The Greek Plays

by The Greek Plays- Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles

  The circumstances in which we attend theatrical performances today underscore the segregation between our theater and what Aristophanes would call “the city.” We attend plays in the evening, when the workday is over, or on weekends, at the end of the working week. When we attend a performance of a drama or a musical comedy, we do so as private persons expressing personal preferences: from a wide array of choices we choose the play we happen to be interested in at the moment; we select the date and the time that suit us; we order our tickets so as to be sure to have the kind of seats we prefer. When we enter the theater itself, however, the “selves” that we have expressed in making these choices disappear: we assume a kind of willed anonymity, exchanging the familiar world of lights and activity and noise for an uncanny, hushed darkness. In this blackness we sit, invisible and unrecognizable to one another until such time as the play is over, at which point the lights come up and we shuffle out of the theater to assume our public identities once more.

  Private, personal, anonymous, invisible: it would be hard to think of a theatergoing experience less like the one familiar to the ordinary Athenian citizen during the 400s B.C. This—the so-called “Athenian century,” the hundred-year period of Athens’ political and cultural dominance, from the establishment of her democratic government in 509 B.C. to her humiliating defeat at the end of the three-decade-long Peloponnesian War in 404—was also the century, not coincidentally, in which the dramatic masterpieces collected in this volume were composed, produced, and first performed. I say “not coincidentally” because what we think of as “Greek tragedy” was, properly speaking, “Athenian tragedy”: invented at Athens, this uniquely Athenian genre flourished in tandem with the Athenian state—and withered and died with it, too.

  That the fates of Athens and of tragedy were so closely entwined suggests a profound organic connection between the polity and the genre. For us, the children of Freud, great drama is often most satisfying when it enacts the therapy-like process by which the individual psyche is stripped of its pretensions or delusions to stand, finally, exposed to scrutiny—and, as often as not, to the audience’s pity or revulsion. (One thinks again of Streetcar.) But even though there are great Greek plays that enact that same process—Sophocles’ Oedipus, most notably—it would appear, given the strange twinning of Athenian drama and Athenian political history, that for the Athenians, tragedy was just as much about “the city” as it was about the individual. Indeed, the notion of “the individual” in our sense of the word was foreign to the Greeks: when the philosopher Aristotle famously says that “the human is a political animal,” he didn’t mean that we are all like Lyndon Baines Johnson but, rather, that the human species is naturally social and civic—by nature suited to live in a polis, a “city.”

  In fact, both the structure of the Greek plays and the context in which they were originally performed (the latter in particular being unimaginably foreign to our way of experiencing the theater, as will soon be clear) emphasized the political aspect of life—that is, political in Aristotle’s sense, “having to do with the polis.” As a result, tragedy became the ideal literary vehicle for exploring, and often questioning, the political, social, and civic values of Athens herself.

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  In his treatise Poetics, the first extended work of theater criticism in the Western tradition, Aristotle, writing in the mid-300s B.C. and looking back to the great century of Athenian drama and, beyond that, to the dim origins of drama itself, suggests that tragedy grew out of a kind of ritual chorus known as dithyramb, sung in honor of the god Dionysus. (We know that in the fifth century—perhaps a century and a half after the primal moment that Aristotle was trying to reconstruct—dithyrambs were sung at public festivals by choruses of fifty singers, men or boys. These were led by an exarchon, a performer who “led off” the singing.) The philosopher asserts that tragedy grew out of an instant of “improvisation” on the part of these chorus leaders who, evidently, decided at a certain point that instead of simply feeding the opening bars of the chorus to their fellow singers, they were going to sing a few lines of their own.

