Thought for Fifth Month, 2008
Tragic drama was...a treasured institution in Athens. Every year at the City Dionysia, the polis put itself on the stage.
The playwrights often chose subjects that reflected recent events, but usually presented them in a mythical setting that distanced them from the contemporary scene and enabled the audience to analyze and reflect upon the issues. The festival was a communal meditation, during which the audience worked through their problems and predicament....
In tragedy there was neither a simple answer nor a single viewpoint.... The audience had to weigh one insight against another.... Tragedy taught the Athenians to project themselves toward the "other," and to include within their sympathies those whose assumptions differed markedly from their own....
The Greeks firmly believed that the sharing of grief and tears created a valuable bond between people. Enemies discovered their common humanity thus, as Achilles and Priam had done at the end of the Illiad: their tears had been a katharsis that cleansed their grief of poisonous hatred... Catharsis was achieved by the experience of sympathy and compassion, because the ability to feel with the other was crucial to the tragic experience.
This was especially clear in Aeschylus's The Persians, which was present at the City Dionysia in 472 [B.C.E.]....
Aeschylus was taking a risk. But his play achieved the necessary distance by making the Athenians see the battle of Salamis [in 480] from the Persians' point of view... Only a few years earlier, the Persians had smashed their city to pieces and descecrated their holy places, yet now they were able to weep for the Persian dead...
There was no triumphant righteousness; no gloating. Aeschylus did not depict the Persians as enemies, but as a people in mourning... The Persians was an outstanding example of a sympathy that reached out to the erstwhile enemy at a time when memories of desperate conflict were still raw.
—Karen Armstrong,
The Great Transformation:
The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
(New York: Anchor Books, 2006, pp.268-70)
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