HUNDRED PER CENT ATHENIAN
Once in their history fate provided the Greeks with a great cause; that
was in the fifth century, when the gigantic Juggernaut of Persia came
rolling down upon them. King Xerxes assembled his barbarian hordes, his
tribes of wild horsemen and his phalanxes of slaves, his war elephants
and his chariots. Compared with these invaders, the Greeks were modern
civilized men; free men, holding in their minds all the treasures of the
future. They forgot their state jealousies and civic factions, and
rallied and saved their culture. From that national impulse came
practically everything that is worth while in the “classics.” It was
here that the Greek spirit achieved self-consciousness; it was here that
Greek patriotism and Greek religion found their justification, their
validity as propaganda for great art.
Among the Athenian captains who fought at Marathon was one by the name
of Æschylus. He returned, full of the pride of his race, and wrote a
tragedy, “The Persians,” around the story of the king whom he had helped
to defeat; the climax of the drama being the battle in which the poet
had been a leader. It was Greek patriotic and religious propaganda
without any thought of disguise; its purpose being to portray the
downfall of despotism. The play was a popular success, and made Æschylus
the national poet, not merely of Athens, but of all the Greeks.
He wrote other plays of the same religious and patriotic sort, and he
never feared to put in whatever moral teachings he thought his audience
needed. “Obedience is the mother of success, bringing safety,” summed up
his political creed; so, needless to say, he belonged to the
conservative party. So little was he afraid of “propaganda” that in “The
Seven Against Thebes” he praised by name the statesman Aristides, who
was present in the audience. This kind of topical illusion “brought down
the house” in ancient Athens, precisely as it would in New York today.
The sculptors and architects and other artists of Greece felt the same
patriotic and religious thrill, the same consciousness of a sublime
destiny; they labored with burning faith to glorify the gods and
demigods, the ancestors and rulers who had made them masters of the
land. As a memorial to the victory of Marathon the Greeks instituted
national games, which took place every four years, and were a means of
uniting the various tribes in worship of their gods. There was the
keenest rivalry, and the ambition of Greek gentlemen was to win the
crowns and laurel wreaths. When they had won, they wanted the fact to be
known; so they paid poets who could sing their achievements in glorious
verses. The poet Pindar became a high-class publicity man for these
aristocratic sportsmen; also he sang the praises of whatever tyrants
held power in the Greek cities, making them splendid and heroic,
regardless of how unprincipled and cruel they might be.
The production of the dramas was also a kind of game. Each playwright
found a wealthy patron to pay the expenses of drilling and equipping the
chorus for his play; then, if the play carried off the prize, the
wealthy gentleman built a monument to his own generosity; and so we saw,
lining the streets of Athens, the choregic monuments of Andrew Carnegie
and John D. Rockefeller and Otto H. Kahn. Each poet seeking the prize
would take the demigods and ancestral rulers, and portray them
according to his own interpretation; incidentally he would use the
chorus to discuss the current events of politics, and to express his own
convictions. Thus Æschylus wrote his “Eumenides” to oppose the
abolishing of the Areopagiticus, an ancient court which met on the
Sacred Hill: just as if today a poet should produce a drama to combat
the radical attacks on the United States Supreme Court.
Another dramatist arose, the son of a noble family, Sophocles by name.
He wrote some thirty plays, and carried off the prize nineteen times,
and his rivals and enemies took pleasure in charging that he was greedy
for money, a regular old miser, besides being exceptionally fond of the
ladies, and raising a large illegitimate family. Sophocles produced
serene and beautiful works, because he believed in the patriotic and
pious traditions he served, accepting the hideous stories of the
old-time Greek heroes and demi-gods as the natural fate of mortals. He
is the perfect type of the ruling-class artist who achieves perfection
without strife, because he is completely at one with his environment,
identifying the interests of his class with the will of the gods. We
shall encounter a line of such poets--Virgil, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Racine, Goethe, Tennyson. They feel love and pity for the unhappy
children of their brains, and they move us to grief and awe, but never
do they move us to revolt.
But now came another dramatist, in a different mood. This man looked at
the Greek legends and decided that they were not true. He looked at
Greek institutions, private property, and state patriotism, and the
sovereignty of old men in family and tribe, and he decided that these
were not necessarily wise and permanent arrangements. He set himself up
as a propagandist of things that we call “modern,” and that the Greeks
called blasphemy and infidelity. His name was Euripides, and he took the
heroes and heroines of the old legends and turned them into plain human
beings, suffering the cruelties of fate, but fighting back, voicing
protests and doubts. So came a string of plays, jeering at militarism
and false patriotism, denouncing slavery and the subjection of women in
the home, rebuking religious bigotry, undermining the noble and wealthy
classes. A play in which the women get together to rebel against war! A
play in which a devoted wife gives her life to an angry god in order to
save her husband’s life--but the husband is shown as an egotistical cad,
not worthy of this dutiful and pious Greek sacrifice! Read a passage of
the dramatic propaganda of Euripides, and realize how this must have
sounded to hundred per cent Athenian patriots--and right in the midst of
a war to the death with Sparta:
Doth some one say that there be gods above?
There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,
Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.
Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words
No undue credence; for I say that kings
Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,
And doing thus are happier than those
Who live calm pious lives day after day.
How many little states that serve the gods
Are subject to the godless but more strong,
Made slaves by might of a superior army!