Ancient Greek tragedy Aeschylus Sophocles Euripides. Aeschylus

The origin of the tragedy.

Aristotle "Poetics":

“Having originally arisen from improvisations... from the founders of the ditherambs, the tragedy grew little by little... and, having undergone many changes, stopped, having reached what lay in its nature. The speech, from being humorous, became serious late, because... tragedy arose from the performances of satyrs.”

The dithyramb is a choral song from the cult of Dionysus.

Then the soloist is highlighted. Thespis is considered the first tragic poet, whose soloist not only sang, but also spoke, and put on various masks and dresses.

Dialogue between choir and soloist.

Initially (at Arion) the choir members were dressed as satyrs, wearing goat skins, horns, and special shoes. - the song of the goat is a tragedy.

Sophocles(c. 496–406 BC)

"Oedipus the King", "Antigone". The theme of fate and tragic irony in Sophocles: the problem of the impossibility of foresight, unfortunate delusion. Sophocles as a master of peripeteia. The catastrophe associated with the acquisition of true knowledge. "Pessimism" by Sophocles. Oedipus's duel with fate. The motive of the powerlessness of the human mind. The collision of two equal impulses in Antigone. Internal conflict of the human soul. Theme of madness.

"Antigone"(about 442). The plot of “Antigone” belongs to the Theban cycle and is a direct continuation of the legend about the war of the “Seven against Thebes” and the duel between Eteocles and Polyneices (cf. p. 70). After the death of both brothers, the new ruler of Thebes, Creon, buried Eteocles with due honors, and forbade the body of Polyneices, who went to war against Thebes, to be buried, threatening the disobedient with death. The sister of the victims, Antigone, violated the ban and buried the politician. Sophocles developed this plot from the angle of the conflict between human laws and the “unwritten laws” of religion and morality. The question was relevant: defenders of polis traditions considered “unwritten laws” to be “divinely established” and inviolable, in contrast to the changeable laws of people. Conservative in religious matters, Athenian democracy also demanded respect for “unwritten laws.” “We especially listen to all those laws,” says the speech of Pericles in Thucydides (p. 100), “which exist for the benefit of the offended and which, being unwritten, entail generally recognized shame for breaking them.”

In the prologue of the tragedy, Antigone informs her sister Ismene about Creon’s ban and her intention to bury her brother, despite the ban. Sophocles' dramas are usually structured in such a way that the hero, already in the first scenes, makes a firm decision, with a plan of action that determines the entire further course of the play. Prologues serve this expositional purpose; The prologue to Antigone also contains another feature that is very common in Sophocles - the opposition of harsh and soft characters: the adamant Antigone is contrasted with the timid Ismene, who sympathizes with her sister, but does not dare to act with her. Antigone puts her plan into action; she covers Polyneices’ body with a thin layer of earth, that is, she performs a symbolic “” burial, which, according to Greek ideas, was sufficient to calm the soul of the deceased. As soon as Creon had time to outline the program of his rule to the choir of Theban elders, he learned that his order had been violated. Creon sees this as the machinations of citizens dissatisfied with his power, but in the next scene Antigone is brought in, captured upon her second appearance at the corpse of Polyneices. Antigone confidently defends the correctness of her action, citing blood debt and the inviolability of divine laws. Antigone's active heroism, her straightforwardness and love of truth are shaded by the passive heroism of Ismene; Ismene is ready to admit that she is an accomplice to the crime and share her sister’s fate. In vain, Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé, points out to his father that the moral sympathy of the Theban people is on Antigone’s side. Creon condemns her to death in a stone crypt. The last time Antigone passes before the viewer is when the guards lead her to the place of execution; she performs the funeral lament on her own, but remains convinced that she has acted piously. This is the highest point in the development of the tragedy, then a turning point occurs. The blind soothsayer Tiresias tells Creon that the gods are angry with his behavior and predicts terrible disasters for him. Creon's resistance is broken, he goes to bury Polyneices and then free Antigone. However, it's too late. From the messenger's message to the choir and Creon's wife Eurydice, we learn that Antigone hanged herself in the crypt, and Haemon, in front of his father's eyes, pierced himself with a sword near the body of his bride. And when Creon, overwhelmed by grief, returns with the labor of Haemon, he receives news of a new misfortune: Eurydice took her own life, cursing her husband as a child killer. The chorus concludes the tragedy with a brief maxim that the gods do not leave wickedness unavenged. Divine justice thus triumphs, but it triumphs in the natural course of the drama, without any direct participation of divine powers. The heroes of Antigone are people with a pronounced individuality, and their behavior is entirely determined by their personal qualities. It would be very easy to present the death of Oedipus's daughter as the fulfillment of a family curse, but Sophocles mentions this traditional motive only in passing. In Sophocles, the driving forces of tragedy are human characters. However, motives of a subjective nature, for example, Haemon’s love for Antigone, occupy a secondary place; Sophocles characterizes the main characters by showing their behavior in the conflict over the essential issue of polis ethics. Antigone and Ismene's attitude towards their sister's duty, and the way Creon understands and carries out his duties as a ruler, reveals the individual character of each of these figures.

Particularly interesting is the first stasim, which glorifies the power and ingenuity of the human mind in conquering nature and organizing social life. The chorus ends with a warning: the power of reason attracts a person to both good and evil; therefore, traditional ethics should be followed. This song of the choir, extremely characteristic of Sophocles’ entire worldview, represents, as it were, the author’s commentary on the tragedy, explaining the poet’s position on the issue of the clash of “divine” and human law.

How is the conflict between Antigone and Creon resolved? There is an opinion that Sophocles shows the fallacy of the position of both opponents, that each of them defends a just cause, but defends it one-sidedly. From this point of view, Creon is wrong, issuing a decree in the interests of the state that contradicts the “unwritten” law, but Antigone is wrong, arbitrarily violating the state law in favor of the “unwritten” law. The death of Antigone and the unfortunate fate of Creon are the consequences of their one-sided behavior. This is how Hegel understood Antigone. According to another interpretation of the tragedy, Sophocles is entirely on the side of Antigone; the heroine consciously chooses the path that leads her to death, and the poet approves of this choice, showing how Antigone's death becomes her victory and entails the defeat of Creon. This latter interpretation is more consistent with the worldview of Sophocles.

Depicting the greatness of man, the wealth of his mental and moral powers, Sophocles at the same time depicts his powerlessness, the limitations of human capabilities. This problem was developed most clearly in the tragedy “Oedipus the King,” which at all times was recognized, along with “Antigone,” as a masterpiece of Sophocles’ dramatic skill. Myth about Oedipus at one time already served as material for the Theban trilogy of Aeschylus (p. 119), built on the “ancestral curse.” Sophocles, as usual, abandoned the idea of ​​hereditary guilt; his interest is focused on the personal fate of Oedipus.

In the version that the myth received from Sophocles, the Theban king Laius, frightened by the prediction that promised him death at the hands of his “son,” ordered the legs of his newborn son to be pierced and thrown on Mount Cithaeron. The boy was adopted by the Corinthian king Polybus and named Oedipus.* Oedipus knew nothing about his origins, but when a drunken Corinthian called him the imaginary son of Polybus, he turned to the Delphic oracle for clarification. The oracle did not give a direct answer, but said that Oedipus was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. In order not to be able to commit these crimes, Oedipus decided not to return to Corinth and headed to Thebes. On the way, he had a quarrel with an unknown old man he met, whom he killed; this old man was Lai. Then Oedipus freed Thebes from the winged monster Sphinx that oppressed them and, as a reward, received from the citizens the Theban throne, free after the death of Laius, married Laius's widow Jocasta, i.e., his own mother, had children from her and for many years calmly ruled Thebes . Thus, in Sophocles, the measures that Oedipus takes in order to avoid the fate predicted for him, in fact only lead to the fulfillment of this fate. This contradiction between the subjective intention of human words and actions and their objective meaning permeates the entire tragedy of Sophocles. Its immediate theme is not the hero’s crimes, but his subsequent self-exposure. The artistic effect of the tragedy is largely based on the fact that the truth, which is only gradually revealed to Oedipus himself, is already known in advance to the Greek audience familiar with the myth.

The tragedy opens with a solemn procession. Theban youths and elders pray to Oedipus, glorified by his victory over the Sphinx, to save the city a second time, to save it from the raging pestilence. The wise king, it turns out, had already sent his brother-in-law Creon to Delphi with a question to the oracle, and the returning Creon conveys the answer: the cause of the ulcer is “filth”, the presence of the murderer Laius in Thebes. This killer is unknown to anyone; from Lai's retinue only one person survived, who at one time announced to the citizens that the king and his other servants had been killed by a detachment of robbers. Oedipus energetically takes up the search for the unknown murderer and betrays him to a solemn curse.

The investigation undertaken by Oedipus initially takes the wrong path, and the openly expressed truth directs it onto this false path. Oedipus turns to the soothsayer Tiresias with a request to reveal the murderer; Tiresias at first wants to spare the king, but, irritated by Oedipus’s reproaches and suspicions, he angrily accuses him: “you are the murderer.” Oedipus, of course, becomes indignant; he believes that Creon, with the help of Tiresias, planned to become king of Thebes and obtained a false oracle. Creon calmly deflects the accusation, but faith in the soothsayer is undermined.

Jocasta is trying to undermine faith in the oracles themselves. In order to calm Oedipus, she talks about the unfulfilled oracle given to Laius, in her opinion, but it is this story that instills anxiety in Oedipus. The whole setting of Laius's death is reminiscent of his past adventure on the way from Delphi; Only one thing does not add up: Lai, according to an eyewitness, was killed not by one person, but by a whole group. Oedipus sends for this witness.

The scene with Jocasta marks a turning point in the development of the action. However, Sophocles usually prefaces the catastrophe with some further delay (“retardation”), which momentarily promises a more prosperous outcome. A messenger from Corinth reports the death of King Polybus; the Corinthians invite Oedipus to become his successor. Oedipus triumphs: the prediction of parricide was not fulfilled. Nevertheless, he is embarrassed by the second half of the oracle, threatening to marry his mother. The messenger, wanting to dispel his fears, reveals to Oedipus that he is not the son of Polybus and his wife; the messenger received many years ago on Cithaeron from one of barking shepherds and handed over to Polybus a baby with pierced legs - this was Oedipus. Oedipus is faced with the question of whose son he really is. Jocasta, for whom everything has become clear, leaves the scene with a sorrowful exclamation.

Oedipus continues his investigation. The witness to the murder of Laius turns out to be the same shepherd who once gave the baby Oedipus to the Corinthian, taking pity on the newborn. It also turns out that the report about the band of robbers that attacked Lai was false. Oedipus learns that he is the son of Laius, the killer of his father and the husband of his mother. In a song full of deep sympathy for the former savior of Thebes, the choir sums up the fate of Oedipus, reflecting on the fragility of human happiness and the judgment of all-seeing time.

In the final part of the tragedy, after the messenger reports the suicide of Jocasta and the self-blinding of Oedipus, Oedipus appears again, curses his ill-fated life, demands exile for himself, and says goodbye to his daughters. However, Creon, into whose hands power is temporarily transferred, detains Oedipus, awaiting instructions from the oracle. The further fate of Oedipus remains unclear to the viewer.

Sophocles emphasizes not so much the inevitability of fate as the variability of happiness and the inadequacy of human wisdom.

Woe, mortal childbirth, to you!
How insignificant in my eyes
Your life is great! the choir sings.

And conscious actions of people, performed with a specific purpose, lead in “King Aedile” to results that are diametrically opposed to the intention of the actor.

Before us appears a man who, during the crisis he is experiencing, is faced with the riddle of the universe, and this riddle, putting to shame all human cunning and insight, inevitably brings upon him defeat, suffering and death. The typical hero of Sophocles completely relies on his knowledge at the beginning of the tragedy, and ends with an admission of complete ignorance or doubt. Human ignorance is a recurring theme of Sophocles. It finds its classic and most terrifying expression in King Oedipus, however, is also present in other plays; even Antigone’s heroic enthusiasm turns out to be poisoned by doubt in her final monologue. Human ignorance and suffering are opposed by the mystery of a deity who has full knowledge (his prophecies invariably come true). This deity represents a certain image of perfect order and, perhaps, even justice, incomprehensible to the human mind. The underlying motive of Sophocles' tragedies is humility before the incomprehensible forces that direct the fate of man in all its secrecy, greatness and mystery.

Euripides.(480 BC – 406 BC)

“Medea”, “Hippolytus”, “Iphigenia in Aulis”. Cult and philosophical origins of Euripides' work. The conflict between Aphrodite and Artemis in Hippolytus. A deus ex machina intervention. “The Philosopher on Stage”: sophistical devices in the speech of the characters. The problem of interaction between masculine and feminine principles. Female images in Euripides. Strong passions and great suffering. Manifestations of instinctive, semi-conscious forces in man. "Confession" technique. Individualistic “declarations” in the tragedies of Euripides.

Almost all of Euripides' surviving plays were created during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta, which had a huge influence on all aspects of life in ancient Hellas. And the first feature of Euripides’ tragedies is the burning modernity: heroic-patriotic motives, hostile attitude towards Sparta, the crisis of ancient slave-owning democracy, the first crisis of religious consciousness associated with the rapid development of materialist philosophy, etc. In this regard, Euripides’ attitude to mythology is especially indicative: myth becomes for the playwright only material for reflecting modern events; he allows himself to change not only minor details of classical mythology, but also to give unexpected rational interpretations of well-known plots (say, in Iphigenia in Tauris human sacrifices are explained by the cruel customs of the barbarians). The gods in the works of Euripides often appear more cruel, insidious and vengeful than people ( Hippolytus,Hercules and etc.). It is precisely because of this that the “dues ex machina” (“God from the machine”) technique became so widespread in the dramaturgy of Euripides, when at the end of the work, God who suddenly appears hastily dispenses justice. In Euripides' interpretation, divine providence could hardly consciously care about the restoration of justice.

However, the main innovation of Euripides, which caused rejection among most of his contemporaries, was the depiction of human characters. If in Aeschylus's tragedies the titans were the protagonists, and in Sophocles - ideal heroes, in the playwright's own words, “people as they should be”; then Euripides, as noted in his Poetics Aristotle already brought people onto the stage as they are in life. The heroes and especially the heroines of Euripides do not at all have integrity, their characters are complex and contradictory, and high feelings, passions, thoughts are closely intertwined with base ones. This gave the tragic characters of Euripides versatility, evoking a complex range of feelings in the audience - from empathy to horror. Thus, the unbearable suffering of Medea from the tragedy of the same name leads her to a bloody crime; Moreover, having killed her own children, Medea does not experience the slightest remorse. Phaedra ( Hippolytus), who has a truly noble character and prefers death to the consciousness of her own fall, commits a low and cruel act, leaving a suicide letter with a false accusation of Hippolytus. Iphigenia ( Iphigenia in Aulis) goes through a very difficult psychological path from a naive teenage girl to conscious sacrifice for the good of her homeland.

Expanding the palette of theatrical and visual means, he widely used everyday vocabulary; along with the choir, increased the volume of the so-called. monody (solo singing by an actor in a tragedy). Monodies were introduced into theatrical use by Sophocles, but the widespread use of this technique is associated with the name of Euripides. The clash of opposing positions of characters in the so-called. Euripides aggravated agons (verbal competitions of characters) through the use of stichomythia, i.e. exchange of poems between participants in the dialogue.

ANCIENT DRAMA Ancient drama AESCHYLUS PERSIANS CHARACTERS PEOPLE EPISODE FIRST STASYMES FIRST EPISODE SECOND STASYMES SECOND EXOD PROMETHEUS CHAINED CHARACTERS PROLOGUE PEOPLE EPISODE FIRST STASYMES FIRST EPISODE SECOND STASYMES SECOND EPISODE THIRD STASIM THIRD EXODUS SOPHOCLES OEDIPUS THE KING CHARACTERS PROLOGUE PAROD EPISODE FIRST STASIM FIRST EPISODE SECOND KOMMOS STASYM SECOND EPISODE THIRD STASYM THIRD EPISODE FOURTH STASYM FOURTH EXODE KOMMOS ANTIGONE CHARACTERS PROLOGUE PARODY EPISODE FIRST STASYM FIRST EPISODE SECOND STASYM SECOND EPISODE THIRD STASYM THIRD EPISODE FOURTH KOMMOS STASYM FOURTH EPISODE FIFTH STASYM FIFTH (HYPORCHEMA) KOMMOS EURIPIDES MEDEA CHARACTERS PROLOGUE PAROD EPISODE ONE STASIM FIRST EPISODE SECOND STASIM SECOND EPISODE THIRD STASIM THIRD EPISODE FOURTH STASIM FOURTH EPISODE FIFTH EPISODE SIXTH STASIM FIFTH EXOD HIPPOLYTE CHARACTERS PROLOGUE PAROD OF EPISODES TRANS. VY STASYM FIRST EPISODE SECOND KOMMOS STASYM SECOND EPISODE THIRD KOMMOS STASYM THIRD EPISODE FOURTH STASYM FOURTH EXOD ARISTOPHANES CLOUDS ACTING PERSONS PROLOGUE PARABASA PEOPLE EPISODE FIRST EPISODE SECOND EPISODE THIRD EPISODE FOURTH AGON FIRST EPISODE FIFTH EPISODE SIXTH EPISODE SEVENTH EPISODE EIGHTH AGON SECOND WORLD CHARACTERS PROLOGUE EPISODE FIRST EPISODE SECOND PARABASA EPISODE THIRD EPISODE FOUR SMALL PARABASA EPISODE FIFTH EPISODE SIXTH EXODE MENANDR BRUSGA CHARACTERS ACTION ACT ONE SECOND ACT ACT THREE FOUR ACT FIFTH TITUS MACCIUS PLAUTHUS TWO MENECHMEA CONTENTS CHARACTERS PROLOGUE ACT ONE SCENE ONE SCENE SECOND SCENE THIRD SCENE FOUR ACT TWO SCENE TRANS THY SCENE SECOND SCENE THREE ACT THREE SCENE FIRST SCENE SECOND SCENE THIRD ACT FOUR SCENE FIRST SCENE SECOND SCENE THREE ACT FIFTH SCENE ONE SECOND SCENE THREE SCENE FOURTH SCENE FIFTH SCENE SIXTH SCENE SEVEN EIGHT PUBLIUS TERENTIUS AFR GIRL FROM ANDROSA CHARACTERS PROLOGUE ACTION FIRST SCENE FIRST SCENE SECOND SCENE THIRD SCENE FOURTH SCENE FIFTH ACT SECOND SCENE FIRST SCENE SECOND SCENE THIRD SCENE FOURTH SCENE FIFTH SCENE ACT THREE SCENE FIRST SCENE SECOND SCENE THIRD SCENE FOURTH SCENE FIFTH ACT FOUR SCENE FIRST SCENE SECOND SCENE THIRD SCENE FOURTH SCENE FIFTH ACT P THAT SCENE FIRST SCENE SECOND SCENE THIRD SCENE FOURTH SCENE FIFTH SCENE SIXTH LUTIUS ANNEAS SENECA OCTAVIA CHARACTERS SCENE FIRST SCENE SECOND SCENE THIRD SCENE FOURTH SCENE FIFTH SCENE SIXTH SCENE SEVENTH SCENE EIGHTH SCENE NINE

ANCIENT DRAMA

Ancient drama

From Aeschylus, who opens this volume, to Seneca, who completes it, a good five centuries have passed - a huge time. And in the minds of anyone who is more or less familiar with the greatest writers of different eras and peoples, these two names, of course, carry far from the same weight. When they say: “Aeschylus,” some immediately have a vague, others have a more or less clear image of the “father of tragedy”, a venerable, textbook, even majestic image; they imagine the marble of an antique bust, a scroll of a manuscript, an actor’s mask, bathed in the southern, Mediterranean sun amphitheater. And immediately memory suggests two more names: Sophocles, Euripides. But Seneca? If any associations arise here, then, in any case, not theatrical ones: “Oh yes, this is the one who opened his veins on the orders of Nero...” Is this incommensurability of the posthumous literary fame of Aeschylus and Seneca fair? Yes, fair, without a doubt. After testing for centuries - and even more so for millennia - there is, in general, no arbitrariness in the selection of the most significant cultural values.

