[booming music]
Distraught woman: My bed! My bridal! All for misery!
[Intense background music] And I cannot...
[pause]
I cannot...save my child from death!
Dr. Scott: This is one of the most shocking
stories ever written.
A mother, a princess, has lost
her city and her husband in war.
Now, she has to face the news
that she is to be sold into slavery
and her only son –killed.
This film version of an ancient
Greek play called Trojan Women
has become a classic.
The first time I saw it, I was moved
to tears, and it still moves me now.
[pause]
It is a play about the most
charged aspects of human life–
love, war, sacrifice,
fear, and death.
And although it is set
amongst the gods, myths,
and peoples of ancient Greece,
it is still utterly gripping today.
It is one of the main reasons
I study Classics.
[intense music]
An Athenian called Euripides
wrote this play
a little under two and
a half thousand years ago.
Back then, he was often
ridiculed as an angry young man.
But, over time, his plays
have come to symbolize
the incredible sophistication of
ancient Greek civilization.
[ambiguous sound effect]
That civilization has influenced
almost every aspect of our lives.
Not just drama, but politics,
language, philosophy,
art and architecture.
[walking, sad music]
To understand ourselves,
it turns out,
we need to understand
the ancient Greeks.
And the best seat from which
to do that, for my money,
is in the theater.
[soaring music]
This series is about how
ancient drama changed our world.
It's the story of dramatists
like Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides,
who revolutionized
storytelling through plays
like Trojan Women, Antigone,
Oedipus, and The Oresteia.
[instrumental music]
It's the story of
how the Ancient Greeks
gave birth to tragedy and comedy.
And it's the story of how theater
spread throughout Greece and beyond,
becoming a benchmark
of civilization,
not just for Greeks,
but for the world—
then and now.
[music continues]
In this episode,
I want to journey to Athens
to explore how drama first began.
From the very start, it was
about more than just entertainment–
it was a reaction to real events,
it was a driving force in history,
and it was deeply connected
to Athenian democracy.
In fact, the story of theater
IS the story of Athens–
the cultural hub of ancient Greece
and the stage for one
of the greatest shows on earth.
[dramatic theme music]
[instrumental music]
The story of drama as we know it
begins in a particular place,
and a particular time–
Athens in the 6th century
before Christ.
At that time,
Greece was not a single country,
but a mass of competing
city-states, or "polis"–
the Greek term describing
a body of citizens.
[pause]
But in the late 6th century,
the polis of Athens
pulled ahead of the others
politically, economically
and culturally.
[birds chirping, music]
In the last part
of the 6th century BC,
Athens was the breeding ground
for two extraordinary inventions.
The first was democracy.
Athens was ruled, not by kings
or by cliques of aristocrats,
but by the votes of
its own citizens.
But the second was theater.
Athens invented an entirely
new art form: drama.
And these two inventions
were tightly intertwined
at the beating heart
of Athenian society.
And both of them were the result
of an extraordinary
cultural revolution.
[pause, instrumental
music]
At this time, the whole of
ancient Greek culture
underwent a historic transformation.
The revolution extended
from architecture to literature,
from vase painting to philosophy.
You can see the impact
of that revolution clearly
in how Greek sculpture developed.
In the middle 6th century
it was rigid, stylized,
lacking movement and life.
But then things began to change.
By the 5th century,
Greek artists began
to produce some of the greatest
life-like sculptures ever made.
[pause]
It all amounted, not
just to a new-looking world,
but to a whole new
view of the world.
We call it the Classical World.
And in this ground-breaking epoch,
drama was perhaps
the biggest innovation of them all.
[pause]
Tales of love, death and war
had always been passed on
by storytellers and epic poems
like Homer's Iliad
and savage myths had been
celebrated in choral dance and song.
BUT the Athenians added actors and
invented the idea of performance.
These epic stories would now
play out, not only in the mind,
but live on stage.
This was more than innovation,
this was a revolution.
[pause]
Prof. Taplin: Never before in the Greek
tradition that we know of,
in the Greek storytelling tradition,
were things enacted
rather than narrated.
So, instead of having, "And then
the king drew his sword and said..."
Instead, a person actually
draws a sword and speaks.
I know we sort of say,
"Well, children do that"
but to do it with
serious storytelling,
with storytelling that
actually delves into
important roots in human behavior,
that is a very new step, and to
have it done in front of you,
I think that must have been
a very, very startling innovation.
Actor: The son of Thyestes...
Dr. Scott: Ancient Greek drama looked
and sounded very different
from drama as we know it today.
There were no more
than three or four actors.
There was a chorus who interrupted
the action with song and dance,
and all the performers wore masks.
[intense drum music, silence]
Prof. Taplin: When an actor began to
enact rather than narrate,
there's a kind of
dangerousness about that,
that the actor has
to become a woman,
the actor has
to become a slave,
the actor, perhaps even
more dangerously,
has to become a god, and
it's almost as if the mask
is a kind of signal
of the profession,
that protects the actor against
the danger of doing these things.
[dark music]
Actor: Blood shoot of Aetrius...
[muffled speech]
Prof. Taplin: The chorus are costumed
and masked in an identical
or near identical way and they
move and speak as a group.
The chorus is not a bunch
of individuals.
For the Greeks,
the chorus was a group.
In which, in a sense,
they submerged their identity.
AND what the chorus does is,
in its groupness,
it tries to make sense of
what it's witnessing.
They're deeply emotionally involved,
and the suffering becomes a song.
And the chorus, as a group,
with its group response,
sings its choral lyrics.
Different actors: You did it? Plotted it? You?
Single-handed? The people will stone him.
Chorus: You don't stand a chance.
[intense music]
Prof. Taplin: It seems to me, that the crucial
thing is that it is simultaneously
a very strong emotional experience,
and a very strong
thought experience.
