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The Blind Spot
 The Blind Spot
Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience

Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2024 Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence systems or
reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or
information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts
of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and
quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise
uncredited readers.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Frank, Adam, 1962- author. | Gleiser, Marcelo, author. | Thompson, Evan, author.
Title: The blind spot : why science cannot ignore human experience / Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser,
and Evan Thompson.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023012137 (print) | LCCN 2023012138 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262048804
(hardcover) | ISBN 9780262377751 (epub) | ISBN 9780262377744 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Science—Philosophy. | Metaphysics. | Cosmology—Philosophy. | Philosophy of
mind.
Classification: LCC Q175 .F768 2024 (print) | LCC Q175 (ebook) | DDC 501—dc23/eng/20231031
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012137
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012138

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0
 publication supported by a grant from
The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven
as part of the Urban Haven Project
 Contents

An Introduction to the Blind Spot

I How Did We Get Here? A Guide for the Perplexed

1 The Surreptitious Substitution: Philosophical Origins of the Blind Spot

2 The Ascending Spiral of Abstraction: Scientific Origins of the Blind

Spot

II Cosmos

3 Time

4 Matter

5 Cosmology

III Life and Mind

6 Life

7 Cognition

8 Consciousness

IV The Planet

9 Earth
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
 An Introduction to the Blind Spot

The Fire This Time

We write this book with a sense of urgency because we believe our
collective future and human project of civilization are at stake. The success
of modern science at gaining knowledge of nature and control over it has
been spectacular. Think, for instance, of the recent development of mRNA
vaccines, an entirely new kind of vaccine with huge implications for treating
many diseases. At the same time, science denial is on the rise and civil
society is splintered. Most threatening of all, our scientific civilization
confronts an inescapable calamity of its own creation, the planetary climate
crisis. If we cannot find a new path forward, our globe-spanning civilization
and all who depend on it may be unable to cope with immense challenges.
We believe we need nothing less than a new kind of scientific worldview.
Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, we have increasingly looked to science
to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. In the
seventeenth century, a new worldview that was intimately connected to the
rise of modern science but not identical to it began to spread. By the
nineteenth century, it had turned into a juggernaut, transforming culture and its
material basis faster than at any other time in human history. According to
that worldview, nature is nothing but shifting spatiotemporal arrangements of
fundamental physical entities. In this perspective, the mind is either a
derivative physical assemblage or something radically different from nature
altogether. Most important, science gives us a literally true account of
objective physical reality or at least of the totality of observable physical
facts. This worldview of nature, mind, and science eventually came to
underpin our political systems, our economic structures, and our social
organization. But it is precisely that philosophical perspective, including its
presence within scientific theories themselves, that is now in crisis, as
evidenced by its inability to account for the mind, meaning, and
consciousness that are the very source of science itself. In the wake of an
extended series of puzzles and paradoxes, which we chart in the chapters in
this book, about time and the cosmos, matter and the observer, life and
sentience, mind and meaning, and the nature of consciousness, we have been
left unsure of how to make sense of ourselves and our place in the world.
Worse still, the crisis in our understanding occurs at a crucial moment in
history when we face multiple existential challenges, such as climate change,
habitat destruction, new global pandemics, digital surveillance, and the
growing prevalence of artificial intelligence, all of them driven by the
success of science and technology. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the
urgency of these concerns to the forefront as we have experienced the
fragility of our species in a natural world that we cannot and should not
relate to simply as a material resource to control.
Our scientific worldview has gotten stuck in an impossible contradiction,
making our present crisis fundamentally a crisis of meaning. On the one hand,
science appears to make human life seem ultimately insignificant. The grand
narratives of cosmology and evolution present us as a tiny contingent
accident in a vast indifferent universe. On the other hand, science repeatedly
shows us that our human situation is inescapable when we search for
objective truth because we cannot step outside our human form and attain a
God’s-eye view of reality. Cosmology tells us that we can know the universe
and its origin only from our inside position, not from the outside. We live
within a causal bubble of information—the distance light traveled since the
big bang—and we cannot know what lies outside. Quantum physics suggests
that the nature of subatomic matter cannot be separated from our methods of
questioning and investigating it. In biology, the origin and nature of life and
sentience remain a mystery despite marvelous advances in genetics,
molecular evolution, and developmental biology. Ultimately, we cannot forgo
relying on our own experience of being alive when we seek to comprehend
the phenomenon of life. Cognitive neuroscience drives the point home by
indicating that we cannot fully fathom consciousness without experiencing it
from within. Each of these fields ultimately runs aground on its own
paradoxes of inner versus outer, and observer versus observed, that
collectively turn on the conundrum of how to understand awareness and
subjectivity in a universe that was supposed to be fully describable in
objective scientific terms without reference to the mind. The striking paradox
is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of
things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand
how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand
science as a human activity and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as
something to gain mastery over.
Each of the cases just mentioned—cosmology and the origin of the
universe, quantum physics and the nature of matter, biology and the nature of
life, cognitive neuroscience and the nature of consciousness—represents
more than an individual scientific field. Collectively they represent our
culture’s grand scientific narratives about the origin and structure of the
universe and the nature of life and the mind. They underpin the ongoing
project of a global scientific civilization. They constitute a modern form of
mythos: they are the stories that orient us and structure our understanding of
the world. For these reasons, the paradoxes these fields face are more than
mere intellectual or theoretical puzzles. They signal the larger unreconciled
perspectives of the knower and the known, mind and nature, subjectivity and
objectivity, whose fracture menaces our project of civilization altogether.
Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential
threats, concretize this split by treating everything—including, paradoxically,
awareness and knowing themselves—as an objectifiable, informational
quantity or resource. It’s precisely this split—the divorce between knower
and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known—that
constitutes our meaning crisis. The climate emergency, which arises from our
treating nature as just a resource for our use, is the most pronounced and
catastrophic manifestation of our crisis.
In short, although we have created the most powerful and successful form
of objective knowledge of all time, we lack a comparable understanding of
ourselves as knowers. We have the best maps we’ve ever made, but we’ve
forgotten to take account of the map makers. Unless we change how we
navigate, we’re bound to head deeper into peril and confusion.
Regrettably, the three best-known responses to the crisis of meaning in our
scientific worldview are all dead ends.
First, scientific triumphalism doubles down on the absolute supremacy of
science. It holds that no question or problem is beyond the reach of scientific
discourse. It advertises itself as the direct heir of the Enlightenment. But it
simplifies and distorts Enlightenment thinkers who were often skeptical
about progress and who had subtle and sophisticated views about the limits
of science. Triumphalism’s conception of science remains narrow and
outmoded. It leans heavily on problematic versions of reductionism—the
idea that complex phenomena can always be exhaustively explained in terms
of simpler phenomena—and crude forms of realism—the idea that science
provides a literally true account of how reality is in itself apart from our
cognitive interactions with it. Its view of objectivity rests on an often
unacknowledged metaphysics of a perfectly knowable, definite reality
existing “out there,” independent of our minds and actions. It often denies the
value of philosophy and holds that more of the same narrow and outmoded
thinking will show us the way forward. As a result, theoretical models
become ever more contrived and distant from empirical data, while
experimental resources are applied to low-risk research projects that eschew
more fundamental questions. Like Victorian-era spiritualism and pining for
ghosts, scientific triumphalism looks backward to the fantasized spirit of a
long-dead age and cannot hope to provide a path forward through the
monumental challenges that science and civilization face in the twenty-first
century.
Science denial on the right and so-called postmodernism on the left
represent a second response. These movements reject science. They
particularly reject its capacity to establish truths about the world that can be
used as a basis for further knowledge and wise policies and actions. Worse
still, they provide an opportunity for certain groups to manipulate how facts
are interpreted for their own selfish and ideological ends, thereby spreading
intentional disinformation in the form of so-called alternative facts and
alternative truths. Although the motives of these two movements undeniably
differ, both undermine the values of modern society on which they themselves
depend, offering nothing but skepticism and negativism, or willful
disinformation, in return.
Finally, the new age movement uses fringe science or pseudoscience to
justify wishful thinking. Although this movement has had less impact than the
other ones, it has muddied the waters for those of us who look for new
perspectives on the scientific endeavor. Its uncritical embrace of various
misrepresentations of Asian or Indigenous worldviews takes reductionistic
science as the norm of all science, and thereby fails to understand the
scientific ideas and practices of these other cultures.1 As a result,
constructive dialogue with other cultural traditions about their epistemic
practices becomes rare, if not impossible.
 Given that these three responses fail to address the crisis of meaning in our
scientific worldview, how can we find our way forward? First and foremost,
we need to know where the crisis comes from. Our goal is to identify the
source of the crisis, offer clues to a new path forward, and present a new
perspective on some of the biggest issues science faces today. These issues
include time and cosmology, quantum physics and its measurement problem,
the nature of life and sentience, how the mind works and its relation to AI,
the nature of consciousness, and, finally, climate change and Earth’s entry
into the new human-shaped epoch called the Anthropocene. The range of
topics touched by our new perspective is indeed broad, and the vista is
equally expansive. We believe that our perspective can help transform and
revive our cherished scientific culture as it faces its greatest challenges
while reshaping our worldview for a sustainable project of civilization.
We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of
science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the
blind spot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In
the visual blind spot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blind spot sits
direct experience—that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes
available to us. It is a precondition of observation, investigation, exploration,
measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks
to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience
is bodily experience. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world,” says
French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand
bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot.2

