Tragic and Popular Ethics

Tragedy, Aristotle suggests, dramatizes the change of fortune of high-status individuals and excites the audience’s pity and fear (Poetics 1452b28-53a39). Even in this general description lies a claim that tragedy engages the audience’s ethical judgment, for pity is an emotion that typically includes an evaluation of its target’s deserts (Konstan 2001). The downfall of the recipient of the audience’s pity cannot be something that the audience relishes; hence one needs something like Aristotle’s notion of hamartia, spanning a range of more or less venial conditions from mistake to moral error - another issue that will engage the audience’s ethical judgment. Typically, too (as Aristotle also emphasizes, 1453b15-22; cf. Heath 1999, 138; Belfiore 2000), tragedy creates extreme conflicts of obligations, especially between family members or between the family and other imperatives; these an audience will find disturbing or horrifying precisely because ethical assumptions that are normally regarded as unproblematic are being put under strain. In these basic ways (and in many others) we can expect there to be a relation between the spectators’ emotional experience of the play and their values.

But this will not be any straightforward correspondence between the values of the characters and those of the audience. One obvious reason is that the extreme situations in which tragic characters find themselves are such as the audience rarely encounters in real life. Such situations do invoke values by which the audience lives, but are contrived precisely to place those values under stress. Thus there is no necessary inference from Athenian norms to the interpretation of characters’ motivations in tragedy. To take a simple example, Sourvinou-Inwood (1989a) is able to marshal arguments which ‘‘prove’’ that, judged by the standards normally imposed upon unmarried daughters in fifth-century Athenian society, Antigone is a problematic and deviant figure; and indeed elements of this deviance are stressed in the play itself. But this supports the conclusion that an Athenian audience will have been unsympathetic to Antigone only if we accept the premise that Athenian audiences were accustomed to view negatively any female character who departed significantly

From the norms observed in their own everyday lives. That Euripides can repeatedly offer positive representations of unmarried maidens (Macaria, Children of Heracles 500-34; Polyxena, Hecuba 342-78, 546-82; Iphigenia, Iphigenia at Aulis 13681401) who heroically transcend the limitations of everyday maidenhood suggests that this premise should not be accepted.

Since the most formative earlier stage of the traditions from which the extreme conflicts of tragedy derive is heroic epic, heroic values loom large in any discussion of values in tragedy. But these heroic values are presented in a civic context that draws on the experience of the audience as participants in the social and political life of contemporary Athens; an important aspect of that social and political life is debate, both political and intellectual. Thus there is a plurality of sources of reference for the ethical dimension of tragedy, as the heroic values of epic are brought into relation with those of various elements of the contemporary political community and with the questioning of contemporary values that was such a feature of the fifth-century intellectual scene.

Much emphasis in Greek values is placed upon the possession and demonstration of prized excellences and the validation of these excellences by others. Crucial here is the concept of honor (time) as a reflection of a social, public self, whose ethical dimension consists largely in the performance of the social emotions which project and protect an agent’s self-esteem. Tragic dramaturgy can be seen as a pared-down version of this sort of social interaction; the issues of interpretation and evaluation of interactants’ performances are not qualitatively different from those of ‘‘real life’’ (Easterling 1990). The values in question are not abstract, but embedded in the characterization and motivation of the dramatic characters (Heath 1999, 157). Tragedy is thus ethically polyphonic, and the dramatic context, the character’s agenda, and the presentation of the character as a focus of sympathy or antipathy all matter in any interpretation of their values.