Arnott, Peter- Drama in Ancient Greece

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PETER ARNOTT

Greek Drama as Education

I have never believed-despite considerable evidence to the contrary--that a paper intended for delivery before a learned convention should content itself

with the reiteration of the obvious. There is little to be said about the Greek con- ception of the function of drama in society that has not been well and plentifully said already. In the fifth century at least, the drama, like all poetry, was considered primarily as a teaching medium. The poet was the didaskalos, teacher, not merely in the sense that he taught his actors and choruses, but also with the implication that he instructed his public, through a medium that offered the widest possi- bilities for the dissemination of ideas and information, and which could also, in a single hearing, reach the greater part of the body politic. The plays themselves offer ample testimony of this, in great ways and small. When the chorus in The Libation Bearers announce that they will assist Orestes' work "as women may", they mean that they will aid him with the power of song; and they are doing no more than voicing the conventional attitude towards the function of poetry in Greek society. When the satyr chorus in The Cyclops offer similar assistance to Odysseus, they are not merely being cowardly. It is of course true that they shrink from physical participation in the blinding of the monster. But, as both they and Odysseus realize, an appropriate song at this moment of crisis is not without its value. We might recall here that the Spartans, by no means notorious aesthetes, included music in their program of military training. Euripides, in Medea, puts into the Nurse's mouth a powerful, if apparently irrelevant, diatribe against the abuse of poetry:

You wouldn't be wrong to consider The old poets not clever but fools Who wrote music for dinners and banquets, Pleasant tunes for men who were happy, But nobody ever discovered How to use all this music and singing To lessen a man's load of trouble That brought death and misfortune and ruin. It would certainly be an advantage To use music for healing! Why waste it On dinners? There's pleasure enough In a banquet, who wants any more? 1

Euripides is not stating any novel idea, but merely reiterating the traditional belief in poetry as an educative, curative force, and arguing that his predecessors had not fully realized its potential. Mr. Arnott is a Professor of Drama at Tufts University and author of a number of books, includ- ing An Introduction to the Greek Theatre, Plays without People, An Introduction to the Greek World, Greek Scenic Conventions, and, most recently, The Theatres of Japan. This paper was first presented at AETA's z969 convention in Detroit.

1 Euripides, Medea, w. 19o-2o3, trans. Peter Arnott, Three Greek Plays for the Theatre (Bloomington, Ind., 1961).

35 /



36 / EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

In The Frogs, Aristophanes puts into the mouth of Aeschylus a defense of the educational value of poetry and drama on the most literal level. Orpheus taught religion and morality, Musaeus divination, and Hesiod the arts of farming, while Homer gave notable instruction in "battle-drill and military strategy." It is on these grounds that Aeschylus is made to defend his own work, arguing that his Seven Against Thebes is chiefly used as a military manual. It is a joke, yes; but the joke is simply a comic extension of a prevalent attitude. We might remember here, however, that the poems of Homer were taken quite literally as historical documents, and referred to as evidence in territorial disputes. In the same play both Aeschylus and Euripides are made to agree-it is the only point on which they do agree-that the chief criterion of a poet is his instructional ability, namely, whether or not he makes better citizens; and we see too that when Dionysus comes to make his decision, his test questions concern not poetry but politics. What shall we do about Alcibiades? What steps shall we take to save our city? These were the sorts of questions that the poets were expected to answer, and did answer. One of the original purposes of the Oresteia, though admittedly one with little meaning for us, was to stress the desirability of friendly relations between Athens and Argos, and to give mythic sanction to Athens' most venerable judicial body. The play invokes myth in support of actuality just as, at the out- break of the Peloponnesian War, both Athens and Sparta supported their causes with charges against the other side dredged up from remote and legendary history. One of the immediate purposes of The Trojan Women was to question certain aspects of contemporary Athenian foreign policy.

These things, as I say, are sufficiently obvious, sufficiently well known. My primary purpose in this paper is to draw attention to certain less desirable conse- quences of the Greek attitude. At what point does drama cease to be educational and become doctrinaire? What is the borderline between the dissemination of ideas and propaganda? To what extent were the plays limited to the expression of the official viewpoint? Gerald Else has recently suggested, in a stimulating if controversial treatise,2 that Greek tragedy owed its genesis not to any religious manifestation, but to the official need to inform the public of the way in which it was desirable to go; that Greek tragedy, in effect, was born out of politics rather than the act of worship. Plato was clearly convinced of this when he wrote The Republic: in his extremist view the function of drama is to show the citizens only worthy examples of public and private behavior, and everything else must be eliminated. This attitude had already been anticipated, albeit comically, by Aeschylus in The Frogs. The Aeschylus-Euripides debate in that play prefigures the argument between Jeremy Collier and the playwrights of the Restoration. Aeschylus insists that plays should show only what is noble and uplifting, Euripi- des (anticipating by some centuries Congreve's reply to Collier) that they should lead men to think for themselves, and show vice to bring it into disrepute. And there is considerable evidence that the authorities were on Aeschylus's side.

