The Book of Lost Books (6 page)

At the dramatic festival, each playwright presented four plays: a trilogy followed by a satyr play. The trilogy originally described three linked aspects of a single myth: for example, Aeschylus' earliest surviving work,
The Suppliants,
concerned the fifty daughters of King Danaus, who plead for sanctuary with King Pelasgus of Argos, to avoid an enforced marriage to the fifty sons of Aegyptus. It was followed by the lost
The
Egyptians
and
The Danaids,
which presumably described how they relented, how their father then plotted that each daughter should kill her husband on their wedding night, and how one, Hypermestra, refused. A long speech by Aphrodite, goddess of love, survives from
The Danaids.

Prometheus Bound
represents more of a problem. It was followed, naturally enough, by
Prometheus Unbound.
The third part, all sources concur, was entitled
Prometheus the Fire-bringer.
This is odd, since it is the theft of fire from Zeus that precipitated the original binding. Despite the profusion of Christian scholars unpacking the pagan premonition of Christ in
Prometheus Bound,
none of them record how the trilogy ended. The answer to the conundrum may never be known, the crucial evidence atomized in the Egyptian sand.

The satyr plays that followed the trilogy were farcical dramas about serious themes, with a chorus of goat-legged satyrs led by their master Silenus. One example, the
Cyclops
of Euripides, remains, with sufficient fragments of Sophocles'
The Trackers
for it to be reconstructed. Aeschylus was acclaimed as the master of the satyr play, and yet not one of his has escaped the insistent erosion of time. A smattering of lines—“The house is possessed by the God, the walls dance to Dionysus,” “he who hurt shall heal,” “Whence comes this woman-thing?”—are all that are left. We do not even have the
Proteus,
the satyr play that completed
The
Oresteia,
except for the decidedly uncomical lines “a wretched, struggling dove looking for food, is crushed by winnowing rakes, its breast torn open.”

Aeschylus' sole complete trilogy is
The Oresteia,
comprising
Agamemnon,The Libation-Bearers,
and
The Eumenides.
In the first play, Agamemnon returns home from the Trojan War, only to be murdered by his wife as punishment for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon's son, Orestes, is then faced with a moral dilemma: he has to avenge his father's death, but to do so must commit the heinous crime of matricide. When he does, the insoluble problem unleashes the Furies, and the second play ends with Orestes hallucinating their approach, “shrouded in black, their heads wreathed, swarming with serpents.”

The Eumenides
opens with those Furies now visible to the audience as the Chorus. This scene was so indescribably shocking that various members of the first audience miscarried, went mad, or ran out of the amphitheater. The goddess Athena intervenes in the action on stage to rebalance the moral equation. She institutes the first murder trial for Orestes on a hill called the Areopagus—the location, for the Athenian audience, of their court. Athena's casting vote sets him free and transforms the vindictive Furies into beneficent Kindly Ones, or Eumenides.

The Oresteia
moves from a chain reaction of revenge to a society determined to implement justice through reason, from savagery to civilization. The mythological subject matter is again replete with political resonance. The trilogy was staged in Athens in 458 B.C.E., when Pericles had become the leader of the democratic faction and was regarded as the major statesman of the period. The Areopagus had changed since the acquittal of Orestes, and become more of a legislative body for the aristocratic faction rather than merely a criminal court. Pericles had, therefore, taken steps to limit its authority, restricting it to murder trials.

Later critics have sought to argue that
The Oresteia
presents a patrician critique of Pericles: the Areopagus is divinely ordained and is central to Athens' role as the paragon of civic virtue and enlightened behavior. Others have argued that Aeschylus is reminding Athenians of the original function of the Areopagus, and is thus tacitly supporting Pericles' reforms. Whatever our interpretation, Aristophanes tells us that Aeschylus had a rather combative and critical relationship with his fellow citizens.