The Parable of Temperature

For a tangible illustration of what we mean by the “Blind Spot,” consider an
idea as familiar as temperature. We take for granted that temperature is an
objective property of the world: it’s “out there,” independent of us. When
we’re kids in school, we learn that water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at
100 degrees Celsius. We naturally translate from daily temperature reports in
Fahrenheit or Celsius to expectations of how warm or cold we’ll feel and
what clothes we’ll need to wear to go outside. But to distill our now familiar
idea of temperature from our bodily sensations of hot and cold took a huge
and difficult scientific effort lasting several centuries. Today we view
temperature as an objective property of the world, but we’ve forgotten how
the concept of temperature as a physical quantity—the degree or intensity of
heat present in an object—derives from the direct experience of the world
through our bodies. We have lost sight of the lived experience that underpins
the scientific concept and think that the concept refers to something more
fundamental than our bodily sensations. This way of thinking is an instance of
the Blind Spot.
A little history of science is helpful here. The starting point for creating
thermometry (the measurement of temperature) was the bodily sensations of
hot and cold. Scientists had to assume that our bodily experience is valid and
could be communicated to others; otherwise they would have had no basis
for building scientific knowledge. They noticed that sensations of hot and
cold correlate with changes in the volume of fluids (liquids expand with
heat), and they used sealed glass tubes filled partway with liquids as
measuring devices for ordering experiences (“phenomena”) as hotter versus
colder. These tools enabled them to determine that certain phenomena, like
the boiling point of water, were constant enough that they could be used as
fixed points for building thermometers with numerical scales.3
But once they had invented thermometers, and therefore the concept of
temperature, scientists discovered that the boiling and freezing points of
water weren’t as precisely fixed in the natural world as they initially thought.
High on a mountain, for example, water boils at a lower temperature than at
sea level. This discovery meant that scientists had to intervene and control
the context of their measurements as much as possible by manufacturing true
fixed points in highly artificial and controlled settings. This effort required
building special places for sequestering the phenomena they were
investigating. The aspiring practitioners of thermometry had to build what
philosopher of science Robert Crease calls “the workshop,” the communal
scientific infrastructure required for creating new precise experiences along
with the tools for manipulating, investigating, and communicating them.4
Once scientists had created the workshop, they used its tools to redefine
phenomena in ways increasingly removed from direct experience. The
invention of thermometry happened in the absence of any established theory
of temperature. But once the ability to measure temperature had been
developed, nineteenth-century scientists took the next step and began
formulating the abstract theory known as classical thermodynamics. Then, as
if pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, they used thermodynamics
to define temperature even more abstractly. Now, temperature could be
defined without referring to the properties of any particular substance.
Thermodynamics even allowed for a definition of something physically
impossible—absolute zero, the ideal limit of temperature at which a
thermodynamic system has no energy. Later in the nineteenth century, when
physicists devised statistical mechanics, another step in abstraction was
taken as thermodynamic temperature was defined in microphysical terms as
the average motion of molecules or atoms.
The Blind Spot arrives when we think that thermodynamic temperature is
more fundamental than the bodily experience of hot and cold. This happens
when we get so caught up in the ascending spiral of abstraction and
idealization that we lose sight of the concrete, bodily experiences that anchor
the abstractions and remain necessary for them to be meaningful. The
advance and success of science convinced us to downplay experience and
give pride of place to mathematical physics. From the perspective of that
scientific worldview, the abstract, mathematically expressed concepts of
space, time, and motion in physics are truly fundamental, whereas our
concrete bodily experiences are derivative, and indeed are often relegated to
the status of an illusion, a phantom of the computations happening in our
brains.
This way of looking at things gives rise to a whole new problem that
expands the Blind Spot: once we eliminate the qualitative character of bodily
experience from the inventory of objective reality, how are we to account for
the sensations of felt qualities like hot and cold? This is the familiar mind-
body problem, which today goes by the name of “the hard problem of
consciousness” or the “explanatory gap” between mental and physical
phenomena.
The downplaying of our direct experience of the perceptual world while
elevating mathematical abstractions as what’s truly real is a fundamental
mistake. When we focus just on thermodynamic temperature as an objective
microphysical quantity and view it as more fundamental than our perceptual
world, we fail to see the inescapable richness of experience lying behind and
supporting the scientific concept of temperature. Concrete experience always
overflows abstract and idealized scientific representations of phenomena.
There is always more to experience than scientific descriptions can corral.
Even the “objective observers” privileged by the scientific worldview over
real human beings are themselves abstractions. The failure to see direct
experience as the irreducible wellspring of knowledge is precisely the Blind
Spot.
The tragedy the Blind Spot forces on us is the loss of what’s essential to
human knowledge—our lived experience. The universe and the scientist who
seeks to know it become lifeless abstractions. Triumphalist science is
actually humanless, even if it springs from our human experience of the
world. As we will see, this disconnection between science and experience,
the essence of the Blind Spot, lies at the heart of the many challenges and
dead ends science currently faces in thinking about matter, time, life, and the
mind.
Our purpose in this book is to expose the Blind Spot and offer some
direction that might serve as alternatives to its incomplete and limited vision
of science. Scientific knowledge isn’t a window onto a disembodied, God’s-
eye perspective. It doesn’t grant us access to a perfectly knowable, timeless
objective reality, a “view from nowhere,” in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s
well-known phrase.5 Instead, all science is always our science, profoundly
and irreducibly human, an expression of how we experience and interact
with the world. But our science is also always the world’s science, an
expression of how the world interacts with us. Science strives to be a self-
correcting narrative. A successful scientific narrative is made from the world
and our experience of it evolving together.

Plumbing the Depths of Direct Experience

It’s no coincidence that while science was ascending the spiral of
mathematical abstraction and idealization in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, a movement to plumb the hidden depths of direct experience was
occurring in literature and philosophy. Writers such as Emily Dickinson,
William Faulkner, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf depicted
the subjective stream of thought and feeling, while philosophers such as
Henri Bergson, William James, Edmund Husserl, Susanne Langer, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Kitarō Nishida, and Alfred North Whitehead labored to
uncover the primacy of direct experience in knowledge.
A critical moment when these cultural movements intersected was the
famous encounter between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein in Paris on
April 6, 1922. As we discuss later, they debated the nature of time, with
Einstein insisting that only measurable physical time exists and Bergson
arguing that clock time lacks meaning apart from the direct experience of
duration. Historian of science Jimena Canales, in The Physicist and the
Philosopher, takes their confrontation as emblematic of a growing cultural
rift between science and philosophy in the twentieth century.6 That rift
remains in place today, despite many friendly collaborations between
physicists and philosophers (such as this book).
Uncovering the Blind Spot can help to repair this rift and the larger split
between science and lived experience. But beyond uncovering the Blind
Spot, we also need to plumb the depths of the experience it hides.
Drawing from some of the philosophers just mentioned, we will argue that
direct experience lies at the heart of the Blind Spot. Direct experience
precedes the separation of knower and known, observer and observed. At its
core is sheer awareness, the feeling of being. It’s with us when we wake up
every morning and go to sleep each night. It’s easy to overlook because it’s
so close and familiar. We habitually attend to things instead of noticing
awareness itself. We thereby miss a crucial precondition of knowing, for
without awareness, nothing can show up and become an object of
knowledge.7
Philosophers have offered various conceptions of direct experience.
William James, the father of American psychology and one of the most
influential American philosophers of the nineteenth century, emphasized
“pure experience,” which he described as “the original flux of life before
reflexion has categorized it.”8 A little earlier, Bergson wrote about the
experience of “duration,” the immediate conscious intuition of passage or
flow. The twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida drew from
Bergson and James but revised their ideas in light of Buddhist philosophy
and his experience of Zen meditation practice.9 Nishida described pure
experience as direct experience unmediated by the division between subject
and object. Other philosophers have used words like intuition, feeling, and
the phenomenal field to get at this kind of immediate experience or mode of
presence. Nishida, in his later writings, used the term action-intuition to
emphasize that direct experience is not passive and disembodied; to be
aware is already to act with our bodies.10 For example, when you move your
eyes, the focus of your awareness shifts. As Nishida writes, “When we think
we have perceived at a glance the entirety of a thing, careful investigation
will reveal that attention shifted automatically through eye movement,
enabling us to know the whole.”11 Direct experience isn’t simple and
instantaneous; it’s complex and has durational rhythms. Crucially, it’s prior to
explicit knowledge. Knowing presupposes experiencing, and you can’t
derive experience just from episodes of knowing. Your being is always more
than what you know.
In this book, we’ll meet some of these philosophers who struggled to
articulate direct experience and recover its primacy and who worked to keep
our understanding of nature from bifurcating into subject and object, mind
and body. Our central concern will always be the dependence of science on
experience, a dependence that is far richer and more complex than the
obvious dependence of science on observers and experiments. The problem,
and the source of the crisis of meaning in our worldview, is that we’ve
become so captivated by the spectacular success of science that we’ve
forgotten that direct experience is science’s essential source and constant
support.
In plumbing the depths of experience, we have no intention of downplaying
the success and value of science. We reject science denial, but we also reject
scientific triumphalism. Our quarrel is with a particular, misguided
conception of science, one that has come to be built into our present
scientific worldview but isn’t an essential part of science. This misguided
conception, which we delineate in chapter 1, is essentially a philosophy of
science based on certain metaphysical assumptions about nature and human
knowledge. We argue that science doesn’t require this philosophy, and that
given its failures, we should jettison it and move on.
In this way, we call for a balanced perspective, where we recognize both
the success of science and the problems science has helped to create. The
spectacular success of science quickly gave us new vaccines for the
worldwide coronavirus pandemic, but science also gave us the conditions of
rapid international travel and widespread environmental destruction that
made the pandemic possible, with worse future pandemics more likely.
Science has helped to create the climate crisis. “The fire next time” is
already here. We need another way to understand and practice science, one
that doesn’t lead to our world burning and that can help to put out the fire
we’ve already started. In short, we need a new kind of scientific worldview.
Our starting point is to recover the deep connection between science and
human experience that was lost in the Blind Spot.
We began by saying that we write this book with a sense of urgency. The
Blind Spot has limited us to a worldview that misunderstands science and
impoverishes the living world and our experience. To uncover the Blind Spot
and reveal what it hides is to wake up from the delusion of absolute
knowledge. It is to embrace the hope that we can create a new scientific
worldview, one in which we see ourselves both as an expression of nature
and a source of nature’s self-understanding. As we describe later, we are
caught up in a strange loop in which it is impossible to separate ourselves as
knowers from the reality we seek to know. We need nothing less than a
science nourished by this sensibility for humanity to flourish in the new
millennium.12
 I
How Did We Get Here? A Guide
for the Perplexed
 1
The Surreptitious Substitution: Philosophical
Origins of the Blind Spot

