Scholars

• "All Athenian Tragedy was performed within the context of religious rituals in honour of... that elusive but compelling god Dionysus."

  • Carteledge
• TAPLIN (Chorus)

  • "The chorus act as an 'emotional bridge' between the audience and the narrator, telling us how we should be feeling/acting and overcoming the limitations of only having three actors on stage."
• EDITH HALL (slave characters)

  • slaves, although formally powerless, can wield enormous power in the world of tragedy through their access to dangerous knowledge
• GARVIE (oedipus and tiresias)

  • Oedipus is ignorant but determined to know, whereas Tiresias knows the truth but is determined to suppress it
  • Tiresias is physically blind, while Oedipus, the physically sighted, knows nothing.
• GARVIE (oedipus victory)

  • In one sense, Oedipus does not fail at all. He set out to uncover the truth and by the end of the play, he has succeeded in his quest. He never says, "I wish I had not found out", for he has gained what he values most - knowledge, no matter the cost.
• GARVIE (jocasta's anagnorosis)

  • [Oedipus's] excitement contrasts with her horror
• GARVIE (Oedipus)

  • he is the only character for whom to live a painless lie is worse than to accept the painful truth
• FAGLES (Oedipus)

  • Oedipus is his own destroyer. He is the epitome of the Athenian character of a man of action, swift and vigorous.
• Finglass (Oedipus)

  • Oedipus is brought down by a 'tragic virtue', his humane concern for others, which along with his courage lead him to persist in finding the truth and therefore his own destruction.
• MORWOOD (agave)

  • she is degraded by what she carries since such treatment of a human being is non-greek in it's barbarism.
• FOLEY (Dionysus)

  • Euripides presents Dionysus as a director who constructs his own play within a play
• GARVIE (Dionysus)

  • the most striking paradox is that the god who, throughout the play, promises joy will at the end only produce suffering and horror
• HANNAH ROISMAN (AGAVE)

  • agave's recognition scene is one of the most painful and harrowing scenes in greek tragedy
• CARTLEDGE (comedy)

  • in comedy, there is the ingrained tendency for the norms of ordinary life to be suspended, subverted or even turned on their heads
• DOVER (malicious humor at famous athenians)

  • of all the men we know from historical sources to have achieved political prominence at Athens during (this period), there is not one who is not attacked and ridiculed
• BETTENDORF (frogs)

  • the primary purpose of the play, however, is not literary criticism, but political actions