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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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You're got a brother, Christopher and Simon like a mamba,
got your legs, and some flower, that's my poison, but I'm far and not.
Last week on entitled opinions, our topic was Aristotle's
Poetics. We talked with Blair Hockspe about Aristotle's
definition of tragedy, his analysis of its component parts,
and his understanding of its purpose. Now that we know each other a little bit
better, why don't we get closer and take a tumble with the thing itself?
Theory is a fine and fancy place, but none I think do their embrace.
And that's what we intend to do today, embrace the thing itself.
I have with me in the studio a person who can take us through the locked doors of ancient Greek
theater and onto the stage where tragedies of the sort Aristotle theorizes about
were actually performed.
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Rush Rem is a professor of classics and drama here at Stanford, in addition to
which he is an actor and a play director.
Devoted listeners will remember the show he guest anchored last year about the band
Glass Wave, who could forget that show. You won't forget this one either.
After you've heard it, Rush Rem on Greek tragedy. Stay tuned.
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Looks so good. It looks so cool. You're punching.
Like Minerva's Owl, which flies at dusk, philosophy takes
wing at the end of the story, looking back on its plot
and making sense of it from the perspective of its outcome.
Aristotle reflects on the art of Greek tragedy and the twilight of its great
tradition after Euripides, Sophocles and Escalas had had their day in the sun.
And it was a day in the sun, quite literally, since Greek plays were performed
outdoors in full daylight, in wide open amphitheaters carved into hillsides or into
the slope of lofty mountains. With my guest today we'll go back to the practice of
Greek tragedy, not like belated philosophers trying to make sense of its
universal meaning, but like observers of its performance, observers interested above all in the power,
magic and rituals associated with Greek theater.
The further back one goes into the origins of tragedy,
the more important become its occasional aspects.
Theodar, in its earliest instantiations, was associated with occasion.
Indeed it was an occasion, communal, civic, and religious in nature.
I for one don't know how to think of Greek tragedy without invoking the word occasion,
even if that word does not have Greek roots.
Occation comes from the Latin "okazio" which means "opportunity", "the appropriate time",
and how much of tragedy is about occasions in this sense,
the appropriate or decisive timing of events.
Occasm in Latin is the past participle of "ocee-de-de" to fall down or to go down,
"ob" down away, "cad-de-de" to fall. Again,
how much of tragedy is about downfall of a hero, a house, a city?
But hold on, "ocee-de" also means "a falling together" or juncture of circumstance.
Here too, how much of tragedy is about the coincidence
or falling together of events? That's what Aristotle meant by mythos, finally,
a plot whose action unfolds according to laws of probability or necessity,
even though the events in question remain contingent.
In tragedy, contingents events fall together
as if on occasion to produce that sense of inevitability we associate with the tragic effect.
But I'm starting to theorize about tragedy and the mode of philosophers now,
abstractly and stripped of context, whereas what we would like to know is something about the real-life factors
that occasioned the performance of these plays in the ancient theaters of Greece,
and that's why we have Rush Rem with us today to take us back to the essentials in this matter.
Rush, welcome to the program.
Good to be here, Robert.
So I've spoken about Greek tragedies as occasions, Rush,
in what way were they social, festive, or religious occasions for the communities that actually organized and attended their performances?
In the fifth century, BC, tragedy was associated primarily with one city Athens.
We often talk about Greek tragedy, but we really mean Athenian tragedy.
All productions of Greek tragedy and Athens in the fifth century,
and onto much later, were associated with particular theatrical festivals,
particularly the festivals connected to the god Dionysus.
The most important one was the city Dionysia, which happened in the early,
well, actually the earliest spring, March probably an art calendar.
On our time, right here.
That's right. We're in tragic time.
And also there were other festivals in the winter, one called the Liné and January,
and then rural festivals or dean festivals, what we call local theater festivals in probably in December.
So in that sense, all tragic performances were occasioned by their place in the yearly calendar, if you want,
and also were associated then with religious festivals connected to the god Dionysus.
So that's the most important occasion.
The Chinese just didn't pop up any old time in anywhere, but they were part and parcel of what would,
if you were a Christian called a liturgy, seasonal coming around every year.
There's much more to say about the occasions of Greek tragedy.
In part not just the seasonal one, but also the political one.
These were festivals funded by, primarily funded by the city,
that does not make them state in the way we might think of state sponsored theater,
because the way that the city funded the festivals was to get a rich person to pay for it.
And you were sort of drafted to do so.
And if you didn't want to do so, there were ways in which they could find someone else to do it.
If they would be willing to trade your resources for that person.
So people basically took on the responsibility of being drafted to provide a chorus for different trigidians.
There were other ways in which you can talk about the occasional nature of Greek tragedy.
The spring was the time in which the assembly, which was a democratic gathering of the citizens,
would determine, think about the war planning for the summer, since Athens was frequently at war, particularly in the last half of the fifth century.
And so it means that the occasion of performing Greek tragedy might also be occasion in which the polis could think about what it might be planning to do, politically, militarily.
And this actually pops up not only in pre-performance festivals, but also in the plays themselves.
Do you mean like, get ready? We're in for some disaster and catastrophe and down the way.
Well, I would use the pass this nation, because I would take another example.
We know for example, the European, simply, and women was performed probably in 423.
And at the time of 423 BC, and at that time it appears that there were Spartan envoys and Athens trying to negotiate a treaty.
Perhaps a treaty to end the pelib, well, at least to take a break from the Pelibatism, or which ultimately happened in 421.
So you can see that there might be a way in which the play, the content of the plays would reflect on in an indirect, but nonetheless, real way on real events.
So I think this is another way to put this would be that the festival context of Greek tragedy is connected to a whole lot of other social, civic political contexts.
