Welcome to Ancient Greece Today.  My name is Naomi Weiss. I'm a professor of classics at Harvard University, and I am your host for this podcast series, which brings together scholars, artists, and practitioners to think about the ancient Greek world and its afterlives.  

This season is called Tragedy Today. There are eight episodes, including this one, and all of the next seven will revolve around individual Greek plays, or next week a trilogy, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and how these ancient plays have been used and reimagined in the present day. I will be talking to academic experts about the tragedies, but also to many others. For example, Annie Dawson, a pioneering theatre director, about her take on Prometheus. Janet Elber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, about Graham's night journey, the Oedipus story told through Jocasta, and Ferdiya Lennon, author of the best-selling novel Glorious Exploits, which combines comedy and multiple tragedies to explore the power of art in the face of human brutality. My conversation with Ferdiya will be part of an in-person event held at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in DC, and you will be able to watch video of that event as well as listen to audio. 

This first episode is rather different because before we talk about the tragedies themselves, we need to understand what Greek tragedy is or was, what this art form is. To do this, I'm bringing in two colleagues in the field, Rosa Andújar and Josh Billings. They're going to help me. I'll chat with Rosa about the form or forms of Greek tragedy, especially the chorus. Then I'll talk to Josh about the ideas explored in Greek tragedy, as well as the idea of Greek tragedy as it developed later on. Before wrapping up, I'll come back to Rosa to talk about the afterlife of Greek tragedy in the Americas. 

You can find videos of these conversations on YouTube and also on our website, where there is information about Rosa and Josh and, for those of you who want to know more, some reading suggestions. Before we go to my conversation with Josh, however, I want to give you a little introduction to Greek tragedy myself by saying something about its original performance context. We are talking about plays produced in Athens, Greece, in the 5th century BCE, that is the 400s BCE, 2,500 years ago. This is the era of classical Athens, when Athens became increasingly powerful and wealthy following the Persian Wars, and when it became embroiled in a long war with Sparta, the Peloponnesian  War, which it lost disastrously at the end of the century. From this period, we have 32 full or almost full surviving tragedies, and thereby, or in a couple of cases at least attributed to, the big three, the big three tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. 

There were many other tragedians, many other playwrights, many more plays, many more plays. What we have is just a fraction of those produced in the classical period, including those produced by these three playwrights. But even by the end of the 5th century, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were regarded as supreme, their plays as classical, as representative of the best of Athens' cultural output. And as a result, it is their plays that survived over others. 

How did tragedy, how did theatre come about? Its origins are very murky, so I can't really give you any clear account. But what I can say is that there was a big annual festival for the god Dionysus in Athens, likely going way back. But we know that by 534 BCE, it was fully established. It was a big deal. It was called the City Dionysia. 

Dionysus, as I'm sure you know, is the god of wine, but he's also the god of theatre. He's a god for whom people dress up, they put on masks, they dance in choruses. We have plenty of evidence for this in vase paintings in particular. It is in this context that plays start being performed. 

I can also tell you what Aristotle says about the origins of tragedy. He suggests that tragedy evolved from the dithyramb, a huge song and dance performance for the god. He also links tragedy to satyric choruses. That's satyric with a Y. Choruses of men dressed up as horse- or goat-human hybrids. Now, maybe. 

But what's interesting here is that already in the 4th century BCE, when Aristotle was writing, people were wondering about tragedy's origins. They didn't necessarily know what they were. However it developed, by the very beginning of the 5th century, the City Dionysia, that big festival, included a dramatic competition. Three playwrights each presented four plays, three tragedies and a satyr play. The satyr play is named after its satyr chorus. These plays share many characteristics with tragedy, much the same language often, but they are on a very different register. They're bawdy, they're lewd, they're comic. Perhaps they are to provide some relief after the hard-hitting plays preceding them. 

Anyway, this was the tragic competition. Each playwright presenting a tetralogy, so four plays, that included a tragic trilogy, three plays, competing for first prize. And later, a competition for comedies also started up. The plays, tragic and comic, were first performed at the Theatre of Dionysus on the southern slope of the Acropolis, right in the heart of the city. Originally, this was a wooden theatre, rectangular or trapezoidal in shape, but later became a stone structure, which you can still visit in Athens today. So, in the Theatre of Dionysus, for the god Dionysus as part of a festival for Dionysus. Thousands of people flocked to the centre of Athens for this festival, and thousands of people attended the plays in the theatre. 

Athens is very important as a context. Its politics, its citizens, even its urban fabric. Almost all tragedies are set in the mythical past, but as we'll see through this season, they also engage with the socio-political debates and intellectual trends of contemporary Athens. Josh will talk about some of those in just a bit. 

What was a tragedy? As in, what was its form, its structure? You may have heard of things like, recognition or reversal. The word for reversal is peripeteia. That's Aristotle, thinking about what makes a tragedy a tragedy in the poetics. We could also think in terms of an opening monologue, with which many plays begin, or a messenger speech, or a deus ex machina. These are all common, formal elements of tragedy.

But I would like to think a little differently by focusing on the tragic chorus. And for that, I'm going to turn to Rosa Andújar. Stay with us. So, first, I am joined by, and I'm delighted to be joined by, Professor Rosa Andújar, who, by the time you will hear this episode, will be Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. We are recording this in the fall, and she is currently a Senior Lecturer in Classics at King's College, London. She is an incredible expert on ancient Greek drama and also the reception of Greece and Rome, especially drama, across the Americas. She has a huge number of publications. I'm just going to highlight a few for us today. Forthcoming, within the next month, I think, right, Rosa, is Playing the Chorus in Greek Tragedy, coming out with Cambridge University Press. Another forthcoming book, Tragedy and Revolution: Ancient Greek Drama as Political Theatre in the Hispanic Caribbean, with Yale University Press. Rosa is very well known for making adaptations of Greek tragedy accessible to wide audiences and making us think about them in different ways, both in our research and in our teaching. I can say that from first-hand experience. And this is through various publications, but above all, the Greek trilogy of Luis Alfaro in 2020, and as a co-editor for Greeks and Romans and the Latin American stage. 

