Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

280 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
took place in Athens four years earlier, though its true message
seems to be rather more complex.
All tragedy, like comedy, is written in a variety of meters. The choral
passages are punctuated by episodes that resemble the scenes of
a modern play. A central feature of many plays is the agôn, which
takes the form of a contest or dispute between two characters, each
of whom seeks to defeat his opponent in argument. In Sophokles’
Antigone, for instance, the agôn between Kreon and his son Haimon
turns upon the justice of Kreon’s decision to wall up Antigone alive
in punishment for her having given burial rites to her brother, who
has been condemned as a traitor.
Although most tragedies are concerned with violent and destructive
actions, no actual violence is ever perpetrated on stage. Instead,
it was common practice for a messenger to provide the audience
with an extremely detailed description of a murder, suicide, selfmutilation,
or other grisly occurrence that he has just witnessed off
stage.
Most tragedies end with the chorus muttering a few platitudes
along the lines of “What we expected to happen has not happened,
and what we expected not to happen has happened.” It has been
suggested that the banality of such conclusions is probably due to
the fact that the audience would have been heading for the exit by
the time they were delivered. They should not be interpreted as the
author’s final judgment on the subject of the drama.
Comedy
Evidence for fifth-century comedy is even more meager than
for tragedy. We possess only 11 plays by a single dramatist, Aristophanes
(ca. 450 – ca. 385 b.c.e. ). Highly topical in subject matter,
they contain plentiful references to events and personalities in
contemporary Athens, many of which are lost on us. They are also
extremely ribald and scatological. Frequently the plot turns upon a
solution to a contemporary problem, such as how to end the Peloponnesian
War. In Acharnians, for instance, the hero, who is a very
average Athenian citizen named Dikaiopolis, achieves his goal by
making a private peace with the Spartans. Similarly in Lysistrata, the
women of Athens decide to jump-start the peace process by refusing
to have sex with their husbands. Other plays are even more
fantastic. Birds, for instance, is a fantasy about two Athenians who,
fed up with all the pressures of modern life, attempt to set up a new
city among the birds called Cloudcuckooland. In Frogs, Dionysos