Humanity in Crisis
“We find ourselves in the greatest danger of drowning in the skeptical deluge
and thereby losing our hold on our own truth.”1 Edmund Husserl, the
twentieth-century German mathematician and philosopher, wrote these words
a few years before the outbreak of World War II. They are from his final
book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, first given as lectures in Prague in 1935. Husserl founded
the influential movement of phenomenology, which takes experience as its
central focus. Born into a Jewish family, he was removed from his university
position for being “non-Aryan” when Hitler came to power in 1933. Isolated
and discriminated against, Husserl died in 1938, just months before the start
of World War II.
Husserl believed that “Western,” particularly European, civilization had
lost its way. He traced the deep roots of the “crisis of European humanity” to
a failure of reason and a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of
modern science. The confusion was centuries in the making. Science itself,
the actual practice of scientists, was not in crisis. On the contrary, science
was tremendously successful. Instead, the crisis arose from the meaning that
had become attached to science. A particular worldview had been grafted
onto science, the worldview we are calling the Blind Spot. The dominant
philosophical conception of science led to elevating mathematical
abstractions as what is truly real and to devaluing the world of immediate
experience, which Husserl called the “life-world.” Modern humanity had
lost sight of the fact that reality and meaning are far richer than they are
represented as being in the dominant materialistic philosophy attached to
science. That philosophy had led to a “disenchantment of the world,” to use
German sociologist Max Weber’s term. (Weber was Husserl’s
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
follower of Euripides. The master had employed recognized myths as
a framework for a thoroughly “modern” treatment of ordinary human
interests; his disciple finally throws aside the convention of antiquity.
(ii) Another post-Euripidean feature is the use of musical
interludes. Aristotle tells us: “As for the later poets, their choral
songs pertain as little to the subject of the piece as to that of any
other tragedy. They are therefore sung as mere interludes—a
practice first begun by Agathon.”[72] Our poet then is once more
found completing a process which his friend had carried far.
Sophocles had diminished the length and dramatic importance of the
lyrics, but with him they were still entirely relevant. Euripides shows
a strong tendency to write his odes as separable songs, but
complete irrelevance is hardly found. Plays such as Agathon’s could
obviously be performed, if necessary, without the trouble and
expense of a chorus, which in process of time altogether
disappeared. His interludes served, it seems, more as divisions
between “acts” than as an integral part of the play. In this connexion
should be mentioned his innovation in the accompaniment—the use
of “chromatic” or coloured style.[73] His florid music is laughed at by
Aristophanes as “ants’ bye-paths”.[74]
(iii) Occasionally he took a great extent of legend as the topic of a
single drama, and it seems likely[75] that he composed a Fall of Troy,
taking the whole epic subject instead of an episode. Agathon is
trying yet another experiment—it was necessary for a writer of his
powers to vary in some way from Euripides, but this attempt was
unsatisfactory.[76]
In the Thesmophoriazusæ Aristophanes pays Agathon the honour
of elaborate parody. Euripides comes to beg his friend to plead for
him before an assembly of Athenian women, and the scene in which
Agathon amid much pomp explains the principles of his art, contains
definite and valuable criticism under the usual guise of burlesque;
that Aristophanes valued him is shown by the affectionate pun on his
name which he introduces into the Frogs (v. 84):—
 ἀγαθὸς ποιητὴς καὶ ποθεινὸς τοῖς φίλοις,

“a good poet, sorely missed by his friends”. Plato lays the scene of
his Symposium in the house of Agathon, who is celebrating his first
tragic victory; the poet is depicted as a charming host, and, when
the conversation turns to a series of panegyrics upon the god of
Love, offers a contribution to which we shall return.
From these sources we learn as usual little about the poet’s
dramatic skill, much as to his literary style. But under the first head
falls a vital remark of Aristotle: “in his reversals of the action (i.e. the
peripeteia), however, he shows a marvellous skill in the effort to hit
the popular taste—to produce a tragic effect that satisfies the moral
sense. This effect is produced when the clever rogue, like Sisyphus,
is outwitted, or the brave villain defeated. Such an event is,
moreover, probable in Agathon’s sense of the word: ‘it is probable,’
he says, ‘that many things should happen contrary to
probability’.”[77] Agathon belongs to the class of playwrights who win
popularity by bringing down to the customary theatrical level the
methods and ideas of a genius who is himself too undiluted and
strange for his contemporaries. Agathon’s relation to Euripides
resembles that of (let us say) Mr. St. John Hankin, in his later work,
to Ibsen. Of his literary style much the same may be said. He loves
to moralize on chance and probability and the queer twists of human
nature, with Euripides’ knack of neatness but without his insight.
Such things as

μόνου γὰρ αὐτοῦ καὶ θεὸς στερίσκεται,

ἀγένητα ποιεῖν ἅσσ’ ἂν ᾖ πεπραγμένα

“this alone is beyond the power even of God, to make undone that
which has been done,” and even the celebrated τέχνη τύχην ἔστερξε
καὶ τύχη τέχνην, “skill loves luck, and luck skill,” give the measure of
his power over epigram. His easy way of expressing simple ideas
with admirable neatness may remind us of a much greater dramatist
—Terence, or, in later times, of Marivaux.[78]
 Plato tells us that he was a pupil both of Prodicus[79] and of
Gorgias,[80] the renowned sophists, and we may trace their teaching
in the fragments and in the remarkable speech which the greatest
stylist of all time puts into his mouth in the Symposium—the rhymes,
antitheses, quibbles, and verbal trickiness of argument. The parody,
both brilliant and careful, which Aristophanes presents at the
opening of his Thesmophoriazusæ is directed chiefly perhaps against
his music, whereof we have no trace. The blunt auditor, Mnesilochus,
describes it as lascivious.[81] The words set to it read like a feeble
copy of Euripides—fluent, copious, nerveless, in spite of the “lathe,”
the “glue,” the “melting-pot,” and the “moulds”[82] over which his
satirist makes merry.
Agathon, then, marks unmistakably the beginning of decadence.
The three masters had exhausted the possibilities of the art open to
that age. A new impulse from without or the social emancipation of
women might have opened new paths of achievement. But no great
external influence was to come till Alexander, and then the result for
Greece itself was loss of independence and vigour. And the little that
could be done with women still in the harem or the slave-market
was left to be performed by Menander and his fellow-comedians.[83]
Agathon made a valiant effort to carry tragedy into new channels,
but lacked the genius to leave more than clever experiments.
On a lower plane of achievement stands Critias, the famous leader
of the “Thirty Tyrants”. Two tragedies from his pen are known to us,
Pirithous[84] and Sisyphus, both at one time attributed to Euripides;
but he is too doctrinaire, too deficient in brilliant idiomatic ease, for
such a mistake to endure. The Pirithous deals with Heracles’ descent
into Hades to rescue Theseus and to demand of Pluto Persephone’s
hand for Pirithous. Of this astounding story we find little trace in the
fragments, which are mostly quasi-philosophical dicta. For instance:
—

A temper sound more stable is than law;

The one no politician’s eloquence
 Can warp, but law by tricks of cunning words
Full often is corrupted and unhinged.
In strong contrast to these prosaic lines is Critias’ superb apostrophe
to the Creator, which may be paraphrased thus:—

From all time, O Lord, is thy being; neither is there any that
saith, This is my son.
All that is created, lo, thou hast woven the firmament about
it; the heavens revolve, and all that is therein spinneth like a
wheel.
Thou hast girded thyself with light; the gloom of dusk is
about thee, even as a garment of netted fire.
Stars without number dance around thee; they cease not,
they move in a measure through thy high places.

