Citizens to Lords - Ellen Wood

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and war. Having fought at Marathon, he saw the democracy come into its own. With experience of the past and steeped in its traditions, he was nevertheless very much a part of the new climate, in which citizens were forced to confront new questions about the moral and political responsibility of ordinary humans who no longer looked upon themselves as simply playthings of the gods or obedient subjects of lords and kings.

      His classic trilogy, The Oresteia, appeared in 458 not long after the murder of the democratic leader Ephialtes, who had deprived the Areopagus of its traditional functions, apart from its role as a homicide court. It is likely that Aeschylus was, among other things, conveying the message that this old aristocratic institution, while it still had a role to play in the democracy, had been rightly displaced by more democratic institutions. The trilogy has as its central theme a confrontation between two conflicting conceptions of justice, in the form of a contest between the endless cycle of traditional blood vengeance and new principles of judgment by judicial procedure. The first represents Destiny, the fury of uncontrollable fate; the other, human responsibility – an opposition that may also represent the antithesis of old aristocratic principles of kinship and blood rivalry as against the judicial procedures of a democratic civic order.

      The murder of Agamemnon, king of Argos, by his wife, Clytemnestra, sets in train what could be an endless cycle of blood, as Orestes obeys an apparently natural law and avenges his father’s death by killing Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. The inexorable laws of revenge mean that Orestes, pursued by the Furies, must also become the victim of blood vengeance, and so the cycle will go on and on. There is also, in a confrontation between the Furies and the god Apollo, a clash between old principles of kinship – represented by the Furies – and Apollo’s commitment to patriarchal-aristocratic right, according to which the murder of a king is a crime in a way that matricide is not. The resolution comes in the last of the three plays with the establishment, on the instructions of Athena, of a court to hear the case of Orestes and end the matter once and for all. The jury will be manned not by gods or lords but by citizen jurors. Aeschylus still gives the gods a role, and fear will still play a part in enforcing the law – as the Furies become the more benign Eumenides. Nor does the tragedian repudiate the customs and traditions of the old Athens. But he is unambiguous about the importance of replacing the force and violence of the old order with new principles of reason, the rule of law and ‘Holy Persuasion’, the kind of order established by the polis and its civic principles – in particular, the democratic polis ruled by its citizens and not by kings or lords.

      The attribution to Aeschylus of another play, Prometheus Bound, has been put in question, although his authorship was generally accepted in antiquity. Yet, whether or not it can be read as expressing his views, it tells us much about the culture of Athenian democracy, if we compare its telling of the Promethean myth to other versions of the story. The myth in what is probably its more conventional form appears in Hesiod. Prometheus steals fire from Zeus as a gift to humanity. In his anger, Zeus threatens to make humanity pay for this gift. There follows the story of Pandora’s ‘box’, a storage jar containing the threatened ‘gift’ from Zeus. Contrary to the advice of her brother-in-law Prometheus, she opens the jar and releases every evil, ending a golden age when the fruits of the earth were enjoyed without effort, and humanity was free of labour, sorrow and disease, although hope remains trapped inside. Hesiod combines this with another story about stages in the decline of humanity, which was once equal to the gods but is now a race that works and grieves unceasingly. For Hesiod, this is, in the main, a story about the pains of daily life and work. In Aeschylus’s recounting of the Prometheus story, as in other variations on the same themes in Sophocles, and in the Sophist Protagoras, it becomes a hymn in praise of human arts and those who practise them.

      In this first and only surviving play of a trilogy, (pseudo?) Aeschylus’s Prometheus, being ruthlessly punished by Zeus for his pride, is presented as a benefactor to humanity. He has given them the various mental and manual skills that have made life possible and good, ending the condition of misery and confusion in which they had first been created. He also represents the love of freedom and justice, expressing contempt for Zeus’s autocracy and the servile humility of the god’s messenger, Hermes. As in The Oresteia, the tragedian is not here repudiating the gods or tradition, and there may be some right on both sides. But there is no mistaking the importance of the way he tells the Promethean story. Human arts, skills and crafts in his version betoken not the fall of humanity but, on the contrary, its greatest gift. The full political significance of this becomes evident not only when we contrast this view of the arts to the practices of Sparta, where the only ‘craft’ permitted to citizens was war, but also, as we shall see, if we compare it to Plato’s retelling of the myth, where labour is again presented as a symbol of decline, in the context of an argument designed to exclude practitioners of these ordinary human arts, the labouring classes, from the specialized ‘craft’ of politics.

      In Sophocles’s Antigone, as in Aeschylus’s plays, there are also two opposing moral principles in tragic confrontation, and again there is right on both sides. Eteocles and Polyneices, sons of the late ruler, Oedipus, and brothers of Antigone, have killed each other in battle. The new king of Thebes, Creon, has decreed that Eteocles, who fought on the side of his city, will be buried with full military honours, while Polyneices, who fought against the Thebans, will be left unburied. Antigone insists that she will bury her traitorous brother, in defiance of the ruler’s decree and in obedience to immortal unwritten laws.

      The play is sometimes represented as a clash between the individual conscience and the state, but it is more accurately described as an opposition between two conceptions of nomos, Antigone representing eternal unwritten laws, in the form of traditional, customary and religious obligations of kinship, and Creon speaking for the laws of a new political order. This is also a confrontation between two conflicting loyalties or forms of philia, a word inadequately conveyed by our notion of ‘friendship’ – a confrontation between, on the one hand, the ties of blood and personal friendship and, on the other, the public demands of the civic community, the polis, whose laws are supposed to be directed to the common good.

      It cannot be said that Sophocles comes down decisively on one side or the other. It is true that we have great sympathy for Antigone, and increasingly less for the stubborn Creon; yet both the antagonists, Antigone and Creon, display excessive and uncompromising pride, for which they both will suffer. The tragedian here too clearly respects ‘unwritten laws’, but he also stresses the importance of human law and the civic order. Yet, for all of Sophocles’s even-handedness, it becomes clear that Creon’s chief offence is not that he insists on the supremacy of civic law but rather that he violates the very principles of civic order by treating his own autocratic decrees as if they were law.

      In a dialogue with his son Haemon, Creon, having decreed Antigone’s punishment, maintains that her act of disobedience was wrong in itself. Haemon believes it would be wrong only if the act itself were also dishonourable, and, he says, the Theban people do not regard it so. ‘Since when,’ Creon objects, ‘do I take my orders from the people of Thebes?. . . I am king and responsible only to myself’ – in a manner reminiscent of Xerxes in Aeschylus’s Persians. ‘A one-man state?’ asks Haemon. ‘What kind of state is that?’ ‘Why, does not every state belong to its ruler?’ says the king, to which his son replies, ‘You’d be an excellent king – on a desert island.’

      In an ode that interrupts the action, the Chorus sings the praises of the human arts, and the rule of law which is the indispensable condition for their successful practice. We can deduce from this interlude that Sophocles regards the civic order and its laws as a great benefit to humankind, the source of its progress and strength. Yet he is also very alive to the dangers of allowing the polis to be the ultimate, absolute standard, discarding all tradition. Among the chief benefits of the civic order is the possibility of governing human interactions by moderation and persuasion. Perhaps the polis is, ideally, the place where different ethics can be reconciled. But one thing is clear: the possibility of resolution by discussion and persuasion, rather than by coercion, is greatest in a democracy, where one man’s judgment cannot prevail simply by means of superior power.

      There is also, in the ode, another indication of Sophocles’s commitment to Athenian democracy. Of all the wonders of the world, he writes,

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