Socrates: A Man for Our Times (5 page)

Socrates was also fascinated, as various dialogues recorded by both Plato and Xenophon indicate, by the whole process of illusion in art, and entasis is one of its subtlest applications. We have to assume that Phidias, in consultation with Pericles, was responsible for what architects now call these “refinements,” for they added considerably to the cost. At the Parthenon, the upward curvature in the east
krepidoma
and the batter or inverted inclination of the exterior planes of walls were amazing and expensive features. Indeed this great building marked the climax of optical sophistication in the architecture of antiquity. The deflections, while adding enormously to the difficulty of erecting the Parthenon, which was made throughout from the finest marble, greatly enhanced its beauty and stability, and explains why, despite the efforts of barbarians, Turks, Venetian artillerymen, and others, it has somehow survived two and a half millennia.

The Parthenon was embellished, inside and out, by sculpture of the highest quality, under Phidias’s watchful eye, and occasional master hand and chisel. The best of it was saved by Lord Elgin and can still be seen, gloriously displayed, in the British Museum. In its entirety it marks the culmination of the art of ancient Greece, and no more need be said here—except on one point, of great interest to Socrates. Greek temples were the homes of the gods, and their decorations, outside and within, portrayed the activities of immortals. That was a religious duty and an inflexible artistic convention. However, in the Parthenon, the frieze shows a procession of mortals: Athenian citizens moving in their ranks to honor Athena. This is the first and one of the few surviving examples where a gathering of mortal men and women, albeit for a sacred purpose, is represented on a Greek temple. All others portray gods or heroic mythology. That this innovation was deliberate and authorized at the highest level we cannot doubt, and it marked the most adventurous point of Periclean humanism. To Socrates it must have been the most significant feature of the entire cultural enterprise that Pericles launched.

We look at these marble figures, in the British Museum and elsewhere, and admire the majestic monumentality of the Parthenon in respectful silence. But such images need to be seen in their aural context of poetry and music. We should never try to conjure up the spirit of Socrates in silence. The Greeks had ascended from barbarism by creating civilized, controlled, and disciplined sounds, whether spoken in poetry, sung in chorus, or sung solo to the accompaniment of various instruments, especially the stringed lyre and the flute, or twin-piped aulos. Greeks recited or sang poetry long before they learned to write prose, and music was a form of moral training centuries before their thinkers turned to ethics.

In the fifth century B.C. the Greeks, conscious of the enormous emotional power of music, began to investigate systematically its intellectual aspects. Pythagoras, in what is now Italy, discovered the relationship between musical intervals and mathematics, and in Athens, Damon became almost the first to write extensively on music, especially about the ethical effects on people of various rhythms and scales. Both Damon and his teacher Prodicus were well known to Socrates and esteemed by him; and Plato, whom Socrates introduced to the whole subject of musical ethics, had much to say on the subject when he came to write, especially the
Republic
.

Socrates, I suspect, had a poor musical ear. Although he knew that a man seeking wisdom and virtue ought to attend to music, he found it hard to do so. He exculpated himself by arguing that philosophy was the finest kind of music. In old age he aspired to learn the lyre, the instrument most accessible to amateurs, as the guitar is for us today. He never doubted the importance of music and listened to Damon earnestly. It is significant that Damon had been Pericles’ tutor. Music offered a unique means to involve large numbers of citizens of both sexes and all ages in public events. There were endless religious processions, with singing and musical accompaniment. A special building, the Pompeion, near the Dipylon Gate of Athens, was erected at the spot where processions assembled. Virgins carried sacred implements at the head of the procession. Old men bore green branches. Youths led sacrificial animals. Often chariots and men on horseback followed. Marshals kept order. An orchestra was part of all processions.

