WORLD LITERATURE I (ENG 251)Activities for Greek Drama1. The q.docx

WORLD LITERATURE I (ENG 251)
Activities for Greek Drama
1. The questions do not have single, simple answers, but are
designed to help you to think about what you are reading.
2. These Activity entries in this course must be thoughtful; each
one should be the equivalent of at least a full typed page or
more in length (e.g. not less than 250 words) . They may be
longer if you need to say more on your topic. You will not be
able to do these Activity entries properly unless you have
carefully read the assigned literature.
HINT: Read through the Activities Lists before reading the
texts. Identifying interesting questions in advance will allow
you to focus your most careful reading in your chosen Activities
areas.
3. Citing Sources:
Since you will be using a wide variety of sources both for your
reading of the stories and for background information about
them, you need to cite all of the sources you use, both in your
Activities and in your Exams. Use in-text citation to show
where you are using the information. Here is a good guide to in-
text
citation: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/02/
And then use a List of Works Cited at the end of your Activity
or Exam to give the full MLA Bibliography. Here is a good
guide for that
purpose: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/05/
If you use information without citing the source, that is
considered plagiarism. Any plagiarized Activity will be given a
grade of 0 and cannot be redone.
4. NOTE ON PLAGIARISM:
Since you are able to read what other students have written on
the forums, any copying of their work without the use of
quotation marks and proper attribution by name of the student
will be considered plagiarism. Any plagiarized Activity will be

given a grade of 0 and cannot be redone. If you find an idea in
another student's essay that you would like to include in your
discussion, you must quote it exactly (you can use copy/paste to
do this), use quotation marks to set it off, and indicate the name
of the student and the Activity in parentheses immediately after
the quote. Further, you must use this quote to develop some
point of your own, not to simply imitate the ideas of the other
student.
5. If you find that all of your ideas on a topic have already been
used by someone else, choose a different Activity.
Please read through all of these Activities before making your
selection. Make a copy of the Activity question to begin your
response. Post your Activity to the Activity 4: Greek
Drama Forum in Blackboard.
The chili peppers indicate the degree of difficulty of each
Activity. One chili pepper is pretty easy. Two chili peppers are
more difficult. Three chili peppers indicate a challenging
Activity. However, your grade does not depend on the number
of chili peppers, but on how well you deal with the Activity you
select.
Agamemnon. The House of Atreus is one of the world's most
famous dysfunctional families. Look up each of the family
members, starting with Tantalus, write a brief biography of
each, and then explain what the family's main problems were.
Support your ideas with specific examples from your
reading. Bulfinch's Mythology is a good place to start. Be sure
to cite the sources you use and do not copy anything without
attribution--that is plagiarism! It is better to paraphrase what
you find, but you still must cite the sources used, or it is
plagiarism! Plagiarized work will receive no credit and cannot
be redone.
Agamemnon. Consider the scene where Clytemnestra persuades
Agamemnon to walk into the palace on valuable tapestries. She

is treacherous; he is arrogant. He has sacrificed their daughter
Iphigenia; she has taken his cousin as her lover. So who is to
blame for what happens next? Do you think her killing of
Agamemnon is righteous vengeance or criminal murder?
Support your position with specific examples from the play.
Agamemnon. Discuss Agamemnon's character as a king and as a
husband in the play Agamemnon. Do you think he deserved to
die? Why or why not? Support your comments with specific
examples from the play.
The Bacchae. Pentheus and all of Thebes are destroyed because
he refuses to accept Dionysus as a god. Can you see any point
in the play where Pentheus still had the opportunity to behave
differently and avoid his terrible fate? If so, discuss this point
and how Pentheus could have behaved differently; if not,
explain by examining the play in detail why not. Support your
position using specific examples from the play.
The Bacchae. Did the people of Thebes deserve what the god
did to them? After all, it was really only Pentheus who denied
the divine nature of Dionysus. Can you see any kind of justice
in the Bacchae? If so, what? Explain in detail using specific
examples from the play to support your ideas.
Lysistrata is about women seizing power and withholding sex in
order to stop a war. However, it was written by a man during a
period of history when Athenian women couldn't even go to the
marketplace on their own. Do you think a woman would have
written this play differently? Why? How? Be specific in your
answer and use examples from the play to support your ideas.
Medea. Medea is betrayed by her mortal husband Jason. She
responds by killing his father in law and new wife AND by
murdering her own children who were fathered by Jason. Why
do you think Medea kills her children? Use specific examples
from the play to support your points.
Medea. Medea is a woman, a foreigner, a witch, a scary,
powerful creature. Do you think Euripides was sympathetic to
her strangeness, or did he use it to show what a horrid being she
was? Discuss and support your comments with examples from