So, as you can tell, I'm very happy to have Rosa here today. Welcome to Ancient Greece today, Rosa. 

Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. 

As you know, I have invited you here, because I hope that you can help us work through what I think will increasingly turn out to be a much more complex question than it seems at first, and that is, what is Greek tragedy? This whole series is about Greek tragedy, but first of all, we need to grapple with this question. And I've said a few words about its ritual context, its political context, a little bit about its performance in fifth century BCE Athens. But given your expertise, especially this new book, I was wondering if we could approach the question differently. And the first way I'd like to do that is through the question, what is Greek tragedy at a more formal level? And also, because it's closely related to form at the level of performance. And later, we're going to come back to you for a different sort of question about the nature of Greek tragedy. I've already mentioned to our listeners that Greek tragedy was a big musical production. There were actors, there was a chorus, there was an instrumental accompaniment, there was a mix of dialogue and speeches on the one hand and song and dance and the other. What more can we say about this art form? Or how would you explain the formal structure of tragedy or just what is tragedy to your students? 

Oh, well, that is that is a huge question. I would first of all say that tragedy, I think, is interested in a series of rhythms. So I, if you've already mentioned to your listeners, the fact that there are, there is song, there is speech, Greek tragedy is, I think, interested in this, these oscillations between speech and song. And at a very basic formal level, Greek tragedy is essentially comprised of various episodes that are kind of punctuated by choral song. So there is this sort of blend of speech and song that's at the core, at the heart of Greek tragedy. And connected to that, I mean, I would say that much more so than sort of the mythical medium, much more so than sort of political context, if we are to kind of break down or think about what is the most distinctive feature of Greek tragedy in comparison to other tragic traditions, it is the chorus that is at its heart. And it's the thing that kind of makes it Greek tragedy. 

Now, the chorus is obviously part of that formal element. You know, as I've mentioned, the chorus is largely responsible for these songs that kind of stand in between these episodes where a dramatic action is unfolding characters, you know, the three actors, you know, sort of as they're split up into various characters are discovering things, questioning things. And then you have, you know, at the end of these little scenes, you have the chorus sort of singing and kind of maybe perhaps expanding the temporal scope of the tragedy, reminding you of, through their songs of events in the past of the city or say past crimes that some ancestor committed. 

So, so I think in a way that mixture of speech and song or sort of episodes and song is what makes tragedy. But the chorus, as I said, is basically what defines tragedy, what kind of gives shape to the drama. And I would say sort of in a way they do provide this kind of structural function, right? So you have that sort of contrast between the episodes and the songs. 

But I would say that, you know, in addition to that, I mean, they are this group of people, I mean, we think, well, 12 or 15, that, you know, from the time that they enter the stage, and by the way, they enter the stage in a very sort of grand manner, they do so by the ramps that accompany the sides of the theater. So they, you know, it would have been a huge group of people arriving on the stage. And once they're on the stage, they are there for that, for the entirety of the whole play. 

So in a way, they also, in addition to contributing to that sort of shape or structure or drama, they kind of define, you know, they find the whole sort of dramatic space, they find the whole dramatic shape. When they when they exit, that's the end of the drama as well. So the show, I guess you can look at them from this sort of very formal perspective of how they they contribute to song, how they their movements in and out of the stage kind of shape tragedy. 

I've mentioned very briefly that I think through their songs and through their contributions, they can broaden this temporal scope of the drama in a way. But I have to say one of the things that I'm most drawn to the chorus and that I think is something that we moderns fail to acknowledge or fail to sort of appreciate about them. It's not that they're just this formal feature, they are, but they're also quite flexible. They are imbued with a dramatic identity. So it is this group of 12 people that are there in every drama. They yes, they sing these songs, they occasionally contribute, but they themselves are imbued with a dramatic identity. And so what that means is that they themselves are also implicated in the action. They themselves are also part of whatever story is unfolding. And I would say that there's a flexibility or plasticity to the fact that they can be imbued with these different identities, which I think was one of the things that gave tragedians some sort of freedom. 

So most tragedies from the ancient Greek world, from Athens, 5th century Athens, with the exception of Aeschylus's Persians, are mythical, right? And so when you're dealing with mythical material, you are dealing with a set of stories, and there is a degree of innovation that you can introduce to these stories. But at the same time, you know, there's not much, there's not much novelty you can introduce in a certain sense, but you can control a chorus. So, for example, you know, you have a story about, let's say, I don't know, let's go to Thebes, let's go to the family of Oedipus. I mean, you can't just suddenly introduce Uncle Bob, or some random character that has nothing to do with the family. But what you can do as a tragedian is think about who your chorus will be. And who your chorus will be and how they interact with those characters. And in a way, it gives you different outcomes, or it allows you as a playwright to emphasize different possibilities. So that's what I would say. Of course, there's a lot of different things, formal, but also, as I said, they themselves are also implicated in the dramatic action. 

Yeah, I love that answer. Thank you. Because, just to be clear to our listeners, Greek tragedy is often defined in terms of its chorus, when we talk about tragedy as a genre. But what is really new about what Rosa is saying, is that the chorus is a flexible thing. We tend to like to think of it as rather monolithic, as just a choral body, right? We even use the singular form for it in our writing about it, as if it's all doing, they are all doing the same thing at the same time. And what Rosa is talking about is actually that it's something that can be very flexible, it can be broken up, it can be shifted around, and there can be surprising members of the chorus, too. Sometimes, in some plays, it's as if there's no reason for them to be there, apparently, at all. At least, it's very surprising for the audience that they should be there, even if they make their presence, the reason for their presence clear. I don't know if you have any ideas about modern struggle with the chorus on the stage. Can you give a sense of why that is the case, or the range of ways in which it might be approached in production? 

Yeah, well, I mean, there's a long, sort of complex history of why we treat the chorus, I guess, in a very rigid way. And it stems all the way, we can go all the way back to Aristotle, who himself was not very interested in the chorus. So really much about spectacle. And so there are ways from Aristotle onwards, where people have tried, I think, just to put it very simply, and not to go into much detail, to kind of just fix the chorus with sort of a single static identity. And a lot of times, that identity was always sort of juxtaposed with the actors, you know, so the actors are, I mean, especially when it comes to philosophical accounts, and much later accounts, sort of also from the 18th century onward, where people are interested in ideas of tragic agency.