Why, despite the fact that Aeschylus lived in the 5th century BC? e. in Greece, and Seneca in the 1st century AD. e. in Rome, and despite the fact that one left a very deep trace in the memory of posterity, and the other as a playwright - a weak, superficial trace, both ended up under the same binding? Did they really meet? Yes, by right. Our book is called “Ancient Drama,” and ancient drama, if you look at it with our eyes today, from a distance of two thousand years, is still one whole, welded together not only by common historical prerequisites - the slave system, pagan mythology, - but also purely literary continuity, which consisted in the borrowing and development of technical techniques, in imitation of predecessors or their parody, in polemics with them and sometimes even, in today’s language, in “personal contacts.” It is known, for example, that Aeschylus and Sophocles performed their tragedies in the same competitions and competed for the first prize. With all the differences in eras and talents, flourishing and decline, with the seemingly diametric opposite of tragedy and comedy, with the diversity of languages ​​between the Greeks and Romans, despite the fact that only a small part of what was written has reached us from some authors, and nothing at all has reached us from others , - with all this, ancient drama seems to us today as a tight ball, where the ends of the threads are hidden, stretching to all the later victories of the European dramatic genius - to Shakespeare, and to Lope de Vega, and to Moliere, and to Ostrovsky.

How did this tangle begin, where did it all begin? It is enough to read any tragedy of Aeschylus once to feel in it some kind of old culture of spectacle and acting. First of all, the indispensable presence of the choir is striking - a strange feature, in modern opinion. And then, reading it, you notice that without the chorus, perhaps, the action would not have moved: in one case there would have been no dialogue, in another there would have been no exposition necessary for understanding what was happening, in the third - and this is the most striking thing - there would be no would be the main character, because the chorus is precisely the hero around whom the drama revolves. And you also notice, reading Aeschylus, that the parts of the choir are subject to some of their own compositional rules and these rules are developed in a very sophisticated way. The choir sings at the beginning, when it appears in front of the audience, and in the middle of the play, when the actors leave, and at the end, leaving its platform - the orchestra. All these choir performances even have special names - people, stasim, exod. - Another pattern is striking: the choir’s songs usually consist of paired parts, and the second (“antistrophe”) repeats the rhythm of the first (“strophe”) on a new text. Such subtle mechanics do not arise out of nowhere. It is easy to discern a tradition behind it, and even if we did not have ancient evidence about the origin of the tragedy and about Phrynichus, the predecessor of Aeschylus, the primary role of the chorus and the complex system of choral parts in Aeschylus’s theater would lead us to the idea that Aeschylus can only be called the “first” conditionally, and would point us to the chorus as the starting point for a search that would lead to the origins of tragic drama. And comparing the enormous importance of the chorus in Aeschylus’s tragedies with its role in the poets of the next generation - Sophocles and especially Euripides - about whom someone, albeit with a degree of exaggeration, said that they can be read without any damage to the understanding of the meaning, skipping the choral parts, - you see even more clearly that the chorus in tragedy is its oldest, most archaic, closest to the beginnings of drama core.

The theater that comes to life on the pages of our collection, even the earliest one, Aeschylus’s, is the theater of people who are already civilized, possessing both writing and a high literary and musical culture. It was culture that made possible the qualitative leap that was the transition from ritual songs in honor of the god Dionysus to a professionally prepared performance. The word "tragedy" means "goat song". The translation itself does not explain anything, and to this day there are different interpretations of it, which, however, are always based on the conviction coming from the Greeks that the cult of Dionysus, who was considered the patron of viticulture and a symbol of the life-giving forces of nature, gave birth to the tragedy. Drunken processions have long been held in honor of Dionysus. Participants in these processions portrayed shepherds - the retinue of Dionysus, they put on goat skins, smeared their faces with grape must, sang, danced, praised their intoxicating god, who was sometimes also represented by one of the mummers, and completed the ritual with the sacrifice of a goat. Goat skins on the hips and backs of the “shepherds”, a goat as a traditional gift to Dionysus, not to mention the famous mythical companions of this god - goat-footed satyrs - oh yes, if it all started with the Dionysian cult, then, really, there were enough reasons to The oldest genre of drama has received its not-so-pretty name.

How the lead singers stood out from the choir of mummers, how instead of Dionysus the main figures of the action became other gods, and instead of gods and along with them - heroes of myths, how the dramatic performance became more complicated, moving further and further away from its cultic origins, it is not so difficult to imagine , and this is the path from ritual songs to literary tragedy, the initiator of which is considered to be Thespis (VI century BC). However, having become literature, tragedy continues to develop in the same direction: it becomes more and more secular, choral singing takes up less and less space in it compared to dialogue, not only mythical heroes appear among its characters, but also real historical figures, such as, for example , like the Persian kings Xerxes and Darius. She almost cuts the umbilical cord connecting her with the Dionysian songs, with the religious cult.

But only almost! If you look closely at it, then it will never completely cut off this umbilical cord on Greek soil. Up to Euripides, the altar remained an obligatory accessory of theatrical props, and the indispensable theme of the tragedy chorus was the glorification of the gods; up to Euripides, and even more often than not, it was with him that heroes and gods would arrive at the scene of action in chariots derived from the half-cart, half-boat on which Dionysus “himself” came to Athens on special holidays, in the same way as he comes today In some kindergarten we have Santa Claus himself. And always, always, performances in ancient Athens will be given only on holidays in honor of Dionysus, twice a year, in winter and spring, even if the themes of the dramas will no longer have the slightest relation to this god.

What we need to look closely at today was always in plain sight for the contemporaries of the three great Greek tragedians. And the inertia with which theatrical performances were allowed only on Dionysia and Lenaia gave birth to a proverb in Athens: “What does Dionysus have to do with it?” This mocking question is surprisingly apt and infectious. He clearly points out that in the heyday of tragedy, the traces of the liturgical ritual preserved by it were perceived as a relic, and for us, separated from the world where they believed in gods and heroes for centuries, this question directly calls on us to expand its meaning and see beyond the foggy sometimes the mythological shell of tragedy brings living, earthly life.

From the very beginning of Greek drama, earthly affairs were included in it without the mediation of mythology. Athens theater of the 5th century BC. e., and tragic - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and comic - Aristophanes, always dealt with the most pressing issues of politics and morality, it was a very civil, very tendentious theater, aware of its educational, mentoring role and proud of it. And there is, it seems to us, some instructive pattern in the fact that the first pre-Aeschylean drama about which more or less coherent and detailed information has reached us was the tragedy of Phrynichus “The Taking of Miletus,” written on a topical topic, under the fresh impression only that the events have died down.

The story of Phrynichus deserves to be told here because it anticipates important features of the theatrical life of his century. In 494 BC. e. The Persians destroyed the city of Miletus, a Greek colony in Asia Minor that rebelled against their rule. A year later, in 493 BC. e., Phrynichus staged a tragedy in Athens about the defeat of the Milesians and was fined by the Athenian authorities one thousand drachmas on the grounds that with his composition he brought the audience to tears, reminding them of, so to speak, a national misfortune. And this tragedy was forbidden to ever be staged. The sentimental and naive, seemingly, motivation for the ban actually masked the fear of the propaganda power of the play, the fear of those who felt responsible for insufficient assistance to the Milesians and, in general, for their lack of preparation to repel the Persians at a time when the threat of their invasion of Greece was becoming increasingly reality. In the same year that Phrynichus staged the “Taking of Miletus,” Themistocles, a statesman who understood the inevitability of war with the Persians and advocated for the construction of a navy, was elected to the high post of archon in Athens. But Themistocles was soon removed from power; he gained political weight only ten years later, and then the intensive construction of the Athenian fleet began, which defeated the Persians at the island of Salamis in 480 BC. e. And four years later, already at the zenith of his political glory, Themistocles, at his own expense, staged the tragedy of the same Phrynichus, “The Phoenician Woman,” where this victory at Salamis was glorified. “What does Dionysus have to do with it?”

Neither “The Taking of Miletus” nor “The Phoenicians” have reached us; the first tragedian whose dramas we can read now was Aeschylus (524–456 BC), from whose works, as well as from the works of Sophocles (496–406 BC) and Euripides (480–406 BC), at least a small part, has still been preserved. Phrynichus, therefore, is only the prehistory of the tragic theater, but the prehistory is significant, fundamental. This theater is closely connected with the social life of its time, with its ideological trends and political troubles.

What kind of era was this in Hellas, the famous 5th century BC? e.? We already know that it began under the sign of war. Greece was then not a single state, but several independent cities, each of which headed the region adjacent to it as its administrative and commercial center. They spoke in all these city-states (they were called poleis) in different dialects of the same language - Greek. Each city had its own local legends, patron gods and heroes, but the system of religious and mythological ideas was generally the same everywhere, captured most fully by Homer’s poems. At that time, Athens, the largest Greek port, the capital of Attica, rich in olive oil and wine, had the most developed social and cultural life compared to other policies. Athens led the pan-Hellenic war with the Persians and, having won it, rebuilt itself even more magnificently, democratized its political institutions, and achieved enormous success in the development of the arts. Of course, Athenian democracy was a slave-owning democracy, and if its leader, Pericles, said that the state system of the Athenians “is called democratic because it is based not on a minority, but on the majority of the people,” that the Athenians “live a free political life in the state and not suffer from suspicion in everyday life,” then, reading these pathetic words, one should not forget that there were much more slaves in Athens than free citizens. The democratization of political institutions meant only the wider participation in them of small free owners, who gradually got rid of the oppression of the nobility. But the spiritual climate of Athens was still completely different than, for example, in Sparta, with its harsher life and rougher morals, not to mention Persia, where it was customary to prostrate before the kings and their satraps.

The pan-Hellenic patriotic upsurge, accompanied by the flourishing of culture in Athens, did not, naturally, destroy all kinds of contradictions either within the city-states, including within Athens, or those that had long existed between city-states, especially between Athens and Sparta; and internal contradictions, as always happens, only became sharper and more naked due to foreign policy troubles. Beginning in 431 BC. e., less than fifty years after the Salamis victory over the Persians, the intra-Hellenic war, called the Peloponnesian war, split Greece into two, as we would now say, blocs - Athenian and Spartan. This war dragged on for a long time, it ended two years after the death of Euripides, in 404 BC. e., the defeat of Athens and dealt a severe blow to Greek democracy. At the request of the Spartan military leader Lysander, all power in Athens passed to the Committee of Thirty, which established a brutal terrorist regime. A severe blow was dealt to art, and first of all to its most accessible and most civic form - the theater.

Even this brief sketch of historical events of the 5th century BC. e. allows us to distinguish three stages in them: the formation of Greek city-states and Hellenic identity during the patriotic war with Persia; then, mainly in Athens, the flourishing of social life and culture and, in connection with this, the moral development of the individual; finally, the loss of national cohesion, ideological confusion and the inevitable weakening of moral principles under such conditions, a revaluation of ethical standards that seemed unshakable.

And since there are also three great Greek tragedians and Aeschylus is older than Sophocles, and Sophocles is older than Euripides, then, perhaps, it is quite tempting to “link” each with the corresponding stage, especially since material in favor of such a scheme can be found in the tragedies of all three. Literary historians have often succumbed to this temptation of symmetry and harmony. But in real life, to which the artist always listens sensitively, different, sometimes even opposite, tendencies exist simultaneously, and Euripides, for example, as we will see, was no less a Greek patriot than Aeschylus, although he lived during times of intra-Greek strife, and Aeschylus, although he portrayed mainly strong-willed, unbendingly strong people, he was not deaf to the dark, pathological sides of human nature, which are generally considered the specialty of Euripides. Not only does the symmetrical scheme take into account neither the versatility of life, nor the individual characteristics of talent, which determine the writer’s interest in those and not others of its facets, the mechanical distribution of the three tragedians into the three stages of history also requires a certain chronological tension. In the year of Aeschylus’s death, Sophocles turned forty years old, and this age, it should be noted, was considered by the Greeks to be the pinnacle of the development of human abilities, so there is every reason to call the first two tragedians contemporaries. True, it may be objected that Sophocles outlived Aeschylus by as much as fifty years. But Euripides survived him by exactly the same amount and died, it seems, even a little earlier than Sophocles, but Sophocles’ heroes, as we will see, are harmonious, majestic and noble, and Euripides’s are tormented by passions, sometimes absorbed in family troubles and sometimes do not live in palaces, and in huts. Of course, time inevitably invades books and leaves its mark on them. But, speaking about artists, it is necessary, in addition to general historical changes, to remember the uniqueness of each talent, that some literary techniques are replaced by others, developing and improving them, that art does not tolerate repetition of what has already been said by its predecessors.

The emergence of this harmonious three-stage scheme in the assessment of great tragedians was greatly facilitated by the paucity of our factual data about their life and work, the incommensurability of the small number of dramas that have reached us with the number of them written. From ancient sources it is known, for example, that the victory of young Sophocles during his performance at the tragedian competition in 468 BC. e. offended Aeschylus so much that he soon left Athens for the island of Sicily. Such evidence seems to provide food for conclusions confirming the widespread scheme: “Well, of course, different times - different morals, Aeschylus was already outdated, he was unable to respond to the new demands of the audience, and he had no choice but to give way to Sophocles.” But in 1951, among other texts of the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, a fragment was published from which it is clear that Aeschylus still managed to defeat Sophocles: he received the first prize for his tragedy “The Petitioner” at the same competition where Sophocles only got the second. And all sorts of hasty constructions immediately collapse, and once again the vulnerability and fragility of all kinds of schemes is revealed.

What was, with all their differences, undoubtedly characteristic of all dramatic poets of the 5th century BC. e. - both tragedians and Aristophanes? The conviction that a poet should be a teacher of the people, their mentor. The educational role of theater in those days is now difficult to even imagine. There was no printing, no newspapers or magazines, and apart from official public assemblies and informal market gatherings, the theater was the only means of mass media. The Athenian Theater of Dionysus accommodated about seventeen thousand spectators - as many people as an average stadium today, almost the entire adult population of Athens at that time. No speaker, no manuscript could count on such a number of listeners and readers. Under Pericles, a state allowance was introduced for the poorest population to pay for theater seats, the so-called “theoricon” (translated: “show money”). Performances took place, however, only on holidays, but they began in the morning and ended at sunset and lasted for several days. The authors' art was assessed by specially selected judges, the first prize meant victory for the poet, the second - moderate success, and the third - failure. The list of such eloquent details can be continued, but isn’t it already clear that every dramatic competition was an event not only for the heroes of the occasion - the authors, but also for the entire city, that the very meaning, the very staging of the theatrical business obliged the poet to the greatest exactitude, to consciousness of their high civil mission?

That Greek playwrights actually regarded their work as a pedagogical ministry is confirmed by a number of ancient evidence. “Just as mentors teach boys to be smart, so adults are poets,” this verse was put into the mouth of Aeschylus by Aristophanes, his admirer and the great theatrical poet himself, in his comedy “Frogs.” Antiquity has preserved one story about Euripides, perhaps anecdotal, but, like any good anecdote, it captures the very essence of the phenomenon. The audience allegedly demanded that Euripides remove some passage from his tragedy, and then the poet went on stage and declared that he was writing not to learn from the public, but to teach it. As for Sophocles, he, according to Aristotle, said that he “depicts people as they should be, and Euripides as they really are.” "What they should be"! In this very expressive formula one can hear edification, and if Euripides called himself a teacher of the people, then Sophocles, judging by these words, considered himself to be one in an even more precise and more demanding sense.

The lessons that the poets gave to the audience became more complex from author to author, based on what was taught by their predecessors. Before Aeschylus, as they say, in addition to the choir and the leader of the choir, only one actor participated in the action, and Aeschylus introduced a second, after which Sophocles - a third. Ideas were adopted, enriched and developed, of course, not as simply and directly as purely professional technical experience, but a certain continuity certainly existed here too.

