Greek literature: the origins and characteristics of Greek theatre, the style of the main Greek tragedians and playwrights and the beginning of prose

Greek Literature: Drama and Prose

It is a very happy season, which continues in the supreme splendor of the following century: the century of theater and the beginning of prose . From the peripheral areas, literature concentrated in Athens , champion of democracy and individual freedom, and expressed itself in its own dialect, Attic. Athens also created in those years the masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, painting, while the artistic predominance was accompanied by the political one of the city.

Greek Literature: The Theatre

Little is known about the origins of Greek theatre , of which Thespis is considered to have been the initiator in the last decades of the 6th century. In the 5th century tragedy entered Athenian public life, as well as reaching its maximum level of development. Several times during the year cycles of dramatic performances were held, with official competitions among poets. These presented a group of three tragedies (which, if they developed the same myth, constituted a “trilogy”) and a satyr drama, a short final comic act. The greatest Athenian tragedians of the 5th century were Aeschylus (525-456 BC), Sophocles (497/96-406 BC) and Euripides (480-406 BC).

Glimpses of absolute lyricism alternate in Aeschylus’s theatre with profound theological and human meditations; the Greek fear of destiny, the condemnation of pride, the religious sense of life are expressed in an intense and arduous style. With Sophocles, the purest, the clearest, the most serene and simple of Greek tragedians, the action and the role of man in it, a man always great and noble, are broadened and deepened.

The classical objectivity of Sophocles already cracks with Euripides, a pupil of the sophists , a more restless and doubtful spirit. His is a less grandiose and more lively theatre in the performances, with critical discussion that insinuates itself into the action. Pessimism envelops the Euripidean world, where pathetic or tragic heroines emerge in the highest degree. Everything now reflected an evolving society and political moment; the theatre was oriented towards bourgeois drama, that of middle-class comedy. Ancient comedy was born at the same time as tragedy and its origins are no less obscure. In Attica, in the 5th century it developed in various scenes, interspersed with choral interludes, and took on a character of unbridled, imaginative comedy not disjoined from a continuous reference to the reality of the moment and to political, religious, artistic and social satire. The greatest genius was Aristophanes (ca. 445-after 388), who between the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 4th composed about forty comedies. Aristophanes appears substantially conservative, averse to the new philosophy of the sophists; but, beyond the satire, the fertility of his inventions and the lyricism of many passages, especially choral ones, are attractive, a delicate contrast with frequent ugliness (hence the masterpiece of The Birds).

The reversal of the subsequent comic theatre with respect to this approach is total: outside of Athens and its political regime, bourgeois comedy develops, in the second half of the 4th century, in the Alexandrian age. Cosmopolitanism, moral philosophies, more calm and defeatist attitudes throughout society are reflected in more realistic plots, even if complex in their almost constant vicissitudes; action and dialogue are now predominant.

Among the many authors , of whom we have almost nothing, the greatest is best known to us, Menander , an Athenian (342/41-291/90 BC). Menander observes life around him and melancholically mirrors it; he begins a timid representation of characters, expresses himself in a natural style , in a simple language , as is found in everyday conversation. He is therefore the master of later Latin comedians and to a certain extent, through them, of modern comedy.

Greek Literature: Prose

Mention has been made of the slower maturation of prose compared to poetry. The first Greek prose writings were historical: some Ionian “logographers” narrate the origins of their cities, genealogies of heroes, travels. The first historian whose works we possess in their entirety was Herodotus , also an Ionian (from Halicarnassus, ca. 485-ca. 425 BC), but who lived mainly in various other countries in Asia and Europe: he travelled a lot, saw and studied many things and then set them down in 9 books of Histories, a work of great beauty and interest. He narrated the geography and events of Persia, Egypt, the Scythians, and above all the clash, shortly before himself, between the Persians and the Greeks at Marathon and Salamis. If the precision of his data and the accuracy of his story are not absolute, he has, however, first and foremost a sense of history (he was called “the father”), that is, of the value, the interest, the organicity and a meaning of human events.

The next one, by Thucydides (ca. 460-ca. 395 BC), is already a literary work in comparison. In his History of the Peloponnesian War everything breathes meditation and critical reconstruction of the facts: Thucydides declares that he does not want to attract the reader, but to expose the truth as a conquest useful forever. It is another aspect of the Greek spirit, one that is rapidly moving towards the great philosophical meditation and that is already evident in the discussions of the sophists. The intellectualism, the rationalism of Thucydides, his discernment of the complex plot of facts are indeed a definitive conquest for historiography.

The third historian of this age cannot but succumb next to the genius of the first two: Xenophon (ca. 430-ca. 350 BC), an Athenian, who vividly narrated in the Anabasis an expedition of Greek mercenaries to Persia. But his continuation of the histories of Thucydides up to 362 (Hellenica) is far too weak, just as the biography of Cyrus the Great (Cyropedia) and various of his historical and philosophical pamphlets show only stylistic qualities and a pure language. Xenophon was a pupil of Socrates at a young age and later defended the memory of his master.