Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes
Justice is the central preoccupation of Greek moral and political thought. The basic word is dike, a cosmic principle that makes things right, from which is derived such words as dikaios, just, and dikaoiosyne, the quality of being just. Dike, justice, means originally something like the way things have always been, are now, and ought to be. Homer’s Achilles makes Agamemnon swear that he has not had intercourse with Briseis as is the dike of men and women. But dike comes to mean normative custom and thus the power that can make wrongs right. The simplest form of this is revenge.
Like earlier Greek poets, Solon had observed that good men do not always prosper and that bad men sometimes die happy in bed. The judgment of dike then must be visited upon their children. Greeks also believed that guilt and justice could be collective: Priam of Troy did wrong in not forcing his son to give Helen back to Menelaus, and his entire city, not just his family, has to suffer. Justice belongs not to the individual, in other words, but to family, kin, and the community.
However, justice is ultimately in the hands of the gods and the divine forces of fate and necessity and revenge who set limits on human ambition. When Xerxes bridged the Hellespont, lashed the sea, and tried to obliterate the distinction between Europe and Asia, the Greeks were made the agents of divine vengeance just as Agamemnon had been the agent of Zeus’s vengeance against the Persians. This is more or less the approach taken both by the historian Herodotus and by the dramatist Aeschylus in his play the Persians.
The period of the Persian Wars and the aftermath were a period of intense political activity at Athens. In one generation, Athenians had expelled the tyrants, completely reorganized their commonwealth, and beaten back two Persian invasions. Such success was bound to inspire confidence in the Athenian commonwealth, a confidence that would lead to hybris and ruin. Since the lowest classes were needed to man the fleets that chased the Persians out of the Aegean, skillful and ambitious politicians who were determined that Athens should create a thalassocracy—that is, a naval empire—played upon the pride and resentments of the poorer classes. Xanthippus, Ephialtes, and Xanthippus’ son Pericles were determined to eliminate every check on the power of the Athenian assembly, but they were resisted by rival representatives of the old nobility. This period of social and political conflict is the backdrop for the literary career of one of the greatest writers of the Greek language: Aeschylus. Aeschylus’ first surviving play, the Persians, produced in 472 is a meditation on Persian hybris and the divine vengeance they brought upon themselves. It is also a great celebration of the Athenian victory at Salamis. Could anyone have foreseen in 472 that Athens, in the next 50 years, would commit the same follies as the Persians? Aeschylus may not, but 14 years later in his greatest work, the trilogy known as the Oresteia, he explicitly compares the crimes of Agamemnon the sacker of Troy with the crime of the Asian king Priam and his son Paris.
Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes was produced in 467, only 11 years after Xerxes returned to Persia, having failed to conquer mainland Greece, though a few Persian garrisons remained until 465. The menace was still serious, however, and Athens had spent the previous decade in sweeping the Persians out of the Aegean and establishing her own empire. But hearing that the Persians were mustering another invasion force in Asia Minor, Athens in 467 sent Cimon son of Miltiades, with a fleet and 5000 hoplites. Cimon decisively defeated the Persians by land and sea.
The political picture was rapidly changing at Athens. Relations with Sparta had begun to grow tense, and Themistocles—the political genius who organized Greek resistance to Persia—had been ostracized in 472. But, perhaps unexpectedly, the leading position did not go to anyone in the Alcmeonid clan but to the young arch-conservative, Cimon son of Miltiades, who had generously collaborated with Themistocles during the wars. When other conservative aristocrats wanted to put their trust in the hoplites and rejected Themistocles’ strategy of evacuating Athens, the young Cimon, whose father had defeated the Persians at Marathon in 490, led a procession of young nobles to the acropolis where they dedicated their bridles—the symbols of their knighthood—to Athena.
Cimon’s policies were clear: war with Persia, peace with Sparta, and a maintenance of the successful status quo established by Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid: a balanced constitution in which both the people and the aristocrats were able to carry out their proper functions, freed from the dictatorship of the mob and the oppression of an oligarchy. Under Cimon’s leadership, Athens became mistress of the Aegean, and was at peace both with her allies and with the Spartan alliance. His very success antagonized the democrats led by Ephialtes and Pericles, and Pericles prosecuted him for bribery, during the scrutiny after his return from his victorious campaign on the Eurymedon. Cimon was acquitted and might have stayed in power had he not made the mistake of going to the aid of the Spartan allies during the Messenian Revolt. But it is also possible that he was doomed by the emergence of a new kind of politics based as much on demagoguery as on personal influence. As an Alcmeonid aristocrat who pandered to the mob, Pericles could make both techniques work for him, and he may well have viewed poor Cimon—a brave and honorable man—as a political simpleton.
Cimon, who argued strongly for maintaining the alliance with Sparta, was at the height of his success and influence in Athens, when Aeschylus was writing his play, a work that Aristophanes appropriately described as “full of Ares.” I do not know which, if any side, Aeschylus took in the political struggle between Cimon and the Alcmeonids Xanthippus and his son Pericles. Pericles had produced the Persians, a play that seems to celebrate Themistocles and his victory at Salamis. And some progressive-minded historians have hastily assumed that this proves the existence of a three-way alliance of Aeschylus, Themistocles, and Pericles against Cimon and the conservatives. However, the Alcmeonids seem to have been against resistance to Persia, and the tales we hear of Themistocles’ corruption probably emanate from Alcmeonid sources. Pericles may well have wanted to change his image by acting as choregus for Aeschylus, as is often said, but it is just as likely that he was picked accidentally to produce the Persians, or, if there was a political scheme, Pericles might well have wanted to redeem his family’s reputation from the charge that they had been pro-Persian, as they most probably had been.