Aeschylus allegedly called his tragedies crumbs from Homer's banquet table. This modest self-assessment must, apparently, only be understood in such a way that Aeschylus, like other tragedians later, drew plots for his works from mythology, and the most abundant source of mythological stories were the Iliad and the Odyssey. After all, the tragedy rethought the mythological images of the Homeric epic, relating them to an era of much more complex and developed social relations. The Athens of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides was not the patriarchal-pastoral Greece that can be imagined from the poems of Homer, but a developed city-state (we emphasize the second part of this term), where agriculture, crafts and trade flourished, but - most importantly for art - a completely different, due to these differences, type of person. A person’s individual characteristics, his character and abilities acquired greater weight in his own eyes and in the eyes of society, his idea of ​​himself and the gods changed. The naive anthropomorphic Homeric religion, where the gods differed from people only in immortality and supernatural power, but in general behaved like good or evil people, was replaced now, when man became the measure of things, with a more complex religious consciousness. Having inherited external human-likeness from their past, the gods also became the personification and bearers of high moral standards and human ethical ideals. And if we talk about the continuity - from tragedian to tragedian - of ideas, then first of all we mean the continuous development of the idea of ​​the human personality as the basis for any reflection on the world and life, the constant delving into the recesses of the human soul.

Let's open the books and read first the first of the great three, then the second and third. Not a single one of the tragedies that have come down to us, not only Aeschylus’s, but generally all those that have survived, has such real, non-mythical characters as the “Persians”. Atossa, Darius, Xerxes are historical figures, rulers of the Persian state, and not heroes of the Trojan or Theban cycle of myths. The time of action is not the hoary Homeric antiquity, but 480 BC. e., when the Persian naval and land army suffered a crushing defeat in Greece, the author himself, Aeschylus, is a contemporary of the events he depicts, a participant in the battles of Marathon, Salamis and Plataea, and to pass by such a frank, one-of-a-kind fusion of Greek poetry the tragic with his truth would mean missing a wonderful opportunity to penetrate into his state of mind.

The action takes place in the camp of the enemies of Greece, in the Persian capital of Susa. We learn here about the greatest triumph of Greece only from the lips of her enemies. These enemies call themselves “barbarians” - an incongruity that makes us smile, because only the Greeks themselves called all non-Hellenes that way, although they did not put into this word the fullness of its current negative meaning. Indeed, there is nothing barbaric in the modern understanding, that is, wild, inhuman, savage, neither in the grief-stricken Atossa, nor in the sensible Persian elders, and especially in the wise, from the point of view of Aeschylus, King Darius. The only “negative” hero, the unreasonable and punished for his unreasonableness, King Xerxes, can only be blamed for his exorbitant pride and insolence, to which thousands of his compatriots fell victim. But pride and arrogance for Aeschylus are not at all specifically foreign traits - the Greeks also suffer from these shortcomings, for example, Polynices (“Seven Against Thebes”), Aegisthus (“Oresteia”) and even the main god of the Greeks, Zeus, until he lost his primitive humanity ( "Prometheus Bound") No, pride, which does not disdain violence, is for Aeschylus a universal vice, it is, as it were, the polar opposite of morality. And yet, it is precisely the context of the “Persians” that persistently revives in our minds the current meaning of the word “barbarian,” and it seems to us that the translators of Aeschylus are right when they do not replace “barbarians” here with any “foreigners,” “strangers,” or “Persians.” The point is not that the Persians in this drama constantly cry frantically, beat their chests and are generally not embarrassed by the immoderate manifestation of grief and despair. Crying, groans, even screams are a common place in tragedies, a genre feature probably associated with their origin from ritual laments. What tragedy doesn't involve sobs and screams? The association with “barbarism” does not come from here.

Atossa tells the elders his ominous dream. “I dreamed of two elegant women: //One was in a Persian dress, the other had Dorian attire.” The women the queen dreamed of were symbolic figures personifying Persia and Greece. When, Atossa continues, her son, King Xerxes, tried to put a yoke on both women and harness them to a chariot, “One of them obediently took the bit, // But the other, having risen, tore the horse harness // She tore it with her hands, threw off the reins // And “I immediately broke the yoke in half.” These images themselves - a yoke, a harness - are already quite significant. Further, the contrast between the Greeks and Persians becomes even clearer. “Who is their leader and shepherd, who is the lord over the army?” - asks, referring to the Greeks, the Persian queen, who cannot imagine any other form of government other than autocratic. And he receives an answer from the choir, strikingly reminiscent of the speech of Pericles already known to us: “They serve no one, are not subject to anyone.” And when it turns out that Atossa’s dream came true, that Xerxes was completely defeated by the Greeks, Aeschylus, again through the mouth of the Persian choir, draws such general and far-reaching conclusions from this that one can already speak. about the opposition of two ways of life, one of which is “barbaric” in the current sense, and the other is worthy of a person, civilized: people will no longer fall to the ground in fear and hold their tongues, because - “He who is free from the yoke , // Also free in speech.”

In the tragedy “The Petitioner,” which takes place in the legendary antiquity of Aeschylus, there is an episode where the king of Argos Pelasgus negotiates with the herald of the sons of Egypt threatening to invade his territory. The antagonists here are thus the Hellene and the Egyptian. Pelasgus has secured the support of the people's assembly, he is strong in unanimity with his subjects and scoffs at the legislation of eastern despotism, at their, we would say, bureaucracy: “We did not carve on stone slabs, // We did not put on sheets of papyrus // Our own decrees - no, free // You clearly hear the word: “Get out!” Isn't Pelasgus' attitude towards the Egyptians similar to... Aeschylus' attitude towards the Persians? In “The Oresteia,” a mythological tragedy in its material, like “The Petitioner,” a familiar motif again sounds in the words of King Agamemnon: “You don’t need to bend before me, as before a barbarian, // With your mouth open, bend into three deaths, // There’s no need , to the envy of everyone, to lay under my feet // Carpets.”

The persistence with which this motif is repeated shows that it is very important to Aeschylus. For the poet, Persia is not just a specific political enemy, but also the embodiment of a backward, less humane social order than in his native Athens, but also a prototype for depicting an external enemy as a threat to the deepest roots of Greek civilization. In the tragedy, for example, “Seven against Thebes,” where the case takes place, as in “The Petitioners,” in legendary times, the Greek city of Thebes is attacked not by the Persians or the Egyptians, but by the Argive Greeks, that is, the compatriots of the same Pelasgus who addressed the Egyptian herald with such a proud sense of his superiority. But, looking at events through the eyes of the Thebans, Aeschylus seems to forget that the Argives are Greeks. The Thebans call them “an army of alien speech” and pray to the gods not to allow “... to be taken by storm // And the city where the speech of Hellas rings and flows perishes.” In Aeschylus, patriotic pride for Athens and Greece develops into pride for the democratic principle of state life, for a freedom-loving person in general.

Noting that in “The Persians” Aeschylus does not mention the Ionian Greeks who fought on the side of Xerxes, that is, against their fellow tribesmen, and is silent about the discord in the Greek camp itself on the eve of the decisive battle, some researchers explain this by the purely political calculation of the author, by the fact that what Be that as it may, reproaches seem to him tactically inappropriate at a time when it is necessary to create a strong union of Greek states. But it seems to us that this is not just a matter of narrow political calculations. Aeschylus is not an official historian, but a poet, an artist; he generalizes events, interprets them broadly, contrasts, starting from them, entire worldviews; Yes, he is a politician, but a politician, like any real artist, in big ways, not in small ways. Among the names of Persian commanders listed in The Persians, many are fictitious. But what does this mean for us now? Absolutely none. What significance would it have for us to mention, say, the ruler of the Ionian city of Halicarnassus, the Greek woman Artemisia, who earned the gratitude of Xerxes himself? Absolutely none if it did not become an impetus for thinking about betrayal, about war between people speaking the same language, that is, if it were not ideologically and artistically productive. It is quite possible that such reflections became the theme of other tragedies of Aeschylus that have not reached us. But that’s not what “Persians” is about. It is precisely regarding “The Persians,” the only “historical” tragedy known to us, that I would like to recall the winged words from Aristotle’s “Poetics”: “Poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history: poetry speaks more about the general, history speaks about the individual” (chapter 9, 1451) .

In Aeschylus, pride in victorious Greece grew, as we said, into pride in man. Isn’t there already in the very awareness of human greatness some kind of encroachment on the authority of the gods, a well-known fight against God? How to understand Marx’s remark that the gods of Greece were “wounded to death” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 1, p. 389.) in Aeschylus’ “Prometheus”? If we compare Zeus, as he appears in the tragedy “Prometheus Bound” (we mean the monologues of Prometheus and Io) with the image of this supreme god in the choral songs of other Aeschylus tragedies, one cannot help but notice a strange contradiction. Zeus in Prometheus is a real tyrant, a cruel, insidious despot who despises people “whose age is as day,” a lustful rapist, the culprit of the madness of unfortunate Io, an evil and vindictive ruler who subjects his enemy Prometheus to the most sophisticated tortures. And in the “Oresteia” this deity is essentially good, which, albeit “through torment, through pain,” but “leads people to reason, leads to understanding,” a deity whose power hides mercy, and in “The Petitioners” the chorus trusts in the just the court of Zeus, whose will “and in the darkness of the night of black fate before the eyes of mortals burns like a bright light.” How to reconcile one with the other?

Prometheus, who stole fire for people and taught them all kinds of arts and crafts, is undoubtedly the personification of the human mind, civilization, and progress. The inquisitive spirit of Prometheus comes into conflict with inertia, autocracy, opportunism - everything that Zeus and his associates personify - Hermes, Hephaestus, Strength, Power, old man Ocean. But the vices that they personify are also vices of human relations, and Prometheus - and with Prometheus Aeschylus - rebels not against the gods in general, but against the gods who have absorbed the worst qualities of people. The gods who are “mortally wounded” here are primitive humanoid gods, a relic of Homeric or even more ancient times.

Aeschylus is not an atheist in the sense of denying religion. But his religion is, first of all, loyalty to the ethical principle, personified by the goddess of Truth. In “The Petitioners,” the poet names three commandments of Truth, three elementary requirements of morality: honoring the gods, honoring parents, and hospitable attitude toward strangers. The first point is the most vague, but it certainly includes the conviction that the gods repay evil for evil, that an evil deed does not go unpunished - after all, all the tragedies of Aeschylus show the chain reaction of evil when these simplest rules are violated. More or less similar rules, in particular, the principle of “evil for evil,” were in the Old Testament, and in Babylonian legislation, and in the Roman laws of the Twelve Tables. The religion of Aeschylus is a type of ethical code of developed ancient civilizations, which developed in the poet’s homeland in his era and received a traditional Greek design.

We know that “Prometheus Chained” is only part of a trilogy, which also included the tragedies “Prometheus Unbound” and “Prometheus the Fire-Bearer”. We do not know either the order of the parts or the contents of the other two. But even a comparison of “Prometheus Bound” with all the other surviving tragedies of Aeschylus, where the religious idea of ​​a fundamentally moral world order runs like a red thread, suggests that in “Prometheus” the poet makes a kind of excursion into the history of contemporary religion, into history, if one might say, the civilization of the gods, conditioned by the civilization of man. This much-explaining assumption is also supported by the obvious passion of Aeschylus, who, like other tragedians, always set himself educational tasks for any, from his point of view, scientific material. Let us pay attention to the long geographical passages in the same “Prometheus” or in “Agamemnon”, to the enumeration, through the mouth of Darius in “Persians”, of the Persian kings. The poet seems to open the world to the audience in all possible spatial and temporal breadth.

But although in the center of this world there is already a man - proud of his love of freedom, the king of nature improving himself and his gods, we still almost cannot discern in Aeschylus’ man those subtle features that turn a monumental figure into a psychological portrait, a bearer of a good or evil principle - into full-blooded image. No, Aeschylus cannot be blamed for rational abstraction, for inattention to the contradictory movements of the human soul, even to its irrational impulses. His Clytemnestra, his Orestes, when committing murder, are not absolutely right or wrong. His mad Io and Cassandra were written by an artist who is also interested in the pathological side of life, and not by a philosopher who puts his points into the form of dialogue. Philosophical dialogue and philosophical drama will come to literature later; Aeschylus is too early a writer for this. And precisely because he is still just a path-maker, a pioneer, his characters look like gigantic statues, boldly carved from a block of stone, barely processed with a chisel, unpolished, but having absorbed all the hidden strength and heaviness of the stone. And perhaps “Prometheus,” where the action takes place at the edge of the world, among the primordial chaos of rocks, far from human habitation, a tragedy where, according to the plan, not people appear before the viewer, but only fairy-tale creatures, only faces, not faces, in such an external structure especially impressively corresponds to this characteristic rough outline of the characters characteristic of Aeschylus.

When, reading Sophocles' Antigone, you come to the choir's song: “There are many wonders in the world...” - a feeling of something familiar arises. Man - the choir sings - is the greatest miracle. He masters the art of navigation, has tamed animals, knows how to build houses, cure diseases, he is cunning and strong. In this list of human capabilities, abilities and skills, some points seem to be borrowed from Aeschylus, from his list of Promethean benefits. Of course, there is no direct borrowing here. It’s just that both poets have the same source - myths about deities who taught man all sorts of useful arts. But, reading the same “Antigone”, you discover a continuity that is deeper, a more meaningful continuation of the Aeschylean tradition than a simple rehash.

The plot of the tragedy is very simple. Antigone buries the body of her murdered brother Polyneices, whom the ruler of Thebes, Antigone's uncle Creon, forbade to be buried on pain of death - as a traitor to the homeland and the culprit of the internecine war. For this, Antigone is executed, after which her fiance, Creon's son, and the groom's mother, Creon's wife, commit suicide.

With such simplicity of plot, this Sophoclean tragedy provided rich food for thought and debate to distant descendants. What interpretations of “Antigone” have not been offered by learned wit! Some saw in it a conflict between the law of conscience and the law of the state, others - between the right of the clan (the head of the clan is the brother) and the demand of the state; Goethe explained Creon’s actions with his personal hatred of the murdered man; Hegel considered “Antigone” the most perfect example of a tragic clash between the state and the family. All these interpretations find more or less solid support in the text of the tragedy. Without going into an analysis of them, let us ask ourselves the question of why it was generally possible to interpret so differently a drama with such a small number of characters and so economically constructed. First of all, it seems to us, because in Sophocles people depicted in relief argue, characters and individuals collide, and not bare ideas and tendencies. After all, in life, every action, every conflict, not to mention such an extreme manifestation of the will as self-sacrifice, is prepared by many prerequisites - a person’s upbringing, his beliefs, his special psychological make-up, which is why it is difficult to fully explain any everyday Drama.

Sophocles, like Aeschylus, is full of interest in man. But Sophocles' people are more plastic than those of his predecessor. Her sister Ismene is shown next to the main character. The fact that Antigone and Ismene are sisters puts them in exactly the same position relative to Creon and Polyneices. Perhaps, as the bride of Creon’s son, Antigone might have even more internal motivations for “agreement” than Ismene. But it is Ismene who puts up with Creon’s cruel order, not Antigone. We find the same exact comparison of two characters at a moment requiring decisive action in another Sophocles tragedy - “Electra”. Before us again, as in Antigone, are two sisters - Electra and Chrysothemis. Both are pushed around by their mother Clytemnestra, who, together with her lover Aegisthus, killed her husband, Agamemnon, and is afraid of revenge at the hands of her son, Orestes, brother of Electra and Chrysothemis. But Chrysothemis, unlike Electra, is not able to hate her father’s killers strongly enough to take revenge on them at the risk of her own life. And therefore it is Electra, and not Chrysothemis, who turns out to be Orestes’s intrepid assistant in the hour of revenge.

With such comparisons of two figures, each inevitably shades the other. Aeschylus had only the sharpest contrasts - between good and evil, civilization and savagery, pride and piety. The Sophoclean contrast is richer in shades, and the Sophoclean man is richer in shades.

In Sophocles' Electra we are talking about exactly the same thing as in. Aeschylus' "Victim at the Tomb" - about Orestes' revenge on his mother and her lover for the murder of his father. And in Aeschylus, Electra occupies an important place among the characters. But in Sophocles she becomes the central character, and it is not an exaggeration to say that Electra owes this promotion to the role of the main character to her sluggish, timid sister, ready to compromise, who was not present at all in Aeschylus’s tragedy. Only in comparison with Chrysothemis is all the originality and remarkable character of Electra visible, and in Aeschylus Electra had no choice but to be content with the role dictated by myth as a passive ally of her brother.

Sophocles' comparison of Antigone with Ismene and Electra with Chrysothemis has a deep educational meaning. Yes, man is the king of nature, yes, man’s deeds are wonderful, yes, he is able to argue with the gods themselves. But what must he be like to realize this ability? Maximally demanding of oneself, ready to sacrifice personal well-being and even sacrifice life in the name of one’s moral ideal.

The pinnacle of such pedagogical demands on a person is Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King.” When they say that Greek tragedy is a tragedy of fate, that it shows the helplessness of man before the evil fate predetermined for him, they mainly mean this drama. But the widespread idea that fate is the driving force of Greek tragedies has developed primarily because of the plots, which strike the modern reader with their outlandishness much more powerfully than the psychological skill with which they are developed, because: to the psychological subtleties of literature he , unlike the ancient Greek, I got used to it, and I internally long ago abandoned its obligatory connection with myths, including myths dating back to the ancient times of incestuous marriages and parricides. In other words, in the perception of Greek tragedy as a tragedy primarily of fate, there is a share of modernization, and the easiest way to verify this is precisely by the example of Oedipus the King.

