The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  This ‘wet look’, which first appeared here on the Parthenon, was an Athenian sculptor’s clever way of revealing the form almost more effectively than if the figure were nude – thus sidestepping the Greek cultural taboo of those times against the public depiction of naked goddesses. The ancient reputation of the Athenian artist Pheidias, who supervised the Parthenon sculpture, came to resemble Michelangelo’s today. He might have been the creative genius here.

  As with other aspects of ancient Greece, this approach to drapery effects is now so familiar, whether from ancient sculpture in modern museums or from neo-Greek statuary of more recent times, that it is easy to forget that it was something stunningly new at its first appearance.

  In the following generation, lesser sculptors working in the Greek style copied this Athenian novelty. In the case of those figures in the previous gallery, they once adorned the so-called Nereid Monument. This was a tomb built in the 390s BC in south-west Turkey for a non-Greek ruler who loved Greek art.

  Two ancient anecdotes illustrate a widespread enthusiasm for a Greek art form which fifth-century Athens developed to the point of more or less inventing it. After the Syracusans in 413 BC decisively defeated the Athenian expedition to Sicily,

  many Athenians who reached home safely greeted Euripides with affectionate hearts, and recounted to him, some that they had been set free from slavery for rehearsing what they remembered of his works; and some that when they were roaming about after the final battle they had received food and drink for singing his songs . . .

  By now in his late sixties, Euripides was a highly successful Athenian playwright. The story shows that the culturally up-to-date Syracusans must have seen Sicilian performances of his plays – written like all Greek drama of the time to be both spoken and sung. A generation later, in the 360s BC, a Greek tyrant of a city in central Greece ‘left the theatre abruptly’ during a performance of extracts from a tragedy by the same Euripides that had moved him to tears. He didn’t want this display of emotion to dent his ‘strong man’ image.

  This particular theatre in central Greece was one of many built in the 300s BC as the Athenian appetite for theatrical performances took hold among ordinary people across a large swathe of the Greek world. Cities demanded a new architecture in stone to dignify what was now a performance art able to attract audiences of ten or fifteen thousand at a time. Nowadays the theatre of Epidaurus built in the later 300s BC is the most famous of this first wave of monumental Greek theatres.

  In the late fourth century BC the philosopher Aristotle, based in Athens, wrote down what he had found out about the origins of Athenian drama. It had developed, he thought, out of folk rituals that the Athenians performed to honour Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy: tragic plays had grown out of group song and dance in praise of the god, and comedy from the carrying in bawdy procession of an image of an erect penis.

  Other Greek civic communities, including the Spartans in the 500s BC, as seen, staged religious performances involving the use of a key element in Athenian drama of the fifth century BC, the mask. Where the Athenians differed from other Greek communities was in the development from such beginnings of the genre of the theatrical play in the recognizably modern sense. That is, a form of literature consisting of characters delivering dialogue, written by a playwright for live performance, not just for reading.

  Early on, the Athenians had the bright idea of holding competitions for the best of these dramas at their annual festival for Dionysus in the city centre. They introduced contests for what became the two chief classes of ancient Greek drama: for the best ‘tragedy’ around 534 BC, and for the best ‘comedy’ in 486 BC. Then as now, competition was a stimulus to innovation.

  A scrap of an ancient writing roll now in Vienna, made in the usual way from the stem of the papyrus plant, preserves a few lines of poetry from a fifth-century BC Athenian play:

  I grieve, I grieve – your mother’s blood that drives you wild. Great prosperity among mortals is not lasting: upsetting it like the sail of some swift sloop some high power swamps it in the rough doom-waves of fearful toils, as of the sea.

  The verses – also from Euripides – suggest the lofty solemnity of tragic language. But the great rarity of this fragment, dating from about 200 BC, is that along with the verses is written the musical score. For this the scribe used an established system of notation based on letters of the alphabet, placed above the words. So fifth-century BC audiences in the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens experienced a kind of musical theatre.

