by Lance Lee
Thus as we consider Athens we must see a political and social transformation simultaneous with a new religion rising to prominence, with all of which the first great burst of dramatic writing was intimately involved and embodied.
Athen’s involvement with the Ionian revolt sparked the Persian invasion of Greece with its famous incidents: the death of three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae, the triumph of the Greek fleet at Salamis, and the destruction of the remaining Persian army at Platea in 479 BCE. Athens carried the war to the Persians in Cyprus, Ionia, the Middle East, and Egypt. It founded and then turned the Delian League into an empire, erected the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis, and finally plunged into the Peloponnesian War with Sparta and its allies for dominance in Greece in a frenzy of self-destruction that went on for thirty years and devastated Greece. Only fifty years later an exhausted, divided Greece fell to Philip of Macedonia and his son, Alexander.
Within this transformative and violent background there was an intellectual and creative explosion in Athens that remains unsurpassed, if on some rare occasions matched. Now Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote dramas for the competitions in the Greater Dionysia that grappled with the “great questions” as their natural métier: the purpose of the gods, the nature of man, the inscrutable burdens of destiny, and the nature of justice.
Recently, Jacob Burckhardt’s lectures on Athens and Greece in this period have been gathered up and published.1 The young Nietzsche takes off from Burckhardt’s thought in The Birth of Tragedy. Burckhardt’s evaluation of Athens is revelatory for our purposes too.
He observes how well the fifth century BCE started. Athens was triumphant, the Persians on the run, and in the west, the Carthaginians defeated in Sicily. Ionia was free. Athens fascinated the Greeks; Burckhardt observes the city was a continual overachiever, undertaking projects seemingly beyond its ability and population base out of sheer esprit and daring. Even an exile could thrive there, unlike the case for the more traditional city states. Athens was Greece’s great market and emporium, as well as undisputed center of intellectual and cultural life. The ideal of kalokagatheia predominated at the start of its great century, embodying a blend of wealth, nobility, and excellence which the male citizens strove to embody. The Athenians thought well of themselves too, certain they had created civilization itself. History and religion in the form of myth were continuous, living strands interwoven with politics and used as a matter of course in the great tragedies.
For myth, according to Burckhardt, although so shadowy a literary relic for ourselves, was alive and public in Athens, and reached the level of a publicly celebrated religion through the tragic dramatists. We need to remember that the renewal of life after winter was celebrated in the Greater Dionysia in the spring, and that Dionysus is a god who dies and is reborn, his return the creative root bursting into literal flower.
Three tragedies a day were performed in these competitions, with a bawdy, comic satyr play at their end. Performance started at dawn and ended at dusk, the same male, governing citizens from the military, political, and social worlds the participants and audience. Nor were the plays themselves offered in the droning, dull performance often satirized, as in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite: they were sung and danced, with special effects like thunder, flying dragons, or gods appearing on stage. All these effects were carried out in a way adequate for the imagination then, as our own high tech productions meet our expectations. Then as now the sense of dramatic reality flows from the emotional persuasiveness of the action, buttressed by cause-and-effect and necessary and probable writing, not from the sophistication of production machinery.
But Greek tragedy was capable of effects we can only envy: so persuasive were some choral performances that on at least one memorable occasion the first rows of viewers were thunderstruck and fled the apparitions before them as if they were literally real. Those who led the city were in the first rows and the performance was Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, which begins with a chorus of Furies appearing, the dark goddesses of vengeance. Imagine a performance in Washington so compelling that the president and his immediate staff, the leaders of Congressional committees, the justices of the Supreme Court, and top brass from the Pentagon run in panic from the performers. Tragedy was the “last and grandest realization of myth,” its playwrights nationally famous, their work literally shocking. Burckhardt remarks on the “passionate private will that drove these people on,” whether in warfare, politics, culture, or religion.2
But a life lived on the edge came with a price that Burckhardt sums up as lawsuits, megalomania, and self-exhaustion. By the end of the fifth century, Plato felt embittered about Athenian society which executed his mentor, Socrates, after it lost the war with Sparta. Athens began its great century with an unforced morality, an almost impressionable, tender conscience, such that it felt criticism sorely even if it continued what it was doing, often quite brutally in warfare. By the end it was hysterical and self-destructive.
Athenian democracy itself was exhausting, and over the century natural eloquence gave way to oratory and rhetoric. These, by becoming techniques available to anyone, empowered the mediocre. After Pericles, there is a severe decline in Athenian leadership, with second-rates and demagogues leading the Assembly. Breeding gave way to money, modesty declined, and the urge to excellence became the urge to self-glorification, culminating by the century’s end in a man like Alcibiades, wholly involved in his own glory like someone from the Renaissance, whether leading Athens, helping Sparta defeat Athens, or doing another turn as the would-be savior of Athens.
Homosexual love was common and not a feature of the decline: the most effective fighters in the next century before Alexander were the Theban Sacred Band of homosexual lovers who helped destroy Spartan predominance on the battlefield. But homosexuality does indicate how one-sided Athenian and Greek society was, for women were without political rights and heavily segregated. Some courtesans achieved great fame, like Pericles’ companion Aspasia, but on the whole this was rare. Men were unpolished in love and untrained in love affairs, while Athenian literature is almost uniform in casting aspersions on the opposite sex.
