The Madness of Tragedy

Abstract

This chapter presents a scene in Menander’s Aspis , revealing how great a fascination the madness of tragedy could still exert upon Athenian audiences, about a century after the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. Greek tragedy contains many scenes of terrible suffering, what Aristotle indicated with the general term πάθος. Among all the kinds of psychological suffering to be found in Greek tragedy, madness is the most extreme. The paradigmatic example of Greek tragic madness is Orestes; the chapter begins with Orestes' case, in order to establish the basic outlines of the ailment. The chapter suggests a different approach to Orestes’ peculiarly visual variety of madness, connecting it with the emphasis on vision in these scenes and in other scenes closely connected with them. It is suggested that the depiction of tragic madness is influenced by the essential visuality of the tragic medium itself. Keywords: Aspis ; Greek tragedy; madness; Orestes