To blaze like a golden flame, and to attain a godlike pitch of strength and valour: this it was, in the Iliad, to be most fully a man. Physical perfection and moral superiority were indissoluble: this was the assumption. On the battlefield at Troy, only the base were ugly. Such men might on occasion merit being mocked and beaten, but they were hardly fitting opponents of a hero. The surest measure of greatness was in a contest worthy of the name: an agon. This was why, in the fighting between Greek and Trojan, the gods themselves would sometimes descend onto the battlefield; not merely to watch the serried lines of men, their shields and armour glinting, as they moved in for the kill, but to fight in the cause of their favourites – and whenever they alighted, they would quiver with anticipation ‘like nervous doves’.22 It was why, as well, sitting in their golden halls, the gods might not hesitate to sacrifice whole cities and peoples to their enmities. When Hera, the queen of the gods, demanded of her husband that he surrender Troy, which he loved above all other cities, to her quenchless hatred, and Zeus demurred, she refused to cede the field.
The three cities that I love best of all
are Argos and Sparta, Mycenae with streets as broad as Troy’s.
Raze them – whenever they stir the hatred in your heart.23
What mattered was victory, not the cost.
This spirit, this ferocious commitment to being the best, was one in which all aspired to share. In Homer’s poetry, the word for ‘pray’, euchomai, was also a word for ‘boast’. The gods invariably looked with favour upon an agon. Rare was the sanctuary that did not serve as the venue for some competition, be it for dancers, poets or weavers. From athletics to beauty contests, all had their divine sponsors. When Aristophanes wrote The Acharnians he did so as a contender in an agon. The Lenaia was held in honour of Dionysus, a god whose fondness for drunken revelry and female company rendered him a more than appropriate patron for Aristophanes’ brand of comedy. Kings and princes, of the kind who on the plain of Troy had dared to fight even with gods, no longer reigned in Athens. Less than a century before the time of Aristophanes, revolution had come to the city and a radically new form of government, one in which power was entrusted to the people, been enshrined there. In a democracy, the right to contend with one’s peers was no longer the prerogative of aristocrats alone. Indeed, the ethos of gods and heroes might come to seem, when viewed through the prism of a more egalitarian age, more than a little comic. Aristophanes, who was nothing if not competitive himself, did not hesitate to portray them as oafs, or cowards, or liars. In one of his comedies, he even dared to show Dionysus, disguised as a slave, shitting himself as he was threatened with torture, and then being scourged with a whip. The play, like The Acharnians, was awarded first prize.
The tension, though, between ancient song and the values of those who were not heroes, was never simply a matter for laughter. ‘Are there no guidelines set by heaven for mortal men, no path to follow that will please the gods?’24 This question, which the sick, the bereaved or the oppressed could hardly help but ask, had no ready answer. The gods, inscrutable and whimsical as they were, rarely deigned to explain themselves. They certainly never thought to regulate morals. The oracle at Delphi might offer advice, but not ethical instruction. ‘The god does not rule by issuing commands.’25 Such guidelines as mortal men had set for them derived from tradition, not revelation. Law was so dependent on custom as to be indistinguishable from it. With the coming of democracy, though, that assumption was challenged. The right of the people to determine legislation emerged as something fundamental to their authority. ‘For everyone would agree that it is the city’s laws which are chiefly responsible for its prosperity, its democracy and its freedom.’26 Only in the assemblies, where citizens met as equals to deliberate and vote, was there to be found a source of legitimacy appropriate to the rule of Athens by the people. What value liberty otherwise?
Nevertheless, the Athenians could not help but be nagged at by a certain anxiety. To submit themselves to laws of human origin was to run the risk of tyranny: for what was to stop an over-ambitious citizen from framing legislation designed to subvert the democracy? Unsurprisingly, then, the laws most reassuring to the Athenians were those that seemed to sprout from the very soil of their homeland, like the olive trees in the fields beyond Athens, their roots clinging fast to stone. This was why, in an attempt to give legislation a comforting patina of age, it became the habit to attribute its authorship to sages from the city’s distant past. There were many, though, who believed in something infinitely more venerable: indeed, a law so transcendent that it had no origin at all. Some four or five years before the first performance of The Acharnians, another play staged in the theatre of Dionysus gave potent voice to this conviction.* Sophocles, its author, was not, like Aristophanes, a writer of comedies. There were no jokes in Oedipus the King. Tragedy, the genre of which Sophocles was a prize-winning master, took the ancient stories told of gods and heroes, and made play with them to often disorienting effect; but not for laughs. The downfall of Oedipus had been dramatised many times before, but never to such bleak effect as in the version presented by Sophocles. King of Thebes, a city to the north-west of Athens much detested by the Athenians, Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother. That he had committed these crimes unwittingly, having been exposed as a baby, and brought up by foster parents, did not serve to extenuate his offence. His crime was against laws that were timeless, eternal, sacred. ‘Begotten in the clear aether of heaven, fathered by Olympus alone, nothing touched by the mortal is their parent, nor shall oblivion ever lull them to sleep.’27
These laws, unlike those of mortal origin, were not written down: it was precisely their lack of an author which distinguished them as divine. ‘Neither today or yesterday were they born; they are eternal, and no one knows when they first appeared.’28 Quite how, if lacking a written form, they were to be recognised, still more to be distinguished from human legislation, was an issue that did not much concern the average citizen; most Greeks – whose capacity to hold two dissonant points of view at the same time was considerable – were not greatly perturbed by the resulting tensions. But some were; and among them was Sophocles. Oedipus the King was not the only play he wrote about the curse brought down on Thebes by the crimes of his hero. In an earlier tragedy, Antigone, he had portrayed the ultimate doom of Oedipus’ house. The play opened amid the aftermath of civil war. Oedipus’ two sons, fighting over the kingdom, both lay dead before the walls of Thebes. Only one, though, Eteocles, was to be afforded proper buriaclass="underline" for their uncle, Creon, succeeding to the throne, had decreed the second brother, Polynices, to blame for the war, and that as punishment his corpse be left as food for dogs and birds. Even to mourn the traitor, so the new king had pronounced, would mean death. Yet this edict, for all that it had the force of law, did not satisfy everyone that it was legal. Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter, dared to defy her uncle, and give Polynices a symbolic burial by scattering dust on his corpse. Brought before Creon, she scorned his edict. ‘I do not believe your laws, you being only a man, sufficient to overrule divine ordinances – unwritten and unfailing as they are.’29 Sentenced to be walled up alive in a tomb, Antigone hanged herself. Creon’s son, who had been betrothed to her, likewise committed suicide; so too his queen. The ruin was total. The chorus, witness to the tragedy, drew the seeming lesson. ‘The chiefest part of happiness is wisdom – that, and not to insult the gods.’30