In the beginning the role of this first actor was only to respond to the chorus and its leader, providing a spoken dialogue between the songs of the chorus. The subject of this dialogue was a heroic saga of the kind Homer had made familiar. The chorus continued to sing its lyric songs, but the presence of a dramatized figure from the story offered the chorus a newly dramatic role. Thespis’s modest innovation did not destroy the liturgy but was beginning to transform what had been a festival to please a god into a performance for the delight of spectators.
In 534 B.C., at the first recorded performance of Greek tragedy in its primitive form, Thespis won the prize. And he took another step toward an art of impersonation when he experimented with the mask. According to tradition, Thespis disguised his face when acting by covering it with white lead, and then hung flowers over his face. Later he tried plain linen masks, which his disciples varied for dramatic effect. They saw how masks could serve a new practical purpose before the fifteen thousand spectators on the hillside, to make the character of the wearer plain.
Since there were never more than three actors in a performance of classic Greek tragedy, masks helped them play many parts. Eventually there were thirty different types of masks, distinguishing the young and the old, the amiable, the irascible, or the heroic. Pallor displayed suffering. The masks of women’s characters suggested an old servant, a young virgin, an experienced courtesan. A snub-nose marked a person of low birth. The needs of the spectator at a distance would govern.
After Thespis, the new art of Greek tragedy speedily unfolded. Seldom in the West has the genesis of an art form been so clearly visible or so sharply focused. The great creators of Greek tragedy were the Athenian trinity—Aeschylus (525–c.456 B.C.), Sophocles (4967–406 B.C.), and Euripides (485–406 B.C.). In the pitifully small sample of their works that has survived, we can see the new art come into being. The Greek tragedian was expected, even required, to be prolific. To be performed at an annual Dionysiac festival he had to produce not just one play but a tetralogy of three tragedies and a light satyr piece. Altogether the tetralogy might add up to six thousand verses (compared with about eight thousand verses in Shakespeare’s Hamlet). To win his two dozen victories, Sophocles had to be wondrously fertile and able to produce on demand.
In the arts, as in social drinking, athletics, and other cultural activities, the Greeks loved competition. They enjoyed contests at their festivals, made their festivals into contests, and delighted in praise and prizes to the winners. Epitaphs of poets, musicians, and tragedians note their prizes. Contests for a prize in dithyramb at the Dionysia did not cease until the late fourth century B.C., when the private patrons (choregoi) were displaced by annually elected sponsors (agonothetes) supported by public funds. With the rise of drama as a recognized form, interest focused on the contests among the tragedians. The panel of ten judges, one from each of the ten tribes, swore to give an impartial verdict. Spectators sometimes became violent to protest an unpopular award. The winner was proclaimed by the herald and honored with a crown of ivy.
The many victories won by Aeschylus and Sophocles suggest that the custom encouraged the great creators. Each won the prize for more than half his plays. Euripides, a bolder and more irreverent innovator, had less success with the judges. In the age before best-seller lists and published box-office receipts the prizes show the tragedians’ popular appeal. In the annual competitions at Athens for the best tragedy, Aeschylus won first prize thirteen times, Sophocles won twenty times, once defeating Aeschylus, and once being defeated by Euripides. The poets crowned by posterity were applauded by their first spectators.
Before the death of Euripides in 406 B.C. Greek tragedy had acquired a form that makes it almost recognizable as drama to modern eyes. But costuming and staging were conventional, physical action was restrained, and violence occurred only offstage. There were three actors, action, suspense, climax and denouement. In the fifty years that separated the first performance of Aeschylus from the death of Euripides, the ancient Dionysian festival was transformed and the dramatic legacy of classic Greece had taken shape.
The lives of the great trinity of Greek tragedians, when there was no Left Bank or bohemia, reveal how closely the fortunes of the arts were tied to the fortunes of the community. They show us the poet as the public man. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles took on conspicuous civic commissions. Aeschylus fought at Marathon (490) when he was thirty-five, and again at Artemisium and at Salamis. Pindar and Sophocles were his disciples. And Sophocles’ first offering at the Dionysiac festival of 468 B.C. actually won the prize over his master, for the panel of judges had been packed with Aeschylus’ political enemies.
Sophocles’ long life spanned the Great Age of Athenian power. He served as a treasurer for the tribute money from the subject states, was elected one of Athens’s ten generals, and mounted expeditions to discipline the allies. At the age of eighty-three, in 413, after the defeat of Athenian forces in Sicily, Sophocles served on the commission to reorganize the government. A man of wealth, noted for his elegant style of life, he was a model of the Athenian public man of letters. Like Aeschylus, he still saw a cosmos where man could take solace in rhythms enforced by gods.
The legends of Euripides report him as a diluter of the old religion, losing faith in these divine rhythms. No religious patriot, he was scholarly, withdrawn, and morose, and, like Socrates later, he was reputed to have been prosecuted for blasphemy. The Trinity of Tragedians had acquired a canonical status in the 330s, when Lycurgus erected bronze statues of the three in the Theater of Dionysus below the Acropolis.
