Greek Tragedy

Tragedy arose in Athens from the choral worship of Dionysus and was performed at his festival, the City Dionysia, before the whole citizen body: three tragedians competed each year with three tragedies and a satyr-play apiece. Aeschylus gave the form its grandeur, Sophocles its perfection, Euripides its questioning; from their contests survive the thirty-two plays on which the whole Western theatre stands.

Philosophy was born quarrelling with it. Plato banished the tragedians from his city as imitators who feed the passions; Aristotle’s Poetics answered that tragedy, through pity and fear, effects the katharsis of such emotions. Later Platonists read the tragic stage as the world itself — souls playing parts assigned by fate, under masks that are bodies.