the play.
Oedipus the King. Discuss the relationship of Oedipus and
Jocasta in Oedipus the King. Are there any indications that she
is much older than Oedipus? That she might be his mother?
Should Oedipus have been concerned about who she was when
he married her? Do you suspect Oedipus of practicing DENIAL?
Support your comments with specific examples from the play.
Agamemnon. What could be more dangerous than going off to
war while a treacherous, adulterous woman stays at home? This
is the threat of Clytemnestra. No matter how successful
Agamemnon might be, he could not defend himself against his
wife. She is one of the most feared and loathed women in Greek
literature. List some of her interesting behavior patterns and
explain why they make her seem so dangerous to Agamemnon
and other Greek men of the time. You might want to look for
background information using Diotima, which links to materials
for the study of women and gender in the ancient world
Oedipus the King. The fate of the infant Oedipus was predicted
at birth. No matter what he did in life, he would end up killing
his father and marrying his mother. Contrast this to the
conditional futures that Tiresias predicts for Odysseus when he
visits Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey. If Odysseus does one
thing, "A" will happen, and if he does something else, then "B"
will happen. Compare the fixed fate of Oedipus with the fluid
fate of Odysseus. Use examples from both texts to support your
points.
There are a number of excellent films of Greek Dramas,
including Agamemnon, Oedipus and Medea. If you can locate
one of these films, watch it and write a critical review,
describing how the film interprets the drama and comparing it
to the text of the play (which you, of course, have read).
Woody Allen's film, Mighty Aphrodite, uses a Greek chorus
which gradually moves from Greece to Manhattan over the
course of the film. Compare his use of the Greek chorus to its
use in a Greek drama that you have read. Be sure to support
your ideas using specific details from both the Woody Allen

film and the Greek drama.
Both Oedipus and Job from the Hebrew Bible struggle with the
question of the inscrutable nature of God's will. Although the
answers are quite different, each is disturbing, because there
does not seem to be much room for human understanding,
action, and freedom in relation to God and/or fate.
Compare/contrast these two ancient heroes who struggle with
divine power and support your ideas with specific examples
from both texts.
Gilgamesh (Ishtar and Flood), Oedipus, Job and Pentheus
(Bacchae). Examine the kinds of divine justice that you find in
each of these ancient stories and see if you can find common
themes and/or profound differences among them. You will need
to consider each story in some depth and using specific details
to support your ideas. Poetentially worth double credit if very
well done.
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GREEK TRAGEDY
Greek theatre was something new in its time; it developed out
of a mixture of ancient myths, stories and religious rituals,
contemporary lyric poetry, the genius of a remarkably few men,
and the Greek love of theatrical spectacle.
This theatre developed in some relation to the god Dionysus.
Although scholars disagree about just how classical Greek
theatre was involved with the religion of Dionysus, they
generally agree that the early forms of Greek theatre stem from
poems and dances performed for Dionysus, a rather disorderly
god of mixed blessings.
Whether we see the fully matured Greek theatre as Dionysian or
not, we can certainly look for and see the elements of Dionysus
in Greek tragedy and comedy: insanity, violence, intoxication,
wildness--these are properties of Dionysus as well as of the
theatre that developed in Greece. And we do know that
performances of dithyrambs (poems celebrating Dionysus), as

well as satyr plays, tragedies and comedies, took place at the
festivals of Dionysus in Athens.
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DIONYSUS
Definitions:
Dionysus
god of wine and madness
Dithyramb
("twice-born") - dance/poems in honor of Dionysus
Satyrs
male worshippers of Dionysus - wore animal skins, horses tails
and ears
Maenads
female worshippers of Dionysus - nursed infant male animals;
also hunted and ate them raw
Goat ("tragos")
the sacred animal of Dionysus
Dionysus was "the god who gave man wine. However, he was
known also as the raving god whose presence makes man mad
and incites him to savagery and even to lust for blood...he was
also the persecuted god, the suffering and dying god, and all
whom he loved, all who attended him, had to share his tragic
fate." (W. Otto)
Dionysus had a difficult birth; he was snatched from his
mother's womb and secreted in the thigh of his father, Zeus,
until he was ready to be born. Because of this, he was called
"Dithyramb" or twice-born. His sacred animal was the goat
whose Greek name, "tragos" is included in the word tragedy.
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SATYRS AND MAENADS

The satyrs joined the maenads in wild dances in honor of
Dionysus.
Many scholars, although not all, trace the development of
tragedy back to such wild dance rituals worshipping the god
Dionysus.
Bieber suggests that "The worshippers of Dionysus danced
around the goat, singing the dithyramb; they then sacrificed it,
devoured its flesh and made themselves a dress...out of its skin,
or they threw it around their shoulders like the maenads. Then
they felt themselves to be goats....the maenads and
satyrs....were endowed with goat nature through a change of
dress, by taking the goatskin as a costume."
This ecstatic changing into someone else was supposedly the
beginning of acting, of playing a character other than oneself.
Not everyone agrees with her and Brian Vickers thinks that
whatever was Dionysian in early Greek theatre was gone by the
classical period of the fifth century. He also comments that
probably the "tragos" goat was the prize for the winning play,
not the disguise of the dancers. Whatever the case, these
elements were related in some way in the early development of
Greek drama.
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STEPS OF DEVELOPMENT OF GREEK DRAMA
1.
Ecstatic dancing and singing in honor of Dionysus (men dressed
as satyrs wearing animal skins, horse's ears and tails and
animal-like masks).
2.
Satyr play--the leader of the chorus represented someone other
than himself, usually a character from heroic saga, but still
wore a satyr mask.
3.

