The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  But the public still dreads Cleon. To avoid angering him by a truthful portrait, those who make masks for the theater go on strike. “His eye is everywhere,” Demosthenes complains, “And what a stride! He has one leg on Pylos and the other in the Assembly; his arse gapes over the land of the Chaonians, his hands are with the Aetolians and his mind with the Clopidians.” Speaking for all later demagogues Cleon explains, “I only stole in the interest of the City!” “I may shout indifferently for right or for wrong, but I keep you fed by it!” The sausage seller, now the savior of Athens, condemns Cleon to an appropriate punishment. “It will not be over-terrible. I condemn him to follow my old trade; posted near the gates, he must sell sausages of asses’ and dogs’ meat; perpetually drunk, he will exchange foul language with prostitutes and will drink nothing but the dirty water from the baths.”

  When the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse wanted to know all about Athens, Plato sent him the plays of Aristophanes. He could not have done better, for nothing escaped Aristophanes’ eye. In The Wasps, which won first prize at the Lenaean Festival of 422, he makes fun of the Athenian legal system, which had transformed juries into a system of public welfare. When the city gave three obols each day for serving on a jury, shiftless citizens were reluctant to bring trials to an end.

  The Sophists were the inviting target of The Clouds. Aristophanes makes Socrates the comic villain of this piece, though in real life Socrates was the Sophists’ outspoken enemy. A stupid farmer trying to dispose of his creditors, hears that Socrates’ “Thinkery” teaches people how to make the Worse Cause appear the Better. When the lessons of the Thinkery become too complicated for him he puts his son under Socrates’ tutelage. There, according to the Thinkery’s impeccable logic, the son is taught that he must beat his father.

  Tell me, is it not right, that in turn I should beat you for your good, since it is for a man’s own best interest to be beaten? What! must your body be free of blows, and not mine? am I not free-born too? the children are to weep and the fathers go free? You will tell me, that according to the law, it is the lot of children to be beaten. But I reply that the old men are children twice over and that it is far more fitting to chastise them than the young, for there is less excuse for their faults.

  At the Great Dionysia of 423 the play received only the third and lowest prize, but Aristophanes still considered it his best.

  Some of Aristophanes’ most appealing themes concern the power (and the powerlessness) of women. Later generations always seem to understand his Lysistrata, offered at the Lenaean Festival of 411, a desperate moment for Athens. The expedition to Sicily in 413 had ended in disaster—ships, army, and the best young men all lost. The war was in its twentieth year, and with no peace in sight. Was there not some way, Lysistrata asked, to enlist lust in the cause of peace? If the men in charge could not find a way, why not the women? “What sensible thing are we women capable of doing? We do nothing but sit around with our paint and lipsticks and transparent gowns and all the rest of it.”

  For his ingenious peace mission Aristophanes creates the strong but not unfeminine Lysistrata (Dismisser of Armies), who leads the women of Athens in a sex strike. They will refuse their husbands the pleasures of the marriage bed, then seize the Acropolis and the treasure in the Parthenon. Finally the women win by persistence and self-control, and the comedy ends in a festal scene of Spartans and Athenians with their wives. “Such a merry banquet I’ve never seen before!” an Athenian exclaims, “The Spartans were simply charming. After the drink is in, why, we’re all wise men, every one of us.”

  Preserving the sexual without the ritual ingredient has made Lysistrata seem indecent. But Dionysiac comedy was a phallic festival. In Aristophanes’ time, actors in the Old Comedy regularly wore a monstrous phallus hanging out of their costume.

  Still Aristophanes never let his social conscience stifle his fantasy, nor let his comic mission keep him grounded. The Great Dionysia in the spring of 414 was another bitter time for Athens. Less than two years before, the Athenians had committed one of the most shameful excesses of their long war when the inhabitants of the neutral island of Melos refused to surrender in 416—all the adult men were massacred and the women and children enslaved. Thucydides gave twenty-two chapters to this savage episode. For other reasons, too, this was an ominous season. On the night before the fleet set out for Sicily the city suffered a horrendous sacrilege when the sacred herms had their noses and phalluses broken off. The consequences of the sacrilege appeared soon enough when disaster befell the expedition to Sicily.