The contemporary viewer of Sophocles was quite familiar with the myth of Oedipus, who killed his father, not knowing that it was his father, and then took the throne of the murdered man and married his widow, his own mother, again not suspecting that this was his own mother . In the plot of the tragedy, Sophocles followed a well-known myth, and therefore the attention of the viewer, and the author, was not focused on the plot, which so amazes us with a truly fatal coincidence of circumstances. The tragedian and the audience were concerned not with the question “what?”, but with the question “how?” How did Oedipus find out that he was a parricide and a desecrator of his mother’s bed, how did it come to the point that he had to find out about this, how did he behave after learning this, how did his mother and wife Jocasta behave? To answer this psychologically accurately, to show precisely in the transition from ignorance to knowledge the noble and integral character of the hero and, through his example, to teach the viewer courageous readiness for any blows of fate - this is the humanistic task Sophocles set for himself. “There should be nothing contrary to the meaning in the course of events; or it must be outside of tragedy, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus,” wrote Aristotle. And in fact, nothing “contrary to the meaning”, nothing that would be illogical, unmotivated, or would not fit in with the characters’ characters, can be found in the development of the action of “Oedipus”. If anything is “contrary to meaning,” it is the obvious undeservedness of the blows falling on Oedipus, the blind stubbornness of fate, that is, everything connected with the myth on which the plot is built. Aristotle’s words that in Oedipus “the opposite of meaning” is “outside tragedy” give, it seems to us, the key to the ancient perception of this drama: the mythological plot, where fate played the most important role, was, as it were, put out of brackets and accepted as indispensable convention, served as a reason for talking about a person’s moral responsibility for his actions, for a psychologically correct picture of decent behavior in the most tragic circumstances.

In another Sophocles tragedy (“Oedipus at Colonus”), written by the poet in his old age, when he began to have disagreements with his sons over property, the reason for Oedipus’s departure from Thebes is given differently than in “Oedipus the King,” which ended with the hero’s farewell to his homeland and relatives and his own decision to go into exile: here Oedipus is an involuntary exile, the king was deprived of the throne by his sons and Creon, who was striving for supreme power. Doesn't this also speak about the conditional and auxiliary significance of myth for the tragedian? After all, using different versions of a well-known mythological plot and presenting the same mythological person in different circumstances, the poet only emphasized what particularly worried and occupied him. In this sense, he worked on the same principle as, for example, the painters of the Renaissance, for whom familiar biblical subjects served as a form that absorbed modern life material and deep knowledge of man.

Entirely mythological characters also act in the tragedies of the youngest poet of the famous triad - Euripides. However, the works of Euripides seem to the modern reader to have been written much later than the tragedies of his two older contemporaries. As a rule, they are quite understandable without any special explanatory comments, and our imagination responds to them more vividly and directly. Why is that? First of all, probably because the topics on which Euripides wrote are closer to us than, say, the archaic cosmography of Aeschylus or his religious ideas, than the exceptional circumstances into which Sophocles’ Oedipus or Antigone find themselves. The main theme of Euripides can be judged by his two most famous and best tragedies included in our collection - “Medea” and “Hippolytus”. This theme is love and family relationships. The same thing - about love, about jealousy, about seduced girls and illegitimate children - is discussed in almost all other Euripidean tragedies that have come down to us.

But it's not just about the topics. Euripides boldly introduced into the tragedy, which spoke in a sublime and sometimes pompous language, the most real everyday details. In Aeschylus and Sophocles, if slaves appeared on stage, they did so only in small, “passing” roles, and more often as extras. The place of slaves in Euripides’ theater was much more consistent with their place in the poet’s contemporary life. In the tragedy “Ion,” the old slave, Creusa’s teacher, a figure, so to speak, “not programmed” by myth, is one of the main characters. Euripides' Electra from the tragedy of the same name turns out to be married to a simple peasant by the time Orestes appears. Neither Aeschylus nor Sophocles prepared such a prosaic fate for Agamemnon’s daughter; both said only that Electra was pushed around in her home and that she lived in it almost in the position of a servant. Euripides gave this situation an everyday, earthly development, and what happened to the mythological heroine was something that, under similar domestic circumstances, could well have happened to some Athenian girl from a well-born family: Electra was married off to a peasant against her will. The poet seemed to offer a reading of the myth that was more in tune with everyday life.

Euripides' desire for maximum verisimilitude of a tragic action is also visible in the psychologically natural motivations for the characters' behavior. It is difficult to count - there are so many of them in Euripides - cases when the hero, entering the stage, explains the reason for his appearance. It seems that the poet is disgusted by any stage convention. Even the very form of monologue, speech without interlocutors, addressed only to the audience, that is, a convention with which the theater has not parted to this day - even this, in Euripides’s opinion, sometimes needs, apparently, logical justification. Read the beginning of Medea carefully. The nurse pronounces a monologue that introduces the viewer to the situation and outlines in general terms the further development of the action. But now the exposition is given, and the monologue, having completed its task, is over. However, internally the poet has not yet “dealt with” him, because he has not yet motivated this speech, which was not formally addressed to anyone. When an old slave appears on stage with Medea’s children, his very first words pave the way for filling the logical gap: “O old queen’s slave! // Why are you here alone at the gate? Or // Do you believe your grief?” And the nurse explains this speech to “herself” as a consequence of a sorrowful insanity: “Before // I was exhausted, you believe that the desire, // I don’t even know how, was in me // Appeared to tell the earth and the sky // The misfortunes of the queen ours."

These features of Euripides’ dramaturgy, subordinated to his general attitude towards bringing tragedy closer to everyday life, to everyday practice and everyday logic, an attitude, the innovative fruitfulness of which was shown by the entire subsequent history of ancient, and then the entire European theater, apparently create the impression that Euripides separated from us by a much shorter time distance than Aeschylus and Sophocles, that there is much less “dust of centuries” in his writings.

With such “everydayism” of Euripides’ tragedies, the participation in their action of gods, demigods and all sorts of miraculous forces not subject to earthly laws seems especially inappropriate. Against the background of the universal elements, the winged chariot of the Oceanids in Eskhgat’s “Prometheus” does not cause much surprise, and the magic chariot on which Medea flies away from Jason is somehow puzzling in a tragedy with very real human problems. The modern reader, perhaps, will consider this feature of Euripidean drama simply an archaic relic and make an excuse for antiquity. But Aristophanes already blamed Euripides for the inharmonious mixture of high and low, Aristotle already reproached him for his addiction to the “god ex machina” technique, which consisted in the fact that the denouement of the tragedy did not follow from the plot, but was achieved by the intervention of God, who appeared on the stage with the help of theater machine.

Neither a simple reference to antiquity, nor an equally simple agreement with the opinion of the ancient critics of Euripides, who believed that he lacked taste and compositional skill, will help us penetrate into the depths of this aesthetic contradiction, which did not prevent Euripides from remaining in the memory of posterity as an artist of the same rank , like Aeschylus and Sophocles. The poet really tried to portray people as they really are. He boldly introduced everyday material into the tragedy and just as boldly included dark passions in its field of vision. Showing in “Hippolytus” the death of a hero who self-confidently resists the blind power of love, and in “The Bacchae” - a hero who overly relies on the power of reason, he warned about the danger that the irrational principle in human nature poses for the norms established by civilization. And if to resolve the conflict he so often needed the unexpected intervention of supernatural forces, then the point here is not simply the inability to find a more convincing compositional move, but the fact that the poet did not see the resolution of many complicated human affairs in the real conditions of his time. For Euripides, it was sometimes more important to pose a problem, to ask a question, than to give an answer to it - after all, the bold formulation of a new problem in itself educates and teaches.

Already the earliest of the tragedies of Euripides that have come down to us - “Alcestes” - shows how much more than the denouement of the drama, this poet was concerned with the formulation of the problem, a problem in this case, a moral and philosophical one, for “Alcestes” is a tragedy about death.

The goddesses of fate promised Apollo to save King Admetus from death if any of his loved ones agreed to go to the underworld in his place. “The king tested all his relatives: neither his father, // Nor his old mother, // But he found a friend here in one wife, // Who would love the darkness of Hades for a friend.” Just when Admetus is mourning the dying Alceste, Hercules comes as a guest to his house. Despite the mourning, Admet turns out to be a hospitable host, and as a reward for this, Hercules, having defeated the demon of death, returns his already buried wife to Admet alive.

If we judge only by the plot and denouement, then “Alceste” with its unambiguously happy ending is a work of a completely different genre than “Hippolytus” or “Medea”. By the way, in “Alcestus” the happy ending is achieved without the help of the “god ex machina” technique; it follows from the plot: Hercules appears not at the end of the action, but almost in the middle, and the service he rendered to Admetus is motivated quite realistically - by gratitude for hospitality. But, reading more deeply into “Alcestes,” you see that Euripides is already here “the most tragic of poets,” although Aristotle called him that because “many of his tragedies end in misfortune” (“Poetics,” ch. 13, 1453 a ).

Processing the myth with a successful outcome according to all the rules of dramatic technique, Euripides made the conversation between Admetus and his father the ideological center of gravity of his work. Admet reproaches Feret for clinging to life in old age and not wanting to sacrifice it for the sake of him, his son. Feret’s behavior is all the more unsightly because his daughter-in-law Alcesta agreed to self-sacrifice, and the viewer is already inclined to take Admet’s side. But then Feret takes the floor and returns to Admet, who agrees to buy life at the cost of his wife’s life, a reproach for cowardice: “Be silent, child: we are all life-loving.” And it is immediately clear that Admet is no less selfish than his father, that it is still a question whether it is worth sacrificing life for such a person, moreover, that there are no objective criteria for the legitimacy of self-sacrifice. Alceste’s noble act, as the poet tells us, does not remove the problem, but raises it without providing any general solutions, and in the face of this unsolvability, only silence is appropriate. Here it is, a truly tragic collision, in which a successful outcome seems as much a theatrical convention as a magic chariot carrying Medea away from the insoluble problems of her family.

The poet is skeptical; he does not have a firm, Aeschylean-Sophoclean conviction in the highest moral correctness of the gods who arrange human affairs. Aristophanes, a supporter of patriarchal antiquity, did not like Euripides for this and in every possible way opposed Aeschylus to him, as the singer of the courageous generation of marathon fighters. Yet Euripides was the real successor of Aeschylus and Sophocles. A civic poet like them, he also consciously served the most humane political system of his time - Athenian democracy. Yes, Euripides questioned a lot and touched upon issues that were not within the competence of tragedians before him. But he never had doubts about the greatest value of the democratic traditions of his native Greece. It is impossible to list all the poems in which the poet glorifies Athens - there are so many of them in his tragedies. In order not to go beyond the limits of our collection, we draw the reader’s attention only to the place in “Medea” where the Greek Jason declares to his abandoned Colchian wife that he has completely repaid her for everything that she did for him - and to her, we note , owes his life. “I acknowledge your services. What // Of this? The debt was paid long ago, // And with interest. Firstly, you are in Hellas // And no longer among the barbarians, the law // You have learned the truth instead of the power // Which reigns among you.” What can I say, Jason is a hypocrite, he is fussy, but still, what is this “first” worth even in his mouth! A subtle psychologist, Euripides would hardly have put such an argument into them first of all, if the Periclean-Aeschylean pride in his freedom-loving people had not been organic to him. No, Euripides, like Sophocles, is Aeschylus’s brother, only the youngest brother, the least inert, critical of the experience of his elders.

However, criticism became a real element of the Athenian theater with the flowering of another genre and thanks to another author, whom Belinsky called “the last great poet of Ancient Greece.” This genre is a comedy, the so-called ancient Attic, author - Aristophanes (approximately 446–385 BC). When Aristophanes was born, comic poets had already been regularly participating in Dionysian competitions along with tragedians for about forty years. But we know little about Aristophanes’ predecessors Chionides, Cratina and his peer Eupolis; at best, only fragments of their works have survived. The fact is that time has saved us from the heyday of ancient drama - the 5th century BC. e. - the works of only brilliant tragedians and only brilliant comedians, this must be due to some kind of natural selection.

Aristophanes' criticism is primarily political. Aristophanes lived during the years of the intra-Greek Peloponnesian War, which was waged in the interests of wealthy Athenian traders and artisans and ruined small landowners, separating them from work, and sometimes devastating their vineyards and fields. After Pericles, the main official in Athens was Cleon, the owner of a tannery, a supporter of the most decisive military, political and economic measures in the fight against Sparta, a man whose personal qualities did not earn approval from any of the ancient authors who wrote about him. Aristophanes took the opposite, anti-war position and began his literary career with persistent attacks on Cleon, satirically portraying him as a demagogue and covetous in his early comedies. The comedy of the twenty-year-old Aristophanes, “The Babylonians,” which has not reached us, forced Cleon to initiate legal proceedings against the author. The poet was accused of discrediting officials in the presence of representatives of the military allies. Aristophanes somehow avoided the political process and did not lay down his arms. Two years later, he performed the comedy “The Horsemen,” where he portrayed the Athenian people in the form of the feeble-minded old man Demos (“demos” in Greek - people), who completely submitted to his rogue servant Tanner, in whom it was not difficult to recognize Cleon. There is evidence that not a single master dared to give the comedy mask a resemblance to the face of Cleon and that Aristophanes wanted to play the role of the Tanner himself. Courage? Without a doubt. But at the same time, this story with Cleon shows that at the beginning of Aristophanes’ activity, democratic morals and institutions were still very strong in Athens. For attacks on the chief strategist, the poet had to be brought to open court, and having avoided trial, the poet could again, and in war conditions, ridicule the first person in the state in front of an audience of thousands. Of course, the success of theatrical satire did not yet mean political collapse for the one against whom this satire was directed, and Dobrolyubov was right when he wrote that “Aristophanes... stabbed Cleon not in the eyebrow, but in the very eye, and the poor citizens were glad of his caustic antics ; and Cleon, as a rich man, still ruled Athens with the help of several rich people.” But if Cleon had been sure that no one would dare to publicly “prick” him, then he, with his inclinations as a demagogue, would have ruled Athens, perhaps even more abruptly and would have taken even less into account his opponents... The last years of the poet’s activity - after the military defeat Athens - proceeded in different conditions: democracy lost its former strength, and the topical satire, full of personal attacks, so characteristic of the young Aristophanes, came to almost nothing in his work. His later comedies are utopian tales. The political passions that worried Aristophanes are long gone, many of his hints are incomprehensible to us without comment, his idealization of Attic antiquity now seems naive and unconvincing to us. However, the pictures of peaceful life, which the poet, as an opponent of the Peloponnesian War, glorified, touch us even now, and in 1954, Aristophanes’ anniversary was widely celebrated on the initiative of the World Peace Council. But when we read Aristophanes, we experience true aesthetic pleasure from his inexhaustible comic ingenuity, from the brilliant courage with which he extracts the funny from everything he touches, be it politics, everyday life or literary and mythological canons.

The very external form of Aristophanes' comedy - with its indispensable chorus, whose songs are divided into stanzas and antistrophes, with the use of theatrical machines, with the participation of mythical characters in the action - makes it possible to parody the structure of tragedy. On the days of dramatic competitions, spectators watched the tragedy in the morning, and in the evening, sitting in the same theater, in the same seats, a performance designed to cleanse the soul not with “fear and compassion” (as Aristotle defined the task of tragedy), but with fun and laughter. Under these conditions, could a comic poet refrain from mockingly imitating tragedians? As if released from a bottle by external stage similarity, the spirit of parody captured different spheres of tragedy. In the comedy "The World", the farmer Trigaeus rises to the skies on a dung beetle. This is already a parody of a tragic plot: it is known that the tragedy of Euripides “Bellerophon”, which has not reached us, was based on the myth of Bellerophon, who tried to reach Olympus on a winged horse. But the parody of tragedy does not end with the plots; it goes further, extending to language and style. When the old man Demos in “The Riders” takes the wreath from his servant the Tanner and gives it to the Sausage Man, the Tanner, bidding farewell to the wreath, paraphrases the words with which in the tragedy of Euripides Alcest, who dies for her husband, bids farewell to her marriage bed. There are many similar examples. Such consistent ridicule of the technology of tragedy is on the verge of an encroachment on theatrical conventions in general. And Aristophanes crosses this line in the so-called parabass.

Parabasa is a special choral part unknown to tragedy. Here the choir members take off their masks and address not the other actors, but directly the audience. Interrupting the action for the sake of a lyrical and journalistic digression, the poet, through the mouth of the choir, tells the public about himself, lists his merits, and attacks his political and literary opponents. Conversation with the audience, apparently, is not an Aristophanes invention, but the most ancient choral basis of accusatory comedy. But against the broad background of Aristophanes' parodic inventions, the parabass is perceived as one of them - as a parody of theatrical convention, as a deliberate destruction of stage illusion, anticipating. all further - from Plautus to Brecht - steps of world drama on this path.

As if emerging from the “guild” limits where he was born, Aristophanes’ spirit of parody was not limited to the tragic theater, but naturally invaded a variety of areas of culture and everyday life, if only it benefited the author’s political intentions. By forcing Socrates and Strepsiades to talk in “Clouds” about how to get rid of debts, that is, on a topic that was by no means philosophical, Aristophanes parodied the form of Socratic dialogue and by this alone made Socrates look ridiculous, whom he considered a sophist, shaking the foundations of the democratic Athenian state and patriarchal morality. The spirit of parody did not retreat even before the venerable shadow of Homer. In the comedy "Wasps", the old man Kleonolub (an eloquent name!), obsessed with a passion for litigation, is locked in the house by his son Kleonokhul, and Kleonolub gets out of the same way as Odysseus from the cave of the Cyclops - under the belly, however, not of a ram, but one being bred for donkey sales. What Homer! Aristophanes, without embarrassment, parodies prayers, articles of law, religious rituals - the very ones that were really in use in his times. The spirit of parody truly knows no “taboos.”

What is this, unbridled mockery of everything and everyone, denial raised to the absolute? After all, even that Aristophanes character, whose triumph ends the corresponding comedy, is also always funny. Aristophanes, who loves the quiet village life of Strepsiades and ultimately sets fire to Socrates’ “thought room,” mercilessly places him in situations that should cause the audience to have a mocking attitude toward this antagonist of Socrates: either he is eaten by bedbugs, or he cheats with creditors, or beats his own son. Rising into the air on a dung beetle, the hero of “The World,” the peasant Trigeus, shouts to the theater mechanic who operates the device for “flight”: “Hey, machine master, have pity on me!.. // Be quiet, or I’ll feed the beetle!” » In the comedy “Akharpians”, the Attic farmer Dikeopolis - and the name means “fair city” - who ultimately concluded a separate peace with Sparta for himself alone, appears before the public in frankly farcical scenes, replete with farcical humor. But no matter how funny these characters are, we have no doubt that the author’s sympathies are on their side. Aristophanes' laughter does not convey the chill of negation.

