The Greek Plays
Page 3
We know the names of more than sixty dramatists who were active in the fifth century, though in most cases, only fragments of their work survive. Aeschylus’ Persians (472) is the earliest drama that has come down to us. Sophocles won his first tragic competition in 469; Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy was produced in 458. Euripides had his first success in 441, three years before he produced the Alcestis (see time line). By the end of the fifth century it became clear that most people considered Aeschylus (c.525–456 B.C.), Sophocles (497/6–405/4), and Euripides (485/4–406/5) to have been the greatest playwrights. In his comedy the Frogs, which was first performed in 405, the poet Aristophanes imagines that those three poets are the only dramatists the god Hades had considered eligible to hold the chair of tragic poetry in the Underworld.
Euripides appears as a character in three of Aristophanes’ surviving comedies (the Acharnians, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Frogs). Aristophanes knew Euripides’ plays well, and he made fun of him by making him espouse and embody the most radical statements in his dramas, all expertly taken out of context for maximum comic effect. In the Frogs, which was first performed just after Euripides’ death in 405 B.C., Aristophanes portrays the god Dionysus as a great admirer of Euripides’ trendiness. Dionysus goes to the Underworld with the intention of bringing Euripides back from the dead. After he gets there, he is asked to judge whether Euripides should be allowed to take over the chair of tragedy, which Aeschylus had held until Euripides arrived. Aristophanes has Euripides with great insouciance and facility pray to absurdly different gods and question traditional morality. But Aristophanes’ Aeschylus respects traditional religious practices, and he speaks in ponderous and sententious phrases, using cumbrous compound words, like the Choruses in some of his dramas. He boasts that he wrote plays about weighty issues like war and justice and accuses Euripides of being interested in ordinary life and trivial household affairs. After witnessing the competition between the two poets, Dionysus decides to bring Aeschylus back from the world of the dead, on the grounds that his presence would do more to help save Athens from being defeated by Sparta than would that of Euripides, who (as Aristophanes suggests) is responsible for the moral deterioration that has led to their military failures.
Because Aristophanes was a contemporary of Euripides, his portraits of the two poets have often been regarded as essentially accurate, even if exaggerated for comic purposes. But in his comedy the Clouds, Aristophanes turns Socrates into a pedantic sophist, suspended in a basket, claiming he is walking in the air and contemplating the sky—a caricature that didn’t resemble him in the least (or so Plato has Socrates say in his Apology). There seem to have been few limits to what a comic poet could say about his contemporaries, and portrayals even of living persons were not expected to be fair-minded or accurate. Nonetheless, that caricature appears to have encouraged many of Socrates’ contemporaries to believe that he had a corrupting influence on his young male followers. Why should we suppose that he was inclined to treat Euripides with greater respect? In reality we do not know what Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, or any other ancient poet intended his dramas to convey to his audiences, and virtually nothing about how or why they became poets or how or by whom they were taught to write verses and the music that accompanied it. At best we can suppose that most poets came from propertied families, if only because they had been taught to read and write and had the time to compose verses and music.
It is almost miraculous, and a testament to their continuing cultural importance, that some of the works of these great dramatists have survived to the present day. At first the poets probably used a stylus to write down drafts of their work on wood tablets coated with wax. The finished works then were copied by hand onto papyrus scrolls, a medium on which longer texts could be written down with pen and ink. But because papyrus eventually deteriorates in variable climates, the texts of the dramas needed to be copied and recopied over the centuries. Inevitably in the course of transmission, mistakes and omissions were introduced; also, actors and editors altered the texts and added new lines of their own. In the fourth and third centuries B.C., texts of the dramas were stored in the library of the Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt, where the dry climate helped to preserve the papyrus rolls on which the dramas had been copied. But that library was destroyed at the end of the fourth century A.D., and still more copies of the dramas were lost after the fifth century, when Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. In the end, copies continued to be made of only a relatively small number of texts, most likely because they were judged suitable for reading and study of rhetoric.
As a result of the process of attrition and selection, we now have only a small fraction of what the three great poets produced. Roughly speaking, in the case of Aeschylus, we have six complete dramas (not counting the Prometheus Bound, which was probably by another poet) out of as many as 90, seven out of as many as 123 for Sophocles, and eighteen out of as many as 92 for Euripides (not counting the Rhesus, which was almost certainly by another poet). These totals, however, are not exact, because the same play could be known by different titles. Of the nineteen surviving plays attributed to Euripides, ten (including the Rhesus) were preserved in multiple copies because they were selected for reading in schools of rhetoric. The other nine were preserved in a single manuscript that, in addition to the ten plays selected for school use, also contained nine other complete plays whose names begin with the letters epsilon, eta, iota, and kappa; the dramas Electra and Helen in this volume come from that manuscript. We also have some fragmentary texts of dramas on papyrus that were preserved in Egypt, but the texts of the complete plays come from parchment codices, or books, starting around the fifth century A.D.