  It was in this spring of 414, at the Great Dionysia, that Aristophanes offered The Birds. All who would build vast empires yet avoid war must simply grow wings, set up their empire in the sky, and surround it with walls. From this strategic location the Birds could dominate mankind by threatening to devastate the crops. From their Cloud-cuckoo-land they could also dominate the gods by intercepting the steam from the sacrifices on which the gods depended for nourishment. To suit the avid bird-watcher, Aristophanes displays a colorful variety—the aggressive hoopoe, the mellifluous nightingale, the graceful flamingo, and the less celebrated cormorant, halcyon, widgeon, jay, sedge-bird, finch, kestrel, cuckoo, falcon, and miscellaneous doves, among others. They still govern mankind by the omens in their flights read by professional augurs. And needless to say, the Birds win their battle against the starving and humiliated gods. As a prize, the leader of the Birds gets Zeus’ daughter Basileia (Sovereignty) for his wife, which lets Aristophanes end the play in the customary festive wedding.

  Aristophanes’ most popular play for later generations, The Frogs, appears to have been his most successful too in his own time, winning first prize at the Great Dionysia (405), and replayed by popular demand the very next day. Imagine fifteen thousand Athenians showing wild enthusiasm for a play that compared the literary merits of two dead tragedians! The Frogs vividly reveals the grand role of drama in Athens’s community life. Their literature was certainly not, in Woodrow Wilson’s phrase, “mere literature.” In 405, when The Frogs was produced in the Theater of Dionysus, Aeschylus was fifty years dead, Euripides and Sophocles gone only a year before. “I want a poet,” Dionysus in the play complains, “for most be dead; only the false live on.” A bevy of mediocrities offer themselves, “All writing tragedies by tens of thousands, And miles verboser than Euripides.” For Dionysus they are (in Gilbert Murray’s translation):

  Leaves without fruit; trills in the empty air,

  And starling chatter, mutilating art!

  Give them one chance and that’s the end of them,

  One weak assault on an unprotected Muse.

  Search as you will, you’ll find no poet now

  With grit in him, to wake word of power.

  He descends to Hades, where all the great tragedians had gone, to find Euripides and bring him back to earth. As Charon ferries him across the Styx, the frogs, from whom the play takes its name, chant their famous chorus—

  Brekekekex co-ax.

  Co-ax, co-ax, co-ax,

  Brekekekex co-ax?

  Our song we can double

  Without the least trouble:

  Brekekekex co-ax.

  Dionysus arrives in Hades just in time to witness a competition between Aeschylus and Euripides for the Throne of Tragedy, and the right to sit beside Pluto. Finally, when Pluto asks Dionysus to choose between them he prefers Aeschylus simply because he likes him more, and brings him back up to Earth, as the Chorus sings,

  Send good thoughts with him, too, for the aid of a travailing nation,

  So shall we rest at the last, and forget our long desolation,

  War and the clashing of wrongs.

  26

  The Arts of Prose and Persuasion

  “IN most of our abilities, we differ not at all from the animals”; Isocrates observed about 374 B.C., “we are in fact behind many in swiftness and strength and other resources. But because there is born in us the power to persuade each other and to
show ourselves whatever we wish, we not only have escaped from living as brutes, but also by coming together have founded cities and set up laws and invented arts, and speech has helped us attain practically all of the things we have devised.” It was writing, of course, that made it possible for the powers of persuasion to reach across the years.

  Poetry, which usually meant metrical language or “verse,” bore conspicuous signs of the intention to be remembered. But prose, the language of everyday trivia, bore no such signs. It required an effort of imagination to see how the flow of daily words could become the substance of lasting art.