The leader of the satyr chorus wore the mask of a god or hero.
4.
The leader of the satyr chorus was entirely separated from the
chorus as an actor.
Following Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater
THE FIRST PLAYS
1.
Thespis placed a separate actor opposite the leader of the
chorus.
2.
Spoken dialogue developed between this actor and the leader of
the chorus.
3.
The subject-matter was taken from heroic saga.
4.
The chorus changed into various citizens of the heroic age
according to the story of the play.
5.
Thespis brought this form of drama, probably by wagon, to
Athens in 534 B.C.
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INNOVATIONS OF AESCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES AND
EURIPIDES
Aeschylus
the second actor (more dialogue); 524-456 BC: a definite actor's
costume; large, dignified masks; magnificently decorated
theater
Sophocles
the third actor (still more dialogue); 496-406 BC: scene painting
Euripides

a prologue explaining preceding events; 480-406 BC: the deus
ex machina ending
The theatres themselves were out of doors, with seating built
around the slopes surrounding a circular arena. Behind this
arena was a skene or backdrop building, which gradually
became more elaborate over the years.
A day of theatre would begin in the early morning and include a
series of three tragedies, three separate comedies, and perhaps a
satyr play.
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TRAGEDY
Greek tragedies are intensely emotional and focus on the horror
of murder and violent death, often within the family. The
characters are noble, often kings and queens, not ordinary folk.
The chorus, representing the society as onlookers, worries and
bewails events, but is helpless in the face of the disasters
befalling the main characters.
According to Aristotle, such intense emotions on stage make us
experience pity and fear, and hence purge us of those emotions.
This process of purgation is called catharsis.
There has been enormous controversy over the centuries as to
exactly what Aristotle meant by this term, catharsis, but the
only issue we need to think about in this context is: do we feel
somehow calmer, if not wiser, after experiencing one of these
tragedies? If so, that calmness may be called the effect of
catharsis. Or does witnessing one of these tragedies in fact
upset us and leave us in a more disturbed frame of mind than
before we experienced it?
Today we ask whether or not violence in the media is making
people more violent, or in fact allowing them to release their
tensions vicariously, so that their actual daily lives are calmer.

People seem to be inclining to the position that watching
violence in fact makes people more violent.
However, it is important to recognize that while Greek drama
dealt with emotional violence, it never showed physical
violence on stage. Further, the violence it dealt with was
witnessed by a sorrowing society in the form of the chorus, and
the plays ended with some form of resolution.
These differences are worth thinking about when asking whether
the emotional violence of Greek tragedy is in any way like the
emotional and physical violence of modern film and television.
Greek tragedies are often family tragedies: Agamemnon, for
example, harks back to the sacrifice of a child (Iphigenia),
enacts the murder of a spouse (Agamemnon), and looks forward
to the murder of a parent (Clytemnestra). This stress on
violence within the family is typical of Greek tragedy and stems
from the great importance of the family in Greek life. Brian
Vickers points out that since "The Greek expected to live on not
in an afterworld so much as in this world, in the memory and
continuous homage of his descendants....the most serious crimes
for the Greeks were those which struck against the very basis of
family existence: parricide, matricide, all `shedding of kindred
blood', and incest" because such crimes interfered with the
continuity of the family.(110-14)
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GREEK TRAGEDIES AND TROY
After Homer, Greek attitudes towards the Trojan War and its
heroes changed. The individualistic behavior and violence of
Homeric heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus became less
acceptable in civilized fifth century Athens. The wild violence
of heroic age women such as Clytemnestra, already a problem in
Homer, became even more unacceptable. Yet, the stories
remained popular. A number of plays surviving from fifth
century Athens are based on Trojan War material. They include:

Aeschylus
Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
Sophocles
Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes
Euripides
Hecuba, Andromache, The Trojan Women, Iphigenia in Tauris,
Helen, Electra, Orestes, Iphigenia at Aulis
Most of these plays are concerned with events before and after
the war, rather than with the war itself, and a surprising number
center on women, many suffering, some evil, rather than on the
ancient heroes.
Greek legends about the heroes and heroines of the Trojan
Cycle were plentiful and varied; different stories about the same
event or character might even contradict one another, especially
in the details. For example, in one version of the legend of
Iphigenia, she is sacrificed by her father Agamemnon at Aulis
so that Artemis will allow favorable winds for the Greek fleet to
sail to Troy. This sacrifice is used in the Agamemnon as a
motive for Clytemnestra's murder of her husband.
In an alternate version of the legend, Iphigenia is saved at the
moment of sacrifice by Artemis, who snatches Iphigenia away
to Tauris and replaces her on the altar with a sacrificial deer.
Euripides wrote two melodramatic plays about this happier
variant, Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris.
Consequently, although the stories used for Greek dramas were
often based on stories about the Trojan War, the treatment of
the stories was up to the individual dramatist. The legends of
Troy were there for the taking, available to be made into plays
that met the needs and interests of Athen's rapidly changing
civilization.
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THE ORESTEIA
The Oresteiaby Aeschylus consists of three plays:

Agamemnon
Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus, kill Agamemnon when
he returns home from the Trojan War.
The Libation Bearers
Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, kills Clytemnestra, his own
mother, to avenge her murder of Agamemnon.
The Avenging Furies ORKindly Spirits
Orestes now must deal with the consequences of his murder of
his mother and, with divine help, appease the furies who exact
vengeance for matricide.
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THE CHARACTERS OF THE ORESTEIA
Agamemnon
King of Mycenae; husband of Clytemnestra; father of Electra,
Iphigenia and Orestes; sacrificed Iphigenia; murdered by
Clytemnestra
Aegisthus
lover of Clytemnestra; cousin of Agamemnon
Apollo
god of purification
Athena
patron of Athens; established Court of Aeropagus which voted
to set Orestes free from blood guilt for killing his mother
Cassandra
daughter of Priam; war-prize of Agamemnon; speaks truth and
is not believed; murdered by Clytemnestra
Clytemnestra
wife of Agamemnon; sister of Helen; mother of Electra,
Iphigenia and Orestes; lover of Aegisthus; murders Agamemnon
and Cassandra
Furies
ancient demonic goddesses that uphold blood rights, especially

