26/2/07 - Classical Literature - Plato's Denial of Tragedy

Why study ancient responses to ancient drama? In Aristophanes' Frogs, Dionysus fetches an ancient poet back to life because he thinks that Athens needs a poet to save her from the war. This implies that tragedy at this time was dead. This is not strictly true; tragedies were performed in Athena after Aristophanes, until 4 BC, although none survive after Aristophanes. Tragedy was considered moral and educational.

There continued to be powerful responses to Greek tragedy, especially by Plato and Aristotle. Plato's Republic was his philosophy on ideal life and how people should be educated. He contrasts his philosophy with 'tragic poetry'. Plato was criticised for focusing mainly on Homer, but this is because he considered Homer to be the template/master of the poets that followed him, and because Homer looks at the human condition more fully than do the other poets.

Plato's charges against 'tragic poetry'

1) In tragic poetry Gods are responsible for evil (Resp. 2.379a-380c)
"God, therefore, being good, cannot be responsible for everything, as is the common opinion, but only of some few things in human life. There is much for which he bears no responsibility. Our blessings are far fewer than our troubles, and while none but God is responsible for the blessings, we must seek other causes for the troubles ...
We must therefore not allow Homer or any other poet to make foolish mistake about gods, and to day that 'by Zeus' door stand two jars full of dooms,/one good, one bad' and if Zeus gives a man mixture of the two, 'sometimes he is in trouble, sometimes in luck,' while is he gives him the one kind unmixed, 'grim famine drives that man over the earth.' Nor can we allow that Zeus is 'steward of our goods and ills.' ... Young people must not be allowed to be told, in Aeschylus' words, that 'God breeds a crime in men/when he would utterly destroy a house.'
If a poet does write about the story of Niobe, or the House of Pelops, or the Trojan War, or anything like that, then either he must be allowed to say that they are not the works of God, or if they are, he must concoct some such account as the one we are now seeking, and say that what God did was just and good, the victims profited from their punishment. What the poet mustn't say is that God did it, and the victims are wretched. It is all right to explain that the wicked were wretched because they needed punishment and profited from receiving punishment at the God's hands. But that god, who is good, is the cause of evil to anyone is a proposition to be resisted at all costs. No one must hear it said. This goes for young and old, for tales in verse and prose. Such tales, if told, would be wicked, unprofitable, and self-contradictory."

2) In tragic poetry these ruthless and destructive Gods take on different shapes, lie, and deceive human beings (Resp. 2.380-383c)

3) In tragic poetry death is perceived an evil to be feared, being a negation of everything worth living for (Resp. 3.386a-387c)

4) In tragic poetry even the greatest heroes regard the death of those they cherish as an ultimate loss (Resp. 3.387d-388d)

5) In tragic poetry justice and happiness are not correlated, the world is not made for goodness (Resp. 3.392c8-e2)
"Because we shall say that poets and prose-writers make serious bad statements about men - that there are many unjust man who are happy and just men who are wretched, that secret wrongdoing is profitable, that justice is the good of others at our own loss - and so on. We shall have to forbid them to say this, and command them to compose songs and fables to the opposite effect."

6) Tragic poetry as 'mimesis', as imitation of an image and thus 'twice removed' from the truth (Resp. 10.595a-605c)
"We must now consider tragedy and its leader, in the light of this, for we hear it said by some that tragedians know all arts, all human affairs where vice and virtue are involved, and all divine things too: for they say, the good poet must compose with knowledge if he is to compose well on any subject. We must therefore consider whether these people have fallen within a set of imitators who have deceived them and have failed to realise that their works, which they see, are 'third removes' from the reality and are easy to make even if you do not know the truth. They are images, not realities. Or do you think there is something in what they say, and good poets really do know about the things which ordinary people think they describe as well?"
[10.598d7-599a4]

7) 'The greatest accusation': tragedy's emotional power to make the best of us 'surrender' ourselves to the tragic conception of life and thus to make us 'more wretched' (Resp. 10.605c6-606d7)
"But we still haven't brought the greatest accusation against it. It is a terrible thought that it can ruin good men, apart from a very few.
... When the best of us hear Homer or some other tragic poet imitating a hero in mourning, delivering a long speech of lamentation, singing, or beating his breast, you know how we feel pressure and give ourselves up to it, how we follow in sympathy and praise the excellence of the poet who does this to us most effectively."
"The element which forcibly restrained in our own misfortunes, starved of tears and the satisfaction of lamentation, though it naturally desires this, is the very element which is satisfied and given pleasure by the poets. In these circumstances, our best element, not being adequately trained by reason or habituation, relaxes its watch over this element of lamentation, because the sorrows it sees are others' sorrows and there seems no disgrace in praising and pitying a man who claims to be virtuous and is mourning out of season; indeed, the pleasure seems a positive gain, and we can't bear to reject the whole poem and so be deprived of it. Not many people can see that the consequences of others' experience invades one's own, because it is difficult to restrain pity in one's own misfortunes when it has grown strong on others."
"Poetical imitation in fact produces the same effect in regard to sex and anger and all the desires and pleasures and pains of the mind - and these, in our view, accompany every action. It waters them and nourishes them, then they ought to be dried up. It makes them our rulers, when they ought to be under control so that we can be better and happier people rather than worse and more miserable."

Since Plato's Republic many people have felt the need to defend poetry, such as Jones, a professor at the University of Oxford, who published a defence of poetry in 1964.

Consequences 1: Plato's denial of tragedy and repudiation of Homer and tragic poetry
"So when you find admirers of Homer saying that he educated Greece and that for human management and education one ought to take him up and learn and direct one's whole life of his principles, you must be kind and polite to them - they are as good as they are able to be - and concede that Homer is the foremost and most poetical of the tragic poets; but you must be clear in your mind that the only poetry admissible in our city is hymns to the gods and encomia to good men. ... Well these are the points that I wanted to recall to complete our justification for wishing to banish poetry from the city, such being its nature."
[10.606e-607e]

Consequences 2: Plato and the perennial defence of tragedy
"And we might also allow her defenders, who are lovers of poetry but not themselves poetical, to make prose speech on her behalf, to show that she is not only pleasing but useful for government and life; and we shall be glad to listen. After all, it will be our gain if she turns out useful as well as pleasing."
[10.607c-d]

Compare Plato's view of the human condition to Sophocles':

"O generations of mortals,
I count your lives as equal
To nothingness itself.
For who, tell me who,
has happiness that stretches further
Than a brief illusion
And, after the illusion, decline?
Considering you as a model,
Considering your daimon, yours alone,
O wretched Oedipus,
I count no mortal blessed."
[Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 1186-1196]

"Not to be born is the best by every reckoning; and once one has appeared, to go back to where one came from is the next best thing. For while youth is with one, carrying with it light-headed thoughtlessnesses, what painful blow is far away? What hardship is not near? Murders, civil strife, quarrels, battles, and resentment! And the next place, at the end, belongs to must-dispraised old age, powerless, unsociable, friendless, where all evils of evils are our neighbours."
[Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1224-1238]