by Stuart Kelly
Given that he was so successful, and so well loved by the Athenians, it may seem mysterious that more of Sophocles’ plays, let alone his prose or his poems, have not survived. One possible reason may be that of the plays that did, one was considered perfect. Only the best was saved.
Coleridge wrote that Oedipus Rex, along with Jonson’s The Alchemist and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, were the three perfect plots in existence. A similar opinion was held by Aristotle, who frequently used OedipusRex as an exemplar in his treatise The Poetics. When discussing the importance of the epiphany and peripeteia, or revelation and reversal, or when expounding on the role of fear and pity, it is to Oedipus Rex that Aristotle instinctively refers. Longinus, too, quotes approvingly from the play.
Despite the fact that other writers have given variations on the story of the unwittingly incestuous king and his rash promise to bring justice to the person whose sin is tainting the city, Sophocles’ version remains the Oedipus. To what can the enduring fascination be attributed? In literary terms, one might point to the extreme economy of the plot—the embedded irony that the villain is revealed to be the hero. Even the protagonist’s name is slick with double meaning: the Greek oida means “I know”; and yet the king is in the dark until the denouement, when he blinds himself. The play raises, without answering, profound questions about fate and free will. Oedipus cannot avert his destiny, nor can he merely submit to his doom.
Sigmund Freud, of course, famously claimed that there was something about the play that “a voice within us [is] ready to recognize,” namely the repressed incest urges of the subconscious. But, as Robert Graves wittily observed, though Plutarch mentions that the hippopotamus is unique in the animal kingdom for murdering its father and impregnating its mother, Freud did not call his theory the hippo complex. Oedipus Rex is more than its story.
Though critics can cavil about the unfeasibility of the various messengers adhering to the drama’s unity of time, it is very close to perfection. If we had any number of Sophocles’ other, lost dramas, the preponderance of second-bests and inferior offerings might make him less, not more, respected. As Longinus said, “Yet would anyone in their right mind put all of Ion of Chios’ tragedies on the same footing as the single play of Oedipus?”
Euripides
{480–406 B.C.E.}
AT THE TIME of the battle of Salamis, Aeschylus was fighting, Sophocles was preparing to sing in the victory procession, and Euripides was being born, or so the legend goes. Most biographical details about the third member of classical Greek drama’s mighty triumvirate have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Take, for example, the Life and Race of Euripides by one Satyrus. This work was thought to be lost, and our only traces of it were contained in commentaries, lexicons, and other authors, until a near-complete papyrus from Oxyrhynchus was pieced together in 1911. Until then, it would have been acceptable for any critic to quote these marginalia without too much worry about the source.
Among the tidbits we learn in the intact work, about Euripides’ mother being a vegetable seller and about his often stormy relationship with his wife, we also learn that at one point the women of Athens became so frustrated with Euripides’ supposedly misogynistic depiction of heroines that they convened a meeting to decide upon his punishment. Euripides persuaded his father-in-law, Mnelisochus, to attend the assembly, disguised as a woman, to learn what they were scheming. On the surface an amusing, if improbable, anecdote, until we remember that this is exactly the plot of Aristophanes’ comedy the Thesmophoriazusae. The name “Satyrus” may well indicate we should not take the text too seriously.
Though Aristophanes put Euripides onstage at least twice, and peppered his own plays with parodic versions of Melanippe the Wise, Stheneboea, Oeneus, and other plays now known only through their travesty, some writers thought the two men more similar than divergent. Cratinus slated an aspiring poet character in one of his plays as “a hair-splitting master of niceties, a regular Euripidaristophanist.” They moved in the same intellectual circles. Both Aristophanes and Euripides grew up during Athens’ cultural and political heyday, and became opposed to its increasingly imperial policies as the war in the Peloponnese lingered and festered.