We do know that Aeschylus was of a Eupatrid family from Eleusis, that is, he came from the most distinctive small town in Attica, with a deep religious tradition—the Eleusinian Mysteries—a place remote from the class struggles going on in Athens itself. He probably fought at Salamis and possibly at Plataea, but it is certain that he and his brother fought at Marathon under Cimon’s father, Miltiades. For the hoplite class and landed aristocracy, Marathon was the defining moment in Greek history and proved that it was farmer-soldiers, not the rabble who rowed in the fleet, that saved Athens. It seems likely that Aeschylus, like many landed aristocrats of his day, took the side of unity: the unity of the Athenian people against the barbarian invader, and the unity of all the Greeks who had resisted the invasion. In the Seven Against Thebes, he seems to suggest that it is better for the Athenians to rally against the enemy than to quarrel among themselves. This had been the policy of Themistocles and later of Cimon. But it was surely not the policy of Xanthippus and his son Pericles.
The whole play breathes the spirit of martial defiance, and though there are not many scholars who would agree with me, I think the enemy is still Persia. Why else emphasize the foreign tongue of the Argive attackers? Yes, Greeks were very sensitive to their dialect differences that sharply distinguished Spartans from Athenians, but what Athenian cares about the differences between Argives and Thebans? The panic-stricken chorus of women pray that gods will not allow the enemy to devastate a land that speaks the tongue of Greece (72-72) and later, not to abandon the city to an alien-speaking army (170). I am not suggesting that Aeschylus intended the audience to make an immediate connection, rather that he was framing his dramatic struggle in terms that would resonate with them: wild and impious aliens attacking a civilized city.
Let us turn to the story of the play, which draws upon the same mythological material as Sophocles Theban plays. The Seven is the third play of trilogy, a set of three plays, in this case, as in the Oresteia, forming a coherent and interrelated whole. Laius, king of Thebes, disobeys Apollo’s injunction against having children and exposes his son Oedipus, and the grown Oedipus, after killing an unknown stranger in a quarrel arrives in Thebes and in ignorance marries his mother. He eventually realizes that he has fulfilled the oracle by killing his father and marrying his mother and, after blinding himself, he curses his children, particularly his two sons Eteocles and Polynices, who may or may not have done something additional to offend him. Eteocles expels Polynices, who goes to Argos, marries king Adrastos’ daughter, and assembles an army, led by himself and six other champions, to attack and sack Thebes. The city is defended by Eteocles and six chosen champions. All 14 heroes fall in battle killing each other.
I shall pause here to allow a few days to look over the play. In reading it, I want you to pay attention not just to the story but to the treatment of the one significant character on stage, Eteocles, and to what we learn of the character of his offstage brother. Those of you who have read Antigone and participated in that discussion will quickly perceive how different are Aeschylus' interests from Sophocles'. Sophocles was a pious man and a good citizen, but Aeschylus seems to live in a world where divine forces are less remote and where the civic order of the city is both strengthened and attacked by the supernatural.
Why should Laius have been forbidden to have children? In the original folk tales, there may simply have been no good reason or merely some symbolic offense, like Agamemnon’s sin in killing a deer sacred to Artemis, which led to her demand that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. But Aeschylus, probing the mystery of life, would not have been content—as he was not content with the story of the doe in the Agamemnon—with a guiltless fault. There was a story, perhaps used by Aeschylus, that Laius had committed a sexual crime by raping Chrysippus, the son of Pelops, who was the ancestor of Agamemnon and Menelaus. In this popular version of the story, Laius was the inventor of pederasty, and a curse on his procreation would seem to be a perfectly natural divine response.
Eteocles’ misogyny may be conventional, but it is expressed in unusual language: He does not want to share a home or dwell with women. This would seem to be a repudiation of marriage. A homosexual angle might also clarify the puzzling order he announces that whoever disobeys—whether “woman, man, and whatever in between”--will be stoned. Commentators either express bewilderment or explain the phrase as a meaningless rhetorical attempt to make a list of three, but it is far from impossible that Aeschylus is indeed suggesting that the family of Laius recognizes an intermediate category. Stoning was a public penalty of great severity, inflicted on deserters. That is apparently the point of a fragment plausibly attributed to the Myrmidons, Aeschylus’ play about Achilles and the death of Patroclus. The Greek commanders threaten to stone Achilles for desertion, but the hero insists on his own dignity at the expense of the army. This detail is specially interesting since we are told that Aeschylus is the first to have made Achilles and Patroclus into homosexual lovers. I do not want to push this argument too far, but it is not impossible that Laius, a sexual predator, has bequeathed a curse on his family that involves both sex and violence. Indeed, the women fear that if the city is conquered they will be forced to serve the enemy as concubines. There is nothing unusual in such a fear, but it is a significant point that is emphasized in this play [363-68].
The curse plays an active role in the play. Eteocles has the temerity to invoke it as a god right after Zeus, Earth, and the gods who protect the city: “Curse, the powerful vengeance spirit of my father.” This seems an unusual invocation, but Eteocles takes a pragmatic, even impious approach to religion. Worship and prayer are all very well, but success is what counts, and too much public hysteria might undermine morale, he tells the frightened women.
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Private: Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes
Justice is the central preoccupation of Greek moral and political thought. The basic word is dike, a cosmic principle that makes things right, from which is derived such words as dikaios, just, and dikaoiosyne, the quality of being just. Dike, justice, means originally something like the way things have always been, are now, and ought to be. Homer’s Achilles makes Agamemnon swear that he has not had intercourse with Briseis as is the dike of men and women. But dike comes to mean normative custom and thus the power that can make wrongs right. The simplest form of this is revenge.
Like earlier Greek poets, Solon had observed that good men do not always prosper and that bad men sometimes die happy in bed. The judgment of dike then must be visited upon their children. Greeks also believed that guilt and justice could be collective: Priam of Troy did wrong in not forcing his son to give Helen back to Menelaus, and his entire city, not just his family, has to suffer. Justice belongs not to the individual, in other words, but to family, kin, and the community.
