Dictators have no time for Tragedy.
In their blinkered, paranoid certitude, why would they want to watch a play about the fall of someone mighty.
Tragedy is tied to Athenian democracy. As a recent professor of mine said, “It was a democratic form for a democratic audience,” an audience so often restive, even riotous, that “rod holders,” theater police were required to keep order. It is helpful to remember that the theater and the battlefield were both called the “dancing floor.”
For Athenians, Tragedy was not an escape, a morning or afternoon spent forgetting about life outside the Theatron. Tragedy was an extension of their democracy where the polis came together to watch plays that described and illuminated their identity as Athenians.
The Gods and chance rule over their Tragic worlds, forces which human beings cannot control, but human agency is the third element of these plays. The Sun God, Helios, sends a chariot and flying horses to take Medea away from justice after her murders. A herdsman, just happening upon him, rescues Oedipus as a baby abandoned to die. But Medea, clear headed and clear sighted in every instance, also chooses her many murders. Without knowing where it will end, Oedipus relentlessly searches out the origin story of how he came to be King.
Many of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are “coming to know” plays. Characters undergo an entrance into knowledge, often a knowledge the audience already possesses, thus heightening the dramatic irony. What those characters come to know creates suffering and out of that suffering comes revelations, theirs and the audience’s as well. Catharsis requires an individual to acknowledge often painful truths.
Why would any dictator want any of that? What use does a dictator have for catharsis?