Aristophanes’ criticisms of Euripides’ plays exaggerate, but they do not invent. Euripides had shocked his audience by showing kings dressed as beggars, in the lost Telephus, for example. The Bellerophon had another ruler reduced to ignominious circumstances, and—well, so says Aristophanes—scandalized the audience so much that every decent member swallowed poison immediately afterward. Sophocles said that he showed men as they ought to be, but Euripides showed them as they are. In the short term, this “realism” was no doubt considered a defect; in time, it becomes a virtue. Euripides also showed women, for the first time, as intelligent, vengeful, complex beings. His Medea still stuns, with the murderous foreigner rising like a goddess at the end, and no doubt, the Daughters of Pelias, Cretan Women, and Alcmaeon in Psophis would too, if they still existed. Most controversially, Euripides used the drama as a vehicle for philosophical speculation.
The young Euripides was taught by Anaxagoras, the adviser to Pericles and a natural scientist of intense perceptiveness; for example, he conjectured that the sun was not a god, but a mass of burning stone, “several times the size of the Peloponnesian peninsula,” and that the moon reflected light from the sun. Euripides was also well acquainted with the sophist Protagoras, who read his work On the Gods in Euripides’ house. It opens: “About the Gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, since there are many obstacles to knowledge, the subject is obscure and man’s life is short.” An echo of the sentiment can be heard in a line from Euripides’ Orestes: “We are the slaves of the gods, whatever gods may be.” Both men were accused of impiety, and On the Gods was ordered to be burned, though the Orestes survived. Both ended their lives in exile from the increasingly intolerant Athens. According to Philodemus, when Euripides left Athens it was to the malicious celebrations of the citizens.
It is therefore ironic that more plays survive by Euripides than by Sophocles and Aeschylus put together: eighteen, including our only complete satyr play, out of over ninety. Even more surprising is the survival of plays that openly attack the Athenian policy. In the 430s and 420s, he wrote plays that honored the mythical founder of Athens, Theseus; nonetheless, the Aegeus, the Theseus, and the Erechtheus are all no more. In 420, Euripides wrote the Olympic Victory Ode for Alcibiades. At the time, Alcibiades was beginning to display the venality, vanity, and self-seeking impulses which would lead him to turn traitor, then return as a once-again victorious general. Beautiful, arrogant, beloved by Socrates, and riddled with contradiction, Alcibiades arranged for the Spartans to be banned from attending the games, in part to bolster his own chances of success.
Euripides’ attitudes changed profoundly in 416 B.C.E., when Athens forcibly colonized the island of Melos. The city once hailed as the “Savior of Hellas” was now murdering the indigenous inhabitants of a minor island, and selling their women and children into slavery. When Euripides’ The Trojan Women was staged, few could have been in doubt that it contained a political subtext, given that it showed a grandmother holding the corpse of a murdered grandchild, executed because he might one day, hypothetically, develop into a threat. In case we are in any doubt, the opening chorus rings out, “Such is the handiwork of Athena, daughter of Zeus.” The onetime propagandist of the state had become its implacable conscience. We have lost much of Euripides; though, on balance, it may be preferable to have lost his panegyrics and not his protest plays.
“Have all the nations of the world since his time created a dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?” opined Goethe. Euripides was a patriot betrayed by his country, who combined traditional stories with the most advanced investigation into what it meant to be human and ethical. He was caricatured as a misanthropist, gynophobe, and blasphemer because he dared to look at the complexity of the world. Goethe’s question applies as
much to his person as to his art.
Agathon
{c. 457–c. 402 B.C.E.}
AT THE CLOSE of the fifth century B.C.E., King Archelaus of Macedonia was gradually realizing his ambitions to transform the northern Greek kingdom into something more substantial than a semibarbarous satellite state. He wished to form a nation that did not have to second-guess the strengths of Athens and Sparta and side with whichever seemed in the ascendant. Admittedly, he had had to murder his half-brother to gain the throne. Nonetheless, since the last decade of the century, an influx of exiles from Athens had greatly contributed to the ongoing program of civilization. His palace was decorated by the painter Zeuxis, whose trompe l’oeil were so convincing that birds reputedly attempted to snatch grapes that were no more than pigment on plaster. He listened to the intricate instrumental music of Timotheus, who had increased the number of strings on the cithara in order to turn his mental compositions into actual sounds.
As Athens became ever more militaristic, its much-vaunted intellectual freedoms became curtailed. Around 404 B.C.E., both Euripides and his friend and colleague in the theater Agathon decided that not only their finances, but their lives, were imperiled by Athens’ drift into doctrinaire repression. They were right—in 399 B.C.E., the philosopher Socrates, with whom they had both been intimate, was sentenced to death for corrupting the young. The court of King Archelaus must surely have appeared a relatively enlightened place to retire.
Agathon had suffered carping and derision from the Athenians. The comic playwright Aristophanes, whose wit notoriously spared neither friend nor foe, had lampooned his method of composition in the Thesmophoriazusae.Agathon had been presented dressed as a woman, justifying his odd vestments by saying that to write a female role, one had to think as a woman; and some moderate transvestism helped that process no end. Sly digs at his preference for homosexual over heterosexual relationships were accompanied by pastiches of his precious, ornate style.
Agathon’s overrefined and rhetorically embellished poetry had been criticized often enough, and his retort to the critic who suggested excising those purpler passages had erred on the side of self-absorbed arrogance: “Would you purge Agathon of Agathon?” Other innovations introduced by him had been equally skeptically received. Aristotle, years later, would remember that “even Agathon” had been censured for trying to incorporate too much of an epic sweep into a single play. He had even severed the link between the Chorus and the action of the play, reducing their role to mere interludes.
Most contentiously, he had introduced an element into tragedy that had broken with every tradition: originality. His play Antheus (or The Flowers) had been based on a plot of his own devising. It is hard to fully imagine the shock to the audience: instead of an Oedipus, whose incest and blinding would be fully expected, or a wounded Philoctetes, or a passion-struck Phaedra, there were characters whom nobody recognized. Nobody knew what was going to happen next, let alone at the end. The lost Antheus is the only original tragic plot we know of; later Greek authors returned to the well-worn myths.
All that said, Agathon had been successful. He had won the first prize in 416 B.C.E., and the celebration afterward would later be the setting for Plato’s Symposium. Even in that imaginative reconstruction, lineaments of Agathon’s character emerge. His lover, Pausanias, is present, and gives a defense of homosexual love affairs. Agathon’s speech attests to his powers of invention and slightly florid tone. Although Phaedrus begins the debate by citing Hesiod and the lost author Acusilaus, who both maintain that Love is one of the oldest of the gods, Agathon begins by declaring conversely that Love is the youngest. He quotes the lost Stheneboea of Euripides, saying that love can turn men into poets, and argues with sophistication that since love is the strongest of passions, all other passions must be subordinate to it. Socrates gently unpicks the muddle of ingenuity.
As Agathon and Euripides, having finally decided to skip to Macedonia, headed toward the northern fastness of Archelaus, they may have discussed how best to write works that would flatter and challenge their new ruler. They may have compared notes on the veteran tragedian Sophocles, and his recent remarkable Oedipus at Colonus. What opportunities and advancements lay ahead? After all, they had already done enough to guarantee their immortality.
Put “Agathon” into an Internet search engine. Weed out the copious commentaries on Plato’s Symposium. You will find a lot of information about precision tool manufacturing, with a special emphasis on ball sleeves, tool guiding, and plastic molding. There is a kennel club, a Webhosting service, and an academic publisher specializing in political science. There are details about a northern European rock band, Agathon’s Favorite, who played in Liverpool once, and synopses of the 1975 movie Assault on Agathon, directed by Laslo Benedek (about a Greek Second World War veteran, thought dead, who returns to fight again). In January of the same year, Marvel Comics’ Haunt of Horror #5 featured Agathon the Tempter, a servant of Kudros, a.k.a. Satan, who was impaled on a spiked sculpture by Satan’s daughter, Satana. Jonathan Edwards played Agathon in season three of Xena, Warrior Princess, where he is now a warlord with magic armor from Hephaestus, the god of metalworking. The Wreckage of Agathon (Harper and Row, 1970), by John Gardner, a philosophical satire, was compared by one Amazon reviewer to Borges.
There are no extant plays by Agathon.
Two fragments of Agathon’s work were used by Aristotle to emphasize and illustrate his arguments. “Art loves Chance and Chance loves Art,” reads one, and chance has snatched any art Agathon was once thought to have had. “Not even the Gods can change the past,” reads the other: a fitting epitaph, perhaps, for all the lost books.
