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PETER ARNOTT

Greek Drama as Education

have never believed-despite considerable evidence to the contrary--that a
paper intended for delivery before a learned convention should content itself
with the reiteration of the obvious. There is little to be said about the Greek conception of the function of drama in society that has not been well and plentifully
said already. In the fifth century at least, the drama, like all poetry, was considered
primarily as a teaching medium. The poet was the didaskalos, teacher, not merely
in the sense that he taught his actors and choruses, but also with the implication
that he instructed his public, through a medium that offered the widest possibilities for the dissemination of ideas and information, and which could also, in a
single hearing, reach the greater part of the body politic. The plays themselves
offer ample testimony of this, in great ways and small. When the chorus in The
Libation Bearers announce that they will assist Orestes' work "as women may",
they mean that they will aid him with the power of song; and they are doing no
more than voicing the conventional attitude towards the function of poetry in
Greek society. When the satyr chorus in The Cyclops offer similar assistance to
Odysseus, they are not merely being cowardly. It is of course true that they shrink
from physical participation in the blinding of the monster. But, as both they and
Odysseus realize, an appropriate song at this moment of crisis is not without its
value. We might recall here that the Spartans, by no means notorious aesthetes,
included music in their program of military training. Euripides, in Medea, puts
into the Nurse's mouth a powerful, if apparently irrelevant, diatribe against the
abuse of poetry:
I

You wouldn't be wrong to consider

The old poets not clever but fools
Who wrote music for dinners and banquets,
Pleasanttunes for men who were happy,
But nobody ever discovered
How to use all this music and singing
To lessen a man'sload of trouble
That brought death and misfortune and ruin.
It would certainlybe an advantage
To use music for healing! Why waste it
On dinners? There's pleasureenough
In a banquet,who wants any more?1

Euripides is not stating any novel idea, but merely reiterating the traditional belief
in poetry as an educative, curative force, and arguing that his predecessors had not
fully realized its potential.
Mr. Arnott is a Professor of Drama at Tufts University and author of a number of books, including An Introduction to the Greek Theatre, Plays without People, An Introduction to the Greek
World, Greek Scenic Conventions, and, most recently, The Theatres of Japan. This paper was
first presented at AETA's z969 convention in Detroit.
1 Euripides, Medea,
w. 19o-2o3, trans. Peter Arnott, Three Greek Plays for the Theatre
(Bloomington, Ind., 1961).

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EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

In The Frogs, Aristophanes puts into the mouth of Aeschylus a defense of the
educational value of poetry and drama on the most literal level. Orpheus taught
religion and morality, Musaeus divination, and Hesiod the arts of farming, while
Homer gave notable instruction in "battle-drill and military strategy." It is on
these grounds that Aeschylus is made to defend his own work, arguing that his
Seven Against Thebes is chiefly used as a military manual. It is a joke, yes;
but the joke is simply a comic extension of a prevalent attitude. We might
remember here, however, that the poems of Homer were taken quite literally as
historical documents, and referred to as evidence in territorial disputes. In the
same play both Aeschylus and Euripides are made to agree-it is the only point on
which they do agree-that the chief criterion of a poet is his instructional ability,
namely, whether or not he makes better citizens; and we see too that when
Dionysus comes to make his decision, his test questions concern not poetry but
politics. What shall we do about Alcibiades? What steps shall we take to save our
city? These were the sorts of questions that the poets were expected to answer,
and did answer. One of the original purposes of the Oresteia, though admittedly
one with little meaning for us, was to stress the desirability of friendly relations
between Athens and Argos, and to give mythic sanction to Athens' most venerable
judicial body. The play invokes myth in support of actuality just as, at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, both Athens and Sparta supported their causes
with charges against the other side dredged up from remote and legendary history.
One of the immediate purposes of The Trojan Women was to question certain
aspects of contemporary Athenian foreign policy.
These things, as I say, are sufficiently obvious, sufficiently well known. My
primary purpose in this paper is to draw attention to certain less desirable consequences of the Greek attitude. At what point does drama cease to be educational
and become doctrinaire? What is the borderline between the dissemination of
ideas and propaganda? To what extent were the plays limited to the expression
of the official viewpoint? Gerald Else has recently suggested, in a stimulating if
controversial treatise,2 that Greek tragedy owed its genesis not to any religious
manifestation, but to the official need to inform the public of the way in which it
was desirable to go; that Greek tragedy, in effect, was born out of politics rather
than the act of worship. Plato was clearly convinced of this when he wrote The
Republic: in his extremist view the function of drama is to show the citizens only
worthy examples of public and private behavior, and everything else must be
eliminated. This attitude had already been anticipated, albeit comically, by
Aeschylus in The Frogs. The Aeschylus-Euripides debate in that play prefigures
the argument between Jeremy Collier and the playwrights of the Restoration.
Aeschylus insists that plays should show only what is noble and uplifting, Euripides (anticipating by some centuries Congreve's reply to Collier) that they should
lead men to think for themselves, and show vice to bring it into disrepute. And
there is considerable evidence that the authorities were on Aeschylus's side.
One of the more newsworthy acts of the Greek colonels, after their coup of
1967, was their censorship of the Athens Festival. Plays dealing with tyrants were
2 Gerald F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