The enigmatic Eleusinian Mysteries of his birthplace offer a different reason for the bad blood between Aeschylus and the Athenians. From Aelian and Clement of Alexandria we learn that he was charged with revealing the Mysteries on the stage. At some point—aggravatingly, the sources do not record which, exactly—the audience was so enraged by the blatant infraction that Aeschylus was nearly murdered onstage and had to seek refuge in the temple of his onetime mentor, Dionysus. Sicily may have been altogether safer for someone who had, in Aristotle's words, “spoken those things of which it is impious to tell.”

What secrets had he let slip? The Eleusinian Mysteries, supposedly, promised an afterlife. Homer had depicted the listless wasting-away that awaited even the heroic dead: the Mysteries offered an alternative. Just as Demeter had rescued her daughter Persephone from the Underworld, an initiate would not be trapped with the melancholic wraiths in the kingdom of Hades, but reach a paradisiacal place called the Elysian Fields. In
The Frogs,
Aeschylus boasts that although he is indeed confined to Hades, his name lives on in his work: of all the playwrights, only his plays are still staged after his death. Did the idea of literary immortality make him lax or dismissive about the orthodox paths to eternal life? Poets have always claimed that their work guarantees a kind of immortality. Aeschylus may have taken this boast more literally than the religious arbiters of his day thought fit.

Aeschylus did not know that his artistic canonization only occurred by the narrowest of margins. He had been warned in a prophecy that his own death would come by a blow from heaven, and, one presumes, made sure he did not sit under trees in Sicily's countryside and run the risk of the appointed lightning bolt suddenly striking home. He probably even enjoyed the sunshine on his wrinkled, hairless head, musing about dear old Phrynicus; the excellence of Homer; Orpheus, who made the first lyre from a tortoise shell; and how he would be remembered.

He was not cremated—the epitaph tells us as much. But could he imagine that
The Priestesses, Bassarides, Phineus, The Carding Women,
The Sphinx, Europa, Hypsipyle, Niobe, Nereids, Oedipus, Laius, The
Archer Maidens, Semele, The Nurses of Dionysus, Lycurgus, Atalanta,
Nemea, The Award of the Arms, Mysians, Myrmidons, Sisyphus Rolling
the Stone, Sisyphus the Runaway, The Net Drawers, The Bacchae, The
Kabeiroi
(or
Drunken Heroes
),
Palamedes, Penelope, Pentheus, Perseus,
Philoctetes, Phorcides, Psychostasia
and
Polydectes, The Young Men
and
Glaucus of the Sea, The Women of Salamis
and
The Women of Thrace,
and many, many others would end as ash?

Aeschylus may have suspected his works deserved pride of place in a magnificent library. He knew enough about war to know temples were looted and palaces despoiled. He was acquainted with the whim of tyrants, and their penchant for surrounding themselves with genius. But no one could predict that the sole copy of his plays would become a casualty in a religious war between two theologies a thousand years in the future.

Sophocles

{495–406 B.C.E.}

THE GREEKS VENERATED Aeschylus and were challenged by Euripides; Sophocles, however, they loved. Even the rebarbative Aristophanes, in his lit-crit comedy
The Frogs,
gave a heartfelt tribute to the recently deceased playwright, saying that “Sophocles is getting on with everyone in Hades just as he did on earth.” Another comedian, Eupolis, eulogized him as “the happiest of men.”

Born in 495 B.C.E. in the provincial town of Colonus, Sophocles first comes to attention in 480, when he was chosen to sing, play the lyre, and, on account of his beauty, lead the victory procession naked, to commemorate the Greek defeat of Xerxes at Salamis. At the age of twenty-seven, he won his first dramatic victory against the renowned Aeschylus, who left Athens, mortified at the result. The decision was taken by Cimon, the military leader who had recently returned from Scyros with the bones of the legendary King Theseus. In an unexpected departure from normal procedure, the archon insisted that Cimon and his nine officers be appointed as the arbiters of the dramatic festival. Such a break with tradition was mirrored in the sudden toppling of the preeminent Aeschylus by the fledgling Sophocles.