Pictures on pottery—our chief window on fifth-century Athens—give us illuminating glimpses of ceremonial music. A black-figure Attic amphora done thirty years before Socrates was born, now in the Munich Gallery of Antique Art, shows such a band of aulos and kithara (the professional form of lyre), barbitos (a bass lyre), and clappers—the clapper man dancing. Instrumentalists were usually men—women specialized in the harp, which was too large to be portable—but men, women, boys, and girls sang in the choirs. The lyre had originally been made from the shell of a tortoise, which formed the soundbox, but this had been replaced by wood in Socrates’ day. The kithara was more substantial, its arms prolonging the soundbox, and being big and heavy had to be held against the body, with a strap running over the shoulders and a band attached to the left wrist to steady it. A lyre, being much lighter, could be played by women. We also see them on pottery playing the aulos.

Only about a thousand bars of ancient Greek music has survived (some of them carved on rock), but Aristoxenus, a musical theorist born a generation after Socrates’ death, says the notes covered three octaves and were grouped in five vocal headings, corresponding to bass, baritone, tenor, alto, and soprano, the last two often sung by children. Music was of several different types: processionals, with a strong beat of various speeds; religious hymns; comic hymns to Dionysus called dithyrambs, sung under the influence of alcohol and male-only; and paeans, songs of praise to gods and goddesses and to heroes, both mythical and contemporary.

The paean flourished under Pericles, who liked to add a triumphant, even military note to public occasions. He usually had himself sculpted wearing a helmet, visor lifted, showing his stern, handsome features: There is a fine Roman copy of a fifth-century-B.C. bronze original in the British Museum. But thanks to his efforts, music became a much more important element in Athenian life, and in Socrates’ time we begin to hear of professional composers: Cinesias, Timotheus, Philoxenus, Melanip-pides, though not one of their notes survives. Greece had held musical competitions for some time, at Delphi, for instance, for the Pythian Games: One of Pindar’s odes celebrates the victory of an aulos player. But Pericles created the Panathenaea music festival at Athens, which included prizes for every kind of music, including solo singing to the kithara and aulos, and the solo playing of both. Socrates’ eventual interest in music and its ethical implications reflects this increase in quality and variety.

The dynamism of Pericles’ cultural revolution likewise affected the theater, though it is misleading to draw any clear distinction between music and drama, even though the Athenian theater and the Odeon were two separate buildings, for most musical performances had dramatic elements, and nothing performed on the stage was without a musical element, before and after and often during the dramatic recitations. The Greeks did not feel there was much difference between the rhythm of their music and their poetical meters. The original essence of the drama was the chorus, chanted or sung. The unit was not the metrical foot but the phrase, and poets built up phrases of their choral lyrics into complex stanzas. The Greeks had always produced poets, long before they became literate. And all poetry was religious in origin: That is, it dealt with the actions of gods and their relations with men and women. Poets recited their works, which they knew by heart of course—a tradition still valid in England, for example, in the days of Coleridge and Wordsworth. And the audience learned them by heart too, in part; sometimes whole, even in Socrates’ day. He refers to a friend who could recite the whole of the
Iliad
. Homer’s works were quasi-religious, the nearest equivalent the Greeks had to the Jewish Torah, since they not only recounted their history but taught, after a fashion, manners and morals, too.

The theater was also religious in origin, springing from the cult of Dionysus. This half-human, half-animal, tragicomic, bibulous, and satyr-like god, springing from a barbarous tribal past, has no equivalent in Judeo-Christian religion and is difficult for us to understand. Yet his hold on the Greek cultural imagination was very powerful, and the fact that Socrates had a strong facial and bodily resemblance to caricatures of the god was an important source of his fascination to Athenians, his popularity and his unpopularity. They could not take their eyes off him when he held forth. Dionysus stood for the aspect of religion we would call fundamentalist or evangelical: highly emotional, noisy, singing, clapping, shouting, and dancing. Its solemnity was heavily qualified by wine-drinking, especially by the men. The women went into ecstatic convulsions and were then known as maenads. They wore human masks. This was the true origin of the drama, which in time bifurcated into comic and tragic performances.

