Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae And The Nature Of Tragedy
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چکیده
Two generations before Aristotle wrote his celebrated treatise on what the nature of tragic mimesis (or imitation) is, the comic poet Aristophanes had written two plays about the subject, Thesmophoriazusae and the more celebrated Frogs. The first play has the poet Euripides as its hero, and the second the god Dionysus. This god is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, and at a festival in his honour, dramas both tragic and comic were presented at Athens. Through these festivals, the citizens of Athens saw the presentation of two different forms of the divine human relationship, each mediated by the characters’ participation in the life of the polis. In tragedy, human life is seen as dependent on the life of the gods, while in Comedy, man makes the life of the gods his own. With one exception, Persae of Aeschylus, all the extant tragedies are set in the mythic realm, and all the comedies of Aristophanes involve an element drawn from contemporary Athenian life.
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Aristophanes on Tragedy
Fifty years before Aristotle wrote his Poetics, Aristophanes had devoted two comedies, Thesmophoriazusae (411) and Frogs (405), to the subject of tragedy. In both plays the plot shows the education of the main character in the nature of tragedy. Euripides learns in Thesmophoriazusae that he must present noble and not base women in his dramas. His depiction of perverse women in the theatre had m...
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