Greek tragedy died in a manner different from all its ancient sister artistic styles: it died by suicide, as a result of an insoluble, hence tragic, conflict; whereas, all those others passed away in advanced old age with the most beautiful and most tranquil deaths. For if it is an appropriately happy natural condition to depart from life with beautiful descendants and without any painful strain, then the endof those older artistic genres manifests such a fortunate natural state of things. They disappeared slowly,and their more beautiful offspring were already standing there before their dying gazes, impatiently craning their heads with courageous gestures. By contrast, with the death of Greek tragedy there was created an immense emptiness, profoundly felt everywhere. Just as the Greek sailors at the time ofTiberius once heard from some isolated island the shattering cry “Great Pan is dead,” so now, like a painful lament, rang throughout the Greek world, “Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself is lost with it! Away,away with you, you stunted, emaciated epigones! Off with you to Hades, so that there you can for once eat your fill of the crumbs from your former masters!”1

If now a new form of art still blossomed which paid tribute to tragedy as its predecessor and mistress,it was looked upon with fright, because while it certainly carried the characteristics of its mother, they were the ones she had shown in her long death struggle. This death struggle of tragedy was fought by Euripides, and that later art form is known as New Attic Comedy. In it the atrophied form of tragedy lived on, as a monument to tragedy’s extremely labourious and violent death.

Looking at things this way, we can understand the passionate fondness the poets of the newer comedies felt for Euripides. Thus, Philemon’s desire to be hanged immediately merely so that he could seek out Euripides in the underworld, provided only he could be convinced that the dead man was still in possession of his wits, is no longer something strange. However, if we want to state, briefly and without claiming to say anything in detail, what Euripides has in common with Menander and with Philemon and what worked for them so excitingly and in such an exemplary manner in Euripides, it is enough to say that in Euripides the spectator is brought up onto the stage.2 Anyone who has recognized the material out of which the Promethean tragedians before Euripides created their heroes and how remote from them lay any intention of bringing the true mask of reality onto the stage will also see clearly the totally deviant tendencies of Euripides.

As a result of Euripides, the man of ordinary life pushed his way out of the spectators’ space and up onto the acting area. The mirror in which earlier only the great and bold features had been shown now displayed that awkward fidelity which also conscientiously reflected the unsuccessful features of nature. Odysseus, the typical Greek of the older art, now sank in the hands of the newer poets into the figure of Graeculus, who from now on stands right at the centre of dramatic interest as the good-hearted, clever house slave. What Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs gives himself credit for as a service, namely, that through his household medicines he freed tragic art of its pompous corpulence, that point we can trace above all in his tragic heroes.3

Essentially the spectator now saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage and was happy that the character understood how to talk so well. But this was not the only delight. People themselves learned from Euripides how to speak. He praises himself on this very point in the contest with Aeschylus [in Aristophanes’ Frogs] — how through him the people now learned to observe in an artistic way, with the keenest sophistication, to negotiate, and to draw conclusions. Because of this transformation in public language, he also made the new comedy generally possible. For from that time on there was nothing mysterious any more about how ordinary life could appear on stage and what stock phrases [Sentenzen] it would use.

Middle-class mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his political hopes, now had its say. Up to that point, in tragedy the demi-god and in comedy the intoxicated satyr or semi-human had determined the nature of the language. And so the Aristophanic Euripides [in Frogs] gave himself high praise for how he presented common, well-known, ordinary living and striving, which any person was capable of judging. If now the entire crowd philosophized, administered their lands and goods with tremendous astuteness, and carried on their own legal matters, well then, he claimed, that was to his credit and the achievement of the wisdom which he had drummed into the people.

The new comedy could now direct its attention to such a prepared and enlightened crowd, for whom Euripides became, to a certain extent, the choir master. Only this time the chorus of spectators had to have practice. As soon as this chorus was well trained to sing in the Euripidean musical key, that style of drama like a chess game arose, the New Comedy, with its continuing triumph of shrewdness and cunning. But Euripides, the leader of the chorus, was incessantly praised. Indeed, people would have let themselves be killed in order to learn even more from him, if they had not been aware that tragic poets were just as dead as tragedy itself.

With tragedy, however, the Greeks had surrendered their faith in immortality, not merely the faith in an ideal past, but also the faith in an ideal future. The saying from the well-known written epitaph, “as an old man negligent and trivial” is applicable also to the old age of Hellenism. The instantaneous, the witty, the foolish, the capricious — these are its loftiest divinities; the fifth state, that of the slave, or at least the feelings of a slave, now come to rule, and if in general one is entitled still to talk of a “Greek serenity,” it is the serenity of the slave, who has no idea how to take responsibility for anything difficult, how to strive for anything great, how to value anything in the past or future higher than the present.

It was this appearance of “Greek serenity” which so outraged the profound and fearful natures of the first four centuries of Christianity; to them this feminine flight from seriousness and terror, this cowardly self-satisfaction with comfortable consumption, seemed not only despicable but also the essentially anti-Christian frame of mind. And to their influence we can ascribe the fact that the view of Greek antiquity as that age of pale rose-coloured serenity lasted for centuries and endured with almost invincible tenacity — as if Greek antiquity had never produced a sixth century, with its birth of tragedy, its mystery cults, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, indeed, as if the artistic works of the great age simply did not exist — although these works, each and every one of them, cannot be explained at all on the grounds of such a senile joy in existence and serenity, a mood appropriate to a slave, these works which testify to a completely different world view as the basis of their existence.1

Finally, when it is asserted that Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage in order to make the spectator truly capable for the first time of judging drama, it may appear as if the older tragic art had not resolved its false relationship to the spectator, and people might be tempted to value the radical tendency of Euripides to attain an appropriate relationship between the art work and the public as a progressive step beyond Sophocles. However, the “public” is only a word and not at all a constant, inherently firm value. Why should an artist be duty- bound to accommodate himself to a power whose strength is only in numbers?

