How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (48 page)

The play takes place in an upscale restaurant. There are two sets of diners, each of which is spotlighted in turn until the end, when it evolves that they have an uneasy connection to each other and they begin to communicate directly. There's a quiet couple, Matt and Suki, playfully talking about their romance, about sex. The larger, more boisterous group consists of a quartet of sozzled vulgarians out for a celebratory night on the town: two brothers, Lambert and Russell, married to two sisters, Julie and Prue. These four may be wearing expensive (if a tad cheesy) togs, but they're essentially working-class—not all that different,
beneath their suits and cocktail dresses, from the grim couple in
The Room
(which was presented with
Celebration
as a double bill). Lambert and Julie, Russell and Prue are cheerfully, loudly ignorant (they don't know whether they've just been to the ballet or the opera), coarse (“they don't want their sons to be fucked by other girls,” one of these aging girls cries out, apropos of mothers-in-law), and wholly unconcerned if everyone else in the restaurant knows it. The men are clearly rich and smug about the success they've snatched from the Nineties glut. (Russell's a banker, and Matt and Lambert are “strategy consultants.”)

Appearing onstage from time to time to disrupt these two groups are three members of the restaurant's staff: the maître d', who's very solicitous of his customers' pleasure; his assistant, Sonia, a young woman who chats with the two parties and can't help revealing intimate things about herself (she's a hilarious parody of stereotypical British insularity: “You don't have to speak English to enjoy good food,” she says, with some incredulity, after telling a story about a trip abroad); and, finally, a young waiter, who constantly interrupts both parties. “Do you mind if I interject?” he'll ask, each time, and then launch into stories about his now-dead grandfather and all the famous people he'd known and all the world-historical events he'd been grazed by. At one point, it's Hollywood in the Thirties; at another, it's Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of the First World War. The sheer, loony excess of these fevered riffs generates its own kind of hilarity:

Funny as this almost Homeric name-dropping is, it's the waiter and his heedlessly eager, puppy-dog attempts to interject, to insert himself, however inappropriately, into the proceedings that give the play its tension, poignancy, and meaning. Without him, the interactions among the two sets of diners would constitute a typical Pinter “drama.” Their vacuous, self-important chitchat and boasting and flirting would be entertaining—this is by far the funniest play Pinter has written; even if there had been those silences, you'd never have heard them, the audience was laughing so much—without being anything beyond a static parody of the avarice and greed that flourished in the last decade of the century. (Here again you think of Peter Greenaway, with whose
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
, that vitriolic send-up of Thatcher-era greed, the new Pinter work shares a certain mood and style.)

But as the waiter keeps trying to catch the attention of his self-important, superficial charges, it's hard not to start noticing which names he drops. The eponymous celebration in this rich play may be an anniversary party—that's what the characters think, at any rate—but it soon becomes clear that what
Celebration
is celebrating, or at least marking, is the passing of the twentieth century. What this waiter keeps interjecting is, in fact, an endless string of references to gigantic swaths of twentieth-century culture: books, film, the Hollywood studio system, Mitteleuropa, Kafka, the Three Stooges, and so on. It's his third and final speech, with its reference to the assassinated archduke, that clues you in: before your eyes the whole twentieth century passes, from its beginning (the outbreak of World War I), to its middle, and right through to its tawdry end. But of course the diners don't really listen, because they've been blinded to the culture, to the century itself and its meanings, by their own narrow greed—by the kind of success that the century and its culture have, ironically, made possible, if not indeed inevitable.

Most of Pinter's work shows you evil things, and for that reason can upset you in some way, but precisely because he so often stacks the dramatic deck, so often tries to make up your mind for you, the plays are depressing without being the least bit tragic. What makes
Celebration
so provocative is the way in which it tantalizes you, as real tragedy
does, with the specter of missed opportunities. The fact that its subject—what it is that its characters are talking about, even if they can't hear each other—is world-historical, and has a great deal to do with this specific postmillennial, post-ideological moment, gives this short, vivid work a deep political gravity that none of the more obtuse “political” plays can match. You feel, for the first time, as if something's at stake here—something, that is, other than the playwright's feelings. In the week and a half of the Pinter Festival, with its nine plays and numerous showings of the films, its onstage valentines posing as discussions, all accompanied by the endless drone of ongoing press adulation, you feel that here, at last, was something you wouldn't mind being forced to watch.

