Undated. Began transcribing June 21, 2024.
The Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind, from Odysseus to Socrates, Keld Zeruneith, c. 2007.
480 BC: Athens power -- defeats the Persians at Salamis, naval battle; followed the land battle at Marathon, a year earlier.
Political dominance / cultural flowering for next 50 years.
with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, then the plague that took Pericles.
Pericles; dominant politician of the age, guarantor of stability and growth.
From then on, crisis followed crisis.
Pericles: 495 - 429 BC
Fifth century Athens, 487 - 404 BC
- formerly the Golden Age of Athens
- with the later part, the Age of Pericles.
480 BC: Athens victory over the Persians, at Salamis -- Aeschylus, a 45-year-old man.
Aristotle comes along about 150 years after the rise of tragedy -- p. 331.
***************************
472 -- 406 BC
The Great Tragedies
The great tragedies.
Homer:
- poet of war and slaughter
- around 850 BC, maybe 750 BC
Hesiod:
- transitional poet
- poet of peace
- active between 750 - 650 BC
The tragedians:
- Aeschylus
- Sophocles
- Euripedes
Turning away from myth --> scientific -->
- Anaximander: 610 - 546 BC
- Xenophane: 570 - 475 BC
- Heraclitus: 535 - 475 BC
- Pythagoras: 570 - 495 BC
- Parmenides: 515 - 460 BC
- Empedocles: 490 - 430 BC
In 480 BC:
- Aeschylus: 525 - 456 BC -- 45 y/o
- Sophocles: 497 - 406 BC -- 17 y/o
- Euripides: 480 - 406 BC -- newborn in 480 BC
- Socrates (Plato): 470 - 399 BC
- Aristophanes, 466 -- 386 BC: comedy about this time (between Euripedes and Socrates
- so Aristophanes was a contemporary, but 20 years younger than Euripedes
- Aristotle: 384 - 322 BC
- Alexander the Great: 356 - 323 BC (about 30 years younger than his teacher)
Thucydides: comments on the tragedies, 460 - 400 BC
- a contemporary of Sophocles and Euripides
So, along with the three great tragedians, come two more contemporaries:
- Aristophanes: comedy
- Thucydides: historian
- from wiki: father of "scientific history"
- strict standards of evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect without reference to intervention by gods
Euripedes was doing the same thing.
So, the progression of the tragedians during the Golden Age of Athens was to move away from the gods as meddling in human affairs.
Chapter XIV
The Life and Form of Tragedy
p. 327
"Athens greatest contribution to world literature was surely to bring tragedy to perfection."
The Return of Myth
Dithyramb and Genesis
Dithyramb: ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus -- the god of wine and fertility.
- also used an epithet of the god Dionysus
- Plato: dithyrambs are the clearest example of poetry in which the poet is the only speaker.
- but more often, associated with the choir of 50 singing wildly
Aristotle: the dithyramb was the origin of Athenian tragedy.
Dithyramb: a mildly enthusiastic speech or piece of writing -- still used occasionally
Tragedy
Tragedy started with groups of up to 50 men or boys singing or dancing, to please Dionysis.
Greek drama emerges as pinnacle of poetic practice -> a return to (Homer's) myths.
Pre-Socratic philosophers / dramatists:
- tried to distance themselves from Homer
- wanted to get away from myth
- became more scientific
Tragedy and Dionysus inextricably linked -- p. 330.
But difficult to explain this link.
Has to do with the various forms that Dionysus took -- like all gods, taking different forms (think the "trinity" in Christianity).
Tragedy: tragos
Comedy: outlying hamlets -- komia which Athenians called demes
comedians: p. 331 -332
Nietzsche: died insane, p. 333.
The formal structure of the tragedy: perhaps deriving from ritual sequence (dromenon) in the dithyramb.
- prologue
- chorus entrace song (parados)
- plot-driven episodes with actors
- chorus song from the orchestra (stasima)
- closing song (exodus)
Stage construction
- scenery
- hoist for deus ex machina
Relatively small number of actors (hypokrites)
- played all roles
- all male actors -- p. 335
The Bacchae, Euripedes -- the only extant tragedy about Dionysis and his distinctive features, p. 330.
Tragedy:
- Archon: the director; chose the three actors
- supervised the Dionysia
- chose the choregos
choregos: the wealthy patron who produced the play
- paid for the stage, equipment
- probably paid the leader of the chorus
- members of Athens -- citizens -- appointed the chorus!!
*Tragedy: only known from Athens, p. 336.
Athens defeats persian at sea (480 BC); Salamis.
Next 50 years -- Athen's golden age.
