A Greek Theater of Ideas

Author(s): William Arrowsmith

Source: Arion, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1963), pp. 32-56
Published by: Trustees of Boston University
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A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS

William Arrowsmith

fcta/EVERAL YEARS AGO I MADE A PLEA

S
that scholarship and criticism should do their best to recover a
feeling for what I called "turbulence" in Greek tragedy.1 By "tur
bulence" I meant both "the actual disorder of experience as that
experience gets into Greek drama" and "the impact of ideas under
dramatic test." What I want to do here is to take up the turbu
lence of ideas, as I see those ideas expressed by Euripidean drama,
with the purpose of showing that the Greeks possessed a theater
which we should have no difficulty in recognizing as a genuine
"theater of ideas." "theater of ideas" I do not mean, of course,
By
a theater of intellectual sententiae or Shavian "talk" or even the
theater of the sophist-poet; Imean a theater of dramatists whose
medium of thought was the stage, who used the whole machinery
of the theater as a way of thinking, critically and constructively,
about their world.
In such a theater I assume that the emphasis will be upon ideas
rather than character, and that a thesis or problem will normally
take precedence over development of character or heroism; that
esthetic or formal pleasure will be secondary to intellectual rigor
and and that the of ideas presented re
thought; complexity may
severe formal dislocations or intricate of emotional
quire blurrings
modes and genres once kept artistically distinct. It is also Ukely
that the moral texture of an action will be "difficult," and that
moral satisfaction will not come or even at all; that
easily prob
lems may be left unresolved; that is, that the effect of a play may
very well be discomfort or even pain, and that the purpose of this
discomfort will be to influence the social rather than the individual
behavior of the spectator. Beyond this, I would expect such a
theater to be concerned with the and drama
commonly diagnosis
tization of cultural crisis, and hence that the universe inwhich the
dramatic action takes place would tend to be either irrational or
All of these characteristics are, of course, ab
incomprehensible.
stracted at random from the historical "theater of ideas" from
Hebbel to the present, but in their ensemble they serve to give at
least a general sense of the kind of "theater of ideas" I have in
mind.
That such a theater?so "modern" and anti-tradi
specifically
tional a theater?existed the Greeks is not, I be?eve, ex
among
an article of faith scholars and critics. To be sure, the
actly among
Greek theater, Uke other theater, made abundant use of
any great
ideas, and the Athenians the theater, not as entertain
regarded

1 See Criticism of Greek in The Tulane Drama Re

"The Tragedy"
n. 3 (
view, Vol. Ill, Spring, 1959), p. 31ff.
 William Arrowsmith 33

ment, but as the instrument of cultural instruction, a

supreme
democratic in itself. for instance, uses
paideia complete Aeschylus,
ideas with stunning boldness, showing in play after play how the
com
great post-Hesiodic world-order could be compellingly and
prehensively adapted to Athenian history and society; and his
theater provides not only a great, and new, theodicy, but dra
creates the idea of Athens as the
matically evolving supreme
achievement of the mind of Zeus and the suffering of mankind.
As for Sophocles, I am not of those who believe that he, like
Henry James, possessed a mind so fine that no idea could violate
it. In Oedipus, for instance, we have Sophocles' image of heroic
man, shorn of his old Aeschylean confidence in himself and his
world, and relentlessly pursuing the terrible new truth of his, and
human, destiny. Oedipus looks into the abyss that yawns beneath
him?the frightful knowledge of his nature which fifth-century
man had learned from the war, the
plague and the atrocities, the
revolution, and the of the old world-order?and
sophistic collapse
dashes out his eyes at the unbrookable sight. Similarly in Soph
ocles' I think we are meant to see a somewhat earlier
Ajax symbol
of the old aristocratic ethos; in new and anti-heroic cir
caught
cumstances which
degrade him and make him ludicrous, Ajax
consistently prefers suicide to a life of absurdity in an aUen time.2
But all this is merely to say that Sophocles, like Aeschylus, uses
the perceptions of cultural crisis as dramatic ideas or
framing sym
bolically, not that his theater is in any meaningful sense a theater
of ideas. it is to innovator and
Clearly Euripides?the experimen
talist, the anti-traditional "immoraUst" and
"stage-sophist"?that
we must look for any valid fifth-century theater of ideas.

That the second half of the fifth century B.C. was a period of
immense cultural crisis and political convulsion is, fortunately for
my purpose here, beyond any real doubt. The evidence itself
needs only the barest rehearsal, but it should at least be there, the
real though sketchy weather of my argument. Let me therefore
touch it in.
There is, first of all, the breakdown of the old community, the
overwhelming destruction of that mythical and coherent world
order which Werner Jaeger has described so fully. PoUtical con
vulsion? stasis and revolution?broke out If civil war
everywhere.
was new the Greek civil war on the
nothing among city-states,
scale was in its
fifth-century absolutely unprecedented savagery:
man man, father son. Under
city against city, against against

2
Compare situation with statement in the
Ajax' Thucydides' Corcy
rean excursus: "The ancient into which honor so
simpUcity largely
entered was laughed down and disappeared."
34 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS

such conditions the whole kinship structure on which the polis

was theoretically and constitutionally founded was irretrievably
weakened. In culture the revolution ushered in some
sophistic
a
thing like transvaluation of morals. In society there was the rise
of a new bourgeoisie provided with new sanctions and new the
ories of human nature, as well as a conscious
politically proletariat.
In the arts restless innovation was the rule, and the
throughout
Hellenic world?in Uterature, thought, and poUtics?there took
a vast debate whose terms the schism in
place very vividly report
the culture, especially in the great argument between physis
(nature) and nomos (custom, tradition, and law). Men began to
wonder whether the laws of the state and the state itself, once
thought divinely established, are any longer related to physis at
large or to human physis in particular. Thus the great experience
of the late fifth century is what can be called "the loss of inno
cence." Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Thucydides are
all, each in his different way, haunted by the disappearance of
the old integrated culture and the heroic image of man that had
incarnated that culture. There is a new spirit of divisiveness
abroad in the Hellenic world; and nature and
appearance reaUty,
tradition, move steadily apart under the destructive pressure of
war and its attendant miseries. to harsh hu
Subjected necessity,
man nature now shows itself in a new nakedness, but also in a
new of behavior, chaotic and uncontrollable.
startling range
How that convulsion was, how extreme and cata
wrenching
strophic, is told us by no less an authority than Thucydides him
self:
"So bloody was the march of the revolution [in Corcyra], and
the which it made was the greater as it was one of
impression
the first to occur. Later on, one may say, the whole Hellenic
world was convulsed. . . The which revolution en
sufferings
tailed the cities were and terrible, such as have
upon many
occurred and will occur, as as the nature of man
always long
kind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and
varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the
cases. In peace and states and individuals
particular prosperity
have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves
war takes
suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but
the of wants, and so a
away easy supply daily proves rough
master, that brings most men's characters to a level with their
fortunes. Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and
the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what
had been done before, carried to a still excess the refine
greater
ment of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their
enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to
was now
change their ordinary meaning and to take that which
them. Reckless came to be considered the cour
given audacity
age of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice,
 William Arrowsmith 35

moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanUness,

abiUty to
see all sides of a to act on Frantic vio
question inaptness any.
lence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a
mean of self-defence. The advocate of extreme meas
justifiable
ures was his a man to be sus
always trustworthy; opponent
. . Even blood became a weaker tie than from
pected. party,
the readiness of those united the latter to dare
superior by
everything reserve; for such associations had not in
without
view the blessings derivable from estabUshed institutions but
were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confi
dence of their members in each other rested less on any reUg
ious sanction than in crime. . .The cause of all
upon compUcity
these evils was the hunger for power arising from greed and
ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of
parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities,
each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with
the cry of political equaUty for the people, on the other of a
moderate for themselves in those
aristocracy, sought prizes pub
lic interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiUng
from no means in their for in
struggles ascendancy, engaged
the direct excesses; in their acts of
vengeance went to even
they
greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the
state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment
their standard, and with readiness the con
only invoking equal
demnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of the strong
arm to
glut the animosities of the hour. Thus religion was in
honor with neither party, but the use of fair phrases to arrive at
guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate
part of the between the two, either for not
citizenry perished
joining in the quarrel or because envy would not suffer them to
escape.
Thus every form of evil took root in the Hellenic countries by
reason of the troubles. The ancient simpUcity into which honor
so largely entered was
laughed down and disappeared; and so
ciety became divided into camps in which no man trusted his
fellow. To an end to this, there was neither to be
put promise
depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all
parties dwelUng rather in their calculation upon the hopeless
ness of a permanent state of affairs, were more intent self
upon
defence than capable of confidence. In this contest the blunter
wits were most successful. of their own deficien
Apprehensive
cies and of the cleverness of their antagonists, they feared to be
worsted in debate and to be surprised by the combinations
of their more versatile opponents, and so at once boldly had
recourse to action; while their adversaries, think
arrogantly
ing that they should know in time, and that it was unnecessary
to secure action what often fell victims to
by policy afforded,
their want of
precaution.
 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS
36

Meanwhile Corcyra gave the first example of most of the

crimes alluded to; of the reprisals exacted by the governed who
had never treatment or indeed
experienced equitable anything
from their rulers?when their hour came; of the
except outrage
iniquitous resolves of those who desired to get rid of their ac
customed and coveted their pos
poverty, ardently neighbors'
sessions; and lastly, of the savage and pitiless excesses into
which men who had begun the struggle, not in a class but a
party spirit, were hurried by their ungovernable passions. In
the confusion into which Ufe was now thrown in the cities, hu
man nature, the law and now its mas
always rebelling against
ter, gladly showed itself uncontrolled in passion, above respect
for justice, and the enemy of all superiority; since revenge
would not have been set above religion, and gain above justice,
had it not been for the fatal power of envy. Indeed men too
often take themselves in the of their revenge
upon prosecution
to set the example of doing away with those general laws to
which all alike can look for salvation in their day of adversity,
instead of allowing them to exist against the day of danger
when their aid may be
required."
(III. 82 ff.)
sentence of that account deserves to be read, and
Every slowly
meditatively, with due weight given to every phrase, every word,
lest we underread, as we so often do with the classics, and trans
late the cultural crisis of the Hellenic world into a
greatest paro
chial and ephemeral time of troubles. If Thucydides is to be
trusted, the culture of his time had been shaken to the roots, and
he feared for its survival.

11

How did this convulsion of a whole culture affect the idea of a

theater as we find that idea expressed by Euripides?
The immediate, saUent fact of Euripides' theater is the assump
tion of a universe devoid of rational order, or of an order incom

prehensible to men. And the influence of Aristotle is nowhere

more obvious than in the fact that this aspect of Euripides' theater
is the one least often recognized or acted upon by critics. Yet it is
stated both expUcitly and implicitly from play to play throughout
us is a great
Euripides' Ufetime. "The care of god for thing," says
the chorus of Hippolytus, "if a man beUeve it. . . So I have a
secret hope of someone, a god, who is wise and plans; / but my
men and their des
hopes grow dim when I see / the actions of
tinies. veers and currents life are
/ For fortune the of shift
always
forever course." "O Zeus, what can I
ing, / shifting, changing say?"
cries Talthybius in Hecuba. "That you look on men and care? Or
do we, holding that the gods exist, / deceive ourselves with un
substantial dreams and Ues, while random careless chance and
/
 William Arrowsmith 37

change / alone control the world?" Usually desperate, feeble and

skeptical in the first place, it is the fate of these hopes to be de
in action. In Heracles the fatal chaos of the moral universe
stroyed
is a reversal which the flaw
expressed formally; savage expresses
in the moral universe splits the entire
play into two contrasting
actions connected only
by sequence. Thus the propter hoc struc
ture Aristotelian drama is in everywhere
required by Euripides
annulled by created disorder and formal violence. What we get is
dissonance, disparity, rift, peripeteia; in Euripides a note of firm
tonality is almost always the sign of traditional parody, of the
false, the unreal, or lost innocence remembered in What
anguish.
this of disorder means is: first, that form is not or
assumption
second, that character is not or at best a
ganic; destiny, only part
of it is; and third, that Aristotelian notions of responsibility, tragic
flaw, and heroism are not
pertinent.
The central dissonance assumes a of forms. But the com
variety
monest is a constructed clash between
carefully myth (or received
on the one hand, and fact (or on the
reaUty) experienced reality)
other. . . . 81 as the Greeks
Aoyo) /xeV epyo) put it, constrasting
theory (logos) and fact (ergon), appearance (or pretence) and
reality, legend and truth. In Alcestis, for instance, Euripides jux
taposes the traditional magnanimous Admetus with the shabby
who results when a "heroic" character is translated into
egotist
realistic fifth century terms. By
making Alcestis take Admetus at
his own estimate, Euripides delays the impact of his central idea
?the exposure of Admetus' his the appear
logos by ergon?until
ance of Pheres, whose "realistic" denunciation of his son
savage
exposes the "heroic" Admetus. a similar translation,
totally By
becomes a of
Euripides' Odysseus demagogue realpolitik, Aga
memnon a and ineffectual and a vul
pompous field-marshal, Jason
gar adventurer. It was, of course, this
technique
of realism, this
systematic exposure and deflation of traditional heroism, which
earned Euripides his reputation for debasing the dignity of the
tragic stage. And in some sense the is irrefutable.
charge Euripi
des' whole bent is anti-traditional and his sense
clearly realistic;
of rebelliousness is expressed beyond doubt by the
consistency
with which he rejects reUgious tradition, by his restless
experi
ments with new forms and new music, and his obvious and inno
cent delight in his own
virtuosity?his superior psychology and his
naturalistic stagecraft. With justifiable pride he might have seen
himself as a dramatic new and cour
pioneer, breaking ground,
ageously refusing to write the higher parody of his predecessors
which his world?and ours?have demanded of him. There must
be, I imagine, very few theaters in the world where the man who
writes of "people as they are" is
automatically judged inferior to
the man who writes of as should be."
"people they
But it would be to assume that reaUsm was the whole
wrong
story or that Euripides was drawn to realism because he knew it
 a greek theater of ideas
38

would offend the worthies of his day. For itwas Ufe, not Euripi
des, which had abandoned the traditional forms and the tradi
tional heroism. What Euripides reported, with great clarity and
honesty, was the widening gulf between reaUty and tradition;
between the operative and the professed values of his culture;
between fact and myth; between nomos and physis; between Ufe
and art. That guff was the greatest and most evident reaUty of
the last half of the fifth century, the dramatic subject par excel
lence, and it ismy beUef that the theater of Euripides, like Thucy
dides' history, is a radical and revolutionary attempt to record,
new view of
analyze and assess that reaUty in relation to the
human nature which crisis revealed. To both Thucydides and
Euripides, the crisis in culture meant that the old world order,
with its sense of a great humanity and its assumption of an inte
was irrecoverably gone. The true dimensions
grated human soul,
of the human psyche, newly exposed in the chaos of culture, for
bade any return to the old innocence or heroism. Any theater
founded on the old psyche or the old idea of fate was to that
extent a Ue. The task imposed upon the new theater was not
merely that of being truthful, of reporting the true dimensions and
causes of the crisis, but of coping imaginatively and inteUectuaUy
with a in man's very condition.
change
It is for this reason that Euripides' theater almost always begins
with a severe critique of tradition, which necessarily means a criti
of his Such criticism is what we
que predecessors. programmatic
case
expect from any new theater, and in the of Greek theater,
where the dramatist is official didaskalos charged with the paideia
of his people, it was especially appropriate. Aeschylus and So
were not theatrical were
phocles merely great predecessors; they
the moral tutors of Athens and their versions of the myths em
bodied, as nothing else, the values of tradition and the old paideia.
Given such authority and power, polemic and criticism were only
to be expected, the only possible response; indeed, were it not for
the fact that Euripides' criticism has generally been construed as
cultural l?se-majest?, the point would hardly be worth making.
When Shakespeare or Ibsen or Shaw or Brecht criticize the theater
of their immediate predecessors, we applaud; this is what we ex
the a new theater When Eu
pect, aggressive courage requires.
does it, it becomes somehow a crime the
ripides sacrilege, against
classics. We if at all, with traditionaUsm, auto
respond, outraged
we seem to re
matically invoking that double standard which
serve for the classics, that apparent homage which turns out to be
our own prejudices.
nothing but respect for
In Euripides' case, the prejudice is usually justified by the argu
ment that Euripides' criticism of his predecessors is destructive
and negative; that his attack on the old order is finally nothing
but the niggUng rage for exposure, devoid of constructive order.
If this argument were sound, it would be impressive; but it is
 William Arrowsmith 39

