Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Though the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides–the only tragic authors whose works have survived–are classics to us, to the Athenians of ancient Greece they were brand new, exploiting and reflecting the new realities of democracy, science and military tactics. The new wisdom had put man into a new relation, both with the gods and with his fellow men. In classical tragedy, human nature is pitted against the nature of the gods, free will set against destiny. Though man always loses–killed or banished through his ignorance or defiance of the gods, or his hubris, his arrogant self-confidence–death is used in tragedy as a device to concentrate the mind, to provoke thought and reflection as to why it comes about. Though direct links between tragedy and contemporary politics are hard to discern, they are there. The drama in Athens exemplifies a stage in the evolution of man’s self-consciousness: is self-confidence, as reflected in the advances in science and philosophy and politics and law the same as arrogance? What is the true place for the gods, amid all this new knowledge?

  The development of Athenian theatre was a direct effect of a long period of prosperity. We infer there was prosperity in Athens because this was a time that saw the planting of many olive trees. Since olive trees do not produce their fruit for about thirty years, their planting indicates that people were, at the least, optimistic about the future. The growth in the export of olive oil also encouraged the development of pottery, in which the oil was transported. About 535 BC came the invention of red-figure vase painting. Hitherto, black figures had been painted on vases, with the details incised. Now the whole surface was blackened, with figures picked out in the natural red. This allowed much more variety and realism.70 But the prosperity brought about by the international trade in olive oil spread to the peasants and it was their rituals, with choral song and mimic dancing, celebrating Dionysus, god of the vine, whose blood was shed for the service of men, that formed the basis of early theatre. When Dionysus was worshipped, the usual sacrifice was a goat and the ritual itself was known as the trag-odia, or Goat-Song. Thus there is a direct link between sacrifice and tragedy: this primitive ritual lives on in our most powerful form of theatre. In the beginning, trag-odia was a purely religious celebration, with a single celebrant, called the Responder, who narrated the Birth of the Divine Child and ‘the calculations of his enemies’. In between episodes, a chorus sang and danced (it was their role to highlight issues raised by the Responder for general contemplation).71 Before long, innovations proliferated. Narratives were taken from gods other than Dionysus, and dialogue was introduced, usually between the Responder and the leader of the chorus. Around 534 BC, Thespis introduced a further change: the solo voice, or hypokrites, now made successive entries, each time changing his costume and mask in the dressing tent, or sk?n? (our word scene). In this way the solo voice represented different characters, adding to the complexity of the narrative, and his speeches were delivered accompanied by the music of a double flute. The chorus, which still occupied the stage most of the time, sang or danced the emotions evoked by the developing story.

  There was an annual festival of Dionysus at Athens, held in the shadow of the Acropolis and here the tragic drama became established as a regular occurrence. Prizes were offered for the best plays and for technical innovation: Thespis was an early winner, for his sk?n?, and Phrynichus also won for introducing roles for women (though the characters were always played by men). In their explorations of character, plot and counter-plot, it became the custom for playwrights to compose tetralogies, which comprised three tragedies and a satire.72

  The first of the three great Athenian tragedians was Aeschylus (525/524–456 BC), with his ‘rich and pregnant’ language. He introduced a second actor, which made dialogue less stilted, more realistic, adding to the tension, and he was also alive to the dramatic possibilities in delay.73 The early plays had not much drama, or revelation, or excitement, as we would understand the terms. Usually, the central dilemma was given early on and the rest of the play revolved around the reactions of the characters. But in The Persians, for example, Aeschylus delays the main development for 300 lines. Even so the climax occurs before the play has reached its mid-point.74 Seventy-two tragedies by Aeschylus are recorded in one catalogue, but only seven have come down to us.

  Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC) was the son of Sophilus, a successful arms manufacturer from Colonus outside Athens. He may have studied under Aeschylus and knew Pericles, who saw to it that Sophocles was given a number of important posts: collector of tribute, general, priest, ambassador. When he turned to writing he was no less fortunate: his 120 plays won twenty-four awards and it is a tragedy in itself that–again–only seven survive.75 But his plays introduced two innovations over and above those of Aeschylus. First he allowed a third actor to appear, adding complexity and depth to his plotting. No less important, his plots used myths that were very familiar to his audiences. This allowed him to develop and refine the technique of ‘tragic irony’–when the audience knows what will happen but the characters do not. This stimulated tension and encouraged reflection in his audiences as they compared the human view of predicaments with the established perspective of the gods and destiny. Such ambiguity was part of the attraction and still appeals, even today. Aristotle saw Oedipus Rex as the greatest play of all for its concern with self-knowledge and ignorance and for its dramatic tension; and of course its influence is felt in our own day, thanks to Freud and the Oedipus complex. Sophocles’ main point, however, was that man is often trapped by forces greater than he. Heroes can fail.

  Euripides (485/480–406 BC), the third of the great tragedians, was more colloquial, more strident. He came from a family of hereditary priests and in Athens was much more of an outsider than Sophocles: his ninety or so plays won few prizes. The best known is Medea, a work that deals with a novel theme in Greek drama: the terrible passions that can transform a woman who has been dealt a great wrong. His aim is less to show the difference between hubris and other emotions than to show how human personality can deteriorate in response to vengeance and retribution. Euripides is more interested in the calculated venalities of humans than the more arbitrary and wayward power of the gods. Love, and the victims of love, especially women, are a major preoccupation. As a result, under Euripides the individual assumes larger importance than before and psychology takes centre-stage over destiny.76 (Medea was not Greek, but an outsider from the Black Sea, so in this play there may also have been references to ‘barbarian’ behaviour. See Chapter 10 below.)

  The works of Homer, and the great tragedians, were based on myth. There was a fair measure of real history included, but no one knew just how much. It is, however, also to the Greeks’ credit that they invented history proper, an emancipation from myth if still not quite history as we know it today.

  Herodotus (c. 480–425) is generally described as ‘the father of history’ though he probably loved a good story too much to be completely reliable. He came from a family of poets at Halicarnassus, now Bodrum in Turkey, on the Aegean coast. He set himself the task of writing about the wars of Greece, first the battles between Athens and Sparta, then the invasions of the Greek mainland by the forces of the Persian kings, Darius I (490) and Xerxes I (480–479). Herodotus chose these for the simple reason that he believed they were the most important events that had ever taken place. Apart from his basic idea, of writing history as opposed to myth, his work stands out for three reasons. There was his research method (the original meaning of historia was ‘research’): he travelled widely, consulting archives and eyewitnesses where he could, checking land surveys (to get the names right, and the shapes of battlefields) and literary sources. There was his approach, distilled from Homer, of conceding that both sides had stories worth telling, with their own heroes, skilful commanders, clever weapons and tactics. And third, he was obsessed–as were Homer and the tragedians–by hubris. He thought that all men who ‘soared high’ must be tainted by an arrogance that would provoke the gods.77 This, and his belief in divine intervent
ion, invalidated many of his arguments about the causes and outcomes of battles. But this accorded more or less with the understanding of his readers and his lucid style (and sheer hard work) ensured that his book was extremely popular.

  Thucydides (c. 460/455–c. 400) made two more innovations. He selected a war theme also but he chose a battle of his own time: in effect, he invented contemporary history. He too thought that the Peloponnesian War (431–404, between Athens and Sparta) was the most important thing that had ever happened. He did not have Herodotus’ eye for anecdote but–and this was his second innovation–he allowed little or no place for the gods in war. ‘Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides attached primary importance in military affairs to intelligence. The word gnome, meaning understanding or judgement, appears more than three hundred times in the book and intelligent men are singled out for praise time and again, notably Themistocles, Pericles and Theramenes.’78 This allowed Thucydides to achieve the penetrating insight that the war had two sets of origins, the proximate causes and the underlying ones, which he identified as Sparta’s fear of Athenian expansion. Such a distinction, between immediate causes and basic realities, ignoring the gods, was a major advance in political thinking. ‘In this sense Thucydides has also been called the founder of political history.’79

  Just as prosperity was a factor in Greek drama, so peace helped create the golden age of classical art. By 450 BC, roughly speaking, Athens was secure again after a period of war. She had managed this by putting herself at the head of a confederacy in which the other city-states paid her tribute in return for her navy defending them against any attack from outside, in particular from the Persians. In 454 Pericles, the great Athenian general and leader, set aside a proportion of this tribute for extensive rebuilding after the ravages of earlier wars: his aim was to make Athens a show-place for Greece.80 She would never look so splendid again.