Fifth-Century Athens
Tragedy according to Aristotle, p. 338 - 343.
AESCHYLUS
The poet from Eleusis.
Aeschylus: "tries in drama to formulate a vision of life for the new age, which dawned in Athens when the city was constituted a democrate state."
*** He seems "older" than Home in his insight, penetrating and thinking via the mythical reality relating to the maternal cult. -- p. 344. Reminder: pre-Homer - matriarchal heirarchy; post-Homer (because of Homer) -- patriarchal heirarchy.
ORESTEIA
A world connected to life of the underworld
blood revenge and he Erinyes of the Night
tells how maternal cult resulted in tryannical arrogance of the aristocracy of Homer's Heroic world -- it unleashed the primordial female forces that the Heroic Age tried to limit.
[Homer tried to repress fertility cults such as Demeter (female)]. -- p. 345.
Who invented the third actor? See p. 346, Zeruneith.
Aeschylus had three actors in Orestia -- but probably "stole" idea from the younger Sophocles.
At any rate, the SAT answer is Sophocles. LOL.
Aeschylus: follows the familial outcome of hubris (desire for power / wealth) which upsets the gods -- retribution delivered unit the third generation.
Diagram:
Thyestes / Atreus: kill half-brother Chrysippus to get kingdom.
Pelops exiles Atreus.
Therefore: third generation -- pays (Electra and Orestes)
To know Greek tragedy, know:
- Aeschylus
- Sophocles
- Euripides
To know Aeschylus, know Orestia -- Orestia is the tragedy above all other tragedies -- p. 348.
Orestia: tragedy above all tragedies -- p. 348, Zeruneith.
- third generation pay for sins of earlier generation
- shift from maternal to paternal system
THE PERSIANS
The Persians:
- not a trilogy
- earliest tragedy we possess -- 472 BC
- based on historical event, not myth
- Battle of Salamis, 480 BC
- defeat of Persian King Xerxes
- the start of Athens as a great power
The Persians: why a tragedy? Told from the Persians' point of view
a view of empathy
leads to soul-searching and sophrosyne
From various / multiple sources.
Aeschylus: the trilogy, Orestia, Fifth-Century Athens.
- Agamemnon, the sacrifice of Iphigenia
- the Libation Bearers
- the Eumenides
Agamemnon:
- three daughters
- Artemis, the stag
- sacrifice of Iphigenia, Aulis
Oresteia: the only extant example of ancient Greek theater trilogy. WOW!
Concerns:
- murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra
- murder of Clytemnestra by Orestia
- the trial of Orestes
- teh end of the urse on the House of Atreus
- the pacification of the Erinyes
Wow, Aeschylus covered a lot in one play, albeit a trilogy.
Aulis, from wiki:
Aulis, a Greek port, located in ancient Boeotia in central Greece, at the Euripus Strait, opposite of the island of Euboea, at modern Mikro Vathy/Ag. Nikolaos. Livy states that Aulis was 3 miles (4.8 km) from Chalcis.
Aulis never developed into a fully independent polis, but belonged to ancient Thebes (378 BC) and Tanagra respectively.
According to Homer's epic The Iliad, the Greek fleet gathered in Aulis to set off for Troy.
However, the departure for the Trojan War was prevented by Artemis, who stopped the wind to punish Agamemnon, who had killed a deer in a sacred grove and boasted he was the better hunter than she. The fleet was only able to sail off after Agamemnon had sacrificed his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. Strabo says that the harbour of Aulis could only hold fifty ships, and that therefore the Greek fleet must have assembled in the large port in the neighbourhood.
Aulis appears to have stood upon a rocky height, since it is called by Homer "rocky Aulis", and by Strabo a "stone village."
OEDIPODEA
Seven Against Thebes
Aeschylus Trilogy
Trilogy plus the satyr play:
- Laius: gone
- Oedipus: gone
- Seven Against Thebes: all that is left
- Sphinx, the satyr play: gone
Thebes:
- historically anti-Athens
- allied with Persia, 480 BC
Diagram:
Sophocles
Lived to an old age (~ 90) -- 496 - 406 BC -- the entire 50 years of the Golden Age and the following five years.
So, he was 16 - 18 years of age at time of Marathon, Salamis; coming of age; when writing plays, could look back 20 years ealier.
Known to posterity for introducing the 3rd actor (see p. 346 of Zeruneith)
More important, he abandoned the trilogy
Rather, he found a single protagonist.
*******Points to a material shift in the tragic view of the world; just as the 3rd actor becomes necessary as a part of the psychological analysis he is attempting since the actors neow function as a mirror to each other. -- p. 410. ********
How and why? Blood guilt.