those of motherhood
Iphigenia
daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; sacrificed by
Agamemnon to receive favorable winds to sail to Troy
Orestes
son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; brother of Iphigenia;
murders Clytemnestra; driven mad by Furies; cleansed by
Apollo; set free by Court of Aeropagus
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THE STORY OF THE ORESTEIA
The Oresteia tells the story of the resolution of an ancient myth-
family tragedy, the blood guilt of the House of Atreus. This
conflict started with the two sons of Pelops, Atreus and
Thyestes, quarreling over the kingship of Mycenae. Atreus
became king and banished his brother Thyestes. However, when
Atreus discovered that Thyestes had secretly committed
adultery with Atreus' wife Aerope, he hid his rage, inviting
Thyestes to return home for a banquet. Atreus murdered two of
Thyestes' children and then served their bodies as meat to
Thyestes at the banquet. After Thyestes had eaten, Atreus
displayed their bloody heads, hands and feet on another dish.
Thyestes vomited and cursed the seed of Atreus. Agamemnon
and Menelaus are the sons of Atreus.
The curse worked itself out through:
· Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia
· Clytemnestra, who murdered her husband Agamemnon
· Orestes, Agamemnon's son, who murdered his mother,
Clytemnestra.
The Furies pursue and torment Orestes because he avenged one
crime with another more forbidden crime. The Furies are the
mythic enforcerers of ancient blood vengeance law, for whom
the greatest crime is matricide, since the closest blood tie was
between mother and child.

Orestes, seeking purification from his guilt, petitions Apollo,
who advises Orestes to seek help from Athena. She sympathizes
with Orestes, because she was not born of a woman herself, but
sprang from her father Zeus' head. Athena arranges a trial, using
Athenian citizens as jurors to weigh the claims of mother blood
guilt versus Clytemnestra's crime killing her husband. The
Furies agree to abide by the decision of the jury. They put forth
their claims of the primary right of the mother.
However, Apollo asserts that the mother is simply a passive
vessel, so that the child is really connected by blood to the
father alone. This would mean that matricide is not a blood guilt
crime at all! His arguments only persuade half the jury, which
gives a tie vote. However, the tie frees Orestes, ending his
blood guilt. Athena then placates the Furies, persuading them to
become the Kindly Ladies, benevolent powerful spirits of the
city of Athens, tucked underground, safely out of sight.
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AGAMEMNON
Early Greek tragedy can be difficult for a modern audience to
appreciate. Practically nothing happens in Agamemnon except
an offstage murder of a man we have just met by a woman we
don't like.
Because Greek dramas developed originally out of the lyric
satyr choruses, they have large sections of lyric poetry (the
choruses) interspersed with sections of
dialogue. Agamemnon's lyric sections are especially long. They
are supposed to be especially beautiful in the original Greek;
unfortunately, the translations I've read have not been
particularly attractive. Frankly, as a modern reader, I wish the
choruses of this play were shorter and the dialogue longer. If
you have a chance to see a film or play of Agamemnon, do so; It
can be more accessible with real actors than as a text.

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THE STORY OF AGAMEMNON
Agamemnon is the first of three plays which display the
unending and terrible consequences of a private blood feud
which continues from one generation to the next until it is
finally stopped by instituting a public legal process to replace
private revenge.
Agamemnon focuses on Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon.
She wants vengeance because Agamemnon sacrificed their
daughter Iphigenia at Aulis ten years earlier in order to placate
the goddess Artemis. This goddess had been sending contrary
winds to prevent the Greek Armies from sailing to Troy. It is
easy for us to be horrified at what Agamemnon did and want to
excuse Clytemnestra, but the play offers no excuses for her--she
is presented as thoroughly dislikeable, wicked, and dangerous.
The play starts at night with a watchman awaiting a fire signal
passed from hill top to hill top to indicate that the Trojan War
has ended. Clytemnestra has arranged for these fires which
cross many miles between Troy and Greece. She is a clever
woman as well as a dangerous one, and even worse, she has the
heart of a man in her woman's breast, as the watchman tells us
at the very start.
There is not much action in Agamemnon; the first half of the
play is spent anxiously awaiting the arrival of Agamemnon.
Here, the real action begins, centered on an argument between
Agamemnon and his wife Clytemnestra which displays
Agamemnon's conceited pride and Clytemnestra's treachery. She
wants him to walk into the palace on a valuable blood-red
tapestry; he objects that this would be an act of excessive pride.
Their argument, which is the only time we see them together in
the play, reveals each of their characters.
Philip Harsh remarks that "the essential weakness of
[Agamemnon's]...character is only too apparent in this clash
with the strong-willed Clytemnestra.... In attempting to make

Agamemnon accept her base flattery and walk upon the blood-
red tapestry, Clytemnestra is attempting to cause him to commit
an act of insolence ...which will evoke the disgust and hatred of
men and the vengeance of the gods." (69)
Agamemnon surrenders to his wife and, walking on the blood-
red tapestry, enters the palace, shortly to die. Now the most
intense scene of the play occurs, the raving prophecy of the
prophetess Cassandra outside the palace, predicting murder
most foul, while Clytemnestra, with help from her lover
Aegisthus prepares to murder Agamemnon within.
Agamemnon's death cries follow and the play is essentially
over. Agamemnon has been murdered, but there will be more
murder to avenge his death. Murder is not able to solve the
problems of this cursed household; indeed that is the whole
point of the trilogy. Murder only begets murder; setting up a
court of law is the only way to stop the series of bloody feuds.
This is a message about the need for civilization, but it is not
yet made in Agamemnon, so we are left with only darkness and
death. For this reason, the three plays of this trilogy should be
read as a set; Agamemnon is really only the first act of a three
act play.
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OEDIPUS REX
Modern audiences appreciate this play, but the more we think
about it, the more troublesome it becomes. Oedipus Rex is
difficult for us to cope with, because we believe so deeply today
in the idea of freewill and the potential for both human and
divine justice. But these concepts are not particularly relevant
to Sophocles' play about a man who was born fated to kill his
father and marry his mother. Everything that matters has
already happened before the play begins.
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THE STORY OF OEDIPUS REX
Before Oedipus was even conceived, the oracle of Apollo
prophesied that Oedipus would kill his father Laius and marry
his mother Jocasta, who were the king and queen of Thebes.
This dire warning led Jocasta to give the infant Oedipus to a
shepherd to expose to wild animals in the hills. The shepherd
felt pity and gave the infant to another shepherd who took him
to a distant city where Oedipus was adopted by the childless
king and queen and raised as their son.
Growing to adulthood, Oedipus heard a prophecy that he would
kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he left the city
to prevent these awful events from occurring.
On his travels, he met a carriage and several men at a crossroad.
The man in charge was rude and threatening and Oedipus killed
him, not knowing the man was his real father, Laius.
Oedipus then encountered the Sphinx and answered her riddle;
this won him the reward of marrying Jocasta, Queen of Thebes.
The play opens many years after these events. Thebes is being
devastated by plague, sent by Apollo because there is pollution
in the city. King Oedipus is determined to find out the source of
the pollution and drive it out of the city in order to stop the
plague. The play focuses on Oedipus' urgent drive to know the
truth. Being an impetuous man as well as a powerful king,
Oedipus is rude and hostile toward anyone who seems to
interfere with his search, especially the seer Tiresias who knows
the truth but does not want to tell it to Oedipus.
The terrible irony of this play is that Oedipus himself turns out
to be the source of pollution, the cause of the plague, the
murderer of his father and the husband of his mother. He finally
discovers the truth, and knowing it destroys his life as king of
Thebes.
Oedipus responds to this terrible knowledge by blinding himself
and at the end of the play he is prepared to leave Thebes and
wander in the wilderness, knowing himself and knowing that his

entire life was spent fulfilling his fated destiny.
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IS OEDIPUS GUILTY?
We must be careful not to blame Oedipus for what he did, nor to
think of his final exile as punishment. As Rohde points out, the
stain of pollution "is not `within the heart of man'. It clings to a
man as something hostile, and from without, and that can be
spread from him to others like an infectious disease. Hence, the
purification is effected by religious processes directed to the
external removal of the evil thing." Oedipus must leave Thebes,
but that does not mean he is guilty, merely that he is polluted
and a source of disease for the city.
Pollution is a fascinating index of a true difference between our
contemporary culture and that of classical Greece. Our system
of morality and justice is based firmly on the idea that each
sane person is or can be responsible for his or her own actions,
and that those actions can be "paid" for. E.g., a robber can pay
for his crime by going to jail. We simply cannot accept the
notion that a person could carry a moral disease like a virus
without being personally responsible for it, and that this moral
disease could sicken others just as physical viruses carry the flu
from one "innocent" person to the next. The only exception we
generally make is for insanity, which is why some people tried
for crimes plead "insanity" to explain that they were NOT
responsible. However, Oedipus is absolutely sane; there is no
question here of insanity. It is useful to notice where other
times and places are genuinely different from ours and pollution
is a good example of such a genuine difference.
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MEDEA

Medea is a revenge tragedy about a woman who murders her
own children to punish her ex-husband. This is a difficult
situation for us to identify with, yet Medea is an easy play to
read and relate to because of the powerful psychological
presentation of the mad, murderous, yet grieving mother.
Medea is a powerful, dangerous witch. After committing various
criminal acts including several murders to help her lover, Jason,
Medea has fled into exile with him to Corinth. Here Jason
deserts her and marries the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth.
Top
THE STORY OF MEDEA
The actual play starts at this time. It begins with the Nurse
worried about Medea's children; she evidently knows Medea
well and fears for their lives. Creon, the King of Corinth and
father of Jason's new bride intends to drive Medea and her
children by Jason out of the city into exile. Medea pleads with
Creon for one day's time before she leaves.
Next comes a really disgusting scene in which Jason, an
unbelievably smooth and egotistical rat, says that if Medea had
only behaved nicely, she could have stayed in Corinth. He
further claims to have married the princess in order to
consolidate the position of his and Medea's children. Medea
doesn't buy that lame excuse.
Medea schemes to prepare her revenge on Jason. First, she
arranges for her own safety by promising the childless King
Aegeus of Athens that if he gives her refuge she will enable him
to have children.
Next, Medea sends her own children to Jason's new bride,
carrying rich gifts of a robe and tiara, supposedly to soften the
princess' heart so that she and her father will let Medea's
children stay in Corinth, even though Medea must leave. But the
gifts are in fact poisoned, and when the princess puts them on,
not only does she die, but her father embraces her and he too

dies from the poison.
Finally, Medea leaves Corinth in a dragon wagon, taking the
bodies of the two dead children so that Jason won't even have
the satisfaction of burying them. Not only is this her ultimate
touch of revenge, but it is a good example of a deus ex machina
ending. Medea's actions had made so much trouble that there
was no way she could escape by natural means, so Euripides
provided her a wagon pulled by a dragon.
Euripides makes Medea strangely sympathetic in her murderous
sufferings. She loves her children and yet she is finally willing
to kill them in order to complete her total revenge against their
father.
The most disturbing aspect of this play to modern readers is that
Medea gets away with murdering her own children as well as
Jason's new wife and her father. This was certainly disturbing
to playgoers of Euripides' time, too, but they would have been
more able to understand the outcome, because Medea was
related to the sun god and such creatures did not have to operate
strictly in terms of human morality. Niobe is an example of
what the Greek gods did to human beings when offended. Niobe
was a proud mother of many children and she bragged that she
had more children than the goddess Leto, whose only two
children were Apollo and Artemis. Leto was offended. To
soothe their mother, Apollo and Artemis killed all of Niobe's
children.
Morality is for human beings; the gods are always potentially
dangerous to impious, unwary, and even totally innocent
humans (e.g. the unborn Oedipus). Although the gods, at times,
seem to have ideas of right and wrong, these ideas may be quite
different from human ideas of right and wrong.
Top
OLD COMEDY
Old Comedy was the form of comedy written and presented in

the fifth century B.C. in Greece. It is quite different from later
kinds of Greek Comedy.
STRUCTURE OF OLD COMEDY
1.
Main character conceives an absurd happy idea (e.g. no sex in
Lysistrata)
2.
Violent opposition to happy idea
3.
Happy idea conquers opposition in a debate
4.
Test of happy idea in practice
5.
A series of scenes between the main character and various
figures who have been affected
6.
A satisfactory climax including a party
Following Harsh, A Handbook of Classical Drama, 258-259
Top
LYSISTRATA
Lysistrata is set in contemporary Athens during the
Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. This war
eventually destroyed the Athenian democracy. The title
character, Lysistrata reveals her happy idea of a sex strike to
force the men to stop fighting and make peace. She convinces
the other women that this is a good idea and the women seize
the Acropolis, where the money for the war effort was kept.
Then two half-choruses enter, one of old women and one of old
men. Their clash represents the dramatic clash of the entire
play.

Next, the Magistrate tries to get the women to behave. He is a
typical pompous Athenian male. After he is thoroughly
humiliated, Lysistrata chastises the Athenians for their
destructive warlike behavior which is destroying both Athens
and Sparta. Then the two choruses clash again providing low
comic contrast to Lysistrata's serious advice.
A few days pass and then Lysistrata announces that the women
are undermining her revolt. The two half-choruses express their
hatred of one another. The men are getting pretty horny by now,
and we have the wonderful scene of Cinesias begging his wife
Myrrhina for sex, while she teases and refuses him and he
finally leaves.
The Spartan Herald arrives and announces that the Spartan men
are in the same fix as the Athenian men, and finally a meeting
and truce is arranged. Lysistrata makes a moving appeal for
pan-hellenism, reminding each side of the debt they owe to the
other. Naturally, all ends with a banquet, singing and dancing.
Top
INTERESTING ISSUES: THREATENING WOMEN:
Lysistrata: organizes a revolt of women against men
Clytemnestra: takes a lover while her husband is at Troy;
murders her husband when he returns home
Medea: a witch; murders many people, including her own
children; gets away with it all
Jocasta: tries to have her infant son killed; marries her
unrecognized adult son; kills herself
The plays Lysistrata and Agamemnon both make much of role
reversal: in both plays women seizing power act as men. In the
case of Lysistrata, it is all very amusing, but in the case of
Clytemnestra it is the deadliest of dangers, as we saw earlier in
the Odyssey, where Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon was a

constant warning to Odysseus of what can happen to a
homecoming soldier if he can't trust his wife.
The actual role of women in classical Greece was extremely
limited, especially in Athens where women were not even
allowed out of the house to go marketing. They were tightly
controlled to insure that the male head of the family had male
heirs which were truly his own. Beyond this, women were not
much valued. Certainly they did not behave like the women in
these plays. It is fascinating to wonder why a culture that so-
controlled its women would write plays about such powerful
and disturbing women...was it memories of being an infant
dependent upon a woman, or was it memories of an earlier time
when women had had a more active role in the society?
At any rate, Medea is a powerful, dangerous witch woman. And
one cannot feel good about Jocasta although her troubles were
largely beyond her control. One gets the feeling that classical
Greek playwrights were not comfortable with powerful women.
None of these women are in any way normal, and are as much
monsters as female in the way they are presented. Lysistrata is
an amusing monster; Jocasta a disturbing one; Clytemnestra and
Medea intensely dangerous.
Top
INTERESTING ISSUES: FREEWILL IN OEDIPUS REX
This play is wonderfully controversial. Oedipus Rex is probably
the single best document we have for thinking and arguing
about ideas of fate and freedom in classical Greece. I have
selected just a few comments by contemporary scholars to give
a sense of the ideas this play stirs up.
"There is no suggestion in the Oedipus Rex that Laius sinned or
that Oedipus was the victim of an hereditary curse, and the
critic must not assume what the poet has abstained from
suggesting....we think of two clear-cut alternative views--either
we believe in free will or else we are determinists. But fifth-