[drum beat, fades to quiet]
Dr. Scott: When the Greeks came to
analyze their new art form,
they discerned three
different types of play.
Two of which we still have with
us today - tragedy and comedy.
But, in many ways,
modern tragedy has actually changed
from how ancient tragedy worked.
For us, tragedy is a
play with a sad ending,
but for the ancient Greeks,
tragedy was a play
in which the events offered
the audience a tough decision.
And because no real ancient
tragedy ends conclusively—
siding with one
course of action or another—
what it does is face
the audience with a problem.
What would THEY do if they
were in the same situation?
[instrumental music]
Take one of the most
famous plays ever written,
Oedipus The King by Sophocles.
It tells the story of Oedipus,
a man who was destined to kill
his father and marry his mother.
Although this outcome
is predicted by an oracle,
Oedipus himself makes
a series of free choices
that lead to its fulfillment–
choices that would have posed
serious questions for the audience.
The play ends with Oedipus
blinding himself in despair.
[intense, then calm music]
The issues dealt with in tragedy
were often so disturbing
that the plays were nearly always
set away from Athens,
in the land of myth and legend,
or at very least a far away city.
And after a series of tragedies,
the Athenians were
offered a satyr play.
Now, we don't have
this any more today,
but effectively the satyrs
were the half-male, half-goat
companions of the god of revelry,
who would be allowed
to run around the stage
doing lots of lewd and bawdy things
as a bit of light relief.
But what we do have today is comedy.
And ancient comedy,
just like tragedy,
spoke directly to
contemporary Athenians.
[playful music]
Usually set in a topsy-turvy
version of real life,
or in a realm of fantasy, they
poked fun at contemporary Athens.
The Birds is a play that mocks
the Athenian obsession
with litigation and politics.
It tells the story of two men
who are tired of a life of
law courts and civic duties.
To escape, they turn
themselves into birds
and create a bird city-in-the-sky
called Cloud Cuckoo Land
where they reject all attempts to
impose Athenian-style law and order.
Both comedy and tragedy
sought to have a direct bearing
on life in Athens.
And most fascinating of all, is how
they seamlessly blended together
religion and myth with
contemporary politics.
This means that a play
like The Oresteia by Aeschylus
can start with a mythic
tale from the Trojan wars
where Agamemnon is murdered by his
wife and avenged by his son Orestes,
but can end in a courtroom,
in democratic Athens,
with Orestes on trial
for the murder of his mother.
[booming music]
Dr. Wyles: The Oresteia is one of the
biggest hits in antiquity,
it's also one of the very
few trilogies that we've got.
So what you have is three tragedies
and, in this case,
it's got a connected story.
Dr. Scott: How does tragedy take this,
this, this smorgasbord if you like,
and make it into a story?
Dr. Wyles: Well it's not the same problem
for the ancient Greeks
as it might be for us.
You know there's not this
idea of anachronism.
Your mythical world, with
the gods, with the Trojan war—
all of this that we've had in
the first parts with the trilogy—
can then end in that third part
with a law court in Athens,
which would have been familiar,
of course,
from 1st century
contemporary Athens.
So you have this brilliant genre
where you can zoom from your
present day into the past
and bring your past
into your present day.
And it's that relationship,
that tragedy uses to be able to say things
about its contemporary society.
[transitional music]
Dr. Scott: To find out more about how
drama and democratic Athens
became so intimately connected,
I want to look at how
theater first emerged.
[quiet music]
Everything in ancient Greece
came under the auspices
of a particular god,
and the god controlling theater
was called Dionysus.
He was also the god
of wine and revelry
and many scholars think that
theater evolved directly
out of the choral songs
performed in honor of Dionysus.
But there's also something
else going on here.
Something that is
suggested by the ruins
at a place called Thorikos,
near Athens.
[quiet harp-sounding music]
This region was once home to
the ancient Athenian silver mines
but is also the site
of the oldest stone-built theater
in the Greek world.
We're in an industrial heartland
of the ancient Athenian state,
with the ore washeries
and the mine shafts
just beyond the theater here.
[pause]
The first phase of this theatre
is late 6th century
and that puts it in the same time
as the invention of
Athenian democracy itself.
Which throws up another question–
just what is the relationship
between theater and democracy?
And how did the two
help each other into being?
[contemplative music]
It's a question that has been
debated by scholars for centuries–
were theater and democracy
connected from the very start?
Prof. Cartledge: Now I actually buy into
the story that tragic drama
IS a democratic invention.
I have a particular take
because I am one of those who
think that Athenian tragic drama
was deeply, strongly politicized.
Not just, it happened in a polis,
but it happened in a polis
of a particular sort and could
not have happened before Athens
became a polis of that
particular sort, a democratic one.
Prof. Osborne: The theatrical side
seems to coincide
fairly closely with
the political identity.
Theatrical activities of
some sort or another
were one of the ways in which
they expressed the fact
that now they all belonged together,
this was the place to which they
came and in which they acted.
It's about, you know,
the local community feeling
itself to be a local community.
[string music]
Dr. Scott: I'm on my way to visit one of the
smaller Athenian communities
to try and find some more proof
about the connection
between drama and politics.
I want to see what the archaeology
itself has to say.
[music]
Now, neither for theater
nor democracy,
was there any kind of
immaculate conception.
Nor were either born
into the fully-developed form
that we recognize them today.
Both developed,
arm-in-arm, over time.
And all around us
as we drive in Attica,
we can see the building blocks,
the basis of the Athenian
democratic system.
[dramatic music]
People tend to think of
Athenians as city dwellers,
but much of the population
actually lived in village
communities called demes.
There were 139 demes making up
the Athenian democracy
and each deme governed itself.
The deme I'm looking for
is one of the remotest–
it's called Rhamnous.