God is everything, man is nothing. Sophocles, p. 411.
Greek notion of miasma -- crime is always punished. -- p. 412. See internet here.
Then several pages left blank. I assume those pages were saved to write more about Sophocles.
The transition from Sophocles to Euripides -- "... we will trace how similar moral scruples are presented in Euripides, whose critical analysis does not have the same utopian impact, but, on the contrary, is almost dystopian."
Euripides
Birthplace: Salamis! Apocryphal -- born at the very place and on the very day in September 480 BC that the Greeks defeated the Persians. Said to be apocryphal.
Socrates attended the performances of Euripides' tragedies. -- p. 456.
The new age -- focus on the individual and on the psychological ...
Aristophanes, wrote comedies, not tragedies, in The Frogs, pits Euripides against Aeschylus.
... it was this rejection of the heroic and especially the mythical that persuaded Nietzsche to attack Euripides -- p. 457.
Aeschylus and Sophocles: identified themselves with the glory of the divine state, Athens.
Euripides: wrote mostly during the decline; yup -- that would be correct -- he lived so long, see above. The reversal came with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, 431 BC.
Salamis, 480 BC --> Peloponnesian War, 431 BC. Fifty years. A few uyears later -- plague decimated Athens.
Thucydides, a historian -- also usses the plague to describe a state in dissolution, p. 457.
To a greater extent than Herodotus, Thucydides was the inventor of historical writing.
See last paragraph, p. 457.
Then several pages blank again -- to fill in later.
THE END OF TRAGEDY
p. 493
" .. as it appears in Aristophanes' The Frogs --" perhaps there ere no longer (in Aristotle's time) any good tragedians after the death of Sophocles and Euripides.
Tragedy only had a grea age of about 65 years -- going back to The Persians.
the three great tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.
Aeschylus: actor -- introduced the first actor (before it was only the chorus).
Sophocles: seven plays of 120 survived! Survivor: lived to 90. Many changes: third actor most important.
Euripides: eccentric (dystopian)
Tragedy died the same year both Sophocles and Euripides died -- 406 BC.
480 BC --------------------> 406 BC
Salamis ---------------------->death of Sophocles and Euripides
Plato himself wrote (p. 497): ".. there is NOT and WILL NOT be any written of Plato's own. What are now called his (Plato's) are the work of a Socrates, embellished and modernized."
Just as Odysseus was Homer's supreme consciousness, so Socrates becomes the supreme view / conscience of Plato.
****Kierkegard: "Socrates' act of dialectics, based according to Kierkegard on irony, which ends in the negation of pure nothingness." *******
- https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opth-2020-0129/html?lang=en/
- http://sorenkierkegaard.org/concept-of-irony.html
Plato's works (?):
- Protagoras: perhaps before Socrates?
- The Republic: Socrates
- The Laws: a late work; not Socrates
Socrates
470 - 399 BC
Plato: one cohesive work.
Socrates: the principal protagonist.
Plato's work is directed toward a utopia of the good and the "inner human being."
Socarates is the incarnation of his interpretation --
The principal of human development is described as an erotic process.
Development of the self requires a method such as is presented through Socrates' interlocutory technique and philosophical dialectic.
His conviction and death is the turning point in Plato's writings --prompting him to set up the norms for a utopian state based on the philosophical person and human self-development in general -- which is why Odysseus is incoporated into his work as Socrates' most important prefiguration, the act of showing or suggesting that something will happen in the future.
Plato followed Socrates for 6 - 7 years from about 407 BC.
Socrates recurring themes -- p. 497.
the good
the cardinal virtues
the nature and immortality of the soul
Zeld will look at Socrates metaphorically.
Socrates came 400 years before Christ.
Tragedy --> dialogue genre.
Zeld equates:
Homer:Odysseus::Plato:Socrates
both Homer and Plato -- works of both men came during a period of crisis, p. 499.
Author finds a parallel between Home and Plato, p. 499.
Socrates becomes elevated into metaphor and myth, reading beyond his historical existence and into the future philosophical thinking of the west -- p. 449.
The thirty (30) tyrants -- p. 500.
[Wiki: Peloponnesian War -- Sparta wins -- installs an oligarchy of 30 to run Athens -- maintained power power for 13 months --
Socrates "on writing" -- p. 521.
Socrates' wife: Xanthippe -- pp. 523 - 524.
Then a couple-page gap.
Athens: A Portrait of the City in the Golden Age
Christian Meier
Starting with chapter 5: The Persian Threat
Meshes nicely with Zeruneith's The Wooden Horse.
