Greek Drama

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GREEK DRAMA

When Plato spoke of an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, and when Aristotle said that poetry is more serious and more philosophical than history, they were both thinking primarily of epic and dramatic poetry, especially of tragedy. The reason why the two great Greek philosophers paid so much attention to dramatic poetry is closely connected with the reasons why Greek tragedy continues to deserve the interest of philosophers today. An account of philosophical ideas in "Greek drama" can usefully begin with some consideration of ancient philosophical ideas about Greek drama.

Plato and Aristotle

It is well known that Plato was hostile to what he regarded as the inflated pretensions of the poets as moral and religious teachers and to the arrogant claims made on their behalf by rhapsodes and expositors. In numerous dialogues (notably in Apology, Ion, and Republic ) he reiterated the complaint that poets lack the knowledge that, he believed, can be achieved only by rigorous philosophizing and that is necessary for the understanding of the human situation and the ordering of human life. The poets pronounce on life's problems without being able to "give an account" (λόγον διδόναι ) of themselves and their ideas. Plato might ironically allow that, like conventional statesmen, they have some divinely inspired glimpses of moral and political truth, but he insisted that they lack the true knowledge that is achieved by the philosopher after strenuous dialectical thought.

Tragedy is essentially a kind of rhetoric (Gorgias 502d), and Plato reviled it with all the passion that he displayed in his attacks on forensic and political oratory. All these are the arts of mere persuasion, and they are customarily used to persuade men of what is false. Plato explicitly held that most orators, politicians, and poets are dishonest or ignorant, or both, and even the most famous of them would be refused admission to the ideal republic.

One of Plato's most important grounds for despising literature was based on the theory of Forms. The poet deals in the concrete and particular; dialectic, like its mathematical archetype, is concerned with the abstract and universal. It follows that even an honest poet must inevitably fail to achieve and convey knowledge and understanding, since he is operating at entirely the wrong level. He presents images of images; he and his audience are at two removes from the world of reality and truth (Republic 597e).

Aristotle, the philosopher of the concrete particular substance, with his keen interest in the actual particular specimen, was more sympathetic to poetry and literature. Poetry is philosophical because it portrays the nature of man in general by presenting particular individual men in such a way that each portrait throws light on other individuals, just as the biologist studies the genus or the species by attending in detail to actual particular specimens. A chronicle of "what Alcibiades did or suffered" tells us only about Alcibiades. Oedipus or Agamemnon is Man as well as a man. Aristotle regarded the poets as contributors to thought, knowledge, and understanding, not as mere entertainers.

The opposite views of Plato and Aristotle on the value of literature must not be allowed to hide the importance of a point on which they agreed. Plato's attack on poetry, like Aristotle's more sympathetic treatment, presupposes that there is an overlapping of function between philosophy and literature. Plato thought that the poets gave wrong answers to the questions and problems that he dealt with in his dialogues, but the very form of his attack implies his recognition that the poets are also concerned with those questions and problems. The old battle between philosophy and poetry could not take place at all unless the two parties shared at least a battleground.

This point is confirmed, and its importance is underlined, by further knowledge of the history of ancient literature and philosophy. It was only in the time of Plato and Aristotle themselves that there began to appear any very clear distinctions between philosophy, history, science, and imaginative literature. Homer had fulfilled all the functions that were later divided among historians, tragic and comic poets, philosophers, theologians, moralists, and scientists. Parmenides and Empedocles were poets as well as philosophers; they did not write both poetry and philosophy—their poetry was their philosophy. Heraclitus wrote in prose but in an oracular, literary manner. Hesiod is part of the history of philosophical and cosmological speculation as well as of the history of literature. Plato himself wrote philosophy that is also literature and, in spite of his own strictures, imaginative and dramatic literature.

Modern Views

Modern controversy about Greek tragedy has followed similar lines. Many scholars and critics have praised the Attic tragedians as religious and moral thinkers and prophets, thus accepting Plato's view of the nature of the aims and themes of the ancient plays while often strongly dissenting from his valuation of them. Others, by contrast, have denied that the tragedians either showed or meant to show any moral or religious depth or originality, and have presented them as "mere" poets and playwrights whose purpose was purely literary and dramatic and who used traditional mythological and religious material simply because it was traditional.

This dispute is misconceived and is based on a false dichotomy. It not only ignores the artificiality of any attempt to draw a sharp distinction between literature and philosophy in Greek times but also involves drawing a distinction between them that is too sharp to be faithful to the nature and function of literature and philosophy in any age, including our own. Both parties to the dispute share Plato's mistaken assumption that nothing can count as philosophical, religious, or moral thought unless it is explicitly and formally general and systematic. Aristotle's recognition that fifth-century tragedy illuminated morality and religion by a dramatic presentation of particular events and characters needs to be extended to literature in general. The themes of Greek tragedy are the themes of literature: Man, God, Nature, Chance, Freedom, Will, Fate, Necessity, and Good and Evil. Most, if not all, of these themes are also themes of great and permanent philosophical interest, and philosophers should not despise the contributions of dramatists, poets, and novelists to our understanding of them.