  In art and architecture, a number of purely pragmatic or technical advances had been made at the end of the sixth century/beginning of the fifth: the triangular pediment had been invented, together with square metopes, various forms of distinctive column, caryatids (female figures acting as supports for the pediments), town-planning, and red figures on pottery. And, as happened at other times in history (the High Renaissance, for example), a greater than usual number of talents were alive at more or less the same time: Euphronius, Euthymides, Myron, Phidias, Polyclitus, Polygnotus, the Berlin, Niobid and Achilles Painters (whose actual names are not known, but who are named for their most distinguished works). This happy set of circumstances resulted in a golden age for art, the very world that we now revere as ‘classical’. It produced the telesterion at Eleusis, the temples of Poseidon at Sounium and of Nemesis at Rhamnus, the famous temple of Zeus at Olympia and its statue, the bronze charioteer from Delphi, the temple of Apollo at Bassae, but above all in Athens the Odeon (the original, not the one there now) and the temples of Hephaestus and Dionysus, not to mention a completely new arrangement for the sacred hill of the acropolis, which we know as the Parthenon. These temples, of course, are not one work of art each, but very many.

  The great temple of the Parthenon was built on a site that had always been dedicated to Athena, the guardian goddess of the city (full name Athena Polias. The name Athena Parthenos meant she had been later amalgamated with the ancient virgin fertility goddess). Its architect, Ictinus, and master-builder, Callicrates, devised a number of optical illusions in their design to make the temple more striking (for example, the columns lean slightly inward and are laid in a shallow convex line, to make the lines seem longer). They combined the more robust Doric colonnades with more slender, elegant Ionic friezes and so arranged the main temple and entrance (the Propylaea) for maximum visual effect. The success of the Parthenon, with the ‘Critian Boy’ statue and the Erechtheum, and the Greek style in general, may be judged from the fact that it is by far the most imitated style the world over.

  Phidias, the sculptor who masterminded the reliefs for the friezes and the free-standing figures in the temple, was only the first of three who made mid-century statuary famous in Athens–the others were Myron and Polyclitus. Phidias’ frieze (which he designed and then had as many as seventy other sculptors execute) was originally 520 feet long–420 of which survive, mainly in the British Museum in London. It depicts Athens’ most famous festival, the Great Panathenaea in which, every four years, the new robe of the great goddess, woven by the citizens’ daughters, was brought to the Acropolis. The two pediments of the temple show the birth of Athena and her conflict with Poseidon, the sea god, for control of Attica. But Phidias’ masterpiece was the free-standing Athena Parthenos, forty feet tall and made (perhaps the first of its kind) of gold and ivory (chryselephantinon). Like so much else, she has been lost but is known from Pausanias’ description, small copies, and coins. About her shoulders she wears her miracle-working short goatskin cloak, her aegis. Phidias depicted himself on her shield (as a bald man), a bad case of hubris forcing him to flee to Olympia where he designed a second gold and ivory statue, of Zeus. This was later removed to Constantinople, where it burned in a fire. But again we know what it looked like from coins and replicas. Its expression was so sublime and gentle, it was said, ‘that it could console the deepest sorrow’ and was regarded as one of the seven wonders of the world.81