And by political, I think we need to revert to Aristotle's notion of the word in politics, where he says, human beings are creatures of the polis.
We often translate political animals. It really means sort of creatures of the polis.
They are creatures of their local political community, which Athens would have been.
So not only would the civic festivals connected to Dionysus in which tragedies were performed reflect on these religious connections, but also the political
occasions of the assembly meeting. They often reflected other performance elements of ancient Athens, for example, law courts, meetings and discussions and debates in the agaraw, even private symposia.
So there's, and I could add to that, the way in which marriage and funeral rituals pop up again and again in tragedy.
So one could almost talk about Athens as a sort of performance culture in which tragedy played a role much more integrated and interconnected with these other elements of civic political religious life and not simply an art practice separated from different from stuck in a kind of museum.
And that, as you pointed out in introduction, is reflected quite obviously in the fact that in Greek tragedy, the performances took place outdoors in the light of the sun, not only could you see what was going on on stage, but you could see the city behind the theater wasn't blocked off and perhaps more importantly, you could see each other, the way that the seating was arranged as certainly possible for most citizens be looking at other people as well as the place.
So in that sense, it's slightly de-essetto-sized from the way we think about theater or art now, which is kind of quietly reflected upon privately. And this would not have been the case in my view for Greek tragedy.
When you look at those amphitheaters in some of these Greek ancient Greek cities, they are enormous and they are really at the would be at the heart of the police in many ways.
And some of them, you know, seated up to 14,000, 20,000 people. So it was clearly not at all just a kind of side show in the realm of aesthetics, but something crucial to the, you know, the liturgical life of the police, as you were saying, were people obliged to attend these plays?
No, we don't know as much as well, the wonderful thing about the Greek world is we don't know as much as we'd like, which allows us to think a lot. We're not inundated with material in some sense.
With mere facts.
Yeah.
It does not appear that there was a requirement to attend the theater at all, but there was at some point and there's a debate about when this happened.
It could have been in the fish that you could have been in the four century, where there was a fee given by the city, two people to encourage them to be there.
And it's not clear when that happened and if it was necessary that they use the money to buy a ticket.
So you might think of it as a subsidy in some sense as the theater was deeply subsidized, as I already said by rich people by the city and perhaps by this little fee that went to citizens to go see the plays.
By the way, as far as we also know, it was not attendance at the, I'm talking about the city dynasty in Athens, was not limited to citizens by any means.
As far as I can gather, although there's a debate about this, but I think the evidence is on my side, that women could attend the theater, whether they did it's not, not certain it's quite clear slaves could attend.
Foreigners could attend.
And again, talking about the city dynasty in March, another aspect of that timing was that the sailing season would have opened.
And in the ancient world roads were awful.
You get this in Greek tragedy.
You walk on the road and you might get beaten by somebody who turns out to be a father.
That's the edifice.
So people tended to travel if they needed to go distances by sea, even though the Greeks had a healthy respect for the sea and didn't like it much.
They didn't sail for fun.
But the opening of the sailing season meant that people from abroad, like I mentioned, the Spartans could come to see these festivals and they became something of a showcase for the city.
And in my view, one of the most remarkable things about the showcase for the city was its ability to take on the flaws and faux pas and foibles and even the
deeper problems of that the city manifested.
Well, Rush, I'd like to ask you a little bit about the antecedents to the tragedies being performed at the heart of the police and having references to the city in which they're taking place.
And the actual historical political moment.
And while that certainly had to be the case when you're dealing with a city like Athens, there seems to be evidence indicating that the origins of tragedy, which is a matter of great speculation with great philologists like you and Nietzsche won among them.
Speculating about the non-cybic context of the earliest sort of precedence for tragedy, but it would be a rural, more kind of something that would, I would, in my mind, it's more like a village than a polity as such.
Do you think that there was something that the origins of tragedy come really from the countryside or from...
Yeah, I'm not of that school. Nietzsche was influenced by, well, many, many things, or knows in his own sort of originality.
But there was a kind of feeling in the 19th century, one can generalize, that somehow there was this primal element out in the country before it was tamed and shaped by the city.
And then there even read that in different ways. It was a magnification of something, or it was a repression of something, and you can go in different ways on that.
And of course we don't know. But this also featured into a notion about dynasty, act ritual and worship that was kind of wild and crazy, and then, of course, it had to be sat on.
But excuse me for interrupting in just a moment, but we do know as a fact that tragedy and Greek theatre in general is associated with the God Dionysus.
Yes, it is, absolutely. There's no doubt about that. The question is what was the nature of dynasty at worship?
And there is some good studies on that, and it's much more, was anything we know about it, is much more to do with organization, ritual than the normal sense of the word, and not wild or, or, or, or, or, gestic ecstasy that we're ultimately had to be tampered down by authority.
It's just an intriguing fact about dynasty ritual, and also the notion you get it in a rippity's backy, that Dionysus is a new God, but if you can read linear B, which goes back to the 1400s, 12th, you know, pre-Greek Greek Dionysus pops up.
So he's, he's an old God, in spite of his failure to kind of reach the pantheon.
But he is the God of intoxication.
He is in God of intoxication. He's the God of lots of things. He's a God of border crossings, if you want to call it that, and there's a man in the sense of kind of metaphysical borders, that kind of transgression.
But Dionysus, like worship, as far as I know, and going about this, we want, was much more organized and less chaotic and radically independent.
This is a kind of notion that the romantics like to have about the Greeks that they were.
Now, now I'm not trying to say that, go back to the notion of Vinkleman and all these people being the Greeks were very ordered and organized, but ritual was more organized than the Greek.