not enough to offer on Euripides' behalf the reply which Morris

Cohen is said to have made to a student who accused him of de
stroying his reUgious beliefs: "Young man, it is recorded of Her
acles that he was required only to clean the Augean stables." Not,
that is, ifwe are serious inmaintaining that Euripides was a great
dramatist. Negative criticism of dead tradition and inert values is
often of positive therapeutic effect, but no really great dramatist,
it seems to me, can the for order.
escape responsibiUty imaginative
Actually the charge that Euripides is negative is based upon mis
reading of the plays. For one thing, Euripides did not always
expose myth and tradition; this is his bias, to be sure, but there
are exceptions inwhich the received myth and its values are used
to criticize contemporary reaUty and pubUc po?cy. The obvious
example is the Trojan Women. A more revealing instance is the
Iphigeneia in Tauris, in which the cult of Artemis of Brauron is
re-estabUshed by Athena at the close of the play in order to lay
bare the immense human "blood-sacrifice" of the Peloponnesian
War.
The point here, I beUeve, is both important and neglected. Let
me try to restate it. Euripides' favorite technique for demonstrat
ing the new dissonance in Athenian culture, the disparity between
values and real values, is reaUsm of the
putative simple pattern
. . . cpyw S?. But it is balanced at times
A?yw p.iv by the converse
technique?allowing the myth to criticize the everyday reality:
. . . are
cpyw pi v X?y<? St. And these exceptions important,
since
us that a matter of simple
they show Euripides' reaUsm is not
anti-traditionaUsm, but consistent dramatic technique. What is
basic is the mutual criticism, the mutual exposure which occurs
when the
incongruities of a given culture?its actual behavior and
its myth?are juxtaposed in their fullness. That this is everywhere
the purpose of Euripidean drama is clear in the very complaints
critics bring against the plays: their tendency to fall into incon
sistent or opposed parts (Heracles, Andromache); their apparent
multidimensionality (Alcestis, Heracles), or the frequency of the
deus ex machina. This last device is commonly explained by a
hostile criticism as for archaism and aetiol
Euripides' penchant
ogy, or as his way of salvaging botched plays. Actually it is
always functional, a part of the very pattern of juxtaposed incon
gruities which I have been describing. Thus the appearance of any
god in a Euripidean play is invariably the sign of logos making
its epiphany, counterpointing ergon. Most Euripidean gods ap
pear only in order to incriminate themselves (or a fellow god),
though some?Uke Athena in the Iphigeneia in Tauris?criticize
the action and the reaUty which the action mirrors. But it is a
variable, not a fixed, pattern, whose purpose is the critical coun
terpointing of the elements which Euripides saw
everywhere
own
sharply and significantly opposed in his culture: myth con
fronted by behavior, tradition exposed by, or exposing, reaUty;
 40 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS

custom and law in conflict with nature. What chiefly interested

him was less the indictment of tradition?though that was clearly
essential?than the confrontation, the dramatic of
juxtaposition,
the split in his culture. This was his basic theatrical perception,
his reaUty, a perception which makes him utterly different from
Aeschylus and Sophocles, just as it completely alters the nature
of his theater.
Is that theater merely analytical then, a dramatic description of
a divided culture? I think not. Consider this statement: "As our
our cul
knowledge becomes increasingly divorced from real Ufe,
ture no contains ourselves (or only contains an
longer insignificant
part of ourselves) and forms a social context in which we are not
'integrated.' The problem thus becomes that of again reconciling
our culture with our Ufe, by our culture a living culture
making
once more. . ."That to be Ionesco on Artaud, but it could
happens
just as well be Euripides' description of the nature and purpose of
his own theater. The reconciUation of Ufe and culture is, of course,
more than theater, let alone a dramatist, can
any single perform;
and it is perhaps enough that the art of a divided culture should
be diagnostic, should describe the new situation in its complexity.
Only by so doing can it redefine man's altered fate. It ismy own
conviction that Euripidean theater is critical and diagnostic; and
that, beyond this, it accepts the old artistic burden of constructive
order, does not restrict itself to alone. But what concerns
analysis
me at the moment is the way in which his basic theatrical per
ceptions altered his theater.
First and most significant after the destruction of propter hoc
structure is the of the hero. With the sole excep
disappearance
tion of one to define a new heroism
Heracles?Euripides' attempt
?there is no play which is dominated by the single hero, as in
Sophocles' Oedipus or Ajax.
Corresponding to the disappearance of the hero is Euripides'
of the major characters. What we is
"fragmentation" get typically
an or contest divided between two characters (some
agon paired
times there are three) :Admetus and Alcestis; Jason and Medea;
Hippolytus and Phaedra; Andromache and Hermione; Pentheus
and etc. In such a theater, the AristoteUan search for a
Dionysus,
tragic hero is, of course, meaningless. But the significance of the
is not easy to assess; it is not to say
fragmentation enough merely
that Euripides was temperamentally drawn to such conflicts be
cause they afforded him opportunities for analysis.
psychological
What is striking about the consistent paired antagonists one finds
in Euripides is, I think, their obsessional nature. They function
like obsessional of a whole human soul: as
fragments Hippolytus
chastity, Phaedra as sexuality. The wholeness of the old hero is
now diffused over several characters; the
represented divisively,
paired antagonists of the Euripidean stage thus represent both
the warring modes of a divided culture and the new incomplete
 William Arrowsmith 41

ness of the human psyche. Alternatively, as in The Bacchae,

they
embody the principles of conflicting ideas; Pentheus as nomos,
as
Dionysos physis.
This fragmentation is also the sign of a new psychological in
terest. That the convulsion of the late fifth century had revealed
new dimensions in the human psyche is sharply expressed by
Thucydides, and just as sharply by Euripides. Indeed, Euripides'
interest in and mental is so marked that
abnormaUty derangement
critics have usually seen it as the very motive of his drama. This,
I think, is a mistake. The interest in psychology is strong, but it is
always secondary; the real interest lies in the analysis of culture
and the relationship between culture and the individual. If I am
correct in assuming that Euripides' crucial dramatic device is the
juxtaposition and contrast of logos and ergon, then it follows that
the characters of his plays must bear the burden of the cultural
a
disparity involved. I mean: if myth is bodily transplanted from
its native culture to a different one, then the characters of the

