The evolution of tragedy from Aeschylus to Euripides. Ancient Greek tragedy: Sophocles and Euripides

This list can include such famous ancient authors as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Aristotle. All of them wrote plays for performances at festivities. There were, of course, many more authors of dramatic works, but either their creations have not survived to this day, or their names have been forgotten.

In the work of ancient Greek playwrights, despite all the differences, there was much in common, for example, the desire to show all the most significant social, political and ethical problems that worried the minds of the Athenians at that time. In the genre of tragedy in ancient Greece, no significant works were created. Over time, the tragedy became a purely literary work meant to be read. On the other hand, great prospects opened up for everyday drama, which flourished most in the middle of the 4th century BC. e. It was later called "Novo-Attic Comedy".

Aeschylus

Aeschylus (Fig. 3) was born in 525 BC. e. in Eleusis, near Athens. He came from a noble family, so he received a good education. The beginning of his work dates back to the time of the war of Athens against Persia. It is known from historical documents that Aeschylus himself took part in the battles of Marathon and Salamis.

He described the last of the wars as an eyewitness in his play The Persians. This tragedy was staged in 472 BC. e. In total, Aeschylus wrote about 80 works. Among them were not only tragedies, but also satirical dramas. Only 7 tragedies have survived to this day in full, only small pieces of the rest have survived.

In the works of Aeschylus, not only people are shown, but also gods and titans, who personify moral, political and social ideas. The playwright himself had a religious-mythological creed. He firmly believed that the gods govern life and the world. However, the people in his plays are not weak-willed beings who are blindly subordinate to the gods. Aeschylus endowed them with reason and will, they act, guided by their thoughts.

In the tragedies of Aeschylus, the chorus plays an essential role in the development of the theme. All parts of the choir are written in pathetic language. At the same time, the author gradually began to introduce into the canvas of the narrative pictures of human existence, which were quite realistic. An example is the description of the battle between the Greeks and Persians in the play "Persians" or the words of sympathy expressed by the Oceanides to Prometheus.

To intensify the tragic conflict and to complete the action of the theatrical production, Aeschylus introduced the role of a second actor. At that time it was just a revolutionary move. Now, instead of the old tragedy, which had little action, a single actor and a chorus, new dramas appeared. They clashed with the worldviews of heroes who independently motivated their actions and deeds. But the tragedies of Aeschylus nevertheless retained in their construction traces of the fact that they come from the dithyramb.

The construction of all tragedies was the same. They began with a prologue, in which there was a plot plot. After the prologue, the choir entered the orchestra to stay there until the end of the play. This was followed by episodies, which were the dialogues of the actors. The episodes were separated from each other by stasims - the songs of the choir, performed after the choir ascended the orchestra. The final part of the tragedy, when the choir left the orchestra, was called "exode". As a rule, a tragedy consisted of 3-4 episodies and 3-4 stasims.

Stasims, in turn, were divided into separate parts, consisting of stanzas and antistrophes, which strictly corresponded to each other. The word "strofa" in translation into Russian means "turn". When the choir sang along the stanzas, he moved first in one direction, then in the other. Most often, the songs of the choir were performed to the accompaniment of a flute and were necessarily accompanied by dances called "emmeley".

In the play The Persians, Aeschylus glorified the victory of Athens over Persia in the naval battle of Salamis. A strong patriotic feeling runs through the whole work, i.e. the author shows that the victory of the Greeks over the Persians is the result of the fact that democratic orders existed in the country of the Greeks.

In the work of Aeschylus, a special place is given to the tragedy "Prometheus Chained". In this work, the author showed Zeus not as a bearer of truth and justice, but as a cruel tyrant who wants to wipe out all people from the face of the earth. Therefore, Prometheus, who dared to rise up against him and stand up for the human race, he condemned to eternal torment, ordering him to be chained to a rock.

Prometheus is shown by the author as a fighter for the freedom and reason of people, against the tyranny and violence of Zeus. In all subsequent centuries, the image of Prometheus remained an example of a hero fighting against higher powers, against all oppressors of a free human personality. V. G. Belinsky said very well about this hero of the ancient tragedy: “Prometheus let people know that in truth and knowledge they are gods, that thunder and lightning are not yet proof of the rightness, but only evidence of the wrong power.”

Aeschylus wrote several trilogies. But the only one that has survived to this day in full is Oresteia. The tragedy was based on tales of terrible murders of the kind from which the Greek commander Agamemnon came. The first play of the trilogy is called Agamemnon. It tells that Agamemnon returned victorious from the battlefield, but at home he was killed by his wife Clytemnestra. The commander's wife is not only not afraid of punishment for her crime, but also boasts of what she has done.

The second part of the trilogy is called "The Choephors". Here is a story about how Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, becoming an adult, decided to avenge the death of his father. Sister Orestes Electra helps him in this terrible business. First, Orestes killed his mother's lover, and then her.

The plot of the third tragedy - "Eumenides" - is as follows: Orestes is persecuted by Erinyes, the goddess of vengeance, because he committed two murders. But he is justified by the court of the Athenian elders.

In this trilogy, Aeschylus spoke in poetic language about the struggle between paternal and maternal rights that was going on in Greece at that time. As a result, paternal, i.e. state, right turned out to be the winner.

In "Oresteia" Aeschylus's dramatic skill reached its peak. He so well conveyed the oppressive, ominous atmosphere in which the conflict is brewing that the viewer almost physically feels this intensity of passion. The choral parts are written clearly, they have a religious and philosophical content, there are bold metaphors and comparisons. There is much more dynamics in this tragedy than in the early works of Aeschylus. The characters are written out more specifically, much less common places and reasoning.

The works of Aeschylus show all the heroism of the Greco-Persian wars, which played an important role in educating patriotism among the people. In the eyes of not only his contemporaries, but also of all subsequent generations, Aeschylus forever remained the very first tragic poet.

He died in 456 BC. e. in the city of Gel, in Sicily. On his grave there is a gravestone inscription, which, according to legend, was composed by him.

Sophocles

Sophocles was born in 496 BC. e. in a wealthy family. His father had a gunsmith's workshop, which provided a large income. Already at a young age, Sophocles showed his creative talent. At the age of 16, he led a choir of youths who glorified the victory of the Greeks in the battle of Salamis.

At first, Sophocles himself took part in the productions of his tragedies as an actor, but then, due to the weakness of his voice, he had to give up performances, although he enjoyed great success. In 468 BC. e. Sophocles won his first absentee victory over Aeschylus, which consisted in the fact that Sophocles' play was recognized as the best. In further dramatic work, Sophocles was invariably lucky: in his entire life he never received a third award, but almost always took first place (and only occasionally second).

The playwright actively participated in state activities. In 443 BC. e. the Greeks elected the famous poet to the post of treasurer of the Delian League. Later he was elected to an even higher position - a strategist. In this capacity, he, along with Pericles, took part in a military campaign against the island of Samos, which separated from Athens.

We know only 7 tragedies of Sophocles, although he wrote more than 120 plays. Compared with Aeschylus, Sophocles somewhat changed the content of his tragedies. If the first has titans in his plays, then the second introduced people into his works, albeit a little elevated above everyday life. Therefore, researchers of Sophocles' creativity say that he made the tragedy descend from heaven to earth.

Man with his spiritual world, mind, feelings and free will became the main character in tragedies. Of course, in the plays of Sophocles, the heroes feel the influence of Divine Providence on their fate. Gods are the same

powerful, like those of Aeschylus, they can also bring a person down. But the heroes of Sophocles usually do not rely resignedly on the will of fate, but fight to achieve their goals. This struggle sometimes ends in the suffering and death of the hero, but he cannot refuse it, since in this he sees his moral and civic duty to society.

At this time, Pericles was at the head of the Athenian democracy. Under his rule, slave-owning Greece reached an enormous internal flowering. Athens became a major cultural center, which sought writers, artists, sculptors and philosophers throughout Greece. Pericles began building the Acropolis, but it was completed only after his death. Outstanding architects of that period were involved in this work. All sculptures were made by Phidias and his students.

In addition, rapid development has come in the field of natural sciences and philosophical teachings. There was a need for general and special education. In Athens, teachers appeared who were called sophists, that is, sages. For a fee, they taught those who wished to various sciences - philosophy, rhetoric, history, literature, politics - they taught the art of speaking to the people.

Some sophists were supporters of slave-owning democracy, others - of the aristocracy. The most famous among the sophists of that time was Protagoras. It is to him that the saying belongs, that not God, but man, is the measure of all things.

Such contradictions in the clash of humanistic and democratic ideals with selfish and selfish motives were also reflected in the work of Sophocles, who could not accept Protagoras' statements because he was very religious. In his works, he repeatedly said that human knowledge is very limited, that due to ignorance a person can make this or that mistake and be punished for it, that is, endure torment. But it is precisely in suffering that the best human qualities that Sophocles described in his plays are revealed. Even in cases where the hero dies under the blows of fate, an optimistic mood is felt in tragedies. As Sophocles said, “fate could deprive the hero of happiness and life, but not humiliate his spirit, could strike him, but not win.”

Sophocles introduced a third actor into the tragedy, who greatly enlivened the action. There were now three characters on the stage who could conduct dialogues and monologues, as well as perform at the same time. Since the playwright gave preference to the experiences of an individual, he did not write trilogies, in which, as a rule, the fate of a whole family was traced. Three tragedies were put up for competitions, but now each of them was an independent work. Under Sophocles, painted decorations were also introduced.

The most famous tragedies of the playwright from the Theban cycle are Oedipus the King, Oedipus in Colon and Antigone. The plot of all these works is based on the myth of the Theban king Oedipus and the numerous misfortunes that befell his family.

Sophocles tried in all his tragedies to bring out heroes with a strong character and unbending will. But at the same time, these people were characterized by kindness and compassion. Such was, in particular, Antigone.

The tragedies of Sophocles clearly show that fate can subjugate a person's life. In this case, the hero becomes a toy in the hands of higher powers, which the ancient Greeks personified with Moira, standing even above the gods. These works became an artistic reflection of the civil and moral ideals of slave-owning democracy. Among these ideals were political equality and freedom of all full citizens, patriotism, service to the Motherland, nobility of feelings and motives, as well as kindness and simplicity.

Sophocles died in 406 BC. e.

Theater as an art form

Theater (Greek θέατρον - the main meaning is a place for spectacles, then - a spectacle, from θεάομαι - I look, I see) - a spectacular art form, which is a synthesis of various arts - literature, music, choreography, vocals, fine arts and others, and possessing its own specificity: the reflection of reality, conflicts, characters, as well as their interpretation and evaluation, the assertion of certain ideas here takes place through dramatic action, the main carrier of which is the actor.

The generic concept of "theatre" includes its various types: drama theater, opera, ballet, puppet, pantomime theater, etc.

At all times, the theater has been a collective art; in the modern theater, in addition to the actors and the director (conductor, choreographer), the stage designer, composer, choreographer, as well as props, costume designers, make-up artists, stage workers, and illuminators participate in the creation of the performance.

The development of the theater has always been inseparable from the development of society and the state of culture as a whole - its heyday or decline, the predominance of certain artistic trends in the theater and its role in the spiritual life of the country were associated with the peculiarities of social development.

The theater was born from the most ancient hunting, agricultural and other ritual festivals, which reproduced natural phenomena or labor processes in allegorical form. However, ritual performances in themselves were not yet a theater: according to art historians, the theater begins where the viewer appears - it involves not only collective efforts in the process of creating a work, but also collective perception, and the theater achieves its aesthetic goal only if if the stage action resonates with the audience.

In the early stages of the development of the theater - in folk festivals, singing, dance, music and dramatic action existed in an inseparable unity; in the process of further development and professionalization, the theater lost its original synthesism, three main types were formed: drama theater, opera and ballet, as well as some intermediate forms

Theater of Ancient Greece.

Theater in Ancient GreeceThe theater in Ancient Greece originates from festivities in honor of Dionysus. Theaters were built in the open air, so a large number of spectators were placed in them. It is believed that theatrical art in ancient Greece originates in mythology. Greek tragedy began to develop rapidly, so it was told not only about the life of Dionysus, but also about other heroes.

Greek tragedy was constantly replenished with mythological subjects, since they had a deep expressiveness. Mythology was formed at a time when the people had a desire to explain the essence of the world. In Greece, it was not forbidden to portray the gods as people.

Comedies contained religious and worldly motives. Worldly motives eventually became the only ones. But they were dedicated to Dionysus. Actors acted out comedic everyday scenes. Elements of political and social satire also began to appear in comedy. The actors raised questions about the activities of certain institutions, the conduct of the war, foreign policy, and the political system.

With the development of dramaturgy, the staging technique also developed. In the early stages, decorations were used, which were wooden structures. Then the painted decorations began to appear. Painted canvases and boards were placed between the columns. Over time, theatrical machines began to be used. The most commonly used retractable platforms on low wheels and machines that allowed the actor to rise into the air.

Theaters were built so that there was good audibility. To amplify the sound, resonating vessels were placed, which were in the middle of the hall. There were no curtains in theaters. Usually 3 people participated in the production. The same actor could play several roles. The extras played silent roles. There were no women in the theater at that time.

Women's roles were played by men. Actors had to have good diction, they also needed to be able to sing - arias were performed in pathetic places. Voice exercises were developed for the actors. Over time, dance elements began to be introduced into the plays, so the actors learned to control their bodies. The Greek actors were wearing masks. They could not express anger, admiration or surprise with the help of facial expressions. Actors had to work on the expressiveness of movements and gestures.

The performance in the theater ran from dawn to dusk. Spectators who were in the theater ate and drank there. The townspeople put on their best clothes, wore ivy wreaths. The plays were presented by lot. If the audience liked the performance, they applauded loudly and shouted. If the play was uninteresting, the audience would scream, stamp their feet, and whistle. Actors could be driven off the stage and thrown with stones. The playwright's success depended on the audience.

Creativity of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes.

Aeschylus

He died in 456 BC. e. in the city of Gel, in Sicily. On his grave there is a gravestone inscription, which, according to legend, was composed by him.

Sophocles

Sophocles died in 406 BC. e.

Euripides

Euripides was born c. 480 BC e. in a wealthy family. Since the parents of the future playwright did not live in poverty, they were able to give their son a good education.

Euripides had a friend and teacher Anaxagoras, from whom he studied philosophy, history and other humanities. In addition, Euripides spent a lot of time in the company of sophists. Although the poet was not interested in the social life of the country, there were many political sayings in his tragedies.

Euripides, unlike Sophocles, did not take part in the staging of his tragedies, did not act in them as an actor, did not write music for them. Other people did it for him. Euripides was not very popular in Greece. For all the time of participation in competitions, he received only the first five awards, one of them posthumously.

During his lifetime, Euripides wrote approximately 92 dramas. 18 of them have come down to us in full. In addition, there are many more excerpts. Euripides wrote all the tragedies somewhat differently than Aeschylus and Sophocles. The playwright portrayed people in his plays as they are. All his heroes, despite the fact that they were mythological characters, had their own feelings, thoughts, ideals, aspirations and passions. In many tragedies Euripides criticizes the old religion. His gods often turn out to be more cruel, vindictive and evil than people. This attitude towards religious beliefs can be explained by the fact that Euripides' worldview was influenced by communication with the sophists. This religious free-thinking did not find understanding among ordinary Athenians. Apparently, therefore, the playwright did not enjoy success with his fellow citizens.

Euripides was a supporter of moderate democracy. He believed that the backbone of democracy was the small landowners. In many of his works, he sharply criticized and denounced demagogues who seek power with flattery and deceit, and then use it for their own selfish purposes. The playwright fought against tyranny, the enslavement of one person by another. He said that it is impossible to divide people by origin, that nobility lies in personal virtues and deeds, and not in wealth and noble origin.

Separately, it should be said about the attitude of Euripides to slaves. He tried in all his works to express the idea that slavery is an unjust and shameful phenomenon, that all people are the same, and that the soul of a slave is no different from the soul of a free citizen if the slave has pure thoughts.

At that time, Greece was waging the Peloponnesian War. Euripides believed that all wars are senseless and cruel. He justified only those that were carried out in the name of defending the motherland.

The playwright tried to understand the world of spiritual experiences of the people around him as best as possible. In his tragedies, he was not afraid to show the basest human passions and the struggle between good and evil in one person. In this regard, Euripides can be called the most tragic of all Greek authors. The female images in the tragedies of Euripides were very expressive and dramatic; it was not for nothing that he was rightly called a good connoisseur of the female soul.

The poet used three actors in his plays, but the choir in his works was no longer the main character. Most often, the songs of the choir express the thoughts and feelings of the author himself. Euripides was one of the first to introduce the so-called monodies into tragedies - arias of actors. Even Sophocles tried to use monodia, but they received the greatest development precisely from Euripides. At the most important climaxes, the actors expressed their feelings through singing.

The playwright began to show the public such scenes that none of the tragic poets had introduced before him. For example, these were scenes of murder, illness, death, physical torment. In addition, he brought children to the stage, showed the viewer the experiences of a woman in love. When the denouement of the play came, Euripides brought to the public a “god in a car”, who predicted fate and expressed his will.

Euripides' most famous work is the Medea. He took the myth of the Argonauts as a basis. On the ship "Argo" they went to Colchis to extract the golden fleece. In this difficult and dangerous business, the leader of the Argonauts, Jason, was helped by the daughter of the Colchis king, Medea. She fell in love with Jason and committed several crimes for him. For this, Jason and Medea were expelled from their native city. They settled in Corinth. A few years later, having made two sons, Jason leaves Medea. He marries the daughter of the Corinthian king. From this event begins, in fact, the tragedy.

Seized with a thirst for revenge, Medea is terrible in anger. First, with the help of poisoned gifts, she kills Jason's young wife and her father. After that, the avenger kills her sons, born from Jason, and flies away on a winged chariot.

Creating the image of Medea, Euripides several times emphasized that she was a sorceress. But her unbridled character, violent jealousy, cruelty of feelings constantly remind the audience that she is not a Greek, but a native of the country of barbarians. The audience does not take the side of Medea, no matter how much she suffers, because they cannot forgive her terrible crimes (primarily infanticide).

In this tragic conflict, Jason is Medea's opponent. The playwright portrayed him as a selfish and prudent person who puts only the interests of his family at the forefront. The audience understands that it was the ex-husband who brought Medea to such a frenzied state.

