Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  Ten thousand men could be accommodated comfortably, fifteen thousand uncomfortably, on the Pnyx, where the Assembly convened forty times a year, each meeting lasting but a couple of hours. Six thousand citizens constituted the quorum necessary for ratification of many of the decrees. Imagine your fellow citizens—at least twenty percent of them, sometimes as many as fifty percent—squeezing forty times a year into an open-air stadium, listening to debates, noisily electing magistrates (including the ten stratēgoi chosen annually to conduct the city’s wars), voting on decrees by a show of hands, impaneling jurors. On each of the popular courts, called dicastēria, 201 to 501 citizens served as both judges and jurors, the number of citizens depending on the seriousness of the matter under consideration. Once a year, the citizens voted on whether or not they should hold an ostracism. If the majority voted yes, each member of the Assembly then wrote on an ostrakon (potsherd) the name of the person he felt the city could best do without. Whoever turned up on the most ostraka was banished for ten years, after which time he could return, his property still intact. In this way, would-be tyrants—and not a few other nuisances—were eliminated. (If at first the primitiveness of this procedure shocks you, consider for a moment what benefits it could bring to your city.)

  Athens, the world’s first attempt at democracy—a Greek word meaning “rule by the people”—still stands out as the most wildly participatory government in history. Never again would such a broadly based, decidedly nonrepresentative model be attempted. And, given the compactness of Athens, the theatrical extroversion of its citizenry, and the consequent excitement of their meetings, it worked.

  THE ASSEMBLY was not Athens’s only arena of democracy. In Solon’s old age, another kind of forum emerged, an artistic innovation as inventive as the political one. It was made possible by the air of free discussion that permeated the city, and it afforded its citizens regular opportunities to consider the profoundest issues of their political and social life. It was called drama; and it rose out of the musical presentations that were central to the great religious festivals. The soloist who stepped forward from the chorus often represented a storied god or hero, an assumed persona, sometimes dressed in a recognizable costume (say, the armor of Athena or the lion skin of Hercules), sometimes wearing a mask for further identification. In time, the dialogue between soloist and chorus became more elaborate, as episodes from one of the myths were reenacted on a circular dancing floor (called an orchestra) around a stepped altar dedicated to the festival god. The chorus, arranged around the altar, sang its commentary on the soloist’s story and danced in consecrated movements, while the members of the audience, seated in a theatron (watching place), a semicircular terraced hillside, listened in hushed reverence to the story and supported with their own voices the musical responses of the chorus. This is the essence of what the Greeks called leitourgia (work of the people, public service performed without recompense, liturgy).

  Out of liturgy, then, rose the world’s first drama, as it would rise a second time out of liturgy—in the eleventh century when a soloist, in this case portraying an angel, stepped forward from the monastic chorus, portraying the women at the tomb of Jesus, and asked, “Quem quaeritis?” (“Whom seek ye?”) From pagan Greek liturgy came all of ancient drama; from medieval Latin liturgy came all of modern drama. That drama has always risen out of liturgy suggests that even the most secular theater is caught up in some aspects of communal religious experience: a large, hushed arena of spectators, who laugh, cry, applaud (and perhaps even sing) together and are therefore conscious of their fleeting bonds of community—their communion with the personae brought to life by the actors, their communion with one another as witnesses to a symbolic story that is, at least in some archetypal sense, a mirror of their own lives and the lives of their families and friends. It is this (usually) unspoken religious dimension that can give theater such depth, even at times such mystical resonance.

  A legendary figure called Thespis (whence thespian) is credited with developing the soloist into a genuine stage character, partly by his invention of a larger-than-life mask, which enabled a character to be identified even by the lowest orders of society occupying the back rows of the theatron and enabled a young man to play a woman or an old man and, by careful training and by virtue of the megaphone built into the mouth of the mask, to project his voice as far as the last row. High, thick-soled shoes called buskins increased the actor’s stature. Despite its hushed attention, the Athenian audience was an impatient one, hoping to be seized by emotion but poised to taunt a bumbling actor or an indifferent script. Even beloved theatrical figures could receive rough treatment. The famous tragic actor Hegelochus was hooted off the stage when (in Euripides’s Orestes) he slipped up on a tongue twister—“The calm that comes when storms are past again I see”—and uttered with consummate dignity something on the order of “The comb that calms when palms are stashed again I pee.”