—The New York Review of Books,
October 4, 2001

T
he early spring of 431
B.C
. witnessed, at Athens, the beginning of a great war, the commencement of a great book, and the première of a great play.

The war was the culmination of fifty years of simmering tensions between two superpowers: the Athenian empire and the Spartan alliance. It was, naturally, advertised by each side as a war of liberation (each of the antagonists claimed to be freeing some injured third party), but it was really a struggle for total domination of the Greek world. Like some other world wars, it began relatively small—a diplomatic crisis involving Corinth, a Spartan ally; some low-level combat in a small town near Athens—but it eventually metastasized into a conflict that lasted nearly three decades, involved numerous states both Greek and non-Greek, and resulted, finally, in the defeat and disarmament of Athens and the abolition of her democratic institutions. Because Sparta and her allies dominated the large southern peninsula called the Peloponnesus—and, more to the point, because the men who wrote the best-known histories of the conflict were Athenians—the war would come to be called the “Peloponnesian.” The Spartans, as the Yale historian Donald Kagan dryly points out in
The Peloponnesian War
, his brisk
if tendentious new history of the war, probably thought of the conflict as the “Athenian War”; but then, there were no Spartan historians to call it that.

The book was the work of an affluent young Athenian who, on the hunch that the conflict just getting under way that spring would be “a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past,” began taking notes “at the very outbreak” of hostilities. About the life of the historian we know relatively little, apart from the crucial fact that he himself commanded troops in the war—something you might have guessed anyway, since an officer's crisp lack of sentimentality informs nearly every page of his work, which would come, in fact, to be valued above all for a scrupulous insistence on getting the story straight, on allowing readers to “see the past clearly” for themselves. This soldier-historian gives his name in the first line of his book, which had no official name and which is generally referred to as the
History
. He was called Thucydides.

The play was by an Athenian citizen in his mid-fifties who'd been writing for the theater since the age of thirty. Like the war, the play involved trouble in Corinth and some minor violence that eventually came home to roost in Athens; as with the war, it would be some time before people appreciated its magnitude. (The year the play was entered in the annual springtime dramatic competition at Athens, the year the Peloponnesian War began, it took third prize.) The playwright's name was Euripides. The play was called
Medea
.

 

Thucydides'
History
is the only extant eyewitness account of the first twenty years of a war that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen up until then—what he called “the greatest disturbance in the history of the Hellenes, affecting also a large part of the non-Hellenic world, and indeed, I might almost say, the whole of mankind.” The war lasted so long that the author didn't live to finish his manuscript; it ends in midsentence during a description of the aftermath of a naval battle in 411. (We do know, from references in his text, that he lived to see Athens's ultimate surrender, in 404.) But such was his achievement that others who wrote about the war—for instance Xenophon,
whose
Hellenica
covers the final decade of fighting—began where Thucydides left off.

Until the Peloponnesian War, warfare among the various Greek city-states had for centuries been a regular, predictable, and unsentimental affair—part of the rhythmic cycle of seasons. You planted your crops in the spring, went away to do battle with this or that enemy in the summer, and (hopefully) came back in autumn for the harvest. Wars were decided by the outcome of a single pitched battle on a single day, after which the victorious army set up a victory trophy and headed home. Then the whole cycle would repeat itself the next year.

