Further thoughts on Herodotus and Aeschylus

When trying to compare Herodotus and Aeschylus, do not fall for the trap of the false dichotomy. I’d suggest that the two writers have very similar purposes and very similar attitudes to their subject matter. I’d suggest that Herodotus is a little more cynical and a little more removed and of course the genres are different. But perhaps not as different as they seem. Both rely on Homer as a kind of model; both are powerful examples of taking real events and eye-witness accounts and shaping them to be able to construct a compelling narrative.

Both of them are admirers of Athens and Athenian democracy and both are deeply critical of the hubris of leaders which leads them to ignore wise advice; whether it comes from other mortals or from the world of the gods, dreams and oracles. Both are also deeply aware of the risks of Empire building and of what we might call the Homeric paradox – War is how men win glory; but however Necessary it might be, its reality is brutal and cruel and leaves the innocent bereft of fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.

Perhaps most interesting, both are producing texts where “barbarians” play a central role. Barbarian means simply one who is not Greek. All other peoples were barbarians to the Greeks and while there is an element of judgement involved – the Greeks clearly thought themselves superior (as all peoples tend to) – it does not have any of the same implications as its modern usage. The Greeks do see the Persians as “soft” – pampered, luxuriant and feminised. They find their clothing ludicrous and their attitudes strange. Herodotus in particular juxtaposes an idea of Greek freedom, with the despots of Persia.

The question then is why would both texts choose this focus; in Aeschylus’ case, an exclusive focus. There are no Greek characters in the Persians, nor even any Greeks named. I think the answer lies in the socio-historical context. With the expulsion of Xerxes’ army after the Battle of Platea in 479BCE; and having seen off the Persian navy at Salamis earlier that year – Greece is free, at least in the short term, from the Persian threat. This is not, as Aeschylus suggests, the end of Xerxes or of Persia as a major power. In fact the continuing threat of Persia is key to what happens next in Athens. The Athenians broker a deal with a number of other Greek states to set up a treasury, initially on the island of Delos (a supposedly neutral territory). This fund will be a war chest in case there is a further Persian invasion and much of it is used to build a navy, which Athens controls. This Delian League is matched by a similar grouping of city states around Sparta on the Peloponnese. Over time though Athenian supremacy and the fact that they control the navy means that the Treasury is moved to Athens (to the Acropolis in fact, apparently for its protection!) and the League becomes an Athenian Empire where the the other states become not so much equal members as tribute-paying vassals.

This Empire is still in the future when Aeschylus writes, but it was certainly already in the wind. By the time Herodotus is writing, the Athenians imperial ambitions have helped create the circumstances for the Peloponnesian War. I would suggest that both writers are wary of the ambitions of Athens and are offering a warning. Herodotus is in fact explicit – those that are great will fall; those that are small can become great.

The two writers spend so much time examining the Persians because the I think they believe that the fate of Persia will become the fate of Athens. This is especially pertinent for Aeschylus. He is working with what will become a trope of tragedy – he may even have created it. Tragedians use The Other in order to create for their audiences the painful experiences and uncomfortable truths that are too difficult to watch if they are about ourselves. Tragedy is almost always set outside Athens – in Corinth or Thebes or in the case of The Persians – the court of the Persian King. It is almost always set also in the distant, mythic past. (The Persians is a fascinating exception to this).  And it is peopled by characters who are not the Athenian male citizen audience. Foreigners, slaves and women make up a disproportionate number of the characters in tragedy.

By watching the suffering of The Other, Athenian citizens can learn the valuable lessons; can experience catharsis; can look their own crimes and suffering in the face – but in a way which is far more palatable and easier to digest.

Greek Tragedy - a beginner's guide

This is a very basic introduction to Greek Tragedy

Greek theatre is a religious ritual which grew out of the dithyramb – the sung hymn. It began as Choral singing and dancing on what was probably the threshing floor – and developed to first include one actor with separate parts and then by the time of Aeschylus around, 480BCE, two actors. Sophocles uses three actors and Euripides occasionally appears to use four (but this is disputed).

The some of the performance was probably sung – a little like modern opera –but there were also spoken and chanted sections; particularly where characters were interacting.

In the Greek theatre design the original dancing floor is maintained – its called an Orchestra and is the wide circlular space in front of the slightly raised rectangular stage. It is where the Chorus would have danced. This dancing was an important part of the performance – in some translations of the plays you will see strophe and antistrophe indicating the movement across the stage of the two halves of the Chorus as they sang. It is what Aristotle is mainly referring to when he discuss Spectacle as an aspect of Greek theatre – though he also means the highly elaborate costumes.