The people who lived here
were mostly farmers,
but all the male citizens
voted for the council,
and on local regulations
and on by-laws.
And right at the heart
of the community,
are the remains of what
was once a theater.
[pause, dramatic music]
This is what I've come looking
for on this very hot afternoon–
an inscription that
shows us democracy
at its most local
level in operation.
[pause]
"Dionisoi": to Dionysus...
"Hypo tes boules": from the Boule,
the local council controlling
this deme, here in Attica.
And it's to Dionysus because,
yes, you've guessed it,
we're in a theater –a theater,
the space of Dionysus.
The privileged seats for the
distinguished local clientele,
and the stage set out before us.
Religion, politics, theater...
at democracy's most local level.
[dramatic piano music]
These theaters really were far more
than just places of entertainment,
they were places where the whole
deme would gather together.
[pause]
No-one's going to bother
to build a theater
just for a couple of days
of drama a year.
But the theaters here,
at the lowest, most basic level
of the Athenian democracy,
seem to have also been used
as multi-purpose civic spaces,
giving them all-year-round
potential, not just for drama,
but also for democracy
and democratic action itself.
And THAT is what the archaeology
is really beginning to uncover–
not only the demes,
but the deme theaters,
spreading across all of Attica.
[upbeat dramatic music]
The use of theaters
for democratic activity
seems to have been the case,
not just in the demes,
but in the city of Athens itself.
Every year, the democratic
authorities spent a fortune
on the Great Dionysia Festival:
a drama competition
that took place in
the Theater of Dionysus
in honor of the god of theater.
It's through understanding the
different stages of this festival
that we can get closer to
understanding what ancient Athenians
experienced when they
watched and created drama.
The festival began
with a procession–
a rowdy affair with
feasting, drinking,
and a great crowd of people
parading through the streets
with a statue of the god and a
small herd of sacrificial animals.
When it reached the altar of the
12 Olympian Gods in the marketplace,
the first thing that happened
was a holy dance.
Dr. Agelidis: The cult of Dionysus
is very much
a psychological thing.
You know wine was, of course,
very important, for Dionysus,
everyone knows that,
but the thing was that by
drinking wine,
you were getting closer to the god
and the more wine you drink,
the more you step out of yourself
and get closer to the god.
And that is also what happens
when you're dancing,
you're getting outside yourself,
so to say, but also by, for example,
wearing a mask...
The ancient people thought
that when you were wearing a mask,
you really become someone else.
Dr: Scott: And the Greek word is...
Dr Agelidis: It's ecstasies.
Dr Scott: So "ec" - out, "stasis" -
of one's self, of one's stance.
Dr Agelidis: Yes.
Dr. Scott: And that's our ecstasy.
Dr. Agelidis: It is the ecstasy as we know it.
Dr. Scott: The ecstasy of the god.
Dr. Agelidis: Yeah.
[celebratory music]
Dr. Scott: The procession then
surged through the streets
along a route lined with tripods—
monuments put up by the proud
sponsors of the winning plays.
Often politicians,
they spent fortunes
funding dramatic productions,
and marked their victories
with monuments like this one:
put up by a winner
from the 4th century BC.
[triumphant music]
So, the drama festival was more than
an opportunity for staging plays,
it was a chance for the
leading figures of Athens
to stage their generosity, and
their success to the whole city.
Finally, having wound its way
right around the Acropolis,
the procession emerged noisily
into the precinct of Dionysus.
By now, the participants
were becoming a single entity.
Dr. Agelidis: It was a religious but also
a political incident, actually.
You know, the whole city, so to say,
steps towards the god
so in order to worship the god.
And they show not only their piety
but also that they belong together.
Dr. Scott: So... It's an extraordinary
idea, isn't it?
That when they take their seats
in theater, it's no longer,
we would say in English, "It's no
longer Joe Bloggs and somebody"—
it's no longer the farmer
and the individuals,
it is a collective of people
with a new identity—
which is that of worshipers
of the god Dionysus.
Dr. Agelidis: Yes, correct.
Dr. Scott: It's a bit different to going to the
theater today, right?
Dr. Agelidis: It is indeed.
[both laugh]
[calm music]
Dr. Scott: All of this put the audience
into a receptive state
for the drama competition
that was to follow.
But first, as they took their seats
in the theater,
there was one more important
set of rituals to come.
[brief music]
The audience were seated here,
perhaps in the same groupings
as when they went to war.
The citizens of Athens
who were acting on the stage,
were acting in the same groups
as when they went to war.
And in the front seats of the
theater were the reserved seats
for various priests of the city, and
for the important civic officials.
And then, before the plays began,
there were a series of events.
First, a libation
(an offering to the gods) were poured
in the center of the
stage by the generals,
the military generals of the city.
Then, a parade of tribute,
of all the money paid by the cities
and states of the Athenian empire
to Athens, was literally
taken across the stage,
paraded in front of an audience
that contained members
from those same city and states
who'd had to pay all that money.
Then a list of all those who had
benefited the city in some way
was read out.
And finally, onto the stage
were brought the orphans,
those whose parents had died
fighting for the city in battle,
and whom the city would now
take on the expenses of
bringing up and educating.
They came on, dressed themselves
in the armor of war
and took their seats, their
special seats here in the theater.
Only then did the plays begin.
[intense music]
From dawn until dusk, for five days,
the citizen audience watched
three playwrights
each put on three tragedies
as well as a farcical satyr play,
and some comedies.
At their heart were issues
of justice and loyalty,
war and peace,
vengeance and compassion,
which sent powerful
messages to the citizen audience.
[pause]
In the centuries
of Athens' greatness,
over 1,000 plays were written
for the Dionysia.
But today, just 32 of them
survive in full.
And those 32 have survived, in part,
because they were considered
to be the greatest.
