Meaning Through Tragedy

What do you think of, when you hear the words, “Greek tragedy?” Oedipus Rex? Hubris,

fatal flaw? Fate in general, with tragic results that can never change? Well, in the past few years,

there has been a shift in the scholarship away from this viewpoint. And instead, scholars are now

looking at tragedy as something meant to teach us, the audience, something. Bryan Doerries, a

translator and director explains tragedies as “not designed to fill us with pessimism and dread

about the future of human existence…[but] to help us see the impending disaster on the horizon,

so that we may correct course and narrowly avoid it”. Doerries sees it as an ancient technology,

something that Mary Lefkowitz, and James Ronn, editors of The Greek Plays, would certainly

agree with. They describe tragedies as “not only [speaking] to the causes of despair; they can

also provide the words that can bring a partial remedy”.

Doerries works on doing just that. On September 7th, this past year, our Classics

Department here at UC, along with CCM and the Trauma Recovery Center at the Cincinnati VA

Medical Center hosted an event entitled The Theater of War. It is a program, the brainchild of

Bryan Doerries, which uses scenes from Greek tragedies, most notably Sophocles’ Ajax and

Philoctetes to spur discussion about PTSD and the other struggles that combat veterans face in

coming home. His goal is to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”. Actors read a

few scenes (this time just from Ajax), with Doerries giving enough information in between to set

the scene. Once they are done, a panel of four or so people, who have not seen the production

before, will respond based on their own experiences. At ours, it was a Marine infantry officer,

the director of the Trauma Recovery Center at the Cincinnati VA, an Iraq veteran, and his wife.

After their thoughts, Doerries opened up a discussion in the audience. All this is in his effort to
connect these ancient tragedies to the present day. He says in his book, called The Theater of

War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today, that the tragedies “[give] voice to

timeless human experiences…Through tragedy, the Greeks faced the darkness of human

existence as a community”.

This experience was incredible to me because it brought the Greeks alive for me. It was

so affirming to hear everyone’s thoughts on how easily they found their lives relating to this play

written over 2000 years ago about characters from about 5000 years ago. The tragedians then

wanted this reaction too. The tragedies were performed at the Theater of Dionysus, during his

festival (a “public, state-sanctioned holiday”), every year, and every Athenian was there. Nothing

we have today is even remotely like that, where we can all come together as a community for

this purpose. As we all know, life in ancient times was not all sunshine and roses, and they

certainly had the thought of death hanging over their heads more so than we do today through

war, disease, etc. The tragedies—whether it was Ajax, or Iphigenia at Aulis or Oedipus

Tyrannos, gave the ancient Greeks a place to face this reality in. Yet it was still slightly removed.

They could see themselves in these characters, and they were all characters that the Ancient

Greeks knew and loved but the details didn’t map perfectly onto their lives. Because then that’s

not entertainment, it’s just looking in a mirror. By using the characters and larger plot points of

myths though, rather than something completely new, the tragedians had their audience already

set in the story. They knew the characters already, so the author can jump immediately into the

story they want to tell without needing to do exposition on the plot and characters. Interestingly

enough, we, in looking back to the fifth century Athenians to find help, parallel exactly what

they did in going back to their heroes of the Bronze Age. Doerries says this is because “we are

relieved to discover that we are not alone, especially across time.”

 This whole story is deeply personal for me, because I too found that relief in knowing

that people 2000 years ago struggled with the same emotions and experiences that I do. On

February 27th, 2015, my parents picked me up from school, sat my siblings and me down in the

living room and broke the news to us that my father had been diagnosed with ALS. ALS, also

called Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is a horrible disease which destroys a person’s muscles, slowly but

surely and will eventually result in death, often due to asphyxiation. My father was given 3-5

years to live; he passed away December 18th, 2017. Living with and caring for someone with

ALS feels like its own tragedy—someone I talked to once described it as a trauma, and I don’t

see how the wound can every fully heal. When I sat in the audience that night, and listened to the

screams of Ajax and Tecmessa, I connected completely. When Ajax said to himself, “When a

man suffers, without end in sight and takes no pleasure, in living his life, day by day, wishing for

death, he should not live out all his years”, I wept. My dad fought until the very end but I would

be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about how my dad’s suffering would end. When Bryan

Doerries asked the audience, “What if we could be on the beach with Ajax? So he isn’t alone.

Would that change anything?”, I reevaluated how my interactions with my dad had been going

and resolved to spend more and better time with him, for both his sake, and my own. This past

fall semester I had decided to live at home, for that reason (although it hadn’t been going

particularly well) and also because my family needed much more help. I was living at home and

really struggling with the day-to-day effects of caregiving and balancing everything else in my

life. I felt overwhelmed and I desperately wanted support. But I felt that I could not get help from

others at the ALS Association. I couldn’t see anyone further along in the progression of the

disease than my dad because I was barely able to make it through each day at a time. I could not

look at what our future was going to look like, it would be too much to handle. And I couldn’t
look back either because I was so angry that my dad didn’t have the same capabilities that these

people still had. But somehow, Greek tragedy helped. These characters, these authors, did not

know me or my situation, but I could see a lot of what I was facing in theirs. I bought Mr.

