THE THREE WHALES OF TRAGEDY

The three whales of Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, are frequently lumped together, as if the three of them were inseparable triplets. I confess that in my first acquaintance with these three, I lumped them together too, and there was a good superficial reason for that. Let us read Bertrand Russell’s momentous History of Western Philosophy to understand this reason, capsulated in the following passage: “There was at this time, in Athens (the Golden Age of Pericles), an extraordinarily large number of men of genius. The three great dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all belong to the fifth century…” And, in a different place, “Aeschylus was quickly followed by Sophocles, and Sophocles by Euripides…”

No wonder, therefore, that from the far distance of two and a half millennia, distance becomes the primary identifying factor, unlike, say, the later times, when people living at the same time and in the same country are judged by more relevant criteria, like their creative credo and style, and, therefore, distinguished more competently than in the case of the ancients.

To be sure, Russell does make a distinction between the first two and the third in the following manner:

“Aeschylus fought at Marathon and saw the battle of Salamis. Sophocles was still religiously orthodox. But Euripides was influenced by Protagoras and by the free-thinking spirit of the time, and so his treatment of the myths is skeptical and subversive…”

Not only that, we may add. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles seem to be completely divorced from the reality of everyday life, while Euripides exudes it in his plays. The only reason why we may not see the difference between them so easily is once again the great distance between us and them, which makes their everyday life barely distinguishable from the lives of the gods and the heroes of Greek mythology.

Incidentally, there is an anecdote about Sophocles in Plato’s Politeia, which emphasizes Sophocles’s depth of alienation from his contemporary reality. One may look upon it as a joke about his old age, but clearly, it is much more than that, being a statement about the detached quality of his creative talent as such:

“Someone asked Sophocles, ‘How do you feel now about sex? Are you still able to have a woman?’ And he replied, ‘Hush, man! Most gladly am I rid of it all, as though I’d escaped from a mad and savage master.’”

Having made all the points I wanted to make I am furthermore directing my reader to Nietzsche’s masterful discussion of these three great whales of Greek tragedy in his Die Geburt der Tragödie, which can be found in toto either in print, or on the Internet (e. g. on Nietzschesource.org), and also in selective excerpts in my specific Nietzsche entries, still to come.