But ritual was more orderly than not, and this is manifest in many ways. But to go back to the question of the origins of tragedy more generally, I would find it more, and Aristotle does this as well, a more useful route is the performance as the oral tradition performing a Homer.
And this goes back at least to the probably the 8th century, maybe earlier we don't know, and then there was some sort of redaction and eventually these texts were written down, and they were performed.
And Athens, every four years, minimally at the Panethanaic Festival on the biggest, senior festival. And as you, they were performed in order, the rapsoads were sort of ac proto-actors, they played many parts, but only one actor.
And Aristotle and the puttics talks a fair bit about the way in which Epic and tragedy overlap, and then, of course, he goes on to say how tragedy distinguishes itself.
He also adds one other element in the origin question, which is the idea that there's also a choral element in the origins of Greek tragedy, which he associates with long narrative, well, some sort of narrative poems associated with Dionysus called Ditharram.
And at the festival, the city of Dainysia, in addition to the performances of tragedy and comedy in these March annual festival, there was also performances 20, 10 men's choruses and 10 boys choruses organized around political units called tribes,
and there were tribes that were basically political organizations like cities, if you want, or internal suburbs. And each of those mounted of both a man's and a boys chorus of a ditharram, so at the same time tragedy performed, ditharams were performed.
What is the Ditharram?
Well, it's hard to know there's some late ditharram, and I'm not much of an expert on it, but it's some kind of narrative poem in which Dionysus may appear somehow.
And it's associated with satters?
Well, no, Ditharams aren't. They are associated with large choruses of 50 in Greek tragedy. You seem to have a chorus of 12 and then maybe 15.
And as I recollect, Ditharams are not masked, whereas Greek tragedy is masked. We have to figure out how did you get masks into this. And there's some associations, perhaps with Dionysia, a worship that suggests that.
But anyway, the origin question is a complicated one. I don't think Nietzsche and people like Fraser and the Cambridge anthropologist got it quite right, but they were very, very interested in rural, rural, ritual somehow getting tamed and corrupted and pulled into the city.
And I mean, who knows it could be true. But I'm more intrigued by the complex narrative that you get in tragedy, the extraordinary language, which seems to be far removed from any notion of, like, let's go kill a goat and dance around.
Yeah, it's true. And we want to speak about some of the formal elements of tragedy. But there is this undeniable fact that much of tragedy is about suffering.
Oh, absolutely.
And about pathos. And that suffering seems to entail, often, in the most moving versions of it, a loss of control, a downfall of some sort, some kind of catastrophic.
Disruption in the everyday order of things.
So.
Well, that's certainly true. And I mean, it's absolutely true. And that would be the heart of what most of us are drawn to in tragedy.
East Galiss has a great phrase, two little words, thrown together that are remarkable, the patho mouthos, which means by suffering, learning, or we generally translate, we learn by suffering.
We learn by mathematics because you know, that's the root of mathematics.
Well, no, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not.
So we, we mathematicize suffering would be better way to put it.
Now, one could go to town with this, and I would love to, at least a little bit of town.
It's, it's not a simple, more or less, that we have to suffer to get something.
It's deeper than that, because it's, in this little passage, it's embedded in a longer, uh, excreters by the course in East Galiss like I'm not, trying to figure out to whom they should address their prayers.
And they decide on something called Zeus, whatever he is, whatever he is, however, we should identify this, this God, this force so that we don't miss anything so that he, he, or it will listen.
And it'll go on to say we learn by suffering, and then against, against our will comes wisdom.
Just lay, lay, lay around that one for a while, against our will comes wisdom, the grace of God by force.
So there's something about learning by suffering that is built into the system.
It's not a moral, does it a rata, it is inescapable.
Um, and that's the, I guess the tragic element.
It's not just we ought to learn by suffering, whether we like it or not, whether we choose it or not, that will happen.
And that's, though, that's what, in a sense, the world of tragedy, at least a good bit of the world that tragedy explores.
Would it be trivializing it to say that none of us, necessarily enjoys being thrown out of our everyday, let's say stoop or of believing that everything's going to turn out okay, but, and that we have to be reminded, not only of suffering, but of, you know, death and violence and all the things that threaten the police with, you know, destruction.
And, and that therefore, despite ourselves, we need to recall.
Yes, I, I think that that's absolutely true and particularly true now, in some sense, truer, much truer now than then.
In a way, I would almost move towards a kind of realistic explanation of the way, why the Greeks dealt with this, because if, you know, they didn't, people died at home, they were born.
They were born at home.
There was death and dying and birth and funerals all around your daily life.
The military conflicts and Greece were person to person, hand to hand.
People slipped in the blood.
It was so different from the world we live in, in which we are, we are politically and ideologically encouraged to distance ourself from certain kinds of suffering.
You know, we're sending drones and pack, that's fine.
Right.
It's all, it's all there where somebody is playing a video game and someone, 10,000 miles away is nine kids are, you know, gathering firewood blown away.
Oh, well, that's too bad.
On and on and on, like a go on and have in fact, and print gone on about this subject.
But for the Greeks, I'd say, I don't, I mean, my view is that they probably didn't need so much reminding.
That's what tragedy can do for us.
As they saw reflected in a more cosmic scale, their own kinds of, at least something of their own kinds of experience.
So it was more an elevation and a generalization of their own lives to a larger scale than it was.
You know, hey guys, you got to remember that life's really, you know, can be quite awful.
And one other thing I'd say, and if you like, I can be the passage from Adam as a colonist about this.
It's, it's perhaps be among the most negative kinds of, if you want to use contemporary language, negative kinds of views of what life is like.
And if you'd like, I can just read that.
So this is one of the choruses in Adam as a colonist, which was basically his last play.
Whoever wants a greater share of life, not keeping to a moderate portion, has its skewed.
