5
Religion was a central part of Greek life, and since the gods’ favour to a city was believed to be essential to its prosperity, the Greek world lacked any division between church and state. Festivals such as the Great Dionysia combine what we would perceive as religious and secular activities: alongside sacrifice and religious ritual we find activities that glorify the Athenian state (see Chapter 1), and events like tragedy that we would call entertainment. Priests and priestesses were public officials, often appointed by the assembly, and holding a priesthood was not a sacred calling but a civic responsibility. Oracles were consulted on state matters such as whether to found a colony or go to war, while gods were believed to have relationships with cities, not just with particular human beings. Nor was religion a purely personal matter, as the gods’ primary interest was in the honour shown to them, rather than in individual belief, and this was achieved through sacrifices, festivals and other forms of ritual practice.
Tragedy itself was performed as part of a religious festival, and portrayed the gods whom the audience worshipped in their daily lives. As Robert Parker notes in his study of Athenian religion: ‘[T]he tragedians can scarcely merely have reflected, but must also have shaped, the religious experience of the citizens, of which they formed a part. The theatre, it can be argued, was the most important arena in Athenian life in which reflection on theological issues was publicly expressed’ (Polytheism and Society at Athens, p. 136). There is no simple answer to the question of what the Greeks believed about their gods. Within the framework of a modern religion such as Christianity we find a spectrum ranging from those who take the Bible literally to those who approach it with a great deal of nuance. Ancient Greek religion, which had no sacred book or religious dogma to bind its worshippers together, must have had still more variety. At one end of the spectrum are rationalists like the historian Thucydides, who criticizes the superstition of most Athenians. Similarly, thinkers like Plato condemned the traditional myths and insisted on a conception of the divine as fundamentally good and just. But Thucydides and Plato were educated intellectuals, and we cannot extrapolate from their beliefs what the average peasant farmer would have thought about religious matters. Most ordinary people probably did not have an intellectually watertight framework for thinking about religion, and might pick and choose aspects of religion that appealed to them, or believe different things in different contexts. The way the gods are presented in tragedy varies from how they behave in (say) lyric poetry, formal hymns or art, but these are not so much inconsistencies as ways of using different media to explore different facets of religion.
Nevertheless, readers of tragedy since antiquity have been troubled by how the plays present the gods. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates finds its portrayal of vengeful gods who bring suffering to mortals so troubling as to ban it (along with Homer and other unsuitable types of poetry) from the ideal city (5.377d–391e), and it is true that the gods of tragedy are profoundly unsettling. This chapter will explore how tragic gods behave, whether there is an overarching tragic theology, and whether we find differences between the tragedians. Aeschylus is said to have described his plays as ‘slices from the banquet of Homer’, and in theology as in so much else, we can see deep-seated continuities between tragedy and the Homeric poems.
Divine honour and divine wills
It was a fundamental tenet of Greek thought that the gods were as, if not more, concerned with their honour as human beings are, and this explained their need for worship. In tragedy, the failure of heroes to honour the gods (or a particular god) is often responsible for their downfall. In Sophocles’ Ajax, for example, we learn that Athena’s hatred for Ajax has come about as a result of his previous rudeness to the goddess. Ajax boasted that being helped by a god is the mark of a weakling, and he compounds this by rejecting Athena’s support in battle (761–77). The idea that mortals should remember their limits is deeply embedded in Greek thought and literature, and it would be obvious to a Greek audience that Ajax’s attitude is likely to incur divine anger. Athena makes this point explicit when she uses Ajax’s downfall as a moral lesson for the watching Odysseus (127–33):
Look at such things then, and never yourself speak an arrogant word towards the gods, nor behave with conceit if you outweigh some other in might or great wealth. Know that one day can topple down all mortal affairs or raise them up again. The gods love those who behave with moderation and hate the wicked.
Athena’s explanation of divine law is reassuring, but the suffering we find in tragedy is not as easy to accept as she suggests. As Aristotle noted (see Chapter 4), tragedy would lack emotional impact if it depicted the justified fall of a wicked man, and while the characters of tragedy may make mistakes in their relationship with the gods, they are not inherently evil people. The gods’ jealousy for their honour means that their punishments go further than we naturally feel is fair. Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae make this point overt, since both plays depict a mortal who is punished with a painful death for failing to respect a deity. Hippolytus and Pentheus are arrogant in their rejection of Aphrodite and Dionysus; both are warned of the dangers of their attitude and choose to disregard this advice. In Hippolytus an elderly servant tells the young hero of the dangers of angering a god, telling him ‘one must treat the gods with honour, my child’ (107). Similarly in Bacchae, Pentheus refuses to acknowledge Dionysus’ divinity, despite warnings from other characters and the god himself. Pentheus mocks the disguised Dionysus, and attempts to humiliate him and crush his religion, as he tries to destroy its ritual objects and imprison its worshippers (493–518). Nevertheless, both young men have redeeming features, and the plays would not be effective if we lacked any sympathy for them. Hippolytus is a virtuous man in many ways (for example, he keeps his oath of silence despite the terrible consequences for his own life), and his piety to Artemis is indisputable. Although Pentheus is foolish to reject Dionysus, he acts from genuine concern that the new religion is undermining society and corrupting the women of Thebes, and he believes that he must protect his citizens from a dangerous new cult. However, Hippolytus’ and Pentheus’ virtue in other areas do them no good, since each god is concerned for his or her own reputation and is entitled to defend it. This punishment frequently involves innocent bystanders, as in Bacchae, where Pentheus’ grandfather Cadmus suffers as a result of his grandson’s actions, although Dionysus has no reason to hate him. When at the end of Bacchae Cadmus suggests that Dionysus’ punishment was excessive, the god replies ‘yes, because I was insulted by you, and I am a god’ (1347). In other words, just as the gods’ power surpasses that of human beings, so does their anger, and they will punish transgressions against them with disproportionate violence.
Figure 5.1 ‘The Death of Hippolytus’, by Giovan Battista Airaghi (1829). (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.)
The story of Hippolytus also highlights the difficulty that humans face in a polytheistic system where each god has his or her own agenda. Hippolytus’ piety towards Artemis is of no interest to Aphrodite, who demands respect in her own right. This model of divine society is inherited from Homer, whose mortals must manoeuvre among the competing wills of different deities. In the Iliad, the gods are divided between those who support the Greeks and those who prefer the Trojans, and they go as far as to fight on the battlefield for their chosen side. The gods offer special support to their favourites (such as the Iliadic Apollo’s love for Hector) but they also bear grudges, as in the Odyssey where Poseidon does everything he can to thwart Odysseus’ homecoming. Divine favour does not necessarily offer protection, since the gods’ affections do not always run deep, and they are often willing to give up humans to achieve some other purpose. For example, Hera in the Iliad offers Zeus the opportunity to wipe out any of her favourite cities in exchange for the guaranteed destruction of Troy (4.51–4). Moreover, being loved by one god does not mean that you are not hated by another, as with Odysseus in the Odyssey, whose patron goddess Athena cannot protect him from Poseidon’s wrath.
Hippolytus deliberately (and unnecessarily) chooses to reject Aphrodite, but sometimes in tragedy it is impossible for mortals to negotiate the competing demands of different gods without angering one. This is the dilemma the chorus describe at the beginning of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, where they report the omen given to the Greek army before they sailed to Troy (104–58). Menelaus and Agamemnon see two eagles, which represent them, feeding on a pregnant hare, which represents Troy and its inhabitants. The prophet Calchas predicts the fall of Troy, but also warns of the anger of Artemis (134–7):
Out of pity, holy Artemis bears a grudge against the winged hounds of her father, who sacrificed the wretched hare, litter and all, before it could give birth. She loathes the eagles’ meal.
Sacking Troy is Zeus’ will, a point made repeatedly by the chorus, who emphasize Paris’ crimes against hospitality. However, as in epic, not all the gods agree with Zeus’ wishes, and Artemis seeks to protect the hare and her young (the Trojans) by delaying the eagles (Agamemnon and Menelaus) and by demanding a compensatory sacrifice of young, namely Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon’s decision as to whether to kill his daughter is compounded by the knowledge that whatever he chooses will anger one of the gods (205–11):
The senior king spoke as follows: ‘fate will be heavy if I do not obey, but heavy if I kill my child, the darling of my house, polluting my fatherly hands with streaming blood from a slaughtered maiden at the altar. Which of these is without evil?’
In the epic poem Cypria, Agamemnon had angered Artemis by boasting that he surpassed her in his skill at archery, so Iphigenia’s death is a punishment for his arrogance. By contrast, Aeschylus presents the scene with no explanation or back-story to soften the blow. Agamemnon simply has to choose, and the suddenness of the scene intensifies our sense of his dilemma.
Double determination, human action
From a modern perspective it is hard not to feel that Agamemnon is put in an unfair position. The Trojan War is Zeus’ will, and is part of necessity, and yet Agamemnon is punished for his actions that make it come to pass. Here we find more continuity with Homer in the principle of double determination, that is, the idea that any action performed by a mortal character is simultaneously capable of two explanations, one on the human level, the other on the divine level. The most important aspect of double determination, and the one most alien to modern audiences, is the fact that divine influence does not diminish the human characters’ responsibility for their actions and the consequences of these actions. While the concept of divine intervention may be hard for moderns to relate to, we are familiar enough with the idea that someone must bear responsibility for their actions and yet has their life shaped by forces greater than them. We do not find it hard to understand a statement like ‘it was inevitable that he would turn to a life of crime, since he was brought up in such terrible circumstances’, nor do we tend to feel that such a person should be let off the hook when they do commit a crime. In Agamemnon’s case, the fact that Zeus wants him to go to Troy does not mean that he has no choice whether to do so, and the language he uses above shows that he knows he has options, even if both are unappealing. In weighing up this choice, he focuses on the (to his mind) particularly awful consequences of not sailing to Troy and so deserting the army. As Agamemnon makes his choice, the chorus say ‘he put on the yoke-strap of necessity’ (218). This image expresses the mixture of fatalism and free will in Agamemnon’s actions. The yoke-strap is an image of subjugation, and he is bound by necessity. Yet Agamemnon puts the yoke-strap on himself, and so it is by making his decision that he commits himself to this course of action and loses his freedom to choose otherwise.
Agamemnon’s fate reveals that the gods of tragedy care about what humans actually do, not what was in their minds when they did it. This basic morality runs through the Oresteia, and is explicitly identified as the justice of Zeus (1562–4):
The striker is struck, the killer pays the price. It stays true while Zeus stays on his throne that the doer suffers. That is what he has ordained.
This is the morality that justifies the fall of Troy, and the punishment of all the Trojans for colluding in Paris’ crimes. It also justifies the killing of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and even though Orestes is acquitted of murder at the end of Kindly Ones, it remains the case that someone who commits a killing must be tried, and if they are convicted they face death. This cycle of crime and punishment may be harsh, but it is also predictable, and people who commit wrong acts must do so in the knowledge that they and those around them will be punished.
However, the gods’ focus on actions rather than intentions raises the issue that humans may transgress inadvertently. This lies at the heart of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, where Oedipus has committed terrible crimes, but has done so in ignorance. Oedipus’ fate is doubly determined, since we learn of the oracle that predicted his acts before his birth, but are also told how Oedipus made the choices that led him to kill his father and marry his mother. When asked by the chorus at the end of the play which of the gods led him to blind himself, he names Apollo and himself as the agents (1327–32), and so emphasizes that both divine influence and human will acted together to determine what happened. Yet we are never given an explanation as to why the gods should have burdened Oedipus with such a fate, and this lack of justification makes Oedipus’ downfall seem particularly harsh. Moreover Oedipus, unlike Agamemnon, is not in a position to recognize the implications of the choices he makes, and his ignorance makes us feel great pity for him, because of the mismatch between his intentions and his actions (and the terrible consequences that result from them). Sophocles thus explores the ramifications of the theology that ‘the doer suffers’. We learn at the start of the play that the gods wish the killer of Laius to be punished, and the characters assume throughout the play that he is a wicked man who has acted out of viciousness. When Oedipus’ identity is unveiled, no one doubts that he must be punished, and yet his ignorance makes his fate horrifying. Sophocles highlights the gulf between our instinctive feeling that our intentions make a difference, and the traditional divine focus on actions. The terrifying power of the play derives from our understanding that any of us might act in ignorance, and yet, as the modern philosopher Bernard Williams put it, ‘in the story of one’s life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done’ (Shame and Necessity, p. 74).
Euripides the ‘radical’ and divine morality
Thus far we have assumed a coherent ‘tragic theology’ that can be found across different plays. However, there is a long tradition of treating Euripides as an iconoclast and his reputation for radicalism is largely based on his treatment of the gods. This dates back to Aristophanes, who makes a vendor of religious garlands complain in his comedy Women at the Thesmophoria that Euripides’ plays have damaged her business, since he has persuaded many people that the gods do not exist (450–2). Modern scholars have often accepted the image of Euripides as a rebel, and this continues to be the dominant tradition in studies of his work.
It is true that the gods of Euripides act selfishly and that their behaviour is disturbing. However, as we have seen, this is a tradition that date back to Homer, and although Euripides may foreground it in his work, it is by no means unique to him. We must be cautious in using Aristophanes as a source, since humour can be hard to interpret. Jokes may be funny because they are true, but they can also generate humour for quite different reasons (for example, because they are so bizarre and far from reality). The garland-seller’s comments must be taken with a certain detachment: it would be strange to claim that the logical response to a play like Bacchae, where a mortal is severely punished for refusing to accept divinity, would be to stop worshipping the gods. We have also seen that there are basic theological continuities across tragedy. It is hard to argue that it is worse for Aphrodite to punish Hippolytus than for Athena to punish Ajax, when both mortals are guilty of the crime of disrespect. However, the clearest difference between Euripides and his rivals is the frequency with which his gods appear on stage. Twelve of his seventeen surviving tragedies contain a divine appearance, compared with only one of Aeschylus’ six (excluding Prometheus Bound) and two of Sophocles’ seven. A play like Ajax, where we are confronted with a vengeful deity explaining their motivations, appears to have been fairly unusual for Sophocles. In most of Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ plays, human characters may claim to know what the gods wish, but their actual intentions are left veiled as we can access them only through oracles, portents and fallible human understanding. Presenting the gods on stage makes us confront their motivations, and rather than mysterious and wise, they often seem petty and personal.
Moreover, Euripides’ plays often contain characters who complain about the behaviour of the gods, and who suggest that they ought to be kinder than they really are. The servant in Hippolytus who warns the hero of Aphrodite’s anger prays to the goddess and begs her to let her grudge go, telling her that ‘gods should be wiser than men’ (120). Similarly, Cadmus at the end of Bacchae claims that ‘it is not right for gods to be like mortals in their anger’ (1348), while in Ion the young hero is appalled by the story of a divine rape and chastises Apollo for behaving in a way that a human being would be criticized for, telling him ‘since you have power, pursue goodness’ (439–40). Within the context of the plays, all of these characters are shown to be wrong: the gods are angry, vengeful and act to pursue their own agendas. By uttering these complaints, Euripides’ characters highlight the paradox within traditional myths about the gods, whereby the gods act as arbiters of mortal behaviour, and yet act in a way that humans could not get away with. This idea is made explicit by Ion, who argues that the gods should be moral examples, and that by raping a mortal woman, Apollo has lost the right to enforce the law (441–51). Yet divine rape is a traditional part of Greek myth, just as is the idea that gods guard their honour. While Euripides’ gods behave no better or worse than the gods of Greek myth more widely, it is true that he draws our attention to the theological issues involved in believing in gods like this.
We know that these ideas were debated outside tragedy, as for example in Plato’s Euthyphro, a dialogue on the nature of holiness and piety, where Socrates criticizes myths that present the gods doing things that we would normally regard as wrong. This sense of a contemporary debate is found at the end of Euripides’ Heracles, where Heracles and Theseus discuss the nature of the divine, with Theseus attacking the gods for their dysfunctional family lives (which include violence and sexual impropriety) while Heracles denies that these stories are true (1341–6):
I do not think that the gods enjoy inappropriate love affairs or bind each other in chains. I have never believed it and will never be persuaded, and nor will I believe that one of them is master of another. A god needs nothing, if he is really god. These are the wretched stories of poets.
Heracles adopts the same attitude as Plato’s Socrates, denying that a god worthy of the name can behave in an immoral fashion, and blaming poetry for propagating inappropriate views on the divine. Yet the play Heracles depicts a particularly clear example of the gods’ vindictiveness, since Heracles has done nothing wrong, and yet is driven mad by Hera and forced to murder his own children. Even the goddess of madness, Lyssa, finds Hera’s actions distasteful, and argues that Heracles has benefitted mankind and demonstrated piety, and so does not deserve to suffer (843–54). Euripides’ play does not explain why Hera hates Heracles, but the audience would have known the myth that she was jealous of Zeus’ philandering and hated him because he was the product of one of her husband’s many affairs with mortal women. There is therefore an irony in a man who owes his existence to an inappropriate love affair denying that gods can do such things, and in the victim of divine malice insisting on their perfection. Heracles claims that these stories are invented by the poets, and expressing this thought within a tragedy makes it a self-conscious reflection on Euripides’ own place in theological debate, and what role tragedy should play in shaping the audience’s beliefs.
The idea of gods as moral arbiters presupposes that they care about more than simply their own honour. While ensuring their own worship remains the gods’ primary concern, gods in tragedy are sometimes interested in other issues that we might describe more broadly as ‘ethical’, and humans are punished for transgressions of this moral code. In Sophocles’ Antigone, for example, we learn from the prophet Tiresias that the gods are offended by Creon’s refusal to bury Polynices, and that treatment of the dead is a matter of religious scruple and can incur punishment if abused (998–1022, 1064–76). Similarly, the chorus of Agamemnon are confident in Zeus’ role in overseeing the code of hospitality, and the reason for Troy’s fall is Paris’ offence against the sacred relationship between guest and host (700–16). There is not a clear line, however, between abstract morality and the gods’ own interests. Zeus is the god responsible for hospitality, and so transgressing against it is an insult to his status. The gods in Antigone do not care about Polynices as an individual, but refusing to bury a corpse breaches the boundary between the underworld and the upper world, which brings pollution upon them. The personal and the moral can overlap, as in Euripides’ Trojan Women, where Athena and Poseidon discuss the punishment in store for the Greek fleet, in return for their abuses during the sack of Troy. Athena is personally offended because Ajax has raped her priestess Cassandra, which shows disrespect for the goddess and her sanctuary (69–86). When Poseidon agrees to help Athena by stirring up a storm, he points out the wider moral significance of acts like these, warning the audience that people who sack cities and desecrate shrines and graves will always incur divine punishment (95–7).
Tragedy presents a wide range of aspects of religion: we see gods appear on stage, we hear different characters’ views about the gods, and we encounter supernatural occurrences through prophecy, oracles, omens, and ghosts. The age of heroes was believed to be much closer to the gods than the contemporary world, and the heroes, who were often children of the gods themselves, had access to the divine in a way that a tragic audience would never expect to. It would be wrong to claim that the gods of tragedy are never kind. In Aeschylus’ Kindly Ones, for example, we see Apollo defending a mortal from persecution, while Athena changes the whole system of crime and punishment in order to end the perpetual cycle of violence. Similarly, we see loving relationships between humans and individual gods (as with Hippolytus and Artemis), and the gods of Euripides often appear at the end of a play to fix the mess made by mortals. Nevertheless, tragedy tends to focus on the darker side of divine behaviour, just as it portrays the worst of human relationships within the family and the community. While religious and celebratory poetry expresses the community’s hopes regarding the gods (that they will love us if we worship them and behave well; that they will protect us from evil and listen to our prayers), tragedy explores its fears that humans suffer inexplicably, and that correct behaviour is no guarantee that we will have a happy life. As we saw in Chapter 1, the greatest theme of tragedy is human suffering, and as such it must confront the problem of why the gods allow this to happen and how we can reconcile what we experience of the world with a belief in powerful and just deities. Tragedy offers its audience a safe space to explore the difficult truth that life is often unfair, and that bad things happen to good people. The justice of the gods in tragedy is harsh and uncompromising, but their punishments are not random. This sense of order and predictability may not soothe us, but it elevates the suffering of the characters to give it some sense of purpose.