The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (40 page)

The poets thus helped the spectator, a person at a distance, rediscover the heroes of myth and saga. But how slowly they dared create new themes and characters! Only forty lines survive of the bold young poet Agathon (born c.445–c.400
B.C.
) who, as Aristotle noted, wrote a tragedy “in which both incidents and names are of the poet’s invention.” Plato immortalized Agathon by placing his
Symposium
at Agathon’s house in 416 on the occasion of that young poet’s first victory in competition, and the legendary Agathon was reputed to be the only poet worthy of succession to the great trinity. Centuries passed before others dared follow his lead.

D
IONYSUS
the twice-born became the foster father of two opposed spirits as the dithyramb that celebrated him divided into Tragedy and Comedy. In the last days of Athenian glory both Tragedy and Comedy, as Aristotle said, attained their “natural” forms. But both still revealed their archaic skeleton, and Dionysus never ceased to reign.

By mid-fifth century
B.C.
, Tragedy and Comedy each had staked out different realms. Tragedy recaptured the ancient and the remote, gods and heroes. The spectator could see an enlarged version of himself struggling with grand issues of time and destiny. “All human happiness or misery,” Aristotle observed in his
Poetics
, “takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of action … therefore … the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and … characters come second.” Tragedy was a vision of events at a great distance in time (usually too in space) from the spectator.

Comedy held up a mirror to the present. If Tragedy conjured up the unseen, Comedy rescued the familiar from the cliché. Comedy intensified daily experience, dramatizing the garrulous old man, the boastful soldier, the vain courtesan, the rude conceited youth, who all were so commonplace that they had ceased to be interesting. But Comedy made them laughable.

Tragedy, then, tended to depict men as better than they were. But Comedy, Aristotle explained, showed “an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly.… the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.” This meant that Comedy required a courage not found in all poets. Aristophanes (c.450–c.357
B.C.
), the Greek writer of Comedy who became companion in fame to the great Trinity of Tragedians, was as eminent for his courage as for his eloquence, wit, and fantasy. Eleven of his plays have survived, but perhaps three times that many have been lost.

In ancient Greece, the writer of drama had a monopoly on media of public criticism. Drama was already the most democratic of the arts. The Old Comedy exploited the opportunity of a traditional festival Day of Misrule, when nothing was sacred. Behind the veil of religion and liturgy and in front of the assembled community, the comic poet could condemn the tyrant, satirize arcane philosophers, question male dominance, mock sexual morality, and make the gods objects of fun. If his messages were amusing enough, and embellished and enlivened by dance and music, in ancient Athens (population of some thirty-five thousand) he could instantly reach an audience of fifteen thousand. While the tragedian had to offer a tetralogy of three tragic plays and a light satyr piece in order to compete at the annual festival, the competition in comedy required only a single play.

Aristophanes eagerly seized the poet’s opportunity. Like other comic poets, he was transforming the folk art of village comedians into a self-conscious art form—and so created a mirror of comedy that would inspire generations of dramatists to speak in the voice of social critics. The stirring times of Aristophanes’ adult life spanned the whole quarter-century of the Peloponnesian War (431–404
B.C.
). This testing time for Athenians and their empire would be a proving time for the arts of comedy. Experiments in colonizing, in enlisting and subduing allies, brought the exhilarations of victory and the frustrations of defeat, and revealed the perils of both democracy and tyranny. Aristophanes seems to have been raised in the peaceful countryside on the island of Aegina. When he first came to Athens as a youth he saw a fevered city permanently at war. While his jibes had all the topical relevance of a modern political cartoonist they have not become obsolete.

From the beginning, his irreverence toward the great and the powerful was awesome. In his early twenties, with his first comedy he won second prize at the Great Dionysia of 427. Surviving in fragments,
The Daitales
(
The Banqueters
), about the eternal battle of the generations, shows a know-it-all city-educated son returning home to his rustic father. His father despairs that while he has not learned his Homer, has neglected athletics, and cannot even sing a traditional song, he has become a connoisseur of wines and perfumes, and learned the tricks of the money changers. “No pity,” the father insists, “shall deter me from washing this salt fish with all the dirt I know is in it.”