Plays were presented as part of an annual competition – the City Dionysia or Festival of Dionysus. They are specifically Athenian. The Dionysia is a competition for Tragedies, there was a separate competition for comedies. Three playwrights were chosen to compete, each on a separate day. They presented three tragedies and a fourth play called a satyr play – a light-hearted romp. The four plays were usually linked thematically or about the same myth. The only complete set of three plays we have is Aeschylus’ Oresteia which is three plays about Agamemnon’s homecoming from Troy, his murder by his wife Clytemnestra, her murder by her son Orestes (and daughter Electra) and Orestes forgiveness by the goddess Athena and the people of Athens.

The Chorus is always a central part of the plays, in particular the Choral odes which include hymns. The Chorus are usually ourselves as audience in some way and act as a kind of moral compass, generally telling us as an audience how we should be responding to the action. Sometimes the playwrights subvert this.

Plays should create catharsis in the audience – the experience of strong emotions peaking and being released.

The Three Theban Plays

This is the name given to three separate plays written by Sophocles at different times in his life. They are NOT a trilogy and were not written to be performed together but they all deal with aspects of the Oedipus myth – what is often referred to as the Theban cycle – because that’s where it happens – the city of Thebes.

In the order of the story the plays are the Oedipus the King (Oedipus Rex) which deals with the hubris of Oedipus and his ability to meet his fate with dignity; the Oedipus at Colonus which deals with the last days of Oedipus’ life having been in exile with his daughter Antigone and the Antigone which deals with the fratricidal war in Thebes between Oedipus’ two sons and the subsequent punishment of his daughter Antigone for burying her brother.

They were written in the order of The Antigone, The Oedipus Rex then The Oedipus at Colonus.

The Oedipus Myth

Oedipus, the son of the King and Queen of Corinth, is told there is an oracle that says he will kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid this terrible fate he runs away from home, as far away as he can imagine, to the city of Thebes. On the way he kills a wealthy man on the road who refuses to let him pass. In Thebes he hears of the terrible Sphinx that is harassing the town, so he visits it, solves its riddle and as a reward is wedded to the Queen Jocasta (her husband, it seems, has mysteriously gone missing…).

The play Oedipus Rex picks up the action about ten years later when a terrible plague is killing the Thebans. Oedipus agrees to find the pollutant that is causing it. His investigations first find that it was the King of Thebes he killed on his way to the city. But he goes further, discovering that the King of Thebes had been given a prophecy before his son’s birth that the child would kill its father and marry its mother. He thus had the child exposed on the hillside – but a kindly shepherd saved it and took it to the childless King and Queen of Corinth to be raised as their own. And that’s where our story began!

The play ends with the distraught Jocasta hanging herself and Oedipus taking her cloak pins and putting out his own eyes. In a device common to most Greek drama this climatic and gruesome action is described to the horrified Chorus and audience by a Messenger. Oedipus then reappears and accepts his punishment – exile from Thebes. His brother in law Creon takes the throne and Oedipus leaves Thebes to wander Greece with his loyal daughter Antigone.

In the Oedipus at Colonus Oedipus finds his way to the Athenian suburb of Colonus (this is the deme that Sophocles belonged to and this part of the story is a construction by Sophocles to have the important figure of Oedipus associated not just with Athens but with his specific part of Athens. This re-shaping of myth to suit contemporary purposes is part of Greek drama. There is no cannon in Greek myth and so the playwrights could do whatever they liked with the basic stories. The same playwright would often write a range of versions of the same myth depending on their purpose.) Oedipus is accepted by the people of Athens and dies there, bringing luck to the city and the deme of Colonus in particular. Antigone returns to Thebes.

The Antigone is the final part of the Oedipus story. After his death his two sons began a fratricidal war. The war is covered in a play called Seven against Thebes. The war ends just before the play begins with the two young men impaling one another on their spears simultaneously and dying.

For the second time Creon takes the kingship and must restore order to the city. He denies burial to Polynices, who he claims was a traitor. Antigone, using an argument similar to one made by a queen in Herodotus (Sophocles probably borrowed the idea for this part of the play from here) says it is repugnant to not have her brother buried and despite Creon’s law, spreads soil over her brother’s rotting corpse.

The god’s appeased she accepts her fate – which is to be buried alive! She goes to her death speaking of the grave as if it were a bridal bed – this is a trope in much Greek drama – the young woman who associates marriage and death or who dies just before or on her wedding day. Her finance, the son of Creon tries to rescue her – but too late – she’s hung herself in her walled up cave. So of course he then falls on his own sword. Creon’s wife kills herself when she hears of all this. Creon is left totally bereft – a little unfair given he was trying to do the right thing and restore law and order.