However, justice is ultimately in the hands of the gods and the divine forces of fate and necessity and revenge who set limits on human ambition. When Xerxes bridged the Hellespont, lashed the sea, and tried to obliterate the distinction between Europe and Asia, the Greeks were made the agents of divine vengeance just as Agamemnon had been the agent of Zeus’s vengeance against the Persians. This is more or less the approach taken both by the historian Herodotus and by the dramatist Aeschylus in his play the Persians.
The period of the Persian Wars and the aftermath were a period of intense political activity at Athens. In one generation, Athenians had expelled the tyrants, completely reorganized their commonwealth, and beaten back two Persian invasions. Such success was bound to inspire confidence in the Athenian commonwealth, a confidence that would lead to hybris and ruin. Since the lowest classes were needed to man the fleets that chased the Persians out of the Aegean, skillful and ambitious politicians who were determined that Athens should create a thalassocracy—that is, a naval empire—played upon the pride and resentments of the poorer classes. Xanthippus, Ephialtes, and Xanthippus’ son Pericles were determined to eliminate every check on the power of the Athenian assembly, but they were resisted by rival representatives of the old nobility. This period of social and political conflict is the backdrop for the literary career of one of the greatest writers of the Greek language: Aeschylus. Aeschylus’ first surviving play, the Persians, produced in 472 is a meditation on Persian hybris and the divine vengeance they brought upon themselves. It is also a great celebration of the Athenian victory at Salamis. Could anyone have foreseen in 472 that Athens, in the next 50 years, would commit the same follies as the Persians? Aeschylus may not, but 14 years later in his greatest work, the trilogy known as the Oresteia, he explicitly compares the crimes of Agamemnon the sacker of Troy with the crime of the Asian king Priam and his son Paris.
Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes was produced in 467, only 11 years after Xerxes returned to Persia, having failed to conquer mainland Greece, though a few Persian garrisons remained until 465. The menace was still serious, however, and Athens had spent the previous decade in sweeping the Persians out of the Aegean and establishing her own empire. But hearing that the Persians were mustering another invasion force in Asia Minor, Athens in 467 sent Cimon son of Miltiades, with a fleet and 5000 hoplites. Cimon decisively defeated the Persians by land and sea.
The political picture was rapidly changing at Athens. Relations with Sparta had begun to grow tense, and Themistocles—the political genius who organized Greek resistance to Persia—had been ostracized in 472. But, perhaps unexpectedly, the leading position did not go to anyone in the Alcmeonid clan but to the young arch-conservative, Cimon son of Miltiades, who had generously collaborated with Themistocles during the wars. When other conservative aristocrats wanted to put their trust in the hoplites and rejected Themistocles’ strategy of evacuating Athens, the young Cimon, whose father had defeated the Persians at Marathon in 490, led a procession of young nobles to the acropolis where they dedicated their bridles—the symbols of their knighthood—to Athena.
Cimon’s policies were clear: war with Persia, peace with Sparta, and a maintenance of the successful status quo established by Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid: a balanced constitution in which both the people and the aristocrats were able to carry out their proper functions, freed from the dictatorship of the mob and the oppression of an oligarchy. Under Cimon’s leadership, Athens became mistress of the Aegean, and was at peace both with her allies and with the Spartan alliance. His very success antagonized the democrats led by Ephialtes and Pericles, and Pericles prosecuted him for bribery, during the scrutiny after his return from his victorious campaign on the Eurymedon. Cimon was acquitted and might have stayed in power had he not made the mistake of going to the aid of the Spartan allies during the Messenian Revolt. But it is also possible that he was doomed by the emergence of a new kind of politics based as much on demagoguery as on personal influence. As an Alcmeonid aristocrat who pandered to the mob, Pericles could make both techniques work for him, and he may well have viewed poor Cimon—a brave and honorable man--as a political simpleton.
Cimon, who argued strongly for maintaining the alliance with Sparta, was at the height of his success and influence in Athens, when Aeschylus was writing his play, a work that Aristophanes appropriately described as “full of Ares.” I do not know which, if any side, Aeschylus took in the political struggle between Cimon and the Alcmeonids Xanthippus and his son Pericles. Pericles had produced the Persians, a play that seems to celebrate Themistocles and his victory at Salamis. And some progressive-minded historians have hastily assumed that this proves the existence of a three-way alliance of Aeschylus, Themistocles, and Pericles against Cimon and the conservatives. However, the Alcmeonids seem to have been against resistance to Persia, and the tales we hear of Themistocles’ corruption probably emanate from Alcmeonid sources. Pericles may well have wanted to change his image by acting as choregus for Aeschylus, as is often said, but it is just as likely that he was picked accidentally to produce the Persians, or, if there was a political scheme, Pericles might well have wanted to redeem his family’s reputation from the charge that they had been pro-Persian, as they most probably had been.
We do know that Aeschylus was of a Eupatrid family from Eleusis, that is, he came from the most distinctive small town in Attica, with a deep religious tradition—the Eleusinian Mysteries—a place remote from the class struggles going on in Athens itself. He probably fought at Salamis and possibly at Plataea, but it is certain that he and his brother fought at Marathon under Cimon’s father, Miltiades. For the hoplite class and landed aristocracy, Marathon was the defining moment in Greek history and proved that it was farmer-soldiers, not the rabble who rowed in the fleet, that saved Athens. It seems likely that Aeschylus, like many landed aristocrats of his day, took the side of unity: the unity of the Athenian people against the barbarian invader, and the unity of all the Greeks who had resisted the invasion. In the Seven Against Thebes, he seems to suggest that it is better for the Athenians to rally against the enemy than to quarrel among themselves. This had been the policy of Themistocles and later of Cimon. But it was surely not the policy of Xanthippus and his son Pericles.
The whole play breathes the spirit of martial defiance, and though there are not many scholars who would agree with me, I think the enemy is still Persia. Why else emphasize the foreign tongue of the Argive attackers? Yes, Greeks were very sensitive to their dialect differences that sharply distinguished Spartans from Athenians, but what Athenian cares about the differences between Argives and Thebans? The panic-stricken chorus of women pray that gods will not allow the enemy to devastate a land that speaks the tongue of Greece (72-72) and later, not to abandon the city to an alien-speaking army (170). I am not suggesting that Aeschylus intended the audience to make an immediate connection, rather that he was framing his dramatic struggle in terms that would resonate with them: wild and impious aliens attacking a civilized city.
Let us turn to the story of the play, which draws upon the same mythological material as Sophocles Theban plays. The Seven is the third play of trilogy, a set of three plays, in this case, as in the Oresteia, forming a coherent and interrelated whole. Laius, king of Thebes, disobeys Apollo’s injunction against having children and exposes his son Oedipus, and the grown Oedipus, after killing an unknown stranger in a quarrel arrives in Thebes and in ignorance marries his mother. He eventually realizes that he has fulfilled the oracle by killing his father and marrying his mother and, after blinding himself, he curses his children, particularly his two sons Eteocles and Polynices, who may or may not have done something additional to offend him. Eteocles expels Polynices, who goes to Argos, marries king Adrastos’ daughter, and assembles an army, led by himself and six other champions, to attack and sack Thebes. The city is defended by Eteocles and six chosen champions. All 14 heroes fall in battle killing each other.
I shall pause here to allow a few days to look over the play. In reading it, I want you to pay attention not just to the story but to the treatment of the one significant character on stage, Eteocles, and to what we learn of the character of his offstage brother. Those of you who have read Antigone and participated in that discussion will quickly perceive how different are Aeschylus' interests from Sophocles'. Sophocles was a pious man and a good citizen, but Aeschylus seems to live in a world where divine forces are less remote and where the civic order of the city is both strengthened and attacked by the supernatural.
Why should Laius have been forbidden to have children? In the original folk tales, there may simply have been no good reason or merely some symbolic offense, like Agamemnon’s sin in killing a deer sacred to Artemis, which led to her demand that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. But Aeschylus, probing the mystery of life, would not have been content—as he was not content with the story of the doe in the Agamemnon—with a guiltless fault. There was a story, perhaps used by Aeschylus, that Laius had committed a sexual crime by raping Chrysippus, the son of Pelops, who was the ancestor of Agamemnon and Menelaus. In this popular version of the story, Laius was the inventor of pederasty, and a curse on his procreation would seem to be a perfectly natural divine response.
Eteocles’ misogyny may be conventional, but it is expressed in unusual language: He does not want to share a home or dwell with women. This would seem to be a repudiation of marriage. A homosexual angle might also clarify the puzzling order he announces that whoever disobeys—whether “woman, man, and whatever in between”--will be stoned. Commentators either express bewilderment or explain the phrase as a meaningless rhetorical attempt to make a list of three, but it is far from impossible that Aeschylus is indeed suggesting that the family of Laius recognizes an intermediate category. Stoning was a public penalty of great severity, inflicted on deserters. That is apparently the point of a fragment plausibly attributed to the Myrmidons, Aeschylus’ play about Achilles and the death of Patroclus. The Greek commanders threaten to stone Achilles for desertion, but the hero insists on his own dignity at the expense of the army. This detail is specially interesting since we are told that Aeschylus is the first to have made Achilles and Patroclus into homosexual lovers. I do not want to push this argument too far, but it is not impossible that Laius, a sexual predator, has bequeathed a curse on his family that involves both sex and violence. Indeed, the women fear that if the city is conquered they will be forced to serve the enemy as concubines. There is nothing unusual in such a fear, but it is a significant point that is emphasized in this play [363-68].
The curse plays an active role in the play. Eteocles has the temerity to invoke it as a god right after Zeus, Earth, and the gods who protect the city: “Curse, the powerful vengeance spirit of my father.” This seems an unusual invocation, but Eteocles takes a pragmatic, even impious approach to religion. Worship and prayer are all very well, but success is what counts, and too much public hysteria might undermine morale, he tells the frightened women.
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Why should Laius have been forbidden to have children?
Odd. I had thought that the Delphic Oracle warned and commanded Laius not to have children because his child would both kill him and set into motion a series of crimes that would harm Thebes. At least that was my impression from the third Choral Ode (before the messenger enters to declare victory) as well as from the three part lament of Ismene, Antigone and the chorus. I did not see any suggestion of Laius' homosexuality at all. Rather the crimes I saw are Laius' impiety to Oracle, Oedipus impiety to his father (patricide) and mother (incest), and Polynices impiety to the polis -- all violations of the natural order (as is homosexuality), and thus all requiring Dike to expropriate punishment and to set matters right. And which impiety is the gravest?
Likewise, I had thought that Eteocles’ reproach to the women was not because he is homosexual but rather because, as the city's leader, the moment called for manly valor, not womanly fear, for men at the city's walls and gates, not in their homes and bed chambers.
I do acknowledge a tension among piety to the gods, piety to one's own blood -- both expressed by the chorus of women and the two sisters -- and piety to the polis, expressed by Eteocles, the messenger, and the herald, all men -- a tension that seems unresolved at the end of the play as the chorus divides.
But, what do I know? I am a simple, ignorant man. It is very deep in the dead of night for me, and I am very tired. I shall have questions tomorrow.
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I have arisen this morning and have consulted Der Kleine Pauly, vol iii, page 454, the entry for "Laios". The entry says that there are roughly two versions of the Laius curse, one of which is Dr. Fleming's: Laius and his house are cursed because of his assault on Chrysippos. The other view: Laius' wife Epikaste/Iokaste was barren, Laius asked the gods for a child, and the oracle warned him that a child of his would kill him. Both views, so the entry, can be dovetailed.
I shall trust Dr. Fleming on this and shall drop my own misreading. The Laius-Chrysippos homosexuality curse does seem to be the view of Euripides' The Phoenician Women, if memory serves me right. The Pauly says Euripides actually wrote a play, now lost, called Chrysippos.
Sorry to have raised this matter.
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Let me be very precise about what I am saying. I do not say that Eteocles is a homosexual or that the sexual-predator version of Laios' curse is correct, though I think it is the more probable. I do believe that a sex-crime gives the neatest explanation of Laios' sin and of Eteocles' behavior. The Kleine Pauly is an excellent reference and though I have not looked up this entry, the whole work was updated from the full edition of the encyclopedia. Being an encyclopedia, however, it focuses on general information. Every playwright put his own spin on these stories and without a full trilogy, we fall back on probable conjectures. I don't believe my version is very popular. Indeed, I don't know of anyone who takes this position of the Septem.
We are just starting our Summer School, but I'll try to remember, tomorrow, to bring in some things written by Bruno Snell, re the Myrmidons.
Finally, it seems to me some comments have disappeared from the discussion. I'll check.
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I thank E.A. for his kind words. Now please allow a few questions and comments. I express my regrets beforehand to readers for wasting their time if the answers to these questions are already foreseen.
1. the Kleiner Pauly, under the entry for “Aischylos”, says that this play was part of a tetralogy, the first play about Laios, the second Oidipos, the third our play The Hepta, and the fourth a satyr play call “the Sphinx”. Is this correct? What is more, is Aeschylus the father of such tetralogical drama?
2. I preface my next question with background. Germany (and the rest of Middle Europe) has a unbroken stage tradition extending back to the Easter Play, a cultural tradition that has not be replaced by electronic media. In my own university days, my professors chastised me for treating passages in plays as they were poetry, poetry with complex imagery, the meaning of which needed to be worked out by reading and re-reading, much like the poetry of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbury, or the Pisan Cantos of Pound, with their cubist arranging of ideas. The audience, my professors said, has to grasp the image at once, because it is performed before them on a stage, not read by them in the quiet of a study. Furthermore, they said, a drama is not a text at all; all we have from the author is a script. Granted, the scripts of Tennessee Williams almost read as if they were novels, with very detailed stage instructions, yet older dramatic scripts only tell us what words the actors are to say, and little more. So, they said, a drama’s script is to be read with the eyes and ears of a producer and stage director.
Now: If Greek drama was sung (yes?) and thus resembled more our opera than drama (yes?), The Seven strikes one as resembling more an oratorio, as if it had the subtitle a cantata for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. For there is so little interaction between individual characters; in the middle part, there is a highly stylized three part arrangement repeated seven times of messenger/Etocles/chorus, all very builded; in the last part, the two sisters and the chorus respond antiphonally, and in the two sisters’ dirge, we have one line exchanges that seem to be not said to each character but rather a duet sung from a script and declaimed to the audience. In short, more fitting for musical performance than dramatic action? Does this play seem to resemble more what we know as a church service, or even a pageant, than a play?
So my question: How are we to image this work being staged?
3. In the same vein: Aeschylus is said to be the very dramatist who added more than one actor to Greek drama (though the Pauly says this claim is contested). Given that The Seven has so little interaction, may we say that Aeschylus is going back to an earlier form of drama, and one familiar to his audience?
4. A question about Dionysus: Just as drama in Middle Europe had its Medieval origins in a worship service (the Easter Play), so also with the Greeks, with the worship of Dionysus (yes?). By the time of Aeschylus, had this worship become peripheral and pro forma, no longer important for the action? Was the subsequent satyr play (a dance?) just for amusement?
5. An observation: To make so utterly vivid one of the chief characters (or thirteen!) who in fact never actually appears on the stage (or never appears alive) is a feat I’ve only seen as well done in Hitchcock’s Rebecca.
6. A final observation. There are many tensions in this play: the grace of the gods vs. a Pelagian emphasis on human achievement; men vs. women; the family vs. the polis; ate, hybris, dike (guilt, arrogance, distributive justice). Yet what struck me the most are the climax and catastrophe: The messenger makes his announcement about the battle’s outcome, and the resulting turn of the drama is amazing, wondrous, utterly unexpected – and one of the most astonishing that I’ve seen in all drama. One expects x from the choir, and one gets the opposite y I shall not be a plot spoiler and give this turn away. Instead, I vigorously urge all readers to finish the play, let this effect/affect wash over them, and then help me. Am I wrong to think that the key to the play might lie in our understanding of this turn?
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I am in and out of lectures, but I want to begin answering the good questions that have been posed. First, a tetralogy consists of three tragedies, not necessarily on a related theme, topped off by a farce or burlesque known as a satyr play. Of this form we have one poor example, Euripides' Cyclops (which appears to be less broad in humor than what we are told of these plays) but also substantial fragments of Sophocles', particularly the Ichneutae. Most if not all of Aeschylus' works would have been in tetralogie, and he, unlike later writers, seems unusually prone to write tragic trilogies on one theme, e.g., the Oedipus, Prometheus, Orestes. By contrast, Sophocles 3 plays on Oedipus and his family were written at different periods of his life.
Italian composers created opera in the belief that they were reviving Greek tragedy. Tragedies were performed in three modes: 1) spoken dialogue in either iambic trimeter or (much less frequently) trochaic tetrameter; 2) choral chant in anapaestic dimeters, often used to get the chorus of 12 or 15 on stage; 3) choral songs in complex lyric meters, often highly poetic and even mystical, annihilating the bounds of time and space and reaching toward moral and spiritual truth. Although staging in Aeschyus' day was simple, in terms of mechanics--a simple stage building, a mechane for divine apparitions--a dancing floor for the chorus to sing and dance the odes--we know that Aeschylus was famous for using dramatic costuming and effect. You are absolutely right that one cannot judge this play by the conventions of, say, Elizabethan drama, and this makes Aeschylus one of the most difficult ancient writers to appreciate.
The history of tragedy goes, I believe, something like this. By the 7th century and almost certainly earlier, Greek communities had festivals in which, in addition to epic performances, choruses of men or girls sang songs. Some were liturgical in nature; others were celebratory--Salve, festa dies etc.--while others narrated some heroic tale from the mythic past. The most prominent names are Stesichorus and Ibycus. These poems could become quite complex as we see in Aeschylus' contemporaries Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides. At some point the mob must have said, "Good grief, what is all this?" Thus a prologue might have been recited by a hypokrites, that is, an interpreter, who might also at one point have impersonated the hero and given speeches, sung a lament, and interacted with the chorus, making a bit of dialogue possible. This suggested adding a second hyopkrites, making real dialogue and conflict an important part of the play. Aeschylus is by convention credited with this innovation, though who knows? Sophocles is said to have added a third actor, which Aeschylus uses clumsily and ineffectively in Agamemnon.
More to come...
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As for Dionysus, there is the saying attributed to Epigenes that tragedy has nothing to do with Dionysus, and yet it was performed at his festival, most importantly the Greater Dionysia. The connection with his cult, however, is hard to trace, apart from Euripides' Bacchae.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that tragedy is closer to liturgy or a mystery play than regular drama. In Sophocles' Oedipus, the chorus wonder if atheists like Jocasta and Oedipus are permitted to blaspheme, ti dei me choreuein? That is, why do I have to sing and dance in this chorus?
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A very interesting and informative article but did not the horseman Nestor of Gerenia advise the Argives to "not hastily depart homewards until each had lain with the wife of some Trojan." ? (Iliad, II, 354 et seq.) The lads were in it for the loot and the women, not the dike of Menelaus' wounded sexual pride.
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A reasonable point in general, but the Iliad is literature, not history (though the Greeks regarded it as historical). Homer does not give us much of a glimpse into the motivation of individual soldiers. He does say that t he theme of Achilles' rage has something to do with a plan or will of Zeus. Nestor's advice is reminiscent of Napoleon's address to his soldiers on the invasion of Italy--sex and booty are an incentive, though they were not Napoleon's primary motives nor those of the Atridae in either the Iliad or in Aeschylus. The crime of Paris was not so much sexual as it was a violation of the laws of Xenia (obligation of guests and hosts) which are presided over by Zeus.
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In The Eumenides Aeschylus seems to have a high opinion of the Areopagus. Does this mean that he therefore sides with Cimon and the Eupatridae?
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Jeff, take a look at Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War, chapter 5 “What War Is Fought For”, and Chapter 6, “Why War Is Fought”. I have used the latter chapter in teaching The Iliad to high school students, even though Homer is mentioned only in passing. Indeed Homer himself, were he a theoretician, easily could have written these two chapters. Homer knows the fighting man, and knows why he fights. Van Creveld: “In any war, the readiness to suffer an die, as well as to kill, represents the single most important factor. Take it away, and even the most numerous, best organized, best trained, best equipped army in the world will turn out to be a brittle instrument” (p. 160). And here one can ask if the chorus (of women) in The Seven has forgotten this, and if Eteocles hasn’t. Van Creveld insists that war is exclusively a man’s game, not a woman’s
“However strong an army may be in other respects, where the fighting spirit is lacking everything else is just a waste of time” (p. 191). Odysseus in Book IX forgets that no one is willing to die for his own interests, because dead men don’t have interests. It is even more absurd to die for someone else’s interests, what Agamemnon forgets in Book I. And Achilles himself forgets that in war, the I must become a We . By the way, Van Creveld’s book, eloquently written, is indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand war and Fourth Generation War. We’re in the mess in Iraq right now because our and politicians haven’t read this book.
Back on topic: One can see why the Greeks regarded Homer as Scripture; so many of their institutions can be traced back to him. Homer is father of tragedy; the story of Achilles is not a calamity but a classic Greek tragedy with all the trimmings. He’s the father of Isocratic rhetoric, if one examines how carefully speeches are crafted. And he’s even the father of comedy: Only in the Gilgamish are the gods so risible.
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I think Eteocles' agon with the chorus should also be looked at in the context of Bk. 6 from the Iliad--where Hektor has his "final" encounters with his mother Hekabe, Helen and then most especially his wife Andromache (who is holding their little baby boy Astyanax) by the very gates of Troy. Eteocles and Hektor both state their cases as to why the men must step away from their women to protect them--but their reasonings are quite different, and Hektor is nowhere near as dismissive of the womens' arguments (or as disparaging of the role they play) as Eteocles is.
So I also don't quite know what to make of Eteocles. But that's one of the great things about Greek tragedy (at least the plays I've encountered): there are no clear-cut "good guys" or "villains." The tragedies are anything but simple morality plays.
Dr. Fleming: You've intrigued me with your assertion that Aeschylus makes clumsy use of the third actor in the Oresteia. I'll be eager to hear you say more about that when we get there.
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Why should Laius have been forbidden to have children?
Odd. I had thought that the Delphic Oracle warned and commanded Laius not to have children because his child would both kill him and set into motion a series of crimes that would harm Thebes. At least that was my impression from the third Choral Ode (before the messenger enters to declare victory) as well as from the three part lament of Ismene, Antigone and the chorus. I did not see any suggestion of Laius' homosexuality at all. Rather the crimes I saw are Laius' impiety to Oracle, Oedipus impiety to his father (patricide) and mother (incest), and Polynices impiety to the polis -- all violations of the natural order (as is homosexuality), and thus all requiring Dike to expropriate punishment and to set matters right. And which impiety is the gravest?
Likewise, I had thought that Eteocles’ reproach to the women was not because he is homosexual but rather because, as the city's leader, the moment called for manly valor, not womanly fear, for men at the city's walls and gates, not in their homes and bed chambers.
