The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [124]
Ignorant men do not know what they hold in their hands
until they have flung it away.
To him who is in fear everything rustles.
For somehow this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friends.
Words are the physicians of the diseased mind.10
Athenian theatre dealt with the very stuff of life.
The original theatre audiences here were tenderised – the theatre was a space where emotions were intentionally heightened. All manner of tricks and tropes were used to ensure that the democratic Athenians, – 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 of them – were deeply moved by what they saw before them. Primal, shared musical nights were the stem-cells of Greek theatre. Drama had evolved from ritual song and dance. Playwrights were also poets; actors learned to sing haunting refrains and to fill the theatres with abstract, choral sounds. Euripides et al. composed their own music: melodic, monophonic rhythms that beat out the heart of the matter. Refrains from oboes (auloi) and cymbals represented ethos – sensibility itself. A theatre performance guaranteed all kinds of assaults on your senses, on your sentiments. And so the fact that Socrates turned up as a character in the plays of Aristophanes, one of the most ingenious and waspish playwrights of the day, was significant. Scrutiny of this new art-form was intense. Socrates’ appearance on the comic stage in Aristophanes’ play Clouds, where he was parodied mercilessly, mattered.11 We learn of the impact that the theatre had on Socrates’ contemporaries from one of Plato’s Dialogues, when Socrates bumps into a rhapsode, a professional ‘reciter’ called Ion:
SOCRATES: And are you aware that your rhapsodies produce these same effects on most of the spectators too?
ION: Yes, absolutely aware: for I look down on them from the platform and see them at such moments, crying and turning awestruck eyes upon me and yielding to the amazement of my tale. For I have to pay the closest attention to them; since, if I set them crying, I shall laugh because of all the money I take, but if they laugh, I myself shall cry because of the money I lose.12
Athens’ plays might be matchless in their honesty, with their forensic analysis of the extremes of the human condition, their investigation of human flaws, but they wrapped the experience in a lusty, feel-good mantle. Plays were where you came to process information, to learn to form an opinion of the world around you, and to love your polis. Although there is frequently criticism in the dialogue of overweening ambition, of cliques, of tall poppies, an imaginary, theatrical Athens is often a place that is high-minded and fair, in direct contrast to the bad-boys of Greece: Corinth, Sparta, Thebes. The experience of theatre was meant to be one that re-affirmed Athens’ robust sense of demos-solidarity. The very front row was reserved for the sons of men killed in war. As a showy prelude to the drama, these fatherless young men paraded through the theatre dressed in state-sponsored armour. Each war orphan then took a binding oath to protect and preserve the city. And when the tributes had been collected from amongst Athens’ ‘allies’, these goods (to all intents and purposes, taxes) were processed in public, before an admiring Athenian crowd, at the opening of the Great Dionysia competition. The March end-of-year returns in Athens’ treasury were an explicitly theatrical affair. Theatre in Socrates’ day was a heady and patriotic experience.
Although women and foreigners were almost certainly not allowed in to see the comedies and tragedies, children may well have been, possibly even as judges of the competition13 – an impressionable age to sit and watch a charismatic version of real life played out in front of you.14
It is into this highly