Kings in Greek Tragedy

To the modern reader there is nothing initially surprising about the presence of kings in Greek tragedy. After all, in European tragedy down to at least the eighteenth century kings were regarded as the natural dramatis personae of the genre. 1 But if we forget for the time being about later traditions and consider the fifth century B.C. at Athens there is – or seems to be – an element of paradox in this choice. Athens was by now the leading democratic state in the Greek world, and, although she had known tyranny under the Pisistratids in the sixth century, the monarchy had of course long since vanished. It is inconceivable that monarchy as such represented any kind of threat or problem to the Athenians; tyranny or oligarchy might indeed be feared, but no one can seriously have thought that rule by a king was now possible at Athens, whatever may have been true of conservative Sparta. Why then were royal persons regularly chosen as the leading characters in Attic drama?