And they were all written
by just three people—
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—
the great tragedians
of the 5th century BC.
[dramatic music]
Aeschylus was the first.
He was the author of the Oresteia,
the only whole trilogy
to have survived.
Sophocles wrote
two of the most enduring plays,
Oedipus The King and Antigone,
which tells the tragic story
of Oedipus' daughter
who is sentenced to death
for breaking the law and
burying her rebel brother.
But, of all the playwrights,
Euripides is now considered
in many ways to have been the best.
He wrote the play Medea,
with its shocking tale
of a woman betrayed by her husband
who takes revenge
by killing her own children.
The playwrights of ancient Athens
were all gurus of the city
in one form or another:
Aeschylus the war hero,
Sophocles the civic official,
and Euripides, the sort of "enfant
terrible" of Athenian society.
[inhales]
The Greek word for playwright
is "didaskalos",
which means "trainer", or "teacher".
Now, in part, that refers
to the playwright's role
in training the chorus
for their play,
but many believe it also refers
to the role of the playwright
in training the audience for
participation in democracy itself.
If we take Sophocles' Ajax,
as an example,
it's a retelling of a classic myth
set in the time of the legendary war
between the Greeks and the Trojans.
And, on the one hand, it's just that,
but on the other it's also a lesson,
a lesson in the sacrifices that have
to be made for democracy to work.
[foreboding music]
Ajax was one of the warriors who
fought with the Greeks at Troy.
After the death of Achilles,
the greatest hero of them all,
the Greeks take a vote on
who should get his weapons.
They choose Odysseus, not Ajax,
and Ajax is furious.
[thunder]
Unable to accept the result of the
vote, he goes on a killing spree.
And ultimately, consumed
by the shame of his actions...
he is driven to suicide.
[music continues,
stops]
The motor of this play is a vote:
a process that would
have been very familiar
to the democratic citizens
of ancient Athens.
But it's a vote that
Ajax refuses to accept.
Ajax is the antithesis of
the good democratic citizen.
[pause]
But the play also goes further.
Because, for me, the key moment
is actually what happens
after Ajax's death.
What Sophocles has
the other Greeks do
is debate about how
they should proceed.
And some argue that Ajax should not
be buried because of his actions
but Odysseus steps in to
argue that he should be buried.
[sweeping music]
"Do not fling his body out unburied,
treated so unfeelingly.
And don't let force have such
control of you that you allow
your hate to trample justice down."
For scholars, this is the
critical point in the play.
[pause]
Prof Osborne: There's a real danger in Ajax
that because you've
got these two extraordinary episodes
that are bloody and shocking,
you think the play
is about those two episodes
that are bloody and shocking.
But I think the play is about
the process of debate
that leads to decisions
in the wake of actions that really
you haven't been able to cope with.
And so, this is a play
that stages debate
and it stages it in all its forms.
Prof. Hall: One way of thinking about Ajax
is as a Homerical Bronze Age
or archaic warrior stuck in a much
more modern political system.
He has values about being
an individual and being a hero,
not being a co-operative person...
that make him very, very difficult,
as if individuals can no longer
be powerful figures in the democracy.
Dr. Scott: A man out of time,
out of place?
Dr. Hall: Yes.
Dr. Osborne: So, this may be someone who
is hardly a role model citizen,
but there are going to
be lots of people in Athens
who are hardly role model citizens.
[sweeping instrumental music]
Dr. Scott: Athens, no doubt, would have
had its own fair share of bigheads
and glory seekers - people who just
wouldn't work within the democracy.
And this play plays out the dilemma
of what do you do with
those kinds of people?
How do you keep
the democracy on track?
And that, for me, is why Odysseus'
intervention is so crucial,
because he shows that you need
to have empathy with these people
and you need to let
justice run its course.
Odysseus offers a way
for the community
to come back together, make a
joint decision and move forward.
[pause]
And that's why this play
is such a great example
of what theater did in
ancient Athenian society—
it told a story, it posed problems,
it asked questions,
questions of the audience
about what would you do
in this kind of situation,
a situation which they would
undoubtedly have to face up to
at some point in their lives.
[dramatic music]
Theater was vital to the
processes that played out
here on the Pnyx,
home of the Athenian assembly.
It was the oil that allowed
democracy to function.
A contained space which allowed
for a continual process
of risky reflection,
self-doubt, and debate.
It's no accident that
the most important words
in any Greek tragedy are
"Ti draso?" -
"What shall I do?"
Theater and democracy
had grown up together
and were now inextricably
linked in Athenian minds
and every year, for almost
the next two centuries,
the Athenians came to the theater
to rework the old myths
into tragic dramas
that spoke to the problems
that had beset
and were fundamental
to one of the most important and
interesting stories in history–
The Rise and Fall of Athens.
And, at the same time, those
very same people were here,
in the assembly,
making the decisions
that affected those events.
[dramatic music]
It's therefore no surprise
that a common subject matter
in Athenian drama
was a problem that constantly
dogged the Athenian assembly: war.
And one war in particular
fired the imagination
of the playwright Aeschylus,
who lived through
the real life drama
and was inspired
to write what is now
the first ancient Greek play
to survive in full.
In 490 BC, less than 20 years
after the democracy was established,
Athens was attacked by the greatest
power on earth - the Persian empire.
[men screaming]
The first crisis came at Marathon,
26 miles from the city of Athens.
[intense music]
A Persian fleet arrived
with an enormous army.
Although outnumbered,
the Athenians attacked,
and against all the odds,
they triumph.
[pause]
The Athenian dead were commemorated
by a memorial barrow
near the battlefield,
which is impressive even today.
[pause]
But ten years later,
the Persians were back with an army
said to have been
more than a million strong.
As it bore down on Athens,
the assembly passed a heroic decree
at the urging of a leading
general called Themistocles.