  Whether this notion was based on hard evidence known to the author and since lost, or simply a shrewd surmise, the theory has an obvious appeal: its narrative—of the leader who sets himself apart from the group, the individual who is willing to stand isolated from others—is, in embryo, the narrative of most Greek tragedies. Every one of the thirty-two Athenian tragedies that have survived from antiquity to the present day enacts the process whereby someone makes a decision to take an oppositional stance; every one of these plays, moreover, consists of a series of arguments about that decision, speeches that are delivered in the presence of a Chorus that never leave the stage and that, at intervals, sing songs that comment on, or are thematically related to, the controversy at the heart of the play. What is noteworthy in all this, what contributes the “political” element (in Aristotle’s sense), is the constant presence of the Chorus: the group that, like the city itself, is always watching, listening, observing.

  These relatively simple formal components—the pointed debates between characters or between a character and the Chorus, the rhythmic alternations between individual utterance and choral song—allowed Athenian dramas to explore with particular incisiveness the city’s great social and civic preoccupations. Many people know that Athens in the fifth century B.C. was a radical democracy, in which all citizens voted directly on most matters of pressing public concern and in whose day-to-day workings all citizens were, at least theoretically, expected to participate. (Certain offices were assigned by lot.) What is less well known is that the great aristocratic families of an earlier era in the city’s history continued to hold and to covet power, manipulating the ostensibly democratic system in order to preserve their prestige and privileges; Pericles, for instance, belonged to a family that might well be compared to the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers of a later age. Unsurprisingly, the tensions between glamorous, charismatic, and powerful leaders—“heroes,” in a word—and the masses, who are simultaneously susceptible to and suspicious of those heroes’ allure, often make themselves felt in Greek tragedy, where uneasy dynamics between protagonists and Choruses are a central feature in many works. Whatever else Sophocles’ Oedipus is about, the arc that it traces from the Chorus’s worshipful adulation of the hero at the beginning of the play to the revulsion and pity they feel for him by the play’s final revelation of his true identity reminds us that our relationship to great leaders is often unstable.

  This opposition between individual and group, which forms one strand of tragedy’s DNA, allows it to dramatize with particular elegance certain kinds of political conflicts and, indeed, to examine certain kinds of polities. Aeschylus’ Agamemnon begins with the Watchman hinting darkly at the smoldering resentment felt by the people toward the queen, Clytemnestra, who has seized power illicitly with her paramour, Aegisthus; by the end of the play this tension has erupted into open confrontation between the queen and the Chorus leader, a dire instability that is resolved only at the end of the final play of the trilogy to which the Agamemnon belongs, when the rule of law is enshrined at last. In the same playwright’s Persians, the Chorus of Persian elders is pointedly reminded by another queen—the mother of the emperor, Xerxes, who has failed in his attempt to invade Greece—that although the foolish ruler has been defeated, he will return from his campaign to reign with impunity in Persia. Monarchs, we are reminded—unlike elected leaders—are not subject to political scrutiny or review.

  The other strand of tragedy’s DNA—the theater’s ability to enact confrontations between entire worldviews by placing two individuals with opposing convictions across from each other onstage and letting them argue—allowed the genre both to articulate and to investigate other kinds of tension that surged through the Athenian polity. The best-known example occurs in Sophocles’ Antigone, which features a stark confrontation between two characters who are mouthpieces of very different views about the indiv
idual’s relation to the state: one character insists on the authority of the state and on obedience to its laws, whereas the other insists on adherence to religious custom and allegiance to family and clan. In real life, these two realms were and are, of necessity, interdependent; the staged conflict in Sophocles’ play literally dramatizes the difficulties of finding equilibrium between them.

  It is, indeed, no accident that so many tragedies explore the fatal consequences of a failure to maintain a healthy balance—often among the disparate elements of a single individual’s nature, which, in some plays, becomes a microcosm for “the city” as a whole. In Euripides’ Bacchae, the protagonist, an overly rigid young king whose obsessive interest in maintaining political control (and what we would call psychological “boundaries”; he’s very anxious about sexuality, among other things) leads him, as it does the king in Antigone, to ignore certain social and religious priorities at terrible cost to his city. This political failing is enacted in the play’s highly symbolic finale, a scene of astonishing violence in which the youthful ruler is literally torn to pieces, no longer in control of anything, unable to maintain the boundaries even of his own body. The Bacchae, it’s worth pointing out, was produced in 405 B.C., a year after its author’s death, a year before the fall of Athens itself: a polity whose inability to maintain its own balance, one might say, led to its “tragic” fall from the heights of political and cultural supremacy. And 405 was also the year that saw the first performance of Frogs, the comedy that expressed the forlorn hope that a play could save the city.

