Two public arts in one city
Tragedy and philosophy both reached maturity in Athens during the fifth century BCE, within a few decades and a few kilometres of each other. The coincidence is unlikely to be accidental. Both were public activities in a democratic city that valued speech, both asked what people owe to the gods, the state and one another, and both relied on a trained audience willing to follow an argument. The relationship was not only friendly, however; each also criticised the other.
The social mechanics were simple. Playwrights competed at festivals of Dionysus, and philosophers competed for pupils and reputation. Many of the same men, the citizens of Athens, filled the theatre seats and the audiences for public debate. The Dionysian festivals therefore offer a useful starting point for how drama entered civic life, and it is worth remembering that the origins of drama are themselves tied to religion and ritual.
Tragedy as moral inquiry
Greek tragedies mostly retold myths, but they used the stories to pose questions that philosophers would also ask. Aeschylus’s Oresteia dramatises a shift from cycles of family vengeance to a trial before a civic court, with the goddess Athena casting the deciding vote in a tied decision, a play about the origin of justice as Athenians understood it. Sophocles’s Antigone stages a conflict between a ruler’s decree and a family’s religious duty, with neither side comfortably in the right. In Oedipus the King, a man investigates an unsolved crime and finds that he himself is the answer, which has invited readings about knowledge, responsibility and fate.
Euripides pressed further. His plays, such as Medea and Bacchae, expose the limits of reason and the dangers of both repression and unrestrained passion. Ancient tradition connects Euripides closely with Socrates and with the sophistic movement, partly because his characters argue in elaborate speeches. How much of this connection is biographical fact is uncertain, and some of it may derive from comic caricature. What can be said is that Euripidean drama reflects the intellectual climate of late fifth-century Athens, in which traditional beliefs about the gods were openly questioned.
Comedy turns on the philosophers
Comedy answered philosophy with ridicule. In Clouds, first produced in 423 BCE, Aristophanes presents Socrates as the head of a “thinkery” who studies the sky and teaches pupils to make a weak argument defeat a strong one. The portrait mixes features of natural philosophers and Sophists, and it is generally considered a distortion of the historical Socrates. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates himself recalls that this kind of caricature had helped poison public opinion against him. Whether the play contributed to the charges in 399 BCE is debated, since the trial took place more than twenty years later. Other Aristophanes comedies, including those that take aim at politicians and fashionable ideas, also show that new ways of thinking were common knowledge.
Plato’s quarrel with the poets
Plato had mixed feelings about poetry. He wrote his own works in dramatic form, with named characters, settings and sometimes comic touches, yet he also criticised the poets. In the Republic he argued that the stories of Homer and the tragedians gave unworthy pictures of gods and heroes and stirred the emotions in ways that weakened rational self-control. Imitation (mimesis) was, for him, twice removed from reality, since a painter or poet copies appearances, which in turn copy the Forms. For this reason, he proposed that the ideal city should supervise or exclude much poetry. How seriously to take this proposal, and how it fits with his own literary skill, is an old scholarly debate.
Plato’s dialogues borrow theatrical devices throughout. The Symposium is staged at a party in honour of a tragic poet’s victory, with a speech by a comic poet who is a character in it. Scholars often point out that Plato’s frame, with its voices, irony and set pieces, uses the resources of the theatre while insisting on a different goal, the pursuit of truth over entertainment. That setting of a drinking party is also typical of the Greek symposium.
Aristotle’s reply
Aristotle, Plato’s student, defended poetry on different grounds. In the Poetics he defines tragedy as an imitation of a serious action that arouses pity and fear and achieves a catharsis of such emotions. The term is much discussed: it has been read as purgation, purification or clarification, and the text does not settle the question. He argued that imitation is natural to human beings and a source of learning, and that poetry tends to deal with universals, with what could happen, whereas history records what did happen. For him, the best tragic plots depend on a change of fortune that arises from error rather than villainy. The Poetics is among the earliest surviving works of literary theory.
Why the connection mattered
The close link between the two traditions had lasting effects. Philosophical dialogue adopted dramatic form, and drama gave audiences practice in following competing arguments. The theatre helped shape a public language for moral problems. The playhouses themselves, with their curved seating and clear acoustics, which belong to the story of theater architecture, were civic spaces where thousands of citizens engaged with ideas together.
It also helps explain a feature of Athenian thought that can seem puzzling today: philosophers argued with poets because poets were the main moral educators. Homer and the tragedians were the shared text of Greek culture, and anyone proposing a new account of virtue or the gods had to deal with them. Philosophy and drama grew side by side partly because each needed the other as a rival.