Among the many tragedies of Euripides, one can single out the drama Iphigenia in Aulis, which is distinguished by civil pathos. The work is based on the myth of how, at the behest of the gods, Agamemnon had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia.

This is the plot of the tragedy. Agamemnon led a flotilla of ships to take Troy. But the wind died down, and the sailboats could not go further. Then Agamemnon turned to the goddess Artemis with a request to send the wind. In response, he heard an order to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia.

Agamemnon summoned his wife Clytemnestra and daughter Iphigenia to Aulis. The pretext was the courtship of Achilles. When the women arrived, the deception was revealed. Agamemnon's wife was furious and did not allow her daughter to be killed. Iphigenia begged her father not to sacrifice her. Achilles was ready to defend his bride, but she refused to help when she learned that she must be martyred for the sake of her fatherland.

During the sacrifice, a miracle happened. After being stabbed, Iphigenia disappeared somewhere, and a doe appeared on the altar. The Greeks have a myth that tells that Artemis took pity on the girl and transferred her to Tauris, where she became a priestess of the temple of Artemis.

In this tragedy, Euripides showed a courageous girl, ready to sacrifice herself for the good of her homeland.

It was said above that Euripides was not popular with the Greeks. The public did not like the fact that the playwright sought to depict life as realistically as possible in his works, as well as his free attitude to myths and religion. It seemed to many viewers that by doing so he violated the laws of the tragedy genre. And yet the most educated part of the public enjoyed watching his plays. Many of the tragic poets who lived at that time in Greece followed the path opened by Euripides.

Shortly before his death, Euripides moved to the court of the Macedonian king Archelaus, where his tragedies enjoyed well-deserved success. At the beginning of 406 BC. e. Euripides died in Macedonia. This happened a few months before Sophocles' death.

Glory came to Euripides only after his death. In the IV century BC. e. Euripides began to be called the greatest tragic poet. This statement remained until the end of the ancient world. This can only be explained by the fact that the plays of Euripides corresponded to the tastes and requirements of people of a later time who wanted to see on stage the embodiment of those thoughts, feelings and experiences that were close to their own.

Aristophanes

Aristophanes was born around 445 BC. e. His parents were free people, but not very wealthy. The young man showed his creative abilities very early. Already at the age of 12-13 he began to write plays. His first work was staged in 427 BC. e. and immediately received a second award.

Aristophanes wrote only about 40 works. Only 11 comedies have survived to this day, in which the author posed a variety of life questions. In the plays "Aharnians" and "Peace" he advocated an end to the Peloponnesian War and the conclusion of peace with Sparta. In the plays "Wasps" and "Horsemen" he criticized the activities of state institutions, reproaching dishonest demagogues who deceived the people. Aristophanes in his works criticized the philosophy of the sophists and the methods of educating youth ("Clouds").

The work of Aristophanes enjoyed well-deserved success among his contemporaries. The audience flocked to his performances. This state of affairs can be explained by the fact that a crisis of slave-owning democracy has matured in Greek society. In the echelons of power, bribery and corruption of officials, embezzlement and fraud flourished. The satirical depiction of these vices in the plays found the most lively response in the hearts of the Athenians.

But in the comedies of Aristophanes there is also a positive hero. He is a small landowner who cultivates the land with the help of two or three slaves. The playwright admired his industriousness and common sense, which manifested itself both in domestic and state affairs. Aristophanes was an ardent opponent of war and advocated peace. For example, in the comedy Lysistratus, he expressed the idea that the Peloponnesian War, in which the Hellenes kill each other, weakens Greece in the face of the threat from Persia.

In the plays of Aristophanes, an element of buffoonery is sharply noticeable. In this regard, the acting performance also had to include parody, caricature and buffoonery. All these tricks caused wild fun and laughter of the audience. In addition, Aristophanes put the characters in ridiculous positions. An example is the comedy "Clouds", in which Socrates ordered himself to be hung high in a basket so that it would be easier to think about the sublime. This and similar scenes were very expressive and from a purely theatrical side.

Just like tragedy, comedy began with a prologue with a plot of action. He was followed by the opening song of the choir as he entered the orchestra. The choir, as a rule, consisted of 24 people and was divided into two half-choirs of 12 people each. The opening song of the choir was followed by episodies, which were separated from each other by songs. The episodies combined dialogue with choral singing. They always had an agon - a verbal duel. In the agon, the opponents most often defended opposing opinions, sometimes it ended in a fight between the characters with each other.

There was a parabasis in the choral parts, during which the choir took off their masks, took a few steps forward and addressed directly to the audience. Usually parabaza was not connected with the main theme of the play.

The last part of the comedy, as well as the tragedy, was called the exode, at which time the choir left the orchestra. Exodus was always accompanied by cheerful, perky dances.

An example of the most striking political satire is the comedy "Horsemen". Aristophanes gave it such a name because the main character was the choir of horsemen who made up the aristocratic part of the Athenian army. Aristophanes made the leader of the left wing of democracy Cleon the main character of the comedy. He called him the Leatherworker and presented him as a brazen, deceitful man who thinks only of his own enrichment. Under the guise of old Demos, the people of Athens perform in the comedy. Demos is very old, helpless, often falls into childhood and therefore listens to the Leatherworker in everything. But, as they say, a thief stole a horse from a thief. Demos transfers power to another swindler - Sausage Man, who defeats Leatherworker.

At the end of the comedy, the Sausage Man boils Demos in a cauldron, after which youth, reason and political wisdom return to him. Now Demos will never dance to the tune of unscrupulous demagogues. And the Kolbasnik himself subsequently becomes a good citizen who works for the good of his homeland and people. According to the plot of the play, it turns out that the Sausage Man was just pretending to get the better of the Leatherworker.

During the great Dionysia of 421 BC. e., during the period of peace negotiations between Athens and Sparta, Aristophanes wrote and staged the comedy "Peace". Contemporaries of the playwright admitted the possibility that this performance could have had a positive impact on the course of negotiations, which ended successfully in the same year.

The main character of the play was a farmer named Trigeus, that is, a "collector" of fruits. Continuous war prevents him from living peacefully and happily, cultivating the land and feeding his family. On a huge dung beetle, Trigeus decided to rise into the sky to ask Zeus what he intended to do with the Hellenes. If only Zeus does not make any decision, then Trigeus will tell him that he is a traitor to Hellas.

Rising to heaven, the farmer learned that there were no more gods on Olympus. Zeus moved them all to the highest point of the sky, because he was angry with the people because they could not end the war in any way. In a large palace that stood on Olympus, Zeus left the demon of war Polemos, giving him the right to do whatever he wants with people. Polemos seized the goddess of the world and imprisoned her in a deep cave, and filled up the entrance with stones.

Trigeus called Hermes for help, and while Polemos was gone, they freed the goddess of the world. Immediately after this, all wars ceased, people returned to peaceful creative work, and a new, happy life began.

Aristophanes drew a red thread through the entire plot of the comedy, the idea that all Greeks should forget enmity, unite and live happily. Thus, for the first time, a statement was made from the stage, addressed to all Greek tribes, that there is much more in common between them than there are differences. In addition, the idea was expressed of uniting all the tribes and the commonality of their interests. The comedian wrote two more works that were a protest against the Peloponnesian War. These are the comedies "Aharnians" and "Lysistrata".

In 405 BC. e. Aristophanes created the play "The Frogs". In this work, he criticized the tragedies of Euripides. As an example of worthy tragedies, he named the plays of Aeschylus, whom he always sympathized with. In the comedy The Frogs, at the very beginning of the action, Dionysus enters the orchestra with his servant Xanthus. Dionysus announces to everyone that he is going to descend into the underworld in order to bring Euripides to the earth, because after his death there was not a single good poet left. After these words, the audience burst into laughter: everyone knew the critical attitude of Aristophanes to the works of Euripides.

The core of the play is the dispute between Aeschylus and Euripides, which takes place in the underworld. Actors portraying playwrights appear in the orchestra, as if continuing the argument started off the stage. Euripides criticizes the art of Aeschylus, believes that he had too little action on the stage, that, having taken the hero or heroine to the platform, Aeschylus covered them with a cloak and left them to sit silently. Further, Euripides says that when the play exceeded its second half, Aeschylus added more "words stilted, maned and frowning, impossible monsters, unknown to the viewer." Thus, Euripides condemned the pompous and indigestible language in which Aeschylus wrote his works. About himself, Euripides says that he showed everyday life in his plays and taught people simple everyday things.

Such a realistic depiction of the everyday life of ordinary people provoked criticism of Aristophanes. Through the mouth of Aeschylus, he denounces Euripides and tells him that he has spoiled people: "Now market onlookers, rogues, insidious villains are everywhere." Further, Aeschylus continues that he, unlike Euripides, created such works that call the people to victory.

Their competition ends with the weighing of the poems of both poets. Large scales appear on the stage, Dionysus invites the playwrights to throw verses from their tragedies onto different scales in turn. As a result, the poems of Aeschylus outweighed, he became the winner, and Dionysus must bring him to the ground. Seeing off Aeschylus, Pluto orders him to guard Athens, as he says, "with good thoughts" and "to re-educate madmen, of whom there are many in Athens." Since Aeschylus returns to earth, he asks for the time of his absence in the underworld to transfer the throne of the tragedian to Sophocles.

Aristophanes died in 385 BC. e.

From the point of view of the ideological content, as well as the spectacle of the comedy of Aristophanes, this is a phenomenal phenomenon. According to historians, Aristophanes is both the pinnacle of ancient Attic comedy and its completion. In the IV century BC. e., when the socio-political situation in Greece changed, comedy no longer had such a power of influence on the public as before. In this regard, V. G. Belinsky called Aristophanes the last great poet of Greece.

Aeschylus (525 - 456 BC)

His work is associated with the era of the formation of the Athenian democratic state. This state was formed during the Greco-Persian wars, which were fought with short breaks from 500 to 449 BC. and were for the Greek states-policies of a liberating character.

Aeschylus came from a noble family. He was born in Eleusis, near Athens. It is known that Aeschylus took part in the battles of Marathon and Salamis. He described the Battle of Salamis as an eyewitness in the tragedy "Persians". Shortly before his death, Aeschylus went to Sicily, where he died (in the city of Gela). The inscription on his tombstone, composed, according to legend, by himself, does not say anything about him as a playwright, but it is said that he proved himself a courageous warrior in battles with the Persians.

Aeschylus wrote about 80 tragedies and satyr dramas. Only seven tragedies have come down to us in full; small fragments of other works survive.

The tragedies of Aeschylus reflect the main trends of his time, those huge shifts in socio-economic and cultural life that were caused by the collapse of the tribal system and the formation of the Athenian slave-owning democracy.

Aeschylus' worldview was basically religious and mythological. He believed that there is an eternal world order, which is subject to the action of the law of world justice. A person who voluntarily or involuntarily violated a just order will be punished by the gods, and thus the balance will be restored. The idea of the inevitability of retribution and the triumph of justice runs through all the tragedies of Aeschylus.

Aeschylus believes in fate - Moira, believes that even the gods obey her. However, this traditional worldview is mixed with new views generated by the developing Athenian democracy. So, the heroes of Aeschylus are not weak-willed beings who unconditionally fulfill the will of the deity: a person in him is endowed with a free mind, thinks and acts quite independently. Almost every hero of Aeschylus faces the problem of choosing a course of action. The moral responsibility of a person for his actions is one of the main themes of the playwright's tragedies.

Aeschylus introduced a second actor into his tragedies and thereby opened up the possibility of a deeper development of the tragic conflict, strengthened the effective side of the theatrical performance. It was a real revolution in the theater: instead of the old tragedy, where the parts of the only actor and the choir filled the entire play, a new tragedy was born in which the characters collided with each other on the stage, and themselves directly motivated their actions.

The external structure of the tragedy of Aeschylus retains traces of proximity to the dithyramb, where the parts of the lead singer alternated with the parts of the choir.

Almost all tragedies that have come down to us begin with a prologue, which contains the plot of the action. This is followed by parod - a song that the choir sings, entering the orchestra. Next comes the alternation of episodies (dialogical parts performed by actors, sometimes with the participation of the choir) and stasims (songs of the choir). The final part of the tragedy is called the exode; exode is the song that the choir leaves the stage with. In tragedies, there are also hyporchemes (a joyful song of the choir, which sounds, as a rule, at the climax, before the catastrophe), kommos (joint songs-crying of the heroes and the choir), monologues of the heroes.

Usually a tragedy consisted of 3-4 episodies and 3-4 stasims. Stasims are divided into separate parts - stanzas and antistrophes, strictly corresponding in structure to one another. During the performance of stanzas and antistrophes, the choir moved along the orchestra first in one direction, then in the other. The stanza and the antistrophe corresponding to it are always written in the same meter, while the new stanza and antistrophe are written in a different one. There are several such pairs in a stasim; they are closed by a common epod (conclusion).

The songs of the choir were necessarily performed to the accompaniment of the flute. In addition, they were often accompanied by dances. The tragic dance was called emmeleia.

Of the tragedies of the great playwright that have come down to us, the following stand out:

· "Persians" (472 BC), which glorifies the victory of the Greeks over the Persians in the naval battle of the island of Salamis (480 BC);

· "Prometheus Chained" - perhaps the most famous tragedy of Aeschylus, which tells about the feat of the titan Prometheus, who gave fire to people and was severely punished for it;

· The trilogy "Oresteia" (458 BC), known for being the only example of a trilogy that has come down to us in its entirety, in which the skill of Aeschylus reached its peak.

Aeschylus is known as the best spokesman for the social aspirations of his time. In his tragedies, he shows the victory of progressive principles in the development of society, in the state system, in morality. Creativity Aeschylus had a significant impact on the development of world poetry and drama.

Sophocles (496 - 406 BC)

Sophocles came from a wealthy family who owned a gun shop and received a good education. His artistic talent manifested itself already at an early age: at the age of sixteen he led the choir of young men, glorifying the Salamis victory, and later he himself acted as an actor in his own tragedies, enjoying great success. In 486, Sophocles won his first victory over Aeschylus himself in a playwrights' competition. In general, all the dramatic activity of Sophocles was accompanied by constant success: he never received a third award - he most often occupied first and rarely second places.

Sophocles also took part in public life, holding positions of responsibility. So, he was elected a strategist (commander) and, together with Pericles, participated in an expedition against the island of Samos, which decided to secede from Athens. After the death of Sophocles, fellow citizens revered him not only as a great poet, but also as one of the glorious Athenian heroes.

Only seven tragedies of Sophocles have come down to us, but he wrote over 120 of them. The tragedies of Sophocles carry new features. If in Aeschylus the main characters were gods, then in Sophocles people act, although somewhat divorced from reality. Therefore, Sophocles is said to have caused tragedy to descend from heaven to earth. Sophocles pays the main attention to a person, his emotional experiences. Of course, in the fate of his heroes, the influence of the gods is felt, even if they do not appear in the course of action, and these gods are as powerful as those of Aeschylus - they can crush a person. But Sophocles draws, first of all, the struggle of a person for the realization of his goals, his feelings and thoughts, shows the suffering that has fallen to his lot.

The heroes of Sophocles usually have the same integral characters as the heroes of Aeschylus. Fighting for their ideal, they do not know spiritual hesitation. The struggle plunges the heroes into the greatest suffering, and sometimes they die. But the heroes of Sophocles cannot refuse to fight, because they are led by civic and moral duty.

The noble heroes of the tragedies of Sophocles are closely connected with the collective of citizens - this is the embodiment of the ideal of a harmonious personality, which was created during the heyday of Athens. Therefore, Sophocles is called the singer of Athenian democracy.

However, the work of Sophocles is complex and contradictory. His tragedies reflected not only the flourishing, but also the brewing crisis of the polis system, which ended in the death of Athenian democracy.

Greek tragedy in the work of Sophocles reaches its perfection. Sophocles introduced a third actor, increased the dialogic parts of the comedy (episodes) and reduced the choir parts. The action became more lively and authentic, as three characters could act on the stage at the same time and give motivation to their actions. However, the choir in Sophocles continues to play an important role in the tragedy, and the number of choirs was even increased to 15 people.

Interest in the experiences of an individual prompted Sophocles to abandon trilogies, where the fate of a whole family was usually traced. By tradition, he presented three tragedies for competitions, but each of them was an independent work.

The introduction of decorative painting is also associated with the name of Sophocles.

The most famous tragedies of Sophocles from the Theban cycle of myths. These are "Antigone" (about 442 BC), "Oedipus Rex" (about 429 BC) and "Oedipus in Colon" (staged in 441 BC, after the death of Sophocles) .

These tragedies, written and staged at different times, are based on the myth of the Theban king Oedipus and the misfortunes that befell his family. Without knowing it, Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. Many years later, having learned the terrible truth, he gouges out his own eyes and voluntarily goes into exile. This part of the myth formed the basis of the tragedy "Oedipus Rex".

After long wanderings, cleansed by suffering and forgiven by the gods, Oedipus dies in a divine way: he is swallowed up by the earth. This takes place in the suburbs of Athens, Kolon, and the tomb of the sufferer becomes a shrine to the Athenian land. This is told in the tragedy "Oedipus in Colon".

The tragedies of Sophocles were the artistic embodiment of the civil and moral ideals of ancient slave-owning democracy during its heyday (Sophocles did not live to see the terrible defeat of the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC). These ideals were political equality and freedom of all full-fledged citizens, selfless service to the motherland, respect for the gods, nobility of aspirations and feelings of strong-willed people.

Euripides (about 485 - 406 BC)

The social crisis of the Athenian slave-owning democracy and the resulting breakdown of traditional concepts and views were most fully reflected in the work of Sophocles' younger contemporary, Euripides.

Euripides' parents appear to have been wealthy and he received a good education. In contrast to Sophocles, Euripides did not take a direct part in the political life of the state, but he was keenly interested in social events. His tragedies are full of various political statements and allusions to modernity.

Euripides did not have much success with his contemporaries: in his entire life he received only the first 5 awards, and the last posthumously. Shortly before his death, he left Athens and moved to the court of the Macedonian king Archelaus, where he enjoyed honor. In Macedonia, he died (a few months before the death of Sophocles in Athens).