Although each added new elements to the novel art, all three were confined by the traditional forms. Centuries would pass before Athenians would let their dramatic imagination play freely with their heroic past. They still dared only marginal changes of the Dionysian dithyramb. “The number of actors,” Aristotle tells us, “was first increased to two by Aeschylus, who curtailed the business of the chorus, and made the dialogue, or spoken portion, take the leading part in the play.” With only two spokesmen (now beginning to be called actors) and a chorus, the opportunities for what we think of as drama were still limited. But Aeschylus’ own tragic concept was fulfilled with the two actors. He did not see drama as a conflict (agon, or contest) between actors but saw a solitary hero—an Agamemnon, an Orestes, an Eteocles, a Prometheus—facing his own destiny, wrestling with his soul. And Aeschylus’ second actor made it possible for the plot to move. The performance, unlike that of Thespis, was no longer only a hero’s statement with choral background. When the second actor, like the ghost of Darius in The Persians, came in with news, the situation could change. This second character could establish the innocence of the hero, provide a new range of moral choices, and so add suspense and surprise.
“A third actor and scenery were due to Sophocles,” according to Aristotle. With his third actor Sophocles too made a new kind of tragedy. Now the hero could be judged against a more complex web of circumstances. Sophocles’ chorus, no longer merely liturgical, takes part in the plot. In place of epic narrative or a lyric song, we hear dialogues among all three actors. Persuaded by this innovation, Aeschylus himself adopted a third actor for his Oresteia. Sophocles’ stage begins to be set for a more realistic showing of a man and his problems.
Euripides further widens the dramatic range, changes the saga to suit his purpose, and begins to humanize his hero. His prologue no longer merely opens the action but tells the story before the action. And he finally resolves his dramatic problem by the deus ex machina, a god lowered onto the stage with a crane and pulley to intervene in the action. Euripides, Aristotle tells us, marked the final development of the literary form of Greek tragedy.
The trinity commanded the attention, the passions, and the admiration of their whole community. The most prized in his own time was Aeschylus, long revered as the founder of Greek tragedy. Sophocles was worshiped as a hero. Knowing his Euripides, Plutarch noted, was an infallible test of the true
Athenian. By reciting Euripides, Athenian prisoners at Syracuse won their liberty. Once a suspicious ship was allowed entry to an Athenian port only after passengers showed their familiarity with Euripides. Legend had it that Athens was saved when conquering Spartan generals, about to level the city, were restrained by a chorus from Euripides’ Electra.
Greek tragedy remained remarkably close to its origins. The subjects, the heroes, and the moral choices continued to be confined by religious tradition, and liberation from that ancient archetype of the dithyramb was long and slow. The stage, masks, and costumes stayed on as ties to the Dionysian festivals. The spectator of Greek tragedy was not to be shocked or amused by unique and novel characters. And the tragedian with his chorus and three actors aimed to reinforce in the doing what had so long been known only in the telling.
Most Greek tragic dramas elaborated the Homeric legends whose messages from dim antiquity thus became vividly contemporary. In the ocean of time all men swam together. “Time will reveal everything,” said Euripides, “it is a babbler, and speaks even when not asked.” The secrets of the future were no more obscure than the secrets of the past, and the great poets brought them together.
Stage costumes reinforced the rhythmic, ritual familiarity of the events recounted. By Aeschylus’ time there was a conventional stage costume for tragedy, which remained a tie to the ancient rituals even into Roman times. The basic garment for the tragic stage was a chiton, a loose garment made from a rectangular piece of linen or wool, similar to that in daily use. Women wore it draped, to reach from neck to ankle, on men it reached the knees. This simple chiton for daily wear, familiar on the caryatids of the Erechtheum, was sleeveless, kept in place at the shoulders by brooches and at the waist by a belt that bloused the excess material into a pouch. But the stage costume for tragedy, unlike the daily chiton, was elaborate and costly, paid for by wealthy citizens who vied with one another in elegance and extravagance. The Greek word cothurnus for the actor’s heavy wooden-soled boots became a synonym for the mannered lofty style, the elevated grandeur, of the tragic drama.
The poets thus helped the spectator, a person at a distance, rediscover the heroes of myth and saga. But how slowly they dared create new themes and characters! Only forty lines survive of the bold young poet Agathon (born c.445–c.400 B.C.) who, as Aristotle noted, wrote a tragedy “in which both incidents and names are of the poet’s invention.” Plato immortalized Agathon by placing his Symposium at Agathon’s house in 416 on the occasion of that young poet’s first victory in competition, and the legendary Agathon was reputed to be the only poet worthy of succession to the great trinity. Centuries passed before others dared follow his lead.
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The Mirror of Comedy
DIONYSUS the twice-born became the foster father of two opposed spirits as the dithyramb that celebrated him divided into Tragedy and Comedy. In the last days of Athenian glory both Tragedy and Comedy, as Aristotle said, attained their “natural” forms. But both still revealed their archaic skeleton, and Dionysus never ceased to reign.