Not to be born wins the prize by all accounts.
But once you come into being to go back from where you came as fast as possible, that comes second.
When you are young, empty-headed and easy with life, what painful blows lie ahead, what crushing grief won't find you, murder, civil strife, discord, war, envy.
And last place, that goes to damnable old age, powerless, friendless, alone, where evils of every shape are your only neighbors.
Take that.
Yeah, I take that.
And that is Greek pessimism that, again, I don't want to insist too much on Nietzsche's interpretation, although I know that it's, I've been imbued by it.
So I can't get away from it.
But this pessimism regarding the fact that it would be the best of all would be not to have been born.
And once you have to be born, then to get back to wherever it was you came from as quickly as possible, that he understood tragedy as, as something that the Greeks
managed to affirm life in the face of this realization of the horror.
Absolutely.
And again, the trouble with any kind of quotation is that it's one part of a play.
It's not the conclusion.
And this, I just read it as an example of how bleak and in some sense, I have to say truthful.
I mean, talked to, I mean, sometimes old ages great for people if they're lucky, but, you know, for a whole lot of people, it's not like that.
And there's a whole lot of people that don't have the privileges, you know, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, you can, you know, we need to expand our horizon, but what the world is really like, especially in a place like Stanford.
But this is embedded in a, in a play about a man who has persevered.
Adipus persevered so far by the end of the play of curses, his sons.
And to be then in some extraordinary fashion, heroized in Athens.
So the, this is not a prescription of doom and choosing doom because you're thrown into the world.
And there's your, the great occasion, right?
You're thrown into the world without knowing who you are.
You'd without choosing to be thrown into the world.
And the Greeks, that, that meant something.
It meant already no matter what you thought you knew about the world.
You didn't know at all.
And no matter how much power you may have, you'll never get away from all sorts of things that you cannot control.
And spite of what you think, and this in my mind is an extraordinarily important lesson for those of us living in this country now, where we think we can pretty much do anything.
I mean, we have limits, but they're always economic limits and they always have to do with making sure that rich people have a lot of money.
But, but they're actually are much deeper limits and we can think about all the ways in which we don't think about that.
Oh, for sure, we live in a society in which tragedy is almost antithetical to the self understanding of our, of ourselves as a society as well as individuals.
And of course, that doesn't mean that the suffering that tragedies are traditionally about doesn't occur in abundance, even super abundance in our midst.
It's just that we are, our nation has somehow was born under a different kind of paradigm of the pursuit of happening, the kind of right to the pursuit of happiness, which is, I would imagine an ancient Greek would not know what to make of it.
They would be somewhat dazzled by the thought. Again, that doesn't mean that pessimism rules, as you pointed out in each extraordinary insight picking in the birth of tragedy, is that to paraphrase them that the myth is that we as individuals somehow matter.
And of course, that's an absolutely American myth, right? I might have the right to this and that. And nobody gets to get out of my way, I should be able to do anything I want.
It's all up to me, me, mama. And of course, the Greeks who lived in a polis political community, real community, familial community, economic community, in the old sense of working the household would not have known what to do with that.
But Nietzsche gets it that, "Individuation is the myth, but there is a kind of life force underneath this groundswell of being he calls it wonderful, wonderful, evocative phrases that tragedy celebrates.
And this just keeps going." And in some sense, it's almost associated with natural forces. And this connects with the Greek, you get it in Greek tragedy all the time.
It's both, I guess, a curse and our only blessing that we are intergenerational, that we procreate, that life goes on, and that can carry back things we didn't control, but it also projects into the future.
So tragedy is always projecting out of the past and into the future, but it refuses, I think the phrase in one of my books, the priority of the past.
I mean, obviously past is prior, but we don't think about it as also in some sense being the thing that tells us where we're going, from which we cannot escape.
And in the United States, as you will know, I mean, we have a cult of forgetting the past, again and again and again.
In fact, we forget it every week, and that's encouraged. The Greeks were, and Greek mythology clearly was all about holding on to some ways in which tradition keeps working through.
It could be a family curse, it could be a story that keeps returning. It could be an archetype of return, like, you know, the no story of the heroes after the children work,
but any number of things. But these things keep moving through their contemporary meditations and reflections on their own lives.
I wanted to ask you about that precisely, because so many Greek tragedies seem to concern themselves with the families, or family dramas. If not the downfall of families, then, you know, it's the killing of the father and or the, you know, the, the, the orist I am about the whole Agamemnon thing.
And family is the institution of where past, present and future are interconnected through the chain of generations, obviously. And so, if there is going to be some kind of future to the past, you locate it oftentimes in the generations.
And it's extraordinary how much of the tragedy is, is wedded to the, the institutional family doing.
Yes, absolutely. But I would take come to, to pretty clear examples of say familial curses. One would be the House of Atrius and the orist I and the other would be the edipist story.
So what's an extraordinary in the orist I as you well know is that it moves away from the familial curse.
And I mean, there's a, when, when Agamemnon returns from Troy, the course welcome him and they know something's up and we sort of know something's up if we are attentive to quite a message language if not her.
Clarity. They say king who ravaged Troy offspring of Atrius. How should I welcome with where to deserve? Okay, so King who ravaged Troy clearly something Agamemnon did.
So you have right there the conjunction of if you will inherited fate.
Osping of Atrius and choice. King who ravaged Troy. That is a king of a city who ravaged another city. Okay.
At the end of the orist I, the, the arrest is just tried and he's acquitted and you would think then that would be only quitted with, you know, even boats and also to complications.
So not, not acquitted in a, in a clear and happy way but acquitted in a, we can, can't get any closer to not deciding how to end this thing.
