Greeks, Americans, and Political Factions

As you’ve noticed I have been reading about ancient Greek drama. I was interested in the transition from serious drama to comedy that occurred in the time of Aristophanes, and the chapter on the subject mentioned Aristophanes political views. The following description comes from H.J. Rose, The Handbook of Greek Literature:

“Aristophanes was a supporter of the old Conservative party in Athens. That is to say he was opposed to extreme democracy and to the Peloponnesian War. Not advocating peace at any price but supporting whatever steps were necessary to avoid war. He took this position as a traditional Athenian who as a member of the land holding class, saw little gain from imperial expansion and overseas trade and much to lose if Attica was invaded by the Spartans. The opposite group, containing those who were more staunchly democratic, were artisans and tradesmen who saw a benefit from the demand for goods that war would bring. Rowers would be needed for the navy, the poor would be absorbed into the service, and be paid.”

So what we see here is a left wing of hawks and a right wing of doves. Interesting to compare it to the United States where the left wing are doves and the right wing hawks. What is the difference?

In our country Democrats favor the people and Republicans favor business. Generally speaking the Democrats worry about what can be done domestically to improve the lives of the public. That focus is more important to them than foreign policy which is complicated and takes money away from domestic needs. The Republicans favor a strong foreign policy because it protects their business interests -- more important to them than the needs of the people.

The key difference between Greece and the United States is that the Greeks, as an agrarian society, could do well producing for domestic consumption. In our world economy that doesn’t work. Wages are highest in the United States, so to be competitive we have to produce goods elsewhere. That production is protected by a strong foreign policy.

Of course the Greeks would laugh at the irony of the recent efforts of the “party of the people” which is moving away from the democracy they espouse to a bureaucratic government of regulation and control. If this goes far enough the we’ll end up less of a democracy than we are today – perhaps an oligarchy of the Congress.

Theater of Dionysus Athens

The drawing below depicts the structure of the Theater of Dionysus in Athens. The action occurs in the orchestra; a platform were the actors stood during performances. Since the Dionysian festival was religious in nature, an altar was located in the center of the orchestra for sacrifices.
The Skene (original meaning “tent”) was a large wooden wall used for the backdrop. It could also be decorated as part of the set. The Skene was a substantial structure because it had to incorporate a lifting apparatus to be used to suspend actors in the air. In the case of one play, the entire chorus went to visit Zeus and “flew” to Mount Olympus. There were two (or three) openings cut in the Skene connected to long ramps called Parodos. These ramps were used for entrances and exits for the actors.

The Paraskenia was a roofed building which housed the dressing rooms and costumes for the actors. Next to the public seating was a roofed building called the Odeon of Pericles which provided shelter in case of inclement weather.

I looked at the many pictures of the Theater on the internet and few if any depict it as it was during the time of Pericles. Some show a Skene constructed out of stone, others a stage. These either represent later versions of the original theater or a reconstruction under the period of the Roman occupation.

The Theater of Dionysus

The picture below locates the Theater of Dionysus near the Acropolis in Athens. Most of the structures on the Acropolis were destroyed during the Persian invasion in 480 B.C. Construction of a new Parthenon was begun after the war but not completed until 431.



The Theater of Dionysus was located on the southeast side of the Acropolis. Destroyed at least twice, the current remains are part of a Roman reconstruction. To its right is the Odeon of Pericles, a roofed structure designed for rehearsals and to shelter the public in case of inclement weather. The theater supposedly held as many as 17,000.

Greek Tragedy As Intellectual Expression

We’ve been talking about the intellectual accomplishments of the ancient Greeks and unique contribution they made to the history of mankind. This creative capability existed in both the Dorian and Ionian races because we know that Sparta made a contribution to the arts before its militaristic political system cut off artistic expression. Still the majority of the output occurred in Athens where the people’s sense of freedom combined with the wonder they felt about life produced a wellspring for creativity.

Tragic drama is an interesting facet of the Greek cultural contribution because the body of work is monumental. Indeed, as scholars rate the great dramatic playwrights of all time, three out of the top four were Greeks from the golden age of Athens – Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

The drama plays began as a part of the Festival of Dionysus in the sixth century B.C. Dionysus was the Greek god of wine, inspirer of madness and ecstasy, and the god of theater. He was celebrated in a rural Dionysia in late fall and a city Dionysia in March. The Greeks loved to dance and sing so a festival honoring the wine god would certainly be a wonderful pretext for merriment. The Dionysia was a merging of religion and joy like no other. The first day of the festival featured a grand parade ending at the Theater of Dionysus. Included in the procession were sacrificial animals, sons of those who died in battle, and the political leadership of Athens.

On the second day, the schedule of dramatic plays was announced and judges were selected by lot. Three playwrights put on three of their own dramatic plays along with one satyr play. The satyr play featured a mythology-based plot in a burlesque style probably designed to be a break for the audience after the intensity of the dramas.

The dramas were designed to teach the public the important virtues of life, validate the political system of Athens, and criticize its enemies. All the public was invited including the poor who were given money to buy their tickets. Many times the comment has been made that the drama plays were more democratic than the democracy of Athens because the plots included groups, like women and slaves, who had no rights in the political system.

The plays were very structured: in meter with a specific format to the dialog. Each play featured a chorus that sang or provided an external view of the action. The number of actors was limited to three and they wore masks. There was also a chorus included which took the role of an external observer of the action.

