Why would an audience take pleasure in witnessing the spectacle of pain and suffering as experienced by the heroes of Ancient Greek tragedy?

-- Kate Ferns (kmdferns@hotmail.com), May 13, 2001

Answers

I don't know that "taking pleasure" was the point of Greek tragedy. You might have a look at Aristotle's _Poetics_, which discusses the ancient Greek theory of tragedy at some length. The audience was supposed to experience the catharsis (a term revived centuries later by Freud) of fear and pity, which was thought to be both instructive and healthy.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), May 14, 2001.

As I remember, these plays were little morality lessons. Pain and suffering were the consequences of wrongful behavior, for example, excessive pride and arrogance. The play provided an object lesson for the audience in how a good Greek should think and behave.

-- Warren Street (warren@cwu.edu), May 15, 2001.

To respond to Warren's answer, there was a didactic element in the earlier Greek tragedies (Aeschylus, Sophocles), to be sure, but I wouldn't say that this was the sole intent. It seems to me that it was more like an *assumption* of the day that the content of plays would be virtuous than it was an explicit *aim*. They were almost all based on traditional religious tales. It may be, at least in part, for this reasons that the later plays of Euripides were so scandalous when they were first presented -- they violated conventions that were so deeply engrained in the culture that the Greeks themselves may not have been fully conscious of them. Thus, it is in the aftermath of Euripides that we first(?) see the writing of treatises on aesthetics (such as Book X of Plato's republic) in which the moral character of art and artists (especially poetry and poets) is explicitly discussed.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), May 15, 2001.

As Christopher mentioned in his first reply, Aristotle described the function of tragedy as a catharsis of Pity and Fear through pity and fear. For example, Oedipus proposing to find, prosecute, and judge the criminal, while he is the criminal. Nietzsche's work "The Birth of Tragedy" may be of interest to you if you are looking for a *psychological* account of function of Greek Tragedy (you may want to try Francis Golffing's translation published by Doubleday). For Nietzsche, the tragedy provided a metaphysical solace for the audience. Nietzsche goes further to say that tragedy at its peak was the pinnacle of human art...that the tragedy gave to the ancient world their perspective of the world, their values. Looking at the writings of both Aristotle and Nietzsche on this topic may be most useful because Nietzsche accuses Socrates of "murdering" Greek tragedy and inventing the value of modern natural science (though the "tragedian" who commits the actual suicide is Euripides). Incidentally, the plays of Euripides were apparently tear-jerkers and the audience wept!

-- Mirisse Foroughe (mirisse@yorku.ca), November 06, 2001.

The answer which Nietzsche gives in The Birth of Tragedy is that in true tragedy (Sophocles and Aeschylus, but not Euripides) the tragic hero is always really the god Dionysus, who makes his appearance through the tragic individual (e.g. Oedipus) and saves himself and all Nature through the sacrifice (and hence ruin) of this individual. Even Oedipus is really Dionysus - though we look at and listen to and suffer with and fear for Oedipus the individual, it is really Dionysus who stands behind the mask and emerges at the tragic moment of the downfall of Oedipus. Nietzsche speaks in The Birth of Tragedy of The Primal Unity and its being 'eternally divided against itself'. By this I understand the following : all 'individuals' (or 'beings) are in truth one and arise from the eternal contradiction which lies at the heart of The Primal Unity (this also appears in the fragments of Heraclitus, whom Nietzsche praised highly). It is as if Nietzsche is recalling an ancient lost wisdom which teaches that God is All but cannot endure His own solitude and is the eternal broken hearted One at the centre of all beings, which, as really The Primal Unity itself, war against each other but all will the same end - a return to metaphysical Oneness. It is the effect of the tragedy in Nietzsche's view, I believe, to achieve this return and thus give metaphysical comfort to the 'onlookers', who, however, because they are in truth one with the suffering tragic hero (e.g. Oedipus) experience this suffering in themselves as if it were their own, which in a sense it is - for in the moment of tragic revelation the individual, the individual as such and not only Oedipus (who is only the representative of the individual as such), is completely annihilated, and all is return to a mystical and primal oneness. The 'comforting' aspect here is the dream-vision of the suffering tragic hero who through his heroic submission to fate suffuses everything with light and redeems not only all men but Nature itself.

-- John Richardson (JOHN@curly40.freeserve.co.uk), January 06, 2002.