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GREEK DRAMA AS EDUCATION

out. Prometheus Bound and Ajax, together with the music of Theodorakis,
became politically undesirable overnight. There was an immediate outcry in the
news media of the world about this latest example of the way in which the cradle
of democracy had fallen victim to a vicious tyranny. I hold no brief for the
colonels, but it is only fair to remember what some Greeks of the fifth century
said about their "cradle of democracy," and how Thucydides, for example,
described it as "a democracy in theory, an autocracy in reality." As Punch recently
pointed out in one of its more acid obiter dicta, the only real difference between
Pericles and the colonels is that the latter have, as yet, inspired no great poetry
or architecture. And there is ample evidence that fifth-century officialdom was
as sensitive to criticism from the theatre as its modern counterpart.
We have an early instance of fifth-century censorship in the story of Phrynichus's The Capture of Miletus, a topical play based on the recent disaster
in Asia Minor when a major center of Greek influence was razed to the ground
by the Persians in revenge for the destruction of Sardis. The playwright, in
Herodotus's account, was fined one thousand drachmas and his play forbidden
further representation on the ground that "he had reminded the Athenians of
the sorrows of their kinsfolk." " This charge, of contributing to the public
despondency, was compounded by political factors; it is more than possible that
Phrynichus was acting as spokesman for the war party, and that his work was
intended to foment anti-Persian feeling. His subsequent connection with
Themistocles would lend support to this theory.
This, it must be admitted, is the only known example of overt political intervention in tragedy; but subsequent plays suggest that the poets, at least in some
ways, recognized the expediency of following the party line. Even Aeschylus was
not immune to the shifting tides of political fortune. His Persians, written in 472,
eight years after the Athenian victory at Salamis, mentions numerous Persians by
name, but not one Athenian. This restraint was, surely, not merely to relieve the
Athenian heroes of the stigma of hybris that he had attached to Xerxes. It was
due also to the fact that Themistocles, who had engineered the victory of 480, had
fallen out of political favor by 472, and was to be ostracized shortly afterwards.
In Sophocles, the Spartans tend to be cast as heavies: thus Menelaus in Ajax. In
Hecuba, Euripides can create a vicious and morally irresponsible Thracian king
at a time when Athens was dealing with a living incumbent of the Thracian
throne who possessed the same qualities to a marked degree. And Euripides,
much as he disliked war in general, and the Peloponnesian War in particular,
could still include in his plays references to contemporary Athenian victories.
Examples of specific legislation aimed at the control of comedy are more numerous. We know of two forms of censorship: private prosecutions brought by
individuals who felt themselves maligned by comedy, or psephismata, acts of the
Assembly (ekklesia) as a body. The most famous example of the former is the
series of prosecutions brought by Cleon against Aristophanes, sufficiently well
known to need no further discussion here. Of the latter, one instance at least was
far-reaching in its implications. It is alluded to in The Birds, v. 1297, where the
3 Herodotus,Histories,VI. 21.

