I’d say wine is the thing—and not tears,
which cannot heal wound or cure curse.
With dry eyes I’ll party all night—
it sure can’t make anything worse.
Thus Archilochus, the earliest of the lyric poets, a tough, much wounded veteran, whose humorous lyrics are full of mockery and world-weariness. He is reputed to have loved one woman intensely but been denied by her father. Father and daughter then became the subjects of Archilochus’s widely repeated satirical verses, so cutting that both subjects were forced to suicide. After this, the poet seems to have sunk, like Swift in old age, into a kind of mordant despair, his poetry specializing in the pornographic humiliation of women. In this one, Alcman’s immortal kingfisher is put to novel use:
She flipped and she flopped round his cock
As a kingfisher flaps on a rock.
She stooped, slurped him up—oh my dear!—
like a Phrygian drinking his beer
through a straw, then presented her rear.
No doubt this sort of thing, which occupies a good deal of Archilochus’s surviving fragments, got a big reception from his friends.
Banquets of like-minded friends were called symposia. (The singular, symposium—the Greek original is symposion6—means “a drinking together,” that is, a drinking party.) These banquets took place in private homes in a room called the andron, literally “men’s room,” but the sense is closer to “men’s club.” At such gatherings upper-class males arranged themselves on comfortable couches ample enough for two or three guests to recline together, wore floral crowns, ate from low food-laden tables, and were regaled with music and served bowls of wine by servants—usually teenage male servants or females who were professional hetairai, literally “companions,” actually on the order of accomplished geishas or call girls. Interestingly, the male guests were called hetairoi, the same word Homer uses for companions-in-arms. So they all got together—the hetairoi, the hetairai, and the paides (boys)7—for a rousing evening. Early in the banquet, libations were poured to Dionysus, god of wine, and a dithyramb, a song-and-dance to the inebriating god, was beaten out. You may, if you like, label this prayer, but it was from our perspective a lot closer to a conga line, as doughty old Archilochus informs us:
I lead the dancing to the dithyramb,
the hymn to Dionysus, lord divine.
I’m good at it, I’m even quite the ham—
Provided that my brains are braised in wine.
There was plenty of tension in Greek life, since the Greeks, however many parties they threw, became as time went on even more bellicose than they had been in Homer’s day. These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—“the father of all, the king of all,” “always existing by nature,” as the Greek philosophers expressed it. Enough wine and one could forget about the war of the moment or, if not forget, reduce its importance at least temporarily. Thus this ditty attributed to Theognis, an early-sixth-century songwriter of airy facility who believed in good breeding, great parties, and lively romance between men and boys, the Cole Porter of ancient Greece:
Strike the sacred strings and let us drink,
and so disport ourselves ’mid sounding
reeds
that our libations gratify the gods—
and who gives a shit about war with the Medes?
But as tends to be the case when drunkenness substitutes for thoughtfulness, the hilarity often ended badly. In this fragment from a fourth-century comedy by Eubulus, an already wobbly Dionysus boasts of how the typical symposium progressed:
Who but Dionysus pours the flowing
wine
and mixes water in the streaming bowls
tonight?
One bowl for ruddy health, then one
for getting off;
the third brings sleep—and wise men
leave before they’re tight.
For after that the bowls no more belong
to us:
the fourth’s for hubris and the fifth for
lots of noise,
the sixth for mindless fucking, followed
by black eyes,
the eighth brings the police, the ninth’s
for throwing up,
the tenth for trashing everything before
we stop.8
There’s sadness beneath the merriment. It is as if, no matter how much these revelers sing, dance, howl, recite their jokes, and screw one another, a constant, authoritative note of pessimistic pain sounds beyond all their frantic attempts not to hear it. Even Archilochus, a sensational athlete in his time and a master of the revels if ever there was one, cannot deny that none of these nighttime activities makes good sense. In his most thoughtful lines, he seems to remove the mask, denuding himself of his gruff and rollicking persona, and to counsel himself in the clear light of day not to excess but to sobriety—to balance, modesty, and even resignation:
O heart, my heart, no public leaping when you win;
no solitude nor weeping when you fail to prove.