500 BC: Marathon -- everything changed
Drama: tragedy
sculpture: Kouros -- Critius
vase painting: Dionysius, maenads
politics:
The Change
Politics (p. 228): particularly evident in 487 -- an interesting alteration of the procedure for appointing archons was made
10 men elected for each phyla: ~ 100 men
9 archons picked by lot from these 100
Was Themistocles behind this reform?
Ostracism: probably instituted at the same time
punishment by ostracisim
Ostracism
Athens may have considered:
ostracism as early as 10 years earlier; under Cleisthenes but not instituted until after Marathon -- 487 -- survival of Athens at stake?? -- p. 229
Ostracism -- once annually
487 BC, #1: Hipparchus, son of Charmus, Pisistratid family (Hippia's son-in-law)
486 BC, #2: Megacles, sone of Hippocrates,
Alcmaeonid family
nephew of Cleisthenes (irony)
485 BC, #3: Callias, son of Cratius
first three: "friends of tyrants" -- but not true of the 4th -->
484 BC, #4: Xanthippus, father of Pericles
connected to the Pisistratids
486 BC: Themistocles -- came close, p. 234.
480s
Island of Aegina / Persian concern
Athens: Piraean Harbor
Concerned about Persian avenging defeat at Marathon.
Themistocles vs Aristides
thetes: members of the lowest economic class -- p. 238
Aristides: ostracised to Aegina! At Salamis he served Athens selflessly!
481: Aegina-Athens Confederation.
Victory at Salamis, p. 240.
Alexander, King of Macedonia, p. 241.
by this time, Darius had died, Xerxes, now king.
479 BC: Battle of Plataea -- 2nd major land battle between Greece / Persia
Greece wins this one also.
Chapter 6
479 - 461
From Devastation to Democracy
Defeating the Persians, the Greeks have become a huge power -- they did not realize it, but difficult understanidng what it all meant -- Tragedy helped! -- p. 274
So, this is why Marathon was important --
Marathon: 500 BC
Salamis: 481 BC
Battle of Plateae: 479 BC
Athenians:
Marathon: the Athenians had won it alone without help; the hoplites had secured the victory.
Helots (p. 251) -- people subjugated under Sparta -- prone to rebellion.
So, after turning back the Persians three times, Greek isonomies trying to sort things out among themselves.
Acropolis wall in Athens: made of "Persian rubble."
Spartans: challenged far from home
Athens: excelled even if far from home -- p. 251.
Rebuilding the Athenian wall -- p. 254 -- 6 km long
Themistocles and Aristides -- collaborated / cooperated
!! Athens -- now recognized no authority over itself.
DELIAN LEAGUE: 477 BC
began with summit on island of Delos
annual mts coincied with festival of Apollo of Delos
Apollo: originally the league's patron diety
Athenians, Ionians, Island dwellers
Goal of the league: remain free of Persians.
Cleisthenes -- Athenians' legendary founding hero -- p. 246.
Again, Greece vs Persia
Athens / Sparta / Delian League -- p. 260
Athens could not have seen the role it played in future -- sometimes politics, city govt, philosophy, art, world history, p. 261.
Unclear who led Athens at this time, p. 261
Aristides still played a role
Themistocles: hardly mentioned now
Cimon -- possibly -- worked with Spara
New sculpture: p. 262.
Areopagus: p. 266
Cimon -- new naval strategy with triemes
instead of ramming, boarding enemy ships with hoplites -- p. 267
Metics: p. 268
Architect and political theoretician: Hippodamus of Miletus, p. 269
Hippodamus:
city planning,
"blocks"
grid
parks, shrines
The tragedies, plays, satyr play at the annual Great Dionysus festival, p. 270
Tragedy -- p. 272-- necessary.
For Athenians -- the plays were of existential importance!
Tragedies dedicated to Dionysus Elenthereus
cult led by Pisistratus
"Dionysus was the god not only of wine but also of the mask, of stepping outside oneself and identifying with others." He combined many opposites, life and death, chaos and order, war and peace, truth and deception; he tended to flip from one extreme to another.
Oldest extant play: Aeschylus' The Persians -- 472 BC
- first dramatic competition under the tyrants, ca 535
- midway: 472 BC
- Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, 401 BC
- last of the tragedies that have survived
- 472 production: choregos, young Pericles, son of Xanthippus, descended on his mother's side from the noble Alcmaeonids, "the most famous man of Athens."
- 1st time he appeared in public eye.
That's all that was in the notebook.
Additional notes:
- wrote 90+ plays
- only 19 survived
- most of his plays were written in the 420s
- last two Euripides plays: 405 BC, so Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus was the last of the tragedies that survived (401 BC)
From wiki:
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates".
But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism.
Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.
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