But even though the texts of the dramas that we still have contain some textual gaps, later additions, and other imperfections, and even though we have only partial information about the paraphernalia and music that accompanied the original performances, Greek dramas continue to be discussed, revived, restaged, and quoted, as they have been for generations. Even in modern languages with different sound patterns and forms of versification, reading the dramas is a transformative experience, disturbing, inspiring, puzzling, never irrelevant or boring. They have survived because they portray essential truths about the real nature of human life, our ultimate powerlessness, and the limits of our understanding.
It is said that after the Athenians were defeated by the Syracusans in Sicily in 414 B.C., wandering Athenian soldiers were given food and drink in return for reciting lyric passages from Euripides’ dramas, and that some Athenian slaves working in the mines in Syracuse were freed because they could recite passages from his plays to their captors. For those soldiers and the captors it was not the props, costuming, sound effects, or staging that mattered most; for them, as for us, it was what the poets thought and wrote that they wanted to hear again and again, and, however imperfectly, to remember.
AESCHYLUS
Aeschylus (c.525–456 B.C.) came from a propertied family in Eleusis. His first tragedies were performed in the early 490s, but it was not until 484 that he won his first victory in the competition at the City Dionysia. He fought against the Persians at Marathon in 490 and probably also at Salamis in 480. In 472 he described the battle at Salamis in his Persians, the earliest of his surviving tragedies. In 470, Hieron, the tyrant of the Greek city of Syracuse, invited Aeschylus to Sicily to stage a performance of his Women of Aetna (now lost). After returning to Athens, Aeschylus won first prize at the Great Dionysia with five of his other extant tragedies, the Seven Against Thebes (467), the Suppliants (463), and the trilogy, translated in this volume, known as the Oresteia (458), consisting of the Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides.
Although Aristophanes, in his comedy the Frogs (405 B.C.), satirizes Aeschylus’ style as pompous, bombastic, and sententious, in his extant dramas Aeschylus writes in a variety of modes, ranging from straightforward exposition to densely poetic language characterized by distinct
ive combinations of words and metaphors. The old men in the choruses of Persians and the Agamemnon use sonorous words and speak in complex rhythms that bring profundity and emotional depth to their reflections on the human condition and the inscrutability of the gods. Metrical motifs carried over from the Agamemnon reappear in the terrifying songs of the Furies in the final play of the Oresteia trilogy, the Eumenides.
In 456, Aeschylus was invited back to Sicily, and he died there. But the Athenians did not forget about him. Half a century later his dramas were so well remembered that even while making fun of his writing style, Aristophanes endorsed his work for its ethical and patriotic values, wishing that Aeschylus could be brought back to life.
INTRODUCTION TO AESCHYLUS’ PERSIANS
So far as we know, only three Greek tragedies dealt with recent history rather than age-old myths, and all three portrayed episodes from what we now call the Persian Wars: the twenty-year stretch of armed conflict (499–479 B.C.) that pitted various coalitions of Greek cities against the vast, wealthy, monarchic Persian Empire. The first two of these dramatic experiments were the work of Phrynichus, but both are now lost; Aeschylus’ Persians came third, in 472 B.C. It follows by only eight years the event at its core, the surprising, seemingly miraculous Greek victory over the Persian navy at the island of Salamis, off the west coast of Attica. That victory, achieved despite long odds, had saved most of Greece, and especially Athens, from a fearsome choice between annihilation and subjection to the might of imperial Persia.
It’s no accident that the Persian Wars provided the subject matter for all three of these known Greek historical dramas. The magnitude and scope of this conflict, which appeared to the Greeks to pit the manpower and wealth of all Asia against a much poorer and less populous Europe, gave it mythic dimensions even as it took place, and these only became amplified with the passage of time. Herodotus, writing about the same struggle perhaps half a century after it ended, saw it as the culmination of a millennium-long contest for supremacy between two great ethnopolitical blocs, and therefore as a major turning point in human history.
In dramatizing the naval battle off Salamis—an event he himself, and many members of his audience, had taken part in—Aeschylus closed the chronological gap that gives most Greek plays their sense of otherworldliness, but opened up a gulf of cultural distance instead. The play takes place before the palace at Susa, one of the capitals of the Persian Empire, in what is today western Iran—a place Athenians could neither visit nor visualize, a city they imagined as replete with fantastic wealth and ruled by immensely powerful monarchs. The exotic robes and soft slippers worn by the actors helped convey this distance to the original audience, perhaps along with musical phrases and choral dance steps suggesting the Far East. It has even been suggested by a modern scholar* that the backdrop for the play’s production was the ornate tent-cloth beneath which the Persian king, Xerxes, camped during his invasion of Greece—one of the proudest spoils of Athenian victory. If true, this story explains how the word skēnē, originally meaning “tent,” came to denote the stage on which the dramas were played, eventually coming into English in a Latinate spelling, “scene.”
