Stories from Greek Comedians vs. Stories from Greek Tragedians
So, for school over the past few weeks, I have been reading stories from Ancient Greece. I have read both stories form Greek Comedians, and stories form Greek Tragedians. Today, I'll be discussing both of them, and the differences between them.
So- stories from Greek Comedians. They are, well, not certainly not Tim Hawkins-type comedy. The humor is.... dated, to put it lightly. The stories involve the main character/characters having some sort of problem (i.e. war with Sparta, falling out of favor with those in power), and they go through completely ludicrous and ridiculous acts to solve their problem. For instance, in one story (Spoiler alert!!!!) Athens is at war with Sparta. One man is unhappy with this, and decides to solve the problem. So, he decides to appeal to Zeus to give the Grecian people peace. How will he get to Zeus? Well, he'll fly. On a dung beetle. That he fed himself so that it would grow large enough (End of spoilers). Ha, ha. Well, though the humor falls flat today, I am sure that they were hilarious when they were first written in Ancient Greece.
Greek Tragedies- NOT designed to make you laugh. In the stories form Greek Tragedians, the predicaments the main characters find themselves in are more severe, and the stories do not end happily ever after. There is more violence, and the stories sometimes end with all but one of the main characters dying/being killed in battle/being poisoned/committing suicide. Or, in one story (Spoiler alert!) an archer sailing to Troy is bitten by a snake, and left to die by his comrades on an abandoned island (No more spoilers, promise!). Not comedies. The stories, contrary to what you might expect, don't contain warnings or morals intentionally written (At least, that's my opinion). One thing that is interesting about the tragedies is this: Some of the stories have sequels. This tells me one of three things: One, that was just the way the translation was organized, and the stories was actually all written in one place; Two, the authors planned to write multiple stories, instead of putting the whole story into one stone tablet (They do have limitations, I wouldn't like to carry the Lord of the Rings around if it was written on a stone tablet!); Three, the public wanted to know how the story ended, and they demanded that the author write a new story to finish the old one. (Similar to when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the story of Sherlock Holmes dying, and the public was shocked and demanded that he somehow brought Holmes back.)
So, the Comedies versus the Tragedies. I would say the major differences are these:
1. The Comedies have ridiculous stories, almost to the point of goofiness, while the Tragedies have a more serious nature to them.
2. The Comedies normally end happily, and the Tragedies.... don't.
I have also noticed a similarity between them both. They use any setting for their stories, i.e. the Athenian-Spartan wars, domestic problems, the Trojan wars, revolutions in the governing system, anything you can think of.
Well, thank you for reading my post! Have a great day!