The war that began in the spring of 431, however, represented what Kagan rightly calls “a fundamental departure” from this tradition—not only in scope, and complexity, and length, but also in savagery and bitterness. It began, that night early in 431, with a nocturnal sneak attack by the Thebans, allies of Sparta, on a small Athenian protectorate called Plataea—a sordid violation of the norms of Greek warfare that set the tone for things to come. As the conflict roiled on over many years, on many fronts, from the Hellespont to Sicily to the coast of Asia Minor, and under the banners of many Spartan kings and many Athenian governments, with many victories and defeats for both sides, none of which signaled a clear resolution to the conflict, it began to seem frustratingly unwinnable—not that it was any longer clear just what “winning” might consist of. The result, as Kagan emphasizes at the outset of his own retelling of it, was a cycle of cruelty and reprisal, ending, ultimately, in a “collapse in the habits, institutions, beliefs, and restraints that are the foundations of civilized life.” The anomalous treachery that led to that first nocturnal attack would devolve, by the end, into the kind of atrocity that had never before featured as part of Greek warfare: schoolboys murdered in their classrooms by mercenaries, civilians slaughtered, suppliants dragged from (or burned at) altars, the war dead left to rot on the battlefield. All this was symbolized by the unimaginable collapse of the great standard-bearer of Greek civilization itself: after nearly three decades of fighting, bankrupt, imploded by civil strife, crushed from without by an unholy alliance between Sparta and the Greeks' old enemies, the Persians, Athens finally surrendered in 404.

It was impossible to foresee any of this in the spring of 431. Athens was at her peak: the mistress of a far-flung empire of subject-allies stretching all across the Mediterranean, commander of a huge and well-trained navy, her special national character—raucously democratic with yet an aristocratic esteem for the finest products of high culture—emblematized by her leader, Pericles, an aristocrat of what Kagan calls “the bluest blood” who had, nonetheless, a populist appeal. (Teddy Roosevelt, say, rather than JFK.) It was Pericles who advised his countrymen, during the first few years of the war, to follow an unusual—and unusually difficult—defensive strategy: to remain within the city's walls (which included the so-called Long Walls, a pair of parallel structures that connected Athens to her strategically crucial port, Piraeus, eleven miles away) as the Spartans came each summer to burn their crops, and to put their faith in the sea.

The Athenians' power, and economy, depended on her fleet, after all: food could be supplied from various trading partners abroad, and meanwhile Athenian and allied ships could harry the coastal towns of the Peloponnese, seeking to exhaust the enemy (as Kagan notes), “psychologically, not physically or materially.” Pericles well knew that the Spartans ruled their own alliance with an iron hand; behind the Athenian leader's ostensibly passive strategy lay the assumption that after a few years of this harrying, this psychological attrition, the alliance would crumple and the Spartans would be eager for peace. Kagan relates all this with briskness and authority. He's a particularly shrewd reader of the realities behind certain kinds of political rhetoric—not least, the material and economic considerations that affect policy and strategy. Where others might see in Pericles' famous exhortation to restraint an admirably and very Apollonian impulse to moderation, Kagan sees the calculations of a politican who knew he had only enough drachmas in the bank “to maintain his strategy for three years…but not for a fourth.” Let alone a twenty-seventh.

Pericles' strategy, however, died fairly swiftly after the man himself did, in 429, a victim of the plague that ravaged Athens from 430 to 426—the first blow of many that resulted in the disintegration of the city, both physically and morally. (In a rare reference to his personal life, Thucydides writes in the
History
that he had the illness but survived.) He was succeeded at first by the hawkish demagogues Cleon
and the aptly named Hyperbolus, two men who never met a peace offer they couldn't walk away from. Thucydides, himself related to a royal family (of the northern region called Thrace, from whose silver mines he earned an income substantial enough to allow him to devote himself to writing), evinces disdain for these nouveaux riches, examples of the so-called new politicians of the second half of the fifth century
B.C
. in Athens—politicans who didn't come, as did Pericles and his protégé Alcibiades, from the rarefied ether of Athenian society, but who were pragmatic self-made men with mercantile fortunes at their disposal, and who cared little for the genteel pieties of the upper crust. (Cleon's father made a fortune in leather, the subject of no little amusement for the comic playwright Aristophanes.) It was Cleon, more than anyone else, who broke with the Periclean strategy and urged Athens on to the more aggressive stance that, for many historians—Kagan isn't one of them—cost Athens her empire.

