Ajax

The unknowability of the gods, their plans, and their intentions is a theme across Athenian tragedy that reflects the unpredictability of life. Since no one can know the gods’ long term plans for certain until they come to pass, pity for human suffering can be understood as a form of piety. Pity itself had a divine manifestation: the goddess Eleos.

Annual festivals in honor of the gods were the settings at which tragedies were performed in competition. Three playwrights were chosen ahead of time to produce three tragedies and one tragicomic satyr play, with a jury selected to pick a winner. This performance context is an essential component of interpreting the playwright’s characterizations of the gods. It is possible that the ancients did not ‘believe’ in the gods but submitted to and accepted them as a feature of life, in the way modern readers accept gravity, thunderstorms, and emotional overwhelm. Virtually everything that humans experience had, in ancient Greek cosmology, a sacred counterpart, from love (Aphrodite), rage (Ares), and peace (Eirene) to delusion (Atê), rumor (Phêmê), and family (Hestia). This can help access why Sophocles (and other ancient poets) portrays gods behaving in ways that moderns would consider negative but that ancients simply accepted as facets of human experience that span the spectrum of emotion, from joy to grief.