This is the genius of this poet, that he does not have “positive” reasoners who are immune from ridicule, but there is a positive hero. This hero is peasant common sense, and common sense is always humane and kind. Thanks to such a humane basis of Aristophanes’ humor, his creations are durable, and we, for whom the Peloponnesian War and its consequences have long become ancient history, read Aristophanes’ comedies with sympathetic interest and aesthetic pleasure.

We know little about how Greek drama developed immediately after Aristophanes. Apart from the names of six dozen authors, nothing remains of the so-called Middle Attic comedy. We can judge about it only speculatively, based on Aristophanes’s latest comedies (“Women in the National Assembly” and “Plutos”), where there are no specific political figures among the heroes, where there are no journalistic parabas and where the chorus almost does not participate in the action. We face a gap of almost a century, and if not for the lucky discoveries of the 20th century - the texts of Menander were discovered in 1905 and 1956 - the gap in our knowledge of ancient drama would have been even greater regarding the next, so-called Neo-Attic stage in the development of comedy We too would only have to speculate.

Under Menander (342–292 BC), Athens no longer dominated Greece. After the military victory of the Macedonians over the Athenians and Thebans in 338 BC. e. this role was firmly assigned to Macedonia, and as Alexander’s power expanded, Athens became an increasingly provincial city, although for a long time it still enjoyed fame in the ancient world as a hotbed of culture. Life here now flowed without political storms, civic feelings had died down, people were no longer bound, as before, by their belonging to one city-state, human disunity intensified, and the circle of interests of the Athenian was now closed, as a rule, with personal, family, everyday concerns and affairs . The new Attic comedy reflected all this; moreover, it itself was a product of this new reality.

Even before the finds of 1905 and 1956, the words of Aristophanes of Byzantium, a learned critic of the 3rd century BC, were known. e.: “O Menander and life, which of you imitated whom!” When you get acquainted with what has survived from the works of Menander, such an enthusiastic assessment may surprise you. Aristophanes no longer took plots from mythology, but invented them himself, relating the action of his comedies to the present time, and Euripides boldly introduced purely everyday material into tragedy. These features of Menander's dramaturgy are not so original, we say. And, in our opinion, all sorts of happy coincidences play an inordinately large role in Menander’s comedies. In the “Court of Arbitration”, by chance, a young man marries a girl, not knowing that she was the one who was raped by him shortly before and that her child is their common child. In “The Grouch” - again by accident - the old man Knemon falls into the well, and this gives Sostratus, who is in love with his daughter, the opportunity to help the old man and win his favor. Such accidents seem to us too naive and deliberate for the plays built on them - with a plot that is certainly love - to be called life itself. And Menander’s characters are generally reduced to several types and only slightly vary the same patterns. From comedy to comedy, a rich young man, a stingy old man, a cook, and certainly a slave pass, who at the same time does not always part with his name - so much has the name Dove merged with the mask of a slave. Here too we want to say: “No, this is not the whole life of Athens at that time.”

But no matter how exaggerated Aristophanes of Byzantium expressed his admiration for Menander, he admired him sincerely and was only one of his many ancient admirers. Ovid called Menander “admirable,” and Plutarch attested to the enormous popularity of this comedian. We read Menander, already knowing Moliere, Shakespeare, and Italian comedy of the 18th century. A miserly old man, a roguish servant, confusions and misunderstandings ending in a happy reconciliation of lovers, two love couples - the main and the secondary - all this is already familiar to us, and, finding all this in Menander, we, unlike his ancient admirers and imitators, do not we can imbue ourselves with a living sense of novelty. Meanwhile, it is to Menander - through the Romans Plautus and Terence - that the later European comedy of characters and situations goes back. Due to the fact that Menander was “discovered” only recently, even literary historians have not yet fully appreciated his innovation.

Menander's innovation consisted not only in the fact that he developed the most productive, as the future showed, methods of constructing everyday comedy and created a gallery of human portraits of such realistic naturalness, which neither mythological tragedy with its majestic heroes, nor the grotesque Aristophanic comedy had ever known. Menander was the first in European literature to artistically capture a special type of relationship between people, born in a slave society and then existing in feudal times - the complex relationship between master and servant. When one person is subordinate to another, is with him almost inseparably and depends on him in everything, but is dedicated to everything, even the intimate details of his life, knows his habits and disposition, he can, if he is not stupid by nature, turn this knowledge to his benefit and , skillfully playing on the weaknesses of his master, to some extent control his actions, which will give rise to a feeling of superiority over him in the servant. With a mixture of devotion and hostility, goodwill and malice, respect and mockery, the parasites and slaves of Plautus and Terence, the servants and maids of Goldoni, Gozzi and Beaumarchais, Leporello s., talk to their patrons. Don Guan in “The Stone Guest” by Pushkin. In the speeches of Menander’s slave-confidants, whose advice and help their masters usually cannot do without in either love or family matters, this tone is quite clearly audible, and, speaking of Menander’s innovation, one cannot fail to note his psychological sensitivity.

We have already gotten ahead of ourselves a little when we mentioned the Roman imitators of Menander. Roman drama, at least in its part that has survived to our time, is generally imitative and closely related to Greek, but like all the flowers of Greek culture, transplanted into the soil of another country, another language, another era, and this flower of its, adapting to a new environment, changed its color, acquired a different aroma.

Let's say right away - this flower has faded. The theatrical business in Rome has always been in unfavorable conditions. The authorities were afraid of the ideological influence of the stage on the masses. Until the middle of the 1st century BC. e. There was no stone theater in Rome at all. In 154 BC. e. The Senate decided to demolish the newly built seats for spectators, “as a useless structure that corrupts society.” True, this and other official prohibitions (bringing benches with you so as not to stand during the performance; arranging seats for spectators closer than a thousand steps from the city limits) were violated in every possible way, but they influenced minds, forced them to look at the theater as for something suspicious and reprehensible. Actors in Rome were treated with contempt, and theater authors were not very favored either. The poet Naevius (III century... BC), who tried to speak from the stage in “free language” - this is his own expression - ended up in prison for this, never becoming the Roman Aristophanes. It is noteworthy that the largest Roman comedians were people of low social status. Naevius is a plebeian, Plautus (c. 250–184 BC) is an actor, Terence (born c. 185 BC) is a freedman, former slave. Imitation of the Greeks dominated in Rome not only due to the general orientation of the younger culture there towards the old and refined, but also because the theatrical poet simply did not dare to teach the public with his own, free and topical song, either in republican or imperial Rome.

Hence it is completely different than in Greece of the 5th century BC. e., the attitude of the Roman author towards himself and his work. Aristophanes was proud that he was the first to teach goodness to his fellow citizens in comedy. We do not know how Nevius assessed himself; only a few poems have survived from his poetry. The self-awareness of Plautus and especially Terence is characterized by the consciousness of their epigonism, their secondary nature. They didn’t pretend to be big; all their ambition was aimed at entertaining the audience. In one of his prologues, Terence, with touching innocence, explained to the public why he borrowed the plot and, in general, all the material from Menander: “In the end, you can’t say anything anymore // What hasn’t been said before by others.” Prefacing the prologue of each comedy, Terence answered his literary opponents in it, and from these answers it is clear how alien the spirit of primogeniture was to both polemicizing parties - both Terence himself and his critics - it is difficult to say who is more. They accused him of not simply translating into Latin any comedy by Menander or another neo-Attic author, but reworking it or even resorting to contamination, that is, combining two Greek models into one. And Terence said in his defense that he was not the first to do this, that he was only following in the footsteps of his Roman predecessors - Naevius, Plautus.

As for Plautus, he was much more talented than Terence. Plautus's genre is also “cloak comedy” (this name comes from the fact that the actors, performing in adaptations of the comedies of Menander, Diphilus and other Greeks, wore Greek cloaks - himation). However, Terenzhy remained, as Julius Caesar aptly called him, “Half-Menander,” and Plautus managed to revive the old forms in his own way. The action of Plautus always takes place in Greek cities - in Athens, Thebes, Epidaurus, Epidamnus and others, but Plautus's city is frankly conventional, it is some kind of special comedic country, where Greeks nominally live, but Roman officials - quaestors and aediles - serve. where Roman coins - nummas - are in use, where there are clients, a forum, and other attributes of Roman life. And Plautus’s humor is not Menander’s, subtle and restrained, but rough, more accessible to the Roman public, sometimes farcical, and his language is not literary-smooth, “translated,” but rich, rich, folk. Plautus cannot be called a half-Menander.

And yet Plautus did not break away from Greek models so much as to feel like an original author, and not a translator. In Platov's Rome, life was much harsher than in Hellenistic Athens. And the signs of Roman life in the comedies of Plautus were intended only to make his translations more intelligible, more understandable to the public, but did not add up to the broad picture of modernity, did not take the viewer away from the world of theatrical conventions, and did not carry any topical generalizations. An intelligent and talented man, Plautus himself spoke about his constraint by the “rules of the game” with cheerful ridicule: “This is what all poets do in comedies: // They always place the action in Athens, // So that everything certainly seems Greek.” But such mocking of tradition coexisted with Plautus, who was still at the very origins of Latin literature, with some distrust of its own capabilities. Plautus called Naevius a “barbarian poet”, and his comedy “Donkeys”, where, in addition to the signs of Roman life, there are sparkles purely Italian humor - just a “translation into barbarian language” of the comedy of the Greek Difpla.

Plautus and Terence imitated the Greeks in an era when Rome, having won victories over Carthage and the largest Hellenistic states - Macedonia, Syria, Egypt - was just becoming the strongest power in the world. By the time of Seneca (late 1st century BC - 65 AD).

Rome has long been this, having survived slave uprisings, wars in rebellious provinces, a civil war, and the replacement of a republican system by an empire. The comedians Plautus and Terence belonged to the lower classes of society. Seneca held the title of consul in the best years of his career and was very rich. In addition to philosophical treatises and satire on the death of Emperor Claudius, this “first intriguer at the court of Nero” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 15, p. 607.), as Engels called Seneca, composed several tragedies that turned out to be the only examples of Roman tragedy that have come down to us, so we can only judge it by them. From the works of Seneca's Roman predecessors in this genre - Livy Andronicus, Naevius, Pacuvius, Actium, poets of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. e. - nothing left.

So, before us are works written in a different era, in a completely different genre and by a person of a completely different social status than Platov’s and Terentius’s adaptations of Greek plays. Nevertheless, the former have one feature in common with the latter - formal adherence to the canons of the corresponding type of Greek drama. Here, however, a caveat is necessary. Plautus and Terenzny wrote for the stage, expecting that their comedies would be played by actors and watched by spectators. Seneca, according to researchers of his work, was not a theatrical author, his tragedies were intended to be read aloud in a narrow circle. This feature, no matter what caused it, in itself fundamentally distinguishes Seneca from all his predecessors - both Greeks and Greeks. and the Romans - and makes his name, figuratively speaking, a most notable milestone, and even more precisely, a monument in the history of ancient drama. Precisely a monument - because the refusal of drama to perform is evidence of its death. For all their lack of independence, Terence’s comedies were still an organic continuation of the tradition that existed in antiquity since the time of the most ancient Dionysian performance. But with Seneca, tradition degenerated into scientific stylization.

This should not be understood in the sense that in his mythological tragedies Seneca did not touch upon the Roman reality of his time at all. Against. The motives of all these tragedies - incest (“Oedipus”), the monstrous atrocities of the tyrant (“Thiestes”), the murder of the king by his wife and her lover (“Agamemnon”), pathological love (“Phaedra”), etc. are quite relevant for palace life Julio-Claudian dynasty, for the circle to which Seneca belonged. The hints scattered throughout the text of these tragedies are often quite transparent. But Seneca does not have that high poetry into which the tragedy of the Greeks translated the truth of life, there is no Aeschylean inspiration for a humane idea, there is no Sophoclean plasticity of characters, there is no Euripidean analytical depth. Seneca's generalizations do not go further than the commonplaces of Stoic philosophy - coldly didactic reasoning about submission to fate, unconvincing in his mouth preaching indifference to the blessings of life, beyond abstract rhetorical attacks against autocracy. Outwardly, Seneca has everything like the Greek tragedians, the scene of action is palaces, monologues and dialogues are interspersed with choral parts, the heroes die in the end - but his internal attitude to myth is completely different - myth does not serve as a basis for art in his tragedies, Seneca needs it to illustrate current Stoic truths and to disguise troublesome allusions to modernity.

In addition to nine mythological tragedies, one has come down to us under the name of Seneca - “Octavia”, written on Roman historical material. Seneca, of course, was not the author of Octavia. The tragedy, where the true details of the death of Nero, who is also depicted as a despot and a villain, is given in the form of a prediction, was composed, of course, after the death of this Caesar, who outlived Seneca - he, on his orders, opened his veins - for three whole years. But in composition, language and style, Octavia is very similar to the other nine tragedies. This is a work of the same school, and Seneca himself is depicted here not just sympathetically, but as a kind of ideal of a sage. Among the Greeks, the only historical tragedy known to us is “The Persians” by Aeschylus, among the Romans it is “Octavia,” which is why we chose it for our collection.

The plot here is based on the actual events of 62 AD. e. By order of Nero, who decided to marry his mistress Poppaea Sabina, his wife Octavia was exiled to the island of Pandatria and killed there. The frequent references in this tragedy to other atrocities of Nero - his matricide, the murder of Octavia's brother Britannicus, the murder of the husband and son of Poppaea Sabina - also correspond to reality. We are not talking about the legendary Oedipus, Medea and Clytemnestra, not about foggy antiquity, as in Greek tragedies, but about real people, about deeds that were done in the author’s memory.

Greek tragedians “humanized” the myth; they looked at it through the prism of later culture and put into its interpretation their worldview, their ideas about moral duty and justice, even their answers to specific political questions. The author of Octavia, on the contrary, mythologizes modernity, subordinating the dramatic narrative of Caesar’s fanaticism to the Greek tragic canons. Poppea tells the ominous dream she had - she tells it to her nurse. Nero's mother Agrippina appears on stage as a ghost. A messenger reports about the discontent of the people of Poppea. How can one not remember the dream of Atossa, the shadow of Clytemnestra, the nurse of Phaedra, the messengers and heralds of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides! The similarity with Greek tragedy is completed by the participation of two choirs of Roman citizens in the action.

And again, the similarity here is only external. After the death of Nero and the replacement of the Julio-Claudian dynasty by the Flavian dynasty, when it was no longer dangerous to talk about Nero’s crimes, the author of “Octavia” allows himself to touch on this painful topic. But how! With pedantic pedantry and aesthetic coldness, he dissects the bloody reality, puts it in the Procrustean bed of literary imitation, thereby turning it into an abstraction, into a myth. Such a response to them does not carry any moral understanding of real events, any spiritual purification. This is the fundamental difference between Roman tragedy and Greek tragedy. This is an undoubted sign of the death of the brainchild of pagan mythology - ancient drama,

Ancient tragedians most often took ancient myths as the basis for their works, which each of the authors interpreted exclusively in their own way. The same myth could be interpreted so differently by different authors that the heroes of this myth in some works could appear as positive, while in others - as negative. An example of such a phenomenon can be considered a complex of tragedies, which are based on the “myth of the Atrids.” The three greatest ancient Greek tragedians - Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides - created a number of dramatic works in which they interpreted mythological events in their own way, the conventional chronological framework of which is considered to be the first decade after the Trojan War.

Directly myth

1) The Atrid family begins with Tantalus - the son of Zeus and the nymph Pluto. Tantalus, who ruled the city of Sipila, was a mortal, but considered himself equal to the gods. Because Since he was their favorite, he more than once had to attend their divine feasts, from where he dared to deliver the food of the gods to earth to treat mortals. He tried more than once to deceive the gods, and, in the end, their patience ran out. One day Tantalus decided to test the gods to see how omniscient they were. He killed his son Pelops and decided to treat him to the meat of the gods invited to his feast. The gods, of course, did not succumb to deception, with the exception of Demeter alone. Pelops was resurrected, and Tantalus was punished by the gods, and was the first to bring a curse on his descendants.
2) Pelops, the son of Tantalus, decided to marry the daughter of King Oenomaus - Hippodamia. However, for this he needed to defeat Oenomaus in the races, since he was the best rider at that time. Pelops used cunning to defeat Oenomaus. Before the competition, he turned to Mithril, the son of Hermes, who was watching the horses of Oenomaus, with a request to provide Oenomaus with a chariot that was not ready for the competition. As a result, Pelops won solely thanks to this cunning, but did not want to reward Mithril as expected, but simply killed him, receiving a family curse as Mithril’s dying cry. Thus, Pelops brought upon himself and his entire family the wrath of the gods.
3) Atreus and Thyestes are the sons of Pelops. They initially find themselves doomed to commit atrocities: Atreus received power in Mycenae, which is why his brother began to envy him. Thyestes stole his brother's son and instilled in him hatred of his father; as a result, the young man himself fell at the hands of his father, who did not know who he was killing. Atreus, in revenge, prepared Thyestes a meal from his own sons. The gods cursed Atreus and sent a crop failure to his lands. To rectify the situation, it was necessary to return Thyestes to Mycenae, but Atreus found only his little son, Aegisthus, whom he raised himself. Then the sons of Atreus, Menelaus and Agamemnon, found Thyestes and called him to Mycenae. The brothers - Thyestes and Atreus - never made peace. Atreus ordered Aegisthus to kill Thyestes, who was imprisoned. However, Aegisthus learned that Thyestes was his father. Aegisthus killed Atreus's uncle. And he and his father began to rule together in Mycenae, and Agamemnon and Menelaus were forced to flee. Subsequently, Agamemnon overthrows Thyestes and takes the throne in Mycenae.
4) Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter to Artemis so that she will change her anger to mercy and allow Agamemnon’s ships to reach Troy. Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon, takes revenge on her husband when he returns from Troy for the death of his daughter. Together with Aegisthus, they seize power in Mycenae.
5) Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, almost suffered a terrible fate while still a child. He was the only heir of Agamemnon, so Clytemnestra was interested in him not being there. However, Orestes escapes and is raised for a long time by King Strophius in Phocis. At a conscious age, Orestes returns with his friend Pylades to Mycenae and kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus as revenge for the death of Agamemnon. Orestes, as a matricide, is pursued by Erinyes, the goddess of revenge. The hero seeks salvation in the temple of Apollo, but Apollo sends him to Athens to the temple of Athena, where Athena institutes a trial over Orestes, during which Orestes is acquitted.
7) Orestes’ wanderings do not end there, and he is forced to go to Taurida for the sacred figurine of Artemis. On the island, he was almost sacrificed to the gods by his own sister Iphigenia, who turns out alive, despite the fact that Agamemnon sacrificed her to the gods (at the last moment, the gods, in order to prevent bloodshed, instead of Iphigenia put a doe on the altar, and Iphigenia is sent to Tauris as a priestess of the temple of Artemis). Orestes and Iphigenia recognize each other, flee Taurida and return to their homeland together.

