The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (39 page)

When the Athenian citizens were moving up from the level orchestra into their stone seats on the hillside, separating themselves from the dancing participants, a similar separation was taking place in the circular chorus below. Slowly, one after another, to the number of three, “actors” moved out of the chorus, making possible a schematic reenactment of deeds from the past. Until then what went on in the orchestra was a
telling
danced and sung by the chorus, in which the whole community somehow took part.

The primitive orchestra, like the farmers’ threshing floor of hardened ground used in Greece today, was a village dancing place. It was naturally circular for dancing around some sacred thing—a maypole, an image, or an altar of the god. There the whole community of worshipers were dancing the same dance, chanting the same chorus. To dance was to join the community, to cease to dance was a kind of death. When all were in the action, a spectator place, a “theater” or seeing place, was not needed, for the dance was everyone’s ritual. And the Greek word for ritual was
dromenon
, “a thing done.” The rites of spring, the
dromenon
of the Dithyramb, the Spring
Festival, as Jane Harrison has explained, were “a re-presentation or a pre-presentation, a re-doing or a pre-doing” of the hoped-for results. The “doing” of the ritual was communal, and its purpose was quite practical, for without the return of Spring, there would be no crops, no newborn cattle. The Rites of Spring, the invocation and propitiation of Dionysus, were the invitation and reassurance.

In Greek the word
drama
, like the word for ritual, also meant “thing done.” But now there were “actors” (doing the doing) and “spectators” (seeing the doing). The dithyramb was the whole community jointly addressing the god. Now a
drama
, the doing of actors down there in the orchestra, was for the benefit of spectators. One part of the community was addressing another part. A few were acting for the many. The religious overtones of Greek drama, resounding with its dithyrambic origins, would never be lost. When not only the god but a human community of spectators was there, the performance could be judged for its own sake. No longer merely a familiar ritual for the return of the familiar, the performance was a work of art, a creation, offering a new kind of uniqueness.

After the seventh century
B.C.
when the dithyramb failed a few times to bring abundant crops, perhaps it lost some of its magical appeal. Perhaps the rhythms of the circular chorus became stale and perfunctory. It was about the time of the emergence of drama from ritual in the late sixth century
B.C.
that Pisistratus organized the works of Homer into their classic form and decreed that the whole
Iliad
and
Odyssey
be recited at the annual Panathenaea festival. For drama, too, heroic themes had irresistible appeal. It is hardly surprising that, after the centuries of singing and dancing to the
telling
and
retelling
of heroic ancient tales, someone had the idea of
doing
or
redoing
those long-sung deeds. Thespis, said Aristotle, was the true inventor of Attic tragedy, the prototype of Greek drama. A poet from Icarus’ home district in Attica, he was the first to introduce an “actor” into the chorus. What a small beginning! The thespian prototype was nothing but a single person whose role Thespis invented as answerer standing apart from the chorus. The Greek name for this actor, who pretended to be someone he was not, was Hypocrites. Two millennia later the Greek word became the root for the English word “hypocrite,” used by both Wyclif and Chaucer for any dissembler.

In the beginning the role of this first actor was only to respond to the chorus and its leader, providing a spoken dialogue between the songs of the chorus. The subject of this dialogue was a heroic saga of the kind Homer had made familiar. The chorus continued to sing its lyric songs, but the presence of a dramatized figure from the story offered the chorus a newly dramatic role. Thespis’s modest innovation did not destroy the liturgy but
was beginning to transform what had been a festival to please a god into a performance for the delight of spectators.

In 534
B.C.
, at the first recorded performance of Greek tragedy in its primitive form, Thespis won the prize. And he took another step toward an art of impersonation when he experimented with the mask. According to tradition, Thespis disguised his face when acting by covering it with white lead, and then hung flowers over his face. Later he tried plain linen masks, which his disciples varied for dramatic effect. They saw how masks could serve a new practical purpose before the fifteen thousand spectators on the hillside, to make the character of the wearer plain.