Rejoice at simple things; and be but vexed by sin
and evil slightly. Know the tides through which we move.
The last sentence is quietly ominous. The tides through which we move—the highs and the lows, the peaks and the troughs—tell us repeatedly that nothing lasts and that all life ends in death. Let us temper our excitement and agitation, whether for the ecstasy of battle or the ecstasy of sex, whether over great achievement or great loss, and admit to ourselves that all things have their moment and are gone. If we live according to this sober knowledge, we will live as well as we can.
1 In their own language, the Greeks are called “Hellenes.” Pan is Greek for “all”; thus Panhellenic refers to all of Greece. Despite the popularity of these festivals, which proved such a draw to poets, the customs of court poetry did not die out entirely, since there were always new political leaders in need of poetical praise. In the late sixth century B.C., Pindar, who wrote most of his poems to order (almost all of them for winning athletes, making his poetry the Sports Illustrated of its day), wrote a choral ode to Hieron I, the newly minted tyrant of Syracuse, a Greek colony on the southern coast of Sicily. Hieron had won the Olympic horse racing kudos (a much-abused Greek singular meaning “the glory of victory”). Hieron’s capacity for receiving praise was nearly infinite, but Pindar must have chafed under his assignment and got his own back in the last lines of his ode to Hieron:
The highest peak can only crown itself,
and there’s no need to look for higher peaks.
So may your highness loom without surcease—
Like me, who keeps only winners for friends,
Me, the greatest poet in all Greece.
2 The Greek masculine singular regularly takes the ending -os, the masculine plural -oi, corresponding to the Latin endings -us and -i.
3 One epithalamion begins with the bracing line “Raise high the roofbeam, carpenters!” encouraging workmen in their construction of a bridal bower—while at the same time encouraging the bridegroom to raise his own “beam” to the height of physical ardor. J. D. Salinger used the line as the title of one of his novellas about the Glass family.
4 In subgroups that are exclusively homosocial, there is always a greater incidence of homoerotic activity than in the larger society that surrounds them. The New York Jesuits, who had missions in the Caroline and Marshall Islands, used to joke among themselves that in the indigenous language of the islands there was no word for homosexual till the Jesuits established a boys’ boarding school. But it is also possible for whole societies to encourage a rise in homoerotic relations by the vigilant social division of the sexes. This was true—well into the nineteenth century—of Samurai culture in Japan, where upper-class males invariably preferred other males as sexual partners, and it tends to be true today of the puritanical Islamist societies of the Middle East.
5 As in the
ir similar approaches to deliberative assemblies and alphabetical writing, the currents of Greek and Hebrew life continued to run in rough parallel: these ingredients are not so far from the “loaves and fishes” of the New Testament, the everyday food of the ancient Jews, who like the Greeks reserved meat for religious occasions. But whereas the Jews limited themselves to fish with fins and scales, the Greeks welcomed the fruit of the sea in all its variety. A floor mosaic by Sosos of Pergamon, titled The Unswept Hall (or, rather, a Roman copy of Sosos’s work), gives us a wonderfully complete picture of the comestibles offered at a typical symposium: scattered evenly along the floor, in trompe l’oeil fashion, are wishbones and claws, fruit and vegetables, and the discarded bones and bits of just about every sea creature that swims the Mediterranean.
6 The -ion ending, like the Latin -ium, is neuter singular. The plural ending is -a in both languages. Later in this same paragraph, hetairai is a feminine plural form; the singular is hetaira; the masculine plural hetairoi becomes hetairos in the singular.
7 Girls were kept carefully apart, at least if they were from better-off families, to learn—under the watchful tutelage of women like Sappho—the arts that would stand them in good stead in married life.
