Meditations XI.6
Originally tragedies were brought on to remind us of real events, and that such things naturally occur, and that on life’s greater stage you must not be vexed at things, which on the stage you find so attractive. For it is seen that these things must be gone through, and they too have to endure them, who cry Ah, Kithaeron!14 Aye, and the dramatic writers contain some serviceable sayings. For example this more especially: Though both my sons and me the gods have spurned, For this too there is reason;15
and again: It nought availeth to be wroth with things;16
and this: Our lives are reaped like the ripe ears of corn;17
and how many more like them.
And after Tragedy the old Comedy was put on the stage, exercising an educative freedom of speech, and by its very directness of utterance giving us no unserviceable warning against unbridled arrogance. In somewhat similar vein Diogenes18 also took up this role. After this, consider for what purpose the Middle Comedy was introduced, and subsequently the New, which little by little degenerated into ingenious mimicry. For that some serviceable things are said even by the writers of these is recognized by all. But what end in view had this whole enterprize of such poetical and dramatic composition?19
- 14.Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex 1391; Epictetus’s Discourses i. 24, § 16. Perhaps Marcus had in mind the lines of Timocles (Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters vi. 2): πρὸς ἀλλοτρίῳ τε ψυχαγωγηθείς πάθει Μεθ᾽ ἡδονῆς ἀπῆλθε παιδευθείς ἅμα.
In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the blinded Oedipus cries out to Mount Cithaeron (Haines’s “Kithaeron”), where he had been exposed as an infant. Timocles was an Athenian comic poet of the 4th century BC. Athenaeus’s The Learned Banqueters (c. 200) is an anthology of quotations set as dinner-table conversation; the Greek, in translation: “absorbed in another’s suffering, he goes away with pleasure, and instructed at the same time.”
- 15.Euripides, Antiope, Fragment 207; vii. 41.
- 16.Euripides, Bellerophon, Fragment 289; vii. 38.
- 17.Euripides, Hypsipyle, Fragment 757; vii. 40.
- 18.Diogenes Laertius, Life of Diogenes 7.
- 19.Lucian’s On the Dance 35 says of the Art of Dancing (Pantomime) that it requires the acme of culture and even of philosophy!