Study On Prosperity And Deterioration Of The Greece Tragedy

Greece, the cradle of ancient civilization, is also the birthplace of solemn tragedy. Tragedy of the Greeks was evolved out of religious rituals featuring the dithyrambic songs in honor of Bacchus and "the goat-song" at the festivals of which the subject was his mournful fortunes, his mystical death and the joy of his re-birth. At the era (during the early period of human society) when the Grecian tragedy arose people could only explain the changeable and unpredictable natural phenomena in terms of fate due to backwardness of science and technology. Therefore, people took the view o f the world in the way of mysticism. And destiny had become the most common theme of tragedy, which displayed the ancient Greeks interpretations and observations of the Universe, nature, and human life, characterized by their primitive thoughts,psychology,emotion and cultural particularity. The unpredictability of the outer world, untameability of nature and vicissitude of Life had constituted Grecian view of destiny that was religious fatalism or determinism in essence.The most influential tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, represented the art of ancient Greek tragedy, "the rise-and prosperity-the decline of the highest achievements of each period. But the golden age of Greek tragedy lasted for a short time and was brought to an end suddenly.Many arguments were made about the decline of Greek tragedy. Nietzsche, a great thinker in 19thcentury,argued that it was the loss of the spirit of music that spelled the death of Greek tragedy.1 The reason for the art of tragedy declining, according to Nietzsche, were as follows:the lack of mythological thinking, the intrusion of Socratic rationalism, the degradation of poetry. His viewpoint afforded new dimensions in the research on the cause of the fall of ancient Greek tragedy. However, we must take into consideration the period of time in which the decline of classical tragedy occurred. It was the product of times. In other words, the changes in social circumstances led to the death of Grecian tragedy. To be specific, the change of time could be regarded asthe external cause of the tragedy's fall, while the self-development of literature was the internal cause. The ancient Greek tragedy walked on the decline through external factors and the internal factors.Different generations have different literature forms. In any field of art, each has its inevitable historical course of rise, flourish and fall. Though classical Greek tragedy was called tragedy of destiny in itself, its own destiny was of no exception.