Notes

on Aristotle’s Poetics and Euripides’ Orestes

Aristotle (385 BC to 323 BC)
- A student of Plato, lecturer on many diverse subjects, scientist, invented formal logic and descriptive
biology, a tutor to Alexander the Great. Writes The Poetics at least 70 years after the plays he discusses
were written. Never wrote a tragedy himself, as far as we know.

The Poetics (as somewhat interpreted by David Greenspan, inspired by Gerald Else)
- Written as a lecture, just his notes, looking back on the theater of his grandparents’ generation.
- All art is imitating something from reality and drama is imitating action.
- Tragedies have 6 elements: plot, character, ideas, verbal expression, songs, visuals.
- Plot is the most important element in the success of a tragedy.
- There is power in the mere recitation of the plot itself, without character.
- Complex plots (the preferred kind) need reversals (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis). (I
think this is Aristotles’ most influential idea.)
- Reversal is “a sudden and unexpected shift of what is being undertaken to the opposite.”
- Recognition is “is a shift from ignorance to awareness.”
- Tragedies are finest when these happen together, as in Oedipus the King.
- Pathos “the destructive or painful act” “is the foundation stone of tragedy.”
- “The catharsis is a purification—of whatever is filthy whatever is polluted in the pathos.”
- “We fear that which is about to happen or seems likely to happen to ourselves, we pity—feel pity
for that which happens or is about to happen to another because it might happen to us.”
- “The special pleasure—and it is a pleasure—of tragedy is neither simply intellectual or simply
emotional but has its roots in both these realms.”
Other important ideas from The Poetics that still influence (that The Argument doesn’t cover):
- Plots should be unified in their action.
- Plays should have a Beginning, a Middle, and an End. (the concept of “the dramatic arc”)
- Action is better dramatized than narrated. (show don’t tell)

Eugenio Barba’s “The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work”
- A counter to Aristotle? Or an Aristotelian supplement?
- “Actions… are not only what the actors do and say…”
“Actions are all the relationships, all the interactions between the characters, or between the
characters and the lights, the sounds, the space. Actions are what work directly on the
audience's attention, on their understanding, their emotiveness, their synaesthesia.”
- A plot has two dimensions:
o 1. “the development of actions in time by means of a concatenation of causes and effects”
or two alternating parallel developments.
o 2. “simultaneity—the simultaneous presence of several actions “
- Is Barba contrasting a written text to a performance text? Or is he distinguishing the linear from
the three-dimensional? (“Surface” and “depth” maybe sounds too judgmental.)
- Is the difference between “what you’re given” and “what you do with it”? Is it an issue of
interpreting? Or as Barba provocatively concludes between the right and left halves of the brain?
- “The problem is not, therefore, the choice of one pole or another, the definition of one or another
type of theatre. The problem is that of the balance between the concatenation pole and the
simultaneity pole.” What he calls the tension.

Ancient Greek Theater and Tragedy
- The origins are much argued about but many believe it begins in ritual and celebrates Dionysus.
- All the Greek tragedies we have were performed in Athens between 472 BC and 405 BC at the
Theater of Dionysus at the Acropolis, an amphitheater that seated 15,000 people (a large
percentage of the populace), overlooking the city. The theater, because of its size, was also used
by the Athenian assembly for semi-annual meetings, and it is said, occasionally as a location for
those legal trials for which there was great public interest.
- The tragedies were part of an annual competition in which three playwrights competed, each
composing three tragedies (sometimes related, sometimes not) and a shorter parody called a
“satyr” play.
- The plays were performed using three male actors wearing and changing masks to portray all the
speaking roles, a chorus of 12 to 15 also masked who would dance and perhaps “sing” their poetry,
and some masked “mute” actors who would stand in for characters when the primary actor was
playing someone else. (There is an interesting study to be made of the doubling and tripling of
parts that each actor has.)
- The theater had many traditions: No violence onstage, the use of messengers to relate what
couldn’t be shown, and a stage crane (the mechane) that would transport and hover characters,
usually gods onto the stage. Where we get the idea deus ex machina.
- Only 3 tragedians have works that have survived antiquity – Aeschylus (7 plays), Sophocles (7
plays), and the most recent, Euripides (19 plays)

The Dionysia
- The tragedy competition was part of a larger civic festival celebrating the city of Athens and the
triumphs of the previous year. Elaborate processions preceded all performances with tributes to the
leading generals and important city benefactors. They would lead to the theater where civic magistrates,
high priests, foreign ambassadors, and distinguished citizens would get preferred seating. Lastly, a parade
of the sons of the Athenian soldiers who had died fighting for the city would enter in full dress uniform and
be seated in the front to view a play whose backdrop was the city itself. I think it’s hard to imagine a more
political theater.