  At its highest, classical statuary represents ‘ideal realism’, beauty that ought to exist. Its two main forms are the male nude (kouros) and the draped female, usually a deity (kore). The male nude appears to have originated from Naxos and Paros, islands rich in limestone and marble, which enabled the creation of large-scale images. The female figure developed in Athens but only after the flight of Ionians to the city following the Persian invasion of 546 BC.82 The tradition of the kouros starts from the fact that, in ancient Greece, athletic contests were a form of worship: in taking part in the games, Greek athletes were competing in a religious ceremony. There was thus a mystical aspect to competition but, more important from an artistic point of view, bodies–athletic male bodies in particular–were seen in a religious light. The perfectly formed body was viewed as a virtue, an attribute of someone with godlike powers. Artists therefore sought to show bodies as real as possible, in the way in which the muscles and hair and genitals or feet or eyes were represented; but at the same time they combined the best parts of different people, to create humans who were also, in effect, superhuman in their beauty–gods. This clearly owed a lot to Plato’s theory of forms. The most famous is Myron’s ‘Discus Thrower’ (Discobolus) which was probably part of a group and also survives only in Roman copies. The tense moment before the athlete explodes into action is beautifully caught. In rational Athens it was a virtue to have one’s passions under control, as the gods did. Likewise the statues.83

  Red-figure vases seem to have been introduced in Athens around 530 BC. The colour scheme is the exact opposite of what went before: instead of a black figure on a red ground (the fine Ceramicus clay in Attica was rich in iron, which gave it its colour), we have a red figure on a black ground. At the same time, the brush replaced the incisor. This enabled far more detail to be included and a greater flexibility in subject matter, poses, and comment.84 Greek vases were popular all over the ancient Mediterranean world: their subject matter was partly myth, but also, partly, scenes of everyday life–weddings, burials, love scenes, athletic games, people gossiping at the well. They show what earrings people wore, how they bound up their penises, prior to athletic combat, what musical instruments were played, what hairstyles were fashionable. In the fifth century, the Athenian poet Critias listed the most distinguished products of the different states: the furniture of Chios and Miletus, the gold cups and decorative bronzes of Etruria, the chariots of Thebes, the alphabet of the Phoenicians, and from Athens the potter’s wheel and ‘the child of the clay and oven, the finest pottery, the household’s blessing’.85

  The development of Greek painting can perhaps be seen best in the evolution of vase decoration, from the
‘pioneer’ style of Euphronius, through the Niobid Painter, to the Berlin Painter and his pupil the Achilles Painter. Drawing and subject matter become ever freer and more varied, never quite losing their tenderness and restrained ambience. Although often very beautiful, these objects are documents before they are works of art. No ancient people has given us such an intimate account of themselves as the Greeks did in their vase painting. It may be the first form of popular art.

  Sir John Boardman has also made the point that, for the Greeks, the experience of art was not as our own. There was a uniformity in classical Greece that we would find taxing, ‘as if all twenty-first-century cities were comprised of art nouveau buildings’. On the other hand, all the art of Greece was finished to a high degree–there was nothing ‘shoddy or cheap’ about the experience of art in Greece. Probably, much public art was taken for granted: the mythological stories were well known, literacy was low, and so sculpture in particular would be a form of ever-present, pre-Herodotus history.86

  In classical art, two things go together. There is first the sheer observation of the natural world, from the finest points of anatomy and musculature to the arrangement of flowers in a nosegay, the expressions of horror, lust or slyness, the movement of dogs, horses or musicians, much of it not lacking a sense of humour either. There was a down-to-earth quality about all this, and a growing mastery over the materials used. This is most clearly shown in the way drapery is handled in sculpture. Greek sculptors became masters in the way they represented clothing in stone, the way it fell, so as to both conceal and reveal the human form underneath. (The figure of a woman touching her sandal from the temple of Athena Nike, in the Acropolis, is a superb example.) But, beneath and beyond this observation and realism, there was a restrained quality, a serene harmony of the figures, a ‘bridled passion’ which the Greeks valued because it epitomised their achievement–the discovery of the intellect, or reason, as a way forward.87 This restraint is sometimes misconceived as an emotional coldness and, certainly, in the centuries which followed, ‘classicism’ and ‘romanticism’ have often been contrasted, as opposing forms of sensibility. But this is to misconceive the Greeks, and classicism. They made a distinction between techne, what artists knew, and sophia, what poets and musicians knew, but they were not passionless. One of Phrynichus’ plays, The Taking of Miletus, made the Athenians weep so much that it had to be banned.88 The Greeks valued calm because they knew where passion could lead. (Plato wanted to ‘silence’ emotion because it interfered with cool, rational thought.) This is what classicism is all about.