How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  O Mother, star my hair with flowers of victory…

  The Trojans have that glory which is the loveliest:

  They died for their own country. So the bodies of all who took the

  spears were carried home in loving hands,

  Brought, in the land of their fathers, to the embrace of earth

  And buried becomingly as the rite fell due. The rest,

  Those Phrygians who escaped death in battle, day by day

  Came home to happiness the Achaeans could not know;

  Their wives, their children….

  Though surely the wise man will forever shrink from war,

  Yet if war come, the hero’s death will lay a wreath

  Not lusterless on the city. The coward alone brings shame.

  The Greek invaders have, by contrast, lost all the accoutrements of civilized life—family ties, burial in the soil of their hometowns; so that in the play we are made to understand that the exercise of absolute power can come at a terrible price. And indeed, we know from the prologue that the capricious gods are about to wreak havoc on the Greeks, as surely as they did for the Athenians immediately after their moment of unthinking triumph at Melos.

  One definition of coward, as the play makes clear, is an armed adult male who murders small children, as Cassandra’s nephew will soon be murdered by the Greeks for the seemingly pragmatic reason that, if allowed to reach adulthood, he might yet avenge his city’s downfall. While the child’s mother, Andromache, screams in anguish as her son is pried from her arms, the Greek envoy addresses her with words that uncannily recall those of the Athenians to the Melians:

  Let it happen this way. It will be wiser in the end.

  Do not fight it. Take your grief as you were born to take it,

  Give up the struggle where your strength is feebleness

  With no force anywhere to help. Listen to me!

  Your city is gone…you are in our power.

  Physical power, perhaps; but it’s clear who the moral winners are. The emotional climax of the play is, in fact, the pathetic little funeral ceremony for the little boy; it’s not without significance that the same Greek soldier whose swagger, a few episodes earlier, couldn’t help reminding the audience of the attitude of Athens’s own emissaries on Melos a few months before, is moved, in the play, to perform the funerary rites himself. This is another kind of peripeteia, another reversal of character; but it’s too late. The Greeks will soon go to their ruin: Agamemnon to be murdered, Ajax to suicide, Odysseus to his terrible wanderings.

  So who are the real victors here? And whose vision of Greek war is, by Greek standards at least, “immoral”? Cassandra’s speech suggests why it is the tragic vision, rather than the glib pose of pragmatism, that should guide us in examining the moral questions raised by the wars to which Professors Kagan and Hanson have devoted their efforts. For all that these authors admire, and to some extent seek to imitate, Thucydides’ hardheadedness and his careful method, their books lack what makes Thucydides’ book (which is, after all, so much like a play) so great: his broader vision of history and statecraft and war, his humanity. Like Greek tragic drama, the History is an artful object, a careful manipulation of words and actions that can lead you, if you pay attention, to a “clear vision” of that which Thucydides, like the Attic dramatists, prized so highly: not necessarily the facts, but the truth. (As, for instance, the truth about the real motives for “wars of liberation.”) It’s worth remembering that “ship of state” is a metaphor we owe not to a historian but to a tragedian; Aeschylus, who fought in the Persian Wars—the war whose “bad guy” Athens herself would, in a quintessentially tragic inversion, ironically come to resemble—coined it for his play Seven Against Thebes, a work ferociously preoccupied with questions of how the state ought to handle itself during times of war. If you miss the connections between tragedy and history, between poetry and politics, you’re likely to miss the boat.

  Certainly the Athenians thought so. We are told that when Cleon scored his stunning success at Sphacteria, the rewards granted to him by a grateful city included front-row seats at the Theater of Dionysus, which was located just behind the Acropolis and which was the site of the annual tragic festival. Whether he actually made use of that gift, and what he made of the plays he would have seen there if he did, Thucydides doesn’t say.