18 dramas have come down to us from Euripides (in total, he wrote from 75 to 92) and a large number of passages.

The playwright brought his characters closer to reality; he, according to Aristotle, depicted people as "what they are." The characters of his tragedies, remaining, like those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the heroes of myths, were endowed with the thoughts, aspirations, and passions of contemporary people of the poet.

In a number of tragedies of Euripides, criticism of religious beliefs sounds, and the gods turn out to be more insidious, cruel and vindictive than people.

According to his socio-political views, he was a supporter of moderate democracy, the backbone of which he considered small landowners. In some of his plays, there are sharp attacks against politicians-demagogues: flattering the people, they seek power in order to use it for their own selfish purposes. In a number of tragedies, Euripides passionately denounces tyranny: the domination of one person over other people against their will seems to him a violation of the natural civil order. Nobility, according to Euripides, lies in personal merit and virtue, and not in noble birth and wealth. The positive characters of Euripides repeatedly express the idea that the unbridled desire for wealth can push a person to crime.

Noteworthy is the attitude of Euripides towards slaves. He believes that slavery is injustice and violence, that people have one nature, and a slave, if he has a noble soul, is no worse than a free one.

Euripides often responds in his tragedies to the events of the Peloponnesian War. Although he is proud of the military successes of his compatriots, he generally has a negative attitude towards the war. It shows what suffering the war brings to people, especially women and children. War can only be justified if people defend the independence of their homeland.

These ideas put forward Euripides among the most progressive thinkers of mankind.

Euripides became the first playwright known to us, in whose works the characters of the characters were not only revealed, but also developed. At the same time, he was not afraid to depict low human passions, the struggle of conflicting aspirations in one and the same person. Aristotle called him the most tragic of all Greek playwrights.

Glory came to Euripides after death. Already in the IV century. BC. he was called the greatest tragic poet, and such a judgment about him was preserved for all subsequent centuries.

Theater of Ancient Rome

In Rome, as well as in Greece, theatrical performances took place irregularly, but were timed to coincide with certain holidays. Up to the middle of the 1st c. BC. no stone theater was built in Rome. The performances were held in wooden structures, which were dismantled after their completion. Initially, there were no special places for spectators in Rome, and they watched "stage games" standing or sitting on the slope of the hill adjacent to the stage. The Roman poet Ovid describes in the poem "The Science of Love" the general view of the theatrical performance of that distant time:

The theater was not marble, the bedspreads were not yet hanging,

The saffron has not yet filled the stage with yellow moisture.

All that was left was the foliage from the palatine trees

It just hung around: the theater was not decorated.

At performances, people sat on turf steps

And he covered his hair only with a green wreath.

(Translated by F. Petrovsky)

The first stone theater in Rome was built by Pompey during his second consulate, in 55 BC. After him, other stone theaters were built in Rome.

The features of the Roman theater building were as follows: the seats for spectators were an exact semicircle; the semicircular orchestra was not intended for the choir (it was no longer in the Roman theater), but was a place for privileged spectators; the stage was low and deep.

The productions of the Roman theater were spectacular and intended mainly for plebeian spectators. "Bread and circuses" this slogan was very popular among the common people in Rome. At the origins of the Roman theater were people of low rank and freedmen.

One of the sources of theatrical performances in Rome was folk songs. These include fescenins - caustic, evil rhymes, which were used by disguised villagers during the harvest festivals. Much came to the theater from atellana, a folk comedy of masks that originated among the Oscan tribes who lived in Italy near the city of Atella.

Atellana brought established masks to the Roman theater, having their origins in the ancient Etruscan Saturnian games held in honor of the ancient Italic god Saturn. There were four masks in the atellan: Makk - a fool and a glutton, Bukk - a stupid braggart, idle talker and simpleton, Papp - a rustic foolish old man and Dossen - an ugly charlatan scientist. This nice company has been amusing honest people for a long time.

It is necessary to name another ancient type of dramatic action - mime. Initially, it was a rough improvisation, performed at Italian holidays, in particular at the spring festival of Floralia, and later the mime became a literary genre.

Several genres of dramatic performances were known in Rome. Even the poet Gnaeus Nevius created the so-called pretextatu-tragedy, the characters of which wore the pretextu - the clothes of Roman magistrates.

Comedy in Rome was represented by two types; comedy togata and comedy palliata. The first is a cheerful play based on local Itelian material. Her characters were people of a simple rank. The togata got its name from the upper Roman clothing - the toga. The authors of such comedies Titinius, Aphranius and Atta are known to us only from separate surviving fragments. The name of the comedy pallita was associated with a short Greek cloak - pallium. The authors of this comedy turned primarily to the creative heritage of the Greek playwrights, representatives of the neo-Attic comedy - Menander, Philemon and Diphilus. Roman comedians often combined scenes from different Greek plays in one comedy.

The most famous representatives of the comedy palliata are Roman playwrights. Plautus and Terence.

Plautus, to whom the world theater owes many artistic discoveries (music became an integral part of the action, it sounded both in lyrical and comedic scenes), was a universal personality: he wrote the text, played in performances that he himself staged ("Donkeys", " Pot", "Boastful Warrior", "Amphitrion", etc.). He was a truly folk artist, like his theater.

Terence is most interested in family conflicts. He banishes coarse farce from his comedies, makes them refined in language, in forms in which human feelings are expressed ("The Girl from Andos", "Brothers", "Mother-in-Law"). It is no coincidence that in the Renaissance, the experience of Terence was so useful to the new masters of drama and theater.

The growing crisis led to the fact that the ancient Roman dramaturgy either fell into decay or was realized in forms that were not actually related to the theater. So the greatest tragic poet of Rome, Seneca, writes his tragedies not for presentation, but as "dramas for reading." But atellana continues to develop, the number of her masks is replenished. Her productions often dealt with political and social issues. The traditions of atellana and mime, in fact, never died among the people; they continued to exist in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance.

In Rome, the skill of the actors reached a very high level. The tragic actor Aesop and his contemporary comic actor Roscius (1st century BC) enjoyed the love and respect of the public.

The theater of the ancient world has become an integral part of the spiritual experience of all mankind, has laid a lot in the basis of what we today call modern culture.

The Roman theater, like the Roman drama, is modeled on the Greek theater, although in some respects it differs from it. Seats for spectators in Roman theaters occupy no more than a semicircle, ending in the direction of the stage along a line parallel to this latter. The stage is twice as long as in Greek, stairs lead from the audience seats to the stage, which was not the case in Greek. The depth of the orchestra is less for the same width; entrances to the orchestra already; the stage is closer to the center. All these differences can be observed in the ruins of many Roman theaters, of which the best preserved are in Aspendos (Aspendos), in Turkey and in Orange (Aransio) in France.

Vitruvius gives an accurate description of the plan and construction of the Roman theaters, as if establishing two types of theaters independent of each other. The deviations of the Roman theater from the Greek are explained by the reduction, then the complete abolition of the role of the choir and, depending on this, the division of the orchestra into two parts: both of them began with the Greeks and only received their completed development from the Romans.

In the Roman theater, as in the Greek one, the space of seats for the audience and the stage depended on the main circle and the inscribed figure. For the main figure of the Roman theater, Vitruvius takes four equilateral triangles with vertices at equal distances from one another. The lower edges of the place for the audience were always parallel to the stage, in contrast to the Greek theater, and went along a line drawn through the corners of the inscribed figures closest to the horizontal diameter of the circle, which is why the extreme wedges were smaller than the others. The upper arc of the main circle formed the lower boundary of the seats for spectators. This space was also divided by concentric passages (praecinctiones) into two or three tiers, which in turn were divided into wedges (cunei) by stairs along the radii. The size of the space for spectators was increased by the fact that the side entrances to the orchestra were covered and were also assigned to spectators. In the Roman theater the orchestra is smaller than in the Greek theatre; there were seats for senators; the stage (pulpitum), on the contrary, is expanded, since it was assigned not only to actors, but to all artists; according to Vitruvius, it is significantly lower than the Greek scene, by which he means proscenium, also calling it logeion. He determines the maximum height of the Roman stage at 5 feet, the Greek - at 10-12 feet. The fundamental mistake of Vitruvius in comparing the theaters of the two types is that he imagined the Roman stage as a transformation of the Greek proscenium, which he considered the scene of the actors, with the difference that in the Roman theater the proscenium was made lower, wider and longer, moved closer to the audience. In fact, the Roman scene is part of the ancient Greek. orchestras - that part, which, with the reduction of the role of choirs in dramatic performances, became superfluous even among the Greeks in the Macedonian period; for the actors, that part of the circle that lay directly in front of the stage and the proscenium was enough; at the same time, both parts of the orchestra either remained on the same plane, or the place for the actors could be raised to the level of the lowest row of seats. Following the model of Roman theaters, some Greek theaters were rebuilt and new ones were built in Greek cities.

Another important innovation in the Roman theater was the roof, which connected the building of the stage and the seats for the audience into a single, integral building. The machines and stage costumes in the Roman theater were, in general, the same as in the Greek. The curtain (auleum) fell before the start of the game under the stage and rose again at the end. Masks for Roman actors were allowed late, it seems - already after Terentius; this, however, did not prevent the Roman youth from disguising themselves in atellani. Stage performances adorned various annual holidays and were also given on the occasion of important state events, during triumphs, on the occasion of the consecration of public buildings, etc.

In addition to tragedies and comedies, atellani, mimes, pantomimes, and pyrrhic plays were given. Whether there were competitions of poets in Rome is not known exactly. Since the games were organized either by private individuals or by the state, the supervision of them belonged to either private organizers or magistrates (curatores ludorum). Until Augustus, the leadership of the annual stage games was entrusted mainly to the curule and plebeian aediles, or to the city praetor; Augustus transferred it to the praetors. Extraordinary state holidays were in charge of the consuls. An entrepreneur (dominus gregis), the main actor and director, the head of a troupe of actors (grex, caterva) entered into an agreement with the person who arranged the holiday - official or private; he received the agreed payment. The remuneration to the author of the play was paid by the entrepreneur. Since in Rome stage plays meant fun, and not service to a deity, it was customary for poets to receive money for plays, which in the eyes of society reduced poets to the position of artisans. In Greece, poets were high in public opinion, the highest government posts were open to them; in Rome, plays were performed by the lower classes, even slaves. In accordance with this, the craft of the actor was also lowly valued, lower than the title of rider and gladiator; the title of actor imposed the stamp of dishonor.

The actors were usually farts and vacationers. In general, the theater in Rome did not have that lofty, serious, educational, as it were, sacred character, which it had long distinguished in Greece. Stage plays borrowed from Greece have gradually given way to performances that have nothing to do with either tragedy or comedy: mime, pantomime, ballet. The state treated this kind of entertainment with no sympathy. The magistrates, who gave the games, and private individuals at first built wooden stages for the actors themselves, which were destroyed after the performance. Most of the expenses, sometimes very significant, also fell on the organizers of the games. For the first time, a Greek-style theater (theatrum et proscaenium) was built in Rome only in 179 BC. e., but was soon broken. A permanent stone building for the stage was built in 178 BC. e., but in this place there were no seats for spectators; the audience stood separated from the stage by a wooden fence; they were not even allowed to take chairs with them in the theater. The attitude towards the public was completely opposite in Greece: the audience took pillows, food, delicacies, wine with them in the theater. The closest acquaintance with the Greek theater began after the conquest of Greece (145 BC). The permanent stone theater, which could accommodate more than 17,000 seats (according to Pliny - 40,000), was built by Pompey in 55 BC. e. The ruins of a theater built in 13 BC have been preserved. e. Octavian.

Theater attendance was free, equally free for men and women, but not for slaves. In order to win over the audience or surprise them with luxury and splendor, the organizers of the games in later times extended their concerns for the public to the point that they strewed the theater with flowers, sprinkled fragrant liquids in it, decorated it richly with gold. Nero ordered to stretch over the audience a purple veil, dotted with golden stars, with the image of an emperor on a chariot.

Similar information.

Antique drama Antique Drama Persians Actors Actors Parrot Episodia First Stasim first episodia second Stasim Second Exodi Primety Cleaned Actors Prologue Parrod Episodia First Stasidi Second Episodia Secondies Second Stasidia Third Stasim Sophocles Episodia Active Persian Persiades First Stasim First Stasim First Episidia Second Kommos Stasim Second episodia Third Stasim Third episodia fourth stasim fourth exod comos antigon Actors Acts Episodia First Stasidi first episodia Second episodia second episodia Third episodia Fourth episodia fourth episodia fourth stasim -fifth (Hiperxem) Commos Medei Active Medei Prosda Paros EPISODIUM FIRST STASIM FIRST EPISODIUM SECOND STASIM SECOND EPISODIUM THIRD STASIM THIRD EPISODY FOURTH STASIM FOURTH EPISODY FIFTH EPISODIUM SIXTH STASIM FIFTH EXODUS HIPPOLYTOS CHARACTERS PROLOGUE PAROD EPISODIUM FIRST PERIOD Stasim the second episodia Third Kommos Stasim Third Episody Fourth Stasim Fourth Exsode Aristophanes Cloud Active Parbas Parabas Parabasy Episodia The First Episodia The Third Episodia Fourth Episodia The Sixth Episody of the Seventh Episodia Eighth Episodia The Acts The First Episodia The First Parabis of the Episodia Parabasis Episodia The third episodia fourth parabasy episodia fifth episodia Sixth Exodia Menandra Burzga Actors Action First Action The third action Fourth action Fifth Titus Mazion Plave Two Menhehma Content Prologue Acts First Scene First Scene the Third Scene the Third Action The Fourth Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene The First Scene is the First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene First Scene The First Scene is the First Scene The First Scene is ACT THIRD SCENE ONE SCENE SECOND ACT THREE SCENE FOUR Eighth Publius Terentius Afre Afre Acts Acts Prologue Action First Scene First Scene the Second Scene the Third Scene Fourth Scene Fifth Action First Scene the First Scene the Third Scene Fourth Scene Fifth Scene Sixth Sixth Scene the Third Scene the Third Scene the Third Scene Stage Fourth Scene Fourth Fourth Four Scene first scene second scene Third scene Fourth scene fifth scene Fifth scene first scene the second scene the third scene Fourth scene fifth scene Sixth Lucius Anneka Octavia Active Faces Scene First Scene the Third Scene Fourth Scene Sixth Scene Seventh Stage Eighth Scene Ninth Scene Ninth Stage Ninth Stage Ninth Stage Ninth Scene Eight

ANTIQUE DRAMA

antique drama

From Aeschylus, with whom this volume opens, 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 largest writers of different eras and peoples, these two names, of course, do not have the same weight. When they say: “Aeschylus”, some people immediately have a vague, others more or less clear image of the “father of tragedy”, an image of a venerable textbook, even majestic, marble of an antique bust, a manuscript scroll, 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, at least, not theatrical: “Oh yes, this is the one who opened his veins on the orders of Nero ...” Is such an incommensurability of the posthumous literary glory of Aeschylus and Seneca fair? Yes, it is true, without a doubt. After checking for centuries - and even more so for millennia - arbitrariness in the selection of the most significant cultural values, in general, does not happen.

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 imprint in the memory of posterity, and the other, as a playwright, a weak, superficial trace, both ended up under the same cover? Did they rightfully meet? Yes, by right. Our book is called "The Ancient Drama", and the ancient drama, if you look at it with our today's eyes, from a distance of two thousand years, is still one whole, soldered not only by common historical premises - the slave system, pagan mythology, - but also by purely literary continuity, which consisted in borrowing and developing 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 at the same competitions and challenged each other for the first prize. With all the differences in eras and talents, flourishing and decline, with the seemingly diametrical opposition of tragedy and comedy, with the multilingualism of the Greeks and Romans, despite the fact that only a small part of what was written has come down to us from some authors, and nothing has come down from others at all , - with all this, ancient dramaturgy seems to us today to be 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, how did it all begin? It is enough to read any tragedy of Aeschylus once to feel in it some kind of old culture of spectacles and acting. First of all, the indispensable presence of the choir is striking - a feature that, in the modern view, is strange. And then, reading carefully, you notice that without the choir, perhaps, the action would not have moved: in one case there would not have been a dialogue, in another - there would not have been an exposition necessary for understanding what is happening, in the third - and this is the most striking - there was no dialogue at all. would be the main character, because the chorus is precisely the hero around whom the drama revolves. And you also notice, when reading Aeschylus, that the parts of the choir are subject to some kind of compositional rules of their own, and these rules are developed very sophisticatedly. The choir sings both at the beginning, when it appears before the audience, and in the middle of the play, when the actors leave, and at the end of it, leaving their platform - the orchestra. All these performances of the choir even have special names - people, stasim, exodus. - One more pattern is striking: the songs of the choir usually consist of paired parts, and the second (“antistrophe”) repeats the rhythm of the first (“stanza”) on a new text. Such fine mechanics does not arise from scratch. Tradition is easily guessed 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 choir and the complex system of choral parties in the Aeschylus theater would lead us to the idea that Aeschylus's "first" can only be called conditionally, and would point us to the chorus as the starting point for a search that would lead to the origins of the tragic drama. And comparing the great importance of the choir in Aeschylus' tragedies with its role in the poets of the next generation - Sophocles and especially Euripides - about which someone, albeit with a bit of exaggeration, said that they can be read without any loss of understanding of the meaning, skipping the choral parts, - you see even more clearly that the chorus in tragedy is its most ancient, most archaic core, closest to the beginnings of drama.

The theater that comes to life on the pages of our collection, even the earliest one, Aeschylus', 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 that qualitative leap, which was the transition from ritual songs in honor of the god Dionysus to a professionally prepared performance. The word "tragedy" means "goat's song" in translation. The translation itself still 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. In honor of Dionysus, drunken processions have long been arranged. The 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 drunken god, who was sometimes also represented by one of the mummers, and completed the ceremony 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 well-known mythical companions of this god - goat-footed satyrs - oh yes, if everything started with the Dionysian cult, then, really, there were enough reasons to the oldest genre of dramaturgy received its not very beautiful name.

How soloists stood out from the choir of mummers, how instead of Dionysus other gods became the main figures of the action, and instead of the gods and along with them - the heroes of myths, how it became more complicated, more and more moving away from its cult fundamental principle, a dramatic performance, 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, even after becoming literature, tragedy continues to develop in the same direction: it becomes more and more secular, choral singing occupies less and less space in it compared to dialogue, not only mythical heroes appear among its characters, but also real historical figures, such as like the Persian kings Xerxes and Darius. She almost cuts off the umbilical cord that connects her to Dionysian songs, to a religious cult.

