There is a popular conception that Athenian tragedy is universal, and that its counterpart, Old Comedy, is parochial and therefore inaccessible. This runs alongside a broader preference for tragedies (which we now often call dramas) when it comes to cinema. A brief look at Best Picture Winners at the Academy Awards (great reproducers of public taste) shows us that comedy has to work harder to be deemed worthy of artistic merit. When 'comedies' do win, it is a monstrous occurrence. Think of the dreadful
Shakespeare in Love (1998) which beat the pure and holy Oscar fodder
Saving Private Ryan (1998), or
The Artist (2011) which defeated all the American-language films which are so popular these days. Most would protest that anyone who really cares about film would steer clear of the Oscars, and they would be right. But, oddly enough, the comparison is useful.
In the golden era of Athenian drama, the competitors were shortlisted (somehow) and after their plays were performed they were awarded 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place respectively. It would be difficult to say which play was 'the best' in a given year. The tragedians were judged on four plays performed one after another, and while one tragedy might have stood out in each tetralogy, it's not clear by what metric it might be compared to the victorious comedy of that year. We would probably like to infer that the best tragedy is presumed to be superior to the best comedy, but I don't think Athenians in the 5th century BCE really saw it that way. Apples and oranges. Plato famously has Socrates claim, presumably contrary to common opinion, that the same man can write comedy and tragedy. For all the formal similarities we can observe between tragedy and comedy, it perhaps seemed futile, unfair, or just silly to pit them against each other.
Sometimes I imagine two ancient theatre-goers, one prefers tragedy and the other comedy, arguing with one another as Euripides and Aeschylus quarrel in Aristophanes'
Frogs. Possibly such a comedy really existed, certainly comedies about drama itself were performed before
Frogs and remained popular afterwards. Even New Comedy which we often imagine as nothing but ancient rom-coms, had a considerable interest in the reception of earlier drama and poetry. Diphilus for example, wrote a play which anachronistically portrayed Hipponax and Archilochus as competing lovers of Sappho! Why am I suddenly thinking of Shakespeare in Love again?!
This digression turns out to be a handy shortcut to what I think the central problem is with our modern conception of tragedy as universal. Comedy's naked interest in its own literary, philosophical, political etc. etc. context actually points us in the right direction. Aristophanes really liked tragedy, but he especially liked Euripides - whatever nasty things he says about him in his plays. Dionysus' complaint at the beginning of
Frogs that there are no good tragedians left and that he has a longing for Euripides must reflect some sort of feeling amongst the Athenian literati (to which Aristophanes belongs) that tragedy had gone to pot. If Athenian democracy is often claimed to die with Demosthenes or at Chaeronea, then equally silly people might claim that tragedy dies with Euripides. The supposed degeneration of Greek poetry as the Classical period comes to an end and what we call the Hellenistic period begins is now a very tired concept in Classical scholarship, and one rightly treated with suspicion as smelling a bit of fascism. This is a sticky topic best treated elsewhere but the same sort of thinking feeds into our misrecognition of tragedy as universal. The point is that even 80 years or so before Chaeronea, Aristophanes begins the process of the canonisation of the three great Athenian tragedians. While Aristophanes cannot really be held responsible for what happens next, I cannot think of an earlier extant example of such a retrospective view of tragedy.
After
Frogs, the stability of comedy and tragedy in the 5th century (nothing but a mirage in the first place) is blown up. The changes are easier to trace in comedy if we start with Aristophanes' later plays (
Wealth and
Assemblywomen) and pay close attention to the fragments of Middle Comedy until we get to Menander and then to the messy relationship between the
fabula palliata and New Comedy. Menander, for reasons left for yet another post, is at some point deemed the greatest comic poet of his time. Thus our popular genealogy of comedy just goes: Aristophanes ---> Menander ---> Roman stuff? Plutarch at least, compares them as the two preeminent representatives of two different styles of comedy from two different times (Menander obviously comes out on top). Occasionally, I should admit, Cratinus and Eupolis, and Diphilus and Philemon are given honourable mention in order to complete the triads. In modern thinking (surely influenced by ancient reception and canonisation), Menander is also awarded the garland of being 'universal' and sometimes is seen more as an heir to Euripides than any one comic poet. This is a purely ideological process, during which Menander and his poetry were reshaped to fit a particular ideal. The same tension (Aristophanes vs. Menander) can be mapped onto Plautus and Terence.
It is difficult to find a parallel discourse for tragedy. There is nothing after Euripides. Of course, there was a huge amount of new tragedies being composed and performed all over the Hellenistic world, and we do get the Alexandrian Pleiad as a canonised group of tragedians from the 3rd century BCE, but next to nothing remains of their output. Even for students of Hellenistic poetry, names like Sositheus or Philiscus are spicy and exciting - or perhaps dry and dusty. Again, unless one is interested in early Latin literature names like Accius, Pacuvius, and Naevius are delightfully fresh. If we heave ourselves forward in time for a moment and look back at our line of great tragedians, just before Shakespeare we get... Seneca. Now there is a real tragedy.
