ABSTRACT

The question of whether tragedy was performed in late antiquity and, if so, in what form, has provoked considerable scholarly debate. Much of this work has been influenced by the Gibbonesque model of decline and fall. Culture as an articulation of society mirrors the political decline of the empire. Even scholars who attempt to distance themselves from such a model find it hard not to portray theatre in the middle and late empire as a pale reflection of the dramatic glories of the past.1 Tragedy becomes a stagnant elite literary exercise which even the educated classes approached in a half-hearted manner, whilst the rest of the populace indulged in the intellectually vacuous pleasures of the pantomime and mime.2 Scholarship has made a careful distinction between the activities of the tragic pantomimes and tragedy, between late antiquity and the ‘Classical world’, and ultimately between text and performance. This chapter will argue that these suppositions are essentially unhelpful in understanding the role that tragedy played in the cultural milieu of late antiquity. The argument will centre on two main considerations:

(a) Tragedy should not be categorised simply as a medium that reached perfection in fifth-century Athens and was in decline from then onwards. By creating a rigid definition of what can and cannot be considered a tragedy we create distinctions that simply did not exist in late antiquity. Both pagan and Christian writers of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries evidently still perceived it to be within their remit to discuss tragedy both as a text and as a performance medium. We are impressed by the overwhelming frequency of references in pagan and Christian authors to tragedy in some form or other, sometimes to particular playwrights, plays, or characters (‘as Euripides

makes Medea say…’), sometimes just to ‘tragic stories’ or the idea of the tragic. The sheer range and extent of the evidence force us to the conclusion that tragedy continued to have strong symbolic value, as something of much wider cultural resonance than an exclusively ‘high-brow’ art form, and that whether or not it was actually performed it was still imagined as a performance medium. If this approach is justified it means that one can sidestep factual questions about whether anything that could be defined as ‘tragedy’ was actually being staged in the fourth and fifth centuries and later, and concentrate instead on how tragedy in the broadest sense was used by people of the time in their construction of identity,

(b) Tragedy is an appropriate tool with which to think about ideas of culture and identity in late antiquity. As an art form strongly associated with the Classical past, tragedy had strong cultural associations for the people of late antiquity whether pagan or Christian. As such, it was a useful vector for individuals to think not only about the past but also the present and future and to stake a claim to their own roles within these time-scales. Discussion about tragedy in late antique texts helps illuminate the cultural congruity of both pagan and Christian elites whilst also offering the scholar insight into the self-representation of Greek, Roman and Christian in late antiquity.