From the same hymn probably comes the majestic passage which
tells of “unwearied Time that in full flood ever begets himself, and
the Great Bear and the Less....”
In apparent contrast to this tone is the remarkable passage, of
forty-two lines, from the Sisyphus. It is a purely rationalistic account
of religion. First human life was utterly brutish: there were no
rewards for righteousness, no punishment of evil-doers. Then law
was set up, that justice might be sovereign; but this device only
added furtiveness to sin. Finally, “some man of shrewdness and
wisdom ... introduced religion” (or “the conception of God,” τὸ
θεῖον), so that even in secret the wicked might be restrained by fear.
The contradiction between these two plays is illusory: Critias
combines with disbelief in the personal Greek gods belief in an
impersonal First Cause. It is too often forgotten that among the
“Thirty Tyrants” were men of strong religious principles. The
democratic writers of Athens loved to depict them as mercenary
butchers, but it is plain from the casual testimony of Lysias[85] that
they looked upon themselves as moral reformers. “They said that it
was their business to purge the city of wicked men, and turn the rest
of the citizens to righteousness and self-restraint.” Such passages
read like quotations from men who would inaugurate a “rule of the
saints,” and if their severities surpassed those of the English
Puritans, they were themselves outdone by the cruelty which sternly
moral leaders of the French Revolution not only condoned but
initiated. Critias was the Athenian Robespierre. But the one
revolution was the reverse of the other. The régime of the Thirty was
a last violent effort of the Athenian oligarchs to stem the tide of
ochlocracy, to induce some self-discipline into the freedom of
Athens. They failed, and Critias was justified on the field of
Chæronea.
The most successful tragic playwright of the fourth century was
Astydamas, whose history furnishes good evidence that after the
disappearance of Euripides and Sophocles the Greek genius was
incapable of carrying tragedy into new developments. While prose
could boast such names as Plato and Demosthenes, the tragic art
found no greater exponent than this Astydamas, of whose numerous
plays nothing is left save nine odd lines. There were, moreover, two
Astydamantes, father and son, whose works (scarcely known save
by name) it is difficult to distinguish. But it seems that it was the son
whose popularity was so great as to win him fifteen first prizes and
an honour before unknown. His Parthenopæus won such applause in
340 b.c. that the Athenians set up a brazen statue of the playwright
in the theatre; it was not till ten years later that the orator Lycurgus
persuaded them to accord a like honour to the three Masters. We
learn from Aristotle[86] that Astydamas altered the story of
Alcmæon, causing him to slay his mother in ignorance; and
Plutarch[87] alludes to his Hector as one of the greatest plays. He
was nothing more than a capable writer who caught the taste of his
time, and probably owed much of his popularity to the excellence of
his actors.
Only one fact is known about Polyidus “the sophist,” but that is
sufficiently impressive. Aristotle twice[88] takes the Recognition-
scene in his Iphigenia as an example, and in the second instance
actually compares the work of Polyidus with one of Euripides’ most
wonderful successes—the Recognition-scene in the Iphigenia in
Tauris. It appears that as Orestes was led away to slaughter he
exclaimed: “Ah! So I was fated, like my sister, to be sacrificed.” This
catches the attention of Iphigenia and saves his life. Polyidus here
undoubtedly executed a brilliant coup de théâtre.
During the fourth century many tragedians wrote not for public
performance but for readers. Of these ἀναγνωστικοί[89] the most
celebrated was Chæremon, of whom sufficient fragments and notices
survive to give a distinct literary portrait. Comic poets ridiculed his
preciosity: he called water “river’s body,” ivy “the year’s child,” and
loved word-play: πρὶν γὰρ φρονεῖν εὖ καταφρονεῖν ἐπίστασαι.[90]
But though a sophisticated attention to style led him into such frigid
mannerisms, he can express ideas with a brief Euripidean cogency:
perhaps nothing outside the work of the great masters was more
often quoted in antiquity than his dictum “Human life is luck, not
discretion”—τύχη τὰ θνητῶν πράγματ’, οὐκ εὐβουλία.
The only technical peculiarity attributed to him is the play Centaur,
if play it was. Athenæus calls it a “drama in many metres,”[91] while
Aristotle[92] uses the word “rhapsody,” implying epic quality. It may
be that the epic or narrative manner was used side by side with the
dramatic in the manner of Bunyan. Here is another proof that by the
time of Euripides tragedy had really attained its full development.
Attempts at new departures in technique are all abortive after his
day.
A delightful point which emerges again and again is Chæremon’s
passion for flowers. From Thyestes come two phrases—“the sheen
of roses mingled with silver lilies,” and “strewing around the children
of flowering spring”—which indicate, as do many others,
Chæremon’s love of colour and sensuous loveliness. It was his desire
to express all the details of what pleased his eye that led him into
preciosity—a laboured embroidery which recalls Keats’ less happy
efforts. But he can go beyond mere mannerism. A splendid fragment
of his Œneus shows Chæremon at his best: it describes the half-
nude beauty of girls sleeping in the moonlight. One can hardly
believe that Chæremon belonged to the fourth century and was
studied by Aristotle. In this passage, despite its voluptuous
dilettantism, there is a sense of physical beauty, above all of colour
and sensuous detail, which was unknown since Pindar, and is not to
be found again, even in Theocritus, till we come to the Greek
novelists. In one marvellous sentence, too, he passes beyond mere
prettiness to poetry, expressing with perfect mastery the truth that
the sight of beauty is the surest incentive to chastity:
κἀξεπεσφραγίζετο ὥρας γελώσης χωρὶς ἐλπίδων ἔρως:—

Love, his passion quelled by awe,

Printed his smiling soul on all he saw.

It is the idea which Meredith has voiced so magically in Love in the

Valley:—

Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless,

Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.

That Greek literature has progressed far towards the self-conscious

Alexandrian search for charm can nevertheless be observed if we
compare this passage from Chæremon with the analogous
description in Euripides’ Bacchæ[93] (which no doubt suggested it).
There the same general impression, and far more “atmosphere,” is
given with no voluptuous details: θαῦμ’ ἰδεῖν εὐκοσμίας—“a marvel
of grace for the eye to behold”—is his nearest approach to
Chæremon’s elaboration. If, as has been well said,[94] one may
compare the three Masters to Giotto, Raffaelle, and Correggio
respectively, then Chæremon finds his parallel among the French
painters; he reminds one not so much of the handsome sensuality of
Boucher as of that more seductive simplesse in which Greuze
excelled.
 A curious figure in this history is Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of
Syracuse from 405-367 b.c. Like Frederick the Great of Prussia, not
satisfied with political and military glory, he aspired to literary
triumphs. With a pathetic hero-worship he purchased and treasured
the desk of Æschylus, and similar objects which had belonged to
Euripides, hoping (says Lucian[95]) to gain inspiration from them.
The prince frequently tried his fortune at the dramatic contests in
Athens, but for long without success, and naturally became a butt of
the Attic wits, who particularly relished his moral aphorisms (such as
“tyranny is the mother of injustice”!); Eubulus devoted a whole
comedy to his tragic confrère. In 367 b.c. he heard with joy that at
last the first prize had fallen to him at the Lenæa for Hector’s
Ransom; gossip said that his death in the same year was due to the
paroxysms of gratified vanity. Little is known about the contents of
his dramas, but we hear that one play was an attack upon the
philosopher Plato. In other works, too, he appears to have discussed
his personal interests. Lucian preserves the bald verse:—

Doris, Dionysius’ spouse, has passed away,

and the astonishing remark:—

Alas! alas! a useful wife I’ve lost.

But one may be misjudging him. Perhaps by “useful” (χρησίμην) he

meant “good” (χρηστήν); Dionysius had a curious fad for using
words, not in their accepted sense, but according to real or fancied
etymology.[96]
Ancient critics set great store by Carcinus, the most distinguished
of a family long connected with the theatre. One hundred and sixty
plays are attributed to him, and eleven victories. He spent some time
at the court of the younger Dionysius, the Syracusan tyrant, and his
longest fragment deals with the Sicilian worship of Demeter and
Persephone. We possess certain interesting facts about his plots.
Aristotle[97] as an instance of the first type of Recognition—that by
signs—mentions among those which are congenital “the stars
introduced by Carcinus in his Thyestes” (evidently birthmarks). More
striking is a later paragraph:[98] “In constructing the plot and
working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the
scene, as far as possible, before his eyes.... The need of such a rule
is shown by the fault found in Carcinus. Amphiaraus was on his way
from the temple. This fact escaped the observation of one who did
not see the situation. On the stage, however, the piece failed, the
audience being offended at the oversight.” This shows incidentally
how little assistance an ancient dramatist obtained from that now
vital collaborator, the rehearsal. In the Medea[99] of Carcinus the
heroine, unlike the Euripidean, did not slay her children but sent
them away. Their disappearance caused the Corinthians to accuse
her of their murder, and she defended herself by an ingenious piece
of rhetorical logic: “Suppose that I had killed them. Then it would
have been a blunder not to slay their father Jason also. This you
know I have not done. Hence I have not murdered my children
either.” Just as Carcinus there smoothed away what was felt to be
too dreadful in Euripides, so in Œdipus he appears[100] to have dealt
with the improbabilities which cling to Œdipus Tyrannus. He
excelled, moreover, in the portrayal of passion: Cercyon, struggling
with horrified grief in Carcinus’ Alope, is cited by Aristotle.[101] The
Ærope too had sensational success. That bloodthirsty savage
Alexander, tyrant of Pheræ, was so moved by the emotion wherewith
the actor Theodorus performed his part, that he burst into tears.
[102]

Two points in his actual fragments strike a modern reader. The

first is a curious flatness of style noticeable in the one fairly long
passage; every word seems to be a second-best. The opening lines
will be sufficient:—

λέγουσι Δήμητρός ποτ’ ἄρρητον κόρην

Πλούτωνα κρυφίοις ἁρπάσαι βουλεύμασι,
δῦναί τε γαίας εἰς μελαμφαεῖς μυχούς.
 πόθῳ δὲ μητέρ’ ἠφανισμένης κόρης
μαστῆρ’ ἐπελθεῖν πᾶσαν ἐν κύκλῳ χθόνα.
To turn from this dingy verbiage to his amazing brilliance in
epigram is like passing from an auctioneer’s showroom into a
lighthouse. (The difference, we note, is between narrative and
“rhetoric”.) Such a sentence as οὐδεὶς ἔπαινον ἡδοναῖς ἐκτήσατο
(“no man ever won praise by his pleasures”) positively bewilders by
its glitter. It is perhaps not absolutely perfect: its miraculous ease
might allow a careless reader to pass it by; but that is a defect which
Carcinus shares with most masters of epigram, notably with Terence
and Congreve. More substantial is the wit of this fragment:—

χαίρω σ’ ὁρῶν φθονοῦντα, τοῦτ’ εἰδώς, ὅτι

ἓν δρᾷ μόνον δίκαιον ὧν ποιεῖ φθόνος·
λυπεῖ γὰρ αὐτόχρημα τοὺς κεκτημένους.

“I rejoice to see that you harbour spite, for I know that of all its
effects there is one that is just—it straightway stings those who
cherish it.” One notices the exquisite skill which has inserted the
second line, serving admirably to prepare for and throw into relief
the vigorous third verse.
Theodectes of Phaselis enjoyed a brilliant career. During his forty-
one years he was a pupil of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle, obtained
great distinction as an orator (Cicero[103] praises him), produced
fifty plays, and obtained the first prize at eight of the thirteen
contests in which he competed. Alexander the Great decked his
statue with garlands in memory of the days when they had studied
together under Aristotle. That philosopher quotes him several times,
and in particular pays Theodectes the high honour of coupling him
with Sophocles; the examples which he gives[104] of peripeteia are
the Œdipus Tyrannus and the Lynceus of Theodectes. The same
drama is used[105] to exemplify another vital point, the difference
between Complication and Dénouement.
 He was doubtless a brilliantly able man and a popular dramatist
with a notable talent for concocting plots. But all that we can now
see in his remains is a feeble copy of Euripides, though he was, to
be sure, audacious enough to place Philoctetes’ wound in the hand
instead of the foot—for the sake of gracefulness, one may imagine.
For the rest, we possess a curious speech made by some one
ignorant of letters, who describes[106] as a picture the name
“Theseus”—this idea is taken bodily from Euripides—and sundry
sententious remarks, one of which surely deserves immortality as
reaching the limit of pompous common-place:—

Widely through Greece hath this tradition spread

O aged man, and ancient is the saw:
The hap of mortals is uncertain ever.

Mention should be made of Diogenes and Crates the philosophers,

who wrote plays not for production, but for the study, as
propagandist pamphlets. They may none the less have been
excellent plays, like the Justice of Mr. Galsworthy. Very little remains
on which an opinion can be founded. One vigorous line of Diogenes
catches the attention: “I would rather have a drop of luck than a
barrel of brains”.[107]
A more remarkable dramatist was Moschion, whose precise
importance it is hard to estimate, though he is deeply interesting to
the historian of tragedy. For on the one hand, he was probably not
popular—nothing is known of his life,[108] and Stobæus is practically
the only writer who quotes him. On the other hand, he is the one
Greek poet known to have practised definitely the historical type of
drama. Moschion is of course not alone in selecting actual events for
his theme. Long before his day Phrynichus had produced his
Phœnissæ and The Capture of Miletus, Æschylus his Persæ; and his
contemporary Theodectes composed a tragedy Mausolus in
glorification of the deceased king of Caria. But all four were pièces
d’occasion. Moschion alone practised genuine historical drama: he
went according to custom into the past for his material, but chose
great events of real history, not legend.[109] His Themistocles dealt
with the battle of Salamis; we possess one brief remnant thereof, in
which (as it seems) a messenger compares the victory of the small
Greek force to the devastation wrought by a small axe in a great
pine-forest. The Men of Pheræ appears[110] to have depicted the
brutality of Alexander, prince of Pheræ, who refused burial to
Polyphron.
These “burial-passages” include Moschion’s most remarkable
fragment, a fine description in thirty-three lines describing the rise of
civilization. The versification is undesirably smooth—throughout
there is not a single resolved foot. Like a circumspect rationalist,
Moschion offers three alternative reasons, favouring none, for the
progress made by man: some great teacher such as Prometheus,
the Law of Nature (ἀνάγκη), the long slow experience (τριβή) of the
whole race. His style here is vigorous but uneven; after dignified
lines which somewhat recall Æschylus we find a sudden drop to bald
prose: ὁ δ’ ἀσθενὴς ἦν τῶν ἀμεινόνων βορά:[111] “the weak were
the food of the strong”.
It is convenient to mention here a remarkable satyric drama,
produced about 324 b.c., the Agen,[112] of which seventeen
consecutive lines survive. This play was produced during the
Dionysiac festival in the camp of Alexander on the banks of the
Hydaspes or Jhelum, in the Punjaub. Its subject was the escapades
of Harpalus, who had revolted from Alexander and fled to Athens.
The author is said[113] to have been either Python of Catana or
Byzantium, or the Great Alexander himself. No doubt it was an
elaborate “squib” full of racy topical allusions. Were it not that
Athenæus calls it a “satyric playlet”[114] we might take the fragment
as part of a comedy. But about this time satyric drama tended to
become a form of personal attack—a dramatic “satire”. Thus one
Mimnermus, whose date is unknown, wrote a play against
doctors[115]; Lycophron and Sositheus, both members of the
Alexandrian “Pleiad,” attacked individual philosophers, the former
writing a Menedemus which satirized the gluttony and drunkenness
of the amiable founder of the Eretrian school, the latter ridiculing the
disciples whom the “folly of Cleanthes” drove like cattle—an insult
which the audience resented and damned the play.[116]
The third century saw a great efflorescence of theatrical activity in
Alexandria. Under Ptolemy II (285-247 b.c.), that city became the
centre of world-culture as it already was of commerce. All artistic
forms were protected and rewarded with imperial liberality. The
great library became one of the wonders of the world, and the
Dionysiac festivals were performed with sedulous magnificence.
Among the many writers of tragedy seven were looked on as
forming a class by themselves—the famous Pleiad (“The
Constellation of Seven”). Only five names of these are certain—
Philiscus, Homerus, Alexander, Lycophron, and Sositheus; for the
other two “chairs” various names are found in our authorities:
Sosiphanes, Dionysiades, Æantides, Euphronius. Nor can we be sure
that all these men worked at Alexandria.[117] That the splendour of
the city and Ptolemy’s magnificent patronage should have drawn the
leading men of art, letters, and science to the world’s centre, is a
natural assumption and indeed the fact: Theocritus the idyllist,
Euclid the geometer, Callimachus the poet and scholar, certainly lived
there. Of the Pleiad, only three are known to have worked in
Alexandria: Lycophron, to whom Ptolemy entrusted that section of
the royal library which embraced Comedy, Alexander, who
superintended Tragedy, and Philiscus the priest of Dionysus.
Homerus may have passed all his career in Byzantium, which later
possessed a statue of him, and Sositheus was apparently active at
Athens.
Lycophron’s Menedemus has already been mentioned. His fame
now rests upon the extant poem Alexandra, in high repute both in
ancient and in modern times for its obscurity. But Sositheus is the
most interesting of the galaxy. We may still read twenty-one lines
from his satyric drama Daphnis or Lityerses, describing with grim
vigour the ghoulish harvester Lityerses who made his visitors reap
with him, finally beheading them and binding up the corpses in
sheaves. Sositheus made his mark, indeed, less in tragedy than in
satyric writing: he turned from the tendency of his day which made
this genre a form of satire, and went back to the antique manner.
Sosiphanes, finally, deserves mention for a remarkable fragment:—

ὦ δυστυχεῖς μὲν πολλά, παῦρα δ’ ὄλβιοι

βροτοί, τί σεμνύνεσθε ταῖς ἐξουσίαις,
ἃς ἕν τ’ ἔδωκε φέγγος ἕν τ’ ἀφείλετο;
ἢν δ’ εὐτυχῆτε, μηδὲν ὄντες εὐθέως
ἴσ’ οὐρανῷ φρονεῖτε, τὸν δὲ κύριον
Αἵδην παρεστῶτ’ οὐχ ὁρᾶτε πλησίον.

