Introduction: Plato’s Challenge

Abstract

For centuries, tragedy has been the source of debate and speculation. To evaluate tragedy’s effect on the audience is itself predicated upon beliefs regarding the genre’s composition, including by whom, and for what purpose, the tragedy in question is composed. It is a debate regarding the relationship of mimetic art (in this case, poetry in general and tragedy in particular) to knowledge, emotions, and truth—what Socrates described to his interlocutors as an age old “quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Plato, [1935] 2006: 465). Contemporary vocabularies and academic scholarship tend to reduce tragedy to a literary genre. For the Greeks, however, to interrogate the value of tragedy was not merely a question of aesthetic pleasure, but whether such representations could benefit the polis (city-state) and “all the life of man.” To examine the significance of tragedy then is not a topic limited to the realm of literary theory, philosophy, and aesthetics (though these fields are integral to the genre). It is a sociological issue concerning what constitutes a tragedy, how tragedy is constructed, and the consequences of representing tragedy in society.