There are several aspects of Greek theatre its useful to understand:

Structure : Prologue – an introductory scene – often a monologue, often by a god, sets the scene

Parode (sometimes called Parados) – the entry of the Chorus – the most awaited part of the play – a highlight for the audience as the costumes of the Chorus were always spectacular.

Episode – of which there were several, usually involving the actors and sometimes including choral odes.

Stasimon – ends each episode and is a choral ode but one sung stationary, without dancing.

Exode – the Chorus’s final song as or just before it exits.

There is almost never actual violence on the stage – violent events are reported, in graphic and usually very beautiful verse, generally by a Messenger.

All parts are played by men. There are no professional actors, though some scholars assume that given the skill required to perform many of the parts, there were only limited men who could play the speaking parts. The playwrights sometimes performed. We don’t know if women even went to the theatre. There is no reliable evidence either way. Given it was a religious ritual, its possible that women attended but also given the nature of Athenian society, its possible they didn’t.

The Chorus is 12 or possibly 15 – they speak as “I” even when they are all speaking. There is sometimes a Chorus leader. They are all the same – all “people of Thebes” or “citizens of Colonus” or whatever collective the playwright wants us as audience to connect with.

All Greek tragedy is based in the myth cycles (the one exception is a play called The Persians by Aeschylus about the battle of Salamis). The plays though are usually about contemporary issues or concerns in Fifth century Athens.

The City Dionysia included sacrifice to and feasting in honour of Dionysus. His temple is opposite the Theatre of Dionysus at the base of the Acropolis, where the plays were all staged.

Classical Athens for Beginners

This is an introduction to some of the key features of Classical Athenian society. It focuses on the details which when linked up help understand how those Classical Athenians thought about their world.

Democracy

The Classical period is 500BCE to 400 BCE approximately and while we speak about classical Greece, we are really talking mainly about the art, writing and ideas of the city state of Athens.

Athens was the only city state in Greece to adopt a system of democracy – rule by the demos or people. Voting citizens were men over a set age (18, possibly 20) and while the rules change at various points, they generally had to be the children of parents who were both citizens.

Democracy is instituted in about 593BCE through the reforms of Solon. It is over-turned many times by individual tyrannts – the most well-known being Pisistratus. The word tyrant in Greek does not have any of the implications it has in modern English – it just means a one-man ruler, who rules by force.

Democracy is important because the system impacts on the way Athenians see themselves in relation to everyone else in Greece and certainly how they view foreigners.

Wars

There are three separate conflicts which shape the fifth century – but it is important to remember that war is an everyday part of Greek life. Every Athenian citizen wealthy enough to buy armour would have been a hoplite (a foot solider). Those too poor to buy armour would have rowed in the huge Athenian navy. Every Athenian male would have experienced combat at some stage in their lives.

In 490BCE the Persian King Darius invades Greece. He is stopped on the plain of Marathon by a force led predominantly by Athens. The fallen heroes of Marathon become an important part of Athenians’ understanding of themselves – they see themselves as the state that saved Greece.

Ten years later his son Xerxes makes a second attempt. The second Persian invasion is 480-479BCE. Xerxes brings a much larger force by both sea and land. He famously bridges the Hellespont, thus yoking Europe to Asia – an act of terrible hubris. He is held for a time by the brave self-sacrifice of the Spartan King Leonidis and his Three Hundred Spartans at the pass of Thermopylae. (of course there were lots of other Greeks there too…). Having been warned, Athens was ready for the Persians – the city was evacuated to the island of Salamis (visible from the Acropolis) and a clever ploy to draw the Persian navy into the narrow straits was used. The naval battle of Salamis was a decisive victory for Athens. The complete rout of the Persians was then completed at Platea – a land battle where the Spartans gained the victory.

All of this is covered in Herodotus’s Histories where he examines “why the two people’s fought”. The conflict with Persia sets up not just the Athenians sense of themselves but also the key geo-political conditions, particularly in Greece, for the next nearly hundred years.

After the second Persian War, the Greek states of the mainland (as opposed to the Peloponnese, dominated by Sparta), establish, under Athenian leadership, a Treasury on the island of Delos and a military alliance called the Delian League. The aim is to have funds to always have a navy ready to defend Greece from Persia – but Athens, as the great naval power already, dominate and the navy is under their control and leadership. Its not long before the Treasury moves to Athens and the League becomes effectively, an Athenian Empire with tribute-paying states.

