If you want to identify me, ask me not where I

live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my

hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail,
ask me what I think is keeping me from living
fully for the thing I want to live for..
-Thomas Merton

DEVOTION
Ancient Greece
Athens
The Acropolis
The Parthenon
Skene

orchestra – “dancing place”

where the performance was
DIONYSUS
Greek god of…

…Wine
…Fertility
…Sex
…Theatre
Dithyrambs
Songs sung to
Dionysus (hymns)

THESPIS – First actor?

Dithyrambs now featured
ONE actor + Chorus

This is the early form of TRAGEDY

City Dionysia
AWARDS
to winning playwright
Maaah!
to winning actor

TRAGEDY =
GOAT SONG
Tragedy
Three Forms
of Greek Drama
 Tragedy
 Satyr Play
 Comedy
It’s time to meet your playwrights…
History dates them around 500 BCE
But you can date them today…
 N T
T A
Euripides
Tragedy’s Rebel

Aeschylus

X
Earliest writer of Greek Tragedies

E Sophocles
The Poetic Tragedian
Aristophanes
The C omedian
Loves togas, early democracy,
and puppies.

Wrote the Oresteia trilogy:

Agamemnon
Libation Bearers
Eumenides Aesc hylus
Earliest writer of Greek Tragedies
Sophocles
Considered one of the most poetic of
Greek playwrights, expert at
backrubs

Wrote the Oedipus “Trilogy”:

Oedipus Rex
Oedipus at Colonus
Sophoc les
Antigone The Poetic Tragedian
Euripides
Pioneers of early drama,
not looking for it in
relationships.

Wrote:
Medea Euripides
Tragedy’s Rebel
The Trojan Women
Voted class clown and most
likely to

Wrote:
Clouds
Birds Aristophanes
The C omedian
Frogs
Lysistrata
Aristotle (384-322 BC)

T a t !
NO r igh
w
play
Aristotle’s POETICS
DESCRIPTIVE of 5th century Greek
Tragedy

Became PRESCRIPTIVE to later

generations of writers
Aristotle’s definition of
tragedy….
“….a process of imitating an action which has
serious implications, is complete, and possesses
magnitude; by means of language which has been
made sensuously attractive, with each of its
varieties found separately in the parts; enacted by
the persons themselves and not presented
through narrative; through a course of pity and
fear completing the purification of tragic acts
which have those emotional characteristics.”
Aristotle’s POETICS
Six Elements of Tragedy (Drama)
Plot
Character
Thought
Diction
Music
Spectacle
Plot
 Complex
 not episodic
 linear and logical
anagnorisis
recognition
peripety
reversal
Aristotle’s POETICS

TRAGIC HERO
hamartia
mistake

“tragic flaw”

“sin” or “trespass”
katharsis
Goal of tragedy

purgation
medical
moral
artistic
Satyr Plays
Later….Comedy!
Comedy
Komoidia

487 BC

all extant classical Greek

comedies are by the same
writer!
Aristophanes
(c.450 – c.380 BC)
Wrote about 40 plays (according to records)

We have 11 surviving plays

“Old Comedy” = Aristophanic Comedy

Aristophanic Comedy
Social commentary (politics, art, war)

Exaggerated action

Emphasis on physical pleasures

Greek “New Comedy”
Hellenistic Period
Hellenistic Period
-- from beginning of
Alexander the Great’s
reign (c. 336 BC)
to defeat of Greece by
Rome in 146 BC
New Comedy
New Comedy
Menander
(342-291 BC)
MENANDER
Other play fragments found in …

Outer wrappings of mummies!