Tragedy and the tragic

Ten days ago, I attended the last performance at this year’s Festival of Epidauros, Nikaiti Kondouri’s production of Aeschylus’ Persians. There were more than 6,000 people on the beautiful marble seating of the ancient theatre. The atmosphere beforehand was lively, expectant, talkative. But once the drama began, this huge audience fell mute and minutely attentive.

Why do so many people love these ancient dramas, whether tragedies or comedies?

It may, of course, be something to do with what Aristotle sniffily called ‘the spectacle’, the getting up of which was, he thought, ‘more a matter for the costumier than the poet’. And the spectacle at Epidauros was, of course, spectacular: from the arrival of the Chorus of Persian Elders, carrying muffled lamps into the orchestra; to the robing and procession of Atossa, the widow of Darius; to the humiliating irruption onto the stage of Xerxes, stark naked after return from his great defeat.

Others may be more attracted by the sound of tragic poetry. Even in a modern Greek translation, much of Aeschylus’ great poetry reached the ears, to enchant, to thrill, and to disturb.

But there is much more to the tragedian’s ancient vision than the spectacle and the poetry. At the heart of his view, Aeschylus places the unknown quality and unforeseen consequences of human action, in a world where the gap between human aspiration and divine knowledge is only dimly apparent in the bleak auguries of the human mind: dreams, visions, phantoms. In this world, high ambitions eventuate in folly; glorious adventurism becomes a disorderly flight from slaughter; fate turns hunter into hunted.

The Persians is a remarkable, rather perplexing play. Most Athenian tragedies deal with the heroes of ancient myth. But the Persians covers historical events that happened only a few years before its writing. And equally curiously, in dealing with the destruction of the Persian fleet and army at Salamis and Plataea, it focuses exclusively on the emotional reactions of the Persian characters caught up in the tragedy of Xerxes’ failed campaign.

Many have argued that Aeschylus’ intention was simply patriotic or nationalistic: and certainly there are moments that resonate with pride at Athenian valour (the audience solemnly clapped the great paean “Forward, you sons of Greece! Set your country free! All is now at stake!”). But I think that, in explaining the Persian loss in the terms of Greek theology and through the form of Athenian tragedy in which the hubris of the Greek heroes is depicted, Aeschylus is pointing to something that embraces us all, something that is catholic, universal in our humanity and in our lot.

With its theme of conflict between nations, Aeschylus’ Persians resonates powerfully today. Across the Middle East and even closer to home, nations and peoples are embroiled again in war and conflict. Our social media and TV screens are punctuated with scenes of the vilest inhumanity, which stir us to revulsion, pity and to action. I guess that most of us have wept at the events and incidents we have seen of late.

In the face of the overwhelming reality of human suffering, art may seem paltry or glib. But it can also make us face and think through the awful complexities and paradoxes of human action. In the Persians, Aeschylus is proud of the Athenian investment in freedom and disparaging of foreign despotism, but he presents this in terms of broader human cost, through expressions of pity and loss that cross the boundaries of warfare.

In this year when we commemorate the start of the Great War, while we contemplate the need to defend and protect our humanity in the face of serious threats, a humane vision of the pathos and tragedy of human conflict is one we should grasp, tightly. The evening at Epidauros was an evening well spent.