Three Electras:Competitions and Mythopoetic Writings in Ancient Greek Tragedies
Ancient Greek tragedy thrived in democratic Athens,a city with highly competitive spirit.Agōn(竞赛),i.e.,competition,can be said as an essential characteristic of Greek drama.Traditional studies on the competition of tragedies used to focus on the mechanism of competition and the comparison of those plays performed in the same year.However,the competition of tragedies presented on the stage was far more than it seemed.Through comparing the three plays staged in different periods by three great tragedians-Aeschylus'(埃斯库罗斯)Choephoroi(《奠酒人》),Sophocles'(索福克勒斯)Electra(《埃勒克特拉》)and Euripides'(欧里庇得斯)Electra,we can see that the competitions among the tragedians with their works existed not only in the theaters of various times,but also in their cross-spatio-temporal dialogues.In their plays,the three tragedians,by portraying different characterizations of the core character,Electra,offered variant and competitive interpretations on the ethical dilemma of matricide in the myth of Oresteia(奥瑞斯提亚),and therefore further demonstrated their respective treatments of the tragedy as a literary genre.In the competitions across space and time,tragedy became a highly-extensible mechanism of expression,and its dramatic power was no longer confined to the Athenian City-State at a given space and time,but it became a transcendental field which witnessed the transformation of thoughts in a macro sense and even the epochal changes.
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