I do acknowledge a tension among piety to the gods, piety to one's own blood -- both expressed by the chorus of women and the two sisters -- and piety to the polis, expressed by Eteocles, the messenger, and the herald, all men -- a tension that seems unresolved at the end of the play as the chorus divides.
But, what do I know? I am a simple, ignorant man. It is very deep in the dead of night for me, and I am very tired. I shall have questions tomorrow.
I have arisen this morning and have consulted Der Kleine Pauly, vol iii, page 454, the entry for "Laios". The entry says that there are roughly two versions of the Laius curse, one of which is Dr. Fleming's: Laius and his house are cursed because of his assault on Chrysippos. The other view: Laius' wife Epikaste/Iokaste was barren, Laius asked the gods for a child, and the oracle warned him that a child of his would kill him. Both views, so the entry, can be dovetailed.
I shall trust Dr. Fleming on this and shall drop my own misreading. The Laius-Chrysippos homosexuality curse does seem to be the view of Euripides' The Phoenician Women, if memory serves me right. The Pauly says Euripides actually wrote a play, now lost, called Chrysippos.
Sorry to have raised this matter.
Let me be very precise about what I am saying. I do not say that Eteocles is a homosexual or that the sexual-predator version of Laios' curse is correct, though I think it is the more probable. I do believe that a sex-crime gives the neatest explanation of Laios' sin and of Eteocles' behavior. The Kleine Pauly is an excellent reference and though I have not looked up this entry, the whole work was updated from the full edition of the encyclopedia. Being an encyclopedia, however, it focuses on general information. Every playwright put his own spin on these stories and without a full trilogy, we fall back on probable conjectures. I don't believe my version is very popular. Indeed, I don't know of anyone who takes this position of the Septem.
We are just starting our Summer School, but I'll try to remember, tomorrow, to bring in some things written by Bruno Snell, re the Myrmidons.
Finally, it seems to me some comments have disappeared from the discussion. I'll check.
I thank E.A. for his kind words. Now please allow a few questions and comments. I express my regrets beforehand to readers for wasting their time if the answers to these questions are already foreseen.
1. the Kleiner Pauly, under the entry for “Aischylos”, says that this play was part of a tetralogy, the first play about Laios, the second Oidipos, the third our play The Hepta, and the fourth a satyr play call “the Sphinx”. Is this correct? What is more, is Aeschylus the father of such tetralogical drama?
2. I preface my next question with background. Germany (and the rest of Middle Europe) has a unbroken stage tradition extending back to the Easter Play, a cultural tradition that has not be replaced by electronic media. In my own university days, my professors chastised me for treating passages in plays as they were poetry, poetry with complex imagery, the meaning of which needed to be worked out by reading and re-reading, much like the poetry of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbury, or the Pisan Cantos of Pound, with their cubist arranging of ideas. The audience, my professors said, has to grasp the image at once, because it is performed before them on a stage, not read by them in the quiet of a study. Furthermore, they said, a drama is not a text at all; all we have from the author is a script. Granted, the scripts of Tennessee Williams almost read as if they were novels, with very detailed stage instructions, yet older dramatic scripts only tell us what words the actors are to say, and little more. So, they said, a drama’s script is to be read with the eyes and ears of a producer and stage director.
Now: If Greek drama was sung (yes?) and thus resembled more our opera than drama (yes?), The Seven strikes one as resembling more an oratorio, as if it had the subtitle a cantata for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. For there is so little interaction between individual characters; in the middle part, there is a highly stylized three part arrangement repeated seven times of messenger/Etocles/chorus, all very builded; in the last part, the two sisters and the chorus respond antiphonally, and in the two sisters’ dirge, we have one line exchanges that seem to be not said to each character but rather a duet sung from a script and declaimed to the audience. In short, more fitting for musical performance than dramatic action? Does this play seem to resemble more what we know as a church service, or even a pageant, than a play?
So my question: How are we to image this work being staged?
3. In the same vein: Aeschylus is said to be the very dramatist who added more than one actor to Greek drama (though the Pauly says this claim is contested). Given that The Seven has so little interaction, may we say that Aeschylus is going back to an earlier form of drama, and one familiar to his audience?
4. A question about Dionysus: Just as drama in Middle Europe had its Medieval origins in a worship service (the Easter Play), so also with the Greeks, with the worship of Dionysus (yes?). By the time of Aeschylus, had this worship become peripheral and pro forma, no longer important for the action? Was the subsequent satyr play (a dance?) just for amusement?
5. An observation: To make so utterly vivid one of the chief characters (or thirteen!) who in fact never actually appears on the stage (or never appears alive) is a feat I’ve only seen as well done in Hitchcock’s Rebecca.
6. A final observation. There are many tensions in this play: the grace of the gods vs. a Pelagian emphasis on human achievement; men vs. women; the family vs. the polis; ate, hybris, dike (guilt, arrogance, distributive justice). Yet what struck me the most are the climax and catastrophe: The messenger makes his announcement about the battle’s outcome, and the resulting turn of the drama is amazing, wondrous, utterly unexpected – and one of the most astonishing that I’ve seen in all drama. One expects x from the choir, and one gets the opposite y I shall not be a plot spoiler and give this turn away. Instead, I vigorously urge all readers to finish the play, let this effect/affect wash over them, and then help me. Am I wrong to think that the key to the play might lie in our understanding of this turn?
I am in and out of lectures, but I want to begin answering the good questions that have been posed. First, a tetralogy consists of three tragedies, not necessarily on a related theme, topped off by a farce or burlesque known as a satyr play. Of this form we have one poor example, Euripides' Cyclops (which appears to be less broad in humor than what we are told of these plays) but also substantial fragments of Sophocles', particularly the Ichneutae. Most if not all of Aeschylus' works would have been in tetralogie, and he, unlike later writers, seems unusually prone to write tragic trilogies on one theme, e.g., the Oedipus, Prometheus, Orestes. By contrast, Sophocles 3 plays on Oedipus and his family were written at different periods of his life.
