[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