By mid-fifth century B.C., Tragedy and Comedy each had staked out different realms. Tragedy recaptured the ancient and the remote, gods and heroes. The spectator could see an enlarged version of himself struggling with grand issues of time and destiny. “All human happiness or misery,” Aristotle observed in his Poetics, “takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of action … therefore … the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and … characters come second.” Tragedy was a vision of events at a great distance in time (usually too in space) from the spectator.
Comedy held up a mirror to the present. If Tragedy conjured up the unseen, Comedy rescued the familiar from the cliché. Comedy intensified daily experience, dramatizing the garrulous old man, the boastful soldier, the vain courtesan, the rude conceited youth, who all were so commonplace that they had ceased to be interesting. But Comedy made them laughable.
Tragedy, then, tended to depict men as better than they were. But Comedy, Aristotle explained, showed “an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly.… the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.” This meant that Comedy required a courage not found in all poets. Aristophanes (c.450–c.357 B.C.), the Greek writer of Comedy who became companion in fame to the great Trinity of Tragedians, was as eminent for his courage as for his eloquence, wit, and fantasy. Eleven of his plays have survived, but perhaps three times that many have been lost.
In ancient Greece, the writer of drama had a monopoly on media of public criticism. Drama was already the most democratic of the arts. The Old Comedy exploited the opportunity of a traditional festival Day of Misrule, when nothing was sacred. Behind the veil of religion and liturgy and in front of the assembled community, the comic poet could condemn the tyrant, satirize arcane philosophers, question male dominance, mock sexual morality, and make the gods objects of fun. If his messages were amusing enough, and embellished and enlivened by dance and music, in ancient Athens (population of some thirty-five thousand) he could instantly reach an audience of fifteen thousand. While the tragedian had to offer a tetralogy of three tragic plays and a light satyr piece in order to compete at the annual festival, the competition in comedy required only a single play.
Aristophanes eagerly seized the poet’s opportunity. Like other comic poets, he was transforming the folk art of village comedians into a self-conscious art form—and so created a mirror of comedy that would inspire generations of dramatists to speak in the voice of social critics. The stirring times of Aristophanes’ adult life spanned the whole quarter-century of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.). This testing time for Athenians and their empire would be a proving time for the arts of comedy. Experiments in colonizing, in enlisting and subduing allies, brought the exhilarations of victory and the frustrations of defeat, and revealed the perils of both democracy and tyranny. Aristophanes seems to have been raised in the peaceful countryside on the island of Aegina. When he first came to Athens as a youth he saw a fevered city permanently at war. While his jibes had all the topical relevance of a modern political cartoonist they have not become obsolete.
From the beginning, his irreverence toward the great and the powerful was awesome. In his early twenties, with his first comedy he won second prize at the Great Dionysia of 427. Surviving in fragments, The Daitales (The Banqueters), about the eternal battle of the generations, shows a know-it-all city-educated son returning home to his rustic father. His father despairs that while he has not learned his Homer, has neglected athletics, and cannot even sing a traditional song, he has become a connoisseur of wines and perfumes, and learned the tricks of the money changers. “No pity,” the father insists, “shall deter me from washing this salt fish with all the dirt I know is in it.”
At the very next year’s Great Dionysia (426) Aristophanes plunged into the risky realms of current politics. And he dared defy Cleon, whom Thucydides called “the most violent man at Athens and by far the most powerful,” with his Babylonians, a sharp attack on the war and on Athens’s brutal contempt for its allies. Silently casting Cleon in the Persian tyrant’s role, he showed a chorus of branded Babylonian slaves, forcibly working in a mill. So Aristophanes asserted “freedom of the drama,” millennia before the freedom of the press. This brought on his prosecution by Cleon for calling Athens the “tyrant-City,” and so compounding his sin of pacifism with slander and treason.
The young Aristophanes kept up his pacifist barrage, even while the war-fevered community remained subservient to Cleon, whose frown, it was said, made people vomit with fear. At the Dionysian winter festival (425 B.C.) Aristophanes won first prize for another bitter antiwar comedy, The Acharnians, which appeared under a pseudonym, for reasons that Aristophanes himself explains (in Gilbert Murray’s brillia
ntly modernized translation):
And how Cleon made me pay,
I’ve not forgotten, for my last year’s play:
Dragged me before the Council, brought his spies
To slander me, gargled his throat with lies,
Niagara’d me and slooshed me, til—almost—
In so much sewage I gave up the ghost.
The plot of The Acharnians centers on Dicaeopolis, Aristophanes’ model of the good citizen who hates war but cannot persuade the politicians to make peace. Finally he negotiates a treaty of peace privately for himself and his family.
Relentless against tyrants, Aristophanes plunges on. The Knights, at the next winter Dionysian Festival (424), savaged Cleon by name and was awarded first prize. In Aristophanes’ rollicking travesty the central character is Demos, the Athenian people whose household is disrupted by a newly purchased slave, Cleon, who has groveled into the master’s favor. When an oracle reveals that Cleon will be succeeded in favor by an Agoracritus, a sausage seller, a chorus addresses Cleon: “You devour the public funds that all should share in; you treat the treasury officials like the fruit of the fig tree, squeezing them to find which are still green or more or less ripe.”
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 30