Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ intrusive rudeness of Penelope’s suitors who, in their confidence that her husband, Odysseus, will never return to punish them, are breaking all the rules of decency.

      Homeric usage, then, idealizes a society in which the way of things has not been subjected to serious challenge. Dik does not appear as a standard of justice against which the prevailing order can and should be judged. But a very different meaning of dik already appears in the work of Homer’s near, if not exact, contemporary, Hesiod; and it is surely significant that the poet in this case is speaking not for nobles but for peasants. Himself a ‘middling’ farmer in Boeotia, Hesiod is no radical; yet his poem, Works and Days, is not only a compendium of farming information and moral advice but also a long poetic grumble about the lot of hard-working farmers and the injustices perpetrated against them by greedy lords. In this context, dik appears in the figure of a goddess who sits at the right hand of Zeus. Hesiod tells us that she watches and judges ‘gift-eating’ or ‘bribe-swallowing’ lords who use their judicial prerogatives to exploit the peasantry by means of ‘crooked’ judgments. Dik, Hesiod warns, will make sure that the crooked lords get their come-uppance. The poet, to be sure, is not calling for a peasant revolt, but he is certainly doing something of great conceptual significance. He is proposing a concept of justice that stands apart from the jurisdiction of the lords, a standard against which they and their judgments can and must themselves be judged. It could hardly be more different from Homer’s customary and unchallenged aristocratic way of things.

      The difference between Homer and Hesiod is social no less than conceptual, the one idealizing an unchallenged dominant class whose values and judgments pass for universal norms, the other speaking for a divided community in which social norms, and the authority of dominant classes, are acknowledged objects of conflict. The issues raised here by poetry would become the subject of complex and abstract debates, for which writing would increasingly become the favoured medium, reaching fruition in the philosophical discourse of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, especially in democratic Athens. The kind of systematic enquiry that the Greeks had already applied to the natural order would be extended to moral rules and political arrangements. Dik would pass from the poetry of Homer and Hesiod to the elaborate philosophical speculations of Plato on justice or dikaiosune in The Republic, as opponents of the democracy (of which Plato was the most notable example) could no longer rely on tradition and were obliged to construct their defence of social hierarchy on a wholly new foundation.

      The Culture of Democracy

      To get a sense of how much the issues of political theory permeated the whole of Athenian culture, it is worth considering how moral and political questions arose not only in formal philosophy but also in other, more popular cultural forms, notably in drama. The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides tell us a great deal about the atmosphere in which political philosophy emerged. We have already seen how political debate intruded into Euripides’s Suppliant Women. In Aeschylus, the first of the major tragedians, the questions of political theory are introduced with greater subtlety but are also more integral to the dramatic action. Aeschylus was particularly well placed to judge the importance of the changes that Athens had undergone. He grew up in an age of tyranny and war. Having fought at Marathon, he saw the democracy come into its own. With experience of the past and steeped in its traditions, he was nevertheless very much a part of the new climate, in which citizens were forced to confront new questions about the moral and political responsibility of ordinary humans who no longer looked upon themselves as simply playthings of the gods or obedient subjects of lords and kings.

      His classic trilogy, The Oresteia, appeared in 458 not long after the murder of the democratic leader Ephialtes, who had deprived the Areopagus of its traditional functions, apart from its role as a homicide court. It is likely that Aeschylus was, among other things, conveying the message that this old aristocratic institution, while it still had a role to play in the democracy, had been rightly displaced by more democratic institutions. The trilogy has as its central theme a confrontation between two conflicting conceptions of justice, in the form of a contest between the endless cycle of traditional blood vengeance and new principles of judgment by judicial procedure. The first represents Destiny, the fury of uncontrollable fate; the other, human responsibility – an opposition that may also represent the antithesis of old aristocratic principles of kinship and blood rivalry as against the judicial procedures of a democratic civic order.

      The murder of Agamemnon, king of Argos, by his wife, Clytemnestra, sets in train what could be an endless cycle of blood, as Orestes obeys an apparently natural law and avenges his father’s death by killing Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. The inexorable laws of revenge mean that Orestes, pursued by the Furies, must also become the victim of blood vengeance, and so the cycle will go on and on. There is also, in a confrontation between the Furies and the god Apollo, a clash between old principles of kinship – represented by the Furies – and Apollo’s commitment to patriarchal-aristocratic right, according to which the murder of a king is a crime in a way that matricide is not. The resolution comes in the last of the three plays with the establishment, on the instructions of Athena, of a court to hear the case of Orestes and end the matter once and for all. The jury will be manned not by gods or lords but by citizen jurors. Aeschylus still gives the gods a role, and fear will still play a part in enforcing the law – as the Furies become the more benign Eumenides. Nor does the tragedian repudiate the customs and traditions of the old Athens. But he is unambiguous about the importance of replacing the force and violence of the old order with new principles of reason, the rule of law and ‘Holy Persuasion’, the kind of order established by the polis and its civic principles – in particular, the democratic polis ruled by its citizens and not by kings or lords.

      The attribution to Aeschylus of another play, Prometheus Bound, has been put in question, although his authorship was generally accepted in antiquity. Yet, whether or not it can be read as expressing his views, it tells us much about the culture of Athenian democracy, if we compare its telling of the Promethean myth to other versions of the story. The myth in what is probably its more conventional form appears in Hesiod. Prometheus steals fire from Zeus as a gift to humanity. In his anger, Zeus threatens to make humanity pay for this gift. There follows the story of Pandora’s ‘box’, a storage jar containing the threatened ‘gift’ from Zeus. Contrary to the advice of her brother-in-law Prometheus, she opens the jar and releases every evil, ending a golden age when the fruits of the earth were enjoyed without effort, and humanity was free of labour, sorrow and disease, although hope remains trapped inside. Hesiod combines this with another story about stages in the decline of humanity, which was once equal to the gods but is now a race that works and grieves unceasingly. For Hesiod, this is, in the main, a story about the pains of daily life and work. In Aeschylus’s recounting of the Prometheus story, as in other variations on the same themes in Sophocles, and in the Sophist Protagoras, it becomes a hymn in praise of human arts and those who practise them.

      In this first and only surviving play of a trilogy, (pseudo?) Aeschylus’s Prometheus, being ruthlessly punished by Zeus for his pride, is presented as a benefactor to humanity. He has given them the various mental and manual skills that have made life possible and good, ending the condition of misery and confusion in which they had first been created. He also represents the love of freedom and justice, expressing contempt for Zeus’s autocracy and the servile humility of the god’s messenger, Hermes. As in The Oresteia, the tragedian is not here repudiating the gods or tradition, and there may be some right on both sides. But there is no mistaking the importance of the way he tells the Promethean story. Human arts, skills and crafts in his version betoken not the fall of humanity but, on the contrary, its greatest gift. The full political significance of this becomes evident not only when we contrast this view of the arts to the practices of Sparta, where the only ‘craft’ permitted to citizens was war, but also, as we shall see, if we compare it to Plato’s retelling of the myth, where labour is again presented as a symbol of decline, in the context of an argument designed to exclude practitioners of these ordinary human arts, the labouring classes, from the specialized ‘craft’ of politics.

      In Sophocles’s Antigone, as СКАЧАТЬ