222 CLASSICS NOTES FOR 2/4/09 Reminder: If you signed up for the first paper topic, due in one week, on 2/11, the topic has been posted in the course documents area of the Blackboard site since 12:01am today. For Friday, you will read Euripides Alcestis. Euripides is very good about telling you at the start all you need to know to understand his plays, so no brief introduction is required here. Note that the Alcestis is a 4th play. While it is not a full-blown satyr play, it is not a tragedy. It even has a happy ending. Enjoy. Philoctetes First, we need to set up the intellectual revolution of 5th century Greece.. Starts traditionally in Sicily where there is the polis of Syracuse. They throw out tyrant in 460sestablish a radical democracy, and realize they need new skills to get along under a radical democracy. They export these skills to Athens, as do similar folks from the eastern part of the Greek world. In Athens, under the radical democracy, the minimum jury size is 201, and people regularly speak for themselves rather than employing an advocate. If you can speak persuasively, you stand a better chance of winning your case. If you can't speak persuasively, you may not be able to protect yourself and your family. Men come from Sicily in the West and Ionia in the East and say to Athenians that they will teach people the arete of living in a polis That arete is very different from the Homeric arete of Ajax. It amounts to the art of persuading people Athenians thought of these teachers as wise mencalled Sophists. They were the first "higher education professionals", and their instruction was amazingly expensive. Protagoras, an early Sophist and one of the most expensive, understood that the new technology of persuasive argument means that, at the moment when a vote is taken or a jury decides, the most important thing is the opinion they hold at that moment. In that sense, "Man is the measure of all things." The new technology of persuasive argument is overwhelming for the Athenians. Technology of rationalization, for those unaccustomed to it, can persuade people of just about anything. And that persuasive power allows one not only to defend one's household in the law courts, but to get ahead in the community. Those without this technology are equally disadvantaged. [We demonstrated this with the generous help and good humor of Mr. Downey.] We further demonstrated [with the cautious help of Mr. Reeves] the word game that could result in the conclusion that a dog is your mother, agreed that anyone in our culture above the age of 8 would find this sort of word game silly, and noted that a classical Athenian did not yet have the background in rational thinking and in understanding how words work to be able to see through this. For such an average Athenian, the simple manipulation of words could seem to have an almost magical persuasive power. Problem: Athenians have always believed that we are good honest people. But their explanations for why they should be have been mythologically based in an immediate way. We are good to each other because the gods want us to be. Justice is the daughter of Zeus. Mythological superstructure explaining our values has rational arguments thrown at it, and of course it doesn't stand up.
As another example of sophistic virtuosity in argument: Gorgias, another sophist, wrote a treatise Concerning Nature, or What does Not Exist. He argued that 1) Nothing exists, 2) If it does exist, it cannot be perceived. 3) If it can be perceived, it can not be communicated. He surely didn't believe this, but by making a persuasive case he could show people how effectively they would learn to persuade if they paid to have him teach them. Where does this lead? Protagoras, the sophist who had said "Man is the measure of all things," wrote Concerning the Gods. Although this work is lost, we have the first sentences: "Concerning the gods, I do not know if they exist or not. The question is difficult and life is short. " In Athens, atheism is punishable by death, so these rationalists' ideas are very disquieting. Enormous strain is placed upon ethics, and the myths that justify ethics by this rational revolution. This erosion of ethics is exacerbated by the plague of Athens in 429. Thucydides tells us that some people abandoned their ethics because honorable behavior seemed to bear no relation to whether one got the plague or not. Conservative reaction to the sophists was crystallized by the comic poet Aristophanes, who wrote plays during the Peloponnesian war. The Clouds (originally produced in 423) is a father and son story. The son goes off to a school of Sophists. There is an agon, a debate, formal between