And then the rest of the, of the humanities is about converting the furries into forces of good that will make their home in Athens and substantiate in the literal sense.
The court of the Ariabagos, which is the first homicide court homicide court. So you've got a movement from the tragic curse of the house of Atrius and the choices that individuals made Agamemnon to, to,
I can remember to, to, to, to, to, to destroy and sacredize his own daughter,
arrest these two killers on mother and all and on to, that family amethis,
in some sense then transformed and embedded in the city as the foundation of
a civic institution; trial, uh, acquittal, things like that, where the
gods now drop out, and humans take over. Okay. That's, I think,
a pretty clear example of the way family bleeds into, feeds into,
moves up into the foundations of the city.
Adipis, uh, Adipis Tarantis, which we all know, you know,
Adipis finds out that he's cursed to kill his father and marry his mother and
does everything he can to avoid that, ends up inadvertently doing it.
But that play is set in the context of a plague, and Adipis is a
Tarantis, he's the leader of a city,
Tarantin that sense that doesn't mean the same thing as our word
tyrant means he became, became the power oddly. Um, okay. So whatever
else Adipis does in that play, he also finds the person that causes the plague
of thieves, and for the second time he frees the city of plague. So even the
familial curse is somehow linked to larger political or
police health. And that there are many larger things you can say about that
in terms of the function of tragedy, uh, uh, developed in the fissendren
and so forth. But I would just say that you're absolutely right. Family is essential
and never forgotten, but it frequently feeds into a much larger, um, nexus.
What's beautiful about the orastia in my reading of it is the way it ends with a
kind of exaltation, or let's say glorification of the democratic institutions of
Athens, the city, which through the tribunal and the power to acquit and to judge,
can actually put an end to a kind of endless reciprocal violence that comes from,
you know, the curse of the family. And, um, so family, as you were suggesting,
gets subsumed under a larger, let's say expansive definition of the family of
the city as a, as a whole. So, and then the gods can kind of take, and the
furies can also be domesticated and brought into an allegiance with them.
Right. But of course that is a particularly edifying ending, whereas there are
other tragedies I'm thinking of Antigonee, where there is an incommensor,
or let's say an ear, reconcile ability between the law of the orchos of the
household, let's say the, the more ancient law of the, of burial of kin, that
Antigonee upholds versus Creon, who is the, you know, the head of the city, and the
law of the police and the law of the family are in a kind of tragic conflict that
cannot end with this kind of resolution that you have in the lower side.
That's absolutely true. Um, I would say that Creon, who is a kind of, in my view
anyway, manifests increasing over the course of the play, the symptoms of a
state's tyrant, and there were things like you see that in other great tragedies.
Um, increasingly uses the notion of family to apply to the city in the way that
sometimes right when political states often do, you know, we're, supporters of
the family, I, you have to do things our way because we know what is right,
and those sorts of things. So, assumption of the metaphor family to the
larger, the folk, you know, and you, we don't need to go into many different
ways in which that's worked at historically and still is used on by, by political
forces. But intriguing about that play is that Creon devalues the, the local
family. He, he rejects intelligent and decent and humane advice from his own
son. After, after all, Antigonee is his niece. The consequences of it are that
Creon loses his own family, his son commits suicide, sides if you will, with
Antigonee breaks up the familial, the legion's father for someone he thinks is
acting morally and civically correctly, and also Creon's wife commits suicide.
So, what happens is that, um, Creon loses if you will, his family by virtue of
insisting without inclusion, the notion of family or stuff on it,
sitting, he knows what the family really means. And acts, accordingly, and acts
in a, in a fashion that is extremely undemocratic. I mean, he's an absolute
autocrat. He doesn't listen to good citizens giving him a good advice and so
forth. So even there, although it would, it's often set up as a tragedy about
oh, it's, um, family versus the state and this, and the state has to
subsume the family and eat it up. And that's the, in fact, that doesn't work
out like that. And by the end of the play, the person who's really destroyed
and is clearly not on the side of the gods at all is Creon. And Antigonee,
although she's dead and clearly died at least as far as I can tell if you care
about these things, and some kind of despair she hangs herself in a cave, she is in
some sense of indicated by the play. And Creon is completely, whatever the
opposite of indicated is, de-vindicated, destroyed by, um, by his own actions. And
yet this, it is built exactly as you say around the issue of family and state, but
your family and state's worked on it in a different, in a different calculus.
Well, would you say that Creon deserved his fate and that therefore the, the
outcome of that play is one where the good guys win and the bad guys pay the
price for it? Because if that's the case, then it's not the most sublime kind of
tragedy as a way I was taught that tragedy is not about right against wrong, it's
about right against right. And two different concepts of what is the right.
And, and, yeah, this is a great question. Um, and I'm probably not articulate
enough to get, to get at the best answer to it. I am not convinced that, that the
sublimity of tragedy lies in the notion that it's right versus right. This is a
gale, hale, and Hegel has this idea that is a beautiful idea. It's wonderful.
Great reading of history. I mean, you just, you have to love it even if it's not
right. Um, that's what makes something tragic is that their partial rights and
you're moving towards some ultimate in his ovable one. Um, and this is the
movement of history and it's terrific. I don't believe it's a very adequate
reading of Antigone. Um, now at the end of the play, nobody wins. And
Tiganie's dad, Hyman's dad, he read his he's dead and Crayon's destroyed and
Thebes is messed up. So it doesn't look like anybody won this one. But what you saw
was that someone who thought Crayon because he had political power that he
could act in some sense without limits. The Greek word for that would be
something hubris. Crayon does also divine as to the world and everyone says so
Tereseus says so ultimately, Tereseus comes in speaking for the gods and says, you
knew you did something you cannot do. You mixed up the living in the dead. This is
don't do that. That gods don't like that. They're not something like it's more,
they don't like it because Hades doesn't get its right and Zeus doesn't, you
know, this is all wrong. This is wrong in so many levels. Who do you think you
are? Well, I'm the tyrant and I know and I, you know, and also I know how the
gods aren't like that. God doesn't work like that. I know the gods work that
God's on interest and those sorts of things. You know, he's very, very in some sense
modern and he has this trans political standard. The trouble with this
trans political standard is zero to do with democracy. Everything to do with autocracy.
