Aeschylus: ‘Seven Against Thebes’

 There is nothing like a chorus of hysterical women to throw you off the track.

In Aeschylus’ play, the women of Thebes are mad with fear. The Argives have surrounded the city with plans to sack and pillage. The women are making such a scene that King Eteocles tries to reassure them. Their panic is a public danger, undermining the city’s ability to defend itself.

The women are so distraught that Eteocles casually mentions that he himself will defend one of the city’s gates. And with that line, dropped so casually it seems like an afterthought, that we learn that the play is not about the fate of Thebes but about the fate of Eteocles.

The Argives have seven champions, each leading soldiers against one of the city’s seven gates.

Eteocles coolly weighs what kind of man each Argive is and selects just the right person, by temperament and character, to lead the defense. Every choice is careful, considered, just.

Unsaid is that Polyneices, Eteocles’ brother, is leading the Argives. They are both sons of Oedipus, once king of Thebes, and both have been cursed by their father. Polyneices hates his brother so much that he’s willing to sack the city rather than let his brother have it. But Aeschylus doesn’t mention Polyneices by name until late in the play.

Instead, we know that Eteocles will defend one of the gates and that, one by one, he’s eliminating choices about which gate he’ll defend.

Somewhere along the way, we folks in the audience begin to suspect that Polyneices is at the seventh gate.

H.D.F. Kitto, whose reading of the play is being followed here, points out that any modern dramatist would have done it differently. Sophocles, Aeschylus’ younger contemporary would have done it differently.

Other playwrights would have loved the conflict between brothers. As Kitto puts it, Aeschylus had a different view of what tragedy was.

 

His mind and dramatic imagination were absorbed in the questions of Man’s relation to God, fate, and the Universe, not in his relation to Man.

 

Kitto says “Seven Against Thebes” is the most complete example of for Old Tragedy, just as Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” is the perfection of Middle Tragedy. After such a feat, playwrights have to try something new or tragedy, as an art form, decays.
• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on “Seven Against Thebes” is on pages 46-57. The quotation is on p. 48.

“Seven Against Thebes,” translated by David Grene, is in Aeschylus II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 88-130.

The Wise Woman calls crows

 The Wise Woman, knowing I’m interested in crows, bought a bag of unshelled peanuts and a crow call. 

She auditioned for me.

I told her she was doing just fine.

She took her show outside to a live audience.

Within seconds, I heard the crow version of “The Hallelujah Chorus.” Three crows can sound like a choir, but I counted seven from my upstairs window, with more coming in.

The Wise Woman’s version of a crow in distress was convincing — to a red-tail hawk. The hawk arrived, seeking an easy kill. Crows from all over mobbed it.

Early January in the Piedmont

 On a cold New Year’s Day, we put on scarves, gloves and heavy coats and went for a walk on the Yellow River, where a young woman was splashing mid-stream.

When we called from the bank, she said the water was indeed cold, but it was fun. She advised that you have to keep moving.

We took her advice, tightening our scarves as we moved on down the trail.

Roger Deakin, an English writer I admire, was an advocate of wild swimming — swimming in natural bodies of water, as opposed to pools. Wild swimmers tend to swim year-round. I’ve found there are enthusiasts in the Georgia Piedmont.

When my father was a doctoral student doing research in Norway in the 1950s, my parents rented a flat from a woman in her 70s who used to swim in the fjord, regardless of season. I had grown up thinking that winter swimming was a European pastime.

Among other wonders outdoors:

• I’ve been sampling the leaf litter, looking for invertebrates, and have been surprised how often I find small green plants beneath the litter. They don’t seem the worse for repeated nights of freezing weather or for lack of sunlight. I suppose a gardener would think the litter was deep mulch.

• The beech trees at Stone Mountain still have their leaves, a khaki-colored canopy where the surrounding oaks and hickories are bare. I wrote often about this last winter. I go see the beech stand, I guess, because I can scarcely believe it.

• At Panola Mountain, we saw fragments of hickory nuts on top of a downed pine log. There were perhaps 200 shell fragments on top of the log. I can’t imagine why squirrels have declared it to be the place for a picnic.

'Purpose' and 'meaning'

 Among the many failures in my education was my first lesson on the dictionary.

I was told that words had meanings and the meanings could be found in the dictionary. The problem is not one of fact but of concept.

I imagined that meanings have some existence independent of us — you and me, the people involved in this conversation. I thought that meanings live, independently of our activities, in some ideal place. 

We share words, use them in common. But the use of the words is their existence, and we frequently use words in ways that stretch or exceed the definitions in dictionaries.

A better way of looking at it: Words that we use accumulate meaning. It’s more like accretion, and if that suggests a slow process, I think that’s generally true. It’s often so slow we don’t really notice. It’s one of the reasons that we find ourselves, later in life, “ready” to read someone we couldn’t read earlier.

Recent notes have been about J.L Austin and Ordinary Language Philosophy. Borrowing from Austin’s method, I took a stab at the distinction between meaning and purpose.

The dictionary was not that helpful, especially compared this:

 

Purpose determines what I will do with this part of my life. Meaning demands to know why I’m doing it and with what global results.

 

That’s Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, going beyond the dictionary.

I think we all do that — that is, I think that’s the way we use language. If the conversation gets beyond a basic level, we define terms for ourselves and try to show how looking at it in that way is useful.

Austin always went to the dictionary first. Then he looked for examples of usage. He found law to be a rich source. Austin was a classicist, and classicists find a lot in nomos, the Greek word usually translated law. The word also was used in the sense of usage, custom and ordinary (or decent) behavior. A law was not generally something that was written down — it was what decent people habitually do.

