Tragedy as “An Augury of a Happy Life”

Like Aeschylus’s Women of Aetna, fifth-century Greek tragedy functioned as an augury of happiness. In Aristotle’s time, however, these tetralogies were performed only as “monologies.” Stripped of their celebratory satyr plays and other civic elements, fifth-century tragedies came to look like one-act tear-jerkers, merely sad stories of the deaths of kings. This type of play, which Aristotle calls tragedy and attributes to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, was probably the invention of fourth-century Method actors. Their professional skill, together with new rules for tragic competition, transformed a propitious political art into a weepy histrionic one—and produced Aristotle’s otherwise perplexing “sad-ending” theory of tragedy.