Civilization #9: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as Prophets of Democracy

Okay, so we will do Greek theater today. Now, as a society, every society has a problem. The problem is, how do we organize the thinking of the people within our society? How do you create an identity? And in modern society there are institutions that create a collective identity for society. So the first would be, what? Exactly, thank you, schools, right? So public schools. You're here to learn about the history of China, you're here to learn about the politics of China, right? The idea is to make everyone think alike or have the same basic knowledge and worldview. Okay, what's another institution that does this? The media, right? So mass media. So when you turn on a TV, when you read a Chinese newspaper, it's presenting a particular worldview, and when you absorb this worldview you become more Chinese, right? And what's the last institution that helps us form a collective identity in China? Entertainment, right? Mass culture. This includes TV shows, this includes movies, this includes books. Does that make sense? So through these three institutions societies can create a national identity, and depending on your society you create a different worldview, right? So in America, Americans would want to create an individualistic identity, whereas in China we want to create a collectivist identity.

Okay, so what I will show you today is Greek society, Athenian society, was doing the same thing, but it was doing it through theater. And the main function of theater was to create an identity as a democratic citizen. Why do we have a democracy? What does it mean to live in a democracy? What is your responsibility as a citizen to be in a democracy? So that's what theater does in Athens.

So let me give you some background about theater. Theater formed the basic structure of society. There are two months of the year when everyone went to the theater, once in winter and once in the summertime, and they were called the Festival of Dionysus. Dionysus was the Greek god of the theater, of art, of music, of sex, of wine. And so the Festival of Dionysus, there were religious elements to it, but it was mainly about watching theater, and through the process of watching theater Athenians created a national identity that they all believed in. So this happened twice a year for one month and it was free for everyone. It's the rich who paid for all the place to be performed, and that's how the rich, the aristocratic families, won favor from the people.

In fact, Athenians considered going to the theater the greatest birthright of being an Athenian. That was the privilege and the right of being an Athenian. It was the highest honor in Athens to participate in the festival as a playwright, and every festival there would be two competitors, and they were called the protagonist and the antagonist. So today we know that protagonist means the hero of a novel, antagonist means the villain of a novel, but back then all this meant was you were the first competitor, and then the antagonist was the second competitor.

And the entire point of theater was to promote democracy in Athens, and they did that through many mechanisms. First of all, whoever won the festival was decided by popular vote. The entire process of theater was democratic. There were no professional actors in Athens, people were selected from the community to act out the play, and everyone participated in watching the play. In fact, the largest amphitheaters, these are all outdoor theaters, could hold 10,000 people, 10, 15,000 people. The maximum population of Athens was 50,000 people. So this was a huge community event that brought everyone together, and they loved it.

The three most famous playwrights in Athens at that time were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. These were really playwrights, poets, but they were first and foremost prophets of democracy. They were teachers of democracy who told the Athenian people why do we have democracy, why is democracy good, and how should we protect and promote our democracy. All right, so in their plays the very heart and soul of their plays was about the promotion of democracy in Athens, and these three were the most admired of all the playwrights. Everyone at that time wanted to be a playwright because that was the highest honor in Athens. So to win first place at the Festival of Dionysus is like winning the Nobel Prize in physics today. Okay, so what I will do now is go over the most famous plays so we can understand how they promoted democracy through their artwork.

But are there any questions so far before I continue? Yes, it's an amphitheater. Okay, so that's a great question about acoustics. We call this acoustics. So how the theater was designed was like this. You had the stage and then the theater was designed like this, like an oval.

So in other words, the sound was captured like in a cavern, in a cave, so there was resonance, but obviously you were required to shout out the words slowly so everyone can hear. That's the first thing. Second thing is these plays were so popular everyone memorized the lines, you understand? So they already knew the content of the plays, but they wanted to participate in the community aspect of the play. Does that make sense? So the two things: the theater was designed in a way so that sound traveled very freely in the theater so everyone can hear, but also everyone memorized the lines anyway. Okay, does that make sense? Okay, great question. All right, any more questions before I continue?

All right, so let's talk about Aeschylus, because he was really the first of the major playwrights, and he wrote a play called the Oresteia, and I will explain to you the plot of the Oresteia before I explain to you the meaning and interpretation of the play. All these plays come from Greek mythology because everyone knows mythology, and so what the playwrights did was they took material from Greek mythology and packaged it in a contemporary context to explore modern themes.