Amazingly, a later copy
of the decree
actually survives
in an Athens museum.
This is one of the most evocative
inscriptions surviving to us today.
It's a decree of the people
of Athens and here's the key word:
"Salamina" - Salamis.
This is the decree
recording the decision
by the Athenian people
to evacuate their home city
and go to the island of Salamis
to save themselves from the
invading hordes of Persians.
This is the record of
one of the most key moments
in the whole of ancient history.
[pause, music]
The Athenians abandoned their city
and took to their ships,
leaving only a few men
barricaded on the Acropolis.
[pause]
The Persians ransacked the city,
destroying the temples.
But the Athenian gamble paid off –
the Athenian fleet
defeated the Persians
in the narrows off Salamis.
Greece was saved.
[pause]
And witnessing it all, not from afar
but at close range, was Aeschylus.
[music, pause]
Aeschylus wasn't just a playwright -
he was also a soldier.
He stood in the Athenian
ranks on the plane at Marathon,
on that fateful day when
the Persians first arrived.
He was part of the
victorious Athenian army,
but he also lost his brother
on the battlefield.
[pause]
Aeschylus, in his own epitaph,
preferred to be remembered for
his role here at Marathon,
rather than for his plays.
Without doubt, it was his
extraordinary experiences
here on the battlefield that
gave him a unique perspective
and allowed him
to represent war on stage
in a way that has echoed ever since.
[scattered drums]
Aeschylus composed over
90 plays in his lifetime
and of the few that survive,
the play that he composed
about these great events
is one of the most moving,
and one of the most fascinating.
In 472 BC, Aeschylus produced
a play called The Persians,
and it's the first ancient tragedy
to survive to us in full today.
Its sponsor was no-one less than
the future democratic hero Pericles.
But what's really surprising
about it is its subject matter,
because it tells the story
of how the Persians
reacted to the news of their defeat
at the battle of Salamis,
a battle that those in the
audience had fought and won
just eight years before.
[drum music]
The play is set in
the Persian capital.
A messenger arrives
at the Persian court
with the news of the Greek victory.
The Persians cannot believe
that they have been defeated,
and they fall to pieces.
In their misery,
they summon the ghost of the
previous King Darius for advice.
The ghost of Darius
tells the Persians
that they themselves
are to blame for their defeat,
because their pride
and their ambition
has led them to disregard the gods.
[foreboding music]
"The voiceless heaps of slaughtered
corpses shall eloquently show
that no one human should
puff up inflated thoughts.
You see how insolence,
once opened into flower,
produces fields ripe with calamity
and reaps a harvest-home
of sorrow."
This is the crucial
theme of the play.
Dr Wyles: Well, I think, really, at its heart,
really it's almost a tragedy about hubris.
[Scott hmms] This idea of, sometimes
translated as "arrogance",
something like that - going too far,
crossing a line, transgressing.
And the Persians had done that.
They thought big, they thought
they could go and take Greece.
They didn't win and, actually,
part of what the play is exploring
is the idea that
big empires can fall.
Dr. Scott: What kind of resonance
and implications does a play
like The Persians have for us today?
Dr. Wyles: It deals with one of these eternal
themes - it looks at war.
And it looks at the destruction,
the loss,
the risks you run if you go to war.
They became really popular
with the Gulf War
and then with the Iraq War as well and
this is a really interesting one.
In some modern productions,
what you get is costume
that really tells you
that the audience should be making
a link with contemporary war.
Dr. Scott: What point is Aeschylus making,
do you think, with that?
Dr. Wyles: I mean this is an amazingly
difficult question to answer,
you can't even imagine how this
must have felt for the audience
when they'd had their city sacked,
they'd really come close
to being completely
occupied by Persia.
This play is, on one level
really celebratory... [Scott: Yeah].
But you have to imagine it
operating on another level as well
because there are incredibly
moving speeches in this —
the language isn't just
victorious, if you like.
I think it tells us a lot
about what tragedy is doing,
it is complex and it doesn't
make it easy on the audience
and it's really asking
the society to reflect.
[somber, eerie music]
Dr. Scott: This play, for me, is both an
exception to normal tragedy
AND a fantastic example of it.
It's an exception because unlike
most that focus on mythical stories,
this focuses on real
and recent history.
But it's a fantastic example
of what tragedy does
because it doesn't
just allow the Athenians
to gloat over their victory.
Instead, it offers a warning.
For the Persians,
pride came before a fall,
and at a time when Athens
and the Athenians
were beginning to grow in their
own power within the Greek world,
the play offers that same message—
"be careful or you too could end up
just like the Persians."
[birds]
[intense music]
This warning had a direct bearing
on the current situation in Athens.
[music continues]
In the aftermath
of the Persian wars,
Athens reached the peak
of her power and influence
and the fleet that had
secured victory at Salamis
now reached out across the Aegean.
[eerie music]
Athens became the leading city-state
in a new anti-Persian alliance.
But what began as a free coalition,
was soon under Athenian control.
[music continues]
The financial muscle at Athens'
command allowed it eventually
to turn the free alliance
of Greek cities and states,
that had been brought together
to wreak revenge on the Persians,
into an empire solely to
support the glory of Athens.
And it was policed by the mighty
and yet brutal majesty
of the supreme Athenian fleet.
The war-chest of
that free alliance,
which had been kept on
the sacred island of Delos,
was moved to Athens,
placed on the Acropolis
and eventually into
a building –the Parthenon–
which has today become synonymous
with democracy and freedom.
And yet which was originally built
with the blood-money of
Athenian empire.
[more dramatic music]
Every year, each city
in the alliance or empire,
contributed money
in silver as tribute,
and this money was displayed
in the theatre, in Athens,
at the Great Dionysia Festival.
But when any members of the
empire refused these payments,
Athens sent a fleet to attack them.
