Golden Age of Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides’ Legacy

Fifth-century Athens became known as the Golden Age of Greece, which produced artistic creations in architecture, art, and literature. In the area of literature, the development of tragedy stands out. The plays produced and performed in this genre were meant to educate as well as entertain the audience at several festivities throughout the year. The plays performed at the Great Dionysiac theater over a course of three days allowed a writer to present works for judgment; the winners were given prizes. Each day witnessed five plays, three tragedies, a satyr, and a comedy.

The development of tragedy became the hallmark of the growth of drama. The competitors produced so many plays that from 480 to 380, there were 2,000 new dramas performed in Athens. The general format in the early period featured a chorus, which told the story; soon an actor was added, so the chorus and actor talked with each other to relate the conflict of the story.

Tragedies were meant to educate society; although most of the stories dealt with common themes of heroes and mythology, there were some that give historical events. For example, in 493, the tragic poet Phrynichus gave an account of the Fall of Miletus in his work Capture of Miletus that showed the capture of the city by the Persians.

Terra-cotta statuette of an actor, late 5th–early 4th century

The Athenians were quite upset by the play, probably due to Athens abandonment of the Ionian Revolt leading to Miletus’ capture, and fined him 1,000 drachmas and prevented any further performance of the play. Some believed that Themistocles had made arrangements to put on the play to whip up anti-Persian sentiment. The only extant play dealing with a nearly contemporary event was Aeschylus’s Persian Women, which dealt with the Persian Wars. During the fifth century, three great writers fomented the evolution of tragedy and created the hallmark of the genre: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

The first of these was Aeschylus, born in 525. He lived during the expulsion of Hippias, the birth of democracy, and the fight for freedom against the Persians. He fought at Marathon with his two brothers in 490, and again in 480 in the fleet at Artemisium and Salamis, as well as in the army at Plataea in 479. He produced his first play in 499, and he dominated the field of drama and visited Syracuse in 476 and 470, praised by Hiero I. In 468, he lost first prize to a new playwright named Sophocles, but he won it in 467 with his play Seven Against Thebes. In 458, he won his last prize with the only complete trilogy of Greek plays, the Oresteia Trilogy. In 456, he returned to Sicily and died there in that year. Of the seventy to ninety dramas he wrote, only seven survive.

Aeschylus created a second actor, completing the change from a Dionysian chant to an actual play with multiple characters (including the chorus). The stage only handled two actors (or three, including the leader of the chorus). His play Prometheus Bound, in 460 may have been part of a trilogy, Promethia with the second and third play missing. The play is about the struggle of human will against destiny, and rebellious ideas against conservative thoughts. His play criticizes the Olympian gods since their fellow god Prometheus helped mankind by bringing fire to humans and is then punished by Zeus. Prometheus becomes the true hero. In 458, Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia trilogy consisting of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, which has been hailed as the finest drama of all time. It is the story of violence across generations, which breeds violence.

The story has as its prologue the myth of Tantalus, who caused the anger of the gods by stealing the nectar and ambrosia of the gods and giving them to his son, Pelops. Pelops seized the throne of Elis, killed the king, and married his daughter; they had three children, Thyestes, Aerope, and Atreus. The story went on to tell how Thyestes seduced Aerope, and Atreus then cooked and served Thyestes’s children to him as a punishment; Aegisthus, the son of Thyestes by his daughter, vowed vengeance against his uncle and his family.

Atreus had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Agamemnon married Clytemnestra, and they had two daughters, Iphigenia and Electra, and a son, Orestes. When Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia and sailed to Troy, Aegisthus seduced Clytemnestra and they plotted Agamemnon’s fall. This event marks the beginning of Aeschylus’s play, Agamemnon which shows the vengeance of Clytemnestra over Agamemnon and his slave Cassandra as he returns to Mycenae. As Agamemnon relates the ravages of war, he remains unaware of what his own fate will be. The play ends with Clytemnestra exiting the palace after the audience hears screams from her killing both Agamemnon and Cassandra with an ax, with blood on her face.

In the second play, Libation Bearers, Clytemnestra has sent Orestes away, hoping that he will not remember his father and his murder, but he has been reared in the memory of vengeance. Orestes must avenge his father’s murder. He returns and hears his sister Electra call upon their father’s spirit to arouse in Orestes the desire to avenge his murder. Orestes, in disguise, tells his mother that Orestes is dead, and Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are overjoyed that they will escape vengeance. Orestes soon slays him and kills his mother, committing matricide.

The third play, The Eumenides, follows Orestes, who is pursued by the Furies. He finally goes to Athens, where the goddess Athena orders a trial to determine Orestes’ guilt. The judges which includes Athena acquit him and she creates the Council of Areopagus to try these blood guilt crimes, thus appeasing the Furies. The trilogy extols the virtue of the democracy of Athens and was written after Ephialtes in 462 had deprived the Areopagus of its power his assassination in 461 and may have attempted to show the importance of the Areopagus.

Written in 458, the Oresteia presents the council as the wisest body in Athens. His trilogy was seen as the greatest piece of Greek literature after the Iliad and the Odyssey, Aeschylus even won prizes for them after his death. He was interested in the overreaching cosmic themes in these plays.

In 468, though, a young new playwright, Sophocles, won his first prize at the age of twenty-seven. He was the son of a swordmaker and held numerous offices. He was a friend of Pericles, and his life effectively ran from the Persian Wars through the Peloponnesian War. Of his 113 plays, only 7 are complete. He added the third actor to plays and was interested in character development.