Insights from law are helpful in many cases, but the usage of some words is made clearer from discussions about art or religion, as in the case above. The Greek psyche and pneuma are often interesting to artistic and religious thinkers — and both kinds of thinkers are prone to speak of inspiration.
Chittister says that purpose is about goals and productivity. Meaning is about who cares — who is helped or hurt by an intended action. Those are her distinctions, not the dictionary’s.

Her claim seems like the start of a conversation to me.

• Sources and notes: Joan D. Chittister, O.S.B., Wisdom Distilled from the Daily; New York: HarperOne, 1991, p. 102.

M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023. My notes on this book begin with “Reading your way into it,” Nov. 6, 2023.

If the gist of this post sounds familiar, see “A lexicon of words that mean trouble,” Oct. 30, 2023.

Meet Professor Morgenbesser

 One of the pleasures of M.W. Rowe’s new biography of the philosopher J.L. Austin is meeting some eccentric philosophers who are now almost forgotten.

Rowe says that when Austin was lecturing in America, he once made a logical point that every student of logic knows: a double negative makes a positive, but a double positive never makes a negative.

A young professor named Sidney Morgenbesser was in the crowded lecture hall and could be heard muttering, “Yeah, yeah.”

Morgenbesser taught at Columbia and had a reputation for always having the quick reply. When someone asked him about Pragmatism, Morgenbesser said: “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”

• Source: M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023, p. 517.

Rowe: 'J.L. Austin'

 J.L. Austin proposed a method of doing philosophy in a new way. He devised procedures for researching how we talk about troublesome concepts to see whether we could unsnarl the language underlying philosophical problems.

For some students, including me, his ideas were fascinating.

His essay “A Plea for Excuses” is, in my mind, the defining example of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Instead of tackling the whole field of ethics, the business of distinguishing good and bad, right and wrong, Austin looked at a small slice of it. What are we doing when we make an excuse? How is doing something that might be wrong but excusable under certain circumstances different from making a mistake?

When I read the paper decades ago, I thought Austin’s methods offered hope for solving problems that have persisted for as long as thinkers have recording thoughts.

Unfortunately, the paper that everyone agrees is an outstanding example of Ordinary Language Philosophy could also be viewed as the school’s high-water mark. Austin died at 48 in 1960. His students carried on his work.

One of the most interesting parts of M.W. Rowe’s new biography recounts Austin’s work on the problem of causation. Everyone talks of cause and effect.

Austin researched the question of what happens when we talk of causes and their consequences or results, as opposed to their effects. Does the different language change the picture?

He and his colleagues looked at sentences such as “The effects of the explosion could be felt for miles.” They substituted “consequences” and “results” for “effects.” They noted what happened when the sentence is modified, considering “unfortunate” and “voluntary” effects, consequences and results.

The research produced insights into our use of language but didn’t do much for our understanding of the philosophical problem.

Rowe’s biography is 617 pages. I think the outline above is a fair summary of Austin’s work. I’d like to know what philosophers think about why these methods failed.
I found real pleasure in two things.

First, some of the details of Austin’s life were wonderful. He was a reserved man who used “Austin” when everyone else was on a first-name basis. I would have loved to have seen him when he was visiting Harvard and was invited to a softball game. Not knowing the rules, but being athletic, he stepped up to the plate and lined a shot over second base.

His host expect him to stop at first, but he made it to second, standing up, after tagging first — with his hand. 

Second, I loved the minor characters, especially some of the philosopher professors, now almost forgotten, who wandered into his life. I’ll post an example tomorrow.

• Source: M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023.  The anecdote of the softball game is on page 529. Several notes, beginning Nov. 6, 2023, mention the biography.

Aeschylus: ‘The Persians’

 H.D.F. Kitto’s account of this strange play makes sense. Eight years before the play was produced, the Persian army had invaded Greece, intent of subduing the troublesome small states on the edge of their empire. But the play is not a celebration of the Greek victory, with long lists of heroes and tales of their deeds. It’s a tragedy, and it’s a tragic story only from the Persian point of view.

It would be pathetic from the point of view of the Persian military camp, where soldiers were mourning their comrades. It’s tragic only from the point of view of the inner circle of the empire, where Queen Atossa, Xerxes’ mother, and the chorus of old counselors, slowly realize that the hubris of one man had led to the disaster.

This is Old Tragedy, long before the days when battles were enacted in stage fights. But the disaster is not simply reported. The queen grills the herald. He tells the story only in response to her questions, and with each reply she absorbs the news of horrific events as if she’s absorbing the blows of a beating.

It might be more satisfying if Xerxes had come to a realization of what he’d done. But he’s a shell in this play. He sings a duet with the chorus — the scholars call such a song a kommos — that is all woe and lamentation, rather than insight.

As Kitto points out, the queen feels the enormity of the disaster. As he puts it, she is 

 

political enough to understand what her son has done, woman enough to sympathize with the bereaved, sensible enough to ask the right questions of the Messenger, prudent enough to think of invoking the aid of Darius’ ghost, mother enough to find excuses for her son’s folly.

 

The play has some wonderful moments. My favorite is when the queen asks the chorus to summon the ghost of Darius, her husband and Xerxes’ father, hoping for counsel and consolation. Darius arrives, out of sorts, complaining that a trip from Hades is not easy and wanting the chorus of counselors to get to the point so that won’t get in trouble for dawdling. It’s my kind of ghost story.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954, p. 46.

“The Persians,” translated by Seth G. Benardete, is in Aeschylus II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 43-86.