ANCIENT GREEK CULTURETHE GOLDEN AGE OF DRAMASeagull...glue melts, feathers separate, bird-boy drowns. And the moral
is: listen to your father.
PERSEUS
Perseus’ impossible task was to kill the gorgon, Medusa (p 736 ). With a
head of snakes she could turn a man to stone with a single glance. Armed
with an invisibility cap and a pair of fl ying sandals from Hermes, Perseus
used his refl ective shield to avoid Medusa’s stare. Having cut off her head
and secreted it in a bag, it was shortly unsheathed to save Andromeda, a
princess bound to a rock in her fi nal moments before being sacrifi ced to a
sea monster. Medusa turns the sea monster to stone, Perseus gets the girl.
OEDIPUS
You can run but you can’t hide...having been abandoned at birth,Oedi-
pus learned from the Delphic oracle that he would one day slay his fa-
ther and marry his mother. On the journey back to his birthplace, Thiva
(Thebes), he killed a rude stranger and then discovered the city was
plagued by a murderous Sphinx (a winged lion with a woman’s head).
The creature gave unsuspecting travellers and citizens a riddle; if they
couldn’t answer it they were dashed on the rocks. Oedipus succeeded in
solving the riddle, felled the Sphinx and so gained the queen of Thiva’s
hand in marriage. On discovering the stranger he’d killed was his father
and that his new wife was in fact his mother, Oedipus ripped out his eyes
and exiled himself.
The Golden Age of Drama
In the 5 th century BC Athens had a cultural renaissance that has never
been equalled – in fact modern classical scholars refer to it as ‘the mira-
cle’; such was the diversity of its achievements. The era started with a
vastly outnumbered Greek army defeating the Persian horde in the bat-
tles of Marathon and Salamis and ended with the beginning of the inevi-
table war between Athens and Sparta. It’s often said that Athens’ Golden
Age is the bedrock of Western civilisation and had the Persians won, Eu-
rope today would have been a vastly diff erent place. Some historians also
call this era ‘the age of Pericles’, after the statesman and patron of the arts
who dominated for some 40 years and fi ercely encouraged free speech
and free thought. Like Paris in the 1930s, Athens magnetised a hotbed
of talent. Any artist or writer worth their salt left their hometown and
travelled to the great city of wisdom to share their thoughts and hear the
great minds of the day express themselves. The great dramatists like Ae-
schylus ( the Oresteia), Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles (Oedipus
Rex) had redefi ned theatre from religious ritual to become a compelling
form of entertainment. They were to be found at the Theatre of Dionysos
at the foot of the Acropolis (see also the colour section of the Acropolis,
p 76 ), and their comedies and tragedies reveal a great deal about the psy-
che of the ancient Greeks.
Across the country large open-aired theatres were built on the sides
of hills, with increasingly sophisticated backdrops and props, choruses
and themes, designed to maximise sound so even the people on the back
row might hear the actors on stage. The dominant genres of theatre were
tragedy and comedy. The fi rst known actor was a man called Thespis
from which we derive the word thespian.
Philosophy
While the dramatists were cutting their thespian cloth, late 5th- and
early-4th-century BC philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates were
introducing new trains of thought rooted not in the mysticism of the
myths, but rather in rationality, as the new Greek mind focused on logic
AphroditeApolloHermes