Okay, all right. So the play is set in a place called Argos, and during the Mycenaean period, so this is before the Bronze Age collapse in Mycenaean Greece. Argos was the most powerful city in Mycenaean Greece, and when the king died he left the throne to his eldest son, named Atreus. But often what happens in these cases is the younger brother refuses to accept the authority of the eldest and he rebels. So a war was fought over the Argos throne, Atreus won, and then his brother comes and begs for forgiveness. And Atreus, being the king, says, you're my brother, I want to show I'm a benevolent king, so I will forgive you, and to show that I forgive you I will host for you a banquet and a feast. And so the younger brother is very happy about this. But during the feast, before the feast, what Atreus does is he kills all the sons of his younger brother and he cooks them, and during the feast he feeds it to his younger brother. And when his younger brother finds out about this, he dies after this, but before he dies he curses Atreus and says, "Curse upon you and your house, because a feast is a contract between you and the gods.

When you hold a feast you promise the gods this feast will be peaceful, and so people trust you and come and eat your food. So when you poison your food like this you are insulting the gods, so I curse you and your entire house." Okay, and then he dies, but before he dies his son Aegisthus escapes. So his only remaining son is Aegisthus, and Aegisthus is responsible now for avenging the death of his family.

Okay, all right, so Atreus becomes king, he has two sons who inherit his throne. The first is Agamemnon, who becomes king of Argos, and he is the king of kings. He is the one who starts the Trojan War and launches an invasion of Troy. And his brother is Menelaus, who becomes king of Sparta, and they both marry sisters. They marry two sisters: Agamemnon marries Clytemnestra and Menelaus marries Helen. This is important because remember, Helen runs away to Troy, and Menelaus tells his brother Agamemnon, Agamemnon gets upset, and they agree to organize this massive Greek army to invade, destroy Troy and get Helen back. Okay, but when they're about to set sail for Troy there's no wind, and Agamemnon knows the gods are not happy with them.

So Agamemnon consults a fortune teller who tells him how to win the favor of the gods. He tells Agamemnon, you have to sacrifice your daughter Iphigenia. And at this point Agamemnon should be like, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to sacrifice my daughter Iphigenia so that I could go to Troy, and why do I want to go to Troy in the first place, right? Helen is not my wife, it's Menelaus's wife, not my problem, right? I should just give this up because obviously the gods don't want me to go. That's what he should do. But instead he's like, fine, I'll I my daughter. Okay, so he kills his daughter Iphigenia, the wind is released from the skies and they set sail to Troy. And we know what happens: they're there for 10 years and end up destroying Troy.

Who's really pissed now? Who's really angry now? Who's really angry about all this? Clytemnestra, right, the wife of Agamemnon, because their daughter has been killed for like no reason. Okay, so Clytemnestra, while Agamemnon is away for 10 years, she plots her revenge. What she does is she finds Aegisthus and they become lovers, and they plot how to avenge the death of Iphigenia.

So 10 years later, when Agamemnon comes back from Troy victorious, Clytemnestra kills him, and she makes Aegisthus now king of Argos. The problem is that Agamemnon has a son named Orestes, and Orestes during this time was exiled from Argos. And now Orestes, upon hearing the death of his father, is now honor-bound to kill his mother. Now obviously he doesn't want to do that. So he's struggling emotionally about what to do, so he consults Apollo, who is basically the god of justice, and Apollo tells him you are right and just to want to avenge your father. So Orestes goes back to Argos and he kills his mother Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and now he's king of Argos.

The problem now is, because he's killed his mother, there are these demons called the Furies who come up from the underworld and they begin to haunt him. They're torturing him, and Orestes becomes so tortured he runs away from Argos, and he's trying to run away from the Furies but the Furies refuse to let him go. And Orestes says to them, "I killed my mother in order to avenge my father.