Sophocles went on to write 120 plays, and was only ever awarded first or second prize in the festivals. Of these plays, only seven survive, with substantial fragments from one of his satyr plays,
The Trackers.
He was a close friend of Pericles. Like Pericles, Sophocles had a foreign mistress, Theoris, as well as an Athenian wife. His legitimate son, Iophron, was apparently infuriated by his father's favoritism toward Sophocles the Younger, his grandson through Theoris' child. The family feud ended in court, with Iophron claiming his father was senile. The ninety-year-old Sophocles read from his as yet unperformed
Oedipus at Colonus:
the judges summarily dismissed the case and punished Iophron for his unfilial behavior. It was perhaps at the same time that Sophocles made the pronouncement attributed to him by Plato: “I bless old age for releasing me from the tyranny of my appetites.”

We do not have in Sophocles' seven plays an intact trilogy, as we do with Aeschylus'
Oresteia.
Although
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus,
and
Antigone
all deal with the ramifications of a single story, they were written at different times of his life, and were originally linked to other plays. Aristophanes mentions a play called
Tereus,
of which Aeschylus' nephew Philocles wrote a derivative imitation. There is the lost
Orithyia,
a single line of which survives. Longinus, in his essay on literary style
On
the Sublime,
favorably compared the death of Oedipus with the ghostly appearance of Achilles at the end of the lost
Polyxena.
(The scene was apparently only bettered in a poem by Simonides, which is lost as well.) There was an
Athamas,
about a father who vowed to sacrifice his children, and was himself nearly sacrificed when they escaped, and a
Meleager,
which may have dealt with the prophecy that the hero's life would last only as long as a burning branch. His mother, after having preserved and treasured the charred wood, destroys it in a vengeful fury.

Our knowledge of Greek dramaturgy would no doubt be greatly enhanced if Sophocles' essay
On the Chorus
had survived. As it is, all we know is that he increased the Chorus from twelve to fifteen, and that they acted as a substitute audience, rather than as a character (as in Aeschylus) or as an interlude (as in Euripides). Sophocles also wrote a paean on the god of medicine, Asclepius, and was known to be such a devout adherent of that divinity that the statue of Asclepius was left in his safekeeping. This too has perished.

Given that he was so successful, and so well loved by the Athenians, it may seem mysterious that more of Sophocles' plays, let alone his prose or his poems, have not survived. One possible reason may be that of the plays that did, one was considered perfect. Only the best was saved.

Coleridge wrote that
Oedipus Rex,
along with Jonson's
The Alchemist
and Henry Fielding's
Tom Jones,
were the three perfect plots in existence. A similar opinion was held by Aristotle, who frequently used
OedipusRex
as an exemplar in his treatise
The Poetics.
When discussing the importance of the epiphany and peripeteia, or revelation and reversal, or when expounding on the role of fear and pity, it is to
Oedipus Rex
that Aristotle instinctively refers. Longinus, too, quotes approvingly from the play.

Despite the fact that other writers have given variations on the story of the unwittingly incestuous king and his rash promise to bring justice to the person whose sin is tainting the city, Sophocles' version remains
the
Oedipus. To what can the enduring fascination be attributed? In literary terms, one might point to the extreme economy of the plot—the embedded irony that the villain is revealed to be the hero. Even the protagonist's name is slick with double meaning: the Greek
oida
means “I know”; and yet the king is in the dark until the denouement, when he blinds himself. The play raises, without answering, profound questions about fate and free will. Oedipus cannot avert his destiny, nor can he merely submit to his doom.

Sigmund Freud, of course, famously claimed that there was something about the play that “a voice within us [is] ready to recognize,” namely the repressed incest urges of the subconscious. But, as Robert Graves wittily observed, though Plutarch mentions that the hippopotamus is unique in the animal kingdom for murdering its father and impregnating its mother, Freud did not call his theory the hippo complex.
Oedipus Rex
is more than its story.

Though critics can cavil about the unfeasibility of the various messengers adhering to the drama's unity of time, it is very close to perfection. If we had any number of Sophocles' other, lost dramas, the preponderance of second-bests and inferior offerings might make him less, not more, respected. As Longinus said, “Yet would anyone in their right mind put all of Ion of Chios' tragedies on the same footing as the single play of
Oedipus
?”