Poets

To the end of the fifth century historians of Greece have to pay attention to poetry. Poetry was written down from the eighth century onwards, while there was no prose literature before the fifth century and none which now survives before the second half of the century; and a good deal of early poetry touches on themes of interest to historians.

Homer, at the climax of a tradition of oral poetry, probably in the eighth century, told stories connected with a Trojan war which (when they started calculating) the Greeks dated to the twelfth century. Troy was discovered in the nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann, but we can still entertain doubts at various levels. Was there a war in which the Greeks united against Troy at all? If so, were the people and events of the Iliad and the Odyssey - or at any rate some of them (much of the Odyssey is fairy-tale) - part of it? Is the background - the organization of households and cities, the style of fighting, and so on - correct for the time of the Trojan war, or the poet’s time, or some time in between? Is there enough consistency, enough connection with reality at some time, to make it feasible to discuss ‘Homeric society’? For classical Greeks Homer was writing about their past; they realized there were problems, but were not prepared to doubt as fundamentally as we do. Herodotos believed that there was a Trojan war, but not that the Trojans would have endured that war to keep Helen, so Helen was not in Troy (Hdt. 2.112-20: cf. above). Thucydides believed that there was a Trojan war, and that poets exaggerate but with a rational approach one can still extract history from them; and he thought that we can calculate from the ‘catalogue of ships’ in Iliad 2.484-760 how many Greeks went to Troy (Thuc. 1.10.3-4).

We have some material from a number of poets active between 800 and 500. Those of interest to historians include Hesiod (probably seventh century), whose Works and Days is set in agricultural society in Boiotia; Tyrtaios of Sparta (mid seventh century) and Solon of Athens (early sixth century), who were involved in and wrote about public affairs in their cities; Theognis of Megara (perhaps later seventh century), who was - or posed as - an aristocrat who saw his world destroyed by the rise of the nouveaux riches.

Early in the fifth century Simonides wrote epigrams and longer poems, some connected with the Persian Wars. A recent discovery gives us part of a poem comparing the Greeks who fought in the battle of Plataiai in 479 with the Greeks who fought at Troy (Simonides F 1-22 West2). Pindar of Thebes wrote (among other things) odes for victors in the great games: rich aristocrats in cities like Thebes, Korinth and Aigina; in Athens too; at the other extreme, the kings of the Greek settlement in Kyrene, and tyrants in Greek cities in Sicily. He had to manoeuvre tactfully, to flatter his current patron but not say things which might offend potential future patrons elsewhere. There is a good collection of scholia, ancient commentaries, on Pindar, explaining the background to and the allusions in the various poems: for Sicily in the early fifth century Diodoros (above, pp. 31-2) is our only continuous narrative source, and it is useful to have these scholia to set beside his account.

But the largest body of fifth-century verse literature is Athenian drama - tragedies spanning most of the century and ‘old’ comedies from the late fifth century and the beginning of the fourth. How, if at all, this is to be used by historians has become contentious. Traditional ‘literary’ interpretations, willing to recognize allusions to or comments on contemporary events of a straightforward kind, have been rivalled by newer approaches: some scholars have concentrated on the works as plays performed rather than texts to be read; others have focused on the festivals in connection with which the plays were performed, some studying them as festivals of the god Dionysos, while others emphasize the civic nature of the festivals and see the plays - the tragedies as well as the more obviously topical comedies - as engaging with civic concerns.

That one approach is valid and enlightening does not mean that others are invalid or unprofitable: drama may legitimately be interpreted in various ways. However, many of the ‘civic’ interpreters of drama have seen a strong connection between the plays and the circumstances of their performance on one side and the Athenian democracy on the other - but it can be argued that, while there is of course something Athenian in the plays and in the particular setting in which they were performed, to a considerable extent the circumstances are an Athenian version of circumstances which could be found in other Greek poleis too, and many of the issues addressed in tragedy are issues which would concern Greek polis-dwellers in general and not only the citizens of democratic Athens (see, for instance, below on the themes of Sophokles’ Antigone).

There were three great tragedians of whom plays survive. The oldest, Aischylos, was active from the 470s to the 450s. Most tragedies known to us are on themes from the legendary past, though there may be contemporary relevance in the choice and the handling of the theme; but Aischylos’ earliest surviving play, Persians of472, is on a subject from the recent past (and his older contemporary, Phrynichos, wrote more than one play on a recent subject). Persians treats the Greeks’ defeat of the Persian invaders in 480, specifically the reception at the Persian court of the news of Persia’s defeat in the battle of Salamis. It can be interpreted on more than one level, not mutually exclusive: as a patriotic Greek play (though some interpreters have judged it sympathetic to the defeated Persians); as a patriotic Athenian play, since the victory at Salamis was particularly an Athenian achievement; as a partisan Athenian play, choosing to focus on Salamis, the victory of Themistokles and the navy, rather than Marathon (490), the victory of Miltiades, father of Themistokles’ rival Kimon, and the army. The play includes an account of the battle of Salamis, which is somewhat different from and perhaps preferable to that of Herodotos; and it makes some of the contrasts between Greeks and Persians which were to become standard.