This situation is key in the growing tensions that then lead to the Peloponnesian War (if you believe Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War). This is a war predominantly between Sparta and Athens which lasts from 429BCE to 404BCE when Athens is defeated and the wall in the harbour of Piraeus is dismantled. There is a long peace, called the Peace of Nicias in between and some scholars, including probably most contemporary Athenians, see it as a series of separate wars. The war overhangs much of what occurs in Athens in the latter part of the fifth century – the comic playwright Aristophanes is particularly obsessed with it.

The period in Athens from the end of the second Persian War, till the beginning of the Peloponnesian War is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age”. The important statesman Pericles, rises to prominence (he dies in a terrible plague in 429BCE). It is he that is responsible for the huge building works in Athens – including the constructions of the Parthenon on the Acropolis.

The plasticity of myth and the position of Homer.

Greek myth is not a cannon and even Homer should not be viewed as cannon. Hesiod, in the sixth century, writes the Theogyny – a long lyric poem about the birth of the gods and it is from this that we have many of our ideas about the Olympian gods in particular. But its just one story. Vase paintings often tell very different versions of myths from the epic poems. The playwrights of the fifth century acted a lot like fan-fiction writers today – they told their own versions of the myths, changing endings, characters and character relationships to suit their own thematic needs. Sometimes the same playwright would produce different versions of the myth – depending on their specific intentions.

Homer and The Iliad

Homer is at the centre of Greek and particularly Athenian life. Homer is credited with constructing the two key epic poems which contain the myth of the Trojan war. The Iliad – the story of Ilium – deals with a few months in the tenth year of the Trojan War. It is an epic poem. It was probably first written down in something like the form it would have had in classical Athens about 200 years previously, at the end of the “Dark Ages” – around 700BCE. Until that point it was part of the oral tradition and even in classical Athens would have been recited, in parts, by rhapsodes rather than read. The same is true of The Odyssey –the story of Odysseus’ travels back to Ithacca from Troy at the end of the war.

The Iliad begins with the word “Rage” and ends with the line “So the Trojans buried Hector, breaker of horses.” It is the story of how the rage of Achilles leads not just to the deaths of many Greeks but also to the death of the noble Trojan prince Hector and to his own. The poem ends though, not with the destruction of Troy, but months earlier, with the return of Hector’s body, taken by Achilles, to his father, King Priam of Troy. It is not a conventional narrative of war.

The Trojan myth and its prominence in Athens in particular tells us a lot about how the Athenians viewed war. The story of Troy is a genocide narrative. Early in Book 1 Agamemnon, leader of the Greek (Achaean) forces says to his brother Menelaus (whose wife Helen has been “stolen” by the Trojan prince Paris and is the cause of the conflict) that all the Trojans must die, “even the babies in their mother’s bellies.” The destruction of the family line and of the city is something that caused the Athenians great horror – the Troy myth is a story of Greeks committing a series of terrible, genocidal crimes. These crimes though are in response to an equally bad crime – Paris has disrespected the idea of xenia – guest friendship – by running off with Helen whilst a guest of her husband. It is the same crime the suitors commit in Ithaca when they seek to marry Penelope whilst Odysseus is lost after the end of the war. Guest friendship is Zeus’ special concern and thus disrespecting it is a great offence to him.

Book 1 of the The Iliad deals with why Achilles experiences rage in the first place. It is central to understanding the key Greek ideal – the heroic ethos. The Book begins with a terrible plague striking down the Greeks. They are told it is punishment from Apollo because Agamemnon has taken the daughter of a priest of Apollo as his war prize and refuses to return her. War prizes are material expressions of a heroes bravery and battle prowess. They are the evidence that the rest of the community holds them in high honour and they indicate that the hero has won glory.

Achilles argues with Agamemnon and demands he return his war prize – for the good of the rest of the army. A good leader should put the community first. This angers Agamemnon – it would besmirch his honour. He agrees, only if he is given another war prize and the one he wants belongs to Achilles. When Achilles war prize is taken away; he refuses to fight anymore and goes a step further – he asks his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, to plead with Zeus to kill as many Greeks as possible as punishment for the offence they have done him.

The heroic ethos is a set of ideas about what it means to be a hero.

-          Bravery

-          Battle prowess (being very good at fighting, but also being crafty or clever – heroes can have brain or brawn and often both)

-          Honour (having material evidence that other heroes and the community respect you)

-          Glory (having one’s name live on forever)

-          Having the love and assistance of one or more gods.

None of these criteria suggest that the person needs to be “good” – Agamemnon, the “pig of Greek literature” to quote Australian Homer scholar Chris Mackie, is still a hero. Paris and Hector, the Trojan princes, are both heroes.