How can we jump from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides straight to Seneca and then to Shakespeare? This is the problem which the process of canonisation and transmission presents. A whole tradition can be lost forever because of a few arbitrary events - others it seems are deliberately destroyed. A diverse set of factors influence which authors are to be remembered, and which of their texts are to survive. It is naive or simply crass to believe that what we now consider the basis of 'Western' drama attained that status purely on its own merit (tastes change). I once heard from a young man that Ennius must not have been very good, and that that is why the
Annales has survived only in shreds and scraps. I'll leave that one up to you. Parts of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, are lost for Christ's sake!
It's often thrown around that certain tragedies are still with us because they ended up on Byzantine school curricula, and that explains the survival of physical texts but not why they ended up on the curriculum in the first place. Perhaps we can understand if we go back to a famous anecdote about Ptolemy III Euergetes playing switch-a-roo with the "official" texts of the plays of the three great Athenian tragedians, sending copies back to Athens and keeping the "originals" and thus forfeiting the deposit he had paid on them. The point of this dubious anecdote (told by Galen of all people) is to show how desperately the Ptolemies wanted to possess the cultural prestige of Classical Athens and what that comes with. To speak crudely here, the Romans do much the same thing with Classical Greek culture and literature and the trend becomes unstoppable thereafter. In the first instance then, tragedy becomes a high prestige genre and certain authors are privileged within it, firstly for practical and political reasons and then perhaps on the basis, still arbitrary, of literary merit. Things get even messier when Christianity begins to spread and tragedies are suddenly subjected to an entirely new set of criteria. Accordingly, tragedies are reinterpreted along the lines of Christian morality. It is to be suspected that Seneca's success might be the product of the favour he found with Christian writers (otherwise I cannot understand it). A particularly fascinating example of the interactions between canonised Athenian tragedy, now with a good thousand years of accretions, is the
Christus Patiens, a cento of Euripidean and Aeschylean tragedy which treats the crucifixion of Christ and has often been attributed to Gregory Nazianzen (Archbishop of Constantinople in the 4th century). A few hundred years later, Milton wrote his
Samson Agonistes which is meticulously modelled on Sophoclean tragedy with nods to Euripides (especially
Medea) and Aeschylus (
Prometheus Bound). Milton cites the
Christus Patiens as legitimising his endeavour to compose a Greek tragedy on a Christian theme.
The immense popularity of ancient Athenian tragedy in the modern theatre -most every actór and directór must get their grubby hands all over an Antigone or an Oedipus before they're done- relative to the neglect of comedy is the result of this historical process
Someone who believes that Athenian tragedy
is universal will point out that I have actually proven its universality in a roundabout way by showing how tragedy transcends time and place in a way which Old Comedy cannot. It is worth pointing out that tragedy can do this because it holds pride of place in the mythologised "Western Civilisation" narrative. More bluntly it is difficult to claim a superior cultural heritage by appealing to fart jokes in Aristophanes. Still! Everything is historically contingent and tragedy is surely no exception.
I'll take Sophocles'
Antigone as an example. It is one of the most popular Athenian tragedies at present, and has a very rich reception history. It is also more difficult to assail its alleged universality. The clash between Antigone's moral obligation to her family and yet also to obey the law seems to be widely applicable. But the conflict between the individual and the state has also been a classic problem for "Western" philosophers and political theorists. I'm thinking of J.S. Mill's
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Oh no, it's Hegel! (Image)
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On Liberty because nothing has been more influential, whether we realise it or not, on our everyday thinking about such conflicts. But the
Antigone itself is was also a favourite of Hegel's, and his reading seems to have had a massive influence as well.
But to dare even think about the Antigone in these terms is completely reprehensible. Perhaps a modern adaptation could present a version of the Antigone like this but it would be an adaptation, a version. I wonder in these cases, if we hypothesise an "original", would the Antigone be the kernel of truth and beauty at the centre of the play or would it be a completely superficial veneer which deceives an audience into giving a performance more respect than it deserves? In order for tragedy to be "universal" it must constantly be altered and adapted, and I take no issue with modern performances and translations, but if it must be changed to such an extent is it really universal?
To be fair, this is what Athenian tragedy was: poets presenting existing myths and stories in dramatic form. Indeed, many of the tragedians dealt with the same subjects. Sophocles and Euripides both wrote an
Electra (and then there is overlap with material from Aeschylus'
Oresteia), and so on. My point anyway is that tragedy's universality is a fact of reception, and while I don't really believe we can recover some pristine point where a play comes into existence free of such messy things like history... I do think it is worth re-enstranging or defamiliarizing tragedy a little rather than just imposing our own assumptions onto it. At the same time, I think it is time that comedy is seen as a more 'universal' form. And I mean this with the same caveats. In my opinion anyway, the idea of Old Comedy is far more 'universal' than that of classical Athenian tragedy. Killing your father and marrying your mother is not my idea of relatable - not yet anyway. Thanks for grappling with those universal human problems, Sophocles. Look, Aristophanes' heroes seek to end some injustice, to strive for some sort of utopia, they want to eat, drink, and have orgies! Of course, just like with tragedy I have to be selective to make this argument and gloss over the sexual violence that is so often a part of Aristophanic comedy. Perhaps that issue should make us question our canon all the more. Still, with that component removed, what could be more universal than the desire for peace and plenty?