“O mortal men, whose misery is so manifold, whose joys so few,

why plume yourselves on power which one day gives and one day
destroys? If ye find prosperity, straightway, though ye are naught,
your pride rises high as heaven, and ye see not your master death at
your elbow”—a curiously close parallel with the celebrated outburst
in Measure for Measure. We observe the Euripidean versification,
though Sosiphanes “flourished” two centuries[118] after the master’s
birth, and though between the two, in men like Moschion, Carcinus,
and Chæremon, we find distinct flatness of versification. The fourth-
century poets, however second-rate, were still working with
originality of style: Sosiphanes belongs to an age which has begun
not so much to respect as to worship the great models. He sets
himself to copy Euripides, and his iambics are naturally “better” than
Moschion’s, as are those written by numerous able scholars of our
own day.
After the era of the Pleiad, Greek tragedy for us to all intents and
purposes comes to an end. New dramas seem to have been
produced down to the time of Hadrian, who died in a.d. 138, and
theatrical entertainments were immensely popular throughout later
antiquity, as vase-paintings show, besides countless allusions in
literature. But our fragments are exceedingly meagre. One tragedy
has been preserved by its subject—the famous Christus Patiens
(Χριστὸς Πάσχων), which portrayed the Passion. It is the longest and
the worst of all Greek plays, and consists largely of a repellent cento
—snippets from Euripides pieced together and eked out by bad
iambics of the author’s own. The result is traditionally, but wrongly,
attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus (born probably in a.d. 330). Its
only value is that it is often useful in determining the text of
Euripides. It would be useless to enumerate all the poetasters of
these later centuries whose names are recorded.

In this chapter we have constantly referred to the Poetic of

Aristotle, and it will be well at this point to summarize his view of the
nature, parts, and aim of tragedy. Before doing so, however, we
must be clear upon two points: the standpoint of his criticism and
the value of his evidence. It was long the habit to take this work as
a kind of Bible of poetical criticism, to accept with blind devotion any
statements made therein, or even alleged[119] to be made therein,
as constituting rules for all playwrights for ever. Now, as to the
former point, the nature of his criticism, it is simply to explain how
good tragedies were as a fact written. He takes the work of
contemporary and earlier playwrights, and in the light of this,
together with his own strong common sense, æsthetic sensibility,
and private temperament, tells how he himself (for example) would
write a tragedy. On the one hand, could he have read Macbeth then,
he would have condemned it; on the other, could he read it now as a
modern man, he would approve it. As to the second point, the value
of his evidence, we must distinguish carefully between the facts
which he reports and his comment thereon. The latter we should
study with the respect due to his vast merits; but he is not infallible.
When, for instance, he writes that “even a woman may be good, and
also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being,
and the slave quite worthless,”[120] and blames Euripides because
“Iphigenia the suppliant in no way resembles her later self,”[121] we
shall regard him less as helping us than as dating himself. But as to
the objective facts which he records he must be looked on as for us
infallible.[122] He lived in or close to the periods of which he writes;
he commanded a vast array of documents now lost to us; he was
strongly desirous of ascertaining the facts; his temperament and
method were keenly scientific, his industry prodigious. We may, and
should, discuss his opinions; his facts we cannot dispute. The reader
will be able to appreciate for himself the statement which follows.
Aristotle’s definition of tragedy runs thus: “Tragedy, then, is an
imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain
magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic
ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the
play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear
effecting the proper purgation of these emotions”.[123] Adequate
discussion of this celebrated passage is here impossible; only two
points can be made. Firstly, the definition plainly applies to Greek
Tragedy alone and as understood by Aristotle: we observe the
omission of what seems to us vital—the fact that tragedy depicts the
collision of opposing principles as conveyed by the collision of
personalities—and the insertion of Greek peculiarities since, as he
goes on to explain, by “language embellished” he means language
which includes song. Secondly, the famous dictum concerning
“purgation” (catharsis) is now generally understood as meaning, not
“purification” or “edification” of our pity and fear, but as a medical
metaphor signifying that these emotions are purged out of our spirit.
Further light on the nature of tragedy he gives by comparing it
with three other classes of literature. “Comedy aims at representing
men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.”[124] In another
place he contrasts tragedy with history: “It is not the function of the
poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is
possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet
and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose.... The
true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other
what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a
higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal,
history the particular.”[125] Our imperfect text of the treatise ends
with a more elaborate comparison between Tragedy and Epic,
wherein Aristotle combats the contemporary view[126] that “epic
poetry is addressed to a cultivated audience, who do not need
gesture; Tragedy to an inferior public. Being then unrefined, it is
evidently the lower of the two.” His own verdict is that, since tragedy
has all the epic elements, adds to these music and scenic effects,
shows vividness in reading as well as in representation, attains its
end within narrower limits, and shows greater unity of effect, it is
the higher art.[127]
In various portions of the Poetic he gives us the features of
Tragedy, following three independent lines of analysis:—
§ I. On the æsthetic line he discusses the elements of a tragedy:
plot, character, thought, diction, scenery, and song. Of the last three
he has little to say. But on one of them he makes an interesting
remark. “Third in order is Thought—that is, the faculty of saying
what is possible and pertinent in given circumstances.... The older
poets made their characters speak the language of civic life; the
poets of our time, the language of the rhetoricians.”[128] This
prophesies from afar of Seneca and his like. As for character, it must
be good, appropriate, true to life, and consistent.
Concerning Plot, which he rightly calls “the soul of a tragedy,”[129]
Aristotle is of course far more copious. The salient points alone can
be set down here:—
(a) “The proper magnitude is comprised within such limits, that
the sequence of events, according to the law of probability or
necessity, will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from
good fortune to bad.”[130]
(b) “The plot ... must imitate one action and that a whole, the
structural union of the parts being such that if anyone of them is
displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and
disturbed.”[131] A tragedy must be an organism. It therefore follows
that “of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst ... in which
the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or
necessary sequence”.[132] He is recommending the “Unity of Action”.
(c) “Plots are either Simple or Complex.... An action ... I call
Simple, when the change of fortune takes place without Reversal (or
Recoil) of the Action and without Recognition. A Complex Action is
one in which the change is accompanied by such Reversal, or by
Recognition, or by both.”[133] Reversal we shall meet again. By
Recognition Aristotle means not merely such Recognition-scenes as
we find in the crisis of the Iphigenia in Tauris (though such are the
best) but “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or
hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad
fortune”.[134]
(d) “Two parts, then, of the plot—Reversal and Recognition—turn
upon surprises. A third part is the Tragic Incident. The Tragic
Incident is a distinctive or painful action, such as death on the stage,
bodily agony, wounds, and the like.”[135] In the words “death on the
stage”—or “before the audience” (the phrase[136] has no bearing on
the stage-controversy), Aristotle casually but completely overthrows
another critical convention, that in ancient Tragedy deaths take place
only “behind the scenes”. In the extant plays, not only do Alcestis
and Hippolytus “die on the stage” in their litters, but Ajax falls upon
his sword.
(e) The best subject of Tragedy is the change from good fortune
to bad in the life of some eminent man not conspicuously good and
just, whose misfortune, however, is due not to wickedness but to
some error or weakness.[137]
(f) The poet “may not indeed destroy the framework of the
received legends—the fact, for instance, that Clytæmnestra was slain
by Orestes and Eriphyle by Alcmæon—but he ought to show
invention of his own, and skilfully handle the traditional material”.
[138] This injunction was obeyed beforehand by all the three
Athenian masters; it is especially important to remember it when
studying Euripides.
(g) “The unravelling of the plot ... must arise out of the plot itself;
it must not be brought about by the Deus ex Machina, as in the
Medea.... The Deus ex Machina should be employed only for events
external to the drama—for antecedent or subsequent events, which
lie beyond the range of human knowledge.”[139] This vital criticism
will be considered later, when we discuss the Philoctetes[140] of
Sophocles and the Euripidean drama.[141]
(h) “Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the
irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the
tragedy. Such is the irrational element in the Œdipus of
Sophocles.”[142] Aristotle means certain strange data in the Œdipus
Tyrannus—the fact that neither Œdipus nor Jocasta has learnt earlier
about the past, and so forth.
§ II. On the purely literary line he tells us the parts:—[143]
(a) “The Prologos is that entire part of a tragedy which precedes
the Parodos of the chorus” (see below for the Parodos). Thus a
drama may have no “prologos” at all, for example the Persæ. The
implications of our word “prologue” are derived from the practice of
Euripides, who is fond of giving in his “prologos” an account of
events which have led up to the action about to be displayed.
(b) “The Episode is that entire part of a tragedy which is between
complete choric songs.” “Episodes” then are what we call “acts”: the
name has already been explained.[144]
(c) “The Exodos is that entire part of a tragedy which has no
choric song after it.” The few anapæsts which close most tragedies
are not “choric songs”—they were performed in recitative. Thus the
Exodos is simply the last act.
(d) “Of the choric part the Parodos is the first undivided utterance
of the chorus: the Stasimon is a choric ode without anapæsts or
trochees: the Commos is a joint lamentation of chorus and actors.” It
will be seen later[145] that by excluding trochees he probably means
the trochaic tetrameter as seen in dialogue; lyric trochees are very
common.
§ III. On the strictly dramatic line he tells us the stages of
structural development.
(a) “Every tragedy falls into two parts—Complication and
Unravelling (or Dénouement).... By the Complication I mean all that
comes between the beginning of the action and the part which
marks the turning-point to good or bad fortune. The Unravelling is
that which comes between the beginning of the change and the
end.”[146]
(b) “Reversal (or Recoil, Peripeteia) is a change by which a train of
action produces the opposite of the effect intended, subject always
to our rule of probability or necessity. Thus in the Œdipus, the
messenger comes to cheer Œdipus and free him from his alarms
about his mother, but, by revealing who he is, he produces the
opposite effect.”[147]
Much might be written on this analysis of dramatic structure. One
remark at least must be made. It is not plain how much importance
Aristotle allots to the Recoil or Peripeteia. We have seen that he did
not regard it as indispensable. At the most he seems to think it a
striking way of starting the dénouement. It is better to look upon it,
and the action which leads up to it, as a separate part of the drama
—and it may be argued that every tragedy, if not every comedy, has
a Peripeteia—to form, in fact, that middle stage which
elsewhere[148] in the Poetic he mentions as necessary.
 CHAPTER II
THE GREEK THEATRE AND THE PRODUCTION
OF PLAYS

