Table Of ContentAESCHYLUS: PLAYWRIGHT EDUCATOR
AESCHYLUS:
PLAYWRIGHT EDUCATOR
by
ROBERT HOLMES BECK
I I
MARTINUS NIJHOFF - THE HAGUE - 1975
in memoriam
M. Carl Beck and Richard M. Elliott
© 1975 by Martinus Nijho.u; The Hague, Netherlands.
Soflcover reprint oft he hardcover 1st edition 1975
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or
to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form.
ISBN-13: 978-94-011-8175-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-011-8818-0
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-011-8818-0
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abbreviations VII
Periodicals . VIII
Acknowledgments IX
Prologue XI
PART ONE
LIFE, BACKGROUND AND VIEWS
I. The Symbol and the Man 3
II. Moral Lessons in Aeschylean Drama 14
III. Time and Time . 42
PART Two
THE ORESTEIA
IV. Agamemnon 63
V. Crime, Punishment and Judgment 85
PART THREE
THE RHYTHM OF MORALITY
VI. Prometheus Bound III
VII. The Danaid Trilogy 132
VIII. Plays with odd endings: Persians and Seven Against Thebes 168
References . 193
ABBREVIATIONS
Aga. Agamemnon
Apoll. Rhod. Apolionius Rhodius
Diod. Diodorus Siculus
Eum. Eumenides
fn. footnote
II. Iliad
LB. Libation Bearers (Choephori)
M Mediceus Laurentianus, codex 32, 9
Od. Odyssey
PB. (PV.) Prometheus Bound (Prometheus Vinctus)
Pers. Persians (Persae)
Oxyp. Oxyrhynchus Papyri
RE Real-Encyclopiidie
Semon. Amorg. Semonides of Amorgos
Seven. Seven Against Thebes (Septem.)
Suppl. Suppliants (Supplices)
Theog. Theognis
Vita Vita Aeschyli (in the Codex Mediceus)
PERIODICALS
AJPh American Journal of Philology
BICS Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the
University of London
C&M Classica et M ediaevalia
CF Classical Folia
CQ Classical Quarterly
CR The Classical Review
CW The Classical World
G&R Greece and Rome
GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
HSPh Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies
Phoenix Phoenix
PCPhS Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society
RhM Rheinisches Museum
Symb Osl Symbolae Osloenses
TAPhA Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philo
logical Association
WS Wiener Studien
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many persons whose help has made this study possible. The
staff of the Wilson Library Reference Services Department offered assis
tance unstintingly. The College of Education and the Graduate School of
the University of Minnesota underwrote much of the cost occasioned by
the preparation of this manuscript. Miss Josephine Zimmar, Supervisor
of the Faculty Secretarial Office, College of Education, released the secre
tarial time.
The aid of several research assistants is gratefully acknowledged; I have
pleasant memories of the help given me by research assistants Raymond
Larson, Penelope Lawrence, Cornelia Ooms, Tyra Orren, and Shirley
Stewart.
The rather long trail taken in this study began with conversations initiated
by William A. McDonald, the University of Minnesota Classics Department.
McDonald has maintained his interest from that beginning. All along the way
Donald C. Swanson, also of the Classics Department, has been a willing
consultant on technical points in Greek language.
Special thanks are owed to the three men who offered to read the manu
script and whose suggestions have proved invaluable. One of these men,
Michael Molitor, Department of Classics, University of Calgary, not only
was a meticulous and most helpful reader, but loaned me his comprehensive
manuscript study on the life of Aeschylus. Equally helpful were the two
readers at the University of Minnesota: Arthur H. Ballet, Department of
Speech and Theater Arts, and Robert P. Sonkowsky, Chairman and Pro
fessor of Classics. The faults remaining in the manuscript are not there
for want of strenuous efforts made by these readers.
My wife, Maeve, has been a willing listener over the years as I took too
many hours trying out notions on how some one of the characters or aspects
of Aeschylus' dramas was intended. But Maeve's help went further. Her
knowledge of literature and her common sense saved me from many blind
alleys.
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This manuscript required painstaking and tireless preparation. For their
care I am very conscious of the help of Katherine Fisher, Anne Marie
Nelson and Deborah Vigness-assisted by Trinidad Montero and Donald
Olson.
