Tragedy Offstage: Suffering and Sympathy in Ancient Athens

Introduction

Introduction One night, several passersby see a group of thugs attacking someone in the center of the city. On a nearby island, another man’s childhood friend lies mortally ill, unable to rise from his bed. Athenian citizens, this time soldiers, are wounded and unable to walk as the rest of the army retreats after a disastrous battle. A man kidnapped by the marauding crew of a warship is first sold into slavery, then ransomed, then threatened with slavery once again if he cannot pay off his ransomers. In a murder trial, a slave is tortured for legal evidence as parties to the case look on. In each instance, the sufferers who face pain, danger, or death are desperately in need of help. Will they get it? How do strangers, friends, war comrades, neighbors , or slave-owning citizens feel about the suffering that they witness? Do they care? Can they afford to? Will pity, empathy, or a sense of humanity prompt them to intervene?1 All of these people live in the same society. What do they think they owe one another? This book studies part of the moral universe of the ancient Athenians: how adult male citizens may have treated one another in times of adversity, when and how they were expected to help. It is not a cheerful book, and cannot be, because it concerns suffering, and a certain amount of time must be spent building up a detailed picture of the terrible situations that Athenians sometimes faced and how they dealt with them. Lest readers relatively new to the world of classical Athens carry away an indelibly grim picture of that time and place, it is worth stating at the outset that Athenian society made room for joy and pleasure and valued both highly. Elite male citizens feasted, competed, and pursued their passions; the entire community held celebrations throughout the year. Yet the fortunes of individuals and the city-state were mutable, and calamities got in the way, casting a shadow 2 tragedy offstage over lives and engendering a profound distrust of the future that is captured perfectly in the famous and impossible anecdote in which Solon the Athenian advises Croesus to “call no man happy until he is dead.”2 Throughout the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e., and despite all the vicissitudes of history, Athens witnessed a remarkable cultural flowering that would impart to the West a world of ideas: naturalistic art that put human beings at the center; a democratic system of government; a refined concept of virtue; philosophy for the soul, medicine for the body; rhetoric that allowed people to persuade and be persuaded; narrative history; and many types of poetry. The poetry was part of ordinary people’s lives. They all knew Homer, and each spring at the Theater of Dionysus, on the south slope of the Acropolis, Athenians staged and watched numerous spectacles, including choruses, dithyrambs, comedies, satyr plays—and tragedies. The latter told stories that moved their spectators; similar scenes are found in the histories (Griffin 1998, 56–59). Strikingly, most tragedies had to do with irremediable suffering. One thinks, for example, of Oedipus, driven to blind himself; of Cassandra, the anguished war captive who foresees her own death; of Jason’s young bride, whom Medea hideously kills. In scenes such as these, the chorus and other characters are made to feel pity, and so are the spectators. Until recently, the lion’s share of scholarship on pity in ancient Greece was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of the pity and terror—leading to some kind of purging or katharsis—experienced by those spectators. The emotions Aristotle describes were no doubt real enough, but one must draw a clear distinction between “tragic pity” and pity in everyday life. They are not the same. Indeed, commenting on the turmoil created by faction and warfare in his own day, Isocrates says that people weep in the theater but view the actual calamities of others with something like pleasure (4.168): “They think it worth crying over the misfortunes composed by the poets; but looking upon real sufferings, the many and terrible things brought about by war, they are so far from pitying that they rejoice more in the evils of others than in their own private advantages.”3 In the theater, pity is akin to pleasure and costs nothing but spent tears. Nothing is required of the spectator but a fleeting emotional involvement in fictional situations that are soon...