the old and the new education. In this debate, we see the old education urging conventional values, while the new sophistic education encourages the young man to commit adultery, then cite Zeus to justify himself. If Zeus, a great and mighty god, succumbed to his desire for women, how can a mortal be expected to have greater self-control than a god? Aristophanes hates such reasoning. At the end of the play, the Sophist school is burned down to general merriment. Philoctetes General considerations: This is the 3rd Philoctetes. Aeschylus had one, Euripides had one (in 431), and now Sophocles in 409. We know that in Euripides' play, which is lost, Lemnos is not a desert island. Embassies from the Greeks and from the Trojans both came to appeal to Philoctetes, and finally his sense of Hellenic patriotism prevailed despite the way in which he had been treated. Euripides won 3rd prize that year. Sophocles' Philoctetes shows a man who suffers unbearably for no clear reason. He had violated the shrine of Chryse on the way to Troy. We don't even know what this is, but one gets the idea that he was not a temple robber, he just accidentally wandered into a sacred grove. A snake bit his foot, the wound would not heal, and both the pain and the stench were unbearable. So his companions marooned him on the island of Lemnos, where he is completely isolated, truly apolis - a man without a community. Why does Philoctetes have to suffer so terribly? He has been guilty of no intentional wrongdoing. He is not an evil man. So, again we are confronted with the question of why bad things happen to good people. In terms of Philoctetes' own character, Sophocles' play is an exploration of a human being's ability to continue to trust when he has been betrayed. One horror of the play is the way in which he needs to trust Neoptolemus, does so, and sees his trust betrayed. [Here Dr. Craig tried to perk
up the presentation with references to a variety of betrayals of trust. None of these will be on the next test.] Finally, the play examines the tensions between the values of the Homeric world and the hard realities of modern 5th century BCE Athens. We expect this in a play focused on characters involved with the Trojan War. Neoptolemus, Achilles' son from Scyrus, was sired when Achilles' mother hid him on Scyrus so the prophecy of his early death with glory would not be fulfilled. Achilles was hidden, in drag, in the quarters of the royal daughters. Odysseus was sent to get him, and penetrated his disguise by laying out two chests in the women's quarters. One was filled with finery, the other with weapons. The heavy-set girl who went for the weapons was Achilles in disguise. So Achilles went to Troy. While in the quarters of the princesses of Scyrus, he had had a liaison, of which the result is Neoptolemus. The chronology doesn't work out. Achilles is not old enough to be the father of a young warrior in the tenth year of the war. Explanation for this inconsistency: How 'bout them Vols? Neoptolemus is the walking embodiment of the sense of fair dealing and nobility that is the legacy of the Iliad as an educator of Greece. Odysseus has become much less sympathetic in the 40 or 50 years since the Ajax. He is purely concerned with expediency. It is still important to remember that, by Odysseus' lights, the success of the entire war depends upon his delivering Philoctetes and his bow, along with Neoptolemus, to Troy. The captured Trojan seer Helenus had said that only if that happened could Troy fall. Odysseus is more concerned with ends than means. Odysseus will do anything to secure the victory over Troy, in sharp contrast to Neoptolemus, who would rather fail with honor. A parallel to the contrast of Odysseus vs. Neoptolemus might be found in recent debates about the use of torture to extract information to stop potential terrorist attacks on Americans. It is as easy to favor Neoptolemus as it is absolutely to condemn the use of torture. But while one may be uncomfortable with Odysseus behavior, it is not incomprehensible. Walk through of Philoctetes I will briefly point to the passages we highlighted: Neoptolemus and Odysseus have different senses of the relationship of justice to expediency. Where does arete lie? pp. 197-200, shame reference on p. 200. Neoptoloemus on pp. 202-203 gives the traditional rationale that Philoctetes suffering is part of the gods larger plan. Note Philoctetes as virtual puppy dog when he enters on p. 204. p. 213 Philoctetes' appeal to shame and nobility p 214-215 Neoptolemus pretending he would be shamed. Here is the collapse of Homeric noble values. Be of good cheer! Things will get better! But not until Friday.