One of the more newsworthy acts of the Greek colonels, after their coup of 1967, was their censorship of the Athens Festival. Plays dealing with tyrants were

2 Gerald F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).



Raisa Ketzer Porto

Raisa Ketzer Porto

Raisa Ketzer Porto

37 / GREEK DRAMA AS EDUCATION

out. Prometheus Bound and Ajax, together with the music of Theodorakis, became politically undesirable overnight. There was an immediate outcry in the news media of the world about this latest example of the way in which the cradle of democracy had fallen victim to a vicious tyranny. I hold no brief for the colonels, but it is only fair to remember what some Greeks of the fifth century said about their "cradle of democracy," and how Thucydides, for example, described it as "a democracy in theory, an autocracy in reality." As Punch recently pointed out in one of its more acid obiter dicta, the only real difference between Pericles and the colonels is that the latter have, as yet, inspired no great poetry or architecture. And there is ample evidence that fifth-century officialdom was as sensitive to criticism from the theatre as its modern counterpart.

We have an early instance of fifth-century censorship in the story of Phry- nichus's The Capture of Miletus, a topical play based on the recent disaster in Asia Minor when a major center of Greek influence was razed to the ground by the Persians in revenge for the destruction of Sardis. The playwright, in Herodotus's account, was fined one thousand drachmas and his play forbidden further representation on the ground that "he had reminded the Athenians of the sorrows of their kinsfolk." " This charge, of contributing to the public despondency, was compounded by political factors; it is more than possible that Phrynichus was acting as spokesman for the war party, and that his work was intended to foment anti-Persian feeling. His subsequent connection with Themistocles would lend support to this theory.

This, it must be admitted, is the only known example of overt political inter- vention in tragedy; but subsequent plays suggest that the poets, at least in some ways, recognized the expediency of following the party line. Even Aeschylus was not immune to the shifting tides of political fortune. His Persians, written in 472, eight years after the Athenian victory at Salamis, mentions numerous Persians by name, but not one Athenian. This restraint was, surely, not merely to relieve the Athenian heroes of the stigma of hybris that he had attached to Xerxes. It was due also to the fact that Themistocles, who had engineered the victory of 480, had fallen out of political favor by 472, and was to be ostracized shortly afterwards. In Sophocles, the Spartans tend to be cast as heavies: thus Menelaus in Ajax. In Hecuba, Euripides can create a vicious and morally irresponsible Thracian king at a time when Athens was dealing with a living incumbent of the Thracian throne who possessed the same qualities to a marked degree. And Euripides, much as he disliked war in general, and the Peloponnesian War in particular, could still include in his plays references to contemporary Athenian victories.

Examples of specific legislation aimed at the control of comedy are more numerous. We know of two forms of censorship: private prosecutions brought by individuals who felt themselves maligned by comedy, or psephismata, acts of the Assembly (ekklesia) as a body. The most famous example of the former is the series of prosecutions brought by Cleon against Aristophanes, sufficiently well known to need no further discussion here. Of the latter, one instance at least was far-reaching in its implications. It is alluded to in The Birds, v. 1297, where the

3 Herodotus, Histories, VI. 21.




scholiast elaborates and explains: "Syracosius is called 'the jay' . . . he seems to have set up a psephisma that no one should be mocked in comedy by name (m& k6m6deisthai onomasti tina). As Phrynichus says in his The Hermit 'May an enormous and spectacular mange fall upon Syracosius, for

h.e forbade me to

deride whom I pleased.' " The law of Syracosius was supposedly passed before the production of Aristophanes' The Birds and Phrynichus's The Hermit at the City Dionysia in 414. If the law really forbade the mockery of individuals by name, both playwrights conspicuously broke it. Not only is Syracosius himself lam- pooned by each of them, but The Birds is replete with personal allusions. If the scholiast is right about the content of the law, we can only conclude that the law was never enforced.