The last episodes of the Atrid myth are reflected in Aeschylus' trilogy "Oresteia", consisting of parts "Agamemnon", "The Mourner" and "Eumenides", and in the tragedies of Sophocles "Electra" and Euripides "Iphigenia in Aulis", "Electra", "Orestes" ", "Iphigenia in Tauris". A direct comparison of the three author's points of view is possible at the level of Aeschylus's Oresteia and the two tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides.

Aeschylus
In order to understand Aeschylus' point of view, it is necessary to trace how the myth of the Atrids develops, starting with the first part of the trilogy.
The main characters of the first tragedy “Agamemnon” are King Agamemnon himself and his wife Clytemnestra. The events are tied to the tenth year of the Trojan War. Clytemnestra is plotting an evil plan against her husband, wanting to take revenge on him for the murder of her daughter Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice in order to appease Artemis, by whose will his fleet could not go on a campaign against Troy. The king pursued public interests:
In the yoke of fate - once he harnessed his neck,
And a dark thought - once unfortunately,
Having become embittered, he declined, -
He became bold, began to breathe courage.
Having intended evil, a mortal dares: he will gain
The sick spirit is one rage.
This is the seed of sin and punishment!
Daughter condemned to execution by father
Avenger of the brotherly bed, -
If only we could start a war! (replica of the choir, reflecting the author’s position)
Clytemnestra could not come to terms with the death of her daughter and the injustice of fate. Judging by the text of Aeschylus’s tragedy, she was a willful and free woman; she did not want to wait for her husband’s return from the many years of war, and she took a lover in the person of Aegisthus, who was Agamemnon’s cousin. The heroine skillfully hides her feelings under the guise of external chastity.
The house is intact: the Tsarev’s seal has not been removed anywhere.
I wouldn’t be able to tint a copper alloy,
I don’t know such betrayal. Temptation is alien to me.
The slander goes numb. To an honest woman
With this truth, it seems, boasting is not shame.
Gradually, the author’s vision of the problem of the Atrid family is introduced into the tragedy; Aeschylus points to fate as an inevitably and eternally dominant force over all representatives of this family. The motif of fate appears in Aeschylus' tragedy at different levels. In particular, it appears in the remarks of the chorus of the first stasim, where it is said that the war with Troy was also inevitable, since Helen - the main culprit of the famous events - belonged to the Atrid family, since she was the wife of Menelaus, Agamemnon's brother.
She left, the gift of swords to her homeland
And the forest of spears, the sea path, leaving military work,
Bringing destruction to the Trojans as a dowry.
A bird fluttered from the towers! Threshold
The impenetrable has crossed...
It turns out that, through the prism of the author’s vision, the events taking place are dictated by fate and the gods, whom Aeschylus portrays as supreme beings with enormous influence on people. The narration is conducted in such a way that the representatives of the choir know in advance the whole situation unfolding before the reader; in their remarks, hints periodically arise of the terrible ending of the unfolding events:
Herald
Why were the citizens so destroyed? Is there fear for the army?
Leader of the choir
To avoid causing trouble, I’m used to being silent.
Herald
Without a king, did the people begin to fear the strong?
Leader of the choir
Like you, I will say: now even death is red to me.
So, Clytemnestra, as a cunning and dexterous woman, meets her husband with great pomp, skillfully playing the role of a happy wife who rejoiced at her husband’s return. The meeting turns out to be so magnificent that even Agamemnon himself becomes embarrassed in front of the gods for such a luxurious reception in his honor. Clytemnestra clouds his mind with her sweet speeches, and tells him that she sent their son Orestes away from Argos in order to avoid the terrible danger that seemed to await him, although the whole story was invented personally by Clytemnestra herself in order to be able to carry out her insidious plan.
Clytemnestra's true intentions are directly expressed only at the end of the second stasim, when she lures Agamemnon alone into the palace to fulfill her intention.
O supreme Zeus, Zeus the executor, accomplish it yourself,
What I pray for! Remember what you were destined to do!
The feeling of inevitability and tragedy is heightened by the introduction of another significant character into the tragedy - Cassandra, whom Agamemnon brings with him from Troy as a concubine. According to myth, Cassandra had the exceptional gift of seeing the future, but by the will of Apollo, no one believed her words. Thus, the heroine becomes an exponent of the true order of things in the tragedy:
A godless shelter, a concealer of evil deeds!
The house is a knacker! Executioners
Platform! Human slaughter, where you slide in blood.
<…>
Here they are, standing here, witnesses of blood!
Babies cry: "The body is for us
They cut us open and boiled us, and my father ate us."
The speeches of the choir representatives reach an emotional climax at the moment of the murder of Agamemnon, when it becomes clear that even the hero exalted by the gods in numerous battles will not escape the terrible fate of the entire Atrid family:
Exalted by the gods, he came home.
If the king is destined to atone with blood
Ancient blood and, saturating the shadows,
Bequeath blood vengeance to descendants:
Who will boast, hearing the legend that he himself
Is the original untouched by the infection? (remark from the choir leader)
Immediately after the murder, the reader learns about the internal state of Clytemnestra, who in the first hours after the terrible deed felt completely right and spotless before the gods; She justifies herself by saying that she was taking revenge on her husband for the death of her daughter. However, gradually Clytemnestra comes to the realization that her will was subordinated to the force of fate beyond her control:
Now you have found a fair word:
Navi is a demon in his family.
Weaned by blood drinking, but the stomach gnaws
A family infected with an insatiable worm.
And the festering sore in the groin did not heal,
How new ulcers have opened up.
The heroine awakens to fear for what she has done, she is already losing confidence in her rightness, although she is trying to convince herself and reassure herself that she did everything right. However, her remarks about the fate hanging over the family remain key:
It's none of my business, even if my hands are
They brought an ax.
Just think, old man: Agamemnon is my husband!
No! the evil spirit of the ancestral spirit has killed the fatal one,
An ancient ghoul - under the features of his wife -
For Atreev's massacre, parental sin,
Agamemnon as a gift
He gave it to the babies who were martyred.
At the end of the fourth stasim, Clytemnestra herself calls her act an obsession; she sees no way to correct what happened.
The tragedy of Agamemnon ends on neither a sad nor a happy note, which indicates that the main issue of the trilogy has not yet been resolved; further developments occur in the tragedy “The Mourners”.

The tragedy of “The Mourner,” unlike the previous one, reveals the images of two more heroes belonging to the Atride family - Electra and her brother Orestes. The action begins when Orestes arrives with his friend Pylades to his homeland to honor the memory of his father. At the same time, a choir of mourners led by Electra approaches the grave. The heroine complains about her unhappy fate, condemns her mother in every possible way for her actions: the murder of her legal husband, her new husband Aegisthus, cruel treatment, etc.
We were sold. We are homeless, without shelter.
Our mother drives us out of the doorway. I took my husband into the house.
Aegisthus is our stepfather, your enemy and destroyer.
I serve for a slave. Brother in a foreign land,
Robbed, disgraced. For luxury
Screw their arrogance that you have acquired through your labors. (Electra's speech)
Miraculously, a scene of recognition of brother and sister occurs, during which Electra for a long time did not want to believe the words of Orestes, and only indirect evidence managed to convince her, heartbroken, that her brother was really standing in front of her:
Orestes
Didn’t you recognize my cloak that you wove it yourself?
And who wove patterns of these animals on it?
Electra
My desired one, my beloved! You four times
My stronghold and hope; rock and happiness!
Brother and sister unite in their desire to avenge their father. On the one hand, the mourners in the choir convince the heroine of the need for revenge, on the other hand, the god Apollo calls on Orestes to pay tribute to his husband-killer mother. The decisive attitude and hatred of the mother, which grew over time, is passed on from Electra to Orestes. And the heroine’s complaints heat up the atmosphere:
Oh my mother, my evil mother,
You dared to turn the removal into dishonor!
Without citizens, without friends,
No crying, no prayers,
Atheist, bury the ruler in the dust!
Despite the fact that the heroes, at first glance, themselves take responsibility for everything that is destined to happen according to their plans, Aeschylus does not cease to include his key position in the chorus’s remarks, which is that all members of the Atrid family are doomed from the beginning to suffering and misfortune. Despite the apparent freedom of the heroes in making decisions, the motif of fate comes to the fore:
Choir
The destination has been waiting for a long time:
May Rock come to the challenge.
The chorus members are initially aware of how the events connecting Electra, Orestes and Clytemnestra will develop, however, in order to maintain intrigue and emotional intensity that arises almost from the very beginning of the tragedy, the chorus’s remarks are often not direct and sometimes ambiguous. Thus, thanks to the dialogue between the leader of the choir and Orestes, the reader learns that fate haunts Clytemnestra even in her dreams, because she saw a bad omen regarding her own death. In front of the false guest in the person of Orestes, she expresses artificial regret about the death of her son, while we learn about her true thoughts only from the speech of the maid:
...In front of the servants
She is heartbroken, but there is laughter in her eyes
Hiding under a frowning brow. Good luck to her
And at home there is mourning and final destruction, -
What the guests announced with clear speech. (Kilissa)
Meanwhile, a deception is being committed, which turns into another tragedy for the Atrid family in a series of terrible murders. The author, through replicas of the choir, continues to explain the events taking place by fate and divine will:
Destroy the enemy's power!
When the time comes to lower the sword
And the mother will cry out: “Have mercy, son!” -
Just remember your father
And don’t be afraid to strike: dare
The burden of accepting the curse!
And indeed, nothing stops Orestes from committing two murders - first of Aegisthus, and then of Clytemnestra’s mother. Orestes himself understands that he is to some extent weak-willed and, by killing his mother, shows an inability to resist the power of fate and divine influence, and completely refuses to think independently. At the moment of the murder, the hero utters the phrase: “I am not the murderer: you execute yourself,” which reflects the hero’s internal state, shows that the hero either does not think or does not worry about the fact that the murder will be followed by punishment from above. In addition, in Exod, the leader of the choir, among her final remarks, says:
You did the truth. Forbid your lips
To defame your sword. Evil will call forth a slander.
You freed the entire Argive people by cutting down
In one fell swoop, two dragon heads.
However, immediately after the crime, the hero is punished in the form of the terrible Erinyes pursuing him, who want to punish him for the bloody murder he committed. The work ends on a tragic note with a remark from the choir, which includes a question, the answer to which remains unclear:
Calm again - how long? And where will it lead?
And will the curse of the family die out?

The Oresteia trilogy ends with the tragedy of the Eumenides, where the main character is one of the few living descendants of the Atride family, Orestes. The central problem of tragedy is no longer so much the problem of fate as the problem of fair punishment.
Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes, does not find protection in the temple of his patron Apollo, who only briefly puts the Erinyes to sleep, thereby allowing Orestes to flee to Athens to the temple of Pallas Athena and seek protection there. Apollo takes responsibility for the crime committed, but this does not remove the guilt from the main character.
Apollo
I won't change you; your guardian to the end,
Representative and intercessor, am I approaching,
If I stand at a distance, I am threatening to your enemies.
Erinyes and Clytemnetstra, who appears in the tragedy in the form of a shadow coming from the underworld of Hades, thirst for revenge. Their main argument against Orestes is that he killed his mother, committed a blood crime, which cannot be compared with Clytemnestra’s crime - murder of husbands.
Accordingly, a confrontation arises between Apollo, who puts above all else “the oath that Zeus established / With the family Hero...”, and Erinyes, for whom “Manicide is not blood murder.”
Wise Athena decides to arrange a fair trial of Orestes and convenes judges and honorary citizens.
Aeschylus expresses his position in such a way as if he distances himself from what is happening in the tragedy and allows the heroes to solve problems on their own:
The old system has been overthrown,
The century has come - new truths,
If the court now decides:
Killing a mother is no sin,
Orestes is right.
At the trial, the votes are distributed equally, which allows the author to skillfully introduce into the work his vision of the problem of punishment, this time expressed in the remarks of Apollo and Athena:

Apollo
Not the mother of the child born from her,
Parent: no, she is a wet nurse
The perceived seed. Sower
Direct parent. Mother is like a gift, a pledge
Taken for safekeeping from a guest friend, -
What is conceived will flourish, unless God destroys it.

Athena
Everything masculine is kind, only marriage is alien to me;
I am courageous in heart, I am a desperate daughter.
Holier than my husband's blood, as I can honor
The wife who killed the landlord, blood?

Thus, Aeschylus' trilogy has a happy ending, although throughout the three tragedies the heroes had to experience many difficulties and face intractable tasks.
The author offers the reader his interpretation of the myth of the Atrids, the main feature of which is the belief in inevitable fate, in the virtual complete absence of a personal principle in the hero at the time of committing terrible crimes, as for Clytemnestra, within whom doubts quickly arose about her rightness, as soon as she committed a crime, whereas at the time of the murder she had no doubt at all that her act was justified, as well as Orestes, fulfilling the will of the gods in committing the murder of his own mother.

Sophocles
Sophocles also proposed his own dramatic interpretation of the myth of the Atrids in the tragedy “Electra”. From the title alone one can judge that the author’s embodiment of the ancient myth in this work will differ from that proposed by Aeschylus. Sophocles brings out the main character of the tragedy in the title, but from the plays of Aeschylus we know that Electra was not the main character even in the second part of the Oresteia - in The Mourners.
The tragedy opens with a prologue containing monologues of Orestes, Mentor and Electra. Already from the first speech of Orestes, the reader can understand what basic principles Sophocles was guided by when transposing the famous myth in his own way. The heroes of the tragedy are endowed with a large number of individual traits; they are free to make decisions themselves, and do not blindly obey the orders of the gods:
I visited the sanctuary of Python,
Trying to find out how I should take revenge
For the death of the father, how to repay the murderers -
And so the most luminous Phoebus answered me,
That by cunning, without troops, without weapons,
I must take righteous revenge myself. (Orestes speech)
Electra's speeches are not only full of tragedy, but also emotionally rich. Even at the level of purely visual perception of the text, it is difficult not to notice that the heroine’s remarks consist of a large number of exclamatory sentences and unfinished sentences that convey fluctuations in Electra’s internal state:
Ah, noble at heart
Girls! You console my sorrow...
I see and feel, believe me, it’s noticeable to me
Your participation... But no, I'm still
I will begin to moan about what was unfortunately lost
Father... Oh, let it be
We are bound by friendly tenderness in everything,
Leave it, give it to me
Grieve, I pray!..
Sophocles often resorted to the use of contrasts, which were a distinctive feature of his work, and therefore in Electra he uses this technique on many levels.
Thus, to embody the image of Electra, Sophocles introduces another female image into the work - Chrysothemis, Electra’s sister. Both girls experienced the same tragedy, but Chrysothemis accepted her bitter fate, while Electra did not. One sister thirsts for revenge, while the other urges her to calm down and silently endure the state of the humiliated, while the behavior of their mother Clytemnestra and Aegisthus only aggravates the situation, forcing Chrysothemis to suffer even more, and Electra to thirst for cruel revenge.
Chrysothemis
Why try to strike
When you have no strength? Live like me too...
However, I can only give advice,
And the choice is yours... To be free,
I submit, sister, to those in power.

Electra
A shame! Having forgotten such a father,
You please a criminal mother!
After all, all your admonitions are her
Prompted, the advice is not yours.

Sophocles brings to the fore not the problem of fate, as Aeschylus does, but the problem of the internal experience of murder, which seems unfair to Electra. Electra practically never leaves the stage, and the author conducts the entire course of the tragedy through her remarks. She is the only heroine to whom the full horror of what is happening is revealed, because she experiences not only the death of her father at the hands of her own mother, but also the lack of human conditions for life, which is caused by the will of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. However, the heroine is too weak to dare to take revenge on her own, and she does not find support in her sister.
In the tragedy “Electra,” Sophocles uses a number of traditional elements that go back to the works of Aeschylus: the prophetic dream of Clytemnestra, the false death of Orestes, the scene of recognition by a lock of hair, which, as we will see later, will be interpreted in a completely different way by Euripides.
As for the image of Clytemnestra, the author depicted her in a new way. The heroine is fully aware of the crime committed, but she does not experience pangs of conscience:
It's right,
Killed, I don't deny it. But she killed
Not only me: Truth killed him.
If you were smart, you would help her.
Electra cannot agree with her mother’s point of view, but not only because she is heartbroken, but also because she believes that her mother did not have the slightest right to raise a hand against her husband, that in addition to murder, she also committed betrayal of her entire family when placed Aegisthus, an unworthy husband, next to her.
Orestes and the Mentor come up with a tragic story about the alleged death of Orestes in order to lure Clytemnestra and Aegisthus into a trap. Electra has to go through another shock, but even after the news and death of her brother, it cannot be said that she is broken in spirit. She invites Chrysothemis to take just revenge with her, but the sister continues to stand in her position and urge Electra to abandon thoughts of revenge and obey the will of “those in power.”
Electra’s numerous dialogues with her sister, with Orestes (when she did not yet know that her brother was standing in front of her), reflect the emotional state of the main character, her unabated rebellious spirit, which became the key to understanding the author’s interpretation of the myth of Atrid. Sophocles allows the viewer to look into the soul of his heroine - he makes her lines so alive. It becomes clear that for the author of “Electra” it is not so much the twisted and complex plot that is important, but the detail of the characters’ images and their believability. The main subject of Sophocles' depiction is feelings.
The scene of recognition of the heroes occurs not so magnificently, but more vitally - Electra recognizes her brother by her father’s ring. They agree on how they will take revenge, but even here, despite the similarity of the plot lines with the tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles introduces a number of his own elements. An interesting detail is that Orestes asks his sister not to reveal her joyful feelings to others for the time being, so that no one - and mainly Clytemnestra and Aegisthus - would suspect something was wrong while Orestes prepares revenge on them. Ultimately, Orestes kills his mother and then Aegisthus. And the final conclusion sounded in the last replica of the choir is this:
O Atreev, who has known all calamities, O race!
Finally you have achieved the desired freedom, -
Happy with the current situation.
It must be said that such a sequence of murders (first Clytemnestra, and then Aegisthus) is found only in Sophocles. It can be assumed that such a rejection of the traditional arrangement of plot elements reflects the author’s desire to show that for him this order does not play such a major role, that for him it is much more important to reveal the image of Electra.
Thus, apparently, Sophocles does not consider it necessary to continue further development of the plot, as Aeschylus did, because he achieved his main goal - the multifaceted and complex character of the main character was revealed. The myth itself acquires a more everyday and reduced sound in contrast to the work of Aeschylus, however, the wealth of images and artistic techniques allows us to call Sophocles a great Greek tragedian.

