RECONSTRUCTING

Religious Roots

When prehistoric people had no answers for natural forces that controlled their existence, they attributed them to the supernatural—super-human forces, gods—and began to search for ways to influence them, among which were music, song and dance, mimicry, self-sacrifice, epic stories, spectacle—all elements of theatre—which evolved into codes of religious ritual. So popular were these rites (and festivals) that they continued to be performed even after the mysteries were solved, at which point theater emerged as a separate entity.

Or so one theory goes.

The love/hate synergy between religion and theater through the ages is addressed in Thespis and Theocracy. This page narrates the historical context, how theater has been used and abused by church and state, the “powers that be,” to reflect, reveal, and often shape the course of human history.

Ancient Times

Drama emerged from primitive religious ritual in 534 BCE, when the lyric poet Thespis stepped away from the dithyrambic chorus and became the world’s first actor. In 509, the Athenian tyrant Cleisthenes instituted democratic government. The first earthshaking Moment is the connection between these two events.

Ancient Greece and (Lesser) Rome

Theater officially began in ancient Greece in (or around) 534 BC, when the tyrant Peisistratus, against the advice of Solon the Wise, allowed or prevailed upon the lyric poet Thespis to create an ode for presentation at the City Dionysia, in which he impersonated a mythic god or hero and argued with the chorus, thereby becoming not only the world’s first actor, but also its first playwright.

Moment #1: Democracy

Follow the dots.

• Dithyrambs were epic poems sung and danced by as many as fifty well-rehearsed performers for huge crowds of spectators at religious festivals in honor of Dionysus, the god of grapes and wine, fertility, and unbridled revelry—a very popular celebration.
• In Athens, the City Dionysia was second in importance only to Panathenaea (All-Athenian) festival (later the Olympic Games), and the plays were presented free of charge to all Athenian citizens.
• The introduction of an actor speaking thought-provoking odes so aroused and pleased the crowd that the wise and clever tyrant incorporated drama into the City Dionysia and encouraged other poet-actors to write plays that argued ethical, moral, rational themes to civilize the tribes.
• Within 25 years, the tribes were dispersed among ten civil demes and Athens was a democratic city-state.

The Golden Age

From 499 to 478, Athens fought two wars with Persia, after which a very young (and very wealthy) Pericles produced The Persians (472), by the poet Aeschylus—who had fought in the deciding battles of both wars—to launch the Golden Age.

It was Aeschylus who introduced a second actor to the stage, in conflict with the first, to become the Father of Tragedy, followed by Sophocles , who added  a third, as dramatic art evolved and blossomed over forty years—until the Peloponnesian War (431-404), when Athens fell to Sparta. Euripides and Aristophanes wrote excellent plays that railed against the war, to no avail. Defeated (and censored), later playwrights produced lurid tragedies and lewd comedies, of which only one has survived: The Grouch (317), by Menander.

These five playwrights are the only ones whose works survive today. The first four, writing in the Golden Age, are among the greatest of all time, but it was the last whose works influenced history.

Moment #2: Excommunication

The same year Athens became a democracy, Rome became a republic; but after Athens fell to Sparta, Rome began expanding into Mediterranean and northern Greece, assimilating her culture. Plays were introduced in Rome in 240 BC, and continued until the robust Republic became the decadent Empire (27 CE), but only 37 survived the ravages of time, the works of only three writers, who (sadly) emulated the the Greek New Comedy of Menander (Plautus and Terence) and the lesser tragedies of Euripides (Seneca).

Drama faded away during the Empire in favor of the chariot races, gladiators, Christians and lions who played the coliseum; few traces of it still exist. Theatrical entertainment degenerated into scurrilous spectacles, lewd and lurid mockeries of all things sacred, appealing to the worst in human kind, played by actors on a social par with beggars, criminals, prostitutes, and slaves. Among their favorite targets was the new religious cult, whose miracles and steadfast faith were ripe for ridicule.

Even the best of Republican Roman drama is inferior to the classical Greeks, but the few plays that survived the First Millennium became the models for the Neoclassic Renaissance. Thus from Thespis, the seed of drama, comes the Golden Age, which dissipates into inanity until another seed, long dormant, sprouts and flowers into Shakespeare. But that’s a later Moment.

The one lasting, devastating Roman Moment happened slowly over the next three centuries as the Empire spread, then decayed, and the fairytale Christian cult became the Roman Catholic Church, espoused by the Emperor Constantine (312 CE) and declared mandatory throughout the Roman world by Theodosius (393). Five years later the Catholic Council of Carthage issued a decree that piously (but with a vengeance) banned all plays, destroyed all manuscripts, and excommunicated all actors and producers. What was left of Ancient drama in the aftermath of barbarian invaders was rooted out and expunged—which is largely why we only know a few of the works of only eight playwrights.

Much of the antipathy to the wholly human art most people feel today derives from this cataclysmic Moment.

Aftermath

In all the years between Thespis and the Crucifixion, dramatic art was in alliance with both devout pagan religion and the temporal Greek and Roman states, its dramatists and actors honored and rewarded. Christians, on the other hand, believed all mortal pleasures were sinful—drama worst of all, both for its sacrilege on stage and for the disgraceful lifestyle of its players.

From this Moment forth, theists and thespians have waged a love-hate war that vacillates, with religion lovingly embracing drama to suit its purpose, then viciously attacking when it rebels.

Dionysus & Democracy

Dionysiae were religious festivals. Dionysus was the bastard son of the mortal virgin Semele and the great god Zeus who, on Hera’s orders, incinerated the mother and had her newborn son torn into shreds and boiled in a cauldron; But Zeus brought im back to life (like Jesus Christ)—“and from the soil where spilt his blood, there springs the vine.” Also known as Bacchus, the Goat God of fertility and wine, lust and drunkenness. Which made the worship of Dionysus very popular—especially the week-long festival, what with satyrs and maenads dancing around in a wild, lascivious frenzy, chanting hymns of praise: “Evohe! Blessed are the Thyrsus-bearers, those who wield in their hands the holy wand of god! Evohe!” Sort of like the Pentecost, but with a phallus.

You know what phalli are.

It’s important to understand that until this time the Greeks were tribal savages whose barbaric exploits were mythic in the Iliad. By introducing tragedy into the bacchanal, Thespis opened the collective conscience to the wisdom of Homer. In tragedy, a man stands up to God and suffers irony.

By the end of the Sixth Century, the focus of the City Dionysia was a three-day contest among three dramatists, each of whom presented one trilogy of tragedies and, beginning in 501 BC (most likely to appease the bacchantes), one burlesque satyr play that ridiculed the tragic theme. A fourth day, for five competing comedies, was added in 486. Meanwhile, in 508, just twenty-five years after Thespis tragedy was born, Athens became the world’s first democracy.

I’m not saying one resulted from the other, although it is significant that theater was by far the best means for entertaining and informing (and persuading) the masses—the TV of its time—and that the wildest party of the year was paid for by the state and sanctioned by religion. On the other hand, it gratifies me to believe the Greeks were brainwashed by the theater into achieving the Golden Age.

And there is evidence for this, if one allows as typical the example of The Oresteia, by Aeschylus, the only extant Greek trilogy, which replaced revenge (blood justice) with the world’s first trial by jury and that determined men were the superior gender.

In the first play, Agamemnon, supreme commander of the Greeks at Troy and scion of the cursed House of Atreus, having sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis to unfurl the sails of the Thousand Ships, returns home in triumph, only to be slaughtered by his wife, Clytemnestra, in reverence. Play Two: Years later, Daddy’s girl, Electra, persuades her brother Orestes to kill their mother, tit for tat; at which point the ancient Furies—serpent-haired, dog-headed, bat-winged daughters of Mother Earth—attack and pursue him into the wild. Play Three: Orestes finds his way to Athens and appeals for relief to the Goddess of Wisdom, who puts the case before a panel of twelve citizen judges.

The question was the importance of motherhood: Did the murder of one’s father justify matricide? The argument for Orestes, made by Apollo, was that a woman was no more than the inert furrow in which the husbandman casts his seed. When the jury locked at six to six, Athena cast the vote in favor of Orestes, and consoled the Furies by changing them into the kindly Eumenides, goddesses of hearth and home.

Two icons of the western world—Trial By Jury and Patriarchy—instilled in one fell swoop, endorsed by the goddess of wisdom, demonstrated graphically through the course of three violent and disturbing plays. (When the chorus of Furies appeared “in wild disorder in the orchestra,” according to an ancient account, they “so terrified the crowd that children died and women suffered miscarriage.”)

Greek Playwrights

Aeschylus was the first of only five Ancient Greek playwrights (of whom there were hundreds) whose works we know today, and of his eighty plays, only seven remain. Writing in the early days of the Athenian Democracy, his tragedies are “of the gods,” while those of Sophocles (seven of 120, including Oedipus), thirty years his junior, are “of heroes,” and Euripides (19 of 90), fifteen years younger still, “of men”—perhaps because, during their overlapping lives, Athens first achieved the Golden Age and then, one year after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides, lost the Peloponnesian Wars. All three told the same familiar stories (the Oedipus Electra, for example). Aeschylus, however, dealt with epic themes, reflecting the confidence and vigor of a powerful state; Sophocles, a young man when the wars began, focused on heroic choice, civic duty, responsibility. Euripides depicted human failure, exposing people as perverse, irrational, self-serving, decadent.

The fourth playwright was Aristophanes, younger even still by 35 years but competing in the same contests, writing Old Comedy that ridiculed the war, among other things, and people—including Socrates, who knew all three.

The fifth, Menander (only one—The Grouch—of over 100), was born a half century after all the rest were dead. By then, Alexander the Great ruled Greece. The Golden Age was history, freedom of expression had been repressed, religion was a joke, and what theatre remained—although now secular, professional, and widespread—second-rate melodrama modeled on Euripides and New Comedy, innocuous and bland, sitcom. Typical plots revolve around stock characters (young lovers, lechers, miserly old men, clever wives and servants, concubines, clowns) and involve sex, greed, gluttony, and mistaken identity. These plays became the models for the scavenging Romans, who translated and adapted them and passed them on to the Renaissance, who passed them on through all the ages down to us, as musicals and sitcoms.

One line in particular, from a lost play by Menander, became a Greek, then a Roman proverb that influenced Petrarch, the father of Humanism in the 14th Century: “I am a human being: and I deem nothing pertaining to humanity is foreign to me.”

Ludi Romani

Plays were introduced in Rome in 240 BCE, and for 250 years, Roman versions of the lesser Greeks, like their predecessors, were written to honor Jupiter and performed at the annual Ludi Romani (Roman Games), the highlight of Rome’s many festivals.

Of all these many plays and playwrights, only three left works behind. Plautus (254-184 BCE), a lowly comic actor, wrote comedies modeled on Menander, twenty of which survive intact and a few of which still play. Menaechmi (Twin Brothers) is the source for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors; Milos Gloriosus (Swaggering Soldier) for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Likewise Terence (c. 190-c. 159), born in Libya six years after Plautus died and brought to Rome a slave, whose six existing comedies reflect the growth of Republican Rome. His masterpiece, Hecyra (Mother-in-Law), however, is thematically inappropriate for civilized society today (a young man rapes a young girl in the dark who soon later becomes his loving wife).

And three generations later, in the early Empire, Seneca (4 BCE – 65 CE), a Spaniard raised in Rome, left eight tragedies based on Greek originals, with gory, graphic plots and long, rhetorical speeches that lead most scholars to believe they were intended to be read, not played. (That said, this author saw the 1969 Peter Brooke production of Seneca’s Oedipus in London, and it blew him utterly away. But that’s another story somewhere.)

All in all, this trio’s plays rank far below their old Greeks masters, but the fact of their existence is the link to all the rest of western drama!

Decline and Fall

Everything changed drastically when the Republic became the Empire (27 BCE) and Christ rose from the dead. By that time Rome ruled the world, but power corrupts; Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and theatre declined in favor of a vast array of popular amusements, from circus acts and sideshows to chariot races and gladiatorial contests. The Wholly Human Art survived as coarse and brutal burlesque mimes that ridiculed minorities—especially the new religious cult, with its silly saints and martyrs, whose beliefs were particularly susceptible to derision.

Over time, however, the new religion found its following, and swelled in number until the Emperor Constantine converted (312 CE) and Theodosius I, in 393, outlawed the practice of any religion except (Roman) Catholicism. Five years after that the Council of Carthage denounced all pagan theatrics and specifically excommunicated all actors who would not forswear their profession—a decree not rescinded in many places until the eighteenth century!

These decrees mark the official beginning of both the Christian bias against what they righteously (and often rightly) perceive as the godless religion and the off-and-on, love-hate relationship that through the centuries implanted scurrilous attitudes that remain ingrained our psyches today. Examples appear frequently throughout this essay in historical context. For a comprehensive analysis, read Thespis and Theocracy.