Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
The Greek Way
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Big Love
by Charles L. Mee
directed by Les Waters,at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,November 20–December 9, 2001
How relevant to contemporary events should a classical Greek tragedy be? According to the classical Greeks, not too much so: that, at any rate, is what the sad case of Phrynichus suggests. In 494 BC, the wealthy city of Miletus, culturally Greek but located on the coast of Asia Minor, was brutally sacked after a failed insurrection against its Persian overlords. This event had two results: it inflamed the moral outrage that drew Athens ever closer to a war against Persia (which would follow in another few years), and it inspired what was surely one of the first 'fact-based' dramas in the Western tradition—a tragedy by the playwright Phrynichus entitled The Capture of Miletus, produced at the annual dramatic festival at Athens two years after the Miletian disaster, in 492 BC. It was a shrewd choice of subject on the dramatist's part: Miletus had had particularly close cultural ties to Athens, and tugging on Athenian heartstrings was, no doubt, a sure way to move the audience—and, perhaps, the judges of the dramatic competition. But as Herodotus relates, the playwright got more pity and fear than he bargained for:
Review, 3122 words
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