After the end of the classical period, the performance of tragic drama continued to take place in numerous parts of the Greek and Greco-Roman worlds for many centuries. Classical tragedies were also widely read, in the course of their education and beyond, by the cultural elite. At the rudimentary level of classification, later reflected in marginal notes (scholia) to texts of the tragedians (Meijering 1987, 20920), the genre was standardly assumed to focus on the exhibition of great suffering, pathos, and to aim above all at the arousal of pity. But beyond that basic generic characterization the Hellenistic and Imperial periods saw a number of important developments in attitudes to tragic drama and/or life. One new factor, though picking up from Poetics chapter 9, was a debate about the relationship between tragedy and history. Some Hellenistic historians foregrounded deliberately theatrical, pity-inducing scenes in their writing, a tendency which could be criticized, as at Polybius 2.56, for confusing historiography with tragedy (and thus dubbed ‘‘tragic history’’ by modern scholars). Yet Polybius, a forthright opponent of tragic history, himself believed that historiography could function as an instruction in the human condition, showing its readers how to learn from the misfortunes of others (1.35) - in other words, appropriating for itself one conception of tragedy's own purpose, as Polybius acknowledges by tragic references and vocabulary in this context. These issues have ramifications which cannot be pursued here, but they illustrate how ideas of tragedy continued to find their way into intellectual controversies that reached far beyond the theater itself.
From the full range of postclassical responses to tragedy, I have selected just two, one philosophical and one ‘‘literary,’’ for concentrated attention in this final section. I start with Stoic attitudes to tragedy, which grew from an attempt to answer the challenge thrown down to ‘‘lovers of poetry’’ by Plato (Republic 608d) to show that poetry ‘‘is a source not only of pleasure but also of benefit to communities and to human life.’’ The Stoic answer was unreservedly didactic. It propounded the thesis that poetry could and should vividly epitomize moral paradigms and their consequences. Poetry, on this view, is a type of popular philosophy, a means of bringing home certain truths to the minds of those who might lack the ability to contemplate them in more abstract form (De Lacy 1948). Tragedy is an important test case for this Stoic thesis, since its subject matter highlights the starkest examples of how disastrously the lives of human beings can go wrong. Weaker forms of didacticism had some currency in the classical period itself. Timocles’ comic character, we recall, claims that tragedy ‘‘benefits’’ (ophelein) spectators by helping them see certain things about the world and thereby influencing their broader outlook on life. But the Stoics give tragic didacticism a special twist. They do not so much extend earlier thinking about tragedy as stand it on its head. In the process, and under the pressure of their larger enterprise of reforming human emotions (Sorabji 2000), they change the very idea of what constitutes the tragic. We can trace one remarkable case of this in the recorded thoughts of the Stoic ex-slave Epictetus.
‘‘What are tragedies,’’ asks Epictetus bluntly, ‘‘other than the sufferings [pathe], displayed inverse, ofpeople who have admired external things?’’ (Discourses 1.4.26). We should notice at once that the term pathee refers at least as much to the psychological trauma, the anguished ‘‘passions,’’ of the characters in question as to their physical adversity. Just before asking his question Epictetus has described the goal of achieving virtuous independence from ‘‘externals’’ (i. e., material circumstances) as the removal of‘‘griefs and lamentations’’ from one’s life (1.4.23). He has contrasted Socrates’ tranquility in the face of death with the self-pitying exclamations of tragic figures like Priam and Oedipus, indeed ‘‘kings in general’’ (1.4.24-25). By definition Epictetus cannot be citing Priam and Oedipus solely as great instances of the impingement of misfortune; he must mean them as examples of the psychic depths of possible human misery. Such misery is measured by the tragic subject’s own tortured reaction to the loss of external prosperity (symbolized by the possession of monarchical power). Tragic ‘‘suffering,’’ pathos, is truly in the mind, like all Stoic virtue and vice. But this opens up a potentially puzzling space between the subjectivity of the tragic character and the viewpoint of the spectators whose goal is to remove ‘‘griefs and lamentations’’ from their own lives.
The argument presented by Socrates in Republic 10 insisted that the tragic spectator ‘‘sympathizes’’ (sumpaschein) or ‘‘suffers with’’ the tragic character and is therefore infected emotionally by the latter’s values (i. e., attachment to externals, including one’s own kith and kin). The Stoic Epictetus seems to imply that the properly attuned spectator of tragedy will observe the character’s pathe (sufferings) with detachment, recognizing how the latter’s unhappiness is really self-inflicted, since the result of false judgments of value. But there is a problem. The genuine Stoic might be capable of watching tragedy in that state of mind, but he or she would have no need to do so; whereas anyone not already convinced of the truth of Stoicism might have difficulty achieving such detachment at all. So the status of Epictetus’ conception of tragedy seems unclear. If meant normatively, it is far from obvious why tragedy should have any role in the life of the (would-be) Stoic, especially given the danger of the soul’s ‘‘surrender,’’ in Platonic terms, to the dramatic characters’ emotions; if descriptively, it seems simply false - that just isn’t the way tragic audiences are known to react. What, we wonder, has happened to pity (and fear), or, more generally, to tragic psuchagOgia (imaginative/emotional enthrallment)?
One possibility is that Epictetus means to preserve something like a traditional notion of psuchagOgia, but thinks this can ultimately operate in support of Stoic principles. On this view, the arousal of the passions in the theater will (later) assist us in extirpating them from our own lives. This possibility, which was certainly endorsed by another Stoic, Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 11.6), is opened up by Epictetus’ statement, immediately after his ‘‘What are tragedies...?’’ question, that even being ‘‘deceived’’ (exapatan) is a price worth paying in order to learn (man-thanein) the irrelevance of externals (1.4.27). Could Epictetus here be echoing the old Gorgianic notion that in tragedy ‘‘the one who deceives is more just than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the undeceived’’? If so, his position would amount to a two-stage response to the Platonic charge of Republic 10: first, an admission that even the ethically mature tragic spectator might be drawn into the imaginative world of the play, ‘‘deceived’’ into taking its characters seriously; but, secondly, an unplatonic claim that such a spectator could nonetheless emerge from the experience with a better grasp of true (Stoic) priorities, all the more convinced of the irrelevance of externals for having been vicariously absorbed in the passions of those who erroneously attach great importance to them. We might think of this hypothesis as a sort of ethical aversion therapy.
A consideration which obstructs this reading, however, is that at 1.4.24, just before the reference to tragedy, Epictetus speaks of the need to ‘‘learn’’ (mantha-nein) in real life ‘‘what death, exile, prison, and hemlock are,'' in order to emulate the equanimity of Plato's Socrates in the dialogue Crito. This characteristically Platonic-Stoic conception of philosophy as a rehearsal for death suggests that the normal hold of bodily suffering over the mind can be actively defeated. On this premise, we would expect the experience of tragedy to furnish opportunities to practice active resistance, even imperviousness, to emotions such as pity and fear. With both the alternatives I have set out, Epictetus' view of tragedy would ironically amount to a variant on the (tragic) principle of pathei mathos, ‘‘learning from suffering.’’ What is at issue here, however, as regards the psychological health of the (would-be) Stoic spectator, is whether tragedy is to function as an enactment of ethical anti-models to be watched with outright revulsion (see Plato, Republic 605e5 for this idea in a counterfactual form), or, as for Marcus Aurelius, a medium of emotional exposure which is only a step on the road to knowing what is misplaced about the values of tragic characters. On the first reading, not only does one lose the Gorgianic interpretation of ‘‘deception’’ at 1.4.27; it is also hard to see why one would want to attend the tragic theater, or read tragic texts, at all, given the overwhelming cultural presumption that what is on offer is profoundly emotional in nature. On the second reading, it remains unclear exactly how Stoics are supposed to survive and benefit from exposure to pity and fear (or other tragic emotions), rather than being thereby made more susceptible to such emotion in their own lives, as Socrates had maintained at Republic 606a-b. The likeliest answer to this last problem - and one which gained adherents among neo-Stoic theorists of tragedy in the Renaissance - would be that the sheer intensity of emotion experienced in the theater leads to subsequent repudiation of the false life-values that generated the unhappiness displayed in tragedy.