But only almost! If you take a closer look at it, then it will not completely cut off this umbilical cord on Greek soil. Up to Euripides, the altar remained an obligatory attribute of the theatrical props, and the glorification of the gods was an indispensable theme of the tragic choir; up to Euripides, and even most often it was with him, heroes and gods will arrive at the scene of action on chariots descending from that half-carriage-half-boat, on which Dionysus "himself" came to Athens on special holidays, just about as he arrives today we have Santa Claus "himself" in some kind of kindergarten. 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 dramas will no longer have the slightest relation to this god.

What we need to look closely at today was always in sight among the contemporaries of the three great Greek tragedians. And the inertness with which theatrical spectacles were allowed only on Dionysia and Lenya gave birth to a proverb in Athens: “What does Dionysus have to do with it?” This mocking question is surprisingly well-aimed and contagious. He clearly indicates that in the heyday of tragedy, the traces of the liturgical ritual preserved by it were perceived as a relic, and we, separated from the world where they believed in gods and heroes, thicker than centuries, this question directly calls to expand its meaning and see beyond the foggy sometimes a mythological shell of tragedy living, earthly life.

From the very beginning of Greek drama, earthly affairs entered into it without the mediation of mythology. Athenian theater of the 5th century BC. e., and the tragic - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the comic - Aristophanes, always dealt with the most burning issues of politics and morality, it was a very civic, very tendentious theater, aware of its educational, mentoring role and proud of it. And there is, it seems to us, some instructive regularity in the fact that the first pre-Aeschylean drama, about which more or less coherent and detailed information has come down to us, was the tragedy of Phrynichus "The Capture of Miletus", written on a topical topic, under a fresh impression only that noisy events.

The story of Phrynichus deserves to be told here because it anticipates important features of the theatrical life of its age. 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 a thousand drachmas on the grounds that with his work he brought the audience to tears, reminding them of, so to speak, a national disaster. And this tragedy was forbidden to ever stage. The seemingly sentimental and naive motivation for the ban actually masked the fear of the agitational power of the play, the fear of those who felt responsible for the lack of assistance to the Milesians and, in general, for being unprepared to rebuff the Persians at a time when the threat of their invasion of Greece was becoming more and more real. In the same year that Phrynichus staged the Capture of Miletus, Themistocles, a statesman who understood the inevitability of war with the Persians and advocated 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 fame, Themistocles, at his own expense, staged the tragedy of the same Phrynichus "Phoenician", where this victory at Salamis was sung. "What does Dionysus have to do with it?"

Neither the Capture of Miletus nor the Phoenician Woman have come down to us; the first tragedian in time, whose dramas we can still 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), although a small part, nevertheless survived. 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 was this era in Hellas, glorified by the 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 and are called policies) 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 with the greatest completeness by Homer's poems. At that time, Athens, the largest Greek port, the capital of Attica rich in olive oil and wine, lived the most developed social and cultural life compared to other policies at that time. Athens led the all-Hellenic war with the Persians and, having won it, rebuilt itself even more magnificently, democratized its political institutions, and achieved tremendous 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 do 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 a wider participation in them by 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 more severe way of life and coarser morals, not to mention Persia, where it was customary to prostrate before the kings and their satraps.

The all-Hellenic patriotic upsurge, which was accompanied by a flourishing of culture in Athens, naturally did not eliminate all kinds of contradictions either within the policies, including within Athens, or that had long existed between the policies, especially between Athens and Sparta; and internal contradictions, as always happens, became only sharper and more naked because of the troubles in foreign policy. Started in 431 B.C. e., less than fifty years after the Salamis victory over the Persians, the intra-Hellenic, called Peloponnesian, war broke Greece into two, as we would now say, blocks - 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 commander Lysander, all power in Athens passed to the committee of thirty, which established a brutal terrorist regime. The strongest blow was also dealt to art, and first of all to its most accessible and most civic form - the theater.

Even this brief outline of the historical events of the 5th century B.C. e. allows us to distinguish three stages in them: the formation of Greek city-states and Hellenic self-consciousness 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, the reassessment of ethical norms that seemed unshakable.

And since there are also three great Greek tragedians, and Aeschylus is older than Sophocles, and Sophocles is Euripides, it is perhaps 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. Often historians of literature have 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 in 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 Euripides' specialty. 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 in other facets of it, the mechanical distribution of the three tragedians over the three stages of history also requires a certain chronological stretch. In the year of Aeschylus's death to Sophocles turned forty years old, and this age, it should be noted, was considered by the Greeks as 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 to us that Sophocles survived Aeschylus by as much as fifty years. But after all, Euripides survived him by exactly the same amount and died, it seems, even a little earlier than Sophocles, but the heroes of Sophocles, as we will see, are harmonious, majestic and noble, and Euripides's are tormented by passions, sometimes absorbed by family troubles and sometimes do not live in palaces, but in huts. Of course, time inevitably invades books and leaves its mark on them. But, speaking of artists, it is necessary, in addition to general historical changes, to remember the uniqueness of each talent, that some literary devices, developing and improving them, are being replaced by others, 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 the great tragedians was greatly facilitated by the scarcity of our factual data on their life and work, the incommensurability of the small number of dramas that have come down to us with the number they wrote. From ancient sources it is known, for example, that the victory of the young Sophocles during his speech at the competition of tragedians 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, other times - other mores, Aeschylus is already outdated, he failed 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” in the same competition, where Sophocles got only the second. And immediately all sorts of hasty constructions collapse, and once again the vulnerability and fragility of all sorts of schemes are revealed.

What was, for all their differences, undoubtedly inherent in all dramatic poets of the 5th century BC. e. - and tragedians and Aristophanes? The conviction that the poet should be a teacher of the people, his mentor. The educational and educational role of the theater in those days is now difficult even to imagine. There was no printing, there were no newspapers or magazines, and apart from official popular assemblies and unofficial market gatherings, the theater was the only medium of communication. The Athenian theater of Dionysus accommodated about seventeen thousand spectators - as many people as the average stadium today, almost the entire adult population of Athens at that time. No speaker, no manuscript could count on so many listeners and readers. Under Pericles, for the poorest population, a state allowance was introduced to pay for theater seats, the so-called "teorikon" (in translation: "spectacular money"). Performances took place, however, only on holidays, but they began in the morning and ended at sunset and stretched over several days. The art of the authors was evaluated by specially elected judges, the first prize meant victory for the poet, the second - a moderate success, and the third - a failure. The list of such eloquent details can be continued, but is it not already clear that each dramatic competition was an event not only for the heroes of the occasion - the authors, but for the whole city, that the very meaning, the very staging of the theater business obliged the poet to the greatest exactingness, to consciousness of his lofty civic mission?

That the Greek playwrights did treat their work as a pedagogical service is confirmed by a number of ancient testimonies. “As mentors teach boys the mind, so people are already adults - poets,” - this verse in his comedy “The Frogs” was put into the mouth of Aeschylus by Aristophanes, his admirer and the great theater poet himself. Antiquity preserved one story about Euripides, perhaps anecdotal, but, like any good anecdote, grasping the very essence of the phenomenon. The audience allegedly demanded from Euripides that he throw out some place from his tragedy, and then the poet went on stage and declared that he was writing not in order to learn from the public, but to teach it. As for Sophocles, he, according to Aristotle, said that "depicts people as they should be, and Euripides as they really are." "What they should be"! Edification is heard in this will-expressive formula itself, 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 complicated from author to author, relying 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 the second, after which Sophocles - the third. Ideas were adopted, enriched and developed, of course, not as simply and directly as purely professional technical experience, but a certain continuity, of course, existed here as well.

Aeschylus allegedly called his tragedies crumbs from the banquet table of Homer. This modest self-assessment should, apparently, be understood only in such a way that Aeschylus, like other tragedians, drew plots for his works in mythology, and the Iliad and Odyssey were the most abundant source of mythological stories. After all, the tragedy rethought the mythological images of the Homeric epic, correlating them with the era of much more complex and developed social relations. Athens of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides was not patriarchal-pastoral Greece, which 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 - developed completely different, due to these differences, type of person. The individual characteristics of a person, his character and abilities acquired more 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, has been replaced now, when man has become the measure of things, with a more complex religious consciousness. Having inherited from their past external human likeness, the gods also became the personification and bearers of high moral standards, human ethical ideals. And if we are talking about the continuity - from tragedian to tragedian - of ideas, then first of all we mean the incessant development of the idea of the human person as the basis of any reflection on the world and life, the incessant deepening into the recesses of the human soul.

Let's open the books, read first the first of the great three, then the second and third. None of the tragedies that have come down to us, not only those of Aeschylus, but in general all that have survived, has such real, non-mythical characters as the Persians. Atossa, Darius, Xerxes are historical figures, the rulers of the Persian state, and not the heroes of the Trojan or Theban cycle of myths. The time of action is not hoary Homeric antiquity, but 480 BC. e., when the Persian sea and land forces suffered a crushing defeat in Greece, the author himself, Aeschylus, is a contemporary of the events depicted by him, 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 a tragedy with his truth would mean missing a great opportunity to penetrate into his mindset.

The action takes place in the camp of the enemies of Greece, in the Persian capital of Susa. Of the greatest triumph of Greece, we learn here 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, although they did not put into this word the fullness of its current negative meaning. Indeed, there is nothing barbaric in the modern sense, that is, wild, inhuman, savage, neither in the heartbroken Atossa, nor in the judicious Persian elders, and even more so in the wise, from the point of view of Aeschylus, King Darius. The only “negative” hero, unreasonable and punished for his folly, King Xerxes, can only be blamed for his exorbitant pride and audacity, the victims of which thousands of his compatriots fell. 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"), Aegistus ("Oresteia") and even the main god of the Greeks Zeus, until he lost his primitive human likeness ( "Prometheus Chained"). No, pride, which does not abhor violence, is for Aeschylus a human vice, it is, as it were, the polar opposite of morality. And yet, it is precisely the context of "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, not replacing "barbarians" here with any "foreigners", "foreigners" or "Persians". It's not that the Persians in this drama now and then frantically cry, beat their chests and are generally not embarrassed by the immoderate manifestation of grief and despair. Crying, groans, even cries are a common place in tragedies, a genre feature, probably associated with the origin of ritual lamentations. What tragedy does not contain sobs and cries? The association with "barbarism" does not come from here.

Atossa tells the elders her ominous dream. “I saw two well-dressed women: // One in a Persian dress, on the other a dress // There was a Dorian one.” The women who dreamed about the queen are 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 the chariot, “One of them obediently took the bit, // But the other, flying up, the horse harness // Tore with her hands, threw off the reins / And immediately broke the yoke in half. These images themselves - the yoke, the harness - are already significant enough. Further, the opposition between Greeks and Persians becomes even clearer. “Who is their leader and shepherd, who is master over the army?” - asks, referring to the Greeks, the Persian queen, who does not imagine any other form of government except 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 utterly defeated by the Greeks, Aeschylus, again through the lips of the Persian choir, draws from this such general and far-reaching conclusions 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 man, civilized: people will no longer fall to the ground in fear and keep their mouths shut, because - “He who is free from the yoke , // Also free in speech.

In the tragedy "The Petitioner", which takes place in ancient times legendary for Aeschylus, there is an episode where the king of Argos, Pelasg, negotiates with the herald of the sons of Egypt threatening to invade his territory. The antagonists here are, therefore, the Greeks and the Egyptians. Pelasg enlisted the support of the people's assembly, he is strong in unanimity with his subjects and mocks the laws of the Eastern despotisms, over their, we would say, bureaucracy: // You clearly hear the word: Get out! Doesn't Pelasg's attitude towards the Egyptians look like. Aeschylus' attitude towards the Persians? In "Oresteia", a tragedy mythological in material, like "The Petitioner", in the words of King Agamemnon, the familiar motif sounds again: , to the envy of everyone, lay under my feet // Carpets.

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

Noting that in the "Persians" Aeschylus does not mention the Ionian Greeks who fought on the side of Xerxes, that is, against his fellow tribesmen, and is silent about strife in the Greek camp itself on the eve of the decisive battle, some researchers explain this by the author's purely political calculation, by the fact that what whatever it may be, reproaches seem to him tactically inappropriate at a moment when a lasting union of the Greek states must be created. But the matter, it seems to us, is not simply a narrow political calculation. Aeschylus is not an official historian, but a poet, an artist, he generalizes events, interprets them broadly, contrasts, starting from them, whole worldviews; yes, he is a politician, but a politician, like any real artist, by and large, and not by small things. Among the names of the Persian commanders listed in the Persians, many are fictitious. But what does this mean for us now? Exactly none. What significance would it have for us to mention, say, the ruler of the Ionian city of Halicarnassus, the Greek woman Artemisia, who deserved the gratitude of Xerxes himself? Absolutely none, if it had not become an impetus for thinking about betrayal, about a war between people speaking the same language, that is, if it had not been ideologically, artistically productive. It is quite possible that such reflections became the subject of other tragedies of Aeschylus that have not come down to us. But "Persians" is not about that. It is about 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 about the individual" (ch. 9, 1451) .

Pride in victorious Greece grew in Aeschylus, we said, into pride in man. Is there already in the very awareness of human greatness some kind of encroachment on the authority of the gods, a certain theomachism? 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 Chained" (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 fail to notice a strange contradiction. Zeus in "Prometheus" is a real tyrant, a cruel treacherous despot who despises people, "whose age is like a day", a lustful rapist, the culprit of the madness of the unfortunate Io, an evil and vengeful ruler, subjecting his enemy Prometheus to the most sophisticated tortures. And in "Oresteia" this deity is essentially good, which, although "through torment, through pain", but "leads people to the mind, leads to understanding", a deity behind whose power mercy is hidden, and in "The Petitioners" the choir hopes for a just the court of Zeus, whose will "even in the darkness of the night black fate before the eyes of mortals burns with a bright light." How to reconcile one with the other?

Prometheus, who stole fire for people, 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 relatives personify - Hermes, Hephaestus, Strength, Power, the old man Ocean. But the vices that they personify are also the vices of human relations, and Prometheus - and with Prometheus Aeschylus - does not rebel against the gods in general, but against the gods who have absorbed the worst qualities of people. The gods, “deadly” wounded here, are primitive humanoid gods, a relic of Homeric or even more ancient times.

Aeschylus is not a theomachist in the sense of rejecting religion. But his religion is, first of all, fidelity 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: reverence for the gods, reverence for parents, and a hospitable attitude towards 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 just show a chain reaction of evil when these simple 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 kind of ethical code of developed ancient civilizations, which developed in the homeland of the poet 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 Unchained" and "Prometheus the Firebearer". We do not know the order of the parts, nor the content of the other two. But even a comparison of "Prometheus Chained" 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 digression into the history of his contemporary religion, into history, if so to speak, the civilization of the gods, due to the civilization of man. In favor of such an explanatory assumption, the obvious predilection of Aeschylus also speaks, who, like other tragedians, always set himself educational and 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 the "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, perfecting 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 beginning - into full-blooded image. No, Aeschylus cannot be reproached 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 insane Io and Cassandra are painted by an artist who is also interested in the pathological side of life, and not by a philosopher who wraps his positions in the form of a dialogue. Philosophical dialogue, philosophical drama will come to literature later, Aeschylus is too early a writer for this. And precisely because he is still only a trailblazer, a pioneer, his characters look like gigantic statues, boldly carved from a stone block, barely processed with a chisel, unpolished, but absorbing all the hidden strength and heaviness of the stone. And perhaps Prometheus, where the action takes place at the end of the world, among the primordial chaos of rocks, far from human habitation, is a tragedy where, according to the plan, not people appear before the viewer, but only fairy-tale creatures, only faces, not faces, by such their external construction especially impressively corresponds to this rough outline of the characters characteristic of Aeschylus.

When, reading Antigone by Sophocles, you reach the song of the choir: “There are many miracles in the world ...” - there is a feeling of something familiar. The man - the choir sings - is the greatest miracle. He knows the art of navigation, tamed animals, knows how to build houses, heal from diseases, he is cunning and strong. In this list of human capabilities, abilities and skills, some items 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 one source - myths about deities who taught a person all sorts of useful arts. But, reading the same Antigone, you discover a deeper continuity, a more meaningful continuation of the Aeschylus tradition than an unpretentious rehash.

The plot of the tragedy is very simple. Antigone betrays the body of her murdered brother Polynices, whom the ruler of Thebes, Antigone's uncle Creon, forbade to bury on pain of death - as a traitor to the motherland and the culprit of civil war. For this, Antigone is executed, after which her fiancé, Creon's son, and the groom's mother, Creon's wife, commit suicide.

With such its plot simplicity, this Sophoclean tragedy gave rich food for thought and debate to distant descendants. What interpretations of "Antigone" did not offer learned wit! Some saw it as 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 a brother) and the demand of the state, Goethe explained Creon's actions by his personal hatred for the murdered, Hegel considered Antigone to be the perfect example of the tragic clash between the state and the family. All these interpretations find more or less firm support in the text of the tragedy. Without going into an analysis of them, let us pose the question - why it was possible at all to interpret a drama with such a small number of characters and so economically constructed in such different ways. First of all, it seems to us, because in Sophocles the people depicted in relief are arguing, characters, individuals collide, and not bare ideas, tendencies. Indeed, in life, every act, every conflict, not to mention such an extreme manifestation of the will as self-sacrifice, is prepared by many prerequisites - the upbringing of a person, his convictions, his special psychological make-up, which is why it is so difficult to explain exhaustively any worldly Drama.

Sophocles, like Aeschylus, is full of interest in man. But Sophocles' people are more plastic than those of his predecessor. Next to the main character, her own sister Ismene is displayed. The fact that Antigone and Ismene are sisters puts them in exactly the same position with respect to Creon and Polyneices. Perhaps, as the bride of the son of Creon, Antigone could have even more inner motives for "agreement" than Ismene. But it is still Ismene who puts up with the cruel order of Creon, and not Antigone. We find exactly the same comparison of two characters at a moment requiring decisive action in another Sophoclerian 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 Elektra, is not able to hate her father's killers enough to take revenge on them at the risk of her own life. And that is why it is Electra, and not Chrysothemis, who turns out to be the fearless assistant of Orestes in the hour of revenge.

With such comparisons of two figures, each involuntarily sets off the other. Aeschylus had only the sharpest contrasts - between good and evil, civilization and savagery, pride and piety. Sophocles' contrast is richer in shades, and Sophocles' man is richer in shades.

Sophocles' Electra is about exactly the same thing as v. Aeschylus' "The Sacrifice at the Tomb", about the revenge of Orestes 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 would not be an exaggeration to say that Elektra owes this nomination to the role of the main character to her sluggish, timid, ready-to-compromise sister, who was not at all in Aeschylus's tragedy. Only in comparison with Chrysothemis, all the originality and remarkable character of Electra is visible, while Aeschylus Electra had no choice but to be content with the role of a passive ally of his brother dictated by myth.

In Sophocles' comparison of Antigone with Ismene and Electra with Chrysothemis, there is 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 should he be in order to exercise this ability of his? The most demanding of himself, ready in the name of his moral ideal to sacrifice personal well-being and even sacrifice his life.

The pinnacle of such pedagogical exactingness to a person is Sophocles' Oedipus the King. When they say that Greek tragedy is the tragedy of fate, that it shows the helplessness of a person in the face of an evil fate predetermined for him, they mainly mean this drama. But the popular notion that rock is the driving force behind Greek tragedies has developed primarily because of the plots that strike the current reader with their outlandishness much more than the psychological art with which they are developed, because: to the psychological subtleties of literature it , unlike the ancient Greek, got used to it, and long ago renounced its obligatory connection with myths, including myths dating back to the ancient times of incestuous marriages and parricide. In other words, there is a measure of modernization in the perception of Greek tragedy as a tragedy predominantly of fate, and this is most easily seen in the example of Oedipus Rex.

The modern Sophocles viewer 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 combination of circumstances. The tragedian and the audience were worried not by the question “what?”, but by the question “how?”. How did Oedipus know that he was a parricide and a defiler of his mother's bed, how did it come to the point that he had to find out about this, how did he behave when he found out, 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 to teach the viewer, by his example, courageous readiness for any blows of fate - this is the humanistic task that Sophocles set himself. “Nothing contrary to meaning should be in the course of events; or else 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, would not fit with the characters' characters, cannot be found in the development of the action of "Oedipus". If anything is “against the meaning”, it is the obvious undeservedness of the blows that fall on Oedipus, the blind obstinacy 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 of 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, accepted as an indispensable convention, served as a pretext for talking about the moral responsibility of a person for his actions, for a psychologically correct picture of worthy behavior in the most tragic circumstances.

In another Sophocles tragedy (“Oedipus in Colon”), 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 called different than in “Oedipus the King”, which ended with the hero’s farewell to homeland and relatives and his own decision to go into exile: here Oedipus is an exile involuntarily, the king was deprived of the throne by his sons and Creon, eager for supreme power. Doesn't this also speak of 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 he was especially worried about and occupied. In this sense, he worked on the same principle as, for example, the painters of the Renaissance, for whom the usual biblical scenes served as a form that absorbed modern life material and a 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 current reader written much later than the tragedies of his two older contemporaries. They are, as a rule, quite understandable and 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 in which Sophocles' Oedipus or Antigone fall. The main theme of Euripides can be judged by two of his 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 the other Euripides tragedies that have come down to us.

But it's not just the themes. Euripides boldly introduced the most real everyday details into the tragedy, which spoke in a sublime, and sometimes pompous language. In Aeschylus and Sophocles, if slaves appeared on stage, then only in small, “passing” roles, and more often as extras. The place of slaves in the Euripides' theater was much more in line with their place in the contemporary life of the poet. 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 the daughter of Agamemnon, both said only that Elektra was being pushed around in her own house and that she lives in it almost in the position of a servant. Euripides gave this situation a worldly earthly development, and something happened to the mythological heroine that could well have happened to some Athenian girl from a well-born family under similar domestic circumstances: Electra was married to a peasant against her will. The poet seemed to offer a more consonant reading of the myth.

Euripides' desire for the maximum likelihood of a tragic action can also be seen in the psychological-natural motivations for the behavior of the characters. It is difficult to count - there are so many of them in Euripides - cases when the hero, going on stage, explains the reason for his appearance. It seems that the poet is disgusted by any stage convention. Even the very form of a monologue, a speech without interlocutors, addressed only to the audience, that is, a convention that the theater still does not part with, - even she, in the opinion of Euripides, sometimes needs, apparently, a logical justification. Read carefully the beginning of the Medea. The nurse delivers a monologue that brings the viewer up to date and outlines the further development of the action in general terms. 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 with Medea's children appears on the scene, 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 grief to yourself? And the nurse explains this speech to “herself” as a result of sorrowful insanity: “Before that // I was exhausted, you believe that desire, // I myself don’t know how, in me// It appeared to tell the earth and sky// The misfortunes of the queen ours."

These features of the dramaturgy of Euripides, subordinated to his general attitude towards bringing tragedy closer to everyday life, to worldly practice and worldly logic, a setting whose innovative fruitfulness was shown by the entire subsequent history of the 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 the ages” in his writings.

With such "everyday life" of the tragedies of Euripides, the participation in their action of gods, demigods and all sorts of miraculous forces that are 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 it flies away from Jason Medea, is somehow puzzling in a tragedy with very real human problems. The present reader, perhaps, will consider this feature of Euripides' drama simply an archaic relic, and make an excuse for antiquity. But after all, Aristophanes already blamed Euripides for the inharmonious mixing of high and low, Aristotle already reproached him for his predilection for the “god from the machine” 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 a god who appeared on 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 to 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 l Sophocles. The poet really tried to portray people as they really are. He boldly introduced everyday material into tragedy and just as boldly included dark passions in her field of vision. Showing in "Hippolytus" the death of a hero who self-confidently opposes the blind force of love, and in "Bacchae" - a hero who overly relies on the power of reason, he warned of the danger that the irrational principle in human nature poses for the norms established by civilization. And if he so often needed the unexpected intervention of supernatural forces to resolve the conflict, then the point here is not just the inability to find a more convincing compositional move, but the fact that the poet did not see the resolution of many intricate human affairs in contemporary real conditions. It was sometimes more important for Euripides 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 Euripides' tragedies that have come down to us - "Alcesta" - shows how much more than the denouement of the drama, this poet was concerned about posing a problem, a problem in this case moral and philosophical, because "Alcesta" is a tragedy about death.

The goddesses of fate promised Apollo to save Tsar Admet from death if any of his relatives agreed to descend into the underworld instead of him. “The king tested all the relatives: neither his father, / He did not pass the old mother, / But he found a friend here in one wife, / Who would love the darkness of Hades for a friend.” Just as Admetus mourns the dying Alcesta, Hercules comes to his house as a guest. 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.

Judging only by the plot and denouement, Alcesta, with its unambiguously happy ending, is a work of a completely different genre than Hippolytus or Medea. By the way, in Alces the happy ending is achieved without the help of the "god from the machine" 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 Admet is quite realistically motivated - gratitude for hospitality. But, reading the Alcestus, 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 a myth with a successful outcome in accordance with all the rules of dramatic technique, Euripides made Admet's conversation with 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 his son. Feret's behavior is all the more unattractive because his daughter-in-law Alcesta agreed to self-sacrifice, and the viewer is already inclined to take the side of Admet. But then Feret takes the floor and returns it to Admet, who agrees to buy life at the cost of his wife's life, reproach for cowardice: "Be quiet, child: we are all cheerful." And it is immediately clear that Admet is no less selfish than his father, that it is still a question - is it worth sacrificing one's life for the sake of such a person, moreover, that there are no objective criteria for the legitimacy of self-sacrifice. The noble act of Alcesta, as if the poet tells us, does not remove the problem, but poses it, without giving any general solutions, and in the face of this insolubility, only silence is appropriate. Here it is, a truly tragic collision, in which a successful denouement seems to be the same theatrical convention, like a magic chariot that takes Medea away from the insoluble problems of the family.

The poet is skeptical, he does not have a firm, Aeschylean-Sophocles conviction in the supreme moral correctness of the gods who arrange human affairs. An adherent of patriarchal antiquity, Aristophanes disliked 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 to Aeschylus and Sophocles. The same civic poet as they are, he also consciously served the most humane political system of his time - the Athenian democracy. Yes, Euripides questioned a lot and touched upon issues that before him were not within the competence of the tragedians. But he never had any doubts about the great value of the democratic traditions of his native Greece. It is impossible to list all the verses 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 will draw the reader's attention only to that place in the Medea, where the Greek Jason declares to his abandoned wife - a Colchis woman, that he fully paid off with her for everything that she did for him - and to her, we note owes his life. “I acknowledge your services. What // From this? The debt has long been paid, // And with interest. Firstly, you are in Hellas // And no longer among the barbarians, the law// You also learned the truth instead of the power // Which reigns among you. What can I say, Jason is hypocritical, bustles, but all the same, what is this "first" worth even in his mouth! A subtle psychologist, Euripides would hardly have put such an argument into them in the first place, if the Periclean-Aeschylean pride in their freedom-loving people had not been organic to him. No, Euripides, like Sophocles, is the brother of Aeschylus, only the brother is the youngest, the least inert, critical of the experience of the elders.

However, criticism became a real element of the Athenian theater with the flourishing 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, the author is Aristophanes (approximately 446-385 BC). When Aristophanes was born, the comic poets had been participating regularly in the Dionysian competitions for forty years, along with the tragedians. But we know little about the predecessors of Aristophanes Chionides, Cratinus and his peer Eupolis, at best, only fragments have survived from their works. In the fact that time has saved us from the heyday of ancient drama - the 5th century BC. e. - the works of only brilliant tragedians and only a brilliant comedian, it must be some kind of natural selection.

Criticism of Aristophanes is primarily political. Aristophanes lived during the years of the intra-Greek Peloponnesian War, which was fought in the interests of wealthy Athenian merchants and artisans and ruined small landowners, tearing them away from work, and sometimes devastating their vineyards and fields. After Pericles, Cleon, the owner of a leather workshop, a supporter of the most decisive military, political and economic measures in the fight against Sparta, became the main official in Athens, a man whose personal qualities did not win approval from any of the ancient authors who wrote about him. Aristophanes took the exact opposite, anti-war position and began his literary career with a persistent attack on Cleon, portraying him satirically as a demagogue and covetous man in his early comedies. The comedy of twenty-year-old Aristophanes "The Babylonians" that did not reach us forced Cleon to initiate a lawsuit against the author. The poet was accused of discrediting officials in the presence of representatives of military allies. Aristophanes somehow avoided the political process and did not lay down his arms. Two years later, he performed with the comedy "Horsemen", where he portrayed the Athenian people in the form of a feeble-minded old man Demos ("demos" in Greek - the people), who completely obeyed his rogue servant Kozhevnik, in whom it was easy to recognize Cleon. There is evidence that not a single master dared to give the comedic mask a resemblance to the face of Cleon and that Aristophanes wanted to play the role of the Tanner himself. Courage? Undoubtedly. But at the same time, this story with Cleon shows that at the beginning of Aristophanes, democratic customs 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 a political collapse for the one against whom this satire was directed, and Dobrolyubov was right when he wrote that “Aristophanes ... did not prick Cleon 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 a few rich people. But if Cleon were sure that no one would dare to publicly “prick” him, then he, with his makings of a demagogue, would rule Athens even more abruptly and would even less consider his opponents ... The last years of the poet’s activity were after a 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, almost disappeared in his work. His later comedies are utopian tales. The political passions that agitated Aristophanes are long gone, many of his hints are incomprehensible to us without comments, his idealization of Attic antiquity now seems to us naive and unconvincing. However, the pictures of peaceful life, which the poet, as an opponent of the Peloponnesian War, glorified, touch us even now, and in 1954 the Aristophanes jubilee was widely celebrated at the initiative of the World Peace Council. But when reading Aristophanes, we experience true aesthetic pleasure from his inexhaustible comic ingenuity, from the brilliant courage with which he extracts the funny from everything that he touches, be it politics, everyday life or literary and mythological canons.

The very external form of Aristophanes' comedy - with its indispensable chorus, the songs of which 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 the tragedy. During the days of dramatic competitions, the audience watched the tragedy in the morning, and in the evening, sitting in the same theater, in the same places, a performance designed to purify the soul not with “fear and compassion” (as Aristotle defined the task of tragedy), but with fun and laughter. Could the comic poet, under these conditions, refrain from mocking imitation of the tragedians? As if released from a bottle by external stage resemblance, the spirit of parody captured various spheres of tragedy. In the comedy The World, the farmer Trigay takes 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 come down to us, was built on the myth of Bellerophon, who tried to reach Olympus on a winged horse. But the parody of the tragedy does not end with plots either, it goes further, extends to language and style. When the old man Demos in The Horsemen takes away the wreath from his servant Tanner and hands it over to the Kolbasnik, the Tanner, saying goodbye to the wreath, paraphrases the words with which, in the tragedy of Euripides, dying for her husband Alcestus says goodbye to her marriage bed. There are many such examples. Such consistent ridicule of the technology of tragedy is on the verge of encroaching on theatrical conventions in general. And Aristophanes crosses this line in the so-called parabas.

Parabasa is a special choral part unknown to tragedy. Here, the choir members take off their masks and address not other actors, but directly to the audience. Interrupting the action for the sake of a lyrical-journalistic digression, the poet, through the mouth of the choir, tells the public about himself, enumerates 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 parabasa is perceived as one of them - as a parody of theatrical conventions, as a deliberate destruction of the stage illusion, anticipating. all further - from Plautus to Brecht - the steps of world dramaturgy along this path.

As if coming out of the "guild" limits where he was born, the Aristophanean spirit of parody was not limited to the tragic theater, but freely invaded the most diverse areas of culture and life, if only this benefited the political intent of the author. Forcing Socrates and Strepsiades to talk in The Clouds about how to get rid of debts, that is, on a topic that is by no means philosophical, Aristophanes parodied the form of Socratic dialogue and by this alone put Socrates in a ridiculous light, whom he considered a sophist, shaking the foundations of a democratic Athenian state and patriarchal morality. The spirit of parody did not recede even before the venerable shadow of Homer. In the comedy "The Wasps", the old man Kleonolub (an eloquent name!) obsessed with a passion for litigation, is locked in the house by his son Kleonochul, and Kleonolub is released in the same way that Odysseus from the cave of the Cyclops - under the belly, however, not a ram, but brought out for donkey sales. What a Homer! Aristophanes, not embarrassed, parodies prayers, articles of laws, religious rites - the very ones that were really in use in his time. The spirit of parody truly knows no "taboos".

What is this, unrestrained mockery of everything and everyone, denial elevated to the absolute? After all, even that Aristophanes character, whose triumph ends the corresponding comedy, is also always ridiculous. A lover of quiet village life, Strepsiades, who eventually sets fire to Socrates' "thinking room", Aristophanes now and then ruthlessly puts him in situations that should cause the audience to derisive attitude towards this antagonist of Socrates: either he is eaten by bugs, then he cheats with creditors, then he beats his own son. Having risen into the air on a dung beetle, the hero of Mir, the peasant Trigei, shouts to the theater mechanic who controls the device for the “flight”: “Hey you, machine master, have pity on me! .. // Quiet, otherwise I will feed the beetle! » In the comedy Akharpyane, the Attic farmer Dikeopol - and the name means "fair city" - who eventually concludes a separate peace with Sparta, for himself alone, appears before the public in frankly farcical scenes full of buffoonery humor scenes. But no matter how ridiculous these characters are, we have no doubt that the author's sympathies are on their side. The coldness of all-denial does not emanate from Aristophanes' laughter.

That is the genius of this poet, that he does not have “positive” reasoners insured against 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 been ancient history, read Aristophanes' comedies with sympathetic interest and aesthetic pleasure.

We know little about how Greek dramaturgy developed immediately after Aristophanes. Apart from the names of six dozen authors, nothing remains of the so-called Middle Attic comedy. We can judge her only speculatively, according to the latest Aristophanes comedies (“Women in the National Assembly” and “Plutos”), where there are no specific political figures among the heroes, where there are no journalistic parabases and where the choir almost does not participate in the action. Before us is a gap of almost a century, and if it were not for the happy finds of the 20th century - Menander's texts were discovered in 1905 and 1956 - the gap in our knowledge of ancient drama would have been even greater with regard to 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 entrenched in Macedonia, and as the power of Alexander expanded, Athens became more and more a provincial city, although for a long time it enjoyed fame in the ancient world as a hotbed of culture. Life here flowed now without political storms, civic feelings died out, people were no longer connected, 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, by personal, family, household worries 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 scholarly critic of the 3rd century BC, were known. e.: "O Menander and life, which of you imitated whom!" When getting acquainted with what has survived from the works of Menander, such an enthusiastic assessment may surprise. Already Aristophanes did not take plots from mythology, but invented them himself, referring the action of his comedies to the present time, already Euripides boldly introduced purely everyday material into the tragedy. These features of Menander's dramaturgy are not so, we say, original. And, in our opinion, an exorbitantly large role is played in the comedies of Menander by all sorts of happy coincidences. In the Arbitration Court, by chance, a young man marries a girl, not knowing that it was she who was raped by him shortly before and that her child is their common child. In "Bruzga" - again by accident - the old man Knemon falls into the well, and this makes it possible for Sostratus, who is in love with his daughter, to help the old man and win his favor. Such accidents seem to us too naive and deliberate, so that the plays built on them - with a plot, moreover, by all means love - could be called life itself. Yes, and the characters of Menander are reduced in general to several types and only slightly vary the same samples. A rich young man, a stingy old man, a cook, and certainly a slave, who at the same time does not always part with his name, pass from comedy to comedy - so merged, for example, the name Dove with the mask of a slave. And here we want to say: "No, this is far from the whole life of the then Athens."

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 "delightful", and Plutarch testified to the great popularity of this comedian. We read Menander, already knowing Molière, Shakespeare, and the Italian comedy of the 18th century. The miserly old man, the roguish servant, confusions and misunderstandings culminating 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 feel a vivid sense of novelty. Meanwhile, it is to Menander - through the Romans Plautus and Terentius - 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 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 that neither mythological tragedy with its majestic heroes, nor the grotesque Aristophanes comedy had yet known. Menander was the first in European literature to artistically capture a special type of relationship between people, born in a slave-owning society and then existing in feudal times - the complex relationship of master and servant. When one person is subordinate to another, is almost inseparable from him and depends on him in everything, but is privy 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 advantage and , skillfully playing on the weaknesses of his master, to some extent control his actions, which will give birth in the servant to a sense of his superiority over him. With a mixture of devotion and hostility, benevolence and gloating, respect and mockery, parasites and slaves of Plautus and Terentius, servants and maids of Goldoni, Gozzi and Beaumarchais, Leporello p. Don Juan in Pushkin's Stone Guest. In the speeches of Menander’s confidant slaves, without whose advice and help their masters usually cannot do either in love or in seed matters, this tone is quite clearly audible, and, speaking of Menander’s innovation, one cannot fail to note his psychological sensitivity.

We have already jumped ahead a little by mentioning the Roman imitators of Menander. The Roman drama, in any case, in its part that has survived to our time, is generally imitative and closely connected with the Greek, but like all the flowers of Greek culture, transplanted onto the soil of another country, another language, another era, and this flower of it, adapting to a new environment, changed its color, acquired a different flavor.

Let's say right away - this flower has died. Theatrical business in Rome has always been in unfavorable conditions. The authorities were afraid of the ideological influence of the scene on the masses. Until the middle of the 1st century BC. e. in Rome there was no stone theater at all. In 154 BC. e. the Senate decided to break down the newly built places for spectators, "as a useless building and corrupting society." True, both this and other official prohibitions (bringing benches with you so as not to stand during the performance; arranging places for spectators closer than a thousand steps from the city limits) were violated in every possible way, but they influenced the minds, forced to look at the theater as something suspicious and reprehensible. Actors in Rome were treated with contempt, theatrical authors were also not very favored. The poet Nevius (III century ... BC), who tried to speak from the stage in “free language” - this is his own expression, - ended up in prison for this, without becoming the Roman Aristophanes. It is noteworthy that the largest Roman comedians were people of low social status. Nevius - a plebeian, Plautus (c. 250-184 BC) - from the actors, Terence (born c. 185 BC) - a freedman, a former slave. Imitation of the Greeks dominated Rome, not only because of 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 his own, free and topical song either in republican or in imperial Rome.

Hence, it is completely different than in Greece in the 5th century BC. e., the attitude of the Roman author to himself and his work. Aristophanes was proud of the fact that he was the first to teach fellow citizens goodness in comedy. How Nevius assessed himself, we do not know; only a few verses have survived from his poetry. Plautus, and especially Terence, is characterized by the consciousness of their epigonism, their secondary nature. They did not pretend to be big, all their ambition was aimed at entertaining the audience. In one of his prologues, Terentius, 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 already, / What others would not have said before.” Introducing the prologue of each comedy, Terentius answered his literary opponents in it, and from these answers it is clear how alien the spirit of primogeniture was to both polemizing parties - both Terence himself and his critics - it is difficult to say who is more. They accused him of not simply translating any comedy of Menander or another neo-Attic author into Latin, but reworking it or even resorting to contamination, that is, combining two Greek samples into one whole. And Terentius 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 - Nevius, Plautus.

As for Plautus, he was much more talented than Terentius. The genre of Plautus is also a “cloak comedy” (this name came from the fact that the actors, speaking in transcriptions of the comedies of Menander, Diphilus and other Greeks, put on Greek cloaks - himations). However, Terentzhy remained, as Julius Caesar aptly called him, "Half-Menander", and Plautus managed to revive the old forms in his own way. The action of Plavt always takes place in Greek cities - in Athens, Thebes, Epidaurus, Epidamne and others, but the city of Plavt is frankly arbitrary, it is some kind of special comedic country where the Greeks nominally live, but Roman officials - quaestors and aediles, serve, where Roman coins are in use - nummas, where there are clients, and a forum, and other attributes of Roman life. Yes, and Plautus's humor is not Menander's, subtle and restrained, but rude, more accessible to the Roman public, sometimes farcical, and his language is not literary-smooth, "translated", but rich, juicy, folk. You can't call Plautus 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 Plavtov'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 they did not add up to a broad picture of modernity, they did not take the viewer away from the world of theatrical conventions, they did not carry any topical generalizations in themselves. A smart and talented man, Plautus himself spoke of his constraint by the “rules of the game” with a cheerful mockery: “This is how all poets do in comedies: / Always place the action in Athens, / So that everything seems to be certainly Greek.” But such a mockery of tradition coexisted with Plautus, who was still at the very origins of Latin literature, with some distrust of its own capabilities. Italian humor, - just a "translation into barbaric language" of the comedy of the Greek Difpla.

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

Rome has been it for a long time, having survived slave uprisings, and wars in recalcitrant provinces, and a civil war, and the replacement of the republican system by the empire. The comedians Plautus and Terence belonged to the lower classes of society. Seneca was in the best years of his career the title of consul and was very rich. In addition to philosophical treatises and a 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 samples of Roman tragedy that have come down to us, so that we can judge it only by them. From the works of the Roman predecessors of Seneca in this genre - Livy Andronicus, Nevius, Pacuvia, Action, poets of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. e. - nothing left.

So, we have before us works written in a different era, in a completely different genre and by a person of a completely different social status than Plavtov's and Terence's adaptations of Greek plays. Nevertheless, the former have one feature in common with the latter - a formal adherence to the canons of the corresponding type of Greek drama. Here, however, a caveat is necessary. Plautus and Terence wrote for the stage, with the expectation that their comedies would be played by actors and watched by spectators. Seneca, according to the 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 it was called, in itself fundamentally distinguishes Seneca from all his predecessors - both Greeks and l and the Romans - and makes his name, figuratively speaking, the most notable milestone, or, more precisely, a monument in the history of ancient drama. It is a monument - because the drama's refusal to perform is evidence of its death. For all their lack of independence, the comedies of Terentius were still an organic continuation of the tradition that existed in antiquity from the time of the most ancient Dionysian action. And with Seneca, the tradition degenerated into a learned stylization.

This should not be understood in the sense that in his mythological tragedies Seneca did not touch contemporary Roman reality at all. Against. The motives of all these tragedies are incest (“Oedipus”), the monstrous atrocities of a tyrant (“Tieste”), the murder of a king by his wife and her lover (“Agamemnon”), pathological love (“Phaedra”), etc. are quite relevant for palace life the 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 with a humane idea, there is no Sophocles' plasticity of characters, there is no Euripides' analytical depth. Seneca's generalizations do not go beyond the commonplaces of Stoic philosophy - coldly edifying reasoning and resignation 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, palaces serve as the scene of action, monologues and dialogues are interspersed with choral parties, the heroes die at the end - and his internal attitude to myth is completely different - myth does not serve as a soil for art in his tragedies, Seneca needs it to illustrate walking stoic truths and to mask troublesome allusions to modernity.

In addition to nine mythological tragedies, under the name of Seneca, one came down to us - "Octavia", written on Roman historical material, rial. The author of "Octavia" Seneca, of course, was not. The tragedy, where the true details of the death of Nero, who is also depicted as a despot and a villain, are given in the form of a prediction, was composed, of course, after the death of this Caesar, who survived Seneca - he opened his veins on his orders - 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 brought here not just sympathetically, but as a kind of ideal of a sage. Among the Greeks, the only historical tragedy known to us is Aeschylus's Persians, among the Romans it is Octavia, which is why we chose it for our collection.

The plot here is 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. Correspond to reality and frequent references in this tragedy to other atrocities of Nero - about his matricide, about the killing of Octavia's brother Britannicus, about the murder of her husband and son Poppaea Sabina. This is not 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 memory of the author.

Greek tragedians "humanized" the myth, they looked at it through the prism of later culture and invested in 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 the present, subordinating the dramatic narrative about Caesar's fanaticism to the Greek tragic canons. Poppea tells her ominous dream - she tells her nurse. Nero's mother Agrippina appears on the stage as a ghost. A messenger informs 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 heralds and heralds of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides! The similarity with the Greek tragedy is completed by the participation in the action of two choirs of Roman citizens.

Again, the resemblance is only superficial. 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 dogmatic 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 comprehension 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,

Tragedy fathers Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides - these are the three great titans, on whose incomparable work the stormy poetry of Her Majesty Tragedy, full of inexpressible passions, boils. The most burning intricacies of human destinies in an endless battle fight for unattainable happiness and, dying, do not know the joy of victory. But out of compassion for the heroes, a bright flower of purification is born - and its name is Catharsis.

The first song of the choir from Sophocles' Antigone became a great hymn to the glory of Great Humanity. The hymn states:

There are many wondrous forces in nature,
But stronger than a man - no.
He is under the blizzards of the rebellious howl
Boldly leads the way across the sea.
Revered in goddesses, Earth,
Forever abundant mother, he tires.

Too little time has left us information about the life of the great tragedians. Too much of it separates us, and too many tragedies that swept over the earth swept away the history of their destinies from the memory of people. And from the huge poetic heritage, only crumbs remained. But they have no price... They are priceless... They are eternal...

The very concept of "tragedy", which carries the full power of fatal events in the fate of a person, his collision with a world filled with a tense struggle of characters and passions breaking into the space of being - in Greek means only - "goat song". Agree, my dear reader, a somewhat strange feeling, which does not allow you to come to terms with this unfair combination, is born in the soul. Nevertheless, it is so. Where did the "goat song" come from? There is an assumption that the tragedy was born from the songs of satyrs, who performed on stage in costumes of goats. This explanation, coming from the external appearance of the performers, and not from the internal content of the performed work, seems somewhat superficial. After all, satyrs should have performed plays of a satirical content, and by no means of a tragic one.

Perhaps the "goat's song" is the suffering song of the very scapegoats on which people laid all their sins and released them into the boundless distance, so that they would carry these sins away from their homes. The scapegoats, on the other hand, told endless distances about what an unbearable load they had to carry on their innocent shoulders. And this story of theirs became a story about the tragedy of human existence ... Perhaps everything was exactly like that? Who knows…

We have already met some of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and they helped us to feel the very spirit of those times, to feel the aroma of living spaces unknown to us.

Aeschylus was a direct participant in the wars and knew firsthand what it means to look death in the eyes and become numb from its chilling gaze. Perhaps it was this meeting that carved in the soul of the tragedian one of the main mottos of his poetry:

For those who are filled with pride
Who is full of arrogance, who is good in the house,
Forgetting about every measure, carries,
The more terrible Ares, the patron of vengeance.
We do not need untold riches -
The need not to know and save from troubles
Modest prosperity, peace of mind.
No abundance
A mortal will not redeem
If the truth is great
He tramples on his feet.

The poet carefully peers into all manifestations of human existence and decides for himself:

I must think. Into the deepest
Depths of reflection let the diver
A keen, sober and calm look will penetrate.

Aeschylus understands:

Man cannot live without guilt
It is not given to walk the earth without sin,
And from grief, from troubles
No one can hide forever.

The gods for the "father of tragedy" are the main arbiters of human destinies, and fate is omnipotent and irresistible. When a defenseless mortal approaches

An irresistible stream of unstoppable troubles,
Then into the raging sea of terrible fate
He is thrown…

And then he can no longer find a quiet and comfortable pier anywhere for himself. If luck turns to face him, then that luck is "a gift from the gods."

Aeschylus was the first poet who began to carefully peer into the whole clot of terrible crimes that is hidden in the struggle of hungry heirs for a coveted inheritance. And the richer the family, the more terrible the fight. In a wealthy home, blood relatives only have hatred in common. And there is no need to talk about the royal. Here

Divides the father's inheritance
Merciless iron.
And everyone will get the land
How much is needed for the grave -
Instead of the expanse of royal lands.

And only when the blood of half-brothers mixes with the damp earth, "the rage of mutual murder subsides and lush flowers of sadness" crown the walls of the native house, where the only loud cry is heard, in which

Goddesses curse rings, rejoicing.
It's done! The ill-fated family collapsed.
The goddess of death has calmed down.

Following Aeschylus, the longest line of poets and prose writers will develop this burning theme of all times.

The father of tragedy Sophocles was born in 496 BC. He was seven years younger than Aeschylus and 24 years older than Euripides. Here is what ancient testimonies about him tell: Glorious became famous for his life and poetry, received an excellent upbringing, lived in abundance, distinguished himself both in government and in embassies. So great was the charm of his character that everyone and everywhere loved him. He scored 12 victories, often took second place, but never third. After the naval battle of Salome, when the Athenians celebrated their victory, Sophocles, naked, anointed with oils, with a lyre in his hands, led the choir.

The name of the divine Sophocles, the most learned man, was added to the names of philosophers when, after a heavy golden goblet was stolen from the temple of Hercules, he saw in a dream a god telling him who had done it. He didn't pay any attention to it at first. But when the dream began to repeat itself, Sophocles went to the Areopagus and reported this: the Ariopagites ordered the arrest of the one whom Sophocles pointed out. During interrogation, the arrested man confessed and returned the goblet. After everything happened, the dream was called the appearance of Hercules the Herald.

Once, in the tragedy of Sophocles "Electra", a famous actor was busy, surpassing all others in the purity of his voice and the beauty of his movements. His name, they say, was Paul. He skillfully and with dignity played the tragedies of famous poets. It so happened that this Paul lost his dearly beloved son. When, by all accounts, he had long been grieving over the death of his son, Paul returned to his art. According to the role, he was supposed to carry in his hands an urn with supposedly the ashes of Orestes. This scene is conceived in such a way that Elektra, carrying the remains of her brother, as it were, mourns him and mourns over his imaginary death. And Paul, dressed in the mourning robe of Electra, took his ashes and urn from the grave of his son and, squeezing him in his arms, as if they were the remains of Orestes, filled everything around not with feigned, acting, but with real sobs and groans. So, when it seemed like a play was going on, real mourning was presented.

Euripides corresponded with Sophocles and once sent him this letter in connection with a nearly shipwreck:

“The news reached Athens, Sophocles, about the misfortune that happened to you during the voyage to Chios; the whole city reached the point where the enemies grieved no less than the friends. I am convinced that only thanks to divine providence could it happen that in such a great misfortune you were saved, and did not lose any of your relatives and servants who accompanied you. As for the trouble with your dramas, then in Hellas you will not find anyone who would not consider it terrible; but since you survived, then it is easily corrected. Look, come back as soon as possible safe and sound, and if now you feel bad from seasickness while swimming, or, breaking your body, annoys the cold, or it seems that it will annoy, immediately return calmly. At home, know that everything is in order, and everything that you punished has been fulfilled.

This is what the ancient testimonies about the life of Sophocles tell us.

Of his vast artistic heritage, only seven tragedies remained - an insignificant part ... But what! ... We don’t know anything about the rest of the works of the genius, but we know that he never in his life had a chance to experience the cooling of the Athenian public, either as an author or as a performer of the main roles in their tragedies. He also knew how to charm the audience with his art of playing the cithara, and the grace with which he played the ball. Indeed, the motto of his life could be his own lines:

O thrill of joy! I am inspired, I rejoice!
And if the joy of life
Who lost - he is not alive for me:
I can hardly call him alive.
Save yourself riches if you want
Live like a king, but if there is no happiness -
I won't even give you a shadow of smoke
For this all, with happiness comparing.

The jubilant, victorious pace of Sophocles through life was not to everyone's taste. Once it came to the point that the ill-fated passion for victory overcame another genius - Aeschylus. When Sophocles won a brilliant victory at the feast of Dionysus, dejected, saddened, consumed by envy, Aeschylus was forced to retire away from Athens - to Sicily.

“In the terrible years for Athens, when war and an epidemic burst behind seemingly strong defensive walls, Sophocles began work on the tragedy King Oedipus”, the main theme of which was the theme of the inevitability of the destiny of fate, rigorous divine predestination, hanging like a thundercloud over those who tried with all their might to resist this Oedipus - the hostage of the goddesses of fate Moira, who wove a web too inhuman for him. After all, “if God begins to persecute, even the strongest will not be saved. Human laughter and tears are in the will of the highest, ”the poet warns. And it seems that the Athenian tragedy created for his soul that necessary background of hopelessness that the tragedy of Oedipus rex breathes.

Independence in their decisions, readiness to bear responsibility for their actions distinguishes the courageous heroes of Sophocles. To live beautifully or not to live at all - such is the moral message of a noble nature. Intolerance to other people's opinions, intransigence towards enemies and towards oneself, indomitability in achieving the goal - these properties are inherent in all true tragic heroes of Sophocles. And if in the Euripides "Electra" the brother and sister feel lost and crushed after taking revenge, then there is nothing similar in Sophocles, because matricide is dictated by her betrayal of her husband, Electra's father and is sanctioned by Apollo himself, therefore, is carried out without the slightest hesitation.

As a rule, the very situation in which the characters are placed is unique. Any girl sentenced to death will mourn her failed life calling, but not every girl will agree, under pain of death, to violate the tsar's ban. Any king, having learned about the danger threatening the state, will take measures to prevent it, but not every king should at the same time turn out to be the very culprit he is looking for. Any woman, wishing to regain her husband's love, can resort to a life-saving potion, but it is by no means necessary that this potion be a deadly poison. Any epic hero will have a hard time experiencing his dishonor, but not everyone can be guilty of having plunged himself into this shame due to the intervention of a deity. In other words, Sophocles knows how to enrich each plot borrowed from myths with such “details” that unusually expand the possibilities for creating an unusual situation and for manifesting in it all the various traits in the character of the hero.

