Athenian tragedy is a ‘representation of élite practice …’, focusing primarily on the actions of ‘people superior to us’ in their moral and social station. Although it is debatable exactly what Aristotle means by σπουδαῖος in the context of a tragic plot, and to what degree his theory of tragedy is wedded to a belief in the social, as well as ethical, ‘superiority’ of the leading characters, there is no denying the obvious fact that the surviving plays draw a sharp line between the ‘serious’ (or ‘better kind of’) characters, whose decisions, actions, and sufferings form the core (or ‘soul’) of the plot, and the minor characters (‘us’) who form the socio-political context for those decisions and actions, and whose attitudes and desires tend to be affected by, but never to cause or determine, the key crises and reversals of that plot. The ‘serious’ characters are invariably royal or noble, while the minor characters are of markedly lower status. Thus, while it may be correct to describe Athenian tragedy as ‘polyphonic’ and ‘egalitarian’ in its form, in so far as it gives generous opportunities for female, servile, foreign, and lower-class voices to be heard, along with – and even in opposition to – the voices of the aristocratic main characters, the trajectory of the plots, along with the costumes and spatial arrangements of the theatre itself, nonetheless tend to reassert very strongly the differences between high and low, ‘superior’ and ordinary.
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