myth must bear the burden of the transplantation, and that bur
den is psychological strain. Consider, for example, Euripides'
Orestes, a man who murders his mother in an where civil
Argos
exists; or the heroic translated into the con
justice already Jason
text of a fifth century Corinth; or an Odysseus or Hermione or
Electra cut off from the culture in which their actions were once
or moral, and set in an alien time which immoralizes
meaningful
or distortsthem. The very strain that Euripides succeeds in im
posing upon his characters is the mark of their modernity, their
involvement in a culture under similar strain. And it is the pre
viously unsuspected range of the human psyche, the discovery of
its powers, its to circumstance, its
vulnerability incompleteness
and its violence, that interest Euripides, not the psychological
process itself. The soliloquy inwhich Medea meditates the murder
of her children ismuch admired; but Euripides' dramatic interest
is in the or of culture?the between
collapse derangement gap
eros and makes that murder both and nec
sophia?which possible
essary.
Side by side with cultural strain is the striking loneliness of the
theater. Loneliness is, of course, a feature of tradi
Euripidean
tional tragedy, but the difference between Euripides and his pred
ecessors in this respect is marked. In Aeschylus the loneliness of
human fate is effectively annulled by the reconciliation which
closes trilogies and creates a new community in which god and
man become joint partners in civiUzation. In
Sophocles the sense
of loneUness is extremely strong, but it is always the distinguish
ing mark of the hero, the sign of the fate which makes him an
outcast, exiled from the world to the world's and his
advantage
own But in loneliness is the common fate. In
anguish. Euripides
sofar as the characters are obsessional, their loneli
fragmented,
ness is The one cannot do is com
required. thing they normally
42 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS

municate, and even such communications as occur

typically (for
instance, Heracles' moving reunion with his children) are Uable
to almost certain destruction the malevolence of fate.
by Again
and again Euripides gives us those exquisite painterly groupings
which stress the impassable gulf which separates the old from the
man from woman from man, and even hero from hero.
young, god,
The climax of the Heracles comes when Heracles, touched by
Theseus' philia, makes his great decision to Uve; but the under
standing is then immediately and deUberately clouded as Theseus
fails to understand the enormous of his friend's new hero
range
ism. The touch is typically and revealingly Euripidean. The gulf
seems to close to widen out
only again.
From the point of view of traditional tragedy nothing is more
strikingly novel that the Euripidean fusion and contrast of comic
and tragic effects. Thus at any point in a tragedy the comic?or
more the or ludicrous?can with
accurately, pathetic erupt poig
nant effect, intensifying the tragic or toughening it with parody.
Nor is this a device restricted to Euripides' so-called "romantic"
or his it occurs even in the most powerful
plays tragicomedies;
and serious tragedies. Teiresias and Cadmus in Bacchae, for in
stance, are seen as both and comic, that is,
simultaneously tragic
directly pathetic and incongruous: two old mummers of ecstasy;
they try to dance for Dionysus as the god requires, but their
bodies, Uke their minds, are incapable of expressing devotion ex
as a ludicrous in Medea, has tra
cept mimicry. Aegeus, puzzled
ditional interpretation from Aristotle on, precisely because he is
Euripides' pathetic and ironic embodiment of Athens?that Athens
which the chorus hails later as the place
where Cypris sailed,
and mild sweet breezes breathed along her path,
and on her hair were flung the sweet-smelling garlands
of flowers of roses by the Lovers, the companions
ofWisdom, her escort, the helpers of men
in every kind of arete.
The irony is not, of course, the cutting irony of exposure, but the
gentler irony that comes when logos and ergon of things not too
far apart are juxtaposed: we feel it as a Ught dissonance. Which
ismerely another way of saying that the new element of the comic
in Euripidean tragedy is just one more instance of the dramatist's
insistence upon preserving the multipUcity of possible reaUties in
the texture of his action. In the traditional drama, such dissonance
is rightly avoided as an offense against seriousness and tragic dig
nity; Euripides significantly sees both tragedy and comedy as
equally vaUd, equally necessary. A drama of truth will contrive to
contain them both; the complex truth requires it.
It is for this same reason that Euripides accentuates what might
be called the multiple moral dimension of his characters. Every
one of them is in some sense an exhibit of the sophistic perception
 William Arrowsmith 43

that human character is altered by suffering or exemption from

suffering; that every human disposition contains the possibiUties
of the species for good or evil. Aristotle objects, for instance, that
Euripides' Iphigeneia changes character without explanation. And
so, in fact, she does, and so does Alcmena in Heracleidae. They
change in this way because their function is not that of rounded
characters or "heroes" but of the ideas of
specifications shaping
the play. Besides, if HeracUtus was right, and character is destiny,
then the complex or even contradictory destiny which Euripidean
drama assumes and describes must mean and contradic
complex
tory characters. But the one kind of character which Euripides'
theater cannot afford is that splendid integrated self-knowledge
represented by the "old fantastical Duke of dark corners" inMeas
sure for Measure;
Euripides' theater is all Angelos, Lucios, and
Claudios, maimed, irresolute, human nature.
average, incomplete
The case of Heracles himself, the most integrated hero Euripides
ever created, is darkened by Euripides' insistence that we ob
serve, without that even the culture-hero has
passing judgment,
murder in his heart. This fact does not, of course, a
compose
tragic flaw, but what Nietzsche called "the indispensable dark
as Euripides tried to show,
spring" of action. Moral judgment is,
no less precarious and difficult than the comprehensive descrip
tion of reaUty. How could it be otherwise?
This does not mean that Euripides avoids judgment, or that his
plays are attempts to put the problematic in the place of dramatic
resolution. It means merely that his theater everywhere insists
upon scrupulous and detailed recreation of the complexity of
reality and the difficulty of moral judgment. The truth is con
cealed, but not concealed. There can be Uttle doubt,
impenetrably
for instance, that meant his Medea to end in a way that
Euripides
must have shocked his contemporaries, and which still shocks to
His was, of course, not to shock, but to force
day. purpose merely
the audience to the recognition that Medea, mortally hurt in her
eros, her and human must act as she
defining enabUng passion,
does, and that her action has behind it, Uke the sun, the power
of sacred There is no more
savage moral oxymoron in
physis.
Greek drama. But if Euripides here speaks up for physis against
a corrupt nomos, he is
capable elsewhere of defending nomos and
insisting that those who prostrate themselves before physis, Uke
the old Nurse inHippolytus, are the enemies of humanity. Neces
submission, but any that of a man
sity requires necessity requires
that he sacrifice the morality that makes him human, must be re
sisted to the end, even if it cost him?as it will?his life. Better
death than the mutilation of his specifically human skill, that
sophia which in Euripides ismankind's claim to be superior to the
man in this theater makes morality; it is
gods and necessity. Only
this conviction, the bedrock classical conviction, that provides the
one unmistakable and fixed reference-point in Euripides' dramatic
 44 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS

world. Above that point all truths are purposely played off against
one another in endless and detailed exactness of observation.
Within this new context of changed reaUty, Euripides' whole
theater of ideas is set.

Several examples.
The Iphigeneia in Tauris is a play commonly classified as ro
mantic or melodrama, and seems at first, or even second
escapist
remote from the "theater of ideas." Aristotle, for
sight, extremely
instance, particularly admired its elegant finish and its tightness
of its famous he talks
structure?especially recognition-scene?and
about it with the enthusiasm a nineteenth-century critic might
have shown for a "well-made" Smooth, urbane, and
good play.
exciting, the play appears pure entertainment, Uvely and sophisti
cated but without a thought in its head. Clearly not tragic, its plot
is as improbable as it is skillful; situation clearly counts for a great
deal, characterization for very little. None of the leading charac
ters, for instance, is more than deft, traits, and
given generaUzing
the very sUghtness of the characterization draws attention to the
virtuosity of the plot and the remarkable faciUty of execution.
But the romantic is no means absolute;
atmosphere by again
and again Euripides intrudes into this artificial world the jarring
dissonance of a harsh
contemporary reaUty. Quite deUberately,
and with odd effect, he evokes and remembers the real war: the
vision of the dead and the doomed; the illusion of ambition and
the deceptive hope of empire; the exile's yearning for home; the
bitter image of a Hellas at peace, remembered with longing from
the impossible distance of the present. Logos set against ergon;
form in partial conflict with subject; romantic myth undercut by,
and therefore intensifying in turn, the actual world, as though the
of Cinderella were revealed as set on the outskirts
story suddenly
of Auschwitz. If this play is melodrama, it is melodrama subtly
but sensibly tilted toward the experience of national tragedy, and
exploiting that experience symboUcally.
SymboUcally how? It is perhaps easy for moderns to misunder
stand or over-read. But I wonder what Athenian, even the most
insensitive, could have failed to grasp or respond to the image
which this play sets before him, especially in the Ught of that ex
perience of war which the play so powerfully exploits. A sister
dedicates her brother to death by the sword. It seems perhaps
melodromatic to moderns, but unless I am mistaken, that
badly
is addressed to the the con
symbolism directly experience?and
science?of a which, for had suffered
people nearly twenty years,
all the horrors of fratricidal war. The symboUsm is available and
famiUar, and it culminates in the scene,
naturally great recognition
 William Arrowsmith 45