  The first literary work in prose was history. And we call Herodotus (c.480–c.425 B.C.) the Father of History because his is the earliest surviving work in Greek prose that aimed to give literary form to an extended narrative of the past. The Greek historie means “inquiry” or the search for truth. Herodotus might also perhaps be called the Father of Prose, for until his time verse was still the normal vehicle for narratives of great events and heroes of the past. The chroniclers and philosophers like Heraclitus (c. 540–c. 470 B.C.) had already tried to give literary form to their prose and to sharpen the precision and accuracy of their language. But the surviving fragments of Heraclitus’ work lack the clarity and elegance of later prose. In fact, ancients called him “the obscure one,” and not until the dialogues of Plato (428–347 B.C.) did philosophic prose take polished literary form.

  Although he writes in prose, Herodotus is still in the Homeric tradition celebrating great men and wondrous deeds. His accounts of the local customs of Egyptians and others broadened the Greeks’ views of themselves. His successor Thucydides was in the same tradition, but professed to be more scrupulous in separating rumor and romance from fact. Herodotus, lacking documents, reported speeches as he thought they ought to have been said under the circumstances. And Thucydides also explained, “My habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.” Apologizing for the lack of “romance” in his history, his purpose was “not an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.” Herodotus and Thucydides proved that prose could be an appealing, effective, and durable literary medium. And they set a standard of literary art that survived. But history, unlike music and gymnastics, did not become a new field of study for the Athenian educational program of paideia.

  Still, Herodotus did signal the appearance of a new literary art of prose to which the future belonged. Politics in the West was not to be a chronicle of lonely Solomons keeping their own counsel. Rather it was to be a history of councils, of senates, parlements and parliaments—of men trying to persuade one another, their fellow governors, and the people whom they governed. In politics there was neither time nor opportunity for epics elaborating messages into verse. Prose, the language of everyday life, would be the vehicle of persuasion. And the new art of rhetoric would provide the techniques, define the standards, and shape the style of the message. What was required was not merely rules for judging a polished literary work but skill in using the common discourse. Even as public expectations grew, despots needed the arts of persuasion to mollify and satisfy their subjects. Rhetoric, which Aristotle himself defined as the arts of persuasion, became a necessary if often unacknowledged skill of the government classes. The arts of prose became essential to the arts of governing.

  We know much more about the creation of this new art of prose and its handmaiden rhetoric than we do of the origins of the art of poetry. Prose was associated with the earliest hesitant moves toward democracy. And we see it allied, too, with opposition to Plato’s pursuit of absolutes. The rise of prose as an art and of rhetoric as a discipline is plainly connected both with wider public participation in government and with appeal to expediency rather than to truth as the guide of political life. The classic antithesis between rhetoric (the concern for the appropriate) and philosophy (the pursuit of truth) was dramatized by Plato in two of his Dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Gorgias. Ever since Plato’s time the arts of persuasion have been associated with popular institutions, with the pursuit of compromise and the acceptance of relative and temporary solutions instead of the pursuit of Truth, of the Utopian and the ideal.

  Gorgias (483–376 B.C.), born in Leontini, near Syracuse, the oldest Greek settlement in Sicily, is reputed to be the first ancient Greek to create an art of prose style. His arrival as an ambassador from his hometown seeking Athenian aid in 427 B.C. marks the beginning of rhetoric in Athens. He was one of the most prominent and influential of the Sophists. These practical philosophers were a thriving symbol of the Greek quest for links between thought and action, between the pursuit of truth and the arts of persuasion. For us, “sophist” describes a person given to clever but specious reasoning. But originally a Sophist (from the Greek sophia, wisdom; or from sophizesthai, making a profession of being clever) was simply a wise man skilled in some special way. In the fifth century B.C., the Great Age of classic Greece, a Sophist was a teacher who traveled about giving instructions in successful living. The Sophists were paid for their services, and some, like Gorgias, did very well for themselves. Plato (in his Protagoras, Phaedrus, and Gorgias) and others who were unsympathetic to their pragmatic approach to life treat them as an errant school of philosophy or, rather, of antiphilosophy. But they were a varied lot who simply shared a suspicion of absolutes and ultimates, of the pursuit of Truth and Virtue, of which Plato was the brilliant exponent. They were more interested in what they called successful living, in the accommodations of community, than in the Platonic Ideas.