8 While it is dangerous to take any society’s comedy as a literal description of its mores, the humor would make no sense at all if it did not refer to recognizable behavior. There are other comedic passages in which excess is derided as a vice typical of foreigners rather than of Greeks. In Acharnians, produced in the midst of the bloody Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and the earliest of several antiwar plays by Aristophanes, the comic genius of Athens, there is an exchange between the main character, Good Citizen, and a decadent ambassador, who lauds the banquets of the barbarians because the barbarians “esteem as men of importance only those who eat and drink in enormous quantities.” “While we [Greeks],” replies Good Citizen, “esteem them as cocksuckers and buttboys”—one of a number of generous hints in Aristophanes that homosexual relations were not everywhere applauded.
IV
THE POLITICIAN AND THE PLAYWRIGHT
HOW TO RULE
Menelaus, king of Sparta, proves an exception. After the war he returns home with the errant but repentant Helen to rule a harmonious kingdom. Most of his fellow chieftains, however, have already been slain at Troy or, like Odysseus, meet with impossible obstacles on the home-going voyage or find crippling troubles awaiting them on their return to Greece. These stories of the oral tradition, which are probably traceable to the twelfth century B.C., may be symbolic of the mysterious and precipitate decline of Mycenaean culture that archaeologists have discovered at the end of the Greek Bronze Age. One story particularly struck the Greeks—that of Menelaus’s brother, haughty Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the Greek forces at Troy. Though Agamemnon is its central figure, the story begins before his time and continues after him and is usually given the title “The Fall of the House of Atreus,” after Agamemnon and Menelaus’s father, Atreus, who was believed to have founded the Mycenaean kingship.
Atreus and his successors were under a curse because Atreus had—at what had been billed as a banquet of reconciliation—fed his unwitting brother Thyestes the flesh of his own sons, Atreus’s nephews. Atreus was himself killed by Thyestes and Aegisthus, Thyestes’s last surviving son; and Atreus was succeeded by Agamemnon. During Agamemnon’s long absence at Troy, Aegisthus moved in and became the lover of Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, who had it in for Agamemnon anyway, since just prior to the Trojan War he had offered their daughter Iphigenia as a human sacrifice to the goddess Artemis. (Artemis, angry at the Greeks, had to be assuaged because she had sent contrary winds that prevented their fleet from sailing out of the port of Aulis for Troy.)
Agamemnon returned from Troy with his new concubine, Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba and sister of Hector and Paris. Cassandra had from Apollo the gift of predicting the future but labored under the burden that no one believed her. Earlier, she had prophesied the fall of Troy to her disbelieving fellow Trojans. Now, hysterically, she foresees what Clytemnestra has in store, but to no avail. Agamemnon, who is wheedled into taking Clytemnestra’s elaborate welcome as his due, is murdered in his bath by his hate-filled wife in a scene worthy of Alfred Hitchcock:
great sprays of blood, and the murderous shower
wounds me, dyes me black and I, I revel
like the Earth when the spring rains come down,
the blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear
splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!
—as Clytemnestra exultantly relates her deed to the horror-struck citizens of Mycenae. Cassandra also falls to her hostess’s avenging wrath.
But the vengeance creates a new generation of avengers, the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra: Electra and her younger brother, Orestes, who are bound to avenge their father. After the mild-mannered Orestes, thrust forward by his more bloodthirsty sibling, murders his mother and her lover, he is pursued by the Furies, terrifying goddesses of avenging conscience who never allow the guilty any peace. Orestes, the mother-murderer, takes refuge in Athena’s temple on the Acropolis at Athens, where he pleads for justice. A trial is arranged with Orestes as defendant, the Furies as prosecutors, and a jury of Athenian citizens, including Athena herself. Their votes turn out to be divided equally between conviction and acquittal. Athena then declares that, for all time, when there is a hung jury the defendant is to be acquitted.
The Furies, primeval, unrelenting spirits of Earth, are furious but are encouraged by wise Athena to become more beneficent and to take a new name, the Eumenides, or Kindly Ones. They are given a temple at the base of the Acropolis, where they are to transform themselves into patron-protectors of the Athenians, in Athena’s words “these upright men, this breed fought free of grief,” whom they are to love “as a gardener loves his plants.”