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EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

scholiast elaborates and explains: "Syracosius is called 'the jay' . . . he seems to

have set up a psephisma that no one should be mocked in comedy by name (m&
k6m6deisthai onomasti tina). As Phrynichus says in his The Hermit 'May an
enormous and spectacular mange fall upon Syracosius, for
forbade me to
deride whom I pleased.' " The law of Syracosius was supposedlyh.e
passed before the
of
Hermit
at the City
The
and
The
Birds
production
Phrynichus's
Aristophanes'
in
If
the
the
of
individuals
law
forbade
414.
Dionysia
really
mockery
by name,
both playwrights conspicuously broke it. Not only is Syracosius himself lampooned by each of them, but The Birds is replete with personal allusions. If the
scholiast is right about the content of the law, we can only conclude that the law
was never enforced.
Max Radin 4 gives an alternative explanation of the law of Syracosius. He
points out that there was a law of libel in effect in Athens in 384 B.C. Although
the date of its enactment is unknown, it had probably been in operation for a
number of years. The oration against Theomnestus, written by Lysias and
delivered in 384, is concerned with a prosecution under this law. It established a
group of aporreta, things it was not permitted to say. One could not say of anyone
that he had thrown away his shield in battle (that is, deserted in action), killed
anyone, or beaten his father or mother. The penalty was the heavy one of 500
drachmas. Radin believes, with some reason, that this law was the one passed
under Syracosius's name in 415/414. One of the aporreta was aspida apoballein;
it was forbidden to say of anyone that he had thrown away his shield. This charge
had been made frequently by Aristophanes against Cleonymus, one of his favorite
butts. In The Clouds, v. 353 he calls him a ripsaspis, shield-thrower. The charge
is repeated in The Wasps, vv. 15ff., where the exact words prohibited by the law
are used, and in The Peace, vv. 674ff. In The Birds there is a significant difference.
As the members of the bird-chorus enter, they are identified by the Hoopoe. One
is a gannet, or glutton-bird. The following dialogue ensues:
PISTHETAIRUS A gannet? Is there another one besides Cleonymus?
EUELPIDES It can't be him. He'd throw his crest away.5

Radin believes that Aristophanes deliberately engineered this conversation to

make his familiar joke about Cleonymus while keeping to the letter of the law;
and this suggestion is supported by a later reference to Cleonymus in the same
play where he is described not as man but as a tree (vv. 1470-1480):
We have flown on explorations,
Seen some strange, exciting places,
Many things we'd never heard of.
There's a tree, for instance, growing
Slightly to the north of CardiaNo one's ever seen one like it!
Called Cleonymus, by nature
4Max Radin, "Freedom of Speech in Ancient Athens," American Journal of Philology,
XLVIII (1927), 215-230.
5 Aristophanes, The Birds, vv. 289-290, trans. Peter Arnott, Two Classical Comedies (New
York, 1958).

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GREEK DRAMA AS EDUCATION

Fat and cowardly, and never

Any use to anybody.
In the spring it's sprouting wildly
With a crop of accusationsIn the winter, what a difference!
Shedding shields instead of leafage.

