1 The Living Art of Greek Tragedy Marianne McDonald, Ph.D., MRIA ...

Excess” was one of the sayings of the sages affixed on a temple at Delphi. Victors can easily
become victims, and this play advocates sympathy for the defeated. It is to the credit of the
Athenians that they gave a first prize to this play that showed sympathy for a long-standing
enemy.
There are effective dramatic moments, such as the first entry of the Persian chorus in
their colorful and exotic costumes. We should remember also that they sing and dance. The
Queen mother enters in a chariot. The ghost of Darius, Xerxes' father, is invoked and rises from
the dead in hopes that he can save the city. Xerxes himself finally appears in rags, the
embodiment of defeat. The incorporation of ghosts and gods in modern stagings can contribute
to the overall drama not only visually, but in tapping into an age-old desire for additional
explanations and recourse behind phenomena. Religion, and religious awe, even in the most
secular age, still seems based in the human psyche.
The staging would have shown a tomb, possibly in the middle of the orchestra. The
location was Sousa, the capital of Persia. One of the left and right entries might indicate the
palace and home, and the other the direction of Greece or the "foreign" land.
Seven Against Thebes
This play, like the Persians, contains long choral passages of lamentation; in both plays
the chorus has half the lines. It seems fitting that our very first tragedies to survive from antiquity
transformed human suffering into beautiful poetic song. In the Persians, it was an Asiatic
foreigner, the "other," who did the weeping, and in this play it is women, also regarded as "other"
by the Greek males.
As in the Persians, there is strong sense of the divine in the play, and of the pitilessness
of fate. Seven Against Thebes, following Laius and Oedipus (which no longer survive), is the
third play in a connected trilogy about the family of Oedipus. The satyr play that followed, The
Sphinx, was also connected in theme.
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