century Greeks did not think in these terms...." (Dodds 40)
"From Homer to Aristotle both poets and philosophers tended to
ask not `was he free?' as we might do, but `is he responsible
...?'...the ancient question, is answered in the affirmative if it
can be shown that the men involved acted according to their
characters..." (Gould 52)
"Sophocles has provided a conclusive answer to those who
suggest that Oedipus could, and therefore should, have avoided
his fate. The oracle was unconditional (l. 790): it did not say "If
you do so-and-so you will kill your father"; it simply said "You
will kill your father, you will sleep with your mother." And
what an oracle predicts is bound to happen." (Dodds 39)
Oedipus' "lack of freedom in the past needs to be emphasized
since it is the assurance of his innocence in the present. Had he
had the faintest suspicion of his true identity and relationship to
Laius and Jocasta then he would indeed be an `inhuman
monster'". (Vickers 499)
Top
INTERESTING ISSUES: KINGS AND HEROES
Agamemnon in Agamemnon
Oedipus in Oedipus Rex
Jason in Medea
Greek kings were pretty arrogant by modern standards and this
was ok under most circumstances. Be careful not to impose our
ideas of a nice guy on them. However, Agamemnon was perhaps
a little too haughty for his own good, and gets in trouble in
the Iliad because of his hot temper and pride which incite him
to quarrel with Achilles. This pride is important in
Aeschylus' Agamemnontoo. As Philip Harsh points out:
"The pride of Agamemnon...is...spectacularly symbolized by
Agamemnon's triumphant entrance in his chariot with followers
and fanfare. He is ...too proud of his utter destruction of Troy.
His conceit entirely prevents him from properly understanding

the veiled warnings of the chorus. From his haughty and
contemptuous response to Clytemnestra's hypocrisy, it is
obvious that he despises her; but...he pathetically
underestimates his adversary. " (69)
Oedipus too is arrogant, but there is no doubt in the play that he
has been a good king and is sincere in his attempts to root out
the source of plague that is harming his country. And once
Oedipus discovers the terrible truth about his life, his arrogance
totally disappears. It would be interesting to compare the
characters of Oedipus and Agamemnon to distinguish between
two kinds of kingly pride, one excessive even in fifth century
Greece.
As for Jason, he is a self-seeking, egocentric rat and deserves to
die, but of course it is not Jason, but his children, who are
killed. His smarmy speeches to Medea explaining why he "had"
to marry the king's daughter to protect his and Medea's children
are masterpieces of disgusting rationalization that would be
perfectly at home in a modern context. Jason could be a villain
on a daytime TV show.
Top
INTERESTING ISSUES: FOREIGNERS AND MONSTERS
Cassandra
Medea
Oedipus
Tiresias
Cassandra and Medea are both female, foreign, monstrous, and
closely connected to things sacred. Cassandra has troubles
because she deceived Apollo; her punishment is to prophesy
truly while no one believes her, which she does while
Agamemnon is about to be murdered. She uses her supernatural
gift "to draw again and again the connection between crime and
retribution, linking past, present and future in the house of
Atreus." (Vickers 374) The chorus just listens to her and goes

oh woe and such but nobody takes a step to help Agamemnon or
to keep Cassandra from going into the palace to be herself
murdered.
Medea, on the other hand, gets away with everything, because
she is descended from the sun god. Indeed, "one of the chief
difficulties which Euripides faced in writing this play was in the
humanization of Medea, for the Medea of popular legend was
both the most famous witch of antiquity and the cold perpetrator
of barbaric murders." (Harsh 177) For all this, Euripides
transforms the mythical witch into a passionate woman who can
weep bitterly while she murders her own children.
Oedipus is also foreign and monstrous. He becomes a sacred
monster, especially after he blinds himself and prepares to leave
the city as a wanderer. In a later play by Sophocles, Oedipus at
Colonus, we are told that Oedipus' final death was a sacred
event bringing blessings on the place where he died.
Tiresias is an interesting character; he is the seer who gives
Odysseus good advice in the underworld about how to get home
safely. Tiresias lived part of his life as a man; part as a woman.
He was ancient, wise, a sacred monster. In Oedipus Rex,
Tiresias is still alive, blind, yet able to see the truth, something
Oedipus cannot do until after he loses his physical eyes. Much
of the irony of the play lies in the contrast between the
physically blind who can see and the mentally blind who cannot
see even though their eyes function perfectly.
Indeed, the development of Greek drama out of the rituals of
Dionysus suggests much of the foreign and monstrous inherent
in the very fabric of the early dramatic ritual. Dionysus was
known as the god who came from elsewhere, forcing his way
into Greece, overcoming resistance, driving people mad who
refused to worship him. This is described at length
in The Bacchae by Euripides. Dionysus' powerful ritual mixture
of ecstasy and suffering, dance, song, wine and death, is
eminently suitable for the god of Greek tragedy, a theatre of
intense, complex emotion, great suffering and final calm.