Radin believes that Aristophanes was forbidden by the recently passed law of
aporreta to make his charge directly, but came as close to it as he could. It is also
significant that another of the aporreta, unnoticed by Radin but surely perceived
by Aristophanes, is worked into the same play. This is the charge of fatherbeating. One of the immigrants to Cloudcuckooland has designs upon his father.
But he is not allowed to fulfill his intentions; Pisthetairus dissuades him. One
may perhaps imagine the gasp that went up from the audience when the forbidden subject was broached, and the subsequent amusement when the poet neatly
side-stepped the issue. Once again, Aristophanes plays with the idea, but keeps
the law.
The more specific the prohibition, of course, the more easily it can be circumvented. Sufficient proof of this has come from the ease with which American filmmakers have continually evaded the intent of their self-imposed censorship.
Unspoken censorship, as represented by public prejudice, is always harder to
circumvent. How powerful this pressure could be is seen, for example, in Aristophanes' The Knights. Here the subject is the corruption of the commonwealth
by its ministers. Demos, the Athenian public, is represented as a foolish master
who is being ruined by his corrupt steward, a character who is Cleon in all but
name. This man can only be supplanted by a rogue who is worse than he; and
the play is largely concerned with a contest between two thieves and charlatans
to decide which is the worse. However accurate this may be as a reflection of
contemporary--or, indeed, of any-politics, it is hardly flattering to the Athenian
public. By the nature of his play and his line of attack, Aristophanes has found
himself in the position of showing his audience its own corrupt and infinitely
fallible corporate image. Although artistic integrity might find this desirable, a
poet competing for a public prize has other claims on his attention. The Knights,
therefore, ends with an ambiguity. Logic demands that the play be allowed to
finish as it has begun, with Demos falling into even more unworthy hands.
Prudence and the desire for public favor dictate otherwise. Demos must be permitted to redeem himself; the public must be reassured. Thus Demos, at the end
of the play, performs a complete volte-face. He announces that he has only been
pretending, and that, while seeming to be duped by his underlings, he has only
been biding his time; he appears at the end as omniscient and uncorrupted. Cornford saw this revitalization as further proof of the development of comedy from
ritual sources; it was, for him, another example of the rebirth of the principal
character, like the symbolic death and resurrection of the fertility rites. One cannot help but suspect that the real reason is more prosaic and less admirable.
Aristophanes, like any other playwright, desires the favor of the audience he
abuses.

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EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

An interesting modern parallel to the regeneration of Demos appears in a

modern American popular novel, Fletcher Knebel's Night at Camp David. This
offers a critical analysis of the complexity of American government by asking
what would happen if the President became insane. How long would it be before
effective action could be taken? Throughout the novel pressure on the President
to resign increases, until a confrontation is engineered between him and his
accusers; but at the end the President resigns voluntarily, admitting his own
unfitness for office. The novel thus works in the same direction as Aristophanes'
play. Certain weaknesses of the system are explored, but the system itself is left
unscathed. The Ameritan public is reassured that, in the last resort, its collective
wisdom could never have elected a man totally unfit for high responsibility.
One may note a similar tendency to compromise in Euripides. Here a story told
in connection with the production of Ixion, apparently one of the author's more
outrageous dramas, is of particular interest. Plutarch notes that "Euripides is said
to have replied to those who were abusing his Ixion as foul and impious, 'I did
not take him off the stage until he had been bound to the wheel.' " 6 This protest
is interesting because of its similarity to modern methods of censorship and
defences against them: I refer specifically to codes of censorship in the film
industry.
In Great Britain some sort of censorship is imposed on films by licensing boards,
whether at the national or the local level. In the United States such censorship
has been largely self-imposed, partly to forestall any attempt at federal interference, and partly out of a genuine, and politic, desire to comply with the wishes
of the public. In both countries, one of the principal results of this censorship
has been the famous dictum that "crime must not pay." A criminal must not be
shown enjoying the fruits of his wickedness; otherwise, the theory runs, the public
might be inspired to emulation. Therefore, whatever villainy a criminal may
indulge in for the greater part of the film, he must be imprisoned or otherwise
punished before the end. Scarface must die, in defiance of history; Alec Guiness
in The Lavender Hill Mob, a sympathetic criminal if ever there was one, must
be arrested.
It is evident that this sort of censorship is not only productive of artistic
absurdities but totally fails to achieve the desired object. The rules specify that
the criminal must be caught, and so he is, in the last few minutes of the film. But
often the moral ending is so arbitrarily applied as to be completely unconvincing
(like the conventional moral sentiments that so often close a Restoration comedy)
or occupies so little time in relation to the rest of the film that its impression is
negligible. In practical terms, the criminal is permitted to do what he likes for an
hour or so, as long as he is punished in the last two minutes; and the viewing
public is likely to remember the film's main events long after it has forgotten the
ending. Euripides' Ixion seems to have responded to the same pressures. This
play has been lost; but we find, again and again, that the author puts his more
offensive sentiments into the mouths of characters who are destined for a sticky
6 Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry, I9E.