It was under the ambitious, risk-taking, and aggressive Cleon that the war began to oscillate between unforeseeable victories (such as the Athenians' capture of one tenth of all of Sparta's citizen-soldiers on the island of Sphacteria in 425, which would provide tremendous strategic and diplomatic leverage for years to come) and unnecessary defeats (such as the dreadful Athenian defeat at Delium in 424, the outcome of a rash effort to force a decisive encounter). Under Cleon, Athenian policy also began to reflect the notion, then fashionable in certain intellectual circles which rejected old-fashioned pieties, that “might makes right,” a principle of which Cleon himself was the greatest exponent. When the city of Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, revolted from the Athenian alliance in 427, it was Cleon who proposed to the Athenian assembly that all of the rebellious city's adult men should be put to death and all its women and children sold into slavery as a punishment—a motion that passed, only to be revoked the following day by the guilt-ridden Athenians. Luckily for the Mytilineans, the ship bearing the reluctant executioners was overtaken by that bearing news of the reprieve. (Not for nothing does the action of Euripides' final bitter wartime drama,
Iphigenia at Aulis
, turn on a comparable volte-face involving two dispatches, one bearing death and the second bearing a reprieve; in the play, however, the second fails to catch up with the first.)

After Cleon's death in battle in 421, a brief peace—negotiated by his longtime rival for leadership, a wealthy, deeply pious man called Nicias—soon gave way to a cycle of more and more arrogant strategies that led to ever greater disasters. By the time the tiny island of Melos, a Spartan colony, refused to become part of Athens's alliance in 416, the Athenians no longer felt any compunctions about punishing civilians: in Book 5 of the
History
, Thucydides crisply relates how all of the men were put to death, and all of the women sold into slavery.

For many historians, Melos marks the watershed in Athens's moral decline. The next year, greedy for more empire, the Athenians decided to invade another island, Sicily—a decision heavily influenced by the glamorous but untrustworthy political wild-card Alcibiades, a figure whose beauty, taste, intellectual brilliance, and diplomatic smoothness (to say nothing of his unpredictability, his lack of ethical compass, and mercurial nature) make him, in the latter part of the
History
, a useful symbol for Athens herself. The Sicilian Expedition, which takes up the entire sixth and seventh books of the
History
, ended in the complete annihilation of the Athenian armada, the death of Nicias, and the beginning of the end for Athens.

Even Athens's occasional triumphs during the dismal last decade of the war were vitiated by capricious behavior that suggested a polity no long in control of itself. After the great Athenian naval victory at Arginousae, the Assembly voted to put the victorious admirals to death on the grounds that they failed to rescue sailors who'd drowned in a tempest following the battle. It's during a description of the aftermath of this horror that Thucydides' narrative breaks off, in midsentence. What came next, we learn from his contemporary, Xenophon: increasingly violent internal strife, the overthrow of the democracy and its replacement with a succession of oppressive oligarchic regimes, the fatal alliance between Sparta and Persia, which put terrible pressures on an increasingly cash-poor Athens; the final, catastrophic defeat of the Athenian navy at Aesgispotami in the Hellespont—all but ten ships of the great Athenian fleet destroyed, all four thousand Athenian prisoners put to death by the Spartans. The following year, in March 404, exactly twenty-seven years after the war had begun, Athens capitulated. The visible sign of her defeat was the destruction of the Long Walls by the gleeful Spartan allies, an event that Kagan rightly does not presume
to describe, instead quoting Xenophon: “With great zeal they set about tearing down the walls to the music of flute-girls, thinking that this day was the beginning of freedom for the Greeks.”

 

Twenty-five years ago, you knew what to make of all this. Indeed, it used to be easy to teach the Peloponnesian War: all you had to do was think of the Cold War. For most of the half century from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union—and certainly during the late 1970s, when I was an undergraduate classics major wrestling for the first time with Thucydides' prose—the parallels between the Peloponnesian War and the Cold War seemed self-evident. It wasn't that the course of the contemporary conflict was following that of the ancient one—or at least you hoped not, given Athens's fate. It was more a matter of personality. You knew, as you read about Athens, about her boisterous democratic politics and fast-talking politicians, her adventurous intellectual and artistic spirit, that these were the good guys—our own cultural forbears. And you knew, just as surely, as you read about Sparta, about her humorless militarism and geriatric regime, her deep antipathy to democracy and her drab cultural life, that these were the bad guys. They, too, looked awfully familiar.