This article offers a new interpretation of Athenian tragedy, in which the poets competed for their audience's favour by constructing stories in which the protagonists suffer and die because they act within a world which lacks the institutional compensations of which fifth-century Athenians were so proud. Far from being a subversive or apolitical art form (the most popular current poles of scholarly interpretation), Athenian tragedy was heavily and positively involved in its contemporary social and political discourse.

Greek Tra

In this chapter I argue that the ‘socio-political dimension’ of fifth-century Greek tragedy amounts to its engagement with the collective ideology and competitive ethos of the democratized classical polis on the one hand, and more traditional Homeric and mythic conceptions of religion and heroic self-assertion on the other. In addition, I consider the Greek tragedians’ interest in framing dilemmas of action with debates over the merits and meanings of certain key fifth-century socio-political concepts. I address the pressing question of how far Greek tragedy’s ‘socio-politics’ speak to watching Athenians and their guests from other Greek states as polis-dwellers in general as opposed to singling out the democratic aspects of the Athenian civic experience. We see that while Greek tragedy sometimes used tales of monstrous royal goings-on and heroic extremism to highlight the civilized values of Athens, this city’s democratic citizenry rarely watched a play which would not have unsettled their senses of social and political well-being. However, any claim to the effect that Greek tragedy had real socio-political ‘bite’ for its audience has to be tempered with a recognition that Greek tragedy’s overarching mythical idiom should preclude any reading of it as a vehicle for specific messages or manifestos. Having dealt with the case of classical Athens, I briefly argue that the social and political force of tragedy did not diminish after the classical period. Neither the facts of Hellenistic or Roman ‘appropriation’ nor the paucity of available evidence should prevent us from realizing that Roman Republican tragedy spoke provocatively and productively to its audience’s specific socio-political milieu. The politics of writing tragedy under the Roman emperors were a different matter again. I show briefly that Seneca’s distinctively baroque, bloody and highly rhetorical mode of tragic presentation reflects the socio-politics of Nero’s Rome through its very eschewal of direct political ‘comment’ or allusion.

Whether making assembly speeches preliminary to military campaigns, or persecuting draft-dodgers in the law courts, or delivering the annual funeral oration over the war dead, the public speakers of fifth and fourth-century classical Athens revealed a people proud of their military achievements both recent, and those which had taken place in the twilight of their distant (and sometimes mythical) past. The importance of tragedy as a possible counterweight to this militaristic thinking cannot be overemphasised. But tragedies were performed at a state festival, and were preceded by a number of ceremonies which left the audience in little doubt about the military strength and glory of Athens and her martial values. This paper will examine the extant tragedies of Euripides in their socio-political context and the ways in which war is portrayed within them. It will show that his portrayal of war is complex and resistant to definitive categorisation. While freely showing the negative effects of war Euripides is nevertheless careful to avoid criticism of Athenian war-making, and the portrayal of Athens' contemporary enemies catered to audience prejudices. Most of his plays leave the audience at once saddened by the devastation of war and yet supportive of Athenian military campaigns. This has important consequences for Athenian thinking on matters of war.