Important Links
Online Play: Lysistrata Assignments: Lysistrata Classwork
Online Play: Iphigeneia at Aulis Assignments: Iphigeneia Classwork
Greek Tragedy
Presently there is a debate in education over the value of studying the humanities. What can you gain from the knowledge of history, literature or art from the distant past? Should schools and universities spend diminishing resources to teach students in the 21st century about events that happened thousands of years ago, or ask students to read the literature or philosophy of people who lived in that "dark backward and abysm of time" (Tempest 1.2) ? To what purpose?It is worth noting that the plays written and performed during the “Golden Age of Greek Drama” during the 5th century BCE, were concurrent with the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta, which would eventually bring down the entire Greek civilization. These wars shape the background of the plays, which very often deal with war and the suffering of soldiers and civilians. Aristophanes' anti-war play Lysistrata, where women wage a sex strike to stop the death, addresses this conflict. Colombian women's active take on the play resulted in a sex strike to stop gang violence, and in 2003, there was a global performance of Lysistrata to protest the US invasion of Iraq.
Worth reading also is Pericles' Funeral Oration in which Pericles claims Athens is so superior to Sparta that is cannot lose. They do. It is humbling for all who believe that the United States can never fail because of our morally superior government, and for those who would justify U.S. hegemony because of it.
In the linked excerpt from his newly-published book, The Theater of War, Bryan Doerries explains why plays such as Sophocles' Ajax, about a soldier suffering from PTSD, still resonate today. He also connects the plays to the end-of-life experiences of his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend. The message of these timeless works resonates importantly for all of us bound by our own mortality. Their characters model dignity and valor for us in our suffering. Another doctor describes why the play Philotetes resonates for veterans and anyone suffering from disfiguring wounds.
In the years before however, Johnson had been instrumental in escalating the war, believing that he needed to save Vietnam from the spread of communism and from falling under the power of the Soviet Union, a nuclear threat at the time to the United States. But this was a war that Americans increasingly did not support, and American hegemony was unwelcome in Vietnam.
The decision to wage war and sacrifice the lives of many is a brutal burden that our modern world has not erased. It is the decision that plagues Agamemnon in Euripides play, Iphigenia at Aulis, when Agamemnon must decide if he would sacrifice his own child in the war he is about to wage in Troy. His inconstancy of moral commitment is something that perhaps should not plague humankind, yet we are creatures who persevere in misguided truths. (See article on cognitive dissonance.) And, check out the following article about a recently discovered grave of a Greek warrior who died as Minoan culture yielded to Mycenaean, that of the heroes who fought at Troy, after which the Greek civilization would face a Dark Age. This is significant in considering Euripides's play Iphigeneia at Aulis, written during the Peloponnesian Wars when Greek culture was facing its final threat.
Indeed, when Robert Kennedy ached to understand how he could announce the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April of 1968, Jacqueline Onassis advised him to turn to Greek tragedy. He looked to Aeschylus' Agamemnon to find a character who, after sacrificing his child for political gain, returns home destroyed by grief at his own actions. (Link to speech.) Kennedy's words to a nation broken by racism included these powerful lines derived from this play: “In our sleep, pain
which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own
despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Robert Kennedy would himself be dead in less than two months. In June of this violent year, on his way to winning the Democratic primary for the presidential election, he would become another victim of political assassination.
Presented in Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy are eternal themes: In Oedipus Rex, it is of finding the courage to face trauma and the disease that infects us when we do our best to bury heinous truths. In Oedipus at Colonus it is the excoriating path to finding forgiveness and reconciliation for self and others. In the Antigone, it is the struggle to understand what is right when what you are threatened with death for your beliefs. In the following linked article, an oncologist explains how the play Oedipus at Colonus led her to understanding why it meant more for a terminally-ill patient to leave the hospital for a night than to say there, bound by dying. In another example, a performance of Oedipus Rex at the maximum-security prison Sing Sing proves transforming for inmates whose crimes weigh down their lives. See also: "Denial Makes the World Go Round" and "For Delphic Oracle, Fumes and Visions." Also worth viewing is 1995 film Dead Man Walking, relating to themes of overcoming trauma and unthinkable suffering.
Perhaps more than any other genre of literature, the brilliant tragedies from ancient Greece provide catharsis for the suffering from error caused by our inability to see clearly where our choices will lead. They provide the means of understanding that through human frailty, we inadvertently cause others harm, and must live beyond our own sins and find atonement. Aristotle, in his Poetica makes the claim that art has the moral obligation to edify society and help us all live better lives. As Edith Hamilton, a famous translator of ancient Greek wrote, the literature inspires us "to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world." These plays indeed provide ways to for us to heal the soul, and are as such perennially worth the effort to bring to students of all ages