He earned eighteen first prizes in the Dionysiac festivals, winning his last when he was eighty-five. His plays are more about the psychology of the actors. In The Thracian Women, the central theme is not the punishment of Heracles or love, but rather the idea of jealousy. In Electra, he explores a daughter’s hatred of her mother Clytemnestra over killing her father Agamemnon, and in Oedipus the King, he wrote of the demand to find out what is behind the events leading to one’s fall. In this latter play, the story opens in medias res; a plague had fallen on Thebes due to the murder of the previous king.

The current king, Oedipus, wants to find out who the murderer is (not knowing that it is himself). Everyone knew the story how the king and queen, Laius and Jocasta, were told that their son would kill his father and marry his mother; how Oedipus was abandoned and then raised by the king and queen of Corinth, fled when he heard he would kill his father and marry his mother (not realizing he was adopted). Hence, he killed his father on the highway and saved Thebes by solving the riddle of the Sphinx, earning the kingdom and marrying the widowed queen, his mother. When he discovers the truth about these events, Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus blinds himself and leaves Thebes.

The play Antigone, the third in an unintended trilogy (but the first one actually written), is about the power of divine law over man’s laws. Oedipus’s daughter, Antigone, attempts to obey the laws of the gods by burying one of her two fallen brothers, who had fought for control of Thebes. One brother, Eteocles, died defending Thebes and is buried by the new king, Creon, the brother of Jocasta. But the other, Polynice, is forbidden by Creon to be buried because he fought against him. Antigone disobeys, and Creon orders her to be buried alive; Creon’s son, Haemon, protests the act and goes to die next to Antigone. Creon discovers his son’s body and his own deed realizing he has lost everything due to his hubris (pride). Sophocles died in 406, the same year as the last great tragedy writer, Euripides.

Euripides completed the development of Athenian tragedy using emotion. He was born on Salamis, supposedly on the day of the great battle in 480. Both his parents were wealthy nobles. He lived on Salamis in his later years. He originally wanted to be a philosopher, and his plays often illustrate philosophical struggles. He wrote seventy-five plays, of which eighteen survive, from The Daughter of Pelias in 455 to The Bacchae in 406. He was also the first to have a library.

Euripides presents great emotion in his works, such as in Hippolytus, where the eponymous youth announces his love for Artemis, and says that he will love no other. Aphrodite in revenge sows into the heart of his stepmother Phaedra love for her stepson, who refuses her advances. Phaedra dies, but she leaves a note saying that Hippolytus has seduced her. Her husband, Theseus, calls upon Poseidon to punish his son, who ultimately dies in a hunting accident when Poseidon causes Hippolytus’ chariot to crash and he is dragged to death. Another play that evokes deep emotion is Medea, where Jason reaches Colchis and Princess Medea falls in love with him and helps him gain the Golden Fleece.

He returns to Thessaly, where Medea poisons Peleas the king, who had promised Jason the throne but plotted against him. Jason cannot marry Medea because she is a foreigner, so they live together and have two children. At last, Jason leaves Medea to marry the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth, and Medea is exiled. Medea then takes her revenge—she sends her rival a poisoned robe, which when she puts it on erupts in fire and burns her, and when her father Creon tries to help his daughter, the flames consume him as well. Medea then kills her own children before Jason’s eyes and flies off with their corpses in a chariot pulled by a dragon.

Euripides wrote of the various struggles of life and fate in plays about the Trojan War. In Helen, the famous “face that launched a thousand ships” is not taken away to Troy by Paris willingly—that was only an illusion, a sort of lifelike phantom, that fooled all of Greece because instead she was taken to Egypt against her wish and only rescued later by Menelaus when he discovers that the Helen in Troy is not real. In Iphigenia in Aules, the concept of parental love versus divine destiny is explored in a tale of how the young princess refuses to flee and nobly goes to her death, knowing that sadness will come to her entire family as a result.

Another work, The Trojan Women, which Euripedes wrote in 415, took place after the destruction of Melos and before the attack on Syracuse. Shocked by the treatment of Melos, the playwright promotes the concept of peace. The play has the fate of the women of Troy spelled out in great horror. Hecuba, wife and widow of King Priam, will be given to Odysseus while her daughter Cassandra will be given to Agamemnon as a concubine. Cassandra who can see the future but no one believes her is glad at the prospect since she sees that Agamemnon (and herself) will be killed by Clytemnestra. Hecuba’s youngest daughter Polyxena has been sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles, while Hecuba’s daughter-in-law Andromache will become Achilles’ son Neoptolemus concubine.

Krater (mixing bowl) depicting Medea in her chariot, from Euripides’ Medea

The Greeks order Andromache and her dead husband Hector’s son Astyanax killed by being thrown off the walls of Troy. Although Helen is supposed to suffer greatly from her husband Menelaus, everyone knows she will live. In the earlier play Hecuba, written in 424, the queen of Troy, who has seen her daughter Polyxena sacrificed, enters with Andromache and Cassandra. Andromache, the widow of Hector, has her son ripped from her arms to die by being hurled from the walls. Menelaus arrives to kill his wife, Helen, and Hecuba is pleased, only to see that Helen can wrap Menelaus around her finger again and survives. Euripides wrote on a variety of subjects, and he even advocated against slavery, since during the Peloponnesian War most of the slaves existed due to the accidental or incidental taking of Greek prisoners. Slaves play important roles in his works.

Euripides was apparently a gloomy individual. His views made him many enemies in Athens. He attempted to push boundaries, which upset a good number of people. He was attacked like Socrates for corrupting the values of citizens. In 410, he was indicted on charges of impiety. In 408, he left Athens and went to the Macedonian kingdom at age seventy-two. There, he wrote Iphigenia in Aules and The Bacchae before his death in 406. His son produced these two plays at the Dionysiac and won first prize at the festival.

The end of the Golden Age corresponded with the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides. Their plays sought to teach Athenians the lessons of life. Unfortunately for Athens, learning these lessons did not do enough to keep it safe.