Tragedy is centered around a character with an important role in the universe, and how they handle it through intense emotions like revenge, lamentation, and suffering. These characters are often presented with a task, either through their own choices or from influence by the Gods. These influences can offer the audience a way that they may safely feel emotions like pity and fear towards the characters, allowing them to be engrossed in a tragic story. Most of our principle characters were given their circumstance by forces out of their control, however a handful of them made their decisions themselves.
For example, in The Agamemnon, while Clytemnestra and Aegisthus choose to murder Agamemnon (because he sacrificed Iphigenia), there were more influential circumstances at play. Most of the characters are aware of the curse of the house of Atreus, and mention it themselves several times throughout the Oresteia. They know that Agamemnon is a son of Atreus, he is afflicted by this very curse. Rationally they need not act on the curse, but they feel like they must enact revenge to make up for other loses. …show more content…
While Athena intervenes in Ajax’s life, she does not force his struggle. His choices and brash actions are his own, which ultimately end with him losing his life. He is acting on his own primal emotions at not being selected over Odysseus, which encompasses the strong emotion for revenge and rejection. The Bacchae is clearly direct god intervention, although it begins with Pentheus’s decision to explicitly not worship a god. Which evoked Dionysus’s wrath pretty quickly, in the worst ways. And despite the choices made by the characters, everyone seemed to suffer by Pentheus’s decision to not believe in Dionysus’s