We're really interested in these characters, and who they are, and what they mean. And you can just also think about all the many political readings of Greek tragedy. And against, in sort of those intellectual traditions, the chorus just plays a very simple role. And that is, again, as I said, you know, contrast. And they tend to be reduced, if you look at tragedy under that lens, and not through production, or not through spectacle, you are essentially, you know, sort of confining the chorus to, you know, their sort of passive, a passive role, they're witnessing the action, they're sort of there, but not doing very much. And it has to do with the way in which, I think, you know, in the modern age, across multiple societies, we don't have anything like it. 

So, in 5th century Athens, I mean, you know, the chorus as a collective, a group, obviously, there's a lot of resonance there, you know, thinking about what collectivity meant for the emerging, you know, for the, against the context of democracy. There's all these sort of ways, I think, in which the ancient Athenians were interested in sort of thinking about dynamics between a group and an individual. But I think that group is never unified, I think, if you think about the context of democracy. They're interested in all the fissures that emerged. But anyway, so I think, so there's all these different things. 

And also the fact that in the 5th century city, a chorus is something that is obviously central to drama, but also is something that plays a huge role in all kinds of other institutions to do with education. I mean, there's all these ideas about a chorus as a social order. Anyway, there's all these things. And I think, you know, when it comes to trying to make sense of the chorus from an intellectual perspective, it is quite easy to sort of reduce it to a single role. To approach it through production, and this is what I'm interested in and in my work. And I should say also that this also has to do with my own personal experience of being involved in plays. I should say I've only acted in one play a long time ago, but I have been involved in various productions as advisor. And when you sit down with the text of, you know, most Greek tragedies, you know, you can see that the chorus is doing multiple things. Yes, they do sing. Yes, okay, fine. In one respect, they are, you know, their songs are, you know, juxtaposed to the speech of actors. Okay, fine. 

But there's another moment when they're also intervening or commenting. And they do so in a range of modes, you know, not just sort of the song. They can do it also in speech within the action. You know, you can think about, I don't know, there's a famous, you know, Oedipus Rex, for example. 

Obviously, there's some very famous choral odes there that are fascinating. But when you come to the scene where the Corinthian messenger comes in, and this is for those of you, I hope I'm not spoiling anything. So someone comes in from Corinth and sort of gradually reveals that Oedipus is not who he thought he was. He thought he was the son of the king and queen of Corinth. And there's a scene, this messenger is kind of revealing that, you know, the king, you know, your parents are dead. You know, this king and queen of Corinth. And Jocasta is there on stage and is sort of, it's slowly realizing that Oedipus is not who she thought he was. And suddenly, I think she rushes off stage. And we know that because the chorus actually says something like, oh my goodness, like, you know, where has Jocasta rushed off in all this wild grief? And they express fear. You know, they say something like, oh, I think, like, I'm afraid that some grief will come out, you know, something bad will happen. 

So the chorus can also comment. Or they're also very much involved. I mean, yes, they're witnessing, but they comment. And I think through those words, they're, you know, letting us know. I mean, we don't have any stage directions. This is a big problem when it comes to tragedy. But it's only through the text or through characters' words oftentimes that you know what's happening. And you know that she just has rushed off to go off stage. And when women rush off in tragedy, it's never a good thing. It's never a good thing. Anyway, so that's just sort of a small example. 

I think, you know, so there's multiple moments across a tragedy where the chorus is, you know, it's commenting. It's interrupting. It's, you know, it looks like it's or it's set up to set up, you know, to start singing a song, but then suddenly it does something else. So there are ways in which even within sort of, even though you could say they have this formal role, they're still very much adaptable or flexible. And I'm interested in that plasticity. 

And I think thinking maybe also thinking ahead to, you know, how do we produce Greek drama today? I think we have a lot more options than we might expect because we usually are used to working within these rigid traditions. But I think actually there is evidence in the, if you look at ancient performance, if you look at the text, even though that is, they can be quite limiting. There is evidence for multiple choreographies, let's say, beyond, you know, a single chorus singing as a unified group. There's other things that are also happening that we do have clear evidence of. 

Yeah, that's great. Thank you. And I'm increasingly thinking that the tragic scripts that have survived to us today themselves hold out multiple possibilities for performance, as opposed to dictating the one single performance that we tend to be obsessed with, the original performance, as it must have been at the city Dionysia in Athens, as opposed to all of those other performance almost immediately afterwards, all across the Greek world. 

So when you think like that too, you can think about all the different possibilities from the get-go for the chorus across lots of different productions. And then finally, I just want to throw in my favourite moment currently in all of Greek tragedy, just because of something I'm working on, which Rosa has discussed too, which is in a play by Euripides called Orestes. This is, you could say, you could say it's an adaptation by Euripides of actually more than just one of the plays we're going to be talking about in the next episode, Aeschylus' Orestes. But anyway, we don't need to get into that. What I want to just mention is the moment when the chorus comes on stage, and the protagonist at that point in the drama is Elektra, and she immediately tells them to shut up, be quiet, don't be a chorus at all. And so you're left wondering, what kind of drama is this? Because if you're shutting the chorus up, can it even be a tragedy? Which is quite a telling moment, I guess, for the genre. 

I think this is the other surprising thing. If you start looking at, you know, sort of for scenes or for moments in Greek tragedy, where if you allow yourself to sort of more flexible modes, you can see sort of, for example, in that play where she's telling the chorus to shut up. But she's telling them to shut up at the precise moment when they enter the parados, the moment when they enter the stage is a big, sweeping, probably one of the most dramatic moments of any play. And, you know, as I said, this group of people would have entered through the side ramps, and then, you know, obviously bodies, you know, they're sort of moving, they're, you know, they're chanting, singing, they're making a lot of noise. And she, as soon as they step onto the stage, she's telling them to be quiet. And so that's quite a striking moment. And she also refers to them as, you know, sort of, here they are again, my friends. You know, just calling attention to the fact that there are multiple plays where Elektra is always there with a chorus of women. 