Since there were never more than three actors in a performance of classic Greek tragedy, masks helped them play many parts. Eventually there were thirty different types of masks, distinguishing the young and the old, the amiable, the irascible, or the heroic. Pallor displayed suffering. The masks of women’s characters suggested an old servant, a young virgin, an experienced courtesan. A snub-nose marked a person of low birth. The needs of the spectator at a distance would govern.

After Thespis, the new art of Greek tragedy speedily unfolded. Seldom in the West has the genesis of an art form been so clearly visible or so sharply focused. The great creators of Greek tragedy were the Athenian trinity—Aeschylus (525–c.456
B.C.
), Sophocles (4967–406
B.C.
), and Euripides (485–406
B.C.
). In the pitifully small sample of their works that has survived, we can see the new art come into being. The Greek tragedian was expected, even required, to be prolific. To be performed at an annual Dionysiac festival he had to produce not just one play but a tetralogy of three tragedies and a light satyr piece. Altogether the tetralogy might add up to six thousand verses (compared with about eight thousand verses in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
). To win his two dozen victories, Sophocles had to be wondrously fertile and able to produce on demand.

In the arts, as in social drinking, athletics, and other cultural activities, the Greeks loved competition. They enjoyed contests at their festivals, made their festivals into contests, and delighted in praise and prizes to the winners. Epitaphs of poets, musicians, and tragedians note their prizes. Contests for a prize in dithyramb at the Dionysia did not cease until the late fourth century
B.C.
, when the private patrons (
choregoi
) were displaced by annually elected sponsors (
agonothetes
) supported by public funds. With the rise of drama as a recognized form, interest focused on the contests among the tragedians. The panel of ten judges, one from each of the ten tribes, swore to give an impartial verdict. Spectators sometimes became violent to protest an unpopular award. The winner was proclaimed by the herald and honored with a crown of ivy.

The many victories won by Aeschylus and Sophocles suggest that the
custom encouraged the great creators. Each won the prize for more than half his plays. Euripides, a bolder and more irreverent innovator, had less success with the judges. In the age before best-seller lists and published box-office receipts the prizes show the tragedians’ popular appeal. In the annual competitions at Athens for the best tragedy, Aeschylus won first prize thirteen times, Sophocles won twenty times, once defeating Aeschylus, and once being defeated by Euripides. The poets crowned by posterity were applauded by their first spectators.

Before the death of Euripides in 406
B.C.
Greek tragedy had acquired a form that makes it almost recognizable as drama to modern eyes. But costuming and staging were conventional, physical action was restrained, and violence occurred only offstage. There were three actors, action, suspense, climax and denouement. In the fifty years that separated the first performance of Aeschylus from the death of Euripides, the ancient Dionysian festival was transformed and the dramatic legacy of classic Greece had taken shape.

The lives of the great trinity of Greek tragedians, when there was no Left Bank or bohemia, reveal how closely the fortunes of the arts were tied to the fortunes of the community. They show us the poet as the public man. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles took on conspicuous civic commissions. Aeschylus fought at Marathon (490) when he was thirty-five, and again at Artemisium and at Salamis. Pindar and Sophocles were his disciples. And Sophocles’ first offering at the Dionysiac festival of 468
B.C.
actually won the prize over his master, for the panel of judges had been packed with Aeschylus’ political enemies.

Sophocles’ long life spanned the Great Age of Athenian power. He served as a treasurer for the tribute money from the subject states, was elected one of Athens’s ten generals, and mounted expeditions to discipline the allies. At the age of eighty-three, in 413, after the defeat of Athenian forces in Sicily, Sophocles served on the commission to reorganize the government. A man of wealth, noted for his elegant style of life, he was a model of the Athenian public man of letters. Like Aeschylus, he still saw a cosmos where man could take solace in rhythms enforced by gods.

The legends of Euripides report him as a diluter of the old religion, losing faith in these divine rhythms. No religious patriot, he was scholarly, withdrawn, and morose, and, like Socrates later, he was reputed to have been prosecuted for blasphemy. The Trinity of Tragedians had acquired a canonical status in the 330s, when Lycurgus erected bronze statues of the three in the Theater of Dionysus below the Acropolis.