That was the right and just thing to do." And the Furies say to him, "We are old gods, we are responsible for maintaining order and structure in the universe. One thing that you cannot do is kill your parents, especially your mother. By doing so you are breaking the order of the universe, therefore we will haunt you for the rest of eternity. We will not let you go." Okay, Orestes goes and talks to Apollo, and Apollo tries to intercede on behalf of Orestes, and the Furies say to him, "You are a young god, you are a new god. We are the old gods, we are much older than you are, we are much wiser than you are, you have no authority over us. We don't care about justice, we don't care about the laws of men, we care about the laws of the universe, and Orestes has broken the law of the universe." Okay, so now Orestes is in a lot of trouble, and so in an act of desperation the last thing he does is he runs to Athens, where Athena is, and Athena is the goddess of wisdom. So Orestes tells Athena the goddess his story and he begs for her help. Okay, and Athena takes pity on Orestes, and she basically says, I'm going to convene a jury of 500 Athenian citizens, and you will make your case before them, the Furies will make their case before them, and they will decide whether or not you are guilty.

Okay, so both Orestes and the Furies make their case, and morally speaking both cases are compelling, right? Because even though Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon, the fact of the matter is Agamemnon was an right. Agamemnon killed their daughter for no particular reason and then he went off to Troy and killed a lot of people for like no reason as well. Okay, so both cases were very strong, and so at the end of the day 250 Athenians decided Orestes was guilty, 250 decided he was innocent. So it's what we call a hung jury. It was divided evenly. So what then happens now is Athena comes in and says, because you are deadlocked, I will be the deciding vote. I vote in favor of Orestes. So now Orestes is free to go home and live his life in peace. Now the Furies say to her, "No, no, no, no, no, no, we don't accept your laws, Athena." And then Athena says to them, "Fine, you guys, I'll make you a deal.

Okay, right now you're demons and everyone fears and hates you, but I will now make you stand for justice, truth and righteousness, so that we Athenian people will worship you and admire you." And the Furies say, "Okay, that's a pretty good deal." So the Furies accept this deal and Orestes is allowed to go home, and the story ends. Okay, does that make sense?

So what's the relevance of the story? Well, for Athens it tells them where democracy comes from. Athena, the goddess herself, gave democracy to Athens, right? But it also tells them what a tremendous gift this is, because by giving the Athenian people democracy it basically gave them the power of gods. Because when you have these 500 jurors, each of them has the same power and authority as the god Athena herself. Athena can only cast one vote, right? And so what this is telling the Athenian people is, the gods gave you democracy, honor them by taking it very seriously. When you vote, do so very seriously, because when you vote in a good way, meaning you've thought very clearly over your decision, then you bring justice, truth and righteousness into the world.

Okay, does that make sense? And that's why I say Aeschylus is a prophet of democracy, because through this play he is telling the Athenian people where democracy comes from, why it's important, and what they can do to ensure democracy stays in Athens. Okay, any questions so far about this?

All right, let's move on to Sophocles. Sophocles wrote many plays, his most famous is the Oedipus trilogy. Now you may have heard of the Oedipus trilogy, but I will summarize the story for you. So what happened is, in the city of Thebes, a king and his wife, they have a young son, and as is the custom at that time they go see a fortune teller, and the fortune teller tells them, your son is going to kill you, the father, and marry the mother. And the king freaks out and he's like, I don't want that, so he orders his soldier to go out and kill the baby. And the soldier takes the baby, and again it's just a baby, like maybe a few days, a few weeks old, he goes out in the woods, and he's supposed to kill the baby, but he's a soldier and he feels it'd be dishonorable to kill a baby, so what he does is he just leaves the baby in the woods and runs away, thinking maybe the wolves will come and eat the baby.

Instead a shepherd from another city comes and finds the baby and he takes care of the baby. He goes home, in the city the king and queen have no child, they have no son, they have no heir, so the shepherd presents the baby to the king and the king names him Oedipus. And Oedipus grows up to be a very strong, very noble, very handsome young man. When he is of age he goes and talks to a fortune teller. The fortune teller tells him, I am sorry but you are cursed, you are cursed to kill your father and marry your mother. So Oedipus freaks out and says, I don't want to do that, I don't want to kill my parents who love me, so he runs away from his city. And he's going to Thebes, and on the way to Thebes he gets in an argument with an old man and his friends and he kills all of them. This old man happens to be his real father, the king of Thebes.