Top
WORKS CITED
Margarete Bieber. The History of the Greek and Roman Theater.
E.R. Dodds. "On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex."
In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Ed. by Harold Bloom.
Thomas Gould. "The Innocence of Oedipus: The Philosophers
on Oedipus the King." In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Ed. by
Harold Bloom.
Philip Whaley Harsh. A Handbook of Classical Drama.
Walter F. Otto. Dionysus: Myth and Cult.
Erwin Rohde. Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in
Immortality among the Greeks.
Brian Vickers. Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth, Society.
The 9 Principles of Quality Customer Service
by Lyndsay Swinton
The quality of customer service is the key differentiator
between good, bad and
indifferent companies. Good quality customer service keeps
customers coming
back; bad customer service drives customers away, taking their
friends, family
and workmates with them.
All else being equal, good quality customer service gives the
edge over
competitors. Regardless of industry, here are the 9 key
principals of good
customer service that always make business sense.

1. Attracting new customers costs more than retaining existing
customers
A satisfied customer stays with a company longer, spends more
and may
deepen the relationship. For example a happy credit card
customer may enlist
the company’s financial services and later take travel insurance.
This is an easy “sell”, compared with direct marketing
campaigns, television
advertisements and other sophisticated and expensive
approaches to attract
new customers.
2. Customer service costs real money
Real costs are associated with providing customer service and
companies spend
in line with a customer’s value. If you are a high value
customer or have the
potential of being high value, you will be serviced more
carefully.
Companies reduce the cost of customer service by using
telephone voice
response systems, outsourcing call centers to cheaper locations,
and self-
servicing on the internet. However, companies risk alienating
customers through
providing an impersonal service.
Some internet banking companies are bucking the trend by
charging customers
to contact them. In exchange, customers receive better interest

rates due to
reduced overheads and are satisfied with that.
http://www.mftrou.com
http://www.mftrou.com/lyndsay-swinton
3. Understand your customers’ needs and meet them
How can you meet your customers’ needs, if you don’t know
them? To
understand your customer’s needs, just listen to the “voice of
the customer” and
take action accordingly.
Customer listening can be done in many ways, for example
feedback forms,
mystery shopping, and satisfaction surveys. Some companies
involve senior
employees in customer listening to ensure decisions benefit the
customer as
much as the company.
4. Good process and product design is important
Good quality customer service is only one factor in meeting
customer needs.
Well designed products and processes will meet customers’
needs more often.
Quality movements, such as Six Sigma, consider the “cost of
quality” resulting
from broken processes or products. Is it better to service the
customer well than
to eradicate the reason for them to contact you in the first
instance?

5. Customer service must be consistent
Customers expect consistent quality of customer service; with a
similar, familiar
look and feel whenever and however they contact the company.
Say you visit an expensive hairdressing salon and receive a
friendly welcome, a
drink and a great haircut. You are out of town and visit the
same hairdressing
chain and get no friendly welcome, no drink and a great hair-
cut. Are you a
satisfied customer who will use that chain again? Probably not,
as you did not
receive the same customer service – which is more than a good
hair-cut.
6. Employees are customers too
The quality management movement brought the concept of
internal and
external customers. Traditionally the focus was on external
customers with little
thought given to how internal departments interacted.
Improving relationships
with internal customers and suppliers assists delivery of better
customer service to
external customers, through reduced lead-times, increased
quality and better
communication.
The “Service-Profit Chain” model developed by Harvard
University emphasizes
the circular relationship between employees, customers and
shareholders.

Under-staffed, under-trained employees will not deliver good
quality customer
service, driving customers away. Equal effort must be made in
attracting,
motivating and retaining employees as is made for customers,
ultimately
delivering improved shareholder returns. Better shareholder
returns mean more
money is available to invest in employees and so the circle
continues.
7. Open all communications channels
The customer wants to contact you in many ways – face to face,
by mail,
phone, fax, and email - and will expect all of these
communication channels to
be open and easily inter-mingled.
This presents a technical challenge, as it requires an integrated,
streamlined
solution providing the employee with the information they need
to effectively
service the customer.
8. Every customer contact is a chance to shine
If a customer contact concerns a broken process, then
empowered employees
will be able to resolve the complaint swiftly, possibly
enhancing the customer’s
perception of the company. Feeding back this information
allows corrective

action to be made, stopping further occurrences of the error.
If you inform customers about new products or services when
they contact you,
you may make a valuable sale, turning your cost centre into a
profit centre. This
is only possible when you have a good relationship with your
customer, where
you understand their specific needs. A targeted sales pitch will
have a good
chance of success, as the customer is pre-sold on the company’s
reputation.
9. People expect good customer service everywhere.
Think about an average day – you travel on a train, you buy
coffee, you work.
You expect your train to be on time, clean and be a reasonable
cost. You
expect your coffee to be hot and delivered quickly. You expect
your work
mates to work with you, enabling you to get the job done.
People become frustrated when their expectations are not met,
and increasingly
demand higher service quality in more areas of their lives.
Providing outstanding customer service at the right price is the
holy grail of most
companies. It is worth remembering that we all experience
customer service
every day. We can learn from these and apply them in our own
line of work,
whatever it may be. The quality of customer service will make
you stand out
from your competitors – make sure it’s for the right reasons!

The 9 Principles of Quality Customer Service1. Attracting new
customers costs more than retaining exist2. Customer service
costs real money3. Understand your customers’ needs and meet
them4. Good process and product design is important5.
Customer service must be consistent6. Employees are
customers too7. Open all communications channels8. Every
customer contact is a chance to shine9. People expect good
customer service everywhere.

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