by Sophocles
The occasion offered Athens the chance to display treasure exacted from subjugated ‘allies’ (or tributes others willingly brought to the stage) and to award gold crowns to citizens whose achievements Athens’ leaders wished to honor. The sons of soldiers killed in Athens’ ongoing wars paraded in new battle armor paid for by the city. Theater attendance itself was closely linked to citizenship; local town councils issued free festival passes to citizens in good standing. The ten generals elected yearly to conduct Athens’ military campaigns poured libations to Dionysos. In the front row (eventually on stone chairs, some of which are still in place today) sat priests and priestesses of the city’s chief religious cults. Members of the five-hundred-member city council and the ephebes, or newly inducted soldiers, filled ranks of wooden seats, while the city’s tribal units congregated in their own wedge-shaped sections. The theater’s bowl seethed with a heady, sometimes unruly brew of military, political, and religious energy.
Performances began at dawn and lasted well into the afternoon. The 14,000 or more Athenians present watched in a state of pleasurable anxiety. Whatever else it did to entertain, move, and awe, Athenian tragedy consistently exposed human vulnerability to the gods’ malice and favoritism. Because the gods were potent realities to Athenian audiences they craved and expected an overwhelming emotional, physically distressing experience. That expectation distinguishes the greater intensity with which Athenians responded to plays from our more detached encounter with drama in the modern era. Athenians wept while watching deities punish the innocent or unlucky, a reaction which distressed Plato. In his Republic, rather than question the motives or morality of the all-powerful Olympian gods for causing mortals grief, he blamed the poets and playwrights for their unwarranted wringing of the audience’s emotions on the grounds that the gods had no responsibility for human suffering and banned both from his ideal city.
Modern audiences would be thoroughly at home with other, more cinematic stage effects. The sights and sounds tragedy delivered in the Theater of Dionysos were often spectacular. Aristotle, who witnessed a lifetime of productions in the fourth century, identified “spectacle” as one of the basic elements of tragic theater: oboe music; dancing and the singing of set-piece odes by a chorus; masks that transformed the same male actor, for instance, into a swarthy-faced young hero, a dignified matron, Argos with a hundred eyes, or the Kyklops with only one. The theater featured painted scenery and large-scale constructions engineered with sliding platforms and towering cranes. Greek tragedy has been considered a forerunner of Italian opera.
Judges awarding prizes at the Great Dionysia were chosen by lot from a list supplied by the council—one judge from each of Athens’ ten tribes. Critical acumen was not required to get one’s name on the list, but the choregoi (the producers and financial sponsors of the plays) were present when the jury was assembled and probably had a hand in its selection. At the conclusion of the festival the ten selected judges, each having sworn that he hadn’t been bribed or unduly influenced, would inscribe on a tablet the names of the three competing playwrights in descending order of merit. The rest of the process depended on chance. The ten judges placed their ballots in a large urn. The presiding official drew five at random, counted up the weighted vote totals, and declared the winner.
V
When Sophocles was a boy, masters trained him to excel in music, dance, and wrestling. He won crowns competing against his age-mates in all three disciplines. Tradition has it that he first appeared in Athenian national life at age fifteen, dancing naked (according to one source) and leading other boy dancers in a hymn of gratitude to celebrate Athens’ defeat of the Persian fleet in the straits of Salamis.
Sophocles’ father, Sophillus, manufactured weapons and armor (probably in a factory operated by slaves) and his mother was apparently a midwife. The family lived in Kolonos, a rural suburb just north of Athens. Although his parents were not aristocrats, as were most other playwrights’ families, they surely had money and owned property; thus their status did not hamper their son’s career prospects. Sophocles’ talents as a dramatist, so formidable and so precociously developed, won him early fame. As an actor he triumphed in his own now-lost play, Nausicaä, in the role of the eponymous young princess who, playing ball with her girlfriends, discovers the nearly naked Odysseus washed up on the beach.
During Sophocles’ sixty-five-year career as a didaskalos he wrote and directed more than 120 plays and was awarded first prize at least eighteen times. No record exists of his placing lower than second. Of the seven entire works of his that survive, along with a substantial fragment of a satyr play, The Trackers, only two very late plays can be given exact production dates: Philoktetes in 409 and Oedipus at Kolonos, staged posthumously, in 401. Some evidence suggests that Antigone was produced around 442–441 and Oedipus the King in the 420s. Aias, Elektra, and Women of Trakhis have been conjecturally, but never conclusively, dated through stylistic analysis. Aristotle, who had access we forever lack to the hundreds of fifth-century plays produced at the Dionysia, preferred Sophocles to his rivals Aeschylus and Euripides, considered Oedipus the King the perfect example of tragic form, and developed his theory of tragedy from his analysis of it.
Sophocles’ fellow citizens respected him sufficiently to vote him into high city office on at least three occasions. He served for a year as chief tribute-collector for Athens’ overseas empire. A controversial claim by Aristophanes of Byzantium, in the third century, implies that Sophocles’ tribe was so impressed by a production of Antigone that they voted him in as one of ten military generals (strategoi) in 441–440. The classicist Thomas Gould speculates that it was the managerial and inspirational skills on display during the production, rather than any politically rousing sentiments in the play, that earned Sophocles this post. Later in life Sophocles was respected as a participant in democratic governance at the highest level. In 411 he was elected to a ten-man commission charged with replacing Athens’ discredited democratic governance with an oligarchy, a development that followed the military’s catastrophic defeat in Sicily in 415.
Most ancient biographical sources attest to Sophocles’ good looks, his easygoing manner, and his enjoyment of life. Athanaeus’ multivolume Deipnosophistai, a compendium of gossip and dinner chat about and among ancient worthies, includes several vivid passages that reveal Sophocles as both a commanding presence and an impish prankster, ready one moment to put down a schoolmaster’s boorish literary criticism and the next to flirt with the wine boy.
Sophocles is also convincingly described as universally respected, with amorous inclinations and intensely religious qualities that, to his contemporaries, did not seem incompatible. Religious piety meant something quite different to an Athenian than the humility, sobriety, and aversion to sensual pleasure it might suggest to us—officially, if not actually. His involvement in various cults, including one dedicated to a god of health and another to the hero Herakles, contributed to his reputation as “loved by the gods” and “the most religious of men.” He was celebrated—and worshipped after his death as a hero—for bringing the healing cult to Athens. It is possible he founded an early version of a hospital. He never flinched from portraying the Greek gods as often wantonly cruel, destroying innocent people, for instance, as punishment for their ancestors’ crimes. But the gods in Antigone, Oedipus at Kolonos, and Philoktetes mete out justice with a more even hand.
One remarkable absence in Sophocles’ own life was documented suffering of any kind. His luck continued to the moment his body was placed in its tomb. As he lay dying, a Spartan army had once again invaded the Athenian countryside, blocking access to Sophocles’ burial site beyond Athens’ walls. But after Sophocles’ peaceful death the Spartan general allowed the poet’s burial party to pass through his lines, commanded to do so, as legend has it, by the god Dionysos.
—RB & JS
Aias
INTRODUCTION
ACHILLES IS DEAD
Achilles is dead. Aias,
the next greatest warrior, should inherit his armor, but Agamemnon and Menelaos award it to Odysseus. Enraged, Aias sets out to kill them, but Athena deludes him into slaughtering the war spoil of the Greek army: defenseless sheep, goats, oxen, and herdsmen. When Aias realizes what he has done, his shame is irremediable. He does then what no Greek hero ever does: He kills himself.
Heroic Aias epitomizes the aristocratic ethos of the Homeric world. Sophocles’ play, however, was conceived four hundred to five hundred years after Homer’s time, in the challenged democratic ethos of fifth-century BCE Athens. To Athenians, Aias’s life was legendary. Roughly 10 percent of the population revered him as an ancestor. Homer shows him saving the Greek forces many times over. Accordingly—an occupational hazard of Greek warriors—he’s full of himself. His lack of sôphrosunê, the wisdom to understand and accept his own limits and those of life itself, looms huge. When realization does come, it’s too late. The “savage discipline” he learned as a warrior is so ingrained it has become his nature. He cannot choose to act outside it. He may regain his honor only by killing himself. Yet when he does do that—though he had seemed to be the center of the world, the focus of everyone’s consciousness, their hopes and fears—the world doesn’t end. Against all expectations, the play goes on over his lifeless body, which must be dealt with.
