National Hellenic Museum: Tragedy, Comedy, & Democracy in Ancient Athens

On Monday, April 10 at 6:00 p.m., I attended a virtual talk, “Tragedy, Comedy, and Democracy in Ancient Athens”, presented via Zoom by Dr. Katherine Kelaidis of the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, IL. Dr. Kelaidis began the talk by defining the meaning of tragedy as understood in Ancient Athens. In the 5^th century BC, the city-state or polis hosted a festival called Dionysia in honor of Dionysus, a god also called Bacchus or Bromius. He represented wine and theater, making him an excellent choice for the festival. Very few plays submitted to the festival have survived to the modern era, with notable examples written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Everything in Athens was a competition, including intellectual and athletic events. Athenians compared competition to democracy, where all members of society tested themselves against each other.

Dr. Kelaidis explained that the philosopher Aristotle lived about a hundred years after the peak popularity of the Athenian tragedy and wrote about the genre. In contrast to a comedy, which usually had a happy ending, tragedy purged feelings of pity or fear. The Athenians believed exorcising their emotions was a religious rite, along with allowing them to function rationally during democratic or civic decision-making. The idea of democracy concerned other city-states in Ancient Greece, as emotions easily overtook people. The philosopher Plato, the teacher of Aristotle, wanted to be rid of plays altogether. In his book, The Republic, which created a model for a “perfect” society, he regularly spoke out against theater. Plato and Aristotle also differ on their means of creating catharsis or purging emotions. Plato believed theater was not real and distracted from real life issues. Aristotle believed this came through mimesis, meaning imitation, that art represented real life. The struggles of the heroes in plays represented the struggles of everyday people facing their fates.

Besides differing from each other, Dr. Kelaidis that Greek philosophers differed from Hebrew prophets from the same era, around the 5^th century BC, in their ideas of heroes and justice. Before tragedies, the Greeks considered heroes as dead people to whom living people could appeal for help. This version of ancestor worship later became the veneration of saints in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Later, Greek philosophers from Ancient Athens believed tragic heroes stood alone against fate. Hebrew prophets from the Second Babylonian Period believed God manufactured justice, so that noble but imperfect characters would receive what they deserved.

Dr. Kelaidis listed six elements to a tragedy as first described by Aristotle:

1. Plot
2. Character
3. Thought
4. Diction
5. Song
6. Spectacle

While song now exists only in musical versions of modern plays, operas arising from the end of the Renaissance to the present are an attempt to recreate this type of theater. Athenian philosophers compared plays to statecraft or politics, although political debates also dropped the musical element. In addition to the six elements, tragedies contained the three unities:

1. Action
2. Time
3. Place

These unities appear simpler than their modern counterparts, and the action contained a single plot following a tragic hero over a single day in a single place. These rules existed for practical reasons, as plays appeared in outside theaters during the middle of the day with no sets.

Finally, the play must have a tragic hero, a generally noble man with a fatal flaw who recognizes his shortcomings but cannot correct it to save himself. This undoing comes in five steps:

1. Hamartia, the fatal flaw or deadly sin
2. Peripeteia, the reverse of fortune to fortunate to doomed
3. Anagnorisis, the hero recognizing that he brought this reversal on himself because of his flaw
4. Hubris, the pride to go forward despite the flaw
5. Fate, with a demise worse than the hero deserves.

These steps of the play are a dialog not only between characters, but also a commentary given by the chorus. Made from a group of singers much like a modern chorus, they represent the democratic citizens of the polis and provide advice to the hypokrites, or “one who answers back to the chorus”. Dr. Kelaidis humorously compared this conversation between the chorus and the hypokrites to modern social media, where millions of users view and discuss the content generated by a single user.

To illustrate how an Athenian tragedy functioned, Dr. Kelaidis described the play Bacchae by Euripides, a title referring to the women worshipers of Dionysus or Bacchus. He wrote this tragedy for Dionysia in 455 BC when he was seventy-five years old. Euripides began his career as a patriotic writer who became antiwar after living through the Peloponnesian War. He did not believe in the gods and Aristotle posthumously called him “the most tragic of the poets”. In Bacchae, Euripides reminded the audience of “undomesticated emotions” from an earlier period of worshiping Dionysus. During the play, the god visits his mother’s family, the House of Cadmus. His cousin, Pentheus, does not believe he is a god, but the women of the city sure do, along with his grandfather Cadmus and the blind seer Tiresias. Dr. Kelaidis described Pentheus as an ideal citizen and “quintessential Greek”, possessing youth, power, and health but not wisdom. Although he is worthy of ruling the polis, he does not know when to share or relinquish his power, a fundamental part of democracy. Because he lacks respect toward Dionysus, all the Bacchae (including his own mother) tear him apart and eat him.

In addition to what I have summarized, Dr. Kelaidis compared Christianity to mystery cults, saying that “Christianity is the Beyonce of the mystery cults. You know that Destiny’s Child existed, but the only one you remember is Beyonce”. Both worship of mystery cult gods like Dionysus and modern Christian services might include a shared meal, baptism, and the promise of a better afterlife. She noted a passage in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2:6-11) which paraphrases a passage from the Bacchae and substitutes Dionysus for Jesus.

I greatly enjoyed the fast-paced and fun fact packed presentation given by Dr. Kelaidis. I was amazed by how quickly she switched from discussing Ancient Athens to comparing disparate religions to joking about the European Middle Ages. Fully understanding the talk required substantial prior knowledge of a broad range of topics, so someone without a college degree in history or theology had a high chance of become lost. A slower paced talk on a single, more general topic such as Greek plays or Greek gods would have a broader appeal, but Dr. Kelaidis may have intended the presentation for a highly educated expert audience. This talk was not recorded, but the museum’s YouTube Channel does boast an array of interesting sessions. I look forward to future webinars hosted by the National Hellenistic Museum.