So I think there's also ways in which you can, if you open up, sort of, if you're a bit more flexible about how you can see the chorus, you can also start looking at connections between plays and how tragedians also, I mean, they're not working with one single canon. I mean, they themselves are always sort of revising various myths and potentially signaling to sort of earlier productions or earlier versions of the same myth that they've done. 

Yeah, absolutely. 

Well, we should move on. But Rosa, thank you so much. It really helps us to grapple with at least part of this question, which is a huge question. What is Greek tragedy on the performative, on the formal level, and thinking about tragedy as a choral genre and what that even means. So thank you so much. We're going to return to Rosa in just a short while. So stay with us. 

So now I am joined by Josh Billings, coming to us from Princeton University, where he's a professor of classics and comparative literature, and also the acting chair. I'm especially delighted to have Josh with us because of his extraordinary expertise. He's written two fantastic books, The Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy, which came out in 2014, and The Philosophical Stage: Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens, which came out in 2021. Lots of chapters and articles, he's currently working on a play, which actually we won't be covering in this podcast, a commentary on Euripides' Hippolytus, and a new book, which I believe is provisionally entitled After Philology. 

Welcome, Josh, to Ancient Greece Today, and thank you so much for being here. 

Thank you for having me. 

My pleasure. So in this episode, we're thinking about the question, what is Greek tragedy? I've talked about this in terms of the murky origins of tragedy, as far as we can make them out, and the immediate context for the premieres of these plays. So the city Dionysia, the big religious festival in Athens, once a year, but also briefly the political context, democratic Athens. We've also heard from Rosa Andújar about tragedy's form, especially in terms of the chorus, and we're actually going to return to Rosa a little bit later to hear about a few examples of how Greek tragedy appears now in contemporary theatre. But I was hoping you could help us to approach this question, what is tragedy, in a couple of other ways. 

The ideas, plural, of tragedy, and the idea, singular, of tragedy. So, first, the ideas. By this I mean, what sorts of big questions is tragedy as an art form engaged with? And maybe before we really get into that, would you be able to give us a picture of the intellectual context for tragedy in the 5th century? You know, what are the intellectual trends or popular philosophical questions of the day in this democratic city? Or is philosophical even the right word? 

Sure. So, it's a great question. And I think a place to begin might be to think about the origins of philosophy in Greece, which take place mostly in a different part of Greece, but more or less coincidentally with the origins of tragedy in Athens. So, as listeners will know, tragedy sort of develops in the late 6th century BCE in Athens. And around the same time, especially in southern Italy and Asia Minor, there are developing the first sort of people who are identifying themselves with new forms of philosophical thinking. They're not yet calling themselves philosophers, but they're doing something that we can recognize retrospectively as being, in some important sense, philosophical. 

And tragedy is from the earliest plays that we have access to in some kind of dialogue with those philosophical ideas. And the ones that I tend to find most kind of interesting and compelling in my own work and thinking are ideas about the state, ideas about the gods, and probably ideas about the self. If, as listeners will know, tragedy is very much engaged in thinking about its democratic context. And philosophical thought at this moment is similarly engaged in thinking about forms of social organization and of ethics that have very strong political dimensions. 

To move on, the second topic I mentioned was the role of the gods. And there, philosophy is really thinking through, at this moment, what comes from the gods and what comes from human beings. What is inborn? What is developed by custom? And how to understand the relationship of human culture to a sort of divine noumenon. And that, in my mind, is one of the central questions that tragedy is always thinking through. How do humans exist in a world that is not created for them and in many ways seems to be created against them? 

The third context I mentioned is tragedy is thinking about the self. And that's another area in which, especially later in the fifth century, people were coming to maybe think more critically about the role of the individual within society. And about the ways that an individual is one or many. About how it is that people come to sort of be themselves. And I think at the broadest level, tragedy is often interested in that question of how it is that human beings are formed. And in relation to what sort of internal and external forces those formations take place. 

That's fantastic. Thank you so much. I think maybe before we delve into a couple of those questions in relation to maybe a couple of specific tragedies. Could you offer some ideas on what it is about tragedy that makes it a good place to enter into these sorts of debates, this sort of discourse? It's not something we would necessarily expect in a massively popular play today. So why this medium for exploring those sorts of things? 

It's a great question. And I'm not sure there's one answer, but maybe I'll give you a couple. And that at least is a start to an answer to a question. I think one reason that tragedy has this sort of elective affinity with philosophical questions has to do with just the formal constitution of tragedy. So the way that it is so much created by dialogues between individual speakers and those dialogues and the speeches within them tend to be long and discursive. And that allows for a kind of in-depth exploration of different ways of seeing the world, which I think is sort of central to tragedy as a form. 

Another way is getting more to sort of that last topic I mentioned, the self, and especially in its relation to society, the dichotomy between protagonist, actor, and chorus, is also a way that tragedy, just in its formal context, in its formal constitution, almost necessitates a kind of back and forth and a kind of push and pull between these different demands. And that stepping back and thinking about that push and pull is really essential to thinking through these philosophical questions. 

I suppose the other thing that I would mention is that tragedy, as your listeners will know, is performed at a festival of Dionysus. And there is a ritual form. And so one of the, I think, persistent sort of aspects of a tragic consciousness or the consciousness of tragedy is that the gods are watching and that the gods are nearby. And that there is, so tragedy is quite centrally, I think, concerned with the role of the gods in human life because of its place in a religious or ritual context. 

That's really helpful. That's really helpful. Thank you. Since we're on the topic of Dionysus and the role of gods in human life, one of the plays we are going to get to toward the end of this season is The Bacchae. And I know you have thought a lot about The Bacchae. Could you tell us just a little, maybe a little teaser for your work on The Bacchae, what you think might be going on there in terms of these sorts of questions? 

Yeah. So I think what the Bacchae is sort of as if I set out the three questions as being sort of about the state, about the gods and about the individual, the Bacchae is one of the places where those three most sort of come together and in some ways collide. The Bacchae is quite centrally focused on the god Dionysus, who begins the play and appears throughout it in the guise of a human religious mystic of some kind and who comes into conflict with the state as he finds it in Thebes. And in that conflict, we see, I think, a sort of negotiation about what human beings owe to the gods versus what they owe to political rulers. And we also see a negotiation on the sort of level of the individual of how the individual relates to society and to the gods as the human protagonist, Pentheus, who is the cousin of Dionysus, comes in and the ruler of Thebes, comes into existential conflict with the god and with Dionysiac ritual. 