Aias’s family and his sailor warriors are regrouping, preparing the body for burial. First Menelaos and then Agamemnon intervene, both insisting the remains be left as carrion for scavengers. Teukros argues with each in turn—until Odysseus arrives and pressures Agamemnon into letting the burial proceed. The obvious question is, why was it necessary to dwell, at such extraordinary length, on the conditions of Aias’s burial?
Let’s go back a bit. Between Aias’s death and the discovery of his body, the Chorus, divided into two search parties, stumble about, disoriented, calling out to one another. Within this ‘hole in time’ (literally, a historical void), the play undergoes a definitive shift in historical and ideological perspective.1 This is confirmed by Teukros, Aias’s half brother, a lesser but not insignificant version of Aias himself. His exchanges with Menelaos and Agamemnon bring the tone and concerns of the play down, ingloriously, to an earth less cosmically resonant than the one we’d started out with. On these grounds, the terms of perception become those of fifth-century Athens. The heroic era has undone itself. We have witnessed its tragic end. Why then hasn’t Sophocles left it at that?
Sophocles was considered not only a great playwright, but a great teacher.2 The philosophically and theatrically difficult heart of Aias is his brilliant attempt to delimit and resolve a civic and historical conundrum: how does a political system, indeed a culture, adapt to new circumstances without self-destructing? Specifically, how does it make the transition from a monarchical/aristocratic tribal structure, in which the lives of all depend on heroic, bigger-than-life individuals, into an electoral republic sustained by the inter-dependence of all—who are not mythic but life-sized, yet who still bear the strains of ancient heroic values? How may this intensely but incompletely democratized culture honor the individualistic heroic legacy that never ceases informing it?3 There are no final answers, nor is this the only way to frame the issues. Nonetheless, it is concerns of this order that drive the plot of Aias.
Aias is caught in the wrong kind of war. Objective conditions have changed; he cannot. Everyone has depended on him for their survival: family, his retinue of Salaminian marines, the Greek forces and their commanders. All have needed him to be a tower of strength—his brutishness not a flaw but, rather, crucial to his heroic stature. He has held the battle line when no one else could. Yet circumstances have rendered his aretê (his particular valor) obsolete. The war has become a quagmire. Now it’s not the broad-shouldered who are needed, but those with brains—as the blunt-spoken Agamemnon puts it, comparing Aias to a big ox kept on the road by a little whip. The resourceful Odysseus (whose ingenuity ultimately conceived the Trojan horse) is the hero the Greeks really need.
During the original performance—presumably after Aias’s death, as the language and social perspective of the play dropped down into an antiheroic, demythifying mode—the audience reacted violently.4 Small wonder. Imagine that audience engrossed in the fate of Aias, an Athenian cult figure. They have been empathizing with him to his bitter end. The air is still resonant with the stunning poetry of Aias’s death, when suddenly—in an extraordinarily irruptive entrance—the long-absent Teukros straggles in too late to save the day. Yet more unsettling, Teukros brings with him the unbeguiled social reflexes of a fifth-century Athenian.5 Immediately he demythifies Telamon—the legendary hero father whom Aias has spent his life trying to live up to—by exposing him as a sour, aimlessly mean old man. Teukros, like Aias, is combative and courageous, but as a ‘barbarian’ and a lowly archer he lacks Aias’s stature. Nonetheless, in dressing down the Greek commanders he can, and does, demolish the source of their unquestioned authority. And the audience? Given the collision of once timeless myths and current realities—the jamming together of high rhetoric and muckraking plain speech—their outrage seems inevitable. Sir Francis Bacon noted that “narratives made up for the stage are neater and more elegant than true stories from history, and are the sort of thing people prefer.” Sophocles’ audience expected him to rework a legendary past, not challenge it with a jaundiced view from their own historical moment. Yet that’s exactly what Teuk-ros does, subjecting their mythic heritage to a perspective and concerns that are wholly contemporary, mundane, and unresolved—thereby redirecting the focus of the play away from received myth and onto the audience itself. In fifth-century Athens, the sarcasm and insults crackling the air over Aias’s remains may have been more shocking than the self-contained tragedy of the mythic Aias. Some spectators, especially aristocratic and oligarchic ones, must have felt unease at Teukros’s open contempt for the two kings.6 Others had to have been thrilled at the over-the-top rendering of Menelaos, the authoritarian Spartan king whom more than a few Athenian farmers, tradesmen, and warriors must have loved to hate. All we know for certain is that what that audience experienced was not ‘tragedy’ as might be expected—nor what a modern audience viewing tragedy through a generalized Aristotelian lens would be looking for—but a different kind of experience: a fundamentally civic, political, ethos-challenging drama.