To be a “good” man though, a hero would also have to fight to protect his family and put his city’s needs before his own. This is the dilemma that Hector finds himself in in Book 6 of The Iliad – he can’t protect his family and also fight in the front row of battle to defend his city. It’s the kind of paradox that the Greeks loved. The Troy myth starts with a similar impossible choice between two unbearable options – but for Agamemnon. When the Greek fleet is supposed to set sail from Aulis the winds die. To raise the winds, Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. He can’t protect his child and lead the army. He chooses to sacrifice his daughter and that choice eventually leads to his own death at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra (Helen’s sister!). It is a story dealt with in Aeschylus’ cycle of plays The Oresteia.

Monsters in The Iliad

There are no monsters in The Iliad. In the poem the acts of monstrosity are those committed by men. Old heroes like Nestor look back on a better time when men fought monsters, not each other. The only monster is in a story told within the narrative of Book 6 about the hero Bellerophon and his fight with the Chimera.

Greek Theatre

There are three tragedians and one comedic playwright that we have extant works for. There were many more that we have as only names or fragments. Even for the playwrights where we have many of their works, there are many more missing or that we know of only from titles and fragments.

In chronological order they are :

Aeschylus – the most traditional, with significant use of the Chorus and with only two voice actors. He wrote the only tragedy that is not based in myth – The Persians, about the battle of Salamis.

Sophocles – competed with Aeschylus. He was a prominent politician himself and probably a close friend of Athenian leader Pericles. He introduces a third voice actor.

Euripides – writes characters that are more psychologically “real”. He is known for his particularly beautiful lyrics in the choral odes. He competed with Sophocles. He went into self-imposed exile during the Peloponnesian War.

Euripides is sometimes described as writing humans as they are whereas Sophocles writes them as they should be!

Aristophanes, the one comic playwright we have extant examples from, is roughly contemporary with Sophocles. He writes Lysistrata towards the end of the Peloponnesian War. He is writing in a genre called Old Comedy. It is explicitly political, usually highly satirical and contains a lot of physical, slapstick and scatological humour. Actors in comedy would have been grotesquely masked and had costumes with over-sized buttocks, breasts (if they were female) and huge phalluses (if they were male). Much of the humour in the plays would have been achieved by characters running about and tripping over their own over-sized genitalia. Aristophanes comedy is supposed to be funny, but its also often very bitter, and bitingly critical of political opponents.

Women

While the position of women in Athenian society feels deeply foreign to 21^st century eyes – it would be anachronistic to view it as “sexist”. The Greeks in general and the Athenians in particular, had a deep fear of the power of women. Most Greek mythological monsters are female – the gorgons, the Scylla, the Harpies, the sirens, the Amazons. The exception is the Minotaur – a male monster created by the monstrous pairing of a queen and a bull.

Athens’ patron god is Athena Parthenos – the Parthenos is the girl in the liminal state before she is married and becomes a woman. It is the state in which women are considered most powerful and most dangerous. That’s why so many young women die on their wedding days in Greek myth.

Women’s power and danger is linked to sexuality. The most powerful god (at least in some senses), more powerful than Zeus because even Zeus is under her power, is Aphrodite. She’s not the goddess of love – she’s the goddess of women’s sexual appetite and power, especially outside of marriage. She’s older than Zeus, born from the “sea foam” when the genitals of Uranus are thrown into the sea by his son Chronus who seeks to overcome him. She is one of the old, dark, chthonic gods whereas the rest of the Olympians are children of Chronus, including Zeus, who overthrew him.

In practical terms, wealthy women were secluded from public life, generally in the second storey of the house. They were responsible for running the household and vitally for weaving. All cloth production was done domestically. The ideal woman in Greek myth is “white-armed”. Hera – the god of marriage is always described with this epithet. So is Hector’s wife Andromache, and Odysseus’ wife Penelope. It implies that they stayed inside and did the weaving! The Athenians in particular were afraid of women’s rampant sexuality. Women without men to “protect” them were dangerous. Penelope is held up as such an ideal because she waited for her husband to return and in fact found ways to protect herself from the advances of the suitors. She uses the ruse of weaving a shroud for her father in law – which she unpicks each night. This connection between protecting her virtue and the art of weaving is no coincidence.

It would be wrong to see women as hated or even mistreated. There were laws preventing domestic violence and even violence against household slaves was frowned upon. Women were married young – probably about 14 – but there were protections including their dowries and they could ask for divorce – though only via a male relative. If a woman’s husband died, it was the responsibility of his family and hers to find her another husband or to take her and her children back and protect them. Funerary monuments and the inscriptions on them suggest great affection between husbands and wives, with very moving scenes and verses.

