[lit-ideas] The Arts and the Peloponnesian War

  • From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2008 17:47:14 -0800

Hanson, op cit, pp 101-2:

 

"The historian Xenophon noted, when news arrived at Athens that Lysander was
on his way into Piraeus, that panic broke out among the citizens who though
that they might now suffer some of the barbarity that they had inflicted on
others, running the gamut from planning to cut off the right thumbs or
entire hands of captive seamen and throwing captured crews overboard in the
high seas, to butchering the Histiaeans, Scionaeans, Toronaeans, Aeginetans,
'and many other Greek peoples.'  In the new Athenian world there was nothing
intrinsically at odds with citizens watching a play of Euripides' one day
and voting to kill the adult male citizens of Scione the next.

 

"Indeed, in the very midst of the war the Athenians nevertheless pursued art
and culture as they always had.  Take, for example, a sample period between
411 and 408, when a seemingly exhausted Athens was plagued by internal
revolution and the Spartan plundering from Decelea, while fighting for its
life in a series of climactic sea battles at Cynossema, Abydos, and Cyzicus.
Nevertheless, in the midst of such killing and calamity, Aristophanes staged
his masterpiece antiwar comedy Lysistrata (411), followed by
Thesmophoriazusae - fantasy plays in which women take state policy and the
courts into their own hands.  And while the masons were nearing completion
of the Erechtheum, the last and most daring of Pericles' envisioned
Acropolis temples, Euripides produced one of his darkest tragedies, Orestes,
and Sophocles his majestic Philoctetes - about the unconquerable will of an
unfairly tormented hero who resists the forces of accommodation.  Actors,
theatergoers, and artisans alike might ride, row, or riot in between plays
and stonecutting."

 

Comment:  Someone I read recently (I don't think it was Hanson) wrote, in
effect, that more great works of literature were written in and about war
than in and about peace.   I believe it was with that understanding that
Fukuyama didn't end his title with The End of History, but added The Last
Man.   Nietzsche's "Last Man" lives during a time of perpetual peace and
creates no great works of art - or anything else.  It is during some form of
aggressive affirmation rather than passive acceptance that the great works
are created - so Nietzsche and Fukuyama would have argued, and they may have
been influenced in this to some extent by their study of the Peloponnesian
War.

 

Lawrence Helm

San Jacinto

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