  By ancient repute, Protagoras (c.485–c.410 B.C.) was the first Sophist. A friend of Pericles, he prospered and attained wealth and eminence by his fees from teaching. When Athens founded a colony at Thurii in 444, he was given the task of drawing up its laws. He professed to teach arete (honor or nobility), which some said was simply the technique of successful living. He is best remembered for his motto “Man is the measure of all things.” He and his fellow Sophists were impressed that different nations had different rules even about sacred matters like marriage and burial. They concluded that most morals were conventional. Therefore, they preached, since morals were relative and successful living was the important thing, all men should defer to the morals of their community. This also implied that all knowledge was relative and no science could be universal. So Protagoras ridiculed the philosophic speculations of Socrates and Plato about what was the “real” world. Nevertheless Protagoras himself did write a book, On the Gods, which questioned the gods’ existence. His books were publicly burned, and he was expelled from Athens.

  But paradox plagued the Sophists and others who claimed that they could improve society by improving its techniques of persuasion. It seems that Protagoras had instructed a young man in rhetoric, with the understanding that he should be paid his tuition fees only if the young man won his first lawsuit. Unfortunately the ungrateful young man’s first lawsuit was the one that Protagoras had to bring to recover his fees.

  Gorgias, pioneer Sophist of another breed, focused less on philosophy than on oratory, and made the art of rhetoric his key to successful living. In cities newly experimenting with democratic institutions, it seemed that success depended on the ability to influence people. When the spoken word was the only medium that reached the whole community, rhetoric aimed to train pupils to defend any cause or its opposite. Platonic philosophers naturally ridiculed this as only the technique of “making the worse seem the better cause.” Like Dale Carnegie, Gorgias and his fellow Sophist teachers of rhetoric promised to teach their pupils how to influence people. They taught the arts of persuasion but not the techniques of discovering virtue. To show the superior importance of the powers of persuasion, Gorgias once told how his brother, a physician, saw that his patient needed a particular operation. But the patient would not agree to the operation until Gorgias used his rheto
rical powers.

  Distrusting the philosophers’ pompous distinctions between the phenomenal world of everyday life and their own “real” world of Ideas, Gorgias countered with his satirical treatise “On That Which Is Not, or on Nature.” His three mock-philosophic propositions disposed of the private world of the philosophers. He said he had proven that nothing exists, that even if something existed no one could have knowledge of it, and finally, in the unlikely event that somebody did know, there was no way he could communicate it to others. But Gorgias was famous also for having his very own prose style. According to Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian in the first century B.C., he was “the first to make use of figures of speech which were far-fetched and distinguished by artificiality: antithesis, isocolon, parison, homoeoteleuton, and others which then, because of the novelty of the devices, were thought worthy of praise, but now seem labored and ridiculous when used to excess.” His extravagant figures of speech came to be called the “Gorgianic figures,” symptoms of the strenuous effort to create an art of literary prose.

  As a Sophist, Gorgias built his style and his system of rhetoric on the concept of “the opportune” (to kairon). The master of the art of rhetoric, Gorgias said, had the ability to defend any cause, and the worse the cause the better the test of the orator’s skill. In his Encomium of Helen he showed the flamboyant style that would influence his successor Isocrates as well as Thucydides. He had chosen this subject, he explained, because it was the orator’s duty not only to praise the praiseworthy but to defend the maligned. And who was more in need of such defense than Helen of Troy? She should not be blamed for abandoning her husband Menelaus and yielding to the handsome Paris, for she must have been the innocent victim of fate, the will of the gods. Or if not, she must have been overcome by force or by words or by the irresistible power of love. These exhausted the possibilities, and Gorgias, like a defense lawyer in a courtroom, showed that in every conceivable circumstance Helen was blameless.