Can Epictetus’ other references to tragedy help to clarify the puzzle, seemingly posed by 1.4.25-27, of how far the Stoic should temporarily ‘‘live through’’ the miseries of tragic characters, as opposed to observing their calamities with dispassionate detachment? At 1.24.15-18 Epictetus reinforces the point, already made at 1.4.25, that it is ‘‘among the rich, kings, and tyrants’’ that tragedies (in reality as much as on the stage) ‘‘have their place,’’ not in the lives of the poor. He cites Oedipus’ cry, ‘‘O Cithaeron, why did you accept me?’’ from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (1390; a cry that chimes with the paradigmatic pessimism of‘‘better never to have been born’’) as a microcosm of how blighted a whole life can be by a mistaken estimation of external circumstances. Stoics are actually advised to see ‘‘tragedy’’ in the world around them: ‘‘when you approach one of those people [i. e., kings, etc.], remember you are approaching a tragic performer [tragOdos] - but not the actor, rather Oedipus himself.’’ (See the reference to the tyrant at Plato, Republic 577b1 for an antecedent to this motif of tragedy played out within the show of public life.) There is no suggestion here that the Stoic should feel sympathy for such people, merely that he should inspect their predicament and realize afresh the unenviable delusions of their social status.
At 1.28.31-33 Epictetus derives all tragedies from the source of misguidedly following sense-impressions or appearances (phainomena) without proper consideration. He cites four tragedies, including Euripides’ Atreus, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and Euripides’ Hippolytus, as emblematic of this point; in each case he seems to have in mind the disastrous consequences of a mistaken belief (such as Theseus’ certainty of his son’s guilt in Hippolytus). This way of adducing plays is most compatible, once again, with the idea that the ideal Stoic spectator would observe the errors of tragic agents with enlightened impassivity, not become emotionally engrossed in their stories. At 2.16.31 Epictetus’ conception of tragedy reaches an extreme of vehemence which makes it even harder to see how he could find much value in the genre. After mocking the childish dependence of many people on material circumstances, he produces a parodic tragic trimeter on the subject of baths and water-supply, then exclaims: ‘‘See how tragedy comes about when chance events befall fools!’’ If the characters of tragedy are nothing better than ‘‘fools’’ (moroi), how can the Stoic spectator sympathize in any way with them? Similarly, the injunction at 4.7.15, ‘‘do not turn death into a tragedy’’ (me tragodei to pragma), harks back to Platonic gibes at the ‘‘so-called seriousness’’ of tragedy: the implication is that tragic characters make big mistakes about the significance of death (and therefore the value of life). From this perspective, to understand and learn from tragedy will be to grasp the nature of such mistakes, not to be emotionally moved by their perpetrators.
What emerges most clearly from the passages cited above is an idea of tragedy as grounded in far-reaching misjudgments about the nature of ethical value, and therefore as something that happens both inside and outside the theater. Less stable is Epictetus’ view of the usefulness of beholding the psychological trauma of tragic agents. At one extreme (tragedy befalls ‘‘fools’’), he seems to leave little room for anything like a traditional version of tragic emotionalism, but at 1.4.25-27 there is a glimmer of a suggestion that, for some people at least, exposure to the ‘‘deception’’ of tragedy, and therefore perhaps its emotional power, may serve to bring home by counter-example the truth of Stoicism’s own worldview. However precariously, Epictetus manages to avoid a wholesale rejection of tragedy. The tone of contempt conveyed by some of his references to it is not contempt for tragic theater or plays tout court but for the human errors which, in principle, tragedy can help us to understand and avoid.
It was not only Stoics who could find themselves ambivalently disposed toward the importance of tragedy. The general status of tragedy in the Imperial period was ambiguous. Greek thinkers were influenced by culturally elitist, and in part philosophical, attitudes (anticipated in the classical period: Aristotle, Poetics 1461b26-62a11) that regarded the theater with some disdain as a populist institution and sometimes perceived tragedy itself as a hyperbolic, overblown art form (again, an old complaint). On the other hand, tragic texts retained a substantial, even prestigious, role in the literate culture that defined the self-images of Greek intellectuals and writers in this period. The resulting ambivalence can be traced, for example, in the prolific work of Plutarch, who regularly associates tragedy with falsehood and pretence, yet also manifests the influence of tragic story-patterns in his own writing (Mossman 1988). But I have space here to present only one case-study, that of the treatise On the Sublime (whose author I shall follow custom in calling Longinus). The rationale of ‘‘the sublime’’ as a literary category is unequivocally positive; it tethers the potential of the human mind and imagination to the greatness of nature and the cosmos. It is therefore unsurprising that Longinus should harbor reservations about tragedy. We know, on the other hand, that some versions of tragedy could be deemed life-affirming, expressive of heroically aspirational ideals, or edifying in other ways. What kind of accommodation did Longinus reach between sublimity and tragedy?
Early in On the Sublime (3.1) Longinus uses a quotation of what he takes to be overwrought tragic rhetoric (Aeschylus fr. 281, but author uncertain) to illustrate how easily a writer can slip from true sublimity into mere bombast. In doing so, however, he acknowledges production of ‘‘the fearful’’ (to phoberon) and stylistic grandeur as a pair of quintessential tragic features that are, by implication, compatible with the sublime. Yet such features carry, in his eyes, a heightened risk of crossing the dividing line between the acceptably ‘‘tragic’’ ( tragikos) and an effect of inadvertent self-parody or counterfeit tragedy (paratragodos). This risk exemplifies Longinus’ larger concern with the relationship between the authentically sublime and the pseudo-sublime. What is at stake here, as throughout the treatise, is not purely stylistic; it involves a complex interplay between style and substance, between language and a vision of human existence. Tragedy, with its generic tendency toward extremes of experience and a concomitantly expansive style, accordingly becomes an important challenge for Longinus’ theory.
The ways in which tragedy threatens to fail the test of sublimity amount to more than bombast. The sublime stems in part from ambitiously soaring thoughts and strongly ‘‘inspired’’ emotion (8.1); but there are also ‘‘low’’ (tapeinos, 9.10), that is, unheroic, emotions which block sublimity (Innes 1995): Longinus (8.2), at least indirectly influenced by Stoicism in this respect, denominates some types of ‘‘pity, grief, and fear’’ (oiktoi, lupai, phoboi) in this class. Now, if to phoberon (3.1) is compatible with sublimity, while various kinds of phoboi are not, clearly Longinus assumes a distinction between different emotional effects relating to fear. The legitimately ‘‘fearful,’’ 3.1 indicates, requires impressively imposing, forceful (deinos) imagination; in such cases to phoberon will be (or cause) a kind of awe in the hearer’s or reader’s mind (cf. 34.4), whereas at 8.2 Longinus appears to deprecate the depiction of unmitigated states of fearfulness and grief. Consistent with this is the fact that at 9.7 he praises the Iliadic description of cosmic upheaval during the battle of the gods as phobera (though also - a separate point - verging on the irreligious). Consistent too, if more subtly, is 22.2, where Longinus admires the Herodotean depiction of a character who voices instinctive fear but does so (we notice) in a speech exhorting his audience with rousing fervor to risk everything in defense of their homeland. Both these cases harness ‘‘the fearful’’ to sublime ends.
What, though, of pity? At 11.2 the possibility of successfully creating pitiful effects ( oiktoi) is expressly dissociated from the sphere of the sublime. It makes sense, then, that this should be part of the repertoire of Hyperides (34.2), an author Longinus thinks multi-talented but lacking in grandeur. Also revealing is that lamentations and expressions of (self-)pity (oiktoi again) are picked out as characteristic of the ‘‘ebbing’’ genius of Homer in the Odyssey (9.12), in contrast to the supposedly more dramatic heroism of the Iliad. It is not that Longinus has a poor opinion of the Odyssey; he has shrewdly registered the work’s penchant for scenes where characters’ recollections reduce them (and others) to tears. But he finds it a less sublime epic than the Iliad because he takes the latter’s heroes (typified by the Ajax of book 17 who cries to Zeus, ‘‘Kill us if you want, but do so in the daylight, not in darkness’’) to be energized by bold aspirations that transcend an attachment to mere survival. The implications of this contrast for Longinus’ estimation of tragedy are corroborated at 15.5, where he compares the ‘‘heroically’’ daring imagination of Aeschylus to the warriors of Seven against Thebes, warriors whose lack of (self-)pity (oiktos) Longinus specifically recalls. True heroism, whether that of the fighting warrior or of the heroic writer himself (who faces his own ‘‘dangers,’’ 15.4-5, and must be fearless, 14.3), strives courageously into zones which lie beyond pity (as well as beyond the kind of fear that merely incapacitates). Longinus occupies a critical position which commits him to rejecting tragedy qua pessimistic, life-denying genre, and (re)conceiving it as a vehicle for the expression of soaringly heroic ambitions. The sublime - which is a creatively joyous state of mind (7.2), capable of embracing a vision of the entire cosmos (ch. 35) - demands this of him.
On the Sublime does not follow through this logic by formulating an explicit theory of tragedy. But it unmistakably associates the traditionally canonical tragic emotion of pity with emotional states below that of the sublime, while concomitantly distinguishing the awesome ‘‘fearfulness’’ attaching to (some dimensions of) the sublime from the ‘‘low’’ emotion of ordinary, inhibiting fear. This leaves Longinus free to find sublimity selectively in individual passages of tragedy (though he can also admire a whole play: see 33.5 on Oedipus the King). Chapter 15, in particular, praises all three of the major fifth-century tragedians for their sublime powers of vivid visualization (phantasia). Most interesting here is the praise of Euripides, a poet Longinus takes not to be naturally sublime, for ‘‘forcing’’ his imagination to depict emotions such as madness and love with an intensity that transports the hearer into each character’s state of mind. Although the characters in question may be tragically doomed, Longinus’ critical framework redeems them for sublimity by identifying an exhilarating, mind-transforming experience (a form of ekplexis, ‘‘amazement,’’ 15.2) in our exposure to their passionate consciousness.
One further Euripidean example, if carefully interpreted, confirms this complex stance. At 40.3 Longinus praises a single line of Heracles (1245: ‘‘I am fully loaded with sufferings - no room for more’’) for its phrasing of ordinary words into a magnificent whole. On one level the point looks like a formally rhetorical comment on word arrangement; but there is more to it. If we ask how Longinus would square his admiration of the passage with his earlier disapproval of (tragic) pity, we might notice that Euripides’ Heracles thinks of himself as somehow beyond pity (1237), as well as beyond the limits of suffering, and that he exhibits a scornful defiance toward the gods that makes him not unlike the Iliadic Ajax, whose appeal to Longinus’ sensibility has already been mentioned. If Longinus can discover sublimity in a scene that might strike other eyes as a paradigm of the tragically (even nihilistically) pitiful, this is because he discerns an enduring assertion of Heracles’ own will in the face of ‘‘the worst’’ that the gods and the world can throw at him. Euripides’ Heracles, on this (partial) reading, transcends pity and leaves a sense of greatness that befits the sublime’s perspective on eternity (35.2). True tragedy, for Longinus, escapes any pessimism over the loss of material fortune (which in quasi-Stoic fashion he glosses as ‘‘that which is externally trumped up a la tragedy,’’ to exOthen prostragOdoumenon), including the loss of life itself. Revaluated in the light of the sublime, tragedy becomes a statement of a force that can rise heroically above such loss to affirm an inner human nobility - even, symbolically at least, a kind of immortality.
Longinus corroborates one of the principal claims of this chapter, that ancient responses to tragedy were not just codifications of a highly elaborate art form (interested though Greek critics often were in the genre’s general poetic and dramaturgical components) but entailed attempts to locate meaning and value in, or beyond, existence itself. Ideas of tragedy are built around the relationship, and the intersection, of drama and life. That helps to explain why the last notable ancient response to tragedy, though one which lies outside the scope of my treatment, was that of Christianity, which reacted to, and against, tragedy as a central phenomenon of the whole mentality of paganism. By late antiquity ideas of tragedy in the Greco-Roman world, both pagan and Christian, formed an arena of diverse possibilities whose legacy was to be reworked in the Middle Ages (Kelly 1993) and, subsequently, in both the dramatic practice and the critical doctrines of the Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and modern literary theory. The history of ancient responses to tragedy - a history that has never been fully written - is of importance in its own right but also for its long-lasting repercussions within the cultural categories of Western thought.
World History