Euripides
Another ancient Greek tragedy dedicated to the theme of the Atride family is rightfully considered “Electra” by Euripides, written in a fundamentally different manner compared to the previously discussed works. It is obvious that Euripides relied on the experience of his predecessors, but he also showed a lot of originality in his interpretation of the myth of Atrid. Mainly, in his interpretation, the author enters into polemics with Aeschylus. In addition, the question of which “Electra” was written earlier - Sophocles or Euripides - remains open.
The images of characters already known to us are unique. Electra especially stands out from the general background, who in the tragedy of Euripides unexpectedly turns out to be the wife of a simple plowman. Aegisthus, afraid of revenge from his new “relatives,” comes up with a very specific way to protect himself from danger from Electra - he passes her off as a simple person without family or name, assuming that he will not take revenge, since, as a simple person from the people, will not be filled with high feelings, will not strive to restore the honor and nobility of his wife.
Aegisthus
He hoped that by betrothing the princess
Insignificant, it will reduce to nothing
And the danger itself. After all, perhaps
A noble son-in-law would give wings to the rumor,
He would threaten the murderer of his father-in-law with punishment... (chorus response)
In a unique way, Euripides introduces the motif of recognition of heroes into the work: the author enters into a polemic with Aeschylus, emphasizing the naivety and frivolity of the depiction of the meeting of recognition in the tragedy “The Mourners”. In Aeschylus, Electra recognizes Orestes by the clothes that he himself once wove. According to the myth, we remember that brother and sister separated a long time ago, so it would be unreasonable to assume that since then Orestes has not grown up or worn out his clothes. Aeschylus allows for artistic convention, because focuses his attention on other aspects of the work, but on the basis of this, the following lines appear in Euripides’ Electra:

Old man
And if you compare the footprint of the sandal
With your leg, child, can we find similarities?
<…>
Say again: the work of children's hands,
Do you recognize Orest's clothes?
which you wove for him
Before I carry it to Phocis?
Ultimately, Orestes is recognized by a scar received as a child. Perhaps in this case we are dealing with a connection between the motive of recognition in Euripides and a similar one in Homer, because Odysseus is also recognized by his scar. Thus, we can say that in some ways Euripides, entering into polemics with Aeschylus and Sophocles, turned to an ancient perfect model - the Homeric epic.
In Euripides' tragedy, Electra shows cruelty towards her mother, although she does not provide specific arguments in defense of her point of view. She evaluates her with contempt:
What do she care about children, if only she had husbands...
Together with Orestes, they embark on a cruel plan of reprisal, and Orestes, not yet being recognized, finds out the position of his sister, and she directly expresses her readiness with the words: “The ax is ready, and the blood of the father is not washed away.”
Unlike previous dramas, in Euripides it turns out that all responsibility for the future murders falls on the shoulders of Orestes and Electra, because There are not enough arguments to find Clytemnestra guilty of all the troubles of the Atrid family.
O our father, who has seen the underground darkness,
Killed by misfortune, oh earth -
Lady, my hands are stretched out to you,
Save the king's children - he loved us. (replica of Orestes)
The scene of Orestes killing Aegisthus is depicted with amazing accuracy and with a large amount of detail:
And just above the heart
He bowed attentively, Orestes
The knife also rose on tiptoe
Hit the Tsar in the scruff of the neck, and with a blow
It breaks his back. The enemy has collapsed
And he tossed about in agony, dying. (replica of the Herald)
Electra, with genuine interest, finds out the details of the murder of Aegisthus. Only the mother remains - Clytemnestra. Before committing the murder, feelings awaken in Orestes, he begins to doubt whether he is really right in committing a terrible blood murder. Those. it is implied that Euripides' hero acted not according to the will of the gods, but according to his own conviction.
In this case, Clytemnestra is portrayed as the most sensible person, capable of explaining the reason for her actions:
Oh, I would forgive everything if the city
Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken it if the house
Or did he save the children with this sacrifice,
But he killed the little one for his wife
Depraved, because her husband didn’t understand
The traitor deserves to be punished.
Oh, I kept silent then - I'm heading towards oblivion
I was already preparing my heart to execute
Atrida did not get ready. But from Troy
The king brought a mad maenad
On the wedding bed and stood in the chamber
Keep two wives. O wives, our destiny is
Blind passion. Even if careless
My husband will show us coldness, now
To spite him we take a lover,
And then everyone blames us for everything,
Forgetting the instigators of the offense...
The exponent of the truth, which reflects the author’s point of view, is Corypheus, who responds to Clytemnestra’s speech in the following way:
Yes, you're right, but the truth is your shame:
No, women, if they are mentally healthy,
Submit to your husbands in everything, O sick people
I won't say - those from the accounts...
Clytemnestra sincerely regrets what she did, but Electra remains implacable, as if there was nothing living in her. “She is in the hands of children - oh, a bitter lot!” - this is how the author characterizes her situation. The author focuses on the fact that all the misfortunes of the Atrid family are connected not so much with fate, but with the personal will of representatives of the same family. That is why the phrase in the exode reads:
There is no home, no one is more unhappy than you,
House of Tantalus... it couldn't be more unfortunate...
Orestes experiences internal disagreements after committing a murder and is put on trial. The author only briefly introduces the story of Orestes' trial and forgiveness, whereas for Aeschylus this topic is the theme of an entire tragedy. Thus, it is obvious that Euripides’ dramatic interpretation of the myth of Atrid differs significantly from the interpretations of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which allows us to talk about the development of a theatrical tradition and the emergence of a wide variety of heroes.
The problems that Euripides raises are embodied, at first glance, as everyday ones (which is facilitated by the specific manner of narration and the images of the heroes), although, of course, behind such simplicity lies the author’s deep vision of how life works, what place is assigned to fate and destiny , and what about the heroes’ own decisions.

Conclusions:
1) Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who lived in the same era, used similar material to create their works. However, each of the authors has their own interpretation of various myths, in this case using the example of the myth of Atrid, and it is determined by the author’s vision of the problems raised in their works and the artistic preferences of each of them.

2) For Aeschylus, the key concept was fate, although the author cannot completely deny the author’s attempts to individualize the characters, but nevertheless, mainly the heroes act not according to their own will, but according to what fate is destined for them, or according to what order they received from the gods . It can also be assumed with considerable probability that in the third part of the Oresteia trilogy, the author sought to express his socio-political views, giving a significant role to the Areopagus in his tragedy. Here we can also talk about the expression of the author’s moral position: Orestes is acquitted if the votes are equal, we can talk about the entry of the court of conscience, in which the decision on the issue of “shed blood” is given to the Areopagus. The tragedy of Aeschylus was in tune with the time in which it was created. Thus, the author’s interpretation allows him, in addition to directly mythological elements, to bring a lot of personality into the work.

3) For Sophocles, the key element of the tragedy of Electra is the detailed depiction of one image, which practically does not disappear from the stage throughout the entire action of the tragedy. The play of contrasts allows Sophocles to introduce new techniques for depicting images into literature, to show that myth does not at all limit the scope of the work and the breadth of disclosure of images.

4) Euripides is most characterized by an innovative approach to the interpretation of myth, because he is the furthest away from the traditional interpretation of the Atrid myth. But at the same time, he brings a lot of new things to the tragedy as a whole, because even at the level of the tragedy “Electra” one can notice an increased interest not so much in social problems as in the problems of a specific individual. The concept of fate and destiny fades into the background, the heroes become more independent.

The following translations of works were used in the work:
Aeschylus "Oresteia" - Vyach. Ivanov.
Sophocles “Electra” - S. Shervinsky.
Euripides "Electra" - I. Annensky

The poet Aeschylus, who lived during the Greco-Persian Wars, came up with especially many new things for the theater. Performances began to depict not only myths, but also recent events. Aeschylus, himself a participant in the battle of Salamis, presented in the tragedy “The Persians” the flight of the barbarians and the humiliation of the “great king”.

To revive the theater, Aeschylus came up with the idea of ​​introducing a second actor. While only one actor left the stage, he could only tell in words what happened to the god or hero he was portraying. Two actors, especially if they represented opponents, could reproduce the incident itself, could present the action (drama in Greek). So that the actors could move more freely and still be higher than the choir, Aeschylus stopped taking them out onto the platform or on a cart and provided them with high wooden heels or tethered stools. Aeschylus also arranged the first decoration. His actors had to play closer to the tent: they began to paint its front wall, giving it, depending on the play, the appearance of an altar, a rock, the front facade of a house with a door in the middle, etc. If in the play it was necessary to present both people and gods , then the gods entered the flat roof of the tent to appear taller than people.

In Aeschylus' tragedies the plot was sublime or sad. Spectators watched with bated breath as the goddesses of bloody ghosts pursued the unfortunate Orestes, who killed his mother because she treacherously stabbed to death her husband Agamemnon, Orestov's father, when he returned home after the capture of Troy. They were deeply worried, looking at the hero Prometheus, chained to a rock, a noble friend of people, punished by Zeus for stealing fire from the sky for people, teaching them to work and raising them above the rough life of animals.

Many citizens took part in theatrical performances. It was not professional actors who played on stage, but amateurs who were constantly changing. Even more shifts were needed to perform choirs and dances. The play was usually performed only once. The public demanded four new dramas for each major holiday: three tragedies and one play of mocking content in conclusion. Athenian poets were therefore very prolific. Pericles' contemporary, Sophocles, wrote more than 120 plays. Among the few that have come down to us, there are three tragedies related to each other in content. They depict the suffering of King Oedipus and the misfortunes of his children.

The royal son Oedipus, who, according to his parents, is dead, kills his father, whom he did not know at all, in a random quarrel. He then reigns happily ever after, until a severe pestilence sets in among the people. Then the fortuneteller announces that this is a punishment for the king’s great sin. Oedipus, horrified by what he learned, renounces power and gouges out his eyes, but trouble haunts his house: his two sons kill each other in a dispute for power; his daughter dies because she wanted to bury her murdered exiled brother. There is no guilt on all these people; they are looking for a better way in their actions; they perish because their condemnation has already been decided and predicted in advance. The idea of ​​this drama is that a person, no matter how he builds his life, no matter how many high impulses he has, is still powerless against fate.

In Sophocles' dramas, the action was diversified with lively scenes. His play "Ajax" presents the hero of the Trojan War, who fell into wild madness when the armor of the murdered Achilles was awarded not to him, but to Odysseus; Ajax's wife tells the chorus of his comrades that Ajax, in rage and blindness, killed a herd of rams, mistaking them for Odysseus and his warriors; During these words, the doors of the stage tent open wide: out of them comes a platform on wheels and on it the unfortunate, lost Ajax among the figures of the animals he killed; after a few minutes this moving stage is rolled back and the action continues.

During the Peloponnesian War, Euripides* was given out among dramatic writers. As usual, he chose content from myths, but under the guise of heroes he portrayed people of his time. In the dramas of Euripides, the misfortunes and death of a person are presented as consequences of his character and the mistakes he made. In the conversations of the characters, various questions are raised: power or truth triumphs in the world, is it possible to believe in gods, etc. These conversations sometimes resemble disputes and evidence in an Athenian court.

* Euripides.

Euripides came up with a lot of new things for the theater. His play usually began with a large live painting. In order not to prepare it in front of the audience and not spoil the impression, they began to arrange a curtain in front of the stage, between its elongated side walls: this is how a quadrangular space turned out between the back stage, the side walls (stages) and the curtain. This place, which has since been called the stage, was raised above the orchestra; the actors came out of the back door and the choir from the sides of the tent; Having passed around the orchestra, the choir entered the wide steps onto the stage.

In the plays of Euripides, new effects were prepared for the end: the hero flies into the air on a winged horse; the sorceress is taken into the clouds by dragons, etc. The audience is accustomed to looking up at the end of the action. The denouement was usually brought by a god or an enlightened hero appearing from heaven. For this purpose, a special machine was invented (our word machine comes from the Greek mehane, which means lifting for flight): the wings were extended upwards significantly higher than the tent; between these wings there were ropes along which it was possible to move the basket, where the actors sat portraying the gods in the air; behind the ropes a wide wall was painted the blue of the sky; or hooks were attached to the pillars at the edges, which held the basket with the actors and turned towards the middle.

The performances differed from ours in that the actors covered their faces with a mask, which changed depending on the character of the figure being portrayed. Women's roles were played by men. Greek tragedy was somewhat similar to our opera: the choir sang several songs; The characters, in addition to ordinary conversation, also chanted poetry.

In the Greek theater, only the stage was covered. The audience crowded or sat around the open orchestra. To give them more space, stone ledges were built around the orchestra, rising upward in ever wider circles. Below, closer to the stage, were placed the main persons in the city, bosses, council members and honored guests from other cities.

The Greek theater could accommodate incomparably more spectators than ours: more than 20–30 thousand people. It served not only for performances; people gathered in its wide room to listen to music, listen to the reading of poetry and speeches. The speaker (rhetor) chose a subject that could inspire those present, for example, about the fight against the Persians. The listeners watched him as carefully as in a national assembly, appreciated his beautiful turns of speech and rewarded him with warm approval.

General characteristics of the ancient world and its main historical periods. Historical significance of ancient culture.

Greco-Persian Wars and their significance in the history of Greece. “The Age of Pericles” is the flowering of the culture, philosophy, and arts of Greece. The harmonious image of man is a world-historical merit of Greek thought and creativity. The birth of theater in Athens (VI-V centuries BC). The role of the cult of Dionysus, ritual procedures of the Eleusinian mysteries, choric and monodic medicine, phrenos in the emergence of Greek theater, the main genres of Greek drama (tragedy, comedy, satyr drama). Aristotle on the emergence of tragedy and comedy. The general humanitarian and sociocultural role of Greek theater in the life of Athenian society and pan-European culture.

The Peloponnesian War and the gradual decline of the Greek city-states.

Greek mythology is the soil and treasury of Greek and pan-European art. The metaphorical nature and universality of myths as the main motive for their use as plots by ancient playwrights and authors of modern times.

General concept of myth. Types and attributes of myth. Mythological consciousness of the ancient Greeks. The myth of Dionysus and the holidays of the Great Dionysius. The Myth of Demeter and the Eleusinian Mysteries. The main mythological cycles on the basis of which the heroic epic, melik and drama arise are the Trojan, Theban and cosmogonic cycles.

The flourishing of monodic melica and its outstanding representatives - Alcaeus, Sappho, Anacreon. Choric melica, its types and outstanding representatives - Alcman, Arion, Simonides, Pindar. Appointment and composition of the choir. Corypheus and choregi.

The path from dithyramb (hymn in honor of Dions) to drama - the poets Archilochus, Arion, Pratin. The meaning of Thespis is the selection of a special performer, actor from the choir and the crossing of the line separating the lyricism of the dithyramb from the drama of the tragedy. Transformation of the “song of the goats” (tragos - goat, ode - song) into drama, that is, into action. Thespis is the founder of tragedy. Transformation of the “song of revelers” (komos - revelers, phallic processions of mummers; ode - song) into a comedy.

Dionysian chorus, satyr drama, phrenos, Eleusinian mysteries - the four main sources of ancient Greek theater. Establishment of the national holiday of the Great Dionysius in 534 BC. e. Dramatic competitions are the culmination of the holiday.

Annual holidays in honor of Dionysus: Small or Rural Dionysia, Lineaeus, Anthisterium, Great Dionysia. The structure of the holiday of the Great Dionysius in Athens, its nationwide character. The culmination of the holiday is a three-day dramatic competition of poets and playwrights: the role of the state in their organization.

Construction of the Theater of Dionysus as an open-air theater with natural light. Orchestra with sacrificial altar to Dionysus (femella). Skene, proskenium, paraskenium. Parod. Theatrical equipment and machines are ekkiklem. Theatron.

Choir in ancient Greek theater, social and artistic functions. Corypheus. Jauregui. Horevts. The right to “get a choir.” The chants and movements of the choir around the altar of Dionysus as a reflection of the strophic principle of tragedy and comedy.

Lyrical-orchestral and mimetic parts of the tragedy. Actor and acting art. The law of three actors. Masks and their purpose in ancient Greek theater. Costume. Koturny. The structure of the acting image and the requirements for the actor. The word in the theater is a synthesis of recitation, melodic recitation, and vocals. “Ancient gesture”, plastic, dance. Kommos - actor and choir.

Aeschylus. The formation of tragedy before Aeschylus. Thespis is the founder of tragedy. Phrynichus. Characteristics of the main elements of the tragedy (prologue, parody, episodies, stasima, epod, commos, exodus).

Aeschylus (525-456 BC) is the legislator of the Athenian tragic scene in its established forms. Theatrical “roots” of Aeschylus. Aeschylus is a warrior and patriot, a man of transition. Evolution of creativity: from “Petitioners” and “Persians” (1st period) to “Chained Prometheus” and “Seven against Thebes” (2nd period); to understanding the complex interweaving of both human and divine relationships in the Oresteia trilogy (3rd period).