But though the play is ostensibly set at a far remove from Athens, the moral and religious ideas around which it revolves are unmistakably those central to archaic and early classical Greece. Aeschylus uses the plight of Xerxes, a defeated king stripped of both his army and his royal robes, to explore the role of hybris and atē, unsanctioned overreach and the blindness that leads to it, in the rises and falls of individuals and of nations. The Chorus of Persian elders confide their fears about atē in the play’s unique opening ode:
Kindly and wheedling at first comes reckless Atē,
but then she leads men into nets and snares;
no mortal man can jump over, or hope to escape. (96–100)
If the placement of these lines by modern editors is correct (they have been moved from their position as found in the manuscripts), they follow directly after a proud recitation of Persia’s long string of military victories, capped by the recent creation of a Persian navy. That navy, as the Chorus does not yet know but Aeschylus’ audience does, has already been smashed by the Athenian-led Greek fleet at Salamis. The “fine-stranded [ships’] cables” of which the Chorus boast have become the woven “nets” in which the gods trap those hungry for conquest.
“Cables” in the context of this play has a wider resonance than mere ships’ riggings. As Herodotus’ account of Xerxes’ invasion makes clear, the Persian land army marched into Europe by way of an enormous pontoon bridge stretched across the Straits of Hellespont (the modern Dardanelles), the place at which a mile-wide stream of salt water separated Europe from Asia. Enormous flax ropes, stretched between anchored ships, held this bridge together and effectively joined the continents. Aeschylus uses the double meaning of zeugma and related Greek words—both a “link” between two things and a “yoke” thrust upon a team of animals to subdue them—to connect this bridge to notions of enslavement and subjugation. A chariot that Atossa has dreamed of, and that she describes to the Chorus in her opening speech, is pulled by another kind of zeugma—the forcible “yoking” of two enslaved sisters, dressed to represent the peoples of Asia and Europe respectively (the European one, significantly, throws off her yoke, while the Asian one accepts it). A typically dense Aeschylean mesh of motifs begins to form around these zeug- words. Ropes, nets, ships, bridges, and yokes are woven together in this poetic tapestry, all evoking the expansionism of imperial Persia, the nation that sought (in Herodotus’ words) “to make all lands one land” (Histories 7.8ɣ).
The long stretch of time over which these themes are traced is also typically Aeschylean, reminiscent of the panhistorical scope of the Oresteia. Two generations are represented onstage, an older one to which the Chorus and queen belong, and a younger one represented by Xerxes. But Xerxes’ father, Darius, who rises spectacularly from the Underworld in ghost form at the play’s climax, seems to transcend time with his omniscience about both the past and the future. He looks back over five generations of rule that preceded his own, describing Persia’s gradual conquest of Asia as a mandate handed down from Zeus. Xerxes, in his view, has rashly exceeded that mandate by entering Europe, offending not only Zeus but Poseidon—here virtually a personification of the straits that Xerxes had bridged, the Hellespont. Aeschylus obscures the fact (or perhaps did not know) that Darius, too, in reality had built an intercontinental bridge (across the Bosporus, according to Herodotus) and campaigned in Europe, against the Scythians north of the Black Sea. The dead king is not a historical portrait so much as an incarnation of all of Persia’s past, a past that Xerxes has, in the view of the play, betrayed and partly undone.
Though Darius rages at his son’s arrogance, he also speaks of oracles that foretold the present catastrophe. Xerxes’ downfall, like that of Agamemnon and other Aeschylean heroes, is the result of both error and fate. On the whole, the Persians suggests that Xerxes is more deserving of pity than blame. The Chorus only rarely express anger toward him, and the solemn, dirgelike procession they share with him in the play’s last scene is a moving evocation of shared sorrow. Atossa’s anxiety for her child allows us to see Xerxes as a frail and vulnerable creature, a mother’s son as well as an army’s chief. The queen exits the stage (at line 851) on a touchingly domestic mission, seeking to bring her son a new robe to replace the rags he now wears. When Xerxes enters shortly thereafter, we see that her mission remains incomplete. The tattered glory of the Persian royal house cannot be restored easily, if at all.
At the heart of the play (from lines 302 to 514) stand the reports of the first Persian soldier to return from Greece, grim catalogs of horror that rank among the finest of surviving Greek messenger speeches. Aeschylus, who had himself fought at Salamis on board an Athenian ship, here demonstrates a remarkable ability to see the battle through the eyes of the enemy. Though the gods are clearly on the side of the Greeks (as signaled by the
supernatural voice bidding them to charge and win their freedom), the sufferings of the Persians, both during the battle and in the retreat afterward, are presented with deep compassion and superb artistry. Here and throughout the play, Aeschylus uses sonorous roll calls of Persian casualties, their names resonant with exotic Iranian phonemes, to construct a kind of verbal memorial to the valiant dead. Though he wrote for Athenians, whose city had been razed by the Persians and who had reasons to celebrate the outcome of Salamis, Aeschylus did not indulge in triumphalism or vainglory. There is no irony in the Chorus’s final wails of woe.
The date at which the Persians was produced, 472 B.C., makes it the earliest play in this volume and, quite possibly, the earliest play among all surviving Greek tragedies. Despite this antiquity, the Persians has had great resonance in recent decades, especially as Western military engagement with the Middle East has become a more central issue. Important productions were mounted in Edinburgh in 1993 and New York in 2003, in response to the first and second Gulf Wars.