by Will Durant
He worked painstakingly, composing the music for each poem, and often training a chorus to sing it. He wrote hymns and paeans for deities, dithyrambs for the festivals of Dionysus, parthenaia for maidens, enkomia for celebrities, skolia for banquets, threnoi, or dirges, for funerals, and epinikia, or songs of victory, for winners at the Panhellenic competitions. Of all these only fortyfive odes remain, named after the games whose heroes they honored. Of these odes, again, only the words survive, none of the music; in judging them, we are in the position of some future historian who, having the librettos of Wagner’s operas but nothing of the scores, should list him as a poet rather than a composer, and should rank him by the words that once attended upon his harmonies. Or if we picture some Chinese scholar, unfamiliar with Christian story, reading in one evening, in lame translation, ten Bach chorals divorced from their music and ritual, we shall measure our justice to Pindar. When read today, ode after ode, in the silence of the study, he is beyond comparison the dreariest outpost in the classical landscape.
Only the analogy of music can explain the structure of these poems. To Pindar, as to Simonides and Bacchylides, the form to be followed in an epinician ode was as compulsory as sonata form in the sonatas and symphonies of modern Europe. First came the statement of the theme—the name and story of the athlete who had gained the prize, or of the nobleman whose horses had drawn their chariot to victory. In general Pindar celebrates “the wisdom of man, and his beauty, and the splendor of his fame.”4 In truth he was not much interested in his formal subject; he sang in praise of runners, courtesans, and kings, and was willing to accept any promptly paying tyrant as a patron saint5 if the occasion gave scope to his rich imagination and his proudly intricate verse. His topic might be anything from a mule race to the glory of Greek civilization in all its variety and spread. He was loyal to Thebes, and not more inspired than the Delphic oracle when he defended Theban neutrality in the Persian War; but later he was ashamed of his error, and went out of his way to praise the leader of the Greek defense as “renowned Athens, rich, violet-crowned, worthy of song, bulwark of Hellas, god-protected city.”6 The Athenians are said to have given him ten thousand drachmas ($10,000) for the dithyrambs, or processional song, in which these lines occurred;7 Thebes, we are less reliably informed, fined him for his implied reproof, and Athens paid the fine.8
The second part of a Pindaric ode was a selection from Greek mythology. Here Pindar was discouragingly lavish; as Corinna complained, he “sowed with the whole sack rather than with the hand.”9 He had a high conception of the gods, and honored them as among his best clients. He was the favorite poet of the Delphic priesthood; during his life he received many privileges from them, and after his death his spirit was, with Caledonian generosity, invited to share in the first fruits offered at Apollo’s shrine.10 He was the last defender of the orthodox faith; even the pious Aeschylus seems wildly heretical beside him; Pindar would have been horrified by the blasphemies of Prometheus Bound. Sometimes he rises to an almost monotheistic conception of Zeus as “the All, governing all things and seeing all things.”11 He is a friend of the Mysteries, and shares the Orphic hope of paradise. He preaches the divine origin and destiny of the individual soul,12 and offers one of the earliest descriptions of a Last Judgment, a Heaven, and a Hell. “Immediately after death the lawless spirits suffer punishment, and the sins committed in this realm of Zeus are judged by One who passeth sentence stern and inevitable.”
But in sunshine ever fair
Abide the good, and all their nights and days
An equal splendor wear.
And never as of old with thankless toil
For their poor empty needs they vex the soil,
And plough the watery seas;
But dwelling with the glorious gods in ease
A tearless life they pass,
Whose joy on earth it was
To keep their plighted word. But, far from these,
Torments the rest sustain too dark for human gaze.13
The third and concluding section of a Pindaric ode was usually a word of moral counsel. We must not expect any subtle philosophy here; Pindar was no Athenian, and had probably never met or read a Sophist; his intellect was consumed in his art, and no force remained for original thought. He was satisfied to urge his victorious athletes or princes to be modest in their success, and to show respect for the gods, their fellow men, and their own best selves. Now and then he mingled reproof with praise, and dared to warn Hieron against greed;14 but neither was he afraid to say a kind word for that most maligned and loved of all goods—money. He abhorred the revolutionists of Sicily, and warned them almost in the words of Confucius: “Even for the feeble it is an easy thing to shake a city to its foundation, but it is a sore struggle to set it in its place again.”15 He liked the moderate democracy of Athens after Salamis, but sincerely believed aristocracy to be the least harmful of all forms of government. Ability, he thought, lies in the blood rather than in schooling, and tends to appear in families that have shown it before. Only good blood can prepare a man for those rare deeds that ennoble and justify human life. “Things of a day! What are we and what not? A dream about a shadow is man; yet when some god-given splendor falls, a glory of light comes over him, and his life is sweet.”16
Pindar was not popular in his lifetime, and for some centuries yet he will continue to enjoy the lifeless immortality of those writers whom all men praise and no one reads. While the world was moving forward he asked it to stand still, and it left him so far behind that though younger than Aeschylus he seems older than Alcman. He wrote a poetry as compact, involved, and devious as Tacitus’ prose, in an artificial and deliberately archaic dialect of his own, in meters so elaborate that few poets have ever cared to follow them,* and so varied that only two of the forty-five odes have the same metrical form. He is so obscure, despite the naïvete of his thought, that grammarians spend a lifetime unraveling his Teutonic constructions, only to find, beneath them, a mine of sonorous platitudes. If despite these faults, and his frigid formality, and turgid metaphors, and tiresome mythology, some curious scholars are still persuaded to read him, it is because his narratives are swift and vivid, his simple morality is sincere, and the splendor of his language lifts to a passing grandeur even the humblest themes.