  —The New Yorker, January 12, 2004

  The Bad Boy of Athens

  In the early spring of 411 B.C., Euripides finally got what was coming to him. The playwright, then in his seventies, had always been the bad boy of Athenian drama. He was the irreverent prankster who, in his Elektra, parodied the famous recognition scene in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers. He was an avant-garde intellectual who took an interest in the latest theorists—he is said to have been a friend of Socrates, and it was at his home that Protagoras (“man is the measure of all things”) first read his agnostic treatise on the gods; in works like The Madness of Herakles, he questioned the established Olympian pantheon. Stylistically, he was a playful postmodernist whose sly rearranging of traditional mythic material, in bitter fables like Orestes, deconstructed tragic conventions, anticipating by twenty-five centuries a theater whose patent subject was the workings of the theater itself.

  But no aspect of the playwright’s roiling opus was more famous, in his own day, than his penchant for portraying deranged females. Among them are the love-mad queen Phaedra, whose unrequited lust leads her to suicide and murder (the subject of not one but two Hippolytus plays by the poet, one now lost); the distraught erotomane widow Evadne in Suppliant Women, who incinerates herself on her dead husband’s grave; the ruthless granny Alcmene in Children of Herakles, who violently avenges herself on her male enemies; the wild-eyed Cassandra in Trojan Women; the list goes on and on. And, of course, there was Medea, whom the Athenians knew from established legend as the murderess of her own brother, the sorceress who dreamed up gruesome ways to destroy her husband Jason’s enemy Pelias, and whom Euripides—not surprisingly, given his tastes in female characters—decided, in his staging of the myth, to make the murderess of her own children as well.

  And so it was that, shortly after winter was over in 411, the women of Athens had their revenge on the man who’d given womanhood such a bad name. Or at least they did in one playwright’s fantasy. In that year, the comic dramatist Aristophanes staged his Thesmophoriazousae. (The tongue-twister of a title means “Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria”—this latter being an annual, all-female fertility festival associated with Demeter.) In this brilliant literary fantasy, Euripides learns that the women of the city are using the religious festival as a pretext to hold a debate on whether they ought to kill the playwright in revenge for being badmouthed by him in so many works over the years. Desperate to know what they’re saying about him, and eager to have someone speak up on his behalf—something no real woman would do—Euripides persuades an aged kinsman, Mnesilochus, to attend the festival in drag, spy on the proceedings, and, if necessary, speak in the poet’s defense. The plan, of course, backfires, Mnesilochus is found out, and only a last-minute rescue by Euripides himself—he comes swooping onto the stage, dressed as Perseus, in the contraption used in tragedies to hoist gods aloft—can avert disaster. Peace, founded on a promise by the playwright never to slander women again, is finally made between this difficult man of the theater and his angry audience. The play ends in rejoicing.

  Many contemporary classicists—this writer included—would argue that the females of Athens were taking things far too personally. Athenian drama, presented with much ceremony during the course of a public and even patriotic yearly civic festival, structured on the armature of heroic myth, rigidly conventional in form and diction, was not “realistic”; we must be careful, when evaluating and interpreting these works, of our own tendency to see drama in purely personal terms, as a vehicle for psychological investigations. If anything, Athenian tragedy seems to have been useful as an artistic means of exploring concerns that, to us,
seem to be unlikely candidates for an evening of thrilling drama: the nature of the state, the difficult relationship—always of concern in a democracy—between remarkable men (tragedy’s “heroes”) and the collective citizen body.

  In particular, the dialogic nature of drama made it a perfect vehicle for giving voice to—literally acting out—the tensions that underlay the smooth ideological surface of the aggressively imperialistic Athenian democracy. Tensions, that is, between personal morality and the requirements of the state (or army, as in Sophocles’ Philoctetes), and between the ethical obligations imposed by family and those imposed by the city (Antigone); and the never-quite-satisfying negotiations between the primitive impulse toward personal vengeance and the civilized rule of law (Oresteia). Greek tragedy was political theater in a way we cannot imagine, or replicate, today; there was more than a passing resemblance between the debates enacted before the citizens participating in the assembly, and those conflicts, agones, dramatized before the eyes of those same citizens in the theater. Herodotus tells the story of a Persian king who bemusedly describes the Greek agora, the central civic meeting space, as “a place in the middle of the city where the people tell each other lies.” That’s what the theater of Dionysus was, too.