The Greeks did like to talk, meaning men in social gatherings called symposia, where conversation emphasized wit and intelligence arguing great themes however much wine was drunk, something reproduced by Plato in his Symposium. Sociability seemed “inborn in Greeks.”3 Great themes were not restricted to the drama. These symposia continued all through the looming failure of the Peloponnesian War: “That this was possible at such a time supports Renan’s belief that the stormy periods of history are actually favorable to the life of the mind.”4
Burckhardt has an unusually positive opinion of the Sophists who entered into this feverish society over the course of the century, a group of men given a bad name by later philosophers but who had the role of teachers at the time, often imparting practical subjects as well as amorality, as embodied in their teaching that there are two sides to every issue, or that “might makes right.” Crucially, the Sophists were skeptical about received religion and the myths, as the Athenians became too as the fifth century wore on. They led a widespread rejection of myth in favor of a lucid, rationalistic way of thinking. Euripides supported them and was Socrates’ friend: he attacked the very myths he used in his plays, correcting them and giving voice to the demand the gods live by the same standards as men. The life went out of the myths, as well as the steel from the Athenian character, with the decay sparked by the war, rhetoric, self-aggrandizement, and rationalism. Athens never again emulated the military feats of the fifth century; we remember the city now for its cultural achievements.
Nietzsche spells out the consequences of this decline of myth tellingly in The Birth of Tragedy. As we have seen, he develops a view of tragedy as the ultimate joining of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses, such that at the climax “Apollo” gives shape to and communicates “Dionysus,” unifying and giving voice to the impulses to ord
er and to sweep away, to create and destroy, to blend with everything and speak from the self’s heart, to join in the action of the characters and imagine ourselves part of the chorus, some of whose songs approach the power of the Psalms.
Consider this from the second choral ode in Oedipus Rex:
Let me be reverent in the ways of right,
Lowly the paths I journey on;
Let all my words and actions keep
The laws of the pure universe
From highest Heaven handed down.
For Heaven is their bright nurse,
Those generations of the realms of light;
Ah, never of mortal kind were they begot,
Nor are they slaves of memory, lost in sleep:
Their Father is greater than Time, and ages not.5
Or from Oedipus at Colonus:
Though he has watched a decent age pass by,
A man will sometimes still desire the world.
I swear I see no wisdom in that man.
The endless hours pile up a drift of pain
More unrelieved each day; and as for pleasure,
When he is sunken in excessive age,
You will not see his pleasure anywhere.
The last attendant is the same for all,
Old men and young alike, as in its season
Man’s heritage of underworld appears:
There being then no epithalamion,
No music and no dance. Death is the finish.6
Even Euripides in The Bacchae writes in this vein.
Slow, yet unfailing, move the Powers
Of heaven with the moving hours.
When mind runs mad, dishonors God,
And worships self and senseless pride,
Then Law eternal wields the rod.
Still Heaven hunts down the impious man,
Though divine subtlety may hide
Time’s creeping foot. No mortal ought
To challenge time—to overbear
Custom in act, or age in thought.
All men, at little cost, may share
The blessing of a pious creed;
Truths more than mortal, which began
In the beginning, and belong
To the very nature—these indeed
Reign in our world, are fixed and strong.7
That is part of the last great spiritual trope from Greek tragedy in the last great play written by an old man in exile still married to reason and using, finally, the very form of Greek tragedy against itself to witness the perils of mass delusion and violence. All three quotes, if any were needed, make clear the spiritual burden assumed as a central thread in myth as given its last great turn by classic tragedy.
Nietzsche develops a detailed critique of Euripides’ challenge to myth. For Nietzsche, Euripides is blind to the opportunity offered by tragedy of unifying primary human, apparently opposing drives, or how by doing so tragedy quite rightly belonged in a supreme religious festival and gave meaningful voice to human wholeness and transcendence. All this was as mysterious and doubtful to Euripides as to his friend Socrates and required a reform. Perhaps from a rational perspective tragedy and myth did. Psychological realism enters with Euripides—sentimental emotionality, and feminine passion as a motive power—as in the Hippolytus and Medea. Spectacle grows in importance, and a Euripidean development of plotting whereby the audience is told at the start of the action what to expect and at the end a god is flown in by a machine, the deus ex machina, to clear up any untidiness. Everything is rational and clear. The importance of the chorus fades, and with it music and dance.
