Quick questions on Greek tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides: HSC Drama elective

Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are the three Athenian tragedians whose plays survive in any number. The festival competitions of the fifth century BCE involved many other tragedians (Choerilus, Phrynichus, Pratinas, Ion of Chios, Agathon and others), but their work is lost except for fragments.

Added the second actor, enabling dialogue between characters. Earlier tragedy had been chorus plus one actor. The two-actor innovation transformed Greek drama into a dialogue form.

A trilogy that follows the curse on the house of Atreus across three plays. Agamemnon returns from Troy and is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. Their son Orestes avenges Agamemnon by killing Clytemnestra.

Grand, archaic, with extensive choral material. The chorus is dramatically central. The language is dense with metaphor and ritual cadence.

Oedipus, king of Thebes, learns over the course of one day that he is the murderer of King Laius (and his own father), and the husband of Queen Jocasta (his mother). The play observes a tight unity of time and place. The dramatic irony is sustained from the opening: the audience knows what Oedipus will discover.

After the death of her brothers Eteocles and Polynices on opposite sides of a civil war, Antigone defies King Creon's edict and buries Polynices. Creon orders her execution. Antigone hangs herself; Creon's son Haemon (her fiance) kills himself; Creon's wife Eurydice kills herself.

Medea, abandoned by Jason for the king's daughter, takes revenge by murdering her own children and the new bride. The play gives Medea sustained psychological argument with herself about whether to commit the murder. The chorus of Corinthian women is largely sympathetic, which complicates the audience's moral position.

After the sack of Troy, the Trojan women (Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, Helen) wait to be parcelled out as slaves. The play stages the price paid by the defeated. Performed in 415 BCE shortly after the Athenian massacre at Melos, the play has often been read as a critique of Athenian imperialism.

Dionysus, disguised as a stranger, comes to Thebes to enforce his cult. King Pentheus resists. Dionysus drives Pentheus's mother Agave and the other Theban women into a frenzy, and in the frenzy they tear Pentheus apart.

Greek tragedy repeatedly stages the conflict between what is fated and what characters choose. Oedipus's failure to escape the prophecy is the canonical example.

The gods appear directly in many tragedies (Aeschylus's Eumenides, Euripides's Bacchae) and indirectly throughout. Aeschylus presents the gods as ultimately just; Sophocles is more ambiguous; Euripides often presents them as cruel or arbitrary.

Many tragedies examine the conflict between household loyalty (oikos) and civic obligation (polis). Antigone is the classic study; the Oresteia ends with the establishment of civic justice over household vendetta.

Oedipus's discovery is the canonical study. Greek tragedy often dramatises the cost of knowing what one previously did not.