Once a dramas were concluded, the judges voted and the winners were announced. Of the three giants of Greek drama, Aeschylus wrote 70-90 plays of which seven survive. All seven won first prize at the Dionysia. Sophocles wrote 123 plays of which seven survive. He won twenty-four times and never finished lower than second. Euripides wrote 91 plays of which eighteen survive. Euripides won first prize four times.

Aeschylus was considered the father of Greek drama. As a religious man and philosopher, his plays were more rough in structure as he developed the model. Sophocles brought the form to its highest level in terms of structure and balance between the story and the moral. Euripides, impatient with what came before him and overtly emotional, brought the inner thoughts and anxieties of his characters into his plays. His works represent a drop off in the traditional form. After Euripides, drama declined and it was replaced by comedy, most notably that of Aristophanes.

The great period of Greek drama spanned the period from 472 B.C, when Aeschylus’ The Persians was performed, to 401, when Sophocles Oedipus of Colonus was performed posthumously. The form had been created, reached perfection, and died in a century. Because art reflects the mood of a culture, the end of classical drama in Greece is not surprising when one considers the impact of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). Perhaps the Greeks found their dramas too depressing and needed comedies to help them deal with the occupation of the Spartans.

Dorians and Ionians

According to historians, the ancient Greek people were made up of Dorians and Ionians; tribes who migrated from the north into Greece during the Mycenaean Era. The Peloponnese was Dorian while the Attica Peninsula and the western coast of Asia Minor were populated by Ionians. Dorians had their own dialect of Greek and observed their own festival-laden calendar.

Most people who know a little Greek history are familiar with the Dorian and Ionic columns of Greek Architecture.

The Greeks used these designations to relate each type to its ancient race, although it is not clear whether there was any connection. Doric columns were used in mainland Greece and Sicily: Ionic in western Asia Minor. The most famous Greek temple, The Parthenon, is constructed in the Doric style.

The Doric order is older and more simple than the Ionic. The use of a Metope (square block of stone between Triglyphs) may have been part of a transition from wooden buildings which the space occupied by the Metope was the opening between two roof beams.

Timeline of the Golden Age of Greece

The chart below (click to enlarge) was put together to compare the intellectual accomplishments of the Greeks around the time of the Golden Age of Athens. The list includes philosophers, playwrights, scientists, mathematicians, the poet Pindar, and Hippocrates who is known as the “father of medicine”.



The two horizontal bars delineate the period of greatest achievement, which brackets the Golden Age of Pericles (464-431).

It’s interesting to note that the Greek philosophers overlapped each other over a three hundred and sixty year period as each built on the accomplishments of his predecessors. We see how the tragic playwrights were active during the time of the Persian Wars and into the golden age.

Plato lived through the decline of Athens and Aristotle, as Alexander’s tutor lived through the transition from an independent Greece to Greece as a part of the Macedonian Empire.

The Greek Mind

What is it about the Greeks that enabled them to create the unique civilization we admire twenty five hundred years later -- a civilization some might argue has never been matched. To try and get at the answer, we look at the setting that fostered the building of a Greek identity, starting with the Greek dark ages and progressing to the classical period during the 5th century B.C. when the intellectual Greece reached its zenith.

In the time before the Greeks, man saw life as a dark and risky experience. Priests were part of each tribe and carried the responsibility for interpreting the will of the gods, which was not something that could only be understood by “specialists”.

The Greeks were able to escape the primitive view of the world and become enlightened as individuals. How?

Part of the story is the geography of Greece: mountainous with areas of extraordinarily fertile land, sitting at the connection of Europe to Asia, and not easy to invade. The mountains separated the people into local tribes, and those human colonies evolved into cities of equals. No aristocracy developed because there was no way to accumulate wealth; no way for a king to buy power. Military leaders ruled because each city had to be able to defend itself. Geography kept the colonies small and homogeneous -- the right setting for evolving the Polis.

Still geography does not tell us the whole story. It doesn’t tell us why the Greek mind began to wonder about man’s place in the world. To these first thinkers, the world seemed predictable and not magical. Physical events could be shown to repeat themselves meaning there must be order to the universe.

But the Greeks were thinking more broadly than the laws of physics. They adopted a unique synthesis of mind and spirit which has seldom existed before or since. Everything was looked at in terms of the whole and not its parts. Human beings were seen as part of a species even though they are individuals. The Greeks understood anatomy but realized a heart is the same in everyone. When they designed a building, the Greeks took into account its surroundings and how it fit in the space – the whole as important as the parts. Famous men were interested in everything as we see in the philosophers who were trying to learn all that could be known.

The Greek spirit is what we are missing today -- the experience of the joy of life. They played games for the purity of athleticism and competition and not for any other purpose. How sad to compare the Roman games of slaughter with the Olympics! They reveled in the joy of beauty and the appreciation of beautiful things. They described virtue as “beautiful” giving an aesthetic trait to human character.

The Romans never had the Greek spirit. They were “mind” only. Look at a problem, solve it, and move on. The context doesn’t matter; only the finished product – best army, best temples, best roads – but spiritless.

The same problem exists in the world today. We have become pieces separated from the whole – there is no whole. Only the individual matters, and individual rights over the rights of the people as a whole. Our minds have produced the greatest “things” but what does owning a designer shirt mean? Only more self-serving isolation from the rest of mankind.