At the very next year’s Great Dionysia (426) Aristophanes plunged into the risky realms of current politics. And he dared defy Cleon, whom Thucydides called “the most violent man at Athens and by far the most powerful,” with his
Babylonians
, a sharp attack on the war and on Athens’s brutal contempt for its allies. Silently casting Cleon in the Persian tyrant’s role, he showed a chorus of branded Babylonian slaves, forcibly working in a mill. So Aristophanes asserted “freedom of the drama,” millennia before the
freedom of the press. This brought on his prosecution by Cleon for calling Athens the “tyrant-City,” and so compounding his sin of pacifism with slander and treason.

The young Aristophanes kept up his pacifist barrage, even while the war-fevered community remained subservient to Cleon, whose frown, it was said, made people vomit with fear. At the Dionysian winter festival (425
B.C.
) Aristophanes won first prize for another bitter antiwar comedy,
The Acharnians
, which appeared under a pseudonym, for reasons that Aristophanes himself explains (in Gilbert Murray’s brilliantly modernized translation):

The plot of
The Acharnians
centers on Dicaeopolis, Aristophanes’ model of the good citizen who hates war but cannot persuade the politicians to make peace. Finally he negotiates a treaty of peace privately for himself and his family.

Relentless against tyrants, Aristophanes plunges on.
The Knights
, at the next winter Dionysian Festival (424), savaged Cleon by name and was awarded first prize. In Aristophanes’ rollicking travesty the central character is Demos, the Athenian people whose household is disrupted by a newly purchased slave, Cleon, who has groveled into the master’s favor. When an oracle reveals that Cleon will be succeeded in favor by an Agoracritus, a sausage seller, a chorus addresses Cleon: “You devour the public funds that all should share in; you treat the treasury officials like the fruit of the fig tree, squeezing them to find which are still green or more or less ripe.”

But the public still dreads Cleon. To avoid angering him by a truthful portrait, those who make masks for the theater go on strike. “His eye is everywhere,” Demosthenes complains, “And what a stride! He has one leg on Pylos and the other in the Assembly; his arse gapes over the land of the Chaonians, his hands are with the Aetolians and his mind with the Clopidians.” Speaking for all later demagogues Cleon explains, “I only stole in the interest of the City!” “I may shout indifferently for right or for wrong, but I keep you fed by it!” The sausage seller, now the savior of Athens, condemns Cleon to an appropriate punishment. “It will not be over-terrible. I condemn him to follow my old trade; posted near the gates, he must sell sausages of asses’ and dogs’ meat; perpetually drunk, he will exchange foul
language with prostitutes and will drink nothing but the dirty water from the baths.”

When the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse wanted to know all about Athens, Plato sent him the plays of Aristophanes. He could not have done better, for nothing escaped Aristophanes’ eye. In
The Wasps
, which won first prize at the Lenaean Festival of 422, he makes fun of the Athenian legal system, which had transformed juries into a system of public welfare. When the city gave three obols each day for serving on a jury, shiftless citizens were reluctant to bring trials to an end.

The Sophists were the inviting target of
The Clouds
. Aristophanes makes Socrates the comic villain of this piece, though in real life Socrates was the Sophists’ outspoken enemy. A stupid farmer trying to dispose of his creditors, hears that Socrates’ “Thinkery” teaches people how to make the Worse Cause appear the Better. When the lessons of the Thinkery become too complicated for him he puts his son under Socrates’ tutelage. There, according to the Thinkery’s impeccable logic, the son is taught that he must beat his father.

At the Great Dionysia of 423 the play received only the third and lowest prize, but Aristophanes still considered it his best.