  This is the context in which we must interpret tragedy’s passionate females—as odd as it may seem to us today. The wild women characters to whom Aristophanes’ female Athenians so hotly objected weren’t so much reflections of real contemporary females and their concerns—the preoccupation of Athenian theater being issues of import to the citizen audience, which was free, propertied, and male; we still can’t be sure whether women even attended the theater—as, rather, symbolic entities representing everything “other” to that smoothly coherent citizen identity. (Because women—thought to be irrational, emotional, deceitful, slaves of passion—were themselves “other” to all that the free, rational, self-controlled male citizen was.) As such, Greek drama’s girls and women—pathetic, suffering, angry, violent, noble, wicked—were ideal mouthpieces for all the concerns that imperial state ideology, with its drive toward centralization, homogenization, and unity, necessarily suppressed or smoothed over: family blood ties, the interests of the private sphere, the anarchic, self-indulgent urges of the individual psyche, secret longings for the glittering heroic and aristocratic past.

  For this reason, the conflicts between tragedy’s males and females are never merely domestic spats. Clytemnestra, asserting the interests of the family, obsessed by the sacrifice of her innocent daughter Iphigenia (an act that represents the way in which the domestic and individual realms are always “sacrificed” to the collective good in wartime), kills her husband in revenge, but is herself murdered by their son—who later is acquitted by an Athenian jury. Antigone, for her part, prefers her uncle’s decree of death to a life in which she is unable to honor family ties as she sees fit. To be sure, this is a schematic reading, one that doesn’t take into account the genius of the Attic poets: men, after all, who had wives and mothers and daughters, and who were able to enhance their staged portraits of different types of females with the kind of real-life nuances that we today look for in dramatic characters. But it is useful to keep the schema in mind, if only as a counterbalance to our contemporary temptation to see all drama in terms of psyches rather than polities.

  Two recent productions of works by Euripides illuminate, in very different ways, the dangers of failing to calibrate properly the precise value of the feminine in Greek, and particularly Euripidean, drama. As it happens, they make a nicely complementary pair. One, Medea, currently enjoying a highly praised run on Broadway in a production staged by Deborah Warner and starring the Irish actress Fiona Shaw, is the playwright’s best-known and most-performed play, not least because it conforms so nicely to contemporary expectations of what a night at the theater should entail. (It looks like it’s all about emotions and female suffering.) The other, The Children of Herakles, first produced a couple of years after Medea, is his least-known and most rarely performed drama: Peter Sellars’s staging of it in Cambridge, with the American Repertory Theatre, marks the work’s first professional production in the United States. That this play seems to be characterized far more by a preoccupation with dry and undramatic political concerns than by what we think of as a “typically” Euripidean emphasis on feminine passions is confirmed by classicists’ habit of referring to it as one of the poet’s two “political plays.” And yet Medea is more political than you might at first think—and certainly more so than its noisy and shallow new staging suggests; while the political message of The Children of Herakles depends much more on the portrayal of its female characters than anyone, including those who have been bold enough to stage it for the first time, might realize.

  By far the more interesting and thoughtful of the two productions is the Cambridge Children of Herakles. Euripides’ tale of the sufferings of the dead Herakles’ refugee children, pursued from their native land by the evil king Eurystheus and forced to seek asylum in Athens, has been much maligned for its episodic and ostensibly disjointed structure: the Aristotle scholar John Jones, writing on the Poetics, summed up the critical consensus by calling it “a thoroughly bad play.” But the imaginative if overcooked staging by Peter Sellars, who here effects one of his well-known updatings, suggests that it can have considerable power in performance.