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  The circumstances under which the Athenian citizen took in these dramas, followed these plots, and analyzed these conflicts further emphasized the theater’s public and civic concerns. All Greek tragedies were composed for and performed as part of a grand annual religious and civic ceremonial known as the City (or Great) Dionysia, held each spring in honor of Dionysus (a deity who, as the timing of the festival suggests, also presided over vegetative fertility and growth). The climax of this celebration, which went on for five days and featured magnificent processions and sacrifices, was the theatrical performances. Each year, three dramatists were selected to present four plays each: three tragedies (sometimes linked by plot or theme as a trilogy) plus one so-called “satyr play,” a short comedy whose ribald humor was, presumably, meant to alleviate the intense emotionality of the serious dramas that preceded it.

  This brings me back to our typical Athenian of the 400s B.C. and why he would have found our theatergoing practices incomprehensible: for the performances he attended had almost nothing in common with the ones we are familiar with today. Whereas our theaters plunge us into darkness as a necessary condition for the “suspension of disbelief,” Greek plays were performed in broad daylight, the performances starting at dawn and ending at sundown. This meant, among other things, that the citizens who attended the plays were not anonymous, as we are, but as plainly visible to one another as the actors and Chorus on the stage were. Those Chorus members, it’s worth mentioning, were not professionals but ordinary Athenians: the audience was mirrored therefore on the stage. This must have given audiences a thrilling sense of connection to the dramas that were unfolding before them (particularly, you can’t help feeling, those in which the Choruses stood up to kings and tyrants). The audience members didn’t choose their seats, as we do, but were seated according to “tribes,” the ten subcommunities into which all Athenian citizens were divided as part of the city’s political structuring. All citizens were expected to attend: by Aristotle’s time, a fund had been established to help poorer Athenians pay to attend the theatrical and civic festivals.

  The polis-oriented organization of the audience was reflected in the elaborate pre-performance ceremonials. Before the performances began, the city’s ten leading generals, the stratēgoi, solemnly poured libations before the vast audience. (The Theater of Dionysus could hold as many as eighteen thousand spectators.) Following that rite, the tribute that had been amassed that year from Athens’ subject-allies was paraded around the theater precinct; afterward, the names of citizens who had greatly benefited the city in some way were recited by heralds, each civic benefactor receiving an honorary garland or crown. Finally, the sons of Athenian soldiers who had died in the city’s wars—boys who had since been raised at the state’s expense—were paraded before the vast audience. The official proclamation that was recited by a herald during this portion of the ceremonies underscored the elaborate connections between the city, its citizens, and the theater, connections that lay at the heart of the entire festival:

  These young men, whose fathers showed themselves brave men and died in war, have been supported by the state until they have come of age; and now clad thus in full armor by their fellow citizens, they are sent out with the prayers of the city, to go each his way; and they are invited to seats of honor in the theater.

  The daylight, the fanfare, the solemn rites and loud proclamations: we are very far here from the private, anonymous vacuums in which we today absorb the theater and its lessons. The vast and impressive buildup to the performance of Athenian dramas, so many of which focused on conflicts between individuals and their societies, emphasized above all the authority and might of the city: the dignity of its military leaders and institutions, the extent of its predominance over other city-states, the honors that attached to civic service and to military self-sacrifice.

