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The Greeks in Time and Space
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15183 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1989 |
6,306 Words |
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Peter Arnott
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In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the boys of Shrewsbury School in England staged a Greek comedy. It was Peace by Aristophanes, composed with misplaced optimism during a brief lull in the Peloponnesian War. Its choral centerpiece showed the goddess of the title resurrected from the pit into which Ares had flung her. When, in the English staging, Peace emerged from her imprisonment, she was seen to be waving the Union Jack. Aristophanes' Athenians would have appreciated this chauvinistic anachronism. They were used to such things in their own theater.
Greek drama, of course, was not Greek at all, in any panhellenic sense. It was Athenian. If there were playwrights from other city-states, their names have vanished from the record. Did the theaters of Thebes, Argos, and Corinth stage Athenian plays? No local works have been discovered. An ancient tradition suggests that Euripides was commissioned by the people of Corinth to write Medea. Aeschylus was killed in a bizarre accident while staging certain of his works in Sicily; like many a playwright after him, he died out of town. But the plays that have come down to us--the grudging total spared by history, barely larger than the Shakespearean corpus--were written by Athenians for Athenians, to be spoken in the Athenian dialect and staged in the Athenian sunshine. They mirrored the desires, ambitions, and prejudices of a people whom Aristophanes saw as meddlesome and overbearing, complacent and loquacious to a fault, but who still contrived to set their stamp upon the ages. And the tragedies bracket, between their first and last, some three-quarters of a century, spanning Athens' rise to eminence and her collapse.
Our first surviving play recalls Athens' proudest moment. In 480 B.C. King Xerxes of Persia, burning to avenge past defeats, launched a two-pronged invasion of Greece. His massive army bridged the straits dividing Europe from Asia (a feat not emulated until the present century) and moved rapidly south. His fleet kept pace along the coastline, supplying the army in a land that could barely support its own.
The Greek cities, terrified, abandoned their habitual jealousies and desperately united. Expelled from the mountain passes of the north, the combined armies fell back on the Isthmus of Corinth, the next easily defensible point. Athens was abandoned to its fate, its people evacuated, its buildings sacked. And then, in the flash of genius that would change the pattern of world history, the Athenian Themistocles put his faith in ships; he lured the heavy Persian vessels into the landlocked waters of Salamis and in destroying them destroyed also his enemy's lifeline. Xerxes, watching the disaster from a cliff nearby, abandoned tent and baggage and began the long trek home.
Eight years later, Aeschylus offered his dramatic memorial of this event. In the first audience of The Persians were many who (probably like Aeschylus himself) had fought so recently in the battle it describes. So volatile were Athenian politics that it was not prudent to name names; Themistocles, the hero of 480, was persona non grata by 472. But the praises of the city could still be sung. In Aeschylus' account (all the more stirring through being seen from the loser's viewpoint) of the high hopes for the expedition followed so closely by disaster, in the narrative of retreat through the barren highlands, in the spectral apparition of King Xerxes' father, admonishing his people never to lay hands on Greece again--in the play's every moment--the Athenians savored the
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