He goes into Thebes and the people are crying, and Oedipus asks what the problem is, and the citizens there tell him, well, our king is dead and also there's a Sphinx, an evil demon who is haunting us. So Oedipus volunteers to challenge the Sphinx to a duel, and the Sphinx asks Oedipus a riddle. If Oedipus can get it right, the Sphinx will go away, but if Oedipus gets it wrong then the Sphinx will eat Oedipus. And the riddle is, what walks in the morning with four legs, what walks in the afternoon with two legs, then what walks in the evening with three legs? And the answer is, human. Okay, so it's a very famous riddle. He gets it right and the Sphinx loses and flies away. The people of Thebes are so thankful they make him king of Thebes. If you're king of Thebes you marry the queen of Thebes. So he's done this, he's married his mother, and he killed his father.

Okay, 20 years later there's a plague in Thebes, and Oedipus, now the king, knows that somehow he's angered the gods, so he talks to a fortune teller. The fortune teller tells him, well, the gods are angry at you because you've killed your father and you've married your mother and you've had children of your mother.

So all your children are products of incest, so the gods are angry at you. So what Oedipus does is he blinds himself and he exiles himself to die somewhere else. Now the problem now is who inherits the throne. So his eldest son is supposed to inherit the throne, but he has another son named Polynices who rebels and he fights for the throne, the two brothers kill themselves in battle, they kill each other fighting each other. And now Creon, who is the brother to the dead queen, the queen has killed herself, he now inherits the throne. And the first thing he does is announce that the dead king will be given a state funeral, we will honor him, but Polynices, who rebelled against the king and who caused all this suffering and misery in the world, he will not be given a funeral, he will not be buried. And the reason why is Greeks believe that only by burying the dead can they find peace in the afterworld. So it's a very serious thing not to bury the dead. Antigone, who is the daughter of Oedipus and the BR and the sister of Polynices, she finds out about this and she thinks this is unjust.

Polynices has done a lot of bad things but no one deserves this. So she secretly buries Polynices. Creon finds out and demands Antigone to be arrested, and Creon says to her, "How dare you defy my laws, how dare you disrespect my orders?" And Antigone says to him, "Your laws are unjust." And Creon says, "The laws are the laws, without laws there will be complete chaos." And then Antigone responds by saying, "Human laws must conform to justice. There are these laws in the universe that are divine, unwritten and immutable, and we must respect these laws. Human laws cannot override these laws of justice." Okay, and this makes Creon very angry, and so he sentences her to death for disobeying him.

The problem is Antigone is the fiancée of Haemon, who is Creon's son. So Haemon the prince comes and begs his father, and Haemon says, "Can you please forgive Antigone?" And Creon thinks his son has betrayed him, right? Your love for Antigone has blinded you from seeing the truth, from doing what is right. And Haemon responds and says, "Father, I'm not doing this for Antigone, I'm doing this for you, and the reason why is the people of Thebes fully support Antigone.

They think she is a hero. They think she is just and right to want to bury her brother. They think you are a tyrant, father." And Creon says, "Should I obey the mob? Should I, the king, listen to the mob?" And then Haemon says, "No, you should listen to what is right and just." Okay, Creon gets very angry and kicks Haemon out. But then Creon has a change of heart and he doesn't know if he's done the right thing, so he talks to a fortune teller. And the fortune teller tells him, Antigone is right in this situation, you have to save her. If you don't save her, if she dies, the gods will be very angry at you. And that scares Creon. So Creon and his guards look for Antigone, but when they find Antigone she's in a cave and she's dead. She's killed herself because she doesn't want to be executed. Okay, and weeping over the body of Antigone is Haemon. He's crying, he's so depressed and sad, and Creon sees his son crying and he tries to put his hand on him and console him. The moment that Haemon sees his father he becomes so angry he lunges at him with his sword.

Okay, but he misses, and when he finds out he has failed to kill his father, in his anger and in his grief he kills himself. So both Antigone and Haemon are now dead, and when Haemon's mother finds out about this she kills herself too, and now Creon is alone in the world. Okay, does that make sense? So does this story make sense to you?

All right, now what does the story mean? Well, remember Athens is a democracy, and so this is a message that's very much anti-king, right? Like, let's not have a king, because kings do stupid things. And why do kings do stupid things? Because of hubris. The problem with kings, with monarchy, with power, is people develop hubris, arrogance, right, violent excessive arrogance, and that makes them do stupid things, like refuse to listen to what is right and good and just. That's why kingship is a bad thing, that's why we Athenians have democracy and not a king. Okay, so that's the first message. The second message is basically the world works when the old give way to the young. The old must always listen to the young. So remember that in the Oresteia the play ends with the Furies, the old gods, giving way to the new gods who bring justice into the world.

The Oedipus trilogy ends in tragedy because the old king refuses to give way to young people. Okay, so the other message is society works, there is truth and justice in the world, when the old give way to the young. So those are the two main messages of this play. Any questions so far before I move on? Oh, that's a great question, why do people trust the fortune tellers? Because remember everyone's religious, so the fortune tellers speak on behalf of the gods. They're called seers or prophets or diviners. So their job, what makes them special, is they're able to interpret the will of the gods, and that's why the kings listen to them. And remember, for most of human history humans were extremely religious people, including the Greeks. The Greeks were especially incredibly religious. Okay, does that make sense? All right, any more questions before I move on?

All right, let's talk about Euripides. Euripides was the youngest of these three and he was the least prized, or the least respected in Athens when he was alive. And the reason why is, as you can see, the Oresteia and the Oedipus Rex trilogy, they celebrate Athenian democracy, but Euripides criticized democracy, right?

So the example is in 415 BCE, and this is the height of the Peloponnesian War, he put on a play called The Trojan Women. And this play is about the aftermath of the Trojan War. So at the end of the Trojan War all the Trojan men are killed, right, and the custom is to enslave the Trojan women. So one character is Hecuba, and Hecuba is the queen of Troy, and Priam, her husband, he's been killed. Hecuba is a tragic figure because she's seen all her sons die, and then one of her daughters has been killed for Achilles. Achilles died in the war, and Achilles is dead, so they sacrificed a young girl who's a princess of Troy, Hecuba's daughter, in order to accompany him in the afterworld. So all her daughters have either been killed by the Greeks or they've been enslaved and forced to be the mistress or concubine of a Greek hero like Odysseus. Okay, then you have Andromache. Andromache is the wife of Hector, the prince of Troy, who died at the hands of Achilles. Okay, so she saw the death of her husband and she has a young baby.

And this young baby is only a few months old but he's a boy, and the law at that time is all boys must be killed, because the Greeks fear if he grows up, and he's the son of Hector, right, he might want revenge. So Andromache must witness the Greeks killing her son who's only, again, only a few months old, and then she is dragged away to be a slave, to be basically a mistress, a lover of a Greek, Odysseus, and so Hecuba must personally bury the dead child. And so it is a play that made everyone in Athens weep.

What makes this play powerful is that the year before, 416 BCE, and this is again during the height of the Peloponnesian War, Athens was attacking everyone, including Melos, an island called Melos, and when they attacked Melos they killed all the men and enslaved all the women. So in many ways The Trojan Women is a direct response to what happened in Melos. Euripides is telling the people, do you see how terrible we are? We are a terrible people. Do you see all the hurt and suffering we've brought onto the world?

Because of our empire. Okay, now obviously the Athenian people didn't like this play, and so he lost in the competition to this obscure nobody. And Euripides got really angry about all this, he was very bitter about all this, so he exiled himself to Macedonia, where he died. He died away from Athens. In his last play, he wrote his last play, called The Bacchae, in Macedonia, and after he died his friends brought this play back to Athens. This play, The Bacchae, is considered his masterpiece, his best play. Okay, so again, what I will do now is I'll explain to you the plot of The Bacchae and then I will explain what the interpretation is.

All right, so there's a god, there's a god named Dionysus. Another name for Dionysus is Bacchus. So the Bacchae are people who worship Dionysus, the god of theater, of music, of festivals, of wine, of sex. Now, Dionysus, the legend is he was born in Thebes to a Theban princess, and his father was Zeus, the king of the gods. Zeus likes to go around and rape women, and he has many, many children. But when the princess of Thebes announced that she's been impregnated by Zeus, no one believed her. Everyone laughed at her.