Finally I wish to thank the following publishers who kindly have granted
permission to quote: Cornell University Press; Doubleday & Company,
Inc.; Robert Graves and A. P. Watt & Son; Harvard University Press;
William Heinemann, LTD.; Richmond Lattimore and The University of
Chicago Press; Manchester University Press; Penguin Books, LTD.
PROLOGUE
" ... We have schoolmasters for little boys; we have poets for
grown men. Let our concern be only with what is goOd."l
The purpose of this book is to offer students of the history of Western
education a comprehensive and consistent statement of Aeschylus' moral
philosophy as given us in his extant plays. While the primary audiences
for which the book has been written are classicists and those concerned
with the history of Western educational thought, other audiences have been
kept in mind. Aeschylus frequently used a form of debate, the agon logon
to which subsequent pages so often refer. Perhaps the earliest record of
debate that professors and students of speech can review are those to be
found in the tragedies of Aeschylus. It goes without saying that historians
of theater are a natural audience for anyone who reflects on Aeschylus.
While all this seems true enough, what really needs to be admitted is that
Aeschylus has been neglected as an important figure in the history of educa
tion. That his lessons were not taught in a classroom, but could be learned
out of the living theater, does not make Aeschylus less of an educator.
Not all ideas of prime importance in education can be found in writing
about education. Aeschylus was an educator and ought to be taken seriously
as one of the first of those who made a known contribution to defining the
purpose of education as engraining what the Greeks agreed to be right and,
pari passu, persuading men and women to refrain from what was agreed to
be evil. If more needs to be said, I think it is enough to recognize that with
Aeschylus the history of ancient Western education heard a final poetic
version of a reconstructed Homeric lesson with special emphasis on indivi
dual responsibility for moral decision. Sophocles and Euripides changed
the lessons and with Plato one has shifted to philosophy rather than poetry.
1 Aristophanes. The Frogs. Translated by Dudley Fitts. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1955, p. 107, lines 1053-1055.
XII PROLOGUE
I began with labeling Aeschylus as a moralist. I might have added that
Aeschylus stressed individual moral responsibility. Doubtless, professional
students of ethics will have a good deal to say about Aeschylus' moral
philosophy-with full appreciation for its conservative quality. In any
case I would welcome their cooperation in the study of ancient Greek
education. Those philosophers who have liberal positions in ethics should
be fascinated with the thoughts of a man who was uncompromising in
upholding a stern individualism in his ideas about moral responsibility.
There is another group whose joint effort with historians of education is
most desirable. I am thinking of the classicists. Classicists have contributed
the greatest share of what has been written about Aeschylus. Those in
the classics are the natural leaders in the cooperative effort that this book
invites. In fact the history of ancient education in the West must be a collabo
rative undertaking of educational historians and others, classicists above
all. I hope that this book will be something of a bridge between the two
fields. All the while I am conscious of the fact that classicists have not
neglected Aeschylus, as have students of the history of educational thought.
Over thirty years have gone by since Gilbert Murray published his
Aeschylus: The Creator of Tragedy and more than twenty since Owen's
The Harmony of Aeschylus. Before and after those publications there has
been a spate of writing on Aeschylus, almost all of it by classicists. If a
historian of education presumes to say anything about Aeschylus, he is
obliged to intend a concribution rather different from what has been written.
This book is tendered in that spirit of obligation, and with full knowledge
that Aeschylus has not been ignored by all.
My basic difference with Owen and with Murray is that I do not believe
that the intention of Aeschylus' Zeus-or of any other immortal in Aeschy
lus' tragedies-is mysterious in the first or second plays of a trilogy, only
to be revealed in the final play. In Chapter IV I will elaborate on this point.
Thinking more of Owen than of Murray, my difference is twofold. I hold
a view on the rhythm of Aeschylean morality (see Chapter III and Part III)
that assigns a distinct role to each play in a trilogy. This rhythm can be dis
cussed as the design of Aeschylus' trilogies. I see the first playas one in which
there is a transgression of some part of the moral code. Punishment of that
transgression is the major theme of the second play. Both a judgment on the
morality of the punishment and, at the very end of this third play, a 'har
mony' prevails. If all of this is forced into one or two plays, as has been
true of the Persians, the rhythm is manifested in the design of that play.
But the difference I find between Owen's views and mine is over more
than rhythm of Aeschylean morality. The harmony of Aeschylus of which