Max Radin 4 gives an alternative explanation of the law of Syracosius. He points out that there was a law of libel in effect in Athens in 384 B.C. Although the date of its enactment is unknown, it had probably been in operation for a number of years. The oration against Theomnestus, written by Lysias and delivered in 384, is concerned with a prosecution under this law. It established a group of aporreta, things it was not permitted to say. One could not say of anyone that he had thrown away his shield in battle (that is, deserted in action), killed anyone, or beaten his father or mother. The penalty was the heavy one of 500 drachmas. Radin believes, with some reason, that this law was the one passed under Syracosius's name in 415/414. One of the aporreta was aspida apoballein; it was forbidden to say of anyone that he had thrown away his shield. This charge had been made frequently by Aristophanes against Cleonymus, one of his favorite butts. In The Clouds, v. 353 he calls him a ripsaspis, shield-thrower. The charge is repeated in The Wasps, vv. 15ff., where the exact words prohibited by the law are used, and in The Peace, vv. 674ff. In The Birds there is a significant difference. As the members of the bird-chorus enter, they are identified by the Hoopoe. One is a gannet, or glutton-bird. The following dialogue ensues:

PISTHETAIRUS A gannet? Is there another one besides Cleonymus? EUELPIDES It can't be him. He'd throw his crest away.5

Radin believes that Aristophanes deliberately engineered this conversation to make his familiar joke about Cleonymus while keeping to the letter of the law; and this suggestion is supported by a later reference to Cleonymus in the same play where he is described not as man but as a tree (vv. 1470-1480):

We have flown on explorations, Seen some strange, exciting places, Many things we'd never heard of. There's a tree, for instance, growing Slightly to the north of Cardia- No one's ever seen one like it! Called Cleonymus, by nature

4Max Radin, "Freedom of Speech in Ancient Athens," American Journal of Philology, XLVIII (1927), 215-230.

5 Aristophanes, The Birds, vv. 289-290, trans. Peter Arnott, Two Classical Comedies (New York, 1958).




Fat and cowardly, and never Any use to anybody. In the spring it's sprouting wildly With a crop of accusations- In the winter, what a difference! Shedding shields instead of leafage.

Radin believes that Aristophanes was forbidden by the recently passed law of aporreta to make his charge directly, but came as close to it as he could. It is also significant that another of the aporreta, unnoticed by Radin but surely perceived by Aristophanes, is worked into the same play. This is the charge of father- beating. One of the immigrants to Cloudcuckooland has designs upon his father. But he is not allowed to fulfill his intentions; Pisthetairus dissuades him. One may perhaps imagine the gasp that went up from the audience when the forbidden subject was broached, and the subsequent amusement when the poet neatly side-stepped the issue. Once again, Aristophanes plays with the idea, but keeps the law.

The more specific the prohibition, of course, the more easily it can be circum- vented. Sufficient proof of this has come from the ease with which American film- makers have continually evaded the intent of their self-imposed censorship. Unspoken censorship, as represented by public prejudice, is always harder to circumvent. How powerful this pressure could be is seen, for example, in Aristo- phanes' The Knights. Here the subject is the corruption of the commonwealth by its ministers. Demos, the Athenian public, is represented as a foolish master who is being ruined by his corrupt steward, a character who is Cleon in all but name. This man can only be supplanted by a rogue who is worse than he; and the play is largely concerned with a contest between two thieves and charlatans to decide which is the worse. However accurate this may be as a reflection of contemporary--or, indeed, of any-politics, it is hardly flattering to the Athenian public. By the nature of his play and his line of attack, Aristophanes has found himself in the position of showing his audience its own corrupt and infinitely fallible corporate image. Although artistic integrity might find this desirable, a poet competing for a public prize has other claims on his attention. The Knights, therefore, ends with an ambiguity. Logic demands that the play be allowed to finish as it has begun, with Demos falling into even more unworthy hands. Prudence and the desire for public favor dictate otherwise. Demos must be permitted to redeem himself; the public must be reassured. Thus Demos, at the end of the play, performs a complete volte-face. He announces that he has only been pretending, and that, while seeming to be duped by his underlings, he has only been biding his time; he appears at the end as omniscient and uncorrupted. Corn- ford saw this revitalization as further proof of the development of comedy from ritual sources; it was, for him, another example of the rebirth of the principal character, like the symbolic death and resurrection of the fertility rites. One can- not help but suspect that the real reason is more prosaic and less admirable. Aristophanes, like any other playwright, desires the favor of the audience he abuses.




An interesting modern parallel to the regeneration of Demos appears in a modern American popular novel, Fletcher Knebel's Night at Camp David. This offers a critical analysis of the complexity of American government by asking what would happen if the President became insane. How long would it be before effective action could be taken? Throughout the novel pressure on the President to resign increases, until a confrontation is engineered between him and his accusers; but at the end the President resigns voluntarily, admitting his own unfitness for office. The novel thus works in the same direction as Aristophanes' play. Certain weaknesses of the system are explored, but the system itself is left unscathed. The Ameritan public is reassured that, in the last resort, its collective wisdom could never have elected a man totally unfit for high responsibility.

One may note a similar tendency to compromise in Euripides. Here a story told in connection with the production of Ixion, apparently one of the author's more outrageous dramas, is of particular interest. Plutarch notes that "Euripides is said to have replied to those who were abusing his Ixion as foul and impious, 'I did not take him off the stage until he had been bound to the wheel.' " 6 This protest is interesting because of its similarity to modern methods of censorship and defences against them: I refer specifically to codes of censorship in the film industry.