I. The Occasions of Performance

Greek drama was looked upon not only as a form of entertainment
and culture, but as an act of worship offered to the god Dionysus. It
was, in consequence, restricted to his festivals; performances of a
quite secular character are unknown. Three Attic festivals are
connected with the tragic drama: the City Dionysia, the Lenæa, the
Rural Dionysia. The City or Great Dionysia were the most splendid of
the three, held in the precinct of Dionysus Eleuthereus on the south-
eastern slope of the Acropolis, where the ruined theatre still lies.
Tragedies, comedies, and dithyrambs were performed, but of these
tragedy was the most important. The time was the month of
Elaphebolion (March to April). The Lenæa or “Wine-Press Festival”
which occurred in Gamelion (January to February) was the great
occasion for comedy, though tragedies were also to be seen. It was
held at first in the Lenæon, a sacred enclosure, the site of which is
still uncertain, later in the same theatre as tragedy. The Rural
Dionysia fell in Poseideon (December to January), and were
celebrated by the various Attic townships, especially the Peiræus;
most of the dramas performed were probably such as had been
successful in Athens itself; companies of actors travelled about the
country for this purpose.
Of these three celebrations the City Dionysia were the most
important for tragedy. The tyrant Pisistratus greatly increased the
splendour of this festival and instituted the tragic contest. Each year
during the fifth century three tragedians submitted each a tetralogy,
and five comedians one play apiece. Tragedies were given in the
mornings, comedies in the afternoon, and the celebration continued
for at least five days.

II. The Buildings

Since the performance was a state-function, the whole nation was
theoretically expected to be present, and in point of fact enormous
audiences attended: the great theatre accommodated perhaps
30,000[149] spectators. This fact governs the nature of the whole
presentation. The theatre could not be roofed, and the acting
therefore differed greatly from that customary in modern buildings.
A Greek theatre consisted of three parts—the auditorium, the
orchestra, and the “stage-buildings”. The heart of the whole is the
orchestra or “dancing-ground” (ὀρχήστρα) upon which the chorus,
throughout the action, were stationed—a circular area of beaten
earth, later paved with marble. Beside the altar in this orchestra
stood, in the earliest days of the theatre, the sacrificial table upon
which the single actor mounted. This table in the fixed theatre is the
descendant of the waggon from which the peripatetic actor of
Thespis delivered his lines. In addition to the celebrants the passive
worshippers were needed—the audience. Therefore the orchestra
was placed at the bottom of a slope; and the spectators stood or sat
on the higher ground. On the farther side rose the “stage-buildings,”
whatever from time to time they were. The general plan, then, of
any Greek theatre was this:—
 A is the circular orchestra, B the altar (θυμέλη) of Dionysus which
invariably stood in the middle of it. C represents the “stage-
buildings”; D, E, F, are the doors which led from the building to the
open air. The building usually projected into side-wings (G, G), called
παρασκήνια. H, H, are the passage-ways (πάροδοι), by which the
chorus generally entered the orchestra, and by which the audience
always made its way to the seats. J, J, J, is the auditorium, a vast
horseshoe-shaped space rising up a hillside from the orchestra, and
filled with benches. This space was intersected by gangways,[150] K,
K, L, L, etc., called, perhaps, κλίμακες; the areas M, M, N, N, etc., so
formed, had the name “pegs” (κερκίδες). In most theatres a
longitudinal gallery O, O, O, was made for further convenience in
getting to the seats. In the strictly Greek type the front line of
“stage-buildings” never encroached on the circle of the orchestra.
But these theatres were used in Roman times also, and altered to
suit certain needs. The front of C was thrown forward so that it cut
into the orchestra and obliterated the passages H, H. To replace
these, entrances were tunnelled through the auditorium. Thus at
Athens the orchestra is now only little more than a semicircle,
though amid the ruins of the “stage-buildings” can still be seen a
few feet of the kerbstone which surrounded the original dancing
floor—the only surviving remnants of the Æschylean theatre; this
masonry shows that the diameter of the whole was about 90 feet.
The “stage-buildings,” as we have called them for convenience,
require a longer discussion. Originally there stood in that place only
a tent, called scēnē (σκηνή), which took no part in the theatrical
illusion, but was used by the one actor simply as a dressing-room.
Soon, no doubt, came the important advance of employing it as
“scenery”—the tent of Agamemnon before Troy, for example. Later a
wooden booth was erected, and Sophocles’ invention of scene-
painting—that is, of concealing this booth with canvas to represent
whatever place or building was needed—added enormously to the
playwright’s resources. This booth was afterwards built of stone and
became more and more elaborate; Roman “stage-buildings” survive
which are admirable pieces of dignified architecture. The building of
course contained dressing-rooms and property-rooms. There were
doors at the narrow ends. The front of the building was pierced by
three, later by five, doors.
Upon what did these doors open? Was there a stage in the Greek
theatre? This problem has aroused more discussion than any other
in Greek scholarship save the “Homeric Question”. That all theatres
possessed a stage (λογεῖον) in Roman times is certain; the Athenian
building—which in its present condition dates from the alterations
made by Phædrus in the third century after Christ—shows quite
obviously the front wall of a stage about 4½ feet high. But did the
dramatists of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ write for a
theatre with a stage or not? There is a good deal of prima-facie
evidence for a stage, and a good deal to show that the actors moved
to and fro on that segment of the orchestra nearest to the booth.
That is, the question lies between acting on top of the proscenium
(or decorated wall joining the faces of the parascenia G, G) and
acting in front of it. A brief résumé[151] of the evidence is all that
can be attempted here. It is confined to the consideration of the fifth
and fourth centuries b.c., to which belongs practically all the extant
work. For the period after 300 b.c. the use of a stage seems
indisputable.

