The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis David

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

The Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,

While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

If cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,

And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods

Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each would shape

Bodies of gods in their own likeness.

― Xenophanes  (c. 570-478 B.C.E)

October 14, 2021

Johnny’s Brief Guide to Ancient Greece

WARNING!: My mind tends to meander. This essay might do likewise.

About five years ago, or so, I chanced to read “The Suppliants” by Aeschylus. Written about 463 B.C.E., it is one of the earliest plays there is. In it, a group of women have come from North Africa to Argos, in Greece, seeking asylum, to escape being forced into marriages against their will. When I read it, I thought: “Wow! That’s still happening: women are coming to Greece as refugees from North Africa to escape from forced marriages—among other things.” And I thought it would be cool to do a production of “The Suppliants” in one of those big amphitheaters that you see pictures of.

Theater at Epidauros

It was one of those fantasies that last for a while, until other ideas come along and crowd it out.

Then, earlier this year, a Greek actor and director named Stratis Panourios was a guest speaker for the Shakespeare in Prisons Conference. I saw his talk online,

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuKvkE_cZDk&t=32s),

and a week later participated in an online conversation with him. He had directed a production of Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” at a prison in Greece. He is smart, funny, engaging—I liked him immediately.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zMZaUUW_Xs&t=64s.) 

I emailed him my idea about doing “The Suppliants” of Aeschylus and including stories of contemporary refugee women in the performance. He sent me a “call for submissions” form from an arts festival: 2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture.

We submitted a proposal, along with three other collaborators: Zeina Daccache, Vassiliki Katrivanou and Alokananda Roy. Some prison friends will remember Zeina. She is a drama therapist who came to our production of “Twelve Angry Men” at Two Rivers prison, in 2012. Zeina had directed a production of the same play at Roumieh prison, and made a great documentary film about it called “12 Angry Lebanese.”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf5akVvHhx4&t=29s.)

Vassiliki lives in Athens and has worked on refugee issues as a member of the Greek Parliament. She currently works for the Greek Council on Refugees.

(https://openroadpdx.com/team/vassiliki-katrivanou/.)

She made a documentary film with Bushra Azzouz called “Women of Cyprus.” She came to our production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Two Rivers in 2010, and took photos for the film Bushra was shooting. (That film is nearing completion, and should be released in 2022.) I met Alokananda Roy in 2018 at the Shakespeare in Prisons Conference in San Diego. She had directed big dance-theater productions at a prison in India, and the performers had taken the shows on tour to theaters in many Indian cities.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OspzzO7gAiw&t=1s.)

Our Dream Team is still waiting to hear if we will be included in the festival. Keep your fingers crossed!

I got very excited about going to Greece. When acting in or directing a play, I like to do research on the background of the story—the time and place when the play was written, and also the time and place in which the story is set. Ancient Greece is a treasure trove! For the past several months I’ve been reading about Greek Drama and Philosophy and Culture and Religion and Literature and Mythology—everything written by a Greek or about the Greeks that I can get my hands on.

The Western tradition of Literature begins with the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. In Athens, in the Fifth Century B.C.E, the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes began our tradition of theater. Our philosophical tradition begins with the Greeks, notably Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, in Athens. The Athenians were the first city-state to attempt Democracy as a form of government. And then there are all those strange myths that have inspired poets, painters, playwrights and psychiatrists since the Renaissance. Shakespeare wrote a long poem called “Venus and Adonis.” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is set in Athens, just before the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. Botticelli painted “The Birth of Venus”!

(https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/birth-of-venus.)

Yeats and Rilke both wrote poems about Leda and the Swan. Homer’s Odyssey inspired James Joyce’s Ulysses and Nikos Kazantzakis’ epic The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. Stephen Berkoff’s 1980 play “Greek” is a modern re-telling of Sophocles’s “Oedipus Tyrannus.” Lee Breuer’s 1989 musical “The Gospel at Colonus” is based on Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus.”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZyQP_zrD2U.)

In 2017, Nancy and I saw a great production of Mary Zimmerman’s play “The Odyssey” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland. Sigmund Freud postulated an “Oedipus Complex” to explain why human life is such a tragedy. Et cetera. Et cetera.

At a tender age, I got involved in Theater and also I went off to India to study Philosophy, so I have always been intrigued with Greece, where these things began in the West. I fell in love with Socrates, and sat in on classes taught by the great Greek scholar-philosopher Gregory Vlastos at the University of California at Berkeley, when he was giving lectures in preparation for writing his book Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. I got a CETA grant back in 1977, and the first play I ever directed was Choēphór0i, “The Libation Bearers,” of Aeschylus. I’ve played the part of the blind seer Tiresias in “The Bacchae” of Euripides twice!—directed by Keith Scales for the Classic Greek Theater of Oregon, and directed by choreographer Bill T. Jones, for a dance-theater workshop production at Columbia University.