Yet the modish anti-Dionysiac spirit shows itself most clearly in the denouements of the new plays. In the older tragedy one could feel at the end the metaphysical solace, without which it is impossible to imagine our taking pleasure in tragedy.8
Instead there is now a new spirit:
It believes that the world can be corrected through knowledge and that life should be guided by science; that it is actually in a position to confine man within the narrow circle of soluble tasks, where he can cheerfully say to life: “I want you. You are worth knowing.”9
In other words, a rational view of life and a reduction of mystery to the knowable have been substituted in tragedy in place of a perception that combined often profound viewpoints concerning the great issues with an underlying act of unification of the warring parts of human nature through the dramatic action, the Nietzschean fusion of Apollonian and Dionysian. The new drama succeeding Euripides loses touch with the impossibility of avoiding conflict in self and society, as Freud might say, or the peculiarity of creativity that can be paradoxically destructive, as seen by Campbell and Winnicott, and loses the ability to spark the sense of tragic wonder or “metaphysical solace” Aristotle and Nietzsche saw as characteristic. Nietzsche, of course, may be right about the Greeks, but he is also looking about nineteenth-century Europe and taking issue with the new scientific, materialist optimism all around him embedded in the socialist dream of perfecting society. Painful as it has been, history has taught us to move from that dream too.
What is clear is how the loss of spiritual weight in the drama coincided inevitably with the decline of tragedy and drama generally in an exhausted, overwrought Athens, and with the quality of the writers drawn to the art. It hardly matters what we make out of Nietzsche’s metaphysical solace or Aristotle’s tragic wonder beyond noting their absence after Euripides’ The Bacchae at the end of the fifth-century Athenian apogee. As Burckhardt pointedly writes, there was in fact no easy optimism or serenity in Greece in the fourth century but a general sense of malaise of which the famous Greek “serenity” could only be a denial. What succeeded tragedy was a comedy of types introduced by Menander, creating the dramatic repertoire of the nurse, ingénue, braggart-soldier, busybody, and so on that have been staples of comic writing ever since. Experience is stylized in such writing which, as we know, in comedic form enshrines a flight from reality. Comedy dies out too, after being given a last spin by Terrence and Plautus in Rome in the first century BCE.
Neither form of drama met the spiritual needs of its audience any longer; with that failure, it died.
Gladiator gives us a glimpse into the dominant entertainment that rose as drama declined and persisted for centuries after drama’s death. Maximus falls from a great height by refusing to accept in a timely manner Marcus Aurelius’s request that he restore the republic. Instead, his son Commodus kills Marcus and has Maximus’s family murdered and attempts to kill Maximus when he refuses obedience. The wounded Maximus discovers his family’s fate and despairs. A caravan nurses him to health and sells him as a slave to Proximo, a freed gladiator, who needs fodder for provincial gladiatorial shows. Maximus, however, won’t fight. Proximo gives a speech before their first “performance,” reminding his fighters that if they can’t control their lives, then they can by fighting at least be remembered as men. Maximus fights, startled by the crowd’s cheers as he triumphs. By the second time we see him fight he is the premier gladiator. He enters the arena alone first, slaughters a group of nervous opponents, then throws his sword into the crowd. “Are you not entertained?” he challenges them. He has learned a crucial lesson: killing men spectacularly is the ultimate expression of conflict and entertainment. He has become a star.
He returns to Rome as part of Proximo’s “troupe”: win the crowd, Proximo tells him, and you rule Rome, may gain your freedom and make a lot of money. Maximus, however, seeks vengeance on Commodus. So he does win the crowd in spectacular fight sequences and joins a plot against Commodus. The plot fails and Commodus wounds Maximus before facing him in the arena himself to win back the crowd. But Maximus kills him anyway. The hero’s triumph may be for the community, but it is always won personally.
What chance is there for an art form like drama that has lost spiritual meaning and become merely a trivial entertainment against an entertainment that pits man against man and caters directly to our destructiveness? It is raw but not he
avy, for there is a winner, while we as audience control the fate of the fallen with a thumbs up or down. We are made vicarious masters of life and death. Can a stage full of corpses that then rise for applause at the curtain compete with the emperor Claudius, who once famously staged a gladiatorial sea battle, ranting on the shore he would execute everyone if they didn’t fight better? Can it match the confrontation of Roman and Carthaginian in Gladiator, the sacrifice of repressed minorities to wild beasts, the wholesale slaughter of Christian fanatics? Gladiator may be a film giving an entirely modern spin on this Roman “entertainment,” but there were in fact gladiators in Rome and the provinces who provided regular “entertainments” of this kind, even in the Christian empire following Constantine’s conversion in the fourth century. The answer is clear to the question starting this paragraph: drama could not, and historically did not, compete against such “entertainment.”
Greek tragedy was the “last and grandest realization of myth,” as Burckhardt points out and Nietzsche develops at length; both agreed that with its collapse the religious impulse hardly disappeared, but its public, penultimate spin of mythic belief gave way instead to underground religious cults like the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece and later to the plethora of cults vying for supremacy in the Roman Empire, until finally Christianity prevailed. Nietzsche adds, “Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural, healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture.”10 This echoes Campbell’s view that the traditional myths are dead in our culture and we have the burden of creating a new and unifying one out of ourselves. There is no guarantee we will do so. The emphasis on “healthy creativity” is particularly revealing, in view of Winnicott’s view that the creative response to experience is characteristic of health. The death of drama in the ancient world indicates a spiritual confusion and loss and a growing debasement of public and private life, features the early church fathers attacked constantly. There is also an unexpected overlap with Freud’s concluding thoughts in Civilization and Its Discontents.