  The legend on which this odd drama is based was familiar to the Athenian audience, not least because it confirmed their sense of themselves as a just people. After his death, Herakles’ children are pursued from their native city, Argos, by Eurystheus—he’s the cruel monarch who has given Herakles all those terrible labors to perform—and, led by their father’s aged sidekick, Iolaos, they wander from city to city, seeking refuge from the man who wants to wipe them out. Only the Athenians agree to give them shelter and, more, to defend them; they defeat the Argive army in a great battle during which Eurystheus is killed—after which his severed head is brought back to Herakles’ mother, Alcmene, who gouges his eyes out with dress pins. (There was a place near Athens called “Eurystheus’ Head,” where the head was supposed to have been buried.) The legend was frequently cited in political orations of Euripides’ time as an example of the justness of the Athenian state—its willingness to make war, if necessary, on behalf of the innocent and powerless.

  And yet Euripides went to considerable lengths to alter this mythic account precisely by adding new female voices. In his version, the two most significant actions in the story are assigned to women. First of all, he invents a daughter for Herakles, traditionally called Macaria but referred to in the text of the play simply as parthenos, “virgin”; in this new version of the famous patriotic myth, it is not merely the Athenians’ military might that saves the day, but Macaria’s decision, in response to one of those eleventh-hour oracles that inevitably wreak havoc with the lives of Greek tragic virgins, to die as a sacrificial victim in order to ensure victory in battle. The playwright also makes Alcmene a more vigorous, if sinister, presence: in this version, it is she who has Eurystheus killed, in flagrant violation of Athens’s rules for the treatment of prisoners of war. The play ends abruptly after she gives the order for execution.

  Classicists have always thought the play is “political,” but only because there are scenes in which various male characters—the caustic envoy of the Argive king, the sympathetic Athenian monarch Demophon, son of Theseus—debate what the just course for Athens ought to be. (Come to the aid of the refugees and thereby risk war? Or incur religious pollution by failing to honor the claims of suppliants at an altar?) But it’s only when you understand the political dimensions of the tragedy’s portrayal of women that you can see just how political a play it really is. The contrast between the two female figures—the self-sacrificing Macaria, and the murderous Alcmene; one concerned only for her family and allies, the other intent on the gratification of private vengeance—could not be greater.

  In symbolic terms, the terms familiar
to Euripides’ audiences, the play is about the politics of civic belonging. Herakles’ children, homeless, stateless, are eager to reestablish their civic identity—to belong somewhere; Macaria’s action demonstrates that in order to do so, sacrifices—of the individual, of private “family” concerns—must take place. (In her speech of self-sacrifice, she uses all of the current buzzwords of Athenian civic conformity.) Her bloodthirsty grandmother, on the other hand, eager to avenge a lifetime of humiliations to her family, dramatizes the way in which private concerns—she, like Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, is the representative of clan interests—never quite disappear beneath the smooth façade of public interest. “I am ‘someone,’ too,” she hotly replies, during the closing minutes of the play, in response to an Athenian’s statement that “there is no way that someone may execute” Eurystheus in violation of Athenian law.

  It is a shame, given the trouble Euripides goes to in order to inject vivid female energies into a story that previously had none, that Peter Sellars (who you could say has made a specialty of unpopular or difficult-to-stage Greek dramas: past productions include Sophocles’ Ajax and Aeschylus’ Persians, a work that has all of the dramatic élan of a Veterans Day parade) has focused on those issues in the play that appear “political” to us, rather than those that the Athenians would have understood to be political. Because there are refugees in the play, Sellars thinks the play is about what we call refugee crises—to us, now, a very political-sounding dilemma indeed. He has, accordingly, with his characteristic thoroughness and imaginative brio, gone to a great deal of trouble to bring out this element, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

  Indeed, the American Repertory Theatre’s performance of Children of Herakles is only one third of a three-part evening. It begins with a one-hour panel discussion—the guests change each night of the play’s run—hosted by the Boston radio personality Christopher Lydon, that focuses on refugee crises around the world. The night I saw the play, his three guests were Arthur Helton, the director of Peace and Conflict Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations; a female asylum-seeker from Somalia called Ayisha; and a Serbian woman from the former Yugoslavia who’d emigrated to the United States after suffering during the Balkan wars. Then comes the performance of Euripides’ play, which lasts two hours; and then a screening of a film. The latter represents, in the words of the program, “an artistic response to the current crisis—a series of films made in countries that are generating large numbers of refugees.”