Having an empire meant
that the Athenian assembly
was now making
life-or-death decisions,
not just about themselves, but about
cities and peoples far away
who had no real say in the matter.
[intense music]
These decisions were far from
easy, as the Athenians discovered
when they had to decide how
to deal with the city of Mytilene.
[music continues]
In 428 BC, the city of Mytilene
rebelled against
the Athenian empire.
The Athenian assembly met
to decide how to respond.
The hardliners
wanted to execute every man
and enslave every woman
in the city–
the moderates just to execute
the ringleaders.
And on the first day of debate,
the Athenian assembly
sided with the hardliners.
They even dispatched a trireme to
Mytilene to carry out those orders.
And yet when they met
on the second day,
the Athenian assembly started
to doubt its own decision.
And indeed they went on to reverse
it, sending a second trireme
which got there just in time.
Now these events not only brought
great relief to the Mytileneans
but it also brought home to the
Athenians the critical importance
of thinking through properly their
decisions before taking action.
[drum heavy music]
Dealing with life and death
decisions like this
had always lain at the heart
of Athenian drama.
And authors like the prize-winning
Sophocles forced the audience
to experience vicariously
the consequences of sloppy thinking.
In 442 BC, Sophocles won yet
another victory at the City Dionysia
with his play Antigone.
Now, Sophocles was a man
intensely involved
with the affairs
of the Athenian state.
He had been a general
and he would go on
to become one of
its closest advisors
during its darkest hours
in future years.
And his play Antigone deals
with exactly this kind of thing:
how to debate and argue
through the difficult
and yet critical issues
that face a city.
[pause]
And what can happen
when it all goes terribly wrong.
[sad music]
The play tells the sad story of
Oedipus' daughter Princess Antigone.
[thunder and lightning]
When Antigone buries
the body of her rebel brother,
she is following
the law of the gods.
But the city's law and her uncle,
King Creon have forbidden it.
[quiet piano music]
Creon is furious,
and condemns her to death.
[music continues]
Creon's son Haemon,
who is in love with Antigone,
urges his father to reconsider.
[same music]
He argues that "A city is not a city
if it is the holding of one man."
But Creon is stubborn
and uncompromising.
He refuses to listen,
and refuses to back down.
The play ends with Antigone and
Haemon both committing suicide
and with Creon facing the
displeasure of his people
and of the gods.
Creon has to face the fact
that his actions,
and his alone,
have caused this disaster.
[sad music]
Prof. Hall: All of Greek tragedy stages
dilemmas that cities under leaders have,
where they're faced
with either very bad luck,
or very bad management, or both.
Now, at one end of that
spectrum you've got Oedipus,
who has very, very, very bad luck [laughter]
right? He's doomed before he's even born.
How do you react to that?
How do you conduct yourself
in a situation with very bad luck?
Right at the other end is the story
of Oedipus' daughter Antigone,
faced with THE most incompetent
leader in all of Greek literature
and that is saying something.
Creon simply cannot put a foot
right, so Sophocles is asking people
to think about what
a good leader might be
through showing them
the worst possible leader
and the Athenians loved that
so much that Antiquity said
they made him general in response.
Prof. Osborne: Creon is getting pretty
a bad stick from Edith
but there is a real sense in which
the issue at the center of the play
is an issue that arises
even in Athenian law.
In Athenian law,
if someone is a traitor
they are not to be buried.
You have to take
them beyond the borders
and you can then bury them outside.
If you're a dimark in Athens
and there is a dead body in your
deign you are obliged to bury it.
So, immediately that clash of,
"Yes, you must bury it
but no, you can't"
arises if the dead body
happens to be a traitor.
So this isn't a non issue,
this is a real issue
and Creon may make a
complete fist of resolving it
but he makes a fist because
there are two diametrically
opposed, justifiable views
and you then have to pick
your way through these.
[quiet music]
Dr. Scott: Due to his dogged determination
for others to do
exactly what he wants, his inability
to listen, to compromise,
Creon ends up paying
the ultimate price–
the loss of his family
and his authority.
It's a play about listening,
debate, compromise,
what it takes to be a leader.
Those are issues which,
of course, had relevance
to the ancient Athenians
watching the play,
but they're also issues that are
relevant to any society at any time.
That's what makes
Antigone so timeless.
[quiet string music]
Dr. Wyles: It's got universal appeal
because it's about someone
fighting against the system
and a system that's wrong.
I mean, that's how
it gets picked up now
and that's, that's what really appeals to
modern audiences, I think, about it.
Dr. Scott: A play like Antigone,
what kind of resonance
does that have for us today?
Dr. Wyles: Thinking about this
adaptation that Jean Anouilh
produced in 1944 in France while it
was being occupied by Nazis.
That's a real example of
where you've got this play
which is really taken on and
championed by the Resistance.
Dr. Scott: How did it ever get
permission to be performed
if it's such a play of resistance?
Dr. Wyles: Well, I think that's
the ambiguity of the play.
So, you know, for the occupying force,
for the Vichy government,
actually, you can look
at this play and think,
"This is a play about
law and imposing law
and actually this
is a silly little girl
who breaks that law and, you know,
she gets what's coming to her."
So, it's that ambiguity that allows,
even in those circumstances,
this great play of resistance,
for some people, to be put on.
[transitional music]
Dr. Scott: Tragedy was an effective way of
engaging with the issues
that beset the democracy,
but it was not the only way.
There was also comedy.
Comedy was irreverent,
rude and bawdy,
and it was also personal,
targeting real individuals.
And just like today, ordinary
Athenians in the marketplace
were deeply suspicious
of their elected political leaders.
[pause]
Some people, it seems,
were just naturally born
to successfully navigate
the slippery waters
of Athenian politics.
And one of those guys
was a man called Cleon.
[speaking Greek]
Now, Cleon was what we would call
today an opportunistic politician.
He would be with the aristocrats
or he would be spurring
on the lowest of the low
of the Athenian citizenry.
And the ancient commentators
are fairly hard on Cleon.
And today we'd probably
be a bit more balanced,
but without a shadow of a doubt
he would do whatever it took to
get whatever he wanted.
Naturally, he had his enemies.
They accused him of being
greedy, not just for power,
but for fresh-caught tuna,
seen back then as a luxury desired
by the rich and anti-democratic.
[city noises]
How could the democracy
keep people like this in check
while not killing off
their energy and enthusiasm
that at the end of the day
benefited the city?
Well, one of the ways
they did it was in the theater,
by taking the piss out of them,
right in their very face.
[upbeat, quirky music]
Comedies, while performed
at the Dionysia Festival,
also had their own, smaller festival.
It was called the Lenaia.
It took place early in January,
long before the season
for sailing started,
so there were no foreigners present.
This meant that comic writers
could really let rip
without letting the city down.
[music continues]
Dr. Wyles: What you have is
really lively plays,
very outrageous plays, actually, sometimes,
but they are politically involved.
The settings can be, you know, amazing in
the real sense, [Scott: Yep] incredible.
You have comedies that
go to the underworld,
they go to hell,
and that's where you get
these animal choruses like frogs.
This is a frog that was used
in the King's College Greek play.
I mean animal choruses are
quite common in comedy.
You've got, for example,
the chorus here...
[pause]
These guys performing and the
songs that they get to sing,
I mean, this is a
great source of comedy.
Dr. Scott: What kind of level of biting
satire are we talking about here
in ancient comedy?
Dr. Wyles: It's extremely personal,
there's insults really
of quite an infantile nature.
You have plays which actually put
politicians as one of the characters,
very thinly disguised,
but the-they'll be the
leading politicians of the day.
Their policies will be clear, the
way they speak might be parodied,
even the mask can reflect
characters from Athenian society.
[fun music]
Dr. Scott: This was the sort of thing
that lay in store
for ambitious politicians
like Cleon.
[pause]
And the man who was
the real expert at this
was a comic playwright
called Aristophanes.
And for Aristophanes and Cleon,
it was a grudge match –
they even came
from the same village.
[playful music]
In 425 BC, Aristophanes
wrote a play called The Knights.
It portrays Cleon
as a cunning servant
working for an old man called Demos.
Demos represents the people,
and as his crafty servant,
Cleon misuses his position
for the purposes of
extortion and corruption.
Yet, in the end, it is Demos
who has the last laugh.
Cleon's corrupt ways are
exposed, he loses his position
and he is reduced
to selling sausages
outside the Athens city gates.
Aristophanes didn't
pull any punches–
this play brings Cleon
right back down to earth.
And, of course, the politicians,
about whom the jokes
were being made,
were right here, visible
to all in the audience.
So it's like having
one of our shows,
The Daily Show in the States
or Have I Got News For You here,
being played out in
an important civic space
–the Capitol or
the House of Commons–
with the people they're
taking the piss out of
sitting right here in the audience,
having to take it
in front of everyone.
The Greeks even had a word
for this,
they called these people,
the "komedoumenoi",
those made fun of in comedy.
And this isn't just
some sort of sideshow.
This, many ancient commentators saw,
as the hallmark of
ancient Athenian democracy
and of freedom and free speech.
[mysterious music]
The laughter didn't
stop Cleon's career.
Despite his slippery reputation,
he was elected again and again.
But the effect of comedy
was more subtle than that.
What it did do, was police
the boundaries of behavior,
skewer pretensions and remind
those in positions of power
of their responsibilities and of
the limits of their ambitions.
It's a kind of satire
that we can still see at work
in our own democracy today.
By the time of Cleon, this
experiment in Athenian democracy
was heading towards its centenary.
And in that time it had seen it
all, from fighting for survival,
to cultural supremacy,
to empire, to wealth.
And it was, still, at war,
not now with Persia
but with Greece's greatest
fighting force: the Spartans.
[pause]
And desperate times called
for desperate measures.
[ominous music]
The war between Sparta
and Athens started in 431 BC
and lasted for decades.
It was a fight to the death.
Sparta ruled by land,
Athens ruled at sea.
But there was one island
that had never submitted
to Athenian domination
and tried instead
to remain neutral:
the small island of Melos.
[pause]
In 416 BC, the Athenian
democrats had had enough;
it was time for
the Melians to submit.
So the Athenians sent their
fleet to enforce their demands.
[pause, waves]
Now, according to Thucydides,
the contemporary Athenian historian,
the Athenians sent in
not just their fleet
but also some diplomats
to put the case.
The case was very simple,
it was this– join us or die.
[pause]
But what happened next,
according to Thucydides,
was an extraordinary debate
between the two sides.
"These envoys the Melians did not
bring before the popular assembly,
but bade them tell in
the presence of the magistrates
and the few what
they had come for."
The envoys gave the Melians
an ultimatum:
surrender and pay tribute
to Athens, or be destroyed.
The Melians argued that they were
a neutral city, not an enemy.
And that it would be shameful and
cowardly to submit without a fight.
But the Athenians were unmoved.
They countered that if they didn't
extract surrender from Melos,
the empire would look weak.
They argued that the strong have
the right to exert their authority.
[distant string music]
This is a classic example
of what we call in Greek
an "agon" –a debate.
You could have seen it in
the philosophical lecture hall,
or in the political assembly,
or in the law courts,
or indeed on the stage
in the theater.
And it's summed up... Well, it's
summed up rather well, actually,
by an enthusiastic student who seems
to have had this copy before me.
And who has written rather pithily
in the margin, "Might is right".
And that was the Athenian argument.