Okay, and the people of Thebes refused to worship Dionysus. Now Dionysus is worshiped around the world, including in India, as far as India. So Dionysus has always been bitter about all this. He's bitter about the fact that his mother was insulted by the Theban people. He's also bitter about the fact that the Theban people don't pay homage to him. Okay, so he plots his revenge. What he does is he disguises himself as a wanderer, a stranger, and he makes the women insane. He makes them worship him, and what they do is they run off to the mountains where they have sex orgies. They're having like sex, they're doing all these crazy things in the worship of Dionysus. The king of Thebes, his name is Pentheus, he hears about this, he hears about all this chaos, and he decides, you know what, I'm going to get my army, go in the mountains and kill everyone, because the Bacchae are too disruptive, they are amoral. And he's about to do this, but then Dionysus the wanderer tells him, hey, I'll make you a deal, don't kill the Bacchae. I want to take you into the mountains and together we can watch them have sex together.

Okay, we can watch their sex parties. And Pentheus says, okay, that's interesting. So together the two go into the mountains and they hide behind a rock as the Bacchae are about to worship Dionysus. Pentheus is hiding behind the rock, you can't really see that clearly, but he's really excited, he really wants to see the Bacchae in action. So Dionysus says, why don't you climb that tree, and that tree will give you a better view of all the action. So Pentheus climbs the tree and he hangs by the branch, and he has a very clear view of the Bacchae, who are in a circle. Then what Dionysus does is he lowers the branch, so Pentheus is now in the circle of the women, and Dionysus commands the women to kill Pentheus, to rip his body apart. And one of the women in that circle is actually Pentheus's mother, right? Okay, so Pentheus dies in the mountains. The people of Thebes are now very anxious, the king has disappeared, the women of Thebes are in the mountains. Then Pentheus's mother comes back and she's running, she's really excited, and she's holding the head of Pentheus and she's shouting to the people of Thebes, "Look how wonderful I am.

Look how brave and courageous and strong I am, because I'm holding a lion's head by my bare hands. With my bare hands I killed a lion and ripped the head off his body. Here it is." Okay, and it takes a very long time for the people of Thebes to convince her, that's not a lion's head, man, that's your son's head. Okay, so this is an extremely weird play. Very weird. And there are different interpretations of what this means, and I'll tell you my interpretation.

So think about this image: a mother holds her son's head in her hand and she's celebrating how brave she is. Right now I think this is a metaphor for war and empire. The reason why is war and empire happens when old people send their children to fight and die for their glory. Does that make sense? So this image of a mother holding her son's head and shouting to the whole world, look how brave I am, look how great I am, it's really a metaphor or an image for war, empire. Because remember, the Peloponnesian War is really about building empire, right? Athens wants to build its empire and it's sacrificing its young people in order to accomplish this.

So The Bacchae is a direct criticism of the Athenian Empire and a direct criticism of the Peloponnesian War. Okay, does that make sense?

Also, some further evidence to support this interpretation is, in 431 BC the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens started, and about a year afterwards a lot of Athenian men are dead, and it is the custom at that time to honor the war dead by holding a huge state funeral. So the state of Athens will pay for the burial of all its war dead. During this huge funeral all citizens come out to watch an oration, and so Pericles, who again, remember, we'll talk more about Pericles later on, but Pericles is basically the first citizen of Athens, which basically means he's the king of Athens, and he gives his funeral oration during this time. And the funeral oration is considered by many to be the greatest speech ever made. It is beautiful, it is extremely eloquent, it's very powerful. In the speech he says this: Athens is the greatest place ever, and that's because we celebrate excellence. Athens is a place where anyone can come and through hard work, through talent, can achieve greatness. We are an open, tolerant, cosmopolitan people. We have a democracy where everyone can participate in the civic life, the political life of Athens.

That's what makes Athens therefore we must protect our democracy. War, it is good that the young go out and fight for our empire, our democracy, because that's what gives meaning to their lives. These men who are dead before us, they died well because they died protecting Athens and defending our democracy, and we should have all young men go and fight for us. Okay, that's a speech that's literally what he says. So Euripides was probably in the audience, right, because everyone was in the audience when the speech was given, and he reimagines his funeral oration as the mother holding her son's head and saying to the world, look how brave I am. What Pericles is really saying is we're an empire, an empire is so good because it brings glory to the old people, and so the young must protect the glory of the old people by dying in a war. Does that make sense?

