We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

Names, right. Let's see if Windows bluescreens again before I can get this post up.

We have extant works attributed to three surviving playwrights:
Aeschylus c. 513 BCE - c. 455 BCE
Sophocles c. 495 - 405
Euripides c. 480 - 406
However, Prometheus Bound was almost certainly not written by Aeschylus and Rhesus was probably not written by Euripides. We've got no idea who did write them, though.

They've all got very different personalities, at least according to Aristophanes (author of our only surviving comedy from the period). Greek Old Comedy was all about making fun of politics and real people, and Aristophanes absolutely loved Euripides as a target. Also Socrates.

You see, the fifth century in Athens was a time of major philosophical changes, including the full establishment of democracy,* and the upper classes (who were the ones with time and leisure to write) spent most of their time complaining about them. So anyone with any attachment to the new philosophical ideas, like Euripides, was in for it. (Socrates, on the other hand, seems from Plato's accounts to have spent a lot of time attacking democracy, although he didn't write anything himself so we aren't sure).

Athens is the city in Greece we know the most about, because of all the surviving writings. On the other hand, we therefore mostly just have the perspectives of upper class Athenian men, at least from this period. So we don't know how typical it was. We know Sparta was entirely different, but the rest of Greece seems to have thought Sparta was weird too. But that doesn't mean the rest of Greece was just like Athens.

So what was Athens like? By the time Euripides was writing, Athens was the centre of a major maritime empire called the Delian league (after the island of Delos where they originally kept the treasury before moving it to Athens), which was originally started to stop the Persians from coming back but which quickly became mostly a source of income for Athens, and also protection for the islands that their grain supply came from. They refused to admit it was an empire but insisted upon having a say in everyone's government and didn't allow anyone to leave, much like America today.

The growth of Athenian power was a serious threat to Sparta as the former power, and to everyone who didn't want to sign up for the Delian League, and tensions grew until 430 when war started. It wasn't constant; there was occasional peace and interruptions for plague and poorly thought out foreign campaigns, but eventually in 404 Sparta won, and besieged Athens until they agreed to their terms. Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine has a wonderfully heartrending description of the Siege of Athens.

The upper classes had very little power officially and lots of power practically, as usually happens. In 411 they tried to overthrow the democracy and failed, and then at the end of the war they colluded with Sparta in getting rid of it. This failed too, eventually. It turns out if you give 30 people absolute power they act like assholes. Who would have thought?

But that's after the tragedians stopped writing.

Athens was a very multicultural city, although the non-Athenians had no say in government. It was a slave society - the concept of "paid servant" dates back to the Middle Ages and not before. Slaves could be from anywhere in the Mediterranean - usually they were war captives. People from all over Greece, and the Greek diaspora, came to Athens to do business, the way people normally move to big cities. They were called metics - resident foreigners. Freed slaves also went in this class.

The ideal in Athens was that women stayed home and were not seen on the public street - not until "she's old enough to be taken for someone's mother instead of someone's wife." They married at fifteen, didn't see or talk to any men except their husband and family, and went out only for religious occasions (where they had major roles).

Of course, this didn't work well for most people. Poor families couldn't afford to have a mostly unproductive family member. Widows even engaged in commerce. And slave women went everywhere. Greek ladies couldn't go to the marketplace, so they sent slaves. Greek wives couldn't be seen by their husbands' guests, but prostitutes were hired to attend dinner parties. Metic women sometimes had more freedom than citizens, and might be well educated. They often ended up as the mistresses of citizens specifically because they were intelligent and entertaining and well-read - even though in a wife this was discouraged.

And then the playwrights wrote women like Medea and Clytemnestra and Antigone and Electra and Alcestis and Deianira and Iphigeneia, not to mention all the goddesses. All these women are respectable wives or daughters, except maybe Medea, and yet they have unbelievably clear and mostly sympathetic voices. Even the evil ones. Even when they are arguing against the authorities.



*Such as it was. Athenian democracy allowed all adult free citizen men to go to the assembly in person and vote. Citizen was soon defined as "someone with two citizen parents," so there was no way to become a citizen unless you could get a majority to vote you in (or, later, buy your way in). Freed slaves? No. Foreigners? No. Fourth generation descendants of immigrants? No. Women? Yeah right.

So. Three Weeks for Dreamwidth is starting nowish, and I am going to use it as an excuse to get over my social anxiety and post stuff. Specifically stuff about Greek tragedies, since I am reasonably confident I know stuff about them. Aren't linguistic placeholders fun?

This is here to remind me.