And we see over the course of the play, his kind of sense of himself progressively break down to the point that he is on the verge of madness or is fully mad. And in that state, he is manipulable by the god Dionysus in ways he would never be otherwise. And I think that that staging of the sort of breakdown of the self in Bacchae is describing in some way the sort of the weight or the danger of living in a world that is full of gods. And the play, on the play, on the whole, in my mind, gives quite a sort of equivocal and ambivalent view of the way that human beings should relate to divinity. 

Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Another play I was thinking about, because in the next episode we're going to be reading Aeschylus' Oresteia and briefly talking about its afterlives, is a play that we won't spend much time with, unfortunately, in this series. But it's still important: Sophocles' Electra. Might you offer some thoughts on that play in this broader intellectual context? 

Sure. 

And I should say, while Josh thinks about this question that I have just thrown at him, that Sophocles' Electra is one of several plays that riff on a big trilogy by Aeschylus that we will be delving into in the next episode, the Oresteia. So Euripides riffs on the Oresteia with a couple of plays, his Electra, his Orestes, Sophocles does too. But the question, particularly on my mind right now, is to do with some of the intellectual questions that this particular play, Sophocles' Electra, might be involved in. Because it seems a particularly interesting one. We tend to fixate on Euripides as being the guy who was engaged with these sophistic debates, but this play actually shows it's not just Euripides. 

Yeah. So I think, to me, the sort of central philosophical questions that Sophocles' Electra addresses are questions about appearance and reality and about epistemology, how you know what's true. It's interesting in relation to the Oresteia, which I know you'll be talking about, in that the question of whether it is just to kill your mother, which I take to be one of the central questions of the Oresteia, is more or less absent. Although this is a play that is fundamentally about matricide, the question of justice barely gets asked in the course of the entire play. And rather, where I think the weight of the concern about justice is sort of displaced to is a concern about how you know what's true. And so it's a play in which false stories proliferate massively and in which the sort of falseness of those stories begins to almost invade reality to the point that disentangling these two things is tremendously difficult. And I think leads to a sort of conclusion of the play where it's very difficult to know what to believe in terms of truth and falsehood. And that has sort of ramifies to our understanding of the sort of central act of matricide, which I take to be sort of problematized in some of the same ways that a meaning kind of trust in... 

Let me state that differently. I take the way the play ends to problematize the individual's grasp of truth just as it problematizes the question of justice, which subtends the play in this rather complex way where it's largely unasked but somehow hovering over the story. 

Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I increasingly like Sophocles' Electra. For those of you who have never come across this play, although it's been one of the most influential in terms of subsequent dealings with tragedy in the modern era, I thoroughly recommend it. But it takes some time, I think, for a modern reader, certainly, and audience to get to grips with. And certainly it took me some time. But for these very reasons, it's fascinating. And I think it's really dealing with the nature of theater itself, too. One final question before we move on to the idea of tragedy, which is just how far do you think the average audience member watching one of these plays in, let's say, the late 5th century in Athens, how far do you think they would be themselves familiar with or drawn into these sorts of debates? And does that matter? 

That's a good question. It's a very hard question to answer. Because we have such a limited evidentiary base to know what circulated, what people knew, what people read, what people heard. But I think I take tragedy to be – I don't think there's any way that the stories of tragedy rely on a familiarity with philosophical questions. To understand the stories or even to sort of unpack their deepest resonances. I think of tragedy less as a sort of response to what's going on in philosophical thought at the time and more as a parallel version of philosophical thought. 

And so the way that I would think about that question, about the sort of ways that audiences would relate to these bigger philosophical questions in drama, is to think that audiences, whatever they knew about Empedocles or Socrates, were incredibly sophisticated in their understanding of the stories of tragedy. Because they had grown up going to these dramatic performances and seeing the competitions year in, year out. And so they would have been exquisitely attuned to the ways that different versions of stories were inflecting that story in ways that were able to ask these big philosophical questions. So – and that's what I – and so I take tragedy to be doing a sort of parallel work from philosophy, even as there are also moments of sort of exchange between the two. But I think an audience could be totally ignorant of the exchange and still see the depth of the philosophical work that tragedy is doing. 

Yeah, I agree completely. Okay. Let's move on for the sort of second part, but shorter part of our conversation to, as I said, the idea singular of tragedy. This is something I know you have thought a lot about, especially in your prize-winning first book. Could you explain what you mean there by the idea of the tragic or what people have meant by this idea? 

Yes. So I think a way to – we might be able to start by thinking about this idea of the tragic emerges from a very particular philosophical context. At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. And that's a moment in which the major philosophical questions are about – they're, on one hand, about human freedom and sort of determination, freedom and necessity. And on the other hand, they are about the state and society. 

And tragedy at that moment to a number of very, very important philosophers, most important Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but any number of others in his circle, began to think that Greek tragedy could give some purchase onto those questions, onto the question of human freedom and onto the question of the state and its relation to the individual. 

And so they fastened on tragedy and especially on just a few tragedies. I mean, the Oresteia we've already mentioned. The other one that they're really interested – or there are two others that they're really interested in, the Antigone and the Oedipus of Sophocles. Both of which we will be looking at, listening to, hearing about. And they saw these plays as sort of distillations of the philosophical questions that they were asking. And they began to think about their own world almost in terms of tragedy, to use tragedy as an explanatory model for these central philosophical problems. So it almost sort of reverses the way that I was talking about tragedy in ancient Greece, where tragedy is thinking through these philosophical problems, which are contemporary to it in the late 18th and early 19th century. And this tradition really continues well into the 20th century and maybe even up to today. 

People were really using tragedy to do the philosophical work that they felt that philosophy in its sort of discursive form was often actually incapable of doing. That there was something about drama, that there was something about the way that it put individuals on stage that could access versions of truth that philosophy would reach toward. But – and this depends on which philosopher you ask – but may or may not actually be able to touch itself. When you were exploring all this for your first book, which philosopher did you find most interesting in this respect? 