A. Arguments For a Stage

§ 1. A High Stage.—Vitruvius, the Roman architect, who wrote at

the end of the first century b.c., in his directions for building a Greek
theatre says: “Among the Greeks the orchestra is wider, the back
scene is farther from the audience, and the stage is narrower.[152]
This latter they call logeion (speaking-place), because the actors of
tragedy and comedy perform there close to the back scene, while
the other artistes play in the ambit of the orchestra, wherefore the
two classes of performer are called scænici and thymelici
respectively.” [Literally, “those connected with the booth” and “those
connected with the central altar”.] “This logeion should be not less
than 10, and not more than 12, feet in height.”[153] This, says
Dörpfeld, applies to the Greek theatre of Vitruvius’ own time, but has
been extended by modern writers to the fifth century. Supposing,
however, that Vitruvius was thinking of the fifth century, then:—
(a) The stage is too narrow for performances, viz. 2·50 to 3
mètres, from which 1 mètre must be subtracted for the background.
The remaining space is not enough for actors and mutes, not to
mention any combined action of players and chorus.
(b) It is also too high. Many passages in the plays show that
chorus and actors are on the same level; in all these cases the
chorus would have to mount steps, or the actors descend. This is
absurdly awkward; nor is there evidence for steps. An attempt has
been made[154] to meet the difficulties by the assumption of another
platform about half the height of the stage, erected on the orchestra
for the chorus. But the various objections to such a subsidiary
platform are so strong that it is no longer believed in. With it,
however disappears the only way by which plays with a chorus could
be performed on the high stage of Vitruvius.
§ 2. A Low Stage.—Many scholars, abandoning Vitruvius as
evidence for the fifth century, postulate a low stage. Their
arguments are:—[155]
(a) Aristotle in the fourth century calls the songs of the actors τὰ
ἀπὸ τῆς σκηνῆς, and says that the actor performed ἐπὶ τῆς σκηνῆς,
phrases which seem to mean “from the stage” and “on the stage”
respectively. And though Dörpfeld would take σκηνή as
“background” (not “stage”) translating Aristotle’s phrases by “from
the background” and “at the background,” there remains the
difficulty that Aristotle plainly thinks of actors and chorus as
occupying quite distinct stations, which scarcely suggests that they
move on contiguous portions of the same ground.
(b) The side-wings or parascenia must have been meant to
enclose a stage. What else could have been their use?
(c) There are five phrases used by Aristophanes. Three times[156]
an actor, on approaching other actors, is said to “come up”;
twice[157] he is said to “go down”. Nothing in the context implies
raised ground as needed by the drama, so that we seem forced to
refer these expressions to the visible stage itself. Dörpfeld and
others would translate these two verbs by “come here” and “go
away”; but there is no evidence for these meanings.
(d) The existing plays throw incidental light on the problem:—
(i) Certain characters[158] complain of the steepness of their path
as they first come before the audience. Do they not refer to an
actual ascent from orchestra to stage?
(ii) Ghosts sometimes appear. How can they have ascended out of
“the ground” unless action took place on a raised area? This
argument is, however, not strong. In later theatres such spectres did
rise from below. But in the fifth century they may well have walked
in.
(iii) A more striking[159] argument is that on several occasions the
chorus, though it has excellent reason to enter the back scene,
remains inert. In the Agamemnon the elders talk of rushing to the
king’s aid; a similar thing happens in the Medea; there are a number
of such strange features. The inference is that there was a stage, to
mount which would have appeared odd.
(iv) A stage was needed to make the actors visible, instead of
being hidden by the chorus.[160] But, though there is no evidence
that the chorus grouped themselves about the orchestra (as in the
performances at Bradfield College), and they apparently stood in
rows facing the actors, they could have been placed far forward
enough to enable all to see the actors. Anyone who has visited a
circus will appreciate this.
(v) Plato[161] remarks that Agathon and his actors appeared on an
ὀκρίβας, a “platform”. But the word suggests a slight structure:
Dörpfeld objects that this appearance was probably in the Odeum,
or Music Hall, not the Theatre of Dionysus; if it was in the theatre,
the passage rather tells against a stage, for a temporary platform
would not have been used if there was a stage.
(vi) Horace[162] says that “Æschylus gave his modest stage a floor
of beams” or “gave the stage a floor of moderate-sized beams”.
Dörpfeld alleges (without evidence) that pulpitum (translated “stage”
in the last sentence) may mean “booth,” and suggests that the poet
assumes a stage as matter of course: he is marking the advance
made by Æschylus upon Thespis, who (according to Horace
himself), performed his plays upon a waggon. But the proper answer
is surely that Horace is regularly unreliable when he deals with
questions of Greek scholarship, and that he is no doubt arbitrarily
combining his knowledge of contemporary Greek theatres with his
knowledge that Æschylus advanced in theatrical matters beyond
Thespis.
 Such are the main arguments in favour of a stage in the fifth and
fourth centuries before Christ.

B. Arguments Against a Stage

(i) The evidence of the extant dramas. This, already adduced by

many to prove that a stage was used, is taken by Dörpfeld[163] as
“showing unmistakably that no separation existed between chorus
and actors, that on the contrary both played on the same area”. He
refers to action where people pass between house and orchestra
with no apparent difficulty or hesitation. The chorus enter from the
“palace” in the Choephorœ, the Eumenides, and Euripides’
Phaethon; the chorus of huntsmen enter it in the Hippolytus. There
are other probable or possible instances. Particularly noteworthy is
the fact that in Helena the chorus in the midst of the play enter the
building, and later reappear from it.
(ii) The tradition in later writers. It is true, says Dörpfeld, that we
have no express assertion that there was no stage—it never
occurred to the older writers to say so, for they knew of no such
thing. The later writers imply that there was none. Timæus,[164]
commenting on ὀκρίβας, says: “for there was not yet a thymele”.
Thymele there means “stage”. Several late writers tell us that the
Roman logeion (“speaking-place” or “stage”) was once called
“orchestra”: this supports the view that the stage is part of the old
orchestra, higher than the other portion (see below). The scholiast
on Prometheus Vinctus, 128, remarks: “They (the chorus) say this as
they hover in the air on the machine; for it would be absurd for
them to converse from below [i.e. from the orchestra] to one aloft”.
Now, the pro-stage theory makes all choruses do this. The scholiast
on Aristophanes’ Wasps, 1342, writes: “The old man stands on a
certain height (ἐπί τινος μετεώρου) as he summons the girl”. The
word “certain” (τινός) implies that he knew nothing of a regular
stage. Finally, if there was a definite and regular difference of
position between actors and chorus, is it not astonishing (a) that
there is in Greek literature no certain allusion to the fact, (b) that the
older literature contains no word for the stage, the place where the
acting was performed being referred to merely by reference to the
booth (ἐπὶ σκηνῆς and ἀπὸ σκηνῆς)?
(iii) The architectural remains. Dörpfeld sums up his celebrated
architectural researches thus. No theatre survives from the fifth
century, but the theatre of Lycurgus (fourth century) belongs to a
period when the plays of that century were still acted in the old
manner. Also we possess numerous buildings which represent the
rather later form of the theatre (the building with fixed proscenium),
and which belong to that period to which the remarks of Vitruvius
apply. From the Lycurgean theatre we learn that there was no stage
high or low. A platform for actor or orator is only necessary when
the audience are all on a flat area. If they sit on a slope, a stage is
more inconvenient than if the speaker stands on the ground.[165]
And so, in the earliest times, when there was no sloping auditorium,
Thespis, for example, performed upon a cart. In Italy the slope came
into use only late, and the stage had been widely adopted before
that time—for there was no chorus to provide for. When the Greek
theatre was introduced into Italy, the Roman form was invented.
They did not abandon their own stage, but divided the Greek
orchestra into two parts of different height. The farther half, now
superfluous (the chorus having vanished) could be used for
spectators or gladiators. This portion was (in earlier theatres of the
true Greek type) excavated and filled with fresh seats. The stage
was, of course, not made higher than the lowest eyes.
The nature of the proscenium in Greek theatres was not suitable
for the supporting wall of a stage. It would be absurd to see a
temple in the air above a colonnade.[166] Again, it was impossible to
act on top of the proscenium. The fear of falling, when the actor
wore a mask and was forced to approach the edge in order to be
well seen by the lowest spectators, would spoil his acting. Finally,
why was the proscenium-front not a tangent of the orchestra circle?
It should have been brought as far forward as possible if they acted
on top of it.
To sum up. The orchestra in the earliest period was the place of
the chorus and the actors. It kept that function when the scēnē was
erected beside it as a background. The chorus used the whole circle,
the actors only part of it and the ground which lay in front of the
scēnē. No change in this arrangement was made later. The actors in
Roman times, of course, stood above the level of the excavated
semicircle. But they remained throughout at the same distance from
the spectators[167] and at the same level—that of the old orchestra.
How then are we to deal with Vitruvius’ statement about the
height of the stage? Dörpfeld suggested[168] that Vitruvius used
plans and descriptions made by a Greek; Vitruvius, in absence of any
warning, taking it (as a Roman) for granted there was a stage, saw
it in the proscenium; or he may have misunderstood the phrase ἐπὶ
σκηνῆς in his Greek authority. But such a fundamental error made by
a professional architect, who even if he had never been in Greece,
must have known many persons familiar with Greek acting, is
extremely hard to assume.[169] Yet the mistake is credible as
regards the Greek theatre of the fourth and fifth centuries.
Amidst the mass of evidence and argument, only an outline of
which is here presented, it is difficult to decide. The majority of
inquirers will probably be swayed as regards the theatre of
Sophocles and Astydamas by two considerations: the acting
exigencies of the plays we now read or know of, and their own
feeling as to how the performance would look with a stage and
without. It seems, perhaps, most likely that Dörpfeld is right: that
there was no stage, though when the façade represented a palace
or temple a few steps might naturally appear.

III. Supervision of Dramatic Displays