So in some sense, yes, Crayon is gets what he deserves, but Crayon like many
characters, even Antigone doesn't know or doesn't have full knowledge of the
consequences of their own actions. So all of them, Heimon doesn't presumably,
when he comes to speak his father, one to die. He wants to convince his father
that his father's wrong and he ought to actually listen and he ought to bend and
you know, be a better leader and all sort of thing. And he ends up, you know,
committing suicide, you know, when the arms of the dead Antigone. So I don't think,
I don't think Greek tragedy avoids some kinds of moral judgments about
characters or ethical choices. In fact, choice is so essential in tragedy,
but it is certainly as what is it, um, George Steiner said long, long time ago in
that's a tragedy. I mean, it's not the kind of, it's not raising the kind of
issues that could be solved by better divorce laws. Right. I mean, if only
Clyde and Mr. Lagom and we ought to do it, that's not it. So there is a
level in which, you know, there is no choice. There is. There certainly is. But
there also, that does not obviate good and bad decisions taken along the
way. And I mean, I think that's built into many, many, many plays and you see
it again and again. And do you think that notion, uh, Aristoty, the Aristotle
introduces in the poetics about how much Tia, which we discussed last week with
our guest that that it has to do with making a wrong choice.
Well, I think how Martia in Aristotle's sense is more functional and less moral
and that he means, and I think you discussed it with your guest last time.
It's a kind of, um, what you call archery term. It means when you shoot at a
target and you miss the, you miss the bullseye. But crayon misses it.
Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. But, but, but, but, but, but,
for, for Aristotle, I think he means something like an ignorance of something.
For example, edipus doesn't know. I mean, it's a simple question. Realists wonder
why doesn't he, but that's not the world of the play. He doesn't know who he is.
It's, it's he, he does his best to know who he is and he does his best to, to,
you know, to act on what he knows. Like a good leader and a good, perhaps human
being ought to do a good Greek ought to do. You, you try to, you know, know what
you can know. So he does his best, but he doesn't know who he is as a result.
He runs into all of these problems and the, and the horrific ones. Um, but it
has nothing to do with his intention. And I don't think it has anything to do
with his pride. Some people like to read it as study of study and pride. It
doesn't seem to mean you can do that if you want, but it seems to me much
more about, okay, he just doesn't, and that's a kind of metaphor for kind of
great classic metaphor. Reason was so popular that play in the, in the 20th
century and part. Also Freud has something to do with it. But that you, you, you do
the best with what you know. And, and that can not necessarily take you to it. It
may in the plague and the age of just horrific, but it may also, you may
also discover that your own cursed roots and you have to, in some sense, live
with it to go back to Greek pessimism. My reading about it as, uh, at a
pesteranis is somewhat heroic. That is in spite of, or in the face of this, he
does, many people have said, you know, the Greek, the Greek mask has a mouth
open and eyes open. And you always have to look at it. You can't turn your back
and you can agree that you know what would hear you or see you. So you're always
facing it. You, in a sense, meet your fate. You don't sort of just run into it. You
meet it or you, you run into it and then you meet it. And
edipus meets it. And he really meets it. And he blinds himself and the
plague goes on from the turn of 50 lines. So it's not about edipus finding out
who he is is about what edipus does after he finds out who he is. And it's
quite remarkable really. And he reasserts his, I mean, he reasserts himself,
tries to take care of his kids. He does all these amazing, amazing things. So
even in the in the face of not knowing who you are and running into what that
what horror that can mean, there's still some call to the human to address it
and not run away from it. And to become the humanity that you are and
that means the earlier you said about despite our will, we achieve wisdom
and the wisdom in that case is I understand that I'm immortal and being
immortal means that I'm not a God and I'm not necessarily in control of the
fate that befalls me, although I can in so far as I am human, come out to meet it
face on
and to take and to take responsibility for which is intriguing. I mean,
edipus could say in an edipus fantasy doesn't and edipus colonialism kind of does.
It's kind of an interesting change at the end of software his life. One
could probably spend a lot of time on. But edipus never says, well gosh, I didn't mean to do it.
I didn't know. He says, I look what I did. In imagine Americans taking on that kind
of such a responsibility. Well, wouldn't our fault we didn't know? We're good into all the
time we just spread havoc across the globe and well, well, we do, we do know.
Blah blah blah. This will say hello, read some great tragedies back off.
No, if there were any tragic pathos in some of our leaders after we acted in ignorance
and discovered what kind of outcomes we brought about through our actions, the horror of it would
have caused some of them to blind themselves if they were had that edipus spirit. Absolutely
right. Yes. Rather than that, they find excuse to get a place at the Hoover.