  Experts infer from the way that the rhythmic pattern of beats of the lines – their metre – changes in surviving fifth-century plays that audiences at that time could have experienced performances as a mixture of sung choruses; arias and duets; passages of chanting or recitative; and rhythmic poetry delivered in a speaking voice.

  There was also spectacle. In one of its storerooms the Naples Archaeological Museum guards an impressive product of the Athenian potteries – a vase, nearly 2.5 feet high. Around its middle runs a band painted with figures engaged in a theatrical performance. The painting dates from around 400 BC.

  Some of the actors, all men, wear lifelike masks; others hold theirs. They are dressed in theatrical costume: ‘Heracles’, with his props of lion skin and club, is clearly recognizable. Others in the painting are chorus members, always citizen amateurs at this date, here dressed up with animal tails, hairy loincloths and drooping phalluses as ‘satyrs,’ fantasy creatures, wild followers of Dionysus. Some are practising their dance moves. The playwright is there, holding a copy of the text on a scroll. In central place sits the piper, playing his double flute, the usual instrument in fifth-century Athenian theatre.

  At my school we studied for the exam in Ancient Greek the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. At that age I didn’t particularly relish this high-minded and deeply moral tragedy about the relentless exaction by the gods of ‘debts of justice’ owed by sinning mortals, be they ever so high and mighty. Now I recognize its grandeur.

  Agamemnon, the glory-seeking commander-in-chief of the Greek expedition against Troy, must suffer for the impious act of sacrificing his own daughter to obtain a fair wind for the Greek fleet. For being the instrument of divine justice his wife must suffer in turn – in the play it is she who avenges her daughter’s death by killing her husband on his triumphant return home ten years later.

  Aeschylus wrote the play as the first of three, the other two continuing the story, and all for performance at one festival. In the second play he serves the come-uppance now due to the wife. But the horror only worsens – it is her son who, on the orders of Apollo, avenges his father’s death. In the third play Aeschylus redeems this awful cycle of familial bloodletting with a modern ending. With gods as advocates, the cast-off son is tried and acquitted for his mother’s murder in an Athenian court before a jury of democratic citizens.

  In this trilogy Aeschylus offered dramatic actions meant to inspire in the audience fear and pity. Like other tragedians, he found some of his plots in traditional stories about the bloody family dramas of the Greek ruling houses of mythical times. For his audience of Athenian citizens, Aeschylus ended the drama with a lesson in civics: the difficult ethical choices facing the conscientious citizen juror.

  At the university where I used to teach in the north of England, the Classics department held annual open days at which lecturers gave talks to school sixth-formers studying classical subjects for university entrance exams. For years the most popular talk was invariably the one on Aristophanes, the only writer of comedies in fifth-century Athens whose plays have survived.

  Sometimes there was standing room only, such was the demand of coach parties from schools all over the country to see the two lecturers – a male double act – imitate the comic turns of the ancient actors. Their party trick was to improvise with balloons of various shapes and sizes the item of ancient costume which did so much to set the tone for the humour of Aristophanes – dangling male genitals, in ancient times made
of leather.

  As a comparison shows, not all translators do justice to the obscene innuendo of Aristophanes, some of it homosexual in theme, as here:

  That being agreed, an easy chair I’ve brought, a page too, young and strong, to carry it. Sit on him too, if ever he calls for it.

  Now that that’s settled, here’s a folding stool for you, and a boy (he’s no eunuch) who’ll carry it for you. And if you feel like it sometimes, make a folding stool of him!

  Apart from the bawdiness of some of the humour, another feature of the surviving plays that may strike a modern reader is how blatantly political they are. Not only did Aristophanes invent plots based on current affairs, notably the Peloponnesian War; he also introduced real-life politicians as characters in plots, made biting attacks on ones he disliked, and poked fun at the Athenian democracy itself – his audience, basically:

  [FIRST SLAVE]: We two have a master with a farmer’s temperament, a bean chewer, prickly in the extreme, known as Mr Demos of Pnyx Hill, a cranky, half-dead little codger. Last market day he bought a slave, Paphlagon, a tanner, an arch criminal, and a slanderer. He sized up the old man’s character, this rawhide Paphlagon did, so he crouched before the master and started flattering and fawning and toadying and swindling him with odd tidbits of waste leather . . .