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GREEK DRAMA AS EDUCATION

end. In Hecuba, Polymestor, King of Thrace, utters a statement which is, to say
the least, heretical:
Nothing's secure. A good name may be lost.
Things may go well today and not tomorrow.
The gods are always shuffling our affairs,
Creating chaos, so we worship them
Through fear of the unknown.7

This description of the nature and function of the gods is typically Euripidean
in its desire to shock and offend. It is no less typical in the defence it provides
against possible criticism. First, the lines are put into the mouth not of a Greek,
but of a barbarian; and barbarians, as any good Greek knows, are capable of
saying anything. Second, the speaker is ultimately punished. At the end of the
play Polymestor is blinded, and his sons are killed. Euripides has provided himself with a ready-made defence. If challenged for impiety he can point to the ending and reply, as in the case of Ixion, "But see who said it, and see what happened
to him." Crime-in this case, blasphemy-must not pay.
Hecuba contains another familiar type of Euripidean precaution. It occurs in
vv. 799-80 , which have regularly puzzled commentators. Baldly translated, the
lines read as follows:
But the gods are strong; and so is the law (nomnos)which controls them. For it is by law
(nom6) that we believe in the gods, and live our lives dividing right from wrong.

The meaning of the passage depends on the interpretation of the word nomos.
This may mean "principle," "law," or "custom," and it makes a considerable difference which we choose. If we take the first meaning, we have, "But the gods are
strong, and so is the principle which controls them-for by this principle we consider the gods to exist." This would postulate an organization of the universe, an
eternal and unchanging principle, to which even the gods are subject; and this
sentiment would hardly be offensive to any member of the audience. Alternatively nomos can have its more usual sense of "law," the body of man-made law
in general. Euripides would then be saying that it is law that controls the gods
in the sense that we worship those whom the state tells us to worship. This
would be rather less acceptable. The third possibility is even more sinister: if
we give nomos the equally familiar meaning of "custom" or "convention,"
Euripides would appear to be adhering to the sophistic theory that the gods are
a convenient fabrication, and can be unmade as readily as they were created; and
this interpretation would be, to many, very offensive indeed.
Editors have argued hotly over which interpretation is the correct one. I
suggest-for LIamold-fashioned enough to believe that a dramatist is only obscure
when he intends to be-that Euripides meant all three. He speaks with one voice
to the orthodox believers, and with another to the agnostics; and if he is attacked
for impiety, he can always claim that he has been misunderstood. Nomos, he
7 Euripides, Hecuba,
vv. 956-96o, trans. Peter Arnott, Euripides: Hecuba and Heracles (London,
1969).

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EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

can argue, does not mean "convention" at all, but "principle," and he is saying
something no more harmful than what Sophocles has said before him in Antigone.
Examples could be multiplied. I hope that I have said enough, however, to
suggest that the conventional view of the Greek teacher-dramatist, as seen through
the rose-colored spectacles so prettily tinted for us by Edith Hamilton and her
school, needs substantial modification; and that while the Athenian public clearly
recognized the function of the dramatist as teacher, it still reserved the right to
dictate the curriculum.

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Robert Brustein as Sir Anthony Absolute in The Rivals. Yale Repertory

Theatre. See Theatre in Review.

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