Greek Influence on Western Literature Essay

Slide unrivalled The plays performed at the Festival of Dionysus represented a completely new executing genre drama. Plays like Oedipus Rex, Medea, and Antigone laid the groundwork for the great plays to make up the western canon, from Shakespeares Hamlet to Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Slide Two This era also saw the birth and cultivation of a new literary genre tragedy. In plays like Oedipus Rex, the underlying tragic structure in which a character experiences a interchange from happiness to suffering was codified and refined. In the hands of writers like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, it became a vehicle for the exploration of some of humanitys fundamental fears and questions virtually existence. You can see the same questions being explored in works by Shakespeare, for example, hundreds of years later.Today, more than 2,000 years later, these plays are still studied by modern tragic playwrights. Slide Three Finally, the Athenian tragedies were important because they stage humans at the center of the story. In the Iliad, for example, the gods are closely baffling in the action they take sides, they intervene on behalf of their heroes, and so on. part gods do appear in these plays, it is the very human protagonists such as Oedipus or Medea who take center stage, and whose actions determine the plot. This change signaled a commove in focus from the supernatural to the human in literature, which would have a profound influence on the Western tradition, particularly after the nerve center Ages.