  In the fifth century, Aeschylus, the first of the great playwrights, added a second actor to the dramatic ensemble and made his actors the principal players, concomitantly reducing the role of the chorus, who nonetheless retained a role in the unfolding of the plot. His plays contain no cliffhangers, no surprises. Drawing, rather, on stories known to all—such as “The Fall of the House of Atreus,” with which this chapter began—Aeschylus presents us with august, slow-moving pageants of times past. His characters give poetic speeches and employ exalted language. The simplicity of Aeschylus’s cycles of plays has much in common with the simplicity of the medieval mystery cycles: this is this, and that is that. Their beauty lies not in complexity of metaphor nor subtlety of concept; they exemplify the clarity of orthodox religious thought—the lesson that god is god and cannot be hoodwinked by men. In Aeschylus’s case, the god is Zeus, whose justice falls on those whose hubris (insolence) has tempted them to defy the right order of the world. Guilt, like wealth, can be inherited, falling in a never-ending chain reaction on the children of the guilty, then on their children, then on theirs. Only the creation of a finer, more just human system—which in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the third play of the Oresteia, turns out to be Athenian democracy—can arrest this downward spiral and transform even ancient goddesses of unending vengeance into public-spirited presences, watching, like all divinities, over the blessed fate of Athens.

  Aeschylus used ancient legend to speak to a contemporary issue, namely, opposition by aristocrats to their loss of power under the democratic reforms. The playwright’s final message: heaven wills a better way, so your objections, like those of the aboriginally terrifying Furies, are beside the point; though we must fear you and take you into account, you will no longer control all outcomes. Thus was the sacred pattern set for Aeschylus and the dramatists who followed him: a consecrated, apodictic story, its truth beyond contest, its roots sunk deep in Greek consciousness, but shaped now by the playwright to speak to the polis in its present moment. The chorus came in many plays to represent the common man, the audience, amazed by the outsized nature of the action, mouthing simple verities and coming to new insight in the course of the drama.

  The second great tragedian was Sophocles, Aeschylus’s younger contemporary, who introduced a third actor in his dramas, a practice gladly imitated by Aeschylus in his later plays. This paucity of actors on the stage reflects the liturgical roots of Greek theater, which continued to stick close to its religious origins. Authentic liturgy is always steeped in tradition and, eschewing novelty, changes slowly lest it lose its essence. But gradually, other improvements were introduced: a raised platform at the back of the orchestra, forerunner of our modern stage, from which the actors delivered their lines; the skēnē (whence our scene), the facade of a building that served as backdrop for the stage and concealed the actors’ dressing rooms. On its roof certain actions could be played, such as the setting for the palace watchman at the outset of Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia. Its wide central doorway could be opened to reveal a tableau, such as bloody Clyte
mnestra standing over the savaged bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. For such a display, the actors were wheeled through the double doors on a platform, called an ekkyklēma (roller). Another machine, called a mēchanē, was a sort of crane that swung an actor playing a god over the parapet of the skēnē and out above the stage (thus the Latin phrase deus ex machina for a solution from nowhere, an unforeseen answer to prayers).

  Though the Greeks found it unnatural to avoid innovation entirely, in their theater they limited themselves to what seemed necessary enhancements to the drama itself. The roller, for instance, was necessary because the actual violence of murder could not be depicted as part of religious ritual; only its consequences could be displayed. As with a Christian crucifix, some distancing, some framing, some symbolization was required; one could not bring the actuality into liturgy. But certain elements—the altar in the open-air circle, the stepped hillside for seating—remained constant throughout the history of Greek theater, which spread eventually from Athens to enthusiastic audiences as far away as Italy and Gaul, Arabia and Persia.