This is the version of the story given by Aeschylus, the first of the great dramatists, in his trilogy of plays, the only Greek dramatic trilogy to survive intact, collectively known as the Oresteia and produced at Athens in 458 B.C. There are many variants. In one of these, a version by Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris (c. 413 B.C.), Artemis secretly saves Iphigenia and makes her a priestess in the Crimea. But in none of the versions is the House of Atreus a model family.
For, in truth, the House of Atreus, even among the bellicose Greeks, was a synonym for savagery, for the barbarism latent within each human being and within society itself. In Aeschylus’s trilogy, however, the story becomes (to use Richmond Lattimore’s phrase) “a grand parable of progress,” taking us from Greece’s chthonic roots in prehistoric Mycenae to the wind-swept freedom of its most forward-looking city. Though Zeus, the great father-god, “lays it down as law / that we must suffer, suffer into truth” (as the chorus of Mycenaeans reminds us), this suffering into truth becomes “our rite of passage from savagery to civilization” (in the words of translator Robert Fagles), for “the Oresteia dramatizes our growth from primitive ritual to civilized institution.”
The generations of Atreus have suffered enough; it is time to bring reason to bear on the woven patterns of unending vengeance. Tradition, fretted inextricably through human culture, is one thing, but true civilization must be another altogether, the result not of habitual taboos and unexamined impulses but of rational deliberation and conscious choice.
IN THE TIME of the lyric poets, the most distinguished exponent of the ancient wisdom of resignation—expounded at the end of the last chapter by the unlikely Archilochus—was Solon, archon eponymos (or chief magistrate) of Athens in the early sixth century. Solon was a sort of Athenian Franklin D. Roosevelt, an innovative though basically moderate statesman who found ways to improve the economy and raise the public’s expectations of government—by, for instance, the introduction of coinage—despite the many conflicting political interests that constantly threatened to tear Athens apart. He was an aristocratic reformer who un
derstood instinctively that the aristocracy’s monopoly on power had to be loosened and some power given to the lesser orders if social peace was to be shored up. He was seen as a traitor to his class because he abolished such pigheaded injustices as slavery for debt; but he favored relative justice, attempting to be fair while always aware that perfect justice was beyond human possibility. His genius for political compromise, which saved Athens from many disasters, stemmed from his vision that human beings must make themselves satisfied with pieces of temporary happiness that can never be complete.
His sensible verses, not nearly so gay or extravagant as many of the examples we considered in the last chapter, struck a deep chord with the mass of Greeks, who thought they touched on the truth—and with such clarity as to require no commentary:
Happy he who has his sons and hounds,
his horses and a friend far from his bounds.
Just as rich he of abundant horn
of gold and silver, fields of blackest clod,
and horse and mule; and he, though lesser born,
who eats and sleeps well and goes softly shod
and now and then enjoys a girl, a lad,
and vigor quite enough to have a go.
Here’s true wealth, for there’s no one, king or cad,
can take it with him when he goes below.
And none of us can buy escape from death
or dread disease or failing force and breath.
One cannot fail to be attracted to Solon’s reconciled serenity, nor can the modern reader fail to notice to what extent his attitude is fortified by aristocratic advantage. The “lesser born” is imagined as enjoying the simplest pleasures of life—food, sleep, sex—just as much as the aristocrat enjoys his horses and hounds and the rich man his estates and treasury. Each may find contentment in his lot. This is at base the sentiment of a Tory, not dissimilar to the entitled voice of Victorian England, where an enlightened churchman could preach on the simple cotter “rejoicing over his potato,” while the churchman was doubtless looking forward to a rather richer repast. But it is nearly impossible to find the lesser born, speaking on their own behalf, anywhere in world literature before the eighteenth century, when writers such as Robert Burns (“A Man’s a Man for A’ That”) speak for the first time in the authentic voice of the cotter; and such voices are heard infrequently enough even to the present moment.1 In the ancient world, the lesser born found voice only through the mouths of those who had the requisite skills to speak aloud.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea Page 9