Aristophanes
{c. 444–c. 380 B.C.E.}
AT THE END of Plato’s great debate on the nature and purpose of love, The Symposium, three of the guests remained awake: Socrates, the philosopher, Agathon, the tragedian, and Aristophanes, the comedian. The conversation had moved on from metaphysical investigation into the precise interrelations between passion, devotion, and friendship, and, as the wine was passed around, and the men passed out, they discussed drama. Unfortunately, with the exception of Socrates’ contention that a man capable of writing tragedy would necessarily be able to write comedy, and vice versa, we do not know what occurred.
How did two of the most notable practitioners of their respective genres react to Socrates’ theory? What theory of literature did they themselves subscribe to? And, with their tongues sufficiently loosened by the wine, did either Socrates or Agathon upbraid their comedic colleague for having satirized them on the stage?
Aristophanes would certainly have agreed that comedy had a function every bit as serious as that of tragedy. In the eleven plays we have, out of the forty he is said to have written, there is a consistent emphasis on the castigation of vice, the promotion of harmony, and the proper responsibilities of the ruling class. “What do you want a poet for?” Dionysus is asked in The Frogs as he attempts to liberate one of the great dramatists from the Underworld. “To save the city, of course” is the answer. That such noble intentions were quite compatible with knockabout farce, sexual innuendo, and even personal invective is in part explained by the heterogeneous, hybrid nature of the comedy itself. Aristophanes is the earliest comic dramatist whose works have survived, yet he incorporated many of the registers, methods, and propensities of his shadowy, lost predecessors.
According to the inscriptions on the Parian Marble, the comic chorus was invented by a writer called Susarion in the sixth century B.C.E. Almost nothing is known of this Thespis of comedy except his name. Archilochus of Paros (c. 714–c. 676 B.C.E.) is credited with the invention of the lampoon, in iambic meter. His barbed, vituperative poetry was notoriously so cutting that it drove its subjects to suicide. Aristotle maintained that the first person to develop comic plots was a Sicilian, Epicharmus (c. 540–c. 450 B.C.E.), and Plato refers to him as comparable to Homer in the field of comedy. He was supposedly a student of Pythagoras, and on
ly a few fragments and titles have survived.
Two figures dominate the scene just prior to Aristophanes’ debut in 427 B.C.E. Cratinus (519–422 B.C.E.) was famous for the extremely vicious diatribes he launched on public figures of the day. The statesman Pericles, with his “squill-shaped head,” was a frequent target, as was his mistress Aspasia, and his advisers. Tragedians and lyric poets were satirized in the Euneidae. Though none of his plays survive, the fact that one was called The Followers of Archilochus amply attests to where Cratinus derived his lashing style. The Dionysalexandros, the Nemesis, Chiron, Drapedites,and Thracian Woman all reiterate his accusations.
Crates, who flourished around 470 B.C.E., had originally appeared as an actor in Cratinus’ plays; however, he became increasingly uncomfortable with the torrent of vitriol he was forced to enunciate. According to Aristotle, he adopted the more philosophically nuanced plots of Epicharmus: a fragment from Crates’ play about the Golden Age, The Beasts, depicts fishes willingly basting and cooking themselves. If Aristotle is correct, then Cratinus followed Crates’ example with his own utopian play Riches. Aristophanes eulogized Crates’ wit and dry humor, though, as ever, he qualified this by stating that he rarely won any prizes for it.
Although Aristophanes praises Cratinus’ choruses in The Knights, he also launches an equally unsparing attack on the satirist; in short, Cratinus was a drunk. The Chorus in The Knights proclaims its truthfulness by claiming that if they are lying, they would rather be Cratinus’ bedclothes, saturated with the results of his incontinence. Likewise, it is wholly appropriate that he sits next to the statue of Dionysus, god of drama, and alcohol. These jibes did not go uncountered: Cratinus took the daring step of producing a work entitled The Bottle, showing his bibulous self torn between his wife, the Muse, and his mistress, Booze. It won the prize in 423 B.C.E., relegating Aristophanes’ satire on Socrates, The Clouds, to an ignominious third place.