Greek tragedy
A civic festival stages plays about the limits of human understanding.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 99 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Athenian tragedy develops from choral ritual into drama with individual actors, performed in competition at the festival of Dionysus before audiences of thousands. Aeschylus adds a second actor, Sophocles a third. The surviving plays — the Oresteia, Oedipus, the Bacchae, Medea — put unresolvable conflicts on stage: duty against duty, law against kinship, the cost of knowledge. Only about thirty-two of perhaps a thousand tragedies survive.