He lived to the age of eighty, secure in Thebes from the turmoil of Athenian thought. “Dear to a man,” he sang, “is his own home city, his comrades and his kinsmen, so that he is well content. But to foolish men belongeth a love for things afar.”17 Ten days before his end (442), we are told, he sent to ask the oracle of Ammon, “What is best for man? “—to which the Egyptian oracle answered, like a Greek, “Death.”18 Athens put up a statue to him at the public cost, and the Rhodians inscribed his seventh Olympian ode—a panegyric of their island—in letters of gold upon a temple wall. When, in 335, Alexander ordered rebellious Thebes to be burned to the ground he commanded his soldiers to leave unharmed the house in which Pindar had lived and died.
II. THE DIONYSIAN THEATER
The story is told in the Lexicon of Suidas19 that during the performance of a play by Pratinas, about 500 B.C., the wooden benches upon which the auditors sat gave way, injuring some, and causing such alarm that the Athenians built, on the southern slope of the Acropolis, a theater of stone, words.” Most of the dialogue is spoken or declaimed; some of it is chanted in recitative; but the leading roles contain lyrical passages that must be sung as solos, duets, trios, or in unison or alternation with the chorus.24 The singing is simple, without “parts” or harmony. The accompaniment is usually given by a single flute, and accords with the voices note for note; in this way the words can be followed by the audience, and the poem is not drowned out in the song. These plays cannot be judged by reading them silently; to the Greeks the words are but a part of a complex art form that weaves poetry, music, acting, and the dance into a profound and moving unity.*
Nevertheless the play is the thing, and the prize is awarded less for th
e music than for the drama, and less for the drama than for the acting; a good actor can make a success of a middling play.26 The actor—who is always a male—is not disdained as in Rome, but is much honored; he is exempt from military service, and is allowed safe passage through the lines in time of war. He is called hypokrites, but this word means answerer—i.e., to the chorus; only later will the actor’s role as an impersonator lead to the use of the word as meaning hypocrite. Actors are organized in a strong union or guild called the Dionysian Artists, which has members throughout Greece. Troupes of players wander from city to city, composing their own plays and music, making their own costumes, and setting up their own stages. As in all times, the incomes of leading actors are very high, that of secondary actors precariously low;27 and the morals of both are what might be expected of men moving from place to place, fluctuating between luxury and poverty, and too high-strung to be capable of a stable and normal life.
In both tragedy and comedy the actor wears a mask, fitted with a resonant mouthpiece of brass. The acoustics of the Greek theater, and the visibility of the stage from every seat, are remarkable; but even so it is found advisable to reinforce the voice of the actor, and help the eye of the distant spectator to distinguish readily the various characters portrayed. All subtle play of vocal or facial expression is sacrificed to these needs. When real individuals are represented on the stage, like the Euripides of’ the Ecclesiazusae and the Socrates of the Clouds, the masks imitate, and largely caricature, their actual features. The masks have come down into the drama from religious performances, in which they were often instruments of terror or humor; in comedy they continue this tradition, and are as grotesque and extravagant as Greek fancy can make them. Just as the actor’s voice is strengthened and his countenance enlarged by the mask, so his dimensions are extended with padding, and his height is enhanced by an onkos, or projection on his head, and by kothornoi, or thick-soled shoes, on his feet. All in all, as Lucian puts it, the ancient actor makes a “hideous and appalling spectacle.”28
The audience is as interesting as the play. Men and women of all ranks are admitted,29 and after 420 all citizens who need it receive from the state the two obols required for entrance. Women sit apart from men, and courtesans have a place to themselves; custom keeps all but the looser ladies away from comedy.30 It is a lively audience, not less or more mannerly than such assemblages in other lands. It eats nuts and fruit and drinks wine as it listens; Aristotle proposes to measure the failure of a play by the amount of food eaten during the presentation. It quarrels about seats, claps and shouts for its favorites, hisses and groans when it is displeased; when moved to more vigorous protest it kicks the benches beneath it; if it becomes angry it may frighten an actor off the stage with olives, figs, or stones.31 Aeschines is almost stoned to death for an offensive play; Aeschylus is nearly killed because the audience believes that he has revealed some secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries. A musician who has borrowed a supply of stones to build a house promises to repay it with those that he expects to collect from his next performance.32 Actors sometimes hire a claque to drown out with applause the hisses they fear, and comic actors may throw nuts to the crowd as a bribe to peace.33 If it wishes, the audience can by deliberate noise prevent a drama from continuing, and compel the performance of the next play;34 in this way a long program may be shortened within bearing.