In Great Britain some sort of censorship is imposed on films by licensing boards, whether at the national or the local level. In the United States such censorship has been largely self-imposed, partly to forestall any attempt at federal inter- ference, and partly out of a genuine, and politic, desire to comply with the wishes of the public. In both countries, one of the principal results of this censorship has been the famous dictum that "crime must not pay." A criminal must not be shown enjoying the fruits of his wickedness; otherwise, the theory runs, the public might be inspired to emulation. Therefore, whatever villainy a criminal may indulge in for the greater part of the film, he must be imprisoned or otherwise punished before the end. Scarface must die, in defiance of history; Alec Guiness in The Lavender Hill Mob, a sympathetic criminal if ever there was one, must be arrested.

It is evident that this sort of censorship is not only productive of artistic absurdities but totally fails to achieve the desired object. The rules specify that the criminal must be caught, and so he is, in the last few minutes of the film. But often the moral ending is so arbitrarily applied as to be completely unconvincing (like the conventional moral sentiments that so often close a Restoration comedy) or occupies so little time in relation to the rest of the film that its impression is negligible. In practical terms, the criminal is permitted to do what he likes for an hour or so, as long as he is punished in the last two minutes; and the viewing public is likely to remember the film's main events long after it has forgotten the ending. Euripides' Ixion seems to have responded to the same pressures. This play has been lost; but we find, again and again, that the author puts his more offensive sentiments into the mouths of characters who are destined for a sticky

6 Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry, I9E.




end. In Hecuba, Polymestor, King of Thrace, utters a statement which is, to say the least, heretical:

Nothing's secure. A good name may be lost. Things may go well today and not tomorrow. The gods are always shuffling our affairs, Creating chaos, so we worship them Through fear of the unknown.7

This description of the nature and function of the gods is typically Euripidean in its desire to shock and offend. It is no less typical in the defence it provides against possible criticism. First, the lines are put into the mouth not of a Greek, but of a barbarian; and barbarians, as any good Greek knows, are capable of saying anything. Second, the speaker is ultimately punished. At the end of the play Polymestor is blinded, and his sons are killed. Euripides has provided himself with a ready-made defence. If challenged for impiety he can point to the ending and reply, as in the case of Ixion, "But see who said it, and see what happened to him." Crime-in this case, blasphemy-must not pay.

Hecuba contains another familiar type of Euripidean precaution. It occurs in vv. 799-80 , which have regularly puzzled commentators. Baldly translated, the lines read as follows:

But the gods are strong; and so is the law (nomnos) which controls them. For it is by law (nom6) that we believe in the gods, and live our lives dividing right from wrong.

The meaning of the passage depends on the interpretation of the word nomos. This may mean "principle," "law," or "custom," and it makes a considerable difference which we choose. If we take the first meaning, we have, "But the gods are strong, and so is the principle which controls them-for by this principle we consider the gods to exist." This would postulate an organization of the universe, an eternal and unchanging principle, to which even the gods are subject; and this sentiment would hardly be offensive to any member of the audience. Alterna- tively nomos can have its more usual sense of "law," the body of man-made law in general. Euripides would then be saying that it is law that controls the gods in the sense that we worship those whom the state tells us to worship. This would be rather less acceptable. The third possibility is even more sinister: if we give nomos the equally familiar meaning of "custom" or "convention," Euripides would appear to be adhering to the sophistic theory that the gods are a convenient fabrication, and can be unmade as readily as they were created; and this interpretation would be, to many, very offensive indeed.

Editors have argued hotly over which interpretation is the correct one. I suggest-for LIam old-fashioned enough to believe that a dramatist is only obscure when he intends to be-that Euripides meant all three. He speaks with one voice to the orthodox believers, and with another to the agnostics; and if he is attacked for impiety, he can always claim that he has been misunderstood. Nomos, he

7 Euripides, Hecuba, vv. 956-96o, trans. Peter Arnott, Euripides: Hecuba and Heracles (London, 1969).




can argue, does not mean "convention" at all, but "principle," and he is saying something no more harmful than what Sophocles has said before him in Antigone.

Examples could be multiplied. I hope that I have said enough, however, to suggest that the conventional view of the Greek teacher-dramatist, as seen through the rose-colored spectacles so prettily tinted for us by Edith Hamilton and her school, needs substantial modification; and that while the Athenian public clearly recognized the function of the dramatist as teacher, it still reserved the right to dictate the curriculum.

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Robert Brustein as Sir Anthony Absolute in The Rivals. Yale Repertory Theatre. See Theatre in Review.



Arnott, Peter- Drama in Ancient Greece

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