Well, I began – I got interested in this topic through working on Nietzsche, who in a way is a sort of latecomer to this tradition of exploring tragedy, but who finds in Greek tragedy the sort of – the answer to the philosophical questions he is dealing with in 1871 and 1872 when he publishes The Birth of Tragedy. And takes the sort of – and takes the sort of model of tragedy and makes it into an explanatory model for the sort of fundamental drives in ancient Greek existence and in human existence more generally. 

And I sort of worked backwards from Nietzsche, who's the writer who sort of first caught me on – or turned me on to this problem or this issue and worked backwards. And then learned more about Hegel, who I already mentioned, about Schelling, a friend of Hegel and a collaborator at times, and about their mutual friend, Friedrich Hölderlin, who is best known today as one of the greatest poets in the history of the German language or any language. And who is also, as we've increasingly come to understand, a very, very important philosopher in his own right. And so it's really that sort of triad of Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel that I was most interested in. And those are also the people who have sort of had the greatest influence on modern ideas of tragedy from that period. 

Great. So could I finally push you on that last part? Can you give us a sense of how their ideas or the idea of the tragic develops into the modern period and how far into the modern period? 

Yeah. So one way – I mean, one way to answer that is to sort of trace a philosophical lineage. And that philosophical lineage would sort of run through the folks I mentioned, through Nietzsche, through Walter Benjamin, through Heidegger. And it's mainly a sort of German philosophical tradition. And it intersects with existentialism in some interesting moments in the mid-20th century. 

But another way to think about it, and maybe the broader way to think about it, would be to put that philosophical moment in dialogue with the sort of rediscovery of Greek tragedy, which is taking place around this time. So it often surprises people that Greek tragedies were simply not performed until – or performed very, very rarely in very special contexts until really the early 20th century. 

In Greek, that sort of genealogy of performance goes back, importantly, to a performance of the Antigone in 1841 in Potsdam. But this was a moment in which tragedy was being translated into modern languages for the first time and in which people were reading and engaging much more deeply and widely with Greek tragedy than they had in previous eras. And so I think the sort of largest claim that I would make for the importance of this tradition is that it is part of the reason that Greek tragedy became the cultural and literary touchstone that it did in the 19th century. 

And the reason that the reason that Greek tragedy is because many of the people who were interested in Greek tragedy had been sort of sent there by this philosophical tradition. And there's a sort of feedback loop that develops between the philosophical tradition of Greek tragedy and this increasing popular interest in Greek tragedy, which, you know, begins with translations, continues with stagings, and really explodes in the 20th century with a sort of tremendous outpouring of stagings of Greek drama in translation of adaptations of Greek tragedy, books on the stories of Greek tragedy. And I think we're still in many ways living in the world that idealism and its idea of the tragic creates. 

That is the perfect segue to the next part of this episode. So thank you for that. But more importantly, thank you so much for all of your thoughts, your insights into actually what is quite a hard question, deceptively simple question of what is Greek tragedy. So thank you very much, Josh, for joining us today. 

So we are back with Rosa for the final segment of this episode, what is Greek tragedy to begin with. And previously, Rosa helped us think through what is Greek tragedy as a choral genre and more broadly at the level of form and performance. Now, I'm hoping we could talk about this question yet again in a different way. We've heard from Josh Billings about the idea of the tragic in late 18th and 19th century German philosophy and how that some of the ways in which that comes through into the modern era. But I now want to fast forward to the 20th century and 21st century and give a little taster to our listeners about some of the ways in which Greek tragedy has been adapted, performed, used, transformed in the last hundred years or so. And I'd like to shift our focus away from Europe and toward the Americas. So Rosa is a wonderful person to do this with, to think about what is Greek tragedy. 

But now in terms of the contemporary stage, there's no way to address this question fully in the space of five or 10 minutes. 

Yes, of course, of course, that's what this whole series is about in many ways. But I was hoping that we could just get a sort of little sense of the landscape. I mean, what I can say is that, you know, if we're just focused on the U.S. context, we could think about how it takes a while for Greek tragedies to become popular in the U.S. as opposed to in Europe, where they start being performed in the 16th century. There are some productions in the 19th century, mostly on college campuses. In the late 19th century, early 20th century, there are the big hitters in Medea, Oedipus, Sophocles' Electra, Trojan Woman. Trojan Woman will get to the end of this season. That becomes really popular with World War I onwards. 

And then if we are focused on the U.S., there are particular productions that would often be part of a kind of potted history of Greek tragedy through the 20th and into the 21st. And probably one of the ones at the very beginning of that would be Eugene O'Neill's hugely successful Morning Becomes Electra in 1933, which later becomes a very successful film. And many new adaptations in this country, especially since the mid-20th century. 

But I was hoping that you could fill that picture out maybe a little in broad strokes, widen our lens so that we're thinking not just about the U.S., which will dominate our discussions for the rest of this podcast, but about Greek tragedy in the Americas, plural. 

Yes, thank you. Happy to do so. I should say, so one of the things that fascinates me about the afterlife of Greek tragedy in the Americas is something that you kind of have already said. It's something that happens, sort of Greek tragedy happens quite late, I think, in the Americas. So you just mentioned this. In comparison to Europe, where you have various productions and interests since the 16th century, and I say not just the United States, but across the Americas, it's really mostly sort of a 20th century phenomenon, or a 20th century and onwards phenomenon. 

And what that has to do also is to do with, I think, the strange history of, say, of Greeks and Romans across the hemisphere. So there was an interest, I think, in, I think, especially looking at the U.S., I think specifically, in the colonial period, in the revolutionary period, up until even the 19th century. There were tragedies that were in the mold of, or sort of based on classical material, but most of them were based on Roman material. I think there was an early tragedy about Cato. There's stuff to do, like a Roman, titles like A Roman Father. Very popular play about Dido. And I think this is also something that was, that also traveled south to, I know, Argentina, present-day Argentina and Brazil. So there's a lot of sort of tragedy that was billed as classical, but always sort of with Roman material. And in general, I think that kind of helps us think a little bit about the afterlives of Greco-Roman antiquity across the hemisphere. 

And, you know, as you mentioned, I think, especially in the United States, in the late 19th century, you start getting college productions of Greek drama. People start, I mean, I guess people are aware of this thing that is Greek drama. And I think it becomes a little bit more accessible where, you know, people study in Greek or sort of translations. But it's not really until the 20th century. 

And I think in the United States, it's really O'Neill who kind of puts it on the map. And I love, I mean, O'Neill is really, is really fascinating because I think O'Neill shares, I think, a concern that other, let's say, American, broadly speaking, playwrights share when they turn to Greek drama in the 20th century. That is, they're interested in creating a national theater culture or sort of a pro or thinking about what is tragedy for us. And so what Morning Becomes Electra, really, is sort of an attempt to define American, North American tragedy. And it's really fascinating that that trilogy is obviously also set in the American Civil War. Because I do think O'Neill was interested in sort of exploring lots of different contexts for the play. 

And I think there is evidence. O'Neill scholars have pointed to writings and letters where he kind of dismissed the American Revolution as kind of being too far away and also sort of too mythological, which is interesting. And then World War I, which was much closer as kind of being too close. So the Civil War of the 19th century was kind of the perfect mythologizing material. But that's interesting. So how do we make tragedy our own? And obviously O'Neill also is quite interesting as well because he's also interested in sort of the psychology of Greek drama. And I think, again, I mean, I've done some readings of various scholars who link this to the fact that O'Neill says that there's no room for gods in modern tragedy. And so one of the things that does, what drives us? You know, so he locates sort of these drives and these desires in the psychological. And so Morning Becomes Electra and I think also Desire Under the Elms are quite interested in these forces. And they can be a little bit more melodramatic. 

Anyways, so you start seeing this late interest in Greek tragedy as a way, as I said, to define, you know, what it means for that public. You have the same thing across other national traditions. In Cuba, in Brazil, it's the same thing. I mean, people start turning to, you know, we need to define a national theater culture. People really start turning to the theater because it is sort of one of the most preeminent modes of, obviously, entertainment. But it's something that theater obviously has this long history and all these people who are engaged in these sort of conversations or intellectual thoughts about what theater is and what it could be. 

They also eventually talk about the Greeks and they want to sort of be part or look their countries into this sort of broad, like, you know, thousand, you know, 2000 year old tradition. That was political. That did sort of speak for the time. And I think so, so there's these, so I think Greek tragedy, so just, I guess, just to sort of summarize, it's sort of linked or you find Greek tragedy in these sort of broader conversations about who we are, who we want to be. And these are conversations that are really, that start happening in the 20th century. 

Do you have, do you have a couple of favorites? You've worked on so many adaptations of Greek tragedy from many different places, but I wonder if there's a couple of favorites right now, for whatever reason, whether it's the form the Greek tragedy takes, the ways in which it's transformed or the sorts of messages that it is used to convey. 

Yes, I have a number of favorites, but before I get into those, I mean, the other thing to say about Greek tragedy is that once, you know, sort of you start, you know, from the 20th century onward, you start seeing sort of these questions and people interested in linking up their own local theatrical or national tradition to this broader history. So before I get to my example, I'll just say just briefly, Antigone is a play that really sort of becomes its own sort of, it has its own sort of particular history, becomes its own sort of powerful force across the Americas, and especially in Latin America. 

There's a scholar from Argentina who wrote a book, one of the first books exploring the relevance of Sophocles' Antigone across Latin America and called it a Latin American play. Because Antigone is about, I mean, you can think, you know, see the conflict between Antigone and Creon, and there's this whole thing about the individual in the state. It becomes a perfect play to discuss all kinds of sort of horrible things that happen when it comes to sort of state oppression, dictators. And so a lot of, I think almost every country across the Americas has an Antigone, where they're kind of interested in exploring all kinds of fraught and horrible recent histories to do with political oppression. 

So I think once we start looking at Greek tragedy across the Americas, you can also just start to see how certain plays sort of become, take a life of their own. So that's just a general thing that I kind of wanted to point out that it's just, maybe I should say a favorite fact about looking at Greek tragedy, not from Europe. 

And I might butt in before I even let you answer my original question, which is just to say, yeah, quite how important that is to not always think about the modern product with nothing in between, and then the ancient play. Because these plays, you know, are performed and re-performed and adapted in any tradition over and over again, especially particular ones, as you say, like Antigone, which means that there is so much in between that can't be neglected, but often it is. Anyway, sorry, please, Rosa, let us know what are your big favorites. 

Yeah, so I think in terms of my favorites, I mean, I should say, so in general, there's a lot of, there's a lot of tragedies that kind of have a surprising afterlife or surprise, you know, sort of folks across the Americas can sort of spin or emphasize new or novel aspects of the myth. And so one of my favorite plays on the level of sort of mythological innovation is a play from Cuba that was originally, I guess, written or performed in 1948 by Virgilio Piñera, and it's called Electra Garrigo. So it's, in many ways, I think, actually, I know this now because I have looked into this. So he was interested in the myth of Electra, like O'Neill. And in fact, he had read O'Neill. O'Neill, they don't start performing some of O'Neill's plays until a little bit after that, until after 1948. But I think Piñera had read O'Neill's play and was interested in, again, thinking about what would it mean to Cubanize a Greek drama. And so he comes up, I mean, he's very interested in this family, you know, Agamemnon, the core family of the Electra myth. You have obviously Agamemnon, you have Clytemnestra, you have Electra, you have Orestes. But he introduces a twist that I think I have not seen anywhere else in any ancient or modern production in that he decides to have Agamemnon still be alive. He's still there. He's there. He's alive. He's an old guy. 

I mean, in Piñera's play, he kind of wanders around drunk with beer. He drinks a lot of beer. He kind of just wanders around without a purpose. But it means that you have in the play a completely different orientation. You have Agamemnon and Clytemnestra interacting with their grown children. And if you think about, you know, what it means to have Agamemnon alive, you can think about how Electra and Orestes also kind of have no purpose. You know, he never died. So Electra does not is not full of grief and there's no wailing. Orestes never left. So they're all there. And so I kind of I love it. I think it's almost like kind of like a Euripidean flair to do this kind of thing. 

Like what would I mean, what would what would happen if it's kind of like a strange thought experiment?

Well, what's what I what I like about it is not only sort of that level of innovation, but it's also the ways in which he's he brings in or interjects various sort of prominent Cuban elements into this play. So I should say from the outset, it's called Electra Garrigo, because obviously you have the same names and the same kind of structure of the ancients. But they have a Cuban last name. Garrigo is that their Cuban name. But in addition to that, you have, you know, I mean, in the course of the play, I hope this is not a spoiler alert. Both parents die. But Clytemnestra is actually poisoned by her son with a papaya fruit. So that's a there's there. You know, there's there's a ritual there that kind of that mimics. There's a sort of a cockfighting ritual that's in there. That's a very Cuban thing that is kind of like another way of bringing in like a more modern day ritual into this play of ancient. Rhythms, you have a chorus that is singing to the tune of the Guantanamera song. 

So you make so by injecting these elements, he's also very visibly kind of Cubanizing and appropriating the tragedy and making it sound and look Cuban. The characters are also dressed in sort of very visible, you know, sort of very visible Cuban clothes like the, you know, the guayabera. I don't know if you've seen this sort of linen tropical shirt that a lot of men wear. This is what these men are wearing in the play. 

And so so there's there's a there's this interesting, as I said, innovation in terms of like messing around with the myth and helping us sort of rethink or focus. What is this play really about? If you were to change a couple of things, but also this huge interest in kind of appropriating it and making Greek tragedy speak to the Cuba of the time. And so, I mean, yeah, it's it's my favorite example for that. But not just that, it's that play in particular. 

To me, it's also kind of just it's fascinating because of the multiple receptions it's had. So this is the other thing about, you know, looking at Greek tragedy from the Americas versus Europe is that sometimes you have audiences or publics, even within the same country, within even a short space or, you know, a few years having completely different reactions. 

So this play, as I said, Piñera is someone who's very interested in theater. He did spend some time abroad. He never had any Greek. It doesn't matter. But he read these plays in translation. So he knew he kind of came across Greek tragedy through his various readings and travels. But a Cuban public. So when it first premiered in 1948, everyone hated it. 

So at the time, also, Cuban theater was really interested in kind of establishing or developing a Cuban, you know, well, developing a Cuban theater. But what it meant in the 40s, I think most of what they had, most of the productions across Havana were, you know, presentations of European, especially European and some North American plays, but especially European plays. And you also, I mean, a few years before, you actually had this one Austrian émigré who had set up this thing called the University Theater in Havana, where they showed the first productions in Spanish of ancient Greek plays. So there's a sense in which the public was learning what theater was and sort of a very sort of revered way of sort of dealing with European theater. 

And when it came to Greek tragedy, you know, they had seen, you know, within the backdrop of the university, which I think was modeled after Columbia University. You had these columns and this sort of neoclassical facade. And the university theater would stage these open air plays, productions of Antigone, of Oedipus, of various things in Spanish, but very, you know, very, very static with, I think, some kind of togas. 

But then when Piñera's play came around, you know, in 48, everyone hated it. This did not fit the bill. This is not what they thought Greek tragedy was. You know, these characters wandering around in sort of Cuban clothing or sort of Cuban elements. And, you know, people hated it. There were all these things in the newspapers about how terrible it was. One critic famously said that it was un escupitajo al Olimpo. It was a gob of spit aimed at Olympus. And so, you know, it's terrible, terrible. Everybody hated it. Piñera allegedly, well, not allegedly. He did actually run away to Buenos Aires, as you do, and sort of spent the next 10 years there. I think he was so ashamed. 

But anyway, within a space of 10 years, so 10 years later, in 1958, that same play, which had been so hated, suddenly they started to put on new productions of it. And, you know, there's a lot of debate as to why this happened. But I think it's because this play, which is fundamentally about a younger generation killing off the older one, you know, had a whole huge resonance in the wider context of the emerging Cuban revolution, which was very much dominated by young people. 

And the play, you know, kind of, you know, within a space of, you know, a couple of years, became an emblem of the new Cuban revolution, to the point that in 1960, you know, you know, you have Fidel Castro now developing a new government. You know, you had, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir visit Cuba in February 1960, they're taken to see this play. Electra Garrigot is kind of being emblematic of the new nation. And it kind of launches, this is a fascinating thing, within 10 years, it just has a completely different reception. It's revered. And it also launches a very Cuban, distinctive Cuban tradition of kind of Cubanizing Greek tragedy. 

There's multiple plays that, again, in a similar way, try to inject visible Cuban elements into ancient tragedies. I mean, it's a tradition that actually continues until today. So it's, I find that really fascinating. Again, like the ways in which, you know, one playwright, like thinking about how to make it, you know, how to appropriate, how to insert oneself or one's people in this sort of broader tradition, you know, sort of led to sort of an experimental play that was initially hated, but then within a different political context, just took a life of its own. I find that really fascinating in the Americas. That is endlessly fascinating and how it continues through to the contemporary present, too. 

We have to leave it there, Rosa, but thank you so much. You have really, I hope, for our listeners as well as for me, widened our scope and really given us some very important questions to think about as we continue with this season of Ancient Greece today, focusing on tragedy today. So thank you very much, Rosa, for joining us. 

Thank you for having me. 

Well, I hope my conversations with Josh and Rosa have given you a sense of some of the ways we can think about Greek tragedy, some of the questions it raises, some of the forms it takes. 

Next episode, I have the daunting task of starting where so many courses on tragedy start with Aeschylus' Oresteia. Not one tragedy, but three or four, if we include the satyr play. I'll get into that. Be warned, it's going to be a long episode simply because there is so much to cover across these plays. I'll be talking to Afroditi Angelopoulou, a professor at the University of Southern California, about tragic emotions. And also with Larry Tye, a best-selling biographer about one of the most famous uses of Aeschylus in U.S. history, Senator Robert F. Kennedy Sr.'s quotation of some lines from the Oresteia when announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. 

So, thank you for listening today, and I hope you join me next time.