Some of Aristophanes’ most appealing themes concern the power (and the powerlessness) of women. Later generations always seem to understand his
Lysistrata
, offered at the Lenaean Festival of 411, a desperate moment for Athens. The expedition to Sicily in 413 had ended in disaster—ships, army, and the best young men all lost. The war was in its twentieth year, and with no peace in sight. Was there not some way, Lysistrata asked, to enlist lust in the cause of peace? If the men in charge could not find a way, why not the women? “What sensible thing are we women capable of doing? We do nothing but sit around with our paint and lipsticks and transparent gowns and all the rest of it.”

For his ingenious peace mission Aristophanes creates the strong but not unfeminine Lysistrata (Dismisser of Armies), who leads the women of Athens in a sex strike. They will refuse their husbands the pleasures of the
marriage bed, then seize the Acropolis and the treasure in the Parthenon. Finally the women win by persistence and self-control, and the comedy ends in a festal scene of Spartans and Athenians with their wives. “Such a merry banquet I’ve never seen before!” an Athenian exclaims, “The Spartans were simply charming. After the drink is in, why, we’re all wise men, every one of us.”

Preserving the sexual without the ritual ingredient has made
Lysistrata
seem indecent. But Dionysiac comedy was a phallic festival. In Aristophanes’ time, actors in the Old Comedy regularly wore a monstrous phallus hanging out of their costume.

Still Aristophanes never let his social conscience stifle his fantasy, nor let his comic mission keep him grounded. The Great Dionysia in the spring of 414 was another bitter time for Athens. Less than two years before, the Athenians had committed one of the most shameful excesses of their long war when the inhabitants of the neutral island of Melos refused to surrender in 416—all the adult men were massacred and the women and children enslaved. Thucydides gave twenty-two chapters to this savage episode. For other reasons, too, this was an ominous season. On the night before the fleet set out for Sicily the city suffered a horrendous sacrilege when the sacred herms had their noses and phalluses broken off. The consequences of the sacrilege appeared soon enough when disaster befell the expedition to Sicily.

It was in this spring of 414, at the Great Dionysia, that Aristophanes offered
The Birds
. All who would build vast empires yet avoid war must simply grow wings, set up their empire in the sky, and surround it with walls. From this strategic location the Birds could dominate mankind by threatening to devastate the crops. From their Cloud-cuckoo-land they could also dominate the gods by intercepting the steam from the sacrifices on which the gods depended for nourishment. To suit the avid bird-watcher, Aristophanes displays a colorful variety—the aggressive hoopoe, the mellifluous nightingale, the graceful flamingo, and the less celebrated cormorant, halcyon, widgeon, jay, sedge-bird, finch, kestrel, cuckoo, falcon, and miscellaneous doves, among others. They still govern mankind by the omens in their flights read by professional augurs. And needless to say, the Birds win their battle against the starving and humiliated gods. As a prize, the leader of the Birds gets Zeus’ daughter Basileia (Sovereignty) for his wife, which lets Aristophanes end the play in the customary festive wedding.

Aristophanes’ most popular play for later generations,
The Frogs
, appears to have been his most successful too in his own time, winning first prize at the Great Dionysia (405), and replayed by popular demand the very next day. Imagine fifteen thousand Athenians showing wild enthusiasm for a play that compared the literary merits of two dead tragedians!
The Frogs
vividly reveals the grand role of drama in Athens’s community life. Their literature was certainly not, in Woodrow Wilson’s phrase, “mere literature.” In 405, when
The Frogs
was produced in the Theater of Dionysus, Aeschylus was fifty years dead, Euripides and Sophocles gone only a year before. “I want a poet,” Dionysus in the play complains, “for most be dead; only the false live on.” A bevy of mediocrities offer themselves, “All writing tragedies by tens of thousands, And miles verboser than Euripides.” For Dionysus they are (in Gilbert Murray’s translation):