Italian composers created opera in the belief that they were reviving Greek tragedy. Tragedies were performed in three modes: 1) spoken dialogue in either iambic trimeter or (much less frequently) trochaic tetrameter; 2) choral chant in anapaestic dimeters, often used to get the chorus of 12 or 15 on stage; 3) choral songs in complex lyric meters, often highly poetic and even mystical, annihilating the bounds of time and space and reaching toward moral and spiritual truth. Although staging in Aeschyus' day was simple, in terms of mechanics--a simple stage building, a mechane for divine apparitions--a dancing floor for the chorus to sing and dance the odes--we know that Aeschylus was famous for using dramatic costuming and effect. You are absolutely right that one cannot judge this play by the conventions of, say, Elizabethan drama, and this makes Aeschylus one of the most difficult ancient writers to appreciate.
The history of tragedy goes, I believe, something like this. By the 7th century and almost certainly earlier, Greek communities had festivals in which, in addition to epic performances, choruses of men or girls sang songs. Some were liturgical in nature; others were celebratory--Salve, festa dies etc.--while others narrated some heroic tale from the mythic past. The most prominent names are Stesichorus and Ibycus. These poems could become quite complex as we see in Aeschylus' contemporaries Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides. At some point the mob must have said, "Good grief, what is all this?" Thus a prologue might have been recited by a hypokrites, that is, an interpreter, who might also at one point have impersonated the hero and given speeches, sung a lament, and interacted with the chorus, making a bit of dialogue possible. This suggested adding a second hyopkrites, making real dialogue and conflict an important part of the play. Aeschylus is by convention credited with this innovation, though who knows? Sophocles is said to have added a third actor, which Aeschylus uses clumsily and ineffectively in Agamemnon.
More to come...
As for Dionysus, there is the saying attributed to Epigenes that tragedy has nothing to do with Dionysus, and yet it was performed at his festival, most importantly the Greater Dionysia. The connection with his cult, however, is hard to trace, apart from Euripides' Bacchae.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that tragedy is closer to liturgy or a mystery play than regular drama. In Sophocles' Oedipus, the chorus wonder if atheists like Jocasta and Oedipus are permitted to blaspheme, ti dei me choreuein? That is, why do I have to sing and dance in this chorus?
A very interesting and informative article but did not the horseman Nestor of Gerenia advise the Argives to "not hastily depart homewards until each had lain with the wife of some Trojan." ? (Iliad, II, 354 et seq.) The lads were in it for the loot and the women, not the dike of Menelaus' wounded sexual pride.
A reasonable point in general, but the Iliad is literature, not history (though the Greeks regarded it as historical). Homer does not give us much of a glimpse into the motivation of individual soldiers. He does say that t he theme of Achilles' rage has something to do with a plan or will of Zeus. Nestor's advice is reminiscent of Napoleon's address to his soldiers on the invasion of Italy--sex and booty are an incentive, though they were not Napoleon's primary motives nor those of the Atridae in either the Iliad or in Aeschylus. The crime of Paris was not so much sexual as it was a violation of the laws of Xenia (obligation of guests and hosts) which are presided over by Zeus.
In The Eumenides Aeschylus seems to have a high opinion of the Areopagus. Does this mean that he therefore sides with Cimon and the Eupatridae?
Jeff, take a look at Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War, chapter 5 “What War Is Fought For”, and Chapter 6, “Why War Is Fought”. I have used the latter chapter in teaching The Iliad to high school students, even though Homer is mentioned only in passing. Indeed Homer himself, were he a theoretician, easily could have written these two chapters. Homer knows the fighting man, and knows why he fights. Van Creveld: “In any war, the readiness to suffer an die, as well as to kill, represents the single most important factor. Take it away, and even the most numerous, best organized, best trained, best equipped army in the world will turn out to be a brittle instrument” (p. 160). And here one can ask if the chorus (of women) in The Seven has forgotten this, and if Eteocles hasn’t. Van Creveld insists that war is exclusively a man’s game, not a woman’s
“However strong an army may be in other respects, where the fighting spirit is lacking everything else is just a waste of time” (p. 191). Odysseus in Book IX forgets that no one is willing to die for his own interests, because dead men don’t have interests. It is even more absurd to die for someone else’s interests, what Agamemnon forgets in Book I. And Achilles himself forgets that in war, the I must become a We . By the way, Van Creveld’s book, eloquently written, is indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand war and Fourth Generation War. We’re in the mess in Iraq right now because our and politicians haven’t read this book.
Back on topic: One can see why the Greeks regarded Homer as Scripture; so many of their institutions can be traced back to him. Homer is father of tragedy; the story of Achilles is not a calamity but a classic Greek tragedy with all the trimmings. He’s the father of Isocratic rhetoric, if one examines how carefully speeches are crafted. And he’s even the father of comedy: Only in the Gilgamish are the gods so risible.
I think Eteocles' agon with the chorus should also be looked at in the context of Bk. 6 from the Iliad--where Hektor has his "final" encounters with his mother Hekabe, Helen and then most especially his wife Andromache (who is holding their little baby boy Astyanax) by the very gates of Troy. Eteocles and Hektor both state their cases as to why the men must step away from their women to protect them--but their reasonings are quite different, and Hektor is nowhere near as dismissive of the womens' arguments (or as disparaging of the role they play) as Eteocles is.
So I also don't quite know what to make of Eteocles. But that's one of the great things about Greek tragedy (at least the plays I've encountered): there are no clear-cut "good guys" or "villains." The tragedies are anything but simple morality plays.
Dr. Fleming: You've intrigued me with your assertion that Aeschylus makes clumsy use of the third actor in the Oresteia. I'll be eager to hear you say more about that when we get there.