There are three days of drama at the city Dionysia; on each day five plays are presented—three tragedies and a satyr play by one poet, and a comedy by another.35 The performance begins early in the morning and continues till dusk. Only in exceptional cases is a play performed twice in the Theater of Dionysus; those who have missed it there may see it in the theaters of other Greek cities, or with less splendor on some rural stage in Attica. Between 480 and 380 some two thousand new dramas are performed at Athens.36 In early times the prize for the best tragic trilogy was a goat, for the best comedy a basket of figs and a jug of wine; but in the Golden Age the three prizes for tragedy and the single prize for comedy take the form of grants of money by the state. The ten judges are chosen by lot in the theater itself on the first morning of the competition, out of a large list of candidates nominated by the Council. At the end of the last play each of the judges writes his selections for first, second, and third prizes upon a tablet; the tablets are placed in an urn, and an archon draws out five tablets at random. These five judgments, summed up, constitute the final award, and the other five are destroyed unread; no one, therefore, can know in advance who the judges are to be, or which of them will really judge. Despite these precautions there is some corruption or intimidation of judges.37 Plato complains that the judges, through fear of the crowd, almost always decide according to the applause, and argues that this “theatrocracy” is debasing both the dramatists and the audience.38 When the contest is over the victorious poet and his choragus are crowned with ivy, and sometimes the victors set up a monument, like the choragic monument of Lysicrates, to commemorate their triumph. Even kings compete for this crown.
The size of the theater and the traditions of the festival determine in large measure the nature of the Greek drama. Since nuances cannot be conveyed by facial expression or vocal inflection, subtle character portraits are rare in the Dionysian theater. The Greek drama is a study of fate, or of man in conflict with the gods; the Elizabethan drama is a study of action, or of man in conflict with man; the modern drama is a study of character, or of man in conflict with himself. The Athenian audience knows in advance the destiny of each person represented, and the issue of each action; for religious custom is still strong enough in the fifth century to limit the theme of the Dionysian drama to some story from the accepted myths and legends of the early Greeks.* There is no suspense and no surprise, but, instead, the pleasures of anticipation and recognition. Dramatist after dramatist tells the same tale to the same audience; what differs is the poetry, the music, the interpretation, and the philosophy. Even the philosophy, before Euripides, is determined in large measure by tradition: throughout Aeschylus and Sophocles the prevailing theme is the nemesis of punishment, by jealous gods or impersonal fate, for insolent presumption and irreverent pride (hybris); and the recurring moral is the wisdom of conscience, honor, and a modest moderation (aidos). It is this combination of philosophy with poetry, action, music, song, and dance that makes the Greek drama not only a new form in the history of literature, but one that almost at the outset achieves a grandeur never equaled again.
III. AESCHYLUS
Not quite at the outset; for as many talents, in heredity and history, prepare the way for a genius, so some lesser playwrights, who may here be forgotten with honor, intervened between Thespis and Aeschylus. Perhaps it was the successful resistance to Persia that gave Athens the pride and stimulus necessary to an age of great drama, while the wealth that came with trade and empire after the war provided for the costly Dionysian contests in dithyrambic singing and the choral play. Aeschylus felt both the stimulus and the pride in person. Like so many Greek writers of the fifth century, he lived as well as wrote, and knew how to do as well as to speak. In 499, at the age of twenty-six, he produced his first play; in 490 he and his two brothers fought at Marathon, and so bravely that Athens ordered a painting to commemorate their deeds; in 484 he won his first prize at the Dionysian festival; in 480 he fought at Artemisium and Salamis, and in 479 at Plataea; in 476 and 470 he visited Syracuse, and was honored at the court of Hieron I; in 468, after dominating Athenian literature for a generation, he lost the first prize for drama to the youthful Sophocles; in 467 he recaptured supremacy with his Seven against Thebes; in 458 he won his last and greatest victory with the Oresteia trilogy; in 456 he was again in Sicily; and there, in that year, he died.
It took a man of such energy to mold the Greek drama into its classic form. It was Aeschylus who added a second actor to the one drawn out from the chorus by Thespis, and thereby completed the transformation of the Dionysian chant from an oratorio into a play.* He wrote sev
enty (some say ninety) dramas, of which seven remain. Of these, the earliest three are minor works;* the most famous is the Prometheus Bound; the greatest make up the Oresteia trilogy.
The Prometheus Bound, too, may have been part of a trilogy, though no ancient authority vouches for this. We hear of a satyr play by Aeschylus called Prometheus the Fire Bringer; but it was produced apart from the Prometheus Bound, in a quite different combination.41 Fragments survive of a Prometheus Unbound by Aeschylus; these are well-nigh meaningless, but anxious scholars assure us that if we had the full text we should find Aeschylus answering satisfactorily all the heresies which the extant play puts into the hero’s lines. Even so it is noteworthy that an Athenian audience, at a religious festival, should have put up with the Titan’s blasphemies. As the play opens we find Prometheus being chained to a rock in the Caucasus by Hephaestus at the command of a Zeus irate because Prometheus has taught men the art of fire. Hephaestus speaks:
