The Greeks, as their playwrights if not their philosophers knew, were in desperate need of the admonition—the vicarious comeuppance—that a play such as Oedipus could provide.
You will not be surprised to learn that, like so much else in Greek life, playwriting turned into a contest. At the springtime Dionysia, the Athenian festival in honor of Dionysus, three days of tragedies, chosen in advance, were performed almost in the manner of a modern film festival, though with significant differences. The festival began with a solemn religious procession of leading citizens, distinguished visitors, and all the choruses, garlanded and colorfully costumed for the plays they would appear in, led by officials who carried the great phalloi, enormous sculptures of erect penises, symbols of the god, to his temple, where the ten stratēgoi, the generals of the Athenian armies, poured libations and offered animal sacrifices. After this grand opening, thirty thousand festival-goers—twice as many participants as ever showed up for the Assembly—crowded into the vast open-air theater in the hollow on the southern slope of the Acropolis to watch the new productions.
Aeschylus, who wrote more than eighty plays (of which only seven have come down to us), won thirteen first-place victories. Since tragedies were presented in trilogy, this actually meant that thirty-nine of his plays were winners. His younger contemporary Sophocles, who lived to be ninety and never stopped writing, was even more successful. He had begun his theatrical career as a beautiful chorus boy and went on to hold several public offices, twice elected general by the Athenian Assembly, much helped by his temperate nature and general likability. He wrote more than 120 plays (of which we have but seven) and won twenty-four first-place victories—for the majority of his trilogies. All the rest of his plays won second place.
Euripides, the third great dramatist, was not so fortunate. A decade or so younger than Sophocles, he died just before him in 406 B.C. At the Dionysia that year, the generous, fair-minded Sophocles commemorated his colleague’s death by presenting his chorus in mourning, ungarlanded. But Euripides, a loner with few friends, won in his lifetime only four victories at the Dionysia, though he wrote more than ninety plays (of which, by chance, nineteen have survived).
Far more decisive than his personality, Euripides’s penchant for naturalism deprived him of recognition during his lifetime. Aristotle tells us that “Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.” Euripides had no patience for elevated language or the chimeras of nobility. His characters, even if they were aristoi, might find themselves in rags or be overheard to utter shockingly foul thoughts; and his slaves might show themselves to be truly noble. These reversals of conventional expectations were too upsetting to the audiences of Euripides’s day for him ever to become the darling of Athens.
In nothing was Euripides more unexpected than his presentation of the thoughts and actions of women. In his Medea, for instance, the title character is a witch who already has a string of murders to her name. Having fallen in love with Jason, she used her magic to enable him to steal the Golden Fleece from her father, the king of Colchis at the eastern edge of the Black Sea. The couple then took refuge in luxurious Corinth, where Medea bore Jason two sons. But as the play opens, Jason, now well adjusted to a life of ease and tired of Medea, has deserted her and arranged a profitable new marriage for himself with the local princess, daughter of Creon, Corinth’s king. Euripides’s Jason is no Greek hero, hardly the swashbuckling adventurer who put out to sea with his fellow heroes, the famed Argonauts, in a story beloved by all Greeks. He is just another self-promoting, self-justifying cad, the typical cheating husband. Since the audience was full of men who cheated on their wives, who got rid of their wives once they tired of them, who had taken up with teenage chippies, men whose self-justifications were the quintessence of eloquence, it is no surprise that Euripides’s Medea lost the competition it was entered in.
But more shocking than the playwright’s daring presentation of the typical Greek husband is his portrayal of Medea, the foreign witch who speaks the truth in her very first appearance on stage, dripping her sarcasm over the audience:
Ladies, Corinthians, I’m here.
Don’t think ill of me. Call others proud.
In public, in private, it’s hard to get it right.
Tread as carefully as you will,
“She’s proud,” they’ll say, “she won’t join in.”
What human being looks fairly on another?
They’d sooner hate than know you properly,
even before you’ve done them any harm.
And when you’re a foreigner: “Be like us,” they say.
Even Greeks look down on other Greeks,
too clever to see the good in them.
As for me, the blow that struck me down
and eats my heart I least expected.
My lovely life is lost; I want to die.
He was everything to me—and now
he’s the vilest man alive, my husband.
Of all Earth’s creatures that live and breathe,
are we women not the wretchedest?
We scratch and save, a dowry to buy a man—
and then he lords it over us: we’re his,
our lives depend on how his lordship feels.
For better for worse: we can’t divorce him.
However it turns out, he’s ours and ours he stays.
Women’s cunning? We need all of it.
Set down with strangers, with ways and laws
she never knew at home, a wife must learn
every trick she can to please the man
whose bed she shares. If he’s satisfied,
if he lives content, rides not against the yoke—
Congratulations! If not, we’re better dead.
A husband, tired of domesticity,
goes out, sees friends, enjoys himself—
but we must always look to him alone.
Our reward? A quiet life they promise us.
They’ll grab the spears. They’ll take the strain.
I’d three times sooner go to war
than suffer childbirth once.
There’s not a line here that would not outrage someone’s sensibility. And two lines dare to challenge divine Homer himself, whose poetry was known to all by heart. In the Iliad, after the death of Patroclus, Zeus delivers the famous aperçu:
There is nothing alive more agonized than man
of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.
“Man” is now knocked from his perch, noble “mankind” parodied by “women”! Zeus, our high god, pushed aside by this monstrous foreign hag, this Black Sea bitch, this———! The Greeks had a rich multiplicity of slurs at their command, and we can be sure they used them in this instance. Medea is an early play in the Euripidean canon. But the playwright would be forced to listen to the criticism that raged against him throughout his thirty-year career. By 408, he had exiled himself from Athens in bitterness and died two years later in Macedon.
At the drama’s climax, Medea, having effected the excruciating death of her rival, the princess bride, murders her own children to achieve complete revenge on Jason. Pace Aristotle, there’s no catharsis here, no wise and placid exit from the theater for all those entitled Greek males, the ones who hadn’t already stormed out, the ones still quivering in their seats on the gently terraced hillside. “Of course, she was a foreign witch, not Greek at all, a depraved, unnatural woman, so what could one expect?” With such excuses they may have soothed themselves as they found their way to the exits; and violent, unbalanced Euripides gained a reputation for being unfair, especially to women. They missed the point. Euripides did not mean to expose women as more base and irrational than men. He was posing a question to his audience: what could drive a woman to such extremes that she would kill her own children? And he found the answer smack in the middle of Greek life as it was then lived.
For the strutting aristoi of the symposia, the nature of life was obvious: you gave
it or you got it. To represent ancient Greece as a homosexual society is to miss the central lesson. It was a militarized society that saw everything in terms of active and passive, swords and wounds, phalloi and gashes. Aristocratic boys were courted by aristocratic men as part of a puberty ordeal, the last step before adulthood, during which the man was to act as a model and help the boy achieve bristling manhood. He could masturbate between the boy’s thighs but was not allowed to come in his mouth or sodomize him. He was not, therefore, allowed to make him into a passive partner. Of course, he—and any male citizen—could do whatever he liked to anyone else, male or female, adult or child, so long as his object was not another citizen or a properly married woman. If she were divorced, as Medea was about to be, she was as fair game as anyone. The Homeric insights into longtime love between two people—Hector and Andromache, Odysseus and Penelope—are never spoken of again in Greek literature after the close of the Odyssey. Sappho’s expressed preference for love of an individual—“black earth’s most beautiful thing”—over the beautiful cavalries, infantries, and navies that entranced most Greeks remains a solitary preference, never again voiced after her death in the early sixth century. Rather, the Greeks became ever more striving, ever more competitive, ever more bellicose. Sometimes, all they seemed to be left with was fucking or getting fucked.
After Euripides died, his last trilogy of plays was presented at the Dionysia and took first place, helped no doubt by the well-regarded Sophocles’s public reverence of his colleague’s memory. The Athenians, who, after all, prided themselves on their openness to invention, learned soon enough to tolerate Euripidean discomfort. One of the last three plays was the Bacchae (Women of Bacchus, that is, the female celebrants of the rites of the god Bacchus, or Dionysus), and it is the most unsettling of all Greek dramas. We are back in Thebes, where King Pentheus is opposed to the introduction of the cult of Dionysus, lord of wine and wild inspiration, which the king sees only as a source of chaos. Unbeknown to him, his own mother, Agavē, has joined the cult and, inspired by the god, dances in ecstasy with her fellow bacchae on Mount Cithaeron. Pentheus goes to spy on them and is ripped to pieces by the bacchae, who, in their ecstasy, mistake him for a mountain lion. His own mother brings his head in triumph back to Thebes and only by degrees returns to herself and recognizes what she has done.
The play served as Euripides’s final warning to his fellow Athenians, so sure of themselves, that there were forces in life they were militantly ignoring, forces that could undo them and their whole political and social establishment. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy proposed that there were two poles in Greek civilization: daylight, intellectual clarity, mind, measure, all represented by Apollo; and darkness, emotion, inspiration, chaos, all represented by Dionysus, the inspirer of tragedy and the more important god. But Apollo was always more important to the Greeks. Like Pentheus, they feared Dionysus and didn’t quite know what to do about him. Euripides reminded them that there was a subterranean reality they were unaware of, a god whom, despite their festival, they had yet to acknowledge.
1 Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes caused such a stir when it was published in 1996 in part because the clean elegance of its prose was married to the narrative of a kind of life that is seldom memorialized in literature. Few who grow up in circumstances of extreme poverty have the opportunity to master the middle-class craft of writing.
2 Our word xenophobia is formed from two Greek nouns, xenos (stranger) and phobos (panic flight or panic fear). Phobos is used in English in many Greek-inspired combination words, such as acrophobia (fear of heights), agoraphobia (fear of open spaces).
3 In the ancient world, in which contraception was normally by magical means and abortion often spelled death for the woman, exposure of infants was common, giving us the common Latin surname Expositus (Esposito in later Italian and Spanish), which came to designate an orphan abandoned—more often on a doorstep than in the wild.
4 Aesthetic and poetics are derived from Greek, as are our many words ending in -ic and -ics.
V
THE PHILOSOPHER
HOW TO THINK
“Next,” I said, “here’s a situation which you can use as an analogy for the human condition—for our education or lack of it. Imagine people living in a cavernous cell down under the ground; at the far end of the cave, a long way off, there’s an entrance open to the outside world. They’ve been there since childhood, with their legs and necks tied up in a way which keeps them in one place and allows them to look only straight ahead, but not to turn their heads. There’s firelight burning a long way further up the cave behind them, and up the slope between the fire and the prisoners there’s a road, beside which you should imagine a low wall has been built—like the partition which conjurors place between themselves and their audience and above which they show their tricks.”
“All right,” he said.
“Imagine also that there are people on the other side of this wall who are carrying all sorts of artifacts. These artifacts, human statuettes, and animal models carved in stone and wood and all kinds of materials stick out over the wall; and as you’d expect, some of the people talk as they carry these objects along, while others are silent.”
“This is a strange picture you’re painting,” he said, “with strange prisoners.”
“They’re no different from us,” I said. “I mean, in the first place, do you think they’d see anything of themselves and one another except the shadows cast by the fire on to the cave wall directly opposite them?”
“Of course not,” he said. “They’re forced to spend their lives without moving their heads.”
“And what about the objects which were being carried along? Won’t they only see their shadows as well?”
“Naturally.”
“Now, suppose they were able to talk to one another: don’t you think they’d assume that their words applied to what they saw passing in front of them?”
“They couldn’t think otherwise.”
“And what if the sound echoed off the prison wall opposite them? When any of the passersby spoke, don’t you think they’d be bound to assume that the sound came from a passing shadow?”
“I’m absolutely certain of it,” he said.
“All in all, then,” I said, “the shadows of artifacts would constitute the only reality people in this situation would recognize.”
“That’s absolutely inevitable,” he agreed.
EVERY GREAT PHILOSOPHY has been … the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir,” exclaims Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. No one can doubt the confessional dimension of Nietzsche’s seminal first book, The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872 and so disconcerting to his fellow classicists that it ruined his reputation as a scholar. But over time its thesis came to replace what had been till then the standard Enlightenment view of classical Greece as the home of “noble simplicity and silent greatness”—all those placid white statues forever maintaining their blissful dignity. Its seldom-used full title, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, hints at its grand purpose: to elevate the music of Richard Wagner as the model for a new tragic age. Nietzsche scorned both Sophocles and Euripides for, as he saw it, degrading Greek tragedy from its original Dionysian purpose by the introduction of excessive (Apollonian) rationalism. Four years later, he turned against the composer for failing to advance sufficiently into Dionysian madness; thirteen years after that about-face, the philosopher went insane and remained so till his death in 1900. Till recently, it had been universally assumed that Nietzsche’s harrowing last years were the result of the effect on his brain of late-stage syphilis. But the neurologist Richard Schain has made a compelling case for “manic-depressive psychosis which gave way in time to signs of chronic schizophrenia.” If so, the categories Apollonian and Dionysian may be seen as Nietzsche’s attempt to name the polarity he found within himself.
But it is not necessar
y to buy Nietzsche’s whole thesis in order to find his categories useful. Apollo, giver of sunlight and measurement, the great archer whose arrows never miss their targets, is the god of severe justice, the god in whom the sense of order is paramount, the one who cannot rest till all wrongs have been righted and all corners have been plumbed. It is Apollo who cannot bear to allow Oedipus to continue his reign and whose holy and uncanny presence is felt throughout Sophocles’s play, sparking supernatural fear in all who sense his proximity. The divine model for the typical human hero, Apollo stands in stark contrast to Dionysus, dark lord from the East, giver of the vine, showing himself an alluringly effeminate youth with long, luxuriant hair, surrounded by the vines that entangle others and attended by his satyrs—boisterous creatures from the countryside, horned, betailed, goat-footed (the very images that would be adopted by Christian artists to portray devils), enormous penises erect, subhuman sex machines always at the ready. This was the god for whom the Dionysia was celebrated, whose primitive choruses—called tragōdiai (goat-songs)—were the origin of drama. Even in fifth-century Athens, the trilogies of the great tragedians each ended with a short satyr (or satyric) play, a coarse burlesque of mythic material connected to the preceding trilogy. It helped to set aside all that tragic seriousness and brought the day to a merry close, introducing the night of drinking that lay ahead.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea Page 12