Women in other Greek city states had varying statuses. In Sparta women probably owned and certainly controlled property – a necessity of a system where the men were segregated into barracks. We have statues showing Spartan girls running and they certainly participated in athletic competition.

Homosexuality

There was no moral problem with either male or female homosexuality. Both are shown in vase painting; though acts of male homosexuality are more frequent. There was no separate homosexual identity. People were not “homosexual” but most men would have engaged in homosexual activity at some point in their lives.

There was probably a separation between the casual sexual activity, both heterosexual and homosexual that adult males engaged in with slaves, performers, dancing girls and boys and prostitutes of both genders and the more formalised relationships of lover and beloved.

There appears to have been a short period in boys’ lives from about the moment they enter puberty, when they were considered highly attractive to slightly older male admirers. These admirers were unlikely to have been much older than 18 to 20 – young men not yet of marriageable age, but no longer boys. The older man would send his beloved gifts, hares are common in vase painting, but also more expensive items – like the vases themselves which often have kalos inscriptions. Kalos translates as beautiful but has erotic implications and implies the admired is male. The boys were under no obligation to accept these proposals. If they did, sex was generally intercrural (between the thighs) – if the explicit images on vase paintings are accurate! Aristophanes is particularly disparaging of anyone who engages in anal sex and of older men (married men) who still pursue young lovers.

In Plato’s Symposium, a collection of stories about love supposedly told one night at a drinking party (symposium) by prominent Athenians; it is Aristophanes that tells the charming story of the time in the distant past when humans were four-armed, four-legged creatures with two bodies and two heads but joined. Some were male, some were female and some were hermaphrodites. Because humans could satisfy all our emotional and physical needs within ourselves in this form, the gods became jealous and divided us from ourselves – making the two legged creatures we now are. That’s why humans always seem to be searching for their other halves and why some people’s ideal partner is of the same gender and some prefer the opposite! It’s a satire certainly – but says a lot about how the Athenians viewed sexuality; and love.

Aeschylus' The Persians and Herodotus' The Histories

One of the things to notice about Aeschylus’ The Persians, is the grandness of the language - its epic qualities. Its the oldest play we have extant - and unusual because its not based in the semi-mythical world. It contains very long Choral odes and very long monologues - two speaking parts at most in most scenes. But even though its about a contemporary event - only eight years after the Battle of Salamis it describes - it keeps that common aspect of so much tragedy in that it focuses on the Other - on The Persians. There are no Greeks in the play and none mentioned by name.

Those aspects of the play are very significant. Firstly, as an early tragedy, with only the two speaking parts; it gives us insight into how tragedy was developing in Athens. Remember that this is still only about 50 years after the Democracy has been established and theatre itself is a relatively new art form. Later, when you look at Euripides or Sophocles – who use three speaking parts in scenes and build up much more the relationships between characters – it becomes obvious how different to modern theatre, or even later Greek tragedy, Aeschylus is.

This focus on the Other is also important. Greek tragedies are rarely set in Athens – even though that’s where the art form flourished. The Athenians seem to want to keep their distance from the terrible crimes and hubris of the characters they are observing in the tragedies. When tragedy does come to Athens – in the Eumenidies that ends the Oresteia or in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus – the terrible crimes have already been committed and Athens acts as refuge and healer. The same is true in Euripides Medea; where Medea makes her escape after killing her children, to the refuge of Athens. While The Persians is about an event that the contemporary audience members participated in; its set a long way away in the Persian court. No contemporary Greek is mentioned by name. Aeschylus has his Greek audience observe the pain that war, and defeat in war in particular brings by having them watch the impact of their victory on their enemies. But we have to be careful – this is not glorifying victory – though Aeschylus is proud of the heroic nature of the Athenians who defended their city and his descriptions have the ring of Homeric epic. Tragedy uses the Other because it is often too painful to see the crimes committed as our own – to warn Athens against its own possible hubris; Aeschylus shows us the hubris of the enemy. In other tragedies, tragedians achieve the same thing by setting the stories in the semi-mythical past; in other cities or by focusing on the Other for Athenian citizens – women, slaves and foreigners.

The Persians connection with the Histories is because of the shared events - but more so the shared fear of hubris and the almost inevitable results of Empire building. Neither Herodotus or Aeschylus have quite got to the point of codifying this the way Thucydides *does maybe only a few years after Herodotus is "published" - Thucydides explicitly states that the problem with empire building is that once you have an empire, to hold on to it you have to expand; but by expanding you risk over-reach and losing the Empire altogether.

