The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (38 page)

Dionysus himself was a messenger from that underworld. When he grew to manhood he had descended to Hades to rescue his mother, Semele. He brought her up, and so raised her to Olympus. In due course she acquired her own cult, which Pindar saluted:

Dionysus, then, was both the god of fertility and the god of death. Heraclitus said that “Hades and Dionysus are one and the same.”

The nuns of Dionysus were maenads (or
mainades
), from
mania
(madness), named after the wild ecstasy of their worship. At Delphi, the center of their cult, the Pythia gave her oracular answers in the sanctum where beside the golden statue of Apollo was the tomb of Dionysus. These maenads, officially appointed delegates from their cities to the festival of Dionysus, celebrated the god in sacral dances. Led up the hill above Delphi by a young priest who played the role of the god, they set a style for wine-hazed orgies (
orgia
), the frenetic dances to drum and pipe that titillated the Greeks and later enticed the Romans.

These drunken devotees of Dionysus, filled with their god (
entheos:
from which “enthusiasm”), felt no pain or fatigue, for they possessed the powers of the god himself. And they enjoyed one another to the rhythm of drum and pipe. At the climax of their mad dances the maenads with their bare
hands would tear apart some little animal that they had nourished at their breast. Then, as Euripides observed, they would enjoy “the banquet of raw flesh.” On some occasions, it was said, they tore apart “a tender child as if it were a fawn.” On midwinter nights they would dance from Delphi up to the very top of Parnassus (eight thousand feet above sea level). On one occasion, Plutarch recounted, the maenads rescued from a snowstorm were brought back with their clothes frozen stiff. The cult of Dionysus reached Italy by the second century
B.C.
, when the Roman Senate had to issue a decree forbidding their Bacchanalian rites.

Dionysus, in the familiar role of the persecuted god, was ingenious in devising punishments for unbelievers. Thebes, home of his mother, Semele, by the fifth century
B.C.
had become the center of the Dionysiac cult. There Semele’s three sisters, daughters of King Cadmus of dragon’s teeth fame, all denied Dionysus’ divinity. When Pentheus, the son of one of them, succeeded to Cadmus’ throne, he forbade the worship of Dionysus. The god bewitched Pentheus into dressing up as one of the maenads and enticed him up the mountain to spy on their orgies. When the maenads saw him they tore him to pieces. Pentheus’ mother, Agave, proudly returned to Thebes with his severed head, which she imagined to be that of a lion.

“The fair song of Dionysus” at his festivals, the “dithyramb,” was the womb from which Greek drama came. Perhaps dithyramb refers to Dionysus’ birth “through two doors,” or it may suggest the “triumph” of the god (from thriambos, Latin
triumphus
), or perhaps identifies him as lord of the “tomb.” It may even have been a ritual name for Dionysus himself. “I know how to lead the fair song of Lord Dionysus, the dithyramb,” boasted Archilochus of Paros in the seventh century
B.C.
, “when my wits are fused with wine.” When Archilochus, a poet of legendary eloquence, was denied the hand in marriage of his beloved Neobule by her father, he avenged himself by writing such mordant satire that father and daughter both hanged themselves.

At first simply a song of Dionysus led by the wine-misted god himself, the dithyramb became a fixed choral creation with a definite form. The talented poet and musician Arion (625–585
B.C.
) according to Herodotus was “the first to invent the dithyrambic measure, to give it its name, and to recite in it at Corinth.” Once on his return from a successful recital tour to Sicily, the sailors decided to seize his treasure and throw him overboard. Arion persuaded them to let him sing one last song with his lyre, which charmed a dolphin to come alongside. The dolphin then carried him safely to Corinth even before the ship. When the sailors arrived there pretending that they had left Arion behind, they were punished, while Arion’s lyre and the friendly dolphin achieved immortality as constellations.

Arion, it was said, made the dithyramb a formal, stationary song, which
he taught choirs to perform. The Dionysia at Corinth was celebrated in circular dances to the music of reed flutes by choruses of fifty men and boys around the altar of Dionysus.

In the sixth century
B.C.
the dithyramb itself became a rich source of literary legend. Lasos of Hermione (548
B.C.
), who was said to have brought the dithyramb from Corinth to Athens, there initiated the competition in making dithyrambs. His principal competitor was Simonides of Ceos (c.556–468?
B.C.
), “inventor” of the arts of memory, and reputedly the first poet to accept money to write eulogies. According to Aristophanes, the repeated competition for the honors between Lasos and Simonides became so tiresome that Lasos finally gave up with an “I do not care!” So the most successful ancient dithyrambist, Simonides, won fifty-six prize bulls and countless dedicatory tripods.

Simonides’ nephew, Bacchylides (c.505–c.450
B.C.
), also prospered by writing odes to the winners of athletic contests, encomiums (honoring the hosts at the
komos
, the revels at the end of a banquet), and dithyrambs for the Dionysian festivals. Pindar (528–442
B.C.
), better known for his odes to the Olympic victors, also wrote dithyrambs for the spring festival at Athens. Athens erected a statue to him in reward for his dithyrambic praise:

“Circular chorus” was another name for the dithyramb at Athens, where it was danced and sung by fifty men or boys around the altar in the orchestra. So it was distinguished from the rectangular dramatic chorus of the later drama.

At Athens the contest of dithyrambic choruses was not among individuals but among tribes. Each chorus was drawn from one of the ten tribes, five offering choruses of men, and five of boys. The expense of producing a festival dithyramb was first undertaken by a wealthy citizen, the
choregus
. The cost was much greater than for the later performances of tragedy and comedy. In the years of Athens’s decline, when no one citizen could afford to pay for this honor, it was shared by several, then finally undertaken by the state. During the Great Age the citizen-sponsors competed for the services of the best poets and musicians. The victorious tribe was rewarded with a tripod dedicated to Dionysus. The winning poet was awarded a bull, second prize was an amphora of wine, and third prize was a goat. The
winning
choregus
also was rewarded. Simonides boasted of the many times his head had been covered with ribbons and roses, when he was carried home in a festal chariot.

The dithyramb, after about 450
B.C.
, gradually disintegrated. As the words became less important, the music dominated and these latter-day bursts of bombast made “dithyrambic” a synonym for wild and vehement rhetoric. The dithyramb finally became secular music, like the nineteenth-century European oratorio but with the popular appeal of modern calypso.

In ancient Greece, where poets sang, music and poetry were never quite separate. When the dithyramb lost its rhythmic symmetry, strophe (when the chorus moved in one direction) against antistrophe (when the chorus moved in the other direction), solo songs were added. Literary form was smothered by the sounds of music. The new looseness of the dithyramb offended critics. As the flute acquired modulation and a wider range some complained of the undue influence of the flute player. Plato himself was troubled by the audience’s passion for novelty, which would prove a catalyst for creativity. “With the ancients,” Dionysius of Halicarnassus (died 7
B.C.
) reported nostalgically in his
Antiquities
, “even the dithyramb was orderly.” By the fourth century
B.C.
the traditional forms had dissolved, and the dithyramb lost its featured place in Athenian festivals. But its fertile by-products would glorify Greece long after dithyramb had become a strange archaic word.

S
ONGS
to Dionysus would bring back spring. Every dithyrambic tie to the past insured the future. Ritual was insurance against spring frost, but in every man there was a maenad, dissatisfied with stale rhythm. Everyone was twice-born, torn between wish for the familiar return and hope for the intoxicating new.

In drama man found ways to create unique events for delight, reflection, and dismay, and so make experience outlast the actor. But the idea of drama did not come quickly or easily. The role of
spectator
, the person who stood outside the action, was not obvious, for the shared communal experience
was overwhelming. The chorus came before the solo. In ancient Greece, from the seventh century
B.C.
we see the slow stages by which man discovered that he need not always be a participant. In a new kind of immortality man could now outlive his time, relive earlier times, foreshadow later times by witnessing actors on a stage.

While drama would be a fertile vehicle of creations, the idea of drama itself was no man’s conscious creation. It was a by-product of man’s worship, of his twice-born ambivalent nature. And Greek drama would provide elegant archetypes in which to recast experience to relive it at will. When the Athenian could sit in the Theater of Dionysus and watch the reenacted struggles and quarrels of Agamemnon, time past had become time present, and could be projected at will into time future. The dramatist had created new dimensions of experience. To achieve this demanded courageous acts of imagination. The watching citizens must imagine themselves elsewhere. And the actors must successfully pretend to be other people.

This was the momentous advance from ritual to drama. For the history of this achievement, the surviving literature of Greek drama is woefully incomplete and accidental. We have seen how few of the works of their great dramatists have survived. But the ancient Greek theaters indelibly marked the landscape, leaving us a more ample record of the places than of the words and music uttered there.

The birth of the spectator in ancient Greece is the story of the festivals of Dionysus, of how and where they were celebrated. The first Dionysian festivals were a general community activity that moved about and required no permanent building. Not separated from other daily concerns, they were celebrated first in an “orchestra” (Greek for “dancing place”) in the agora (marketplace), where everyone took part. These outdoor celebrations were open to the sky. In Athens they were later moved from the agora to the southern slope of the Acropolis, where too the nucleus was an “orchestra,” a circular dancing place around the altar of the god. The dithyrambs sung and danced there came to be known as “circular” dances for a “circular” chorus. And the altar would remain long after the festival had taken on a new dramatic form. In the beginning, it seems, all present participated in the festival. Since there was no raised platform for the chorus, all stood on the same level. Near the orchestra was the temple of the god, conveniently placed so the holy image could be taken out on festival days for the god to witness his celebration. Except for the god there were no “spectators.”

In festive song and dance, any separation of citizens was invidious. Since the whole community reaped the benefits of the spring-insuring rituals, all should join. But when ritual became drama, a new separation marked the community as a new dimension was added to experience. Now some “acted” while others watched. Citizens became witnesses, with a new set
of sentiments. The communal focus ceased to be merely an orchestra or dancing place and became instead a theater (from
theatron
, “seeing place”). To create drama, the spectator had to be separated from the actor. We do not know precisely when the spectator was born. But we can see the architecture that would give the Greek spectator his vantage point and multiply him in the next centuries. The hilly landscape helped by making it possible for citizens seated in rows to see the drama below. Poets celebrating the isles of Greece have not often enough extolled the hills of Greece, which also nurtured the culture that was the Greek glory.

By the early fifth century there seem to have been wooden seats for spectators, perhaps in the agora and probably also in the Theater of Dionysus on the side of the Acropolis. The collapse of these wooden seats was said to be the occasion for providing a proper “theater” designed to seat a large audience safely in an auditorium for the convenient viewing of performances. At first circular tiers of seats were cut into the side of a hill and later made of stone or marble. Remains of such an auditorium of the fourth-century
B.C.
that would seat fifteen thousand spectators are visible on the slope of the Acropolis of Athens. In the Great Age of Greek drama, other features were added. The orchestra probably remained as it was, with the central altar intact. Behind it, in full view of the seated audience appeared the
skene
(perhaps from Greek for “tent”) in which actors could change masks and costumes. The
skene
became a movable wooden structure to represent a palace or a temple.

In the drama poets, playwrights, and actors found a laboratory for their imagination. And for all spectators it was a way of escaping their time and place. Drama conquered time for the new community of spectators.