Initially music played a dominant role, and the main performers were the chorus. In both its moods, it was much closer to what we would call an oratorio than a play. In the original Dionysiac drama, the dithyramb to the god was a hymn in the form of an ode, and the action was a service of worship, the chorus being the Athenian people doing homage to their god. Gradually the Dionysiac element diminished, then disappeared, clinging on only in the comedies as a species of masked buffoonery. Meanwhile plays appeared in which both the action and the lyrics presented in dramatic form stories from Greek myths and legends that were essentially tragic, the chorus providing narrative commentary and pointing morals. There were religious dramas throughout Socrates’ lifetime and well into the fourth century B.C., for the subject matter was the relations between humans and the gods who controlled their destiny.

Some Greeks were coming to believe in the idea of eternal life and the immortality of the soul—it was a central theme of Socrates’ thinking—and the Dionysian theater, certainly in its tragic form, gave a spur to these beliefs, as Dionysus was the Lord of Souls. Similar notions of eternity and soul salvation were stirring in other civilized societies in the fifth century B.C., especially in Egypt and still more in Hebrew Palestine. The Hebrews even developed a form of drama as a result of these forces, a notable example being the Book of Job, which has survived because it found its way into the canonical writings. Scholars seem to think its date was around 400 B.C., the time of Socrates’ death, when Greek tragic drama had matured but was still religious. With its mocking chorus, Job’s dialogue with God, and its tremendous descriptions of the natural world, Job is essentially a play about the mysterious workings of God’s providence, and it is poetry intended to be recited in public—all characteristic of Greek fifth-century-B.C. drama. It would be surprising if it was not influenced by the Greek religious theater, as were no doubt other Hebrew plays now lost to us. There is no evidence I know of that Jews visited Athens or lived there in Socrates’ time, but plenty of Greeks lived in Palestine.

We now see this tragic poetry of Athens, usually enacted first in the Theater of Dionysus, as Greece’s greatest contribution to world literature, Homer alone excepted. It was changing and maturing throughout the fifth century B.C. but Pericles’ cultural program hugely accelerated its development. Competition became annual, and substantial prizes were awarded. There were in consequence a large number of playwrights, but the stage was dominated by three. The earliest and historically the founder of the genre was Pericles’ favorite, Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.), who had fought at the Battle of Marathon and probably Salamis, too. He was a passionate Athenian religious patriot. He won many competitions in his lifetime, and his plays continued to receive prizes after his death, but only 7 out of 70 to 80 have survived. We have only 7 by Sophocles (496–406) too, though he wrote 136, and 96 secured first or second prizes (he was never third). Euripides (485–406) was more fortunate: We have the texts of 19 of his plays out of 92, and he, too, won prizes.

According to Aristotle, who wrote at length about the theater, it was invented by Thespis, a sixth-century writer who introduced a solo actor who alternated with the chorus. Aeschylus built on this innovation and had two actors, three in his late plays, though it was Sophocles who brought in the third actor. Soon there were four or more, and as the actors multiplied, the role of the chorus, originally dominant, declined. It became a mere episode between scenes, like our curtain, and by the end of the fifth century B.C. had ceased to have anything to do with the play, being a mere musical punctuation mark. The religious element declined, too, after the death of Aeschylus, and the mythical heroes and heroines were developed into real-life characters. Sophocles and, still more, Euripides invented episodes, and toward the end of the century a new playwright, Agathon, who won his first victory in 416 B.C., when still a young man, invented entire plays, such as his
Antheus
, though only forty of his lines have survived. Plato’s
Symposium
about Socrates was to celebrate this victory.

In Socrates’ day there was no such thing as a purpose-built theater, like the magnificent one at Epidaurus, with its superb acoustics, which allow someone in the back row to hear whispers on the stage. Everything took place in broad daylight, though some scenes were set at night. Sophocles introduced stage scenery, and soon actors entered and left through doors, though there was no upper stage until the fourth century, after Socrates’ death. Plays were taken with increasing seriousness and great efforts were made to judge the competitions fairly. Athens was divided into ten districts (originally tribes), and names of winners from each were sealed in an urn. But Plato says that decisions of judges were usually determined by the amount of applause from the audience.