The shift from an aristocratic, heroic ethos to a democratic one—tested and threatened though that might be—would seem to suggest an overall ‘narrative of progress.’ Yet there is none. Within the heroic ethos, Tekmessa, despite occasional checks, speaks with authority. Her noble lineage, her wife/concubine relation to Aias, and her own sôphrosunê, certified by the Chorus, earn her that freedom. In the relatively democratic air that seems to sweep in with Teukros, however, she’s mute. She must defend Aias’s remains as her child Eurysakes does; they are two speechless suppliants shielding his body with their own. What power they presume inheres, now, in their piety. Yet the social disjunct is so striking we may be reminded that in fifth-century Athens, where participation in the democratic polity was restricted, women did not have a public voice linked to political power.
The intrepid Teukros has humanizing depths and resonances of his own, however. He knows something about mentoring that Aias had no way to envision. Organizing the funeral procession, Teukros says to the still speechless Eurysakes: “You too, boy, with what strength you / can muster, and with love, put your hand / on him and help me, I need your help / to lift your father’s body . . .” (1595–1598). That Eurysakes’ help is more symbolic than actual doesn’t make it any less crucial. In contrast, all Aias himself had imagined, by way of training or nurturing, was putting his boy’s hand into the loop of the monster shield that he alone, a giant of a warrior, could bear the weight of. Short of that, the most Aias could conceive of was the play world of a child who knows neither joy nor grief—a sentimental projection steeped in the pathos of Aias’s own doomed life.
The end Sophocles
envisions is neither judgment nor justification, praise nor blame, but a social/political modus vivendi. Nothing could be simpler, yet harder, to achieve, though something of an answer does come from Odysseus when he feels pity for the deluded, blood-smeared Aias, despite the fact that Aias has tried to kill him. Later, the dead Aias no longer a threat, Odysseus again emphasizes that their commonality as human beings, whose lives are as “shadows in passing,” runs deeper than personal differences or antagonisms.7 Consequently, when Agamemnon grasps at reasons to prevent Aias’s burial, Odysseus brushes them aside. He won’t bargain that commonality away. Assuming the authority vested in him by the award of Achilles’ armor, Odysseus says to Agamemnon: “However you put it [explain it, justify it], you’ll do what is right” (1553). Though diplomatically posed as a statement of fact, in context this has the force of a warning. ‘Right’ means not what is expedient, but what human beings as human beings ought to do. “One day,” Odysseus says, “I will have the same need” (1549), thus presuming a socially vested self-interest.
How might this outlook translate into our own world? It was said by Irishman John O’Leary, who had reason to say it: “There are things a man must not do to save a nation.”8 A nation (a society, a culture, a tribe, an army, a polis) must have some basis in universally applicable principle; otherwise it’s a pit of expediency. Some things are sacred, we say, meaning there are acts one must not commit: like torture. More horrific than ‘murdering’ defenseless domestic animals, as Aias does, is torturing them, which he also does. More issues and realities are aired in Aias than are raised here. Let’s just say the play in its entirety hovers uneasily over grounds such as these, grounds no less sacred in this world than in that of fifth-century Greece.