  Here the character ‘Demos’, meaning ‘People’, stands for the citizen body. As seen, its place of assembly at this time was the Athenian hill of the Pnyx. The character of ‘Paphlagon’, a slave and leather tanner who fawns over, so as to take advantage of, his complacent master Demos, is a thinly veiled allegory for a populist politician of the post-Pericles era called Cleon, the son of a rich tanner, who used eloquent speeches to persuade the citizen assembly in favour of his policies.

  In this play, Knights (424 BC), the plot follows two other slaves of Demos who successfully scheme against Paphlagon. He ends up losing his master’s favour and is demoted to selling sausages at the city gates. At the end of the play, having been shown the error of his ways, old man Demos experiences a transformation, losing his ugliness to become beautiful.

  The playwright exercised this freedom of expression against political leaders in the highly public arena of the theatre, where the audience comprised not only male citizens but also (probably) their womenfolk, as well as foreigners. The Athenians liked this play so much that Aristophanes won first prize at its first performance. But the play did not prevent the Athenians from going on to elect Cleon the real-life politician to a senior military command.

  Not all modern leaders of western democracies would happily tolerate such public ridicule before the whole civic community. Although Cleon’s response is unknown, sometimes the comic playwright’s waspishness certainly seems to have stung. In another comedy, Aristophanes made fun of the intellectuals who had become a conspicuous feature of Athenian life in the second half of the fifth century BC. His target in one play was Socrates, an Athenian citizen in his mid-forties at the play’s premiere in 423 BC.

  Aristophanes presents Socrates as an eccentric, who walks barefoot in the city streets. His pallor betrays long hours indoors, unlike the suntanned norm for the active outdoorsy citizen male of those times. He is headmaster of a school where the teachers ‘train you, if you give them money, to win any argument whether it’s right or wrong’. That is, this school offered training in public speaking – rhetoric, as the Greeks called what at this time was a new discipline.

  Aristophanes ridicules Socrates as a free thinker who rejected conventional religion. He is made to say that the gods are ‘rubbish’, with the exception of a new god called Dinos, who has ousted Zeus, and of the clouds (the play’s title). These shape-shifting entities are goddesses, he tells a doubting pupil, who not unreasonably thinks they look more like fluffy sheep fleeces. The character Socrates then uses a teaching technique – question-and-answer, essentially – to lead this pupil into reversing his opinion. The young man even starts praying to the clouds.

  The entertainment value for the audience seems to have lain in the way that Aristophanes had channelled a popular view of not so much the real-life Socrates as the general milieu in which his fellow citizens placed him, that of the nonconformist intellectual. The type held novel ideas verging on impiety, gained a hold over impressionable youth and took fees in return for classes in public speaking. To some this last kind of teaching wasn’t entirely ethical. An unscrupulous citizen could enter public life and use deceptive arguments to win over an audience, even if he was not in the right.

  The real Socrates, who must have been an extraordinary figure, did not teach for money. His philosophizing style seems to have been to go out in public, frequenting the streets and civic spaces of Athens, and to chat with people who fell in with him. It was partly in this way that he attracted friends and followers, including the young and the well born. These followers were usually men. Social norms discouraged respectable Athenian women from being seen to join in talk on street corners with groups of unrelated men.

  These conversations were the essence of Socrates the philosopher. In them he would explore high-minded questions preying on his own mind, questions that today would be called ‘ethical’. Essentially, they hinged on the morally serious business of how best to live one’s life. His conversational technique for this purpose was, indeed, a kind of gentle cross-examination – as parodied by Aristophanes.

