible, but contentious, influence); Euripides’ work, by contrast, allegedly encouraging spectators to speak democratically and think critically (948-58), while debasing the genre by confusing it with ordinary life (959), making its characters overtly pitiful (1063-66; cf. Acharnians 413), and peddling immorality of various kinds (especially vis-a-vis female characters, 1043-54, 1079-82). For our purposes, blatant comic exaggerations and distortions matter less than the critical templates that may have shaped them. Most interesting of all is the contrast between tragedy as fear-arousing yet courage-inducing and, on the other hand, as a genre that softens its audience (as well as its characters) through pity. Part of what seems to lie behind this contrast (which later influenced Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy) is a distinction between heroically uplifting and pessimistically life-denying types of tragedy. This dichotomy never crystallizes into a lucid framework of judgment (Dionysus’ final verdict is a comically sentimental piece of cultural nostalgia), but there are enough hints to make it plausible that these divergent construals of tragedy’s relationship to overarching life-values had some salience within contemporary reactions to the genre (Konstan 1999).
We can draw tentative lines of connection between Frogs and our other evidence for classical responses to tragedy. Might, for example, Euripides’ gibe that Aeschylus’ pompous nonsense ‘‘deceived’’ (exapatan) his gullible audiences (910) reflect the Gorgianic concept of tragic deception we have already considered? Alternatively, we might wonder whether Gorgias himself was reworking into a deliberate paradox (we can learn from tragic ‘‘deception’’) an existing slur against theatrical illusionism. There are also interesting parallels between motifs found in Frogs and some fourth-century sources on tragedy: a resemblance, for instance, between Aeschylus’ standard of heroically more-than-human grandeur (esp. Frogs 1058-61) and Aristotle’s formulation in the Poetics of tragic characters as generically ‘‘better than people of the present.’’ Equally, the critique of tragic pity in book 10 of Plato’s Republic (as an emotion with ‘‘depressing’’ consequences for the spectators’ own lives) perhaps encapsulates one version of the Aeschylean case against Euripides in Frogs (and a version diametrically opposed to the idea of tragedy as ‘‘consolation’’ found in Timocles fr. 6 PCG). Such suggestions can assimilate the comic schematizations of Frogs while still detecting in the play some echoes of ongoing arguments about tragedy in Athenian culture. But those arguments must have had ramifications that Aristophanes has no incentive to render faithfully. Where Frogs appears to pit tragic fear against tragic pity (a standpoint we will reencounter in Longinus), Gorgias, Plato, and Aristotle all took their possible combination for granted; where Frogs presents pity as an emotion of weakness, Timocles’ character, as we saw, could claim that it fortified tragic audiences in their own endurance of suffering. The relationship between tragic emotions and tragic pleasure is another psychological complexity on which Frogs makes no clear-cut sense, though it does occasionally edge toward the issue, notably when Dionysus describes the thrill he derived from the grief-laden atmosphere of Aeschylus’ Persians (1028-29). Frogs yields no secure evidence for individual theories of tragedy, but it offers intermittent pointers to some of the disagreements by which Athenian discussion of tragedy was animated. It was against that cultural background, in the following century, that two key philosophical accounts of tragedy formed themselves.
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