Problems of fate, moral duty to people and the homeland-state, revenge or retribution in the works of Aeschylus as a reflection of the main issues of the worldview of the ancient Greeks. Myth and events of real history in the tragedies of Aeschylus. The novelty and courage of Aeschylus in the interpretation of the myth.

“Prometheus Bound” is one of the parts of the trilogy (“Prometheus Unbound” and “Prometheus the Fire-Bearer”), which is based on the Greek myth about the Titan Prometheus. The image of Prometheus in Hesiod’s “Theogony” and the tragedy of Aeschylus. The plot and characters of the tragedy. Intellectual character tragedies as the personification and confrontation of ideas: on the one hand, slavish obedience, weakness, prudent compromise with the power of the almighty, on the other, rebellion against the arbitrariness and violence of the gods.

Trilogy “Oresteia” (“Agamemnon”, “Choephori”, “Eumenides”, 458 BC). Its basis is the tragic fate of the house of Atrides, borrowed by Aeschylus from the myth of the death of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon (Trojan cycle). The plot and characters of the trilogy. The intellectual nature of the tragedy. The confrontation between maternal and paternal rights, unfolded by Aeschylus through clashes between people and gods, through the bloody events of the trilogy; moral, philosophical and political issues of “The Oresteia”. The novelty of Aeschylus's interpretation of the ancient myth and the central problem of ancient Greek views - the problem of retribution. The conflict of tragedy is a clash of different truths and rights. Approval of the idea of ​​statehood, paternal law, civil law and order through the justification of the crime of Orestes in the Areopagus.

The evolution of Aeschylus the playwright: from tragedy-cantata (“The Petitioner”) to tragedy-drama (“Oresteia”); bringing action into the tragedies themselves; increasing drama and pathosity in each subsequent tragedy. Aeschylus's mastery. Aeschylus's introduction of the trilogical principle, the antistrophic principle, observance of the rule of integrity of verse. The majesty and severity of Aeschylus's heroes, their non-psychological nature. Introduction of the second actor and development of the dialogue. The evolution of the choir and its functions. The lyric-epic nature of Aeschylus' tragedies. Universal talent of Aeschylus.

Sophocles (c. 496-406 BC) - philosopher-playwright and theatrical figure from the heyday of Athenian democracy, which proclaimed man “the measure of all things” (Protagoras). Political and state leader of Athens, associate of Pericles, constant rival of Aeschylus in dramatic competitions, “darling of fate,” harmonious personality. The creative heritage of Sophocles and its universal resonance.

The confrontation between man and fate is the main conflict of the tragedies - as an expression of the religious and ethical foundations of Sophocles' worldview. Man and power, man and state, the moral responsibility of a hero, vested with power over others, for his actions before God and people; the delusions and misfortunes of man, the violent emotional turmoil and suffering of man, the nature of human relationships - the humanistic foundation and stage flesh of Sophocles' dramaturgy.

The heroes of Sophocles are people of a high moral imperative, people “as they should be” (Aristotle), whose motto is: “To live well or not to live at all.” Principles of depicting a person in Sophocles. The richness of the internal content of the image and mask. Methods of individualization and individuality of Sophocles' characters. The uniqueness of situations created by the playwright or given by myth. Contrasts in the organization of characters' speech.

“Oedipus the King” (c. 429 BC) - tragedy of fate, “tragedy par excellence” (Aristotle). Mythological basis (Theban cycle), the problem of interpretation of myth. Content and main characters. Tragic irony in Sophocles and recognition as intertwining elements of peripeteia - “the reversal of what is happening” (Aristotle). Oedipus’ search for the killers of Laius (the plot of the tragedy) and the dialectic of the hero’s subjectively noble intentions and the objective results of his actions as a chain of involuntary crimes. The problem of Oedipus’ guilt, his determination to inflict punishment himself oneself, the ability to be responsible for one’s actions as the norm of a tragic hero. The relationship between fate and personal freedom. Oedipus is a symbol of humanity’s eternal desire for truth, for the mystery of being. The concept of catastrophe. The composition of Sophocles’ tragedy.

“Antigone” (c. 442 BC) - the tragedy of debt. Mythological basis (Theban cycle), the problem of interpretation of the myth. Content and main characters. The conflict between Antigone and Creon is a clash of different public ideas about the duty of the individual. Public the meaning of the conflict is the agon of Creon and Antigone.The heroic maximalism of Antigone and her moral victory over Creon.

“Electra” is a tragedy of revenge. The novelty of the interpretation of the Mycenaean myth (Trojan cycle) in comparison with Aeschylus’s “Hoeforms”. Content and characters. The principle of contrasting comparison of two sisters. The truth of Electra, her determination in carrying out revenge and obsession with the idea. The social meaning of the conflict is agon Electra and Clytemnestra.

“Oedipus at Colonus” (406 BC) - the completion of the theme of Oedipus in the works of Sophocles. Athenian myth and glorification of Athens. Justification of Oedipus.

Euripides. Peloponnesian War (431-401 BC) and the defeat of Athens. A crisis of faith in divine power, the justice of the universe, the reasonableness of laws. Criticism of mythological traditions. Deheroization and decomposition of myth.

Euripides (480-406/407 BC) - philosopher on stage, “the most tragic of poets” (Aristotle). The range of interests of Euripides: the internal closeness of the philosophy of the Sophists; attitude to traditional religion, to war, to democracy.

“Alcesta” (438 BC) - a family drama; the image of a wife (Alcestes) accepting death to save her husband. Depiction of the idea of ​​self-sacrifice, the idea of ​​genuine love in a clash with selfish love.

“Medea” (431 BC) - the originality of the interpretation of the myth of the Argonauts. The movement of the semantic center from the sphere of divine commands and predestination to the sphere of tragic relationships between people is the main discovery of Euripides. The tragedy of the image of Medea is a consequence of the internal split of her soul. The collision of Medea’s personality with a world hostile to her is the tragic conflict of the work.The impact of Euripides’ “Medea” on the dramaturgy of Modern times (the tragedies of Shakespeare, Racine, European psychological drama).

“Hippolytus” (428 BC) - a unique interpretation of the myth. The theme of Phaedra’s strange love for her stepson Hippolytus. Love as a curse, as a distortion of the norm of human relations leading to death - the novelty and primordial nature of this theme in ancient tragedy. Philosophical aspects of the image of Hippolytus.

“Iphigenia in Aulis” is a unique interpretation of one of the myths of the Trojan cycle associated with the sacrifice of Iphigenia. The depiction of the love of Iphigenia and Achilus as a feeling that transforms the consciousness of Iphigenia, helping her to comprehend the world, to realize the idea of ​​​​freedom and free choice of her destiny.

The interweaving of lyrical, civil, philosophical motifs in the dramaturgy of Euripides - the creator of a new type of drama (“tragedy of intrigue”), where in the center is the collision of man and the world, the clash between people; a depiction of a person’s inner world with its tragic dissatisfaction and, often, duality of the soul. The insignificant significance of the chorus and choral parts in the tragedies of Euripides. Prologues and denouements (“God ex machina”). Agons and monody. Staging the tragedies of Euripides in modern times.

Aristophanes. Folk origins of comedy. Traditions of Attic Komos. Sicilian mimes and fliacs. Epicharmus and Cratinus are the creators of the comedy genre and predecessors of Aristophanes. The structure of the comedy (prologue, agon, parabasa, exodus).

The comedies of Aristophanes (445-385 BC) are an artistic document of his time. Aristophanes' Agon is a clash of opposing political ideas. The comedies “Acharnians” (426 BC) and “Horsemen” (424 BC) are a mockingly grotesque depiction of demagogue politicians during the crisis of Athenian democracy.

The anti-war nature of the comedies “Peace” (421 BC) and “Lysistrata” (411 BC).

“Frogs” (405 BC) - issues of theater, literature, art; a look at the playwright as a teacher of fellow citizens; censure of Euripides.

“Birds” is the problem of the relationship between the demos and the leaders.

The dramaturgy of Aristophanes as a living public understanding of the philosophical, aesthetic, political problems of the time in the form of a theatrical performance. Techniques of caricature, cartoon, free imitation of real historical characters; imperceptible transitions from reality to fantasy, sharpness and courage in building a dramatic comedic conflict; folk humor, puns, lively colloquial speech are features of the style of Aristophanes' comedy.

The evolution of Aristophanes' creative principles, changes in the artistic fabric of his comedies. Aesthetic and religious views of the playwright. Productions of Aristophanes' comedies in modern times.

Topic 2. Theater of Ancient Rome

The emergence of Roman culture and contradictory connections with ancient Greek culture. Troy and the Trojan culture are the source of Roman culture. Antagonism between Roman aristocracy and Greek democracy. The history of Rome as a history of wars of conquest (Punic Wars). The principle of practical necessity is the central feature of Roman utilitarianism, which embraces all spheres of life, from everyday everyday life to philosophical and poetic manifestations. Greek cultural influence in the 3rd and 2nd centuries. BC e. Origins of Roman theater. Fescennins. Performances by histrions (from the Etruscan “hyster” - actor). Livia Andronicus (d. c. 205 BC) - founder of Roman literature, literary translation, author of tragedies and comedies, creator of the new stage genre “palliata” (“cloak comedy”), author and director of the first drama in Latin language (240 BC). Gnaeus Naevius (c. 280-201 BC) - the first Roman poet, creator of a new genre of Roman tragedy - pretext (“Romulus”). Comedy is the main genre of Roman theatrical culture. Saturas (“okroshka”) and Roman saturnalia. Atellana and her masks.

Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254-184 BC) and the “togata” play: Roman life and morals are shrouded by Plautus in a “cloak” of Greek subjects and names; the techniques of neo-Attic comedy of intrigue are combined with Roman atellana. Heroes of Plautus' comedies. Images of smart, nosy slaves (“Pseudolus”, “Boastful Warrior”). Euclion is the first image of the “miser” in the world theater (“Comedy about the Pot or Treasure”). Development of a comedy of intrigue (“Menekhmas” or “Twins”) and a touching, serious comedy (“Prisoners”). Dynamic action, the technique of reducing the sublime, buffoonery (“Amphitryon”). Combination of dialogues with cants (arias, duets, trios), creation of a musical comedy. Roman humor. The language of Plautus. The influence of his comedies on the work of Shakespeare, Moliere, Lessing, Ostrovsky.

Publius Terentius Africanus (c. 185-159 BC) and translations and adaptations of the plays of Menander and others. Contamination as the main method of adaptation. Focus on the circle of the Roman aristocracy. Themes of family and Hellenic education of youth (“Brothers”); noble relationships based on trust and help (“Mother-in-law”). The language of Terence is the language of an educated Roman, orator, rhetorician - the standard of Latin speech for subsequent eras.

The separation of theater from literature, the gradual disappearance of tragedies and comedies from the stage. Replacement of theater by circus and pantomime shows. Pompous processions, animal persecution, gladiator fights, circus games. The enchanting and naturalistic style of the Empire's spectacles. Increasing the number of holidays from four in the era of the Republic to one hundred and fifty in the era of the Empire. Organization of holidays. Circus Maximus and Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum).

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC - 65 AD) and his tragic theater - “Oedipus”, “Medea”, “Phaedra”. Seneca's tragedies - dramas to read. Problems of the individual and the state, the vicissitudes of fate and the destructiveness of passions in the tragedies of Seneca. His works as a form of philosophical statement. Seneca's influence on the history of European theater, on the aesthetics and dramaturgy of classicism.

Pantomime as a widespread genre of the Empire era. Differences between Roman theater and Greek theater. Organization of theatrical performances. Low position of actors. Pompey's first stone theater (55 BC).

Topic 3. Medieval theater

Feudal formation and its culture. Periodization: early Middle Ages - V-XI centuries: mature Middle Ages - XII - mid-XVI centuries. System of suzerainty and vassalage.

Religion as the dominant form of ideology in feudal society. Ideas of Christian humanism of the Middle Ages. The role of the Christian religion and the Catholic Church in literature and art. Folk culture of the Middle Ages.

The actions of amusing histrions (jugglers in France, mimes in Italy, shpilmans in Germany, minstrels in England, frams in Poland, buffoons in Russia) are a new type of folk spectacle of the 11th-13th centuries, which developed in the fair environment. Syncretism of histrion art. Variety of genres. Differentiation: buffoons, jugglers-storytellers, troubadours. Persecution of them by the church.

The emergence and development of theater in the bosom of the church. Performance at the altar. Liturgical drama (from the 9th century) as part of the Catholic mass. Christmas and Easter cycles. Liturgical drama “The Bridegroom, or Wise Virgins and Foolish Virgins” (late 11th - early 12th century). Semi-liturgical drama (mid-12th century) - drama on the church porch. The principle of simultaneity. Secularization of liturgical drama - “The Act of Adam” (XII century). Vagantes (“wandering clerics”) are exponents of the rebellious spirit of the free games of histrions in the medieval city. The impact of the creativity of vagants on the process of secularization. The evolution of liturgical drama into mystery (XV-XVI centuries).

Miracle is a dramatization of church legends about saints. Sources, contents and heroes of the miracles. French miracles of the 13th century: “The Game of St. Nicholas” (1200) by trouvere Jean Bodel, where the holiness and inviolability of private property, guarded by the wonderworker Nicholas, appears as the main idea of ​​the miracle; “The Miracle of Theophilus” by Trouvère Rutbeuf (translation by A. Blok), where the “Faustian” theme of the hero leads him along the path of suffering, atonement for guilt and leads to the miracle of transformation. Development of the miracle genre (“play about a miracle”) in the 14th century. and its affinity with everyday didactic drama. “The Miracle about Robert the Devil” and “The Miracle about Bertha with Big Legs” are pictures of a cruel century.

Mystery - a performance performed on the square in front of the cathedral - is the main genre of medieval folk theater of the 15th-16th centuries. Mysteries and the free city. The area, mass and amateur nature of the mystery. Participation of workshops. The role of “brotherhoods”. Thematic and plot range of the mystery. Religious and secular, passionate piety and blasphemy, asceticism of Christian morality and “freedom of judgment in the square” (A. Pushkin) as a fusion of content and genre of mystery. The junction of poetic convention and crude naturalism, fantasy and everyday life, pathos and caricature, religious ecstasy and buffoonery. Mimic mystery (“The Passion of the Lord”, Paris, 1313) as the source of mystery theater.

Mystery as a phenomenon of public theater. Three ways to stage a mystery play. The principle of simultaneity in the construction of scenery and the movement of the plot. Scenic miracles. A spectacle of torture and execution. Comic improvisations and comic figures of the fool and the demon. "Game Director" Gothic style in the mystery theater. Activities of “brotherhoods” (“Brotherhood of Passions” in Paris). The evolution of the mystery play from a citywide holiday to a professional theatrical spectacle - “The Acts of the Apostles” (1541). Prohibition of the Mysteries by the French Parliament (1548).

Urban culture and secular theater of the Middle Ages. Trouvert Adam de la Halle (1238-1286) and his activities in the Arras “Puy”, in Paris and Naples. “Game in the gazebo” (1262) as a synthesis of living impressions of reality and folk poetry and music. “The Game of Robin and Marion” (c. 1280) - a musical, song, folk and dance performance about the love of a shepherd and a shepherdess, Adam de la Halle - poet, actor, composer, playwright - the founder of the future musical theater.

Moralite (XV-XVI centuries) - “dispute in persons”, an edifying drama about the clash of good and evil, about the struggle of spirit and flesh, about the duality of man, presented in the form of allegories in specific characters-symbols. Replacement of dramatic action with discussion, passions with judgments about passions, characters with rhetoricians. The performance as a stage illustration for the Prologue. French (“Moral and Immoral”, “Prudent and Unreasonable”, 1436) and English (“Every Man”, 1493) morality books as examples of moralizing drama, “sermon in person”. Moralite is the repertoire of the chamber of rhetoricians in Dutch cities. Presentation of morality plays by amateurs in monasteries, at the courts of feudal lords, in the market squares of a medieval city. Introduction of everyday interior (compared to mystery). Allegorical figures of morality in the Renaissance drama of Bayle, Cervantes, Shakespeare.

Farce (from the Latin farte - filling) is a comedy genre formed by isolating comedy and everyday elements (inserts) from the mystery play and dramatizing the schwank. Plebeian roots of farce (histrion performances, Maslenitsa games). A plot-driven anecdote, an everyday incident as the basis of a farce - “The Wife in the Vat.” Cunning, trickery, and private interest are the main virtues of the farce hero. Life, customs and psychology of a medieval townsman in the anonymous farce “Lawyer Patlen” (XV century). Parodic style of the farce of Pierre Grengor “The Game of the Prince of Fools and the Foolish Mother” (1512).

Farceurs - the sharp character, dynamics, and cheerfulness of their art. The famous French farce actor, master Jean Pontale (Jean de l'Espina). National varieties of farce - soti (France), fastnachtspiel (Germany), interlude (England).

Farce and Renaissance theater in Europe: commedia dell'arte (Italy), Lope de Rueda (Spain), interludes by John Gaywood (England), Molière (France).

Theater of the Renaissance and modern times (XVII century)

The Renaissance (XIV-XVI centuries in Italy; late XV-XVII centuries in Spain; XVI-XVII centuries in England and France) - the gradual collapse of feudalism, the crisis of church ideology. Liberation of man from the shackles of subordination to religious dogmas. Development of science and arts. Formation of a culture of humanists. Ideals of humanists in the works of great artists of the era. Cheerful freethinking and the evolution of Renaissance humanism. The concept of man and the world in the art of the Renaissance.

The main ideas of the early and High Renaissance: freedom - “that dynamic idea that blew up the world” (Hegel); man and the cult of individuality; discovery of the world and knowledge of both the external and internal world of the individual: the revival of antiquity.

Second half of the XVI-XVII centuries. The crisis of Renaissance consciousness, the image of a disharmonious world, a return to a pessimistic view of human capabilities, for man himself is the focus of tragically insoluble contradictions. The main ideas of the late Renaissance (second half of the 16th-17th centuries): the incomprehensibility of life and reality, “the limitations of human capabilities, the self-restraint of human pride, the subordination of self-will and individual claims to more general interests.

The art of Baroque and classicism. Theater in the system of styles of the Renaissance and Modern times (XVII century).