Sophocles, who knows how to weave the extraordinary destinies of people in his tragedies, turned out to be not so far-sighted in everyday life. At one time, citizens entrusted him with an important post of strategist and made a mistake, by the way, a very common one. The rich imagination and subtle intuition that a poet needs are more likely to interfere with a politician who needs cruelty and speed in making decisions. Moreover, these qualities should be in a military leader. An intelligent and creative person, faced with a problem, sees too many ways to solve it and an endless chain of consequences of each step, he hesitates, is indecisive, while the situation requires immediate action. (Kravchuk)

If Sophocles turned out to be not so hot what a strategist, then there is no doubt about the wisdom of his sayings. Therefore, my dear reader, let me present you with some of the poetic masterpieces of an incomparable master:

Your table is magnificent and your life is luxurious, -
And I have only one food: a free spirit! (Sophocles)

Light souls
Shame is not sweet, their honor is in good deeds. (Sophocles)

Experience teaches a lot. None of the people
Do not hope to become a prophet without experience. (Sophocles)

Saved by God, do not anger the gods. (Sophocles)

A man is right - so he can be proud. (Sophocles)

In trouble, the most reliable
Not the one who is powerful and broad-shouldered, -
Only the mind overcomes in life. (Sophocles)

To labor is to multiply labor by labor. (Sophocles)

Not in words, but in their actions
We lay down the glory of our lives. (Sophocles)

To live without knowing the troubles - that's what's sweet. (Sophocles)

Who asks for the lawful,
You don't have to ask for a long time. (Sophocles)

When your urgent request
They don't do it, they don't want to help
And then suddenly, when the desire has passed,
They will fulfill everything - what is the use in this?
Then mercy is no longer yours. (Sophocles)

All people make mistakes sometimes
But who fell into error, if he is not windy
And not unhappy from birth, in trouble,
Leaving perseverance will fix everything;
The stubborn will be called insane. (Sophocles)

Perhaps not loving the living
The dead will be regretted in difficult times.
A fool has happiness - does not keep,
And if he loses happiness, he will appreciate it. (Sophocles)

Empty, presumptuous people
The gods plunge into the abyss of grave disasters. (Sophocles)

You are not wise, if you are out of the path of reason
You find taste in stubborn self-conceit. (Sophocles)

Look into yourself, see your torment,
Knowing that you yourself are the culprit of torment, -
This is true suffering. (Sophocles)

I recently realized
That we must hate the enemy,
But to know that tomorrow we can love;
And a friend to be a support, but remember
That he may be an enemy tomorrow.
Yes, the harbor of friendship is often unreliable ... (Sophocles)

If someone takes revenge for the offense of the offender,
Rock never punishes the avenger.
If you answer the insidious with deceit,
Sorrow, and not good to you as a reward. (Sophocles)

Works for loved ones
Should not be considered for work. (Sophocles)

What does mother mean? We are abused by children
And we don't have the strength to hate them. (Sophocles)

Must husband
Cherish the memory of the joys of love.
A grateful feeling will be born in us
From a feeling of gratitude, - husband,
Forgetting the tenderness of caresses, ungrateful. (Sophocles)

Because of the empty rumor
Blame your friends should not be in vain. (Sophocles)

Rejecting a devoted friend means
Lose the most precious thing in life. (Sophocles)

Contrary to the truth - and bad in vain
Consider friends and enemies of the good.
Whoever expelled a faithful friend - that life
I cut off the color of my favorite. (Sophocles)

And finally…

Everything in life is impermanent:
Stars, troubles and wealth.
Unstable happiness
Suddenly disappeared
A moment - and joy returned,
And behind it - again sadness.
But if the exit is indicated,
Believe; any misfortune can become a boon. (Sophocles)

We have received information that Sophocles had a son, Jophon, with whom, in all likelihood, he first had the most wonderful relationship, because they were connected not only by their own blood, but also by a love of art. Iophon wrote many plays with his father and staged fifty of them. But the son forgot the wise admonition of his father:

The small one holds on, if the great one is with him,
And the great one - since the small one is standing next to him ...
But such thoughts are in vain to inspire
For those who are of poor mind.

When Sophocles grew old, a lawsuit broke out between him and his son. The son accused his father of losing his mind and squandering the inheritance of his children with might and main. To which Sophocles replied:

You all shoot me
Like an arrow target; and in censure even
I am not forgotten by you; by his relatives
I have long been valued and sold out.

Perhaps there was some truth in this lawsuit, because the poet's indifference to beautiful hetaerae was no secret to anyone. Sophocles was especially tender and reverent in love with the incomparable Archippa, with whom he lived soul to soul until a ripe old age, which made it possible for the restless gossips to scratch their tongues, but did not tame the love of the poet and hetaera, which Sophocles reinforced with care for his beloved, making her heiress of his condition.

Here is what ancient testimonies tell about this story: “Sophocles wrote tragedies until old age. When the son demanded that the judges remove him as if insane from the possession of household property. After all, according to customs, it is customary to forbid parents to dispose of the household if they do not manage it well. Then the old man declared: If I am Sophocles, then I am not mad; if he is insane, then not Sophocles” and recited to the judges the composition that he held in his hand and had just written, “Oedipus in Colon,” and asked if such an essay could really belong to a madman who owns the highest gift in poetic art - the ability portray character or passion. After he finished reading, by decision of the judges he was released from the charge. His poems aroused such admiration that he was escorted out of court, as if from a theater, with applause and rave reviews. All the judges stood before such a poet, brought him the highest praise for wit in defense, magnificence in tragedy, and left no sooner than accusing the accuser of imbecility.

Sophocles died at the age of ninety as follows: after the grape harvest, a bunch was sent to him. He took an unripe berry in his mouth, choked on it, suffocated and died. In another way, while reading Antigone aloud, Sophocles came across a long phrase at the end, not marked in the middle with a stop sign, overstressed his voice, and with it expired. Others say that after the performance of the drama proclaimed the winner, he died of joy.

Joking lines were written about the reasons for the death of great people:

Having eaten a raw centipede, Diogenes immediately died.
Choking on grapes, Sophocles gave up his spirit.
Dogs killed Euripides in the distant regions of Thrace.
God-equal Homer was starved to death by a severe hunger.

And solemn odes were created about the departure of the great:

Son of Sophill, you, O Sophocles, dancer,
She took a small measure of the earth into her bowels,
Curls of ivy from Acharn were completely wrapped around your head,
Muses of tragedy star, the pride of the Athenian land.
Dionysus himself was proud of your victory in the competition,
Every word of yours shines with eternal fire.
Quietly, spreading ivy, bend over the grave of Sophocles.
Quietly accept in your canopy, cover with lush greenery.
Roses, open buds, vine stems,
Flexible wrap around the shoot, beckoning with a ripe bunch.
May it be serene on your grave, God-equal Sophocles,
Ivy curls are always flowing around a light foot.
Bees, descendants of oxen, always let them irrigate
Your grave is poured with honey, Hymettian drops are poured.
Sophocles the God-equal was the first to erect altars to these deities.
He also took the lead in the glory of the tragic muses.
You spoke about sad things with sweet speech,
Sophocles, you skillfully mixed honey with wormwood.

The childhood of another Father of tragedy, Euripides, was barefoot, and sometimes a hungry belly, grumbling sullenly, prevented him from sleeping sweetly on a bed of straw. His mother was not always successful in selling vegetables at the market, and then she had to eat those that had already rotted - they were not in demand among buyers. The young man Euripides was also not in demand, because he was not only ugly, but also had some physical defects. But he had one virtue - the love of the word!

Why, - he asked with inspiration, -
O mortals, we are all other sciences
Trying to study so hard
And speech, the only queen of the world
Are we forgetting? Here's who to serve
Should all, for a fee dear
Bringing teachers together so that the secret of the word
Knowing, persuading - to win!

But fate did not give him true victories during his lifetime, denied him the opportunity to soar high into the heavens in their joyful ecstasy. At poetry competitions, a laurel wreath was rarely hoisted on the head of Euripides. He never pandered to the desires of the audience. To their demands to change some episodes, he replied with dignity that he had a habit of writing plays in order to teach the people, and not learn from them.

To an insignificant boastful poet, who boasted before him that he, they say, writes a hundred verses a day, while Euripides is not able to create even three, making incredible efforts, the great poet replied: “The difference between us is that your there will only be enough plays for three days, but mine will always come in handy.” And he turned out to be right.

About what glory came to him, having passed through the millennia, Euripides failed to find out. Death had overtaken her considerably. On the other hand, the adversities that often visited the poet and sought to trample on his rushing spirit happened to suffer crushing defeats, because the poet’s life experience, rich in suffering, told him that

And in life a tornado
Like a hurricane in the field, it does not make noise forever:
The end comes to happiness and misfortune ...
Life keeps moving us up and down
And the brave is the one who does not lose faith
Among the most terrible disasters: only a coward
Loses vigor, seeing no way out.
Survive the disease - and you will be healthy.
And if among the evils
Announced us, happy wind again
Will it blow us?

Then only the last fool will not catch his life-giving tight streams in his sails. Do not miss the moment of good luck and joy, reinforce it with the intoxicating currents of Bacchus. Otherwise you

Mad man, so much power, so much sweetness
Opportunities to love which game
Wine promises freedom... to dance
God calls us, and takes away the memory
Past evils...

But evil is eternal, it goes away and comes back again. It rages in life and on the darkened sheets of tragedies. In the tragedy Hippolytus, a chaste young man avoids female love and affection. He only likes free hunting in the company of the beautiful virgin Artemis. His stepmother Phaedra, who has fallen in love with her stepson Hippolyte, needs only his love. Light is not dear to her without this all-devouring love. But while passion has not exhausted her to the end, Phaedra tries to hide her misfortune from those around her, and especially from the all-understanding nurse. In vain ... Finally she confesses:

Woe, woe! For what, for what sins?
Where is my mind? Where is my goodness?
I was completely insane. Evil Imp
Defeated me. Woe to me, woe!
Love, like a terrible wound, I wanted
Move with dignity. At first I
She decided to remain silent, not to betray her torments.
After all, there is no trust in the language: the language is much
Only to calm someone else's soul,
And then you yourself will not end up in trouble.

The unfortunate Phaedra rushes about, cannot find peace. There is no rest, but quite different, and the old sympathetic nurse:

No, it's better to be sick than to go after the sick.
So only the body suffers, and here the soul
There is no rest, and hands ache from work.
But a man's life is one torment
And the hard work is unceasing.

The confessions that escaped from the soul of Phaedra, desecrated by the impudent, shameful gift of Cyprida-Aphrodite, this time asked for, horrify the nurse:

O hateful world, where in love and honest
Powerless before vice. Not a goddess, no
Cyprida. If you can be higher than God.
You are higher than God, dirty mistress.

Cursing the goddess, the nanny tries to calm Fedra, fed by her milk:

My long age taught me a lot,
I realized that people love each other
It is necessary in moderation, so that in the very heart of love
She did not penetrate, so that she could, at her own will,
Then loosen, then pull tight again
The bonds of friendship. heavy burden to
Drops out who owes one for two
Grieve. And better, for me,
Keep the middle always and in everything,
Than, not knowing the measure, fall into excess.
Who is reasonable - I agree with me.

But is love subject to reason?.. No... Phaedra sees one, only one hopeless way out:

I tried
To overcome insanity with a sober mind.
But all in vain. And finally despairing
In the victory over Cyprida, I considered that death,
Yes, death, - do not argue, - is the best way.
And my feat will not remain unknown,
And from shame, from sin, I will leave forever.
I know my illness, its infamy
I know well that I am a woman
Branded with contempt. Oh be damned
Scoundrel, that the first with a lover
Wife cheated! It's a disaster
Went from the top and the female ruined the sex.
After all, if the noble amuses the nasty,
That vile and even more so - such is the law.
Contemptible are those who are under the guise of modesty
Reckless-daring. Oh foam born
Lady Cyprida, how they look
In the eyes of husbands without fear? After all, the darkness of the night
And the walls, accomplices in crimes,
They can be issued! That's why I call death
My friends, I don't want infamy
Execute my husband, I don't want my children
Disgrace forever. No, let the proud
Free speech, with honor and dignity
They live in glorious Athens, not ashamed of their mother.
After all, even a daredevil, having learned about the sin of his parents,
Like a vile slave, he lowers his gaze in humiliation.
Truly for those who are just in soul,
More precious than life itself is a pure conscience.

The nurse is trying with all her might to dissuade Phaedra:

Right, nothing too scary
It didn't happen. Yes, the goddess is angry
Yes, you do. Well, so what? Many love.
And you, because of love, are ready to die
Doom yourself! After all, if all lovers
Deserved to die, who would want love?
Do not stand on the rapids of Cyprida. From her - the whole world.
Its seed is love, and we all, therefore,
From the grains of Aphrodite were born into the world.

Phaedra, exhausted by unbearable passion, almost loses consciousness, and the nurse, in order to avert trouble, begins to reproach and exhort the unfortunate woman:

After all, not under special
You walk like gods: everything is like you, and you are like everyone else.
Or there are no husbands in the world, in your opinion,
Looking through their fingers at the betrayal of their wives?
Or there are no fathers that indulge sons
In their lust? This is old wisdom
Do not expose unseemly deeds.
Why do we humans need to be overly strict?
After all, we are the rafters of the roof with a ruler
We do not verify. How are you, overwhelmed
Waves of rock, will you leave your fate?
You are a man, and if the beginning is good
You are stronger than evil, you are right all around.
Leave, dear child, black thoughts,
Down with pride! Yes, he sins with pride
One who wishes better to be the gods themselves.
Don't be afraid of love. This is the will of the highest.
Is the disease unbearable? Turn the disease into a blessing!
It is better, having sinned, to be saved
Than to give life for magnificent speeches.

The nurse, in order to save her favorite, convinces her to open up to Hippolyta. Phaedra takes advice. He ruthlessly rejects her. And then, in desperation, the nurse resorts to Hippolytus, once again tries to persuade him to quench Phaedra's passion, that is, offers to cover the honor of her own father with disgrace. Here Hippolyte first unleashes all his unbearable anger on the nurse:

How are you, you rascal! you dared
I, son, offer a sacred bed
Father of the native! Ears with spring water
I'll wash it now. After your vile words
I'm already unclean. What about the fallen?

And then anger, like a stormy wave, falls upon the entire female race:

Why, O Zeus, on the mountain of a mortal woman
Have you given a place under the sun? If the human race
You wanted to grow up, are you without it
Couldn't get along with the insidious class?
It would be better if we were in your sanctuaries
Demolished copper, iron or gold
And received, each on its own merit
Your gifts, the seeds of children to live
Freer, without women, in their homes.
What now? We exhaust everything that the house is rich in,
To bring evil and grief into this house.
That wives are evil, there are many examples of this.
I pray that it doesn't
Overly smart women in my house.
After all, they are something for deceit, for dashing deceit
Cyprida and pushes. And brainless
Poverty will save the mind from this whim.
And to assign to the wives not servants, no,
And mute evil beasts to a woman
In their chambers under such protection
And I couldn't exchange a word with anyone.
Otherwise, the maid will give a move immediately
Any bad idea of the bad lady.

While Hippolytus curses the female race, Phaedra hides from all eyes and throws a noose around her neck. Her husband Theseus suffers mercilessly for the loss of his beloved:

How much grief fell on my head,
How many troubles are looking at me from everywhere!
No words, no more urine. I died. Died.
The children were orphaned, the palace was deserted.
You left, you left us forever
Oh my dear wife. better than you
No and there were no women under the light of day
And under the stars of the night!

But Phaedra did not pass away silently, unrequitedly, she decided to justify herself before her family and before the world with a false letter in which she slandered Hippolyta, declaring that it was he who allegedly defiled his father's bed and thereby forced Phaedra to lay hands on himself. After reading the letter, Theseus changed his mournful speeches to angry ones:

The city is sad
Hear, hear people!
Forcibly take possession of my bed
Tried, in front of Zeus, Hippolytus.
I will order him
Go into exile. Let one of the two fates
Will punish the son. Or, heeding my prayer,
In the chamber of Hades Poseidon punishing
He will be sent, or a stranger
To the bottom, the ill-fated outcast will drink the cup of troubles.
O human race, how low can you fall!
There is no limit to shamelessness, no boundaries
Doesn't know arrogance. If it continues like this
And with each generation, everything is spoiled,
People will get worse, new land
In addition to the old, the gods must create,
To all villains and criminals
Enough space! Look, the son is standing,
Flattered on his father's bed
And convicted of meanness by evidence
Deceased! No, don't hide. Managed to sin -
Be able to look into my eyes without flinching.
Is it possible to be a God-chosen hero,
An example of integrity and modesty
count you? Well, now you're free
To boast of lenten food, to sing hymns to Bacchus,
Praise Orpheus, breathe the dust of books -
You are no longer a mystery. I give orders to everyone -
Holy beware. Their speech is good
Thoughts are shameful and deeds are black.
She is dead. But it won't save you.
On the contrary, this death is any evidence
Is. No eloquence
Will not refute the sad dying lines.

The choir sums up the experienced tragedy with a terrible conclusion for people:

There are no happy people among mortals. The one who was first
Becomes the last. Everything is upside down.

And yet Hippolyte tries to explain himself to his father:

Think, there is no young man in the world -
Even if you don't believe me, it's more pure
than your son. I honor the gods - and this is the first
I see my merit. Only with honest
I enter into friendship with those who are their friends
Doesn't force you to act dishonestly
And he himself, for the sake of friends, will not do evil.
I can not for the eyes of comrades
Scolding slyly. But the most sinless
I am in that, my father, with which you brand me now:
I kept my innocence, I kept my purity.
Love is only familiar to me
Yes, according to the pictures, even without any joy
I look at them: my soul is virgin.
But if you do not believe in my purity,
What could, tell me, seduce me?
Perhaps there was no woman in the world
Prettier than this one? Or maybe,
I strove to take possession of the royal heiress
For her legacy? Gods, what nonsense!
You will say: power is sweet and chaste?
Oh no, not at all! Gotta be crazy
To seek power and take the throne.
I want to be the first only in Hellenic games,
And in the state let me stay
Second place. Good comrades,
Well-being, carefree complete
My soul is dearer than any power.

Theseus, stunned with grief, completely dismisses such obvious arguments of his own son:

What eloquence! Nightingale sings!
He believes that with his equanimity
Will force the offended father to be silent.

Then Hippolyte makes a lunge in his direction:

And I, to confess, marvel at your meekness.
After all, I would, if we suddenly changed places,
I killed you on the spot. Wouldn't get off
Exile encroaching on my wife.

Theseus immediately finds an answer to his hated son:

You are right, I do not argue. Only you won't die like that
As he appointed himself: instant death
It is most gratifying for those who are punished by fate.
Oh no, banished from home, a cup of bitterness
You will drink to the bottom, living in poverty in a foreign land.
This is the retribution for your guilt.