when Iphigeneia, on the point of butchering her brother Orestes,

scene the whole play
suddenly discovers his true identity. For this
was built, and its quite remarkable power is ultimately based, I
think, upon the explosive liberation of love which reunites a fam
ily or a people, grown hostile, estranged, and unfamiliar. Behind
the recognition of brother and sister in the play lies a people's
a of kind. For read Hellas; for
recognition, recognition Argos,
the history of the house of Atreus, the history of Hellas. What is
war but blood-sacrifice? Why, the play asks, should Greeks kill
Greeks? And to give his argument further point, Euripides intro
duces Athena to establish in Attica the cult of the civilized Arte
mis who will put an end to human sacrifice and, by impUcation,
the needless butchery which is war. The symbolism is, of course,
the more effective for being unobtrusive, but once felt, it drasti
alters the of the What seems at first roman
cally experience play.
tic escape becomes confrontation and a true
recognition, tragi
comedy inwhich the tragic shapes the comic or romantic, and the
romantic gives poignancy to the tragic. In short, the kind of play
we might have expected from the dramatist of the Alcestis and
the humanist of The Trojan Women. Admittedly a fresh poUtical
interpretation of its major symboUsm does not transform the
Iphigeneia in Tauris into a true drama of ideas; but the existence
of a serious and critical intent in a re
deeply play universally
as most frivolous "entertainment," is indicative
garded Euripides'
of the dramatist's bent in the "darker"
plays.
In the Orestes, for instance. Here, if anywhere in Euripides'
work, the contrast between and is structural and cru
logos ergon
cial. The play falls abruptly into two distinct parts. Ergon is repre
sented by the body of the play proper, a freely invented account
of the events which followed Orestes' matricide; and logos by the
concluding epiphany of Apollo, an archaizing dews ex machina in
which the god foretells the known mythical futures of the char
acters. These two are with dissonance,
parts enjambed jarring
since the characters as developed in the play and their mythical
future as announced by Apollo are incompatible. Through this
device the play becomes problematic: the spectator is hterally
it seems, to choose between his own of the
compelled, experience
and words, between ergon and be
play Apollo's closing logos,
havior and myth. Moreover, the choice is a hard one; for if the
experience of the play proper is of almost unbearable bitterness
and are f ooUsh and "traditional"
pessimism, Apollo's arrangements
to the point of unacceptabiUty. In short, impasse, or so at first
it seem. But here, as so often in a crux or
sight might Euripides,
problem or impasse is the dramatist's way of confronting his audi
ence with the necessity of choosing between apparently antitheti
cal realities or positions (Hippolytus or Phaedra? Pentheus or
Dionysus? Physis or nomos? Cold expedience or passionate eros?
 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS
46

Barbarian or Greek? Victim or oppressor? Logos or ergon?)3 Al

most without these choices are
exception, seemingly necessary
finaUy illusory alternatives, the dramatist's device for stiumulating
his audience and forcing it on to the critical perception which
underUes and comprehends the alternatives, unifying them in a
single, complex, synthetic judgment?the judgment which holds
the play together, and for which the plays were written in the first
place. That Euripides' critics have so seldom managed to arrive
at this final judgment would seem to indicate that his theatrical
strategies were ineffective; but on the other hand, Euripides'
critics have usually assumed that his consistency of
technique ne
cessarily meant a consistent failure to write correct traditional
tragedy in the (imagined) manner of Sophocles.
Certainly the impasse between logos and ergon in the Orestes
is apparent only. What resolves it is a common purpose in both
curve of exposure, first of the "heroic" Orestes
parts?an ascending
who killed his mother and tried to kill Helen, and then of the
traditionally "wise" Apollo who drove Orestes to matricide. The
exposures are, in fact, mutual and cumulative, us to
compelling
see that if Orestes,
by any human standard of moraUty, is mad,
Apollo is utterly insane (for madness or incompetence in a god,
and a god of radiant reason at that, is a fortiori more dangerous
than in a and
mortal). Logos ergon, apparently contradictory,
are in fact complementary:
depraved and immoral human action
in the play proper is mirrored by, sanctioned
by, the callous folly
of heaven and the brutaUty of the myth; Orestes and ApoUo mu
tually create, deserve, each other: murderers both. Man
mutually
and god project each other; myth influences behavior, and be
havior in turn the in a vicious of moral de
shapes myth cycle
terioration. If from this perspective we ask why Euripides freely
invents the story of Orestes instead of recreating the traditional
matricide, the answer is clear: because he wants to
immediately
demonstrate through the abortive attempt to kill Helen?a crime
in which Apollo significantly plays no Orestes is a mur
part?that
derer born, a man who kills not from necessity but in freedom,
out of his sickness and hatred. Having demonstrated this, Euripi
des can proceed to the complementary exposure of Apollo, a god
made in the image of Orestes.
Produced just half a century after Aeschylus' Oresteia, Euripi
des' Orestes is not only an indictment of the Aeschylean myth, its
values and its hero, but a savage critique of Hellenic society in
3A
dramatic I beUeve, of Protagoras'
adaptation, antilogoi?the
rhetorical of first and then defending a thesis, or
technique attacking
of antithetical theses. method of contrasting set
Thucydides' speeches
?the debate, for instance?is an historian's of
Mytilenean adaptation
the antilogoi and a way of indicating, between the lines, by what is
omitted and shared by both speakers, the crucial and unspoken
spoken
assumptions of poUtics and ethics. So too in the case of Euripides.
 William Arrowsmith 47

the last decade of the fifth century. If the impasse between logos
and is, as I claim, resolved a continuous mutual
ergon by expo
sure, the purpose of that exposure is a complex and profoundly
bitter cultural statement. Euripides seems to be saying something
Uke this: A society whose sacred legend is embodied in a god Uke
Apollo and a man Uke Orestes runs the risk that its citizens may
emulate the revive it, in their own behavior. That
myth, poUtical
is: Athens and Greek society generally are in danger of realizing
their own myths, of at last reconciUng logos and ergon, myth and
conduct, in a new of murderous and
synthesis brutaUty insanity
?the worst myth fused now with the worst behavior. In earUer
plays Euripides critically contrasted myth and behavior with the
aim of letting the better expose the worse; here, in the bitterest
play of all, he shows how bad behavior and bad myth interact for
the defeat of culture and communal life. That this bleak conclu
sion is the purpose of the play is supported by the systematic deso
lation which Euripides visits upon every aspect of moral and
political behavior. Thus there is not a character in the play who
is not defined either by inhuman devotion to sound principle, by
patent treachery, or nightmare loyalty of compUcity or stupidity.
Every moral word is consistently inverted or emptied of its mean
as the action from madness to "honorable" murder
ing, proceeds
on a wave of sickening "heroic" rhetoric. As for justice, if Orestes
creates none, he none either; for human here is
gets justice merely
or mob and rules in heaven. Be
power poUtics passion, Apollo
tween health and sickness, heroism and depravity, morality and
immorality, every distinction is removed. PoUtics is either brutal
or the honorable motives are self-inter
power demagoguery; only
est and In short, the world of the Orestes is
revenge. indistinguish
able from the culture in convulsion described by Thucydides;
point for point, Euripides and Thucydides confirm each other.
And, presumptuous or not, I am tempted to see in this frightening
play Euripides' apocalyptic vision of the final destruction of
Athens and Hellas, or that Hellas to which a civiUzed mind could
still give its full commitment. In the house of Atreus we have the
house of Hellas: the great old aristocratic house, cursed by a long
history of fratricidal blood and war, brought down in ruin by its
heirs.
degenerate
Finally, consider the Medea. Traditionally classified as "psycho
logical tragedy," it is better interpreted as a genuine drama of
ideas. Superficially it is a critique of relations between men and
women, Greeks and barbarians, and an ethos of hard,
prudential
self-interest as against passionate love; at a profounder level it is
a
comprehensive critique of the quaUty and state of contemporary
culture. Like the Bacchae, Euripides' other great critique of cul
ture, the Medea is based a central Inade
upon key-term, sophia.
translated "wisdom," is an term,
quately sophia extremely complex
including not only Jason's cool seff-interest, the magical and erotic
 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS
48

skills of the sorceress Medea, but that ideal Athenian fusion of

moral and artistic skills which, fostered eros, creates the dis
by
tinctive arete of the civilized This third sense of
polis. sophia?
nearly synonymous with "civilization" and specifically including
the compassion4 for the suppUant and the oppressed for which
Athens was famous and which Aegeus significantly shows to
Medea?is the standard by which the actions of Jason and Medea
are to be judged. Thus the vivid harmony of eros and
sophia
which Athens represents is precisely what Jason and Medea are
not. Jason's calculating, practical sophia is, lacking eros, selfish
and destructive; Medea's consuming eros and psychological sophia
emotional which makes her a artist of re
(an cunning supreme
are, without maimed and destructive. are
venge) compassion, They
both of themselves, of others, of
destroyers?destroyers sophia,
and the poto5?and it is this destructiveness which above all else
Euripides wants his audience to observe: the spirit of brutal self
interest and passionate revenge which threatens both Ufe and cul
ture, and which is purposely set in sharp contrast to life-enhancing
Athens where the arts flourish, eros collaborates with sophia, and
creative physis is gentled by just nomoi. Behind Jason and Medea
we are meant to see that of expedience and
clearly spreading spirit
revenge which, unchecked by culture or reUgion, finally brought
about the Peloponnesian War and its attendant atrocities. For it
cannot be mere coincidence that a play Uke this was performed in
the first year of the war.
What of Medea herself? Upon our understanding of her de
pends the final interpretation of the play. Thus those who find in
Medea a barbarian woman whose lack of self-control, for
hunger
and male set her in firm contrast to the Corinthi
revenge, courage
an women of the chorus, with their Greek of
praise sophrosun?
and their fear of excess, see the as a
usually play psychological
of this there are decisive
tragedy revenge. Against interpretation
For one takes to show that
arguments. thing, Euripides pains
Medea is not at all pure barbarian feminity, but rather a barbarian
woman who has been partially and imperfectly Hellenized. Thus
Medea's first is an one, domi
appearance intentionally striking
nated by her attempt to pass for Greek, to say the right thing: she
talks, in fact, the stock language of Greek women, h?suchia and
4 Cf. Orestes is
Euripides' Electra, 294-6, where says: "Compassion
found in men who are never in brutal and ignorant men. And
sophoi,
to have a mind is not without to the
truly compassionate disadvantage
sophoi."
5 as Medea and Jason between them Creon and his
Just destroy
Glauke, so Medea, once she is domiciled in Athens, wiU at
daughter
tempt to murder Theseus, the son whom Aegeus
so
passionately desires
?a fact which Athenians could be expected to know and hold against
Medea, in view of Aegeus' to her. Whenever
especially generosity
the polis as represented is threatened.
Medea goes, by the ruling family
 William Arrowsmith 49

sophrosun?. Now this may be a pose, but it may just as well be

cultural imitation, the sort of a barbarian woman
genuine thing
in Corinth might be expected to do. But the point is important for,
if I am right, this play records the loss of the civilized skills
through the conflict of passion; and for this reason Euripides first
shows us his Medea making
use of those civilized virtues which,
in the throes of she loses, to barba
passion, promptly reverting
rism. Euripides' point is not that Medea qua barbarian is different
in nature from Greek women, but that her inhibitions are weaker
and her nearer the surface. Thus she
passions correspondingly
can very
quickly be reduced to her essential physis, and it is
this nakedness of physis, shorn of all cultural overlay, that
Euripides wants eros (or
displayed. Unimpeded unimpeded
can be shown in Medea with a concentration and natural
hatred)
ness in a Greek woman, not because Greek women are
impossible
less passionate, but because their culture them to repress
required
their passions. If culture is truly effective, the control of passion
becomes true where culture
eventually self-mastery: sophrosun?;
is less effective or out of joint (as in the Corinth of this play),
physis is checked only by fear, and reveals itself in resentment of
the punishing authorities and ready sympathy with those who
rebel against them. Hence the profound resentment which the
chorus feels in this play against male domination. And this?and
not mere theatrical convention or Medea can so
necessity?is why
easily convince the chorus to become her accompUces in her
"crusade" and male Their control over their
against Jason society.
while than Medea's is still
passions, greater perhaps, inadequate
and precarious; and Medea's arouses their fullest sym
revenge
as war evokes the barbarian in an civilized
pathy, just imperfectly
man. And this is that "one touch of nature"
Euripides' point,
makes kin of Hellene and barbarian. In Medea's barbarism we
have a concentrated of human and a of the
image physis symbol
terrible closeness of all human nature to barbarism; in her inade

quate sophrosun? and her imperfect sophia is represented the

norm of Hellenic, and most
human, Thus when cries
society. Jason
out, "No Greek woman would have dared this crime," we are

meant, not to but to wonder and doubt, and dis

argue, finally
beUeve.
The vaUdity of that doubt and disbelief is immediately con
firmed by the appearance of the golden chariot of the Sun in
which Medea makes her escape to Athens. In this chariot Euripi
des does two related things: he first restates, vividly and un
mistakably, the triumph of Medea over Jason, and secondly he
provides the whole action with a symboUc and cosmological
framework which forces the private agon of Jason and Medea to
assume a larger public
significance. And by showing Medea,
murderess and infanticide, as rescued by the Sun himself?tradi
tionally regarded as the epitome of purity, the unstained god who
 50 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS

will not look upon pollution?he drives home his meaning with the
shock of near sacrilege. As for the chariot of the Sun, it is the
visible cosmic force which blazes through Medea's motives,
which her whole pathos expresses: the blinding force of Ufe
itself, striped of any mediating moraUty or humanizing screen;
naked, elemental eros; intense, chaotic, and cruel; the
unimpeded,
condition of man and the world.
primitive, pre-moral, pre-cultural
If that force vindicates Medea as against Jason, her ardor as
against his icy self-interest, it is only because her eros is elemental
and therefore invincible. But she is vindicated only vis-?-vis Jason;
and she is not justified at all. Of justification there can be no
here, not because eros is, Uke elemental neces
question only any
sity, amoral and therefore unjustifiable, but because Euripides
a tragic defeat for man
clearly believes the loss of sophia to be
and human culture.
In the agon of and Medea, vengeance, and self
Jason passion,
interest and that agon stands, as we have seen, for
expel sophia;
the Peloponnesian War?and the war which Euripides, Uke Thucy
dides, feared would expel sophia from civilized cities, thereby
barbarizing and brutalizing human behavior. At any time, in both
individuals and cities, sophia is a deUcate and precarious virtue;
if anywhere in the Hellenic world, sophia flourished in Athens,
but even there it bloomed precariously (how precariously the
plague which overtook the city in the following year proved).
And in the of Medea to Athens, seems to
coming Euripides imply,
would come the of and
spirit vengeance passion, endangering
whose creation and made Athens, in
sophia?that sophia growth
"the education of Hellas." For Hellas and
Thucydides' phrase,
a new and terrible dawns at the close of the Medea.
humanity day

IV

In sum, the Greeks possessed a recognizable and developed form

of what we should not scruple to call a classical theater of ideas.
And there, in substance, rests.
my argument
Whatever its critical shortcomings may be, its historical basis is,
I think, sufficiently secure. If historically the theater of ideas tends
to occur in times of severe cultural crisis, then we
may properly
suspect it, if anywhere, in late fifth-century Athens, for of all the
cultural crises of Hellenism, this crisis was by far the most
its casualties are classical and
profound. Among tragedy comedy;
the old mythical cosmology and the culture which it mirrored
and sanctioned; the gods of the polis; the sense of community
on which the was based, and therefore in some sense
polis
the polis itself. In short, the whole cloth of culture, fabric and
to repiece
design together. In the fourth century Plato's attempt
the old culture?to reconcile physis and nomos, myth and be
 William Arrowsmith 51

havior, to reweave the moral community of the heroic

polis?was
but unsuccessful. Plato was a conservative and a
finally great
was only pre
great revolutionary, but the Hellas he preserved
served by being radically changed, in fact revolutionized. The
old Greek culture?the culture to which Western world most owes
its being and to which it returns for life and freshness when
Platonic Hellenism threatens to swamp it?died in the fifth cen
tury H.c, and it is this culture in its crisis of disintegration that
records. If Euripides could no longer hold out the old
Euripides
heroic image of man, it is because he preferred to base his theater
upon what he actually saw as the prime reaUty of his time: the
new emerging human psyche, tested and defined by crisis, the
apparently uncontrollable chaos of human behavior and therefore
the turbulence which any viable culture must know how to con
tain, but without repressing.
Put it this way. The complex knowledge and experience about
so evident inHecuba or Bacchae look forward
poUtics and culture
to Plato and also Plato's to the same crisis. Both
explain response
men share the conviction that war and for power have cor
greed
rupted culture or deranged it; both are convinced that chaotic
human nature, as revealed crisis, cannot be controlled within
by
the framework of existing culture. But Euripides' Uberating per
has become Plato's restrictive For any
ception premise. Euripides
new cultural order must somehow contain what is uncontrollable
in behavior; the failure to allow for turbulence, the failure to
democratize its ethics, was what had made the old culture so sus

ceptible to crisis. The Athenian democracy after Pericles could no

more make do on aristocratic than industrial
sophrosun? England
could run on The solution, however, was not to
knightly chivalry.
to on and the old aristo
reorganize society operate sophrosun?
cratic ethos, but to revise and in terms of a
sophia sophrosun?
more democratic view of human nature. It is for this reason in the
Bacchae that Pentheus' inability to control his inward turmoil is
matched by his incompetence to control the public situation. He
is an emblem of his age, out of his of him
attempting ignorance
self and his culture to cope with chaos by means of an inadequate
or aristocratic for whatever the solution to
corrupted sophrosun?;
chaos be, it is not a more
Dionysiac may repression?but perhaps
responsibly Dionysiac (which is to say, liberated and liberating)
society. The new polis may not be quite "polymorphously per
verse," but it will at least be free, disciplined by experience of
inward and outward chaos to a
larger self-mastery.
For Plato the ideal polis can only be based upon a coercion that
looks Uke consent. And it is therefore subject to the fate of
Euripides' Pentheus, the terrible revenge which physis takes upon
a nomos which cannot itself to a true human order. In
enlarge
short the culture Plato rests upon sup
envisaged by ultimately
of the natural?the natural in Plato becomes the evil?
pression
52 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS

and is to that degree profoundly pessimistic and anti-Hellenic.

for culture rest an real
Euripides' specifications upon extremely
istic judgment of human nature and its potentiaUties for disorder;
but because what is chaotic is seen as the thrust of Ufe itself, as
something below (or beyond), good or evil, morally neutral,
culture is a for for free order, for the creation
always project hope,
of new institutions in which man's society will not be in conflict
with his nature. The Athens which Euripides had so triumphantly
hailed in the great choral ode of the Medea may have betrayed
what it stood for, but the creative fusion of the passions (erotes)
and the civilized and artistic skills (the large sense of Sophia,
nearly synonymous with "culture") which produced arete?here,
however transient, was a paradigm of ideal social order, the polis
which made man's fulfillment possible.
That Euripides was an innovator is, of course, not an altogether
new idea; Werner Jaeger's word for him is, flatly, revolutionary.
But those who as an innovator or a
regard Euripides revolutionary
more than a theatrical sophist or the in
rarely see in him much
ventor of a reaUstic and psychological as I know,
tragedy. So far
has seriously proposed what I am proposing here?that
nobody
Euripides' theater is no less revolutionary than his ideas, and that
his ideas are implicitly expressed in the assumptions of his theater
and his dramatic hypotheses. In short, that his theater is his ideas;
that his radical critique of crisis in culture is not just Sophoclean
a wholly new theater,
tragedy turned topical and sophistic, but
uneasily based upon the forms and conventions of the old. That
is, not tragedy at all, but a critical drama related to Aeschylus
and in much the same way as Hebbel's theater was, at
Sophocles
least in related to Schiller's.6 And for this very reason, I
theory,
suppose, the argument will be discounted: Why, it will be ob
has a point like this been somehow missed for twenty-five
jected,
hundred years?
To tiiis question it would be possible to make a great many
answers. For one thing, the identification of the 'theater of ideas'
is of recent date, even critics of the theater. For
very among

6A
comparison I owe to Eric Bentley 's The Playwright as Thinker.
Hebbel described his new theater in this way: "At its every step there
around it a world of views and relations, which point both
throngs
backwards and forwards, and aU of which must be carried the
along;
life-forces cross and destroy one another, the thread of thought snaps
in two before it is spun out, the emotion shifts, the very words gain
their independence and reveal hidden meaning, annulling the ordinary
one, for each is a die marked on more than one face. Here the chaff of
little sentences, bit to bit and fiber to fiber, would serve the
adding
ill. It is a question of presenting conditions in their organic
purpose
. . . Unevenness of rhythm, and confusion of
totality. complication
contradiction in the figures are elevated to effective and indis
periods,
rhetorical means...."
pensable
 William Arrowsmith 53

another, classicists have been?as remain?hos

traditionally they
tile or indifferent to Uterary criticism. For this reason they have
very rarely asked the kind of question which might have led them
to a Uterary answer. Instead, that is, of giving the dramatist the
customary benefit of the doubt, they have assumed that a hostile
tradition was sound and that was an interest
generally Euripides
aberration but too realistic, irreverent and to
ing finally vulgar
fill the bill as a bona fide classic. With deplorable regularity
scholarship has insisted that it was Euripides' fate to be an
imitator or higher parodist of his predecessors, and then, just as
regularly, has condemned him for bungling the job. I doubt, in
fact, that the of Uterature can show a more
history pathological
no dramatist of the world has ever received
chapter. Surely great
less benefit of the critical doubt or been more consistently patron
ized; a fourth-rate Broadway hack will normally demand, and get,
more courtesy from critics than Euripides has received from six
centuries of scholarship. Even when he is praised by comparison,
the comparison is inevitably patronizing. We do not honor our
greatest classics by asserting their modernity; if classicists and
critics compare Euripides to Ibsen, this is more to Ibsen's credit
than Euripides'?though this is not the assumption. We pay no
honor to Shakespeare when we compliment him on his modernity:
we merely reveal the true proportions of our contempt for the
classics. Having said that, I can now say without being misunder
stood: the theater of Brecht and of Sartre, and even the Theater
of the Absurd, are in many ways remarkably like the theater of
Euripides.
In any traditional perspective, Euripidean theater is complex
and almost to a taste founded
uncomfortably strange, exasperating
on and Its as we have seen, are
Aeschylus Sophocles. premises,
unlike, and almost the inversion of those of the traditional Greek
theater. Typically it likes to conceal the truth beneath strata of
irony because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive. For the
same reason it its actions as and
presents typical problems thereby
involves the audience in a new relation, not as but
worshippers
must resolve
jurors who the
problem by decision. But because the

