The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy (Volume 1) by Wright Matthew.;

Author:Wright, Matthew.; [Wright, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472567772
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2016-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

5

Some Fourth-Century Tragedians

If one’s impression of the tragic genre is formed exclusively on the basis of the few plays that survive, or the accounts that are offered in the standard handbooks or surveys of Greek literature, it is easy to imagine that tragedy was essentially a fifth-century phenomenon, and that it more or less died out at the end of the fifth century.1 But this would be a serious mistake.

There are several obvious reasons why this point in time can seem to represent the end of an era, not just in literary history but in other respects too. Sophocles and Euripides both died in 406–405 BCE, which means that none of the writers that we have come to see as canonical were producing plays any more. In 405 Aristophanes produced his Frogs, a comedy that has exerted a disproportionately large influence on the later reception history of drama: in this play a character claims that all the good tragedians are dead, leaving behind only awful amateurs who have brought the tragic art into disrepute. In 404 the Athenians were finally defeated after the long and exhausting Peloponnesian War. At around the same time their democratic system of government was seriously destabilized by a series of oligarchic revolutions. And thus the fifth century came to a close.

This last fact, at least, is irrelevant, since the classical Greeks did not count in years BCE, but it is difficult to resist the problematic periodization that is so conveniently implied by the labels ‘fifth-century’ and ‘fourth-century’. Indeed, it is hard to think of an alternative way of referring to the authors discussed in this chapter without automatically marking them with the taint of posteriority. ‘Later writers’, ‘tragedy after the Peloponnesian War’, ‘post-Euripidean tragedy’ or similar titles would all carry the same undesirable implications – of a crucial cut-off point somewhere around the year 405, of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Nomenclature remains a problem, then, but tragedy certainly did not come to an end after the fifth century. We must take Aristophanes’ humorous assessment of the situation with a large pinch of salt.

Athens may have been undergoing a political crisis, but the theatre continued to flourish and expand throughout the fourth century and beyond. Many successful, prolific and talented new playwrights emerged during this period, and a quick glance at the contents page of TrGF shows there are almost as many tragedians attested for the fourth century as for the fifth.2 It is true that from 386 BCE the archon in charge of the City Dionysia introduced ‘old tragedy’ alongside the other categories of performance – a change that has sometimes been seen as implying a lack of confidence in new writing.3 But new tragedies continued to be produced for several more centuries yet,4 and it is hard to see why this revival of interest in earlier poets and their work should have affected the way in which contemporary playwrights were perceived. All that it proves is that the Athenians were developing a keener sense of the theatre as an institution with its own history and traditions.

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