The Death of Hippolytus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. (Wiki Commons.)
We live under perpetual war. Yet the media and other cultural institutions are silent. They thrive on violence and trivia. I travelled to ancient Greece for an alternative model. Rereading Euripides’ play, Hippolytus, was gratifying. The play brought together 800 years of Athenian history. The heat of the Peloponnesian War became the mirror for reexamining the past.
The heat of war
I enjoyed the drama of Euripides in my student days, but did not think much about the tragic characters, the myth-history embedded in the play or its implications for Athenians, much less us. But now, decades later, the tragic play spoke to me directly.
Euripides’ play reached the theater in 428 BCE, three years after the start of the Peloponnesian War and one year after the death of Pericles, Athens’ preeminent political leader. The Peloponnesian War shook Greece, and Athens in particular, to the core. But why the war? What happened to the leadership of Pericles, the teaching of philosophy and science, the practice of democracy, all that gorgeous art, and the victory over the Persians?
Athens in the fifth century BCE stood at the center of the Golden Age of Greece. Indeed, in some way, Periclean Athens was the Golden Age.
According to the great Athenian historian Thucydides, Pericles bragged that Athens was the school of Hellas – not much different than the claim of American exceptionalism.
Nevertheless, Athens was,…