Although each added new elements to the novel art, all three were confined by the traditional forms. Centuries would pass before Athenians would let their dramatic imagination play freely with their heroic past. They
still dared only marginal changes of the Dionysian dithyramb. “The number of actors,” Aristotle tells us, “was first increased to two by Aeschylus, who curtailed the business of the chorus, and made the dialogue, or spoken portion, take the leading part in the play.” With only two spokesmen (now beginning to be called actors) and a chorus, the opportunities for what we think of as drama were still limited. But Aeschylus’ own tragic concept was fulfilled with the two actors. He did not see drama as a conflict (
agon
, or contest) between actors but saw a solitary hero—an Agamemnon, an Orestes, an Eteocles, a Prometheus—facing his own destiny, wrestling with his soul. And Aeschylus’ second actor made it possible for the plot to move. The performance, unlike that of Thespis, was no longer only a hero’s statement with choral background. When the second actor, like the ghost of Darius in
The Persians
, came in with news, the situation could change. This second character could establish the innocence of the hero, provide a new range of moral choices, and so add suspense and surprise.

“A third actor and scenery were due to Sophocles,” according to Aristotle. With his third actor Sophocles too made a new kind of tragedy. Now the hero could be judged against a more complex web of circumstances. Sophocles’ chorus, no longer merely liturgical, takes part in the plot. In place of epic narrative or a lyric song, we hear dialogues among all three actors. Persuaded by this innovation, Aeschylus himself adopted a third actor for his
Oresteia
. Sophocles’ stage begins to be set for a more realistic showing of a man and his problems.

Euripides further widens the dramatic range, changes the saga to suit his purpose, and begins to humanize his hero. His prologue no longer merely opens the action but tells the story before the action. And he finally resolves his dramatic problem by the
deus ex machina
, a god lowered onto the stage with a crane and pulley to intervene in the action. Euripides, Aristotle tells us, marked the final development of the literary form of Greek tragedy.

The trinity commanded the attention, the passions, and the admiration of their whole community. The most prized in his own time was Aeschylus, long revered as the founder of Greek tragedy. Sophocles was worshiped as a hero. Knowing his Euripides, Plutarch noted, was an infallible test of the true Athenian. By reciting Euripides, Athenian prisoners at Syracuse won their liberty. Once a suspicious ship was allowed entry to an Athenian port only after passengers showed their familiarity with Euripides. Legend had it that Athens was saved when conquering Spartan generals, about to level the city, were restrained by a chorus from Euripides’
Electra
.

Greek tragedy remained remarkably close to its origins. The subjects, the heroes, and the moral choices continued to be confined by religious tradition, and liberation from that ancient archetype of the dithyramb was long and slow. The stage, masks, and costumes stayed on as ties to the Dionysian
festivals. The spectator of Greek tragedy was not to be shocked or amused by unique and novel characters. And the tragedian with his chorus and three actors aimed to reinforce in the
doing
what had so long been known only in the telling.

Most Greek tragic dramas elaborated the Homeric legends whose messages from dim antiquity thus became vividly contemporary. In the ocean of time all men swam together. “Time will reveal everything,” said Euripides, “it is a babbler, and speaks even when not asked.” The secrets of the future were no more obscure than the secrets of the past, and the great poets brought them together.

Stage costumes reinforced the rhythmic, ritual familiarity of the events recounted. By Aeschylus’ time there was a conventional stage costume for tragedy, which remained a tie to the ancient rituals even into Roman times. The basic garment for the tragic stage was a
chiton
, a loose garment made from a rectangular piece of linen or wool, similar to that in daily use. Women wore it draped, to reach from neck to ankle, on men it reached the knees. This simple chiton for daily wear, familiar on the caryatids of the Erechtheum, was sleeveless, kept in place at the shoulders by brooches and at the waist by a belt that bloused the excess material into a pouch. But the stage costume for tragedy, unlike the daily chiton, was elaborate and costly, paid for by wealthy citizens who vied with one another in elegance and extravagance. The Greek word
cothurnus
for the actor’s heavy wooden-soled boots became a synonym for the mannered lofty style, the elevated grandeur, of the tragic drama.