Historical context of the Greek theater – the Peloponnesian Wars (Athens vs. Sparta)
- Beginning in 499 BC, the Persian Empire launched wave after wave of military attacks against the
Greek city-states in a conflict that lasted off and on for more than 30 years. (The playwright
Aeschylus actually fought in several battles and wrote a play about one historic defeat called The
Persians.)
- Athens’ ultimate victory (circa 478 BC, but never fully over) announced a period of great prosperity
often referred to as the Golden Age (or the Age of Pericles for the ruler) with an expanded military,
major construction, and significant advances in the arts and sciences.
- But in 431 BC, Sparta began a comprehensive attack on Athens that coincided with an epidemic of
plague and the death of Pericles. New more militaristic leaders tried increasingly aggressive and
costlier strategies, both in terms of lives and funds, and over the course of 27 years of war,
destroyed Athens’ famous navy, bankrupted its citizens, and reduced the city to ruin and
starvation, a shadow of its former glory. The city surrendered in 404 BC.


Aeschylus’ Oresteia (a sort of prequel to this week’s play)
- Written in 458 BC, is probably the most celebrated and imitated tragedy of its day.
- Over three plays, it tells a story of cyclical violence after the Trojan War.
(Play 1) Agamemnon has sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to make the winds blow to get his ships
to Troy. (To help his brother Menelaus rescue his brother’s “stolen” wife, Helen.)
When he returns home, his wife Clytemnestra kills him and his concubine/hostage Cassandra.
(Play 2) Their daughter Electra plots revenge, and when her brother Orestes returns home,
convinces him and his friend Pylades to kill Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, but once they do,
Orestes is attacked by a flock of demons, the Furies.
(Play 3) The god Apollo works to save Orestes and the action resolves in an epic trial at the
Acropolis with Athena as judge and Athenian citizens as the jury.
- This play is said to serve as a sort of creation myth for the transformation of revenge culture into a
justice system, one of the democratic institutions at the center of Athenian pride.
- Although this play was presented when Euripides was a boy, he wrote his own versions and
revisions of this central theatrical story throughout his career in many plays.
-
Translator Anne Carson: “Sometimes I wonder if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic.”

Euripides (480-406 BC)
- Wrote over 90 plays, including: Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Iphigenia in Aulis, The
Bakkhai
- A lifelong resident of Athens, but he wasn’t an important military figure or leader like Aeschylus
and Sophocles.
- A famous or notorious Athenian featured in a lot of other writing of the time with a reputation for
cleverness, cynicism, bleak sophistication, and disrespecting institutions, a favorite of young people
and radicals, but rarely the winner at the competition.
- His controversial plays were celebrated at the time for revealing psychology, especially for
sympathetic portrayals of women. Also for clothing his regal characters in rags. And above all for
his use of the deus ex machina.
- His plays, often somewhat satirical and attacking hypocrisy and politics, became increasingly critical
of war as the circumstances escalated.
- According to Aristotle, he is “certainly the most tragic of the poets.”

Orestes by Euripides (408 BC)
- The play could be interpreted as rewriting The Oresteia, starting from after Aeschylus’ second play.
- The play is notable for its experimental use of verse and also for its scenic innovation.
- Also innovative in the storytelling: This is the only version of this myth that includes Menelaus,
Helen, and Hermione.
- This is the last play that Euripides personally supervised in Athens.
- After the play, he leaves Athens and doesn’t return.
- Many believe he escaped with his life or was driven into exile by a government tired of his
provocations, the same group that would soon prosecute Socrates for his intellectual “corruption
of youth” and demand his death.
- Euripides died two years later in exile. His final plays were presented posthumously.
- Although Orestes won no prize its year, shortly after Euripides’ death, the play took its place as the
most popular of all Greek tragedies for hundreds of years before falling into more obscurity in the
modern era.