Its a sentiment which Herodotus is expressing in the proem (the introduction in Book 1 – 1:1-5) - when he talks about the fact that small nations were once large and large nations are likely to become small. Its an understanding of the cyclic nature of existence which is common across Presocratic philosophy and is a part of the Greek view of the world - but Herodotus gives it a new and political form in The Histories. He moves it from physis to nomos** - and Thucydides expands on this (though he'd never admit an intellectual debt to Herodotus). In other words, Herodotus takes what seems to be a law of nature – there are seasons and cycles and applies it to human civilisation. And by so doing implies that there is a strong degree of human agency in those cycles. It is our own acts of hubris; our refusal to read the signs accurately; or to listen to wise advisers – which means our great cities fall. Equally, its human agency which has built them in the first place. Herodotus tells us in the proem that he is recording the great deeds of Greeks and barbarians so that all may have their glory – he’s deeply interested in the accomplishments of human thought and ingenuity and not just on the battlefield. That’s why he tells us stories about sporting prowess as well as battle prowess and is deeply interested in the political machinations among both the Persians and the Greeks.

A key question is the extent to which Herodotus uses Aeschylus’ text to create his own. There are certainly differences between them and we can assume that Herodotus did his own researches – probably interviewing people who had been there. Though if we are to believe that his Histories was “published” around 420BCE and even if he had been conducting his research for many years prior to this; men who fought at Marathon and Salamis would have been very elderly when they spoke to him.

Nonetheless, Herodotus used all the sources available to him – and there is likely to have been other accounts which are now lost to us. He would have been familiar with Aeschylus’ play and may even have seen it performed – though probably not at its original performance as he would have still been relatively young and probably not in Athens.

This leads us to ask questions about why the accounts are different, but also what the similarities mean. Presumably the two writers have purposes, which are similar but not necessarily the same. Both are trying to offer some kind of warning – Aeschylus in the early days of the creation of an Athenian Empire; Herodotus by the time that Empire has found itself in a devastating war with Sparta. Aeschylus is an Athenian – and proud of it. He fought at Marathon and his brother died there. This brother is named by Herodotus – “Cynegirus…the son of Euphorion.” (6:114) – and though Herodotus doesn’t make the connection explicit himself, both he and his readers must have understood this. It feels like a nod in the direction of Aeschylus and his version of events in the later Battle at Salamis. Unlike Aeschylus though, Herodotus comes from the edges of the Greek world – while he is likely to have visited Athens – he was born in Halicarnassus – a city that fought on the side of Xerxes at Salamis. Herodotus gives a lot of space in the account to the warrior queen Artmesia – and he is clearly proud of her achievements.

This means we have two commentators on events coming from very different perspectives – but in many ways arriving at the same conclusions – hubris, over-reach – will lead to disaster. But also, that the heroic acts of all people – Greek and barbarian alike are worth considering and glorifying.

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Notes

*- Thucydides is the author of The History of the Peloponnesian War. He saw himself as being more objective than Herodotus and more focused on the “facts” rather than storytelling. He was an Athenian general. His two key ideas are the one above about empire building and the idea, borrowed from Hippocratic medical philosophy, that like diseases social and political problems (like war) can be diagnosed and that if the same “symptoms” are present, the the same prognosis (result) can be expected. In other words – you can look at a situation that has occurred in the past, see what happened and predict that if that situation arises again and is dealt with the same way – the result will be the same. He argues that wars like the Peloponnesian War will continue as long as people ignore the “symptoms”. He may well have been right!

** - Nomos and physis are two key ideas in Greek thought – they are difficult to translate into English. Nomos can be seen as culture or the human element; whereas physis is more like nature. Sometimes they are translated to mean the laws of a society and the laws of nature. Nomos is often associated with the order created by life in the polis – in the city; whereas physis has an element of the chaos of the natural world. You could also think of it as the things that humans can control and the things they can’t.

Fate and Free Will

Fate, destiny, Necessity, the will of the gods are all the driving forces in Greek tragedy. The idea of Free Will, in its modern sense, comes from the Protestant Reformation and the 18^th century enlightenment. It is an anachronistic concept we shouldn’t apply to the Classical texts. Free Will in a modern sense is the opposite of Predestination – the idea that we can change nothing by our actions or that even those actions we believe to be free are in fact predestined. In Greek thought these two opposites don’t exist in the same way – Fate is real; but so is human choice within that. Our fate, and the choices we make on the way towards it are able to exist together.

The gods may know the fate of humans and we may not be able to avoid that fate; but that doesn’t mean that human characters in the tragedies don’t have choices available to them. In fact human choice is central – we may not be able to avoid our fate, but we can make a choice about how we face it.