But if you think about it, even though Euripides is criticizing Athenian democracy, what he's really doing is also trying to defend Athenian democracy, because a democracy only happens when citizens are engaged in a process of argumentation, debate and self-reflection. And so what Euripides is really trying to do is put a mirror before the Athenian people, and he's saying to the Athenian people, look how awful we are, we can do better.

And that's what a democracy really is, it's an open and honest discussion about how we can be. Okay, and again, these three, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, are considered the three greatest in Athenian history, and these plays are actually still performed today. So the Oresteia, Oedipus Rex and The Bacchae are still performed in theaters around the world today. That's how amazing they were. So, any questions?

Oh, okay, great question. Okay, so The Bacchae, how do other scholars interpret The Bacchae, right? Okay, so there are different interpretations, but the most common interpretation is it is a play that explores the idea of religious devotion or religious fanaticism. Okay, does that make sense? That's the most common interpretation, this play is really about the power of religion and faith and how it drives us to madness. That's the most common interpretation. Another interpretation is, well, Dionysus is the villain. He's not really the villain, but he's the main focus of this play, and Dionysus does a lot of bad things, right? Well, guess what, for most of his life Euripides was participating in the festival of Dionysus hoping to win first place, right, to be the protagonist, to win first place, but most of the time he lost because he kept on offending the Athenian people, right?

So another interpretation is this play, The Bacchae, is a satire on the power of Dionysus and of theater in general. It's a direct criticism of the Festival of Dionysus, and what Euripides is really saying is the Festival of Dionysus, it's not about art and reflection and democracy, it's really just a wild sex party that's trying to please everyone. So you can also interpret this as a criticism of democracy itself: democracy is just a wild sex party, right? So these are the two major interpretations, that it's about the power and dangers of religious devotion, fanaticism, and also the play, The Bacchae, is a direct attack on the idea of theater itself and democracy. Okay, but I don't see it that way. I think the most likely explanation for me is it is a direct criticism of empire. And you can believe whatever you want, that's the power of Athenian theater, there are different ways to interpret it. So even today modern audiences are still amazed and inspired by these plays. Any more questions?

Great, good question. Okay, so revenge. Okay, you're right in that all these plays have the idea of revenge. And the reason why is, if you think about human motivation, what really drives us, right? What really drives us to violence? What? Revenge. So revenge is the main plot device we use to drive action, it's what motivates us to do violent things, and that's why throughout all these plays revenge is a common theme. But another very common theme is the idea of hubris, right? Hubris, arrogance. And this is what the Greek playwrights focus a lot on. What they discovered is things go wrong in society when the leaders, when the elite, when the kings develop hubris, because it leads to bad judgment. But what they also discovered is hubris is just a part of human nature. If you put someone in a position of power, he or she will always feel hubris. So hubris is basically the most common theme throughout all these plays, and you're right that revenge is also a very common theme as well. So yeah, there are these common themes, and the reason why is these playwrights, these poets, they're trying to explore what it means to be human.

They're trying to decipher the essence of being human. They're trying to look into the human heart and trying to figure out what makes us human, basically, and all humans are alike. Okay, any more questions?

Yeah, the Athenians. Okay, so the thing about Euripides was that today scholars will all agree, of all these three, Euripides was the most talented, meaning his use of poetry, his use of metaphors, imagery, it was the most imaginative. We also agree that he is the most shocking. His ideas, the way he presents things, it is the most visual and imaginative. So in terms of pure talent he's the most talented. But when he was alive he was an extremely arrogant person who believed theater should be about awakening people, should be challenging people's sense of reality. It should be about education and edification, and these people tend to be hated by contemporaries. But after they're dead, later generations respect them more. So even though The Trojan Women did not win first place, The Bacchae did win first place, and that's because Euripides was dead, and they were able to see the genius and imagination of The Bacchae much more closely.

Okay, does that make sense? So Euripides basically had his image, his reputation, rejuvenated after his death, but during his lifetime he was despised by a lot of people. People respected his genius but they didn't like the fact that he was so arrogant and candid. And that's true for most of human history, where if you are a controversial writer you are not respected by contemporaries, but after you're dead people appreciate your genius. And this is true for most really famous writers. Any more questions? These are great questions, by the way. Okay, great. So next class we will do Socrates and Plato. Okay.