Confucius believed that the key to good government and social harmony was a proper adherence to natural hierarchies: 'Let the father be a father, and the son a son/ From the obedi- ence and deference owed by a child to a parent, and the corre- sponding protection and education given by the parent to the child, he thought, every other social relationship could be deduced: ruler and minister, husband and wife, elder and younger, even friend and friend (because each would defer to the other). He had an optimistic view of human nature, but believed that education was essential to develop that nature to its full potential. And, like Sуcrates (as described by Plato [12]), he understood that a recognition of one's own ignorance is the foundation of learning.
Though a man of deeply conservative views, Confucius opposed hereditary privilege in favor of a meritocracy—proba- bly his greatest gift to Chinese history, and to the world. His ideal was the gentleman, but he imbued that word with special
meaning: A gentleman, for him, was anyone whose actions, education and deportment marked him as such, while a lout whose father happened to be an aristocrat was no gentleman at ali. Confucius also opposed written codes of law, which he saw as an invitation to deceit and evasiveness; he favored instead the rule of li, a word that has no English equivalent but which embraces, in part, the concepts of etiquette, decorum, ritual, and common law. This unwritten social code was to be put into action in a government run by the natural meritocracy of the virtuous (and it is interesting to compare this class with the rul- ing elite in Plato's Republic).
If Confucius wrote anything during his lifetime, it does not survive; the Analects, a collection of his conversations, lessons, and miscellaneous sayings, began to be compiled by his disci- ples shortly after his death, and was added to over a period of several generations. The book has no continuous narrative thread, and there are occasional passages that are obscure or confusing. Some of the teachings will seem self-evident, even banal; this is perhaps because they have so often proved to be true over a period of twenty-five centuries. Some readers will be bothered by Confucius's conservatism, and especially his unquestioning embrace of a patriarchal system that relegated women to an inferior status; reflect that the same charge could be leveled at every great thinker of the ancient world.
The Analects is a fairly short book, worth reading and re- reading; it is the record of a lively and generous mind.
J.S.M.
5
AESCHYLUS
525-456/5 B.C.E. The Oresteia
(Ancient Greek tragedy is so different from the plays we are familiar with that the beginning reader will do well first to
study some standard book on the subject; or to consult the rele- vant chapters in a history of Greek literature; or at least to read carefully the notes and introductions usually accompany- ing the translation. You might also look up the myths associated with the names of the chief personages in the recom- mended play. See the Bibliography for some suggestions for further reading.
Classic Greek drama was written in verse, usually in an elevated and formal style. It was presented in the open air at the yearly festival at Athens in honor of the god Dionysus. That means the plays were part of a religious ceremony, attended, as a civic duty, by ali or most of the citizens. The plays were given as trilogies, followed by a shorter play of a comic nature, and the dramatists competed with one another for the laurel of victory. Aeschylus's Oresteia is the only complete surviving trilogy.
It is hardfor us to visualize these ancient Greek sunlit pro- ductions. They incorporated music, dance, and chorai song, and doubtless words were declaimed or chanted in a manner quite dissimilar to our modern realistic convention. As the plots were usually reworkings of famous legends, they ojfered no suspense; everyone knew the story in advance. Two features, among others, that seem strange to us were the Chorus, which acted as a kind of commentary on the action, and the Messenger, who recounted ojfstage events, particularly if they were of a violent kind. As we approach Greek drama we must try to keep in mind that it is religious in origin and partly so in ejfect; and that its language and action are not in our sense "realistic.")
Though he did not "invent" Greek tragedy, Aeschylus is generally considered its earliest leading practitioner and so the ancestor of ali Western tragic drama. He lived through the great days of the growth of the Athenian democracy and him- self helped in its ascendancy, for he fought at Marathon and perhaps at Salamis. Born in Eleusis, near Athens, he spent most of his life in and around Athens, dying in Gela, Sicily, from the effects, says an improbable story, of a tortoise dropped by an eagle on his bald head. Of his ninety plays, seven survive.
Best of these is the trilogy known from its central character as the Oresteia. Its theme is one frequently encountered in Greek legend, family blood-guilt and its expiation. The Agamemnon is a play about murder, the murder of the returned hero Agamemnon by his faithless wife, Clytemnestra. The Choephoroe (Libation-Bearers) is a play about revenge, the revenge taken on Clytemnestra by Orestes, Agamemnon^ son. The Eumenides (Furies) is a play about purification: the tormenting of Orestes by the Furies and his final exoneration by a tribunal of Athenian judges and the goddess Athena. The entire trilogy is a study in the complex operations of destiny, heredity, and pride, which produce a tragic knot untied by the advent of a higher conception of law and order.
As the word for Homer [2] is noble so the word for Aeschylus is grand. He cannot be read as modern plays are read. His language is exalted and difficult; it struggles magnifi- cently to express profound ideas about guilt and sin, ideas that have become part of the world of imaginative literature right up to our own day with 0'Neill [115] and Faulkner [118]. Aeschylus is much more akin to the author of the Book of Job than to even the best of our contemporary dramatists. He must be approached in that spirit.
C.F.
6
SOPHOCLES
496-406 B.C.E.
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
Sophocles was born in what we would call a suburb of Athens, of upper-class family. He held high office; he was a constant victor in the dramatic competitions; he developed in
various ways the relatively primitive techniques of Aeschylus [5]; he lived long and, it appears, happily; and he was one of the greatest ornaments of the Periclean Age. Of his more than one hundred twenty plays, we possess seven. But these suffice to place him among the few great dramatists of ali time.
Formulas are treacherous. But it is not entirely untrue to say that the beginning reader may best see Aeschylus as a dra- matic theologian, obsessed with God and his stern edicts. Sophocles may be seen as a dramatic artist, concerned with human suffering. Euripides [7] may be seen as a playwright- critic, using the legends as a vehicle for ideas current in his skeptical and disillusioned era.