Greek Drama · Part 18 · Our own city · B2–C1
Drama in Alexandria
Part 18 of Greek Drama, the last: the theatre of our own city. Alexandria became the capital of Greek scholarship about drama, and it had its own playwrights: the seven tragedians called the Pleiad, Herodas with his sharp little Mimes of everyday life, and Ezekiel, a Jewish poet who turned the story of Moses into a Greek tragedy. And behind them all stands Aristotle, the first theorist of drama. The language of definition and academic explanation (is defined as, refers to, consists of, is known as, a… in which), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
We end where we live. For eighteen lessons we have travelled to Athens and Thebes, Troy and Corinth. Tonight we come home to Alexandria, the city that collected, copied, edited and argued about all those plays, and wrote some of its own.
Yes, Philo: Ezekiel’s Exagoge, the story of the Exodus written as a Greek tragedy, by a Jewish poet of our city. Tonight we meet him, Herodas, the poets of the Pleiad, and the man who first explained what a tragedy is: Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander, who founded our city. Tonight’s grammar is the language of definitions, the grammar of scholars.
Alexandria, from the 3rd century BCE to Philo’s own time
Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the teacher of Alexander the Great, wrote the Poetics, the first surviving theory of drama. He defined tragedy as the imitation (mimēsis) of a serious action that, through pity and fear, brings about a catharsis, a cleansing or release of those emotions. He said the best tragic hero is a good man who falls because of a hamartia, an error or flaw, and he praised plots with a reversal (peripeteia) and a recognition (anagnōrisis), like Oedipus discovering…
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