Philosophy has become an academic subject, taught by Philosophy Professors to Philosophy Students in Universities. Mostly, they read the writings of the most famous philosophers in the Western Philosophical tradition, and discuss their ideas. For Socrates and Plato, philosophia, the love of wisdom, was something quite different. They wanted to know: how should we live? Life is short—what is the best way to spend the brief time we have? When I went to India, I didn’t go in order to become a scholar of Indian Philosophy. I wanted to get enlightenment! The gurus I studied with taught what might be called “The Art of Living,” which included Philosophy, Psychology and Religion—as it did for Socrates and Plato. I read Plato and Walt Whitman not because I want to impress people at cocktail parties, but because I want to live a meaningful life. I want to be wiser, kinder, happier, more free. I want to better understand what’s going on here!

The word theos, “god,” had a different meaning for the Greeks in those days than it does for those of us who grew up with a monotheistic worldview. Instead of saying “God is Love,” it would have made more sense to say “Love is a god.” Anything eternal was a god or a goddess—Earth, Sky, Night, Day, Evening, Sleep, Dreams, Madness, Desire, Violence, Friendship, Fate, Chaos, Death—all were holy. The Greeks lived in a sacred landscape, where mortal women gave birth to children whose fathers were gods—or even rivers!

The performances of Greek tragedies were sacred rites. The “City Dionysia” was a festival in Athens dedicated to the god Dionysus. The god was believed to be present for the performances. Just as New England Puritans were required to go to church, Athenians were required to attend the plays. It was a religious duty. Everyone was expected to honor the gods and goddesses by making sacrifices and performing sacred rites. One thing you definitely didn’t want to do was anger the gods. The plays told stories sacred to the Greeks, including stories about the Trojan War and its aftermath. If you’ve read the Iliad, you will remember that the gods and goddesses of Olympus took sides, and got very involved.

Most of the stories that the Greek playwrights told were tragedies—so much so, that we might get the impression that the Greeks in those days had a “tragic worldview.” But trying to understand how people in Athens at the time of Socrates understood the world and their place in it is extremely challenging. Maybe even a Herculean labor! It’s mind-boggling! So much was going on! And they were going through big changes—thanks in no small part to the philosophers and playwrights.

Aeschylus  (c. 525-455 B.C.E.)

There were three kinds of plays: tragedies, comedies and satyr plays. We have only seven of the seventy to ninety plays that Aeschylus wrote, seven of the more than 120 plays that Sophocles wrote, eighteen of the ninety or so plays that Euripides wrote, and eleven of the forty comedies that Aristophanes wrote. One satyr play survives, “The Cyclops” by Euripides. Every year at the City Dionysia Festival three playwrights would be invited to present four plays each—three tragedies and one satyr play. It’s interesting that after watching three tragedies, full of suffering—Oedipus’ mother hangs herself and he gouges out his own eyes—the mood would shift to a knockabout comedy, full of bawdy humor. (Satyrs spent their time getting drunk and having sex. Greek vases give us ample evidence that ancient Greeks were definitely not Puritans.)

The chorus was an essential part of all Greek plays. In an early play like “The Suppliants,” the chorus of Egyptian women, “Danaïdes,” is the protagonist of the drama. (Lots of words we use today come from the Greek: protagonist, antagonist, drama, tragedy, chorus, catharsis, nemesis, hubris, myth, psyche, eros, idea, and on and on.) Most modern plays don’t have a chorus, but most operas do, and lots of dance productions and musicals do. The Greek chorus didn’t just speak their lines, they sang them. And they danced. Among the many challenges for our production will be integrating music and movement into the performance. Fortunately, one of our collaborators is a dancer-choreographer.

There are a lot more books and essays about Greek Tragedy than about Greek Comedy, but I’d like to say a word or two about Aristophanes. He boldly made fun of the most powerful (and dangerous) men in the city—and they were in the audience! He made fun of everyone and everything, including tragic playwrights, philosophers, gods and goddesses. Most remarkably, he wrote anti-war plays, like Lysistrata—where the women refuse to have sex with their husbands until they end the war—and he did this while his country was at war! It’s a credit to the people of ancient Athens that he got away with it!

I hope we get the grant! For me, going to Greece will be a kind of pilgrimage. I want to see the places where Zeus hit people with lightning bolts, places where gods and goddesses were born, where heroes performed their mighty deeds. I want to walk around the agora, where Socrates spent his days asking his fellow citizens about the meaning of Justice and Virtue. He was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth with his philosophizing. He calmly drank the poison after explaining to his friends why he was completely unafraid to die.