In Suppliant Women (commonly dated 463) the fifty daughters of Danaos flee to avoid being forced into incestuous marriages with their cousins, the sons of Aigyptos, and seek refuge in Argos. The characterization of Argos is striking: the king to whom they appeal is a very unkingly king, and insists emphatically that the right to grant sanctuary belongs not to him but to the assembly of the people. It can hardly be accidental that this emphasis on the democratic principle occurs shortly before 462/1, when the reforms of Ephialtes took powers from the council of the Areopagos (comprising all living ex-archons) and transferred them to more representative bodies, leaving homicide trials as the most important function of the Areopagos and making Athens self-consciously democratic.

In 458 Aischylos produced the trilogy (set of three plays) known as the Oresteia, the last play of which was Eumenides. Orestes, who had killed his mother Klytaimnestra because she had killed his father Agamemnon, was pursued by the furies and came to Athens; the goddess Athena instituted the Areopagos as a homicide court to try him, and he was acquitted by her casting vote. There is good evidence for what we may call a Themistokles-Ephialtes-Perikles set, with which Aischylos was linked: Persians supported Themistokles, and Perikles was its choregos, the rich citizen paying for the production; Suppliant Women stresses the democratic idea; Eumenides cannot have been written in innocent unawareness of the recent reform of the Areopagos. We should expect Eumenides to favour the reform: some eminent interpreters have thought that it does; but other eminent interpreters have thought that it deplores the reform, or at any rate fears that the reformers may continue too far; and one scholar has argued recently that Aischylos was intentionally ambiguous.

Sophokles was active from 468 to his death in 406. His first success was in a political context: in 468 Kimon and his fellow generals were called on to act in place of the normal judges, and awarded the prize to Sophokles although Aischylos was competing (Plutarch Kimon 8.7-9). It is, of course, possible that Sophokles’ were uncontroversially the better plays; but in view of the link between Aischylos and Kimon’s opponents this outcome is at least interesting.

Sophokles played some part in public life: he was one of the hellenotamiai (treasurers of Athens’ Delian League) in 443/2 (IG 13 269); he was a general in 441/0 and again later (Androtion FGrHist 324 F 38; Plutarch Nikias 15.2); he was one of the ten probouloi, Athens’ emergency cabinet of older citizens, in 413-411 (Aristotle Rhetoric 1419a26-30). In the sense of alluding to particular events, he is the least political of the three tragedians (the one likely allusion is Oedipus Coloneus 616-23, foreseeing a time when Athens and Thebes will be enemies); but he does more generally reflect issues which were of interest in the current intellectual climate, for instance, in Antigone, the clash between human law and divine law, and between obligations to the family and obligations to the state.

Euripides was active from the 450s, and died in 406, the same year as Sophokles. He was not involved in public life (except that he may once have served on an embassy to Syracuse: Aristotle Rhetoric 1384b15-16 with scholion), but there is more contemporary relevance in his plays. At a general level, though his plots are traditional stories involving interventions by the traditional gods, the handling of the story is apt to make readers question the rightness of the gods’ justice; his versions of the stories give greater prominence to ordinary people (in his Electra, for instance, Orestes’ sister Elektra has been forced to marry an ordinary peasant); there are various traces of ideas fashionable among the sophists.

A change in attitude can be detected in the course of the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens. Euripides’ plays towards the beginning of the war - Heraclidae, Andromache, Suppliant Women, Hecuba - show both a patriotic dislike of Sparta and a consciousness of the horrors of war; later in the war, either the horrors are still on display but the patriotism is not, as in Trojan Women and Phoenician Women, or else he turns away from the harsh realities to produce melodramatic plays with happy endings, such as Iphigenia Among the Tauri, Helen, Ion. The suppliants of his Suppliant Women are the mothers of the Seven Against Thebes, who appeal to Athens when the Thebans will not allow their sons to be buried (this may be a reflection of the Thebans’ refusal to let the Athenians recover their dead after the battle of Delion in 424: Thuc. 4.97.2-4), and in this play there is a remarkable political intrusion: there is a scene (Euripides Suppliant Women 399-466) in which the Athenian king Theseus defends the principle of democracy against a Theban herald who has come to demand the handing-over of the women.