Hippolyta, perhaps, could still have been saved by the true truth, had he told it to Theseus, but the nobility of his soul did not allow him to open his mouth. His wanderings were not long. The moment has come for Hippolyte to say goodbye to life. He is mortally wounded. And then the goddess Artemis stood up for his honor, whom the young man indescribably honored and with whom he gave himself only to the free wind and hot hunting. She said:

Take heed, Theseus,
How can you enjoy your shame?
You killed an innocent son.
Unproven, deceitful believing the words,
You proved, unfortunate, that you have a mind
I got confused. Where will you go from shame?
Or sink into the ground
Either as a winged bird you will fly up to the clouds,
To live far from the sorrows of the earth?
For places in the circle of just people
You are now lost forever.
Now listen to how the trouble happened.
My story will not console you, it will only hurt you,
But then I appeared, so that with glory,
Justified and pure, your son ended his life
And so that you know about the passions of your wife
And the nobility of Phaedra. Struck
The goad of the one that is more hateful than all the gods
To us, eternally pure, to your son
The wife fell in love. Overcome the mind passion
She tried, but in the nets of a wet nurse
She died. Your son, having taken a vow of silence,
I learned a secret from my nanny. Honest young man
Didn't fall into temptation. But how did you not shame him,
He did not break his oath to honor the gods.
And Phaedra, fearing exposure,
She slandered her stepson treacherously
And she lost. Because you believed her.

Hippolytus, mercilessly suffering from his wounds, utters his last words:

Look, Zeus
I was afraid of the gods, I honored the shrines,
I am more modest than everyone, I lived cleaner than everyone,
And now I'll go underground, to Hades
And I will end my life. piety labor
I carried in vain and was reputed in vain
Pious in the world.
Here again, here again
Pain took hold of me, pain dug into me.
Ah, leave the sufferer!
May death come to me as a deliverance,
Kill me, finish me off, I pray
Cut into pieces with a two-edged sword,
Send a good dream
Give me peace by finishing with me.

Artemis, who appeared so late, tries to console both the deceived father and the dying son:

O unfortunate friend, you are harnessed to the yoke of trouble.
You have lost a noble heart.
But my love is with you.
The insidious Cyprida thought so.
You did not honor her, you kept her purity.
Girls' songs will not be silent forever
About Hippolyta, the rumor will live forever
About bitter Phaedra, about her love for you.
And you, Egeus the elder's son, your child
Hug stronger should and press to the chest.
You killed him unwittingly. Mortal
It is easy to make a mistake, if God permits.
My order to you, Hippolyte, do not be angry
To your father. You fell victim to fate.
Now goodbye. I shouldn't see death
And defile the departed with the breath
Your heavenly face.

Euripides, an ardent misogynist, cursed the immortal Cyprida in his tragedy, but forgave the mortal Phaedra. The poet placed Chastity on the podium. Hippolytus - a contemplative of nature, passionately worshiping the virgin goddess Artemis and despising sensual love for a mortal woman - this is the true hero in the imperfect world of gods and people. Such is the predilection of Euripides.

Despite the fact that he curses women who are hated by him, and perhaps because of this hatred, because the feeling of hatred and the feeling of love are the sharpest experiences in the world - Euripides creates the most complex and most vivid images of the fair sex. Rich life observations allow the poet to present to the audience all the diversity of human characters, spiritual impulses and violent passions. Unlike Sophocles, who shows people as they should be, Euripides strives to portray people as they are. He concluded the highest statement of justice in these lines:

Isn't it a mistake to stigmatize people for their vices? ..
If the gods are an example to people -
Who is to blame? Teachers. Perhaps…

But the meaning of the tragedy can be revealed in another way. “As in Medea, the action is driven by an internal struggle – only not of two passions, but of passions and reason. Phaedra cannot defeat her love with reason. But the meaning of the tragedy is deeper. Its protagonist is not the vicious Phaedra, but the innocent Hippolytus. Why is he dying? Perhaps Euripides wanted to show that the position of a person in the world is generally tragic, because this world is arranged without logic and meaning - it is ruled by the willfulness of the forces that the author clothed in the images of the gods: Artemis, the chaste patroness of the chaste Hippolytus, And Aphrodite, his sensual opponent. And, perhaps, Euripides, on the contrary, believed that harmony reigns in the world, the balance of power, and the one who violates it suffers, neglecting passion for the sake of reason, like Hippolytus, or not listening to reason in the blindness of passion, like Phaedra. (O. Levinskaya)

One way or another, Euripides' man is far from harmony. No wonder Aristotle called him "the most tragic of poets."

In his tragedy "Electra" Euripides reveals the depth of the abyss of endless horror that has fallen on a man of a thirst for revenge.

I am twisted with evil and torment, - Elektra yells, -
Burned with grief.
Day and night, day and night I
I'm languishing - cheeks in the blood
Ripped apart with a sharp fingernail
And my forehead is beaten
In honor of you, the king - my father ...
Don't be sorry, don't be sorry.

What made the poor girl so desperate? And the following happened: her royal mother kills her lawful husband - the hero of the Trojan War, in order to fall free into the hot embrace of her lover. Elektra, who lost her father, is expelled from the royal chambers and drags out a miserable, destitute existence in a poor shack. To the girls who invite her to have fun, Elektra replies:

Oh, the soul does not break, virgins,
From my chest to fun.
necklaces of gold
I don't want to, and with my foot
I am flexible among the virgins of Argos
I won't be in the round dance
trample on the native fields,
The dance will be replaced by tears ...
Look: where is the gentle curl?
You see - the peplos is all in rags
Is this the share of the royal daughter,
Proud daughter of Atris?

When Elektra's brother Orestes returns from distant lands, she tells him about everything that happened:

Killer
Grabbed with unwashed hands
Father's rod - he rides in a chariot,
In which the king rode, and how proud he is!
No one dare to water the royal graves.
Decorate with a branch of myrtle, bonfire
The leader did not see the victim, but the grave
A tyrant, drunker with wine, tramples with his feet ...

Orestes is horrified by what he heard and Electra convinces his brother to kill his mother's insignificant lover. The feast of revenge begins.

And here comes the blow of the knife
Opens the chest. And just over the heart
Orestes himself bowed attentively.
On tiptoe, the knife rose
He thrust the king in the scruff of the neck, and with a blow
He breaks his spine. The enemy collapsed
And rushed about in agony, dying.
And now Orestes cries out: “Not a robber
He came to the feast: the king returned home ...
I am your Orestes.

To Elektra he says:

Here's a dead one for you
And if you feed it to the beasts
Ile scarecrows for birds, children of ether,
You want to nail it on a pole, it's for everything
I agree - he is your slave, yesterday's tyrant.

And Elektra, proudly standing over the corpse of her enemy, “unwound the whole ball of speeches and threw it in his face”:

Hear that you must still be alive
Was to listen. Damned, without guilt
Why did you leave us orphans?
Having fallen in love with the leader's wife, enemy walls
You did not see ... And in arrogant stupidity
A murderer, a thief and a coward, did not dare to dream,
That taken by adultery will be
An exemplary wife for you. If anyone
On the bed of caresses deceitfully bowed
Married, she will become her husband and
Imagine that a modest friend
His hall was decorated, to name
He can't be happy. Oh you weren't
So happy with her, as perhaps dreamed of.
Wicked kisses did not wash away
From her soul, and your baseness
In the midst of ardent caresses, she did not forget,
And you both tasted the bitter fruit,
She is yours, and you are her vices.
Oh worst of shame
When the wife is the head of the family, and the husband
So pitiful, so humiliated that among the people
Children are not called by patronymic.
Yes, a truly enviable marriage - from home
Get rich and noble
Wife and become even more insignificant with her ...
Aegisthus coveted gold:
He dreamed of adding weight to them ...

In the soul of Elektra, the feast of revenge flares up more and more. She tries to persuade Orestes, following her lover, to send to the underworld their own mother - "beloved and hateful." Orestes at first resist the onslaught of his sister. He does not want to embark on a "terrible path to a terrible feat", does not want to shoulder a "bitter burden" on his shoulders. But he takes it on... And now "the mother is in the hands of the children - oh, a bitter lot."

A bitter lot overtakes the son-murderer. In a feverish delirium, he keeps repeating and repeating:

Have you seen how bitter from under the clothes
She took out her chest so that the killer's knife would tremble?
Alas, alas! How do I like her
There, crawling on her knees, she tormented her heart! ..
Heartbreak!..
Heartbreak!

Orestes, who has lost his mind, rushes about for a long time among the empty, bloodied walls of the palace. But time passes and the mind returns to him. After all, not only by the will of Electra is justice done, but also by the will of the god Apollo himself.

If in his poetry Euripides lived with passions, deeply penetrating with his soul into the inner world of a person overwhelmed by love, jealousy, joy, sadness, then in life solitude was the sweetest thing for him. “The opening of the grotto, in which Euripides often basked, opened the silvery sea to his gaze. Peace reigned here, broken only by the measured splash of waves against coastal boulders and the plaintive cries of birds nesting on the rocks. The poet brought here scrolls of papyri. He loved books, and although he was not rich, he bought them wherever he could. In the grotto, Euripides read and created. Sometimes, in search of the appropriate word and rhyme, he peered into the sky for a long time or slowly followed the boats and ships quietly gliding along the sparkling surface.

Euripides watched the sea from the hills of Salamis. Here he was born, here he managed on a piece of land inherited from his father. He never had any special property, and later many laughed at the fact that the poet's mother herself sells vegetables in the market.

A crevice in the rock attracted Euripides not only with a beautiful view from here, but also with silence, remoteness from the noisy crowd. The love of solitude led to the fact that later the poet was accused of hostility towards people in general. Not true! He despised not people, but the mob. He was disgusted by her loudness, base tastes, naive dexterity and ridiculous self-confidence.

What a fuss! he lamented,
Call him blessed
To whom the daily day does not hide evil.

But in front of quiet people, who pondered the secrets of the universe, Euripides joyfully opened his heart, “he looked for expressions for his thoughts.” Leisurely conversations in the circle of the elite intoxicated with poetry and calm wisdom. Therefore, he often said: “Happy is he who penetrates the secrets of knowledge. He will not be lured by a policy that is detrimental to everyone, he will not offend anyone. As if enchanted, he peers into the eternally young and immortal nature, explores its indestructible order.

Even over a cup of wine, Euripides did not know how to laugh carelessly. How different he was in this sense from Sophocles, who, although he was 15 years older than him, immediately became the soul of every feast, shone, had fun and amused others! The feast "battlefield" Euripides willingly yielded to this favorite of gods and people. However, he was always saddened by the fact that, in the opinion of the public, he would never be compared with him as a poet. Sophocles received his first award at 28, he - only at forty. But Euripides did not stop working.” (Kravchuk)

In his tragedies, he does not worship the gods, on the contrary: his gods are endowed with the most disgusting human traits: they are envious, petty, vengeful, capable of destroying a pure, honest, courageous person out of jealousy. Such is the fate of Hippolytus, the distraught Hercules, Creusa, who was vilely possessed by Apollo, and then also ruthlessly treated the maiden seduced by him,

Together with his hero Iona, Euripides “is indignant at the fact that the gods, who created laws for people, trample them themselves; therefore, one cannot call people bad if they only imitate the gods. He does not like the actions of people either: the royal power is good only in appearance, but in the house of a tyrant it is bad: he selects friends among the villains and hates worthy people, fearing to die from their hands. This is not compensated by wealth either: it is unpleasant to hold treasures in your hands, hearing censures. Good and wise people do not take part in business, but prefer to remain silent so as not to arouse the hatred of people in power. Therefore, Jonah likes a moderate life, but free from grief. This mood of Ion was alien to those who occupied an influential place in Athens under Pericles. It is characteristic of the people of the next generation, when the vicissitudes of politics have forced many to retire far from the anxieties of public life.

In the drama of the satyrs, Euripides, in the images of the heroes of mythology, shows modern man. His Polyphemus knows only one god - wealth; everything else is verbal embellishment, hype. How he teaches the “little man” Odysseus, who fell into his clutches, who vainly tries to convince him of the disastrous vile self-interest with arguments from the past of Hellas. Polyphemus despises those who invented laws. His Zeus is food and drink" (History of Greek Literature)

Euripides knows how many endless misfortunes and bad weather await a person on his life path. Experience shows: "If you sow one misfortune - you look: another will sing."

And still

Good prevails, not evil,
Otherwise, the light could not stand.

We bet that reading an ancient Greek tragedy is easier than it seems?
I used to think: in the dense “BC” there was a completely different culture. She had her own centuries-old history, in which only candidates and doctors understand a little. Their way of life, religion, and they have many traditions and conventions. Completely incomprehensible language. Complex, it can hardly be easily translated. So the literature is heavy and too confusing for me. If the ancient Greek texts are translated into Russian, then this is certainly similar to Lomonosov. And yes, it makes no sense. I used to think so.
But it turned out that the ancient Greek tragedy can be read with interest and even understand something if you prepare a little. What do you need to know?

A bit of history (not much)

Ancient Greek tragedy appeared, conditionally, in the 6th century BC. in Athens. Time and place already say a lot: this policy will soon become a prosperous center of economy and culture, the "golden age of Athenian democracy" will come. Pericles, one of its founders, will make going to the theater the duty of every citizen, so that the Athenians learn to think and argue. They will like such entertainment, and in the 5th century BC. dramatic competitions will become the central cultural event in the life of the policy. They will be held once a year. Three tragedies and three comedies by different authors will be staged on them. In both genres - one winner, their names go down in history. At the same time, even the most successful dramas are staged only once, they are never shown twice. All worries about staging, including financial ones, are entrusted to noble citizens of the policy. Payment and organization of theatrical competitions is an honorable duty and even a privilege for the Athenian rich.

How did the tragedy appear and what does the goat have to do with it?

Tragedy - tra-gos - can be translated as "the song of the goat." The fact is that the tragedy is rooted in an important religious holiday - Dionysia. The god of the forces of nature and winemaking, Dionysus, was believed to die with the advent of winter and resurrect in the spring. The "death" of Dionysus was mourned by the whole policy. A goat was sacrificed to him, and the choir, dressed in goat skins, sang a dithyramb - a song of praise. A vocalist stood out from the choir, to whom short "solo parts" were given. From here the structure of the tragedy will develop: there will be one hero entering into a dialogue with the choir.

Myth, destiny and catharsis

The playwrights could not write about what they wanted. The plot has always been based on either a well-known historical event or a common myth. Therefore, for example, there are two "Antigone", Sophocles and Euripides. Nevertheless, tragedies about the same thing could differ strikingly from each other in interpretation, semantic accents and details.

The Greeks believed in fate. Every event, they believed, was predetermined. Man cannot change destiny. The choir was the personification of fate in tragedy. He always knew what was waiting for the hero, and he asked the chorus about his future. He was divided into two groups: the first, reading the stanza, moved in one direction, the second, reading the antistrophe, moved in the opposite direction. The pendulum movement of the two groups of the choir symbolized the passage of time and the inevitability of events prepared by fate.

There was no need to cry at the tragedy. The Greeks did not like too emotional productions. In tragedy, one could fear and sympathize. For viewers, tragedy is a source of not only experience, but also knowledge. The experience is not only emotional, but also intellectual. Empathy for the heroes and comprehension of their fate were supposed to help a person “cleanse” from negative emotions and thoughts. That is what catharsis means.

Who to read?

The earliest surviving tragedies belong to Aeschylus which is why he is often referred to as the "father of tragedy". He introduced a second actor and shortened the choir parts in favor of dialogue. The main themes of his tragedies are patriotism and the greatness of Athens. Aeschylus was a participant in the Greco-Persian wars, a long bloody invasion of the Persians. The Greeks emerged victorious from the war, and Athens played a key role in this. Aeschylus fought at Marathon, Salamis and Plataea - the main battles of the Greco-Persian wars. The most famous tragedy of Aeschylus about the glorious history of his policy is "Persians". In it, he exalts the heroism of fellow citizens, and sympathizes with recent enemies. And most importantly, he warns the Athenians - pride and a thirst for power can lead to the collapse of not only the Persians, but also themselves.

tragedy Sophocles fall on the era of the highest heyday of the genre. He introduced a third actor, further complicating the composition. He also began to use scenery in productions. Sophocles, following Aeschylus, shortened the choral parts. So he was able to reveal the characters and the state of mind of the characters. He often depicted mood swings, the dynamics of the image, the spiritual and intellectual development of the characters. Sophocles liked to oppose completely different heroes, made them argue, defending opposing views on one problem. Sophocles wrote about fate, about how a person tries in vain to escape from a terrible future. Is the hero guilty of a crime if he does not control his own destiny? The ancient Greek "detective" about the inevitability of fate is "Oedipus Rex".

The last classic tragedian was Euripides. His images are even more psychological, he develops in detail the dialogues and monologues of the characters. They fight not with the forces of fate, but with themselves, they solve topical social and ethical problems. He is interested in different people, so in the tragedies of Euripides there are deep images of slaves, the poor and other "non-heroes". For him, both male and female images are important, and family life is one of the most interesting topics for him. So he leaves the strict framework of historical and mythological subjects. At the same time, it destroys the traditional structure of ancient Greek tragedy. The myth becomes a living modern history, and its heroes become ordinary people in the Medea tragedy.

Five more important facts

Actors could only be men. Moreover, this profession was very honorable, so the actors had to have an impeccable reputation and, of course, they were free citizens of the policy.
They played with masks. The tradition has been preserved since the time of the rites in honor of Dionysus. All participants in the sacrament had to hide their faces from the uninitiated. Subsequently, this tradition turned out to be very useful, because only men played in the theater, and female images were more easily created using plaster, brightly colored masks.
Clothing has always been bright and lush. The actors had special shoes on the platform - koturny.
Since the performances were required to attend all the citizens of the policy, a special fund was created, from which tokens (tickets) for poor citizens were paid.
The theaters were huge because they were designed for all the citizens of the policy, that is, for several thousand spectators. From an architectural point of view, these were open-air amphitheatres. And between the rows were resonators. So that everyone can hear the speech of the actors.

By the way, ancient Greek tragedies are often staged in Russian theaters. For example, the repertoire includes Igor Stravinsky's opera Oedipus Rex. And "Electra" by Richard Strauss. Perhaps the production, albeit operatic, will help prepare for reading.

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