Doerries’s book that night, and finally got the chance to read it in early December. I was hooked

immediately. I found meaning throughout the whole book, but the last chapter, entitled Heracles

in Hospice, particularly hit home for me. This chapter examines Sophocles’ Trachiniae, where

Heracles has put on the poisoned cloak given to him by Deianira who thinks it’s doused in a love

potion. Once he puts the cloak on, he immediately starts struggling through pain and dying. Let

me tell you, I found myself in every single page of that chapter, in everything Hyllus said to his

father, and I often saw my father in Heracles. I won’t dwell on this too long, but equal attention

is given to Heracles’ struggle as he stares down death through the pain of his illness and Hyllus’s

psychological pains at balancing his role as caregiver and it was so validating to see this struggle

completely portrayed.

Also in the chapter is part of Philoctetes, which features the same situation: an older man

with a terminal illness and a young caregiver. Neoptolemus says to Philoctetes,

“ἀλγῶ πάλαι δὴ τἀπὶ σοὶ στένων κακά.”. An incredibly literal translation would be: “Indeed I am

pained, sighing over your troubles” but Doerries, in his attempt to “reimagine it for our time”, as

it were, translates this as, “Your pain is painful to observe”. Watching a person you love suffer

and experience pain even though most ALS patients don’t have any pain involved, is the hardest

thing I have ever had to do.

Doerries, Lefkowitz, and Romm all agree, in not so many words, that “tragedy is

designed to validate our moral distress at living in a universe in which many of our actions and

choices are influenced by external powers beyond our control”. Euripides’ The Trojan Women, is
a beautiful example of this. It is a place which focuses in on Troy, on Hecuba, Cassandra,

Andromache, and Helen after Troy falls and they await their fate. It won 2nd place at the festivals

of Dionysus in 416 BC, one year after the Athenians sacked Melos, in the Peloponnesian War

killing every man, and selling every woman and child into slavery. Euripides clearly wanted to

“afflict the comfortable”. He asked of the Athenian audience ‘what have we done?’ The chorus,

comprised of Trojan women, and Hecuba show concern for Cassandra because they worry about

her going crazy. In a moment of lucidity, she says “Hector died. It hurt so deeply. But he lives in

fame. He is a hero for all time. Without the Greek invasion, this would not be”. She takes

comfort in the fame and glory, the kleos, that her brothers have received as a result of this war.

Personally, I see this as a cold comfort, but she uses them to contrast the Greeks. The Greeks

sought this out and have lost many lives for the sake of one man’s pride and one man’s greed.

Cassandra’s viewpoint forces the Greeks in the audience to think about what they’ve done to

Melos. His audience sees their heroes do exactly what they’ve just done and be cursed for it.

Aristotle, in his Poetics when talking about tragedy discusses the idea of a catharsis. He

argues that the fundamental point of tragedies, all this emotion and all this suffering is to draw

out some sort of catharsis. What he means by this word is unclear and he does not clarify

himself. Whether he means a complete purging of negative emotions (thereby removing the

emotions) or instead a purging of the feelings of the negative and toxic powers they hold is

completely up for debate. Now, no matter what he means by the term, the characters of the

tragedies themselves rarely if ever get a cathartic experience. But the audience, gets to see the

characters acting out their same pain on that stage and can identify so strongly with it, as I did,

seeing myself in Hyllus and Neoptolemus. As I said, there is often no cathartic moment in the

play for the character. In The Trojan Women, Hecuba and Andromache are allowed a scene
where they just wail. They scream in half-lines, trading back in forth, fitting in the lines in

between each other. Hecuba wails “τί παιᾶν᾽ ἐμὸν στενάζεις;” “why do you wail out my song of

sorrow?” while they both say multiple times, “οἴμοι, αἰαῖ, ὦ Ζεῦ”. Its purpose, the time it was

first performed, was clearly not to comfort anyone in that audience. The play ends with, basically

no hope. All the women have stared down what their lives will now look like and are off to go

live as slaves. The last lines are “The Greek fleet waits.” When I finished reading this (just

reading it, not seeing it performed with all the emotion that is inherent in a live production), I just

felt incredibly overwhelmed, heavy, and emotional. I never want this to happen to anyone ever,

so I can see Euripides’s point.

I’m still grieving, and characters in tragedy don’t get a nice resolution to all their

problems. There is no guarantee that everything is going to be okay. I’m not going to pretend

that tragedy has all the answers. So why is Greek tragedy so enduring? Pages can be filled and

essays can be written about the new stagings and adaptions and simply new directions that

people have taken these tragedies since the first time they were staged in fifth century Athens.

First, I would argue that it is part of the human condition to retell, respin, and reshape old stories

to fit well into the present, whether they explicitly map onto something in the present or not. But

second, and most importantly, tragedy can show us how to deal—or not deal with the issues that

are a major part of being human.