The strong do as they can.
The weak suffer what they must.
And that's exactly what happened.
The Athenians invaded
the island of Melos,
they executed all the men,
they enslaved all the women
and the children,
and they established
an Athenian colony there.
[pause]
And yet, just the very next year,
in the Theatre of Dionysus,
in the centre of Athens,
Euripides, the "enfant
terrible" of Athenian drama,
staged a play called Trojan Women.
Its subject matter was what
happened to the women at Troy
after the Greeks had besieged,
invaded, and destroyed the city.
[pause]
So the Athenians
sat down to watch a play
which laid before them on the stage
the tragic reality
of what they had done,
just the year before,
to the island of Melos.
[booming]
The play is set in the aftermath
of the legendary siege of Troy.
[pause, booming]
The city has fallen,
all the Trojan men are dead,
and the surviving Trojan women,
who make up the chorus in the play,
are to be sold into slavery.
But for Princess Andromache,
there's worse–
her son is to be taken
from her and slaughtered.
[pause]
When she argues, the messenger tells
her to be brave –"might is right".
[Princess Andromache wails]
[all women scream]
Man: Hush!
[the women quiet]
[Princess Andromache pants]
Messenger: If you say words that
make the army angry...
[she shudders]
the child will have no burial...
[breathing heavily]
and without pity...
[shuddering]
so bear your fate as best you can.
[still breathing heavily]
Then you need not leave him
dead without a grave...
[shallow breathing]
and you will find
the Greeks...
[shuddering]
more kind.
[gravel crunching as he stands]
[shuffling]
Dr. Scott: Trojan Women may well have spoken
to Athenian actions on Melos,
but Euripides was also crucially
sending a broader message
about the disillusionment
that was taking hold in Greece
after years of
relentless, savage war
and the terrible impact
that such conflict has on
all members of society.
[boom, fades]
Prof. Cartledge: Why should WE think that
what the Athenians did to the Melians
would have generated
such terrific outrage
when the Spartans had done something
very similar to the people of Hisiai just a few
years earlier? [overlapping: Exactly. Exactly.]
I mean that's purely historically.
On the other hand,
the coincidence of date means,
it seems to me, that as
Euripides is writing this,
what is the big campaign that
the Athenians are involved in
that is going to involve
women as slaves of war?
Well, it is the Mel- there is
no other campaign going on
as Euripides is writing
it in the winter of 416-5,
but he could have thought it
at any time, that's the thing.
Prof. Hall: By 416/415, I think Euripides
really has seen that war
as a way of life brings
nothing but misery
to both victors and vanquished.
Prof. Osborne: And from that point of
view, if you focus on Melos,
you actually miss that point.
Prof Hall: Exactly.
Prof. Osborne: The more you think
this is just a sort of,
"Oh, there's been a terrible
atrocity..."
[other professors agree]
Prof. Osborne: ...the more you miss
that this is about the fact that
war is irrational and terrible.
Prof. Hall: Euripides is presenting
a very –a, a, view of all the Greeks
as having barbarized themselves
during the course of
the Peloponnesian War.
[dramatic music]
Dr. Scott: Euripides was not the only one
to despair at the state
of affairs in Greece,
or criticize Athenian behavior.
Many in Greece now felt that
Athens was guilty of hubris,
of over-reaching pride.
And anyone who had ever
seen a Greek tragedy
would have been aware
of what could happen next.
[quiet music]
Here at Rhamnous in the 6th century,
the people had built a temple
to the Greek goddess responsible for
punishing those guilty of hubris.
She was called Nemesis, a name that
comes from the Greek verb "nemein",
meaning to give what is due.
[ominous music]
Now, after the Melian atrocity,
it seemed like Athenian
ambition and pride
was beginning to over-reach itself.
They not only had enemies abroad,
they had an increasing number
of enemies in Greece,
and indeed an increasing number
of enemies at home as well,
who were beginning
to think of democracy
as perhaps the immoral
inversion of the righteous order.
The question was,
as the glorious Golden Age of
the 5th century drew to a close,
how would theater and democracy,
which had so spectacularly
grown up together,
survive in a much harsher
and more difficult world?
[nature, dramatic music]
Although the future of Athens
now looked uncertain,
the past century had
been a spectacular era,
Athens had invented and pioneered
an array of things
which underpin our own civilization.
From classical sculpture
and architecture
to new directions
in philosophy and history.
[music swells]
But for me,
out of all those legacies,
two stand out as the most
extraordinary...
First, democracy:
Athens created the first
democratic constitution in history,
which has become a beacon
across the centuries.
[music]
And second: at the very same time,
Athens invented a powerful
and incisive new art form
–theater– an innovation
without which, perhaps,
that democracy might
never have survived.
[pause]
Drama comes from the Greek word,
"dram": to do, to act, to perform.
And if there is one thing
that has become abundantly clear
it's that theater was
never just mere entertainment,
never a passive spectator.
It was a performer in Athens'
story in the ancient world.
From tragedy making our most
important beliefs uncomfortable,
to comedy questioning
and policing citizenship,
and keeping people in check.
Theatre was an institution that
plugged into religious, civic,
political, and military aspects
of ancient Athenian society.
It was an extraordinary,
and an extraordinarily uncomfortable,
risky, and yet essential
part of Athenian life.
Join the Open University
as we explore
the connections between Greek
theatre and modern-day democracy.
Go to bbc.co.uk/ancientgreece
and follow the links to the Open
University's free-learning website.
[dramatic end music]
Female voice over: Peter and Dan Snow
explore another 20th century battlefield
in just a moment's time here on BBC Four
this evening, and then a chance to re-meet
the ancestors: families of the Stone Age
in stories from the dark earth at eleven.
Stay with us.
[dramatic end music resumes,
continues to end]
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd, edited
for Hope College