  In Sophocles we reach Greek theater at its most exquisitely political; and never in theatrical history has there been a more political play than Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos (called often by its Latin title, Oedipus Rex). Young Oedipus traveled to the city of Thebes while it was being terrorized by a monster called the Sphinx, who ate all those who could not answer the riddle she posed: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three at evening? The answer: a man, who crawls in infancy and uses a stick in old age. Oedipus solved the riddle, whereupon the Sphinx committed suicide and the newcomer was welcomed as tyrannos of Thebes. He married the desirable Jocasta, widow of the recently murdered king, Laius, and sired two sons and two daughters by her.

  This is the proximate background to the play, which opens on a Thebes newly beset, this time by plague, a curse inflicted, as we know from the Iliad, by the god Apollo. “Death / so many deaths, numberless deaths on deaths, no end— / Thebes is dying,” sings the chorus. Oedipus, typical politician, delivers a speech to the citizen-petitioners of the chorus, gathered in front of his palace:

  My children,

  I pity you. I see—how could I fail to see

  what longings bring you here? Well I know

  you are sick to death, all of you,

  but sick as you are, not one is sick as I.

  Your pain strikes each of you alone, each

  in the confines of himself, no other. But my spirit

  grieves for the city, for myself and all of you.

  I wasn’t asleep, dreaming. You haven’t wakened me—

  I have wept through the nights, you must know that,

  groping, laboring over many paths of thought.

  He feels their pain—and vows to get to the bottom of things, to learn why Apollo has sent the plague, and to “bring it all to light myself.”

  But even as the chorus in their middling intelligence soon suspects, this crisis will not yield to Oedipus’s heroic intelligence as did the Sphinx. Apollo’s oracle at Delphi—Greece’s holiest, most mystical site—pronounces that the plague has come because the blood of Laius, Thebes’s murdered king, goes unavenged and that the murderer himself is the corruption harbored by the city. Oedipus, as the Greek audience would have known, is the murderer. Though he does not know it, Laius was his father and Jocasta is his mother. Laius long ago, learning from the Delphic oracle that he would be murdered by his own son, ordered that his newborn babe be exposed3 upon Mount Cithaeron, left to be eaten by animals or to perish in the elements, his ankles pierced together with a spike. The Theban slave to whom Jocasta gave the child, however, could not in his tenderness leave him to die and entrusted him instead to a Corinthian shepherd, who brought him to his own city, where the boy was raised as the adopted son of the childless king and queen. As a young man Oedipus himself heard at Delphi that he would murder his father and marry his mother. Unaware of his adoption, he left Corinth for good, preventing, as he thought, the prophecy from coming to pass. On his journey, princely Oedipus passed Laius and his party at a “triple crossroad,” not knowing who he was. When the haughty old king attempted to push Oedipus off the road, Oedipus killed him, then journeyed on to Thebes, saved the city, became its king, and married the widowed queen.

  All this Oedipus, in his determination to “bring it all to light myself,” will learn step by step. Toward the play’s end, just after the final revelation, Jocasta hangs herself. Oedipus, discovering her, “eased her down / in a slow embrace,” then tore from her body

  the long gold pins

  holding her robes—and lifting them high,

  looking straight up into the points,

  he digs them down the sockets of his eyes, crying, “You,

  you’ll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused!

  Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen,

  blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind

  from this hour on! Blind in the darkness—blind!”

  His voice like a dirge, rising, over and over

  raising the pins, raking them down his eyes.

  And at each stroke blood spurts from the roots,

  splashing his beard, a swirl of it, nerves and clots—

  black hail of blood pulsing, gushing down.

  For the original spectators, the turns of the screw that Sophocles administered throughout this play must have been received with sharp pain, not because they did not know the story but because these cocky, princely, Oedipal Greeks were being made to feel acutely the limitations of human society—in which no political leader, no matter how gifted or courageous, can remain a savior forever, in which every man must come to know that he is no hero but essentially a flawed and luckless figure and that “the pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.” As blind Oedipus is led away by his daughters to the wretched, vagrant life that faces them, the chorus speaks the play’s last, comfortless words:

  People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus.