Classical tragedy can appear deterministic – in other words – what will happen is laid out beforehand and the human characters are simply towed along by Necessity or Fate. This is simplistic. Certainly by the time Plato is writing, at the end of the Fifth century; there is much debate about human choice; about good and bad choices and what drives us to make them. This philosophical debate finds expression in tragedy too.

Let’s look at an example. Oedipus is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. His father before him has been given this oracle and now so has he. Fearing he can avoid it no other way; he runs away from it. Literally, running in the opposite direction to the city he believes is his home. This is a choice he makes. He chooses also to kill an old man on the road. And he chooses to fight the Sphinx and accept the prize for doing this – a woman as wife, old enough to be his mother…

He then chooses to get to the bottom of why there is a plague in Thebes – even though his wife and the wise seer Tiresias counsel him against these actions. His choices all lead him to one place – the unavoidable knowledge that in running from Fate, he ran straight into it. He has killed his father and been awarded his own mother as wife. He has walked with eyes open into his crime and now he faces another choice. His choice is to punish himself with blindness and in so doing to become the fully self-actualised man. He encapsulates one of the two important aphorisms of the Delphic oracle – Know Thyself. (The other is Everything in Moderation – something Oedipus could have done with emulating!).

When Oedipus appears on stage having blinded himself; he says “I am Oedipus”. In this moment he accepts himself, faces his Fate and acknowledges it is his own choices that have brought him there. Oedipus can’t escape Fate but he chooses to face it on his feet, bravely and ironically with his eyes fully open to the truth for the first time.

Agamemnon is our other example. He has a stark choice presented to him. Sacrifice his daughter at Aulis; or not be able to lead the Achaean troops to Troy. Its worth noting that one way or another the Greek gods would have got the Trojan War that they seem so urgently to want. Agamemnon can’t stop the war – he certainly doesn’t want to. All he can do is make a choice about his role in it.

Later when he chooses to burn the city to the ground and not prevent the descecration of the altars or when he strides to his death across the blood red tapestries laid out for him by Clytemnestra; he is also making choices. He cannot avoid his Fate (and at this point despite warnings he doesn’t even know what it is!)  – the avenging Fury will succeed in killing him once he enters her domain – he can though choose how he meets that fate. Like everything else in his life Agamemnon chooses arrogance and hubris.

In both cases the characters are Fated – but the playwrights have been able to introduce the idea of human choice; agency. Its not free will, Oedipus and Agamemnon cannot avoid what will be – but they can choose how they face it.

Were Free Will in the modern sense be an idea available to the tragedians, then human choices would change the outcome. But Free Will is not a concept the ancient Greeks use – so instead human choice only changes whether the characters are able to face their inevitable fates with dignity and grace (or in Agamemnon’s case – without it!).

That seems to me to be a very powerful and human message. And probably much more useful than any ideas about free will anyways!

Introduction (How to use this blog)

I teach Classical Studies and Ancient History - but mainly I teach young people!
Over twenty five years of teaching I've built up a big collection of resources, teaching ideas and the kind of synthesis of knowledge that means I can lecture off the top of my head on Classical text. Sometimes for hours. Ask my students!
This blog then is an attempt to collect together a lot of those resources - mostly readers and beginner's guides I've written for students and other teachers over the years.
At least in Australia, where I teach, our text list changes regularly. Students need to get their heads round complex texts and they need to be able to compare these in terms of ideas, techniques and socio-historic context. Its a challenging task because it asks for a deep understanding not just of the text - but of the world that produced it. Its Classical Studies in a genuine way - our students act like real classicists - albeit ones reading the text in translation.
As a teacher it means I've had to consider these texts from a range of angles - and consider a variety of options for comparison - it leads, I think, to a much deeper appreciation of how the Classical world is deeply connected.
I love teaching students about that great Sophoclean tragedy - Oedipus the King - forget all that free will nonsense that later commentators have imposed on the text. What a narrow, anachronous reading. Oedipus, returning to the stage after the dreadful death of his mother wife and after the terrible act of blinding he has performed on himself. There he stands, dominating the stage, blood dripping from his empty eye sockets; in gouts down his cheeks. His first words, depending on translation of course, are "I am Oedipus!". In those three words he completely reclaims his kingship; his power and dignity and most importantly his humanity. He is the fully self-actualised man. Oedipus teachers us what it is to be human. To suffer. To be humiliated. To face up to your own unspeakable crimes. To seek the truth and accept the consequences of that truth. And to take action rather than being a passive recipient of the Fate the gods have laid out for us.
I can't think of any lessons we can teach young people that are more important than those.
Over the coming weeks and months I'll start putting up the various bits and pieces of a quarter of a century of reading, thinking and talking with young people about these ideas. I hope a few other people might find them useful.