What was Greek tragedy ?
Posted: Thu Jun 03, 2004 2:22 pm
Salvete,
Reading in G.L. Dickinson's "The Greek View of Life" I mentioned earlier, I began to ask myself again what was the true nature of Greek tragedy. Did the Greeks primarily see it as a religious event (after all, tragedies in Athens were performed during the great Dionysos-festival in spring), did they regard it as a moral-psychological process, as Aristotle's theory* seems to suggest, or was it, in their eyes, rather a social happening and a form of public entertainment (a large part of the Athenian population could and did visit the tragedies, being almost free thanks to state-intervention). Or did Nietzsche understand its appeal better when he suggested that the Greeks, being a very rhetoric-minded kind, just loved to hear beatiful words and phrases; after all, they already knew the standard mythological stories that were adapted to plays - and how they would end - when they went into the theater.
Any opinions on this intriguing question ?
Valete,
Q. Pomponius Atticus
*A brief outline of it can be read at http://www.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/poetics.html
Reading in G.L. Dickinson's "The Greek View of Life" I mentioned earlier, I began to ask myself again what was the true nature of Greek tragedy. Did the Greeks primarily see it as a religious event (after all, tragedies in Athens were performed during the great Dionysos-festival in spring), did they regard it as a moral-psychological process, as Aristotle's theory* seems to suggest, or was it, in their eyes, rather a social happening and a form of public entertainment (a large part of the Athenian population could and did visit the tragedies, being almost free thanks to state-intervention). Or did Nietzsche understand its appeal better when he suggested that the Greeks, being a very rhetoric-minded kind, just loved to hear beatiful words and phrases; after all, they already knew the standard mythological stories that were adapted to plays - and how they would end - when they went into the theater.
Any opinions on this intriguing question ?
Valete,
Q. Pomponius Atticus
*A brief outline of it can be read at http://www.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/poetics.html