  He solved the famous riddle with his brilliance,

  he rose to power, a man beyond all power.

  Who could behold his greatness without envy?

  Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him.

  Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day,

  count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.

  Aeschylus’s trilogy on the House of Atreus begins at Mycenae and ends at Athens. The action of Sophocles’s Oedipus begins and ends in a single day at Thebes, all its scenes taking place on the steps of the palace of the tyrannos, its matter the straightforward inquiry by Oedipus into the source of the city’s pollution, an inquiry that begins and ends with him. For the fourth-century Athenian philosopher Aristotle, Oedipus was the perfect tragedy, observing the unities of time, place, and action, presenting as its central character a model human being, whose hamartia brings him down. This hamartia (tragic flaw, the same word that early Christians will use for “sin,” especially for original sin, the sin we are born with, the sin beyond any human being’s control) is not incidental to Oedipus but is, rather, essential to his admirable character. He is strong, courageous, self-possessed, taking charge and striding boldly where others fear to go—the very qualities that foretell his undoing. Our vicarious involvement in the lives of the principal characters elicits our pity for them and our fear for ourselves—lest something similar should happen to us. The peripeteia, the fall of people better than ourselves, and their anagnōrisis, their recognition of their true situation—Jocasta in her suicide, Oedipus in his self-mutilation—finally engenders in us, the audience, a catharsis, a purging of our distraught emotions on their behalf and our behalf.

  We remember in the final moments of the drama, said Aristotle, that this is not life but mimēsis, a mimicking of life, an imitation. The actors leave the stage and the central doors are shut for the last time. It is as if we have been playing with dolls, imitat
ion humans that we have now put back in their box. We leave the theater warned by what we have witnessed but purged of negative emotions. We are pleasantly exhausted now, as if we had recently expelled a poison from our body. We are at peace, exalted by our encounter with this pageant of truth, just as a medieval pilgrim would have felt after looking on a sequence of brightly colored windows depicting the passion of Jesus. I am restored by this vicarious brush with destruction and death. I didn’t die. I am still alive—and can face tomorrow with a certain placid wisdom.

  Aristotle’s analysis—though, much later, it would lead the French playwrights of the seventeenth century to bind themselves by rigid rules—has never been improved upon. Freud’s “Oedipus complex” may be an insightful treatment of the Oedipus myth for modern psychological purposes, but it sheds little light on this play. Aristotle’s aesthetic, however, which is laid out in his treatise the Poetics,4 enables us to penetrate the emotional (and even the religious) temper of classical Athens.

  The Greeks were strivers far more than they were individualists, men who all felt in their heart of hearts that they should be in charge like Oedipus, women who all saw themselves as gracious but sharp-eyed queens like Jocasta. If we could save but one word from Greek civilization, it would have to be aretē, excellence. The aristocrats gave themselves their name, the aristoi (the best). It is an open question whether anyone considered himself a member of the kakoi (the worst, the craven, the dumb shits), though this putdown prances everywhere in the surviving literature. But there can be no question that aristoi striving for aretē don’t kill their fathers or sleep with their mothers and that shame—the paralyzing fear of being numbered among the kakoi—is the hidden engine that ran Greek life.

  These were people who thought very well of themselves, as the not-so-humble Aristotle happily informs us himself:

  Europeans, as well as peoples who live in cold climates generally, are full of spirit but somewhat lacking in intelligence and skill; and because of these deficiencies, though they live in comparative freedom, they lack political organization and the ability to rule others. Asians, on the other hand, though intelligent and skilled by nature, lack spirit and so are always subject to defeat and slavery. The race of the Greeks, however, which occupies the center of the earth, shares the best attributes of West and East, being both spirited and intelligent. Thus does this race enjoy both freedom and stable political institutions and continue to be capable of ruling all humanity.