problem is usually incapable of outright resolution, is in fact

"tragic," the audience is compelled to forfeit the only luxury of
a decision?the
making luxury of knowing that one has decided
wisely. Something?innocence, comfort, complacency?is always
forfeited?or meant to be forfeited?by the audience of jurors. And
this suggests that the essential anagnorisis of Euripidean theater
is not between one actor and another but between the audience
and its own experience, as that experience is figured in the plays.
Anagnorisis here is knowing moral choice, exercised on a problem
which aims at mimicking the quandary of a culture. As such, it is
a of the way in which the is made whole
pattern psyche again,,
and the of a culture.
hope
 54 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS

It is thus a difficult theater, and difficulty in Uterature, as op

posed to textual difficulty or a doubtful MS. reading, has never
the of classical scholars. Indeed, the commonest
quickened pulses
scholarly response to the suggestion of a complex critical reading
is that no classical writer could ever have been so unclear as not
to be immediately transparent. If he was unclear or
unusually
or at aU contorted, he was to such
complex clearly unclassical;
a
degree has Winckelmann's criterion of "noble simpUcity" seized
the imagination of classical scholars. To those who believe that
Euripides could not possibly have meant more than the Uttle they
are
waning to understand, there is no adequate reply. But if it is
true that critics who interpret great dramatists often seek to
involve themselves in the dramatist's greatness, those who deny
the dramatist any ideas but their own clearly involve the dramatist
in their own dullness. John Finley's words to those who
charge
that more is read into Thucydides' speechs than the average
Athenian citizen could have understood, are appropriate:
"It might be rephed that the mass of the people could not have
followed speeches of so general a character, but to make such
an
objection is to misunderstand the mind of the fifth century,
indeed of any great period. The plays of Shakespeare and the
sermons of early Protestantism give
proof enough of the ca
assumed in an audience or It
pacity ordinary congregation.
could be that any era which offers the ordinary man
argued
vast horizons of opportunity demands and receives from him a
fresh to his fresh
comprehension proportionate self-respect.
Attic tragedy, even the philosophical and pohtical subjects
treated by Aristophanes, cannot be explained on any other
assumption."
As for Euripides, if I am right in assuming that his subject was
nothing less than the Ufe of Greek and Athenian culture, respect
for the intelUgence and good faith of the ordinary audience must
be forthcoming, since it is the premise of culture itself. And if
Euripides for the most part failed to win the understanding of his
audience?as I think he did?the fact does not disprove the intent.
It is, I think, not sufficiently recognized that the very scholars who
object that literary criticism means importing modern prejudices
into an ancient text, are themselves the worst offenders.
usually
Utterly unconsciously they take for granted aU the cramping
which a culture Uke ours can confer an uncritical
prejudices upon
man, and confer them in turn "The classicist's
upon antiquity.
attitude toward the ancient world," wrote Nietzsche, "is either
or derives from the notion that what our
apologetic age values
highly can also be found in antiquity. The is
right starting-point
the i.e., to start from the of modern ab
opposite, perception
surdity and to look backward from that viewpoint?and many
things regarded as offensive in the ancient world will appear as
 William Arrowsmith 55

necessities. We must make it clear to ourselves that we

profound
are acting absurdly when we justify or beautify antiquity: who
are we?"
men and critics of Uterature, as
Among Uterary opposed to
scholars, it be assumed that a Greek theater of ideas would
might
find favor, if only as a sanction and precedent for the new in
tellectual theater. But I suspect that this is not the case, precisely
because criticism and literature are so
contemporary stubbornly
and unreasonably convinced that the entire Greek theater from
Aeschylus to Euripides is firmly rituaUstic. In saying this, I am
thinking, first, of the fact that the modern poetic theater, in
searching for anti-naturaUstic models, turned significantly to
Greek drama. What interested contemporaries in Greek drama
was, of course, the beUef that they would find in it those features
?ritual, a sacramental sense of life and com
styUzation, gesture,
munity?which promised release from the restrictions of the
naturaUstic theater. They were confirmed in this by the literary
vogue of anthropology, and the apparent success of the so-called
Cambridge school, especially Cornford and Jane Harrison. But the
strongest argument for the ritual view of Greek drama came, I
think, from the inabiUty of the classicists themselves to give any
substantial to Greek drama. Thus men, a
meaning literary always
Uttle nervous when confronted with a Greek text and seldom
inclined to quarrel with scholarship, eagerly accepted a scholarly
view of the Greek plays that at least had the merit of making
them mean something and which also suited their own theatrical
Ritual for them was a "find." For Greek drama it was,
programs.
as I have tried to show elsewhere, an disaster.
unqualified
But because its basis is "need," ritual is
interpretation particu
larly insidious. My own objections to it are threefold; first, that
it is a clear case of the genetic fallacy, the belief that developed
tragedy still bears the visible structural and esthetic effects of its
origin; second, that there is so Uttle evidence for it in extant
tragedy that its own originator, Gilbert Murray, recanted it; and
third, that it is really Cornford's arugment for comedy?a far
sounder in view of late nationaUzation?that
argument comedy's
gives it cogency. My critical objection to it is that it tends to di
minish rather than enhance the literary value of the plays; in short,
that it tends to make priests of tragedians and worshippers of
audiences. This is not, of course, to the
deny religious importance
of the Greek tragedian or his religious concern. But it is to deny
that his subject was prescribed, his treatment wholly conventional
or and his or unadventurous. What
styUzed, thought unimportant
ever value the ritual
approach may have for Aeschylus or Sopho
cles (and I think the value is small), its appUcation has obscured
even further the nature and
originaUty of the Euripidean theater
of ideas, since it is discursive, critical the com
precisely thought,
plex "dialectic" of Euripidean drama, that rituaUst interpretation
 A GREEK THEATER OF IDEAS
56

suppresses. Thus the result of the ritual criticism of

regularly only
Greek drama has been, in my a further falsification.
opinion,
But the essential, the crucial, reason for oui'
misunderstanding
of the Greek drama in and
theater in par
general
Euripidean
ticular is one which and classicists men alike share with
literary
the whole modern world. And this is our cultural need of
special
the classics, our own crucial of classical culture. A tradition
myth
is, after all, Hke love; we "crystallize" it, endow it with the per
fections it must have in order to our need and our love.
justify
And classical Greek culture has for some time stood in relation to
modern culture as a measure of
chaos, our own a cultural Eden
which we measure our fall from and innocence. Thus
by grace
we view the Greeks with the same envious and needful wonder
that Nietzsche and Thomas Mann reserved for Goethe?that

integrated soul?and which Euripides' age felt for the age of

To our modern dissonance, the Greeks the role
Aeschylus. play
of old tonality, the abiding image of a great humanity. They are
our lost power; lost wholeness; the pure and of
presence certainty
our culture has lost.
reality
Against a need like this and a myth like this, argument may be
futile. But we should not, I think, be allowed to mythologize
unawares. If we first classical culture of its true turbu
deprive
lence in order to make ourselves a of what we have lost, and
myth
then hedge that myth with false ritual, we are depriving ourselves
of that community of interest and danger that makes the twentieth
true kin to the Greeks. We ourselves, in short, of
century deprive
access to what the can teach us in order to take what
past only
we want. And that is a cultural loss of the first
magnitude.