So I'm intrigued by the this motif that we've touched on between the non-priority of the past
and the way in which the family is an institution that obviously has a past and it has a future
and the present is the generation that's trying to keep them together. And the notion of the
adivistic elements that you can have in certain places, maybe it's too strong of word to apply to
antigonies stubborn insistence on fulfilling the mandates of the law of the orchos of the household
against the law of the city. But nevertheless, we know that there are different
temper, how should I call it, kind of heterochronous elements in Greek tragedies, namely elements that
belong to different ages or different moments of the past. So some are very archaic and some are
modern. Yes. So the furies, for example, are among the most ancient goddesses and they belong to it
a time of where the law of sheer vengeance without private vengeance. But of course society has moved beyond
that at the time that escolises writing the orchos and the institutions are trying to get beyond
an adivistic kind of law of vengeance. And you have a conflict between a present and an
kind of adivistic past. At the same time, I would like to ask you if you think that the heterochronous
multiplicity of different times is also in the form of Greek tragedies in the sense that is it
is it true that the choruses, for example, might be older in form and so far as they use
meters and poetic forms that are much more ancient than, let's say, the speech of the actors,
which some were probably not sung, at least not all of the things were sung. So that the actors
would represent something that would be more recent. Yeah, the question is a very good one. I'm not sure,
let me see if I can unpack some of it. A Greek lyric in tragedy is extremely complicated and
remarkable because Greek is an inflected language. You can find medical patterns and match them
in a way that is impossible in English because the English word order just prohibits it. You
have a nonsensical sentence to be able to match it. And much of Greek lyric is written in what's called
"response" and that is you have a section that of so many lines that is repeated matrically exactly
and then you say, say, A, a prime and then you have B, B prime and then maybe C or something like that.
And there are different patterns. And there are forms in Greek lyric that are Doric, which is
Greek from the Peloponnese primarily. And most of the attic in the rhetoric in the speeches is what's
called ionic. So there are some differences. Whether that reflects age is hard to know,
I don't know. I have to say that. But I do take the general point, absolutely, that tragedy is a
multiplicity of, contains a multiplicity of temporality. Just as it contains a multiplicity of forms,
lyric and rhetoric ring the two primary different ones. And we don't have anything like that.
From Markable merging of rhetoric or speeches, I guess you could call them
written in "I Am a Trimiter." It doesn't matter. It's in a verse, but it's not a song.
And then full lyric sung by 12 or 15 chorus members who also danced at the same time,
of course, means dancing to dance to the Greek phrase to direct a play was to do the dasculine
chord on the teacher chorus. That would be the direct to play. So the courses were primary in that
sense. But so there's a multiplicity operating already that suggests that some of the multiplices
in the performance culture from all these different elements find their way happily in the Greek
tragedy. A kind of bastard art in the sense, not sublime and pure, but a combination of all sorts
of things. But in terms of temporality, I'm not sure that the formal elements are where you would go
to find it most clearly, although maybe from better linguists it would be. But for me,
it would be the way in which time is manifest in the plays. We already pointed out this sort of
intergenerational time, the number of ways in which the metaphor of giving birth operates in
tragedy is extraordinary. And it's not just a figure speech. I think it suggests this, the past
generating the present and then generating some kind of future. On top of that kind of time,
you have what one might call seasonal time, cyclical time, the time I mentioned in the festivals,
but also in the way that they measure time. They'll talk about well when the dipper moved around
and was here. You realize that the way the opening of Agamemnon that watch me is on the roof,
looking at the, I know about the year because in how the stars move. And against that kind of time,
I'm going to talk about the arrival of a beacon, a very specific time, what we call kyros,
particular moment in time, or the intervention of specificity into the temporal landscape, if you want.
And there are other ways you can talk about, it's a kind of a pockled time, the time of a person's life.
Anyway, I mean, you can maybe have a kind of you're in fourfold of times operating here. And you see
them and their intersection is really important because Greeks were aware of time as almost an agent.
In East Los Alamos, the place time is doing something, time reveals things. And this is something to do
back to our notion of forgetting, our notion of Americans forgetting the past. For the Greeks,
for example, judgment or punishment might not hit you, it might hit your kids or your grandkids,
it tends to familial curse, right? Now, if we think about say we're in the nuclear weapons and nuclear,
we're also stuff, nuclear waste, to half life of 10,000 years, which we're going to store somewhere,
you know, how old are we, 250 years, I mean, what is this? It's absurdity and the absolute
incredible insanity. But we just think, well, well, well, time, you know, it's all okay, but
the Greeks think, no, no, no, time, it might not get you young man, but it might get your great,
grandkids. Now, of course, we don't care about them, but we pretend we care about them. And the
Greeks seem to have that notion. Hence that again, back the priority of the past moving through
means a kind of moral relationship to the world. It's not so much balance as equanimity,
but as a recognition of limit. And so our understanding of time and tragedy is the beginning
of a way to understanding our own limit. And of course, it's something that does not sell,
you know, a target. So we don't want to do that. We can buy, we can just keep buying, we can buy a way
out of time.
And what you say raises an interesting issue for, in the context of a discussion of tragedy,
at least for me, which is the issue of consequence, because it's true that if you live in a
mindset where your action, the consequences of your action might hit your great, great,
grandchildren. And you, you pay lip service to, you know, the future, but basically,
as a society, we could not care less about three generations away from that.
Nevertheless, our actions all have consequences that are long-term, especially with the enhanced
technology at our disposal. And so much of the plays, the actual plays of tragedy have to do,
as I see it working out the consequences of certain, either actions that take place on the stage,
or actions that had taken place some time in the, in the, in the deep past, but that the
consequence, shallity of causation or agency is something that I think Aristotle was very
sensitive to when he was speaking about inevitability or probability, you know, that there's a,
a law of consequence, and to take cognizance of the fact that one's actions have consequences,
even if they're unintended, especially maybe if they're unintended, that this becomes a, a moral
awareness. No, absolutely. I mean, absolutely. I think in one way, this is one of the attractions
of the Greeks to their mythological tradition. I mean, just think about it. I mean, sometimes it's
still operates for those of us who care about this sort of thing that there are these old stories,
it's meant quite clear that, you know, and if this wasn't invented the week before,
the theme and play started, you know, popping up. The Trojan War goes back in, at least in,
in their historical memory and their cultural memory hundreds of years, minimally.