And if, with respect to his talent and intentions, the artist senses that he is superior to every single one of these spectators, how could he feel more respect for the common expression of all these capacities inferior to his own than for the one who was, by comparison, the most highly talented individual spectator? To tell the truth, no Greek artist handled his public over a long lifetime with greater daring and self-satisfaction than Euripides. As the masses hurled themselves at his feet, he himself sublimely defied even his own characteristic tendencies and openly slapped them in the face, those same tendencies with which he had conquered the masses. If this genius had had the slightest reverence for the pandemonium of the public, he would have broken apart under the cudgel blows of his failures long before the middle of his life.

Taking this into account, we see that our expression — Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage, in order to make the spectator truly capable of making judgments — was only provisional and that webhave to seek out a deeper understanding of his dramatic tendencies. By contrast, it is, in fact, well known everywhere how Aeschylus and Sophocles during their lifetimes and, indeed, well beyond that, stood in full possession of popular favour, and thus, given these predecessors of Euripides, there is no point in talking about a misunderstanding between the art work and the public. What drove the richly talented artist constantly under pressure to create so powerfully away from the path above which shone the sun of the greatest poetic names and the cloudless sky of popular approval? What curious consideration for the spectator led him to go against the spectator? How could he be contemptuous of his public out of a high respect for his public?

The solution to the riddle posed immediately above is this: Euripides felt himself as a poet quite superior to the masses, but not superior to two of his spectators. He brought the masses up onto the stage. Those two spectators he honoured as the only judges capable of rendering a verdict and as masters of all his art; following their instructions and reminders, he transposed the entire world of feelings, passions, and
experiences, which up to that point had appeared in the rows of spectators as an invisible chorus for every celebratory presentation, into the souls of his stage heroes. Following the demands of these two judges, he also sought out for these new characters a new language and a new tone. In the vote of these two spectators alone he heard a valid judgment of his creation, just as he heard their encouragement promising victory, when he saw himself once again condemned by the justice of the general public.
The first of these two spectators is Euripides himself, Euripides the thinker, not the poet. Of him we could say that the extraordinary richness of his critical talent, like that of Lessing, constantly fostered, even if it did not create, an additional productive artistic drive.1 Given this talent, with all the clarity and agility of his critical thinking, Euripides sat in the theatre and struggled to recognize the masterpieces of his great predecessors, as with a painting darkened by age, feature by feature, line by line. And here he now encountered something not unfamiliar to those who know the profound secrets of Aeschylean tragedy: he became aware of something incommensurable in every feature and in every line, a certain deceptive clarity and, at the same time, an enigmatic depth, the infinity of the background. The clearest figure still had a comet’s tail attached to it, which seemed to hint at the unknown, the inexplicable. The same duality lay over the construction of the drama, as well as over the meaning of the chorus. And how ambiguously the solution of the ethical problems remained for him! How questionable the handling of the myths! How unequal the division of luck and disaster! Even in the language of the older tragedies there was a great deal he found offensive or, at least, enigmatic. He especially found too much pomp and circumstance for simple relationships, too many figures of speech and monstrosities for the straightforwardness of the characters. And thus he sat there in the theatre, full of uneasy thoughts, and, as a spectator, he came to realize that he did not understand his great predecessors. But since his reason counted for him as the real root of all enjoyment and creativity, he had to ask himself and look around to see if there was anyone who thought the way he did and could in the same way attest to that incommensurability of the old drama.

But the public, including the best individuals among them, met him only with a suspicious smile. No one could explain to him why his reflections about and objections to the great masters might be correct. And in this agonizing condition he found the other spectator, who did not understand tragedy and therefore did not value it. United with him, Euripides could dare to begin emerging from his isolation to launch the immense battle against the art works of Aeschylus and Sophocles — not with critical writings, but as a dramatic poet, who sets up his idea of tragedy in opposition to the tradition.

Footnotes:

1Tiberius : Tiberius Caesar August (42 BC to 37 AD), second Roman emperor, after Augustus. Pan: in Greek mythology, a god of the wilderness, hunting, and shepherds. The quotation comes from Plutarch, a Greek historian (46 AD to 120 AD).

2Philemon: (c. 362 BC to c. 262 BC), very successful Athenian playwright; Menander: (c. 342 to 291 BC), Greek dramatist, famous for his works of New Comedy.

3Graeculus : “little Greek,” a pejorative name for a Greek; Aristophanes (456 BC to 386 BC), the greatest dramatist of Old Comedy; his play Frogs features a long satiric verbal duel between Euripides and Aeschylus in Hades, an argument about which of them is the better poet and what the features of the best dramatic poetry must be.

1Pythagoras : a Greek philosopher in the sixth century BC; Heraclitus : ( 535 BC to 475 BC), Ionian philosopher.