There is a great deal of obvious concern with contemporary issues in Athens’ ‘old’ comedy, from which we have a number of surviving plays by Aristophanes and fragments quoted from plays by others, but how the plays are to be interpreted has been much disputed. At the beginning of the twentieth century scholars simple-mindedly saw the characters as speaking for the poet. In the middle of the twentieth century it became fashionable to stress that the poet was writing to amuse a mass audience, not to spread propaganda or to enlighten us, and the most extreme champion of this approach claimed that the poet’s political views are irrecoverable and would not help us to appreciate the plays if we could recover them. More recently there has been a variety of approaches, and no consensus.

There is no doubt about Aristophanes’ interest in current issues. His Babylonians (426) does not survive, and reconstruction of its contents is hazardous, but we know that it landed him in trouble with the democratic leader Kleon (Aristophanes Achar-nians 377-82 with scholion 378, 502-8, 630-1). In Acharnians (425, six years into the Peloponnesian War) the hero makes a private peace treaty with Sparta. In Knights (424) Kleon, the principal slave of Demos, the Athenian people personified (other slaves are Nikias and Demosthenes), is a vulgar leather-seller, to be supplanted by an even more vulgar sausage-seller. Clouds (423) represents or misrepresents Sokrates as a typical sophist, who can teach how to make a bad argument defeat a good. Wasps (422) focuses on the Athenians’ love of litigation. Peace was produced in 421, at the point when the war seemed to be at an end. In Birds (414) men who are tired of Athens found a city in the sky, Cloudcuckooland, which reproduces the familiar faults of Athens. In Lysistrata (411, when Athens was in difficulties) the women break off sexual relations with their husbands to force the men to make peace with Sparta. Thesmophoriazusae (411) deals with Euripides’ treatment of women. Frogs (405) was written when Sophokles and Euripides had died: the god Dionysos goes to Hades to bring back a good tragedian, and the play turns into a contest between Aischylos and Euripides as to which was the better or more useful poet. Ecclesiazusae (late 390s) explores the ideas of government by women and community of property and family relations. In Plutus (388) the god of wealth, who is bestowing his favours on the undeserving because Zeus has blinded him, has his sight restored.

Aristophanes is interested in the war, politicians, jurors, sophists, women, literature and much more. Is he just making jokes? Is he attacking any one prominent enough to make a good target? Or is his aim more specific? I am one of those who believe that it is. His Kleon is obviously a caricature, but that means that he displays features possessed by the real Kleon (there is reasonable consistency between Aristophanes’ Kleon and Thucydides’ Kleon). Aristophanes does seem consistent in preferring aristocratic leaders to vulgar upstarts (but men who laughed at Aristophanes’ Kleon were happy to back Kleon in the assembly), in disliking some features of trendy cleverness (but he had a love-hate relationship with Euripides, and of course Aristophanes himself was clever), in disliking extreme bellicosity (without being a pacifist or a traitor).

In Acharnians (514-38) and Peace (605-18) Aristophanes alludes to the causes of the Peloponnesian War, each time focusing on Athens’ sanctions against Megara, and (in different stories) suggesting that Perikles was obstinate over Megara for disreputable reasons of his own. The stories are no doubt Aristophanes’ own inventions, though they were taken seriously by later Greek writers (that in Acharnians involves a parody of the beginning of Herodotos’ history; to that in Peace the chorus responds, ‘I never heard that before’), but they may well reflect a view prevalent in Athens at the time that Athens had to endure the miseries of the war because of Perikles’ obstinacy over Megara. Thucydides considered Athens’ power and Sparta’s fear of it to be the ‘truest explanation’ for the war (Thuc. 1.23.4-6: cf. above, p. 29), and among the particular grievances Megara is one about which he says little: he was perhaps in part reacting against the kind of view reflected by Aristophanes - and he was an admirer of Perikles who would not take seriously suggestions that Perikles had acted improperly.

Comedy can be useful to historians for more than its main themes and the targets of its jokes. The plays are not only concerned with but are set in the contemporary world, and contain a great deal of interesting background material. We learn, for instance, about the red-dyed rope used to herd reluctant citizens into meetings of the assembly in the fifth century (Aristophanes Acharnians 19-22), about the prayer-cum-curse which began every meeting of the assembly (a parody in Aristophanes Thesmophoriazusae 295-311 and 331-51), about the gate at the entrance to the council-house and the railings which separated the members from spectators (Aristophanes Knights 641, 674-5), about the payment made for attending the assembly in the fourth century, which one would fail to obtain if one arrived after a specified time or after the number qualifying for payment had been reached (Aristophanes Ecclesiazusae 300-10). We learn from the hero’s festival after he has made his private peace treaty with Sparta (Aristophanes Acharnians 1000-end) and from the celebrations after the rescue of Peace and her attendants Harvest and Festival (Aristophanes Peace 871-end) about proceedings at Greek festivals.