Where to start with Greek tragedy
Start with one short play that asks the whole question, then read three more before the trilogy that holds them all.
You have heard the Greek tragedies are foundational, you have heard names like Antigone and Oresteia, and you want a sequence that lets you meet the form before the academic apparatus arrives.
Starting with the Oresteia and meeting the trilogy form cold, or treating the plays as ancient curiosities rather than as live theatre that was meant to be performed in a single day in front of the city. The plays are short — the failure mode is reading them as if they were long.
The reading path
- Antigone — Read it in one sitting. The argument between Antigone and Creon is the spine; the chorus is the city watching itself fail. Notice how short the play is, and how much it carries.
- Oedipus Rex — The play Aristotle built the Poetics around. Read it knowing the plot — the suspense is not the point; the form is the point. Watch how the recognition scene works on you when you already know what is coming.
- Medea — Euripides at his most uncomfortable. A wronged wife, a foreign queen, an intolerable choice. Read it after Antigone and Oedipus; the form is the same and the question is darker.
- The Oresteia — The trilogy that runs from murder to vengeance to the founding of the law-court. Aeschylus is the oldest of the three, the most religious, the most patient with the chorus. Read it last; it is the trilogy that the single plays were always pointing toward.
Why this order
Greek tragedy is the form in which the polis worked out its most dangerous moral questions in public, and reading the plays in the right order — short and sharp first, then the trilogy that institutes the law — is the closest a modern reader can come to that civic experience.