Tragedy

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had much in common: they all drew their characters and plots from a common stock of religious mythology and historical legend inherited from Homer, and they all used their plays as means of presenting the relations between men and gods. The stories of the Trojan War, of Agamemnon and the House of Tantalus, of Oedipus and the House of Cadmus recur in the works of all three. (A "history play," such as The Persians of Aeschylus, is exceptional, although commentators have found historical and political allusions in many of the plays that are based on mythical themes.)

Aeschylus and Sophocles were relatively orthodox in their treatment of the traditional themes. The Oresteia of Aeschylus presents, through the story of the working out of a family curse, a study of the conflict between man's efforts to choose and guide his own life and the almost irresistible weight of past events and external influences. Agamemnon "puts on the yoke of necessity" when he chose to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia rather than to risk the ruin of the Greek expedition against Troy. In that phrase and in that incident Aeschylus combines an awareness of the force of circumstance with a consciousness of the responsibility that a man bears for his own actions, however circumscribed they are by what lies outside his control. The yoke is a yoke of necessity; but it is Agamemnon who puts it on. In the same trilogy Aeschylus portrays the growth of revenge ("a kind of wild justice," as Bacon called it) into the cultivated plant of civil law. His Prometheus Bound is also concerned with conflict. The struggle between Prometheus and Zeus is also the struggle between man's aspiration after knowledge and power and the forces of nature and environment represented by the gods. Men pay in suffering for every step in understanding.

The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles also shows the price that must be paid for knowledge and self-knowledge. The man who answered the riddle of the Sphinx finds, when he knows his own nature and his own circumstances, that not all knowledge is sweet, and blinds his eyes that have seen too much. And yet it was ignorance that led him to his tragic end. If he had known more and had known it sooner, he would have done better and fared better. In the Antigone we find the "conflict of right with right" that led to G. W. F. Hegel's definition of tragedy; the legitimate claims of Creon, the civil power, are set against Antigone's ardent loyalty to holy and unwritten laws.

Euripides used the same stock of mythical material but in a different spirit. He was a friend of Anaxagoras and a student of the sophists and orators, whose influence is seen in his set debates and rhetorical speeches. The sophistry of Hippolytus ("my tongue it was that swore; my heart is not forsworn") and the atheism of Bellerophon are only two examples of the "free thought" of some of his characters that shocked Aristophanes and other conventional Athenians. It was debated, and is still debated, whether Euripides was himself an atheist or a modernistic theologian. To the modern reader of the plays the question is of merely academic interest. In the Hippolytus and the Bacchae he vividly presents conflicts between Aphrodite and Artemis and between Dionysus and the forces of order and restraint. The impact of these conflicts on a modern reader is not much affected by questions about whether Euripides literally believed in the gods of the Greek pantheon or merely used them as personifications of forces in human nature that are as familiar to us as they were to his original audience.

In reading Greek tragedy, as in reading any work of imaginative literature, we must beware of attributing to the author the opinions and attitudes expressed by his characters. The best Greek tragedies are as dialectical as the works of Plato. The issues they deal with are too complex and subtle to allow a neat answer to be given to them in the speeches of any one character. The dramatist presents and portrays; he does not argue and declaim.

Comedy

Attic comedy is of little more than historical interest from the philosophical point of view. The Clouds of Aristophanes pillories and parodies a "Socrates" who is made to represent all that was new and disturbing in contemporary Greek thought. Aristophanes shows here and in several other plays (especially in the parabasis, or address of the chorus to the audience on current topics) that he was a conservative who looked back to the golden days of Aeschylus and the other "men of Marathon." His satirical purpose could best be served by ignoring the great diversity in the movements of thought that he disliked: Pythagorean and Orphic mysticism, natural speculation, sophistic attacks on conventional morality and religion, and the revolutionary theology of Euripides.

Comedy, like tragedy, was religious in its origin, and Aristophanes, if read with caution, can contribute to our knowledge of the history of Greek religious thought. But no comic writer can be trusted very far as a source of information on philosophical or scientific thought, and in particular Aristophanes' account of Socrates needs more delicate handling than it has received from scholars preoccupied with the "Socratic question." What the Clouds does show is that philosophical speculation was of some interest to the general public in Athens, even if only as a butt of jokes and gibes. Socrates testifies in Plato's Apology that attacks by comic poets helped to foster prejudice against him.

The contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in the Frogs of Aristophanes is one of the earliest examples of literary criticism, and it preaches, as Plato did, that the poet's function is to edify and instruct his audience.

Bibliography

Adkins, Arthur W. H. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.

Gill, Christopher. Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Havelock, E. A. Preface to Plato. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1963.

Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth, eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. See the articles on Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, tragedy, Aristophanes, comedy, and philosophers on poetry.

Kitto, H. D. F. Greek Tragedy. London: Methuen, 1939.

Lesky, Albin. Greek Tragic Poetry. Translated by Matthew Dillon. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.

Lloyd-Jones, P. H. J. The Greeks. London: Watts, 1962.

Lucas, D. W. The Greek Tragic Poets. 2nd ed. London: Cohen and West, 1959.

Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986; 2nd ed., 2001.

Segal, Charles. Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Verrall, A. W. Euripides the Rationalist. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1895.

Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Williams, Bernard. "The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics." In The Greeks and Us: Essays in Honor of Arthur W. H. Adkins, edited by Robert B. Louden and Paul Schollmeier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Renford Bambrough (1967)

Bibliography updated by Grace Ledbetter (2005)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy