All plays consist of a number of episodes or scenes involving the principal
characters, written in iambics (see p. 141), divided by choral interludes called stasima,
that were written in a variety of metrical forms. In Aeschylus, the choral part amounts
to a third of the play; in the third part of the Oresteia, the chorus of Furies, the
Eumenides, who give their name to the play, are central to the action itself. Sophocles
and Euripides reduced the proportional part of the chorus, though in particular plays
it might still play a special role, as in the case of Euripides’ Bacchae, where the chorus
of Bacchanals bear witness to and define the nature and benefits of the Dionysiac
experience. More commonly, the chorus is detached from the main actions involving
the heroic figures of myth, but in comment and response is fully integrated into the
emotional and thematic pattern of the play as a whole. The need to integrate the
chorus with the main action and the comparative brevity of a Greek play when
compared to a modern drama (approximately 1,500 lines in length including the
chorus), determined by the festival production of four plays in one day, precluded the
development of complicated plots involving more than one strand of action, variety
ofscenes (there is a scene change from Delphi to Athens in the Eumenides but this is
rare) or complicated time sequences. Concentration of effect and a concern for unity
of design are principles endemic in Greek art from Homer onwards. In drama
simplicity and economy were further encouraged by limitations of time and form
outside the playwright’s control.
Greek drama was therefore a more stylized form than subsequent European
drama, and the particular style was determined by inherited conventions connected
with festival production and by the physical conditions of the theatre. But within the
limitations imposed by the performance of the plays as part of a religious festival,
what is striking is the remarkable freedom allowed to the individual dramatist, who
is not restricted to myths involving Dionysus or subject to any kind of priestly control.
Indeed, the earliest extant play, the Persiansof Aeschylus (for which Pericles was
choregos), is not mythological at all, but takes its subject from recent history. The only
sense in which the playwright is a priest is figurative: he is a priest of the Muses. And
if Greek drama developed from some form of religious ritual, then it quickly freed
itself from the restrictions implied in the word ritual, which is not appropriately used
to describe Greek tragedy.
Aeschylus (525–456)
Tragedy is a phenomenon that came into existence simultaneously with the gradual
transformation of the Athenian state into a democracy. Though Thespis dates from
the latter days of the tyranny of Peisistratus, that tyranny itself, comparatively
enlightened in character, marked a stage in the destruction of the archaic aristocratic
LITERATURE 149