So that they already saw a tie between old tales and their own lives. Do you know what I mean?
I don't think this was forced. I think this was a natural understanding of the way things work. So
the archetypal story still operate in the same way that past actions have consequences in the
present or in the future. And I completely agree with you that one of the things that tragedy keep
showing is the consequences of actions which are frequently taken either in ignorance or sometimes
at the best intentions or out of this on the passions of the spur of the moment. But the audience
is able in ways that the characters sometimes can't see how those consequences play out. And then
are asked in this civic arena, if you want, civic religious, what everyone called it,
there's arena of the theater to, I would imagine, reflect on how this thing actually is going to
play out in their own lives, in their own city. And again, remember that there are participants,
I mean, not all of them. I mean, women didn't have, you know, political rights and didn't get them in
this country until the last century and not that long ago. But it's not that it was a radical
democracy in the total sense, but it was a much more radical democracy than anything we've come
close to because people took votes and changed things, you know, day in and day out. And they did it.
So these issues in some sense had purchased more directly, I would think, on the manifestations of
action that the Greeks could, they, they, Indians could take part in. So I agree with you at consequences
mean something and they don't mean something in abstract. I mean something in what you're going to do.
There's a great example of this is in some sense an easy one, too easy. But in European
supplement women, I'm probably, I mentioned earlier, there's very much interested in political
decision making. It's a very political play in obvious sense of theses calls on. There's a
question should, should he go to war and help some people recover their corpses and ask the old
crayon and thieves is allowing the archive women to bury their corpses of their sons. And
theses manages to raise an army and liberate the corpses. And then there's this big discussion of
well, they could go and sack thebes and these, he says, no, I, I'm, I only came to do this one thing.
I'm remarkable restraint given the, you know, joys of war. And the messenger says that's the
kind of leader to choose. Now, I think he's not saying vote for, you know, so and so. But rather,
here we have a mythological example of something horse has been twisted by your
repures and manipulated a little bit. But there it is. And we have kind of paradigm and
archetype and Greeks like that sort of thing, mythical archetypes, paradigms, ways that one might
model their own actions. Here it is. Now Athenians, what will you do?
Well, a rather embarrassing question then for you Russia, which is if Greek tragedy contains this
kind of wisdom about the consequences of actions and the importance of decisions and the gravity
with which one should take, make certain choices. Why is there history, there actual history, not,
not wiser, not wiser because they were, as you said at the beginning of the show, they were
constantly at war. They screwed things up as much as anyone else did. And in the final analysis,
did they just not learn the lessons? Or is there another order of fate, which emerges to say that,
well, no matter how hard we try, we're always going to screw it up anyway because we're somehow
fallible and we're kind of guilty. There's an intrinsic guilt and we're never going to.
That's a real good question. I think that probably is going to say more about the critic and
readers than it is about the form because, you know, question of how you want to take it. I believe
that the tragedy keeps playing between, I've said it before, choice and fate that there are
elements that you can't have no control over and there elements you do. In time and again, you see
characters, sometimes they're caught in a situation in which their choices are so limited that
it's very hard. I mean, Aresti says before killing his mother, he has this crisis and he says,
"Teetra, what shall I do? Vernal calls it the tragic question. I love it. What shall I do? Drama,
what shall I choose to do?" So it's all about choice and Pillity says, I'm speaking for a
pollo, do what the gods tell you to do. So he kills his mother and then of course he suffers
horrifically killing his mother. He finally vindicate, but it's not like he has a very good time with
it and he's not happy about doing that. So it's really my mangano and horrible thing. So
here's a, if you wanted to humanize it, horrific circumstance in which the world has thrown
Aresti's. As I say at some point, Aresti doesn't choose to be Aresti's, but once he's thrown
into being Aresti's and then Aresti's being Institute's, so he begins to choose things. So I don't
think that in my reading of tragedy, it's fate dominates. That's just my reading of it.
Clearly it's very much more prominent and I think it's a useful imperative to correct our own
notions of self-empowerment. And I don't think that you would present this to an audience
given all of these democratically democratic notions of voting. And not just voting, but you could
just be picked by lottery to serve on a very important government function. I mean, in some
a sense, the high end of this would be that our society is only as strong as its weakest link.
I.e. we really have to believe in something like public education for Americans, right?
It matters. So I think that it's a kind of education in a way, in my mind with some of the political
reading of tragedy and education towards democratic practice, although done in a mythical and archetypal way,
not in a highly specific and individualized historical moment way. Whether that human race is doomed
or not, you know, and whether that's what the message of Greek tragedy is, I rather think like
edifice, what if that was the message you got? You went to Delphine and said, "Oh, the human race is
doomed." And what are you supposed to do with that information? You're supposed to go on have a party,
you're supposed to help it to its doom? Presumably as a human being you're supposed to fight against it.
That's what edifice does. He says, "Well, I am not going to then go off and run and find somebody
looks like my father and kill him. In my mother, I'm going to run away from that, but run
towards the future and do my best to avoid it." And, you know, and I think that's the reasonable
position for anyone to take. Well, that's a beautiful rush. And now that we've come to the end of our
show, I understand much more profound way, what Saaft meant to all things when he said that we are
condemned to freedom, we're condemned to our freedom. So that seems to be the kind of profound message
in a certain way of what we've just heard you talking about. I'd like to remind our listeners,
we've been speaking with Professor Rush Rem from the Department of Classics and Stanford here on
entitled opinions. Thank you, Rush, for coming on. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. We'll
be with you next week. Take care, Rush. Thank you, Robert. Bye bye. Bye.
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