Greek Drama

Greek drama premiered as competition, not private reading: playwrights entered the City Dionysia and the citizens themselves voted. Six plays chart the two poles the festival built in under a century and a half: tragedy's guilt revealed too late, and comedy's total license to mock the room.

1. 1
   Medea

   Euripides · 431 BCE

   Lvl 4100pp

   Euripides gives the wronged woman the last, most terrible word: the shortest route into how completely Greek tragedy can make you root for the wrong side.

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2. 2
   Lysistrata

   Aristophanes · 411 BCE

   Lvl 4120pp

   A hard swerve into Old Comedy: Aristophanes has the women of Greece end a war by withholding sex, and names living generals to their faces while he's at it.

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3. 3
   Antigone

   Sophocles · 441 BCE

   Lvl 5100pp

   Sophocles compresses tragedy's other great subject, the state's law against one woman's conscience, into a single unbending day.

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4. 4
   Oedipus Rex

   Sophocles · 429 BCE

   Lvl 5100pp

   The model tragedy Aristotle built his whole theory of catharsis around: a man solves every riddle except the one about himself, and the audience already knows the answer.

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5. 5
   The Bacchae

   Euripides · 405 BCE

   Lvl 6100pp

   Euripides' late, wildest play lets Dionysus dismember the one character who won't admit the god is real: tragedy pushed past reason's edge.

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6. 6
   The Oresteia

   Aeschylus · 458 BCE

   Lvl 7300pp

   The capstone: Aeschylus's trilogy follows one house's blood-guilt for three plays before inventing trial by jury to end the cycle, the origin of tragic architecture, and of an actual civic institution.

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