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  To be aware of all this is, often, to be forced to rethink our customary responses to some of the most familiar Greek tragedies, many of which are collected in this volume. To take an example mentioned already: to us, Sophocles’ Antigone can seem like a straightforward parable about the virtue of individual resistance to state oppression. In the play, the headstrong young Theban princess Antigone defies a decree issued by the city’s new ruler, her uncle Creon (to whom, as the play opens, she pointedly refers as “the general”), that forbids anyone to bury the body of her traitorous brother, Polynices, who has been slain while trying to invade the city. She opposed Creon’s decree in the name of family ties and of religious law (which insists that bodies must be interred with due ritual). In her defiance, we have traditionally liked to see an unambiguously heroic act of conscience—an admirable act of individual resistance to the state. It is this aspect of the play that has made it a favorite of later adapters with a pointedly political agenda: for instance, the French writer Jean Anouilh, whose Antigone premiered in Paris in 1944 and was clearly intended as a parable of resistance to the Nazi occupation.

  But it is hard not to wonder how, precisely, the play’s original audience would have considered the act of resistance to military and political authority that is the fulcrum of Sophocles’ drama. How would her contempt for “the general” and his decree have struck an audience that, only minutes before the actor playing Antigone uttered this speech, had witnessed a moving ceremony presided over by the city’s greatest generals and honoring its civic leaders, a rite during which they beheld the poignant sight of young men who had been raised by “the state”: the orphaned children of soldiers who, unlike Antigone, had unquestioningly followed the decrees of their commanding officers, at the cost of their own lives?

  So, too, with many other plays. There is a wrenching moment early in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon when the Chorus recall the long-ago crime that has triggered this play’s action: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia at the beginning of the Trojan War, a rite performed in order to win fair winds for the Greek armada as it sailed for Troy. It is in revenge for this infanticide—a crime evoked by the Chorus in poignant detail, down to the way in which the gagged girl pleaded with her eyes for mercy—that Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon at the climax of Aeschylus’ play. (Like Antigone, Agamemnon’s queen sees herself as the champion of family interests that have been eclipsed by those of the state.) And yet here again, an awareness of the tribal and patriotic energies that must have animated the audience members as they watched this play for the
first time makes it difficult to dismiss Agamemnon’s decision, as modern audiences tend to do, as crass military opportunism or political self-interest. The Iphigenia myth symbolizes, and the play dramatizes, a far more complicated and vexing reality: that whenever a city goes to war, every family, every private household, must “sacrifice” its children. For Americans, who do not have to perform compulsory military service (a political choice that betrays our conviction that citizen participation in war is not a civic duty), the obvious choice, increasingly, is to save the child—the “individual.” For the Greeks, to whom warfare, like attendance at the theater, was a civic obligation, the opposite choice—to “save the city,” prioritize the community—was just as obvious, although of course no less agonizing. It is this agony that plays such as the Agamemnon explore.

  The few examples cited thus far are notable for another crucial feature in Greek tragedy, the nuances and ramifications of which are also best appreciated in light of the realities of Athenian culture and society. The conflict between ideologies, between competing allegiances, that animates the plays written for the Athenian stage is often dramatized as a conflict between a man and a woman: Clytemnestra versus Agamemnon, Antigone versus Creon, and many more. Looking at the titanic heroines of Greek drama—not only Clytemnestra and Antigone but Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Phaedra, Hecuba, and Helen—it can be easy to forget that in classical Greek society, women were meant to be largely invisible, confined, at least in theory, to the women’s quarters of their houses, compelled to wear veils in public, unable to own property, and denied any role in political life. (There is still debate as to whether women even attended the tragic performances.) We cannot know the precise extent to which these social conventions were observed in day-to-day life, but certainly the women and girls in Greek tragedy were aware of them. “Silence is the adornment of women,” a character in Sophocles declares; in a drama by Euripides called the Sons of Heracles, a young girl who volunteers to be a human sacrifice in order to save the city of Athens makes her entrance by apologizing for having violated feminine decorum by speaking in public.