The Dramatic Perspective of Athens' End

The Dramatic Perspective of Athens' End

The plays of Athens written during the twilight of its empire at the end of the fifth century show a palpable anxiety regarding the future of the Athenian people in both drama and comedy. With the knowledge that these plays were always created for a civic purpose, it is understandable that the project of these plays was to council their audience and prepare it for uncertain times ahead.

Earlier in the century Aeschylus sang of old heroes embodying a traditional Greek morality. He sang to the glory of a culture which had asserted its dominance over virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean. By the time Athens had become seriously engaged in the Peloponnesian war authors no longer aimed primarily at praising Athens, but focused on fixing blame and moving past current events toward a time of healing.

Among the most interesting playwrights of this time is Aristophanes, for within the body of his work one can see a shift from his lighthearted Clouds to his deeper Frogs. In the Clouds, the old Greek view of comedy is seen: sexual innuendo, excremental humor, and common character types. The Clouds pokes fun at the Sophists and bemoans the state of Athens' courts, but presents no alternative. When watching the Clouds one is very cognizant of the fact it is a play being seen: a fluid narrative is broken up by a speech of Aristophanes and the play transitions through a series of sketch-like scenes rather than an ongoing tale.

The evolution toward a deeper work comes in the Birds. It has all the same tell-tale signs of the older Greek comedies cited above, but it also expresses a more refined message to the audience and shows a constant plot in which even the parabasis is pertinent to the work itself. In the Birds one sees a critique of Athens presented on a grand scale; No one group or one issue is targeted, but the whole of society. The moral of this work can best be summarized by translator Peter Meineck:

"if we want to ignore our responsibilities to our community, run away, and attempt to live the hedonistic life, then we better be prepared to become our own gods for the only way to a truly happy society [is]... to learn to live together... and not to expect life to always be the way we want it to."

This understanding of the Birds's message is almost optimistic when taken in context as written before the end of the Sicilian Expedition. The notion that things could still be pulled together would have no doubt been a comfort to a city under duress, but not yet under imminent destruction.

The progression of Aristophanes' work then follows to Lysistrata. In Lysistrata the departure from old comedy becomes more evident, save for a few holdouts of sexual innuendo being very prevalent. The message also becomes clearer and more contemporary as the discussion of peace with Sparta by any means would not have been unpopular when this play was produced. The Birds and Lysistrata may have had a similar moral element to them as, but the difference between them is the extent to which the Birds is more of an old style Greek comedy than Lysistrata.

From that understanding the next logical step to take is to examine the Frogs. Here the departure from old comedy is most apparent as the parody moves past the stock protagonistic dumb citizen and drama itself is ridiculed. The narrative here reaches its greatest fluency in any of Aristophanes' comedies, and the message of the story becomes the most salient feature of the play. This work was performed at the apex of Athenian insecurity and does obfuscate its goal at all: to examine where Athens went wrong and where it needs to go.

It is fitting that the two authors Aristophanes uses to critique the change in his city's culture are Aeschylus and Euripides. The work of Aeschylus was clearly understood by Aristophanes to be aimed at precisely the goals discussed above, and although he turns a more critical eye to Euripides it should not be surmised that Euripides did not have an admirable goal of his own. His plays definitively strove to make the audience think and reflect more deeply on their thoughts and feelings. In this way Euripides tried to be a therapist for an entire city during the latter part of the fifth century when that was precisely what it needed. Clearly