  The ancient Greeks called this type of exchange ‘dialectic’, from the Greek verb ‘to converse’. The idea was that the conversers would come to an acceptable definition of righteous living by speculating, for instance, on the exact meaning of common Greek notions of goodness. What was it, really, to be ‘just’, or ‘moderate’? If he knew what these behaviours amounted to, a man had no excuse for not leading an ethical life.

  Socrates ran up against the limits of Athenian tolerance for maverick thinking, when some fellow citizens brought charges against him of corrupting the young and impiety. This was in 399 BC, five years after the resounding defeat of Athens by the Spartans, years when the self-confidence of the Athenians was badly shaken. The democracy seemed fragile, and the oligarchic connections of some of Socrates’ friends perhaps put him under suspicion.

  This was where Aristophanes might have stung. Addressing the jury at his trial, Socrates was said to have decried the ‘slanders’ which had put him in the dock, pointing his finger specifically at the Theatre of Dionysus:

  For you yourselves saw these things in the comedy of Aristophanes, a Socrates being carried about there, proclaiming that he was treading on air and uttering a vast deal of other nonsense, about which I know nothing, either much or little.

  One of the large juries of democratic Athens, numbering 501 citizens, found him guilty by a small majority of thirty. His accuser proposed the death penalty. By law the accused would propose a counter-penalty. With rich friends willing to put up money, the impecunious Socrates asked for a fine instead, but proposed a meagre one. The jury opted for death. Socrates duly drank a cup of poison.

  Socrates owed his posthumous fame to the later writings of his disciples, who included a rich young Athenian called Plato. Plato’s surviving writings feature a number of pieces formatted as conversations between Socrates and his followers. There is also what purports to be the defence which Socrates gave at his trial, known after the Ancient Greek word for this type of courtroom speech as The Apology.

  Written twenty years after the event, this noble speech, from which the above quotation comes, seems to idealize the speaker. Like the entire presentation of Socrates in the writings of Plato, much of it may be, to put it bluntly, creative fiction. Plato’s writings likewise obscure the difference between the philosophical beliefs of the teacher and those of the pupil.

  One of these was the deeply moral idea that the philosophical life confers the hope of life after death – immortality in other words. Awaiting death in his cell, Plato has Socrates at this final crisis of his life converse with followers about his attitude to deat
h.

  ‘For if I did not believe,’ he said, ‘that I was going to other wise and good gods, and, moreover, to men who have died, men who are better men than those here, I should be wrong in not grieving at death. But as it is, you may rest assured that I expect to go to good men, though I should not care to assert this positively; but I would assert as positively as anything about such matters that I am going to gods who are good masters.’

  Plato’s Socrates then explores his idea that at death the body parts company from its partner in life, what he calls its psyche. If the psyche has kept itself as untainted as possible by the pleasures of the flesh, and the life led has been ‘pure’ and ‘moderate’ according to the ethical tenets of the lover of wisdom or philosopher, the reward after death is separation of the psyche from the body, its release from the underground realm of the dead and its journey upwards to a heavenly abode. In English the usual translation of this word psyche is ‘soul’, something that resides in the body in life, but is not of the body.

  Another of Plato’s dialogues gave rise to the modern idea of Platonic love. It is called the Symposium because it is set in a drinking party, albeit one where guests make the novel choice of conversing instead of the usual quaffing. It centres on Socrates once more. The subject of conversation is erōs, the Ancient Greek word for sexual love or desire.

  Plato’s Socrates presents his own views on this topic as the wisdom he learnt from a wise woman. She had reasoned to him that there were two kinds of pregnancy. One gave birth to human children in a relationship between a man and a woman. The other, which was superior, began with a man whose soul was pregnant ‘with things that it is fitting for the soul to conceive and to bring to birth’, namely wisdom and the other virtues. Its fruit came from the encounter with a beautiful body and soul worthy of impregnation with this wisdom: